456-457 / 536
THE SPEAKING BODY
Xth Congress of the WAP,
Rio de Janeiro 2016
457
456
“It speaks, does the unconscious, so that it depends on language, about which
we know so little: despite what under the term linguistery I group whatever
claims –and this is new– to intervene in men’s affairs in the name of linguistics.
Linguistics being the science that concerns itself with
lalangue,
which I write as
one word, so as to specify its object, as is done in every other science.”
p. 5-6
“Which allows for the grounding of the unconscious in the ex–sistence of
one more subject for the soul. For the soul as the assumed sum of the body’s
functions. (…)
In fact the subject of the unconscious is only in touch with the soul via the
body, by introducing thought into it: here contradicting Aristotle. Man does not
think with his soul, as the Philosopher imagined (…)
Thought is in disharmony with the soul. And the Greek
nous
is the myth of
thought’s accommodating itself to the soul, accommodating itself in conformity
with the world, the world (
Umwelt
)
for which the soul is held responsible,
whereas the world is merely the fantasy through which thought sustains itself-
‘reality’ no doubt, but to be understood as a grimace of the real.”
p. 6
“How did this happen before the unconscious was located? In order to work,
a practice doesn’t have to be elucidated; this is what can be deduced from that.
(…) There are, insofar as the unconscious is implicated, two sides presented by
the structure, by language.”
p. 7
“Whence the unconscious, namely the insistence through which desire
manifests itself, in other words the repetition of the demand working through
it–isn’t that what Freud says of it at the very moment he discovers it? whence the
unconscious, if it is true that the structure –recognized as producing, as I say,
language out of
lalangue–
does indeed order it, reminds us that to the side of
meaning that fascinates us in speech –in exchange for which being– this being
whose thought is imagined by Parmenides –acts as speech’s screen–reminds us, I
conclude, that to the side of meaning the study of language opposes the side of
the sign.”
p. 8
“Namely that one of these phenomena is naively articulated: articulated means
verbalized, naively means according to vulgar logic,
lalangue’s
usage as it is
commonly received (…)
I’ve talked about a side of the sign in order to mark within it its association with
the signifier. But the signifier differs from the sign in that its inventory is already
a given of
lalangue.
To speak of a code doesn’t work, precisely because it presupposes meaning.
The signifying inventory of
lalangue
supplies only the cipher of meaning.
According to context, each word takes on an enormous and disparate range
of meaning, meaning whose heteroclite condition is often attested to by the
dictionary.”
p. 9
“
Lalangue
is the precondition of meaning
.
”
p. 9
[Manuductio, J.–A.M.]
“No doubt their grammar is buttressed by writing, and it bears witness, for
all that, to a real, to a real which remains, as we know, an enigma as long as in
analysis the pseudo-sexual spring doesn’t pop out: that real which, capable only
of lying to the partner, is marked as neurosis, perversion, or psychosis. (…)
What Freud discovers in the unconscious –here I’ve only been able to invite you
to take a look at his writings to see if I speak truly– is something utterly different
from realizing that broadly speaking one can give a sexual meaning to everything
one knows, for the reason that knowing has always been open to the famous
metaphor (the side of meaning Jung exploited).
It is the real that permits the effective unknotting of what makes the symptom
hold together, namely a knot of signifiers.”
p. 10
“I do not base this idea of discourse on the ex–sistence of the unconscious. It is
the unconscious that I locate through it—it ex–sists only through a discourse.
(…) The unconscious thereby ex–sists all the more in that since it is witnessed
clearly only in the discourse of the hysteric, what’s to be found everywhere else is
just grafted onto it: yes, even, astonishing as it may seem, in the discourse of the
analyst, where what is made of it is culture. (…)
Let’s say that it is the ideal worker, the one Marx made the flower of capitalist
economy in the hope of seeing him take over the discourse of the master; which,
in effect, is what happened, although in an unexpected form. There are surprises
in these matters of discourse; that is, indeed, the point of the unconscious.”
p. 14
“Only analytic discourse gives ex–sistence, to the unconscious, as Freudian.”
p. 14
[Manuductio, J.–A.M.]
“So as to embody what the structure entails, namely allowing the subject, the
subject of the unconscious, to take him as the cause of the subject’s own desire.”
p. 15
“I conclude that scientific discourse and the hysteric’s discourse have
almost
the
same structure, which explains our error, induced by Freud himself, in hoping
that one day there would be a thermodynamic able to provide –within the
future of science– the unconscious with its posthumous explanation.”
p. 19
Jacques Lacan