ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the roots of J. Lacan’s thinking of the intrication of language and flesh in instances of writing in seminal essays of what is commonly considered Lacan’s structuralist period, emphasizing the signifier and the register of the symbolic, such as ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’ and ‘The Signification of the Phallus.’ It argues that the grammatology J. Derrida has in mind, and which involves the primacy of writing to speech, had already taken place, as he himself intuits in ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing.’ The book examines the place of the flesh in the linguistic components of the psyche from the vantage point of Lacanian psychoanalysis upon its Freudian roots. It describes a signifier of real value, a portion of what both Jacques-Alain Miller and Colette Soler have called the real unconscious.
