You have before you the first Newsletter which prepares the next congress of the EuroFederation of Psychoanalysis, Pipol 11, under the title Clinic and Critique of Patriarchy.
It was proposed by Jacques-Alain Miller, because of its topicality. Everyone talks about patriarchy or has heard of it. It would be the cause of discontent in contemporary civilization, even though it had disappeared from circulation due to its decline, or even « évaporation »[1]; the father, we were doing without it more and more.
The name of this Newsletter is Nobodaddy, a term forged by the mystical poet of the late 18th century, William Blake. Its polyvocal construction allows us to highlight this paradox : on one hand, the father’s absence, the nobody, on which the poem is explicit : « Why art thou silent and invisible, Father… ? » ; face of the jouissance on the other : « …, Father of Jealousy ? » [2], which is not without recalling the father of Totem and Taboo[3].
loser to us, Catherine Millot used this term as the title of her book Nobodaddy, L’Hystérie dans le siècle (Nobodaddy, Hysteria in the century), in which we find a « duplication, of one purely significant side and one obscure side », which makes « the failure of One father » [4].
Finally, the Joycean accents of W. Blake’s writing make it possible to read the nœud bo, the nœud beau du père (beautiful knot of the father). We find in this linguistic creation, and it is not by chance, the function of the father that Lacan defined at the end of his teaching as a symptom in the principle of Borromean knotting. Indeed, the father, far from being One, is articulated by the three constituent dimensions of the parlêtre, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary.
The first three editions of Nobodaddy will be dedicated to the sections guidance of the Pipol 11’s blog which you can discover by visiting www.pipol11.eu. These sections, six in total, will host the texts that each of you who are willing can propose to participate actively in the preparation of the congress.
In this first edition, Neus Carbonell presents the section To do without / to make use of it. She raises the question of the conditions, not at all incompatible with the decline of patriarchy, for a father, in his singularity, to not impose authority and the law but transmits the function of desire by knotting, always symptomatically, his relation to jouissance to a woman. In the era of beyond the father and the patriarchy, which can lead to the worst, the symptom will indeed remain Lacan’s cornerstone to approach the singular solution of each One contrary to any standardized normativisation.
For the Authoritarianism section, Domenico Cosenza, justifying the title of C. Millot’s book, starts from the hysterical subject who objects to the diktats of the father as well as to the dominant discourses. Freud’s choice to let the subject speak made it possible to highlight the signifiers, master-signifiers, which subjugate him without his knowledge. Thus indicates that, well beyond the father, it is language that leads the dance. Like N. Carbonell, D. Cosenza points out that the decline of the father can lead to the worst in the various forms of ideological or fundamentalist authoritarianism.
Here are two texts which give the first orientations of the way which will lead us to the congress of 1st and 2nd of July. Enjoy your reading !
Translation : Ana-Marija Kroker
Proofreading : Aurélie Solliec
Picture : @ Fabien de Cugnac
[1] Lacan J., « Note sur le père », La Cause du désir, n°89, march 2015, p. 8.
[2] Blake, W. “To Nobodaddy”, Notebook, 1793, p. 109. French translation by Alain Suied, https://www.espritsnomades.net/litterature/william-blake-approches-de-william-blake-par-alain-suied
[3] Freud, S. Totem and Taboo, 1913.
[4] Millot, C. Nobodaddy, L’Hystérie dans le siècle, Paris, Point hors ligne, 1988, p. 13.
