I just came back from the Venice Biennale, where the artists reduce everything to the real, launch a takeover on the modes of jouissance patented by the insane instances of the capitalistic-correct discourse. Nonetheless, they make a name for themselves with the general support of the enveloping, dominant discourse; they are beloved, bought, praised.
Psychoanalytic discourse also makes modes of enjoyment incomplete and deflates them, but arouses no love: rather hatred, a will to annihilate which cannot be denied. Last year, Freud was “unbolted”. Now it’s Lacan who is being assassinated. Why this spite against Lacan, who’s been dead for thirty years? And beyond Lacan, why this hatred for analytic discourse? Let us take a look at the underlying passions.
Are we dealing with a jealous envy, with the desire to be the caliph in the caliph’s place? Or, given that these times clearly are not the Caliphs’, a desire to place the expert – a common name – in the place of a proper name? This argument is valid for analysts when they become their masters’ rivals.
But jealous envy can be found in all fields of knowledge. However, it must be said that it doesn’t have the same effects there. Competition and rivalry don’t work in this way for artists who justly make a name for themselves, with the general support of a discourse on art. Nor do they work like this for Nobel Prize winners, or for authorities acknowledged by the university.
This difference does not arise from a kind of transference that would only exist in the field of psychoanalysis. Transference is everywhere and nobody escapes transference. No, the difference arises from recognition: acquired by artists through the market, consecrated by Nobel Prize winners, distributed by academic institutions. Consensual recognition.
Everything takes place as though analysts could never obtain recognition: they may be known and yet never be really acknowledged.
This is logical, given that in psychoanalysis knowledge belongs to a different register. It belongs to the common language, of which knowledge is supposed, not of analysts, much less of some tutelary authority. Thus a further element must be added to envious jealousy: an element that is specific to analysts and to the analytic discourse.
If an expert, whatever his or her field, has no name, and least he or she has a function: the expert places knowledge in the place of the master signifier, actually an imperative, or rather a procedure. Thus is why PROSEMA® is the interpretation that kills!
“Men of desire”, Freud and Lacan followed the course of this “fire river”, guided not by some standard technique, but by the contingency of improvisation, which is living speech and moving discourse. This requires rigor, and mobilizes the fields of knowledge, but excludes the Pantheon, which is blown to smithereens.
Of course, but artists do the same thing nowadays and instead of being hated they are adored. Why? Why is art loved and Lacanian psychoanalysis hated?
Twofold hypothesis:
1. Artists are outside the power game. Art is an inconsequential practice for masters, and it even contributes to the health of the market. True, it’s a subversive product, but it’s a product nonetheless. And civilization keeps placing devastating products on the market. Nowadays art clearly interprets with a objects, makes no use of the Father, but remains an item. Nowadays works are “interesting”, a term which has replaced “beautiful”. But art continues to dazzle, and this dazzlement protects artists from the vindictiveness of masters.
By contrast, dazzling Lacan provokes it all the more.
For analysts are given power and at the same time are demanded to have it. More so, they are requested to give the formula of this power in order to use it easily to handle the crowds, which “psy” professionals obligingly promise. The consequences of this are also feared.
But psychoanalysis is not a treatment for speaking beings aimed at bringing them back into the fold (there are too many treatments of that sort). Rather, it’s a treatment of the object and modes of enjoyment, an unheard-of treatment which attacks, like art, master signifiers but makes a completely different use of the object in that it does not allow us to retrieve it. Through this psychoanalysis obtains specific results, and thus consequences, as shown by Jacques-Alain Miller’s interview in Le Point. It can predict – which is something that unsettles people – not only dazzle.
In addition to the envy which Melanie Klein so insightfully turned into a real knot, it is impotence that plays a role in this hatred of psychoanalysis: the impotence of a demand for power (the power to understand, handle, heal, control…) addressed to the analyst – a demand which remains unsatisfied as well as unsaid. Freud, Lacan, and others have replied to this demand in a different way – NO – because there is no other possible answer.
Analysts are not forgiven their objection to the service of the master’s discourse, which admitted by artists. Analysts are expected to be at the service of the father or whatever plays this role nowadays. This is the deep root of this hatred which lasts. Hatred towards Lacanian psychoanalysis is thus the father’s death throes: hatred takes the place of the name which no longer exists or is fading away. Hatred arises towards those who don’t speak as experts. The formula for an expert would thus be the following: someone who turns his or her impotence in the face of the real into a power to do damage in the Other.
2. But knowledge in psychoanalysis – this coveted and envied knowledge, vilified because it follows no procedure, can only be paid for with a pound of flesh: it cannot be bought or given or stolen. This is the difference with art. For although artists object to the master’s discourse (the Pope rejected Velázquez’s portrait of him), they make it possible to recover the pound of flesh.
Knowing how to read Freud and Lacan is paid in the same coin. Collecting or buying the books is not enough to be able to use them and be an expert, or even an amateur.
Is the irretrievable pound of flesh the key to the hatred which the non-duped have for Lacanian psychoanalysis?
Translated by Asunción Álvarez
