The Name-of-the-Father as an operator that regulates jouissance is born in Lacan on the side of metaphor and then goes on to be conceived as a logical function and, finally, as a knot or symptomatic knotting. In the clinical and social realms of the twenty-first century, we find these different versions of the father, notable examples of what operates, among which I would like to mention three writers who have used writing to border on a real situated beyond the father. At the turn of the century, the American writer Joan Didion coped with the illness and the death of...

By casting doubt on “the primacy of the father, which is supposed to be a kind of reflection of patriarchy (la primauté du père reflet patriarcal)”, Lacan created a gap – which it is relevant to maintain – between father and patriarchy. And for good reason as the father of Lacanian psychoanalysis half-says how he copes with his jouissance. His saying conveys a lack, a hole in the symbolic that the Name-of-the-Father has precisely the task of covering with a certain inventive flexibility that the patriarchal order does not offer. In his latest film, The Crime Is Mine, François Ozon depicts...

Being as jouissance ? May 1968. The Name-of-the-Father, already well undermined, is defeated. This is the intoxication of the revolution ! Other than the « conservatives », no one dares to refer to the patriarchy. Jacques Lacan, an « anti-progressive », responded not without malice : « What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one. » It's done ; we have him ! Not in the form of a new « father » figure but in the form of collectives of modes of jouissance that demand to be in the place of the agent in the discourses and the social bond. Being and jouissance : this is already a...

« In the shadow of your anger, father, I was born, I lived and fled. Today I am back. I arrive and I am naked. Alone and empty-handed. » Following a call from her brother, the narrator reluctantly returns to the village of the Alps where she grew up. « I arrive and already the memory of your voice is pounding in my head. You will never be loved by anyone. One day, father, you told me that. You’ll fail in your life. You told me that, too. With all my strength, I wanted to prove your curse wrong. » Her brother tells her...

« William Blake es uno de los hombres más extraños de la literatura. Fue el menos contemporáneo de los hombres. » J. L. Borges The striving of humans towards God the father is eternal. He deceives. And we believe in it. He disappears. He is restored to the heart of being, in politics. At best, one can just as well bypass it, on the condition that one make use of it. At worst, the nostalgia for patriarchy ends up generating nationalism and racism, for which the direction of feminine jouissance, “outside the machinery of the Oedipus” represents the paradigm. God, Father, Patriarchy,...

Heading towards Pipol 11, clinicians question themselves, report on various aspects, try to approach elements with clarity. This resembles the work of focusing a telescope and also lighting the cavern. The four texts in this issue explore facets of patriarchy. Here, the ferocious father. Whether in his will to be the “father who professes the law over everything” or in the tyranny of his excesses of jouissance, with no civilizing function. There, the woke discourse. “Denouncing the arbitrariness of patriarchy”, would it not effectively establish another arbitrariness, substituting one jouissance for another and thus upset the social bond, since it is...