The highly arcane "wisdom" produced by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is either endlessly regurgitated and recited as holy writ by his numerous acolytes, or radically dismissed as unpalatable nonsense by his equally countless detractors. Contrary to these common, strictly antagonistic yet uniformly uncritical practices, this book offers a meticulous critique of some key theoretical and clinical aspects of Lacan's expansive oeuvre, testing their consistency, examining their implications, and investigating their significance.
Innine interrelated chapters, the book highlights both the flaws and the strengths of Lacan's ideas, in areas of investigation that are as crucial as they are contentious, within as well as outside psychoanalysis. Drawing on a vast range of source materials, including many unpublished archival documents, it teases out controversial issues such as money, organisational failure, and lighthearted, "gay" thinking, and it relies on the highest standards of scholarly excellence to develop its arguments. At the same time, the book does not presuppose any prior knowledge of Lacanian psychoanalysis on the part of the reader, but allows its readership to indulge in the joys of in-depth critical analysis, trans-disciplinary creative thinking, and persistent questioning.
This book will appeal to researchers and students alike in psychoanalytic studies and philosophy, as well as all those interested in French theory and the history of ideas.
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Chapter 1 Lacan's Ăcrits Revisited: On Writing as Object of Desire
DOI: 10.4324/9781003252276-2
Maybe it was a patent case of morphogenetic resonance avant la lettre.1 Maybe it was a mere occurrence of simple acausal synchronicity. Whether on 15 November 1966 the undead soul of Carl Gustav Jung whispered ever so softly into the young ears of Rupert Sheldrake, analytical psychology gradually giving birth to formative causation, fact of the matter is that this remarkable Tuesday was a day of three mighty crashesâtwo of which carefully planned, a third definitely unplanned, two pre-scheduled and eagerly anticipated, a third totally unexpected, yet all three of them equally memorable and momentous. In the early hours of the morning, cargo flight Pan Am 708, departing from Frankfurt with a destination of Berlin, crashed on initial approach in what was then Eastern Germany, 15 kilometres from the landing strip at Tegel airport, killing all three crew members. Some 16 hours later, the American spacecraft Gemini 12 splashed down in the North Atlantic Ocean, less than 5 kilometres off target, after which the two crew members were safely picked up by a U.S. aircraft carrier. Both events made newspaper headlines around the world the following day, totally obfuscating the third crash, even though in many ways the latter would prove equally pivotal and consequential. If there is any truth in Jacques Dutronc's lyrical portrayal of Paris as waking up at 5am, the third probably already happened in the French capital quite some time before daybreak, yet various other cities in the provinces and around Europe would not have been spared the tremendous impact of a thumping doorstop, landing in huge quantities and colonizing large amounts of precious shelf space. For all I know, when the colossal paper scatter bomb inscribed Ăcrits (Lacan, 1966a) landed in the bookshops on Tuesday, 15 November 1966, it did not cause any casualties, yet no one could have predicted its triggering a small intellectual tsunami, at least in the francophone world, whose ripples would still be felt 50 years later.2
For all its explosive contents and its humongous size, Jacques Lacan's Ăcrits would have looked surprisingly plain to anyone daring to approach it and mustering the strength to pick it up. White as mortal sin graciously forgiven, with no image or drawing teasing or enticing the reader, it was as if the hefty tome was afraid to disclose itself, drawing an unadorned ivory veil over its heavy haecceity, compelling curious hands to look for telltale signs elsewhere, or forcing scrutinizing eyes to discern themselves in the central space of the white paper jacket. Inviting both projection and reflection, the volume's uncannily empty cover is the learned man's intellectual equivalent of the white sleeve the Fab Four would use, almost exactly two years later, for their weighty ninth release. Equally uncommon for a book, its front cover featured the name of its author twice, once at the top and once at the bottom, once in red and once in black, once in the same large font as the name of the publisher, and once in a smaller font, just above the name of the publisherâthe name of the author thus repeated, although not exactly in the same way, as if one mention would not have been sufficient as an index of authorial ownership and intentionality.3
One must have read this collection from cover to cover to realise that a single debate is pursued in it, always the same. Should it seem dated, it shall nonetheless prove to be that of the Enlightenment.
For there is a field in which dawn itself is late in arriving: the field that runs the gamut from a bias of which psychopathology has not rid itself to the false evidence with which the ego entitles itself to flaunt its existence.
Obscurity passes itself off as an object in this field and flourishes through the obscurantism that finds anew its values in it.
No wonder, then, that it is precisely in this field that people resist the discovery by Freud, a term that may be extended here on the basis of an amphibology: Jacques Lacan's discovery by Freud.
The reader will learn what is demonstrated in it, which is that the unconscious stems from pure logicâin other words, from the signifier.
Epistemology will always be lacking here, unless it starts from a reform, which is the subversion of the subject.
At the risk of straying into slightly self-indulgent, and always already fictionalized autobiographical reminiscences, when I assimilated these words for the first time in the original French, back in the mist of time, some time during the autumn of 1984, I had absolutely no idea what they meant. But then again, as Lacan himself intimated in the opening sentence, a proper appreciation of the nature and the stakes of the debate would have required my having read the entire volume, from beginning to end, all 900-odd pages of it. Inquisitive as I am, I followed Lacan's unequivocal exhortation to read. Almost 40 years later, I am still as curious as I was back then, and I still find myself reading, occasionally wondering what I missed, or whether I should re-read what I have already read numerous times over. In all sincerity, despite endless re-readings, I still cannot claim that I fully appreciate what Lacan was trying to convey here, from which culture industry he was trying to rescue his subversion, and to which persistently obscure field he had addressed his Fiat Lux.
On 12 May 1971, when Lacan delivered âLituraterreâ at his weekly seminar in Paris, he further disclosed to his audience that his title Ăcrits was effectively âmore ironic than one might think: when it concerns either reports, a function of conferences, or let's say âopen lettersâ where I bring into question a facet of my teachingâ (Lacan, 2013[1971a], p. 328).7 Hence, the essays collected in Ăcrits had allegedly fallen out of Lacan's weekly teaching to psychoanalytic trainees, or out of his presentations at conferences and his public lectures, as the tangible material residues of an ephemeral discourse, with the proviso that in some cases the texts had been prepared before, and with the explicit purpose of being read out loud.8