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

The enigma of the shadow

María Cristina Giraldo
Psychoanalyst
Analyst Member of the School (AME)
by the Nueva Escuela Lacaniana (NEL)
and World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAM)
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[...] we orientals create beauty
by causing shadows to be born in places that
are insignificant in themselves.
(TANIZAKI, 2013, p. 69)

I use Junichirō Tanizaki's poetic prose, both in the title and in the epigraph: the enigma of the shadow is a distinguishing mark in traditional Japanese aesthetics, like the use of light as an ally of beauty in the West. The enigma is on the side of meaning and, paradoxically, it is at the same time impossible to explain; This is how you can pierce a speech. Psychoanalysis, since Freud, has supposed to keep open the hole of logical disagreement with other discourses, thanks to the difference that singularizes it. "What does a woman want?" It was an unsolved enigma for Freud. This opacity of the real, this enigma of the shadow, was formalized by Lacan in the analytical discourse as one of the logical non-existences: there is no sexual relationship, Woman does not exist and the non-existence of the analyst. They account for what there is not, but also for what there is, the One of jouissance, the jouissance of each speaking being that is incomparable, singular, irreducible.

Miller (2010, p. 57-58, our emphasis) states, in Extimidad:

there are races that respond to the definition given by Jacques Lacan, for whom a race is constituted by the way in which symbolic places are transmitted through the order of a discourse. It means that the races, those that are active among us, are effects of discourse... the use of jouissance in the order of a discourse is what marks the differences.

The orientation towards the real of jouissance in analytical practice subverts the master's discourse that focuses on standardized practices that serve direct utility, whose form of racism is psychosocial incapacity, which is equivalent to being outside the jouissance prescribed by this discourse.

Lacan's aphorism “Everyone is mad, that is, delusional”, an investigation aspect of the XIV WAP Congress, held in Paris in February 2024, puts into action a political orientation that subverts this norm that is paired with a universalizing ideal which leads to segregation. Jacques-Alain Miller invites us to reduce the possible misunderstanding that this aphorism has generated by becoming true for everyone, repeating itself as a slogan without discussion, while it could be confused with post-clinical egalitarianism because we know that its opposite is racism. Miller (2023, s/p) proposes transforming it into an enigma, into a lying truth that is the object of investigation; we could say that it gives birth, in the light of the slogan, to the shadows that veil the real at stake, while the analytical discourse “has nothing universal... it is for the One-all-alone”.

An experience of analysis orients the speaking being, who demands the listening of an analyst, to get closer to what is most unique, which is his way of jouissance, impossible to fit into a universal that totalises and standardises the practice in a equal model for everyone, because the experience of an analysis is not only unique, but also makes the identifications of the being to the Other fall. This is what allows the teaching of the pass to pierce, due to the singularity of the solution of each School Analyst (AE), the doxa that we believe we have, and that the Lacanian Orientation implies a bonding among the episteme, politics and the clinic in relation to analytical practice, the School and original definition of the analyst in Lacan.

The practice of the pass and the guarantee in the School separates the hierarchy of power and that of the gradus in the analytical institution, making the act essential in analytical training: the permanent supervision (el control) of the practice and the experience of the analysis carried to the end, from which an analyst appears, without being in an analysand’s position, therefore not making a plug in the hole of the analyst's non-existence.

In “Address on child psychoses”, Lacan (1967/2003, p. 361) formulates an essential question in relation to subversion as a response to segregation, how psychoanalysis can become a symptom of the discourse of the time, “how we, psychoanalysts, will respond: segregation brought to the order of the day by an unprecedented subversion”.

This unprecedented subversion links the experience of analysis to the experience of School. A not-all School differs from an analytical society in that it relies on the most unique aspects of each one, on the one hand, because, as Miller (2016) stated in “Theory of Turin: on the subject of the School”, it is a sum of subjective solitudes and, on the other hand, because it can be subjectivized and is the cause of desire, a forced choice, for each member.

Being in the position of analysand of one's own relationship with the subject supposed to know, of the ideal, of the real jouissance that will not stop insisting and that is beyond identifications, implies the belief in one's own unconscious, in its formations, which leads to demanding an analysis . The speaking being is alone with his jouissance, which is extimate, with the Other to which he gave consistency in his fantasy; in his relationship with the ideal and with his identifications. What Éric Laurent (2020) calls “desegregative identifications” differentiates this inevitable loneliness of each person from racism that is based on collectives formed by identity activisms, which could be called, paraphrasing Laurent, aggregative. The School, he says, is “a laboratory for producing desegregative identifications” (LAURENT, 2020).

The end of an analysis allows us to verify the feminine of the desire of the School's in relation to the inconsistency of , the pass is “a mark of the crossing of identifications” (LAURENT, 2020 p. 54). The feminization that produces this body event that is the sinthome, a new, meaningless, peerless signifier, which accounts for singular forms of arrangement with jouissance itself, an unprecedented and incomparable solution of the One-all-alone. The jouissance beyond the phallus, which cannot be numbed, nor cured, nor framed in the false freedom of lifestyles that only lead to the place of an impossible egalitarianism through identification bonds that seek to restore the Other in that which does not make community, the One of jouissance. Feminine jouissance in its opacity is this shadow to veil nothingness, a hole that can only be addressed by an invention without guarantees and open to the contingent. Without knowing what Woman is, nor what The Analyst is in School politics.  

The jouissance beyond the phallus implied, at the end of my analysis, crossing the rejection of the feminine, the double racism of my being as a woman and of the rejection due to my skin colour, placed on the Other, to which I gave consistency with my fantasy. Differentiating what makes School, which separates each parlêtre from the identity activism of a group, from what can slide along the known paths of identifications that are supported by the master signifiers that give consistency to group functionings, is to highlight the root of racism in an institution: the group segregates those who differ or oppose. Inhabiting the School, on the other hand, is to be in the place of No-One-Anymore, in which the fiction of the Other, which gave consistency to the fantasy, no longer responds to the position of phallic jouissance and shows the affinity between the feminine position and the position of analyst. These are the shades of shadow, in which not-all (no-todo) is black, not-everything (ni-todo) is white. It is the enigma of the shadow with the different forms of Lacanian subversion to racism.

References

LACAN, J. Alocução sobre as psicoses da criança. In: Outros escritos. Tradução de Vera Ribeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Ed., 2003, p. 359-368. (Trabalho proferido em 1967).

LAURENT, É. Política do Passe e identificação dessegregativa. Opção Lacaniana: Revista Brasileira Internacional de Psicanálise, n. 82, 2020.

MILLER, J.-A. Racismo. In: Extimidad. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2010.

MILLER, J.-A. Teoria de Turim sobre o sujeito da Escola. Opção Lacaniana Online, n. 21, nov. 2016. Disponível em: http://www.opcaolacaniana.com.br/pdf/numero_21/teoria_de_turim.pdf. Acesso em: 20 fev. 2024.

MILLER, J.-A. Todo mundo é louco: Apresentação do XIV Congresso da AMP. 2023. Disponível em: https://congresamp2024.world/pt-br/todo-mundo-e-louco/. Acesso em: 20 fev. 2024.

TANIZAKI, J. El elogio de la sombra. Madrid: Siruela, 2013.