Illiteracy and Psychoanalysis - What is a cartel ?

Extract from : http://topoi.net/place

What is a cartel ?

1) Descriptive

Unlike the standard attempt to educate the student in psychoanalytic theory on an academic model, PLACE formulates the transmission of psychoanalytic theory in a purely psychoanalytic structure – the cartel. In order to abbreviate this reorientation, the standard professor-student relation is replaced by that of the analyst-analysand. The psychoanalytic cartel was first formulated by J. Lacan in order to assure the development and practice of a psychoanalytic theory beyond the sociological derivations and philosophical tradition of an academy. Following Lacan, the cartels at PLACE function to establish the clinical basis of a transmission of knowledge having the effect of a school. Thus, the school in psychoanalysis is an effect of its clinical knowledge and is in no way a place for a purely theoretical and contemplative acquisition. This type of stagnation not only is found in the current scholarization of psychoanalysis, but in the therapeutic reduction of psychoanalysis in intension to a purely ‘personal affect’. Inversely, the psychoanalytic clinic is not a place for experimental research and the application of a theory previously studied in a school. For the ethics of psychoanalysis makes it evident that it does not suffice to have a school and professors in order to teach and educate the student in psychoanalysis; just as it does not suffice to be in a transferential analysis (therapy) in order to have accomplished an analysis. The problem is not there and the field, both in extension and intension requires an re-orientation.

Firstly, the relation to knowledge and the divisions of labor within the analytic school itself must be established on the basis of the transfer. Thus, the analytic school is always already functioning at the level of its clinic. Hence, the singularity of each individual is engaged in an analysis of the transfer such that a transmission of psychoanalysis goes far beyond the acquisition of intellectual concepts to include both an affective component and a question of truth. The cartels are designed to introduce this question of singularity into a transmission in a way that includes the style of each individual and allows a truth-affect to be achieved in doing so. In this respect, analysis is never practiced on others, but with others; just as the transmission of a school is never taught from a professorial position, but from the subject barred from knowledge $. To begin to introduce this ignorance and affectivity in a transmission in a way that does not digress into mere drama or passion, but produces the construction of a truth and in the most refined instances an object , requires a theory and practice adequate to the task. It is our position at PLACE that Lacan first determined this adequacy in determining the analytic school-clinic on the basis of the cartels. On the admission into the program, the cartel will be developed in detail from the first semester Course: Orientation into the Lacanian Field.

2) Function of the Cartel with the School and Clniic

The following text proposes to set up a series of guidelines for the structure of the cartels at P.L.A.C.E. The cartels follow the procedures set up by Lacan (texts available on request) and are only modified to suit their transplantation to the United States. This text consists does not state the I- Formal conditions (=Vectorization) that determine the choice of topics or the names of the collective one chooses to work in, but seeks only to state in general terms the interdependency between cartel-school-clinic.

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