Psychoanalysis and screen

I am very happy to be here and to have the opportunity to talk about psychoanalysis. I would like to hank each
and every one of you for coming here today to hear about it. There are many of you and this is good news for
psychoanalysis and for our association.

I also thank IMH for hosting this symposium. I feel honoured to be able to speak in this place. I myself worked
for a few years in psychiatric cares when I lived in France.

I would also like to thank the members of PAS who trusted me by choosing me to represent our association
today. What I really like about our association is that when we get together we only talk about one thing:
psychoanalysis. But at some point we realize, I believe, that this word does not have the same meaning for all
of us. So there is a great misunderstanding between us about psychoanalysis. But we know that
psychoanalysis is not intended to eliminate misunderstanding, because when you talk to someone,
misunderstanding is never an accident but the rule. Today, therefore, I would like to be as clear as possible
about my position on psychoanalysis. Because I am named as the Lacanian of the group. I don't really like that
name, for several reasons, but I think somewhere along the line we still deserve our reputation.

Of course I thank Shawn Ee, who is the founder and president of the Psychoanalytical Association of
Singapore. Without his idea, this would certainly not have been possible to gather so efficiently so many
people who are interested in psychoanalysis. But to tell you the truth, Shawn, I'm still wondering if you really
know what you've done by officially importing psychoanalysis into your country. Maybe you know this
anecdote:

This was at a time when psychoanalysis was only in its infancy and was beginning to be exported, particularly
to America. Freud and Jung were on the boat leading them to the United States. Jung addresses Freud:

- Sigmund, isn't it great news that the United States is so eager to welcome psychoanalysis? Isn't it great that
so many Americans want to hear about your discovery?
And Sigmund Freud to reply :
- yes, It' is. But they still don't know we're bringing the plague to them.

So, thank you Shawn for importing the plague into your own country.

Freud was totally opposed to the idea of psychoanalysis as a « happiness therapy ». It is not a therapy and it’s
also not about happiness. Psychoanalysis doesn’t make any promise of happiness. But how can we understand
what Freud said? Is psychoanalysis similar to plague? Maybe we should ask ourselves against what
psychoanalysis can claim to be a plague? Isn’t it against this very idea of happiness. Not that psychoanalysis
preaches unhappiness and desolation, but questions and even divides, like the plague, the injunctions that
accompany this pursuit of happiness. You know as well as I do that nowadays happiness has become a moral
duty. "You must be happy." But this presupposes that the subject knows what he wants. And if psychoanalysis
teaches us anything, it is that we don't know what we want or even what we say. One day I met a young man
who was very successful both professionally and in terms of his family. He explained to me that he had always
dreamed of being on the cover of a finance magazine and that he had worked hard for it. But
incomprehensibly the day that this really happened to him he fell into a deep depression. We might think that
this is a special case, but psychoanalysis teaches us that it is the case for each of us. We don't want to be
happy, but we want to keep dreaming that one day we will be happy. We desire to desire. That's a huge
difference. So if one day we realize our ideal, we lose it by the same act. As Lacan says, happiness is in fact
little to the one who desires.

Psychoanalysis is often described as an old, dusty invention. Psychoanalysis is no longer considered at all as a
novelty or innovation, but on the contrary it is rather described as an old-fashioned, outdated thing. However, I
would argue that psychoanalysis has never been as relevant as it is today. As Lacan would say, it is the artificial
lung of humanity. Maybe I could get you to hear it a little bit tonight. So psychoanalysis is between the plague
and the artificial lung. This is quite wide.

I do not want to spend too much time on the reason why I have chosen that topic for this intervention because
it seems so obvious, but nevertheless, and as Hegel would say, the well-known precisely because it is well
known is not known at all. So I'll try not to talk about things as if they were obvious. Sometimes, the very
function of the psychoanalyst is to question the evidence and to suggest that things are never as obvious as
they seem. So why the screen? There are more and more screens around us one of the paradoxes that
everyone can notice is that screens, whether smartphones, iPads, TVs, computers are supposed to have been
invented to connect people, but in our world loneliness is an increasingly widespread and deep evil.
Loneliness is of course a central theme in people's lives and in their analysis, when they go for it. I will develop
through my presentation many aspects of that paradox.

Of course, this presentation cannot claim to be complete. This is an overview of what I have observed and
gathered to date. I am still working and will certainly bring other elements in a more or less near future.
Before I begin, I would like to say a few words about the fact that I talk about psychoanalysis in a different
language than my own. Someone made a very clever remark to me last time, that this can be seen as a screen.
You can see that we are still on the same topic. A screen here as an obstacle, that limits and protects, but
against what? It is true that it is always preferable to speak of psychoanalysis in one's own language, the
mother tongue, the language which we first have been colonized by. By speaking English today, or rather by
trying to speak English, I might feel that I couldn't really go through with it, that I couldn't really say what I have
to say, and why not even say everything. It is true that it is preferable to make an analysis in your mother
tongue, but the mistake we should not make, it seems to me, is to imagine being able to say everything in our
mother tongue. If psychoanalysis teaches us anything, it is that there is something impossible to say, what
Lacan calls the Real, and it is from this impossible that the cure takes its power and efficiency. Paradoxically,
speaking a language other than one's own could reinforce the belief that our mother tongue could be total,
not missing or lacking, perfectly consistent. To put it in Lacanian terms, it would reinforce the idea of a non-
lacking Big Other, which is first and last, always the language itself. By speaking a language other than my
own, i should rather see with more ease this lack in the language itself. So I won't take my poor English as an
excuse or an extenuating circumstance. If there is something Real that must be transmitted between us
tonight, it will be transmitted. And then, we can always dream that one day our association will be sufficiently
established to recruit translators.

Image in psychoanalysis

In Sigmund Freud's work, the image does not appear as a concept or a notion in itself. He talks about it when
he talks about dreams and memories.

In psychoanalysis, great importance is given to dreams. They almost always present themselves to the subject
in the form of images. However, what matters is more the story that the subject makes of the dream than the
dream itself.

This made make Freud said that the less the subject remembers his dream, the more valuable the dream is.

If the dream is the royal way to access the Unconscious it is precisely because images are always supported by
words, symbols, and more precisely by signifiers.

It is only by telling a dream that one can try to grasp something of it. When the subject talks about a dream, he
builds it and makes it exist.

It is rather with Jacques Lacan that the image, which is the minimal element of the imaginary dimension, takes
on a new place in psychoanalytic theory.

It is the conceptualization of the mirror stage that allows us to understand a bit what is the imaginary
dimension in Lacan’s theory.

To understand the mirror stage we must keep in mind that the human newborn is always born prematurely.
Indeed, he is still premature with regard to the functions that would allow him to live relatively independently.
At birth, the human child does not know how to speak, does not know how to walk, does not know how to
feed himself. He is therefore in absolute dependence on the other, who is most often embodied by his mother.
This is what Freud calls Hilflosigkeit - primordial distress. It is this absolute dependence on the other that
makes the human being a social being.

At the time of the mirror stage, the child is therefore still in this feeding relationship with his mother, and let us
insist on the fact that he still has only a very approximate control of his body and movements. His body is
beyond his control. The baby undergoes all his drives. This is also how to understand that in the young child
there is such a strong desire to control the other, his parents, this is absolutely vital for him, especially through
crying. By trying to control his environment, his parents, the child compensates for his constitutive weakness
and physiological helplessness. And gradually he will understand that it is not because he can’t control the
other that he is in danger.

At first, the child does not notice that on the surface of the mirror it is an image, and even less his own, so he
can play with the image while imagining that he is playing with another child. He does not yet distinguish
between the real and the imaginary. Gradually, he will realize that what is on the surface of the mirror is indeed
an image. It is therefore interesting to note that at first even our image is experienced as something
extraneous. But what is decisive and what allows the child to identify with this image is none other than the
presence and words of the mother. As he recognizes his mother's image in the mirror, he can recognize his
own. And especially when he looks back at his mother as then looks at his image. It is all this play, this dynamic
of crossed glances that makes the child feel alive in the gaze of the Other, here his mother, who comes to
authenticate that it is him. We always and only exists through the other. What seals the operation is the
mother's word  « look ! It’s you ! You are so beautiful ! ». The child well before being sensitive to his image is
sensitive to his first name, to the little nicknames given to him by his parents, to the words spoken by them.
The true mirror is therefore not the object as such but the eyes of the mother through which the child feels and
knows he exists.
knows he exists.

It is not uncommon to see children when they identify with their image kissing their reflection on the mirror.
They are very impressed and in love with their image. Perhaps this reminds you of the myth of Narcissus
because of course this is the constitution of secondary narcissism, and to be even more precise it is the
formation of the Ideal Ego.

Primary narcissism is the amount of psychic energy (libido) that remains in the body itself (self-love). Secondary
narcissism is the amount of psychic energy that returns to the body itself after having invested an object (self-
esteem).

In psychoanalysis we speak of the Ideal ego, Ego ideal and the Superego. The ideal ego is the internalized
image of myself that I like to look at and for which I like to believe I am. The ego idéal is the image of myself I
like to someone I take as a model. And the Superego is the authority that judges the gaps between the Ideal-
Ego, the Ego-Ideal, and the ego. When there is a gap between the ego and the ideal ego it produces shame
and when this gap exists between the ego and the ego ideal it produces guilt.

(Joker) In the opening scene of the film, we first hear the radio announcing only bad news. This is to remind us
of the historical, symbolic context of things that always prevails. Then we see a man looking at a mirror and
disguising himself as a clown (ideal ego). Being a clown, so making people laugh, in a black and dark period,
of course it looks like a fight against sadness. And we see that the character forces himself to smile as if he had
been commissioned by someone to have to be happy, smiling. We will learn that this is indeed the case later
in the film (ego ideal).

In psychoanalysis the subject can’t be mistaken with the ego, his image. If all the psychic energy was invested
in the image, it would become too real to the point where you would imagine that in front of you is your
double or that someone has stolen your identity (phenomenon of imaginary depersonalization).
There is also symbolic depersonalization, for example when you walk down the street and suddenly hear your
name and it makes you turn around and you realize that it was for someone else than you, who has the same
name, who was called. For a short moment you are lost, you do not understand. As if your name has been
stolen. That is depersonalization.

In psychoanalysis we are very careful about these little things, which seem to be nothing. This shows how
fragile and shaky our identity is because it is based only on images and words. That is why we will prefer to talk
about identification rather than identity.

Irena Talaban, mask, torture, remove the layers of identification one by one until they reach the constituent
void of the subject. Onion.

As you have understood, the Ideal ego is a totalizing instance of the subject on the imaginary plane. However,
let us not forget that the subject cannot be confused or mistaken with his image. Lacan says that the subject
ignores himself in his ego, makes a misconception of himself through his ego. This does not mean that he
does not know himself, but that he fails to recognise himself through his ego. Isn't the mirror stage in Its
imaginary aspect, by giving me an armour, already a kind of screen that protects me from my primordial
distress? Against the constitutive void on which any identification is based?

Here maybe we can take a short break from the theory and ask ourselves about the phenomenon of selfies?

Isn't the mirror stage, in a way, the very first of the selfies? The original selfie?

Selfie is a much more complex phenomenon than it seems. It's not just about taking pictures of yourself with
your smartphone. Selfie consists mainly of sending a picture of oneself, a kind of modern and instantaneous
self-portrait, to the other. The other is already always included, integrated, at least potentially in a selfie. This
may already reduce the usual comments on the subject that selfie is only for people, especially teenagers, with
overwhelming narcissism. Moreover, if teenagers are the first consumers of selfie it may also be because at this
period of life narcissism is severely altered, sometimes even very shaken, the limits of the body change and
transform... and to a certain extent the teenager goes through what he already knew when he was a child: a
body beyond his control. The selfie could then come, at least temporarily, to give the illusion of a fixity, a hint
of identity that rests, once again a screen that protects against anguish, against this "disturbing strangeness".

But even more strikingly in its resemblance to the mirror stage, isn't the selfie a request to the other to come
and authenticate my existence? Doesn't the selfie testify that the subject exists through and in the eyes of the
Other? Doesn't the person who follows this practice, when he sends his photos on the internet, addresses
himself like the child in front of the mirror who looks at his mother looking at him? Does he not address the
other person and ask, "Do you see me? What do you see in me? "Isn't there always potentially another person
to see you on the Internet? Isn't there always someone to make a beautiful, kind comment, a little like the
mother compliments her child in front of the mirror? Of course, this can also go in the opposite direction and
produce real disasters. I will talk about this later on.

Some Instagram or Facebook profiles are so full of selfies that when you look at them inattentively, you may
get the impression that it is actually just a multiplication of a single photo. This multiplication of selfies on a
single and same profile, beyond or even below celebrating the narcissism of the subject, his ego, is it not, by
its very repetition, the admission of the failure of the imaginary dimension, the image, to come to touch the
truth of the subject.

I think here of people who have gone through a radical change in their appearance. For instance, someone
who was overweight and got slimmer or even very slim in few months or years. That people, I have noticed,
are very sensitive to selfie. And it is a bit like they want to reassure themselves that they are still slim and they
post in a very obsessive way many selfies to get the other’s approval. So here, one can see that selfies are not
for narcissistic people but I would say for people who have some narcissistic disorders. Of course, they are
well aware that the selfie is not the way to get rid of this internalised image of themselves as overweight. But
here we have to hear this behaviour as a call than can give something very interesting if that people were to
go for analysis for instance and to talk about what it is to have gone through this radical body change. To make
a story of what it is to have gone through that radical transformation. To really symbolically introjection that
transformation. Here the selfie is at the same time a way to try to express something about the image of the
body and to refrain to express it verbally, symbolically ...

The fantasy

Everything I said earlier leads me logically to talk to you now about what in psychoanalysis is called fantasy.
The fantasy is the most unconscious thing about the subject and yet it is what supports the reality.

Very early in his life, the subject creates fantasies with the elements of his environment to overcome his
primordial distress, his powerlessness, what Lacan calls the Real. I know that in the audience there are
Kleinians and that they know all this much better than I do. I will therefore not go into too much details here.
Fantasies are always created according to the phase of development in which the subject is in.

To put it simply, fantasy is the framework, and why not the screen, that allows the subject to answer the
distressing question: "What does the Other want from me?" It is therefore a framework in which my desire is
accommodated and makes me build stories, scenarios...

It protects the subject from the proximity of the Real. Real is in Lacan what can neither be imagined nor
symbolized. For example, we can understand that trauma is an irruption of the Real. One could imagine Real
as a hole that would form on the screen and gradually engulf it. To put it simply, this is what happens when
people come to a psychoanalyst. Their reality or a significant part of it has been broken, cracked. Their fantasy
no longer protects them against the irruption of the Real.

Painting - Magritte - the condition of man (1935)

Several of Magritte's paintings represent very well the function of fantasy as a screen, as a veil, which protects
the subject from the emptiness, from the nothingness of the Real. Here is represented a painting in front of a
window on which is represented what would be behind the painting, here the landscape. But this painting in
the painting is nothing more than a trompe l'oeil and Magritte plays with the observer of this painting who is
none other than ourselves - no character is represented in the painting - The painting in the painting was
painted for us. The proof is that only us can see what is supposed to be behind the picture from this
perspective. If there had really been a painter who had painted this landscape at the edge of his window the
result, the perspective would have been quite different. What Magritte wanted to represent here is that behind
the appearance, behind the illusion, behind the reality itself supported by our fantasy there is nothing. And
this nothing is what we call in psychoanalysis the Real. One could very well imagine that if the landscape
painting were to be moved a hole would appear, as if a piece of reality was leaving. In fact, that is what he
replied to an American who asked him what was behind the painting. He said, "nothing." Now we can better
understand why he called this painting "the human condition". That is to say, behind the appearance, behind
the screen, the veil, the fantasy that supports our reality there is nothing. And as a human being we are forced
to be fooled by this reality, this little reality, as Lacan says, which is supported by our fantasy. Moreover,
Magritte has painted other paintings that go in this direction.

There is a very beautiful poem by Pessõa that says much the same thing

The mystery of things, where is it?

Where is it since it doesn't show up?

Could it be to show us that it’s a mystery?

What does the river know about it and what does the tree know about it?

And I, who am nothing more than them, what do I know about it?

Because the only hidden meaning of things

Is that they have no occult meaning at all.
What's stranger than any strangeness
And that the dreams of all poets
And the thoughts of all philosophers,
It's that things are really what they seem to be
And that there's nothing to understand.

Yes, this is what my senses have learned on their own: -

Things have no meaning: they have existence.

Things are the only occult meaning of things.

Now you must certainly think that I am nothing more than an scholar who likes to talk about painting and
poetry and that my considerations are far too abstract to have any clinical interest. But think again, this poem
and this painting are the closest to our practice with suffering people. You see, this reminds me when I was
working with women who have suffered from domestic violence in France. And if you have also worked with
women you know that it is difficult to work with them, because what do they say? They say that behind
appearances their husband, or their boyfriend, has a good heart, that he is actually a soft little teddy bear. So
they imagine that there is something softer, better, more comforting behind reality, while behind all this there
is of course nothing at all. It is the same when you are caught up in a disastrous love relationship that has not
given you any satisfaction for months or even years, but the only thing that makes you stay in a relationship is
no longer what the relationship gives you, but only the illusion that one day it will get better.

A film can help you understand what fantasy is. It is Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). This is a movie
where a man with a broken leg has nothing else to do than to stay in front of the window the all day. This film is
itself based on a short story written by Cornell Woolrich "it had to be murder" (1942). What I particularly
appreciate in this short story is especially the first page where the subject describes the situation very well as if
it appeared to him in all objectivity, as if he had nothing to do with his perceptions. Fantasy transcends the
classic opposition between objectivity and subjectivity because fantasy is the very subjective way in which
things appear to me objectively and the objective way in which things subjectively appear to me. In Rear
Window one could almost believe that the observation spot allows the main character a quasi-scientific
posture, that is to say, without any subjective effect on what he is observing. But Alfred Hitchcock's talent
makes it possible to grasp that what happens outside the house, through the window, is always in resonance
with what happens inside. The subject perceives in the other, in the object, or in the situation, what his being is
lacking of without even realizing it, without being aware of it, his blind spot, the cause of His desire... what
Lacan calls the object (a). For instance, I have personally noticed that many of the wedding Photographers that
I have met are single men. Isn’t it something that they always have in their camera frame people who are
getting married ? Does it tell us a bit about what they desire ? Anyway, let’s come back to the movie. For
example, what we see in the film is that the main character is not in love with his girlfriend, doesn’t want to
marry her but when she starts to be perceived through his window, there he desires her and even starts to love
her. As if, she has entered his fantasy. So to take an example, when I'm in love with someone it means that that
person has entered into my fantasy. As Lacan says in a beautiful formula "fantasy supports the utopia of
desire", it means that fantasy frames my desire and even allows me to desire. This means that when I love
someone I never have access to her being other than through my fantasy. I perceive in the other a tiny little
thing, a surplus, an excess. To refer to new technologies, can one not say that reality is already always
augmented? I never describe reality as it is, but as it is when I add myself to it. This does not make it any
simpler. But this is also true in the other way, when someone falls in love with me and integrates me into her
fantasy, it can be something very scary because it raises the question of what she wants from me. What does
she sees in me that is so desirable that I don't see? What does she knows about me that I don't know? I
worked with a woman who attracted a lot of men and every time she noticed it she ran away, because it made
her very anxious.

The frame of our fantasy is of course not without reminding us of the frame of our technological objects. But
for psychoanalysis, the fantasy frame is always the very first one compared to the screens of our objects. These
ones are like a re-presentation of our fantasy. They show us where and how to desire.

Here we can talk about Cyberspace. What psychoanalysis teaches us is that the human condition, as in
Magritte’s paintings, is to take seriously the appearances. So how to deal with the pseudo on internet or social
networks ? It’s very easy. For psychoanalysis the choice of a pseudo to replace your real name tells even more
about you than your real name. If in reality, I am shy, weak, inhibited ... and on social network I behave as a
violent man, very disrespectful, talk bad, insult people ... this shows who I really am even more than in social
life where politeness and social rules refrain me from expressing myself « freely ».

In psychoanalysis, we refuse to accept this false distance with things or behaviour on the Internet because the
style and the appearances are ultimately what we are. The appearance is always the very form of the essence.
The appearance is the form that takes the essence. It is the very way how this essence appears and there is
absolutely no essence without its appearance. The truth of essence is the appearance.

It reminds me a woman who told me she went for a carnival in Germany during a all weekend. While she was
wearing a mask and totally disguised, she had the feeling to really be herself at that moment and it has not
been the case for a while. It is only because the truth is never behind the mask but always in the mask itself. So
I think it can teach us a lot about false identity or pseudonym on the internet, and of course about Cyberspace
harassment.

We can believe that this is not so important and that it is all about appearances. But this little story proves the
opposite. A woman who was seriously starting to get sad in her marriage decided to go to an internet forum.
There she met a man with whom she exchanged long months without ever meeting him. After a period of
hesitation she decided to make the step and meet him. That she was not surprised when she went there and
found herself face-to-face with her husband, who also thought he would meet another woman. Here it seems
obvious to us that fantasy is the support of our reality. In this story we can easily imagine that the couple share
too much proximity, which often can turn into disinterest or even disgust, and that the screen has made it
possible to put this fantasy distance to allow them, without even knowing it, to desire each other again.

Another example to illustrate the double function of fantasy: to indicate how to desire and also to protect
ourselves against being too close to the object of desire. You may be aware that the American army is at the
forefront of technology concerning weapons of war. They invented the war zero dead. Zero dead, of course on
their side. Now more and more weapons are being guided from a checkpoint where the soldier is behind a
screen and can choose his target without putting himself in mortal danger. Kind of like a video game. what
interests me here is that these soldiers, to the great surprise of American clinicians, have what is called a post-
traumatic syndrome. That is, the soldiers had nightmares just like the soldiers who were really traumatized by
the war, but also false memories of bloody battles with the enemy who they slaughtered... once again we can
attest to the impact of the screen on our psychic economy, but what is even more interesting is that the fantasy
here comes to humanize a war that was too cold, too robotic, too inhuman.

Nowadays screens manage to capture our subjectivity and have a big impact on our psychic economy ; when I
watch a film and suddenly I start crying. Doesn't that mean that I would have identified with the character, a
little like in the mirror stage, but even more than with the simple image, wouldn't I have identified myself with
the story that happens to the character, a story that perhaps even without really realizing it touches something
of my fantasy(s)? And today perhaps even more with series? There are countless series where all the fantasies
of murder, incest, revenge... are made (Game of thrones, Black Miror...). The multiplication of series seems to
indicate that there are now as many series as there are people. Today almost everyone has his own series, and
it seems difficult to predict a future without screen. How could the subject do without such a device that
captures his subjectivity and exacerbates it? This is certainly why so many people today are "addicted" to
screens. But isn't the danger, if there is one, that of standardization of the fantasy? That through the various
screens the injunctions are stronger even more subtle? I recently spoke with a person who works in the field of
video games and he told me that he would never let his children play with them because he says that video
games deprive us of producing our own fantasy and imposes us already-made fantasies, while cutting us off
from all our other senses.

Video Game

If the 20th century was the century of cinema, we don't take much risk by saying that the 21st century will be
the century of video games. You may know that video games are the "cultural commodity" that generates the
most money worldwide in front of the film industry. Video games cannot therefore fail to have a great
influence on modern subjectivity and perhaps even contribute to the production of a new subjectivity. With
video games, the danger is not to take them too seriously but not to take them seriously enough.

I remember the very first time I played Mario Bros. it was on Nintendo. You all know the principle of the game
which consists of making the character progress and jump over obstacles... I still remember the very first time I
lost in this game. When the character fell into the hole and for a few seconds I couldn't control him anymore, I
really panicked for a moment and start thinking I had destroyed the game, or even the Nintendo itself. As if
something of death, of finitude had been expressed at that moment. What a surprise and relief it was to find, a
few moments later, that everything could start all over again.

I think that through this example we can understand a little bit how video games are in a way the witness of a
new form of subjectivity; a subjectivity that could avoid death, or what we call in psychoanalysis castration.
Here I like to talk about castration as Françoise Dolto does, when she talks about vertical castration, between
genders, and horizontal castration, between generations. Castration is not in psychoanalysis something
negative or bad, on the contrary, it is a symbolic operation which allows the subject to accept his finiteness
and to belong to a gender and a generation. When the castration is assumed you know you are a boy/girl and
the Son/Daughter of ...

There is something about video games that refuses or maybe not refuses but deals with castration in a very
different way and it seems to have an effect on players. Besides, maybe one day we could invent a Lacanian
video game: once you lose the game, it disintegrates. Finally, perhaps in its very first version the tamagoshi
was a Lacanian video game, because as you know as soon as the pseudo-animal died the game was really
over. It's a bit like Zizek's famous sentence when he says that his fiancée is never late for a rendezvous because
as soon as she's late she's no longer his fiancée. Of course here the example is pushed to the extreme but it is
to make us understand something of the order of finiteness that is absolutely rejected in video game, and this
more and more the case. Today online video games are almost infinite in terms of time, and games can start all
over again. There is even a video game that can be found on mobile phones where it is about of massacring,
torturing a character with all kinds of instruments until he dies and then reappears like new. Of course this
logic is not specific to the video game, it is also found, for example in cartoons like Tom and Jerry, where one
of the two characters is cut into small pieces etc. then reappears in the next scene with no scratches. Of
course, and once again, we can simply say to ourselves that this is a video game, but when we take a close
look at our times, we can perhaps see it as a kind of videogamization of reality. For instance, there are these
never-ending love relationship, where people forever imagine they can start over again and again despite all
the injuries they caused to each other . Don't dating sites make us believe that we can always start over again
with someone else, always available ? As if he had always an extra life, a life up, like in video game. At yet
another level, a little more ideological, where specialists or experts tell us that we can always reinvent
ourselves, recreate ourselves, start a new life. There is also now the medical possibility of gender changes
which seems to be linked to this emergence of a new subjectivity that refuses castration or deals with it in a
very different way. And perhaps also what is called transhumanism that pushes away the death itself and aims
at immortality. Of course, psychoanalysis is not a vision of the world and is not there either as a moral garant.
We just have to know as much as we can our time to work with the new emerging subjectivity and symptoms.

Interpassivity

Example of canned laughters, when you come back home after a Long and hard day at work, you just turn,on
your tv and watch a Serie. In that Serie there are canned laughters, you know, programmed laughter in the
audio of the Serie. You are so tired that you can’t laugh. But strangely after watching your Serie you feel
relieved as if you had really laughed. We call this phenomenon interpassivity. Here the TV, the object laughs
for you, on behalf of you. And I think nowadays the objects do, live, endure things for us, vicariously.

This a concept from Lacan but he did not develop it at all, but Slavoj Zizek did and even the one who named it
as interpassivity. There is even a very good book written by Pfaller that explains very well this phenomenon
without which we could not understand many aspects of our modern societies.

Interpassivity is of course a concept that questions what is usually called interactivity. Today interactivity is
described as the end of the passive spectator in front of his screen because he is not only observing or
watching but interacts with the media, it would be like in a kind of communication, of exchange. We cannot
deny this reality, indeed, there is an activity when someone is playing video game or even surfing on the
internet, but is it not, most of the time, reduced to its minimum? Clicking or pressing on a button.

Not only screens provide us a minimal activity but it also deprive us of our passivity. The passivity which is the
very core of any experience, if we follow the definition of Heidegger who said that "To make an experience
with anything, an object, a human being, a god, it means: to let it come upon us, to let it reaches us, falls upon
us, knocks us over and makes us different, let it change us.

In this expression, "to make" does not mean that we are the operator, the agent of the experience; but to pass
through, to suffer from the beginning to end, to endure, to welcome what touches us by submitting to it.

Are we still making experience with objects or are we becoming the objects of the objects ? Because more
and more new technologies deprive us from our very passivity.

To give some examples of interpassivity:

Watch the videos on YouTube Where people do daily tasks, the famous DIY, (washing a car, baking a cake,
taking care of your children, piercing your pimper...)The audience feels like a relief because it gives them a
feeling of everyday life in their life that goes faster and faster, where you don’t have time to do anything, but
maybe we can rename the DIY by DY : delegate yourself

Moreover, there is a video game, the Sims, which is in my opinion, the perfect example of interpassivity where
most of the time the player creates his own character and succeeds in life (he works at school, gets his
diplomas, buys his car, goes to work, gets a promotion, gets his house built...) when in reality he is in front of
his screen. Here the player really delegates everything to the video game.

On the Cyberspace Too, social network, with online petitions.

Isn't the act of "signing" an online petition the perfect prototype of interpassivity? We want to save
psychoanalysis, African children, whales in Japan ... we just have to click on the petition and the Other (Internet
here) takes care of it for us, so we can go about our small daily activities with a clear conscience. Isn't the only
purpose of these online petitions to make us feel good? It's as if we've done our moral duty. We are relieved
until the next petition.

To give another cultural example, Of course, and as Christmas is coming soon , we can also find this
phenomenon of ingerpassivity in our families themselves. When we ask parents if they believe in Santa Claus,
they laugh at us and tell us that it is to make children believe in it. But when we ask the children, they tell us
that they don't believe in it either, but that it's to make parents believe that they, the children, believe in it.

Today we no longer dare to believe directly but we believe at a distance, we believe through another,
vicariously, on behalf of the other. The other can also be an object of course.
It's like in love, people dare less and less to say "I love you" but almost engage in a psycho-philosophical
description of their feelings to avoid having to say it. It is like this new type of relationship, which is called
"polylamouros", that is, several people are chosen according to what they can meet as specific needs in the
subject. We choose a woman for her conversation, another for her body... but isn't this also a way to refuse to
fully love, to really fall in love , to refuse to engage or commit oneself. I think more and more the subjectivity is
like that.

But this is what some dating sites, at least in France offer us, they clearly say that they can provide us love
without the fall.

Dating sites allow us to put online what we imagine of ourselves that would be likely to please the other.

Without mentioning in detail the algorithmization of the profiles, which is no longer a secret, according to their
"desirability index" which means that we only see profiles with the same index as ours appear on our Tinder
screen.

An encounter such as "Roméo et Juliette" seems no longer possible. At least on the internet.

Is it like pre-romantic marriages, the traditional ones ? Where encounters and marriages between young
people were organized and arranged by families in order to preserve or extend their own interests (economic,
social...). Except that today it is no longer uncles, aunts or parents who organize these meetings but websites,
all while making us believe that we are free. No one is more a slave than he who thinks he is totally free, said
Gœthe.

So we have coffee without coffein, sugar without calories, beer without alcohol, tobacco without nicotine,
poverty without poverty, war without dead, and love without fall. It is as if we wanted the thing but without its
disturbing and subversive core, as if we only wanted the imitation of the thing but no longer the real thing.
Here I think the same than the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, love must be reinvented.