Jacques Lacan continues to be subject to the most extravagant interpretations--some of them idolizing, some demonizing. To recall Lacan's career, now that the heroic age of psychoanalysis is over, is to remember an intellectual and literary adventure that occupies a founding place in our modernity. For, if Lacan went against the current of many of the hopes aroused by 1968, he embraced their paradoxes, so that his language games and wordplay resonate today as so many injunctions to reinstate society in the face of a degraded individualism. Widely recognized as one of the leading authorities on Lacan, Elisabeth Roudinesco here undertakes to revisit Lacan's life and work: what it was--and what it remains.
