Abstract

To take as the object of one’s inquiry the analyst’s «know-how» is an indication that, while psychoanalysis is indeed a theory, it remains essential to the understanding of its status and of the effects produced by it outside its specific field that it be addressed in terms of its actual, clinical working out. The aim of the article is to demonstrate how psychoanalysis manifests a practical orientation, thus situating it in what is a strategic position for any politics aimed at the opening of the space of conflict by effecting a change in its coordinates, instead of the attempted erasure of the latter, or the attempt to introduce an instance of moderation or justice into the specific cases of conflict. Insofar as its clinic takes precedence over an anthropology, to the point where it can ultimately do without the latter, psychoanalysis enables us to reconsider the relations between the masses and ordinary singularities, thus envisaging a politics without an anthropology.