Summaries
Conversation with Sergio Benvenuto
A-atheism: what is it? A stammer? Perhaps, but in that case it is of the same kind that seizes some persons (John of the Cross, for example) in the presence of “god”. Or perhaps it is not a stammer at all: it is an attempt to indicate the negation of a negation, but in such a way that the first negation would be neither the dialectical substitute nor the pure and simple invalidation of the second.
Many recent philosophical discussions have been marked by the rather stunning re-launching of the question of realism, triggered by Quentin Meillassoux’s book After finitude (Après la finitude, 2006), and followed by a wider, albeit less homogeneous, movement named ‘speculative realism’. This paper raises the question of whether the conceptual field of Lacanian psychoanalysis is concerned with this debate, and if so how. The central argument scrutinizes the status of the ‘real’ in science, and its implications for psychoanalysis in view of the Lacanian identification of the subject of the unconscious with the subject of (Galilean) science. Taking seriously Lacan’s claim that ‘If I am anything, it is clear that I’m not a nominalist’, the present paper aims at sketching out a psychoanalytic version of realism.
The genesis of this set of three articles is to be found three years in the past, in a Parisian café amidst an enormous gathering of children protesting proposed cuts by the government of François Hollande. Néstor Braunstein had suggested that I meet with Daniel Koren, a close colleague of his, while I was visiting the French capital. Our meeting marked the beginning of a fruitful exchange that has resulted in the following conversation, undertaken in three parts.
[1] During his seminar of 9th January 1997 Charles Melman made the following remark: The 21st Century will be Lacanian or it will be barbarian. What people call barbarian can be given a very strict, very rigorous definition. It is not simply a metaphor for vaguely designating the foreigner or the Barbaros, the person who could only say bar-bar-bar! Barbarism deserves a rigorous defini…
The title I propose for this article, pastiche of two prestigious previous ones and answers Jean-Pierre Lebrun’s article title (“The 21st Century Will Be Lacanian Or It Will Be Barbarian”) with an anti-sentence, as he, in turn, takes on the pastiche by Charles Melman from an apocryphal sentence by Malraux. The 21st Century will be Lacanian or it will be barbarian. What people call barbarian can be given a very strict, very rigorous definition. It is not simply a metaphor for vaguely designating the foreigner or the Barbaros, the person who could only say bar-bar-bar! Barbarism deserves a rigorous definition and I am happy to propose it to you. It consists in a social relation organized by a power that is no longer symbolic but real. From the moment that established power is supported, takes as reference its own force and nothing else, and does not try to defend or to protect anything other than its existence as power, well then we are barbarian. What is proper to democracy, is that the real power, the real forces by which it is supported, the police, the army, this real power is at the service of an authority that has a purely symbolic reference. Barbarism, for its part, is outside discourse, it is not based on a discourse, it is based only on the number of agents that are at its service.
Engaging the texts of J.P. Lebrun and Daniel Koren published here, the author argues that the temporal sequencing of Lacan’s discourses in the U.S., particularly California, differs from that of Europe, with important implications for the psychoanalytic clinic and the formation of subjectivity. The 21st Century will be Lacanian or it will be barbarian. What people call barbarian can be given a very strict, very rigorous definition. It is not simply a metaphor for vaguely designating the foreigner or the Barbaros, the person who could only say bar-bar-bar! Barbarism deserves a rigorous definition and I am happy to propose it to you. It consists in a social relation organized by a power that is no longer symbolic but real. From the moment that established power is supported, takes as reference its own force and nothing else, and does not try to defend or to protect anything other than its existence as power, well then we are barbarian. What is proper to democracy, is that the real power, the real forces by which it is supported, the police, the army, this real power is at the service of an authority that has a purely symbolic reference. Barbarism, for its part, is outside discourse, it is not based on a discourse, it is based only on the number of agents that are at its service.
