1

Editorial

PAPERS N 7
List of members of
the Action Committee
of the School One
Paola Bolgiani
Gustavo Dessal
Mercedes Iglesias
Ram Mandil
Laure Naveau
(Coordinator)

Silvia Salman
Florencia Fernandez
Coria Shanahan

Responsible for the

edition:
Marta Davidovich

Paola Bolgiani
The five texts published in this seventh
issue of PAPERS keep their focus on
the main theme A Real for the XXIst
Century, which will have us gathering
together in Paris in April. They
constitute in depth explorations and
debates that originate from JacquesAlain Miller's presentation of the theme
of the Congress.
We can read this texts by ordering them
according to two working threads: the
first one is an interrogation of the redefinition of the analyst's desire, which
contains contributions from Giovanna di
Giovanni, Santiago Castellanos and
Raffaele Calabria. The second one
includes contributions from Despina
Andropoulou and Marcela Antelo,
which articulate -starting from Miller's
indications- respectively the effects of
the combination of two discourses, the
discourse of Science and the discourse
of Capitalism and magic as the
longing for a Scientific discourse, as
inspired by Frances Yates' thesis.
Giovanna di Giovanni's text What are
we to do with the burning Real?
opens the present issue with the
fundamental question around the ethics
of
psychoanalysis
and
the
psychoanalytic act, oriented by the
Real, illustrating with a clinical vignette
how the analyst is he who accompanies
the subject to the threshold of action,
which opens for each one onto the Real,
a Real to be re-dreamt each time by
each subject, in the contingency of each

case.
In his text, Santiago Castellanos
illustrates, from his own analytical path,
how the analyst's desire is a desire to
reach the Real, to reduce the Other to its
own Real and thus liberate it of
meaning. His experience testifies to
how his analysis, as it opened the
experience of the unconscious for him,
made
him
passionate
about
psychoanalysis and in love with truth,
but also that he needed to be cured
from that in order to operate within an
ethics that is oriented by the Real of the
symptom.
Raffaele Calabria continues along the
same interrogation, showing the
partiality of the dimension of truth and
falsehood, in favour of the discovery -in
analysis- of the signifying dimension as
soaked in the Real, the Real of
jouissance which leaves out of the game
both meaning in each of its articulations
and their own meaning in itself. By
going back to a concept previously used
by Nunburg in a 1926 article, recovery
intended not as recuperation but rather
as restoration, return - he illustrates,
with two clinical cases, how a clinic
oriented by the Real leads not so much
towards that kind of restitutio that the
term recovery evokes, but rather it
promises something new, on the
condition that we allow ourselves to be
deserted by the emptying of meaning
that the analytic operation, through the
unconscious signifying articulation,
requires.
Despina Andropoulou offers a very
fine reading of the consequences of the
combination of the scientific discourse
with the capitalist discourse, where the
latter has turned into a Financial
Capitalism
and
Economy
is
subordinated to the power of Finance.
The effect of unrestrained individualism
that derives from it, leaving the subjects

more in a state of Hilflosigkeit than a

state of anguish, can paradoxically be
the doorway to seeking an analyst,
whereas boredom, as a sign of
resistance against a universal Real,
can push towards an invention.
Finally, Marcela Antelo's text, inspired
by Miller's suggestions on Frances
Yates' thesis, analyses Yates' thought,
highlighting not only the extraordinary
finesse of her work on the passage from
the pre-scientific Era to a time
dominated by the scientific method
-thus emphasising a paradigm change
that concerns the body, calculation and
knowledge-, but also her example as a
researcher who, like Freud, promoted a
politics of knowledge against the not
wanting to know. One who followed
marginal topics, footnotes of official
history, since, as the author points out,
What one generation omits forms the
basis for the ignorance of the next.
Enjoy the reading!
Translated by Anna Milleri

What are we to do with

the burning Real?

Giovanna di Giovanni
Psychoanalysis in the 21st Century
A man's life occurs, Freud and Lacan
tell us, between an unknowable Real
and a dreamt reality.
Indeed, when something happens in
their dreams that threatens to cross over
into the real, it distresses them so much
that they immediately awaken, in other

words, they go on dreaming.1 But the

human being, differently from the stone
which, no matter how many times it is
thrown it still does not get used to it, the
human being accustoms himself to his
dream2 and it is the fear to change
dream that prevents him from taking a
new path, even in the cure. There is
indeed something of death in letting go
of a habit even if painful-, to open
oneself to the unknown.

interest the future generations, for what

it allows the human being see about
himself, of the unknowable Real that
inhabits him and propels him. In the
face of this, reality itself is a defence 5,
interwoven by dreams, with the veil of
the fantasy, not to be blinded as Oedipus
was. The unconscious discourse
whereby the subject is spoken,
circumscribes for him the core of this
unknowable Real.

In the path of his life-dream there is no

instinct to guide the human being in the
search for his own good, in a world
where there is nothing more than
shadows to him, shadows that are
mistaken for the prey and he himself is
the shadow's prey3. What man finds is
not the good he longs for, but rather the
trace with which the signifier makes the
nostalgia for the forever lost object
eternal.

Man's yearning however, still remains

the same, the search for happiness, of
the longed for and totalising fulfilment,
through the mirages that each Era
sparks. The subject even enters analysis
searching for happiness, ascribing it to
the analyst in the transference. However
to guarantee that the subject will in
some way be able to find happiness
even in analysis is a form of fraud.6

From its very inception, psychoanalysis

asked about the mystery of man: a being
exiled from
biology into language, who inexplicably
drifts towards his own destruction, a
desperate affirmation of life that is the
purest form we can find of the death
drive.4
Freud tells us that it is especially
because of this that psychoanalysis will
1

J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,

On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love
and Knowledge (Encore). Book XX, W. W.
Norton and Co., London, 1999, p 56.
2
J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Book VII,W.
W. Norton and Co., London, 1999
3
J. Lacan, De la psychanalyse dans ses
rapports avec la ralit, in Autres Ecrits , Seuil,
Paris, 2001, p.355
4
J. Lacan., The Function and Field of
Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,
in Ecrits The First Complete English
Edition, W. W. Norton and Co., London,
2006, p 263 [translation modified].

What the subject will find in analysis is

a kernel of painful jouissance, with
which he will have to come to terms
with, his singular Real devoid of any
meaning. Lacan interrogates the
analyst's position: Are we analysts
simply something that welcomes the
suppliant then, something that gives him
a place of refuge? Are we simply, but it
is already a lot, something that must
respond to a demand, to the demand not
to suffer, at least without understanding
why? in the hope that through
understanding the subject will be freed,
not only from his ignorance but from
suffering itself. 7
In current times, the discourse of
Science, massified by technique, strives
at stemming every possible question.
For everything there is a ready-made
answer, a fix, a remedy, if not today, in
5

6
7

J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,

The ethics of Psychoanalysis Book VII,W.
W. Norton and Co., London, 1999, p 232.
J. Lacan, op. cit., p 303.
J. Lacan, op. cit., 8.

the near future and accessible to all.

A peculiarity of our times is indeed the
ready-made or manufacturable object.
The central lack at the core of being is
foreclosed. But the subject, as long as
he is alive, does not allow to be silenced
and returns tirelessly in symptoms that
are always changing and astutely dupe
science.
The
unknowable
but
inextinguishable Real that moves each
of us, does not allow to be blown out.
It comes back burning, it signals that
what is impossible of the sexual
relationship is there and nothing will
ever fulfil it, but it demands to be
lodged. Analysis can accompany the
subject along this path.
Eugenia is 40 and comes to see me
because, since she was 15, she eats and
vomits, keeping it a secret from
everyone, parents first, husband
afterwards. She has often tricked even
the more knowledgeable, she says, on
the causes of her serious illnesses. Now
she has temporarily stopped, thanks to a
vow she made upon his father's health,
but she's afraid she will resume the
ritual. The nodal point of her question is
her body, a source of anxiety and
disgust, from her childhood. In a way,
her whole life is two-fold. She eats in
public but vomits in secret, she is
officially married but when at home
with her husband, they often fight to the
point of physical violence. She is an
established professional but her parents
follow her every day to work. Her
swaying seems to represent the
oscillation of her impossible separation
from the Other, between intrusion and
rejection. The prototype of this lies in
her relationship with her depressed
mother and her ever discontented gaze
upon her daughter. As she proceeds in
her discourse within her treatment,
Eugenia rediscovers interests that she
had ignored for a long time: music and

especially painting. She will separate

from her husband and put some limits to
her parents. Unexpectedly, her paintings
are greatly appreciated by the public.
She mainly paints female figures which
are hidden, veiled or seen from behind.
She seems to cautiously interrogate
what is it to be a woman, no longer a
victim or a scrap, but subject of a
mysterious arrangement with the Real
that inhabits her. Even her appearance
changes and she ironically notes that
now she even wears skirts, she can now
put a veil on that body which used to
disorderly barge in.
In the treatment the analyst is aware,
Lacan tells us, that his action is that
through which we enter the Real8 For
this reason it is necessary that the
analyst has already come to glimpse the
point of jouissance which sustains his
own existence, that he has come to
terms with it and has adjusted to it, so
that he can achieve not a know-how,
namely a transmitted and transmissible
technique, but rather a knowing-how to
make do with of singular invention, to
signal that it is possible. For this
reason it is necessary that the analyst
moves the focus of interpretation from
the Oedipal picture to the Borromean
one, thus moving from the listening for
meaning to the reading of the outsideof-meaning.9 The Freudian residue
then appears to be at the very origins of
the subject, a primary event where the
letter tied itself to jouissance and
marked the body, which then became a
rock itself.
This highlights even more the ethical
position of the analyst, as he
accompanies the subject to the
threshold of action, which opens for
8
9

J. Lacan, op. cit., p 22.

J.-A., Miller, The Real in the 21st Century,
Presentation of the Theme of the IX
Congress of the World Association of
psychoanalysis, Buenos Aires 27th of April
2012.

each one onto the Real, a Real to be redreamt each time by each subject, in the
contingency of each case.
Translated by Anna Milleri

Interpretations and End

of Analysis

Santiago Castellanos
The theme around which we shall
gather for the WAP Congress 2014 in
Paris, invites us to interrogate, in the
logic of Lacan's later teaching, the
status of interpretation in the path that
goes from the transferential to the real
unconscious. In order to do that I will
take my own clinical case, focusing on
the interpretation that borders the real
and the end of the analysis. For Freud,
meaning is the compass that orients
psychoanalytic
practice,
and
interpretation suits that orientation
perfectly. Freud is interested in the
decipherable side of the symptom and
the relieving effects it implies, but he
realizes that the obstacle is that despite
them, the symptom insists and returns.
There is a paradoxical and dark libidinal
satisfaction included in the symptom
itself, in its functioning.
How to get out of there? One could ask.
What is the function of interpretation
when one gets the limit where words
fail?
The first Lacan was oriented to finding
the symbolic truth of the symptom
despite the imaginary layer. It is about
grabbing the signifying nuggets from
the waves of empty speech and allowing

for the symbolic to unfold. Playing the

dummy, as in the game of bridge, to
facilitate this possibility while at the
same time not identifying with the place
of the Subject Supposed to Know, thus
allowing the analysand to produce his
own master signifiers to be validated as
a full speech.
In the structuralist period, the symptom
is a metaphor of unconscious desire,
whose truth is unknown. It is a mask formal envelope of the symptom
which may fall if unconscious desire is
deciphered. But this desire slips away
like the ferret that never stops running
and is held in a libidinal dimension, one
of jouissance.
Lacan will say that the ultimate truth of
the symptom can only be indicated in an
allusive way. Thus, he resorts to an
allegory to evoke the position of the
analyst comparing it to that of St John
the Baptist in Leonardo Da Vincis
painting in the Louvre, in which we can
see St John with a raised finger. The
ultimate truth of the symptom, which
cannot be articulated, can be referred to
by pointing at a direction: that of the
forzaken horizon of being.
This "forsaken horizon of being", refers
to a being of jouissance, small object a,
and interpretation must target this core
outside of words.
Lacan will then refer to the different
modes of interpretation before the
impossible to say: the cut, allusion,
punctuation, citation and equivocation,
which he will develop in his writing
LEtourdit
as
homophonic,
grammatical or logical modalities.
The small object a is here a semblant of
the real, it no longer has a specular
character and it is a question of
indicating it in an allusive way, which
supposes that the emphasis is no longer
the orientation by the symbolic truth of
the symptom. It is the concept of the

end of the analysis as crossing of the

fantasy.
In the Preface to the English edition of
Seminar XI there is a complete
reformulation of the end of the analysis:
introducing
the
dimension
of
satisfaction, Lacan abandons the idea
that the fantasmatic meaning is the last
word of analysis. The perspective of the
sinthome does not annul the crossing of
the fantasy but isolates and promotes
what remains and with those "spare
parts" the possibility of invention opens
up. Invention insofar as something new
can be done outside of the fantasys
jouissance program.
But let us not be mistaken: it is not
about throwing away the different tools
at the level of interpretation which can
be drawn from Lacans teaching, but
about the function or use that can be
made of them. As Jacques-Alain Miller
points out in his seminar of 11.05.2011:
"If my practice has evolved is not
because of having abandoned the
interpretation of desire, but because it is
no longer ordered by it."
J. -A. Miller tells us that in supervision
one tries to pass on to the debutant the
method to give power to his word, so
that it can be creationist.
Surprise! He states: it is necessary to
learn to shut up. It is necessary that
speech is scarce so that it can reach and
retain the attention of the analyzed. But
watch out! Regarding jouissance one
should abandon all attempts to be
creationist and become more humble.
Miller asks whether it is necessary to
replace "interpret" by some other verb,
but it happens that at this point they all
fail: it could perhaps be replaced by
"establish" or circumscribe"... but this
vocabulary does not satisfy him.
In the experience of my analysis there is
a dimension on the side of the meaning

which was necessary but not sufficient,

because it was not enough to sift what is
left of jouissance once the bricolage of
the fantasy was dismantled. The fantasy
is a montage that deceives with regards
to the jouissance that is opaque to
meaning [sense] and that for its very
nature- wraps it disguising it with the
tricks of joui-sense [enjoyed meaning].
It was necessary to find those fragments
of real of which Freud said constitute
the traumatic kernel or the foreign body
that remains hidden until the end.
Two years before the end of the
analysis, I had a dream in which an
incandescent "magma" appears which
transforms -like a mass or source of
energy-, which transforms into glowing
colors and provokes in me a certain
horror.
What is this shining "Thing"? Why does
it provoke so much horror?
On the couch I will respond to myself
by saying that the dream is about an
imaginary representation of my own
jouissance. That sort of "thing, shit that
shines" is me, falling residue, energy
transmuting into colors and trying to
shine. It is my own jouissance,
condensed, which had remained hidden
behind the meanders of the neurosis and
the screen of the fantasy.
What was thus glimpsed was the most
opaque side of jouissance: the
connection of the gaze with this other
childhood scene in which my father lies
down on the ground, its montage
through the identification to that
mortifying jouissance and pain as a
trace in the body.
What then became clear were the love
logic in which I had been entangled
making oneself be admired and falling and the drive slope of the difficulties for
separation, which was the reason to start
my first analysis.

And what now? How to go on? I

wondered.
I spent several years trying to construct
my own case. I was doing this with
tenacity, with a determination that is a
feature of my desire. But this exercise
included a trap that was dismantled by
the analyst through his silence, cut and
an interpretation, which broke down my
attempts to continue in the direction of
meaning, of the S2 added to the S1. It
was a wrong pathway, for the variations
of meaning end up inevitably meeting
ones own de-being [deser] and nothing
new could happen via this way.
I said at the beginning of a session:
"analysis is made of spare parts" and the
analyst stood up and replied: "exactly",
ending the session. I got up from the
couch and told him that I wanted to tell
him that... and he replied: "its left
spare".
This act of the analyst dismantled the
dynamics
of
the
transferential
unconscious and had consequences.
At this point in the analysis I had
already realized the discontinuity in
history produced by the analytical
process. The non-sense of dreams, slips
of the tongue and the bungled actions,
the impasses of my own speech, after
twenty years of analysis, the tendency
to want to say it all had already, to a
certain extent, been decompleted.
The tendency of the unconscious
towards interpretation and meaning had
to be counteracted, since that is
precisely its natural tendency and this
was the trap I was immersed in.
I could say that if one is not playing the
game with this orientation in the
position of the analyst, the game could
be almost infinite.
In Television Lacan states: "I always
speak the truth. Not the whole truth,

because there is no way to say it all.

Saying it all is literally impossible:
words fail. Yet it is through this very
impossibility that the truth holds on to
the real."
Therefore, the orientation by the real
depends on the position of the analyst
and his act. It is necessary to go against
the transferential unconscious so that
the real unconscious may emerge. I
think this this is a particularity of the
experience of the end of the analysis
and of the production of the analyst. We
could also add that what becomes
necessary is the unfathomable decision,
on the side of the analysand, to go to the
end.
We can thus conceive of interpretation
as an operation of disjointing, as
indicated by Miller (10.12.2008), two
ineliminable ingredients of jouissance.
On the one hand, it must allow for the
removal of the drive object, the object
small a, from the field of th Other, and
on the other hand to isolate the S1s
outside of meaning. It is about an S1
that says nothing, but which works as a
carrier of the marks of a primitive
jouissance in the body, body events
outside of meaning. Over that letter of
jouissance each ones own neurotic
delusion is produced.
In the dream of the end of the analysis, I
am undergoing the pass and four letters
and a hyphen appear: CPUT -.
I have the absurd idea of doing a
Google search because I could not
associate anything to it. I cannot do the
search because I do not know in
between which letters to place the
hyphen. It is truly a hole that excludes
meaning. Its function changes. Instead
of being a sign for the articulation of the
functions of language, the hyphen in the
dream cannot be accommodated by any
writing. That is to say, it does not cease
not to be written, which we may

consider equivalent to Lacans aphorism

there is no sexual relation".
There is no place for the hyphen; it is
definitely "a spare part", and thus the
analysis ends. This is how we my loves
with truth ended.
During my first analysis, after some
fundamental
signifiers
that
had
sustained my ideals were revealed, all
of them in the role of repairing the
father figure, I said to the analyst in a
moment of anguish:
- And what can do now since I don't
believe in anything?

jouissance that remains and which is not

negativizable. Thus the dimension of
the real unconscious can open up, where
interpretation as analytic action which
operates in the register of meaning, no
longer takes place.

Translated by Renata Cuchiarelli

Presentation given in Madrid at the

Preparatory Evenings of the School
towards the IX Congress of the WAP.

And the analyst replied:

-"But you have done the experience of
the unconscious".

Recovery and Real

The analysis continued, despite the

anguish, taking on me the belief that
this was the only exit I had to the
entanglements in which I was caught.
In my story, something had not been
able to be said, it was not available to
me, and since I had actually done the
experience of the unconscious, its
revelations had made me passionate
about psychoanalysis and about the
loves with truth. If I may say it like this,
I also had to be cured of that. One must
be cured of that in order to be able to
sustain an ethics oriented by the real of
the symptom.
As J.-A. Miller points out in his seminar
"The very latest Lacan": "on the side of
speech we find the real under the form
of the impossible to say". It could say
that of this form I encounter, at the end
of the analysis, the performance of
which I spoke in my first testimony. In
this installation there are "spare parts",
which become evident to me once the
drive circuit that includes the bricolage
of the fantasy is deconstructed, and
once I can circumscribe in its edges the

Raffaele Calabria
There are some intuitions, which, in
their simplicity and brilliance, leave an
indelible trace in one's own knowledge
[sapere]. One of this kind is certainly a
formulation made by Jacques-Alain
Miller in his 1998/99 Seminar The
experience
of
the
Real
in
Psychoanalysis, when he speaks about
the extimacy of the Real as
necessitating, always, of a form of
inclusion which does not make the
mutual exclusion between the Real and
meaning totalising: the Symbolic in the
Real [Lacan] calls it the lie... what is it,
in Lacan's teachings, that has always
been isolated as that which functions as
Real within the Symbolic? Here the
importance of the phenomenon
identified by Freud as anxiety... A lie is
that which deceives and anxiety is, par
excellence, that which does not
deceive.10 And the lie, Lacan tells us,
10

J.-A. Miller The experience of the Real in

Psychoanalysis, in: The Sinthome n. 14,

is itself posited in this dimension of

truth.11
Therefore, one cannot speak, in
analysis, without lying, and it is only in
the articulation between speaking and
lying that one can plunge into his or her
own truth, the truth of the symptom.
After all, when I free associate, I speak
something true, but never everything
about the truth; and it is precisely this
not-all that will turn out to be at the
same time partial (in relation to my
subjective truth) and lying, in relation to
the more true that will eventually
emerge as the analysis progresses.
There is always a plus of truth that I am
lacking, which is what always leaves
me fundamentally divided. Will I ever
be able to speak all the truth about
myself? Never, psychoanalysis will
answer, because the unconscious, which
of the order of the subjects truth, is not
only the return of the repressed, but also
-and especially-, primary repression
(...which consists in the psychical
representation of the drive being
excluded access to consciousness)12.
There is an inaugural lie, which will
explode in all of its truthfulness at the
end of the analysis and which pertains
to each patient's question at the
beginning of the treatment: asking the
analyst for something he calls health,
when his symptom so the theory saysis created in order to bring him certain
satisfactions13. Here Lacan makes
reference to an article written by
Nunburg in 1926, entitled The will to
Summer 2013.
J. Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis Book XI, W. W. Norton and
Co., London, 1998, p 138.
12
S. Freud: Papers on Metapsychology,
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14,The Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis,
London.
13
J. Lacan, op. cit., pp. 137-138.
11

recover14. His elucidation, though,

needs to be clarified: recovery does not
mean cure (guarigione, as it is
commonly translated in Italian), but
rather renovation, return, as it is well
articulated in Nunburg's article.
Nunburg expresses it well when he
claims that, on the one hand, as the
conscious will to recover rests upon
unconscious motivations, there is
always a misunderstanding between
doctor and patient, they are not in tune
with one another, as mental health
means two completely different things
to them. On the other hand, he suggests
that the conscious disposition towards
recovery satisfies, in the transference,
the unconscious tendency to move back
to an infantile stage of the libido15. It is
the transference that is revealed here in
all its power; the disturbed libido is
tied to it, at a loss, and this is the very
motor of the demand to be cured, which
will lead the treatment towards the drive
elements at play.
This unconscious tendency is also the
tendency to restore a pre-existing
status, which made possible for Freud
the discovery of the death drive, which
tends towards reducing the living to the
inorganic.
With a leap, which only Miller allows
us to make, we come to what he says in
his introduction to the WAP Congress
2014: In the transference the SubjectSupposed-to-Know is introduced in
order to interpret the Real. Starting from
there, a knowledge is constituted not in
the Real, but about the Real. It is of
this Real that the satisfaction in the
symptom is constituted, as well as what
is primary in repression, something of
a Heraclitean memory, hiding itself
14

In International Journal of Psychoanalysis,

Vol. VII, 1926, p. 64-78.
15
S. Freud, A general introduction to
psychoanalysis, Boni and Liveright
Publishers New York, 1920.

10

from any search for meaning. We lie,

ultimately, because nothing can be said
on the Real, no signifier can
circumscribe it, no word can determine
it. In fact, one finds out that signifiers
themselves are soaked in the Real, the
Real of jouissance which leaves out of
the game both meaning in each of its
articulations and their own meaning in
itself. This would be the final breakage
between signifier and signified, where
the former will emerge alone and
autistic, leaving the latter astray,
abandoned to the pure effects of
jouissance. Of this Real it will only be
possible to retrieve a few pieces of
semblant, the objects a. This is what we
learn from the experience of the pass,
the extraction of the object as semblant
and condenser of jouissance.
An analysis pushed to its limits reveals
the lying character of meaning and
inexorably frames a Real which makes
its appearance on the horizon. A Real
which, as Lacan put it in his Ecrits 16 is
already there. We might even say that it
talks all by itself [cause toutseul]. The
subject can see something of it emerge
in the form of a thing which is far from
being an object that satisfies him and
which involves his present intentionality
only in the most incongruous waythis
is the hallucination here insofar as it is
radically differentiated from the
interpretive phenomenon.
Mario, aged 45 and haunted by
hallucinations and delusions for a long
time, sees everywhere male members
that are following him, invading him
through each orifice of his body. Often,
the very words spoken by others are
perceived by Mario as phallic bullets
16

J. Lacan, Ecrits. The First Complete English

Edition, W. W. Norton and Co., London,
2006, p 325.

penetrating him so aggressively that he

is seized with fear and horror or with
anguish and desperate rage. The voice
and the gaze are materialised with
effects on the body to a point of
devastation: he tightens up his buttock,
shuts his mouth, lowers his head and
crumples up in an impenetrable mutism.
How can he defend himself from such a
violent and destructive Real? In the
sessions Sandro speaks about his
readings, of his psychology books that
he devours and of the strategies he
employs to defend himself from the
invasions of the other that humiliate him
on a daily basis. Over the years he has
developed a strong interest for
naturalistic finds which he looks for in
his long and solitary walks along the
beach or in the nearby pine woods. With
the help of his nurses he organises small
exhibits: he shows his objects to the
gaze of others, dead objects full of
ancient history, timidly proud of the
knowledge he has acquired about them
over the years, and with the tension of
he who wants to show evidence of a life
which used to be and which perhaps
may be again. He found, for now, a way
of dealing with the Real, showing
insignificant objects, which he himself
can bring to life, that same life that he
feels fading away in him day after day
in his constant contact with the Other.
In Sandro it is clear how the necessity to
defend himself from an obscene and
ferocious jouissance is pushing him,
with the help of a long-term
psychoanalytically oriented treatment,
to a delusional invention which
represents, at the moment, his way of
relating to his recovery, installing a
certain function of the object that is in
tension with the Ego Ideal.
What happens for a neurotic when, at
the end of his analysis, once the
meaning which has represented him up
to that point is dissolved, finds himself

11

alone and at the mercy of a

symptomatic
jouissance
which
overwhelms him and traps him at the
level of the fantasy? How can he escape
from the necessity of a repetition which
glues him to the fundamental fantasy,
coercing him to follow its script, thus
compelling him to a strenuous fight
with himself?
Eric Laurent, in a keynote lecture in
1993 at a meeting of the ACF in
Bordeaux, elaborates on how much
more orientating a clinic of jouissance
can be, when compared to a
psychoanalytic clinic that is oriented by
repetition: Starting from there [ from
the empty den at the end of the
analysis] he has the opportunity to look
out for possible encounters and to
respond to them in a different way,
meaning that he can deal with his
fantasy in such a way that is different
from the way he had been dealing with
it up to that moment. For this to happen
it is necessary that he has emptied the
bowl, drinking from it all the way down
to the dregs, the bowl of demand, so
that he is now left with the encounter.
In this way the idea of a contingent Real
is outlined, a Real linked to a random
encounter, for which everything that has
emerged in the course of the analysis
had a preparatory and opening function.
This is not the messianic and illusory
wait for an event which is in line with
one's own ideals, but rather the opening,
after having crossed the profoundly
disappointing character of the symbolic,
to an accidental appointment before
which one can act in a new and
surprising way, thus managing to make
of this new decision a sort of retake of
the game with the Other, even if it does
not exist. It is an encounter, which, in its
contingency, will drift the path of one's
own jouissance, which has become stale
and rigid, thus making room for that
singular originality one has spent an
entire life looking for.
Mara, a beautiful 43 year old lady of 43

in analysis for over ten years, having

dealt with the trauma of being abused
by her father trauma that left her
fixated both to the death bearing idea of
men being violent and exploitative and
to the idealised wait for a saviour and
having dealt with the hatred towards a
mother who, despite everything, chose
to stay loyal to her husband,
interrogates herself on her way of being
a woman and on the meaning that the
several sexual relationships she has
engaged in, always short and with no
future, have in her life. She discovers
that she has repeatedly looked for men
who would persecute her, who would
frighten her with their lustful and
devious manners. Now, away from her
family and alone in her own house, she
retraces her history under a different
light: the gaze of the Other, inquisitive
and charmer of her beautiful face and
body. A gaze that she cannot do without
and yet terrifies her for the mortifying
sense it carries. How can she abandon
this jouissance that imprisons her in
between being an object of love and the
petrifying gaze of the Other? There is
no signifying solution to this, if not by
framing a Real towards which she can
unclench to embrace it in the
contingency. If she will have the
courage she may, by means of a unique
act of determination, go back playing
with the Other.
Perhaps Sergio Laia's17 interesting idea
can be read from this perspective,
whereby he suggests that a Real is what
Lacanian Psychoanalysis can offer to
the 21st Century? A real as an offer is a
real that revives, galvanises and creates
enthusiasm; it does not debase nor
flatten. It is a Real which promises
something new, on the condition that we
allow ourselves to be deserted by the
emptying of meaning that the analytic
operation, through the unconscious
signifying articulation, requires. It is a
17

See What's Up! N*5

12

Real which goes far beyond recovery (a

concept borrowed from cognitivebehavioural theories to indicate the
process of coming out from a mental
illness through the whole-signifier): it
allows reaching the very creative act of
the subject, re-founding him in relation
to his symptom.
Ravenna 15/10/2013
Translated by Anna Milleri

Cults of novelty

Despina Andropoulou
Dr Lacan would teach on the nature of
the real in 1954: For the real does not
wait [attend], especially not for the
subject, since it expects nothing from
speech. But it is there, identical to his
existence, a noise in which one can hear
anything and everything, ready to
submerge with its roar what the reality
principle constructs there that goes by
the name of the "outside world."18
Fantasy is the reality principle, he will
specify a few years later19.

The montage of fantasy serves as a

frame for reality20 -through the
extraction of the object a- providing in
18

Lacan, J. Response to Jean

Hyppolite 's Commentary on Freud's
Verneinung., in crits Fink, B. (ed.)
[1954 (2006)] New York & London:
Norton, p 394.
19

Lacan J. (1975) La troisime. Lettres de

l'EFP, Vol. 18.

the same time defense against the

devastating noise of the real. Fantasy
constitutes the window to the world; the
frame of knowledge [savoir]. It is
exactly thanks to this knowledge that
life stops at a certain limit towards
jouissance and the route towards
death21. In return for the abstracted
jouissance, the remnant, which is the
trace of the erasure caused by the
operation of the symbolic, becomes
surplus jouissance, the object that
incarnates the value of jouissance to
which the human life is reduced22.
Cause of discourse and cause of the
symptom, surplus jouissance is an
irruption that has fallen in the field of
something of the order of jouissance,23
which animates the life of every subject
in a singular way.
Lets specify at this point that the object
a is different to the object of surplus
jouissance in that it allows an
introduction of a little bit of air in the
function of surplus jouissance24. The
latter is also distinct from the sham
surplus jouissance25 in the era of the
common market, in which the
capitalists discourse reigns abiding by a
specific ethics. () every ethics has to
be sought for in its principle, in its
origin on the side of the Real. () and
more specifically in politics. Its not for
that reason that this should encourage
you to look for it on the side of the
20

Lacan, J. On a Question Prior to Any

Possible Treatment of Psychosis. In crits Fink,
B. (ed.) [1958 (2006)] New York & London:
Norton, note, p. 462.
21
Lacan, J. [1969-70 (2007)] The Seminar, Book
XVII. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. New
York & London: Norton. p. 17-19.
22
La Sagna, P. (2012) Les stratgies du sujet au
XXIe sicle et la psychanalyse. In
Linconscient au temps de lAutre qui nexiste
pas, Actes des travaux du Bureau de Rennes de
lACF-VLB 2011-2012, Sept. 2012, p. 61.
23
Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XVII. Op. cit., p.
19-20.
24
La Sagna, P., Les stratgies Op. cit., p. 67.
25
Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XVII. Op. cit., p.
81.

13

common market. Moral law derives

from the intervention of the real that
causes the elision of the subject, while
at the same time sending it back to the
trace. The trace isnt erased; its the
signifier that returns to the state of the
trace26.
In his recent teaching J.-A. Miller
(2010-2011) clarifies the correlation
between One signifier and jouissance:
It is only by starting from the One that
you can situate and think of every mark,
because its only starting from the One
that you can situate and think of the
lack. Its the original mark. 27 This One
all alone on which every signifier
depends or, even better, every signifier
is28, is characterized by its erasure: At
first, one has to be erased and this
erasure is produced by zero being
marked.29 This erasure is the pivotal
point of repetition or, even better, of
reiteration, which leads desire and
founds existence.
The common market: the obliteration
of the mark

the masters discourse. Cunning, it is

destined to go flat, because its
untenable. It runs too fast, it is
consumed so that it is used up31, he
would remark.
Indeed, the consumer of the era of
globalization, of the dissolution of
politics and cultural particularities of
the market32, could be the paradigm of
what J.-Cl. Milner calls the easy
universal33, where the name becomes
anyone and the particular is erased. An
example that illustrates nicely the ethics
of the liberal individual, not divided by
the object that causes their desire, is the
social phenomenon of Private rehoming of children or child
exchange.34 According to the latter,
adoptive parents post the qualities of the
child theyve been given and no longer
wish to keep, on Facebook or Yahoo,
putting the child, thus, in the market.
This is the actual patent of the objectcause through an incessant and blind
alteration of the consumable object-aim,
destined to disuse.

In 2008, a sociologist called

Immanuel Wallerstein argued that our
age is the one where the virtual decline
of capitalism has become real. He adds,
moreover, that crisis and the
powerlessness of the powerful ones
open the space for everybodys free
will30.

The general subordination of the

economy to the power of finance
transformed old industrial capitalism
into a capitalism of finance and of
owing private means. It is thus that
power can no longer follow the
development of knowledge [savoir].
Knowledge goes forth all alone and
power runs behind it35.

This statement reminds us that as early

as 1972 Lacan spoke of the crisis of the
capitalists discourse, the substitute for

The limits of the financial spheres

growth and its revenues as well as the
augmentation of surplus value have

26

Lacan, J. (2004) Le Sminaire, livre X,

Langoisse. p. 174, 177, 178. Paris: Seuil.
27
Miller J.-A. (2011) Lorientation lacanienne.
Ltre et lUn. Unpublished lesson of March
16th at the department of psychoanalysis at the
University of Paris VIII
28
Miller, J.-A. Op. cit.
29
Miller, J.-A. Op. cit.
30
Interview with I. Wallerstein entitled Le
capitalisme touche sa fin. Published in Le
Monde on December 16th 2008, taken by A.
Reverchon

31

Lacan,
J.
(1978)
Du
Discours
Psychanalytique, Lacan in Italia. Milan: La
Salamandra
32
Caille A. and Insel A. (2002) Quelle autre
mondialisation ? La Revue du Mauss (20), 2, p.
148-170.
33
Milner J.-Cl. (2006) Le juif de savoir. Paris:
Grasset
34
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/adoption/
#article/part1
35
La Sagna, P. Les stratgies Op. cit. p. 63

14

been
reached.
Expressions
like
capitalism is omnivorous36 and the
devouring passions of the habits of
consumption designate a desire that
disappears once satisfied37, illustrate
the libidinal breaking of the consumer
who stands without refuge before the
leaders jouissance.
In the era of the non-existing Other,
civilizations superego demand for
Something Else is reduced to the order
Give
me
something
new38,
constituting the core of the symptom of
capitalism
qualified
by
certain
sociologists as pure39. The subject,
relinquished to the automatism of
novelty cant help repeating the search
for something new ad infinitum. The
consumer wants to know nothing of the
fundamental rule of human nature, the
rule of always the same thing, of the
predominance of an immemorial
instance which renders the novelty of
the contemporary mercantile production
fake and obsolete.
If in psychoanalysis
repetition
demands something new as childrens
games show, which veils what is the
true secret of fun, i.e. knowing the most
radical diversity that repetition itself
constitute,40 the cult of novelty in the
common market becomes the other
name of the death drive. The subject
going flat is the result of the imperative
to enjoy an indestructible and exhibited
thus tyrannical- object.

36

Le Monde. Op.cit.
Sennett R. (2006) La culture du nouveau
capitalisme. ditions Albin Michel.
38
Miller J.-A. & Laurent . (1997) LAutre qui
nexiste pas et ses comits dthique.
Unpublished lesson of April 23rd.
39
As for example the statistician and economist
M. Husson, author of the book Un pur
capitalisme
40
Lacan, Jacques [1962-63 (1998)] The
Seminar, Book XI. Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psychoanalysis, p. 61, New York & London:
Norton, 1998.
37

Yet, as Immanuel Wallerstein remarks,

everyone is offered the possibility to
influence the future via their individual
action; however, since this future will
be the sum of the incalculable number
of these actions, it is absolutely
impossible to predict which model will
impose itself in the end. The liquid real
of capitalism opens itself to contingency
and offers the possibility for different
answers.
J.-A. Miller explained the reason why
Lacan would indicate the barred subject
itself as master signifier of the
capitalists discourse. The absence of
the master signifier is compensated by
the subjects own vacuum, by its own
cult of its own authenticity, by its own
development, its own blossoming and
its self-reference; the obligation to live
and enjoy are maintained in an
extraordinary coercive force41. Could
we anticipate the emergence of some
grade of subjectivity under the reign of
individualism?
This own, which could constitute
another way for designating the auto
of autism could be an answer to what
Lacan designates in Seminar VI as
without recourse before the Others
desire and the concept of Hilflosigkeit
-more primitive than anxiety, since the
latter is already a first sign of
organisation- insofar as that is an
expectation,
Erwartung42.
In
psychoanalysis, this situation could be
an expectation of the emergence of
speech susceptible to establishing
otherness. Yet, the answer of
contemporary civilisation is rather to
segregate.
Escaping the real but with realism43
41

Miller J.-A. & Laurent . LAutre qui

nexiste pas Op. cit.
42
Lacan J., (2013) Le Sminaire, Livre VI. Le
Dsir et son interprtation. Paris:d. de la
Martinire, 2013, p. 502.
43
Subtitle of the article LEmpire des jeux
vido in Le Monde diplomatique of December

15

Transcribing the real is the ambition

and the solution promoted by the ideal
merchandise
of
contemporary
capitalism, which promises the client
to experience his fantasies, the latter
being nothing but ready-made situations
in the American style. According to
articles about video games in the
Monde diplomatique, their objective is
not simply to amuse to the point of
debility, but also to form and even raise
the players awareness of social
phenomena. Thus, the player of the
game Paper Please plays a boarderguard in a fictitious dictatorship. He
controls the passports of prospective
immigrants, grants them entry to the
country or arrests them. The
recreational interest yields to the cruelty
of the sought realism: pressurised by
time, the player is dehumanised and
dehumanises the migrants, the
journalist comments.
The capitalists discourse with the aid of
the discourse of science aspires to the
foreclosure of the subject as answer of
the real. Its impasse results from its
ambition to protect from the
unpredictable, as long as a realistic
situation risks being repetitive and
annoying, fun represents in a way a
severe limit to the representable44.
Boredom as an answer to Hilflosigkeit,
to the Others inexistence, is often the
symptom that leads a subject to look for
another solution. Its the resistance to
the universal real that pushes towards
invention. [] If there is something
that testifies that of the real there arent
but pieces, this is exactly what we
commonly call resistance and what we
also call castration.45
2013, Vol. 177.
44
Le Monde diplomatique, Vol. 177, December
2013, p. 23.
45
Lacan J. (1976) Neuvime congrs de lcole
freudienne de Paris, Palais des congrs de
Strasbourg Lettres de lcole freudienne, Vol.
19, p. 555-559.

Dame Yates

Marcela Antelo
When Miller described the disorder of
the real last year in Buenos Aires, he
invoked magic as one of the basic
positions of truth, listed by Lacan: He
defines magic as the direct summons of
the signifier that is in nature on the basis
of the signifier of incantation.46 Miller
recalls that a magician speaks to disrupt
nature, to infringe upon the divine order
of the real. To explain the properness of
magic as a Wunsch aimed at scientific
discourse, our protagonist states that
this was the thesis of erudite Frances
Yates, who considers that hermeticism
prepared the way for the scientific
discourse47. Points to be examined en
route to Paris 2014.
Interest in Hermeticism may explain
that Frances Yates published her major
work The Art of Memory 48 in the same
year as Lacan published his Ecrits.
Their hour of death also brought them
together in 1981, aged 81. A quirk of
hermetics.
Her most powerful trilogy begins with
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic
Tradition (1964), continues with The
Art of Memory (1966) and concludes
with Theatre of the World (1969) which
examines the influence of the Greco46

Miller, J.-A., A Real for the 21st Century, in

Hurly-Burly 9, May 2013, p. 202.
47
See Yates F.A, La Philosophie occulte
l'poque lisabthaine, Paris, Dervy, 1987.
There is a Spanish version: La filosofa oculta
en la poca isabelina, Fondo de Cultura
Econmica, Mxico, 1982.
48
Yates, Frances A., El arte de la memoria (The
Art of Memory). Madrid: Taurus, 1974.

16

Roman Vitruvius from the viewpoint of

the XVI century, particularly a theatre
of
cosmological
proportions.
McLuhans current disciple, Derrick de
Kerckhove49, says that theatre is a
physical simulation of mental space,
extending Yates work to hyperlinked
internet culture.
This work interests us as it addresses
artifice in the use of memory. Artifice,
art-craft (TN: arte-oficio in the
original), which Yates elevates to the
status of art. Her book begins with the
feat accomplished by Simonides of
Ceos (556 BC-468 BC) a poet and
painter, author of hymns, dithyrambs,
eulogies and funeral orations for the
celebrities of Periclean Athens in
managing to remember the names of
hundreds of guests at a fatal feast, in
their spatial order at the table, after all
died buried except for Simonides, who
was called to the door by the twin gods
Castor and Pollux just as the roof fell in
onto the diners.
Latin sources that reflect the teachings
of this myth of the origin of the art of
memory are Ciceros De Oratore, the
anonymous Ad Herennium libri IV and
Quintilians Institutio Oratoria.
The art of memory is a kind of intimate
writing developed by rhetoricians, poets
and eulogisers of antiquity to sustain
their discourse. All oral civilisations
bowed before Mnemosyne, the goddess
of memory, mother of all muses. For the
Greeks, the worst could be held at bay
through remembrance, song and praise.
Being forgotten meant perishing. Yates
has memory descend from Olympus to
earth where she discovers that veritable
palaces of memory have been erected to

house knowledge. From object of

veneration to technical, mnemonic
object, a device that relies on
interconnecting memory with invention.
Now let us turn to the treasurehouse of inventions, the
custodian of all the parts of
rhetoric, memory50.
Yates does not stop there. She will have
knowledge use memory as an art which,
with the passing of centuries will
become the cornerstone of scientific
discourse. Close to the Warburg school,
she was a colleague of Erwin Panofsky
and Ernst Gombrich and it is as an art
historian, against the current of the
Platonic philosophers, that Yates
manages to read the importance of
images as vehicles of memory, a trace
of cultures surface.
The method of the loci, plural of Latin
locus, meaning place, enables the art of
memory, which is always spatial, to
build links between representations and
to endure. The inseparable: place and
bond. Since the act of remembering is
partly physical there exist 51 Loca
corporalia, bodily locations of memory
like Freuds erogenous zones, loaded
with memories.
Active images are deposited in the body,
percussive scenes that we Freudians
used to call traumas. Strikingly
grammatical images that forever
frighten us, memories of trauma, traces
of displeasure. There is a block of wax
in our souls 52 Yates cites Plato in his
Theaetetus, stating that in Plato memory
is not simply a matter of rhetoric but
rather the foundation of knowledge.

49

The Return of the Memory Theatres in the

Digital Age. Vortrag mit MultimediaPrsentation 27.05.2011 Utrecht University /
Utrecht School for the Arts (Keynote zur
Performance Studies international conference
#17: Camillo 2.0). Online Video: http://petermatussek.de/Pub/V_74.html.

50

Here Yates quotes the Ad Herennium, the

founding manual of an unknown Roman
professor of rhetorics (86-82 B.C.). p. 17
51
Yates, Frances, op. cit, p. 23
52
Ibid., p. 53 Teeto 191 C-D

17

Yates revolutionised the way history is

written, emphasising links between
religion and culture to illuminate the
present and rewrite the past. According
to her American biographer, a professor
at Sing Sing prison called Marjorie G.
Jones, despite Yates being born in the
twentieth century, she felt more at ease
in the nineteenth. As the youngest
daughter of a Victorian family of
readers and an idol to all, she was
educated at home by her mother before
leaving to see the world and spending
time in Paris. As a result of the Masters
degree in French theatre she completed
at London University, the young woman
became fascinated by Rabelais, from
whom she extracts the core of her book.
In the chapter devoted to The Art of
Memory in the Middle Ages, Yates
takes us to the time of the collapse of
the ancient world: Once the rule of the
barbarians and vandals had begun, the
voices of the orators fell silent. Written
reminders can now serve to reach
heaven.
In one of the fabulous reviews Yates
wrote for the New York Review of
Books, she discusses the various stages
of destruction of medieval imagery in
England, when the psychology of the
imagination and theological issues lost
their power to generate beliefs.
Miller invokes Yates precisely at the
point that she considers her own object
of fascination: A factor of development
of the scientific method, the fate of the
art of memory in the late Renaissance
period. The instigators of the scientific
method: Francis Bacon, Descartes,
Leibniz, make the art of memory into a
tool to investigate the encyclopaedia of
the world. She moves from the
humanistic to the hermetic tradition.
Robert Fludd is the main figure of the
hermetic system, based at Shakespeares
Globe Theatre. A Kabbalist, from the

Rosicrucian brotherhood, with the

worldview of a Renaissance magician.
It was Pierre de la Rame (1515-1572),
Ramus, who popularised the term
method, releasing memory from the
moorings of rhetoric to link it with logic
and clean it of the affective impact of
images. The term method flourished
in Llulism and the kabbalah. Giordano
Bruno (1548-1592) who also spoke of
the method was feared not for his early
rationalism but rather for his magicians
air, as was clearly stated by Miller in his
reference to Yates.
Bacon retains respect for magicians
hidden memory, desiring science on the
one hand and belief on the other.
Descartes, in proposing to reduce things
to their causes, makes a modern
rationalisation of hidden memory.
The term he uses is quantity, marking
the enormous change from a qualitative
and symbolic use of numbers. The
occultist tide was receding and in the
changed atmosphere the search turns in
the direction of rational method53.
Yates provides examples of the
emergence of more rational methods
from Renaissance occultism. The
seventeenth-century mathematical trend
arose in the context of the continuing
influence of the arts of memory. Leibniz
and the universal computation that was
to have solved every problem. Those
in disagreement, for example, about the
Council of Trent, would no longer go to
war but would sit down together saying:
Let us calculate.54
To Yates, the fate of these philosophers
shares a disturbing similarity: Bruno
feverishly tried one memory system
after another, until he met death at the
stake, Giulio Cammilo (1480-1544),
53
54

Yates, F., Ibid. p. 435.

Yates, F., Ibid. p. 444.

18

from the hermetic Kabbalistic tradition

initiated by Pico della Mirandola, failed
to finish his extraordinary memory
theatre for want of a sponsor, Leibniz
encyclopaedia was never put together,
his allocating characters to notions was
never brought about, and universal
calculation was never established. The
Cold War, however, did exist.
Leibniz describes his project as
innocent magic according to Yates,
fending off potential suspicion from
Oxford Ph.Ds. It is after Leibniz that
Giordano Bruno can be seen placing
moving images on Llulls combinatorial
wheels, traveling across Europe with his
fantastic art of memory, like a
Renaissance prophet announcing a
scientific method in hermetic terms.
Leibniz is the 17th Century heir to that
tradition and its final point.
Yates raised controversy among her
peers and continues to be extensively
researched. Her material legacy led to a
foundation that grants scholarships to
those following her leads, always on
marginal topics, footnotes to official
history, a practice of knowledge. What
one generation omits forms the basis for
the ignorance of the next. The art of
memory as a tool to combat the not
wanting to know. In 1972 she was made
an Officer of the Order of the British
Empire in 1977, becoming Dame
Commander (DBE).
If, as Joyce writes in Ulysses, history is
a Nightmare from which you will never
awake, then Lady Yates practiced a
politics of awakening.

Chronology
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/yates
.html