ABSTRACT
In 1966, the same year that the Ecrits appeared, Louis Althusser (see 1966, pp. 33–37) circulated among his students a manuscript entitled “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses”. At that time, Althusser’s interest in Lacan was intense, as he had already shown with his 1964 article, “Freud and Lacan” (Althusser, 1993, pp. 7–32) which had been published in La nouvelle critique, the journal of Communist party intellectuals. The section of Writings on Psychoanalysis entitled “The Tbilissi affair: 1976–1984” (Althusser, 1993, pp. 79–124) includes two texts that were written for a conference on psychoanalysis that was held in the Soviet Union. The first, which Althusser withdrew but which was later published without his permission, was written in the spring of 1976 and was entitled “The Discovery of Doctor Freud”; the second, written the following year, was called “On Marx and Freud”. Unlike Bataille, for whom jouissance is the hypostasis of desire (see the five-issue journal Acephale, partially translated in Bataille [1986]), the seminar on ethics posits that there is a point of disruption between desire and jouissance.
