DEAR JACQUES LACAN: AN ANALYSIS IN CORRESPONDENCE                  


INTRODUCTION


On or around the 20th of February, I was sent, by Jacques-Alain Miller (who, I should say, rarely engages with electronic mail), a series of "psychoanalytic" exchanges between three so-called "Jacques": the late, famed Jacques Lacan; his almost equally-famous disciple Jacques-Alain Miller; and a clinical patient Jacques Debrot, a fairly obscure and obviously brilliant American poet and doctoral student at Harvard University (whose very institutional name functions as a kind of Law in the cultural unconscious of at least five-hundred million people across this soon-to-be-hit-by-a-giant-asteroid planet that we inhabit). In a separate mailing I received the final letter of March 1, whose current date, I note, has for some reason been altered from an original postmark of a few days previous. Whether this is a slip being corrected or a new slip being made, I am not sure. In any case, the matter may be of no importance whatsoever.

I am unsure as to the origin of these writings1, and --like the British-Poets Listserv, which would appear to have had a rare form of panicosis colectividae2 in reaction to them-- I am equally unsure of their true purposes, though the triple name flakes-off as if from archetypal flint (albeit not Jungian, heaven forbid) a bizarre form of pure poetry, a Sokalian hoax-thrust under the guise of an-as-yet-unclassified expression of hysteria, which may be read, in fact, as unconscious homage (whomever the Authors may be) to the dead Father, Lacan. I have my crime-suspicions, of course, and they are legion.

Nor can I say, with absolute certainty, if the exchange is the work of one, two, or many, even though the epistles forwarded to me carried the address headings of one "Kent Johnson" and one "Jacques Debrot," neither of which name had previous familiarity to me, as they did not to anyone else on the editorial board of Lacanian Ink.

All things considered, it seems clear that this dream-like repartee has, at the very least, the participation of Jacques-Alain Miller, my friend and former psychoanalyst. I say this hesitatingly, but with a good deal of
pride: The inimitable style is there, here and there, if one parses the odd syntax. And there is, too, an extended subliminal slippage (even at phonemic-pun levels), between Lacanian theoretical/clinical matter and "obvious" dilletantish garbage, for the "correspondence" to be anything but the brain-child of someone deeply-in-the-know. Thus, I say, going out, perhaps, on a ceibo limb, that Jacques-Alain Miller is the primary author of these psychoanalytic exchanges... I am in awe, if a bit befuddled at the same time. And so I can offer little more, I fear (besides my happy pleasure at this blue-bolted jouissance), than the most banal, genetic speculation.

But the way we speculate about the unknown (Das Unbewusste, as Alain Miller draws from Freud in a letter to Debrot) will tell us in itself much about the structures and patterns of the psyche, about its limitations and prejudices, about its paradoxical claims to science even as it is impelled by the neurotic desires of the aesthetic.

As a movie by Hitchcock, I leave it all for others to analyze.

--Slavoj Zizek

(Belgrade, February, '01)


1 Obviously, the Lacan side of the correspondence is dream-product.
2 Originally presented on the British and Irish Poetry Listserv, these letters caused considerable scandal and scorn there, bringing forth many accusations of “pornography” and numerous demands that the guilty be expelled.

Introduction
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