From the moment we speak, we are condemned to the semblant. Our being depends on the speech that supports it, a being made of appearances. The semblants are pluralised and from this plurality, the singularity of the symptom can be heard. It is through the dimension of the sinthome that the new semblant can come to light, extracted from the psychoanalytic experience itself. This Congress is both an opportunity to take stock and to open a perspective for reading: practice, theory, but also civilization and its discontents.
VIIth WAP Congress. Paris. April 26-30, 2010. Direction: Luis Solano.
Présentation
Éric Laurent, President of the WAP
The very title of the Congress resonates differently. Until then, the title “Semblants and Sinthome” constituted a series with the two preceding Congresses, in a necessary après-coup. After having considered what was contingent or necessary about the semblants of the Name-of-the-Father, we have examined how the object a manifests itself in psychoanalytic experience.
At this particular point, the distribution of the Names-of-the-Father in the symbolic dimension and that of the objects a in the dimension of the real receded in the development of Lacan’s teaching. The choice of the title for 2010 by Jacques-Alain Miller displaces these distributions. It is the object a itself that becomes semblant, a semblant of jouissance, in the development of Lacan’s teaching. Its status changes in the face of the dimension of the sinthome, now finding itself in the non-negativisable residue, outside any form and beyond any in-form. It is through the dimension of the sinthome that the new semblant may come to light, extracted from the psychoanalytic experience itself.
The surprise, after the “Paris Event”, is that at the dawn of the 21st-Century, it is the routine semblants of the analyst that are falling. They need to be reinvented in order to face up to the new demands of civilisation. The stake for the “Semblants and Sinthome” Congress will be to identify the new semblant that we are in the process of inventing, in the same way an end of analysis produces a new, a supplementary signifier, the product of the subject’s unconscious.
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Miller J.-A., “Semblants and Sinthomes: Presentation of the Theme of the 7th Congress of the WAP”, Hurly Burly 1, 2009, 87-96.
->Scilicet, Semblants et sinthome, texts collected by the WAP, Paris, École de la Cause freudienne, coll. Rue Huysmans, 2010.