Here we are, we know since this morning that the three knocks of the « Lacanian ‘Back to Work’ (Rentrée) » have now struck. Let the party begin !
First, there has been Lacan Quotidien, with the return of the one who had been repressed from cultural reviews and broadcasts of the so called ‘Rentrée’. The one whose work was robbed and name erased, took the floor again, and how!
Then came Monday evening and Gérard Miller‘s TV film Rendez vous avec Lacan, portraying for a very large audience the amazing guy Lacan was, who quietly endured the slanderous stereotypes about his person and his practice.
Tuesday, the evening was less quiet, when, in front of the 400 people gathered in Montparnasse, and next to a famous writer representing littérature-lituraterre, namely Sollers, who, in unforgettable words spoke of his affection for Lacan ‘s person and speech, Jacques-Alain Miller mentioned his past correspondence with the management of the Le Seuil publishing house, the bad manners he repeatedly had to endure, and eventually his decision, taken that very morning, to break with this publishing house where Lacan published his Ecrits in 1966… He spoke about the last afternoon’s developments, his meeting with Hervé de la Martinière, and his choice of this group, to invent and develop a new Lacanian editorial policy….
Finally, yesterday, the magazine Le Point: Judith Miller gets out of her chair and “ declares war” on Elisabeth Roudinesco, due to the intolerable ending in her pamphlet on Lacan, where she accuses Judith to have betrayed her father’s last wishes. “The historian” – let’s laugh – is soon going to be made history, just like the sprinkler is sometimes sprinkled.
We are at a crossroads of psychoanalysis’ history in France
No end to history for the Lacanians. New separations, declarations, clarifications and developments are in sight, prior to meeting up again in superior unity. Extinction through a broad consensus such as some people might have dreamt of for the evening organised on Friday night at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, is out of the question. I will read the Seminar’s text on Hamlet that Catherine Clement allotted to me there, but it will happen in a context where a spade will be called a spade, and not all cats are grey in the dark.
The history of Lacanian psychoanalysis in France is not the history of (incrées) generations which would just follow one another, like well behaved cohorts. It is the history of an irreducible gap, Lacan’s lacuna, preventing history to go in circles, making heard that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Macbeth is a good path for Lacan’s Joycean feeling about history, as « nightmare one doesn’t wake up from », a parody of eternity.
This reopening of the gap in history is a fine way of marking Lacan’s anniversary. This death occurred the year following the dissolution by him of his school, the Ecole Freudienne de Paris ( EFP). This very act marked his stubborn refusal to let the institution continue as a lie, after the misunderstanding, which brought it to its final deadlock. It is the opposite of « I am dying, and the Fatherland does not ». It is not, as some people reproached him, an « After me the Deluge ». He wanted it to be replaced by a School whose statutes had been thought out according to his indications and the lessons learnt from the dissolution.
The context of Lacan’s death is also one of the foundation of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne (ECF) that he adopted before passing away.
Before arriving at the starting level of the ECF, it had taken multiple scansions. At the beginning, it was easy, there were those who were for or against Lacan’s act of dissolution. Among those against, one could find Madame Aubry [1], along with Françoise Dolto. Then, very quickly, we are engulfed by the fog of war, an uninterrupted succession of letters, where it was difficult, among the colourful positions and idiosyncrasies of everyone, to find again the nice simplicity of the beginning. One shouldn’t lose the thread, between those whose displayed spirit of compromise poorly hid their deep opposition to the process, and those who from the start posed as leaders of the pro dissolution movement, only to follow up with a brutal betrayal, in a jouissance of unique obscenity.
Lacan, for his part, knew perfectly where he was going, joining the group supporting the dissolution, gathered at his home that evening of December 1980, just after the betrayal of M*. After listening to us, he concluded: « All that is just beautiful muck ». All this muck has been the breeding ground of the transformation of those on the list who had declared themselves in favour of him, the « Thousand », thus named because of their number and in memory of Garibaldi, in a school of 300 members, at the end of a process that had gone on in a strange atmosphere. The most beautiful flowers grow on manure. It was a time that those under 30 can’t know, when a long-time friend could, from one day to the next, without a single word, turn his back on you, and appear on a list of people insulting you with passion. Or, in contrast, you could receive calls asking you, in smooth spoken words, if you were fine. The tremendous pressure that reigned made one even fear suicides, etc.…
Whatever it was, the adoption of the ECF by Lacan, at the conclusion of his last Seminar and after the journey to Caracas in 1980, was heard as a call for the future. It was heard « beyond the dissolution of the School he had founded – heard beyond his death, which occurred the 9th of September 1981 – heard a long way from Paris, where he lived and worked ». Those were the words expressed, on the 1st of February 1992, in the text of the Paris Pact, written just as the Ecole de la Cause freudienne, the Escuela del Campo freudiano of Caracas, The European School of Psychoanalysis of the Freudian Field, and the Escuela de la Orientacion lacaniana del campo freudiano, decided to converge in the World Association of Psychoanalysis, just founded by Jacques-Alain Miller. Since then, the Schools have changed, others have been created, the ECF has been declared public utility by decree of May 5, 2006, and the WAP was granted the status of « special consultant » from the NGO branch of the United Nations, on July 31st, 2011.
*
In order to specify the common orientation preserved through the different Schools, the World Association of Psychoanalysis in July 2000 adopted the Declaration of the School One.
It underlines that the School born of the dissolution is not a gathering of professionals sharing a common knowledge. It is composed of members who agree on recognising an irreducible non-knowledge, the unconscious itself. There they find the incentive to « pursue the work of elaboration, oriented by the desire of an invention of knowledge and of its complete transmission », what Lacan will later on call the matheme. On this foundation of an abyss, covering it with his own name, he established his School and called for « the reconquest of the Freudian Field ».
This reconquest takes on a new meaning in the context of this current « Lacanian Rentree ».
Something of the ‘Life of Lacan’ has to be reconquered from the stereotypes, disinformation, open defamation and pacifying university-isation, under the guise of maintaining a balance between applauders and critics. We will soon know better which current of the French ideology, and why, insisted so much on Lacan having been a Maurassian Catholic, and not a Sollersian. Or why he has been pictured as an absolute monarch.
It is from the event of a rupture that we are living in at present, that it will be possible to read the structure of the lucubrations which were the material of what until now passed as a biography of Lacan, and which sometimes succeeded to seduce even distinguished minds.
We are at the bivium of two logics, two sensibilities, two ethical ways.
Everyone will be able to choose.
Paris, this 9th of September 2011
