#lacan

…

An unknown language speaks in us, which we Are at the words of, fronted from reality.

A Roundtable on Language, the Subject, and Liberation

Setting: A packed seminar room at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes, 1975. The air is thick with smoke and anticipation. Three chairs are arranged around a low table bearing water glasses and ashtrays. A MODERATOR shuffles notes nervously.

Characters:

· Jacques Lacan (74, impeccably dressed, twisting a cigar)

· Jacques Derrida (45, intense, often leaning forward with a half-smile)

· Angela Davis (31, serene but direct, radiating political urgency)

---

MODERATOR: Welcome. We are here to confront a question that haunts critical thought: Can we conceive of a revolutionary subject—a subject of liberation—without falling back into the metaphysics of presence, or the fantasy of the unified ego? I’d like to begin with Professor Derrida.

DERRIDA: If there is a subject of liberation—and I underline the “if,” the perhaps—it cannot be a subject fully present to itself, a consciousness master of its own house. The classical revolutionary subject, the proletariat rising in luminous self-identity, that is a metaphysics of presence. It effaces the trace, the différance that always already divides any “we.” Liberation, if it means something, must pass through the ordeal of the undecidable. A “we” that is not a fusion but a spectral gathering, haunted by all those excluded by its own border. There is no pure revolutionary origin.

LACAN: (sighing through a cloud of smoke) What you so patiently circle, Derrida, is what I have inscribed with a simple matheme: the subject is nothing other than the subject of the signifier, a barred subject, $. The revolution you invoke, the moment of rupture, is what I call an act. An act touches the real. It does not negotiate with the big Other, it restructures the symbolic coordinates themselves. Your différance is a beautiful hesitation, but the act—like Antigone’s—does not hesitate. The subject of the unconscious is that division, yes, and precisely from that division a new desire can erupt, a desire not captured by the master’s discourse.

DAVIS: Both of you locate the problem in the structure of language and the psyche. I locate it in the structure of the prison, the plantation, the wage. When I listen to you, I wonder: for whom are these questions most urgent? The Black woman in a California prison, the person subjected to the daily terror of racist violence—they do not experience their division primarily as a linguistic effect. They experience it as state-inflicted trauma, material deprivation, the attempt to crush their humanity. So I must ask: can your theories account for a subject who is not merely barred symbolically, but barred materially from freedom, from breathing? And can they guide us toward a practice that actually tears those bars down?

DERRIDA: You are right to bring the question of matter, of the carceral. But I would say the prison is not merely a material enclosure; it is an architectural writing, a text of power that attempts to fix identities. To abolish the prison is not simply to knock down walls—though that too, perhaps—but to deconstruct the entire oppositional logic that produces the criminal, the deviant, the dangerous. Justice, which is undeconstructible, exceeds the law that fills those prisons. My work has always been to show that the foundation of law is a violence without ground, and that justice demands an infinite responsiveness to the singularity of the other. That means no prison can ever be just. In that, I am with you.

LACAN: (leaning forward) The prison, Madame Davis, is one of the names of the master’s discourse made architecture. It is the superegoic institution par excellence, extracting a perverse jouissance from the punishment of the body. The prisoners you defend—they are not simply victims. They are symptoms. The social symptom. The crime is the hysteric’s question posed to the master, and the prison is the master’s brutal answer. The analyst’s discourse, which I propose, subverts this: it puts the objet petit a, the cause of desire, in the position of agent. Revolution is not a march of egos; it is the traversal of the fantasy that the master and his prison are necessary. The pass, the act, is an ethical position: not to cede on one’s desire.

DAVIS: But the analyst’s couch costs money. The psychoanalytic institution, I fear, too often reserves its “act” for those who can pay, while pathologizing those who revolt against intolerable conditions. I want to ask: what is the desire of the incarcerated? Is it a desire to have their fantasy traversed, or a desire to be free, to see their loved ones, to have their basic needs met? We cannot psychoanalyze away the state’s monopoly on violence. We need a collective subject—not a fused, mythical unity, I agree with Derrida there—but a strategic collectivity that can engage in mass struggle. The Montgomery bus boycott, the Attica uprising, the movements in South Africa: they were not waiting for an ethics of the Real. They were making the Real tremble through organized, collective action.

DERRIDA: I would never deny the necessity of what you call strategic collectivity. But every “we” carries a terrible risk: that it will repeat the violence it claims to oppose, that it will produce its own exclusions, its own prisons. Deconstruction is not quietism; it is a hyper-politicization, a vigilance that asks: in the name of what, of whom, do we act? The messianic without messianism, the promise of a justice to come, is what deconstruction opens within the here and now. When I read your work, Angela Davis, I see this vigilance. Your abolitionism is not a simple negation; it demands the invention of new forms of community, of care, of accountability that do not replicate the logic of the cage. That is a deconstructive practice in the most radical sense.

LACAN: (smiling enigmatically) Ah, the logic of the cage! The cage is made of signifiers. But the bars of the symbolic are what hold us, yes? And yet, there is a real beyond the symbolic, a hole. That hole is where the revolutionary act inserts itself. Antigone was not a community organizer. She said “No” and entered the space between two deaths. That is terrifying. But from her act a new symbolic order became possible. The collective you speak of, Madame Davis, can become a hysteric’s question on a mass scale—a demand addressed to the master that, at the right moment, short-circuits and passes to a new discourse, the discourse of the analyst, or something else entirely. The revolution is when the proletariat—pardon me, the excluded—stops demanding from the Other and begins to desire in a new way.

DAVIS: What strikes me, Dr. Lacan, is that you place the burden of the act on a singular figure—Antigone, the hysteric—while movements are made of thousands of people acting in concert, yet without erasing their differences. My friend Toni Morrison might say we are the subjects of experience, not just signifiers. Slavery and its afterlife left a psychic wound, yes, a kind of Real, but also a profound knowledge of survival, of freedom dreams. Our desire is not merely a response to the father’s law; it is a creative, world-making desire, born from our collective practices of resistance. We see the bars, we feel them on our flesh, and we have long traditions of dismantling them, brick by brick, law by law, heart by heart. We don’t simply traverse the fantasy; we abolish the institutions that turn the fantasy into concrete and steel. And for that, we need a subject that can say “we” without closing the door to infinite difference—a coalitional subject, a prismatic “we.”

DERRIDA: Coalitional subject. A beautiful and difficult phrase. Coalition implies a gathering that does not melt into One. It keeps the trace of the other, a spectral pact. Perhaps the undeconstructible justice I speak of finds its rhythm in coalition: an always-to-be-renegotiated solidarity, attentive to the singular cry of each. This would be a subjectless subject, a “we” made of différance, not presence. I think we are closer than it seemed, even if our vocabularies clash.

LACAN: (slowly extinguishing his cigar) The unconscious is the discourse of the Other. If that Other changes, the subject changes. But the Other is not a coalition; it is a structure. The question I pose to both of you is: what guarantee is there that your new symbolic order, your prisonless world, will not produce its own dark, ferocious superego? The analyst knows there is no ultimate good. The only ethics is the ethics of the act, of not giving ground relative to the desire that inhabits you. If your coalition holds that fidelity to desire—not to demand, but to desire—then it may indeed touch the real and change something. If it mistakes its demands for justice, it might just build a more beautiful prison.

DAVIS: The guarantee you seek doesn’t exist. That’s the risk of freedom. We build movements knowing they can err, reproduce hierarchies, fail. But the alternative is paralysis. I am not interested in a perfect revolutionary subject; I am interested in a movement that learns, that corrects, that stays accountable to those it claims to liberate. We must not cede on the desire for a world without cages, you say? I agree. But that desire must become the material force that dismantles the cages, not just the theory that interprets them. We need an abolitionist unconscious, one that dreams what this world deems impossible.

DERRIDA: The impossible, precisely. Deconstruction begins with the impossible, the aporia that incites action, not resignation. To hope for a future without the carceral logic is to affirm an impossible justice that demands to be made possible, here, now, through the labor of the concept and the labor of the streets. Perhaps our tripartite discourse itself is a small coalition tonight, a fragile gathering against the massive violence of the prisons of meaning and meaning of prisons.

LACAN: (with a wry bow of his head) Then we are in a session of an impossible analysis. The world on the couch, and no guarantee of a cure. Only the act. Madame Davis, Derrida—perhaps we have just begun a very strange discourse.

« Ainsi la dialectique freudienne qui a révélé la vérité de l’amour dans le cadeau excrémentiel de l’enfant ou dans ses exhibitions motrices, se renverse ici en un bilanisme hors nature où la fonction sexuelle se définit biologiquement comme un surplus de l’excrétion, psychologiquement comme un prurit né d’un moi à la limite de son efficacité. »

Intervention au Premier Congrès mondial de psychiatrie en 1950 qui fait suite aux exposés de Franz Alexander, Anna Freud, Mélanie Klein et Raymond de Saussure, dans le cadre de la Ve section du Congrès mondial, « Psychothérapie, psychanalyse ». Ce discours a été publié dans les Actes du Congrès, volume 5, à Paris, Hermann et Cie, 1952, pp. 103-108.

I wanted to play around with different hairstyles and clothes for different seasons. I tried to give them a mix of Luke and Rosa's outfit from the card.