Le Maître Chez Lui

A key theme in Jacques Lacan: Past and Present—as Jason E. Smith, the translator, highlights in his foreword—is dissolution: the dissolution of Lacan’s teaching, of his ability to speak and perform, of the psychoanalytic school he had founded, as well as the dissolution of any pretense of cohesion; of what Lacan would term “consistence,” in short, which can only be imaginary, propped up, and exclusionary; ultimately the strange position of those who find themselves tasked with interpreting a teaching that refuses to be.

Lacan’s dissolution is a well-thumbed chapter of French intellectual history; the decade leading up to his death, for instance, witnesses his seminar become so formalized as to render it absurd at times: “I remember perfectly well,” Élisabeth Roudinesco recounts, “sessions of his seminar in which he stopped speaking” (54). On tape he sounds exhausted, alternating between sighs and entreaties for his audience to go home. Even the topological models, the means of transmitting a discourse that would not be a semblant, begin to bog him down—to bind him, often literally, to the rings of string he would spend hours knotting and unknotting.

Dis-integrated, dis-solved, and la dis-solution (as suggested in his “Lettre de dissolution,” the official disbanding of the École Freudienne de Paris), the layers of signification multiply with each pun, confounding any hope of transmissibility (“I speak without the slightest hope,” he opens that same letter, “of making myself understood”).¹ Alain Badiou proposes that we inhabit this dis-solution, in which the dis (“saying” but also “un”) implies a solution to the process of unraveling: “The muteness of his last years and his death,” he asserts, “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?” (53–54).

What is it, after all? What does Lacan want? The question is very Lacanian: Che vuoi? What does he demand of us? And then: how does Jacques Lacan: Past and Present respond to that demand?

The text itself is billed by Smith as “a portrait, drawn from two hands and from two perspectives” (x). One hand belongs to Badiou, the French philosopher of political and ontological subjectivity; the other belongs to Roudinesco, the psychoanalyst, historian, and author of Lacan’s biography. The portrait emerges over the course of two dialogues, the first of which, titled “One Master, Two Encounters” and from April 2006, deals above all with the circumstances that lead each thinker to Lacan (or Lacan to each thinker). For Badiou, whose account is more cohesive and personal, Lacan occupies a singular position in the philosophical-psychoanalytic discourse of late 1960s Paris. It is a narrative that nicely complements that of Roudinesco, who seems to have the whole of France’s history with psychoanalysis at her fingertips (she is also the author of the two-volume Histoire de la psychanalyse en France). “Thinking Disorder,” the second dialogue from March 2010, is more explicitly concerned with the aforementioned dissolution. It contains a number of helpful insights, particularly those that underscore the ways in which Lacan’s teaching changes over the course of his career; this latter is of particular use to English speakers, whose access to the later Lacan, for instance, is limited to a handful of translated works.

That said, both conversations could be called light, topical even. Political philosophy plays a prominent role, understandably, as does the matter of Lacan’s legacy. There are few surprises for anyone familiar with either discussant: for Badiou, the Lacanian subject, which is both structured and irreducible, foregrounds the Subject-of-Truth, the seat of political action; for Roudinesco, the “psychoticization” of later Lacan is exasperating and does little for the psychoanalytic clinic. What we do learn of...