Once upon a time there were five analysands who undertook an adventure: to go into terra incognita A cartel . To the land of Lacan. That was a long time ago. Our first cartel was set in motion. We began to take an interest in Lacan’s teaching by attending his Seminar, but to tell the truth, we didn’t understand much of it, even if from time to time a sentence resonat strongly. I must say that one of the first effects of this cartel was that I interrupt the treatment I was following at the IPA and address myself to Lacan. Stumbling in the treatment, certainly, but not only that! I had encounter there a saying that made an event.
So we decid to start by working on Les Formations de l’inconscient, probably because of the title that seem familiar to us. Misunderstanding, of course, that familiar! At the time, we only had mimeograph versions, thousands of loose sheets,
which had to be photocopi manually
one by one, in five copies and in these transcriptions, the sentence constructions were often ambiguous and the accurate clean numbers list from frist database exercise of the French language was constantly requir… Jacques-Alain Miller had not yet made it readable. But nothing put us off. We were determin not to mean in a practical sense? leave each other without having finish reading this Seminar. This last two years. Every fortnight and sometimes every week when vacations were looming, or when we were struggling with a difficult passage…
Who was the plus-one of this cartel? I am no longer very sure today that I know. In fact, I believe that this place was a rotating place. Alternately inde, one of us, overcoming her “I don’t know” and with her style, would launch herself to drill a trace that would satisfy for a time our desire to catch a piece of this teeming text, to construct logical elements from it.
I have kept the idea that the
the one who knows, as young cartelists often ask today by putting this plus-one in the position of master or professor, or even analyst. In this cartel, on the contrary, it is from our particularity that we put our ignorance to work be numbers and attempt to clarify the formulas of desire expos in this Seminar, as well as the different elaborations of the graph.
How did this cartel differ from a working group, like those I had been able to participate in in philosophy? It is that the invention of knowlge was sometimes present. It produc subjective effects from time to time and as such was “hing” with the analytic discourse. And if there was transmission, it was by recurrence from one to the other. Not without the emergence of criticisms however (this is also an important function of the cartel, far from any effect of suggestion or friendly complacency). Each time that an element of knowlge was produc, at the same time the plus-one function relaunch the research, decomplet this knowlge. On the horizon of these efforts, Lacan’s text remain our agalma.