ABSTRACT

This chapter provides a detailed annotation of Lacan’s The Youth of Gide, or the Letter and Desire in Écrits and a survey of passages discussing Gide in previous texts, like the obscure allusion to Gide at the end of The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or the detailed reading of Gide’s “perversion” in Seminar V, and the later re-emergence of Gide in connection with Joyce in the seventies. Writing this double review of Delay’s and Schlumberger’s books on Gide for Critique, Lacan praises the former and criticizes the latter. Delay has captured the essence of Gide insofar as his entire being was transformed by the letter and literature, whereas Schlumberger errs by contrasting fact and fiction. What stands out for Lacan is the main crisis that brought about a clash between Gide and his wife Madeleine after she burned all their letters. This allows Lacan to link the hole of the letter with the irruption of jouissance when desire fails. Gide’s wail of despair nevertheless keeps an element of comedy or of Nietzschean parody whose ramifications Lacan teases out in Gide’s texts.