Correspondence with Jacques Lacan

Editor

This exchange of letters begins at a crucial moment in the life of Jacques Lacan: he had just been stricken from the list of training analysts of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP) on October 13, 1963, after two years of negotiations with representatives of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). Stripped of the right to train students, Lacan was then obliged to break with the official institution, which plunged him into great turmoil, evidence of which can be seen in his first letters.

For his part, Louis Althusser published that same year in the Revue de l'enseignement philosophique (13, no. 5 [July 1963]) an article, "Philosophie et sciences humaines," in which he praised Lacan. The two men had not yet met—and that would not occur, in fact, until the beginning of December 1963, as these letters and Althusser's diary, conserved in his archives, indicate; quite plausibly they met in the course of a dinner on December 3.

Finally, to situate this epistolary exchange, it should be noted that Lacan delivered his last lecture at Sainte-Anne on "les noms du père" [the names of the father] on the very day on which he would write, at night, his first letter to Louis Althusser and that it was through Althusser's intervention that he would make his entry at the Ecole Normale Supérieure on January 15, 1964, with a first lecture on "excommunication."

These letters of Lacan and Althusser were discovered in the archives of Louis Althusser. Those of Lacan, eight in number, are all handwritten and composed on stationery measuring 13.5 cm by 20.5 cm, with a heading on the right mentioning the address of 5 rue de Lille and a telephone number, with the exception of a postcard (no. 8) sent from Greece and the last letter (no. 12) written on a blank sheet of standard size. Since it was impossible to have access to the originals of Althusser's letters and thus to possible handwritten marginal additions, the text of his letters has been established following typed duplicates that Althusser kept in a folder marked "Lacan," along with the latter's letters.

It has seemed useful to us to add to this exchange the text of a long letter (no. 5) that Althusser had also typed but finally chose not to send—as he himself confirms in the letter to Franca of January 21, 1964, cited in the introduction to this volume. It will be noted in this regard that the Althusser archives contain numerous unsent letters to numerous correspondents and that they turn out in almost every case to be extremely interesting. The one we are publishing in this volume will thus arrive at its destination, but posthumously…

O. C.

1. Jacques Lacan to Louis Althusser

This Wednesday, no, Thursday 21-XI-63

Our relations are old, Althusser. You surely remember that lecture I gave at Normale after the war, a crude rudiment for a dark time (one of the actors in my present drama found his path there, nevertheless); for the rest, your somewhat impressionistic judgment was "reported" to me some time after.

The one that now comes to me from the (June-July) Bulletin de l'enseignement philosophique, I would be ungracious to decline the honor, and I thank you for allowing this testimony to be heard at a juncture in which, to be sure, I have no reason to doubt my enterprise, but in which, all the same, a stupid wind is raging over my very fragile skiff.

I have put an end to this seminar in which I tried for ten years to trace the paths of a dialectic whose invention was for me a marvelous task.

I had to. It grieves me.

And then I think of all those gravitating in your vicinity and of whom I am told that they held in esteem what I did—which was not for them, nonetheless.

I am thinking this evening or, rather, early this morning, of those friendly faces … Something should be said to them. I would like you to come visit me, Althusser.

J. Lacan

2. Louis Althusser to Jacques Lacan

[Paris] 26.XI.63

Dear Lacan,

Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your word, your thought, and your sympathy touch me deeply.

You are not alone. I am speaking not only of the analysts who owe you everything: their number is great, and they are often the best. I am speaking also of those who, in contesting you, nevertheless follow you willingly or not, constrained by the truth you have brought to light. I am speaking also of those who, from the outside, have discovered and recognized you.

I have already spoken (and have had others speak) about you in this house for six years. I know you came here a very long time ago. I was at the time a prisoner returning from Germany, a convalescent kept far from the Ecole, and concerning your lecture all I heard was the stir it made and the repercussions it had. This year the discourse I am conducting about you is at the heart of a collective labor to whose rigor I subject (with their agreement) all those whom the subject affects. We have had a very good beginning.

I regard you as being, in the field one is provisionally obliged to call the "human sciences," the first thinker who has assumed the theoretical responsibility of giving to Freud veritable concepts worthy of him—and to that extent the first to have accorded that "domain" the path of access, the only one, that might be expected of Freud: a forbidden path. That interdiction, insofar as it is forbidden, is the path of access itself. I have been thinking this for several years. I am now in a position, at least I believe so, to give proof of it with reasons precise and rigorous enough for me to run the risk of publishing them.

I have been pursuing obscure works on Marx for some fifteen years. I have finally, slowly, laboriously, emerged from the night. Things are clear to me now. That austere inquiry, that long and harsh gestation, was needed.

When I managed to see clearly in Marx, at the time I found myself able to give Marx's wild dialectic (wild not because he didn't "have the time," as fools say, to tame it and to enclose it in his theory but because, like Freud later on, he was subject to the condition of having to produce his thought within the matter of a work that was nonphilosophical in its object, because that philosophical thought "in its practical state" in that work was precisely reduced to a "wild" state by the historical constraint of concepts imposed by his time, Hegelian ones, the only ones then available and handy)—at the time, then, when I found myself able to give to Marx's thought (I am speaking emphatically of his "philosophy, and not of his work: Capital) its theoretical form, it was then that I saw myself on the threshold of understanding you.

Previously I had certainly felt and then grasped the interest of your theoretical investigations, but I had grasped it only in its relation to Freud. I can say now that it has bearing (in a paradoxical form: that of interdiction, or absolute discontinuity) well beyond Freud. I will reveal it one day soon, hoping not to betray you, when I will show, precisely, that beyond. I will then explain in what and why your attempt implies (in the paradoxical form of absolute discontinuity) the theoretical absolute of the enabling conditions of Marx. That is what I wanted to communicate, in advance, in abbreviated form, by speaking of Marx's revolution (rejection of homo economicus, rejection of any philosophical "subject") and of Freud's revolution, which you have restored, if not given, to us (rejection of any homo psychologicus). When I was able to utter that simple word, everything was clear. I believe I understand that this line has fulfilled its purpose if it is true that it has allowed you to judge whether I had, on an essential point, encountered your intention.

To be sure, I work in a domain apparently quite removed from your own. Let us abandon those appearances. I am doing my best in my "domain" to combat the very adversaries who would like to reduce you to silence, to their silence. I speak of your theoretical work and of the beyond on which it touches. You will have allies, have no fear, and I can see a large number of them already among the people who still don't know you, whom you no doubt didn't think you were addressing so directly; all those will shove down the throat of the pseudo-"psychologists" and other philosophers of the "human person" and "intersubjectivity," as well as the technocrats of "structuralism," their pretensions, their sermons, and their amateurism: in sum, their theoretical imposture.

I have no merit in running the risk of this prophecy; henceforth we have a right to it, since we possess the means for it, in this country at last become ours.

You can imagine what pleasure I will have in meeting you. But I am presently in the (temporary) situation of having to bear a large part of the weight of the Ecole. We have a marvelous director, but he has been here for only two months; we no longer have an assistant director. I help the former in part of his work, and I take over the functions of the latter, and then my own in addition—I mean work of general administration. In addition, I am in charge (I am more attached to this than anything else) of studies in philosophy (philosophers are proliferating at an astonishing pace in the house), and I must, of course, maintain my role in teaching and research.

Let us allow some time to pass, time enough for this situation to be transformed. We will see each other then, and I will be able to tell you of the state of the work and research of which you are the center.

I am sending you under the same cover a text written last spring. It speaks of concepts and characters entirely foreign, to all appearances, to your problems. You will see, however, where I was, as though in a mirror, and you will be able perhaps to infer where I am presently, assuming that I have advanced a bit in the meanwhile. I don't need to tell you that the text appeared in La Pensée and that I had to start with the rudiments.

I extend to you my best wishes for your work. You will know that our expectations of you are still infinite.

I communicate to you the very high esteem in which I hold you.

[Louis Althusser]

3. Jacques Lacan to Louis Althusser

This Saturday, December 1, 1963

Very dear friend,

What precious testimony your letter constitutes for me.

That at the distance at which you are what I address to one close by, often opaque, manages to make itself understood is justification for the faith I seem to accord (to the point of disconcerting some) to the pure act of saying—to the sole fact of having said (they are the ones who express themselves like that).

Your article —I am reading it. It fascinates me, and I discover my questions in it.

But the urgency remains that makes it imperative for me to ask you for the hour I requested of you the other day.

So, at your convenience. I will call Monday.

Your J. L.

4. Louis Althusser to Jacques Lacan

Dear Lacan,

Paris, December 4, '63

I thought a good deal about our conversation since yesterday. I had many other things to tell you, but we will no doubt have the time and the opportunity. A bit of leisure is needed to broach them. But you are caught up, and it's quite understandable, not in the urgency of the impossible situation that has been inflicted on you but in its subjective as well as objective effects. An outside witness, above all from outside the world that has been the object of your efforts, can only give you his sympathy and his understanding. I fear that those sentiments will hardly help you and that you will be alone in the face of your bitterness.

All that I can offer you: a few reflections spoken out loud, precisely in the name of the exteriority that constitutes the witness that I am.

My question: what did they understand of your discourse—a question that others (and first of all Delay) must have had to repeat. That question has a very profound meaning for me. I will tell you why: it calls into question the issue of the access to theory (that of any discipline whatever: I am treating a very general question) of those who are plunged into the horizon of a practice, either because they pursue it or because they are, dare I say, its material. A very, very particular practice, because before you that theory did not exist. How can one accede, from the very heart of a practice pursued or experienced, blindly pursued or experienced, to its concept? A problem of pedagogy, it will be said, but in the last analysis it is not a problem of pedagogy. It's an entirely different problem that concerns the transition from what I would call a "practical truth" (which is practiced or experienced) to the theory of that truth or to its concept. Now this problem is, at bottom, a specific—and crucial—theoretical problem. You have admirably shown that problems of analytic technique cannot be resolved at the level of technique, that a leap was needed—the recourse to theory—and that in the final analysis only theory decides and determines problems of technique; what does that mean? Does it mean that there is, on the one hand, pure and simple technique, which would be only technique, practiced by people without any idea of theory and to whom that theory must be taught so that they can then reform their technique? That is not the way things go. The conflict is not between a pure technique without theory and pure theory. There is no pure technique, and that too you have shown. Any technique that wants to be pure technique is, in fact, an ideology of technique, that is, a false theory. Moreover, that is indeed what your effort implies: you are not one who teaches people who are only technicians that they are simply blind, or ignorant, quite simply by teaching them of the existence and the necessity of a theory; you are one who teaches allegedly pure "technicians" the truth of their practice on the absolute condition of destroying something other than an ignorance or blindness—by which I mean an ideology, the false theory that is the obligatory mate of their false innocence as pure technicians. Every pedagogy thus cannot consist in teaching a truth to one who is ignorant, thus filling a void with a plenum—every pedagogy consists of substituting an explicit and true theory for an implicit and false theory, replacing a spontaneous ideology (in the Leninist sense, in the sense in which man, whether a union member or an analyst, is by nature an ideological animal—that expression is not Lenin's) with a scientific theory. Now what distinguishes an explicit and conscious scientific theory from the implicit and spontaneous ideology it must replace is a radical discontinuity. In a precise sense, it can be said that pedagogy has nothing of a phenomenology, even a disguised one: there is no internal transition from ideology to science. Every pedagogy is necessarily a break, and to be something other than a compromise or an illusion, it must be pursued within the conscious forms of that break. (I take the term phenomenology, you will understand me, in its Hegelian sense, in the sense of the immanent development of consciousness, from its elementary-originary forms, which negate themselves as elementary-originary in and from the outset of their first position-pretension, until its higher forms, which for Hegel are already "in germ" in the first.) Traditional pedagogy registers that theoretical imperative in its forms of practical existence, if only in the institutional distance separating teachers from students, etc. I won't insist. Those forms may be aberrant in their metamorphoses; they are, as the very existence of the break in essence between ideology and knowledge, essential to the truth of the essence of all pedagogy. That those forms remained at a practical level, without being the object of reflection, is the defining characteristic of the pedagogy of most, if not all, dissemination of knowledge at present. That the nonreflection of those forms of break, which grounds every pedagogy of a science in the inevitable element of ideology, that the nonconcept of those forms of rupture or break—in other words, the lack of an explicit and theoretical thematization of those essential forms of break—can, in certain cases, seriously harm the science that is precisely the object of the pedagogy in question is clarity itself. In certain precise cases the theory of pedagogy, and thus the theory of the break (or of the absolute discontinuity existing between science and ideology), must be theoretically developed and spelled out, since it is organically part of the science that is, precisely, to be taught. I know from experience of a case in which that theorization of the pedagogy of a science as an integral, indispensable part of the very science it is a question of teaching is absolutely indispensable to the theoretical practice of that science: it is philosophy (note that this thematization is, in my opinion, indispensable to every theoretical pedagogy—but that imperative is not acknowledged, except in philosophy, or at least by certain philosophers). The history of philosophy shows that the problem has long (and since Plato himself) been consciously raised by the great philosophers—raised, if not resolved, since all their solutions are mythical, but at least they raised the problem. The mythical solution par excellence, which denies what allows the very positing of the problem—in other words, the theory of the positing of the problem in the very form that excludes not only its solution but its own positing—is Hegel's phenomenology. I skip ahead here; this point—which is, moreover, exciting—is too easy to develop.

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] in treating that great deceased figure in a manner worthy of him, that is, by speaking of him as though he were still alive) 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.

That both groups might be analysts to boot no doubt adds something essential to the mix.

I return to your audience. That condition: everything in your teaching, and, what is more, in its very form, is its denunciation. To be sure, you brought to those who came to receive them from you the results of a fishing expedition in which each could recognize, from a distance at first, then closer up, his own favorite rockfish and all the dark captives of the deep. They were still alive in the net of words. They were yours, but also theirs: multiple fish, and all communed in the public evidence of that proliferation. Yes, they saw that it was their own reserves that you were bringing back to the surface, in those mute and sprightly beings, without perceiving that one can catch anything in a net except the sea. Concerning the sea, you wanted to tell them in a desperate effort that it was there, in its products, and more than the sea, the sky that dominated them, that oppressive layer of air without weight, so light to human respiration that men move in it as in the very liquid of their stare, their voice, without problem, that is, without ever making contact with its problem: that absence of contact, more than the sea or the earth beneath them, supporting their paces and their bodies, and their very contentment, thus, to their very heart. You warned them with numerous great cries, denouncing the illusion of their peace, all the illusions bearing the names of our enemies: bitter cries suspecting that they were often for your audience no more than a mania that one had to allow you, the cost of your freedom, not necessarily the condition of their freedom. Your very language, those turns that they reproached you for, that way of saying in which some who wish you well see the reminder of primordial articulation, in the strangeness of a snapshot in which they suddenly see themselves stared at by a truth that does not return their gaze, in which their very gaze encounters in your words its own void (the stare of their dead eye, which they thought alive), their garrulous ear, its own radical deafness—your very language was a warning, a desperate warning. Those who wish you well hear in that disconcerting silence what they understand as the language of the Other, thus rendered almost present, offstage, among them. They don't see me, but I am among them. They don't hear me, and yet I speak to them. There too their own experience sought and found itself in an ordeal in which it was a question of something entirely else: a theoretical break, and not an allegory of silence.

In brief, that is how I see your public. It is not from within but from without that one can announce that a break has come, that the break is consummated, and that one must, to understand the very interiority one is living, begin by it. This idea, or rather this concept of an absolute (theoretical) exteriority as the enabling condition of a theoretical understanding of interiority itself, is something they had at bottom no desire to receive from you. They have remained in their inside. They think they've got enough for ten years; they never go too far in search of the pleasure of returning home, or rather, when one has traveled a bit, one is happy to take a stroll in the forest at Compiègne, since after all, barely has one left the city and there are the same trees, and the country, and the air, the air! the same air everywhere. They never go too close by in search of the pleasure of returning home. They never go too close by in search of the pleasure (the security) of staying at home.

Could you do more? They would undoubtedly have chased you sooner. And those very warnings through which, talking to them about Hegel and Plato, and philosophy, you hoped to indicate to them that there is a place for theory, that it has its topos, that it has its home, which was not theirs, those very warnings were perhaps also taken for one of your manias, which you had to be forgiven, since it was you, while waiting for it to pass; those references also flattered their need for security, their need not to be alone but to have witnesses on the outside, great witnesses to reassure that anxious ground of their soul which asks only for security and not knowledge. That Ricoeur so moved them I see as a sign that they were above all looking not for the knowledge you wanted to impose on them but for simple recognition, which can, to be sure, take the moving form (but what relation?) of an honest man telling of his relations with psychoanalysis, that is, with his own ignorance. Merleau, Ricoeur, perhaps others soon, gratifications, with the advantage of a certified university label, what the hell, philosophy, which has its officials just as psychiatry has its Delays—with generosity into the bargain, and sincerity, even when one is at the Collège [de France], or one allows oneself to be carried there one day. You were speaking to them about the existence of theory while speaking to them about Hegel and Plato. They understood that for all eternity they were not alone and that, as a result, they could together enjoy the security of the testimony of their existence. You know: that old proof of the existence of God through universal consent, which one sees in certain humanists of the fifteenth century take the form—worthy of their intellectual aristocracy—of proof by the consent of Great Authors.

Could you do more? You were, whatever you did, for them, someone from the inside. At the limit bearing witness about an outside, about the outside. Agreed. But they had in advance delegated to you the portfolio of External Relations without themselves going to take a look. You were their guarantor. They acknowledged that portfolio and that function in you, but on the tacit (radical) condition that you leave them the hell alone by leaving them at home. They let you arrange things, that is, the inside, their inside, their interiority, their "interior," yes, and then, when they felt that the situation was adequate like that, that you were becoming an annoyance, that they had heard enough, that it looked good, a look that classified them, they proceeded in such manner that one day the door would be slammed in your face. That is in order. Not the order of reasons, that is, of Reason, but of proprieties. One has to think of the future, that is, of the present.

All this to give some meaning to what, at the end of our conversation, when we were walking through the streets before the tobacco stands closed, I was saying to you precisely about the outside. Yes, there is an outside, thank God. And one day, willingly or unwillingly (unwillingly, but they will manage one day to put a good face on it), they will have to recognize directly, without an intermediary charged with that impossible mission, without being able to depend on someone who was protecting them from the outside that he was announcing, that such an outside exists.

Outside. You are henceforth outside. In your true place: that of your reasons, of Reason.

There, you are not alone.

It is enough to begin working—you who have not stopped working—it is enough to begin working with those who are working within that outside.

A simple question of organization of work. It can be arranged. There are precedents.

Yours, [Louis Althusser]