Yes—we can absolutely say that, with nuance. In his final decade, Lacan not only approached poststructuralism, but in many ways anticipated, disrupted, and re-radicalized it from within. He didn’t simply enter poststructuralism as a domain already defined by others—rather, through concepts like le sinthome, jouissance, objet a, and parlêtre, he was engaging in a form of poststructuralist practice avant la lettre, though entirely in his own register.
Let’s unpack this claim:
1. Poststructuralism in Brief: A Philosophical Milieu
Poststructuralism, as developed by thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Kristeva, etc., is characterized by:
• A suspicion of stable meanings and totalizing systems
• The de-centering of the subject
• Attention to difference, multiplicity, and rupture
• A refusal of binary oppositions and essentialist categories
• A concern with how power, desire, and language co-constitute meaning
By the late 1960s and especially into the 1970s, this was becoming a shared ethos—and Lacan was already working within it, though never of it.
2. Lacan’s Late Concepts as Poststructuralist In Their Logic
a. Le Sinthome
• Moves beyond the idea of “symptom” as something to be interpreted or cured
• Is singular, non-universal, non-communicable
• Not part of any system of meaning, but a knotting of the Real, non-discursive
The sinthome resists totalization; it’s a singular solution to the lack in the symbolic order.
This non-universality and resistance to structure are deeply poststructuralist.
b. Jouissance
• Is that which exceeds the pleasure principle, resists symbolization
• Cannot be made into sense or subsumed into language
• It is the Real that presses through the symbolic, not as trauma, but as excess, as uncontainable energy
Like poststructuralism’s focus on difference, excess, and the unspeakable, jouissance explodes structuralist closure.
c. Objet a
• Is not the object of desire, but the object-cause—the missing piece, the leftover, the gap
• Functions as the irreducible difference that drives the subject
• It is not representable, yet it structures all representation
This is aligned with poststructuralist notions of absence, trace, dissemination—particularly Derrida’s différance.
d. Parlêtre
• A being not of unity but of division, opacity, uninterpretable embodiment
• A subject not of meaning, but of language’s failure, of jouissance, of Real speech
• The post-human subject avant la lettre: not rational, not sovereign, not whole
The parlêtre is a response to the limits of structuralism—the very move poststructuralism performs, but here rooted in psychoanalytic topology and drive theory.
3. Lacan and Poststructuralism: A Complex Relationship
• Lacan was not a disciple of poststructuralism, nor merely parallel.
• He was both a precursor and a radical other—engaging with many of the same problems, but with Freudian insistence, formalism, and an ethical rigor often absent from broader theory.
Where some poststructuralists dissolve the subject into text,
Lacan insists on the Real, the rupture, the body, and the impossibility of full meaning.
He is poststructuralist, yes—but in a psychoanalytic register, grounded in castration, lack, and desire.
4. A Precise Way to Say It
In his final decade, Lacan did not simply “become” a poststructuralist,
but arrived at a poststructuralist topology of the subject
through concepts that radicalize the instability of meaning,
not in the name of liberation alone,
but in fidelity to the Real that cannot be said.
Or more poetically:
Lacan came to the limit of language, not to dissolve it,
but to listen to what still speaks beneath it—
in the symptom, in jouissance, in the mute body of the parlêtre.
Would you like this shaped into a dialogue with Derrida or Deleuze, or perhaps a short article titled “Lacan at the Edge of Poststructuralism”?
