Lacan takes us on a startling psycholinguistic exploration of the bounds of love and knowledge. Often controversial, always inspired, French intellectual Jacques Lacan begins the twentieth year of his famous Seminar by weighing theories of the relationship between the desire for love and the attainment of knowledge from such influential and diverse thinkers as Aristotle, Marx, and Freud. From here he leads us through mathematics, philosophy, religion, and, naturally, psychoanalysis into an entirely new and unexpected way of interpreting the two most fundamental human drives. Anticipated by English-speaking readers for more than twenty years, this annotated translation presents Lacan's most sophisticated work on love, desire, and jouissance.

Also available from Lacan's Seminar: Book I, Freud's Writings on Technique; Book II, The Theory of the Ego in Psychoanalytic Theory; Book III, The Psychoses; Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis; and Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (all from Norton).