The Experience of the Real

translated by Jorge Jauregui

Today I will be commenting on some of what I talked about at the University of California in Los Angeles where I was invited to give a lecture. The main audience, categorically entrenched in the domain of cultural studies, was certainly not made of practitioners, not of clinicians, but of academics proper. What to tell you? The interest in Jacques Lacan flourishes in this category, and this is how you are bound to admit it as an undeniable fact.

To convey an understanding of cultural studies in the United States would entail some casual reference to the couleur locale, and this is what I will abstain from doing. I won't do it because we are not alone and my words would reach their ears at once [laughter] loaded with our own couleur locale and with the misunderstandings to follow from there. So let me leave the couleur locale aside, much as my personal perception with regard to Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Sunset Boulevard.

I say enough if I tell you that above all I was charmed with the weather [laughter] and now I feel as if I am in a uniform dressed with a suit and a tie. Over there I found myself driven by the climate, by the ambiance, to the point of acquiring white sneakers and participating in the colloquium open-collared in a T-shirt. I promised myself to do the same upon my return [laughter] but there is dust in Paris, and I've actually realized that I am a bit of a chameleon myself who takes pleasure in conforming to environments.

During my talk, I tried to find a spot for these cultural studies in the Freudian Field, that is studies that are not clinical as they earnestly avow. Devoted to contemporary sublimation, the aforementioned studies analyze objects of cultural consumption - from the most ordinary to the most sophisticated. If at its best they disclose one of the bearings of discontent in civilization, at their worst they are simply being part of it.

No enticement offered by our civilization, as they say, to colonize the site of Das Ding - of jouissance qua impossible - is foreign to them.

[...]

* Miller, Jacques-Alain, "L'expérience du réel dans la cure analytique." Paris, 03/17/99. back up

Art: Renée Cox, Hot-Ten-Tot, silver gelatin print, 1994>

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