The Desire to Translate Lacan

One translates Lacan at one’s own risk; his writing is linguistically complex in all registers, replete with neologisms and homophonic plays on words, and there are many opportunities for misinterpretation. Lacan did not write to be unequivocally understood which in itself gives rise to questions and requires a constant re-engagement with the texts. The English translations of these foundational texts were published between the 1980s and mid-90s when the study of Lacan was gaining momentum in the Anglophone world. While we have learned from these translations, our reading of Lacan and the commentaries on his work in French over the last three decades has allowed us to become more familiar with Lacan’s use of language and his particular vocabulary. We were also aware that a major foundational text, ‘The address to the Freudian School of Paris’ was in need of a new translation.

Hence this project to translate and retranslate the founding texts by members of the Forum of Melbourne – Esther Faye, Deborah McIntyre, Leonardo Rodríguez and Susan Schwartz – and Chantal Degril from the New Zealand Forum. It began with the translation of the ‘Italian note’, which was first circulated a few years ago but is included here in its final version (December 2022). This was followed by the ‘Address to the Freudian School of Paris’ and Lacan’s two short, final letters, the ‘Letter of Dissolution’ and the ‘Letter of the Freudian Cause’ which were all translated in 2022. These four texts are collected here.

The texts should be considered in their context. Lacan’s ‘Founding Act’ for his French School of Paris (École française de Paris, to be renamed three months later École freudienne de Paris, EFP) was first disseminated by roneoed copies in June 1964 and was published in the Annuaire 1965 of the École française de Paris. His ‘Address to the Freudian School of Paris’ was delivered on December 6th, 1967, in response to comments that had been made – or not been made – about his text, ‘Proposition of October 9 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School’. This had been circulated two months earlier, and is a text which argues for a radical reconceptualising and restructuring of the analytic institution, the training of analysts, and hence the aims and end of analysis itself.

Lacan speaks of the ‘Address’ as his act in relation to the analytic cause. Throughout the ‘Address’ he refers to his ‘proposition’, which we have kept in lower case in the translation, as it is in Autres écrits. While the ‘Proposition’ was published in Scilicet in 1968, the ‘Address’, with its supplementary commentary, was not published there until 1970 but both texts clearly had effects before then. Another very significant text, contemporary with the above, and reference to which Lacan makes implicitly in the opening of the ‘Address’, is his ‘Report on the Seminar on the Psychoanalytic Act 1967-1968’, which appeared in the Annuaire 1968-1969. It concerns the function of the act of the analyst, and the implications of this notion of act for an analysis, its aims and its end. For Lacan, the analytic act, which is only made evident in its consequences, bears close relation to his conceptualisation of the analytic cause: that is, the analyst as constituted from the object a, object cause of desire. The place and function of the object a as agent will be formulated in the ‘Discourse of the Analyst’, in his contemporaneous Seminar XVII of 1969-1970, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. He will develop this notion further in the ‘Italian note’.

In delineating a completely different way of becoming an analyst, these texts distinguish Lacanian psychoanalysis fundamentally from the mode of psychoanalytic training and practice of the IPA, and that institution’s deviation from the implications of Freud’s conceptualisation of the unconscious. This is particularly clear in Lacan’s introduction, in the ‘Proposition’, of the dispositive of the Pass. It was designed to hear, through the passer’s transmission of the passand’s testimony to the Cartel of the Pass, evidence that the pass from the position of analysand to the position of analyst in the analysis had occurred and that this step marked the advent of the unprecedented desire of the analyst for the passand. In that text he makes the definitive and orienting statement that ‘there is a real at stake in the training of analysts’ and he asserts that ‘existing societies be founded on this real’. Given the very scope and importance of his proposition, Lacan appears rather taken aback (albeit with some irony) by the lack of engagement with his ideas by members of the IPA, including by those whom he considered to be closer colleagues. However, there is no sign of regret. While all Lacan’s foundational texts have a very distinctive voice and are characterised by an interweaving of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis based on the Freudian unconscious, the structure of the institution, and its political effects, the ‘Address’ in particular is both a very personal and intensely political document. For this reason, and as it is a text with which English speakers may not be so familiar, I will make some comments about our translation.

The ‘Address’

As the ‘Address’ was initially a spoken text, the language is often quite colloquial and familiar, a mode that we have tried to capture in the translation. Lacan is clearly at home here within his circle; it is his School and he has chosen its members and divided them into two non-hierarchical classes in the interest of equality. They are confreres; there is no leader as such. At the same time his ire towards the IPA and its treatment of him rankles but while his tone can be scathing or sarcastic it can also be humorous and galvanising.

Lacan raises key questions: How to make the structure of his School more analytic than that of other Schools? How to deliver this notion of structure and how to form ‘classes’ within it that not only validate the basis of their distribution but serve both to produce it and to reproduce it? We see this idea also in the beginning of the ‘Proposition’ in the distinction between hierarchy and gradus. He asks how they can hope to have a legal status recognised for an analytic experience that they don’t even know how to respond to. The term ‘legal’ is pertinent here due to the status of non licet – not allowed – that Lacan’s mode of practice had accrued in the IPA.

The ‘Address’ emphasises the fundamental importance of the psychoanalytic act and its real effects. Lacan speaks of his lone act of founding his School and of the fact that the analyst works alone in relation to the analytic act. The analyst can only be alone in his act but he is not the only one in relation to the School. The singularity of the analyst finds its place in a School of other singularities – with a common aim of contributing to the analytic cause.

In the ‘Proposition’ he puts forward the dispositive of the Pass as the means of grasping the moment of the effect of the analytic act for it can only be considered to be one, as mentioned above, by its consequences. There is clearly a link between the psychoanalytic act having a real effect on the analysand and the radical step from the desire of the Other and the fantasy that supports it, to the desire of the analyst which is in relation to desire as cause, the object a. The desire of the analyst is thus contingent upon the fall of the Subject-supposed-to-know, the semblant that covers the object a. Lacan’s emphasis on that act thus makes the ‘non-analyst’ the guarantor of psychoanalysis in that he can testify to the moment of the pass in his analysis and to the advent of this unprecedented as desire. The privileging of the analysand and the ‘non-analyst’, terms used as equivalent but with a certain irony in the ‘Address’, functions as contrast with the notion of qualification determined by the Other as happens in the IPA. As the aim of his School is the expansion of the psychoanalytic act, he emphasises the fundamental distinction between this act and the professional condition of analyst.

But why is there a horror of the analytic act, Lacan asks. The act does not support the semblant, that is, representation by the signifier; it is beyond language and its effects are real. A psychoanalysis grounded in the real makes the semblants of belief tremble in that it opens up what is intolerable for the subject of the unconscious: the economy of jouissance. This is the stake of a Lacanian psychoanalysis which moves from the deciphering that nourishes the ‘saids’ (les dits) of analysing speech, to the residue of that speech, that singular ‘saying’ (le dire) of the analysis as an effect of the end, and the real identity of the speaking being in the jouissance of his symptom.

The ‘Italian note’

Sometimes referred to as the ‘Letter to the Italians’, this short text, as condensed as it is significant, is addressed to the three members of the Italian group who approached Lacan about developing a School in Italy. As such it gives Lacan the opportunity to write about the requirements for a Lacanian School, the making and marking of the analyst, the practice of psychoanalysis and the crucial importance of writing about the experience of analysis based on evidence derived from the experience of the Pass. In this text, the Pass is considered to be an entry requirement to the School, a requirement that was abandoned. Lacan makes a distinction between an analysand who has finished his analysis and an analysand who has passed to the position of analyst in the final stage of his analysis. This logic is the basis for his statement that the analyst is authorised only from himself and it is this self-authorisation that grounds his function. In brief, this authorisation concerns the mark of the mutation of desire which is the desire of the analyst and which distinguishes an analyst in the Lacanian tradition. This desire can be recognised by another analyst who has been through his own singular experience. The real at stake in the training of analysts that Lacan stipulated in the ‘Proposition’ is developed in the ‘Italian note’: ‘it is necessary to take the real into account’ as the condition for there to be an analyst, an analyst whose unique desire is to be ‘the refuse’ of humanity, that is, to be rejected, thrown away. As the analyst is made of the object a, that object must fall. This position is in fundamental contrast with any notion of the analyst as an ideal figure with whom an analysand identifies at the end. It is in opposition to any notion of ideal, for the ideal can only be semblance. Hence the necessity for the disbeing of the analyst as that ideal, the Subject-supposed-to-know. For Lacan, the mark of being refuse is the mark the analyst carries with enthusiasm, a mark that can be verified in the Pass and which will be the source of future writings. This is not the idealising of a particular moment. Rather it concerns the aim of Lacanian analysis: to unravel the fabric of closely woven of threads of the symbolic and imaginary to find the real that it conceals.

The ‘Letter of Dissolution of the Freudian School of Paris’ and the ‘Letter of the Freudian Cause’

The ‘Letter of Dissolution’ of his School written in June 1980, seven years after the ‘Italian note’ is, unsurprisingly, different in tone but no less clear in its orientation. Lacan has no hope of being heard or understood, but he manages to ironise this situation because at least he knows that that is the case. He compares dissolving his School with the cutting of one of the rings of the Borromean knot, a necessary act if he is to be true to his reason for founding it, that of returning to the field defined by the Freudian unconscious and of critiquing the deviations in psychoanalytic theory and practice that have followed from it.

In the act of dissolving his School, which had fallen into deviation and compromise, he will start another and he calls for candidates to apply who will renew the critique of those who veer towards meaning, hence semblance, thus going in the opposite direction of his teaching based on the real. Out of the residue of the FSP, a new group will arise.

This rather galvanising voice can be heard, albeit more faintly, in the ‘Letter of the Freudian Cause’, called so because it is a letter written on paper with the letterhead ‘Cause freudienne, 5, rue de Lille’. It is rather abbreviated and fragmentary but its direction is clear. Written ten months after the ‘Letter of Dissolution’, in October 1980, it is in support of his new group, based in Caracas, and his intention is that the Freudian Cause will become a School. He is true to his Freudian roots, true to the hole that is the irreducible repressed of the unconscious, true to the importance of the cartel as the primary cell of the School and to the principle of movement – the permutation of positions in the School every two years. He also remains committed to the dispositive of the Pass with the production of Analysts of the School as its consequence and to the nomination of Analyst Members of the School. This echoes the structural principles of the ‘Founding Act’ and the ‘Proposition’. He certainly does not resile from his rejection of the sterile logic of the caste.

Lacan died 11 months after writing this letter. I say ‘writing’ but there is debate over whether the letters were written by him, whether they were written based on notes he provided or whether they were written not by him but in his name. He was very ill but it seems that he approved the letters and in reading them we can hear his distinctive voice clearly and see the way they complete the arc traced by his singular desire. It is transmitted through these texts. Their significance lies in their placing the emphasis on how it is the principles upon which the psychoanalytic institution is based that structure it and guide its functioning and which will determine the type of analyst who will emerge from it. For Lacan, these principles are grounded in knowledge of the Freudian unconscious and are augmented by his own complex contribution which includes, crucially, the location of that knowledge in the unconscious real, not in the real of science. Lacan emphasises that the psychoanalytic institution must be responsible for a continuing critique of the organisational tendency to doxa and hence resistance to change. The Discourse of the Analyst, in situating the object a in the place of agent, gives us our orientation. These are living texts that are concerned fundamentally with the institution’s responsibility to gather evidence about the effects of an analysis through the dispositive of the Pass, certainly, but also through the writings of its members about the analytic experience and those members’ vital contribution to the examination of analytic theory and practice. It is these principles that ground psychoanalysis in the Lacanian tradition, and also give it its political import in the critical perspective that it brings to the world beyond it.

Susan Schwartz

Melbourne, January 2023