Conference on Rafah Nashed: Speech Delivered to the Women's Forum Organized by Lacan Quotidien and the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne, October 9, 2011 Translated by J. Todd Dean

There could be no better way to breathe new life into our respect for Lacan than to examine the collision, torn from the headlines, as it were, among psychoanalysis, politics, and women. We are living in a time that must be called historic for all three, one that will inevitably lead to debates, reflections, colloquia, seminars, movements, papers…My thanks for having invited me to present my reflections. Please allow me to briefly sketch out a few lines of thought that will lead to our main focus today: the endangered, feminine genius of Rafah Nashed.

1 There cannot be a politics of psychoanalysis. It is the most intimate of experiences, as Freud and Lacan never stop pointing out to us, each in his own fashion. On the other hand, listening to the speaking-being is the very Copernican revolution of values and norms that opens new possibilities of a link to others. Such links constitute the very essence of the political. Because listening to the unconscious is what reveals the singularity of the one who speaks, it is inevitable that psychoanalysis confront the central preoccupation of the third millennium, which I would define thus: what meaning should one give to this singularity, which has become synonymous with happiness through freedom? Psychoanalysis is called to respond to this question. Why? Because Freud's discovery of the unconscious has transferred the religious and philosophical ambitions of an Occident concerned about the rights of man to the very heart of scientific rationalism. And this approach, our psychoanalytic approach, to what is human is opposed as much to a pseudohumanism, ready to constrain sick people in the straightjacket of risk management, as it is to the terror that fundamentalist systems of religion and politics spew out, as well as to positivistic blindness. Rafah Nashed is the witness to this resistance when she tries to give speech to fear, in opposition to the Syrian regime.

2 Is this the resistance of a woman, or of a feminist? What is