My Way 30 – Super-heroes, with-out Norm?
“Man, the male, the virile, such as we know him is a creation of discourse”[i]
In this final issue of My Way Jonathan Leroy takes us behind the scenes of super-heroes, we can gather that their cape does not so much cloak subjects with-out norm, as rather males caught in the straightjacket of oedipal law with its lot of identifications. Except perhaps, as Marco Mancassola depicts in raising the veil on their “little eccentricities and amorous entanglements”, with regard to their sexual life. Indeed it’s when it comes to writing their own jouissance, in “finding their identity of jouissance”, as per Marie Brémond’s excellent expression, that a mode of living is invented. This is what we discover by following Christine Maugin in the meanderings of Catherine Millet’s sexual life, as she [Millet] forges a paradigm beyond norms out of the jouissance of the Other. If we take-up the writing of jouissance which Lacan proposes in his formulas of sexuation: the masculine phallic all and the not all phallic feminine, we might wonder where superheroes are situated? Certainly not, or no longer, in the figure of the surgeon such as we find in the documentary Burning Out; the director of same, Jérôme Le Maire, is interviewed by Marie Brémond and Céline Danloy. Indeed nowadays we are witnessing what Jacques-Alain Miller names as “the decadence of the heroic posture consonant with the disappearance of virility”. There is no longer any masculinity save as semblant: “a virile masquerade”[ii] founded on the decline of the father who no longer offers the identifications which superheroes need. This brings Jacques-Alain Miller to the point of considering that “the only heroic posture which is permissible in the era of absolute knowledge” is the figure of the analyst, “in the sense that he is not governed by any identification but rather from his subjective destitution.”[iii]
I will let you to discover works by fascinating artists which are presented to us by Anne Chaumont, Justine Junius, Patrick Lejuste and Juliette Parchliniak, as part of a preparatory event towards the PIPOL Congress organized by the Belgian ACF.
On behalf of the entire editorial team of the Blog, see you next weekend for a discovery of a passionate program which has been devised for us, in conjunction with the PIPOL Commission, by Patrica Bosquin-Caroz.
Translated by Raphael Montague
[i] Lacan, J., The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII, Ed J.-A. Miller, trans. R. Grigg, W.W. Norton and Co., London and New York, 2007. p. 55.
[ii] Miller, J-A., Bonjour sagesse, LCD 95, April 2017, p 91.
[iii] Ibid. p 93.
