François Regnault


François Regnault is a French philosopher, playwright and dramaturg. Also a university instructor and teacher, Regnault was maître de conférences at Paris VIII before his retirement. Among his various writings he is the author, with Jean-Claude Milner, of the seminal Dire le vers and of Conférences d'esthétique lacanienne.

Studies

Regnault studied philosophy at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand, and then the Ecole Normale Supérieure beginning in 1962 where he attended the seminars of Louis Althusser.

Psychoanalysis

At ENS, he attended the seminars of Jacques Lacan and was a member of the editorial board of Cahiers pour l'Analyse beginning with its inception in 1966. Regnault taught at the Lycée de Reims from 1964–70, where he became a close friend of another philosopher and playwright, Alain Badiou. In 1970, Regnault joined the Department of Philosophy at the then newly founded University of Paris VIII. In 1974, he moved to Paris VIII's Department of Psychoanalysis.
Since the early 1970s Regnault's work expanded to include, alongside philosophy and psychoanalysis, a practical involvement in theatre. Coming from a family with theatrical connections, he has sustained an interest in the theatre, including many translations. In 1973 he translated Tankred Dorst’s Toller for Patrice Chéreau. Later, he translated among other well-known works: Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. But never drifting far from his initial interest in Lacan, Regnault joined the editorial board of Ornicar? in 1975 and began to publish articles there on Lacanian psychoanalysis and aesthetics.

Theater

Working as a theorist, dramaturg, and playwright, Regnault also co-directed the Théâtre de la Commune at Aubervilliers from 1991 to 1997, and from 1994 to 2001 he taught diction at the Conservatoire National d’Art dramatique in Paris. As a brief explanation of his work and life, Regnault says in a short autobiographical note that whether he is writing on psychoanalysis or working in theatrical aesthetics, it is a double field which shares the subject: Lacan's teaching and the love of theater.

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