Jacques Lacan Past and Present a dialogue AlAin BAdiou & ÉlisABeth Roudinesco tRAnslAted By JAson e. smith Jacques Lacan Past and Present Jacques Lacan Past and Present a dialogue AlAin BAdiou & ÉlisABeth Roudinesco tRAnslAted By JAson e. smith Columbia University Press | New York Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Jacques Lacan: Passé présent by Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco © 2012 Editions du Seuil English Translation © 2014 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Badiou, Alain. [Jacques Lacan, passé présent. English] Jacques lacan, past and present : a dialogue / Alain Badiou and Elisabeth Roudinesco ; translated by Jason E. Smith. pages cm Translation of the author’s Jacques Lacan, passé présent. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16510-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-16511-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53535-9 (e-book) 1. Lacan, Jacques, 1901–1981. 2. Lacan, Jacques, 1901–1981—Influence. 3. Psychoanalysis. I. Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 1944– II. Title. BF109.L28B3413 2014 150.1995092—dc23 2013036082 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Jacket Image: Agence Opale Jacket Design: Jordan Wannemacher Contents Foreword: “I am counting on the tourbillon”: On the Late Lacan by Jason E. Smith vii Preface xxi 1. one mAsteR, two encounteRs 1 2. thinking disoRdeR 31 Notes 69 Index 73 Foreword “i Am counting on the touRBillon” On the Late Lacan The short book you hold in your hands brings togeth- er two people who share a long friendship and an equally enduring attachment to the thought and legacy of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. They share in particular the conviction that Lacan was what the French call, in a hardly translatable term, a maître: at once teacher, master, and great thinker, around whose teaching an array of institutions, stu- dents, disciples, enemies, and apostates gather. And yet the two people brought together in this dialogue had very differ- ent relationships to Lacan. Élisabeth Roudinesco is a historian and psychoanalyst and the daughter of an analyst who was quite close to Lacan. Roudinesco is best known for her two books on the history of French psychoanalysis—a massive two-volume history of psychoanalysis in France and the definitive biography of Jacques Lacan1—that will likely remain the reference works on these subjects for decades to come. She frequently in- tervenes, often polemically, in public debates around the status of psychoanalysis and its relation to the family, to the state, and to cognitive science and contemporary forms of behaviorism and psychotherapy. While mounting a dogged defense of psychoanalysis against a legion of enemies and threats, she has also been quick to identify Lacanian ana- lysts themselves—in particular, those devotees of the “late” Lacan and his attachment to mathematical formalization dd rR and the infamous “short session”—as often incapable of oo ww defending and renewing this legacy. She has therefore of- ee rR ten contended, as she does in this dialogue, that the in- oo ff | | heritance of psychoanalysis should be assumed in part by iiii nonanalysts, and that the vitality of psychoanalysis as a ViVi clinical practice and figure of thought requires a renewed engagement with contemporary philosophy. After having been a student of Gilles Deleuze and Michel de Certeau— the latter a key factor in her turn toward the study of history and in particular of the French Revolution—Roudinesco was a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) from 1971 to 1979 (during which time she was close to the Marx- ist philosopher Louis Althusser). Now defining herself as a social-democrat, Roudinesco has argued that Lacan’s teach- ing and thought—Lacan’s political orientation was largely Catholic and conservative, however radical his conception of ethics—remains unsurpassed in its diagnosis of a con- stellation of symptoms signaling a deep, structural crisis at the heart of Western culture, society, and politics. Alain Badiou is a philosopher who has never undertak- en a psychoanalytic cure and a communist militant whose thought has been shaped and nourished by Lacan’s teach- ing since the early 1960s. Though he first encountered Lacan’s work in the early 1960s at the bidding of his teach- er at the École normale supérieure, Louis Althusser, per- haps his most important encounter with Lacan’s thought occurred through his work with the Cahiers pour l’analyse, founded in 1966 by a group of Althus ser’s students and devoted in part to a synthesis of Althusser’s dialectical ma- terialism and Lacan’s theory of science and its relation to d r o the category of the “subject.”2 This project was cut short w e by the unforeseen student and worker revolt of May and r o f June 1968, an event that occasioned a break between this |  group of students and Althusser’s PCF over what the for- X i mer perceived as the latter’s openly counterrevolutionary role in these events. Where Roudinesco drifted toward the PCF during what many consider to be its most troubled period, following the failures of 1968 and its formation of a “common program” and electoral alliance with François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party, those grouped around the Ca- hiers pour l’analyse formed or entered Maoist organizations, almost all becoming actively involved in La Gauche Pro- létarienne, with the exception of Badiou, who went on to form a smaller Maoist group. While many of those who be- came Maoists became disillusioned with their experience after 1973—some assuming various positions of distinction in bourgeois French society, and some forming an anti- Marxist, rightest tendency in French intellectual life that