{"id":11004,"date":"2012-05-30T21:13:06","date_gmt":"2012-05-30T19:13:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/?p=11004"},"modified":"2012-05-30T21:14:13","modified_gmt":"2012-05-30T19:14:13","slug":"the-real-in-the-21st-century-by-jacques-alain-miller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/2012\/05\/the-real-in-the-21st-century-by-jacques-alain-miller\/","title":{"rendered":"The real in the 21st century by Jacques-Alain Miller"},"content":{"rendered":"

Presentation of the Theme of the IXth Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Buenos Aires, 27th<\/sup>\u00a0April 2012<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I will not make you wait very long for the theme of the next Congress.<\/p>\n

\u00a0A new series of three themes has begun with this Congress on the Symbolic Order in the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0Century.\u00a0 It will be a series specifically dedicated to the \u2018aggiornamento\u2019 \u2013 as one says in Italian \u2013 to the bringing up to date of our analytic practice, its context, its conditions, its novel co-ordinates in the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0Century, with the growth of what Freud called the discontents, and which Lacan deciphered as the impasses, the dead-ends, of civilization.<\/p>\n

For us it is a question of leaving behind the 20th<\/sup>\u00a0Century, leaving it behind us, and renewing our practice in a world itself amply restructured by two historical factors, two discourses: the discourse of science and the discourse of capitalism.\u00a0 These are the two prevalent discourses of modernity which, since their respective appearances, have begun to destroy the traditional structure of human experience.\u00a0 The combined domination of these two discourses, one supporting the other, has grown to such an extent that this domination has succeeded in diluting, perhaps even breaking, this tradition in its deepest foundations.\u00a0 In this way we have seen the tremendous change in the symbolic order, whose corner-stone has been fractured: that is, the corner-stone – the Name of the Father – which is, as Lacan says with extreme precision, the Name of the Father\u00a0according to tradition<\/em>.\u00a0 The Name of the Father according to tradition has been touched, has been devalued by the combination of the two discourses of science and capitalism.<\/p>\n

The Name of the Father, this famous key function of Lacan\u2019s first teaching, is, one could say, a function now recognised across the entire analytic field, whether Lacanian or not.\u00a0 This key function, the Name of the Father, has been discounted by Lacan himself, depreciated in the course of his teaching, ending up being no more than a\u00a0sinthome<\/em>, that is, a supplement for a hole.\u00a0 One could say in this ambit, in this assembly, one could say as a short cut that this hole filled by the symptom name of the father is the non-existence of the sexual proportion in the human species, the species of living beings that speak.\u00a0 And the depreciation of the name of the name of the father in the clinic introduces an unprecedented perspective, which Lacan expresses by saying\u00a0everyone is mad, delusional<\/em>.\u00a0 This is not a joke, it translates the extension of the category of madness to everyone who speaks; that everyone suffers from the same lack of knowing what to do about sexuality.\u00a0 This phrase, this aphorism, indicates that which the so-called clinical structures have in common: neurosis, psychosis, perversion.\u00a0 And of course it shakes, undermines, the difference between neurosis and psychosis, which has until now been the basis of psychoanalytic diagnosis and an inexhaustible theme of the teachings.<\/p>\n

For the next Congress I propose entering further into the consequences of this perspective, studying the real in the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0Century.\u00a0 This word \u2018the real\u2019, Lacan makes a use of it that is his own, that was not always the same, which we need to clarify for ourselves.\u00a0 But I believe there is a way of saying it that has a sort of intuitive evidence.\u00a0 For anyone \u2013 it is already a lot to say this \u2013 for anyone who lives in the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0Century, beyond us Lacanians, there is at least a sort of evidence for those who have been formed in the 20th<\/sup>\u00a0Century, and who now for a certain time belong to the 21stCentury.\u00a0 There is a great disorder in the real. Well, this is the very formula that I propose for the Congress in Paris in 2014:\u00a0A Great Disorder of the Real, in the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0Century<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I wish to now communicate to you the first thoughts that this formula has provoked in me, this title whose formulation I came across two days ago.\u00a0 They are suggestive thoughts framed to launch our discussion in the School One which will last for two years, and not of course to settle this discussion.<\/p>\n

The first thought that occurred to me in this respect, which I have accepted as it came, is the following: previously the real was called nature.\u00a0 Nature was the name of the real when there was no disorder in the real.\u00a0 When nature was the name of the real you could say, as Lacan did, that the real always returns to the same place.\u00a0 Only in this epoch, in this epoch in which the real disguised itself as nature, the real appeared as the most evident, the most elevated, manifestation of the very concept of order.\u00a0 The return of the real in the same place is of course opposed to the signifier, in as much as what characterises the signifier is displacement,\u00a0Entstellung<\/em>, as Freud says.\u00a0 The signifier is connected, is substituted in a metaphorical or a metonymic mode, and always returns in unexpected, surprising places.\u00a0 By contrast, the real, in this epoch where it was confused with nature, was characterised by not surprising, one could calmly await its appearance in the same place, on the same date.<\/p>\n

This is something indicated by Lacan\u2019s examples to illustrate the return of the real in the same place.\u00a0 His examples are the annual return of the seasons, the spectacle of the skies and the heavenly bodies.\u00a0 You could say… based on examples from all antiquity: Chinese rituals of course used mathematical calculations of the position of the heavenly bodies, etc.\u00a0 You could say that in this epoch the real as nature had the function of the Other of the Other, that is, that the real was itself the guarantee of the symbolic order.\u00a0 The agitation, the rhetorical agitation of the signifier in human speech was framed by a weft of signifiers fixed like the heavenly bodies.\u00a0 Nature \u2013 this is its very definition \u2013 is defined by being ordered, that is, by the conduct of the symbolic and the real, to such an extent that according to the most ancient traditions all human order should imitate natural order.\u00a0 And it is well known, for example, that the family as natural formation served as the model for putting human groupings in order and the Name of the Father was the key to the symbolised real.<\/p>\n

There is no shortage of examples in the history of ideas of this role of nature.\u00a0 There is such an abundance and so little time that I will not take up these themes today.\u00a0 The history of the idea of nature needs to be investigated, with the formula that nature was the real, that it was order.\u00a0 For example, the world in Aristotelian physics was ordered in two invariable dimensions: the world above separated from the sublunary world, as one says, and each being seeks its proper place.\u00a0 It is in this way that this physics functions, it is a topography, that is to say, a set of well fixed places.<\/p>\n

With the entrance of the God of creation \u2013 let us say the Christian God \u2013 this order remains valid, in as much as the nature created by God answers to his will: there is the divine order, even though there is no longer a separation of the Aristotelian worlds, the divine order which is like a law promulgated by God and incarnated in nature.\u00a0 This gives rise to the concept of natural law, and one has to view things a little from the side of Saint Thomas Aquinas\u2019 definition of natural law which gives place to a sort of imperative.\u00a0 A\u00a0noli tangere<\/em>, to say it in Latin, a \u2018do not mess with nature\u2019, because there was the sentiment that you could mess with nature, that there are human acts that go against natural law, acts of bestiality in particular, and against this\u00a0do not mess with nature<\/em>.\u00a0 And I have to say, even though it is not perhaps the sentiment of the majority here, that I consider it admirable how even today the Catholic Church fights to protect the real, the natural order of the real, in matters of reproduction, sexuality, the family etc.\u00a0 It is as if… of course they are anachronistic elements but they testify to the presence, the duration, the solidity of this ancient discourse.\u00a0 You could say that it is admirable as a lost cause, because everyone feels that the real has broken free from nature.\u00a0 From the beginning the Church perceived that the discourse of science was going to mess with the real that it was protecting as nature, but it was not enough to imprison Galileo to halt the irresistible scientific dynamic.\u00a0 Just as it is not enough to halt the dynamic of capitalism by qualifying it as\u00a0torpitudo<\/em>\u00a0in Latin, the thirst for profit, for gain \u2013 it is Saint Thomas who uses the Latin word\u00a0torpitudo\u00a0<\/em>for profit.<\/p>\n

Lost cause, but Lacan also said that the cause of the Church perhaps announces a triumph.\u00a0 And why?\u00a0 Because the real emancipated from nature is so much worse that it becomes more and more unbearable; there is something like a nostalgia for the lost order and even though it cannot be recuperated it remains in force as illusion.\u00a0 Before the actual appearance of the discourse of science the emergence of a desire to touch the real was apparent under the form of\u00a0acting<\/em>\u00a0on nature, making it obey, mobilising and utilising its power.\u00a0 How?\u00a0 Before science, and let us say a century before the appearance of the scientific discourse, this desire was manifested in what was called magic.\u00a0 Magic is something different from the conjuring tricks that we use to entertain children.\u00a0 Lacan considered it so important that in the last text of his\u00a0Ecrits<\/em>, \u2018Science and Truth\u2019, he inscribes magic as one of the four fundamental positions of truth: magic, religion, science, psychoanalysis.\u00a0 Four terms that anticipate something of the famous four discourses.\u00a0 He defines magic as the direct summons of the signifier that is in nature on the basis of the signifier of incantation.\u00a0 One speaks \u2013 one, that is, the magician \u2013 in order to make nature speak, in order to disturb it, and this already infringes on the divine order of the real, in such a way that magicians were persecuted in so far as magic was a form of witchcraft.\u00a0 But this magic, the craze for magic, was like an expression of a longing for the scientific discourse.\u00a0 This was the thesis of the erudite Francis Yates, who considers that hermeticism prepared the way for the scientific discourse.\u00a0 And it is a historical fact that Newton himself was a distinguished alchemist.\u00a0 The economist Keynes wrote about this, saying that Newton devoted more years to alchemy than he did to the laws of gravitation…\u00a0 I mention this as subjects for research, this branch of the history of science.\u00a0 But we would do better to follow Alexandre Koyr\u00e9, who insisted on the difference: magic makes nature speak where science makes it shut up.\u00a0 Magic is rhetorical incantation or purgation.\u00a0 With science speech becomes writing.\u00a0 As Galileo said: nature is written in the language of mathematics.\u00a0 We have to remember that at the extreme end of his teaching Lacan was not afraid to ask \u2013 when he no longer had the ambition to make psychoanalysis scientific \u2013 whether psychoanalysis was not a sort of magic.\u00a0 He only said it once, but it is an echo to consider.\u00a0 Of course with this begins a mutation of nature which we could express with the aphorism of Lacan: \u2018there is knowledge in the real\u2019.\u00a0 This is the novelty, something is written within nature.<\/p>\n

One went on speaking of God and of nature, but God was no more than a subject supposed to know, a subject supposed to know in the real.\u00a0 The metaphysics of the 17th<\/sup>\u00a0Century described a God of knowledge who calculates, according to Leibniz, or who is mistaken for this calculus, according to Spinoza.\u00a0 In any case it was a question of a mathematized God.\u00a0 I would say that it was the reference to God, veiling the old illusion of god, that permitted the passage from the finite cosmos to the infinite universe.\u00a0 With the infinite universe of mathematical physics nature disappears; it becomes solely a moral instance.\u00a0 With the philosophers of the 18th<\/sup>Century, with the infinite universe nature disappears and the real begins to be unveiled.<\/p>\n

Fine, but I have been asking myself about the formula\u00a0there is a knowledge in the real<\/em>.\u00a0 It would be a temptation to say that the unconscious is at this level.\u00a0 On the contrary, the supposition of a knowledge in the real appears to me to be an ultimate veil that needs to be lifted.\u00a0 If there is a knowledge in the real there is a regularity, and scientific knowledge allows prediction, it is so proud of prediction, in so far as this demonstrates the existence of laws.\u00a0 And it does not require a divine utterance of these laws for them to remain valid.\u00a0 It is by way of this idea of laws that the old idea of nature has been preserved in the very expression\u00a0the laws of nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Einstein, as Lacan remarked, referred to an honest god who rejected all chance.\u00a0 It was his way of opposing the consequences of Max Planck\u2019s quantum physics; it was, for Einstein, an attempt to restrain the discourse of science and the revelation of the real.\u00a0 Little by little physics has had to make room for \u2018uncertainty\u2019 \u2013 between commas \u2013 as for chance; that is to say rather a set of notions that threaten the supposed subject of knowledge.\u00a0 Nor has it been able to make the real and the material equivalent; with subatomic physics the levels of matter have multiplied and, let us say, the \u2018the\u2019 of matter, like the \u2018the\u2019 of the woman, disappears.\u00a0 Perhaps I can hazard a short cut here: with respect to the importance of the laws of nature one grasps the tremendous echo that Lacan\u2019s aphorism \u2018the real is without law\u2019 ought to have.\u00a0 This is the formula that testifies to a complete rupture between nature and real.\u00a0 It is a formula that decidedly severs the connection between nature and the real.\u00a0 It targets the inclusion of knowledge in the real that maintains the subordination of the subject supposed to know.\u00a0 In psychoanalysis there is no knowledge in the real, knowledge is an elucubration about the real, a real stripped of all supposed knowledge.\u00a0 At least this is what Lacan invented with his notion of the real, to the point of asking himself if this was not his symptom, if this was not the cornerstone that held together, that maintained the coherence of, his teaching.\u00a0 The real without law appears unthinkable, it is a limit idea.\u00a0 I would like, first, to say that the real is without natural law; everything, for example, that has belonged to the immutable of reproduction is in motion, in transformation.\u00a0 Whether at the level of sexuality, or of the constitution of the living human being, with all the perspectives that are appearing now, in the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0Century, to improve the biology of the species.\u00a0 The 21st<\/sup>\u00a0Century announces itself as the great century of bioengineering1<\/sup>, which will give rise to all the temptations of eugenics.\u00a0 And the best description of what we are plainly experiencing now, remains the one that Karl Marx gave in his\u00a0Communist Manifesto<\/em>\u00a0of the revolutionary effects of the discourse of capitalism \u2013 revolutionary effects on civilizations.\u00a0 I would like to read some phrases of Marx that assist a reflection on the real:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bourgeoisie cannot exist without the condition of incessant revolution of the instruments of production, and thereby of the relations of production, and with them all social relations. […] There is an incessant disturbance of all social conditions, constant uncertainty and agitation. […] All fixed and ossified relations with their train of beliefs and ideas venerated for centuries are swept away…\u201d \u2013 the clearest expression of the break with tradition.\u00a0 \u201cAll that is solid vanishes into the air, everything sacred is profaned.\u201d\u00a02<\/sup><\/p>\n

I would say that capitalism and science combine, they have combined, to make nature disappear.\u00a0 And what is left by the vanishing of nature, what is left is that which we call the real, that is, a remainder.\u00a0 And, by structure, disordered.\u00a0 The real is touched on all sides by the advances of the binary capitalism-science, in a disordered way, randomly, without being able to recuperate any idea of harmony.<\/p>\n

There was a time, when Lacan taught the unconscious as a knowledge in the real, when he said\u00a0structured like a language<\/em>.\u00a0 And in that epoch he sought laws, the laws of speech on the basis of the structure of recognition in Hegel \u2013 \u2018recognise in order to be recognised\u2019 \u2013 the laws of the signifier, the relation of cause and effect between signifier and signified, in metaphor and metonymy.\u00a0 He also presented, ordered, this knowledge in graphs, under the pre-eminence of the Name of the Father in the clinic and the phallic ordering of the libido. But he already opened up another dimension with\u00a0lalangue<\/em>, in as much as there are laws of language but no law of the dispersion and diversity of languages.\u00a0 Each language is formed by contingency, by chance.\u00a0 In this dimension, the traditional unconscious \u2013 for us, the Freudian unconscious \u2013 appears to us as an elucubration of knowledge about a real.\u00a0 Let us say a transferential elucubration of knowledge, when one superimposes on this real the function of the subject supposed to know, which another living being consents to incarnate.\u00a0 Yes, the unconscious can be ordered, in as much as it is discourse, but only in the analytic experience.\u00a0 I would say that the transferential elucubration consists in giving meaning to the libido, which is the condition for the unconscious to be interpretable.\u00a0 This supposes a previous interpretation, that is, that the unconscious itself interprets, as I have developed previously.<\/p>\n

What does the unconscious interpret?<\/p>\n

In order to be able to give an answer to this question one has to introduce a term, a word, and this word is the real.\u00a0 In the transference one introduces the subject supposed to know in order to interpret the real.\u00a0 On this basis one constitutes a knowledge not in the real but about the real.\u00a0 Here we locate the aphorism \u2018the real has no meaning\u2019, not having meaning is a criterion of the real, in as much as it is when one has arrived at the outside meaning that one can think that one has emerged from the fictions produced by a want to say\u00a03<\/sup>.\u00a0\u00a0The real has no meaning<\/em>\u00a0is equivalent to\u00a0the real does not answer to any wanting to say<\/em>; one gives it meaning, there is a donation of meaning by way of a fantasmatic elucubration.\u00a0 The testimonies of the pass, these jewels of our Congresses, are accounts of one\u2019s fantasmatic elucubration, of how it is expressed and dissolved in the analytic experience in order to be reduced to a nucleus, to an impoverished real which is sketched as the pure encounter with\u00a0lalangue<\/em>\u00a0and its effects of jouissance in the body.\u00a0 It is sketched as a pure shock of the drive.\u00a0 The real, understood in this way, is neither a cosmos nor a world, it is also not an order: it is a piece, an a-systematic fragment, separated from the fictional knowledge that was produced from this encounter.\u00a0 And this encounter of\u00a0lalangue<\/em>\u00a0and the body does not respond to any prior law, it is contingent and always appears perverse \u2013 this encounter and its consequences \u2013 because this encounter is translated by a deviation of jouissance with respect to that which jouissance ought to be, which remains in force as a dream.<\/p>\n

The real invented by Lacan is not the real of science, it is a contingent real, random, in as much as the natural law of the relation between the sexes is lacking.\u00a0 It is a hole in the knowledge included in the real.\u00a0 Lacan made use of the language of mathematics \u2013 the best support for science.\u00a0 In the formulas of sexuation, for example, he tried to grasp the dead-ends of sexuality in a weft of mathematical logic.\u00a0 This was like a heroic attempt to make psychoanalysis into a science of the real in the way that logic is.\u00a0 But that can\u2019t be done without imprisoning jouissance in the phallic function, in a symbol; it implies a symbolisation of the real, it implies referring to the binary man-woman as if living beings could be partitioned so neatly, when we already see in the real of the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0Century a growing disorder of sexuation.\u00a0 This is already a secondary construction that intervenes after the initial impact of the body and\u00a0lalangue<\/em>, which constitutes a real without law, without logical rule.\u00a0 Logic is only introduced afterwards, with the elucubration, the fantasy, the subject supposed to know, and with psychoanalysis.<\/p>\n

Until now, under the inspiration of the 20th<\/sup>\u00a0Century, our clinical cases as we recount them have been logical-clinical constructions under transference.\u00a0 But the cause-effect relation is a scientific prejudice supported by the subject supposed to know.\u00a0 The cause-effect relation is not valid at the level of the real without law, it is not valid except with a rupture between cause and effect.\u00a0 Lacan said it as a joke: if one understands how an interpretation works, it is not an analytic interpretation.\u00a0 In psychoanalysis as Lacan invites us to practice it, we experience the rupture of the cause-effect link, the opacity of the link, and this is why we speak of the unconscious.\u00a0 I am going to say it in another way: psychoanalysis takes place at the level of the repressed and of the interpretation of the repressed thanks to the subject supposed to know.<\/p>\n

But in the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0Century it is a question of psychoanalysis exploring another dimension, that of the defence against the real without law and without meaning.\u00a0 Lacan indicates this direction with his notion of the real, as Freud does with his mythological concept of the drive.\u00a0 The Lacanian unconscious, that of the latest Lacan, is at the level of the real, let us say for convenience, below the Freudian unconscious.\u00a0 Therefore, in order to enter into the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0Century, our clinic will have to be centred on dismantling the defence, disordering the defence against the real.\u00a0 The transferential unconscious in analysis is already a defence against the real.\u00a0 And in the transferential unconscious there is still an intention, a\u00a0wanting to say<\/em>, a\u00a0wanting you to tell me<\/em>. When in fact the real unconscious is not intentional:\u00a0 it is encountered under the modality of \u2018that\u2019s it\u2019, which you could say is like our \u2018amen\u2019.<\/p>\n

Various questions will be opened up for us at the next Congress: the redefinition of the desire of the analyst, which is not a pure desire, as Lacan says, not a pure infinity of metonymy but – this is how it appears to us- the desire to reach the real, to reduce the other to its real, and to liberate it of meaning.\u00a0 I would add that Lacan invented a way of representing the real with the Borromean knot.\u00a0 We will ask ourselves how valid this representation is, of what use it is to us now.\u00a0 Lacan made use of the knot to arrive at this irremediable zone of existence where one can go no further with two.\u00a0 The passion for the Borromean knot led Lacan to the same zone as Oedipus at Colonus, where one finds the absolute absence of charity, of fraternity, of any human sentiment: this is where the search for the real stripped of meaning leads us.<\/p>\n

Thank you.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0Translated from the Spanish by Roger Litten<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

_____________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

[1]<\/sup>\u00a0In English in the original [TN]<\/p>\n

[2]<\/sup> Translated from the Spanish [TN]<\/p>\n

[3]<\/sup> \u201cQuerer decir\u201d: \u2018to mean\u2019 and also \u2018to want to say\u2019.[TN]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Presentation of the Theme of the IXth Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis<\/p>\n

Buenos Aires, 27th\u00a0April 2012<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":11005,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11004"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11009,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11004\/revisions\/11009"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}