A Portrait of Desire: On Jacques-Alain Miller's Life of Lacan and the Anti-biographical Imperative

Abstract:This essay examines Jacques-Alain Miller's avoidance and refashioning of various conventions of biography in Life of Lacan in his attempt to adequately represent not a "Great Man" but a "man of desire"—the embodiment of a psychoanalytic ethics of desire. In doing so, comparisons are made to other biographies and memoirs such as Élisabeth Roudinesco's Jacques Lacan, Catherine Millot's Life with Lacan, and Sibylle Lacan's A Father: Puzzle. A discussion of Lacan's own resistance to biography and the mixed regard in which he held the biographies he read is followed by an explanation of the anti-biographical imperative established by Lacan and adopted by Miller as an unrealizable ideal of the psychoanalytic doctrine's transmission without reference to the person of Lacan. The third section is a reading of Miller's experiment in psychoanalytic life writing as an effort to represent, without resolving, the enigma of desire that Lacan is said to exemplify.