6 May ’68, The Emotional Month Joan Copiec [Emotions ran high in Pais in May 68, particularly among students in the universities. Sensing the perl of ignoring the groundswell of emotion, faculty responded immediately, but variously. Some conservative old’ fessils attempted to quash the rebellion, while more ibersl-minded, avunculr types "ook tothe barricades’ cating their lot withthe student radicals. Both camps permitted themselves @ litle more passion than usual, precisely because “usual’ seemed to have evaporated in the hurly-burly of dissent. In the upheaval, everything scemed to have been turned upside down and inside ‘ut, including reason, which ~ suddenly agitated ~ became clouded with roly sediment. Les cool-headed and clear, reason hecame crimson-faced. ‘The response of Jacques Lacan did not fit, however, into either camp. Aligning himself neither against nor on the side of the student radicals, he simply accused them of not being radical enough, of behaving like unwitting flunkies of the university against which they imagined themselves tbe in revolt, Detecting in their cries a plea for & new Master he warned that they were on the verge of getting one. The monitory finger he held in their faces assumed the form of a year-long seminar, Séminaire XVI Lienvers de la poychanalyse (The Underside (or Reverse) of Psychoanalysis In this seminar Lacan maintained that although the students wanted to believe they were shandoning the university for the sets the university was not so easily abandoned; it had already begun to take them over ~ as well as the stcet. Which is why even certain elements of their revolt reflected academic business as usta For the most pact, the reversals or upendings referred to inthe seminars tide produce something other than psychoanalysis, another kind of discourse, namely that ofthe Maste, the Hysteric or the University. Tat is the speciic ‘operation of ‘reversal’ referred to in the ile is that ofthe ‘quarter turns’ ot rotations which produce the four discourses, of which psychoanalysis is only tone? Yet there is also a sense in which the reversal does take place within MAY '68, THE EMOTIONAL MONTH mn mychoanalsis itself, as Lacan turns classical Freudian theory upside down ind inside out to produce a more revolutionary version of it, and thus to ‘redefine the ‘analytic discourse’ as @ new social bond. At the end of the ‘emia this social tie is rendered in a distilled formula that exposes the uikimate ambition of the analyst ~ who, in hee impossible role as analyst, ‘operates on the analysand ~ as rather unseemly. The final aim of psycho imalysi, turns out, i the production of shame. That which Lacan himselt ‘lscribes as unmentionable, even improper to speech as such, is mentioned {and mentioned only) on the threshold of the seminar’ close. The seam underside of psychoanalysis, the backside towards which all the twists and ‘urns have lei finally shames that affect whose very mention brings a blush to the face’ Why is shame given such a place of honour if we may put it that way; i the seminar? And what should the postion of the analyst be with ‘respect to it? Should she try to reduce i, get Fd of it, lower her eyes before it? [Nos Lacan proposes that the analyst make herself the agent of it. Provoke it "ooking out into the audience gathered in large numbers aeound him, he accounts for their presence in his fina, closing remarks thus:ifyou have come hereto isten to what Ihave to say, it is because Ihave positioned myself with respect €0 you as analyst that iz as objectcause of your desire, And in this ‘way Ihave helped you to fecl ashamed, End of seminar T want to allow what Lacan is saying to sink in. In response to May “8, a very emotional month, he ends his seminar, his long warning against the rampant and misguided emotionalism of the university students, with an Jmpassioned plea for a display of shame, Curb your impudence, your shame- lestnes, he exhorts, cautioning: you should be ashamed! What effrontery! ‘What a provocation is this seminar! But then: what are we to. make of i? Because the reference to shame appears so abruptly only inthe final session and without elaboration, this isnot an easy question to answer, One hears ‘echoes of the transerential words of Alcibiades, who has this to say in The Symposium about Socrates: ‘And with this man alone I have an experience ‘which no one would believe was posible for me ~the sense of shame. But to ‘detect the vibrations of his precedent ea farcry from understanding what to make oft. Te sort matters out, on looks for hints that might be seen in retrospect Ihave been dropped along the way, and might now steer us in the proper direction. Shame did emerge as atopic of interest in earlier seminars. In Seminar VI: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, for example, Lacan compared shame to beauty, noting thatthe two functioned similalyto mark a imi and in Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Conceps of Psycho-Analysis, in bis siscussion of Sartre's scenario ofthe voyeur atthe keyhole, he dwells For 32 ‘THEE SILENT PARTNERS {ime on the phenomenon of shame a f tying to justify Sartre's contention that it marks the ‘birth of the soca’. In L'envers Lacan adjust that claim slightly arguing that shame marks not the soci link as such, but that particu lar link wich analysis is intent on forging, One ofthe mont feitl paths to follow, however is the one lad down by Lacan's remarks on affect, preci because am affects what shame is. ‘That the return to Freud via Saussurean linguistics was guilty of a disas {rous neglect of affect ws, by May 68, nota new charge. Lacan had dealt with it before, particularly in Seminar X, the seminar on anxiety. But it not dlfcult to understand why the charge was resurrected by the students who confronted him, during the course ofthis very seminar, on the steps of the Pantheon. The percived hyperrationaliy of the formulas drawa on black ‘boards by their structurals professors seemed arid and far removed from the ‘rm that surrounded them, from the newness of extraordinary even the violence of police beatings, andi fom their own inchoate feelings of solidarity With the workers. grumbling sense that something had beet left ou, that something inevitably escaped these desiccated and timeles structures, was ‘expressed inthe renewed demand that Lacan begin redressing the university's failures by recognizing the importance of affect, They had had it up to their eyeballs with signfirs and all the talk of signfirs, which only lf a whole area of thet experience unacknowledged: precisely the fat of thie being agitated, moved by what was happening here and nov. Lacan responded by drawing more formulas on the backboard. Bu let ws t least ret im with this he bent over backwards to point out that he wis not simply talking the tlk, he was... well, he was fting his structures with fet Indeed, he mentions this over and over: my structures have legs They do rmarchs they do move, my four-legged creatures. If he keeps tepeating this joking reference to his four-footed structures, itis not because he is delighted ‘with his tle metaphor, but because its not a metaphor. The movement in these signifying structures i rea, whichis how we know they do not ignore alec as many had charged, Afect is included in the formulas of the four discourses, But where? A, negative answer fits: one misses the point if one tiesto locate affect or ouisance, in Lacan's preferred vocabulary — in any of the individual symbols ‘that compose the structure; affect (again, afect) isnot to he treated ay a local