This paper presents the research-address of “Laboratorio di Studi Lacaniani” founded in 2012 by Prof. Mimmo Pesare at University of Salento, Dept. of Human and Social Sciences, with the aim of wide-spreading the network of researchers in both Education and Theoretical Psychoanalysis fields. Here a part of my Ph.D. research contribution is presented, that is the one that connects a Lacan-oriented Philosophy of Education – which is systematically dedicated the first part of my research – and the attention to youth subcultures as a context of expression and informal education through a case study on punk subculture in Slovenia before its independence. The “Underground” scene in Ljubljana during the '80s is the background of both the punks were born (the Socialist Republic lead by Tito), but also the Grund of Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis research, that nowadays is well-known through Slavoj Žižek world-wide philosophical activity. “Underground” is the keyword to connect the two sides of the enquiry: on one hand, it is the psychopedagogical look on the Unconscious, with the attention to the latent structures that work in each subjectivation and self-formation (Massa 1997); on the other hand, it represents the storytelling of a fellowship, the one between the intellectuals (Ljubljana School) and youth subcultures (Slovene punks and avant-gardes), that is here presented in order to enlighten a ‘minor’ context, that enriches a “Psychopedagogical and Lacan-oriented Theory of Subjectivation”. The youth subcultures are shown as “sublime objects” of the research, that welcomes the contemporary reception of Jacques Lacan theoretical and clinical interpretation by a transdisciplinary approach.

In the general theoretical context, it is specified that Subjectivation is a lemma that comes from philosophical thought, mainly from the XIX Century and, in other respects, from that of psychoanalysis. For both (philosophy and psychoanalysis), the net of the uses and research methodologies within which the notion of subjectivation appears, it is possible to isolate a transdisciplinary red thread that characterizes its semantics. Whether it is philosophy, psychoanalysis or other fields of knowledge that have borrowed the notion from them – some sociological orientations, some anthropology, the history and hermeneutics of systems of thought – we can agree on the fact that in the social sciences it is associated with the transversal concept of the construction of one’s own subjectivity.

The unconscious, as the primary vector of subjectivation – as the bearer of this transformative and relational dimension – is then, above all, thinkable as a form of social discourse, as the singular and irreducible decode that the human being makes of the structure–cultural, linguistic, educational, anthropological–that pre-exists it, re-elaborating itself in a personal way. In these terms, shifting from the clinical language to the philosophical-educational one, the subjectivation would, therefore, represent a device that catalyzes the social discourse (the Lacanian Big Other, the Foucaldian structure) in the singular assumption of the personal and formative history of an individual.

By saying that “punk is a symptom” (Žižek 1981), the Slovene philosopher starts a new consideration of punk subcultures that are related to the critique of ideology and the “symbolic” social discourse functioning. According to its theory, Žižek warns that punk irrupts into the normal functioning of the Big Other (the Socialist discourse) by representing a removed dimension. The Ljubljana School, in fact, defended punk and avant-guards by a theoretical support on the Journal of Theoretical Psychoanalysis “Problemi”, siding against censorship and repression of youth movements, that with their “symptomatic” expression were showing that “the king was naked”. That is, exactly, the inconsistency of the Big Other in the form of a crystalized ideology.

What is important to underline in this context is the dynamic nature of Subjectivation process; in order to trace its pedagogical legitimacy, in the case one assumes the philosophical roots or the psychoanalytical ones, subjectivation implies the consideration of a “transformative dimension” (cfr. "Umbildung" theory by Sola 2003). In other words, and more specifically, for the human being to constitute himself as a subject, it is necessary to amend every form of innatism and postulate that his life is determined by that principle of “psychic causality” (Lacan 1966) that builds him in contamination with the other, rather than thinking of it as the repository of a pre-constituted plexus of temperaments, attitudes and tendencies, inherited from some predetermined genetic or character code. There is no ineluctability (and this is, probably, the political element in the question) in all the paths of existence. We are always the result of a law of cause and effect that shapes our lives on the basis of a “phenomenology of the encounter” with the other, understood both as similar and as a socio-cultural structure. Contrary to the innatist interpretation, both Foucault and Lacan insist on the fact that human existence is always “the product of a discourse about a body,” where discourse is a sort of technical term that describes all that the linguistic, cultural, values-based, social code represents for our daily life and within which it is immersed even before our birth. Lacan defines this code as “the Big Other” or “the discourse of the Other” i.e., the transcendence of a third structure which removes the naked life of the human being from its physiological and animal framework, guaranteeing the subject its “cultural intelligibility” (Zupančič 2000). Freud, in lesson 31 of Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1917), compares human subjectivity to a dialectical institution: the Ego is not the ruler of subjectivity, an absolute monarch who enjoys a stable and definitive unity and compactness. Subjectivity, rather, is the site of a permanent debate between a multiplicity of instances and voices. This new subject that overcomes and overturns Descartes’ modern subject and that constitutes itself in that gap between being and truth, is the “subject of the unconscious,” the insu que sait, the “not knowing that knows” (Lacan, 1986).

If Pedagogy is the discipline that reflects on man’s education and Psycho-pedagogy represents a particular expression of it that privileges the deep dynamics of this formation, the process of subjectivation or the path along which the human is singularized and separated from the other (even if it is structured with the other as we will see in the next chapter), cannot but reenter, by right, into the question of education. The construction of an existence takes place, pedagogically, through this singular/plural dialectic: the subject is built through encounters with his Bildungsrats and, at the same time, through the unique and unrepeatable singular assumption in relation to these encounters, in a continuous communication between intrapsychic and interpsychic (Pesare 2018). After all, our idea of the subject, that is, the idea of the subject shared by those who internalized Freud’s lesson (also in pedagogy), is not that of an autarchic, monolithic subject, endowed with a self-defined aura. "Punk is a symptom" is a way to show how the social discourse works in both individual and group identity, and interrupts the normal functioning of the Big Other (Lacan Graph of Desire). It is a way to enlighten the actions lead by youth subcultures, bearer of a "censored" meaning (Agagiù 2020). If punk is the most radical subculture (Madrussan 2021, Hebdige 1979), and the Master is the "Subject supposed to know" something about a symptom, it is necessary, according to Žižek, to let the symptom itself speak, and not to censor it. As the symptom comes from the Unconscious, and the Unconscious is the depositary of "truth", the knowledge-field should look, also, to the "not knowing, that knows".

References Agagiù, C. 2020. Speech, Event, Desire: Psycho-Pedagogical Perspectives about the Symptom, in "International Journal of Psychoanalysis and Education", vol. 12, n. 2, 2020, 6-11. Freud, S. 1917. Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, in ID., 1968, Gesammelte Werke, 18 vol., Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer. Foucault, M. 2001. L'herméneutique du sujet, Paris: Seuil-Gallimard. Hebdige, D.1979. Subculture. The Meaning of style, London: Methuen &co. Lacan, J. 1966. Écrits, Paris: Seuil. Id. 2001. Autres écrits, Paris: Seuil. Id. 1986. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre VII. L’éthique de la psychanalyse (1959-60), Paris: Seuil. Massa, R. 1997. Formazione del soggetto e proceduralità pedagogiche, in A. Madrussan, E. 2021. Formazione e Musica. L’ineffabile significante nel quotidiano giovanile, Milano: Mimesis. Pesare, M. 2018. Il soggetto barrato. Per una psicopedagogia di orientamento lacaniano, Milano: Mimesis. Sola, G., 2004. Umbildung. La «trasformazione» nella formazione dell'uomo, Milano: Bompiani. Žižek, S. 1981. Dragi bralec, “Problemi – Društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo”, Ljubljana, n. 205/206, XIX. Zupančič, A. 2000. Ethics of the Real. Kant, Lacan, London: Verso.