Un réel pour le XXI sciècle
WORLD ASSOCIATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
IXth Congress of the WAP • 14-18 april 2014 • Paris • Palais des Congrès • www.wapol.org

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5 MINUTES ON THE AIR
Armand Zaloszyc
Interview on the theme « A Real for the XXIst Century »
by Anaëlle Lebovits-Quenehen

Anaëlle Lebovits-Quenehen: How do you understand the title of the next WAP Congress, "A Real for the 21st Century"?

Armand Zaloszyc: This title is really well chosen. The difficulty with the real is in fact to say what it is. A real keeps us in suspense and opens perspectives that will authorize us to clarify what it's about. So let's start by saying what it's not. "The real", is a word that designates something whose limits can't be grasped by our signifying organizations, so that we can only define it negatively (in the same way that God was defined by negative theology). We can say what it isn't: the real is not defined, it is not limited, it has no face, it has no name. Whence the care taken in speaking not of the real, like we know what it is, but of a real for the 21st century.

A. L.-Q.: For all that, in grasping the real by what it isn't, can't we gain a little idea of how to understand it all the same?

A. Z.: Let's understand it negatively, supposing that there is something about which we can't say what it is.Based on this existence that we suppose, we can say that it can happen at any moment in life, in everyday existence, as an existence of an entirely different order.

A. L.-Q.: So still, there are signs that it exists. How, in everyday life, do we seize the signs of this specific existant?

A. Z.: If we refer to the psychoanalytic clinic as Freud constructed it, first anxiety, and all its derivatives – these phenomena that we struggle to grasp with our usual categories.

A. L.-Q.: These difficulties in grasping anxiety, do they stem from the fact that it expresses itself in the body?

A. Z.: That would suppose that the body be that real. That may be going a little too quickly.

A. L.-Q.: Anxiety is certainly a particular affect, but who says affect, says relation to the body.

A. Z.: Let's say that anxiety is the "signal" – that's Freud's term – of something going on somewhere, and that will usually be located in the body.

A. L.-Q.: If we follow Freud, anxiety indicates then, that a real has suddenly appeared. Are there other manners of apprehending the real for the speaking-being [parlêtre]?

A. Z.: Anything that is unexpected, that is contingent, can be a signal of a real.

A. L.-Q.: Shouldn't one also add: that which disturbs?

A. Z.: If it disturbs, it's firstly because it's unexpected and contingent, but also because it overflows our psychic apparatus – that is organized exactly in such a way as to be a defense against the stimuli that risk to overflow it.

A. L.-Q.: So on the one hand, there are the expressions of the real that we cope with as best we can using this apparatus, and on the other, there are expressions of the real with which we don't cope – like the encounter with a real that leads us to meet with a psychoanalyst…

A. Z.: Meeting with a psychoanalyst is also a way of coping.

A. L.-Q.: Exactly, what is it that allows us to cope when we go to see an analyst?

A. Z.: If you're plunged in the real you've encountered, it has to be about getting out of it in order to stop the disturbance. You stop it the minute you meet a partner who lets you form a couple with him/her and enter into networks so that they free you from the continuity, the limitlessness, of the real – which is precisely the cause of the disturbance that you're suffering from.

A. L.-Q.: Let's skip without transition to the moment when we leave the couple analysand-analyst. If we go into it to make this disturbance stop, can we say that we leave it when we consent to make do with the disturbance?

A. Z.: The disturbance implies the arrangement. When we cope with what disturbs, we can in deed cease to resort to the analyst. It's about finding what Lacan, somewhere, calls "tricks" .

A. L.-Q.: Could we say that the real first expresses itself as what disturbs our arrangement, and that to be able to live without the support of the couple analysand-analyst implies coping with one's arrangement?

A. Z.: Or finding another arrangement that allows us to get by, or even to live…

A. L.-Q.: What would you have to add to the expression "a real"?

A. Z.: If we first understand « a » as the indefinite article, and "real" as the noun, we can also just as well take "a" for the noun, as in "one", and "real" for the adjective. The organization finds itself transformed thusly: it's the A, or One, that is real, and the One has a long history, that goes back to Plato's Parmenides, spanning across the Neo-Platonist tradition and the mystics of Christianity who call "God" this real One; and it's also the God found in the Jewish tradition.

A. L.-Q.: So, God would be one of the figures of the real One?

A. Z.: Yes. This real of which we can know nothing, we locate it by giving it a name that can be the One, that can be God – or just as well, a real.

A. L.-Q.: Can't the analytical device allow us to give a different destiny to this One, that we have exteriorized and characterized as limitless behind the figure of God?

A. Z.: We certainly give it a different destiny, that is not necessarily the entry into a relation with God! The psychoanalytical experience is going to allow us to encircle this limitless real that can be neither situated nor localized, and to make possible a different relation with it.

A. L.-Q.: The title of this congress has a second part; how do you understand this "for the 21st century"?

A. Z.: I don't know what the organizers were thinking in choosing this title, but it's clear that if we treat the question of a real, it has to be for our century. Nonetheless, their idea can't stop there: in that it is quite especially in the psychoanalytical experience that this real can be treated, it is also about asking ourselves what will become of this treatment of the real that is psychoanalysis in the 21st century, when this century is characterized by ideologies founded on the negation of what, in this real, is absolutely indefinable.

A. L.-Q.: Armand Zaloszyc, Thank you.


Retranscription et édition : Alice Delarue
Translation : Julia Richards

  1. Lacan J., Seminar, Book VI, Desire and its Interpretation, Paris, La Martinière / Le Champ freudien, coll. Champ Freudien, 2013, p. 131.