Badiou Alain - Jacques Lacan, past and present: a dialogue

Jacques

Lacan

Past and Present

Jacques

Lacan

Past and Present

A DIALOGUE

ALAIN BADIOU & LISABETH ROUDINESCO

TRANSLATED BY JASON E. SMITH

Columbia University Press | New York

Columbia University Press

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Jacques Lacan: Pass prsent by Alain Badiou and lisabeth 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, pass prsent. English]

Jacques lacan, past and present : a dialogue / Alain Badiou and Elisabeth

Roudinesco ; translated by Jason E. Smith.

pages cm

Translation of the authors Jacques Lacan, pass prsent.

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, 19011981. 2. Lacan, Jacques, 19011981Influence.

3. Psychoanalysis. I. Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 1944II. Title.

BF109.L28B3413 2014

150.1995092dc23

2013036082

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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Jacket Image: Agence Opale

Jacket Design: Jordan Wannemacher

CONTENTS

Foreword: I am counting on the tourbillon:
On the Late Lacan by Jason E. Smith

T 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 matre: 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.

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 themselvesin particular, those devotees of the late Lacan and his attachment to mathematical formalization and the infamous short sessionas 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 Certeauthe latter a key factor in her turn toward the study of history and in particular of the French RevolutionRoudinesco 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 Lacans teaching and thoughtLacans political orientation was largely Catholic and conservative, however radical his conception of ethicsremains unsurpassed in its diagnosis of a constellation of symptoms signaling a deep, structural crisis at the heart of Western culture, society, and politics.

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 Althussers PCF over what the former perceived as the latters 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 Franois Mitterrands Socialist Party, those grouped around the Cahiers pour lanalyse formed or entered Maoist organizations, almost all becoming actively involved in La Gauche Proltarienne, 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 1973some 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 influentialBadiou 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). Badious 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 Lacans seventh seminar, never give way on your desire.

Jacques Lacan, Past and Present is therefore the portrait of a matre, 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 Lacans 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.

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 Lacans 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 Lacans 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. Lacans late turn toward topology signals, Badiou and Roudinesco suggest, a renunciation of the masteryor hypermasteryconsoli 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 Lacans rightly celebrated Seminar VII from 195960 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 Lacans 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.