Article de Yorgos Dimitriadis publié initialement dans la revue Ágora : estudos em teoria psicanalitica, 2025
If, as per General Carl von Clausewitz’s famous phrase, “War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means” (CLAUSEWITZ, 1955, p.67) (1), then as psychoanalysts we must consider his words in the light of two of Lacan’s statements, namely that “the unconscious is politics” (LACAN, 2004, lesson of May 10th 1967), and that war is one of the modalities of “human commerce” (LACAN, 2009, lesson of December 11th 1957). As far as I know, there is only one reference by Lacan to Clausewitz, in his seminar ‘The Psychoanalytical Act’, on the eve of May 68, where he talks about the dissymmetry that the object petit a introduces between the psychoanalyst who occupies this place of objet petit a for his analysand: “Of course Clausewitz did not know the objet petit a. But if by chance it were the objet petit a that made it possible to see a little more clearly into something that Clausewitz introduces as the fundamental dissymmetry of two parties in war, namely what is absolutely heterogeneous, and this dissymmetry is found to dominate the whole game, between the offensive and the defensive, whereas Clausewitz was not precisely someone to gibber on about the necessities of the offensive” (LACAN, 2022, lesson of January 24th 1968).
Lacan considered a scientific approach to the aetiology of war, to the real of war, to be impossible, thus distancing himself, somewhat ironically, from the 1932 epistolary exchange between Einstein and Freud (FREUD, 1933/1964). I quote: “It’s crazy how science rejects, isn’t it: in principle everything we’ve just said, and yet it exists all the same, namely war: they’re all there, the scientists, racking their brains: Warum Krieg. Ah! ah! why war. They can’t understand it, the poor things! Yeah… Freud and Einstein, they both have to do it. It’s not in their favour… ” (LACAN, 2010, lesson of November 20th1973). Let’s hope that the fact that there are several of us here will work in our favour, perhaps already because our approach is not inspired by the scientific discourse that is the discourse of today’s master par excellence. What can war teach psychoanalysis, and how can psychoanalysts contribute to polemology? More precisely, I aim to provide some small insight into polemology from a psychoanalytical point of view, through Charles Melman’s concept of the “Moses complex” (MELMAN, 1998) and through what Lacan called, in his “Or Worse…” seminar, the “transfigured brother” (LACAN, 2013, lesson of June 21th 1972) born, as he put it, of the “analytical conjuration” and “improperly called our patient” (ibid).
In “Warum Krieg?” (Why War?) (FREUD, 1933/1964) Freud’s position, in answer to Einstein’s question “Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?”, can be summed up as follows: the crowd produces a dissolution of the subject’s moral consciousness and responsibility, in particular in times of war. This dissolution gives free rein to the subject’s death drives, which become destructive drives, as they lose their relationship to the eros drive. In his letter to Einstein, Freud outlines five possible, but unsatisfactory, ways of freeing mankind from the threat of war (legislation, the defusion of drives, exacerbated conflict with the superego, identification, and the dictatorship of reason). In a desperate attempt to come up with a solution, Freud ultimately proposes that cultural development could be the way forward. To quote him: “Whatever fosters the growth of civilization (Kulturentwicklung) works at the same time against war.” (FREUD, 1933/1964, p.215). The answer, therefore, hardly seems clear-cut, all the more so since, in a much earlier text entitled “Thoughts on the Times of War and Death”, dating back to the Great War, Freud wrote that “ Anyone thus compelled to act continually in accordance with percepts which are not the expression of his instinctual inclinations, is living, psychologically speaking, beyond his means” (FREUD, 1915/1925, p.284). Freud went on to say that “our contemporary civilization favours the production of this form of hypocrisy to an extraordinary extent” (FREUD, ibid). A vicious circle, in other words… So if living beyond one’s means was what the culture of the time promoted, what of today?
It might seem trite to underscore how topical the question of war is, given current events in the Middle East and the war in Ukraine, which has been mired since February 2022. And yet, in these two wars, we observe what can be considered a general trait of today’s wars, namely the difficulty distinguishing conventional wars from “global terrorism” or the “diffuse war” (GROSS, 2016) which has now become a reality for us all since September 11, 2001 (cf. GROSS, 2022 ): no limits in time or space, no regard for the rules (the so-called jus in bello) or for international conventions concerning, for example, the principle of proportionality of counter-offensives or the distinction between combatants and civilians. Nor are there any limits to the so-called “surgical” interventions and “justified” states of exception (2002 U.S. Patriot Act, and article 20 of France’s 2013 military programming law) for counter-terrorism. Civil war, the kind of war that can affect one’s life if one’s neighbor explodes a bomb or becomes a kamikaze – the unlimited war (cf. HOFFMANN, 2022) that aims for the total “genocidal” destruction of the enemy – becomes the paradigm of all conflict: “global civil war”, in Hannah Arendt’s (ARENDT, 1963/2013) words, in “one or another area of the world at any one time,” (AGAMBEN, 2015, p.30) has become possible since the Second World War – in other words, since the so-called Final Solution and the explosion of the atomic bomb (BROUSSE, 2015, p.152). War in other words, since the so-called Final Solution and the explosion of the atomic bomb. The election of the new American president, along with the economic war he has declared on Europe and other countries, as well as his stance on immigration, does not, in my view, give cause for optimism for peace.
Since Freud’s time, the world has become increasingly globalized, as a result of neo-liberal economic trends, the prevalence of scientific discourse, social networks and exile of every kind, all of which displace bodies (2). In our postmodern society, the decline of the father and the name, as replaced by numbers, has reshaped the social bond. The collective is no longer so much governed by the place of the exception and the resulting repression. In this respect, the place of the Other, of the unconscious, but also of the “Great Narratives” (LEFORT, 1979/2018), which referred to a universal, but also to a promise (DUFOUR, 2014), such as that of eternal life or of communism, is depreciated in favour of the investment of individualism, of Ones alone – modifying even the concept of crowds. Today’s crowds are formed much more by affinity of jouissance (enjoyment) than by love for a leader, and wars – those between states, those between gangs, or even the total war that is terrorism (whether by terrorist organizations or states) – are structured by this transformation of societies. Borders are no longer watertight, and the immigrant becomes the enemy, all the more so if he or she is of a different race. An immigrant is someone who does not share the same enjoyment as you, a foreigner who is not the έτερος in Greek, in other words, someone with whom you have common humanity, that which has to do with the Other and the unconscious. This “identity delirium” (DUFOUR, 2016, p.199), to use Dany-Robert Dufour’s expression, presages the “civil war” (DUFOUR, 2016) which, I would argue, for want of producing symbolic ideals as vectors of promise, leaves the rivalry of the “intrusion complex” (LACAN, 1938/2001, p.36).
But let’s take this syllogism a step further with Charles Melman (MELMAN, 1998). If, through the “Oedipus complex”, the father poses as the ideal for the child, he nevertheless continues to possess the object. So, while the Oedipus complex introduces the ideal and a promise that, as we know, will be disappointed in adolescence, it in no way organizes subjectivity in the subject’s relationship to the ideal. In other words, it allows for the nostalgia of a possible union with the ideal, i.e. the nostalgia of a real father capable of keeping his promise. This union with the ideal simultaneously gives access to possession of the object. According to Melman, Freud wrote Moses And Monotheism (FREUD, 1939) between 1934 and 1939 precisely to get rid of this ideal father figure. Freud wrote this text during the period following his response to Einstein, during the rise of National Socialism with its promise of atavistic Aryan purity through the elimination of all foreign flaws, and most especially the elimination of bearers of universal values. The Jews were already exemplary in this respect, thanks to their ability to sow their own seeds: the very etymology of the word ‘diaspora’ means just that. According to Isaac Deutscher in his book, The non-jewish jew and other essays : “Jews are inscribed in the interstices, margins and borders of the Nation-State. This is why the Jewish tradition can underpin the universalist perspective with thinkers of the highest calibre, such as Spinoza, Marx and Freud” (quoted by BIRMAN, 2024, p.80). Freud, with his new myth of an Egyptian Moses, who was moreover killed by the Jews, shatters this idea of a possible true divine filiation: “that is to say, between the dead father, between the dead ancestor, and the sons, there is an unbridgeable break – if only because… this ancestor is Other […]. So Freud sets out to create this otherness with whatever means he can. He can only make him a foreigner, which is not at all the same thing, of course!” (MELMAN, lesson 14th Mai 1998). For Other, έτερος in Greek, is surely not analogous to the foreigner, which is a neurotic fantasy to interpret otherness. But, in any case, according to Melman, the form Freud gives to his narrative, with the constant duplicity of peoples, gods and Moses, distances us from the “Oneness” of monotheism and the possibility of joining the ideal, of embracing it, of finally delivering its true children, even though this is not possible. This was how, in 1998, Melman introduced what he called the “Moses complex”, an element of structure that would be Freud’s correction to his “Oedipus complex”, since it introduces, according to Melman, the fact that the subject is cut off, not only from his object, but also from his ideal. In an article published in the latest issue of the French-language periodical Topique, Joel Birman puts it another way: “Thus, the characterization of the historical figure of Moses as being of Egyptian rather than Jewish origin […] places this identification in the register of the unconscious and breaks with the logic of identity and self-repetition – since the identification is established exogenously (Egyptian) rather than endogenously (Jewish). What’s more, the imperative of otherness would be constitutive of the conception of identification, putting to the fore the register of the Other and not that of the Same” (BIRMAN, 2024, p.76). So, in our age of the decline of the father as pointing towards something of a universal, which is also to say as pointing towards the hole in language, the real where the dead father, the unattainable father, dwells, how are we to find this universal? Because, in the absence of a “Moses complex”, as it were, the backlash may be the emergence of nostalgia – Vatersehnsucht – for an ideal father, an ideal of the father. By this term, according to Jean-Luc Nancy, Freud thus designates, in his text “The Ego and the Id” (FREUD, 1923/1927), the primary relationship – original, archaic in the truest sense – that any constitution of identity (of an individual, of a self) necessarily implies. We only know substitutes for this unrepresentable nostalgia: the ego ideal, God, the Chief, and also ‘father’ in every sense of the word” (NANCY, 2021, p.97). According to Laura Sokolowsky “In times of war, the enemy is not on the outside, but on the inside, since it is an Other who drives one to sacrifice” (SOKOLOWSKY, 2015, p.113), the very ideal that renders neurotics, in Lacan’s words, “indestructible” (LACAN, 2010, lesson of December 11th 1973). At any rate, I would say, that they may believe themselves to be so, and thus sacrifice themselves under the effect of this warrior superego, into which their ideal is transformed. As Hélène Brousse puts it, “in war, the symbolic undergoes an essential transformation under the influence of the real: it changes the means into the end, and the ego ideal into the superego” (BROUSSE, 2015, p.156). In a letter dated February 26, 1930, Freud responded to an appeal from Dr Chaim Koffler, director of Jerusalem’s Kerren Ha-Yessod (the building fund for Jewish settlements in Palestine) to support the Zionist cause in Palestine and the principle of Jewish access to the Wailing Wall, saying that he did not believe “that Palestine could ever become a Jewish state, nor that the Christian world or the Islamic world, could ever be ready to entrust their holy places to Jewish care” (cf. ROUDINESCO, 2004, p.9). I cannot,” he said, “have the slightest sympathy for a misinterpreted piety that turns a piece of Herod’s wall into a national relic” (cf. ROUDINESCO, ibid). It must be noted that he wrote this before the Shoah. But here’s what Hélène Brousse said in a 2015 piece, echoing Freud’s position: “The imaginary object of aggressive rivalry is certainly used as a means in the service of the symbolic, but it also serves the real as the unattainable of our saga, its vanishing point: this city [Jerusalem] is the objet petit a. Neither the use of aggression nor negotiation will overcome it, because for each of the adversaries it manifests the lost, non-negotiable object” (BROUSSE, 2015, p. 155).
How do you create a fraternal bond in an age of segregation, when fathers become gods of war? The enemy recovers the obscure part of one’s jouissance, and one comes together with one’s allies, against one’s enemies, in relation to this obscure part, which can take on various guises: nationalistic, religious or racial. In October 1967, Lacan (LACAN, 1967/2001, p.257) wrote that the concentration camps were a precursor to what would develop as a consequence of the reshaping of social groups brought about by science, and in particular the universalization it introduces. Our future of common markets, he said, “will find its balance in an increasingly harsh extension of segregation processes” (LACAN, 1967a/2001, p.257). The question, he would then say two weeks later, was “how we psychoanalysts will respond to this segregation, which has been put on the agenda by unprecedented subversion” (LACAN, 1967b/2001, p.363). In 1972, at the end of his …Or worse seminar, he asked: “ At the cultural point we’ve reached, of whom are we brothers? Of whom are we brothers, in any other discourse than analytic discourse? ” (LACAN, 2013, lesson of 21st June 1972) Lacan answered thus: “It has to do with much more than the family circus: we are our patients’ brothers insofar as, like them, we are the sons of discourse” (LACAN, ibid). In the era of the “evaporation of the father”, Lacan foresaw the coming segregation and, above all, racism in the fraternity of bodies that no longer had a father, because “it is around the one who unites, the one who says no, that all that is universal can and must be founded” (LACAN, ibid). He expected the “transfigured brother” (4) (LACAN, ibid) born of the “analytical conjuration” “that we improperly call our patient” (LACAN, ibid) to provide an answer to the inevitable atavistic return to the idolatry of the body and the “frérocité” that follows it like its shadow. I would remind that ‘frérocité’ is a neologism coined by Lacan, which is an amalgam of words meaning Brother, Ferocity and City. Lacan is thus referring to the divided subject ‘this split thing’, as he puts it in the same passage, which can be glimpsed as the transfiguration that arises from analytic conjuration. As Jean-Luc Cacciali points out, ‘If the analytic operation makes the analysand a brother (5) of the analyst, then it is a brother transfigured by the fact that we are all sons of discourse: it is no longer a question of a brotherhood of the body […] it is certainly not by arguing that we have the same skin colour, the same sexual identity, or even that we are the sons of the same ancestor’ (CACCIALI, 2022, p.127). To be the son of discourse and not of an essentialized ancestor, ‘to be that split thing that is the subject’ (LACAN, 2013, lesson of 21st June 1972), is to bank on the possibility of a new discourse. is to rely on the singularity of the subject in its relation to the Other, the Other who is the locus of speech. Whereas, as Jean-Luc Cacciali also says: “A group identified on the basis of a fraternity of the body, even to highlight the discrimination it may suffer, must not allow us to forget that this is an operation based on reality, and that it can easily slide into racism, the very thing that was supposed to be denounced” (CACCIALI, 2022, p.128).
Nicole Loreaux, in her book “La cité divisée” (The Divided City) (LOREAUX, 1997), recalls that in 403 B.C., after the civil war in Athens that ended with the fall of the so-called Thirty Tyrants, the victorious democrats solemnly undertook never to recall past events, i.e. “not to punish, by judgment, the crimes committed during recent past” (LOREAUX, ibid., p. 260). Commenting on this decision – the invention of amnesty – Aristotle wrote, in “The Constitution of the Athenians”, that the democrats acted in the most “political manner” (ARISTOTE, 40.3, p.121). Denys Ribas, a French psychoanalyst who is far from Lacanian, asks the question “Why peace?”: “What made it possible to stop a civil war and the infernal spiral of retaliatory revenge – in Northern Ireland, for example? How did apartheid come to an end in South Africa without an appalling bloodbath? How was peace achieved? This is the real question, tragically present in conflicts where every attack or massacre creates a sacred debt of blood for the generations that follow. One day, we have to let go, give up on the object of our hatred, give up on vengeance” (RIBAS, 2016, p.25).
I will leave the last word to Denys Ribas in the spirit of Philadelphia, which is the name of the city where the homonymous 1944 declaration was made, but which also means brotherly love (6).
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BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES
