Elisabeth Roudinesco's Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault's Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, and Myron Kofman's Edgar Morin
Wolin, Richard
FOR SOME time time now it has been fashionable to bemoan the end of the age of the great French intellectuals. In the early 1980s, Sartre, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, and Foucault all passed from the...
...She estimates that he earned approximately four million francs a year from his practice —close to $2 million in 1998 dollars...
...Just as Nietzsche spoke of the "will to power" as the hidden motivation underlying all human pursuits, even the most sublime—religion, philosophy, and so forth— Foucault invokes the "will to knowledge" to characterize the nefarious and inescapable entwinement of reasoning and social power...
...They were among the first on the French left to understand that the traditional Marxist 122 DISSENT / Summer 1998 recipe for social revolution, based on the thesis of proletarian immiseration, was no longer tenable...
...It seems that toward the end of his life Foucault experienced a change of heart concerning a number of matters of fundamental intellectual significance...
...Nevertheless, the Parisian Psychoanalytic Society, sensing that in Lacan they had a wunderkind, awarded him the status of training analyst...
...To a question from Noam Chomsky concerning cognitive process, Lacan had the following to say: "We think we think with our brains...
...Instead, he viewed it, constructively, as an epoch in which systematic reflection on the historical present and the possibilities it contained first took hold...
...Instead, in an age of unprecedented working-class affluence, it needed to be conceptualized "psychologically": in terms of lost capacities for selffulfillment and self-realization...
...Jacques Lacan, a figure who towered over the French psychoanalytic establishment for three decades, and who is often ranked alongside these master thinkers, died in August 1981...
...I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my DISSENT /Summer 1998 121 own transformation...
...On his honeymoon Lacan sent telegrams to a former girlfriend...
...Most follow the standard hagiographic lines established by the master himself and perpetuated by his intellectual heirs...
...Whereas the right sought to repress disorder in the name of logic, authority, and the state, the left, by embracing chaos and complexity, sought to further the ends of anarchistic freedom...
...One of the highlights of Roudinesco's narrative concerns a trip Lacan made to the United States in 1975, at the beginning of his Borromean phase...
...With his first family (he would have three other children with MarieLouise Blondin) he maintained a fiction of domestic tranquility...
...Instead, they are concerned with what Foucault calls an "aesthetics of existence"— the "choice of a beautiful life...
...Lacan had arrived at the iconoclastic (and rather un-Freudian) conclusion that the ego was in essence an agent of dissimulation and deception, of narcissistic resistance to the voice of the unconscious...
...Through the contributions of Lefebvre, Arguments introduced the idea of a "critique of everyday life...
...Toward the end of his life, Lacan presented something of a sad spectacle...
...The work is divided into two parts...
...At the time Freud's ideas were beginning to gain a foothold in France—not only among the psychiatric establishment, but also, due to the surrealist rehabilitation of the unconscious, among the Parisian bohemian literati as well...
...He became obsessed with "Borromean knots"— made of rope that supposedly originated from the mythical planet Borromeo...
...Several years later, Lacan began a long-term affair with Georges Bataille's actress wife, Sylvia...
...If the reign of power-knowledge and the "punitive society" is indeed as total as Foucault leads us to believe, are there any prospects for escape...
...They never seemed to figure in his own self-analysis...
...Only by sacrificing the intellectual radicalism of its master thinkers was France able to reenter the discourse of contemporary democracy...
...women had quite a few options: they could deceive their husbands, pilfer money from them, refuse them sex...
...He had become convinced that political problems were a mere subset of broader ecological and cosmic themes...
...Lacan's great feat was to imbibe these currents, according them legitimacy within the influential framework of French psychoanalytic circles...
...In these pre-Christian, pagan contexts selfcontrol was devoted to the ends of living to the utmost—"Marcus Aurelius was thinking of that when he wrote that 'moral perfection requires that one spend each day as if it were the last,'" observes Foucault—rather than those of self-abnegation...
...As psychoanalysts began to flee Nazi-dominated Central Europe, a few of Freud's followers found their way to Paris...
...The decade's reigning assumption was that the life span of liberal democracy in Europe was exhausted, that the spirit of progress and Enlightenment had played itself out...
...According to Lacan, the symbolic stage coincides with the child's acquisition of language, an event that also signals the onset of socialization...
...by then the sessions had shrunk to an average of five minutes...
...In 1968 Morin, along with Castoriadis and Lefort, co-authored La Breche, a May '68 postmortem, which celebrated the anarchistic energies that the movement had unleashed...
...Louis Althusser experienced a metaphorical death: after strangling his wife, he was found incompetent to stand trial and institutionalized for many years until his actual death (at home) in 1991...
...The work of Jurgen Habermas, an intrepid defender of Enlightenment reason and the "unfinished project of modernity," is also sympathetically treated...
...Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting...
...personally, I think with my feet...
...For someone intent on seeding the French psychoanalytic scene with his own intellectual and clinical progeny, such limitations seemed intolerable...
...When it first appeared in France in 1993, it created no small stir: the French are still relatively unaccustomed to acknowledging that their beloved intellectuals have feet of clay— and then some...
...Convinced that they were the path through which one might unlock the secrets of reality, he exchanged information about their hidden properties with a group of intimates...
...WHERE HAVE all the French intellectuals gone...
...Thereafter, his thought would revolve around the manichean conceptual opposition between "order and disorder," which he came to associate with the political divide between right and left...
...In 1963, Lacan and most other members of the French Psychoanalytic Society were expelled from the IPA outright...
...For the most part they pertain to his reconceptualization of "power," which has been so influential in the areas of history, social theory, and liter120 DISSENT / Summer 1998 ary criticism...
...but the unorthodox Marxism of the Arguments group went even further...
...DISSENT / Summer 1998 123...
...Initially, Lacan drew the line at twenty minutes...
...Elisabeth Roudinesco, herself a Lacanian analyst and the author of the standard two-volume history of the French psychoanalytic movement, La Bataille de cent ans (the second volume has been translated into English as Jacques Lacan & Co...
...I know that knowledge can tranform us, that truth is not only a way of deciphering the world, but that if I know the truth I will be changed...
...In Lacan's view, Freud's émigré followers were the real heretics, insofar as they departed from the depth-psychological orientation of Freud's theory of the instincts, emphasizing instead the centrality of the ego...
...That Lacan's fellow analysts and patients continued to justify such practices, claiming that unpredictable session length greatly enhanced one's power to "free associate," offers pathetic insight concerning the uncritical reverence with which even his most far-fetched ideas were viewed...
...He departs from his characteristic concern with modes of subjugation and instead concentrates on "ethics...
...The time had come to embrace the demons that lurked beneath the veneer of civilized respectability...
...One wonders...
...Along with Socialism or Barbarism (led by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, who also contributed regularly to Arguments) and the Situationist International, the kind of cultural or philosophical Marxism developed in Arguments provided the theoretical inspiration for May '68...
...The course summaries are valuable insofar as they demonstrate the way Foucault's research interests changed during the last decade and a half of his life...
...Roudinesco's insinuations of IPA smallmindedness in this connection fail to convince...
...RICHARD WOLIN teaches European intellectual history at Rice University...
...But of at least equal interest are his candid remarks about the relationship between his research interests and his personal life...
...Even his earlier suspicions of "rule of law" and the "rights of man" as normative, hence normalizing, constructs underwent a thoughtful reevaluation...
...In a rebuff to the Enlightenment view of knowledge as something that will ultimately set us free, Foucault claims that systems of thought are always implicated in the reproduction of power relations...
...the great technical adventure requires an active life of play where man, becoming aware of just this adventure, attempts to live...
...His co-editors were the leading lights of a dissident French Marxism with a Lukacsian, autogestionniste slant: former resistants Kostas Axelos and Henri Lefebvre, as well as for a time Roland Barthes...
...A 1982 interview, for example, contains the following stark confession: I am really not a good academic...
...And maybe I will be saved...
...At the same time, the risks of this new "cultural Marxism" were also apparent...
...From there it is but a short step to his depiction of modernity tout court as a "punitive" or "carceral" society, in which disciplinary practices predominate at all levels...
...According to Roudinesco, during the final two years of his practice, Lacan saw an average of ten patients DISSENT / Summer 1998 119 an hour...
...The concept of the "mirror stage"—crucial to the formation of the infant's self—dates from the 1930s...
...It was a decade of constant political tumult, punctuated by frequent changes of government, a failed right-wing coup attempt, a rising Nazi threat, the growth of an internal fascist menace, the ignominy of Munich and Vichy...
...And given the vehemence with which they had deconstructed the shibboleths of liberalism ("man," "the subject," and so on), there was little hope that they might recoup their losses...
...Renegade concepts such as "post-Marxism" were freely bandied about...
...The standpoint of Arguments was resolutely undogmatic, its criticisms of the reigning forms of bureaucratic communism relentless...
...Here, Sartre's theory of authenticity played a key role...
...By jettisoning inherited Stalinist orthodoxies, its editors were able to expose the French left to an unprecedented range of themes...
...There are historical reasons that help explain the decline of France's master thinkers...
...For Lacan, this view represented a betrayal of the radical implications of Freud's original doctrine...
...r4 MAR MORIN is one of France's more fascinating intellectual mavericks...
...But toward the end of Lacan's clinical career, even twenty minutes seemed too restrictive...
...I do occasionally think with my forehead, when I bang into something...
...Lacan's notoriety derived not only from his revolutionary refashioning of psychoanalytic theory—accomplished in the name of a "return to Freud...
...Part I reproduces the course summaries that Foucault was required to provide for his annual lectures at the College de France...
...Lacan's concept of the imaginary refers to the intrinsic falsifications of the self that coincide with the construction of the ego...
...With this conceptual armature, Lacan attempted to deliver his final assault against ego psychology and what he disparagingly referred to as the "Americanization of psychoanalysis...
...But most of Lacan's other innovations —above all, his notions of the "symbolic" and "imaginary" stages of development—date from the 1950s...
...Early on in his career Lacan perceived the classical psychoanalytic hour (already clipped to forty-five minutes) as an unacceptable obstacle to the number of patients he could see per week...
...You see, that's why I really work like a dog, and I worked like a dog all my life...
...Increasingly, Morin himself turned away from everyday politics...
...In the early 1980s, Sartre, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, and Foucault all passed from the scene...
...This landed him in hot water with the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), which refused to accept Lacan-trained analysts as a result of the Master's unorthodox practices...
...The audience was stupefied...
...But I've seen enough electroencephalograms to know there's not the slightest trace of a thought in the brain...
...Part II contains interviews and short works from Foucault's final years...
...In the interviews contained in part II, Foucault reflects further on the methodological implications of his work...
...He could hardly be expected to support such tastes on an analyst's income alone...
...This apocalyptic mood was reflected in the intellectual fashions of the day: Alexandre Kojeve's theory of the "end of history," Georges Bataille's glorification of tribal communities, Martin Heidegger's portentous philosophical hymns to Being...
...In 1956, the year of Khrushchev's Twentieth Party Congress Speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he cofounded the anti-Stalinist political review Arguments...
...The transformation of one's self by one's own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to aesthetic experience...
...In his seminars and his analytic sessions, Lacan ceased to speak...
...Roudinesco tries to minimize the body count among Lacan's patients—several took their own lives—contending that the suicides reflected the type of borderline patient Lacan was willing to see rather than his shortcomings as an analyst...
...Predictably, the bourgeois institution of marriage soon proved too restrictive for Lacan, whom Roudinesco describes as "polygamous by nature...
...Yet, as Roudinesco points out, Lacan's criticisms of the ego and its elaborate deceptions and defense mechanisms stopped at home...
...His attitude toward the Enlightenment changed...
...In 1934 Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin...
...The following year, however, the Pompidou-led Gaullists enjoyed a resounding electoral victory, and May seemed a distant memory...
...Upon his death in 1981, Lacan had four bank accounts, three Paris apartments, and a sumptuous home in the country...
...The next generation of French philosophers—the poststructuralists—seeking to make an absolute break with the norms of bourgeois society, staked their reputations on the concept of "antihumanism...
...Her study is an important one insofar as it chronicles the grandeur and delusions not only of Lacan himself, but of an entire generation of French analysts and intellectuals who succumbed to his mesmerizing influence...
...It may come as a surprise to many that, according to Foucault, power is never as totalizing as it may appear on first view: it inevitably breeds opposition and resistance...
...As the philosopher observes: Even when the power relation is completely out of balance, when it can truly be claimed that one side has "total power" over the other, a power can be exercised over the other only insofar as the other still has the option of killing himself, of leaping out the window, or of killing the other person...
...Instead, they were succeeded by a new generation of neoliberal thinkers (Alain Finkielkraut, Luc Ferry, Alain Renaut) who were politically respectable but intellectually unexceptional...
...The problem, however, was that it became increasingly difficult to find a suitable political vehicle through which they might be realized, especially once it had become clear that the prospects of reforming Marxism from within were negligible...
...Apparently none of them had yet seen the light emanating from planet Borromeo...
...In the early course summaries Foucault's neo-Nietzschean pairing of power and knowledge occupies pride of place...
...Entire issues of the journal were devoted to heretical topics such as "The Problem of Love" and "The Problem of Cosmology...
...Her research is exhaustive and breaks entirely new ground...
...Arguments folded in 1962...
...Nor were the oppressive features of postwar capitalism—consumerism, advertising, French colonialism—spared...
...Kant, who in The Order of Things had been denigrated as a progenitor of the pernicious "sciences of man," comes in for a favorable reassessment...
...Morin remains a sympathetic figure whose intellectual and political good faith has never been in doubt...
...His work is little known outside of French intellectual circles, and Myron Kofman's Edgar Morin: From Big Brother to Fraternity is a useful introduction to a representative, if complex, intellectual odyssey that has spanned five decades...
...Nor was Lacan adept at observing traditional Freudian strictures against using transference to his own libidinal advantage...
...In this context, Freud's doctrine of the unconscious—his heretical claim that the human ego or consciousness, far from being master of its own household, was a mere plaything of underlying forces—seemed predestined for a great career...
...The emancipatory ideals that had animated Morin's youth always remained keen...
...Hence, the phenomenon of "alienation" could no longer be understood in the traditional Marxist idiom of mass impoverishment...
...Among the most prominent was Rudolph Loewenstein, a proponent of ego psychology who would become Lacan's training analyst...
...but politically speaking their approach proved disastrous...
...They recognized that the industrial base of the French working class was shrinking, and that workers themselves were becoming more integrated, more bourgeois...
...T. HE FIRST of a projected three-volume collection of Michel Foucault's essential works, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth provides a wonderful entrée to Foucault's otherwise difficult oeuvre...
...His admirers were convinced that such behavior was an expression of his genius...
...In Cambridge, he addressed an audience of MIT linguists, eager to learn what words of wisdom France's psychoanalytic guru might have to dispense...
...Few on the established political left found much in Morin's ideas with which they could identify...
...His most controversial innovation was his employment of so-called short sessions...
...As far as the ultimate serviceability of his ideas and theoretical legacy is concerned, a healthy skepticism would be in order...
...In one well-known case in which he had fallen in love with a patient's daughter whom he refused to stop seeing, the patient committed suicide...
...They were, one might say, philosophically successful...
...Thus the man who for three decades would reign as France's leading train118 DISSENT / Summer 1998 ing analyst never completed his own analysis...
...For me, intellectual work is related to what you could call 'aestheticism,' meaning transforming yourself...
...The Arguments group was able to address a range of important cultural themes that helped update Marxist thought in light of the changing nature of postwar capitalist society...
...Although some of these texts have already appeared in English, the translations were in many cases defective, wrongs that have now been set right...
...His arguments became increasingly esoteric, speculative, and cluttered with fanciful neologisms: "chaosmos," "computo," asservissement...
...That's the only way I really come into contact with anything solid...
...Toward the end of the course summaries, Foucault changes his focus dramatically...
...At issue is a proliferation of "acts and pleasures" instead of the Western-Christian obsession with the strict regulation of "desire...
...This question seems especially relevant insofar as Foucault had ruled out the fashionable 1960s discourse of "emancipation" (Reich, Marcuse, and other representatives of the Freudian left) which in his view remained beholden to traditional ideals of identity and coherence...
...Though he would marry Sylvia Bataille in 1953, until the mid-1950s he concealed from the three children of his first marriage the fact that they had a half-sister...
...In 1941 Sylvia Bataille gave birth to a daughter by Lacan, Judith...
...Especially galling to him was the fact that it limited the number of training analyses he could pursue...
...0 UT OF this background emerged the rich and baffling psychoanalytic doctrine known as Lacanianism...
...it also stemmed from his revision of psychoanalytic technique...
...Morin traveled to California, where he underwent a conversion to the biological anarchism that would mark his post-'68 writings on science and society...
...No longer did he associate it, as in his writings of the 1970s, with the emergence of a "carceralism" or a disciplinary sensibility...
...Specifically, he is concerned with pre-Christian forms of individuation, where the ideal of self-mastery is not yet tied to modern methods of self-renunciation or "normalization...
...departs from the hagiographic model...
...One of the strengths of Roudinesco's book is the facility with which she integrates Lacan's biographical idiosyncrasies within a broader French cultural tapestry...
...It seems that the age of intellectual stars on the order of Sartre, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and Foucault is indeed over...
...Of course, there were distinct pecuniary advantages to such practices...
...Born in 1922, Morin was expelled from the French Communist Party in 1951 for publishing an article on Trotsky...
...The further it departed from its socialist roots, the more it threatened to turn into a type of trendy "lifestyle Marxism...
...Lacan's conception of a "return to Freud," in which the unconscious was restored to its central role, was developed in polemical contrast to Loewenstein's approach...
...The trajectory of Morin's later intellectual course well illustrates this dilemma...
...Lacan has been the subject of countless biographies...
...Ultimately, however, it played a pivotal role in the development of the French New Left...
...As Morin would remark: "the petty-bourgeois life of comfort becomes a passive life of play with dreams, pastimes, distractions...
...And it would be a severe disappointment if, in a biography of this scale, full due were not given to Lacan's legendary personality quirks...
...Throughout these years, Lacan lived a bizarre double life...
...In 'What is Enlightenment...
...Lacan's fondness for rare books, antiques, objets d'art, and surrealist painting were well known...
...This means that in power relations there is necessarily the possibility of resistance because if there were no possibility of resistance (of violent resistance, flight, deception, strategies capable of reversing the situation), there would be no power relations at all...
...While expressing skepticism about Habermas's utopian ideal of communication free of domination, Foucault observes in a spirit of conciliation: "I am quite interested in his work, although I know he completely disagrees with my views...
...Yet, to judge from the foregoing example, one suspects that Foucault abandoned too quickly the ideal of political emancipation: all the instances of resistance he invokes allow the relationship of domination in question to remain structurally intact...
...Instead, he would enter the room and, childlike, begin playing with his knots...
...In the Hellenistic world, observes Foucault, "It is a matter of the formation of the self through techniques of living, not of repression through prohibition and law...
...Many of the themes will be familiar to Foucault's readers...
...To take what is undoubtedly a very simplified example, one cannot say that it was only men who wielded power in the conventional marital structure of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...
...Lacan's worldview was shaped during the 1930s, the so-called hollow years...
...Sounding like a human rights advocate and a convert to the Socratic spirit, he waxes lyrical about "ethical concerns and the political struggle for the respect of rights, of critical thought against abusive techniques of government and research in ethics that seeks to ground individual freedom...
...His trilogy on "method"—distinguished by titles such as The Nature of Nature, The Life of Life, and The Knowledge of Knowledge—appeared in the early 1980s...
...After six years, Lacan seized upon a pretext to break it off...
...If only Foucault had lived long enough to translate such tantalizing insights into a fully developed research program...
...In this respect Morin and his associates were certainly influenced by the renaissance of existential Marxism facilitated by Sartre and Les Temps modernes...
...During the 1970s and 1980s, when the rest of the world was rediscovering the importance of human rights, civil liberties, and the values of an "open society," France's avant-garde was left out of the conversation...
...Having earlier declared the "real" (the true facts of one's life, as it were) to be unreachable, he now tried to gain access to it through mystical means...
...Predictably, Lacan's analysis with Loewenstein proved anything but smooth...
...Born in 1901, Lacan was a member of the "lost generation" that came of age during the interwar years...
...Like the Frankfurt School, Morin and company explored the hidden relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis...
Vol. 45 • July 1998 • No. 3
