THE TWO lectures published in this volume were delivered by Louis Althusser in the course of the seminar on Lacan and psychoanalysis held at the École normale supérieure during the academic year 1963–1964. This was the third seminar Althusser organized: after one on the young Marx held in 1961–1962 and another on the origins of structuralism held in 1962–1963; the one held the following year on Marx’s
Capital led to the publication of
Lire Le Capital. At the same time, Althusser invited Lacan, who had been expelled from the Sainte-Anne Hospital, to set up his own seminar at the École normale supérieure, and its first session took place on January 15, 1964.
1 On December 6, 1963, Althusser also gave a long speech presenting the seminar of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron.
2 The time had come, he thought, to make strategic alliances with the aim of changing the state of the theoretical field, which was then broadly dominated by “structuralist” problematics and more generally marked by the emergence of the “human sciences.” In fact, with the almost simultaneous publication of
Pour Marx and
Lire Le Capital at the end of 1965, Althusser was rapidly to become a major theoretical authority for his period.
When Althusser organized his seminar on Lacan and psychoanalysis, he had already published most of the articles that were to be included in
Pour Marx; on the other hand, he had so far written hardly anything on psychoanalysis, and it was precisely in the context of this seminar that he wrote, in early 1964, most of his article “Freud et Lacan.”
3 However, these two lectures, far from being simple drafts of this famous work, have an incontestable originality. The accent is put on a question that is not central in “Freud et Lacan”: “What place does psychoanalysis have today in the domain of the human sciences”? Which implies, Althusser immediately adds, “that we know very precisely what psychoanalysis itself is, and that we know very precisely what the general domain of the human sciences is.” Whence immediately results a doubling of the inquiry; it involves both a question of fact and a question of right.
The question of fact: “today in 1963,” in France, what “empirically factual” place does psychoanalysis occupy in the domain of the human sciences? This question can itself be answered only by making a long empirical detour through the history of the reception of psychoanalysis in France, which constitutes most of the first presentation. While taking care to explain that he proceeds in this way “for a provisional reason that,” he hopes, “will soon be transcended,” he nonetheless makes a proposal concerning which the least one can say is that it is hardly frequent in the work published during his lifetime: “I am going to tell you the story of my own encounter with this problem.”
Question of right: “What must the relation between psychoanalysis and the domain of the human sciences be?” Althusser recognizes at the outset that this is question is no doubt “excessive,” because the objective is simply “to define the theoretical conditions of the possibility of valid research in both the domain of psychoanalysis and the domain of the human sciences in general.” The second presentation has as its goal to take up one of the aspects of this vast problem: that of the relations between psychoanalysis and psychology. By drawing a line of rigorous demarcation between these two disciplines, Althusser may have helped make his enterprise a little less excessive. When she arrives at the end of this volume, the reader will no doubt have a more precise idea of the peculiarly Althusserian interpretation of a position so characteristic of a period: the rejection of psychology.
The seminar of 1963–1964 on Lacan and psychoanalysis took place in the following way. The first presentation was that of Michel Tort, which was divided into three sessions and devoted to the general establishment of Freud’s and Lacan’s concepts. Althusser’s first presentation was delivered between the first two sessions with Michel Tort. Étienne Balibar then devoted two sessions to talking about psychosis. Then came Jacques-Alain Miller’s presentation on Lacan (three sessions). Achille Chiesa spoke next about Maurice Merleau-Ponty and psychoanalysis, then Yves Duroux spoke about “Psychoanalysis and Phenomenology.” Then Althusser gave his second presentation, and the last speaker was Jean Mosconi (“Psychoanalysis and Anthropology”).
4 Althusser’s correspondence shows that he seriously considered publishing all these presentations, but the project was never realized.
Althusser’s archives contain no written version of his presentations, or even the slightest collection of preparatory notes, and the recording of his second presentation clearly shows that he was not, on that day, reading a text written in advance, in contrast to what he did, for example, during the seminar on Marx’s Capital. The text of the first presentation was established on the basis of the rough transcript (preserved in Althusser’s archives) of a recording that has now disappeared: a transcript that is often very defective, especially with regard to proper names. In order to establish this text, we have therefore relied on the notes taken by Étienne Balibar, which were extremely valuable to us. The text of the second presentation was established on the basis of the transcription of a tape recording preserved in Althusser’s archives, occasionally supplemented by Étienne Balibar’s notes.
In both cases, we had a twofold goal: maintaining the specific rhetoric of the presentations and producing a legible text. This led us to make the following decisions: we simply omitted, without systematic indications, repetitions whose sole effect would have been to make the text syntactically incorrect; and we have also omitted, but indicating the suppressions by ellipses, incomplete sentences whose meaning could not be determined (Althusser having interrupted himself in the middle of a sentence to begin another one); we modified certain sentences that were syntactically inadmissible, when their meaning was not in doubt; and finally we let stand certain sentences that were syntactically vague, when they seemed not to hinder reading. Naturally, we take complete responsibility for any errors of transcription that may have been made.
We would like to thank François Boddaert, Louis Althusser’s heir, who has generously granted us his confidence, as well as Élisabeth Roudinesco and Étienne Balibar, without whom the establishment of the text of these presentations might have been an impossible task.