Le passage à l’acte à l’épreuve du post-contemporain

Abstract

ObjectiveThe starting-point of this article consists in considering what is contemporary as being post-contemporary. Like the present, what is contemporary is something that cannot be pinned down. It requires hindsight in order to analyse it. Our first objective is to approach our post-contemporary age as being characterised by radicality. This takes the form of a search for origins, which shows up in a return of the religious, alongside the emergence of an anguish reducing things to nothingness. Solitude is a characteristic of this radical position, raising the issue of an otherness that turns anguish into hatred, whether of oneself or of the other. Indeed, the post-contemporary subject acts-out when faced with social ties and a culture that can no longer uphold him. Our second objective is to demonstrate that the effect of this radical position leads the subject to use his body as the only way out. Having become an external organism, the body comes to represent that which is intolerable for the subject. In order to escape anguish turned into hatred, the subject excludes himself from his own body. Finally, the third objective is to show how the free radical subject is a product of ‘liberal’ society, seeking to create his freedom at every moment. MethodOur method uses clinical practice. We work from two contrasting clinical fields; on the one hand acting out in the form of acts of murder or suicide, on the other hand acts of passage from one gender to another. ResultsActing out and acts of passage both relate to these free radical subjects who shape their own body, or who shape the body of the other as though it were their own. DiscussionWe will discuss the points of convergence and divergence between these two situations. ConclusionOur conclusion demonstrates that acts on the body of the other and acts on one's own body coincide. Acting out in the form of murder or suicide masks the wish for an act of passage, which is however impossible. The act of passage from one gender to the other requires an acting out that sometimes cannot be countenanced. With those whose aim is an act of passage, it is an acting out that must be sought. Similarly, with those who act-out, the need is to try to restore, in the aftermath, the possibility of an act of passage.