In the seventies and early eighties Lacan was generally interpreted in the English-speaking world, and especially in American criticism, as a proponent of a formalism, structuralism or poststructuralism which, like the New Criticism, severs the text from the world and proclaims the ethical superiority of the eternal aesthetic over the merely practical, historical or social. He was either praised for exalting the infinite play of the signifier over the imprisoning mastery of establishing meanings, or, on the contrary, chastised for recommending that meaning be fixed in accord with the normative linguistic and social system of a patriarchal order. While these readings are not entirely false, above all they are far from constituting Lacan's truth. Although his thought emerges from the contradictory problematics of romanticism and symbolism, the longing for transcendence in a world without divinity or community and for the valuation of the individual, he begins by demonstrating the impossibility of attaining either one.