ZADIG – the application form

 La Movida Zadig

                                        Zadig Nosce Tempus

I would like to join the network "Zadig Nosce Tempus" on the basis of its "orientation table" of Lacan Voltaire Weil, published in the brochure, "la Movida Zadig" Issue No. 1, that came out on 20 May 2017. 

I certify that I am not a member of a political party, nor an agent of entryism or of infiltration of any such organization. I accept that if I were to become a member or an agent of a political party, I would cease ipso facto to be part of this network. 

My name:……………………………………………………………………………………………….

My profession:…………………………………………………………………………………………               

My credentials:……………………………………………………………………………………………….

My diplomas or absence thereof:………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

My email address:…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

My telephone number (preferably cell phone) :………………………………………………………………………………………

(city):…………………………………………………………………., (date):…………………………………………………………

signed :

This letter or a copy of this letter is to be sent by postal mail only to this address: ZNT, Square Vergote 51 – 1030 Brussels – Belgium.

NB : No subscriptions or contributions are due; Zadig Nosce Tempus is not a non-profit organization, but rather a contact network intended to be followed by diverse impetuses, among which its inventor, J.-A. Miller, is for the moment playing a determining role.   

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Zadig. A radically decentralised, flexible and interplanar organisation.

The UK can heave a sigh of relief now that Theresa May has been brought back down to earth on the question of her real worth – “strong and stable, my arse!” as artist Jeremy Deller so eloquently put it.

We can go back and pick up the threads of our lives while Parliament considers its options. I find the idea of a hung parliament very appealing right now, and not only because it gives time to stop and think. Simone Weil’s slim tome “On the Abolition of all Political Parties” is sitting on our kitchen table, the translators note alone is worth the price of the book! Listen: “Once in a blue moon, on strictly non-political issues, dealing purely with questions of ethics, members of Parliament are allowed to make a ‘conscience vote.’ A conscience vote – what an extraordinary notion! It should be a pleonasm: don’t we all assume that every vote – by definition – is being made by MPs who listen to their consciences, instead of following some diktat from a political party?” (translator: Simon Leys.)

The word ‘vote’ is etymologically linked to the word wish. It is not simply a voice, but a voice that has thought and desire behind it. Without thought and desire there can be no ethical position, no ethical action. It is the opposite of what you can expect from an automaton. It is a position in which one can respond to an event and invent some new solutions. Response-able. Responsible.

As you know, I am off to Paris today to be ready for a meeting tomorrow organised by Envers de Paris. And in July I am going to the PIPOL meeting in Brussels which is organised by the EuroFederation of Psychoanalysis. In London I belong to the London Society of the New Lacanian School. The NLS (itself, one of 7 schools that make up the World Association of Psychoanalysis) includes societies and groups in several different countries. The Lacanian community of psychoanalysts is made up of practitioners who are fixed to a spot (at least some of the time) and who also move around a lot. Psychoanalysis has even been described as the 7th continent – created through its ideas and language, and sustained through the movement of its members, travelling across geography to speak to each other in person. There is a wide network that operates across a several land masses, national borders, and languages. The network changes its form over time. It depends. And right now, as Jacques-Alain Miller put it when he spoke after the defeat of Marine Le Pen in the French Presidential elections (he was speaking in Madrid on 13 May): “we are in engaged in a long-term effort which demands a new vehicle, a radically decentralised, flexible and interplanar organisation, capable of perpetuating and extending the unprecedented alliances which have been knotted in the context of the Forums.”

 Miller proposes an Alpha Network, known familiarly as Zadig (recalling the novel of Voltaire). It would be a way to think without feet of clay but without leaving the planet either. “Zero Abjection Democratic International Group” [La Movida Zadig]. Patricia Bosquin-Caroz, the current President of PIPOL, has taken up Miller’s proposal and made this the theme for Sunday’s programme for the PIPOL meeting in July: “The rise of populism in Europe: what is the response of politicians, intellectuals and psychoanalysts?”.

“Practitioners in the analytic orientation, whether they are in private practice or in mental health institutions, are learning how to outfox the modern Master, to give him the slip, to find another way; off the beaten track.” (Patricia Bosquin-Caroz, translation by Raphael Montague)

This presents an especial challenge to those of us who work in the UK whose trajectory has been set to leave the EU. It is indeed a challenge. But today’s election result shifts the prospects once again. It is a challenge. We have to make sure we are up to it.

Three Girls – a BBC TV drama based on the true story from Rochdale, 2012.

Three Girls – a BBC TV drama based on the true story of the Rochdale sexual grooming and abuse scandal. Screened on 16 May 2017.

Episode one just watched, how to begin to speak about it?

Gasp inducing … what’s ‘appropriate’, what does it mean? … staggering lack of competence and imagination on the part of police and social workers. Or is it rather a staggering response from people employed in these big institutions? The people become almost like robots, ‘dead from the neck up’, if you like.

Thank god, we find ourselves thinking, for the one person who was able to think and act, in this case one person in the Rochdale Sexual Health Clinic. One person. One. She got her team to document and build a file of evidence based on what the girls said when they came for their condoms. She and her colleagues pieced it together, drew a chart showing how one man was the ‘boyfriend’ of many girls at once. They drew a picture of pimps and their … but this is the language of prostitution (which would be tough enough), but one line leaps out from this episode: “There is no such thing as a child prostitute. There is child abuse.” That’s it.

The girl at the centre of this episode, Holly, seems to be part of a fairly ordinary family: mum, dad and a couple of younger siblings. The house is unremarkable, shabby, but too small, really, for such a number in the family. Not much more information than that at the start. Gradually as the episode unfolds more little details leak in. There are, for example, several mentions of ‘vulnerable young girls’. Vulnerable? What does that mean? It is not really explained. Is it just the absence of money? This is a point that needs exploring. Otherwise the girl is left to be nothing but a victim. But this particular story, the one unfolding on BBC1, is taking a different tack. We see Holly appear to walk wilfully into a tragic trap. The drama takes as its focus the trap itself. It reveals the apparent willingness of so many other people to close this trap around a young girl and so to make it deadly. She starts looking like a sacrifice. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

We start to talk about groups. Belonging to a group. Identifying with a group. This line of comment began a few minutes ago as we read the Wiki entry on the Rochdale case. It is very clear that everyone is nervous of saying something in terms of a group identity of the men, and a group identity of the girls. The tentativeness is because the very first word that leaps out of the script is “Pakistani”. And with that, the nomination miraculously returns to you in the mirror, defining you in your turn as … English, presumably ... then white (as opposed to black), and thirdly – whisper it – Christian (as opposed than Muslim). Boom, boom, boom. Three monumental names line up and freeze us, stop us thinking. Interesting. And in episode one these words (white, English, Christian) seem also to identify the girls.

Seems simple, but then actually it is complicated. What you need, however, is a few little tricks and enough courage to push on through the … xxx  … what word can we use here? Push on through the Mud? Horror? Grime? No, none of these words really work. But what they do is remind me of an early scene in the film: Holly comes home from school, (about 10 minutes into the episode) and her father, unshaved, is watching out for her return from behind the net curtains. What is the first thing he says to her? “Put on your rubber gloves and clean out the bins.” What? What did he say? He said “that waster from next door has been leaving all his crap in ours.” From these small fragments we begin to piece together some details about Holly’s family: they live in an area they don’t ‘identify’ with; her father must have lost his job. He has lost his place of identification and his means – and you can take this literally – of making a living. Consequently, apparently, his daughter, Holly, has ‘no friends’ at school. She doesn’t 'belong to a group’. “He doesn’t know what it’s like to rock up to a new school where you have no friends.” She reproaches him. They live in an area where the possibility of hating one’s neighbour is an easy option. From both sides of the fence.

This is the angle I propose to take, the way in to analyse this TV dramatisation of the shock of the Rochdale sex scandal. Stay tuned!