Badiou and Roudinesco on Lacan's Legacy

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Lacan, lucid about himself up to the end, after months of eclipse. But this is not a testament. Unlike Freud, Lacan leaves nothing as a legacy. He undoes what he built by knitting his knots and his pieces of string. And this is why Lacan’s heritage is in danger, more so than that of Freud: the psychoanalysts of the first Lacanian circle received noth­ ing as a legacy, they received the dissolution. . . . And what is more, he never stopped advocating “the work of dissolu­ tion,” as if it were a major concept. One has the impression that it is necessary to grasp Lacan’s work in a new way, out­ side the field of psychoanalysis: the only way to make it live. c.g.: To conclude, I would like to know to what extent Lacan

is, for you, a thinker who is useful for understanding our age. a.b.: He remains a decisive master for the following rea­

son, which is of the highest importance: the contemporary world is haunted by uncertainty, disorientation, and the specter of permanent crisis. And Lacan is a great thinker of disorder. More generally, it is even possible to define psy­ choanalysis as an orderly, methodical thought of subjective disorder. On this point, it is in fact parallel to Marxism, which also has an objective to make intelligible a collective existence founded on violent anarchy and the unappeasable and voracious contradictions that make up the whole dis­ order of capitalism. If you think of the current crisis, Lacan remains essential in that he tries to regrasp, right within the disorder, an immanent order, a referential frame that refers to the horizon of the symbolic. If one extrapolates starting

é.r.: In the same vein as what Alain just said, I see Lacan as a

weapon of subversion against the current capitalist system: this capitalism of finance, dehumanized, with no people or subject, prone to slipping out of control. To be inspired

by Lacan against this madness would be to sow disorder in the order. The reading of “Kant with Sade” (1963), a para­ digmatic text that is a turning point in this story, is testi­ mony to it. To associate the categorical imperative with an imperative of jouissance in order to show that it is a matter of two sides of a same problematic: this is what allows one to

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from Lacanian thought, you could say that the crisis of the contemporary world is a crisis of the symbolic. From there, Lacanian categories can be mobilized to understand, once more, an entire series of phenomena: the death throes of inherited hierarchies, the omnipresence of money, the con­ stantly hurried and vain circulation of all things, and so on.

At the same time, the ethical imperative that consists in not giving up on your desire still has a striking currentness.

In a configuration of crisis, in fact, you can feel swept up or caught in the grip of a confused immediacy. If you want to resist, in the strong sense of the term, this experience of being adrift, you have to have the firm will to not let yourself be submerged, to not blindly give yourself over to the wan­ dering—to not, precisely, give up on your desire. Lacan’s contribution today is as a result fundamentally double: on the one hand, it makes possible a limpid structural compre­ hension of the crisis as a symbolic crisis or crisis of the sym­ bolic; on the other hand, he makes possible the affirmation of the irreducibility of the desiring subject as such.

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be intelligently indignant about both sides of contemporary society, scientism and obscurantism.

In the Anglophone world, philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek or Judith Butler lay claim to a Lacan that is quasi “femi­ nist” or anticapitalist. In France, a large number of psy­ choanalysts—not all, thankfully—have to shut Lacan up in wordplay, in repetitive jargon, and they observe the world from the armchair and the clinical cases they hear: they re­ count in a certain sense very “Lacanian” cases and this often makes for bad literature. What’s more, they make Lacan the herald of regressive values. So they erect the “Name­of­the­ Father” into a fixed slogan, the incarnation of a “symbolic law” that serves to protect society against a proliferation of “bad mothers” who are accused of fusing with their children without respecting the “Oedipus complex.” And they lam­ bast modern society, all the while claiming to remain politi­ cally “neutral.” Neither right, left, or center.

They condemn, therefore, not scientism, but science— medically assisted conceptions, for example, or homosexu­ al couples, single mothers, the mothers of autistic children who are judged to be too “fusional,” and so on. Why not imagine in the near future psychoanalysts criticizing di­ vorce or adultery, in the name of the “good of the children” and a stable relationship among siblings? It’s strange, all the same, this attempt to transform Lacan—a baroque and libertine thinker, a lucid conservative—into a sort of bishop whose virtue is a little mischievous, furnished with a phal­ lic club. This is not my Lacan. I believe that a revolution is necessary in France in order to change this view of Lacan.

In a word: no to the reactionary Lacan, yes to the subversive Lacan! c.g.: Thank you for these analyses and positions. Would any­

from the audience: I would like to know what, according to you, Lacan’s contribution to the question of existence is.

In what way can he help us today to understand our con­ crete existence, and more generally the sense of life? No doubt, Lacan’s concepts are subversive. But to take their full measure, it is necessary to enter into his system and its language, which are so closed in on themselves. It could be that due to this closure, his teaching offers nothing from the point of view of existence. a.b.: What seems to me to be problematic about your ques­ tion is knowing what exactly you mean by existence. Dur­ ing this discussion, we have addressed the tension in Lacan between the symbolic order on the one hand, and the prin­ ciple of subjective irreducibility on the other. When one in­ vokes such a tension such as we have spoken of it, are we not speaking of existence itself ? Moreover, I do not agree with you at all: the language of Lacan is absolutely not closed in on itself. Quite to the contrary, it is full of holes, fraught with points and lines of flight. His language is like a laby­ rinth that includes its own exit doors, its own possibility of escape. As for me, I have never read Lacan with the feeling

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one in the audience like to intervene, make comments, or pose questions to Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco?