Jacques Lacan

In her extraordinary and controversial biography, Élisabeth Roudinesco, a psychoanalyst trained at the École Freudienne in Paris and the author of a canonical history of psychoanalysis, draws a portrait of the teacher that spans almost half a century of the ups and downs of thought in France. At the heart of the book, the characters that will help to draw the portrait of the great protagonist: teachers, friends, disciples, rivals, the family circle. But also Koyré, Kojève, Bataille, Heidegger, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson. Roudinesco, as Toni Negri affirms, has written more than a biography, although she is also one, and excellent. His is a "high-risk task: that of making biography coincide with the central points of the genesis, development and culmination of Lacan's philosophical system", a thinker who has managed to "infect the plague of analysis, of criticism and freedom to the normalized society of mature capitalism, where everything is language and communication". The century at first mocked the verbal extravagance and jargon of its heirs, but history will retain that it was this man who knew how to analyze with greater lucidity the transformations of the Western family, the decline of the paternal role, the contradictions of love, the illusions of the Revolution and the logic of madness.