The relation to the next
The relation to the text
There is no sexual relation, except surely textual. The text loaned to the Other is obviously imaginary, but always prescriptive of a conduct. To discharge one’s duty towards it, it is sufficient to accomplish a ritual. Each one can then move on to his own affairs. He has sufficiently sacrificed.
The laicisation of teaching has in no way thwarted this heritage, most often religious. And it is in so far as the pupil is requested proofs of an accumulation that he now knows how to repeat, even if that then means that he must behave according to his fantasy.
The dissociation between knowledge and practice thus becomes a norm able to inspire methods of direct initiation. We are not joking: it is likely that its principle commanded sexual transmission in Athens. As soon as an ephebe had grown hair, one could no longer touch him.
Psychoanalysis is the only discipline to correct the misunderstanding: the practical real of the subject is invited to find its guide, not in the imaginary text loaned to the Other, but rather in the lack that inspired it, perhaps in order to defend oneself. This type of transmission is therefore opposed to the traditional one that aspires to a master as recipient.
If this is true it is a shame that this originality is no longer perceptible in a colloquium, indeed in a relation.
Charles Melman
29 February 2020
Traduction faite par Michael Plastow