VIII° MEETING OF THE SCHOOL – EPFCL, MAY 2, 2024 – PARIS, “KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE IN THE PASSAGE TO THE ANALYST”
PROGRAM
Amphitheatre Lavoisier (Simultaneous translation English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese
8:00->REGISTRATIONS
9:00 ->OPENING
Carolina Zaffore (Argentina) and Dominique Fingermann (France)
Secretaries of the International College of the Guarantee
9:15 -10:45
Discussion: Martine Menès (France)
Elynes Barros AE (Brazil): What can you know from an analysis?
Rebeca Garcia (Spain): What resonates from an experience
Nicolas Bendrihen (France): The scar of chance effects?
10:45-11:15 : COFFEE BREAK
11:15-12:45
Discussion : Sandra Berta (Brazil)
Constanza Lobos AE (Argentina): Desiring a holed knowledge
Anne Marie Combres (France): Passing point ?
Mikel Plazaola (Spain): Effects of the passage between ignorance and knowledge
12:45-14:15->LUNCH
14:15-15:45
Discussion : Teresa Trias (Spain)
Dimitra Kolonia AE (France): Surprises of the end
Marie-José Latour (France): Working for the uncertain
Ana Laura Prates Pacheco (Brazil): With the window open for the pass
15:45-17:15
Discussion: Didier Castanet (France)
Christelle Suc AE (France): From the lucubration to the unthinkable: anything new?
Armando Cote (France): The praise of not knowing and its relationship with truth
Carolina Zaffore(Argentina):What is didactic in the passage to the analyst?
17:15 -17.45->PUNCTUATIONS
Anastasia Tzavidopoulou (France)
Colette Soler (France)
Opening 1 – “The analytical act between the end and the beginnings”
Carolina Zaffore
“So then, let us start from things as they present themselves. You have come to the end once. It is from this that you must deduce the relation that this has with the beginning on every occasion.”
Lacan: “The Psychoanalytic Act” in The Seminar 15, class January 10, 1968
How does the authorization of the analyst, proper to the final phase of the analysis, connect with the authorization at the beginning of the analysis that he or she will conduct? How does the moment of passage from analysand to analyst affect someone’s praxis? What elaborations do we gather from the AS (AE) on this point? What knowledge does the passage from analysant to analyst deliver and what is its use in the analytic operation?
Lacan proposes a work of deduction, and the next Meeting of the School will be a good gauge of the two areas at stake: the logic of the act and the daily practice of the analysts.
Opening 2
Didier Castanet
In his 1967 ‘Proposition on the Psychoanalyst of the School’, Lacan argues that “ This in no way authorises the psychoanalyst to be satisfied in the knowledge that he knows nothing, for what is at issue is what he has to come to know” (Lacan, J., Proposition of October 9 on the Psychoanalyst of the School, trans. Russell Grigg, Analysis 6, 1995, p. 6.)
Even if Lacan varied throughout his teaching on the question of knowledge, he would always insist that it is what we do not know that must guide us. This is why he begins by arguing that it is a question of settling, not on a hypothetical desire to know, but on the passion of ignorance. Ignorance here has a precise meaning, far removed from the usual meaning of the absence or negation of knowledge. This is because the question is not about a lack of knowledge, which is always detrimental and is not something to be resigned to, but rather about what can never be known at the beginning of a therapy, namely the truth of the subject who engages in it. This truth that he necessarily ignores the analyst has to locate it correctly and not confuse it with a lack of knowledge.
And to identify that which beforehand he can only ignore, at least to know that there is something to know, he needs to equip himself with very substantial knowledge”. In effect, there is a fundamental difference between knowing or not what we don’t ignore. And it is only in this sense that ignorance has nothing to do with the illiteracy or ignorantism that Lacan has always complained about,but constitutes the most elaborate form of knowledge. This form that Lacan first called the non- knowledge, later the “non su”, is at the beginning of the therapy an empty form, an empty set, knowledge of which so far there is only the framework. An essential framework in which will be able to collect and develop the unconscious knowledge of a subject, as Lacan puts it, that “« le non -su s’ordonne comme le cadre du savoir » Autres Ecrits, p.249.
What would be this substantial knowledge capable of locating our ignorance ? Although it is better to have access to a substantial doctrinal knowledge, it is obviously not enough to be a man of letters.This knowledge must also concern the real and the true.This is where the analyst is a product of the therapy, his own, real and true can only be him own. It is therefore up to him to be able to make knowledge with his experience,knowledge likely to accommodate then a truth that does not belong to him, or even to presentify it in the transference.This opens up the question of the analyst’s desire.
Translation: Amélie Billa – Anastasia Tzavidooulou
Opening 3 – “Knowledge is what guides us”
Anne-Marie Combres
In The moment to conclude, Lacan insists on the fact that the analyst would have to know how to operate appropriately, i.e. that he must be aware of the significance of words for the analysand, something that he is unquestionably unaware of. So here we are at the heart of the question of knowledge and ignorance… Is it from knowledge -knowing that there is ignorance- that he can take guidance? In the same seminar, Lacan points out that the unconscious is that knowledge that guides us, so how does this play out in the treatments, on both the analysand’s and the analyst’s side, and what additional insight could the passage from analysand to analyst shed on this point?
(J. Lacan – Seminar The moment to conclude, (Unpublished) lesson of 15 November 1977)
Translation: Pedro Pablo Arévalo
Revision and correction: Susan Schwartz
OPENING 4 – Metamorphosis of the knowledge?
Rebeca García
“…and it is in this that he must have discerned the cause of his horror, of his own, his, detached from that of all others, the horror of knowing.”
From that moment he knows how to be refuse.”
Lacan, Italian Note, Other writings.
In his Italian Note Lacan mentions, on at least five occasions, the word “refuse” in reference to the position occupied by the analyst after having made the passage from analysand to analyst.
He “promises” there a certain knowledge in his operation as an analyst: he will know how to be refuse, a strong affirmation, a conviction that points to the analytic act as such.
A passage from one side to the other: from winnowing the cause of one’s own horror of knowing to knowing how to be refuse.
A crossing of an experience of the real that conveys an unprecedented desire.
To know how to be the refuse of so-called humanity that does not want to know, the refuse of learned ignorance that has not shied away from confronting the hole in knowledge, the refuse of the love affair with truth.
Metamorphosis without return? How could the School, the base of operations, welcome and relaunch this unprecedented desire, separate from that of all? What operations could we expect in the life of the School from the one who has taken up this position?
Translation: Pedro Pablo Arévalo
Revision and correction: Susan Schwartz
Opening 5 – The shadows of knowledge
Teresa Trias SPFLF-Spain (FOE Barcelona)
In his Seminar “L’insu…”Lacan speaks to us of the pass as “recognising oneself between shadows” (“se reconnaître entre soir”) on condition of inserting ‘av’ (“se reconnaître entre s(av)oír”) “recognising oneself between knowing”.[1]
The shadows of knowledge. Transmission through testimonies. The difficulty of transmission is obvious. What do we expect from the Pass?
The “unconscious consists of, in being a knowledge which is articulated out of lalangue, the body that speaks being knotted to it only by the real of which it enjoys”.[2] Substance of jouissance? Lalangue? Knowledge in the real? Knowledge that is not known, but is enjoyed? Knowledge that it is not known that you know?
Horror of the knowledge of the particular jouissance that has always been there in order for it to be deciphered. How far can the horror of knowledge be deciphered? To the point of being refuse?
In the Pass: paradox for the testimony where the passands and passers are subjects who must divest themselves of their subjection in order to be able to listen and transmit to the Cartel of the Pass the hystorisation of the passand. The desire of the analyst, an unprecedented desire, is there, waiting to be transmitted if the analytic act has taken place, if the passage from analysand to analyst has taken place.
Translation: P.P. Arévalo.
Review: S. Schwartz.
[1] Lacan, J. Seminar 24, unpublished. “L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre”. It must be understood in the French language, because if it is translated, we lose what he wants to say.
[2] Lacan, J. ‘The Third’, The Lacanian Review, trans. Philip Dravers, no. 7, p. 95.
Argument
This VIII° Meeting of the School of the EPFCL once more puts into question psychoanalysis in intension. It will, in other words, again examine what, in a psychoanalysis, produces a psychoanalyst: the passage from analysand to analyst. Psychoanalysis in intension, which determines the extension that the School and its Forums definitively aim to support in various places, it is the very subversion of the link wherein « something of the psychoanalyst » is produced.
Not predicable, shall we say. Yet Lacan, after having specified it as the desire of the analyst in order to extract from it the act that depends on it, finally proposed a matheme which writes the operation proper to it: the Discourse of the psychoanalyst. The contingent result of this unprecedented link can be « of the psychoanalyst », and so on…
« So that psychoanalysis becomes an act that comes again »[1] we count on a practice which supports its logic and on the fortuity of finding practitioners up to the ethics this logic demands.
The EPFCL’s International College of the Guarantee, the ICG 2023-2024, like all those preceding it, supports the dispositif of the pass and the living experience that flows from it. Each pass is received with the utmost consideration for the upheavals that occur here and there during the course of analyses; but what orients the cartels is obviously a particular attention to what, in the testimonies, can denote « passage to the analyst ».
Work on this question was started at the last School Meeting in Buenos Aires, on the initiative of the preceding ICG. We are taking it up and propose it by indicating, from the outset, in the statement of our title, an affirmation: the passage to the analyst that an analysis can provide produces a radical transformation in the relation to knowledge, that is, to the unconscious.
Therefore: KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE IN THE PASSAGE TO THE ANALYST.
Psychoanalysis is an experience of knowledge, this is what makes it « didactic ». This experience of knowledge begins with that « something » which completely escapes the sufferer, he knows nothing about it but, by chance, he can meet a good listener who will know how to make a question from this ignorance and make it speak. This experience of speech, « the practice of the the blabla » addressed to the analyst, will move the initial «I don’t want to know anything about it » into the inexhaustible pathway of a knowledge supposed to this drifting subject, into what Freud called « his representations », and which Lacan will characterize as lucubrations. The transference, that «love which addresses itself to knowledge»[2] tireless decipherer, is the vector of the « practice of meaning » which will have to find its end : the not known that knows of the one-blunder (l’insu que sait de l’une bévue). In response to the impasse of the Subject Supposed to Know, there can occur a pass to the analyst.
With the transference as support, the analytic learned ignorance is a pressure toward knowledge. Thus there is a route, a crossing, whose stake is the end of the analysis, that is, a profound modification of the relationship to knowledge and to the jouissance it ciphers, brought about by the practice « of the analyst », that is, the position of the unconscious: putting knowledge « in the place of truth ».
Lacan called this crossing the « Pass ». Sleight of hand (tour de passe-passe), subtle passage from the knowledge of the analysand to the knowledge of the psychoanalyst. The knowledge of the analysand is first oriented from the Subject Supposed to Know; the psychoanalyst’s act as the reverse side of neurosis will favor the analysand’s bumping up against the impasse until he can bear this non known knowledge without recourse to representations, lucubrations, fictions of the lying truth which vectorized his address to the Other.
This knowledge is horrifying because, in contrast to the supposed knowledge, there is no respondent in the Other. «Horror of knowledge»[3] says Lacan, in order to underline the stakes of this passage, for the knowledge turns out to be connected to a jouissance which does not produce a relation, and thus leads one to « confronting the sexual impasse », that is, to castration and the attached jouissance. By debunking the sexual theories that neurosis concocted and confined within the limits of the fantasme, this non known knowledge sends the one who made the journey back to his solitude, troumatique, that Lacan could write: there is something of the One (Ya de l’Un).
What then remains of our transferential loves and of their desire for knowledge? A desire to know can emerge from it and reverberate the effects (affects) of a non knowing knowledge.
Indeed, if «analysts are the sages of a knowledge about which they cannot converse»[4], they can put it to use, put it into act and make it known beyond.
Let us hope that the AMEs and the passeurs they designate are attentive to the unexpected and unheard of the effects of this non knowing knowledge …
On the side of the cartels of the pass … let us count on the wisdom of their ignorance.
The School, the School, always begun anew … so that there be the chance of an analyst.
International College of the Guarantee – ICG 2023-2024
[1]Lacan, J. Introduction de Scilicet, Autres Écrits, Seuil, Paris, 2001, p. 288.
[2] Lacan, J. Introduction à l’édition allemande des Écrits, Autres Écrits, Seuil, Paris, 2001, p. 558.
[3] Lacan, J. Note Italienne, Autres Écrits, Seuil, Paris, 2001, p. 309.
[4]Lacan, J. De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports à la réalité, Autres Écrits, Seuil, Paris, 2001, p. 359.