On 4 October 2016 the Slovenian Association for Lacanian Psychoanalysis (SALP) received a letter of support from Branimir Stojanović, a Serbian psychoanalyst and member of the Belgrade Psychoanalytic Association.

The letter was received after SALP’s first public report (dated September 27, 2016) about the obstruction of the work of Lacanian psychoanalysts in Slovenia by philosopher Mladen Dolar and institutions linked to the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis (presided by Slavoj Žižek). The letter reveals the political and historical Yugoslav-Slovenian context of these obstructions.

We publish the unabridged letter here.

 

Branimir Stojanović

 

After the public appeal of the Slovenian Society for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, the 35-year-old history of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Slovenia got what it has been missing. By the definition of Lacan’s logical time as a logic of analytic séance it got a time to conclude. This public appeal is simple and it can be summed up in short:

 

“We inform the public about the presence of psychoanalysis in Slovenia. There is a Lacanian psychoanalytical society, furthermore, there are Lacanian psychoanalysts.”

 

But why has this simple message announcing the presence of psychoanalysts in Slovenia, which due to vast popularization of Jacques Lacan gives the worldwide impression of a ‘’psychoanalytical country’’, caused such panic? And how is it even possible that until now there have been no psychoanalysts in this ‘’psychoanalytical country’’? The answer to this question is most simple: The Lacanian Philosopher.

The Lacanian philosopher is a public figure who has actively prevented not only the emergence of psychoanalysts for over 30 years, but has also been regularly degrading the Slovenian intellectual space.

 

Just like by the logic of the psychoanalytical procedure, those questions emerged at the instance of the gaze, which happened 35 years ago in Yugoslavia, when someone posed the question: Why is there no psychoanalysis in socialism, thus neither in Slovenia?

After ten years (from the late 70s to the 90s) of the initial accumulation of the means and conditions for this question to be answered, but also the euphoria which emerged as a result of this moment, we nowadays tend to forget that the initial accumulation is a violent process. Future researchers of Yugoslav socialism thus might find it interesting to pose the following question:

How was it possible for the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, being one of the first Non-Governmental Organizations in Yugoslavia, to privatize such incredible public and infrastructural resources like newspapers, publishing houses, institutes, and departments at humanistic universities?

This demonstrates how strongly the Lacanian philosopher relies on the privatization of public property, which can nowadays be seen in the logic of privatization of public and private cooperation, and the prohibition of discussion of that historical period. What stays crucial for the Lacanian philosopher is the orally sadistic moment of swallowing, and the incorporation of public property, which is based on the prohibition from socialist times: psychoanalysis is allowed, psychoanalysts are banned!

 

The instance of the gaze, which lasted for a decade, was followed by the second moment of logical time: the time for understanding. In Slovenia the time for understanding has now lasted for more than twenty years (from early 90s on). For this logical time it is important to stress that it works retroactively, and thus creates an unbending structure. Rigidness is exactly the subjective reason for its existence. It can also be described as a contemplative standstill of the subject as well as the world: I am not moving, the world is not moving! And this is precisely the birth place of the Lacanian philosopher, who emerged in this dead time, and therefore he guards a dead time in which he uses a stupid doubt to fulfil the unfillable discrepancy, found in his name: EITHER a Lacanian OR a philosopher.

 

The official message from the Slovenian Society for Lacanian Psychoanalysis dated 27 September 2016 marks the third moment of logical time in the Lacanian history in Slovenia. This is the time to conclude when the subject at last identifies his or her desire, which was before hidden in a syntagm ‘’the Lacanian Philosopher’’ and the question: “Why does Lacanian psychoanalysis not exist in Slovenia?” Today this desire has finally found its conclusion: the Slovenian Association for Lacanian Psychoanalysis!