Le symptôme entre neurosciences et psychanalyse. Actualité de l’au-delà du principe de plaisir

Asking the question of current affairs implies that of knowing if we can really access what is current, what is present. Saying the present excludes its existence. Nietzsche said of the present that it is inactual. Such is its fundamental contradiction, the contradiction peculiar to the contemporary. Perhaps it is only possible to tell the topicality of something from its aftermath. This is the case with the symptom which, paradoxically, finds its place as a symptom through the after-effects of the analytical treatment, whereas, in the moment of life, it only asserts itself. The symptom is a complex articulation of the relation to time. It brings together, in itself, the present of the past, the present of the present and the present of the future. In any case, the symptom declines in time in a paradoxical way. The symptom is a present that persists, an inactual present that insists, bringing into play the topicality of an inactivity that goes beyond the subject. Another dimension of the symptom is the coincidence it implies between the most intimate and the most political. And one could say that every symptom is both intimate and political, because fundamentally, the symptom brings together both an origin and an incidence which happen to be simultaneously intimate and political - another way of repeating the statement of Freud on the link between the individual and the social, when he posits individual psychology as being also, “from the outset and simultaneously, a social psychology, in this broadened but perfectly justified sense ...