Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XVI (1968–69), From an Other to the other, is a pivotal text for readers interested in how psychoanalysis bears on politics, knowledge, and sexuality. Delivered in the aftermath of May ’68, the seminar brings Lacan’s formal concerns about language and the subject into contact with the university, capitalism, and the social organisation of enjoyment. This edited collection offers a set of carefully guided readings of Seminar XVI, designed to clarify its key moves while remaining faithful to its difficulty.

Across the volume, contributors show why Lacan turns to logic, set theory, and topology, and how these resources help him formulate limits internal to discourse, including the claim that there is no metalanguage. The chapters also develop Lacan’s account of the “big Other” and the subject, and trace how Seminar XVI prepares later work on discourse and social bonds. Further essays read Lacan’s discussion of Pascal’s wager alongside the logic of capitalist accumulation, and examine the seminar’s treatment of drive, perversion, sublimation, and sexuation, including the concept of surplus jouissance.

Written for scholars and advanced readers across Lacanian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and critical theory, the volume provides a reliable route into a notoriously demanding seminar and demonstrates its continuing importance for contemporary debates on knowledge, politics, and sexuality.

Emily Laurent-Monaghan is a PhD candidate at Newcastle University, UK, where her research focuses on Freud, Lacan, and modern science. Emily presents her research internationally, has taught on philosophy and psychoanalysis at universities in the UK and Canada. She is a founding member of the international collective Stabitat.