Conversation with the Empty Seat (2024)

Conversation with the Empty Seat

Published online, September 2024.

Excerpt from Chapter 7 — “The Night of the Mistress,” Speak to My Body

1 — Gender… again?!

2 — Current Developments of Gender in Psychoanalysis

3 — Notion or Concept?

4 — My Degree Zero of Gender

5 — Conversation as method

6 — How Did We Get Here?

7 — At the Goutte d’Or

**

Hello everyone,

Welcome to this first session, titled “Conversation with the Empty Seat.”

For this introductory session, I accept the task of presenting, if not the entire project, at least its beginning, starting immediately by clarifying its recent historical coordinates, as well as a partial review of previously discussed elements that must, however, be considered in light of the last fifteen years since I began presenting propositions on sexual current events and psychoanalysis.

I apologize in advance for having to start this cycle with a somewhat massive presentation. But it is necessary as it stands; we must prime the pump, starting from a statement of intent that I am delivering to you today. We are going to discuss it. It is an opening, and as with the end of a loaf of bread or a ham, everyone has their own libidinal fixations on this point: whether we love it or hate it, we deal with it regardless.

**

Excerpt from Chapter 7 — “The Night of the Mistress,” Speak to My Body.

“Nothing holds anymore, then, in this moment and forever, but did it hold, did anything hold before?

What remains that can say what I am from now on?

I, Marc, do not know, as strongly as I perhaps never knew, without knowing it.

What is happening to me is unprecedented. The great transformation, a reversal. The right side on the wrong side. All that’s left is to let this piece of body recover as well. Reconnect inside, re-knit the interior.

How hard it is. Nothing has ever been as difficult as this in my life, or else I cannot remember it. I am going mad, mad with love, sick with sex.

To love in all the nuances of love, especially those lightened of the genital empire in the liberal style. Is this a serious lead or a suspicious puritanical wish? No, what a beautiful program: to heal love from sex.

No roots, no stable sex, no crushing identity, no erotic caricature, no patriarchy…”

1 — Gender… again?!

Speaking under the title Psychoanalysis & Sexual Current Events should at the very least seem a bit dated, or at least anachronistic. But that is not the case. This title, strangely, has the effect of an opening; it piques our interest. This observation is strange, especially for psychoanalysis: what else could it talk about, if not sexual current events? How is it that we are challenged by sexual current events as a specific question when it constitutes the inevitable ordinary of the psychoanalytic experience in the making?

Yet this is precisely what brings us together today. And it is this very thing that gradually motivated the launch of this project. To address the fact that sexual current events seem to have been insufficiently considered by psychoanalysis since the last century. To try to find out to what extent this is true and, above all, in what ways it is true. We must draw many questions from this observation. At least one, which brings almost all of them together… How did we get here?

This is the fundamental question, a double epistemological and critical question that invites us to this double requirement, fundamental to the psychoanalytic experience: the experience of knowledge, with and against the knowledge of experience. Because it is not conceivable to journey in this field without first confirming a kind of principle for all sincere attempts at elaboration in the psychoanalytic field, including ours today and later: thinking about what psychoanalysis does to us and what we can do with it is only possible by taking very seriously the risk and the necessity of inventing knowledge against knowledge — of reinventing. What we think we know here has value only on the sole condition of assuming it as knowledge until proven otherwise or confirmed, of submitting it to question, thus conducting an inquisition with not God as a guide and landmark, but what speaking means and what it does to speak.

To progress along this path, for it is an established fact that we are gradually achieving it, we can still seize a unique opportunity which, while no longer very recent, nonetheless remains original in its own way, disruptive enough to be fruitful, modern if it protects against classicism, or simply attuned to the effects of speech at the beginning of this 21st century. Let us designate it by a primary signifier: ‘gender’, whose irresistible rise has been continuously unfolding for over forty years. Gender and its questions, gender issues as the common expression goes, which must be handled with care and suspicion, so as not to let ourselves be too easily contaminated by the most harmful cliché in this field of research and practice which, foolishly, makes gender a counterpart of sex, just as we can all observe the weakness of the propositions and modes of treating these questions in the field of psychoanalysis (and beyond it) for the past twenty years, almost all of them fixed on an approach subjected to certain sociological, political, and also philosophical discourses tinged with a symptomatic binary conception of nature and culture.

For there are lines of fracture between discourses; we must take them into account without settling for simple divisions between them. Their properties are more complex than that. What we know very well, for example, between the Psychoanalytic Discourse and the University Discourse, which are definitively compatible, and therefore irreconcilable.

I introduced the signifier “gender” at the start. It is perhaps already the oldest in our sexual current events; it is beginning to date. It is a paradox: for anyone wanting to grasp current events, it immediately ages our initiative. Already old, it is, beyond the rhetoric that allows this juxtaposition in discourse of new signifiers, some of which rise to the position of master long before we have had the chance to realize it. So, let us catch up by mentioning, without delay, two other signifiers that have recently moved into the position of masters as well, in my view: “trans” and “iel” (they/them) which, differently from the signifier “gender,” are also new signifiers in their own way.

A first conceptual perspective opens here simply by adjusting these three signifiers within the same paragraph. Let us take advantage of this from the introduction, and we will have time to return to it in detail. The Gender will be the form, in the imaginary, that can finally teach us what we still do not know about sex; trans will be the perspective giving access to the symbolic treated by the real; the real of the refused bisexual unconscious, signified and saved by iel. And already we are doing a bit of topology: gender, trans, iel / imaginary, symbolic, real. A small remark: when I say the bisexual unconscious, I am deliberately making an error; the unconscious is not bisexual, it is bisexuality; we will have the opportunity to return to this by detailing what binarity is—implied sexual binarity—which has unfortunately become a religion of the double where it nevertheless asserts itself as a practice of relativity (provided it is freed from fantasy).

If this seems obscure or complex, let us not be afraid. It is not as complicated as it looks. It is only the effect that advancing on the trail of pending knowledge has on us. There is nothing excessively difficult in what follows, only complexities that invite our rigor, which we can untangle provided we accept and endure the questioning of what we believe we know in order to settle for thinking it. Which is already a lot, and often impossible. Which is also the only way to progress and follow the letter in what is said and heard, without following to the letter what we believe we know.

Thus, and only thus, will we approach fertile territories, in the fringes of invention and reinvention where the finite and infinite of the psychoanalysis in experience maintain, provided the effort is made, the openings beneficial to the meticulous examination of our states of mind regarding what we generically call sexualities.

2 — Current Developments of Gender in Psychoanalysis

It will not be a matter of loving psychoanalysis, nor even sexual current events. But of loving the opportunity to think in a way effective enough to destabilize us for the benefit of some inventions profitable to our progression in these dark continents of psychoanalysis, the first of which was stated by Freud — “The sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology” in “The Question of Lay Analysis,” in 1926 —, quickly joined, even if they are still not sufficiently considered in the psychoanalytic field, 1 — by the socio-cultural echoes of gender, 2 — then the symbolic trouble of trans, completed by 3 — the impossible-to-penetrate historical aspect of constitutive psychic bisexuality (signified by iel).

Generally speaking, until now, contributions to the clinic of gender in psychoanalysis — as I designate this field — have sometimes been described as “obscure” or “incomprehensible” propositions, most often relegated to the rank of “insignificant” or “woke” phenomena — the irony is that these phenomena are the very place, currently, of the appearance of new signifiers and that, as such, their sidelining becomes symptomatic for this practice of listening.

I who work on this, as they say. Let’s say, who tries to follow this thread that I noticed, for my own part, a long time ago in my reading of The Cause of Adolescents, by Françoise Dolto, I can attest to and qualify differently this so-called insurmountable complexity for some, peremptory for others. I want to qualify it differently, by putting it in direct perspective with the fate reserved for gender issues and to those who embody them, or who have attempted to embody them within psychoanalytic institutions in particular, be they societies, associations, or schools — which is equally true in academia. For the institutional treatment of these questions and of the clinicians who have grappled with them—a simplifying, and thus fascist, treatment that has already led to numerous events—allows us to draw a conclusion right now. In psychoanalytic institutions, where these questions of sexual actualities have been raised, worked on, or fought against, they have each time been very quickly crushed by a sociological and philosophical conception of the individual and the subject. This has, each time, rendered their object accessory and marginalized, directly and indirectly, those who dared to speak about them. By taking gender as a cultural and social (or public) expression of intimate and private sex, there was no other possibility than to persist in these impasses. What’s more, this is the result of a manifest reversal, into its opposite, of a latent confusion between the intimate and the public, a confusion situated at the source of sexual totalitarianism, for lack of being able to confront the horror of knowledge about sexual truth and its limits.

Several knots were very quickly encountered when, under the pressure of current events, so-called gender issues were addressed in the psychoanalytic field. Knots in the brain first, then knots in theories, finally neglecting the ground where it happens and which we know has the power of untying, whether we like it or not: clinical practice.

Thus, the difficulties of understanding or of ideological and political adequacy, inherent in any desire to approach these questions, must be identified as being primarily fueled by institutional effects, far more than being attributable to the very nature of these questions. If we feel we understand nothing, it is not so much because of the difficulty of the object as because of the instituted distortion of our listening and our thinking, both of which are far too aligned with conceptual orthodoxy and current intellectual postures in the field of psychoanalysis.

Always, and it still continues, the only question has been to relate sexual actualities to supposedly already known things, to sexualities before them, to compare and evaluate them. Each time, it has been about reducing the unknown to the supposedly known. On every occasion, an attempt has been made to highlight the unfruitfulness of these questions by confirming not only the value of acquired theories, but indeed their reified use by those I call the phallus-bearers of psychoanalysis: one finds authentic reactionaries, bureaucratic henchmen, but also post-modern figures who are just as problematic when they disguise intellectual opportunism as open-mindedness. They do, however, have one indisputable common point, and that is how they are recognized: they have proposed nothing new, neither in the reading nor in the writing of psychoanalytic theory; not one serious critique nor one original proposition has emerged in this vein, with slogans most often claimed like “nothing new under the sun” versus “what matters is only to dust off Freud.” The psychoanalytic milieu is falling significantly behind life while it struggles between heritage, impossible transmission, and careers.

Reinventing is certainly not starting from scratch. But it nevertheless requires starting from nothing, which is not nothing, which is not zero. A nothing like a degree zero so as not to lose ourselves in a void without edges, to establish a starting point with some chance of following through. The degree zero of gender is its status as an object in the imaginary, as it is encountered in the first moment of its effectiveness, for everyone, analysands or analysts or anyone else.

To shed light on this encounter with gender that we all experience, with the notion of gender and not with the concept of gender that we must keep at bay, I must tell you the path that has been mine on this subject. What was my degree zero of gender, long before I chose it as an object of work? But before answering, a clarification…

3 — Notion or Concept?

I say notion and not concept; it is an important nuance. For nothing allows nor should justify, to date, claiming or believing that regarding gender anything has been said that is worth a conclusion by anyone. Firstly for a temporal reason, and that is why we can designate these sexual questions as current events, and on the other hand as an ethical and political precaution aimed at maintaining the critical effort that must not fail our attempts to think these questions. No one knows what would or could be the closed perimeter of what gender gives us access to regarding sex and the sexual. Unless one consents to an approach, to a reduced conception of gender such as certain psychological, sociological, political, or philosophical, even psychoanalytic perspectives use and illustrate in too many problematic recent propositions. In this regard, we will have the opportunity to explore different reactionary symptomatologies, from their expressions in certain discourses or positions that are often undemanding, almost systematically oriented currently against the signifier “trans” and its tributaries, the most sensitive example of which is the question of “trans children.” Psychoanalysts (often publicized and published ), but also, for example, femmellistes, are leading real ideological battles, wars in the name of feminism or clinical ethics that will serve us to grasp the level of contemporary compromise with the totalitarian temptation, sick with wanting to defend political necessities against those of the Subject. I mean by this a certain number of activists, analysts, professionals of the profession, “specialists in the solution of problems ,” to use the expression of Neil Sheehan, the American journalist behind the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, an expression taken up and extended by Hannah Arendt after him.

Why this direct link with this political theorist? For a reason as simple as the enemy to be fought, namely the fantasy disguised as political demands in the service of totalitarianism. Here, that of patriarchy sacralized in place of the unbearable effects of the sexual relationship that does not exist. A patriarchal fantasy that gives voice to the expertise of experts in the Father and other Oedipal triangulation, or even in the difference of the sexes based on their very personal idea of what is necessary, even if it means denying the facts, even if it means violently denying the living contingency of psychic realities on the one hand, and corrupting the necessary meticulous consideration of the place of the other, of the o/Other of the sexual, on the other. These specialists, so sure of knowing what is necessary, fuel a politics of the sexual forgetful of a fact brought to light by Freud and reformulated by Lacan in the now well-known expression from the seminar The Logic of Fantasy “The unconscious is politics” (1966-1967). As if it were unbearable or impossible for them to recognize the real unconscious and the summoning force of Jouissance — let’s say, perhaps, the drive economy in the broad sense —, these specialists in the solution of problems adepts of the domino theory allow us, however, to specify the territory and nature of this totalitarian enemy that must be fought, and whose name must, little by little, be clarified. Since it is making itself known especially today, in the social field transformed into a battlefield, not only as an expression of the war of the sexes, in sexual and gender-based violence, and even more certainly in the symptomatic illustration of the unbearable tensions between the individual and the subject. I spoke of patriarchal fantasy. This needs to be elaborated…

Personally, I long considered and thought that patriarchy was the problem. The signifier ‘patriarchy’ itself is very convenient for designating it as an enemy. An excess of Father can be heard between these consonants, and its vowels resonate with muffled cries. The suspect makes a very good culprit. But it is too simplistic to stop at this ease. We must go further, we must elaborate, because patriarchy is also the name of a Culture, whether we like it or not, and as such it deserves to be analyzed as an authentic Civilization and Its Discontents, and not just a discontent of culture. This is to extract with interest what this patriarchy tells us about structural elements that deserve, after examination, to be separated from it. We will have the opportunity to work on a paradoxical defense of patriarchy to reduce it to next to nothing : its true nature, and its authentic function. Then, one of Marc’s questions will be addressed: “Patriarchy doesn’t fit, what else?”

So, patriarchy can be the name of the enemy, of the problem, but that’s a bit short. So I proposed patriarchal fantasy, so as not to simply, for example, designate white cisgender heterosexuality as the name of the problem, although this notion is fruitful for identifying, from categorical intersections, essential nuances in the processes of discrimination and violence. Another name for this enemy must be proposed, to simultaneously realize that the word ‘enemy’ has already been uttered several times — warlike semantics. What war is this? The war of the sexes, as we can justify and understand the necessary emergence of feminisms? We will have to answer these questions. For there is indeed a war. There are victims, injured, and dead to be heard, repaired, honored. There are also culprits and those responsible to be brought to justice.

Another name then, but which one? How to express that beyond the enemy, we must be interested in its psychic object, the subjective process at stake, the formations of the unconscious far from courtrooms and opinions. I would like to propose this, to pinpoint this central psychic lever, the heterosexual patriarchal fantasy where fantasy can be understood in its psychoanalytic, patriarchal as a reference to Culture, and heterosexual as a social witness where heterosexuality is not here a sexual orientation, but a political regime. In English, the formulation seems simpler, we could say The Straight Fantasy of Patriarchy, which allows us to reformulate this expression in French as Le fantasme hétéro du patriarcat. Since it is not the enemy — fantasy is not an enemy —, it is the central object of our attention, our starting point and perspective, to advance on our questions of sexual current events beyond all the nuances of sexual orientations, sex or gender identities, all concerned by this straight fantasy of patriarchy, as it comes to support the march of desire for all subjects, in response to the irreducible consequences of what we mentioned earlier as the effects of the sexual relationship that does not exist in its Lacanian expression, or even the effects of the Oedipus Complex in its Freudian expression. When we can delve into this, we will have the opportunity to address this clinical fact that sexual orientation has no meaning, although it means something else, socially, politically, or even culturally and sexually. I also give another name to this fantasy: the heteros-patriarch fantasy; it will interest us later to approach another fantasy that de-completes it, the a-patride fantasy, itself opening to the understanding of another sexuation than the Lacanian sexuation (a sexuation of the excluded middle, that of the necessary exclusive), a-sexuation (a sexuation of the included middle, that of the necessary inclusive), itself opening to new discourses that in turn complete the discourses identified by Lacan. Lacan identified the discourses of hysteria, the university, the master, and psychoanalysis. We will gradually see how a-sexuation opens access to four other discourses: identity discourse, trans discourse, feminist discourse, and ecological discourse.

4 — My Degree Zero of Gender

I return to my degree zero of gender. How did I encounter gender?

Like everyone else, at first without realizing it. And that lasted several years. I was born in 1976; while feminism was very active at that time, questions of sexual identity or gender identity did not have the place in the surrounding discourse that we know them to have now. At that time, the words of certain psychoanalysts were broadcast in the media, notably those of Françoise Dolto on Europe 1 in 1969 (SOS Psychoanalyst!, where she intervened live under the pseudonym Doctor X), and especially on France Inter between 1976 and 1978 (a daily program hosted by Jacques Pradel, When the Child Appears, where this time she answered listeners’ letters). We can also mention the television program Psy Show in 1984-1985 in which Serge Leclaire participated.

I quote Françoise Dolto because she marks my entry into psychoanalysis. Not during my first two years of life, even if my mother listened to the radio show, but especially during adolescence, when our family subscription to France-Loisirs led us to receive a selection of works including The Cause of Adolescents. I was twelve years old; it was my first psychoanalysis book, and my first conscious thought about the unconscious, at the invitation of my dear Françoise D. Then, for a long period of my young adult life, this book disappeared from my boxes. I never managed to find it in the cellar or the attic, to the point of doubting I had ever held it, as my parents also believed. Thirty years later, during my experience of the passe as a passant, and through a series of coincidences that life holds the secret to, the book arrived one morning, as I was going to meet one of my passeurs for one of our last interviews. On the way to the café where we had an appointment, I unpacked the package and stopped dead on the sidewalk, flipping through the book. It was my copy of Françoise Dolto’s book, my adolescent cause had come back to me at the invitation of the pass. I had it in my hands and I read in the margins of the pages my annotations from the time which, suddenly, had come back to my memory. I remembered having written specific things about speech, the importance of speech, and underlined capital sentences, which I found while leafing through, including this one that I will never forget: “The ill-fated, psychoanalysis can save them.”

What does this have to do with gender, you might ask? I only discovered it recently, while leafing through this book and my annotations again. One of them illuminated my degree zero of gender. In the chapter devoted to adolescent identities, Dolto talks about the choice of clothes, the style adopted to give form to an identity in construction. In the margin, I had written ” sexual look” and “gender”; it was my translation of the relevant paragraphs. Reading it again a few weeks ago, while I have been trying to theorize these questions for a long time having forgotten this personal historical encounter, I understood that gender had caught me at that precise moment. A conception of gender that does not suit me today, too weighed down by questions of appearance and reality, too blind to the unconscious psychic processes that have interested me since regarding gender. But it is my degree zero of gender, where it first appeared to me as an object in the imaginary, and therefore in reality and the body.

But I specified, in the introduction, that no personal expertise on gender deserves to be considered valid for others from the outset. This does not mean that no experience of gender is true; they all are, and it is this immeasurable experience that must be taken into account and cared for. It is in this way that I began to work on these questions from a research perspective, starting from gender as object in the imaginary — and not as an imaginary object. In the imaginary, therefore where the gender object activates a trouble by appearing, in reality and the body, regarding the sex thus awakened from its deceptive sleep that makes sex pass for a given, to be sure. The appearance of gender, its encounter, is a troubling, disturbing experience, instantaneous or lasting, that we can qualify as a queer experience, or an experience of the uncanny (Unheimliche). Where gender appears in one dimension, sex wavers in another dimension. Where gender troubles, in the imaginary when it presents itself, sex trembles in the symbolic; this is the first step to grasping it, recognizing it. In a second step, when the gender symbolic process takes up the gauntlet of the trouble of sex in the symbolic, it allows the recreation of sex in the imaginary where it is an instance, an instance of belief supported by the representations linked to it that can reach a kind of confirmation, unity, or coherence.

I repeat. For example, I meet a human being whom I cannot read, nor place within the sexual landscape; it is an experience queer : I do not know who they are, nor what they are, nor what they do. Thus, my unconscious unease, regarding my place and my function in the sexual landscape (of my sex, let’s say) too uncertain, demands that something respond to this disturbance which can be unbearable to me, demands that the psychic apparatus work to circumscribe it, to reduce it. For from the gender encountered in the other, which reactivates the uncertainty of my sex, an unconscious questioning/interpellation opens up, which reopens to the creation/recreation of the sex that will follow, in different stages. Let’s summarize these first two stages: gender presents itself (object to the imaginary), sex is disturbed (process to the symbolic), gender is given meaning (process to the symbolic), which re-establishes the representation of sex (instance to the imaginary). At this stage, reassurance may appear and suffice, or not: at the moment of isolating a point in space, sex, for example, comes back to life in the ordinary logic of phenomenal reality, freed for a moment from the contingencies that structure it behind the scenes. I proposed a possible definition of gender and sex in psychoanalysis: « gender is the limit situated both outside and inside sex, the coastline or margin of sex capable of revealing its depth of field. Gender appears under the effect of the sexual; it questions the unconscious knowledge of sexual difference, and makes identifications waver until their renewal. Thus, gender undoes sex and creates sex in the in-between of its intermittent disturbance, at the moment of stability where it is experienced. » Nothing more, such is the Gheschlescht (a term used by Freud, which can be translated as sexgender). This is accessible provided that sex and gender are apprehended as two unknowns in an irreducible equation, as two semblances of a Real that we have for too long designated, wrongly, by the single word “sex” (sex, the two sexes), all too pleased to have found there the a priori incontestable means of sorting the human mass, even to the point of giving it a place in a few conferences that are sometimes titled with one of the possible variations such as “sex and its semblances”, except that sex is a semblance. One immediately hears the common error that makes sex a given. This is precisely what the clinic of gender teaches us: from the disturbance of gender, which reveals this sex for what it is not—what we nevertheless continue to believe on behalf of the individual—and opens onto the possibility of creating the new sex that better suits the subject of the unconscious. For today, we shall go no further in exploring the other stages, nor the background that is sexuation in this matter.

How did I cobble this together? Starting from gender as an object in the Imaginary, in order to move forward in my preparatory work for developing a doctoral thesis, I pulled on this thread to identify the qualities of gender in the other registers, namely the Real and the Symbolic. I needed a method, a recipe not too far removed from psychoanalytic experience and its practice. Not knowing at all how to go about it, very discouraged by the texts available on readings of Lacanian sexuation or the primacy of the phallus, penisneid, etc., I cobbled together my own toolkit, which I hoped would be psychoanalytic. I organised a double trident, Freudian and Lacanian, hoping thereby to obtain results that could be put to the question, tested against facts and thoughts, and verified by other practitioners of analysis. Starting from a state of gender, that of the object, in a register, the Imaginary, I proposed to extrapolate, for the two other registers, the Real and the Symbolic, two other states, those of the process and of the instance. So I had my two tridents: object, process, instance and imaginary, symbolic, real. A tool more cobbled together than invented, since it is a gloubiboulga of what I thought I had understood of psychoanalysis at that time. You will find it in a first small table in the appendix. All the same, it very quickly proved effective, and rather solid from a methodological point of view. Which led one of the members of the thesis jury in question—more than conservative—after finally reading this work, reluctantly, to make this declaration of love in the form of a threat upon arriving at the defence: “In the end, I read your thing; the worst of it is that it works, and what is more, it is Freudian.”

5 — Conversation as method

I am recounting this moment of work not to tell you that I believe I have managed to grasp something—that remains to be proven and it is not for me to do so—but to implement one of the objectives of these conversations, namely that of expressing psychoanalytic clinical practice. And this without needing to resort to clinical cases or vignettes, which I have decided to completely proscribe, for myself and all the invited participants. I am convinced that articulating psychoanalytic clinical practice cannot pass through illustrations, but only through direct expressions of experience, literary productions, or mathematical stagings. Even if this is very delicate and requires very significant efforts that we do not often have the opportunity to provide. We will be focused on this risk of speaking out, on the part of those who will speak in the conversations or discussions, the risk of speech, with all necessary precautions, without forgetting the part of those who will remain silent. These conversations will be an opportunity to presentations by practitioners of psychoanalysis, namely analysts and/or analysands, all of whom practise psychoanalysis—there will also be writers, singers, or mathematicians who share the experience of addressed speech.

For the moment, the conversation will be the one I maintain with the empty place, which is neither an absence nor a disappearance, but ultimately proves to be the one with whom—with what—all practitioners of psychoanalysis, in an armchair or on a couch, find themselves experiencing the place, and the bond of what must be confronted in order to shed light on this a/Other of the sexual that the analyst and the analysand find themselves being in turn. Thus, the empty place is a crowd. Conversations that will serve as a support for our discussions, to unpack, hear, and question a series of propositions, findings, and questions—so as to undo them, extend them, and keep them open.

What I am evoking now coincides, as if by chance, with the question of the training of the analyst. This question largely occupied all the exchanges prior to the launch of this project. It is a central question, from which the desired conversations cannot escape. I myself attended, for about twelve years, a school of psychoanalysis, the Sigmund Freud School of Psychoanalysis (EpSF), in which I enrolled after having laboriously tried to approach other places where a place was possible without being condemned to remain a pupil or a former student forever in relation to supposed masters or supposed professors. In this school, I did the most important part of my training: the part where I could—where I had to, not without difficulties—experience and disentangle the impossible of the group in its most crude dimension, but also the totalitarian temptation inherent in any institution that nothing comes to treat, only to regulate enough for the work of each and everyone to continue. I can testify that one nevertheless steers one’s boat there, from a sea to be invented with the boat, as Nazim Hikmet writes: a boat that can invent other seas and travel the archipelagos of the Whole-World. This does not prevent accidents, does not avoid departures, resignations, sometimes very violent conflicts, and serious subjective injuries. This reinforces and confirms, if it were needed, that the only existing training of the analyst is the formations of the unconscious , those that make themselves known in the cure—nothing but the cure—in intension and in extension. Thus, having begun to receive analysands about sixteen years ago, I now find myself compelled by the cures to open something, an arm of the sea. I am not at all sure that I will manage, nor that it has any chance of succeeding. But that is not what matters in order to begin. What matters is what decided it: namely my experience of psychoanalysis today, which invites me to respond, from the cures, to the beyond of the cures. All of this supported and determined by a main stake: to gradually develop a supplement to Sexual Theory, to reinvent a part of psychoanalysis from an object that troubles it more than any other for a very long time—an object we can designate as “gender”, but which can and must just as well be designated as “trans” and “iel” now; we shall have the opportunity to explore these signifying variations.

6 — How did we get here?

I return, to move towards a temporary conclusion to this introduction, to the initial question. How did we get here? To be challenged by the possibility of considering Psychoanalysis and Sexual Current Affairs—this paradox?

This question expresses the unavoidable political dimension inscribed at the heart of psychoanalytic questioning—about the unconscious, the sexual fact, and desire—which never fails to pursue a dialogue with the world in which it is practised.

Several elements stand out (2):

1 — Any resemblance to our national (and global) political situation cannot be fortuitous, but is indeed the expression of a symptom that will interest us intensely: that of the contamination of the social field by knowledges about the sexual arising from psychoanalytic experience, whose effects outside the cure—but not without transference—confirm their direct and indirect impact on the social bond, on the possibility of making society or a collective, and on libidinal economy in general.

2 — The nagging and incontestable agony of patriarchy—an agony nevertheless fought by a few poorly castrated men and women—deals ever more violent blows to everyone as speech and its effects gain the ground that was denied to them. To the point that the battle engaged—a battle for life and for knowledge—seems lost from the outset. This is not surprising for a system founded on necessary exclusivity, on the murder of the father and the totemic meal that imposes its recurrence, and its maintenance at any cost, however morbid.

This invites us to appreciate our current situation, that of our culture, that of psychoanalysis in experience, in light of sexual actualities. I insist on this perspective: it is sexual actualities that can teach psychoanalysis and not the other way around, unless we deliberately and blindly remain in a diagnostic, academic, and ideological movement. For what presents itself in experience deserves to be welcomed, heard at the height of its unprecedented, still unknown qualities, whose contours, dynamics, creative capacities, and critical power against the symbolic must be illuminated, where the real comes to treat it where it takes shape in our realities, where semblances play: between real and imaginary.

In the armchair, on the couch, we listen; we say what has not yet been thought to the point of having already produced new elaborations. This is an analytic fact; it is the very essence of psychoanalysis. Yet it is contested by the insistence of the overhanging attitude of the theoretical knowledge of our well-stocked libraries, tirelessly crushing the knowledges in the process of appearing. This has condemned, for forty years already, psychoanalysis to the bourgeois numbness from which it suffers at its core, where its institutional dimension (that of learned societies, psychoanalytic schools, or universities) encourages it to refuse a knowledge still unconscious, whose sidelining—chiefly by the graces of disavowal—blocks, like a faecaloma, the channels of outflow necessary to our contemporary humours.

Our present situation is violently paradoxical. Throughout all this time that psychoanalysis has amply turned a deaf ear—and continues to do so—to what is addressed to it, in the intimacy of the cure or in the public square, unavoidable constructions and elaborations have been produced outside it for the most part, to the point that it can continue, today, to welcome what it does not know how to welcome except as particularisms, minor or minority phenomena. Its historical collaboration with the major Universal costs it its capacity for awakening and wonder before the infinite metamorphoses of libido. It has made itself guilty of a pathogenic conservatism that allows those whom I call Phallus-Gates to keep, at a distance from its work, the so-called questions of gender, the fruitful contributions of the transpective (trans perspective), and the grand opening of epicene writing, where language continues to be created.

In other words, to bring, on its horizon, the subjectivity of its time—this invitation from Lacan to analysts of every stripe—which has not had the effect that was expected. It aimed to prevent candidates for the function of analyst from trapping themselves in that of mere “interpreters in the discord of languages”. Since then, new identity expressions have been able to encourage a deceptive reification of subjectivities, for lack of being able to keep open the field of the subject of the unconscious at the beginning of the 21st century. This has given birth, by forceps, to philosophical and existential perspectives of little use to the analytic process, then fantasised as being queer, or feminist, or intersectional, to the point of confusing its outside and its inside, of letting go of the hypothesis of the unconscious and the law of the signifier. The unconscious is politically incorrect; trying to burnish its image with fashionable glitter has no other meaning than avoidance, or a counterproductive amalgam founded on the confusion between the identitarian and identity, primarily. This critique, which I formulate here, figures this paradox from which one must suffer enough to learn something and, in the same stroke, to extract, in the cure, ways of handling the signifier effects of sexual current affairs: if the ambient discourse demands that the identity qualities of all those who speak, as well as their statements themselves, be specified to the extreme, we must remain more than vigilant regarding the particularisms thus encouraged, without fearing affiliation with the major Universal that totalises diversity. And if we must, obviously, fight psychoanalysis like a campaign wherever it refuses the effects of feminisms, of the queer or of intersectionality, we must do so without concession. The identitarian is a matter—a dark matter. Identity knows nothing of it, cannot know it, but can be believed to be a star, whereas it is rather a supernova.

Another element of the paradox in question is irredeemably aggregated around the question of the transmission of psychoanalysis. An impossible transmission, requiring the demand of perpetual reinvention, deserving to be kept apart from the stakes of inheritance and filiation in the psychoanalytic milieu. For the training of the psychoanalyst is thereby deprived of being able to appreciate the deformations of the psychoanalyst, largely abandoned to individual cures without sufficient echo in the shared elaboration of symptoms in common that practitioners—analysands and/or analysts—can nevertheless put to work, submit to the question so as not to recoil from what comes, since these deformations, these transformations, these transsexuations are the paths of the analyst’s formation where transmission remains impossible, therefore practicable.

The street, the youth, the various communities that make up our society have taken a very significant lead over the psychoanalytic milieu, difficult to reduce. They know more than we do, and yet in a way that deserves to be extended by the analytic perspective. This will be very visible in the conversations to come, when it will be necessary to take up again arguments and elaborations nevertheless available for several decades, almost all of which continue to produce, even today, a surprising effect of astonishment on a discourse—the psychoanalytic discourse—and on analysts, from whom we were nevertheless entitled to expect, given the cures that have not ceased to move with their time, a little more modernity without needing it to be pinned down as an added value or a specific feature, but simply the mark of its time.

We shall therefore take up, point by point, the study of many elements and no less numerous notions that hold no secrets for the next generation of our time—for a large part of the analysands who come to speak in sessions—whereas we are very often challenged by what is no longer a question for many of our contemporaries.

This observation is not discouraging, since taking up everything said that escapes what is said lays the bed of analytic listening and its act. If, for many analysands, the so-called questions of gender, trans, and iel are no longer a mystery, this is, on the one hand, a good opportunity for the analyst to bring, on their horizon, the subjectivity that presents itself to their listening; which, on the other hand, opens the possibility for the one who speaks to hear their saying through the unconscious echo that their analyst will agree to assume bearing, in order to sustain the promise and the process of the cure.

7 — At La Goutte d’Or

Why converse in a washhouse, in La Goutte d’Or?…

We are at the Lavoir Moderne Parisien, a historic place of words exchanged around a domestic task: washing laundry. A women’s affair, like that of conversations that were only identified as such thanks to their worldly exercise in the salons of former times, left to the relative autonomy of women deemed fit to discuss non-state matters, non-primordial for royalty and other political regimes—namely feeling, style, music, or the arts of minor scope, propriety, and the education of women in society.

For several years, I wrote in my corner and circulated texts marginally on the internet; I also produced a few books independently on the editorial level. But the exercise of the solitary post, like masturbation, invites opening up, sharing, to risk its erotic charge in other sexual activities. I inquired into the ways of the world. I rediscovered what conversations of old were.

My living room being too small to invite a small crowd, and not mastering the codes of polite society, the neighbourhood of La Goutte d’Or imposed itself as my address. I live and work here now. So it is here that we shall meet, hoping that these occasions will be as pleasant as tasting a conversation—that little tart made famous, in the 18th century, by Mme d’Epinay, who knew how to receive, and whose recipe was disseminated by her in a text entitled Émilie’s Conversations. Sugar, almond powder, eggs, and a bit of technique. There are not many places left in Paris where one can taste them; the addresses remain confidential. I will not give you these addresses, since we shall attempt to reinvent the recipe.

Here, the conversations will not be political utopias, nor outdated socialities that make up the stale scenarios of cinematic fictions and the simulacra of thought we are confronted with where intellectualism presides over everything.

There will therefore be, in these conversations, very complicated things, because psychic life is very complicated. It demands to be at work, as people say all the time. It is not serious. It is not necessary to understand in order to benefit from meaning, and better still from the shifts that attentive listening to a proposition can generate in the body, in the mind of all of us gathered provisionally for this exercise—for this work, for it is collective work. Whether one listens, speaks, or remains silent, it is work that we are going to do here. We shall rely on logic and its impasses or its surpassings, on intuition with the help of a few wanderings. We shall twist the language, listen to space, attempt writings about things that force us to transgress grammatical rules and make our dormant spellings bloom again.

So, how should one go about it, whether one is already initiated into these questions or quite naïve? To support this effort of opening and deepening the so-called “gender” questions—which I prefer to state as a Clinic of gender psychoanalysis—I wrote a small book entitled Speak to My Body, which is, from near and far, a more literary version of my first work entitled Sex Reinvented by Gender, whose text is somewhat complex, I have been told. Thus, Speak to My Body, which is not a novel properly speaking, nor even literature according to the prevailing canons, can help one enter and progress in a rather vast series of questions that the main character, Marc, allows us to follow with them. It is from this text that the thirteen questions arose that will serve as pretexts for the conversations, to try to answer them. I do say: try.

I conclude with these thirteen questions, which will not be recited like a rosary, but addressed pell-mell, one with another, over the course of our wanderings:

1. And why must I sexuate like you?
2. How does sex come to the mind?
3. What sexuality for one who knows the sexual?
4. Does sexual orientation have any meaning?
5. Patriarchy does not work—what else?
6. Being a mother like a man?
7. A trans psychoanalyst?
8. What does sexual arousal respond to?
9. What psychoanalytic definition of gender, of sex?
10. A sexuation outside Phallus?
11. MeToo & Psychoanalysis?
12. There is no sexual relationship—what about a gender relationship?
13. What new perversion?

Next time, I shall speak under the title “My Couch Trembled”, in reference and homage to James Baldwin, to speak a little about love. To make a path between two erotics: To heal love from sex; To make love of sex. We shall abandon today’s inaugural lecture for another format, more poetic, I hope.

Until then, when you have been able to listen again to this first session, you will be able—beyond the discussion we are going to have now—to send (by email) your questions and comments. Our next meetings may respond to them, in one way or another. Thank you for listening to me.

Vincent Bourseul

End

Appendices

Psychoanalytic definition of gender (2013) : gender is the limit situated both outside and inside sex, the shoreline or margin of sex capable of revealing its depth of field. Gender appears under the effect of the sexual; it questions the unconscious knowledges of sexual difference, and makes identifications waver until they are renewed. Thus, gender undoes sex and creates sex in the in-between of its intermittent disturbance, at the moment of stability in which it is experienced.

Construction of the table: