To give life, to build a family, to have a child, entails for the subject who engages his desire in it, a “subjective mutation.”[1] The act it constitutes, Jacques-Alain Miller tells us, if it is “true in Lacan’s sense [can be considered as] a “suicide of the subject”[2] to be put “in quotation marks to indicate that it may be reborn, but it is reborn differently.”[3] 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 crossing of this exact register. It “aims at the heart of being: jouissance.”[4] The responsibility that it implies “does not rest on a mastery but on a desire.”[5] It is not based on reasonable knowledge but on the use of a part of oneself that can experience a “feeling of absolute risk.”[6]
The ethics of psychoanalysis is an ethics of the act, therefore based on desire and jouissance at the heart of the subject’s being. An ethics of the “one by one” when it is supported by the analyst’s desire for absolute difference, the point of solitude and fundamental and vivifying singularity at the heart of a subject’s being. As such, and as Clotilde Leguil recalled on France Culture quite recently, psychoanalysis can be understood as a practice that makes life happen by words.”[7]
Each of the texts in this new issue of Ombilic makes us see in its own way, the ethics of the psychoanalytic cure. Each of the contributions offer an orientation towards what this assumption of its part of living would be by the subject, whether or not it is declined in a desire for a child.
In contrast to this ethical field, you will be able to discover the current affairs of the growing commodification of egg donation, the pitfalls and drifts of which Celine Gauthier[8] denounces through the interview she gave to the PIPOL 10 team.
Good lecture and good discovery!
Review: Caroline Heanue
Photography: © Laporte Françoise : https://www.francoiselaporte.com/
Bibliography
Miller J.-A., ”The child and the object,” intervention at the Lausanne symposium titled “The child between the mother and the woman,” 1996, published in La petite girafe, n°18, 2003, p. 10.
[1] Miller J.-A., “Jacques Lacan: comments on his concept of acting out,” Mental, n°17, April 2006, p. 18.
[2] Ibid., p. 21.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., p. 22.
[5] Leguil Cl., Céder n’est pas consentir, Paris, PUF, 2021, p. 34.
[6] Ibid., p. 33.
[7] Cf. The intervention of Clotilde Leguil on France Culture for the programme Les Chemins de la philosophie, in a number titled “The uterus on the coach,” broadcasted 2nd March 2021. Available on the internet.
[8] Céline Gauthier is a journalist, co-founder of the quarterly investigation and Medor stories and author of the article “La maculée conception, Ces bébés belges issus du business des ovules espagnols.” Available on internet: https://medor.coop/magazines/medor-2-spring-2016/business-ovocytes-ovules-espagne/?full=1
