In the Shadow of Althusser 1963–1966 145
to understand the various “logics” of French intellectual life in this
century,’ Derrida declared in one of his dialogues with Élisabeth
Roudinesco.^1 In fact, when Althusser brought him in to teach there,
Normale Sup was enjoying a particularly dazzling period. A group
of brilliant young philosophers had begun their studies there in 1960:
they included Régis Debray, Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, and
Pierre Macherey. They had become Communists largely because of
the Algerian War and together debated at length about Marxism
and possible ways of reinvigorating it. They went to Althusser, who
as yet had published nothing but a short book on Montesquieu and
a few articles, and asked for his help in their theoretical work, over
and above his role as caïman.
In 1961–2, Althusser’s seminar was devoted to the early Marx: the
following year, it focused on ‘the origins of structuralist thought’. In
1963–4, Althusser worked on Freud and Lacan. He was interested
in the dispersed works of Lacan, and asked his best pupils to read
them: this was because he had been struck by a homology between
the return to Freud advocated by Lacan and his own research into
Marx’s texts.
Althusser’s scrutiny of Lacan was important in at least two
respects. At that time, within the French Communist Party, psy-
choanalysis was still considered to be a ‘bourgeois science’; the
article ‘Freud and Lacan’, which was published in 1964 in one of the
Party’s reviews, La Nouvelle Critique, marked the opening up of rad-
ically new terrain. But Althusser’s intervention was just as decisive
within the context of the French universities, where psychoanalysis
remained little known. As Élisabeth Roudinesco notes, ‘for the fi rst
time, Lacanian texts were read from a philosophical perspective that
amply exceeded the framework of clinical practice’.^2
It was also Althusser who, with the support of Flacelière,
advocated the moving of Lacan’s seminar to the École Normale
Supérieure. Lacan had just been through a period of grave crisis:
banished from the Société Française de Psychanalyse together with
several of his associates, ‘excommunicated’ as he would put it, he
decided to give a new twist to his teaching. He moved away from
the traditional structures within which he had hitherto worked,
and chose the theme of the ‘four fundamental concepts of psychoa-
nalysis’ to discuss in front of this much bigger but less specialized
audience. On 15 January 1964, in the Dussane lecture hall, the
fi rst session of his new seminar was a solemn occasion. Claude
Lévi-Strauss was in the audience, as was the psychiatrist Henri Ey.
Apparently Derrida did not attend this inaugural session. He was
probably detained by an obligation at the Sorbonne, as, in previous
years, he had often gone to hear Lacan at Sainte-Anne, sometimes
in the company of Michel Deguy.
‘From that day on,’ writes Roudinesco, ‘over a period of fi ve