In Seminar XIX, Ou Pire (1971-72), Lacan points out the moments we exclaim, with a chuckle and a sigh,‘Hurrah for the small difference!’. “Each and everyone one of us” are said to experience this: when we become sexually active, or when our children are born,… The complicated matter of sexual difference here find its bearing in the identification of a small distinction in the sexual organ – to have, or to have not.
But this small difference is many things, and as a result, deceptively simple. It’s a difference that operates precisely in its ‘smallness’, a small kernel which stands not only between a small boy and a small girl, but also between a man (homme) and a lobster (hommard). We locate this small difference in a sexual organ, which, through this very act of signification, becomes more than an organ alone – rather, an organon, an instrument. Through the intermediary of this organon, the linguistic criteria by which we judge the other sex can pass over into the real, into the body. What was necessarily a small indifference to the child, is retroactively (re)written in the adult world as a biologically observable small-yet-not-so difference. Hence, psychoanalysis must confront what Ou Pire calls the “myth of biology”, the idea that the sexual difference is not logical, but can be “located in two little cells”.
As with many matters of the unconscious, Lacan notes that the very smallness, the very simpleness of this difference, conceals the hefty price we pay for it. Time to find out and pose some of the many questions smothered by our ‘hurrahs’. How does the small difference impact the formulas and logics of sexuation? What does its signification as an organon tell us about the drive, and the object of desire and its freedom? What about the earlier mentioned linguistic criteria, the way in which language cuts into the body? How does it help us distinguish the human animal? And how must one think the contemporary notion of gender in light of this small difference?
In pursuit of this “multifaceted issue”, we will be guided by Lorenzo Chiesa (Newcastle University), who, in his influential work The Not-Two (2017), argues that “it is indeed from this little difference that Lacan’s—and Freud’s—entire discourse emerges”, and by Ariane Bazan (ULB), who might just slightly differ in relation to that viewpoint.
In any case, this workshop seeks to highlight those points where, like the logic of the small difference itself, psychoanalysis must pass through deceptively simple ‘mere facts’ of biology, in order to address the real.
Ons annulatiebeleid kan je hier terug vinden.
