When the State becomes Troumatism – Isolda Alvarez (NLS) ENGLISH

Beyond the political ideologies to which someone can affiliate or not, a political position is inevitably inhabited by the ethical stand of that one who holds a certain political position. If the political position is correlative to the ethical position, psychoanalysis cannot remain silent and subtracted from the problematic of certain political positions that we find in the contemporary world, taking into account that the ethics that matter to us, is not the ethics in the philosophical sense, as a mental construct. For he ethics that concern us as psychoanalysts is the     ethics concerning each one of us, if someone becomes or

not responsible for its singular way of jouissance.

Kansuke Yamamoto. Reminiscence, 1953.

If one of the indications made by Jacques Lacan, is that the « psychoanalyst must be up to the subjectivity of its time », psychoanalysis has somethings to say about politics: up to the extent that we are able to read how the hole manifests itself at the time, in that way , we will be more aware how each singular jouissance is organized in its singular way.

Neither the State nor the Judiciary are in charge of what we call singularity. The laws are made « for all » in an attempt to regulate and bring some order to a collectiveness. Finally, the laws have been created and changed as a response to different emergencies of the real, a real that cannot be captured in the civilizing mechanism. One of the main functions of the State is precisely to offer a certain guaranty, which however does not exhaust or dominate, nor ameliorate the emergencies of the real, but it establishes possible responses that at the level of the collectiveness to allow the running of a society.

Now, what happens when the State itself becomes the traumatic agent? What do we find when the State makes present the troumatism?

When a country exceeds the international standards of child malnutrition (Venezuela), when one of the immigration policies of a State generates more than 3000 children separated from their parents and located in cages, some of which were given for adoption to American families because they had no way how to contact their parents (USA), when it is a Communist State in which any gesture of privacy is interpreted as a threat, or a state in which the content of the internet and your participation in such networks is translated as « good or bad behavior « , evaluation wether you can travel freely or not, be able to buy certain supplies, etc. (China), or when one of the penalties for adultery includes stoning … Lacanian psychoanalysis cannot stay mute and inert, is in its ethics to speak out.

In order to be able to speak out and stand up – beyond the comfort of our offices and the space of the School- it is necessary to have a political conjuncture in which that would be possible. That is why, the existence of psychoanalysis has as a condition, a political system that includes the differences, diversity of singularities and, and therefore a system that respects the private space. So far, the best version that we have known is called Democracy. System that is going through a shift of paradigm, in a moment in which its own foundations are questioned, not only at the level of rhetoric but mainly by the political actors that inhabit it.

It’s not about ideologies it’s about facts. And while we can say that the facts are interpretable, at the same time there is a dimension of the facts that is closer to the real than to the possible interpretation that one can give to them. In Venezuela, for example, it has been a “de facto” sustained genocide, covered up by those in the supposed left ideologies that are neither ideologies nor left. In the United States, we have an immigration policy that kidnaps children and then delivers them to anyone, like any other object of consumption.

If the Lacanian psychoanalysis takes as a principle of its action, the act at the core of the singular ethics of who we call parlêtre, the participation in politics for each analyst would only be possible from the principles that guide and sustain that singular ethics. Principle contrary to the usual basis of a political party, namely: the connection between alienation and the identification that sustains and feeds up itself in the mass phenomenon.

It would then be a matter of making a style of politics that does not support an Other: a policy without an Other; this is our continue effort in the School, a device that functions as a link and cause to sustain the analytical discourse at the condition that the School does not become another version of the Other.

More often we find policies from the State that make present more the troumatism than the guarantee expected from this entity. The symbolic order that the State is supposed to have, will have to be reconsidered. The subjectivity of the time has taught us new ways of dealing with the real, inventions of the contemporary. Politically speaking we will have to wait for the answers that will come, that would have to be invented once again in the effort to deal with the real, knowing that “dealing with” has no end. It never ceases.