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1969

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One reads this short text by Jacques Lacan with interest, a text to which he alludes during the penultimate lesson of the seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.

Intended for publication in the free opinions section of the newspaper Le Monde, it never found its place there.

Lacan presents his reading of the reform that emerged from the events of May 1968, affecting the joint field of the university and psychiatry.

The general framework in which this reform unfolds is indicated: a context of the generalization of capitalist discourse, in which the university participates through a commodification of knowledge transformed into units of value—units that, moreover, are quickly devalued in the market. The well-known student reactions will give rise only to a response that amplifies this generalized commodification.

Also discernible here is the function of sociatry, which, although denounced by Michel Foucault, has been the role of the psychiatrist from the outset—the very role through which, in this context, he can only be called upon to tend to the segregative consequences of this market generalization.

N. D.

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There are no free opinions.

I must state this for the header of this section.

In discourse, freedom is only ever acknowledged in order to reveal the necessity that this artifice exposes. See mathematical discourse, and also free association, operative in psychoanalysis.

The Reform in Psychiatry and the “Scientific” Emotion

A birth is announced as being registered in the civil registry: the birth of psychiatry colleges in a certain number of centers—indeed, even in de-centered locations—across France.

This reform has two levels.

The level of teaching. A marvel: psychiatrists will have their say in it. Even better, they will teach what they know.

The level of their practice. It is instituted on the principle of the function they have fulfilled from the beginning, as social in nature. This principle takes shape in the institution of the sector, which a team takes charge of under the title of mental health, prophylaxis included.

Horrendum: from one level to the other, ascent is foreseen—even permanent back-and-forth movement.

From this arises the fear expressed at the level of the University: namely, from the faculties of medicine and the faculties of letters, even the sciences.

Here is its apparatus: the dominance that results from this sociatry in teaching is of a nature to divert what is promised to this domain in terms of scientific research, for which other means are available.

That pharmaceutical laboratories, in this warning, are promoted to the rank of endangered research leaders, would be conducive to immediately dismissing it. Who, indeed, does not see that chemical solutions are far from leaving the stage?

The objection raised seems to us to merit examination on a more serious basis—not merely, as we are told, summed up by our minister as a response from the level of teaching, rejecting with a kick the term sociatry in order to pin the issue onto the other level.

This term is, in fact, all the more relevant as the very thing it designates is itself pertinent.

Indeed, the social fissure is clear—it will always absorb more personnel, more construction, and more of the money required for it. The cost of this is small compared to the expertise that will now be required to deal with it.

This very expertise is what the university authorities—now alarmed—have, strictly speaking, never wanted to acknowledge at the precise time when they were in charge of overseeing it.

The rest requires that we understand why this was the case—something that will be illuminated by an example.

The Disjunction of the Neurologist from Psychiatry

The example must be crossed as quickly as possible, for it stems from a rut that we are anguished to leave behind—just as I myself experienced it in the aftershock of a dream, a rare formation in my present conjuncture, when, in an initial drafting of this untimely writing, I lingered too long on the said example.

It concerns the conjunction of the neurologist and the psychiatrist within the qualification certificate instituted by the medical faculties. It is known that this is now obsolete, if we adhere to the reform.

Yet, it must be recalled that this conjunction received, for twenty years, the active and doctrinal support of the same psychiatrists who now applaud its end—an end brought about by the force of things, that is to say, by truth when it screams.

It was, of course, with the most pious intention, a matter of standing on the side of what, for them as for so many others, the University held—the thing expressively called the handle.

The handle—of which youth demonstrates to the cadres of a University, showing them what the universe has been lacking for quite some time—that it may be reduced to mere blundering—when, across the entire world, these cadres are now stranded in disarray.

From our example, it becomes clear that, by insisting on the danger that the psychiatrist’s ignorance of a neurological fact posed to medical practice, one neglected the inverse risk—this because the psychiatric fact was held to be subject to everyone’s judgment. Who does not admit that a human formation is sufficient for a supportive therapy?

In their reverence for science, those whom today’s events have awakened were able to acquit themselves more easily back then.

Making pharmacodynamics accessible to (authorized) incompetence was enough for them to consider themselves scientists, in the name of the undeniable fact that the drugs they distributed were produced scientifically and tested in the same manner.

Yet, an ideal appeared on the horizon—a promise: that the security and high scientific rigor of the neurologist (otherwise wise, incidentally, in his therapeutic endorsements) would come to encompass the field believed to have to yield to them—because the cerebral crossroads is the obligatory passage for the psychiatric fact.

Does this mean that it cannot be grasped elsewhere if it originates elsewhere? If it is from elsewhere that it primarily calls upon us? No matter—the widened edges of the vessel offered to its flow function: they stream towards the asylum sites where the community segregates its discordant members. Here, sociatry has not been disregarded for nearly two centuries, and it is not scrutinized closely enough for a scientific order to be discernible within it at a second level—for example, as the effect of science upon the social.

The net benefit of the process is the maintenance of a position of prestige, one known to contribute significantly to medical efficacy.

And it matters little whether the ideal thus proposed is a dead end—something already manifest in the fact that no formation (for here lies the crux), no formation is more ill-suited than that of the neurologist to prepare one for grasping the psychiatric fact.

Of Knowledge at Low Cost

The concern for science is then relegated to the hands of psychologists, testers, and sociological assistants if you will—an immense workforce, which, having been devalued by this very relegation, is in turn suspected of remaining underdeveloped from a scientific standpoint.

Let there be no mistake: there is no contestation here of the role of medicine in this matter—only the denunciation of the crime in which it partakes as an academic institution.

At the level of medicine, as elsewhere, preserving the benefits of knowledge is indeed the most minimal definition one can give of the University’s mission. It implies the preemption of training as an effect of knowledge upon the value by which a market prices it.

In medicine, as elsewhere, the University certainly did not fail in this regard.

But it was overtaken by the subversion arising from what we designate as the market.

And we do so rightly, since the value at stake here has fallen below that which is at play in the capitalist market—a market that establishes it on the basis of commodities and the radicalization it carries out by incorporating labor into it.

Must one state elementary truths and declare here what is obscured by those who seek to protect knowledge? Namely, that knowledge is not acquired through labor—and even less so the training that is its effect?

This is by no means a denial of the knowledge possessed by the worker, or, if one prefers, by the people—but an assertion that, no more than scholars, does he acquire it through his labor.

Galileo, Newton, Mendel, Gallois, Bohr, or the darling little James D. Watson owe nothing to their own labor, but rather to that of others. And their discoveries are transmitted in an instant to whoever has merely undergone the kind of training produced by short circuits of the same order—numerous ones—even if school-induced boredom has extinguished the memory of them.

Any mother knows that reading is an obstacle to her work; the first laborer that comes along knows that it is an escape from his; the communist worker knows that it grants him his letters of nobility.

So then, what is the inherent value rating of knowledge?

Of a Hole and the Small Heap That Unclogs It as It Clogs It

This is where the function intervenes, one that can only be articulated through psychoanalytic theory—the one I have tied to the effects of knowledge by which the subject is inaugurated, as an effect of loss, signified by a cut in the body, under the algebraic designation of the object (a). Read: little a; the illiterate, confined to the use of speech alone, translate it as small heap, a mere computational glitch.

This determination is sufficient, yet also necessary, to properly situate what all of philosophy has failed to grasp: the cause, or rather the acause of desire.

In the latest developments of a discourse that continues, I have correlated it with the function expressed by surplus-jouissance (Mehrlust—obviously homologous to Marx’s Mehrwert, but certainly not analogous, as it is rather a cause than an effect of the market).

There are readers of these lines to whom the impact of my Écrits on psychoanalytic practice has reached. But the fact that they are now addressed to the reader of Le Monde, quo talis est, does not preclude advising him to refer to them, since, contrary to the prose in which I am kindly granted a place, said Écrits cannot be read diagonally: rather, let us say that the formative effect that mathematical invention knows how to extract from such a grasp can only remain indistinct here, due to a still insufficient formalization.

Yet, with a little effort, one would see that the object (a) is much better suited to making love to the specular image it perforates than to animating the whirlwind it stirs up as surplus-jouissance.

Any ideal taken from anywhere suffices for this, and until now, that of an Other supposed to know. This is what the psychoanalyst dares to offer you as transference.

A fruitful impudence—to produce truth: first, the truth that only it necessitates work.

It is the work required to constitute man’s identification, and then, with regard to the jouissance encountered in the woman from whom he was born, to undo it: that is, to rediscover the hole—at last, vivid—of castration, from which the woman emerges in veracity.

Such is, at least, the path that neurosis has paved for the psychoanalyst so that he may complete it in truth through its repetition.

This is something he can only accomplish by supposing himself to be in désêtre, as nothing but a desire to know.

Which is as much as saying that for the formation of the psychoanalyst to be removed from the hands of helots, conveniently corralled in an international reserve (but this is another story, not to be dealt with here…).

It should, by right and by obligation, be received by anyone who henceforth wishes to be responsible for a teaching as one that forms toward science.

This leaves little opportunity for certain patrons to continue the customary, graduated, ceremonial, or direct access of their students to their interior—whether social or of retreat, preferably not familial, and certainly not dissipated.

Perhaps it would be better (for he is not a type to be imagined based on what currently appears of him) if the psychoanalyst also did without it for himself and lived in a draft—if only to prove that he is neither cold-footed nor blind-eyed, nor stifled in the throat. There is no longer a teat for Tiresias to cover.

Such is the price to pay for the value of knowledge to rise again on the market, for from there, the necessary selection may impose itself upon those who wish to see their shares listed.

The selection will be structuralist or will not be. The subject of science has nothing to do with the puffed-up inflation that dominates the market of influence.

I do not say this out of knowing what it sometimes costs to put one’s house in order on this matter, but to remind where the object (a) also resides.

The Stir of May and Its Memory in the Capitalist Subject

Thinking about it, one sees more clearly the confluence of biases, the rippling motif of the stir of May (as it will come to be called).

This is not to diminish its meaning. For the anxiety of young bourgeois at seeing influence in dire straits due to what we recognize as the contraction of the market does not strip them of the merit of having highlighted something that anyone calculating a reform would do well to consider. That is, they will not be kept quiet by the promise that next time, they will have nothing left to welcome it with but golden cobblestones.

For what they were rejecting under the title of the consumer society and of cars that serve only to clutter sidewalks were the objects this society expects to satisfy them with in excess—because they do not replace the fateful object (a).

The universal capitalist submersion has not finished oscillating from West to East. It has its role to play.

The “never again like before” with which the memory-work (maimorisation) of good souls becomes hoarse must be taken in its comic—therefore, disheartening—aspect. For it is clear that it is more than ever like before, and that the stir of May accelerates what caused it.

The “unit of value” promoted as the measure of diploma-based rewards confesses, in the manner of an enormous lapse, what we pinpoint as the reduction of knowledge to a function of the market.

As for the psychiatric “sector”, its outlines emerge—no less than in the new daycare centers labeled as universities—the final point toward which the system is tending, should the science that still aids it succumb: namely, the generalized concentration camp.

The whirlwind intensifies around the hole, without any way to cling to the edge—because this edge is the hole itself, and what rebels at being drawn into it is its center.

It is not youth that can slow the wheel in which it is caught, when it is within youth that the hub—by virtue of its inexistence—comes to pay a visit to some.

For the subject of events, as much as it drifts about, is not consciousness—and this is why its response never comes from a group, but always from a single head.

To make sense of it, one must know that the present is contingent, just as the past is futile. It is from the future that one must hold on to the fact—against Aristotle, who faltered on this point—that the present derives what necessity it has. The unknown victor of tomorrow is already in command today.

This 3rd of February, 1969