Though the result of a long history whose premises date back almost forty years, this book is nevertheless the outcome of a specific conjuncture: the celebration, in September 2011, of the thirtieth anniversary of Lacan’s death. We have known each other a long time and though we have not always shared the same political orientations, we have always kept up a long-standing, fruitful dialogue, founded on the acknowledgment of our differences and even more so on a friendship that has never wavered. We share a taste for the Greek tragedy so dear to Freud as well, for the Revolution and its history, for poetry as an act of resistance of language, for the cinema, and for political commitment.
In April 2006, a year and a half after the death of our mutual friend Jacques Derrida, we came together along with Yves Duroux at the École normale supérieure for a debate on “our” philosophers, among them Althusser, Foucault, Sartre, Canguilhem, and Deleuze. Then in March 2010 in Rennes, at a forum organized by the newspaper
Libération and moderated by Éric Aeschimann, we faced off again, this time evoking what were once called “enchanted tomorrows”:
1 “The law of happiness,” we said in recalling Saint-Just, “cannot be found in the fact that we are all called to appear before the market of available objects.” And then: “Today, hygienism and norms are the catastrophe: the contrary of happiness.”
2 We dislike religious fanaticism and scientism, mad money (
argent fou3), and the rampant evaluation and assessment in our society that is a symptom of the abandonment of the ideals of reason. In short, we share the conviction that political commitment must be accompanied by work, rigor, and erudition.
It was therefore logical that one day a dialogue would bring us together, and in this case it was about Lacan: thirty years after. We have always maintained that Lacan, the renewer of Freudian thought, was a master in the Socratic sense of the term, one able to offer a contemporary politics of the subject, of desire, and of the unconscious.
4 And we have the conviction that the double approach proposed here, both historical and philosophical (however brief it may be) should allow the reader to revisit the crucial question concerning the relations between political and subjective revolution. We have also transformed this conviction into a dialogue in two voices, two times, and two moments:
Jacques Lacan, Past and Present.
The first part, “One Master, Two Encounters,” develops a series of personal reflections on the relation each of us had with Lacan throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The second part, “Thinking Disorder,” is a critique, developed through the evocation of the most pertinent aspects of Lacan’s advances, of all the contemporary sectarianisms—the ideal of community, obscurantism, the passion for ignorance—that have contributed to a debasement of thought both in the field of psychoanalysis and in the field of politics.
We would like to believe, here and now, that beyond the deadly anxiety through which our society continually speaks of its own crisis, a representation of the future makes a new hope possible. After all, Freud elaborated a certain tragic conception of our inner life that was very different from the each-his-own that characterizes our own age. Why not envisage this invention becoming once again, along with revolution, a new idea in the world?