The unlimitedness of the desire for a child Reproduction is nowadays manipulated by science, which has itself become the instrument of the desire for children. When the empire of the father and of the Law decline, how can we regulate caprices, fantasies and extravagances? Medically assisted procreation (MAP) consists of a set of biological and medical techniques that make it possible to overcome the multiple causes of sterility. They open up a field of interventions that seem to give the desire for a child almost unlimited possibilities. They promise to defeat the impossible contingency that has up until now...

By pairing the desire for a child with almost unlimited possibilities, scientific advances now promise to overcome the contingent impossibility that has hitherto limited the will to procreate. In fact, if there is no longer any natural impossibility, then the desire for a child becomes a right for all. In the text Techno-maternities published in this issue, Dominique Laurent explains to what extent "MAPs have contributed, by disrupting the conditions of procreation, to demonstrating the naturalist illusion of the notion of family and the supposed universality of the desire for a child, anchored in the model shaped by the Enlightenment."...

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To give life, to build a family, to have a child, entails for the subject who engages his desire in it, a “subjective mutation.” The act it constitutes, Jacques-Alain Miller tells us, if it is “true in Lacan’s sense   a “suicide of the subject” to be put “in quotation marks to indicate that it may be reborn, but it is reborn differently.”  The subject is reborn as another and it is for this reason that his act takes the place of a saying. It is not inscribed as continuity of a thought but as discontinuity, a...

“In the beginning, there was not the origin. There was the place” , says Lacan, making the words of Genesis resonate and indicating the need to rely on topology when exploring the "mystery of the incarnation" as to being into the word. Years later, his statement “Fiat hole!”  translates the topological truth of the biblical statement “Fiat lux”. Usually, this hole is covered by the order of succession between beings. Although, says Lacan, “nothing in the symbolic explains the fact of their individuation, the fact that beings come from beings.”  One thing “evades the symbolic tapestry, it's procreation in its essential...

The interventions of technology on living beings do not cease to produce, in contemporary times “more and more surprising disruptions in the fields of procreation, gender and filiation” . On the 3rd and 4th of July 2021, the PIPOL congress will address the sources and impasses of the desire for a child in direct connection with the great disorder in the traditional structures of the human experience since “the evaporation of the father (père)”, the “rise of the object to the zenith” and the free movement of the “Ones all alone” . If the psychoanalysts must join the spire of...