In my Rapid Eye Movement sleep, I dreamt the song lyrics: It’s the end of the world as we know it . . . It’s the end of the world as we know it . . . and I feel fine.
What is the status of the world today? Doomed? Or is everything just fine? Although The Lacanian Review 15 was brought out by the climate crisis as a particular paradigm or symptom of discontent in the world today, we also examine various other forms of twenty-first century anxiety and malaise.
Amidst utopian fantasies, ideals of progress, war, discourses of catastrophe and impending doom, and fictions of the end of the world, what is the place of psychoanalysis? Within those, perhaps all we can do is make a cut. Hence, the title for TLR 15: “Cut.” Short and simple, to function as a cut in itself.
Inherent in the image of the globe is an imaginary form of wholeness, and yet various events and contingencies puncture that belief in the bubble, in particular, the climate crisis. Insofar as the world is constructed—“this world that is but a dream of each body,” Jacques Lacan says—cuts can perforate the imaginary, perhaps just enough to allow us to see that the world is always only ever, as the R.E.M. song says:
. . . the world as we know it . . .
Inevitably, any attempt to make a world confronts us with waste. Lacan’s equivoque im-monde has contemporary resonance: the world (monde) is polluted (immonde). From the letter as waste or remainder, outside of meaning, to waste as a form of the real in the twenty-first century . . . We explore the complexity of waste: the risks of a subject identified with waste, and yet the potential of this very thing—finding a way to do something with, and even, as Jacques-Alain Miller proposes, elevate to the dignity of a practice, this waste object.
Lacanian cuts are distinctive. And they can be on the side of life. Stemming from the desire of the analyst and through a horticulture of analytic action, rooted in an ethics, cuts can be life-generating. It is perhaps ironic that precisely by way of demonstrating the very impossibility of living, psychoanalysis can also make it possible to find a way to make the world—each one’s singular world—a bit more livable.
Cristina Rose Moro, Managing Editor
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New Lacanian School
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GIEP – NLS
2 March 2024
Knottings Seminar of the NLS
with Patricia Bosquin-Caroz
& Els Van Compernolle
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New Lacanian School
Three Questions to Jacques-Alain Miller
by Corinne Rezki*
In 1946, in his “Presentation on Psychical Causality,” Lacan, having already perceived the risk for psychiatry of searching for the cause of madness in neurology, described the decline of the psychiatric clinic. Would the equation therefore be: “everyone is mad + neurological cause = depathologisation”?
Contemporary depathologisation is not simply the consequence of the dissolution of the clinic due to the DSM and the promotion of medication as the universal key to “mental disorders”. It proceeds from the epochal shift in Western civilization, completely reconfigured by the system of radical individualism. We used to distinguish the normal from the pathological. Once the normal is deconstructed as “norm-mal(e)”, the pathological deconsists.
The pathologies of yesteryear are destined to become “lifestyles”.
Today's depathologisation is heir to what is already at work in “Presentation on Psychical Causality” of 1946, which is an existential depathologisation. It holds that madness – Lacan does not say “psychosis” – is a matter of the subject's freedom, of “the unsoundable decision of being”.
How can we not recognise in this an echo of the “original choice” on which Sartre’s Baudelaire is based, whose publication in Les Temps modernes precedes that of the “Presentation…” by a few months?
If Lacan takes his distance from the “metaphysical causality” attributed to the philosopher, he is nonetheless inspired to dissolve the so-called “organic causality” of madness in order to substitute it with the functions of freedom, its “minute blade” and its “ungraspable consent”.
Lacan makes no secret of his indebtedness to the existentialist school, acknowledging that he follows Merleau-Ponty's “phenomenological method” insofar as it “consider[s] lived experience prior to any objectification.” This gives rise to an initial distinction between the subject and the ego: the latter is but an objectification of the former.
It is demonstrable that the emergence of the Lacanian instance of the subject is correlative to a radical depathologisation of the psychic event.
In Seminar IV, on page 120, Lacan said of the madman: “the instituted world of the British Isles indicates that everyone has the right to be mad on the condition that one remain mad separately. Madness begins when one imposes one’s private madness on the entirety of subjects.” [translation modified]. What is the relationship between this definition and the Congress theme?
This is a thesis about England, and about the founding principles of tolerance of which it had given the world the theory and example. See Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration, its influence on Voltaire; Spinoza precedes it (Treatise on Theology and Politics).
The idea is that we agree to tolerate the other’s beliefs, on condition that he does not hold to them enough to impose them on me, nor that he tries to make me give up mine. Tolerance supposes that no one claims to communicate with an Absolute, and to love it madly. So, believe, yes, but in moderation – not absolutely. Believing is therefore ambiguous, because not believing is a moment of believing.
It follows that your belief is always particular to you. It cannot pass to the register of “for all x,” in other words, of the universal.
Nevertheless, it is in this solution of continuity, in other words, in the impotence of the particular to meet up with the universal, that Lacan, with Hegel, sees “the general formulation of madness” (See the “Presentation…”).
This contradiction is explained if we replace the half-flesh / half-fish belief, which is imaginary, with the delusional belief, which has to do with a real.
This is where the formula “Everyone is mad” is inscribed. This madness in question is that of each one, one by one. It has to do with fantasy insofar as it determines each one’s conception of the world – which is like no other – and his or her singular feeling about life. In that sense, it is a “private madness.” To collectivise it is to pass from fantasy to fanaticism.
Lacan was surprised that so many people attended his Seminar. As head of the School, he prohibited any group life in his School, which he left to others to run in a rather disorderly way.
This theme resonates with a burning topicality. What is the mainspring of the visionary character attributed to some of Lacan’s propositions? Is it rooted in the finesse of a logical identification of the tribulations of the parlêtre?
Lacan began by formalising the Oedipus in terms of the paternal metaphor, and by establishing the Name-of-the-Father as the master signifier essential to humanising and normalising desire.
Subsequently, he was able to note, in his practice, the disintegration of patriarchy and the promotion of the object a, there where the S1 had been. He extrapolated a new clinic from this and announced very early on, the overthrow of the old order of things in Western civilisation.
He was not enthusiastic about this prospect. The title of his Seminar XIX discreetly indicated this: an ellipsis followed by “…or Worse.” It was the Father who was thus elided. “Père ou pire” – “Father or Worse,” this is where we are.
Translated by Peggy Papada
Reviewed by Philip Dravers
*First appeared in Hebdo Blog on 4 February 2024.
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New Lacanian School
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Proposed axes of work
We propose seven axes of work to orient your clinical cases for the Parallel sessions in English, French or bilingual (simultaneous translation).
1. Instants of seeing: love at first sight – twists of fate – insights
2. Effects of Captivation: the body – the mirror – the fetish
3. The appeal of the gaze: Where am I seen from? By whom? Between the Ideal and the Superego
4. Through the window of fantasy: voyeurism/exhibitionism – porn addiction
5. The stain: the uncanny – shame – indignity
6. “Wandering gazes”: these objects (a) that run everywhere, all alone and always ready to grab you at the first turn…
7. The resources of artifice: veil, modesty, adornments, beauty…
For more information… here
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Questions
for Christiane Alberti, President of the WAP
What is the WAP?
The World Association of Psychoanalysis brings
together seven Schools, situated in different countries, on different
continents. Characterised by a diversity of languages and styles, it is a
translinguistic experience which aims at keeping the Lacanian orientation and
Psychoanalysis alive in the world. All its members have one thing in common:
their theoretical references, their concern for the formation of the analyst,
their way of practising psychoanalysis, and their doctrine regarding the end of
analysis. Its members, living in different cultural milieus, feel that, one by
one, they form a School ONE, sharing its destiny, sharing as destiny:
psychoanalysis.
The Congress?
Every two years, the World Association of
Psychoanalysis holds a Congress for its members and anyone else interested in
psychoanalysis. This Congress will be held virtually from February 22nd
2024, to February 25th 2024.
The aim? To take advantage of the best of the virtual, to gather across
borders and languages.
Contemporary clinical issues at the
Congress?
“Everyone is mad”, this proposition by Lacan gave its title to the XIVth
Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis. It resonates immediately
with the demand for egalitarianism that dominates the contemporary world. Taken
to its logical conclusion, it implies the exclusion of any notion of normality.
In
a sense, then, Lacan had anticipated the consequences of our contemporary
ideology of universal egalitarianism, which takes the form of a generalised
depathologisation. Today, as a matter of fact, it is the clinic itself, as a
whole, that is being called into question, always under the suspicion of
promoting segregative categories.
Contrary to current ideological prejudices that deconceptualise the clinic and
tend to rely on the will of subjects, against a backdrop of denial of the
unconscious, Lacanian depathologisation does not erase the clinical structures
at all. On the contrary, it highlights the edges of a mode of jouissance. Here,
the clinic is not aimed at for its own sake but serves as an instrument for
orienting oneself in the interpretation that is the principle of the analytic
method.
So a congress via videoconference means 4
days in front of the screen?
No, not at all! Just a few hours a day!
To listen to clinical cases?
Yes, during the parallel clinical sessions on Thursday, the 22nd
and Friday, the 23rd of February!
And Saturday and Sunday?
Those will be the plenary days, when you'll hear contributions from
psychoanalysts of the WAP, writer-poets, polymaths…
And in the run-up to the conference?
You can discover tiktalks by colleagues from all over the world and the TLMF
series!
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To register: https://congresamp2024.world/en/produit/congres-2024/
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For the schedule: https://congresamp2024.world/en/the-simultaneous/
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The arguments: https://congresamp2024.world/en/category/arguments/
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TikTalks: https://congresamp2024.world/en/category/tiktalks-en/
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TLMF series: https://congresamp2024.world/en/category/tlmf-en/
Interview conducted by Pascale Rivals for ACF Midi-Pyrénées
Translated by Stéphane Preteux.
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