Lacan noticed me when he devoted a session of his seminar to my book on Sacher-Masoch [1967]. I was told—although I never knew anything more than this—that he had devoted more than an hour to my book. And then he came to a conference at Lyon, where I was then teaching. He gave an absolutely unbelievable lecture . . . It was there that he uttered his famous formula, “ Psychoanalysis can do everything except make an idiot seem intelligible. ” After the conference, he came to our place for dinner. And since he went to bed very late, he stayed a long time. I remember: it was after midnight and he absolutely had to have a special whisky. It was truly a nightmare, that night.

My only great encounter with him was after the appearance of Anti-Oedipus [1972]. I’m sure he took it badly. He must have held it against us, Félix and me. But finally, a few months later, he summoned me—there’s no other word for it. He wanted to see me. And so I went. He made me wait in his antechamber. It was filled with people, I didn’t know if they were patients, admirers, journalists . . . He made me wait a long time—a little too long, all the same—and then he finally received me. He rolled out a list of all his disciples, and said that they were all worthless [ nuls] (the only person he said nothing bad about was Jacques-Alain Miller). It made me smile, because I recalled Binswanger telling the story of a similar scene: Freud saying bad things about Jones, Abraham, etc.