Did You Say Bizarre?
JACQUES-ALAIN
MILLER
Analytical Case
JACQUES-ALAIN
MILLER
Sex, The Last Thirty Years
JULIET
FLOWER
MacCANNELL
Prized Possessions
DAVID
EBONY
Surplus-Enjoyment
SLAVOJ
ZIZEK
Rorty and the Orchids
MARIO
GOLDENBERG
The subject, "Did You Say Bizarre?" hadn't been announced, thus stood as a surprise for mostly everyone. Bizarre enough, psychoanalysis after Jacques Lacan is, even today, rare in the USA. No, it wasn't that. Miller's point was to reach further into an essential aspect of the matter: "...the unconscious reveals itself in a manner that is bizarre, that is always bizarre...the so-called psychoanalytic interpretations are statements, speech acts, that escape the ordinary...One comes to analysis when one feels oneself to be the seat of certain bizarre phenomena." Still the utmost expression of the bizarre was to call upon the psychoanalyst, right away the best illustration sticking out in behalf of the master, "Take a look at Jacques Lacan! The bulk of anecdotes about him - and which are all true, even the false ones, show him to be extravagant, bizarre."
A political bias at the end of the talk, Miller disclosed a say-it-all complex. Actually at the base of a democratic society the say-it-all complex stands for common sense - and this is a permissive society, psychotherapy and freedom of expression proliferating. If psychoanalysis will come to terms with democracy it's "thanks to that which doesn't settle down. There is something that despite the saying-it-all doesn't settle down, never settles down. And that's something which has to do with sexuality.
"He said bizarre, we said chapeau! he said...
The talk ended, we were waiting for cars and taxis, when the voice of the directrice at La Maison Francaise sounded, stirring in the cold "wait, I'm going back upstairs, Miller forgot his cap." Miller's cap rescued, we left for dinner.
Soon a conspicuously notorious publisher wooed Miller in order to win his favors over the matter of some of his écrits. If he had come with a mission, he endeavored to no avail. The closing words are nevertheless worth mention: "Are you a free man?" asked Miller, "Yes" answered the publisher, "So am I, free over you not publishing me."
Miller was leaving, "where is my cap?" We scoured the closet, combed the house... This time the search was sterile, the cap was not there! It was there, at the bottom of the closet, only that we had to wait for the next day for the cap to reappear. I proceeded to take the cap to the hotel, leave it with the concierge and the many recommendations.
Miller was ready waiting for the car that would take him to the airport. Come back soon, we enjoyed your paper! "Wait, do you have your cap?" "My cap?" "No." I ran inside, talked to the concierge...The cap resumed Paris together with Miller.
The idea of translating and publishing Analytical Case: the IPA and Jacques Lacan was also concocted during the same short period of time in NYC. Here the two fractions at work disclose their particular ways throughout the techniques of supervision, the performing of it corresponding with a public session where Miller is invited to take the lead.
Juliet Flower MacCannell takes on the matter of the jouissance of the body of the Other. A body of words is being wedded to the letter, the part that has effects without signifying, jouissance effects, and this substance gets off and enjoys. If it makes for the absence of sexual relation it's because the certain jouissance, Other, prevails beyond the phallus, is in excess. "A couple's strenuous, impossible, effort to merge their sexed bodies depends on concealing this breach with words, yes - but they must be new and special words, not cliche, sterile givens... The men who wanted to possess the signifier by 'having' it/her have shown themselves singularly lacking in the courage that really having the phallus would demand of them." Should I quote Cathy Lebowitz while perusing this article, she exclaimed, "Do you think American men bite the real?"
David Ebony's article brings together more than one possible discourse which it discerns in the ever present furies of language throughout time. While the very contemporary, on behalf of Jacques Derrida, often quoting Jacques Lacan, confirms perversion along the line, "...if language is able to possess, then it does so by means of a form of aggressive colonialism," Gustave Moreau's images are not phlegmatic either, "...the Sphinx claws his chest with the front paws and digs her hind paws into the man's upper thighs, very near his discreetly covered genitals." Actually what makes for the possible is in Ebony's reflection itself. "In various ways, each asks the same question: Does one possess language, or is one possessed by language?"
With Slavoj Zizek you get to wonder if there's enough nothingness to satiate the anorexic. "...Lacan emphasized how, in anorexia, the subject does not simply 'eat nothing' - he rather actively wants to eat the Nothingness (the void) itself that is the ultimate object-cause of desire." Zizek's illustration recovers a Coca-Cola motto from some years ago and discerns in its ambiguity: "Coke that's IT!...insofar as that's NEVER effectively IT, precisely insofar as every satisfaction opens up a gap of 'I want MORE!'" You want more/you want less, surplus-enjoyment on behalf of caffeine-free diet Coke, "...its nutritional value is suspended and the caffeine as the key ingredient of its taste is also taken away..."
J.A.
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