Smoking the Phallus in the Peace Pipe (2023)

Smoking the Phallus in the Peace Pipe

or Psychoanalysis: Sororal Symptom

It now falls to me to present some reflections motivated by reading Silvia Lippi and Patrice Maniglier’s book Sisters. For a Feminist Psychoanalysis, recently published by Seuil. To avoid getting lost in too many digressions, I focus, this time, on three notions: sisterhood, inclusivity and the Phallus. If my angle of approach is acute and my gaze concentric, numerous other considerations should be sustained from this reading that we will not have time to address.

Since they are not lacking, I will draw on the reactions and comments provoked by sexual current events at the beginning of the 21st century, which certain psychoanalysts of the present dare to utter at the risk of the new.

This to evoke in fine, succinctly, an example of theoretical opening and innovation to which sororal and gendered perspectives in psychoanalysis give us access from the experience of the couch to our libraries, passing through the analyst’s chair.

I must declare, customary precaution, a conflict of interest with the authors: our connivance of experiences and thoughts in the field of psychoanalysis, which will have led us to recognize ourselves as sisters. Sisters of the unconscious and its word. Sisters of madness.

Hypothesis

Psychoanalysis in experience is responsible for the circulation of knowledge about the sexual, outside treatment but not without transference effect, which have continued for over a century to contaminate social space, discourse, speech, bodies and sexes, among others. To this pandemic of unbearable knowledge (related to the famous Freudian plague) have responded and respond various current events, displaced symptoms, emergences and more or less new phenomena that we qualify as sexual current events. To the list of these productions, I particularly inscribe the irresistible rise of gender as notion and concept from the social to the consulting room on one hand, and on the other from political claim to psychoanalytic theoretical elaboration, and now the effectiveness of the notion of sisterhood continuing to illuminate the coordinates in continuous metamorphosis of structure, libido, our knowledge.

Yes, I consider gender a terrible child of psychoanalysis resulting from the circulation of unconscious knowledge about the sexual by psychoanalysis itself; this assigns to it, to psychoanalysis, moral responsibilities and an ethical requirement, which this essay’s contribution demonstrates where there is no need to retreat before what seems mad at first glance. Sisterhood, from this point of view, is the first cousin of gender, and godmother of the crying truth of madness.

The Phallus of Our Sisters, the Half-Soft of Our Brothers

Sisterhood is not the reverse of fraternity nor its reversal. This reduction, this simplification only holds for the Phallus-bearers and patronesses of psychoanalysis whose comments, in the form of professorial sanctions, most often accuse of naivety, puerility or immaturity struck with misrecognition the ensemble of these voices now perceptible in social space that are feminisms, gender studies, struggles against sexual inequalities, MeToo, violence against women or even transidentities with claimed contempt. No, it is not that, sisterhood. The content of Alain Rey’s Historical Dictionary of the French Language will need to be revised as it is no longer up to date on these entries.

Just as the not-all phallic is not the counterpart of an imaginary all-phallic, but indeed a space necessary for the phallic to hold there the possibility of its ex-sistence guaranteeing the vivacity of language on its orbit: its matter, its logic, its sign. At the shoreline of its acquisitions, sisterhood reopens what fraternity began to establish, under the high patronage of the Universal, about 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.

That being said, these reactions motivated by doubt, reproach, fear or questioning (in the rarest case) ask to be interpreted if we want to move forward. The notion of sisterhood, just like that of gender, occasionally undergoes a sort of trial well before being seriously put to work. The entire set of variations linked to these notions are also concerned, among them: trans questions, neo-feminisms versus historical feminisms, inclusive writing, etc.

These accusations, somewhat hasty, of which it is the object, have the perfume of negative therapeutic reactions, that of reflex defenses mobilized against the unheard-of, marking a characterized refusal to learn from the symptom in its current events nor from new twists of language, from which it would be astonishing that psychoanalytic experience chooses to deprive itself when it must perpetuate itself by reinventing itself, which the book Sisters nourishes us and convinces us with tact by treating modalities of transmissions freed from the throes of inheritance: acute current event of the psychoanalysis world, today.

All these hostile manifestations, beyond simply not being sustained by demanding questioning, seem to activate in a counterattack targeting the peril at work against the symbolic Phallus to the point of making it waver, even if the view blurs to the point of confusing it in its different nuances, this Phallus.

Let us specify our purpose. It is not so much the symbolic Phallus as the one called imaginary that finds itself disturbed and degendered now submitted as it is to this happy attempt at inclusion by these new denunciations of the effects and misdeeds of symbolic castration faced with the unshared reign of the exception guaranteeing the Universal, pledge of fraternity. Indeed, the symbolic Phallus is probably not as immediately affected as it appears, not first, by these sexual current events, it is in a second time, after the imaginary Phallus has been enjoined to transform itself under the effect of new forms of libidinal expressions, and symbolic castration (symbolic Phallus) evaluated as damage and no longer only as civilizational necessities.

But curiously, and not so much, it is indeed the attacks on the symbolic Phallus that provoke the most reactions, oppositions and worried comments faced with the subjectivity of our era. This is not a coincidence. And this indicates to us that the underlying movement of these current events does not first concern the imaginary father, but the real father: what the expressions of the MeToo movement notably also show, where really accomplished crimes are denounced, as well as the symbolic losses they produce, where they prevent living, where they kill, and not only the real privation (of organ or object) suffered from the imaginary father which can also be the object of a reflected fraternal combat (bringing together men, women, trans) useful to the civilizational effort. No penis envy in MeToo, or in transfeminism, let it be said and convinced; all current clinical practice proves it, it is indisputable and non-demonstrable. The form of phallic stakes in the social field has begun to modify itself, it no longer aims as spontaneously at that of the little phallus that certain speaking-beings have in their underwear, but much more deeply the path from substance to object where the form that can take in its time a bit of the real of sex is established.

Thus, the Phallus is quite confirmed and honored, let’s say it simply, by these recent social and sexual evolutions, probably also those to come even if we cannot anticipate them. Confirmation of the Phallus not only in its function, but in what it is and what it is not, in our way, the one where we prefer it to be the missing signifier and a function sustaining the Subject’s inscription in language, in structure, further from its forced uses that make it a pretext for stunning interpretations of existing theory when it is about avoiding having to build a new one.

In other words, joking: the Phallus is nicotine. The best drug capable of uniting with all others without major negative interactions, and the power to potentiate the effects of other substances incorporated with it. The Phallus is the lack for all, and for all singularly established: no need to be the same to be together.

So we can stop smoking!

But any new form presenting itself sees all sorts of accusations, trials of intentions rise up. As if the form induced by matter were capable of deforming matter itself, while it is only the form that reforms itself in our current events. Many psychoanalysts are astonished and offended by this. Paradoxical reaction if we think about what the experience of the pass in particular has taught us radically: on one hand, that simple disturbances or openings to the imaginary do not guarantee access to the real, except to take bladders for lanterns, and on the other hand that the vacillations of the imaginary are almost always illustrated in fearful tensions about the symbolic that would be in danger. Is there confusion of register? Would the denied knowledge of experience be seized again in these anxieties of seeing the Phallus disappear while it is already missing. This panicked anxiety translates, in my sense, a recurrence, a regression in our experience. Let us rejoice, regressing quite often precedes an advance in treatment and the modification of a libidinal economy at the measure of desire. So, perhaps, are we holding the right end?

The real is encountered again in its impenetrability, and if this real as such does not change, its experience modifies its effect and scope, invites us to treat the symbolic from the real, where the symbolic is confronted with its imperialism: in covering the real it fails, even more than the imaginary stumbles on the form of which it makes itself vector between the impossible and the sign.

Applied to the book’s content, this allows us to access a modern reading of Freudian propositions in particular, and Lacanian ones also about the symptom, those which give a shared dimension to the unshareable trauma. The shared symptom, typical of the sisterhood bond, differs from the social edification of fraternity charged with the perpetuation of Oedipal civilization, where I read sisterhood as being the one charged with its treatment. As such, the clairvoyant reading and Freudian interpretation by Lippi and Maniglier of Freud’s text and the famous girls of the dormitory enamored with an erratic common, enjoins us to deepen what reads much better, today, with MeToo, than we did not see so well before these young girls dared to leave their dormitory, equivalent of their closet, to celebrate in public space the advent of another possible bond.

In other words, two uses of the same fracture, that of the sexual relationship that there is not, opening to two possible circulations of libido, that of fraternity working to make love from sex, making love of sex, while sisterhood heals love of sex, curing love of sex. Sexual relationship that there is not except incestuous will say Lacan, I add HIV contaminations, this real object with notably formidable imaginary effects whose epidemic clinic for forty years continues to explore the consequences of a certain relationship between sexes contaminating each other.

The unconsciously shared symptom functions as imaginary Phallus, where it replaces the sharing of women by the brothers of the horde, it is as such a path of access healed from sex to the symbolic, despite trauma, in favor of love without the systematic normative need to articulate itself to the symbolic Phallus of the imaginary father as the only axis of survival in feminine hystericization or feminine madness (pleonasm): nothing but paths of failure both political and social… must we content ourselves with this? From the real father whose crimes are denounced, a sororal symptom offers another healing to the unspeakable and uncessable trauma: the solidarity of the solitary/singular affectively available to each other. No doubt there is here a connection with this other delicate notion that is care, surpassed for the occasion where the latter is not founded on psychic unity nor on any other common expected than that recognized by the brother honored by the mobilization of dear sisters.

Further, sisterhood is revealing of a beyond of Community where a practice of identity as matter of trauma proves capable of establishing a common not founded on the simplistic death of individuals constituting, by their disappearance, the foundations of said community. A Community that departs from the common identity of brothers united at the source of their fratricidal wars, to prefer the common identification recognized and celebrated for the occasion to the point of vivifying Freudian propositions, notably, where it confirms the opportunity of a union activated by psychic movement, active, proactive, attentive to the drive more than to its object. This to the point of perceiving the premises of an ethics of the drive distant from the reign of the object.

Would this not be the entrance to a path of thought giving access to the recognition of Psychoanalysis as sororal symptom itself, sister Sigmund?

This can and should keenly interest analysts inscribed in groups, associations or schools, in other words in these valid forms of psychoanalysis organization dating from the last century. They have much to learn from what presents itself to them to the point of troubling them, making them retreat by reflex, if they still aspire to reinvent psychoanalysis and treat the aporias identified and fought in its own field which still sees no stable and lasting openings to sexual minorities in its ranks, whether on the couch or in the chair. No need to speak of the university institution which could be added to the list of morbid configurations of unconscious knowledge when it is taken as a matter to teach: I have resigned from them, from some as from others, and rejoice in having ensured my survival there, as Subject and as practitioner of psychoanalysis.

A sororal community is no doubt more enlightened, more woke or aware, on its structure, its impasses and its potential new, necessary, accessible, possible, happy and desirable creations.

It will also be necessary to resume the work of analyzing bonds of solidarity having emerged on the occasion of the AIDS epidemic among gay men, faggots, MSM. I had not felt, when I entered Act Up-Paris at the time that we were in a dormitory, yet we said my sister when we mocked our commitments and the comments provoked in others, fraternal spectators, adding thank you for your struggle to mock the mass’s inactivity to which we responded with this incredible pajama party between girlfriends that activism knew how to be for a time… before being caught up by brothers jealous of shared laughter and tears.

The sororal bond is not the cancellation of structure, quite the contrary, it is a new practice of it, perhaps even a precision of possible orientations of the Subject in structure; it is what allows this additional opening to what we had not yet encountered and already been able to put to work; it allows, perhaps definitively, to stop believing in the rock of castration as we have collectively deformed Freud’s purpose on the biological functioning as rock,where the father of psychoanalysis had not failed, there again, to leave an opening to surpassing: if the anatomical body makes a cut between beings, their tears like their drops of blood remain infinitely more shareable to them: let us think that love of the product is not that of the object, or that the object with a thousand forms (mixable substances) surpasses the monolithic object, or again from which to understand that the unary trait is not a unitary trait.

Sticking to fraternity bearing a sororal negativity is not sufficient, sisterhood, also full of a negative dialectic is a positivity in sight, we can no longer ignore its form, its productions invite us to let go of the objectal railing at the very place where it limits us, and prefer the creative wandering of the non-dupes who know how to deal with the worst… by using the father, without serving him anymore: because it is reasonable.

Psychoanalysis has succeeded in passing from organ to its representation, from penis to phallus, from Phallus signifier of desire to Phallus signifier of jouissance, etc. it can probably venture further still in its knowledge of sexual continuity full of variations and now approach the beyond of the beyond of the Phallus, which is not the beyond of the not-all phallic but rather its elsewhere, which I designate by outside-Phallus which is nonetheless phallic, by finding one’s way at least, which I write x, we will return to this.

On Inclusive Writing

It is astounding to read and hear the reactions and contestations to the recourse to inclusivity in writing, noting from now on that oral inclusivity does not make the object of as many critiques as its applications to writing. Which can make us think that attention is here focused on the letter more than on the signifier, perhaps the symbol more than the sign.

Inclusive writing, Silvia and Patrice’s book demonstrates it, is not a posture of petty white bourgeois in need of cheap and easily accessible perverse fantasies, but an authentic translation as we approach translation and the untranslatable between languages: something that psychoanalysts have more than others experienced since the first Freudian texts put into circulation in their original versions or their first translations, then their rewriting/translation in the Complete Works, notably.

Inclusive writing consists, in my experience of psychoanalytic practice, that of writing as author and that of reader of texts by other authors, in an authentic work of translation of the untranslatable, namely the emergence into discourse and speech of a new release of the real of sex inviting the treatment of the symbolic order. If the real of sex has been illustrated, quite widely until now, in the heteros which says what separates and sustains subjects, beings and individuals at the base of our sexuality fantasy – where our sexual stakes in lack of reality are expressed -, we are manifestly approaching a decisive moment of the traversal of this fantasy that I qualify as hetero-patriarch.

Because it is indeed, contrary to many received or disappointed ideas, about seriously taking into account what is said, today. Uses of language, practices of language, of which speech in particular, evolve constantly. Some of their current events are passing, others inscribe themselves more durably in the evolution of language, its necessary preservation. Now, we can note that in discourse a new sex has imposed itself: Trans. Alongside Man and Woman, Trans has settled not only in speeches, but also in discourse to the point that the transitivity of signifiers has been vivified, is vivified, perhaps even brought back to the taste of the day against its established and functional habits. Which relaunches no less than the Phallus itself, offering us the happy possibility of apprehending otherwise, by traversing it at new expense, the object relation of the word with the elements of the sentence. Transitivity which is at the foundation of inter-signifier dynamics sewn with bonds and gaps, hollows and bumps between which the cause of the desire of the divided Subject lets itself be heard, gives itself to see and read, to write from its prehistory of cry, of jaculations carried outside the body where the conditions of a possible social bond articulated to the use of language are established, as far as possible from the risk of its mistake.

On the letter, I was saying, we spontaneously brace ourselves, seized with fright before the risk of a symbolic attack where we do not see that it is, there too, first the imaginary that is in question, where form does not wait for matter, but informs itself of it as of life to embrace its conditions, the possibilities of its realization and the quality of its presence.

Let us look further, or closer, and reassure ourselves. What gives itself to be read and heard continues to forge a path on the track of the unknown that holds us.

With Enlightened Structure, Accentuated Sexuation

What can all this give us access to, notably on a theoretical level?

The Phallus is confirmed, and even relaunched. It and its phallic function, the stakes of the phallic among which the not-all phallic completes our understanding of the phallic not by uncompleting it, but by extending it. To this, I add the outside-Phallus, as the beyond of its beyond (fixed in not-all).

At the edge of this extension, whose reflexive or clinical practice is potentially reinforced by a thought of sisterhood, or of gender, presents itself a new space, a new field of sexuation, which I designate by a-sexuation. Such as is the result of the clinic of gender in psychoanalysis and of the sororal perspective, which I did not name thus before deepening my reflections with Silvia and Patrice, whom I take into my theoretical wanderings. A-sexuation is to sexuation what the not-all phallic is to the phallic, namely that it is not its inverse nor its opposite. A-sexuation designates what relying on sexuation, where the relationship of the subject of the unconscious to the phallic function and to jouissance is articulated, partially objects to it at the very place where it extends it: this outside-Phallus (which is not its beyond or its refusal) which makes possible the exploration still awaiting of what it is about the function of castration (of which saying no to the phallic function) in reality, to the imaginary and not only to the symbolic as the experience of psychoanalysis has been able, until now, to study it widely, by reducing it too often to the rank of negative reaction while it constitutes, everyone agrees in theory, always a truly fruitful and salutary and creative proposition. What the formulas of sexuation, proposed by Lacan, deny of the psychic bisexuality constitutive of the Subject of the unconscious as situation, not preferentially an orientation (major secondary effect of undue belief in sexual orientation endowed with meaning), reappears in sexual current events in offers of perversion of the phallic function (there’s no reason to abandon the Phallus, even if it means reinventing it a bit, in its margins) where the Phallus is outmaneuvered by object a, cause of desire, to the point of giving consistency to the dextrorotatory side of the Borromean knot on which we could spend hours and hours exploring its mysteries. What from sex imposes itself on the speaking-being can be thought further from its real put into form, and no longer preferentially from its symbolic resonances. A-sexuation accounts, in a table of formulas to come, for the relationships of the Subject to the function of castration and its object relation, dynamized by the perversion of the phallic, in the neighborhood of sexuation which accounts for the relationships of the Subject to the phallic function and to jouissance, dynamized by the acquisition of the Phallus; its fantasy, distinctly from the hetero-patriarch of Lacanian sexuation, can perhaps be called a-patride.

All this should be developed under other conditions…, but one thing is certain, this official entry of sisterhood into our vocabularies already produces its effects in my practice and thought.

Psychoanalysis, Still?

Several times, the question has been asked around the release of this book: is this still psychoanalysis?

I remain very surprised by this question, for several reasons probably. First of all, I measure how difficult it is to appreciate to what extent psychoanalysis has distanced itself from its time by dint of wanting to stay in its own. The psychoanalysis of which Silvia and Patrice speak is for me the only existing one, the one I encountered the day Françoise Dolto convinced me of an intention in the form of desire, formulated as a promise of action the badly-started, psychoanalysis can save them It is psychoanalysis constituting itself at the margins of forms crushing matter, that of the mad whom I today say all mad women, which caught me, I was twelve. I do not know, in my flesh and my thoughts, psychoanalysis too instituted which, building itself on the solidarity of hysterical marginals and others, only lets itself be encountered in submission to the abusive authority of a knowledge carried in knowledge. That of the University, that of almost all houses of psychoanalysis (associations, schools). That whose discourse no longer has any kind of relationship with daily clinical experience, and which however, being unavoidable, makes the necessity of real listening, listening to the real: the only perspective capable of keeping us distant from the assurances and guarantees sought by the speaking-being to the point of losing the thread of their desire.

This sororal psychoanalysis, I understand it thus on reading this book, is the only psychoanalysis that is worth in my eyes, that of my life, of my psychoanalytic cure, of my passage from couch to chair, the one which from my first experiences as social worker in the street with highly marginalized drug-using populations runs public space by slipping through interstices, that of back kitchens more than shop windows, that of cellars and squats, or hospital rooms where the frame walks around, the one that troubles and not the one that assures, the one that does not retreat and not the one that comments and professes, the one that passes and not the one that has passed, the one that can do without said Phallus to prefer x to it, closer to The Thing in Duras than to original penis envy. X, which is not that of Madonna in Madame X, although a new chapter of Madonna’s Studies can open here. No, an x that assumes being the unknown of the equation, whose matter and form always remain missing enough for attempts at clarifications of meaning, representation and the impossible in which our lives journey to activate with it/them.

One fraternizes with an enemy, one sisterizes with all and others.

To conclude, and as proof of what remains intangible in certain respects, even if humor knows how to illustrate its weaknesses, I finish my purpose on this revisited performativity: Silvia Lippi, Patrice Maniglier, do you accept to take, Vincent Bourseul here present, as sister? While knowing that the question does not arise, here where cooptation would have no meaning.

PS: The following table is not that of a-sexuation which will come later.

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