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.

Judith Miller (née Bataille) contributed work on the philosophy of science to the pages of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse. She is the daughter of Jacques Lacan. The patronym ‘Bataille’ came from her mother Sylvia Maklès-Bataille, who at the time of Judith’s birth was married to, though separated from, Georges Bataille. Lacan divorced from his first wife shortly after Judith’s birth, and he and Judith’s mother were married in 1953. Lacan’s biographer Elisabeth Roudinesco writes that ‘he loved her with a passionate and exclusive love [...]. Even in her teens, she formed part of the circle of his disciples and shared in the rapid evolution and rising influence of his thought’. In November 1966, she married Jacques-Alain Miller, and was placed at the top of her year in the philosophy agrégation. In 1968, Michel Foucault recruited her, along with Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, François Regnault, Etienne Balibar and several others, to join the Philosophy department of the new University of Paris VIII (Vincennes). Judith and Jacques-Alain Miller joined the Maoist group Gauche Prolétarienne during its early years, shortly after the events of May 1968, and the programme at Vincennes was dominated in the early 1970s by the figures of Lacan and Mao. Her subversive radicalism eventually led to her dismissal from Vincennes, and she later taught in a lycée. Together with Jacques-Alain Miller she continues to edit the Champ freudien series with Éditions du Seuil, the series founded by her father and in which the official publications of his seminar appear. Her article in Volume 9 of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse applies the idea of the epistemological break to Galileo’s ‘physics and metaphysics’.