Interview with Miquel Bassols

By Mariana Gómez.
Director of Maestría en Teoría Psicoanalítica Lacaniana. Escuela de la Orientación Lacaniana Section Córdoba

MIQUEL BASSOLS


In his Seminar XI, The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, Lacan associates the figure of the obscure god with Nazism. There he says that very few subjects can resist succumbing, as if under some monstrous spell, to the offering to obscure gods of an object of sacrifice. Following this reference, it seems to us that Lacan is telling us that the sacrifice to the obscure gods is realized in different ways over time, with that of Nazism being perhaps the most frightening and hideous one. How do you see these obscure gods today? Can we equate what a mass extermination implies, like the one that occurred during Nazism, with the will of jouissance that can be noticed in certain subjects involved in some current phenomena?


You say something about that in your text Technology, religion, and their victims. Could we relate it somehow with what you say regarding art, religion, and science, if we think about the issue of the object, placed in its dignity by art, but foreclosed by science and displaced by religion?


Eric Laurent, in The Reverse of Biopolitics, states that “the social nominations of what victimizes the body highlight that which is beyond the individual and should not be reduced to a personal signification of jouissance.” That is, not every victim participates in his/her misfortune. So, how can we think about this in relation to the issue of violence against women?


In relation to this series that you just placed—childhood, madness, and that which is feminine—as places where segregation and violence operate in a more drastic way, you have also reflected on the effect of identification regarding that which is media-related and that which is epidemic. Could we also locate in that series poverty sectors of countries where the subjects are reduced to pure body, in subhuman conditions, especially in countries of the third world?


In our country, Argentina, although surely in many other countries this can also be seen, there are lynchings and people taking the law into their own hands against people who commit crimes. This is in the media’s agenda under the motto of doing justice. Then, if we follow Lacan’s postulates on the sacrifice to the gods with respect to opaque jouissance and its segregative effects, how can we think about this phenomenon from psychoanalysis?

Colaborators:

Matías Meichtri
Juan Pablo Duarte
David González
Agustina Brandi
Lorena Beloso
Sofía Kolic
Eugenia Destéfanis
Verónica Magnano