1 In the spring of 1973, Jacques Lacan and his partner Catherine Millot visited Tirana, where Millot’s father was serving as the French ambassador to Albania. As she recalls in her memoir, Life with Lacan (2016), he was curious about this ‘almost inaccessible country, a small enclave of Maoism under the grip of Enver Hoxha.’ The Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha led Albania’s National Liberation War against the Italian and Nazi occupations during the Second World War and remained in power until his death in 1985. Initially backed by Tito’s Yugoslavia, he later aligned Albania with the Soviet Union; after breaking with the Eastern Bloc in 1961, he forged a new alliance with Maoist China. By the time of Lacan’s planned visit, Albania had become one of Europe’s most isolated and ideologically rigid socialist states. At the time, Albania could be reached only via Rome or Budapest.…