To two Jacques, who recently left us. Jacques Le Brun, of generous thought, and Jacques Leibowitch, who was not afraid to speak to viruses.

At break of day, the clearest thoughts seem distant, perhaps too much so. Hidden behind the horizon line, they initially escape sight, remaining inaudible upon waking. A fierce desire to reduce the distance between them stings the moment, for this intense return to reality is frightening, caught between residual anxieties of the night and the succession of bad news—their inexorable inflation, their duration. Waking up is not a good moment these days. At break of day, there are, escaped from the night, the memories of past catastrophes, those where humans have already encountered the horror of their condition, about which they have a thousand things to think in terms of causes, effects, and consequences. These black spots serve for some as thoughts, or even as arguments for reflections and debates. A continuous flow. Yet, there is nothing to be expected from this crude use of History which, moreover, does not define the contours of what we are living in the present. The past illuminates the future, so they say, but it is only in the moment that it is encountered, even if dated. From this, the analytical experience can share a few discoveries with others, including this one: that time results from space experienced bodily; we have not finished extracting knowledge from that result, especially in these delicate days. What we are currently experiencing is unprecedented in many respects; unheard of too, since we still have to say it, write it, think it, and also let ourselves be thought by what is happening to us. This epidemic, like all those that preceded it, forces us to change our point of view, displaces us. Therein lies the opening missing from somber mornings, the very one that serves, in ordinary times, as a malevolent lair from which only horror seems able to emerge, seen from here. The HIV/AIDS epidemic taught us this, although we have not yet really begun to write its history and draw from it knowledge to be experienced: at the closest point to what seems to constitute total horror, the path of a thought of experience is discovered, capable of differing from the fields of comprehension, criticism, or speculation. Other terrifying times in History have also confronted us with this knowledge.

Letting ourselves be thought by what happens to us, by what happens without presaging what there would be to think of it, as experts may be invited to do in the media, rightly or wrongly, constitutes a practicable path here, perhaps not so far from our habits or our lived experiences. Opening ourselves to thoughts connects us with more truth to the world, can modify the sudden halt we are suffering today, when our words and our imaginaries are pushed to the limits of their effectiveness, frozen by traumatic suspense. From what we cannot foresee, we construct ideas to meet the need to grasp what is happening. Those that pass are thoughts first, which we adopt and transform into ideas. For thoughts are not decided; what we do with them is, to feed the ideologies or reflections that compromise them. Our will to know is not respectful of thoughts when it aims for an effect, whether of comprehension, reassurance, or problem-solving. A situation such as this brings us back to the crossroads where reflection and thought are distinguished, and perhaps a little further, philosophizing and psychoanalyzing. Not to oppose them, but rather to return them to the articulations that distinguish them, beyond the transversal perspective of the entanglement of the biological and the political, to reclaim the drive originality of libidinal motions without structural or compassionate regard for already reflected models.

What do we know at this hour? 1 – That known models can be found wanting, while the system itself, let us say its structure, is not modified, or is already safeguarded. 2

What do we know at this hour? 1 – That the financial survival (which is not the economy) of said system, decided without question, will take the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings dying from Covid-19. Thus, what we have garnered, lived, and what we have retained from it perhaps deserves, this time, not to be invested or engaged too quickly in the gesticulation aimed at resolving positions, opinions, and analyses developed too hastily—precocious jaculations. The slow approach to the hole through which reality leaks motivates us to delay; going too fast would deprive us of the vertigo and the change of perspective. So yes, we are nauseous; big deal! We are certainly not going to seek relief from so little.

But not all the mornings of this world are all the mornings of the world. What did we know, shortly before these current events, of which the experience of psychoanalysis has at most assured us, or at least initiated us? Principally, that the real treats the symbolic (and not the reverse), although it is nevertheless necessary to think this real, and to employ it as a signifier. As recent proof, it will soon be necessary, or let us say less dramatically, advisable to be “seropositive” to circulate while benefiting from one’s “immunity.” A word of advice: tell that to a good friend who is HIV-positive and you will hear them promise you some pretty bad trips!

Perhaps carried out on a large scale, this signifying and subjecting experience of a new kind will allow for a necessary revision of our theoretical explorations: the non-sexual relationship and its exceptions. For obviously, in the event of contamination, with or without genital exchange, there is a sexual relationship, a sexual relationship is written – and, of course, without recognizable orientation, since this time it is the virus that takes the biological place of the representatives of the object a.

A virus can be a version of the object a by permutation of the cause’s destiny. From the AIDS epidemic we had learned this, forty years ago already, but it is only now that the thing can be formulated, with this other virus, this virus other. Contamination via sexual exchanges can produce a relationship between those sexes involved in the exchange, but this can also occur without sexual exchange – in the genital sense – since the equivalence of bodies, in giving or receiving the virus, is decided and finds its guarantee in the real.

Sexuality is not sex. It is not defined by psychoanalysis, which has not defined sex either. The sexual, which we readily call the Freudian sexual, in reference to psychosexuality, is not summarized by sex or sexuality, but reports on the real of sex, another notion. If philosophy can work in depth on what can be articulated here from the entries sexuality or sex, or even the sexual, as Freud identified it and philosophy put it to work in its exercise, it cannot account for articulations other than diachronic ones that the experience of psychoanalysis – in situation – exposes regarding the real of sex as the symbolic, imaginary, and real registers (or dimensions) shape for our understanding. Thus can be understood what separates the Cartesian cogito, I think, therefore I am, from I am thought, therefore – as I perceive the angle of psychoanalysis, according to my experience – where truths and knowledge are indexed to the unconscious admitted not as a concept but as an effect of language in motion that can only be reflected from within language itself, without exteriority to the objects that vectorize it, unlike philosophy which does not exclude being also a hermeneutics, rightly so, while psychoanalysis always extracts itself from metaphysics.

In the middle of the day, hoped for since morning to separate the passing time, ideas descend toward the hunger that the stomach harbors. From the ideational overflow, this greedy hollow provides the natural opportunity to satisfy a need and changes the paradigm for a few moments: eating, this time, to fill within what is no longer already filled by the needs of the outside (though shaky now), changing form and responding to the event. Rid of the hollow, satiated, one must then digest. And the ideas return; eating is not enough.

A failed nap later, precisely due to digestion, is the opportunity to notice the books in the library, numerous, arranged for years against one another. What do they contain now? Are they still full of the available knowledge likely to aid reflection? Have some of them not fallen from their shelf with the epidemic fact, emptied of their substance, rendered obsolete by the planetary viral event? What can be hoped from them today, tomorrow? What to write and what to read now?

Later, attempting to think beyond oneself, with another. And questioning the limits of the same in question. Not localizing it, letting it go, and remembering that this same is taken from the other, from others, after an encounter. Preserving the self and attempting to locate it in this modified space. Then, questioning Friendship.

What can be expected from discussions with friends and those around us these days, that is not a further demonstration of the impossible dialogue between speaking beings? What can be expected if not a series of opinion adjustments, all useless to the cause, all serving the balance of the mouth (nothing else) from which they are expelled? It is delicate to apprehend during a crisis the state of perpetual crisis that we know by essence. Whether approached through identity, being, or substance changes nothing in this case; beyond the imaginary decor of destinies as thought by each individual, the generic appointment remains the same: we will find ourselves at the sand pile, sometimes by way of Rungis. And it is indeed its specter that illuminates the night, thickening the air with droplets of anxiety infested with the questions of others: the goal, beyond the object.

Then the telephone rings; it is time for the sessions. The telephone is not a telephone; let us distinguish the invention of the telephone and the telephone handset, which we must use to telephone a call or a word. And already it appears that we should separate what a telephoned call is, given or received, from a telephoned word, given or received distinctly from the fact that receiving or giving a phone call is not always calling someone or receiving that call from the other, but differently welcoming their word, for example. A call is a word; the reciprocal does not hold. Let us add to this that it takes at least two telephone handsets to telephone, whether or not there is an answer, whether it is spoken live or automated on an answering machine. Is the telephone therefore an invention, a tool, or rather a space?

Even if it is clear that videoconferencing risks making the body pass for something seen, and that a good part of the analytical failure of the device depends on this, nothing says that it prevents it, nor how much or how, even if it is clear that of these bodies that count we have more than usual to say from now on. And the analysands in concert with the analysts, no doubt. All in the same boat. Deprived of bodily presence, the earthly anchor of the speaking being, the life of the Planet seems quite agitated for a single individual word. Language is called to the rescue, and the body that made it too, therefore. The body makes language, the word makes the body: this matter holds; neither globalization nor cybernetics have reached it, here is a path to explore.

Without the image, the device seems to better correspond to our expectations, although exhausting in concentration, as everyone has noticed. More interestingly, it is to free speech and no longer only associated speech (through free association) that we must give a place. And to question anew small talk, conversation… But to hold court, in the boudoir, in the car, in the room where usually nothing is so much addressed to the outside, with a headset, or perhaps the speakerphone? How is the analysand’s voice given to be heard through this telephone? Here (in my office), I have tended to take advantage of the free space of the couch, more spacious than my armchair, with the speakerphone on. The cat did not see it that way. The couch is for visitors, not for the human-papa. So she bites me if I squat on the couch too much and scurries off to sit in my armchair, where, she has clearly understood, someone, and more precisely something, must be present, whatever the cost! The cessation of our guests’ passage every day is something she misses: fewer presences, fewer caresses. This little cat, recently arrived, is a relentless pursuer of the unconscious. And bitten, I am thus once again by her animal vigilance. Personally, if I had to grasp what makes sense, I would have to discourse on the name I bestowed upon her: Circe, the first nymph of mythology.

The telephone therefore remains an invention to be thought of in a new light. Historically, the idea of the telephone was developed in 1854 by a certain Charles Bourseul, author of a conceptual memoir, An Apparatus for Conversing at a Distance, before the thing was officially invented by Graham Bell in 1876 (but also in 1857 by Antonio Meucci who realized what Bourseul dropped a few years earlier), where telephone designates the transmission of speech by electricity by means of metal disks and a current magnetizing and demagnetizing the wire of its transmission to play the vibratory waves of the voice from one device to another. The “imaginary telephone of C. Bourseul” thus ended up finding other developments through the care of a few others, and here we are a few developments later, with smartphones: which are undoubtedly no longer telephones?

Let us pause a moment on this: an apparatus for conversing at a distance. Conversation is not an analysis session, but it suits very well what the telephone allows. And more, the telephone invites conversation. How many patients have been, unexpectedly, addressed with an accidental informal “tu” since the beginning of the confinement by the analyst speaking with this device?

The eroticism of the session is disrupted, the field of the o/Other is too, but just as much is the technique supporting the possibility of the session. Thus we are touched in terms of the dimensions we know: symbolic, real, imaginary. It remains to describe what unknotting the session undergoes that would be compensated or assumed at such and such a point of the ordinary knotting. The telephone seems, at first glance, to interpose itself, but is this really the most effective effect of its current use? Is it substitution, compensation, permutation, displacement? Is it really an additional element such that it can interpose itself? Not sure at all that it is an additional element. Supplementary perhaps, and that remains to be demonstrated, like a temporary recruit to reinforce “the regular forces,” as our dictionaries may define the term by situating it in times of “war.”

But today’s telephones are more than telephones, and perhaps are no longer such. We say smartphone, mobile phone, terminal… Voice, image, and personal data are in the device and can be transmitted instantaneously to another telephone device, but also to any connected device, all terminals connected to the web of the Internet. We are very far from the mere transmission of speech by electricity; we can even say that the current situation has nothing to do with that of the telecommunications of the past. Thus, the sessions conducted, made, led today are improperly qualified as “sessions by/on the telephone,” the same for the use of the image transmitted live via cameras and screens, except to emphasize that the signifier telephone has become different from itself: then a fertile path opens for analysts… Noting this recent habit in common formulations: “Good, then we will speak again Monday at six PM…”; “Can you hear me well?… Yes, I hear you,” etc.

Hearing and speaking seem to impose themselves, with not far from them, and favored by the health situation, a place made for the missing body of the sessions: “Are you well?”; “Have you been ill?”; “Are you feeling better?” where the body of the analyst exists, where the body of the one who calls also exists, as if sustained in its real dimension eclipsed by an imaginary reinforcement (specular or not, depending on whether there is an image or not). Some analysands immediately resolved this point by saying the first time “I have lain down”; “I am in a quiet place, alone,” while others remained in front of the computer screen or with the television on in the living room and discover, one and all, what the possibility of speaking and being heard really, and not just digitally, clings to and depends on: the encounter. The analytical session is further illuminated by being a repeated encounter between a word, a subject, and a knowledge. That it requires two beings for this is a concrete, unavoidable detail, characteristic of the human species. That these two beings are equipped with a device remains to be described and situated exactly.

But evening falls, at last. One must indeed lie down, every evening, upon the vacuity of the world. These days, that is an understatement… Doubting that sleep will come is recurrent, worrying, a little more so these times than usual. Remembering Freud: “In the beginning of times, words and magic were one and the same thing,” and Omar Khayyam: “There is no one who knows the secret of the future. What is needed is wine, love, and rest at discretion.” While waiting for someone to respond to these few words, to these thoughts of the passing day. All thinkers, post-modern is over!

“Good night… until tomorrow”

Vincent Bourseul