PSYCHOANALYTIC STRUCTURALISM IN THE CAHIERS POUR L'ANALYSE

Abstract

This paper examines key articles contained within the experimental journal of philosophy Cahiers pour l'Analyse, published in Paris between 1966 and 1969, with a view to assessing the different ways in which Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, along with Althusser's structural Marxism, were appropriated by the journal's authors. In particular, early writings by Jacques-Alain Miller and André Green published in the journal are interrogated for the differences they reveal in the ways that “object,” “formalization” and “subject” were conceived by the theoretical partisans of structuralism in 1960s Paris. More broadly, the article argues for a renewed attention to the formation of Lacanian-inflected structuralist thought, with a view to understanding the underlying conceptual conflicts, more than the seeming continuities, that made it such a dynamic, transdisciplinary moment in the evolution of Western philosophy.

Keywords:

• Lacan
• structuralism
• Althusser
• formalization
• psychoanalysis

Notes

A version of this paper was first delivered at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy research seminar at Kingston University, London, in January 2011. I am grateful to all those who attended, and especially those whose searching questions have informed this revised version of the paper. I am also grateful for the insightful comments of Angelaki's anonymous readers.

For representative examples, see Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005); Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2007).

The lead investigator on the Cahiers project was Professor Peter Hallward of Kingston University, London. Dr Christian Kerslake served as project fellow, in collaboration first with Ray Brassier and then Knox Peden. I am exceptionally grateful for their hard work, without which this paper would not have been possible.

A website produced as part of the project, containing all of the journal's articles, along with synopses, interviews and other scholarly texts, is available at: <http://www.kingston.ac.uk/cahiers>.

See, most recently, Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2009) 43–79; Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009) 124.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology [1958], no trans. (New York: Basic, 1976).

Louis Althusser, Freud and Lacan in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971) 189–221.

Jacques Lacan, The Logic of Phantasy 1966–1967, trans. and ed. Cormac Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts, available <http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACAN-XIV.pdf> (accessed 12 Dec. 2010).

Ibid., lesson of 10 May 1967.

Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” [1949] and “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis” [1948] in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006) 75–81, 82–101.

Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX, trans. Bruce Fink; ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1999).

Available in English in Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, eds., Interpreting Lacan (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983) 161–93.

Jacques Lacan, Science and Truth in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006) 726–46.

André Green, “The Logic of Lacan's objet (a) and Freudian Theory: Convergences and Questions” in Interpreting Lacan, eds. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (New Haven: Yale UP) 168, hereafter Green, “Logic.”

Ibid. 166.

Ibid. 164.

Recent scholarship by Lorenzo Chiesa and Adrian Johnston has similarly emphasized the importance of recognizing the conceptual continuities in Lacan's work; see Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2007); Adrian Johnston, Time-Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2005).

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan; ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Penguin, 1994) 79–91.

Green, “Logic” 176.

André Green, The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse [1973], trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1999).

Green, “Logic.”

André Green, Le Discours vivant. La Conception psychanalytique de l'affect (Paris: PUF, 1973).

Lacan, Encore 84.

Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 2007) 54.

In an article originally published in the final edition of the Cahiers, Alain Badiou takes Miller to task for misrepresenting the fundamentally self-enclosed and self-sufficient domain of number. While, for Miller, the self-identical field of number necessarily covers over or “sutures” its grounding in the non-identical, for Badiou no such ground is necessary; instead, the signal benefit of mathematical logic is its ability to provide its own self-guarantee. There is no room here to enquire after how Badiou's thesis fits into the more general conjunction of Lacanianism and Althusserianism in the Cahiers, but for an illuminating discussion see Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011) 66–76.

Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier” [1966], The Symptom 8 (winter 2007), available <http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/miller8.html> (accessed 12 Dec. 2010); hereafter Miller, “Suture.”

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Miller's arguments refer to Gottlieb Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954).

Miller, “Suture.”

Ibid.

Ibid.

Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 207.

Miller, “Suture.”

Jacques-Alain Miller, “Matrice,” Ornicar? 4 (1975); translated into English by Daniel G. Collins in Lacanian Ink 24.

Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III, trans. Russell Grigg; ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Routledge, 1993) 81.

Ibid.

Ibid. 33.

Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital [1968], trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009) 208–09.

Louis Althusser, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter” in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978–1987, trans. G.M. Goshgarian; eds. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet (London: Verso, 2006) 163–208.

Robert Paul Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991).

Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.

In 1966, and only published posthumously, Althusser composed a set of notes entitled “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses.” Therein, he charged psychoanalysis with lacking a “general theory” to render consistent its “regional theories” as they manifested in clinical interventions. The formalism of Althusser's insistence on such a division, arguably undermined in Lacan's insistence on the implication of the concept of the unconscious at all levels or “regions” of theoretical knowledge, is reproduced in Miller's own tendency to place the elements of structures into complementary but distinct regions, in “Suture” manifesting as the strict distinction between the non-identical and the identical. More work is necessary in order to fully understand the relationship between Althusser's aborted research into scientific discourse and Miller's subsequent synthesis of Althusserian and Lacanian themes. See Louis Althusser, “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses” in Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966–7), trans. G.M. Goshgarian; ed. François Matheron (New York: Verso, 2003).

Jacques-Alain Miller, “Action of the Structure,” The Symptom 10 (spring 2009), available <http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=423> (accessed 12 Dec. 2010).

Ibid.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss [1950], trans. Felicity Baker (New York: Routledge, 1987).

Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire Livre XXIII. Le Sinthome, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Champ Freudien, 2005).

Benedictus de Spinoza, Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley; ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002) 82.