While the economic consequences of war are making headlines all over Europe, Olivier De Ville devotes a reflection in this issue on the economic causes of war. Indeed, what becomes of the economy – always of enjoyment –, when it no longer deals with it through the lack of an object?
The American dream was first a Western concern before becoming a global nightmare. The objects that populated this dream were used as social vindication. Thus, the swimming pools in the film The Swimmer served no other purpose than to display the owner’s success. The American Way of Life, brilliantly depicted in this film, ends up as an empty shell, as Cédric Grolleau points out. The object is lost.
But the economy of daddy is no more. Lack and agalma have been replaced by shortage and waste. The invasion of our lives by excess objects in the form of gadgets is not pacifying. As Rik Loose points out in his text, these objects do not make symptoms, but rather distress us. It seems that our dependence on these objects is more prone to anxiety than our dependence on autocratic powers that rely on scarcity.
What happens to the object of desire under these conditions? Is the child the last vestige? Paloma Larena shows us how the child, in the absence of signifying opposition, becomes the object on which the parent’s mode of enjoyment is centred. This mode is an investment, still libidinal, but now following a flow, occasionally stock market.
Is it serious? Children can find ways of inventing a difference in signifiers. However, this will not happen without a word that names and tempers the excesses of enjoyment, as Natacha Delaunay points out in relation to children’s literature. It has the role of introducing without gravity, but not without consequences, the burning questions that torment us, all ages combined.
The same applies to Nobodaddy.
Translation: Ana-Marija Kroker
Proofreading: Aurelie Solliec
Picture : © Ateliers d’Art de La Baraque
