NY Daisy Chain

How does one make one’s life among others? Something important happens at the juncture in an analysis—in a life—at which one begins to make decisions by way of lateral associations. It seems to me that part of the effect of an analysis is to promote intra-generational ties, as well as to broaden one’s conception of what and whom a generation comprises, and how it interacts with those previous and succeeding. Where once your life was dictated by a static Oedipal script, you begin to find your way, creatively, with your fellows. What Lacan calls the moment of decision, whatever its content, begins to get made in view of what your peers are up to, not according to some imaginary principle of mimicry, but by way of how you have defined your ability to work with them. You become a scout for the types of work that can be invented in the various constellations (dyads, small groups, larger collectives) that you find and make, and find-make; relating itself becomes a method of landing on forms of collaboration; you begin to see that a generation defines its own stakes, and that your elders are nothing but a cadre of people in the process of figuring it all out together too. Thus, you begin to rewrite the Oedipal script. And, you start to take responsibility for your successors, not in order to dictate their activities, but simply to perform and transmit the way your collectives have landed on the work of mutual formation, so that they might start to do this themselves, in other collectives of their own find-making. Inevitably, you then have to open yourself up to their transferences, allow yourself to be placed in their Oedipal scripts, and see what happens. To a certain extent, this is what it is to grow up.

In his paper, “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty,” Lacan (2007) writes a parable of the self-authorization of the analyst within what might be considered a collective of lateral associations—that is, a collective without a leader, where one decides that one is an analyst by way of successive rounds of reading where one is in one’s formation vis-à-vis where one perceives one’s fellows to be. It seems to me that this type of acephalic collective—a collective that lands on its forms of work according to a logic of progressive collaboration, where I move something in you and you (not necessarily symmetrically) move something in me, and the group moves accordingly, and new decisions are made that dialecticize each individual with the group, and new forms of work emerge in turn—is also what might obtain on the other side of an analysis, as its ongoing effect. To call it a “cartel,” or anything else uniform, is inevitably to institutionalize it and reduce its polymorphous strangeness. We will go where we will, together. I would like to propose that this form of collective only really becomes possible in middle age. And that its maximum number of members is five.

Thus, the moment in an analysis at which these lateral associations become possible marks its terminal phase. This is also the moment at which mortality as such emerges for the subject. By way of these dual terminations, at the end of analysis, the work of the analytic dyad gets distributed into the social. The analytic function is diffused into the surround. You start to have the sense that your life is your analysis. You are the analysand of your own life. To end analysis—to be cured—then simply means that the analysis becomes commensurate with the living. As Sergio Benvenuto (2020) says, for Lacan, the end of analysis is “extroverted” (p. 92); cure is nothing but the cure of the introversion of the analytic pair. It is an extension of oneself onto the group. It is a new act of love.

Yes, but how does one inherit, and why does one transmit? Analysis goes on, but you have parted ways with the body of your analyst, the waiting room, and couch. Your parents, beloved mentors, formative tormentors begin to fall. And you can let them rest only to the degree you bear witness to the secret they left addressed to you and its injunction to choose, to conclude. From the time of transference to the time of dissolution and ghosts, the time of the transference of inheritance, as Derrida says in “Geopsychoanalysis: ‘… And the Rest of the World.’”

In the 2002 documentary, Derrida, Avital Ronell tells an anecdote of being with Derrida and his mother the day différance was inducted into a French dictionary. Ronell proposed they celebrate, and Derrida’s mother, mortified, said, “Jackie, did you spell différance with an a?” I like this story. I saw the documentary in theaters, before I had ever read Derrida, and this was the only part I remembered when I came back to it recently, though I had inaccurately remembered that we were with Derrida and his mother when this occurred. The documentary, like Derrida, is effective to the degree it is able to play with this reserve. Something echoes. As much as Derrida insists that one can only establish an inheritance by inscribing oneself within it, few figures were more reticent in relation to inscription. And so I must inscribe myself without demonstration or model, with only that withdrawal that makes inscription ever more exigent, that pressures it and, we may hope, gives it its torque. To improvise, to speak without provision and from this withdrawal, is to appropriate this torque. In the documentary, Derrida says:

And so I believe in improvisation, and I fight for improvisation, but always with the belief that it is impossible. And there where there is improvisation, I am not able to see myself. I am blind to myself. And it’s what I will see — no, I won’t see it. It’s for others to see. The one who is improvised there—no, I won’t ever see him. (Dick & Ziering Kofman, 2002)

We do need a few others, we can’t go without them, to entrust with this I that I can see nothing of: we will go where we will, together. It is borromean, this transference of inheritance: withdrawing revenant, intra-generational cartel, inscription through transmission. No single one is possible without the other two. Tying this knot is the chance that is proper to middle life.

This is the moment of construction, of historical truth, of anamnesis and conclusion, without clemency, that founding act of all fraternal politics. It is incumbent on you and your few others, without tutelary guide, to keep inventing new ways of being-with and doing together. You look into your fellows, and they look back into you, abysally. Will you be made into monsters? Will you be sisters yet? A new act of love: to find-make a new politics of memory and generations.

To live among others is to find oneself in the midst of prohibitions, the ever-present murmur of ‘no,’ the injunction that shapes both psychoanalysis and politics at their core. Prohibition is not merely a limit but the very ground upon which collective life is staged, the art of agreeing, tacitly or otherwise, on what must not be done. Freud’s civilization is a field of necessary discontent, a choreography of renunciations and losses, signatures left in the family and in education, each inscribed and affirmed by the subject who must bear them. Yet psychoanalysis unsettles any easy recourse to the binary of ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ refusing to let affirmation or negation stand as simple markers of knowledge. Freud himself was wary of the subject’s ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ preferring to listen for what resists saying, for the truth that lingers in the unsaid. How, then, are we to think assent, affirmation, the moment of assuming one’s desire, so that it does not collapse into mere obedience or its shadow, transgression? Where, in this field of interdictions, does one receive the permission to practice psychoanalysis, to want to be an analyst, to read and write one’s way into its questions?

Lacan mischievously inverted Dostoyevsky: “If there is a god, then anything is permitted.” The etymology of permission is from the Latin permittere, with per modifying the verb mittere, which means “passing through” or “let go.” Another derivative of mittere is “transmission,” a carrying over, passing, or sending across. Readers of Lacan may hear the “pass,” a procedure through which analysands-in-formation testified to their experience as analysands, in an appeal to be nominated as an analyst of the school. Lacan’s formulation, “the psychoanalyst derives his authorization only from himself” (Lacan, 1995, p. 1), strikes the ears as tautological; “I am who I am.” Perhaps this is why he later adds “and some others,” as the criterion for authorization for both the analyst and the sexed being. Unlike Yahweh, the analyst answers with a name. It is a nomination without guarantee, suspended between a singular declaration and collective recognition. Like a baptism, brit, or aqiqah, it is a naming conferred by witnesses, not a birth certificate. The psychoanalyst is without papers.

To work and live with others is to inhabit the counterpoint of yes and no, to bind and unbind, to organize and to let dissolve, always in the movement between forms that hold and those that slip away. To manage, among others, is to make incalculable decisions to sometimes endure, sometimes give up. But what insists is a name, an affirmation of existence, that is without ground, without assurance or promise, but that is nevertheless recognized. This is what is sometimes called trust.

Only when I cannot see myself, and when I am not hung up on what is seen in me, can I give what I have to give, my particular inheritance, which I find-make by giving it. Often at the moment of speaking it. One can understand this intellectually, yet it can only be found as true through experience with some-others. This is transmission.

First, it takes an analysis. It has then taken work with my some-others to learn to do this together; and then, with them, to learn to do this in the broader world; and only then to grasp, again and again, that this is something of what is happening. Transmission is a process, not an endpoint.

Cure is not eliminating the anxious regression away from this position of giving with no guarantee of receipt. Cure is rather the capacity to bear that regression as part of an arc toward something new, an arc that, by its very nature, cannot be seen in full from above. Nevertheless, at times, a sense of it can be glimpsed—while in it. This, perhaps, is the knowledge, the know-how, that allows one to take up the position of analyst. One learns over time to catch the glimpse and then to trust it.

I can never really know how what I give lands with my others. I also never know when my some-others’ words will spark something in me. But one part of trust, here, is trust that whatever I have given will be taken up in good faith. Even if occasionally what I produce falls apart on landing. With trusted others, you can laugh together about the collapse and move on. (Or better yet, look more closely into the rubble to see whether there is a found object to salvage.) Knowing that such laughter is possible sustains the going-on-being of a creative dialogue. Symptoms, loosened, finally, by a certain sense of laughter, are free to become texture, style, an ingredient of what is loved.

The navel of the dream at the crux of this kind of giving, this transmission, lies precisely in the fact of its blindness: what lands, what is received, necessarily is transformed upon translation. Yet with trust, whatever makes it across the gulf has a good chance of functioning as a gift—something serendipitous, surprising in its value, yet just what was needed. To then be taken up and found-made by someone else, into another inheritance, the nature of which I can have no definitive knowledge. And vice versa. It is an economy of glimpses, in which ledgers and counting to a total sum have no place.

Only when living and analysis have become the same can I, along with my trusted some-others, work out the yes’s and no’s that truly guide the inventive counterpoint of our collaborations, versus the false yes’s and particularly no’s one is constantly having to shed. Until one accepts the asymptotic reality that such shedding—binding and unbinding—is actually living.

I find the mind that I have only when I am collaborating with my some-others. Through responding to what I receive from them. With a response that comes from an unfettered, or at least less “fettered,” position, which I reach by trusting them. Where do you find some others who, by their presence and creative dialogue, give you your own mind? This is a general question of living.

With an ethic, the honoring of the no’s that I take up as my own, and perhaps our own, is not simply the bowing down to, the ingestion of, the staying-within-the-lines-of, a set of prohibitions laid out by the Other. This would be morality. With an ethic, the taking up of particular no’s, honoring limits that one believes in, ultimately allows for powerful, affirming yes’s—an architecture that allows for the first steps into the next I-don’t-know. And the next. And the next. Make-find upon make-find.

Perhaps morality is oedipal, whereas ethics, though not directly a product of lateral collaboration, is rather an effect on each of us of trusting collaboration itself. A position by which further collaboration—that is, love, work, and love-work— is made possible. With all its implications of care in relation to the neighbor. This may be one definition of freedom. Flip it over, and there is the luck, itself a glimpse, that one catches when it comes.

The “small group” is a formation that comes up again and again in the history of psychoanalysis. Its most basic function is to limit the number of subjects below that of the totality of the mass. A small group is indeed always small, discrete, and differentiated: it is capped at around three to nine subjects in the therapeutic groups that Wilfred Bion organized at the Tavistock Clinic after World War II, to six to eight patients in the group therapies that took place at the Neuropsychiatric Day Clinic run by Frantz Fanon in Tunisia at the end of the 1950s, and to four or five analysts in the cartels that Lacan formalized in 1964 as the elementary unit of the École Freudienne de Paris. It is interesting that the small group seems to be reinvented in moments of historical upheaval, institutional crisis, utopian possibility, even revolution. Perhaps the small group’s closest historical cousin is the political cell.

Limiting groups to such a small size prevents each subject from identifying with an institution—a hospital, or school, or profession, or idea, or heck, a political party—as a sublime ideal or imagined community. And that is done to assure that the institution, or its master signifiers, remain a symbolic Third and nothing more, the function of which is to guarantee the fecundity of the group, its permanent openness to contingency, conflict, resolution, and ultimately, separation.

Beyond its eponymous size, the other feature of the small group is its task-delimited nature. It is constituted on the premise of completing a particular objective or set of undertakings, and that alone, without getting disoriented by concerns about the reproduction of its form, the maintenance of its ranks, the distribution of titles among its members, the curation of its identity, or the preservation of its reputation. A small group is rigorously inward-looking, focused on its task, but this makes it anything but insular, since it belabors something it inherits from the Other (whether bequeathed by the last generation or deposited in its account by its own), to which it mixes its own desire. A small group also accedes to deliver something of its in-house labor to the world—not for the judgment or satisfaction of the Other, but out of desire’s necessity of wanting something that does not yet exist to come into being, out of its inner tendency to conduct itself along symbolic lines of transmission, despite the risk of getting garbled in the imaginary. So what sort of task founds a small group? It can be anything, but in any event, it always concerns love and work, that couple that Freud (1930/1961) called the “parents of civilization.”

A psychoanalytic collective must constantly work against itself if it wants to spare the becoming of an institution from the stasis of being institutionalized. “Stasis of being” is, of course, one of Lacan’s definitions of madness. And “becoming” is a good shorthand for desire. Breaking up the mass of all analysands—or analysts, or subjects in general, really—into small groups functions precisely as an antidote to institutionalization, where institutionalization means the dissolution of the singularity of each subject into a permanent group and the replacement of concrete and delimited tasks with permanent and hierarchical identities. In this sense, there is no such thing as individual freedom, nor is institutional affiliation a guarantee for the specific form of freedom that psychoanalysis supports: a freedom which is identical to desire, a desire that psychoanalysis can help make identical to life, and a life of desire that can only exist in that frighteningly rare and ever slimmer margin between the self and the mass, between privacy and politics.

The autonomy of small groups acts, then, as an organic bulwark against the totalitarian fact and fantasy of fusion, as a defense against the fascist institutionalization of “all” subjects into a racial mass, into a homogenous and homogenizing mob in which each sacrifices their singularity—their desire, their freedom—in the name of the unlimited “one” of the nation, a nation whose mad freedom is limited to the suicidal extermination of the racial Other. And so I say: workers of the world, unite into small groups!