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Dear reader,
Thank you for opening our special issue of Division/Review devoted to this enigmatic conjunction, “community psychoanalysis.” It is a home that feels appropriate: a division of an organization, a small community, and also a mark of that which divides me from you and both of us from ourselves, which we can, perhaps, review but never mend. Our measure in common.
It seems that in these days of distress—in this way, ordinary days—something has been given us in common, to which we also have to respond commonly… That something which one may call misfortune, but which one also has to leave nameless, can in a certain way, be common. Which is mysterious, maybe a delusion, maybe unutterably true. (Maurice Blanchot, letter to Georges Bataille, 1983/1988, p.xiii)
We live in the ruins of the names, find hiding places among their desiccated husks, ever waiting to be found, bracing for it. Will it yet come?
The lack of divine names—the suspension of prayer, or worship—would thus be a way for the sacred to keep itself in reserve, to withhold itself, and as a consequence, thereby to offer itself, to offer itself in reserve, both as its own reserve and as its own withdrawal. (Nancy, 1991, p.120)
I encounter you there, where the name withdraws. I am gutted, wordless. I cry out. I offer you my voice, these invocatory entrails. Is it a gift, this exposure? Is it an exposition, this potlatch? Is it a rock placed upon a pile of stones, here at the furthest edge of the known lands?
this is the region where
those we've caught up with are resting
…
They pay off the debt that sparked their origin,