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”[1], would it not effectively establish another arbitrariness, substituting one jouissance for another and thus upset the social bond, since it is based on the exclusion of what is – and those who are – non-conforming.
Valérie Binard invites us to read Gaëlle Josse’s La nuit des pères. The author traces, with tact and poetry, a childhood journey, in the “shadow of a ferocious father”, a mountain guide. In order to grow up, each child – the narrator and her brother – built a way to escape suffocation. At the gates of oblivion, the father will illuminate his horror, humanizing the ferocious father that he was and bringing a certain appeasement to the narrator.
René Raggenbass recalled Lacan’s interpretation to the students in ’68: “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You’ll get one!” It’s done; we have him! And he proposes to link Wokism not to the “return” of patriarchy, but to a “tyranny of jouissance that presents itself in the guise of group ideals”.
Françoise Denan explores woke at work. In today’s corporate world, woke concerns with a ferocious superego effect have replaced industrial paternalism and the well-meaning familialist system. The ideals of the Father – and its prescriptions for all – have given way to the demand for plural jouissances. During the era of historical capitalism, the bond was preserved through social and trade union struggles… What new form of bond could exist today?
Céline Menghi evokes the journey of William Blake, author of the poem “Nobodaddy”, seeking a balance between writing and drawing, making traces of the visions that have crossed him since childhood. A man opposed to “rationalist dissent”, empiricist philosophy and science.
However, in addition to the precision with which each of the authors adjusts our vision of what can be housed under “patriarchy”, what brings these texts together is the opening they provide: taking psychoanalysis as a compass is an opportunity for each subject struggling with the “pain of living” or with the “tyranny of the jouissance of the Ideal”.
Siding with the micrometric screw or the sooty torch, psychoanalysis, – through its theoretical approaches or its practice – functions as a tool for elucidation. And above all a support for the invention of each One.
[1] Berkane-Goumet S., “Woke discourse, a new rapport?”, guidance text, Nobodaddy, blog Pipol 11, 26 February 2023.
Translation: Benjamin Wimmer
Reviewing: Adeena Mey
Picture : @ Geoffroy Mottart
