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In autumn 1978 Lacan had a car accident while driving his white Mercedes. He emerged unscathed. But to those around him he gave the impression of being diminished. His tiredness grew worse and his silences lasted longer. For its twenty-sixth year his seminar was due to focus on ‘Topology and Time’. During the first session on 21 November, Lacan lost the power of speech in front of his audience, which remained as silent as him. Everyone could see the old man beset by immense weariness and deprived of the voice which, for a quarter-century, had held generations of intellectuals and psychoanalysts spellbound.
While he was drawing his knots and plaits on the blackboard, Lacan became confused, turned towards the audience, spoke of his mistake, and then left the room. ‘No matter,’ people were heard to murmur, ‘we still love you.’
In September 1979 a journalist wrote a crazy article in which he compared Lacan to the Ayatollah Khomeini:1 ‘You don’t fire on an ambulance’, he said in conclusion. The next day, hundreds of letters, sent from every corner of France, arrived at the newspaper, written not only by intimates and intellectuals, but also by anonymous people who obviously had not read his work: psychiatric nurses, specialist teachers, social workers, educational psychologists, patients. The journalist had forgotten how popular Lacan was – not the Lacan of knots, Antigone or ‘Kant with Sade’, but the psychiatrist, the doctor of the insane, the one who for half a century, together with some fellow-travellers, supporters of the common good and public service, had embodied the ideals of an institutional psychotherapy and a humanist psychiatry, today in disarray. Following the publication of my History of Psychoanalysis, I frequently realized how alive the name of Lacan remained in the collective memory of all these practitioners of psychic suffering. And it still is today.
From December 1979 onwards, some began to say that Lacan was applying himself to remaining silent so as to hear better; that he was still fully lucid and his hearing perfect. People sought to ignore the terrible suffering that ravaged him and which was expressed by face spasms. No more voice, no more words. I had occasion to speak to him then. His face was already turned to the world of an infinite silence and his expression remained elusive, as if attracted by that immemorial elsewhere. Lacan was afraid of ageing, of dying, of no longer seducing. In him were combined Don Juan and the statue of the Commendatore.
On 9 September 1981, Lacan died under a false name in the Hartmann Clinic of a cancer of the colon that he never wanted treated. He was buried privately, and without ceremony, in the Guitrancourt cemetery. He had thought of ending his days in Italy, in Rome or Venice, and one day, although a materialist, out of bravado had even dreamed of a grand Catholic funeral.
Libération, the most Lacanian of the French newspapers, paid him a beautiful tribute by mixing background articles with slogans that resembled him: ‘Tout fou Lacan’, ‘Lacan fait le mort comme tout le monde’, ‘Lacan n’est plus’, ‘Lacan même’.2 That Lacan – the Lacan of an avalanche of words, things, lists, collections, places, discrepant objects, of the inversion of meanings, the gap, insatiable jouissance, the origin of the world, of hatred provoked and reciprocated, of such bravado – I too remember him, thirty years after his death.
Lacan in spite of everything.