“We Migrants”
Humans constantly create walls, barriers and laws to bring in or to keep out other human beings. Those who trespass these human-made barriers are considered outlaws, without rights, devoid of citizenship, prevented from living a more bearable life in his or her own singular manner. Being a migrant, a refugee or asylum seeker may be applicable to anybody, any analysand coming for analysis.
Imminent War
War proliferates sleep. It keeps us asleep, supporting blind fraternity in arms that turns away from the metaphor of woman’s body. War rages against life, against women, even if they blend in the military ranks on a par with men. None go to war out of love. The sleep which the combatants walk into, moderates the imminence into not yet. The external threat lives and comes in effect from within.
War, Disbelief and the Ethics of the Subject
I have kept remembering the words of a mother of the West Bank who was interviewed by French television immediately after 7 October 2023. Under the gaze of the camera and the urgent questioning of the reporter, she said that Hamas hadn’t committed the violence that the reporter was describing because Hamas doesn’t target civilians, women, or children. Her words were echoed by several testimonies and documents.
Introduction: War and Psychoanalysis
This issue of Contemporary Heretic contains – and invites – interventions on psychoanalysis and war. Why war? Albert Einstein famously asked this question of Freud in 1932. After Freud and Lacan, what can psychoanalysis say about war today, particularly the conflagrations now convulsing the world?
What is Simone Weil’s “inner light”?
In a recent essay, Gil Caroz invites us to heed Jacques-Alain Miller’s call, in the context of the formation of La Movida Zadig, to take “inspiration from Simone Weil and to create a group where each member is oriented by an exclusive fidelity to his own inner light, that is to say his own way of thinking things and not to an external authority or to a common and consensual ideal”. I want to pause on this example and look a little more closely at Weil, her symptom, and what she means by the “inner light”.
The Story of a Man without a Story
I didn't even know the name Constantin Fântâneru. His only novel, Interior, appeared in 1932, and received the prize of the Society of Romanian Authors. I read it and was amazed by the lyricism of Fântâneru’s prose, the brilliant adjectivation of his sentences; it is a work whose form and style strongly reveals the logic of his writing, even if it does indeed lack a plot or argument.
The Highway and the Heretical Road
We know what determines the possibility of understanding within a community: it is the meaning determined by the Name of the Father. This also establishes a canon, a kind of orthodoxy. In a sense, the landscape of modernity, marked by the decline of the Name-of-the-Father, presents a landscape made up of paths, alleys, lanes where everyone must find his or her own way.
Heresy and the One: Introduction to Contemporary Heretic
Welcome to Contemporary Heretic!
Readers of Jacques Lacan will recognise in “heretic” a term he highlighted in his late teaching. He attributed it to Joyce, a heretic who did not draw on the symbolic guarantee of the Name-of-the-Father. Today, and by implication, the heretic names everyone who is mad, which is to say delusional, in accordance with Lacan’s aphorism, which is every speaking being and marks each subject’s singularity.