ABSTRACT
An impressive reconstitution of the French intellectual scene of the 1930s, Lacan in Contexts investigates four major contexts: surrealism, philosophy, linguistics and feminism. Lacan’s intimate association with the Surrealists, like the influence of Kojève on an entire generation, was known to many, but never before researched in such illuminating detail. Macey’s project is to explode the myth of ‘final statism’, Lacan as self-made intellectual with a stable, self-contained theory: ‘the connotations of the terms shift considerably…. Their final acceptations tend therefore to be the result of a process of semanticconceptual accretion, and their meanings are contextual rather than definitional.’
