The Psychic Life: A Life in Time: Psychoanalysis and Culture

Last year I published an autobiographical text in the form of interviews with a young psychologist entitled Je me voyage. The title’s neologism gives a nod to my foreign status in the French language which has largely determined my psychosexual positioning in research and in writing; the psychic experience has been central to my life’s trajectory (which I will not elaborate on here.)  In my familial context, culture constituted a world that made life liveable —and I experienced life, due to the importance accorded to language, as survival, as an intimate resistance and an inherent creativity in social time.

Stockholm: Going Beyond the Human through Dance

I will then uphold that new political actors are incarnating and realizing this refoundation of humanism which the globalized world  direly needs.  I take as examples two of these experiences which cruelly lack a means of expression in today’s codes of humanism: adolescents in want of ideals and maternal passion at the cross-roads of biology and meaning. At these crossroads of body and meaning, of biology and sublimation it is perhaps dance more than other trans-linguistic experience that informs and accompanies the process of transhumanisation as it counters the crisis and exceeds the impending threat of apocalypse. 

Hannah arendt: política y singularidad

En el centro de la polémica a raíz de la publicación del libro de Alan Sokal sobre las imposturas intelectuales, sin eludir lo problemático del concepto de postmodernidad ni las discusiones acerca del uso de la metáfora y de las analogías en la construcc

Qui est Méduse?

Une belle histoire de têtes coupées traverse l'Antiquité grecque : celle des Gorgones, trois monstres ailés au corps de femme et à la chevelure de serpents, dont le regard changeait en pierre celui qui se risquait à les contempler – Méduse, Euryalé et Sthéno. Pour commencer, Méduse est une jeune fille qui se fait remarquer : séduite puis violée par Poséidon, elle se révèle fertile puisqu'elle accouche de faux jumeaux, le cheval Pégase et le géant Chrysaor. Une longue fable la transforme en terrible puissance. Pour simplifier, disons que le monstre est par deux fois tué : Persée assassine d'abord Méduse pour assurer la protection de sa mère, Danaé, importunée par le roi Polydectès. Ensuite, il délivre Andromède des liens méduséens qui la retiennent et, pour ce faire, tranche la tête de la Gorgone. La mer se teinte de sang, tandis que le vainqueur tient à l'écart l'épouvantail de Méduse, de peur que ne soient changés en statues de pierre ceux qui s'exposeraient à sa vue

Roméo et Juliette ou l’amour hors la loi

Cette lecture de Roméo et Juliette, faite par une femme, une théoricienne de la littérature et une psychanalyste, se situe dans le contexte français du début du XXIe siècle, et s’accompagne d’une interrogation sur le couple, l’amour et l’identité sexuelle. Le couple comme défi à la loi sociale, le couple au voisinage de la mort, tels sont les deux thèmes développés dans cette étude. Transgression et revendication d’une liberté sans limites, la passion des amants est néanmoins inséparable de sa consécration par le mariage. En ce sens elle obéit à une double loi : celle, idéale, de l’Église qui bénit leur union, et celle qui dresse les familles les unes contre les autres, et régit les hiérarchies et les contradictions historiquement et politiquement constituées dans la cité. Les métaphores solaire et nocturne sont les deux visages du temps amoureux propre à cet amour à mort, qui se complètent et se stimulent réciproquement. Et si la mélancolie de Juliette tranche sur l’empressement solaire de Roméo, leur passion reste portée par son envers, la mort. La mort en effet sera le seul espace commun de ces amants solitaires. Enfin, le sommeil des amoureux que suggère le thème final du philtre, renvoie à l’apaisement narcissique dans lequel se ressourcent aussi bien le lien amoureux que l’expérience esthétique. Tel est le plus beau rêve d’amour en Occident. À qui la faute ? Aux familles ? À la société féodale ? À l’Église ? Ou à l’amour lui-même, biface, soleil et nuit, délicieuse et tragique tension entre deux sexes ?This reading of Romeo and Juliet by a woman, a literary theorist and a psychoanalyst, is set in the context of the beginning of the 21st Century in France; it is an exploration of the couple, love and sexual identity. The couple as a challenge to conventions and the couple surrounded by death, are the two themes developed in this essay. The lovers’ passion, despite its trangression and demand for boundless liberty, cannot free itself from consecration through marriage. In this sense, it obeys two laws : the ideal law of the Church which blesses their union, and also the law which sets the families against each other and governs the hierarchies and contradictions historically and politically constituted in the City. Solar and nocturnal metaphors are the two sides of the “time of love”, particular to this love-death, which complete each other and stimulate each other reciprocally. And if Juliet’s melancoly stands out against Romeo’s solar eagerness, their passion is still carried by its opposite, death. Death will indeed be the only one space shared by these solitary lovers. Finally, the lovers’ sleep, which is suggested by the last theme of the philtre, refers to the narcissistic calming which replenishes their love and renews the spectators’ aesthetic experience of the play. Such is the Western world’s most beautiful vision of love. Who is responsible for this? Their families? The feudal society? The Church? Or love itself, two-sided, sun and night, the delicious and tragic tension between the sexes

Stockholm: Going Beyond the Human through Dance

I will then uphold that new political actors are incarnating and realizing this refoundation of humanism which the globalized world  direly needs.  I take as examples two of these experiences which cruelly lack a means of expression in today’s codes of humanism: adolescents in want of ideals and maternal passion at the cross-roads of biology and meaning. At these crossroads of body and meaning, of biology and sublimation it is perhaps dance more than other trans-linguistic experience that informs and accompanies the process of transhumanisation as it counters the crisis and exceeds the impending threat of apocalypse.   </p

Message culturel de la France et la vocation interculturelle de la francophonie (le)

Comment redonner toute sa place à l\u27action culturelle extérieure de la France, pour qu\u27elle puisse s\u27adapter aux nouvelles conditions de la mondialisation ? A travers cet avis, le Conseil économique, social et environnemental appelle à repenser les contours du message de la France en faveur de la diversité des cultures et des identités pour conduire une politique multiculturelle « dynamique et ouverte sur le monde »

Traces of the (m)other: deconstructing hegemonic historical narrative in Teat(r)o Oficina Uzyna Uzona's Os Sertões

This article focuses on the way in which renowned São Paulo-based theatre company Teat(r)o Oficina Uzyna Uzona deconstructs hegemonic historical narrative in their 2000 - 2007 25 hour-long production of Euclides da Cunha’s seminal Brazilian novel Os sertões (“Rebellion in the Backlands”), an account of the War of Canudos (1896-1897), the first major act of State terrorism carried out by the nascent Brazilian Federal Government on the country’s subaltern population. The Teat(r)o Oficina’s epic adaptation fuses events from the colonial period, the military dictatorship and contemporary 21st Century São Paulo to relate the repetitive cycles of misappropriation, oppression and resistance that have characterized the history of Brazil and its people over the centuries. However, any fatalistic view of victimhood as an essential aspect of Brazilian subjectivity is radically challenged by the vibrant, rhythmic, material impact of the theatrical super-signs underpinning the performance text. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic - the pre-linguistic, illogical, rhythmical materialism of language intimately related to a primordial relationship with the abject mother – I shall suggest that it is the rhythmic, libidinal force of the performance and its extensive use of the cultural manifestations of Brazil’s subaltern population that imbues Os Sertões with the silent presence-as-absence of the abject Brazilian (M)Other – the Black, Indigenous and Mestiza matriarchal line whose alternative discourse is often barred from hegemonic accounts of Brazilian historiography. Her silent heritage is embodied on stage by the members of the Oficina, who reclaim an alienating national heritage for themselves by transforming the often tragic tale of Brazil’s past into a joyous celebration of tenacious vitality