Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue [Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only] 9780231535359

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Jacques

Lacan Past and Present

Jacques

Lacan Past and Present a dialogue AlAin BAdiou & ÉlisABeth Roudinesco tRAnslAted By JAson e. smith

Columbia University Press

|

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Jacques Lacan: Passé présent by Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco © 2012 Editions du Seuil English Translation © 2014 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Badiou, Alain. [Jacques Lacan, passé présent. English] Jacques lacan, past and present : a dialogue / Alain Badiou and Elisabeth Roudinesco ; translated by Jason E. Smith. pages cm Translation of the author’s Jacques Lacan, passé présent. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16510-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-16511-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53535-9 (e-book) 1. Lacan, Jacques, 1901–1981. 2. Lacan, Jacques, 1901–1981—Influence. 3. Psychoanalysis. I. Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 1944– II. Title. BF109.L28B3413 2014 150.1995092—dc23 2013036082 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

Foreword: “I am counting on the tourbillon”: On the Late Lacan by Jason E. Smith vii Preface xxi 1. one mAsteR, two encounteRs 1 2. thinking disoRdeR 31 Notes 69 Index 73

Foreword “i Am counting on the touRBillon” On the Late Lacan

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he short book you hold in your hands brings together two people who share a long friendship and an equally enduring attachment to the thought and legacy of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. They share in particular the conviction that Lacan was what the French call, in a hardly translatable term, a maître: at once teacher, master, and great thinker, around whose teaching an array of institutions, students, disciples, enemies, and apostates gather. And yet the two people brought together in this dialogue had very different relationships to Lacan.

Élisabeth Roudinesco is a historian and psychoanalyst and the daughter of an analyst who was quite close to Lacan. Roudinesco is best known for her two books on the history of French psychoanalysis—a massive two-volume history of psychoanalysis in France and the definitive biography of

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Jacques Lacan1—that will likely remain the reference works on these subjects for decades to come. She frequently intervenes, often polemically, in public debates around the status of psychoanalysis and its relation to the family, to the state, and to cognitive science and contemporary forms of behaviorism and psychotherapy. While mounting a dogged defense of psychoanalysis against a legion of enemies and threats, she has also been quick to identify Lacanian analysts themselves—in particular, those devotees of the “late” Lacan and his attachment to mathematical formalization and the infamous “short session”—as often incapable of defending and renewing this legacy. She has therefore often contended, as she does in this dialogue, that the inheritance of psychoanalysis should be assumed in part by nonanalysts, and that the vitality of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and figure of thought requires a renewed engagement with contemporary philosophy. After having been a student of Gilles Deleuze and Michel de Certeau— the latter a key factor in her turn toward the study of history and in particular of the French Revolution—Roudinesco was a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) from 1971 to 1979 (during which time she was close to the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser). Now defining herself as a social-democrat, Roudinesco has argued that Lacan’s teaching and thought—Lacan’s political orientation was largely Catholic and conservative, however radical his conception of ethics—remains unsurpassed in its diagnosis of a constellation of symptoms signaling a deep, structural crisis at the heart of Western culture, society, and politics.

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Alain Badiou is a philosopher who has never undertaken a psychoanalytic cure and a communist militant whose thought has been shaped and nourished by Lacan’s teaching since the early 1960s. Though he first encountered Lacan’s work in the early 1960s at the bidding of his teacher at the École normale supérieure, Louis Althusser, perhaps his most important encounter with Lacan’s thought occurred through his work with the Cahiers pour l’analyse, founded in 1966 by a group of Althusser’s students and devoted in part to a synthesis of Althusser’s dialectical materialism and Lacan’s theory of science and its relation to the category of the “subject.”2 This project was cut short by the unforeseen student and worker revolt of May and June 1968, an event that occasioned a break between this group of students and Althusser’s PCF over what the former perceived as the latter’s openly counterrevolutionary role in these events. Where Roudinesco drifted toward the PCF during what many consider to be its most troubled period, following the failures of 1968 and its formation of a “common program” and electoral alliance with François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party, those grouped around the Cahiers pour l’analyse formed or entered Maoist organizations, almost all becoming actively involved in La Gauche Prolétarienne, with the exception of Badiou, who went on to form a smaller Maoist group. While many of those who became Maoists became disillusioned with their experience after 1973—some assuming various positions of distinction in bourgeois French society, and some forming an antiMarxist, rightest tendency in French intellectual life that

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was media-friendly and influential—Badiou persevered in his commitment to what he deemed the Maoist renewal of communist politics throughout the 1970s. Immersed though he was in political activity and militant theory, his philosophical work, especially during the late 1970s, was nevertheless profoundly marked by the teaching of the same late Lacan, in particular, his use of mathematical formalization and the turn this took in his very late years, namely, his experiments with topology and Borromean knots (Roudinesco contends that this work deviates from and in certain ways damages his legacy). Badiou’s first major philosophical work, Theory of the Subject, was published in 1982 and represents a systematic articulation of the political thought of Mao and the Lacanian theory of the subject, a fusing together of the call to revolt launched by Mao during the Cultural Revolution, “you have reason to rebel,” and the ethical maxim first formulated in Lacan’s seventh seminar, “never give way on your desire.” Jacques Lacan, Past and Present is therefore the portrait of a maître, drawn with two hands and from two perspectives. Roudinesco asserts, moreover, that the concept, theme, or relation of mastery is also a fundamental aspect and condition of both Lacan’s teaching and clinical experience more generally. In the domain of psychoanalytic practice, she emphasizes, “the problematic of identification with and transference onto the person of the master is essential.” It is for this reason that one of the most striking aspects of the dialogue between Roudinesco and Badiou in the pages that follow is their portrait of the so-called late Lacan and

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what each characterizes as the dissolution or unraveling of this mastery. This phase of Lacan’s teaching is widely regarded to have begun in the seminars following the Encore seminar of 1972–73,3 and to have ended only with the disbanding of Lacan’s school, the École freudien de Paris (EFP), in 1980 and Lacan’s subsequent death a year later. This period is marked by profound transformations of his theoretical framework, emphasizing and to some extent prioritizing the register of the Real over the Symbolic and the Imaginary, and reweaving the relation between these three registers through recourse to the mathematical field of topology and the theory of knots. This turn to topology follows hard on the heels of Lacan’s introduction of the concept of the “matheme” in Seminar XX and another text from the same period, “L’Étourdit.”4 In many ways, the doctrine of the matheme, with its claim that recourse to mathematical formalization would ensure the integral transmission of knowledge produced in the field of psychoanalysis, represents a triumphant moment in the development of Lacan’s thought: it would secure the infinite transmissibility of his legacy beyond his death and the conclusion of his teaching. In this sense, the consolidation of Lacan’s thought around the matheme can be said to project a kind of hypermastery, a guarantee of the incorruptibility of his thought beyond the living presence of the master himself in the seminar and in the transferential dynamics of the clinic. Lacan’s late turn toward topology signals, Badiou and Roudinesco suggest, a renunciation of the mastery—or hypermastery—consoli-

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dated in the doctrine of the matheme, or, to use the language that Lacan himself will use on the occasion of unilaterally disbanding his own school on the eve of his death, its “dissolution.” In drawing the portrait of Lacan and in particular of the late Lacan, Roudinesco and Badiou find the image of the dying Oedipus from Oedipus at Colonus unavoidable. If Lacan’s rightly celebrated Seminar VII from 1959–60 elaborates a properly psychoanalytic ethics through the intransigent figure of Antigone and her refusal to give way on her desire, Badiou and Roudinesco emphasize instead a certain ethical and tragic dimension to Lacan’s late style. The turn to topology is, it is suggested, the mark of a will to pursue the extremes of formalization to the point of a global undoing, of his thought, his school, and even his person. “Even physically,” Roudinesco remarks, “in his walk and his gestures,” he recalled the hobbled Oedipus seeking out his unmarked grave in a foreign land, doomed to leave no secure legacy behind. The final scene of his life is one, Badiou observes, in which “a man undoes by himself the knot of his own existence”; Lacan, trembling, at times incapable of speaking, “undo[es] his own thought in public,” Roudinesco concurs, in a gesture that is “deeply subversive, like a final blow leveled at his supposed theoretical omnipotence.” It is under the sign of dissolution that Roudinesco knots together all of these later unravelings: Lacan was “engaged in a gigantic process of dissolution: dissolution of physical faculties, his capacity for thought, the dissolution as well of the School that he founded and oversaw.”

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To speak of the late phase of Lacan’s teaching as a kind of dissolution of his mastery would require that we take into account the different roles the figure and concept of the master have played in his thought. As powerful as this portrait is, particularly in the way that it depicts a courageous Lacan pursuing the consequences of his own thought to the point of its disintegration, it is important to recall that Lacan, in addition to being a maître in the sense developed by Roudinesco and Badiou, placed the notion of mastery at the center of his thought. In his seminar on ethics, for example, the passage from the master of Aristotelian ethics to Hegel’s modern dialectic of master and slave is decisive. A decade later, in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969–70), the master will be identified with one of four discourses— social ties—that are articulated together through discreet recombinations of four elements, and will be explicitly differentiated from “analytic” discourse properly speaking.5 I want, nevertheless, to insist on the figure of dissolution invoked by Roudinesco in her account of Lacan’s subversive gesture of dispersing his mastery in order to interrogate how this final gesture of Lacan’s is intimately connected to his ultimate conception—elliptical, as always—of philosophy. More specifically, I want to interrogate the unexpected appearance, in a short text that makes up part of what we can call Lacan’s final testament, of an unexpected name, that of a philosopher who in a certain sense renounced philosophy: Marx. In 1980, Lacan’s frailty meant that he was not able to give his final seminar. It was published in bits in the recently es-

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tablished journal Ornicar?, founded by his son-in-law and the future executor of his literary estate, Jacques-Alain Miller. The seminar, eventually given the name Dissolution, consists of a series of pronouncements and declarations regarding the disbanding of the École freudien de Paris, including a “Letter of Dissolution” dated January 5, 1980. These pronouncements, enigmatic as they often are (“I don’t boast of making sense. Not the contrary either.”),6 are nevertheless framed by a very concrete question, to wit, about the need to reorganize the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the wake of the dissolution of his school and its organizational procedures, which Lacan felt had ultimately been unsuccessful (in particular, the institution of the “pass”). Lacan states the issue like this: what is needed is a way of transmitting the knowledge produced in the space of psychoanalysis that will avoid or prevent any effet de colle, a typically punning formula that rhymes école with colle, “glue,” and the school effect with a coagulation, a stickiness, with fixation (effects Lacan long identified with the register or axis of the imaginary). Lacan’s antidote is to dissolve his school in favor of cartels or working groups that would consist of four analysts and one supplementary member to lead and oversee the group’s work. These groups would be provisional, constantly undergoing structural mutations, the respective positions of the members rotating in a churning, swirling motion. Lacan insists that this structure and this motion would aid the transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge by ensuring that no hierarchies—which Lacan explicitly identifies here with the Church and its clergy— would take hold or stick. “I have put no one in charge of

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the Freudian Cause,” Lacan remarks. The reorganization he proposes is instead one of constant movement and permutation, assuming not a top-down bureaucratic shape but the movement of a maelstrom or vortex, a whirling motion, turbulence: “I’m counting on the tourbillon.” Many of the texts included in the “Dissolution” sequence are concerned with the setting off of this tourbillon, which would stir up any sediments of “sense” or meaning (sens)— a privileged target of Lacan’s, a term he associates at once with religion, philosophy, and hierarchical organization such as the Church or the school—produced in the process of transmitting knowledge. At stake in these interventions is the formation of a bulwark against the hardening of the Lacanian legacy into a stratified bureaucratic structure tasked with the mission of managing that inheritance. In the midst of one of these refinements of the cartel structure, Lacan feels compelled to make a declaration that seems completely unrelated to these pragmatic, even technical, concerns: “I rebel, if I may say so, against philosophy.” This remark is, however, set up by the opening gambit of Lacan’s intervention, which begins with Lacan noting that he recently came upon the Monsieur A. of the text’s title, whom he simply identifies as a philosopher. The initial “A.” was most likely easily deciphered by those in Lacan’s circle as not just any philosopher, but the best known and most important Marxist philosopher in France: Louis Althusser. The same Monsieur A. who invited Lacan, in 1964, to teach at another école, the École normale supérieure. This offer introduced Lacan to a group of young philosophers who would in turn have a profound impact on his own teach-

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ing and legacy. This same Monsieur A. had just a few years earlier written a short essay entitled “Is It Simple to Be a Marxist in Philosophy?”; shortly after the encounter Lacan invokes, Althusser’s life will take a tragic turn, and he will spend the rest of his life confined to an institution, where he will work sketch out his own “late” style, his philosophy of aleatory materialism.7 The sudden encounter with Monsieur A., the Marxist philosopher, immediately triggers in Lacan the memory of a text written when he was only nineteen, Tristan Tzara’s “Monsieur Aa, Antiphilosopher.” If Monsieur A. is a philosopher, and a Marxist philosopher at that, “Monsieur Aa is an antiphilosopher. As am I.” The identification of Monsieur A. as a Marxist philosopher helps clarify what follows in “Monsieur A.” The text appears to comprise a series of unarticulated propositions in which considerations on institutions and hierarchy, religion and psychoanalysis, Marx and the symptom pile up. Closer examination reveals the tissue connecting them. Lacan predicts, as he had done throughout the 1970s, that the near future will witness a religious “boom,” a warning that appears directed at those who would want to turn psychoanalysis into either a religion or, implicitly, a philosophy. What philosophy and religion share, Lacan suggests, is a commitment to interpretation. Where psychoanalysis operates only with “the signifier as such,” in its materiality, interpretation moves in the element of “sense.” It is on the basis of this implicit identification of philosophy and religion—in which the real movement of the signifier as such gets stuck in the glue of sense—that, in a second move, Lacan

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characterizes, in an unexpected reference, the ambiguity of Marx’s thought. On the one hand, Lacan declares, “I have paid homage to Marx as the inventor of the symptom”; on the other hand, “Marx is . . . the restorer of order, simply because he breathed back into the proletariat the dit-mension of sense.”8 The first of Lacan’s propositions here, that philosophy is a form of theology insofar as it is founded on an act of interpretation that exhumes a latent, buried meaning, is in fact—and Lacan is surely aware of and playing on this—a famously Marxist proposition. Marx’s concluding thesis on Feuerbach condemns philosophers, after all, for interpreting the world rather than transforming it. Lacan’s second assertion, stressing the ambiguity of Marx’s thought, is more difficult to decode. In his seminar RSI from 1974–75, Lacan observed that “the notion of the symptom was introduced, well before Freud, by Marx, insofar as he made of it the sign of something wrong in the Real.” From this perspective, Lacan argues that Marx “invents” the symptom insofar as he identifies the proletariat with the senseless signifier as such: the proletariat is nothing more than a real point of impossibility of the capitalist order, registered only as a punctual breakdown of that order. And yet Marx, according to Lacan, is driven to interpret this symptomatic emergence of the proletariat not as a sheer point of derangement of the logic of capitalist valorization, but as the hidden meaning or sense of that order itself. To contend that Marx puffed the proletariat back up with sense is to contend that Marx defined the proletariat not simply as a symptomatic

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perturbation of the bourgeois world but as the secret bearer of the sense of history itself, the guarantor of its imaginary consistency. Marx, antiphilosopher: the proletariat as a real point of disorder. Marx, philosopher: the proletariat as the latent sense of this order. In his introduction to the German edition of Écrits, published in 1973, Lacan writes of the relation between “metaphysics”—another name, here, for philosophy—and politics. The philosopher referred to in this case is not Althusser but “my ‘friend’ ” Martin Heidegger. In an allusion no doubt to Heidegger’s putting his thought, in the 1930s, in the service of the Nazi “movement” (he would speak, as late as 1966, of the “inner greatness of the Nazi movement”), Lacan declares that “metaphysics has only ever been and can only continue insofar as it busies itself with plugging the hole of the political.”9 Philosophy, for the antiphilosopher Lacan declares himself to be, is a discourse whose task is to stop up the hole a truth makes in a given order with sense. These formulations echo in advance Lacan’s later account of the ambiguity of Marx’s own thought. Transposing Lacan’s terms, Marx the materialist antiphilosopher identifies the proletariat—the political—with the symptom, that is, a pure and simple hole in the capitalist order. Marx the philosopher tries to fill this hole by assigning the proletariat a historical mission, to impose on this world a direction, orientation, and sense (sens). One of the fundamental questions posed and debated in Jacques Lacan, Past and Present is whether Lacan’s thought offers us the resources to think the proletariat and politics not only as hole and hysterical symptom, but as “subject.”

Such a subject would be defined as a historical force that not only has the shape of a hole, but one that, forming along that hole’s edges, takes on the turbulent consistency of a tourbillon.10

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Jason E. Smith

PreFaCe

T

hough the result of a long history whose premises date back almost forty years, this book is nevertheless the outcome of a specific conjuncture: the celebration, in September 2011, of the thirtieth anniversary of Lacan’s death. We have known each other a long time and though we have not always shared the same political orientations, we have always kept up a long-standing, fruitful dialogue, founded on the acknowledgment of our differences and even more so on a friendship that has never wavered. We share a taste for the Greek tragedy so dear to Freud as well, for the Revolution and its history, for poetry as an act of resistance of language, for the cinema, and for political commitment.

In April 2006, a year and a half after the death of our mutual friend Jacques Derrida, we came together along with Yves Duroux at the École normale supérieure for a debate on “our” philosophers, among them Althusser, Foucault, Sartre, Canguilhem, and Deleuze. Then in March 2010 in

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Rennes, at a forum organized by the newspaper Libération and moderated by Éric Aeschimann, we faced off again, this time evoking what were once called “enchanted tomorrows”:1 “The law of happiness,” we said in recalling SaintJust, “cannot be found in the fact that we are all called to appear before the market of available objects.” And then: “Today, hygienism and norms are the catastrophe: the contrary of happiness.”2 We dislike religious fanaticism and scientism, mad money (argent fou3), and the rampant evaluation and assessment in our society that is a symptom of the abandonment of the ideals of reason. In short, we share the conviction that political commitment must be accompanied by work, rigor, and erudition. It was therefore logical that one day a dialogue would bring us together, and in this case it was about Lacan: thirty years after. We have always maintained that Lacan, the renewer of Freudian thought, was a master in the Socratic sense of the term, one able to offer a contemporary politics of the subject, of desire, and of the unconscious.4 And we have the conviction that the double approach proposed here, both historical and philosophical (however brief it may be) should allow the reader to revisit the crucial question concerning the relations between political and subjective revolution. We have also transformed this conviction into a dialogue in two voices, two times, and two moments: Jacques Lacan, Past and Present. The first part, “One Master, Two Encounters,” develops a series of personal reflections on the relation each of us had with Lacan throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The second part, “Thinking Disorder,” is a critique, developed through

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the evocation of the most pertinent aspects of Lacan’s advances, of all the contemporary sectarianisms—the ideal of community, obscurantism, the passion for ignorance—that have contributed to a debasement of thought both in the field of psychoanalysis and in the field of politics. We would like to believe, here and now, that beyond the deadly anxiety through which our society continually speaks of its own crisis, a representation of the future makes a new hope possible. After all, Freud elaborated a certain tragic conception of our inner life that was very different from the each-his-own that characterizes our own age. Why not envisage this invention becoming once again, along with revolution, a new idea in the world?

Jacques

Lacan Past and Present

one One Master, twO encOunters

philosophie magazine: To start off, can both of you ex­

plain your relation to Lacan? What were the circumstances in which you encountered his thought?1 élisabeth roudinesco: For me, the adventure of psycho­

analysis began at home. My mother, Jenny Aubry, was a hospital doctor and worked with abandoned and neglected children. She was also a psychoanalyst, and was known for having introduced into France the clinical principles of John Bowlby and Anna Freud, which she encountered in London. Beginning in 1953 she became not so much a disciple as a fellow traveler of Lacan, and she was by his side at the mo­ ment the French Society of Psychoanalysis (SFP) was found­ ed. Lacan often came to my mother and stepfather’s (Pierre Aubry) house after my parents divorced. Jenny was a close friend of Sylvia Bataille, whom Lacan had just married.

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At the time, I went to Guitrancourt, to “La Prévôté,” as Lacan’s country house was called, but little did I know that this man I knew well was such a significant thinker. Later, in adolescence, I wasn’t attracted to psychoanalysis at all. I had almost no desire to concern myself with this business that interested my mother so much. I dreamed instead of writing novels or making films. I studied literature, then linguistics, and had a passion for the Cahiers du cinéma, the Nouvelle Vague, and Hollywood films. In 1966, I went to teach in Algeria, at Boumerdès. That same year, both Foucault’s The Order of Things and Lacan’s Écrits appeared. What an exceptional moment! The struc­ turalist wave, initiated by Claude Lévi­Strauss and pro­ longed by Louis Althusser’s For Marx in 1965, was a real rev­ elation for me. While the philosophy courses I took in high school were terrible, I finally discovered philosophers and thinkers who wrote in such a remarkable way: thinkers of language. I dove into Lacan’s Écrits with delight, and all the more easily given my solid knowledge of the structural linguistics (beginning with Ferdinand de Saussure and de­ veloped by Roman Jakobson) that Lacan made use of. An astonishing scene: I recall myself saying to my mother, in a peremptory way, how brilliant “her” Lacan seemed to me. And she answered: “I’ve told you that forever!” We then began to have sometimes quite lively exchanges about his theory of the signifier, which we approached in different ways. After May 1968, I gave up on the project of writing nov­ els and oriented myself toward the human sciences and

alain badiou: My own path was different. As young man,

I was a convinced Sartrean. Between 1958 and 1962 I was a student­philosopher at the École normale supérieure (ENS) at Rue d’Ulm, where I encountered my second master, after the Sartre of my adolescence, Louis Althusser. What a clash of contraries! Althusser proposed rereading Marx by strip­ ping away all the faded humanist finery at the very moment Sartre proposed an existential vision of Marx. Completely by

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philosophy, and I earned my master’s in literature under the guidance of Tzvetan Todorov at the University of Paris­VIII at Vincennes (today Saint­Denis), where I went on to defend my doctorate. I followed Gilles Deleuze’s “Anti­Oedipus” seminar, then shifted toward history when I met Michel de Certeau, who taught in the Department of Psychoanalysis, which was founded in 1969 by Serge Leclaire. In 1972 I met Louis Althusser. As for Lacan, I began to attend his seminar in 1969 at the law school at the Panthéon. When my mother told him about my interest in his teaching, he immediately called upon me. During our meeting he exclaimed: “What is the story? Why have you have waited so long to come see me?” I told him what I was doing: I had begun to work on Georges Politzer with the journal Action poétique, run by Henri Deluy, and he insisted that I join the Freudian School of Paris (EFP), which he founded in 1964, even though I had not yet decided to enter analysis. I accepted, meeting up so to speak with my destiny. I remained a member of the EFP up to its dissolution by Lacan himself in 1980, a year before his death.

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chance, I fell upon the first issue of the journal La Psychana­ lyse, which included Lacan’s famous Rome Discourse (his lecture titled “The Function and Field of Speech and Lan­ guage in Psychoanalysis,” from 1953). This text left me liter­ ally dazzled—I experienced a veritable textual fascination, so much so that my theoretical relation to Lacan has always been mediated by his writing. After this initial discovery, I continued to read La Psychanalyse, and I began to slip refer­ ences to Lacan into my own essays. Very intrigued by these borrowings, Althusser took me to a session of Lacan’s semi­ nar at the Sainte­Anne Hospital. This was in 1960–61. At the same time, I was the first student at the ENS to propose, at Althusser’s request, one and then two presentations of Lacanian thought. é.r.: Did you read Freud too? a.b.: Yes! I was occupied with the systematic reading of

Freud from my very first year at the ENS. We considered him to be one of the milestones leading to the human sci­ ences, the human sciences that were going to replace, some thought, philosophical idealism with a “serious” material­ ism. But beyond the obvious continuity, I quickly perceived the profound difference between his work and that of Lacan, which was absolutely novel. é.r.: So novel that the reading of Lacan left deep traces on

many intellectuals’ readings of Freud, including my own. I read Lacan before I read Freud, and therefore my reading of Freud was “Lacanian.” However, we should not confuse the

a.b.: Whatever the case may be, in my eyes Lacan immedi­

ately imposed himself as a major figure of the intellectual scene, even though he had only published a few articles, which were not always easy to get a hold of. é.r.: That was always the story with Lacan: before 1966 and

the gathering together of his Écrits, there was no book avail­ able. Everything was dispersed. a.b.: In 1966, as a matter of fact, I was teaching philosophy at

the high school in Reims. Through the intervention of Fran­ çois Regnault, who was also appointed to Reims, I ended up joining the editorial committee of Cahiers pour l’analyse, the Lacanian­Marxist journal started by a group of normaliens a little younger than I. Among them, besides Regnault, were Jacques­Alain Miller, Jean­Claude Milner, Yves Duroux, Alain Grosrichard. . . . The two first articles I published in this journal dealt very closely with mathematical logic—one of my great passions at the time, as it is now—and referred to Lacan explicitly, though with a critical tone, a reserved distance. For example, I contested the idea that there is a subject of science: I remained Althusserian on this point. Science referred, for me, to an asubjective process. Keep in mind that we are speaking of 1966, 1967. . . . Then came the torment after May 1968, an event that turned my life upside down and led me to spend long years in political thought and action.

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work of Freud and Lacan to the point of believing that Freud was already Lacanian.

é.r.: For you, at bottom, the reading of Lacan coincided

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with a political break, whereas for me it was with the struc­ turalist caesura. a.b.: I ended up personally meeting Lacan. It was in 1969.

I think that for him, everything was urgent, and he wanted therefore to see me with a great deal of urgency. Since, oc­ cupied as I was at the time fighting it out in factories and foyers,2 I was not reachable during the day, he was never able to speak to me on the telephone. We did however find a moment to have breakfast together. Very much the seducer, he tried to attract me with the same resounding voice you mentioned, Élisabeth: “But why didn’t you come to see me sooner?” and so on. Nevertheless, I did not join the EFP and never became a psychoanalyst or even an analysand. I knew nothing of the couch. Lacan always remained for me a thinker of the first order rather than a psychoanalytic mas­ ter. Always the primacy of the written! For this reason, he occupied a considerable place in my philosophical work, and this from my very first synthetic work, Theory of the Sub­ ject (1982). He has been, and still is, constantly present on my intellectual horizon. p.m.: How would you characterize his contribution to phi­ losophy in general, and in particular to your thought? a.b.: Lacan’s theoretical work could be incorporated into my

own philosophical development because it laid out a com­ pletely singular position on the question of the subject. At

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the beginning of the 1960s, like other young philosophers I found myself in a particular conjuncture. I was, as I’ve said, a convinced Sartrean. But, with the help of Althusser, the time came for me to break with phenomenology, and Sartre was one of its most illustrious representatives. Why this inevitable break? From its invention by Husserl, phe­ nomenology folded the thought of the subject back onto a philosophy of consciousness. It is rooted in lived experi­ ence, immediate and primitive. The subject is confounded with consciousness and the transparent comprehension of what happens to me. It is not by chance that phenomenolo­ gists (think of Merleau­Ponty) accord so much importance to perception: it is the most elementary experience of this direct and intentional relationship consciousness has with the world. Moreover—and in this sense French phenom­ enology is also an inheritor of traditional psychology—the subject is apprehended as an interiority, seen from the point of view of its feelings, its emotions, and so on. The result is a heavy focus on the reflexive ego or self and the sphere of intimacy or inwardness. In order to free up a thought of revolutionary emancipa­ tion supported by science (our “common program” at the time), we had to extract ourselves from this phenomeno­ logical model of the subject that was at once reflexive and existential. To take leave of it, we could lean on the human sciences, scientific objectivity, and logico­mathematical formalism. In short, against phenomenology, structural­ ism represented a lifeline. The disparate thoughts that have been gathered under this label have at least one point in

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common: they orchestrate a revolt against the traditional conception of the subject. The structuralist constellation finds its completion in “theoretical antihumanism,” to use Althusser’s crucial phrase, or in the “death of Man,” to cite Foucault. In this general movement, variants and inflec­ tions are possible. Some declare the subject to be an illu­ sion, a mirror effect of more essential structures that are invisible yet can be thought by science. Others attempt to demonstrate, often in the wake of Heidegger, that the classical metaphysical subject is an old­fashioned idealist concept. It is asserted that what is real in the notion of the “subject” was only a particular form of object. Still others, disciples of Althusser, contend that the subject is an em­ blematic, and even central, category of the bourgeois era. Ultimately, whatever approach is privileged, all structuralist roads lead to a radical critique of the concept of the subject. Where does Lacan fit into this context? On the one hand, he takes part in the break with phenomenology, all the more so to the extent that he knew well the thought of Sartre and Merleau­Ponty. He inserts himself into the structuralist galaxy not only because he had recourse, much more than many others, to logico­mathematical formalisms, but also because he renounced the reflexive subject as the center of all experience. From his analytic perspective, the subject hinges on an irreflexive and in certain ways transindividual structure: the unconscious, which for Lacan depends en­ tirely on language. The science of the unconscious there­ fore replaces the philosophy of consciousness. Given all of this, Lacan—this is the second aspect of his singular position—does not go as far as the “hard”

p.m.: Élisabeth Roudinesco, what is your perspective on this Lacanian revolution insofar as it shook up both psychoanal­ ysis and philosophy? é.r.: First of all, Lacan was situated at the crossroads of an

unexpected and often conflictual encounter between the two disciplines. On the one hand, it was he who made phi­ losophers understand that psychoanalysis brought about a philosophical revolution. But on the other hand, he was also the one who led psychoanalysts to turn toward philoso­ phy. This second movement of the pendulum seems to me

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structuralists like Foucault or the Heideggerians such as Derrida, who consider the category of the subject to be the mere avatar of a defunct metaphysics. Instead, Lacan wants to conserve this category in order to renew it from the ground up. This is because, for him, the subject remains at the heart of clinical experience. So Lacan saves the subject in the midst of a full­on structuralist offensive against it. “His” subject is certainly subjugated to the signifying chain; it is divided, unbeknownst to itself, split, exposed to a radical alterity (what Lacan names “the discourse of the Other”). But for him it remains coherent, and even necessary, to pro­ pose a theory of the Subject. Consequently, in the 1960s and 1970s, Lacan allowed me to align myself with the theoretical antihumanism of the period while remaining faithful to my Sartrean youth and to the notion of the subject. For this rea­ son, he seemed to me to be a decisive contemporary. A con­ temporary who knew how to incorporate the most disparate materials in order to build his own construction.

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to be of capital importance: Lacan made use of philosophy, and he had numerous philosophers come to his seminar in order to raise the bar for psychoanalysts who, as far as he was concerned, lacked intellectual credentials. Through his intervention, psychoanalysts rediscovered philosophy and intellectuals rediscovered psychoanaly­ sis, at a moment when psychoanalysis was stuck between psychology and medicine. And through structuralism, those who worked in the field of literature, like me, for ex­ ample, were able to rediscover the importance of philoso­ phy thanks to a generation of philosophers who were also stylists and who were interested in literature. I did not find this in my philosophy course in high school. As for me, I only really plunged into Spinoza or Hegel after having read Althusser or Foucault and having followed the teaching of Lacan. I came to philosophy through the openings made by structuralists, then by following the lecture courses of Pierre Macherey: I owe him a great deal. In fact, a gap had already opened up before 1966—a miraculous year for structuralism—between those who made use of philosophy and those who kept their distance from it and preferred to keep psychoanalysis in the field of psychology. I think Lacan’s singularity is due to his particular itiner­ ary. We should not forget that, at the beginning, he was a psychiatrist. Now, psychiatry has always been more recep­ tive to philosophy than to psychology, and psychology has always wanted to detach itself from philosophy in order to become “scientific,” which it never will be. And like Georges Canguilhem, Lacan never stopped criticizing psychology as

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a false science, with the hope of leading psychoanalysis to­ ward the “noble” disciplines. More specifically, at the moment Lacan began to move toward psychoanalysis—around 1931—the most dynamic French psychiatry was phenomenological in orientation. Lacan himself was a phenomenologist during this pe­ riod, before beginning his initiation into Hegel’s thought through Alexandre Kojève. After the Second World War, he distanced himself from this heritage, preferring structural­ ism, and he turned toward Saussure through his closeness to Jakobson and Claude Lévi­Strauss and through his read­ ing of their works, contrary to what certain Lacanian psy­ choanalysts claim today, “revising” history in order to deny this influence and make of Lacan a self­proclaimed Phoenix inspired solely by himself. In this sense, there are many “re­ visionists” in the psychoanalytic milieu. Lacan was certainly fascinated by the thought of Hei­ degger for a time, but he ceased to be after 1957, as can be seen in “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud.” This did not stop him, however, from spending time wanting to be recognized by Heidegger the man. But he had resolutely taken the side of science, of for­ mal objectivity, whereas Heidegger, following a phenom­ enological and ontological orientation, asserted that “sci­ ence does not think.” That Lacan’s roots are in psychiatry is fundamental, and to say this reiterates what Alain said regarding the reten­ tion, in his thought, of the philosophical problematic of the subject. Psychiatry is not only concerned with psychic

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discontent; it deals just as much with madness as a shat­ tering of the subject. Now, this idea of a strangeness and of a breaking up of the personality appeared very early on in Lacan, who, moreover, was inspired by the surrealists and notably by Salvador Dalí. In 1932, he devoted his medical thesis to a woman who was mad—Marguerite Anzieu (re­ baptized “the Aimée case”)—before becoming interested in the story of the Papin sisters, two maids who killed their two bosses in Le Mans for no apparent reason. Lacan had a talent for showing that paranoia—especially in the case of feminine paranoia—was a mad logic that simulated nor­ mality and had no organic or constitutional cause. It had to do with psychogenesis. This is the perspective from which Lacan became interested in mystic women and their search for an absolute jouissance, beyond the borders of reason. This was a crucial difference from Freud: where the founder of psychoanalysis treated for the most part neuro­ ses—even if, today, we know that the patients he dealt with suffered very acute pathologies—Lacan plunged into the tormented universe of psychosis, of feminine madness, of paranoia as a system of logical and even formal thought. This alone, if I may say so, signals the philosophical stakes of his project. Let’s not forget that Freud mistrusted phi­ losophy, which he willingly assimilated to a paranoiac dis­ course, that is, a logic of madness. . . . a.b.: I completely agree. To put it in a slightly cavalier way,

the neuroses are ultimately a matter for clinical psychology. Everyone knows these little stories of failures in love, dis­ turbing obsessions, latent impotencies, these stories that

é.r.: I should here confess a certain reticence: Lacan was

passionate about paranoia, whereas as far as I am con­ cerned the great “philosophical madness”—a two­faced madness (exaltation and depression)—the one that seems the most fascinating, the most literary, and the most cre­ ative remains melancholy. It is for this reason that I stud­ ied the figure of Théroigne de Méricourt, this melancholic woman and pioneer of feminism, who brilliantly incarnated the revolutionary exaltation of 1789. It is the collapse of the revolutionary ideal that sent her into madness in 1793. She would finish her life in the asylum at Salpêtrière, observed by Jean­Étienne Dominique Esquirol. How can we not think of the fate of Louis Althusser? I have always been struck by Lacan’s lack of interest in this form of madness that has pro­ voked so much interest since Homer and Aristotle. a.b.: Lacan privileges paranoia because it is much more sys­

tematic. This is also quite clear in Freud; The Schreber Case is a gripping text, with an implacable logic. You have the impression that this case can be entirely reconstructed in

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are so terribly identical and boring. I have always admired the fact that psychoanalysts could spend their lives, day in, day out, listening to these symptomatic confessions. It is in fact a form of heroism. Neurosis is so boring! Whereas madness haunts philosophy at its very origins: What is this violent form of the subject’s submersion? How can we con­ ceive of this surging up all of a sudden of a radical alterity? There is no doubt that psychosis is much more interesting for philosophy.

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a self­sufficient matrix. Paranoia goes perfectly with struc­ tural analysis, and this is why Lacan was so interested in it. p.m.: You have pointed out a first divergence between Freud

and Lacan, concerning the respective accents they place on neurosis and psychosis. Do you find this divergence once again in their conception and handling of the cure? Is the difference between a Freudian analysis and a Laca­ nian one—and we know that Lacan’s practice of short ses­ sions was scandalous and was in part the motivation for his exclusion from the IPA (International Psychoanalytic Association)—obvious? é.r.: Yes, the difference was very clear at the beginning of the 1960s, above all in Paris. The orthodox Freudian ana­ lysts were proponents of a kind of vulgar materialism. They were interested in memories, emotions, in the ego, in nar­ cissistic disturbances, in normal or abnormal behaviors, and thought that anything exceeding the narrow framework of the clinic was speculative and therefore dangerous: be­ havioral psychology was not that far off. Now, Lacan made it possible to get away from this, in theory and in practice, by placing the accent on language, by an attention to what is said, and on the necessity for a break to occur at the heart of the process of the analytic cure. He was not narrow­minded; he respected his patients’ vocations, and was not obsessed by an ideal of the cure or normalization. At this time, orthodox Freudian psychoanalysts called upon the students of Lacan to choose their camp and made psychoanalysis an interpretative religion. Lacan, to the

a.b.: Positivism is more often than not an inverted religion,

such that far from serving the science it claims to be, it is enslaved to ideological objectives that are foreign to the becoming proper to science itself. For this reason, a re­ ligious person has many more reasons to fear positivism than science itself. Nothing prevents us from thinking that God loves science, even if he doesn’t love the ideology of positivism. . . . é.r.: Certainly! They were also put off by the Freudian assim­

ilation of religion to neurosis. In fact, the French Freudian psychoanalysts were for the most part anticlerical positivists who were not very open to intellectual or spiritual engage­ ment and rarely oriented toward philosophical discourse. Whence the conversion—even if I don’t like the connota­ tions of this word very much—of many Jesuits to Lacan’s thought. That said, at the end of his life Lacan favored a dogmatic conception of the ultrashort cure, which became

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contrary, demonstrated an open mind: if a priest, for ex­ ample, came to do analysis with him—as happened many times—he advised him to remain a priest if this was his true desire. It is because Lacan understood the essence of spiri­ tuality—and the essence of philosophy, moreover—that the Jesuits in particular were attracted to him, even though he was an atheist and completely attached to the rigor of scien­ tific discourse. The biologizing paradigm that came from a Freud reread through the lens of a lifeless positivism deeply disturbed those religious people who wanted to undertake a cure.

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a source of frustration and even fraud. By dint of critiquing the recourse to emotion, the Lacanian fundamentalists, ob­ sessed with the formalism of knots and mathemes, risked losing sight of the suffering of patients. The more novel a theory is—and Lacan’s certainly was, so much so!—the more it risks slipping at one moment or another into dog­ ma. Lacanianism is not an exception to this rule. p.m.: Alain Badiou, does the cure in the Lacanian sense have

a properly philosophical interest? One senses that it poten­ tially brings into play the renewal of the subject you spoke of. . . . a.b.: The cure is an act that both presupposes and traverses

a form. The forms in question are in fact the objective struc­ tures of the unconscious. Now, the cure, while referring it­ self to these structures, breaks them up, fragments them. For Lacan, who was quite moderate on this point, analysis does not have as its final aim a “recovery”; it should lead to a real point where the subject can lift himself back up and live again. The cure inflects what seems to be experienced as a fate and reopens the capacities of the subject. I have always found the definition proposed by Lacan himself to be mag­ nificent: the aim of the cure is to “raise impotence to the im­ possible.”3 The impossible is the real in the Lacanian sense, namely, what never lets itself be symbolized. The analysis is therefore supposed to unblock a situation that is initially ex­ perienced by the analysand as an impotence (I am separated from my desire, caught up in the hardness, the stagnation

é.r.: Lacan turns his back on both scientism and

obscurantism. a.b.: Exactly. Today, these two pitfalls are more threaten­ ing than ever! They form our conjuncture! The secret alli­ ance between these two supposed adversaries—narrow sci­ entism and superstitious obscurantism—is not, moreover, a recent phenomenon. This is why we need Lacan so much. In any case, and as far as I am concerned, I am a fundamen­ talist Lacanian on this question. To think what a truth is, I need to find the point where the form of what is and what

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of existence), so that it leads to a real point where the sub­ ject, bogged down in the imaginary, can once again recover some of its powers of symbolization. On the philosophi­ cal plane, this apparatus is completely remarkable. The act (what takes place in the cure) remains intelligible from the point of view of the form (the structures of the unconscious) while also traversing these structures. Something happens in analysis (the Subject comes face­to­face with a real point), but in order to theorize this event, it must be reconnected to its formal context. Lacan, especially in his last years, was a philosophical hero for me, since he avoided two pitfalls: on the one hand, he avoided a flat determinism insofar as he posited that a cut or break, unsuspected, could arise in the cure, and on the other hand, he kept himself at a clear dis­ tance from spiritual or religious doctrines, in the sense that there is nothing miraculous about this break—it is directly related to the rational forms of the unconscious.

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breaks with this form converge. My own work is a search for a formalism adequate to the challenge of thinking the possibility of an effective break in the context of forms. Nei­ ther determinism (today’s behaviorism is a remnant of it in the clinic) nor the neoreligious horizon (today a certain phenomenology is inscribed within it), but a radical mate­ rialism that gives a place to the unforeseeable real—what I call the event. With this ambition, in my own way I walk in Lacan’s footsteps. p.m.: Alain Badiou, you have never undertaken the cure

yourself, even though it interests you philosophically. a.b.: No, this experience has remained completely for­

eign to me, even if it has been practiced a great deal in my midst. My emancipation, to use a big word, came through political activism, amorous discovery, theatrical and nov­ elistic writing, and the taste for mathematical formalisms, with all of these coming together ultimately in philoso­ phy. I have not felt it necessary to repeat these experiences through an analysis. Like Lacan himself, I believe and have always felt that one should undertake an analytic cure only if you are affected by symptoms that introduce too much impotence or suffering into your life. If the suffering is bearable or, so to speak, normal, the only reason to go into analysis is in order to become a psychoanalyst oneself. In my case, engaged in a coherent political logic, activating intricate philosophical symbolizations, for the most part happy in existence, I have felt that I could do perfectly well without the cure.

of a psychoanalytic formation. I was not completely sure about my will to become a full­time psychoanalyst. More­ over, I was doing fine, I presented no pathological symp­ tom! But for a daughter of an analyst, the choice was almost obligatory. I ended up going into analysis with Octave Man­ noni, then was supervised by Jean Clavreul. It was a very classical Freudian cure, with sessions lasting three­quarters of an hour, with a classical supervision as well. What I ulti­ mately liked about these Lacanians was that they remained very Freudian while integrating Lacan’s innovations into their practice and their clinic, just as my mother did in fact. I would never have gone the way of a psychotization of neu­ rosis as it is practiced by Lacan’s epigones. Many others did the same as I did, and I must say it was a remarkable ex­ perience. Today, alas, psychoanalysis has for the most part stopped being an intellectual adventure, a voyage, a quest, an initiation. In the same way, and here I meet up with Alain via other paths, every so­called therapeutic cure was similar to what is called a “training” analysis. These days, we do an analysis only when we “need” it. But the cure is a passionate traversal of oneself and not a utilitarian service in view of some “effectiveness,” even if the notion of a successful cure does exist. When it is con­ ducted well, by an intelligent clinician, the cure brings about an extra lucidity with regard to other engagements, particularly political ones. p.m.: Let’s speak of just that, politics. Does Lacan’s thought

have, for you, a political dimension? The question is even

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é.r.: As for me, I hesitated before entering into the process

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more difficult to the extent that he himself forbade any form of ideological or partisan recuperation of his teaching. a.b.: For me, Lacanian psychoanalysis takes place in a sig­ nificant political context. We rediscover the profound sense of the cure, which aims at, as I have recalled, an opening up of the subject in relation to an original state of powerless­ ness. Now, this process is capable of taking on a collective dimension. For me, the political field corresponds to the liberation of possibilities of life that a determined situation blocks and makes impossible; oppression is always defined as a sterilization of individual and collective capacities. From this point of view, the Lacanian cure, even though it is totally apolitical in its own specific exercise, proposes for thought a political matrix all the same. I maintain that there is a continuity between the thought of Lacan and a revolutionary type of process, which reopens a collective availability or openness that has been stuck in a repetition or checked by state oppression. p.m.: It moreover occurred to Lacan to present himself as

the “Lenin of psychoanalysis.” . . . a.b.: Absolutely, and I happily take up this formula for my

own part. Lacan compared himself to Lenin while compar­ ing Freud to Marx. With these more or less metaphorical associations, he wanted to emphasize that Freud was still situated in the medical logic of the cure, and Marx in the posture of a promise. Now, Lenin no longer promises com­ munism: he decides, he acts, he organizes. And Lacan, in

é.r.: That’s putting it mildly! For him, May ’68 was an illu­

sory movement that expressed not a will to generalized lib­ eration but, to the contrary, an unconscious desire among the insurgents for still more ferocious servitudes. a.b.: “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master.”4

When he pronounced this famous phrase at Vincennes, the pill was hard to swallow. But after all, Hegel would not have thought very highly of the proletarian revolutionarism of his disciple Marx! When Lacan died, I in fact wrote that he

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turn, no longer seeks the cure as Freud does. He is a fero­ cious adversary of the adaptive vision of psychoanalysis, which would be content with training the human animal to conform to its social environment, transforming it into an animal subjected to dominant values that would no lon­ ger have any reason to endure the psychic sufferings due to some nonconformity, to an excessive originality. The stakes for psychoanalysis are much more radical. It is a vector of emancipation, even if this is concealed beneath an explicitly apolitical finery. With his vision of the cure, Lacan was for us when we were young one of the operators of our general mobilization between 1968 and the 1980s, even if he in no way saw things in these terms. This was already my analysis at the moment of May 1968: I saw in it an event that, like the confrontation with the real in the cure, allowed for the redeployment of a new liberty, in this case a radical left that worked out local emancipations against the inegalitarian capitalist machinery. Lacan was, as we know, clearly less enthusiastic. . . .

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was our Hegel. When a master sees his disciples taking his thought off in a direction that is not his own, it is proof that his thought is living. é.r.: At bottom, Lacan thought that the true revolution,

the only desirable one, was Freudian psychoanalysis! Left­ ist agitation could only lead, as far as he was concerned, to the restoration of despotism. Beyond May ’68, the question of Lacan’s relation to politics requires recalling some facts. He came from a right­wing Catholic family: the old chau­ vinist and intolerant France in its most detestable form. He worked to oppose this genealogy, and his natural inclina­ tion led him toward the center Left, incarnated at the time by political men such as Pierre­Mendès France and repre­ sented in the media by L’Express. This earned him a tena­ cious hatred from right­wing milieus. But publicly, Lacan remained a sphinx throughout his life. He never took sides the way Sartre did. He only signed one petition his entire life. Willfully keeping his distance from the most burning struggles of his time, he did not take part in the Resistance and it is not even certain that he was, despite his visceral aversion toward racism, a militant anticolonialist. He did, however, support the decolonization process, and in partic­ ular, Laurence Bataille, daughter of Sylvia and Georges Ba­ taille, when, with her cousin Diego Masson, she entered the support networks for the FLN.5 In May 1960, when she was arrested and then incarcerated at the prison in Roquette, he brought her the transcribed pages of his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and specifically those devoted to Antigone.

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Nevertheless, this absence of militant engagement did not prevent him from closely following contemporary poli­ tics or from grasping the movement at the heart of French cultural life. For example, he understood that the Catholic Church represented a major political force, and he wanted to meet the pope in 1953. That same year he also sent his Rome discourse to Maurice Thorez, then head of the French Communist Party. He was himself not a communist, far from it, but since I was—I joined the Party in 1971 and left in 1979—he often called upon me to ask about the evolutions of and debates within the Party. The process of de­Staliniza­ tion had begun at that time and Lacan followed it with close attention. He saw both the Church and the PCF as potential reservoirs for recruits for his own movement. As an analyst, he refused no one. It happened that he had to attend to and defend quite “colorful” characters, some of them highly du­ bious or even outlaws. But I think that in acting this way— and I was not the only one who questioned him regarding his extravagant gestures of support—he helped some of his patients and the students from my generation avoid fall­ ing into extremism. Lacan was a veritable rampart against terrorism, which was rife at the time in Germany and Italy. He knew how to neutralize such aspirations by trusting psychoanalytic practice alone and in refusing stubbornly, in fact, any political recuperation. He served as a symbolic guardrail by adopting the following posture: come with me, it’s better than the Revolution or extreme activism. Yes, it’s true that a certain extreme Left, and in particular certain Maoists, claimed to follow him. But Lacan, even if he was fascinated by Mao Zedong as a great and significant figure

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of the age, had little sympathy for Maoism, quite the con­ trary. When I read here and there that he was a Maoist, I am flabbergasted. . . . The Lacanian Maoists, in turn, and this is significant, often ended up converting to right­wing liberalism. p.m.: And yet is this not how you, Alain Badiou, would de­

fine yourself ? a.b.: Today, we can only say that Mao was part of a

great revolutionary history, just like Robespierre, Saint­ Just, Blanqui, Trotsky, Lenin, and many others. This said, it is necessary to explain why the great major­ ity of young Lacanian intellectuals of the 1960s be­ come Maoists in the 1970s. An odd coincidence? Cer­ tainly not! It stems in fact from the Lacanian concept of the subject, to which it is completely coherent if not nec­ essary to give, via philosophy, a subversive political dimen­ sion. The passage from a Lacan who says, “do not give up on your desire,” to a Mao who says, “you are right to rebel,” was for us perfectly clear. é.r.: But Lacan was not a revolutionary or authoritarian

leader; he was more a constitutional monarch, very identi­ fied, we should not forget, with the English political model. The EFP was a place of freedom, not a party or sect. There is no doubt that Lacan exercised a transferential hold over his patients and students. But if they submitted to him, it was their own doing. They freely became disciples, for that

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was their desire. The representation of a totalitarian Lacan is ridiculous. All the more so in that Lacan, while favoring submission, never respected his epigones, and he at the same time valorized those who resisted his seduction. Ultimately, I have always had reservations about at­ tempts to give a political signification to Lacan’s radicality. What is radical in Lacan is his dark vision of the relations among men. The only place where the curse of human plu­ rality might be lifted was, for him, the cure. I do not know how a revolutionary politics could be founded on such a basis. To sum up, it’s clear that Lacan was not a progressive in the classical sense, including the political one. But nei­ ther was he a reactionary thinker, as one sometimes would have us believe. Certain psychoanalysts made reference to him in order to oppose the marriage between homosexu­ als and gay parenting, arguing that these measures would shake the symbolic function of the father. This is a grave misunderstanding. Already in his own time, Lacan was one of the first psychoanalysts to take homosexuals into analysis without wanting to change their orientation and he did so in view of authorizing their becoming psycho­ analysts. What’s more, the aforementioned symbolic func­ tion of the father can be assumed as much by a woman as by a man, and in a homosexual couple, by one or the other partner. There are so many ways to form a family, and none should be excluded a priori! When Lévi­Strauss was asked about the possibility of homosexual marriage, he responded in substance by saying that there are so many

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forms of organization of the family in human societies that this should not at all be shocking. Lacan always refused to envisage the difference between the sexes in terms of a biological determination. He dealt with the question of the family very early on. In a text from 1938, Les Complexes familiaux, he associates the birth of psy­ choanalysis with the decline of paternal authority. He con­ tended that the fallen figure of the father should be revalo­ rized. Nevertheless, he did not call for the reestablishment of patriarchal omnipotence. On this subject and on many others, Lacan seems to me to be a lucid conservative on the political plane, like Freud himself. p.m.: What do you think of this, Alain Badiou? Was Lacan a progressive or a conservative? a.b.: One aspect of his genius is the constitutive ambiguity

of his thought. There are in Lacan undeniably conservative strata that exist alongside elements of extreme radicality. On the one hand, the human animal is rooted in a change­ less soil, structured by language, assimilated to an imme­ morial Law whose organizing signifier is the Name­of­the­ Father. But on the other hand, this human animal can at times free itself from these burdens and invent the new. é.r.: The Law cannot be gotten around, but it nevertheless

offers itself up to the play of transgression. a.b.: That’s right. If you only keep the Law and the symbolic

prescription of the father, then, in effect, you make Lacan a

é.r.: If I speak of a lucid conservatism, it is also in order

to bring out the critical dimension found everywhere in Lacan’s work. He is a thinker of the dark Enlightenment, the one that ceaselessly unveils the underside of reason and modernity. He mistrusts the ideologues of unlimited prog­ ress and happiness for all. He is too conscious of the fact that the Western world can at any moment slide into hor­ ror, dereliction, nihilism. At the end of his life, he explicitly

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reactionary, which in reality he is not. In return, if you place the accent on the experience of the subject who manages, despite being prey to the structures of the unconscious, not to give up on his desire, Lacan seems to be a thinker of emancipation—and this is what I use from his teaching. For what is emancipation if not this movement of torsion or twisting, of exception, with respect to the Law? We must understand that it is always in a localized figure, an excep­ tion, through a sort of almost invisible fault in the order of things that emancipation can occur. The idea of a brusque Revolution of the social totality has no sense. From this point of view, Lacan was right to be a conservative who did not believe in a general revolution, in a Grand Soir.6 But he is just as much someone who critiques absolutely the dog­ matic rejection of the practicable liberation [affranchisement] of the subject. We know that he changed the Name­of­the­ Father into the form of the maxim “the non­dupes err.” The non­dupes are those who claim to know the negative heart of things and who cynically deny the possibility of emanci­ pation. They err is this way, and are at bottom imposters. Lacan is not the dupe of these non­dupes.

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announced the rise of our current plagues: racism, the com­ munitarianisms that are a variant of it, frenzied individual­ ism, and above all the stupidity of mass demagogy, the reign of public opinion. This is his Tocqueville side. In short, un­ like Freud, the Jewish Viennese of the old Europe, Lacan draws his references from the French eighteenth century, Catholic Baroque culture, German philosophy, the literary modernity of the twentieth century, formal logic, structur­ alism, and the poetry of Mallarmé. a.b.: Yes, he was a visionary, a character from before our

present world in tatters. I have always found it symbolic that he died in the 1980s, that is, at the very moment when the inane world that became our own began to form: the world of modern capitalism, of savage globalization, of unlimited financialization, of generalized neoconservatism. p.m.: We therefore come to Lacan’s contemporaneity. In what domains and on what subjects does his thought seem most pertinent today? Were he with us today, what phenom­ ena would he stand up against? é.r.: The twenty­first century is already Lacanian. Because

he predicated its excesses, and because thought allows us to combat them. Even though he was a man of pleasure, Lacan never hailed the blind hedonism that has replaced the quest for the truth of desire with illusion. He opposed every form of identitarian closure that denies the alterity that consti­ tutes us and he opposed the behaviorism and cognitivism

Lacan would have indeed stigmatized stupid cognitivo­behaviorist therapies, which are part of the sick­ ness itself. He stood up against the medicalization left and right of symptoms and the flourishing of the dime store psychology that we are constantly told is cutting­edge knowledge of the subject. He would mock the omnipo­ tence of mediatized communication to the detriment of knowledge. He would have perceived the inexorable de­ cline of academic discourse, for which he had in reality a great respect. The great leveling of sense and the pro­ liferation of the fake [semblant] would have horrified him. So too the outrageous, miserable fetishization of security

a.b.:

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that have reduced man to his naturality, reduced him to his biological being, to his body and his brain. Even though he adored animals, Lacan always judged ridiculous the idea that there is an absolute continuity be­ tween man and animal, which the adepts of deep ecology and ethology today assert. Through his theory of the sub­ ject and of the signifier (language, speech), he maintained a necessary caesura between the human and nonhuman, all the while remaining Darwinian, of course. Now, if you ob­ scure what is proper to language and psychic subjectivity in the human, the path to a fascistic scientism is opened up: you claim to understand man by examining his neurons, you treat his suffering without listening to his speech, bombard­ ing him with medications in a purely mechanical fashion. Where is the subject in this? What happens to his singular­ ity? It is held in contempt, whisked away.

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by those who govern us. As Élisabeth said, Lacan appears to me to be a vital antidote to the appalling stupidity that overwhelms us each day. é.r.: He would have certainly lambasted the return of the

most blatantly ideological programs: populism, psycholo­ gism, recriminations founded on victimization, general­ ized assessment and measurement, and so on. p.m.: Wouldn’t he have also had an ironic response to the

reactivation of communism undertaken by certain philoso­ phers, you included, Alain Badiou? a.b.: Suspect irony! Those who deny communism are typi­

cally non­dupes who err in the service of the powerful of the day. Communism is the exact contrary of a utopia; it is the true name of the real as impossible. To give up on com­ munism, or on any possible name for emancipatory excep­ tions, is to give up on the very form of true political desire. Lacan, who is indeed a lucid conservative, thought it was better to give up than to risk Terror. But he would have all the same judged the contemporary world to be miserable, a world that for him deserves . . .   é.r.: . . . a good thrashing!

two thinking DisOrDer

christine goémé: Thirty years after his death, Lacan has

never been so alive. All over the world his thought and the language that carries it make possible advances that are not always limited to the domain of psychoanalytic practice. He forged operatory concepts that make possible an analysis of the crisis and of the discontents currently rocking Western civilization. Before addressing this aspect of Lacan’s modernity, can each of you, Élisabeth Roudi­ nesco and Alain Badiou, paint for us a personal portrait of Lacan?1 alain badiou: To evoke the figure of Lacan is not only to

draw the portrait of a great thinker; it is also a return to an exceptional moment of thought and action in the twentieth century. From this perspective, Lacan is truly a master. His speech and his singular writings have a sort of resonance,

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an extraordinarily ample echo, which carries well beyond the borders of psychoanalysis and the analytic act as such. Lacan is also a master in the sense that his work was im­ mediately and violently debated. If he was attacked in this way, it is because the novelty he proposed appeared in such a brilliant and commanding fashion. It is also because he created schools and surrounded himself with disciples. As everyone knows, a disciple is by definition often tempted to betray his master. He believes he has the means to do so. Lacan himself was perfectly well aware of this: for him, the fundamental ethical trial that someone in the position of a master will one day have to endure is betrayal. And he was, in fact, widely slandered and betrayed, probably more than anyone else during the same historical period. He still is to­ day, and will be tomorrow. In this way, he is a clear inheritor of Freud, who was also vigorously criticized and slandered during his lifetime. In order to understand the attacks on Lacan, we have to reconstitute the intellectual context in which his thought was rooted. During the 1950s and 1960s, the philosophical conjuncture was dominated by the conflict between a wan­ ing phenomenology (Sartre, Merleau­Ponty) and a structur­ alism that was taking off (Lévi­Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, and many others). Now, between these two currents, Lacan developed an absolutely singular theoretical position. On the one hand, informed by his clinical experience and guided by the model of scientific certainty, he revamped the concept of the unconscious as a system that determines sub­ jective experience. On the other hand, however, he upheld,

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while also reworking it from the ground up, the notion of the subject, a concept that was central in phenomenology— and for Sartre in particular, who tied the subject to a theory of consciousness and freedom. Lacan walked along a ridge, along a completely particular brink: on the one hand, he takes up and refounds the structuralist heritage, by show­ ing that the unconscious, structured “like a language,” de­ termines the constitution of the subject; on the other hand, he redeploys the concept of the subject in all its radicality by affirming the possibility for each and everyone to freely un­ dertake a risk of an ethical nature. One of Lacan’s principal seminars is not called The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–60) by chance. This ethical dimension overlaps with an affirma­ tion, with the subject itself claiming for itself the structure of its desire. The imperative, in order to once again take up Lacan’s famous formula, is to “not give up on your desire,” a formula that, let’s not forget, Lacan says usually signifies “do your duty.” Thus, I would say that Lacan was a master to the extent that he located himself at the point of convergence between two exigencies. First, as a man of the Enlightenment he takes on the demand for rationality, the ideal of scienti­ ficity, which amounts in his own work to the eminence of structure and the unrelenting quest for the formalization of subjective experience. Second, he takes on the irreducibil­ ity of a subject that configures its own destiny. This is a vi­ sion that is at once rebellious and dramatic, drawing heavily on the theater and more particularly on Greek tragedy, to which he never ceased to refer. This is the portrait of Lacan

that I, for my part, would propose: a man of the Enlighten­ ment who encountered the power of theater.

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élisabeth roudinesco: Lacan is clearly a master, since

he brought about a wide­ranging refoundation of Freud­ ian thought that interests global culture in general, well beyond psychoanalysis. But the fact that he was a psycho­ analyst complicated the situation in a particular way. Today, his thought and his conception of the cure are carried on by clinicians who did not know him and who are the students of a generation of practitioners who were analyzed by him, a generation that since his death has been scattered. Also, in a transferential manner, they have inherited less the thought of Lacan than the hatred that the various interpret­ ers of Lacan have for one another. And this situation is not without risks. The danger con­ sists in a sectarian reappropriation of his teaching. Such is the danger lurking for psychoanalysts today, especially when they want to know nothing about the history of their discipline, which they inherit second hand. Among phi­ losophers and researchers in the human sciences, masters no doubt exist. But in the domain of psychoanalysis, the problematic of identification with and transference onto the person of the master is essential. Lacan analyzed a large number of clinicians who claim him for themselves and who are now scattered into rival groups. The transmission of his legacy becomes from that point on complex, if not skewed. Putting themselves in a sovereign position, psychoanalysts have arrogated to themselves an exclusive ownership of and control over the work of the founders, as if they alone were

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capable of understanding the canonical texts and putting them into practice. For a long time, Freud was the subject of such confisca­ tions. Opening his archives to the public after his death took thirty years. Today, the same problem arises with Lacan, but with a greater acuity insofar as there is no true Lacanian community, whereas the inheritors of Freud, through the IPA (International Psychoanalytic Association), managed for better or worse, after Nazism, to come to an agreement in order to establish archives (Library of Congress in Wash­ ington) and memorial sites (Freud Museum in London). This is not the case for Lacan: everything broke apart and was scattered. And this is why it seems to me indispensable that his teaching finally be secularized, that is, that it be dif­ fused outside of psychoanalytic circles alone, just as Freud will from now on be studied in places other than psychoan­ alytic associations alone. In short, Lacan should no longer be preempted by Lacanians. To come back now to what Alain said, I completely agree on the point about the coming together of a rational thought and a reflection on theater. I would add that in Lacan’s work the orientation or aspiration toward the tragic is a form of the return to Freud that he called for and performed. The reference to the Greeks is always central in philosophy, but in psychoanalysis it is unavoidable, and it crystallizes around tragedy. It is impossible when working on or with psychoanalysis to not endlessly confront the tragic. What matters is that this is not the pop psychology of the Oedi­ pus complex but a reflection on the tragic. If Freud had not had the brilliant idea, at the end of the nineteenth century,

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to bring the petty affairs of the Western bourgeois family back to Greek tragedy—that is, to an unconscious fate— he would have simply been a psychologist of neurosis, like Pierre Janet. Consequently, each true thinker of psychoanal­ ysis is required to repeat this gesture, just as philosophers are always required, in order to think the present, to return to the origins of philosophy. In this regard, there is a decisive difference between Freud and Lacan. In the genealogy of the Labdacids, the most tragic of the Greek dynasties that inspired Sophocles so much, Freud privileges Oedipus Rex, the story of a sover­ eign convinced of his splendor and his invulnerability, a sovereign who arrives at the summit of glory and wisdom before becoming the victim of his own impetuosity, his hubris. And what does Lacan do? He instead emphasizes Oedipus at Colonus. And he is also interested in Oedipus’s fi­ nal moment, in this figure of an old man stripped of all his splendor, an old man already approaching death who curses his descendents. The sense of the tragic is therefore differ­ ent for Freud and Lacan. Freud theorized the defeat of the omnipotence of patriar­ chal authority. When in 1909 he became interested in Moses, and in particular the famous statue sculpted by Michelange­ lo for the tomb of Julius II in the San Pietro in Vincoli church in Rome, he was struck by the way the prophet sublimated his anger and resisted throwing the Tables of the Law down against his people, who had returned in his absence to the worshiping of idols. Then, he valorized the idea that what constituted the greatness of the first monotheism—whose

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origin he traced back to Egypt—was not Judaism (which is an identity) but Jewishness (which is universalizable), that is, the capacity to think, to rebel against, and to abstract oneself from representation, affect, and submission: no idol and no image, the mastery of self and rationality. The contrary, for him, of the Christianity that came after it, a religion of the masses and of emotion. Lacan was in turn interested in an authority that was ir­ reversibly shattered. He was fascinated by the Roman Cath­ olic religion, isolating two perennially conflictual aspects of it: political power on the one hand (the Church and its popes), mystical knowledge on the other (a pure, objectless faith pursued to the point of self­destruction and incar­ nated by women). The Oedipus at Colonus is neither Oedi­ pus the King nor Moses, but rather the ultimate version of a diminished sovereign who retains nothing of his former grandeur. There is nothing sublime left in his suffering: he is not defeated, he is nothing, he is already dead. This is the tragic for Lacan. As for Antigone, Freud only speaks of her when refer­ ring to his own daughter Anna, who accepted remaining unmarried in order to be his inheritor and his support. A completely different Antigone haunts Lacanian thought. Marked by the reading Hegel made of Sophocles’s charac­ ter, Lacan states the precept according to which one must never give up on one’s desire. For Lacan, Antigone is a mys­ tic: she embodies the stubbornness, the hardness of the subject ready to do anything in order to follow his or her in­ clinations. The famous opposition between the laws of the

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state and the unwritten laws of the family—in whose name Antigone defies her uncle Creon’s edicts to give her brother a tomb—is not the central theme emphasized by Lacan. In his eyes, Antigone is the very instance of the tragic. Com­ panion of the crushed sovereign, she is the inscription of the subject’s impetus toward death, that is, the name of an inalienable desire. She demands burial rites, a funeral, be­ yond any grave. She is also a woman, which demonstrates the prominence [pregnance], if not the preeminence, of the feminine pole in Lacan, whereas the referential universe of Freud is rather masculine. A final word on the theater. Lacan the man was also a tremendous actor, an exceptional performer. His seminar was theater. Much more so than the courses given at the same time by Barthes or Foucault. Lacan was always per­ forming. For him, everything is speech, and he had a hell of a time with writing, which terrorized him. Anyone who ever attended one of the sessions of his teaching experienced something unforgettable. It is, moreover, regrettable that it was not possible to film everything so that new generations could understand his talent for staging himself. c.g.: He had an extraordinary sense of humor. . . . é.r.: Yes, but I insist that we should never forget the dimen­

sion of the tragic. When you read him, or when you watch the rare videos of him we do have, you can see a profound suffering. Lacan suffered from the difficulties he had in transmitting his thought. This man of the Enlightenment

c.g.: To be schematic, we might say that Lacan, unlike Freud, posits the absolute primacy of language as the con­ dition and texture of the unconscious. Now, Lacan pre­ sents himself as the one who read Freud and carried out a return to his work. This seeming paradox covers over a clear difference: between the founder of psychoanalysis, a

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always feared that he was not being clear enough, that he was not being understood. It is true, moreover, that his work, which is difficult, has been thought of as hermetic in the eyes of some. To finish up on the Lacanian moment, my discovery of his teaching was much later than it was for Alain. Personal­ ly, I particularly admire the structuralist Lacan of the period 1950–65: the Lacan of the Rome discourse and “The Agency of the Letter,” of the theory of the signifier and of the ad­ vocate of scientificity in the wake of Koyré. I have an equal affection, as I’ve already said, for the Lacan from between the wars, for the phenomenologist who was close to Bataille and the surrealists, and who began to deconstruct the signi­ fiers of the Western family. In my most recent book, Lacan, envers et contre tout [Lacan: In spite of everything],2 I evoke the final Lacan of the 1970s, who pursues to the very end the adventure of language: a nocturnal Lacan, haunted by death and the transmission of his work, a Lacan who inverts his topic (symbolic, imaginary, real—SIR) in order to put the real in the first position so as to make the heterogeneous that escapes all symbolization, something very dark, heard. A wavering of reason.

conventional Viennese bourgeois, and Lacan, the provoca­ tive and cosmopolitan Parisian, there is also a difference in style. What do you make of this [appreciez­vous]?

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a.b.: The question of Lacan’s literary style is in fact funda­

mental and makes up part of his identity in a crucial way. Freud’s prose, written in a beautiful classical language, is at once dense and clear, seeking an order of exposition that follows the real movement of his thought. Now, Lacan’s stylistics in many ways seem closer to the meanders of the unconscious: it seizes in a statement what precisely es­ capes every conscious reflexive order. There is a magic to Lacanian writing that I was always struck by, one that is in its effect like the fascination exercised by certain modern poets, such as Mallarmé. Lacan’s language adopts the fol­ lowing ruse: writing always give us more to think than you originally thought you understood, as if each phrase had a remainder that slipped away from all univocal comprehen­ sion. What is said is caught up in an act of saying that ex­ ceeds its immediacy and never lets itself be exhausted by its first theoretical capture. He was, moreover, often accused of having slipped into the rhetorical, in order to both seduce and frustrate his listeners and readers. In reality, Lacan’s style mixes in a completely remarkable way the syntacti­ cal labyrinth of the language and the very French element of the maxim. In fact, Lacan gave birth to formulas that be­ came famous: “there is no sexual relation,” “woman does not exist,” “the non­dupes err,” “there where it thinks, I am not,” and so on. Such statements, which place their author

é.r.: Lacan is sometimes situated on the side of the seven­

teenth century (La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld), sometimes on the eighteenth century and the Baroque. The writing of the nineteenth century, Romantic and positivist, is foreign to him. He revives, in fact, a certain idea of the French liter­ ary spirit. He bathes in the history of his native language: he did not speak any others. But to listen to or read Lacan is also to hear the unconscious hard at work, much more so than in Freud. Lacan is the mime, the ventriloquist of the unconscious. And this is accentuated in the final years

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in the lineage of the great French moralists, are embed­ ded in a sinuous becoming that leads us to the aporias and surprises of the dream. Lacan’s language is the place of an encounter, of a difficult and almost anguishing fusion of the dream narrative and the trenchantness of the formula of which the French language is capable. Lacan brilliantly exploited these two possible sides: on one side, we find the brilliance of clear sentences that are easily fixed into place, and on the other side he takes the winding paths of a lan­ guage that cannot be grasped, that diffracts itself into infi­ nite and enigmatic echoes. In a word, it is the language of the psychoanalyst, and even more, a language that converges with the movement of psychoanalysis as such. Finally, outside of any and all pa­ triotism or flag­waving nationalism, it is a language, I be­ lieve, that is deeply French. The distance from Freud, whose thought and writing are inseparable from resources that are specific to German, is found there.

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when he inverts his topic (RSI instead of SIR) with reference to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. As for Freud, he was very much a nineteenth­century Ro­ mantic. His literary tastes are those of the cultured schol­ ars of his day. Deaf to the avant­gardes, Freud’s own work’s aesthetic is close to that of the novel, whereas the maxims of the French moralists that are so prized by Lacan have nothing novelistic about them. To find the novelistic in the nineteenth­century sense with Lacan, you have to turn not to his writings, but to his life, which was so rich with tumul­ tuous turnabouts. Such a contrast with the relatively banal existence of Freud! We should note that both knew the ex­ perience of war in Europe: Freud saw the old world of the central empires he came from crumble, while Lacan lived the triumph of Nazism as a collapse of Europe. However, these two thinkers maintain an extremely different relation to writing. Freud resembles Victor Hugo: each day he writes with an alarming ease. He was a tireless letter writer, hav­ ing sent over twenty thousand letters, of which half have been found. His work cannot be seriously studied without considering this voluminous correspondence. With Lacan, inversely, writing is a kind of suffering. Writing was for him always a tragic test. Here, then, are two men who do not resemble each other in the least. And yet, it was Lacan who undertook, in France at the beginning of the 1950s, such a fruitful return to Freud. The paradox is striking. Lacan came from psychiatry, hav­ ing been a student of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, and he was interested in psychosis and everything that Freud was put off by. But it is precisely because he was so distant from

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the founder of psychoanalysis—and that he was perfectly unfaithful to him on the intellectual level—that Lacan was able to return to the letter of Freud’s work while refusing to meet him when he was still able to. Lacan carried out this return to Freud in a historical con­ text that was not favorable to such an initiative. During the 1950s, the psychoanalytic community was attempting to “overcome” Freud and abandon the Viennese Freud, who was deemed obsolete. And what is more, this abandonment was desired by the same people who knew Freud and were compelled to leave Europe because of Nazism, all of whom were Jews and who kept with them the memory of a world that had been ruined and that they no longer wanted, once they were able to complete their difficult integration into the Anglo­American world. Lacan, the Catholic with deep French roots, having broken with the faith and with every form of chauvinism, comes on the scene and proclaims a return to Vienna. But which Vienna? Not that of the émigrés, but a dreamed­up Vienna, reinvented by the structure of the signifier. And it is in a lecture from 1955 (“The Freudian Thing”) in Vienna, moreover, that Lacan invents the idea that psychoanalysis is the equivalent of an epidemic (the plague), able to poi­ son minds. Lacan had not known the Europe of the central empires: he was French and Parisian through and through. This was the brilliant maneuver: the one who carried out an unprecedented recasting of Freud’s work, he who lead what I have called the “orthodox sublation of Freudianism,” was neither part of Freud’s inner circle nor an émigré from his­ torical Vienna. He was someone who came from without, a

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subject almost foreclosed from the Freudian saga. No one expected Lacan; certainly not Freud. You can easily under­ stand, then, why Lacan so quickly incurred the wrath of the international psychoanalytic agencies, to the point of being rejected by them. He was perceived as a threatening foreigner, a potential heretic. He nowhere appeared in the official genealogy of Freudianism, neither among those of Viennese origin nor among those from the North American continent. c.g.: Alain Badiou, do you agree with what Élisabeth Roudi­

nesco just said? If Lacan was able to be faithful to Freud, is it because he did not resemble him at all? a.b.: Yes, it’s undeniable. But this faithless fidelity toward

Freud is not a unique case in the history of thought. It hap­ pens quite often that an intellectual invention is brusquely redeployed and magnified by an intervention that comes from without. For my part, I would like to make the point that, among the “foreign” elements that Lacan used to re­ found psychoanalysis, a primary role fell to philosophy— and naturally this moves me, quite a bit. . . . Philosophy was one of the major instruments of the Lacanian renewal. Over the entire course of his seminar, whom do we meet, in fact? Plato, Spinoza, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Wittgen­ stein, and many others. The psychoanalyst never stops call­ ing on philosophers, and you could almost write a history of philosophy according to Lacan. It would no doubt be strange and completely interesting. Each time, the philosophers are filtered, retranslated, and folded back onto a discipline not

their own. They even become possible conceptual charac­ ters of the analytic linkage itself. This is particularly true in the case of Socrates, one of Lacan’s privileged interlocutors. c.g.: The same goes for Plato, since Lacan claimed that Pla­

a.b.: Indeed! He retroactively Lacanianized many philoso­

phers! But he did it with a particular talent. Contrary to what one might think, Lacan is always rather literal, quite close to the texts he moves through. His interpretations, sometimes bold or impertinent, are not at all far­fetched or abusively drawn out. He moves freely through the philo­ sophical corpus, oscillating between complete incorpora­ tion and radical exclusion. For Lacan also called himself on many occasions an antiphilosopher. Let’s take, in fact, the example of his reading of Plato: sometimes he completely takes over Platonic apparatuses for his own purposes. So, in . . . or worse,3 he includes for his own purposes entire sec­ tions of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides. Elsewhere, he mocks Plato ruthlessly, as when he reduces the philosophical and political project of The Republic to the raising of docile hors­ es. . . . Lacan is not always gentle with philosophers, and the charges made against them are sometimes extremely violent. Reading this strange antiphilosopher who is so infatu­ ated with many philosophers, I came to the conclusion that the philosophers of my generation could not do without a real confrontation with Lacan. It is not merely a matter of appreciating and assessing philosophy’s externality with

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to was Lacanian. . . .

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relation to psychoanalysis. What’s happening there is a questioning that is more intimate and secret: How can and should we philosophers relate to this Lacanian use of phi­ losophy, or to his theme of antiphilosophy? To what extent are our own conceptions of the philosophical discipline af­ fected or even shaken up by Lacan’s bringing it on board in this ambivalent way? For me, finally, no contemporary phi­ losophy can be considered important if it has not measured itself, at one point or other on its path, against the Lacanian interpretation of philosophy. It is in any case highly significant that philosophy had been mobilized to this extent by Lacan in order to reorga­ nize, and even twist, the Freudian, Viennese model of psy­ choanalysis. At the same time, this also created and stirred up a sort of deaf rivalry between the two disciplines. Lacan carries within himself this conflict that is sometimes latent, sometimes manifest: sometimes he seems to be a character on the philosophical stage, sometimes he is the one who leaves that stage in order to dissolve philosophy into an en­ tirely new space, that of analysis such as he conceives it. He was such a magician that he only ever made this or that glo­ rious fragment of the history of philosophy appear in order to make it disappear again, back beneath the great coat of his psychoanalytic creation. é.r.: Here again we have a new paradox. Lacan performed the very strong gesture of bringing philosophy back into the field of psychoanalysis. However, his relationship to phi­ losophy was in fact a life­and­death struggle. Lacan used

c.g.: How, then, would you characterize Lacan’s relations

with writers? His work is shot through with literary refer­ ences, from Sade to Joyce. Are we in the same situation as with the philosophers, a relation that is at once an appro­ priation and a rejection? é.r.: Whoever the author he is speaking about may be, Lacan

initiates a process of incorporation: he thinks the other is stating the same thing at the same time as he is. He often judged earlier thinkers or writers to have anticipated his own reflections. We’ve seen how he was able to argue, not

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philosophy in order to better enter into conflict with it. He was wrestling with it at each and every moment. Freud did not have the same position with regard to philosophy at all. And this is important: in France, it was not rare that intellec­ tuals in the 1960s read Freud after having read Lacan. They read Freud in light of the Lacanian overhaul. When I was working on my History of Psychoanalysis in France, I also had to “de­Lacanianize” myself in order to discover the original Freud. Outside of France, I know many Freudian psycho­ analysts and other commentators on Freud’s work who have a devil of a time reading Lacan’s work: this is particularly the case for Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Carl Schorske. In the Anglo­Saxon world, in fact, Lacan is studied above all in literature and anthropology departments (cultural and gender studies). In that world, Lacan is therefore perceived to be a philosopher, a cultural anthropologist, or even still a theoretician of literature, and hardly a psychoanalyst at all!

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without humor, that Plato was already Lacanian. This sort of assimilation has given rise among certain Lacanians to some comic discourses. Some think, for example, that Freud was Lacanian in advance, and that the concepts of Lacan are al­ ready found in his work. Regarding contemporaries, Lacan often felt he had been “plagiarized.” This trait was at times pathological: in his correspondence, he never stops asserting that he is being plundered, that his ideas are being stolen, whereas he him­ self offers long commentaries on and takes on as his own entire movements of the work of certain philosophers. Such an attitude could only produce conflict. Let’s take as an ex­ ample his relations with Jacques Derrida, who was an atten­ tive, scrupulous, and uncompromising reader of Lacan’s work. Well, Lacan could not stand him: he claimed that Derrida stole his ideas. Or in other cases he judged certain writers, such as Marguerite Duras, to have simply offered a thought interchangeable with his own, on the order of “me, it’s the other,” “the other is me,” “he or she does what I do,” and so on. As for those writers who had an effect on him, Lacan ul­ timately spoke very little of the surrealists, in whose circles, however, he moved and whom he knew well. It is clear that his tastes take him rather toward the poetic and literary ex­ periences of Mallarmé and Joyce. Lacan was truly fascinated by the new language of Ulysses and then of Finnegans Wake, and he incorporated that language, as I said. However, in my opinion, his relations with philosophy and theater— Greek tragedy, but also Shakespeare and Claudel—were more fruitful for him.

theater, but we must not lose sight of the essential role the formal sciences and the logical figures of contemporary for­ malization played for Lacan. In a first phase, he relied on the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson. In a second phase, he turned toward the mathematized logic of Boole and Frege. Finally, in a third phase that corresponds to the seminars of the 1970s, he brought into this framework the mathematical theory of sets and, with his exploration of Borromean knots, topology, geometrized algebra. Conse­ quently, there is a very rich history of Lacan following the most modern forms of formalizing activity in the strict sense. He was not content, though this would also already be worthy of praise, to incorporate the tragic theater, the great Mallarméan poetry, the brilliant Joycean shattering of language, and the Viennese conceptual legacy. The branch­ es of Lacanian knowledge also reach out into the driest of the formal disciplines. Why did he need them? I think the crucial point is the following: I have already emphasized that Lacan attempt­ ed to make the tragedy of the subjective—in the lineage of Romanticism and Sartrean existentialism—compatible with structuralism. He had two objectives: on the one hand, to affirm the irreducibility of the subject (with the figure at once dramatic and ethical of Antigone) and, on the other, to situate this very irreducibility in a transmis­ sible structural universe. The late Lacan turned toward mathematics and topology in order to create his own con­ cept of the “matheme.” Now, the matheme is precisely this formal space in which one can project and transmit the

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a.b.: We are speaking of philosophy, literature, and the

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subjective experience of the cure; the latter is therefore a relation to a rational, scientific matrix that can be trans­ mitted without remainder. However, such a transmission cannot cover the totality of subjective experience, since the subject is and remains, as we have seen, irreducible. Of the subject, there is always something that escapes being put into form, its logico­mathematical capture, in fine its transmission through formal knowledge. In what sense? In the sense that the subject, for the last Lacan, is inextricably tied up with the real. The real, in its Lacanian conceptual content, is what absolutely resists symbolization, whether carried out by means of mathematics, logic, or topology. This motif recurs over and over: the real of the subject is unsymbolizable. As a result, Lacan goes as far as possible in formalization in order to experience a fundamental im­ passe. At some point, the integral formalization should break down because it no longer has a hold on the very thing it is trying to grasp. This is the moment when we touch on the real point of the subject. Such is, it seems to me, one of the strongest movements of Lacanian thought, which surges up in his writing as well: pushing, extending formalization to the point where some­ thing that evades and unravels it surfaces. Whence the mag­ nificent figure of the knot in the late Lacan: the knot is at once what is tightened and what comes undone. It is this real point where doing and undoing are practically indistin­ guishable or identical. For me, with his use of the theory of knots, Lacan offered to his puzzled audience the ultimate metaphor for all of his thought. But on this point, I know Élisabeth disagrees with me. . . .

During his late seminars, Lacan slipped into a certain spec­ ulative delirium: he insists on tying and untying his knots. The mathematicians he worked with, Pierre Soury and Mi­ chel Thomé and also Jean­Michel Vappereau, took part in this adventure that left multiple traces: colored drawings with rings and coordinates. In Lacan’s work, this adventure coincides with the progressive disappearance of speech and saying. At the end of life, Lacan became not aphasic, but almost mute, all the while generating neologisms ad infi­ nitum. It was fascinating to see this man undoing his own thought in public. The gesture is unheard of, deeply sub­ versive, like a final provocation, a final blow leveled at his supposed theoretical omnipotence. Lacan had it out with his aporias and sunk into despair: he was scared of and de­ fied death at the same time. Personally, I do not think that he can be imitated on this point, as certain of his epigones have done. Have the extreme formalizations and their im­ passes offered anything to analytic practice? Let’s say that I do not think so, since they above all consisted in dissolv­ ing the time of analytic sessions in the name of a cruel and brutal formalism that I do not share and that tends to de­ humanize the cure. But let’s leave the question open. That the late Lacan was heroic, even in his final anguish, I do not deny it, quite to the contrary. But I do not think that this final quest bears within it any renewal of the clinic. c.g.: Isn’t one of the most important aspects of the Laca­ nian enterprise the fact that it stands in the way of any and all psychologization of the subject?

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é.r.: I find the final step of his journey to be instructive.

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é.r.: Yes. The rejection of psychology is a constant in Lacan’s

work. Lacan had one hell of a horror for this discipline. At the time, he was not alone. The aversion was widely shared in my generation, and it was a good thing. Georges Canguil­ hem’s famous attack on it, in his lecture from 1956, “What Is Psychology?,” is still to the point: “when you exit the Sor­ bonne on the rue Saint­Jacques, you can go up or down; if one goes up, you come to the Panthéon, which is the Con­ servatory of some great men; but if you go down, you’ll certainly wind up at the Prefecture de Police.”4 And it is all the more relevant today since almost all psychoanalysts of the new generation have been forced to complete studies in psychology in order to practice in healthcare institutions. This is very problematic given the critical exteriority of psychoanalysis with regard to psychology, which is not the case, it should be noted here, with psychiatry. The training of psychoanalysts is a critical issue for the future. And Lacan’s return to Freud can here serve as a point of reference: for him, psychoanalysis was precisely an anti­ psychology. He had contempt for the American school of “ego psychology,” focused as it was on the ego or self. He wanted more of the unconscious, more of the real, in order to avoid the pitfalls of the psychologization of existence that amounts to no more than the behaviorist domestica­ tion of consciences. It is not by chance that he carefully avoided discussing the Oedipus complex, which can also generate banal accounts of familial conflicts. On this point Deleuze was right in his critique of the Oedipalization of subjectivity.

c.g.: To come back to the late Lacan, it seems you like him

a.b.: It’s true. It is not only because he had recourse to the formal sciences, with the accent on logic and topology that I evoked. It is also because I cannot help but see in him, like Élisabeth in fact, Oedipus at Colonus. It is necessary to re­ turn to and insist on this point: Oedipus Rex was not a favorite of Lacan, who cannot be seen in the figure of the deceived sovereign. To the contrary, he could be represented with the characteristics of Oedipus at Colonus, that is, in a situation where a man undoes by himself the knot of his own exis­ tence and imposes on whoever listens to him this terminal, final unraveling. This posture is, to be sure, in certain ways obscure, spectral. But it reveals and condenses the tragedy itself of the subject. Not giving up on your desire is also be­ ing able, and knowing how, to undo what you believe you have done and tied together in a compact way. The final Lacan is obviously difficult at first, but he takes on in this way an eminence, an exceptional stature. This is one of the reasons why his death struck me as a completely particular event. That masters will die one day, we all know. However, the death of Lacan was cloaked in a singular aura because it echoed his own work. His death is modeled after his late thought, which was placed under the sign of, precisely, Oedipus at Colonus, this figure of an old man who dies and leaves to all the world the insoluble enigma of his death. Lacan, if I may say so, succeeded in pulling this off: the muteness of his last years and his death

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quite a bit, Alain Badiou. . . .

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form an integral part of his enigmatic legacy. Twenty years later, Lacan’s mystery is still there. The relation to his work cannot be stabilized, even if you recognize him as a master. We will never finish interrogating this man and his thought. What was it about really, at bottom? Psychoanalysis? Obvi­ ously. Philosophy? Yes, in a certain sense. Contemporary writing, the adventure of language? Of course. The drama of subjectivity? That too. And what else? Is there some un­ fathomable remainder? Lacan was, is, and will always be an enigma, an author who is impossible to classify and to com­ pletely decipher. His immanent multiplicity is relentlessly disconcerting, today just as much as it was yesterday. é.r.: I completely agree. At the end of his life, Lacan trans­ formed into Oedipus at Colonus even physically, in his walk and his gestures. He was engaged in a gigantic pro­ cess of dissolution: dissolution of his physical faculties and his capacity for thought, as well as the dissolution of the School that he founded and oversaw. I remember perfectly well sessions of his seminar in which he stopped speaking. These were gripping moments, moments mocked by cer­ tain others with a detestable irony. There was, in this logic of monstration, something surrealist. Lacan no longer said anything; he showed and showed himself in the decomposi­ tion of his own language. a.b.: The gesture is in fact surrealist, but also quite close to

Wittgenstein—there again a philosophical incorporation. Everyone knows the famous aphorism that closes the Tracta­ tus logico­philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof

c.g.: In September 2011, Lacan’s Seminar XIX from the year 1971–72—whose title is . . . or worse [. . . ou pire]—was pub­ lished by Seuil. Lacan opens the text by commenting on his title, with this witticism that grabs the attention of the reader: “Perhaps certain among you heard it as ‘ . . . ou pire,’ which is in sum what I can always do.” At the end of his in­ troduction he adds: “My title underlines the importance of this empty place and also demonstrates that this is the only way to say something with the help of language.” Do you have a commentary on this title and this seminar in particu­ lar, Alain Badiou? a.b.: This strange title, . . . or worse, and its punctuation in­ troduce, of course, a suspension. But the suspension equal­ ly implies what is coming as real. The complete syntagm, the whole formula is: “There is no sexual relation .  .  . or worse.” It is therefore a question of what is worse than the “no” of the sexual relation. This is interesting since, from the beginning, Lacan always tried to flush out the imaginary

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one must be silent.” If the real is unsymbolizable, it is ulti­ mately that about which one cannot speak; therefore, one must be silent. But remaining silent always implies as well, and this is still Wittgenstein’s perspective, the duty to indi­ cate, to point. You must show that about which you must remain silent. I imagine the late Lacan as someone who continues to point his finger at an unsayable real. Except that, in the end, we can no longer know what this gesture indicates and truly implies. It is left to us as an enigma, like death itself.

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manifestations or figures of reality. In a certain sense, the worst arrives when instead of and in the place of a void, a fundamental not­being, the presence of an idol is imposed by force. I also appreciate quite a bit the very first seminars of Lacan, for reasons at once theoretical and stylistic: in them he displays a serenity that will be brilliantly dismantled af­ terward. Now, in the inaugural seminar, Freud’s Papers on Technique, he has this striking interrogation: shouldn’t cures end with exposés on justice and courage, as in the ancient style? It is a sort of opening send­off, a condensing of the mission that Lacan assigned psychoanalysis and, beyond that, every intellectual effort: the original gap should never be filled in by an icon; the primordial abyss should never be stopped up with a creation of the imaginary. With his usual curtness, Lacan once said that philosophy has never done anything other than plug the hole of politics.5 That’s not very generous toward philosophers! But I see completely what he means. All in all, it is better to hollow out a new hole in thought than to fill in some other hole with stuff­ ing. These days, the so­called morality of the rights of man and the call for a return to Kant are just so much stuffing. If what is bizarrely called the “new philosophy” were really philosophy, which to be frank I highly doubt, then Lacan’s formula would be totally justified. There you have indeed a school of so­called philosophers who spend a great deal of energy plugging up the hole of politics! é.r.: This formula also bears witness to the violence he could bring to bear against philosophy and politics in general. . . . or worse is in fact a strange seminar, since Lacan speaks in

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it about abjection, the One, the impossibility of the sexual relation, all the while playing with language: ou pire can also be written s’ . . . oupir.6 There is a chapter that refers to the formula of love: “I ask you to refuse me what I offer you be­ cause that is not it.” This echoes the famous “love is giving what you do not have to someone who does not want it.”7 In other words, Lacan gives himself over here to new logical constructions by overturning the symbolic order in order to go from now on toward the real. And there, of course, as Alain said, there is this very strong idea in his work of mak­ ing a gap appear that cannot be filled in. And this happens at the moment when he himself became something of an idol for his disciples. He undoes what he constructs in order to go toward the worst, seeking to show that modern man, the man of science, can tend toward the worst insofar as the relation between two subjects is impossible. Against the symbolic, Lacan places the real; against desire, jouissance; and against every relation that would like to be fusional, the impossibility of a relation: you offer what you do not have and what the other does not want, and so on. Existence is therefore, in itself, a tragedy. There is in this terrible pes­ simism of the last Lacan something that evokes the worst of the history of the twentieth century: the cut that is Au­ schwitz. Lacan truly saw, in the extermination of the Jews of Europe, the “worst.” He interpreted it through the per­ spective of the unleashing of the death drive. But he did not take up the thesis that contends that this event will mark an unthinkable caesura for philosophy. Nor did he say that it was a matter of a nonhuman horror that no one can inter­ pret. He affirmed, to the contrary, that only psychoanalysis

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could contribute to thinking this event, thanks to a reread­ ing of the late Freud. On two occasions, he even mobilized the signifier of wholesale extermination as the founding el­ ement of a new approach to the unconscious. A first time in 1964, at the moment of the foundation of the EFP (l’École freudienne de Paris), when in his seminar on The Four Fun­ damental Concepts of Psychoanalysis he invokes the “Holocaust” while proposing to make his school the place for a renewal of Freudian thought in the face of the sclerosis of psycho­ analytic societies. A second time in 1967, when he wants to introduce the procedure of the passe for the training of psychoanalysts. At this point, he maintained that the IPA served as a refuge for persecuted psychoanalysts, though only in order to immediately add that it soon became a seg­ regating empire. And he affirms that in the face of a new barbarous world—that of scientism and of the norming of the subject by mass society—we must revive the values of Freudian universalism. Remember that the notion of the death drive gave rise to intense debates in the history of the psychoanalytic move­ ment between its detractors (primarily American) and its partisans (Europeans). Freud introduced the concept in 1920 in the form of a hypothesis in Beyond the Pleasure Prin­ ciple, an astonishing speculative text that will lead him to a certain pessimism at a time when Europe was moreover ravaged by the brown plague. Progressively, the “old world,” that of the old Freudian Europe, darkened. And in Moses and Monotheism (1939), which is a veritable testament left to pos­ terity, Freud seeks out the essence of evil and he affirms, in a stupefying hypothesis, that the sense of Jewishness is

a.b.: Perhaps there is in Lacan a certain form of dissimu­

lated Romanticism that flares up in every aging classical figure. é.r.: Definitely, and this is why I compared this final Lacan

to Balthazar Claës, the Balzac character who, at the end of his life, sacrifices everything for his passion for alchemy and who, at the moment of his death, has a revelation that he will not be able to hand down to science. And he leaves this life without being able to offer a response to the ques­ tion that torments him: “I am obstinate, I disappear,” said

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transmitted in the unconscious and that it is unsinkable, even beyond Judaism. Consequently, he said, we will never come to the end of the anti­Semitism that is its corollary, even in the form of Jewish self­hatred. What audacity! It is understood that certain psychoana­ lysts have been disturbed by this final Freud and preferred to turn back to his more clinical works. But this Freud is to­ day studied with close interest by philosophers, anthropolo­ gists, and historians. And he is the logical model for Lacan, who will also lay down a speculative challenge to the mod­ ern world with RSI.8 In the final Lacan, the real is affirmed and emancipated: it is the unsayable, the unnamable, mad­ ness. Taking this reversal seriously is to show the advance Lacan made toward a dissolution of himself and his school. This late Lacan does not believe in progress, change, or the Revolution. This man of science, this sumptuous rational­ ist, becomes over the years a convinced skeptic. His legacy is all the more undecidable. . . .

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Lacan, lucid about himself up to the end, after months of eclipse. But this is not a testament. Unlike Freud, Lacan leaves nothing as a legacy. He undoes what he built by knitting his knots and his pieces of string. And this is why Lacan’s heritage is in danger, more so than that of Freud: the psychoanalysts of the first Lacanian circle received noth­ ing as a legacy, they received the dissolution. . . . And what is more, he never stopped advocating “the work of dissolu­ tion,” as if it were a major concept. One has the impression that it is necessary to grasp Lacan’s work in a new way, out­ side the field of psychoanalysis: the only way to make it live. c.g.: To conclude, I would like to know to what extent Lacan

is, for you, a thinker who is useful for understanding our age. a.b.: He remains a decisive master for the following rea­

son, which is of the highest importance: the contemporary world is haunted by uncertainty, disorientation, and the specter of permanent crisis. And Lacan is a great thinker of disorder. More generally, it is even possible to define psy­ choanalysis as an orderly, methodical thought of subjective disorder. On this point, it is in fact parallel to Marxism, which also has an objective to make intelligible a collective existence founded on violent anarchy and the unappeasable and voracious contradictions that make up the whole dis­ order of capitalism. If you think of the current crisis, Lacan remains essential in that he tries to regrasp, right within the disorder, an immanent order, a referential frame that refers to the horizon of the symbolic. If one extrapolates starting

é.r.: In the same vein as what Alain just said, I see Lacan as a

weapon of subversion against the current capitalist system: this capitalism of finance, dehumanized, with no people or subject, prone to slipping out of control. To be inspired by Lacan against this madness would be to sow disorder in the order. The reading of “Kant with Sade” (1963), a para­ digmatic text that is a turning point in this story, is testi­ mony to it. To associate the categorical imperative with an imperative of jouissance in order to show that it is a matter of two sides of a same problematic: this is what allows one to

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from Lacanian thought, you could say that the crisis of the contemporary world is a crisis of the symbolic. From there, Lacanian categories can be mobilized to understand, once more, an entire series of phenomena: the death throes of inherited hierarchies, the omnipresence of money, the con­ stantly hurried and vain circulation of all things, and so on. At the same time, the ethical imperative that consists in not giving up on your desire still has a striking currentness. In a configuration of crisis, in fact, you can feel swept up or caught in the grip of a confused immediacy. If you want to resist, in the strong sense of the term, this experience of being adrift, you have to have the firm will to not let yourself be submerged, to not blindly give yourself over to the wan­ dering—to not, precisely, give up on your desire. Lacan’s contribution today is as a result fundamentally double: on the one hand, it makes possible a limpid structural compre­ hension of the crisis as a symbolic crisis or crisis of the sym­ bolic; on the other hand, he makes possible the affirmation of the irreducibility of the desiring subject as such.

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be intelligently indignant about both sides of contemporary society, scientism and obscurantism. In the Anglophone world, philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek or Judith Butler lay claim to a Lacan that is quasi “femi­ nist” or anticapitalist. In France, a large number of psy­ choanalysts—not all, thankfully—have to shut Lacan up in wordplay, in repetitive jargon, and they observe the world from the armchair and the clinical cases they hear: they re­ count in a certain sense very “Lacanian” cases and this often makes for bad literature. What’s more, they make Lacan the herald of regressive values. So they erect the “Name­of­the­ Father” into a fixed slogan, the incarnation of a “symbolic law” that serves to protect society against a proliferation of “bad mothers” who are accused of fusing with their children without respecting the “Oedipus complex.” And they lam­ bast modern society, all the while claiming to remain politi­ cally “neutral.” Neither right, left, or center. They condemn, therefore, not scientism, but science— medically assisted conceptions, for example, or homosexu­ al couples, single mothers, the mothers of autistic children who are judged to be too “fusional,” and so on. Why not imagine in the near future psychoanalysts criticizing di­ vorce or adultery, in the name of the “good of the children” and a stable relationship among siblings? It’s strange, all the same, this attempt to transform Lacan—a baroque and libertine thinker, a lucid conservative—into a sort of bishop whose virtue is a little mischievous, furnished with a phal­ lic club. This is not my Lacan. I believe that a revolution is necessary in France in order to change this view of Lacan.

In a word: no to the reactionary Lacan, yes to the subversive Lacan! c.g.: Thank you for these analyses and positions. Would any­

from the audience: I would like to know what, according to you, Lacan’s contribution to the question of existence is. In what way can he help us today to understand our con­ crete existence, and more generally the sense of life? No doubt, Lacan’s concepts are subversive. But to take their full measure, it is necessary to enter into his system and its language, which are so closed in on themselves. It could be that due to this closure, his teaching offers nothing from the point of view of existence. a.b.: What seems to me to be problematic about your ques­ tion is knowing what exactly you mean by existence. Dur­ ing this discussion, we have addressed the tension in Lacan between the symbolic order on the one hand, and the prin­ ciple of subjective irreducibility on the other. When one in­ vokes such a tension such as we have spoken of it, are we not speaking of existence itself ? Moreover, I do not agree with you at all: the language of Lacan is absolutely not closed in on itself. Quite to the contrary, it is full of holes, fraught with points and lines of flight. His language is like a laby­ rinth that includes its own exit doors, its own possibility of escape. As for me, I have never read Lacan with the feeling

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one in the audience like to intervene, make comments, or pose questions to Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco?

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that he was shutting me in. Still less can we speak in his case of a system. His thought is made up of layers and stra­ ta whose arrangements have nothing systematic to them. Lacan puts into circulation and makes available—and this is why he is useful—a whole series of notions that are at the same time complex and singular, which are sometimes dis­ persed, sometimes connected. It is up to the reader to take them up one by one or link them up. It is up to him to pass from one layer to the next. Lacan himself authorized the greatest possible freedom with regard to what he invented. Élisabeth and I have envisaged the ways we have been served by his teaching. Lacan has been useful to us for his compre­ hension of being, of the subject, of what is. Now, I see no difference between the thought of what is and existence. At bottom, your question has as its philosophical background an opposition between thought (closed, according to you, in Lacan) and existence. This opposition seems to me to be completely false or contrived. from the audience: Lacan represents an evolution of

Freudian psychoanalysis. Do you think that French psycho­ analysis has continued to progress since his death? Has it modernized itself, in the good sense of that term? é.r.: I think that the current situation of the psychoana­

lytic movement in France bears witness to the end of the French exception. Lacan embodied this exception, and to­ day psychoanalysts, and not only Lacanians, are in a diffi­ cult position: that of mourning the figure of a master. The practice of psychoanalysis is not what it was: it has become

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a profession constrained by restrictive regulations and cur­ ricula. You have to obtain a diploma in psychology if you want to work as a psychoanalyst in institutions. And the psychiatrists are no longer oriented toward psychoanalysis, since psychiatry is now focused on biology and dominated by chemical treatments. The French school of psychoanalysis, whatever the dif­ ferent currents within it may be, has been brought into line and no longer has anything very special to offer on the glob­ al level. It is shot through with internal struggles but there is nothing unique about this. In Moscow, to the contrary, psychoanalysis is expanding, with dozens of psychoanalytic groups. In Buenos Aires, there are many groups as well. In Brazil, it is taught in the universities instead of and in the place of psychology. Likewise, there are four large interna­ tional associations that federate dozens of associations. But what is missing today from all of these powerful associa­ tions is a soul, an intellectual and political commitment, a passion. In short, they lack creativity, an adventurous spirit, a thought. In becoming workers of the psyche, psychoanalysts have stopped being intellectuals: they have become psycho­ therapists, respectable doctors of psychic suffering. The tragedy is that psychoanalysis is nowhere considered an autonomous discipline, like anthropology, history, literary study, or philosophy. And since it is also not a science—in the sense that biology or physics is—it has in some way become a branch of psychology. Everything happens, then, as if it were a private discipline that the inheritors of the founding fathers imagine they own: the Freudians think

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the work of Freud belongs to them, the Kleinians think that of Melanie Klein is theirs, and the Lacanians think they are the holders of the truth and word of the master. In other words, psychoanalysis has not acquired its own identity in the public space or in the university. This is not the case with other disciplines, which are not or are no lon­ ger the property of their founders. Sociology belongs no more to Émile Durkheim than it does to his inheritors. It has been secularized. Are psychoanalysts destined to become psychologists, technicians of the soul, or psychotherapists, that is, sim­ ply clinicians cut off from all scholarly research? Are they doomed to replace psychiatrists, whose discipline is on the way to being absorbed into neurology? It is clear that one can find the means in Lacan, the thinker of disorder, to critique this evolution of the psycho­ analytic movement and of the “profession” of the psychoan­ alyst. The revalorization of the psychoanalytic cannot only occur through clinicians; it must also occur through works outside the clinical field. How can clinicians be trained for high­level creative research when they are required, in or­ der to practice their craft in healthcare institutions, to ob­ tain psychology diplomas while also undertaking a training analysis in psychoanalytic schools? a.b.: Following what Élisabeth has just said, I would like to

end today by making an appeal—why not, after all? Recent­ ly in France we have seen a proliferation of very violent and particularly clumsy attacks on psychoanalysis. These attacks represent a general threat to intellectuality. Psychoanalysis,

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we know, is not the sole target. Marx is the object of fierce assaults, compromised as he is in the eyes of our moralists by the inhumanity of “totalitarianism.” Darwin himself has been pilloried by American reactionaries. There is also a lurking temptation to begin questioning the discoveries of Einstein. All of these attacks have the goal, implicit or ex­ plicit, of destroying the figures of modern intellectuality in order to replace them with technical subproducts that can be used quickly and easily, embellished with a moralizing sauce that can be used on any occasion. I affirm that it is necessary to stand up against this will to the depreciation and domestication of thought, whether political, scientific, or psychoanalytic. The threat is real, infinitely serious. To paraphrase a well­known formula of Clemenceau, we can­ not leave the defense of psychoanalysis to psychoanalysts alone. The struggle must be widened. Of course, psychoanalysts are on the front line in this combat for the recognition of their discipline and their practice. However, the professionalization Élisabeth spoke of constitutes a threat of self­domestication. We must not abandon psychoanalysis to this terrible fate, and to avoid this, help from without is required. The contemporary charges against psychoanalysis seem to me, in fact, still more grave than those leveled at Marxism. Marxism pre­ supposes and implies a fight! What is happening today with psychoanalysis is much more dangerous—we must be on high alert. Because wanting to eradicate Freud or Lacan is to go after the very concept of the modern subject. And if that is abolished, the door is open to reactionary ideologies of the worst sort.

This is why I solemnly make this appeal: rise up to de­ fend psychoanalysis. . . . whatever the way.

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é.r.: How can one not subscribe to this appeal? I do so all

the more willingly, given what I have observed on many occasions, namely, that psychoanalysts defend their disci­ pline little or poorly. That’s not a barbed comment direct­ ed against them, simply an observation. They have a great deal of difficulty analyzing and combating knee­jerk anti­ Freudianism, and they remain for the most part “neutral” and disdainful when faced with this adversity, either dream­ ing of better days or turning back with nostalgia toward the past: “In my time, it was better.” Today, the attacks on Freud are just as dishonest as before, but more widely dif­ fused thanks to the Internet. A counterattack is necessary and urgent. Yes, we must mobilize in the defense of psy­ choanalysis. And we should do so by uniting our forces well beyond the circle of psychoanalysts. Everyone should feel concerned: it is a matter of civilization.

Notes

Foreword: “I am couNtINg oN the tourbIlloN ”— oN the late lacaN

1. Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–85, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 2. See Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, eds., Concept and Form, vols. 1 and 2 (London: Verso, 2012). 3. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX, On Female Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1999). 4. “L’Étourdit” has been collected in Autres écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), pp. 449–95. See also Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship: Two

5.

6. 7.

70 |   n ot e s

8.

9.

10.

Lessons on Lacan, trans. Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007). Lacan identifies the master’s discourse, in fact, with the “other side of psychoanalysis,” its hidden backside or underside (envers). Jacques Lacan, “Monsieur A,” Ornicar? 21–22 (Summer 1980). Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978– 87, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2006). Lacan identifies Marx, rather than Freud, as the inventor of the symptom in the December 10, 1974, session of Seminar XII, RSI: “The notion of the symptom was introduced well before Freud by Marx, as the sign of what does not work in the real.” Dit-mension is here a coinage that, echoing “dimension,” brings together saying or speech, lying, mansion, and so on. Lacan, “Introduction à l’édition allemande d’un premier volume des Écrits,” Autres écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), pp. 553–59. The passage cited is found on p. 555. I would like to thank Nathan Brown, Rachel Kushner, Kenneth Reinhard, and Susan Spitzer for their insight and assistance. PreFace

1. The expression “Lendemains qui chantent,” in the tradition of the French Left, refers to the arrival of a new society founded on bases other than those that structure our capitalist world: money, exploitation, work. The event referred to here was a forum hosted by the newspaper Libération convened in Rennes on July 26, 2010, and oriented around the question “can we still believe in enchanted tomorrows?”

2. The French term “hygiénisme” refers to the medicalization of all areas of life, a process often undertaken by the state in the interests of public “health” and welfare. 3. L’argent fou is the title of a book by Alain Minc, published in 1990. 4. Maître can also be understood as “teacher,” “mentor,” and “model.”

1. Note from the French text: A fragment of this dialogue appeared in Philosophie Magazine (September 2011) with the title “Choose Your Lacan!” It was subsequently completely revised, corrected, and expanded by the authors based on a transcription made by Martin Duru. 2. “Foyers” refers to housing establishments for foreign workers. 3. Cf. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton), 164–79. 4. Cf. ibid., 207. These remarks occurred during a question and answer session following an “impromptu” intervention by Lacan at the new university at Vincennes on December 3, 1969. 5. “FLN” refers to the Front de Libération Nationale, an organization leading the anticolonial struggles in Algeria. 6. Grand Soir: a phrase in common use particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century among revolutionaries to denote a sudden, total overturning of society. 2. thINkINg dIsorder

1. Note from the French text: Transcription of a debate on the theme “Lacan, thirty years after” that took place at the Bib-

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1. oNe master, two eNcouNters

2. 3.

72 |   n ot e s

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

liothèque Nationale de France on October 4, 2011. Organized by Jean-Louis Graton and conducted by Christine Goémé, in partnership with France Culture and Philosophie Magazine. Transcribed by Martin Duru and completely revised and corrected by the authors. Élisabeth Roudinesco, Lacan, envers et contre tout (Paris: Seuil, 2011). Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire: Livre XIX, . . . ou pire (Paris: Seuil, 2011). Georges Canguilhem, “Qu’est-ce que la psychologie?,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 1 (1958). This passage is referred to in Jacques Lacan, Écrits (New York: Norton, 2006), 730. Cf. Lacan’s “Introduction” to the German edition of his Écrits, from 1973, and published in Scilicet 5 (1975): 11–17. Lacan speaks of “metaphysics” rather than “philosophy.” Soupir: “sigh.” Cf. Lacan, Écrits, 516. RSI: Real, Symbolic, Imaginary. RSI is the name given to Lacan’s Seminar XXII, in 1974–75.

INdex

alterity, 9, 13, 28 Althusser, Louis: Badiou and, ix, 3–5, 7; institutionalization of, xvi, 13; Lacan and, xv–xvi; “late” style, xvi; as Marxist philosopher, xv–xvi, 3–4; Roudinesco and, 3; and structuralism, 32; “theoretical antihumanism,” 8, 9 animals, 29 Antigone (Sophocles), xii, 22, 37–38, 49 anti-Semitism, 59 Anzieu, Marguerite, 12 Aubry, Jenny, 1, 19 Aubry, Pierre, 1

Badiou, Alain: Althusser and, ix, 3–5, 7; background, ix–x, 3–4; and Cahiers pour l’analyse, ix, 5; and École normale supérieure, ix, 3, 4; first encounter with Lacan’s thought, 3–4; Freud and, 4–5; on Lacan (see specific topics relating to Lacan); meeting with Lacan, 6; philosophical development of, 6–9, 17–18; political orientation, ix–x, 24; psychoanalysis not undertaken by, 6, 18; Sartre and, 3, 7; and unrest of May 1968, 5; works, x, 6

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Balzac, Honoré de, 59–60 Bataille, Georges, 22 Bataille, Laurence, 22 Bataille, Sylvia, 1, 22 behaviorism, 18, 28, 52; cognitivo-behaviorist therapies, 29 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 58 Borromean knots. See knots, theory of Bowlby, John, 1 Butler, Judith, 62 Cahiers pour l’analyse (journal), ix, 5 Canguilhem, Georges, 52 capitalism, 61 Catholic Church, 22, 23, 37, 43 Claudel, Paul, 48 Clavreul, Jean, 19 cognitivism, 28 cognitivo-behaviorist therapies, 29 communism, 30. See also French Communist Party; Maoism consciousness, 7, 52. See also subject, the Cultural Revolution (China), x cure, the, viii, 14–21, 34, 56 Dalí, Salvador, 12 death, 51, 53–54

death drive, 57–58 de Certeau, Michel, viii, 3 de Clérambault, Gaëtan Gatian, 42 Deleuze, Gilles, viii, 3, 52 de Méricourt, Théroigne, 13 Derrida, Jacques, 48 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 2 desire, 57; and Antigone, xii; “never give way on your desire” maxim, x, 24, 27, 33, 37, 53, 61 determinism, 18 dissolution, xi–xiii, 54, 59–60 dit-mension, xvii, 70n8 dogmatism, 15–16, 27 Durkheim, Émile, 66 Duroux, Yves, xxii, 5 École freudien de Paris (EFP), 24, 57; disbanding of, xi, xii, xiv, 54; Roudinesco and, 3 École normale supérieure (ENS), ix, xv, 3, 4 Écrits (Lacan), xviii, 2 effet de colle, xiv EFP. See École freudien de Paris emotions, 7, 14, 16 ENS. See École normale supérieure Esquirol, Jean-Étienne Dominique, 13

family, 25–26 father, 25–26 feminine, the, 37–38 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 48 FLN. See Front de Libération Nationale For Marx (Althusser), 2 Foucault, Michel, 2, 32 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), 57 France: perceptions of Lacan in, 62–63; psychoanalysis in, 64–65; student and worker revolt of May 1968, ix, 5, 21–22 French Communist Party (PCF), viii, ix, 23 French language, 40–41 French Society of Psychoanalysis (SFP), 1 Freud, Anna, 1, 37 Freud, Sigmund: Badiou and, 4–5; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 58; contrast to Lacan, 4–5, 12, 14, 36–38, 42–43, 47; correspondence of, 42;

criticisms and attacks on, 67–68; and death drive, 58; and Greek tragedy, 35–36; and Judaism, 37, 58–59; Lacan’s return to, 35, 39, 42–44, 52; Marx and, 20; Moses and Monotheism, 58; and neuroses, 14; and patriarchal authority, 36; and philosophy, 12, 47; and psychoanalysis, 12, 14–15; The Schreber Case, 13; transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge, 35; writing style, 40, 42 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), 22, 71n5 La Gauche Prolétarienne, ix gender, 25–26, 37–38 German language, 41 Grand Soir, 27, 71n6 Greek tragedy, xii, 33–38, 48, 49, 53 Grosrichard, Alain, 5 happiness, 27 Hegel, G. W. F., 11, 21–22, 37, 44 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 11, 44 History of Psychoanalysis in France (Roudinesco), 47 Holocaust, the, 57, 58 homosexuality, 25–26

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ethics, xiii, 33. See also maxims of Lacan The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), x, 22, 33 “L’Étourdit” (Lacan), xi existence, 57, 63–64

humor, 38 hygiénisme, xxii, 71n2 International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), 14, 35, 58

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Jakobson, Roman, 2, 11 jouissance, 12, 57, 61 Joyce, James, 48, 49 Judaism, 37, 58–59 Kant, Immanuel, 61 “Kant with Sade” (Lacan), 61 Kierkegaard, Søren, 44 Klein, Melanie, 66 knots, theory of, x, xi, 49–51 Kojève, Alexandre, 11 Koyré, Alexandre, 39 Lacan, envers et contre tout (Roudinesco), 39 Lacan, Jacques: as actor, 38; as antiphilosopher, 45–46; background, 22; and Catholic Church, 22, 23, 37, 43; contrast to Freud, 4–5, 12, 14, 36–38, 42–43, 47; correspondence of, 48; criticisms and attacks on, 32; dangers of sectarian reappropriation of Lacan’s teaching, 34–35; and death, 51; death of, xi, 21, 28,

53–54; Derrida and, 48; disbanding of École freudien de Paris, xi, xii, xiv, 54, 59; disciples of, 24–25, 32, 57; and dissolution process, xii, 54, 59–60; as enigma, 54; exclusion from IPA, 14; and Greek tragedy, xii, 33–34, 53–54; and homosexuality, 25; influences on, 28; as the “Lenin of psychoanalysis,” 20–21; as man of the Enlightenment, 33–34, 38–39; Marx and, xvi–xviii; as master, x, 31–32, 60–61; medical thesis, 12; perceptions of, in Anglophone world, 47, 62; perceptions of, in France, 62–63; and philosophy, 6–13, 32–33, 44–47 (see also philosophy); political orientation, viii, 22–23, 26–28; and psychoanalysis, 11, 12, 14–17, 20–22, 42–44, 46–47, 56; and psychology, 52; relation to other writers, 47–49; and science, 11; and student and worker revolt of May 1968, 21–22; suffering of, 38–39, 42; and surrealism, 12, 48; teachings (see Lacan, teachings of; seminars of

and the symbolic, xi (see also real, the; symbolic, the); relation between politics and philosophy, xviii–xix; return to Freud, 35, 39, 42–44, 52; roots in psychiatry, 10–13, 42; Roudinesco’s first encounters with, 1–3; and structuralism and phenomenology, 32–33; and the subject, 6–7 (see also subject, the) language: and animals, 29; French and German languages, 40–41; Freud’s writing style, 40, 42; Lacan’s writing style, 40–42, 63–64; and psychoanalysis, 14; and the unconscious, 8, 39 Law, 26–27 Leclaire, Serge, 3 Lenin, Vladimir, 20–21 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 2, 11, 25–26, 32 Libération (newspaper), xxii, 70n1 literature, 10 love, 57 Macherey, Pierre, 10 madness, 11–13 maître, Lacan as. See mastery Mallarmé, Stéphane, 28, 48, 49

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Lacan); and theater, 48 (see also Greek tragedy); transmission of legacy, xiv–xv, 34–35, 60; writing as difficult task for, 38, 42; writing style, 40–42 Lacan, teachings of: Althusser and, xv–xvi; Badiou and, 6–9; and the contemporary world, 28–30, 60–62; contrast to Freud’s thought, 4–5, 12, 36–38; and the cure, 16, 34, 56; and dissolution, xii, 54, 59–60; and dogmatism, 15–16; early Lacan, 56; and gender and family, 25–26; and Greek tragedy, xii, 35–38; influence beyond psychoanalysis, 31; and knot theory, 50–51; and language, 8; late Lacan, viii, xi–xv, 39, 50, 51, 53, 59–60; and mastery, xiii; and mathematical formalization, viii, x, xi, 7–8, 49–51; maxims (see maxims of Lacan); and need for defense of psychoanalysis, viii; and paranoia, 14; and philosophy, xiii, 7–13 (see also philosophy); and politics, 19–28; and psychosis, 12–14; the real

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Mannoni, Octave, 19 Maoism, ix–x, 23–24 Mao Zedong, 23–24 Marx, Karl, 60; Althusser and, xv–xvi, 3–4; criticisms and attacks on, 67; Freud and, 20; Hegel and, 21; and philosophy, xiii, xvi–xviii; and the symptom, xvi–xviii, 70n8 Masson, Diego, 22 mastery, 71n4; and betrayal, 32; dissolution of, xi–xiii (see also dissolution); Lacan as maître, x, 31–32; and psychoanalysis, x, 34 mathematical formalization, viii, x, xi, 7, 49–51 “matheme,” xi–xii, 49–50 maxims of Lacan, x, 40–42; “love is giving what you do not have to someone who does not want it,” 57; “never give way on your desire,” x, 24, 27, 33, 37, 53, 61; “the non-dupes err,” 27, 40; “there is no sexual relation . . . or worse,” 55, 57 meaning (sens), xv melancholy, 14 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 7, 8, 32 Miller, Jacques-Alain, xiv, 5

Milner, Jean-Claude, 5 Mitterand, François, ix “Monsieur Aa, Antiphilosopher” (Tzara), xvi morality, 56 Moses, 36 Moses and Monotheism (Freud), 58 Name-of-the-Father, 26, 27, 62 Nazism, xviii, 42, 43 neuroses, 12–15 “never give way on your desire” maxim, x, 24, 27, 33, 37, 53, 61 “the non-dupes err” maxim, 27, 40 obscurantism, 17, 62 Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles), xii, 36–37, 53–54 Oedipus complex, 52, 62 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 53 oppression, 20 . . . or worse seminar, 55–57 The Order of Things (Foucault), 2 Ornicar? (journal), xiv The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), xiii Papin sisters, 12 paranoia, 12–14 Parmenides (Plato), 45

of May 1968, ix, 5, 21–22; terrorism, 23 Politzer, Georges, 3 positivism, 15 proletariat, the, xvii–xviii psychiatry, 10–13, 29 La Psychoanalyse (journal), 4 psychoanalysis: Badiou and, 6, 18; criticisms and attacks on, 66–67; and the cure, 14–21, 34, 56; current status of field, 19, 65–66; death drive, 57–58; and differences between Freud and Lacan, 12, 14–15, 42–43; in France, 64–65; Freud and, 12; historical context, 43; and identification with and transference onto the person of the master, x, 34; Lacan and, 11, 12, 14–17, 20–22, 42–44, 46–47, 56; Lacan’s predictions about, xvi; and Lacan’s return to Freud, 42–44; Lacan’s “The Freudian Thing” lecture (1955), 43; and language, 14; and later generations of practitioners, 34; need for defense of, viii, 67–68; and neuroses, 12–14; orthodox Freudian analysis, 14–15;

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patriarchal authority, 26, 36 PCF. See French Communist Party perception, 7 phenomenology, 7–8, 18, 32–33 philosophy, xiii; and the cure, 16–17; determinism, 18; Freud and, 12, 47; Lacan and, 6–13, 32–33, 44–47; Lacan as antiphilosopher, 45–46; and madness, 12–13; Marx and, xiii, xvi–xviii; obscurantism, 17, 62; phenomenology, 7–8, 18, 32–33; and politics, xviii– xix, 56; positivism, 15; and psychoanalysis, 9–13, 15, 44, 46–47; and psychology, 10–12; and religion, xvi–xvii; scientism, 17, 29, 58, 62; structuralism, 7–9, 32–33, 49; and the subject, 7–8, 11–12 Plato, 44, 45, 48 politics: Badiou and, ix–x, 5; and Catholic Church, 23; and the cure, 19; Lacan and, viii, xviii–xix, 19–28; and philosophy, xviii–xix, 56; and psychoanalysis, 20–22; Roudinesco and, viii; student and worker revolt

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psychoanalysis (continued) and philosophy, 9–13, 15, 44, 46–47; and politics, 20–22; of priests, 15; and psychology, 10, 52, 65, 66; and psychosis, 12–14; and religion, 15; and revisionism, 11; Roudinesco and, 19; in Russia, Argentina, and Brazil, 65; short sessions, viii, 14–16; transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge, xiv–xv, 34–35 psychology: cognitivobehaviorist therapies, 29; Lacan’s distaste for, 52; and neuroses, 12–14; and philosophy, 10–12; and psychoanalysis, 10, 52, 65, 66; and psychosis, 12–14 psychosis, 12–14, 42 real, the, xi, 57; Marx and, xvii; and psychoanalysis, 21, 52; and the subject, 50; symbolic, imaginary, real (SIR), 39; as unsymbolizable, 50, 55, 59 Regnault, François, 5 religion: Catholic Church as political force, 23; Freud’s view of, 15; Lacan’s Catho-

lic background, 22; and philosophy, xvi–xvii; and positivism, 15; psychoanalysis of religious people, 15 The Republic (Plato), 45 Rome Discourse, 4 Roudinesco, Élisabeth: Althusser and, 3; background, vii–viii, 2–3; and defense of psychoanalysis, viii, 68; and École freudien de Paris, 3; first encounter with Lacan’s thought, 1–3, 39; on Lacan (see specific topics relating to Lacan); meeting with Lacan, 3; philosophical development of, 10, 39; political orientation, viii, 23; psychoanalysis of, 19; works, vii–viii, 39, 47 RSI (Seminar XXII), 59, 72n8 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 7, 32, 33 Schorske, Carl, 47 The Schreber Case (Freud), 13 science, 5, 11, 15. See also mathematical formalization scientificity, 33, 39 scientism, 17, 29, 58, 62 seminars of Lacan: final seminar, xiii–xiv; Freud’s Papers on

ness, 11–13; and Maoism, 24; and Oedipus complex, 52; and phenomenology, 7, 33; and the proletariat and politics, xviii–xix; and psychoanalysis, 17, 20; and the real, 50; Sartre and, 33; and structuralism, 7–9. See also unconscious, the surrealism, 12, 39, 48, 54 symbolic, the, xi, 17, 26; the real as unsymbolizable, 50, 55, 59; symbolic, imaginary, real (SIR), 39 symptom: and Marx, xvi–xviii, 70n8; medicalization of symptoms, 29, 71n2 terrorism, 23 theater, 48. See also Greek tragedy “theoretical antihumanism,” 8, 9 Theory of the Subject (Badiou), x, 6 “there is no sexual relation . . . or worse” maxim, 55, 57 Thomé, Michel, 51 Thorez, Maurice, 23 topology, x, xi, 49, 53 tourbillon, xv, xix

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Technique (inaugural seminar), 56; and late Lacan, xi–xv, 55–57; and philosophy, 44–45; Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), x, 22, 33; Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis), 57; Seminar XIX ( . . . or worse), 55–57; Seminar XX, xi; Seminar XXII (RSI), 59, 72n8 SFP. See French Society of Psychoanalysis Shakespeare, William, 48 signifier, theory of the, xvi, xvii, 2, 29, 39, 43 SIR (symbolic, imaginary, real), 39 Socialist Party, ix Socrates, 45 Sophocles. See Greek tragedy Soury, Pierre, 51 Spinoza, Baruch, 44 spirituality, 15 structuralism, 7–9, 14, 49 subject, the: and animals, 29; and clinical experience, 9; and the cure, 17; and ethics, 33; irreducibility of, 49–50, 63; Lacan and, 6–7, 11–12, 24, 33; and Lacan’s political orientation, 27; and mad-

tragedy, 57. See also Greek tragedy Tzara, Tristan, xvi

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Ulysses (Joyce), 48 unconscious, the: and the cure, 16, 17; and Jewishness, 58–59; Lacan and, 8, 16, 27, 32, 39, 52; and language, 8, 39

Vappereau, Jean-Michel, 51 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 44, 54–55 women, 12, 13, 37–38 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 47 Žižek, Slavoj, 62