Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue

PHILOSOPHIE MAGAZINE: To start off, can both of you explain your relation to Lacan? What were the circumstances in which you encountered his thought?¹

ÉLISABETH ROUDINESCO: For me, the adventure of psychoanalysis began at home. My mother, Jenny Aubry, was a hospital doctor and worked with abandoned and neglected children. She was also a psychoanalyst, and was known for having introduced into France the clinical principles of John Bowlby and Anna Freud, which she encountered in London.

Beginning in 1953 she became not so much a disciple as a fellow traveler of Lacan, and she was by his side at the moment the French Society of Psychoanalysis (SFP) was founded. Lacan often came to my mother and stepfather’s (Pierre Aubry) house after my parents divorced. Jenny was a close friend of Sylvia Bataille, whom Lacan had just married.

At the time, I went to Guitrancourt, to “La Prévôté,” as Lacan’s country house was called, but little did I know that this man I knew well was such a significant thinker. Later, in adolescence, I wasn’t attracted to psychoanalysis at all. I had almost no desire to concern myself with this business that interested my mother so much. I dreamed instead of writing novels or making films. I studied literature, then linguistics, and had a passion for the Cahiers du cinéma, the Nouvelle Vague, and Hollywood films.

In 1966, I went to teach in Algeria, at Boumerdès. That same year, both Foucault’s The Order of Things and Lacan’s Écrits appeared. What an exceptional moment! The structuralist wave, initiated by Claude Lévi-Strauss and prolonged by Louis Althusser’s For Marx in 1965, was a real revelation for me. While the philosophy courses I took in high school were terrible, I finally discovered philosophers and thinkers who wrote in such a remarkable way: thinkers of language. I dove into Lacan’s Écrits with delight, and all the more easily given my solid knowledge of the structural linguistics (beginning with Ferdinand de Saussure and developed by Roman Jakobson) that Lacan made use of. An astonishing scene: I recall myself saying to my mother, in a peremptory way, how brilliant “her” Lacan seemed to me. And she answered: “I’ve told you that forever!” We then began to have sometimes quite lively exchanges about his theory of the signifier, which we approached in different ways.

After May 1968, I gave up on the project of writing novels and oriented myself toward the human sciences and philosophy, and I earned my master’s in literature under the guidance of Tzvetan Todorov at the University of Paris-VIII at Vincennes (today Saint-Denis), where I went on to defend my doctorate. I followed Gilles Deleuze’s “Anti-Oedipus” seminar, then shifted toward history when I met Michel de Certeau, who taught in the Department of Psychoanalysis, which was founded in 1969 by Serge Leclaire. In 1972 I met Louis Althusser. As for Lacan, I began to attend his seminar in 1969 at the law school at the Panthéon. When my mother told him about my interest in his teaching, he immediately called upon me. During our meeting he exclaimed: “What is the story? Why have you have waited so long to come see me?” I told him what I was doing: I had begun to work on Georges Politzer with the journal Action poétique, run by Henri Deluy, and he insisted that I join the Freudian School of Paris (EFP), which he founded in 1964, even though I had not yet decided to enter analysis. I accepted, meeting up so to speak with my destiny. I remained a member of the EFP up to its dissolution by Lacan himself in 1980, a year before his death.

ALAIN BADIOU: My own path was different. As young man, I was a convinced Sartrean. Between 1958 and 1962 I was a student-philosopher at the École normale supérieure (ENS) at Rue d’Ulm, where I encountered my second master, after the Sartre of my adolescence, Louis Althusser. What a clash of contraries! Althusser proposed rereading Marx by stripping away all the faded humanist finery at the very moment Sartre proposed an existential vision of Marx. Completely by chance, I fell upon the first issue of the journal La Psychanalyse, which included Lacan’s famous Rome Discourse (his lecture titled “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” from 1953). This text left me literally dazzled—I experienced a veritable textual fascination, so much so that my theoretical relation to Lacan has always been mediated by his writing. After this initial discovery, I continued to read La Psychanalyse, and I began to slip references to Lacan into my own essays. Very intrigued by these borrowings, Althusser took me to a session of Lacan’s seminar at the Sainte-Anne Hospital. This was in 1960–61. At the same time, I was the first student at the ENS to propose, at Althusser’s request, one and then two presentations of Lacanian thought.

É.R.: Did you read Freud too?

A.B.: Yes! I was occupied with the systematic reading of Freud from my very first year at the ENS. We considered him to be one of the milestones leading to the human sciences, the human sciences that were going to replace, some thought, philosophical idealism with a “serious” materialism. But beyond the obvious continuity, I quickly perceived the profound difference between his work and that of Lacan, which was absolutely novel.

É.R.: So novel that the reading of Lacan left deep traces on many intellectuals’ readings of Freud, including my own. I read Lacan before I read Freud, and therefore my reading of Freud was “Lacanian.” However, we should not confuse the work of Freud and Lacan to the point of believing that Freud was already Lacanian.

A.B.: Whatever the case may be, in my eyes Lacan immediately imposed himself as a major figure of the intellectual scene, even though he had only published a few articles, which were not always easy to get a hold of.

É.R.: That was always the story with Lacan: before 1966 and the gathering together of his Écrits, there was no book available. Everything was dispersed.

A.B.: In 1966, as a matter of fact, I was teaching philosophy at the high school in Reims. Through the intervention of François Regnault, who was also appointed to Reims, I ended up joining the editorial committee of Cahiers pour l’analyse, the Lacanian-Marxist journal started by a group of normaliens a little younger than I. Among them, besides Regnault, were Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, Yves Duroux, Alain Grosrichard…. The two first articles I published in this journal dealt very closely with mathematical logic—one of my great passions at the time, as it is now—and referred to Lacan explicitly, though with a critical tone, a reserved distance. For example, I contested the idea that there is a subject of science: I remained Althusserian on this point. Science referred, for me, to an asubjective process. Keep in mind that we are speaking of 1966, 1967…. Then came the torment after May 1968, an event that turned my life upside down and led me to spend long years in political thought and action.

É.R.: For you, at bottom, the reading of Lacan coincided with a political break, whereas for me it was with the structuralist caesura.

A.B.: I ended up personally meeting Lacan. It was in 1969. I think that for him, everything was urgent, and he wanted therefore to see me with a great deal of urgency. Since, occupied as I was at the time fighting it out in factories and foyers,² I was not reachable during the day, he was never able to speak to me on the telephone. We did however find a moment to have breakfast together. Very much the seducer, he tried to attract me with the same resounding voice you mentioned, Élisabeth: “But why didn’t you come to see me sooner?” and so on. Nevertheless, I did not join the EFP and never became a psychoanalyst or even an analysand. I knew nothing of the couch. Lacan always remained for me a thinker of the first order rather than a psychoanalytic master. Always the primacy of the written! For this reason, he occupied a considerable place in my philosophical work, and this from my very first synthetic work, Theory of the Subject (1982). He has been, and still is, constantly present on my intellectual horizon.

P.M.: How would you characterize his contribution to philosophy in general, and in particular to your thought?

A.B.: Lacan’s theoretical work could be incorporated into my own philosophical development because it laid out a completely singular position on the question of the subject. At the beginning of the 1960s, like other young philosophers I found myself in a particular conjuncture. I was, as I’ve said, a convinced Sartrean. But, with the help of Althusser, the time came for me to break with phenomenology, and Sartre was one of its most illustrious representatives. Why this inevitable break? From its invention by Husserl, phenomenology folded the thought of the subject back onto a philosophy of consciousness. It is rooted in lived experience, immediate and primitive. The subject is confounded with consciousness and the transparent comprehension of what happens to me. It is not by chance that phenomenologists (think of Merleau-Ponty) accord so much importance to perception: it is the most elementary experience of this direct and intentional relationship consciousness has with the world. Moreover—and in this sense French phenomenology is also an inheritor of traditional psychology—the subject is apprehended as an interiority, seen from the point of view of its feelings, its emotions, and so on. The result is a heavy focus on the reflexive ego or self and the sphere of intimacy or inwardness.

In order to free up a thought of revolutionary emancipation supported by science (our “common program” at the time), we had to extract ourselves from this phenomenological model of the subject that was at once reflexive and existential. To take leave of it, we could lean on the human sciences, scientific objectivity, and logico-mathematical formalism. In short, against phenomenology, structuralism represented a lifeline. The disparate thoughts that have been gathered under this label have at least one point in common: they orchestrate a revolt against the traditional conception of the subject. The structuralist constellation finds its completion in “theoretical antihumanism,” to use Althusser’s crucial phrase, or in the “death of Man,” to cite Foucault. In this general movement, variants and inflections are possible. Some declare the subject to be an illusion, a mirror effect of more essential structures that are invisible yet can be thought by science. Others attempt to demonstrate, often in the wake of Heidegger, that the classical metaphysical subject is an old-fashioned idealist concept. It is asserted that what is real in the notion of the “subject” was only a particular form of object. Still others, disciples of Althusser, contend that the subject is an emblematic, and even central, category of the bourgeois era. Ultimately, whatever approach is privileged, all structuralist roads lead to a radical critique of the concept of the subject.

Where does Lacan fit into this context? On the one hand, he takes part in the break with phenomenology, all the more so to the extent that he knew well the thought of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. He inserts himself into the structuralist galaxy not only because he had recourse, much more than many others, to logico-mathematical formalisms, but also because he renounced the reflexive subject as the center of all experience. From his analytic perspective, the subject hinges on an irreflexive and in certain ways transindividual structure: the unconscious, which for Lacan depends entirely on language. The science of the unconscious therefore replaces the philosophy of consciousness.

Given all of this, Lacan—this is the second aspect of his singular position—does not go as far as the “hard” structuralists like Foucault or the Heideggerians such as Derrida, who consider the category of the subject to be the mere avatar of a defunct metaphysics. Instead, Lacan wants to conserve this category in order to renew it from the ground up. This is because, for him, the subject remains at the heart of clinical experience. So Lacan saves the subject in the midst of a full-on structuralist offensive against it. “His” subject is certainly subjugated to the signifying chain; it is divided, unbeknownst to itself, split, exposed to a radical alterity (what Lacan names “the discourse of the Other”). But for him it remains coherent, and even necessary, to propose a theory of the Subject. Consequently, in the 1960s and 1970s, Lacan allowed me to align myself with the theoretical antihumanism of the period while remaining faithful to my Sartrean youth and to the notion of the subject. For this reason, he seemed to me to be a decisive contemporary. A contemporary who knew how to incorporate the most disparate materials in order to build his own construction.

P.M.: Élisabeth Roudinesco, what is your perspective on this Lacanian revolution insofar as it shook up both psychoanalysis and philosophy?

É.R.: First of all, Lacan was situated at the crossroads of an unexpected and often conflictual encounter between the two disciplines. On the one hand, it was he who made philosophers understand that psychoanalysis brought about a philosophical revolution. But on the other hand, he was also the one who led psychoanalysts to turn toward philosophy. This second movement of the pendulum seems to me to be of capital importance: Lacan made use of philosophy, and he had numerous philosophers come to his seminar in order to raise the bar for psychoanalysts who, as far as he was concerned, lacked intellectual credentials.

Through his intervention, psychoanalysts rediscovered philosophy and intellectuals rediscovered psychoanalysis, at a moment when psychoanalysis was stuck between psychology and medicine. And through structuralism, those who worked in the field of literature, like me, for example, were able to rediscover the importance of philosophy thanks to a generation of philosophers who were also stylists and who were interested in literature. I did not find this in my philosophy course in high school. As for me, I only really plunged into Spinoza or Hegel after having read Althusser or Foucault and having followed the teaching of Lacan. I came to philosophy through the openings made by structuralists, then by following the lecture courses of Pierre Macherey: I owe him a great deal. In fact, a gap had already opened up before 1966—a miraculous year for structuralism—between those who made use of philosophy and those who kept their distance from it and preferred to keep psychoanalysis in the field of psychology.

I think Lacan’s singularity is due to his particular itinerary. We should not forget that, at the beginning, he was a psychiatrist. Now, psychiatry has always been more receptive to philosophy than to psychology, and psychology has always wanted to detach itself from philosophy in order to become “scientific,” which it never will be. And like Georges Canguilhem, Lacan never stopped criticizing psychology as a false science, with the hope of leading psychoanalysis toward the “noble” disciplines.

More specifically, at the moment Lacan began to move toward psychoanalysis—around 1931—the most dynamic French psychiatry was phenomenological in orientation. Lacan himself was a phenomenologist during this period, before beginning his initiation into Hegel’s thought through Alexandre Kojève. After the Second World War, he distanced himself from this heritage, preferring structuralism, and he turned toward Saussure through his closeness to Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss and through his reading of their works, contrary to what certain Lacanian psychoanalysts claim today, “revising” history in order to deny this influence and make of Lacan a self-proclaimed Phoenix inspired solely by himself. In this sense, there are many “revisionists” in the psychoanalytic milieu.

Lacan was certainly fascinated by the thought of Heidegger for a time, but he ceased to be after 1957, as can be seen in “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud.” This did not stop him, however, from spending time wanting to be recognized by Heidegger the man. But he had resolutely taken the side of science, of formal objectivity, whereas Heidegger, following a phenomenological and ontological orientation, asserted that “science does not think.”

That Lacan’s roots are in psychiatry is fundamental, and to say this reiterates what Alain said regarding the retention, in his thought, of the philosophical problematic of the subject. Psychiatry is not only concerned with psychic discontent; it deals just as much with madness as a shattering of the subject. Now, this idea of a strangeness and of a breaking up of the personality appeared very early on in Lacan, who, moreover, was inspired by the surrealists and notably by Salvador Dalí. In 1932, he devoted his medical thesis to a woman who was mad—Marguerite Anzieu (rebaptized “the Aimée case”)—before becoming interested in the story of the Papin sisters, two maids who killed their two bosses in Le Mans for no apparent reason. Lacan had a talent for showing that paranoia—especially in the case of feminine paranoia—was a mad logic that simulated normality and had no organic or constitutional cause. It had to do with psychogenesis. This is the perspective from which Lacan became interested in mystic women and their search for an absolute jouissance, beyond the borders of reason.

This was a crucial difference from Freud: where the founder of psychoanalysis treated for the most part neuroses—even if, today, we know that the patients he dealt with suffered very acute pathologies—Lacan plunged into the tormented universe of psychosis, of feminine madness, of paranoia as a system of logical and even formal thought. This alone, if I may say so, signals the philosophical stakes of his project. Let’s not forget that Freud mistrusted philosophy, which he willingly assimilated to a paranoiac discourse, that is, a logic of madness….

A.B.: I completely agree. To put it in a slightly cavalier way, the neuroses are ultimately a matter for clinical psychology. Everyone knows these little stories of failures in love, disturbing obsessions, latent impotencies, these stories that are so terribly identical and boring. I have always admired the fact that psychoanalysts could spend their lives, day in, day out, listening to these symptomatic confessions. It is in fact a form of heroism. Neurosis is so boring! Whereas madness haunts philosophy at its very origins: What is this violent form of the subject’s submersion? How can we conceive of this surging up all of a sudden of a radical alterity? There is no doubt that psychosis is much more interesting for philosophy.

É.R.: I should here confess a certain reticence: Lacan was passionate about paranoia, whereas as far as I am concerned the great “philosophical madness”—a two-faced madness (exaltation and depression)—the one that seems the most fascinating, the most literary, and the most creative remains melancholy. It is for this reason that I studied the figure of Théroigne de Méricourt, this melancholic woman and pioneer of feminism, who brilliantly incarnated the revolutionary exaltation of 1789. It is the collapse of the revolutionary ideal that sent her into madness in 1793. She would finish her life in the asylum at Salpêtrière, observed by Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol. How can we not think of the fate of Louis Althusser? I have always been struck by Lacan’s lack of interest in this form of madness that has provoked so much interest since Homer and Aristotle.

A.B.: Lacan privileges paranoia because it is much more systematic. This is also quite clear in Freud; The Schreber Case is a gripping text, with an implacable logic. You have the impression that this case can be entirely reconstructed in a self-sufficient matrix. Paranoia goes perfectly with structural analysis, and this is why Lacan was so interested in it.

P.M.: You have pointed out a first divergence between Freud and Lacan, concerning the respective accents they place on neurosis and psychosis. Do you find this divergence once again in their conception and handling of the cure? Is the difference between a Freudian analysis and a Lacanian one—and we know that Lacan’s practice of short sessions was scandalous and was in part the motivation for his exclusion from the IPA (International Psychoanalytic Association)—obvious?

É.R.: Yes, the difference was very clear at the beginning of the 1960s, above all in Paris. The orthodox Freudian analysts were proponents of a kind of vulgar materialism. They were interested in memories, emotions, in the ego, in narcissistic disturbances, in normal or abnormal behaviors, and thought that anything exceeding the narrow framework of the clinic was speculative and therefore dangerous: behavioral psychology was not that far off. Now, Lacan made it possible to get away from this, in theory and in practice, by placing the accent on language, by an attention to what is said, and on the necessity for a break to occur at the heart of the process of the analytic cure. He was not narrow-minded; he respected his patients’ vocations, and was not obsessed by an ideal of the cure or normalization.

At this time, orthodox Freudian psychoanalysts called upon the students of Lacan to choose their camp and made psychoanalysis an interpretative religion. Lacan, to the contrary, demonstrated an open mind: if a priest, for example, came to do analysis with him—as happened many times—he advised him to remain a priest if this was his true desire. It is because Lacan understood the essence of spirituality—and the essence of philosophy, moreover—that the Jesuits in particular were attracted to him, even though he was an atheist and completely attached to the rigor of scientific discourse. The biologizing paradigm that came from a Freud reread through the lens of a lifeless positivism deeply disturbed those religious people who wanted to undertake a cure.

A.B.: Positivism is more often than not an inverted religion, such that far from serving the science it claims to be, it is enslaved to ideological objectives that are foreign to the becoming proper to science itself. For this reason, a religious person has many more reasons to fear positivism than science itself. Nothing prevents us from thinking that God loves science, even if he doesn’t love the ideology of positivism….

É.R.: Certainly! They were also put off by the Freudian assimilation of religion to neurosis. In fact, the French Freudian psychoanalysts were for the most part anticlerical positivists who were not very open to intellectual or spiritual engagement and rarely oriented toward philosophical discourse. Whence the conversion—even if I don’t like the connotations of this word very much—of many Jesuits to Lacan’s thought. That said, at the end of his life Lacan favored a dogmatic conception of the ultrashort cure, which became a source of frustration and even fraud. By dint of critiquing the recourse to emotion, the Lacanian fundamentalists, obsessed with the formalism of knots and mathemes, risked losing sight of the suffering of patients. The more novel a theory is—and Lacan’s certainly was, so much so!—the more it risks slipping at one moment or another into dogma. Lacanianism is not an exception to this rule.

P.M.: Alain Badiou, does the cure in the Lacanian sense have a properly philosophical interest? One senses that it potentially brings into play the renewal of the subject you spoke of….

A.B.: The cure is an act that both presupposes and traverses a form. The forms in question are in fact the objective structures of the unconscious. Now, the cure, while referring itself to these structures, breaks them up, fragments them. For Lacan, who was quite moderate on this point, analysis does not have as its final aim a “recovery”; it should lead to a real point where the subject can lift himself back up and live again. The cure inflects what seems to be experienced as a fate and reopens the capacities of the subject. I have always found the definition proposed by Lacan himself to be magnificent: the aim of the cure is to “raise impotence to the impossible.”³ The impossible is the real in the Lacanian sense, namely, what never lets itself be symbolized. The analysis is therefore supposed to unblock a situation that is initially experienced by the analysand as an impotence (I am separated from my desire, caught up in the hardness, the stagnation of existence), so that it leads to a real point where the subject, bogged down in the imaginary, can once again recover some of its powers of symbolization. On the philosophical plane, this apparatus is completely remarkable. The act (what takes place in the cure) remains intelligible from the point of view of the form (the structures of the unconscious) while also traversing these structures. Something happens in analysis (the Subject comes face-to-face with a real point), but in order to theorize this event, it must be reconnected to its formal context. Lacan, especially in his last years, was a philosophical hero for me, since he avoided two pitfalls: on the one hand, he avoided a flat determinism insofar as he posited that a cut or break, unsuspected, could arise in the cure, and on the other hand, he kept himself at a clear distance from spiritual or religious doctrines, in the sense that there is nothing miraculous about this break—it is directly related to the rational forms of the unconscious.

É.R.: Lacan turns his back on both scientism and obscurantism.

A.B.: Exactly. Today, these two pitfalls are more threatening than ever! They form our conjuncture! The secret alliance between these two supposed adversaries—narrow scientism and superstitious obscurantism—is not, moreover, a recent phenomenon. This is why we need Lacan so much. In any case, and as far as I am concerned, I am a fundamentalist Lacanian on this question. To think what a truth is, I need to find the point where the form of what is and what breaks with this form converge. My own work is a search for a formalism adequate to the challenge of thinking the possibility of an effective break in the context of forms. Neither determinism (today’s behaviorism is a remnant of it in the clinic) nor the neoreligious horizon (today a certain phenomenology is inscribed within it), but a radical materialism that gives a place to the unforeseeable real—what I call the event. With this ambition, in my own way I walk in Lacan’s footsteps.

P.M.: Alain Badiou, you have never undertaken the cure yourself, even though it interests you philosophically.

A.B.: No, this experience has remained completely foreign to me, even if it has been practiced a great deal in my midst. My emancipation, to use a big word, came through political activism, amorous discovery, theatrical and novelistic writing, and the taste for mathematical formalisms, with all of these coming together ultimately in philosophy. I have not felt it necessary to repeat these experiences through an analysis. Like Lacan himself, I believe and have always felt that one should undertake an analytic cure only if you are affected by symptoms that introduce too much impotence or suffering into your life. If the suffering is bearable or, so to speak, normal, the only reason to go into analysis is in order to become a psychoanalyst oneself. In my case, engaged in a coherent political logic, activating intricate philosophical symbolizations, for the most part happy in existence, I have felt that I could do perfectly well without the cure.

É.R.: As for me, I hesitated before entering into the process of a psychoanalytic formation. I was not completely sure about my will to become a full-time psychoanalyst. Moreover, I was doing fine, I presented no pathological symptom! But for a daughter of an analyst, the choice was almost obligatory. I ended up going into analysis with Octave Mannoni, then was supervised by Jean Clavreul. It was a very classical Freudian cure, with sessions lasting three-quarters of an hour, with a classical supervision as well. What I ultimately liked about these Lacanians was that they remained very Freudian while integrating Lacan’s innovations into their practice and their clinic, just as my mother did in fact. I would never have gone the way of a psychotization of neurosis as it is practiced by Lacan’s epigones. Many others did the same as I did, and I must say it was a remarkable experience. Today, alas, psychoanalysis has for the most part stopped being an intellectual adventure, a voyage, a quest, an initiation. In the same way, and here I meet up with Alain via other paths, every so-called therapeutic cure was similar to what is called a “training” analysis.

These days, we do an analysis only when we “need” it. But the cure is a passionate traversal of oneself and not a utilitarian service in view of some “effectiveness,” even if the notion of a successful cure does exist. When it is conducted well, by an intelligent clinician, the cure brings about an extra lucidity with regard to other engagements, particularly political ones.

P.M.: Let’s speak of just that, politics. Does Lacan’s thought have, for you, a political dimension? The question is even more difficult to the extent that he himself forbade any form of ideological or partisan recuperation of his teaching.

A.B.: For me, Lacanian psychoanalysis takes place in a significant political context. We rediscover the profound sense of the cure, which aims at, as I have recalled, an opening up of the subject in relation to an original state of powerlessness. Now, this process is capable of taking on a collective dimension. For me, the political field corresponds to the liberation of possibilities of life that a determined situation blocks and makes impossible; oppression is always defined as a sterilization of individual and collective capacities. From this point of view, the Lacanian cure, even though it is totally apolitical in its own specific exercise, proposes for thought a political matrix all the same. I maintain that there is a continuity between the thought of Lacan and a revolutionary type of process, which reopens a collective availability or openness that has been stuck in a repetition or checked by state oppression.

P.M.: It moreover occurred to Lacan to present himself as the “Lenin of psychoanalysis.” …

A.B.: Absolutely, and I happily take up this formula for my own part. Lacan compared himself to Lenin while comparing Freud to Marx. With these more or less metaphorical associations, he wanted to emphasize that Freud was still situated in the medical logic of the cure, and Marx in the posture of a promise. Now, Lenin no longer promises communism: he decides, he acts, he organizes. And Lacan, in turn, no longer seeks the cure as Freud does. He is a ferocious adversary of the adaptive vision of psychoanalysis, which would be content with training the human animal to conform to its social environment, transforming it into an animal subjected to dominant values that would no longer have any reason to endure the psychic sufferings due to some nonconformity, to an excessive originality. The stakes for psychoanalysis are much more radical. It is a vector of emancipation, even if this is concealed beneath an explicitly apolitical finery. With his vision of the cure, Lacan was for us when we were young one of the operators of our general mobilization between 1968 and the 1980s, even if he in no way saw things in these terms. This was already my analysis at the moment of May 1968: I saw in it an event that, like the confrontation with the real in the cure, allowed for the redeployment of a new liberty, in this case a radical left that worked out local emancipations against the inegalitarian capitalist machinery. Lacan was, as we know, clearly less enthusiastic….

É.R.: That’s putting it mildly! For him, May ’68 was an illusory movement that expressed not a will to generalized liberation but, to the contrary, an unconscious desire among the insurgents for still more ferocious servitudes.

A.B.: “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master.”⁴ When he pronounced this famous phrase at Vincennes, the pill was hard to swallow. But after all, Hegel would not have thought very highly of the proletarian revolutionarism of his disciple Marx! When Lacan died, I in fact wrote that he was our Hegel. When a master sees his disciples taking his thought off in a direction that is not his own, it is proof that his thought is living.

É.R.: At bottom, Lacan thought that the true revolution, the only desirable one, was Freudian psychoanalysis! Leftist agitation could only lead, as far as he was concerned, to the restoration of despotism. Beyond May ’68, the question of Lacan’s relation to politics requires recalling some facts. He came from a right-wing Catholic family: the old chauvinist and intolerant France in its most detestable form. He worked to oppose this genealogy, and his natural inclination led him toward the center Left, incarnated at the time by political men such as Pierre-Mendès France and represented in the media by L’Express. This earned him a tenacious hatred from right-wing milieus. But publicly, Lacan remained a sphinx throughout his life. He never took sides the way Sartre did. He only signed one petition his entire life. Willfully keeping his distance from the most burning struggles of his time, he did not take part in the Resistance and it is not even certain that he was, despite his visceral aversion toward racism, a militant anticolonialist. He did, however, support the decolonization process, and in particular, Laurence Bataille, daughter of Sylvia and Georges Bataille, when, with her cousin Diego Masson, she entered the support networks for the FLN.⁵ In May 1960, when she was arrested and then incarcerated at the prison in Roquette, he brought her the transcribed pages of his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and specifically those devoted to Antigone.

Nevertheless, this absence of militant engagement did not prevent him from closely following contemporary politics or from grasping the movement at the heart of French cultural life. For example, he understood that the Catholic Church represented a major political force, and he wanted to meet the pope in 1953. That same year he also sent his Rome discourse to Maurice Thorez, then head of the French Communist Party. He was himself not a communist, far from it, but since I was—I joined the Party in 1971 and left in 1979—he often called upon me to ask about the evolutions of and debates within the Party. The process of de-Stalinization had begun at that time and Lacan followed it with close attention. He saw both the Church and the PCF as potential reservoirs for recruits for his own movement. As an analyst, he refused no one. It happened that he had to attend to and defend quite “colorful” characters, some of them highly dubious or even outlaws. But I think that in acting this way—and I was not the only one who questioned him regarding his extravagant gestures of support—he helped some of his patients and the students from my generation avoid falling into extremism. Lacan was a veritable rampart against terrorism, which was rife at the time in Germany and Italy. He knew how to neutralize such aspirations by trusting psychoanalytic practice alone and in refusing stubbornly, in fact, any political recuperation. He served as a symbolic guardrail by adopting the following posture: come with me, it’s better than the Revolution or extreme activism. Yes, it’s true that a certain extreme Left, and in particular certain Maoists, claimed to follow him. But Lacan, even if he was fascinated by Mao Zedong as a great and significant figure of the age, had little sympathy for Maoism, quite the contrary. When I read here and there that he was a Maoist, I am flabbergasted…. The Lacanian Maoists, in turn, and this is significant, often ended up converting to right-wing liberalism.

P.M.: And yet is this not how you, Alain Badiou, would define yourself?

A.B.: Today, we can only say that Mao was part of a great revolutionary history, just like Robespierre, Saint-Just, Blanqui, Trotsky, Lenin, and many others. This said, it is necessary to explain why the great majority of young Lacanian intellectuals of the 1960s become Maoists in the 1970s. An odd coincidence? Certainly not! It stems in fact from the Lacanian concept of the subject, to which it is completely coherent if not necessary to give, via philosophy, a subversive political dimension. The passage from a Lacan who says, “do not give up on your desire,” to a Mao who says, “you are right to rebel,” was for us perfectly clear.

É.R.: But Lacan was not a revolutionary or authoritarian leader; he was more a constitutional monarch, very identified, we should not forget, with the English political model. The EFP was a place of freedom, not a party or sect. There is no doubt that Lacan exercised a transferential hold over his patients and students. But if they submitted to him, it was their own doing. They freely became disciples, for that was their desire. The representation of a totalitarian Lacan is ridiculous. All the more so in that Lacan, while favoring submission, never respected his epigones, and he at the same time valorized those who resisted his seduction.

Ultimately, I have always had reservations about attempts to give a political signification to Lacan’s radicality. What is radical in Lacan is his dark vision of the relations among men. The only place where the curse of human plurality might be lifted was, for him, the cure. I do not know how a revolutionary politics could be founded on such a basis.

To sum up, it’s clear that Lacan was not a progressive in the classical sense, including the political one. But neither was he a reactionary thinker, as one sometimes would have us believe. Certain psychoanalysts made reference to him in order to oppose the marriage between homosexuals and gay parenting, arguing that these measures would shake the symbolic function of the father. This is a grave misunderstanding. Already in his own time, Lacan was one of the first psychoanalysts to take homosexuals into analysis without wanting to change their orientation and he did so in view of authorizing their becoming psychoanalysts. What’s more, the aforementioned symbolic function of the father can be assumed as much by a woman as by a man, and in a homosexual couple, by one or the other partner. There are so many ways to form a family, and none should be excluded a priori! When Lévi-Strauss was asked about the possibility of homosexual marriage, he responded in substance by saying that there are so many forms of organization of the family in human societies that this should not at all be shocking.

Lacan always refused to envisage the difference between the sexes in terms of a biological determination. He dealt with the question of the family very early on. In a text from 1938, Les Complexes familiaux, he associates the birth of psychoanalysis with the decline of paternal authority. He contended that the fallen figure of the father should be revalorized. Nevertheless, he did not call for the reestablishment of patriarchal omnipotence. On this subject and on many others, Lacan seems to me to be a lucid conservative on the political plane, like Freud himself.

P.M.: What do you think of this, Alain Badiou? Was Lacan a progressive or a conservative?

A.B.: One aspect of his genius is the constitutive ambiguity of his thought. There are in Lacan undeniably conservative strata that exist alongside elements of extreme radicality. On the one hand, the human animal is rooted in a changeless soil, structured by language, assimilated to an immemorial Law whose organizing signifier is the Name-of-the-Father. But on the other hand, this human animal can at times free itself from these burdens and invent the new.

É.R.: The Law cannot be gotten around, but it nevertheless offers itself up to the play of transgression.

A.B.: That’s right. If you only keep the Law and the symbolic prescription of the father, then, in effect, you make Lacan a reactionary, which in reality he is not. In return, if you place the accent on the experience of the subject who manages, despite being prey to the structures of the unconscious, not to give up on his desire, Lacan seems to be a thinker of emancipation—and this is what I use from his teaching. For what is emancipation if not this movement of torsion or twisting, of exception, with respect to the Law? We must understand that it is always in a localized figure, an exception, through a sort of almost invisible fault in the order of things that emancipation can occur. The idea of a brusque Revolution of the social totality has no sense. From this point of view, Lacan was right to be a conservative who did not believe in a general revolution, in a Grand Soir.⁶ But he is just as much someone who critiques absolutely the dogmatic rejection of the practicable liberation [affranchisement] of the subject. We know that he changed the Name-of-the-Father into the form of the maxim “the non-dupes err.” The non-dupes are those who claim to know the negative heart of things and who cynically deny the possibility of emancipation. They err is this way, and are at bottom imposters. Lacan is not the dupe of these non-dupes.

É.R.: If I speak of a lucid conservatism, it is also in order to bring out the critical dimension found everywhere in Lacan’s work. He is a thinker of the dark Enlightenment, the one that ceaselessly unveils the underside of reason and modernity. He mistrusts the ideologues of unlimited progress and happiness for all. He is too conscious of the fact that the Western world can at any moment slide into horror, dereliction, nihilism. At the end of his life, he explicitly announced the rise of our current plagues: racism, the communitarianisms that are a variant of it, frenzied individualism, and above all the stupidity of mass demagogy, the reign of public opinion. This is his Tocqueville side. In short, unlike Freud, the Jewish Viennese of the old Europe, Lacan draws his references from the French eighteenth century, Catholic Baroque culture, German philosophy, the literary modernity of the twentieth century, formal logic, structuralism, and the poetry of Mallarmé.