You are here: Home / Names / François Regnault (1938–)

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.

AHRC logo

CRMEP logo

François Regnault (1938–)

Regnault studied philosophy at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand before moving on to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1959. At the Ecole Normale he attended the seminars of Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan in the early 1960s, and was a member of Cahiers editorial board and the Cercle d’épistémologie from their inception in 1966. He taught at the Lycée de Reims from 1964-70, where he became a close friend of Alain Badiou. In 1970 he joined the Department of Philosophy headed by Michel Foucault at the new University of Paris VIII (Vincennes) in 1970. In 1974, he moved to Paris VIII’s Department of Psychoanalysis, where he remained through to his recent retirement from teaching. In 1975, he joined the editorial board of Ornicar? and began to publish articles there and elsewhere on Lacanian psychoanalysis and aesthetics.

From the early 1970s, Regnault’s work expanded to include, alongside philosophy and psychoanalysis, a practical involvement in theatre. Coming from a family with theatrical connections, in 1973 he translated Tankred Durst’s Toller (1968) for Patrice Chéreau. In 1974, with Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman, he founded the Compagnie Pandora. He has continued to work in the theatre ever since, as a translator (of, amongst many other works, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World) and as a theorist, dramaturg, and playwright. From 1991 to 1997, again with Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman, he co-directed the Théâtre de la Commune (Pandora) at Aubervilliers, and from 1994 to 2001 he taught diction at the Conservatoire National d’Art dramatique in Paris.

In the Cahiers pour l’Analyse:

François Regnault, ‘Avertissement: Politique de la lecture’, CpA 6.Introduction [HTML] [PDF] [SYN] [TRANS]
François Regnault, ‘La Pensée du prince (Descartes et Machiavel)’, CpA 6.2 [HTML] [PDF] [SYN] [TRANS]
Jacques-Alain Miller & François Regnault, ‘Avertissement, L’Orientation du roman’, CpA 7.Introduction [HTML] [PDF] [SYN] [TRANS]
François Regnault, ‘Optique de Gombrowicz’, CpA 7.3 [HTML] [PDF] [SYN]
François Regnault, ‘Dialectique d’épistémologies’, CpA 9.4 [HTML] [PDF] [SYN] [TRANS]

Select bibliography

  • ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une coupure épistémologique?’, lecture of 26 February 1968 for Louis Althusser’s ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’. Notes on the lecture were published as ‘Définitions’, in Michel Pêcheux and Michel Fichant, Sur l’histoire des sciences. Paris: Maspero, 1969.
  • ‘Meditations sur la Somme’. Ornicar? 2 (March 1975).
  • ‘Le sujet de la science et la fantasme du monde’. Ornicar? 5 (winter 1975).
  • ‘Que selon Marivaux aussi, la vérité, on ne peut que la mi-dire’ Ornicar? 7 (June 1975).
  • ‘Dickens, le théâtre et la psychanalyse’. Ornicar? 17/18 (spring 1979).
  • ‘Entretiens sur les mariages, la sexualité, et les trois fonctions’. Roundtable with Claude Dumézil, Joël Grisward, Alain Grosrichard, Jacques-Alain Miller and Jean Claude Milner. Ornicar? 19 (autumn 1979).
  • ‘Système formel d’Hitchcock’. Cahiers du cinéma, ‘Hitchcock’, hors-série 8 (1980).
  • ‘De deux dieux’. Ornicar? 24 (1981).
  • Mais on doit tout oser puisque. Paris: Bibliothèque d’Ornicar?/Seuil, 1981.
  • Dieu est inconscient. Paris: Navarin, 1986.
  • Le Spectateur. Paris: Beba, 1986.
  • ‘Usages et mésusages de Lacan’. Ornicar? 36 (1986).
  • Dire le vers, with Jean-Claude Milner. Paris: Seuil, 1987; Verdier, 2008.
  • Le Théâtre et la mer. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1989.
  • ‘Lacan and Experience’. In Lacan and the Human Sciences, ed. Alexandre Leupin. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska, 1991.
  • ‘The Name-of-the-Father’. In Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein, Maire Jaanus, Bruce Fink. Albany: SUNY, 1995.
  • La Doctrine inouïe. Dix leçons sur le théâtre classique français. Paris: Hatier, 1996.
  • Conférences d’esthétique lacanienne. Paris: Agalma, 1997.
  • ‘Vos paroles m’ont frappé’. Ornicar? 49 (1998).
  • ‘Du comme ça au just so’. Ornicar? 49 (1998).
  • L’Une des trois unités. Paris: Isele, 1999.
  • Théâtre-Équinoxes. Paris: Actes Sud, 2001.
  • Théâtre-Solstices. Paris: Actes Sud, 2002.
  • ‘Art after Lacan’, trans. B.P. Fulks & J. Jauregui. lacanian ink 19 (2002).
  • Notre objet a. Paris: Verdier, 2003.
  • ‘Ethics and the Theatre’, trans. B.P. Fulks & J. Jauregui. lacanian ink 21 (2003). [Originally published in Magazine littéraire, 1993].
  • ‘Le Marx de Lacan’ [2005]. Compte-rendu of a seminar at the École de la cause freudienne. In Lettre mensuelle de l’ECF 242, online at http://www.causefreudienne.net/index.php/agenda/lettre-en-ligne/les-textes-publies-par-la-lel/le-marx-de-lacan-par-fran-ois-regnault.html.
  • ‘Presentation’ (c. 2008), http://www.editions-verdier.fr/v3/auteur-regnault.html
  • ‘Saintliness and Sainthood’, trans. P. Bradley. lacanian ink 33 (2009).
  • and Pierre Macherey. ‘L’Opéra ou l’art hors de soi’. Les Temps Modernes 231 (August 1965), 289-331.
  • [François Regnault, published anonymously]. ‘Idéologie technocratique et le teilhardisme’. Les Temps Modernes 243 (August 1966).