(Re)-turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies Spring 2005, Volume 2The following selection is for preview purposes only. You must subscribe or login to view the entire article |
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Chapter 1
Presentation of the Year's Theme
Jacques-Alain Miller
Translated by Ellie Ragland
To continue the series, the serious
Two modes of jouissance
No clinic without ethics
The fantasy is an axiom
The body of the Other
The person who just brought me here told me she was very happy the course was starting again. Well, me too.
I conceive of what I am doing here as a course - a rather long course, since you will meet me at this place and at this time, all the available weeks.1 Not less than twenty-eight times before the end of the month of June, that is. If we advance a bit into July, it will be thirty.
I realized that this course - this long course - suited me, despite the work it imposes on me. There is, not only in psychoanalysis, but also in existence, the function of staying the course and running the distance - which I am trying to do here.
Here. That means that I have some other lectures to give as well, and even a seminar where, above all, it is up to others to prove themselves, although I must make certain interventions. I have to provide orientation, in other words, in a context which is, in general, like all contexts: it is alluvial, made of deposits where various materials have already become sedimented.
The difference for me here is that the context, the sedimentations, are what I myself have already said the preceding year. I must confess in reference to this context.
That happens for me here, not elsewhere. It is here that I must say what follows, that I must continue the series.
In Lacan's sense, to canyon with the series is the only way to be serious. That consists, in particular, of drawing the consequences from what one has said, and especially the consequences of the consequences. This is especially difficult because it happens, more often than one wishes, that the consequences of the consequences are not in agreement with the premises.
Certainly, I 'profess' this course insofar as I have a profession in the University.
I have done so by this rubrique since 1972 - precisely from 1972 to 1979. That means that, for seven years, I have addressed myself to the systematic coherence of the teaching of Lacan. I have tried to say how it holds together, how - according to the very terms of Lacan - he did not fall flat on his face, and how these terms, these constructions, responded to one another.
Then I stopped for two years. I was not on strike during these two years, but I stopped the series. What led me to mark this scansion? What incited me to it? It was the destruction of the University of Vincennes. This University was razed. I am not using a metaphor. They brought cranes, an especially long street, a long chain, at the end of which there is a kind of ball that they drove into the building of this university. Now, the only trace that can be seen there is a ruined lawn. Since I found it painful to speak, just in anticipating what is not even a ruin - they don't even stop that today - I stopped. I stopped the series.
It so happened at the same time, at the juncture of this decade, that there were other destructions as well, in particular the destruction of the Freudian School of Paris. That too was razed.
At this juncture, I also began the practice of psychoanalysis. And especially, Jacques Lacan was dead.
That led, last year, to my beginning a second tour of Lacan's teaching.
I do not know if it will continue like that for seven years. There might be seven years of fatted cows, after which there would be seven years of lean cows. But nothing permits me to qualify cows. After all, there are good cows, good troupes of cows. The difficulty is to be in the process of doing something.
I.
My point of departure, the one I shall take up again in order to give you a foundation, is
situated exactly at this juncture.
It seemed urgent to me, in 1980, to promote an other Lacan than the one who has been
interpreted for almost thirty years.
An other Lacan - that I introduced to Doctor Lacan, the last time I had the opportunity to
speak before him, on the occasion of the International Rencontre in Caracas - consisted of
opposing the fixity of fantasy to the dialectic of desire. This point of departure is, for me, a
guide. It can be found published in an internal Bulletin which is called Delenda,which was
doing fine in a period of destruction.
What I did last year seemed, retrospectively, to merit the name of Scansions dans
l' enseignement de Jacques Lacan (Scansions in the Teaching of Jacques Lacan). I have
continued, from this moment of beginning, in the sense of stressing that it was abusive to
interpret the whole of Lacan's teaching based on L'instant de la lettre ("The Agency of the
Letter"). It is also abusive to interpret the whole of Freud's work based on "The Ego and the
Id."
This attempt, in which the orthodox New Yorkers have distinguished themselves, often
goes very far. It is even too much to say that they interpret all of Freud's work starting
with "The Ego and the Id." What they do is much more radical. They distinguish a first theory of
Freud's, the one he focused on in The Interpretation of Dreams, and the following one, with the
three terms of the unconscious, preconscious, conscious. And they oppose to that, quite simply,
the tripartition of the ego, id, and superego. That has produced a work, like that of the most
distinguished of the orthodox New Yorkers, Arlow and Brenner, in which the first chapter is
made of the exposé of the first theory of Freud, the second chapter of the exposé of the second
theory, the third chapter of the statement that these theories are incompatible, and the fourth
chapter opts for the second theory of Freud.
Put another way, I would say that their choice of 'The Ego and the Id" is a principle, not
for interpreting, but for amputating, Freud's work. [continued...] (Re)-turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies Spring 2005, Volume 2
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