Annotations to Lituraterre

Abstract

Jacques Lacan’s text ‘Lituraterre’ was originally published in the journal Litterature, 1971, 3 (October), pp. 3–10 and subsequently reprinted in Ornicar?, revue du Champ freudien, 1987, 41, pp. 5–13, and in Autres Ecrits, Paris: du Seuil, 2001, pp. 11–20. Lacan read and elaborated on his text in the session of 12 May 1971 of his seminar D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, which is now available in an official French edition: Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire. Livre XVIII, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant (1971), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: du Seuil, 2006. At the beginning of this session Lacan told his audience that the text had been commissioned as the introduction to a special issue of Litterature on the topic of ‘literature and psychoanalysis.’ The three published versions of Lacan’s text differ only to the extent that in the Ornicar? and the Autres Ecrits reprints the word ‘sovietique’ (Soviet) has been capitalized, and that a clear typographical error in the Ornicar? version has resulted in the word ‘plu’ (rained) on p. 7 of the original being printed as ‘plus’ (no more, more). My translation follows the Autres Ecrits version of the text, yet I have also drawn on tape recordings and various transcriptions of the session of 12 May 1971 of Lacan’s seminar for resolving ambiguities and elucidating obscure passages. As in so many of Lacan’s writings, these ambiguities originate mainly in syntactical rather than semantic twists, and therefore pose as many problems to the French as to the English reader. Nonetheless, in translating ‘Lituraterre’ I have also found that the grammatical constraints of the English language could generate new areas of confusion at those points where the original French is unequivocal. By contrast with the English, in which there is only one definite article (‘the’), and one personal pronoun (‘it’) for a