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Jelica Šumič RihaWhat follows is anattempt to examine the various ways in which politics and psychoanalysis addressthe issue of otherness in the late capitalist conjuncture while theorizing andpracticing new forms of the non-segregationist collectivity. Our aim in this essay is tocontribute towards an understanding of this complex issue by bringing into question the seemingly self-evident relationship ofthe mutual exclusion between politics and psychoanalysis. In order to expose anaffinity in dealing with the issue of otherness in politics and psychoanalysis,it is necessary to move beyond the traditionally hostile polarities of thesingular and the universal and to reverse the usual perspective, according towhich there is no passage between the domain of the singular and the domain ofthe universal. We will then move on to consider the relationship betweenpsychoanalysis and politics from the point of view of the collectivity “forall” constituted through a complex practice of disidentification and productionof the generic or, to use Agamben’s term, ”whatever” singularities. Ourstartingassumption isthat politics andpsychoanalysis encounter the same structural impasse that of dealing with somekind of an irreducible heterogeneity or alterity. Indeed, the central issue inanalysis is precisely that of a knot which holds the subject together, aninstance that links together three registers that would otherwise remaindisconnected: the symbolic of his or her representation, the real of his or herjouissance, and the imaginaryconsistency of the body's image. What the patient learns at the end of his or heranalysis is that nothing holds together these three instances, the real, theimaginary and the symbolic – except the symptom or sinhome as Lacan termed it in his later teaching. Politics,likewise, irrespective of the regime, of the type of government, confronts asimilar impasse that could be formulated in the following terms: how to holdtogether singularities which have nothing in common. Modern politics, at leastfrom the French Revolution onwards, has treated this impossibility of thesocial bond by constructing a form of collectivity which would be “for all”. Itis a paradoxical collectivity since the condition for its very constitutionrequires the exclusion of the exception, of some otherness that is presumed tobe evading the universalisation.From such a perspective, psychoanalysis andpolitics appear to be two different languages for articulating heterogeneity orotherness that are in confrontation with each other. But is the heterogeneityor otherness in psychoanalysis the same as that which we encounter in politics?What is at issue here is precisely the question: under what conditions is itlegitimate to bring together politics and psychoanalysis? Indeed, any attemptto relate psychoanalysis to politics is far from obvious. According to the receivedidea, there seems to be no commonground permitting their encounter. In this view, psychoanalysis is presumed to be defending therights of the singular, of that preciselywhich resists the universal. Indeed, psychoanalysis is by definition the domainof the “not for all”. As such, psychoanalysis cannot, without losing itscompetence, force the boundaries of confidentiality imposed by its practice to wanderinto a domain in which, on the contrary, something is valid only insofar as itapplies to all. From this viewpoint, psychoanalysis has no competence in thedomain destined ”for all”.&#160; Politics, bycontrast, designed as the order of the collective, deals with the masses, withthe multiple. In so far as politics is preoccupied with the question of thatwhich is valid for all, can only turn a blind eye to the singular: the properobject of psychoanalysis. For politics, in which there seems to be no place forthe singular, it would be an illegitimate step to make the opposite move: fromthe “for all” to that of the “only for one”. Indeed, if we follow the received idea, what makes their encounter impossible is a double interdiction of thepassage from the register of the singular to that of the multiple. We propose to reverse this perspective and toexamine under what circumstances the relation between these two domains, thatof the “for all” and that of the “irreducible singularity”, can be established.Hence, the very fact of posing the question of heterogeneity or otherness inpolitics and psychoanalysis, requires the construction of a site, a scene fortheir encounter. &#160;Our guide in thispivoting of perspective will be Lacan. We will refer, more specifically, to hisTelevision, in which he presents bothhis critique of politics as a way out of capitalism and the task ofpsychoanalysis in a universe governed by the capitalist discourse. Consider thefollowing remark: “Themore saints, the more laughter; that's my principle, to wit, the way out ofcapitalist discourse – which would not constitute progress, if it happens onlyfor some.”[1] First of all it should be noted that topropose psychoanalysis as a solution, as the way out of capitalism, is onlypossible in the very specific circumstance of the collapse of the belief in theemancipatory power of politics to face the growing impasses of the way out ofcapitalism, i.e. of a regime of mastery that yields to generalized metonymization.As a consequence, psychoanalysis, according to Lacan, is confronted with aparadoxical task: to find a way out of a discourse which is considered to belimitless, “eternal”, a discourse which precisely knows of no way out. Itcould, then, be said that, for Lacan, only psychoanalysis is capable ofinventing, of forcing even, in the situation of an impasse, a radically newsolution: that of an immanent way out. However, it is important to consider howpsychoanalysis can emerge as a way out of capitalist discourse. It is true thatLacan harboured some ambitions concerning the “duty incumbent upon [psychoanalysis] in our world”[2], as he puts it. From thispoint of view, it seems that psychoanalysis, according to Lacan, is capable ofsucceeding there where the politics of emancipation failed: to find a way outof the growing impasses of capitalism. Indeed, one is tempted to say thatpsychoanalysis emerges as a tenant-lieu, place-holder of the impossible,absent emancipatory politics. Politics of the symptom or politics of love?What could, then, be a politics proper topsychoanalysis? Actually, there exist two interpretations of the politics ofpsychoanalysis respectively termed the “politics of the symptom” and the“politics of love”. Both of these interpretations which have their partisansand critiques are to a certain extent grounded in Lacan’s work, in particularas they both take as theirpoint of departure the&#160; irreducibleheterogeneity inherent in&#160; the subject, &#160;a kernel of the real resisting the dominantsocial bond. There is something in the subject which makes him/her other,unlike any other in the community to which he or she belongs. While both ofthese paradigms refuse the antinomic relation between politics andpsychoanalysis, they nevertheless differ in outlining the crucial stakes ofsuch a politics proper to psychoanalysis.According to a first reading, the politics ofpsychoanalysis can only be a “politics of the symptom”. Setting out from theassumption that politics and psychoanalysis are in an antinomic relation, thetask of psychoanalysis is to examine contemporary modes of the social bond fromthe view point of the symptom. The symptom here is conceived as a specificfixing of jouissance proper to eachsubject, in a word, as that which in the subject resists universalisation. Thecentral stake in such a politics of symptom is therefore to uncover the tensionbetween the social bond and the symptom. More particularly, to reveal theincompatibility between the allowed and the forbidden jouissance. Thus, there is, on the one hand,&#160; jouissance,such as is prescribed by the social Other, and, on the other hand, there is thesymptom as a mode of jouissance,particular to each subject and which is as such irreducible to the standard jouissance. As a result, the jouissance under the guise of thesymptom cannot but present a threat to the social bond. There are two structural consequences that follow fromthe politics of the symptom. The first is that the conclusion to be drawn fromthe conflict of these two jouissancesis that nothing can “hold together” subjects-symptoms, nothing can bringtogether these irreducible modes of jouissance.From this perspective then, jouissancecan be seen as the impossible-real of the social bond. Jouissance, as a symptom, is that irreducible otherness or heterogeneityon which no collective logics can be grounded. The ultimate lesson to be drawnfrom psychoanalysis insofar as it ventures into the domain of the social andpolitics is then the affirmation of what we would propose to call the “solipsismof jouissance”.&#160;There is however a problem that such a ”politics of thesymptom” cannot solve to the extent that the hegemonic social bond today, thediscourse of the capitalist, brings into question what is supposed to be the majorissue in this politics, namely, the tension between the prescribed, standard jouissance, and jouissance provided by the symptom. Thus the politics of the symptommay well have been applicable in Freud’s times, whereas today there seems to beno place for such a politics of the symptom precisely to the extent that thecapitalist discourse itself dissolves the tension between the singular and theuniversal. Capitalism is therefore an exceptional social bond. Capitalism, in asense, could be seen as an aberration among social bonds, since it realiseswhat in all the other social bonds seems to be impossible: its compatibilitywith jouissance. The capitalistdiscourse is a social bond which does not demand that the subject sacrifice hisor her jouissance. Rather, thecapitalist social bond is a bond that adapts itself to the “trifle”, theprivate jouisance of everybody. It isoffered as an apparatus which is able to provide the subject with the lacking jouissance. So, from this perspective,it could be argued that, not only does jouissancenot threaten the capitalist social bond, but, on the contrary, capitalismpresents itself as a discourse in which the solipsistic “democracy of jouissance” rules, a democracy whosesole principle is primum vivere: &#160;one lives for jouissance. This is because the capitalist discourse, by situating, in the place of the agent, the barred subject that iscaught in an infinite quest for the missing signifier, the one which could putan end to the subject’s erring, exploits the lack it installs in the subject asa way of reproducing itself. The cunning of the capitalist discourse thenconsists in exploiting the structure of the desiring subject: by manipulatinghis or her desire, i.e. by reducing it to demand, the capitalist discoursecreates the illusion that, thanks to scientific development and the market, itis able to provide the subject with thecomplementof being that he or she is lacking by transforming the subject’s lack of beinginto the lack of having.In thisview, “having” is considered to be a cure for the lack of being of the subjectof the capitalist discourse. One could then say that, being nothing but theembodiment of the lack of being, the subject of the capitalist discourse canonly be completed by products thrown on the market.This is why Lacan named the subject of the capitalistdiscourse, “the proletarian”, this being a name for the subject that isinseparable from that which constitutes thecomplement of his or her being: his or her plus-de-jouir, &#160;surplus-jouissance, the object a.As the dominant structure of social relations, thecapitalist discourse provides the conditions for an obscure subjectivation, onethat depends on the conversion of the surplus-value, that is to say, anyproduct thrown on the market, into the surplus-jouissance, the cause of the subject’s desire. Indeed, it is precisely this indistinction between thesurplus-value and the surplus-jouissancewhich makes it possible for the capitalist production of “whatever objects” tocapture, indeed, to enslave the subject’s desire, to sustain its eternal “thisis not it!” It could be claimed that capitalism, insofar as itpromotes a sort of anautistic jouissance, promotes at the same time a particular communal figure, that which J.-C.Milner termed a “paradoxical class”, a collectivity in which its members arejoined or held together by that which disjoins them, namely, theiridiosyncratic mode of jouissance. [3]What is thus placed in question is precisely the social bond. Or to be moreprecise, the social bond that exists today is one presented under the form ofdispersed individuals that is but another name for the dissolution of all linksor the unbinding of all bonds. For something has radically changed with theglobalization of the capitalist discourse.Globalization, in this respect, does not mean simply that nothing is leftin its place as no anchoring seems to be capable of controlling the unendingmovement of displacements and substitutions. Indeed, in the current space ofdiscursivity, the notion of place itself is strangely out of place. What ismore, with the category of place thus rendered inoperative, it is one of thekey categories of emancipatory politics, the notion of lack - necessary to thesubject for it to sustain itself in the symbolic Other -, which as a resultbecomes obsolete.&#160; Both of these features of the capitalist discourse, disidentificationand the replacement of the prohibition of jouissancewith commanded jouissance through theregulation of desire, could, then, be brought together in a single syntagm ofthe generalized proletarianzation. In the words of&#160; Lacan,&#160;“there is but one social symptom: every individual is in effect a proletarian,that is to say that no discourse is at the disposal of the individual bymeans&#160; of which a social bond could beestablished”.[4]Ironically, proletarianzation remains the symptom of contemporary society.Only, this proletarianzation is of a particular kind, one that, by beingarticulated with the intrinsically metonymic nature of the capitalistdiscourse, has lost all its subversive effectiveness, all its revolutionarypotential. Summarizing in this way Lacan’s thesis on the contemporary proletarianzationis to shed some light on the impasses of the presentgeneralized “metonymization”, operated by the capitalistdiscourse, in order to identify the difficulties for contemporary subjectivityin finding a way out of the present impasse. For the inexistence of the Other,contrary to what might be expected or hoped for, is not in and of itself aliberating factor for the subject, it is not experienced by the subject asliberation from the capture which the Other effects upon him/her. Quite thecontrary: in the absence of the master signifier which would render a givensituation “readable”, the subject remains a prisoner, not of the Other thatexists, but of the inexistent Other, better put perhaps, of the inexistence ofthe Other. The second paradigm of the politics of psychoanalysisis to a certain extent the reversal of the first one. What is at issue here isto show that jouissance, precisely asan irreducible heterogeneityor otherness, is the pointat which psychoanalysis encounters politics. Far from precluding all socialbonds, jouissance appears rather as afoundation for that politics which could be called, for lack of a better term,the “politics of love”. At issue in this paradigm is love for one’s neighbourrather than the solipsism of jouissance.The texts of reference here are, of course, Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents and Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, two texts having as their point ofdeparture the presupposition that what constitutes the otherness of the otheris jouissance insofar as it is evil. For Freud, the evil jouissanceI suspect exists in the Other justifies my reservations with regard to him, thereason why the Other does not deserve my love since I can give my love only tothe one who is like me. For Lacan, on the contrary, it is precisely this evil jouissance that the Other and I have incommon. This irreducible otherness of jouissanceis what joins us together. And this is why Lacan can claim that “thatfundamental evil which dwells within this neighbour…also dwells in me.”[5]This is why Lacan in his “Kant with Sade” reproaches Sade, but in an indirectway Freud too, with the misrecognition of his own jouissance. Sade, just like Freud, says Lacan, “refuses to be my neighbour”. The reasonfor this refusal, according to Lacan, is that “Sade does not have neighbourlyenough relations with his own malice [méchanceté] to encounter his neighbour init”,[6]backing away, just like Freud, from the Christian commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”. Nothingthen, to follow Lacan, is closer to me than that which I try desperately toavoid, this nameless, evil jouissancethat I encounter not only in the Other but in myself too. On the other hand, itis precisely because, like myself, the Other is in the same position inrelation to that which Lacan calls lachose la plus proche, that thing which is closest to me – which is, ofcourse, jouissance -, that I can lovethe Other. What is difficult to accept here is not the idea that the Other isunfathomable, enigmatic, wholly other. What is unthinkable is this samenessthat the Other and I share at the level of jouissance.That which radically separates me from the Other, his or her&#160; absolutely particular jouissance, is at the same time that which we have in common: thisotherness in me. Paradoxically, jouissanceas this irreducible otherness is the foundation of sameness. &#160;The crucial point of Lacan's interpretation of the love of one’sneighbour, far from a postmodernist exaltation of the irreducible otherness ofthe Other, is designated here as a strategy for handling this irreducibleotherness in me. Love - insofar as it is beyond all transaction, thisnon-reciprocal love, in the final analysis, as a renouncement of any directequivalent to that which I give, all promise of payment, this whollyunmotivated, gratuituous love, love as a gift without recompense - is whatLacan proposes as a solution to the impasse caused by the encounter with the jouissance in the Other, with theotherness of the Other. This “real” love – real in the sense that it demandsthe impossible – to love somebody for that which provokes their hatred andaggression and turns them against me –&#160;is a possible strategy for handling that otherness in me, forneutralising it. From the perspective of the second interpretation of thepolitics of psychoanalysis, only psychoanalysis, by bringing to light jouissance as the irreduciblesingularity common to me and my neighbour, as a paradoxical sameness inotherness, can elaborate a theory of the subject appropriate, indeed, necessary,to democracy. It is precisely at this point that the political implications oflove of one’s neighbour can be drawn out. Love of one’s neighbour as a way ofdealing with jouissance is preciselywhat Derrida perceives as a chance for democracy. According to Derrida, “thereis no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity.” But,Derrida adds, “there is no democracy without a ‘community of friends’, withoutthe calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable,representable subjects, all equal”.[7]A nonreciprocallove for one’s neighbour detached from all usefulness, is that terrain on whichpolitics and psychoanalysis necessarily meet. Indeed, such a love can be seenas a model for a nonsegregationist community. This is because the indifferenceto the useful which situates love beyond all altruist utilitarianism, signifiesa radical mutation in the field of politics, a mutation which concernsprecisely the status of the Other. For the break with the useful characterisesnot only love and friendship, but also hatred, as Freud himself points out inhis Civilisation, because my enemy isnot interested in the profit he might gain from the wrongdoing he inflicts onme. This leads to a somewhat unexpected conclusion: if the refusal of usefulness,the indifference as to the possible gain, is what friend and enemy have incommon then the distinction between the friend and the enemydisappears.The crucial question here is of course: what consequences can be drawnfrom the disappearance of the demarcation line between friend and foe, in thefinal analysis, from the collapse of the figure of the Other for the socialbond and, consequently, for politics? This is precisely the central issue inSchmitt’s theory of politics. As is well known, Schmitt situated thefriend/enemy discrimination at the core of politics[8]signalling in this way that the moment ofhatred is essential in politics. The intrinsic complicity between enmity andthe Other, more precisely, between the identification of the Other and thedomestication of hatred, is embedded, according to Schmitt’s fundamentalthesis, in the very constitution of a (homogeneous) political community. In Schmitt’s view, a mere agglomeration of&#160; fellow men can never bring about the desiredhomogeneity, as their recognisable similarity requires the existence of aninstance of dissimilarity, an element of otherness or heterogeneity which, atthe level of the relationship between mere fellow men, is precisely what is lacking.At this level, not only is the other not an other at all, since it iscoupled with the ego, in a relation which is always reflexive, interchangeable,but this specular relation itself is governed by a lethal alteration: if it isyou, I am not, and if it is me, it is you who are not. In deconstructive terms:in the absence of some radical otherness, which makes it possible forindividuals who are grouped together to identify themselves as being in somecrucial aspects similar and can thus constitute themselves as a&#160; community, the unleashing of a pure logic ofidentity or equivalence would, instead of bringing about a reconciliation andunification, lead to a total destruction depicted in the Hobbesian fantasy ofthe state of nature.Schmitt’s greatest merit is to have pointed out the intrinsic complicitybetween enmity and the Other. If we are to follow Schmitt, for homogeneity tobe established at all the existence of an instance of dissimilarity, an elementof otherness is required, that which at the level of the relationship between semblables, fellow men, is preciselylacking.&#160; Schmitt’s introduction of thefriend/enemy distinction can thus be understood as an attempt at diffusing thehatred that the fellow men would otherwise vent against one another through the“exportation” of this inherent aggressivity elsewhere.&#160; This externalisation of the Otherthat prevents slipping into cruelty and total destruction is possible only onthe condition that the relationship of enmity is purified of all passion andaffects. Hence it is not simply the “we”/“they” distinction that would in itselfrender the checking of the excess of hostility, the measureless violence,possible, but the symbolisation of enmity, involving a distance, a constructionof a remote, external Other, and rules that must be respected by all. Viewed from this perspective, the role of the Other is pacifying.&#160; On the other hand, however, hatred is never completely domesticated. AsSchmitt himself is forced to acknowledge, the establishment of such aconstitutive Beyond is always incomplete since the Other is always contaminatedby another figure of the enemy, within the community. This other Other, bybeing unlocatable, indiscernible, corrodes the communal being, threatens thecommunity with its dissolution. From the very start, there are then two figuresof the enemy and not simply one: the symbolic enemy that Schmitt calls thepolitical enemy. And there is yet another figure of the Other: the “real” orinternal enemy. Whereas the first figure is essentially pacifying, the secondactivates the absolute destructive hostility leading to a permanent civil war. Thisdistinction between the “good”, external, i.e. political enemy, and the “bad”unfathomable internal enemy, is patently undermined in present conjecture ofglobalisation. This is because today we are facing a situation in which,strictly speaking, there is no instance that could play the role of the“constitutive outside”, no instance of the “they” that would render possiblethe construction of the “we”, since both “we” and “they” are always already“in”, included. Hence, it is essential to realise how contemporaryotherlessness, paradoxically, opens upthe possibility for the emergence ofahatred that nothing can appease. The proliferation of the hated real others inan era of the nonexistence of theOther is necessary since – once the figure of the external, political,&#160; “symbolic” enemy is eliminated, onceeverybody is included –&#160; anybody, myself included, can occupy theplace of the radical, real other. For what characterises present-day globalisationis, so to speak, the denial of all exclusion. The exclusion of the exclusiondid not, however, make the exclusion disappear. It has only become internal andthus invisible. &#160;It is precisely becausethe frontier between the included and the excluded is ultimately invisible, asthere is no sign, no attribute that would help me determine who is “in” and whois “out”, that, in a universe without beyond or limit, a universe that knows ofno exception, anybody can, in principle, find him/herself occupying the placeof the real, dehumanised Other. This construction of the “altogether others” ina constellation in which no Other is possible bears some similarities to themovement designated by J. Lacan as the barbarism of all human assimilation.According to Lacan, in order for the subject to attain his/her identity, s/heis compelled to resort to her/his self-affirmation: “I declare myself to be aman for fear of being convinced by men that I am not a man.”[9]This is precisely the reason that the“politics of love”, a politics which aims at the impossible articulation of theotherness and the social bond, the impossibility of counting and the necessityof counting, remains forever contained within the perspective of the promise,it is forever “to come”, “à venir”, never in the here and now. In otherwords, such a politics cannot provide us with a satisfactory answer to thequestion: how is it possible to justify the legitimacy of the move from thesingular to the universal. The politics of love is satisfied with the ceaselessaffirmation of the singularity of otherness. That is why it cannot indicate away in which this singularity could be asserted politically, i.e. a way ofpoliticising the singularity of the singular by introducing another principle of counting:that of counting the uncounted, the uncountable. Ultimately, what such aconception of politics in terms of love misrecognises is precisely theirreducible gap between counting and the impossibility of counting as the solesite in which contemporary politics of emancipation can be situated. We proposeto call the politics of emancipation that politics that organises aconfrontation between counting and the impossibility of counting, an operationthat reveals the constitutive impossibility of institutionalising a collectivity“for all”, a collectivity in which what is at stake isprecisely the predicate determining the belonging to the community, the line ofdemarcation between inside/outside, us/them. Lacanian School and Its PoliticsIt is precisely at this point that the contemporary politics ofemancipation encounters psychoanalysis. We would argue that psychoanalysis canshow us how it is possible, in spite everything, to think and to practice acollectivity “for all” as an open, nonsegregationist community.&#160; For the great merit of Lacan’s proposed solution in Television consists in recasting thequestion of the universal, of the “for all”, from the perspective of thenot-all, of the infinite. Clearly, the solution proposed by Lacan is aparadoxical solution since we are dealing here with an interior way out: if wemay say so, a paradoxical way out which implies no transgression, no forcing ofa barrier, since there is no barrier separating the outside and the inside. Inview of this interior way out, everything depends, of course, on the way inwhich we understand Lacan’s statement: “It would not constitute progress if ithappens only to some”. Does the expression “not only for some” imply “for all”or not? Our claim is that it points in the direction of the “for all”. To besure, this is a very peculiar “for all” since, in the not-all, that is, in aninfinite universe in which this “for all” is situated, it is impossible to state the universalityof the predicate. To fully grasp the political implications ofthis articulation of the “for all” with the “not-all", we must distinguishbetween two forms of the not-all: the not-all of incompleteness and the not-allof inconsistency. The first not-all is what we usually refer to as the all orthe universal, to use its traditional name. This category designates a unityconstructed through the limitation, or, more precisely, through the exclusionof an exception. And there is another form of the not-all, the inconsistent not-allwhich can, paradoxically, be obtained, not through the exclusion of theexception, but through its inclusion. By the very fact of subtracting theexception from a series we render it limitless, non-totalizable. Now, whatexactly is the status of the exception seen from the perspective of thenot-all? We cannot simply state: there is no exception to the universalfunction, for instance, “All As are B”. We should rather say: if there is anexception we don’t know where to find it.&#160;From the perspective of the not-all, the exception is seen as beingerratic. It is everywhere, yet nowhere to be located.&#160; It could then be said that the exception isgeneralised. We could also say, for instance, that we are all exceptions. The first figure of the not-all is subtractiveor segregationist, because the price to be paid for the constitution of the“all” is the exclusion of those who do not posses the required predicate. A“true” not-all is non-segregationist because, from the outset, all exception ispostulated as being undecidable, indeterminable. Consequently, such a not-allis open, inclusive, in a word: “for all”. We can see here a solution to the impassethat Schmitt confronted: how to conceive of a community when there is no Otherfrom which the members of the community are to be distinguished. The politicsof the non-segregationist not-all is symmetrically inverted, when compared tothat proposed by Schmitt: it consists in including the Other rather than inexcluding the Other. Not of course in the name of respecting the rights ofotherness, openness to the Other, but in order to bring into question thecommunal identity, the supposed homogeneity of the group. It is this second aspect of thenot-all, one in which it is impossible to determine the existence of atotalizing exception that can best be illustrated by the politics inherent toLacan’s School: École de la Cause. Forthere is yet another way of considering a politics proper to psychoanalysis,one that is capable of dealing with the problem of structuralnon-totalization.&#160; A shift in Lacan’s reflections onpolitics in general and the functioning of a psychoanalytic institution whoseprincipal task would be the transmission of a radically singular experiencesuch as can only be encountered in an analysis, is marked by a paradoxicalthesis according to which: a group is the real, that is, according to Lacan’svocabulary, a radical impossibility. The real of the group is that which isprecisely at stake in the foundation of his School: École de la Cause, School of the Cause.&#160; If we propose to consider Lacan’s thesisabout the real of the group seriously, this is precisely because Lacan, whileinsisting on the impossibility of the group, by founding his Schoolnevertheless succeeded in demonstrating that there is a way of dealing withthis impossibility.Lacan’ssolution to the impasse of collectivity consists in opening his School “toeverybody”, which is to say “to anybody”. Setting out from the assumption thatthere is absolutely nothing to define the analyst, no pregiven predicate orproperty on which his identification could be grounded, the only viable &#160;solution is one that takes into accountprecisely this impossibility of determining a predicate that would be proper tothe (Lacanian) analyst. The solution is then none other than to call on allthose who are willing to work in the Freudian field. By inviting to his schoolanybody, without any qualification, Lacan created an open, empty space destinedto be inhabited only by a special kind of work, the work of the “determinedworkers”[10], be itanalysis or not, as he puts it. As the expression “determinedworker” suggests, it is the work that decides one’s belonging to thecollectivity. This also implies that this work cannot be standarised. The workto be done is by definition indeterminable since it cannot take place unlessthere is a transference to a cause at hand. This expression, “determined worker”, emphasizes theimportance of the fidelity to a cause, the willingness of everyone involved init to risk him or herself and his or her desire in the pursuit of what isultimately unknowable. All that the work to be done by everybody requires, and thisdespite the fact that neither its quality nor quantity can be prescribed, is anew relation to the cause; in the final analysis: the task that everybody isconfronted with is that of inventing psychoanalysis. It is precisely in thissense that in Lacan’s School it is impossible to distinguish good, determinedworkers from idlers. Rather, School of the Cause is to be seen as acollectivity that is profoundly non-segregationist. It is non-segregationistbecause the presence of an element that is allegedly heterogeneous to thecollectivity, a non-analyst, is not only tolerated but required in order tobringing into question the predicate: to be an analyst.[11]This Lacaniancollectivity “for all” can serve us as a model for the anonymous egalitarianismrequired by contemporary emancipatory politics in so far as it renders visiblethe functioning of both universalist, albeit incompatible logics: the one thatis grounded in the exception, and the other that takes as its departure pointthe axiom according to which: “there is none who has not got it”, namely thecapacity to be a determined worker. The paradox of the politics implied inLacan’s School resides so to speak in the fact that it is situated precisely atthe level of that which cannot be represented or counted, since it is what isleft after the completion of identification. In short, it is situated at thelevel of the pure, whatever singularity. Yet it is precisely this irreduciblesingularity that Lacan’s School proposes to take into account, to ‘count’. Forthe ambition of Lacan’s School is not only to find a way out of the traps ofidentification. It is above all to find, to force, a passage there where thereis a non-passage, an impasse, a deadlock, of the group.&#160; What is at stake in the foundation of the École de la Cause is a paradoxicalproject: to universalise the singular. We can seenow that what is at stake in the distinction of the two logics of the universalis eminently political. At issue here is the way in which the logic of thenot-all is set to work, made operational there where the segregationist logicoperates, there where the exclusion, be it visible or invisible, reigns. From this perspective, Lacan’sSchool can be viewed as a special collectivity “for all”, that of workers, acollectivity which implies the disidentification practised at the level of thegroup: everyone ought to become anyone, a whatever singularity. This is not tosay that one discovers oneself as already being such. On the contrary, one onlybecomes such: anyone. This is a subjective transformation that everyone has toaccomplish for him or herself. Thisis because the collectivity “for all” is ultimately grounded in a cause thatsets us to work. In this sense it includes in the real a radical novelty: aparadoxical collectivity that is at once not-all, non-totalisable and yet atthe same time “for all”, offered to all.Such a collectivity&#160;“for all”that is grounded in the real of the group, which is to say in itsimpossibility, is certainly a forcing: a forcing of saying, because whatcharacterises such a collectivity is precisely the advent of an allegedly mute,uncounted, invisible instance that starts to speak out and, in so doing,asserts its presence: “We are here”.Butit is also a forcing of all social order and its counting. What is at issuehere is not to correct the&#160; miscount madeby the social order by including those who were left outside, those who did notcount, but rather to accomplish, in view of those uncounted and counted alike,the operation of transfinitisation, an operation that aims at constituting anopen, non-segregationist “for all”. How many members will count this “for all”of the not-all? It doesn’t matter. It is not about the numbers. On thecondition, however, that it remains, just like a Cantorian aleph, indifferent,impervious, to both all addition and all subtraction. So this paradoxical interior way out is nothing other than theconstitution of a local, temporary, provisional collectivity “for all”. It isnot to remain forever. All that remains forever, ultimately, is its name andits call. &#160;&#160;[1] J.Lacan, Television, &#160;AChallenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, &#160;trans. J. Mehlman,&#160; New York: W.W. Norton &#38; Co., 1990, p. 16.[2] J.Lacan, &#160;“Founding Act”, in J. Lacan, Television,A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, &#160;trans. J. Mehlman,&#160; NewYork: W.W. Norton &#38; Co., 1990, p. 97.[3] J.-C. Milner, Les noms indistincs (Paris&#160;: Seuil,1983), pp. 116-123.[4] J. Lacan, "Latroisième", in Lettres de l'Ecolefreudeinne de Paris, n° 16, 1975, p. 187.[5] J.Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. TheEthics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter,&#160;London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992, p. 186. &#160;[6] J.Lacan, “Kant with Sade”, Ecrits, &#160;trans. B. Fink, New York: W.W. Norton, 2006, &#160;&#160;p.666.[7] J.Derrida, Politics of Friendship,trans.&#160; G. Collins, London and New York:Verso, 1997, p. 22.[8] “Thespecific political distinction, to which political action and notions can bereduced is the distinction between friend and enemy.” The Concept of the Political, trans. by George Schwab. Chicago andLondon: Chicago University Press 1996, p. 26.[9] J.Lacan, “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty,” Ecrits, p. 174.[10]This expression was introduced by Lacan in his “Fouding Act”, p. 100.[11] See, for instance, J. Lacan,“Discours à l’Ecole freudienne de Paris”, in Autres écrits, Paris: Seuil,2001,&#160;pp. 270, 272.