Jacques-Alain Miller - Life and Career

Life and Career

As a student at the École Normale Supérieure, he met his future father-in-law Jacques Lacan in 1964 while attending his seminars at the rue d'Ulm. After having read everything Lacan had thus far published, he asked him, "Does your notion of the subject imply an ontology?" and an entente was made with him. In 1966 he founded Cahiers pour l'Analyse, a seminal publication whose editorial board included Alain Badiou, François Regnault and Jean-Claude Milner. He was the editor of Ornicar? when Lacan announced the dissolution of L'Ecole Française de Psychanalyse, and the foundation of L'École de la Cause Freudienne.

At the École Normale Supérieure, Miller studied with Louis Althusser at the same time as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Rancière, but soon he was following the teachings of Jacques Lacan who in 1964 had been appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Althusser assigned him the task of reading "all of Lacan" and Miller carried out the task admiringly. In time he would become instrumental in Lacan's Ecole Freudienne de Paris. When Lacan moved to the University of Vincennes—the Department of Psychoanalysis was renamed "Le Champ freudien"—Lacan became its director, and Jacques-Alain Miller the president. Lacan's dissolution of the École Française de Psychanalyse in 1980 was followed by the creation of La cause freudienne. Soon thereafter Lacan died leaving Miller as the sole editor of his seminars, an endeavor that would require Miller's entire life.

Jacques-Alain Miller, who married Lacan's daughter (aka Judith Miller), started his own weekly seminars in 1980, called "L'Orientation lacanienne" intended to expound and elucidate Lacan's work. As the editor of Jacques Lacan's seminars, he has so far published more than half of them in French. He also supervised the English translations of Lacan's work: "Écrits", and the seminars, "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis", "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis", Encore – On Feminine Sexuality. In 2001 he started a series of public interventions on behalf of the independence of psychoanalysis vis-à-vis government control in France. He wrote First Letter addressed by Jacques-Alain Miller to An Enlightened Public, "Clear Like Day Letter" and "The Tenderness of Terrorism" where he asserted that "an analyst is only authorized by her/himself" (Lacan's dictum: l'analyste ne s'autorise que de lui-même).

In the early nineties, Miller's work began to be translated into English and published in the United States through the New York-based cultural journal Lacanian Ink under the editorship of Josefina Ayerza. More recently other groups have taken root in America, notably in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1992 Miller set up the World Association of Psychoanalysis in order to advance Lacan's teachings. Today it has over a thousand members in Europe, America, Israel and Australia. The association creates schools that transmit psychoanalysis, ensure the formation of analysts, guarantee their qualification and the quality of their practice.

Within the frame of his "Orientation lacanienne" Miller works in apparent conjunction with other European philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. There is nevertheless a clear distance from them, from the beginning as may be seen in the review "Cahiers pour l'Analyse".