Discontent in the family makes it speak. It is as if, around the family, after having shaken up the prerogatives of patriarchy, speech has, as they say, been freed. We hear the equivocation; on the one hand, people speak more openly, where many things had been kept quiet, and on the other hand, speech unfolds without the anchoring that gave it its coherence. So, the texts proposed here, speak of that which of speech could make family, and which is found to unfold according to tidbits of its own lalangue that are emancipated from the “family lalangue” [1].
If, as Jacques-Alain Miller has pointed out, psychoanalysis has contributed a great deal to a “familliarization of the world, as if it had been absorbed by neurosis [2]” by refocusing on parent-child relationships, today it is the dimension of “defamiliarization [3]” that is put forward to give an extension to the fact that it is a strange language that is spoken.
This strangeness is not that of another language, but the one of the misunderstanding that lies at the heart of humankind by the very fact that humans are beings of language. Thus, they are dependent on speech and all its avatars which the unconscious unfolds for each parlêtre. It is in his or her own language that each parlêtre first finds his existence, but we understand very well that surreptitiously, he slips between two languages, between two cultures.
Then, this in-between intrudes into the very same family, making its members strangers to each other. In this way, everything and everyone is called into question, and the imputation of intentions returns, as one of the authors puts it, to the family as a place of perdition, not so much in its most abject sense, but to underline that what results from the not-said is systematically a saying no.
The secret takes its place. In the Freudian discovery, it is located at the point where psychoanalysis is bound up with the intimate of families. The family is the place of [the] secret par excellence. Sometimes it’s a pact sealed by the previous generation on a point in the subject’s family history that remains unknown to him or her. For others, it’s a fact, an event that has been marked by repression: part of the family history kept secret by the unconscious. The secret is a distinct knowledge, separated. The fact that it comes to be known by the subject does not necessarily change its status: a treasure of the particularity of his jouissance. Despite its demand for truth, the modern subject cannot escape this. But, more than a simple displacement of the “I don’t want to know anything about it”, the truth that is expressed leaves no room for doubt, to the extent of the jouissance that this speech underlies.
The secret keeps the possible ajar and “the speaker is the one who is spoken [4]”. This is good news, if he does want to know anything about it.
[1] Miller J.-A., “Lacan avec Joyce”, La Cause freudienne, no. 38, février 1998, p.12.
[2] Miller J.-A., “Affairs of the Family in the Unconscious”, trans. F.-C. Baitinger and A. Khan, The Lacanian Review, no. 4, 2018, p. 74.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII: On a Discourse that Might not be a Semblance, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, Polity Press, 2024, p. 64.
Translation: Ana-Marija Kroker
Proofreading: Raphael Montague
