2 ..16
Of course, here there is the question about the judgement we pass on ourselves. This is a difficult point, on which I touched in my comment regarding the Letter to the Romans. What I think is that when one judges, one cannot but feel each one of his acts as ethically insufficient. I am not only referring, here, to what Freud says in relation to the Super-Ego (if anything, this is just a consequence). I am referring also to the fact that to judge oneself to be in the right means, indeed, to commit an act of pride. This does not mean that one who acts well has no knowledge of it. But one thing is to know it and another is to say it. This is why those who give a religious direction to their existence attribute all the good that they accomplish to a power outside themselves, and to themselves only all the sins. This is not the result of some hypocrisy but of an entirely structural ethical reason.
Therefore, when I express a fear or even a general judgement, I do not exclude that for someone else the contrary could be true. What I know for sure is that Spaziozero will loose every function, unless it takes some clear and public positions on the problem of the analysts’ formation and of their judicial position. This has nothing to do with my predilection for small political games (of which I never sin, given my complete repulsion for all that has to do with this sort of thing). It depends instead on an awareness, which I hope is ethically well founded (I hope, because I cannot say to be certain of it).
But let us come to a second problem. You say that because it ‘does not aim at any elevation of the spirit’ psychoanalysis is ‘for nothing’. From a logical point of view, you will admit that this is really not a great deduction. That something does not have the function of elevating the spirit does not mean that it has no function at all. Of course, we must understand each other about what we mean by ‘useful’. When I say that psychoanalysis is for forming (whereas psychotherapy has the function of eliminating a symptom) I am not at all original, because, in a different way, I am only repeating what Lacan says when he holds that didactic analysis is finite analysis. On the other hand, it seems to me that to say that psychoanalysis has no uses whatsoever corresponds neither to reality, nor to what you yourself believe (in fact, if you really believed this, you could no longer place any difference, for example, between a correct theory and one that is incorrect and reductive). Third problem: the One. Maybe once you have read my paper we will have an opportunity to ‘fight’ about this for a very long time. When you say that ‘the One becomes undone’, I could ask you: and are the parts produced in this way not also ‘ones’ as the original was? I gave a seminar on this, which I sent to you hoping that you would tell me what you think of it. Of course, it did occur to me that you would disagree with much of what I said. But, if this were the case, why not say so? Or else, were all my statements so banal as to deserve not even the slightest consideration? Finally, I really cannot see what relationship there might be between falling from the throne of the phantom and the One.
But let us come to the most important point. Your thesis (which, of course, is not only yours) is certainly not ‘revolutionary’. Whether you know it or not, it is, instead, intolerably reactionary. The judicial positivism that you and the solicitors defend, as if it were the most obvious thing on earth, corresponds to that ideology of rights that favoured no less than the birth of Nazism. I am not at all exaggerating. Indeed, to say that the State has the right to legislate anything means to totally separate the sphere of rights from that of justice, and, in so doing, to authorise any regime to do whatever it wishes.