From psychism to otherness:

the readings by Politzer, Merleau- Ponty and Foucault on singularity in the freudian clinic

Abstract

This article proposes a discussion on the intersection between contemporary French philosophy and psychoanalysis, specifically focused on the issue of “singularity” in psychoanalysis, highlighting authors such as Politzer, Foucault and, especially, Merleau-Ponty. It is about thinking about how these authors seek to channel the theme of singularity in Freud. The objective is to determine how the singularity that Freud encountered in his clinical work of listening to patients can be defined and in what sense this singularity is not reduced to the theoretical formulations later developed by the psychoanalyst in terms of psychic system – and which Politzer called of abstract. It considers, especially, the efforts of Merleau-Ponty to think the Freudian notion of singularity in the terms of a new theory, which became known as the theory of otherness, in which the philosopher approaches the singularity to the notion of the death drive, anticipating what years later Lacan would call “extimacy”. From where the leading question of this research follows: what is singularity in the psychoanalytic clinic and in what sense is it possible for one to hear it from the other without subjecting it to an abstraction or knowledge imposed as a device?