LACANIAN REVOLUTIONS

Gabriel Tupinamba's Desire for Psychoanalysis proposes thinking about psychoanalysis in a way that has never been done before - as a scene whose clinical and conceptual significance must for the first time yield to the institutional clashes that take place on it. The development of a critical theory of psychoanalytic institutions is made possible by events that have made the institutional register, after the death of Jacques Lacan, generate events that go beyond questions of internal governance in the communities that Lacan inherited. Tupinamba emphasizes that it is in post-Lacanian analysis that elements of crisis institutional intervention come to the fore, implying control over the "political sanity" of psychoanalysts, as well as the persecution that the more radical and autonomous wing of Lacanian researchers is constantly subjected to from the institutional center coordinated by Jacques-Allain Miller, holder of the monopoly on "clinical thought." The illumination of these processes also allows us to ask other questions that relate to the circumstances usually presented in psychoanalysis as its natural historical coordinates. We are referring first of all to the inequality of those undergoing analysis in terms of their ability to pay for it, to the pathological insularity of the analytic communities themselves, leading to the maintenance in them of an illusory regime of depoliticization against the background of external socio-political crises. At the same time, the effects of the latter are artificially normalized by the clinic and institutions of analysis in the name of maintaining the stability of psychoanalytic practice. The Desire for Psychoanalysis calls for an end to the internal justification of these circumstances, calling into question the very possibility of "continuing with Lacan" claimed by his institutional heirs. Instead, Tupinamba proposes to reassess the Lacanian legacy itself, both in its institutional domain and in the part of the theory Lacan created, suggesting a problematic relationship between the conceptual foundations of Lacanian thought and the shape of the clinical community he created shortly before his death.