Who am I with psychoanalysis? A journey from identity to nomination

Abstract

'Polyamorous', 'pansexual', 'asexual', but also 'racialised', 'non-binary', 'hypersensitive', 'zebra', 'HPI'... From the refusal to be assigned a diagnosis to the self-nominations under which subjects now present themselves, the era is full of new signifiers that are proliferating, and around which new communities are gathering. What function can be attributed to these names, which the age seems quick to adorn, with the paradox that on the one hand there is confirmation of a movement towards generalised depathologisation against a backdrop of democratic egalitarianism, while on the other there is a demand to present oneself with a name, sometimes a name of jouissance that allows one to be inserted into society?

Should we see this generalised push for identity as a recuperation by capitalist discourse of the so-called freedom to construct oneself, beyond any biological mark (I am not what my body says I am) or signifying mark (I am not what you say I am)? As a strategy of particularisation in an era of generalised crisis, a contemporary avatar of the Freudian little difference?

With Lacan, we will try to grasp what relationship to speech seems to be at stake today, by attempting to understand what is covered by the terms assignment, performativity, nomination and self-nomination.

We hope that these notions will enable us to refine how the path of analysis aims to bring out a symptomatic identity, in the words of Jacques-Alain Miller, an anti-identitarian nomination, a point of absolute difference that reshuffles alienation from the Other of language, so that we can make a name for ourselves in a different way.