"I Am Counting on the Tourbillon": On the Late Lacan

Foreword “i Am counting on the touRBillon” On the Late Lacan

T

he short book you hold in your hands brings together 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, students, disciples, enemies, and apostates gather. And yet the two people brought together in this dialogue had very different 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

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Jacques Lacan1—that will likely remain the reference works on these subjects for decades to come. She frequently intervenes, 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 analysts themselves—in particular, those devotees of the “late” Lacan and his attachment to mathematical formalization and the infamous “short session”—as often incapable of defending and renewing this legacy. She has therefore often contended, as she does in this dialogue, that the inheritance of psychoanalysis should be assumed in part by nonanalysts, and that the vitality of psychoanalysis as a 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 Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser). Now defining herself as a social-democrat, Roudinesco has argued that Lacan’s teaching and thought—Lacan’s political orientation was largely Catholic and conservative, however radical his conception of ethics—remains unsurpassed in its diagnosis of a constellation of symptoms signaling a deep, structural crisis at the heart of Western culture, society, and politics.

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Alain Badiou is a philosopher who has never undertaken a psychoanalytic cure and a communist militant whose thought has been shaped and nourished by Lacan’s teaching since the early 1960s. Though he first encountered Lacan’s work in the early 1960s at the bidding of his teacher at the École normale supérieure, Louis Althusser, perhaps 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 Althusser’s students and devoted in part to a synthesis of Althusser’s dialectical materialism and Lacan’s theory of science and its relation to the category of the “subject.”2 This project was cut short by the unforeseen student and worker revolt of May and June 1968, an event that occasioned a break between this group of students and Althusser’s PCF over what the former 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 Cahiers pour l’analyse formed or entered Maoist organizations, almost all becoming actively involved in La Gauche Prolétarienne, with the exception of Badiou, who went on to form a smaller Maoist group. While many of those who became Maoists became disillusioned with their experience after 1973—some assuming various positions of distinction in bourgeois French society, and some forming an antiMarxist, rightest tendency in French intellectual life that

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was media-friendly and influential—Badiou persevered in his commitment to what he deemed the Maoist renewal of communist politics throughout the 1970s. Immersed though he was in political activity and militant theory, his philosophical work, especially during the late 1970s, was nevertheless profoundly marked by the teaching of the same late Lacan, in particular, his use of mathematical formalization and the turn this took in his very late years, namely, his experiments with topology and Borromean knots (Roudinesco contends that this work deviates from and in certain ways damages his legacy). Badiou’s first major philosophical work, Theory of the Subject, was published in 1982 and represents a systematic articulation of the political thought of Mao and the Lacanian theory of the subject, a fusing together of the call to revolt launched by Mao during the Cultural Revolution, “you have reason to rebel,” and the ethical maxim first formulated in Lacan’s seventh seminar, “never give way on your desire.”

Jacques Lacan, Past and Present is therefore the portrait of a maître, drawn with two hands and from two perspectives.

Roudinesco asserts, moreover, that the concept, theme, or relation of mastery is also a fundamental aspect and condition of both Lacan’s teaching and clinical experience more generally. In the domain of psychoanalytic practice, she emphasizes, “the problematic of identification with and transference onto the person of the master is essential.” It is for this reason that one of the most striking aspects of the dialogue between Roudinesco and Badiou in the pages that follow is their portrait of the so-called late Lacan and

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what each characterizes as the dissolution or unraveling of this mastery.

This phase of Lacan’s teaching is widely regarded to have begun in the seminars following the Encore seminar of 1972–73,3 and to have ended only with the disbanding of Lacan’s school, the École freudien de Paris (EFP), in 1980 and Lacan’s subsequent death a year later. This period is marked by profound transformations of his theoretical framework, emphasizing and to some extent prioritizing the register of the Real over the Symbolic and the Imaginary, and reweaving the relation between these three registers through recourse to the mathematical field of topology and the theory of knots. This turn to topology follows hard on the heels of Lacan’s introduction of the concept of the “matheme” in Seminar XX and another text from the same period, “L’Étourdit.”4 In many ways, the doctrine of the matheme, with its claim that recourse to mathematical formalization would ensure the integral transmission of knowledge produced in the field of psychoanalysis, represents a triumphant moment in the development of Lacan’s thought: it would secure the infinite transmissibility of his legacy beyond his death and the conclusion of his teaching.

In this sense, the consolidation of Lacan’s thought around the matheme can be said to project a kind of hypermastery, a guarantee of the incorruptibility of his thought beyond the living presence of the master himself in the seminar and in the transferential dynamics of the clinic. Lacan’s late turn toward topology signals, Badiou and Roudinesco suggest, a renunciation of the mastery—or hypermastery—consoli-

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dated in the doctrine of the matheme, or, to use the language that Lacan himself will use on the occasion of unilaterally disbanding his own school on the eve of his death, its “dissolution.”

In drawing the portrait of Lacan and in particular of the late Lacan, Roudinesco and Badiou find the image of the dying Oedipus from Oedipus at Colonus unavoidable. If Lacan’s rightly celebrated Seminar VII from 1959–60 elaborates a properly psychoanalytic ethics through the intransigent figure of Antigone and her refusal to give way on her desire, Badiou and Roudinesco emphasize instead a certain ethical and tragic dimension to Lacan’s late style. The turn to topology is, it is suggested, the mark of a will to pursue the extremes of formalization to the point of a global undoing, of his thought, his school, and even his person. “Even physically,” Roudinesco remarks, “in his walk and his gestures,” he recalled the hobbled Oedipus seeking out his unmarked grave in a foreign land, doomed to leave no secure legacy behind. The final scene of his life is one, Badiou observes, in which “a man undoes by himself the knot of his own existence”; Lacan, trembling, at times incapable of speaking, “undo[es] his own thought in public,” Roudinesco concurs, in a gesture that is “deeply subversive, like a final blow leveled at his supposed theoretical omnipotence.” It is under the sign of dissolution that Roudinesco knots together all of these later unravelings: Lacan was “engaged in a gigantic process of dissolution: dissolution of physical faculties, his capacity for thought, the dissolution as well of the School that he founded and oversaw.”

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To speak of the late phase of Lacan’s teaching as a kind of dissolution of his mastery would require that we take into account the different roles the figure and concept of the master have played in his thought. As powerful as this portrait is, particularly in the way that it depicts a courageous Lacan pursuing the consequences of his own thought to the point of its disintegration, it is important to recall that Lacan, in addition to being a maître in the sense developed

by Roudinesco and Badiou, placed the notion of mastery at the center of his thought. In his seminar on ethics, for example, the passage from the master of Aristotelian ethics to Hegel’s modern dialectic of master and slave is decisive.

A decade later, in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969–70), the master will be identified with one of four discourses— social ties—that are articulated together through discreet recombinations of four elements, and will be explicitly differentiated from “analytic” discourse properly speaking.5 I want, nevertheless, to insist on the figure of dissolution invoked by Roudinesco in her account of Lacan’s subversive gesture of dispersing his mastery in order to interrogate how this final gesture of Lacan’s is intimately connected to his ultimate conception—elliptical, as always—of philosophy. More specifically, I want to interrogate the unexpected appearance, in a short text that makes up part of what we can call Lacan’s final testament, of an unexpected name, that of a philosopher who in a certain sense renounced philosophy: Marx.

In 1980, Lacan’s frailty meant that he was not able to give his final seminar. It was published in bits in the recently es-

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tablished journal Ornicar?, founded by his son-in-law and the future executor of his literary estate, Jacques-Alain Miller.

The seminar, eventually given the name Dissolution, consists of a series of pronouncements and declarations regarding the disbanding of the École freudien de Paris, including a “Letter of Dissolution” dated January 5, 1980. These pronouncements, enigmatic as they often are (“I don’t boast of making sense. Not the contrary either.”),6 are nevertheless framed by a very concrete question, to wit, about the need to reorganize the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the wake of the dissolution of his school and its organizational procedures, which Lacan felt had ultimately been unsuccessful (in particular, the institution of the “pass”).

Lacan states the issue like this: what is needed is a way of transmitting the knowledge produced in the space of psychoanalysis that will avoid or prevent any effet de colle, a typically punning formula that rhymes école with colle, “glue,” and the school effect with a coagulation, a stickiness, with fixation (effects Lacan long identified with the register or axis of the imaginary). Lacan’s antidote is to dissolve his school in favor of cartels or working groups that would consist of four analysts and one supplementary member to lead and oversee the group’s work. These groups would be provisional, constantly undergoing structural mutations, the respective positions of the members rotating in a churning, swirling motion. Lacan insists that this structure and this motion would aid the transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge by ensuring that no hierarchies—which Lacan explicitly identifies here with the Church and its clergy— would take hold or stick. “I have put no one in charge of

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the Freudian Cause,” Lacan remarks. The reorganization he proposes is instead one of constant movement and permutation, assuming not a top-down bureaucratic shape but the movement of a maelstrom or vortex, a whirling motion, turbulence: “I’m counting on the tourbillon.”

Many of the texts included in the “Dissolution” sequence are concerned with the setting off of this tourbillon, which would stir up any sediments of “sense” or meaning (sens)— a privileged target of Lacan’s, a term he associates at once with religion, philosophy, and hierarchical organization such as the Church or the school—produced in the process of transmitting knowledge. At stake in these interventions is the formation of a bulwark against the hardening of the Lacanian legacy into a stratified bureaucratic structure tasked with the mission of managing that inheritance.

In the midst of one of these refinements of the cartel structure, Lacan feels compelled to make a declaration that seems completely unrelated to these pragmatic, even technical, concerns: “I rebel, if I may say so, against philosophy.”

This remark is, however, set up by the opening gambit of Lacan’s intervention, which begins with Lacan noting that he recently came upon the Monsieur A. of the text’s title, whom he simply identifies as a philosopher. The initial “A.” was most likely easily deciphered by those in Lacan’s circle as not just any philosopher, but the best known and most important Marxist philosopher in France: Louis Althusser.

The same Monsieur A. who invited Lacan, in 1964, to teach at another école, the École normale supérieure. This offer introduced Lacan to a group of young philosophers who would in turn have a profound impact on his own teach-

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ing and legacy. This same Monsieur A. had just a few years earlier written a short essay entitled “Is It Simple to Be a Marxist in Philosophy?”; shortly after the encounter Lacan invokes, Althusser’s life will take a tragic turn, and he will spend the rest of his life confined to an institution, where he will work sketch out his own “late” style, his philosophy of aleatory materialism.7 The sudden encounter with Monsieur A., the Marxist philosopher, immediately triggers in Lacan the memory of a text written when he was only nineteen, Tristan Tzara’s “Monsieur Aa, Antiphilosopher.” If Monsieur A. is a philosopher, and a Marxist philosopher at that, “Monsieur Aa is an antiphilosopher. As am I.” The identification of Monsieur A. as a Marxist philosopher helps clarify what follows in “Monsieur A.” The text appears to comprise a series of unarticulated propositions in which considerations on institutions and hierarchy, religion and psychoanalysis, Marx and the symptom pile up.

Closer examination reveals the tissue connecting them.

Lacan predicts, as he had done throughout the 1970s, that the near future will witness a religious “boom,” a warning that appears directed at those who would want to turn psychoanalysis into either a religion or, implicitly, a philosophy. What philosophy and religion share, Lacan suggests, is a commitment to interpretation. Where psychoanalysis operates only with “the signifier as such,” in its materiality, interpretation moves in the element of “sense.” It is on the basis of this implicit identification of philosophy and religion—in which the real movement of the signifier as such gets stuck in the glue of sense—that, in a second move, Lacan

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characterizes, in an unexpected reference, the ambiguity of Marx’s thought. On the one hand, Lacan declares, “I have paid homage to Marx as the inventor of the symptom”; on the other hand, “Marx is . . . the restorer of order, simply because he breathed back into the proletariat the dit-mension of sense.”8 The first of Lacan’s propositions here, that philosophy is a form of theology insofar as it is founded on an act of interpretation that exhumes a latent, buried meaning, is in fact—and Lacan is surely aware of and playing on this—a famously Marxist proposition. Marx’s concluding thesis on Feuerbach condemns philosophers, after all, for interpreting the world rather than transforming it. Lacan’s second assertion, stressing the ambiguity of Marx’s thought, is more difficult to decode. In his seminar RSI from 1974–75, Lacan observed that “the notion of the symptom was introduced, well before Freud, by Marx, insofar as he made of it the sign of something wrong in the Real.” From this perspective, Lacan argues that Marx “invents” the symptom insofar as he identifies the proletariat with the senseless signifier as such: the proletariat is nothing more than a real point of impossibility of the capitalist order, registered only as a punctual breakdown of that order. And yet Marx, according to Lacan, is driven to interpret this symptomatic emergence of the proletariat not as a sheer point of derangement of the logic of capitalist valorization, but as the hidden meaning or sense of that order itself. To contend that Marx puffed the proletariat back up with sense is to contend that Marx defined the proletariat not simply as a symptomatic

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perturbation of the bourgeois world but as the secret bearer of the sense of history itself, the guarantor of its imaginary consistency. Marx, antiphilosopher: the proletariat as a real point of disorder. Marx, philosopher: the proletariat as the latent sense of this order.

In his introduction to the German edition of Écrits, published in 1973, Lacan writes of the relation between “metaphysics”—another name, here, for philosophy—and politics. The philosopher referred to in this case is not Althusser but “my ‘friend’ ” Martin Heidegger. In an allusion no doubt to Heidegger’s putting his thought, in the 1930s, in the service of the Nazi “movement” (he would speak, as late as 1966, of the “inner greatness of the Nazi movement”), Lacan declares that “metaphysics has only ever been and can only continue insofar as it busies itself with plugging the hole of the political.”9 Philosophy, for the antiphilosopher Lacan declares himself to be, is a discourse whose task is to stop up the hole a truth makes in a given order with sense. These formulations echo in advance Lacan’s later account of the ambiguity of Marx’s own thought. Transposing Lacan’s terms, Marx the materialist antiphilosopher identifies the proletariat—the political—with the symptom, that is, a pure and simple hole in the capitalist order. Marx the philosopher tries to fill this hole by assigning the proletariat a historical mission, to impose on this world a direction, orientation, and sense (sens).

One of the fundamental questions posed and debated in Jacques Lacan, Past and Present is whether Lacan’s thought offers us the resources to think the proletariat and politics not only as hole and hysterical symptom, but as “subject.”

Such a subject would be defined as a historical force that not only has the shape of a hole, but one that, forming along that hole’s edges, takes on the turbulent consistency of a tourbillon.10

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Jason E. Smith