Jacques lacan, past and present : a dialogue

74 Pages·2014·0.63 MB·English

by  Lacan

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
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Jacques Lacan: Passé présent by Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco
© 2012 Editions du Seuil
English Translation © 2014 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-53535-9

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

A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-
[email protected].
Jacket Image: Agence Opale
Jacket Design: Jordan Wannemacher
CONTENTS

Foreword: “I am counting on the tourbillon”:
On the Late Lacan by Jason E. Smith
Preface
1. ONE MASTER, TWO ENCOUNTERS
2. THINKING DISORDER
Notes
Index
FOREWORD
“I AM COUNTING ON THE TOURBILLON”
On the Late Lacan

The 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 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.
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
anti-Marxist, rightest tendency in French intellectual life that 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 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