“What leads Lacan towards the object a? A regret – that of having reduced to its phallic signifier what remains alive in the subject, through a kind of rudder stroke.’’ Jacques-Alain Miller [1]
I appreciate the invitation to contribute with some thoughts on the topic that such a suggestive title evokes: Wanting a child? The tone of the question posed by the text is already imposed from the beginning, questioning not only the object at stake, namely: the child, but also the verb: ‘to want’. The latter puts the focus on the position from which someone expresses one’s own intention to proceed to the necessary actions to achieve that goal. From Lacan we have learned a use of logic that is not in line with the most common version of the Aristotelian text, namely: the use of the universal and the particular as two exhaustive and exclusive modalities through which the conclusion is affirmed or denied.
On the contrary, the analytical operation that fosters contingency favors the opening effect of interpretation, the truth as alétheia, the intervention that shakes the fantasy so that the act has a chance to occur. Thus, we make use of a not so well known use of the Aristotelian logic that Lacan, however, mentions in his seminar “… ou pire” (1971-1972), in which, not by chance, he elaborates his formulas of sexuation. In it he refers to Prior Analytics, in which the philosopher places the negation on the predicate instead of applying it on the copula [2]. That is: he quotes the sentence the man is not white to which he opposes the man is non-white, a paragraph that – according to Lacan – considerably allows us to appreciate other possibilities of interpretation. It is the same logic with which Lacan asserts that the woman is Not All.
Well, likewise, in order to address these lines on the topic in question, I would like to apply herewith a similar logic in order to title the text I am presenting: wanting a non-child? It seems to me that it opens a horizon in which the child appears as the lure of other desires, of which the subject prefers not to become aware. For example, wanting a non-child may well mean to desire a pregnancy but not a child. For whatever reason: to compete with a friend, to show this or that person that one is capable of gestating; because we don’t know what to do, so why not have a child; because I want to know if he or she loves me (as a patient said some days ago in her analysis); because a child can help us get along better, and a long etcetera list whose weave and density unfolds according to the singularity of each one, in this day and age when – through science- a child is served à la carte.
I would like to consider that this child -impossible for language- occupies the place of waste, an object fallen from the parents’ bed (object a), even if the child in question comes from a test tube whose product is implanted in a surrogate mother hired by a couple of two men. Hence, the matheme of the object in psychoanalysis is written a/ minus phi. In other words, the object (the child) over the phallic glow that sexualizes it, without fully covering it, just as anxiety notifies us throughout our existence. In line with this, Jacques Alain Miller says that the object a is the crossed out phallus [3]. My comprehension of such a definition is that the object a is situated where language – the phallic meaning – fails. It constitutes an internal limit to the language.
Upon reflection, it would be worth asking ourselves how many families, couples or individuals are clear about what they desire when they bring a child into the world. As I understand it, this is where the analytical operation finds its zone of intervention, so that a subject is able to decide if they want what they desire, which could very well differ completely from the truth of the what is being said as a correspondence between words and things.
This is where I would like to introduce a phrase that has recently gained unusual popularity due to the success achieved by the series that bears it as its title: The Queen’s Gambit. That chess move that, according to the legend, allows Beth – the protagonist – to win the world chess championship. But Beth unfolds – for better or worse – her Queen’s Gambit throughout her inevitably feminine life, her way of intervening overturns any board on which she performs.
Now, not by chance, in the text “On beginning the treatment”, Freud uses the chess game to illustrate the importance of the beginning and the finale of the game. The word Gambit even appears at the third or fourth line of the text. Well, the truth is that the Queen’s Gambit emerges as a good way to approach the opening maneuver with which the analytical intervention stands in front of the question Wanting a child? in order to, for instance, transform it into a Wanting a non-child? and, thus, dribble a loophole in the neurosis, that contingency may reserve for desire.
In my opinion, Lacan goes very far with this, so far that he himself seems to be surprised when he claims nothing less than that a woman can have a child with the analyst. Certainly not because it is the practitioner who contributes with the genetic material, but because the latter acts as the cause that operates there for that desire to occur, something that incidentally introduces the issue of the Father and with it the relationship between Father and woman (or Queen, in order to continue with the series). The truth is that the Gambit of the analyst can go very far. Let’s go to the text:
“I sense that I am entering dangerous territory, but too bad (…) If there is one question that analysis could raise, it’s that one. Why, in a psychoanalysis, would it not be – one suspects that this is the case from time to time – the psychoanalyst who is the real father even if he is in no way the one who has done it, there, on the level of the spermatozoon? From time to time one has the suspicion when it concerns a woman patient’s relationship with, to be modest about it, the analytic situation that she has finally become a mother’’.
And as if that wasn’t enough, he concludes with this reflection:
“By the same token we are aware, because this gives a broader perspective, that there is no need to take the reference to analysis, which I have taken as the most burning one, for the same question to arise. One can very well give one’s husband a baby, and yet this be someone else’s child, even if one hasn’t fucked with him, someone, precisely, whom one would have liked to be the father. Yet, it’s for that reason that one has had the child.” [4]
What appears on the horizon is the figure of the Real Father that Lacan puts on account of language, so that –should any clarifications be necessary- little remains for the anatomy on this matter. He states that this Real Father is impossible and it is there where the encounter between father and woman is, in my view, most profitable regarding the function of waste with which the locus of family is approached in his two Notes on the child: in the place of the welcome failure of the Name of the Father.
In this impossibility, Father and woman find themselves in a handful of signifiers whose particularity harbors a libidinal interest that, depending on the circumstances, can provide a desiring exit or a dark abyss. No wonder the poet Alejandra Pizarnik asks herself: “What is the name called?” [5] and thereby exposes the inconsistency of language –or of the phallus if you like- in order to answer our ultimate and definitive cause: Alejandra’s Gambit.
Translated by Rafaela O. Lima
Edited by Polina Agapaki
Photography: ©Poppe Véronique : www.veroniquepoppe.com & Rolet Christian : www.christianrolet.com
[1] Jacques-Alain Miller, “Donc”, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2011.
[2] Linking verb. In his formulation of syllogistic propositions, instead of the copula (“All/some… are/are not…”), Aristotle uses the expression, “… belongs to/does not belong to all/some…” or “… is said/is not said of all/some…” [P.A.]
[3] Jacques-Alain Miller, “ Los signos del goce”, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1998.
[4] Jacques Lacan: “Βeyond the Oedipus complex VIII From myth to child” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. 17, The other side of psychoanalysis, translated by Russell Grigg, Norton (2007), pp. 127-128.
[5] The poet referred to is Alejandra Pizarnik. The cited verse can be found in: Alejandra Pizarnik: “An Ancient Autumn. Extraction of the madness stone” (1968), in Obras Completas, Ediciones Corregidor, Buenos Aires, 1999, p. 130.
