27 April, 2019
Jorge Assef
In the course of his Brazilian
seminars published under the title of “The Erotics of Time”, Jacques-Alain
Miller, referring to La Rochefoucauld’s saying about the impossibility of
looking death in the face, states: We could say there is a Horror Temporis[1].
After the decline of the Name
of the Father, and confronted with the empire of the capitalist discourse and
the consequent rise of object a to the social zenith, we can see how
our era lives in the frenzy of making the most of its time. The push to jouissance,
along with the imperative that “time is money” so don’t waste it, have shaped
the hyper-modern version of the contemporary “Horror Temporis”: This is the
horror at wasting time which translates into an ongoing status of subjective
urgency.
The other side of these
phenomena is that those who do not know how to catch this train remain on the
fringes, in some sort of suspension of time, or delayed condition of apathy or
uncertainty. How does this phenomenon appear in the clinic today?
One typical form has to do
with being in a hurry: patients ask about the length of the treatment in their
first interview, say that they don’t have time to come often, get upset if
there are delays in the waiting room, etc. Another form is a kind of lethargy
manifested in the doubt that some patients express about coming every week,
using as justification the argument that there is nothing so important going on
in their lives, they would not know what to talk about, for instance.
What both these forms express
is an avoidance of what Lacan situated as the logical time between the instant
of seeing and the moment for concluding. Lacan calls this blank space, where
there are no certainties (whether good or bad), no conclusions and no answers,
the time for understanding. It has to do with a necessary lapse, a lapse where
something can come into being, something can be loosened, something can be
built, can ripen, break away or crop up.
For this “Time for
Understanding” to acquire its power, we need to safeguard it against the
oppression of apathy as dead-time and from the acceleration of hyper-activity;
which is something that in itself goes against the grain of our era and its
imperatives. It installs the analytical experience as an unprecedented pause in
the generalized velocity of our way of life.
There is an often repeated
remark from Lacan’s interview on Belgian radio published as a text called
“Radiophony” where, referring to Socrates, he states: “He knew like us that a
being needs time to come to be” [2]. Lacan says that
this time, which is a logical time, needs to be respected and supported not
only by the patient but also by the analyst. That is why he then adds: “This ‘it
takes time’ (faut du temps), he — i.e. the analyst — supports it long
enough for that which comes to be said not to fail…[3]”
And precisely, when Lacan
gives his interview for the Italian magazine Panorama he
states: “My books are called incomprehensible. But for whom? I did not
write them for everyone, thinking that just anyone could understand them. (…).
For me, it is enough to have an audience who reads my work. If they do not
understand, well, let’s be patient. (…) I am also convinced that within ten
years at the utmost, people reading my work will find it entirely transparent
(…).’ [4].”
He does not say that his work
will become transparent, as if he were a man ahead of his time; he says
that those who read it will, within ten years at the utmost, find it
transparent, meaning that he also includes time in the act of reading. The
formation of the psychoanalyst thus also requires time for understanding.
In fact, when an analyst
acquires the skill of managing time in the direction of the treatment (which
includes supporting the time needed “to come to be”) it is an effect of their
formation, and formation is also a matter of time.
We thus see that supporting
time, a time that has no forced limits, no deadlines, no certainties, the time
of the “Time for Understanding”, is part of the materiality of the analytical
session. That is why Lacan says: “(…) except that discourse is not simply
(…) something which leads somewhere, has a fabric, a texture, and not only does
it take time, not only does it have a dimension in time, a certain density
which means that we cannot in any way be satisfied with the instantaneous
present (…)[5]
Therefore, it is thanks to
this “Time for Understanding” that the “Instants of Seeing” can irrupt, like
the spring of the lion that Freud talks about, as well as the “Moments for
Concluding” as precipitations that often take the subject by surprise.
The analytical experience
ranges between these two zones[6]:
The series, frequency,
continuity and regularity: so that those events in life that left a mark on the
subject (and which fixed a certain regime of jouissance) are displayed. Then
the effects of truth can be gathered[7] and organized
as knowledge.
The cut, spring, surprise, the
act, the irruption.
It is between these two
registers of time that one makes room for something to happen that will lead to
the end of the analysis.
In the meantime, our practice
does not detain itself in setting deadlines, or goals according to a time
schedule, a chronological period or fixed hours. It is not a question of how
long an analysis takes or how long a session lasts, but about the effects that
are produced there.
It is said that once a
journalist asked Jackson Pollock how he knew when one of his drip paintings was
finished. His answer was: “And how do you know when you are finished
making love?”
The time of the analytic act
is a time that breaks all clocks, because it operates at the level of the
subjective experience of time. This is why Miller claims: (…) In precise
terms, I consider Lacanian sessions as a time frame with a supplement of the
infinite (…) Otherwise the problem of the duration of sessions would become
insolvable. They will always be too short or too long (…) It is not that we
give short sessions, but that we give sessions that are infinite[8].
[2]
Lacan, J. (2012) “Radiofonía” in Otros Escritos. P. 449. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
[3]
Lacan, J. (2012) “Radiofonía” in Otros Escritos. P. 451. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
[4]
Lacan, J. (1974 [2015]) “Jacques Lacan Freud for Ever” an interview with Panorama.
Published in Hurly-Burly. The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Issue 12. P. 16. Published for the Freudian Field by the New Lacanian School.
[5]
Lacan, J. (1957-1958 [2017]). “Formation of the Unconscious. The Seminar of
Jacques Lacan | Book V”. USA: Polity Press.
[6]
Brousse, M-H. (2019) Available at: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=299986064184879/
[7]
Córdoba, C. (2019). Available at: https://www.facebook.com/CIECSeminarioInternacional/photos/a.790997284294532/2145609028833344/
[8]
Miller, J-A. (2002). “La erótica del tiempo”. P. 19. Buenos Aires: Tres Haches.
No comments:
Post a Comment