Jacques Ranciere's Freudian Cause

Abstract

What is to be done, when you are invited to the de Psychanalyses in Brussels, when you are the author of a considerable body of work demonstrating original thought, and when you announce from the beginning that you have no competence to speak from the point of view of psychoanalytic theory? (L'inconscient esthitique, 9). Jacques Rancikre, thus solicited in January 2000, responds by inventing a new formula of the Or rather, he discovers what was already there, waiting to be described and named, and which will thereafter be called Jacques Rancibre's unconscious. This concept, linked at its foundations to the unconscious theorized by Freud, will nonetheless play the role of an agitator-concept, ever constitutive of the aesthetic genesis buried in psychoanalysis. It is rare and unforeseeable that an external circumstance should thus become an essential milestone in a conceptual creation, that an original thought, challenged by something foreign-by its other that is psychoanalysisshould produce such a concept. Every creator must be able to summon his interlocutors onto his own terrain-in this case, for Rancibre, that of the aesthetic. Further, he must know how to separate from himself, to distance himself from his own system of thought, and play with it, put it into a fictive relationship with another, in a new scenography.2 This fecund displacement onto the terrain of the other, which happens to be an Ecole de Psychoanalyses, is not trivial.3 It signifies both the fundamental stakes of this encounter, and beautiful obsession of Jacques Rancibre, for whom always and everywhere the only thing that counts comes back to a single and same cause--that of emancipation and its pedagogy. In this particular conjuncture, L'inconscient esthitique will free us from the consensual image of a Freud who is divided--on the one hand revolutionary in his science, and on the other, conformist in his artistic tastes and traditional in his aesthetic studies. This book will substitute for this image the powerful theoretical fiction of a Freud resolutely and deliberately classical, Rancibre's objective ally in an intransigent struggle against all forms of nihilism.4 A fiction fomented by Rancikre's polemical Freudianism that will give a rough time to contemporary radical Freudianism ? Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2004 25 SubStance # 103, Vol. 33, no. 1, 2004