Scilicet
in English! For the first time, for the 9th Congress of the WAP, ‘A
Real for the 21st Century’, Paris, 14-18 April, 2014.
If you go to the
WAP Congress in April, you will receive a free copy of the Scilicet
journal, which is offered this year for the first time, translated into
English.
If you need to remind yourself about what's special
about Scilicet you can talk to the wise old birds who've been around a long
time, or look on wikipedia.
They will tell you that Scilicet, the word, cropped up in Schreber’s memoires,
and entered into Freud’s correspondence the year that he read it (1912). It
means, literally, thou mayst know, and the early versions of journal – the first issue of the journal came out in
Spring 1968 – had written on the front: Tu peux savoir ce qu’en pense l’École
freudienne de Paris (thou
mayst know what the École freudienne de Paris thinks about it).
The
journal was revived in 2006 for the 5th WAP-Congress in Rome, with the theme of
The Name of the Father. Then there was the issue 'Les objets a dans l'éxperience analytique’ in 2008
for the 6th WAP Congress in Buenos Aires. In 2010 it was ‘Semblants et
Sinthome’, and in 2012 ‘L’ordre symbolique au 21st siecle’.
The
one for this year's congress, promised in English for the first time, came out
last November in French, and has also already been published in Spanish. 118
short texts (each one less than 1,000 words) arranged alphabetically like a
dictionary, starting with Anxiety,
and taking in Crime, Desire of the Analyst,
Esthetic Surgery, Science, Magic, Homoparentality, Knot, the Shoah, all the
way to Woman. The great majority of
entries have been written by Spanish speaking analysts, the second largest
language section has been translated from French. There has also been some
translation from Portuguese, Italian and only the handful of English texts this
time did not need to be put through this particular mill, this time round.
At the
end of the book are 18 Scili-Tweets, another first. These are really short
pieces inspired by 8 tweets by Leonardo Gorostiza, the outgoing president
of the WAP. In this section there are short pieces on Dostoyevsky, Bret Easton Ellis, Pornography, Organic-Green, Racism,
iPads and so on.
Thou
mayest know what people in the Schools of the WAP think about a lot of
interesting and pressing things.
Some
of us in London, and many more elsewhere, already know about this book, on
account of the fact we have been helping with the huge job of translating the
texts into English. The work bears witness to a lively and rigorous community
of analysts who have taken it in turns to invent, to write, to read and
re-read, to check, to follow up footnotes, to proof-read and to create working
relationships across the globe to get the job done.
Here
we are, a few days before the production deadline, and ‘The job’ still seems
nigh on impossible to finish. Did you ever watch the film Shakespeare in Love?
Here is a bit which sums up what I think about our prospects of completing ‘the
job’ at the moment:
Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The
natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent
disaster.
Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?
Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it
all turns out well.
Hugh Fennyman: How?
Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.
So, if
you turn up at the WAP and pick up your copy, you may know that insurmountable
obstacles on the road to imminent disaster were indeed the natural condition,
and none of us know how we got it finished in time, though perhaps some of us
know a bit more about the “nothing” that was needed to get it done…
For
now
Janet
Haney
