You certainly grinned when reading the lines where Lacan invited us to love women – whatever our gender. Why love them? What do they represent? Lacanian diagrams indicate a place for women in so far as representation of otherness: the side called woman is the other side. It is a consequence of structure for all speaking beings –beings being spoken to, Lacan will say several times – which is based on the fact that not all speaking beings have the same relationship to the real.

If we thus understand tolerance, as an appreciation for otherness, we can say that to love women has always made it possible to build a social bond, to maintain it and even to advance it. A complex link between two places, considering that the difference between these two places is the very condition of desire. Moreover, the consultations addressed to psychoanalysts do not address anything else but: the tension between S1 and S2, between the place which commands and this place other. This tension plays out in a fraternity – Charles Melman, who left exactly two years ago, said that there was only one S1 and that this place was not to be shared. For couples, a little differently, they bring to our attention the tension between the two partners, the two places. And this tension even applies to the subject who, thanks to a dream, a parapraxis or a slip of the tongue, has noticed an internal otherness.

What can be said about social bonds? And about our way to make bonds nowadays? How do we love women today? What attention do we pay to this place other and to those who, regardless of their gender, occasionally embody it? We can say that current times favor homogeneity: we love if we are the same. And it’s not social media that is going to contradict us. Between the same people, intramurals, there is a lack of differentiation between genders and generations. We pushed out the not-all, the place that comes to unseat our certainties. It happens that even psychoanalysis is pushed towards the door, but this bad press is another story…

Should the psychoanalyst feel nostalgic for an idealized past? No need! – but he can be worried, because he knows the violent effects, on a small or large scale, of an abolition of otherness. He knows that, when this happens, it is this place of women that comes down first.

Omar Guerrero

Vice President of ALI