Jacques Lacan

Between Psychoanalysis and Politics

Samo Tomšič, Andreja Zevnik, Andreja Zevnik, Samo Tomšič

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415724333
• eBook ISBN: 9781317933250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A charismatic and controversial figure, Lacan is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century and his work has revolutionized a range of fields. The volume aims to introduce Lacan's vast opus to the field of international politics in a coherent and approachable manner.

The volume is split into three distinct sections:

• Psychoanalysis and Politics: this section will frame the discussion by providing general background of Lacan's engagement with politics and the political
• Lacan and the Political: each chapter will focus on different key ideas and concepts in Lacan's thought including ethics, justice, discourse, object a, symptom, jouissance
• Political Encounters: seeks to represent different ways of engaging with Lacanian thought and ways of adopting it to explain and comment on global political phenomena

Bringing together internationally recognised scholars in the field, this volume will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars in areas including critical theory, international relations, political theory and political philosophy.

Part I

Political significance of psychoanalysis

1

Lacan’s ‘Année Érotique’ (1968/1969)¹

Jean-Michel Rabaté

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Soixant’neuf, année érotique

Soixant’neuf, année érotique…

Serge Gainsbourg and
Jane Birkin

In May 1973, as I was in charge of the ‘ciné-club’ of the École Normale Supérieure where I was a student, I decided to collect and screen documentary films about the May ’68 ‘events’. It was just five years after the ‘events’ (as we still called them) had happened. We showed these amateur and professional documents in May 1973 to an avid crowd, still being in the same Parisian premises where so much had taken place, and to our surprise we felt as if we were watching images from another century. In five years, fashion had drastically changed, flower power had crossed the Channel, men had long hair, open shirts with garish colours, many sported ear-rings, finger rings, or weird leather hats and boots. We were astonished to see the white shirts and neat ties worn by Latin Quarter student leaders like Geismar or Sauvageot; only Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s open collar was an exception, but he came from Germany … Our ’68 activists had the looks of tired union workers after signing a resolution they had discussed all night, their demeanour evoked more William Burroughs’ paranoid executive style than the funky orientalism of the Beatles whom we had started aping … 69 année érotique indeed. Had it boiled down to this only – a revolution in fashion, accompanied by the belated discovery of a new libidinal body?

Historians like Tony Judt repeat Raymond Aron’s diagnosis that May ’68 was a French psychodrama acted by the children of the bourgeoisie who were foundering in ideological confusion and delusions. The root would have been the decision by students of Nanterre to allow females into male dorms – then a quite unthinkable transgression in the paternalist order of de Gaulle’s hierarchical French society. While noting that the students’ unrest in the 1960s had a strong sexual component, I would not want to reduce its impact to a sudden liberation of a young and privileged elite, a way for France and other European countries to catch up with international fashion marked by a Californian ethos of ‘Make love not war’ that was conquering the world of the baby-boom teenagers. This would mean in fact denying any political importance to the movement. Focusing on Lacan’s layered responses to May ’68, I will try to show that psychoanalytic discourse is best equipped to do justice to the libidinal (erotic) component involved even when political stakes are implied – to the point that the concept ‘politics’ has to be revised.

The French debate about the nefarious or positive influence of the heritage of May ’68 has raged. In a talk-show aired by a French channel on 2 March 2008, Alain Finkielkraut dismissed May ’68 because, allegedly, the movement triggered only disrespect for a traditional culture mistakenly identified with authority. Cohn-Bendit was more nuanced, arguing that right-wing President Sarkozy corresponded to the type of a ‘soixante-huitard’ who had succeeded because he applied to the letter the famous ’68 slogan: ‘Enjoy without fetters’ (didn’t he vacation on millionaires’ yachts and marry a beautiful model and pop singer, Carla Bruni?). To sound a different note, I will follow the chronology of Lacan’s responses to the students’ unrest before generalizing from the models he elaborated.

The first perception of disruption appeared in Seminar XV. On 27 March 1968, Lacan noted that many ‘seniors’ and faithful auditors had not showed up. He blamed the diminished attendance on vacations, exams, and ‘thousand other factors’. In fact, in the Latin Quarter Lacan knew unrest was brewing, people were plotting, chatting, preparing tracts and demonstrations. Lacan expressed both annoyance and relief because the small number allowed him to engage in conversations. So far, his seminar had been devoted to a definition of the psychoanalytic act and Lacan was moving toward a better formulation of the logic of sexuation. His displeasure at the disappearance of the ‘old guard’ of licensed analysts was compensated by a reassurance from the younger generation. He was relying on Normaliens like Nassif (named several times in that session) and Jacques-Alain Miller to help him formalize his logics of sexuality. March 1968 had seen the publication of the first issue of Scilicet, the notorious review in which Lacan alone was to sign his articles, the other contributors remaining anonymous. In the second half of this same seminar, Lacan surveys the ground covered that year.

He started from a clinical vignette: one of his male patients planned a romantic weekend in a chalet with a new girlfriend he was in love with, then found himself unable to have sex. A common occurrence, no doubt, which triggered disquisitions about the mother/whore paradigm. Lacan wondered why any ‘naturalism’ was expected in that situation: was it so ‘natural’ that the couple make love without any impediment? He went further:

Why? Not at all to tell you things that are afterwards going to do the rounds of Paris, namely that what Lacan is teaching means that man and woman have nothing to do together. I am not teaching it; it is true. Textually, they have nothing to do together. It is annoying that I cannot teach this without giving rise to scandal. So then I do not teach it, I withdraw it.

(Lacan 1967: 180)

Lacan describes a paradox that would be similar to the liar’s paradox, yet is only a paradox if one takes for granted a naturalist frame of reference. Naturalism would be a norm as doxa, implying that men and woman ‘go together’, thus have sex without obstacle. What if the man who thinks he is in love with the girlfriend is in fact in love with his mother? The unconscious thought can trigger the effect of a castration. Meanwhile the woman has to struggle with the fact that is for him the object a, not herself. If an analyst interprets too fast, he risks reaching an untimely ending: the intervention will appear as a piece of shit to be promptly dumped.

Contrarily to what Dylan Evans (1996) writes in Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, the first time that Lacan offered his formula of ‘There is no sexual rapport’ did not date to 1970 (1996: 181) but was stated in the 1967 seminar on the ‘Logic of fantasy’. Lacan had said that there was a lack in the junction of sexual rapport with its subjective realization on 22 February 1967, adding then that there is no ‘complementarity’ between the male and the female side in sexuality (Lacan 1967). On 12 April 1967, he asserted explicitly that there was ‘no sexual act’: ‘The great secret of psychoanalysis is that there is no sexual act’. He added: ‘It is precisely because there is sexuality that there is no sexual act’ (Lacan 1967: 12 April). Here lay the core of Lacan’s new teaching, which might pass for revolutionary, even though the bad news would not help the student’s rebellion.

When in 1968 Lacan mentioned the rumour going around Paris, he quoted the previous year’s seminar (‘I have formulated that “there is no sexual act” I believe that the news circulates in all the city, well, finally I didn’t announce it as an absolute truth’ (Lacan 1967: 19 April)); then Lacan offered a new ‘truth’ with Marxist-Leninist overtones; on 19 April 1967, he quotes Lenin’s tag that ‘Marx’s theory will triumph because it is true’. Those terms define jouisssance in the social field as caught up in surplus in value. Such was the theoretical framework of the seminar from 1967–68, which deploys these striking formulations about sexuality.

The seminar of 8 May could not take place because of a general strike by the teachers’ union, but Lacan chatted with those who were present. On the 9th, Lacan signed a manifesto supporting the protesting students, incited by his daughter and son-in-law, both involved in Maoist activities. Lacan then talked with students in psychiatry on strike; he was not impressed by their claim that they needed more dialogue with professors, as he questioned the very notion of dialogue. On 14 May, Lacan arranged a meeting with Cohn-Bendit and other leaders of the students’ movement, praising on the next day Cohn-Bendit’s witty retorts. Lacan did not hold his seminar but came prepared with notes. He began by insisting that he was speaking for psychoanalysts, then mentioned signing an open letter in reference to his own signature. Lacan praised the courage of those who stood up to the police:

… to be worthy of the events, I would say that even though psychoanalysts bear witness to their sympathy for those caught up in pretty hard encounters, for which one needs to have – this should be underlined – great courage, you should have received, as we analysts do, the testimony of what is experienced at these moments to measure better and at its true value what is represented by this courage. Because from the outside, like that, you can admire, of course, but you cannot always realize that the merit is no less great because these lads are really at certain moments carried away by the feeling of being absolutely bound to their comrades. They express it by saying that it is exalting to sing the International while being clubbed by police truncheons, but this is on the surface, since of course, the International may be a very fine song but I do not think that they would have this irrepressible feeling that they could not be anywhere other than where they are if they were not carried along by a feeling of absolute community … something to be explored further.

(Lacan 1967/68: 189–90, modified)

Lacan mentioned an important commentator of the events, Raymond Aron, whom he presented as ‘a comrade’ and ‘a friend’. Aron had just published an article in which he observed that there were students’ demonstrations everywhere, alluding to American universities and to Poland. Praising the article’s tone, Lacan added that it had missed a structural factor: the globalization of the phenomenon was crucial, but because of a new knot between knowledge and truth, a knot that only psychoanalysis could make sense of. Moreover, Aron’s article argued that current teachings, including Lacan’s, were rejected for not being dynamic enough. Indeed, Lacan knew from radical student leaders that Wilhelm Reich was often quoted by the Nanterre leftists, and stated his disagreement: ‘Reich’s ideas are not simply incomplete, they are demonstrably, fundamentally false’ (Lacan 1967/68: 192). It was because psychoanalysts did not bear witness to their experience concerning sexes and sexuality that these misguided notions had spread.

As an interesting aftermath to this seminar, the last of that Spring, Lacan recognized that those who were missing were not students busy erecting barricades but the older analysts. The May events confirmed a split in his school, while opposing it to the psychoanalytic community. The disaffection of older psychoanalysts led to a schism in 1969. Jean-Paul Valabrega, Piera Aulagnier, and Francois Perrier left Lacan’s school to found the Organisation Psychanalytique de Langue Francaise. Roudinesco has described the tension that mounted in 1968–69 between the old guard of clinicians and the new philosophers who were more radical in their politics. However, in a symptomatic gesture, Lacan borrowed de Gaulle’s formula to express his disgust with traditional psychoanalysts:

It is rather curious that from the moment simply when some paving stones start flying, for at least a moment everyone has the feeling that the whole of society might be involved in it in the most direct way in its daily comfort and its future.

We have even seen psychoanalysts questioning the future of the trade. To my eyes, they were wrong to question it publicly. They would have done better to keep it to themselves, because all the same, people who saw them questioning themselves about it […] found this a little funny. In any case one cannot say that the stock of psychoanalysis rose! // I have a crow to pluck with the General. He stole a word from me that for a long time I had – it was certainly not, of course, for the use that he made of it: psychoanalytic shit-in-bed (la chienlit psychanalytique). You cannot imagine for how long I wanted to give that as a title to my seminar. Now the chance has gone!

(Lacan 1967/68: 197–98, modified)

Even if Lacan assured his audience that he didn’t use de Gaulle’s phrase to accuse the students of ‘shitting in their own beds’, his attitude betrayed an identification with de Gaulle, the ageing founder of the Fifth Republic. Both had gone to Collège Stanislas, and shared a similar family background. De Gaulle, after he came back from Germany where he had considered a military action against the insurgents, launched the phrase: ‘La réforme, oui, la chienlit, non!’ (Reform yes, shit-in-bed, no!) The June elections brought success for the Gaullists: the country, frightened by the spectre of civil war, rallied around the General. A second referendum failed in April 1969; this self-engineered political suicide led de Gaulle to resign from presidency on 28 April 1969. He retired and died in 1970. Lacan’s continued identification with him extended beyond the immediate moment of the ‘events’; he was pondering the implications of a political power ready to ‘resign’ in the session of the 19 March 1969. When no one, in spite of his request, asked a question, he said: ‘Don’t make me discouraged, for I, too, might well be tempted to resign’ (Lacan 2006: 244).

If in May ’68 de Gaulle coined the phrase of ‘chienlit’ to imply that the leftist students had ‘fouled their own nest’, Lacan saw what was wrong not with the students but with official psychoanalysis: most psychoanalysts had fouled their nests when they had failed to remain true to the revolution in human subjectivity initiated by Freud. More hope came from the mixture of Marxism, Dadaism, surrealism, and anarchism combined in a strange brew by leftists. Lacan would not renounce that hope, all the while aware that the students were easily deluded. In the same June seminar, he made a typical aside about the logics of the excluded middle: ‘Naturellement c’est bébé comme le mouvement du 22 mars’ (Lacan 1967/68: 318). He felt that he was grandparenting a movement that risked spinning out of control.

Consequently, the June 1968 seminar closed on a militant note. Lacan began with this declaration: ‘Je ne suis pas un truqueur’ (Lacan 1967/68: 297; ‘I am not a cheater’) and ended about prophecy: ‘At the level of the Other, there’s nothing but prophecy. On the other hand, it is at the level of the Other that science is totalized, and thus for the subject, totally alienates itself. What matters now is to know whether there might still be for the subject something of the order of prophecy’ (ibid.: 324). Also he deplored that he had to suspend his discourse on the psychoanalytic act because his main audience, the professional psychoanalysts, had vanished.

When the seminar resumed in November 1968 the first session offered no hint of changes triggered by the Spring. Lacan pursued the elaboration of new mathemes and formulas, alluding to Althusser and his disciples whose structuralist Reading Capital could be emulated. Marx had paved the way to a new understanding of the object a caught up in the economy of jouissance; one could revamp the concept of Mehrlust defined as homologous or parallel to Mehrwert. Lacan offered a framework in which capitalism played a key role. The May ‘events’, as a symptom of capitalism, testified to the clash between knowledge and truth, to the struggle between capitalistic accumulation of knowledge and the irruption of a truth linked with jouissance:

I have been looking for the root of what has been ridiculously called the events. There hasn’t been any event in this business but I’ll explain this to you later. // The process by which science gets unified […] reduces all knowledge to a single market. […] What is it, then, that represents the discontent in civilization, as one says? It is a surplus jouissance (plus-de-jouir) brought about by a renunciation of jouissance, while the principle of the value of knowledge has been respected.

(Lacan 2006: 40)²

Lacan presented May ’68 as a gigantic strike of knowledge, whose truth had appeared only to be lost again. The perverse effect of the process was that it just modernized old-fashioned French institutions of learning to make them more competitive, machine-like, and bureaucratic:

The way in which everyone suffers in his or her rapport to jouissance, in so far as we only connect to it by the function of surplus-jouissance, this is the symptom – it appears from this, that there only an average, abstract social truth. // This results from the fact that a knowledge is always paid at its price but below the use-value that truth generates, and always for others than those who are in truth. It is thus marked by surplus-enjoyment. And this Mehrlust laughs at us since we don’t know where it’s hidden. // This is where things are at, my dear children. That’s why in May, all hell got loose.

(Lacan 2006: 41)

Lacan qualified the uprising with more precision by alluding to Michel de Certeau’s La Prise de Parole: pour une nouvelle culture. In that book, dated from 9 September 1968, de Certeau, not only a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Jacques Lacan between psychoanalysis and politics
• Part 1: Political significance of psychoanalysis
• Part 2: Lacanian psychoanalysis and the political
• Part 3: Psychoanalysis and political encounters
• Index of names
• Index of notions