[Glice]

I'm a bit busy at the moment, but a brief defence of Lacan's writing: he himself decries it. He's really not interested in the written word. He constantly repeats, in interviews and so on, that his seminars were most important, and his students have spent most of the last century saying that his was a work in progress, an amorphous, constantly-changing response to the world. There are themes, and there are consistencies, and he has a lot of ideas that recur, but he himself would've likely been aghast at the amount of stress that's placed on works he didn't necessary stand by as definitive.

And if he says something very simple (which he does) which has been said elsewhere (which is debatable, but not very - I can't be bothered to negate it), is that really a problem? Ultimately, we're stuck between two poles - he's a difficult 'writer' saying something simple, re-articulating existing points. His consolidation of Wittgenstein into psychoanalysis, reconstituting a modern metaphysics is indispensable and seminal, to my mind, but if that requires a historical-narrative-context to obviate its uniqueness, well, that's kind of what philosophy, in the broadest possible terms, always does.