The Lacanian Review No. 9: Still life?

We began our research for this volume of The Lacanian Review with an equivocation between the two languages of the New Lacanian School, English and French: Still Life – Nature Morte. It implied an orientation to the drive, persistence, even still, on the side of life, and a painterly gesture towards the drive on the side of death that permeates nature. Nature Morte—Dead Nature. Fallen tulip petals and decomposing fruits plucked from the source, encaptured in composition, life made still by the gaze. For how many decades have scientists and activists warned of the death of nature? From Silent Spring to the unravelling of the Paris Climate Accord. How to persist in living when it has already been too late for us for so long? Yet, we keep doing it, still, despite the momento mori that accumulates from the production of life, waste. Lacan said in 1974, “To be waste is what anyone who is a speaking being aspires to without knowing it.”The encounter with a second signifier of our silent spring, corona, reinterpreted our still life. In the span of one month, the world, our nature, came to a standstill, the pause that brought global production to its knees: a lockdown of social movement. The death count passed one million worldwide and then next day the media highlighted astonishing drops in carbon emissions, clear waters in Venice, blue skies, and the flourish of bird calls heard this spring in empty city streets. The dead and nature. An ordered pair in an inverse relationship.

Our patients speak of the paradoxes of time during this pause. A shifting global study of the real of time and space impacting the speaking body. A crisis of temporality: when will this be over? How long will this last? It exposes a lack in the Other. Nobody knows, neither science, nor government. Yet analysands willing to push the inert real of their symptom to the very end, have been able to say something about how it ends. Not the end of the world, not the apocalyptic fantasy of the pandemic, just the end of analysis. Thus this volume of The Lacanian Review collects a dossier of testimonies and texts on the pass presented in Ghent, at the Premiere Event: The Pass in Our School – Interpretation Encore. They attempt to transmit what can be said about the end.