At the end of the PIPOL 11 Congress, on the clinic and the critique of patriarchy, Jacques-Alain Miller uses the term “vaporisation” first of the father and then of the mother. While he situates the vaporisation of the father – and not his evaporation – in a previous era, he announces the vaporisation of the mother in its turn [1].
Why vaporisation rather than evaporation?
Although vaporisation and evaporation are physical phenomena involving the transformation of a liquid into a gas, they are nevertheless distinct. The latter is a slow and spontaneous process that occurs on the surface of a liquid. It is a natural phenomenon, whereas vaporisation involves deliberate or intense intervention. It can include two phenomena: boiling and forced evaporation, when additional energy (heat, pressure, etc.) is applied to accelerate the process.
Furthermore, vaporisation also refers to the action of dispersing a liquid into fine droplets.
The vaporisation of the father is therefore not a natural phenomenon, and its transformation into fine droplets can thus be thought of as the pluralisation of the Names-of-the-Father, the Name-of-the-Father becoming the fine droplets. The term “evaporation” comes from Lacan, while J.-A. Miller prefers “the father became vapour”. According to him, the Enlightenment contributed to this, as did the beheading of the King of France on 21 January 1793, even though the father continued to babble from beyond the grave [2]. Despite the drafting of the Civil Code by Napoleon with a view to strengthening patriarchy, Balzac was already lamenting in 1842 “the diminution of paternal power” [3]. J.-A. Miller wonders what replaced the father at the social zenith. He concludes that it was money that took his place. Capitalism would therefore have brought about the end of patriarchy. After Napoleon, it was Freud who also wanted to save the father in distress. “The combined effects of the Enlightenment and capitalism […] have contributed to diminishing, belittling and finally vaporising the father […]. Viewed from a distance, the decline of the father is due to the discourse of science, of which the Enlightenment is the effect [4].”
Lacan, for his part, had no fantasy of saving the father, as evidenced by the letter he wrote to his father in his youth, explaining, among other things, that he would always refuse to submit to arguments of authority [5].
During Lacan’s teaching, the concept of the Name-of-the-Father went through several phases. In 1938, in “Family Complexes,” Lacan already noted “the social decline of the paternal imago” [6]. In the 1950s, the Name-of-the-Father was a central function of psychical organisation, the quilting point of the Other of language. Its introduction already marked a departure from Freud’s myth of Oedipus and a mathematisation of the figure, which thus became a function. In the 1960s, Lacan introduced a pluralisation of the concept. He abandoned the idea of a single Name-of-the-Father to recognise a plurality of paternal functions. He emphasised that the function can be embodied by people other than a man in relation to the mother. With Seminar XXIII, Lacan redefined the Name-of-the-Father on the basis of the Borromean knot. The sinthome is the fourth circle that can hold the knot together if the other three are not tied in a Borromean manner: it can thus replace the paternal function and take the place of the quilting point that holds the structure together. From then on, the dissolution of traditional patriarchal figures – what J.-A. Miller called the vaporisation of the father – forces us to rethink the construction and functioning of the contemporary family. We are therefore living in an era of generalised defamiliarisation.
In 1969, in his “Note on the Child,” Lacan indicated that the conjugal family supports the function of residue in the evolution of society. The residue is therefore supported by the couple. This residue is what remains after a process, the result of a symbolic or imaginary transformation. This residuary function highlights the irreducibility of the transmission of a subjective constitution, involving a desire that is not anonymous. Communal utopias (Charles Fourier’s phalansteries in the 19th century, kibbutzim or Soviet communist experiments, etc.), where children are entrusted to the care of nurses or specialised educators, do not work, and produce disastrous subjective results. The functions of the father and mother are measured according to this necessity of transmission. On the mother’s side, it is a question of providing care that bears the mark of a particular interest, and on the father’s side, it is a question of his name being the vehicle for the embodiment of the law in desire. The child’s symptom then becomes a response to the symptom of the family structure. It can either represent the truth of the couple in the best case, or be merely attached to the mother’s subjectivity and thus correlated to her fantasy. In this case, the child becomes the object a in the maternal fantasy, and the paternal function does not allow them to find a regulation, [that is to say] a limitation of desire.
During the epistemic study-day of the PIPOL 12 Organising Commission [7], a contemporary tendency for the family to shrink even further around the kernel of the child itself was highlighted.
The result is even greater diversity in today’s families: same-sex parent families, broken and blended families, single-parent families, parallel families in co-parenting, etc. The means of forming a family, of cobbling together a family, are now limited only by human inventiveness.
[1] Cf. Miller, J.-A., “Le père devenu vapeur,” Mental, 48, 2023, pp. 13-16.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Excerpt from a dedication in La Rabouilleuse that Balzac addressed to Charles Nodier, in Miller, J.-A., La psychanalyse au miroir de Balzac, École de la Cause freudienne, Paris, 2006.
[4] Miller, J.-A., “Le père devenu vapeur,” op. cit., p. 14.
[5] Cf. Lacan, J., Ornicar? Lacan Redivivus, Navarin, 2001, pp. 150–161.
[6] Lacan, J., “Les complexes familiaux,” Autres écrits, Paris: Seuil, 2001, pp. 23–84.
[7] Epistemic Study-day on 23 November, organised by the PIPOL 12 Commission at the ACF-Belgium premises.
Translation: Raphael Montague
Proofreading: Ana-Marija Kroker
