The end of the parlêtre

If we start from a simple psychoanalytic definition of barbarism, namely the domination of a real power over a symbolic one and the exclusion of alterity, we do not need to go to Israel, Armenia or Ukraine to see that it is everywhere, in us, in our streets and obviously on the Web.
However, seeing for the first time since the Holocaust hundreds of Jews (children, babies, women, grandparents) killed on the spot or piled into vans – there are no trains in this region – in order to be locked up and probably executed on another territory, could have brought everyone together to condemn the horror of undeniable terrorist acts. But the terror still shatters our ears as we hear some – and this is only the beginning – justifying and reclassifying the barbarity in question as acts of war or even resistance… The news broadcasters, for their part, are rubbing their hands to see their audience increase while the episodes in Ukraine were just starting to tire viewers.
If the Jews “had been kind, they would have disappeared a long time ago, we would no longer talk about them,” wrote Charles Melman in an editorial in 2002. But if this people steeped in history, who reminds us despite ourselves of the existence of the Father and the central role of the letter, became too kind to the point of disappearing, then perhaps no one would really speak anymore… Barbarism would have won and reduced to nothing our status as parlêtre (speaking-beings).
Psychoanalysts know the growing precariousness of this status in the face of the onslaught of men and machines alike. But who listens to them?

Thierry Roth,
President of the ALI

Translation : Lorena Strunk