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→4. Louis Althusser to Jacques Lacan
You know the ''other'' example: psychoanalysis. Everything you have told me about your current research concerning the desire of the analyst goes in this direction. It is the ''encounter'', in specific forms and structures, with this problem, by the psychoanalyst, in his own self-image, but generally not as an object of reflection. You are in the process of reflecting on that encounter (and many other things!) in your current research. I consequently suspect that you will understand what I am getting at.
I was extremely struck by your response: "What I say to them says something to them, codifies, transforms their attitude, their recognition of reality, their way of approaching analytic reality." You were saying it at once about the analysts who listened to you and the analysands (in analysis) who listened to you. They threw back at you that, in sum, this was an analyst's intervention about his patients, that the public and apparently impersonal—and thus objective—forms of the intervention (which was entirely theoretical, all theory) might serve as an alibi or a mask, etc., for an intervention experienced as real by members of your audience then in analysis. I am collecting phenomena even from the odious arguments with which you are countered, without those phenomena ever being able, in my eyes, to serve as an argument against you. From all this I retain the following (which at first sight seems to be rather disparate): that it is you who uttered the words, the master words of the situation. Those who listened to you, from the very depth of their "experience"—whether analysts, practitioners, or analysands, the ''"practitioned," each in his place as subject-object of practice, of a common experienced but ''unthought'' practice, since the ''thoughts'' of the analyst practitioners were in fact as little ''thoughts'' as those of the analyzed—all those auditors of the ''concept'' you were giving them, of the concept of the practice they lived, all those auditors had no right to the ''concept'' of break implied in your enterprise.
If I am saying something scandalous here, you will correct me. I shall explain. Their ''general' theoretical ignorance, that is, their ignorance of the existence and the imperative of ''theory überhaupt'' (without any consideration of content) was such, that is, their lack of ''theoretical'' training in general was such (and the culprit must be, if not current university teaching, then the empiricist pedagogy of medicine, etc.), that the enterprise of having them make a transition from their "living experience" to its own theory was a quasi-hopeless enterprise, ''pedagogically speaking'' (according to the essence of all pedagogy), that the undertaking of taking them by the hand from their own experience and their own practical situation, of showing them the outline of the very theory of that practice, was an objectively quasi-hopeless undertaking. One does not pass without a break from a practice to its concept, from experience to its concept. This illusion has been thematized by well-known philosophies, such as Hegel's formerly and more recently Husserl's and Merleau's. I say thematized, that is, accepted and expressed in concepts, in the very concepts produced by that illusion, thus in illusory concepts. That, fundamentally, was Merleau's path. That is why it never crossed your own, in theory, I mean. That is why Merleau, who needed (and no doubt for vital reasons, which appear well in Sartre's admirable article on him in ''Les Temps modernes'', where you were alone [''seul'']<ref>Althusser had originally typed "the only ones" (les seuls) and then eliminated the plural.</ref> in treating that great deceased figure in a manner worthy of him, that is, by speaking of him as though he were still alive)<ref>Cf. ''Temps modernes'' (1961): 184–85, a special issue devoted to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with articles by Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lefort, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alphonse de Waelhens, and Jean Wahl.</ref> that security of continuity, never succeeded in achieving that beginning of understanding what is at stake in psychoanalysis; his theory of it is aberrant and aberrantly disarming in its theoretical infantilism (I take the term in its almost technical sense: there was at the bottom of it all a certain unresolved relation with his mother). Merleau thought that from "experience" to its concept there was a path traced, ''emerging from experience itself'', like Ruth's tree from the entrails of Boaz or like the child from his mother's womb (the image of Boaz: it's something else—the placenta, the cord, it's something else). This myth of a path that in the very night is inscribed by essence to lead to the daylight, which is already the outline and the imminence of the day, its promise, its ripening future, this myth of deaf and tender spring keeping vigil and growing in the dead of winter until May comes, this myth of the sun keeping watch in the night itself, simply hidden by the other side of the earth, its other opaque with its very presence, and appearing at dawn as what it was in the shadows, those shadows that are only light (Feuerbach, who had taken the idea I don't know where—do you?—said that opaque bodies are only light, but in the form of infinitesimal light, that finally, essence never has an opposite, since its opposite is only itself in alienated form)—so here I am no doubt far from Merleau but very close to the illusion of those who, not reflecting on the break they should be able to know, or of those who don't reflect on it because they are not yet at the point of suspecting it, that spontaneous myth in which men commonly represent their relation to their knowledge in the form of their nonrelation to its real conditions, that myth that represents to them their wish for a future without history, without break, without the imaginary of a past that has led them to where they are and that is ''not cut off from them'', that imaginary myth in which men, every day, embody their umbilical theoretical security (philosophers and their mothers, a good subject for a thesis, the idealist philosophers, I mean), that myth defines the real condition of most of those who teach a body of knowledge to those who listen to them.
