Third Reich, Science and Psychoanalysis (LRO 327) : 2nd February 2022 : Yaron Gilat
by Julia Evans on February 2, 2022
Published https://www.thelacanianreviews.com/third-reich-science-and-psychoanalysis/ & www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /authors a-z (Gilat)
Circulated
From: NLS-Messager [New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis – Messager]
Subject: [nls-messager] 4124.en/ LRO 327: “Third Reich, Science and Psychoanalysis”
Date: 2 February 2022 at 09:53:05 GMT
References
[2] See Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts: 1963-1964 : beginning 15th January 1964 : Jacques Lacan or here
Jacques Lacan located psychoanalysis amid science and religion, being not exactly either one or the other.
[2] Seminar XI : 15th January 1964 : p6-7 of Alan Sheridan’s translation :
This definition of praxis, then, is very extensive. We are not going to set out in search of our psycho-analysis, like Diogenes in search of man, in the various, very diversified fields of praxis. Rather we shall take our psycho-analysis with us, and it will direct us at once towards some fairly well located, specifiable points of praxis.
Without even introducing by any kind of transition the two terms between which I wish to hold the question—and not at all in an ironic way—I posit first that, if I am here, in such a large auditorium, in such a place, and with such an audience, it is to ask myself whether is a science, and to examine the question with you.
The other reference, the religious one, I already mentioned a little while ago, specifying that I am speaking of religion in the true sense of the term—not of a desiccated, methodologized religion, pushed back into the distant past of a primitive form of thought, but of religion as we see it practised in a still living, very vital way. Psycho-analysis, whether or not it is worthy of being included in one of these two registers, may even enlighten us as to what we should understand by science, and even by religion.
I would like at once to avoid a misunderstanding. In any case, someone will say, psycho-analysis is a form of research. Well, allow me to say quite clearly—in particular to the public authorities for whom this search has seemed, for some time now, to serve as a shibboleth for any number of things —that I am a bit suspicious of this term research. Personally, I have never regarded myself as a researcher. As Picasso once said, to the shocked surprise of those around him—I do not seek, I find.
Indeed, there are in the field of so-called scientific research two domains that can quite easily be recognized, that in which one seeks, and that in which one finds.
Psychoanalysis draws from these two discourses. It depends upon them and has no independent existence of its own, but all the while it functions as an opposition. Not in order to replace them, not in order to gain power over them, but in order to perforate them, to make holes while treating their real by the symbolic
[3] Seminar XI : 15th January 1964 : p6 of Alan Sheridan’s translation :
What is a praxis? I doubt whether this term may be regarded as inappropriate to psycho-analysis. It is the broadest term to designate a concerted human action, whatever it may be, which places man in a position to treat the real by the symbolic. The fact that in doing so he encounters the imaginary to a greater or lesser degree is only of secondary importance here.
This definition of praxis, then, is very extensive. We are not going to set out in search of our psycho-analysis, like Diogenes in search of man, in the various, very diversified fields of praxis. Rather we shall take our psycho-analysis with us, and it will direct us at once towards some fairly well located, specifiable points of praxis.
In the end of this seminar [4], shortly after he asserts that “re-enacting the most monstrous and supposedly superseded forms of the holocaust, is the drama of Nazism”, Lacan warns us from succumbing to the dark god, from offering an object of sacrifice to obscure gods.
[4] Seminar XI : 24th June 1964 : p274-275 of Alan Sheridan’s translation
There is something profoundly masked in the critique of the history that we have experienced. This, re-enacting the most monstrous and supposedly superseded forms of the holocaust, is the drama of Nazism.
I would hold that no meaning given to history, based on Hegeliano—Marxist premises, is capable of accounting for this resurgence—which only goes to show that the offering to obscure gods of an object of sacrifice is something to which few subjects can resist succumbing, as if under some monstrous spell.
Ignorance, indifference, an averting of the eyes may explain beneath what veil this mystery still remains hidden. But for whoever is capable of turning a courageous gaze towards this phenomenon—and, once again, there are certainly few who do not succumb to the fascination of the sacrifice in itself—the sacrifice signifies that, in the object of our desires, we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this Other that I call here the dark God.
It is the external meaning of the sacrifice, to which no one can resist, unless animated by that faith, so difficult to sustain, which, perhaps, one man alone has been able to formulate in a plausible way—namely, Spinoza, with his Amor intellectualis Del.
What, quite wrongly, has been thought of in Spinoza as pantheism is simply the reduction of the field of God to the universality of the signifier, which produces a serene, exceptional detachment from human desire. In so far as Spinoza says—desire is the essence of man, and in so far as he institutes this desire in the radical dependence of the universality of the divine attributes, which is possible only through the function of the signifier, in so far as he does this, he obtains that unique position by which the philosopher—and it is no accident that it is a Jew detached from his tradition who embodies it—may be confused with a transcendent love.
This position is not tenable for us.
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