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(All parts in English)

8 May: Since Lacan adhered to the strike order of the National Union of Higher Education (S.N.E.Sup.), he did not hold his seminar on May 8 and 15, but he was present.

I came today just as I did eight days ago, expecting that there would be a certain number of people here, in order to maintain contact.

No more than eight days ago will I do what I am accustomed to doing here under the name of a course or seminar, insofar as I am adhering to the strike directive which, I believe, still stands at this hour, from the National Union of Higher Education.

That is simply a matter of discipline. That is not, however—if one may say so, which would be desirable—living up to the events. In truth, it is not very convenient for many.

As for me, I have to concern myself… I have always emphasized this for a very long time, and it is not now that I will deny what I have always taken care to repeat… only with psychoanalysts, I speak to psychoanalysts, it is for psychoanalysts that I believe I have been sustaining for many years a labor which is far from negligible. I would even say, to a certain extent, that this is an occasion for me to realize it, because the mere fact of not having to prepare one of these seminars, since it was already prepared for the last time, I feel how relieving it is for me.

Naturally, it opens the door to all sorts of things. At the same time, I can become aware of something that effort and labor always conceal, namely, my dissatisfactions. It also gives me the opportunity perhaps to read articles that I inevitably let pass like that, just from seeing their signature. One must read the articles even of people from whom one knows in advance what to expect. It has happened to me like that to be very surprised, I’m talking about articles by my colleagues, of course!

Well, for now, to live up to the events, I would say that, although psychoanalysts bring their testimony of sympathy to those who found themselves caught in rather harsh encounters, which required—this must be emphasized—very, very great courage, one must have received, as we sometimes do, we psychoanalysts, the confidence of what is felt in those moments in order to better assess, at its truest value, what that courage represents. Because from the outside, like that, of course, one admires, but one does not always realize that the merit is no less great in the fact that, really, some guys, at certain moments, are truly carried away by something which is the feeling of being absolutely bonded with their comrades: that they express this as they wish, that what is so exhilarating in singing the Internationale at the moment one is being beaten, it is that surface.

Because obviously, the Internationale is a very beautiful song, but I do not believe that they would have this absolutely irrepressible feeling that they cannot be anywhere other than where they are, if they did not feel carried by a sense of absolute community, there, in action with those with whom they are shoulder to shoulder. That is something that ought to be explored, as people say without knowing what they’re saying, in depth.

I mean that it does not seem to me, returning to our psychoanalysts, that the fact of signing, in this regard, even if we are also very much shoulder to shoulder—but after all, it is not quite of the same nature—we can be seventy-five… since that is, it seems, the figure, as was said last night… signing a text of protest against the regime and its agents, I mean its police agents.

Of course, it is commendable, and no one should be dissuaded from affixing their signature to such a protest, but it is slightly inadequate, it is precisely insufficient. If all of us sign it, people from all origins and from all backgrounds: very well! But signing as a psychoanalyst… moreover, very quickly also opened to the side of psychologists… that seems to me a rather easy way of doing what I mentioned earlier: considering oneself as having discharged one’s duty with the events.

It seems that when something of this order occurs, of such seismic nature, one might perhaps question oneself when one has had a responsibility, because after all, psychoanalysts have had a responsibility in… one cannot say in teaching since they are not, none of them—as for me, I’m on the edges, on the margins—none of them are properly speaking in the University, but then again, the University is not the only one responsible at the level of teaching. Perhaps, after all, one could say that psychoanalysts have not been very concerned with what could nevertheless be easily connoted at a level of relations which, although collective, nonetheless fell directly under a certain heading, a certain field, a certain knot, which is their own.

Let’s try to call this without insisting too heavily on the fact that after all we ourselves have pointed it out, that somewhere, in our Écrits, there is a text titled “Science and Truth” which is not completely out of season, to get a small idea, that what is happening cannot be reduced to what we would call “effects of turbulence” occurring here and there.

There is someone… whom I cannot say I do not esteem, he is one of my comrades, we sat on the same benches, with ties between us, and we became quite acquainted… he is a friend: Mr. Raymond ARON, who wrote an article this morning in a newspaper that reflects the thinking of honest people, and who says: this is happening everywhere.

But in saying that, for him it means, precisely, they are a bit agitated everywhere, everyone must calm them down according to what is wrong in each place. It is because, it seems, in each place there is always something that is wrong, that that is why they are stirring.

It starts, of course, as you know, at Columbia, that is to say, right in the middle of New York. I’ve had very precise and quite recent reports, and then it goes all the way to Warsaw, I don’t need to do the mapping.

That no one would at least want to ask themselves, or at the very least that it would be resolutely dismissed… as is the thrust of this article, written in very fine tone… that there must be a much more structural phenomenon at play, and since I alluded to this corner, this knot, this field, for me it is quite clear that the relations between desire and knowledge are being questioned, and that psychoanalysis also allows this to be tied together at a level of lack, of insufficiency which is properly speaking stimulated, evoked by these relations which are the relations of the transmission of knowledge.

Echoing are all sorts of currents, elements, forces, as one says, a whole dynamic, and on that note I will refer once more to that article I read recently. There was emphasis on the idea that, in a certain order of teaching—mine, to name it—the energetic dimension would be neglected. I very much admire that these energeticists have not at all noticed the displacements of energy that may be underlying there; perhaps this energy has a certain interest in terms of theoretical evocation, but tying things together at the level of a logical and even logician’s reference, in a time when there is much talk of dialogue, could have a certain interest.

In any case, I think—and I seem, it seems to me, to be confirmed by the event in the fact—that in finding that this is the manageable, the articulable aspect of what we are dealing with, I am not wrong to lean on it as much as I can, where it is dispensed with, or where one even believes it should be dispensed with, where one will readily speak of “intellectualization”—that’s the big word as you know—there is no particular sense of orientation regarding what is happening, nor a proper appreciation of the weights involved and of the genuine and authentic energetics of the thing.

I note in passing a simple small pinning for information: we had in a meeting of that thing called my School, which took place last night, one of the heads of this insurrection—not at all an ill-formed head. In any case, it is not someone who lets himself be fooled nor who says foolish things, he knows very well how to respond with wit, and when one asks him a question, I must say, quite a touching one like this:

“Tell us, dear friend, from where you stand, what could you expect from psychoanalysts?”

Which is really a completely insane way to pose the question! I’ve been killing myself saying that psychoanalysts should be the ones expecting something from the insurrection. There are those who retort:

“What would the insurrection want to expect from us?”

The insurrection replies to them:

“What we expect from you for now is, when the occasion arises, to help us throw paving stones!”

To lighten the atmosphere a little, I pointed out at that moment, it was a discreet indication, that at the level of dialogue, the paving stone fulfills exactly a prescribed function, the one I have called the object (a). I have already indicated that there is a certain variety in the object (a). The paving stone is an object (a) that corresponds to another one, really, then, a capital one for any future ideology of dialogue when it begins from a certain level: it is what we call the tear gas grenade!

Let us leave it at that. But indeed we have learned, from an authoritative voice, who naturally found himself taking an immediate advantage over what might otherwise have unfolded, that, at the outset, all that stirred in the beginning in a certain field, namely at Nanterre—it was truly an insight—we learned that the ideas of REICH… you may believe me if you wish, many here are inclined to believe me since I am passing it on to them, it surprises me but it is a fact… were frightening to them, and this around very specific conflicts that were manifesting in the field of a certain university campus.

It is still interesting. It is interesting for psychoanalysts, for example, who can consider… as for me, this is my position… that REICH’s ideas are not simply incomplete, that they are fundamentally demonstrable as false.

The entire analytic experience, if we are willing to articulate it properly… and not consider it as a kind of place of whirlwinds, of confused forces, an energetics of “life instincts” and “death instincts” intertwining with each other… if we are willing to put a bit of order into what we objectify in an experience that is a language experience, we will see that REICH’s theory is formally contradicted by our everyday experience.

Only, since psychoanalysts bear absolutely no testimony on matters that could really interest everyone, precisely on this subject of the relations between one sex and the other, things in that realm are truly wide open, in the sense that anyone can say anything, and it shows on every level.

I was reading yesterday… since I now have time for reading… a little publication called Concilium—this happens at the level of the priests. There were two fairly brilliant articles on the access of women to the functions of priesthood, in which a number of categories were stirred, those of the relations between man and woman.

It is exactly, of course, as if psychoanalysts had never said anything on the matter. Not, of course, that the authors do not read psychoanalytic literature—they read everything—but if they do read that literature, they will find absolutely nothing that brings them anything new compared to what has always been stirred around this confused notion: who, between man and woman, is… in regard to whatever you like: Being… the superior, the more worthy, and all that follows.

Because, ultimately, it is still striking that what, at the level of experience, was denoted by psychoanalysts, has been so perfectly drowned out by them, that in the end, it is exactly as if there had never been any psychoanalysts.

Obviously, all this is a point of view that you may perhaps consider a bit personal. It is clear that under that sort of note with which I believed I should open in a certain tone a certain publication that is mine and that I emphasize with a designation I call failure, namely that almost everything I have tried, myself, to articulate, and that—I must say—one only needs a bit of distance to realize that not only is it articulated, but it is articulated with a certain force, and that it will remain so, attached, as testimony of something in which one can find oneself, where there is a north, a south, an east and a west, it may be noticed, after all, when psychoanalysts are no longer around to render it, by the mere fact of what they make of it, absolutely ineffective.

In the meantime, manifestos of solidarity with students are signed just as one would for the unemployed, which is still not the same thing, or anyone who, in a scuffle, might get beaten up.

In short, nonetheless there is something being realized, something one might find quite well written in advance. I have said that in any case, even if psychoanalysts refuse, at all costs, to be up to the level of what they are entrusted with, what they are entrusted with nonetheless exists, and in any case will nonetheless make itself felt in its effects… first part of my propositions, here we are… and it will still be necessary that there be people who try to be up to the level of a certain type of effects which were, in a way, offered and predestined to be addressed by certain people within a certain framework.

If it is not those people, it will necessarily be others, because there is no case where, when effects become a bit insistent, one doesn’t have to eventually realize they are there and try to operate within their field.

I told you all this just like that, so that you didn’t come here for nothing.