Monday, November 2, 2009

The subject is not "the subjective' (French)

De Dieu, ou comment

« le réel peut tromper, et le sujet n’est pas le subjectif. »

Auersperg et Sprockhoff ont démontré (1935) que, si l’on montre a l’œil une série de points lumineux qui passent rapidement, on peut, tout en fonction du mouvement de l’œil, choisir décomposer la ligne dans ses points constitutifs, ou bien la maintenir comme un tout jusqu'à l’inclure dans le champ de la nouvelle direction du regard. L’œil, donc, fait les deux taches a la fois : on voit le surprise de ce qui est actuel, (les points comme points séparés) tout aussi comme on attend, en rétablissant l’image de fusion des point lumineux comme une droite. (Cité par Victor Weizsaecker, « Gestaltkreis »). Il y a donc, conclut Weizsaecker, une figure prévue et une figure imprévue.

Dans une autre expérience, on demande a des sujets dessiner un cercle de différent grandeur sur la table. La figure est dessinée toujours environ dans le même temps. Il s’agit aussi d’une sorte d’anticipation. La figure tracée par la main n’est pas l’ellipse des planètes. Tout ca se passe de manière complètement inaperçue. Il n’ya pas d’intention possible, mais on doit admettre une sorte d’anticipation. On voudrait séparer le subjectif de l’objectif dans les deux cas, mais ca en raison du principe selon lequel la nature ne peut pas nous tromper, ou se contredire, ou se tromper elle-même.

Voila que nous arrivons au Dieu. Lacan fait recours a la tradition judéo-chrétienne, plutôt au judaïsme-- a l’occasion de se demander qu’est-ce que ne trompe pas pour nous, qui est a la base de la fondation de la science moderne. Le caprice de Dieu, créateur de l’univers et des lois, est la pour soutenir cet acte de foi qu’est l’existence de la science en tant que telle.

Le plus étrange : le cognitivisme est pseudoscience en cela qu’il parait rejeter cet acte de foi, en postulant l’homme-machine.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Antonio Damasio's error

Antonio Damasio writes that Descartes's error (this is the title of his book) is that first we are, (we have a body, we are biological beings) and only then we think. According to Damasio, Descartes error was also that he thought he could radically separate mind from body.
But Descartes was very cautious, more than Damasio. Descartes--as we can see thanks to the reading line by line by Marcial Gueroult--believed that
"La connaissance de mon existence ne pouvant être que strictement intellectuelle, il en résulte que ma nature ne peut être conçue que comme pure intelligence et, par conséquence, comme pur esprit." (Marcial Gueroult, "Descartes selon l'ordre des raisons", t 1, p. 65).
Damasio's error : we cannot point to an Error in Descartes without speaking to him.
Because Descartes posed by his own words --as Lacan precisely says--"cogito sum". Descartes perhaps forgot he first of all-- said. Descartes had to say this.
So, in the same line, only speaking with Descartes it would be possible to "knot" Descartes's error.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Daniel Cohen, economist, and Aldo schiavone, Roman Law professor

Daniel Cohen has written some remarquable books. The last one (2009) is "La prosperite du vice" (Albin Michel, Paris). It is a sober description, a sort of history of economy, beginning with the invention of agriculture, till today, when we are in the global era, the era of "virtual capitalism", when the capital is in research and developpement, publicity, fashion, and finances. Rich countries have their hand firmly grasping immaterial production.
Among his references: Aldo Schiavone's "The end of the past" (1996), Harvard translation (2000), a history of the fall of the Roman Empire. for Schiavone--cf http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Schiavone- the Roman Empire fell because it gradually transformed its economy, from a purely agriculture-based one, where aristocracy has its roots, its legitimacy and its legend, to a slave-labor economy, where the bulk of wealth is produced by slaves, ruining the small landowners, forcing them to enroll in the army, the conquering machine which produced more prisoners, more slaves, till this cycle is broken when the war stops to be a conquering war and begins to be oinly defensive.
The most striking about the excelent Schiavone is that he fails to grasp, even remotely, the relationship between philosophy and slavery, so precisely pointed by Lacan: philosophy is the appropiation, in a certain moment of history, by the master of the craft and artisanal know how of the slave.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Te all of dialectics and its stop

The all of dialectics and its stop

I have been trying some years to understand the effort of Slavoj Zizek to capture the problem of the Arab-Israeli conflict using Hegelian dialectics. (See for example, perhaps still in this site: “Dialectics as superstition”).
This includes of course the core: the Shoah of European Jewry. I must confess that every time has been impossible. This conflict and its core is somewhat resistant to Hegelian-Marxist dialectics.
Karl Marx , who lived in 19th century, did not see this black hole of history, Auswichtz. So, it was not part, it could not be a part, of his work on the “Jewish question”, not even as a distant shadow. Sigmund Freud wrote a line when his books were burned by the Nazis—“There is some progress, in other times they would have burned me”—. He didn’t see the Shoah, but it was present, he smelt the danger. Heidegger saw it and did as it was nothing important, he continued with his metaphysics. Jacques Lacan not only saw it, he lived it. He listened. He wrote that there is no chance to understand it with dialectics. Dialectics, that means we can make the contraries meet by some sublime magic. We can for example say “the Palestinian question”, and it sounds as “the Jewish question.” It is a sound, a resonance.
We may also write, as Zizek, “the Germans tried to kill all the Jews”. But this does not stand as a definite description for “Shoah”. Jean-Claude Milner, quoted by Zizek, uses another, different word: “annihilation”. This word is a non-dialectical word. No chance for Hegel of even dreaming of something like this. Hegel saw everything when he saw Napoleon, his “aleph”. He didn’t see the scientific annihilation. Not Absolute Knowledge, but Absolute Annihilation.
By the way, Zizek uses the “obliteration” (soft reminder of the more sincere “erase of the map”) word when he points to the most radical anti-Zionist Arabs calling for the “obliteration of the state of Israel”. Israel as a state, not its citizens, stands supporting as an object the non-dialectical verb and its consequences.
Analogous problem we face with the expression “West Bank free of Palestinians”. The Nazis coined the term “Judenrein”, to specify their purpose of purify all of Europe, and so to give a solution to their problem, “the Jewish problem”. In Israel, it is not so uncommon the use of Nazi language resonances for public dialectics and discourse. There is a sign of stop, however, waiting in every corner for this rhetoric, a sign addressed to the rhetorician, more than to his audience or his readers.

Let’s take the book of Norman Finkelstein “The Holocaust Industry”. He essentially points to Israel and some Israel politicians as using the Holocaust to obtain political gains. It is a book that certainly has caused many waves, and it may have a point: from the moment the Shoah enters public discourse, it enters the field of truth and the “surplus value of truth”. There is a use value and an exchange value. The silence of the Shoah survivors, a known phenomenon—silence that may persist till their last days– is surely not without relation to the social echo, even to the remembering of its horrors. But this “surplus value of the Holocaust” has its limit in its own excess, and it is exemplified by Norman Finkelstein’s “boomerang achievement”: he himself has been also named by his detractors or disputers as another “Holocaust Industry” producer, but now his own, private industry, Norman’s Finkelstein “Holocaust Industry”. Such is the field of dialectics. You sell-say a truth, and this very truth includes your personal truth price tag.
And this is why I find very difficult for me to understand the attempt of dialectization of the Arab-Israeli conflict, its transformation in a intellectual field, a competition in the “truth market”. In this sense, I find some points of silence in Jean-Claude Milner’s argumentations more close to the “intractable” nature of the conflict. It may even be that the so-called “the Jewish name” by Milner is a sort of name of the intractable (and so, more akin to Francois Regnault’s “notre petit a”, than to Zizek’s “fetish”). The humorist Biderman put it very precisely in a caricature in “Haaretz”, the day that the so called “Judas Gospel” surfaced somewhere in the sands of Egypt. Here was the Pope, very concerned, looking at the newspaper with one of the Cardinals at his side. A little sentence read: “These Jews, they are making trouble once more”. Some years before, James Baker, the former American Secretary of State, called the Arab-Israeli conflict “the most intractable of all conflicts”. Being himself a man of the south, he probably knows something about this. Dialectics, very probably, turns intractable problems even more difficult: it obscures them.

Short comment of "The uses of the word 'Jew', " by Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou proposes a “global” or “reboot” solution for the Middle East conflict. The living body is not included in this perspective.
I will say, firstly, that I feel deeply touched by Badiou’s statements and conclusions regarding the abolition of identity predicates, among them, as he writes, “Jew” and “French” as means of establishing national and political boundaries, because they are prone to not desirable consequences. I thank him personally. I also agree. It is surely desirable to reach this advanced phase. I’m also afraid it is too advanced for a species with a body, an enjoying body, to live with.
It is a fact—a discourse fact– that the state of Israel, founded in 1948, if it is supposed to be the consequence of Zionism as political ideology and movement, undoubtedly was a de facto consequence of what I shall call, yes, the Shoah—because that is the name most convenient subjectively for survivors, if we believe some testimonies—and there is no reason not to believe them. Survivors feel, in my experience, less persecuted when they use “Shoah”–. Survivors lost their entire families by the industrial massacre orchestrated by the Nazis, with the inestimable, precious help of European democracies and governments. Without the precious European help, it is perhaps difficult to imagine such perfection in economy, means, timing, transports, information, data recollection, statistics, etc. etc.
Those economies and democratic states are very civilized nations today, that after great and moving efforts of many years have reached an agreement to slowly form an entity, political and economical, called in the meantime the EU, that puts aside as a sort of temporary “semblant”, some of the many national characteristics of the people living there, as Badiou says, in Europe. But they still live and call themselves with generic names, attributive suppositions of identity.
It is also undoubtedly a great achievement for the United Nations to have reached to the conclusion that helped to create the state of Israel, a home for those bearing the danger of believing too intensely to have something to do with the “Jew predicate”. It alliviated many more continued forms of persecution for these people. If you strogly believe you “are” something “called X”, and you are persecuted by people who coincide with your identity delusion… Well, it is rather urgent for you to find a place where you may feel that this “identity predicate” has some chances of being included in discourse, kept away from persecution, to give you some time to bear your own definition of it, to reach a sort of a pact with it, etc. You will need time, and a place to live.
It is also a sort of paradox that it is asked—as Badiou does– precisely from Israel, as a state, to “cross the fantasy” of collective predicate– to cross it collectively. It sounds as if Badiou is asking Israel “to be the light to Nations” once more. To achieve as a community precisely what so many nations only touch as a very far “semblant” (make-believe).

Perhaps. There are many courageous people in Israel—Badiou dixit—who are already ready for this, at least in declaration. This sort of change takes more than exhortations or desires. In psychoanalysis, it takes the one-by-one crossing of the “identity attributions”. “Identity attributions” include the body, the living body of each one.
To reach the point where you agree to separate from some attribution of identity, (a signifier of the Other, a S1 as Lacan writes it) you will need to do it with some distance from the attribution of the Other who, starting to say you are effectively “X”, you must depart from “the territory for X”, or perhaps to turn “the territory for X”, into “the territory for X, Y, and Z”, and so to help solve “a problem”” that your erroneous solution of identity has somehow fixated in a way incompatible to enlightened Europeans/Americans. I use the plural. But I don’t know what sort of plural is this. We are in a complete imaginary field. Testimonies are one by one.

The problem with Badiou’s solution (a “global” or “reboot the system” solution)
The problem with Badiou’s proposed solution for the Middle East conflict is built-in the solution itself. The solution is a sort of generalized proposal: “You should undo the collective identification that defines you as “Jewish state”, and then proceed to define the new situation as ‘Israeli is who is situated here’”.
This is a sort of “reboot the system” proposal. The only problem with this global solution is that the identification of “Jews” as “ Israelis” was made necessary and urgent by the fact of the Shoah, which in turn was a “final solution” of the Nazis for the “Jewish problem”. It became evident that the Nazis caught even those enlightened ones for the only reason they had ancestors who called themselves “Jew”. Thn they reduced their bodies to ashes or soap. Now Badiou asks for the undoing of the state as a “Jewish state”. May I remind, by the way, here that the title of Hertzl’s seminal book is “Judenstaat” (“A state for/of the Jewish”).

Spinoza refused to accept the idea of “the chosen people”, except for: (PTT, Ch 3)
Lastly, if any one wishes to maintain that the Jews, from this or from any other cause, have been chosen by God for ever, I will not gainsay him if he will admit that this choice, whether temporary or eternal, has no regard, in so far as it is peculiar to the Jews, to aught but dominion and physical advantages [imperium et corporis commoditates](for by such alone can one nation be distinguished from another), whereas in regard to intellect and true virtue, every nation is on a par with the rest, and God has not in these respects chosen one people rather than another.

But Spinoza is inimitable. He separated himself from “the chosen” position by his singular invention—as Borges writes, Spinoza created God. From there he could examine what is the function of “chosen” positions. This is something that only can be made-through “one by one”.
This is partially the reason for which Lacan preferred Kant to Spinoza. Kant includes Shylock. Shylock is an “anti-reboot” character. Spinoza, with all its lovable beauty, rejects the body, even if he writes “imperium et corporis commoditates”.
After a subject arrives to a little separation from “the Other’s attribution”, he still may decide to continue using this “attribution”. I don’t see how it is only by “force of the Other” that the use of “Jew” exists as such.
This distance, we need a name for it. Perhaps is more precisely a sort of “moment to understand”. Perhaps it is “subjective time”. It took Freud many years to reach his “Acropolis conclusion” that put him a little step forward from one particular use—Freud’s use– of the “name of the father”. Is there a chance of a collective pluralisation , something like “the names of the Father” as a basis for a new collective discourse?
Israel is “archaic” as a state in the same sense that to “have a body” today is “archaic”.

Finally, in these times where the best 50 internet sites of the World as “chosen” by “Time inc” are sites where you may have the sensation that nothing is lacking there, that “everything is there” and it is a sort of surfing experiment in anxiety, may I say that I read Badiou’s sentence about the state of Israel as “archaic” in this sense: to attach such an importance of a state and the definition of its citizens— among other, circumcised in general – is archaic in the same sense as today it is more and more difficult to say you have a body.

Dialectics as superstition

Dialectics as Superstition
a reading of Slavoj Zizek's "critique" on Jean-Claude Milner
Marco Mauas

I'll begin my answer from the very last sentence of Zizek's critique: "Does the idea of Jews turning into a Nation-State not imply the END (sic, in very big letters) of Judaism, no wonder that the Nazis supported this plan! Jews stood for the "Four-fold" precisely in order to maintain their identity without a Nation-State."

This sentence is precisely the Hegelian-point of this critique. Exactly as Hegel said that Christianity is really the end of God (without writing it like this: "END") - with its mortal passion of the Christ, so would be the Nation-State of the Jews should be the "END" of Judaism. Were the Jews and their Destiny, including the Shoah, a dialectical puzzle, Zizek has the right point. But this is a more material puzzle, that Hegelian Dialectics does not recognize as such. This is Lacan's thesis in his XI Seminar 1 - it is really much more than a thesis, it is a matter-of fact, a consequence of his deduction of objet petit a as something that is "the very limit of these dialectical discussions". Freud himself did not believe that these "Critiques" were very worth of. He preferred to abstain, because there is something in psychoanalysis that makes it non-dialectical. Well, what I am saying now is precisely this: that Lacan's saying in Seminar XI about the shoah is the equivalent of Freud's reluctance to any dialectical discussion.

In its place we have something as a "conversation". Jacques-Alain Miller has put it clearly that in the era of the non-rapport between signifier and signification (S/s), the conversation is the only recourse we have to cope with this gap, to try to make it a visible gap. Eric Laurent also stressed it in his intervention at his seminar with Jacques-Alain Miller "L'Autre qui n'existe pas et ses comités d'éthique": the conversation about marriage. This is not only about of dialectics; this is also about conversation. The conversation takes into account something that is not possible to dialecticize. It takes into account: it lets it to be, to exist. From this point of view, it is possible to continue to read après-coup the text of Zizek: "The Jews stood for the Four-fold" precisely in order to", implies something of an intention: "in order to". So that not only we have a dialectics of Jewish position, we have an intention in this dialectics. Hegel named it with a very clear and clever name: the astuteness of reason. What does it mean? What is this astuteness of reason? 2 The reason knows everything from the beginning. We have to remind here that for Jacques Lacan this is precisely the non-analytic, the non-Freudian point of Hegel. Neither the reason cannot know everything from the beginning, nor could these Zionists and their Nazis collaborators know everything from the beginning.

What is the name we can ourselves give to this "intention"? Let's continue our tour. The Spinoza's name for it was simply "superstition": 3 to believe that the Gods will be in your side if you know what to offer to them. Spinoza's example is that of Alexander the Great: when things were doing fine for him, he didn't care of his magicians and augurs. When things begun to complicate, he called them all to him. Zizek is calling in this sense to the augurs of dialectics: to help him, us all also, give a dialectical intention and explanation to this strange meeting between Zionists and Nazis. It is a Deus ex machina. They supposedly met because they wanted the same in some obscure sense, even if they are supposed to be the extreme absolute, or precisely because of that. Well, this is a dialectical interpretation. It is true, but it is not the end of it, it is only a dialectical truth. We have to continue. And to continue means: to continue against dialectics, because there is a gap, an internal gap. So let's continue our tour.

Lacan gave to this intention a different name: the truth as a final cause as we find it in religion. It is a superstition of reason also, but we have with Lacan a different mode of treatment. Lacan named it the final cause 4 as Spinoza did, but what is the aim of Lacan when he poses it as the truth as fibnal cause? The real cause. The aim of Lacan is the real cause, or more precisely, "the cause as real". 5 The object petit a is the cause of desire, so there is a causal gap that makes it impossible to fill it with dialectical intentions. If we accept Francois Regnault interpretation - it is not a thesis, it is an interpretation 6 - that the Jew is the object petit a of Western civilization , we accept also that this object has no dialectical intention in it. It is rather a position, as Jacques-Alain Miller simply put it in his "Extimite" course (1986-87). "The Jew" is a "separation position." This is something not easy to grasp with the dialectics of Zizek, because this dialectics is blind to it, as it is blind to the fact that the object petit a is a cause in the real sense of the word. Dialectics cannot cope with this humble fact, because dialectics is a sort of superstition of reason. "Give me a problem and I can dialecticize it". If you try to interpret my position, I will show you that you are speaking the truth against yourself.

Well, were dialectics the all-might instrument to solve gaps, we would not really need psychoanalysis. And I am not sure this is the case.

This is the reason why Jacques-Alain Miller statement in this same course of 1986 comes to meet a similar statement by Leo Strauss in 1958. Let's see Miller 's statement in the first place:

Il est même incroyable de voir que ce qui a l'air le plus populaire ce soit la position sartrienne qui consiste a dire que le Juif n'existe pas, qu'il n'existe que par le regard d'autrui. Ca me semblerait devoir susciter l'insurrection précisement la ou on vous tartine de la sécificité juive... Eh bien moi, cet égard. je suis lacanien. Je ne pense pas que c'est le regard d'autrui qui est constitutif de cette position... 7

Now let's see what Leo Strauss has to say:

On peut diviser en deux classes les Juifs non religieux d'aujourd'hui. Il y a ceux qui souhaitent n'être pas juifs, qui considèrent leur origine juive comme un malheur; et il y a ceux qui ne souhaitent pas ne pas être nés juifs, et qui sont peut être même heureux d'être nés juifs. Ils pensent que ce qu'il y a de mieux en eux vient de leur origine juive, ou se trouve en tout cas inextricablement lié a cet origine. D'une manière étrange, ils croient encore d'une manière ou d'une autre que les Juifs sont le Peuple élu... Freud a été certainement un Juif en ce sens. Je fais un pas de plus. Je crois que les Juifs du type numéro deux son a la fois meilleurs et plus heureux que les Juifs du type numéro un. 8

"The Jew" cannot, by structure, have any intention to maintain his position - even if there is an active side of this position, as Jacques-Alain Miller stresses it - as an object, so to survive as a Jew. We can make the clear cut distinction between activity and intention. Freud said it was really a question, what made this people survive - actively, of course - through the ages. But Freud was not so Hegelian, nor Lacan, with all due respect for Hegel.

What is the underlying coincidence between these two sayings? In what sense can we understand Jacques-Alain Miller a cet égard, je suis lacanien? There is a clinical reason in it, a reason that simply supposes the humble fact of psycho-analytical practice: the subject is directed toward his destiny, his tragic-comical destiny, and there is no dialectics that can be able to surpass his confrontation, his responsibility vis- a -vis his jouissance.

Lacan says something about the reason that is inherent in "being Lacanian" as Miller says in his course. Lacan stresses in his 25 january 1967 seminar, "La logique du fantasme":

J'avais rêvé pour quelques petits de cette tribu qui m'entoure, de leur rendre service d'élucider un peu la question concernant leur rapport au Dieu au nom imprononçable, à celui qui s'est exprimé dans le registre du je, non pas "je suis celui qui suis", pas de transposition d'une pensée Plotinienne, mais "je suis ce que je suis" tout simplement. J'avais pensé ; "j'y reviendrai toujours pour leur rendre ce service, et nous en resterons toujours là tant que nous n'aurons pas repris cette question du nom du père". Je parle des petits, il y a aussi les grands. Les grands juifs n'ont pas besoin de moi pour s'affronter à leur Dieu. Mais nous, nous avons ici à faire à l'Autre en tant que champ de la vérité et que cet Autre soit marqué, que nous le voulions ou pas, comme philosophe, qu'il soit marqué au premier abord, par la castration. Voilà aujourd'hui ce à quoi nous avons affaire. C'est ce contre quoi, dès lors que l'analyse existe, rien ne saurait prévaloir.

It is the lacanian name for this impossibility, that remained as such till the last teaching of Lacan: there is something incurable. Zizek's "Critique" aims to cure the Jews from their Milnerian dreams, as it were, to become universally Europeans with the Muslim Other. But it disregards the difference in position. The same superstitious dialectics can be transformed in the secret of an active position, non-dialectizable, incurable as such. But this is not tha aim of Zizek, his aim is a Critique, so he does not admit as such the Jew as a serious question mark, he simply rejects it in and with this dialectical superstition.

In its more radical sense, Milner's book is an interpretation, and this fact may be the fact that makes it "weak" in Zizek's "Critique" (p. 3). Zizek's "Critique" is really a Critique of a Milnerian interpretation, a Milnerian-Lacanian interpretation that is "Lacanian" in the same sense of Miller's sentence: in the sense that it preserves the position, the cause and the causal gap, without trying to find a cure, a dialectical solution, a superstitious solution that can restore the "sense". It is more striking when you read another article in the same book by Leo Strauss, another very Milnerian sentence:

Je recommence encore. Il n'existe pas de solution du probleme juif. L'esperance d'une telle solution vient de la prémisse selon laquelle tous les problemes ont une solution." 9

This is - paradoxically enough - more akin with a chance of analytic interpretation. There is a stop on it. And this is also the secret of Jean-Claude Milner's book-interpretation of the Jewish Position.

Notes:

1. Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XI, Seuil, Paris, Ed. établi par Jacques-Alain Miller: "C'est, présentifiant les formes les plus monstrueuses et prétendues d'epassées de l'holocauste, le drame du nazisme. Je tiens qu'aucun sens de l'histoire, fondé sur les prémises hégéliano-marxistes, n'est capable de render compte de cette resurgence, par quoi il s'avere que l'offrande a des dieux obscures d'un objet de sacrifice est quelque chose a quoi peu de sujets peuvent ne pas succomber, dans une monstruouse capture."
2. About this particular point, cf.: Lacan, Écrits, Ed Seuil, Paris, 1966, p 809 and ff.
3. Spinoza, TTP, Préface, 4.
4. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, p. 872. Seuil, Paris, 1966.
5. Cf for the beginning of this clinical point concerning the practice: Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XI, (1963-64) Ed. établi par Jacques-Alain Miller, Seuil, Paris, 1973, Ch. II, p. 25: "Eh bien, l'inconscient freudien, c'est a ce point que j'essaye de vous faire viser par approximation qu'il se situe, a ce point ou, entre la cause et ce qu'elle affecte, il y a toujours de la clocherie... (...)... Car l'inconscient nous montre la béance ou la névrose se raccorde a un réel - réel qui peut bien, lui, n'etre pas déterminé."
6. Francois Regnault: "Notre objet a", Ornicar 50, 2003, p. 31
7. Jacques-Alain Miller, "Extimité", cours du 22-1-1986, (Version not corrected by J-A Miller.)
8. Leo Strauss: " Freud sur Moise et le Monotheisme" (1958), dans Pourquoi nous restons Juifs, "La Table Ronde Editions, Paris, 2001, p. 267.
9. Leo Strauss, op. cit, p. 22.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

How to become a psychoanalyst

INTERPRETATIONS INTERNATIONALES
Marco Mauas : Comment devenir psychanalyste en Israël
Dans mon cas particulier, j’ai du en passer, pour commencer, par une formation en Argentine,
dispensée par des analystes de l’IPA, fervents disciples de Racker et du contre-transfert. Je
commençai une analyse à Paris peu après mon arrivée en Israël. Une interprétation de mon
analyste, « Oui, la psychanalyse n’a pas d’effet sur les relations sexuelles », fut un instrument
efficace de coupure par rapport au contre-transfert comme par rapport aux fantaisies de tout
traiter par le sens sexuel. Cette interprétation première me permet maintenant de livrer quelques
indications personnelles sur la pratique de la psychanalyse en Israël, et de pointer les coupures
qu’elle exige.
Coupure 1- Le non au non de l’hébreu. Lacan a pu dire que les Japonais sont inanalysables
entre autres raisons, à cause, du « oui » perpétuel de la langue japonaise. En revanche, on trouve
en hébreu un « non » perpétuel. Ici, on est trop analysable : on discute tout, on analyse tout.
Résultat: on doit persévérer d’autant plus dans sa propre analyse pour trouver le « non au non ».
En somme, la question est de savoir comment transformer un Israélien en un Japonais…
Réponse: par l’analyse. L’analyse n’a pas d’effets sur les relations sexuelles, mais peut faire ca :
f (A) : Israélien- Japonais.
Coupure 2 - Quine (W.V.O). Être quinien est un réquisit de formation. L’impossibilité
d’arriver à un accord sur la traduction doit figurer à l’entrée de chez vous, à coté de la mezuzah.
On parle et on traduit, mais surtout on corrige votre traduction. L’hébreu est correcteur. Donc,
Quine pour tous. Analyse + Quine.
4
Coupure 3- Herem. Lacan compare son excommunication par l’IPA à celle de Spinoza,
tombé sous le coup du Herem, qui l’excluait de la communauté juive. Eh bien, en Israël, peutêtre
faut-il admettre qu’un analyste doit subir le Herem comme de structure. Si l’on veut entrer
dans la communauté analytique, on doit sortir structurellement de la communauté juive,
intimement - ce qui ne veut pas dire de façon publique. Analyse + Herem structurel. C’est en
tout cas ce que je crois.

Journees de l'Ecole de la Cause Freudienne

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Gideon Levy is called "the Israeli conscience"

Today I read in a talkback that Gideon Levy is called in Europe "The Israeli conscience". Do Europeans remember what Freud said to them about conscience, namely, that the real name for it is Superego? What do you do with your Superego? Accodring to Freud, if you kindly try to obey his orders, it--it is better "it" than "he"--it returns to you and asks for more obedience.  "Obey me more!", that could be its returning message, no matter how good you try to appear in its eyes. So, what's the best to do here? Lacan writes that the secret is very simple: the order is to enjoy. "Jouis!" And the only possible answer from the subject is "J'ouis"--"I listen". Well, Gideon, according to Europe, that is the answer they advice. European ambivalence towards morals and ethics is very suspicious. In this point, I adhere to Jean-Claude Milner. He has given us the clue to European Democracy ethics.