The clinic and critique of patriarchy via Nobodaddy has been in full swing for six months. Together with the eleven texts in this latest issue, there are more than one hundred and twenty contributions from colleagues across the EuroFederation that you can read on the blog, which has been maintained by a team of around one hundred people, orchestrated by those shown in the illustration.
If you still have doubts instilled by the proponents of the Anti-Œdipe about the supposed complacency of psychoanalysts towards the patriarchal order, read Alexandre Gouthière’s text, which demonstrates, with the case of Minna, that psychoanalytic treatment consists in de-idealising the father figure. Or the one from Jacqueline Dhéret who tells us that in analysis, we move from a position of heir to a position of heretic. We discover ourselves, in fact, the children of the signifiers we encounter and of language. And then continue with Andres Borderias’ text, which shows that the real tyrant within us is the superego, which, with the evaporation of the father, now subjects us to an even more ferocious iron law: the one that makes everything permissible compulsory. Psychoanalysis is also the treatment of this introjected father figure, a distancing of the signifiers thus transmitted with their load of jouissance.
For Lacan, each father becomes the model of the function, which places the father on the side of the symptom and not the universal (Caroline Nissan). And that’s why, for us psychoanalysts, it’s a question of situating how each subject deals, or doesn’t deal, with the model he encountered in childhood. But the ideal of doing without the father by making a radical cut with him does not allow to make use of him, and leads inexorably to worse, as Florence Smaniotto reminds us, based on her reading of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Again with P. Roth, Eve Carrere Naranjo points to the solution of a melancholic subject who may need to bring a mean Other into existence to cover up his real as a waste object. Bérangère Remy reads Goliarda Sapienza’s attempt to get rid of the father by refusing to use the signifier father: “I didn’t kill my father, but from that night on I always called him the lawyer”. As for Anne Weinstein, she shows us how Nadia Murad, having been through the worst, no longer believes in traditional patriarchy. She does without a father, but she makes use of him to write. Gérard Garouste’s only solution to the indignity of fathers is to invent his own way of painting, his own language, “like the artificer of a skill that is now exceptional” (Sophie Charles). To do without, to no longer believe in it, but to use it without being subject to the ferocious law of the signifier that constitutes the superego.
Nor is it a question of idealising women and mothers and dreaming of a gynaecocracy, because, as Philippe Benichou reminds us, there is no political solution to the lack of sexual report. Nor is capitalist discourse one, because it aims to erase the subject in favour of individual enjoyment connected to mass-produced objects. Hence the difficulty within the collective of finding a point of concernement with the reality of war (Célia Breton).
All the texts published in Nobodaddy are and will remain accessible on the internet. They are a preparation, but also an echo maintained beyond the event that brings us together this weekend in Brussels. We wish you all a very good, studious and festive congress!
Translation: Ana-Marija Kroker
Proofreading: Benjamin Wimmer
