Concept and Form:
The Cahiers pour l’Analyse
and Contemporary French Thought

This project is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research grant and is supported by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) and Kingston University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

A practicing psychoanalyst for more than fifty years, Xavier Audouard was an early associate of Jacques Lacan’s who was noted for his special interest in the relation between psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectics. A Jesuit from 1943, Audouard left the religious order and entered into analysis with Lacan from 1958 to 1962 and from 1965 to 1969. Much like Serge Leclaire’s contribution, Audouard’s grants to the Cahiers pour l’Analyse the imprimatur of a practicing analysis. In an interview, he once avowed that he had little interest in topology or the various other formal sciences that so exercised Lacan and the Cercle d’Épistémologie (although he did maintain a lifelong amateur engagement with astronomy). In the spring of1965, Lacan invited him to contribute a lesson on Plato’s Sophist to his seminar, which is reproduced in Seminar XII, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis. Jean-Claude Milner’s ‘Le Point du signifiant’ (CpA 3.5) was first delivered in the same seminar several weeks later. The two ‘lessons’ are reproduced together in a dossier in volume three of the Cahiers devoted to Plato’s Sophist. In Audouard’s and Milner’s contrasting lessons we see different views of the relationship of the subject to non-being, with Audouard making a case for their conceptual unity in a kind of dialectical closure, with Milner instead arguing for the vacillating nature of non-being as both function and term and thus as a barrier to conceptual synthesis.