There are still traces of Kojeve in the Lacan's first seminar, and Kojeve mixed with sociobiology (pigeons and the imaginary) and the ego and the id. The imaginary will at this point play a larger role than it will later, as will the ego (formed out of the imaginary and the mirror stage), but at the same time the origin of negativity and aggression, located in an alienating picture of ourselves. But is not negativity ultimately located in language (and even more specifically, in the word "not"), the word "elephant" that is more deadly to the the elephants than any machete? The word as the murder of the thing? It is curious that Lacan and Kojeve once planned to write a book on Freud, and Kojeve and Strauss planned a book on Hobbes and Hegel. The intersection is the state of nature, the humble theoretical origin of Kojeve's desire of another's desire.

If you want to read Lacan, forget all the confusing introductions by people like Zizek, Gallup et al. And absolutely don't bother with "Ecrits"--they're dense rewritings of earlier speeches. Instead, begin where it all began...the seminars, Paris, the 1950s. A who's-who of Paris intelligentia are here to listen to the new kid on the block with an intriguing new back-to-basic reading of Freud. Lacan here, in transcriptions from his class, asks only one thing from his students: do your homework. If he's going to talk about a particular essay by Freud, he expects you to read it. You get group presentations by the students, plus Lacan's sardonic asides. Great fun.