Taking an interest in
psychoanalysis is a choice. Taking an interest in the darkest aspects of our reality,
is a choice. Taking an interest in the exposed, ferocious, relentless, real
that sows terror in unpredictable ways … is a choice. For the psychoanalytic
association, L’Envers de Paris, this choice takes the form of a need to
understand, especially since our city was hit in full force in the last
two years. We now have a clear ‘before and after’ – we live and travel
differently now than we did before.
It is urgent to look at
these events again today, after the terror and the stupor have subsided, in
order to grasp the structure and extract the logic from the mark they have left
in the world today. The new
manifestations of hate and the death drive which are accomplished in the name
of religious certainty have reconfigured the way of the world with
unprecedented virulence. It is important to know whether this return of
religion is the same as the one Jacques Lacan had predicted at the beginning of
the Sixties, or if it obeys a new logic forged by changes in civilisation that
have accompanied the passage of the century preceding ours.
The paternal regime with
its tyrannical ideas and its binary thinking has collapsed and given way to
hypermodernity with its ‘not all’ and the accompanying ‘unlimited’ that inevitably
misleads. It is clear that this transition, far from encouraging any
appeasement has given rise to new manifestations where the superego finds enough
nourishment for its insatiable demand for sacrifices. Lacan had already pointed
out that the advances in the discourse of science and the hegemony of capitalist
discourse would cradle the new forms of segregation, a term which he repeatedly
paired with another, that of fraternity: “I know only one single origin of
brotherhood – I speak human, always humus brotherhood – segregation.”
How does the move from
the patriarchal order to that of the band of brothers garner new forms of
collective identification around a pure death wish? Does it always obey the
fatal conjunction between the object and the ideal described by Freud in his
Group Psychology and the Ego? Why does it favour communion or even conversion
to a powerful sacrificial enjoyment? In what way can the real we touch in
psychoanalytical practice shed light on these questions?
Belief is not the only domain that
roots segregation. It takes shape in other in other contexts linked to
migration and population displacements. It takes shape in the societal changes
around sexuality and parenthood, where the folds/contours of identity harden up
in the name of a political banner or shared jouissance.
So what can we expect from analytic
discourse? How can we take up today what we have learned from Freud and Lacan? The
‘otherness’ that we dislike and that we reject in the Other only hides what
horrifies us and that lies in the most intimate part of ourselves. This foreign
zone is precisely the one that we like to locate in the threatening Other,
rather than to assume it as our own obscure enjoyment. But only I can answer to
this as a subject.
The study day will be build on what
our clinic teaches us, and we shall enter into a conversation with our guests
who will bring their own insights and reflections on these burning questions.
Camilo Ramirez and his colleagues in L’Envers de Paris hope that you will join them at the Amphithéâtre Farabeuf, 15 rue de l’écoulé de Médicis, Paris 6th, Metro/Bus: Odéon.
L’Envers de Paris – The New Faces of Segregation: Saturday 10 June 2017
To register go to the website www.enversdeparis.org
* The quote is from Seminar 17, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, which in French is, of course, L’envers de la psychoanalyse. The English translation of this seminar is by another colleague, Russell Grigg (Australia), and is published by Norton, 2007, and the quote appears on page 114.
[Blurb translated by Janet Haney]
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