are a wretched invention, and the natural heirs to the cafés du commerce where all that bar room philosophizing used to go on). We will end up going, in all our pomp, to the philosophical outhouse.
So, yes, it would be right and proper to recall what a philosopher is. And to remind ourselves by looking at the examples of those who adopted that title in recent decades. We have to call them to our rescue to clean up and give a new lustre to the words in whose name they propose, with great difficulty and under great intellectual tension, to accept unconditionally the need to find at least one true Idea and never to give in, whatever the consequences, and even though, as Mallarmé said of Igitur, the act for which no one claims responsibility ‘is perfectly absurd [except that] the infinite has at last been fixed [fixé]’.
Basically, I am calling my philosophical friends who are no longer with us as witnesses for the prosecution in the case the infinite is bringing against the falsifiers. They have come to say, through the voice that eulogizes them, that the imperative of contemporary democratic materialism – ‘Live without Ideas’ – is both cheap and inconsistent.
These texts are very different in form and intent. They are all tributes to great minds, often paid to mark their passing, the anniversary of their passing or a colloquium devoted to their memory. The texts are collected here in the order of the philosophers’ date of birth. Whilst these tributes range from short essays to lengthy meditations, the differences between them have no hierarchical meaning whatsoever in this context. And besides, the final pages give not only the date and provenance of these short texts but also a little supplementary information about my intellectual relationship with the philosophers I talk about.
Whilst some of them were the masters of my youth, I would not say today that I unreservedly agree with them as to how it was constructed. I had ties of friendship with some, and a few quarrels with others. But I am glad to say here that, given the potions they are trying to make us swallow today … well, I love all these fourteen dead philosophers. Yes, I love them.
The man who has just died was all the greater in that greatness is becoming rare – very rare – in our uncertain lands. The media let him see that very clearly, as their goal is always to align that which exists with the transient and limited prose of journalism. They all asked his sworn enemies and those who go through the dustbins to say something about him.
When not even death can silence envy, it really is a sign of just how barbaric our societies are. All those psychoanalytic dwarves, all those gossip columnists amplifying the mean cry of ‘He was standing in my way, and now he’s dead at last. Now pay some attention to ME!’
It is a fact that Lacan was on the warpath right from the start, denouncing the illusory consistency of the ‘Ego’, rejecting the American psychoanalysis of the 1950s which proposed to ‘reinforce the ego’ and thereby adapt people to the social consensus and arguing that, because it is symbolically determined by language, the subject is irreducibly the subject of desire, and as such cannot be adapted to reality, except perhaps in the imaginary.
Lacan in effect established that the cause of desire is an object that has been lost, that is lacking, and that, being articulated under the symbolic law, desire has no substance and no nature. It has only a truth.
He made money out of this particularly bleak vision of psychoanalysis, in which it is the truth and not happiness that is in play, thanks to the practice of what were sometimes very short sessions. The crucial and non-existent role of psychoanalysts in the plural is to let shine – with a searingly subjective brightness – the signifier of a break that lets slip the truth of desire, whilst the individual psychoanalyst must, ultimately, reconcile himself to be nothing more than what is left at the end of the analysis and when that work is done.
The practice of short sessions polarized a real hatred of the truth against Lacan. As a result, he was literally excommunicated by the psychoanalytic International. The need to organize the transmission of his thought, and to train analysts who would act in accordance with what he believed to be the ethics of psychoanalytic practice, led him to found his own school. But even there, the splits and dissolutions were testimony to a stubborn reluctance to hold the severe position he promoted to the end.
It had become good form to state that the ageing Lacan was no longer transmitting anything worthwhile from the 1970s onwards. In my view, it is quite the opposite. Having lamented the theory of the subject’s subservience to the signifying rule, Lacan made one final effort to pursue his investigation into its relationship with the real as far as he could. The rules of the signifier were no longer enough. What was needed was some kind of geometry of the unconscious, a new way of representing the three agencies (symbolic, imaginary, real) in which the subject-effect is deployed. Lacan’s recourse to topology was an internal requirement born of this new stage in his thinking, and it brought out his underlying materialism.
Lacan held that politics has no effect on the real. He used to say that ‘the social is always a wound’. And yet it so happens that even a Marxism in crisis cannot avoid making reference to the dialectic of the subject that he outlines. It is in effect clear that the fiasco of the Party-States that emerged from the Third International opens up radical questions about the essence of the political subject. Now, neither the subject-as-consciousness (Sartre’s thesis) nor the subject-as-natural substance will do. The at once divided and errant subject theorized by Lacan in his own realm does offer us a way out of that impasse. For such a subject is a product of a break, and not of the idea that it represents a reality, not even that of the working class. For today’s French Marxists, the function of Lacan is the function that Hegel served for the German revolutionaries of the 1840s.
Given the trite situation in which we find ourselves, marked by the platitudes and relative self-abasement of our intellectuals, the death of Lacan, coming so soon after that of Sartre, does nothing to improve matters. We were anxious to hear what he might still have to say. Quite aside from the content of his teaching, he developed an ethics of thought that is now highly unusual.
Le Perroquet1 will of course come back to the almost incalculable import of that ethics. For the moment, the important thing is, without any restrictions or any presumption, to pay tribute to one who is no longer with us.
Georges Canguilhem (1904–1995)Jean Cavaillès (1903–1944)
We will celebrate here, in the ancient manner, the celebration of dead masters by living masters. In doing so, we twice break the rule of our rapid societies, which worship what is supposedly a studied casualness. We forget our dead as quickly as we can because we are in a hurry to outlive them in our flabbiness, and we mock the masters who rejected journalism and sloganizing – ‘anti-elitist’ – representations of intellectual democracy.
Georges Canguilhem was – and therefore still is, for there can be no appeal against such an inscription – the strong and discreet master of my philosophical generation. Why did this specialist in the history of the life sciences exert an academic authority that could not have been further removed from his infinitely precise thought? Probably because his conception of intellectual rigour extended, on the one hand, to a minutely detailed account of the history of concepts and, on the other, to the pure logic of commitment. As a result, Canguilhem, a believer in the conception of a perennial liberal university, who was more inclined than anyone else to tell the difference between what is valid and mere semblance, extended his attention far beyond the specialist areas of knowledge in which he excelled, with an almost forgotten excellence, to everything that combines the articulated meaning of history with the ethics
