From Lacan: In Spite of Everything, by Élisabeth Roudinesco loc 1,101-1,107:
‘I’m behind with everything I’ve got to do before dying and I’m finding it difficult to make progress.’ This sentence, uttered in 1966 at the Baltimore symposium, encapsulates a problematic of being and time that is one of the major themes of Lacan’s thinking. Hindered since childhood by his slowness and anxieties, Lacan never stopped theorizing the ‘not-all’ or half-saying, whereas he evinced a strong desire to master time, to read all the books he had collected, to visit all the centres of culture, to possess all objects.
…
At the end of his life, not only did he continue to reduce the length of his sessions, to sleep fewer than five hours a night, and to drive his car without observing basic safety rules, he was also increasingly haunted by the fantasy of ‘shrinking’. Dreading the marks of an old age that would put an end to his intellectual activity, he was gradually haunted by the fear of dying and seeing his words and his legacy disappear. And this led him to re-examine, back to front, the myths, words and concepts with which he had fashioned his reading of Freud’s doctrine: castration, waste, genitals, jouissance, letter, death, mystic, trinity.
https://markcarrigan.net/2024/05/19/im-behind-with-everything-ive-got-to-do-before-dying-and-im-finding-it-difficult-to-make-progress/
#Lacan #mortality #rushing #time