As early as the Founding Act in 1964, Lacan made the cartel the “basic organ” of his School and of the formation of the psychoanalyst: A sustained elaboration in small groups, each of them composed of at least three people, four being the right balance. Plus-one responsible for the selection, the discussion and the outcome to be accorded to the work of each. Almost sixty years later, the vitality of this mechanism of work with others has never waned.
To carry out this work we shall adopt the principle of sustained elaboration in small groups.
Jacques Lacan, “Founding Act”, 1964.
In Montesquieu’s novel, Usbek and Rica, who had just disembarked from their faraway Persia, were discovering France and its astonishing customs, while the Parisian bourgeoisie, overwhelmed by the difference, asked them the famous question “How can one be Persian?”
Anyone who is a little interested in our cartel’s experience will not be less intrigued: in the twenty-first century, when universal knowledge is only a click away and in the comfort of one’s armchair, moving late at night to work on a theoretical text or an often extremely difficult clinical question, presenting one’s reading, comparing it with that of others, leaving content and/or empty-handed. . . “How can we really be cartelisands?”
The Cartel as a Basic Organ
To decide that both theory and analytic praxis should be studied and elaborated by the group is to reflect from the outset about the way, like in any society, in which a school of psychoanalysis must question and be questioned by the effects of the imaginary, rivalry and aggressivity, just like the movements of love or fascination for a leader. The short – predetermined – time frame for which the cartel is formed, and consequently the acceleration and anticipation of its outcome is a first guarantee against the homeostasis and lethargy of the group. Equally, the presence of a plus-One, insofar as his or her extimate positionguarantees an empty place suitable for becoming a surface of transference, subjectively attached to a desire of the School: The Plus-One would then be this “poor leader”, as Jacques-Alain Miler names him[1], modest, and what is more, who will be led by the game of permutation to be replaced after a few months. Under these conditions, it is difficult to take oneself as a troop leader.
The work of the school goes through the cartel – not in seminars, conferences, courses.
Jacques-Alain Miller, “The Cartel in the World”.
Exposing a Knowledge and Exposing Oneself
The relation to knowledge in the cartel is then necessarily subverted: we do not come there to listen to a master who would feed us with his understanding of theoretical texts. But one has to come forward, alone, in his or her own name, outside of any hierarchical distinction, in order to give voice to what he has grasped of a notion, of a concept, while immediately experiencing – precisely in the question addressed to the group or by the group – to what extent this knowledge, which, as Lacan says, very often emerges “in a flash” can slip through one’s fingers and be very quickly questioned by the clinic or any page of Lacan’s that might seem contradictory to the first.
If the cartel offers a gain in understanding, then its very device constitutes a veritable subversion of knowledge, by the production not of a sum of knowledge in due form, closed, in the image of the so reassuring imaginary sphere of absolute Truth. Rather, it is a questioning of the concept itself, a fortiori by the “cartelisands”, who are well aware that the object of study that they have undertaken concerns them in the first place. It confronts each of the cartelisands with his or her own relation to knowledge, to understanding, to speaking up, to his or her relation to the Other, briefly, their symptomatic relation to the world.
Psychoanalysis, Alive. . . Not Without the Cartel
This is undoubtedly what remains so powerful, attractive and what makes the cartel so topical today: this confrontation with the other, not in any imaginary rivalry but in support against.[2] We study in a cartel as in a very particular form of social bond, certainly not to feel less alone, but undoubtedly because the device invented by Lacan is absolutely attuned to the very object that is ours in our daily lives as analysts: that which escapes transmission, that which is subject to interpretation.
Far from all encyclopaedic knowledge, it is therefore the link between practice and theory that resists withdrawal and frank understanding, which makes the cartel special today, and whose cutting edge we must continue to work on: At a time when individuals are triumphant and knowledge is horizontal, would not the group of cartelisands then be the democratic collective par excellence, making room for the subject of the unconscious, its surprises and flaws, not in an egalitarianism of good faith, but one that arouses the desire to know a little more and to assume one’s commitment through an enunciation that is singular each time?
[1] Miller J.-A., « Le cartel dans le monde », Intervention à la Journée des cartels du 8 octobre 1994 à l’ECF, transcrite par Catherine Bonningue. Paru initialement dans La Lettre mensuelle n°134. Disponible sur le site de ECF.
[2] Cf. Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XXIII, The Sinthome, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), p. 116.