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On the face of it, Élisabeth Roudinesco’s new book is something of an oddity. Following the scholarly efforts that went into her previous texts on Lacan – particularly the formidable Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and History of a System of Thought (1997) – her new text, Lacan: In Spite of Everything, cannot but amount to a modest undertaking. Motivated in part by a series of observations derived from the biographical research underpinning her previous work, it is, strictly speaking, an account not so much of Lacan, but of the task of researching him, and of the many frustrations the author encountered as part of this project (the lack of viable evidence about Lacan’s childhood, the inaccessibility of much of his surviving estate, the non-existence of a viable archive). The book is also a collection of reflections on how various of Lacan’s personal idiosyncrasies connect to facets of his thought. Hence, comments of the following sort:
Lacan was his own mother, his own father, his own progenitor, hence desirous of possessing things and beings. He loved lists, collections, unpublished texts and rare editions. This great theorist of the object relation, the necessity of lack, and promotion of the symbolic function of the father, spent his life thinking against himself – against his difficulty in being a father, against the anxiety of lack, against his detestation of mothers. (p. 12)
It is sometimes the case that scholars are only able to write with true economy and fluency about a given system of ideas once they have already scrutinized such a system at length elsewhere. One certainly has this impression in reading Roudinesco, who proves adept at producing such deft descriptions of key emblems in Lacan’s oeuvre, and linking them to crucial events in his own personal life. In the late 1930s, Lacan conducted an affair with Sylvia Bataille behind the back of his pregnant wife (both women were in fact pregnant at the same time) and kept his first offspring in the dark