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In 1990, during a conference on Lacan, Jacques Derrida recalled the circumstances of their first encounter, at a famous symposium on structuralism organized in October 1966 by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. At the time, Lacan was afraid that the idea of collecting the quintessence of his teaching in 900 pages would end in disaster: ‘You’ll see’, he said to Derrida, referring to the binding, ‘it won’t hold together’.
Such was the anxiety that racked him as soon as the issue of publication arose. ‘Poubellication’ (binning/publishing), he would later say, therewith referring to the remains, residue or waste that the object of his fondest desire could become for him. ‘Stécriture’ (dis-writing), he would also say in connection with his seminar, expressing with a disdainful gesture how much he affected to scorn the transition from the spoken to the written. And again: stembrouille, stupidification, poubellicant, poubelliquer, p’oublier, and so on.
Over and above his clinical practice, since 1964, with his entry into the École normale supérieure in the rue d’Ulm on Louis Althusser’s initiative, and then with the creation of the École freudienne de Paris, Lacan had become a recognized, controversial thinker, like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and others. Thus he belonged to a generation of thinkers more concerned with the unconscious structures of subjectivity than the status of the self-consciousness of the subject in its relationship with the world: thinkers more attuned to a philosophy of the concept than to existentialism.
Lacan feared plagiarism; and that is why he sought to keep his most cherished thoughts secret. In reality, however, he endlessly desired that they be recognized from one end of the planet to the other, and with the éclat they deserved. Haunted by a fear of not pleasing, he exhibited a kind of terror at the idea that his oeuvre might escape the interpretation he himself wanted to give of it. Thus he allowed the written trace of his spoken word to appear solely so as to have it circulate in the restricted milieu of Freudian institutions and journals.
He therefore preserved the typed volumes of his seminar and the off-prints of his articles, now become unobtainable, in his desk drawers, as if he never managed to detach himself from them. He looked at them lamenting – ‘What am I going to do with all this?’ – or distributed them by way of reward, with subtle dedications or ambiguous confidences. He exhibited them secretly, like a hidden treasure similar to the wide-open genitals of L’Origine du monde.
Thus did Lacan’s oeuvre remain inaccessible to anyone who wished to read it normally, outside the circle of initiates. This was all the more true in that his 1932 thesis had fallen into oblivion without having been reprinted. And when, by chance, a copy turned up on the shelves of a specialist bookshop, Lacan hastened to purchase it.
It was an editor – François Wahl, with whom he had a strong counter-transferential relationship, since Wahl had been his patient – who in 1966 enabled Lacan to publish the sum of his writings, which was in fact composed of his lectures, themselves derived from his seminar.
As a result, following publication, Lacan became the author of a summa, organized by someone else, which functioned like a bible, subsequently commented on by his pupils orally. It must be appreciated that Lacan had always made an equation between his therapy and his seminar, to the extent that for his analysands attendance at the seminar was equivalent to a session: a long session, since it lasted nearly two hours; a session that was very different from the short sessions which occurred in the rue de Lille, in Lacan’s consulting room.
But the magnum opus realized by Wahl also allowed Lacan to become the author of a written oeuvre different from the one formulated in his seminar, which was itself recorded and then transcribed by his pupils before being written, from 1973 onwards, by a co-author: Jacques-Alain Miller.
In this respect, the Écrits should be viewed less as a book than as the collection of a whole lifetime devoted to oral teaching. Hence the title Écrits, to signify trace, archive, something that does not come undone, does not vanish, cannot be stolen: a letter arriving at its destination. And that is why the book opens with the famous ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’.14
This magnum opus immediately advertises its difference from the seminar, which proclaims orality: a work shared with another author. For the name of Wahl, ‘obstetrician’ of the texts, does not figure on the cover of Écrits, whereas that of the seminars’ transcriber – Jacques-Alain Miller – justifiably features alongside the name of Lacan.
‘I’m behind with everything I’ve got to do before dying and I’m finding it difficult to make progress.’ This sentence, uttered in 1966 at the Baltimore symposium, encapsulates a problematic of being and time that is one of the major themes of Lacan’s thinking. Hindered since childhood by his slowness and anxieties, Lacan never stopped theorizing the ‘not-all’ or half-saying, whereas he evinced a strong desire to master time, to read all the books he had collected, to visit all the centres of culture, to possess all objects. His legendary impatience, the desire always to have his own way, was manifested in everyday life by various symptoms that only became more marked with age.
At the end of his life, not only did he continue to reduce the length of his sessions, to sleep fewer than five hours a night, and to drive his car without observing basic safety rules, he was also increasingly haunted by the fantasy of ‘shrinking’. Dreading the marks of an old age that would put an end to his intellectual activity, he was gradually haunted by the fear of dying and seeing his words and his legacy disappear. And this led him to re-examine, back to front, the myths, words and concepts with which he had fashioned his reading of Freud’s doctrine: castration, waste, genitals, jouissance, letter, death, mystic, trinity. Lacan thus sought to launch a perverse challenge to the literality of his oeuvre, always undone, reconstructed, or still to come.
In publishing the bulk of his written work at the age of sixty-five, he imparted ontological weight not to a mere collection of articles, but to a ‘writing’ defined as a founding event. This is because, thanks to Wahl, Lacan had precisely fashioned his Écrits as a realm of memory, subject to a subjective re-historicization: ‘I thus find myself situating these texts in a future perfect … In seeing them spread out over the years that were not very full, aren’t I exposing myself to the reproach of having given into dwelling on the past [attardement]?’15
As a result, as the author of a text manufactured on the basis of other texts, derived from the spoken word, he was struck by the same symptom as his followers: he began to comment on his own written work as if it involved the work of another, anterior to himself – a big Other, God or Freud – and to make himself the spokesman of his own discursiveness. Thus it was that from around 1970 he enjoyed citing himself, referring to himself in the third person, over-interpreting his own positions, imitating his old verbal habits, ‘jouljouer’, ‘joycer’, ‘lituraterrir’.
Be that as it may, in the Écrits are to be found the various strata of the development of his thought, each of them punctuated by arresting formulas: ‘The unconscious is structured like a language’; ‘man’s desire is the desire of the Other’; ‘I, truth, speak’; ‘there is no Other of the Other’, and so on.
It was on 15 November 1966, after months of work and discussion, that the opus came out accompanied by a classified index of its major concepts (constructed by Jacques-Alain Miller), a critical apparatus, and a logical (as opposed to chronological) presentation of the texts. Five thousand copies were sold in a fortnight, even before any press reviews had appeared. More than 50,000 copies of the standard edition were bought and the paperback sale would beat all records for a collection of such complex texts: more than 120,000 copies for the first volume and in excess of 55,000 for the second. Thereafter, Lacan would be celebrated, attacked, hated or admired like a major thinker, and not only as an unorthodox practitioner.
Far from being an ad hoc work, Écrits is a summa that resembles both Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Consequently, it functions as the founding Book of an intellectual system which, depending on the era, can be read, criticized, glossed or interpreted in many ways, the worst being that of the epigones.
14. When, twenty years after Lacan’s death, Jacques-Alain Miller published Autres écrits, he chose to place ‘Lituraterre’ at the head of the volume: ‘[this text] seemed to me to be destined to play here the role accorded in the Écrits to the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’ ”.’ Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 9.
15. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, New York, Norton, 2007, p. 56.