On the Form of Naming (2018)

On the Form of Naming (2018)

Carnets de l’École de Psychanalyse Sigmund Freud, n°111, 2018, p. 47-60.

BEFORE CORRECTION FOR THE CARNETS

 

To experience the Pass within the school’s framework is to encounter a living procedure.

Undergoing the Pass is not an end in itself. Presenting oneself to it holds the essential stake; emerging from it reserves surprises. Everyone engages in it at their own risk.

The Pass in the cure is no small matter, but it is supported by transference. The Pass within the school’s framework tests the school bond, that unparalleled echo of transference in the collective. To put it into play involves the stake of inscription, whether existing or future.

At the entry and exit of this procedure, I encountered, within our framework, “problems”; shortly after the random selection of the passeurs and at the conclusion of the cartel’s work. Today, I will focus on the end of the procedure, on the announcement made to the passer, betting that the “problems” encountered are authentic productions of what the Pass has been attempting since 1967 not to resolve, nor even always to clarify, but to keep uncovered, so that what there is to make known about the analyst’s irreducible step may still appear.

This text is the most difficult I have had to write to date. Yet, I have filled pages with it, I have offered it to be read and heard. Here, it is a different matter. There are formulations in this presentation that remain indelicate, despite my efforts to phrase them as best as possible; provided that this warning frames them. My purpose is not to question the work of the College; I have made my feelings known to them about what happened by mail. I do not wish to further incriminate the work of the cartel, which did what it could, nor the particular person who was tasked by the cartel with giving me the result of its work. I specify this, on the one hand, because I am by no means addressing the members of the College, but the general structure of our framework, which is the College for the School, as well as the Pass cartel as an instance and not a particular Pass cartel. And on the other hand, because after a rather long reflection, I chose to retain the signifiers that constituted this announcement, in order to base my elaboration on them. For what happened overwhelmed us, the spokesperson of the cartel and myself, quite harshly, without it being entirely possible, ultimately, to define who this “we” encompasses. I wager that this “we” embraces a bit of the school; a bit of the school and beyond it.

At the College, I asked to be able to speak, but it could not grant my request within my timeframe, referring me to the “time to understand,” without accepting or refusing my request, as if the College could know something about the passer’s time or even claim to respond to it. I therefore speak today, on the occasion of this day, both to respond to the theme of these 50 years of the Pass, and because it is simply possible to speak here, without restraint or “pseudo-analytic” appreciation of the desire that motivates this speech, a possible and necessary speech.

In doing so, I question the Pass framework, distinctly from the procedure, as well as the Pass cartel as an instance, unlike the College, which I would like to suggest, in passing, should be preserved from taking itself too much for an instance (whose etymology refers to the notion of demand) and be left alone as a structure of the framework (whose etymology refers to the notion of assembling) — something that our recent modifications in its constitution may no longer sufficiently offer it on the part of the school.

Everything I say is directed towards a hope for work, that shared by analysts grappling with the real, whose endeavor is often rendered unnecessarily arduous by the impossible nature of the analytic group, with which something must be done. And since humanity has not necessarily made progress other than technical, and from non-being no philosophy, I say what compels me. I am sure that the following proposals will find an echo.

I will examine different points: the evolution of the matter-life-spirit triptych, the announcement made to the passer, naming and its aporias, three of my personal lucubrations on the Pass that I began to invent despite myself, three questions, and a small current event.

Without transition — a brief detour

At the invitation of Pierre Boulez, in 1978, Gilles Deleuze, accompanied notably by Barthes and Foucault, spoke on musical time. On this occasion, he reflected on the unpulsed time of contemporary music, on time a priori freed from classical measures, from pulsation and trajectories expected by conventions, and the formatting of sound when it is conceptualized notably by modern art instead of being thought musically. To do this, he dealt with the evolution of the relationship of the matter-life-spirit hierarchy and its upheaval since the beginning of the 20th century.

I quote him: “It may be [on the contrary] that matter is more complex than life, and that life is a simplification of matter […] In philosophy too, we have abandoned the traditional coupling between a thinkable undifferentiated matter, and forms of thought of the type categories or grand concepts. We try to work with very elaborate thought materials, to make forces thinkable that are not thinkable by themselves.”

I retain the implicit proposition to consider a major change, in the history of thought, between what was conceived under the prism of form informing matter, of spiritual form welcoming an informable matter capable then of providing information about life and, on what Deleuze surreptitiously sketches here, not a paradigm shift, but rather a reversal, thanks to which form is welcomed (can we say treated?) by the matter that informs it and shapes life.

This lecture suggested several ideas to me. The first is a rapprochement between the inseparable alternative of a Psychoanalysis perspective operating a treatment of the real by the symbolic, and that which can be formulated by the treatment of the symbolic from the real. This conception, both double and contradictory without being absolutely contrary, could be likened to a psychoanalytic conception that I call a priori form against, very much against, that of form to come.

Deleuze’s propositions invoking this evolution, determined by the entry into the 20th century and its unprecedented mutations, also made me aware of the advent of Psychoanalysis during the same period, when the forces of the unconscious, not thinkable by themselves, invited the elaboration of complex materials, without a priori form, to work not on the differentiation of these unthinkable forces, but on their elaboration.

This is, I believe, the path taken by Freud, not succumbing to the sole objective of categorization or conceptualization, which always flattens experience, preferring, against all odds, the nuances of a dynamic-topical-economic elaboration.

Dream — I did not expect my Pass experience to unfold as it ultimately did. Yet, I had a literal dream four days before receiving the announcement from the cartel. In this dream, the Pass cartel is in a working session. Its members, around a table, are arguing over the construction of a kind of sculpture, erected high, with barely recognizable contours. The debate is lively about the nature of the construction to be realized, between the proponents of a priori form and the defenders of form to come. A priori form and form to come as two formulas of two tendencies, two knowledges extracted from distinct, opposed, completely contradictory analytic experiences. The dream ends on this unfinished, but quite clearly problematized dispute. Upon waking, I told myself that the cartel’s response would be not only “negative,” but also “problematic.”

The Announcement — The cartel’s announcement was indeed both “negative” and “problematic.” The announcement made to me, and whose signifiers I take up for our purpose, was thus constituted: “Your naming was not unanimous”… I told myself that the cartel must have agreed on this way of giving its answer, and that the “explanations,” which had been announced to me on the phone, were undoubtedly necessary, in the sense that they would signify the answer to be associated with this announcement. At that moment, I remained stunned and speechless.

From the “explanations,” I hoped to be able to clarify whether it was a denial — a dubious refusal — or something else. I heard this: “Not everyone could agree to accept your naming”; “certain person(s) could not accept your naming”; “You did not achieve unanimity”; “Naming, no matter what is often said to the contrary, is still also a title.”

A dubious refusal then, concerning the analytic, a denial accompanied by a political confession concerning the person and thus the institution, the school. A denial, but who/what would be the fetish? Personally, it would be too much honor and too much of a title for me to embody this phallic representation: I confess that it is not really my style. I rather think that naming is the fetish, let’s even specify that it is the name of A.E., and even the letters “A,” “E,” which are both elevated by appearing and simultaneously brought down. If my assessment of the said denial is correct in finding it a bit perverse. I take, not as proof, but as signs, the questions not truly addressed around the modifications of the formulations of the name of A.E., of what it covers. As for the political confession, an imaginary symptom, on naming as a title, I will return to it later.

Aporias — Faced with this, rather than slamming the school’s door, there was no other choice but to rely on the aporias of the Pass, within the school, regarding naming, regarding the name of A.E. The naming that the experience of Psychoanalysis had, I thought, sufficiently freed from its shadows since 1967 and 1994, through the distancing of meaning and the fundamental disagreement with the mirage of institutional coherence on the part of analysts and non-analysts engaged in practice and shaped by this experience.

This was without counting that what I counted on, in the school, was not necessarily the case for others, not all, that I had neither to assume nor fear it, trust is not an issue in the Pass.

The refusal of the impossible of the name with which one must risk oneself in this matter can be lost in the mirages of the unnameable, when what is impossible is confused or covers the impossible that it is not. Unnameable that the cartel’s voice also recommended I read that day, under Beckett’s pen.

It was, for me, the height of absurdity, nonetheless, that the analytic experience could go astray to the point of believing that anything could remain unnameable, when from the impossible to say this experience of Psychoanalysis has, in my eyes, taken the path of a treatment of the symbolic from the real, the path of welcoming unthinkable matter that modifies form to inform life, the path opened by Lacan’s School identifying in cures, in the analyst’s step, this amnesia carrying oblivion that the procedure offers to highlight for the school, for the analytic community and not for the analyst or the passer.

What does the Pass instituted by Lacan in his School allow, for 50 years, not to let pass from this confusion by permissiveness, “molecular” Deleuze would say, between the impossible and what is impossible, a confusion made possible by the repeated procrastination of analysts before the necessity of a treatment of the known and the thinkable by the future of a thought of the impossible? Procrastination largely encouraged, it seems to me, by the imaginary fascination of a beyond language insufficiently subjected to the question of the test of the real. In other words, does the Pass still allow us, in 2017, not to soften on the form where our pretensions succumb, and to gather at each of its manifestations the information that matter offers us to welcome about life? In still other words, what does what we do with the Pass in 2017 reveal to us about our pretensions regarding form? What do we welcome from the matter that presents itself to the Pass? What do we dare to think about life from the Pass informed by this matter that informs us?

Naming — Instead of a cartel, a naming was in question, was said to lack unanimity. Something of the order of an appreciation of I-don’t-know-what became an obstacle to the point of making it impossible, unacceptable, without agreement, manifestly contrary to prior imaginary expectations about the title, and thus about what a naming is and is not. A naming simultaneously called “and at the same time” — according to the current political expression of the moment — negativized, denied, Macronized.

There are three kinds of namings: naming of the real, to which, it seems to me, a large part of the EpSF’s work on the Pass is attached; naming of the symbolic — against which a part of the restructuring of our framework positioned itself when La Lettre Lacanienne left it — and; I had not considered it before, naming of the imaginary, whose question of form may be signaling its return, since this is already the impasse denounced by the IPA in 1967, and on which Lacan based his re-appropriation of the IPA’s non-analyst signifier to carry it further, further than what Valabrega made of it in his letter of November 1967. An imaginary naming which, it must be said, remains best placed to welcome the reappearance of knowledge refused by a denial.

One of the RSI sessions is quite clear on imaginary naming. I refer to Brigitte Lemerer’s text, which greatly helped me on this point. Retaining her conclusion, which I paraphrase: if the cure offers anything, it is indeed to go beyond the symptom alone as an analytic outcome that the analyst in the mirror would be content to be, to prefer form beyond the image where the denial of the real becomes a support for the recognition of the step taken. Provided, however, that the cure has been carried far enough.

On the Pass Cartel — I had not imagined, before, that a Pass cartel could conclude its work with an equivalent of a vote. A vote as a conclusion, with a majority or unanimity, regarding analytic work, seems suspicious to me. I thought I had only encountered this with my thesis committee at the University, shortly before that institution of knowledge finally named me by awarding me the title of maître de conférences after another vote, that of a competition — a competition where, of course, institutional politics had slipped its ballot into the urn. Naming of a discourse, the academic one, which I eventually shed by resigning to save my skin, noting despite myself the perfect irreconcilability — not incompatibility — of psychoanalytic discourse with academic discourse.

Lucubration No. 1 — I suppose that when a naming occurs, when it emerges from the signifiers of the cartel expelling the knowledge that comes to it from the real cause of the testimony, that through the throats of the cartellists new knowledges about Psychoanalysis force their voice to suddenly have to say them to get rid of them and at the same time perform an act of naming, it is true that when this happens, one must be shaken. But why, or what then would not hold enough for the members of the cartel to sustain the experience of the cartel? For I suppose that a conclusion by denial possibly translates a transgression, an acting out for escape. Why would the analytic sometimes fail a cartel by letting it fall back on the fictions of groups where voting, where being in common under the guise of phantom unanimity, would have to come to the rescue of cartellists without deviation? Would the analytic, this remainder of what the unfathomable dependence of transference has been able to allow to constitute itself, have to be refused as knowledge, where the person of the analyst would claim the self-determination of their act reflected on themselves to dress it in a new representation in a place where nothing can hold?

Lucubration No. 2 — It seems to me, in this vein, that a Pass cartel works less on interpretation than on construction. The advent of this construction in the place that the cartel has become, that it can recognize itself to be, by the presence of the constructed, frees it from all necessities of all readings of the matter that has come to it, since by attesting to this construction it names. We do not expect the cartel to make an inventory of the materials of the passer’s analysis, or else that would ultimately mean that the Pass has something to do with the cure, and in a strange way.

Lucubration No. 3 — A Pass cartel is not a form from which information about the matter that the passeurs bring to it is expected; it can only appreciate the matter it becomes. The sculpture has no a priori form, nor a posteriori. The name of A.E. is always original, unprecedented every time it is uttered, and its originality lies less in the invention of a passer than in the perpetual reinvention of the school to which the passer responds. The naming, the sculpture, that can be produced is not a form responding to the appreciated matter. Naming seems to me much better thought of as shifted; it is the echo of a sound without noise, a crackle of the voice passed to the cartel from the passer by the passeurs. This silent voice event is detectable at the moment of feedback produced in the real place that the cartel is for a time. It can only appreciate this acoustic feedback from receiver to emitter, through its work of retrospeculative and non-speculative construction, on the matter of the heard Pass. This is how the school’s call finds some resonance in passers-by coming towards it, some of whom it can allow to bear a bit of its name.

I cannot imagine that a Pass cartel could engage in the impasse of the unnameable, by avoiding confronting the impossible, unless it were to assert a conception of the Pass in this School that is, in my eyes, unprecedented, and a mistaken reading, it seems to me, of the 1967 proposition. I do not imagine it, and my experiences as a passeur, my experience as a member of the school, as an analyst, as a passer, all refuse it. For who/what would be unnameable? We would be coasting, here, in meanders where the imaginary disguises itself, transforms itself into a symbolic that we recognize as falsified, when the acronym is taken for the symbol. A.E. is a symbol, it is not an acronym, and we still have to write its theory, to make known what this restricted symbolic era that it is realizes of the real. A.E. is not an acronym, but its fascinating little letters, reified in place of the name, undoubtedly play us strange tricks, without our knowledge.

The real of naming can lead to a denial, making the naming that appeared, for example in a cartel, the object of a trade with its imaginary twin, the illusion of impossible naming. To invoke the unnameable and reify impossible naming, within the setting of denial, to avoid the impossible of naming would be a rather clear turning point, an acting out, opposed to the work accomplished over the last twenty-four years at the EpSF on the Pass.

Question 1 — Where are we, after more than a century of experience, with what would return from the spiritual form that would have to inform matter, or do we continue to join the subjectivity of our era, to support a contemporary thought, definitively turned towards a different horizon than that which entrusted forms with a spirit, preferring an absence of a priori form? This horizon, in more ways than one, seems to me to correspond to Lacan’s offer when he took the step of this proposition in October 1967.

Question 2 — Does naming designate the movement of knowledge caused by the real that comes to the cartel, pushed to say it and to confirm the naming as a production of this knowledge without further appreciation? In other words, is naming this surge of voice that takes the cartel as the place for the enunciation of an utterance entrusted by the passer to the passeurs? Or would naming have to become the conclusion of an appreciation of the effects produced by the account of a testimony on which each member of the cartel would have to pronounce? Effects mistakenly taken for knowledge. Which, in my opinion, would bring us back to the impasses of the IPA forcing Lacan to formalize this matter, and would also shift the Pass with the real as horizon towards the resonances of subjectivities — even if analyzed — as a detector of a form that is entirely imaginary, to which everyone is, after all, free to entrust the meaning they assume it to have, but whose persistence or return in the Pass are symptomatic.

Question 3 — Is naming still this symbolic expression of the imaginary form constituted by the cartel as a place for the real, as the work of the EpSF testifies between 1994 and 2000? Or is naming, finally, defined by its singular and collective effects, as they have been so widely commented on between 2000 and 2012, from which everyone can read how they may have encouraged the appreciation of naming in light of the subjective cause, by which the act was to be so considered, rather than as a cause of the collective. Subjective productions illustrated by all these bodily and reality effects taken for proofs or consistencies of the edge of a hole of which nothing says, a priori, whether it is true or false. A hole in reality is first only a hole in the imaginary; it does not provide access to the real, nor even to the form that may come from it. Worse, the prior, a priori, existence of this hole, structurally speaking, prevents any possible manifestation of a real whose future form could take us a little further than this point of contemplation where we benignly perceive ourselves. That the imaginary, at the R-I splice, can extend the real by the form it brings forth is one thing, a movement identifiable as an analytic movement. This does not make the imaginary the automatic path for identifying the real. The non-specular imaginary is not an absence of image, real or virtual. It is not enough not to perceive oneself to escape the mirage of oneself. On the other side of the mirror, even for Alice, is a test not of passage, but of derealization; this can signal the possibility of an opening to the real, it does not signal the opening to the real. Thus, naming as a form is not an event of reality observed on a body or in the stutters of space-time, or else it is an illusion, an illusion that institutions, including a school of Psychoanalysis, are fond of. We could draw many lessons, on this subject, from recent encounters with gravitational waves, which are not seen and do not perform in reality without escaping their detection in the dark.

Naming and the School’s Current Events — The event of belief in the title of A.E., to which I alluded, is not only a lack of experience that disregards the achievements of the Pass over 50 years; it is also the expression of a current failure in our theorizations of the Pass. A failure of principle, when naming continues to be considered, or believed, to be a complementary act to the Pass itself, or worse, to analysis. History has, however, responded to this: what has not been done by the quantity of A.E.s named by their naming simply by leaving the experience? Furthermore, do we not find in our work a majority of “what does it mean to be named in the school” and far fewer “what do the named do for the school”? Does this not signal a shift from a school name to a member title, which would account for the subjective dimension of naming to the detriment of its analytic scope for the school? This is supported by another shift, that of the school’s naming in favor of a naming/labeling of a member by the small letters, albeit capitalized, which perhaps supplant the name.

This makes me think of the process we call radicalization. I consider radicalization to be this attempt to reduce the signifier to its radical when the latter is expected to perform the phallus that is failing. If certain individuals find the possibility of engaging in the presentification, in flesh and blood, of the phallic signifier, in recent terrorist acts, it is indeed because we have recently experienced a modification of the performative signifier relationship, formerly distinguished by what of the subject of the statement was not confused with that of the enunciation. The radical, formerly kept secret, or in the shadows, is now in a position to occupy the function of the performative, reifying the I’s pushed to their own expression beyond phallic failure, which the signifying agitations in their places indirectly signal. Agitations all arranged around the language droned under the weight of sermons, legalized by a few inscriptions of a few letters traced in the sand that an East wind chases and sanctifies. Leaving no room for all the possibilities of doing something with what we can do without. We will have to, based on these terrible current events, examine our somewhat hasty habit of qualifying the Pass as a performance, its “success,” where this pseudo-edifying theory finds its justification, according to which, when a non-naming occurs, it would mean that “it didn’t pass.” It always passes; the question remains what, that is different, it indicates whether or not knowledge will impose itself on everyone’s awareness, whether or not there is a naming or a non-naming. Signifier and performative no longer maintain the same relationships today as in the past.

What to think of the recent disappearance of the indefinite article “une” (a/an), before the term “nomination” (naming), in the announcements of namings disseminated by the School — the disappearance of the indefinite article “d’” (of) before AE was already enshrined in previous announcements? The device’s regulations, modified in 2015, still retain the mention “une nomination d’AE” (a naming of AE) (without the “.”) and not “given rise to naming AE” as we recently received.

Without the possibility of counting the namings, one by one, to what infinite/undefined naming are we exposing ourselves, with the risk of imaginarily constituting a nebula soon charged with adding to the myth an alter function to the Pass in this school? Would this Naming with a capital N not risk being taken for an ideational god to whom thanks are due when it rises above ordinary signifying articulation, similar to holy scriptures? This could be nourished by an imaginary thought of naming, a unanimous nominal totality as simplistic as fascism. The School needs A.E.s, not the analyst; the analyst needs the School, the difference is not slight. This is because the name of A.E., particularly in its historical version of A.E.-Analyst of the School, is a School name and not an analyst’s name, and even less that of a member.

The small letters, though capitalized, perhaps supplant the name. Naming and lettering are not equivalent. We will have to return to this, because the tightening to letters, nothing but letters, that we are experiencing is not without suggesting an attempt to represent the instance of the letter in the unconscious, a form of scalp of the unconscious that the A.E. would have to figure.

Conclusion — The questions that the Pass posed, or revealed, in 1967 are intact. The effects of entrusting the non-analyst with the control of the act are still as vivid and divisive. This is not a failure — in the common sense — there is nothing to reduce, but everything to gather where it falls, just behind the fall of the subject and its destitution echoing each other — of the analysand, of the analyst.

Failure is the name of this step on which the analyst bases himself when he fails to transmit — because only perpetuation remains for him — when he lets go of what he cannot, what cannot be preserved, neither by the analysand passing to the psychoanalyst, nor by the present analyst — which does not mean that they do not have to find it again, to pick it up from where the weight of the void they support themselves with would dilute in favor of a very dubious assurance, refusing the non-analyst that they are, one after the other, and forever without resemblance. Failure is a naming by Lacan, of this step that had questioned him to the point of proposing the Pass. Whether he liked it or not, he could not help but name what had been revealed to him, and to others, in his experience of the Pass. The signifier that came out is “failure,” it is very good. Etymologically, “échec” (failure) means booty, and it comes to us from Old High German schâh (“sack”) which, according to literature, prevents connecting this word “échec” to “échoir” (to fall due). I therefore connect it to “choir” (to fall), because there is no longer, in fact, a subject capable of claiming that it comes back to him; only the analyst remains on whom it falls. Of the analyst that the Pass is not able to attest, neither his presence nor his training, which constitutes the basis of his failure on the cartel side. Let us note in passing that from this same root, at least three series of meanings have appeared, those related to “choir” (to fall), “échoir” (to fall due), and “déchoir” (to fall from grace), to which we owe the fall, the deadline, and the forfeiture.

All this is said, and this will be the final word, in a famous verse by Angelus Silesius, to whom reference has been made many times this year: The rose is without why. I add: the analyst shares the same struggle.

Vincent Bourseul

Paris, November 2017.

Additional Note

To the questions and comments that followed my presentation in November, I was able to formulate the following addition:

Can the pass mechanism protect us from what the procedure exposes us to? This is at stake in all the torments, accidents, and difficulties encountered since the beginning of this experience. After several attempts to think about this, I always return to Why War?, between Einstein and Freud. Death and aggression remain, through the drive activity that bears witness to them, inexhaustible sources of reduction of our freedoms. At our individual or collective initiative, brought back as we are to the edge of the real by the experience of the pass, led to the impossible that does not cease not to be written, each one can be traversed by their own survival which often engages the other in the opposite direction. And we separate, temporarily, on this interval of space and time where the collective bears the mark of being only the subject of the individual. Summoned to the point of their survival, the subject can prioritize their own, or their individual sacrifice, over the collective. Perhaps we could see in this the indication of a collective regression, forged on the individual ones that cures allow, toward that point where the drive surreptitiously detaches from the organic—sometimes discernible in movements of subjective destitution—the latter asserting its demand to persist—in life or death—without mental mediation, and even less so of right. There, the intimacy of experience forged by ethics, between the pass and the camps, imposes itself. In The Birch-Tree Meadow, Marceline Loridan-Ivens lends to her main character this question to the girls of Birkenau: were the worst among us, the hardest, the ones who survived at the expense of the others?

Vincent Bourseul

March 21, 2018