Jacques-Alain Miller
Towards PIPOL 4
International Programme of Studies on Applied
Psychoanalysis in the Lacanian Orientation
This is the key to the shock of civilizations. What we thus name is essentially the opposition, the incompatibility, between the religious civilization and the merchant civilization, between the civilization dominated by the ideal ego and the one that the superego strictly speaking dominates, the superego whose imperative can be formulated jouis, between the civilization of respect and ours, which is that of greediness. The merchant civilization stigmatizes as fanaticism that of the ideal ego, and it is in turn stigmatized as perversion, corruption, immorality, Jouissance-pride. [5] We find between the two an enigmatic mix, today’s China, where we can observe both an authoritarian control of the Ideal and an extraordinary disinhibition of consummation.