From This Week's Column

When Jacques-Alain Miller pontificates, it is, verily, as a pontiff. Besides control of the enigmatic theorists's literary estate, Miller has inherited Lacan's mantle as leader of one international current in psychoanalysis. His influence spans several continents. Within the Lacanian movement, he is, so to speak, the analyst of the analysts' analysts.

He was once also a student of Louis Althusser, whose seminar in Paris during the early 1960s taught apprentice Marxist philosophers not so much to analyze concepts as to "produce" them. Miller was the central figure in a moment of high drama during the era of high structuralism. During Althusser's seminar, Miller complained that he had been busy producing something he called "metonymic causality" when another student stole it. He wanted his concept returned. (However this conflict was resolved, the real winner had to be any bemused bystander.)

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