Out of sex ? Not without desire – Cecilia Naranjo

This sixteenth edition of OMBILIC offers, on the basis of non-sexual procreation made possible nowadays by science’s progress, a variation of insights regarding the desire for a child that is at stake.

It is in a painting by Sandro Botticelli -which depicts the mystery known as the Angelic Colloquy- that Vicente Palomera unfolds the embarrassment of Maria confronted to the ordeal of her own desire. This embarrassment, or Conturbatio, first condition according to preachers for the mystery of the Annunciation, is not without echoing the emotion Lacan evokes in Seminar X when the critical decision to consent to one’s own desire arises.

After painting, Valérie Bussières invites us to the cinema, with Lunch on the Grass by Jean Renoir. This fiction, at the time of the artificial procreation’s first steps, stages the indestructible misunderstanding that are inseparable from birth: facing the indomitable will, the fantastical scenario will keep its course to touch lightly the truth of desire.

In the dystopian society of The Scarlet Servant, an organisation where the reproduction of human species is separated from any motherhood, Cinzia D’Angelis offers a version of femininity in the heroine whose desire for a child appears as a decided touch of madness.

Eventually, this tour ends and reopens on Genesis. Along with science, what originally seemed to go together now manifests as separate, and there is no longer a common opinion about the best ways to enjoy bodies. Susana Huler resonates God’s creation of Eve from Adam’s rib as an ezer kenegdo, a help against him, as a solution including the movement of desire, allowing the abandonment of auto-erotic enjoyment and making possible the illusions of love.

Have a good reading.

Bibliography

“Psychoanalysis has known how to be a refuge against the discourse of science, and against the discourse of science in so far as it gains the different human activities, that is to say, in particular, that it has won against medicine, and that psychoanalysis has taken charge of the residue, the unscientific residue of medicine, which cannot be scientificized, that is to say what, as Lacan says in Television, what of medicine operated by words, what in medicine operated by transference. Psychoanalysis has taken charge of this residue, it is that residue. “

Miller, J.-A., “ L’orientation lacanienne. Un effort de poésie “, Leçon du 13 novembre 2002, 2002-2003, enseignement prononcé dans le cadre du département de psychanalyse de l’université de Paris VIII, inédit.

Photography: ©Nathalie Crame