Buenos Aires, on the premises of the EOL: First Preparatory Evening of the WAP Congress 2010, Semblants and Sinthome

Wednesday, May 27, on the premises of the AOL was held the first Preparatory Evening of the WAP Congress, 2010. We had the pleasure of hearing and conversing with Graciela Brodsky and Leonardo Gorostiza, whose papers appear in the Scilicet, volume of the Congress.

With much enthusiasm and the delicate coordination of Silvia Tendlarz, the authors treated, respectively, the themes of "Truth and lie", and "inconsistency". The commentators, Frida Nemirosky and Ernesto Sinatra, handled the subject with as much precision as rigor.

Frida described Graciela’s paper using the figure of a bow strung between Freud’s first laborious imaginings on the complexity of the notion of truth in psychoanalysis and the way Jacques-Alain Miller problematized this, and the status of truth at the end of analysis, in his last Class of this year. She also praised the paper, both terse and clear, underscoring the complexity of its construction and the openings it offers. For example, using Freud’s first papers, Graciela treats the notions of truth or of the wild imaginings of unconscious knowledge as pure semblants – as Jacques-Alain Miller put forward in his Class.

In this way, are put in series, the election of the joke about Cracovy where Freud tries to show that the truth can intend to lie; the return to the case of Emma, and from which Freud draws the notions of "false premises" and "false conclusions" in hysteria (proton pseudos), or again, the misleading example of the young homosexual woman that allows Freud to say that the unconscious can lie. All this was not without effect, to judge by the joy and the number of questions that prodigiously enriched the debate.

In Leonardo Gorostiza’s presentation of the paper on "inconsistency", a paper centering on the reading of the contemporary world, where "everything vanishes and where the subject looses itself in a world of semblants", the author calls on the notion of the inconsistency of the Other, stressing it in relation to its antinomic corollary: the logical consistency of the object a.

In his commentary, Leonardo opposed the inconsistency towards which psychoanalysis could slip in its quest for truth using only the path of the signifier, if it did not find the ancorage that the object a gives to the subject, both as a condenser of jouissance obtained from the woof of its fundamental fantasy and as the result of the analytical experience.

The author goes a step further in his presentation, saying that the only issue to contemporary relativism, as inspired by his reading of Rorty, would be, using psychoanalysis, by means of the sinthome, whose kernel of signifier, jouissance and real, would permit the subject, at the end of the analytical experience, to invent a good usage of semblants.

The "agudeza" of Sinatra’s commentary centered specifically on the author’s propositions in the Item published in Silicet. The rich commentary which fed the debate, solicited the publics’ response concerning the end of the analysis, the discourse and the place of the sinthome.

Thus was the overture that this evening offered to the many members of the WAP who honored this meeting proposed by Silvia Tendlarz, member of the Action Committee of the School One, and the EOL, in preparation of the WAP Congress 2010.