TIDBITS – Perla Miglin – Towards the NLS Congress 2019

The book, A History of Zionism by Georges Bensoussan had been recommended to Marco Mauas by Jacques-Alain Miller about the time of the publication of Lacanian Quotidian [LQ]. Taking this recommendation to the letter, I hastened to read this book. In my case, the abandonment of the disapora, accompanied by the loss of a Jewish identity, made me dive into the fact that in language, it is not possible to say a=a, and that it is possible to be satisfied with the basic reasoning permitting to see that there is no “all,” that there’s nothing that’s all. 
 
This dive was accompanied by feelings of depersonalisation and anxiety which led me to ask for an analysis, treating the “realism of structure.”
 
This “Israel” in which I had arrived was completely foreign to me, but the anxiety that pervaded me daily to the point of paralyzing me indicated the presence of an extimacy, the source of which I could not find. There, in the place where this Jewish identity was lost, signifiers came to be organized which, in my childhood, made it possible to filter the galut [exile] of my paternal and maternal grandparents who arrived in the colonies of Baron Hirsch in the New World. A few pages of this book managed to describe the itinerary, plunging me again in that time… Immigrants from Russia and Palestine… The permanent translation that immigration exposed me to revealed the principle of the logic of signification, namely that “there’s nothing that’s all [rien n’est tout] ” [1]; there is always more to the operator of totalisation, an excess, which goes beyond the set on which it operates. This is what Lacan calls S(A barred), and summarizes the principle of “there’s nothing that’s all,” that is to say, there is always a “more”… 
  
I associate this principle with what Freud tells us in his texts of 1895-7 about the fact that in sexual life there must be an independent source of displeasure, that it’s from jouissance that the subject separates, that is there is an originary knot between knowledge and jouissance. I can thus make this knot, fruit of contingency.
 
 
Translated by Joanne Conway

¹ Lacan, J., “Radiophonie”; Autres écrits, Seuil, Paris, 2001, p. 440, unpublished in English.