Three or Four Types of Thesis

This title directly echoes a sentence spoken during the lesson of May 15. Two-thirds of the way through, Christian Fierens says something that catches our attention: “I would like to pose three or four types of question on this part.” On the one hand, it is quite unusual to encounter questions so openly formulated in the course of the seminar; on the other hand, upon reflection, these three or four types of question strictly speaking constitute theses that I intend to discuss with you today in order to take the measure of their novelty regarding the question of the psychoanalytic act.

Three or four? Hard to say. What is certain: neither three nor four. Much more, and at the same time, only one: that of jouissance as a principle from which flows the object a in its vocal form of absolute nothingness, from which flows the psychoanalytic act. Why “types of question”, and not directly “questions”? Etymologically, the word “type” is related to Indo-European words expressing a movement, a shock (Tupos derives from Tuptein, “to strike”). Thus even where we least expect it, it is movement that imposes itself in Christian Fierens’s path of thinking. Without a doubt, these “three or four types of question” produce the effect of a jolt inscribed in the “other-beginning” (autre-commençant) movement of psychoanalysis to which we are invited.

The First

The first contains several questions on its own. All have in common that they point to the conditions of possibility necessary for the psychoanalytic act to operate. In the manner of Kant, it is a matter here of topologically experimenting with the different options enabled by the tetrahedron by showing what works and what does not work, up to approaching the hollowed-out dimension of the psychoanalytic act. Thus Christian Fierens asks: does the analytic process necessarily imply taking into account both alienation and truth? Can one envisage an analysis starting from the position of truth (like an obsessional cure) to move toward alienation? How is transference to be situated in this moving process? […]