Lacanians Against Lacan Author(s) : Monique David-Menard and Brian Massumi Source: Social Text, No. 6 (Autumn, 1982), Pp. 86-111 Published By: Stable URL: Accessed: 04/09/2014 09:44

Lacanians Against Lacan
Author(s): Monique David-Menard and Brian Massumi

Source: Social Text, No. 6 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 86-111
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466618 .
Accessed: 04/09/2014 09:44
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Lacanians
Against
Lacan
MONIQUE
DAVID-MENARD
PUBLIC DISGRACE OR RECOGNITION OF A CRISIS?
Since
September,
1979,
the
psychoanalysts
of the Freudian School of Paris have been
perturbed by
the most
contradictory passions.
Or
rather,
passions long repressed
are now
emerging
- I would not
say
in broad
daylight,
since their roots remain
unspoken,
but in
public
nevertheless.
They
have all the
appearance
of
symptoms seeking explicit expression.
For the fourth time in French
psychoanalytic history,
a schism has
occurred,
bringing
with it the
myriad emotionally
laden conflicts of
theory
and
personality
that
invariably
boil
beneath the surface of the
analytic
institution. Freud himself set the
precedent:
the
early
history
of the association he founded was
punctuated by struggle only
his own term -
Oedipal
-
can
adequately
characterize.
Jung
and Adler,
young renegade analysts,
were
bitterly expelled
in the name of theoretical
purity.
Since
then,
each successive
controversy
has fallen into the same mold of a battle around
allegiance
to an individual and the doctrine
he or she embodies.
In 1953 and
1964,
Jacques
Lacan was the
renegade, fighting against
what he saw as the
betrayal
of the
radicality
of Freud's discoveries
by
the International
Psychoanalytic
Associ-
ation
(IPA),
headed
by
Anna
Freud,
and its French
affiliate,
the Paris
Psychoanalytic
Association. Lacan was
actually
the
president
of the latter
organization
when,
in
1953,
his
unorthodox
theory
and
practices (especially
the "short
session")
earned him a vote of no
confidence
by analysts representing
the IPA line. Lacan
resigned
and formed his own
organization,
the French
Psychoanalytic
Association,
which soon overshadowed the
original
group.
In
1964,
the
powerful
IPA offered Lacan's
bourgeoning
school international accredita-
tion: on condition it
stripped
Lacan of his
membership.
The issue was a volatile one - as it
stood,
French-trained
analysts
were not
recognized
outside of
France,
a restriction
severely
limiting
the influence of their movement
-
and the
resulting split
led to Lacan's
founding
yet
another
group.
This
new-comer,
the Freudian School of
Paris,
again rapidly grew
to
outnumber its
predecessor despite
the older
group's
institutional
legitimacy.'
MONIQUE
DAVID-MENARD teaches
philosophy
and is a
practicing psychoanalyst
in Paris. She did her
psychoana-
lytic training
under Lacan, and studied
philosophy
with Louis
Althusser
at the Ecole normale
superieure.
I
The
story
of these controversies, and an
interesting sociological analysis
of the new "French Freud" is found
in
Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic
Politics
(New
York: Basic Books, 1978).
Documents in French on the
founding
of the Freudian School are collected in the "Excommunication"
supplement
of Ornicar (no. 8),
the bulletin of
"Le
Champ
Freudien," ed. J.A. Miller.
86
Lacanians
Against
Lacan
87
Important
theoretical and
political
differences
lay
behind the
disputes.
The trend
repre-
sented
by English
and American
psychoanalysis, long
dominant in the
IPA,
places
most
emphasis
on the structure of the
ego
and the
analysis
of its defenses. It considers the aim of
analysis
to be a
strengthening
of the
ego
and the
"reality principle,"
to allow the
patient
to
rechannel desires so as better to conform to
society's
demands. Lacan
rejected
this
outright
as
repressive, refusing
to define a successful
analysis by
normative standards. For
him, the
ego
has the structure of a massive
lie,
and the "cure" is the unknown
subject
at last
breaking
through
to
speak
the
repressed
truth of its
history.
The Lacanian
analyst
does not
impose
a
prescriptive interpretation,
but
merely "punctuates"
the
patient's
discourse in a
way
that
illustrates its
falsity;
in the
end,
the true form of the
patient's
desire becomes
interpretable
to
the
patient,
in his or her own
terms,
for his or her own ends.
Against
the
bureaucracy
of the IPA and the theoretical
timidity
of its conformist
ego
psychology,
Lacan
proposed
a bold return to the
original
texts of Freud. An association
truly
dedicated to
elucidating
the
workings
of the unconscious would be the
very
antithesis of the
hierarchical and
dogmatic
IPA,
reflecting
in its structure the
fluidity
of its
object
of
study.
In
Lacan's new Freudian School of
Paris,
no distinction would be made between
analyst
and
analysand. Anyone
could
join
without
formalities,
and
any analysis
could be a
training
analysis
-
the sole criterion for
becoming
an
equal
member of the School was the individ-
ual's own conviction of a readiness to
practice.
The truth of the unconscious follows no
rules.
But
by
1969,
Lacan himself was the tradition. His Freudian
School,
over which he came
to exert almost absolute
power,
was a seasoned
institution,
and the
phenomenal growth
of
interest in his
theories,
particularly
in the
budding
feminist movement and the
post-May
68
radical
left,
elevated him to the status of an idol. He had become the Master in the seat of
Truth,
a role the Zen-like
style
of his now famous Seminar did
nothing
to
discourage.
He
proposed
to institute a
qualifying procedure
called the
"pass"
to confer the
right
to train new
analysts,2
and to create the title of "School
Analyst"
to
distinguish
those able theoreticians
who made the
grade
from mere
patients
of clinicians. The idea was met
by anger
and
disbelief
by
those who saw in it a contradiction of Lacan's own fundamental
attitudes,
and it
became current to refer to the
organization
as a Church. The
ensuing controversy,
which
would end in
yet
another
split,
aroused all the
passion
of a
loyalty fight
around an embattled
leader.3
The source of the emotional
entanglements
of such
psychoanalytic politicking
lies in the
structure of the
analytic
situation itself. The
precondition
of
any analysis
is the
process
of
transference
whereby
the
analysand's
most basic identifications settle into the
empty image
of the
analyst.
The
analyst's
calculated aloofness elicits
repeated appeals
for
recognition,
and revives those
imaginary
seductions or attacks that characterized various
stages
in the
history
of the
patient's
desire. The
patient speaks
in the void of the
analyst's
refusal to
respond;
vain demands for
reciprocity
reanimate the relation to absence at the heart of the
subject's desire,
illustrating
in ever clearer detail the structure of
meaning through
which that
2
In the
"pass,"
an
analyst
recounted the events of his
training analysis
to three other members of the School
who then
"passed"
it on to a review
committee,
which
always
included Lacan. The committee voted to decide if
the
analyst
had
adequate
theoretical abilities, and conferred the title of
-School Analyst"
on those who were
accepted.
For
details, see
Turkle, op.
cit.,
pp.
123-130.
This
time, Lacan
stayed
and the others
left,
forming
the "Fourth
Group."
88
David-Menard
desire was
gradually
refracted,
lost in
disguise.
Transference is marked
by
a form of
love,
and carries with it all love's
complexities.
When it is realized that the
training analysis
of
every longtime
member of the Freudian School was conducted
by
Lacan
himself,
whose
public persona
was calculated to incubate transference
reactions,
the
emotionally charged,
incestuous nature of a
major
debate can well be
imagined.
The
psychoanalytic
association
(like
all
organizations,
but more
consciously)
is cemented
by
transference and
sibling rivalry
in the shadow of the
giver
of the law of desire.
Paradoxically,
the first
sig'n
of the
present
crisis came in the form of a vote:
Lacan,
the
director of the Freudian School from its
inception,
had informed the
vice-president,
Denis
Vasse,
a Jesuit doctor and
psychoanalyst,
that he was
being
relieved of his duties. Lacan
gave
no
reason,
but his action came after Vasse had addressed a
meeting
of "Confronta-
tion,"
a
group sponsoring regular
theoretical
presentations
to
provide
a free forum at which
analysts
from all the various schools could meet to discuss their differences. Founded in
1974,
it had soon
begun
to draw hundreds of
participants, among
them
prominent analysts
from each of the rival associations who were accused of
attempting
to
pave
the
way
for the
post-Lacan period (Lacan
was
eighty
at the
time).
Franqoise
Dolto,4 a
longtime
friend of Lacan and a
commanding personality
in
psy-
choanalytic
circles,
read to the
general assembly
of the Freudian School a letter of
protest
from another
prominent analyst,
Michele
Montrelay,5 demanding
an
explanation
from
Lacan. One-third of the members of the School endorsed the
protest by refusing
to
pass
the
minutes
presented by
the
secretary-general.
What
exactly
was
being protested
that
day?
What was at stake in the
disagreement?
For
many
members,
it was unclear.
Clans formed
quickly:
in a newsletter born of the
occasion,
Charles
Melman,6
a member
of the Board of
Directors,
wrote that the vote
betrayed
a
deep
division in the
School,
and that
the
dissidents,
who were no
longer
Lacanian
(or
never
were),
should
get
out. The dam broke.
The
opposition
elaborated
complaints against
the new
political leadership,
which had
been
approved
in a
September,
1979,
General
Assembly.
A new board of
directors,
including
several
psychoanalytic
theoreticians from the
University
of Vincennes
department
dedicated to the
"Champ
Freudien,"
had been elected in technical violation of the
by-laws.
Among
these new members was
Jacques-Alain Miller,7
Lacan's
son-in-law,
who is well-
known in France and abroad as the official
guardian
of Lacan's works. He is
responsible
for
4
A well-known
clinician,
Dolto trained
many analysts
in child
analysis,
of
psychotic
children in
particular.
Excluded from the International
Psychoanalytic
Association with Lacan in
1953,
she numbered
among
the
"School
Analysts,"
and had a seat on the review committee of the
pass.
She is also known to the French
public
as
the moderator of radio
programs
on children and education. Her
publications
include Le Cas
Dominique (Seuil,
1974)
and
L'Evangile
au
Risque
de la
Psychanalyse (two vol., Seuil, 1979).
5 Montrelay
was also on the review committee of the
pass.
She has
published,
most
notably,
L'Ombre et le Nom
(Minuit, 1977)
and
"L'Effet
de Bande" in
Confrontation (no. 2,
Aubier
Montaigne, 1980,
pp. 159-167).
6
Charles
Melman,
a well-known
analyst,
was a member of the
Directory
of the Freudian School,
and also
served on its
teaching faculty.
7
J.A.
Miller was the leader of a decisive moment in the
history
of Lacanianism in the
1960s,
when a
group
of
philosophy
students at the Ecole Normale
Sup6rieure,
followers of Louis Althusser and for the most
part
Maoist
activists in
1968,
entered the School as a
group (or
a "cartel" as
they
were called at the
time).
Judith Miller, his
wife and Lacan's
daughter,
is also a
philosopher.
Lacan's seminar was held at the Ecole Normale
Sup6rieure
then.
Miller's
group published
its work in the Cahiers
pour
l'analvse.
Several of its members became
analysts,
but
Miller remained in the
university.
He directs, with Lacan's
support,
the
Psychoanalysis Department
of the
University
of Vincennes
(now St.
Denis).
Lacanians
Against
Lacan 89
establishing
the texts of Lacan's unwritten
seminars,
and directs the
foreign
translations of
his
books,
particularly
those
appearing
in the United States.
Just before Christmas
1979,
the
opposition
to the line
represented by
Miller
-
a non-
analyst
academic with
power
in the Freudian School
-
confirmed its
positions:
a letter
signed by
four members and addressed to Lacan detailed the
legal irregularities
of this
power
grab,
and demanded that the board of directors
put
an end to it. A
simple
clan
quarrel?
Obviously
not,
since theoretical differences are a
part
of the
opposition
to Miller:
(1)
a different
conception
of
psychoanalytic theory
and its relation to the
university
and
the world of culture is
expressed;
(2)
questions concerning
feminism also
play
a role:
just
before the
procedural
battles
came to the
fore,
Lacan had forbidden
Montrelay
to conduct her seminar on male
sexuality
on the
premises
of the Freudian
School,
and her
opponents
accused her all
along
of
being
more of a feminist at heart than an
analyst.
Whatever was
smoldering
beneath the surface of the
procedural
conflict,
Lacan re-
sponded
to these letters of
protest
with his own
letter,
dated
January
5, 1980,
addressed to all
members of the School. In
it,
he announced the dissolution of the
very
institution he had
created,
which he said had been transformed into a
Church,
or a
Party (by whom?),
and had
proved incompatible
with the
practice
of
psychoanalysis. Admitting
his
failure,
he invited
"all
those who wish to
proceed
with
Lacan,
this month of
January
1980,
to associate
themselves with him once
more,"
and launched into more severe criticism of the "devi-
ations and
compromises"8
nourished within the School than he had ever voiced before. He
declared that he had no need for
large
numbers. He received 1000
responses.
The members
of the Freudian School number fewer than 600.
Curiously,
the
press
seized
upon
this affair.
Psychoanalysts,
whose debates
ordinarily
remain
internal,
began expressing
themselves in the
daily
and
weekly newspapers
as
though
something
so violent had come between them that
they
could not discuss it in their
customary
meeting places
or at work.
Some of them
jubilantly
cried
victory: finally,
our hands are
untied,
we're free of those
stupid
and
annoying analysts caught up
in the
appeal
to
experience
as a substitute for
thought. They
hailed Lacan's "I dissolve
... " statement as an admirable
psychoanalytic
intervention
inspiring
renewed confidence.
Miller, meanwhile,
wrote that all would soon be
well:
As far as we are
concerned,
it's all over. Lacan is
founding
a new
group.
Whoever likes him will
follow
him;
but I
suppose
that he will have to like them as well. We are
starting
anew,
not from
ground
zero,
but as fresh as can be. All that remains is to convene a
special assembly
of the ex-
Freudian School and then it's all over.9
Then
twenty-eight analysts
filed suit for a motion
by
which the court takes over the
administraton of an association
guilty
of
breaking
its own
by-laws by appointing
an overseer
to reinstate the
legal
order.
They
won: the decisions of the
September,
1979,
General
Assembly
were declared invalid
by
the chief
judge
of the District Court in Paris. The
analysts
who had resorted to the courts had intended to demonstrate that
psychoanalytic
discourse
does not take
place
in a vacuum.
They
denounced the confusion of the
symbolic
and the
8 This
expression
of
Lacan's,
quoted by him,
appeared
in the
founding
statement of the Freudian School.
"Self-Interview"
by J.A.
Miller in the radical
weekly
Liberation,
January
10, 1980.
90 David-Menard
judicial
that Lacan's
pretension
to
lay
down the law
exemplified,
a confusion
which,
according
to
them,
encumbered his
practice,
and even his theories.
The
problem
was that Lacan's
thought,
rooted in the
analysis
of
language
and the
way
in
which its structure
shapes
the
subject,
could
only
deal with the
political
from a
particular
angle.
A
pertinent example
is his treatment of the
Oedipus complex, always
a factor in his
institutional decision.
Freud had
hypothesized
a
"primal
horde" at the dawn of civilization. It is ruled over
by
a
jealous patriarch,
whom covetous sons
finally
murder;
to
assuage
their
guilt,
the sons
identify
with the
father,
taking
his
place
as
though
to
prove
he is still
among
them.
Eventually, they
reinstitute his law
-
the incest taboo
regulating
the
exchange
of women
that is the cornerstone of
patriarchal
culture. Their
guilt-ridden agreement
is
consciously
meant to
bring
order to their violent
rivalry,
and
unconsciously designed
to ward off a
repetition
of their crime.
To
supplement
this
"analytic myth," dramatizing
what
every
son is said to
experience
in
fantasy,
Lacan had detailed the
process
of identification with the father in a new
way.
The
emotional melodrama of Freud's version of the
Oedipal
conflict was
replaced by
a structural
model,
based in
part
on
modern
linguistics,
in which the son assumes the functional
place
of
the "Name of the Father"
("nom"
and "non" are
homophonous
in
French).
The
father,
an
unwelcome third term inserted into the
primal
mother-child
relationship, destroys
the
boy's
dream of
reuniting
with the mother's
body by paternal prohibition.
The child's desire is
deflected from its
primitive
aim of
being
(one with)
her
(being
her
desire,
what is
lacking
in
her),
to a new
aim;
having
her
(having
her
desire,
being
what she
wants). Being,
like the
father,
the
independent object
of a woman's desire becomes the
only socially acceptable
option.
The
process
is one of the
symbolic assumption
of the
"name"
of the father: that
name is a label for a
socially functioning
unit defined in
every way by
the sex and
kinship
ties
a name
implies.
It carries with it a
special
role.
Lacan holds that the structure of the
speaking subject
constituted
through
this identifica-
tion with the Name of the Father is in
many ways homologous
to the
purely linguistic
structure
by
which a
name,
like
any signifier,
is determined in its differential relation to other
signifiers.
The
linguistic
side of the
theory
is most often taken to be the crucial element
because the fundamental
binary
structure of
language
underlies the two foundations
upon
which the
Oedipus complex
is built: the
primitive
formations of the
pre-subjective
uncon-
scious and the basic rules of social
exchange
that later
impinge upon
it from without. The
fact that the
symbolic "capture"
of the
Oedipalized subject,
and the father-function behind
it,
bring
an entire network of social determinations to bear
upon
the anarchic desires of the
child is
rarely emphasized.
It is
hardly
mentioned that while the
imposed
social relations and
the unconscious
upon
which
they
act
may
share the structure of
language,
the end effect of
the
Oedipal process
is one of the exercise of a
properly political power
that is not inherent in
words alone.
Lacan is often accused of
operating
too much in this
symbolic
realm,
in which Freud's
dramatic vision of the murder of the
primal patriarch
could be
expressed
in terms of the
linguistic
use of the
pronoun
"I" and of the name with which it comes to be
coupled.
He was
accused of
forgetting that, once
they
have been
grounded
in social
reality,
laws and the
resultant institutions have a
history
and
specificity
all their own. His theoretical
emphasis
undermines the
political
as a
separate
domain. Lacan's
opponents
meant to remind him that
the Freudian School, intricately
tied to the lives and careers of so
many,
was more than a
Lacanians
Against
Lacan 91
symbolic
screen for the
primal
horde
(though
it was also
that,
as events have
shown),
and
that it was also
part
and
parcel
of a
reality
that
enjoyed
another kind of
efficacy.
But Lacan's followers countered that in
appealing
to the
courts,
to "an Other to which
one cannot
respond," analysts
were
brought
into
disrepute.o0 Putting
Lacan,
the Director of
the
School,
under
judicial tutelage
was seen as a
public disgrace.
Lacan treated the
analysts
he
suspected
of
wanting
to take over the name of the Freudian School as
imposters.
An
undefined violence and hatred stirred beneath the insults.
The overseer had in fact his own
agenda
in
mind;
in
opposition
to the
rapid
dissolution
desired
by
Miller,
he wanted to leave time for reflection for both the members of the
Freudian School and those who had
pledged allegiance
to Lacan
by endorsing
his as
yet
undefined
plan.
The divisions were not
just
between two or three
clans,
but
surged up
within
them as well.
As members of the Freudian
School,
we all believe that without Lacan and his friends
and
collaborators,
psychoanalysis
would have been erased form the
map
of the Latin
world,
transformed into normative
psychology,
as it was in Eastern
Europe
and North
America.
Shortly
after the Second World
War,
Lacan
brought psychoanalysis
out of the
psychologiz-
ing
rut in which it was
vegetating.
He allowed it to become
something
more than that
instrument of mental and social
"hygiene"
which
psychiatrists
and
analysts opposing
Lacan
from a Marxist
perspective
in 1953 wished to make it." For
Lacan,
psychoanalysis
was a
therapeutic practice,
but also a radical
inquiry
into desire and madness as
they
affect each
and
every
intellectual endeavor and call into
question
the
symbolic
and social
systems
within
which we are
caught.
But first
generation
Lacanians and those who came
after,
all who
followed Lacan
through
the fertile schisms of the
past,
are
presently perplexed.
The words of
Octave Mannoni are
symptomatic:
I am a Lacanian
(from
before there was
"Lacanianism,"
since
1948)
. . . I intend to remain one if
I do not meet with insurmountable difficulties. But it seems to me that
psychoanalysis
should show
more concern for its own
crises,
instead of
furnishing
the most
impassioned partisans
with
doubtful
arguments.12
On the official
scene,
spring
1980 was
fast-paced: Montrelay
held her seminar on male
sexuality
in a
private
hall. Miller was named
by
Lacan to head a committee entitled
"Dissolution
Work,"
which remained within the framework of the as
yet legally
undis-
solved Freudian School. At the same
time,
he
organized
a series of sessions for the new
association founded
by
Lacan,
"The Freudian
Cause,"'1
at which
speakers attempted
to
define the theoretical and clinical differences
along
which a
split
should be drawn between
0o
On
January 19, 1980,
Le Monde
(p.
2) published
three
representative
articles: Miller,
Franqois Roustang
and
Jean Clavreul. See
Liberation,
January
10,
1980
(p.
2),
in which two women of
opposing
views,
Montrelay
and
Ch.
Hamon, express
themselves.
" See "La
Psychanalyse, ideologie
reactionnaire?" in Ornicar,
supplement
to no. 7,
pp.
17-28.
2
La
Quinzaine Litteraire,
no. 326, June
1, 1980,
p.
18. Mannoni has most
notably published Psychologie
de
la Colonisation
(1950), Clefs pour l'Imaginaire
ou l'Autre Scene
(1958),
and Un Commencement
qui n'en finit
pas (1980),
all at Editions du Seuil.
3
This term
goes
back to Freud's
expression
"the
psychoanalytic
cause,"
quoted
in Lacan's
article,
"The
Freudian
Thing," (Ecrits.
New York:
Norton, 1977), pp. 114-146.
To French ears,
it also recalls "The
People's
Cause,"
a Maoist
group supported by
Sartre,
and of which J.A. Miller was a member.
92 David-Menard
the
opposing camps.
Later,
I will discuss at
length
this call for secession
inaugurated by
Miller'4 and Melman.'"
The denunciation of
dangerous
tendencies in the
writings
of certain
analysts
dominated
the debates. The themes were
interpretation,
the status of the
body,
and the ideas of the
psychoanalyst.
As
spring passed,
the situation became more and more
complex.
In
principle,
the
divisions were
supposed
to become clearer. But this did not seem to be
happening.
The fact
that
Montrelay,
one of the backers of the court
motion,
had attended a
meeting
for
Delenda,
the newsletter of the Freudian
Cause,'6
inviting
her
opponents
to
debate,
was
avidly
criticized
by
some of the
plaintiffs.
It had become evident that the 28
signers
did not
constitute a coherent
group
in
themselves,
and had no wish to form one.
They
had not
originally
meant to
provoke
a new
split,
but rather to illuminate what was at stake in the crisis
and to reflect on what
passed
unsaid in
psychoanalytic
schisms
beginning
with Freud. But to
do
that,
it was
necessary
to avoid
playing
the role of
organized
secessionists that Miller
called
upon
them to take.
Politically,
this
period
came to an end
by
a vote: a General
Assembly
on
July
5, 1980,
decided
against
the dissolution announced
by
Lacan six months before. Lacan won the
majority
of the
votes,
but
according
to the
by-laws
a two-thirds
majority
was needed. Of 466
voting
members
(there
are 590 in the Freudian
School),
294 were for
dissolution,
145
against.
In a letter dated
July
10, 1980,
and sent
by
mail under the name of the Freudian Cause to
all members of the
School,
Lacan declared
that,
"as for the Freudian
School,
it will have no
peace
until I'm done with it." A new General
Assembly
was convened for
September
27,
1980,
with the same
agenda:
dissolution.
THEORY TO THE FORE?
To listen to the leaders of the Freudian
Cause,
this was the
appointed
hour for theoretical
cleavage:
after
years
of
laxity
and
tolerance,
it was time to be
firm,
to close ranks and defend
the
gains
of Lacanian
theory against
the
revengeful
threats of the
psychiatric
establishment
and disillusioned
analysts.
Is there
anything
to this
argument?
The
legal protest
and Lacan's act of dissolution
opened
a
period
of reflection. This "Interval"
(the
title of the newsletter of the
analysts
bringing suit)
became an occasion for debate.
Beginning
in
February,
1980,
Montrelay,
in
her
seminars,
outlined her work
methods,
clinical
conceptions,
and
agreements
and dis-
agreements
with Lacanian
theory. Although
she
presented
herself as a rival to Miller in his
claim to
represent
the Lacanian
heritage,
and was thus in
underlying complicity
with his
confrontational
strategy,
she
posed
vital
questions
about
primal repression,
and on the nature
of
feminity
in men and its clinical and institutional
consequences.
The entire
question
is of
greatest sensitivity
since it
goes straight
to the heart of Lacan's
theory
of the
Oedipal
complex
in its relation to
language,
the
very
cornerstone of his
teachings.
14
Plus
Un
(the journal
of the "cartels" of the Freudian
School),
no.
2, pp.
5-6.
'5
Plus Un,
no.
1, p.
9.
16 The name comes from the
phrase
"Delenda est
Carthago," Carthage
must be
destroyed.
Cato the Elder used
it to
punctuate
his
speeches
to the Romans.
Carthage
was
destroyed.
Lacanians
Against
Lacan 93
"Primal
repression"
is
contemporaneous
with the child's accession to
language.
It
begins
with the "murder" of the desired
object (which
is
always
a substitute for the
breast).
To avoid the
anxiety
of its
absence,
the
object
is
replaced by
the
reassuring,
virtual
presence
of the word that
designates
it. Primal
repression
is thus the
process by
which the child
distances itself from the
immediacy
of the flux of desire and its
objective
context. A measure
of self-control has been
gained through
the
symbol;
desire is now
present only
in the
negative, deposited
in the verbal substitute of its absent
object,
which can be
manipulated,
recalled,
rejected,
or redirected at whim. The child's desire
gains
social
currency, catapulted
through language
into an unconscious
dialogue
with others that breaks the
psychic hege-
mony
of the
family.
The
price
for social
being
is the alienation of
desire,
whose
meaning
is
lost with the
eternally
absent,
necessarily forgotten object,
and whose verbal substitutes are
now
captured by
the conventions of
language.
For
Lacan,
it is
actually
the
completion
of the
primal repression
at the resolution of the
Oedipal complex
that
lays
the
groundwork
for its own
eventual,
partial
subversion in
analysis.
The
boy (as usual,
male
development
is
privileged
in the
theory), by assuming
the
Name of the
Father,
is
given
a
symbol
for the self:
through
a "suicide"
parallel
to the earlier
"murder"
of the
object.
The self is made the
object,
and a second
distancing
is effected
-
that of self from
self,
which defines conscience and reflective
thought.
The alienated desire
of the
subject
is
unknowingly reintegrated
as an
object
of
thought, lying
dormant,
twice
removed,
in the
signifier
of the self.
Both sexes are bisexual
by
nature
according
to Freudian
theory.
But the
"feminine"
side
of men is
rarely spoken
about,
especially
after the
primal repression
at the
Oedipal stage,
when it is
theoretically submerged by
that
"paternal metaphor"
which is the Name of the
Father. When it is
broached,
it is
usually spoken
of in terms of
repressed (or
not so
repressed)
homosexuality.
The
theory
is
unabashedly phallocentric,
as Lacan is wont to
emphasize.
The fact that
Montrelay occupied
a
stormy position escaped
no one's attention. That a
woman should
publicly speak
on male
fulfillment,
especially
in
opposition
to established
truths,
was
certainly something
not
widely
tolerated.
Usually
it is men who
speak
of female
sexuality,
with women limited to that
topic.
Lacan
responded by recalling
his
previous
statements to the effect that if women are not
entirely governed by
the
phallic
function,
they
can have
nothing
to
say
about it
by
virtue of that
very
fact.
The
question
of the
phallus
and castration in the
Oedipal
conflict can be
misleading
if
grasped
in traditional Freudian terms. Like
every
issue in
analysis,
it must be
placed
in the
context of Lacan's new structural and
linguistic
orientation: the
signifier
of the self that
founds reflective
thought
at the end of the
Oedipus complex
is on one level
simply
the
phallus
itself. The
phallus
is not an
organ,
it is not the
penis,
but a
symbol
with a
phallic
function.
Anatomy
is not
destiny:
rather,
the
socially
and
structurally
determined value of
the idealized function of the male
organ
is determinant. For
Lacan,
the
phallus
is the most
privileged
of
signifiers.
Because of its
multiple
determinations,
it becomes the final stand-in
for desire, the
signifier
of all
signifiers. (It is the
symbol
of what the mother wants, thus of
what the child wants to be, and in moments of delusion believes he is; it is the
symbol
of what
the father has, what the mother wants, and thus what the child wants to have, in order to be,
like him, the
object
of her desire; it is what
distinguishes
the other from the father who
lays
down the law, thus
becoming
a
symbol
of
power
or social effectiveness; in this
capacity
it is
the
"paternal metaphor,"
identified with the Name of the Father; lastly,
at its most
general,
it is the
signifier
of unification, the
"copulatory"
in the
linguistic
sense of the
empty
marker
94 David-Menard
of
union.)
The
phallus
is identified with the
object
lost in
primal repression;
as a
camouflage
for the
object's
absence,
primal repression
is the denial of castration
(or
in other
words,
of
separation
from the
mother).
Lacan
usually speaks
of
primal repression occuring
at the onset of the
Oedipus complex,
when
by
his own theories it would rather seem to
begin
at an earlier
stage,
with the first
primitive
structures of
language,
and
being reinterpreted
in
Oedipal
terms
only
later on. It
can be
argued
that
by
the
Oedipal stage
the child has
already
learned the use of
pronouns
and
proper names,
already
has,
in Lacan's terms,
a
signifier
for the
self;
the
Oedipus complex
would then have been built
upon
this substrata as a solidification of the social
meaning
of
self. Lacan's decision to
compress everything
into this later
stage (or
to
telescope
the
Oedipus complex
backwards to include earlier
developments)
can be seen as a
symptom
of
his desire to make the
Oedipus complex
the
founding,
universal
principle
of human
society.
In his
framework,
anyone
foolish
enough
to be
"anti-phallic"
could
only
be
suffering
from a
hysterical
reaction to the horror of a
castration,
and does not have the stuff of a theoretician.
The
phallus thereby
becomes
synonymous
with
desire;
anyone
not
accepting
its
proper place
in the
theory
would then be seen as
part
of the resistance to the Freudian revolution.
A feminist
viewpoint
criticizes the sexist
dogmatism
inherent in
pinning
the label
"phallus"
on the
principle
of union at the basis of desire. In the
opinion
of
some,
the basic
"phallic"
or "castration" functions are fulfilled
by any
number of
signifiers during
the
pre-
Oedipal phases,
and it is
only
after the fact that
they
are bound
together
and redefined in
phallic
terms
(if ever).
On this
view,
Lacan is
taking
the extreme case of the
"successfully"
completed absorption
of
patriarchal
structures as the
precondition
for human
society.
La-
can's
position
would thus be seen as an
essentially political
stand in the name of theoretical
necessity:
a stand that could
only
be
explained by
the Master
analyst's
own
peculiar
relation
to the Law.
Here
is his
pronouncement
on women
analysts:
It is on condition
they
refrain from the
giddiness
of
anti-phallicism,
of which there is no trace in the
unconscious,
that
they
can hear what in the unconscious remains unsaid,
yet
extends into what
grows
out of it into the attainment of
properly phallic pleasures. '
This is
presumably why Franqoise
Dolto,
for
example,
has had a
reputation
her entire
career for
being
an
ingenious analyst
but a
sorry
theoretician,
who conceded that she did not
understand a
thing
about Lacan. For the same
reason,
Montrelay's
seminar was forbidden
by
Lacan and Melman.
All of this
gives
an idea of what was beneath the surface of the theoretical discussions. In
Delenda,
the
theorizing
was overdetermined in a different
way:
its task was to trace the
outline of the divisions and
prepare
the
way
for a clear
parting
of the
ways,
to
bring
out the
profound
theoretical
disagreements among analysts. Psychoanalytic
theoreticians and ana-
lysts
worked
together
more
closely
than
usual,
but
ambiguities appeared.
The debate
demonstrated that it was more a
question
of
politics
than of the
progress
of
psychoanalytic
research. In
particular,
the
political
stakes in the theoretical debates became evident in the
magic
formulas invoked to articulate the
divisions;
I will elaborate one
example,
which
concerns the status of the
body
in
psychoanalysis.
'7
Le Seminaire XX: Encore
(Seuil, 1975), pp. 81-82,
and the Seminar of
January
15, 1980.
Lacanians
Against
Lacan 95
WHICH BODY?
The issue of the
body brings
into
play
the
specificity
of
psychoanalysis
in relation to
body
therapies
which,
imported
from the United
States,
now flourish on the Parisian market -
relaxation,
bioenergy, primal
scream,
behavioral
therapies;
in
sum,
all of the short-term
therapies
that
propose
to remodel the
patient's
unconscious
by acting upon
their bodies.
It is incontestable that here
again
Lacan transformed the
problem:
for an
analyst,
a
subject
inhabits his
body
to
speak
it.
But
according
to one view of the
question,
there was an
enemy
behind the lines:
analysts
working
with
psychotic patients
had
years ago
made the mistake of
claiming validity
for the
notion of a
"body image,"
instead of
strictly abiding by
Lacan's
teaching
that the
"body
is
an
image."
One of Lacan's fundamental innovations was to have
replaced
Freud's
topology
of the
ego, super-ego,
and the id with his own triad: the
Imaginary,
the
Symbolic,
and the Real.
The
body
as an
object
in the real world has no
place
in this schema. To
speak
of an
"objective" body
with a
corresponding image
in the mind is to leave
basically unchallenged
the Cartesian
notion,
attacked
by virtually every
current of modem
thought,
of a self-
contained
subject
in rational relation with the world.
Psychoanalysis suggests
that the
subject's
earliest
experiences
with
objects
and others
are marked
by
dual relations characterized
by
a total lack of differentiation between self and
non-self. These relations are termed
Imaginary. They
are at the basis of
primary
identifica-
tion,
the veritable confusion of self and
object,
or self and
other,
and are most
prominent
at
the
early, pre-linguistic stages
of
development.
The
body
is but the structural sum of these
identifications; later,
the
primitive
structure of the
ego
is constructed out of
them,
particu-
larly
from identifications with
adults,
who
present
an enviable ideal of
completeness
and
self-control. It is when the child
recognizes
his own
image
in the
mirror,
projecting
into it all
he would like to
be,
that the
ego
is
born
as an autonomous structure. Because
prior
confusions and identifications inform this mirror
image, by assuming
it as his own the child
is
adopting
as his the
image
of others. The
disparity
between what he
is,
and what his others
were
(what
he wanted to be and
presumptuously
assumed he
was)
creates an existential
gap,
a rift of self-alienation that founds
subjectivity
on the
non-identity
of self to self. The child is
now an other to which he must
internally
relate.
During
the mirror
stage,
the child masters his own
image
(in
the classic
example, making
it
appear
and
disappear
in the
mirror,
accompanying
each
change
of state with
syllable
like
"fort/da").
The mirror
image,
like the
repressed object
of
desire,
is
replaced by
a
meaning-
ful
sound;
the self becomes
signified.
This is the crucial
step
in
primal repression:
the
existential
situation,
overshadowed
by
the
symbol,
falls into
oblivion,
and with it the
subject's
truth. The fiction of a
unity corresponding
to the child's name
(in boys,
later
assimilated
by
a
secondary
identification into
the
Name of the
Father)
is constructed
using
the
body's physical unity
as a ruse to hide the
subject's painful
division,
to conceal the truth
that the
subject
is
essentially
Other. The
Symbolic,
the
principle
of
mediation,
then takes
ascendency.
It is the third term in
any
human
relationship:
the realm of conscious
language,
the vehicle of the Law, and the
operational
base of the unconscious (which is founded
by
primal repression).
The
subject
can
only
know itself and its desires
through
the "defiles of
the
signifier."
The
body (or any
other
object)
is never
immediately known; it is
always
an
image
laden with
imaginary
confusions. Its
destiny,
like that of all
objects,
becomes
96
David-Menard
attached to its
signifiers,
as time
passes becoming progressively
more
independent
of
any
phenomenal entity.
The Real is not
objective reality
in a
positivist
sense,
but that which
eludes
signification.
In
analysis,
the
subject's reality
is a trauma
rejected
into the uncon-
scious,
especially
the trauma of
separation
which motivates the constitution of the word.
Psychosis
is the failure of
primal repression,
a fixation at or
regression
to a
stage
before the
Symbolic
order was solidified. The
imaginary
confusion of self and
other,
inside and
outside,
still remains
operative; objects
are treated as
symbols,
and words as
things.
Lacan
therefore thinks of
psychosis
as a
deficiency
in the
symbolic
function:
the Imaginary
can
only
be altered
through
the
Symbolic
order.
Psychic
disorders can
only
be caused or cured
through language,
not
by way
of the life of the
body.
On this
view, then,
Franqoise
Dolto,
Gisela
Pankow,
and Michele
Montrelay wrongly
took
psychosis
as a
pretext
to
posit
a
body before language.
For
Lacan,
before
language,
the
body
has the status of
any
other
image;
it has no
unity
and is not
clearly
marked as
belonging
to the
subject
until the birth of
language
allows it to be
objectified.
Even
then,
it is treated as
any
other
object (mortified).
But the dissenters
posited
the
body
as the
living
"container"
theorized
by
Melanie Klein. In
strictly
Lacanian
theory
"the
body
is
always
-1" - which is
to
say,
in the final
analysis,
a
corpse.
The
body
counts as
-1,
emphasizes
J. A.
Miller,
and its
proper
function "is seen in the
tomb."
Any conception
of
psychoanalysis
as a
practice aiming
to "revive dead
zones,
to
return them to a certain ethic of which our
body
is
dispossessed"
8 in neurosis or
psychosis,
was ridiculed as akin to Christian
charity
and an
ideology
of love reminiscent of the
"lamentable
religiosity"
of
Franqoise
Dolto.
Such
dangerous
tendencies automatized the
body
in the name of an
ideology
of
life,
and
were seen as the French version of the
body therapies flourishing
overseas. A schism was
looming.
What ended the debate? That there were electoral stakes? The orators of Delenda decked
themselves with
knowledge
as a
weapon: they thought
it
necessary
to be
wise,
rigorous,
and
imperative
to convince the masses to vote
right
in the General
Assembly
decision on
dissolution.
They
overdid it and lost
losing
the vote. The form their
meetings
took is
explained primarily by
their
public
function: to denounce deviations. It was
always
someone
else who was
wrong,
who was on the downhill slide.
A VICTORY AGAINST MYTH?
That there
may
be fundamental
inadequacies
in the work of Lacan
himself,
or
perhaps
in
the fundamental
concepts
of
psychoanalysis,
was unutterable since the issue was to defend
psychoanalysis
as a whole
against
its innumerable enemies.
Freud, however,
was not afraid to underline the doubts he worked from. He wrote that
the
concept
of the unconscious was confused
by philosophical
and
psychological
standards,
but that he needed it. And also that the idea of
instinct,
or
drive,
the borderline between the
psychic
and
somatic,
was a
myth,
a
paradox,
even a
piece
of
nonsense,
judged
with dualist
rigor.
In short, Freud inscribed into
psychoanalytic theory
the
paradoxes
and doubts that
delimit its field of
application.
He did not hide them.
In contrast, the Delenda theoreticians used
magic formulas
to
deny
the difficulties of
18
Miller's "Self Interview." The
expression
was reused
by
Miller in Delenda.
Lacanians
Against
Lacan 97
analytical theory;
that
is,
they
alluded to them
only by imputing
their
shortcomings
to their
adversaries,
who were made out to be secessionists.
Eric
Laurent,
then
secretary-general
of the
School,
does in fact admit that the
body
is a
thorny problem
in the
analysis
of children and
psychotics.
But that does not
prevent
him
from
believing
that the "true
way" provided
a clear and distinct
principle
to resolve it.
Lacan is
supposed
to have
definitively
demonstrated that the
body,
far from
being
a
container as Klein
thought,
must be conceived of as
coming
from the outside
-
through
the
circuitous
trajectory
of the drive
going
out to encircle the desired
object (already
the
topic
of
an
imaginary identification)
and
returning
within on another level
through
the
introjection
of
its
symbolic
contours: "If we
imagine
that the
body
has an
inside,
it is
by
an effect similar to
a
glove finger
turned inside out. There
is,
before
anything
else,
a surface which creates
effects of
interiority
and
exteriority by
means of
topological phenomena."
The self is the
ordered
agglomeration
of the outline of the sum of the drives' external
objects introjected.
After
early
childhood,
when the
"object"
becomes another
person
in love
(or transference),
this
introjection
takes on the dimensions of a
secondary
identification
defining
the
ego.
The
magic
word is
thereby pronounced.
The
appeal
to
topology
allows them to
resolve,
not to
displace
but to
resolve,
the
inadequacy
that Freud himself saw in the
concept
of the drive.
Thanks to
Lacan,
who no
longer speaks
of the
body,
but of the
Imaginary
and the
Real,
no
longer
of the
psychic,
but of the
Symbolic,
and thanks to the
matheme,
that little known
theory
of non-intuitive
space
studied
by
a branch of mathematics few
analysts
can
know,
(and
the
psychoanalytic applications
of which
yet
fewer can
master),"9 everything
is re-
solved and the
opposing positions clearly
differentiated.
In the course of this
debate,
Lacan's Seminar
XI:
The Four Fundamental
Concepts of
Psychoanalysis
was often cited. In
it,
he tried to establish the relation between drives and the
unconscious as a
signifying system.
Certain
pages
do in fact
present
the recourse to
topology
as a resolution of the old
problem
of the relation of the
body
to
language.
I have been able to articulate the unconscious for
you
as
being
situated in the
gaps
that the
distribution of the
signifying
investments sets
up
in a
subject,
which I
place
at the center of any
relation of the unconscious between
reality
and the
subject.
It is in so far as
something
in the
apparatus
of the
body
is structured in the same
way,
it is because of the
topological unity
of the
gaps
in
play,
that the drive assumes its role in the
functioning
of the unconscious.20
The
"gap"
in the
body
is the "hollow" left
by
an
object
of satisfaction. All satisfaction
must be achieved with the
body
in relation to an
object.
In the
object's
absence, the
imaginary
trace of this
gestural
form
persists
in
perpetual
readiness,
but remains
empty.
That
part
of the
body
that united with the
object
is eroticized
by
its contact, its
imaginary
form
becoming
the
opening through
which drives
(erotic impulses
to
repeat
a satisfaction)
are
channelled
by
a kind of
magnetic pull.
For
example,
the mouth becomes an
erogenous
zone
by
its
nourishing
contact with the
breast,
and
virtually
all drives at a certain
stage
will be
expressed through
the oral function. The act of
sucking
and all of its
symbolic
associations
forever retain an eroticized element. The
"gap"
in the
signifying
chain is the second-degree
19
Lacan's
"matheme,"
a
complex system
based in
part
on mathematics and formal
logic,
is meant to illustrate
this
topology
of the
subject.
One form it has taken is the now infamous multi-colored
diagrams
of "Borromean
Knots,"
whose secrets are a
mystery
to most.
20
Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New
York:
Hogarth
Press, 1977), p.
181.
98
David-Menard
"hollow" formed
by
the absent
object
"murdered"
by
the
symbol,
left
behind, embedded
in its
painfully forgotten
existential
moorings
and never
fully
recovered for conscious
manipulation.
It is the
space
between
signifiers
in the
metonymic sliding
of desire
through
discourse. In
reading
this
text, however,
it is
fitting
to ask
whether,
given
two
heterogenous
series -
the
signifying
chain on the one hand and the
body
at
play
in the drive on the other
-
each
containing
a
rift,
it follows that the
gaps
in
question
are
homogeneous,
and if
a
topological
union has the
power
to assure their
homogeneity.
Several
pages
later in the same
Seminar, however,
the
topological
model once
again
falls
to the status of a
metaphor, anrd
Lacan now
emphasizes
the
mythic
character of the notions
of
the libido and drives.
The libido is the essential
organ
in
understanding
the nature of the drive. The
organ
is unreal.
Unreal does not mean
imaginary.
The unreal is defined
by articulating
itself on the real in a
way
that eludes
us,
and it is
precisely
this that
requires
that its
representation
should be
mythical,
as I
have made it. But the fact that it is unreal does not
prevent
an
organ
from
embodying itself.2'
Here,
Lacan
replaces
the Freudian
metaphors;
he thinks of the libido
"not
as a collection
of
forces,
but as an
organ"
-
an unreal
organ. Correspondingly,
in the
drive,
the
body
operates
like a
montage
of
fragments
in surrealist
painting.
The
appeal
to
topology
is now
seen in a
very
different
light.
It
certainly
is decisive to rework Freudian
metaphors!
But all
things
considered,
epistemological rigor
consists in
recognizing
the
analogies
in
use,
in
situating
the
metaphors upon
which the
theory
rests rather than
claiming
to have
eliminated them in a new abstract
conceptuality
that remains
topological
in nature.
Perhaps,
after
all,
psychoanalytic theory progresses by displacing
lacunae and
rediscovering
them in a
different form.
Why
would it be
dangerous
to
say
so?
Why
should it be
necessary
to
preclude
the
question
with a
magic.formula
sanctified
by
the
prestige
of mathematics?
Rarely
has the invocation of
knowledge
so
transparently
served
politics. Rarely
have
decisive
questions
been so
naively
dismissed in the name of a
prior necessity
to instruct. In
the
meetings
of Delenda Lacan was never once criticized. It was
recognized,
of
course,
that
his
thoughts
offered
up
several
possibilities
for
interpretation,
but it was unutterable that his
text was on some
points incoherent,
or that he stumbled not
just
over
difficulties, but,
like
Freud
himself,
over lacunae.
DOES ONE BECOME AN ANALYST BY READING?
Up
to
now,
I have held to the
hypothesis
that the theoretical debate was informed
by
essentially political imperatives:
who will take
power
in Lacanianism after Lacan? Univer-
sity learning
is
important
for
providing
theoretical
rigor
in the
study
of
texts,
and stands
against
the
impenitent empiricism
of the
analysts,
who mistake their
flights
of
fancy
for
knowledge.
But it would be a
simplification
to leave it at that:
reading
and
working through
the texts
of Freud and Lacan function in the
training
of
analysts
not
merely
as the
entryway
to a
system
whose terms and articulations will be understood
progressively
better,
providing
a counter-
point
to what is said on the couch. What is
significant,
on the
contrary,
is that certain
points
in the texts do not make sense. Blunders, in this hole-ridden
reading,
are not useless
slag,
but
the foundation
upon
which the
subject necessarily
thinks.
21
Ibid,
p.
205.
Lacanians
Against
Lacan 99
The theoretical
problems
encountered in the texts have a vital relation to the
practical
problems
of the cure. In a
cure,
something
in the desire of the
analyst
is mobilized
by
the
patient's transference,
which
provokes
it at a
point
of weakness. In
analysis,
the
analysand
seeks to "seduce" the
analyst.
To do
so,
he must define the
analyst's
desire as it is revealed
in the thread of his elusive
discourse;
this is a
repetition
of the stance of the infant toward the
mother. And
just
as
before,
the desire of the other is the
subject's
own desire
misplaced
in the
object
of his
imaginary
or
mirror-image
identification. The desire of the
analyst
has a "weak
point"
in so far as it "lies this side of and
beyond
what she
(the
mother/analyst) says,
of what
she hints
at,
of what she
brings
out as
meaning."''
In the
indeterminancy
of the other's
desire,
by plunging
into the
gaps
of silence in the
analyst's
discourse,
the
analysand
rediscovers the indeterminant truth of his own desire: that it flows from the
primal
lack
caused
by separation,
the lack of the lost
object.
At the
pivotal point
at the end of
analysis,
the
object
and the lack it fills are discovered beneath the veneer of amorous identification
with a
privileged
Other whose refusal to
reciprocate provokes persistent,
hate-filled chal-
lenges unmasking
the truth of the
patient's
demands. In the same
way,
certain "blanks" in
the
reading
of another's texts arise
simultaneously
with the reader's
symptoms
and with the
questioning of
an
insufficiency
in the Other Text.
Theory progresses through
the elaboration
of this encounter marked with
negativity.
This is true in
many
fields of
research,
and it would
be most
surprising
if
psychoanalysis,
of which transference is the
theme,
should be an
exception
to the rule!
When the leaders of the "Freudian Cause"
contemptuously
assail
practicing analysts,
arguing
from a
synthetic,
transmissable
reading
of
Lacan,
they
lessen the
difficulty,
but also
the
import,
of
analytic theory.
Why
not stick with
philosophy?
That Lacan was never criticized in the
meetings
of Delenda demonstrates that the
analytic,
transferential dimension of theoretical work was foreclosed. The
unspoken
hatred
that resulted from
attempts
at theoretical transformation
expressed
itself in
politics
with the
call to secession.
THE COUCH AND THE SEMINAR ROOM
What does it mean to take
power
in this situation? To assure oneself of a
clientele,
or to
speak
and write in Lacan's name? All of
that,
inextricably.
The
question
is
why,
over the
years,
an "inextricable" was constituted for the
analysts
of the Freudian
School,
but also for
those who left it in 1964 and
1969,
often still
retaining inextinguishable
rancour mixed with
nostalgia.
From the
outside,
this is how the situation
appeared: analysts
built their lives around
Lacan. He was their
analyst,
with whom
they
had to have resolved their
problems,
or to have
related them to an insoluble core from which
they
took their sustenance. He was also their
teacher,
and
they
followed the Seminar over the
years, seeking
nourishment for their clinical
or theoretical
preoccupations
in the
thought
of the
Master,
and also
hoping
to come across an
aside
concerning themselves. Lacan
brought psychoanalytic theory
and
practice
out of its
psychologizing rut, brought
its
subject
matter and
methodology
into contact with
linguistics,
philosophy, and, more
recently, logic (beginning
with the Seminar on
Identification, 1961-2).
22
Ibid, p.
218-19.
100
David-Menard
He elaborated his
principles
in continuous confrontation with Freud's texts on the one
hand,
and on the other with the
English
and American
psychoanalytic
research he so
vigorously
criticized. This
openness
to culture
questioned
each listener at that
point
where his or her
own neurosis or
psychosis
could
easily pass
into
thought
or work. But
curiously,
this relation
to Lacan's
teaching,
which was
avidly
followed as it
developed,
has at the same time
sterilized research: the
disorienting
form of his
teaching
was a constant frustration. Lacan
detoured
meaning by
his
opaque speaking
and
writing style.
The
"open," non-dogmatic
nature of the
teaching,
"which is not
part
of
my practice,
but
complements
it,
"23
gave rise,
by
the fascination it
commanded,
to the most extreme
dogmatism, passivity,
and defense of
established
professional positions.
Lacan
thought
he would avoid the
pitfalls
of
university learning by correlating
his
teaching
and his
analyses,
and because he
marginalized
or excluded the medical or univer-
sity
institutions that
originally
sheltered his seminar: the Saint Anne
psychiatric hospital,
the
Ecole Normale
Sup6rieure,
and then the Law School
adjacent
to the Sorbonne and the
Pantheon. In
hindsight,
it can be asked if this method of
teaching, ingenious
as it
was,
did
not reinforce the
pitfalls
of all
teachings,
and
perpetuate
a
passive, spellbound
relation to the
discourse of an idealized Master.
Every
academic learns sooner or later how difficult it is to
develop
a line of research if no demands are made on it. The entire academic
setting,
with its
research
teams,
pressures
to
publish,
its
congresses
and scientific
meetings,
masks and at the
same time reveals
the, inherent difficulties of intellectual work. Lacan's followers often
avoided
confronting
this
question by
the
weekly
fascination of the
master-analyst's
dis-
course, which,
with admirable ardor and
culture,
gave
each of their
problems overarching
intellectual
significance
in the
contemporary
world at
large.
Again,
it should be made clear that Lacan's success
multiplied
the confusion in a
way
no
one foresaw. As
long
as Lacanians were few in
number,
their
Congresses
were true work
meetings.
Of course the
analysis,
the
friends,
the
clientele,
the
work,
everything
remained
attached to
Lacan,
but in such a
way
that conflicts could nonetheless be
expressed.
It was a
small
group, very
vivacious,
a little
mad,
in which a certain
variety
of
psychoanalytic
practice
was
put
to the test in an
atmosphere
of
love, hate, servitude,
and toil.
All the Lacanians of the
years
between 1950 and 1970 will bear witness to it: there was at
once drama and
play,
and
colloquia
were then not
merely meeting
filled with reverence for
Lacan,
but were an
opportunity
for theoretical advance.24
Things
took another turn when Lacan's influence was confirmed in the
psychiatric,
philosophical,
and academic worlds. The circle closed as it widened.
There has
appeared,
at least in France over the last
decade,
an
ideology according
to which there is
no break to be made between the
analytic
relation and the rest of
existence,
because
psychoanaly-
sis is the
judge
of
all,
and can be
judged by
no
one;
this is due to the constitution of an
analytic
milieu where
analysts
and
analysands
associate
only
with each
other, speak
the same
language,
and have no other culture than that
produced
or transformed
by
their own
milieu.25
The Lacanian school did not
just bring together
a circle of friends
-
it attracted
throngs.
23 Lacan, Seminar-letter to members of the Freudian
School,
June 10, 1980.
24
Writings describing
the crisis at hand were
already beginning
to
appear
in 1973 in official Freudian School
publications.
Cf. "Contribution
B l'6tude
du mouvement
psychanalytique," Scilicet,
no. 4
(Seuil, 1973).
25
F.
Roustang, "Peut-etre" Le Monde,
January
19, 1980,
p.
2.
Lacanians
Against
Lacan 101
It
became
an institution like
any
other,
but continued nonetheless to function as a
group
of
disciples,
all
claiming
a relation
- not
quite
intimate but essential all the same
-
with the
Analyst par
excellence. The
very
success of his
undertaking
made Lacan's
practice,
that
complement
of his
analyses
and the
seminar, undefinable
and all the more admirable. His
name became a fetish while the contours of his texts and
seminars,
unpublished
and
increasingly
numerous,
were lost from view.
The
way
an
analyst listening
to the
master-analyst
is touched to the level of his fantasies
is not the same when the Master surrounds himself with
disciples
like a Greek
philosopher
as
when his words are
spoken
in an immense hall
bursting
with various and
sundry
listeners
seduced and dumbfounded
by
the show of the
super-analyst.
Lacan's discourse was
paradox-
ical,
and his crowd of
analysts
and admirers took succor from it as each saw fit. Lacan
challenged limits;
he
exposed
the unconscious in a discourse with scientific intent. His
listeners
pounced
on the words he
proffered. By mixing
levels of discourse
-
however
ingeniously
-
by confusing
the
teaching
and the institution with the
cure,
the
political
with
the
symbolic,
he was
condemning
his words to random
appropriation
in the
vagaries
of
transference. As he himself
wrote,
he dissolved the School because it is intolerable when "a
teaching
in which
everything
is
carefully weighed
is
flipped topsy-turvy."26
But his own
style
had contributed to
just
such a result.
THE ANALYST'S DESIRE
I will
give
some
examples
of the
protean
function that the transference on Lacan was to
take.
When,
in
1975, I
asked to become a member of the Freudian
School,
the
analyst
with
whom I had an interview asked me who
my analyst
was and in which work
groups
I
participated.
When I mentioned
having
research in
progress,
he had me disclose it to the
reception
committee.
Accompanying
me to the
door,
he added a comment that struck me as
quite mysterious,
but which
today
I
fully
understand. "And then
you
know,
it
goes through
Lacan."
Another time when I was
discussing writing problems
with a friend
(who
had
responsi-
bilities within the
School),
she
said,
"Then send the text to
Lacan,
since that is
your
desire."
In
short,
for
many analysands
and
young analysts,
Lacan himself was crucial to the
study
of Lacan's texts.
Although
neither a
personal
transference on him nor the current state of his
teachings played
a
prominent
role in their
training,
there seemed to be no contradiction in his
centrality
to their efforts. It is without a doubt one of the measures of Lacan's success that he
brought together people
who never came to know him
personally, despite
which the
Freudian School remained
receptive
and
stimulating
for them. It offered a work
atmosphere
in
which,
alongside
one's
analysis,
it was
possible
to
explore
the
problems
in which one was
involved.
But
curiously,
for J. A.
Miller,
there is but one
way
to be a Lacanian: the
only path
that
could lead to
membership
in the Freudian School "is
precisely
to have followed Lacan in his
'organization,
'
to
have desired his direction,
to have
paid
the
price
of his
teaching
-
and in
more
ways
than one, to find oneself well
taught by that.""27
But it is hard to institutionalize
transference
-
and not
just any
kind!
-
in the form of a
government.
26
Letter by Lacan to members of the Freudian
School,
dated
January
5, 1980, published
in Le Monde,
January
17, 1980, p.
13.
27
Plus Un, no. 2, January 1980, p.
4.
I
will have more to
say
on the
meaning
of this text later.
102
David-Menard
The
problem
of Lacan's
teaching,
of the relation between his
professional practice
and
his
teachings,
indicates in a fundamental
way
that the failure of his
project
was a
product
of
what was more relevant in it. Desire has an essential relation to the
transgression
of
limits,
and this relation was at
play
in the
way
in which Lacan made use of the confusion of levels:
the
teaching
and the
cure,
the
political
and the
symbolic.
Freud took as his
point
of
departure
the
irruptions
of the unconscious:
symptoms, slips
of
the
tongue, bungled
actions. Lacan
emphasized
that the unconscious
analyzes
itself when it
makes its
presence
felt,
when
it-is
"out of
place,""2
on
foreign ground.
It is not for
nothing
that the desire of the
analyst,
with its
particular
discordance-effect,
became the
necessary
condition for
analysis. Analytical listening
creates
transference,
or at the
very
least, radica-
lizes it
by untying
the
moorings
of
speech.
In
everyday speech, language
is moored to the
concrete other who is addressed. In
analysis,
this
other,
by
not
responding,
takes on the
generalized
function of the
image
of the Other
(the
ideal
totality
of the
'significant
others"
of the
subject's life). Speech
is freed from the anchor of
intersubjectivity, appearing
as it is
by
nature,
the
essentially
narcissistic discourse of
(addressed
to and borrowed
from)
the
internalized Other. In normal
speech
desire is also
actualized,
always present
but disowned.
The
analyst's
silence,
the absence of his desire in
any
familiar
form,
is a discordance-effect
which lures the
analysand's
unconscious forth. In the absence of the Other's
desire,
the
analysand
substitutes his
own,
and
entraps
himself in an internal
dialogue
with it. It
eventually betrays
its inner
meaning, leading
him back to the
original
error of
taking
the
Other's desire for his own. It would be vain to avoid
saying
it. Lacan made himself clear on
the
subject;
he did not hesitate to make the unconscious
appear
where it
ordinarily
does not
figure.
A THEATER OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
Since all desire is the desire to
know,
what Lacan instituted was a scene of
knowledge
which mobilized desires in
analysis.
If his
writings
are
untranslatable,
and difficult to read
even in
French,
it is because he
attempted
to manifest the
ruptures
that the unconscious
introduces in the thread of
discourse,
and to
practice
those
ruptures
on the rostrum.
His
analytic practice
follows the same
principle.
It does not
preclude,
at
times,
going
beyond
what other
analysts
consider
untransgressable
limits. This could take the form of the
abrupt adjournment
of an
analytic
session when certain
signifiers
or
signifying complexes
for the
analysand
are at
play
-
the infamous
practice
of the short
session,
one of the
major
reasons cited
by
the International
Psychoanalytic
Association for
refusing
to
certify
Lacan to
teach.29 Or it could take the form of a
joke
made at a social
gathering including
one of his
analysands;
or
yet again,
a certain theme
developed
in a seminar that
put
one of his listeners
on the alert. This theatrical dimension to
interpretation undoubtedly, by
its
very
violence,
28
Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts
o
f
Psy
choanalysis, p.
96. and
chapters
7 and 8
generally.
2' The short session is one of the
ways
in which the Lacanian
analyst "punctuates"
the discourse of the
patient.
If a
particularly
fecund unconscious
complex
arises, the
analyst may
end the session to
keep
it in relief, rather than
allowing
it to be flooded over
by
the
following
rationalizations. Traditional
analysts
do not value the dialectics of
the
patient's language
in the same
way.
For
them, the
patient
can
always
be told
directly by
the
analyst
what his
discourse is "about," and the routine of a set
fifty-minute
session is considered
important. Lacan's
approach
seemed
incomprehensible,
at worst the mark of a
quack,
at best an excuse for laziness or a waste of the
patient's
money.
Lacanians
Against
Lacan 103
created the best and the worst results: it articulated the
Imaginary,
the
Symbolic,
and the
Real in
unexpurgated
fashion,
and confronted the
subject
with what is
necessarily
traumatic
in his desire. It claimed to
put
the unconscious to work in a radical
way,
and sometimes
succeeded
admirably.
But the entire
problem crystallizes
around the word "admirable."
Many analysts
in
training
were so seduced
by
the
originality
of Lacanian
practice
that
they
came to
desire,
more than
anything
in the
world,
to imitate him and make his
example
the law of their
analytic practice.
Instead of
working
on and
eventually criticizing
what he
said,
his
analy-
sands were attracted
by
the lure of trauma. To be trained in
analysis
with Lacan was to
acquire
the art of
transgressing
limits. That Lacan sometimes worked
by making
himself the
clown of the unconscious was fine and
good.
But an
appalling
caricature of this
imaginative
clowning
was attained some months
ago:
certain
analysts grouped
under the banner of the
"Freudian
Cause,"
apparently
convinced
they
were held aloft
by
the winds of
History,
authorized themselves to conduct short sessions as
though
it were the
very
essence of
Lacanian
being
-
and
they speak
of that as their ultimate
conquest!
TO STAGE THE UNCONSCIOUS OR TO MASTER THE HETEROGENEOUS?
Lacan
brought psychoanalysis
out of its rut
by staging
a kind of theater of the uncon-
scious. In
trying
to institutionalize that
theater,
Lacan found his
footing;
his aim was to
manifest the
unconscious,
and he succeeded all too well. He unleashed transference without
being
able to assure it would remain
analyzable.
It was this
congenial
confusion of levels that
went
awry,
in the
political
realm as well.
In
1907,
when Freud dissolved the circle that met each
Wednesday evening
in his
apartment,
he severed a certain number of transferential
impasses
and conflicts in which he
himself was
caught;
the effects were decisive for some of his
colleagues,30
even
though
the
group
did not have the dimensions of a
political
association. When in 1964 Lacan
wrote, "I
hereby
found
-
as alone in
my
relation to the
psychoanalytic
cause as I have ever been -
the Freudian School of Paris . ..
.
"3' this declaration could be heard as a
symbolic
initia-
tive,
a
mythic
act.
Here,
to
organize
the unconscious was to
occupy
the
mythical position
of
the father of the
primal
horde,
to
approach
the historical
through
the
symbolic.
But the act
was also the denial of the
heterogeneity
of those two
registers,
not because the Lacanians
were within their democratic
rights
in
claiming
the Freudian School as their
own,
but
because
Lacan,
by
his
very style, prohibited
himself from
conceiving
the
heterogeneity
of
the domains within which he was
acting,
domains in no
way
coextensive with the uncon-
scious.
It is
possible
to trace the theoretical antecedents of this
question.
It was
initially
on the
basis of the work of
L6vi-Strauss,
with his
conception
of the
Symbolic,
that Lacan
attempted
to define the
imposition
of the law in the unconscious in relation to what structures
societies.
A harmonious
bridge,
buttressed in the
Symbolic,
seemed to connect the order of uncon-
scious
signifiers
which determined the
subject's position
in the
family
with the
kinship
system
that allowed a
society
to be described as a
system
of
exchange
of women and
goods.
30
On Freud's
unanalyzed
violence towards his
disciples,
which affected the life and death of
psychoanalytic
associations, cf.
Roustang,
Un Destin
sifuneste (Minuit, 1976).
31
"Excommunication," supplement
to no.
8,
Ornicar.
104 David-Menard
Afterwards, L6vi-Strauss
was to
approach
it from a different
perspective, taking
as his
point
of
departure
the Real of the unconscious as
symbolic
residue. What we call
reality
is a
product
of our
representations,
which is to
say
of the
Imaginary,
and the trauma is the
only
Real
recognized by
Lacan. This boils down to not
situating,
in relation to social forms of the
real,
the Real with which the
analysis
is in contact. It amounts to
treating any reality
as the
impossibility
of
discourse,
on the model
suggested
for the realm of desire. In both
cases,
everything
rests in the end on the fundamental idea that a
society
is
nothing
more "real" than
a
symbolic system,
or that social relations and the abstract
system
of social ties are one.
That is also
why
he thinks that an institution is
governed exclusively by
words: "I
hereby
found .
.
. I
hereby
dissolve."
Symbolic
initiative does not
encompass
the law of a social
grouping,
whose
workings
are rather different. Lacan claimed to
articulate,
through
the
mythic point
he was
making,
the laws of the
group implicated by
his act.
He could not
recognize
the
meaning
of his
failure,
and the
persistent heterogeneity
of the
symbolic
and the
political
has
engaged
him in an
unremitting
effort of destruction. He would
have liked to
effect,
simultaneously,
a
symbolic
initiative and the electoral death of the
Freudian School.
Since his
genius
consists in
manifesting
the unconscious in realms where it does not
usually figure,
Lacan could not resolve to deal with the
heterogeneous,
or rather he could not
resolve not to
control,'
at the same time and
by
the same
heterogeneity,
the realms in which
he acts.
WHERE WILL THE GAME END?
One of the
meanings
of the
legal
arbitration
sought by
the 28
analysts
was
certainly
to
remind
everyone
that there is an outside to the field of the
unconscious.
What was astonish-
ing
was the Lacan's followers found
nothing amusing
in
it;
after
all,
it was
only
the return of
a letter to its sender.
Why
not consider it a
grotesque
and
congenial interpretation?
If
interpretation
can make use of
any
raw
material,
why
would the
legal
be excluded? How
could J. A. Miller denounce the
court
action with
unparalleled
emotion,
condemning
it as a
public disgrace?
What are the limits of the
game?
And
if,
in
fact,
interpretation
cannot burn
on
any fuel,
does that not
require
a re-examination of this
very
confusion of
levels,
which
incontestably brings
out the
normally
hidden field of the
unconscious,
but in a
way
that
produces something unanalyzable
in its transferential
play
within a
group?
Recently,
in the seminar addressed as a letter to all the
members
of the Freudian
School,
and sent the
day
before the
vote,
Lacan declared that he was tired of
playing
on the confusion
of levels. He flew off to a convention in
Caracas,
meditating upon
these words: "It will
interest me to see what
happens
when
my presence
is not there to screen what I teach.
Perhaps my
'matheme' will be the better for it.)"32
A curious remark for an
analyst
who founded his work on the art of
linking
his
teaching
and its institution to transference! Is not this
appeal
to "mathemes"
just
an avoidance of the
task at
hand,
an
attempt
to free the transmission of his
teaching
from the effects of the
transference
upon
which it was built? The task at hand is to understand how his
analytic
practice,
which indeed
keeps
the unconscious from
getting lost, is frustrated
by
its
very
successes.
32 Seminar letter of June 10, 1980,
op.cit.
Lacanians
Against
Lacan 105
IS DESIRE MYSTICAL IN PRINCIPLE, PERVERSE IN PRACTICE?
Lacan undertook the return to Freud
by making
desire and
perversion against
the
question
of the
day.
After
all,
psychoanalysis began
with the affirmations that the child is
polymorphously perverse,
and desire indestructible. Lacan added: "What is at issue in the
drive is
finally
revealed here
-
the course of the drive is the
only
form of
transgression
that
is
permitted
to the
subject
in relation to the
pleasure principle,"
and thus on to the essential
narcissism of love. The drive
transgresses
the
pleasure principle
because the death instinct
always
has a
prominent
role in it
(Lacan prefers
the term "drive" to "instinct" as a
translation of "Trieb" because the latter carries
biological
connotations he wishes to
avoid).
The drive is
essentially regressive,
a
compulsion
to reunite with the lost
object,
to relive the
perceived plenitude enjoyed
before the trauma of
separation.
That
mythic
time of unbounded
pleasure
is often
equivalent
in the unconscious to the time before the first
separation
from the
mother,
the time before birth. Plenitude becomes identified with
nothingness,
and the drive
is toward death. The
ego
is the mechanism built
upon
the emotional effects of
separation,
and functions to enforce the
subject's compliance
with the
"reality principle"
that
says
that
reunification will never be achieved. Its structures become
obstacles,
targets
in the
trajectory
of the
drive,
objects
of the death instinct's destructive tendencies toward the self
(or,
as in
sadism,
the Other whose
specular presence
is at the basis of the
self).
Freud said that the
object
of a drive is its most variable
element,
and that it can
change
in
the course of the drive's
destiny
"as often as one likes."33 Lacan
says
that the
object
can be
anything,
that "it
is,
strictly speaking,
of no
importance."34
This indifference is
just
one
aspect
of a
hollow,
a void: the irremediable absence of the
object
makes the structure built
around
it,
the circuit of the
drive,
more
important
than the substitute
objects
the drive later
encircles. The structure is a kind of
imprint
of the form of the lost
object
that
keeps
it
present
(if
only negatively),
and its reactivation becomes an end in itself.
He describes more
precisely
than Freud the status of the
fetish,
which becomes all the
more ridiculous. It is
nothing
but a filler for the
void,
for the radical absence of the
original
object
of desire. It is a
signifier
for the
phallus,
which,
as the
"copulatory,"
the marker of
union,
becomes the
symbol
whose
presence
denies
separation.
Since it is the mother's
presence
that is lost in the trauma of
separation,
she
becomes,
by symbolic necessity,
the
possessor
of the
phallus.
The fetishist is a
phallus-worshipper
whose rites constitute a
religion
of
mystic
union with the mother
-
a
religion only distinguished
from other forms of
mysticism by
the
transparency
of its
object.
Desire,
for
Lacan,
is
mystical
in
principle
and
perverse
in
practice.
I wonder
if,
in the Freudian School of
Paris,
we have not transformed these words into a
sort of
sinister,
communal certitude instead of
putting
them to the test of
psychoanalytic
practice.
Lacanians are fond of
saying
and
writing
to each other that "there is no
object
of
desire,
only
man who
desires."35
It is said that in
proclaiming
as a
group
that desire has no
object, analysts
are
consoling
themselves for that
very
fact
by
their discourse and
knowledge
of their condition.
If the
object
of a drive is variable, sexual satisfaction is
fleeting
and is
significant by
its
33
Cf. "Instincts and their
Vicissitudes,"
Standard Edition of the works of
Freud, Vol.
14,
pp.
111-117.
34 The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp.
168 and 180.
35
Pierre
Legendre,
"Le Recours
ia
Dieu,"
Critique,
no. 392,
January
1980,
pp.
73-5.
106 David-Menard
very precariousness.
Of
course,
there can
always
be other
objects,
but in relation to a certain
object,
a certain
subject
risks a
great
deal: the realization or failure of a satisfaction.
So,
they
just proclaim
that it
always
fails.
Everybody,
then,
is at the same
impasse,
and we can create
a discourse on failure! Satisfaction is still
attainable,
for is not all
desire,
after
all,
only
the
desire to
know'?
Indeed,
the
presence
of the word is a substitute for the desired
object.
In its
first
games
with
language,
the child
willfully rejects
the
object, gleefully "murdering"
it
by
making
it
disappear.
The child
replaces
it
by
its
name,
a
manipulable linguistic
substitute,
as
a
way
of
making
its absence controllable. The
game
is a function of the death
instinct;
it is a
renunciation of satisfaction in favor of the
joy
of
dominating
the
object
whose
comings
and
goings
cause such
anxiety. Speech,
as a
metonymic sliding
from one word to
another,
is a
perpetual filling
of the void of the
object,
the
very
mechanism of desire. All desire is in a
sense a desire to
know,
to find the definitive word. This word would be the
phallus,
the
signifier
of
signifiers,
were it not the most
radically empty
of words
by
virtue of its
very
excess of
meaning.
The
phallus
is the
prototype
of the Word of God.
The seduction worked
by
Lacanian discourse could be
explained
in this
way:
It
displays
the encounter of
perverse sexuality
with
mystical sexuality,
and
gives
all forms of the
attainment of fulfillment the
privilege
of
privacy
-
courtly
love,
hysterical
refusal,
mysti-
cism.
Also,
Lacan knows well that on the issue of
drives,
his "return" to Freud is a debate with
him.
My purpose
is not to
oppose
a Freudian
orthodoxy
to a Lacanian
heterodoxy (after all,
perhaps
Lacan is
right
and not
Freud),
but to size
up
the debate instead of
simply adulating
the Master.
I stress that the drive is not
perversion.
What constitutes the
enigmatic
character of Freud's
presentation
(in
"Instincts and their
Vicissitudes")
derives
precisely
from the fact that he wishes
to
give
us a radical structure - in which the
subject
is not
yet positioned.
On the
contrary,
what
defines
perversion
is
precisely
the
way
in which the
subject
is
positioned
in it.36
Lacan thus resolves what he
maps
out as an
enigma
in the text of the Other he
questions:
where Freud
separated
the model of the drive from its
perverse (voyeuristic
or
masochistic)
mode,
Lacan makes the
perversion
the culmination and realization of the drive: the
perverse
short-circuits the drive's
path by pinning
it down at the
point
that it leaves the
object
to return
to the
erogenous
zone instead of
allowing
it to lose its
path
in the "defiles of the
signifier."
In
voyeurism,
the
subject
seeks to
recapture
the moment at which the look of the other
catches him
looking.
The
voyeur
tries to make himself the
object
of the drive he is motivated
by,
at the same time
satisfying,
and
coinciding
with that drive
(being
seen is a forbidden
act,
at the same time the forbidden
object
is
seen).
He makes himself into a
double-edged
look in
a
conflagration
of
shame,
as if he wished to be at the
very
heart of the
pleasure principle
of
sight.
To be an exhibitionist is to "se faire voir"
("make
oneself
seen,"
or "to be
expelled").
The aim is to
provoke
a reaction that makes him the
subject
and
object
of his
drive at the same time: a reaction of fear
(which
demonstrates that his
will,
what his aim
is,
is
an unknown
quantity,
therefore
proving
his
subjectivity);
and one of
disgust
or moral
outrage (petrifying,
or
objectifying
him
-
making
him an
object negatively judged,
ex-
pelled
from the field of desire like the
object
murdered
by
the word he seeks to retrieve). He
demands from the other the
proof
that he is indeed the look that sees, even if that means
being
caught, petrified by
the look he seeks to be.
36
Concepts, pp.
181-2.
Lacanians
Against
Lacan 107
In the same
way,
in the
fantasy
"a
child
is
being
beaten,"
studied
by
Freud,
the moment
of masochistic
pleasure
is when the
subject
coincides with the action of
beating.
She is
reduced to her
sign,
the
whip
or the rod. To be a masochist is to be the rod that
gives
oneself
pain,
to coincide with the
principle
of the drive.
There are two
steps
in
this analysis.
First,
the
short-circuiting
of the
object
and the drive
which
gives
the
subject pleasure:
the
process
is turned back on the
self,
a
part
of which is
identified with the
object. Afterwards,
there is
subjectification proper:
what constitutes the
drive is the
way
in which the
subject positions
himself,
at first
acephalous,
in its circuit. In
the scenes
studied,
the other who beats is
precisely
the
placeholder
of the
Other,
that is to
say,
in this
case,
of the
process
of the drive itself. The "Other"
always
has
multiple
meanings:
it is that functional
totality
of the
"significant
others" of the
subject's
life,
the
product
of successive
identifications;
it is the
unconscious,
the non-self within the
subject;
it
is
language,
the
place
of the Other in the form of its
linguistic
traces and the transmitter of the
social determinations of others
past
and
present.
In
perversions, privileged
others are
addressed as
though they
were the Other
incarnate;
the
pervert
is
addressing his.own
unconscious. The relation with the first
significant
other,
the
mother,
is marked
by pain
as
well as
pleasure.
Her
leaving
the child is
perceived
as
punishment,
and the
prominence
of the
fantasy
of
beating,
as all sado-masochistic
manifestions,
has as its ultimate reference the
mother. It is a return to the
problematic
of
presence
and absence at the root of
language.
"The
pervert
is he who . .
integrates
in the most
profound way
his function as
subject
with his existence as
desire.'3""
Not
only
does
perversion
realize the
drive,
effectuate its
sealing
in
satisfaction;
more than
that,
the
perverse
drive is the
prototype
of
subjectification
because it assures contact between the drive and the alienation of the
speaking subject
formed in the
Other,
an alienation that is in essence different from a drive.
The
importance
of the
Symbolic
order in Lacanian
thought
finds its
meaning
here: the
pervert
is he who identifies best with the
signifying
chain that manifests him as a
subject,
and
simultaneously
makes him
disappear
like an
object
of
meaning.
This
subjectification
is
paradoxical:
the
subject
in its double nature is
only
created when
the
Symbolic swoops
down on it. In the Freudian
School,
these terms became
pass-words:
signifying gap, splitting,
rift. The
theory
of the
splitting
of the
subject
at the root of
language,
in which one
part
of the
psyche,
identified with the
other,
becomes distanced and
treats
(or mistreats)
the self as its
object,
amounts to the
application
of the sado-masochistic
model to the overall relation of the
subject
to the Other.
Let us reread J. A. Miller's text on Lacanian truths:
Those who
distinguish
the
teachings
of Lacan from his
organization
are not
lacking
-
they
are not
in the Freudian School. These are
people
who
may study
the Ecrits or the Seminars as much as we,
but who are afraid of
getting
a taste of the Director's rod.
Very good. They
are free to do as
they
please.
What,
on the
contrary, distinguished
someone who wished to be a member of the Freudian
School? It is
precisely
to have followed Lacan in his
"organization,"
to have desired his
direction,
to have
paid
the
price
of his
teaching
-
and, in
many ways,
to have ended
up being
instructed
by
that as well.38
Miller has read Lacan well.
37
Concepts, p.
206.
8
Plus Un, no.
2, p.
4.
108
David-Menard
With one
exception:
where one would
expect
to read "and
to have ended
up being
analyzed by
that as
well,"
he writes "instructed." The
importance
Lacan accords the
perverse
sado-masochistic structure as the model of the culmination of the drive and as the
paradigm
of the relations of the
subject
to the
signifying
order,
functions here in the
confusion of levels in this
analysis
-
teaching
and
political organization
take on sado-
masochistic overtones.
J. A. Miller is indeed a
sympton
of Lacan
-
his
symptom
and
nothing
more. I said that
Lacan,
the
analyst, passed
from the borders of one
register
to another in a theatrical mode: he
wished to manifest the unconscious in order to show that the essence of desire is in relation to
transgression,39
not
normalization,
which is adorned with the narcissism of love: "I
suggest
that there is a radical distinction between
loving oneself through
the other
-
which,
in the
narcissistic field of the
object,
allows no transcendence to the
object
included
-
and the
circularity
of the
drive,
in which the
heterogeneity
of the movement out and back shows a
gap
in its interval."40 That was the reason for not
preventing
the
analyst
from
"burning any
fuel" in
interpretation,
in
any
case from
using
a fuel other than the normal one.
This
openness
could remain a theater to the extent that what Lacan
put
forth was
effectively
worked on
by
Lacanians,
his
analysands,
collaborators,
and audience. When one
goes
to the
theater,
even if it is not the theater of
cruelty,
it is well understood that it is not for
real. When one lives in the
analysis
of the
experience
of alienation as terror and
passion
which become all the more violent when
they
cannot be
expressed
-
it is
always
evident that
it is all not
entirely
real. And Lacan did not
prevent
his
analysands
from
continuing
to know
that
they
were,
all the
same,
at the theater. That is from
analyzing
transference,
be it at the
price
of a moment of
rupture.
But Miller is not a man of the theater. And the
committee,
"Dissolution
Work,"
had
nothing
to do with the
presentation
of the unconscious
any longer.
He is a man of
politics,
as his
organizing
activities at the
University
of Vincennes show.
For
him,
it is a matter of
teaching
the relations of desire to
transgression,
to inculcate
them,
not to
analyze
them. The theatrical scene is obliterated.
The "Miller
tendency"
that took
power
in the "Freudian Cause" with Lacan's official
sanction,
is then a
symptom
of what went
awry
with Lacan himself when he succeeded.
To take the
relationship
of desire to
transgression
into account in
analytic practice
attracted
crowds,
and he didn't know what to do with them
except
to insult them
regularly
in
his seminars. All the more
furiously,
doubtless,
because the unconscious was lost before this
spellbound
theatrical audience. He knew
it,
without
being
able to reverse the
process,
perhaps
unable to
accept entirely
the reasons for it.
A
QUESTION
TO ASK
-
AND TO RESOLVE
We will not come out of this crisis
by continuing
to adulate Lacan's
discourse,
nor
by
desiring
to be his rod
-
but in
criticizing
him,
especially
on the
question
of desire and
perversion. This question, so central to
psychoanalysis,
is
given
a
prominent place by
Lacan, while
psychoanalysts
the world over - the members of the International
Psychoana-
lytic
Association
-
pretend
to
ignore
it.
19
Cf. The Four Fundamental
Concepts, p.
183.
41) The Four Fundamental
Concepts, p.
183.
Lacanians
Against
Lacan 109
It is decisive for the direction of the cure:
just
as the
object
of the drive
is,
according
to
Lacan, indifferent,
so too the desire of the
analyst,
the
object
of transference in the
cure,
remains an unknown
quantity
for the
analysand.
In "The Four Fundamental
Concepts
of
Psychoanalysis"
Lacan
says
at one and the same time:
-
that there is an internal relation between the desire of the
analyst
and the desire that underlies the
demand of the
patient,
and,
-
analyst
remains an unknown
quantity.
This unknowable in the desire of the Other fulfills two functions. It
provokes
the
subject
to
sacrifice,
which is an incontrovertible dimension of transference in the same
way
that the
first
object
that the infant offers to
parental
desire,
or of which the
object
is
unknown,
is his
own loss. The child's desire is a lost
object,
so he offers his own absence in order to coincide
with the desire he senses in the Other he wishes to "seduce." "The
fantasy
of one's
death,
of one's
disappearance,
is the first
object
that the
subject
has to
bring
into
play"
in the
dialectic of love.41
But the unknowable for Lacan
goes
back to the
annulled,
what is dead or
always
elsewhere,
the murdered
object. By
not
responding
when the
analysand questions
the
point
of lack
perceived
in the
Other,
the
analysand
makes
possible
the enunciation of the
subject's
desire. But is it conceivable to see the fault in the Other if it is seen
through
the faults in an
other? The
psychoanalyst
makes death
appear.
Is that to
say
that the
signifying
structure of
desire
guarantees
that desire is
always
elsewhere,
never
caught?
Does the desire of the
analyst
remain an unknown
quantity,
or does not the
anxiety
at the
termination of an
analysis
have to do with the
myth
of the Other
undoing
itself because the
desire of an other
appears?
Can the
analyst's
direction of the cure still be called
nothing
more than a "transference
maneuver"? Or does it manifest a kind of desire after all?
If Lacan
proclaims
analyst
remains an unknown
quantity,
it is not
for want of
telling
us his! He does so in a formidable
appeal
to turn around the law that
sustains
perverse
desire to the end.
"One can content oneself to be Other like
everyone
else,
after a life
spent wanting
to be it
in
spite
of the
Law."'42
"The
analyst's
desire is not a
pure
desire. It is a desire to obtain absolute
difference,
a
desire which intervenes
when,
confronted with the
primary signifier,
the
subject
is,
for the
first
time,
in a
position
to
subject
himself to it. There
only may
the
signification
of a limitless
love
emerge,
because it is outside the limits of
law,
where alone it
may
live."'4
Does this
give
the formula for all desire?
Jacques
Lacan died in the summer of 1981. The institutional situation of French
psycho-
analysts
has remained
largely
determined
by
the events outlined above. The media echoed,
the
admiration,
the love and
hatred,
which Lacan had aroused in the
analytical
milieu and
also in the wider field of culture. His death
signified
the end of a whole
epoch,
but not the
end of the crisis in French
psychoanalysis.
During
1980-1981 and after the dissolution of the Freudian School of Paris, the
great
4' Ibid,
p.
214.
42
Lacan, Seminar of
January 15, 1980,
op.
cit.
43
The
closing
lines of The Four Fundamental
Concepts.
110
David-Menard
majority
of Lacanian
analysts
distanced themselves from the
group
around
Jacques-Alain
Miller. As is traditional in divorce
proceedings,
the real conflicts broke out over the
separation
and distribution of
property,
in this case the
"properties"
of the Freudian School.
Everyone
claimed
allegiance
to Lacan and his basic
ideas,
but treated
everyone
else as an
imposter.
One of the directors of the new Freudian
Cause,
Charles
Melman,
accused his own
analysand Jacques-Alain
Miller
publicly
and in
writing
of
being
a
plagiarist
and of
having
written a whole series of
public messages
over Lacan's name at a time when the latter was no
longer physically
well
enough
tb
have
composed
them. Melman's break with Miller and his
alliance with other dissidents
finally swayed
the
majority
of those Lacanian
psychiatrists,
philosophers,
and
psychologists
who were still
hesitating.
A further decisive moment was
the
closing
of the St. Anne
hospital
to Miller and his seminars.
(Lacan's
own clinical
presentations
had
traditionally
been made
there.) Still, Miller's Freudian Cause retained
powerful
institutional
support,
both in the
university
and in the
publishing industry.
Meanwhile,
the
original
dissidents continued to
organize study groups
and to
publish
a
journal
with a clinical orientation. But a new kind of institution has also
emerged:
called the
College
of
Psychoanalysts
and
open
to members of all
psychoanalytic organizations,
this is a
professional organization
whose basis is less that of the
training
and formation of
analysts,
as
hitherto in
previous groups,
than a focus on the
place
of
analysis
in social life
generally.
The
question,
however,
remains that of the
dynamic
of such
groups,
new and
old,
of
their
relationship
to the Law and to the
process
described
by
Freud himself in Totem and
Taboo, and of the inner
necessity
of such
dissolutions, schisms,
diasporas,
and indeed of the
need for the formation of
psychoanalytic
societies in the first
place.
The
history
of the
Freudian School of Paris tends to show that such institutionalization
necessarily
leads to
failure,
and casts doubt on whether what is
really productive
in
analysis
can be
developed
in
such forms. The solitude of the
analytic process
itself
obviously
demands certain forms of
association and
sociability among analysts,
demands
something
like an
analytic
milieu, with
meetings
and collective work:
yet
here too the unconscious
-
rather than the institution -
must remain at work and must
constantly
be
reproblematized by
the
analysts
themselves.
Some such
realization,
now
increasingly widespread,
will have been one of the
positive
results of the
organizational struggles
of the last few
years.
Translated by Brian Massumi
Lacanians
Against
Lacan
111
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ENGLISH SOURCES ON LACAN
Lacan,
Jacques.
lEcrits,
A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:
Norton,
1977. An
abridged
edition of Lacan's seminal work.
Lacan,
Jacques.
Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
Trans. Alan Sheridan. New
York:
Hogarth Press,
1977.
Transcript
of the Seminar of 1964. Much more
approachable
than the
Ecrits.
Wilden,
Anthony.
The
Language of
the
Self.
New York: Delta, 1968. A translation of Lacan's best
known
article,
'"The Function and Field of
Speech Language
in
Psychoanalysis,"
with numerous
notes and an extended
commentary.
Schneiderman, Stuart, ed. and trans.
Returning
to Freud: Clinical
Psychoanalysis
in the School
of
Lacan. New Haven: Yale
University Press,
1980. The
only English
source of clinical
writings by
Lacanians. Contains articles
by
two of the main actors in the recent debates
(Charles
Melman and
Michble
Montrelay).
Laplanche,
Jean & Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. The
Language of Psychoanalysis.
Trans. Micholson-
Smith. New
York: Norton, 1974. A
dictionary
of Freudian
terminology tracing
the
development
of
each
concept through
the works of Freud.
Many
entries include an
explanation
of the Lacanian
usage.
Well referenced.
Lemaire, Anika.
Jacques
Lacan. Boston:
Routledge
and
Kegan Paul,
1977. The most useful
single
introduction to the
thought
of Lacan.
Turkle,
Sherry. Psychoanalytic
Politics: Freud's
French
Revolution. New York: Basic
Books,
1978.
A
sociological study
of the
history
of
psychoanalysis
since Lacan.
"'French Freud: Structural Studies in
Psychoanalysis."
Yale French Studies, no. 48,
1972. A
collection of
major
articles
by
and about Lacan.
''Literature
and
Psychoanalysis:
The
Question
of
Reading
- Otherwise." Yale French Studies, no.
55/56,
1977.
Literary applications
of Lacanian
theory.

Lacanians Against Lacan Author(s) : Monique David-Menard and Brian Massumi Source: Social Text, No. 6 (Autumn, 1982), Pp. 86-111 Published By: Stable URL: Accessed: 04/09/2014 09:44

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Lacanians Against Lacan Author(s) : Monique David-Menard and Brian Massumi Source: Social Text, No. 6 (Autumn, 1982), Pp. 86-111 Published By: Stable URL: Accessed: 04/09/2014 09:44

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Lacanians Against Lacan

Author(s): Monique David-Menard and Brian Massumi

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