Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan 9780367148799, 9780367148812, 9780429053757

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CONVERSATIONS WITH LACAN

Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan brings a unique, non-partisan approach to the work of Jacques Lacan, linking his psychoanalytic theory and ideas to broader debates in philosophy and the social sciences, in a book that shows how it is possible to see the value of Lacanian concepts without necessarily being defined by them. In accessible, conversational language, the book provides a clear-sighted overview of the key ideas within Lacan’s work, situating them at the apex of the linguistic turn. It deconstructs the three Lacanian orders – the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real – as well as a range of core Lacanian concepts, including alienation and separation, après-coup, and the Lacanian doctrine of temporality. Arguing that criticism of psychoanalysis for a lack of scientificity should be accepted by the discipline, the book suggests that the work of Lacan can be helpful in re-conceptualizing the role of psychoanalysis in the future. This accessible introduction to the work of Jacques Lacan will be essential reading for anyone coming to Lacan for the first time, as well as clinicians and scholars already familiar with his work. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and scholars of philosophy and cultural studies. Sergio Benvenuto is a Psychoanalyst in Rome, Editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis, and Researcher in the Institute of Sciences and Technologies of Cognition at the Italian Council for Scientific Research in Rome.

“Sergio Benvenuto brings a fresh look on Lacan and on psychoanalysis that couldn’t be more right. Right because it discerns extremely well what distinguishes from every ‘lacanianism’ and from every theoretical construction a concern for the real as an impossibility to give reason. It thus distinguishes what makes Lacan, before anything else, a thinker among thinkers.” —Jean-Luc Nancy, is a French philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS “A conversation with Lacan is the last thing imaginable—he’s just so impenetrable, obstinate, clownish, exceptionally French! In this stunning, concise book, Sergio Benvenuto imagines the unimaginable, giving us a nondogmatic Lacan to converse, and even, play with. He turns Lacan’s tense f lesh into feeling, life, and breath.” —Jamieson Webster, psychoanalyst in New York, has written for the Guardian, the New York Times and is the author of several books

CONVERSATIONS WITH LACAN Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan

Sergio Benvenuto

First published in English 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business English edition © 2020 Sergio Benvenuto The right of Sergio Benvenuto to be identified as the author has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-14879-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-14881-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-05375-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Foreword Acknowledgements

vii xi

1

The dandy dentist: Lacan as a character

2

Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today

27

3

Lacan in contemporary thought

49

4

The three registers: the Real

77

5

Après-coup, the future perfect, the hermeneutic circle, alienation and separation

103

“Psychopathology” and the cure according to Lacan: Depression, psychosis, hysteria, obsessional neurosis, perversions, transference

125

Can we be Lacanians today?

155

6

7

Index

1

181

FOREWORD

Which reading of Lacan can be recommended today? In other words, what is still interesting in Conversations with Lacan, what is alive of him? By and large, three types of readings of the great masters of psychoanalysis exist today; three readings that I would say are incommensurable. One is based on the type of literature that prevails, increasingly unchallenged, in the sciences. In our age, cognitive validity – truth, in short – is considered to be the domain of scientific discourse. That is to say, knowledges are only true (and hence useful) if they are achieved through the protocols accepted by today’s scientific communities. The protocols derive largely from methodologies formalized by J.S. Mill, the Vienna Circle, C.G. Hempel, K. Popper, and a few others. From this point of view, Lacan’s work absolutely fails the test: his theories may certainly be interesting – they may even have a so-called heuristic value, i.e. they can suggest possible paths to truth for scientific research – but they are not scientifically pertinent. Lacanian theories – and in general Freudian ones too – may even be true, but science can’t state it. The point is that this weakness of science, namely of not recognizing as truth things that are not provable according to its protocols, is championed today as its greatest strength. Lacan inherited scientific discredit from Freud’s doctrine. Freud is appreciated as a pioneer of an objective approach to the “mind” as object, as a theorist who did his best to develop more or less scientific hypotheses on psychic functioning, but it is agreed that the mind sciences have now gone well beyond his early steps. In contemporary thought, the so-called cognitive sciences are now considered to be fully f ledged sciences. In this domain works are published on the model of the “hard” sciences, which means that researchers only read the latest articles or books published, at most, in the last five to ten years. In fact, in physics, astronomy, or biology, the classics (Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein . . .) are seldom read; knowledge formation is based on up-to-date manuals that deal

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with what a scientist in each field must know at the present time. So, direct readings of classical scientific works are left to specialists in the “history of science,” a sort of minor celebrative branch of science. The important thing, if one wishes to take part in scientific research today, is to be up-to-date on what one’s colleagues, mainly one’s living contemporaries, are pursuing. The sciences have little time for the works of those who have long been dead. Today many psychoanalysts imitate this practice: their papers often quote a few texts by classic non-living authors (Freud, Melanie Klein, Winnicott, and a few others) in order to then concentrate on more recent authors, either reaffirming or dispelling their theses. They presume that psychoanalysis – like all the other sciences – is a cumulative knowledge, meaning there is no need to return to the fundamental discoveries. The important thing is to develop the paradigm accepted within a particular analytical school on the basis of the most recent publications. Unfortunately for them however, this imitation of the style of modern scientific literature has by no means convinced scientists to accept psychoanalysis as an “ex officio” member of their club, quite the opposite. A lot of psychoanalysis today tends to wear the mask of science without having its true face. I would call this first “scientific” reading in psychoanalysis: In Awe Simulation of the Scientific Style. Lacan is famously known for drastically rejecting this simulation from the very start. Another, totally different, reading is generally practiced in the history and humanities faculties of universities. Whilst in the scientific literature just described it is the themes that are important, and hence the contribution one can give them, the main concern of historical-hermeneutical literature is the texts of certain authors. For example, in the scientific literature one may write a paper on the unconscious or on memory, whilst in the historical-hermeneutical literature the paper will be on “the unconscious according to Freud” or “the unconscious according to Jung,” and we would read about “memory according to Freud” or “memory according to Piaget,” and so on. In fact, this approach expresses what some philosophers called a pietas (piety) for texts and for the authors are behind them. These studies are usually referred to as the “humanities,” sharply distinct from “scientific studies.” This humanistic reading is accepted today insofar as it is part of the preservation of cultural assets. Cultural assets today are everything that is neither science nor politics, neither technique nor religious faith. I would say that they are assets that real discourse allows to run free like children in one of our increasingly efficient playgrounds: they are considered to be works that are worth preserving or visiting in order to celebrate our cultural origins. This preservation may concern the Colosseum or Plato’s Dialogues, Renaissance paintings or folk festivals, or . . . the thought of Freud and Lacan. The conception that prevails today is that, on the one hand, our civilization has fully operating factories that produce useful knowledge and objects (science, technologies) whilst, on the other, it has texts and relics of the past that we admire in a sort of recreational ritual. I would call this second “historical-hermeneutical” reading in psychoanalysis: Devotional Philological Preservation. Of course, this philological

Foreword

ix

reading of Lacan is gaining ground as Lacan becomes further removed from us in time, but the point is that, in contrast to other authors – Freud himself, for example – Lacan is still a controversial author, i.e. he is by no means peacefully accepted as a cultural asset to preserve. The third reading in psychoanalysis can be called Militant Exegesis of the Absolute Text. This exegesis may be positive or negative. In Lacan’s case, for example, one may write a book to praise the truth, topicality, and usefulness of his ideas, or to prove the fallacy, falseness, and even the fraudulent bad faith of Lacan and his theories. To limit ourselves to the positive type of exegesis, it is usually the work of psychoanalysts from a particular Lacanian school who intend in this way to prove how perspicuously Lacanian, and therefore psychoanalytically correct, their approaches are. Their exegeses are not mere hagiographies, but readings that enact a militancy similar to political, ethical, or religious ones. It is the type of reading that so many leftist intellectuals once habitually made of Marx, Lenin, or Gramsci in order to prove the strategic validity of their political line. Or, in the religious field, one would put forward a particular reading of the Gospels, or of Saint Paul, or of the Fathers of the Church in order to authorize their vision of Christianity. In this sense, Lacan’s text becomes an authentic cult text, like the Torah for the Talmudic authors, the sacred text that contains the core of all truths, which the exegesis of today has the task of clarifying. This is why I talk here of an absolute text, i.e. a text that is loosened (absolutus) from its historical contingency. This is the kind of reading of Lacan that prevails today, which is to say that dealing with Lacan is still a militancy, sometimes against him. In actual fact, every text, however profound or brilliant, bears the limits of historical experience; therefore it is inevitably destined to be attacked, surpassed, abandoned, sometimes rediscovered or made topical again, and so on. The Devotional Philological Preservation reading is not interested in the meta-historical validity of the authors and texts it garners, insofar as the value of these authors and texts only consists in their historical success in past eras. The Militant Exegesis of the Absolute Text implies the meta-historical and topical validity of these texts and authors because they reveal non-contingent truths. They are comments on a revelation. In some psychoanalytical schools the revelation is in the texts of M. Klein, in others, it is in those of Lacan, or in those of Bion, and so on. So, whereas scientific literature prefers the living, and devotional philological literature prefers the dead (even when it deals with the living, it treats them as if they were dead), militant exegesis aims at the immortals. As we can see, the models for the three readings are respectively modern scientific research, the philological reconstruction, and the religious exegesis of the sacred text (or the confutation of the text as falsely sacred). We can therefore say that the In Awe Simulation of the Scientific Style is interested in Lacan only insofar as some of his ideas are still pertinent to today’s neo-cognitive mainstream, the Devotional Philological Preservation is interested in Lacan only insofar as it is a part of the historical and cultural heritage of 20th-century Europe,

x

Foreword

and the Militant Exegesis of the Absolute Text is interested in Lacan as the source and origin of the eternal truths of psychoanalysis. Whilst what counts for scientific literature is knowledges, what counts for the historical and philological literature is the traces or monuments of the past, and what counts for the exegesis of the religious type is truths to reaffirm. I shall immediately say that with Lacan I practice none of these readings, even though today they may seem the only ones possible. I have great admiration for the scientific research of today, but I don’t believe psychoanalysis is a science (as I will detail later), so I think it needn’t assume the fashion and ceremonials of modern science. I have a passion for history and I admire the reconstructions of monuments of the past, but I am interested in Lacan above all because for me the things he says are topical and alive. I appreciate the faithful who revere their sacred texts, because I have my cult books too, with which I am in love and like rereading from time to time, because they are a part of my personal sanctuary. All intellectuals have their own precious texts which they turn back to, like one may turn back to the memory of one’s deceased parents. But my interest in Lacan does not consist in taking him as an atemporal truth. Rather my interest is in deconstructing him. Therefore I do not adopt the scientific literary style, nor the historical garnering, nor the reverential exegesis of texts supposedly containing an incontrovertible knowledge. As I shall try to prove in these conversations, an approach to Lacan based on a sort of deconstructive piety is possible. A reading that can certainly (even though we will not have the space to prove it in this work) also inf luence the clinical approach of practicing analysts.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A special thanks goes to Antonio Lucci (Berlin Freie Universität), who made the first Italian edition of this book possible. Thank you to all the other friends who by reading and commenting on this work, or by presenting the Italian version in public, have helped me improve it: Renato Benvenuto, Cristiana Cimino, Giorgio Cini, Federico Leoni, the late Luciana Sica. Essential contributions for the English version came from Emily Hughes, Gianmaria Senia, and Claudia Vaughn. Finally, I thank Svetlana Uvarova, president of Kiev’s International Institute of Psychology of Depth, for her appreciation of the book and for editing the Russian language version.

1 THE DANDY DENTIST Lacan as a character

1 Lacan’s hybris Between 1967 and 1974 I followed the seminar of Jacques Lacan as a psychology student at Paris 7 University. In 1975, I translated Lacan’s Seminar XX , “Encore,” into Italian for the Einaudi publisher. I met Lacan several times in public situations, but I never considered going into analysis with him, for reasons I shall explain later. While in Paris, however, I did an analysis with a Lacanian analyst. I also attended the “case presentations” at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, which were conducted in the classic psychiatric tradition. Here psychiatrists would bring some of their patients along to allow them to “let it all out” before an audience of clinical practitioners, which included Lacan. Then the patient would leave and Lacan would give his comments, mainly diagnostic ones, on the “case” that had been presented; something he continued to do until the end of his life. In contrast to Freud, who only treated neurotics, Lacan began his career as a public health psychiatrist; his doctoral thesis, which had already made him famous in the 1930s, was on paranoia. Some say that the psychoanalysis of Lacan is Freud reviewed and adjusted according to psychosis instead of neurosis. The fact remains that his teaching ends with a seminar on the later works of Joyce; a writer that he believed had a psychotic structure. Lacan thus began his career with his doctoral thesis, in which he published the poems of his paranoiac patient Aimée – poems that struck the surrealists of the time – and ended it discussing Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. In short, his path began and ended with psychotic literature. Can we find a key in this loop? It was a series of writings – the publication of the Ecrits in 1966, when Lacan was already 65 – that turned him into a star of the French cultural scene. Since then, crowds began to attend his Wednesday seminars. The huge hall of the Law Faculty at the Pantheon couldn’t contain everybody and many had to stand for

2

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hours outside before managing to squeeze in. I was told that there were often as many as three thousand of us attending. For years, an authentic mass infatuation had turned Lacan into a star, something it would be easy to ironize on. But in those roaring days of structuralism – which the Americans then called “post-structuralism,” a term that the French never accepted – the grands maîtres attracted crowds. At the seminars of Roland Barthes, which I followed extensively in the 1960s and 70s, so many people attended that Barthes would rent a vast theatre to fit in his audiences. With Lacan we enjoyed ourselves. He made a formidable seduction machine function perfectly for decades. Most of us were convinced we were attending something historical, a teaching that would never be swept away as so many other trends had been. After all, the cream of the French culture of the time was there, by no means only psychoanalysts. I felt a very similar sensation following the courses of Barthes, Michel Foucault, and a few others. For me, Lacan’s seminars were a key to understanding something of his notoriously incomprehensible writings. The most important features were the rhythm of his discourse, the changes in the tone and timbre of his voice, and his pauses and falsettos. It was a little like the plays of Harold Pinter. When I read them, I found them boring, but when I saw some acted out on the stage I found them irresistible. I had finally learnt how to read them. And I thought the living word of Lacan offered a picklock to “break into” the Ecrits. The written text of Télévision (Lacan 1973a) is a gruelling task, whilst in the video of the television interview, with Lacan speaking, everything becomes clear. Some contemptuously say “many are attracted to the enigmatic obscure word because they seek a master who says more than they are able to understand.” It’s like those who say, after the lecture of the “master”: “Fascinating! I didn’t understand a single word.” But Lacan’s audience also included those who would never easily let themselves be seduced by a charlatan. After all, Lacan was by no means the pop psychoanalyst who reigned on television screens and in the papers like so many we have today, at least in some parts of the world. Lacan only agreed to one radio interview, and very few television interviews: on these occasions, he spoke without making the least concession to the powers of comprehension of the masses. Even then he spoke as he would during his seminars. In short, he was not a circus act. Lacan would allow his audience to watch him think. We were like voyeurs of a statu nascendi of ideas. Lacan always improvised; he would begin a sentence before even having thought out the end of it . . . he would twist his discourse around, wrestle with it. In short, he allowed us to watch the labour of the word, at once loose and troublesome. He always said that in his seminars he spoke not as an analyst but as an analysand – the usual French term for patient – and that the audience was his Other. His was a sort of self-analysis that, rather than being understood, had to be interpreted. I was particularly attracted to the fact that, like Hegel, he dealt with everything, citing authors from all fields, breaking through any disciplinary barriers. And, above all, by the fact that he systematically overturned every cliché in thinking.

The dandy dentist

3

He embodied a hybris. He had many patients, but found the time to read lots of books and amassed a vast fortune. Over 70, he had attractive young lovers. The toscano spiral-shaped cigars he smoked were extremely rare. It’s easy to understand how a young student in Paris like myself, poor but ambitious, could be bewitched by such a herculean exhibition of enjoyment.

2 A performative theory It was evident that Lacan wanted to create an effect. And indeed he did. In France alone, fifty thousand copies of the original edition of his Ecrits were sold, followed by 170,000 copies of the paperback version in two volumes. I have no data for the Spanish and Portuguese editions, but I’m sure the numbers are similar (Latin America is the culture in which Lacan is most popular). At the time, an interviewer of his insinuated that many people bought the Ecrits because it was a status symbol, but that few actually read it. Lacan disagreed: “I think they read it – he said – even if they don’t understand it, because ça leur fait quelque chose, it has an effect on them” ( Lacan 2005, p. 85). This goes for his most sophisticated readers too: an incomprehensible text that always overf lows in what Lacan says seduces them. Even when a reader thinks that he knows Lacan’s thinking inside out, there is always something that a logical linear transcription cannot join together, and this opaque residue affects us. This is what he expressed in Rome: “I did not write the Ecrits so that they may be understood, but so that they may be read” ( Lacan 2005, pp. 84–85). What on earth did he mean? Perhaps that they should be read in the same way as we “read” a symptom, a dream, a delirium, as we read some works by Nietzsche, Joyce, Benjamin, Beckett, or Bion. . . . In short, every time we read one of his texts we find ourselves with a bone that’s hard to chew on. In fact, he was perfectly capable of talking with great clarity, if he so wished. See the interview he conceded to the Italian Paolo Caruso (1969): absolutely comprehensible. Almost like a university textbook. He preferred, however, the style by which we know him, because he wished to make evident, tangible, the presence of the signifier. When one writes in a denotative, transparent language, the signifiers disappear from our mind and we only see what their concatenation presents to us. Then enunciations are like the glass of a window: through it we see the landscape beyond it, but we don’t see the glass, or, at least, we don’t pay attention to it. Unless the glass has some opaque spots, some distortions. Lacan’s intent is to make us halt when we read or listen to him, with enunciations that cease to be transparent. The same happens in poetry. We could prove that all poetry, even classical poetry, functions as a hermetic water’s edge – between the still sand of sense and the f luid sea of the signifier. Yet Lacan didn’t intend to give us poetry, which comes from poiesis, production. Instead he thought that the unconscious was “poetic,” i.e. productive,

4

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unwound from the nets of signifiers. He therefore needed a theoretical writing that would allow us to touch the “poietic quality,” the productivity, of the unconscious. This is how Lacan brought to the field of psychoanalytic writing what the form of art Anglophones call modernism has attempted to do for over a century. A form of art that I would call – stealing a term from Peter Sloterdijk – nobjectal. From Mallarmé, van Gogh, Cézanne, Debussy, Wedekind, Brancusi, and so on, up to more recent artists, the nobjectal arts have always sought something essential: making us notice the signifying matter of which all arts are made. Painters no longer aim at representing, for example, a mountain, in the most faithful and compelling way. Rather, they aim at bringing to the foreground the colours they use, the canvas, or the brush strokes of which their representation of the mountain consists of, or even their act of applying the brush. The same occurs in contemporary music; it no longer aims at delighting us with particular harmonies, but at making us think about the sound, the timbre of the instruments, the rasping or quavering voice of the singers. And it is precisely insofar as nobjectal art thematizes itself, i.e. ref lects its own being and doing, that it lays claim to having a direct impact on the Real. Precisely by relinquishing any “fine representations” of objects, nobjectality wants to short-circuit representations and affirm the performative function of art. The British philosopher John Austin pointed out that many linguistic expressions not only “say” things, but also “do” things. For example, when I say to my daughter “I’ll take you to the movies tomorrow,” this is not a prophecy about what will happen tomorrow, but by uttering these words I am performing the act of promising. An action that commits me as a subject. And, indeed, if the next day I fail to take her to the movies, my daughter could accuse me: “you don’t keep promises!” Austin says that a sentence like the preceding is performative insofar as it qualifies me as “someone who has made a promise,” with all the consequences this implies. This practical, active dimension of language is of great importance in 20th-century art and literature, and in Lacan. I would say that, in a certain sense, Lacan is a sort of Picasso of psychoanalysis. In fact, it seems to me that Lacan considers his own theory a performative analytical act. So, at times, he would count the fact that an analysand had followed one of his seminars as an analytic session. This claim of constructing an action-theory, a theory that produces something for the simple reason that it is uttered, of course perplexes those with a scientific training. According to the scientific spirit, knowledge and technology cannot coincide, otherwise it would be magic. The utterance that water boils at 100°C doesn’t actually in itself make water boil.

3 Dazzling mottos Now, this analytic performativity is reminiscent of dandies, who also exerted an inf luence through words and impactful acts rather than through classically constructed theories. In this sense we can say that Lacan was a dandy.

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5

A dandy also in the more common sense of the word, for the importance he gave to his clothing. His attire caused astonishment or laughter. It was reminiscent of some excesses by the merveilleuses and the incroyables of the French Revolution; men and women in exuberant attire who at the time would make a show of themselves in the streets of Paris. Lacan was a modern incroyable and, after all, he too bloomed in an era that most considered revolutionary. Dandies – mostly British or French – were eccentric characters who enjoyed social success by proclaiming themselves fundamentally above any of the moral norms of the society they lived in. If they were also geniuses – like Baudelaire, Hausmann, Raymond Roussel, and so on – their task was to overthrow commonplace ideas and affirm their irreducible uniqueness from the masses. This is the reason why, today, the cult of the dandy has become a mass cult and those who feel that they are “mavericks” make up a planetary herd. At the PèreLachaise in Paris, a cemetery full of celebrity graves, Oscar Wilde’s grave is the most sought after, more even than Jim Morrison’s, with crowds devoting a touching compassion to the writer’s sepulchre. What fascinates us most about so many dandies is their acrobatic self-spun thinking that opens up profound meanings and cannily subverts commonplaces and stock phrases. This is how Wilde’s most famous aphorisms work, such as: “life imitates art”; “if one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out”; “it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances”; “those furthest from their century are those that best ref lect it,” etc. etc. To create what I would call surplus sense, all that needs to be done is to overturn the plain, expected meaning by making the signifiers swerve slightly. Many of Lacan’s aphorisms and theses are constructed in a very similar way to Wilde’s. Like “I ask you to refuse what I offer because it is not . . . that,” or when he points out that “love thy neighbour as thyself ” is an ironic commandment because everyone hates herself or himself. Indeed, in France, some of Lacan’s expressions have entered common usage. For example, “love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it,” or “there is no sexual relation.” The success of some Lacanian expressions is the effect of the kind of torsion that Wilde was a master of. In Lacan, we constantly find this strategy: playing with the surplus that overturning a stereotype produces; something that seduces those who are receptive towards him and deeply irritates those with a rationalist mentality. Nearly every focal statement of Lacan’s surprises us because it overturns what we would expect. For example, saying “the Real is the impossible.” Here he is referring to logical modes: possible, impossible, contingent, necessary. Now, our common sense, even philosophical, would make us say that the Real is on the side of the contingent, if not on the side of the necessary. It would cross no one’s mind to say that the Real is the impossible. . . . But it did cross Lacan’s mind. And we shall see why. Does this then mean that Lacan was an impostor? And Wilde too? And Karl Kraus? And Heraclitus and Plato too? If we read Plato’s Cratylus, we can see how

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already in the Athens of the time the signifier was all the rave. Overturning commonplaces is not merely a rhetorical technique; it also lays bare something intrinsic to every “normal” discourse: it shows its hidden sardonic side. With language, writers like Wilde, Heidegger, Lacan, or Cioran carry out an operation very similar to the one attempted by Freud, who called it “the unconscious”: it is by turning the glove of common sense inside out that we discover ipso facto the striking sense of its reverse side. A sense that seems to radiate from these paradoxical propositions. Now, talented Lacanians bend over backwards to explain all these apothegms, even the most obscure ones, such as “the woman does not exist”; or “Y a d’l’Un (there is something of the One)”; “there is no sexual relation,” and such like. They sometimes give us enlightening keys. I’m afraid, however, that wishing to explain, hence to rationalize, these maxims is an enterprise that would not only be endless, but even desperate. I read Lacan in the same way that Heraclitus, to mention another enigmatic thinker, is read today: the fragments that have come down to us often strike us, but it would be an arduous task to derive a Heraclitean system of thinking from them. “We should be Delos’ divers” to understand Heraclitus, said Socrates. Of Lacan we don’t have mere fragments, true, but entire seminars; yet with Lacan we have to swim like Delos’ diver. I read Lacan always bearing in mind that his doctrine is essentially based on witticisms. Most of his theoretical statements are structured like quips. For example, “the signifier represents a subject to another signifier” sounds like a definition, but it only “sounds” like one. This is because in a definition, the definiendum or that which needs to be defined – in this case the signifier – cannot appear in the definiens as one of the words it defines. Let’s say that this is a parody of a definition, in the same way that saying “love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it” is a caricature of a definition of love. Significantly, Lacan gave a prominence to Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious – a work that Freudians often consider a minor one – and, together with dreams, parapraxis, and neurotic/psychotic symptoms, turned Witz into a fundamental formation of the unconscious. Now, the relation between jokes and the unconscious actually appears more problematic than in the other “formations.” Let’s take the quip by Heinrich Heine that Freud quotes and Lacan picks up: the poor Jew Hirsch Hyacinthe meets the great Rothschild, the richest of Jews, and says that latter treated him “famillionairely.” Now, if we conceive the unconscious in the strictest sense, as the place of the repressed, of the forgotten, of the not known, then we may wonder what the unconscious has to do with the creation of this droll neologism, “famillionaire.” What kind of repression returns in this quip? Here Freud sets forth, however obliquely, a vaster conception of the unconscious. He turns it into a sort of creative source and, with regard to the Witz, into a sort of special creativity that coincides with a transgression: i.e. with indulging in amusing oneself with language. It’s as if we all spoke bearing in mind this sort of tacit clause which binds us to the following discipline: “respect language! Always remember that it is denotative and referential!” As God prescribes that

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His name shall not be pronounced in vain, language too must not be used in vain. . . . Do cultures exist in which puns, and therefore jokes, are forbidden? Linguistically puritan cultures? A Witz-like famillionaire produces a partially stolen pleasure (not entirely licit, let’s say), precisely because it says and doesn’t say, it manipulates the signifier to draw from it a “little sense,” which comes across to us as a “surplus sense.” In short, for Lacan – and his reading of Freud – the unconscious is also a restless playing around with signifiers, a sort of shameful masturbation of language. It’s quite obvious that most of Lacan’s theoretical propositions are also games with the signifier, similar to jokes and witticisms, as his constant use of puns testifies. Even if in his case the ultimate aim is not to provoke laughter (though his propositions often do make us laugh, but that’s not their main purpose), but rather to agitate something that as yet has no name, that hasn’t yet found a name after over a century of psychoanalysis, something I would call a “joke of intelligibility” or “dazzling motto.” An intellectual brainwave, which I would call graspish in English, can of course be paraphrased in a way that is not dazzling, in a way that is logical and analytical. But then it loses its quality of being a dazzling brainwave, i.e. the surplus sense that always makes use of the little-sense. This is what distinguishes me from many Lacanian friends who take Lacan too “seriously,” who want to eliminate the dazzling brainwave quality and finally make him totally intelligible. Freud himself says that instead of “famillionaire” we could say something like “Rothschild treated me in quite a familiar way, within the limits a millionaire can concede.” But in this way the Witz is lost. And, ultimately, is this this really the sense of the pun “famillionaire”? By analyzing the sense “seriously” as we’ve just done, isn’t there a loss of sense? And what is this sense that we lose? A sense that paradoxically moves as one with the signifier, that never emancipates itself from the signifier by cutting the umbilical cord that keeps it attached to it, and which I would call a construction of neosense. What separates me from many Lacanian schools, even those I respect the most, is that I prefer to make use of this Lacanian neo-sense instead of reducing it, so-to-speak, to its logical and conceptual sense. If Lacan’s discourse loses its halo, not of non-intelligibility but of para-intelligibility, we miss his challenge of lightness: constructing a way of conceptualizing that integrates the formations of the unconscious; a thinking not on the unconscious, but a way of thinking un-consciously about the unconscious. After all, I don’t think Lacan is the only one to practise this type of theorizing: other modern authors, such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, and even in some cases Heidegger, aim at the “dazzling motto,” on the surplus sense produced by the little sense. An hysteric analysand once put me on the spot, and I said to her, “you’re looking for a master to dominate.” This was a quotation from Lacan, but I didn’t tell her so. It had a dazzling effect on her: it disturbed her and made her think extensively, and there was a turning point in her way of being. Lacan’s proposition is evidently a paradox, a Witz, but it talks eloquently to someone who has that problem.

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The dazzling motto shines bright, of course, but like a thunderbolt, only brief ly. Explaining its sense is like trying to turn the light of the thunderbolt into an energy-saving LED lightbulb. The French word for thunderbolt is éclair, as in éclaircir, to clarify. The dazzling motto clarifies, but the clarification doesn’t last long, even if it can have a long-lasting effect once the thunderbolt has vanished. I remember a thriller movie where in the dark of night a sudden thunderbolt lightens the face of a figure who until then had only been a dark presence in the shadows. Many think today that there are only two legitimate registers of discourse, and that one should choose either one or the other, tertium non datur. One is rational discourse (philosophical, scientific, and logical/mathematical), the other is poetic discourse, art. But humour, and a type of thinking that practices intellectual dazzling, tell us that other significant registers of discourse are possible. Lacan presented us with his very own, brand new register, and I think it’s quite interesting that his most duteous disciples are those who tend to deny it the most. I don’t deny that both poetic discourse and logical/philosophical discourse can produce dazzling effects. Some of the poems of Hölderlin, for example, produce it, and even in such a rigorously logical work as Wittgenstein’s Tractatus we find some dazzlements: “[t]he world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy” ( Wittgenstein 1922 , 6.43). A sentence which means too little but also too much.

4 Signifiers’ anthill I think that what really counts in Lacan is the fact that he is able to offer us what Claude Lévi-Strauss – the anthropologist who was a long-time friend of Lacan – called the “plethora of the signifier.” In “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” Lévi-Strauss (1963) posed the problem of how magical practices work in savage societies. He even attempted a comparison between shamanic treatments and psychoanalysis; and Lacan himself quoted this essay ( Lacan 1966, p.  351). According to Lévi-Strauss, normal thinking – both scientific thinking and common sense – tries to explain the world through theories that give things a specific sense. But very often the world refuses to be explained, its cloudiness resists any sort of theory. In short, normal thinking confronts itself with a deficit of meaning: many things have no meaning at all. Instead, what Lévi-Strauss here calls pathological thinking – psychopathological, but not just that – has a plethora of signifiers: neurotics and psychotics are full of interpretations and affective resonances with which they overload a reality that is lacking in sense. According to the anthropologist, shamanic treatments manage an arbitration between this lack of meaning (the non-sense in real life) and the wealth of f loating signifiers. “Normal thought cannot fathom the problem of illness,” Lévi-Strauss writes, “and so the group [to which he or she belongs] calls upon the neurotic to furnish a wealth of emotion heretofore lacking a focus” ( Lévi-Strauss 1963, p. 377).

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Here Lévi-Strauss suggests a model of the signifier-signified relation that moves away considerably from the schema of Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of linguistic structuralism by whom Lévi-Strauss says he is inspired. And Lacan’s model is more Lévi-Straussian than Saussurian. For Saussure, signifier and signified are closely connected; for example, the signifier “chair” is closely connected to all the mental images that English speakers have of chairs and that go on to make up the meaning of chair in English. By contrast, Lévi-Strauss talks here of two parallel series that are not closely connected: the series of pure signifiers with no meaning, and the series of everything in the world that lacks meaning. These two series f loat, but this doesn’t imply that they hold fast to each other. This is what the Lacanian algorithm of the unconscious consists of: on the one hand a series of signifiers f lowing above a bar and, on the other, a series of different signifiers below this bar that can offer meanings to the former. S1 , S 2 . . . S n s1, s2 . . . sn Hysteric symptoms, for example, were found to be so striking at the end of the 19th century because they were inexplicable, meaningless signs. By making hysteric women talk off the top of their heads, by inventing the “talking cure” (as Anna O. called it), Breuer and Freud collected an arsenal of signifiers, which by themselves had no application, but from which Freud selected elements to refer to the series of non-signified. We know which signifying elements he picked to create psychoanalytical theory. But he drew them from hysteric chatter. To say that psychoanalytical theory is a way of “fastening” a series of signifiers to a series of meanings, Lacan took his terminology from the language of upholstery. According to Lacan, the mass of both signifiers and meanings find a fastening point somewhere in the points de capiton (quilting points). Capiton is a carefully stitched or embroidered part of the work. Lacan thus insinuates that the set of signifiers and the set of meanings are in fact connected, but precariously, as in a seam. Just as the two sides of a sofa don’t slide one onto the other but are fastened with quilting, in the same way he thinks that the two sets find connection points somewhere, they find absolute signifiers. These are points where signifiers and meanings overlap stably, somehow draining the two f luid masses. And he adds that psychotic breakdowns occur when this quilting comes undone, and then signifiers and meanings f luctuate without fastening. As for the shaman, for Lévi-Strauss he is usually a pathological subject. Like hysteric women, he too has excessive “unapplied” signifiers. The shamanic cure therefore consists in “selling” this excess of signifier to a community of “normal” people who are astonished before a reality lacking any sense. It’s as if a community bought seams of signifier from “extra” beings, bizarre individuals, to compensate for lacks of meaning. But shamanic cures and psychoanalysis differ; whilst in the former it is the healer who essentially supplies this plethora of signifiers, in the latter it is the

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subject being healed who supplies it, whilst the analyst, the supposed healer, tends to remain silent. By encouraging the analysand to say everything that comes to his or her mind, to describe dreams and fantasies – according to the rules of free association – the analyst acts as a catalyst for an overproduction of signifiers from which analysand and analyst extract particular capiton signifiers, which vary according to the psychoanalytical school in question. With regard to the function of analytic theories, they usually supply the plethora of signifiers produced by patients with points of application, points where it is possible to find strong significations, structural and absolute ones – like the anima and animus in Jung, “the good and bad breast” in Klein, “mental digestion” in Bion, and so on. Instead, with Lacan, analytic theory – not only practice – actually picks up on the shamanic strategy: this time it is the analyst – Lacan – who produces the plethora of signifiers. And here, the “healed” are not his patients, but all those of us who are interested in psychoanalysis; perplexed and dumbfounded before the enigma of our existences as they are plunged into the technological Real (as we will see in more detail further on). Significantly, Lacan said that in his seminars he was in the position of the analysand: he offered his audience the surplus signifier that the analytic setting causes the analysand to produce. For this reason, I don’t think we can interpret everything Lacan says, as his more tenacious pupils try to do. It would be like wanting to interpret every sentence the patient utters! I select what Lacan says because we have to be analysts of his plethoric discourse. I mean to say that Lacan’s word is unsaturated and that trying to saturate it betrays its authentic . . . non-sense. The arbitrational function of the “illuminated” – once shamans, today writers or philosophers, psychoanalysts or singers – consists precisely in supplying obscure, but interesting material. Of course not every “plethora” interests everybody. For example, many find Bion’s late works incredibly fascinating because he too indulges in this surplus production of signifiers, but they don’t personally have a great effect on me. Perhaps because Bion’s fundamental premises are alien to me: Kleinism on the one hand, and a British version of Kantism on the other. Choices in psychoanalysis, as in philosophy or politics, are mainly idiosyncratic. So, interpreting all of Lacan’s aphorisms once and for all, saturating them, is not the correct path. I take most of his teachings as traces and witness accounts of a mental “experience” that can “signify,” even to those who have not undergone an analysis. In the same way, certain figures I have called “illuminated,” illuminati, enjoy their prestige not because their admirers thoroughly understand the experiences they bear witness to, but simply because they provide a surplus of signifier. This is the way things will always work: people will always need a dose of the divine – which, in a certain sense, is the power of the pure signifier. Of course, in the last century psychoanalysis, and not only of the Lacanian kind, has often competed with religions and with the arts as a supplier of this “surplus.” Some Lacanians argue that the Ecrits are not as obscure as they may seem at first sight. They say: “they come across as incomprehensible because they elicit powerful mental resistances in us. If we overcome these resistances, everything

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will appear clear.” This is a fundamentalist position. The Ecrits are actually strewn with allusions to situations and people connected to times and places where the discourse was uttered, and if we know nothing about these situations and these people, what Lacan wanted to say remains absolutely unfathomable. But, as he wasn’t a madman, there were strategic reasons behind the fact that he kept these unfathomable references in his anthology. It’s what he expressed when he said “you do not understand this writing. So much the better, you will have a reason to explain it ” ( Lacan 1973b, p. 253). Lacan counts on the fact that his readers or listeners will remain bewildered and ask themselves: “what the hell is he saying?” This is because, as we said, Lacan wants his readers/listeners to confront themselves with the signifier in its opaqueness; in the same way as the signifier of the shaman, of one possessed, of the schizophrenic prey to a “f light of ideas.” To go elastic – Or as One The Camel’s trait – attained – How powerful the Stimulus Of an Hermetic Mind – ( Dickinson 1960) Lacan never ceases to supply us with signifiers that I would call – as he himself said in a seminar to which I assisted – fourmidables. From fourmi, ant, and formidable. Because signifiers move around like ants.

5 Freedom Lacan’s “dandy” game, as I called it, has metaphysical scope in the broad sense. This is evident in his opposition to, and at the same time complicity with, the tradition I would call libertus – the liberal, libertarian, libertine, liberalistic, and liberating tradition (Liberti, freedmen, were in the Roman Empire slaves freed by their masters). Indeed, we mustn’t mistake “sulphurous” figures such as Wilde or Baudelaire with the liberto (freedman) figure that the 20th century incarnated in the surrealists, Bertrand Russell, Bataille, Sartre, Marcuse, Reich, Deleuze, or Pasolini; preachers of freedom for all, who united the theory and practice of liberation against any form of constriction, whether sexual, political, or religious. The 19th-century rebels against convention, on the other hand, often nourished conservative opinions and did not believe in freedom, neither for all nor for themselves; in other words, they were not concerned with giving their license a universal or ontological ethical/political sense. Because they thought freedom was an illusion, they laid all their bets on an individual subversion that would stress a universal subjugation insofar as they exhibited themselves as an exception to this subjugation. In a brief interview, a journalist asked Lacan what he had to say about freedom. Lacan chuckled sardonically and pitifully before merely saying: “I never

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talk about freedom.” Wilde too, though he served a term of hard labour, never spoke about freedom. Nor did he ever write an essay in defense of the rights of homosexuals, though he claimed he was a Fabian Socialist. This ambiguity pervades Lacan’s doctrine; and I don’t confer any negative connotation on the term ambiguity. Because on the one hand Lacan does not believe in the freedom of being able to build one’s destiny according to one’s wishes: we are all made up of the Other’s desire or jouissance, and what we are as subjects is structured by our history. Our margins of “individuation” are quite scant. But, on the other hand, insofar as we acknowledge this determination what takes place is a sort of Aufhebung, a German term essential in Hegel and that gives us a key to reading the “Lacanian system.” Aufhebung means at once erasing, transcending, and preserving. I would translate it as (e)raising: an erasing that raises, something between raising and erasing. For Lacan, analysis has to make possible an Aufhebung – an eraising – of suffering in life. In the sense that, through analysis, the neurotic symptom is transcended and preserved, erased and raised, taken away and taken up. For example, the capricious and impatient Lacan had a phobia about red traffic lights (Miller 2011). Sometimes, to avoid waiting for the green light, he would leave the car he was travelling in and walk. He obviously couldn’t bear his precipitous advance in history and in life being interrupted by a set of traffic lights. Lacan wanted an open road, he wanted the way paved for him, with no idle loitering. Paradoxically, the analyst who gave prominence more than any other to the function of the law as constitutive of desire had a tendency to break the most banal of laws, the road rules. Is this a contradiction between theory and practice? Or does Lacan simply want to remind us of the structuring power of the law, not to encourage us to submit ourselves to it meekly, but to allow us an eternal, desperate, ironic escape (Aufhebung) from it? Lacan constantly, systematically and almost punctiliously subverts everything, or nearly everything, that we learnt in the healthy faithful textbooks of psychoanalysis, and everything that common sense would suggest. When, as a young student I approached Lacan for the first time, I already had a good knowledge of psychoanalytical literature. I had built for myself an image of psychoanalysis that is still today largely that of an analyst member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, the IPA, which continues to be the most respected psychoanalytic association. At the time, Lacan’s punctual subversion of everything about psychoanalysis that I had learnt to take for granted came as a shock – but a liberating one. For example, I was impressed by Lacan’s use of a concept from Freud’s socalled second topic (also known as the “structural model”), the Über-Ich. This was translated as “Super-Ego,” but the concept could have been conveyed just as effectively with “Beyond-Myself ” or “Above-Myself.” According to Freud, the Super-Ego is one of the three psychic instances, the other two being the Id (originally the Es, the third person neutral in German, like the English “it”) and the Ego, or the “I.” Now, any plain analyst knows that the Super-Ego is the

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intrapsychic instance that voices the guilt-assigning, censorious, let’s say despotic, side of the parents, insofar as they banned us children from doing something or other, or told us off etc. The psychoanalytically correct definition is the following: the Super-Ego is that instance “inside of us” that opposes our impertinent desires to shamelessly enjoy pleasure. Now, Lacan doesn’t make great use of Freud’s second topic, which he retranslated in his own terms. But when he talks about the Super-Ego, he says that its fundamental command is “Jouis!,” enjoy! The categorical command of the Beyond-Myself is the one that forces me, whatever it may cost, to enjoy pleasure. The contrary of what had been said before. So, what justifies this reversal? Some are happy with rationalizations such as “Freud lived in a repressive era, particularly with regard to sexual behaviour, and therefore viewed the SuperEgo as the repression of carnal impulses. Lacan, on the other hand, lived in a society where young people were encouraged to go to bed with as many partners as possible, to take pride in being gay or lesbian, to make money; in short, to be pleasure-loving and successful. This is, today, still the dominant ‘neo-liberal’ morality in the West. Lacan, therefore, only ‘readjusted some of Freud’s concepts to a new mentality.’” This culturalist reading does indeed state an historical truth, but lacks what to Lacan must have appeared as essential, beyond the historical f luctuations of morality, namely: that every age is dominated by commandments, by a system of ethical laws. And that the law – explicit or implicit – to which we are all subject is not a mere repression of instincts, but imperatively enunciates enjoyment too. . . . Whose? Of the Other. Now, language and the law intimately imply each other. I can give orders without using language – for example by yelling – but the law always implies a verbalization; and, in turn, words are regulated by grammatical laws. We will see in more detail what Lacan means by enjoyment of the Other. For now, it will suffice to say that for Lacan, as for Freud, what opposes pleasure is in itself a strategy of pleasure. Human conf licts, moral ones too, are conf licts between pleasures and, above all, between those who must enjoy them. Let’s take the Ten Commandments, which express the will of God. For Lacan, this divine will is the (supposed) enjoyment of God. For example, the rationalist, like Socrates in Plato’s Euthyphro, will say: “the Gods order us not to steal, for it is in itself a good thing not to steal.” A truly religious spirit, like the priest Euthyphro, will instead say: “one must not steal, for this is the will of the Gods.” In short, commandments make sense to us only when they are divine. Even if we are atheists or are not prepared to obey to the desires of a god, we are determined and militarized by what I would call our cause. The latter is an ambiguous term in many languages, as it means both a cause in the physical sense and an ideal for which I am prepared to fight; an enlightening duplicity. Let’s suppose that the commandment I am subject to is to be the richest individual in my country. To fulfil it, I will be prepared to do anything: ruin my family, betray my friends, pay a hitman to get rid of any rivals, and so on. Better dead than

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poor. Roberto Saviano’s novel Gomorrah (Saviano 2007) was so successful because it is an Iliad of the Neapolitan underworld. The camorra men he describes know they will end up in prison, or dead, or fugitives for life, and yet . . . their commandment is to make money. They come across as the new heroes of the inf lexible law of evil. I wouldn’t be surprised if the book, and the television series based on it, encouraged quite a few youngsters to embrace the cause of the criminal organization. But whose is this inf lexible will that gives a nagging, monomaniacal, single aim to my existence? One will say: “it is my will. If I fail to become richer and richer, I cannot find enjoyment.” But who is this me that says “I am enjoying!”? This pleasure-enjoying ego that forces me to sacrifice even my own life, what “ego” is it? According to Lacan, this “I must enjoy pleasure” is the Super-Ego. Kierkegaard had his Don Juan say: “anyone who, when he is twenty years old, does not understand that there is a categorical imperative – enjoy – is a fool; and anyone who does not start doing it is a Christiansfelder” ( Kierkegaard 1988, p. 189). This reversal of the connotation of the Super-Ego is only one of the many moves of the Lacanian “game.” We could say something similar about Lacan’s critique of Ego Psychology. For a naïve Freudian, the Ego is “the good side” of our psyche, the instance which relates us to reality and which protects us from both the wild Es and the too severe Super-Ego; in Lacan the positive Ego is inverted as the main agency of repression and of self-deception. The point is that this reversal makes us face something that is difficult (for many) to swallow: that what we call truth is not something entirely disjointed from the signifier, but is – at least partially – one of its products. This admission distinguishes every “thought on difference,” in which Lacan is inscribed, from the dominant rationalism of today.

6 Dentists of the soul We may ask whether this primacy of the signifier characterizes all of Lacan’s works. Three phases are usually distinguished in Lacan’s thought. The first is the 1930s and 40s, when Lacan affirmed himself in the French psychiatric and psychoanalytical tradition. The second began in 1953, when he started his famous Seminar, which was to continue almost until his death: this is where the core of Lacan’s thought is developed, with the primacy of language. Then, after the publication of the Ecrits in 1966, he has a third phase, in which references to mathematics and logic prevail along with the themes of jouissance and the Real. It need be said that his Ecrits very soon became illisibles, unreadable – as French literary critics say without giving the adjective any derogative sense – whilst his seminars were, at least up to a certain point, comprehensible. But starting in the mid-1960s his seminars became increasingly impenetrable. His puns, at first quite sober, began to overf low more and more. His arguments, originally linear and scrupulous, crumble into sententious statements that become less and

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less capable of proof. His logical/mathematical and topological formulas become more and more invasive. We need only compare the titles of the seminars. Those of the first decade have clear titles: “Psychoses,” “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,” “Transference,” and so on. Then the titles become more and more enigmatic, like “. . . Or Worst”; “Encore”; “Les non-dupes errent ” (which in French sounds like “The Names of the Father” or “The Unduped Wander/Are Mistaken”), etc. In the second from last title he surpasses himself: “L’insu que sait de l’une bévue s’aile à mourre,” literally “the unknown that knows about the one-blunder chances love,” or “the unknown that knows about the one-blunder hovers as odds and evens,” which we can perhaps read as “the failure of the Unbewusst is love,” Unbewusst being the German word for “the unconscious.” Lacan is not the only example of excess at a late age. With time, Joyce and Beckett, for example, slipped more and more towards unreadable “abstract” forms of writing that broke any link between language and representative content. So Joyce moved from almost naturalistic short stories like Dubliners to the shattering of the English language in Finnegans Wake – a text that, significantly, the older Lacan was particularly fond of. And a similar drift also occurred in Heidegger. The fact that this bursting the banks of sense is produced at a late age induces some to suspect that it is due to senile dementia. Some prefer Lacan up to the sixties, when he was less abstruse, but the most significant Lacanian schools, it must be said, embrace the late, more obscure Lacan: they initiate their poor students, defenseless psychology graduates, or MDs, into the thornier version of Lacanian thought. Now, this rarefaction causes outrage in the “respectable” analyst: “what has all this got to do with the analytic profession?” But it is also the case that when Picasso and Braque started exhibiting their “little cubes,” the right-minded exclaimed “what has all this got to do with painting?” But can a psychoanalyst be compared to an artist? Can there be a “classic analysis” and a “psychoanalytical modernism?” Analysis, it is commonly believed, is not an art, but a cure. An analyst friend of mine, extremely distant from Lacan, used to say that he was like a dentist of the soul, stressing the artisanal reparatory character of his function. Instead, the function Lacan gave to analysis was by no means odontological. He led psychoanalysis, a technique that many consider psycho-iatric, in a direction that is decisively Dionysian, in the sense that has been given to this term after Nietzsche. I shall explain why further down. Yet there is an odontological dimension in every analysis where “curing” means “taking care” of someone who is suffering. Some have compared going to see the same analyst for months or years on the same days each week to the security blanket Linus cuddles himself with. Analysis is also what some analysts call holding, i.e. holding someone in one’s arms like a child. To hold is also to detain and possess, therefore holding is detaining someone and keeping them in one’s arms. In fact, Lacan was not “neutral” and, despite his ruggedness, could show affection towards his patients, though he did not theorize “empathy,” which is so popular today.

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Compared to the practices of IPA analysts, Lacan’s analyses were far less ritualized. Many psychoanalysts insist on an anachronistic liturgy. For example, in Italy it is compulsory to use the formal “lei ” (vous in French) between analyst and patient, even if the two have already known each other long before the analysis began and used the informal “tu.” A real analysis demands that you have at least three sessions per week (but nobody explains in what way having two rather than three sessions a week can change the nature of the analytic work). The IPA recommends that male analysts should always wear a grey jacket and female ones a grey loose-fitting suit, to avoid revealing too much of their womanly shape. . . . The consulting room must be aseptic, analysts must not exhibit objects that reveal their personality (but is it really possible not to exhibit one’s personality? If one goes to great lengths to avoid doing so, does this not reveal a personality trait in itself?). There is a sort of petrified analysis which is one of the causes of the decline of psychoanalysis today. Many of these ceremonials of icy distancing between patient and analyst make little sense to Lacanians. The true setting is not a material arrangement of objects or garments, but a type of relationship the key of which is the unconscious. Now, we should see the scrapping of this ceremonial in analysis as a sign of something deeper in Lacan. Something that reveals, I believe, what is really essential in Lacan.

7 An ethical technique At the theoretical level, Lacan creates a radical rupture between psychoanalysis and psychology as a positive science. Lacan sometimes uses the work of psychologists, for example Henri Wallon and Lev Vygotsky, but does so in order to inscribe them in a framework that is by no means “psychological.” Psychology arose in the 19th century as a positive science with the human mind as its object; but for Lacan, the object of psychoanalysis is not the mind, nor is it the unconscious. A “theory of the mind,” like the one conceived by Bion, has nothing to do with psychoanalysis according to Lacan, who says that psychoanalysis is not a psychology but an erotology, i.e. a theory and practice of “erotic” relationships in the broadest sense. He refuses, in short, to consider the subject as the object of an objective investigation. Rather, he aspires performatively to what he called the “subversion of the subject” and constructs a theory that coincides with a process or movement of the subject itself. In clinical practice, Lacan carries out a contortion that is symmetrical to his theoretical approach: he breaks any link between analysis and medical practices and therapies. As in his theory, he separates psychoanalysis from scientific psychology. In the same way, at the clinical level he separates analysis from any technique that attempts to restore a supposed “healthiness.” Significantly, French Lacanians tend not to boast about having cured someone, but say instead “ je l’ai soulagé,” “I have supported and soothed him.” Lacanians don’t step on the pedal of therapeutic triumphalism.

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For this reason, Lacan talks of the analyst’s ethical position more than their analytical technique, as we shall see in greater detail further down. Indeed, ethics is something practical, but not technical; because ethics, in contrast to technique, directly implies subjectivity. Now, it’s true that every ethics implies a technical custom – the word ethics derives from ethos, custom, way of life. Yet, at one point, the choice between one technique and another becomes necessary. This is the problem that some of the scientists of the Manhattan project, those who built the first atomic bomb, were dramatically faced with. The operation demonstrated an outstanding level of technical expertise, but its ethical value was problematic. I was wellacquainted with Joseph Rotblat: a young Polish physicist enrolled in the project directed by Enrico Fermi, who escaped from the United States – pursued by the CIA – to avoid participating in the creation of the nuclear bomb. For this and other reasons, he was awarded the 1995 Nobel peace prize. A non-technical Nobel, I would say. In any case, it seems to me that this “ethical” question is crucial to understanding psychoanalysis in general. Indeed, psychoanalysis, before being a set of hypotheses on mental functioning, is an ethical project concerned with the “direction” of subjectivity. An apparently very simple example: a man came to consult me because he was prone to being late, and, in particular, he would often miss the train that was supposed to take him to work every morning. In other words, he came to me with a symptom, something about himself that he didn’t accept; something egodystonic. Now, the non-analytical psychotherapies essentially respond to what Lacan calls demande, demand. My patient’s demand was for me to remove the symptom. In this case, a cognitivist psychotherapist, for example, would have looked for devices, even quite crude ones, aimed at not making him miss this train, and may have succeeded. Such psychotherapists resort to very precise prescriptions to extend the subject’s control over him or herself. Expressed in Freudian terms, the ethical aim of cognitivist techniques is to reinforce the control of the Ego over himself. This was also the aim of Ego Psychology, the form of psychoanalysis that was once predominant in the United States. An analyst operates differently. Whereas in medicine the symptom is the sign or trace of an underlying disease, the result of a lesion, in psychoanalysis the symptom is the sign or trace of an “other” – or an unconscious, as Freud called it – desire or enjoyment. This is why an analyst will never give patients prescriptions to satisfy their demands, but will instead – as I did – invite the analysand to speak freely, to engage in free association. And while speaking in this way with my patient, it emerged that he was only apparently satisfied with his career; he in fact hated it. Because it was a career that his father had imposed on him, whilst he had always dreamt of something quite different. In other words, behind the manifest demand of being able to control himself – “I wish to be able to no longer miss this train” – desires emerged, hardly confessable ones, even to himself.

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In general, psychoanalysis does not aim at satisfying a demande but at making a désir emerge. Therefore, non-analytic psychotherapeutic ethics is something other from psychoanalytical ethics. The latter triggers a process that sooner or later leads subjects to problematizing what they really want and hence to uncertainty on what they really are. The psychoanalyst aims at the fact that suffering subjects are theatres of diverging wills, are divided, split, and the analytic “technique” is based on this ethical choice: a choice not to stitch up this division, but to bring it into the light of day. The comparative evaluation of the efficiency of the various psychotherapies – to which a multitude of researchers have been devoting themselves for decades – is therefore problematic, and it often risks misinterpreting what each psychotherapy actually does. After one year, a cognitivist therapist could boast that, thanks to him, the aforementioned patient no longer missed his train; whilst after going into analysis, the same patient may stop even trying to catch the train, after realizing it was taking him to a job that was destroying him. Which is to be considered more effective, the cognitive or the psychoanalytical technique? As the two ethical positions – that of the cognitivist and that of the analyst – are so disparate, their techniques are also non-comparable. Many will prefer the quick suppression of the symptom as the apparently simpler way. Many just want the lift they must take to work properly, even if it’s the lift that’s taking them to the gallows. It is from this ethical perspective that Lacan’s so-to-speak technical innovations should be seen. The most spectacular of these is the variable duration of sessions. The analyst decides when a session should end; whether after ten minutes or two hours. This is because, for Lacan, the point at which the analyst “cuts off ” has an interpretative value that’s even more important than verbal interpretation. By suddenly dismissing the analysand, the Lacanian analyst acts, thus punctuating analytical time. In psychoanalytical jargon, acting out is when a subject performs an act outside the analytical setting that should be interpreted as symbolic in analysis. I would say that the Lacanian analyst interprets through an acting in, in the sense of dismissing the patient out of the consulting room. In practice, however, Lacanians have shortened the average duration of sessions when compared to the 45 minutes of the other analytic schools; a Lacanian session allegedly tends to last 20 minutes on average, and a few malignant tongues say that they’ve shortened sessions so as to earn more money. But what really earns you more money, more than the duration of sessions, is the cost of each session. In other words, the technique Lacan initiated is purely anti-intellectualistic. Many believe the contrary: as Lacan was a great intellectual, they believe that a Lacanian analysis is suitable for those who have read Heidegger and Proust, that it’s basically just full of discourse. The opposite is true. Lacanian analysts do not interpret much and act a lot. Or rather: they interpret by acting. When I interpret verbally I give a sense to something that appears senseless, I rationalize the irrational. Instead, analysts inspired by Lacan try to make their analysands interpret their own dreams, slips, etc. Often Lacanians say that analysands analyze, of

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course, and that the analyst interprets; but in fact they prefer that the analysand also interprets. The important thing is to fuel the plethora of the signifier and it will then be up to each analysand to find the points of application, or of stitching this plethora to their specific lacks. Therefore, more than interpreting a dream in the traditional way, a Lacanian analyst will emphasize particular points, or may make a quip or pun on a certain aspect of the dream.

8 Purged psychoanalysis Freud’s original technique was quite intellectualistic and aimed at communicating a concept and a sense: he believed that the intellectual awareness of particular unconscious processes would dispel them. But today no one believes that someone will really change because they have been given very acute interpretations about their dreams, symptoms, and so on. Most analysts, non-Lacanians too, realized long ago that the original analytic technique was a naïvely Enlightenment one. They accordingly abandoned interpretations and aimed instead towards passionate, ineffable, empathic exchanges between analyst and patient. The word is diminished, while all the space is given to emotional processes between “persons,” not too differently from what takes place in relations between wife and husband, between two friends, between father and son, and so on. But by no means does Lacanian anti-intellectualism consist in this. Cristiana Cimino, an IPA analyst, pointed out to me that the new trend – that some call that of “the analyst in underwear” – is only apparently the reversal of “the analyst in a grey suit” that we mentioned previously. In the past, analysts had to completely conceal their personality and even their sex; now analysts indulge in self-disclosure and even start talking to their patients about their private affairs. This is a democracy! In both cases the belief is that the essential point is how the analyst appears or does not appear. Two faces of the same medal. But Lacan would say that one confuses analysts as men or women with their idiosyncrasies, the fact that they would rather hide behind their role or, on the contrary, exhibit their ventures, with the analytic function: that is, with the position the analyst assumes in a relation that is essentially unconscious and symbolic. Now, Lacanian anti-intellectualism is a third way between classic analysis based on “good interpretations,” on the alleged thaumaturgical power of sense-giving statements, on the one hand, and “relational” psychotherapies on the other. For the so-called relational therapies, analysis is an encounter between two persons on the same level. Instead, Lacan puts his money on the signifier. On a practice that doesn’t resolve itself in giving a verbal sense to what the subject says, but one that doesn’t maneuver to try to achieve an affective bond between “equals” either. Lacan doesn’t speak of “relations” but of “social bonds”: a relation between two persons is already something social that transcends individuals. A “third way” that many find difficult to grasp, precisely because they are trapped in the conceptual opposition “intellectual”

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versus “affective.” If one fails to untie oneself from this opposition, nothing of Lacan can be understood. It must be said, however, that in time Lacan’s “analytic scene” became more and more minimalist. After 1975 the duration of many of his sessions was reduced to an absence of duration: the analysand would enter, greet the analyst and leave. The session was reduced to a clocking in and clocking out. Obviously, for those who hate Lacan, this was proof of his imposture, or at least his senile involution. But perhaps short sessions are not always monstrous. Some time ago an analysand of mine, because of various hitches, came to the session extremely late and so the session lasted around five minutes. Well, this was a memorable meeting, an authentic turning point in his analysis. . . . Pure chance? This analysand, forced to mention the essential points of a session in only a few minutes, really ended up mentioning only the absolutely essential. I tend to see this “extra-light” practice of Lacan’s as a subtle, ironic, involuntary satire of psychoanalysis. I know this is a bold statement, but on the one hand, Lacan glorified psychoanalysis in ways that many consider excessive, while on the other it is as if he himself wished to go beyond it, or at least to prove its limits. Indeed, he even predicted its historical end, often repeating that psychoanalysis was a transitional “symptom” of Western culture. In later years, he would often say that in the struggle between psychoanalysis and religion the latter would ultimately win (and history would seem to have proved him right). And in fact, we may ask: after purifying psychoanalysis of all its “conservative” gimmicks and reducing it to an essential f licker consisting of almost nothing, hasn’t one effectively purged it? Now, the term purge has a sinister aura for us. It reminds us of Stalin’s purges in particular, or, going further back in history, of the French Revolution and the Jacobin Reign of Terror. Indeed, this ideal of purification, typical of many modern radical movements, has had its most horrifying consequences in the Stalinist purges, and in several ethnic cleansing procedures around the world. I would go as far as saying that this search for purity has characterized the entire 20th century, even in its most creative and heroic aspects. Alain Badiou, in a book entitled The Century ( Badiou 2007) – i.e. the 20th century – argues, with celebratory and nostalgic overtones, that this quest for “purity” was characteristic of 20th-century culture as a whole, and of the artistic avant-garde in particular, creating a purely pictorial form of painting ( just colours on a canvas, not depictions of the world), a purely architectural architecture (i.e. a functional one), a purely literal literature (i.e. letters and not sense), a purely musical music (sound and silence, not harmonies), and so on. In my day, references were to “the filmic specific,” “the architectural specific,” where “specific” means the essence of an art form. This wanting to reach the essence led to an inf lexible libido vacui, a lust for the void. Indeed, every reduction of praxis to its quid, its essence, sooner or later crosses the “inconceivable” limit beyond which we find the void. Thus Malevič painted his “White Square on White Canvas” and John Cage “composed” 4′33″: a musician comes on stage with his instrument, does

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not play a single note for four minutes and 33 seconds and leaves. And we could continue with a long series of other examples. Is Lacan the Malevič or Cage of psychoanalysis? In fact, he too aimed at the psychoanalytical “specific.” Today the 20th century is commonly referred to as “the short century,” but I would tend to call it “the exaggerated century.” And Lacan was undoubtedly exaggerated. His style was very much inf luenced by the surrealists he frequented – Salvador Dalí first and foremost. And surrealism was indeed a grand fair of brilliant exaggerations. Far be it from me to want to justify the excesses of the later Lacan, which the Lacanians of today usually do not practice. My hypothesis is that Lacan began to make his sessions shorter and shorter for the same reason that he loathed red traffic lights: he was always in a hurry. And, as we know, the older you get, the more you are in a hurry – death is breathing down the necks of us oldies. It is often said that analysts sit behind the analysand’s couch simply because Freud didn’t like being looked at for hours. In the same way, I think many Lacanians practice short sessions simply because I suspect Lacan couldn’t bear to listen to the same person speaking for too long. He needed a change of scenario as quickly as possible. I’m not saying that psychoanalysis just institutionalizes the idiosyncrasies of its creators. Every important practice is steeped in the singularities of its inventor; but these singularities have been successful. In any case, Lacan’s excesses should also be situated as provocations that lay bare the relationship between psychoanalysis and temporality. As we know, analyses today continue for extremely long periods of time, to the point that they evoke permanent therapies such as dialysis for sufferers of chronic kidney disease more than a therapeutic process defined within a timeframe. On the one hand we have the chronological time of analysis, the fact that it may go on for six months or six years; on the other it has its own internal temporality, which can also coincide with meteoric processes from the point of view of astronomical time. The distinction between “timeframes” is not as abstract as one may think. We all distinguish between astronomical time and biological time. As we grow old, alas, we find that time escapes more and more rapidly, because with time our bio-psychic processes slow down. A week for an adult goes by in no time, for a child it is a very long period. According to Lacan we have a third time, neither astronomical nor biological, which he calls the time of the unconscious or “logical time.” Lacan takes up Heidegger’s distinction between Zeitlichkeit and Temporalität: we could say that the former is physical temporality and the latter historical and social temporality. In fact, every culture and society has its Temporalität. For example, in China today time goes at breakneck speed; and not only because they get things done quickly, far more than in Europe, but there are also much more rapid changes with regard to tastes, mentality, and values. Other countries seem instead to be

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slowing down, and let’s say that these tend to be in decline (Italy among them). In turn, Lacan talks of a specific unconscious temporality. Gustav Mahler asked Freud for help regarding, apparently ( Jabif 1998), a problem of impotence with his wife Alma. Freud agreed not to a session, but to a stroll in the streets, and after this walk Mahler’s problem disappeared. It would be naïve to think that this speedy recovery proves Freud’s clinical genius, because that is not the point. The point is that fortunately Mahler found Freud at the right time and Freud probably said something to him just at the right time. The Ancients called this kairos; seizing the appropriate moment, being timely. Therefore, ultimately – and why not? – a session of only a few seconds may have an effect, whilst hours and hours of sessions may not. But is analysis then a question of luck? Yes, but having luck on your side is an art form. In Naples they say, with reference to a card player who seems to be enjoying an outrageous amount of luck: “the card knows whom to go to!” It’s a little similar to the way it is with Zen Buddhist techniques, which should lead to Satori, a state we unlawfully call “enlightenment.” The story goes that a pupil went to live for years with a Zen hermit but never succeeded in talking to him and asking the question he believed to be crucial for him, convinced that the answer would “enlighten” him. For years, the master remained in silence and didn’t pay much attention to him. One day, the pupil finally managed to articulate his question in a concise manner: for the first time the master listened to him attentively. After which, he hit him so hard that he broke his arm. Then, suddenly, because of the pain, the pupil reached Satori. What caused it? The many years spent with the guru, or the blow that maimed him, or both? All this is Chinese anecdotic literature – of the ancient kind, not of the supersonic China of today – but analytic temporality coincides neither with astronomical time nor with psycho-biological time. Yet it does have its specific temporality.

9 Psychoprudence One could then say: well, if kairos is what counts in psychoanalysis, is it not then a psychic technique closer to magic or to the enlightenment practices of the East than to scientific practice? The point is that since the 20th century the prevailing philosophy has been one that we can trace back to Marx and Nietzsche, and that the Americans have developed as pragmatism. According to this philosophy only what works is true. We could then say that, insofar as analysis works, it is true. In any case, seizing the kairos is not so much a quality of magic, but of several “serious” activities, such as art and politics. And competitive sports. I think that the usual question – “does psychoanalysis have scientific foundations?” – is entirely misleading. Many analysts fall into this trap and feel it is their duty to prove that ultimately psychoanalysis, too, is scientific; that it is the technological application of a falsifiable theory, as Karl Popper requires. Jean

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Laplanche, with whom I did a doctorate in psychoanalysis, used to say that psychoanalysis is a science in the Popperian sense! Which is quite inconsistent, to say the least. Others say that it is a hermeneutical activity, pure interpretation, and hence foreign to science. “There are no facts, only interpretations,” the philosopher Gianni Vattimo says, paraphrasing Nietzsche. Psychoanalysis – the hermeneuts say – does not deal with psychic facts, it interprets. But, according to Lacan – and to me – psychoanalysis is neither science nor hermeneutics. So, what is it? Freud himself sort of answered when he wrote that there are three impossible professions: governing, educating, psychoanalyzing (Freud 1937, SE 23, p. 248; GW, p.  94). Impossible but indispensable, I would say. How is it possible not govern a country, not somehow to educate the young? – and even, I would say, not to analyze? Even though a certain analytic function was carried out by other figures in the past (according to Lacan, in Athens it was carried out by Socrates). Once one would turn to a priest or, in Italy, to one’s philosophy teacher (in Italy philosophy is taught in high schools). In other words, for Freud psychoanalysis is in the same register as politics and pedagogy. To these, I would add administering justice – another impossible profession. Of a magistrate we demand jurisprudence, of the analyst we demand psycho-prudence. But I don’t like to mix Latin and Greek in a single term. Prudentia rendered the Greek phronesis, so I would say psycho-phronesis. Neither science, nor hermeneutics, but political practice. And by “politics” I do not mean joining a party or setting up electoral committees, I mean acting “phronetically” in the polis. It’s true that politics is very much based on theories – economic, political and sociological – and a good deal of pedagogy is also based on psychological research. And psychoanalysis refers to theories, those of Freud and of others. But, being human activities, “linguistic games” Wittgenstein would say, politics, education, jurisprudence, and psychoanalysis are not corollaries of more or less confirmed theories. For example, can we say that in the 2016 US presidential elections Trump won because he was more scientific than Hillary Clinton? Today there is a lot of talk about “politics by technicians,” but it is an attempt to fool us, because there can be no technocratic governments; the technicians will still have to take political and ethical decisions. And did the famous pedagogist Maria Montessori create such a stir because her teaching methods were scientific? And, similarly, do we say someone is “a fine analyst” because she is good at applying the most verified psychological theory? The answers to all these questions are negative. Even if Lacan did not put it in the terms I use here, it is still evident that for him psychoanalysis is not a technique that applies a theory, but rather a praxis that is derived from an ethical choice. He explains it very effectively in the seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis ( Lacan 1986). This said, we actually find ourselves before a paradox. Lacan idealizes psychoanalysis enormously, turning it into a way of acting and thinking that is absolutely irreducible to psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, cognitive sciences, philosophy, and so on. His purifying hybris is part of his project for an Aufhebung of psychoanalysis as a whole. In any case, as we’ve seen, Aufhebung means both to

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lift up and to cancel. So, Lacan wished to raise psychoanalysis to the highest levels (which is one reason why those who love psychoanalysis, too much, tend towards Lacanianism), but for this reason, I would say, it’s as if he also wanted to erase it. Hence the very brief sessions. For Lacan, therefore, the analyst needn’t take the trouble to cure patients. What counted was analysis for the sake of analysis, in the same sense that we say “art for art’s sake,” even if this analyzing out of sheer love for analyzing also leads – fortunately – to relieving suffering. The analyst shouldn’t aim at healing a subject’s symptom, because for Lacan the focal symptom is not an impediment to the free expression of the self but is, on the contrary, the essence of subjectivity itself; hence his motto “love your symptom as yourself.” Of course, the analysand hopes that the unbearable paralyzing part of the symptom will disappear – that the symptom will “be raised” and erase itself into a sinthome, no longer a symptôme – but this is only possible if the analyst does not attempt to eliminate the symptom. We said that Lacan did not believe that analysis pursues the ideal of freedom and that, on the contrary, he kept reminding us that we will always be over-determined by our symbolic bond to others, by the discourse of the Other. What’s more, many of Lacan’s best-known maxims inscribe him in the pessimistic tradition, from Schopenhauer to Freud. Not to mention his Leitmotiv of later years: “there is no sexual relation.” Sexual acts do take place, thank heavens, but precisely because there is no relation between the sexes: another obscure proposition, even if it makes several things echo in us. To say, as Lacanians usually do, that there is no sexual relation because in the unconscious there are no symbols corresponding to the masculine and feminine still amounts to saying nothing: because the point is to understand in what sense the symbols “masculine” and “feminine” do not exist in the unconscious and what this lack of relation means in practice when sexual acts do take place. It is a statement that remains entirely enigmatic. Of course, many “positive” down-to-earth thinkers can’t fathom why such a brain-racking and depressing thinking, one that doesn’t even promise any form of healing, and certainly not happiness, can attract so many. The positive success of every form of “negative thinking,” so-to-speak – of every way of thinking reminiscent of a constitutional and structural lack in our being – appears mysterious to those who see the world as a whole with no voids; firm and solid like a rock.

References Badiou, A 2007, The Century, Polity Press, Cambridge. Caruso, P 1969, Conversazioni con Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Mursia, Milano. Dickinson, E 1960, ‘Strong Draughts of Their Refreshing Minds’, in Johnson, TH, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Little Brown and Company, Boston and Toronto, Poem 711, pp. 349–350.

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Freud, S 1937, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937)’, in Strachey, J, ed., Moses and Monotheism and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 23 (1937–1939), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1964, pp. 216–253. Jabif, E 1998, Gustav Mahler y su tratamiento psicoanalítico, en una sola sesión, con Sigmund Freud, Jornadas de la Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires. Kierkegaard, S 1988, Stages on Life’s Way, Hong, HV and Hong, EH, eds., Princeton University Press, Princeton. Lacan, J 1966, Ecrits, II, Seuil, Paris. Eng trans. Ecrits: A Selection, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2004. Lacan, J 1973a, Télévision, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1990. Lacan, J 1973b, Le Séminaire, Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1978. Lacan, J 1986, Le Séminaire, Livre VII. L’éthique de la psychanalyse, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Ethics of psychoanalysis, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997. Lacan, J 2005, Le triomphe de la religion, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Triumph of Religion, Preceded by: Discourse to Catholics, Polity, Cambridge, 2015. Lévi-Strauss, C 1963, Structural Anthropology, Basic Books, New York. Miller, J-A 2011, Vie de Lacan, Navarin, Paris. Saviano, R 2007, Gomorrah, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Wittgenstein, L 1922, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Kegan Paul, London.

2 LACAN IN THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF TODAY

1 A placebo cure? Nearly 40 years after the death of Jacques Lacan, we can ask ourselves: what is alive and what is dead in his teaching? What is still relevant today and what has proved to be evanescent, in particular with regard to psychoanalytic practice? But before taking a close look at the Lacanian trees, perhaps we should look at the psychoanalytic forest first. Lacan died in 1981, followed 29 days later by Heinz Kohut, the forefather of Self psychology. Two years earlier Wilfred Bion, who dominated psychoanalysis in several countries – particularly Italy and Latin America – for the last 20 years, had also died. In other words, the death of Lacan marks the end of an era; the age of the great masters of the second and third generation of psychoanalysts. I envy these analysts of the second and third generations. They died when psychoanalysis was in full sail, when its popularity was constantly growing. By contrast, the analysts of today live in the era of its regression – in a grim old age for psychoanalysis, at least in Western countries. Many consider that the decline of psychoanalysis began in the 1980s. This decline has been due not only to the fact that, in the last 30 years, no masters with the stature of those just mentioned have emerged, but also because in the leading Western country of the 20th century, the United States, a cultural war has been triggered that has deprived psychoanalysis of credibility and respectability. “Today neuroses are no longer cured with psychoanalysis but with drugs,” is the stock phrase I’ve heard pronounced thousands of time in the US, and not only there. A ridiculous statement, as 80% of the clients of analysts complain of problems for which there are no drugs. For example, what drug should be given to a mother who complains that, in her opinion, her adolescent children no longer love her? Or to a homosexual who complains of being unable to stay in a stable relationship? Or to an hysteric

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girl who only falls in love with men who reject her sexually? And the list could continue. If these problems make them depressed, of course we can give them an antidepressant, but the drug won’t solve the problem for which they came to see an analyst. In Europe, too, a campaign to discredit psychoanalysis has been underway. In France – a country where psychoanalysis enjoyed high prestige until not so long ago – popular lampoons such as The Black Book of Psychoanalysis from 2005 and The Twilight of an Idol from 2010 (a trash bestseller by Michel Onfray against Freud) have appeared. A double process has taken place in Europe too: on the one hand the progressive exclusion of psychoanalysis from psychology and psychiatry faculties, and on the other, historiographical, epistemological, and philosophical attempts to undermine the plausibility of psychoanalysis, of which the contributions by Grünbaum, Crews, Bouveresse, Borch-Jacobsen, and Sonu Shamdasani are the best-known examples. The Freud bashers have multiplied. The core of these criticisms is ultimately always the same: psychoanalytic theories have never been verified or confirmed through protocols that are universally accepted today by anyone whose approach is “serious.” And the therapeutic results of psychoanalysis, if there are any, have not been documented in any quantified way and are therefore untestable. Psychoanalysis is a form of superstition. Today, when the Food and Drug Administration or similar agencies have to decide whether to authorize a drug, they apply the “double blind” protocol. A sample of patients suffering from the illness that the drug is claimed to cure are given the real drug, whilst another sample of patients are given an inactive substance referred to as a placebo – which in Latin means “I shall be pleasing” – despite the fact that the poor wretches believe they are taking an effective drug. Not even the doctors taking part in the experiment know whether they’re giving a patient the tested drug or the placebo. In the end, if plain water cures 40% of cases and the drug 50%, then the latter has a very good chance of being authorized as effective. It’s all decided by the percentage difference between drug and placebo – often not a remarkable one. The aim is, as many say, to safeguard the consumer. The consumer of psychotherapeutic techniques too. The problem is that this test is very difficult to apply to psychoanalysis and to psychotherapies in general. What would an analytic “placebo” be? And as verifiability is extremely difficult to establish, the conclusion is that psychoanalysis is something unserious. Effective, perhaps, but in the same way as a placebo. In our age, the non-verifiability of something tends to coincide with its nonexistence; a result of the dominant pragmatist philosophy. For example, if a scientific journal does not follow the criteria required today to assess its scientific quality – a system of peer-reviews, incidentally, also called double blind – it’s as if it didn’t exist, even if it publishes brilliant articles. The age of verifiability extends to all fields with the widespread philosophical criterion according to which “it is impossible to prove the existence of God, therefore God does not exist.” Non-demonstrability and non-existence coincide.

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It must be said that Lacan – who never fails to surprise us – agreed with these slanderers of psychoanalysis. In one seminar he more or less said: “thank you for coming in such great numbers to listen to a talk on something, psychoanalysis, which is not even a science. In fact, one Popper says that it is irrefutable” ( Lacan 1977, Seminar 15 November 1977). Lacan was not kidding. According to Popper, psychoanalysis is not scientific because its propositions are not falsifiable, they are not refutable. Psychoanalytic propositions may even be absolutely true, but we cannot state the fact scientifically and, therefore, we cannot recommend it to consumers. As a consequence, analytic sessions – in contrast to what happens, for example, in Germany and Switzerland – cannot be paid for by the National Health Service. Lacan agreed with Popper: psychoanalysis is not a science. But for him being a science was not the only possible value for a theory or practice. Lacan also said that even though psychoanalysis is not a science, science still supplies it with its materials ( Lacan 2011, p. 141). Psychoanalysis does not follow the scientific method, but it assimilates many contents of science. This makes things more complicated, because it means that Lacan did not consider psychoanalysis – as many analysts consider it today – to be a “humanistic” practice, an “empathic relation,” a “hermeneutics of intersubjectivity,” an “encounter between persons,” a “being with,” and so on. For him psychoanalysis is not a science, but it is still a creation of the scientific era. It is a by-product of the Cartesian revolution, which forced science to follow a method. Psychoanalysis is a non-science produced by the scientific subject; it is unthinkable without science.

2 Psychoanalysis in the epoch of the DSM For many analysts, publicly recognizing the crisis of psychoanalysis outside their circle is undeniably a taboo. I reject this dismal conspiracy of silence. Amicus Freudus, sed magis amica veritas (Freud is my friend, but truth is a better friend). Put more plainly, being a psychoanalyst does not authorize me to look at the problem through rose-coloured glasses. Perhaps it could be proven that in many countries psychanalysis is practiced more today than it was in 1981. But the social sense of the practice has changed to the extent that many American analysts say, for example, that “we feel like dinosaurs,” an extinct species. The new generations of psychiatrists, nearly everywhere in the world, study and train with DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, now in its fifth edition, or with the World Health Organization’s ICD, International Classification of Diseases, which is a sort of DSM’s twin publication. These guidelines have built a diagnostic Esperanto that progressively expels the nosographic categories we analysts use – at least the older ones like myself. Starting with hysteria, which is no longer listed as a mental disorder. Note that the DSM does not refer to “mental diseases” but to “mental disorders.” The language has been de-medicalized. As the Lacanian analyst Fulvio Marone pointed out (Marone 2013), the term

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“psychiatry” is mentioned less and less in favour of the term “mental health.” A sign of our (not only politically) “correct” times. The DSM has given psychiatry a formidable tool for homologation in medicine by doing away with medical language! The sense of being a psychoanalyst today is therefore very different compared to 30 years ago. At the time, psychoanalysis was considered a respectable, though controversial, branch of medicine. In any case, it was an authentic “human science,” like political economics, linguistics or cultural anthropology, and the profane [non-shrinks] believed that a university degree in psychoanalysis existed. By contrast, today psychoanalysis tends to be perceived as a practice on the fringes of the official therapies, a little like “ethnic” medicines such as acupuncture, Ayurveda, and so on. Psychoanalysis may even be fashionable in some areas, but in the same way as many “alternative” forms of medicine. (As for me, I believe – in accordance with the WHO – that some therapies outside of standard medicine should be taken seriously, for example acupuncture.) In 1981 – the year Lacan died – psychoanalysis still believed it could conquer the great institutions, such as public hospitals, mental health services, and psychology and medicine faculties. Yet, today it is a fringe practice that has to defend its own existence. Psychoanalysis has increasingly moved away from the domain of psychiatrists and toward that of philosophers, biopolitical thinkers, art and film critics, feminists, theorists of cultural studies and complementary literatures, political analysts of the New Left, and so on. It has shifted to the postmodern galaxy. In short, practising psychoanalysis today appears to be a specific choice, but not one of those disciplines being “recommended to consumers.” This is something that delights many psychoanalytical schools, because for them psychoanalysis is a form of résistance, as the French, who adore the term and the concept, say. Resistance against the hegemony of the technical and scientific approach, against the hegemony of the impact factor. It is difficult to say whether this marginalization of psychoanalysis is an irreversible process. In fact, in recent years a series of signals – especially from the media – seem to indicate a moderate general revaluation of psychoanalysis. Some of the leading newspapers that dictate intellectual opinion in the world, such as the New York Times and The Guardian, seem to have shifted from a hostile position towards psychoanalysis to a far more benevolent one. But it’s difficult to say whether this is an authentic, radical change of direction. Many political ideologies and philosophies that seemed to be on the decline have had unexpected resurrections. I remember that in Italy in the 1960s and 70s we spoke of the free-market economy in general (liberalismo) as an historical residue composed of nostalgic old men; at the time we believed that Keynesianism and Marxism had completely supplanted liberalism. Then, in the 1980s, with Thatcher and the “conservative revolution,” liberalism made its comeback and we witnessed hasty mass conversions by formerly Marxist intellectuals to free market theory. Today, after the 2008 economic crisis and with the achievements of Brexit and Trump, the wind is apparently changing again away from

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neo-liberalism. No one can know, therefore, whether psychoanalysis will enjoy a new spring. It will be impossible, however, for a nouvelle vague psychoanalysis to be the same as the psychoanalysis that is currently in decline (the spread of the skype analytic sessions is an example of the fact that the old analytic setting cannot always be used). The question is: does Lacan belong to the declining psychoanalysis or can he announce its rebirth? Up until a few years ago, historians and philosophers of medicine had been engaging in attacks against Lacaniansm, branding Lacan as an impostor. It has become a classic accusation against Lacan. Even Noam Chomsky (see Connolly 2016), after meeting Lacan in New York, said that the Frenchman was a charlatan, as were, in his opinion, the vast majority of the Parisian thinkers of the time. In 1971, Chomsky condescended to converse with one such “Parisian charlatan” on Dutch television: with Michel Foucault (Chomsky and Foucault 2006). This debate is one of the most famous “intellectual summits” of the last century. If we read or listen to this debate today, what stands out is the philosophical and political dullness and naivety of Chomsky. It must be said that in Italy and in France at least, any plausibility is denied to psychoanalysis by aiming at its weakest point: its approach to autism. I cannot deal with the issue of autism here, or with psychoanalytic theories on the subject, but the brightest analysts themselves have to admit that analytic theories on autism are still today poor and quite unconvincing (Benvenuto 2019). Obviously a rival discipline is attacked in its weakest aspects. The fact that Lacan is attacked in Italy today with much more emphasis than the equally inf luential leaders of other schools (such as Melanie Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Renik, . . .) has a very simple explanation: Lacanianism, more than any other school or current, risks promoting, against the f low, a relaunch of psychoanalysis in Italy. No one would waste time in vehement attacks against a current that is irrelevant or in its twilight. I think this (partial) revival of Lacanianism, at least in Italy, is a paradoxical effect of the rise of cognitivism. Today, in Italy and elsewhere, most psychotherapists recognized by the state practice cognitivist techniques, or systemic family therapies based on the theories of Gregory Bateson and Paul Watzlawick. In continental Europe, Bateson’s thinking has been remarkably successful (even Lacan paid some attention to Bateson’s work in the 1970s). The psychoanalytic movement in the world has always been lacerated by two opposing needs. One tends to describe psychoanalysis as a corroborated psychological science that should ultimately be integrated into medical psychiatry. The other – first incarnated by Rank and Ferenczi, and then by Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan, the so-called Culturalists – tends instead to drag it towards the sphere of the humanities; towards values, methods, and styles typical of the latter, such as history, literary criticism, phenomenological philosophy, and so on. To me this seems a repeat of the old division between believers and non-believers, except that today we are supposed to take sides with either the scientific or the

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humanities faculties. This alternative has always seemed to me a trap to avoid. I have personally always had an idiosyncrasy against rigid, not properly thought out dichotomies; the intellectual equivalent of rooting for the New York Yankees or the San Francisco Giants. But in the last couple of decades, the tendency to bring psychoanalysis towards medical science has been kept in check by the success of the cognitive sciences, which have been seen to surpass psychoanalysis in the very field it was believed to excel in; that of a science of the psyche. Many young people bypass psychoanalysis and devote themselves directly to the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience. To these new generations, psychoanalysis appears a little like the 19th-century phrenology of Franz Joseph Gall, who was convinced that the shape of someone’s cranium also revealed something about their mind. Neuroscience today can boast advanced techniques that make phrenology seem like a very early and rough attempt to thematize the relation between mind and brain. The topic of the neurosciences needs to be clarified: I too have a humanistic background, but I am careful not to measure everything by the same yardstick. Further, I avoid saying that all neurosciences are only positivist reductionisms in the manner of Gall or Lombroso (another famous 19th-century neurologist who thought he could understand someone’s criminal tendencies on the basis of the shape of their cranium). Lacan always had a certain respect for neurology, today known as neuroscience. In a 1957 seminar, for example, he complained that the neurologists of the time proved they had a good knowledge of linguistics, which analysts didn’t have: as if he were saying “neurologists are ahead of you.” The defensive ref lex of many analysts, even Lacanian ones, against the neurosciences seems to me like the sign of a sort of obscurantism and historical weakness. Some neuroscientists today – for example Gerald Edelman – explicitly pose extremely subtle philosophical questions that many “humanist” philosophers ignore, not because they don’t agree with them, but simply because they know nothing about science and even less about cognitive science. Or rather, they don’t want to know anything about it. For Lacan, the subject of science (not the individual scientist) implies a foreclosure of the subject psychoanalysis deals with: the subject of desire. I think that both the medical sciences and the humanities perform a foreclosure. Many want to know nothing about the scientific theories that today hold centre stage; they nurture a phobia of rationality. For many cognitive scientists today, psychoanalysis is a childish phase of the mind sciences. If we take this point of view, then currents such as Ego Psychology and others, which aimed at turning psychoanalysis into a “scientific psychology,” lose points. Further, in America today Ego Psychology seems to have been replaced by Relationism, which embraces spiritualistic instances linked to ethical and political demands, such as civil rights, feminism, Queer Studies, and so on. And Lacanianism, too, a decisively anti-cognitivist psychoanalysis, ends up coming across today as an “authentic psychoanalysis.” On the other hand, parallel to psychoanalysis, a “humanistic” psychotherapy movement has developed that essentially derives from Carl Rogers. Those who

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were once attracted to psychoanalysis because they were moved by a need for “empathy” with the other, by the desire for a “soul-to-soul contact,” today turn to these humanistic or intersubjective psychotherapies. The most sophisticated of these are based on the phenomenological psychiatry of Minkowski, Binswanger, and Laing. (Note that as a young psychiatrist Lacan too was deeply inf luenced by the phenomenological current.) These psychotherapies reject any pretence of objectivity and present themselves as practices of help, of mutual empathy, of “relations between persons,” and so on. I would call it a sugar-coated psychiatry. In short, psychoanalysis finds itself overridden, by two opposite sides, by schools that seem to better respond to the ideals of those who would once have chosen psychoanalysis. Lacan always felt deeply alien to both of these poles. And this is why I still read him. At a time when currents alien to psychoanalysis are prevailing among the masses of psychology graduates, Lacan emerges as a credible stronghold of psychoanalytic psychoanalysis, so-to-speak, which clearly marks its difference from both cognitive techniques and theories and “empathic” relational practices. Lacan is still one of the few to envision a psychoanalysis that refuses to “f lirt” with its rivals. He rejects any pretence to turn psychoanalysis into a “scientific psychology,” while at the same time aiming at a Cartesian ideal of stubborn, formal rigour. He attracts so many because he manages to square this circle: he doesn’t abandon the ideal of rationality (with his passion for linguistics, logic, mathematics), without adopting, however, the quantitative and simulative protocols of the sciences of today. He still offers the thrill of a psychoanalysis that doesn’t resolve itself in cognitivism on the one hand, or humanistic syrup on the other.

3 The “empathic” analyst Today the key signifier of this syrup is “empathy.” Even in everyday life, we no longer say of someone that they’re “rotten,” but that they “lack empathy.” I think that deep in the background, the success of “empathy” is the proof of a powerful return of a certain type of philosophical phenomenology, also relaunched by a particular variety of neuroscientific research (Francisco Varela, mirror neurons, and so on). This is often a vulgarized phenomenology, summarized, for the benefit of psychotherapists, as follows: the analyst, like anyone who offers herself as helper, must be empathic towards patients, in the sense of trying to “step into their shoes.” The analyst must “understand” the other in the plain sense of the term, like when we say “I understand why you want a divorce,” meaning by this: “if I were in your shoes, I’d want to send that whoremonger of a husband of yours to hell too!” If we focus entirely on “stepping into the patient’s shoes,” practically nothing distinguishes analysis from a good friendship, and it just becomes something like an occasional get-together between two friends at the pub to chat about their woes. In fact, we tend to prefer talking to “empathic” people, who somehow respond to our joys and pains. Today the most successful psychoanalysis is a “pub get-together” psychoanalysis.

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I think that this kind of psychoanalysis, even when theorized with great subtlety, is the symptom of a sort of disintegration of mainstream psychoanalysis. With the term mainstream I refer to the most important psychoanalytic institutions, excluding the Lacanian. For decades, scholars who don’t believe in psychotherapies have said: “When a psychotherapy does have curative effects, this is not due to the psychotherapeutic theories themselves, but to the fact that a subject has found someone who is haloed with the prestige of the specialist who is actually listening to them and giving them empathy, attention, and suchlike.” In other words, all psychotherapies are a placebo, as there is no “active substance” apart from this conviviality “that pleases.” And, indeed, it could be helpful to systematically increase placebo effects in medicine. For example, with a little more empathy we could increase the number of people recovering from illnesses thanks to plain water from 40% to 50%. Why not? Now, it seems to me that these relational and interpersonal currents have fully accepted these criticisms. It’s as if they were saying: “we admit it, there’s nothing ‘real’ at the basis of psychoanalysis; it is merely an empathic relationship between two human beings, in which one may help the other.” We are witnessing a placebation, if you will forgive me the horrendous neologism, of analysis. This is why I believe that relationism – so popular today – is a sign of the crisis of traditional psychoanalysis, under fire by the scepticism towards any talking cure. I believe that this insistence on relation and empathy is a sort of return to where psychoanalysis began: hypnosis. Before psychoanalysis, Freud practiced the “cathartic method,” with the use of suggestion. “Hypnosis” and “empathy” are apparently opposites: Hypnosis is based on the fact that the curing subject imposes his will on the hypnotized subject, whilst empathy is based on the fact that all of the patient’s feelings and life experiences are imposed on the healer. The analyst embraces all of the former’s desiderata. It’s as if psychoanalysis has come full circle, capsizing on itself. But hypnosis and empathic effects have one thing in common, namely: that one of the two subjects adapts to the will or feelings of the other. Now, Lacan would have shown contempt for the “relational” approach, though he was sometimes empathic himself; at the beginning of an analysis a dose of empathy is a fine stimulus. But real analysis begins when this specific understanding between analyst and patient makes room for something else. Allow me to give an example. Some time ago I followed a young man who had embarked on a university career in Italy. He would continuously condemn the pettiness, dullness, and frauds of the Italian university world, which he considered responsible for his failure to obtain tenure. Now, being quite well-acquainted with Italian academic environments, I felt in total empathy with what he was saying. I too had gone through the ordeal he was describing. Like most when they start a psychotherapeutic relationship (before becoming analysands), in me he was looking for a conniving “specialist” who would say to him: “you’re quite right! You’re dealing with some abominable characters!” Most people “go into therapy” wanting to

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buy your empathy; this is their demand. The wholesalers who copiously supply the goods the patients are asking for – approval, solidarity, often even fondness – remain at the level of connivance. Whilst for Lacan, analysis begins when one moves from the reiteration of the demande to a sometimes unpleasant level, that of désir. Unpleasant, because according to Freud, we are truly horrified by our desire. Lacan conceptualizes this passage in Hegelian terms, as a dialectical overcoming of the “beautiful soul,” die schöne Seele. I shan’t delve into the full dialectics of the beautiful soul, but limit myself to what is of interest to us here, i.e. at a certain point the analyst must confront the patient – the client, in today’s terminology, who has come to purchase empathy from you – with the following observation: “what was your own contribution to the decay you are decrying?” But this means the suspension of empathy at the risk of being disliked by the patient. Now, it was precisely by abandoning my empathy towards the aspiring tenured professor that I gradually began to help him realize that the academic defeats he kept falling victim to were somehow of his own making. That he was basically doing everything he could to make the powerful reject him. Why? The analysis had now begun to focus on this question. But for it to emerge, I had to set my empathy aside – my knowledge that all the Italian academic decay he complained about was perfectly true. In addition to empathy, another somewhat opposite prescription is popular today, particularly in Italy: Bion’s “suspension of memory and desire” by the analyst. A slogan that seems to me to be just as dubious as the appeal to empathy. Because if analysts completely suspended memory and desire, they would become like a camera – according to Freud, we are human because we desire and remember. It’s true that analysts should suspend certain desires and certain memories, but not all. It’s crucial that analysts burn with a specific desire: the desire to analyze. It is thanks to the fact that patients are infected by this desire that they connect in transference and become analysands. And analysts should have memories of certain aspects, for example, of everything that keeps repeating itself in the lives of their analysands. Psychoanalysis works when it steers clear of both the Scylla of reducing analysis to an empathic relationship and the Charybdis of stripping its own f lesh, which relegates the analyst to being outside the world of desirers and rememberers. There should also be “empathic” phases of course, because analysis is never pure, it is always seasoned with a dose of psychotherapy, i.e. with relations of favouritism. But analysts, if they can really call themselves that, hope something else will emerge beyond the “relation,” i.e. the structure of the symptom, which for Lacan is everyone’s specific way of enjoying.

4 Political gospels There is an aspect of Lacanianism, however, that should be seriously questioned: the tendency it has had – today a little less so – to split into a myriad of schools. Many of these are proudly opposed to each other, as in a sort of civil conf lict. In

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my opinion, the proliferation of rival schools that were set up in Lacan’s name after his death is more often due – as happens in other fields – to personal incompatibilities or political rivalries than to well-defined theoretical differences. It seems to me that most theoretical “heresies” have been subsequent to political rifts and did not precede them. I use the term heresy because, from its beginnings – consider the unresolvable conf licts between Freud and Jung, Freud and Adler, and so on – psychoanalysis has had a history similar to that of the monotheistic religions, with their heresies and schisms. Today there are several currents within the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), but they all share a common institutional umbrella. This is not the case among Lacanians, who are reminiscent not only of the protestant cults, but also of the quarrelsomeness of Marxist political parties. In fact, such heterogeneous spiritual movements like Christianity, Marxism, and psychoanalysis have something fundamental in common: as Lacan said about Marxism, all three are bringers of good news, they promise a salvation. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam announce eternal life for everyone, or at least for the worthy. In this way, in the monotheistic religions human life appears enshrouded in meaning: what we do in this life will have eternal consequences and inscriptions. As for the “Gospel According to Marx” ( Lacan 1973, p. 253), it envisions salvation at the end of the path of history: Socialism. And then Communism – a paradisiacal society in which all people will receive according to their needs, independently of what they do. In comparison to the two great palingeneses – eternal life for the monotheisms and a just, happy society for Marxism – psychoanalysis definitely seems to promise very little; not even individual happiness, considering that, as Freud wrote at the end of his Studies on Hysteria, “much will be gained if we succeed in transforming our hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (Freud 1895, SE 2 p. 305; GW p. 312). Yet in recent decades the fortunes of Marxism and psychoanalysis seem to have been interconnected. Today the most popular philosophers who base themselves solidly on Lacan’s thinking are authors like Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and the late Ernesto Laclau, who either call themselves Marxists or have a Marxist background. It’s true that they pursue a line that has run parallel to psychoanalysis for at least a century, Freudo-Marxism. The temptation to connect Freud to Marx (and even Lacan to Lenin .  .  .) has been extremely strong and many brilliant minds have given in to it – one after the other, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, and Elvio Fachinelli in his earlier works. The fact that in France The Black Book of Psychoanalysis followed The Black Book of Communism means that the Marx/Freud implication is also valid for the enemies of both: the two black books should be taken as two episodes of the attack against the Freudo-Marxist 20th century. But what does the Freudian promise that seduced the 20th century consist of? Not in the fact that analysis cures neurosis and psychosis, because this is something other techniques are equally capable of doing (or, as the malevolent would

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say: something the other techniques are equally incapable of doing). Lacan is right, the essence of psychoanalysis is not the therapy. If you only want to remove an unpleasant symptom, you don’t enter analysis. What historically makes certain religions, certain political promises, certain wisdoms such as Buddhism, or psychoanalysis so seductive is the fact that they all have a message, even if only implicit, of hope. One of the three theological virtues: fides, spes, caritas – faith, hope, and love. Even before being an experience founded on a faith in the existence of the unconscious, and beyond exploiting a certain transferential love (caritas meant love, not charity), psychoanalysis is attractive because it offers a charge of hope. The Freudian hope consists in telling us that our spiritual sufferings ultimately express our inauthenticity and that thanks to analysis we can live according to the truth, i.e. in accordance with our true desire. Or accepting our specific way of enjoying. Authentic is equivalent to being one’s own: being authentic is being one’s own self. Neurosis and psychosis are then forms of inauthenticity, of being-other-than-oneself, the result of a subject’s resistances to its own truth, of mistaking itself for its own mask. Thus psychoanalysis would seem to give a practical outlet to the modern prescription inspired by Nietzsche, who quoted Pindar, “become what you are.” Being ourselves is not something given, but something we need to become, perhaps by going through analysis. But Marxism doesn’t simply promise a more egalitarian and fairer society either: it aims at a “true” society. It dreams of a society in which subjects are no longer “alienated,” i.e. in which they can be themselves, freed not only from need but, above all, from that fetishist religion, which according to Marx is capitalism. Yet Lacan always distanced himself from Marxism and the ideal of a communist revolution. In one of his Écrits, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Lacan criticizes the concept of revolution, comparing revolutions to those of celestial bodies, which after long rotations return to their starting point. And he was not only referring to intellectual and scientific revolutions, but to political ones too. Lacan thought that psychoanalysis, not politics, was achieving an authentic revolution. Was he then expecting too much from psychoanalysis? Yes and no. In the 1970s Lacan went to Milan, invited for a discussion with young trainees. Lacan had found out that his pupil inviting him was an intellectual organic to an almost fundamentalist Catholic movement, Communion and Liberation. Now, Lacan had no scruples in attacking this pupil in front of the pupil’s own followers: “how can something called Communion and Liberation have anything to do with my teachings?” Lacan didn’t quite know what this movement was, but its very name was enough to make him furious. It was his f lair for the signifier. He said: It cannot be said that my discourse promises any kind of liberation! Because for the analyst it is a question, on the contrary, of gluing himself to the suffering of the people who come to see him. [. . .] The psychoanalyst is most

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definitely the least free of all men. [. . .] As for Communion, of hearts I suppose, it doesn’t have the same sort of resonance as the term “Communism,” which is a communion of goods. Indeed, 65 years after the October Revolution, not the least progress has manifested itself [in Communist countries] in the sense of some sort of liberation! ( Lacan 1978, p. 122, 124, 127) This was a spontaneous attack against those he considered the “natural” adversaries of psychoanalysis: communism, Catholic communion, and liberal liberation. Essentially, he felt alien to the three main political ideologies of his time (today there is a fourth, communitarianism which has been rebaptized as populism). Deep down, he thought that psychoanalysis had to set right the damage caused by Communion – whether communist, communitarian, or Catholic – and Liberation. The writer Jacqueline Risset recalls an episode on Easter of 1975 when Lacan, admiring from their car the splendid cupolas of Rome’s baroque churches, exclaimed: “Elles vont gagner ” (“they shall win”). And added: “they have gratifications to offer; we offer none” ( Risset 2012 , p. 345). The “we” was referred to psychoanalysts, the “they” to churches. For him the struggle between religion and psychoanalysis was an historic one, and he knew who would win. After over 40 years can we say he was prophetical? We must stress that neither Freud nor Lacan were Marxists. Freud never believed in Bolshevism and talked about it as a form of secularization of the monotheisms (Freud 1933, SE 22, pp. 179–181; GW 15, pp. 195–197). Therefore, he considered it, in the same way as religions, an illusion and a kind of neurosis (for Freud neuroses are illusions). In the case of Lacan, he always admired Marx but had never been a Marxist. Most refer to him as an “enlightened conservative,” but he was more of a moderate leftist. He was a friend of Gaston Defferre, the powerful socialist mayor of Marseilles. Lacan was a radical in psychoanalysis and a moderate in politics. He never idealized the May 1968 events, for example, which he saw as an unconscious search by the youth of the time for a master. In fact, in France and elsewhere at the time, a masochistic liturgy drove several intellectuals with great expectations to jubilantly display master Mao’s “Little Red Book,” with the aim of appearing as dumb, in their opinion, as the “people” they claimed they were serving. I know what I am about to say will cost me the approval of some readers: on the subject of the political passions of the 20th century, I feel much closer to Freud and Lacan than to many of their followers. I too was a young Marxist at the time (who claimed they weren’t?), but today I consider the cult of the Revolution one of the grandes illusions of Greek/Christian metaphysics. Freud’s and Lacan’s scepticism towards political Millenarianism is in my view entirely embraceable. I admit it: separating psychoanalysis from its indisposed fiancées – religion and Marxism, to which I add phenomenological philosophy – is risky. But it is

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important for psychoanalysis to fight alone, without the aforementioned lovers, and, if it feels up to it, even after some good Lacanian continence. What sometimes makes my relations with certain Lacanians difficult is the fact that many of them are radical leftists or Catholics, whilst I feel alien to both the Catholic and the Marxist faiths. In the wake of Freud and Lacan, I accept the tragic harshness of the human condition. I have very little Spes. The analytic hope in helping some people implies a sort of background despair. This is the tragic background of psychoanalysis, which Lacan had the courage to stress.

5 Nathan’s rings When one says “Lacan,” one talks about a project of a “return to Freud,” not only in theory but in clinical practice too. Quite frankly, I have never taken this return literally. After all, it wasn’t about a return to Freud’s letter, but to his sense. In my opinion those who claim the contrary distort Lacan. It is a fact that most “orthodox” IPA Freudians are more literally Freudian, in the sense that they use a language and concepts that are much more similar to those of the Viennese. At the same time, it is evident that Lacan’s language and concepts are radically different from Freud’s. Another of Lacan’s paradoxes: promoting an historical return to Freud while creating a diet of thought and words far removed from Freud’s. Being an Hegelian, Lacan knew full well that returns are always illusory; a river never returns to its source. Another Hegelian, Karl Marx, said that history only repeats itself as a farce (Marx 2006, pp. 7–8). Believing that Lacan is merely a modernized reprise of the tragic Freud adds up to considering Lacanian thinking a farce. Luther also wanted to return to the fathers of the church, to Saint Augustine, and he ended up transforming Christianity and making it the religion of the countries that dominated the world. When we commit ourselves to returning to something, we often thoroughly innovate. This is what I would call the necessary unfaithful fidelity to the master. Lacan certainly put forth an acute reading of Freud, even though my personal reading of Freud is different from his – we all have our intellectual obsessions and mine are not the same as Lacan’s. The latter has eradicated from Freudianism any “psychologistic” concessions and the “Jungian” slope, in particular the idea that there are universal symbols, un-historical signifieds to reveal, “archetypes.” Lacan’s reading of Freud still poses the fundamental problem of every hermeneutics, i.e. of any reading of texts by dead authors. It’s an unsolvable paradox. Today, with a rigorously philological commitment, we aim to reconstruct what seems to us the true and authentic sense of, for example, Aristotle or Shakespeare, disposing of the exegetical encrustation from the previous centuries. In this way, many teachers of literary subjects today base themselves on the methods used by anthropologists who study primitive populations, i.e. they situate the text in the tissue of the culture and society in which it was produced. On the other hand, the hermeneutic historicism we’re steeped in today reminds us that any reading of these authors that’s possible today, however relative

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it may seem to us, is still always an “actualizing” reading. In the words of the philosopher Benedetto Croce, another Hegelian, historiography is always contemporary historiography. In other words, historiography is always ego -centric, nunc-centric, and ethno -centric (nunc means “now”). We think we are finally reading Aristotle and Shakespeare unfiltered, yet we also know that never again will we be able to read Aristotle as the Athenians of the 4th century BC understood him; never again will we be moved by the plays of Shakespeare for the same reasons that a Londoner at the Globe Theatre was moved by them. In short, our pietas – piety – for texts written by dead authors is deeply split. On the one hand we want to forget our passions of today and try to plunge entirely into the Jurassic Park, I would call it, of experiencing a text or a theory as they would have been at the time of their creation. On the other, we no longer believe in neutral historical objectivity; we know that “the true sense of Aristotle” is the sense that can be read into his works by us, who have been acquainted with Aquinas, Kant, Heidegger, and so on. Who can read Hamlet today whilst ignoring Freud? This is the paradox Heidegger tried to make us digest calling it “hermeneutic circle,” a non-vicious circle. This virtuous but actually lethal circle also applies to any reading of Freud and Lacan. The majority of Lacanians are convinced that the true, faithful, and lucid reading of Freud is Lacan’s, whilst the readings by Ego psychologists, by Anna Freud, Marcuse, Derrida and others are misleading. Personally, I respect all the important readings of Freud. I think that whilst the Ego psychologists – one of which, Rudolph Löwenstein, was Lacan’s analyst – were Central-European Jews brought up in a context of contempt for America, they nevertheless did an excellent job in finding a way to allow WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) Americans, with a totally different background and tradition from theirs, to digest Freud. Just as excellent a job was done by the Central-European Melanie Klein in making psychoanalysis relevant to a certain “Elizabethan” sound and fury that beats in the heart of every Brit. Through psychoanalysis it was Germanlanguage Jewish culture that extensively colonized the English-speaking world in the first half of the last century, not the other way round, as many wrongly state. In America the stereotype of the analyst was a Jewish gentleman in a dark suit who spoke English with a strong German accent. In the same way, Lacan did an excellent job in making Freud attractive to the passions of Parisian culture. Which is the real Freud? I would answer with the three-ring parable, already known in the Middle Ages and featured in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise, and banned by the Catholic Church at the time. The Arabic sultan Saladin asks Nathan (a Jewish merchant) which he considers to be the true religion, the Jewish, the Muslim or the Christian. Nathan refers to the famous parable. At every generation a father gives a magic ring to his favourite son. But one day the ring comes into the hands of a father who loves his three children in the same way. This father has two new rings made, both identical to the original, and secretly gives one to each of his sons, making him believe he is the receiver of the magic ring. After the death of their father, each

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son obviously claims that theirs is the authentic ring. But who really possesses it? Lessing doesn’t tell us. The three monotheistic religions are like three children who have been led by God the Father to believe that they hold the truth. But who can say which of the three actually possesses it? Today, deep down, we think that the ring that has gone from father to son for generations is not actually a magic ring, but in itself a facsimile. This is what Derrida actually tried to say: that we should consider our cultural history a succession of copies with no original. None of the three rings is the “real” one. Voilà. Mutatis mutandis: which of the three schools – Ego Psychology known today as Relationism, Kleinism known today as Object Relations, or Lacanianism – have captured the real psychoanalysis? I doubt that Lacan would have been very fond of this parable, as he was convinced he possessed the true ring. Nathan the Wise was the manifesto of Enlightenment tolerance, i.e. of what today is known as relativism, something the various churches, the positivists, and the Freudo-Marxists despise. The latter despise what they call the hypocritical ideology of tolerance because, for them, tolerance means saying “as long as you don’t annoy me, anything goes.” The 20th century was the century of relativism, but today the monotheisms, the sciences, and neo-Marxism are allies in fighting it. I think Lacan tended more towards the churches and sciences than towards Enlightenment relativism. Unless we think that Nathan’s three rings were a premonition of the three Borromean rings, which obsessed Lacan in the last decade of his life. The Borromean rings, or rather the Borromean chain, are pictured in Figure 2.1.

FIGURE 2.1

Borromean Chain

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The peculiarity of this chain is that if we cut any of the three rings the other two are free. And the same goes for an undefined number of rings: if a thousand rings are linked in the Borromean way, you can cut one and the other 999 are free. Lacan was so enthusiastic about these rings that he went to Germany to praise them to Heidegger. The latter, already very ill, remained absolutely silent (Millot 2018, p. 101). I shan’t delve here into the use Lacan makes of the three rings, in part because they are too enticing and there is a risk of losing oneself in them, like with an addiction. I’ve met several people with the Borromean monkey on their backs. However, for Lacan the way these rings intertwine describes the functioning of the human subject. Let us take as a metaphor something that in Lessing is literal: the human subject does not need a psychiatrist – the human subject is not mad – only if he is at once “Jewish,” “Christian,” and “Muslim”; given such a rings’ bind, however, if he stops being one of the three he will enter what Hölderlin called “the furious folly of atheism.” An “atheism” leading to involuntary psychiatric commitment. Some have admitted to me: “if I were convinced that there was no God, I would kill myself.” I can understand them. Lacan would say that in such subjects the three rings have not linked in the Borromean way and hence they need a fourth ring, God, to keep the other three together. His seminar on Joyce focuses on this very point: Joyce had a psychotic structure because his three rings were not interlinked in the Borromean mode. To avoid becoming insane, he needed a fourth ring, which was his very special form of writing. Having said all this, I evoked Nathan to say that in my opinion Lacan, more than revealing what is essential about Freud, has somehow transfigured Freud, as in the evangelical transfiguration. Of course he tried to make his pupils believe he possessed “Freud’s authentic ring,” but I’m convinced he was too intelligent not to know that his was facsimile too. And it’s because of this truth, which he knew about without mentioning it, that Lacan still interests me.

6 The four discourses In any case, Lacan undoubtedly attempted to reform the mode of the analytic relation compared to Freud’s. Here too, as usual, Lacan overturns common feelings, in particular the feelings of common analysts. The image analysts usually have of themselves is that they are authoritative personalities. And it’s true that analysands often have an awed deferential attitude towards their analysts, as if they were Indian Mahatmas. Now, Lacan – being a dialectical surrealist – completely overturns this “belief in themselves” that analysts have. For him, the analyst is not a Mahatma like Gandhi, but simply a piece of shit. Literally. For Lacan, analysts – I stress: analysts, not the men or women who occupy that position – are Saint Francis-like figures, masochists wearing cilices, who bask in abjection and humiliation, not to save their souls, but to save analysis.

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Where does this perception that Lacan has, so discordant from the function of the analyst, come from? He tries to explain it in his seminar on transference, largely dedicated to a rereading of Plato’s Symposium. Lacan focuses in particular on the speech in praise of Socrates – which is also an invective against Socrates – by his rejected lover, the splendid Alcibiades. In this speech, Alcibiades stresses that Socrates is profoundly ugly, but that his beastly appearance is a trap, because he is like an àgalma, a statuette reminiscent of a Russian doll. It represented a Silenus, certainly with an erection, because the Sileni were permanently aroused brutes. But when you opened it, the statuette revealed the radiant image of a god. In cruder terms, we could say that Alcibiades enunciates, or rather denounces, Socrates as someone with the appearance of a rogue but who conceals a dazzling pearl. Thanks to this pearl, which does not appear at first sight, Socrates can seduce the most handsome and noble boys of Athens, but without “giving them any.” This is not my own lewd indulgence, but an historical truth: the mature Greek man in love, erastes, would sodomize the well-bred stripling who was the object of his love. The erastes felt authorized to penetrate the boy, promoting himself as his master and life teacher; in other words, the pederastic relationship was half way between paedophilia and pedagogy. Socrates, in contrast, does not use his Silenic phallic knowledge to penetrate his kaloì, his “beauties,” as young lovers were referred to at the time. He even denies he has a phallic knowledge – “I know that I know nothing.” Socrates limits himself to the role of midwife. Like a woman, he limits himself to giving birth to the fine ideas in the mental “uteruses” of those “beauties” undergoing philosophical labour. He is not the father of the ideas to which the feminized paramours give birth, but only their obstetrician, and the ideas to which he helps give birth to do not belong to him. Lacan would say: Socrates uses others to make the Other emerge. For Lacan, the analyst is like the Socrates that Alcibiades described with admiring resentment. Socrates is the first analyst; not only because, like Socrates, analysts relinquish any carnal contact with those who turn to them. I notice that if a medical doctor, a gynaecologist for example, goes to bed with an adult patient we couldn’t care less, but if an analyst takes a consenting analysand to bed, it becomes a scandal. A sign of the fact that the analytic relationship has little to do with the doctor-patient relationship. Behind the curtain of reverential respect for the analyst, Lacan reads – a stroke of genius – the true functioning of the analyst for the patient: the analyst is an écart (gap/scrap), an excrement, and a Silenus that is at once a mysterious diamond, capturing the analysand and tying him to analytic fidelity. But this contempt for the analyst, often disguised as admiration, sooner or later emerges in analysis. By permutation, Lacan would later describe in an enigmatically rigorous fashion what he calls the “analyst’s discourse.” The three other discourses that he considered crucial are that of the “Maître” (master and boss), the “universiterian,” and the “hysteric.” By these four “discourses” Lacan means four types of “social

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bonds,” as he calls them. The analytic is thus one of the four possible bonds, though we may disagree with the fact that these are the only four essential ones. To understand the specificity of the analytic discourse or bond, we will need to say something about the other three. Often the analyst is taken to be a Maître, which means at once boss, master, and teacher. Yet, when an analysand makes a slip of the tongue with the analyst and says “when’s the next lesson?” instead of “when’s the next session?,” then we can bet on the fact that the analytical bond has not taken place. Someone who teaches always risks being pedantic – from paidos, child – insofar as they impose a knowledge the pupil must submit to. When a pedant is skilful, pupils will elect him as their master, as in the case of Lacan. But as the French word maître shows, even the most easy-going of masters has a despotic face and is a boss of souls. If instead the pedant is someone mediocre, we call him a windbag, a pompous braggart. In Italian we can call him a “trombone”; an appropriate metaphor, because the sound of this instrument has a f latulent connotation and in an orchestra it dominates over the other subtler instruments, but behind its pretence to do so we capture a sort of “anal” arrogance. Lacan assigns a precise name to the discourse of the “trombone”: he calls it “university discourse.” Did he allude to the various disciplines taught in universities? Or was this his way of designating any knowledge that is conveyed as universal? I would say that the academic is someone who has failed to be recognized as a master and is happy to talk like a “trombone.” University knowledge is not conveyed thanks to the charisma of the master, nor thanks to the analyst, but thanks to the bureaucratic and pedantic academic system. I think that the cognitive psychotherapies are a clinical application of university discourse. Cognitivists presume that their patients’ problems depend on “cognitive errors,” a bit like students who make a mistake and reiterate that mistake. Cognitivists correct the “mistakes” in red ink and try to divert their patients/pupils from their initial blunder to help them pass their cognitive exam. With regard to the hysterical discourse or bond, why hysteria and not another neurosis? Most say that by the discourse of the hysteric, Lacan means the neurotic order in general. The ambiguity consists in the fact that, though according to the luminary Charcot and his Viennese pupil hysteric men existed too, Freud only presents us with female hysterics. The etymology of hysteria – from hysteron, uterus – was denied by psychoanalysis on the surface, but confirmed on the side. Note, however, that Lacan ultimately shares the opinion of today’s “relational analysts” in thinking that neurosis is a relation, a specific social link, and not an exclusively private matter. In fact, psychoanalysis privileges hysteria with respect to obsessional neurosis. Freud said that the latter is a dialect of hysteria, which is the standard language. Today, however, this is something Freud would not say, because according to modern linguistics there are no dialects. If we consider Tuscan to be the Italian language and Neapolitan or Venetian dialects, this is simply because historically, the Tuscan dialect affirmed itself as the official language, reducing the others to

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the status of “dialects.” A language is a dialect that imposes itself over the others. Now, for psychoanalysis the hysteric dialect prevails over the obsessive dialect. And this precisely because of its feminine specificity. For Freud, every neurosis is hysteric insofar as it is a rejection of our femininity, whether we possess a penis or a vagina. Freud had spelt this out clearly in an almost testamentary work published two years before his death, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937) (in fact, rather: Finite and Infinite Analysis): neurosis is the refusal to be feminine. The neurotic is then a sort of “Prima donna always on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” if you will allow me a f leeting tribute to Almodóvar. We can then give more savoury names to the discourses according to Lacan: Discourse of the Maître: Discourse of the universiterian: Discourse of the hysteric:

Verdicts of the despotic master Lessons of the windbag professor Scene of the prima donna on the verge of a nervous breakdown

What about the discourse of the analyst? One that assumedly began in the 20th century but that, according to Lacan as we’ve seen, was already being held at the highest levels in the restless Athens of the 5th century BC. Considering everything we’ve said on Socrates as an obscene figure possessing a f licker of spiritual seduction, I would say that for Lacan, the discourse of the analyst is “an attraction for the pearly excrement,” a shit in which the pearl tying the analysand, sometimes for years, to the grievous and joyful work of analysis shines bright. Fachinelli (2004) pointed out that patients very often equate their analysts to whores; analysts too supply erotic experiences, in the broad sense, for a fee. For Lacan the analyst is a piece of shit, for Fachinelli a prostitute paid by the hour. For Lacan the analysand holds the analyst in deep contempt but, insofar as the latter insists pigheadedly in not tearing himself away from that position, he keeps magnetizing the subject. According to Lacan, this is because the analyst is in the position of object a, which is the cause of desire. If I suddenly meet a woman and desire her, that woman – Lacan says – is a desirable object, but not precisely an object a. Lacan argues that even in sexual attraction we always mistake objects. Because if there is something that really secretly makes a woman desirable – or a man for a woman, or a man for a man, or a woman for a woman – it is the fact that behind her attractive forms, a woman is a scrap, a déchet. And, indeed, for a woman not to be only a Madonna, but also a woman – Madonna in Italian includes the word donna, woman – it is important for her to engage in an act that in all cultures is considered obscene, though pleasurable: coitus. In this way we can see how object a – which we shall discuss further on – is at once the most attractive and the most repulsive object. Here, too, Lacan shockingly breaks away from both common sense and the established psycho-biological theories. According to the latter, erotic attraction

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is adaptive, because in the other sex we look for someone who will guarantee us offspring: the beauty of a woman is connected to the sign of her fertility, the physique of a man tells us whether he will be able to adequately defend her and their common progeny. All this is (partially) true. But what really attracts us in an individual man or woman, according to Lacan, is the fact that, behind the beneficial male or feminine figures, we glimpse the object a; that which authentically – beyond the “fine figures” – triggers our desire. We can then say that Lacan’s four discourses are his theory on social life. Freud had set out his doctrine on social sets – on the Massen, on the crowds – in texts like Totem and Taboo and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud 1912 –13, 1921). If we read the latter carefully, what becomes apparent is that Freud thought that every form of social life is essentially fascist. Freud didn’t say so explicitly, because fascism and Nazism hadn’t yet affirmed themselves when he wrote the essay in 1921. However, for Freud a Masse, a collective, is never “horizontal” but is always constructed “vertically.” So there are no anarchic collectives. A Masse is set up when an external figure – a Führer, a leader – occupies the place of various people’s Ego Ideals. It seems evident to me that this is the very definition of fascism as we’ve witnessed it in history. I’ve met several fascists first-hand, people who were infatuated with Mussolini when he was still alive and powerful. Some of these people would never have hurt a f ly. Their Ego Ideals were also very different: in one it was the ideal of the warrior, in another the ideal of Aphrodite sleeping with the warrior Ares, in another the ideal of the Italian people emancipated at last, in another still the sense of discipline to fight decadentism, and so on. Each gave particular contents to their ideal, but Mussolini occupied the place of this ideal – he took possession of it – becoming the ideal Object of so many. But for Freud, this is the rule for the construction of any collective. Let’s say that historically, Nazism and fascism lay bare the fascist nature of any established “being a group.” I realize that what I’m saying is extremely serious: most of us belong to some sort of Masse, of which we are often proud members, and wouldn’t dream of considering ourselves “fascists.” For example, how to tolerate the idea that my psychoanalytical association, guided by such an admirable, good-natured, and combative leader, is a fascist one? But we need to read Freud’s essay without blinders: it states exactly what I’m saying here. Freud also described the opposite process to “collective doing,” to the “f lock” as Nietzsche called it. This is when my Ego Ideal totally invests an external object, almost taking its place. He called it Verliebtheit, falling in love, and thought it blinded us no less than the group we belong to. It’s what the French call amour passion, distinct from calm marital love. For Freud, passionate love undermines social aggregation, it tends to break up the Masse. Passionate love is lethal to collectives and collectives are lethal to passionate love, as Shakespeare showed in Romeo and Juliet. Some, even without having read Freud, feel that associative life is structurally fascistic and try to keep away from it; behaving like Stirnerian “Uniques”

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they steer away from any crowd and rebel against the masses like José Ortega y Gasset (The Revolt of the Masses). They belong to the snobbish anti-Mass. Freud, however, who in turn created his own Masse – behaving as a proper despotic leader within it, expelling anyone he disliked – knew that exiting the group is not a solution. That in any case the mass is aggregation, Eros. Retiring to a castle, far from the madding crowd, is Thanatos. Hence the dilemma from which no one can escape: either we enter the fascist, but erotic, logic of being-in-the-group or we leave it in a motion of mortal disintegration. We must choose between killing on behalf of a Führer and causing our own civic death by singing from a different song sheet, by which we risk hitting the bad note of narcissism. We all swing between the “fascism” of the group we belong to and “infatuation” for the person we adore, which may even be ourselves. Ethic decency in our lives is entirely decided by the way we juggle between infatuation and fascism. As for Lacan, he seems to have limited the fascism of groups to what he calls the discourse of the Maître. But he believes there are three more social bonds. He prefers the discourse of the analyst, which is certainly not fascist, but which requires a saintly sacrifice, an immolation of someone who calls herself or himself an analyst. Someone prepared to end up like Socrates, the prototype of all analysts according to Lacan.

References Benvenuto, S 2019, ‘Autism: A Battle Lost by Psychoanalysis (Autism and Psychoanalysis)’, Division/Review, Vol. 19, no. Summer 2019, pp. 26–32. Chomsky, N and Foucault, M 2006, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature, The New Press, New York. Connolly, R 2016, ‘Chomsky on Zizek, Lacan and Theory’. Available from: www.youtube. com/watch?v=NSab2hNsZhk (Accessed: 1st December 2018). Fachinelli, E 2004, ‘The Psychoanalyst’s Money’, Journal of European Psychoanalysis, vol. 18, no. 1. Available from: http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/the-psychoanalystsmoney/ Freud, S 1895, ‘Studies on Hysteria’, in Strachey, J, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2 (1893–1895), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1955. Freud, S 1912–1913, ‘Totem and Taboo and Other Works’, in Strachey, J, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 13 (1913–1914), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1955, pp. 1–162. Freud, S 1921, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in Strachey, J, ed., Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18 (1920–1922), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1955, pp. 65–133. Freud, S 1933, ‘New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysi s’, in Strachey, J, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 22 (1932–1936), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1964, pp. 5–182. Freud, S 1937, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937)’, in Strachey, J, ed., Moses and Monotheism and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological

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Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 23 (1937–1939), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1964, pp. 216–253. Lacan, J 1973, Le Séminaire, Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1978. Lacan, J 1977, Le Séminaire, livre XXV (unpublished). Lacan, J 1978, Lacan in Italia/Lacan en Italie, 1953–1978, Contri, G, ed., La Salamandra, Milano. Lacan, J 2011, Le Séminaire, livre XIX. . . . ou pire, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. . . . Or Worse, Polity, Cambridge, 2018. Marone, F 2013, ‘Affetti/Effetti di Reale’, European Journal of Psychoanalysis. Available from: www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/affettieffetti-di-reale-2/. Marx K 2006, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Available from: www.guten berg.org/files/1346/1346-h/1346-h.htm (Accessed: 1st May 2019). Millot, C 2018, Life with Lacan, Polity, Cambridge. Risset, J 2012, ‘Postfazione a: Risset et al.’, in Le mie sere con Lacan, Editori Internazionali Riuniti, Roma.

3 LACAN IN CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT

1 Linguistic primacy Where should we locate Lacan within the Western intellectual landscape? His work, at least until the end of the 1960s, can be seen as belonging to what Richard Rorty called the linguistic turn: 40 years of Western culture mesmerized by reference to language. In the 1960s semiotics, the science of all signs, f lourished. Phenomenology drifted towards hermeneutics, i.e. a philosophy of reading and interpretation. Deconstructionist philosophy, which originated in the work of Derrida, focused on the notion of “text.” My generation of intellectual babyboomers developed a passion for structural linguistics. The most representative English-speaking intellectual of the 1960s and 70s – no less because of his political battles – was Noam Chomsky, a linguist. Even the physical sciences felt the inf luence of information and communication theories, with cybernetics. And in many European countries, the psychotherapies saw the rise of “communicational” models like systemic-relational family therapy, inspired by Gregory Bateson, Paul Watzlawick, and Mara Palazzoli Selvini. There was a linguistic turn in the arts too. Pop art of the 1960s and 70s was dominated by an “irrealism” that “ref lected” (on) advertising and mass media messages. Take the famous portraits of celebrities by Andy Warhol: he would produce them starting from passport size photos of the stars rather than from their real faces. Reproductions of reproductions, signs of signs. The assumption that formed my generation was: “don’t deal with things, deal with the languages that give shape to things.” The primacy of “language” illustrates what Lacan means by signifier: something literal, not defined by its sense, given that every signifier can have completely different “effects of sense.” Yet there seems to be nothing in common between “the language” that Wittgenstein, Austin, Benveniste, Barthes, Bateson, Quine, Luhmann, and so on,

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spoke about; each gave different meanings to “language.” But language was the signifier that connected them. Now, the signifier “language” polarized the second half of the 20th century because it modified the old dichotomy between two other opposing signifiers: “thought” versus “things.” “Language” worked for many as an exit, with an elegant shortcut, from the century-old Cartesian separation between mind and physical world. In this climate, an intellectual like Lacan who was extremely sensitive to the spirit of the times, rewrote psychoanalysis so as to be in tune with the primacy of language. Hence the mottos “the unconscious is structured like a language,” “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other,” and so on, which are entirely in line with the cultural mood of the time. One by one, Lacan adopted the most prominent themes of Parisian culture, like an Igor Stravinsky of psychoanalysis. In the 1930s Lacan anticipated Sartre’s phenomenological analysis of the imaginary. His work on the mirror stage dates back to 1936, when Sartre published L’imagination, a theme he would return to in 1940 with L’imaginaire. In the 1950s and 60s Lacan captured linguistic preeminence developing a theory of the primacy of the signifier. After assuming the centrality of language, Lacan picked up on the most prestigious form of linguistics of the time: structural linguistics. By the 1970s he probably understood that the wind was changing, hence his insistence on topology, logics and the Real. In saying this I am not implying that Lacan was an opportunist; deep down, as an Hegelian, he embraces Rimbaud’s contention that “One must be absolutely modern” ( Rimbaud 1873). For an Hegelian, the only way to be at the pinnacle of the Spirit is to live one’s present time dramatically, through a connection to the present that is at the same time profoundly discordant with the present. The present is always more in the right (il a raison) and always has more reason ( plus de Raison) than the past. In any case, after Lacan’s death the linguistic turn came to an end. I also consider myself beyond the linguistic turn. But what separates me from several friends who seem to have taken paths similar to mine is that I experienced the linguistic turn, whilst they were intellectually born in a post-linguistic-turn era. The linguistic turn, in the various fields to which it has been applied, can be summed up as follows: we must never forget the very simple fact that our philosophical and scientific thought consists of words. And not just any words, but propositions; i.e. whatever we think or discover will always be within the cage of propositional language. This is not a limit that philosophy set itself at one point in time; it is the limit from within which philosophy was founded. The important thing is that philosophers realize this. Therefore, the problem of linguistic philosophy is: how can the (propositional) language of philosophy take on something that is not linguistic, not propositional? Of psychoanalysis, too, we must never forget that it is practiced through words. It does of course put us into contact with something that is by no means linguistic – the Real, as Lacan calls it – but always within the limits, the horizons, the modulations, of the language we use. Forgetting this would be like a

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painter forgetting that he uses colours and then expecting the fine young lady he has reproduced to come to life, like Pygmalion. Or a physicist forgetting that he uses mathematical words and formulas and then wanting to explain the essence of light through a musical symphony. Every practice is tied down by the limits of one’s language. This is something I never forget.

2 Freud’s basic project Some believe that rather than the linguistic turn having been exhausted, what has occurred instead is the positivist application of the linguistic turn to the exact sciences. The sciences known today as cognitive, which deal with the mind, do certainly deal with language. But in these mind sciences the hegemonic signifier, or constituent “metaphor” as it is referred to today, has changed. The fact that the term “cognitive” has prevailed speaks for itself: the mental is ultimately identified with this type of function. “Language” has been reabsorbed by “cognition.” Cognitivism in the strictest sense is the idea that the human mind is a set of software programs, and the brain its hardware. The mind is conceived in computational terms. And if the human mind and brain are like a computer, then computers themselves will in turn become human minds. This is not mere science fiction, many serious scientists believe that this is exactly what is going to happen. Like in the film Matrix, intelligent machines will challenge our control and even gain power over us. But logo-centric cognitivism has been supplanted by the neurosciences, which try to understand human thought and language according to how the brain, a hard organ, works. Hence the development of research on neural networks. In fact, Freud was the first to describe a neural network, though a purely hypothetical one. I’ve seen a portrait of Freud on the walls of the labs of some important neuroscientists. Freud described a neural network in an 1895 text, published posthumously, entitled “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (Freud 1895). In this Entwurf, or sketch, he perfectly describes the function of something crucial that was only to be discovered much later: brain synapses. Many reject this project because in it Freud uses a neurophysiological language that he would soon abandon for a psychological one; the latter being “correct,” according to many, because it is the language “of the soul” and not “of the brain.” In actual fact we can prove – as Derrida (1967 ) attempted to do – that Freud always remained deeply faithful to this Project, even if he later used a psychic terminology. And he was to return to the themes of this same project in his fundamental theoretical work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. We shouldn’t naïvely mistake the terminology an author uses for the structure of the sense of what he is saying. Naming something is not yet equivalent to thinking it. It was easy for Freud to jump from a neurophysiological language to a “psycho-” language because the structure described in his Entwurf never changed.

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I shall try to summarize this Freudian essential structure in a few words. Freud begins with an axiom that apparently finds no validation in observation. With this I am not implying that Freud’s system is invalid because it is not based on empirical evidence. The history of science shows that the great revolutions in physics are produced when scientists decide to begin from anti-intuitive, nonempirical premises. For example, Galilean physics is based on the principle of inertia, which says that a body will remain at rest or continue to move with uniform speed in a straight line unless an external force “disturbs” it. In earthly experience, however, no one has ever seen a body moving at a constant speed for eternity unless it was disturbed! Aristotelian physics, by contrast, seems to conform much better to daily experience. Every turning point in science occurs when certain forms of evidence are abandoned. For example, quantum mechanics came about after the abandonment of the seemingly obvious premise that space is continuous: that if I shoot an arrow it doesn’t “jump” from one point to the other of the space it travels through – something that has caused a wealth of headaches for philosophers since Ancient Greek times. Freud’s anti-intuitive axiom is that desire tends to hallucinate its own satisfaction, and that human beings tend towards not only wishful thinking but also towards a wishful perception, a perception they desire, towards hallucination. Now, this postulate, which appears quite bizarre, is confirmed by the Charles Bonnet syndrome described in 1760: non-psychotic hallucinations that we could all have in certain conditions. For example, in situations of sensorial deprivation in deaf or blind subjects, or of isolation (Sacks 2013). Cases in which many tend to hallucinate. In Freudian terms: when our drives do not find objects that can satisfy them in reality, they create “a mental movie,” they make subjects see, feel, and hear the inexistent to satisfy something that’s pressing inside them and from within them. In short, Freud builds his theory starting from his own “principle of inertia”: i.e. that the human psyche is not inclined towards the real but towards desiring illusion. For Freud human beings are not essentially cognitive organisms but organisms that aim at enjoyment. Everything else – psychoanalysis – is a corollary. In my opinion, if psychoanalysis, Lacanian or not, fails to deal with the great problems of science, and in particular with the theme of Life in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, it will end up being reduced to a cult, a semi-religious sect. It may even have millions of followers, like gurus such as Sai Baba, but will have lost any prestige among the cultivated élites. A few analysts do try to have a dialogue with the sciences, but one swallow does not a summer make. What’s important is to make sure that the confrontation between psychoanalysis and science is never superficial, that it captures what I would call the metaphysical core of many scientific theories. I think that sooner or later psychoanalysis should confront itself with the metaphor of reticularity, of networks, that was first thought out by Freud. Indeed, the shift towards the neural paradigm, which develops a concrete model of the brain, marks in my opinion a passage from the

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primacy of a linguistic “signifier” (computer programs) to a reticular “signifier,” the model that prevails in so many sciences today. We have witnessed in scientific culture the increasing predominance of Darwinian neo-naturalism (its best-know representatives being Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins), but, within “continental” philosophy too, a parallel slide has occurred. Namely, the linguistic metaphor is being increasingly replaced by the metaphor of life, no longer understood in terms of Erlebnis, experience – something phenomenology was very fond of – but as absolute zoé, animal life. This is demonstrated by the fact that, between the late 1990s and early 2000s one of the most acclaimed philosophers was Giorgio Agamben, whose signifier, “bare life,” was extremely successful. Whilst today, many are compelled by Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. We can talk in similar terms about the signifier zoé – not bios, which also includes social life – as we can of the signifier language: every current and culture gives a different sense to the signifiant Maître, the master signifier, “life.” The philosopher Ernesto Laclau would have said – using a term borrowed from Gramsci – that first language and then life became hegemonic signifiers in different periods. Neo-Darwinism and biopolitics, even if they mutually ignore each other (even despise each other), are the two poles of this new zoo-centric hegemony. Neo-Darwinism can be summed up as follows: “all living things – including Homo sapiens – have an adaptive ratio.” A biologistic version of Hegel’s “all that is real is rational.” Yet being “adaptive” does not mean being the strongest, being the one who can defeat the most enemies and hunt down the most prey. Because if I am a male who obtains all the females and defeats all his enemies but am also sterile, in evolutional terms I am a dead end. Accordingly, by adaptive Darwinism essentially means that phenotypes (individuals) have certain qualities which maximize the reproducibility of their genes. Being handsome and having a great sexual drive is no less important than being strong. Instead, biopolitics considers society and history in terms of policies that discipline and manipulate biological life. According to Darwinism, history, culture, and politics are products of our genome, of that which makes us adaptable to our environment. Yet, according to biopolitics, will and political projects adapt human life, our bodies, to these projects. Two opposite points of view? Or two faces of the same zoé coin?

3 Freud’s single thought Some Lacanians have entirely failed to react to this new cultural climate. Others understand the change of paradigm and aim at a Copernican revolution within Lacanianism: from Lacan-Ptolemy to Lacan-Copernicus. The “Copernicans,” apparently without renouncing logocentrism, try to bend Lacan’s theory so as to remove – bit by bit, somewhat surreptitiously – the hegemony of the Symbolic. Between the three Lacans – the younger Lacan focused on the imaginary, the mature Lacan focused on the Symbolic and the old Lacan focused on the

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Real – they choose the latter. The Real is not exactly the zoé of today’s philosophers, but it somehow includes it. In this way, by focusing on the register of the Real, Lacan promoted the notion of jouissance, enjoyment. And in fact all the young enterprising Lacanians of today have done away with the classic Lacanian themes of desire and lack (manque). Instead, they place all their bets on jouissance; a term, incidentally, that is somewhat difficult to render in English, with “enjoyment” being a rather weak commonly adopted translation. In fact, Lacan’s thought of the 1950s and early 60s focuses on desire, which translates the Freudian drive (das Trieb) into Hegelian terms. Hence famous slogans such as “man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” Then Lacan comes to focus more on enjoyment and the Real. Why? It is my opinion that with these two terms – désir and jouissance – Lacan reinterprets that which is essential in Freud. I have developed my own precise idea of what is essential in Freud ( Benvenuto 1999), concerns that have since become non-essential in most of psychoanalysis. Heidegger said that every great thinker entertains only a single thought ( Heidegger 1961, p. 475). I think he was right. As I think Freud was a great thinker – as well as the inventor of a new social bond, the psychoanalytical – I believe he too entertained a single thought: that the essence and ultimate truth of human beings, and perhaps of living beings in general, is die Lust. This has not always been clear to many because the German term Lust is ambiguous. It means pleasure, and therefore something similar to jouissance, but also yearning or desire. The Freudian Lust is usually translated with “pleasure,” therefore Jenseits des Lustprinzips was translated as Beyond the Pleasure Principle. But, as we’ve seen, this translation does not do justice to the ambiguity of the term. Freud wrote that in referring to desire, he preferred the Latin term libido to the more common Lust, precisely because of the ambiguity of the latter ( Freud 1905, SE 7, p. 135; GW 5, p. 33). But Freud always plays around – often without realizing – with this ambiguity. In translating libido as desire in Hegelian terms, Lacan mitigates – though only partially – its sexual connotations. But desire is only one side of Lust. The other, opposite sides of Lust are pleasure and enjoyment; which are the extinction of desire. Indeed, for Freud pleasure is essentially a release of tension, i.e. the annihilation of desire. The other pole of desire is the joyful end of desire. And the end of every desire, according to Freud, amounts to death. Enjoyment and death are closely related in Freud. I’m putting pleasure and enjoyment on the same level, though any Lacanian would slap me on the wrist for it, considering that Lacan opposes pleasure to jouissance. For him enjoyment is beyond the pleasure principle. In fact, Lacan interprets pleasure – a one-sided translation of Lust as we have seen – in the sense of utilitarianistic philosophy. Utilitarianism was developed by British philosophers such as Hume and Bentham in particular. It is based on the premise that the origin and principle of every human activity is the quest for pleasure; aka, a quest for happiness. Pleasure is another name for happiness. The Constitution of the United

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States, which was inspired by utilitarianism, says that we all have a right to pursue happiness. But this is something blatantly obvious, because for utilitarianism, human beings can do nothing but pursue their personal happiness, period. On the other hand, according to Lacan, enjoyment belongs to a dimension I would call Dionysian. He thinks there is an opposition between the good and balanced order, plaisir, and the dimension of evil and excess, jouissance. And it was Lacan who introduced this opposition into psychoanalysis. Yet, in Freud die Lust has a more ambiguous and tragic sense that goes far beyond a wise economy of pleasures. In fact, Freud says that the final destination of Lust is at the service of the death drive, insofar as a full pleasure is the cancelling out of desire. A nap after orgasm . . . a rehearsal of death, as Hamlet called it. Lacan introduced the search for excess pleasure and would later call it plus-enjoyment. In his vision, unconscious enjoyment undermines peaceful hedonistic management. In other words, plaisir is a conscious egotistic enjoyment, whilst jouissance is an unconscious surplus pleasure. Apart from these differences from Freud, it seems to me that Lacan grasps Freud’s gamble to describe human beings as signifying flesh. As “thinking flesh,” one would be tempted to say. But for Freud, most thinking is unconscious, and one signifies through symptoms, dreams, delusions, and so on. The unconscious is the f lesh that thinks without thinking, and hence signifies. Heidegger affirms that for Nietzsche human beings are essentially “thinking animals of prey” (Heidegger 1961). I would say that for Freud they are “signifying erotic animals,” caro significans. Caro is flesh that suffers and enjoys. For Freud, anthropos is signifying f lesh. Those who do not see humans as signifying f lesh may practice as analysts, but they are not Freudians. Lacan makes Freud’s theory skid slightly towards the human as caro loquens, speaking f lesh. Or, as he would later call it, parlêtre, a neologism translatable as talkbeing. Can we interpret this shift from a Lacan who focuses on desire to one who focuses on enjoyment as a shift from a Freudian Lacan to a less Freudian one . . . to a more Lacanian Lacan? I don’t believe so. I am tempted to state the contrary. Lacan devoted himself to the enterprise of engrafting Hegel, Heidegger and structural linguistics with the Freudian corpus. A titanic operation. As I said, die Lust – the quid of human beings according to Freud – has a face of desire and one of enjoyment, two faces that divide human beings. To desire Freud preferred terms such as libido and drives; to enjoyment he preferred satisfaction and pleasure and read them as being on the side of death. Now, in an early phase Lacan focuses on desire, the “subjectivizing” face. No longer cogito ergo sum, but desidero ergo sum. In a second, less subjectivist and more “realist” phase he focuses on the enjoyment face, in which subjectivity crumbles in the enjoyment of something. Not in the sense of gaudeo, ergo sum (“I enjoy, therefore I am”), but rather in the sense of ego sum, ergo Alienum gaudet (“I am, therefore the Other enjoys”). Regardless of whether it is a case of desire or enjoyment, we remain in the domain of Lust.

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Lacan certainly puts the dimension of logos in the foreground and, as a consequence, tones down Freud’s dense, often brutal, references to elementary drives in favour of an impressionist, Proustian, salon -style flou. As I attempt to explain this further, please forgive me should I now sound a little pedantic.

4 Essence and existence Let’s remember the difference between essence and existence. Metaphysics distinguishes between the quiddity of beings and the quoddity of beings. Quid esse refers to what something is, and quod esse is “the fact that something is.” Therefore, metaphysics tries to state the quid (“the what is”), whilst also acknowledging the quod (“the fact that”). Science does the same. On the one hand it says that the quid of water is being a particular combination of hydrogen and oxygen and on the other it acknowledges that the quod of water is the fact that it exists on our planet, and perhaps on ours alone. Heidegger interprets the difference between two fundamental Nietzschean concepts, the Will to Power and the Eternal Return of the Same, in these terms. What relation is there between these two truths that Nietzsche considers to be fundamental? The Will to Power is the quid or essence of things, whereas the quod is the Eternal Return. Events take place in order to return. Something analogous occurs in Freud’s meta-anthropology. Die Lust as Eros is the quid of human beings, their essentia. Lust as Thanatos is the quod. Because for Freud, every organism lives in order to die in its own way, death is the quod of human beings, their existentia. The factness of life is its being moribund. Like in Heidegger, when he writes that authentic existence is “being-toward-death.” I realize how irksome these statements may sound to those not used to philosophical cogitation, yet this point is absolutely crucial to understanding both Freud and Lacan. What complicates things is that for Freud, the death drive “opposes” Eros as if the existence of things is opposed to their essence. We can say that for Freud, human beings are essentially desire and exist de facto in enjoyment and suffering. His theory states that neurosis and psychosis present themselves as often unbearable sufferings, but only because they express an unconscious enjoyment, it enjoys. If the quid of mammals is that of being viviparous vertebrates, how can we say that the fact – the quod – that mammals exist on the earth’s crust is in conf lict with the quid of being a mammal? Could it be that Freud misinterprets this difference as an opposition, when it is actually a logical distinction between the two categories of essence and existence? In actual fact, this strange struggle between the essence and existence of something is typical of every theory that I would call “militant.” That is, of every theory that does not limit itself to stating something essential on the human, but that instead wants to lead the human to this essential, perhaps through a revolution, or through a “Spring,” to use a term that is more popular today. The political ideal aims at superimposing the essence and the existing of peoples. The

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analytic cure is generally something similar: analysis is a militancy that states “in your very existence, discover your essence.” In other words: “comply with Eros in this life of yours that is running towards death.” Now, it seems to me that for Lacan, too, the quid is f lesh. However, he bets on a quod that is different from Freud’s (the impulse to die): he bets on the fact that human beings are speaking beings. For him, language is a pure event, with no origins; i.e. it does not need to be explained. It is the human quoddity. Once it imposes itself on us humans, it allows us to exist as humanitas. In other words, it is not something that comes from humans. Lacan is here referring back to medieval philosophy, namely to Richard of Saint Victor. The latter identified God with the eternal being that is eternal from Himself. For Lacan, the signifier, language, is the non-eternal being that is non-eternal from itself. This means that the signifier is not eternal, but contingent, yet it reproduces itself from itself. It is not produced by others, Language is an ephemeral divinity, but it is still a divinity ( Lacan 1975, pp. 40–41). So, Lacan linked the symbolic order to the death drive. If we always repeat the same mistakes, never learn from experience, and are forced to suffer the same comedown again and again, then we are bound to a repetition compulsion that for Freud is a death impulse. But for Lacan, this same impulse is like a computer program that continues to run by itself, that doesn’t give a damn about the desires and wishes of people who only want a quiet life – and this computer is logos, i.e. death. It was very bold of him to identify the Freudian death drive with the grim efficiency of language. The idea that the unconscious depends on using language is the consequence of a very precise philosophical vision: the idea that language tears us away from a sort of natural bliss. Language alienates us from nature, from our very own nature as biological beings, and exiles us from an animal world that Lacan considers “imaginary,” in the sense that in animality every image is accompanied by a complementary one. Language demolishes our biological automatisms, not to make us freer, but to subject us further still to the order he calls the symbolic. Now, you are a Lacanian when you profoundly believe in this vision of language as a demolition of animal life. If you do not share this vision, though you may sympathize with many aspects of Lacan’s thought, you can never be a Lacanian. It must be stressed the extent to which making language the matrix of the unconscious overturns what we moderns usually think: that language, the fact that Homo sapiens speaks, is the condition of human consciousness. We all think – starting from Heidegger – that animals are conscious of things but not of themselves. An animal can recognize a staircase, as it climbs it. But only human beings are conscious of the staircase in itself, and hence conscious of the fact that they are conscious of this staircase. We are convinced that language is at the root of our cogito, that it is an auto-ref lexive act, the quintessential conscious act. If we feel ashamed or guilty, if we have conscience and consciousness (in many languages there is only one word for both), then this is an effect of language. Well, Lacan, disappointing our expectations – as usual – turns language into the condition for

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the unconscious. This is because for him consciousness, as he said, is simply a mirror, it can exist even without language – a mirror can’t speak. On the other hand, it is not correct to say that Lacan extolls language because it is constitutive of humankind. He never extolled it because, after all, his entire thought amounts to a condemnation of language. In fact, Lacan’s is one of the most dramatic condemnations of language in the 20th century, equal only to Wittgenstein’s no less ardent denunciation. Language kills the thing, it takes away from us any opportunity of being truly satisfied, because joy and satisfaction are the being there with no words. Lacan’s controversial logocentrism – which Derrida challenged – is actually a logophobia. Strange that so many have failed to see this logophobic spirit in Lacan, which is so well displayed. Perhaps they have failed to see it because, like Poe’s purloined letter, it is too blatant.

5 Desiring the thing How to explain the fact, therefore, that so many contemporary Lacanians reject the part of Lacanian thought that revolves around the theme of desire and the lack that constitutes it? I think it’s due to a reaction against much of the Western tradition since Plato, which has often equated philosophical passion to Eros, to a desire that must always remain unsatisfied. As the term itself suggests, philosophia is always a lack of knowledge and a desire to know. There is a growing intolerance for a way of thinking that extols non-consummation, dissatisfaction as a paradoxical wealth of humankind. The philosophy of desire began with Spinoza, for whom the quid of being human was cupiditas, desiring. The identification of the subject with cupidity is taken up again by Hegel. Then, in Being and Time Heidegger affirms that the being human of humans is Dasein, being there (often poorly translated into English as “existence”), and that the specificity of “being there” is being a “thrown project.” For Heidegger, being a human subject does not mean simply being present, it is not being something. Rather, I am always something that I am not yet. In Heidegger the project replaces the cupiditas. It seems to me that Lacan reinterprets cupiditas, désir, as a project thrown into the universe of imaginary identifications and alienations, which are in turn symbolically commanded. Yet, as we said, the primacy of desire was born with philosophy itself. In my opinion, Lacan first thematizes desire – a Freudianization of Dasein – because he was still working in the wake of the Western philosophical tradition. Philosophers have always considered themselves as hurricanes of desire. Significantly, Socrates confessed he was always in love. Always. So, in the Symposium Socrates states that philosophy is Eros, a variation of erotic attraction. The only difference is that it is not fine bodies that excite the philosopher, but ideai, looks (today we would say abstract forms or structures). In the same way as Socrates desires Alcibiades sexually but rejects the intercourse the handsome boy offers, philosophers desire the thing in itself but make sure they cannot reach it; they refuse to constrain it within an embrace of mucous.

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The term philosophy should thus be interpreted as erotosophia, but as a chaste eroticism. From Plato down to today, philosophy has wanted to be a great panegyric of desire against a transition to the act of enjoying, against transitive power over another thing. In Lacan, enjoyment is often something transitive, it’s an enjoyment of something. Even the Other, when it enjoys me, enjoys something: me. Yet in many other points, Lacan seems to intend enjoyment in the intransitive sense, as pleasure for its own sake. As usual, Lacan swings between concepts, he never allows them to slot into precise signifieds. And what to say of the ascesis of mystics or of certain philosophers? Does it not represent the enjoyment of a privation? Lacan would say that ascesis is an apparent relinquishment: we relinquish certain pleasant objects in order to reach an other object – which in the seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis he called the Thing. This Thing is where the subject situates a primary enjoyment, an ineffable, unrepeatable one. The ascetic mystic tries to derive enjoyment from the Thing, which in the monotheistic religions is called God, i.e. it has no name. Lacan has applied something similar to phenomenology. Husserl impressed his century by pointing out something obvious: that “consciousness is always consciousness of something.” This is the transcendentality of consciousness as something intentional. Anyway, because the term “transcendentality” lends itself to misunderstandings, I shall say that this philosophical tradition is archaeological. From the Greek arche, which means origin, beginning, and command. So-called continental thought – to which Lacan belongs – is an arche thinking: we must start from an initial act that commands. Whilst non-continental rationalist positivist thought is far more reductionist: “at the foundation there is nothing but. . . .” For example, “at the foundation of everything there is nothing but matter and energy,” “at the foundation of human beings there is nothing but selfish genes,” and so on. Whilst so-called continental thought is one of initiality or of the primal, Anglo-American thought is one of ultimateness or basicness. We said that for Lacan – though not always – enjoyment is the enjoyment of some thing. And when we seem to be enjoying nothing, we are still enjoying some thing: “nothing.” But desire too is transcendental in the Husserlian sense; it is always a desire of some thing. Why then this shift in Lacan from desire to enjoyment? We mentioned how the metaphysical tradition has always promoted the eternalization of desire, which has to stop its march towards enjoyment. Philosophy is a consolatio, insofar as, by never extinguishing desire with the enjoyment of knowledge, it elevates us as desiring life – sceptical life, as the Greeks called it; from skepsis, search. For decades now, so many have enjoyed repeating the same rants against vulgar “consumerism,” which they see as characteristic of modern capitalism. Desiring is sublime, enjoying is shameful! Except when enjoyment derives from mystical ecstasy, when it is an enjoyment that involves no material objects, which I would call a “poor” enjoyment. Philosophy – the condition for authentic life

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in general – presumably consists of turning ever-unsatisfied desire into the only authentic pleasure. This is the vision of human beings that Sloterdijk calls miserabilistic (Sloterdijk 2004). But, as we mentioned, many are now bored with this imposed anathema against consumerism, an execration that represents the continuation of our metaphysical (ascetic) tradition. So, Lacan too seems to follow in the wake of the ancient and modern philosophies that see humans as being polarized on lack, on subtraction, on an inevitable dissatisfaction. But only to a certain extent. In fact, the late Lacan seems to take a different direction when he talks – emulating Marx’s surplus value – about plusde-jouir, surplus enjoyment. Here Lacan seems to go towards a different formulation according to which all the pathetic problems of humans derive from an awe of an excess, from the terror man has of an abundance – of an “excessive joy,” as the psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli called it – that tends to overpower him. It must also be said that according to Lacanians, some forms of life are polarized not by a lack but by an excess of libido: psychotic ones. Paranoiacs, schizophrenics, and melancholiacs suffer from a “surplus,” not from a lack.

6 The master and servant acting out Another aspect that Lacanians today are not fond of is all his content – taken from Hegel – on recognition, i.e. the essential desire of every subject to be recognized as such. Lacan almost identified Freudian libido with the Hegelian drama of desire for recognition, and his thought undoubtedly arose from this hybridization. Other psychoanalytical schools that concentrate on the primordial motherchild relationship – most importantly Winnicott’s – have also focused on the question of recognition, i.e. that it is essential for children to be recognized by their nurturers as being of value to them. But only Lacan connected Freudian erotic desire and the Hegelian dialectics of master and servant in a struggle for recognition. In Hegel, the desire for recognition initiates the history of humankind. The matrix is the consciousness of each individual requesting the other to recognize their freedom. But this affirmation of freedom only makes itself recognized in a life or death struggle with the other – a struggle for pure prestige. “Me or you.” For Hegel, the original struggle is triggered because each subject affirms his freedom challenging the other as other consciousness. It is a radical struggle, an absolute one, and one that won’t listen to the case for mutual interest. But it can happen that one of the subjects gives up the fight to the death and, to preserve his life, submits to the other as his servant. According to Hegel, however, historical evolution turns the servant into the real master. To better serve his master, the servant has to work hard and transform the objective world. With time, the subjugated – now an intellectual or scientist – has become, with the great revolutions, the master. Modern democracy is the supremacy of the servants.

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In the wake of this, Lacan develops the concept of the Other with a capital O without which I would be unable to recognize myself as a subject. The difference is that in Hegel, I confront myself with an other who wants to be recognized like me, whilst in Lacan the confrontation occurs with the Other, which does not exist. It’s a fight to the death with someone dead. We will see later what Lacan means by the Other. In this way Lacan introduces into psychoanalysis the Nietzschean dimension of the “will to power,” which was always secondary in Freud. Hysteria, obsessive neurosis, and phobias are thus interpreted from the point of view of power relations with the Other. For a hysteric woman, the Other – usually incarnated by her father – is impotent, and not only in the genital sense of the term. For the obsessive, the Other is a coercive punitive father, and he spends his life waiting for his death. The phobic is searching for a father with the power to terrorize him, and so on. Every “psychopathology” features a form of struggle with the Other. For Hegel, the stakes of the fight to the death are the recognition of one’s freedom, whilst for Lacan, that which wants to be recognized is désir. For Freud, a dream or a neurotic syndrome are ways for certain desires to represent themselves without the subject recognizing them. In Hegel or Winnicott, there is the desire to be recognized as subjects. At the basis of Lacan, however, is there not, rather than the desire to be recognized as subjects – like in Hegel or Winnicott – the recognition of a desire so that subjectivity may, so to speak, fulfil itself ? One wonders whether recognizing a desire implies a form of action, and therefore what the relationship between psychoanalysis and taking action – for example, political, aesthetical, or entrepreneurial – consists of. Psychoanalysis is intrinsically sceptical about acting out. The analyst fears that, instead of desiring motionlessly on the couch, subjects will move on to doing something that will give them enjoyment or suffering. For example, grabbing the analyst by the neck – to kiss or strangle her. Strangling, kissing, eating a dish of fresh brains; any act should be interpreted symbolically as if it were a dream or neurotic symptom. In the past analysts would prescribe patients not to marry or change jobs during analysis and devote themselves entirely to analytic elaboration. Such prescriptions are no longer made. Obviously not all actions carried out outside analytic sessions are an “acting out,” but the analyst always suspects that deep down all of the patient’s actions are a form of acting out. This doesn’t exclude the fact that many psychoanalytically oriented thinkers believe in action – political action in particular. Slavoj Žižek is one of them. But there is a tendential mistrust of action. And when analysts are politically involved, they often face problems with their psychoanalytical institutions. The Austrian Marie Langer became famous in Argentina as a Marxist and feminist psychoanalyst. The Viennese Psychoanalytical Association never accepted Langer in the 1930s, because of her anti-fascist activities. All the young

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activists against the authoritarian regime of Dolfuss – a precursor of Nazism – were expelled from the analytic association. Not because the senior analysts, who were mainly Jewish, were pro-fascist, but because they saw political militancy as a form of acting out. At one point, the Viennese analysts even began to invite officers of the regime’s police forces to their meetings to allow them to ascertain that “we are not involved in politics!” ( Roudinesco and Plon 1997, pp. 612–615). But what lies at the bottom of many analysts’ political indifference is a basic ethical rejection of “action.”

7 Desire and the skinny virgin Let us return to the question of desire. The early Lacan develops a form of existentialist Hegelianism, so-to-speak. He makes the manque à être, the lack of being or being deficit, the centre of subjectivity. According to Heidegger, Dasein lacks “presence,” insofar as it is a project and an anticipation, but it does not lack being. What counts in Lacan, by contrast, is the lack-of-being, the hole around which subjectivity as a whole rotates. The desiring being desires “to be,” but will never be. Hence Lacan develops a vision of human desire that I would call anorexic. Significantly, he uses the term aphanisis, by which he means the extinction or disappearance of desire. In this phase of his thinking, castration is not so much the incapacity to no longer enjoy sex, but the incapacity to desire. This is particularly evident today with tools such as Viagra. Many males – not only the old – complain not of impotence, but of being unable to desire women, or men in the case of homosexuals, and this makes them feel half dead. And in fact, because Lacan essentially understands the subject as desiderans, then the subject itself risks disappearing in the twilight of desire. In the 1950s and 60s Lacan centres on desire, which gives “life” to the subject by never finding satisfaction in a determined object. This is what the Lacanian theory of anorexia is based on. It is an ascetic enjoyment in which mainly young females engage, that prospers almost exclusively in well-off countries where obesity rather than hunger is the main problem. Anorexia is also an anerosia, a lack of Eros: authentic anorexics also reject carnal relations with men or women. If they love someone, they do so only through Facebook or WhatsApp. The “skinny virgin” refuses to satisfy herself with food or orgasm because, in so doing, she preserves herself as a desiring being and hence as a subject. She fears food or the penis like the plague, because they could close the openings of her being a subject. Her want of fat is her greatest wealth, and the “true” anorexic is often in high spirits, frenzied and triumphant. So, at the time, Lacan developed an anorexic-like theory of human beings. We saw how for the ancients, relinquishing satisfaction – relinquishing direct seizure of the glabrous boy or of the structure (the idea) – was limited to a philosophical élite. Instead for Lacan, we’re all “philosophers.” Saint Augustine said that we must love. We desire to desire, and desire, far from extinguishing itself in pleasure, relaunches itself in a spiral.

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8 Purloining philosophy and the music of ideas An Italian philosopher wrote about a doleful quip common among Italian philosophy students: “to do philosophy we have to hang around with the Lacanians!” Today’s philosophy faculties, especially in Italy, are dominated either by Anglo-American analytic philosophy or by a purely philological approach that understands philosophy as a cultural heritage from the past, to be preserved like the excavations of Pompeii. So, “continental” philosophy is apparently only kept alive, outside the museums of philosophy, by the Lacanian circles. Yet Lacan always said he was not and did not wish to be a philosopher, despite his plundering of philosophical themes. His audience were psychoanalysts, not philosophers. He also ransacked other disciplines, from linguistics to mathematics. This is why Badiou (2018) situated him among the anti-philosophers (with Pascal, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein). Nevertheless, it is a fact that many philosophers are attracted by his thinking. But the opposite of what Ronchi quotes is also true. I’ve noticed that when philosophy lectures are given at many Lacanian schools of psychotherapy, students often say “I finally understand something about Lacan!” In short, “to understand Lacan we analysts have to hang around with the philosophers.” It is absolutely significant that Jacques-Alain Miller, one of the leaders of the Lacanian school and editor of Lacan’s Complete Works, studied philosophy. This is where the crucial problem of the transmissibility of a thought or of a praxis emerges. What do these philosophers, who can explain Lacan more effectively than so many analysts, actually help us understand? They help us understand a clarified Lacan, one whose concepts can be conveyed clearly and distinctly. A little like what I’m trying to do here; I’m someone who considers clarity a moral duty. Despite everything, philosophy is on the side of science and mathematics, not on the side of art, politics or psychoanalysis; in other words, it aims at clarifying our ideas. Even though many modern philosophers are actually un-conveyable. But a doubt remains: is what is clarifiable and comprehensible in Lacan really “the thing Lacan”? Is it not a little like turning poems into prose, as they made us do at school to check whether we’d “understood” them? What do we lose in the conversion to prose? As I said, we lose the Witz, the joke, the pun, the echo of the “plethora of the signifier” of which I spoke. When Lacan kept repeating that he absolutely did not want to do philosophy, he did not do so out of vanity. He wanted to challenge philosophy on its own turf, to lure it into making itself say something other than what it wants to make us understand. He blocked clarification with something conceptually opaque that would provoke explicative erections without penetrating sense. If we cannot digest this non-clarifiable quality in Lacan, we end up mixing psychoanalytic apples with philosophical oranges. Even if it is commonly thought that Lacan’s essential reference was philosophy.

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We can say that Freud’s reference discipline was archaeology, Jung’s was cultural anthropology and the history of religions, M. Klein’s the observation of the precocious mother-child relationship, Winnicott’s paediatrics, and Bion’s Buddhism. Whilst one of the disciplines Lacan referred to the most was philosophy. But Lacan’s use of philosophical texts – from Plato’s Symposium to Aristotle, from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, to Hegel, and Heidegger .  .  . – is not heavily criticized by those philosophers who would like to “clarify” according to analytic philosophy. Rather, the most significant criticisms of Lacan – I’m thinking of Derrida’s, Lacoue-Labarthe’s, and Nancy’s – are not from traditionalist academic philosophers, but from philosophers who blame him for not having gone far enough, for having remained attached to a logocentric (and phallocentric) vision, and ultimately to a humanistic conception of the unconscious. However, Lacan attracts philosophers and non-philosophers insofar as, instead of clarifying, he creates thought-events. Consider some Lacanian semi-slogans such as “there is no sexual relationship” or “woman is not-whole [ pas-toute: not-every].” They strike us as other thought-events that ended up giving the world a particular direction. Consider statements such as “man is the measure of all things” by Protagoras. Or the “epiméleia heautou” – “care for self” – of the ancient Greeks; or “all human beings are born free and equal,” or Nietzsche’s “God is dead.” These are mostly gratuitous statements, given to us without the philosopher paying the levy of demonstration. Yet empires, wars, genocides, enthusiasms and desperations, poverty and prosperity, have been generated by such philosophemes, by charming bursts of thought-events. Sometimes when we listen to a particular piece of music we say “this music is making me think!” About what? About no specific concept, yet it’s a piece of music that makes us thoughtful, one that reminds us that the world and life are things to think about, that do not lend themselves to absent-minded simplicity. I think that certain authors are like this “music that makes us think.” After all, what counts is the music of ideas. Some authors say the right things, but their thinking has no musicality and so what they say sounds irrelevant. Those with a taste for Lacan understand his music. For example, I don’t understand certain types of actual music nor certain ways of doing philosophy, therefore they give me no enjoyment. What makes a thinker great is not the fact that he or she has discovered definitive truths, but the fact that his or her ideas have the right rhythm, the rhythm that leads (many of us) “to think.” If this conversation of mine is to be of any value, then it will be because I have produced a conceptual music for certain readers, rather than stated certain truths. The perception of stated truths is a trompe-l’intelligence of this music of concepts. It is by distorting certain philosophical texts that Lacan has enriched them, resituating them in a new regime of sense. The same thing surrealism did with the figurative arts. I think that Lacan is to current psychoanalysis what surrealism was to the more traditionalistic arts of the 20th century. Let’s take the painting “L’ange du foyer ” by Max Ernst, for example. What does this painting really represent? It could be read, of course, as a representation based on the fantastic beings. We see a figure, part human, part monster, which

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seems to be hyperbolically pouncing upon a piece of land. Is this “angel of the hearth” supposed to represent the monstrous side of the good housewife? We then realize that a purely figurative reading of this painting allows us to capture its abstract, non-representational tone. In other words, it is not a representation of monstrous creatures, but an uncertainty in giving them form and sense. On the one hand the painter encourages us to take an interpretative path, but soon condemns it, in the way we say a door is “condemned.” We can still see its shape, but it is walled up, still inviting us to see something figural in the work. It is a painting suspended between figuration, expressionism, and abstraction; images that never coagulate once and for all into describable representations. My feeling is that Lacan does something similar. Some say “Lacan is a philosopher,” but in him we can find plenty of traits that are absolutely nonphilosophical. It is even uncertain whether his is a theory in the strictest sense. Under many aspects it does present itself as a monumental theoretical system. But under others, it presents itself as a series of literary pages written in a baroque style. The writing and speech of Lacan are reminiscent of the writings by psychotics he published in his younger days. Lacan’s writing is also psychotic, because some psychotic discourses are like Ernst’s painting: something that apparently tends to a sense, but fades into other discourses, like a discordant polyphony. Lacan notoriously infuriated not only philosophers, but specialists more generally from all the disciplines he plundered, who often condemned the use he made of linguistic, philosophical or mathematical concepts as malpractice. Linguists, for example, reproached Lacan for his off hand use of some of de Saussure’s and Jakobson’s concepts. Something Lacan couldn’t deny. So he declared “moi, de la linguistique, je m’en fous,” “I don’t give a shit about linguistics.” Then he made fun of himself, saying his wasn’t linguistics but “linguistérie,” “linguisterics.” A neologism we can understand as “hysterical language.” Or as “language shop” (in French, terms that define commercial activities often end in -erie, like pâtisserie, brasserie, boucherie). And he could have said the same of all the disciplines he based himself on. His was “philosophérie” and “mathemathérie.” He purloins the various disciplines he uses, like Poe’s letter. It would be naïve to think that Lacan’s disarraying of non-psychoanalytic authors is the result of an artlessness or amateurism on his behalf. The distortion of certain theories seems to be calculated, something that he even admitted to on occasion. These diversions respond to his intent to “psychoanalyze” the theories he bases himself on, in the sense of making them say what they do not manifestly say, but that is nevertheless nestled in a conceptual latency in the theories themselves.

9 Dionysian thinking Though not explicitly, Lacan makes reference to Georges Bataille’s thinking, and he had close, even personal relations with Bataille. Indeed, Lacan became the companion and then husband of Bataille’s former wife Sylvia, adopting their daughter Laurence, an analyst herself, who died in 1986.

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Lacan doesn’t mention Bataille even once in the Ecrits and only quotes him a few times in the seminars, and there not exactly in f lattering terms. In any case, if it’s difficult for me to say the extent to which Bataille may have inf luenced the psychoanalyst, it seems evident that they both belong to the same cultural “family.” And I think the name we could give this family is Dionysianism. Lacan was a Dionysian dandy. The Dionysian tradition is particularly profuse in French culture. We can count among its members authors such as Deleuze, Guattari, Debord, Baudrillard, Sollers, Maffesoli, and many more. Bataille found a term for Dionysianism: sovereignty. This is dépense, waste, squandering in laughter, in inebriation, poetry, sacrifice, ecstasy, and eroticism. Now, what all these things have in common is the fact that they are all over the top experiences, i.e. they clash with the wise administration of pleasures and goods. According to Bataille there is a restricted economy, or a “towing the line economy,” as I would call it, which corresponds to what we call “the economy” in the strictest sense of the word; goods exchange value and so on. But there is also a general economy, which starts from surpluses and excesses of energy and, by definition, are not useful. Dionysianism is the opposite of Utilitarianism, which – according to Lacan, but also in my opinion – is Freud’s starting point. How is this romantic maudite celebration of excess related to Lacan’s thought, which instead seems to be inscribed, like Freud’s, in a rather tragic vision? Yet, we shouldn’t let appearances deceive us. I think that Lacan’s return to Freud is also a reinterpretation of Freud in a Dionysian key. It would be enough to consider how Lacan conceptualizes the end of analysis. The end is also the aim: does analysis end when it has achieved that aim? We said that its end is not curing the symptom, even though – dodging the theory – this is precisely what the analysand hopes for. Freud wrote that the end of analysis is: Wo es war, soll ich werden. (Freud 1933, SE 22, p. 79; GW, 15, p. 86) A testamentary statement. There’s a diatribe on how to translate this sentence. The Standard Edition translates it with “where id was, there ego shall be.” But Freud doesn’t say “das Es” or “das Ich,” only es and ich. Lacan gives this lack of determiners a great relevance. I would render Es with It, not with the Latin Id. Freud did not use Latin (with the exception of the term libido), but common German. Werden can mean become, get, take over, happen, grow into. Therefore, a possible translation is: (1a) “Where it (es) was, there I have to take over.” Another is: (2a) “Where it was, there I have to become.”

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There’s an obvious difference between the two translations. In fact, two polar psychoanalytical ideals are possible according to whether I interpret my duty as taking over the unconscious, substituting myself to the unconscious, or as entering the space of the unconscious. So, this statement of Freud’s can be interpreted in the sense that (1) the Ego must dislodge the unconscious, impoverish it, dry it up, or in the sense that (2) I must achieve an unconscious status, I must slide into the unconsciousness while remaining I (myself ). The first sense was adopted by the sort of psychoanalyst who wishes to integrate with psychology, which today we understand as “cognitive.” This was perhaps the sense Freud intended, considering that he compared analytic action to the drainage of the sea which, at the time, the Dutch were undertaking in the Zuiderzee. The end of analysis is then similar to the way in which humans seize land from the uninhabitable sea. The second sense was adopted by Lacan: I should be not like a land that invades and dries up the sea, but like the boat of a single-handed sailor who scampers around the seas, inhabiting it without sinking. According the adaptationist reading, the end of analysis is reinforcing the Ego to help it tackle three saboteurs: inopportune drives, strict moral prescriptions, and the strenuous requests of the social world around me. For example, if I’m assailed by paedophile drives, both my Super-Ego and the law forbid me to have sex with children. And analysis will have to strengthen my Ego, in the sense that I will have to gradually abandon my paedophilic impulses both to escape the reproaches of the Super-Ego and avoid being arrested. But according to the Dionysian reading, in order not to feel guilty we should not, Lacan says, “give up on our desire” ( Lacan 1986, p. 368). Hence his ironically catechistical question: “have you acted in conformity with the desire which inhabits you?” ( Lacan 1986, p. 362). Here we have another Wilde-like prescription, opposite to common sense. People usually think that we feel guilty when we give free rein to our raffish desires and hurt others. But the dandy overturns this formulaic ethics: the true guilty action is to relinquish our deepest desires. Some psychoanalyst-philosophers – not to mention any names, Cornelius Castoriadis – expressed their indignation for such a statement, and said: “[Lacan] wished to propose an ideology of desire. Now, that Lacanian ideology of desire is monstrous, because desire is murder, incest and rape” (Castoriadis 1998). But Lacan’s Dionysian ethics is not an incitement to crime. And, indeed, Lacan later specified that not giving up on one’s desire is equivalent to “doing one’s duty” ( Lacan 1986). Lacan’s ethics is Kantian. When he said “don’t give up on your desire,” he meant what we would simply express as “we must never give up on living for our cause.”

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10 Salesman’s narcissism The ancients believed that we each aspire to our own good, and that this good can be achieved through correspondence with the Good. It is only by ignoring true Good that we can do evil. For the ancients, knowing what is good and doing good coincide. It is implicit for Lacan, too, that aiming for the Thing can never resolve itself in authentically evil actions. This is despite the fact that, in  the same seminar, Lacan not only lingers on the martyr Antigone, but also on someone who wasn’t exactly a saint, the Marquis de Sade. Yet whilst we can even destroy the objects we lust after, the Thing beyond them doesn’t lead us to destroying them. I think that Freud himself oscillates between the two meanings of the end (as limit and aim) of analysis that we illustrated previously. And it is in this oscillation that psychoanalysis expresses one of its existential dramas, one that is still unsolved today. La chose est la cause, the Thing is the cause for which we can offer our lives. Ultimately for psychoanalysis, like for the ancients, evil – doing ill to others – is an illusion: it is, in short, a form of ignorance. For Lacan, the end of analysis is therefore allowing subjects to access the place of the unconscious, not by becoming the unconscious themselves, but by taking on its original and peculiar vocation. In other words, the end of analysis does not consist in controlling the obscenity of one’s desire, but in recognizing the Thing that directs that desire. Psychoanalysis should have the direction of a Dionysian access, which is also an excess. In this sense Lacan is Bataillean. But then what does it mean to concretely end analysis? Sometimes Lacan says that at the end of analysis subjects arrive to consciously wanting what they once desired unconsciously. In the end, subjects fulfil themselves in their unconscious desire, wearing it like a glove. But what if, for example, a subject wanted to kill his father? The point is that, for Lacan, unconscious desire is never wanting something specific of the type “I want to kill my father” or “I want to seduce all the women in the world,” or anything along those lines. He thought that our true desire is unspeakable; it is, instead, a structure. But if the conciliation between desire and subject doesn’t coincide with wanting this or that, what guarantees that the process of analysis won’t lead to the awakening of a rogue? Lacan evokes the cases of an analyst who was tempted to jump on an attractive and seductive patient in order to make love to her, and of another who was tempted to hurl an obsessive analysand, one who kept pestering him with quibbles, out of the window. What prevented them from doing so? The fact that there are deontological rules that say that it cannot be done? In actual fact, Lacan says in a Platonizing tone that analysts do not do such things “because they have different desires from making love to analysands or ridding themselves of obsessionals.” And that different desire is the desire of analysing. Analysts don’t err from their role because their Thing is analysing, not reacting towards the other like in any other human relation. This is what separated Lacan from so-called

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relationism. The relation between analyst and analysand is never between two, but between three: the third element, so-to-speak, is the analysis itself. In any case, this Lacanian Dionysianism overturns another assumption of mainstream psychoanalysis according to which analysis is a technique that aims at a higher wisdom, a fine calibration between expressing deep-down desires and accepting limitations; a sort of art of savoir-vivre. Many analysts promote the morals of the stoics. Now, Lacan rejects this ideal of a wise administration of desires and modi vivendi as the aim of analysis. Lacan himself, though a socially successful figure, had undoubtedly very little of the man of wisdom. He never posed as the loveable and sensible grandpa who imparts fatherly advice to the masses of grieving television and magazine consumers. On the contrary, he presented himself in the knotty forms of the Sybil, who can only be half understood, who only follows his own personal thread. Most post-Freudian schools, as we said, have given a highly positive value to the Ego, as English-speakers Latinizingly call it. Instead, for Lacan, the Ego is an eminently narcissistic instance. And, insofar as it acts in support of our “personality,” the Ego is even a function of our paranoid relationship with the world. In other words, though we are not paranoid in the clinical sense, the Egopersonality is the paranoiac feature within us. Of course, Lacan doesn’t deny that in each of us, and in some more than others, there is a “functioning” part that allows us to manage everyday life. Cognitive psychology, for example, concentrates on this functioning part, the Ego identified with a knowing calculating mind; in other words, the cynical mind. But this cognitive-calculative function is of little interest to Lacanian analysts, who read into the rationality of the Ego a deep resistance to recognizing desiring subjectivity. Yet we need only look at our daily interpersonal relationships to realize to what extent narcissism is an indispensable blunder to help us get by in reality, i.e. to live – well or badly – with others. As a child I had an immense respect for adults. I was convinced they knew far more than me and that their knowledge was always more valid than any childish opinion. At the same time I noticed that adults often bitterly disagreed on many things – for example, political opinions, the talent of singers, and so on. But something else soon troubled me: I began to think that all adults were a little mad. I realized that, strangely, everyone “thinks they’re someone.” Who do they think they are? So, still a child, I began to think: everyone thinks they’re right. Everyone thinks “I’m the coolest!” And when they openly argue about something, it’s extremely rare for one of the two to say “I take it back; you were right.” So, as a kid, I was particularly struck by a television drama the name of which unfortunately I no longer remember. In his play Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller put Willy Loman (the Low man) on the stage. Like Loman, the character in this particular television comedydrama “thinks he’s something.” He thinks he’s successful and jolly; he woos and

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seduces women. This “pleaser” was actually put across to the audience as a frivolous charmer, like so many we may stumble upon. One day, Lowman, as I will call him, f lirts with a young woman and stains his face with lipstick. Amused, the girl lends him her mirror: Lowman is stunned! “Who are you?” he exclaims before his image in her mirror. When he looks into his own mirror, he sees a man just like the one he thinks he is, but now. . . . And the same happens every time he looks into someone else’s mirror; he is left devastated. Who does he see in the mirror of the other? The director doesn’t show us, but we infer that it is the person the others see; a low man. This is the Ego according to Lacan: the image we see only in our own mirror. Can we say that analysis leads us to seeing Lowman – the analysand – through the mirror of the others? Those who think, like Kleinians, that analysis should lead us to a depressive position, will say yes. I don’t think so. A successful analysis will lead a subject to coming into contact with a “himself ” beyond mirror images, both for himself and others. In the wake of Freud, Lacan thinks that narcissism is not a pathology in itself but, on the contrary, the condition that allows all of us to function in an acceptable way, like a Lowman. Even if in my life I’ve never achieved anything worthy of note, I have to “believe in myself,” and nurture the fundamental self-infatuation that makes me think “I’m cool!” After all, democratic ideology strengthens our narcissism: in democracy everyone’s and anyone’s opinions count and therefore “my opinion” too, even if I know nothing about politics, is somehow sacralized. Most people, when they see that someone is hostile towards them, will immediately say “he’s jealous!” A sign of the fact that most of us think we’re enviable. This is what Lacan notes as the megalomania of every Ego – unless we look into the mirror of the Other. For this reason, the man in the hand-in-jacket pose who thinks he’s Napoleon has become the paradigm of the paranoiac. Why Napoleon? Not because he was a great general, there have been many others, but, Lacan jokes, because “Napoleon was someone who thought he was Napoleon” ( Lacan 1966, p. 170). He was a low man – also because he was rather short – who became emperor and ended up dying on a remote island in the Atlantic. “In thinking he is Napoleon,” the paranoiac at once fulfils his megalomania and ironically and obliquely exposes every megalomania; the paranoid infatuation of the Ego. Cognitive psychology considers this aspect under the entry self-esteem. These psychologists assess the levels of self-esteem, or self-disesteem, of various subjects, in order to ascertain the extent to which these levels inf luence their activities, and so on. Lacan, instead, would ask: who does one esteem in self-esteem? Now, by narcissism both mainstream psychoanalysis and cognitivism mean love of the self and thinking above all about oneself. They assume there is a Self, which is more or less the object of narcissistic love. For Lacan, by contrast, narcissism is an experience of imaginary alienation: it is a love not of one-Self, but of one’s mirror image. Narcissism is love for the other that represents me. For Lacan we don’t have the “false Self ” on one side and the “the true Self ” on the other (like in Winnicott), because there’s no room for the concept of Self in his topology. For Lacan, there

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is on the one hand the imaginary Ego – i.e. our mirror image, which in our ordinary paranoia we mistake for our self – and on the other, the subject as / S], i.e. an empty place in a series of symbols, a non-representation. In fact, the bar on the /S] should also be read as a crossing out, not only as a split. After Trump’s election to President of the United States, an Italian magazine asked me: “as a psychoanalyst, do you think Trump is a narcissist?” Saying that Trump is a narcissist simply amounts to saying that Trump believes in Trump, in the same way as we all believe in ourselves. For example, whenever there’s a political discussion, anywhere, I’m always struck by the way everyone thinly conceals a certain contempt for those who hold a different opinion. Their own opinion appears self-evident to them, and if someone doesn’t agree, it’s because they’re a slob. This is obviously not stated, and some don’t even think it consciously, but it’s true. We can say, however, that Trump is the narcissism of those who voted for him, most of whom probably suffer from serious narcissistic injuries. Trump, the man of success, tells them “I think what you think! You, who the New York and California intellectuals scorn as rednecks, as hicks full of prejudices, as losers. . . . I shall be your narcissism.” So, a high or lower self-esteem from Lacan’s point of view doesn’t depend on an assessment of one’s qualities, but on the solidity of the self-infatuation an Ego is capable of. We’re efficient insofar as we identify with the mirror image – the ideal image – of ourselves, with our Ego. Luigi Pirandello would say that we identify with our mask. The point is not taking away the masks from subjects to show them their true faces, but to expose the fact that they are only masks (Pirandello called his characters “naked masks”). And in this recognition of being a mask, the subject advient, “succeeds.” The point is that showing how each Ego “believes in itself ” has self-referential setbacks. Insofar as Lacan too was most certainly an Ego – and an extremely powerful one too – he was obviously himself affected by paranoiac miscomprehension. This reinforces many of his pupils, who believe they’re taking part in the strength of Lacan’s Napoleonic Ego, but who also often risk being led to a Waterloo in their relationship with “the people.” Many reject Lacanianism because they believe all they can possibly offer patients is a perspective consisting of a wise acceptation of one’s limits. The limits that will lead them to working in some IT company, B&B, or government office like most of us. Lacanianism seems instead to have an underlying ethically heroic and supermanly perspective, something not usually applicable to the clients of analysts, who are mostly quite common people. And many are surprised by the fact that in several countries – particularly in Latin America – Lacanianism has become a psychoanalysis for the masses. I have met several people who underwent long Lacanian analyses. In most cases I cannot say that their way of weaving into the social fabric is any different from that of people who came out of other forms of analysis. The Lacanian analysand will probably talk of “signif iers” and “traversing the fantasme ,” while the Bionian patient, for example, will talk of “making things thinkable,” of “transformation,” and so on. But, jargon aside, if their

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analysis has been successful, their modes of coping in life don’t seem very different to me. A Lacanian analyst friend of mine from a Northern European country wrote heated articles against the adaptive ideal. He told me a little about his life, how as a young man he’d gotten up to all sorts of mischief: he’d experimented with drugs, had taken Eastern paths, had had f lings with models, and experiences with swingers. . . . I frankly found his youth quite entertaining. “Then, I went into analysis with J. [a notable Lacanian analyst] for 20 years and came out once and for all from that dissolution.” And indeed today he is one of the most prominent analysts in his city, he has a handsome wife, charming unproblematic children, and his life is generally prosperous. He is someone who has perfectly adapted to the social context in which he lives; even though he probably has less fun than he used to. Until now I still haven’t come across former analysands of Lacanians who ended up becoming solitary seafarers or down-and-out artists living in small garrets. They are all quite moderate people, more or less “integrated” in society. So, what about all the campaigns against Adaptationism, the Dionysian tones of so many Lacanian teachings? Are they only a pose to seduce restless Parisians or South American intellectuals who want to distinguish themselves from the American way of life? Is there a discrepancy between what Lacanians preach and what they practice? In other words, aren’t the adaptive analysts de facto right? The point is that for a Lacanian, external behaviour is of little import; Lacanians do not practice a social science, they do not deal with the directly observable and computable. Their interest is in the subjective structure. Not the way someone behaves, but the sense this behaviour has for them. What really counts is “the way they have rectified their relation to the Real.” There are two dear friends: one has completed an analysis and has therefore “rectified,” the other has not, but from the outside the difference is unnoticeable. In the short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” ( Borges 2000), Jorge Luis Borges imagines a minor, early 20th-century French poet who succeeds in a gargantuan enterprise: rewriting – which does not mean copying – Cervantes’s masterpiece. His Don Quixote can be perfectly overlapped with the original text. But are they the same novel ? Borges shows us with the subtlety of which he is a master, that though they are literally identical, the two texts actually carry very different meanings. In fact, the same sentence has one sense for the Spanish reader of the 16th century and a very different one for the reader of the 20th century. They are two totally different novels. Lacan would say: the statements (énoncés) are the same, but the enunciations (énonciations) are different. Pure literary fantasy? Yet how many times do we find ourselves before subjects that are only “literally” similar, but actually profoundly different.

11 Dilly-dallying sciences This explains Lacan’s troubled relationship with the “human sciences.” The concept of sciences humaines is very French. The English-speaking world has no real

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equivalent. It has the humanities, the social sciences and psychology. More recently Anglo-American culture invented the term cultural studies, a sort of anthropological hermeneutics combining Gramsci, Foucault, Barthes, Judith Butler, and Lacan. Today the term “cognitive sciences” includes all the sciences of human beings that treat the subject scientifically, thus excluding the humanities and cultural studies. Forgive me for evoking my own history: the son of a philosophy teacher in Naples, I grew up in the spirit of the idealism of Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, and of Gramsci, the Marxist version of Gentile’s idealism. Italian neoHegelianism rejected the “Human Sciences,” which it considered a creation of positivism, and radically rejected the presumption that the human being, i.e. the spirit, could be the object of any kind of scientific knowledge. Given the fundamental presumption of freedom of the spirit, there can only be a science of the human body, not of the human spirit, because science itself is a product of the spirit, of subjectivity. As a young man, moved by an Oedipal urgency to go beyond my paternal Hegelianism, I plunged into the study of the human sciences, including psychoanalysis, which I considered a science among all the others. French structuralism attracted me precisely because, in contrast to the existentialism of the previous generation, it centred on these vilified human sciences and denied the fundamental freedom of man. Was Freud not a determinist? Did Foucault not write that the very concept of “man” is a relatively recent historical product? I had read structuralism as an anti-spiritualism, but today I know that I was completely deceiving myself. It took me some time to understand that my passion for Lacan as a student in Paris, was actually leading me to the same Hegelianism, hostile to the human sciences that, as an avant-gardist of the sixties, I had gone out of my way to challenge. The Neapolitan Croceans laughed when psychoanalysis was mentioned – in exactly the same way as Steven Pinker-style positivists laugh at it today. However, I was seduced by psychoanalysts who were no less Hegelian. Without realizing it, I had come full circle: I had abandoned my father in Naples only to find him again – without recognizing him – in the Quartier Latin. Today these dynamics of intellectual offspring trying to transcend their fathers aren’t very different and the children of psychoanalysts or of psychoanalysis buffs often go on to study neurosciences or cognitive sciences, evidently doing what my generation did at the time: overtaking their parents on their same route and making them appear to themselves as old bangers. I wouldn’t be surprised, therefore, if these youngsters who want to mark their parents as old fogeys will one day end up rediscovering Freud through the neurosciences. After all, as we mentioned, he was one of the founders of the neurosciences. This is the totemic banquet that follows every Oedipal killing of the father. So, as a young man, I saw in the feelings of disgust of a Baudrillard towards sociology, though he was himself a qualified sociologist, the same contempt the Neapolitan high school teachers had for “those blasted sociologists and psychologists.” In Paris, however, only some sciences were rejected, whilst others were seen as models: structural linguistics, cultural anthropology – especially of the French

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variety – Marxist sociology in the style of Bourdieu, and psychoanalysis. Because these were romantic human sciences (even though the term “romanticism” was also rejected), receptive to the inf lux of phenomenology and of Heidegger. The other human sciences – the “positivist” ones, the “bourgeois adaptative American” ones – were considered dismal sciences, like economics for Thomas Carlyle. And the rejection was always based on the same principle: that human subjectivity cannot authentically be the object of objective study, and the pretence to take it as such removes what is really essential, the Dasein, the Being-there. Not even Lacan had a high opinion of the “human sciences” – apart from, of course, linguistics, anthropology, and, strangely, game theory. He couldn’t have imagined that the latter would become one of the pillars of cognitivism. In fact, he was interested in “human sciences” only when they were structuralist, that is, when they put the language at the core of their approach. A revealing anecdote: during Easter 1953 Lacan wrote to his brother MarcFrançois, a Benedictine monk, illustrating his work and asking to meet the Pope so he could talk to him about the future of psychoanalysis in the church. He was obviously going through a manic phase, as he had just made a similar request to the secretary of the French Communist Party, which at the time was the political and ideological force most opposed to the Catholic Church. Though he declared he was an atheist and belonged to libertine cultural circles, he claimed in this letter to his brother that his theses belonged to Christian tradition. He wrote that he was practically the only thinker who taught a doctrine that roots psychoanalysis as a whole within a great tradition: the one that states that man cannot be reduced to an object (Roudinesco 1993, p. 274). It seems to me that Lacan is here confiding in his brother the deepest sense of his thinking: the rejection of any objective, scientific, approach to human subjectivity, the refusal to turn it into the object of knowledge, predictions, or calculations. But this is a rejection that characterizes every form of idealism. It’s true that Lacan valued a combinative vision of subjectivity, hence his evocation of the “conjectural sciences” – his name for the sciences humaines – of logical/mathematical models, of topology, and so on. Is this a contradictory oscillation in Lacan? Or is it part of his dream of a good science, so-to-speak, a structural and qualitative one, as opposed to a mean science, metrical, quantitative, calculational, and statistical? Lacan would later say in the Seminar, that the only function of the human sciences is to form a branch, of the service of goods, which is no doubt advantageous though of limited value. Those fields are in other words a branch of the service of those powers that are more than a little precarious [in the original French, branlants dans le manche, shaky at the handle, dilly-dallying]. ( Lacan 1986, p. 373) At the “service of goods” are the objects of “bourgeois dreams,” i.e. all private goods, all family and domestic goods, professional goods, and so on; in other

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words all those things that most people believe to be a condition for being happy, or at least as unmiserable as possible. The political and economic powers “serve these goods,” which others call acquisitive, and so – Lacan strangely adds – they dilly-dally. Branler dans le manche refers to the degree of play between a pot and its handle, which makes the grip on the metal unsteady, shaky; it means not being ready to do what one has decided, being irresolute; and also seeing ones position or fortune as being under threat. In short, Lacan didn’t believe that the human sciences on the one hand and the political and economic powers on the other were really effective; he considered both to be awkward and unstable. But then did Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Jean Piaget, John M. Keynes, Niklas Luhmann, to name only a few, dilly-dally too? Hard to believe. Ultimately, Lacan’s was an attitude common to many currents of the 20th century – to neo-Hegelianism as well as to the Frankfurt School, phenomenology and hermeneutics. These “continental” currents scorn the human sciences for their wanting to remove the dimension of subjectivity that I called “archaeological” – the Dasein or intentionality. According to them, the human sciences objectivize the human being considering it entirely “at the service of goods,” i.e. they thematize a Homo entirely devoted to obtaining the goods that are supposed to offer pleasure, satisfaction, and happiness. Note that utilitarianism considers all these terms ultimately equivalent; with not much subtlety, all it needs is the emoticons ☺ or ☹. In this vision, the human sciences – the long arm of utilitarianism – are the cognitive superstructures of the values of what Lacan calls “capitalist discourse.” Yet, Lacan himself said that Freud’s theory took Bentham’s utilitarianism as a starting point. Hence the centrality of Lustprinzip, which Lacan interprets – in my opinion in a distorted way – as “pleasure principle,” and not as desireenjoyment principle. The mastery of the pleasure principle is indeed at the basis of every utilitarian vision, and in particular of modern economic policy as a whole. Freud thought – but he was mistaken – that he was entering the positivist, and therefore utilitarian, line of his time. Instead, as Lacan and all anti-utilitarian Freudians think, at one point Freud starts talking about a beyond the pleasure principle, a beyond utilitarianism. Freud doesn’t dilly-dally. And indeed, by admitting there is a beyond the desire/pleasure principle, he effectively expels psychoanalysis from the “human sciences,” which today are cognitive. The admonition against the cognitive sciences – as knowledge on calculable pleasures – is hence a consequence of Lacan’s fundamental Dionysianism. But what can a theory of the subject that doesn’t take the subject as its object consist of? It can only be a theory that describes nothing about the subject, that doesn’t wish to say anything about it, but only wants to specify its place. This is why Lacan distinguishes rigorously between the Ego (le moi ) and the subject ( Je). The Ego is an object of science because it is an actual alienation, it is the subject’s illusion in believing, as we’ve seen, that he is “someone.” Whilst the subject “is what it is not and not what it is,” as Sartre defined the “for-itself,” the subject (Sartre 1956). The Dasein is not an entity that is simply present or objectifiable.

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The subject is desiring, but desire doesn’t coagulate into an “Ego”; it is always a tension towards something, towards some Thing. This is why Lacan would write the subject as / S], the barred signifier. He writes it in negative terms: as something that cannot be the object of any knowledge, but which we must always imply in everything that a subjectivity expresses. This subject that can never be the object of any knowledge is a desiring project thrown into enjoyment.

References Badiou, A 2018, Lacan: Anti-philosophy 3, Columbia University Press, New York. Benvenuto, S 1999, ‘Eyes Wide Shut. Does Psychoanalysis Have Contact with the Real?’, Journal of European Psychoanalysis, vol. 8–9, no. Winter–Fall, pp.  43–66. Available from: http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number8-9/benvenuto.htm Borges, JL 2000, ‘Pierre Ménard, author of the Quixote’, in Fictions, Penguin Books, London. Castoriadis, C 1998, ‘Conversation with Sergio Benvenuto’, Journal of European Psychoanalysis, vol. 6, no. Winter. Available from: www.psychomedia.it/jep/number6/cas toriadis2.htm Derrida, J 1967, La voix et le phénomène, PUF, Paris. Ernst, M 1937 “L’ange du foyer”. Available at https://images.app.goo.gl/eEPYbf kYAHw Wu7fM6 (Accessed 13th November 2019). Freud S 1895, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895)’, in Strachey, J, ed., Pre-PsychoAnalytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 1 (1886–1899), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1966, pp. 281–391. Freud, S 1905, ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’, in Strachey, J, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 8 (1932–1936), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1960. Freud, S 1933, ‘New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysi s’, in Strachey, J, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 22 (1932–1936), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1964, pp. 5–182. Heidegger, M 1961, Nietzsche, Günther Neske Verlag, Pfullingen. Eng. trans. Nietzsche, Vol. 1, HarperOne, San Francisco, 1991. Lacan, J 1966, Ecrits, I, Seuil, Paris. Eng trans. Ecrits: A Selection, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2004. Lacan, J 1975, Le Séminaire, livre XX. Encore, Seuil, Paris. Lacan, J 1986, Le Séminaire, Livre VII. L’éthique de la psychanalyse, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Ethics of psychoanalysis, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997. Rimbaud, A 1873, ‘Adieu’, in Une saison en enfer. Available from: http://abardel.free.fr/ tout_rimbaud/une_saison_en_enfer.htm (Accessed 30th May 2019). Roudinesco, E 1993, Jacques Lacan, Fayard, Paris. Eng. trans. Jacques Lacan, Columbia University Press, New York. Roudinesco, E and Plon, M 1997, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse, Fayard, Paris. Sacks, O 2013, Hallucinations, Vintage, New York. Sartre, J-P 1956, Being and Nothingness, Routledge, London. Sloterdijk, P 2004, Sphären III. Schäume, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main.

4 THE THREE REGISTERS The Real

1 Imaginary as a mirror As we know, Lacan distinguishes between three registers: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The distinction was set forth at a time when Lacan thought that the symbolic order prevailed. In fact, the very choice of the word registres makes the three something symbolic. A register is a book where official records are written down and the word comes from the Latin regesta, transcribed acts, a “repetition of gesta, of acts.” The reference to transcription therefore gives all three Lacanian registers a symbolic fabric. At first, the distinction between the three registers seems a simple idea. Upon a more careful examination, however, they come across as being quite different from how analysts of other schools would describe the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. Abandon all hope, ye who enter Lacan’s system hoping to find confirmation of your conceptual habits! And indeed, the Lacanian Symbolic symbolizes nothing in particular, whereas the Imaginary is founded on an initial visual experience and becomes confused with our perception of the environment. As for the Real, it is by no means the reality surrounding us. But let us begin with the Symbolic. Lacan separates it from the close relation between the signifier and the signified, which turns a symbol into a sign. We said that in Saussure, signifier and signified are closely connected in the sign, like two sides of a sheet of paper. But, in the wake of Lévi-Strauss, Lacan bends Saussure to his needs. Because for Lacan what really counts is the signifier, not the effects or consequences it may have in terms of signifieds. We are therefore at the opposite end of “symbols” in the Jungian sense, which are usually archetypical, i.e. having universal significations for all, regardless of specific languages or what a symbol may mean

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in relation to the unrepeatable history of each individual. In other words, Lacan’s Symbolic does not symbolize. As for the Imaginary, we usually associate it with fantasies, or fantasmes in French. But what really matters in Lacan is that he uses an experience that is by no means imaginary as the prototype of the imaginary register: us looking at ourselves in the mirror. In the mirror, we of course see our image, which is by no means something inside us, but something entirely outside us. For Lacan, therefore, the imaginary begins not as an internal or private experience, but as an external encounter in relation to an image we perceive before us. And he sees this encounter as the key to paranoia, as we shall later see. The fantasme is something that grasps us from the outside and at the same time something that “belongs to us.” The point is that psychoanalysis after Freud accepted the – let’s call it “common” – topology of the subject: an inside versus an outside. The psyche is conceptualized on the model of the animal body, which is basically a closed bag with several openings or holes – mouth, anus, eyeballs, vagina. . . . Lacan said that for us the soul is a duplex of the body; we imagine it as having the same structure. The problem for analysts would then be to try to understand what comes out of the bag, what goes inside it and what stays there. Hence they will talk about internal or external objects, about containers and contents, and so on. The Lacanian model of subjectivity is instead more like two sides of a border, but a mobile one, like borders are in reality: we have “the side of the subject” versus “the side of the other.” Lacan replaces the opposition inside/outside – or, if we prefer, inthe-bag/out-of-the-bag – with the fundamental opposition subject/other. This is the so-called L schema, on which I shan’t comment here. It will suffice to say that S stands for “subject”; a¢ as “other” is the object a; a as “ego” means the mirroring of the object on the subjective side; and Other (A) is a symbolic dimension which coincides with the unconscious (Figure 4.1). As we can see, the two instances on the left are somehow subjective, we have S (the subject) and the ego; the two instances on the right are the other and the Other. In this schema we need to imagine a longitudinal line cutting it in half, which crosses the point where the imaginary relation and the unconscious intersect: this is the line that separates the subjective side from the side of the other (or, if we prefer, of

(Es) S

a ′ other

im

(ego) a FIGURE 4.1

Scheme L

a

n io at l re ry un a n co gi

ns

cio

us

A Other

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the object). As we can see, the fundamental opposition ceases to be inside/outside and becomes more like being-on-the-side-of-the-subject/being-on-the-sideof-the-other. And this division never has a clear border, but bounces back and forth between the two sides of the division. One of Lacan’s earliest contributions, in 1936, dealt with “the mirror stage.” There is a phase in infancy during which children play with their image in the mirror, knowing full well that they’re seeing a semblance. Instead, when Narcissus saw his ref lection in the water he believed he saw an other very handsome boy. According to Lacan, this mirror image gives coherence to a body that still doesn’t perceive itself as an organic whole and, for this reason, the mirror image becomes the prototype of every narcissistic idealization. Freud sometimes talks of the Ideal Ego and at other times of the Ego Ideal. Whilst commentators often think he is referring to the same thing, Lacan in fact makes a distinction between the two concepts. The Ego Ideal is symbolic and the Ideal Ego is imaginary. An example: I can say that a Ferrari is an ideal car, i.e. I see it as the ideal image of a car. But if I’m a Ferrari engineer, I aim at an automobile-ideal that the current motor vehicle with the Ferrari logo only partially fulfils: I have in mind a symbolic criterion for the car. Therefore, the Ideal Ego is the mirror image as the figure of what we believe we are or would like to be. Everything that will later develop as imaginary life – including the intricate unconscious fantasies that psychoanalysis brings to the surface – has this mirror-like matrix and tends to an idealization of one’s self, or of an other as the ideal image of one’s self. Lacan says that our perceptive relationship to the world, to the environment in which we dwell, is structured in an imaginary way; something that sounds unsustainable. How can I say the computer I’m fiddling on now is structured in an imaginary way? What could be more realistic than the world around me? And there’s more. Lacan also uses the concept of the imaginary to denote what structures animal life, both ours and that of animals in the stricter sense. For him, the animal is trapped in the imaginary, i.e. in a game of mirrors, and when we let these mirrors entangle us, then we become “animals,” we forget our human essence as creatures of the symbolic. Lacan identifies the imaginary dimension with what ethology studies: with our behaviour. Every time Lacan talks of the Imaginary dissolved by the Symbolic, we can be sure he is referring to the ethology of Homo sapiens. Here Lacan is evidently overturning another obvious concept according to which animals are instead dominated by absolutely real biological mechanisms. The biologic reality of animals is to be responsive to imaginary captures. I think that what Lacan says about the – animal – imaginary structure of our relationship to the world has been confirmed to some extent by the discovery of mirror neurons. It’s a real pity that so many Lacanians today scorn the neurosciences as “reductionist and mechanistic.” Lacan, however, did not indulge in this kind of obscurantism. On the contrary, he always tried to keep up with the important

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scientific discoveries of his age and concerned himself with cybernetics and the linguistics of Chomsky; with cognitivism, basically. In particular, Lacan never attacked or disdained the neurology of his time. But most Lacanians do not follow his example. Mirror neurons were discovered in the brains of monkeys – and later in those of humans – by a team in Parma, Italy, headed by Giacomo Rizzolatti. Mirror neurons are in the motor area of the brain, and so should be associated with movement, but this is not so. If I see someone picking up a glass to drink, certain motor neurons are activated in my brain too, and they “shoot” as if I were picking up the glass myself. At the same time, neurons connected to drinking shoot too, so that I anticipate the act of the other in an imaginary way – I see his aim and imitate it. Therefore, as I’m actually absolutely still, I can say that my mind acts as a mirror to the finalized movements of others. But a mirror is something purely visual, whilst here we are dealing with motor “mirrors,” simulational ones. I “am doing” what another is doing without moving. Now, if we must choose a quintessential Lacanian image, it must be the mirror, and I find it strange that Lacanians today disregard this discovery. To this let’s also add that in humans, these neurons are situated, oddly enough, in Broca’s area, the part of the human brain that ensures the use of language. Therefore there’s a connection between mirror neurons and language – in Lacanian terms between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Today mirror neurons are interpreted in a Husserlian phenomenological key by some of their discoverers, and so today everyone says that mirror neurones are the neurons of empathy that allow us to live through the experience (Erlebnis) of another subject. I think Lacanians could say something different on this, something alternative to the phenomenological appropriation. In actual fact, mirror neurons not only come into operation when we find ourselves before other human beings, but also with human-like beings. If a mechanical arm grabs potatoes, the mirror neuron of grabbing “shoots.” And we even react to cartoon characters as if they were humans. In other words, mirror neurons couldn’t care less about the distinction Homo sapiens/living animal/ automaton. Do we feel empathy for machines and cartoon characters that mimic our gestures? Of course. This discovery actually shows that we perceive ourselves everywhere in the world, and that we “become” the world that we interpret as our mirror. Our brain identifies ourselves in the world, in the sense that we interpret the world – even paintings and cartoons – in our own image and likeness. This means that the confusion over who or what the real subject is always possible. In short, we identify in an imaginary way with whatever moves, by attaching an aim to it. When this identification is lacking, alas, we find ourselves confronting the Real. Ultimately, the real is what doesn’t cause mirror neurons to “shoot”; it is everything beyond our imaginary identification with the world. Lacan gave great importance to so-called infantile transitivism, to the fact that a child will often call another child he is addressing “I,” and to the fact that a child cries when other children hurt themselves. Lacan didn’t mention empathy

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but talked of imaginary identification towards our kind. Mirror neurons tell us that ultimately we always remain children, because we always remain transitivistic. The only individuals who are no longer children are the few that are in contact with the Real. Probably autistics. Vittorio Gallese (2006), one of the discoverers of mirror neurons, put forward this hypothesis to explain autistics: they are beings with a shortage of mirror neurons. These beings are not-likethe-world. Now, according to Lacan we cease to be children – we come out of specularity – when we do mathematics, and autistics are often very good at mathematics (Tammet 2012). Lacan believed – like Plato – that only with mathematics and formal logic do we free ourselves from the imaginary neuro-specular dimension of our relationship to the world, and hence obtain access to the Real. Perception, as Rizzolatti says, is also a motionless monkeying of the other.

2 The signifier and the law Today we ask ourselves whether Lacan gives any priority to one of the three registers. As I said, Lacan – at least up to a certain stage – gives priority to the Symbolic. The Symbolic is the very condition of the unconscious – therefore only human beings have an unconscious. This is the primacy of the signifier. This primacy of the signifier seems bizarre to analysts of other schools, who consider the unconscious more as the realm of affections, emotions, of ineffable experiences, of beta-elements, as Bion calls them. Yet the structuring power of the signifier is more or less obvious in political and social life, even though the social sciences refer not to signifiers but to “categorizations.” In the 1950s, Muzafer Sherif, a researcher of Turkish origins, set up the socalled Muzafer Sherif Robbers Cave Experiment in a summer camp for boys. He arbitrarily divided the youngsters into two separate huts – one group decided to call itself The Eagles and the other The Rattlers – and gave each of the two groups a f lag. This was enough to quickly create a growing hostility between the two “identities” – “us versus them.” The researchers launched competitive activities between the two groups, such as athletic contests, which soon aroused mutual scorn and antagonism. During the competitions, the members of the two teams accused each other of cheating, calling each other “swines” and “swindlers,” and so on. Attacks against the “enemy” hut ensued, with the aim of stealing and burning the f lags, whilst the fights at the shared cafeteria became more violent every day. The researchers soon realized they’d given life to a monstrous xenophobic embryo with two randomly formed groups. In Lacan’s terms, it was sufficient to represent the two groups as an opposition between signifiers to obtain a political conf lict. The important point was not, as some more naïve analysts might think, the signifiers we commonly connect to “eagles” and “rattlesnakes,” two animals that are opposites in many ways. The groups could just as easily have called themselves X and Y, as the important thing was to construct a purely signifying opposition. How can anyone fail to see that most of the

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political, ethnic, and religious conf licts that bring bloodshed to the world are the effect of opposing signifiers? Let’s move on to a different field. One of the few examples Lacan gives us of his clinical practice concerns an analysand originating from a Muslim country ( Lacan 1975), who had difficulties using one of his hands. A previous analysis, aimed at tracing this inhibition back to the prohibition of masturbation, had produced no results. At one point, however, the subject evoked an old suspicion of his regarding the integrity of his father, who had lost his job as a company executive. Did he lose it because he was stealing? Now, according to the law of the Koran, thieves will have one of their hands cut off. The re-emergence of this symbolic relation between theft and amputation of the hand dissolved the symptom. The father had never lost one of his hands, but “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children,” and the man’s son had amputated his own. The symptom expressed a signifier of the law. The patient had ceased to be a Muslim long before and actually harboured a deep aversion to the Quranic law. And indeed the law, the symbolic, comes not from the subject, but from the Other, as Lacan calls the symbolic apparatus. Broadly speaking, the more we abhor “our” law, the more we are somehow subject to it, without knowing it. Through the law, which is symbolic in essence, we are in any case subject to God, or Allah, or JHWH, even if we claim to be atheists. For Lacan, no one is atheist in the unconscious. Even if today one out of six human beings declare they’re atheists. But most human beings dedicate a cult to a God because they have an unconscious. The reason why we don’t know of any culture without a divinity: the very idea of God and of a law that transcends us, is implied by the signifier. But then how can we explain Lacan’s patient’s recovery? In any kind of psychoanalysis, I think the most difficult things to explain are therapeutic successes, whereas a good explanation can always be found for the failures. A “hermeneutic” analyst will say that Lacan in any case conferred sense to the symptom; that he built a narration based on the subject’s identification with a father who had supposedly been a thief. Psychoanalysis certainly bets on sense, insofar as it is the cause of effects on the patient, though Lacan – going against the tide – insists on the power of the signifier. Except that, in Lacan, sense functions as the cause of neurotic symptoms insofar as it emanates from the senseless cruel letter of the law to which we are subjugated. The symptom of this apostate Muslim, however, was dissolved; so what happened exactly? The following problem poses itself: if the symbolic is automatón – as Lacan says, taking the Greek term that means “at random” (see Lacan 1973) – the blind law, how can subjects free themselves from it? The Symbolic – Quranic law in this patient’s case – produces the subject’s disability. And, as an initial approximation we could say that, by recognizing the symbolic automatism that has grabbed him, he ceases to struggle against it, adjusting himself to it without suffering it. Is subjectivization then a form of resourcefulness that merely attempts to deal with our being slaves to the Other?

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Probably. According to Lacan, reconstruction through words did not produce the subject’s definitive deliverance from Quranic law, which was unconsciously being applied inside of him. For Lacan, analysis is not essentially emancipation nor psychic maturation – even though usually, seen from outside, this is exactly what it seems to be. Instead, we could suppose that the subject freed himself from the symptom precisely by accepting the fact that Islam had a firm hand on him, quite literally. He admitted that Quranic law was still his own unconscious. Now, only by recognizing himself as being still a Muslim could he free himself from the effects of Quranic law. This paradoxical outcome can be understood thanks to a dialectics I call topo-logical. It is only insofar as we subjugate ourselves to the law that we become subjects; i.e. we remove – in the sense of Aufhebung – the alienating effects of the law. By becoming what we are, we cease to be what we “are.” But ultimately what we “are” is the truth of what we are. . . . Analytical practice consists of navigating through this vertigo. Someone who was not fond of psychoanalysis, Jean-Paul Sartre (1995), wrote a paper in 1944 called Reflections on the Jewish Question. His thesis seems extreme: as biologically there is no Jewish race, Jewishness is a product of anti-Semitism. If there were no anti-Semites there would be no Jews. But in this case, is the solution for authentic free Jews – in other words Sartrian ones – to repudiate their belonging to Jewishness? No, Sartre would reply, precisely because I am not a Jew out of my own choice, I must accept to be one for others – or for the Other, as Lacan would say. Repudiating my belonging to Jewishness is something inauthentic. I imagine that with regard to his patient, Lacan’s position was both analogous and opposite to Sartre’s. Lacan believed we will never be able to free ourselves from the primacy of the signifier; for example, of my being the product of the Muslim or Jewish signifier. An infinitely free subject like Sartre’s is unthinkable according to Lacan. Basically – in non-Lacanian terms – every subject is a product of history. However, we can change our subjective position with regard to what we are. This is what Lacan tries to say with / S], the barred subject; it means that every subject is a signifier – we are marked by our name, surname, nationality, official gender, marital status, etc. Yet a subject is not-entirely-a-signifier. We can adopt an ironic position with regard to the signifier we actually “are.” As we can see, Lacan’s position, though it overturns Sartre’s from many points of view, is akin to the Sartrean predication on the limitless freedom of the for-itself.

3 The empty signifier Both examples – the opposition between Eagles and Rattlers and the amputated hand symptom – illustrate what Lacan indicated as the primacy of the signifier. In the two examples, the signifiers constitute the subjects. In other words: there are no pre-established social or cultural (let alone sexual) identities, but rather effects of signifiers, which are differential in their own right. The

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Quranic law is differential too, insofar as it establishes a difference between “ hand +” versus “ hand –,” and this difference represents the semantic opposition of honest versus thief. Lacan always repeated that “the signifier represents the subject for . . .” – one would expect “. . . for another subject.” No. “The signifier represents the subject for another signifier” ( Lacan 1966, p. 822). This is not a definition of the signifier, as the definiendum (what must be defined) appears in the definiens (that which defines). It’s more like defining woman as “the being that appears as a woman to the eyes of a man.” Let’s take the name Eagles in Sherif ’s experiment: it represents a subject – the group that recognizes itself in that name – because of another signifier, that of the Rattlers, which in turn defines the other group because of the signifier Eagles. Lacan is trying to say that the signifiers that are paraded represent subjects that never come into play as authors; Eagles and Rattlers represent the minds of the boys only insofar as they allow themselves to be identified in that game. Not identities but differences are the driving force of the historical and social world, and of subjective history. This is something that Carl Schmitt had seen clearly in the political field: it is always based on the difference “friend versus enemy.” In politics, if you want to win, you must have an enemy; and if there really isn’t one, then you have to make one up. Something that current politics clearly proves. Ernesto Laclau (2005), a political philosopher inspired by Lacan, described the constitution of any people, whether “the British” people, the “Italian,” the “Iraqi,” and so on, in relation to something he calls empty signifier. But all signifiers are empty, just like “Eagles versus Rattlers” or “Muslims versus Christians” and even “Communists versus Capitalists.” Even Italy, for example, is the effect of a signifier that is ultimately empty. In the 19th century a few intellectuals decided it was necessary to turn this “geographical expression” – as the Austrian minister Metternich called Italy – into a state made up of all the regions where languages similar to Tuscan (today’s standard Italian is fundamentally the dialect spoken in Tuscany) were spoken. Achieving this meant wars, bloodshed, martyrs . . . and the signifier “Italy” took on a political concreteness. It is immediately clear how such an approach – despite all the efforts in the opposite direction – is incompatible with Marxism. In the heyday of poststructuralism, the most prestigious Marxist thinker was Althusser, who also called himself Freudian and was inspired by Lacan. Now, I think the essential point about Marxism is the following: historical epiphenomena express – at once manifesting and disguising – the essence of social relations, which is the struggle between economic classes. This is so because, for Marxism, the human being is essentially a producer of goods; “a thinking producing animal.” Now, I often discuss political matters with people who describe themselves as Freudian/Marxist/Lacanian, and one thing always strikes me: that when they talk about politics, they always forget about the primacy of the signifier. When they speak Marxian, they suppress Lacanian.

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But very often, economic inequalities are not the primary cause of social conflicts, but are rather the effect of what I would call the Leviathan Signifier. The Leviathan was the hideous Biblical whale that inspired Hobbes for the title of his most famous work. This Leviathan produces wars, racial and ethnic hatred, and slaughter. Let’s take a conf lict that risks going for centuries: the Israeli-Palestinian. We can’t say that it’s a conf lict between two religions, because many Israelis and many Palestinians are non-believers. Between Jews and Arabs? But races don’t exist. This struggle is unexplainable in Marxist terms, because it would be in the highest economic interest for both Jews and Palestinians to live in peace. This nominalist conf lict proves the lethal power of the Leviathan Signifier. I owe it to Lacan if I can understand that, despite my youthful communist enthusiasms, I am not ultimately a Marxist. I say “I am not a Marxist,” but Marx should be read, and not only because he was a genius. He understood so many things, especially in economics; he realized that the economy is a system! I have always made a rigorous distinction between Marx and Marxists.

4 The registers of a lecture The three registers are three ways of relating to otherness. They can ultimately be seen as three modes of “alienation.” Imagine that you are my audience in a seminar, and I am the teacher – we fall under two complementary and opposed signifiers. With regards to me you are the Other, because the audience cannot be reduced to the fact that it is you, precisely you, who are listening to me. My audience could have been made up of entirely different people. It would be a problem if I spoke to no audience, to rows of empty chairs – in that case we could suspect some psychotic misunderstanding on behalf of the Other. The mad sometimes talk to themselves in the street, i.e. they talk to the Other as if it existed as Other. And, as the teacher, I occupy the place of your Other, given that another fellow could occupy this same position, and probably even make a better job of it. It then becomes clear why Lacan says that the Other doesn’t exist: of course, you exist as single listeners, but the audience as such does not exist; it is only an implicit function for an institution called “holding a seminar.” Sometimes art and the cinema enjoy making certain signifiers “exist.” The Nanni Moretti film Sweet Dreams features the director playing himself as the main character. Every time the Moretti character has a debate with the audience about one of his films, a boring intellectual stands up to say things like “but why should a housewife from Treviso or a field hand from Lucania give a damn about your film?” (Treviso is a dull city in the Venice region and Lucania was until a few decades ago a poor agricultural area in southern Italy). The intellectual is obviously quoting clichés. Suddenly, however, just as the usual lame intellectual is finishing his sentence, we see the appearance of a real housewife from Treviso and a real field hand from Lucania who have, independently one from the other, decided to take the train to participate in the debate, as if dragged there by a transcendental inspiration.

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This is not a case of psychosis, but of satire. In any case, the Other doesn’t exist even as a housewife from Treviso. Only housewives from Treviso exist, not The housewife from Treviso. This example allows us to understand to an extent why Lacan said that The woman does not exist, that only women exist. / La Femme, the signifier Woman, Lacan wrote, is lacking in the unconscious (an enigmatic statement to unravel). For him this deficit explains hysteria: the hysteric is someone who is convinced that The Woman exists and tries to understand what She could be. In any case, what counts for a subject is to be recognized by the Other. Here Lacan introduces the Hegelian dimension of recognition, giving the burden of this to the Other. If I wish to be recognized as a “teaching subject,” it is necessary for the audience to recognize me as such. Conversely, I will recognize an audience as an audience if I speak with my face facing them, not if I blabber to myself. The imaginary register comes into play when instead I look at you the audience and read some show of interest, pleasure, assent, or wonder in some of you. In this case are you no longer just filling in as the signifier audience, but . . . are you concrete people? No, because in this picture you exist for me only insofar as I read in you what I wish to arouse: I look at myself in you like in a mirror to capture what I’m thinking and saying. I read in you the complementary or symmetrical reaction to what I am saying because it tells me how I appear to you. You are narcissistically confirming me as teacher. The Imaginary has a narcissistic matrix; it is based on the experience of looking at oneself in the mirror and finding oneself amazing. Of course, you, the audience, may also decide to hiss and boo me in disapproval, and then I would become the victim of a “narcissistic wound.” You are wounded when the mirror fails to glorify you, when the “mirror on the wall” replies to the queen that no, she is not the fairest of them all; Snow White is. Whether the audience applauds or boos, it still remains an imaginary relationship between speaker and audience. What about the Real? Imagine that while I am speaking now, and you’re all following me carefully, one of you suddenly stands up and leaves without saying a word, voluntarily excluding himself from the audience-Other, refusing to convey back to me an image of my discourse, not even one of disapproval. In so doing, he drops out from both the Imaginary and the Symbolic. In the Ernest Lubitsch movie To Be or Not to Be, we meet a stage actor whose tour de force is Hamlet’s soliloquy. He has started to notice, however, that every time he begins his “to be or not to be” speech, a male member of the audience stands up and leaves. This terribly irritates the actor, who follows with his eyes the only one who disengages himself from the audience. In fact, many actors can’t tolerate spectators who don’t pay enough attention and, as if attracted to a black hole, “speak” only to them. Whatever disengages itself from the symbolicimaginary bond, whatever resigns from the Other and slips away from the imaginary confrontation with me, Lacan calls object a.

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Why a? Because it’s the first letter of the word “autre,” the French for other with a small a, and a different other from the imaginary other who either applauds me or blows raspberries at me. Whoever leaves, thus breaking the rule of reciprocity, is a déchet, Lacan says, something that falls away like garbage. Yet the ham actor addresses the Shakespearian soliloquy to the only person in the audience who disengages himself. (In the film he later finds out that his wife had an agreement with her lovers for them to leave at the start of his soliloquy, because that’s when she would be free to meet them.) Insofar as the other withdraws from the game, he or she becomes the object of maximum attraction. We could say that actors or public speakers always address an audience that is about to leave. Object a, being real, is something lost, a fiasco. But for this very reason, this object that challenges us is of more interest to us. This is why Lacan can say that object a, being real, is the cause of desire.

5 Love and war At first Lacan spoke of object a as the object of the fantasme, of fantasy, which is, according to Freud, also the object of the drives; i.e. faeces, phallus, gaze – to which Lacan adds the vocalized word. Donald Trump speaks, and many are charmed by him (certainly not me): for these people, Trump’s word is object a. The list of objects is somewhat quaint, including much valued ones, such as the breasts and the phallus, and obnoxious ones, such as the faeces and urine. Yet, in almost every language, when we want to express our contempt for something or someone, we use Grundsprache, the basic language of the drives: we exclaim “you c**t,” “you d**k,” “f***k you,” “that novel’s crap,” “I’ll spit in your face,” and so on. Highly valued organs like the vagina and penis, or acts, like coitus, are interchangeable with highly disrepute “anal” objects. When we’re somewhat “beside ourselves,” the Freudian drive-objects spurt out of our mouths. Lacan’s object a – in its two faces, imaginary and real – also has a double value: it is at once the vilest of things and the most desirable. The offensive word nearly always has this extraordinary ambiguity. Besides, the maximum vulgarity consists in putting divine persons together with anal or sexual bodies, as we know. In my imaginary seminar we saw that we’re dealing with three epiphanies of otherness. We have the Other, with the capital O of the Symbolic. We have the other of imaginary relationships, which always leads back to a relationship of love or unlove, of admiration or contempt, between the other and me. And, finally, we have an other that is reduced to a letter, a or o. These are the three registers of otherness. In fact, it is often found lamentable that Lacan has overloaded the other, especially the Other with a capital O. Of the Other he says that it is the treasure of the signifier, the guarantor of truth; that it is that which recognizes us as subjects, the other sex, the mother in earliest childhood, the analytic position, and so on. All these facets of the Other make its meaning impenetrable for those who have not yet entered the Lacanian Wonderland. We don’t have enough room here to

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show the congruousness of all these “attributes” of the Other. I shall limit myself to discussing the sense in which Lacan speaks of the Other sex. For Lacan, attraction between the sexes is not simply the effect of particular chromosomes dictating, as from puberty, the desire for the other sex. Proof of this is the existence of homosexuals, who are men or women in every sense but receive no “dictate” to desire the other sex. (I would add: non-effeminate male homosexuals often appear super-masculine, the very paradigm of being male; whilst the non-masculine lesbian also appears to me as the cultural paradigm of femininity. Homosexuals appear as pure males and females, unadulterated by commerce with the other sex.) There is of course an animal complementarity in sexuality according to Lacan, a “biological” that he attaches to the Imaginary. In addition, however, the sex that attracts “speaking beings” is Other, in the sense that, for me the teacher, the audience is not simply a group of listeners but a symbolic function that recognizes me as speaker. When during adolescence we fall in love with a boy or girl, a unique emotion reveals a surplus: it is not only the erotic qualities of the person we desire that attract us, but the fact that they are a sort of alien who is recognizing us as a legitimate desirer. The Other sex carries a delightful alienness, which is indispensable to desire imposing itself on us in all its chilling gravity. And this goes for homosexual love too, because the loved one of the same sex is symbolically the Other. We know that this extraterrestrialness of the loved Other – like in the “angelwoman” of medieval poetry – can, alas, disappear. After months or years of “correspondence of amorous senses,” at one point I may cease to desire my partner, even if their charms have remained the same. A topological catastrophe has taken place: my loved one has shifted from the place of the Other to that of “sameness,” s/he has plunged into the banality of my reality. If this collapse of desire is suffered by heterosexuals, they will feel that making love to their dismissed lovers would be like having an embarrassing incestuous or homosexual form of intercourse. Lacan wants to prove that, even if in its sexual career the parlêtre (the speaking being) would seem to behave like all other animals, the logos actually transubstantiates all the “animal” things it feels and does. The human being is an animal incurably corrupted by language. The other is determinant in war too. Ares and Aphrodite are paired, as in the famous painting by Botticelli. For males, war is not simply a means of defending their women or their territory, it is also a symbolic act. The emotion of baptism by fire is that of an initiation to the enemy as an Other, beyond fear and hatred. The wars described in the great epics – from The Iliad to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now – are always odes to the enemy as the Other, without which the warrior wouldn’t be a hero, but only a poor wretch who fearfully attacks or escapes.

6 “Real” others Some may be wondering: “what about the real others? What’s the place of people in f lesh and bones standing in front of me in this system?”

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The others that we take for granted – all the others who are not myself – actually have no place in this system. There are various “others” in Lacan, but never the others, who are absorbed into the “other” or the “Other.” The other I suppose to be a subject more or less like myself seems in Lacan to be split into the three dimensions: the symbolic, the imaginary and the real other. The supposed unity of the other-like-me becomes fragmented like in a kaleidoscope. This is something that frustrates phenomenologists in particular, as they’ve bet everything on the fact the I immediately recognize the other subject; he or she is my primal datum, there’s a primal I/You understanding. According to phenomenology, we don’t perceive a set of coloured mobile dots that after a rapid process of inference we recognize as “Mr Kennedy” or “Ms May.” The intentionality of our perceptive consciousness immediately puts us into relation with the subject Kennedy or May, not with a robot that we recognize as our counterpart. Only post factum phenomenology – a rigorously anti-scientific philosophy – describes our relationship to the world inversely to how science explains it. Science explains, phenomenology describes. Science starts from global processes and then dismantles them to isolate underlying springs and cogs that make an apparent immediate intuition possible. Phenomenology does the opposite, it sends us back to the life experience (Erlebnis) through which we have to do with the things of the world, not with private sensations. “Go back to the things themselves” was Husserl’s programme. And so, Mr Kennedy or Ms May are people I see (in this sense all phenomenology is a philosophy of perception – see Derrida 1967, p. 117). By distinguishing between the three “others,” Lacan seems instead to fall under the analytic programme of science. Analytic, as we said, means that you conceptually distinguish and separate the various parts of a whole. Psychoanalysis is called what it is because Freud wanted it to be analytic, like science. And in fact, many phenomenologists reject Freud and Lacan as “scientists.” Heidegger too saw Freud’s theory as an objectivist approach to the subject, and therefore as a monstrosity (Heidegger 1987). Now, Lacan is not interested in speculatively legitimizing the obvious concept that on the one hand there is me, and on the other all the others, who are in turn all Egos. He is interested in reconstructing the history and structure of each subjectivity. Of course, as adults we all know that the others are egos like us; but what about children? I’ve met young children who expressed solipsistic theories: they thought that “only I am I, because only I feel ‘me.’” This point is crucial, because Freud’s project was to reconstruct the history of each subject by putting between parentheses – here’s a phenomenological term – everything that an external observer can see and understand about this subject. For example, if we observe a newborn, we will see how it behaves in a certain way, how it sucks its mother’s breast, how it cries, and so on. But what interests Freud and Lacan is understanding how the baby constitutes itself as a subject. Obviously the newborn doesn’t know that the warm body it is attached to is that of its mother, it doesn’t know exactly what a breast is and, besides, it is still blind. . . . It has nameless experiences with a very different sense from that which

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is given to them by an adult observer. Freud says that in that phase, the subject is entirely Lust-Ich, Desire-Pleasure-Ego; there is still no Real-Ich, Real-Ego (see Freud 1925). This is the reason why some theories that focus on primitive relations between mother and child – “attachment theory” in particular – eventually separated from psychoanalysis. Such theories also wish to reconstruct the internal processes of young infants, but they start from child observation. Observing does teach some very interesting things, but it risks distracting us from the question that’s essential for psychoanalysis: the constitution of subjectivity. As newborns we have no child-mother relationship, but rather, as Lacan says, a relationship with the Thing. Before everything else, therefore, the child has to do with the Thing and the Other. And the concrete mother occupies the place of the Other in the same way that the ladies and gentlemen attending a seminar occupy the place of the audience.

7 Topology of the Real In the previous chapter we said that a primacy of the Real began to emerge in the later Lacan. What do we mean by this? The Real is among Lacan’s most problematic concepts. I shan’t try to define the Lacanian Real here, because it would mean betraying its sense. A definition – except in mathematics – says nothing about the actual use that is made of a concept. And the Real acquires a sense if we make it function in relation to the other two registers. As we said, the Real is not the objective reality we refer to in practical life and in the sciences; but it’s not even the Kantian thing-in-itself, the unknowable that every knowledge presumes. It is a sort of repercussion of subjectivity itself, hence of the symbolic: it is the non-subjective part that every subjectivity leaves behind as an écart, a gap or discard, within its constitution. The Real is whatever is discarded from subjective signification, what every subject considers impossible. So, the Lacanian Real has a subjective stance. When something unthinkable is reported to us, for example “today, the 11th of September, two planes have destroyed the Twin Towers,” our first reaction is to exclaim “that’s impossible!” This is when we confront the Real. If the Real is the rejected and excluded part of subjectivity, then the Real is a relative concept, i.e. it makes sense only in relation to something that is not real: subjectivity. For Lacan the subject is not a psychic reality: it is / S, it is se barrer, which in French means “to bar oneself,” but also “to sneak away.” I am a subject insofar as I sneak away from what I am. But in a relation between two sides, we can make one side prevail over the other, we can make it not entirely complementary. I can interpret the Real as that part of the Ego that the Ego rejects, and that returns alienated to the Ego as that which is extraneous to one’s self. But I can also interpret it as that which the subject does not symbolize, that which comes before any symbolization and is independent from symbolization, something that remains non-subjective. In this second sense, the Real is no longer

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FIGURE 4.2

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The Torus

the rejected, but is the non-accepted ab initio, with an absolute antecedence to subjectivity and that remains eccentric to it. The effect of what Freud called primary repression. We can illustrate the way Lacan conceives the Real in terms of the yielding of the Symbolic. The Symbolic yields to the Real in the sense that it cannot symbolize it, it cannot fit it in a chain that follows a certain “law.” But yield can also refer to the unsold copies of a book, the remaindered books that the retailer can return: here the Real is the part of the Symbolic that can be returned to the subject as a remainder that has not reached a symbolic destination. Lacan tried to express this double face of the Real with the topological figure of the torus: a doughnut shape (Figure 4.2). The surface of the figure is the torus itself, while the volume it delimits is called a toroid. A torus is a surface closed around the central void it circumscribes. At the centre of the torus we do not find something “intimate,” like at the centre of a sphere. The torus instead draws what Lacan calls extimité, extimacy, the reverse of intimacy: the centre of the figure is outside it. In the same way, we can say that the centre of every subjectivity (and therefore of the symbolic components of which it is constituted) is outside of it, in the Real. The void at the centre that “constitutes” the torus is the figure of the Real. But does it make sense to ask the question: “did this void exist before the torus?” The void is a space that contains nothing. The shape that a part of void seems to take on with the torus is given by the shape of the latter. The void (the Real) is what lies outside the figure (which is symbolic and imaginary) and it is also what the figure owes its shape to. The relationship to the Real relativizes the foremost logocentric instrument: psychoanalytical interpretation. It is always thought that the analyst is someone who will offer the patient the standard, more or less sexual, interpretation.

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During a seminar, Bruno Bettelheim was disturbed by a female student who was knitting while listening to him. Bettelheim told her that what she was doing was a metaphorical surrogate for masturbation. And she replied: “no sir, when I knit, I knit and when I masturbate, I masturbate” (see Leader 2016). It is interpretations such as Bettelheim’s that have ended up turning the analyst into a farcical “stock character.” For Lacan, interpretation – being a form of linguistic elaboration, of symbolization, of “making things thinkable,” and so on – is not decisive: it refers back to something that will always remain outside anything that is symbolizable. For Lacan, analytical constructions work if they re-construct our relationship to the Real, i.e. a relationship to something that remains external to the analytic relation, that structures it, and goes beyond it. In short, the point is not offering a “good interpretation” – of the dream, of the symptom, and so on – but, as Lacan says, “rectifying the subject’s relationship to the Real.” “Rectifying” implies a mistake, a deviation that needs to be corrected. What counts for Lacan is the relationship to the Real, not to other humans, symbols or representations. For Lacan, the end of analysis is not introverted but extroverted. Psychoanalysis is often accused of being therapeutically ineffective because it demands too much. It expects to cure people by changing their mental structure through and through; something that is extremely difficult and the reason why analyses last so long. Behaviourist, cognitive, or pharmacological therapies, on the other hand, try to cure just our symptom, and then we can carry on being the more or less “non-rectified” individuals we’ve always been. If someone suffers from periodical bouts of depression, it will suffice to administer antidepressants that will make them come out of those states, even if their being-in-the-world at the root (perhaps) of their depression remains unaltered. It’s true that after a few months, the antidepressants stop working, that they cause weight gain, addiction, and so on . . . but in the meantime the critical phase has been overcome. Wanting to change the Self is like trying to squeeze blood from a turnip. Sometimes these metanoias – as Saint Paul called them – happen, but they’re relatively rare. Now, strangely enough, Lacan seems to agree with these criticisms of psychoanalysis. In contrast to other analysts, he doesn’t think it’s possible to really change a person’s subjective structure. Being obsessive, hysteric, perverse, paranoid, or manic-depressive are not sets of symptoms, but structures. Lacan is rather sceptical about the possibility that an obsessive will stop being one, or that a psychotic will stop being one, and so on. It’s not on a complete restructuring of the psyche that he counts on, but rather on tiny structural shifts; slightly changing the position that every subject holds with respect to what and who they are. The idea that analysis “allows to rectify the subject’s relationship to the Real” is actually no less enigmatic than most of Lacan’s statements. I shall try to make it more comprehensible by referring to the text, unpublished outside Italy, of a conference Lacan held in Milan in 1974.

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Here he asks himself what pushes people to enter analysis and replies: “something has become impossible because of a sort of invasion of the Real, which perhaps escapes us, but that has become extremely troublesome” ( Lacan 1978, p. 106). In fact, the minimum we can conceive of what happens with this Real is the fact that it will squash us. Or, rather: it will not let us breathe, it is strangling us. ( Lacan 1978, p. 108) Therefore, “analysis is the only thing that can allow us to survive the Real.” What can this Real that suffocates us be? Here Lacan seems to mean the Real as the senselessness of the world, and that analysis can give a little whiff of sense to this murky density of things. But someone like Lacan cannot be so simplistic. Indeed, he doesn’t give us trees, the sea, or the stars as examples of the Real, but the objects that scientific knowledge allows us to construct: The Real has taken on a presence it did not have before because of the fact that we have started building a host of devices that dominate us in a way that would have been unimaginable in the past . . . every sort of gadget ultimately squashes [man] . . . it squashes him because what relates to his life [. . .] is something completely other. ( Lacan 1978, pp. 106–107) I would say that today the ne plus ultra of the Real is the computer, a device that functions like the Symbolic, i.e. software. The real that squashes life is therefore represented by the machines engineered by scientific thought, which at first, Lacan reminds us, had concentrated on the sky, on the part of reality furthest from our life. The ancients were excellent astronomers, not great physicists. Then scientific thought applied its look on the stars to the things of the earthly world. This is why technology squashes our life today; because we are the victims of an “invasion of fabricated things, and fabricated according to the celestial model” ( Lacan 1978, p. 109). Lacan evidently thinks of technoscience as a heritage of the Galilean revolution, which applied to terrestrial nature the geometrical order that the ancients only saw in the starry skies. Human knowledge, science, has machines as a backlash, “namely [à savoir] that their knowledge [savoir] is thrown back into its face and squashes [human beings]” ( Lacan 1978, p. 111). Technology, which Lacan identifies here with the Real, is mostly conceived nowadays as something at the service of human beings, whilst the trees, the sea, and so on, weren’t made for us. In other words, “celestial” science ended up invading the natural reality with a technological real that aims at transforming nature itself into utensils for our use. The Real that devours us is not then the non-sense but, on the contrary, the too much-sense that science and technology impose on us. So, the menacing Real that causes us to go into analysis consists of the artifices,

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the machines, as objects overcharged with utilitarian sense. This Real that threatens us is actually Sense itself as a functionality. What Lacan calls the Real here is basically a Hegelian reversal, a sort of reification of Sense in machines: what presents itself as a triumph of the functional sense comes back into life as a murky Real. Heidegger (1957) quotes a verse by Angelus Silesius: “the rose is without why.” Es gibt, “there is,” in the sense that the rose offers itself without a reason. It is of no use. Its beautiful vain existence challenges the “principle of sufficient reason” that stipulates that “everything must have a reason.” Is the rose an eloquent figure of the Real escaping any rational sense? But why should this rosy Real then suffocate us? Frankly, what’s suspicious about this verse by Silesius is the choice of the rose itself. The rose, though a natural offering, has entered a very human network of senses: the rose as gift, as symbol of the female sex, of the caducity of beauty, of love, and so on. It would be a different story if Silesius’s verse had been “the cockroach is without why.” As a pestiferous being, the cockroach would have served to challenge the principle of sufficient reason far more perspicuously. Gregor Samsa, the salesman of Kaf ka’s Metamorphosis, doesn’t become a rose, but a bug. He really is a ohne warum, a “without why.” In any case, Lacan doesn’t consider the Real – the beyond sufficient reason – in terms of roses or cockroaches. He considers it in human, too human, terms, in terms of computers: a prevarication of sense over life. But is this not in contrast with what Lacan says elsewhere? That the Real is life itself, escaping as it does the deadly tangles of the Symbolic? As always, Lacan’s “plethora” will not allow us to rest in a closed conceptual order: he twists his own concepts, moving them away from equilibrium, he also makes them say what they reverberate. For example, prima facie, Lacan’s doctrine presents itself as an attack against the phenomenological and hermeneutic primacy of sense. Against a totalizing vision that aims at the recognition of sense in that which appears to have none, Lacan puts forward signifiers’ chains – like computer programs – which have no sense as such. But on the other hand, Lacanian thought aims, no less than phenomenological thought, at the order of sense. The primacy given to language expresses the principle that psychoanalysis does not deal with causal links or ineffable life experiences (empathy, emotions, “inner experiences,” and so on) but with sense relations. That is the case, Lacan constantly jeers at naïve theories on sense, but only because he himself tacitly poses the primacy of sense. Something similar could be said about his campaign against conceiving individuals according to the way in which they aim to maximize usefulness. That is, as free enterprise and “human capital.” We’ve said that, snubbing any ideals of freedom, Lacan insists instead on the determinative power that our history, and our social and family structures have over us; in other words, our symbolic structures or culture, which determine and condition us often more than nature. I’ve always found it laughable to identify nature with the tight constraints of need, and culture as the opening of human beings towards new horizons of change and freedom. In actual fact, every culture has its Unbehagen, its discontent, precisely

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because culture adds no less stringent chains to us than nature does. This is the reason why I have never believed in an opposition between nature and nurture. Yet the entire Lacanian critique of the free market chant can only be understood against the backdrop of a Hegelian and Heideggerian thinking, which presupposes precisely the freedom of Geist or of Dasein, of the mind or of “being-there.” And this is because for Lacan, freedom is something to practice, and those who practice something hardly ever theorize it. It’s a little like what Blanchot said of friends: that one can never really speak about them, but only speak to them ( Blanchot 1997, pp. 326–330). Lacan himself was somewhat of a libertine, but did not appreciate the libertine theoretical propaganda of, for example, Georges Bataille, and not because Bataille had been the first husband of his second wife. It’s as if in every attack against particular conceptions, Lacan went through a sort of divorce from his own specular image: attacking the ideologies of Sense in the light of sense, mocking the ideologies of Freedom while practicing freedom, condemning the abuses of the technological Real in the name of reality, and so on. Every single one of Lacan’s controversial campaigns targets an opponent in which he represents himself with self-irony: by condemning the acclaimed X he makes x transpire, without acclaiming it. This oscillating, almost derisive character of Lacanian concepts is invoked by many as proof of the inconsistency of this thought. Whilst those who are attracted to Lacan are pushed by the need to take part in an experience of thinking that offers the enjoyment of developing and twisting particular concepts, of putting them to work in various directions. Those who need a linear nonequivocal way of thinking will prefer to embrace a Hegelian vision, phenomenological psychiatry, traditional psychoanalysis, structuralism, or the linguistic approach – all branches of thought that deeply inf luenced Lacan. The difference is in the fact that Lacan dialecticizes all these branches to which he owes so much: he doesn’t freeze them in a saturated vision, but drags them to new shores of sense that effectually overturn their sense. In short, he overwhelms these virtually accomplished systems with the instability of a wave.

8 The real Real This ambiguity of Lacanian thought also reveals itself in his vision of the symptom. In Seminar XXIII, “The Sinthome,” Lacan introduces a new notion in the title of the text. In French, symptom is spelt symptôme, whilst here Lacan writes sinthome, and one wonders why. Now, the seminar in question is largely devoted to Joyce. This is immediately detectable in the title, where Lacan uses a Joycean licence. Like the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, Lacan is progressively attracted to the enjoyment of deviant words. But it would be naïve to want to find a precise sense to all the puns in both Joyce and Lacan, plays on words invented specifically to fire beams centrifugal from sense. Lacan said that the stigmata of psychosis are neologisms, and more and more did he begin to indulge in them.

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With the sinthome, he seems to be indicating an alternative to the psychotic or neurotic symptom; it is reminiscent of what Winnicott would have called “creativity.” Joyce’s writing is his sinthome insofar as it acts as a prosthesis which achieves a subjective consistency that James lacked. In any case, I think that in talking about Joyce, Lacan was ultimately talking about himself. I would like to insinuate that all of Lacan’s works can be read as his sinthome, as what he produced as a remedy against . . .? Further, the “sinthome” is closely linked to the Real. Lacan said that the Real is ce qui ne marche pas, that which does not work. It is the difference between what works and what does not work. What works is the world. The Real is what does not work ( Lacan 2005, p. 76). But the French for “(to) work,” “(to) function,” is marcher, which also means to walk. The Real doesn’t walk. Now, while science deals with the world that works and walks, or rather that goes round (in the way the planets go round in the solar system, or the electrons go round an atomic nucleus, and so on), analysts confront themselves with the Real, which doesn’t walk or go round. And they confront it through the symptom, through the impotence and suffering that humans carry deep down in the f lesh. Analysts therefore deal with the Real, but they’re not acquainted with it, there is nothing they can say about it. In a seminar, I can’t remember which, Lacan said that the analyst is “un amateur du réel,” an amateur of the Real. Not a professional of the Real (who is?), but only a dilettante. Yet, to our surprise, Lacan sometimes says that it is from science itself that we can finally expect something about the Real! But the real real, if I can speak thusly, the true real, is that which we are able to access via an absolutely precise path, which is the scientific path. It is the path of little equations. This real is the exact one which eludes us completely. We are completely separated from it. ( Lacan 2005, p. 93) Hence: “after all, why not also think that one day we may find out a tiny bit more about the real? – thanks to calculations, always” ( Lacan 2005, p. 98). These statements surprise us, because Lacan had just said that science deals with the world, not the Real. In fact, for Lacan the world is that to which knowledge has given shape and sense. For example, our current image of the world – via science – is that it is an explosion in progress. We’re still in the Big Bang. Yet, beyond this image of the world, Lacan seems to consider mathematics the only path that can tell us something about the Real. Through equations, i.e. by formulating scientific laws. But equations are symbolic devices. In any case, we can conclude that for Lacan the Real is not formless, and that mathematical expressions can convey its shape. Lacan expects that science will give us the cypher of the real Real. Does this hope in science not mark Lacan’s conversion to positivism? But what can we expect from a science that he thinks excludes and precludes subjectivity,

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first of all the subjectivity that produces science? Is he not here denying the “archéological” approach of all his work?

9 Giving up what we don’t have One point seems crucial to me: what makes Lacan incomprehensible to many is the fact that his way of theorizing is all topo-logical, that is, neither logical nor scientific, even if he often adopts the tools of logic – to twist it, of course. Let’s take one of Lacan’s famous aphorisms: “love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” “What’s the sense of such a ‘definition’?” ask the philosophers and scientists I would collectively call – if you will allow me a nudge and a wink – accountant Sokal’s men (Sokal and Bricmont 2003). Does Lacan talk about logic illogically? Yet, in mathematics set theory contemplates empty sets, i.e. sets that don’t contain a single element. A perfectly respectable set, like all the others. The empty set of what one has, can actually be given. Let’s consider one of the most common fears in the world: the fear of death. Ancient philosophers went to great lengths to prove that the fear of death is a fear of nothing, for we can only fear something that is in our life. Yet we know that Epicurean arguments have never had any real impact on our fear of dying, nor have all the religious promises of an afterlife. Because our fear of death is not a fear of nothing, but a fear of nothingness. Giving someone death is not giving him nothing, but ferociously inflicting nothingness on him. I think some clarifications need to be made. Lacan’s argumentative regime belongs to a dimension of discourse I would call topo-logical. Lacan suggests the term “logic of the signifier.” Some call it dialectics, but it is not a Hegelian triadic dialectics – thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Rather, it is, I would say, a tragic dialectics, one without synthesis. We remain in contradiction. This topo-logic is not unrelated to topology, i.e. to the branch of mathematics that fascinated Lacan most, as the discourse of both topo-logic and topology is centred on topoi, places. Topology is a non-metrical (non-quantitative) geometry that deals with the relations between “places” in space. What I call topo-logic is a “logic” that deals with the structural relations between logical “places.” Let’s take the example of a glove. Every glove has a reverse side, so we can turn it inside out. This means that the velvet that was meant for the inside is now on the outside, whilst the itchy surface that was supposed to be on the outside is now internal. Something I wouldn’t wish anyone to have to wear. Yet a glove will always have two sides. Now, as we’ve said, for Freud the unconscious is not what lies inside a sort of sack with holes, which is supposed to be the psyche of each of us, but is the reverse side of this glove, which, in a certain sense, all subjects are. The unconscious is the stinging reverse side of every velvety consciousness. I’m suggesting the name topo-logic to distinguish it from two other kinds of “logics” of which the aforementioned accountant is an expert: formal logic, which I would call mathema-logic, and what I would call epistemo-logic, i.e. the discourse that constructs the knowledge of the world, science.

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Mathema-logic corresponds to classic syllogisms such as: “Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Socrates is mortal.” An example of deductive inference of the type: “If a is x and x is always y, then a is always y.” In the Tractatus, upon which Lacan has commented, Wittgenstein said that logic and mathematics are tauto-logical. Purely typographic operations. It’s like saying “it will either rain or it won’t rain”: this enunciation will always be true, because in any possible world it will either rain or not rain. Mathema-logic is the science of truisms: empty signifiers that say nothing about the exploding world in which we live. An eminent example of epistemo-logic – eminent because used by the great logician Gottlob Frege – is the statement “the Morning Star is identical to the Evening Star.” An astronomical statement that dates back to the Hellenic age. Thousands of years ago, it was noticed that those apparently distinct stars were actually one and the same: Venus. Frege pointed out that the two signifiers (as Lacan would call them) – “Morning Star,” “Evening Star,” “Venus” – have different meanings (Sinne) but the same denotation (Bedeutung): the specific star we today call Venus, an existing object ( Frege 1892). The planet Venus is by no means a construction by astronomers – as a braggartly idealism claims – even though the latter have bestowed various Sinne on this object. Lacan cites Frege to say that the significations the analyst interprets or construes are all Sinne and all have a single Bedeutung, a single denotation. But for Lacan, the Bedeutung of all significations is in turn a signifier, the phallus! The accountant Sokal thinks that Lacan misunderstands both mathema-logic and epistemo-logic, but we could prove that Lacan was aware of both. Yet, along with several other non-transmissible authors, Lacan practices a topo-logic, which he thinks is the most appropriate for those who practice analysis (even though, frankly, I doubt the vast majority of Lacanians knows of what use it would be to them). Still, this topo-logic – the discourse and reason of places – wasn’t born thanks to Lacan. The ancient Greeks had already outlined it perfectly. The Greeks cited the Cretan Epimenides, who said “all Cretans are liars.” The paradox is salient. Because if his statement is true, then at least one Cretan, Epimenides himself, is not a liar, and one exception is enough to falsify any universal statement. Therefore, if the statement is true, then it is false. But if we think that the statement is false, then we have to conclude that it is true, because even Epimenides lies. Paradoxes are the nightmare of every logical mathematical construct. Bertrand Russell proved to Frege that his attempt to reduce all arithmetic to pure logic led to a paradox. His demonstration, that destroyed 20 years of poor Frege’s work, is famously known as Russell’s paradox. It is a slightly more complex version

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of the Epimenides paradox. These paradoxes are the pillars of Hercules of logic and mathematics; if we go beyond them, we end up, like Alice, in a Wonderland, in a world where the strangest things can happen, even the smile of a cat appearing before the appearance of the smiling cat itself . . . Crazy stuff! The stuff of Lacan! So, is this topo-logic a Mad Hatter logic? Paradox is a negative term, but topo-logic has a positive side, as we saw in what Lacan says about love as giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it. In a moment of bonhomie, Sokal may even say: “sure, this is poetic expression, and as such some may like it, but it has nothing of the mathema-logical or of the epistemological.” Lacan should be read as we read a hermetic poet. In Italy, modernist poetry is still today known as “hermetic.” Lacan is hermetic, but he is not a poet. And in fact, his statement on love has the pretentious form of a definition, even if it is evidently not a logical definition nor an epistemic explanation. It is neither poetry nor knowledge, it is topo-logy. I shall try to explain. Since Plato, philosophy has always tried to confute what today is known as relativism, i.e. statements of the type “human beings always delude themselves.” Whether it is the former Pope Ratzinger or Daniel Dennett, anti-relativists point out that with such a statement, a relativist claims to be saying something nondelusional, therefore it is false to say that “human beings always delude themselves.” This anti-relativist argument has been used for thousands of years to try to prove that sometimes human beings do not delude themselves; for example, when they rationalize rigorously, or when they affirm truths written in the Bible or the Koran, or when they understand Gödel’s theorem, and so on. A Lacanian position towards a subject who states that “human beings always delude themselves” could be expressed as follows: this person is certainly speaking the truth, but not-all the truth. Their very enunciation is an exception to the stated truth, but it does not for this reason confute it. In other words, every universalization implies exceptions and eccentricities, and these are the subject matter of psychoanalysis. For Lacan, psychoanalysis has been successful, despite everything, because it deals with exceptions to universalness, with the so-called patients who suffer their state of being outside universalness. When Lacan speaks about truth, deep down he is talking about woman. He returns to an ancient tradition that considers woman an allegory of truth. He says “like the stated truth, Woman is not-all.” Women, individual women, are the Epimenides of femininity because they evade universalness, they evade womanness. In other words: it is true that some women exist, but they are not definable using universal qualities, even those of possessing a uterus and ovaries. That is to say: stating a universal truth always implies a not-all that at once establishes it and limits it. The paradox is that Epimenides is right, but his saying does not fall within his said. In short, Epimenides bars the state of being a Cretan, i.e Cretan ]. As we can see, Lacan’s “logic” is a challenge against logic in the strictest sense of the term. All this seems delirious to the accountant. In fact, we can

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see Epimenides’s not as a mere paradox, but as the core of a political problem. What relationships are there between Epimenides, the Cretans, truth, and lying? Where does Epimenides place himself as a subject? He is a Cretan, yet he presents himself as an exception among Cretans, being the only individual who states the truth about Cretans. We owe it to Epimenides if Cretans are not-all. . . . Is his position then that of a dissident, does he risk exile? Or, on the contrary, by saying that stating the truth is lying, is he running as prime minister of the island of Minos? And what if immigrants from Africa ready to speak the truth landed in Crete? Would they be “repelled” on the rust-buckets of truth as an Italian minister was doing very recently? Has this tangle of topo-implications not always represented the core of political dialectics? And this is something we also saw in the case of Lacan’s analysand of Islamic origins: thanks to analysis he discovered he was a Muslim and didn’t know it. In what religious locus can this man be situated? Therefore, the Lacanian statement “love is giving something you don’t have” has a topological sense insofar as “what you do not have” is still something that can be inscribed as such; in the same way as set theory contemplates the empty set. And a little like a gift that costs nothing that we bring to a birthday party; the birthday girl or boy will say to us “what a lovely thought!” “It’s the thought that counts,” we say, and therefore the object given as a gift is nothing. Or rather, not-nothing, because a thought is not nothing. For example, Lacan says that the anorexic is not a girl who doesn’t eat anything, but a girl who eats rien, “nothing.” She stuffs herself with something that is indeed “nothing,” she finds enjoyment in the empty set. In the same way as I can eat “nothing,” I can give “what I do not have” which, in the case of love, is giving that “thing” – beyond sex and fondness – that I do not have. The significance of the symbolic is clinically proven by the evidence that it is very difficult for many subjects to do without what they do not have. Let’s take the real case of a folie à deux involving a mother and a single daughter, which consists of a series of paralyzing obsessive rituals revolving around washing and keeping the house clean. The mother began the psychotic cycle when she was already over 40, after divorcing from her daughter’s father. It was actually a marriage only on paper, because she and her husband had never lived together and he had disappeared for several years. For years he had been living with another woman, but she absolutely refused to grant him a divorce, until she was forced to do so because of his legal initiatives. Her breakdown, into which she dragged her daughter, occurred immediately afterwards. It’s as if her subjective consistency had been completely clinched to being married, to bearing her husband’s name, even in his absence, i.e. clinched to what I would call The Name of the Man (after all, she had always complained of her father’s total absence; physically present, but absent as a paternal instance). Having lost this name, she and her daughter began acting compulsively, identifying the lost name with dirt; in Lacanian terms, they spend their days keeping the Other away. The mother can’t leave the house because going out would force her to touch or brush against non-domestic

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objects, and, as such, sources of contamination of otherness. And it is significant that the mother sticks a tag on every piece of furniture or household appliance indicating its function, “washing machine,” “tap,” “storage closet,” as if the name made these otherwise alien objects recognizable. This need to tag reveals how the symbolic is detached from reality: the compulsion to avoid any contact with the other betrays the fact that the subject (and the daughter as its derivation) has remained attached to the Other as Name of the Man, as if this Name could guarantee an otherwise impossible self-ownership. Because in French, the propre, meaning clean, is identified with the propre as one’s own. Constantly staging noncontact with the other, the subject always fails the detachment, she doesn’t accept giving up what she doesn’t have. Because it is only insofar as our being does not depend on the symbolic Name of the Other that we can have a sort of ironic dependency on the symbolic. As the Stoics said, meaning is incorporeal. . . .

References Blanchot, M 1997, Friendship, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto. Derrida, J 1967, La voix et le phénomène, PUF, Paris. Frege, G 1892, ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik C, pp. 25–50. Freud, S 1925, ‘Negation (1937)’, in Strachey, J, ed., The Ego and the Id and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19 (1923–1925), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1961, pp. 235–239. Gallese, V 2006, ‘La molteplicità condivisa. Dai neuroni mirror all’intersoggettività’, in a cura di S. Mistura, Autismo. L’umanità nascosta, Einaudi, Torino, pp. 207–270. Heidegger, M 1957, Der Satz vom Grund, 5. Lektion, Günther Neske, Pfullingen. Heidegger, M 1987, Zollikoner Seminare. Protokolle-Gespräche-Briefe, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main. Lacan, J 1966, Ecrits, II, Seuil, Paris. Eng trans. Ecrits: A Selection, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2004. Lacan, J 1973, Le Séminaire, Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1978. Lacan, J 1975, Le Séminare, livre I. Les écrits techniques de Freud, Seuil, Paris. Lacan, J 1978, Lacan in Italia/Lacan en Italie, 1953–1978, Contri, G, ed., La Salamandra, Milano. Lacan, J 2005, Le triomphe de la religion, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Triumph of Religion, Preceded by: Discourse to Catholics, Polity, Cambridge, 2015. Laclau, E 2005, On Populist Reason, Verso, London. Leader, D 2016, Hands: What We Do with Them – and Why, Hamish Hanilton, London. Sartre, J-P 1995, Anti-semite and Jew, Schocken, New York. Sokal, A and Bricmont J 2003, Intellectual Impostures, Gardners Books, Eastbourne. Tammet, D 2012, Thinking in Numbers, Hodder & Stoughton, London.

5 APRÈS-COUP, THE FUTURE PERFECT, THE HERMENEUTIC CIRCLE, ALIENATION AND SEPARATION

1 The weave of destiny A passage from Lacan’s Seminar XXIII: In fact, chances push us left and right, and we make of them – because it is we who braid it – our destiny. We make of these chances our destiny, because we speak. We believe that we say what we want, but really, it is what the others wanted, more particularly our family, that speaks to us – take this us as a direct object. We are spoken, and because of that, we make, of the chances that push us around, a sort of weave. And indeed, there is a weft – we call that our destiny. ( Lacan 2005, p. 162) I chose this passage because in it Lacan not only expresses the core of his thinking as a whole, but also the essential problem that beleaguers and threatens him. In it Lacan seems to be saying that our life is fortuitous, that it doesn’t have a precise sense as such. Something obvious: what thinker today would say that our life has a sense as such? The chances of life push us left and right, but – he adds – we make of them a destiny. Destiny is something that will occur anyway, but here Lacan says “we make of these chances our destiny.” This is an ambiguous expression: does it mean that in these chance happenings we simply interpret a destiny? Do we think we can see something pre-written in our wanderings? Or that a secret necessity guides the chances of our life? But Lacan tells us that “we make of [our destiny] a sort of weave.” So, should we read this “we make of it” in the sense that we actively weave together chance happenings to derive a sense from them? Or the sensation of a destiny, of an ineluctable need? Are we mere readers and interpreters of the wanderings of our life, or

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are we the authors – albeit unawares – of the plot of these wanderings? Of course, the two things can be correlated, but then we must ask: how does the interpretation of our life that we give after the events (après-coup, afterwardness) weave into the way we produce these lives of ours? This is the central problem of every logo-therapeutic practice, i.e. of every psychotherapy. Here Lacan seems merely to be saying that what appears as our destiny – a necessity – has actually been weaved by us; that we are the authors of our future without recognizing ourselves as such. But I find this idea quite banal, and any analyst would subscribe to it. It evokes “self-fulfilling prophecies,” traps that any psychologist is well-acquainted with. Like when someone says “I feel I’ll do badly at the exams tomorrow,” and indeed they do go badly. However, the question remains open to find out whether what we take as our destiny is entirely an effect of our acting in a certain way, or whether it is our acting that is actually only the product of contingent circumstances, even if we interpret these circumstances as “necessary.” The statements that follow do not solve this uncertainty and in fact expound upon it. What follows reaffirms Lacan’s logocentrism: we “make of ” the chances of life our destiny because we are speaking beings. But this word that “destinizes” is not our word, it is that of the Other – firstly of the parent, the first to occupy the place of the Other. Even a non-Lacanian psychoanalyst would agree: “we are spoken,” in the sense that the will of our adults has already defined and designed us. In his book about Flaubert – L’idiot de la famille – Sartre writes: “when fathers have projects, children have destinies” (Sartre 1981, p.  109). In other words, when the Other has a wish for us, we subjects should make it our destiny to satisfy it. Sartre, too, could therefore subscribe to Lacan’s statement. The only difference between Lacan and the analysts of other schools apparently consists in the fact that, for the former, the will of our parents or tutors is conveyed to us essentially through words – and not mainly through motherly emotions or experiences. But this difference doesn’t seem crucial to me. Yet, immediately afterwards, Lacan reinstates the problematic nature of his argument – fortunately. He says that “we make, of the chances [of life] . . . a sort of weave,” insisting on the ambiguity of the “we make.” In fact la trame, weave, is something that is at once objective and subjective (in French trames means plot, weave and weft). The trame of a novel is the way the narrated events are arranged; but their arrangement is also our reading of the events according to a certain logic, according to “a plot.” Is it we who see a narrative form in a series of events, or do the events themselves sketch out a form that imposes itself on us as a plot? Allow me to call these events traumas – when an event breaks a routine, a regular way of life. To what extent is the Gestalt, la trame, of “traumas” (of events) in the dynamics of traumas themselves? Or is it we who see this Gestalt, this figure, as a phantom with which we dress trauma/events? In the 20th century we even had novels with no plot; those of Faulkner, for example. Or unconnected events with a meta-plot in the sense that, in the end, the author gives their succession a form, like in Schnitzler’s La Ronde. Conversely,

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in many television series the events unravel in several plots, but without us being able to say “this is ultimately the general plot.” The several plots never complete the puzzle. In other words, “making a weave” lends itself to an objectivist reading (“there is a weave in the events”) or to a subjectivist one (“we interpret the events as a weft”). This ambiguity is not, however, Lacan’s unique contribution, it was already in Freud. A late essay by Freud, Constructions in Analysis (Freud 1937), is often interpreted as a partial denial of analytic interpretation as a symbolic decoding: analytic work should instead operate as a Konstruktion of the subject’s life plot. Now, in German Konstruktion can mean both “construction” and “reconstruction.” The problem is that these two senses are quite different: we call reconstruction – for example, of a crime – the attempt to narrate the “web” of facts; whilst we call construction a made up story. An historical event is reconstructed, and a novel is constructed. Whilst a plot is something that can be both reconstructed and constructed. The “plots” in the sense of conspiracy are something one constructs. Freud seems to be saying that he means Konstruktion in the sense of reconstruction. Yet, symptomatically, he chooses this term – here too the choice of words reveals more than the author thinks he is telling us; words know a thing or two more than the thoughts they express. There’s a psychoanalytical current today that calls itself “narratological” and has decisively opted for a “constructive” vision, in the sense that the analyst shouldn’t deal with historical truth. According to this conception, the analyst and the patient do no more than build together a narrative plot or web of life; not the truest but the happiest. In fact, an ancient Western tradition thinks that aesthetic construction is more profound and “higher” than historical reconstruction. Aristotle himself said that a work of fiction “is more philosophical and more serious (spoudaióteron) than history. Poetry tends to express universals, and history particulars” (Aristotle 1996, 5.5 “Universality,” 51b, 9). Many today still think that a great deal of made up stories are more “serious” than objective history, that they are truer. According to these narratologists, psychoanalysis constructs, in the sense that it helps subjects to give themselves a profoundly “happier” image of their lives. Analysis changes the plot of their lives après-coup, afterwards. Psychoanalysis for them is then a sort of therapeutic literature, a passage from a woeful to a joyful myth. After all, myths produce history no less than economics or demography; myths can change the course of the world. Urban legends, for example, have fed anti-Semitism for centuries, and the myth of superior races has led to millions of victims. At the opposite end, there is a current that aims at reconstructing historical events as the cause of subjective problems. Many psychiatrists – particularly American ones – always correlate mental suffering to traumatic experiences of violence or incest. They argue that reconstruction does not blend with construction; hence the dullness of these (re)constructions. Whilst for Freud the founding traumas were essentially of the sexual order, the common question is whether, for Lacan, the essential trauma is access to

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language. In other words, does the Symbolic or the Real comes first? But perhaps for Lacan it is the concept of “coming before” that makes no sense, because Lacan always thinks in circular terms: what comes first when we go in one direction comes after if we go in the opposite one. If a current is going round in a net, we will never be able to say whether the state of this current at point A is the cause or the effect of the state of the current at point B. In a distribution within a net, every cause is the effect of itself, and every effect is the cause of itself. Some psychiatrists (Masson 1984) have actually accused Freud of not giving sexual traumas the prominence they deserve. They think that Freud really does consider certain forbidden fantasies traumatic; for example, for a young girl to want to have sex with her father. Whilst, in actual fact, the father really did try to have sex with her. But we could prove, if we had the time, that Freud’s position is quite different. For example, for Freud the Urszene, the primal scene, is traumatic; the fact that as a child the Wolf Man had watched his parents’ coitus. But then Freud says that perhaps he had watched the coitus of another pair of adults, or perhaps only of animals. . . . The move from there to saying that this coitus was perhaps fantasized is a short step, but one Freud dares not take. In any case, this is a case of traumatic images: the trauma consists of having the image (imagined? perceived?) of a trauma – “seeing” one’s parents having sexual intercourse.

2 The trauma and the après-coup In reality, Freud has always thought that the origin of both individual history and collective history is a tragic event. Freud was convinced – even though he never gives us convincing proof – that this original event was the killing of the father. Or, if we prefer, the killing of God, which is its hyperbolization. The Oedipus myth is not important because of the incest involved, but because of the fact that Oedipus kills his father. It was his killing his father, and not his having sex with his mother, that generated the plague in Thebes. And his mythology of the primal horde, in which the Urvater, the original father, is killed and eaten by his male children who have joined forces against him, is itself a fantasy history hyperbolization of the Oedipus. In Moses and Monotheism Freud takes up a totally fantastic theory – let’s call it aberrational too – according to which Moses was supposedly killed by the Jews themselves. In other words, at the basis of subjective and collective history there is a murder. According to Freud, human history is one big thriller. Freud oscillates; sometimes these events have a precise historical dating, at other times they’re mental events, fantasies. But let’s say that there’s always an original event. One thing I find misleading is the classic opposition that so many analysts indulge between an “internalist” Freud, for whom it is alleged that only fantastical, internal life counts, and an “externalist” one, upheld by rival schools, for whom only “objects” count (starting from the mother), along with traumas and intersubjective relations. If Lacan had one merit, it would be that he proved this as a false opposition. We must not think in terms of inside vs. outside or internal vs. external.

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Jean Laplanche, Lacan’s pupil and later his adversary, tried to find a compromise. Laplanche also sees a trauma as the source of the unconscious, but he thinks that this trauma consists specifically in the sexual desire of the adult, of the other. The adult wants something from me that I don’t understand, because as a child I don’t understand sexuality – and I have to try to interpret or “translate” what the adult does and says to me. For Laplanche, the origin is linear, at the beginning there is what the adult wants, what the other wants – there is a primacy of the other in psychoanalysis. Whilst in Lacan, there is no well-defined origin; the Other and the subject kick back and forth to each other, so-to-speak, the ball of the origin of the unconscious. In Greek, trauma means wound; here we are then talking about psychic wounds. But the point is: what wounds us in an event and why does this something produce a great wound in me but not in you? Consider how people react to a cancer diagnosis: each person “realizes” their being sick in a different way. Some people after being diagnosed with an incurable cancer say that they have never been so happy. . . . I’m not joking, I have personally had various experiences of this. Because they felt loved more by others. Trauma and subjective structure – which for Lacan is our fundamental fantasme – are inextricably connected, they mutually imply each other. Already in Freud the true problem was not discovering what wounded us but why a particular thing wounded us. In other words, what gives traumatic value to a certain event? For Lacan, there is a traumatic event because there is a plot of language. But language – the killing of the thing – is not only a metaphysical trauma. Deep down, Lacan conceives our being speaking-beings as a plot or weave of traumas. There is always a loop between Symbolic and Real, between language and event. Incidentally, today many take for granted that a real trauma is the origin of a mental pain. At least until a few years ago, if an American novel or film featured a character with “existential” problems, someone whose distress we couldn’t understand, we could be sure that sooner or later we would find out that in infancy they had been the victim of some incestuous or paedophilic violence. In the US and elsewhere this has led to an authentic mass psychosis, which I’ve had the opportunity to observe closely. Most of the individuals – women in particular – at one point “remembered” that they suffered abuse, sexual abuse in particular, at the hands of fathers, mothers, grandmothers, siblings, or family friends and acquaintances. A witch-hunt. The reasons are the same as those that lead to the persecution of a scapegoat; like the Jews. “If we’re unhappy, the Jews are to blame!” Today, in many rich countries, people say: “we’ve got wealth, but we’re unhappy. Dirty relatives must be to blame.” Identifying a trauma – always the same one – as crucial is the first step towards some form of political persecution. Psychoanalysis tends to become polarized either as a pure interpretation-based “construction” or as a specific historical “reconstruction.” But Lacan doesn’t decide between reconstruction or construction. So, significantly, he talks about “plot” and “trauma.”

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Still today the debate goes on in the social sciences whether we should reconstruct historical and social facts in relation to causes (like in physics) or in relation to sense. If a war causes destruction, is the war the cause of it or is war, as a social institution, a matter of sense? Lacan wants to overcome the alternative between primacy of cause and primacy of sense, between scientific explanation and hermeneutic interpretation. An impossible task? If so, Lacan attempted it anyway. Even if his approach remains entirely within the dimension of sense, within a theory of subjectivity – his Dionysian dandyism – he has nevertheless always insisted on something external to the subjectivity that structures it. He insisted on, bombarded us, with a cause of subjectivity and sense, which he identifies with object a, the object that causes our desire. He calls extimity that central void implied by subjective interiority. As we saw, every subjectivity, every supposed intimacy, is a going around in a torus, in a lack or void. He would give several names to this extimity: lack of being, Thing, object a, agalma, central void. . . . But this externality to subjectivity in Lacan will always be double-faced: on the one hand, the external is what imposes itself as the Real, and on the other, it is what is real for a specific subject. At the same time, extimity will be what for me, as the observer of another subject, is their Real, something that at once exceeds and produces them. The ideal would be to override this alternative, but I wonder to what extent this overriding could only and for always remain an ideal. Hence Lacan tries to play in a sort of third space between cause and sense; a space outlined by the concept of après-coup. Après-coup translates Freud’s Nachträglichkeit. Jean Laplanche (2017) proposes the term afterwardness for English, whilst the Standard Edition uses various disconnected terms such as “deferred action,” “after-effect,” and “subsequent.” By Nachträglichkeit Freud apparently means something very simple: in our life we remember certain events as particularly significant and traumatic, whereas at the time they actually happened we did not experience them as such. Certain events only take on their meaning afterwards, après-coup. The best-known example is the Wolf Man. According to Freud, the neurosis of this adult man was the reprise of a neurosis he had suffered since the age of four and a half, when he had the dream about the wolves: five wolves perching in a tree watching him as he lay in bed. This dream, connected to a neurosis, was an après-coup of an earlier experience, which had been by no means traumatic at the time it happened: having observed a coitus a tergo performed by his parents. This original scene, Urszene, however, is never remembered by the Wolf Man; it is a pure analytic construction (or reconstruction?). A scene does not become traumatic immediately but only afterwards. This would seem quite a trivial statement. Those who took part in the storming of the Bastille in Paris on July 14th 1789 never thought that this limited scuff le was to signal a new era in history. The actors of that event will have realized (future perfect) the historical sense of their experience only après-coup. Lacan

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isolates this concept of Nachträglichkeit in order to distance psychoanalysis as a whole, theory and practice, from positivism; to unleash it from the positive sciences and turn it into a practice of signification. My impression – which I have expounded upon in other writings ( Benvenuto 2018) – is that après-coup appears so important because it somehow puts together cause and sense. First I experience an event 1 that produces no effects; then, at another time, I experience an event 2 that gives a different sense to event 1. This sense becomes, for example, the cause of my neurotic symptoms 3. In both cases we are dealing with events, but the sense that event 2 affords event 1 becomes the cause of a situation 3.

3 The horror of immortality I said earlier that modernity has embraced the precept “become what you are.” In the ancient world things were different. The Greeks, for example, believed that the sense – the plot – of a lifetime would only be revealed at the very end, in the way someone died. So, for the ancients a life will have been beautiful if it ended with a “beautiful death.” And for a man, the most beautiful of deaths was to be killed in battle. We could say that their ethics was “you are the way you will have died.” The analyst too looks at the life of subjects in the future perfect: the history of a life gives the essence of the subject who is living that life only . . . afterwards. “If that woman falls in love with me, then everything I said to her will have been seductive.” While I’m seeing this woman I don’t know whether my behaviour is really seductive: only the future will be able to reveal this to me. The life I live is in the present, whilst its sense will be given in the future: the sense of my current existence is therefore always in the future perfect. If we look at our life as positivists it will seem like a succession – which at a certain moment is interrupted – of present points in time, of heres and nows. If, instead, I look at it “archéologically,” it will seem like a process, the sense of which is suspended in what is to come. The cognitive sciences are also acquainted, empirically, with après-coup. For example, Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize winner for his research on happiness, once studied the way people experience music ( Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, and Stone 2004). He made a sample of individuals listen to a piece of music they particularly liked. Half the sample – group A – were made to listen to a CD where the first part had terrible sound quality, with irritating noises and other defects, and the second part had a perfect sound. The other half of the sample – group B – were made to listen to the same CD, but in the opposite order: the first part had perfect sound quality and the second a very poor one. Well, the result was that, having to express an opinion on their global listening experience, those in group A judged their overall experience far more positively than those in group B. Hence a certain positivistic surprise on behalf of Kahneman, who talked of the listeners making a mistake in assessing their emotional experiences! But this “mistake” is merely the effect of après-coup, the fact that

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experience is never a passive reception of a sum of stimuli, but an organization of sense on the basis of the desire-enjoyment principle. The difference was that group A had lived through an experience of improvement and group B one of deterioration. If we invert the temporal sense of certain events, the sense of the experience changes. Significantly, many languages use the same word – such as the French sens – for both “meaning” and “direction.” Hence the need for a limit – especially that of death – for us to be able to make sense of any experience. For this reason, we cannot agree with Freud’s thesis stating that the unconscious does not really know death, i.e. that we unconsciously believe we are immortal. In fact, if we did not presume death, there could be no après-coup, no structure of sense for us. The Immortal is a short story by Borges (2004). The narrator meets strange human beings who vegetate in a sort of stupefacient catatonic decadence. We then discover that they are immortal beings and that, consequently, their lives are totally meaningless. Only one sense still gives them a motivation: to find the river – the only one on the entire Earth – whose waters make you mortal again. In other words, the most dreadful thing for a human being would appear to be immortality – and Lacan said something very similar. Immortality would dissolve any possibility of the sense – in the double sense of the word as meaning and as direction – of life. Some will argue that according to Christians, we’re all immortal. Does this mean that Christian life is entirely void of sense? No, because death operates a crucial function of separation: if at the end of your life you repent, whatever sin you may have committed, even if you were Hitler, you would be saved. In other words, immortality (if we take hell to be an eternal dying) is uncertain, never guaranteed. There’s some suspense. Why do we say that the sense of an event is traumatic, rather than saying that the event itself was the cause of particular psychic wefts? The relations between cause and sense are problematic. “And indeed there is a weft – we call that our destiny,” Lacan says in the quoted passage. What sense should we give to this “there is”? The same as when we say that the chair on which I am sitting is there? Or in the sense in which a publisher might say that “the novel is there,” meaning that the manuscript already has a satisfactory form for a novel? Being that this weft is a plot, something in the order of a form, the second case would seem more appropriate. The sense of “there is a plot” is in fact “there is a sense.” And to interpret this sense as destiny amounts to interpreting it as a necessity.

4 Psychic causality We should also ask whether there is any room for freedom in this human destiny that appears necessary. We already mentioned Lacan’s profound aversion – in the wake of Freud – toward any discourse that presumes or glorifies human freedom. Yet, insofar as Lacan is opposed to a naturalistic vision of subjectivity,

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he does presume freedom somewhere. It is not a question of saying to the subject “you weaved the plot, which you take as a necessity that has coerced you!”, but of saying to the subject “you have somehow consented to entering the plot the Other has hatched for you.” The point, however, is that the Other, according to Lacan, doesn’t exist. It is not a question of revealing, behind a necessary plot, a sort of free submission to the Other, which should be repudiated, as Sartre preached. The question is evading a necessity insofar as one recognizes it as such. “The plot is there.” But is this supposed necessity, this constrictive plot, the cause of our problems or only their sense? Lacan leaves this question, to which we could only have an answer après-coup, suspended. So we return to the après-coup. We must return to it because it appears to me as the great distinction between science and psychoanalysis. This is a central point. The sciences count on the causal reconstruction of processes generated in a supposedly linear temporality. For example, (1) we have some water, hence (2) we heat it to over 100°C, hence (3) the water boils. Analogously (1) we have a small child, hence (2 ) his mother, who isn’t sufficiently good, interacts with him without reverie, hence (3) as an adult the child will be a manic depressive. Things become more complicated when science deals with networks, such as neural networks: here causality ceases to be linear and becomes far more complex. But it still remains a search for causes. In any case, the definition of circular causes remains within the sphere of an explicative search for causes. Mainstream psychology tries to reconstruct these kind of linear or reticular causal processes among behavioural or mental events. For Lacan, psychoanalysis has nothing to do with linear causality but with the temporality – Temporalität – of sense. It does not describe an evolutional history of subjects, but their genealogy, which is a transcendental history. Only if we grasp the difference between “evolutional history” and “genealogy” will Lacan seem (a little more) comprehensible. So, we can ask what is the place of reality, as we refer to it in both common and scientific language, in the psychoanalysis of Lacan? To what extent are the events that make up the plots of our lives causal? What is the connection, within this plot, between word, desire of the Other and finding or recovering aims and forms? In Lacan all these questions remain unanswered. Perhaps because they have no theoretical answer.

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All of Lacan’s thought is a process that aims at accounting for a psychoanalytic experience, his own. This practical experience is also undecided, it remains as if suspended between the necessary and the contingent, between the signifier and the Real.

5 Interpretation and explanation An Italian-born friend of mine began an analysis in France with a Lacanian analyst. A childhood theme emerged: an intense knee pain his mother suffered from, which in his imagination had been caused by him. The analyst interpreted this pain in the genou, the knee, as a word game with je – nous, “I – us,” something that actually had a certain correspondence with his problems at the time. But of course he soon realized that when he was a child in Italy he had no knowledge of French, and that such a pun could not have worked for him. But the analyst did not f linch: “the interpretation – he said – is valid après-coup.” This analyst confirms two negative clichés about Lacanianism: indulging in word puzzle interpretations and appealing to an easy version of après-coup, to afterward-signification. I wonder, however, whether this risk of sloppiness isn’t present in virtually all analysts of all schools simply because they interpret. Every interpretative system authorizes these hermeneutic excesses that prompt the censure of our “serious” Super-Ego. Among analysts we say that a colleague is “a savage” when he or she doesn’t show the sophistication of those who trained in “serious” analytical schools – well, I would say that every interpretation is savage. On the contrary, every objective explanation of phenomena is “civilized,” because it can be summed up as a search for a regularity in these phenomena. Instead, every interpretation is by nature an erratic explanation, an unfolding or displaying; it is something that is unfurled without explaining, and without a crease. It’s true that Lacanians always tend to dissociate themselves from hermeneutic thinking, but I wonder if many of them don’t actually fall into very poor forms of hermeneutics. In this sense, the appeal to après-coup risks becoming a vehicle towards a “savage” relativism and a hermeneutic degeneration of psychoanalysis. In fact, for Lacan hermeneutics is a degeneration or, as he called it, an obscenity of the universities. He included it in University Discourse. In fact, the abuse is not the interpretative freedom, but the pretence that an interpretation can also describe a causal process. In other words, that a particular sense I read in certain subjective processes can also be their cause. Conversely, every time a causal reconstruction wants to stray into the domain of sense, it will be illicit. Consider what has happened in the last two centuries or so with Darwinian theory; it describes quite convincingly the transformation mechanisms of living forms. But soon after it was given the sense of an ethical and political prescription; so we had the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, a “social Darwinism,” and a certain free-market theory claimed to be inspired by Darwin. But these

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“Darwinisms of sense” have nothing to do with the Darwinism of biology. So, again and again, some explanations become interpretations and some interpretations are mistaken for explanations. But an interpretation that pretends to be a determination of causes of facts is an attempt to cover the senseless contingency of our existence with the syrup of sense. We then understand why Lacan grafts a reference to causality and the Real onto a doctrine of the après-coup. And why, to our great surprise (as we saw in the previous conversation), he says he expects a solution to the mystery of the Real from scientific calculation. When Lacan says that object a – an object outside the plot of language and sense – is the object that causes desire, he wants to bridle hermeneutic complacency. This is the most important difference between Freud and Lacan: whilst for the former drives express organic tensions and seek and find an object that can therefore be replaced by another, the latter considers that the drive has a cause that is external to it, object a. Beyond any sense, there is a causal force, an imprinting of an object that triggers the drive, that steers every interpretation towards an original non-sense. Lacan’s reference to “chance” in the opening quote went in that very direction: the plot or weft of life orbits around an opaque event, around an encounter that will never be reducible to an après-coup sense. We could then say that Lacan completes the Nietzschean prescription with: “become who you are in relation to the Real.”

6 There is no metalanguage It should be clear at this point why Lacan belongs to the tradition of transcendentalist thought (which doesn’t mean he believes in the transcendent, in God, in the angels, and so on). For Lacan, language is a transcendental condition – in the Kantian sense – of human subjectivity. Meaning that it is impossible to stand outside language, and to observe it and describe it objectively from there, for the very simple reason that every observation or description of language will always be made linguistically. In fact, what separates Lacan from the positivist approach is expressed by his statement: “there is no metalanguage.” Or, as he also says, “there is no Other of the Other.” Yet in linguistics and in philosophy, metalanguage seems the most obvious thing in the world. If I say: (1) “‘there is no metalanguage’ is a sentence of the English language,” statement (1) is metalinguistic because its object is in turn something linguistic, the sentence “there is no metalanguage.” Metalanguage is there when language takes itself as object, self-referentially. Note that it is not a question of tongues, but of language. Indeed, if I say: (2) “‘there is no metalanguage’ est une phrase de la langue anglaise,”

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this is a metalinguistic statement expressed in French with an English sentence as the object. By saying there is no metalanguage, Lacan means that everything we can say about language, whether scientific or not, will always belong to the language we’re dealing with; we cannot talk about language as if we were outside language. For Lacan, not even linguistics is a meta-language, because it is always a discourse on languages made with language. In general, Lacan rejects the idea that we can stand outside the reality that we ourselves are and from which we speak, that we can look at ourselves in the same way that a Martian who lands on Earth may look at us: we are always on the “Earth” we happen to ref lect on. Even if we go to Mars, our view on the Earth will never be a “Martian” one, but always an earthly one. The model for this exclusion of metalanguage is the “Transcendental Aesthetic” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. For Kant, every knowable phenomenon – including our thinking – is always spatial and temporal. Importantly, space and time as such are not part of experience itself, but are rather its “transcendental” condition. This means that whilst all our representations are in space and in time, it is nevertheless impossible to represent space and time as such. I could of course paint allegories of space and time, like artists once painted allegories of virtue, modesty, truth, and so on, but these representations would always be spatial and temporal. This does not mean that we cannot talk about space and time, but that we can never talk about them in a meta-spatial or meta-temporal way. Analogously, Lacan does of course talk about signifiers, language, and so on. But he knows that we can never pretend to be talking about them extra-linguistically or starting from a super-language. For Lacan, language gives linguistic shape to everything human beings think, do, and long for. Hence Lacan doesn’t suggest a scientific theory to prove the significance of language in Homo sapiens; he makes the latter a “parlêtre,” a “talkbeing” (a speaking subject). It is an axiom from which he starts. But we cannot start from before or from outside an axiom to prove it, guarantee it, “found it,” and so on. Otherwise it would no longer be an axiom. When we practice natural sciences, our knowledge doesn’t seem to be a part of their object. If we say “water is H 2O,” this sentence is not in itself made of hydrogen and oxygen. But, as we’ve seen, when we try to find out something about parlêtres, we ourselves remain “speaking beings.” This applies to all the so-called human sciences. For example, Pierre Bourdieu, a prominent Marxist university professor, wrote a book about university professors, Homo Academicus ( Bourdieu 1988), which adopted a critical and sarcastic stance toward academics. But it is evident that even this book was in itself an academic act, and in fact it was very successful in the university world. We may even criticize an institutional world, the important thing is that we impeccably remain inside that very world. According to Lacan, the Other is above all language that would incarnate it in more or less concrete figures: mother, father, analyst, and so on. As such, it

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appears evident that “there is nothing Other of the Other.” That is, there are no symbolic relations that found – in the sense of accounting for – the fundamental symbolic relations, such as those between father/children, nurturer/nurtured, woman/man, I/you, analyst/analysand, and so on. Let’s take my example of the symbolic relation between speaker and audience. A scientific study on lecturers and listeners as individuals is certainly possible; we can point out, for example, that Lacan’s seminars are more popular among those of a certain social level, of a certain linguistic area. . . . But none of these objective studies can in turn “found” the symbolic relation between speaker and audience. There is no symbolic code stronger than that between speaker and audience: it is a relation that structures certain human relationships without being in turn produced by a symbolic relation of a higher level. Substantially, all of Lacan’s thought is inside what is known as the “hermeneutic circle,” even though he never personally evokes it.

7 “Your money or your life!” Among the many concepts that Lacan illustrated ( Lacan 1973, pp.  195–205 [French edition]) but rarely returned to, one became particularly popular among Lacanians: the passage from Alienation to Separation. Here he uses the logical and mathematical instruments of set theory; a theory that at the time, 1964, was also extremely popular in the intellectual world. In particular, Lacan uses the union and intersection between sets. A logical union is when we intersect two sets and, rather than simply adding up the elements of one and the other, we unite them. In Figure 5.1 we have one set of European countries and one of Asian countries. But two countries, Turkey and Russia, are both European and Asian; hence the union of the two sets adds up to eight (not ten).

France Italy Germany

FIGURE 5.1

Logical union

Turkey Russia

China Japan India

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The intersection between sets means instead that we take only two elements, Turkey and Russia, as the only ones that combine Europeanness and Asianness. Starting from this simple difference in set theory, Lacan establishes the very complex difference between alienation (logical union) and separation (logical intersection), but radically altering their sense in his mathemathérie. In the place of “European states,” Lacan puts “being (the subject),” whilst instead of “Asian states,” he puts “sense (the Other)” ( Figure 5.2). But in this case, we do not have a union but a choice, vel: “either Being or Sense.” In other words, if we choose Being we lose sense: we have the pure senseless existence of a subject. If we choose Sense, we lose Being: we have the Other, as sense, which doesn’t exist. It’s surprising that he defines the interaction of the two sets as “non-sense,” whereas, following set theory logic, we should instead call it “being and sense” together. But indeed, immediately after relating this schema of his to logical operations, Lacan betrays them. It’s as if in our example the European states excluded the two states that are also Asian (Russia and Turkey). In Lacan’s terms, it’s as if Europe alienated those two countries (which, incidentally, is precisely the situation today between Europe, Russia and Turkey). Alienation is therefore precisely the thwarting of logical union: if I choose Being, I find that a part of me is without Sense (dreams, symptoms, parapraxis . . .). But if I choose Sense, I also lose my Being, and hence, because of this, I lose Sense itself. We enter a dizzying dialectics that is quite alien to the logic of mathematics. And, indeed, Lacan illustrates the alienating vel with an even more astonishing example: the alternative “your money or your life” that a robber presents to his victim (Figure 5.3). There is clearly no choice in this situation: if I choose my life, I will carry on living without my money, whereas if I choose my money, I lose both my money and my life. There is a lethal factor, Lacan says, that makes the choice a

Being (the Subject)

FIGURE 5.2

nonmeaning

Meaning (the Other)

The Spaltung Diagram in Seminar XI

Alienation

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The money

FIGURE 5.3

The money in the life

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The life

“Your money or your life”

non-choice. Indeed, if we substitute “your money” with “sense” and “your life” with “being,” we realize the isomorphism: if I lose sense in order to choose being, I shall be, I shall live, with a senseless slice of life. But if I choose sense, I will be depriving myself of being, and hence of sense too. In short, Lacan uses these formal logical instruments in order to purposely distort them from their original sense. Lacan actually uses these logical operations to refer to something very different from pure logos: to something I would call a power relation. The logical mathematical operations to which the figures refer are “animated” – in the same way as cartoons are animated – by the tragic dimension of the power of life or death at the heart of human destiny. The Lacanian game consists in diverting these instruments of logic and mathematics, in order to help the emergence of something I would call a fundamental violence – a sort of blackmail – at the origin of human subjectivity. “Your money or your life!,” “your freedom or your life!” In other words, it is not a question of seeing how the subject is structured “logically,” maybe in response to primary affective needs. Rather, it is a question of seeing how, from the very beginning, the human subject finds itself before a forced choice, before an only apparently free alternative, in a bridled freedom; how the path of subjective separation is ultimately an impossible process; and the fact that, precisely because it is impossible, it is our only concrete possibility.

8 “The magnificent cuckold” But one may ask: is there any advantage in this distortion of logical instruments? Does it make anything of human life any more intelligible? Or is it a mere lucubration with no applications? I would like to show how a particular theatrical stunt can actually express alternatives very similar to those Lacan talks about. A case in which dramatic artifice illustrates something profound about

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love relations; what I would call a fundamental antinomy that bears them and that the examples of “your money or your life!” and “your freedom or death!” tried to make tangible. The Magnificent Cuckold by Fernand Crommeliynck (1921) was a successful farce, apparently with no real ambitions of psychological analysis. Stella and Bruno are a young married couple and they love each other passionately. Stella is very beautiful and is wooed in vain by many of the males in the Flemish village where they live. But at one point, Bruno is suddenly seized by jealousy and demands that Stella confess with whom she is betraying him. Bruno has a lookalike, Estrugo (a fusion of étranger, stranger, and Iago). And despite the fact that Estrugo doesn’t say anything, Bruno soliloquizes with him, construing his jealous lucubrations. In the end, Bruno convinces himself that it is actually Estrugo who has instilled the suspicion in him, that the man has become his Iago. Bruno’s jealousy puzzles us from the very start. He enthusiastically welcomes a cousin of Stella’s into their house, inviting him to occupy the room next to their marital chamber (to allow him to hear their coituses?) for months. He sings the praises of his wife’s beauty, almost stripping her bare before her cousin, and when he finally detects a lustful interest in the guest’s gaze, he slaps him. But he immediately regrets it: he hugs him with an almost homosexual embrace and begs to be forgiven. Bruno becomes uglier and uglier with the passing of time; his obsessive jealousy is disfiguring him. Until he says: “to no longer doubt her fidelity, I will have to become certain of her infidelity. . . . This very night I shall be a cuckold or I shall be dead, the horns or the rope,” to hang himself. (Note the isomorphism with the Lacanian “your money or your life.”) Like Descartes, Bruno wishes to overcome his doubt by appealing to a certainty. He forces Stella to have intercourse with her cousin under his own roof. In this way, he thinks, he will be able to move from apprehension to certainty. But this oxymoronic move does not cure him of his obsession. The paradoxical anecdote – a fervently jealous husband forcing his wife to cheat on him – reveals an important facet about the structure of many jealousies. We understand that somewhere Bruno needs another man to copulate with his woman. Indeed, he affirms apodictically that if his woman will not betray him, he will die! He cannot survive without horns. Why? Consider also the figure of the shadow-man Estrugo, who always accompanies Bruno but hardly talks. In Shakespeare’s play, Iago was other from Othello, he was his secret enemy. Here Iago is only Othello’s shadow, the silent instigator every jealous man needs in order to give substance and perhaps certainty to his torment. Shakespeare is here reinterpreted by making Iago Othello’s ghost. Psychoanalysis therefore suspects that somewhere, in a corner of their minds, many jealous men want to push their loved ones into the arms of others. If at the explicit level you fear something with no justification, it may mean that, on another level, you wish for this something to happen. On a closer and more malicious examination, fear and desire seem to imply rather than oppose each other.

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Let’s return to the Flemish village. Bruno isn’t satisfied with having set up his wife’s betrayal with her cousin: he now forces Stella not to reject any of the men in the village between the ages of 15 and 60. Stella, who still loves him, acquiesces and Bruno himself magnificently manages the comings and goings of the throngs of lovers. The point is that Bruno’s jealousy has by no mean ended, it has simply risen to another level: it has become transcendentalized, we might say. For him, Stella’s complete promiscuity is “only a game to confuse me, a trap she has laid for me.” In fact, what I must find out, through all those who will come to woo her, is the one who will not come. He, the only one she will want to spare from my revenge. She conceals her malice behind an exaggerated good humour, turn-abouts, meanders, convolutions. I pretend just as much as she does. But her favourite – . . . – no, she will not receive him before my eyes. . . . Woe upon the one who will not come to her! (Crommeliynck 1921, p. 115) For Bruno, the others who copulate with Stella are fictitious: he tries to track down the real exorbitant Other she loves. An Other defined by his exclusion from the series of all-the-men she gives herself to. In fact, by going to bed with everybody, Stella proves her love for Bruno: but it is the one who backs out of her love for her husband that our man wants to ferret out. One evening, two masked men offer Stella a charming serenade, which really moves her – one of the two men reminds her of Bruno before his “illness,” young and handsome. The rule for Stella is that she must never say no to any of her wooers, but in this case she hesitates: she can sense that the other really loves her and in the end, after hesitating, she gives herself to him. The man in question is actually Bruno in disguise. Now, because Stella ultimately went to bed with him, Bruno finally has the proof that he is a cuckold! The plethora of lovers didn’t count: what counts is that, without recognizing him as her husband, she went with a man she really loved. “This time – Bruno exclaims – I can have no more doubts and I shall be cured.” But not even this capital proof is enough. While Bruno is in doubt whether he should punish her for her “infidelity,” a herdsman of the village comes along: he demands that Stella go and live with him and his animals out in the country. Stella resists the boor’s violent demands and smacks him . . . the proof Bruno was looking for: wasn’t the Other supposed to be the only excluded one? Is Stella’s great love not then the herdsman? Bruno grabs his rif le to kill the authentic rival he has finally discovered, but Stella, perhaps to save him, puts her arms around the bumpkin’s neck and accepts him. She goes away with him. And Bruno: “I’m not such a fool! . . . another of her tricks! I’m not falling for it again.” The play finishes here, but of course the game could go on forever. Bruno could think that she went off with the herdsman to please him, so the real Other hasn’t been found yet, and so on.

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9 “Either I desire her, or she will enjoy the Other” This factitious pochade seems very far from reality. Yet something essential about love emerges from the dizzying geometry of Crommelynck’s farce; something Lacan tried to illustrate using the logical, mathematical, and dialectical formulations we’ve discussed. Often a beloved is elected through the exclusion of sexual consummation. In many villages there may be a girl who goes with everybody, except for one, the one who really loves her, and that she ultimately loves. In the most fortunate cases, this single excluded man will become her future husband, forever. After all, this is exactly what happened in the medieval tradition of courtly love: the poet freely had sex with the “pastourelles,” the young shepherd girls, all dark-haired, but it was impossible for him to have it with “his girl,” always fair-haired – perhaps because she was already married, or too far away, or dead. The beloved was sketched out in the negative, i.e. excluded from the series of screen-women, as they were called in Dante; the women he pretended to love to avoid revealing his true beloved. But perhaps even in loves in which tenderness and sensuality finally converge, something like an election of the other by exclusion takes place. Why this intricate contraption? To understand the alternative Bruno is taken in by, we should consider the so-called multistable figures, which can be “read” in various ways, which can be perceived as entirely different images. As, for example, the one in Figure 5.4: If we take the white central part as the image standing out on the black background, we see a vase. If, instead, we make the two lateral images stand out, we see two human profiles. We cannot capture the two structures simultaneously: they are alternative to each other. Vel. Being vel sense. The characters of The Magnificent Cuckold jump from one image to the other. First Bruno is faithful to Stella and Stella to him, i.e. both exclude all other men and women from the possibility of having sexual relationships with them. Then the image is suddenly overturned: Stella has to go to bed with everyone, and the Other will be the only excluded one, starting from Bruno himself – they become like the two black profiles.

FIGURE 5.4

Rubin’s vase

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Lacan would say that Bruno can desire and love his wife only if he assumes the enjoyment of the Other (in both the subjective and objective sense of the genitive). Her intercourse with all the other men does not really make her unfaithful, because these others are not the Other. Now, if Stella authentically enjoyed the Other, and the Other enjoyed her, Bruno should punish and repudiate her. But if Stella does not enjoy the Other, if she remains faithful to him, she ceases to be desirable to him. It’s like finding yourself before a robber: “your money or your life!” In the same way, if Bruno decides that Stella belongs to the Other, he loses everything: he loses Stella and his own desire. If she decides that Stella is his, and only his, he will keep his wife but lose his desire for her. According to Lacan, this vice in which Bruno is trapped is not only valid for an eccentric in a farce, but reveals alternatives in which all human beings, each in their own way, are trapped. On the one hand, we have the alienation of every subjectivity: for I, the subject, to enjoy, I need my loved one to enjoy the Other and this Other to enjoy my loved one. But if I try to expel the Other, what I’m then left with is both non-desire and the absence of enjoyment. As we can see in Figure 5.5. The segment the two sets share – between the desiring subject and the enjoying Other – is the space of jealous torment, thanks to which I must always suppose the infidelity of my partner (the fact that she enjoys the Other) in order to refuse her: but in this way I will have neither desire nor enjoyment. We can see here how the two sets – “desiring subject” and “enjoying Other” – take the respective places of “being (the subject)” and “sense (the Other)” from Lacan’s original figure. The shadow that the enjoying Other throws over the subjective desire of the woman makes it possible for the subject to desire her, but without being able to enjoy her. Bruno’s jealousy occupies the middle space, the alternative “either the Other enjoys her, or I do not desire her.” This is Bruno’s

desiring Subject

enjoying Other “The Other enjoys her”

“I desire her”

“Either the Other enjoys her, or I don’t desire her” (jealousy) FIGURE 5.5

Alienation in Love

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perverse alienation. Hence the promised shore of separation, which remains, however, undecided, imprecise: a desiring of the woman as Other, and a subjective enjoyment of her. To come out of this impasse of alienation, every human being must find access to what Lacan calls separation, i.e. to no longer live with the alternative “either I desire her, or she will enjoy the Other.” It is necessary to pick out the wedge where the two sets intersect and accept the sacramental dimension of desire and love (Figure 5.6). Our sexual life has a double face. Coitus between a man and a woman can be something mechanical, a hardly significant entwining of bodies. Instead, a moving coitus – one that makes you quiver with passion – can be experienced when your partner isn’t merely a representative of the opposite sex, but occupies the position of Other. It’s what I call the sacramental character of coitus. Since the 13th century, coitus has represented for the Catholic Church the celebration of the sacrament of matrimony: once the sexual act is consumed, the sacrament has been accomplished. For the Catholic Church, we shouldn’t copulate because we’re married, but we are married insofar as we’ve copulated  – as long as the copulation was accompanied by the conjugal sentiment that commits us to loving. And coitus is a sacrament because it takes place before God. In other words, in matrimonial coitus the couple is never alone; God has a hand in it. In sexual commerce, it is as if the man offered the woman to the Other, and as if the woman let herself be penetrated by the Other, through her partner. We can be complete atheists, but if coitus is transubstantiated by passion, then as partners we inscribe this carnal union in a sort of intersection between ourselves and the Other, we inscribe this physical contact in a space of sense that goes beyond the material act. Therefore, even non-believers evoke significant coituses using “mystical” terms and speak of “erotic ecstasy,” “mysteries of love,” and so on. SEPARATION

FIGURE 5.6

Separation

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In the farce, therefore, Bruno tries to build this sacramental dimension of love, but he is caught up by the alternative Lacan calls alienation, which we illustrated graphically. He is incapable of that separation. As a result, the desiring subject and the enjoying Other intersect and cut Bruno off from both the subject and the Other. This is the space of a non-jealous sexuality – the kind of sexuality that so many characters of Proust’s Recherche, for example, find impossible; for them love and jealousy coincide. A sexuality in which desire and enjoyment connect, in which what I desire is also the Other’s (the partner’s) enjoyment, and what the Other enjoys is my desire. A difficult surgical operation, mostly an ephemeral one, but if it succeeds, it illustrates the masterpiece of love.

References Aristotle 1996, Poetics, Heath, M, trans., Penguin Books, London. Benvenuto, S 2018, ‘The Après-Coup, Après Coup: Concerning Jean Laplanche Problématiques VI. L’Après-Coup’, Language and Psychoanalysis, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 72–87. Borges, JL 2004, ‘The Immortal’, in The Aleph and Other Stories, Penguin Books, London. Bourdieu, P 1988, Homo academicus, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Crommeliynck, F 1921, Le cocu magnifique: Farce en trois actes, Editions de la Sirène, Paris. Eng. Trans. The Magnificent Cuckold, Roof Books, New York, 2007. Freud, S 1937, ‘Constructions in Analysis (1937)’, in Strachey, J, ed., Moses and Monotheism and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 23 (1937–1939), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1964, pp. 255–269. Kahneman D, Krueger AB, Schkade DA, Schwarz N, and Stone AA 2004, A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day reconstruction Method, Mimeo, Princeton. Lacan, J 1973, Le Séminaire, Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1978. Lacan, J 2005, Le Séminaire, livre XXIII. Le sinthome, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Sinthome, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2016. Lacan, J. 1975, Le Séminaire, Livre XX. Encore, Seuil, Paris. Laplanche, J 2017, Après-coup, The Unconscious In Translation, New York. Masson JM 1984, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Sartre, J-P 1981, Family Idiot. Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

6 “PSYCHOPATHOLOGY” AND THE CURE ACCORDING TO LACAN Depression, psychosis, hysteria, obsessional neurosis, perversions, transference

1 The three main structures When asking what it is that the Lacanian vision of psychopathology consists of, we should begin with the consideration that, for Freud and Lacan, psychopathology does not really exist. This is the psychoanalytic turn compared to psychiatry past and present. As we know, Freud puts dreams, parapraxis, jokes and neurotic symptoms on the same level – in short, both “normal” and “pathological” phenomena are explained in the same way – because his idea is that all these are effects of unconscious processes, and we all have an unconscious. Therefore, Freud assimilates paranoiac delusion into a certain kind of metaphysical system. He thinks religions are a sort of collective obsessional neurosis. Freud also talks about the Witz, jokes, as a kind of liberation from a repression, that is, an equivalent of psychic healing. When an analyst says something and the analysand sincerely laughs, this means that a turning process has occurred in the analysis. In short, with psychoanalysis, the big split between the normal and the pathological, which is at the root of the traditional medicine, vanishes. This is why I am always surprised when I hear analysts talking about a “pathological reaction,” or “the healthy and unhealthy part of the self ” and similar concepts. Though it is true that Freud made use of the diagnostic language of the psychiatry of his time (sometimes inventing his own concepts, such as obsessional neurosis), he nevertheless gave it a new sense. Lacan, too, does not think in terms of illness or disorders, but in terms of subjective structures. This means that you can have a neurotic or psychotic structure but not actually develop any apparent neurotic or psychotic clinical symptoms. For example, Freud distinguished between an obsessional character on the one hand – pedantry, thrift, stubbornness, and a certain cold and “too rational” distance – and

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on the other, a blatant obsessional neurosis, which can drive a subject to despair. According to Lacan, both the (normal) character and the pathology have the same structure. Often something in a subject’s life occurs, given her or his own structure, for which too high a price is to be paid: a symptom, a non-tolerable impotence or sufferance, or both. In fact, each subjective arrangement – even one that appears the most satisfying – excludes or sacrifices something somewhere, but this excluded or sacrificed side can then “return” as a symptom. According to Lacan, there are three essential subjective forms: neurosis, psychosis, and perversions. Is this rigid tern a Procrustean bed as some argue? As a matter of fact, Lacanians accept other post-Freudian diagnoses, for example autism, eating disorders, and addiction. They mistrust the now fashionable category of bipolar syndrome, and do not accept the very popular category of the borderline personality, because it is in fact a form of hysteria (we need to stress that for DSM-5, 75% of borderlines are actually women, and we could give the same percentage for hysterics). It is as if an exchange had taken place: DSM no longer accepts hysteria, but it includes borderline personalities; Lacanians do not accept the borderline diagnosis, but keep, and even exalt, the diagnosis of hysteria. In the field of neurosis, then, Lacan distinguishes rigorously between obsessional neurosis (renamed today obsessional-compulsive), hysteria, and phobias. Like Freud, he basically accepts the Kraepelinian – from Emil Kraepelin – diagnostic system of psychosis. In other words, Lacan endorses the fundamental Freudian pathological categories of psychosis, differentiating between paranoia, schizophrenia, and melancholia. We can say that neuroses, perversions, and psychoses become “pathological” because they are the effect of a negation, Verneinung, as Freud called it. As far as each one of us is neurotic, perverse, or psychotic, all of us as subjects are the result of a negation, yet this is not the same negation for everybody. Lacan later says that the object of all negation is castration, that is, the impossibility of finding enjoyment. This scheme may be useful. Several disorders, which became a focus of attention later in time, are not included in this picture, and it is difficult to insert them. In particular, the

Psychopathology

Type of Negation

NEUROSIS Phobia Hysteria Obsessional Neurosis

REPRESSION (Verdrängung, Displacement)

PERVERSIONS Fetishism – Masochism Sadism, Sadomasochism Voyeurism – Exhibitionism Zoophilia, frotteurism, pedophilia, coprophilia, etc.

DISAVOWAL (Verleugnung)

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Psychopathology

Type of Negation

PSYCHOSIS

FORECLOSURE, seizure (Verwerfung; forclusion) of the Name-of-the-Father

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PARANOIAS – Persecution Delusion – Megalomaniac Delusion – Erotomania – Jealousy Delusion – (Querulous paranoia?) SCHIZOPHRENIAS MELANCHOLIA (MANIC-DEPRESSIVE PSYCHOSIS)

so-called new forms of the symptom (“true” anorexia and bulimia, addictions, psychosomatic disorders), and autistic spectrum, which psychoanalysis too hastily connected to a form of psychosis. Anyway, this is quite a simple and concise scheme when compared to the 360 items listed in the DSM-5 pathologies. Neurosis is correlated to a fundamental negation Freud called Verdrängung – repression in English, but its real meaning is displacement. The Freudian model of repression is forgetting: I forget what disturbs me. The model of all neurosis is the fact that we all tend to displace painful things out of our memory. But to repress is not to destroy, it is a way of putting something aside. So, the repressed representation can always come out sooner or later. Instead, perversions are correlated to a form of negation Freud called disavowal – Verleugnung. We indulge in perverse acts or phantasies because we disavow something we nevertheless know. Lacan is completely original when he states that in psychosis a third type of negation manifests itself: forclusion, foreclosure (see especially Lacan 1981). Both in French and English forclusion and foreclosure are legal terms. We could also use the word exclusion, in the sense of a total rejection; but I would rather say that something is seized from the subject. According to Lacan, psychosis is the effect of a primordial foreclosure of a crucial signifier – which he calls Name-of-the-Father – to which the subject has no access, and never will have, in the sense that this Name is seized by the mother, who is unable to return the paternal function to her child. According to Lacan, the distinction between symptoms and structure is essential. It means that a neurotic subject can show blatantly perverse symptoms, but in actual fact has a neurotic structure. Someone may manifest strong obsessional symptoms, but the analyst understands that his structure is hysterical, and so on. The DSM groups and classifies behaviours in a certain way, but behind these disorders it does not suppose any structure. It is never clear what criteria the DSMs follow to group certain symptoms rather than others. The structural approach can of course be questioned. In fact, the fundamental distinction between structures and symptoms reminds us of a classical

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philosophical distinction, that between essence and accidents. I do understand that this distinction can always be challenged, but in medicine it is focal: a fever is a symptom, tuberculosis (which implies mostly having a temperature) is a morbid structure. The paradox is that psychoanalysis – for which Lacan rejects any assimilation to a medical specialty – actually uses a system of diagnostic classification that is much closer to modern scientific medicine than that of the DSMs, because psychoanalysis integrates diagnosis with aetiology. Psychiatric disorders are like a starry sky. From the beginning, human beings have given some order to the sky’s bungle by identifying specific constellations. And each culture has given its own astrological order to the heavens. But these were all arbitrary figures until the moment when, in the last century, astronomy became strictly connected to physics. Today we know that, whilst to the naked eye two stars can appear to be very close together, one star can in fact be much closer to us while the other is abysmally far away. Today we are convinced that we know the real groupings, because we believe we have discovered the true structure of the universe we see – we trust our contemporary astronomers, just like the Ancients trusted Ptolemy. Lacan tried to do something about the subjective constellations that is similar to what modern astronomy has done in relation to the sky. Unfortunately, in psychopathology we do not have a rigor or strictness comparable to that of contemporary cosmology. We said earlier that, according to Lacan, scientific knowledge fell to us from the sky – human beings know much more about faraway galaxies than about their own minds. Human beings are farsighted, like in ophthalmology: the further an object is from them, the better they see it.

2 Psychopathology and science A certain popularity of Lacan’s approach to “psychopathologies” is probably due to the fact he seems to fulfil a very typical 20th-century dream: to create a grand theory not separate from practice. For many of my generation, the so-called baby boomers, Leonard, Luther, Machiavelli, Marx, Lenin, Eisenstein and Freud were among the ideal intellectuals. What do they all have in common? The fact that they all made a great contribution to their fields, that was both theoretical and practical. On the subject of Marxism, once upon a time the great Marxist theorists – Marx himself, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, and several others – were also political leaders who led the masses. Then, at a certain point, almost all the important theoretical Marxists were university professors – Althusser, Balibar, Negri, Badiou, Hobsbawm, Žižek, etc. Long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marxists had apparently renounced the sentence engraved on the grave of Marx at Highgate in London, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it” (Marx 1976, p. 66). In fact, we have had more and more academic Marxist interpretations and less and less successful changes of the world in an anti-capitalist sense. I wonder whether something similar has

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happened or is happening in psychoanalysis, something that would be a sign of its decline. Lacan quotes Lenin’s sentence: “Marx’s theory is omnipotent because it is true” ( Lacan 1966, p. 349). Here the power rests on truth. But today we tend to think the opposite: the 20th century has been dominated by pragmatist philosophy and by Poincaré’s conventionalism, which reverse the relation between truth and power by stating: “only what is proven invincible is true.” I should stress that my theoretical formation took place in France as a young student within an essentially Lacanian or at least orthodox Freudian frame. Later, in Italy, I had a clinical formation, mostly within a post-Kleinian frame. This was fortunate, because a certain non-coincidence between theory and practice in my training allows me to see the limits of both Lacanianism and post-Kleinism. Moreover, one of my real masters was an IPA analyst, Elvio Fachinelli, an unclassifiable personality, inf luenced at the same time by Lacan, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School. However, even if I did have a Kleinian clinical formation, today I find it easier, when I have to frame a clinical case, to use Lacanian categories. I am not so naïve as to believe that I prefer a Lacanian clinical view because it is objectively the best. I prefer it because Kleinian reconstructions lack a structural gaze, which is something that interests me very much; ultimately, Kleinians always highlight practically the same processes; they bore me. But I do respect those who are charmed by Kleinian “processual” reconstructions. Until not very long ago, the prevailing trend in Italy was inspired by W.R. Bion. When I read or listen to a smart Lacanian, I enjoy it a lot more than when I read or listen to a smart Bionian. (Of course, I am bored by all those who are not smart, whatever their theoretical credo may be. Today not feeling bored is rare in psychoanalysis.) In short, my main argument for preferring the Lacanian clinical approach is the very personal argument of boredom. In fact, is it not our mission to make others participate in our intellectual enjoyments? The master initiates his pupils to a form of pleasure that the master already practices alone; we teach and write in order to find those who can play and enjoy with us. You may say that certain truths are boring anyway. We think that truth has nothing to do with amusement. But I don’t think that this is true. The physicists who are my friends tell me that certain physical theories that may logically be correct are quickly excluded by physicists because they think: “it can’t be that Nature would be so rough and vulgar!” Even in mathematics and physics elegance is fundamental. I enjoy more of a structural vision because, instead of what one generally believes, this allows us to get a better grasp of each human being’s subjectivity. We often repeat that, according to science (which is always structural), human beings are all the same; but exactly the opposite is true. Biological science effectively shows that we cannot find two human beings with the same venous and arterial system, nor with the same neural network, not even when they are identical twins. In the same way, we cannot find two human beings with the same

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subjectivity. But because psychoanalysis is not a science, I don’t have any decisive argument to show that Lacanian constellations are closer to the truth than those of other schools.

3 Melancholia, paranoias Some say that Lacan and Lacanians have neglected the Freudian interpretation of melancholia. In fact, Freud’s theory on melancholia – and on mania, which is its reverse – has had a great inf luence on some psychoanalytical schools, especially on the Kleinian. A very small one, apparently, on the Lacanian. Lacan only speaks of melancholia or depression in passing. For example in his television interview of 1973 ( Lacan 1973, pp. 39–40). Here Lacan talks about affections, about the “passions of the soul,” in general. Freud had interpreted “major depression,” melancholia, as a special form of mourning for a loss. Instead, Lacan – like phenomenologists – leads melancholia back to sadness, quoting Dante and Spinoza: tristitia was above all a sin, a moral blame. I have written a book about acoedia, sloth, a variant in a Christian key of melancholia ( Benvenuto 2008). Indeed, in the Christian Middle Ages being depressed was the fundamental guilt, because the root of sadness germinates all the other “f lowers of evil.” Being sad is the original zero degree of guilt. Lacan overturns the modernist point of view that says: “what religious thinking considered in moral terms as a guilt, we modern psychiatrists, being enlightened, consider an affective illness.” Lacan instead thought that the medieval point of view was right! What to us liberated moderns may appear an affective irregularity should instead be considered a lâcheté, as Lacan calls it. The term means cowardice, but it comes from lâcher, to let go, to slacken. The depressed feel contemptible because something like divine grace has let go of them, and this because they themselves have let go of something essential. In short, melancholics are “sinners”: they have failed to fulfil their duty, which according to Lacan is to “speak well” [the bien-dire, the “well-spoken”]. The depressed, on the other hand, are only capable of badmouthing themselves. The most important Lacanian contribution to psychosis is what he said about paranoias. In the constellation of follies, psychiatry distinguishes between various paranoias, as we saw in the aforementioned scheme. One galaxy is persecutory delusion, which sometimes evolves into delusion of grandeur. Erotomaniacs are convinced that someone, who is usually very important and who they have often never even met, loves them. Those suffering from jealousy delusion are certain their partner is cheating on them in a way that seems unjustified to us. Freud’s preconception is proving that every “psychopathology” is the work of sexuality. Even in paranoias, which he thinks are the result of a repression of one’s homosexuality that comes out again, crookedly, in a delusionary way. To prove it, Freud resorts to a clever grammatical device. In delusion of persecution it is as if the subject, for example a male, said: “I DON’T LOVE HIM, I actually hate him, because he hates me.” In delusion of grandeur he says “I

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DON’T LOVE HIM, I actually love nobody, because I love only myself.” In erotomania the person who supposedly loves me is of the opposite sex, therefore: “I DON’T LOVE HIM, I actually love her, because she loves me.” In jealousy delusion: “I DON’T LOVE HIM, it is her, my woman, who loves him.” As we can see, Freud’s explanatory mechanism is somewhat intricate. Not to mention that there are paranoiacs who are declared and practicing homosexuals. Lacan set himself the task of “dignifying” many of Freud’s theories, giving them greater breadth. For Lacan, what Freud mistook as homosexuality is actually narcissism. After all, the homosexual inclination is partially narcissistic, because in this case one desires a sexual “double” of oneself. Let’s take persecutory delusion. Freud noted that the persecutor is often of the same gender as the paranoiac, which furthers his cause. Let us also add that the persecutor is often an ideal model figure for the subject. For Lacan, this external figure is the subject’s ideal ego, i.e. his mirror image. As we said, in the mirror stage the child’s mirror image is also his or hers ideal image. Lacan says the opposite of what Jean Cocteau wrote: “mirrors should ref lect a little before ref lecting back images” (Cocteau 1964). In fact, mirrors ref lect not ourselves, but what we would like to be. Indeed, we often find ourselves acceptable in the mirror, while we might find a photo or video of ourselves – which is how others see us – devastating. Why does this ideal ref lection of ourselves turn into a persecutor at one point? Because hatred is the reverse mirror image of love: if in the other I see my love for him, I will perceive it as hatred towards me. The real mirror inverts left and right, the psychic mirror inverts things in a triple way: active vs. passive, love vs. hatred, I vs. the other. Therefore, in persecutory paranoia, it is not I who actively hates my ideal Ego, but I am passively hated and persecuted by him or her. This reversal occurs also in the other paranoias. Let’s take erotomania. A woman I know is convinced that a well-known Italian journalist and political commentator who appears very often on television, is in love with her and sends her messages via the screen while debating, even if she and the political commentator in question have never met. Of course, we all think that she’s the one who has “a crush” on him. But she can only see what she loves in a mirror: she knows her love only if it comes from the other, like in a boomerang effect. This woman can cognize – but not re-cognize – her loving only in the passive form of being loved. Narcissism consists essentially in the passive grammatical form. Vampires in films have no mirror image, while paranoiacs are the opposite: they can conceive of themselves only as mirror images. The figure of the vampire can also help us understand the heart of schizophrenia: a vampire sucks the blood of the other, and in a similar way the subjectivity of the schizophrenic is sucked by the Other, who, even if non-existent (for Lacan, the Other does not exist, just like the line of the horizon does not exist as a line), invades the subject’s mind and body.

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Some time ago, I had a psychotic patient who thought he was a completely normal person, and kept describing almost everybody as psychotics, consumed by anger and envy. But in my view he was the psychotic full of anger and envy. Now, mainstream psychoanalysis would say that the boy “projected” his psychosis onto the others. But the concept of projection implies as fundamental the distinction between “inside myself ” and “outside myself,” which Lacan rejects. Instead, Lacan would have said that to say “I live with psychotic people” is the patient’s way of having a cognition of his psychosis without re -cognizing himself as a psychotic: because for him, his subjective reality is in the other, not in himself. To say that “the other is psychotic” is his way of stating “I am a psychotic,” and indeed, he came to me to be cured. Cured of what? He told me: “of the others’ psychosis.” He came to me to have the vampire in the mirror cured. Paranoia is passionate madness in the etymological sense of passion: pathos, what we suffer. Let’s imagine I’m in front of a mirror and don’t recognize it as such: if I stretch my hand towards the gentleman facing me, I will see him stretching his hands towards – or against? – me. In short, I, a paranoiac, do not recognize that the other – my persecutor, sexual cheater, unreachable lover – is my image, and for this reason I misunderstand his or her intentions. Lacan developed a general theory of psychosis, but for him the prototype of psychosis is paranoia. When cases were presented to him by other psychiatrists at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, he would only rarely diagnose schizophrenia. And he would always refer to it as “so-called schizophrenia,” almost as if he didn’t believe in it. Why did Lacan have this strong preference, so to speak, for paranoias? In fact, thanks to Freud and Lacan, psychoanalysis has developed a very attractive theory of paranoia, without developing an equally interesting theory of schizophrenia. I know many Lacanians who when forced to deal with schizophrenias prefer to turn to phenomenologist psychiatrists like Minkowski, Szilasi, Binswanger, and so on. Psychoanalysis is at its best when it interprets, not only paranoias, but also hysteria, phobias, obsessive-compulsive neuroses and melancholia – and sorry if that’s no big deal. It has never been equally successful with schizophrenia, autism, drug addictions, and borderline personalities. The various “constellations” in psychiatry remind me of what the situation was like in optics for three centuries. From the 17th century onwards, two rival theories battled it out. One, started by Newton, argued that light is composed of minute particles, corpuscles, traveling in space; the other, promoted by Huygens, argued that light is like the waves in the sea, a mutation in the form of the medium known as ether. Certain optical phenomena supported the corpuscular theory, others the wave theory. It’s only since quantum mechanics that we have begun to understand that both theories are in fact true. In other words, that they are both false. Light can manifest itself as particles or as waves. In physics, this is called complementarity: a logical conclusion that surpasses the limits of logics. If the mind sciences ever reached the precision of quantum mechanics, they would find complementarity too.

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I am convinced of complementarity in all things regarding the mind too, though it is as yet still unrecognized. Theories that today seem incompatible could ultimately turn out to be complementary. Claiming that our theory is capable of explaining everything is a form of megalomania. Every theory – scientific or psychoanalytical – has a privileged field of application; but as one slowly moves away from the well-lit area, the light theory seems weaker and weaker.

4 Psychosis As I said, according to Lacan a psychotic structure depends on a radical form of negation that he calls foreclosure. A term which, like the French forclusion, has different nuances of meaning. Some argue that a psychotic is someone whose Oedipus complex was not structured during childhood. Now, Lacan says something similar when he transcribes the Oedipus into linguistic terms. He focuses it on the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father, alias the symbolic father. The psychotic is precluded access to this signifier that is fundamental to subjective constitution. As always, Lacan depsychologizes Freud as much as possible, minimizing all the inter-affective theatre of the classical Oedipus. Lacan rewrites that sort Commedia dell’Arte of Freud’s – according to which the male child considers his father his rival because he wants to go to bed with his mother and the female child is in competition with her mother to conquer her father – into strictly symbolic terms. I want to loosen the link between Name-of-the-Father and family paternity even more, by rewriting Name-of-the-Father with the acronym N.o.t.Father, so that we can also read it as “not Father.” After all, with the N.o.t.Father Lacan was not referring to the patronymic. We shall shortly see to what he was actually referring. Years ago in a French psychiatric hospital a delegation of psychotics went to the doctors and asked for a Name-of-the-Father transplant. They’d heard that psychosis was caused by a lack of the Name-of-the-Father. . . . The choice of the term N.o.t.Father came to Lacan in part from a clinical observation: very often psychotics are perplexed by what it means to be a father. They know everything about the physiological function of the male in reproduction, but they do not “realize” what it means to be a father, which is different from being a begetter. A young patient of Kretschmer’s realized she was sexually attracted to a colleague from the office where she worked, an attraction that was apparently mutual ( Kretschmer 1974). This triggered off a delusion: her being pregnant. She remembered that at the age of 12 her uncle got into bed with her, but without any sort of sexual touching. She was now convinced that in the wake of that “guilt,” she was pregnant. For her, everyone – even strangers – knew about it and continuously made spicy allusions to her state. But who was the father of her child ? Not the coveted colleague. She was certain that someone inoculated her with sperm during the night. Made pregnant by X. This particular point is crucial to

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Lacan: we find a generating cause, the sperm, but no father. We could say that in psychosis we have an unfather, just as we say undecided or un able. There, breaking with so much post-Freudian psychology, which focuses entirely on the exclusive mother-child relationship, Lacan practically says: “remember that mum is a woman!” In other words, the child soon realizes that his nourisher is not exclusively for him, but is also involved with a third party. This third party is generally the woman’s companion or lover and – often – the father of the child. But, if for example the mother is a writer or chef, her “Other” will be literature or Grande Cuisine. N.o.t.Father is Lacan’s name for this often materially absent “third party” in the dual mother-child relation. Now, upon understanding that “there is an Other” between he and his mother, the child enters a strictly mystical dimension, which according to Lacan is not only experienced by believers in some sort of transcendence, but by anyone who is not psychotic. N.o.t.Father means that an instance drags us away from the idyllic or lethal tango with our mother. The important thing is that the mother “wants other things” as well as the son or daughter she still loves. Otherwise the child will never “transcend” from a dual relationship to a social one, which is always at least triangular (at least three people are required to form a society). Indeed, when we see an adult who behaves awkwardly in social life, we soon think he’s a mama’s boy, someone who hasn’t separated sufficiently from his mother. However, I fear that in evoking the father Lacan may have limited the impact of his theory. If he really wanted a reference to the Christian trinity, I would have preferred “in the name of the Holy Spirit.” The latter, indeed, is the third person who seems at once to bring together and go beyond the far more concrete pathetic persons represented by the Father and the Son. I think the later Lacan realized this limitation and hence began referring to “names of the Father,” and in general the reference to the father in the parental sense fades away. Once a year the adults of the Hopi of Arizona show the children of the pueblo a group of masked men, the Kachinas, telling them that they are the spirits of the ancestors who have returned to the village and are eager to eat them. In the end, however, the Kachinas are appeased and offer the children corn cakes. Once the Hopi children have grown up, the adults reveal that the Kachinas were actually their fathers and uncles in disguise; but this does not lead them to claim that these divinities do not exist, as we come to claim of Santa Claus. The Kachinas are at the root of the Hopi and Pueblo religious system. The adults themselves believe the Kachinas still return to the village to dance, but in an immaterial and spiritual way. It’s as if, once they’ve opened the eyes of the young, the belief is reaffirmed on another level: in a certain sense – a symbolic one – the Kachinas really do return. Significantly, they are mainly ancestors, dead Fathers: with this rite, Lacan would say, the Hopi stage the N.o.t.Father not as a “present” reality, which is just play-acting, but as a transcendent reality that keeps that society together. When a man makes a woman pregnant and accepts the fruit as “his own,” he behaves a little like the Hopi in their religion: to the efficient cause (supplying

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a woman with semen) he superimposes something transcendent, accepting to be a father, thus entering the order of the N.o.t.Father Sperm banks supply not fathers, but spermatozoons. We could then say that the Hopi use their children by putting them in the position of psychotics: of those who believe that the ancestors (the N.o.t.Father) are actually present. Lacan, by pointing out that this symbolic mystic dimension is intrinsic to our most elementary family relations, is ipso facto telling us obliquely that insofar as the N.o.t.Father spiritualizes the concrete reality of biological relations, it also makes us lose our innocence once and for all. When Hopi or Zuni children are initiated to the truth, they are given access on the one hand to the order of symbolic (mystical) reality and, on the other, they also learn that mystical faith is ultimately a bamboozlement. They become non-dupes, Lacan says, they are not deceived any more. That’s why he says religious believers (and Lacan was not) are the least naïve of people. In every non-psychotic mystic there’s a deep-down irony, the effect of the split between “material reality” and “symbolic reality” that the N.o.t.Father introduces. According to Lacan, we are not psychotics insofar as we realize that the transcendent is ultimately a symbolic simulation. On the contrary, psychotics, because they have not lost their innocence, often think that reality itself is a simulation, an artefact produced by a ploy, like in the case of Kretschmer’s patient, pregnant due to a conspiracy. The “fictionality” non-psychotics see as the indelible shadow of every mystical belief, psychotics see as the very essence of worldly reality. Thanks to the N.o.t.Father all of our psyche becomes “metaphorical,” i.e. “psychical.” We said that according to Lacan language separates us from the world, makes it problematic for us. With the N.o.t.Father we gain access to the metaphorical function of language. In short, we stop taking things “literally.” Just insofar as the Lacanian N.o.t.Father is what allows us to metaphorize biological and affective relations, it should itself be taken as a metaphor. The N.o.t.Father, which turns things into letters, should not be taken too literally. Usually, someone who knows he is about to die shouts out “mum!” or “my God!” The dying, in short, invoke the mother or the N.o.t.Father And it is significant that in our monotheistic religions God has no name – neither JHWH (the Judaic not-name), nor the Lord, nor Allah are names for God. The N.o.t.Father essentially means that this name does not exist. To understand the meaning of the “foreclosure of the N.o.t.Father” better, we need to read August Strindberg’s play Father (Lacan surprisingly never quotes Strindberg in Ecrits or in Seminars). Strindberg was a misogynous paranoiac. He wrote the autobiographical novel The Defence of a Fool, in which he was the fool. He wrote it because he was convinced that European women had united to make him pass for a madman and ruin his writing career. Father, too, is a largely autobiographical work – at the time Strindberg had a terrible doubt: that he may not be the father of the two girls he had with the actress Siri von Essen. He was convinced that Siri went to bed with lots of men and even with a Danish woman. It was all a delusion of jealousy.

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Father is the story of man persecuted by a woman. The victim is named – a fine mockery – the Captain. His wife Laura wants to educate their daughter following her own criteria and convinces the village doctor and pastor that the Captain is a lunatic. In addition, she instils in her husband the doubt that he is not the true father of their daughter. Laura eventually reaches her goal and she herself will force her husband into a straightjacket. Before he dies of heartache, his wife asks whether he would like to see his child. The Captain replies: My child? A man has no children, it is only woman who has children, and therefore the future is hers when we die childless. Oh, God, who holds his children dear. . . . (Strindberg 1983, p. 40) From such a statement, and several other passages, we gather that the Captain does not limit himself to doubting his own paternity: he essentially excludes that one may be a father. He invokes the unfather God, identified to a meek and subdued mother. It is worth noting that, according to Lacan, psychosis is a subjective structure that cannot really be modified. Even people who have never provided a shrink with work may have a psychotic structure, insofar as they’ve never had access to the N.o.t.Father. Many “psychotics next door” are not recognized as such. Even if, as sometimes happens, alas, the very nice gentleman next door kills a neighbour, convinced that he has been persecuted by him for years.

5 Who is a father? Some may say that the Lacanian theory on psychosis, even if extremely elaborate and refined, has something of the psychotic about it. The central role of the N.o.t.Father makes us suspicious, precisely because it seems to take on the apodictic substance of a delirious signifier. But perhaps Lacan gave a psychotic aura to his theory on psychosis on purpose – in the same way as there’s something of the hysteric in his theory on hysteria, of the perverse in his theory on perversion . . . – on the basis of an “expressionist” principle, as I would call it, according to which the theory should have a form similar to its object. Others blame Lacan for the fact that his reference to “in the name of the Father” depends on his link to Christian patriarchal culture, and is therefore not generalizable to other cultures. In short, Lacan is criticized for what Freud’s Oedipus theory was criticized for at the time: that the structuring function of the N.o.t.Father can only apply to patrilineal cultures. How can it apply to matrilineal ones? As early as the 1920s, Bronislaw Malinowski had opposed the Freudian Oedipus with the case of the Melanesian society he had observed for years in the Trobriand Islands. This matrilineal (which doesn’t mean matriarchal!) society happens to deny the function of the natural father, with the paternal role exercised

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by the maternal uncle; the Oedipal hatred of the males is directed against this uncle and not against the natural father, who is considered an “in-law.” Would Lacan say that Trobriand culture, which rejects the generating function of the mother’s husband, is psychotic? Even the most primitive human beings know that a woman must have sexual intercourse with a man for a child to be born after nine months. Malinowski’s Melanesians aren’t naïve or ignorant either. And it appears evident that the Trobrianders know, between the lines, who their real male begetter is; what’s more, they believe that a child physically looks like his or her father and not like the mother! Which is also a false statement, because often a child looks more like the mother than the father. In Lacanian terms: with regard to family relations, the Trobrianders completely split the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The only symbolic relation (filiation) is reserved for the mother and her family, whilst the imaginary resemblance (in-law kinship) is reserved for the father. In other words, the Trobrianders completely separate the male begetter (unrecognized symbolically) from the N.o.t.Father, incarnated by the maternal uncle. To complicate things further, we know of populations in which the exact opposite happens: populations where the only recognized kinship relation is with the father, whilst the mother is only the wife of the father! This is the system among the Lakher (Mara people), a population in Northern Burma and Assam (but the same is true for several other cultures). The fact that mater certissima est (the mother is absolutely certain) is not enough for these South-East Asian eccentrics to realize the kinship relation between mother and child. And, significantly, they too operate a split between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, though in the opposite sense from the Trobrianders: for them a child looks like his or her mother, not like the father. It seems that in Ancient Sparta too, the mother was only an “in-law” for her children. This would explain the fact that Spartan men were allowed to marry their uterine sister, but not their agnate sister (brothers and sisters are uterine when they share the same mother and agnate when they share a common father). In short, in Sparta the uterine sister was not a “blood relative,” as we say ( Leach 1961). Here we can touch with our bare hands what Lacan would call the autonomy of the signifier: every culture structures the symbolic ties between natural relatives in its own way. But does this apparent arbitrariness of the Symbolic not represent a problem for the focal function of the N.o.t.Father? With the Lakher, for example, do we not witness instead a foreclosure of the Mother? Now, as we said, the notion of the “paternal metaphor” is in itself a metaphor. The notion of Name-of-the-Father, like most theoretical cruxes in psychoanalysis, should be taken as an idiosyncratic creation of Lacan’s, no differently from Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the Same, or Kierkegaard’s Øieblikket, the moment (literally: the blink of an eye) as eternity, and so on. And yet, the Eternal Return, the blink of an eye, the N.o.t.Father are all dense concepts, full of resonances for us, because they capture something we feel is important. Lacan’s boldness

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in relating paternity to the psychotic mode of being-in-the-world “makes us think.” He has managed to relate our frequent ironic doubts about paternity – as in when we say “son of a bitch!” – to the very possibility of something that makes us non-dupes subjects: the possibility of not fully believing in something we believe in (even if this something were to be Lacanian psychoanalysis . . .), which saves us from the rigor of psychosis. It is a well-known fact that after Freud many psychoanalysts, from the most various tendencies, have tried to cure psychoses analytically, wanting in this way to belie Freud’s opinion that psychotics were not treatable analytically. Lacan, too, believed that the psychoanalytical technique, created for neurotics, should not be applied to psychotics; but he also believed that psychoanalysts “should not back down when faced with psychotics.” In short, they should encounter them, precisely because they are psychoanalysts. Not a psychoanalysis for a psychotic, but only a psychoanalyst and a psychotic. And their relation needs to be reinvented case by case. You don’t interpret a psychotic’s dreams or actions as you would in analysis: because the psychotic tends to read the interpreting metaphor (every interpretation is a metaphor) as a reality judgement and could receive the interpretations as a form of persecution. By interpreting, the analyst assumes the superior position of “the one who knows,” and psychotics tend not to tolerate those who know. Analysts, Lacan says, should instead be “the scribes of psychotics”: they should register what they say, take note, without ever presenting themselves as “interpreters.” With psychotics, analysts need to become pupils, “the ones who do not know.” Fully aware of the fact that the cure for psychosis is a form of care that can often go on for the psychotic’s, and the analyst’s, entire lifetime.

6 Hysteria Lacan gives great importance to hysteria – and, significantly, he considers the Discourse of the Hysteric to be one of the four fundamental social links. He argues that psychoanalysis was invented by Freud’s hysteric patients, who used him to express and elaborate . . . what? A sort of malaise felt by women regarding their femininity. A discontent that emerged at the end of the 19th century, an era that had planned a new status for women as being “equal” to men ( J.S. Mill, one the most inf luential philosophers of the time, created this feminist project as early as 1869 in his essay The Subjection of Women). An as yet unaccomplished program, but quite unique in the history of humanity. Freud dealt with the syndrome that was fashionable at the time, just like autistic spectrum, eating disorders, and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) are fashionable today. Hysteric women were intriguing at the time because they seemed to resist this modern project of finally making women the equals – and no longer just the complements – of men. In fact, as an Hegelian, Lacan tries to historicize the unconscious too, but in a different way from culturalists like Karen Horney or Erich Fromm.

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In order to illustrate what Lacan adds to Freud’s work, I will refer to the case of an “archetypal” Freudian patient. Cäcilie ( Freud 1895, SE, 2, pp.  176–181; GW, 1, pp. 245–251) who was cured by Freud in 1889 through a method outstripping the cathartic one, can in fact be considered the first patient of psychoanalysis. Cäcilie is the paradigmatic patient; she is the Freudian unconscious explained to children, and she is also the ABC of the “unconscious structured as a language.” Cäcilie, muse of psychoanalysis, was a very rich and intelligent lady who went to Freud because of violent and abrupt trigeminal neuralgia. We shall not go into the details of how Freud analyzed Cäcilie’s specific symptoms by attributing them to metaphorical expressions. We will limit ourselves to a synoptic table: Literal Signifier

Figurative Signifier

Symptoms

Bad Event

Facial neuralgia Pain in the right heel Pain between the eyes Pangs in the cardiac region Cephalalgy Sore throat

“My husband gave me a moral slap in the face” “A false step with strangers” “My grandmother penetrated my brain [mind]” “I’ve been stabbed in the heart” “I have an idea in my head” “I’ve got to eat the crow”

Let us consider the case of her “facial neuralgia.” Cäcilie told Freud that, years back, she had undergone a period of conf lict with her husband. One time, during a quarrel, her husband made a remark that she found highly offensive. In telling Freud this, she rested her hands on her cheeks and said that for her it had been “like a slap in the face!” (Freud 1895, SE 2, p. 178; GW 1, p. 247). After recalling this scene, her neuralgia had disappeared. The cause of the pain was therefore a metaphor: it was “a moral slap in the face.” The fact that these symbolizations are expressed through the “pathetic” body of the subject – recorded in her own f lesh, in this case – had long been considered a typical symptom of hysteria. Conversions are a suffering of the metaphoric flesh. According to Lacan, by “reading” the hysteric’s body as a talking body, Freud had discovered the unconscious. He shows that in hysterical symptoms, just like in dreams, the two fundamental rhetorical figures, which according to postSaussurean linguistics correspond to the two fundamental axis of language, are at work: metonymy and metaphor (see Benvenuto 2015). I would like to point out that metonymy means to refer to a certain thing through association with an element that is contiguous to it, like for example “sceptre” for “king,” or “a skirt” for “a woman.” Metonymy corresponds to the syntagmatic axis of any language, that is, the linear combination of words over time. Metaphor, on the other hand, corresponds to the paradigmatic axis of language: every time we speak, we select one word from within a virtual paradigm. In

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Cäcilie’s sentence “my husband gave me a slap in the face,” for instance, the syntagma “my husband” is the result of a choice from the paradigms “my – your – his/her, etc.” and “husband – partner – man – spouse – sexual partner – my second half, etc.” and so forth. The distinction between metaphor and metonymy draws on a difference that classic associationism had already grasped before Saussure: the signification process proceeds from one thing to another that is similar to it (metaphor), or else from one thing to another that is contiguous to it (metonymy). There exist two ways of thinking that are quite different from one another: the first one, I will call it “systematic” (metaphorical), and the second one “historical-narrative” (metonymy). If we say “water is H 2O,” we are enunciating something systematic – broadly speaking, metaphorical – because we are establishing an equivalence in meaning: “Water means molecules of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.” Such is the way theoretical thinking usually works. But one could also say: “In the year 1800 chemist William Nicholson, while carrying out an electrolysis of water, obtained on the surface electrodes, distinct gaseous bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen.” In this second example you are not giving a paradigmatic definition of water. Rather, you are telling a story. Do both methods of expression say the same thing? We can say they refer to the same thing, but they say different things. Gottlieb Frege would have said that both have the same Bedeutung (the water) but different Sinnen (meanings). Those with a philosophical or scientific mind are more inclined to systematic-metaphorical expressions, whilst historical-narrative expressions can appear as anecdotal stories, for didactic purposes. In our culture, the more “masculine” systematic metaphoricity has always prevailed over the more “effeminate” historical metonymycity. Yet, in time, people started to realize the powerfulness of the second way of thinking, especially in moulding the ideas of those social groups to which each of us belong. Today you say, for example, that “Trumpism is a narrative” rather than an ideological system. Many analysts make the mistake of thinking that some “narrative” patients are unable to interpret their own dreams or any “significant” event taking place during analysis. This is because said analysts privilege the systematic way of thinking. In fact, many of these patients, after telling a dream, make illuminating

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connections, tell anecdotes and fantasies expanding on the content of the dreams themselves. In short, they interpret their dreams, although they do so in a historical-syntagmatic manner. It would seem that Lacan has valued the metonymic dimension – which I have called feminine – in his own psychoanalytical practice. They used to say he was better at curing women, and that he highly valued femininity in his female patients. Lacan explains this twofold axis of language by saying that metonymy is “mot à mot,” word by word, verbatim, such is the case when we say “now repeat what I have said word by word.” For him, metaphor is “mot pour mot,” “a word for another” – in our example of Cäcilie, “slap” stands for “offense.” In this case “facial neuralgia” – the symptom – is a “metonymical metaphor,” so to speak, since “the pain in the cheek” is a metonymy for slap. As such, I would call the hysterical conversion: suffering of the rhetorical f lesh. Nowadays many say that hysteria no longer exists. I, instead, think that a great deal of our female patients are hysterical. The fact is that hysteria no longer manifests itself through symptoms of somatic conversion, as it happened for Cäcilie. Nowadays hysteria manifests itself through anorexia and so-called borderline syndromes. Lacan realized that hysteria is first and foremost an unconscious choice for dissatisfaction. Even in the absence of “rhetorical f lesh,” a subject is hysterical because she does everything she can to feel unsatisfied. Freud noticed this about Dora, but he failed to find an explanation for it. What can Dora possibly want, for trying her best to make both herself and the people around her unhappy? Lacan’s answer is: the hysteric’s primary desire is to always have an unsatisfied desire. Why so? Because hysterics’ primary desire is that of desiring tout court, avoiding that which Lacan calls aphanisis, which means to be swept away: desire is swept away, that is. Because the end of desire, understood in the Freudian sense, is subjective death. Yet, for Lacan, human desire is always desire for desire. Does this mean that human desire is fundamentally hysterical (that is to say, intrinsically feminine)? What then distinguishes an hysterical personality from an obsessive-compulsive or perverse one? What does it then mean for Lacan that desire is desire of desire? And what does his famous aphorism “human desire is the desire of the Other” mean? “Desire of the Other” is to be taken as both subjective and objective genitive. Subjective genitive: the Other desires something. Objective genitive: a subject desires the Other. The two desires, subjective and objective, are circular. Even if we are not hysterical, our fundamental desire, in the end, is to be desired by the Other, so that desire is always desire of the desire . . . of/by the Other. Everyone wants to be loved! This demand for love, as Lacan calls it, carries out a fundamental function in making our desire rotate. And if we place someone in the position of the Other – the man or the woman we love, for example, or our analyst – we want the Other to desire us.

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However, the desire of/by the Other means also to desire . . . other things. A professionally fulfilled woman, with a good and wealthy husband, lets herself be seduced by no one special, which undermines her satisfaction. Why? She can only say “I was bored. I wanted something else.” For Lacan this wanting autre chose, something else – which is not to say something satisfying – is the desire of the Other. It is the corollary of Lacan’s Dionysian thought. This does not mean that from time to time one can get enjoyment. If I am a woman, I can surely “give in” to someone who desires me. However, the hysterical excludes her and the other person’s enjoyment – to say it coarsely, “she does not put out.” Even if she decided to put out to the first comer, then, oddly and as it is often the case, this newcomer would not “put out to her,” for the hysteric’s desire cannot resolve in enjoyment. If she engages in sexual activity every day, then in this case she has a frigid “soul.” In sum, the hysteric seems to encapsulate the famous gag by Groucho Marx: “I would never accept to be a member of a club that accepts me as a member.” Lacan said something similar: “the hysteric needs a master over whom to exercise her power.” One could then ask: is it true that every desire has an object? If I desire a woman, are not her female features the object of my desire? Being the refined Dionysian he is, Lacan could not say something so banal. Therefore, betraying the pompier (kitsch) analyst, Lacan says that human desire has an object that causes it: the object a. But the object at which desire aims is never the object that causes it. Our desire always gets its aim wrong.

7 Obsessive neurosis It is well-known that Freud was one of the inventors of the concept of obsessive neurosis, today called obsessive-compulsive neurosis. For Freud, in this neurosis – as in every psychic form of dystonia – the subject experiences a psychic conf lict. In the case of obsessive behaviour, the conf lict – Freud tells us – is due to a strong ambivalence towards a series of fundamental figures, which are loved and hated at the same time. The obsessional strategy consists in satisfying alternatively, back and forth, love and hate. For reasons that are not easy to explain, obsessive neurosis is more congenial to the male sex. The Rat Man is the clinical case through which Freud illustrated the analysis of obsessive neurosis. The Rat Man has a girlfriend, Gisela, who is also his cousin, and towards whom he has ambivalent feelings. One day, before she leaves the resort where they are vacationing, he notices a stone on the road where the chariot carrying his belle is to go through: thinking that the carriage might stumble on it, he kicks the stone it to the side. Once at home, he thinks “what an absurd thing I have done!” And so he goes back to the same place and puts the stone back where it was (Freud 1909, SE, 10, p. 189; GW, 7, p. 412). Freud interprets this inconsistency – running with the hare and hunting with the hounds – as the gratification of two conf licting impulses: when he kicks the stone away he is

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expressing his feeling of protection towards Gisela, whereas when he puts it back he is expressing his hostility towards her. The truth is that Freud cannot really explain the reason for this ambivalence. The Rat Man sees the paternal figure, who had passed away years back, as an alternative to his girlfriend, as if the ghost of his father was opposing his relationship with the living Gisela. So how to explain this imaginary incompatibility between the two love-objects? Lacan tries to answer by eliminating the psychological implications of the case. In place of the explanation that resorts to the psychological conflict, he prefers the contradiction “a = not-a.” Contradiction is something less psychological than logical. This is to say, the neurotic faces a logical impasse: he has to collect what Lacan calls a symbolic debt. Indeed, the neurotic often insists obstinately on books that do not balance. He is never sure he has the maths right, he suspects that there are shortages, that the others are cheating or that he himself is cheating. The need of the neurotic to check and double-check relentlessly – the obsessional doubt – gives voice to the fact that his life is built on a debt with, say, the law, which is a debt he will not be able to honour . . . because it is not him who has to honour it! In fact, it is not his debt, but the Other’s (in the Rat Man, it is his father’s). For this reason his life seems to freeze, it does not have historical progression, and he obsesses over a shortage he will never be able to cover. In my opinion, the literary work that gets the closest to this obsessive disorder is The Trial by Kaf ka. As is well known, it tells the story of Herr K., who one day finds himself on trial. At the end of the book, he will be sentenced to death, but we will never know for what crime. The charge is hidden to us, since the crime of K. cannot be described – or as Lacan would say “imagined” – since it is a “debt,” which is not just hyperbolic but also symbolic. In fact, when analyzing a neurotic, it will soon come to the fore that he is living to expiate for some sin; but what sin? During analysis, he himself will try to find a childhood “sin,” but the mischiefs coming to mind will not justify this never-ending expiation of his. As a result, he ignores his own desire. He does not know what he desires, because it is the Other – perhaps a late Other – who dictates his desire. An obsessive once told me that at one time he had been watching shooting stars with friends on the night of August 10, which is St. Lawrence Day. It is customary in Italy to make a precise wish whenever you see a shooting star, so that it might come true. Someone said “let each of us now make a wish.” My patient concentrated, and candidly told his friends “I do not wish anything.” Now, this person had recently gotten married. But his belief was: “I did everything I could to marry her not because I wanted it, but because she wanted it!,” which means “it was the Other who wanted it, not me.” For Lacan, desire and subjectivity coincide. To put aside our own desire to the point of not recognizing it anymore is to undergo a “subjective death.” Indeed, Kaf ka’s Mr. K. is described a bit like the living dead: he lives on his own in a

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rented room, he does not have a girlfriend, the women he is courting are implicated in his trial. We do not know his parents, relatives, or friends. By this I do not mean that all obsessionals are like him, but the fact remains that K. manifests an essential, prototypical obsession. Such a debt enslaves the obsessional subject to his master. The immediate connection is to the dialectic between master and slave, which we have already discussed. In Hegel, as we may remember, we have a happy ending: when the slave becomes a master, it is the opposition itself – “master vs. slave” – that is overcome. On the other hand, the obsessive is a slave doomed to perpetually remain as such, and he spends his life waiting for his master’s death. The problem though, is that often his master is already dead. The analysis of obsessive neurosis confronts us with the implications between law and desire, on whose dynamics Lacan trumps all his cards. Here, too, he overthrows the common understanding of this relationship. We common people assume that our spontaneous and wild desires come first, and that only subsequently do the civil and penal law intervene to control them. Many of us wish to kill someone we hate. Likely, however, the laws punishing murder prevent us from doing so. According to Lacan, it is precisely the law that produces desire; first and foremost the desire to transgress the law itself. Paul the Apostle had already noted this paradoxical dialectic: Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. (Holy Bible 2001, Romans, chap. 7, ver. 7–8) After all, the Bible – which I find psychologically speaking more insightful than cognitivism – illustrates original sin in analogous terms. It is precisely because God forbids that apple that Adam and Eve’s desire arises.

8 The obsessive’s law But what is the law? As we said, for religion law is the desire of God, which is to say, the desire of the Other. Behind every law we presuppose the existence of the desiderata of a legislator. Often, in the context of thorny legislative matters, lawyers and judges ask themselves what the will of the legislator might have been. Unfortunately though, the legislator does not exist. It is always Other from the persons who have actually issued the law. Why not say, then, that the human desire is to transgress the desire of the Other? But the will to transgress is an epiphenomenon. Perhaps the real wish of the biblical God was precisely that men and women could not enjoy the valley of Eden, and that they spent their life desiring it instead. The prohibition of the tree of knowledge was a trick designed to bar their enjoyment.

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In obsessive neurosis, however, subjective desire and desire of the Other are distinct and in conf lict with one another. Let us take the Rat Man by way of example. He is sure that his father does not want him to marry Gisela because she is poor, from which his parapraxis towards the poor girl originates – parapraxis ref lecting the “father’s” hostility. The unconscious desire of the Rat Man, then, is the desire of (subjective genitive) his late father. But the subject also thinks that the father has been unfaithful to his true real desire, since, when he was young he, too, had loved a poor woman, despite ultimately preferring to marry a rich woman (the patient’s mother). The paternal law is thus an “anti-law-ofthe-heart” that the Rat Man is tempted to follow: to marry a rich woman he does not love. One’s own desire and the desire of the Other intersect to the point that the subject no longer knows whose desire it is. Whereas the hysterical spends her life protecting her own desire, the obsessive type pre-emptively gives up his own desire. When Lacan says that human desire is the desire to desire, he is saying that desire will never find an object that can fulfil it. Sure, desire is the product of an object, which, however, will not fulfil it: it is the object a that originates desire. This links us back to the scene from Lubitsch’s film To be or not to be where we identified this object with the spectator leaving the theatre. The spectator is the cause of the actor’s desire, to the extent that each actor bends over backwards in order to nab back the spectator who is already ready to leave the theatre room. Theatre is made for those who refuse to be spectators. To return to Kaf ka’s The Trial, it is often read quite trivially in terms of the injustice suffered by Herr K., as the violation of his rights, rather than the most modern novel on feelings of guilt. I wouldn’t be so sure that K. suffers an injustice. We could even assume that K. knows the accusation, except that the author does not tell us. The Trial is not a novel in defence of the civil rights of defendants! Since the reader does not know the accusation, s/he thinks: “K. does not know what he is charged with.” Not necessarily. We have always wondered about the relationship between law and justice, and if each law expresses an innate sense of justice, etc. In Kaf ka, as in the Jewish tradition in general, the law is highly disconnected from justice. God commands Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, a profoundly unjust act. And God victimizes poor Job (Book of Job), who is completely innocent. Those who have been in prison know well that the vast majority of inmates profess themselves innocent. K. is not an exception. We could say that “being unjustly condemned” is a structural implication of every condemnation originating in the law. For Lacan, analysis leads to more than just healing – because there is no mental pathology – rather, soothing, pacification. The neurotic’s sufferance is war-like. This is not, however, an internal conf lict, as psychologists believe, but rather a war against the Other. It often happens that I meet people who say they are approaching the end of analysis. Still, they keep obsessing over which of their parents did wrong, and

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thereby made them into the neurotics they have become. I think, “this person is far from the end of analysis!” Analysis ends with reconciliation with one’s parents, be they living or dead. This means that the subject succeeds in disconnecting those poor parents – whether they have been more or less good it does not matter – from the Other. Only then is the war over.

9 Perversions Lacan has dealt with the theme of perversions, but his most important contribution to perversions is undoubtedly sadomasochism. Psychoanalytic tradition does not oppose sadism and masochism as two alternative models, but it considers them as two moments of the same dynamic, meaning a subject can shift from a sadistic position to a masochistic one or the other way around. Lacan devoted a great deal of attention to the marquis of Sade. Whereas outside of France, Sade is considered just a pornographic writer, in France he is hailed as an illustrious writer and thinker, coming to the attention of authors like Blanchot, Klossowski, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, and Lacan. It is not coincidental that Sade is called “the divine marquis” by the French. Every French person knows Sade’s famous sentence at the time of the Revolution, “French people, just one last effort and we will be Republican!” And to be “Republican” is at the centre of the political rhetoric in France; when talking about politics with a French person nowadays, s/he will bring out his/her being “Republican.” Politically speaking, France is Sadean. Lacan’s masterstroke consists of making Sade into a sort of Kantian figure. I doubt Sade had ever read Kant. The latter published Critique of the Practical Reason – the book used by Lacan to illuminate what he calls “the Sadean fantasy [ fantasme]” – in 1788, one year before the seizure of the Bastille, the jail where the marquis was then incarcerated. So is the temporal coincidence between Kantian ethics and Revolution a mere coincidence? For Kant, the absence of morality has nothing to do with the pathos of real subjects. The universal validity of the ethical law does not admit “pathological” (from páthos) exceptions – that is to say, it does not take affects into account at all; to be good has nothing to do with happiness. Ethics means to do one’s duty, the absolute imperative, since it is not dependent upon the individual’s emotions. The ethical imperative tells me “do not lie,” even though in a specific context it would be wiser to resort to a good lie. For Kant, ethics is apathetic, indifferent to the worries of the subject towards whom you carry out an ethical action. In short, Kantian ethics is sadistic. Whereas the affective imperatives demand that I do what I like or what spares me from suffering, I choose to do my duty freely. For Kant, the only free people are those who do their duty, because they do not submit to Lustprinzip, the despotic prince of the desire-pleasure. Sade, according to Lacan, overthrows Kant. But we know that to overthrow a thought is, somehow, to reaffirm its structure: for Sade the universal law that is extraneous to the subjects’ pathos is that of nature, the cruel mother. Nature

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forces us to pursue pleasure. The enjoyment of nature (subjective genitive: nature pursues enjoyment) consists of the fact that nature needs to destroy life in order to recreate new living beings. In this way, nature forces us to pursue enjoyment at the expenses of others. It follows, then, that the Sadean enjoyment is a Kantian-like categorical imperative: it does not aim at the wellness and conservation of the life of subjects, but forces everyone to be unconditional objects of the others’ enjoyment. The sadist is thus the executioner, the hangman, of the merciless law of nature. Yet, it would seem that to submit to the law is the only way to attain freedom. For Kant, ethical duty and freedom coincide; for Lacan authentic desire and being forced to do one’s will coincide. In short, for Lacan, perversions – not just sadomasochism – are based on moral metaphysics and, like any other metaphysic, are historically determined. The concept of “perversion” was invented by psychiatrists at the end of the 19th century. As the term suggests, it fused moral assumption and psychiatric categorization together. Nowadays ethical metaphysics has changed, to the point that psychiatrists no longer speak of perversion, but of “paraphilia.” Paraphilia or “wrong love” softens the connotation of moral condemnation. Perverse acts are performances in which we can discern the actors, characters, director, and author of the performance. Indeed, although the scripts of Sade’s novels are sadistic, their author is masochistic. Sade tried really hard to spend most of his life between prisons and madhouses following sexual jokes that are relatively mild. To describe this differential, Lacan advances two almost identical graphics (Figure 6.1). The first one on the left shows the sadistic position, the second one on the right shows the masochistic one. In both the graphics, the “game” starts with a, which is the object-thing we have already discussed. The path ends with S, the mythical subject of pure pleasure – something in between subject and signifier. Now, to our great surprise – we would be even more surprised if Lacan did not surprise us, which happens very rarely – Lacan tells us that that object a is the sadistic agent himself. This postulation would surprise us less if we thought of the number of horror, war, or violent movies or novels that so many people are keen on. It is evident that they enjoy watching these forms of sadism – their object a – washing off their guilt with the excuse that they are watching mere fiction.

Schema 1 V

d

a

Schema 2 S

a

V

S

S

S

d FIGURE 6.1

Sadian Scheme

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Lacan notes that “sadistic” artistic works split us as subjects. Indeed, while witnessing sadistic scenes, a good part of us refutes the horrific events we are watching; the rest of us, however, the “aesthetic” part, will appreciate them as strong and well-made sequences. A part of us rebels against tortures, the other one enjoys them. We unload on a wicked person the task to act cruelly, so as to allow ourselves to get engrossed with the sadistic act. If, for Lacan, the sadist is object a, then the real subject [S /] is the victim. For Lacan, sadomasochism is not aggressiveness towards an animal or human object, but rather an act that presupposes a subject that suffers or enjoys. The victim / S is split. On the one hand, the subject subjects itself to his own executioner, it subjects itself to the Sadean law: “be the object of enjoyment of the executioner Other.” On the other hand, the subject annihilates itself to pure sufferance, to an unarticulated scream where dignity and humanity vanish. Liliana Cavani’s film, The night doorman, impressed the audience precisely because it epitomized well this subjective split of the victim. An ex-Lager prisoner meets her Nazi persecutor in Vienna after many years; he is under cover, disguised as a night doorman. Instead of reporting him, the woman starts a sadomasochistic sexual relationship with him, which mirrors the relationship they had at the time of the Lager. Please allow me to use the names of the two main actors: Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling. According to a Lacanian structure, the sadist Bogarde (a) acts on Rampling [S /] through a will (V) that is almost transcendent: the Nazi project. This ruthless will replaces the cruel Sadean nature. The woman is split because, on the one hand, she suffers as a victim; but on the other hand, the sadistic action yearns for an annihilation of pain itself. As Cavani has shown allegorically, the final result is S as a mythical subject of pure pleasure. Rampling goes from being split victim [S /] to post factum S, subjectivity that enjoys, when she again meets her torturer whom she now has in her hands. The difference between the two Lacanian graphics consists in the rotation with respect to d (desire) – the first graphic illustrates Bogarde’s position, the second one Rampling’s. They both attain jouissance, but from different positions. In the first graphic, the focus of desire is on a, the torturer: it is him who starts off the path. In graphic 2, by contrast, the focus of desire is on Rampling, / S. To the extent that she becomes an accomplice of the sadistic act, this leads to S, which – in a book of mine on perversions ( Benvenuto 2016) – I called salvation. Every utopia – including Nazism – promises this S, a subject that enjoys in a happy society. I wonder whether it might be the case that all utopias are sadistic by definition. And in fact Sade was an utopian thinker. Sadists consider themselves avengers in that, by acting cruelly towards innocent people, they believe that they are freeing the world from evil; affording the world a salvific subjectivity such that it might attain infinite jouissance. René Girard (2013) pointed out that innocents have been persecuted since time immemorial – they are scapegoats. Indeed, in every society you are witness to a hideous rivalry that has the potential to make the whole social body

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explode. This is why all the evil is unloaded on someone who is considered “impure” and, as such, is expelled from the community, or even killed. Society purges itself from the rivalry – that is to say, it preserves itself. This, until the process starts again.

10 Transference Freud thought that analysis artificially created a neurosis: transference. For him, analysis was healing from the transference. In short, analysis has to heal from analysis. . . . Now, for Lacan, every subject who does analysis assumes that the analyst knows something special about him; the analyst is a subject supposed to know. And sometimes the patient rubs it into the analyst’s face: “why don’t you tell me what you have discovered about me?” Lacan would say, à la Socrates, that the analyst ought to forget all she knows ( Lacan 1966). But in order for the transference to take place, a certain degree of knowledge on the part of the analyst ought to be presupposed by the analyzand. Why everyone undergoing analysis ask himself/herself “what does my unconscious know?” The transference dissolves, and analysis ends, when the subject stops believing in the analyst’s knowledge. IPA has long been dominated by a pan-transference tendency. If the patient says, for instance, “yesterday I saw that hated uncle of mine,” then the analyst will say, for example, “you are telling me that you find me as hideous as your uncle and that you wouldn’t want to see me again etc.” Many mainstream analysts link everything back to themselves in the attempt to untangle a subjective reality they cannot grasp. This brings some analysts towards a sort of delusion of reference, as we say in psychiatry: everything the patient says refers to the analyst. The Lacanian analyst behaves differently: even when the patient says something that refers directly to the analyst, this latter brings him/her back to the “real object.” That is to say, if the patient says: “today, my dear analyst, I find you particularly hideous,” then the Lacanian psychoanalyst will likely say “you just put me in the place of that famous uncle of yours that you hate.” The Lacanian psychoanalyst does not interpret the transference, she interprets within the transference. Personally I see the shortcoming of both approaches. I remember that, for Freud, transference is a repetition of the type of relationship with our parents – during our childhood they were the first subjectssupposed-to-know. For the infants, parents are always right, and they know everything about their children. Jean Piaget (2001) proved that all children are sure about the fact that adults, and parents in particular, know their thoughts. The first interpreters of the world and of ourselves are those inept figures of our parents. Is it not coincidental, then, that children undergo the “why?” phase when they are asking the subject-supposed-to-know the reason of everything. Transference takes place because analysands infantilize themselves, trusting to someone else, the analyst, the knowledge of the Other, thinking that she knows their unconscious thinking. It is remarkable to observe that in patients who

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know Lacan well, and who are thus aware that transference is just an illusion, that when they decide to undergo analysis with you . . . they suppose that you have the knowledge. It is a structural effect, as the convicted they have to believe they are innocent. If the subject does not agree to infantilize himself, you say he resists, a Freudian term that Lacan does not like. Some people enter analysis in order to become analysts themselves, and thus to profess that they do not have symptoms. It is worth noting that for Lacan a special training analysis does not exist. For him, each and every good analysis is a training analysis. In order to do analysis, for Freud, what you need is inhibition, or symptom, or anxiety. Inhibition-symptom-anxiety are the bread the analyst has to “eat” in order to earn his living. The analysis of a person who wishes to become an analyst starts when she realizes that she is not as “at peace” as she thought, but that even without realizing it, she is at war.

11 The Phallus and the Thing I am sometimes asked about the essential difference between object a and the phallus, a distinction on which Lacan insists so much. In order to answer here, allow me to recall a personal memory. I was a child when I heard someone talking about psychoanalysis for the first time. It was during a comic television show by Renato Rascel, a famous Italian actor-singer of that time. Rascel was rather short. At a certain point in the show, Rascel confesses to a beautiful (tall) girl some discomfort I cannot recall. Then the beautiful woman offers to be his analyst, and asks him to lie down on the couch. In the end, it turned out that what Rascel wished for was . . . a cork. Now, in the Italian language, we say that someone is “a cork” (a midget, that is) when he is very short. Being a “cork” himself, this was what he wished to own. At the end of the show, the beautiful analyst gives him a very long cork. . . . No interpretation seems necessary. The show winks at the audience – who at that time were not even familiar with Freud – on the basis of the common belief that dwarfs, as scoliotic people, have very long penises. That show was strictly Lacanian. The cork – that is to say, what Rascel was missing in order to be a complete man – is a metaphor of what Lacan calls the Phallus, with a capital P because it is not the traditional penis, but rather a unique signifier. Like the other signifiers, but unlike them. Orwell wrote that all animals are equal, but pigs are more equal than the others (Orwell 1945). Similarly, for Lacan, the Phallus is a signifier like the others but one that is more signifier than the others. Phallus surely has a great importance in Freud’s system, but in Lacan it occupies a central role. Lacan seems to be polarized around the symbol of the phallus in the same way as Indian people, who for centuries scattered the streets of their country with many lingam, penises made of stone. The Phallus is a special signifier because it signifies desire itself. And since for Lacan desire is subjectivity, it follows that if the subject represents himself in any way, he is a penis. I am not joking.

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In contrast to Winnicott’s dyad of the “good enough” mother and her child, Lacan retraces the mother-child relationship in phallic terms. He takes seriously Freud’s formulation that the desire of every woman who wishes to become a mother is the desire to have a phallus for herself. Then the drama of the little boy will be “do I have to be my mother’s phallus or rather can I have my own phallus?” To be or to have the phallus? The little girl’s problem will be precisely whether to be given the phallus or to be the phallus for man. Surely the gift of the long cork given to Rascel is derisory – the analyst does not give anything, except analysis – because the cork is a mere signifier of desire, rather than the object of desire. Thus, what does the individual really desire behind the cork-phallus? We could answer, in a way that is applicable to all of us nowadays, that the objects of human desire are essentially: power, sex and love, money, knowledge. But all these objects are surrogates that quench our desiring thirst. For Lacan, they are consolatory surrogates. In Naples, to say that you enjoyed something a lot, for example a succulent dinner, you say “Me song cunsulato,” “I solaced myself.” Pleasant experiences are mere solaces for the desolation of life. With respect to the true object – object a – that originates desire, it will never be possible to have it. Lacan calls this “object” la chose, “the thing.” The thing is the black sun around which our life orbits. Lacan commented on Antigone by Sophocles ( Lacan 1986, Chap. XIX–XXI). Some say the fundamental difference between Freud and Lacan is that the former uses Oedipus as an interpretative key and the second uses Antigone. Lacan’s would thus be a “feminine” re-reading of Oedipus. Antigone transgresses the laws of the city, which forbids the burying of her brother Polynices on account of him being an enemy of his homeland. Again, we have here the relationship between law, desire, and transgression. Antigone “symbolically” buries Polynices and is sentenced to a horrible death by the city’s chief. Now – Lacan asks himself – what bonds Antigone to her brother to the point that she would risk facing death? Under the name of which law does she rebel against the laws of her city? There is a contradiction between two “laws.” Lacan puts forward his odd interpretation: Antigone is a martyr, a witness, not of the “familiar law” which would oppose the “law of the homeland” but of das Ding, la chose, the thing itself. Polynices embodies the thing because, as Antigone says, for her it is an irreplaceable unicum. She will not be able to have any other brother, since the other brother Eteocles died at war, and her parents are too old to procreate. Uniqueness is what bonds us for all of our life, precisely because, being unique, it cannot be represented nor signified, not even by the Phallus. A certain thing, if unique, cannot be represented by anything else, or else it would no longer be unique. Then, every individual is senseless, because she cannot be replaced by another individual. As is clear, Lacan’s theory might appear to many to be very romantic. And I believe that this links back to his eureka, “Y a’d’l’Un,” “there’s some One.” The One whose existence he celebrates is that absolute uniqueness around which our whole existence gravitates.

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Being unique, we are all meaningless. We are labelled with a name, but like unique events we do not mean anything. Surely my parents desired – in the best scenario – a boy, or a girl, but not me. This senseless uniqueness, however, becomes our cause when we say for example “I live in the name (for the cause) of socialism.” Polynices becomes for Antigone the cause to die for, because the brotherly uniqueness causes the desire that makes her a heroine of subjectivity. For this reason, those who betray their cause for opportunism feel “guilty” according to Lacan. The obsessionals are subjects who at a certain point have betrayed the cause, their thing (in French cause and chose are close in sound). Then Lacan’s most famous sentence “those who give up on their own desire are guilty” will appear less absurd. That is to say, those who give up the cause-thing which is at the origin of their desire are guilty. Let us move from an ancient and tragic show, Antigone, to another one, modern and comic: Sessomatto, a movie by Dino Risi. A peasant from the Italian countryside arrives for the first time in Milan, with no previous experience of the urban world. And so he mistakes a transvestite who sells his body at Ravizza park for a nice lady; he falls in love with “her” and takes “her” to his house. Step by step, the peasant will find out that this lady is in fact a male prostitute, and what is more, that he has a wife and children. Later, the peasant will learn that he is actually his own brother, who had left the country many years back. . . . The peasant then mistakes the object of his desire: he believes that his desire is to marry a nice virgin girl. But there is something that binds the peasant to his brother, to the point of leading him to utter the incomparable sentence: “it was enough that you were a woman rather than a man; enough that you were engaged rather than married; enough that you were a nice girl rather than a prostitute; enough that you were my cousin rather than my brother . . . then, we would really be made for each other!” And indeed, at the end, they will end up being a couple. A kitschy analyst would say that the peasant had been in love with his brother since he was a child, and that he has managed to retrieve his incestuous object despite the metamorphoses etc. Lacan would not go down this road. Surely the transvestite brother is not Polynices, but he seems to have something unique and precious for the peasant. His object – the nice lady – was the one prescribed by the law of his country of origin, which the peasant had mistaken for his desire. Suddenly, however, he meets someone – or better said, a certain thing – that seems to reveal a true “law of desire,” that is to say the irresistible attraction that that unicum has on him.

References 2001, Holy Bible: English Standard Version, Crossway Bibles, Wheaton. Benvenuto, S 2008, Accidia. La passione dell’indifferenza, Il Mulino, Bologna. Spanish edition: La pereza. Pasión per la indiferencia, Machado Libros, Madrid. Benvenuto, S 2015, ‘Hysteria, the Bet of Psychoanalysis’, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol 3, no. 1. Available from: www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/hysteria-thebet-of-psychoanalysis/

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Benvenuto, S 2016, Perversions, Karnac Books, London. Cocteau, J 1964, The Essay of Indirect Criticism, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson. Freud, S 1895, ‘Studies on Hysteria’, in Strachey, J, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2 (1893–1895), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1955. Freud, S 1909, ‘Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909)’, in Freud, S, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 10 (1909), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1955, pp. 155–318. Girard, R 2013, Violence and the Sacred, Bloomsbury, New York. Kretschmer, E 1974, ‘The Sensitive Delusion of Reference’, in Hirsch, S and Shepherd, M, eds., Themes and Variations in European Psychiatry, John Wright, Bristol, pp. 153–195. Lacan, J 1966, Ecrits, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. Ecrits: A Selection, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2004. Lacan, J 1973, Télévision, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1990. Lacan, J 1981, Le Séminaire, Livre III. Les psychoses, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Psychoses, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997. Lacan, J 1986, Le Séminaire, Livre VII. L’éthique de la psychanalyse, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Ethics of psychoanalysis, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997. Leach, E 1961, Rethinking Anthropology, Athlone Press of University of London, London. Marx, K 1976, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Engels, F, ed., Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, pp. 61–65. Orwell, G 1945, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, Secker and Warburg, London. Piaget, J 2001, The Language and the Thought of the Child, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Strindberg, A 1983, ‘The Father’, in Strindberg: Five Plays, University of California Press, Oakland.

7 CAN WE BE LACANIANS TODAY?

1 Waiting for Machiavelli Almost at the end of our path, the reader could rightly ask: “so, Benvenuto, are you or aren’t you a Lacanian?” I would answer that I’m not a Lacanian, because I’m not a “-ian” or an “-ist” in any field. I don’t even call myself a Freudian. Freud is a great creator, but I also take into account the limits of the metaphysics on which his vision rests; that of the “signifying f lesh.” However, I’ll admit that I’m a Lacanologist, albeit a deconstructive one. Derrida – who generated deconstructionism – never wasted time deconstructing authors who he felt were alien to him. He dealt with writers, including Lacan, in whose wake he ultimately followed. Derrida’s were actually self-deconstructions, acts of “killing of the father,” thanks to which each father remained as such. In other words, they were a bold distancing of himself from himself. Deconstructing texts is secretly an act of self-criticism, and hence an act of love. And, significantly, Derrida summed up his relationship to Lacan in an essay entitled Pour l’amour de Lacan ( Derrida 1995 –96). My reading of Lacan also aims at being a punctual and scrupulous one, in short a loving one, but with no concessions. And I am not a Derrid . . . ian. In my youth I was a fervent Lacan fan. Then, after overcoming my transference with him, I stopped being one, and for me he was no longer the subject supposed to know. As we said, for Lacan transference occurs because the analyst is considered a subject supposed to know. But my “analysis” with Lacan ended long ago. Which is not to say that someone who has ended an analysis has necessarily been cured. I’m not a Lacanian, but let’s say that I love Lacan. Lacan himself said that we should love our symptom, and, indeed, I love Lacan as my symptom. But, as one

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does with a symptom, I keep at a necessary distance from him, with a sort of pain. Lacan is my joy and my pain. In any case, I consider myself lucky to have had a maître, “master.” I don’t envy those who say “I’ve never had a master.” I feel a tender pity for them, like little orphans who have to steal hot dogs to survive. Separating from your maître can certainly even impoverish you, but it’s not the same poverty as those who’ve never had a true master, and have never therefore had the opportunity to “set up their own shop.” It’s fine to be a prodigal son, but the important thing is not to return to your father with your tail between your legs. Lacan said, “Do as I do: don’t imitate me.” In this case Lacan isn’t very surprising; several masters in various fields have said very similar things. Apparently Marx said he wasn’t a Marxist while Jung said “thank God, I’m Jung, and not a Jungian!” And so on, and so on. The master’s refusal to be a “-ian” or an “-ist” of himself has become a sort of stereotype. And part of the very structure of “being a master” is a certain self-consoling contempt towards one’s pupils, even the most loved ones. In any case, it’s true that I am not a Lacanian precisely because I prefer to do as Lacan did: i.e. I also try to separate from my masters, including Lacan. I am a practical Lacanist, not a theoretical one. I am an imitator of Lacan – and hence not a Lacanian – insofar as I believe we should do to him what he did to Freud. Despite the cover-up of a return to Freud, Lacan is the Freudian who has led us furthest away from the letter of Freud, even though some say the contrary, because they take him too literally. He operated an après-coup with Freud that gives a new sense to the premier coup, to the first event, making it a cause. Today we need to operate an après-coup with Lacan: to repeat some of the things he said, but in such a way as to make them find a different register of sense from when Lacan was alive. Today’s Lacan can’t be yesterday’s Lacan. Now, I find that a great number of my Lacanian friends – not all of them, to be honest – are still in the yesterday. In the same way as many Freudians, who Lacan certainly did not appreciate, still believed in the 1960s and 70s that they were in the premier coup of psychoanalysis. I think we have now entered a third phase of psychoanalysis. The first was the phase when we united or split on Freud’s explicit system of thought: we inherited his cardinal concepts and situated ourselves in relation to them. But Freud’s explicit system is a metapsychology, i.e. a set of myths. Very interesting ones, but still myths. The Oedipus, the primary scene, castration anxiety, the libidinal phases, and so on, are all myths. They undoubtedly capture something of human life, but they should never be turned into dogmas! Along with authors such as Winnicott, Bion, Loewald, and so on, Lacan marked a second phase of psychoanalysis. Freud’s concepts were no longer taken literally, or rather, they were repositioned on a new horizon, the specific one of each of these innovators. But today I believe we have entered a third phase, one in which we have lost our innocence once and for all. In other words, the creators of the second phase must also be relativized, and analytical practice must be questioned about

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its specificity, beyond any metapsychologies and individual theories. We must, in short, do what Machiavelli once did with politics: before him several political theories had f lourished, but it was Machiavelli who first looked at political struggle as such, independently from any idea or ideal of good government. I am waiting for the Machiavelli of psychoanalysis.

2 The matheme and la passe Consequently, my reading of Lacan is charitable, sympathetic, deconstructive, and textual. A sympathetic and charitable reading, neither celebrative, nor fearful, nor propagandistic. Charitable in the sense of the “principle of charity” developed by the analytic philosophers Neil Wilson, Quine (1975), and Davidson. This principle consists in resisting the temptation to dismiss as illogical – or stupid, or false – everything that at first seems complete nonsense to us. The principle of charity is a corollary to modern relativism. Sokal and Bricmont (2003), for example, effectively illustrate the rather uncharitable rejection of a line of thought – French post-structuralism – they don’t understand. A sympathetic attitude is recommended to any anthropologist who goes off to observe a faraway culture: if he wants to understand anything about it, he must feel a sympathy towards it. You cannot be a good anthropologist of a tribe you loathe; otherwise its members will give you a distorted image of themselves. Let’s say that I strive to be a good “anthropologist” of the Lacanians: I’m not a member of their village, but I like to be welcomed there. As for the reading I call textual, I oppose it to two extremes: the rhapsodic reading, which concentrates only on specific fragments, and the purely “mathemic” reading. Something needs to be said about a central expedient in Lacan: the “matheme.” The term “mathematics” derives from máthēma, which in Greek means “that which one learns,” “that which one must know,” or “lesson.” Lacan exploits the etymology of mathematics as the transmission of knowledge. Though Lacan’s teaching was not schematic but f luid and bubbly, he thought that, despite everything, it was possible to create a school of psychoanalysis because we can transmit mathemes to pupils: formulae or algorithms unaffected by the f luctuations of subjective interpretations, by imaginary liquefaction. He thought of sequences of pure signifiers as mathematical equations. Lacan thought that it was possible for psychoanalysis to have something like Newton’s equation mathematizing universal gravitation. In fact, you don’t have to be a genius like Newton to understand the equation. In mathematics and physics, signifiers are stones. Psychoanalysis is therefore transmittable insofar as it has a mathemic hard core. Yet, I don’t believe that this integral transmission is possible even in the “hard” sciences. A software can be transmitted integrally from one hardware to another, but human minds are not hardware, they’re not made of metal. All pupils, however bright – or rather, because they’re bright – misinterpret and alter

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their master’s thought, even without realizing it. This is because there are no two brains – and therefore no two minds – that are exactly the same. According to Edelman (1992) – a nihilistic relativist neuroscientist – two identical thoughts are not possible because there are no two brains in the world with the same structure. In every transmission there is a loss of associations on the one hand and a f luctuating grafting of other sequences on the other. Therefore, the great schools of thought are centres of dissemination and dispersion. We think that Newton’s equation is perfectly transmittable to anyone who has a minimum knowledge of physics. But complete transmission is a trompe l’oeil, because physicists and cosmologists today share a common “linguistic game,” as Wittgenstein would say. This collective “game” produces sufficiently agreed upon senses for “mass,” “distance,” “gravitational force,” and so on. But if this community stopped being cohesive, if various independent scientific communities were created, then even Newton’s equation would take on different senses. Behind every matheme there is always a group of people who play the same game. What the master really transmits is not so much a formal thinking, but a certain style of being-in-the-world. This is why, about Lacan, one can write only introductions to his thought (Benvenuto & Kennedy 1986). The transmission of Lacan’s system is made problematic by the fact that his has always been a thinking “in motion.” As I said, trying to find a complete definition of Lacanian concepts is a dead end, because in the Lacanian opus we find several “definitions,” often in contradiction, for each concept. For this reason, both “scholastic” Lacanians and those who condemn him take part in the same flaw: they start from the presumption that, like in mathematics, a discourse makes sense when one has provided an explicit definition of the concepts used from the very start. “But what does Lacan really define as desire, as enjoyment, and so on?” This is what scholars who don’t understand Lacan, or want to understand him too much, exclaim impatiently in annoyance. Lacan’s journey has been rather an Hegelian one. Now, the essential concept of Hegelian thinking is that of Erfahrung, a term rather hastily translated as “experience.” For Hegel, history is the experience the Mind has of itself, unfolding in temporality. Now, Erfahrung derives from fahren, which in German has the sense of to drive (and drive also translates der Trieb in the Freudian sense). In other words, Erfahrung is the drive to drive, the drive to have experiences, always moving around. Lacan’s thought is an Erfahrung, a journey: the starting point is that human beings are not only Homo sapiens, because they’re shaped by language. But after this initial motive, his path doesn’t proceed in a very linear way: the itinerary never closes in on itself. But Lacan doesn’t fully recognize his Erfahrung, so he aims at the matheme, at the idea that something like a sacrament exists, in the Catholic sense of the term. Sacrament was the Latin translation of the Greek mysterion, mystery. If I am baptized, I am a Christian, even if I then disavow Christianity; if I have taken the sacrament of the priesthood, I will always be a priest, even if I become an atheist. The matheme is an act after which I shall never be what I was before. This is why Lacan proposed a mechanism he called passe.

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His problem was not “how to form good psychoanalysts” but “who a Lacanian school should accept as analysts?” The IPA schools tend to keep a close eye on the training of analysts to co-opt: if you do a certain number of years of analysis with a training analyst, i.e. an analyst the institution considers legitimate, and you prove you can operate correctly with patients, then you will in turn qualify for recognition as an analyst. For Lacan, by contrast, it doesn’t matter who you did analysis with, you could even have done it with an unknown analyst, the important thing is to understand whether there really was an analysis. But this is something neither the analyst nor the analysand can say, for both are too involved in the question. So Lacan came up with the following contrivance: those who want to pass are required to describe their analysis to a colleague, to someone like them, to a fellow. This colleague is then heard by a school jury, and on the basis of what is said by the passeur (the name given to those chosen as intermediaries to talk about an aspiring member’s analysis), the jury verifies whether there really was an analysis. If there was, the candidate can be accepted as a “member.” A system that doesn’t contradict Lacan’s legendary eccentricity. The École chooses as analysts, as peers, people it has never seen, based on the account of a third party! In any case, this strange passing of the buck has a logic: if there really was an analysis – rather than a psychologistic blah blah blah – then the candidate will find a way to make the passeur understand it. In other words, if the analytical act has occurred, it is a sort of matheme that can be handed over without it changing sense or becoming distorted. It’s like transmitting Newton’s equation or Einstein’s: they can be transmitted from physicist to physicist and all of them will understand their impact. The passe is very similar to the technique of psychodrama, which many Lacanians practice. That is, in a group someone tells their story or describes a situation they experienced and the others play the characters of this story or situation, improvising: the often miraculous effect is that these “actors,” though they know nothing about the context, often end up saying or doing things that are quite important for the subject who told the story. It’s as if they had a sixth sense. Does this occur because a matheme has been transmitted? No, because every narrative is like opening a game: if you understand the game, you can continue it even by improvising.

3 Lay analysis Something ought also to be said about the state of Lacanian clinical practice today, even though I’m not an expert on the galaxy of the various Lacanian schools and associations. There’s one thing, however, that worries me: for many years now there have been no major schisms between analysts. Is this because we’ve now reached a settling period of the various tendencies? Yet the secessionist fever is a sign of vitality. When in the 1960s and 70s Marxism was at its peak, there were countless Communist, Trotskyist, Maoist, Situationist, and so on, parties and groups,

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which often came into being by “parthenogenesis.” This multiplying was the mark of the vitality of Marxism at the time. The fragmentation of churches and cults in the United States is also a sign of an enormous religious vitality in the country. In the same way, the diaspora of the Lacan-inspired associations was a sign of life within that current. The day psychoanalysis is reduced to two or three variants it will have reached its mummification. Various Lacanian schools introduce into the Lacanian labyrinth medicine or psychology graduates who had never heard of him when they were in the wellpruned aseptic grounds of the university, and this is a praiseworthy operation. I personally lecture in some schools with a Lacanian orientation, in Italy and abroad. So, Lacanian schools for me are more than welcome, even though I personally work more on the “after-school activities.” But can we generally say that Lacanians are good analysts? After all, this is the question that concerns most of those who are interested in psychoanalysis. The answer is that every psychoanalytic association has both excellent analysts and mediocre ones, and this goes for the Lacanians too. I sometime ask analyst friends from all kinds of schools: “if someone very dear to you, a sister, a son, and so on, felt unwell, what analyst would you send them to?” The answers are often surprising, with some saying they would not send them to an analyst of their own association. They would address them to someone they personally trust. The moral: with regard to analytic trustworthiness, the decisive differences concern individuals rather than schools. Until recently, mainstream IPA analysts mostly considered Lacanian analysts “savages” and blunderers. But then certain figures in Lacanian clinical practice emerged and earned themselves the respect of non-Lacanians. This is the case, for example, with Lacan’s friend Françoise Dolto, who died in 1988, considered even by anti-Lacanians in many countries to be an authentic prodigy in child analysis. Among the analysts of the American Psychoanalytic Association and of the associations inf luenced by it, Lacan was considered irrelevant in his lifetime, and for many of them he still is. Then, gradually, these analysts started finding themselves before young non-analysts of the post-modern galaxy who basically said: “for us psychoanalysis is Lacan. Can you analysts explain it to us?” APA analysts found themselves in an increasingly embarrassing position, because they knew little or nothing about Lacan and risked being totally cut off from the cultivated crowd that was prepared to take psychoanalysis seriously. So, over the years, these analysts searched for friends, colleagues, former partners, mostly European, with a reputation for being well-acquainted with Lacan. They underwent a full immersion in Euro-Continental psychoanalysis, reading Žižek, JacquesAlain Miller, Darian Leader, Bruce Fink, and other bestselling authors, thanks to whom much of Lacan has been passed on to the “masses.” “Masses” in the relative sense, of course: I mean postmodern academic culture. It is also true that often Lacanians come across as a cult. Some Lacanians do tend towards an authentic “cult of personality” with Lacan, similar to the cult of

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Lenin or Mao Zedong at the time of Communist despotism. I confess that often a layperson like me feels quite uncomfortable when faced with iron Lacanians, those who cite Lacan’s utterances as if they were passages from the Bible or the Koran. I never take anything for granted, and definitely not Lacan’s thinking, nor Freud’s or Marx’s. . . . Some concepts must always be thought over again, starting from their origin, and we must always be ready to re-question them. Some might say that even scientists seem to have the cult of particular personalities – like Darwin, Einstein, or Gödel. But in this case it’s the cult of specific theories, not texts. The man of science admires the matheme, whilst many Lacanians consecrate a cult to everything Lacan said. And the same occurs for the cult of Freud, which I often find obscurantist. Newton wrote several books on theology, occultism, and even alchemy. Not having read them, I cannot say whether in these fields too he showed his geniality. But if today someone says they’re a Newtonian, this doesn’t imply they share his opinions on theology or alchemy. The thought of the man Newton is distinctly separated from his matheme, the only thing that counts for a scientist. But this doesn’t happen with Freud, Lacan, or any other psychoanalytical guru: anything that came out of their mouths is taken as gospel truth. These masters are deprived of the freedom of having talked rubbish from time to time. And I think they all did, quite often. Indeed, as I don’t suppose Lacan has the knowledge of all things, I can indulge in a radically secular reading of his thought, and of psychoanalysis in general. Since my early youth, though the son of theologian – even though a rather atheist one – I have always been a layman. It’s my imprinting. “Lay” is the opposite of “ecclesiastic.” In fact a lot of psychoanalysis presents itself as ecclesia, as a closed corporation into which you can be co-opted through a long and costly process of initiation. Psychoanalysis today – I’m referring to all its currents – is therefore governed by a gerontocracy that no one tries to send to the scrap yard. It’s like today’s China, governed by elderly men. The opposite happens in the core sciences, theoretical physics, or mathematics, where you’re already considered past your peak at the age of 35. The “hard” sciences are like sports, you shine when you’re young. The fact that psychoanalysis is instead dominated by the elderly excludes it ipso facto from science. In psychoanalysis, what counts is your Erfahrung, your traveling experience, not your ability with the matheme. What if it was the biological balance of power within a discipline that really counted, and not the acclaimed “method,” which supposedly distinguishes science from what is not science? We should be thinking about a bio-epistemology. The feminists have had the merit of stressing how our biological gender can inf luence our way of thinking, even philosophically, but the same can be said about the various ages of life. Under the umbrella of the psychoanalytic gerontocracy, some try to calculate to which generation they belong after Freud, the forefather. All analysts have had an analyst, and so, from analyst to analyst they can trace back their connection to Freud. An analyst once told me: “I’m a sixth degree Freudian.”

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“Lay” derives from the Greek laikos, which derives from laos, people. Laikos means “of the people,” “something for the commoners, for the vulgus,” something vulgar, in other words. Like these conversations of mine, which try to popularize the subject. I confess, as a layman I think that what is really profound in Freud is his vulgar materialism. Even the famous philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro (author of The Freudian Slip [2010]) used to say “the more vulgar materialism is, the more I like it!” What was actually the core of Freud’s message a century ago? Paraphrasing Pascal, we could say “Le cul a ses raisons que la Raison ne connaît pas,” “the arse has its reasons of which Reason knows nothing.” Vulgar materialism is Freud’s “poetry.” Of course, when I said that, for Freud, the human being is caro significans, the Latin appeared a little less vulgar. The lay position is therefore a non-initiatory, more laid-back position that calls upon a knowledge that can be popularized. One of the best-known avant-garde playwrights and actors of 1960s and 70s Italian theatre, Carmelo Bene, recited a monologue in his Our Lady of the Turks on two possible types of person: “fools who see the Madonna” and “fools who do not see the Madonna.” Well, I belong to the breed of fools who do not see the Madonna – who will never enjoy direct contact with truth. I say this without insinuating that the fools who have not seen the Madonna are less foolish than those who have. Perhaps it is wiser to have seen the Madonna, at least once. Having been a Lacanian in my youth, I think I know what goes on in the mind of those Lacanians who, coming from a scientific background, are careful (as I was) not to throw rationality into the sewers. Plunged into the plethora of the Lacanian signifier, we constantly encounter passages, sentences, statements that challenge our charitable indulgence, especially when Lacan uses concepts from fields we happen to specialize in. What did Lacan mean by pronouncing such apparently – deliberately? – freaky judgements? But, as Lacanians presume Lacan has the knowledge – as theirs is what I would call a logical transference with him – they squeeze their brains for months, years or decades, not only to try to figure out what Lacan meant to say – taking for granted that “he was speaking the truth, though not the whole truth” – but also to make everything work out in the end. A wealth of acumen spent to prove that, despite the appearances, Lacan is entirely logical when he uses logic, correctly philosophical when he uses philosophy, and so on. When charity coalesces with faith, it always nourishes the hope of explaining the text exhaustively. Therefore, many Lacanian commentaries are like Talmudic exegeses. This hermeneutics of the Lacanian text is based on the assumption that Lacan is the bringer of a revelation. Freud was the Old Testament, Lacan the New. And quite a few are convinced they’re developing the Acts of the Apostles. (But it seems to me that none of them adumbrate the Apocalypse.) I say this not out of derision, as I’ve often taken an interest in some forms of biblical and theological exegetics. I am among those who, precisely because they do not have the grace of faith, find enjoyment in following the topo-logical torment of those who do.

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I’m interested in the cogitations of those who have faith because – as Lacan would write – they are sinthomes, sinthoms. He used to say that psychoanalysis is an historical symptom, the price that our era has to pay in order to keep the balance. Which was a way of turning to the benefit of psychoanalysis what Karl Kraus (1990) caustically said in the Vienna of Freud: that psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy. Psychoanalysis, including the Lacanian variety, should be interpreted as an unbalancing symptom thanks to which our society is kept in balance. This hermeneutics of the text of revelation is something monotheistic theologies, Marxist scholastics, and psychoanalytic hermeneutics have in common, because all these forms of life and thought are based, as I’ve said, on a promise of salvation. The Lacanian variety lets us glimpse the possibility of saving ourselves from alienation, from being totally determined by the Other, by the symbolic. It promises a release from an inevitable, blinding, average, human (too human) idiocy.

4 Logical fundamentalism So, what is there to save in Conversations with Lacan? Perhaps it’s easier to state which, according to me, are the aspects of Lacan’s thought that should be scaled down or scrapped. I think that today we should set aside – anathema! – Lacan’s logocentrism, the primal transcendentality of language. But is a Lacan without the primacy of the signifier like staging Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark? And, besides, did I not say earlier that recognizing the power of the signifier is fundamental to the understanding of history, politics, economics, and so on? Of course, but it is one thing to recognize the dominance of the signifier, but it is quite another to consider language, as Lacan does, as the transcendental condition of subjectivity. In the wake of Derrida and Agamben, I try instead to return humans to the domain of animality. Lacan, in my opinion, is too dependent on Heidegger, one of the philosophers who went the furthest in separating the human from life forms in general. We must however recognize that Lacan did pose a fundamental question: in what way does human access to the symbolic profoundly pervert, so-to-speak, our relation to the world? Even if we say that his answers are not satisfactory, the matter is definitely essential. Because language is not only the origin of what we call self-consciousness, but also of what I would call unconsciousness. I appreciate, of course, that his logocentrism is inspired to the specificity of the analytic cure, which is always a “logical” cure. But the risk many Lacanians take is that of abandoning themselves to a modernistic sort of spiritualism. A patient of mine in her sixties told me that she slipped on a damp f lower one evening, fell on the ground, and broke her foot. It took her a month and half to recover. Such falls weren’t uncommon and she’d broken her foot before, sometimes by slipping on something, as in this case, or at other times by misplacing

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her foot. Analysis had helped her recognize these falls as a symptom. We reconstructed – Konstruktion – their context. It turned out that she had always fallen during periods of splendid achievements; either when she had seduced an important man, had enjoyed professional success, and so on. This latest fall was no exception: she was going through a very positive period. And so she slipped on a damp f lower. The analyst then says “there is logos in this!” In short, every time she had taken “a great step forward,” the Other, the symbolic, imposed a “step back” of at least a month with these convenient falls. An Other obviously jealous of her successes, called her back to her rank which, in fairy tale terms, was: “you’ll never be the Cinderella who meets her prince.” Cinderella lost her shoe, this patient would lose her foot for a variable period of time. Feet and shoes, as every fetishist knows, are significant, and it is no coincidence that the name Oedipus means “swollen foot.” This to say that the work of the analyst is quite different from that of all other useful operators such as counsellors, support psychologists, and so on. As Lacan says, the analyst is interested in pathetic, painful, and disabling events, insofar as they are logical events. The problem, however, is that this specialization of analysts often leads them to developing global anthropologies. And this is where dogmatism slips in. We should always remember that Lacan’s theory is the theoretical projection of a specific practice, that of analysis, that feeds on logos. But human reality is not only logos: some Real always surfaces. The subject that Lacan speaks of, that psychoanalysis in general speaks of, is the ref lection of a practice on the screen of knowledge. But this doesn’t take away from the fact that there is plenty of the “animal” in human beings. And this is something many Lacanians are happy to forget. Those we consider the most “human” sentiments – compassion, being faithful to someone, the mix of desire and love for a person, empathy, the pleasure of being together . . . – are all things that animals are perfectly capable of, superior mammals in particular. What marks us as humans is probably the most “inhuman” part of us, “inhuman” in the common sense of the word. What could be more inhuman than language? I dislike logical (from Logos) fundamentalism. Fundamentalisms, in any field, only see one aspect of things, always the same one, whilst everything else is reduced to a corollary or epicycle. Some are convinced, for example, that the origin of all important political and social events is always and exclusively economic interest and conf lict. Even the civil war in Syria, which essentially opposed the signifier Shiite to the signifier Sunni, together with the signifiers of the foreign “powers,” is said to have broken out for economic reasons, even though Syria does not possess great riches. Economic factors are certainly essential to understanding history, but history is not reducible exclusively to an expression of economic conf licts. The signifiers count too, as we’ve seen, together with philosophies, religious beliefs, individual will to power, the collective desire for war, and so on. In psychoanalysis, too, it is a mistake to think that everything that happens to a human being is the effect of the arché of language.

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We shouldn’t ignore the fact that we are also zoé, i.e. non-linguistic beings. Today if we say purely “biological” we refer above all to a genotype. In an organism everything derives from environmental interactions except for our genes, which will never change whatever happens. A question we often ask – “does this trait have a genetic or environmental derivation?” – makes no sense, because for most aspects of our lives, it is impossible to separate what is derived from our genes and what is supposedly the result of our history. The genetic cause of some things is clear, like for example Down syndrome, which is solely due to an extra copy of chromosome 21. Yet, in most instances, whilst our genes determine certain outcomes, our predispositions are formatted by a weft of historical events. Of course, it is due to genetics if I’m short because I have short parents or tall because I have tall parents. But it is also true that my diet since early childhood can inf luence my growth, therefore it will always be difficult to understand the extent to which my height is due to the genes my parents transmitted to me or to how they fed me. We can say that our life is like a river: the mass of water that comes down from Lake Itasca into the Minnesota river is the analogon of the genetic; the course of the Mississippi to its delta is like our real life. Now, take the fact that, before St. Louis, the Mississippi curves towards the north and then bends towards the east. It would be absurd to ask, “is this due to the conformation of the terrain or to the mass of the source water?” This question makes no sense. Life, like a river, is always the effect of a genetic primum, and then the course of life depends on the asperities and external conformations that every being encounters. Now, it’s as if logical fundamentalism said: “the Mississippi is its course alone, the water doesn’t count.” But if there was no water there would be no river. Our genetic heritage will always produce slopes, that will then be shaped by the chances of life. This persistent clinamen – the swerve – should not be ignored. In essence, our genes are our peculiar difference, the reason why we are all different from each other.

5 The ultimatum of the drives But all this sounds like pure theory. What does it mean for clinical practice when we say we should to never forget we are zoé, the expression of our genes? Above all, it means that we shouldn’t believe we’re all exclusively the effect of our relations to others, and to our mothers in particular. Our lives are not only and entirely relational lives. Our mothers are crucial to imprinting a particular course to our lives, but that’s not all. We all play our part too, we all respond with our own specific senseless difference, which is not caused by events. From the very beginning we’re all difference . . . difference from our parents, from our siblings. . . . We’re all born with particular dispositions that relations to others can modify only with great difficulty. The course of the Mississippi is due to the terrain it f lows over, true, but its origin is that lake with a certain slope. Lake Itasca cannot be ignored, or else we fall into idealistic naivety.

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Language, therefore, gives the form of the signifier to drives that are not symbolic. For example, language gives shape to a Trieb that Freud doesn’t recognize, and which I would call competition compulsion. In fact, Lacan does discuss competition and connects it to a sort of constituent envy in human beings. He often quotes the following passage from the Confessions of Saint Augustine: I have myself seen jealousy in a baby and know what it means. He was not old enough to talk, but whenever he saw his foster-brother at the breast, he would grow pale with envy. (Saint Augustine 1961, Book 1, chap. VII) The chapter of the Confessions in which this passage appears is eloquently called “The Miseries of Childhood.” The moral: we humans are born envious, and thus, alas, we remain. Some more so and some less so. Instead, the last of the Ten Commandments concerns the miseries of adults: You shall not covet your neighbour’s house, you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male servant, or his female maidservant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbour’s. (Holy Bible 2001, Exodus, chap. 20, ver. 17) It strikes me in this very politically incorrect commandment that the house comes first: it is the most important possession, being the extension of the body that contains all the other possessions, including the wife. Now, for Lacan the impulse to covet other people’s possessions belongs to the imaginary dimension of narcissism. I shall compete with my mirror images. Lacan heeds to the Chinese proverb, “if you do not know your enemy, you do not know yourself.” Because my enemy is “myself,” i.e. my image. As we said, Lacan sends to the imaginary anything that we, less dandy than him, add to the bill of our being zoè. It is evident that political events broadly speaking, those the entire planet follows more than all the others, are sports competitions – the Olympics, the World Series. The great entertainment for humans, apart from sex, is competitive sports (and war). Competing with others to beat them. Competitions are an endless amusement. After all, the supermarket in which to find symbolic idealities for which to fight others, and perhaps even sacrifice one’s life for, is well equipped. Our competitive drive will then take on the aspect of “my Cause.” The one that makes us vibrate with life until we suffer death, in the way of kamikazes. Freud didn’t stress enough the fact that if you put a handful of people together, sooner or later they will come into conf lict, and not only to ensure for themselves the best samples of males or females for copulation. Deep down there’s always a biological power fuelling struggles for symbolic power. The signifier may have the primatum, but the ultimatum always belongs to the drives, which are

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not a product of logos. In any case, for Freud psychoanalysis was a temporary science, the truths of which would one day be absorbed by biology.

6 Drive and addiction The essentiality of drives in psychoanalysis should never be forgotten. In the seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan examines the drive as one of these four ( Lacan 1973). The other three are the unconscious, repetition, and transference. The drive, as a concept at least, therefore occupies an absolutely eminent position in Lacan too. But, according to some philosophers – such as Jean-Luc Nancy (2010) – the Trieb is even more fundamental than the other concepts. Unconscious, repetition and transference are supposed epiphanies of the drive. In any case, Lacan places drives in an essential position, even though he transubstantiates them into desire. Many today attack the Freudian “primacy of the drive,” which they find to be vulgar, and prefer to replace it with an “intersubjectivistic,” “relational,” or “complex” approach. As I said, a particular sector of psychoanalysis (Roy Schafer’s work, for example) wishes to dissolve the coarse individualism of psychoanalysis into intersubjective dialectics, invoking the Mit-Sein (being-with) of Heidegger, the “communication community” of Habermas or other philosophies interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as promoting the primacy of the community over the individual. I think all these socialistic currents derive from a metaphysical ethics that expresses its awe for what Lacan calls the Real. Because das Trieb, the drive, in Freud has the substance of the Real. These anti-drive currents are organic to a culture, our culture, that wants to entirely humanize the planet, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the sovereign amorality of nature (of which humankind is a fragment) by totally submitting it to political and technological will. If all our problems derive from a defect in our relations with others, from our being trapped in paradoxical or vexatious intersubjective systems, the opacity of our body – Körper – is dissolved in the sweet or bitter honey of being-with, Mitsein. For Freud, instead, das Trieb is not something that belongs only to our lived body (Leib), but also to the body that we do not consciously live but that spurs us. In other terms, the project of psychoanalysis is radically antiphenomenological, i.e. it deeply diverges from all forms of spiritualism. I’ll be frank: it’s still worth reading Conversations with Lacan because he steers clear from a cheap spiritualization of psychoanalysis. I therefore object to the operation, which some are attempting, of leading Lacan back to phenomenology, Sartre and intersubjectivity . . . I perceive it as a castration of the materialistic pudenda of psychoanalysis. Freud’s fundamental premise is that our drives are constant, they never let go of us, they express “internal tensions.” For Freud, the human being is above all tense flesh. Always tense. Some have pointed out that this Freudian premise is in contrast to biological data. In fact, things similar to drives – hunger, thirst, anxiety, boredom,

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anxiety, interest, and so on – are discontinuous, they come and go and depend on different situations. In other words, Freud apparently uses the rude biological metaphor of the drive to say that it is actually our consubstantial intersubjective tension towards others, that it’s not something of the body, and so on. So many analysts insist on the fact that the Freudian drive has nothing to do with instinct, that it is a biological function. But these analysts are referring to an entirely imaginary biology. When we’re attracted to an heterosexual partner, to what extent is it instinct and to what extent is it a drive? When we eat tasty treats, also to satisfy our hunger, to what extent is it an instinct and to what extent is it an oral drive? Expressed in this way the division between instinct and drive doesn’t hold. What counts in the debate within the evolution sciences today is instead the question: is everything in the phenotype, in the organism, adaptive? Hence, are the drives of psychoanalysis – sucking for the pleasure of sucking, being a voyeur in a public park, being in love with Jesus, enjoying reading the Ecrits, everything – adaptive or not? Very few – two names are Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (2010) – argue that not everything in life is adaptive, that Darwin was wrong, that life produces a non-adaptive waste. In short: “there are more things in animals and humans than in all your Darwinism.” Not everything in life is useful, yet it exists. Therefore, the biologism these analysts distinguish themselves for is a fantasy. A Lacanian would say that a not-entirely-Darwinian theory could be reformulated as “Homo sapiens are not-all-adaptation, hence not-all-Homo.” An enunciation with a seductive homology with “the woman is not-all.” It seems to me that Lacan does not follow this spiritualistic slide, that he remains somehow faithful not to the letter of Freud, but to the Freudian metaphysical challenge. In fact, hypothesizing libido as a continuous never-alleviated tension, Freud – according to my reading of his work – tries, using a biological imagery, to indicate what for him is the quid, the essence of human beings beyond hormonal variations or environmental provocations. Indeed, an essence is not something that comes and goes: the drive, as an essence, Eros, is always there. The Trieb is our f lesh, which comes before and is on this side of any imaginary or symbolic construction, of any intersubjective sense structure. Being alive is a constant promise of pain; we can never ignore the fact that we are f lesh. Because we are not f lesh alone, we suffer f lesh: there’s a distance between us and our f lesh, which also makes us its effects and victims. The drives are the opacity that forces the drug addict, for example, to use his drug again and again, to constantly repeat the same enjoyment. Many analysts fail with drug addicts because they try to find a sense to their “monkey.” Addicts say they experience an initial phase of honeymoon with their drug – during which the Ego and the Id dance together, even coincide. But then, in time, as “ego” they no longer enjoy: they are subjugated by Her, by Lady Drug, they have become the slaves of Her enjoyment. So, the same enjoyment which had been egosyntonic, becomes persecutory; the weight of the monkey/enjoyment to bear on your back. Therefore, paradoxically, Lacan himself, despite – or perhaps precisely because of? – his Hegelian and Heideggerian roots, makes in his twilight years a similar

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landfall to Freud’s: where neurosis and psychosis are different forms of addiction, of highs. By centring on enjoyment as something that has the consistency of the Real, Lacan, who had begun with a logocentric subversion of psychoanalysis, in his later years real-ly returned to Freud. To the fact that drives – a fictional concept, like every concept – refer back to something non-interpretable, nonsubjectivizable, to the fact that we are f lesh that signifies and suffers. That the basis of everything that creates a well-ordered society in which all are expected to set up a family, to produce and reproduce, to have sex, to build good schools of psychoanalysis . . . that the basis of all this colossal construction of sense, to which religion, science, politics, education, and so on, contribute . . . is the tension of life as zoé. This is the Nietzschean root of psychoanalysis.

7 The letter and the machine Of course the symbolic – in Lacan and in life – is essential, but, to be frank, logocentrism is idealistic. I think that in time Lacan realized and tried to decentralize it, so to speak. He removed the logos from the centre. I think the importance the late Lacan gave to Borromean knots marked his overcoming of the Hegelian vision from which he began; the idea, in other words, that analysis is an Aufhebung, an e-raising of something already given. The idea of Aufhebung implies a hierarchy, a qualitative leap, an elevation, whilst the Borromean knots are “democratic”: the important thing is not that one ring takes away from the other and elevates itself over it, but how the rings link. Consequently, the symbolic ceases to have pre-eminence over everything else: it is only one of the three rings. The Borromean chain marks a sneaky exit from the primacy of the symbolic. Years ago I recommended that a child psychotherapist friend with a Kleinian training read several Lacanian contributions on childhood by Maud Mannoni, Dolto and others. Some time later she thanked me enthusiastically: “with the Lacanians, at last, children are no longer little animals!” She understood that leading childhood pathos back to language can spiritualize the unconscious, but not in a crude way, without the scent of incense. I wonder, however, whether ultimately Lacan hasn’t actually brazenly laid bare a spiritualist base to psychoanalysis, but has in this way allowed the Aufhebung, the overcoming, of this aspect. John Bowlby was an English psychoanalyst who trained with Melanie Klein before becoming famous for attachment theory, which is based on the immense power that the mother has in determining the child’s mental destiny. Bowlby profited from Konrad Lorenz’s work on animal ethology, in order to decipher the mother-child relationship. At the time, the 1950s, Bowlby’s ethologism caused some unease among British analysts; it appeared too mechanistic  – Bowlby saw human beings as animals. Today, Bowlby’s theory would seem to have triumphed; in Italy psychology students are trained in accordance with attachment theory above all, not psychoanalysis. But at the time it was Bowlby who had been

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marginalized, because, as Hyatt Williams said, he was “taking the poetry out of analysis” (Grosskurth 1988, p. 474). In actual fact, there was very little of the poetic in British analysis at the time, yet what steered them towards psychoanalysis was the same “poetry” that Lacan stressed in his theories: that the reconstruction/construction of signification processes replaces causal explanation. Breaking your foot doesn’t matter, what matters is what the accident means for you. This “poetry” of psychoanalysis is connected to the fact that, through the “formations of the unconscious” (symptoms, dreams, parapraxis, jokes), a subject expresses much more than they realize. But I am not an idealist. Nor am I a materialist. Lacan realized that reducing the Freudian unconscious, with its caro significans substance, to a code in the structuralist sense would disembody psychoanalysis too much. Therefore he spoke of the letter, particularly in his essay “The Instance of the Letter” and even more so in the text that – not incidentally – opens the Ecrits: the seminar on Poe’s The Purloined Letter. With this text, it is possible that Lacan wanted to insinuate that his own newly published writings had been purloined. Where does the difference between signifier and letter lie? In the fact that the latter has something material – this when letters were still written on paper and not on electronic devices like today – whereas the signifier, Saussure said, has only one identity: being distinct from any other signifier. Being distinguishable from any other is what distinguishes the signifier in general. The letter would then be the material face of language, and indeed Lacan would speak of the signifier (read: the letter) as material cause. Here he evokes the four causes according to Aristotle: material, formal, efficient, final. I.e. analytic work is more an act of reading than of listening. He would say that magic is a practice that essentially aims at the efficient cause; that religions give primacy to the final cause; whereas the sciences seek the formal cause. The only “materialist” discipline that believes in the now discredited material cause, is psychoanalysis (Lacan 1966b, p. 319; pp. 351–358). It would seem that for Lacan psychoanalysis alone is materialistic. But it’s not enough to promote the signifier “matter” to be authentically materialistic. Derrida (1987), in his commentary on Lacan’s seminar on Poe’s tale has brilliantly shown that Lacan actually uses the letter (the signifier) as something “ideal.” Lacan in fact says that we cannot make a letter disappear by tearing it; but we know that it is absolutely possible! In that seminar Lacan said that “a letter always reaches its destination,” but Derrida points out: “how can he be so sure?” Here Lacan seems to fall back into a “communicational” vision of language by which human beings exchange messages. Yet the “pure” Lacanian signifier is by no means a message. It’s easy for Derrida to show that, under a materialistic cloak, Lacan’s system – founded on the transcendentality of the logos – is an idealistic one. I agree with Derrida. And I don’t give “idealism” any negative connotation, in contrast to the tendency in the decades dominated by a self-styled Marxist materialism. At the time “idealist” was an insult. There’s nothing wrong with being an idealist; the point is understanding that you are one.

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But Lacan knew that not even Marxism is really materialistic. He would say, as I’ve already mentioned: Marxist theory is the message of Good Tidings, a Gospel ( Lacan 2001, p. 506). It is based on the assumption of labour as value, on the idea that economic value – and what in general is worth something – is given by work as labour, experience, the sweat of one’s brow, lost time. . . . But it is a theory based on a moral metaphysics, on the primacy of praxis as poiesis, on productive human activity, which originally gives value to things and the world. Materialism is no less metaphysical and moralistic than idealism, in the sense that it is based on a priori postulates that “found” a predication to “save the world.” True materialism, I fear, is actually mechanistic, far from Marxism or psychoanalysis. It is the confidence – also metaphysical – that the world as a whole, and thus the human mind too, is a machine. Even if it is a machine that is of no use, that is without aim; a machine that is the product of a huge silent explosion. Deleuze, who lived at the same time as Lacan, and in the same city, understood that there is no true materialism without the machine – so he spoke of desiring machines. Significantly, over psychoanalysis Deleuze preferred Wilhelm Reich, a very popular post-analyst at the time. Reich’s therapy was based on a bizarre machine – in which I once had the honour of being “cured” for a while – known as the orgone energy accumulator, orgones being quanta of vital energy. It’s part of the slang of psychologists, and of many psychoanalysts too, to speak of “psychic mechanisms,” usually to decry them. I reject this conventional term because its use implies a spiritualistic premise, i.e. that we are “pathological” as long as we are prey to blind psychic mechanisms, but that thankfully the psychotherapeutic light will liberate us from “mechanical” determinism and enable us to finally act freely. Thank goodness neither Lacan nor authentic mechanistic philosophers have ever believed in this “machine vs. liberty” alternative. Lacan, like Augustine, Luther, and Spinoza, never believed in free will. The mechanistic ones don’t believe in it because whatever we do we will always be machines. For Lacan, on the other hand, we are subjected to the mechanics of signifiers, even if it is by accepting this mechanism that we can turn it into an Aufhebung. Since the 17th century science has been mechanistic. In physics we have only mechanics: first classical mechanics, then relativist mechanics and quantum mechanics. Modern materialism no longer has anything to do with the “material cause” Aristotle spoke of, if only because modern science has reduced matter to electromagnetic force plus gravitation, i.e. to formal equivalences, to mathematical matrixes, to “powers.” Lacan is right: the formal cause (in the sense of Aristotle) has devoured the material cause. Materialism today is the calculability of the machine, and the Lacanian letter is an ideality.

8 An animal philosophy This has led some to say – for example Julia Kristeva, in a conversation with me in 1994 ( Kristeva and Benvenuto 1996 –97) – that there is a connection between Lacan and cognitivism. Is this true?

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Now, cognitivism proper, which derives from Chomsky and Fodor, has sustained – in contrast to the behaviourism that prevailed in psychology – that scientists must consider mental processes. Therefore cognitivism is mildly materialistic: it fuses together an Aristotelian functionalism with the Cartesian idea of autonomous cogitation. Kristeva saw an affinity between Lacan and cognitivism because both approaches give a primacy to cogitatio in contrast to what Freud called libido. In both, signification overpowers corporeal causality. I said before that so-called continental thought today seems polarized by the image of zoè, of animal life. This is partly due to the pressure of new forms of life in our societies, in particular cognitive technologies, Artificial Intelligence, computer simulations, and so on. What I’m about to say may sound paradoxical: that the decline of the “signifier” in philosophy is the product of the triumph of electronic language technologies. When information science began with the Turing machine, scientists were still dominated by a Cartesian assumption: that what fundamentally distinguishes human beings and animals is cogitatio, thinking activity. According to Descartes, science, mathematics, and logic are mental substance, whereas animals are only machines, extended substance. The development of machines that simulate human activities – it was thought – would have made it much easier to imitate the most elementary animal activities, whereas it would have been far more difficult to imitate superior intellectual ones, such as for example proving theorems. Well, things have gone in precisely the opposite direction. Today computers exist that are capable of beating even the greatest chess or go champions and others that are able to prove even very complex theorems. Yet, machines fizzle when it comes to imitating the simplest human functions. Even the most sophisticated robots aren’t capable of something any dog can do quite easily: recognizing its owner’s silhouette from a distance. The moral: what for centuries philosophical arrogance considered the highest activity of the mind – logical and demonstrative ability – today has turned out to be entirely mechanizable. This has caused cogitatio a certain discredit. Today’s biopolitical philosophers, who reconsider our societies according to the model of our immune system – such as, for example, Roberto Esposito (2008, 2011) – breathe this discredit. New ideas don’t come from our brain but mostly from the air around us. Perhaps one day machines will even be able to demonstrate Gödel’s theorem – the most important mathematical theorem of all time, which was the basis of the huge development of computation. But I fear that they will never be able to imitate the way of thinking of Heidegger or Lacan. And not because their thinking is too sophisticated for a computer program, but because their thoughts . . . breathe. The philosophical positivists don’t like an “animal,” drive-led, noncomputational philosophy. Some will object: in principle, life, even human life, remains mechanizable. They will say: life is far more complex than cogitatio, therefore the simulation of

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human beings is technically impossible. From this point of view, only a merely technological limit, not an ontological one, hinders the creation of robots entirely equivalent to human beings. I can reply that today only the recognition of a huge complexity can legitimize the suspicion of, perhaps not a freedom, but at least an unpredictability of life. A certain spirituality can find scientific space only in pure chance. And it offers a glimmer for us to think that a certain human unpredictability could be the mark of a mysterious, improbable freedom.

9 The invention of the Real Lacan’s thought should then be reread in the light of the biopolitical ref lections that have developed in the West since Foucault. Now, there are different sorts of biopoliticians. Some completely ignore the biological sciences, and often boast about it. But can one talk about immunity in social systems without confronting oneself with the Darwinian theory of the immune system that earned Edelman (1988) – evoked earlier – the Nobel prize in medicine Others seem to know the biological sciences and to take them into account. Because a bifurcation presents itself in biopolitics: i.e. should the “linguistic game” known as philosophy consider the models the sciences propose today or not? I am among those who hope for what I would call the phenomenological preamble (the setting aside of all established knowledge, especially scientific knowledge) to be overcome. And I’d go as far as to say that today we can come out of the dead channel of analytical philosophy only if we non-scientists manage to mount some serious challenges to the sciences, and to the life sciences in particular. At the end, I shall mention the one challenge I think is the most important. The phenomenological setting aside of worldly knowledge is expressed by what Heidegger said about science, and about all metaphysics: that it does not think. I would say the opposite; that science thinks too much, whilst for philosophy, and even more so for psychoanalysis, what is important is sensing, breathing in, sniffing. . . . Psychoanalysts shouldn’t think too much, otherwise they will fail to capture that opacity of the unconscious that Lacan put in the register of the signifier. Perhaps this is why we associate the theory of universal gravitation with an apple falling on Newton’s head: important theories don’t arise from our brains, instead they fall on our heads. Which takes us back to what Lacan called the Real. The more insightful Lacanians say that the most important thing about Lacan is his appeal to the Real, whatever he means by it. I agree with them. But we’ve seen how easy it is to misapprehend the Real as Lacan meant it. Allow me an anecdote, an apparently true one. Two analysands of Lacan’s meet in a café near their analyst’s practice. One has just come down from a session and is feeling down; the session didn’t go so well. The other asks him why and the man complains that he didn’t manage to tell Lacan what he really wanted

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to tell him. The other analysand says: “so, why don’t you go back up and tell him?” This was possible with Lacan, who was very f lexible. The man replies: “great idea, I’ll ask for another session.” After a while the fellow analysand comes back down, looking jubilant this time; the second session obviously went well. His friend asks him: “well then?” And he replies: “as soon as I walked in I said ‘Je me sens vraiment foutu’ – I feel really fucked – and Lacan replied ‘you feel fucked? You are fucked.’ So everything went fine.” This story shows the extent to which Lacan was thoroughly alien to the idea that dealing with sentiments, with feeling fucked or happy and so on, was the main task of analysis. He thought that the raw material and final product was the Real, meant as what one is, not how one feels. Strangely enough, in saying that the unconscious is structured like a language, Lacan doesn’t state that everything may be interpreted: on the contrary, it’s not sentiments or affects, nor even interpretations, that are at the bottom of things, but the Real. I would say that – in general – subjects who seek an analysis rather than a cognitive therapy or therapies of other kinds, are people in search of at least a scrap of Real. It won’t do for them to just feel better or happily adapt to reality, but they wish to know. They wish to know what? I would be tempted to say: the difference that they are but cannot think. Let’s not forget that Lacan coined, with reference to Freud, the definition of the “invention of the unconscious.” With it he intended to replace the “discovery of the unconscious.” Can we then say that Lacan is the author of the “invention of the Real,” and hence that the latter is thematizable only in and starting from an analytical discourse? Or does Lacan indicate the possibility of thematizing the Real outside analytical discourse too? Talking of the “invention of the unconscious” rather than the “discovery of the unconscious” is an index of Lacan’s intellectual honesty. On another occasion – I can’t remember which – he spoke of psychoanalytic knowledge as an “invented knowledge.” As I remarked in the fifth conversation, Lacan exploits Freud’s ambiguity as much as possible, namely that on the one hand one wants a reconstruction of something that already exists in the experience of the subject, but on the other, that one also wants the construction of a psychic reality that wouldn’t exist without psychoanalysis. Lacan tries to undertake a third way, between “interpreting comprehension” and “scientific explanation,” that circumvents both hermeneutics and science. But we find turning to this path, for which nothing in our culture has prepared us, terribly difficult. Meanwhile, the Real as meant by Lacan is inseparable from the Symbolic, a little like the two sides of a coin, heads and tails, are inseparable. For this reason, here the Real is not what in common language we call “reality,” as what is distinguished from everything that exists only in our head. I shall describe three cases in which we may speak of the Real, concerning which the psychoanalyst is an amateur.

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10 Experiences of the Real The first concerns psychosis. When I spoke about it in the previous conversation, I didn’t mention something essential. For Lacan, psychotic hallucinations, and delusions in general, are a return into the Real of what had been foreclosed by the Symbolic. There is an ambiguity here: “ forclos du symbolique” can mean both “foreclosed from the symbolic” and “foreclosed by the symbolic.” So, one may understand either that what a hallucination manifests is a piece of the symbolic that has been rejected, exiled from the symbolic realm, or that this something is kept out of the symbolic and hence has never been part of it. Lacan gives the example of a hallucination suffered by Freud’s patient the Wolf Man at the age of five (Freud 1918, SE, 17, pp. 71–88; GW, 12, pp. 103– 121). Playing around with a penknife cutting a tree, with his nanny present, he was horrified to “see” that his little finger had come off his hand and was hanging from it. But it was a hallucination, which Freud interprets in relation to the Verwerfung – foreclosure in Lacan – of castration ( Lacan 1966a, p. 383). In fact, the hacked finger signifies the cut penis that the patient is unable to “symbolize.” It is not the repressed – which Freud turned into the cause of the unconscious – that returns in the hallucination: a prior foreclosure of something has to occur first. In this case, what is foreclosed is obviously not the real castration, but its signifier. I.e. the Wolf Man allegedly never symbolized castration – in Lacan’s terms, he never symbolized the phallus as missing. Therefore, a hallucination like this one is a return into the Real of something non-symbolized. It is yet another case of overturning “normal” ideas. We all think hallucinations are something imaginary, even if the subject takes it for something real. The hallucination would then be an image so strong as to be mistaken for the actual. Instead, Lacan says that something in psychosis returns into the Real. But in the Real for the hallucinating subject. The Real is not the objective reality we appeal to when we have divergences. Here we are talking about the topological Real: the space every subject considers “not a part of me,” which is situated entirely outside me, and which varies from subject to subject. For the psychotic, the Real is made up of something excluded that I, a nonpsychotic, have not excluded. The Real is like the central void around which the torus opens. The Real is the topo-logical space produced by the symbolic crown that I am. But then is the Real, in which something that has been foreclosed befalls, or falls upon the psychotic, the equivalent of what we non-psychotics call reality? Well, things aren’t so simple. For Lacan the Real of psychotic hallucinations and delusions is quite dissimilar to the “reality” we all speak about when we are not hallucinating or being delusional. Therefore, when the Wolf Man sees his finger dangling he does not describe the experience as one we have with regard to an actual event. In hallucination, Lacan says, the subject plummets into a sort of “temporal funnel” ( Lacan 1966a, p. 388). Hallucinations are the experience of a rupture from the

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continuity of experience of the world. Psychotics often hear voices, but they don’t confuse them with real voices and sometimes, significantly, consider them voices of the dead, voices not of “this” world. The psychotic has devastating contact with the Real insofar as reality is suspended, interrupted. Reality is the world that we “are” thanks to mirror neurons. Very often clinical psychoses dawn with a strange uncanny feeling, known as “derealization.” This is when subjects, though aware that the world is carrying on as always, feel an indefinable alienation, as if the world were no longer real, as if it had become an opaque backdrop to which they no longer belong. The term “de-realization” is an eloquent denial, because Lacan would instead say that this is the dawn of a contact with the Real, one that could become overwhelming. The emergence of a no-longer-being-in-the-world, which is not merely absence but the wasteland to which the psychotic has been confined, corresponds to the twilight of the Real. For this reason, so many films that aim at making us experience “from inside” what a mad person hears and feels are quite misleading, such as, for example, A Beautiful Mind (by Ron Howard), on the life of the psychotic mathematician John Nash. Now, only more than half way through the film do we realize that various situations and characters we have seen earlier were actually Nash’s hallucinations, that we saw and believed as spectators to what the psychotic saw and believed. But the Real in which real delusions take place has an extra-mundane quality, it doesn’t feature the level of reality shown in this film. And, in fact, psychotics often say that the world is solely the effect of manipulations by conspirators who use lasers, computers, and so on. The Real of the psychotic is an artificial pseudo-reality, at times shamefully sloppy. But then does only the psychotic really have any contact with the Real? Here’s another paradox. I would rather say that the psychotic has the privilege, according to Lacan, to look at this Real straight in the face. But is it then possible according to Lacan for us to have a relation to the Real beyond the relation the psychotic has to it? We experience the Real as something beyond experience. We need only to think of common expressions such as “I still haven’t realized I’m a widower.” And to those who still “don’t realize” we say “you have to come to grips with it.” In Italian “come to grip” is said “ farsene una ragione,” literally “to do a reason of it for oneself.” We imply Real and reason. These expressions suggest that while it is one thing for me (the Ego) to know certain things, it is quite another for me to “realize” them. One thing is the lost concrete object – a dead wife, for example – whilst the other is the libidinal object, the loved or loathed thing that keeps on living for me independent of its worldly disappearance. Now, the common expression doesn’t say “effectively detach yourself from the dead woman,” but “realize you’re a widower.” When a loved one suddenly dies, the first thing we instinctively say is “I can’t believe it!” We don’t believe it precisely because the event is real, Lacan would say, i.e. not inscribable into our symbolic. The death of the adored person is like a gap in the gold chain of

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signifiers that give consistency and credibility to our life. My wife continues being there as my significant other, and the Real is this “impossible” discordance of my loved one being there on the one hand and not being there on the other. In Naples, it was believed that the recent dead appeared as ghosts to their loved ones, especially during sleep, and gave them useful advice and information; but only during the first six months. Realizing she is no longer there is a “coming to grips with it,” not because this disappearance has a sense, but because it finds its signifier, thanks to which I accept that I am, for example, a “disconsolate widower.” In this way, the crevice of the Real is led back to reason, and I no longer “suffer like a dog” . . . as is commonly said in Italian: here the dog is an image of the crude Real, of a dehumanization that loss and pain inf lict on us, but without which there would perhaps be no humanity. Because what an unctuous rhetoric calls “having humanity,” “being human,” is in fact a “realization” that we suffer like dogs because of the Real and that this absolute lack of reason in the event means that we must come to grips with this event without the reason that we ourselves are. Our only possibility is accepting the impossibility of an event having a sense, an impossibility we call the Real.

11 Event and chaos If we then consider science, it constantly takes the Real into account, but with the aim of relegating it, of “do[ing] a reason of it” as we say in Italian. Science wants to marry the Real; it is not enough for it to be its enthusiast or lover. In fact, science itself is an apparatus created by the Symbolic. But its task is to give shape to “sufficient reason,” i.e. to explain everything that happens in the world. The principle of sufficient reason says: “nothing is without reason.” And explaining is not only, and not essentially, predicting. Darwinian theory, for example, predicts absolutely nothing about the animal life of the future. Explaining means above all making the world intelligible, i.e. reconstructing it according to a certain model so that reality and the symbolic will overlap exactly. Science gives reason to the world; by capturing particular regularities, it describes the world as if it followed a rule, as if a secret language “spoke” the world – the great book of nature. But beyond the regularized world, the regulated world computed by science, there’s a limit: chaos. Science calls it entropy: the destruction of every sense of things, nothing but heat. There’s a branch of research, a minoritarian one and especially in mathematics, that thematizes chaos. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, many are devoted to it. But chaos theories are scientific insofar as they want to prove that “order disguises itself as chaos.” The latter would be a semblance, superficial special effects, but science finds the secret order in chaos, for example a rigorous fractal order. The systems these theories on the edge of science deal with are described as being “on the edge of chaos.” In other words, there is a risk that our world will fall into the gorge of chaos, of the Real. Into the non-symbolizable abyss around which symbolization turns again and again.

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Now, Freud grasped the ineliminability of chaos from our lives when he spoke of Thanatos, the death drive. Analysts who rejected the death drive have proven their awe of the Real. They hope that everything will ultimately be interpreted, reconstructed, that life is like a Hollywood movie with an ending, a happy or edifying one. And if the Real – in the para-Lacanian sense we have given it – is the pure event, and as such not pre-scribed symbolically and as yet not symbolized, then we can say that the Real does ultimately coincide with reality. Because the universe in which we live, the one described by the various sciences, is in turn a pure event. Bang! If we consider the universe accessible to us in its totality, it is pure existence that defies the principle of sufficient reason. It’s just there, period. The theory of the universe as an ongoing explosion only postpones the question of the origin of everything: why did the energy concentrated in an atom explode at one point creating space? The primal cause is postponed further and further away, into the heart of singularity. For this very reason Aristotle had to resort to divinity as the primal cause: it appeared as the only way, at the time, to come to grips with the fact that the chain of causes and effects that is the universe could be harked further and further back vertiginously. For centuries, minds have striven to plant this volatile world in the stable soil of the divine. We could also say: the Real is that infinite in which every explanation loses itself. The eventful remainder of every reason. It is here that philosophy, together with the experience of psychoanalysis, can dare mount the challenge to the sciences I mentioned earlier. The sciences study Homo sapiens like any other animal organism: as inseparable from its environment. Yet for science, the human being is sensitive not only to its own environment, but is also concerned with the Real, which is never its own. The point is that biological science, by stating that the Homo sapien has access not to reality itself but to its own environment, places itself outside the human environment. Science is like Epimenides, the Cretan who stated that all Cretans are liars. Lacan would say that scientific truth is always not-all. This to say that it is thanks to science that an extra-environmental vocation of Homo sapiens emerges, which could result in a sort of self-refutation of biological knowledge. In other terms, science should recognize its limits insofar as the Homo sapien is a bizarre animal that allows itself, like Ulysses, to listen to the siren of the Real.

12 What future for psychoanalysis? Returning to psychoanalysis as a concrete historical fact, what can we predict about the future of Lacanianism? Despite its eccentricity compared to mainstream psychoanalysis, I don’t think the historical future of Lacanianism is separable from that of psychoanalysis as a whole. So, the real question should be: What future for psychoanalysis? I’m not a prophet, but I can say something about what, in my opinion, the specificity of psychoanalysis is; a specificity around which its survival is at stake.

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Aristotle told an anecdote on the life of Heraclitus, which Heidegger commented on in his “Letter on Humanism” (Heidegger 1964, pp. 144–147) – and which the writers of the film Matrix took up in a sci-fi version: Even as Heraclitus is said to have spoken to those strangers who wished to meet him but stopped as they were approaching when they saw him warming himself by the oven – he bade them enter without fear, “for there are gods here too.” (Aristotle 2001, Book 1, chap. 5, 645a 17–21) Today we think that these visitors were dignitaries of the time who were expecting to see the famous philosopher absorbed in deep thought, with one hand under his chin as befits a thinker. Instead they see a poor man trying to fight the cold with a furnace, laying bear all his destitution. It came to my mind that this encounter illustrates the situation of psychoanalysis today. Psychoanalysis is a poor art, despite the high incomes of some analysts. In fact, in the early decades of the 20th century, psychoanalysis attracted many prestigious “strangers” – writers, artists, philosophers and scientists. Even Einstein wanted to meet Freud and the two began a famous correspondence on the subject of peace and war. But then these “strangers” wanted to take a closer look at psychoanalysis, either by becoming patients of Freudians or by carefully studying its theories, and by doing so they noticed that psychoanalysis was something quite fragile. Two people meet at regular intervals for years and the therapeutic results, though not zero, are not always decisive. In addition, Freud’s ideas come across as non-scientific, full of contradictions and inconsistencies and so on. In short, today “the strangers” withdraw, perplexed before a theory and practice that openly shows its destitution. What can a psychoanalyst say to these eminent representatives of the scientific rationality that – together with religion – dominates the world today? It can invite them to approach analysis in any case, saying “they’re present here too.” But not the gods. In fact, we no longer know what this reference to the divinities meant for someone like Heraclitus. What were gods for the Greeks in the end? Today I think the psychoanalyst can only encourage all those who back away perplexed by saying: “even here there is contact with the Real.” Ultimately, what really counts in a work or practice – whether art, literature, science or religion – is whether or not it touches something of the Real. Psychoanalysis can lay claim to a commerce with the Real, however scanty.

References 2001, Holy Bible: English Standard Version, Crossway Bibles, Wheaton. Aristotle 2001, On the Parts of Animals, Lennox, JG, trans., Oxford University Press, Oxford. Benvenuto, B and Kennedy, R 1986, The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction, St. Martin’s Press, New York.

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Derrida, J 1987, ‘The Maker of Truth’, in The Post Card, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Derrida, J 1995–1996, ‘For the Love of Lacan’, Journal of European Psychoanalysis, vol. 2, no. Fall–Winter. Available from: www.psychomedia.it/jep/number2/deridda.htm Edelman, GM 1988, Topobiology: An Introduction to Molecular Embryology, Basic Books, New York. Edelman, GM 1992, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire. On the Matter of the Mind, Basic Books, New York. Esposito, R 2008, Bíos, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Esposito, R 2011, Immunitas, Polity Press, Cambridge. Fodor, J and Piattelli-Palmarini, M 2010, What Darwin Got Wrong, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York. Freud, S 1918, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1914)’, in Strachey, J, ed., An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17 (1917–1919), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1955, pp. 7–122. Grosskurth, P 1988, Melanie Klein. Il suo mondo e il suo lavoro, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino. Heidegger, M 1964, Lettre sur l’humanisme/Ueber den Humanismus, Aubier Montaigne, Paris. Kraus, K 1990, Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Kristeva, J and Benvenuto, S 1996–7, ‘Freudian Models of Language. A Conversation with Julia Kristeva’, Journal of European Psychoanalysis, vol. 3–4, no. Spring–Winter, pp. 7–20. Lacan, J 1966a, Ecrits, I, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. Ecrits: A Selection, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2004. Lacan, J 1966b, Ecrits, II, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. Ecrits: A Selection, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2004. Lacan, J 1973, Le Séminaire, Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1978. Lacan, J 2001, Autres écrits, Seuil, Paris. Nancy, J-L 2010, ‘Freud – So to Speak’, European Journal of Psychoanalysis. Available from: www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/freud-so-to-speak/ Quine, WVO 1975, ‘On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World’, Erkenntnis, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 313–328. Saint Augustine 1961, Confessions, Pine-Coffin, RS, trans., Penguin Books, London and New York. Sokal, A and Bricmont J 2003, Intellectual Impostures, Gardners Books, Eastbourne. Timpanaro, S 2010, The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism, Verso, London and New York.

INDEX

addiction 42 , 92 , 126, 127, 132 , 167, 169 Adler, A. 36 àgalma 43, 109 Agamben, G. 53, 163 Aimée, case of 1 Alcibiades 43, 58 Almodóvar, P. 45 Althusser, L. 36, 85, 128 Angelus Silesius 94 Anna O., case of 9 Antigone 68, 151, 152 aphanisis 62 , 141 après-coup 103 –113, 156 Aquinas, Thomas 40 Aristotelian: functionalism 172; physics 52 Aristotle 39, 40, 64, 105, 171, 172 , 179 Aufhebung, philosophical concept 12 , 23, 83, 169, 171 Augustine of Hippo 63, 166 Austin, J. 4 autism 31, 81, 126, 127, 131, 138; autistic spectrum 127, 138 Badiou, A. 20, 36, 63, 128 Balibar, E. 128 Barthes, R. 2 , 73, 146 Bataille, Georges 65, 66, 68, 95 Bataille, Sylvia 65 Bateson, G. 31, 49 Baudelaire, C. 5 Baudrillard, J. 66 “beautiful soul” (Hegelian) 35 Beckett, S. 3

Bene, C. 33, 40, 46, 73, 74, 162 , 163 Benjamin, W. 3, 7, 129 Bentham, J. 75 Benveniste, E. 49 Benvenuto, Bice 158 Benvenuto, Renato xi Benvenuto, Sergio 31, 54, 109, 130, 139, 148, 171 Binswanger, L. 33, 132 Bion, WR 3, 10, 16, 27, 31, 35, 64, 81, 129 biopolitics 53, 173 Blanchot, M. 95 Bogarde, D. 148 Borch-Jacobsen, M. 28 borderline personalities/syndromes 126, 132 , 141 Borges, JL 72 , 110 Borromean knot – chain 41, 41, 169 Botticelli, S. 88 Bouveresse, J. 28 Bowlby, J. 169 Braque, G. 15 Brancusi, C. 4 Breuer, J. 9 Bricmont, J. 97, 157 Buddhism 37, 64 Butler, J. 73 Cäcilie (Freud’s patient) 139 Cage, J. 21, 51 Carlyle, T. 74 Caruso, P. 4

182

Index

Castoriadis, C. 68 cathartic method 34 Cavani, L. 148 Cervantes Saavedra, M. de 72 Cézanne, P. 4 Charcot, J-M 44 Chomsky, N. 31, 49, 80, 172 Cimino, C. 19 Cini, G. xi Cioran, E. 6 Clinton, H. 23 Cocteau, J. 131, 153 cognitivism 31, 33, 51, 70, 74, 80, 144, 172 Connolly, R. 31 Coppola, FF 88 Cratylus, Plato’s dialogue 5 Crews, F. 28 Croce, B. 40, 73 Crommeliynck, F. 118, 119

Fabian socialist 12 Fachinelli, E. 36, 45, 60, 129 “famillionaire” 6 –7 fascism 46, 47 Faulkner, W. 104 Ferenczi, S. 31 Fermi, E. 17 fetishism 126 Fink, B. 160 Finnegans Wake ( Joyce’s novel) 1, 15, 95 Flaubert, G. 104 Fodor, J. 168, 172 foreclosure 32 , 127, 133, 135, 137, 175 Foucault, M. 2 , 31, 53, 73, 146, 173 Frege, G. 98, 140 Freud, Anna 40 Freud, S. – ubiquus 23, 36, 38, 46, 51, 54, 66, 90 –91, 105, 139, 142 , 175 Fromm, E. 31, 36, 138

Dalí, S. 21 dandy 1, 4, 5, 11, 64, 66, 67, 108, 166 Dante Alighieri 120, 130 Darwin, C. 53, 112 , 113, 161, 168, 173 Darwinism 53, 112 , 113, 168 Dasein 58, 62 , 74, 75, 95 Davidson, D. 157 Dawkins, R. 53 Debord, G. 66 Debussy, C. 4 Defferre, G. 38 Deleuze, G. 11, 66, 171 Dennett, D. 53, 99 Derrida, J. 40, 41, 49, 51, 58, 64, 89, 146, 155, 163, 170 Descartes, R. 172 disavowal 126, 127 Dolto, F. 160, 169 Don Quixote 72 Dora (Freud’s case) 141 drive (der Trieb) 54, 158, 166, 167

Gall, FJ 32 Gallese, V. 81 Gandhi, Mahatma 42 Gentile, G. 73 Giannini, G. 23 Girard, R. 148 Gödel, K. 99, 161, 172 Gramsci, A. 53, 73, 128 Grosskurth, P. 170 Grünbaum, A. 28 Guattari, F. 66

Edelman, G. 32 , 158, 173, 180 Ego Psychology 17, 32 , 41 Eisenstejn, S. 128 Einstein, A. 128 empathy 15, 33 –35, 80, 94, 164 Epimenides paradox 99 Ernst, M. 64, 65 Eros 47, 56 –58, 62 Es 12 , 14, 66 Esposito, R. 172 Euthyphro 13 exhibitionism 126

Habermas, J. 167 Hamlet 40, 55, 86, 163 Hausmann, R. 5 Hegel, JWF 2 , 12 , 53, 55, 58, 60 – 61, 64, 144, 158 Heidegger, M. 6 –7, 15, 18, 21, 40, 42 , 54 –58, 62 , 64, 74, 89, 94, 163, 167, 172 –173, 179 Heideggerism 95, 165 Heine, H. 6 Heraclitus 5, 6, 179 Hirsch, S. 133 Hobbes, T. 85 Hobsbawm, E. 128 Hölderlin, F. 8, 42 homosexual, homosexuality 12 , 27, 62 , 88, 118, 130 –131 Horney, K. 31, 138 Howard, R. 176 Hughes, E. xi Hume, D. 54 Husserl, E. 59, 89

Index

Huygens, C. 132 hypnosis 34 hysteria 29, 36, 44, 61, 86, 125 –126, 132 , 136, 138 –139, 141 imaginary, Lacanian register 50, 53, 57–58, 70 –71, 77– 81, 86 – 89, 91, 137, 143, 157, 166, 168, 175 IPA, International Psychoanalytic Association 12 , 16, 19, 36, 39, 129, 149, 159 –160 Islam 36, 83 Job, Book of 145 Jabif, E. 22 Jakobson, R. 65 jouissance 12 , 14, 54 –55, 148 Joyce, J. 1, 3, 15, 42 , 95 –96 Judaism 36 Jung, CG 10, 36, 64, 156 Kaf ka, F. 94, 143, 145 kairos 22 Kant, E. 40, 64, 114, 146 –147 Kennedy, R. 158 Keynes, JM 75 Kierkegaard, S. 7, 14, 63, 137 Klein, M. 10, 31, 40, 64, 70, 129 –130, 169 Klossowski, P. 146 Kohut, H. 27 Kraepelin, E. 126 Kraus, K. 5, 163 Kretschmer, E. 133, 135 Kristeva, J. 171–172 Krueger, AB 109 Lacan, J. – ubiquus 1–3, 8, 11, 23, 27, 29, 36, 38, 67, 70, 74, 82 , 84, 93, 96, 103, 115, 127, 129, 149, 151, 171, 175 Lacan, Marc-François 74 Laclau, E. 36, 53, 84 Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 64 Langer, M. 61 Laplanche, J. 23, 107–108 law 1, 12 –14, 67, 81– 84, 91, 96, 143 –148, 151–152 Leach, E. 137 Leader, D. 92 , 160 Lenin, VI 36, 128 –129, 161 Leonard da Vinci 128 Leoni, F. xi Lessing, GE 40 – 42 Lévi-Strauss, C. 8 –9, 77 linguistérie 65

183

Loewald, H. 156 Lombroso, C. 32 Lorenz, K. 169 Löwenstein, R. 40 Lubitsch, E. 86, 145 Lucci, A. xi Luhmann, N. 49, 75 Lust, die 54 –56 Luther, M. 39, 128, 171 Lyotard, J-F 36 Machiavelli, N. 128, 155, 157 Maffesoli, M. 66 Mahler, Alma 22 Mahler, G. 22 Malevič, K. 20 –21 Malinowski, B. 136 –137 Mallarmé, S. 4 Mannoni, M. 169 Mao Zedong 161 Marcuse, H. 11, 36, 40 Marone, F. 29 Marx, K. 22 , 36 –39, 60, 85, 128, 142 , 156, 161 Marxism 30, 36 –38, 41, 84, 128, 159 –160, 171 masochism 126, 146 Masson, J. 106 mathema 97–99, 157 Matrix, The 51, 179 melancholia 60, 126, 127, 130, 132 Metternich, K. von 84 Miller, Arthur 69, 160 Miller, J-A 12 , 63 Millot, C. 42 Minkowski, E. 33, 132 mirror neurones 80 mirror stage 50, 79, 131 Montessori, M. 23 Moretti, N. 85 Morrison, J. 5 Mussolini, B. 46 Name-of-the-Father 127, 133, 136 –137 Nancy, J-L 64, 167 Napoleon Bonaparte 70 Narcissus, narcissism 47, 68–71, 79, 131, 166 Nash, J. 176 Nazism 46, 62 , 148 Negri, A. 128 Newton, I. 132 , 157–159, 161, 173 Nicholson, W. 140 Nietzsche, F. 3, 7, 15, 22 –23, 37, 46, 55 –56, 63 – 64, 137

184

Index

object 45 – 46, 78, 86 – 87, 108, 113, 142 , 145, 147–148, 150 –151 object relations theory 41 obsessional neurosis 44, 125 –126 Oedipus complex 133 Onfray, M. 28 Ortega y Gasset, J. 47 Orwell, G. 150 Palazzoli Selvini, M. 49 paranoia 1, 60, 69 –71, 78, 125 –126, 127, 130 –132 , 135 Pascal, B. 63, 162 Pasolini, PP 11 Père Lachaise, cemetery 5 perversion 126 –127, 136, 146 –148 phallus 87, 98, 150 –151, 175 phenomenology 33, 49, 53, 59, 74 –75, 89, 167 phobia, phobic 12 , 32 , 61, 126, 126, 132 phrenology 32 phronesis, prudentia 23 Piaget, J. 75, 149 Piattelli Palmarini, M. 168 Picasso, P. 4, 15 Pinker, S. 53, 73 Pinter, H. 2 Pirandello, L. 71 Plato 5, 13, 43, 58 –59, 64, 81, 99 Poe, EA 58, 170 Poincaré, H. 129 Popper, K. 22 , 29 post-modern 160 pragmatism 22 Protagoras 64 Proust, M. 18, 123 psychosis 1, 36 –37, 56, 86, 95, 107, 126 –127, 130, 132–134, 136, 138, 169, 175 Ptolemy (astronomer) 53, 128 Quine, WVO 49, 157 Rampling, C. 148 Rank, O. 31, 39, 164 Rascel, R. 150 –151 Rat Man (Freud’s case) 142 –143, 145 Ratzinger, J. 99 Real, Lacanian register 77 Reich, W. 11, 171 Renik, O. 31 repression 6, 13 –14, 125, 126, 127, 130 Rimbaud, A. 50 Risi, D. 152 Risset, J. 38 Rizzolatti, G. 80 – 81

Rogers, C. 32 Rorty, R. 49 Rotblat, J. 17 Rousseau, J-J 63 Roussel, R. 5 Russell, B. 11, 98 Sacks, O. 52 Sade, Marquis of 68, 146 sadism 126, 146 –147 Sartre, J-P 11, 50, 75, 83, 104, 111, 167 Satori, Buddhist 22 Saussure, F. de 9, 65, 77, 139 –140, 170 Saviano, R. 14 schizophrenia 126, 131–132 Schkade, DA 109 Schmitt, C. 84 Schopenhauer, A. 24 Schwarz, N. 109 Self psychology 27 Senia, G. xi Shakespeare, W. 39 – 40, 46, 118 shaman 9 –11 Shamdasani, S. 28 Shepherd, M. 133 Sherif, M. 81, 84 Sica, L. xi Simmel, G. 75 sinthome 24, 95 –96, 163 situationist 159 Sloterdijk, P. 4, 60 Socrates 6, 13, 23, 43, 45, 47, 58, 98, 149 Sokal, A. 97–99, 157 Sollers, P. 66 Sophocles 151 Spinoza, B. 58, 130, 171 Stalin, J. 20 Stirner, M. 46 – 47 Stone, AA 109 Strachey, J. viii, 23, 36, 38, 54, 66, 139, 142 , 175 Stravinsky, I. 50 Strindberg, A. 135 –136 Sullivan, H.S. 31 Super-Ego 12 –14, 67, 112 surrealism 21, 64 Symbolic, Lacanian register 77 symptom 3, 6, 9, 12 , 17–20, 24, 34 –35, 37, 55, 61, 66, 82 – 83, 92 , 95 –96, 105, 109, 116, 125 –128, 139, 141, 150, 155 –156, 163 –164, 170 Szilasi, W. 132 Thanatos 47, 56, 178 Timpanaro, S. 162

Index

torus, toroide – topological figure 91, 91 transference 15, 35, 43, 125, 149 –150, 155, 162 , 167 Trieb, das 54, 167 Trump, D. 23, 30, 71, 87, 140, 144 utilitarianism 54 –55, 66, 75 Uvarova, S. 132 van Gogh, V. 4 Varela, F. 33 Vattimo, G. 23 Vaughn, C. xi von Essen, Siri 135 voyeurism 126 Vygotsky, L. 16

185

Warhol, A. 49 Wallon, H. 16 Watzlawick, P. 31, 49 Weber, M. 75 Wedekind, F. 4 Wilde, O. 5 – 6, 11, 12 , 67 Williams, H. 170 Wilson, N. 157 Winnicott, D. 31, 60 – 61, 64, 70, 96, 151, 156 Wittgenstein, L. 8, 23, 49, 58, 63, 98 Witz 6 –7, 63, 125 Wolf Man (Freud’s case) 106, 108, 175 Zen Buddhism 22 Žižek, S. 36, 61, 128, 160