Disruption is the signifier used by J.A. Miller in the lesson of 23 March 2011 of the Seminar Being and the One [1], to indicate the way the real manifests itself as an effect of the contingent encounter between two substances: the signifying one and the jouissance one. An unspeakable and senseless encounter of which, (as several pass testimonies teach) traces remain, or better still, indelible letters where the singularity of the parlêtre is rooted, beyond any established speech and the semblances that descend from it.
Disruptive is an electric discharge which due to an excess of voltage shatters an insulator; lightning is an example. But disruptive is also another way of naming the “divergent” selection, which in the study of population genetics, indicates an increase in the frequency of the extreme characteristics of a population at the expense of its intermediate forms. In both cases, disruption is therefore the irruption on the scene of the world of an event that introduces a rupture and a radical discontinuity that leaves remnants and opens up to a pluralisation of new classifications. Such a signifier fits well with Lacan’s later teachings, who in Seminar XXIII, The Sinthome questions how to break and “crack” the hard core of the real that underlies the symptom once it is stripped of its value of truth and its meaning.
J.-A. Miller invites analysts to take disruption as a compass to orient themselves in social phenomena that are no longer structured and ordered by the Name-of-the-Father and the logic of castration, but rather manifest themselves in the irruption of delocalised modes of jouissance that shatter every form established according to norms, traditions and customs consolidated over time. In the past, these ways of jouissance and bonding were mainly relegated to the most private and intimate sphere of each one of us, but today come out in the open demanding for new nominations and inscriptions in the field of the Other, in order to see rights recognised that would otherwise be denied. Among these is the right to have or adopt a child regardless of the presence or absence of a partner, of his/her sex, and of the way science and technology are now available to achieve the coveted goal.
However, in order for a child to be born in and to desire, it is necessary that man’s will must stumble, for science not to be reduced to all-knowing, and for technology to respect the impossibility and the opacity that lies at the heart of the living. In fact, the real of the subject, as Lacan recalls in Science and Truth, far from corresponding to the real of science, is rather linked to the impossibility of the sexual relationship to be written in a formula that applies to everyone. Precisely inasmuch as the real of sex is opaque and impossible to be written, foreclosed to meaning and signification, each parlêtre is called upon to respond with a singular invention to this hole in structure. Freud glimpsed these answers in the infantile sexual theories that the child constructs in the face of the enigma of birth, the real of sex and the mystery of death. In this sense, we can affirm that the child is a true scientist, animated by the search for a solution to the real that he encounters in his experience.
To procreate, to be born, to live and to die in the era of The Other who Doesn’t Exist and its Ethics Committees [2] means to be increasingly confronted with a jouissance that struggles to be negativized by the signifier and that therefore escapes the grip of semblants in which we believe less and less. The thrust of the contemporary subject, increasingly disenchanted and disengaged from discourse, is to avoid alienation/identification to the signifier and the castration that this entails, to try instead to affirm himself along the path of the identity of jouissance. The binary signifiers which organised the semblants of man/woman, mother/father, true/false … today give way to a greater fluidity, that if on the one hand can leave the subject lost in front of his/her jouissance, at the same time can offer the possibility for each to find, not alone, his/her own way of being in the world. At this time, it is a matter for the analyst to not only welcome the disruptive effects he encounters in his practice, but also to be capable of embodying, in the act and for the instant of a lapse, these effects, beyond the Other and perhaps, beyond the object a.
In this sense, J.-A. Miller’s invitation to start again from disruption, taking Lacan’s very last teaching as a reference, is truly a subversive operation in order to reinvent psychoanalysis today.
Translated by Rachele Giuntoli
Proof reading: Caroline Heanue
Picture : ©Rachel Silski – Instagram – Facebook
[1] J.-A. Miller, A. Di Ciaccia, The One-All-Alone, Astrolabio, Roma 2018.
[2] J.-A. Miller, E. Laurent, The Other who Doesn’t Exist and its Ethics Committees, Course held at the Department of Psychoanalysis of the University of Paris VIII in the academic year 1996-1997
