Urgency: ¡Never the Same!

Urgency: ¡Never the Same!
Florencia F.C. Shanahan

What kind of punctuation corresponds to the urgency of the end of analysis? Once the fundamental fantasy has been traversed, a zone emerges where the desire of the analyst is most fundamentally put to the test. It is a delicate zone prone to the (di)versions of the act as isolated by Lacan (acting out and passage to the act) and their risks. 

I think it is because of this that Jacques-Alain Miller emphasized long ago that the end of analysis is not a full stop, but a torsion, when he gave us his syntagm, “from symptom to fantasy and back”. The urgent case that one once was does not resolve itself in the contemplation of the marks that commemorate one’s singular troumatisme. There is still the effort to invent a link to the Other, now incomplete and hollowed. There is still the leap towards the new that brings one out from the temptation to moebiously remain on the other side of what the passion for ignorance and the horror for knowledge had been, namely, the fascination with what is no longer ignored and which constitutes one’s jouissance. 

The transmission of the Analysts of the School teach us that the urgency of the end of analysis can take up a myriad of forms; from a palpitating blaze to a discreet whisper, from the subtle drying up to the hustling precipitation, from the certainty extracted in a lightening to the vitality that pours from the slit opened by the separation from the object thus mourned. 

There is no punctuation mark that would account for this encounter, for this surprise.

A door that’s banged, two hands that shake, the shared laughter before the irremediable Witz, a word caught in the air to never be seen again… That there was something of the psychoanalyst [du psychanalyste] at stake will find its demonstration in the après-coup; not so much through its logical strength or the solidity of its argument, but through the potency of the echo it may produce –this desire– in the bodies able to lodge it in the Lacanian procedure of the pass. 

The urgency of the parlêtre is, just like the letter and the woman, always One. 
One which is, however, never the same.