Après-coup - Laplanche, Jean

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Résumé :
Publication of these lectures from the 1989-90 seminar on apr?s-coup completes the English translation of the three major works from a period of Laplanche's greatest synthetic creativity, the other two being New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (1987) and The Temptation of Biology: Freud's theories of sexuality (1991-92). This volume also includes two related essays from the same period translated by Luke Thurston: Time and the Other and Temporality and Translation. In Time and the Other, first presented the month after the end of the seminar, Laplanche wrote, apr?s-coup is an expression taken from everyday speech and converted into a noun (Nachtr?glichkeit) at a specific moment in the letters to Fliess, and which Freud himself then privileges as a technical term. Everything confirms this. The lectures on apr?s-coup are important not only because they solidify the (re)discovery of a concept fundamental to psychoanalytic metapsychology, but also because they point to what is unfinished in Laplanche's theorizing of what he called Freud's 'Unfinished Copernican Revolution.' At the center of that unfinished work is the question of the nature of the urge to translate, to understand, to make meaning. The urge to translate is at the origin of the drives. The relation of translation and apr?s-coup is captured in this excerpt from the last lecture: Why then invoke a theory, a translational model of apr?s-coup and, more generally, a translational model of the theory of seduction and even a translational model of the constitution of the human being? It is because there is no mental process that captures the double movement better than translation, the indivisible double movement of the being carried forward and of referring back. The being carried forward is nothing other than what I designate as a fundamental to-be-translated: a demand to translate the message of the other. - Jean Laplanche...

Biographie:
Jean Laplanche (b. 1924-d. 2012) was a French psychoanalyst and vintner. Among the most innovative and theoretically rigorous thinkers of his generation, his work is characterized by a return to the letter of Freud's text, a method of reading Freud according to Freudian principles, and a complete rethinking of the foundations of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Under the Vichy regime, he joined the French Resistance in 1943. The following year, he entered the ?cole Normale Sup?rieure where he studied philosophy with Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, and Ferdinand Alqui?. In the years 1946-1947, he received a scholarship to Harvard University where he developed an interest in psychoanalysis through the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations. Upon returning to Paris, he became a founding member of the revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie. In this same period, he entered into analysis with Jacques Lacan, who remained his mentor until 1963. Laplanche signaled his formal break with Lacan in 1964. However, his intellectual break was well underway when, at the historic Bonneval conference of 1960, in a paper with Serge Leclaire, he directly opposed Lacan's theory of the unconscious structured like a language. In 1967, with J.-B. Pontalis, he published The Language of Psychoanalysis, today the definitive encyclopedia of Freudian thought. The fruits of this project were distilled in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970). A book of extraordinary insight, Laplanche showed how Freud's thought is structured by the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, wherein the repression of the sexual unconscious is itself the object of repression. This critical return to Freud was intensified through a series of lectures published as Probl?matiques. Lessons from the first five volumes are condensed in New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (1987). Whereas Life and Death showed how the sexual drive leans on vital instinct, thus restoring the rightful place of sexuality in the psychoanalytic understanding of the human being, New Foundations presents nothing less than a refounding of the entire psychoanalytic enterprise. From a recovery of Freud's famously abandoned seduction theory, Laplanche developed a general theory of seduction, which explains how the situation of primal seduction, the primacy of the other in the transmission of enigmatic messages from adult to infant, is simultaneously the irreducible foundation of psychoanalysis and human subjectivity. With career achievements as co-founder of the Association Psychanalytique de France, professor of psychoanalysis and founder of the Center for Psychoanalytic Research at the Universit? de Paris VII, founder of the journal Psychanalyse ? l'universit?, and scientific director of the translation of Freud's complete works into French, the magnitude of his thought is only now starting to penetrate Anglophone audiences.