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Having read Roudinesco's compelling 1997 tome Jacques Lacan: Outline of a Life, History of a System of Thought, I was quite eager to review her current book which looks back on Lacan's life and work on the occasion of the 30-year anniversary of his death.1 Roudinesco promises to share ‘a secret part of the life and work of Lacan … a reverse or dark side emerging to illuminate the record…. A Lacan of the margins, the edges, the literal, carried away by his mania for neologisms’ (p. 5). She writes that her goal is ‘to evoke some striking episodes in a life and oeuvre … and comment on them with the benefit of hindsight, freely and subjectively’ (p. 5). Lacan: In Spite of Everything is a curious book full of ambiguities and uneven presentation. Although I do not think Roudinesco fulfills her promise of revealing a ‘secret’ Lacan, her writing is instilled with an enigmatic originality. As an avid student of Lacan,2 even after numerous readings of the book, I still felt puzzled, wondering for whom is this book written? Also, who is this author that has access to Lacan's ‘secret’ life and work? The answer to the first question remains open; the answer to the second was easily researched. Although midway through the book, Roudinesco briefly mentions her personal connection to Lacan, given her ‘subjective’ perspective, I found it puzzling that she did not contextualize herself more fully to the reader.
Roudinesco is the daughter of Jenny Aubry, a paediatrician, neurologist and psychoanalyst who was a ‘fellow traveller’ with Lacan and close friend of his wife Sylvia (Badiou, p. 2).3 Roudinesco grew up within the ‘inner circle’ of Lacan's world, spending time at his country home as a child, and eventually joining Lacan's 1964 Freudian School of Paris (EFP) and becoming a psychoanalyst. She is also a French academic historian, having written a three-volume history of psychoanalysis in France. The third volume in the series is the aforementioned Jacques Lacan: Outline of a Life,