For me, François Roustang is one of the best readers of Lacan. Roustang was directly involved in the École freudienne de Paris that Lacan founded, and his earlier book [b:Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan|3461252|Dire Mastery Discipleship from Freud to Lacan|François Roustang|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1266546046s/3461252.jpg|254580] is a scathing but fair critique of the paradoxical relationship between psychoanalysis and authority. In the ten years since that book, Roustang's attitude toward Lacanian psychoanalysis has clearly deteriorated - the original French title of The Lacanian Delusion translates roughly as "Lacan, from ambivalence to impasse."

The opening chapter of Roustang's book is called "Why Did We Follow Him For So Long?" and explores the paradoxes of Lacan's character. Roustang shows how Lacan was charismatic and seductive, cruel and tyrannical, and wonders how it is that so few of his disciples were able to see past the man's obvious brilliance and understand the authoritarian aspects of his nature. In short, Lacan betrayed his principles by maintaining the transference of his followers rather than resolving, thus turning himself into the very "subject who is supposed to know" that he criticizes.

Rather than continuing in this bitter direction, however, the long second chapter examines Lacan's paradoxical dream of turning psychoanalysis into a science. Roustang brilliantly traces the evolution of the notion of the "real" in Lacan's work, showing how it was always framed with an eye on formalize his ideas along mathematical and scientific lines. The earliest forms of the real in Lacan are, Roustang claims, influenced by Meyerson and Lévi-Strauss, in which science, mathematics, and psychoanalysis are aligned by the subjective assumption that everything in the universe has a rational order. This changes with Seminar III, in which the collapse of the real in the universe of the psychotic reveals the symbolic order by isolating its function. It is not until Seminar XI that Lacan then begins to formulate his notion of the real as the "impossible."

Roustang's purpose in walking the reader through this very complex evolution of the real is to show the way in which Lacan's notion of the real, in trying to be logical, winds up reverting to a kind of mysticism. "It is an odd logic [...] that manages to exclude from its field the very entity that constituted its object, and which, as a result, cannot be developed as a logic," he writes (p.95).

The full consequences of this logic that ultimately refuses to submit itself to logic is explored in the book's third and final chapter. Roustang quotes Lacan's repeated insistence on psychoanalysis as a "scientific delirium," rigorous in much the same way that a mad scientist can be said to be.

The most devastating critique, however, comes in the form of Roustang's attack on Lacan's formula "the unconscious is structured like a language." Just like the notion of the real, "this one proposition simultaneously excludes the object of research and includes the possibility of a logic founded on linguistics," claims Roustang (p.111). To focus only on the linguistic aspects of the unconscious "is tantamount to saying: Since we can only know certain objects by looking at them, these objects are structured like eyes" (p.112). Roustang goes on to demonstrate how this selectiveness in Lacan's logic allows him to focus on the aspects of things that fit his theory - the unconscious is like a language, for instance, or how he ignores the aspects of the imaginary that are not specular.

Roustang concludes that Lacan's strategy ultimately boils down to two basic tactics: "equivocation" (p.116), in which similarities between ideas and philosophies are used to link concepts together, and "unilaterality" (116), whereby Lacan reinforces this fusion by ignoring the *dissimilarities* inherent in the discourses he is seeking to join together.

In making these arguments, Roustang is not really too far from Shoshana Felman's observation that Lacan is undertaking the impossible task of trying to create a "grammar of rhetoric," or Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's critique of Lacan's strategies of "diverting" texts to his own ends while leaving the parts that don't fit in the margins of his thought.

I willingly admit that Roustang's book is not for everyone. It took me a long time to appreciate what he was trying to do, especially in the long middle section on the "real." Nonetheless, the latter parts of that chapter, together with the devastating blows delivered in Chapter 3, are a revelation. It is truly a pity that Roustang didn't present his ideas with the more elegance and clarity, because the substance of what he has to say here is certainly worth considering. ( )

http://bactra.org/reviews/lacanian-delusion/ ( )