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→5. Louis Althusser to Jacques Lacan
[Louis Althusser]''
=5. Louis Althusser to Jacques Lacan=<ref>This letter was not sent; see our introduction to the correspondence. Note the existence of an anonymous, incomplete, and often erroneous transcription of a recording by Louis Althusser on December 8, 1963, on "the end of analysis," that was found in his archives.</ref>''Paris, Tuesday, December 10 [1963], 6 P.M. '' Dear Lacan, Your silence has a great value for me. I expected it. You could have answered me, or rather someone very different from you could have answered me, while avoiding the question of the text.<ref>Louis Althusser is probably referring to his preceding letter of December 4.</ref> You, no. You have all the art and talent needed to settle a question with a word, to chase off flies, bores, or gossips. But you are not a man to throw words as fodder at things, even if only to get rid of them. You know that a word or a silence, when it is the pertinent word or silence, literally the last word—which can be silence—is the same thing. Yes, the last word on a thing is the thing itself. And when the thing is ''at its last word, that is, at the point at which the only word that one can confer on it is one that confirms its extremity, that of its bare evidence, of its very existence, then one rediscovers the origin at the point of its birth: its own abyss at the moment it denies it in order to be. Your silence is priceless. You will understand that I am addressing the author of your writings, the thought that inhabits them and that can indeed laugh at the affectations and the baseness that historical stupidity, the ideological stupidity of the time, sly exercises in vengeance, rancor, the desperate revenge of little men that it has ''marked'' (yes, as you say so well, that desire is ''marked'')—that the historically inevitable ideological stupidity of the present conjuncture has organized against you. Your thought will live, will grow, and these dwarfs will return to their proper measure: boxwood hedges cut back that have for eternity been ordered to protect the flowerbeds of the walkways of Saint-Anne from no one at all. Everyone ignores them, no one sees them, not even the gardener who shaves their head four times a year. And yet individuals who walk and occasionally have thoughts pass down those paths every day. Protect me from images of indignation, since they are not appropriate; they lower the debate, which I refuse to reduce to the ludicrous conditions of those who opened it. I shall speak another language to you, that of your work. For it is you, to be sure, a man too well known for me to know him—and whom, moreover, I do not know (as one says "to know" when speaking of an "acquaintance": he is or isn't an "acquaintance" of "mine")—who was speaking to me the other evening. I heard you, and I believe I have given you (without my ever having to "lend" you my attention, as one says, since it was returned in advance, and you don't suspect how much) signs; I heard you, as one sometimes hears harmonics of strings repeat on another stave the melody one is playing. I heard you in two keys. In the key of your present personal tragedy, a tragedy since the children of your voice have cut your throat, and you know that they're its children and have committed this crime; since you have refused, alone, bloodied, to accept the only act they abandoned to you: to abandon to you that abandonment called despair, which is death in life itself, a public death without an identifiable murder, which would have given them all the profit of the crime without the risks of sanction (there are others aside from the legal kind). You remained alone, and I, who do not "know" you, I could be nothing other than the witness of that solitude, of your courage and of your pride. Had I heard you only in that key, I would merely have been one more in a long list of impotent witnesses to historical tragedies, which, at times, bear names other than those of Madrid and Barcelona. Those witnesses occasionally recount their memories later on, a helpless film or narrative, as tragic as what they saw, with the distance that renders their intolerable testimony tolerable to nonwitnesses—to nonwitnesses and to the witnesses themselves. It is no doubt not by chance—Nietzsche had sensed it in a miraculous moment before falling into the abyss of cries of suffering—that witnesses of the tragic can bear their memory, that is, their suffering, only on the condition of making of it a ''work to see''. What they saw they want others to see as well, in images, so that they might no longer be alone, so that the solitude that is the tragic itself might finally end for them in its public sharing, so that a ''public'' spectacle (since a book is something read ''alone'') might be imposed on men, beneath the fiction and the lure of art, might, then, be shared, and destroyed in that sharing, the unspeakable and intolerable solitude that has marked them forever. Outside that sharing there is no recourse for them other than the public venting of their suffering, so that, at the least (one never knows), others might hear them; they will no longer be alone in howling their loneliness, like those wounded dogs that wander over the long plains at night and that howl only at night, since by day they would be able to see that no one hears them. The howl of that suffering is a book: Nietzsche himself, who was haunted by the crowds communing publicly in the works of Wagner but who knew, with a prodigious awareness, that is, an unconsciousness, that certain howls need the protection of the night (a book: not ''seeing'' who reads it, one doesn't see, one will not see, and until the end one will live in that desperate hope that it isn't read; one will live out of the belief that it is perhaps read, truly read, ''understood by one or two who have acquired it''). The author of ''The Birth of Tragedy'', the man who had understood in a flash that he was forever the witness of the tragic and forever marked by its seal, that of solitude, also knew that he was forever forbidden from delivering himself of the frightening spectacle of the tragic whose witness he had been, in a ''spectacle'', since he had been its witness not in the flesh but in reason, having experienced the tragedy of understanding what the tragic was; what remained to him was only the night of a book, of books, in which to howl to all men that solitude, which is suffering itself, the abyss of living in the night, in order to keep the hope that another ''would hear him''. The voice, when it says the tragic and says it in the night, is but a howl, a long howl that no longer stops in order to give until the end, until the final instant, a chance to its hope, that is, to its despair, of ever being heard. Thank God I am writing to you; so you have remained silent. I also heard you in a different key—you were thus also speaking in a different key. Your silence: it was that in you a discourse other than the howl of indignation and bitterness continued, alive, giving to the man you are the reason and the courage of that silence. (Oedipus kept his silence; that is, he spoke, and he spoke about the flowers and brooks he no longer saw, he spoke of something else; in him there spoke a reason, a true one, perhaps the first in the world, the one that Nietzsche, deafened by his own suffering, did not hear, that he, for his part, forever confused with the reasoning cowardice of Socrates, not having been able to hear—you know why—that reason to which his prehistory as a man had made him deaf, that reason through which, in the very spectacle of tragedy, a man named Sophocles indicated to all men, and to us, for the first time in the world, that art can be something other than a refuge, and the spectacle of tragedy can be something entirely other than a sharing of suffering: the very birth of reason.) Yes, I heard in you another discourse. It is not by chance, I repeat, that you spoke to me about your work on the analyst's desire. I would have doubted—God forbid! but after all, a tragedy can truly over-whelm, for a time at least, the most courageous of men—that you would have given me, in a dazzling flash, proof that not only was nothing in you breached but that you were already at the very point at which the battle (which some think or perhaps regret they have won so quickly) is joined, the point at which no one, except for you, and perhaps me, is aware that the battle will be played out. You had two words that were also two flashes (and when those flashes traverse the night, there is no more night—in truth, there is no night for you; you have no need of it as the accomplice of a despair you have rejected from the beginning). A work on the marriage of the analyst, of a specific analyst, and his affairs and political obsessions. That was enough. Then a word on the desire of the analyst. That time, no doubt, was any longer possible. You've got the adversary by the throat; you've got the very ones who wanted to deprive you of a voice, and naturally, they don't suspect it. That is in order. Their weakness will have to betray them. Weakness is always paid for, when one knows how to strike it at its weak point, in that ultimate point where it is nothing but weakness. Armor (which can also be covered with heraldry and emblems, armor, which is not only armorial bearings): on the last day, it covers only bare flesh, belly and throat. Ever since they have been fighting, men have known this, and they have related their great fear in tales of combat in which the great themselves no longer have anything left with which to counter the entrails of death except the last rampart of all the protections in the world: a bit of metal to which an artisan, in the noisy sunlight of a forge, gave the awkward form of a man, that ludicrous death of steel in order to preserve the despair of a body, which was alive because naked. That weak point, their weakness itself, the public armor of those undressed pseudo-kings whom you have discovered. They are already defeated and are dying. You have continued on your path, toward other battles, life, in sum. Here is how I would make the reason that speaks in you speak: rather, I let it speak, being only its voice, doing no more than scan, as you have said on other occasions, the discourse that it has already uttered, and for a long time, since it is never anything but a single discourse that you have been conducting for twenty years. The analyst's desire. You sought it in ''The Symposium''.<ref>Cf. Jacques Lacan, ''Séminaire VIII: Le Transfert'' (Paris: Seuil, 1991).</ref> In fact, you were searching in ''The Symposium'' for the illusion of the analyst's desire about itself, Plato having given voice, in the form of a formally irreproachable discourse (if one insists on it, and one can legitimately insist on it), solely to those illusions he wanted to make men recognize as the opposite of illusion. I don't know what you derived from ''The Symposium''; I would have to reread it to come up with your possible discourse. I'll go to what's essential, ''The Symposium'' serving you, like all the philosophical objects you have used in your work, only as a transcendental guide (I mean transcendental not in the sense of the illusion about itself that every transcendental philosophy develops when it describes itself as such but in the sense in which it happens that it misconstrues'' what it is when it acknowledges that it needs a guide—the Newtonian physical object, or the Husserlian "percept," or the Heideggerian ''Umwelt of Sein und Zeit''—when it happens, in the specific form of philosophical misperception, the ideological, that it misconstrues what it is actually in the process of doing, to the extent that it takes its philosophical imaginary for the philosophical symbolic itself, and in that recognition-miscognition it masks its own condition to itself, which is to be structured by entirely other structures than the ones it tranquilly develops, as though it were a matter of those of a transcendental subject—a subject!! You know these confusions from experience, and concerning another object, you have elaborated, in a stage whisper, their theory.) I will thus go to the essential. And in two words. The desire of the analyst. It sends us to the desire of the analyzed. Desire of a desire. Dual structure of fascination, whence so many interminable-unterminated analyses. Dual structure of fascination, which, like all dual structures of fascination, produces the imaginary it needs to support that fate, that is, not to emerge from it—fear is always a precious adviser, isn't it? That imaginary can itself be treated like a signifier. And one can also make a discourse out of it, which will have the formal structure of a discourse instead of being a simple rehash of phantasms—a discourse, with the small difference that it will be, in ''La Psychanalyse d'aujourd'hui'' [''Contemporary Psychoanalysis''] in two volumes at the Presses Universitaires de France, a discourse of the imaginary and not a discourse on the imaginary (that too is conducted at the press, the admirable house! but, note well, in a different collection). You know, you have said it so well: there are, in this order, discourses that are only rehashes and discourses that offer themselves as such, on the condition of fabricating for themselves (an operation that is not at all imaginary but quite an object of reflection, of conscious reflection, the imaginary having total and entire right to the category ''consciousness'', which is the philosophical category no. 1 of the philosophical imaginary, an imaginary that is perfectly ''conscious'', by which I mean deliberate), in a purely artificial manner (a very objective technique, not at all imaginary, any more than the fabrication technique of the imaginary of ''Paris Match'', since it is purely and cynically a deliberate production of the imaginary, is imaginary), on the condition then of fabricating for themselves, in a purely (and consciously) artificial manner, the small technical supplements necessary for a discourse to hold up, the small extensions necessary for it not to be too short: a few concepts, such as object relations, concerning which you have said for all time what needs to be said, that is, very little. But one had to know a devilish lot to say that little, which is unfortunately more dangerous in real life and analytic practice than one might be allowed to hope if one is unaware of the ravages of the ideological ''nil'', socially indispensable to its authors, from the objective observation that one was dealing with a void: theoretical nothingness, I mean. But nature has less horror of a vacuum than does ideology, which is no more than the fullness of that void, that fullness overflowing to the point of today submerging our world, no more overflowing than in former times; between those times and today, however, there is this difference, which is that we are, as witnesses and contemporaries of that overflow, the only ones to be committed (or requested or begged) (that is, who are ''not'' committed or requested or begged, history not having among its official employments either theoretical censors, auctioneers, or public criers [the cry!] [the public cry!] to commit, request, or beg us)— thus by the very necessity that is our law, by virtue of that condition of human historical postmaturation that we can never be our own grandfathers and of the human historical nonprematuration that unfortunately forbids us from being our own grandsons, we are then the only ones obliged, if the fancy takes us, yes, to ''have to" make of our bodies a dike for that overflow. And even then one still has to ''know'' what is overflowing. That dual structure of fascination has the result that the desire of desire (analyst-analyzed) can play interminably in a whirligig (before Sartre, who plainly loves carousel horses, or the entrances of the Musée de l'Homme—I won't make him say so, if I may say so—we would have said ''in this circle''), in sum, in that "philosophical" circle of intersubjectivity, in which Ricoeur (carousel horses are not the only things in the world for giving an idea of vertigo) finds the wherewithal to satisfy (satisfy: a category of the imaginary; is my terminology precise?) his legitimate demands (philosophically legitimate) (I cannot touch on his own personal imaginary, having no credentials for doing so and not having, on condition of not reading him too closely, the means). But you have taught us that the imaginary is also nothing but a mimicry of the symbolic, that it bears its mark, but that never is a ''mark'' on metal—above all in the world of historical deception of a class economy, which is epitomized in the ''thing'' that is a coin—worth a ''title''. The mark comes from ''elsewhere'', from that elsewhere which is the Other, which is the name of the Elsewhere, the name of the absolute Outside, the absolute condition of possibility of any inside, even if, as with the nickel of our five centimes, it is false. The absolute condition of possibility of that falsity's existence, of its quality as false, and of its very structure, which allows it to be given and treated as true, if need be by ''believing'' it to be true (which is not absolutely necessary when one emerges from the analytic object) (one can be conscious and cynical: history is consciousness and cynicism—I mean moral conscience, which is but the good conscience of the cynicism of some and of deception consented to by the others). The desire of the analyst is ''marked'', like every desire, as is ''marked'' (sealed) the dual relation of Imaginary fascination (I propose a capital I), which renders the circle desire-of-desire specific to the analytic relation, in which the analyst ''lives'' the very truth of his analyst's desire. I do not speak, any more than you do, then, of that other dual relation in which the fate of analytic practice is played out; that other dual relation is the dual relation that the patient's desire, marked by the imaginary, attempts to establish between himself and the analyst, a dual relation into which the analyst, precisely, who "isn't playing the game," refuses to enter, because that's why he's an analyst, that is, in order to get his neurotic to move from the imaginary to the symbolic through the vicissitudes of a this time well-scanned Oedipus complex. I am speaking of another dual relation, of the one established by the analyst's desire, of the one that is established by the desire of the analyst: an entirely different situation, one quite strange to the analyst in the street, who, working all week but never on Sunday (pardon), is and always remains more or less in this respect a Sunday analyst. That situation establishes another Imaginary (capital I) at the heart of which the analysis of the patient's imaginary (small i) is developed, that is, most of the time, an analysis that fails, that is interrupted, that one starts afresh with a third party, who in turn starts afresh with the business of the imaginary, and things continue like that until one is fed up or says, "that's enough like that," as of a certain age, or one has been sufficiently "improved [''amelioré'']" (the word reeks of chicory [''chicorée'']!) to be able to say hello to daddy mommy or to get married according to the rules, since, after all, gotta make them happy and make children for France! In brief—I say brief because it's not brief, it's very long, it's even interminable, can it even end? analysis terminable-interminable—don't you think that the difficulty of translating Freud's words has to do with something completely different from a pure matter of signifiers, I mean of the signifiers officially registered as such and inventoried in that admirable system with neither jolts, self-regulator, nor revolutions for which a Genevan (what daring for a Swiss! but a love of social stability can supply illumination concerning the stability of a system in general) one day elaborated the theory, I mean in a dictionary. (And the translators' dictionaries, and the etymological ones that give so many peasant joys to Heidegger, who never would have taken the ''Holzwege'' for paths if he had only been a woodcutter—and he is a philologist a bit in the way he is a woodcutter, treating himself to the sylvan joys of a city-dweller, that is, of a Sunday woodcutter, just as he treats himself to the philological joys of a philosopher, that is, of a Sunday philologist.) (Prévert, who abounds in slyness, rightly says that "Sunday it's the only thing that's true," that is, false). In brief (once again, I repeat my offense), things continue like that for a long time, and at bottom there's no reason for them to stop. A Sunday analyst never truly finishes his analysis. ''His'' analysis. Of course! The one he's conducting: that of the patient … no; ''his'' analysis, ''his own'', even while officially, social-securitily, Delay-psychiatracademically "finishing" his analysis, that of his patient (patience), even when he "finishes'' the analysis of his patient. For concerning that dual relation that he establishes, he himself, through the Imaginary of his analyst's desire, I am not sure that it is ever involved in the analysis of the other imaginary, the one that the desire of the analyzed attempts in vain to establish. And for good reason, since to my knowledge (but it could nevertheless happen, for a priori there is no radical obstacle) the patient in analysis is not charged by the society—I mean the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, France, or the International of London—to lead to the threshold of the symbolic the imaginary within which the analyst's desire ''lives'' the ''objective imaginary'' of the dual situation that is quite simply his p''rofessional condition'', since one cannot decently ask an analyst who occasionally has enough trouble dealing with the imaginary of the patient to self-analyze himself as an analyst (all the same, did not Freud do something that, at a distance, resembled that?), that is, to deal with his own Imaginary, well, things continue. I am saying that you are at the very point where everything will be played out. At the point where the desire of the analyst (ah! those damned countertransferences …) will reveal to us through your theoretical work what ''mark'' is carried, beneath the legal stamp of every mark ''überhaupt'', which is the mark of the symbolic in general, by the Imaginary of the analyst. There are good reasons to bet that this mark bears some famous names, among which Paris, London, the provinces, and a few wives will be involved. For as you say, it happens that analysts are married. And as you know in your flesh, they have businesses at good addresses, arms longer than their sleeves, an official place under the sun of our bourgeois society, their books sell, and—does one ever know?—one has to ''think of the future''. The future: they can certainly think about it. They're right. There will be revolutions that will be more bitter and cruel to them than the one inspired by their fear of losing their social position, their income, and the rest. One can always escape the financial and social effects of a social revolution. And it's not worth it (God save them!), crossing the sea … it's enough to give a deposit, a guarantee, in short, to know how to ''conduct oneself''. In that respect, they have only to continue. They have, dare I say, what it takes. No, I am speaking of a different revolution, the one you are preparing without them knowing it, the one from which no sea in the world will ever be able to protect them, and no respectability, whether capitalist or socialist, the one that will strip them of the security of their ''Imaginary'' and that will one day give them the possibility (they will then be able to freely choose their destiny, without needing social or political guarantees) of delivering their human desire, which has no name, not the name of man, and without doubt not the name of desire (man being, as poor Feuerbach used to say quite unconsciously, the name of all names, just as God was formerly the name of all names, which makes him strictly speaking superfluous, except for those who need that label to sell under it an entirely different—and unconfessable—product) (desire being ''the name [nom] of every no [non]'', that is, of every ''yes'', which renders it strictly speaking superfluous when an analysis is ''finished''—but when is it these days?—which will render it strictly speaking superfluous when the analysis of analysts will be possible, finished, and their analyses—that of their patient patients—finished …), that revolution which will one day give them the possibility of delivering their "man's" "desire" from the Imaginary of the social, religious, moral, matrimonial, etc. condition of the analytic profession in which it lies literally bewitched. They do well to be afraid of that revolution. Just as a neurotic may be afraid of knocking at the door of an analyst, however duly certified. Afraid of the revolution that can make them men like others. Afraid? The best—even the good ones, who are legion—don't merit that fear. when an analysis is finished—but when is it these days?—which will render it strictly speaking superfluous when the analysis of analysts will be possible, finished, and their analyses—that of their patient patients—finished …), that revolution which will one day give them the possibility of delivering their "man's" "desire" from the Imaginary of the social, religious, moral, matrimonial, etc. condition of the analytic profession in which it lies literally bewitched. They do well to be afraid of that revolution. Just as a neurotic may be afraid of knocking at the door of an analyst, however duly certified. Afraid of the revolution that can make them men like others. Afraid? The best—even the good ones, who are legion—don't merit that fear. For like all true revolutions, it does nothing but utter a different word that must still be uttered (as we utter the word ''desire'') and that a man wrote, in an unfortunate time, on walls and in notebooks, but whose object it is to render the very use of that word superfluous: freedom. ''Yours''''[Louis Althusser]''
=6. Jacques Lacan to Louis Althusser=
