The Turin Theory of the School of the People of the Secret

This is a lightly edited version of a paper I presented at the London Society of the New Lacanian School in 2019 at an event studying Jacques-Alain Miller's The Turin Theory of the Subject of the School.

The Turin Theory of the School of the People of the Secret.

I’ve been asked to talk about a presentation that Jacques-Alain Miller made in 2000, at a conference which was part of the foundation of the School in Italy. The text of this presentation is known as The Turin Theory of the Subject of the School. It would be great to do a close reading of this text, and I’m not going to do that here, but I recommend you to read it, or to read it again. It’s certainly been precious to me to be able to re-read it and prepare this presentation.

Miller often presents in a clear, logical style, albeit usually quite wittily. And we can have the impression reading Miller that we understand enough with one reading. It could be easy to miss the emphasis which Lacan often employed, when he would sometimes tell his audience that it’s okay if they don’t understand, it’s more important to know how to use it. It’s worth re-reading Miller despite the impression that we understand it well, and perhaps all the more if we have that impression.

Instead of a close reading, I decided to read bits of the Turin Theory against pieces of Miller’s Course from that year, to see what it could provide.

In the year 1999-2000 Miller’s Course was titled Les Us du Laps – the use – us, it’s an old word for use, relating we’re told to the singular, of the laps – lapse as in a period of time. Miller notes that the laps flows, and falls. But also there is the pun here of us and laps going together as lapsus.

So thematically there’s temporality, use, and the unconscious.

The Turin Theory of the School is a theory of how this strange kind of group, or entity, or organisation might work, a group, more or less, of psychoanalysts, in some sense, since Miller notes that it is a group of people, psychoanalysts, in some sense, since Miller notes that it is a group of people who know that they don’t know what a psychoanalyst is.

***

But let me tell you a bit about what I found in Les us du Laps, since it’s amusing and to the point.

Miller didn’t waste time in this Course in providing an entertaining story. He discusses a very short story by Borges, about a mysterious sect. The story is called The Sect of the Phoenix. You can easily find it online if it piques your curiosity.

This sect has a secret ceremonial act – a rite – and it is constituted by nothing more nor less than the enactment of this rite. By “lending one's body to the symbols” of the rite. “They have no sacred book, they have no common memory, they have no language of their own, they only have a rite. And even, Borges says, the rite is the secret.” What this rite is, is only implied in the story, which is like an extended riddle, but it’s confirmed by Borges elsewhere, and Miller notes up front that this secret rite is, in the end, coitus. It’s a kind of sex cult - well, a cult might imply that there’s a leader, and the sect of the Phoenix doesn’t work that way. Indeed like Borges’ sect, the Turin Theory notes that our analytic group is “not a bureaucratic affair to be regulated by a small group to be gathered on one side”, but, more or less, “takes place in the open”.

And Miller gets straight to the point in Les us du Laps in saying that psychoanalysis, and it’s implicit - a group of analysts - is in some sense like this sect of the Phoenix. Of course psychoanalysis is not really a sect, but still...

From the Course – “First you have to go to a place, it can't be done like that anywhere, you have to go to a specific place, where someone is waiting for anywhere, you have to go to a specific place, where someone is waiting for you, and then this is the access door, the airlock, towards what is called the unconscious, and in this place and only in the presence of the one who waited for you, you come into contact with the unconscious, you copulate with the unconscious, and then you pay and you go out, and then you start again.”

To quote Les us du laps some more – “the twist that Borges imprints on his imagining of the sect, for this text in particular, is that it turns out that the few know no more than all the others. That doesn't prevent them from being grouped, from being brought together, by what ultimately? By the signifier of the sect, a signifier itself which Borges showed us immediately is highly uncertain. They do not know any more than the others what the secret is for the others and even, at the end of this text, what is revealed precisely, is that the few – what were presented as a few are actually so many that they are all others, and that is what comes up at the end of the text. The secret for others is also a secret for themselves and that coresponds to this sentence that I often quote from Hegel in his Aesthetics concerning – it is about Egyptian art that he says that -– the secrets of the Egyptians were secrets for the Egyptians themselves, and that is what, little by little, in the five paragraphs of Borges, ends up emerging.”

And Miller suggests that the alternate name of the sect of the Phoenix – the People of the Secret – would be a great name for psychoanalysis, for a group of its adherents, gathered around its uncertain signifiers.

The secret of the sect is concentrated in its enigmatic, its enigmatised, rite. And Miller is not shy in proposing that this text on the secret of sexuality, of its act performed without knowing what it means, is “the most condensed and most exquisite text in all of literature to stage the sexual non-rapport”.

And then Miller notes that the sect of psychoanalysts is not quite the same as the sect of the Phoenix:

“...we can say, against the background of the Phoenix sect, that people of this sect [of psychoanalysts], who meet regularly, abstain from engaging in the sexual rite. It only highlights the essential relationship that exists between the session and intercourse. This is called the abstinence rule, which would complete the rule of free association. What does this rule mean, if not that sexual intercourse must be possible so that it does not take place? It is moreover, it must be confessed, evoked by the very presence of the bed, of this bed which is called the couch and which means that there are subjects who cannot lie down on this bed, in the analytical session, by the fact that the sexual connotation is, for them, unbearable to support.”

***

And you may be wondering – “when is he going to start talking about the Turin Theory?”.

Okay.

Firstly to note, half aside, that the Turin Theory emphasises the importance of interpreting the School. And as we are working towards our Congress regarding interpretation, we could ask what interpretation of the School could usefully be, now – from interpretation towards truth, to interpretation as event. What for instance would an evental interpretation of the School be, such that the School is formed and lives through the flame of this ongoing interpretation? If I think of our diad of understanding and use – us – use in its more singular dimension, could we perhaps see an evental interpretation more on the side of us? It could bear some attention.

Okay.

The Turin Theory directly implicates the School in a temporal logic, the logic of the lapse, you might say. And in Lacanian terms this brings us to the temporal logic offered in Lacan’s Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty. The logic stated there goes like this, in a way which founds our understanding of all groups:

1. A man [could be a psycoanalyst] knows what is not a man; 

2. Men recognise themselves among themselves;

3. I declare myself to be a man for fear of being convinced by men that I am not a man.

Just as the sect of the Phoenix is oriented around a secret which remains secret to all, so it is here – the shared premise is not known, what is known is what one is not, and the group is formed not from some knowledge held prior to its formation, but through what is found in the dialectic of the process of its becoming, through the use of the School. We don’t know what a psychoanalyst is. We don’t know what the meaning of sex is, sexual rapport is not to be known. I don’t know, and in fact nobody knows, not even Jacques-Alain Miller, and nobody here. We are the group in fact who knows, presumably unlike those beyond our set, that nobody knows. Well, we might hope so...

This logic of the School makes for a “logically inconsistent set”, so notes the Turin Theory – there’s our famous not-all going on there, but this doesn’t mean that the School lacks something, so we’re told, but rather that it is formed in “a series in which the law of formation is missing”.

The Turin Theory suggests that what collectivises the School is an ideal, an ego Ideal no less, the same ideal held by each alone. And he says that ideals can work in two ways to collectivise. Either there is the enunciation of an ideal which creates an us (not an us) and a them. Friend or enemy. Or there is the ideal where there is the enunciation of an interpretation, insofar as to interpret the group “is to dissociate it and send each one of the members of the community to the loneliness of his relation to the ideal”. Well, we know that the former type, the ideal which lends itself to battles for prestige and recognition, has no guarantee of being totally lost, but we hope that the later, the way of the School, may have its effect. With that question of interpretation there.

And if we are to ask what the ideal at stake for each in the School is, we can say that it is the ideal of the cause, which in our terms is of the unconscious. The unconscious in its aspect of being a supposition of hidden, unknown, knowledge. And this relates to the it-doesn’t-work of having no foundation of the sexual relation.

It’s a funny kind of ideal. It’s a sort of ideal which leaves open the kind of aspect of a laps which is a falling, a failing, or the disenchantment of psychoanalysis to quote the title of Miller’s brilliant 2001-2 Course. It’s not an ideal in the sense that it might seem ideal that we all live together happily ever after – not an ideal of the good.

The Turin Theory proposes:

“In the School too there is nothing which does not have the psychoanalytic genius, that does not participate in the Spirit of psychoanalysis. Indeed, this can be in the form of fighting against it, of repressing it, of denying it.”

And by Spirit, Miller is clear – the Spirit of psychoanalysis is Witz. And Witz is the point at which the unconscious can most clearly be seen to be connected with the group. We laugh together, sometimes, hopefully. Still, it can occasionally be hard to see the wit in fighting, repressing, and denying.

Well, on the one hand, this would seem to allow that all of the difficulties of the School are folded in to the life of the School.

It seems to me, however, that much as we know about the agalma – about the position of the one who is alone in the group, of the ones who know that they don’t know – well, knowing on the side of a supposition of understanding is not enough, and we have to know how to make singular us of that agalma, which we reach towards in our analyses. And we are mostly here struggling with the ways in which our fantasies take us away from the use we can hopefully sometimes make of the psychoanalytic agalma in our clinics, in our own analyses, and in our School.

If we see what Miller proposes of the School as a description, then we may perhaps say that the School sometimes, or often, fails or is incomplete – this isn’t really in keeping with Miller’s proposal – and I wonder if this model lends itself too easily to disappointment in relation to a idealisation of the School. The ideal Miller proposes we have in regard to the School is not of an ideal School.

I wonder if it would not be better to consider Miller’s account as perhaps a definition of the School, which has no guarantee of being met.

Just as there is a sense in which psychoanalysis does not always happen, the person there behind the couch is, in a certain sense, not always a psychoanalyst, it seems to me that the School does not always exist – this is a tentative idea of mine – it cannot always be expected to exist. It happens only when we make it happen. It could sometimes be fleeting. The lapsus has its lapse. But it is very precious when it happens, even if it is sometimes lively in ways which are not comfortable.

I wonder if perhaps this idea works against that of the School as a strange entity beyond us, or an authority, perhaps more elsewhere than here, which was there before us. And works rather towards an idea of the School that allows more for the ethical dimension of the School to be apparent – it’s something like the Phoenix reborn each time from flame, or the analytic session – we each need to make it happen, each time again, as an ethical choice.

Alasdair Duncan

www.alasdairduncan.com