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Towards Gay Science: The End of Analysis as the Analysis of the End

by | Vol 35 (3) 2017

In an attempt to account for the end (the goal, the direction) of the psychoanalytic treatment, Jacques Lacan has formulated quite a few principles and ideas over the course of his seminars and writings. Amongst these principles, the notion of the ‘traversal of the fantasy’ has come to occupy a priviliged position, despite the fact that it is effectively a hapax in Lacan’s works. This paper offers a succinct study of an alternative principle, which is rarely recognised in the context of discussions on the end of analysis, notably the principle of the signifier of the barred Other S(Ⱥ). The study of this principle generates the thesis that the end of analysis may be conceptualised as the analysis of the end, which constitutes the point where knowledge becomes ignorance, and the point where the symbolic order becomes ‘de-phallicised’. In the discourse of the analyst, the analysis of the end re-appears in the place of the product, where the master signifier symbolises the function of loss. For the knowledge of the psychoanalyst, this implies that a knowledge in the place of truth can only be maintained as a gay science, in the Nietzschean sense of a poetic, joyful and amusing knowledge.

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