Chance, maybe specific to the charm of radio, made me come across a so-called secular program last Saturday [1], in which Anne Morelli [2] intervened to discuss what, according to her, could cause a religion to disappear. One of the possible outcomes of a religion may be the unravelling of belief in its dogmas, and she illustrated: “How many people think that the Virgin Mary is truly a virgin, even after giving birth?”
How can we fail to listen to this question, when preparations for the Pipol 10 congress are in full swing? And, maybe, it’s the other way round (the question could be considered inversely): how could this story hold up for so long? Due to the lack of science? Unthinkable. It seems to me that an assumption could be made as to what enabled the latter to reach us, and probably persist for some time to come, no offense to Morelli. This story could only be tenable if it were based on the fact that there is something irreducible in conception – that there is a real which always escapes, even from contemporary science, and which leaves its enigma, its mystery to this emergence of life. For example, just how come a fertilized egg drops or clings to the endometrium? How is it that a sperm does its job for a certain couple and that none manages for others. Of course, science has some generalities and approaches on this question – and psychoanalysis encounters some of them – but in the life of a specific couple, these do not always work, and can even lead to ravage. And something of desire or the drive is not always unrelated to an outcome. Sheila Power offers us a powerful article, for this issue of Ombilic, which deals with the fading of desire when there is a will to have a child at any cost, a will which is not unrelated to the medical offer in this field, she tells us.
“The very moment of procreation is elusive/imperceptible,” said a biologist that François Ansermet recalls in the thrilling Pipol 10 Teaser launched at the previous Ombilic – and which you can find on the site’s home page and on Youtube. I invite you to watch or re-watch this video where he (the latter) makes the unprecedented proposal to add the presence of artists to the ethics committees – a proposal that is so contemporary and precious in these pandemic times – artists who offer “performances of the unrepresentable.” And on the question of the origin, of what presided over it, he refers to Victor Hugo’s “Ruth [like Booz] did not know”[3] to “I could not know,”[4] answer in the dialogue of Endgame, between Nagg and his son. François Ansermet reminds us of Beckett’s passage in the teaser – don’t miss it, it’s irresistible. We also get to hear some gems from Jacques-Alain Miller, Éric Laurent and Philippe La Sagna.
“How can one want a child?” wonders Violaine Clément, in another article in this edition of Ombilic. It takes us to the early hours of history, to Rome and elsewhere, to shed light on the topicality of the issue. To discover!
Finally, a third article brightens up this issue of Ombilic, where Marco Focchi recalls that faced with the “decline of the father,” Lacan did not deduce from it the urgency of restoring the function of the Name-of-the-Father, quite the contrary, and he describes to us, the importance of the passage from lack to hole in Lacan’s elaboration.
Enjoy the discovery!
Bibliography :
Ansermet F., “Preface” to The child and the femininity of its mother under the direction of Elisabeth Leclerc-Razavet, Georges Habenberg and Dominique Wintrebert, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2015, page 8
Translation : Polina Agapaki
Review : Caroline Heanue
Photography: Kervyn Emmanuel : http://emmanuelkervyn.canalblog.com/
[1] “In search of meaning,” a programme offered by the Belgian public radio “La Première,” broadcast on 28 February 2021, available on the internet.
[2] Anne Morelli is a Belgian historian and professor at the Free University of Brussels, specialising in the history of religions and minorities.
[3] Cf. Lacan J., The Seminar, Book VIII, Transference, text established by J.-A. Miller, Transl. By Bruce Fink, Paris, Polity, 2017, p. 130.
[4] Beckett S., Fin de partie, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1957, p. 67.
