I have today’s Point in my hands: it is very impressive. The photo of Lacan is one of my favourites: I must say that when I met him in 1979, this is exactly what he looked like.
The catch is the introduction to the paper. Schneider’s tone is inappropriate and the bottom of it is essentially stupid. This non dupe position of believing oneselves to be obliged to use and abuse others when they speak, Lacan or Freud, (virile protesting?) creates a hostility, of which we may doubt that it is limited to this one place.
One day, in 1980, while I was going by bus on the Saint-Germain Boulevard to my session at Lacan’s house, I met a professor of neurology, the Professor Pouyanne, with whom I had done my first placement in Medicine a few years before. He asked me why I was on the bus, I told him, and he answered: “Look after yourself”. Laughing, I promised him I would. My analysis was already a way of looking after myself, in the right way.
There was no hostility in this humanist and rigorous doctor who was not ignorant of the powers of speech and the unconscious. In his service he confronted symptoms, which placed him in a position to know this. There is nothing of the sort concerning M. Schneider, but a voluntarily ambiguous style which verges on slandering Lacan and those he taught (a mad man who seeks to make others mad).
Starting in this way a published paper that is also a commemoration is not defendable: it is necessary for the press to stop thinking that it is a good thing.
Lacan’s pages and yours surmount all of this with elegance. It remains absolutely superb.
Carole
Dear JA,
Your carefully chosen quotes from Lacan, your interview on the Lacanian prophecies: magnificent! You say with few words what can be said, and which no-one says, if not “by” Lacan. Enthusiasm!
I say and all the more that in arriving last night from Denver (Colorado), I hurried in order to download Point on Zinio, an excellent website allowing downloading anywhere you like the daily world press. I read Point here before it came out in France. This was amusing! I have since put it on Twitter and Facebook for everyone.
I am leaving this morning for Wyoming. But Wi-Fi is everywhere. It is certainly also of the One, to extract oneself in a more visible way in the vast American landscape, but it is not difficult for me to spot it, and for a long time now.
Thank you again. We shall see each other at Mollat the 10/09 (I learned this from Zaloszyc and Castanet).
Jean-Pierre
From the very beginning of the presentation in Point of the extract of the Seminar of Doctor Lacan, Ou pire, here I am between laughter and tears – no, between laughter and… laughing. Until the very end! So many enormities, which pretend to introduce the terms of a “balanced” review on the contribution of Lacan. Very unbalanced, that is for sure. Because even the one sentence which seems to be more kind: “Dazzling knowledge mixed up with precocious obscurities” must be read more attentively in order to see that it tips the scale towards the bad side! This is a first class burial.
It is there from the very beginning. The tone is set, twisting the title of Liberation, to not twist from laughing, which the title would have deserved, despite the announcement of the death of Lacan. “All mad Lacan”, well then, does this mean that he was mad? And by the way, why such a contempt for the insane? Sometimes, it produces beautiful things, new, inventive, living, and beyond the commonplace. Certainly, Lacan was not banal, far from it. Not in the ordinary discourse, far from it. Not in half-measure, far from it. Sometimes difficult to read, yes. Often, incidentally. Ingenious, of course. Liberation, with its taste for the play on words, made a beautiful tribute to Lacan, which, perhaps, would have made him laugh. “All mad Lacan”, “You are going”, “Everything goes” [playing on the homonyms of: ‘Tout fou Lacan’, ‘Tu fous le camp’ and ‘Tout fout le camp’]. Yes, Lacan loved playing with words, tracking down the truth hidden in the saying. Yes, we really need this in treatment. We need this, and not over-interpretation like that which was made concerning this title. All mad, this was well spotted: Lacan was full of ardour and enthusiasm. And yes, that incited love, the love of knowledge.
And it continues. Not “Perinde ac cadaver” because it is living. There are no phantoms here.
Love is blind, as we say. Are all students blind? Mad? Why not. He who does not want to be mad is not…Love, precisely, Lacan shed light on its blindness, would you believe. Read the transformation made of the formulation “there is no sexual relation” into “sexuality brings nothing” [ne rapporte rien], it is hilarious, if it was not so pathetic, in what this supposes of the ignorance of Lacan the logician and clinician. If the first proposition is true, it supposes grasping what relation here means; the second is false, because sexuality can report (rapporter]. This can happen.
These mails were addressed to me by three colleagues and friends, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, members of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne, Doctor Carole Dewambrechies-La Sagna, Doctor Jean-Pierre Klotz, and Doctor Catherine Lazarus-Matet. The first two are from Bordeaux, the third from Paris.
Carole is on holiday in Arcachon, and Catherine on Belle-Île. J-P is voyaging in the Mid-West. For my part, I arrived Wednesday at Portes-en-Ré in order to spend three weeks of holidays, I have interrupted my writing of “La Vie de Lacan” to work on my response to M. Schneider’s article which appeared in Point last Thursday. Started yesterday, in a good mood, the text, in escaping from its author, is starting to take on enormous proportions. The methodological introduction has already reached 10,000 spaces, whilst the article that produced it doesn’t go beyond 3,000. The text should enter into the main subject today, and could be concluded Sunday morning. The bad weather, the calm, the fresh and revigorating air, and the idleness, all favour intellectual concentration.
Translated by Frances Coates-Ruet
