To resume again...

Did You Say Bizarre?
J
ACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

Analytical Case
J
ACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

Sex, The Last Thirty Years
J
ULIET FLOWER MacCANNELL

Prized Possessions
D
AVID EBONY

Surplus-Enjoyment
S
LAVOJ ZIZEK

TRACEY EMIN

Rorty and the Orchids
M
ARIO GOLDENBERG

Follie à deux
J
OSEFINA AYERZA


























        

To resume again...

 

Josefina Ayerza

The line along the courtyard where there is La Maison Francaise, New York University, on March 9th, 1999, lit up in lavishness of hats, scarves, gloves, boots... Fairly cold for that time of the year, the University had invited Jacques-Alain Miller to give a lecture. The event to follow, it led right into an alluring salon: there was a piano, a vase of white tulips on the piano...If the luckier found seats, the bunch of people that stood in the back of the room were also lucky if only because of succeeding over the several others that were rejected at the door: the place was full.

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...

[…]

 


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