Mazurka, couple dance born as a community dance from Poland, has a ‘tempo’ of three four with a rythmic accent which, falling on 2nd time of three four musical fraction, gets the typical trot step of well trained horses : that allows therefore a large number of vaults to the dancers, which can so remain into a set of choreographic figures. A high rewrite, by famous musicians allowed a large diffusion of it in XIX century. Here : Claude Debussy (1880) ‘Danse bohemienne’.

 

 

 

 

“You can feel my rush in coming out from so many cautions I’ve been bringing back psychoanalysts to their less debatable certainties.”[1]

The needs of a scientific nature more and more pressing, the multiplying of his own contemporaries, ambitious of stands, the loving slownesses of sorrowful psychopathologies : what then was pressing Jacques Lacan when he called ‘many’ the ‘cautions’ which until that moment he obeyed ?

“… this inspiration came to me : that when on the way of Freud you see the unusual getting lively of an allegorical figure, almost trembling in a new skin it dresses with the one coming out from the well, I was giving her a voice.”[2] Unconscious however is no longer un-conscious when becomes representation, no longer a dark ‘well’ : and ‘the new skin’ with which the ‘bareness’ ‘is dressing herself’ offers a verdict to the defence.

That ‘reduction’ indeed, as Lacan cried, and “sometimes so long to be fulfilled, but ever crucial, for the birth of a science”[3] it is not for the science of thinking, because that reduction is already ‘removal’ and does subtract, rather than bearing fruit the drive start-up.

Hence the ‘experience’, “what Descartes opens and that is named ‘cogito’ …défilé of the rejection of any knowledge, but at the same time pretends to establish for the subject some sort of splashdown in the being, which we believe is the subject of the science” does confirm that the Cartesian ‘cogito ergo sum’ is individual and then legal, not at all an objective ‘cause’ and “…paradox of an imperative urging me to to undertake my own causality.”[4]

If anything, an imperative press the key, and whom with it but without any transport : the urge[5] which Freud ascribed to the drive is not an imperative indeed, it is a ‘benefit’[6].

“Say the subject on whom we operate in psychoanalysis cannot be than the subject of science, maybe seems a paradox… For our position as a subject we are always responsible. You can call that, everywhere you like, terrorism.”[7]

Right here, however, Freud distances himself from Lacan theory, as psychoanalysis doesn’t ‘operate on a subject’, but by the same subject is required in favour of an individual competence and better defence : ‘rushly’, then, is marching in place who is occupying that place without any logic, because not an “epistemological drive”[8] was the one discovered by Freud : but Lacan does insist that “any attempt, or temptation, when the current theory is ceaselessly recidivous in further emboding a subject, is wandering – always prolific in mistakes and as such guilty.”[9]

Lacan never explained why he didn’t appreciate when Freud wrote : “… Everything which has been removed will remain unconscious; however it is our intention to clarify from the beginning that what has been removed doesn’t exhaust the whole of unconscious. The unconscious has a larger extension; what has been removed is a part of unconscious. How can we get to know the unconscious ? Naturally we know the unconscious only in a conscious form, after a transformation or translation in something conscious. Psychoanalytical work makes us experiment every day that such a translation is possibile.” [10]          

For “the birth of a science”[11], Lacan quickens, “some reduction needs… which constitutes its proper object… A position of any science justifying its radical change in the ‘tempo’ of its progress …”[12] : and that ‘tempo’ – which Lacan keeps in Italian in his original document – is, as a cut and reduction, the music ‘tempo’ of any neverending psychopathology which comes back and begins again at a rythmic consolation.

At the crossroads with the individual competence and with an analytical work as proposed by Freud, there is the ‘time’ – unavoidable indeed – of a ‘psychic occurrence’[13] that becomes the goal, the aim and the satisfaction of whom has been working.

 

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio - June 26, 2022

 

 

 

[1] ‘La scienza e la verità. Lezione di apertura del Seminario 1965-1966’ in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri – Bibliot. Einaudi (2002) Vol. II, p.862

[2] Ivi p.871

[3] Ivi p.859

[4] Ivi p.869

[5] ‘Pulsioni e loro destini’, S. Freud (1915) – Bibliot. Bollati Boringhieri (2011)

[6] ‘Aldilà del principio di piacere’, S. Freud (1920) OSF Bollati Boringhieri Vol. IX, p.242

[7]  ‘La scienza e la verità. Lezione di apertura del Seminario 1965-1966’ in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri – Bibliot. Einaudi (2002) Vol. II, p.863

[8] Ivi, p.873

[9]  Ivi, p.863

[10] Here cited from the ‘Premise’ to the essay ‘The unconscious’, in “Gesammelte Werke” published by Freud in 1915 / Bibliot. Bollati Boringhieri (2011), p.69

[11] ‘La scienza e la verità. Lezione di apertura del Seminario 1965-1966 ’ in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri – Bibliot. Einaudi (2002) Vol. II, p.859.

[12] Ivi p.859-860

[13] ‘Precisazioni sui due principi dell’accadere psichico, S.Freud (1911) in OSF Vol.VI Bollati Boringhieri