Hard Bump On The Outside Of My Lip Piercing

Michel Foucault. Lacan, the "liberator" of psychoanalysis

This mini-interview Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was published in an Italian newspaper the September 11, 1981, two days after the death of Lacan.

-J. Nobécourt-is often said that Lacan has been the subject of "a revolution in psychoanalysis." Do you think this is accurate and acceptable definition of "revolution"?

MF-I think Lacan would have rejected the term "revolutionary" and the very idea of \u200b\u200ba revolution in psychoanalysis. He wanted simply to be "psychoanalyst." Which in their eyes represented a violent rupture with all that tended to make psychoanalysis depended on psychiatry, or do something sophistical a chapter of psychology. He wanted to steal the proximity to psychoanalysis, which he considered dangerous, medicine and medical institutions. He sought in a process of normalization of behavior, but a theory of the subject. It is because, despite the appearance of a highly speculative speech, his thought was not unrelated to the efforts had been made to challenge the practices of mental medicine.

- If Lacan, as you say, there has been a revolutionary, it is quite true that his work has had a huge influence on culture in recent decades. What has changed after Lacan in the ways of life of the culture?

MF-What has changed? If I go back to the fifties, the era in which the student that I was reading the works of Levi-Strauss and Lacan's earliest texts, it seems that the novelty was the Next, we discovered that philosophy and human sciences lived on a very traditional conception of the subject, and it was not enough to say with some that the subject was radically free, and others, which was determined by social conditions. We discovered we had to find release all that is hidden behind the seemingly simple use of the pronoun "I" [ je ]. The subject, a complex thing, brittle, it is so difficult to speak, and without which we can not talk.

-Lacan had many opponents. He was accused of secrecy and "intellectual terrorism." What do you think of these charges?

MF-I think the secrecy of Lacan was due to the fact that he wanted the reading of texts is not simply an "awareness" of their ideas. He wanted the reader to discover himself [lui-même ] as the subject of desire through this reading. Lacan wanted the obscurity of his writings out the very complexity of the subject, and that the work required to understand it was a job to perform on itself [ soi-même]. As for "terrorism" only underline one thing: Lacan did not exercise no institutional power. Those who heard him wanted to hear precisely. Just terrified that they were afraid. The influence you exert power can never be imposed.

Trad. Gabriel Meraz.

Lacan, he "Liberateur" the psychanalyse, of Dits et écrits (IV), Gallimard, Paris, 1994, pp. 204-205.