Umbr(a): Semblance

From the editors'
Refusing to oppose truth to semblance, psychoanalysis models its utterances on their alliance. If Freud creates a number of 'scientific' myths that continue to elicit derisive laughter from modern psychologists - Oedipus, the primal father - it is for no other reason than that psychoanalysis emerges at the point where this repressed myth must return in the guise of rationalism itself in order to combat the fierce dialectic of obscurantism and rational atheism... Rather than unmasking the deception of the signifier, psychoanalysis produces this deception in its emptiness, indirectly revealing its semblance and separating off its illusory mystifications without sacrificing the singular jouissance it marks... Far from distancing itself from semblance, by making it into an everyday object against which one can do battle, psychoanalysis should maintain the possibility that this semblance of being might be our only chance to decide, to intervene politically.