Jorge Ahumada Responds

February 26, 2001. Mitchell Wilson bases his letter on the notion that the writer of an essay provides the uninitiated reader an explanation of basic tenets (in the present case, of Lacanism), starting from assumedly “clear principles and assumptions,” leaving cultural and political contexts aside. Thus, he demands a sweet and easy explication of Lacanism—presumably one built on its own tenets. Were such admirable didactic simplicity attainable, one would be hard put to understand that Lacan's disciple Jacques Perrier (1985) can say in his Voyages Extraordinaires en Translacanie that Lacan never managed to pinpoint such keystone principles as the “signifier,” or the fact that Lacan himself complained, in one of his last public appearences, that he felt persecuted by misunderstandings, and that the more he tried to undo them the more he exacerbated them (Julien 1986, p. 11). For this reason, it seemed to me prudent to allow Leclaire the space to display his own explanations.

To his credit, his attempt at clinically demonstrating the Lacanian conception of the “signifier” is the clearest and most comprehensive such exposition I know of, this being why I presented it at some length. Nonetheless, it does little to help the Lacanian concept of “signifier” hold any water.

Lacan did start writing in the thirties, as Wilson notes, but he should be aware also that Lacan initially became a “celebrity” in Paris literary circles based on his early blending of surrealism and phenomenological psychiatry; he was known there as “the new Mallarmé”—a title not gratuitously bestowed. Roudinesco (1993), a disciple and a close friend of the Lacan family, can be profitably consulted on these matters.

To uncover the conceptual structures driven by postmodern rhetorics is not quite on a level with the typical book essay. It involves delving into universes quite alien from our usual, shared, evidence-driven psychoanalytic concerns. In this postmodern ambiance the psychoanalytic experience take