should be interpreted in a rhapsodic, semipossessed manner. In both cases, what
is symptomatically rejected is the working hypothesis, if not the assumption, that
Lacan is a paradoxically systematicthinker.
To paraphrase Zˇizˇek’s defense of the Cartesian subject, one could therefore ar-
gue that the foreclosure of Lacan’s “open system” forms the “silent pact of all [or
at least some of] the struggling parties of today’s academia.”^5 Indeed, it is precisely
this problematic aspect of Lacan’s work that the “pro-Lacanian” call for an end to
exegesis induces one to overlook by disdainfully bypassing any meticulous inter-
pretation. Certainly, it would be naïve to suggest that there is a “true” Lacan who
is waiting to be discovered; reducing the obscurities of his oeuvre does not mean
eliminating them. But, above all, we should avoid detecting in Lacan’s—astutely
maneuvered and self-conscious—pas-à-lireany form of consent toward “wild in-
terpretation,” whether textual or clinical. (His profound aversion to Dostoyevsky’s
“God is dead; everything is permitted”^6 is well known, and forgetting it is simply
inexcusable....)
So why is Lacan a paradoxicallysystematic thinker? Because, despite formulating
a highly elaborate and consistent theory, he decides to present it to us through the
work-in-progress that leads to its emergence and to its continuous, fertile redis-
cussion (in his Seminars) as well as the inherent questions, doubts, and dead ends
that allconsistent, “closed,” and completed philosophical systems end up silently
confronting (in the Écritsand other written articles). After all, this is equally the
reason why Lacan can appropriately define himself as an “anti-philosopher”; in-
sofar as he demonstrates that “philosophy, while using much of the methodology
of the sciences, has a tendency to gloss over incompleteness in its results [and]
lacks the scientific ability to bear incompleteness,”^7 he exposes the hidden side of
all philosophical systems. In parallel, it follows that, from this standpoint, an anti-
philosopher is ultimately more “scientific” than a philosopher.Against the background of such debates and controversies, the principal aim of this
book is to analyze the evolution of the concept of subjectivity in the works of
Jacques Lacan. More specifically, it endeavors to carry out a detailed reading of the
Lacanian subject in its necessary relation to otherness according to the three orders
of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real.^8 Although a significant part of this
work shall be reserved for a detailed confrontation with the gestation of the notion
of the subject of the Real (other) in the years between 195 6and 1963 , it is never-
theless my intention to follow the chronological development of Lacan’s theory of
the subject from his first writings on the paranoiac status of the imaginary subject’s
knowledge (connaissance) in the early 193 0s to his final formulations of the real sub-
ject’s identification with the symptom in the mid-197 0s.introduction