There was a time when the Name-of-the-Father was a generalized reference point (re-père) that allowed subjects to use it as a support around which they constructed themselves or against which they rebelled. Today, they bypass it, without making use of it. We are witnessing the evaporation of the father . Taken to extremes, this new paradigm sometimes leaves children alone, at the heart of families that have run out of reference points to offer. There are no limits to the jouissance of parents, nor to that of offspring. Makeshift constructions emerge as possible, bespoke solutions where “ready-to-wear” ones have failed....

In her recently published story La faille  (The flaw), in which the word “family” (“famille”) is deliberately missing a letter, Blandine Rinkel explores the conditions that allow a subject to extricate themselves, like the missing letter, from family determinations in order to forge a singular desire and destiny. This issue of FαMIL gives us further examples with the lives of Rousseau and Elon Musk, whose beginnings were marked by the death of the mother and the abandonment of the father in the case of the former, and paternal violence and insults for the latter. The cinema of Delphine and Muriel...

It is when illness threatens to erase her family’s history forever that the protagonist of this first-person narrative decides to undertake a journey towards that unknown land, towards that country from which her ancestors were exiled, deported. In the beginning, there are no names— “everything is designated but not named” ; the names will only come later, once, in a sense, the barrier of silence has been overcome, says Cécile Wajsbrot about her novel Mémorial. While the father and the sister never spoke about what had happened before, never uttered a word in their mother tongue, never wanted to...

These family words, which sometimes speak to us and traverse us, and sometimes represent us on the stage of the world, fracture and decompose over the course of an analysis. They then take on an enigmatic resonance which makes them foreign to our own ears. Familiar par excellence, they become other: they reveal a zone of impact where we find ourselves pinned to an unexpected place: slaves to a tyrannical iteration, which, although familiar, stuns us when it reveals the strange satisfaction we derive from it. The clinic that emerged during the last Journées of the ECF , showed the extent...

In his article "Affairs of the Family in the Unconscious,” Jacques-Alain Miller states that “the place of the family remains linked to the language that one speaks, which is to say that to speak, to speak in language, is already to testify to the linkwith the family. It is for this reason that it is preferable to do an analysis in one's mother tongue. It is possible to do ananalysis in another language but then something is lost, even though something is also retrieved since it effectuates adefamilialisation” . This signifier, which indicates both a movement of loss and recovery, may...

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” . If, as Jacques-Alain Miller...