Jacques Lacan, Past and Present

A Dialogue

Alain Badiou, Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jason E. Smith

• Éditeur: Columbia University Press
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231535359
• Sujet: Philosophy
• Sous-sujet: Deconstruction in Philosophy

In this dialogue, Alain Badiou shares the clearest, most detailed account to date of his profound indebtedness to Lacanian psychoanalysis. He explains in depth the tools Lacan gave him to navigate the extremes of his other two philosophical "masters," Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Élisabeth Roudinesco supplements Badiou's experience with her own perspective on the troubled landscape of the French analytic world since Lacan's death—critiquing, for example, the link (or lack thereof) between politics and psychoanalysis in Lacan's work. Their exchange reinvigorates how the the work of a pivotal twentieth-century thinker is perceived.

ONE

ONE MASTER, TWO ENCOUNTERS

PHILOSOPHIE MAGAZINE: To start off, can both of you explain your relation to Lacan? What were the circumstances in which you encountered his thought?¹

ÉLISABETH ROUDINESCO: For me, the adventure of psychoanalysis 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 moment the French Society of Psychoanalysis (SFP) was founded. 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.

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 structuralist wave, initiated by Claude Lévi-Strauss and prolonged by Louis Althusser’s For Marx in 1965, was a real revelation 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 developed 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 novels and oriented myself toward the human sciences and philosophy, and I earned my master’s in literature under the guidance of Tzvetan Todorov at the University of Paris-VIII at Vincennes (today Saint-Denis), where I went on to defend my doctorate. I followed Gilles Deleuze’s “Anti-Oedipus” 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.

ALAIN BADIOU: My own path was different. As young man, I was a convinced Sartrean. Between 1958 and 1962 I was a student-philosopher 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 stripping away all the faded humanist finery at the very moment Sartre proposed an existential vision of Marx. Completely by chance, I fell upon the first issue of the journal La Psychanalyse, which included Lacan’s famous Rome Discourse (his lecture titled “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” from 1953). This text left me literally 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 references to Lacan into my own essays. Very intrigued by these borrowings, Althusser took me to a session of Lacan’s seminar at the Sainte-Anne 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 sciences, the human sciences that were going to replace, some thought, philosophical idealism with a “serious” materialism. 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 work of Freud and Lacan to the point of believing that Freud was already Lacanian.

A.B.: Whatever the case may be, in my eyes Lacan immediately 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 available. 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 François Regnault, who was also appointed to Reims, I ended up joining the editorial committee of Cahiers pour l’analyse, the Lacanian-Marxist journal started by a group of normaliens a little younger than I. Among them, besides Regnault, were Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude 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.

É.R.: For you, at bottom, the reading of Lacan coincided with a political break, whereas for me it was with the structuralist 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, occupied 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 master. 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 Subject (1982). He has been, and still is, constantly present on my intellectual horizon.

P.M.: How would you characterize his contribution to philosophy 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 completely singular position on the question of the subject. At 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, phenomenology folded the thought of the subject back onto a philosophy of consciousness. It is rooted in lived experience, immediate and primitive. The subject is confounded with consciousness and the transparent comprehension of what happens to me. It is not by chance that phenomenologists (think of Merleau-Ponty) 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 phenomenology 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 emancipation supported by science (our “common program” at the time), we had to extract ourselves from this phenomenological 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 logico-mathematical formalism. In short, against phenomenology, structuralism represented a lifeline. The disparate thoughts that have been gathered under this label have at least one point in 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 inflections are possible. Some declare the subject to be an illusion, 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 old-fashioned 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 emblematic, 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 Merleau-Ponty. He inserts himself into the structuralist galaxy not only because he had recourse, much more than many others, to logico-mathematical 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 entirely on language. The science of the unconscious therefore 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” 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 full-on 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 propose 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 reason, he seemed to me to be a decisive contemporary. A contemporary who knew how to incorporate the most disparate materials in order to build his own construction.

P.M.: Élisabeth Roudinesco, what is your perspective on this Lacanian revolution insofar as it shook up both psychoanalysis 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 philosophers understand that psychoanalysis brought about a philosophical revolution. But on the other hand, he was also the one who led psychoanalysts to turn toward philosophy. This second movement of the pendulum seems to me 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 psychoanalysis, 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 example, were able to rediscover the importance of philosophy 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 itinerary. We should not forget that, at the beginning, he was a psychiatrist. Now, psychiatry has always been more receptive 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 G...