Translated by Susana Tillet,
Published The Symptom 12, Fall 2011
and at https://www.lacan.com/symptom12/thoughts-about.html
Also, with notes, at www.LacanianWorks.org /Laurent
References
-‘ What Nietzche said is written with the formulas of Lacan [4]:
What is at play in teaching consists in articulating S2 and a with the good arrow. ‘[4]
Reference [4] Radiophonie : 9th April 1970 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19700409 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
Possibly p3 of Jack W. Stone’s translation of Radiophonie :
If I succumbed now, the only work I would leave would be these scraps chosen from my teaching, of which I have made a buttress against the news (l’information), of which it is to say everything that it diffuses it.
What I have stated in a confidential discourse, has nonetheless displaced common audition, to the point of leading to me an audience that gives me evidence of being stable in its enormity.
I remember the annoyance with which a boy interrogated me, who was mixed in, in wishing himself a Marxist, with a public made up of people from the Party (the only one) who had rushed (God knows why) to the communication of my “dialectic of desire and subversion of the subject in psychoanalysis.” [**]
I gently (gentle as I always am) pointed out what followed in my Écrits, the daze that answered me from this public.
As for him, “Do you believe then, ” he said to me, “that it suffices that you have produced something, inscribed with letters on a blackboard, to expect an effect?”
Such an exercise has carried however, and I have had proof of it, were this only that from the scrap that made for it a right for my book–the funds of the Ford foundation [NOTE] that motivate such meetings from having to sponge them up, being then found unthinkably dried up for publishing me.
It is that the effect that is propagated is not of a communication of speech, but of a displacement of discourse.
[**] Who is the boy who interrogated me? Anthony Wilden was at the 1966 Conference – see NOTE below.
However, Wilden’s translation of The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Rome) : 26th September 1953 : Jacques Lacan [Also known as the Rome Report. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (September 1953)] was published in 1968 [see this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Wilden 1968 or Other Authors‘ texts)] as ‘The Language of the Self, The function of language in psychoanalysis’.
The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire : 19-23 September 1960 : Jacques Lacan. [See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19600923 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts) or the Écrits : October 1966 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /Lacan (19661001 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts.)] is specifically mentioned by Jacques Lacan according to the text published in 1970 and this it seems to me is probably a mistake, either by Jacques Lacan or the transcribers of Radiophonie. If by the conference transcribers in the USA, then their action is probably to protect Anthony Wilden. This needs checking with one of the recordings of Radiophonie : 1970 available on the internet.
[NOTE] : The reference to the Ford foundation in Radiophonie : 1970 is probably to the Conference at Baltimore, October 1966. See The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man – the Structuralist Controversy : 1970 : edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19661018 or Index). Related text : Jacques Lacan cuts between the real(ly)-symbolic (RS) & symbolic(ally)-real (SR) (a cartel ending/work-in-progress presentation) : 17th July 2019 (London) : Julia Evans. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Evans Julia or Index of Julia Evans’ texts)
-‘It is the path of an encounter like the first Clinical conversations or like the one that gathered us together around “Aimee’s case.”’ See On Paranoid Psychosis in its relationships with the personality, followed by first writings on Paranoia (Aimée) : 7th July 1932 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19320101 or Index of texts by Jacques Lacan)
-The essential thing is to make one’s way towards learned ignorance (docta ignoranti). It is crucial in the times of the diffusion, of “anything goes.” From Bibliography of Seminar I, p299 of John Forrester’s translation : The bibliography contains full references to all works cited in the text, including some works that are only alluded to in passing.
Cusanus, Nicholas, ‘De Docta Ignoranti’ (Of Learned Ignorance) (1440). Translated by Germain Heron, Introduction by D. J. B. Howkins, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954 From 7th July 1954,
p278 of John Forrester’s translation of Seminar I. :
The analyst must not fail to recognise what I will call the dimension of ignorance’s power of accession to being, since he has to reply to the person who, throughout his discourse, questions him in this dimension. He doesn’t have to guide the subject to a Wissen, to knowledge, but on to the paths by which access to this knowledge is gained. He must engage him in a dialectical operation, not say to him that he is wrong since he necessarily is in error, but show him that he speaks poorly, that is to say that he speaks without knowing, as one who is ignorant, because what counts are the paths of his error.
Psychoanalysis is a dialectic, what Montaigne, in book III, chapter VIII, calls an art of conversation.[2] The art of conversation of Socrates in the Meno is to teach the slave to give his own speech its true meaning. And it is the same in Hegel. In other words, the position of the analyst must be that of an ignorantia docta, which does not mean knowing [savante], but formal, and what is capable of being formative for the subject.
Because it is in the air these days, these days of hatred, there is a great temptation to transform the ignorantia docta into what I have called, and this is hardly a novelty, an ignorantia docens. If the psychoanalyst thinks he knows something, in psychology for example, then that is already the beginning of his loss, for the simple reason that in psychology nobody knows much, except that psychology is itself an error of perspective on the human being.
I will have to use banal examples to make you understand what the realisation of the being of man is, because in spite of yourselves you put it in an erroneous perspective, that of a false knowledge.[2] ‘un art de conférer’.
See Seminar I, Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953-1954) : from 18th November 1953 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19531118 or index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
Citation
Preface by Cristina Rose Laurita to Section : ‘Lacan, at the Moment’, p140 of The Lacanian Review No 12 (2022), ‘It is akin to what Éric Laurent refers to as “the transmission of the way in which the unconscious has to be read, not as a dead thing […] but as a living thing that has the need for the contribution of each one of its practitioners to find its proper place in the world.”’ See notes to Meeting the Subjectivity of our Time : 6th June 2022 : Thomas Svolos at this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Svolos)