What I need...

Lacan noticed me when he devoted a session of his seminar to my book on Sacher-Masoch. 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. 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 (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. And Binswanger was shrewd enough to assume that Freud would say the same thing about him when he wasn't there. So Lacan was speaking, and everyone was condemned, except Miller. And then he said to me, "What I need is someone like you."

- Gilles Deleuze

"The Inverse Side of the Structure: Žižek on Deleuze on Lacan"