Returning to Lacan's Seminar XVII

We now read Jacques Lacan's seventeenth seminar from "the other side" of a fifty-year gap separating us from its initial delivery, at the Place du Panthéon, in the academic year 1969-1970. This is factually the case, yet viewing it this way is akin to looking down the wrong end of a telescope: the seminar appears to recede away from us into a distorted distance, as if of interest primarily to historians.

This volume aims to do the reverse (l'envers): namely, to return to Seminar XVII by turning the lens it provides us with onto our present, bringing it-and ourselves as contemporary readers of Lacan-into critical and clinical focus. It does so by bringing together, for the first time anywhere in English, twelve members of the New Lacanian School whose systematic readings of each unfolding session of Seminar XVII are rooted not in social, cultural, or political history, but in the living clinic of the present with which analytic practice is necessarily involved.

Published by Lacanian Press, Publishing House of Lacanian Compass.
lacaniancompass.com