{"id":7702,"date":"2025-01-23T19:01:28","date_gmt":"2025-01-23T18:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pipol12.pipolcongres.eu\/?p=7702"},"modified":"2025-02-11T08:29:02","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T07:29:02","slug":"mathieu-siriot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pipol12.pipolcongres.eu\/en\/2025\/01\/23\/mathieu-siriot\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cFamily Nous\u201d – Mathieu Siriot"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cFamily Nous\u201d, such is the theme of this fourth section of PIPOL 12-Blog, which will be devoted mainly to the study of new family configurations, forms of parenthood as well as the ways of being a couple. More than just a catchy title, \u201cFamily Nous\u201d is one of the signifiers that allows us, as close as possible, to pinpoint and define the family of the 21st century and the discontent that reigns within it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNous\u201d is used here as an adjective and describes the art of getting out of a bind by improvising. It decomposes \u201c<\/span>THE<\/span><\/em>Family\u201d and provides a glimpse that there is nothing natural about it, but even more, that it is only a semblance, subjected to and infinitely moldable to the dominant ideology of our time, namely the \u201cmodern <\/span>One-individualism<\/span><\/em> \u201d\u00a0[1].<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout his work, French anthropologist Louis Dumont (1911-1998) has revisited the political and cultural triumph, initiated in the Age of Enlightenment, of the individualist value so characteristic of our modern societies, as opposed to traditional, holistic societies based on hierarchization and the group. For the modern society, he writes in <\/span>Homo hierarchicus<\/span><\/em>, \u201cthe Human Being is regarded as the indivisible \u02bbelementary\u2019 man, both a biological being and a thinking subject. Each particular man in a sense incarnates the whole of mankind \u201d\u00a0[2]. It is from this last sentence, Dumont explains, that the two great ideals of the modern age take shape: every man must be free and all men are equal. The individual – now freed from all feudal hierarchy, absolute monarchy and divine authority – can devote himself without constraint to his own progress, happiness and destiny. Strictly speaking, it is the birth of modern man and liberal democracy, founded on an individualism described as possessive by English thought. Political society, writes Crawford Brough Macpherson, has become \u201ca contrivance for securing individual natural rights, that is, individual freedom and proprietorship \u201d\u00a0[3]. The individual is essentially the proprietor and above all \u201cproprietor of his own person\u201d\u00a0[4].<\/span><\/p>\n

The nineteenth-century family will be shaped and developed according to this new concept of man. In one of the chapters of <\/span>Democracy in America<\/span><\/em>, entitled \u201cIndividualism in Democratic Countries\u201d, Alexis de Tocqueville explains that aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king, whereas democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it. On the basis of this discontinuous principle, Tocqueville develops, that amongst democratic nations, \u201cnew families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced \u201d\u00a0[5]. Democracy, he adds, constantly throws each man upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart\u00a0[6]. Thereby, by the mid-1800s, Tocqueville refers to the rise of the <\/span>Ones-all-alone<\/span><\/em>and the resulting pluralization of lifestyles and ways of being a family.<\/span><\/p>\n

In her book, <\/span>La vie de famille au <\/span>XIX<\/span> e<\/span><\/sup> si\u00e8cle<\/span><\/em>, historian Michelle Perrot gives an insider\u2019s account of the changes affecting the family at the time. All its members were affected by this concept of the \u201cindividual-in-the-world\u201d, to borrow an expression from L. Dumont, as the proprietor of his own freedom and a happy destiny. A child becomes an individual in his own right, women become increasingly emancipated, fathers are called upon more and more to look after their education. This effervescence of lifestyles and roles makes the family more variable and blurred, as M. Perrot notes. The father, she says, by mid-century \u201cbecomes stale \u201d\u00a0[7]. One of the main causes is the impregnation of social life with the discourse of science and capitalism. M. Perrot argues that the capitalist spirit first and foremost infiltrated the nineteenth-century family, changing its self-image. The \u201csmall family business\u201d had become commonplace. In his presentation at Pipol 11, Jacques-Alain Miller argued that the discourse of science – including the Enlightenment – and capitalism had, over time, vaporized the father. He pointed out that today\u2019s practices, for example, of fertilization have the effect of \u201cunrealizing the status of kinship \u201d\u00a0[8]. The mother, he predicted, will be the next to be vaporized.<\/span><\/p>\n

In his book <\/span>\u00catre parent dans notre monde n\u00e9olib\u00e9ral<\/span><\/em>\u00a0[9], Michel Vandenbroeck, a Belgian professor of family pedagogy, shows the current effects of these discourses on contemporary parenthood and the resulting discontent. Mr Vandenbroeck highlights the current privatization and commodification of early childhood. The consumer parent, as he calls him, has become an isolated, alone parent, competing with others. He has also been dislodged from his supposed knowledge of his child in favor of a discourse of support for parenthood, made up of neuroscientific studies and behavioral skills, designed to avoid any form of risk or crisis and to encourage a positive parenting. The contemporary parent is no longer considered as a loving and desiring being, but according to his ability, explains M. Vandenbroeck, to accumulate and learn know-how. Within this individualistic neo-liberal ideology, the parent is on the one hand subjectively relieved of responsibility and on the other held solely responsible for its children\u2019s success, its own fate, in other words its happiness capital. The effect of this logic is a source of discontent. Parents these days, as they are used to say, are \u201ccoping\u201d, \u201ctrying to manage\u201d this relentless and insatiable quest for more happiness, more <\/span>enjoyment<\/span><\/em> (plus-de jouir)<\/span><\/em>; and \u201cit\u2019s consummated so well that it\u2019s consumed \u201d\u00a0[10] – to quote Lacan on capitalism – that it can become unbearable, as evidenced by the appearance of this new symptom: \u201cParental Burn-out\u201d. The consequence of contemporary One-individualism is to expose in plain sight the absence of sexual report and the primacy of solitary enjoyment. Any form of social bond, whether familial or conjugal, must therefore be seen in terms of invention, of an inventive response to an impossible real. The challenge of this section will be to follow the singular ways in which the speaking subjects become family or couple, at a time when ideals and common points of reference are in decline.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>[1] Jacques Lacan, <\/span>The Seminar of Jacques Lacan<\/span><\/em>, <\/span>Book <\/span>XIX<\/span>,<\/span><\/em> \u2026or Worse<\/span><\/em>, ed. Jacques.-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price, (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), back cover.<\/span><\/p>\n

[2] Louis Dumont, <\/span>Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications<\/span><\/em>, (University of Chicago Press: Revised Edition, 1981), 9.<\/span><\/p>\n

[3] Crawford Brough Macpherson, <\/span>The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke<\/span><\/em>, (Hassell Street Press: 2021), 266. <\/span><\/p>\n

[4] <\/span>Ibid<\/span><\/em>.,\u00a0263. <\/span><\/p>\n

[5] Alexis de Tocqueville, transl. James T. Schleifer, <\/span>Democracy in America<\/span><\/em>, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010)<\/span><\/p>\n

[6] Cf. <\/span>Ibid<\/span><\/em>. <\/span><\/p>\n

[7] Perrot M., <\/span>La vie de famille au <\/span>XIX<\/span>\u00a0e<\/span><\/sup> si\u00e8cle<\/span><\/em>, (Seuil: Points, 2015), 66. <\/span><\/p>\n

[8] Jacques-Alain Miller , \u201cLe p\u00e8re devenu vapeur\u201d, <\/span>Mental <\/span><\/em>n<\/span>o<\/span><\/sup>\u00a048, <\/span>L\u2019impuissance des p\u00e8res<\/span><\/em>, (EFP, 2023):\u00a016.<\/span><\/p>\n

[9] Michel Vandenbroeck, <\/span>\u00catre parent dans notre monde n\u00e9olib\u00e9ral, <\/span><\/em>(Edition<\/span> \u00c9r\u00e8s, 2024). <\/span><\/p>\n

[10] Cf. Jacques Lacan, \u201cDiscours de Jacques Lacan a\u0300 l\u2019universit\u00e9\u0301 de Milan le 12 mai 1972\u201d, <\/span>Lacan in Italia 1953-1978. En Italie Lacan<\/span><\/em>, (Milan: La Salamandra, 1978) 32-55. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Translation: Ana-Marija Kroker<\/span><\/p>\n

Proofreading\u00a0: Tracy Hoijer-Favre<\/span><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cFamily Nous\u201d, such is the theme of this fourth section of PIPOL 12-Blog, which will be devoted mainly to the study of new family configurations, forms of parenthood as well as the ways of being a couple. 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