460-461 / 536
THE SPEAKING BODY
Xth Congress of the WAP,
Rio de Janeiro 2016
461
460
“The Place, Origin, and End of My Teaching” (1967), [MT]
“Our subject as such, the subject that speaks (…) being divided, it is bound
up with that other subject–the subject of the unconscious, which happens to
exist independently of any linguistic structure. That is what the discovery of the
unconscious is.”
p. 53-54
“On Hysteria” (1977) Trans.: N. Wülfling. [PN 21, 2010]
“The unconscious originates from the fact that the hysteric doesn’t know what
she is saying, when she truly says something with the words she lacks. The
uncoscious is a sediment of language.”
p. 9
“The idea of unconscious representation is a totally empty idea. Freud was rather
beating around the unconscious. Firstly, it is an abstraction. We can only suggest
the idea of a representation by removing from the real all its concrete weight.
The idea of unconscious representation is a crazy thing. Yet that is how Freud
approached it. There are traces of this very late in his writings.
The unconscious, I propose to give it another body, because it is thinkable
that one thinks of things without weighing them, it only takes words. Words
give body. It does not mean at all that we understand what it is. That’s the
unconscious: one is guided by words of which one understands nothing.”
p. 11
Geneva Lecture on the Symptom
(1975). Trans.: R. Grigg [An 1, 1989]
“The unconscious is not only being un-known.”
p. 12
“How can one sustain a hypothesis such as that of the unconscious, unless one
sees that it is the manner in which the subject, if indeed there is such a thing as a
subject that is not divided, is impregnated, as it were, by language?”
p. 13
“In those times philosophy was a way of life –a way of life concerning which
it could be perceived, well before Freud, that language, this language that has
absolutely no theoretical existence, always intervenes in the form of what I
call– using a word that I have wanted to make as close as possible to the word
‘
lallation
’, ‘babbling’–‘
lalangue
’, ‘llanguage’.
(…) It is absolutely certain that it is in the way in which llanguage has
been spoken and also heard as such, in its particularity, that something will
subsequently emerge in dreams, in all sorts of mistakes, in all manners of
speaking. It is in this
moterialism
, if you will allow me to use this word for the
first time, that the unconscious takes hold.”
p. 14
“It is not for nothing that man is happy with one, or even several, only. It is
because he doesn’t desire the others. Why does he have no desire for the others?
Because they are not consonant, if I can put it like this, with his unconscious.”
p. 17
“How is it that orthography exists? It is the most stupefying thing in the
world, and that moreover it is manifestly through writing that speech makes its
opening, through writing and uniquely through writing, the writing of what are
called figures [
les chiffres
]
,
because no one wants to speak of numbers.”
p. 23
Columbia University: Lecture on the Symptom
(1975). Trans.: A. Price
and R. Grigg [C/C]
“I mean that a body has another way of consisting than what I was just referring
to as a spoken form, in the form of the unconscious, in so far as it is from
speech, as such, that it emerges. These are marks whose trace we can see in the
unconscious. These are marks that have been left by a certain way of relating to
knowledge that constitutes the fundamental substance of the unconscious.”
p. 14-15
“Interpretation must always, on the analyst’s side, take into account that, in
what is said, there is the sonorous element. And this has to be consonant with
the unconscious.”
p. 15
The Other is missing
(1980), [TV]
“Contrary to what is said, concerning phallic bliss [
jouissance
], Woman, if I may
so speak, since she doesn’t exist, is not deprived of it.
She does not have any less of it than the man to whom her instrument
(organon) is hooked However little she herself is endowed with it (for let us
acknowledge that it is slim), she none the less obtains the effect of what limits
the other edge of that bliss, namely, the irreducible unconscious. (…)
It is on the condition of not getting carried away by the idea of an antiphallic
nature, of which there is no trace in the unconscious, that they can hear what in
that unconscious is not intent on being uttered, but attains what is elaborated
from it, as procuring them a properly phallic bliss.”
p. 134
Jacques Lacan