Your Money or Your Life 

Eugenio Díaz

I write this contribution to the open debate about the situation in Catalonia, and the political crisis, which is a crisis of the social bond that this situation shows us in a moment of maximum tension, maximum preoccupation, and maximum uncertainty.

Not long ago, at the 2015 Study Days of the ELP held in Barcelona under the title, Crisis – What the Psychoanalysts Have to Say, we learned and observed that crisis is something consubstantial with the human, and that “wanting to cure it can at times be the best way to feed this imperative and its devastating effects, if one does not first analyse the signifier that orders – in all senses of the word ‘order’ – this jouissance imposed in the name of the Good” (Bassols, 2015). I add, in reference to the current situation: in the name of an imposed jouissance of the Good that is supposedly the indissoluble unity, whether of the nation or the people.

Knowing this has not kept me from a feeling of collective disaster, which for that reason is personal. A jouissance of disaster that I do not want to be invaded by, which is why I am contributing this small idea to consider amongst many other ideas that have already been aired, diverse, discordant, and in the line of exploring the impossible, in order not to remain stuck in impotence and the observance of the push to the worse.

In Seminar XI, Jacques Lacan sets out, in relation to the operations of alienation and separation that cause the subject, the forced choice that is implied in the first of these. There, using a Witz that is almost visual, he indicates that in the choice between the money (the all, we could say) and life, one is forced to choose life, but in choosing it life can no longer be anything but restricted.

A loss is thus implied in this choice. Lacan then goes on to speak of a second operation, that of separation, which properly read also includes a loss, given that in this separare (se parere) what is at stake is a return to the primary alienation, but now in another modality (thus not without loss). There is no separation that does not imply a bond, a new bond. Without this separation we have the passage to the act.

This bond in common – Lacan will speak about this in various ways throughout his teaching – and is based in the solitude and the singularity of the sinthome. It is with this that one can make a community. Otherwise one is rather in the psychology of the masses.

Alienation and separation, by being thus holed, therefore include a loss, even though there is also something that is added: a new bond with the Other, an Other that is now barred, the fall of identifications, which had occupied the place of the “there is no”, of the “not-All”.

In the same chapters of Seminar XI, Lacan speaks about the choice of the slave, which is rather of the order of freedom or death. For the slave, the forced choice comes at the price of life, when life no longer has any value, one chooses life or death.

To return to the current situation, I thought that in the name of the all, that is, in believing that it is possible to have your money and your life – which is in a certain way the wager of those pushing for independence – one can lose one’s autonomy, which is a life of not-All, restricted, but at the end of the day still a life.

Saying that the wager of those in favour of independence is an all is a way of indicating the maximalist position to which those pressing for it have arrived. This involves, for example, equating the desire to decide, to separate, to become independent (about which there is nothing to say), with the right to decide (which in itself is questionable).

This maximalist position has been arrived at with the inestimable assistance of the government of Spain, which has not contributed any politics worthy of the name to this situation, but has rather acted in the manner of the Marx brothers “mas Madera es la Guerra”, as with the dreadful police actions of the 1^st October, but also at many other moments in the course of the years.

It also occurred to me that in the staging of the independent position there has been a forcing. As someone more familiar with the matter said to me: it is a question of demonstrating the incurable of the Spanish State (even beyond the government) in order to justify that independence is the only possible way out. For our part let us not forget that the incurable, being more or less bearable depending on the subjectivities involved, is something for all, while not being completely reducible.

This forcing thus “logically” includes a decanting, a conversion of the forced choice of the subject into that of the slave, a conversion that is nothing but the rendering banal of the dignity of that choice, that of the true slave.

While I was writing this contribution, I heard a Councillor of the Generalitat say the following on the radio: “The Republic is no longer a choice, it is an absolute necessity for survival.” Thus when there is no choice, only “life or death” remains. Subtracting the subject from his forced choice leads to the banalisation of the choice between freedom and death. This choice is rendered banal in the same way and at the same time that applying a law without having previously included the politics that knows that “the unconscious is politics” has incalculable consequences for the social bond and for life.

Translation: Roger Litten

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Turin, a Wake-up Call 

Sergio Caretto

Democracy is not a condition, once and for all, of a guaranteed bond, and this is a fact that is found both in the past and in our times. Sometimes we fall asleep with the idea that those rights, acquired at the cost of hard battles fought by those who came before us, remain unaltered over time, which means that we forget the warning that, if I am not mistaken, Goethe left us: “Who falls asleep under democracy will wake up under dictatorship.” These are words of warning that alert us to not end up, almost without realizing it, deprived of those rights enjoyed under democracy.

And what if democracy today tends to make the subject sleep while dictatorship, on the contrary, makes him wake up? One wonders why democracy would foster a certain anesthesia of the subject – that same democracy that offers itself as a bond in which a blazing conflict can find a home, a conflict linked to desire as well as to the attempt to hold together different subjective positions that are sometimes very distant from each other. The fact that conflict and desire are inseparable was extremely clear to Freud, who learned from the analytical experience an unthinkable lesson, both then and now, of the symptom as resulting from the conflict between drive demands, which are not wholly absorbed by way of language, and the needs of civilisation, which impose a renunciation of the drive on the individual in exchange for a “plus” in terms of security. In this sense, the symptom, a formation of compromise, would be a democratic formation produced by the work of the subconscious, at the moment when it tries to come to terms with a jouissance that constantly comes back, in conformity with the modalities of its expulsion. After all, the analytic experience draws its politics from reducing the symptom to its hard core, and from leading the subject to the edge of that unclassifiable hole which provokes resolute desire as a possible response. In this sense, the politics of psychoanalysis is a politics of the not-all, an osso buco politics, to put it in terms of the Piedmontese culinary speciality. Analysis teaches us that taking responsibility for the jouissance that concerns us in our misery and division, rather than throwing it onto the Other, is a necessary condition for welcoming the other in his radical difference and dealing in a creative way with the conflict that this difference brings with it. Addressing what is produced in terms of symptom, as much at the level of the singular as at that of the collective, therefore becomes one of the conditions for making sure that the encounter with alterity does not simply produce hatred and rejection. In that sense, as psychoanalyst-psychoanalysand, we have the responsibility, in the cure as well as in the social discourse in which we live, to remember what Lacan affirms in the Proposition of 9th October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School: There is a real at play in the formation of the psychoanalyst and this real tends to be misunderstood, as much at the level of the singular as at the level of the collective. This real, however, also pushes the analyst to incarnate, warily, the singular real in a cure, as in the collective discourse of which we are a part and which determines us. Jacques-Alain Miller, by his act, structurally “immondo”, impure, makes himself once again a cause of awakening; he shakes up the schools and the analysts to prevent them from falling asleep when faced with misunderstanding or the rejection of the real that is now at stake in the field of politics. Nowadays, these effects show themselves, in all their destructive power, in the field of politics, and they threaten that form of connection that we call democracy. Effects, like the purloined letter, which are so clear as to be invisible.

The question I ask myself is: is it the case that in democracy, today more than yesterday, we are asleep, since jouissance, under the empire in which we “live”, inhibits the conflictual dimension? I remember a Rosa Elena Manzetti intervention in which, several years ago, she highlighted a particular way for the contemporary subject to be phobic in relation to the dimension of conflict. The avoidance of conflict is nowadays facilitated by the possibility of establishing relationships in the absence of bodies, and by the illusion that it is enough to press a button to avoid meeting the other, where both misunderstanding and conflict manifest themselves on the horizon. However, does a democracy which backs away when confronted with conflict not reduce itself to an empty shape and the bureaucratic exercise of power? Does it not reduce itself to a democracy of statements that actually collapses as soon as it confronts the singular speech of each individual? Hannah Arendt explicitly highlighted the connection between a blind and apparently neutral bureaucratisation and the advent of totalitarianism.

The Turin Forum will be my opportunity to verify how much the speech of each person would provoke the speech of the other, and then another, in noting thus, during the act, that democracy is this field of desire, never guaranteed, which is achieved on the basis of the effects of a speech which takes form, and that therefore gives way to the singularity of the subject, be it individual or collective, rather than expelling it along the path of the concentration camp, which is constantly on the horizon. The Turin Forum is a wake-up call. We await you in Turin with its “Theory of the Subject of the School”[1], its galleries, its chocolate liqueur (bicerin), its osso buco and its lalangue.

Translated by Caterina Tropini

Reviewed by Janet and John Haney

Democracy? Definitely! But What Kind?

Pierre-Gilles Guéguen

Why do Psychoanalysts have a strong desire for democracy?

We will first of all reply that it regards the very existence of psychoanalysis, and its concrete and practical possibility.

The psychoanalytic discourse, before any other discourse, orients the act of those who merit being called psychoanalysts, because it is in their view the only one capable of subverting bio-politics, which was so rightly denounced by Michel Foucault. Before being a profession, the practice of psychoanalysis necessitates, amongst other things, a personal analysis, namely to have put ones analysis and the encounter with the real before all other mundane considerations.

In a political system where freedom of speech is gagged, which is since Hannah Arendt designated as “totalitarian”, there is no possibility of practice of that which, since Freud, we call psychoanalysis, this singular meeting of two, outside of any norm or conformism. The analysand tracks down the truth of his jouissance there, and the extent of the demand of the master discourse. What is revealed to him in his cure is the part he takes in the master discourse, but also that there is an impossible in him to conform to it. A psychoanalysis is not achieved in communion with the unconscious, and Lacan recommended that one guarded against “preferring the unconscious over all else”. Rather, for each one it is achieved by extracting the relationship to the Other, which singularises and objects to what is good for all. One does this by the exploration of this singular concretisation of language that is each one’s symptom. Per via de levare, as Freud said.

Political systems that we would call democratic are those that permit and favour multiplicity of opinion and modes of enjoyment, and which organise their confrontations through different modalities of intervention, accepted by the whole of the social body. This way they assure beyond the inherent fracture in discord, for a unity of the people to exist.

In fact we speak of political systems with parliamentary representation, linked to nation states as they functioned since the 19th century in Europe and on the American continent (with long breaks in certain Latin American countries).

When today we say that there is a decided desire for democracy, we must also ask ourselves in what kind of democracy psychoanalysis of the Lacanian orientation can exist and prosper. In some countries psychoanalysis has spread, in others (England, Germany, USA, not to mention middle Eastern countries) it struggles to establish itself. Freud was the first to realise this with regard to the USA.

Marcel Gauchet[1], political scientist who often refers to Lacan, reminds us that at the beginning of the 21^st century, democracy and its exercise have evolved from the 20^th century. The kernel of a so-called democratic society supposes the respect of the rule of law to guarantee fundamental liberties such as the freedom of expression, the separation of religious beliefs and the exercise of power (the model of the secular republic, less granted in countries like the USA, for example). This exercise supposes also that “governance” is organised along the principles of the separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers. Gauchet remarks that at the end of the century an essential factor of this evolution was the taking into account of the Rights of Man, illustrated by the development of NGOs and the advance of the “right of influence” over areas of other states. According to Gauchet, this taking into account has reconciled the regimes that we consider democratic with the ideal of the French revolution, ideal of equality contained in the declaration of the Rights of Man, but it has at the same time undermined the consistency of democratic regimes and thus nation states, through the introduction of supposedly universal values.

Since the beginning of the 21^st century, other phenomena and beliefs have contributed to the weakening of democracies and their power to overcome the divergences between its citizens through political conversation: The neo-liberal model of economy replaces political action everywhere, and managerial methods tend to take the place of the ideal politician in the service of the state. Standardised and generalised evaluation methods weaken and impoverish the specific content of politics while contractual law imported from Anglo-Saxon thinking, extends to everything. The ultra financialised economy and the phenomenon of numerical globalisation manage to undermine democratic forms of nation states by propagating a thinking “for all” and the expansion of standardising capitalism, which erodes the specificity of cultures and the difference between peoples. Paradoxically, this standardisation of political thinking produces anxiety that sparks the reflex towards identity politics (United Kingdom, Catalonia), always benefitting communalism.

Two interventions by Lacan come to mind on this theme: One dates from 1967 and is in the “Proposition of the 9th October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School”[1]: “Our future as common markets will be balanced by an increasingly hard-line extension of the process of segregation.”[2]

The other is in Television: “ … more than once I’ve seen hope – what they call bright new tomorrows – drive people I’ve valued as much as I value you to kill themselves, period.”[3]

We cannot say that we haven’t been warned.

Translated by Natalie Wulfing