1966 was an exceptionally brilliant year for science. In autumn 1965, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Jacques Monod, François Jacob and André Lwoff for their work on the genetic code; in autumn 1966, the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Albert Kastler for the discovery and development of optical methods for studying Hertzian resonance in atoms. This work fascinated a wide audience, including Mauriac during Monod's opening lecture at the Collège de France. These scientists were also involved in university reform: Monod at the Caen colloquium in autumn 1966; Kastler at the "Six heures pour le Vietnam" (Six hours for Vietnam) at the Mutualité on November 30, 1966.
It was also the year of the "death of man", of Althusser's "theoretical antihumanism". Mauriac and Sartre represented the humanisms of yesteryear: the entire generation of sixty- to eighty-year-olds was swept away by the young (and not so young, like Lacan). Althusser and Foucault became the essential references, along with Lévi-Strauss and Lacan.
In this story, we shouldn't overlook a major player who hasn't yet been mentioned: the Union des étudiants communistes (UEC), which went from jolt to jolt, crisis to crisis, until it was finally taken over by the PCF in the spring of 1966.
Lacan was holding his seminar at rue d'Ulm. Between him and Althusser gravitated a core of students who shared and exchanged views, and who were close to the UEC. The UEC crisis was linked to the upheavals in the student world and its politicization in the wake of the Algerian war. In the end, the PCF could no longer control the UEC, which was looking towards the Italian PC and Europe. The UEC was tempted by a renewal of the PCF. This was the moment of a violent struggle behind the scenes between Garaudy and Althusser, who had just brought together his reflections on Marx in Pour Marx and then Lire le Capital. It was in this highly charged context, where the PCF had to decide on the question of humanism, that the Central Committee meeting of March 1966 opened. The conflict between Garaudy and Althusser took center stage, but the violence of the debates remained absent from the compromise texts.
It was in Argenteuil that the Rue d'Ulm cell saw a reason to break away. After losing the Italians in 1965 and the Trotskyists in 1966, the UEC lost the ultra-orthodox. The UEC was thus purified at the cost of many losses, and the PCF lost its cadres and young people for a long time to come.
The publication of Écrits de Lacan took place against this backdrop. Curiously, the most favorable reception came from Lettres françaises and Le Figaro. Although Lacan was not interested in Marxism, his students were. After Les Mots et les choses, read on the beaches in the summer of 1966, according to Le Jardin des modes in June 1967, Écrits was the favorite reading of socialites on the Côte d'Azur.
Extract from "Le masque et la plume", 5/02/1967: "Sartre en question", François-Régis Bastide and Michel Polac, with François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye and François Wahl. InA archives.
