Fed up with the father
We are witnessing the end of the era of the father, the end of a hegemony that ensured a certain symbolic order. A time that is coming to an end, although it still produces an important malaise that is denounced by multiple social movements, which alert us to the need to be awake to the last throes of patriarchy. What is coming promises to be much better, freer, more ethical, and assures unlimited self-determination and happiness. This awakening, however, does not contemplate the ambiguities and oscillations of current subjectivities, nor the existence of the unconscious.
What is a father ?
At first, in Lacan’s work, the father, as a signifier, has a function of interdiction, which regulates and logifies the Oedipus Complex and the myth of Totem and Taboo.
But this father, reduced to his signifier, is not enough to sift the living from the Freudian corpus. Where are the drives ? Where is jouissance ?
We are still in a phase in which the pulsional, the living of the body, is included in the imaginary, and the symbolic, in this case, the Name-of-the-Father, is expected to metaphorize it.
We can affirm that we are on an ontological plane. On a plane in which the question that arises is about being : Who am I ? or What am I for the Other ? A question that is answered through being. It could be conceived through the fantasy that links the subject of the signifier with jouissance, still in its imaginary aspect. Formation, that introduces us into the entanglements of being and desire. Entanglements that ultimately lead to a nothingness.
On the other hand, in Lacan’s last teaching, from the introduction of the notion of « Yad’lun », a change of proposal is presented. The whole approach to the ontological plane of being will be reduced to the imaginary and now it will be a question of addressing the real. The real as that which insists, that which the response from the ontological plane did not reach. It is about that which iterates. That which persists. It is no longer about fleeting formations of the unconscious in the form of lapses, dreams, or failed acts. It is about that which does not change, that which does not yield to interpretation. That which resists. Of that which is verified. This plane is called the plane of existence and ceases to be imaginary, in order to be defined as real. And here we are dealing with the real of jouissance in the particular. It is what deserves to be called a symptom.
The father symptom
From this perspective, the father is a symptom. The function of the father is to make a symptom. This version of the father is no longer that of the Freudian universal father, but is at the level of the particularity of the symptom. We are on the plane of existence. The symptom exists. We see it in the clinic. It is no longer on the side of the imaginary, on the side of what can be said, of word formation. Rather, it falls on the side of an indelible writing. It is inscribed as a letter on the body. It has more to do with a body event. With something that was once felt, and is always repeated in the same way. A One of jouissance that iterates.
Well then, « this father »[1], conceived as an iterative mark, is a good compass to guide us in the clinic of liquid modernity, where everything is fluid, everything is nebulous…
Translation : Ana Inés Bertón
Review : Linda Clarke
Picture : ©Elena Madera
[1] Miller J.-A., « Lacanian orientation. The being and the one » (2011), course given at the Psychoanalysis Department of the University Paris 8, class of April 6 & May 4, 2011, unpublished.
