Jouissance and Passage to Civil Life: The Case of a Former FARC-EP Combatant ¹

Gozo e passagem para a vida civil: o caso de um ex-combatente das FARC-EP

Abstract:

We present some research findings on the subjective responses around the jouissance, before the semblances offered by the Other, in the case of a former FARC-EP combatant. The purpose was to locate the significant coordinates that determine their position of jouissance with respect to their choice to sign the Peace Agreement with the Colombian State. As a finding, this step was possible when re-encountering the master signifiers that give consistency to his illusion of being something for the Other, maintaining a certain share of drive satisfaction, structural, beyond the phenomenology of the war scenario.

Keywords:
Lacan; jouissance; case; former FARC-EP combatant

Resumo:

Apresentamos alguns achados de pesquisa sobre as respostas subjetivas em torno do gozo, diante dos semblantes oferecidos pelo Outro, no caso de um ex-combatente das FARC-EP. O objetivo foi localizar as coordenadas significativas que determinam sua posição de gozo em relação à escolha de assinar o acordo de paz com o Estado colombiano. Como constatação, esse passo foi possível ao reencontrar os significantes-mestre que dão consistência à sua ilusão de ser algo para o Outro, mantendo certa parcela de satisfação pulsional, estrutural, para além da fenomenologia do cenário de guerra.

Palavras-chave:
Lacan; gozo; caso; ex-combatente FARC-EP

Introduction

With the discovery of unconscious logic, Freud (1900/1986) demonstrated that the idea of a completely self-possessed ego is unsustainable. Of course, other disciplines were already beginning to indicate how structures external to the ego determine some of its paths and limit its possibilities. These constitute what we now call social sciences. However, what they deal with has nothing to do with the unconscious. They attempt to define general laws for explaining human phenomena. This is not reproachable, as, like any other discipline, they deal with the object they have delimited for their purposes. Unlike these, psychoanalysis does not make the case something particular that adds to the objective of generalization, given that its object is not susceptible to respond to laws of that nature but to a causality marked by singularity, which is why its contributions are valuable to the psychoanalyst.

[…] they are not consulted about what lies on the margins of any given knowledge, whether it be the subject’s or common knowledge, but rather about what escapes knowledge, precisely about what each one radically does not want to know (Lacan, 1967/2007, p. 140).

Thus, psychoanalysis brings us closer to unprecedented knowledge with each case, requiring us to listen to the singularity of each individual to reveal what the intention of generalization silences. This is our purpose with this article, in which we analyze the statements of a former combatant of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, People’s Army (FARC-EP), to locate the significant coordinates (Lacan, 1971/2009) that have determined his position of jouissance regarding his choice to sign the Peace Agreement with the Colombian State in 2016.

Therefore, we argue, based on the hypothesis of the unconscious, that the ex-combatant’s consent to the Colombian State’s offer of an Agreement does not fundamentally depend on the agreed points: Rural reform, Political participation, Solution to the illicit drug problem, Agreement on the victims of the conflict, and finally, Implementation, Verification, and Public Endorsement of the Agreement (Colombian State; FARC-EP, 2016). It is self-evident that the agreements on these points were fundamental in attempting to end an armed conflict that lasted more than 50 years. However, the question that drives our investigation is what is singular in the ex-combatant’s choice that allowed the drive satisfaction that motivated his participation in the guerrilla group to justify his renunciation or provided him with some possibility of continuity through other means.

Context and some background

In 2016, the Final Agreement was signed between the FARC-EP and the Colombian State after more than four years of negotiations. The pact sought to resolve the differences that had led to the formation of the revolutionary force, while also addressing reparations for the victims of violence. It incorporated observations from various social and political groups that initially considered the agreement to be insufficient or flawed in some aspects.

In light of political thought and social sciences, it could be assumed that creating paths to remedy the social injustice that motivated the armed conflict would be sufficient for its termination, at least if the progress of civilization had allowed for the change of the fact that “the conflicts of interest between men are settled in principle by violence” (Freud, 1933/1986, p. 188). However, such an assumption would overlook the place that drive holds in the constitution of the subject and the social bond.

Thus, it was expected that a good number of the combatants would follow the directives of their high command by accepting the Agreement, but nothing guaranteed that this would apply to everyone, nor that, having signed, their decision would remain firm and they would not return to arms. Indeed, some of them declared themselves dissidents and continue in the insurgency today, and some of the signatories have abandoned the process of implementing the Agreement (Ahumada, 2020). Therefore, there is no “for all” that can eliminate the singularity that pertains to each individual.

Of course, social studies explaining this phenomenon focus their hypotheses on the power struggles and conflicts within the guerrilla group (Valencia, 2021; Ahumada, 2020; Gutiérrez, 2020). However, it is also essential to consider

[…] the incalculable aspect of the human condition, which drives struggles affecting the process and its possibilities for advancement. These struggles speak to the nature of the social bond and the continuity between the subject and culture, marked by various tensions, both conscious and unconscious. These tensions materialize in discursive exchanges characterized by hatred and the persecution of the other as an enemy. (Gómez et al., 2020, p. 274).

Given that we cannot access those who declared themselves dissidents, the approach of our study is to derive insights from the case of a former combatant who not only accepted the Agreement but also, after several years, remains committed to his process of reincorporation into civilian life.

In Colombia, some psychoanalysts have approached this issue, primarily from a theoretical perspective and through psychosocial intervention. They agree that demobilization and disarmament processes are viable alternatives only if they are achieved through a change in subjective position (Ramírez, 2017; Medrano; González, 2014; Castro, 2006). This is essential for peacebuilding, even considered an ethical-political commitment from psychoanalysis (Moreno; Martínez; Uberty, 2019), seeking to construct a different place for the enemy (Gallo, 2013). Generally, we agree with these theses and their derived conclusions. However, the case we present in this article reveals a new aspect: that a process of reincorporation can also occur through the maintenance of the subjective position, provided that the signifiers that articulate it, as semblances, can be linked to new ideals, as long as these do not undermine their consistency and the fundamental issue at stake is not reduced, for the subject, to the jouissance for which “the death of the enemy satisfies a drive inclination” (Freud, 1933/1986, p. 188).

Drive

The concept of drive is one of the cornerstones of psychoanalysis. With it, Freud sutured the rift between soma and psyche that Descartes, following Aristotelian thought, bequeathed to modern science and which has gradually led to a search to reduce the human either to biological processes or to statistical data, in the pursuit of achieving the objectivity of a res extensa. Freud’s inaugural definitions of drive show this function of linkage between the psychic and the somatic that he sought to rearticulate: “If now, from the biological aspect, we pass to the consideration of psychic life, the ‘drive’ appears to us as a frontier concept between the psychic and the somatic” (Freud, 1915/1986, p. 117).

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud (1920/1986) presented two approaches in his attempt to explain the paradoxical nature of satisfaction, thanks to the compulsion to repeat, that drive poses. On the one hand, he linked it to a dialectic sustained in language, for which he used the fort-da experience. On the other hand, he tried to provide an organic basis for the drive, following the cellular theories of his time (Freud, 1920/1986). From there, he endeavored to demonstrate how, from the psychic realm, drive energy could transfer to the somatic and vice versa. Thus, he laid the foundations upon which Lacan would advance in explaining the logic of the unconscious, the constitution of the subject, and the social bond.

These advances implied, among other things, a solution to the logical problem posed by the Aristotelian-Cartesian conception of space and the type of relationship possible between bodies according to that perspective. The fundamental shift consisted of moving from the container/content relationship, which still prevails in the postulates of neuroscience, to the relationship through incorporation, through inmixing (Lacan, 1966/2001) between bodies, resulting in an original loss that ancient Stoicism labeled incorporeal.

Lacan expressed it precisely in Radiophonie:

The first body forms the second by incorporating itself into it. From this follows the incorporeal, which continues to mark the first from the time after its incorporation. Let us do justice to the Stoics for having known this term, the incorporeal, to signify how the symbolic binds to the body. (Lacan, 1970/2012, p. 431).

Lacan’s advancement took Freud’s earlier suturing to an unprecedented conception, according to which two bodies, language and organism, occupy the same space-time, meaning they are simultaneously one and two. As a result, the incorporeal emerges as a lost cause in a future anterior (Gómez, 2021). This gives the drive its rightful place. It has as its cause an object that, being incorporeal, is unrepresentable, and concerning the existence of a subject, also unrepresentable, that language, via the signifier, attempts to represent. This operation always fails, establishing an irremediable repetition, a testament to the structural lack of being. The consequence is that there is a body bound by the symbolic, by the signifier. Thus, both the organism and the signifier, through their incorporation, create a new, drive-infused body, marked by loss as its cause. This is where the singular resides, that is, the incalculable and unrepresentable with which each individual attempts to cope, utilizing the semblances provided by language, which are essentially unconscious.

Semblance

What is a semblance? It is a signifier. This means that the signifier “represents a subject for another signifier, where the subject is not. Where it is represented, the subject is absent. Therefore, even when represented, the subject is nonetheless divided” (Lacan, 1971/2009, p. 10). This is how Lacan characterizes the function of the signifier; it attempts to indicate something that, despite being unrepresentable, continues to insist as absence, as an obstacle, and as division. In other words, it is what disrupts the illusion of unity of the ego - and of the subject - with which humans dream.

Insofar as the signifier comes to the place of that absence, it attempts to establish an operation that sets repetition in motion, which each individual faces. These signifiers, which are also an effort to create a constant that provides an appearance of consistency, push the subject to encounter the impossible repeatedly. As is well known, Lacan referred to them as master signifiers, which account for their ordering function, although, being unconscious and articulated to the real aspects of the drive, they do not carry any knowledge. Thus, each individual is oriented by a repetition sustained in an order whose only consistency is provided by the master signifiers, as semblances of a being that is lacking.

The above highlights that all discourse - the very structure of the social bond in which each individual seeks to find a place - is nothing but semblance. The expression nothing but should not mislead; the power of semblance is such that it supports how each person experiences jouissance, thanks to a repetition that one suffers from, as if powerless to know how to deal with It. It is precisely some of these semblances, these significant coordinates, that we will identify in the case we analyze later.

Reincorporation

The term adopted within the framework of the Peace Agreement to describe the transition of ex-combatants to civilian life is reincorporation. This term coincides interestingly with what we have indicated in the previous sections about incorporation and the incorporeal. Of course, it is highly unlikely that the choice of this word has anything to do with the perspectives of Stoicism and Lacan. However, appealing to the very principles of psychoanalysis, the coincidence and ambiguity presented to us cannot be overlooked.

Thus, as with any other person, there was an inaugural moment in which those who are now undergoing the process of reincorporation experienced their incorporation - in the Stoic/Lacanian sense of the term, of course. Forcedly, that is, unconsciously, the insurgency is one way, among other possible ways, in which a path was found for the satisfaction of the drive, guided by the significant coordinates that found, in the offer of the armed group, a place in the Other to make the semblances consistent with which a subject attempts to represent themselves.

From this, it becomes admissible to hypothesize that reincorporation, in the sense in which the term is used in the context of the Agreement, does not necessarily constitute an event that makes the transition to civilian life possible unless it allows for the rediscovery of those semblances that sustain the illusion of being something for the Other.

About the method

We use the psychoanalytic clinical method, which is, to some extent, applicable outside the spatial confines of a consulting room (Greiser, 2012). This method “is characterized by the study of a case, a study conducted by delving into all its particularities”, which is why “the ideal of repeatable experience observed in numerous cases is replaced here by the exploration of a singular case” (Pasternak, 1982, p. 146-147).

Thus, it is necessary to understand that since this inquiry employs the psychoanalytic clinical method outside the framework of transference, it does not aim to treat the individuals participating in the research but rather to uncover the knowledge that sheds new light on the singular and the subjective, in the face of a phenomenon articulated in everyday life as a social issue. In that sense:

Research in psychoanalysis is thus the opposite of dogmatically seeking to confirm, for example, a theory or a presupposition. It is about finding a new significant articulation that, in the well-said, expresses in an unprecedented way a real that was impossible to name until then. This requires an effort, the one related to overcoming the repression barrier inherent to the researcher, and authorizing oneself to know beyond what one knows. (Ramírez, 2004, p. 1).

From this perspective, it is about encountering unprecedented knowledge, provided through the subjective discourse that demands going beyond the phenomenological relationships of the ego with the world, to question the relationships of the subject with language, or in other words, with knowledge structured as a language. We are not situated in the clinic of the gaze but in a clinic of listening and reading, of the signifier and the letter.

Case presentation

The interview we have chosen to present in this article was conducted with a man who spent 18 years as a member of the FARC-EP, where he attained a mid-level command position and became a military strategist. He comes from a peasant family and joined this guerrilla group during his adolescence. In his statements, we find what subjectively allowed him to make this choice, as well as the choice to transition to civilian life after the signing of the Peace Agreement.

Although he maintains that there was no forced recruitment, official discourses indicate that this guerrilla group did indeed carry it out, especially with children and adolescents. This clarification is of interest, as according to the laws of the Colombian State, minors under 18 are not considered subjects with the right to choose; that is, all their choices must be endorsed by their parents or the adult legally responsible for their upbringing.

This same observation can be found in social science analyses. However, our analysis is based precisely on the idea that every choice is always a forced choice, not in the sense of social determinations, but in the modalities of jouissance that are found, as Lacan (1987) suggests, determined by the insistence of the chains of signifiers. It is not, therefore, about the subject of law, but about the subject of the unconscious. To understand this, we have found in this person’s discourse two signifiers: “almirar²” (almire) and “precariedad” (precarity), which will allow us to show these unconscious determinations.

Joining the armed group

Talking about forced recruitment implies assuming that there is an omnipotent Other who can exert domination by subjugating the person, which places the individual in the position of a victim and exempts them from all responsibility. In psychoanalysis, however, we speak of a subject who chooses because they find in that Other the possibility to maintain the insistence of the chain of signifiers, that is, the possibility of repeating a certain position concerning jouissance.

In the interviewee, we found a privileged signifier, “almirar.” This signifier brings together several chains of signifiers: one related to the imaginary identification found in various parts of the interview, such as when the guerrillas arrived in his community wearing their camouflage and carrying weapons, presenting a semblance of power (being someone), and another related to the drive to see, which appears repeatedly in the interview. The first can be exemplified with the following fragment:

The first time they appeared, they said... - even I got a beating for sneaking out of the house to see those people, - they said that a group of armed people had arrived in the center of the village... and when they said that they had weapons unknown to me... then I got this urge, this desire to go and look... and my mom and dad locked me up, but I snuck out... I went and looked [laughs].

The “urge, the desire to go and look” appears in his account related to the weapons those men carried, to the point of transgressing his parents’ attempt to prevent him from looking. This is an urge that imposes itself, meaning it does not go through conscious reflection but rather through a drive for satisfaction; a jouissance that the gaze seeks before something fascinating. The encounter with that jouissance inaugurated a fantasy about what he could become through that path:

Then we started playing as guerrillas and the army… and I don’t know if that´s what it was [...] sometimes I can’t explain why I dreamed, eh… even in my dreams, I saw myself as a guerrilla with a rifle, with a backpack. So I said, I think I was born to be a guerrilla, uh-huh… I dreamed.

The imaginary capture, through that identification with the “guerrilla with a rifle”, provides a clue to what motivated his joining the armed group. Of course, the revolutionary discourse of the guerrilla serves as a veil to consciously justify the supposed greater good to which they aspire, as he mentions in the following excerpt:

[…] may education be free; schools and universities should not be private; and those who do not have the financial means to study should have scholarships and grants available. Things like that; that healthcare should also be free and not a business.

However, the play and the dream reveal a desire that imposes itself as destiny: “I think I was born to be a guerrilla”. Joining the ranks constituted the way to fulfill that destiny and to procure the jouissance he had discovered from that moment when he could “look” and see himself in those armed men, like a mirror whose images would be reflected through dreams and play. It is about the “gesture by which the child in the mirror, turning towards the one who carries him, appeals with his gaze to the witness who confirms, by verifying it, the recognition of the image of joyful assumption where he certainly already was” (Lacan, 1960/2009, p. 645).

Regarding the forced choice in this subject, his statement contains an affirmation, an assent to his choice: “In my case, I left because I wanted to”; a phrase that he immediately negates: “In my case, it’s not that I wanted to, but…”. What is precisely enigmatic about forced choice is how it is possible to recognize oneself as responsible for wanting something that, at the same time, one does not want. Not wanting what one desires.

It is precisely this hesitation that appears in his discourse that reveals the division of the subject. As will be seen later, such a choice is not recognized by the ego, as it conceals what emerged there with a phantasmatic construction in the form of a family romance:

When I went to war, I was in eleventh grade. I only had four months left to finish, and I saw that there were four of us siblings studying... and I saw that my father, who was a farmer... economically, he couldn’t manage.

This section is linked to the signifier precariedad - master signifier (S1) - found in the interview, which allows us to situate the coordinates of a fiction that produces deception concerning desire and jouissance. Such fiction reveals something of the truth about the subject’s position concerning the barred Other and emerges in this man’s account when he experiences “the emergence of what constitutes, for the subject, the privileged moment of his jouissance” (Lacan, 1958-1959, 2014, p. 483).

Son of a farmer who struggled to provide education, shelter, and food for his children, this man says that the situation was “very precarious”; despite the efforts of his father, “there was always something missing”. This metonymic aspect of lack becomes evident in his discourse through the self-reference of being nobody, as will be shown later.

The fiction regarding his joining the guerrilla appears as a plug for those inexplicable urges: “In my case, it wasn’t... but the economic situation my father was experiencing, very precarious”. This is surprising when asked about the type of opportunity he saw in the guerrilla, he responds “very few” and goes on to describe the limitations experienced in an illegal military organization: “Things were very limited... the systems, the communication, the dental care, nursing, all that” and even trust, because “very few people were chosen for that... because of infiltration”. He concludes with, “So the opportunity was very precarious”.

Precariedad is a signifier that ties together with the signifier almirar, and both are linked to the desire “to be someone in life!” To become someone, because according to his words, “I was never anything!”

The fiction we have been referring to is bolstered by this signifier precariedad. Social science discourses have highlighted conditions of social precarity, understood as the lack or degradation of an individual’s or community’s living conditions, with the opportunities that society should provide for the fulfillment of personal or collective projects. These conditions are cited as one of the reasons individuals join the guerrilla. While this may be true from the perspective of the objective conditions pointed out by these discourses, psychoanalysis can uncover subjective conditions that motivate such choices, which can be appreciated on a case-by-case basis.

Thus, being nobody, those objective conditions of familial and collective precarity, distort in this individual when questioned about his position regarding “I was never anyone or never amounted to anything,” so recurrent in his narrative. Thus, we find that before joining the FARC-EP, he was a distinguished young man in school, a student representative, and one of the best students with plans to attend university through a secured scholarship. Faced with this, he exclaims, “Alright! That’s how it ended... [silence] I mean... I don’t know what happened to me, it all turned around suddenly” [...] “suddenly I dropped everything [silence], like that... I left”; later he resumes and says:

When I joined the movement, they told me, “Look, here you live through this and that”. They explained the worst to me: you have to endure hunger, you have to walk at night, sleep wet; well, that’s what they told me... If you accept these conditions, you can stay... otherwise, you can leave. You can go home, you might last eight days, fifteen days, a month or two, think carefully so you don’t make a mistake later on...

He was allowed to repent, join the militias, and not be a guerrilla, but he responded, “I want to go in wholeheartedly”. As mentioned earlier, what he sees there is the privileged possibility of his jouissance. This “I want to go in wholeheartedly” categorizes him “as an impulse, something like ... a moment of change so ... like a 360-degree turn from one moment to another”; that is, he saw in the FARC-EP, for many years and up to the beginning of the peace process, the conditions of jouissance that guide his subjectivity.

Jouissance position

This jouissance finds one of its clearest forms in the relationship with death during the period of belonging to the armed group.

In that bombing, when I saw that number of planes... firing... because when I heard that barrage of planes and that burst of bombs... waiting for them to fall to the ground, I said well, I’m going to encounter death, which I’ve always wondered about, what will it be like? Today I’m going to find out.

There manifests a desire for death linked to the relationship with the Other that demands the surrender of life as an imperative. Precarity pushes not towards appearance but towards waste. It is interesting to see how jouissance is at play in this desire for death, in obeying orders that could lead to the loss of life. The Other’s command veils this desire for death.

I never considered death, like saying, for example, “What will death be like?” or “When I die”, or... what will happen to me, nothing. But already, in the movement, already in the war, I always thought about that... what will my death be like? Because once you give your word to join an armed group, your life, your own life, no longer matters. Because there, it’s all orders.

The question about death that arises when joining the armed group and being under the orders of a consistent Other, one that does not deceive, allows us to understand how experiencing war “firsthand”, as he himself names it, constitutes the signifier that attempts to veil what metonymically slides within the signifying chain: war, precarity, being nothing - death.

For me, living through war, experiencing it firsthand, is to confront the State under very precarious conditions... The only thing one thinks about... Once you’re in a war, there’s a law of war that says... There’s a saying, I don’t know how it goes exactly, it says, in war, if you’re not fit to kill, you’re fit to be killed.

We see, then, how what allowed him to remain in the armed group is the veiling of jouissance under the guise of a consistent Other who dictates a law regarding death: “to serve to kill or to be killed”.

Transition to civilian life

With the signing of the Peace Agreement, the high command - previously representatives of the consistent Other - ordered former combatants to adhere to the agreements made. Initially, it might be assumed that this order marked the ex-combatant’s transition to civilian life. However, the findings from the interview reveal otherwise.

To contextualize the above, it is crucial to consider his retrospective view of the meaning of guerrilla struggle, which indicates a shift concerning the Other:

I say it didn’t make sense. Why? Back then, we didn’t analyze the situation. Now, with the knowledge I have, I start to analyze every detail or every move that was made within the group. It’s like... many of us were deceived, that’s how I feel. Why? Because when the peace process was signed, many of the leaders couldn’t handle that challenge...

Thus, this Other who dictated a law is now being questioned. Before the Agreement was signed, the leaders “had been commanding for 20, 30, 40 years; they could move people with just one finger, as the saying goes, ‘do this, bring me that, get me this’, I don’t know how you’ll do it, but get it”, and then suddenly, “out of nowhere they say, ‘well, from tomorrow onwards, you are nothing; you can’t give orders. You are civilians now”. “So, they couldn’t handle that challenge.” This expresses the shift from dictating laws to being nothing, a matter that also implicates him, not only because his position was of middle command, but because he had joined the armed group as an opportunity to “become someone in life”.

The downfall of this now inconsistent Other marks his transition to civilian life. Upon signing the Agreement, those who complied were sent to Transitional Village Zones (ZVTN), where the Colombian state provides the necessary conditions for the transition process. Staying in these zones is not mandatory, and those who choose to leave continue to be part of the reintegration and normalization process, but the monitoring and security guarantees provided are more “precarious”.

Regarding this transition, the former combatant says:

The issue with my departure from the zone... After the peace process was completed... they wanted to continue managing life like it was still military... So, the peace process was signed, we handed over our weapons, well, we were civilians now. But then they started with military procedures again, right? We had to line up, we had to take guard duty at night. I told them: ‘This can’t happen! Understand, gentlemen, we are no longer a guerrilla movement... I’m not going to submit to your whims anymore because I’m a civilian now, and you are nothing.

In the quote, we see how the fall of the Other, which although still demands submission, has ended up on the side of “being nothing”, marks the definitive moment of leaving the guerrilla movement to embrace civilian life. Leaving the ZVTN, he encounters a situation of “precarity” where he will seek a new way to “become someone”. With the illusions offered by the guerrilla’s Other shattered, he is now confronted with the illusions offered by the state through the Agreement, to which he takes an ambiguous stance:

In the Agreement, there were many points that the government was supposed to fulfill, apart from basic income and personal productive projects... Other points that were signed for... society, right? These are things that still haven’t been fulfilled. But individually... in that regard, they have been fulfilled because the projects... little by little, consistently... I mean, the projects are going to be implemented...

The FARC and the State are thus positioned as deceiving Others, raising the following question: what then keeps him committed to transitioning to civilian life? His answer: “To be someone... and the other... what moved me the most, now in civilian life, to work and move forward was... after I found out my daughter was born”. This way, the cycle is established in which jouissance is articulated through semblances; he joins the guerrilla to “be someone in life”, and leaves it when becoming “nothing”, he finds another semblance to “be someone”: being a father.

I said, ‘Alright, my daughter is here’... whatever I have to do, I’ll give her everything; so that at least my daughter has... a better future... through my effort, at least ensuring she has a way of life... not very good, but at least with enough to eat.

At this point, we can position the stance regarding what remains on the horizon; to be someone under the condition of not achieving it; to remain in precarity to continue enjoying. This is evident in the quote when, despite stating “I’ll give her everything”, the limit imposed by the jouissance in precarity returns when he says, “a way of life... not very good, but at least with enough to eat”.

Conclusions

The Peace Agreement unquestionably constitutes a significant social event in the quest to end the Colombian armed conflict with the FARC-EP. However, this does not equate to the subjective event necessary to facilitate the transition to civilian life on an individual basis. The case of the analyzed former combatant teaches us that it is necessary to rediscover the master signifiers that make it possible to give consistency to the illusion of being something for the Other and thereby maintain a certain quota of structural drive satisfaction, beyond the phenomenology of the war scenario.

Given the above, it is necessary to consider that relinquishing the jouissance found under the protection of the guerrilla would entail a transaction where, in addition to the semblances offered by the Other located within the legitimacy of the State, an event must arise that allows each individual to rediscover the old within the new. This means providing a substitution where the structural aspirations of jouissance can articulate with new semblances, as it is essential to reckon with the irreducibility of jouissance and its untameable insistence. Therefore, this insistence will not be satisfied or appeased through the offerings of the State-such as meeting basic needs, organizing individual or collective life projects, or societal changes-but demands that each person find something within the historicization of the drive through the substitution of the signifiers that operate as semblances. In the words of the former combatant: “a turn like a 360-degree change from one moment to another”, meaning to fantasize that (not) everything changes so that (not) everything remains the same.

In this way, this case demonstrates to us that, following what Lacan proposed (1956), “Our research has led us to recognize that the automatism of repetition (Wiederholungszwang) takes its origin in what we have called the insistence of the chain of signifiers” (Lacan, 1956, p. 26).

Finally, we find a common point between the research conducted using the psychoanalytic clinical method and the psychoanalytic clinical practice itself. Namely, both work with discourse and, to that extent, indications can be found of the subject’s relationship with language as well as their relationship to jouissance. However, it is necessary to recognize the difference between the experience of psychoanalysis, where through transference and interpretation a subject may rectify their subjective position, fundamental for bringing about the analytic act, and noting thereby how one can become aware of their position of jouissance. On the side of research, signifiers and coordinates of jouissance can be traced without implying that the interviewee can achieve a subjective rectification.

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• 1
  Article derived from the research Subjective responses regarding jouissance, in the face of the semblances offered by the Other through official discourses, in individuals in the process of reincorporation into civilian life within the framework of the Peace Accords signed between the Colombian state and the FARC-EP. This research was conducted within the Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Contemporary Symptoms research line of the Clinical and Mental Health group at the Universidad Católica de Pereira, categorized as A1 by MINCIENCIAS and funded by the Directorate of Research and Innovation, project internal code: DII-017-002.
• 2
  This is a mistake in which “admire” is replaced by “almire”.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  16 Sept 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  17 Feb 2022
• Accepted
  25 July 2024