ABSTRACT
The arrival in the academic world of Lacanian Discourse Analysis could itself one day be considered to have been an ‘event’. For now, we cannot be sure, though our attempt to name this arrival and inscribe it in the circuits of scholarly production is with a view to what it might become. The chapters in this book mark this event, and our argument that it may one day be recognised as such, draws attention to a key feature of the event. That is, the event is something that takes form for us within the symbolic ‘after the event’ according to the logic of ‘deferred action’, ‘après coup’, what Freud originally spoke about as ‘Nachträglich’. This is a peculiarly psychoanalytic conception of time, a looping back and activation of what has already occurred, and the investment of that first event with a significance that turns it into what it will later always already be. It changes the symbolic coordinates by which we once mapped where we thought an event would happen, and opens up a new field of meaning, so that our own experience of that event at the level of the imaginary is of it as necessarily having taken the form that it does now for us. That incorporation of what we will now recognise to be an event (in our imaginary apperception of it) into a legitimate framework (in our symbolic reproduction of it as something that must have been significant for it to figure as it will do) successfully tames, even we might say betrays, the event as an irruption of the real (of something hitherto incomprehensible, unthinkable).
