… the Real will expand and religion is going to have
many more grounds for soothing people’s souls
Jacques Lacan
On October 29, 1974 Lacan gives a press conference in Rome, which today is known as The Triumph of Religion (1974 [2005]). There, he states that religion is guaranteed to triumph. He could sense its powerfulness, the power manifested in its discourse and especially in its resources for grounding the effects emerging from science.
The role for which the victorious result was announced is that of making sense out of the intrusion of the Real in traumatic ways. The attempt to soothe the anxiety that results from the impossible is a task that culture itself has been focusing on. Both science and religion, at some point, they have been sharing the effort to offer a remedy for human suffering. In this sense, the antidote they propose is mainly linked to making sense, a meaning that takes the form of the sacred. Lacan formulated it in this way: “Faith has, a bit too often for my taste, been letting science resolve problems when questions translate into suffering that is a bit too hard to handle” (Lacan, 1974 [2005], p.32).
In this fifth issue of Lapso we will address the current relationship between psychoanalysis and society and with civilization and its discontents. We take as reference the following quote from Lacan: “That’s my way of translating faith. There are so many faiths, filling niches everywhere, that in the end the only way to properly word it is in the forum, the fair that is.” (Lacan, 1974 [2005], p.94). This leads us to the questions: what do contemporary subjects believe in? Is faith in crisis? What is the future of faith?
Following Éric Laurent’s reading[1], we live in an age where national states are collapsed, dysfunctional and unstable, they are part of the new world disorder. We can think of this phenomenon as the sign of a new landscape that is imposed before our eyes. We find an Other that cannot bear the prevailing chaos. We are witnessing the breakdown of the fabric that weaves the social bonds, the penetration of violence in its multiple forms, and the triumph of a disorganizing individualism. Angst comes out from the loss of our habitual references and it further highlights the role of religion in our days.
It should be noted that the mere idea of society is in itself an act of faith. We trust, nobody knows why, that everything that is part of our daily life —our activities, the basic services, transportation, etc. — all of them will be there tomorrow, ready for us, although we have no idea who or how all of this is been kept. That is why we state that we live in the midst of the subject supposed to know, whom we believe in, a fact that turns society into an act of faith.
We find it in Freud (1920 [2010]), this opposition to the idea that there is an innate gregarious instinct in human beings (something that is present in other species), and which would determine that humans come together to make a life. There is no program that guarantees this from a biological perspective. For Freud, we are not gregarious animals, but animals of the horde. It is by reading Lacan that we say that we need to find the support of the symbolic function, that exists in any social form, on the side of the belief in the Name of the Father, “The essence and function of the father as Name, as pivot of discourse, depends precisely on the fact that after all, you can never know who the father is. You can always look, it’s a question of faith” (Lacan, 1968-1969 [2013], pg. 141).
In this issue of Lapso, the main element that introduces the keynote of this volume is provided by Éric Laurent in the Lapso Interview. Laurent’s presence in Córdoba after more than two decades, is quite a valuable event. You will be able to listen to a clear and accurate enunciation which reflects his lucid and subtle readings on politics, the clinical practice, and the episteme. Laurent does not avoid talking about issues that are sensitive both to our culture and psychoanalysis: love and dignity; the signs of the contemporary master in the forms employment takes in the 21st century; new forms of symptoms before the progress of science; the discontents of politics in the region; the subject ―the religion― the faith. A must-see conversation that will resonate, I’m sure, for a long time.
In the section Special Contributions, you will find an outstanding article by María E. (Baby) Novotny from April 2017, prepared for the second cohort of the Master’s Program. It was in that opportunity that Baby placed the arrival and settlement of the Lacanian Orientation in Cordoba. We thought it was timely to share this valuable document with our readers now, precisely because this year is the 40th anniversary of Lacan’s only visit to Latin America. That seminar in Caracas started a movement, and we are its current consequences.
In the Section Theory and Concepts, we can find a series of thorough, accurate and committed works.
Hernán Brizio dwells on the difficulties regarding belief and meaning in their link with the Real. He uses the notions of image, body, consistency, and belief as references for his readings. It results in a perfectly accurate articulation
between the parlêtre and the trumans (les trumains).
Ivana Rammé suggests following the path of the belief in the symptom as the most singular aspect of the parlêtre. To do so, she situates the differences that arise when opposing psychoanalysis and psychotherapies. Her approach establishes a correlation with the market of the faiths in current capitalism and the biopolitics of consumption that are present in any «psy» treatment.
Ivana Fuentes reads the science fiction series Westworld (HBO: 2016) in a psychoanalytical key. The author wonders if the categories of subject, phantom, the concept of parlêtre, and the dimension of jouissance, could be applied to the android characters in the series.
Gerardo Batistta researches the success of religions and circumscribes it to the fall of the Name of the Father. He gets a good general look at the TV series, Unorthodox (Netflix: 2020), The Handmaid’s Tale (HBO: 2017‑2019), The Young Pope (HBO: 2016), and Something to Believe In (Netflix: 2017‑2018). He also refers to the expansion of Evangelism over Catholicism in Brazil.
Sarah Abitbol tries to distinguish the differences between faith in language and the unconscious, from the faith in religion. She traces Freud’s relationship with science considering what binds him to Judaism and his condition as a Jew.
The work of Emilio Vaschetto in co-authorship with Jorge Faraoni consists of a rigorous reading of the discontents in civilization. They show the forms in which the Other appears and create new communities of jouissance, the emergence of subjective characters in the fields of politics and sexuality, and the influence of technoscience and religious fanaticism among other topics.
In the Section Intersections we will find the works of Paula Hunziker, PhD; Haroldo Montagu, with a degree in Economy and a Master degree in Development Studies; Elsi San Martín with a bachelor’s degree in Theology; and Diana Paulozky, psychoanalyst: four contributions from different fields of discourse to talk about our topic of interest.
In the Section Events and Productions, Guido Coll gives us a description of the visit of Éric Laurent to Córdoba, when he was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the National University of Córdoba. Besides, Luciana Szrank makes a review of the videoconference organized by the Master´s Program in Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory (National University of Córdoba) that oversaw Fabián Fajnwaks named: Is There a Lacanian Feminism? Finally, Marcelo Fiorito gives us a summary of the activity “The City Of Your Waste”, a collaborative work under the Platform of Psychoanalysis and Architecture (Faculty of Psychology and Faculty of Urban Planning, Design and Architecture, National University of Cordoba), the Clinical Institute of Buenos Aires (ICdeBA) and the Center of Research and Clinical Studies of Córdoba (CIEC).
There are three reviews in the Section Publications: the book Desarraigados (Miller et. al, 2016) in charge of Diego Gareca Figueroa, Creencias (Miller et. al, 2019) by María José Ghione and Apostillas del TyA Córdoba: Paradojas de la prevención (2020) by Gonzalo Guzmán.
Dear readers, this time we will try to study the phenomena that result from the weakening of the Other and the subsequent pluralization of the S1. You will be able to find references about science, the market, the capitalist discourse, faith, and religion, to name only a few. At the same time, it will become obvious the ways faith appears in psychoanalysis, because it has to do with the trust we place in language, in its inventions, in its sharpness and flaws. In other words, it is about the belief that we hold in our unconscious.
This is the fifth issue of Lapso, the topic is undoubtedly exciting, and psychoanalysis cannot be shut out from it. You are all kindly invited to read it.
Notes
[1] The general ideas of this paragraph were taken from the book (An effort of poetry) of J. A. Miller, “Un esfuerzo de poesía” (2016). Paidós: Buenos Aires