There is nothing outside the text. Now, even within the text, there is a war between names, as one name negates another. Names are necessary as Being is dumb, but names are violent because they are imposed upon the Real. Thus every name is a point of contestation, where a fight can breakout. And truth becomes a fight with the untruth (disinformation, fake news, etc.) or a fight with the non-sense that exceeds it. Thus all names, truths and so on compete for attention via omnipresent slogans lest they be reabsorbed into the Real. ‘’Our starting point, the point we keep coming back to, since we will always be at our starting point, is that every real signifier . . . signifies nothing’’ (Lacan 1955-1956, 185). The nothing that must be as something.
Writing in Le Monde recently, the historian and leading authority on Lacan, Elizabeth Roudinesco (2019), deplores the loss of prestige suffered by psychoanalysis now that ‘its heroic age is past’. She argues for a return to “humanist” psychiatry, suggesting that “psychoanalysis has entered an endless phase of decline”. She complains that its practitioners use “incomprehensible language in their writings intended only for their inner circle”. Their works of ‘dense theory’ are printed in small editions not exceeding a few hundred copies. She notes that the psychoanalytic movement in France has splintered into nineteen associations with a majority of women members, who often know nothing about each other. They organise conferences, enjoy belonging to an association, but younger analysts have difficulty setting up their practices because clients have become scarce as psychoanalysis attracts fewer and fewer patients. She concludes by suggesting that may be analysts have become humiliated by the success of the many “abject rantings discrediting Freud”, and have largely “abandoned public debate, turning a blind eye to any undertaking critical of them”.
Recall the days when Michael Ignatieff hosted discussions on late night Channel Four, with analysts such as Bruno Bettelheim, Hanna Segal,, Adolf Grunbaum, Andre Green, Robert Young, Elizabeth Spillius, Juliet Mitchell and others, published in the Voices series (Bourne et al 1987) and discussed in The Listener weekly magazine which itself ceased publication in 1991 after 62 years.