Jacques-Alain Miller

Jacques-Alain Miller (French: [milɛʁ]; born 14 February 1944) is a psychoanalyst and writer. He is one of the founding members of the École de la Cause freudienne (School of the Freudian Cause) and the World Association of Psychoanalysis which he presided from 1992 to 2002. He is the sole editor of the books of The Seminars of Jacques Lacan.

In 1962, Miller entered the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), where he studied with Louis Althusser. His fellow students included Étienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, François Regnault, Robert Linart, and Jean-Claude Milner. At the ENS he attended the seminars of Roland Barthes, the "first writer with whom I had a close friendship". At this time he also met the young Jacques Derrida, who was lecturing at the Sorbonne.

In 1963, Althusser assigned Miller the task of reading "all of Lacan". The following year, Jacques Lacan was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes and transferred his Seminar to the ENS. Over the summer break of 1964, Lacan invited Miller to his country house, La Prévôté in Guitrancourt, where Miller read the transcriptions of Lacan's early seminars. During a later stay at Guitrancourt, Miller began a relationship with Judith Lacan, Lacan's daughter, whom he married in 1966. In the same year, Miller composed the index of concepts and the commentary on the graphs in Lacan's landmark book Écrits and founded Cahiers pour l'Analyse, a seminal publication whose editorial board included Alain Grosrichard, Regnault, Milner, and, later, Alain Badiou.

Miller's written texts from this early period are published in the Gallimard collection Un début dans la vie (2002), which includes his interview with Jean-Paul Sartre and an influential essay he presented at Lacan's Seminar of 24 February 1965, "Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier".

After a period of involvement in the left-wing movements associated with May 1968, Miller was encouraged by Lacan to take "another path by which to get your privileged revolt across: mine for example". In time Miller would become instrumental in Lacan's École Freudienne de Paris, founding and editing the journal Ornicar ? which published lessons of Lacan's Seminar. When Lacan moved to the University of Vincennes—the Department of Psychoanalysis was renamed "Le Champ freudien"—Lacan became its director, and Michel Foucault appointed Jacques-Alain Miller president.

Miller's teaching from this period (1972-1978) took on the name L'Orientation lacanienne and gave rise to published texts on Bentham, Peirce and Church.

In 1973, Miller transcribed Lacan's the 1964 Seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis which was to lead to a lifelong commitment to establishing the full series of Lacan's annual Parisian Seminar. Book XI was published by Seuil in 1973, with Books I & Book XX following in 1975 and Book II in 1978.

Miller also contributed in 1973 to the two-part televised programme that later became known as "Television".