After many days since the implosion of everyday life, I find myself looking for how to make room for the discontinuity in the discontinuity, how to obtain what a colleague –in the first series of these bulletins- calls “subjective ventilation.”[1]

Let me explain: what some people call “new normality” installs itself surreptitiously following the discontinuity, without a cut that delimits it, with blurred boundaries, or -to insist on this term- without solution of continuity.

The long series of stories, interpretations and delusions of all kind (as explained in another of these bulletins and which I refrain myself from enumerating despite liking so much to do it), contributes to this. It is enough to say that each one, in his or her own way, produces a dense veil of meaning before that real which is still there, every morning, returning to the same place. The series of ever-increasing numbers also reminds us of this, although they themselves are, indeed, out of meaning.

The analytic session also obeys to the “serial-form,”[2] as G. Wajcman states. At the end of a meeting, a colleague throws in a hilarious occurrence. Her phone rings and she ends the meeting by saying: “I leave you now; I’m going back to the call center”. Thus, she evokes the conditions of the analytic practice today, associating them to a certain mortification, a particular form of tiredness to which many practitioners have testified. However, the serial condition is not altered by the implementation of virtual means of communication.

What makes us return to the call center, every time, even at the price of that strange tiredness? How to sustain there a listening that goes against the grain of sense, of meaning, against continuity?

Jacques-Alain Miller says: “The subject lives off being and, at the same time, he empties it. The subject is destined for this and we accompany him in this emptying.”[3] So, one more effort to keep listening/emptying, session after session.

But Lacan’s later teaching goes beyond being and starts from the solitude of the One, “of the solitary One, the one who speaks alone.” [4]  In the analysis -Miller continues- the two is restituted faced with the One, “simply by the very  fact that interpretation is added.” So, one more turn: to achieve this, the analyst only has the One that animates him; the One that knots giving rise to that strange desire capable of generating an emptying presence.

 

 

Translated by Ana Inés Bertón

 


This text is part of a Series of publications by the EOL, School of the Lacanian Orientation, Argentina. All issues are available online in Spanish. Boletín Discontinuidad-Nueva Serie N° I

[1] Racki, G., Airear, tironear ventilar. Discontinuidad Nº 11.

[2] Wajcman, G., Les séries, le monde, la crise, les femmes, Paris, Verdier, 2018.

[3] Miller, J.-A., “El Ser y el Uno” [Being and the One], Course The Lacanian Orientation delivered within the frame of the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris 8, Lesson of 11th May, 2011. Published in Spanish as  “De la falta en ser al agujero”,  in Revista Freudiana nº 70, Barcelona, 2014.

[4] Ibid