Edinburgh Napier University

  By citing Buffon's famous aphorism “The style is the man himself” as the opening lines of his Écrits, Lacan invites us to consider a number of salient themes concerning the following: the role of reading and interpretation in psychoanalysis; paradoxes pertaining to the functioning of language; how communication might be defined (as “receiving one's own message from the Other in an inverted form”); and the transmission of psychoanalysis. Buffon's pronouncement is a refrain that Lacan returns to throughout this short text, and it proves a means of illustrating familiar thememes within his teaching (the trappings of imaginary, the role of the symbolic Other, the functioning of the proper name) while also signalling the pertinence of the concept of object a. The echoing reciting of Buffon's phrase forces us to reconsider if we know what the phrase means, and indeed, whether style and (apparent) substance might be two sides of the continuous surface of a Mobius strip. Lacan's text operates at once as a puzzle that defies easy assimilation, a Russian doll of literary allusions and references and an easter egg of hidden and insinuated inter-textual meanings. For all of these reasons, the Overture – itself an exemplar of the object a – provides an instructive text with which to open Lacan's magnum opus.