Derivas Analíticas Journal - Nº 20 - March 2024. ISSN:2526-2637

On collectives and singularities

Marina Recalde
Psychoanalyst
Analyst Member of the School (AME)
by the School of Lacanian Orientation (EOL)
and the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP)
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When I received the invitation to participate in this precious Journal, Derivas Analíticas, I remembered Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian philosopher who I met through my friend Marcus André Vieira, on the occasion of one of the EBP Journées in Rio de Janeiro.

I decided to start from there, as it worked and works for me as a compass to be able to think about my own experience at the end of the analysis and what I was able to bring to the conversation and debate with different currents of feminism and the fight against racism.

Why do I say it's a compass? Because this philosopher, in a very acute way, allows me to think, on the one hand, about the tension between the collective and the singular, and, at the same time, to be able to locate connection points.

He interested me because it takes into account issues that, for me, are crucial: crossing binaries: white-black, men-women, rich-poor... definitely: us-them. Necessary crossing to find another way of inhabiting the world.

I believe that this is the key to establishing how psychoanalysis goes against any totalitarianism.

Mbembe (2016, s/p), with extreme lucidity, states: “When power brutalizes the body, resistance takes on a visceral form”. And this impacted me because, effectively, perhaps this clinging to an identity is a form of visceral resistance, but as a response to the brutalization of the body exercised by power.

We have a level at which the individual counts, and being part of a group also becomes important. In other words, there is a level at which a subject is identical to the others but, in one’s singularity, in turn, this subject is unique and incomparable and this is not collectivized.

However, what do we, Lacanian-oriented analysts, have to say about this? How can an analysis carried out to the end allow someone to overcome this tension between the collective and the singular?

It is those collective movements that place, or at least try to place, a limit on this brutality of the Other, to prevent this body from being massacred, humiliated, raped, made invisible. It is what vivifies this visceral resistance to which Mbembe refers. And to enable each subject of this collective to find, in the other, a partner that allows them to better sustain this resistance. Not all identification is mortifying. Some vivify. Furthermore, I think these movements are, on some level, absolutely necessary, potent, and hopeful.

And we have another aspect of identification, in which the neurotic finds himself at ease, identifying himself with a place that clearly names him, but at the same time provides him with suffering, a mortifying side that all identification implies, due to the jouissance it brings.

A point that comes into play in an analysis, to oppose it, taking turns that require a lot of time. A time that tests the extent to which someone is willing to empty and pierce, as far as possible, those signifiers that produce mortification.

Segregation is not a topic that was foreign to me. Neither is the attempt to make this jouissance homogeneous.

In my case, my dark skin color tormented me, as it placed me in a despicable group, identified with my father, in which blondes, with light eyes and white skin, were the ones who had access to a life from which I was excluded. Movement always implies locating oneself in a binary, which is irremediably reduced to a “Them” and “Us”. Logic that reinforces mass identifications and alienates each person to an ideal. We know the bad effects of this.

With neurosis, I sought to create a body and a lovable skin for myself and for the Other. With the analysis carried to the end, I managed to disarm this absurd “chromatocracy” in which I had trapped myself.

Firstly, in a fixed and unintelligible way, and then, as the clarification of the symptom and the fantasy took place in the analysis, this contrast was presented in other ways, but black and white continued to play a leading role. The turns in the story of contrasts (being poor among the rich, ugly among the beautiful) began to be reduced to an essential contrast: a black woman among white people, located in a place of insult.

This mark reappeared in different forms, but showing that the symptom and the fantasy were still operating.

The color of the skin was dramatically disturbing. Dramatism emphasized by the fact that it was something not only ineliminable but also something indisguisable.

I wanted to be white at all costs. I even injured my knees in a desperate attempt to whiten them. In short, it was I myself who had erected me as the bearer of this depreciation of black people and had attributed it to the cruel Other that I had invented.

But, with analysis, I understood that all of that was a tremendous invention of neurosis to try to capture an aspect of the body that cannot be captured. And that what persists is ineliminable, it is called jouissance and is what gives us an identity – which we call sinthomal – at the end of the journey.

As an analyst, I was able to see that there is no class or group that can group a subject, black, white, man, woman, beautiful, ugly... That we are all, as Fernando Pessoa said, an exception to a rule that does not exist (but which neurosis tries to bring into existence, over and over again, with that rigid insistence that only neurotics can sustain in such a failed successful way). Today this no longer mortifies me; Instead, I find satisfaction in these contrasts. The black woman is no longer irremediably linked to injury.

As a citizen, I respect and encourage collective movements that imply lively resistance where an Other tries to crush what is different from a place of power that is very difficult to combat. Perhaps achieving this is logically impossible, but it becomes increasingly urgent and necessary.

References

MBEMBE, A. Achille Mbembe: “Cuando el poder brutaliza el cuerpo, la resistência assume una forma visceral”. Interview to Pablo Lapuente Tiana and Amarela Varela. El diário, junho, 2016. Available at: https://www.eldiario.es/interferencias/achille-mbembe-brutaliza-resistencia-visceral_132_3941963.html. Access on Feb. 20, 2024.

English version by Ana Helena Souza.