Taking an interest in the maladies of the father implies approaching him from the side of his relationship to surplus jouissance [plus-de jouir], as Lacan defines it in his last teaching. The exception that the father is bound to embody is not only supported on the side of his symbolic status of saying no to jouissance, as the Name-of-the-Father already articulated, but also by his père-version and his symptoms. Let’s first appreciate the subversive tour de force that Lacan gave this function, which he was the first to introduce to psychoanalysis, by proposing a formalization of the Oedipus father. For the first time in the history of psychoanalysis, the father is defined in terms of his relationship to surplus jouissance, which was unprecedented. This brings Lacan to state that : « It matters little that he has symptoms provided he adds to them that of paternal perversion [père-version], meaning that its cause should be a woman »[1]. This approach to the father, from the side of the symptoms of his function, would itself be enough to eliminate any suspicion that Lacanian psychoanalysis contributes to the persistence of the patriarchal order and contributes to its legitimation, as Paul B. Preciado[2] or Didier Eribon[3] – to only mention the most well-known authors – claim. On many occasions Jacques-Alain Miller has argued, the revolution on the paternal function demanded by queer authors when revising texts of the 70s – Deleuze and Guattari, and the attempts of the Freudo-Marxists – it was Jacques Lacan himself who put it in motion ! In pointing out that : « There is nothing worse than a father who proffers the law on everything. Above all, spare us any father educators, rather let them be in retreat on any position as master »[4]. Lacan not only shows the structural impossibility for anyone (since, today, it is legally and socially accepted this function is available to all) to be up to the task, but also shows this father would get « a right to respect, if not love, if the said love, the said respect, is – you won’t believe your ears – perversely (père-versement) orientated »[5]. That is, if he is oriented by what makes surplus jouissance for him.
In this perspective Lacan was way ahead of societal shifts when he located the paternal exception on the side of the one who wows [épate] his family, instead of the side of the pater familias : « People have wondered a great deal about the function of the pater familias. What we may require of the function of the father needs to be better focused. How people indulge in these stories of paternal shortcoming ! It’s a fact that there is a crisis. This is not completely false. L’é-pater ne nous épate plus. His wowing us is a thing of the past. This is the only genuinely decisive function of the father »[6]. To wow [é-pater in French]– as explained by Éric Laurent – is both to produce a kind of admiration, to make an impression, but moreover, in playing with the Latin wording pater, it is to take a step aside from the ideal of the pater familias. It’s an operation aiming at a particular effect, which is to distance oneself from the belief that a father can be “for all”. »[7] At this level the real of the paternal function can be measured by grasping his surplus jouissance. Lacan stressed this in his lecture at Columbia University when he noted, also for the first time, that : « The father is a function that refers to the real, and this is not necessarily the truth of the real. This doesn’t prevent the real of the father being absolutely fundamental in analysis. The father’s mode of existence stems from this real. It’s the only case where the real is stronger than the true »[8]. This real of the father is to be located on the side of his père-version, insofar as it indicates to each member of the family that it is on the side of a jouissance limited to the surplus jouissance [plus-de jouir] that one must find one’s way, beyond one’s own symptoms.
One of the symptoms of our civilisation is the difficulty of maintaining the place of the paternal exception which allowed the universal to be founded, according to the formulae of sexuation from the Seminar Encore[9]. The universal no longer holds; and the world of the Law has been replaced by the more blurred world of norms. Each person is free to embody an exception, according to the feminine logic, by articulating a mode of jouir, a singular lifestyle : the problem with this perspective is that it combines so well with the injunction of jouissance that characterises our era, without leaving any gap, any remainder whatsoever, for desire. The success of books extolling the deconstructed man or the way the patriarchal order sabotages heterosexual relationships can be read in this light. The point here is not to advocate a return to the old order where we knew what men were, in the manner of the masculinist or Incel movements, but to return each speaking being to identifying his singular mode of jouissance and making use of it. Regarding fathers, it is a question of being able to embody the model of the function. Éric Laurent explains how a father manages to be a model of the function : « To be a father is to be one of the models, one of the variables (a, b, c, d) of the function P(x). So, to say ‘the father as agent of castration can only be the model of the function’ is to say that the approach Lacan chooses to the question of the father is that of the one by one of those who have become father. »[10]
Among the father’s maladies we can situate at one end of the spectrum the « educating father », the one who can’t be, at the risk of becoming President Schreber’s father. At the opposite end of the spectrum we can situate the toxic father, the one who makes of his children an object of jouissance. The incest problem, so present in contemporary families according to all human sciences’studies, has also been present in literature’s developments over the last decades. Something is new compared to the classical tragedies where incest was also in the foreground : it is autofictional testimonies which make it possible to treat the real of the irruption that the trauma produces in the life of the subject. It is sometimes enough for a father to let slip a remark about his young daughter’s body – a remark that can be heard by a third person and relayed to the subject – for this remark [dit] to take on the value of a trauma.
We also have the « playmate » father mentioned by Éric Laurent, in the style of Little Hans’ father, a pioneer-symptom of the beginning of the XXth century, era of the assumed patriarchal order. The permissive father, serial in his nature, who is a companion in the consumption of various products and who, by his position, admits his powerlessness to limit jouissance. The effects of this resignation are persistently felt by children through various symptoms. We can also add the father’s resignation when he is so absorbed by the jouissance of his own symptoms that he’s no longer able to show the way for « helping his family’s members to say no to the mortifying aspect of jouissance and to say something about a jouissance that might be bearable »[11]. And our epoch, with its countless gadgets, does not fail to offer objects allowing a surplus jouissance that can distract a father from « saying no to jouissance ». Under that perspective the père-version seems almost like a challenge, not only for being a brake to the contemporary push to jouissance [pousse-au-jouir] but also as its true subversion.
Translation : Cédric Grolleau
Proofreading : Robyn Adler
Picture: ©Emilie Divet
[1] Lacan J., Seminar XXII, « RSI », 21 January 1975, transl. by J. Rose in J. Mitchell and J. Rose (eds.), Feminine Sexuality, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1982, p. 167.
[2] Preciado P. B., Je suis un monstre qui vous parle [I’m a monster talking to you], Paris, Grasset, 2020. Not translated.
[3] Eribon D., Hérésies: essais sur la théorie de la sexualité [Heresies: Essays on the Theory of Sexuality], Paris, Fayard, 2003. Not translated.
[4] Lacan J., Seminar XXII, « RSI », op.cit., p. 167.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Lacan J., The Seminar, book XIX, …Or worse, trans. Adrian Price, Polity, 2018, p. 184.
[7] Laurent É., « Parentalités après le patriarcat ». Available in French language at https://institut-enfant.fr/zappeur-jie7/parentalites-apres-le-patriarcat/ Not translated.
[8] Lacan J., « Columbia University Lecture on the Symptom », The Lacanian Review 12, trans. Russell Grigg, p. 78.
[9] Lacan J., The Seminar, book XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, edited by J.-A. Miller, trans. Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1998.
[10] Laurent É., « Parentalités après le patriarcat », op. cit.
[11] Ibid.
