9 9 
Spoken, transcribed, reconstructed or recorded, for a quarter of a century Lacan’s seminar was the site where the battles of Freudianism unfolded and the laboratory of a form of thought which, with its reference to Baroque art, seemed intent on imitating Francesco Borromini’s trompe l’oeil façades. But it was also the site of a kind of long-running banquet where, via the magic of a voice, the sounds and images of History’s great theatre, with its dramas and convulsions, were exhibited. The extent to which, throughout his life, Lacan remained a sensual spectator of the turmoil of the world, and a lucid commentator on the politics of nations, cannot be overstated. Nor did he hesitate to express his jealousy or distrust. He could be hateful and contemptuous. He left none of his listeners indifferent.
It was between 1953 and 1963 that he developed the basics of his intellectual system. Surrounded by excellent followers – Serge Leclaire, Wladimir Granoff, Maud Mannoni and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis were unquestionably the most brilliant of them – and supported by a remarkable generation in search of new inspiration, for ten years he offered the best of himself to those around him. Thus the seminars of this period, when Lacan had his followers intervene, carry traces of that golden age of a free-ranging psychoanalysis which dreamed of changing the fate of humanity: The Object Relation, The Formations of the Unconscious, Desire and its Interpretation, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Transference, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, and so on.
At the point when Lacan engaged in his vast commentary on Freud’s oeuvre he had just accomplished his recasting of psychoanalytical doctrine by drawing on Saussurean linguistics, Roman Jakobson’s theses, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of myths and, finally, Heideggerian philosophy. ‘Return to Freud’ was his term for this structuralist sublation whereby he sought to extricate the Viennese theory from its biological model. In 1957, in particular, with his seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious1 – one of the most important – he claimed to re-think the functioning of the psychic apparatus on the basis of an initial, or primary, model that possessed the structure of language.
From his first seminars, held between 1953 and 1956, Lacan made the unconscious a language, showing that men and women are inhabited by a speech which constantly prompts them to the disclosure of their being. Subsequently, he deduced from this a theory of the subject determined by the primacy of the symbolic function; and he called the element constitutive of the acts and destiny of this subject the ‘signifier’. In 1955, in his magisterial commentary on Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’, he imparted a narrative framework to the theory.2
The story, set in Restoration France, is well known. The chevalier Auguste Dupin is entrusted with a task of the utmost importance. At the request of the prefect of police, he must at all costs find a certain compromising letter stolen from the Queen and hidden by the minister. Conspicuously placed between the arches of the chimney in the latter’s office, the letter is visible to those who really want to see it. But the police have not spotted it, trapped as they are in the lures of psychology. Rather than noticing the obvious fact displayed before their very eyes, they attribute intentions to the thieves. For his part, Dupin requests an audience with the minister and, during the course of their conversation, takes the object which he had noticed almost immediately.
Thus the minister is unaware that his secret has been cracked. He still believes himself master of the game and of the Queen, for to possess the letter is to hold power over its addressee: it is solely possession, not use, of the letter that yields influence. According to Lacan, no subject can be the master of the signifier and, should it think it is, it risks being trapped in the same illusion as the policemen or minister.
In 1957 Lacan progressed to another stage of his theory of the signifier by introducing the idea, borrowed from Jakobson, that Freudian displacement is akin to metonymy (sliding of the signified under the signifier) and condensation akin to metaphor (substitution of one signifier for another). On this basis, he constructed his thesis of the signifying chain: a subject is represented by a signifier for another signifier.
In his seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan resumed the main elements of this theory in accordance with a ternary logic. After an introduction on Freud’s Witz, veritable expression of a structure of the human mind, he passed on to the issue of castration from which he conjured up the incest taboo. He then turned to the dialectic of desire and want, symptom of the intermittences of the heart and love, and finished his exposition with a reflection on Christian religion and obsessional neurosis, mingling references to Melanie Klein, de Sade, Islam and the Aufklärung (German Enlightenment).
As ever, in these years – the most lively – he took pleasure in converting love into hate and the divine commandment (‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’) into an injunction of rejection (‘You are the one you hate’), as if in order to bring out in any form of relationship with the other the permanency of a negativity of the unconscious: play of light and shadow, the cruelty of the word, fantasies, projections.3
At the centre of this system Lacan handled the concept of the signifier in virtuoso fashion, enabling him to link the formations of the unconscious with one another: the signifier stamps the subject with a linguistic imprint by imparting meaning to dreams, jokes, lapsus and parapraxes. But it also governs the forms of desire and otherness that conform to a logic of fantasy. Finally, the signifier makes man a social and religious being, dependent on both a symbolic function and a logos, inherited from the old divine power.
While this system in its entirety was present in several volumes of the published Seminar, it was never given a coherent exposition. For Lacan’s style, or rather the style of his seminar, involved digression, fugue, eroticism, wanderings. Thus, when he sought to embody his thesis on metonymy, he encouraged his audience to re-read the passage from a novel by Maupassant (Bel-Ami) where the hero, having eaten some oysters, slips into a dream of a universe of an imaginary embrace, lifting the veil of words as one raises a woman’s skirts. This, stressed Lacan, illuminates the essence of the metonymy of desire, that ‘perpetual slippage of meaning which any discourse is compelled to hold on to’.
And just as, in Lacan, speech was always captivating, sophisticated, exalted or offensive, so for twenty-six years his seminar was for him the equivalent of a course of treatment, inducing him to think outside of himself: beyond his own limits. Clinician of speech, ear piece of the unconscious and insanity – preferably female – Lacan never knew how to engage in dialogue with anyone, other than hundreds of texts or phrases borrowed from his patients, which he incorporated into his work like so many internal voices, and with Freud – a Freud reconstructed in accordance with his desire, a Freud of whom he considered himself the sole authentic interpreter.
No one ever contemplated genuinely entering into dialogue with Lacan: ‘Me, the truth, I speak’, he said, knowing that the truth could never be fully stated in the absence of a dictatorship of transparency. He also claimed that it could only be half-said, like a ‘half-saying’, a ‘half-said’, or a ‘noon sounded’. Without acknowledgement, Lacan referred to Igitur, Mallarmé’s character, ravaged by insanity. When midnight sounds, Igitur, the last heir of his race, throws a dice and lies down in the tomb of his ancestors to realize their immemorial dream of abolishing chance and acceding to the plenitude of the Absolute, the One of the Universe, the Book, or the abolition of meaning in favour of form. An impossible task, therefore, but one Lacan would set about at the end of his life, between the logic of the matheme and Borromean topology. In these years, Mallarmé’s revolution in poetic language,4 profoundly marked by Hegelian thought, seemed to a whole generation to be something like a twin of the Freudian revolution, of which Lacan had made himself the new interpreter.
Lacan monologued, Lacan delighted in his own speech, Lacan handled half-saying in virtuoso fashion. He loved dispensing his verbal follies to his interlocutors, blending calm and storm in them: suffocation, exhaustion, humour, incongruous gestures – all of it perfectly controlled. But Lacan knew how to listen while fooling his interlocutor. Every time I met him, I was frequently astonished by his ability to do several things at once – turn the pages of a book or take notes, seemingly without bothering about the other person – and then immediately demonstrate that he had perfectly understood what had been said to him.
In 1960, having reached the summit of a linguistic inventiveness that had not yet turned into a topological mania or an obsession with neologisms, Lacan provided a dazzling commentary on one of the most beautiful texts in the history of philosophy: Plato’s Symposium.5
Readers will know the theme. Around Socrates, Plato introduces six characters each of whom expresses a different conception of love. Among them are the poet Agathon, pupil of Gorgias, whose triumph is being celebrated, and Alcibiades, a politician of great beauty whose lover Socrates had declined to be, because he preferred love of the highest good and the desire for immortality – that is, philosophy. No woman is present at this banquet, where, against a background of homosexuality, all possible varieties of corporeal and intellectual love are evoked. However, it is to the speech of a mythical woman – Diotima – that Socrates defers to expound his philosophical conception of love. She is therefore the eighth character in the dialogue, which revolves around the issue of agalma, defined by Plato as the paradigm of an object representing the Idea of the Good.
Since antiquity, commentators on the Symposium had highlighted the way that Plato employed the art of dialogue to articulate different theses on love through several characters – a love always pertaining to a consciously named desire, either by each of them or by the author himself.
Lacan inverted this perspective by interpreting the unconscious desire of each character. Thus, to Socrates he allocated the role of the psychoanalyst teaching his followers a truth that eludes their consciousness. On the one hand, he stressed, therapy is based on speech; on the other, the transmission of psychoanalysis presupposes the existence of dialogue. This was a way of signifying that he was the master of a dialogue that unfolded unbeknownst to itself while being addressed to an addressee.
The idea of the Socratic banquet was already present in Freud, who readily referred to the Greek model of transmitting knowledge: a master, a disciple, a dialogue. In its early stages, his doctrine was developed within an inner circle immersed in the Viennese spirit of the early twentieth century. Convinced that the best form of democracy had been invented by the Greeks, Freud always remained a supporter of a Platonist position. In his view, the Republic of the chosen must curb murderous instincts by promoting taboos and frustration.
Lacan took up the idea by founding the École freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1964. He adopted the word ‘school’, rather than ‘society’ or ‘association’, thus drawing inspiration from the Greek model. He regarded himself as a Socratic master surrounded by his best followers. And it was then that he realized that a whole generation of philosophers and literary critics was interested in his work, particularly through the teaching of Louis Althusser. Among them were Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner, Henri Rey-Flaud, François Regnault, Catherine Clément, Étienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, but also – from different horizons – Christian Jambet or Bernard Sichère. This was the context in which I was invited to join the EFP by Lacan in 1969. My mother, Jenny Aubry, had long followed him, as a result of which I had frequented him in my childhood, obviously without knowing in what his teaching consisted. And it took the publication of the Écrits for me to make a connection between the man and the work.
However, over the years Lacan lost sight of the conflictual essence of dialogue. Thus the banquet came to an end and the suspended letter awaiting the miracle of a future destination was forgotten.
Dazzled by edges, margins, borders, outlines, Lacan never stopped pondering the modalities of the transition from speech to writing. In an enigmatic text dated 1971, he engaged in an erudite escalation that returned him to a primordial obsession: the letter awaiting delivery.
He had returned from a trip to Japan and recounted that, flying over Siberia, he had seen furrows and river courses that resembled crossings-out. Having to speak about the relations between literature and psychoanalysis, he mentioned this episode only immediately to escape into the ‘furrows’ of language. And it is thus that he invented the word ‘lituraterre’ to distinguish the letter from the ‘littoral’ (which refers to a boundary) and the ‘literal’ (which does not presuppose one), thus coining a new series of terms: litura, letter, lituratterrir.
In this account Lacan addressed Serge Leclaire and Jacques Derrida to reaffirm the idea of the primacy of the signifier over the letter. But he also commented on The Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes’ sumptuous book on Japan, dedicated to Maurice Pinguet. In it the author described ways of living and eating, objects and places, as so many specific elements of a sign system, referring the western subject to a language whose meaning she does not understand, but whose difference from her own she grasps, like an alterity that enables her to undo the ‘real’ as a result of other ways of dividing up, other syntaxes: ‘in a word, to descend into the untranslatable, to experience its shock without ever muffling it, until everything Occidental in us totters and the rights of the “father tongue” vacillate – that tongue which comes to us from our fathers’.6
Carried away by the effervescence of his own words, and the curiosity aroused in him by Barthes’ book, with this ‘lituraterre’ Lacan seemed to be proposing a kind of return to the meaning of Lacan, a parody of the famous return to the meaning of Freud that he had previously initiated. As a result, his discourse gave it to be understood that the Japanese subject was different in Lacanian fashion from the western subject, because the letter and the signifier could be married in its language: a real without interpretation, an ‘empire of signifiers’ exceeding speech.
How often have I subsequently heard the master’s epigones transform this unspeakable desire for the East, so essential in Lacan, into a kind of culturalism of the ‘inverted other’, with the ‘Japanese thing’ becoming for them a mirror with many follies. Lacan had always been seduced by the Far East and had learnt Chinese at the École des langues orientales. In his plunge into the heart of that language, as in his attraction to Japanese rituals, he always sought to solve the same Mallarméan mystery: how to ‘write’ – that is, ‘formalize’ – the topography of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary (RSI).
‘Lituraterre’ did not solve the problem. Quite the reverse, in my view this text contributed to a sort of self-annihilation of Lacanian language:
My critique, if it is its place to be taken for literary, could only bear, such was my effort, on what Poe makes of being a writer in forming such a message on the letter … Nonetheless, the ellipsis cannot be elucidated by means of some aspect of his psycho-biography; rather, this would clog it up … My own text would no more resolve itself by mine: the wish I might form, for example, of finally being read properly … To lituraterre myself, I shall note that I have not constructed any metaphor in the furrowing that reflects it. Writing is this furrowing itself, and when I speak of jouissance, I legitimately invoke what I accumulate from my audience, no less than what I deprive myself of, for this preoccupies me.7
Here Lacan seemed to ridicule his ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’. Punctuated with sarcastic remarks and cries of anguish, his speech seemed to me at the time as rigidified as a dead letter: Igitur in the tomb.
In 1975 Jacques Derrida registered this state of affairs by broaching the issue of the purloined letter differently. He stressed that a letter does not always arrive at its destination and that, in the very wording of the ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’, Lacan was returning to himself the indivisibility of the letter – that is, the whole: a dogma of unity.8 Following criticisms by Foucault and Deleuze, this was the start of a fertile critique of the impasses of late Lacan, to which I was immediately sensitive and which even affected me profoundly: destination is the unpredictable, not the mastery of fate. In his way, Derrida received the work of the historian more generously than other philosophers attached to the literality of an unequivocal reading.
Anxious as ever, Lacan could not avoid examining the issue. But in order to understand his main contribution to the clinical treatment of anxiety, we must appreciate the way in which Freud introduced that notion into the field of psychoanalysis.
Concerned not to stick to traditional descriptions, Freud first of all distinguished anxiety from fear and fright. Existential in character, anxiety in his view was a psychic state abstracted from any relationship to an object: a kind of permanent expectation which, when it becomes pathological, can lead to obsessional, phobic, compulsive forms of behaviour, even to a melancholic state.
By contrast, an identifiable object is always involved in fear. One fears something that might happen: death, separation, torture, illness, suffering, physical decline, and so forth. As for fright, it is focused on an indefinable object. Fright is neither fear, nor anxiety. Provoked by a danger that has no object, it does not presuppose any expectation. It too can give rise to a traumatic neurosis.
Freud initially argued that a being’s entry into the world is the prototype of all states of anxiety. In 1924 Otto Rank took up this thesis, claiming that for the duration of its existence each subject does nothing but repeat the traumatic history of its separation from the maternal body. Whatever its audacity, this theory of primordial attachment, so fashionable today among ethologists of the human soul, presented a formidable drawback: it threatened to make childbirth and biological separation a trauma in itself. On this model, indeed, all neuroses are simply the consequence of a causality external to the subject: sexual abuse, war or domestic violence, illnesses, and so forth.
In 1926, responding to Rank, Freud therefore clarified his thinking in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. He distinguished anxiety about a real danger, automatic anxiety, and anxiety as signal. The first, he maintained, is caused by the danger that prompts it; the second is a reaction to a social situation; and the third is a purely psychic mechanism that reproduces a traumatic situation experienced previously, to which the ego reacts defensively.
Lacan adopted all these definitions and commented on them. But he came up with a different conception of anxiety from Freud’s. In a less Darwinian and, in some respects, more ontological perspective, he made anxiety a structure constitutive of psychic organization. Thus, according to him, it is the very signifier of any human subjectivity, rather than a condition peculiar to the anxious subject, as phenomenologists believe. It arises when the lack of the object, necessary to the expression of desire, is lacking to the extent that it fastens the subject to an unnameable real that escapes and threatens it. This ‘lack of the lack’ suffocates desire and is then translated into fantasies of self-destruction: chaos, imaginary fusion with the maternal body, hallucinations, spectres of insects, images of dislocation or castration.
From a clinical point of view, when it becomes pathological, anxiety can be overcome if the subject manages to turn away from this traumatic real and distance itself from a dread of lack, source of disappointment. It can then grasp its signification – that is, in Lacanian terminology, refer to the big Other, the symbolic law that determines it in its relationship to desire.
Lacan was a master of anxiety and a past master in the clinical treatment of anxiety. Himself incapable of eluding its grasp, he considered it at once necessary to the expression of desire, impossible to elude on pain of illusion and, finally, controllable when its origin can be symbolized. Consequently – one feels like adding at a time when, together with depression, it has become the symptom of individualistic, liberal societies – it is pointless trying too hard to neutralize it with drugs. Except, obviously, when it threatens to invade subjectivity to the point of destroying it.9
1. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre V, Les Formations de l’inconscient (1957–58), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris, Seuil, 1998.
2. Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’, in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, New York, Norton, 2007, Chapter 1; The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954–1955), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, New York, Norton, 1991, pp. 191–205.
3. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–60), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter, New York, Norton, 1997.
4. A great reader of Hegel’s oeuvre, Mallarmé made the quest for the finitude of the Book the equivalent of absolute knowledge.
5. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre VIII, Le Transfert (1960–61), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris, Seuil, 2001.
6. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard, New York, Hill and Wang, 1983, p. 6.
7. Jacques Lacan, ‘Lituraterre’, in Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, pp. 12–13, 18 (translation by Jack W. Stone, modified). Another version of this text figures in Le Séminaire. Livre XVIII, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant (1971), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris, Seuil, 2007, pp. 116, 124.
8. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987.
9. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre X, L’Angoisse (1962–63), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris, Seuil, 2004.