Heresy and the One: Introduction to Contemporary Heretic
Welcome to Contemporary Heretic!
Readers of Jacques Lacan will recognise in “heretic” a term he highlighted in his later teaching. He attributed it to Joyce, a heretic who did not draw on the symbolic guarantee of the Name-of-the-Father. In other words, Joyce did not rely on the signifying operator of the name because he himself, following his writing, became the name, one of the names, on the path we can describe as that of a heretic.1 Today, and by implication, the heretic names everyone who is mad, which is to say delusional, in accordance with Lacan’s aphorism, which is every speaking being, and marks each subject’s singularity. Here there is no necessity to refer to the Other of the universal order.
Indeed, when it comes to what is commonly referred to as “heresy”, let’s hit the nail on the head. First, heresy signifies, as the Greek αἵρεσις indicates, a choice that serves a varied purpose, or a choosing that is not oriented by the logic of “the all”, by the majority, by good or bad, but by singularity in relation to language. Lacan stressed here the dimension of truth: “one has to choose the path by which to capture the truth – […], no one is prevented from subjecting it to confirmation, that is, from being a heretic in the right way”2. In the history of religion, the heretic was perceived as an exception deviating from the common rule, from orthodoxy, which for Joyce was the Name-of-the-Father. There is another side to this dialectic that sees the heretic as animated by a choice that entails a dimension of truth that Lacan pursued at the level of the cause in “Science and truth”. It is how Simone Weil spoke of love, finding in it truth as cause that took form of an experience of light.3 What is this light if not the truth of which “we have no prior knowledge” which takes therefore the revelatory dimension of the signifier and becomes the Heraclitean thunderbolt of a singular experience as Weil conveyed to us in her writings. We can say that in the course of her writing she found this singular moment of lucidity on a path of solitude but not of isolation. In this sense, we could speak of a path formed by a contingent choice of acts of love, all alone, but not without the Other, and in a direction that orients the speaking being in relation to the barred Other (Ⱥ), which carries a fault or a loss. Since the Other is marked by a part that is missing in it, the speaking being can assume the right to fault and, therefore, to innocence.
When J.-A. Miller brought heresy to our attention some years ago, 4 Europe was enmeshed with the religious and political orthodoxy surrounding various neofascist aspirations in the time of Brexit and rising far-right nationalism. However, the contemporary political context has somewhat shifted, even if the hangover from delusions of autarchic sovereignty has not faded away. The old hatred towards the neighbour, viewed as hindering and undermining a life of happiness, is now propelling new social and political phenomena, conceiving new social divisions that deafen singular voices. Here the heresy-orthodoxy opposition has lost its fervour, opening a new dimension of how to give life to a cause, a choice beyond the universal/exception divide. How, in other words, to rely on the signifier as all alone, as a partner that is there to stay, without the Other of the Other that does not exist, neither as a guarantee of meaning nor as universal arbiter.
In a time of renewed disdains and grievances between neighbours, which push towards the idea of annihilation of one group by the other, heresy appears as a rare gem: a heretical “madness”, derived from the love that aims at the One, and towards the Other as barred, that can carry a mark of difference. There is no need to place the heretic as a speaking being in what Yanis Varoufakis called the “condemnation game”, alongside the media of competing orthodoxies and ideologies. The aim is to support a polemic based on a singular desire, a point where the position of an analyst can be felt.
Contemporary Heretic thus aims to support a desire for difference that, if not unique to, is specific to the analyst’s position. In other words, the heretic could be approached, and reproached, as the one who defers the universalisation of the signifier. We propose, therefore, to vary the compulsion to belong to the Other of the universal order and to defer the “we are all delusional” by introducing a mediation, if not a countering, via a singular effort of bien dire. It is a dimension of speech, of “saying it well”, at least well enough to allow the polemic to be suffused with confusion and, therefore, make room for a difference between the Other of the universal and the One of the speaking being. In effect, the singularity of bien dire, and Contemporary Heretic with it, aspire in the direction of happenchance and of invention, pointing to the side of contingency which Lacan attributed to the logic of supplementarity.
Contemporary Heretic can serve as such a supplement. It steers clear of the temptation to universalise and promote social and political models whose all-encompassing aspiration leads to the excess we experience today, evident in every corner of the public media. Let’s read, examine, and subvert the vast array of totalising solutions that permeate and inhabit la vie quotidienne of speaking beings. We shun from them, modestly and without condemnation, for example, when an international conflict breaks out, when an unjust war is waged, when disaster strikes or when an unparalleled event takes place in the world. As editors, we do not say that there have always been wars and wastelands, or that “the drive is indestructible”, already mentioned by Freud. Nor do we propose there is only one way to stop and diffuse a disturbance, a good way for all parties, especially when the one proposing this way has his or her delusion at stake in it. We do not believe in a force that would put an end, once and for all, to all tension, thus bringing the death drive to its full realisation. If we do not believe in one end for all it is because psychoanalysis teaches – if it teaches anything – that each particular effect and solution is entangled with a praxis and with a responsibility. In effect, we can say that Contemporary Heretic does not represent anything or anyone, nor even itself, precisely because it depends on a desire that is already a response to a desire for difference. This invention of Lacan, called by him “the desire for absolute difference”, can be taken up in its minimal dimension as a desire that differentiates, following a choice of love that singularises.
Contemporary Heretic is a blog for the lovers of the unconscious and of psychoanalysis: for analysts and analysands, for the enlightened and inspired, and for the disenchanted and discouraged. Indeed, it is for all who, at least once in their life, felt impassioned by a singularity of their experience. It is also a site where questions about the place and status of the psychoanalyst, and of the discourse of psychoanalysis in civilisation today, can be articulated.
Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno on Unsplash
1 Lacan, J., The Seminar, book XXIII, The Sinthome, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. R. Price, Polity, Cambridge, 2016, p. 7.
2 Ibid.
3 Weil, S., On the Abolition of All Political Parties, trans. S. Leys, NYRB, New York, 2013, p. 22.
4 Miller, J.-A., “Heretics”, Psychoanalytical Notebooks Nr 32, trans. B. Wolf, rev. P. Dravers, 2018, London, pp. 11-21.