NLS: Forum of the Impossible Professions

The London Society of the New Lacanian School

Dear Colleague,

We are inviting you to join the Forum of the Impossible Professions. If you wish to join, please reply to this message adding "Register" to the subject header.

The Forum aims to sustain the conversation arising from the Rally of the Impossible Professions, London, 20th September, 2008, held around the theme, “Beyond the False Promises of Security.” The Rally heard presentations from Richard Gombrich, Keith Hayward. Mark Neocleous, Vicente Palomera, Michael Power and Robert Snell, as well as from colleagues from various fields of experience spoke of how the current bureaucratic methods of regulation and governance narrow the scope of professional judgment in the face of work-based contingencies.

This push based on poorly-formulated ideas of what consti tutes effective practice dismantles the know-how that orients practice. As such, it is ineffective, counter-productive and damaging. Among the most harmful aspects being the aim to disable the practitioner from any autonomous action, which leaves the him/her in the grip of a belief in impotence precisely at the moment where contingency requires that s/he act.

After attentive listening, Jacques-Alain Miller made some concluding remarks:

"In my opinion, the gist of the matter is, "Do you believe, or not, in the existence of the Unconscious; of something more or less like what Freud called the Unconscious, and clearly, Positivism, Cognitivism, or contemporary ideology at the beginning of the 21st century, the dominant id eology of which we spoke disbelieves that the Uncon scious exists.

The dominant ideology tries to silence the unconscious. The false promises of security are an effort to silence the unconscious. The unconscious depends on the listener…With Freud, we have learned to read the unconscious, to read symptoms as text. And, for the unconscious to speak, you need someone who listens; you need an audit in the etymological sense of the word. And, if you suppress the listener, you silence the unconscious. You don’t suppress the unconscious but, on the contrary, you nourish it by silencing it, and I would say you intensify or exacerbate...the death drive and the repetition, instead of being spoken, is acted out. We are in a world which is taken by a powerful death drive in the name of security and health.”

The rally left us with the question, "What do we do next?” A question which, whether we know it or not, is a necessary reply to contingency and so an indispensible prelude to the act; an act that takes its bearings from contingency but which must go by way of a question. So, we take up this question, "What do we do next?” as a tool for the work in progress.

One step is that the Forum will the circulate articles on contemporary issues, as well as to organise events to enable us to continue with the necessary task of responding to contingency as best we can in the times to come.

The Forum is supported by psychoanalysts working in the contemporary Lacanian orientation who one by one, with others, work to sustain the dignity of human subjectivity in today’s society. We hope that you will be able to join us.

Regards, Penny Georgiou

Chair