Economics, talent of thinking

“Obtained the solution described above, the mice’s delirium disappeared.”

(1909) S. Freud[1], ‘The Case of the mouse man’.

“If men arrive to think the symbolic order it is because they are caught up in their being. The illusion of having formed it with one’s conscience comes from the fact that it is on the way to a specific gaiety of an imaginary relationship with one’s fellow, that he, or she, could enter this order as a subject. However he, or she, could only make this entrance through the radical ‘défilé’ of the word, the same one of which we recognized a genetic moment in the child’s play, but that, in its complete form, is reproduced every time the subject turns to the Other as an absolute, that is the Other who can annul him or her, in the same way that the Other can come to terms with him or with her, making Himself or Herself an object to deceive him or her.”[2]

Success is ‘via’ work : here it is the indisputable talent of Freud in his diagnoses, because he acknowledges the success of that knowledge – a science actually – which he began to describe ‘unconscious’, as kept in shadow by a conscience which doesn’t  liquidate the issues, as insisting on dissembling, to no avail, the fierceness of every reactive formation.

To individual right, which is not unrelated – it is work competence, as a matter of facts – it ‘occurs’ that stops planning removal.[3]

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – October 7, 2023

[1]  This is a success thanks to the analytical work, as Freud himself confirmed.  The quote is taken from : ‘Sigmund Freud. Casi clinici 2’/ ‘L’uomo dei topi. Osservazioni su un caso di nevrosi ossessiva’ (1909) Bollati Boringhieri 2017, pag.111.

[2] ‘Il seminario su La lettera rubata’, pp.49-50 in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol. I, translated and curated by Giacomo B. Contri (1974) – Giulio Einaudi editore Spa (1974 e 2002). Original title : ‘Écrits’, Jacques Lacan – Éditions du Seuil, Paris (1966).

[3] “Say that there is no human sexual istinct, that is a natural causality of the movement of one sex towards the other – it is the first thinking introduced by Freud with the ‘Oedipus complex’ – it is to say that human desire is constituted from the very beginning, precisely, humanly, that is for the humanization of the body (Menschwerdung), and exactly as constitution, which is a legal constitution : it is a question of law, ‘natural’ like thinking of a relationship that is constituted after a first time of this constitution, ‘via’ the observation of those Others of a Subject who are the parents, also  identified, in a second time, in their own sexes of Man and Woman,  and already in relationship with each other as  S and O.” Cited from : ‘Il pensiero di natura. Dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico’, Giacomo B. Contri SIC Edizioni (1998), p.185.

“We’ve learned to conceive that the ‘signifier’ just stands in a shift comparable to that of the bright advertisements or of the memories of our rotary-machines-to-think-like-men, and this due to its alternating operation which is its very principle, demanding that it leaves its place to return circularly to it. That is exactly what happens in the repeater automatism.”[1]

“The details of the process by which removal changes a possibility of pleasure into a source of displeasure have not yet well understood, or in any case they cannot yet be clearly illustrated; but it is sure that every neurotic displeasure has this very nature : it is a pleasure which cannot be felt as such.”[2]

No automatism rules the principle of pleasure – to which also the displeasure up to pain conforms - remaining law, i.e. right and individual competence, which doesn’t await authorization.[3]

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – August 14, 2023

[1] ‘Il seminario su La lettera rubata’, in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’, at care and translated by Giacomo B. Contri  - Vol. I Giulio Einaudi editore Spa (1974 e 2002) pg.24/  Original title: ‘Écrits’, Jacques Lacan – Éditions du Seuil, Paris (1966).

[2] ‘Al di là del principio di piacere’, S. Freud (1920) in OSF Bollati Boringhieri (2020) Vol. 9, pg.197

[3] “The freedom of active thinking, and taking cares of the law of one’s body (‘cogitans legem corporis’) is not contradicted by being preceded by the fact that the first law of motion of the body has already happened before our thinking thinks it. It is the law of motion for satisfaction by means of the relationship of the subject with the other ( ‘drive’ is a tentative name of this law). The occurrence of this law makes itself memory before any intervention of our thinking when making law (I) and of our conscience too. So it is introduced a first distinction between ‘I’ and ‘conscience’)”, cited from : ‘Il pensiero di natura. Dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico’, Giacomo B. Contri SIC Edizioni (1998), pg.107 in ‘Legge, pensiero’.

‘Prometheus chained’[1] at Siracusa.

Gods are going on a blind track, in the foreground of the very special staging by Federica Parolini for ‘Prometheus chained’, by Aeschylous, 2023 Theater Season – Siracusa, ‘Greek Theater’.

Maybe also Prometheus the Titan thought – the solid and very capable Alessandro Albertin[2] on the stage - that gods lack sense of humour.

“It was all a hustle and bustle without light of mind”, Prometheus loudly reproaches to the audience from the top of the rocky and desolate Scythia, here a menacing but secluded silo-tower to which he has been chained.

When the humans were allowed, as a matter of facts, to to be in the presence of the gods Prometheus liked to challenge the intelligence of the greatest among gods : let Zeus first choose which part he preferred keeping for himself of the just sacrificed ox! And Zeus at once took the one that looked best packaged, but that instead had been filled with waste… So humans kept the best part.

Men too shrewd for the gods Prometheus demiurge was forging indeed, and Zeus took from humans their memory of the spark that can repeat the fire, spread evil in the world through the weak Pandora and condemned Prometheus to chains, prey to an insatiable rapacious bird.

“I will tell, not to humiliate human beings, but to fully reveal the affection that dictated those gifts to me. Even before me they looked[3], and it was blind watching; they heard sounds, and it was not hearing… Mine was, for the good of humans – open throats the hero goes on from the distant tower - the idea of the calculus, first fruit of wit, and mine was the signs system, Memory of the world, fertile mother of Muses.”[4]

The entrance of the insane Iò, de-mented virgin who allowed to be transformed into a ‘cow’ from Hera Zeus’ worthy wife, only confirms the imputability of delegating one’s memory to others, which immediately passes into a dead-end enslavement : but Prometheus[5] already knows about the following vicissitudes of the troubled Iò, as by only chance she will become progenitor of those Ionic people who, with their uprising, will get help from Athens until they break free from Persian rule, and of Heracles who, finally grateful to Prometheus will set free him, by just shooting a single arrow on the insatiable vulture.

That only human question of ‘time’, to which Prometheus refers in the exceptional monologue which is fulcrum of the text, it’s actually the question of ‘work’ that the thousands gifts from the Titan sterilized and emptied of energy, because everyone’s memory cannot do its part.

Surprisingly co-attributable with Zeus for naiveness of gods and to their own detriment, Prometheus introduced laziness among humans, as a very serious factor of unpredictable costs, and in many forms indeed.

Was this perhaps the long-awaited secret from Zeus which Prometheus hadn’t time to reveal ?

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – July 27, 2023

[1] ‘Prometheus chained’ 2023 Theater Season ‘Greek Theater’ Siracusa www.indafondazione.org Direction : Leo Muscato; Translation : Roberto Vecchioni; Scenes : Federica Parolini; Costumes: Silvia Aymonimo; Coreographies : Nicole Kehrberger; Music: Ernani Maletta; Choir leader : Francesca Della Monica; Responsabile del coro : Elena Polic Greco; Main interpreters : Alessandro Albertin, Deniz Ozdogan, Michele Cipriani, Alfonso Veneroso, Pasquale di Filippo, Silvia Valenti, Davide Paganini; with the participation of the Students girls of the ‘Accademia d’Arte del Dramma Antico’ of Siracusa.

[2] Alessandro Albertin is a professional actor and a very trained cyclist : born at Padua in 1972, he graduated in 1999 at the Scuola d’Arte Drammatica ‘Paolo Grassi’ of Milan. He worked with Virginio Gazzolo, Gianrico Tedeschi, Ugo Pagliai, Paola Gassmann, Gigi Proietti (‘Romeo and Giulietta’, 2003), Franco Branciaroli (‘Endgame’ 2005), Alessandro Gassmann, Damiano Michieletto (‘The fan’, 2012). He is author of some dramatic texts that he is bringing successfully on the stage for ‘Spazio Mio Teatro’ of Milan : ‘Lo Sbarco in Normandia, i segreti di una vittoria’; ‘Marco Pantani, il campione fuori norma’; ‘Perlasca. Il coraggio di dire no’.

[3] ‘L’acquisizione del fuoco’, S.Freud (1931), Translation by Giacomo B. Contri (1985), pro-manuscripto.

[4] ‘Prometeo incatenato’, Eschilo / Garzanti Editore SpA 2022, Translation by Ezio Savino with parallel text; pp. : 38-39

[5] Prometheus is ‘the one who thinks first’ and maybe too soon, as well as Epimetheus his brother is ‘the one who thinks later’, that is too late.

https://www.tutorsalus.net/index.php/en/economia-1-talento-di-pensiero-2/492-constructive-solutions

In the picture : brick prototypes for the Children’s Hospital at Entebbe, 35 km. from Kampala. Following the building tradition of the soil ‘pisè’ in Sub-Saharan Africa, the new Children’s Hospital of ‘Emergency’ www.emergency.it was built at Entebbe, in local soil bricks integrated with reinforcing and waterproofing substances, thanks to a collaboration with Politecnico of Milan. The Hospital, which is a pole of excellence among the most important in a large area and has been designed by Renzo Piano together with ‘TAMassociati’, today is able to offer free specialist assistance to children who need surgeries with advanced techniques and qualified personnel// ’Behind the impossible’, www.buromilan.com ‘Design Week’ Milan - April 17-23, 2023/ ‘Fuori salone’ www.fuorisalone.it

What is behind the feasibility of a building ?

‘Behind the impossible’ is an attractive title for this ‘Fuori Salone’ by BUROMILAN[1], well visited during the ‘Design Week’ in Milan : a non-celebratory valuation of one’s thinking at work, starting from an intuition – or already a partnership of thinking – able to deal  with the feasibility of different non oppositive competences.

Technical experience is at the origin of the intuition itself that will prove to be a projects : already the experience of the art workshop – not isolated, but capable of co-presence and union – of our very rich Middle Age and that generated the today’s Academies Polytechnics Factories.

However there is an oneiric experience – never forgotten, also when not translated in words – since one’s birth which entrusts to the sleep the ri-proposition of that irreplaceable journey towards life that every newborn goes on, and of the hurdles up to the solutions encountered and crossed to get to be born. From there first, from this ignored thinking which even resurfaces without fanfare, a skill passes – or not, and then we stay in the darkness of psychic poverty –  that we reductively call ‘technical’, to connect forms materials structures to make them livable places up to the cities of man.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – June 3, 2023

[1] Milan Ingegneria Spa.

Trainings before the competition/ Milano, Arena Civica and Palazzina Appiani – ‘Walk and Middle Distance Night’ April 29-30, 2023.

“As a matter of facts when the reality principle comes into the pleasure principle, it doesn’t mean the dismissal of the pleasure principle, but a better safeguard of it.”[2]

What does bring in the reality principle to the point of requiring a subject – and a child mainly – to be represented so he, or she, can invest psychically in it ? “There is a subject for unconscious…”[3], that’s true.

There is, on one side, the subject of the imagination that – neurotic – averts from reality and in the only comforting capacity may even continue an unfulfilled destiny.

However, on the other side, the lack of fulfillment itself increases – for another subject – the importance of the reality and of the psychical work, which is quite different from the psychical imagination or fantasy.

Here it is the springing, and here it is one’s disposition to ‘springingness’, that cannot be prescribed because it follows an individual judgement of productivity – or unproductiveness – of a specific psychical investment.

It is, as a matter of facts, an experience of analytical work the ‘economical psychic occurrence’ about which Freud specifically noted in 1911, and furtherly then in the following years and works. 

Not fantasy or imagination, not behaviour : rather an individual evaluation, hardly amenable to removal, since the removal actually proved its flop.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio - May 16, 2023

[1] I owe this article to the term ‘saltità’ (I translated with ‘springingness’), as coined by the psychoanalyst and University professor Giuseppe Oreste Pozzi in his intervention to the presentation of the book ‘Generazione DAD. Scuole, politica e psicoanalisi’, at care of Irene d’Elia (Pequod editore, 2022) at the ‘Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense’ in Milan, last April 29, 2023.

[2] ‘Precisazioni sui due principi dell’accadere psichico’, (1911) S. Freud in OSF VOL. 6 Bollati Boringhieri 2012, p.458

[3] Cited from the intervention of professor Giuseppe Oreste Pozzi.

Original painting by Gianni Russomando.[1]

It’s an affection, imputable then : the affection of whom – if swindled – doesn’t disown satisfaction.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – March 14, 2023

[1] Gianni Russomando, biographical note : “I’m born in Vercelli (1956), graduated at the ‘Istituto di Belle Arti di Vercelli’, I describe myself as an ‘amanuense’ (medieval hand-painter) and far from expositions and competitions.”