Conference at the French-American Conversations on Psychoanalysis, University of Chicago & CRPMS (Paris Diderot University), Chicago, 14-15 Octobre 2011

In his recently published Memoirs, Jan Hendrik van den Berg commemorates his brief encounter with Jacques Lacan, a psychiatrist like himself. We may regard their cursory acquaintance as a rencontre manquée, which is deplorable, in view of the many similarities and synchronicities between their intellectual trajectories, approaches and oeuvres, such as their fascination for Baroque architecture and sculpture, and their efforts to formalise the structure of psychoanalysis with the help of a Matheme. In this contribution, I grant their miscarried dialogue a second lease

This paper examines Lacan's historical claims about philosophy, dating back to Parmenides. It is this critical reconstruction of history of philosophy, we argue, that underlies Jacques Lacan’s polemical provocations in the mid-1970s that his position was an “anti-philosophie”. Following an introduction surveying the existing literature on the subject, in part ii, the essay present the account of classical philosophy Lacan has in mind when he declares psychoanalysis to be an antiphilosophy after 1975. It assembles his claims about the history of ideas in Seminars XVII and XX in ways earlier contributions of this subject have not systematically done. Part iii focuses upon Lacan’s remarkable reading of Descartes’ break with premodern philosophy—but touches on Lacan’s readings of Hegel and (in a remarkable confirmation of Lacan’s “Parmenidean” conception of philosophy) the early Wittgenstein. Here we examine Lacan’s positioning of psychoanalysis as a legatee of the Cartesian moment in the history of western ideas. In different terms than Slavoj Zizek, we propose that it is Lacan’s famous avowal that the subject of the psychoanalysis is the subject first essayed by Descartes in The Meditations on First Philosophy as confronting an other capable of deceit (as against mere illusion or falsity) that decisively measures the distance between Lacan’s unique “antiphilosophy” and the forms of later modern linguistic and cultural relativism whose hegemony Alain Badiou has decried. At the same time, it sets Lacan’s antiphilosophy apart from the Parmenidean legacy for which "thinking and being could be the same".