Show Me Your Dormitory, I’ll Tell You Who You Are (2023) – Sisters. For a Feminist Psychoanalysis

Show Me Your Dormitory, I’ll Tell You Who You Are

published online, December 2023

Tschann Bookstore — Paris

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Evening — Sisters, for a Feminist Psychoanalysis

Silvia Lippi and Patrice Maniglier, Seuil.

 

Sisters. For a Feminist Psychoanalysis. Writing about psychoanalysis in 2023 is no easy task. It now lives more discreetly in French society, compared to a time when it imposed itself and shone brilliantly at the end of the last century, in particular. It is even rather difficult, if not impossible, to write in psychoanalysis these days. It is somewhat shunned and, let us say it simply, it has done almost everything to deserve it. Not that it lacks erotic arguments or the capacity to bring forth knowledge. It still has “potential,” as people foolishly say; it continues to be expected. But its intellectual, social, and political appetites have never been so captured by its own institutional turmoil which testifies, since Lacan’s death in my opinion, to the sacrifice of transmission in favor of inheritance, the avoidance of reinvention in favor of conservation. This is characterized today by two simultaneous phenomena: the selective tributes paid in the public sphere to the recently departed from our field and the automatic consignment to oblivion of new voices gradually addressing the manifestations of the Current: a bit of denial and repression to avoid what writing actively imposes, especially: writing to forge a weapon against the Logos.

 

Writing about psychoanalysis for psychoanalysts, or for the rest of the world, is also a challenge when it comes to addressing sexual actualities. Such an initiative constitutes an authentic risk-taking, perhaps a psychoanalytic act, which produces at least two kinds of effects or reactions: 1 — contempt instead of recognition of a valid speech or discourse and 2 — the exclusion or marginalization from a field, that of psychoanalysis itself, through the sentences and zealous condemnations of the political commissars maneuvering a conservative discourse that spares no one from their moods.

 

Let us be clear, I am speaking of writing about psychoanalysis in experience, not the one whose history and knowledge are fixed in our libraries; on that one, the academic one, exegesis has already given up the ghost, the Midrash is well-worn. I am speaking of ongoing psychoanalytic clinical experience, the one that invents new knowledge with the unconscious, that does not retreat from what presents itself (even if it produces surprises and a certain panic) and that attempts new forms of writing to account for the inventions of analysands, the constructions and interpretations that, one day perhaps, will come to swell the shelves of acquired knowledge.

 

The simulacra of debates and conservative theoretical prescriptions about gender, trans questions, and feminisms that we see accumulating in almost all conferences devoted to psychoanalysis, study days, or publications are a symptom of this: the current refurbishing of certain academic or associative houses of psychoanalysis defending their turf fools no one, at least no more than the Christmas windows of department stores on the grand boulevards, with their queer automatons and other little monsters strung up like articulated puppets. It is not enough to make amends for the denounced fashion to make a sincere contribution. This couchwashing is now part of the symptom. A symptom linked to the return of knowledge refused through denial and repression, knowledge about the sexual that psychoanalysis, despite itself it seems, nevertheless managed to put into circulation in its time, beyond cures, in society and culture as a whole. Unconscious knowledge whose effects, outside the cure but not without transference, coincide with the significant emergence of what should be called sexual actualities (which exceed and overflow psychoanalysis), including primarily the irresistible rise of the signifiers 1 — gender then 2 — trans, in the street, in society, and on the couch.

 

Yes, I interpret the advent of gender as that of a terrible child of psychoanalysis, born from the circulation of unconscious knowledge about the sexual by psychoanalysis itself, whose repression in its time allowed us to appreciate its subsequent emergence among sexual knowledge: in another time, but in the same place, that of signs and symbols. Trans is different. From denial this time, the refused knowledge returns in the same time but in another place, to the body and to reality (to summarize extremely). This assigns it, psychoanalysis, moral responsibilities and an ethical requirement, which the contribution of this essay demonstrates where there is no need to retreat from what seems mad at first glance.

 

Sorority, from this point of view, is the first cousin of gender, and the godmother of the screaming truth-madness of trans.

Sorority is not the inverse of fraternity nor its reversal. This reduction, this simplification are only valid for the Phallus-bearers and patronesses of psychoanalysis whose comments, in the form of professorial sanctions, most often accuse, with claimed contempt, of “naivety,” “childishness,” or “immaturity marked by misrecognition” all these voices now perceptible in the social space that are “feminisms,” “gender studies,” “struggles against sexual inequalities,” “#MeToo,” “violence against women,” or even “transidentities.” No, it is not that, sorority. The content of Alain Rey’s Historical Dictionary of the French Language will need to be revised, as it is no longer current on this entry.

Sorority does not merely oppose fraternity, it dialecticizes it. Contradiction does not require moving in the opposite direction. You sustain contradiction by provoking it feministically: thus by disrupting.

Sorority reopens what fraternity began to establish, under the high patronage of the Universal, regarding the social bond. There is therefore a major interest in following it, just as there has been for more than twenty years in our field, a prodigious interest in following gender for what it is and not only what it does. This is to benefit from additional contributions capable of supporting us in our exploration of the so extensive psyche…

 

Anticipating this evening’s presentation of a book addressing, among other themes, that of sorority, a small theatrical fantasy came to me. For lack of time and talent, you will escape the presentation, before you, of a scene easy to imagine in this bookish setting, where we could have held the four roles that follow before you. The action takes place in a comfortable living room decorated like a warm cocktail bar. The living room, worthy of a bourgeois apartment in the fashionable Parisian neighborhoods, reveals the richness of a substantial history torn by the nihilistic destitution of the present, as in a Claude Chabrol film. The lady of the house, Madame Psychoanalysis, receives four guests who are gathered, without her, around a campfire burning in the middle of the room: the bright red embers are spread directly on the floor, on a 1920s kilim rug resistant to flames. The four friends, neither musketeers, nor fantastic, nor Doctor March’s daughters, are seated on single-legged stools, Bottes-culs, forcing them to maintain balance on their two legs in a good position to continually manage the perpetual threat of falling, even if it means not taking advantage of the imbalance.

The discussion is in full swing, the exchanges are lively, the guests passionate. Who are they? Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Valerie Solanas, and Virginia Woolf, for it is they, talking to each other, calling out to each other, and opposing each other. They laugh too. They drink cocktails and I am too far from them to hear them. As in a dream, I am there, quite in the same room as the four of them, I could touch them, but I do not hear them. Worried, I wonder: has the analyst become deaf? Panicked, I pull books from the rich oak library covering all the walls of the living room up to the very high ceilings, one would think oneself in a bookstore. I search with keen haste for the text of their dialogue, in all the pages, in all the volumes within my reach, while they speak: I see them speaking, but I do not hear them. Not a word, nothing but the sound of the pages of the books that I turn at high speed. I find nothing in these books. Those aligned on the highest shelves are not accessible to me. I cannot hoist myself up, my dream body is constrained in this space and my movements are slowed, I move like a puppet on ketamine, I’m spinning my wheels: a stuck dream.

Soon, I have thrown a hundred books on the floor, those located at human height: I grab them, open them, discover in each of them dazzling blank pages. Not a single line, not a single trace of their exchanges, of their questions. And for good reason, they are speaking, and what they are saying to each other, these four, is unprecedented. All the pages are still blank, and the titles of the books fade the very moment I read them. The letters fly away in a cloud of golden powder escaped from the leather bindings. Anxiety appears. I drop each volume and move on to the next hoping to find something. I see nothing. There is nothing where, however, something should be. Wo es war, soll ich werden… has not yet been written. It remains to be said, to be formulated, to be written and read, and heard, as if for the first time.

 

Then, suddenly, I hear something. A murmur reaches me from the back of the room. I approach and discover, on a pedestal table, a small living statue of the Sphinx. She is rather frightening, with her wings and her animal body, her woman’s head not very smiling and her wide headband in her very dark hair. The small piece of furniture where she stands is engraved with the letters of the alphabet; there are also numbers, it is a Ouija board, of those used for séances. It is signed, it is a beautiful antique piece. This pedestal table belonged to the Fox sisters (Maggie, Kate, and Leah), the inventors of 19th-century spiritualism. The Sphinx tells me something without moving an eyelash or her lips.

I approach the Sphinx, fearing being assigned to my Oedipal gender. I will have to answer her if I do not want to be devoured.

And I wonder… but what is she-he this Sphinx, a figure of the Other with a capital “A,” returned to the imaginarization of a real of irreducible sex under the features of a creature, an incubus? Or, as Freud thought, a paternal representation, or for Jung that of a terrible mother?

 

Sounds form, a few phonemes are distinguished. The Sphinx says, approximately, this, in the form of a riddle: What being can escape the prison of the closet, grow in the intimacy of their room, and join the dormitory without needing to pass through the dressing room?

 

Thirty years ago, I would have answered: woman.

Fifteen years ago, I would have answered: a woman. Assured of having caught a piece of The woman who does not exist; thank you brother Jacques.

Today, I would answer: a sister, not without some others, all.

 

The analyst, like the sexed being, while authorizing themselves only from themselves, is not without authorizing themselves from some others. We knew this. Now, sorority in psychoanalysis confirms this knowledge, demonstrating it anew in the aftermath of its past formulation, a renewed opportunity therefore to appreciate existing knowledge and to welcome new knowledge by inventing it.

 

Question.

What is different with sisters, compared to the modalities already known or identified with brothers? Unlike brothers, desire here is not screwed onto the murder of the Father of the horde, but onto the recognition of a common anxiety which, better than being offered to contagion to sink into incest or collective madness, can serve as support for the recognition, on the one hand, of the collective as subject of the individual (thank you brother Jacques, once again), and on the other hand, for the recognition of a possible articulation of desire to the other without direct mediation of the Phallus, outside-Phallus therefore and not simply beyond (where the object a reveals itself to be an instance in the Imaginary and a process in the Symbolic, while the Phallus is confirmed as object in the Imaginary and instance in the Symbolic). In other words, an opportunity to deepen our experience of the possible articulation of desire to its cause. Sorority offers various openings toward new subjective dialectics capable of extending this Lacanian invitation to “do without the father on condition of making use of him.”

 

With this book, we are invited to address a long list of questions and themes. It is impossible to evoke them all in a single evening:

 

1. The relevance of the notions of masculine and feminine for psychoanalytic experience
2. Ditto for the notion of sexual orientation
3. The so-called gender questions and trans questions
4. Feminisms
5. Patriarchy
6. The familial and extra-familial structures of kinship, family, fraternity, and sorority
7. Queer, as a field of investigation and also as discourse
8. The relationships of the signifier to the performative
9. Gender-neutral or inclusive writing
10. Madness and truth
11. Madnesses and loves
12. The identitarian, matter of trauma, which informs the foundations of identity
13. The stakes of the phallic
14. A certain epistemology of the dormitory

… and some others.

 

All these lines opened by psychoanalytic clinical experience traverse this essay. But they are not only addressed as intellectually valid questions in regard to constituted knowledge, knowledge that serves as reference for psychoanalysis in experience, no. They are above all presented as they appear in the experience of the analytic colloquium as so many critical returns, which the experience of knowledge addresses to the knowledge of experience.

 

As Nazim Hikmet wrote in this famous verse, The sea invents itself with the boat.

And as Édouard Glissant said, “The subversion of language comes from creolization, and not from creolisms.”

And as Jacques Lacan suggested, one need only twist language to teach oneself.

One more reference… Neige Sinno, author of Triste tigre says and suggests that literature did not save her from her trauma, no reason to be saved by writing. But it is necessary, because it carries within it the premises of a transformation of others. In other words, writing can act for others beyond the act of writing, where it involves grasping one’s own text.

 

Your book, Silvia and Patrice, carries to the act, an analytic act, with effects of perplexity, trouble, unease and rupture, opening to a possible invention. Its reading affects, bothers, disturbs, and irritates as much as it makes one laugh, smile, love psychoanalysis anew. So much flourishing and screaming joy at the edges of this abyss demanding its border gives this text the perfume of an exaggeration, a wandering, a savagery like so many arrows shot against our anthropia. To the point that it is perhaps only possible to let oneself be worked by the effects of this reading on condition of envisaging the possibility, the necessity, and simply the existence of a post-20th century psychoanalysis.

Always when feminist voices rise, it is to laughter, to snickering, to the grinding of grimaces that words, cries, denunciations are sent back. As long as there is such a need for feminisms, they will be strident. This is also true for the theoretical advances of your proposals that push, beyond equivocation, arguments that hit the mark.

 

So I imagine that if the Sphinx had been teleworking, and replaced, at short notice, by Medusa, the History of our thoughts would have been quite different. Better than a riddle to solve to ensure one’s knowledge, Oedipus would have had access to this happy possibility of recognizing what opposes sight and deserves to be brought to its level of representation, rather than shining with his good answer freezing reason and knowledge into weapons of sexual conquest. Civilization would have lost nothing in the exchange… perhaps an erotic ethic centered on attraction rather than on attribute.

See also this article.