Between philosophy and psychoanalysis, there is no correspondence, if by that we mean the harmonious accord of discourses. “Antipathy of discourse,” stated Lacan.
However, if we consider the epistolary meaning of the word, we may affirm that there have been correspondences between them – correspondences that are also reciprocal questioning.
For psychoanalysts can not ignore what the history of their theory owns to philosophical concepts and to the philosophical experience of thinking. Conversely, philosophers can not avoid the impact that psychoanalysis has caused to metaphysical illusions, and that invites them to “reprise” – which is much more than just reform – their questions and their discourses.
Psychoanalysts and philosophers are obliged to respond to each other. Entertaining this correspondence is their common responsibility. Because neither the one nor the other can avoid the duty of questioning the abyss that is the bottom of the bottomless bottom of the existing-speaking. Described by a philosopher, the “addresses” that are read here participate in this correspondence. On the fields of ethics, politics, aesthetics, on concepts as important as those of drive, anguish, and resemblance, on the issues of university, of language, of social exclusion, they are as much interrogations as answers to these interpellations.