IT’S A PARTY!

The NLS Congress Party will take place
 
at the NOOR JAFFA Culture Club
 
on Pinkhas Ben Ya’ir St 5, in Tel Aviv-Yafo
 
on Saturday 1 June from 8 pm to 1 am
 

Interview

Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff
 

¡Point of Urgency!1

Violaine Clément
 
 
 
Despite the equivocal sound with -urgie, found in "surgery," which led to Werk in German and work in English, the origin of the word “urgency” does not seem to be linked to the group of words relating to “work”. Urgere, in Latin, means to push, to press. However, it is amusing that this term in Latin also means to press in the sense of leaving an impression. Sisyphus pushing the rock was said to urget saxum, and waves push against the shore, press against the shore. Old age is also called urgens, in the sense that it pushes us, inexorably, towards death. The urgency is what does not cease to be written; it is the symptom.
 
In this word there is a notion of strength and turmoil. It is a pressure against which we can do nothing, linked to time, to obstinacy, to the swiftness of the act, and associated with the risk of death. In its everyday sense, urgency, which is intimately linked to crisis, is not subjective: it urges for someone, but it is the professional who will determine the existence, or the degree. In two-thirds of the cases, urgency is not recognized. The point of urgency? ¡A question of punctuation! Because it is linked to time, urgency is the point from where a subject, in his traumatic encounter with a real, tips over, and authorizes himself to write a demand. Sometimes it can be written by a simple comma, a semicolon, or a dash as an outline. But sometimes urgency is purely swept away, crossed-out, denied. The subject is not even supposed, but erased like the trace on the shore, swept away by the wave.
 
Lacan wondered “how someone can devote himself to satisfying these urgent cases. […] I write, however, insofar as I believe I must, in order to be on par with these cases, to be a good pair for them.”[2]
 
Far from summoning the father, Lacan indictes the position of the psychoanalyst, who is a good pair, in order to be on par with these cases.
 

Translated by Jane Hodgson-McCrohan
 

Contemporary Urgencies

Geert Hoornaert
 
In this original text, which directs our work towards Tel Aviv [1], Lacan affirms that “psychoanalysis […] is now practiced in couples”. This assertion may seem surprising. Had he not insisted for many decades on his essentially ternary, even quadripartite field?
 
Initially defined as a practice of access to the truth, it was based – something that the prisoner’s syllogism demonstrated beautifully – on what an intersubjective dialectic, pushed to its end, allowed for: an exit from confinement of the symptom, in a conclusive movement of haste. The truth of the place of subject could be deduced from a sequence regulated by a law that the Other guaranteed.
 
Our era of the Other that does not exist sees the emergence of large-scale phenomena that seem to respond to sequences without law. These are anxiety provoking, as nothing in them indicates where the conclusive moment can be reached. The market and those that it excludes, climate deterioration, migration flux or political attenuation – who will respond to these urgencies? And who can predict by which door we will get out of these impasses? The very movements that bring these emergencies up often refuse to inscribe themselves under a clear master-signifier, thus also engaging in lawless trajectories. Will the only thing left – after this fall of the Other, as much on the collective level as on the level of the subject – be a pure frenzy where the target of the urgency is at every shot missed by a missile which is too random?
 
What is certain as to the urgencies of today is that the truth, which is lying, will no longer answer. It is thus useless to want to reinstall it, supported by a strong father. But if this truth is a “sorting out of the smuddle”, it is not so as to replace it with any old thing, with a simple cynical debasing in the style of generalised fake news. For it to be “satisfying”, “there is a particular way of sorting out the smuddle”, notes Lacan. And this way, he continues, is attained only by usage, where the analyst makes “a pair” [2] with the analysand.
 
In November 1975, did not Lacan specify this particular way, in this lesson on Joyce to which Jacques-Alain Miller gave the title, “Of the Logical Use of the Sinthome”? “One has to choose the path by which to capture the truth […] The right way is the one that, when the nature of the sinthome has been recognized, doesn’t shrink from using it logically, that is, from using it to the point of reaching its real, at the end of which it is sated.” [3] This precise notation indicates to us that our practice, if it no longer has to refer to an abstract Other nor be beholden to “an enormous over-evaluation of the father,” [4] is not therefore condemned to an autism-of-two, nor to imaginary fusions that the term “pair” might suggest. Rather, does the pair not refer to the fundamental equality of all speaking beings in the face of the real of which Miller spoke? If the pair consents to make of itself the duped [s’en faire la dupe], a certain usage of semblants can result, which, there where the fall of the Other can also cause a push-to-the-worst, can put themselves at the service of what Freud called, “the elasticity of living things.” [5]
 
Where everywhere walls are erected, whether to separate the masses or to fix the subject in a closed autonomy, nothing is more urgent than the maintenance of this elasticity.
 
 
Translation: Raphael Montague