496-497 / 536
THE SPEAKING BODY
Xth Congress of the WAP,
Rio de Janeiro 2016
497
496
III /c.2 Other publications
“The Seminar of Barcelona on
Die Wege dear Symptombildung
”
(1996). Trans.: R. Barros [PN 1, 1998]
The symptomatic is constituted by a signifier with repressed signified. The
signifying material of the symptom can be taken in a part of the body,
parasitized by the repressed signified, or in thought.”
p. 20
”The Other Side of Lacan” (2007). Trans.: B. B. Fulks [LI 32, 2008]
“Everything that was invested in the relationship to the Other is thus turned
back on the original function of the relationship to the body itself, in which
there is the idea, the idea of itself, and for which Lacan uses the old Freudian
word
ego
, taking care to stress that the definition of what you are as ego has
nothing to do with the definition of the subject that passes through the
signifying representation. The ego itself is established from the relationship
to the One–body. There is no identification there, but rather belonging,
ownership.”
p. 64
“Psychotic Invention” (1999). Trans.: A. R. Price [HB 8, 2012]
“Lacan is inviting us to think that schizophrenia harbors the property of
making the presence of the body enigmatic, of making the Being in the body
enigmatic. This afternoon I spoke about a tale by Borges in which he makes the
sexual act enigmatic. Well, schizophrenia, without literature, makes the body
and the relation to the organs enigmatic .(…) This is what Lacan signposts as
being specific to the schizophrenic, who is specified as not being able to resolve
his problems as a speaking being (which is what we all are) by calling upon
established discourses, typical discourses.”
p. 254
“Integrating the ‘out–of–body’ organ back into the body is perhaps what
our schizophrenic’s rings and headband assure, as different symbolic ways of
reunifying the body and sustaining it, though not indeed within an established
discourse.”
p. 256
“
Labiter
, writes Lacan, ‘is likewise what forms an organ for his body’. What can
that mean? One has to suppose that this qualifies language. I would translate it
as follows: the fact of inhabiting language forms an organ for his body.”
p. 258
“The idea that the function of language determines the speaking being is a
constant thesis of Lacan’s. What is being added here is that he has to find the
function of the language–organ. Each speaking being finds himself inhabiting
language–you just have to think of the world of speech and writing that
supports the arrival of a newborn–but language is not merely an envelope. It
is also as though one were grafting this ‘out–of–body’ organ onto the speaking
being, and for each speaking being there arises the question of finding the
function of the language-organ, finding what to do with it.”
p. 258-259
“At the Coliseum” (2008). Trans.: F. F. C. Shanahan [PN 23, 2011]
“And perhaps, Lacan would have wanted to make out of
jouissance
something
like Newtonian gravity, which allows the attraction of a mass by others to be
elaborated, which maintains it at a certain distance, that bodies remain in space
according to their masses. And in a certain way, that which corresponds to mass
in the speaking being is the symptom. It is the naked symptom, or shall I say
the knot–symptom, since the Spanish language allows it. In his last seminar,
The
moment to conclude
, Lacan begins by saying that one can say that things know
how to behave and, as I already mentioned before, that speaking beings as such
don’t, they do not know how to behave except as symptom. As symptom, bodies
are arranged with respect to each other according to their symptoms.
In that sense, there is a knowledge in the real. It is as if bodies knew how to
behave at the level of the symptom. But how can this knowledge be elaborated?
Knots give an idea of what the elaboration of that knowledge could be, because
a knot, or a knot of knots, gives the most diverse and complex forms while
responding to a unique and unchangeable structure.”
p. 26
“Speaking Through One’s Body” (2011). Trans.: A. R. Price [HB 11,
2014]
“The body doesn’t speak, it enjoys in silence, in the silence that Freud attributed
to the drives. But it is through this body that one speaks, on the basis of this
jouissance that is fixed down once and for all. Man
speaks through his body
.
Lacan says as much:
by his very nature, he bespeaks
[
il parlêtre
].”
p. 136
“Well, this body, which doesn’t speak, but which you use to speak, as a means
of speech, is what forms a strict couple with the mental health that doesn’t
exist. If mental health doesn’t exist, it is because the enjoying body, the flesh,
excludes the mental at the same time as it conditions it, maddens it, and sends
it off course. If man invented the sexual relation, then it was to veil the horror
of this flesh that is inhabited by a constant quiver (…). Each symptom, each
event of the body, betrays and translates this ‘speaking through one’s body’. This
‘speaking through one’s body’ lies on the horizon of every interpretation, and
every resolution, of the problems of desire.”
p. 136-137
Jacques – Alain Miller