Lacan In Spite of Everything

Jacques Lacan continues to be subject to the most extravagant interpretations, some of them idolizing, some demonizing. To recall Lacans career, now 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 Lacans life and work: what it was—and what it remains.

Élisabeth Roudinesco teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is the author of many books, including Jacques Lacan & Co. and Madness and Revolution.

Élisabeth Roudinesco is Head of Research in History at Université Paris Diderot–Paris 7, and teaches at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. She is the author of many books, including Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985 and Madness and Revolution: The Lives and Legends of Théroigne de Mericourt.