Argument for the NLS Congress

XI^th NLS
Congress – Athens, 18th & 19th May 2013

The
Psychotic Subject in the Geek Era

Typicality and Symptomatic Inventions

In a world where each “One” is
kitted out with his “I-object”, a world where being a geek[1]
constitutes an ordinary lifestyle, what becomes of what we call psychosis? The
triumph of the “I-gadgets” as objects outside-the-body [hors-corps] has upset relations between parlêtres, relations that hitherto were codified by what Freud
called the programme of civilisation. From the 20^th to the 21^st
century, we have passed from the era of discourses that knot the social bond to
the world of the One-all-alone which finds support in the symptom as an
alternative social bond.

In his intervention at the Tel Aviv
Congress, which will be the reference for the Congress in Athens, Éric Laurent
proposes for the NLS “an enquiry into the way in which we read, in our
present-day practice, what the word ‘psychosis’ means for psychoanalysis.”[2].
One can indeed generalise the psychotic effort, which consists in giving order
to the world without the aid of established discourses, to the general effort
of writing one’s own symptom. This symptomatic mark, this seal on the body,
this trace of lalangue, or even
forced invention, consists in a reduction of the flight of meaning. On the
other side, surfing the frantic canvas of the web presents itself as the Danaids’ barrel of the 21st century. Thus,
for Raffaele Simone, the mediasphere produces a revolution in the mind that is
larger and more penetrating than the one feared by Plato in Phaedrus regarding the advent of writing[3].
Rather than adopting an attitude of nostalgic sorrow, we shall say how
psychoanalysis takes on board these new forms of books, written in real-time,
that each individual drafts in his own image, a private Facebook that is more and more open towards the world, an
exhibition of one’s own case under constant revision. However, Simone stands
closer to Lacan in so far as he considers that media are not man’s extension,
but on the contrary, man is the media’s extension. Is not the “I-object” a
supplementary organ whose function is sought by the bloggers we are?

In this context of great disorder in
the real[4],
psychiatry has increasingly distanced itself from the constituent signs of
psychosis in favour of the silence of the organs (to the point of losing all
references, for example, in the case of Anders Behring Breivik). Meanwhile,
psychoanalysis, rather than mourn the decline of the paternal imago, has
revealed the arbitrariness of the father, its fictional dimension, in order to
focus more and more on the formal envelope of the symptom. This is how it aims
at the symptom’s core of jouissance in what is most real about it, which
constitutes at the same time, for the speaking-being, his most singular anchoring
point.

Many discourses attempt to give
order to the world. Lacan formalised four of them, plus the capitalist
discourse “which gnaws away at each of them” and where “it is the object a that rises to the zenith and
redistributes the possible permutations”[5].
The conceptual shift in Lacan’s work which moves from the first to the second
paternal metaphor corresponds to this movement of civilisation that is becoming
plural[6].
It is no longer just the Name-of-the-Father, but the whole of language that
takes charge of phenomena in which signification is stabilised. This Other
which Lacan barred with a stroke to mark that it only takes its assurance from
a fiction, this Other which therefore does not exist, forces each of us to
produce the singularity of our trajectory.

In the papers for the Congress we
will have to emphasize the symptomatic invention, the singular subjective bricolage called upon by the era of the
Other that does not exist[7]
and its “I-objects”. In other words, how does the subject make a language out
of his symptom? How does he grasp hold of objects to turn them into functional
organs? Éric Laurent points this out: it is from the psychotic subject that we
must learn how, for each and every one of us, the whole of language takes
charge of the effort of naming jouissance. Thus, the right way to be a heretic
in psychoanalysis after Oedipus[8]
would be “the one that, from having recognised the nature of the sinthome, does not hesitate to use it
logically, that is to say, to use it until he reaches his real, after which his
thirst is sated.”[9]
To recognise the nature of the sinthome
is to recognise the way in which “enjoying substance is taken up in language
itself” and given order[10].
It is the language-organ that makes a subject a parlêtre, implying that at the same time as it gives him being it fobs him off with a having, his body. By significantizising
them, organ-language plies the organs out of the body, which makes them
problematic and requires that a function be found for them, without the aid of
any established discourse, for the so-called schizophrenic.[11].

We can thus make the catalogue of
psychotic inventions[12]:
invention of a discourse, of a resource to be able to make use of his body in
the case of the schizophrenic, invention of a relation to the Other to stay in
the social bond in the case of the paranoiac, impossible invention in the case
of the melancholic, invention of an anchoring point or an identification in the
cases of ordinary psychosis. Furthermore, non-invention constitutes an equally
interesting class, as the trauma of language appears there in its purity.

Our effort, says É. Laurent, is
however the reverse of classificatory attempts. There is in psychoanalysis a
horizon of the unclassifiable at which this effort aims, so that the symptom
may designate the singularity of a subject. But this extension to the ordinary
status of psychosis to “everyone is mad”, does not mean that everyone is
psychotic. “One should not mix up the lessons to be learnt from the psychotic
subject (which bear on the entirety of the clinical field) with a clinical
category as such, making it the most sizeable category of our experience.”[13].
Thus, our enquiry should also explore “how the ordinary Name-of-the-Father of
existence transforms once we have our horizon of the unclassifiable”[14].
And we shall find once again, with the dimension of the father as fiction, the
typicality of psychosis, and the phenomena of triggering linked to the
encounter with “A-father”, phenomena which do not concern invention.

Ordinary delusion is a geek’s effort
of invention. “You can be sure that it’s a delusion when it stays at the level
of One-by-himself […] Does it manage to form a social bond or not? Sometimes
contingency plays a role. There are forms of delusion that one can clearly see
cannot be socialized”[15].
But don’t religious fanaticism, authoritarian therapies, or even generalised
evaluation, reveal a furious call to the father? To these triumphant forms of
the collective, doesn’t psychoanalysis oppose an unheard-of response in so far
as it is an experience of traversing the impasses of the “One-all-alone”? This
is the question that our enquiry on psychosis in the geek era may contribute to solve.

Dominique Holvoet

Translated by Florencia Fernandez Coria Shanahan