L’Hebdo-Blog: In your teaching in Rennes, you have chosen to go against a certain doxa of psychoanalytic inspiration that professes the failure of sublimation in the face of the triumph of the drive and the object. How can we say that sublimation in its link to the sinthome appears as a particularly appropriate solution to our malaise in culture in its most contemporary forms?

Jean-Luc Monnier : Freud vari very little on this question of sublimation, to the change of goal he brought in 1933, in his text “Anxiety and the Life of the Drive”, the change of object. Without doubt his conception of sublimation is paradoxical, notably because it is free from repression and yet a consequence of the social repression of the drive or even a consequence of the desexualization of the libido after its passage through the ego.

But rather than considering sublimation

as an imprecise, vague concept, we must on the contrary, as Lacan taught us, consider its relationship as a paradox with reality.

There are several important texts on sublimation, but there is one that seems to me to be perhaps more appropriate for  mobile database approaching the answer to your question; this text is entitl “To introduce narcissism”. In this text Freud differentiates very precisely between sublimation and idealization.

In light of this text, I do not believe that “The rise to the social zenith of the object a “, in a word its triumph, is synonymous it has technological support  with the failure of sublimation: it probably rather marks its promotion, if we consider as Lacan does that it is the objects creat by man (in the generic sense) which come to populate the void of the thing.

On the contrary the contemporary world

is a world in which idealization has been in retreat for some time now: so certainly our contemporary Western societies are those of the triumph of the drive but ever more sublimat to the very extent of the erasure of the ideal.

And this is undoubtly where one  betting email list of the connections between sublimation and the sinthome is ensur.

HB: You propose to study the new approach to sublimation, starting in particular from the notion of the escabeau, a term introduc by Lacan in reading Joyce. This allows us to think of sublimation with the body, which is no longer that of the image captur by the mirror. As Eric Laurent indicates in his book L’Envers de la biopolitique, Rembrandt, in his self-portraits, manipulates the image in such a way that he passes through the mirror.