The Time for Surprise! – Céline Aulit

To give life is undeniably to give death. For each speaking being life and death are intimately linked. The analytical experience demonstrates this to us every day: the one and the other come to collide; becoming muddled and responding to each other in a continuous movement. Death on the horizon invites the past to take a place in the present moment, in a questioning of its origins.

Does genetic prediction change this relation to time? François Ansermet revisits the three logical times via the lens of genetic prediction: this “implies a moment of concluding which coincides with the instant of seeing, leaving the time to understand in abeyance” [1]. Prediction, by its very essence, overwrites the time of surprise in a “too much knowledge” [2] effect, which can be cumbersome.

However, this time for understanding is necessary to sow doubt in what seems to have already been written about the intimate of the subject, its fantasmatic framework, and in bringing out an exteriority. This is the opening provided by the analytical session of the Lacanian Orientation: “a lapse of time […] which allows one to think about the phenomenon of traversal” [3] and can offer the subject a different rapport with his unconscious [4]. Thanks to an interpretation and the dimension of surprise that is intrinsic to it, a discontinuity is introduced into the reading of the already written, revealing this dimension of misunderstanding that accompanies every speaking being coming into the world.

Philippe Hellebois and Manuel Fernandez Blanco introduce us to this question of time in filiation.

Translation by Raphael Montague

Picture: ©Gaëlle Poblome

Bibliography

“Periods of time had been mentioned in the dream; and time is assuredly never a matter of indifference in any biological event. I therefore asked Dora when this attack of appendicitis had taken place; whether it had been before or after the scene by the lake. Every difficulty was resolved at a single blow by her prompt reply: ‘Nine months later.’ The period of time is sufficiently characteristic. Her supposed attack of appendicitis had thus enabled the patient with the modest means at her disposal (the pains and the menstrual flow) to realize a phantasy of childbirth. Dora was naturally aware of the significance of this period of time, and could not dispute the probability of her having, on the occasion under discussion, read up in the encyclopedia about pregnancy and childbirth.”

Freud, S., “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”, S.E. Vol. VII, pp, 102-103.

[1] Ansermet F., Prédire l’enfant, Paris, PUF, 2019, p. 25.

[2] Ibid., p. 26.

[3] Miller J.-A., “Introduction à l’érotique du temps”, La Cause freudienne, n°56, mars 2004, p. 76.

[4] Ibid.