The following, from a post on subsub, is the Introduction to the Lacan
Dialogue.
I pass it on as-is, without comment. Apologies to those already on subsub
for cross-posting.
Robin
INTRODUCTION
On or around the 20th of February, I was sent, by Jacques-Alain Miller (who,
I should say, rarely engages with electronic mail) a series of
"psychoanalytic" exchanges between three so-called "Jacques": the famed
Jacques Lacan; his almost equally-famous disciple Jacques-Alain Miller; and
a clinical patient Jacques Debrot, a fairly obscure and obviously brilliant
American poet and doctoral student at Harvard University (whose very
institutional name functions as a kind of Law in the cultural unconscious of
at least five-hundred million people across this
soon-to-be-hit-by-a-giant-asteroid planet that we inhabit).
I am unsure as to the origin of these writings, and --like the British-Poets
Listserv, which would appear to have had a rare form of *panicosis
colectividae* in reaction to them-- I am equally unsure of their true
purposes (though the triple name flakes-off as if from archetypal flint,
albeit not Jungian, heaven forbid) a bizarre form of pure poetry, a
Sokalian hoax-thrust under the guise of an-as-yet-unclassified expression of
hysteria, which may be read, in fact, as unconscious homage (whomever the
Authors may be) to the dead Father, Lacan. I have my crime-suspicions, of
course, and they are legion.
Nor can I say, with absolute certainty, if the exchange is the work of one,
two, or many, even though the epistles forwarded to me carried the address
headings of one "Kent Johnson" and one "Jacques Debrot," neither of which
name had previous familiarity to me, as they did not to anyone else on the
editorial board of *lacanian ink*. http://www.lacan.com/covers.htm
All things considered, it seems clear that this dream-like repartee has, at
the very least, the participation of Jacques-Alain Miller, my friend and
former psychoanalyst. I say this hesitatingly, but with a good deal of
pride: The inimitable style is there, here and there, if one parses the odd
syntax. And there is, too, an extended subliminal slippage (even at
phonemic-pun levels), between Lacanian theoretical/clinical matter and
"obvious" dilletantish garbage, for the "correspondence" to be anything but
the brain-child of someone deeply-in-the-know. Thus, I say, going out,
perhaps on a ceibo limb, that Jacques-Alain Miller is the primary author of
these psychoanalytic exchanges... I am in awe, if a bit befuddled at the
same time. And so I can offer little more, I fear, besides my happy pleasure
at this blue-bolted jouissance, than the most banal, genetic speculation.
But the way we speculate about the unknown (Das Unbewusste, as Alain Miller
draws from Freud in a letter to Debrot) will tell us in itself much about
the structures and patterns of the psyche, about its limitations and
prejudices, about its paradoxical claims to science even as it is impelled
by the neurotic desires of the aesthetic.
As a movie by Hitchcock, I leave it all for others to analyze.
--Slavoj Zizek
(Belgrade, February, '01)
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