LACANIAN REVIEW - E-book - ePub

In spoken English, the word "fuck' recurs as an all-purpose punctuation mark [...]: sex is all over the place, at the very least in language. And psychoanalysis favours evidence-based-on-language over evidence-based medicine! The Lacanian Review 2 Sex all over the place Journal of the New Lacanian School and The Word Association of Psychoanalysis In spoken English, the word "fuck' recurs as an all-purpose punctuation mark [...]: sex is all over the place, at the very least in language.
And psychoanalysis favours evidence-based-on-language over evidence-based medicine! The substitution of the multiple of sexual practices for the binary of sexual difference has profoundly affected the social bond. So is it all over, now that it is all over the place? Are we going to be happy? Some in the field of gender studies and queer theory claim that the future of psychoanalysis is tied to the repressive hypothesis, to the persistence of heteronormativity - and that it is, therefore, fated to fade away, a relic of an oppressive past.
So, is there no future for psychoanalysis? Fuck! It is true that [...] the limits that "nature' seemingly imposed upon the imaginary of sexuality keep being pushed back, and ever more numerous configurations take shape. So, have the fluidity of gender norms, the new modalities of accessing sexual satisfaction, and the advances of science rendered psychoanalysis obsolete? Now that there's no one to blame for one's failure in achieving sexual satisfaction - finding the perfect match, living the dream, pursuing happiness to the full - it seems, on the contrary, that psychoanalysis is more pertinent than ever. As Jacques-Alain Miller demonstrates in the two pieces we have chosen to open and close our thematic section, it is structurally impossible to say the truth about jouissance, to negate jouissance by means of the symbolic.
Jouissance, therefore, unfailingly returns on the subject in a ferocious fashion, causing all manner of suffering in the process. It is the effect of the return of the drive onto the subject that Freud christened "superego', and it is now amply averred that the weakening of social prohibitions has, if anything, increased the superego's might. On what conditions, then, might a new alliance with jouissance be formed? This is the research programme of the Lacanian Orientation. (extract from Véronique Voruz's editorial)