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To resume again...

Lacan, the Devil
ANNAËLLE
LEBOVITS-QUENEHEN

Life of Lacan
J-A MILLER

Lacan, Music
JUDITH MILLER
DIEGO
MASSON

How Lacan
BENOÎT JACQUOT

Lacan's Smile
FRANÇOIS CHENG

Lacan
PHILIPPE SOLLERS

The Reverse
of a Postscript
JEAN-CLAUDE MILNER

Lacan the Poem
FRANÇOIS REGNAULT

Lacan on the Spot
CATHERINE CLÉMENT

Lacan, Red Lights
ADRIAN DANNATT

The Split Collector
GÉRARD WAJCMAN

Lisa Yuskavage
CL INTERVIEWS JA



          

Lacan on the Spot
[excerpt]








Catherine Clément

translated by Asunción Alvarez


 

 

[...]

When I left Europe for India at the age of forty-something, I left with my toolbox full to the brim of the heralds of structuralist thought, Lacan and Lévi-Strauss on the front line. A scholar, I had been gathering materials for a long time: I had submitted a dissertation, taught, and written about them. I had interviewed so many French thinkers that I was overwhelmed and no doubt a bit bored of so much abstraction. India was ideal to shake things up.

[...]

Lévi-Strauss was applicable at all times, everywhere, particularly in India—even though he hadn't liked (or understood) this country in which he travelled through so quickly in 1950—he knew it very well. I could talk about it with him, but Lacan had been dead for six years. What could I do with my Lacan in India, a country in which—with the single exception of Sudhir Kakar— psychoanalysis arouses so little interest, even among élites? For a moment, I thought that his thought didn't apply to India, where Prajapati, whom he used wonderfully, only interests old teachers of Hinduism and cannot be found in daily life. However, when you try to understand the lifestyle of the impromptu mystics that one finds under a tree in a street corner, the entire seminar Encore comes in handy: you can see in the amorous fervor of an outback guru's follower how the love that he has for him stands in for the carefully avoided sexual relationship—when a slightly crazy young Frenchwoman kidnapped her guru to erotically lay hands on him, he called the police, of course!

[...]





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