FaMIL is launched! Each week, it will provide you with texts to feed your reflection and attempt to understand the discomfort in the family in the 21st century. The excellent text by Mathieu Siriot (member of the ECF) introduces us to the section “Family resources” and makes us eager to read the 20th-century thinkers who studied the effects of the modern One-dividualism, as Lacan calls it, on the family institution. The revelation of the irreducible disharmony between man and woman (no sexual report) and the primacy of the solitary enjoyment make any human bond a-normal. To create social, marital, or family ties, the only path is invention.
Then, the text by Laura Storti (member of the SLP) will develop and interpret Lacan’s formula in the “Note on the child,” which is the title of the section “Family residue”. It opens up the question that will guide the section: questioning the functioning of the contemporary family, its forms, and its discomforts, while keeping in mind the directions given by Jacques Lacan in his last teaching: “In sum, [the ideal] would be to finish with the symbolic. In other words, say nothing.” [1]
From the family residue to the child residue, this is what the epistemic morning of November 23, 2024, made us realize, as illustrated by the text of Bruno de Halleux, who highlights Lacan’s operation of approaching the family through its invariant, the object a, the child. After the vaporization of the father, now that of the mother, only the child remains as the real bone of the family that is cobbled together around him.
[1] Lacan, J., L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre: Seminar XXIV, lesson of 8 February 1977, unpublished.
Translation: Jeroen Sollie
Proofreading: Tracy Hoijer-Favre
