Written

Annotation to the book "Written. Volume 1" by Lacan J.: One of the main characters of the 'French theory' that transformed the intellectual world in the 1960s and 1970s, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan preferred practice to theorizing, whether it was therapy—direct work with patients—or teaching—leading a famous seminar where new interpretations of Freudian texts and psychoanalytic techniques, as well as new ways of thinking, were explored in dialogue with the audience. The preference for the spoken word over writing corresponded to Lacan's key idea of psychoanalytic reform-structuralism, according to which the unconscious 'is a language whose speech must be freed.' These are words from the 'Roman Speech' of 1953—a programmatic speech that was also delivered orally but paradoxically became the semantic center of the only collection of Lacan's texts published in 1966 under the title ""—"Written." Having decided, albeit with some hesitation, to present himself to the reading audience in written form, Lacan sharply raised the question of who is speaking: his texts from different years and on various topics—philosophical, literary, strictly psychoanalytic, ranging from science and truth to female sexuality—continuously approach the sought-after speech, giving voice to the most unexpected 'actors,' such as truth itself, while tirelessly reshuffling the situations of 'self-analysis,' in which the writer converses—like in the text he wrote specifically for the cover—with himself. This rhetorical spectacle, brilliantly staged by Lacan on the stage of the book, reinforced his authority in psychoanalysis, but at the same time revealed him as an extraordinary stylist and visionary thinker, whose intellectual toolkit soon became useful to philosophers, philologists, art historians, and film scholars. In 2012, Antoine Compagnon called 1966 the 'Year of Wonders'—the year when "Words and Things" by Foucault, "For Marx" and "Reading 'Capital'" by Althusser, "Problems of General Linguistics" by Benveniste, "Criticism and Truth" by Barthes, "Figures" by Genette, "Theory of Literature" by Todorov, "Student Measurements" by Boulez, and "Written" by Lacan were published. In Russian, "Written" is published for the first time in two volumes, the first of which includes, among other things, the famous "Roman Speech" ("The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis"), the articles "The Mirror Stage...", "Freudian Thing...", and "And Finally, About the Subject."