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The celebrated Orson Welles film Citizen Kane (1941) develops as a biographical reconstruction. A journalist has to reconstruct the life of media mogul and tycoon Charles Foster Kane immediately after his death. He composes a sort of jigsaw puzzle consisting of interviews with various characters who had shared part of their lives with Kane. The several witness accounts make up a multifaceted image of this figure, but what the journalist mainly wants to find out is why, before dying, Kane uttered the word “Rosebud.” Who or what was Rosebud? This signifier seems to indicate a missing piece of the jigsaw.
As well as the unopened flower of a rose, Rosebud is also used to indicate a rosy mouth, delicate and rose-tinted. As an orifice with mucosa, the term also evokes the large and small lips of the vagina. Rosebud would indeed seem to refer to a woman, but it is also a signifier of what in French is known as béance: what remains open, like a slit vein or a half-open mouth. The journalist eventually discovers nothing in particular, with the final revelation-a MacGuffin, in cinema language-being reserved for the spectator; a revelation, however, which leaves open the question of the ultimate meaning of the signifier uttered on the verge of death.
The Welles film came to my mind after reading La vie avec Lacan1 (“Life with Lacan”) by Catherine Millot (2017). The author, a psychoanalyst and writer, was Lacan's pupil-lover and partner in the 1970s. He was 43 years older than she was, and she notes that she has finished writing the book being the same age Lacan was when she met him: he was 72 at the time. Millot's is a witness account of her personal experience with Lacan, one that adds to the various testimonies, all with different perspectives, published over the years by Lacan's relatives, friends, pupils, and analysands; and to the list, we can add the bulky Lacan biography by Elisabeth Roudinesco (1997). We have a wealth of anecdotes, some quite palatable, others more or le