490-491 / 536
THE SPEAKING BODY
Xth Congress of the WAP,
Rio de Janeiro 2016
491
490
subtracted, is to identify with the remaining symptom. The assumption is that
in order to have symptoms, one must have a body, one must not be a body; and
that, in order to identify with the symptom, one must have a psychoanalyst. The
use of language is proof that there are many resources in ‘having’. The symptom
in its natural state, the symptom not denaturalized by analysis, is what shows
that one cannot identify man with his body.”
p. 21-22
“Perhaps we should scrutinize, vary, specify on the body event definition. The
expression is a condensation. In fact, it’s always a matter of events of discourse
which leave traces in the body. And these traces disturb the body. They make
a symptom, but only if the subject in question is able to read these traces, to
decipher them. They have a tendency to lead finally to what the subject can
manage to retrieve from the events the symptoms trace.”
p. 22
“In traumatism in the Lacanian sense, the core of the traumatic event is not
attributable to an accident. Or it is, but the possibility itself of the accident
which leaves traces of affect in the full sense I’ve given, the possibility itself
of the contingent accident, which is always necessarily produced, opens the
incidence of language on the speaking being, and precisely on the body. The
essential attachment is the tracing of language on the body. The principal of
the fundamental event, tracer of affect, is not seduction, not the menace of
castration, not the loss of love, not the observation of parental coitus, not
Oedipus, but the relation to language.
Lacan will condense this, perhaps in an excessively logical way, ‘the signifier is
the cause of jouissance’; but that is written in the notion of the fundamental
body event which is the incidence of language. Thus he refers to Joyce’s
Finnegan’s Wake
, the totally indecipherable account of Joyce’s infantile
memories.”
p. 27
“If we take the categories I’ve presented from the beginning, the Lacanian
event, in the sense of trauma, that leaves traces in each one is the sexual non–
relation. Lacan states that the trace left in each one is not as subject but as
speaker. It leaves symptoms and affects as traces in the body. Lacan defines the
encounter of love as the encounter with everything that marks the trace of exile
of the sexual in a body. That is to say, the traces in the body of what is most
intolerable. Quoting Freud,
the internal end of drive is only the modifications, felt
as satisfaction of the body itself
.”
p. 33-34
“Is the signifier matter? Is the signifier properly speaking material? An ambiguity
persists in the measure in which we only apprehend it as a form which
materializes. But the signifier as such, that is to say as order, is pure formalism.
This is the point that Lacan makes in his writing
Lituraterre
. He speaks of
the signifier as matter in suspension, and he pictures it as clouds displaced by
the wind, but which are susceptible to precipitate in water, and this water is
susceptible to having material effects on the soil, on the ground. In this imagery,
it is the material character of the signifier or lack of it that is in question.
Lacan’s final response made the signifier and its semblance equivalent; that is, he
accented the formal character of the signifier, its logical character, wielded and
traced with small signs, occasions for the signifier to materialize. It materializes
in that which supports the signifier. It is thus that one can understand that
the signifier can borrow its matter from sound, but also from the body. This is
what one valorizes in the hysterical symptom, that the signifier is susceptible to
materializing in the body.”
p. 41-42
“This is not the only structure in play in the rapport of the body and the
signifier. There is a second structure which is distinguished from the structure of
elevation, which is what Lacan studies, examines, introduces correlatively after
his last teaching. The second structure, which one could call embodiment, is
in some way the reverse of
signifiantisation
. It is rather the signifier entering the
body.”
p. 43-44
“It’s a completely different structure from the first. The first is elevation,
sublimation of the thing toward the signifier. Embodiment is, on the contrary,
the signifier understood as affecting the body of the speaking being, and the
signifier becoming body, fragmenting the
jouissance
of the body and causing
excess pleasure to gush forth, cutting up the body, but only to make
jouissance
flow, the excess pleasure which is virtual.”
p. 44
Spare Parts
(2004). Trans.: A. Price [PN 27]
“This reference to the body cannot be eliminated from the unconscious. This
is why the Seminar
Le sinthome
ends with the relationship to the body that is
specific to Joyce, with the status of the
Ego
, which is undoubtedly narcissistic
but in the sense that narcissism means that the idea of the self as a body
carries a weight that cannot be eliminated, and in particular one that cannot
be eliminated in the name of the subject representing a signifier for another
signifier. The relation to the body as such–which is what is meant by the
disjunction between the three rings of string–has nothing to do with anything
that might allow the subject to be defined.”
p. 120
Detached Pieces
(2005). Trans.: B. P. Fulks [LI 28, 2006]
“In order to read the Seminar on the
Sinthome
, we should orient ourselves
by distinguishing two writings: writing which speaks and the designs of the
Jacques – Alain Miller