Roudinesco’s observations remind one of literary critic John Carey’s provocations. On a visit to Dublin, in discussion with Irish literary critic Declan Kiberd, Carey dared to suggest that Joyce’s Ulysses was a treatment for insomnia. Carey was reheating a theme from his The Intellectuals and the Masses (Carey 2005), about the response of the English literary intelligentsia to the new phenomenon of mass culture more than a century ago. The Education Acts of the 1870s created a mass reading public with mass circulation newspapers. Literary intellectuals were hostile to these developments regarding universal education as a mistake. As Carey suggested, ‘they resented the “semi-literate” masses, despised their pretensions to culture and detested newspapers’ (Carey 2014, 326). They created ‘modernist literature which cultivates obscurity and depends on learned allusions, comprehensible only to the highly educated’ (327). Carey noted similar developments in the other arts.
Kiberd himself was to say something similar on the fortieth anniversary of May ’68.
Those who failed to make a revolution in the world settled instead for making one in language. They retreated from the streets and factories to university arts’ facilities. There they propounded extreme forms of post-structural theory in a specialist jargon, which no normally intelligent person could (or should) ever hope to understand.
(Kiberd 2008).
The ‘incomprehensible language’ and ‘specialist jargon’ of the Lacanian groups was in part an elitist response to the newly emergent mass therapy culture during the 1970s and 1980s including Anglo-American psychotherapy post-Freud. The Lacanian intent, never stated, was to exclude the therapy-hungry masses from such high culture and esoteric doctrines. When a colleague attempted to purchase a copy of Lacan’s Écrits in a small Parisian bookstore back in the ‘70s, the owner of the shop strongly discouraged him from spending his money on a text of such supreme difficulty.