Simultaneous Sessions (Saturday July 20th, 2002)
by the Groups of the Freudian Field
Against its will, medicine has to admit that it is becoming a relay between the products discovered by science and the changing nature of morals. It has acquired a role there that it no longer recognises in the chain of demands which are linked to sexual life; it does not take offence at sometimes having to direct its complaints there.
The aim of the care it provides in this domain has already overtaken the area of hygene of yesterday, where sexology claims to find its titles of respectability. What it provides is augmented by a growing demand confronted with the choices of a life in which the individual has a right to the blossoming spontaneity of the body, assimilating the hope of happiness to the social imperatives of good health.
What is health for sex? In what way, in these terms, is sexual life appropriate to furnish indicators valid for everyone ? How and why conceive of jouissance as other than the pleasure of the organ, and approach the organ beyond its psycho-physiological function? In practice, medicine is more concerned with facing up to specific requests in the register of a demand for imaginable and accessible satisfaction than with responding to questions ambitious for truth.
Also, the appearance of a naturalist victory which explains the triumph of the solutions it offers does not mislead those that it trains without hiding from them that its concern about sexual life is proportional to an increasing obliteration : an obliteration which does nothing to clarify the research into the causes of lack which make up the realities of desire, nor to explain that the obligation to enjoy strikes horror into the very ones who brandish it.
This is why the practice of scientific medicine produces new instances of the failures which cause suffering. These days the doctor or the carer is the witness, as receptionist, of ingenious unquenched unsatisfactions, of exquisite pains, which are the contemporary forms of a response to the obliteration of a real that science is unable to define, lacking the ability to tolerate the fact that there is no harmony between subjects, rather that it divides and separates them.
Clip-Medicine will present and debate these technological impasses that sexual life changes into fertile paradoxes.
How does Medicine oblitherate Sex?
Salle 243, avec traduction simultanée français-espagnol