En Israel existen ya una serie de textos de Jacques Lacan y de Jacques-Alain Miller que circulan y se leen en hebreo. Los comentarios a los que han dado lugar han sido sobre todo del diario « Haaretz », considerado « de izquierda », si bien sensiblemente poco simpatico al discurso psicoanalitico, e inclusive a Sigmund Freud. No hace mucho tiempo, « Haaretz » abrio sus columnas a la pretension cognitivista: un grupo de presion, con poder en la Universidad, que protestaba por el supuesto monopolio de la psicologia llamada dinamica en la formacion de los psicologos clinicos en los hospitales. « Haaretz » limito cuidadosamente las respuestas, contadas, de los psicoanalistas que muy timidamente alegaron que no necesariamente lo cientifico es lo mas adecuado para anotar las cosas en este campo. Haca poco se publico la primera edicion hebrea de « El chiste y su relacion con el inconsciente », de Sigmund Freud, y el diario « Haaretz » se apuro en publicar, a plena pagina, los dos unicos comentarios que resultaron acordes a su fariseismo, como diria Lacan. Uno del editor cientifico del texto Freudiano, quien enemistado con la Editorial (la misma que publica los textos de Lacan), pues esta no quiso publicar su prologo, en el que anunciaba que « El chiste… » es un texto sin valor clinico alguno.
Cabe agregar entre parentesis que en esa epoca, hace medio anio, nos visitaba Pierre Naveau. Enterado por nosotros de este episodio, nos aconsejaba: « Uds deben ahora mismo, esta misma noche, escribir una respuesta… » El otro comentario era de un enemigo declarado de Lacan, bajo el disfraz de su interes intelectual por Lacan. El escribio (sobre el Witz): « El menos freudiano de los textos freudianos… » En fin, una verdadera Babel hebrea.
Por ello es que cabe subrayar el hecho, insolito hasta el momento, de que « El triunfo de la religion » (Trad Bracha Ettinger, con : Perla Miglin y Marco Mauas, edicion de este ultimo, Resling Ediciones) haya sido comentado en « Time Out ». Una revista de jovenes y para jovenes de tel-Aviv, con una gran tirada, muy leida, con otro tipo de swing, otro tipo de lectura. De repente sucede eso: alguien puede llegar a leer, y no precisamente desde donde se lo espera.

A man of weaknesses

A slim exciting booklet, blatantly incomprehensible, about the faulty existence of human beings, about the castrating, lost, absent thing
By: Eitan Buganim
« Time Out », 17-24 de julio de 2008, No 298.

Not without reason, Jacques Lacan, the highly praised psychoanalyst, who strove to breathe life into the radical theories of the inventor of psychoanalytic therapy, Freud, is a controversial brand. Many consider him a charlatan or qualified clown while others consider him a one-time genius and spiritual father. Not without reason his texts, from the written seminars to the improvised interviews, known as confusing, difficult, vague and requiring a lot of effort and prior acquaintance with a lot of sources of knowledge. Not without reason, because Lacan wanted to be perceived by his readers and listeners exactly in this way.  » To bring the opinions to embarrassment, to better seduce them », according to Jacques-Alain Miller, his disciple (and son-in-law) and the one in charge of his writings; to sharpen the sting of the revolutionary discoveries of Freud and to extricate them from the abyss of institutional bureaucracy, from their transformation to monolithic authority applied in the field of conformity as social exploitation; to leave the desire (hiding behind every demand and left always unfulfilled), and to speak (meaning, to ask about the experience of the word, its essence, its interchange and mainly about the deep lack that is wide-open in it and cannot be described by it).
The new slim booklet includes two works that were delivered orally: « A speech to the Catholics » which is actually two lectures from 1960, and « The triumph of religion » whose origin is a press conference from 1974. The booklet is a brilliant realization of the audacity and the provocative practice of Lacan, with its nuances entertaining, somber, associative, defying with genius quality. Lacan admits that the lectures are for the well-informed, the elite of psychoanalysts, and that his writings are difficult for reading not with the purpose to make them difficult but because they are a « vast concentrate, in relation to the accumulation of what I said ».
Although it is a concentrate that is difficult to digest – in all his other contemplations – including concepts and a whole field of signifiers and signs that are brought without introduction or explanation, the spirit of things which pulsates in the book certainly passes, tantalizing and throwing the patient reader off track. (Moreover Lacan (like Freud but with a morbid French flavour) reveals himself as a man of weaknesses who knows how to compliment, to desire, to be angry to admit being powerless, to devote oneself and to tell crystal clear things about the unclear.
Supposedly the subject or the pretext to these lectures and interviews is the ethics of psychoanalysis, the morality that it offers our epoch. However, what pops up in this booklet (skipping the mathematics and the method) is a fascinating long series of flagellation, struggles and militant preaching about the faulty and inevitable existence of the human soul on earth « .. the damaged country is totally dependent on something injured, lost, in that castrated something of a mysterious king ».
Lacan opposes to the assumption that the principle of dissatisfaction in human beings originates from a personal defect or developmental norm. He maintains that Eros is firstly a dark god and that « undoubtedly there is incurable distortion in human sexuality » or « that split place, from where nothingness interrogates us about our sex and about our existence ». The human being tries to compromise with the thing in various ways, maintains Lacan, either in Art that represents the alliance with the thing or in religion that glorifies the faith in the thing and causes it to remain in a proper distance, even science confronts the basic evil of the thing. All that is left to human beings is to moderate the frustration, to cover that thing that we look for all our lives, to stop the followers of desire, to find a substitute, a sublimation. All this, to achieve a compromise with the thing, « this nothingness around which all human lust shrinks its grimace is short or long frequency in a cyclic repetition », but in which love is also reflected, because it is the one who points the presence that comes from absence. According to Freud this deprivation relates to the « failing » and traumatic encounter, one that words cannot describe, of the human being with sexuality. Lacan points out (in a typical melancholy) that the character of the « normal » or « moral » fantasy depends on its being dynamic, partial, full of discontent, uncertain and in a constant dialectical revolving. In the psychotic soul, lack does not exist, the thing does not disappear but the word itself does. Their language is a fossilized ensemble of signs and fixed codes.
« Keep this little booklet in your pockets, and read it in four five years from now. You will see that you will lick your fingers », answered Lacan about the problematic of his books, in both in self-annulment and prophetic sense. He was right about the licking, and was wrong when he added that the insights it contains will become with time empty and understood flowery language.

Translated from Hebrew
By Ilana Rabin