Jacques-Alain Miller

Jacques-Alain Miller—Dear Éric Marty, I put together a little speech to start with. I received your book last Wednesday with a dedication that I could not decipher. I leafed through it for twenty minutes, and I thought of Marx’s sentence in The Holy Family about the reception by his contemporaries of From An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, on which I had done my dissertation in philosophy with Canguilhem: “He was greeted with enthusiasm, like an impatiently awaited guest.”

I’ve wanted your book, it’s caught my eye since it first appeared. Without knowing it, I wanted it. And first of all because I never got into the work of Butler, in which Zizek, who was then my pupil in Paris, had tried to interest me since the publication of Gender Trouble in 1990. A number of analysts, inside and outside l’École de la Cause freudienne, have since explored the maze of gender theory, not me. However, said theory is now a worldwide phenomenon. You start your book with an emphatic phrase: “Gender, gender, is the last great ideological message from the West to the rest of the world.” The tone is “romantic,” to use a favorite word of Butler, but, in her eyes, stigmatizing.

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