The issue number 13 of Ombilic invites us to a new walk around the imperceptible mysteries of the origin and of the predicate of the (non) desire of child and of family.
This brought me back to Capharnaüm, a movie by Nadine Labaki from 2018.
Zain is a twelve years old boy who lives in the streets of Bayreuth between mendicity and criminality. The movie opens up on a scene in a courthouse, where Zain says to the judge: “I would like to file a complaint against my parents for having me brought into the world!”
Here is the elementary question that accompanies us during the whole movie. The movie emerges from the desire of Labaki to observe and to know the intimacy of the life of street children in the capital of Lebanon, where she found the protagonist of this fiction anchored into this reality.
Zain is an illegal immigrant. He lives with his parents and their many children in a slum. The children are not attending school and have to fight to survive violence and precariousness in their life.
Stripped of the prediction of his being that the Other should have given him, Zain acts in search of his existence, commits a crime of honor – he avenges his sister – and carries out from prison a lawsuit against his parents: a call to justice in order to inhabit his desire of having a non-anonymous position in this world.
In an era where science opens up the possibility – and the liberty – to predict (almost) everything, the origin remains a mystery for the subject, something imperceptible: the contingency that he will have to make it his own, the contingency that he will have to handle the real without law and the impossibility – as Eric Laurent[1] says – to be cause of oneself.
Among the three texts in this issue, Ros McCarthy articulates the mystery of the origin at this point of the real that constitutes each desire of family and child. Of which symptom is the subject the result? Of which desire, of which jouissance? The point of real that constitutes the origin stays imperceptible.
The interview with the gynecologist and psychoanalyst Jean Reboul invites us to know some clinical cases of infertility from his practice that leads to the encounter of the real – for each subject –and to the possibility of a meeting with the desire.
Aurélie-Flore Pascal invites us to another movie scene with her fine and precise commentary of the movie 17 girls : «To each one her reasonance » [« A Chaque Une sa réson »].
The video in this issue introduces us to the documentary The mankind’s place [“La place de l’homme”] through the interview with the filmmaker Coline Grando. Her work makes room to the non-anonymous enunciation of men that position themselves in relation to their desire of child through the question of abortion. An unprecedented and moving moment!
In Capharnaüm, the father of Zain tells the judge that in order to be a man he needs to have children. In her documentary Coline Grando gives men the possibility to choose!
Enjoy your reading!
Bibliography
BROUSSE, M.-H., « Un néologisme d’actualité : la parentalité », La Cause Freudienne, n.60, 2005, pp.122.
Translation: Tracy Hoijer-Favre
Proof-reading : Cédric Grolleau
Photography: ©Nathalie Crame
[1] Laurent, Eric, Protecting the Child from the Family Delusion, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, n°28 and « Protéger l’enfant du délire familial », La Petite Girafe, n°29, avril 2009, p.7.
