Anika Lemaire

As an exegesis of the work of Jacques Lacan, Anika Lemaire's book is pedantic and dull. His basic concepts are presented here in clear, technical prose that reads more like an industrial or medical manual. There are, in short, far more interesting and engaging books explaining the work of Lacan.

That said, Lemaire's book remains notable as a historical document. It was first published in French in 1970, four years after the publication of Lacan's Écrits, at a time when he was just hitting the peak of his fame. Lemaire's dry and tedious explications of Lacan's concepts have to be placed in the context of a growing fascination with this mode of psychoanalysis.

Particularly interesting is the fact that this book arrives on the scene in the immediate wake of Lacan's 1969 Seminar titled The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, in which he excoriates the rise of what he calls the "university" discourse, an academic approach to thinking that mechanically extracts ideas for bland, utilitarian purposes.

Lemaire's book is a glaring example of this kind of discourse, yet she seems curiously blind to this fact. She thus writes in her conclusion about how the "Écrits do not [...] form a didactic summa of his thought, nor the summa of athought which has arrived at its full maturity. [...] Hence, instinctively and a priori, a distrust [...] of any attempt on the part of his followers or pupils to prolong the roads he himself has left incomplete by throwing bridges over the unknown. A distrust which turns to open hostility when the bridges turn out to have been badly built. Hence the Preface, which shows how little Lacan tolerates the denaturing of his thought." (252-253)

The Preface to which Lemaire refers here is a short piece, written by Lacan, that appears at the front of her book. Lacan uses this opportunity to reject any academic explication of his work, and he playfully turns this renunciation on Lemaire herself. "Anika... what a sign of a new wind is insisting in these initials? May she forgive me then, if I take the opportunity to designate what she effaces by showing it." In other words, Lacan effectively distances himself at the outset from Lemaire's project, even as he effectively supports it by supplying this preface - a characteristic move, if one remembers his paradoxical response to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's critique of Lacan in The Title of the Letter a couple of years later, which he simultaneously praises and denounces.

Essentially, Lacan starts off Lemaire's book by stating that she does not understand him, and that her academic summary of his work flattens and simplifies his ideas - an observation that, having now read her book, seems to me entirely accurate. What is curious is that, until the very end, Lemaire seems to think that Lacan excludes her from this critique, that he is talking about someone else, not her. It is a darkly comic situation worthy of Molière, of whom Lacan was both an admirer and, it seems, an imitator.… (mais)