492-493 / 536
THE SPEAKING BODY
Xth Congress of the WAP,
Rio de Janeiro 2016
493
492
knots. (…) there is a mode of writing which speaks, which is like a body. Saint
Augustine held that meaning is created from writing in the same way in which
the soul causes the vitality of the body. The other mode is writing which means
nothing, in any case that which is not read. Lacan put his terms of ‘not to be
read’ in circulation before launching into his
Sinthome
enterprise.”
p. 30
Pure Psychoanalysis, Applied Psychoanalysis, and Psychotherapy
(2001). Trans.: B. P. Fulks [LI 20, 2002]
“It is a speaking symptom calling to be heard, to be understood. In order to have
a woman as symptom –the only way to love her– one must hear her, one must
decipher her. When the gentlemen are not ready, when they do not have time,
or when they are in front of their computers–another symptom to decipher,
another symptom which speaks–or they are deciphering the symptoms of their
clients, well, the women go into analysis.”
p. 24
A Reading from Jacques Lacan’s Seminar From an Other to the other I
(2006). Trans.: B. P. Fulks, [LI 29, 2007]
“I hesitate to define exactly what the four objects corresponding one by one to
this quaternity are. The term ‘topological structure’ [is] used here in regard to
permit one to join corporeal specimen and logical consistency and especially to
move to the background the identification of the object to something concrete.
What Lacan calls here
objet a
is a hole in the Other, inasmuch as there are
borders and each one of these objects imposes a topological structure distinct
from the other. Since he imposes a structure on it, this is why one can say
that it has a weight equivalent to that of the big Other; and he frees us from
considering the Other as a collection where, for example, the signifiers are found
to be totalized. On the contrary, the
objet a
is here above all designed in its
function of hole having a border. This is not the hole we find in the Borromean
knots.”
p. 22
“[T]he hole which can be distinguished by the title of the
objet a
(…) when it is
designed as topological structure and as logical consistency, has, if I may say, the
substance of the hole, and then some detached pieces of the body are moulded
in this absence (…) the
objet a
as hole and what comes to fill it in.”
p. 25
“The Freudian list of drives includes already, but not clearly, the scopic object
and the vocal object. (…) Lacan gives us a definition which is based on and
takes its value from the fact that we admit that this hole in the Other has the
structure of the
objet a
and that it is going to capture jouissance in this form.”
p. 26
“Separation is the invented operation which modifies dialectically the second
logical form, that of intersection. Lacan formulates it from an equivalence, as if
two dented sets came here to superimpose themselves. The separation is in fact
a superimposition which leads the subject, Lacan says, to find in the desire of
the Other the equivalence to what he is as subject of the unconscious, that is to
say, a limit position, in which the lack in the Other (the origin of desire) and
lack of being of the subject come together (…) he situates (…) the unconscious
in the gaps which are established in the subject by the distribution of signifying
investitures. And one must suppose that something in the apparatus of the
body is structured in the same way as the unconscious. (…) Lacan calls it the
topological unity of the gaps in play (…) as if the place of meaning, the outside
meaning, came to recover the mysterious lack which inhabits the desire of the
Other. This will allow Lacan to give to the drive its role in the functioning of the
unconscious.”
p. 32-33
“Lacan takes the Freudian example of Anna O. (…) On the one hand she
speaks, and on the other hand, there is the hysterical symptom that is there,
well and good, an event of the body. There is ‘something which empties out
at the level of the body’ –Lacan again takes up the void of the empty set– ‘a
field in which sensitivity disappears, another field, connected or not, in which
movement becomes absent’. At the same time, this event of the body is not
legible on the diagrams of the anatomy; it is here anti-anatomical, that is to say,
it is signifying.”
p. 37
“A Reading from the Seminar: From an Other to the other II” (2006).
Trans.: B. P. Fulks [LI 30, 2007]
“For example, Lacan says it well one time when he deduces the function of
demand. One asks why one would need to deduce it, since one could appeal to
evidence, but he deduces it from the inconsistency of the Other: ‘It is because
the field of the Other is not consistent that the enunciation takes the form of
demand’ –demand is already under the operation of S (A)– ‘and this before
whatever it is which can respond carnally even comes to lodge there’. The flesh
arrives there with the notion that, formally, one can determine a whole logical
order, and that, secondarily, the flesh comes to obey this structure. There is this
the notion of a primacy or of a primarynesss of the signifier of the flesh.”
p. 18
“One finds this problematic again with the drive, in as much as it ‘designates to
itself alone the conjunction of logic and of corporality. The enigma bears rather
on this: how has
jouissance
on the edge managed to be called the equivalence
of sexual
jouissance
?’ We have here a problematic that is going to occupy
Jacques – Alain Miller