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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


          

Life of Lacan
[excerpt]








Jacques-Alain Miller

 

Translated by Russel Grigg

 

 

I recall having asked myself, while Lacan was still alive, why I was not to Lacan what James Boswell had been to Samuel Johnson. Why was I writing down nothing of what I saw and heard of Lacan every day, above all at the weekends when I was so often near to him, in his country house at Guitrancourt, an hour outside of Paris? I realized that I had not noted down a single instance of his sayings, whereas I loved reading those of Martin Luther or Anatole France. On no occasion did I ever record a saying, a date, an event.

[...]

By Life of Lacan I intend something completely different from a biography. What is most like a biography is the procedure called la passe when the subject, having resolved that his analysis has ended, considers himself in a position to give an account—of what? Not so much the history of his life as the course of his analysis.

That procedure, when it is put into effect—which doesn't happen everywhere in psychoanalysis, but only there where one complies more or less with invention—is always inseparable, whether the subject perceives it or not, from precipitate action. This temporal modality, haste, is fundamental because the subject, in the moment of la passe, plays his part in relation to primal repression, and must reckon with the unavoidable possibility that there are always other interpretations, still and always.

[...]

Lacan for his part has left a colophon in his "Instance of the Letter" as the trace of a regret he carried: that of having caught up with himself, of having become himself at the moment at which it was already, if not too late, at least a little late. This is how I explain to myself this haste that he was animated by: this sense of urgency that certainly lived within him, which he spread all around him, as was also the case of the two aforesaid, who are going through the famous pass. Moreover, he said as much himself: this pass he went through incessantly. He was, as it were, a considerable pass, but one who was ensconced in his place longer than a Rimbaud, this genius of a drop-out. [...]

 





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