More Lacanian Coordinates: On Love, Psychoanalytic Clinic, and the Ends of Analysis [Paperback ed.] 1782202811, 9781782202813

Citation preview

MORE LACANIAN COORDINATES

MORE LACANIAN COORDINATES On Love, Psychoanalytic Clinic, and the Ends of Analysis

Bogdan Wolf

First published in 2016 by Karnac Books Ltd 118 Finchley Road London NW3 5HT Copyright © 2016 by Bogdan Wolf The rights of Bogdan Wolf to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978-1-78220-281-3 Typeset by V Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain www.karnacbooks.com

To my parents

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ix

PREFACE

xi

CHAPTER ONE On love and the woman that does not exist: an introduction

1

CHAPTER TWO Antigone, the beautiful, or beyond death in the analytic experience

41

CHAPTER THREE On obsessional neurosis: from Freud to Lacan and back

63

CHAPTER FOUR On psychosis: how Joyce constructed his body

95

CHAPTER FIVE Knowledge in discourse or fourfold ignorance

125

vii

viii

CONTENTS

CHAPTER SIX To conclude—the ends of analysis in the teaching of Lacan (1)

165

REFERENCES

201

INDEX

205

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bogdan Wolf became the editor-in-chief of the Psychoanalytical Notebooks, a publication of the London Society in the Lacanian Orientation, after receiving his PhD from Warwick University in the 1990s. He has authored several articles and book contributions in English, French, Spanish, and Polish; co-edited the widely acclaimed collection Later Lacan (published by SUNY Press in 2006); and translated numerous texts. He is a member of the New Lacanian School and of the World Association of Psychoanalysis. He has lived and worked in private practice in London for over twenty years.

ix

PREFACE

Having situated the windmills of guilt, and of jouissance as the inertia of the superego that propels them, Lacanian Coordinates ended on the mystery of desire in so far as it is animated by the mysterious object that appears as both elusive and veiled in semblance of the one who embodies it. But this is not a secret. Lacan devoted the entire middle phase of his teaching to elucidate it, fathoming its causality, deception and function of semblant, notably in the love of your Nebenmensch, whether a man or a woman. And that’s where the current volume, More Lacanian Coordinates, takes up—on the shore of love. But here I will direct my steps neither inside the land nor sail away into the sea. Love, without doubt, is the very fabric of the psychoanalytic discourse. If psychoanalysis has a lot to say about love and relations between the sexes, more than I can attempt on this occasion, it is because love, according to Lacan, is for those who speak. Having linked love with the signifier, or love and the unconscious, Lacan will further connect love with knowledge, partly to grasp the logic of transference he has already given an epistemic status of what one subject supposes in another, and partly in view of the subject’s wrestling, not without a symptom, with tidal vacillations, excesses and deficiencies in their love lives. For most of the time it has been the love for the Woman that xi

xii

P R E FA C E

does not exist, the statement with which Lacan shook the foundations of civilisation known hitherto. But in doing so he merely reminded us of the Freudian discontents and that the sexual relation between lovers has also been dispatched to the realm of nonexistence. What exists, then, when it comes to the dimension of love and speech that addresses, inevitably, the Other? Antigone, and Lacan’s rereading of the play, my second step here, had a lot to say about love that remains unfulfilled because for her it was directed to the object as lost and no longer to be refound among the living—her brother killed in a battle. From the impossible love Antigone will point the way to the impossible desire, that for death if not, also, to death. What follows are the outlines of the Lacanian clinic, the binary of neurosis and psychosis, and what in particular constituted for Lacan the quintessence of structure, its neurotic constellation, and its failures, modifications, and topological solutions. This was certainly the case with the sinthome that Lacan, reading Joyce’s work and life, brought to the fore as a solution and a support in the clinic where the imaginary fails because the body image fails. With regard to neurosis Lacan will follow in footsteps of Freud whose groundwork in the aetiology, economy and anatomy of obsessional neurosis seems incontestable. Moving on to discourse, to the extent that Lacan invented and structured it, inscribing in it, but de facto in four of its modalities, that of the unconscious, the hysteric, the university and the analyst, apart from the divided subject and from what remains externally included as not having the structure of signifier—knowledge. What is knowledge in discourse if not an ignorance that in every corner of history, served, for the Ancient philosopher and the Medieval scholar alike, as a starting point in their quest for knowledge, until birth of the psychoanalytic clinic where, in the space of the signifier’s relation with the real, it received its true recognition, namely as both episteme’s condition and the impossible to know? What is knowledge if not a modality of ignorance each of the four discourses inscribes and conceals from the desire to know which, as Lacan concluded, does not lead to knowledge? To conclude this volume of work led me to what proved for Lacan to have a value of being inconclusive, namely concerning the ends of analysis as he approached and formulated them in several places in his teaching, which only spurred him to devise a procedure whereby the experience of the end of analysis can be testified to and verified,

P R E FA C E

xiii

i.e. conveyed. Lacanian teleology has thus retained a proclivity to push towards a logical conclusion within the space of the signifier, while encountering, inscribed in it, a poetical one in the strict sense of the term poiesis. From the prisoner’s dilemma, and the logic of incarceration and liberation, that shows a human being as a speaking being caught in language, to the sinthome as a way to bind and hold the three registers of subjectivity, the ends of analysis bore for Lacan the particularities proper to each subject. At the end, as Jacques-Alain Miller remarked, there is a coming out from the solitude and a return to community. For each one, we could say, when an analysis comes to an end, it is back from the solitary experience, from the maze of alienation and the discernment of separation, to the solitude among many. Bogdan Wolf September 2015

CHAPTER ONE

On love and the woman that does not exist: an introduction

From the signifier to the letter By way of introduction to the subject of love and the woman that does not exist in Seminar XX Encore (1998a), Lacan resumes speaking about the signifier and its relation to the letter. He refers to Jacobson, Saussure, and linguistics. Why does he speak about the signifier before speaking about love? Lacan’s steps in this seminar should be read meticulously as they provide us with many clues about love. Lacan also speaks about reading. A letter is read and it is read in more than one way. While it is read in what way does it bear a relation to the signifier? Reading a letter and reading the unconscious are obviously not the same thing. If the unconscious is what is read, it is read not as a literary text made of letters, but as the subject of the unconscious, as that which slips away from speech while being tied with the jouissance it pins. Unlike the signifier, Lacan says, the letter is an effect. The signifier, in turn, is primary, and Lacan often mentions in his teaching the primacy of the signifier. The relation between the signifier and the letter has the same logic as that of cause and effect. The signifier precedes the speaking subject that is constituted by the signifier that represents the subject for another signifier. This is Lacan’s 1

2

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

classical definition of the subject. The movement of the signifiers, its associative chain, sustains the subjectivity. The signifier therefore preexists the subject, giving it its abode and its means to exist. The letter, in turn, is an effect—an effect of discourse. For the subject to read the unconscious involves speaking that has to do with the dimension of signifiers but not only. It also involves a letter which is where the real makes its impact. So in reading the unconscious the letter as an effect of discourse comes to play a part as having to do with the real. Some part of this interplay between the letter and the signifier remains in the domain of the unreadable. From the perspective of Freud’s intuitions in his text On Aphasia (1891b), we could say that writing is introduced through reading that is not without signifying effects. When a signifier is written down it turns into a letter and becomes distinguishable from the signifier by virtue of being self-identical. So, the letter is an effect of discourse. The writing of a matheme for Lacan is introduced and accompanied by speaking a language that is understandable. That’s why a letter, say a, that designates something to the readers of Lacan, does not have to be understood because when Lacan wrote it, it was an effect of discourse. And in this sense it was also an effect of castration. This letter is real because it is material and does not have to be understood. It can be read, like the unconscious, and like desire, but it does not have to yield to understanding. In discourse, for example the discourse of the unconscious, it suffices that we can talk about the letter, and in doing so link it to another letter. For example, when we speak about the Other, designated by the letter A, we also link it to the letter $, designating the subject as divided. The writing of a matheme, that is after all made of letters, and therefore of places, makes use of another term that is introduced through the hole or gap in language. For Lacan this term is the signifier as such, the phallus, the signifier of desire that is uncoupled by any signified. It is a signifier that allows to mark the difference between the sexes, between women and men. In his later teaching Lacan used the phallus as a marker of a mode of jouissance he placed on the masculine side. In this sense the phallus is no longer the mark of division between the sexes but a mode of jouissance to which both men and women can accede. When reading a matheme things do not make sense, it is because the reader stands face to face with the signifier of desire that addresses no one in particular, and this can make the reader feel stupid. That’s

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

3

why a matheme or a letter does not have to make sense at all because we have a language with which to move between gaps, to represent, to explain, and to make sense. That’s where the phallic signifier is useful because it allows the addressee to read the letter as addressed to the subject. In this sense the phallus does not discriminate between women and men as both sexes can make use of it. Both women and men can in their reading make sense of the writing of a matheme or to enjoy phallic jouissance produced in the course of this reading. On a different pole, and in distinction to the Lacanian letter, we have the legacy of the notation of classical logic with p, q, and so on. Notation of logic, whether classical or not, is not a discourse. Although the notation of logic is, like the Lacanian matheme, also made of letters that designate functions, the notation of logic is not a discourse. For me this makes the Lacanian letter quite unique. The reason why the notation of logic used by the mathematicians remains distinct from the Lacanian discourse concerns the fact that the letter, the Lacanian letter, is an effect of the signifier. For Lacan the movement runs from the primacy of the signifier in the unconscious to the letter as an effect of discourse. For Freud, the primacy of the signifier is rooted in the unconscious to the extent that the acoustic element of which the signifier is made is also linked to the object-presentations. In this way a connection to what is called reading, which involves visual images, becomes possible and with it so does another connection to what Freud thought was a relatively simple process, namely writing. So we have reading, writing, notation of logic, and the discourse of psychoanalysis that can be written by means of letters. These symbolic agents have always drawn in Lacan’s teaching on the Other as a locus in the structure where they are guaranteed. The operator of the Name-of-the-Father has been supposed to overlook the signifying relations. But in Seminar XX this status of the Other is no longer the only one. Lacan appears now to shift the status of the Other to that of the Other sex. At the same time he speaks of writing qua the nonexistence of the sexual relation. This is what Lacan arrived at, not without Freud’s intuitions, in his later teaching for which it is a premise. For Lacan the relation with the Other as the Other sex cannot be written. I will come back to this. The nonexistence of the sexual relation is a fundamental premise of Seminar XX Encore. It is not the aim of this seminar but a premise on which Lacan builds the relations between the

4

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

sexes, the discourse of love and the modalities of sexuation. There are relations between the sexes, which we touch upon in the love discourse with different signs of love circulating between the lovers, men and women alike, but the sexual relation does not exist. What does Lacan designate under this term of nonexistence? My former logic teacher used to insist that unicorns did not exist. He would then wave the piece of chalk in his hand saying that this chalk did exist. How would he account for Lacan’s nonexistence of the sexual relation? Are these negations equivalent? But is it the same to say that the unicorns do not exist and to say the sexual relation does not exist? We can start to answer this by saying that the sexual relation does not exist because the relation between two modes of jouissance between the sexes cannot be written or said. There is no notation that would inscribe the unity of jouissance, that of a woman and that of a man. Lacan introduced the nonexistence of the sexual relation in addition to the function of the signifier. We could also say that based on the premise of the nonexistence of the sexual relation Lacan introduced a new function of the signifier that leans on the lack or gap in language. It implies that the function of the signifier rests on the signifier of the lack in the Other. This writing of Lacan is not new. He developed it already in the late 1950s, especially at the time of Seminars V and VI where he was working on the graph of desire. He wrote this signifier as S (A /). This signifier of the lack in the Other plays a crucial role in Seminar XX (1998a). Lacan himself refers to “graphicisation” as different ways to support desire and its cause. Having thus written the signifier in the old fashioned way as S (A /), the way of Seminar VI Desire and Its Interpretation (2013a), Lacan now refinds it in Encore in relation to the Other as the Other sex. He places this old formulation of the signifier in the new way, namely on the woman side of the table of sexuation, implying that only the woman as the Other sex can have a relation with it. In fact, this formula of the signifier stands for the truth of the Other sex in so far as desire comes from there, from the Other as lacking. In other words, the Other can only be reached through the lack, for example through the object a because it can be found in the place of the lack as a cause of desire. In which case, as Lacan states in the lesson from Encore entitled “Knowledge and truth”, love relates to semblance. The Other can be addressed through object a as a cause of desire, and love is addressed as a semblance of being.

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

5

Passion and eulogy Since the sexual relation cannot be written, writing takes place in lieu of the nonexistent relation and therefore as a non-relation. What is written then appears to be of the order of the One. The One in this formulation of Lacan is not a mark of unity the lovers aim at in love, because such a mark does not exist, but concerns the One of the signifier. Lacan says Y a d l’Un, “there is such a thing as/something of the One”. This One, in the Lacanian sense, is not the One of addition, of adding up two jouissance of a woman and a man, but the One of the signifier. The One of the sexual relation between the two sexes does not exist and cannot be written in so far as ex-istence is a symbolic category. So the only One, to put it this way, is the One of the signifier. Lacan does not say the One of the letter. He says the One of the signifier because he wants to isolate it from the jouissance of the body of the Other. Following this, once the One is separated from the Other’s body, Lacan can say that the body of the Other is not a sign of love. And he adds that although the jouissance of the Other, which is the Other sex, is not a sign of love, love demands more love, encore but also en-corps, in the body. What body if not that of the Other from which it is supposed to come from? Lacan presents us with a paradox here, which is not simply a paradox of love as passion but of logic of love, which is complex and paradoxical. Love has nothing against logic as it can be written, for example as a demand for love which is a sign to the other, and as a love discourse where semblance has a part in the repertoire of truth. The paradox concerns the jouissance of the body of the Other that is not a sign of love, and the One that is. The statement above “the notation of logic is not a discourse”, which is tantamount with saying there is no discourse of logic, seems to me to be a correlative to what Lacan never refrained from reiterating, namely that there is no Other of the Other or, which is the same thing, that there is no metalanguage. In this regard a matheme comes to form a way of logicisation that strikes the subject as real. And in this sense it is miles away from how things are done by the mathematicians. Lacan’s matheme of fantasy, $ ◊ a, captures something of the real by failing, namely missing the relation with the real, so we are left with the letters. Once formalised, the matheme made of the letters now requires an explanation. $ is the subject, ◊, lozenge, should be read as “desires for”, and a is the object little a, the cause of desire. The letter as such, like the signifier, is stupid. That’s why Lacan linked the statement to the enunciation, as

6

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

the latter implicates subject’s desire. The statement is no more and no less than a signifying representation of the subject, which leads to enunciation where something else is said, what in saying was said as unsaid. Irrespective of how contentious a statement may be—and in the end of analysis none proves to be more so than fireworks in the daylight—it is underlined by enunciation. Given that what I am aiming at here is love, and given that there is no such thing as a discourse of logic, we can make another step by asking ourselves if there is such a thing as a discourse of love. Roland Barthes (1979) certainly thought so. He wrote under this title a long series of fragments of what constitutes a kind of a monologue on what this thing called love might be. In it, Barthes says, to think of another, which he presents as I-you relation, to think of you, boils down to a forgetting, to you as forgotten. For Barthes life is only sustainable as a forgetting. This forgetting functions for him as a metonymy of thinking. You are forgotten therefore I think of you. In which case “you” appears as an effect of this process, as you I think about. Barthes goes on to say that it is impossible to think you except for a memory of “you”, which I can cause to recur over and over again. This you for Barthes is what I forget and bring back as an object wished for, and therefore a memory. And then he links this metonymised thought to writing as an act of having nothing to tell you. And that’s because there is no one really there except for the memory and the thought. The love discourse for Barthes amounts to a certain practice of writing about a love object as lost and memorised, that is to say without you I really love. This leads to a certain kind of reciprocity without the Other as desiring, as speaking. It is in this sense that Lacan approached love as always reciprocated. For Lacan love is always requited because loving another presupposes an image I love and which is the answer to my demand for love, and therefore plays part in this dialogue. And here we have a writer who is engaged in this reciprocity. A love letter supposes an answer from the image to which I write. Barthes makes the lost love object love him back, and this echoes Lacan’s idea of a love as always requited. In this way, and Barthes quotes Goethe on Werther as an example, writing a love letter amounts to an act of both demanding love and giving up on it, which brings back Lacan’s guilt. There is so much to say but nothing to tell you. Marguerite Duras (1990), who had a lot to say about love, found Barthes’ book on love unreadable. She appreciated the cleverness of his tactics, the enticing flow of fragments, but she found him to be the sort

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

7

of writer who is unable to love, who cannot open up to the unknown in the other. For her he remained a writer of the stiff and stereotypical. This was a harsh criticism of a man who devoted himself to writing. What does not surprise is that this harsh criticism comes from a woman who said that all men are homosexual. According to Duras, men are unable to love because love is heterosexual and heterosexuality implies a desire and a lack. For the heterosexual, desire leaves love as always lost. It is the lack, therefore, castration in effect that conditions for the man access to the Other through object a. But Lacan put into question this access to the Other, leaving the man with the object a. At the same time it is the loss that makes love a form of semblance. Duras’ logic of love resonates with Lacan’s statement that the heterosexual is the one who loves women. For Lacan then some men are heterosexual. But Duras does not think so. As a man the heterosexual will try to reconcile man and woman as an inseparable couple. He will attempt to make the sexual relation exist by trying to write it myriad of times in legion of ways. The best Duras can do for a heterosexual man is to present him as the one who makes the sexual relation exist. That’s what love may be for a heterosexual man. It is a passion. But as a passion it leaves him, according to Duras, to love only the passion itself. He is left with a belief in the passion of loving another. And this is no longer love directed to the Other who is radically other. That’s why she calls it homosexuality. Homosexuality’s greatest passion is homosexuality. In homosexuality, according to Duras, one only loves another as oneself, as the semblable. For her, this at least is the case for a man. As for a woman, love is not only a passion. It is also a eulogy. It speaks of loss as inscribed in the heart of passion. Duras was not surprised to see men being repelled by her story of love between a young white girl and a Chinese man. She noted that while men were up to a point curious about love, they would glimpse through pages without reading them. She was baffled how it is possible to read with your eyes closed. She described love as passion and as eulogy, stating that this young girl represented for her the freedom she herself had lost. Duras wrote not only about love as loss but also wrote eulogy to love.

Courtly love What Lacan was attempting to deal with in his seminar Encore (1998a) is not only the eulogy of love but the enigma of heterosexuality. Those who love women, he says, are heterosexuals. Even women who love

8

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

women? If female homosexuality has for Lacan the same logic as heterosexuality it implies that the woman he has in mind is utterly Other, and that by asking about the woman, both sexes refer to the woman as Other sex, other both for women and for men. And that’s the Woman, Lacan says that does not exist. And he writes this as La femme with the bar on La. She does not exist as a whole, is not a whole, pas-tout. On the one hand, the sexual relation between the sexes does not exist, because the jouissances of men and women cannot be represented as one. On the other hand, The Woman does not exist as each one is different and each one experiences her ecstasies differently. This leaves us with the series of ones. As if the nonexistence of the sexual relation was not sufficient to give us the coordinates of the relations between the sexes, Lacan supplements his own coordinates by adding the Woman that does not exist either. She does not exist as generic or universal, nor does she exist as whole and complete some men would want to attain. She is truly Other. Which is why Lacan makes it precise by supplementing his statement with the one about not-whole. The woman is pas-tout, not whole and sometimes not-all. There is a relation then between the nonexistence of the sexual relation and the nonexistence of the Woman. Since the Woman as a whole does not exist, the relationship with her, in so far as she stands for the Other sex, cannot be written. One can only write love letters to a woman or women in the plural as Don Juan did. Every woman is different and counts as one. Analytic experience shows, and the writings of Duras as well as of holy women commonly known as saints confirm, that there are not only phallic women. What Lacan was trying to encapsulate in his seminar Encore was that the jouissance called phallic is not all there is to jouissance. There is, Lacan says, another one, not a phallic one but a feminine one. Lacan read and wrote on the feminine ravishing in one of Duras’s books some years later. She confirmed his findings, and in the end there was nothing she was able to say Lacan did not teach about with regard to women and love. But what Lacan said about Duras, she was unable to say of Barthes. In the seminar Encore Lacan does not speak about the discourse or dialogue of love. He speaks of love letters because they can be written or uttered, which is not easy either, especially for men. Some of these letters are sent out and support the logic of love as the nonexistence of the sexual union. But some are not sent out, and then one can ask to whom were they addressed in the first place?

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

9

What is love? In the first place love is narcissistic. It is addressed to the mirror image and seeks to preserve the lover in the image of the loved one. What is at stake is the image of complementarity which made Lacan say that love is requited, always reciprocated. It is the Janus of love, the face on one side loves the face on the other side, and is loved in return. The reciprocity Lacan speaks about derives from loving the object as mine in the other, for example in the memory of the beloved one. This directs the investments and expectations to the other in such a way that the ego in the subject assumes he is loved in return. Later, Lacan used the Barthesian “you” as the one that remains, to say that there is more to “you” I love, more beyond the “you” I love, namely the object a, which is why I destroy “you”. This would be Lacan’s supplement to Barthes’ fragment on loving the other who is not there. The imaginary reciprocity contributes to the supposition of knowledge in the other that became of importance to Lacan in his definition of transference in the analytic process. Transference is installed with a demand for love, the paradigm of all demands, which gives rise to a demand for a reply. If the reciprocity has an upper hand in transference, the subject is stuck in the silence of complementarity. The latter can become a hindrance to the discourse, as Freud already noted, and Lacan directed our appetite for it to the world of animals and the colour and plumage similarities. From the moment someone says that birds of a feather fly together, it is already a human affair. Since complementarity can only be manifested in the imaginary relations between the ego and its counterpart, i (a), it can only be governed by the symbolic relations and construction to which it is included. Narcissistic love and the idea of unity can only be imaginarised, wished for, as Freud would say, because the real object in love is always lost. The image that comes in the place of nonexistence of the sexual relation is different for a man and for a woman. Each of them draws a different satisfaction from it. What Lacan teaches us about love beyond its narcissistic reciprocity amounts to poetry—there is no love without the signifier. Where there is a real passion, there is also a poiesis of loss. Love discourse is built on the void like a scaffolding around the building in whose place there is only a gap. And when you have a signifier you also have a subject. With the subject represented by the signifier there is also an address to the Other who for Lacan in Seminar XX is the Other sex. It was not without reason that Lacan evoked a particular chapter in the history of love, speaking of the Troubadours of the Middle Ages in the form of the courtly love.

10

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

In the seminar Encore he refers to the book by de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (1972). Why courtly love? Why does Lacan not speak about love in the East, the Tantra, the Kama Sutra? Partly because psychoanalysis is not concerned with the sexual technique of satisfaction but with desire. Psychoanalysis focuses on the fantasy of the supposed jouissance of the Other by way of confronting the lack as a nonexistence of the sexual relation between speaking beings who in this way become sexuated. Lacan identified a specific moment in the history of love that responded to that impossibility. In the Western history, the Troubadours and other poets of the Middle Ages appear to come as close as possible to a certain practice of speaking about love. It comes in the place of the nonexistence of the sexual relation. The love poets address their speeches to a Lady, that one who dominates, domnei— hence la donna who is given and who is a gift—and this gives ground to the relations between the sexes. Love is a form of a social bond, Lacan says, and finds in this discourse of love a prototype of the analytic discourse. It is no longer a Janus of love as the Lady in question never satisfactorily responds to the paeans of the poet, so he can continue with his canti where she can occupy the central place. It is a practice of the signifier and a practice of jouissance produced by means of the desire encountering a lack of the signified. Lacan identified in this production and in this practice of courtly love poetry not only a prototype of his formulation of discourse as social bond. He also found in the idealised woman a place for the Other as the Other sex. This woman as Lady embodied a flight away from the thing she was, which was achieved by the signifiers embroidered around the emptiness of her as the Thing, the crude and horror of her naked flesh. The courtly poets knew how to speak without arriving at the point of destination, which the sexual techniques of the East try to achieve in the dimension of reality. In the West, we love the unsatisfied desire and language, which is poetry and which testifies to this love. The Medieval poets who, according to de Rougemont, derive from the Cathars, knew how to elevate the object to the dignity of the ideal. One could say in this instance that the ideal in question has a different status to the one Freud elaborated under the dissolution of the Oedipus complex. As we know Freud found it difficult to understand why a soldier was prepared to die for a piece of cloth because it represents the country he fights for. But he had no problem understanding a knight who takes to the battle his beloved Lady’s scarf because she is embodied in it. This metonymy of desire guarded him

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

11

well against the death wish as she looked at him through it and was present in it. Love poetry of the Troubadours was oriented in this way. It bore the insignia of a relation with a semblance, here and now, both an ode to life as real and to a semblance of life. What signifier is Lacan speaking about when he takes up the courtly love? On the one hand, it is about the phallus as the signifier of desire, the phallus Lacan placed on the man’s side of the table of sexuation, which does not prevent a woman from acceding to it. On the other hand, it is the signifier that is the condition of writing in lieu of the nonexistence of the sexual relation. These two formulations of the signifier reflect the sexual status of the unconscious. The unconscious is founded on a gap, on the lack in the Other that fails to give designation to the subject. The structure of the musical score serves as an illustration. The interval between any two notes, no matter how infinitesimal their value, will always be marked by a gap. And yet, although this infinite discontinuity is underscored by the case of music, it will have an effect of jouissance.

Two formulations of the signifier There are at least two formulations of the signifier in Lacan’s teaching. The first formulation concerns the lack and pivots on the lack, the nothing. Lacan called it the phallus to the extent that it names desire founded on the lack, namely without a signified that would support or supervise it. The phallus is a kind of unsupervised, solitary signifier whose only partner is that of the lack. Which means that the phallus is only where it is not while guiding the subject relations with the Other. In this sense the phallus gives a sense of being alive, of joy irrespective of what it actually means. It is in relation to this formulation of the signifier that Lacan will develop his idea of creation ex nihilo or creationism as opposed to evolutionism. Lacan’s creationism has nothing to do with religion although this is how it is perceived today. Creationism stems from the Freudian golden rule of associations, whether free or not, and is closer to the poetic creation, like that of the courtly love poets. For Lacan the signifier presents itself solely in acoustic terms, that is to say, as a representation that precedes any attempt at meaning. Hearing produces multiple meanings, bringing the subject back to desire. The discourse of psychoanalysis derives from the signifier in the sense that discourse derives from what is ultimately constituted as the

12

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

first encounter with language. This primary encounter at the moment of trauma, the real, is an encounter at the level of the signifier. In Seminar VII (1992), Lacan cemented this formulation of the signifier as pivoting on the nothing by taking up a fragment from Heidegger. This attempt is not without links to what in fact constitutes the major part of this seminar around which it circulates. The problem Heidegger’s (1971) meditation on das Ding poses, using a vase as an example, is taken up by Lacan by means of a logic he called rubber logic, and which can be found in the Eastern teachings of Zen under the name of koan. What is a koan? It is a conundrum the answer to which is surprising, subverting the logic of complementarity. Take this example “what is the most important part of a soup bowl?” It is just that kind of question Lacan asks about the nature of the signifier. What is the signifier based on or what does the courtly love poetry revolves around? In the hands of its maker, a vase is a signifier. If Lacan speaks of the vase it is to point to what encircles a possible meaning, what allows for its varied production. How does the potter make a vase? When he makes it, which is a process, some material always falls away. It is like the analytical process. In analysis something always falls, session after session, a meaning falls. The work of the signifier, or the work on the signifier, makes the fall possible, circumscribing it. What falls is the jouissance of meaning, the metaphor of the sexual relation. The phallus is the signifier the potter works with but not the signifying material he works on. The vase is produced at the junction of the two, the signifier as a tool and the signification as an effect of the signifier. In effect, what the subject circumscribes, working with the signifier and its articulation, amounts to the void, meaning as emptiness that is infinitely slipping away. The surface of the vase thus allowed Lacan, partly as a surprise, to introduce us to topology, and more specifically to the topology of the unconscious. And you will recall when I earlier referred to the most beautiful definition of the unconscious Lacan has given us, namely the unconscious as “what we say”. The vase is indeed the very embodiment of this formulation, of this topological beauty Lacan introduces us to. And the potter does not even know it. He has not got a clue what the vase of his making will mean to you and me. When the meaning is done with in this way, and only the leftovers remain, the analytical one appears at an end. At least this would be one of its ends. It ends on making a vase with the signifier. Is it of relevance what this product, which is also a gift to the analyst, mean to him? This is what Lacan

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

13

called creation ex nihilo. It serves as one of his early and never outdated coordinates of the psychoanalytic process. Things look completely different at the semantic level. Let’s take a note of that. For Heidegger a vase has a meaning. It signifies an object made of material that serves to carry water. The vase can be empty or full. Being full or half full seem to cohabit the same space of what is quite simply a signifier distinct from other signifiers. Furthermore, they occupy this space between earth and sky, which is where Heidegger, in relation to the function of the vase as a receptacle that first collects water from above and then distributes it below, places it. So here we have the signifier “vase” and the signified “vase” as co-existing as a name of a thing. Is it a metaphor for him of the union of earth and sky? Is it the name of the sexual relation that does not exist? One does not have to move heaven and earth in order to bring out the way in which Lacan hollows out the signifying function of the signifier from the meaning. He did this by putting a bar between the two. The signifier is essentially separate from meaning and in this way Lacan sheds light on the failure of unity in the relation called love. And this brings me to the second formulation of the signifier that Lacan developed in his later teaching, starting with the seminar Encore. He called it the One. I have referred to it above, and now I mention it again. But these do not add up. It was about the One before and it is about the One now. It is still about the One. Leibniz spoke of the one when he developed his theory of monadology. For him a monad was the most basic element of existence, just as atomos was for Democritus. In its nature a monad is singular and indivisible. It is what quantum physicists today call the God Particle. First it was an electron, then proton, neuron, then quark, and finally the innermost, the absolutely singular and indivisible part of matter called boson and referred to as God Particle. God Particle marks the limit for all particles yet to be discovered. And if another particle smaller than the previous one becomes discovered, the search for the God Particle will continue. What interested Lacan was the One of the signifier and not of unity with which it may be confounded. The One also relates to writing or inscription of the signifier. In courtly love you have an interlacing of the signifier of desire because it addresses the Other, the Woman as Lady as the only one. But there is also the One in this poetry that supports writing and prolongs satisfaction of never arriving at the satisfaction of the last word. In this pursuit of love, the One is always among the Ones. The One of

14

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

the signifier is thus the same, self-identical and absolutely different from another One.

The story of an ogre and the whole woman These formulations of the signifier bring me now back to the theme of love. What else is there? Even when you turn away from it, disgruntled and annoyed at having fallen for it, you have turned to facing up to it. It is a logic of love. Neurotics believe in it above everything else, even when they negate it, as Freud showed. Then they end up saying that God is love. Or that at the beginning it was a love of God. Lacan was not so sure. He said that he tried to exorcise God from this supposition by dealing with the Other. Lacan changed the milieu of love moving it away from God to the Other as a lieu it is supposed to come from. A god, a woman, a man, anything according to their satisfaction. Different things are said about love on the basis of where it comes from and goes to, and what one gets from it. It comes down to who loves who. But it is not as if one answer was any more relevant than the other. If a little girl says that to love a teddy is to be like a teddy, this sheds as much light on her idea of love as a courtly love poem on its author. Both articulate how deep we are caught, one by one, in the structure of the signifier. So it is not just who loves who, but also what with. Lacan pointed to the saints as the ones whose satisfaction in their love of God was not clear to anyone. Earlier I have included among them Saint Oedipus, partly in response to Lacan’s remark that he is the only one who did not have to go through the Oedipus complex. Instead, Lacan seems to imply, Oedipus achieved his sainthood by way of redemption that comes not from an authority of the Other but from himself, namely from what he says and does in vivo rather than as a posteriori. Lacan was interested in the saints, in particular what they get from annoying others in their persistence, in their perseverance. In his interview with Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan also stated that his own attempts to achieve this failed. But this did not prevent him from teaching about the holy man Joyce in terms of his saint-homme a few years after the seminar on love. But Lacan was not just focusing on love and its multiple meanings. Although love means different things to different people, it does not change the fact that one by one something about love escapes meaning and does not make sense whether you are in it or

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

15

out of it. And since we are never wholly out of it, but merely between different logical times (Lacan, 2006a) of what might be in the dit-mension of love, there is always something that does not make sense. And I find it of crucial importance in the analytical practice: what is it in love that does not make sense? Where does it come from, I mean this supposition that the Other loves me? I am not implying that the relation between the subject and the Other has a different premise. But where does the premise come from? Another assumption is that the patients often say they know and understand what went wrong with their previous relationship and then they go on to do it again. What in love is not subject to meaning belongs therefore to a different order, even disorder if this is the way in which we could refer to what Lacan called “not-all”. If phallic jouissance allows us to speak about the order of the signifier and with it about the symbolic order, the jouissance called other, or the other jouissance, has remained as uncertain. That’s why Lacan related it to the signifier of the lack in the Other, where it is no longer about perverse ways of covering up that gap from which comes desire. What does not make sense in love belongs to the “not-all” of love. It constitutes an open set as loves or discourses of love simply do not add up. What upholds the relation between love and meaning comes down to the fact that love, being one, is not the only one. The Other disturbs and unsettles it. The plurality of encounters does not make it any easier to deal with love but somewhat makes it conditional to approach it. It follows that the relation between love and meaning rests upon “not-the-only-one”. Love cannot do without the Other, the unconscious, it seems—the Other that continues to unsettle the One of the signifier and its satisfactions. The Other is a reminder that speech involves at least two signifiers, and that one all alone leads to a different modality of satisfaction beyond the social bond. As for what does not make sense in love, then, and what makes it one that is not the only one, or the one among other ones, love follows the same logic as the logic of “not-all”. It is a logic of the transfinite set that Lacan developed with reference to the mathematician Cantor, which became the axis of Lacan’s teaching we refer to as the later one. The not-all, or in French pas-tout, which also translates as “notwhole”—as long as it is not “un-holy”—is what both men and women are subjected to when they speak about the Woman because she is not whole. Hence Lacan’s definition of the heterosexuals as those who love

16

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

women, men and women alike, because they are caught in the relation with the Other sex, which was the case with Duras (1990) who did not say the same of Barthes. When Lacan says in this vein that the Woman does not exist, that she is barred, he introduces us to the logic of not-all, the dimension or disorder where modalities of jouissance do not submit to the order of the signifier. That’s what the Woman is for Lacan. What does it mean? Firstly, and in the thousands of years behind us this has never been said enough, there is no universal “Woman” who would be the sum of all women, as Cantor’s transfinite number would be a sum of all numbers in a series. Cantor marked such nonexistent number as ℵ (alef). For Cantor the nonexistent Woman of Lacan was ℵ. It marks the Woman that is not there, never to be found although perhaps one day she will be invented as whole. Lacan chose a simpler way of marking the Woman that does not exist by putting a bar across La, which in English we try to achieve by putting a bar across the Woman. Lacan already put a bar before on the subject, designating it as divided, and on the Other, marking it as inconsistent, lacking in the symbolic provisions for the already divided subject. Secondly, Lacan says that the woman can well enjoy herself beyond the jouissance called phallic, which is as far, with some exceptions, as a man can go. She can be where she does not exist, which cannot be written or heard. In other words the experience of this other non-phallic jouissance, cannot be conveyed. In this sense, the jouissance of the Woman that does not exist cannot be transmitted and its testimony remains in the domain of the untransmittable. It can only be inferred as an experience of being elsewhere, outside the order of representations, as ravished which is what Lacan found in the writings of the saints or sculptures of some artists like Bernini. Further, the not-the-only-one, which I related to “not-all” as having the same logic, can likewise be attributed to the Woman that does not exist. Since the Woman is not whole, then, by this stroke she, in her nonexistence, comes to be the one who is not-the-only-one. She is, so to speak, amongst the Others. In speaking about the logic of not-all, not only in France but also in Italy, Lacan indeed shook the foundations of millennial suppositions and proportions. In this he also echoed, ironically speaking, the statement of the one for whom all was one, namely Heraclitus. Like the set of all-women, it is an open set. The logic of “not-all” appears as a logic of infinite sets and series. In this sense it fits in or even structures the era of globalisation. Lacan hit the nail on the head when he brought out the logic of “not-all” as a name for infinity

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

17

without limits in the current globalisation, but it did not go without outrage and protests. Let me illustrate this logic. A children’s film character Shrek, who is an ogre, finds himself engaged in resistance fight with other ogres against the witches and wizards led by Rumplestiltskin. The ogres are led by Fiona who is also an ogre, and Shrek’s wife and the mother of their children in a parallel universe. The fight turns against ogres who thanks to the music of the piper are all caught and imprisoned. Only Shrek manages to escape. However, in response to Rumplestiltskin’s offer, he turns himself in in exchange for freedom for all the ogres. They are indeed released except for Fiona who to Shrek’s surprise is enchained. So Shrek angrily asks Rumplestiltskin: “You promised to free all ogres in exchange for me”. “Yes,” the latter cunningly replies, “I did, but Fiona is not all ogre, is she?” Rumplestiltskin refers to a curse that makes Fiona an ogre by night and a beautiful princess by day. At least that is how it used to be. Since then a true love’s kiss turned her into a pretty ogress. The Lacanian Woman is not really all she seems to be, just as what she seems to be is not all she really is. Despite leading the all ogre resistance Fiona does not have to always follow the phallic path on which men enjoy themselves, say, being ogres. She does not have to be one of them. What does it mean? It means that she can feel quite beautiful about herself by night or quite lousy by day. And this manifold existence cannot be reduced to the one. Each time she remains radically Other. The woman, Lacan says, is not the whole woman, because she also experiences, without knowing why and how and where, some other mode of satisfaction and this does not make her whole. But that’s not all. We can note that attempts have been made to capture her in her entirety. Germaine Greer, doubtless the mother of feminism, wrote a very interesting book called The Whole Woman (1999) and it does not tell the story of a Fiona. In it Greer takes an effort to distinguish her, the woman, from animals, from mammals in particular, and obviously from men. And she is quite scientific about it, bearing Marcus Aurelis’ first principles in mind: what is the woman in and of herself? What is she primarily? She is other. Greer follows this principle as a result of a process of gradual differentiation by constructing a long series of fragments which one by one remove from her, from the woman, layer by layer, what is not hers and what she is not. It is a process that I would describe as a universal de-alienation of the woman as such. Does she succeed? At the end of that stripping of presuppositions, prejudices,

18

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

injustices, images projected onto her, on this woman as such, what is there left, what is she at the end? She is still other. Whatever is left at the end after all the impositions have been removed, will make her infinitely other ad infinitum or, one could say, ad femminitum. I do not recall Lacan speaking about Greer in particular but her work seems to me to be of chief importance to Lacan’s attempts to formalise the logic of notall based on the nonexistence of the universal Woman. Greer goes on to place the woman in the world through that series of fragments of her being, body, emotions, mind, function, power, and so on. What she does not end up doing is to speak of the whole woman. Is the title an irony? Woman could only be conceived of as whole in infinity, infinitely Other, as a transfinite number Cantor wrestled with. I am left with a question: does Greer love women? Who is the woman for her? When she writes about their toils and misconceptions they have been subjected to, does she love them, does she love the woman she writes about? What these examples tell us is that being Other, the woman is related to the Other as barred. She is not related to the Other as the Other of the /. Lacan Other. As barred, Woman, she is related to the Other as barred, A implies that to testify to the gap in the unconscious, it can only take the woman as barred. It takes the Other to know about one, so to speak. I will come back to it.

Hateloving At this point I would like to touch on what appears for Lacan as the other side of love, hate, although we should approach it topologically as its reverse side. In the seminar Encore Lacan, for the first time, speaks about an obstacle, a logical obstacle in the love discourse. He does so by evoking Aristotle’s (1941) term ε′ νστασις, enstasis. Stasis comes from istemi, which means “to stand”, hence exstasis signifies that which stands out or ex-sists. In turn, enstasis, is what stands in, in the sense of standing in the way as an obstacle or objection. Where does Lacan take us? He shows us that to formalise love—for example, starting with what does not make sense for the subject or with the phallic parameters in order to give us an inkling of other dimensions—we need to construct a discourse. To speak of love, or of hate, one is in the discourse. Initially, discourse is a social bond. But what defines a social bond if not the diverse ways of speaking and addressing another, which involves supposition of knowledge and therefore love? And now Lacan tries

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

19

to re-enter love as discourse through the door of objection, refutation. What is the obstacle Lacan finds in the logic of love discourse? According to Aristotle in the Rhetoric (1941) there are four such obstacles or objections each one to be raised in response to a statement. One way to disagree with your interlocutor’s argument is by raising counterargument. The second mode is to provide a statement contrary to the interlocutor’s one, e.g., “good men do good things to their friends” can be countered by “bad men do not do bad things to their friends”. The third kind of objection amounts to refuting the argument by using a similar statement, namely “those whose work is taken advantage of always hate their readers” can be opposed by “those whose work is made a good use of do not always love their readers”. And fourthly, the statement can be objected to with reference to actions that precede the argument e.g., “some offenders should not be punished because they do not know what they are doing” could be objected to by “the punisher deserves no approval for punishing them”. Only one of these objections has a diachronic dimension and refers to the temporality of the past, to the “it was”. Aristotle divides these objections into probabilities, examples, infallible signs, and ordinary signs. In the discourse of love, these take on for Lacan a particular dimension. It is not by accident that every time an objection to a statement is raised, this involves a dimension that is particular to the subject and his relation to the objects. But why does Lacan speak about logical objections in Aristotle when speaking of love during a lesson that Miller entitled “God and Woman’s jouissance”? It is not by accident that Lacan presents them to us in this way. To begin with, Lacan evokes enstasis in love when commenting on the infamous book The Title of the Letter (1992). He links knowledge and love, which he already did when defining love in psychoanalysis, which is called transference, as a subject supposed to know. When you assume someone to know something about your desire this supposition presents itself as a form of love. When you expect your analyst to know why, despite understanding what was wrong in the past relationships, he will shed light what goes wrong with all of them, that is to say with the subject, then, Lacan says, this expectation of knowledge is linked to love. Sometimes it is a love of an image, and the subject is stuck but happy, and sometimes it is a love of a subject. An image does not carry knowledge about desire and anxiety. A speaking subject like an analyst may carry it, so if the subject only knew how to ask … The infamous authors of the book, J. -L. Nancy and

20

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

P. Lacoue-Labarthe, both philosophers of the 1970s, accused Lacan of not having knowledge, of not knowing what he was talking about. By the standards of the current discourse this amounts to an insult. But it also presents itself as a reversal of the subject supposed to have knowledge. Lacan chose carefully the term for their objection. He called it desupposition. To suppose someone to know is to love them. To desuppose them of knowledge is a form of hatred. Desupposition forms the reversal of love. What does hatred as a desupposition of knowledge aim at, what is its goal, if not the satisfaction called jouissance? And what kind of jouissance if not the one, precisely, as if taken from Lacan’s mouth at the beginning of Seminar XX (1998a), that he refers to as the jouissance of the Other, the one that is not a sign of love? Lacan locates the character of this hatred in one of the four objections. He does not teach us about pure formalism, free from passions that elsewhere Aristotle placed under the category of “anomaly”. He teaches us about jouissance as the real of the body as inscribed in the social discourse. Lacan says there is no discourse without satisfaction, whether it is love, hate or ignorance. No discourse without jouissance implies no discourse without the real. We could say that this jouissance as the subject’s experience of the drive, is a satisfaction to be found also in the discourse of Aristotle. Are not his objections, the enstases, little signs of hate? Does raising objections, refuting, undermining knowledge in another, desupposing the subject of having knowledge, not demonstrate a certain machine of jouissance that runs counter to the love of the subject whose discourse derives from the Other as desiring, the Other as barred, S (A /)? Does hate not aim to provoke jouissance in the Other? In Lacanian terms, this amounts to refuting or denying the lack in the Other, what he called elsewhere, and what J. -A. Miller and E. Laurent commented on, namely that this Other as a real guarantor of the desire of the Other does not exist. In analysis, love does not aim at the one of being which is where Lacan defined love as always requited, related to the image in the other, the one the ego wants to be, whether it is the little girl’s teddy bear or lover’s image of the loved one. Does love aim then at the Other’s satisfaction? If this is one of love’s coordinates, what is the other one? Lacan brought desire into consideration of love because it intersects with love at the point of lack. When the subject is oriented by love, seeking unity with the loved one, this pursuit encircles the lack. Love and desire

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

21

intersect at that point. Subject’s desire, as Lacan says it from the start, derives from the Other’s desire, which means implicates the lack in the Other because it is the lack in the Other that makes the Other desiring. It is that the Other does not exist, remaining castrated and lacking, that this Other, inadequate and incomplete, appears as desiring. Desire wants to re-find the loved object, bring it back. At the same time desire is caused by the object a that is the effect of castration whether it is about the phallus or jouissance. In a eulogy of love, Duras included the love object as excluded, namely as she used to be for the Other, and which is now lacking. This renders desire aleatory, dissatisfied, unfulfilled, circumscribing the lack in the Other and always reorienting the appetite for true love. Lacan shows us how desire encircles the love relations as caught in the signifier, voice and castration, when he constructs the graph of desire. Is true love real, then?

Can one love the unknown? Philosophers like Descartes tried to deal with the lack by focusing their search on certainty with reference to the Other, by making the Other exist as a witness to the certitude of being. Since we speak about language and the signifier’s effect on love, philosophers from the time of Plato approached language as a function of meaning. But the signifier signifies nothing. The signifier as guaranteed by the Other signifies nothing because it is conveyed to the subject by the Other at the level of desire and not of meaning. It can therefore mean all sorts of things, whatever the subject wishes to hear. This seems to be based upon the premise that has not yet been refuted, namely that the first experience of language for a little human is not at the level of meaning. This experience takes place at the level of a signifier as an acoustic representative, the Freudian sign of perception, Wahrnehmungszeichen, which as such signifies nothing. A whole network of signifiers has to be constructed for this differential system to become effective to produce meaning effects in the neighbourhoods between them. The phallus serves this purpose. It enables the significations to occur. But this special signifier that makes the subject a happy subject, and every ogre enjoy being ogre, is the signifier of desire of the Other. It is a signifier of the lack in the Other and in this sense presented itself to Lacan as a mystery of desire. It was not the jouissance of the Other sex which presented a mystery to Lacan because jouissance is not a sign of love, but a signifier of what the

22

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

Other does not know about the subject and his desire. What was a true secret for Lacan was therefore the signifier of the lack. In The Trinity, which I mention in the earlier part of this study, Augustine (1991) established a similar link between spoken words and the voice. This connection has been misheard over the ages when the wanting/wishing-to-say became equated with meaning. We find evidence for it in the modern philosophers of language like Searle, as I discussed it earlier. Language has always been approached as a modality of semantics. But this attempt, this conflation, just like Greer’s attempt to strip the woman bare of the layers of fantasies and prejudices she has been clad with over the centuries, merely opens us to what does not make sense in what is said in love, and therefore to the semblance of meaning. Lacan speaks about the semblance of sense in Encore in the chapter “A love letter” where sense appears as what one makes of discourse—what discourse if not that of love?—until one arrives at the semblance of sense. It seems that in trying to reconcile the signifier of desire with meaning as a name of the real, philosophers inevitably fell into a trap by trying to marry it to the imaginary other. Why not? As long as the philosopher’s love for psychoanalysis is Platonic, this is how it should be. The subject may wish to marry the signifier of desire to meaning as real. This would form what is called “an arranged marriage” because they have had no experience of knowing each other until this point. And when they do, they end up a cropper. In this sense we could say that the phallus as a signifier of desire remains uncoupled, a solitary signifier, a bachelor, and as eager to trip others as it slips itself. As a bachelor the phallus fails to find a suitable bride to marry. Since none is a match for it, it settles for a semblance. And who is more successful in this than the obsessional who wants to marry the phallus as a signifier of his desire with his jouissance so that they could live as a couple happily ever after? Thanks to Lacan’s operation of placing a bar between the signifier and the signified, we can speak of a certain fall, a fall of the signified, just as one speaks of a falling star. Then you make a wish and it either comes true or it does not because the phallus is contingent. Either it provides meaning in the life of the neurotic or it does not. And that’s the question that we can ask in relation to love. Can love do without meaning? We have heard this before when a woman says to a man: “tell me that you love me even if you don’t mean it”. When he obliges, she has another question up her sleeve: “do you really mean it?” What does

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

23

the man mean when he says he loves a woman? Why does the woman want to know? Do his words have a power to open access to a woman’s body? Does the man give the woman access to the phallus that may be priceless to her but not all she can get off on when it comes to that? Their approaches obviously differ and they are not after the same thing. This was Lacan’s orientation in the matters of love. The truth about love is that it lies. It lies because it cannot be told in its entirety but only in fragments, allusively, between the lines to another. This discourse orbits around the signifier of the lack that opens up the Other’s desire. But the subject encounters it at the level of where its meaning remains uncertain. This signifier, for the Troubadours as well as for Don Juan, in different ways but always in relation to the woman as the Other sex, churns up the real of jouissance just like when in solving puzzles. But is it the right solution? Meaning and understanding arrive as an appeasement, smoothing the ripples in the body. And there, this function of meaning, raises the question of certainty. It does so because what is truly crucial to the dialectic of desire is the wanting-to-say. The answer is in the body, en-corps. You have already noticed that it is not the question of what the man means when he says he loves a woman. Everyone knows this. On her side of things, as Lacan shows us on the table of sexuation, the woman can aim at the phallus. Such is the desire for absolute love or the neurotic desire for the absolute. It is not what the man means, but that he means what he says, that seals him as a man of his phallus, so to speak. It is the name of his passion that a woman embraces in her lover. The man has to pay the price with his castration. Castration is the payment and not that which is lost. If castration is refused as a payment, he will never know how to speak about love. It is not the voice of the Sirens that becomes a prerequisite for a woman to be heard because the voice can only be heard as a lack, a little silence. The Little Mermaid knew precisely that in order to assume a human form of a love object, she had to give up her beautiful voice. In this dance of love, where the mirage of unity is deferred ad infinitum, it is not possible to do without the phallus, both as a minus of castration for him, -ϕ, and as a signifier of desire for her, Φ, although on the man’s side, the words are never enough and leave much do be desired. The castration of the Other, which Lacan approached as maternal castration, provides the masculine subject with phobia and fetish as responses to the lack in the Other. For a man the phallus marks the

24

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

lack in the Other’s desire which in this case is the mother’s desire. The phallus therefore, apart from its signifying function to facilitate signification, also allows to mark the sexual difference, the -ϕ for him, and the Φ for her. These are the two ways for the phallus as a signifier of desire and as a signifier of the sexual difference. As a master signifier it always has a potential to trip up the subject who is on his way to happiness. But is this the same for a woman? If a man is likely to confuse his penis with the phallus, a woman, in turn, is unlikely to confuse the organ with his wit, and enjoys both. For Lacan the phallus as a signifier of desire is a missing reference, the one that cannot be found save its traces. As an uncoupled, always missing referent of the unconscious, it fails to be captured in the way in which jouissance always slips like water off duck’s back. In this sense the phallus tends to elude both men and women to the extent that they are speaking beings. But as missing, as not being where it is sought and showing up where one least expects it, which is not without comic effects as Lacan reminded us, the phallic signifier remains the heterogeneous element of the unconscious, presenting itself in absentia as an object of castration and a veil of fantasy that separates semblance from the nothing. It is in relation to this nothing—or is it something?—where the phobic and fetishist positions can arise. Both have a relation to the veil, or more precisely to the beyond of the veil. To the extent that the object a can be aimed at beyond the veil, the phallus becomes an index or an indicator of the veil. As for the phallus itself it can be found in the place of the veil that in turn separates mother and daughter in the exhausting tirade of what Lacan called ravage. But its destructive power can also be found in the wars of the spouses. At the end of analysis, where Lacan spoke of the crossing of the fantasy as linked to the veil, we could speak about a dephallicisation. In this sense the value of the phallus decreases in relation to the place and function of the object a coming to the fore. Nevertheless, it is thanks to the phallus a woman agrees to receive from a man, and that her feminine parade can now unfold under the cloak of masquerade. Love has to be therefore situated at the very point where the phallus and jouissance fail to collate into one although the former gives a body and a locality to the latter. But it is thanks to this failure that this bar as a minus assumes a positive value. The lack can appear as a plus. At the heart of love dwells nothing. But love also wants to be one. These are Lacan’s chief coordinates on love in his early teaching. In the lovers’ discourse, he situated it as a passion, one of three, and placed

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

25

it at the junction of the imaginary and the symbolic. Only later, around Seminar XI (1977), and notably Seminar XX Encore, he brings the real to it. Because the signifier pivots on the nothing, desire carries love beyond meaning, where things do not make sense and where dissatisfaction calls for certainty. It is just when Hades carries Eurydice to the Underworld so that the jouissance of looking could be renounced when Orpheus takes her back. But because he fails as a man she becomes twice lost. Analytic experience shows that love is always dissatisfied, which is why Lacan approached love’s reciprocity as a mirage making up for its unfulfilment. And this is not only to do with the signifier of a lack. It has to do with the insistence of the real pushing the signifier where, being the signifier of desire, of the desire of the Other, it constitutes knowledge of the real of love. Before Lacan made this connection between knowledge and love as real, Augustine was pondering the relation between love and knowledge in the work I have just mentioned. Augustine believed that one cannot love what is not known. Hearing the word “love”, the lover, the lover of knowledge in the Augustinian sense, wants to know what it signifies for the one who utters it. For Augustine the love of knowledge was therefore linked to the love of meaning. Augustine was convinced that a word is not merely a word, not only an audible sound, but that it signifies something for the subject. To inquire about meaning, to desire to know the meaning of the signifier, is for Augustine already a sign of love, as the subject cannot love what is unknown. It will thus not escape our notice that meaning, the “I mean”, hooks onto desire and its interpretations that slide along the chain of what we say.

Between the Other and the One Where do we find the formulation of the relation between love and knowledge? In Lacan’s formulation “there is (something of) the One [Y a d l’Un]”. The One of the signifier shifts our orientation about love from unity to certainty. In science, the One is the indivisible real, the last and final building block of the matter of the Universe, and, why not? The essence of the Woman beyond illusions and masquerades. For the scientists, like Masters and Jones, the science of the Woman exists. The real in their science is measurable but situated outside subjectivity and expected to be found as “objective”, unchangeable, indivisible, and

26

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

separate from human subjectivity as possible. This fantasy continues to dupe us. The One Lacan speaks about in the 1970s, and in Seminar XX in particular, has a very slapdash relation to the Other. Although they are not disconnected, as the astrologist would wish, their relation is supple. Is there a relation between them given the Other bears no reference for the One? The One in this sense appears to be a loner, the one all alone, as Lacan said of the signifier S1. This S1 makes no use of the Other as a place of knowledge and truth, which would open the chain. This solitary signifier has therefore something to say about love where it does not make sense. When something in love does not make sense, and the register of understanding proves useless, love continues to be written by way of a satisfaction in the real. The reason why Lacan does not sever the One from the Other at this moment of his teaching in the Encore is because he is dealing with the Other as the Other sex, with the woman as the Other. The One of the signifier still appears in Seminar XX as, to use Lacan’s formulation, one of the entries to the Other, which he mentions in the last lesson of Encore. How does he distinguish the One from the Other at this moment? By way of subtraction. The Other, Lacan says, is “one-less [l’un-en-moins]”. What does it mean? The Other, to the extent that it is a barred Other, has a hole which is symbolic. The symbolic hole in the Other indicates the failure to designate the subject, and the feminine subject in particular. I have spoken earlier of Marguerite Duras for whom the Other appears to be one-less because her struggle with love, her eulogy, reveals a symbolic lack in her experience of love so there is a tear of nostalgia appearing in her position in relation to the Other. This lack in her encounter with love belongs to the Other. This lack concerns her in her relation with the Other because in describing her women in The Lover (2006), The Malady of Death (1986b), and in The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (1986a), she describes the woman as not-whole, pas-tout, as deprived now of what she used to be, of the “freedom” she used to have and which is now lost. What therefore remains from the woman Duras discerns, from the woman as not-whole, appears to be the object a. We find this object a as gaze in the love scene with Tatiana in The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein. This object a can be found as mediating between the One that lacks nothing, that which does not make sense, and has the phallic value, and the Other that always lacks in so far as it desires. The object a belongs to neither. It does not belong to the One that does not lack nor to the Other that is barred, A /. Through this object a, while embodying it for a man,

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

27

a woman can cause man’s desire because she appears as the Other that is one-less or as not-whole. It seems that Heidegger shunned the doctrine of the One outside ontology, which none the less figures already from Xenophanes and the Eleatic school to the Neo-Platonists, and remained faithful to Being where love obeys the principle of complementarity. Heidegger endorsed this principle in the form of being-one-with-the-other, which stands for the mirror image of the ego, i (a). Lacan’s orientation was based on désêtre, which amounts to de-ontologisation of the language effects on the body. The One is one of the products of Lacan’s teaching oriented in this way, which aims at the knowledge of the signifier and not of being. For Augustine love signifies the pursuit of knowledge as meaning. To love to know implies for him to know what it means which he will inadvertently separate from non-meaning. Augustine’s idea of love pushed him towards the One to the extent that for him love of God is the love of the one that also is the only one. But if God is the One, then, in accordance with Lacan’s logic, there is no knowledge to be found in God, and no love either. Since Augustine was preoccupied with love as a pursuit of knowledge, having isolated the meaningless as that which cannot be loved, he was relating to God as the Other. On the one hand, love of meaning to say is on the side of desire and its interpretation and, on the other, it takes its stronghold from the real of the signifier as one. For Augustine, wanting-to-know, which is wanting-to-say, assuming one supposes to know what one means to say, pivots on the voice, which is not yet a fully-fledged word but not entirely outside sense either. Inevitably, Augustine found himself squeezed between the one of God and the Other that reminded him of what in love always slips away. What struck Freud in the expression “being in love” was its hypnotic effect. He stressed it in 1921 in his work Group Psychology (1921c). In this elaboration he returns to his earlier intuitions in his theory on narcissism (1914c). Being in love tends to work in the direction of the overvaluation of the object of the drive. Freud calls this process idealisation. In idealisation the drive-object is treated as the subject treats the ego, he aggrandises it under the mask of fantasy. The ideal here serves as a compass of the drive. Freud tells us, when we follow the compass of the drive, that it is as an effect of being in love that the aggrandisement of the drive-object collapses, and renunciation follows. The fall of narcissism, of the narcissistic jouissance, gives rise to an imaginary integration of the ego into the object. The less one enjoys being in love,

28

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

Freud says, the more aggrandised the object becomes. And, the more ideal the object, the less use the critical function of the superego has for the subject. Freud goes on to explain being in love by showing its proximity to the work of a hypnotist, a position he once occupied, still at the doorstep of his analytical route until he went on to stumble on the unconscious. This hypnotist who is always in love, Freud says, occupies the position of the ego-ideal. With his voice as the wand he says do this or do that and the subject does it. Supporting and orienting this ideal, the hypnotist covers up the Other’s lack and with it the access to desire. The hypnotherapist devotes himself to shifting the jouissance of the body and to regulating its satisfactions by means of the ideal. In this way the fantasy as a support of desire, is prevented from ever coming into fruition, which the subject might have yielded as based on that object that both covers and reveals the way to the Other sex. Freud concludes that the effect of being in love becomes a building block, a particle in the material formation of the complex body called a group. And this brings me back to the compass of the real that has already given us some indications in the discussion of hatred as desupposition of the subject. Hatred, as Lacan says, has a link to the imaginarisation of the jouissance of the Other, J (A /), of the body of the Other, which is not a sign of love. The coordinates of hatred, as he notes, are those of the real and of the imaginary. What is actually in question here? On the one hand jouissance is the effect of the signifier, which we call phallic. Its production, which is the production of sense leads back to the Other where the signifier is lodged. On the other hand, Lacan speaks about jouissance as real that is fixed by the One, the S1. This One is responsible for the repetition although it is without meaning. It is a repetition that may have traumatic origin that is now suffered and enjoyed as one each time it takes place. For a smoker it is not a question of how many cigarettes a day he smokes because it is always one, and another one, and another, and so on. So the One gives an orientation to the symptom. It provides the symptom with the means of repetition that may be traumatic and that is outside meaning. And one always repeats only once, every time one repeats whether it is about smoking a cigarette or having a glass of wine. When the subject has access to the Other and its knowledge, jouissance is produced by way of raising objections and refutations, as we saw in Aristotle. Sometimes they are vehement and aggressive, those points of contra-dictio, speaking against your

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

29

interlocutor in an intellectual duel. These are not signs of love, Lacan says, because they attempt to make the sexual relation exist. The relation with the jouissance of the Other cannot be written. Only the One can and is written in the body, again and again, does not cease to be written as a support of the symptom Lacan called sinthome. Hence the One is all alone. If the Other’s jouissance is not a sign of love, and Lacan gives us the most radical example of this in the person and work of Marquis de Sade, it is because its writing is not an effect of the signifier. It can only be symptomatised as the One, as that which does not cease to be written, which is the side of the subject as Lacan says in the last lesson of Encore. The Other remains one-less, i.e., hollowed out by the symbolic lack and therefore failing to give designation to the woman as the Other sex, but also as one by one. The One, which is the register of the signifier that does not stop inscribing itself on the body, only relates to the Other sex as the Other less one. In so far as the Other desires, it lacks. The signifier of this lack in the Other produces jouissance, which, Lacan says, is not a sign of love. What is a sign of love? Is self-sacrifice a sign of love? Lacan would say no, just like Freud who demonstrated that an attempt to sacrifice libido refuels and strengthens it, and with it the sense of guilt. Self-sacrifice implicates the Other as a witness, and therefore as a bearer of my pain and discomfort I commit for them, before them, and thus not without them. By this implication self-sacrifice becomes a trading card of guilt and pity not of love. It is not my pain in sacrifice I want to give to an Other but a sign of not having to suffer, a gift of not being whole, which is not the same as happiness. Will this sign of love for the Other who suffers, broken by an interminable illness and by mortality, be received as a redemption for having suffered myself? In this assumption may be found a spark of true love. That’s why Lacan said that to love is to give what one does not have. A true gift of love comes from the one that does not have it all, which is the subject’s castration. Lacan’s definition touches upon the mystery of the signifier of the lack in the Other, which is a sign of love ex nihilo, namely as an invention. To love the one who is castrated, whether mortally ill or crippled, was for Lacan the question where he distinguished Christian love from mysticism that approaches God as jouit. Without going into detail we can say that Abraham assumed that it would be God’s satisfaction to have his, Abraham’s son, sacrifice as a proof of love. But was it love? Did Abraham discover at the last moment that it was the Other’s desire when the angel stopped

30

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

him from killing Isaac? The same happens in the story of Agamemnon attempting to sacrifice his daughter. Can a mortal subject still assume that the Other loves him? Or is it the nothing that remains of the love of the father? Lacan’s lesson is that it is not the nothing that is the aim of love. Love, there is no question about it, is only for those who speak, who can put the lack into effect. Lacan intimates that it is more difficult to find love in the written testimonies, like that of Santa Theresa of Avila, for example. This is because the love of God, like that of Augustine and Saint Thomas is predicated on the experience of the Other, and the feminine jouissance to be transmitted in writing becomes subjected to the phallic signification. Thus what can be said of this other jouissance, that Bernini clearly did not put on the side of pleasure, can only be inferred from the testimonies Lacan read. The mystic seems to be caught in the vacillation between the experience of the body as beyond, as unmarked, and the symbolic signification that reveals a lack. It is a real with a hole, like every real in the case of speaking beings. If, on the other hand, for a man, jouissance does not go beyond the satisfaction of the organ, if it does not go beyond the jouissance called phallic—for which Lacan’s formula, ∀x Φx, to be read that all are subject to the phallic function—it inscribes him solely in the domain of the fantasy $→a. Here a woman becomes available to him as an object causing his desire. This could be even written as a-veil-able because fantasy is structured around the veil that implies the question of the beyond. What is beyond the veil? It is a question that is answered differently by a man and by a woman. As for the Woman that does not exist, the unmarked and inferred one, the not-whole woman, and therefore outside the relations between the sexes, she is related, as Lacan shows us on the table of sexuation, to the Other as barred, (A /) or, more precisely, to the signifier of the Other as lacking S (A /). Is this signifier not the signifier Lacan discerns as the One, the one all alone that becomes a material of repetition in the symptom? It is the signifier that as such does not lack because it is the Other that lacks, that is the one-less. Being related to the Other means that the Other she is related to, the Other she fails to convey to us while conveying a whole lot of sense, is the Other as one-less. This Other as one-less, to which a woman can have access, is the one that no one knows anything about, so Lacan could only infer it from the written testimonies. There is a passage in Encore where Lacan tells us that he implores women psychoanalysts to tell him something about this

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

31

other jouissance but they can’t. They tell him nothing about it, which is what he tells us—nothing, as if this nothing was a clue to what lies at the heart of an experience of this other jouissance. Earlier we said that there is nothing at the heart of love and that love is only made of the signifiers of those who speak. But this of course is not to say that love is an illusion. It is what one loves that comes under the veil of illusion, $ ◊ a. But to love is real. Don’t we love our illusions above anything else, as Freud already discovered? Only when we fail, and when love does not make sense, it becomes real. In romantic love a man tried to realise what he supposed his beloved desired of him. As long as she would seek him on the man’s side of the table of sexuation, as Lacan designed it for us, a man as a poet, like Keats, lured a woman to the realisation of her expectations in his poetry. Poetry has always been an invention, and responded to the Other’s desire which in turn could only be guessed from the poetry. The poet could make the shimmering moon bend down to her feet, and make a warm sand that touched her skin fold into a rose. There has never been a limit to the poetic production in romantic love that finds support in both the imaginary as a function of the ideal and in object little a that points to erotic sensuality. These were the two slopes of romantic love, on the one hand, the legacy of the Middle Ages with the sublimations of courtly love that verged on the perverse, as Lacan reminded us in Seminar VII and, on the other hand, the sensual, the gaps in the body without which love could not have unfurled. What changes in the scene of love is the one, something of the One. Love oriented by the One no longer relies on the truth as guaranteed by the Other. It shifts toward certainty to suffer from the loss and unobtainability of the object. Goethe’s Werther is one of the examples. In true love the lovers could not care less about reality like social norms and parental tradition. What they put as most vital to their relationship and its satisfactions revolved around certainty. And to attain it, or suffer its impossibility, implied a change in the subject in relation to knowledge. In this sense, and when pushed to the edge, love could do without S2, without knowledge, and rely solely on the one of S1. This push towards certainty in love, which in effect is a push towards the real of solitude, implies anguish, the object of Werther’s suffering. Certainty replies with uncertainty for the subject for whom something in the desire of the beloved does not make sense. Let’s take a note of the fact that when Lacan speaks about anguish, and presents

32

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

it to us as that which does not lie, he does not say that it tells the truth. If anguish does not lie, it does not imply that it tells the truth. The truth is on the side of the Other. As for the One, it supports the certainty of satisfactions even if they do not make sense. Anguish, which Lacan placed on the side of the subject, does not lie because lying tends to protect the Other, even save the Other from the lack, for example suffering. Lying thus correlates to truth, provided that what separates them, what lies in between, is the belief in truth. To tell the truth means that one believe in it and, therefore, lies about it. In this sense, there is always some truth in love because one always tells little lies about it. For Freud love was oriented by the love object. His entire Entwurf revolves around the object as either lost or wished-for or missing in the field of perception. From the start then Freud inserted the hallucinatory element at the heart of the experience of love. None the less, something in this experience is always satisfying, always causing happiness. This implies that the satisfaction-seeking drive could not care less whether the object is essentially lost, and presents itself in the metaphor Freud invented for us, namely that of the lips kissing themselves. Freud did not doubt that the aim of the drive is satisfaction, obtained at whatever cost and expense as long as it makes, as Lacan said, the subject happy. The “happy subject”, shifts from one opportunity to another to seal the hole in the body. And this, which amounts to closing the desire caused by the metonymy of being, to wit the lack, was not for Lacan a sign of love. Lacan made a connection between the sign of love and knowledge that the subject, even the most perplexed subject, supposes to embody. This connection appears to me simply this: love aims at the subject. But what kind of subject? Is it the divided subject? The link is to the destituted subject, the one that gives what he does not have, with what lies beyond and what the subject is subject to. It is the One, of course, but not without the Other. Suffice it to say, as Lacan points out in Seminar XX, that the logic of “not without”, based on his work on anguish in Seminar X, has to do with the unconscious as solitary, namely as bereft of meaning and as prior to interpretation and the correlation of truth and lying. Interpretation aims at the real of the object and in doing so it lies. How does one love the subject? How to love the subject of the unconscious as the One but not without the Other? How do you love your Cassandra?

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

33

How to love your neighbour as yourself or yourself as your neighbour? In view of what we have traversed on the subject of love—and Lacan’s approach is not Apollonian—and of the Woman that does not exist, and a few other nonexistences, the love of one’s neighbour may appear as a way of recuperating some of the strands. Freud took it up as a failure but, like Lacan in his early talks on the subject of religion, Freud gave us reasons, mostly in Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930a) as to why loving your neighbour as yourself may well be found on the side of a narcissistic delusion. That’s where I would like to take it up. That “the aim of love is the subject” is not exactly to say that one loves the subject. It is not that the subject becomes the object of love. To love the subject is rather to want to know it, to seek the response from the Other as desiring. True love remains ambiguous at the level of the demand for love, and the lovers adhere to the discourse in which the signifiers are ambiguous. Each time, the effect is different, because the subject in question is a very particular one. In religion, where the premise of love is universal and all subjects are loved equally, the place of the subject is occupied by the neighbour, my equal, my fellow man or woman, the one like me. In this sense we are all neighbours. And when we speak about the love of the neighbour, that imaginary other across the room or house or country border—given there is a border—we are in the discourse to which Freud gave all the insignia of belonging to that of the obsessional. And with the obsessional, the place of desire becomes easily confused with that of the superego. What is therefore striking at this level is that this Christian commandment about the neighbourly love or gratitude immediately links with the proscriptive imperative that feeds the superego. Love it and enjoy it! That’s the superego. But can one love to love other than demand to be loved? As a universal, this superegoic commandment brings us back to the jouissance of the Other. For Lacan the superego is always its mutation retaining the ferocity of the command. Freud placed it at the end of the dissolution of the Oedipus complex and linked it with the ego-ideal. After the father’s death the superego takes over as an instance of the law. Since Lacan made a conjunction between the law and desire, the superego had a different function, that of an insistence on jouissance. For Lacan the maternal superego manifests itself as a command, and in effect as a demand of jouissance. Enjoy your thinking, enjoy loving

34

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

your other! The paternal agency of the law as Freud left it, came to find its incarnation in the Name-of-the-Father. Its paternal function has a prohibitive function to the extent that it tells desire from jouissance. The “no” of Oedipus is also the “yes” to the symptom with the real as resident. The maternal superego aims to undermine the function of the Name-of-the-Father, and its pacifying effects of the shift from the “no” of prohibition to the “yes” of the symptom, by demanding a reinsertion of jouissance where there is a lack. That’s why Lacan was inclined to approach “love the other as yourself” as a command of the superego, and therefore as a universal imperative that has a character of an obligation assigned to the subject, and can in this sense be found on the side of duty, which for Lacan is represented by the Good. From this perspective the demand of the superego to jouir loving the other as yourself, does not add, or subtract from, anything to the command. What it does do is to emphasise that the insistence on jouissance has the universal status. It has the same logic as the logic of the phallic function as universal, as I have just mentioned above, ∀x Φx. In this respect, the Christian commandment of love for the neighbour excludes the place of the exception, namely the not-all. Since love cannot be enjoyed by all, it points in the direction of the subject as particular and singular. That’s why Lacan was looking for particular signs and manifestations of love. But what he often found was the command of the superego addressing the jouissance of the Other. Subsumed under it, he found the so-called free love of the 1960s as it was piercing the bubble of inhibition—not love therefore, founded on the signifier, but the superegoic insistence on the transgressive satisfaction in any shape and form. Here, the “love your neighbour” came to find its fullest realisation. It was the liberation of the agency that was playing to undermine the prohibition of jouissance. Love’s discretion lay still undiscovered until Lacan. The universal status of the love commandment was one of the objections raised by Freud. Another complication for Freud arose from the as—as yourself. Freud was distrustful in this as, to which Kierkegaard devoted a considerable amount of pages in his Works of Love (1995), and to which Lacan returned in his address on religion in 1960. We love not only illusions of who we love. We also love our delusions as ourselves. This is what Lacan punctuates in his address to the Catholic University at the time. The “as yourself” introduces the order of resemblance which, at the same time, supposedly marks the point of difference between the lover and the loved one. This as supposedly serves

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

35

as a bridge between the universal and the particular. And further, it invites you to transfer the love you have for yourself, for the image of yourself, into the love for your fellow being. There is such a thing as a love for oneself, which is one’s image, Lacan says, and Freud’s theory of narcissism is a valuable reference for this. But this love, as Lacan notes, involves the ego as a stable image, not the body whose effervescence and pulsation flashes up like the traces of the unconscious. This image therefore remains misleading, leaving the whole area of what he calls love untouched. If Duras could not find anything of interest in Barthes’ (1979) book, it was because she was quick to point out at the author having a dialogue with his own image. Lacan brings this difference to our attention at every possible opportunity. Loving your Gestalt is rather the source of boosting my image and for this reason of miscognition [méconnaissance] of thus designed self-portrait. If the painters have engaged in such endeavour from time immemorial, it was with the view to discovering and marking what the painter is not, the real that slips away. All these representations of love are nothing but representations of self-love, namely love of the self-image. That’s what one ends up doing when loving the little other, my little imaginary partner, as myself. What the ethical effects of these delusions of love if not an assumption of the universal and a commandment to produce them? In the year when Lacan gave his address to the Catholics, 1960, he was in the course of teaching his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992). In it he goes beyond the identifications as cemented in the speculations with the mirror stage he himself formulated years earlier, and deals with the real at stake in love. To approach the other with love, Lacan says, is in the first place to approach what dwells at the heart of love, what he calls in the seminar “the unfathomable aggressivity”. The image is what prevents the subject from touching it because it is an image. The subject does not dare cross it, as this would catapult him through his limit-point of das Ding. Freud isolated it, already in the “Project for a scientific psychology” (1950a [1895]), by distinguishing it from what is variable. Topologically, he placed it in relation to that which is adjacent, neighbourly and therefore unpredictable and variable. And he made das Ding constant. This is what Lacan later referred to as the real that does not change place. If the real of das Ding does not change place, it is because everything around it does. The world, appearances, the wardrobe of images, the envelopes of the symptom change but the real does

36

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

not. The function of the as is supposed to create some stability in the relation between the two. But what it establishes is the irreconcilable difference of alienations. What does “as yourself” then tell us? Nothing except for the love for the image, which renders every act of love real, but its object far from it. In the zone of love the neurotics love their illusions, and the psychotics their delusions. The position in relation to the neighbour is therefore marked by alienation where the signifier of love is, so to speak, sitting on the fence between the lovers, and making each read it and enjoy it differently. But love can only be addressed to another if the place from where its signifier comes is located in the Other. This Other is the Other of and as language that does not respond to the image. This is what Lacan elaborated for us in terms of structure and logic of love. It is in this vein of love structured around the lack, that in the Ethics, he insists on the question of how to love one’s das Ding, the jouissance in the structure that does not change place but haunts the body and its vacillations. And while spewing its products the body remains there, never changes place. And it is not what we are, Lacan insists, but what we have, one by one. Lacan thus leaves us with a question that Freud only touched on: how do you love your jouissance? By calling upon the defences, where the politics originates, one of which is the image of the ego. While serving to cover up the jouissance of the body, the image emanates with it. At the same time, the image is brought to service as a means of respect which is correlative to the signifier that runs through the spine of civilisation, namely that of offence. There is another side to this self-love. Love of the similar, of the like-me, stems from the presupposition that man who loves God was made in God’s image. I am therefore a product of my parents conveying onto me the love they had for the image of their selves, which, in turn, they obtained from their parents or, more precisely, their parents’ love of their own images. What emerges in the concatenation of this imaginary transference from one generation to another, is a certain structural constant, a paradigm. This is what Freud tried to isolate. But he did not say what it was because all he found was that libidinal element that remains constant and that is not subservient to symbolic inscription of the image. There is then an “x” that remains unaccounted for when it comes to love, and that’s where Lacan goes. What psychoanalysis inherited from the message “love your neighbour as yourself” that inspired Kant to formulate his categorical

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

37

imperative, was a myth of unity in which Lacan shifted attention to the myth itself. If the myth is recognised for anything in psychoanalysis, it is the real effects it carries and conceals. It is at this point that Lacan speaks about the death of God not only as a universal cause and prototype of a love relation based on the love of the image, but also as a fall of guarantee to seal, for ever and ever, the endless continuity of these relations. From this moment on, the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself stands as alone as the signifier that turns love into passion. For whom? Lacan spoke of the reciprocity in love, as I have already remarked. A patient comes to analysis and offers himself in good faith to the analyst. And he expects the same in return. That’s because something tells him, the patient, that what you do to others you can expect in return from them, as Kant proposed. Therefore if you love your analyst, you have every right to expect some reciprocity. How to love the other if what you love in the other is yourself, love the other as yourself? In answering this question Lacan proposed to define love as always requited. It is requited because loving someone leads to being loved back in return. This reciprocity in love as Lacan formulated it, works like a swing, from the ego to the little other and back. In the course of this seesaw, that which is in the other assumes a character of something that is mine, that I own because it comes from my history, my dreams, fantasies, and therefore concerns me. But because it resides in the other, in the image of the other that is now kindled up, or even rekindled, every time the ego says “I love you”, so it seems, the other loves me. This logic of reciprocity serves to support an image of completeness, while aiming to produce jouissance in the Other. This jouissance is real but it is produced by the imaginary means. It is also in this sense that Lacan’s assertion that “jouissance is not a sign of love” takes on its significance. This so called jouissance of the Other is nothing else but a fantasy that made Marquis de Sade his name. Next time I will take it up in more detail. This jouissance of the Other is, thanks to the fantasy, a hole in the Other. The veil of fantasy is the first witness to this lack. And the phobia and fetish are its first responses. But this, Lacan says, this signifying testimony of the death of God, shrouded in the fictions of truth, does not make jouissance less evil, nor does it make it less reliant on the good. The altruism of doing good is rather a way to discern the “evil jouissance” that, so to speak, is both lived and veiled.

38

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

Caritas It seems that in the view of Freud’s and Lacan’s elaboration on love some variations come to view. Lacan examines one of such variations with reference to Sade: “love your neighbour as an object”. This would doubtless plunge us into a confusion as this proposal comes into direct contradiction with and undermines the commandment “thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s wife”, who after all is also my neighbour. In view of such a promiscuous neighbourhood the question remains how not to conflate love with desire by not confusing an act with poetry or poiesis in the Lacanian sense of invention. Is this why Lacan’s articulation of “love your neighbour as yourself” takes him to affirm that this new law erases, in the face of the death of God, the previous commandments? If so, it is because it not only echoes them but also silences them. This leaves us with what seems to be a more attractive proposition if it was not for the fact that the ethics of psychoanalysis is concerned with a particular subjective effects beyond Kantian or philosophical morality. “Love the other unlike yourself”—not knowing why and where and when—would be a testimony that at least in some way responds to the mystery of love as singular, aleatory, unfulfilled. That’s why Lacan said that Catholicism is the only true religion as it refers to the absolute singularity of the subject’s discomfort of the body or thought that remains unaccounted for, but which in analysis we try to unravel and take, with the naiveté of desire to death, the responsibility for. In the end, responsibility is my freedom, and the fourth logical moment in Lacan’s “Prisoner’s dilemma” and its logic of time. Only then do these singular discomforts of what remains unaccounted for, which can be found not only in the congregation, come to form what Freud called the discontent in our civilisation, the unbehagen and this would lead me to speak of a certain caritas effect that could be found indexed on the passion towards another. It puts emphasis on the fact that even in religion it is the subject who loves and therefore he and nobody else pays for it. The Lacanian caritas, which is not a universal love, derives from the Latin caro, meaning “dear” in so far as this other is the castrated Other as the one who is dear. Further back we find traces of caritas in the Sanskrit Kama. In this sense love is an act of grace for the one who is dear, held in regard because he or she does not hold. It is an affection outside the circularity of the requited love. This love that Lacan found in the Catholic doctrine, points in the direction of charisma as an

O N L OV E A N D T H E W O M A N T H AT D O E S N OT E X I S T

39

act of the destituted subject Lacan mentions in his “Proposition” (1995) in 1967. What is relevant is that it breaks the circuit of reciprocity, and touches on desire, on the Other as barred, A /. Through his Apostles, readers, and followers, Christ made love eternal. But it was not eternity that was invented through love. Eternity existed in the older traditions long before Christianity, having succeeded just as well without love— without love but not without the jouissance of God. In this sense, love is an invention and concerns an act, broadly speaking, of subtraction, of renunciation whose effects can often be surprising. No doubt the Sadean variation of “love your neighbour as an object”, which responds to the Kantian theme of qui pro quo in morality in general, would retain the full impact of a universal imperative worthy of its name. It would, by this virtue, give a tremendous boost to all those ecological movements whose supporters, in so far as the law supports them, keep their love for animals and endangered species unrequited. Luckily for them, I mean the supporters, most of the representatives of the almost extinct species already carry a chip under their skin. This might not have been a concern in Freud’s time but he already recognised in the new law the trace of jouissance that rises at the sight of the image in which man is made. Freud nevertheless proposed to approach the problem of neighbourly love with a certain naiveté. Why to give love away to someone who might not deserve it, who is not worthy of it, namely of my love? Why to squander it on those who never ask for it or on those who are complete strangers to me or on those who are my enemies? We can hear in these questions the echoes of the caritas as a love that bestows affection on another who is dear and special in some way. What Freud seems to question here is not even the element of hatred which for him is indissociable from love. Something remains unaccounted for in the generalised formulation of love but what remains unaccounted, what goes beyond the pleasure principle in the traditional, Kantian morality, what is missing, is precisely what keeps a firm hold on the Christianity’s fundamental precept. How can I enjoy loving my neighbour after all, if he enjoys with all his heart hating me? How can I enjoy loving the other as myself if, in the first place, his demand to be loved masks his hatred? This is how we can today translate with Lacan, Freud’s naïve but in every way legitimate question concerning self-love, which led him from the “Project” (1950a [1895]) of 1895 through the problem of masochism, to the uncharted land of feminine sexuality. Not only did Lacan

40

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

translate Freud’s question on the neighbourly love but he also raised new questions for us. More suffering has been injected into the civilisation in the name of the universal love for the other, which too often translates into the other’s safety and happiness, than by hatred between two neighbours. As we know Lacan’s coordinates for hatred are those of the real and the imaginary. But in this sense Lacan also gives us a new variation of love, where he inserts the symbolic coordinate proper to the love discourse. This new modality of love amounts to what I would call the love to hate. And Lacan already envisaged that this love to hate would take the discourse of religion as its harbinger. It has flourished ever since the love of the universal followed a gradual decline. In this sense, the failure and decline of the universal and of the Name-of-theFather opened the door to the symptom, starting with the neighbourly love as one of the symptoms in civilisation. Love your neighbour can in this respect be regarded as the simplest possible recognition of the fact that as neighbours we are first and foremost foreigners. The neighbour, despite the insistence on the imaginary relations with him, which is real all too real, is always the one who displays in a more or less ostentatious way the different modalities of suffering and of celebration of life. Here is the point of contention that vacillates between envy and repulsion. This neighbour—provided one has a minimum of courage, which cannot be said of some politicians of independent parties where hatred of the other has become the most literal translation of “foreignness”—is his first foreigner for the simple reason that he, too, is a foreigner to him. The moment I am a foreigner to the other, this other is a foreigner to me. This could be called the grammar of foreignness, or of otherness, and in this sense is one of the derivatives of the law of neighbourhood. The bizarre ways of private lives of politicians are not exposed precisely for this reason— lest we burst the bubble of the semblance under whose umbrella we are all the same, which we are not.

CHAPTER TWO

Antigone, the beautiful, or beyond death in the analytic experience

Antigone’s radiance and the crossing beyond To speak about the real and the beautiful, and their relation in psychoanalysis, I have chosen Antigone. To the extent that the analytic experience pivots on what is singular and absolutely particular in its testimony at the end of analysis, Antigone’s, as taken up by Lacan, gives us evidence of such a testimony as situated at a certain conjunction of the signifier and the real. What testifies to this conjunction, to this passage from death to life and from life to death, which Lacan called a passage between two deaths, is, precisely, that no matter what direction she would take, it continues to oscillate between the signifier and the real. Antigone’s path of desire is thus oriented by this conjunction in so far as it is supported and accompanied by fantasy. It is not by accident that for Lacan one of the key signifiers in following Antigone to the end was a “crossing”. It is as if the relation between the real death and the symbolic death was mediated by the imaginary, of which fantasy in the Lacanian sense is a species, for this passage to become graspable. Fantasy and crossing come to form then another inseparable pair, another junction where Lacan situates the text of Sophocles: first to construct it, then to cross it. To construct it implies to locate the deficit, the 41

42

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

lack around which the repetitions revolve, aiming to obtain a jouissance that does not exist. Then to construct the terms of passage, namely a threshold, an interface, a limit point, and then to cross it. Since Antigone is the first one to have completed such a crossing, she is also the first one, we could say, who did the pass. In this sense, Lacan’s choice of this Ancient heroine is very telling. Is he not trying to tell us something along the lines of what Flaubert said of his Madame Bovary, namely c’est moi? Is he not giving us, prior to his elaboration on the pass in 1967, the primary components and the rudimentary coordinates for assembling a device and proposing a procedure whereby the experience of the analytic process, when brought to an end, be verified, i.e., demonstrated as a logic of a passage and a series of passages, and ergo a testimony, that concerns not only the symptom but also the fantasy because it concerns a crossing beyond that which does not exist? In Antigone, then, Lacan found his first passant, and with it the first witness to an encounter with the real between death and life, which will from the start make him present her in a certain light, éclat, as a flash of radiance. This would be my choice of words for the vibrant French term with which Lacan tries to capture her striking character. Without question Antigone’s pass bears the marks of immanence and rapture. She is a criminal, of course, in the sense of the transgression of the law, and in the sense in which we are all criminals, as Jacques-Alain Miller reminds us. She is also a terrorist as she carries her desire beyond the point of no return, which does not have to belong to transgression, and beyond the symbolic order where desire becomes a desire to death. She has gone beyond the point of negotiation as far as the terms of her passage or passages are concerned, following it through like a lightening to the death. But in the case we might be inclined to think so, it is not a question of all or nothing for her, not at all. She gains nothing from losing everything. She therefore crosses over towards the death she already died and from which she has nothing to expect. It is a one way passage, unlike in psychoanalysis, where there is a life after death. But Antigone must also be distinguished from Medea whose desire is intricately intertwined with that of Jason, and whose acts are oriented by the position of castrating the Other as her lover. If the experience of Antigone orients the logic of the pass, at least in its nominal and poetic sense of making and constructing it, it is because this logic includes the experience of the beyond, of passing beyond immanently. These are the terms Lacan extracts from the reading of

ANTIGONE, THE BEAUTIFUL

43

Antigone, the terms of passage and the rites of passage. But he does so by being emphatic about her lure and radiance with which she emanates. The beauty, as Lacan depicts it, prepares us for the step beyond it and therefore beyond the fantasy, where there is a fading of light as a manifestation of the Other, and a dying out in the land of shadows. These shadows are the signifiers for us. What does she desire in wanting her death? From the signifier of life, and the crossing of its limits, to the life of the signifier beyond death, our first conjunction of the signifier and the real, she paves the way for the second death, as Lacan calls it. What remains from this passage, marked by the insignia of Charon and river Styx, arrives as a sign of beauty Lacan puts at the entrance to the crossing. It is around a particular mode of the beautiful that this fantasy as a crossing might be shown as attempted. In its simplest form fantasy has a function of a veil, veiling what is invisible or inaudible or forbidden or impossible for the speaking being. These are nevertheless the modalities of the Other’s castration that the veil serves to cover. Fantasy is therefore a phallic construct to the extent that the phallus, Φ, as the signifier of desire organises and supports the question of beyond by giving body to it. Fantasy appears as an instance of reaching out beyond the veil, where jouissance is supposedly located, with the view to retrieving it. An expectation of satisfaction, and of more satisfaction, falls under the fantasy that the Other has it, enjoys it—ergo I must have it too. This was doubtless a signpost for Sade in the way he treated the body of the other. Lacan presented fantasy in its simple form as a subject’s relation to the loss and to what the veil unveils as a loss, namely the object a. Hence Lacan’s formulation $ ◊ a. The phallus plays a role in opening up this function of beyond, which Freud elaborated in the fetish. Thus we could say that veiling is not the only function of fantasy. To the extent that fantasy veils, it also unveils. This alteration of veiling and unveiling in relation to the real as lost is a matter of structure, structure of the signifier on the one hand, and of topology of the subject on the other. Topologically speaking, veiling and unveiling constitute a surface. This surface is the veil itself. This is our connection to the unconscious to the extent that the unconscious is superficial. Whereas the Freudian unconscious knows no time or contradiction, the Lacanian unconscious is neither deep nor shallow, does not hide under the surface or between the lines of desire. Lacan was thus led to say, which he did in “The position of the unconscious” (2006b), that the unconscious is what we say. I have already

44

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

said that this appears to me to be one of the most beautiful definitions of the unconscious Lacan gave us in his teaching. The unconscious of Lacan has nothing to do with the dimension of profundity but, precisely, concerns the dimension of the beyond, for example of the invisible as inscribed in the visible. Beauty is what captures us as truth. Beauty is not an illusion because after being captured by the beautiful, it is still a beauty whereas after discovery of an illusion it is no longer an illusion. Beauty appears as a mark with a proviso that it is connected to the real. Beauty in the Lacanian sense is a semblance, rendering what does not exist as a mask to the extent that it is not separate from the body and has a structure of truth. At this point we can situate Antigone and her radiance.

Anamorphosis between the beautiful and the sublime From the perspective of the veil, the unconscious is woven with the signifiers that make up the surface. The unconscious, to follow Lacan’s remarks on Baroque, is an indelible surface of the fold where the signifier fixes the object of jouissance. Lacan made a link between the unconscious as surface in fantasy and the beautiful. In the seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, where he takes up a detailed reading of the Sophocles’ text (1986), Lacan speaks, on the one hand, on the beauty that must not be touched, which is the ideal or idealised beauty. But there is also, on the other hand, a beauty that covers, veils where I dare not go in fear of losing the view and discovering the horror underneath. Antigone is between one and the other in such a way that she herself, in her radiance, allows Lacan to formulate the terms of crossing the veil as a fantasy. What interested Lacan in Antigone, was not the platonic, untouchable beauty nor simply the splendour of Baroque. What concerned him, had to do with a certain inflection, a reversal produced by way of anamorphosis. Anamorphosis is an illusion that concerns the real. It is therefore not an ordinary illusion, like magic, where a connection between appearance and disappearance has no stake for the subject. The stake arises when the real of the body is concerned and when the disappearing and appearing image represents a body part of the subject. As it is the case with Antigone, anamorphosis in the Lacanian sense, compresses the disarray of blurred and distorted images and interweaves the multitude of meaningless threads into what Lacan calls the “most beautiful illusion”. We can sense here that this beautiful illusion has to

ANTIGONE, THE BEAUTIFUL

45

do with Antigone’s passion, with what in her desire keeps us awake, as Lacan says, because it is a desire for death. Anamorphosis is the way to transform chaos and horror into beauty provided it is connected to the real, to das Ding, in its most extreme. Surrealists like Dali made these objects on daily basis. First, on the saucer and around its centre, you see an incomprehensible smudge of colours and lines. Then you place a cylinder-shaped and silver-coated cup in the middle of the saucer, and suddenly you see on the cup’s surface a clear image of a face. Lacan made use of the anamorphic transformation, like in the case of the mysterious and incomprehensible object he found at the front of Holbein’s painting Ambassadors. He did this in order to show us that the anamorphic operation serves to demonstrate in reverse the process of creating this new dimension of illusion that connects the real with the beautiful. Thanks to this operation Antigone’s passion for beyond will appear clearly and emanate as her éclat. What constitutes the essence of tragedy for Lacan is passion. The so called tragic error, or hamartia as isolated by Aristotle (1984) in his study of the genre of tragodia, is an effect of the passion that remains unaccounted for. It is wrapped in and traced by the signifier, but unmarked on the signifying chart as an object of jouissance, in the structure of the smudge the signifier circumscribes. Antigone’s passion is that for circumscribing the law of the Other, the edict of Creon. But it also proceeds, as Lacan says, from the “x” of her desire, which is at the heart of her radiating passion. In his teaching, Lacan distinguished three passions. I have already commented on love and hate, and later in this study I will touch on the third passion, ignorance. Analytic experience is at the level of the beautiful. It points to what has never been touched, the good of the other, while at the same time, it points to the beyond of a beautiful lure, to the horror of the drive, pain and loss. It is through the beautiful that the subject aims beyond the limit by deciphering his symptom and unveiling, while crossing, his fantasy. In this process, deciphering which is also ciphering, marks the repetition that can also be recognised on the side of fantasy. It emerges as an effect of the reversal of unveiling. The symptom as a repetition of deciphering that also ciphers, points to a dimension that Jacques-Alain Miller, in his reading of Freud and Lacan in the 1990s, called a variable, even a varieté. This varieté combines the truth and the variable. The symptom in this sense is a variation of truth. This way of approaching the real is different from approaching it in fantasy. And he proposed that

46

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

to the extent that the symptom constitutes a variation in the analytic experience, fantasy presents itself as a constant. In this light, repetition can be approached as developed from fantasy, whereas fantasy itself is a kind of concentrated, that is to say undiluted repetition. Lacan’s path to the symptom follows therefore the path of fantasy. And it is in this sense that he takes the step towards the horizon of the beautiful as touching on the limit of the terrifying, the ugly, and the unbearable. It is also at this junction, the junction of the beautiful and the drive, where Lacan situates fantasy. If he searched and found beauty in Antigone, it was with the view to throwing some light on the fantasy as a crossing she was the first one, topologically speaking, to complete. There is no use for the beautiful in the elaboration of the symptom, unless, of course, the subject is in some way addicted to the beautiful objects and beautiful women, and sometimes taking the latter for the former. In Seminar VI Desire and Its Interpretations (2013a) Lacan examines fantasy where the object is phallic, where the other, whether a man or a woman, but especially in the case of a woman, has the phallus. Throughout Seminar VI the object a is imaginary, and the fundamental fantasy he deals with concern the imaginary phallus in the phallic woman. We find here in Lacan’s teaching a second modality of the imaginary. Is Antigone a phallic woman? For Lacan at this point fantasy operates at the level of the register of the imaginary—not the imaginary of the mirror stage, not the imaginary as formative of the ego by means of the symbolic, and not the imaginary as conflated with and taken for the symbolic, which Lacan placed on the side of méconnaissance or miscognition. If in the Seminar VI on Desire Lacan situated fantasy at the junction of the imaginary and the symbolic, namely the imaginary object wrapped in phallic attributes, but always subjected to the function of the signifiers (Ella Sharpe’s patient’s account), here this undergoes a change. In the seminar on Ethics (1992), and for the first time in his teaching, Lacan situates fantasy at the junction of the real where the object a is real. Anamorphosis functions here as an operator of transmission between the two. The real, the unspeakable and terrifying real of das Ding, is given by Lacan full attention and true colours. Antigone’s beauty emerges in connection with the real as the real without law. This dimension of semblance cannot be confused with Plato’s beautiful form, eidon. In fact, the beautiful Lacan introduces us to, has a relation to poetry. What Lacan is dealing with here was

ANTIGONE, THE BEAUTIFUL

47

captured precisely by Rilke who in his Elegies (1980) speaks of beauty as a horror with a face of an angel. This knot, this tying up of the angelic and the horror it conceals, and in concealing reveals, forms a new definition of the beautiful that engaged Lacan as a dimension that verges on the sublime. How does the beautiful link through anamorphosis to the real object in fantasy? It is the question that arises directly from the analytic experience Lacan refers to. How often do we hear about broken love relationships, about fascinations with a partner, about the irresistible lures that in some unpredictable circumstances turn into encounters with the unbearable, brutal, and unacceptable force in the partner that brings the relation that never was to an end? One by one, we encounter in the analytic experience the proximity of the beautiful and the horrible every step of the way. And this experience, this encounter with the jouissance of the Other that Lacan links to das Ding as a mother, places us in the dimension Antigone was faced with, namely that of a limit. It is at this point that Lacan turns his attention to the sublime. What is the sublime? It is what Kant sheds some light on in the book Lacan mentions in the course of his seminar on Ethics, namely Critique of Judgement (1964). According to Kant, the sublime is “a representation of limitlessness”. As a philosopher, and contrary to his ancient predecessors, Kant liked his abode and never changed the place where he lived and worked. From this place he told us about his experience of the limitless. Unlike Kant, Anaximander was a wandering thinker, always changing places and approaching the unbound, apeiron, from a different perspective. We may feel surprised by the definition of limitlessness Kant gives us in view of the fact that it comes from the mouth of someone who spent all his life, from birth till death, in one town within a radius of a few miles. The formulation may also seem surprising given Kant’s life style imposed upon his daily routine, including a wake up call that came with a striking regularity of the clock, starting at five precisely to his butler’s words: “Professor, it is time!”. It may be surprising that in the midst of this stringent routine and daily revolutions coming always from the same place, Kant tells us that the sublime is what touches on the limitless. This is how he formulates it. The sublime represents limitlessness. How does one represent the limitless? How does the limitless represent, and introduce, the subject in analysis? One goes to analysis when one is confronted with the tyranny of the limitless. Psychoanalysis concerns the excess, the too-much, the too-much of solitude or the toomuch of the crowd, an excess of void or of fullness, each bringing a

48

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

different mode of jouissance, either too much satisfaction or not enough of it, thus causes a mixture of dizziness and anxiety. One suffers from the too-much of sense, and this too-much can have an effect of dizziness, like we saw in Heidegger as driven by Lacan, which is very close to the sublime.

Symptom and fantasy The sublime is always striking, causing a certain disorientation because the subject encounters the unlimited and the unaccounted for. This experience of too-much sends the subject in the direction of the symptom. When the patient brings with him this complaint that will be formulated and reformulated into the symptom, he is not concerned with fantasy. And that’s because fantasy functions as a pleasurable counterforce to the symptomatic discomfort of too-much. Fantasy aims to produce jouissance that is to be tamed and utilised as pleasure. When Kant speaks of the sublime as a representation of the limitless, he does not speak about a fantasy. With Kant we find ourselves in the domain of repetition, a true impetus of the symptom the subject encounters in his repetitions in everyday life. But when this repetition is not encountered as producing the dizziness of too-much, it stays there as the remains of the day in an undiluted, concentrated form. And this would relate repetition to fantasy as what is supposed to bring pleasure, making up for the not enough. This encounter with the subject’s repetition in the same place may provoke an excess of jouissance, the too-much of satisfaction. Kant may have encountered the limitless every day of his life when he thought of beyond. But he committed himself to writing his critiques from the place he never changed and without crossing beyond it. Lacan’s reading of Antigone introduced us to an act of going beyond, which is essential in the analytic experience. She commits an act that carries her beyond the limit, placing her in relation to it. This implies that she is ahead of the signifier of the limit which is a lack—a lack in the Other. In other words, being ahead of the signifier she is in this sense its effect. That’s the starting point for Lacan, the moment Antigone, having crossed the limit, finds herself in relation to the unknown knowledge, not knowing yet what she knows, what the effects of her act are. In this sense she is in the position of the analyst who, while not knowing, may be supposed to know a lot of things. While making it ahead of the signifier, Lacan’s Antigone also causes the ripples of signifiers, we

ANTIGONE, THE BEAUTIFUL

49

know these, the condemnation, the admiration, the lament. In this way Antigone, too, has a relation with the limitless and with the sublime. Lacan demonstrates it with the term Ate. The sublime, as defined by Kant, is not striking in the same way as a painting may seem strikingly beautiful. But the subject’s experience may be striking in the sense of producing a transcending effect, which touches on the limit. This sublime effect could be described as an upsurge of the real. A stone thrown into the water, before there is a ripple effect of the waves, causes first an upsurge, a sudden burst upwards. Antigone’s act upsurges the real in so far as this act comes before the signifier and its effects. First, there is an upsurge caused by the act, then there are ripples of the signifiers as effects of the act. The real, as Lacan never ceased to articulate, does not change place. It does not wander or move from one place to another like the lamella of the real, the pure life that crawls from place to place, or like a nomadic philosopher looking out for new perceptions. The real in fantasy, the object fantasy veils for the subject, making the subject suppose that the real hides behind the veil, does not for this reason move places nor does it, as one says, change hands. The real can be varied, it can unfold, swell or shrink, become inflated or deflated, but it does not change place or hands. It is therefore non-transferable from one subject to another and remains during subject’s existence its own most secret and shame. Rather the real stays put, as it were, remaining on the spot like our philosopher Kant to whom comes the experience of the limitless. The real stays with the subject as its most loyal intruder who never ceases to encroach upon the peace-loving subject. In this way, the subject is never truly alone even though the signifiers that represent him are, one by one, all alone. In short, in the case of Antigone, the real is upsurged in her act when fantasy is reduced to a constant, to an undiluted kernel of the object. And this is just like Kant’s life is compressed to a finite space in which he nevertheless maintains a relation with the infinite. There is a thin line between the “limitlessness” of Kant’s concept of the sublime and the Lacanian sense of the limit, which is where the analytic experience takes us. The limitless of Kant and the limit in the Lacanian sense have to do with encountering Ate. The limit is the Ate, the famous Ate that already appears in Aeschylus Oresteia, the Ate that belongs to the body of the Other, upsurged and, therefore, properly speaking, denoting delusion. It is not a delusion in the Schreber’s sense

50

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

of delusional metaphor. Ate relates rather to a sense of “perplexity” or “epiphany”, effected by being perplexed, wrong-footed or thrown off one’s feet. Ate, as Lacan formalises it in terms of an epiphanic effect that can strike one blind while producing lucidity at the limit, remains closely related to the term éclat that can be both heard and seen. In the case of Antigone, whose presence strikes us at all those levels, the crossing of the limit involves an upsurge of the real in relation to what passes by way of family ties. Antigone marks that limit in relation to the real without law, and appears as an example not to be followed, not to be identified with. What in those family ties concerning her relations with her sister and brother, makes her distinct is the Ate. It isolates Antigone not only from her sister Ismene but also from Creon, the legislator and the man of prudence, who inaugurates the dialogue of reciprocity and obligation. Lacan’s definition of the tragic hero in this sense, which is worth noting here as it opens the field of the good, derives from disidentification. His definition places the hero at the moment of crossing the field of the good and beautiful, which is accompanied by a sense of impunity. Antigone is not the only hero in this sense we find in the Ancient world, but she appears as the most radiant one and the one of grace. Her love for her brother, which takes on a form of paying him what she regards as his burial rights, has no limit and no price. In contrast to the ancient hero who acts with impunity, the modern hero is the one who gets away with things. The more he can get away with, the greater the hero. It is not the deed and responsibility for it that marks the modern, the postmodern hero but the skill to cover tracks. A heroic act, in the modern sense, is a criminal act one can get away with. But when one can no longer get away with the consequences, one tries to make use of psychoanalysis. Where does the analysis of the representation of a hero like Antigone lead us? It takes us to anamorphosis that Lacan introduces as an operation that allows us to follow the reversal of the image, as the Rilkian angel of horror. While the symptom is always what we complain about in analysis to the analyst, fantasy, far from having anything to do with a complaint, is to be constructed as a mechanism of obtaining jouissance in order to make up for the deficit of pleasure, and what formed the experience of satisfaction. In this sense Lacan’s formulation, $ ◊ a, aimed to isolate and situate the elements constitutive of fantasy as an operation of production of jouissance. For the first time in his teaching the object a is no longer imaginary even

ANTIGONE, THE BEAUTIFUL

51

if it is veiled to make semblances. Thanks to the anamorphic device I described earlier, the construction of fantasy can follow the reversal of the image. This is how Lacan presented fantasy—to construct it and then to cross it. And to construct it is to proceed from the beautiful image back to that which, through anamorphosis, can give us an indication of the elementary components, of the real and its particular modes of jouissance. In this sense of the deficit of jouissance in fantasy, the subject does not make much use of the symptom except being dragged and propelled from not enough to too much.

Sade’s fantasy As you can see, in the case of Antigone we are confronted with the dimension of the sublime in so far as Antigone’s acts are committed ad infinitum, without limit or boundary to stop her. What she aims at is not the breach of the law, the transgression of the prohibition. This would define a criminal act in its most banal sense as a kick out of transgression. What Antigone aims at is in infinity and, almost as a side effect and in passing, does she transgress. Aiming at the real ad infinitum has to do with blood ties, as Lacan stresses, the family ties that go beyond the symbolic arrangement of kinship. Antigone aims beyond the limit with the view to gaining however slightest glimpse and trace of what might bring her brother back. And she completes her mission in this sense by granting him what constitutes the most human right—the funeral rites. She accomplishes this, while reaching the point of her own death, what Lacan calls her “second” death, the symbolic price for covering her brother’s corps and separating it from animals. At the same time, we trace her movements every step of the way to elucidate and to assemble that thing called fantasy that preoccupied Lacan. What, then, let’s ask, is the image with which Lacan starts his reading of Antigone? In the first instance, is it not the image of the Other’s jouissance that the subject attempts to construct as his fantasy? We deal with it briefly first using an example of Sade. What constitutes the Sadean fantasy? It is a fantasy of eternal suffering to the extent that its persistent reproduction is concerned with a particular kind of fixation. What we find in Sade is a cornucopia of beautiful victims. But it is not to their perdition and death that Sade leads them, nor simply to show them they are not

52

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

innocent at all, but filled with sexual wishes, body cravings, dreams of destruction, fantasies, and so on. He rather brings them to the interface between pain and beauty to show, in his own, perverse way, that it is not the object that matters in apprehending the beautiful form but jouissance—satisfaction called jouissance as such. Sade’s fantasy is to perpetuate their suffering on this path without death and to bring them to the point at which it is impossible to subtract anything from their experience or to add anything to it. This point, where it is not possible either to subtract or to add anything, amounts to fixing his victims to the point of Ate as immanence once and for all, to incarcerate them in their crossing or, as one says, to capture them one foot in the grave. If Lacan went to such a length to articulate for us the Sadean experience, it was also to show what the analytic experience consists in. As for Sade, he never gets to this point, remaining at the limit point despite crossing all limits. He remains tied to the limit point in the way a pervert preserves a very special relation with the law, depends on it and, in delineating its loops, seeks his jouissance in those areas that escape the law, namely the real of the drive or the real outside law. Sade remains caught, and stuck, at the point where what comes out of nothing cannot return to it. And while believing in the absolute dimension of the jouissance of the Other, he also remains engaged in the writing of the sexual relation that does not exist. It is well known that perverts do not go to analysis. Perhaps this is not always the case. We cannot be sure. But when this is the case, it is perhaps because they have nothing to gain from analysis, and already know how to find satisfaction in life. And this would put the pervert on the side of Lacan’s formulation of fantasy, namely a ◊ $, which amounts to producing jouissance in the subject. It is only when this satisfaction becomes excessive, when it is too much, and the complaint sets in that, one by one, they seek in speaking to an analyst a way of abating this too-much and of desiccating their symptom a little. Lacan found in Sade the embodiment of perversion, that is to say of a belief, formed within the subject’s structure, that the body and the jouissance of the Other hold a clue to his salvation—the term I do not use accidentally given his preoccupation with religion. Sade stops at the point that is crucial for us: it is not the beyond of the veil that is crossed as an object but the subject’s identification with the Other’s pain to generate more pain—encore.

ANTIGONE, THE BEAUTIFUL

53

Towards a deculpabilitation of desire Through the beautiful Lacan introduces us to what he calls the good, even if they do not appear in this order in his seminar. It is on the hinges of what is called beautiful that the door to the good is pushed open. And this would already allow us to say that the experience of the beautiful affects and changes the movement of analysis with regard to morality. It would allow us to say that there is a shift in the movement from the Sadean fantasy to the crossing of the limit by Antigone, a shift that involves a change of position from against morality to the beyond of morality. That’s why I said that Antigone aims ad infinitum. Doubtless Sade is stuck at the former, against the moral, statutory, customary, and any dimension of the law, banging on the door of the Other’s jouissance, which amounts to barking up the wrong tree. On the one side, the psychoanalytic experience focuses on the symptom, its variations, its particularities, the excesses of relations with beautiful women, the obsessional repetition of making always the same mistake, the hysteric’s insistence on drilling a hole after hole in her partner, in short the work around the symptom as knowledge to trim down the real effects, to desiccate the libidinal investments in the meaning of symptoms. On the other side, the analytic experience has the fantasy on its horizon in so far as fantasy belongs to the dimension of false promises of obtaining and regaining the primary experience of satisfaction that supposedly awaits the subject behind the veil like a promised land. The construction of the fantasy for Lacan of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992) touches on the limit point, on its crossing, with a view to arriving beyond it. In other words, the movement of crossing, which is moving from one place to another, follows the path from against morality to beyond morality, a shift manifest in the movement of the signifier to the point of impunity. This would be another way of saying that from the perspective of desire the movement of analysis, the movement based on the analytic experience of the barrier of jouissance, is contrary to guilt. What does it mean? According to Lacan, “contrary to guilt” means that the sacrifice of desire—a sacrifice that has to do with the good of the other—is correlative to the signification of the written law. In other words, the more manifest the erasure, the crossing out of the written law, the greater the debt and the more guilty the subject. The giving up on one’s desire, which is not the best translation of céder sur son désir, is correlative to the subscription to the written law of the state.

54

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

This is one way in which the Lacanian subscription to the unconscious can be grasped. Lacan spoke of the cancellation of subscription to the unconscious in the case of Joyce in the Seminar XXIII Sinthome (2005) which I will take up later. We can introduce this term of Lacan by saying that the subscription to the unconscious, as it appears in the analytic experience, consists in the testimony to the unconscious as real, which makes Antigone’s position so evocative. This idea of the real, which for Freud amounted to representing the unconscious representation, makes Antigone’s path true to the very end. Subscription to the unconscious bears witness to the Ate of the signifier, to the experience of the signifier as real and as radically distinct from the law of the letter. We could say that to the extent that the pathway of the tragic hero fictionalises the law of the letter, deepening the sense of guilt and of what is owed to the Other, and to the Other of the Other, analysis testifies to what I would call a deculpabilitation of desire. The path of desire, therefore, does not amount to a simple opposition to guilt as Freud conceived of it, namely to an unconscious sense of guilt, but to an act of disorientation of guilt, bringing it face to face with the fantasy of jouissance as “nothing to subtract and nothing to add”, which means getting ahead of it. Lacan will describe this position some years later by calling it solitary in relation to the unconscious. But let’s not rush too much. What is the deculpabilitation of desire? It amounts to, it seems to me, to passing desire through a process of rectification and draining the fantasy that supports it from the jouissance of the Other until jouissance and the Other become mutually exclusive. So it amounts to producing a disjunction between jouissance and the signifier of the lack. This notion was alien to the ethics of Marquis de Sade but it is not foreign in psychoanalysis. What his fantasy of production of jouissance in the Other amounted to was an overwhelming sense of guilt as accompanying indebtedness. Deculpabilitation of desire does not aim to remove guilt but to drain fantasy in the process of its construction so that the effects of guilt are abated and the room for desire made. We could describe this step, this operation of rectifying fantasy, by using Jacques-Alain Miller’s expression of “desimaginarisation” of fantasy. This is particularly useful as in the seminar on Ethics, as I have already pointed out, Lacan is no longer concerned with the imaginary register of the object a. We would then speak about the effects of desimaginarisation in a twofold sense. Firstly, with regard to the construction of fantasy, to desimaginarise it implies a cut in the debt the neurotic subject never

ANTIGONE, THE BEAUTIFUL

55

ceases to pay back to the nonexistent creditor. And he pays it by trying to generate and increase more of the surplus of jouissance, which is what remains after the satisfaction of transgression has been dropped. And, secondly, it implies an isolation the object from the drive. To produce more jouissance, more surplus jouissance on the one hand, and to increase the debt owed on the other hand. Needless to say, although this does not go without saying, the culpability in question remains correlative to a belief in the writing of the sexual relation that does not exist. And this brings me to the character of Creon as the fictional creditor whom Antigone can never take seriously. He imposes the law to prohibit her brother’s burial and she owes him nothing. What does Creon want? And what, if anything, does Antigone owe him? He wants the good, the universal good of all. There is certainly no shortage of Creons today. As a man, and as a father, he is the guardian of the law. Of course, he is not the symbolic father, and not even a defender of the paternal law for a particular case because he would have to pay for it with his castration. He is a harbinger of the universal law that at first costs him nothing. As king he is a tyrant, inevitably, unable to particularise his jouissance and his desire when it comes to the relation between the living and the dead. The law of desire, the singular relation to the signifier as embodied by Antigone, is played out in a distance to the superego as represented by Creon. That’s why it would not suffice to discredit him on the ground of making an error of judgement, hamartia, which can be found at the level of action. Because Creon refuses to go from the universal to the particular, which is an effect of castration, he does not err. Nor would it suffice in the case of the master like Creon to oppose desire to the drive. Lacan never opposed the drive to desire. He rather integrated it. And in doing so he gets closest to desire when speaking about Wunsch, a wish manifested in dreams and parapraxes. But the drive, its vicissitudes and representations are something else. Lacan integrated the drive into desire, the theme I articulated earlier, which we can already find on his graph of desire. He placed there the drive as a demand of the Other in so far as a demand is essentially a demand for more jouissance. Hence the divided subject faced with the demand for more satisfaction is always a castrated subject. Or he is the subject in fantasy. These are the two occurrences of the divided subject on the graph, either faced with castration or, if this is refused, like in the case of Creon given we are in the dimension of the Greek tragedy, then it is fantasy of more and more jouissance. These are the positions for the

56

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

subject on the graph, and of course we have to remember that Lacan did not construct the graph of desire to give an account of the structure of the tragic heroes. But we can find them there, just as well. Apart from integrating the drive onto the path of desire, Lacan also integrated the drive by showing that it is the principle of alienation that makes desire turn to guilt, to the debt of jouissance owed to the nonexistent creditor. By integrating the drive to desire Lacan in effect integrated jouissance into the subject’s discourse, which constitutes the inscription of the unconscious into the desire itself. In other words, the construction of fantasy as supporting desire, depends on the decrease of the effects of the death drive or on its deculpabilitation. Lacan presents Antigone’s desire in the play as a pure desire, namely as a desire without limits, namely to death, as it marks the difference between the living and the dead. Her desire derives from the Other of the gods, and Antigone is there to follow this tradition, as eternal as humanity, to carry out the rites of burial, without expecting anyone to pay for it except for herself. That’s her relation with the signifier of the Other’s desire. Her desire and that of Creon are the antipodes, like those of zenith and nadir. She proceeds by covering the cadaver of her brother. It is for this reason that she calls the act of covering her brother’s body beautiful. Beauty is evoked, again, this time with reference to an act. Beauty, again, is linked to the veil and veiling. The reference she makes is the one to the ancient order that precedes the law of the state supported by the royal edict of Creon, and therefore to the difference between her position and Creon’s. This position amounts to Antigone acting in accordance with her desire even if the Other of the gods vouchsafe for it. She believes in it but this belief also solidifies her certainty, and in this sense she is delusional. What does she owe Creon? Nothing. What does Creon owe to the Other of the state? Everything. This is the manifestation of their antipodean desires. None can incorporate the other. All she needs to act is the action of the signifier, and in this sense her desire knows no limits. But she will have only known this after the act, namely when it is interpreted. Lacan chose Antigone to show us the limitless dimension of desire. That’s because the cause of her desire is real. For Antigone what Lacan called the object cause of desire is the object as real. Lacan did not choose the life of Kant to show us the experience of the limitless. It is true, on the other hand, that these encounters, quisquous and dizzy in both cases, intersect to the extent that there is something at stake in both

ANTIGONE, THE BEAUTIFUL

57

that does not go away when infinity is aimed at. The conflict between Creon and Antigone shows us the ambiguity, intrinsic to the signifier, and in the language of the play in particular, that cannot be reduced to a point where Creon and Antigone would cross swords with the latter taking law into her own hands. He imposes a law, she disobeys him, end of story. There is no tragedy and the play collapses. But the drama of desire Antigone represents and plays out, by far more complex than that of Hamlet’s desire, cannot lead to what is ultimately irreconcilable with reality. And that’s where the tragedy as play intersects with what Lacan called the tragic dimension of the analytic experience. At the end of analysis there is a point of irreconcilability with external reality, a point where there cannot be any adaptability to the societal norms as universal. Antigone is in this sense “real” because she perceives Creon’s ban on burial rites for the enemies in general, among whom is her brother, as an assault on an ancient law of the one and the singular, which is the signifier, and, ergo, as Creon’s fantasy. It is the fantasy of the good for all which stems from his belief in the Other of the Other, his edict as guaranteed by the state he represents as a ruler. What Lacan demonstrates is that desire in the analytic experience, or as embodied by Antigone, a desire in the unconscious follows a different order. Antigone will do whatever it takes to honour her brother, to protect his body from being ravaged by animals, and to mark the difference between the living and the dead. She will pay with life for that but that’s in some way as accidental as the alleged transgression. Whatever the price she pays it is not because she holds someone to ransom but because in her desire for death she puts her family ties above anything else and that includes the universal law. In this sense this is her passage, and in some way her pass. But because it leads her to the crypt where she will be walled up alive, we do not follow her example in analysis. In analysis, the way is rather out of the crypt, out of the prison of the fantasy of having to enjoy the step beyond. In analysis the way is from the alienation to living among other speaking beings, back to community, where one can speak of the solitudes of the analytic experience and of the cryptic moments that now bear Antigone’s epigraph. As for her own trajectory and position in relation to the unconscious desire, as highlighted by Lacan in the text of Sophocles (1986), she does not flinch, and this, rather than disobedience to the King’s law, which is secondary, constitutes the coordinates of her caritas I spoke before, her grace in her acts that form the absolutely singular ethics of the subject.

58

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

As for Creon, although he seeks the good of all, which is his fantasy, he is no Santa Clause. He is not the imaginary father everyone is grateful to until the hysteric uncovers his other side to blame him for her choices, and pouring buckets of her dissatisfaction over him. But in doing so, in loving and hating him at the same time, she does not cross him out. By seeking the good of all, Creon equates the law of the signifier with the letter of law. We could say, that he universalises the particular, which was essentially the basis of Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s imperative. In other words, Creon situates the letter in the place of the Thing itself. Das Ding can only be appeased, or pinned down, by the letter of the law. Does Creon succeed? He succeeds in refusing to subjectivise his jouissance, and will only subject to it when it is too late. It may seem surprising but for Lacan Creon is a hysteric although he does not know it yet.

Are there rites of passage in psychoanalysis? Today one speaks of a certain good of all in relation to speaking: it is good to talk, meaning that when you talk it does good to you, just like healthy food. So it is good to speak. “It is good to talk” is a kind of universalisation that completely ignores the fact that every speech is addressed to the other. Perhaps for some it is not good to engage in a blah-blah. There is a jouissance in speaking, and this jouissance in its cathartic sense, as described by Freud in 1880s, is to disregard the disunity of saying and meaning. Talking as a general good only works as long as it supports a social agreement, a social contract, as Rousseau called it, namely an image of unity between saying and meaning. One step further we could say, it is good to understand the other, based on the false assumption of speaking and meaning being one. Creon does not understand Antigone. What Lacan brings to our attention stresses Antigone’s solitude but not victimology. She follows her desire and no one else is responsible for it. There is no one to blame which would run contrary to the process of deculpabilitation that emancipates her desire of the excess of jouissance in guilt. With Antigone Lacan makes the case for the absolute singularity of the subject in relation to desire. If saying and meaning are not one, which they are not, if for some it is not good to talk, and understanding is not the main tool in the social bond where the subject always speaks to the one that is not addressed, then psychoanalysis, as an encounter with a symptom as knowledge, on the

ANTIGONE, THE BEAUTIFUL

59

one hand, and the passing through fantasy, always in the direction of the object, may be of use. At least it is a tragedy that does not end tragically. Saint Augustine was at pains in his search for an answer to the question about how it is possible that God, being perfect and good, who accordingly makes all things good, allows for some evil in the world. Augustine, who is not the last one to broach the problem, comes to the conclusion that even God, good and perfect, cannot do without the evil matter. The materialism of desire, the materialism of wanting-to-say does not really belong to the field of the goods of which God was for Augustine a perfect guardian. In fact, the materialism of wanting-tosay is what subverts the logos of Man and what questions the word of God. That’s why, when it comes to the matter of desire, Lacan called it moterialism, the matter of words, mots, in the plural, or the materiality of desire. From the analytic point of view, it is a matter of desire. Of course, it is not only a matter of desire but it is also a matter of desire. For the neurotic subject, the difficulty arises when, due to the effects of guilt, he realises he cannot get away with certain things, and makes a recourse to the good or the goods. Here we find the banality of Oedipus. When the judge does not know what to do with the child whose interest he is appointed to look after, he sends the child back to where she came from. As for the neurotic subject he wants the good not only for himself but also for the analyst, that is to say for the one he loves in the analyst. This is not necessarily a moment of impasse in analysis but of what Lacan called alienation in which the analysing and the analysed make a full circle to discover that what is dominant in the materiality of desire in the subject belongs to the field of the Other. The Other, in this sense, is alienating, and its most striking manifestation is the illusion of complementarity the subject might strive to achieve. But who would complement who? That is the question that separates the neurotic from the pervert. And since the latter is seldom seen in the practice called analytical, the subject’s wish to complement the Other may pass as a perverse trait. We will have to come back to the problematic of fantasy to follow the process of its transformation, in accordance with Lacan’s formula of it. It would not be surprising if at the end of analysis, the analysand, who now has a knowledge of an analyst, namely of the analysand who can do without the analyst, can find himself in the position of the object as a cause of desire, which is where he once had been.

60

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

Nothing that happens in the analytic process is designed for the good of all. In fact analysis runs counter to the search for the universal good, or father, which is the same thing. This is what I called in the second chapter universalis qua singularis. But this would not be enough to define its singularity. It is not sufficient to measure the process against a totality to which it has no aspirations. It would not suffice to narrow down the analytic process to a technique whereby we could at last see a systematisation of analytic interventions, of the ways to organise a session, say according to the rules of the clock—which clock?—and according to what Jacques-Alain Miller called “the force of the ego” to achieve, as separate from it, what would have to be then called a rule of singularity. As for psychoanalysis it is not the reverse of the formula above either, not at all. Singularity can only be defined as a gradual but systematic deuniversalisation. The problem involved here touches on the very step, the very gradus, in which the barrier of the imaginarised jouissance is made crossable. It concerns, to use the French expression, the pas-audèla of crossing, the step and the “not” of beyond. For the subject it is a matter of desire and its pas. Nor is it sufficient to wage the war against the ego because, as Freud notes in Civilisation (1930a), an attempt to sacrifice the ego has always had the converse and adverse effects of boosting it and making it more forceful, more obscene. The ancient practice of virtue, and of religious ascesis, owes its glory, and its splendour, to this kind of ego sacrifice. The analytic step in the Antigonian sense, differs from that of the virtuous sage, and involves something else, what Lacan’s heroine shows in abundance and in discretion, namely the relation with the real beyond the perceptual. In other words, what we find in the analytic experience is something of the order of subtraction in relation to “it is good to talk”. It is in relation to this “something else” of subtraction with regard to the subject’s mode of jouissance, as one by one, that Lacan orients the ethics of psychoanalysis. It is not so much the ethics of the real but the real in ethics—the meaningless real in the virtue, in the imperative, in the commandment and other coordinates of the universal. Let’s say that the analytic step proceeds in accordance with the rites of burial over the loss, which is castration and the lack it produces. Where do we go from there? If it is not the happiness for all or the wisdom of the virtuous for some, the analytic passage unfolds in accordance with the signifier to open up a certain pas-sage, a step beyond the general knowledge of the virtuous ones. In the subject’s desire the signifier is separated from

ANTIGONE, THE BEAUTIFUL

61

the written, i.e., the letter of the pas-sage, because it is the signifier of the lack in the Other. It may be not enough to cover and veil das Ding of death and loss but without it the subject can only be held hostage to the image. The end of analysis, which I will take up later, has to do with the invention between the real and the lack in the Other. There is certainly no guarantee of the goal to which this passage leads until we get there. This bourgeois dream, Lacan states, is not for psychoanalysis to fulfil. And not even the giving up of the service of the goods offers any guarantees as the case of King Lear shows. His bet was on his daughters’ love but here, too, came the betrayal. Each of the tragic heroes, and Antigone in her own striking way, shows that the relation to desire goes beyond death, that to be true to and to act in accordance with one’s desire, one has to aim beyond death, ad infinitum where the Other does not exist. Not that there will not be other heroes but that in their relation to desire each one of them will have gone beyond death without the guarantee from the Other. Lacan doubtless dissipated any doubts whether for the subject in analysis his relation to desire, which is his passage that is not to be confused with Antigone’s, has anything to do with happiness. Strangely, the subject is always happy, Lacan says. In analysis the subject is always happy when he speaks about his symptom. Nothing in the session makes him happier than speaking about what he does not have or what he is not, what he did not do, did not say or pay, did not think or realise this or that or how guilty he feels and how sorry he is, how inadequate or incompetent. This can go on and on as the list is endless. At some point in the analytical process this may be the very reason for coming to analysis to complain either about himself or his wife or work or others. And sometimes it is a good reason. It is a good reason to start to talk but it does not end there. If speaking about the lack makes the subject happy, if he is happy to talk about his and others’ shortcomings, then it is not about the lack he is in fact speaking. He is speaking about what, deep down, in the secret vault hidden away from the analyst he believes he in fact does not lack. In analysis no one can vouchsafe that this way of going about things will land him beyond the good of all because he has not yet given up any. And if he does how does he know he will not end up a cropper like King Lear? Doing things in the name of the good, and especially the good of the other, leads to guilt which is the reverse side of desire, its underside, to put it topologically. In effect, such actions amount to

62

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

giving up on desire. Antigone is the one who fulfilled it but because she fulfilled it she begins to wale and lament at the end of the play. Once she is across, her passage completed in infinity beyond her death, her audible lament is the only remainder of life she left. It is a strange moment, this moment of crossing, and Lacan pauses here to mark it as “second” death, not the biological death but the death she lives through as a desire for death. The radiant and striking beauty of her acts, and the fading beauty of her departure, intersect at this moment as two modes of the dialectic, the one with the imaginary and the one with the real. Antigone will thus live her life from the beyond, from the place which is always already on the other side in relation to the life she lived and perhaps to what has not been lived. She has no regrets to never have become a mother and always remaining a child, a daughter of her long gone father. It is also from this moment, which elsewhere Lacan called a moment to conclude, that we can speak of her desire as the one that having been fulfilled will always remain unrealised. Desire in analysis can become unrealised, unrealisable. It is the term Lacan uses in Seminar XI (1977) when he comments on the dream of the son who reproaches his father for not seeing his son burning. Antigone’s desire is unrealisable as it is beyond the level of wish fulfilment giving us a glimpse into the beyond of life. In psychoanalysis such a position is designated by the subjective division. In Antigone, this division took on a form of division between two deaths, the biological one that does not concern us because it happens to everyone, and the symbolic one that points to an effect of the signifier on the body, cleaving, dividing it. The moment the subject is caught in language, which happens long before birth as if the place for the subject was already laid in the Other as a place of language, puts an irreconcilable rift between saying and meaning. We do not really understand what Antigone means, although she speaks Greek, the language that can be translated. We do not understand her because she speaks, and in this sense interprets, beyond the limit of meaning where the signifier is always ahead of the meaning effects it produces behind. One more thing surprised me at the end. In some strange and cryptic kind of way she has assumed the position of an analyst in the sense that she is the cause of desire.

CHAPTER THREE

On obsessional neurosis: from Freud to Lacan and back

Hysteric’s partner I will now take up obsessional neurosis as a clinical structure as Freud constructed it and Lacan read it. Both of them approached the obsessional as the hysteric’s partner and interlocutor not to say the latter’s junior. Based on Freud’s developmental study, the hysteric seems to enter the world scene before the obsessional, as the latter one arrives late when some primary libidinal relations already fell into place. In libidinal terms, I would say, the obsessional is a latecomer, a late arrival, as he tries to reorganise the world that pre-exists him. It is Freud who tells us the story of the Ratman (1909d) because the obsessional seems to have nothing to say, namely speaks only to himself. There is a long way for the obsessional in analysis, as Freud followed his complex, even mysterious path, which is where I want to pursue. It took him back to vicinity and neighbourhood of those with whom he started his work, namely the hysterics. Thank God for the hysterics, for without the hysterics there would not be psychoanalysis. One cannot say the same of the obsessionals. The differences between the tonalities of their language, libidinal investments, object choices, subjective positions in relation to the Other, fantasy and desire, seem evident. 63

64

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

These differences nevertheless made Lacan place the discourse of the obsessional in the vicinity of that of the hysteric, as he inscribed the former into the discourse of the latter. The question I want to pose from the start, which is a question for the clinic of neurosis, is what awakens the obsessional into the hysteric’s discourse, where does his hysterisation start. If the obsessional’s speech is already inscribed in the hysteric’s discourse, should we not rather say thank God for the hysteric for without the hysteric there would not be an obsessional? But this is not new. Freud already situated them as neighbours when he spoke of the obsessional’s language being the dialect of the hysteric’s. But this does not imply that the reverse is the case. If the obsessional mode of speech is a dialect or a variant with some distinct elements of hysteria, this does not imply that hysteria too should be regarded as a variant, in fact quite the opposite. Lacan gave us an algorithm of the discourse of the hysteric, consisting of four elements occupying four specific places. I will come back to it but for now suffice it to say that Lacan marked the hysteric’s position as a divided subject, between the jouissance of the body and the signifier with which, and towards which, the hysteric addresses his discourse to the Other. It is not a very successful representation of the subject because there is never a satisfaction that would put a stamp on it. In this address, unsatisfied and unceasing in the demand for more, which therefore conceals a relation to the real, we can find a capacity for telling the truth, and therefore for obfuscating it, without much effort. The obsessional, in turn, has a different way of beating about the bush. His priorities are guilt over desire or image over the action of the signifier, as if his image of the world was not already its puppet. There is clearly a dissymmetry in these neighbourly relations, and what goes one way does not come back unchanged. On the one hand, we could say that this is already indicated in Freud’s approach when he regards libidinal development as a compass for where the psychoneuroses like hysteria and obsessional neurosis could be placed. And in doing so, he situates hysteria at an earlier, that is to say primary stage in the relation to the Other of language. In the Lacanian sense, we could say that the hysteric responds to the signifier at the moment when it is repressed, occulted while showing itself in the symptom and in what is unbearable in the body. The obsessional arrives, that is to say his position is determined by a certain pleasure of the primary experience of language impacting the body. This is how we can read Freud with Lacan. The obsessional arrives at the moment of

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

65

an ideé fix that seems to have put the earlier experience of division and trauma behind or under the carpet. So when he experiences pain, reminiscent here and now of the primary displeasure, he reacts by denying it, indeed playing a fool and recognising discomfort consciously in others but not where it emerges. Freud was precise on that, as early as already in his “Project” (1950a [1895]). The development of his later work on the obsessional neurosis confirms that he did not retreat from this position. He maintained the dissymmetry between the libidinal investments and how these two modalities of neurosis are structured, whereas with Lacan, in his theory of discourse, of desire, subject, and ethics, the emphasis will be on the indication of the existence of different subjective positions in relation to the Other and to jouissance. In other words the subject is only subject—hysterical or obsessional—if it is subjected to the signifier of the Other. The hysteric and the obsessional remain neighbours all right, because the fence, the border that makes them neighbours—that makes one of them dialect of the other but not the other way round—belongs to the order of the unconscious structured like a language. Or, as Lacan will say in the early 1970s, what separates them is the Other. The neurotic subject is only a subject, a divided subject, to the extent that it is subject to an insertion of the phallic signification in response to the life of need. The outcome of this subjection produces two different modalities of relation to the Other. One will consist in the Other appearing as desiring, namely lacking, and therefore addressed by the hysteric’s demand for more, for why, when, where, in other words for the interrogation of the Other’s desire. The obsessional desire in turn, or to be more specific his cancellation of desire, results from the perception of the Other as castrating and pulverises carefully crafted and constructed abode of the obsessional subject. On the one hand, we have an incomplete Other, on the other, a decompleted Other that is also an executioner. And this was the case of Freud’s Ratman. Starting with the true colours of the hysteric subject, one can say even when one is colour blind, that they are always true, always changing and on the side of semblance. Let me refer in this regard to the shortest definition of the hysteric’s desire I have come across so far, which comes from Jacques-Alain Miller’s mouth, namely as “I want, I want, I want”. In hysteria, we can distinguish three equivalent modes of “I want”, the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. First, I want what I don’t have, second, I want because I do not have, and ergo, three—I want to want.

66

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

This pursuit of satisfaction allowed Lacan to inscribe the hysteric desire in the three registers he started working with in the 1970s. Lacan’s work on the topology of the hysteric’s desire as for ever dissatisfied started in Seminar XIX, … ou pire [… or worse] (2011). And Lacan formulated it in the following way: “I demand/want that you refuse what I give you because it is not it”—a simple and beautiful formula that ties up the three registers or rings of the Borromean Knot as we will see later. Can anything be worse than that for the obsessional? His entire misery and self-mortification of his own desire are devised by turning away from the gift of the Other’s desire—which is “it”—while stifling his as derived from the latter. Instead the obsessional subject puts his faith in thought and says he only wants what he thinks he wants, namely what he thinks he has. Thoughts rather than articulations are his habitat as he, or she, remains, in the structural sense of the word, at the level of demand. In this respect the obsessional is well predisposed, to use one of Freud’s key words, to seeking guarantees beyond the Other, to wit in the Other of the Other or in the dimension of beyond of any realm whatsoever he finds himself currently in. And in order not to have to confront it, he will invent the beyond of any order and any world, to pretend to seek solutions to what lies within it. This will step by step not only increase but also intensify the obsessional’s resistance to the unconscious as thwarting his project, and therefore to analysis, to love and to whatever may pose a threat to his drive organisation. Would the beyond be the exit from his suffering or another entrance to the wellbeing he has never left?

The pathways of the obsessional From the beginning of his teaching, Lacan situated psychoanalysis as an experience and cure of neurosis. Neurosis as a moderated pathos of trauma, marked by a missed encounter with the primary signifier, gives ground to the work of the signifiers as constituting knowledge about the former, and provides the basis of analytic formation that revolves around the real. For Lacan of the 1950s the analytic experience is a neurotic experience as organised by the Name-of-the-Father, that is to say testifies to the effects of the signifier on the body, disturbing and dividing it. Psychosis appears at the time in Lacan’s teaching as a sharply distinct and separate concept and clinical structure. And he even opposes cure to the treatment. As for the experience of neurosis,

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

67

it brings with it a plethora of ruses and lies to disguise the oppressive Other the obsessional encounters and the haunting thoughts that keep sending him from one lie to another. For this reason we can say that the discourse of psychoanalysis revolves around disbelief because disbelief as a way of questioning the subject aims to loosen up the fixed satisfactions of defence and dismantle, one by one, the protective devices the obsessional holds so dear. In response he will continue to seek his saviour beyond and outside the question addressed to him, seeking to shift the origins of psychoanalysis beyond the encounter with an analyst and with a question addressed to him, just as may be the case with philosophy. Part of the language of the obsessional is to direct all his efforts, systematically and orderly, towards some other dimension and isolate a certain “outside” or a “beyond” to deflect the questions he feels are addressed to him. To find the “beyond”, or the ultimate leverage point, may be for him tantamount with locating deus ex machina that would finally remove him from the scene of his suffering and of alienation he is trapped in. Before dislocating this “outside”, and disorienting the search for exit door, any analytic work with the obsessional is constrained to this one way path. Where is the “beyond” of psychoanalysis, then? Both Freud’s and Lacan’s work, that is to say their, and others’, “theory”, and of course the clinical experience, may be of great disappointment to the obsessional subject as they send his dodging attempts to the place of articulation. This has been achieved to a greater or lesser degree by topology as a name of the subject’s structure, discovered but unformulated by Freud, and worked with by Lacan from beginning to end. The response to the question comes from where any response comes, from language, rendering the question of origin and of genesis void in so far as it merely brings the obsessional’s aspiration down to his satisfactions, his object, his desire and his unsettling dreams, in short to where he started. That the answer about the “beyond”, the metaphysicians have been wrecking their brains to find, comes from within, is one of the paradoxes Lacan left for us—not to solve them but to let them orient us. Since these paradoxes can only be resolved in infinity, our work in psychoanalysis deals with infinities as reduced to signifiers as constituting the life of the subject, thanks to the phallus as a precondition of their mobility and exchangeability, and therefore moving from one infinity to another as Cantor the mathematician showed with his transfinite bodies.

68

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

For many obsessional patients analysis is either everything or nothing. They make it into a goddess to whom they pray for an absolute transformation, which is one of the modalities of the “beyond”, and liken the process to initiation whose imaginary model can be found represented on the frescoes of Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii. At times, when this demand proves too tiring, albeit nothing can be too tiring for the obsessional once he sets his goal, he speaks of the analytic process as a failure and disappointment, as nothing is happening. The nothing figures prominently in the obsessional’s discourse. It provides him with the leverage point. If “everything” cannot be achieved, and he cannot be transformed into his goddess’s partner, then he can at least achieve “nothing”—that’s something after all. Nothing as something is better than not “everything” although nothing is worse than “everything”. In the case of such patients the emphasis is on swinging between polar opposites and trembling that the fall is imminent, inevitably, because only the fall can send him from the compulsion to find the absolute transformation to the other, to his drive object knocked off by the fall. Before the fall and a disorientation that affects his body, his swinging will continue to inscribe and seal what he in this way conceals, namely his defensive fixations and a distrust in love in psychoanalysis called transference. Hence the cases of negative transference as the only expression of love in the analytic treatment. And each time he swings from one end of the pendulum to another, and then back to the initial position, he takes this circle for a movement, which it is not, paying homage to Sisyphus, his true predecessor and inspiration. And we find this not only in the Ancient myth of Robert Graves but also in Albert Camus’ (1983) modern reading of it. The way down, Camus wondered, is the time for reflection and time to understand. On the way down from the mountain the obsessional subject immerses himself in thought and contemplation, which Camus found for some reason crucial and decisive to upset the pernicious monotony. And yet having reached the bottom of his journey, he picks up the stone and off goes back and up again. The Sisyphal path renders reflection futile, a little distractor from what awaits him once he resumes his itinerary. Whether the obsessional goes up with the stone on his shoulders, or down without it, he gets used on this itinerary to giving up his desire in favour of self-pitying reflection of guilt, of which his tortuous path reminds him. Confronted with as yet another polarity of loss and of repeated attempt to regain what was lost, the obsessional in analysis does not know whether to

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

69

continue giving up on his desire, the only pathway he really knows, or to drive it on as his ideal to which his desire has been reduced. His position remains therefore anchored to this mortifying oscillation between guilt and the compulsion to refind the satisfaction that suffocates him while he keeps searching for it. It is therefore not surprising that the idea of absolute transformation forms for him the ultimate goal. But this transformation never happens, it can be neither promised nor does the analytic process provide it. The “beyond” as a lack produced and possessed by language will have remained for eternity as disparate. While demanding a transformation of that part of him in the Other, he can in fact only submit to what changes in his body, namely in him as subject. Psychoanalysis can maintain its position with regard to the “beyond” as its chief reference point because it is extimate and because it has done so from the beginning by means of a myth whose status in psychoanalysis is radically different from that of science. And this brings me to Lacanian topology. The “beyond” of psychoanalysis has always had a place in analysis, contributing topologically to the question of either inside or outside alternative in the subject. What is this alternative if not a conjunction of one and the other, which shows itself as a paradox? We must discern the “beyond” by means of inventing a link between this paradox, which is the synchrony of outside and inside. The myth, which was for Freud the starting point because it deals with the real, is a place of that synchrony of the signifier and its failed assimilation to the real which science aspires for. It is a myth, Lacan tells us in the 1950s as well as in the 1970s, that introduces an impossibility. The “beyond” introduces a category of the impossible as imbedded and intrinsic in the discourse of psychoanalysis. And if you wanted to write this impossibility—the Woman, the Thing, the sexual relation—you might be led to suppose that this is how the subject, when raising the question of exit, namely that of the “beyond” of analysis as a process, shows his true colours with regard to his desire. That is why Lacan makes a remark concerning the analyst’s desire, saying what it is not. It is not a desire of the impossible.

Freud and Lacan in the Ratman’s labyrinth Philosophers have no problem with this as they happily draw their resources from the discourse of the obsessional. To deal with the

70

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

impossible they remain loyal, so to speak, to the Other as All or to the consistent Other. And that’s what the philosopher of Being, Heidegger, assumes and remains loyal to, namely that the Other be consistent and therefore belong to the ontology of reality. What the obsessional subject believes in this regard, and I will come back to this in a moment, is the absolute being. And we can already see this in play in the case Freud gives us as a paradigm of obsessional neurosis, namely that of the Ratman (1909d). The obsessional believes in absolute being, just as the pervert believes in absolute jouissance or the hysteric in absolute love. As for the paranoiac, he does not believe at all, as Freud stressed the function of unglauben, the psychotic knows. I want to focus now on some traits of the neurotic which would allow us to speak about the obsessional dialect or grammar, found by Freud as late as in 1925, as puzzling, if not mysterious. These traits include suffering from thought, proliferations of debt, the punishment fantasy, the relation to death, the ambivalent relation to the father, and the preservation of being. Let’s move on then to the story of the letter, the Lacanian letter, which is a story or a history of the Ratman’s debt. It reveals a destiny of the signifier, which allowed Freud to name the case after it. Freud tells us the story of the debt which the Ratman narrates almost in the form of a chronicle of his family history to which he himself will become indebted in the way that deserves to be called structural. The signifier is always there to mark the way for the one who follows it, and that’s what Freud shows from the start. I have alluded to the place of myth in psychoanalysis. It is Freud’s starting point in the sense in which he refers to the real father who supposedly keeps guard at the entrance to jouissance. This was perhaps Freud’s only way to account for the father as exception, the father who having an uninterrupted access to jouissance, appears as omnipotent to the visitor, just as the guardian of the law described by Kafka (1992). Freud was later led to consider the death of God as an expression of the fundamental disjunction between the symbolic and the real in the form of the patricide. Lacan confirms this by disassembling the Oedipal logic of this disjunction which, at various historical moments, notably in the so called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, held its believers hostage to a promise of jouissance, which a murder of the master, or a kind of master murder, would enable them to attain. As we know Lacan subverted the

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

71

success of this “sexual revolution” by approaching it as a compulsion to enjoy. But there is another sense Lacan gives to the myth in which fantasy comes into play. The myth in question is that of the neurotic’s myth (1979) of his family. At the cradle of the subject’s birth there is what Lacan calls a “constellation”—a term that would give no trouble to an astrologer to regard it as a name of an oracle, namely as that which is written in the starry sky once and for all. And it is perhaps in this sense that the astrologer as a respected scientist remains silent as subject. It is worth noting that this “once and for all” constitutes, as JacquesAlain Miller noted, a mode of jouissance as such, as I mentioned earlier, namely a jouissance that belongs to the order of the irreversible. It is then another way of saying that as for the symptom it cannot be unwritten because it has been formed once and for all, but also, as Lacan pointed out, that the symptom of the subject originates in the symptom of the family. And this means that an encounter with the letter occurs where “once and for all” remains silent in the form of inheritance, transmission, legacy of prestige, and of the name. The passing of this mode of jouissance remains silent until at some point in the chain of generations and family taboos, the truth of the subject flashes up in analysis, and as analysis, which does not imply it is now all clear. “All clear” would appear to be a rushed reading of truth that points in the right direction, that of the unconscious. This moment of truth, which the obsessional experiences as a result of the fall from his eternal perpetuum, may create this impression—at last, a change happened. How mistaken he might be, however, that, when celebrating his discovery in a lap of honour, but also with a sense of relief, he will soon find himself caught in another orbit of his journey whereby his faith in an absolute truth, as from now finding himself much closer to its centre, may only be refuelled. For the obsessional patient the question remains: since something happened, what’s next? As for the Ratman, his story testifies to the subject’s destiny due to the fact that his parents’ relation is told in a series of events that bind him symbolically in the transference to Freud. The obsessional’s speech is spoken in parts or in instalments, just as his debt, with the view to full reimbursement. And this, I mean the fact that he owes to the Other, is, of course, the starting point. He owes to the Other but, as Freud stresses, the command to which the payment is a response is

72

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

“do not pay”. Let me follow Freud’s and Lacan’s work in four steps to see where it takes us. Firstly, there is the Ratman’s troubled father, a slightly dubious figure, not very successful in his professional career in the army where, having gambled away its funds, finds himself in debt and, to save his honour, at the mercy of his friend who repays it all. This friend of the father remains a mysterious figure for the Ratman. But it will not be a secret to say that this enigmatic turn on the path of the obsessional sets him out, in an obscure kind of way, on a voyage to settle his accounts once and for all, even if, which is what he actually does, it is to postpone them. We can see clearly that the debt and its repayments will dominate Ratman’s entire discourse and therefore his libidinal economy. In this vein, he chooses, by way of tormenting doubts and hesitation, not to get off the train on the way to Freud, and travels in the direction opposite to where the debt could be settled. In this he follows the original command of the refusal to pay as I mentioned above. This command could be formulated here as an imperative: Thou shall not pay to the other without receiving something in return. The “once and for all” mode of jouissance is a dominant one in this part of the story, which is consistent with an act of repayment of all as one, which the Ratman has in view, and which we must clearly distinguish from the series of instalments to which the Ratman is bound in his speech and analysis with Freud. Secondly, there is the Ratman’s mother, a rich woman of high social ranking, able to provide the means of support for the family, with whom the Ratman’s father strikes a match. But this does not prevent her, on the contrary, from making the remarks that rekindle his old flame, namely that of a young and pretty but poor girl he had once loved. And never mind that he will try to extinguish this old flame in front of his wife; for his son it will glow on. The relation between these two figures of the poor girl and rich woman will thus come into play in the Ratman’s love life, as his father urges him to marry a wealthy woman despite his son’s love for the poor one. Here again, although Freud is the first one to formalise it, the logic of the Other’s desire falls for the obsessional on the opposite of what is said. In short, his father’s wish is the son’s command. Thirdly, there is a fear that the punishment he has a fantasy about, namely of the rats being inserted into his anus, will be inflicted upon the poor woman he loves. And this is not without a connection to his father

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

73

and his old flame. What happens is not so much that as a result of a string of identifications in play here, the Ratman finds himself desiring the enigmatic feminine figure from the father’s love life, but that he, the son, places his own beloved into the cocoon of an ideal, from which he hopes she will emerge untouched by his fantasy. I only wish to emphasise here the series of substitutions by means of which Freud presents to us the story, and which reproduce in some way the family configuration within the constellation with which we started. And this is what Lacan called the neurotic’s myth (1979). Two metaphors then, each of which, does not know, in the subject’s speech, that it is a metaphor. The first metaphor concerns the father’s debt to the mysterious friend, replaced in the Ratman’s exploits by the proliferation of debt. In Lacanian terms, as I have already articulated, the proliferation of debt translates into a proliferation of guilt which follows from giving up on one’s desire. Being-in-debt, which is the Ratman’s position in the identification with his father, is the subject’s position of giving up on his desire—in this case in relation to the creditor that does not exist. As for the proliferation of the Ratman’s debt, it derives from his refusal to pay. To pay what if not by renouncing his jouissance generated by the superego’s command: “you shall not pay”. The second metaphor, which concerns having, touches on the object. What is it that the subject does not have or what is the debt supposed to repay? This substitution seems to be a replay of the shift from the father’s friend to the rich woman to the poor girl. In between are the Lieutenants A and B and the lady at the post office who ultimately represents the ending point in the unfolding series. There is a metonymical concatenation in this passage from one object to another. And fourthly, I would like to mention an element which Lacan alludes to, and which is not without significance. The event that produces this domino effect of owing to the Other appears to emerge at the point of the Ratman losing his glasses and their subsequent replacement, which, as we shall see, points to the drive. It has to do with the Ratman’s early experience with his nanny and the compulsion he subsequently develops, namely that of wanting to see. To see what? A naked woman. Freud calls it scopophilia and immediately links it to the compulsive fear that while looking at a naked woman his father would die. To see or not to see therefore names a modality of jouissance that the Ratman both wants while at the same time protects himself against it, namely against harming the idealised object. Here then is another connection of the

74

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

Ratman’s ambivalent relation to the father whose debt he continues to repay while repressing the sadistic-aggressive drive towards him.

The myth of Tantalus The fantasy of punishment, and the impulse to protect his beloved from pain, appears for the Ratman as a way out of his debts. If the proliferation of debt keeps him firmly bound to the inherited obligation of his father, the fantasy of punishment is a response to the superego’s command not to pay. The obsessional brings upon himself a penance which Freud attributed to the fundamental trait of regression but which is not without the capture in the pendulum of hesitation followed by refusal. And this brings me to Tantalus. The obsessional is Tantalus. Lacan makes this remark in Seminar V, Les formations de l’inconscient (1998b). Tantalus was no ordinary hero. He eagerly mingled with the mortals and immortals alike, confusing the mythographers whether to include him among either one or the other. A son of Zeus and the nymph Plouto, also called the “Rich one”, Tantalus was also a grandfather of the Atreus dynasty. As a kind of “middle man” he both dined at the Olympus and hosted banquets for the immortals. His sins, the cause for his punishment, were numerous and included theft, kidnapping, and murder. He is said, for example, to have stolen ambrosia from the gods. But, more importantly, he revealed the secret of immortality to the humans. This, however, seemed to them of much less use than fire. Which is why Prometheus was forgiven, whereas Tantalus learnt the price of immortality by being condemned to punishment for eternity. The stories vary and the causes of his punishment differ but the name of Tantalus is tantamount to deprivation of food and drink. From the structural point of view, he is condemned to spend his life in a hallucinatory proximity of an unattainable object. Bound to a rock, the water beneath him and the fruit branch above him move away every time he tries to reach either one or the other. From the riches of his mother to the secret imparted by his father, Tantalus is bound to torment in the face of the unattainable object and satisfaction, which is that of pure death drive. In fact, we find in this little story an element Freud detected in his analysis of the oral drive when he spoke of the sealed lips that kiss themselves. The excess that the obsessional engages in, is the excess of jouissance which, as Lacan says somewhere, serves nothing.

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

75

This excess, this “too much” I have already mentioned, allows us to recall how Freud defined, very early in his work, the earliest experience in obsessional neurosis. If in hysteria the primary experience is of displeasure, in obsessional neurosis this experience is of pleasure and its excesses. What the obsessional, in his relation to the Other’s demand, encounters amounts to a repeated excess, a ceaseless “too much”, from which he will seek shelter by way of relying on imaginary constructions, such as an ideal. And this shelter of hiding in the ideal ego serves as a defence against the Other of the signifier, with which, let’s stress, the ideal was constructed in the first place. An encounter with the signifier carries with it a danger of diluting his current enjoyments. This self-inflicted pursuit is therefore tantalising. The relation to the demand appears at the level Lacan emphasised as crucial in the structure of obsessional neurosis. It is because the obsessional subject finds the Other’s demand excessive that it gives rise to his defences and makes his relation to desire problematic, if not erasing it altogether. In relation to desire he is reduced to what Lacan called a dependence on the other. Everything for him seems to be at stake in this relation of dependence. Everything, again, that is to say his image as image of and in the other on which he depends. Everything, that is to say the imaginary “all”. And that is why I said that the obsessional believes in the absolute being. The absolute being remains his true master provided this master counts as the imaginary other. The relation to the Other of demand therefore seems to be played out against a backdrop of totality to which the obsessional is particularly attached forming its part and never putting a risk, which carries responsibility, before it. This relation to an image of totality has to be subsequently mediated through the image of the other. What the obsessional wants in his totalising and tantalising demand is an end, a closure, to be precise a closure of desire. In other words, what he is really after is to seek some sort of accomplishment of self-identity by assimilating this little image of the other, so that the beyond of this imaginary relation—that includes a wide range of expressions including interpretations, lectures, monologues, and critical overviews that do not have anything at stake for him—could be erased and foreclosed within once and for all. A belief in the absolute transformation that an obsessional subject like the Ratman shows in the course of analysis gives an indication that the “once and for all” is on a par with an “all-image” he is both part of and in relation to. That is why generosity and benevolence, accompanied by an occasional gesture

76

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

of lavishness, are so characteristic of an obsessional. His generosity is always well calculated and prudently invested because the object of his generous investment is the image of the other, that is to say himself. Having failed to accomplish this “self-identity” in a satisfying way and style, having failed, again and again, to drop the stone, to drop the quote, the pretence, the ambition of absurdity, he bends, still hungry, thirsty and exhausted, towards the nothing. The struggle onto death to erase the “beyond” without, after it has been refound over and over again within, would thus be the obsessional’s ultimate reward—being-all.

Freud’s ground work on obsessional neurosis Let me now move to Freud’s work on the obsessional neurosis which is Lacan’s main reference. In 1913, in his article “The disposition to obsessional neurosis” (1913i), Freud uses for the first time the term “pregenital organisation”. He introduces the term in relation to the anal-sadistic organisation of the drive. His use of the term suggests that in order to guard the love object the obsessional is prepared to go all the way, that is to say to regress. The modality of jouissance “once and for all” only testifies to regression. In the dialectic of demand, I have just spoken about, regression appears as a crucial term. It accounts for what happens when the access to desire is closed off, which triggers a retrogressive movement to the mirror stage. Regression to the narcissistic satisfaction means that the relation to desire becomes secondary. The dialectic that comes to the fore in this case is a closed loop of the demand, with the doors leading to the Other’s desire being currently closed. But there is something else I would like to stress here. What Freud calls “disposition” can only occur if fixation already took place. A fixation, understood as a fixation of jouissance by the Other’s demand, is a condition of the concept of development. Three years later after the text on disposition, in “Lecture XXII: Some thoughts on development and regression” (1916–1917), Freud becomes aware of the dangers lurking behind the conception of libidinal stages. Regression, and with it “pregenital organisation”, confirm this as they undermine the idea of development. In fact, regression is an indicator of the failure of the concept of linear development. Once again, the subject supposed by the signifier replaces what the post-Freudians called libidinal development. There is no such thing as a passage from one stage to another, or as a development of one stage from another. Regression shows precisely

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

77

that in the face of the closed door to the Other’s desire, like in the case of the obsessional, the retrogressive movement goes towards fixation, namely towards the drive jouissance. The subject emerges in the place of this failure, which is a discontinuity and a division, a failure of passing from one stage to another. Back in 1913, Freud himself stages an objection to his own concept of “pregenital organisation”, although his interrogation will not prevent him from using it again in 1925. The objection consists of two parts. Firstly, he says, given that the “pregenital organisation” concerns a lapse to the anal-sadistic mode of satisfaction, the regression to it does not seem to account for other partial drives. In short, the pregenital organisation is itself designed to account only for regression to the anal-sadistic satisfaction. What are these other partial drives Freud has in mind, and could we not already include among them the oral, the scopic and the invocatory drives, the last two added by Lacan? The second part of Freud’s own objection seems more complicated. The hypothesis of the pregenital organisation attaches its importance solely to the libido while disregarding the ego formation in relation to the mirror image. In other words, the hypothesis presupposes a fixation solely at the level of libido—the fixation of jouissance or a modality of satisfaction like the “once and for all”—which introduces narcissism into the scene. Regression to the pregenital organisation is, by Freud’s own account, an assumption of the object in the place of the drive satisfaction. What does it mean? Firstly, it means that the object choice is in operation. Secondly, it implies that the object of love has its foundations in the libidinal satisfaction of the drive, while the moral imperative is there only to

Schema 1.

78

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

protect it. When the phallus, because this is what I am getting at, is too weak to uphold the moral imperative of the superego, the latter, the superego, gives way, so to speak, and its inhibitions relent. Thus, to protect the love object a lapse to the drive satisfaction by way of regression becomes inevitable. But what does it mean to say that the “phallus is too weak”? After all, the question concerns the symbolic phallic function as a signifying operator in the neurotic structure, which implies that the phallus is unquantifiable and immeasurable in terms of degrees. Either it is there to support and generate the signifying chain or it is not. Here we come back to Lacan’s assertion that it is not the Name-of-theFather which prohibits jouissance but that the prohibition is inscribed in the very disjunction between the real and the symbolic, namely in the pleasure principle. From this perspective, the phallus names the castration that upholds the strong superego. It is therefore not the question of the weak or strong phallus but of the excess of jouissance that sets the obsessional subject on the track of the name, as Lacan remarks at the end of “The subversion of the subject” (2006c). In other words, the “too much” makes the unsatisfied desire problematic for the obsessional. On the one hand, then, the trail of the pregenital organisation leads us to take into account other drives among which are also oral and scopic. On the other hand, the maintenance of the loved object requires other resources. To maintain the proximity of the love object when the unsatisfied desire cannot be upheld, implies a regressive relapse to narcissism. And it is within narcissistic economy of the ego, dependent on the image of the other, that we can find the regression to the mirror stage. So when the unsatisfied desire cannot be borne out, the lapse to drive satisfaction follows. This is what Lacan called the service of the goods. And when the love of the other is at stake, which is something altogether different from desire, the obsessional is never short of fulfilling these requirements with all his will. The more he fulfils them and the more he holds this immaculate image of the other in the apple of his eye, the more he is also subject to hatred against and aggressivity towards it. The final word of regression is to lead the subject from love to the drive and hatred. Although in 1913 Freud did not yet introduce his theory of narcissism, we can see that it is already glimmering on the horizon. As Freud points out, the obsessional is opposed to regression, never really gives in to it. And it is in opposition to regression that his symptom is formed. What is neurosis? It is a compromise and therefore giving a little and

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

79

gaining a little, give some and get some, as we say. But it is precisely the compromise that the obsessional does not wish to pay for, as it is based on castration and lack in being. As he beats well around the bush when it comes to acknowledging the lack, the compromise is the last thing on his mind. His beliefs are formed around the command “Never give up, never compromise”. And by saying that he subscribes to the renunciation of his desire and gives up on it. It is thus the subject’s relation to desire as a lack, namely as an equivocation of the Other’s desire, which means never satisfied unlike the always satisfied drive, that decides the outcome of how, in the obsessional neurosis, one could define love. Lacan defined it in relation to being in so far as being is a term that he places along the imaginary axis. What Lacan is speaking about here is a love of the subject that demands to be loved. The first form of love is a demand to be loved. For this reason Lacan spoke of such love as always requited, as I already discussed it earlier, always reciprocated, namely assuming that the other of which I partake is also part of me and therefore loves me, which is also a particular reversal of erotomania. According to Lacan, in erotomania the subject assumes the Other always loves him even if the subject does not love the Other. It is thus on the conjunction of the symbolic term and an imaginary object where for the obsessional love finds its shelter. Captivation of the imaginary other in oneself is adjacent to the passion of hatred which Lacan placed between the imaginary object of captivation, i (a), and the real of drive jouissance. The third element, the real, reveals to us the presence of death, end, finitude, and is therefore anguishing. What is death? The curious thing is that the obsessional, despite his mortified desire in which he becomes a kind of waste for the Other, does not really believe in death. He does not believe in death because, despite dipping his hands into it, he believes in the absolute being. The relation with death, as Otto Rank showed us, is only there to support the idea of immortality in the sense of unceasing deprivation like for Tantalus. There is therefore an oscillation in the position of an obsessional, which, as Lacan points out, swings from a momentary mortification, which at its extreme reminds us of Tantalus, to the other opposite which is akin to Sisyphus and a repeated attempt to regain the totality of being or refuse the compromise of his lack, which he can only approach by asking the Other for permission. Here then his pretence lies in decompleting the Other that supposedly enjoys castrating the subject. From

80

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

this perspective, the obsessional subject, which is not without paranoiac traits, experiences that the Other looks and laughs at him, inflicts punishment, like for the Ratman (1909d), or mortifies the subject or buries him alive. The obsessional enjoys keeping one foot in the grave in case he is found alive. Lacan found a simple formula to answer the question of death in obsessional neurosis. Death is where the real danger lies. Other than that, death belongs to the order of the imaginary as no one has experienced it to live and tell the tale. One of the approximations of death for the Ratman is to bring his mortified desire to the fantasy of punishment although Freud will only elaborate the fantasy of being beaten some years later. Let’s go back to the question of regression now and include in it Lacan’s work on the object a. Once approached through the prism of object a, we will see that it is the concept of regression that comes under attack. We cannot read Lacan without Freud, and to go beyond Freud means that we read Lacan with Freud.

The anal, the scopic, the phallus and the object a Why the regression to the anal erotism in the obsessional? As I have already mentioned using Freud’s objection to the hypothesis of the “pregenital organisation”, regression involves other drives as well. More precisely regression involves a link between anal erotism and the scopic drive. Once we approach regression through the optic of narcissism, we will see that the introduction of narcissism is only a whisker away from establishing a link between the anal and the scopic but also that the axis on which these rest is castration. The scopic relation involves the field of desire. But the scopic is not without the relation to the anal. We saw this already in the Ratman. Lacan mentions this in a little schema in his seminar on Anxiety (2014). It is where Lacan’s work on the object a provides a platform for the effects of Freudian castration, namely of the renunciation of satisfaction called jouissance. Both anal and scopic interests of the subject are organised around the lack but the relation between them involves another term, which is of interest to us at this moment. We can now introduce another piece of Freud’s work. In 1917, in his article “On transformations of instinct” (1917c), Freud, now endowed with the theory of narcissism which is crucial here, returns to regression.

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

81

He returns to the old problem with new insights and discoveries. And he provides an account of a link between the scopic and the anal. As in the Ratman’s case the link between the scopic and the anal becomes manifest in terms of the look provoking anal satisfaction. How does the look provoke the satisfaction in the anal drive? In libidinal terms, the anus is the eye that looks at the world of others by way of refusal. Ratman’s refusal to pay is a hint for us here. As we saw, the obsessional subject’s initial response to the Other’s demand is not to pay. Structurally, the refusal to pay, linked to the anal retention, is accompanied by the want-to-see (scopophilia). The gaze of the Other, the impossible gaze from the Other, takes on a form of a separate object, isolated in the course of the subject’s associations revolving around the desire of the Other. The gaze has a phallic value in so far as looking is facilitated by the signifier. The drive oriented insistence on seeing, like in the case of Ratman’s relation to the woman as naked, meets with the lack, with the “nothing to see”, which is the lack in the Other. The Ratman’s refusal to pay, however, appears imbedded in the phallicisation of the lack in the Other in order to cover up subject’s own castration or to give the subject a sort of anonymity of being invisible. To want to see may erroneously imply that as a seeing subject I am not to be seen. But to see in fact implies that I am in the field of vision for another subject, and to see is an effect of being seen in the first place. There is a link then, between the pregenital organisation and the genital organisation—a link that emerges in the decade of Freud’s work between 1913 and 1923. The link is provided by Freud’s assertion of the primacy of the phallus. For this reason the link involves castration because for Freud castration is always oriented around the phallus. In the same article of 1917, Freud provides us with a connection between the anal object and the penis, which the subject makes in the visual field. It is a field, let’s remind ourselves, which is already organised by the signifier, namely by the symbolic phallus that organises the field of significations. But how does the phallus enter the scene for Freud because his take on the phallus is not the same as Lacan’s? As something missing in the woman’s body, and therefore by way of absence. But if it is missing somewhere, or runs all over the place like for little Hans, Freud observes, the boy comes to the conclusion that the penis is detachable or that it will grow or that it is hidden. In one way or another, the child plays with the lack, with absence and presence, like in the famous Fort-Da game played by Freud’s grandson. At the basis

82

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

of this play, an object is pointed at after it is pushed away, and brought back from afar, which for Freud may have been indicative of the phallus, but Lacan found in it an illustration of the object a that the subject wrestles with because it is internally excluded. Lacan speaks of the primacy of the signifier in so far as the phallus is the signifier of desire and of sexual difference, arriving, often by surprise, when one is not expecting it. The phallus names the sexual difference on the basis of polarity of absence and presence, of what one does not expect to be there, a contingency therefore. A little boy seeks a little willy in a girl because he can perceive himself having it in the same place where she doesn’t. This was Freud’s approach. Lacan took it up and spoke of the imaginary phallus, -ϕ, as a castration, and the symbolic phallus as a signifier of the Other’s desire. The symbolic phallus, Φ, names the sexual difference or the ratio of an absence and presence in play, thus introducing a series of substitutions which deal with the imaginary other. It is this alternation involving a lack that brings the phallus to its prominent position as a signifying operator of the series. It names the desire of the mother who does not have the penis. In this sense, the symbolic phallus names what the mother desires in the place of the lack. And if she desires it, she then comes to find it by, for example, phallicising her child as an object and giving it a value it has for her. But she may also dephallicise the phallic object by devaluing the child and reducing it to a decorative element with which she adorns and complements her body. As a signifier of desire the phallus is where it cannot be found or where its unveiling reveals it as absent. In this sense every mother is phallic but not every woman is phallic, which Lacan was at pain to demonstrate for us. In this way, Freud’s genital organisation is reabsorbed, via the visual field, into the pregenital organisation of the drive like the anal-sadistic for the Ratman. The connection between the two has the scopic field as its arena. For it is in the scopic field that a gap opens up, a gap of castration at the junction of the anal object and the penis. In the same year 1917, Freud stresses that “anal defiance” has links to the castration complex. That is why Lacan will say that drive representation is organised by the phallus as a signifier in so far as a gap, or a stain in the field of vision, introduces the subject to desire. Where I cannot see what I want to look at—the “naked woman” in the Ratman’s case—the world is looking at me. And it looks at me from everywhere. As Freud will conclude in “The infantile genital organisation” (1923e), the castration

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

83

complex can only be fully considered if the primacy of the phallus has been asserted. For the Ratman the anus is the eye because the satisfaction of looking is retained when the payment is asked for. And this changes things a little. Narcissism, which is the reverse of castration, can only be conceived of by means of the mirror stage as this is the source of the imaginary rivalry. Subsequently, in relation to the love object, the obsessional resorts to hatred and aggressivity. Why? Because the only means he has at his disposal at this point to retain his object are those of retaining the jouissance of the other’s image. He will thus seek to destroy with one stone both his image and the love object of the young woman which he confuses with the former. Freud called it ambivalence, and we can see that this ambivalence has its roots in narcissism. Now, castration may well have a pacifying function and can reduce the subject’s anguish. The phallus pacifies. But the phallus also teaches how to desire. Since in the classical social order the father is the bearer of the phallus, he is also the pacifier, the one who appeases child’s anguish by speaking to her about mummy’s anger and disquiet. In the case of the hysteric, the lesson she has learnt from the phallus is to desire, which is her source of mobility. The obsessional’s dependence, on the other hand, grounds him in immobility, namely ties him to the edge, or indeed to the rim of the erotogenic zone, where he enjoys repetition without making another step until he falls. The refusal of castration— which is another name for putting to practice his motto “never compromise”—is therefore the refusal to renounce his drive jouissance, the immanent source of torment of the real. This refusal is also correlative to fantasy as a means of proliferating his jouissance around the rim to retrieve the lost real object. The superego helps him on this path by reminding him: jouir, and so he does: not to pay, to look, and to retain the libido with the expectation that the retention of jouissance carries with it a retention of the love object. Lacan’s work on the object a radically transforms the concept of regression, highlighting the castration all the more. In this respect, castration is not an act of sacrifice which, as Freud himself already stressed in the Civilisation (1930a), can be seen at the core of all religious and ascetic practices throughout the ages, as I have previously remarked. The sacrifice of the ego and of the image on which the ego’s glory depends only strengthens the demands of the superego and jouissance merely changes place. Castration, in Lacanian terms, concerns the

84

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

giving up of the drive jouissance by giving it to the Other from where it was originally stolen. But how, Lacan asks, if the Other of the Other does not exist? But if the Other did exist in this sense, nothing would be more satisfying to the obsessional subject than to make sure that the Other’s jouissance could be assured, too, which is another reason for him to enjoy the symptom. The renunciation of the drive jouissance for the neurotic poses a difficulty due to false and misconceived investments in the imaginary, which is what occupied Lacan a lot in his earlier years of teaching. The question of the difficulty to jettison the renewed power in the imaginary, brings me again to the drive, but this time to its reconstruction. It is what in Seminar XI, Jacques-Alain Miller called demontage of the drive. The drive is reorganised and deconstructed by the phallus. The phallus teaches to desire by way of reorganising the drive. At the end of analysis the phallus has to reorganise the drive. A reorganisation of the drive implies an emergence of the phallic jouissance on the one hand, and the object a, produced as an effect of castration, on the other. The isolation of the object a in this respect falls under what Miller called the “desimaginarisation” of fantasy. Last time, when speaking about Antigone, I referred to the Millerian operation on the fantasy and to the deculpabilitation of desire. This time I return to the imaginary in fantasy from the perspective of castration. The trimming of fantasy to the bare real, which is a shift from guilt to desire in effect of a renunciation of drive jouissance, and further, the isolation of the object a, helps us orient the analytical process in a case of obsessional neurosis. I do not know if they are the goals of psychoanalysis on the whole but they are not its ideals. What reorients the subject’s desire in analysis, according to Lacan, is that in the end it is not the desire for the impossible. This is what Lacan said about the analyst’s desire at least to the extent that in its realisation the impossible percolates into the desire throughout the process, which becomes evident in the role fantasy plays in supporting it. Castration works towards separation of the object a from the signifying apparatus in the Other. In this sense, castration gives the subject a direction. It is different for the obsessional and for the hysteric.

Towards hysterisation To approach fantasy not as a crossing but from castration was already demonstrated by Lacan on his graph of desire. It interests me here

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

85

because this direction poses a problem for the obsessional. The problem for the obsessional subject is that fantasy as a support of desire can only be approached through castration of drive jouissance. But castration as renunciation is imbedded in the subject’s relation to the Other that does not exist, namely that is not there to assure the outcome, the reward and the expected applause in the aftermath of castration. In other words, castration is determined by the inexistence of the Other. That’s why the lack in the Other is not, as it were, on the way of the obsessional. To put it differently, the signifier of the lack in the Other, S (A /), is rather in the way of his path, which is why he goes around it as one goes around an obstacle one finds on one’s path. And think of the stone the Ratman finds on the road where his beloved woman is soon to arrive. He moves it off and back on the road to make it safe for her, predicting and speculating, will she know, will she not know. Early on in his teaching, Lacan situated fantasy on the junction of the imaginary and the symbolic. But this was because when he elaborated fantasy at length in Seminar VI Desire and Its Interpretation (2013a) where the status of the object a in it is imaginary. Lacan concerned himself there with the imaginary substitutions based on the object a as an imaginary partner. That did not prevent him from speaking about the satisfaction called jouissance produced through fantasy when castration is refused. What castration, of the phallus and the power it gives, or of the compensatory satisfaction in the face of the Other failing to replace the loss? Without developing it further now, suffice it to say that fantasy can have this double function of promising what does not exist and of supporting the subject’s desire. Lacan’s well-known algorithm of fantasy, $ ◊ a, should be read in this sense as the subject desires for the a—hence the logic of support of what supposedly exists behind the veil of fantasy. Although the object a is produced as an effect of castration, in fantasy this object has a function of providing the subject with what the Other fails. In “The subversion of the subject” (2006c), Lacan stresses the demand from the Other in the subject’s fantasy. More precisely, he poses a question about the subject being addressed by the Other: Che vuoi? It reads both “what do you want?” and “what does he want from me?” To whom is the question addressed or what does it address? The subject’s secret and precious satisfaction that sustains his imaginary power of the ego has been for this reason cherished. In this sense it relates to the real of the drive satisfaction as a compulsion to repeat and to retain. The signifier of the lack in the Other, as just

86

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

mentioned, is a different matter. It captures the castration of the Other and the inexistence of the Other of the Other as inconsistency and failure to guarantee the unconditional unfolding of the signifying chain ad infinitum. This could be illustrated by a radio programme where the contestants have to speak on any subject for as long as they can until they repeat a word, at which point another contestant buzzes them to stop. Repetition becomes the real that stops the subject in its talking happiness. The Other cannot guarantee the Other, therefore, and the truth is a matter of an instant. This lack of guarantee is reminiscent of the patricide, I mentioned earlier, as a guarantor of all jouissance. As the Other cannot be vouchsafed by an Other, what remains is the Other as desiring, uncertain, aleatory. The object a is a manifestation of the Other as failing in guarantees, and of the divided subject, divided by the Other’s desire. The object a therefore belongs to neither. It is always exterior. But the subject’s relation to it, his desire for it, provides support for his desire in the sense of indicating what this desire is not—it is not jouissance. Lacan notes that fantasy is of the order of imposition that serves to regain a certain balance. In the case of the Ratman, the balance in question aims to make up for the losses, sacrifices, acts of generosity, and to bring an overdraft back to credit. It is the demand that is most crucial here, because the demand articulates the proximity to death, namely to the castrating Other as I said earlier. In the refusal of the Other’s demand—which for the hysteric takes place at the level of the object of desire, object that must be refused because it is not it—there is always something latent, clandestine, and insincere, some fixation remaining from an early moment of an encounter with the signifier, an unhappy encounter no doubt, and now producing insincerity. If analysis of the obsessional is to go anywhere, its itinerary will follow the traces of regression all the way back, beyond the primary moment of pleasure at which he has been stuck, as Freud remarked, to arrive at a point of a dissatisfaction, say oral dissatisfaction. And this happens at the level of articulation. It is not for the articulation of the signifier to produce oral jouissance. This satisfaction is no doubt in excess in the production of meaning in the analytical process. Through this leap, and a cut when the symptom acquires meaning, some effects can be produced in the process. In this series of leaps and falls in the course of associations there may be produced some limping in the movement that will help the neurotic subject reorient its liaisons with his symptom through the Other as failing, that is to say as desiring or as

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

87

speaking which is the same thing. Who is this Other if not the real Other in the first place where the conditions for love, rejection, hatred, tenderness have been set? But for the desire of the Other to be approached, the demand has to be taken up at the level of the signifier as equivocal, ambiguous, and therefore outside meaning, which is how it happened in the first place, namely where articulation is intertwined with lalangue. The oral satisfaction can thus be left at the level of the myth in so far as it points to the real, which is the case of Tantalus, whom Lacan chose to show us how things pan out in response to privation. This “all the way back”, I have just referred to, however radical its formulation may sound, is essential to the extent that it opens a dimension of what Lacan called lalangue. This lalangue appears as the primary tongue, where the real is enmeshed, not yet the language we speak as cajoled by grammar, but in its pregrammatical, even presyntactical, which does not mean preverbal, manifestation as responding to the real of the body. Dare he welcome his own hysterisation just as the analyst finds his position in the feminised subject by being reduced to the object that causes desire. Which is why the analytical process insists on the dimension of “all the way back”, which has to do with the encounter of language and the body, and which is of course different for a woman and for a man but, one way or another, as the clinical experience shows, concerns the hysterisation of desire. Lacan was doubtless revisiting, in a radical way, Freud’s proposition of es war. The subject has to go to where the real object was to replace it for the cause to appear as cause. In transference the subject has to persevere in the course of associations without getting an answer, and work through his alienations whereby he can assume in one of its logical moments that what he has, the master signifiers, are his, which they are not. It is at the moment when they dry up in the trove of the Other, which is their place, that, confronted with this lack in the Other, and helpless that the fantasy of regaining the satisfaction leads nowhere, the neurotic subject stands at the threshold of separation. This step is decisive. It is the moment when the subject’s assumption, fantasy being its abode, that the Other loves me, erotomaniacal in the stake it carries and in the scope it promises, gets dropped, not because the superego insists but because it does not, and because it has become superfluous in the face of the new reality of love. What is this reality of love if not a love for the Other as lacking, inadequate, in short the Other as one-less? In the time to understand, what the neurotic has at his disposal is the dim

88

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

incandescence of what he was for the Other and where he was, which has been his route, the bare and helpless body of the one and alone, and even as absolutely particular as any other.

The hysteric, the master, and the hysteric’s discourse We could perceive in this route one of the itineraries of the analytical process. For the obsessional subject whose dissatisfaction of not having obtained the answer to the question that seemed fundamental because it concerned his being, in the course of which the object of desire appeared as embodied by the analyst, it is possible to accede to speak the language of the dissatisfied desire that the hysteric makes so much ado about. Would that be another mode of satisfaction? The obsessional dialect, as Freud called it, becomes absorbed into the hysteric’s discourse provided the subjective division is recognised as dominant, $ . This is the left side a of the hysteric’s discourse, as Lacan constructed it, and it is important we recognise the elements in play here, and the places through which they pass. The divided subject is in the dominant position, which Lacan based on what he was saying throughout his teaching, namely that man’s desire is the desire of the Other. He did not say then that he meant the woman’s desire as if to give a chance to any subject in so far as he is in this dominant place. It is desire then that is dominant, and for the hysteric this place is occupied by the divided subject. Why? So that this divided subject could nag, question, and castrate the master signifier, S1, we find in that place of the Other to whom the hysteric is so attached— hence $ → S1. At the same time, the divided subject is over and above the object a that occupies the place of truth. They are therefore on different levels, different floors, we could say, separated by the bar that puts them, despite their neighbourly vicinity, furthest apart. I started with the discourse of the hysteric. There is a hysteric and the hysteric’s discourse, just as there is the master and the master’s discourse with which we usually start because in it, in the dominant place of desire, can be found the master signifier. As for the discourse of the hysteric we can see it below on the left. On the right are the places through which its elements pass

$ → S1 S2 a

desire Other truth loss

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

89

The hysteric’s discourse, as Lacan shows, is now only one turn away from the discourse of the analyst which I will take up later. Suffice it to say, the latter one has the object a in the dominant place, and is based on the reversal of the formula of fantasy, $ ◊ a. It thus gives us a → $. Once the gift of love no longer has to be refused because it is not it, as the hysteric would have it, it can be received as it is because the giver, any giver, any lover and any master, is the one who does not have. That’s why the analyst, who is furthest apart from the hysteric, is also the most proximate to her. What makes the difference has to do not with giving, or not, to the Other, but with receiving from it. How to love the father who is dead and who does not know this? For the obsessional this belongs to an enigma but it also forms for him a new reality of love. If we follow Freud’s portrayal of the obsessional, it is not the fantasy that is to be diluted and atomised but the fixation that gives a ground to the fantasy. In defence of fantasy we can stress its regulating function Lacan spoke about in allowing the subject to regain balance, to stabilise his relation to fixation through fantasy. Freud tells us that this fixation has to do with the excess of pleasure but not at the level of the pleasure principle because the principle functions at the level of the primary processes and has a homeostatic function with regard to the libido, just as the law of thermodynamics with regard to entropy. The excess of pleasure takes us straight to the Lacanian real, the jouissance, and specifically the excess of drive jouissance. Let’s ask again, what is the hysteric’s partner? Does she need an obsessional, is she looking for one? And why her, why are we talking about the woman? The hysteric wants a master, Lacan says, and as we know she gets what she wants. She wants a master, but not just any master, not just any masterbator, if I can put it this way. She wants a master who by responding to the desire of the Other she is supposed to embody in flesh and soul, knows something about her desire. In short, the hysteric wants someone who can rule her without reigning over her. This master is first and foremost the master signifier, S1, that in the discourse of the hysteric occupies the place of the Other. We can now see how in the discourse the hysteric’s desire is oriented, where it starts, namely above the object a, and where it aims, the master signifier as the shield of the Other. This shield is also her attachment which is one of the names of love—hence $ → S1. He rules her but she undermines this rule, the rule of S1, and does not let herself be governed by the one from which her supposed knowledge about

90

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

her desire is to come. So just to make sure it does not, she questions it at the same time. What is central in this focus of knowledge, S2, as produced and lost, in the relation between the hysteric and the master is that what one of them giveth the other taketh away. What one contributes to the knowledge of the hysteric’s desire is put into question by the other, because the master’s input, whether he knows it or not, is always mediated, always goes via the desire of the Other, and this is where the obsessional becomes subjected to hysterisation. Hysterisation essentially amounts to dealing with the lack as a mediation, and therefore with the lack in the structure, so that the master knowledge is not all that masterly. Hence the Other’s desire is pivotal here. For the master, knowledge may appear as an ideal, and Aristotle defined it accordingly as a natural, that is to say, universal and anonymous, desire to know. But in the hysterised relation to the Other there is always a desire, the mediator that is decisive because it divides the desire of the master, dividing him as subject, as in the case of Creon. And this division now makes the knowledge of the master leave something to be desired. Now, who is the obsessional? He is the master. He is the master of his neurosis and the master in his neurosis. The master is a new term Lacan gives to the obsessional. This master as master, namely qua the Other’s desire, forms the hysteric’s partner, her master in the discourse, namely the S1 in the place of the Other. And in this sense she wants him as master, needs him, depends on him, feeds on him which, if you look at it, can almost sound like a fantasy. But, let’s not be mistaken, she does all this only in order to castrate him. I will take up this in more detail in relation to the Lacanian discourse as a modality of ignorance. It is important that we distinguish the hysteric from the woman. Although the hysteric may be a woman to the extent that she is divided and not-whole, pas-tout, this passage through the hysteric’s discourse is not reserved for women. It is up to the speaking being, Lacan says, who, having followed the hysterisation, seeks to cross the fundamental fantasy of the phallic mother, and to find in the place of the object a the dominant element of the analyst’s position. And this, Lacan stresses, points to the discourse of the analyst as a basis for every discourse. Suffice it to say that, whether a man or a woman, the analyst’s position is not that of the hysteric’s. In this sense, every hysteric is the same while every woman is different, differing in her desire and oscillating between the feminine and the phallic, the one of the lack in the Other and the one of the phallus on the man’s side as we find them on the table of sexuation. The position of the hysteric comes to be marked by the position

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

91

of the master aka obsessional to the extent that her desire is the desire of the Other, the place where she finds him. This is why she questions his desire, prods his motives, will not settle for anything less than truth. Castration is the name of the game, and the master she wants, ends up a cropper, namely a divided master. Love is never the way it should be and never the way the lover wants it. In fact it is always the other way round, namely the way of the loved one. In questioning her master she of course aims to sieve and rectify his desire of any lies so that what is left could be hers, her own desire as the object causing it but, above all, as the object he values above any other. This is what Lacan highlighted in the case of Dora. We can see now that wherever this dialogue takes them, which are the modalities of discourse, and therefore of speaking of love, one thing becomes certain—the Other of the Other appears as the most hypnotic deception that was needed in the first place by the obsessional to land him in the end with a fragment of truth or with a pinch of truth, so to speak. Lacan placed the Other of the Other on a par with an inexistence of metalanguage. There is no truth about language. In this way Lacan established a paradigm of the fantasy, of the real behind the veil, or of the Other of the Other which is the same thing. Which is why when Lacan evokes in Seminar VI the fundamental fantasy, he relates it to the dimension of belief founded on the imaginarisation of the phallus as residing in the vagina. The belief in the phallic woman, of which the phallic mother serves as a prototype, comes to no more than a debris that in the imaginary register make the Other complete. In the end it is not the fall of the belief in her that gives way to the lack that can neither be filled nor satisfied. The lack comes with the subjective division marked by the phallus as the signifier of desire, namely as the marker of the sexual difference that keeps the master and the hysteric always apart, even if sometimes they can be found on the same side, say the one of man. The castration, which has the phallus as the object, -ϕ, turns the chain of imaginary substitutions, facilitated by the phallic function, in the obsessional’s love life into masculine phallacies. What is “masculine” here is the master as obsessional. There is a point at which neither the master nor the hysteric realise that the true master is the unconscious. The signifier is always a master. Hence it is not by accident that Lacan called the discourse of the master the discourse of the unconscious. In this discourse the master signifier is dominant which coincides with the ideal of the master’s knowledge the obsessional formed as a result of the excess of drive jouissance. The next step, as I have just described,

92

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

will be a dividing move, an ambiguous step that follows from castration to take the truth of the Other’s desire as the biggest prize.

A little memory from New York When I was in New York some years ago, where part of this study was presented, I visited the Museum of Modern Art and noticed a large crowd gathering around a painting. It was called Stars and Stripes, and depicted the American flag. It was not Tantalus or Sysiphus or any other ancient or modern hero but a national emblem in full colours that seemed to have no match. And it reminded me of the remark Freud made early in his work that he felt puzzled by a soldier who was ready to sacrifice his life for a piece of cloth because it bears national colours. Now it was in a museum, a painting hanging on the wall, a double representation, of the ideal represented by the flag and in the painting, giving the viewers a peace of mind that all power and glory were here and now, timeless, on this very canvass, abolishing all uncertainties and vacillations of everyday life into oblivion. And it then occurred to me, here in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, that this made Freud and his work all the more timeless, almost like the unconscious that knows no time and remains master for eternity. The viewers were the very embodiment of the unconscious, the signifiers or the speaking beings as we are, gathering around the place of the painting. And who in the unconscious wanted to be the master to rule our world in the world, to summon us one by one to the display of knowledge of our ideals to give us peace, to soothe the ripples of anguish, of sleeplessness and of discontent? Who else if not the hysteric? While Freud was being revived and eternalised in the Museum of Modern Art, he brought with him the hysteric he found in the first place so that to invent psychoanalysis. By constructing a discourse as a form of social bond, and developing its fourfold variations starting with the discourse of the unconscious, Lacan, in turn, made the hysteric and the master an inseparable couple. The hysteric became inseparable from the master because, as Lacan showed, she is alienated from the master signifier around which others come to swarm leaving her out of it, rejected, alone. Lacan’s work on the alienation and separation could be approached from the position of the hysteric’s discourse. Freud was puzzled by the obsessional neurosis and its insignia. What are we to make of the metaphors like the one produced by Luther

ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

93

who believed that humans are a waste falling from devil’s anus? And what about the wish of Maurice Blanchot (1981) who evokes an image of a man who would like to have his eyes open even in the grave? What is puzzling is the intransigent anonymity of desire that wants to remain invisible while being omnipresent, buried alive yet basking in the pleasures of daylight. This brought to light the intricacies of topology, and in particular the topology of inclusion of the excluded, of the real as extimate that was never foreign to Freud and became for Lacan the guiding point in his teaching. What the discourse of the hysteric testifies to is the master’s relation to this excess of jouissance, how he enjoys the knowledge of it. And to demonstrate that Lacan chose the topology of the Borromean knot, which I will take up next. It is not at the level of the phallus where she castrates her master, because she also has a stake in it, but at the level of jouissance embedded in the knowledge, S2. She needs the phallus, too, although it remains elusive. In its primary sense, the phallus may well be the breath and the meaning of life, the budding of Narcissism, providing a basis for the metabolism of neuroses, as Freud showed it. But the phallus as an uncoupled signifier is also an epitome of solitariness, the all alone, as Lacan called it. This phallic signifier thus appears as a bachelor every jouissance would like to marry although every encounter between them is a missed one. Today we speak of missed opportunities. Every opportunity is a missed one because the sexual relation does not exist and a subject finds her orientation between one and the other. In the end, the phallus only produces jouissance and more jouissance, while remaining solitary. That’s why the hysteric needs it although as a woman she can just as well enjoy herself without it. What the hysteric does do is to unravel the relations and encounters of which she is very much a part, while refusing to shift from the alienation because it does not give her satisfaction. For the hysteric then, the master is her phallus she follows while questioning the phallacies of the master’s knowledge. And here too, I found Freud helpful. While being surprised by the identification with the piece of cloth bearing national colours, Freud also mentions a knight who goes to a battle with the scarf given to him by his Lady because it stands for the guide of his desire, his beautiful angel that will let him through danger and death. If the knight is not lucky to make it back, he will live in her memory—a well-chosen investment when it comes to eternity. This little object was indeed his pass, not to eternity but to her desire, which is why it can be found on

94

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

him whether dead or alive. Unlike the object that always points the way to the woman’s desire to whom it first belonged, the signifier remains nomadic, moves from place to place without any fixed abode we call home. The signifier, knowing no home, nevertheless serves as home for the subject. For a moment, here in the Museum in New York, I was at home.

CHAPTER FOUR

On psychosis: how Joyce constructed his body

A short history of Lacanian psychosis What does Lacan teach us about psychosis? Lacan formulated his first theory of psychosis based on the reading of the memoirs of Schreber, alongside Freud’s work on the case from 1912. This was in the mid1950s at the time of what was to form his Seminar III Psychoses (1993). But this was not the first time when Lacan devoted himself to the study of the logic of psychosis, which he did already in the 1930s both in his doctoral thesis on the case of Aimée, his own patient, who went on to commit a murder, and on the sisters Papin after that. When news broke out that Aimée, Hugeutte Duflos by name, attempted to kill an actress and a public persona, Lacan studied in depth the case of what he called délire à deux, as it involved Aimée’s sister, to speak of persecutory paranoia underlined by erotomania, the term borrowed from Clérambault, and suppressed homosexuality—a thesis Lacan would use later in the case of Schreber. About a year later, there was another wave of news jolting the French community when it was reported that sisters Léa and Christine Papin, employed as maids at the house of Mme Lancelin, massacred their employer and her daughter. While the criminal proceedings occupied the public life for months to come, Lacan wrote an article 95

96

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

on the crime for the Surrealist review Minotaure. In it Lacan rejected the current diagnosis and approached the case, like that of Aimée, from the perspective of paranoia, its meaning and logic. And this also involved a modality of a délire à deux or a double act of two subjects or of a twin subject as the case may be. In his meticulous analysis of the case, Lacan contributed to the view that madness was no longer to be perceived as a deviation from normality but as a logical consistency of the subject’s desire, which was also the lightening that established the foundations of the Surrealist movement. These were Lacan’s early interests in psychosis. We could say that Lacan’s first written accounts of the psychotic phenomena started with crime and the intricacies of crime in the subject’s relation to the Other. The acts of transgression, widely documented in the public media at the time, opened for Lacan the path to the study of psychosis. Under its umbrella Lacan discovered a world of particularity and logical hinges that pointed to different rabbit holes that in the psychiatry of his time went amiss and lost in generalisations. Nevertheless, in his doctoral thesis Lacan made use of German, especially Jaspers (1966), and French, in particular Clérambault, psychiatry. This was then for Lacan the point of departure in his relation to psychosis conceived as a mental and logical organisation outside the organicist theory of medicine-propelled psychiatry. In the course of his seminar on psychoses, where he made his decisive contributions to psychoanalysis, Lacan was led to isolate, following Freud’s Verwerfung, the signifying operator of foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father. Its absence, or presence, was a determining factor whether we are dealing with a psychotic or a neurotic subject. This approach of Lacan affirmed his interest in language as a structure of the subject’s relations with the world, and in this way established its decisive and central point. The Name-of-the-Father as a signifying operator and as a mechanism were to form the condition upon which the unfolding of the signifying chain in the course of use of speech and language became possible or not. These substitutions were thus conditioned upon the master metaphor of the symbolic father and measured all the disturbances in language where Lacan saw the basis of psychotic phenomena. The absence of the master metaphor, but more precisely, its exclusion or foreclosure in the structure of language that was the condition of the unconscious, thus allowed Lacan to form a clinical category in the differential diagnosis. Thanks to the yardstick of the Name-ofthe-Father it became possible to have a fairly clear-cut distinction on

ON PSYCHOSIS

97

which the differential clinic was based: either neurosis or psychosis. It is difficult to speak of the clinic of perversion in the same way. The reason seems to be that perverts either have no need for psychoanalysis or do not stay in it. While this is an experience of many analysts, it does not make the statement more definitive because of it. Instead we often speak of perverse traits, which does not imply that perversion does not exist. But it is not the traits that imply its existence as structure. We are thus left, at least at that moment in Lacan’s teaching, with a clinic based on the logical alternative of either neurosis or psychosis. In a nutshell, either the subject believes in love (and even if he does not believe in love due to repeated disappointments he still, somehow, surreptitiously believes in it), experiences doubts about his body image, has second thoughts, ruminates whether to act or not, spins contradictions, is compulsive and repetitive in his symptoms, keeps coming back for more although cannot take any more of it, gives signs of castration by complaining about various losses of jouissance in his life, lives with a lack side by side, is always ready to compromise or to say he is not, is happy to please others or to refuse to please, follows the Other’s desire but may feel guilty about it so as to make his own mistakes—and, by and large, the subject is neurotic, hysteric or obsessional. Or the subject experiences phenomena indicative of a profound fault at the deepest level of the sense of life and of a fundamental disconnection from the social community, from the law of the symbolic father, from the body that escapes him, from the register of the imaginary, cannot make distinction between what is permitted and forbidden, experiences hallucinations as real, and certitude as reality, acting on them, persecutions of being addressed all the time, is unable to dialectisise and question the meaning of the world around him—and then we can say we are confronted with a psychotic subject. This was the choice and the difference between neurosis, whether hysteria or obsessional neurosis, and psychosis. In effect, this had a determining influence on the analyst’s position in the treatment with regard to transference, interpretation and so on. The Name-of-the-Father remained the one and only, and therefore decisive barometer in the differential clinic. This was Lacan’s first instalment in his teaching on psychosis. We only need to bear in mind that it is preceded by his interest in the criminal acts of the sisters, and in this sense of the “criminal desire”, which could be called a point zero in Lacan’s overall articulation of how a psychotic subject becomes constituted. In the second instalment, Lacan

98

M O R E L A CA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

began to speak no longer of the name or a master paternal metaphor but of the names of the fathers. This pluralisation, as we call it, had a clinical effect of deuniversalisation of the paternal metaphor. It implied that for each psychotic subject there is a different solution to stabilise his or her jouissance, a different way from its ravage and excess, its unceasing and exhausting anxiety, the haunting Other, and so on. Lacan’s pluralisation of the names started in the 1960s and oriented his teaching till the end. When in the 1970s Lacan spoke of sinthome, and of the relation between jouissance and the letter in the subject’s experience of the real, this was also to seek a particular and singular solution for a psychotic subject. Pluralisation of the names would therefore include the case of Joyce whom Lacan studied in the 1970s, and whose sinthome he formulated as a subjectal device. The case of Joyce was Lacan’s answer to his own pluralisation of the names that started a decade earlier. The strictly topological approach of the clinic at that time, and within it of the Borromean knot in particular, allowed Lacan to demonstrate the sinthome, an old name for the symptom with a new application, to produce a certain stabilising effect. Lacan’s work on the topology of the knots, which I have witnessed demonstrated by Riccardo Carrabino for several years in his intrepid effort to stress the importance of topology in the Lacanian clinic, has to be nevertheless sharply distinguished from its uses by the mathematicians. It led Lacan, not only in his seminar on Joyce to specific clinical formulations. But we can see that the main reference remained the history of the subject in its structural sense of the subject’s relations with his body and with the Other. In the case of Joyce, Lacan located a particular predicament that haunted young James from his school years and made him experience his body in a particular way. And here Lacan always emphasised that the subject has a body, and that having a body was always singular. Putting the topological relations in the Borromean knot to use, and starting from it as subject’s reality that consists of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary registers, Lacan showed us where the fault was located for Joyce and how he repaired it with his writing. This writing was for Joyce that main slice of life, interlacing sense and nonsense but increasingly more of the latter when he developed ideas about writing for posterity yet to come in a couple of centuries or so. Joyce’s sinthome, which was the particular “solution” to him, was what he constructed as an ego for himself through writing. And this ego as a binder of the three registers assumed a function of the name of the father.

ON PSYCHOSIS

99

The third way of thinking psychosis was introduced by Jacques-Alain Miller who extracted the concept of ordinary psychosis from Lacan’s teaching. The psychosis Lacan worked on, whether paranoia of Schreber or schizophrenia of Joyce, could be called extraordinary in the sense of absence or foreclosure of the paternal metaphor as distinct from the clinic of neurosis. Unlike psychosis in the classical sense, ordinary psychosis is a new, and not so clear-cut a category in the relation to neurosis. It is a more subtle and refined term. It only arises when the other terms fail. In some way it is a response to the exception or more precisely to what came to be called in the psychoanalytical debates as inclassable. A category arises in the clinic which should lead to differential diagnosis but it does not. Following this, an impasse appears within the differential framework, and it is not possible to establish with a relative certainty whether we are confronted with a structure of psychosis or of neurosis. When the subject gives no indications of paranoia or schizophrenia, which form extraordinary psychoses, when the subject does not testify to the elementary phenomena of delusion and hallucination, whereas at the same time fails to convince us he or she is neurotic by means of the templates of neurosis Freud introduced for us, then we are left with a possibility of ordinary psychosis. If the second theory of psychosis is based on the pluralisation, and therefore particularisation of the names of the father, the third theory of psychosis, the ordinary psychosis, provides room for a further fragmentation or even atomisation of the Nameof-the-Father as spread over and distributed among some areas of the subject’s life while parched and absent in other areas. For example, the name of the father may be functioning in the subject’s love relationships with women, but in other areas, like the social relation in the work office tend to open up a void. Or, as the case may be, the other way round. Either way, this is what Miller calls a compensatory makebelief or semblance of the name, which allows for making some walks of life passable when others are not. While for a psychotic subject, as distinct from the neurotic, the paternal metaphor remains foreclosed, and the delusional metaphor may spring to production, the ordinary psychotic has some compensatory semblance of the paternal metaphor at his disposal with which he can successfully manage to walk from one point to another or from one to one. This may suffice, from case to case, to put forward a diagnosis of ordinary psychosis. It is a new and more refined way to approach psychosis.

100

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

In his first and second teachings of psychosis, Lacan singles out first the Name-of-the-Father as a signifying operator that conditions the unfolding of the signifying chain. This becomes possible when the paternal metaphor succeeds in representing a substitute or a series of substitutes of the mother’s desire, that is to say in introducing the signifier of the lack in the mother’s desire via the mechanism of metaphor, which is that of substitution. Substitution is itself a crossing point of metaphor and metonymy relative to desire, which form the fundamental leverages of and in language as studied by Jacobson and taken up, through Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), by Lacan. In this way Lacan put forward the mechanism of substitution called the metaphor of the Name-of-the-Father as inscribing a fundamental equilibrium in the subject’s structure, and for this reason having stabilising effects on the subject against the impact of the ravages of maternal jouissance. But, in effect, as Miller (2000) brings it to our attention, it is language itself, with its tropes of metaphor, metonymy as external to the real of the body, that provide the subject with a passage to and a place in the social bond, which includes a stable but uncertain image of the body and the enigma of sexuality. The Name-of-the-Father is therefore used by Lacan as an operator of a limit that closes or opens access to jouissance, opening by this stroke the gates to a life in which the subject can experience jouissance called phallic, because it is produced by the phallus as the signifier of desire and of the sexual difference, and live with a lack. The foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father implies limitlessness as a permanent void that never closes, and an absence of the difference between the limit and the beyond of the limit

Topology and the sinthome I will now move on to focus on the second theory of psychosis as Lacan developed it in the 1970s with a use of topology, and topology of the Borromean knot in particular. What is topology in the Lacanian sense? It is a new term for structure, a new if not the last name for the structure. Early in his teaching Lacan spoke of the structure in terms of the signifying relation between two signifiers S1 and S2. This relation implied for Lacan that the signifier’s locus is in the Other, and that there is a lack in the structure to the extent that the signifying element fails to account for the real. The subject of the unconscious initially depended on the Other as a locus of verification and as what a subject is subject to. The Other as

ON PSYCHOSIS

101

a place of truth and a guarantee of the sesame of speech and language, and of the signifying relations within, was Lacan’s name of the structure. But in psychosis, where the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed rendering the paternal metaphor void, the subject, like Joyce, is enclosed within infinity of relations with language and with the body that exists without being affected by the Other. In such a habitat the meaning is real and the real has one meaning. For Joyce it was the case that he meant what he said and said what he meant. These relations could thus be written as a series of signifiers that are not represented, S1 // (S2). Topology opened for Lacan a dimension of the reality of the one, the master signifier, to the extent that this reality testifies to the subject as undivided, as relying on the sinthome that makes the subject hold but as undivided. We have become accustomed in the Lacanian teaching to the subject as divided, as bearing the mark of discontinuity between the signified and the signifier, and taking place in this very division that consists in the breach between the signifier and the real that escapes representation. The psychotic subject of the Borromean knot is not subject to division but copes, one after one, without being affected by the Other. The one of the knot for Lacan is the reality of the real, symbolic, and imaginary being tied up in the way in which a fault can be found in it, namely when one of the three rings remains untied and not knotted up. The Borromean knot is a reality of the one, the subject as undivided. The clinic of the knots, of topology in general, and of the Borromean knot in particular, names for Lacan the radically new way of approaching and treating the symptom. The new way does not mean that we are suddenly in the clinic of the real as opposed to, say the clinic of the imaginary. The Lacanian clinic has always been the clinic of the real because there is not Lacanian symptom without the real as repetitive, insisting, lawless, and of unchanging location. What changed in Lacan’s later approach to the symptom has to do with the change of the status of the Other as no longer the Other of reference or of metaphor. Let’s recall that from the start Lacan takes up Freud’s work concerning the symptom through the prism of libido which is Freud’s real. Hence Lacan’s approach is initially to situate the real of the libido in the symptom in relation to the symbolic. For example, his formulation of the symptom as a metaphor follows closely Freud’s elaboration of the symptom as a substitute-formation. This is because the mechanism of the metaphor is based on substitution. The paternal metaphor which is at the service of the Name-of-the-Father accounts for the signifying

102

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

operation of substitution of the mother’s desire and is written over the signified of the mother’s desire, what the Mother as the real Other does not know. This is the function Lacan assigned to the paternal metaphor as a special agency, as an operator, following his rereading of the Freud’s Oedipus. The symptom appears or presents itself as a message, a letter dressed up in the symbolic attire and addressed to the Other. Lacan called this attire a formal envelope of the symptom, and that’s what the dressing of the real, before sending it off, amounts to. According to such a formulation of the symptom we can say that on the one hand we have a libido on the side of the symbolic as a principle of substitution, subject to the pleasure principle, and on the other hand, there is a libido in the real of the symptom. An example of the latter would be a name an analyst finds for the patient’s mother who was unpredictable to arouse anguish, if only a dominant figure in the subject’s family life. Such a name, say “a filly”, may have a pacifying effect in accordance with the paternal function and its power to facilitate to take the sting out of the series of substitutes. Subsequently, it was for the subject to discover her desire in the interpretation of desiring women he has met in his love life. The distinction between two modes of substitution allows us to say that what was real for Freud, namely libido, was not in its entirety real for Lacan. For Freud libido is a separate and alien element. For Lacan the real amounts to what in language, spoken and written, is externally included as hallucinatory. Lacan’s introduction of the sinthome serves to highlight this difference even further, stressing there is a real external to language even if not everything in the structure of language has a structure of the signifier. And this has a bearing on the symptom. If in his early teaching Lacan focuses almost entirely on speech, on a formulation of the symptom by means of the work of the signifier as a repressed substitute in relation to mother’s desire, in and through speech, in his later teaching he will stress the terms that go beyond the oral transmission of the message. And this will even put into question the very notion of the symptom as a message addressed to the Other. But this is no longer surprising, given that we are moving from the neurotic symptom to the symptom in psychosis. The value of the symptom as a message addressed to the Other is decreased by the fact that the symptom in psychosis has a completely different basis. Approaching psychosis as a differential structure from the perspective of the symptom would therefore reorganise my initial approach to Lacan’s

ON PSYCHOSIS

103

and Miller’s teaching of psychosis from the Name-of-the-Father. With the symptom in mind as a compass, we would speak first of neurosis, then of psychosis and lastly of the sinthome. This shift from thinking the clinical structures from the Name-of-the-Father to thinking them from the symptom resulted from the change of the status of the Other. In this sense, the shift implies moving from the Other as a name of substitution to the Other as equivalence. This thesis of Jacques-Alain Miller is crucial to grasp the transition from the differential clinic, where the Other is the locus of sliding from one signifier to the other, to the clinic where the real around which the substitutions are formed is absorbed into the symptom as equivalent to the Other. I cannot think of a more elegant and precise introduction to the clinic of the Borromean knot. Once we introduce the Other as equivalent to something else, for example to the symptom, then we no longer speak about the Other as purely and simply the locus of the signifier. Suddenly we realise that this Other that is the foundation of Lacan’s teaching from the start, has never been “purely and simply”, but that there has always been several Others, for example the Other as the Other sex, the Other as a place of truth and the Other as desiring, as barred, that only becomes accessible through castration. As equivalent to something else, the Other no longer has a purely symbolic status, and this has implications in the clinic. At this level of the Other as equivalent to the symptom, the symbolic—constituted as a signifying chain in accordance with the pleasure principle—is no longer opposed to the real of jouissance, as in the paternal metaphor, but enters an alliance with jouissance. It is an alliance at the level of equivalence where each element has equal value to another. It is therefore not an agreement or contract, like the social contract of Rousseau that various parties enter into. In the alliance based on equivalence, the functions of the participants differ but their values are equivalent. This is not the case with agreements where the input of the contractors and subcontractors is evaluated beforehand with respect to the benefit to the parties. Equivalence is prior to any value or quality. We could say perhaps that equivalence is a new form of democracy, unknown to Pericles or Rousseau. It is a democracy where every subject has the same value and dignity while being different from another subject. In this new form of alliance based on equivalence, the real of jouissance as beyond the symbolic now enters an alliance with the symbolic. Then the symbolic and the

104

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

real enter an alliance with the imaginary. For the subject, the symbolic, the real, and the imaginary are equivalent, namely have the same value and dignity but different functions. This is my first step towards the clinic of psychosis: to grasp in Lacan’s teaching concerning the symptom a shift from the Other as paternal metaphor to the Other as equivalence. The second step will take me to the symptom in psychosis.

The Borromean knot As we know Freud did not make much of psychosis in psychoanalysis. Not only was psychosis incurable for him but the very notion of cure, just like for an early Lacan, was inscribed in the clinic of neurosis. For Freud transference was impossible in psychosis and that determined for him the futility of dealing with psychotics. In this respect Lacan’s stance concerning the position of the analyst in the treatment of psychosis is precarious. What could be said about love called transference in psychosis? It is not a love that takes its orientation from the object but from the Other as equal, as partner. This of course does not prevent us from opening a dimension in which certain constructions and inventions in the clinic of psychosis like autism are possible, even necessary—constructions that are made within a relation that deserves to be called analytical, namely a relation that involves an analyst. But, as Lacan showed us in his work on Joyce, a work whose aim is not to erect a wall between psychoanalysis and literature, but to give the former an orientation based on the work of the letter, this relation is reversed. In psychosis, the relation between the analyst and the analysand can become reversed and the analyst can take his guidance from heeding to the psychotic subject. Jacques-Alain Miller made an appeal to the analysts working with psychotics by asking them not to forget that they are, that they once were, analysands. The usefulness of this insight is beyond doubt although it has to be said that the reversal in question would not be possible without first establishing the relation of equivalence as a ground for discourse. According to this proposal the reversal in the treatment of psychosis can be perceived as the psychotic subject coming to occupy the position of the Analyst. This follows the logic of the formulation of the partner-symptom, as well as of the analysis of the unconscious in reverse, that is to say starting with the unconscious as real. Why not to say that the psychotic subject is the Analyst?

ON PSYCHOSIS

105

This would give us a little preamble to the psychosis of Joyce whose memoirs of school and artist years in his self-portrait revolve around the axis of the definite article—The artist as a young man (1977). Lacan was quick to point it out, stressing an odd use of the definite article. It is odd to call oneself the artist if an artist would do just fine. After all among artists there is no the artist, just like there is no Master among masters. Joyce, the Artist, and a psychotic subject as the Analyst, echo the equivalence I have just spoken about. According to Miller (2013), in psychosis the subject acts as the Analyst because he works with the real from the beginning. For this reason the symptom is the subject’s partner. Contrary to the formulation of deciphering the symptom as a message addressed to the Other, here we have a symptom as partner in an analyst. The work with a psychotic subject follows the logic of equivalence that allows for the reversal of the analyst and the analysand. The analysand, who was an analyst before, has now become a partner whose support has an indefinite character. In fact, it is a partner who cannot be divorced or separated from because one never entered a contract like marriage with him in the first place. This relation between the psychotic subject and an analysand aka analyst, is therefore built not on an agreement but on the logic of equivalence of the Other to the symptom. Lacan’s teaching traverses from the Other to the One, making the Other, through Miller’s work (2001), equivalent to the symptom, which in turn and by implication makes the symbolic equivalent to the real to the imaginary in the knot Lacan constructed for us in the 1970s. What binds the Real and the Symbolic is the Imaginary whose function differs from the others in that it consists. The Imaginary is distinguished by its consistence. These three make the three rings of the Borromean knot in such a way that if one falls out, so do the other two.

Diagram 1. Borromean knot.

106

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

From the classical logic to the rubber logic Before we move on, let’s try to grasp more precisely what the reversal of the positions of the analyst and the analysand involves. To do this let’s remind ourselves that in neurosis the subject starts from the symptom to traverse towards the real of the drive. The deciphering of the symptom thus draws on the fantasy that supports the symptom by way of masking the real, veiling the supposed jouissance. To cross and go beyond the veil of fantasy leads to, what Miller called, when he subtitled one of the lessons of Seminar XI (1977), the demontage of the drive. The treatment of the neurotic aims at the demontage of the drive while opening the formal envelope of the symptom, that is to say it aims at isolating the little real. Thus, the deciphering of the symptom implies being married to it, namely the condition and support of the symbolic law under which a partnership can exist. For better or for worse.

S s The radical reformulation of the treatment of psychosis thus becomes an effect of the reformulation of the symptom. The analyst’s position is inscribed in this. Lacan’s contribution to the treatment of psychotics is that, contrary to Freud, something can be done, tied up for the psychotic nevertheless, and that although they are not curable in the neurotic sense of the word “cure”, there is a way of treating the psychotic subject even if the treatment is not based on the contract that carries an idea of finitude and limit. The topological clinic, and specifically the clinic of the knots, was how Lacan found the orientation for approaching the logic of the symptom and lessening the intensity of the real that is not subject to any pacts or contracts. According to this new formulation, the position of the analyst, who should not forget that he is or was once an analysand, relies on a different kind of support which involves what I would call the trilitteral. The trilitteral approach to the clinic implies that, starting with the equivalence of the Other to the symptom, for every Symbolic there is also the Real and the Imaginary, and for every Real there is also the Imaginary and the Symbolic, and so on. At the time of Lacan’s work on the topology of the knots, his clinic of psychosis is essentially trilitteral. This would be true if it was not the case that Lacan introduced the Borromean knot with the three registers of S, R, and I, and the clinic of the trilitteral,

ON PSYCHOSIS

107

in Seminar XIX, entitled … ou pire, through neurosis. More specifically, he was interested there in the demand of the hysteric. In this sense, the Borromean knot re-enters the clinical scene four years later and its second coming takes Lacan’s work in the direction of Joyce. Joyce was doubtless a high priest of literature once, having woven the nest for eternity that no one could match. For Lacan the topological clinic of knots proved to be transdifferential, and applicable, provided it is not a clinic of the mathematicians, throughout the psychoanalytic clinic. Lacan’s interest in the topology of the Borromean knot was aroused when he saw the Coat of Arms of the Italian family Borromeo. It depicted a knot consisting of three rings tied in such a way that if you remove one the others will be untied too. Apparently, the members of the family made a pact that if one of them leaves the other two members will leave as well. It was a pact based on an agreement, and therefore had a seal of the symbolic law, just as is the case of a relationship in neurosis. But the knot tied up as a result of this pact had a structure of equivalence in the sense that bringing the rings together and their dissolution concerned equally all members of which there were at least three. And that is what interested Lacan. The alliance of the family members was that of equivalence. The knot was tied accordingly, namely based on the exclusion of the one implying the exclusion of every one. The knot, the Borromean knot is thus the real with equivalence being its material. In other words, equivalence is the materiality of the Borromean knot as Lacan presented it. And this approach of Lacan led me to the idea that this alliance or knotting, based on at least three rings, could be presented as a series of logical propositions. But since we are dealing with at least three elements, we have to stray from the classical logic of the binary propositions. What we need is a ternary logic in order to account for the implication between the three rings. If not A then not (B and C) If not B then not (A and C) If not C then not (A and B) Where A, B and C are equivalent.

Having written this simple formula I was struck by the negation of the conjunction. It forms part of what is called De Morgan’s law. Augustus De Morgan was a maverick and dexterous mathematician and logician for whom imagination was the propelling force of

108

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

mathematics. In his work on logic he simplified the logical propositions that involve negation. Instead of the negation of the long multielemental propositions, he proposed the negation of each of the elements. As a result, he transformed the negation of the conjunction into the disjunction of the negations. This was then called De Morgan’s law. Let’s see if it is of interest to us here. It would present us with the following proposition with regard to the three rings of the Borromean knot: 1. If not A then not (B and C) becomes 2. If not A then not B or not C. This presents us with a problem. The logical condition of the Borromean pact clearly states that if any member leaves, the other two leave as well. Therefore, we cannot have the case of A leaving with either B or C not leaving. The disjunction of the negations, which is De Morgan’s law, is therefore not applicable to the logic of the Borromean knot. After all Lacan was dealing with the knot with a fault and not with the perfectly chiselled Borromean knot that is all tied up for eternity and serves as an aesthetic embellishment. The Borromean knot in its aesthetically pure and symmetrical unity does not take us anywhere when it comes to the case of Joyce as Lacan was working on it. Based on Lacan’s reading of Joyce, we would have to be able to formulate a proposition according to which if not A then neither B nor C, where A, B and C are equivalent. Another problem we are confronted with is that when we rely on the mathematics of the mathematicians, it is the value of these binary propositions that undergoes variations. The same goes for the ternary logic of Kleene, where instead of two there are three values, namely true, false, and unknown. The logical intricacies of the topological knots do not involve values of elements because we are dealing with equivalence. What does it mean? It implies that working with the symptom stands equivalent to working with three rings, and that in doing so Lacan was not seeking a third value. Lacan’s work on topology led him instead to seek a function that the third or even fourth term can perform. He sought a supplementary function where there was a deficit in the subject that forms these binary or trinary propositions. Joyce as a subject does not fall under the same binary, or even trinary, system as a subject for whom the world may be divided and therefore present a conflict between two opposed values with the third

ON PSYCHOSIS

109

value being undetermined. For the psychotic subject like Joyce, it is not a question of a conflict or of an undetermined value. Lacanian operation of holding three rings that fail to hold involves the fourth element as a function of a practical knowledge. It is this function, rather than value, as in the classical logic, that provides Lacan with an instrument with which to make the knot hold and to maintain stabilisation of Joyce as subject. We have to shift therefore our position from the classical logic to what Lacan called already in the 1950s the rubber logic. If the image of the body is what fails Joyce as subject, if it slips away from him, then let’s use the rubber logic that will allow Lacan to invent another term as a function that would guide us to making the Joycean knot hold. Joyce’s knot is constructed on the basis of the fault. We can see the fault in Diagram 2. There is a world of difference between constructing a knot, Borromean or other, based on the theory of aesthetic proportions and symmetry, which you can see in Diagram 1, and constructing a knot based on the fault which is what we are dealing with here. That is the reason why the propositions of the classical logic sooner or later cease to be applicable as they culminate in different values and in this do not present us with the terms to find the solution in relation to the real. Whereas the values of the rings are equivalent to one another, their functions differ. The rubber logic introduced by Lacan does not imply we are ad libitum to work with it. It rather works ad rerum if this is the

Diagram 2. Borromean knot with a fault.

110

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

way to speak about the real. What is the res of Joyce and why does the Imaginary ring fall away? Lacan found in Joyce’s early novels fragments that testify to Joyce’s experience of psychosis as untriggered. It had to do with the beatings and torments of the body he was subjected to by his school mates who according to Joyce tied him to a barbed wire fence and then beat him up. Among them in particular was Heron, the name not without relevance as Lacan pointed out. The fact that Joyce gave one of his school mates the name of a long-beaked bird may have had some significance as it appears not without a link to the vulture pecking at the liver of Prometheus. The latter was thus subjected to an unimaginable suffering by being robbed of the body and of having a body that was gradually hollowed, while its image was shredded to pieces. Young James endured like a martyr, or like the Artist, enduring in humiliation and in silence as if his suffering was for others, for humanity, and his psychosis never triggered. Joyce described his experiences of the body as a skin peeling off, disconnecting from him. Joyce’s bodily image, which Lacan situates at the level of the Imaginary that in the Borromean knot has a function of giving consistence. This image, isolated by Lacan, started gradually to slip away from the rest, from the Symbolic and the Real, of the knot. Thus the body image, perforated and shredded, was being severed, just like a limb can be severed from the body, and this is where Lacan situated the fault. Joyce’s initial endurance became his perseverance. Lacan speaks of père-severance, implying a severance from the father. Severed from his father and from the paternal function, and his body image severed from his hollowed body of which he was losing any feeling, Joyce was left with the writing machine. And through his writing and the ideas of his writing being read for centuries to come, he was elevated to construct for himself a father’s Name. And this, in turn, was to secure his existence for eternity, i.e., for some three hundred years, and inscribe his name on the stellar firmament of the literary criticism. When Lacan took up the Borromean knot again in his seminar on Joyce, he was interested in the faults in the knotting, and no longer in the demand of the hysteric as a few years earlier. In this sense the knot is not a representation but the real as the real subject. Lacan was mapping the real as equivalent to the symbolic and imaginary. It was all as one which amounts to all S1, the elementary signifier(s), however many, but not fewer than three. These rings, not fewer than three in number, are equivalent as all signifiers are equivalent in value and in dignity

ON PSYCHOSIS

111

but not in the function. The one that had a function of holding the three together for Joyce was the fourth one, called sinthome, ∑. Its aim was to allow Joyce to have a body and first to endure and then to persevere. Starting with the fault in the Joyce’s knot, Lacan found the way to reattach the third ring, the Imaginary, to the other two rings, the Symbolic and the Real, which put him at odds with the classical logic. For it was not the case of true or false or unknown value that was at stake in the Borromean logicisation, and that guided Lacan to construct the sinthome, namely the fourth ring with which he knotted the third to the other two, but its function as distinct from the others. First there were three and now there are four for the knot to hold. If this operation can be formulated into a proposition, we could present it as follows If (A and B) and not C then D Where A, B and C are equivalent.

Is the fourth ring equivalent to the other three? It is a special ring as it binds the other three. In the case of Joyce’s knot, the formula of the sinthome would look like this If (S ∩ R) ∩ not I → ∑

Joyce’s writing In neurosis, the cure aims at the real, at the jouissance of the drive, for which the symptom is an indicator and a signpost. In neurosis the symptom directs us toward the real because the real in the symptom is

Diagram 3. The fourth ring as sinthome knotting I to R and S.

112

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

insisting, compelling, keeps coming back. In psychosis, the situation is somewhat reversed since the psychotic goes from the real to the symbolic, aiming to seek the symbolic terms that would give the real a point of reference, a hinge of the symbolic. Hence the function of writing which is a way for the psychotic to plug into the symbolic. Lacan’s work on the sinthome of Joyce responds to the question of this reversal. It was a new and surprising response. But it is also a very specific reply, dealing with Joyce the writer and the artist who aims to achieve in his art what he perhaps would not in analysis. Joyce has no need of psychoanalysis, Lacan says, as he can do without transference or with a generalised transference to the letter. He manages to invent a name for himself so that it can last and outlive him in the way future outlives us, is located in the present that has not been yet. And that’s where Joyce placed himself. In the process Joyce transforms the English language into a language that is untranslatable, which is the case of Finnegan’s Wake (1992). It would not suffice to say “incomprehensible”. It is a language that can be heard and enjoyed as heard but in some way remains unreadable, outside sense, and beyond translation. And to keep his promise to occupy the academics for centuries, Joyce puts the cart, which is his writing, the letters outside sense, before the horse which is his desire. That’s what distinguishes him from a neurotic who may have hopes and believes for the best because they always leave much to be desired. These reversals then give us some points of orientation where the psychotic goes, having left his desire behind or having ceased to subscribe to it. This is an expression of Lacan who spoke of the unconscious. Joyce does not only cancel it altogether but transfers his subscription to his unconscious to the collective unconscious of the future to come, which takes form of the art of the letter. Lacan states on this occasion that there is no better proof of the collective unconscious of Jung than Joyce. And this is because Finnegan’s Wake does not take part in his sinthome. Why did Joyce’s writing become unreadable? We know that much—Joyce did not write to be read in the way one reads a book where sense prevails. He wrote on the edges of meaning, seldom affording us, the readers, the pleasure of sense. Sense and its production form what Lacan calls “the copulation of the symbolic and the imaginary”. It is that area of the Borromean knot where the Imaginary overlaps with the Symbolic. And since for Joyce the imaginary does not come into conjunction with the symbolic, he remains left with the real and the foreclosure of sense. Toying with the real, and being

ON PSYCHOSIS

113

oriented by the real, as Lacan puts it, are the effects of the foreclosed sense. Lacan was interested in Joyce because at a certain level he found in his art the signifier in its most bare, elementary, and meaningless dimension. It is a dimension of Lacan called lalangue through and through with an occasional hiccup of grammar and a dim flicker of sense. What do we find in terms of the final product? The purpose of Joyce’s writing, as Lacan demonstrated, was to construct a device that would make up for the absence of the imaginary, that is to say, for the absence of the ego as the body image with which to make sense. But how can an absence be repaired? The function of the sinthome is to bring the imaginary to the other two rings. Joyce’s writing thus served as a crutch for someone who is limping or a replacement of the function that is missing, absent. Lacan called it suppléance which literally means to stand in for the one who is not there. In psychosis, delusion, or more specifically a construction of a delusional metaphor, serves this reparative purpose, which is to return it to how it was before the damage occurred. The psychotic subject like Schreber repairs the foreclosure by making, through the delusional metaphor, the relation with the symbolic exist and function where it does not exist. And this involves resorting to the sexual relation. Schreber became dead certain he was a woman on a mission to copulate with God so that a new human race could be spawned to replace the current one. This was not only in accordance with his father’s ideal but also as this idea’s continuation, extension almost. And his delusion set him to work, giving him a peace of mind because it all fell into place, the meaning became fixed. Schreber made use of the imaginary more than of any other register, which is the case in paranoia, and which propelled his delusional metaphor. But this was not the case of Joyce who had to confront the collapse of the imaginary, and then its severance. Hence the sinthome that like Hermes connects two disparate registers. But Hermes’s role is not to put these registers under the umbrella of the paternal function that allows the unfolding of the signifying chain. He rather connects different strata, and takes place of where the function is missing. That’s the difference between repression, Verdrängung, and foreclosure, Verwerfung. Schreber may have been a writer but he was not a poet. Lacan makes this point already in his early seminar Psychoses. It is through the uses of the imaginary that a poet introduces us to semblances of his experience. A poet, consciously or not, seduces us to his world because it makes sense to us as a combination of the unknown and the known, and then

114

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

his poetry is translated into other languages. This implies that there are symbolic and imaginary relations introduced in the poem. But this is not to be found in Schreber’s memoirs. What Lacan is saying in his reading of it, is that delusion is not a poem because it speaks to no one. Was Joyce a poet? If he was not, it was for a different reason that he himself encapsulated in the supposition of being the artist. Joyce became a writer but in the course of his increasingly littoral endeavours his writing lost the trail of sense. And so he found himself alone with that signifier that Lacan found disconnected from any other. Subsequently, Joyce’s relation to language became almost entirely narrowed down to the signifier become letter because it no longer resonates, to which I will come back at the end. The sinthome that Lacan was engaging in relation to the function of suppléance concerned Joyce’s writing as based on the letter and the signifier that does not resonate. That’s why it should be stressed that suppléance is not a substitute. Substitution makes use of the metaphorical displacement as Freud invented it in relation to repression and symptom-formation. Suppléance stands in for where instead of the organisation of substitutions there is a void of the paternal function. In other words, in suppléance it is a matter of installing a function in the void, just as it is with a prosthetic device, which is how we sometimes translate the French term, as an artificial limb. That is why we can say that the reading of Joyce, namely the reading of the unreadable, untranslatable, unsignifiable, and senseless art does not fall on the side of producing joysense because there is no body attached to it. Joyce’s production falls on deaf ears, literally, because it has no effects, no echoes in the body. What Finnegan’s Wake does achieve is perhaps some dubious joynonsense—dubious because it is not clear for whom it is meant. Does Joyce enjoy it? Finnegan’s Wake is a music that can never be repeated. The k-not, the knot of Joyce, is in this sense tied negatively, namely through neutralisation of meaning. In this sense he is out there on a limb. And this was my third step. The first step consisted in introducing us to the topological clinic as based on the mutation of the Other as a paternal metaphor into the Other as equivalent to the symptom. Here is the simple way to write it A≡∑ The second step took us in the direction to discern the symptom in psychosis in order to tie up the equivalence of its elements outside the

ON PSYCHOSIS

115

order of substitutions where privileges and discrimination are the rule. The three registers are equivalent and that’s what I meant by calling Lacan’s Borromean orientation trilitteral: R≡S≡I The logic of equivalence, in turn, with respect to the Other implies that the Other is not complete or whole, which Lacan designated as the Other as barred, A /. For this reason Jacques-Alain Miller (2004) proposed to write a correlation of the barred Other and the symptom. This correlation simply accounts for the sinthome as having to do with the fault in the Other of the paternal function. Thus the equivalence of the symptom and the Other responds to the new modality of the Other, namely the Other as barred: A ≡ ∑ (A /) And the fault allows for partnerships and alliances based on the sinthomatic device holding, through knotting, the three registers together. The third step took us a bit by surprise as it was not signalled. Its aim was to unravel what Lacan called the sinthome of Joyce in particular, that is say, how it ties in writing as supporting the function of suppléance, the prosthetic limb. One of the consequences of Lacan’s reorientation of the clinic through and by means of the sinthome was an emphasis on the subject’s elementary signifiers. This is an additional effect of the shift from the symptom as interpretation and deciphering to its prosthetic function serving to reknot the subject’s place in life. Lacan referred in this instance to the primary tongue he called lalangue I mentioned earlier. Lacan evokes this term again at the beginning of the seminar on Sinthome to show the proximity of the real and the signifier, the elementary one. And I will follow this development now. This elementary signifier, implicated in the lalangue as a primary tongue, is Lacan’s material in his interest in the One. What One if not that which renders the Other one-less? The topological clinic takes its orientation from the One without the Other or from the One as the Other, which comes under equivalence. The clinic of the One, one signifier after one, is a clinic where the elementary signifier, while remaining in a proximate vicinity to jouissance, can be approached as lalangue, that is to say without the reference to the Other. The One can only be found at the level of equivalence, not of reference.

116

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

The elementary signifier S1 thus becomes a solitary one, the one all alone, as Lacan called it, and without any relation to S2. S1 // (S2) → S1, S1, S1

Where is the ego? This is Lacan’s reorientation of the clinic of psychosis, from that of the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father and of the delusional metaphor to the one of the one or of the ones equivalent to one another. And this made me go back to Freud who made some important distinctions in his 1924 text “The loss of reality in neurosis and psychosis” (1924e). Let’s see if it provides us with any inklings to inspire Lacan’s final word on Joyce’s sinthome. What Freud addresses in taking up the difference are two different kinds of loss. What results in neurosis is that some of the subject’s drive representations are repressed and some are not. In psychosis, some part of reality is lost and is not subject to repression. In neurosis the loss is compensated by fantasy where some elements of loss are not subject to repression. Freud approaches the process in two stages. First, the ego, being at the service of reality is confronted with a loss of some part of the id. The second stage, which Freud calls proper neurosis, is constituted by a change in relation to reality. The neurotic’s relation to reality, Freud summarises, is based on ignorance. And he refers to a traumatic instance in the life of his old patient who tacitly rejoices at the death bed of her sister because she will now be able to marry her brother-in-law she loves. The loss of her sister is thus ignored and repressed in favour of the demand for love. In psychosis there are also two stages of the change in relation to reality. The first one, Freud tells us, consists in the flight of the ego in the face of the loss of reality. The second stage has a reparative character to make up for the losses, ersatz. Freud stresses that it is in the first stage where neurosis and psychosis differ significantly, and that in the second stage there is a similar tendency in both to account for the loss, repair the damage and to cope with the new way that results for the subject from it. Freud reaches this conclusion on the assumption that a “rejected” [abgewiesene] piece of reality forces itself on the subject, just as the “repressed” drive representation returns in neurosis. In the first instance we have the return of the real as unsymbolised, which is how Lacan described it, and in the second a symbolisation that results in the

ON PSYCHOSIS

117

production of a remainder of the real. Freud appears to seek a point of intersection between neurosis and psychosis and locates it in their respective second stages. But when he introduces fantasy, it relates to the former’s, not the latter’s, response to the loss. Fantasy aims to recapture what some part of the ego has withdrawn, which points in the direction of the image of the body. Lacan called it i (a), the image of the ego in the other as my fellow man, Nebenmensch. In obsessional neurosis fantasy leads to regression, as I showed in the previous chapter. But in psychosis this fantasy turns into a delusional construction starting with the shrivelled image of the ego. And it is then plain that in the case of Schreber the delusional construction serves to render the ego grandiose and overbearing. But what happens in the case of Joyce for whom writing at the time of Finnegan’s Wake is already disengaged from the work of remembering? Joyce in this sense went in the completely opposite direction to that of Proust who made the past present, living and kicking here and now. Joyce in a way writes without the past. And this is another way of cancelling the subscription to the unconscious. Lacan follows Freud’s steps on the loss of reality and sometimes it may seem surprising how closely to the letter he reads Freud. But he advances farther when considering untriggered psychosis of Joyce. From the perspective of the construction of a function, following the loss of reality, the Freudian point of intersection appears to be around ersatzes, the substitutes. He uses the term, both as a verb and as a noun, to describe the second stage in both neurosis and psychosis. For Lacan this grammar of Freud appears as insufficient to account for the reparative process in the psychosis that is not marked by delusional grandiosity of the ego but by writing as a support to the foreclosed ego. What Lacan calls suppléance has therefore to be considered anew, not in terms of substitutes but as a construction of a new phunction that gives sinthome its virility. Lacan writes it in this way to bring the letter Φ into the reading of the fantasy that could be written with the same letter and we will shortly see why. The phunction is to be located on the masculine side, which Lacan defined on the table of sexuation in Seminar XX (1998a). And he contrasts it as a completely different kettle of fish with the function of the barred A, S (A /), which is on the feminine side. Does writing for Joyce come to assume what Lacan calls phunction in the place of the absent paternal metaphor? Joyce has a unique relation to language. His infinitely extended construction of literature consists in collecting scraps of language, words,

118

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

phrases, syllables he finds on shop windows, at train stations, on logos, road signs, lines from newspapers, gossips, exclamations heard and overheard in daily conversations around him. His language is a dustbin of history past and present, daily rubbish of phonemic and literal scrapings. Is this the unconscious as real? We could say that Joyce’s relation to language centres on what is a waste, discarded pieces or simply bags of rubbish in order to recycle them for the purpose of writing. This is his phantasy that highlights his relation to the discard. Man makes love with the unconscious, Lacan says, stressing with just as in with the partner. Who or what is this partner if not the barred Other which signals the nonexistence of the Other of the Other? Joyce does not have a problem with the nonexistence of the Other of the Other because his collection of letters and scraps of language points to the suppléance as the real unconscious made of elementary signifiers S ones. On the one hand, Joyce shows himself as a stamp collector without access to knowledge as to what theme or period of history dominates in this process. On the other hand, he processes the waste of language to be able to recycle and reuse it ad infinitum. Any attempt to search for a subject matter of this collection would put us on a wild goose chase. Instead, Lacan is concerned with how Joyce constructs his body and reinvents its image where it does not consist. This bricolage makes up for the missing paternal function and gives existence to what Lacan called “the real of the organ”. Joyce is exempt from the function, which makes him an exception. This is what Lacan marked on the table of sexuation as x Φx which is to be read that there exists an “x” that is not subject to the phallic function. When Lacan writes phunction or phantasy, this implies that what Joyce is left with is the letter. Instead of the signifying operator of the paternal metaphor, Joyce is left with the letter that has no signifying effects. And this is what can be said about his writing. The real has to be invented in order to be reinserted into the knot. It is just that for Joyce the real can only be accessed through the imaginary, which brings us back to the sinthomatic operation of the reinsertion of the Imaginary into the Borromean knot. The knot does not hold because the Imaginary is at large, so to speak. That does not disrupt, on the contrary, Joyce’s project of writing and the ink flows in abundance. Not only there is no disruption but something is being formed, constructed in the course of this repetition. Having lost a “feeling” of his body, a sense of having a body, the process of uninterrupted writing turns the void of the signifying operator into a

ON PSYCHOSIS

119

concatenation of letters. What is the loss of reality in the untriggered psychosis of Joyce if not the loss of the ego in its specular and narcissistic function already discerned by Freud? What is the function of the ego if not to lend the imaginary support to the body where it loses balance and falls? For Joyce it does not fall due to his writing but bends and limps with the imaginary, walking separately and as disengaged. The image that supports the body as ego is not in place, is not engaged as image. Thus, and this is crucial for Lacan, the disengaged image of the ego turns the relation to his body into a circle. But it is not new. Lacan started with the demand and its repetitions forming rounds. Circularity is the effect of the repeated demand addressed to the Other, which for Joyce is the readership of the academics and of centuries to come. As that which is left the ring in the knot has a function of repetition and Lacan was interested how to reknot these repetitions of Joyce. Which is why Lacan focuses on the function, not on value, true or false, determined or not. The value belongs to the order of the imaginary as isolated, and in this sense to the order of evaluation and of judgement of attribute that Freud separated from the judgement of existence. We start with the judgement of attribute but the aim is the judgement of existence, namely whether something exists or not. In this sense, evaluation and verification is not an existence as it does not respond to the trilitteral knot but the imaginary supported by the symbolic. Does the knot exist due to its quality and value or due to the functions and their work? This question oriented Lacan’s teaching towards the topology of the knots. Joyce’s efforts to assemble the scraps of language, the signs of existence, gave Lacan an indication that despite the fact that his body image slips away, fails to contribute to the production of sense, the symptom holds the subject through the body event that occurs outside the body, and outside the body image. The symptom in the body event rests on having the body that Joyce lost the sensation of. Having a body means having a sense of the body that aches, causes discomfort, tires, does not follow, ages or springs up but which is always there as that which one has. Lacan insists on having the body, just as he would distinguish having the phallus from being it, having it as a father and with it a means to produce jouissance, and therefore being subject to castration, and being the phallus for the maternal Other. Being and having are of relevance here because they define the positions of the subject who has a body that through the symptom insists, repeats, and so on.

120

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

Having been divested of the bodily sensation in effect of his childhood experiences, the symbolic for Joyce formed around a hole and therefore as a circle. Topology, Lacan says at the end of Seminar XXIII (2005), shows us that a circle has a hole. In going round the circle one may never awaken to a sense of having a body but this circular movement will have reparative effects. And it worked for Joyce in so far as he could do without meaning. What he could not do without has to be located elsewhere. He can certainly not do without the sinthome which is his writing. Is the letter a place where jouissance is pinned to the paper? It is not certain given the sinthome aims to bring the Imaginary back into horizon by way of buckling it up to the Real and the Symbolic, just as one buckles a parachute. The fourth ring, the sinthome, functions as the ego. Lacan insists that writing was absolutely essential to Joyce’s ego. This can be seen on Diagram 3.

Joyce’s materialism Lacan started his teaching with the emphasis on speech because it is the only medium in analysis and because our primary experience of language is at the level of the signifier that belongs to the dimension of the auditory. For the neurotic, as long as he has a body, this also has a meaning, causing him pain, and even identifying with the pain of others through the symptom as the hysterics may do in relation to their fathers, as for example for Dora. This meaning fluctuates and varies, and may become less inflated with jouissance, and the symptoms are less of a hurdle in the lives of the neurotic even if it never ceases to be produced which remains part of the symptom and in this sense of the social link called discourse. With Finnegan’s Wake Lacan entered the outside of meaning. It was a mystery. How does one make sense of this “outside meaning”, how do we read what goes beyond the production of sense and of jouis-sense? How do we mark the difference between the function of the letter in Joyce’s writing and the signifier with its resonances on the body one has? In the Lacanian sense of the word, the letter is an effect of discourse and in some way absorbs the signifier at the level of equivocation. Writing abrogates the signifying reverberations. But once the letter has captured some of the jouissance, we go back to speech and to the equivocations of the signifier. This was not the case with Joyce.

ON PSYCHOSIS

121

Joyce forms a singular and unique case of the entanglement of the three registers the Imaginary, the Real, and the Symbolic in the way that reveals a fault rendering the Other of the paternal metaphor useless and to be discarded. This faulty Other, to the extent that it fails to hold, thus forms an alliance with the symptom that I have written above. Since for Joyce the Other does not hold, Lacan constructed the sinthome that is a new real and the condition for the knot to hold. And this is perhaps what we see as Lacan’s itinerary at the end of his teaching—to separate delusional aggrandisement of meaning from the knottings that are writings supporting the signifier. What was to prevent psychoanalysis from being absorbed into incessant delusion, as Laurent (2014) pointed out, was precisely the dimension extraneous to meaning. And this is what Lacan calls writing, to wit an act that supports, materially, the signifier. S is a letter that supports the signifier. The letter is in this sense the effect of discourse. Joyce’s ignorance of meaning and its delusional inflations takes him in a completely different direction in his relation to language and which writing supports. This ignorance, however creative in the process, is not a learned one because castration plays no part in it. On the one hand, we have a failure of castration, of the father failing to pass castration to the son. The same happens with Schreber whose father becomes one with the law and with the Name-of-the-Father as an instrument of its implementation. But the foreclosure of the paternal function and the failure of castration do not by themselves determine the difference between Schreber and Joyce I have been trying to discern. For example, Joyce’s psychosis did not trigger. It triggered in his daughter. Joyce’s writing prevented his psychosis from triggering because it led him to the dimension of language that is external to meaning and therefore to the delusional constructs effected by meaning. If there is the fourth step in my development that started from the change of the status of the Other and led me to the specificity of the Joycean sinthome as writing, it would confirm the difference between these two dimensions of language. And this in a sense is a return to what Lacan started with, namely the primacy of the signifier prior to any meaning whatsoever. But now, Lacan touches on these primary ways of the unconscious from the perspective of the letter. My fourth step would thus come to mark what Lacan stressed in distinguishing Schreber’s delusional pursuit of meaning and Joyce’s writing as a way to steer away from meaning. Schreber’s delusion does not break or fall

122

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

because it is established in the unseverable relation to the Other that exists. It not only supports the inflation of meaning in the construction of the delusional metaphor but also steers Schreber towards what Freud elsewhere called more and more oceanic experience of the ego as the ultimate meaning. Hence the knot of Schreber is continuous and cemented in the continuity of three rings as in the trefoil knot. As for Joyce, his knot will be tied up starting with the parting of the body that has an effect of a severed limb that Joyce will be in need to sow in a prosthetic one in order not to fall. For Lacan this construction has all the insignia of invention of the new real. One does not need meaning to do that. That’s Lacan’s demonstration in the seminar on the sinthome of Joyce. Joyce found his redemption in passing from endurance as a young boy to perseverance as a writer, and severed his relation to the Other. In the end he authorised himself to pass into eternity as a name woven through his writing. Lacan indicates to us another use of the ego he earlier said was indispensable for Joyce’s writing. What does the ego do apart from providing the subject with the imaginary partner to provide conditions for narcissism Lacan already formulated in his mirror stage? Since in schizophrenia the imaginary undergoes a collapse, the ego may become conducive to reparative function to correct the fault. In neurosis, the fault functions as an error, a lack. The subject makes a lapsus by putting his house key to open the door to his analyst’s office, and this is an error that represents the subject for another signifier, both being spurred to action by the slip, namely the unconscious. It is not the aim of the analytic cure to correct the fault or to fill in the lack, on the contrary. The subject may want to be at home in the analyst’s consultation room, having experienced the opposite. One works with this error and with the unconscious from which it arose. The lack is always there. It is already an effect of the language impacting on the body and producing a fault, a missed encounter which at some point in Lacan’s teaching gave rise to a missed encounter between the woman and the man which Lacan called the nonexistence of the sexual rapport. Analysis is in this sense a speaking stage for the failures and impossibilities. But for Joyce, who did not need analysis, because he had his art, his writing, it is not a lack in being but a broken being as it goes all the way down, as it were, all the way and all the time, allowing for the ego that Lacan introduces here to have some Gestalt effect and to mend the broken whole. We could say that the device of the ego as writing “wholeds”, to equivocate on what

ON PSYCHOSIS

123

is involved in the knotting. Hegel was not entirely right when he said that you can mend a sock but you cannot mend consciousness. Lacan showed you can mend the broken connection if the material of language, namely words, letters, and all the motley of collected scraps and discards, can be put into use of reknitting the fault of the unconscious. And this materialism of Joyce makes him completely disinterested, indeed dispassionate of the meaning shuffled in the madness of Schreber, and by anyone, in the sense of generalised delusion of “we are all mad”, as Lacan put it, who appears engaged in the incessant interpretations, readings, critique of everyday pathologies, discontents and “politics of things”, to use J. -C. Milner’s expression. Although for Joyce the unconscious as the place of the signifying chain fails, and the subscription is transferred to the collective unconscious, whatever it means, it is not without the unconscious that he makes amends with writing. The place of equivocation is perhaps crucial here as it disorients the production of sense in the discourse of the hysteric. Interestingly, Lacan starts the next Seminar XXIV (1976–1977) on the unconscious with an equivocation, as Laurent stressed the point. In taking this step Lacan leaves out delusion from the main stream of the psychoanalytic discourse and builds on the material inventions of the real he introduced in his reading of Joyce. The ego appears to provide Joyce with a skin, the fourth ring working as a pin or a staple that puts together what falls apart, what parts, what partly falls out, reinserting the repaired image back into the system. In the course of his writing outside and beyond sense, Joyce succeeded in what Schreber could not, namely steering clear from the signifier of the Sirens which opens the path to delusion with the floodgates of meaning. But in doing so Joyce does not exactly annihilate the signifier. He rather strips it bare. He deafens it and muffles its resonance. The auditory image of the signifier mediates between the sound and the meaning effect that emerges on hearing it. It is there, in this place of mediation, where Joyce stuns the signifier and disables it. In his use of language Joyce disrupts the signifying process right there in the middle. The effect is that the signifier recoils and turns back on itself, empty, silent, and unechoed. This deafness of a writer was what allowed Joyce to continue his voyage.

CHAPTER FIVE

Knowledge in discourse or fourfold ignorance

From the quest for knowledge to the question of knowledge There is an ignorance of the analyst, and there is an ignorance of an analysand to the extent that he is happy to talk and does not know what he is talking about. And, elsewhere, there is an ignorance of the professor. Finally, there is an infinite ignorance of the hysteric. We should therefore start with the question: where is the ignorance in the discourse as Lacan constructed it? Everywhere where there is knowledge. Knowledge was searched for and explored by philosophers long before Plato and Aristotle, which is why they were called pre-Socratics. The discoveries of Thales and Anaximander in the field of knowledge, episteme, would today qualify as pertaining to what we call scientific knowledge in the sense that it focused on the matters of measurement of distances, like the ones between stars, to facilitate movement on earth and the marine navigation, or of constructing sun-dials to calculate the times of departures and returns home for the families and officials to know. These coordinates determined the limits of knowledge. On the other hand, the pre-Socratics were interested in learning to know about the primary substance, its qualities and properties, and what can be done with it. For Anaximander the primary substance 125

126

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

was apeiron, which signifies “boundless” or unlimited, and which we already encountered in the experience of Kant. For Anaximenes the boundless was the air whose limits concerned processes of contraction, expansion, condensation, and so on. The psychoanalytic experience has presented itself as a discipline and a field where some measuring and calculating can be done in the sense of transformational processes, such as topological formalisations. But these no longer follow, as Freud discovered, the laws of science, and cannot therefore be called scientific. Psychoanalytic episteme differs from that of science, which started with the pre-Socratic philosophy, and Freud, although he believed in science as a modus operandi, was also the first one who put its principles, such as that of contradiction, into question. The analytic experience of language gives us indications that the real in psychoanalysis operates beyond the field of measurement even if Lacan found in it a point of limit to that which deceives. Measurement does not deceive, Lacan noted, leaving for us to conclude, that it makes room for, and takes into account, an error. The error thus becomes one of the coordinates of the place of the real, and in this sense cannot be eradicated for the benefits of knowledge because knowledge takes its orientation from a hole in the real which is the place of the error. And this allows me to say that, unlike science, psychoanalysis is not bound by having to navigate its itinerary between deception and error, but takes both on board: the wind on the sails to move between points, and the coordinates with which to find its direction. Both sway the satisfaction of the captain thus summoned to change course. And that’s the point where my question arises: how to speak about the unconscious knowledge that is infinite but not without limits? Let me say straight away, however dogmatic it may sound, that the question concerning unconscious knowledge and what touches on the truth as cause of the symptom, is the question that supposes the subject. Let’s say that when the question of knowledge arises and has an effect of a surprise, the subject of the unconscious is supposed. Secondly, the supposition of the subject, its coming into existence through surprise, mistake, dream, etc., leads us to question knowledge: what the subject wants to know in the unconscious knowledge becomes raised in conjunction with his symptom. In other words, it is through the symptom as formulated in transference, that the question of knowledge, namely of the symptom’s cause arises. Here then is

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

127

the paradox the subject wrestles with: speaking to the one he believes knows about his symptom, he also believes in its power as a power to know. How to come to know this unconscious knowledge at the heart of the symptom? How to come to know the jouissance in the symptom? What is the relation between the woman and the man, father and mother? How does a woman enjoy? But, above all: why does it happen to me? These are some of the questions the analysts only hear so often. Here is the question, always at least one, that isolates the subject supposed by the signifier from other subjects. For Lacan language comes always before the subject. Family, school, carers create the environment of language that precedes the subject. In this sense, we could say along with the pre-Socratics that language is the primary substance, and that its properties and limits are to be found already inscribed in this primacy of language in psychoanalysis. Searching for the cause—for what would lie behind the question posed by the subject, and what indeed brings a particular question to light—the subject inevitably—and why not say necessarily?—bows to that which refuses the answer, as if in the structure he, the subject, was its cause. In this way I have brought to light not one but two paradoxes: firstly, the belief in the subject of knowledge turns into the belief in the subject’s power to know. And, secondly, while searching for the cause of the symptom in his discourse where the subject is supposed, it is the subject that comes to the place of the cause. In other words, there is no cause without the subject. For the subject to recognise himself as a cause, namely as a refusal of the answer, already implicates for us the dimension of speech, namely of the play of the signifier that comes with the (dis)order of the Other’s desire in which the subject’s desire, as Lacan teaches us, is embedded. These then would be our coordinates through which the subject navigates as it cannot occupy these places, of which Lacan designated four, all at the same time: agent, truth, Other, and production. Let’s write them, so that we could later approach the four variants of the Lacanian discourse.

agent

Other

truth

production/loss

128

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

The question I keep returning to, the question of knowledge—as knowledge—which in analysis is associated with the quest for knowledge, and therefore for the cause, and as addressed to the analyst in the form of a complaint about the loss, appears, at the same time, as a mode of investigation or questioning of the knowledge that had moulded the complaint in the first place. This question, in its double sense that is crucial, comes from Latin questus and quaestus, which are to be distinguished only in writing. This question sanctions in the heart of discourse the specificity of what insists and presses in the subject, what pushes it always in one direction without ceasing to repeat itself. That which insists is that which is produced and whose loss imposes itself as a lack that cannot be made up for except in fantasy. We find the first applications of questus already in the eleventh century, which for me is the guide and the coordinate of the episteme as infinite but not without limits. But since the quest for knowledge runs ad infinitum, Lacan insisted that infinity is imbued with the limit which is the limit of knowledge as he says in his 1973 interview Television (1990), to which I will turn in a moment. In this regard Lacan can imply that the limit is the condition of infinity, and that the place for the logical operations is within that limit that involves infinity. In this sense, as Lacan reflected on a fragment of Dostoyevsky’s novel, it is not the case that without God everything would be possible but, on the contrary, without God nothing would be possible. The latter presents us with the ambiguity that does not in any way simplify what it at the same time illustrates, namely the relation between the limit and infinity. Lacan demonstrated the topology of this relation of the limit and infinity by speaking about the circle as a unit of roundness which is the material for the topological transformations we have just seen in his work on the sinthome of Joyce. The limit as a condition of infinity was for Lacan the way in which he parted with the classical tradition of Antiquity which Freud was still part of. Freud, this is not a secret, believed in the drive to know. In this sense he was in agreement with Aristotle who also speaks of man as driven by the desire to know. The crossroads of these two approaches was Brentano whose lectures on Aristotle Freud attended in 1880s. Brentano attempted to establish a link between the thought of the Ancient master and the field of psychology, which was of interest to Freud at the time. Since the analyst does not know what ignorance presses the subject in analysis in a particular direction, he, the analyst, supports the subject’s relation with the refusal of knowledge—whether the latter

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

129

is of the order of impossibility or lack or prohibition—because it implicates the subject of the unconscious. At the same time this support goes in the direction beyond the signifier because not all in the structure of discourse is signifier. Such is the power to know in which the subject believes. And the more he loves his castration the more he refuses it, since in the end it is castration that deprives him of satisfaction of this power which in coming to know he thought he wanted above all knowledge. And this, as Lacan brought it to light from the beginning, is the cornerstone of the ignorance of the analyst—not the refusal to know but not having to understand what in wanting-to-know, the speaking being, or parlêtre, ignores to know. What belongs to the subject and his belief in the power of supposition of knowledge, marks a step in which the analyst, in question and not de facto, while occupying the place of the object that causes desire, is also presumed to know. It is in and through this little detail, dominant in the analyst’s discourse, that the analyst comes to learn about the discourse of the analysand, and even the desire of the analyst has its roots there. The analyst’s knowledge starts there as an unknowledge and as the analyst’s desire that supports the analysand’s lalangue. Following this, we can say that ignorance is raised, from where it is situated as the logical necessity, to passion. Lacan speaks of three passions: love, hatred, and ignorance, and we find his remarks already in Seminar I (1988) where he responds to the questions of Leclaire and other members of the group. Lacan evokes already then the ignorance of the analyst. In what way is ignorance a passion? Is Lacan making a leap here to Freud’s story of the three caskets with reference to both King Lear’s three daughters, and the myth of three goddesses in the judgement of Paris? In effect of these solicitations Paris becomes subject to, the aim is to arouse his passion, which he does by choosing “the third”, Aphrodite, before making the judgement. It is for completely different reasons that Lear as the old father disowns Cordelia as the unassuming, and unmasterly one who loves him in silence, and bequeaths his kingdom to the other two daughters, Goneril and Regan, who declare their love in a vociferous and hubristic way. Passions are afloat here but always lead to the wrong choice or at least the one that conflicts with the expected goal. Ignorance makes itself felt where one chooses between three. In this sense it may seem obvious that love and hatred are passions in the sense of something of the body being at stake. But it is not at all obvious how ignorance constitutes a passion. What is

130

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

passion if not a body that comes to impose itself on the subject? What is passion if not what precedes the subject who barely manages to follow it and from which he is always at some distance? From this perspective, ignorance would appear as a negative passion, namely as a retrieval, a step back from knowledge, perhaps an act of cowardice, which is how it was for the Ancients. The Greeks viewed it, which comes in particular from Aristotle, as an act of flinching. And yet not only does Lacan make ignorance into a passion but also elevates it into a goddess to whom all passions bow down—the passion of not knowing. This, given his later lessons, can even be written as “(k)not knowing” because the topological relation is clearly implied in the ignorance presenting itself as ambiguous. This ambiguity is even embedded at the level of the refusal by the subject, which is precisely to do with discourse whose logic is not that of meaning but of direction. There is no doubt that knowledge in discourse concerns the field of the signifier but includes what is not signifier.

Lacan situated ignorance between the symbolic and the real, which was already at the threshold of his early teaching although it is not certain he was thinking of Joyce at the time. This junction of the symbolic and the real is not at all foreign to us. It gives us indications of another formation, namely that of the symptom. And what this junction evokes is a mode of equivocation, between symptom and ignorance, which I have just discussed with reference to the sinthome. Having presented the new equivocation in this way, we only need to ask about the difference in their functions. In this particular case, the symptom can have a function of the formal envelope of the real of repetition, and allow for the symptom to be addressed, deciphered, and so on. What would be the function of ignorance in analysis? On this occasion my focus, which will not ignore a particular mode of equivalence between the symptom

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

131

and ignorance, will be the latter’s relation to knowledge, episteme, the theme Lacan returns to both in the 1960s and 1970s, e.g., in the Seminar XVII The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (2007). It is nevertheless in Seminar XI Four Fundamental Concepts (1977) where he presents to us a new modality of knowledge. We can locate in Lacan’s teaching in this respect at least three modalities of knowledge.

Modalities of knowledge in psychoanalysis It appears that we could delineate at least three modalities of knowledge in the teaching of Lacan. First, there is miscognition, méconnaisance, secondly, transference as a subject supposed to know, and I will come to the third conception later. Knowledge as miscognition occupies Lacan mostly in his first three seminars. What is in question here concerns knowledge implied by false perception of taking or mistaking the other for the ego. The constructions of knowledge based on the false perception, namely on the image of the ego, or the me, Lacan says le moi, that is then taken as belonging to the other as my counterpart has a structure of the imaginary. This idea of knowledge as connaissance was developed by Lacan in parallel with the mirror stage. Lacan located in it a crucial structural moment when the body image becomes, or not, inserted into the imaginary exchanges with the little other as my counterpart. The image constructed as guided by the signifier refers to what Lacan calls, in the early stages of the analytic process as a moment the analysand speaks to himself about himself. Lacan distinguishes it from speaking to the analyst about himself. If the body image is inserted into the structure of subjectivity, then méconnaissance is the fruit of the perception being in place. In this case, knowledge by cognition is based on the negation. But if there is no miscognition in place, then retroactively, negation as a mechanism of neurosis, was foreclosed. Negation introduces the Other’s desire, opening access to what is occluded and misconceived by the image of the ego. It is the effect of the miscognition in the subject if he takes an analyst for a friend or any imaginary figure from whom the analysand expects what he feels could be expected of him. This reciprocity was for Lacan integral in love as always requited, reciprocated. The imaginary conflations at play in the game of reciprocity form the miscognition. What governs the imaginary knowledge is understanding. Very often the subject in analysis says he understands the problems

132

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

involved. He understands why his love relationships do not work and what the underlying causes are. But he does not know why he keeps getting caught in the love relationship in which to repeat the same mistake and reach the same failure. He understands what he does, and then goes on to enumerate the list of things the women he has met do, do not do, are and are not, and so on, but nothing changes. The imaginary construct of méconnaisance, already inscribed in the repetition, brings him back to the point of mistaking another for himself, which is one of the elements in his symptom. In analysis he also fails to recognise what the analyst, occupying the place of the Other, does not say. In this case, the miscognition remains at the limit of the recurring declaration of understanding and its impasses. The mirror function and its specular exchanges are the dithyramb of the subject’s relations with the imaginary other. Nevertheless, the subject’s cognitions, whether false or not, are determined by the unconscious signifier. If we come to know something falsely, Lacan says, it is because there is a knowledge in relation to which the misrecognition occurs. This is crucial. It is what happens in the so called parapraxes. A slip of the tongue points to the unconscious reality at the very moment it clashes with what one was expected to say. Paranoia has as a foundation an imaginary structure where knowledge as cognition serves to produce jouissance through the imaginary relations of the ego and its counterpart. In paranoia, as examined by Lacan in his reading of Schreber, the imaginary ego becomes an object of all references that occur in the subject’s life. From this perspective, the desire to know for Lacan is not a quest for knowledge but a nourishment of méconnaisance. The second conception of knowledge comes into focus in Lacan’s teaching in the 1960s, around the time of Seminar XI that started his school. This time the knowledge in question is savoir. What does the subject, to be distinguished from the imaginary ego, and from the living individual, know? To begin with the subject believes that there is a subject that knows, namely that there is a subject of knowledge. This already sets in place the logical parameters for the subject that emerges from the Other as a place of language. We could say that fundamentally the subject is the one that believes in the Other. But this would be like to say that the subject believes in the mother or the teacher. The subject only believes in the Other in the sense Lacan always speaks about, namely in another subject who, like me, carries knowledge that is guaranteed by the Other as its locus. The knowledge in the Other is the unconscious

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

133

knowledge. In accordance with the second modality of knowledge, to know implies to suppose, not knowledge, but an agent of knowledge, namely a desire through which, like for Dora, knowledge, belonging to the field of the signifiers, can be represented and addressed. Here then, it is no longer the relation between the “me”, le moi, and the imaginary other, but between you and I as speaking beings, parlêtres. To suppose knowledge in another subject is to suppose another subject of this knowledge, which inevitably comes down to a form of love because this supposition, in which echo the primary identifications, has already been embedded in the desire qua voice of the Other. Lacan states that love, in psychoanalysis called transference, parades under this supposition. Transference appears as an effect of passing to a subject what came from the Other and what the Other guarantees as the truth of these symbolic exchanges. It is in the demand of the Other, in which what is unsatisfied of the need, is carried forth because in it is located the signifier. We can see now that in accordance with this logic, the unconscious, supposedly, knows. I am not saying any more than that at this moment. The unconscious knows. It is the epistemic law of transference Lacan founded at the time of founding his school in 1964. This knowledge as the unconscious gives us every possible sign of being an infinite knowledge. But because an analyst does not know this, there is a limit. The analyst, and before that the analysand, does not know that he knows. I have already proposed this formula earlier to distinguish it from the philosophical tradition where there is another discourse and stake at play. It is not surprising to see where this “the analyst does not know that he knows” takes us. It is the position that differs from that of no other than Socrates himself despite the fact that analysis, too, is engaged in the dialectic. But is it the same dialectic as the one in Plato’s dialogue where the subject’s beliefs are interrogated? Nevertheless, the analyst’s position presents itself as the reversal of that of Socrates who says that he knows that he does not know. Where would the analyst be if his knowledge and his desire of the analyst amounted to the declaration of having knowledge of resistances? Lacan certainly located this resistance in the analyst because it is located in his “does not know”, which appears at the level of perception and therefore concerns knowledge as cognition. In this respect, it is not certain to me that the limit I evoked a moment ago in relation to infinity, is the limit set by resistance. It rather seems to me that resistance refers us back to the modality of miscognition to remind us that what it ushers

134

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

is a resistance to the unconscious. The only resistance, Lacan says, exists in relation to the unconscious. From the perspective of the unconscious there is a resistance. It only emerges in relation to what does not resist because it knows. In other words, from the perspective of an analyst as not knowing, as being on the side of resistance, namely on the side of connaissance, cognition, in relation to the unconscious knowledge, savoir, the limit in question has a different dimension, that of the real. It brings out, precisely, the limit of his ignorance and as ignorance, formed by the tangle of the signifier and the real, to the extent that in analysis an analyst came a long way to have a grasp of what is the one that is his and his only, and what allows him, through this ignorance learnt along the way—namely studied in the Augustinian sense of wanting to know what does not make sense—to place himself where his desire is, namely as an object a that causes it. And because it is both a cause of desire and a reject that catapulted him outside the norm of mastery, this position makes an analyst a symbolic entity as a semblance that is characterised by the absolute difference Lacan spoke about. It is because of this difference as one of the offshoots of analysis, outside any contracts or platitudinous agreements, that the analyst can, and only in this sense has to, not to know. That is why the analyst, while receiving the gift of supposition, which is the gift of love, aims to bring the subject to the truth of this supposed knowledge. And this is because, Lacan says, the truth leads to the real. The supposed knowledge gives the subject of the unconscious a consistency of the imaginary cognition, which is a consistency of not knowing. As long as the truth leads to the real, Lacan can call the subject in analysis the subject supposed to know. As it is becoming clear, the question of the limit has to be raised in parallel with the unconscious knowledge as infinite, because the limit concerns not only the analyst’s position as not knowing what the analysand supposes he does, but also because of the real jouissance at stake, which is not the same for everyone, and certainly not for the man and for the woman. Suffice it to say at this point that the knowledge just evoked no longer belongs to the order of supposition but to the discourse of impossibility. It concerns jouissance as real. We could call it the jouissance of Eurydice. She traverses between death and life, and on one occasion is carried by the desire whose secret is that of an object. Orpheus is not supposed to reveal what causes his desire. He is supposed not to see her before reaching the Earth, not to know her other than as a veil in daylight. But of course he doubted she was following

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

135

him, perhaps Hades deceived him, he’d better check it. And he looked behind him to lose her the moment he found her. Eurydice jouissance is touched at that very instant. She is sent back to the darkness without appearing as a fantasy, fainei signifying light, as that which deceives while preserving the relation with the cause of desire. To return to the earlier question: how does the unconscious know? If I pose a question in this way, does it imply that I do not know the answer, while knowing it very well, as Jacques-Alain Miller suggests somewhere, or that I conceal what I know? Or, given our new finding, is it the case that I am faced with the knowledge of the impossible, of the trauma? In analysis the subject poses a question, supposing that the one he addresses knows, and that the analyst holds the key to the door that opens to the cause of his suffering. Well then, is the answer in the subject? Is it a question of supposing the subject of the unconscious or of coming to know the desire of the one who knows this supposition? “What can I know [savoir]?” Miller asks Lacan in the 1973 interview that became to be known as Television. And Lacan responds: “My discourse does not allow the question of what one is able to know, since it begins by presupposing this as the subject of the unconscious”. […] “I’ll spill my gut about the analytic discourse’s response to the incongruity of the question: what can I know? Reply: nothing in any case that does not have the structure of language; whence it follows that the distance I can go within this limit is a matter of logic”. […] “What can be said with all that as its premise, with the premise of knowledge as ex-sisting—according to us—in the unconscious (but one such that only a discourse can articulate it), what real can be said, if its realness has to come to us through this discourse? That is how your question gets translated in my context, which is to say that it seems crazy [folle]”. In these three sentences Lacan sums up the folly of the question concerning the power to know as the drive to know, as if coming to know the cause of suffering leaned on the cause of asking the question itself. The question thus leans on interpretation. And this brings me back, before we take a step towards analysis of discourse, to the emergence of the quaestio in the Middle Ages, I referred to it briefly, which lay the pathway open for interpretation. From the time of Gerbert de Aurillac, himself a scholar and well acquainted with the Arabic science, who later became Pope Sylvester II, and from the turn of tenth and eleventh centuries in general, the development of history followed the development of the post-Socratic dialectic. Gerbert

136

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

was a true renaissance man in the saeculum obscurum when he put the dialectic into use in the reading of the Scriptures. It is not easy to have a clear grasp for us today how the Bible was read then with a use of the dialectic. With the dialecticians gradually populating cathedrals and royal courts alike, the quaestio became crucial to the popularisation of disputation and discussion. One can think, for example, of the famous public debates in Languedoc between the Catholics and the Cathars, I have already mentioned. This verbal and intellectual orgy took place almost under the Pope’s eyes. This was also the time when the quest for knowledge, leading a century later to the translation of the works of Aristotle (1941), established the quaestio at the centre of the conflict, known as the investiture, leading to the challenge to the Pope’s epistolary power, as I discussed at the beginning of this study. Interpretation became part and parcel of dialectisation, whereas the public oratory, kindled by the passion of the voice, questioned the law of the written. We are at the time of the significantisation of the letter where a voice and a song reverberate in the exercise of reading till they awaken the dead letter into the passion and ambiguity of speech. It was the time when raising the letter to the level of the signifier produced effects of ambiguity and uncertainty with regard to meaning, and this paved the way for public disputations. This ground, nearly a millennium old, sounds strangely familiar to our field of the analytic practice. The pursuit of episteme takes us in the direction of truth of the subject supposed to know, and reaches the dialectical point through the questioning of the demand of the Other, but presupposed by the Other’s desire in the first place. What I describe here is the passage that in the beginnings of the second millennium was cleared for and through interpretation. Now the path lay open for Abelard and Gracian.

From the truth to the real and the meaning of ignorance From his earliest steps towards the science of psychoanalysis, Freud came to realise that the real of the cause eludes the subject. Since the real eludes the subject, Lacan inserted the real in the subject when he formulated the transferential relation as a supposition of knowledge. In the same Seminar XI, Lacan says that transference is an enactment of the sexual reality. The supposition of knowledge and the belief in the subject as a locus of knowledge, is thus intertwined with Lacan’s assertion about the sexual reality of the drive. The subject in discourse

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

137

takes his position by means of the signifying representation that comes from the Other but there is also for the subject another knowledge there, namely the one that comes from the drive as knowledge of the real. The drive propels the subject in the way that he is always busy, always excited with reference to the sexual reality. Lacan even says that the subject is always happy, does not cease to speak of sexual excitations, the term used by Freud. This happiness of the subject, its happy-golucky demeanour, evoked by Lacan in Television, presents the subject as ignorant, as not knowing what and why and where, namely as pushed and eluded by the real, and even deluded by its incessant productions. Does it imply that to suppose an existence of the subject of knowledge gets at the same time entangled and implicated in the failure to know the real in question, namely the jouissance of Eurydice and of the Other sex? I say “implicated” because, with respect to our historical parallels, during the rise of the dialectic in the Middle Ages, the quaestio was associated not only with philosophy, and even less with theology, as with the codifiers of law. The scholars and clerics were equally pressed against the wall to resolve the conflicting arguments. One could make the case for the signifier of the unconscious in the course of resolving these conflicts. The aim was to arrive at the truth. Thus the rise of the quaestio was from the start linked with the truth of the subject provided it implicated the real. In Television, and in the seminar on discourses, Lacan places truth as the most intimate neighbour of the real. In the early teaching truth had a value of a revelation, the signifier popping up in a parapraxis when the unconscious opens up. For the analysand the revelation of truth thwarts the imaginary constructions. It introduces resistance to the unconscious while being a sign of it. And then one follows it, even runs after it. Truth seduces, Lacan says, and therefore deceives. In this respect Lacan speaks of truth as eluding, lying about the real. And he advocates to be strong to deflect its effects to deceive, which is to do with transference. If the seductions of truth have worked, then the subject can enjoy its happiness all the more. In transference truth concerns the demand for love. But if the analyst falls for it, as Orpheus did, it turns into the demand for satisfaction. It is this “happiness” where the real overflows because a happy subject is a driven and undivided subject. That’s why the analyst, Lacan says, has another reason to refuse being seduced by truth. Truth, this other truth Lacan speaks about later, leads to the real to speak in the real. And this led Lacan to introduce

138

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

this other truth that speaks as real, with which he opens his address in Television: “I always speak the truth …”—at which point we sense that a deception is in the offing as the words seem worthy of the master. And to our surprise he continues— “… not the whole truth as there is no way to say it all”. If the first part of the statement starts with the master signifier, the second part falls on “not-whole”, on a fragment, an object. If in the first case the Other of the Other exists, “I always speak the truth”, in the latter part, the impossibility to say all makes existence fall under the bar and renders the Other barred. The truth latches on to the real, we could even say inhabits the real. This forms the second dimension of truth Lacan begins to articulate from the late 1960s onwards. Now, the truth appears as beyond any contract, any platitudinous agreements, and even beyond the law. It is a bride—Lacan calls it a “sister of jouissance”—who no one can marry and who does not age because she is always, at every step, attached to the real. The place of truth, which already implies that it does not change place, is under the bar. What is the truth in that place if not the truth that cannot not speak the truth for which it requires an agent? agent truth Lacan started with the truth as a mistake, a lapsus. Once the space of lapsus overlaps with the space of empty or controlled speech, the subject is happy. In the long run, truth as a revelation and a disclosure of the signifying material turns out to be insufficient and makes room for the truth as real that speaks in fragments, between the lines, in allusions, hints, ironies, in short as what cannot not speak it. In the discourse of the master, also known as the discourse of the unconscious, Lacan situated the subject in the place of truth. And he did so because the subject wants to form a couple with the truth, is always seduced and deceived by it. In this sense the subject is implicated not only in the law of the signifier that represents it, but also in the ignorance that can be found where the knowledge is called for. S1 S → 2 $ a Discourse of the master Let’s now turn to knowledge. In analysis it is supposed by the subject. But what exactly does the subject suppose that can be already found in

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

139

the discourse? It does not suppose the master. It supposes the agent. In the discourse of the master, the place of the supposed agent is occupied or represented by the master signifier, S1. This master signifier to which Lacan assigns a function in every of the four discourses, because it is rooted in the unconscious, is what in the master’s discourse represents the subject to what? To another signifier, S2, located in the place of the Other because this is where it comes from. And that’s what in Television Lacan calls knowledge. And where does S1 come from? It is supposed to have come from the Other, too, as the primary representation of the real, known as what Lacan calls the “sexual reality”, namely that of the drive. In analysis, an analyst is not located at S1 but where S2 is. S1 is what the subject, happy or unhappy, brings with him and through this master signifier, supposing knowledge which in this case signifies a demand for meaning: tell me what it means, what am I talking about. But it is not the analyst’s knowledge to make sense for the subject who supposes its existence. The analyst only provides signifiers if they are asked for. This is where the function of the Name-of-the-Father comes in. The S2 has a function of the father’s name. The subject can only address the Other in supposing that S2 can be found there, in the place of the world wide knowledge, which is not general but different and specific to every analyst. But since the Other fails to provide the infinite knowledge to satisfy subject’s demand for satisfaction once the gift of love has been passed, the subject is left with S1 and with the loss, namely little a. Now, the subject speaks to the Other about his lack, which—and this is the problem at every stage in the analytical process—can also be satisfying. This would be the shortest way to present Lacanian discourse as a social bond between speaking beings of which there are at least two, like in analysis. In reply to Miller, Lacan says that if the knowledge ex-sists, which it does as the unconscious knowledge, namely as S (A /), then it can only be articulated in and through discourse. But, as we already discovered, in articulation the subject is ignorant. To push things further, let’s say that where there is knowledge in discourse there is also to be found there the ignorance that remains the subject’s guide in his quaestio for the cause. Let’s note what modality of ignorance is in this pursuit of knowledge involved for Lacan in each of the discourses. In the times of Antiquity, ignorance came to be understood as the opposite of knowledge. In the context of character education, both Plato and Aristotle spoke about

140

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

ignorance as an anomaly and a deviation from the duty of knowledge, or even of a laziness to know. All these were failures of the human character to be corrected in the course of epistemic training. Ignorance represented the opposite of, and the obstacle to, the ideal, and what should be eradicated with the help of the superego. There is then, already for the classical subject, a certain refusal at work in the form of “I don’t want to know anything about it”. Both Aristotle and Freud recognised in it two different causes. Freud heard in it a refusal at the level of the body, symbolised by repression from which he deduced its mechanism as a guardian of das Ich against the real. For Lacan, who perceived in this refusal a form of collaboration, it became the dominant feature in the discourse of the hysteric. In this sense Lacan introduces an innovation to the term “ignorance”. And he does so not only at the beginning of the seminar Encore (1998a) but already in his Seminar I (1988). To begin with, Lacan translates “I don’t want to know” into “I want not to know”. It is a small yet a huge step in subverting the classical binary opposition of ignorance/ knowledge. What is the refusal to know from this perspective? After all if the question “what can I know?” touches on some unfulfilled incongruity, while supposing the subject of the unconscious at the same time, I can at least ask “why do I want not to know?” Not only is ignorance not opposed to knowledge but it is also beyond knowledge on the proviso that this beyond incarnates the most intimate partner of the subject, the extimate, as Lacan said, which is the truth inhabiting the real. In this way Lacan turned ignorance into a passion, a passion of ignorance, which aims beyond the subject supposed to know every time the question of knowing is raised. But that’s not all there is to the subject’s active refusal. “Ignorance” comes from the Latin ignorantia which signifies “the unknown” and is close to the French unconnu. It refers to a failure in the cognition of the unconscious knowledge. This can be illustrated by the difference between “I know him” (e.g., by sight, from stories), which Bertrand Russell called knowledge by acquaintance, and “I know who he is, can recognise him”. In short, ignorantia names an “unknowledge”, a failure in the field of perceptual cognition of the unconscious signifier, the “I don’t know what I know”, which involves the order of impossibility. But this does not prevent the subject from speaking the truth as it is latched onto the real, not the whole truth, that is impossible, but something of it, namely what Lacan referred

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

141

to as one, Y a d’l’un. Therein lies the impossibility, the not-all or not-the-whole-truth. And in the discourse we continue to find support in the face of the impossibility by making use of S2. How are we to situate this “I don’t know what I know”—“I don’t know that I know”—with respect to the discourses as fourfold structures? How are we to bypass the ancient modalities of epistemic cynicism, agnosticism, stoicism or any other “ism”? Lacan referred to the Medieval scholar and a priest Nicholas de Cusa who himself calls upon Augustine in this regard, and who introduced the doctrine of learned ignorance, docta ignorantia. If the desire to know is not in vain, de Cusa proposes, then it is our desire to know that we do not know. If we can learn it, achieve it, then we will have the learned ignorance. Nothing is more uniquely one’s own, he continues, than the quaesto in the course of which the most knowledgeable are found most ignorant. According to Nicholas de Cusa true knowledge consists in knowing that one is ignorant. We do not know if he meant the matters concerning the Other sex, feminine sexuality and the relation between the sexes. Since ignorance as unknown knowledge lies in the subject’s relation to the real, in the analytic practice it is very remote from the rejection of knowledge. Which is why Lacan called it a passion, when dealing with the analyst’s ignorance, because it is an active force that runs through the four places in the discourse. But it is also a folly, Lacan says. How else to call the instance of an experienced psychiatrist asking a patient: “Do you know that you suffer from schizophrenia?” And yet this folly, and this vanity, governed human relations in the field of psychology for decades, a century almost, by insisting on appealing to the “healthy” part of the ego for the benefit of the clinician. Such a supposition of knowledge, in this case the university discourse, doubtless produced results one of which was the hypothesis of an unhealthy ego.

Why is there ignorance rather than knowledge? Having spoken of ignorance as passion, and locating it at the junction of the symbolic and the real, Lacan situated it within the same logical coordinates as the symptom. Is ignorance the analyst’s symptom? In both cases the speaking subject provides a vehicle, Lacan says an envelope, for the real in question. Through articulation in which the unknown knowledge is addressed, the subject falters in diffusing the effects of the real or in lifting the repressed completely as Freud would

142

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

say. This failure works as a support for the disparity of the symbolic as located inside the real.

Hence we have the (symbolic) hole in the real, which is another way of saying that the Other of the Other does not exist. Without guarantees, ignorance appears as the fragmentary truth Lacan speaks about. The subject as the ignorant truth wants to know about the real as cause, or real cause, ending up with the debris of fragments, remnants. He then wants to understand them and the imaginary is brought in to serve the purpose. As for the real, it has a hole. Where is this hole? It is beyond knowledge as real. The question is what this “wanting to know” addresses and who is the subject and the recipient of the inquiry. And, further, is it not the case that the subject is inscribed in the real which highlights the impossibility of knowledge?

Approached from the topological perspective of the hole in the real, namely the “I want not to know”, it can be found not only in the discourse of the hysteric. For the hysteric subject, which is a divided subject, knowledge can be found under the bar, and therefore repressed, but as what? As a loss. It is not simply knowledge, S2, that is repressed but a knowledge of a loss, S (A /). And because of the loss in the knowledge, the hysteric makes up for it by relying on her truth, namely that she cannot but be the object of desire. This is what Lacan says with regard to the discourse of the hysteric. And since the hysteric is desired as object, she does not have to know—knowledge as S2, lost and produced, is not something that is expected of the hysteric because her priorities are the holes in it, the inconsistencies

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

143

of desire, the impotence of the master and so on. In short, what is expected instead is the subjective division she can almost guarantee for her master—not so much to sink his ship but to make sure it has a hole and to see what he is made of to save the day. What the hysteric in effect refuses is to give body to the loss of knowledge, which amounts to refusing to give the Other satisfaction of not having. This refusal, as I already mentioned, is the way in which she collaborates with the Other. It is what Lacan calls going on strike. How does the hysteric go on strike while collaborating with the Other’s desire at the same time? While keeping the master signifier to herself, she prods the master unknowingly. For example, she will not contact someone she does not want to be in touch with, “knowing” he tries to contact her, because this would amount to giving him satisfaction, her precious jouissance, which is the last thing she is prepared to do. Hence, in this refusal of contact there is also a collaboration with the signifier of alienation. When the hysteric is on strike she cooperates well with the master. The hysteric ignorance lies in castrating the master by questioning his signifiers, while refusing to stop her strike. And since we are talking about the refusal of giving at the level of the body, it comes not without an inspiration from Lysistrata. Opposed to the knowledge of the hysteric can be found the question that haunted Heidegger as the question of all metaphysics, which he formulated: “why are there things rather than nothing?” This jubilation of existence over nonexistence does not translate very successfully into the field of epistemology. In fact, it is not at all certain that we would be able to translate this statement into the following question: “Why is there knowledge rather than ignorance?” One way or the other it is a supposition. But if we were to reverse that latter question, this would serve as a good basis from which to go back to what Heidegger supposed as the question. Where is ignorance in discourse? Everywhere where there is knowledge, S2. Where there is unconscious there is also an ignorance, which is not the same for every variant of the discourse. In the master discourse, the unconscious appears as the master because, like google, it has an answer to every question, although one should rather say a response. The unconscious may have a structure of the google apparatus but only as ergos, a working function, based on the programme of the imaginary knowledge. What the unconscious does not share with the google function is the network of homophonic differences

144

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

and neighbourhoods called metaphors and metonymies. For Freud the unconscious was a sesame, or the larder, Voratskämmer, as he confided to Fliess in one of his letters. In this sense, the homophonic differences between the signifiers in the unconscious allow us to say that not only is the unconscious structured like a language but it is also embedded in the field of the Other’s desire. To be more precise, the field of the Other’s desire is constituted by the signifier of what in the Other is lacking, S (A /), namely what is insufficient, or what leaves to be desired, to fill in the gap opened up by the not-all of knowledge. In other words, in the discourse of the master, but also in the university discourse, to which I will come back in a moment, S2 is not all knowledge in the discourse. There is something else. The unconscious is not all there is to the structure of the signifier. What Lacan inserted in the discourse is the jouissance, produced in the bottom right corner, that follows the subject everywhere he goes. It follows him as a remainder and a reminder of the loss. It goes round the circle. And this leads me to say that the discourse, as Lacan constructed it, can be regarded itself as a variable of ignorance, that is to say as four variables of ignorance around the nonexistence of the sexual relation. And this would give us a new orientation with regard to the modalities of knowledge, to wit from ignorance of knowledge to ignorance of what cannot be written. I will come back to this. I have tried to discern knowledge, S2, in the hysteric’s discourse. Its loss undergoes repression while the master signifier, S1, remains in the place of the Other, leaving the hysteric in alienation. In the master discourse, the unknown knowledge, S2, is in the place of the Other, which is also the place where the analyst can be found. If he provides signifiers from the cornucopia of the trove it is to disorient the subject as happy, to make it seek an alternative sense and follow it through. In the course of his infinite ramblings, otherwise known as associations, the subject comes to confront the limit which is the limit of alienation that points to the disparity of S1 and S2. Once left with his master signifiers, he is now to confront separation as a moment of loss of satisfaction.

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

145

While holding the master signifiers all to himself, the master becomes an easy prey for the hysteric. In the master discourse, the agent is the place for the master signifier that is dominant. This term, on which I commented elsewhere, does not signify domination but refers to the musical term dominanta. What is dominanta? It is an accent put on a note that is struck with more force as it punctuates continuity and introduces discontinuity. In the unfolding of the signifying chain, the master signifier stands out, to wit, sounds louder than others, and is often repeated. It is at the point where in this process jouissance latches onto the signifier, making it masterly, that its excess is shaken off the signifier. That’s why in the analytic process this signifier is left on its own and without recourse to the infinity of the unconscious, hence the schema above. There is now a limit at play. The cut comes before the loop of articulation closes. If it closes, then there is meaning and more meaning to be found between S1 and S2. The master discourse shows it clearly. As for the hysteric’s ignorance it remains at the level of a refusal to know where knowledge, S2, is produced unknowingly. While the hysteric subject as divided continues to bang on the door of the master signifier in the place of the Other, the knowledge remains outside reach and is refused as knowledge of the Other’s castration, namely S (A /). For the hysteric subject, knowledge, S2, is in the place subservient, under the bar, to the dominant signifier S1. As for the refusal of the castration of the Other, namely the nonexistent jouissance in the Other, this knowledge belongs, as Lacan elaborated it on the table of sexuation, to the category of impossibility to the extent that it can only be found on the woman side, to wit, on the side of the Woman that does not exist. There is a variation of the refusal of knowledge to be noted in the scientist. In science the production of knowledge under the bar remains unknown, that is to say, unhampered by consequences. S $ → 1 a S2 Discourse of the hysteric

This is perhaps what one calls the “drive to know”. It took Mr Kalashnikov his entire life to come to the moment of enlightenment as to the effects of his invention. The price for this realisation is the subject’s division— the unbearable position because the ramblings of the subject across the unconscious, encounter a limit point whereby the effects of the invented

146

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

productions return with the vengeance, so to speak. The scientist knows well how to divide the speaking community into antagonists and protagonists. The response to his inventions will always be double edged, both affirmative and negative. The neurotic wants to know what the Other knows, thus confirming the power of transference and the supposition of knowledge of jouissance that is missing. This inevitably implies an encounter with what the Other does not know, in other words with the Other as barred. It turns out that the death of God precedes the fact that God does not know. Lacan proposed a formula in this respect, namely that God is unconscious. He did not say that God is in the unconscious or for this matter that knowledge is in the unconscious. We would thus speak about the unconscious knowledge that is accessible to the subject as divided because when he gets there he does not make head or tail of it. For example, Antigone could not make head or tail of the Creon’s master signifier, and continued to follow the desire of her Other. The tragedy of the subject is that she follows the signifier of the Other’s desire to the death, as Lacan highlighted it. As for the unconscious it does not know any answers to the questions about what is the woman, the mother, the father, the sexual relation or death. And for this reason the unconscious only knows what the subject knows. In other words, the oracle of Delphi is only for those who know how to speak well. In the case of the hysteric’s ignorance, the body cannot stand knowledge. So the body absorbs knowledge at the moment of trauma to form a hole where ignorantia is. It cannot be reproduced but it can be rejected. While refusing to incorporate the unconscious knowledge, the one that would represent the loss, into the discourse, the hysteric’s body remains marked by the language of the Other’s desire. Hence the simultaneous yes and no to the body in the hysteric’s position. How does the body, as marked by the signifier, refuse knowledge or the body of the Other? It is the question Freud addressed in his 1910 article on the “Disturbances of vision” (1910i), which I discussed earlier. In it Freud presents a symptom of blindness as formed at the junction of the refusal of the signifier and of identification with it. According to Freud such partial paralyses of the hysteric’s body are frequent and can be approached from this junction. When it comes to the question of what knowledge does, she wants not to have it while enjoying it. The question arises for the hysteric what body she wants not to have. Lacan paved the way

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

147

for raising this question when he separated S2 and S1, placing the latter above the former.

Professor and student as the master’s brothers The subject is happy until he encounters castration. But even then he can love his castration. The neurotics love their castration. And the more he loves it the more he refuses a responsibility for his sexuality, as Lacan called it, which is part of the symptom based on the identification with this refusal. This was the case of partial blindness as described by Freud. The point in analysis is not how to make the subject divided because the subject is always divided. The question is how not to have to draw satisfaction from being castrated or castrating the Other. As it happens the Other is already castrated, and to pursue it further amounts to flogging the dead horse. Analysis can be suffused with such dead horses because not every signifier resonates. Only those resonate that can have an effect of love and of hatred. That’s why Lacan spoke of passions. Here we are exploring the passion of ignorance. Since the Other is always castrated, it reminds the subject of his own castration. In this sense, ignorance is no obstacle to love. On the contrary, Freud already spoke of love as a state of hypnosis, with the defences wilted, and he must have seen in it an alibi to the experience of castration and to the refusal of knowledge. We could say with Lacan that ignorance forms part and parcel of the condition of love effects. Only then does the question of knowing the cause arise. And in this regard Lacan spoke of Baroque because the baroquesque fold has the structure of the subject’s itinerary, propelled by the love effects of the signifier, speaking, enjoying and not wanting to know anything about it. This is how Lacan captured it. And this of course brings us back to ignorance as a passion and as a mode of satisfaction that agitates the work of the symptom to the point of deflecting the impossible in the question of knowledge, in the desire to know, which is sexuality. For Lacan the loop of ignorance and of knowledge were intertwined, which allowed him to construct discourse as a social bond that circumscribes the impossibility of writing the sexual relation. In this sense, the discourse goes in circles, each circle consisting in four elements falling into four places. Among those nomadic elements are two signifiers and therefore two modalities of knowledge that Lacan separated.

148

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

In the university discourse these signifiers, S1 and S2 come to a vertical vicinity to form a unit in which the latter represents the former. S2 a → S1 $ Discourse of the university In the university discourse the Other of the Other exists because the master signifier is in the place of truth. The truth as uncertain and aleatory, is certified, so to speak, by the master signifier. And this certificate of truth as guaranteed, or occupied by the master signifier, is further represented by knowledge. The S1 is represented by the S2. Let’s pause here for a moment—the master signifier occupying the place of truth. In some way the university discourse starts and ends there. It is all about knowledge. If it was about pleasures and difficulties of transmission and about the experience of learning, or about producing the desire to know, and not about passing a universal knowledge from one to another, then this discourse would not have a structure of the university one. Where is what Lacan calls in Television (1990) above “knowledge, S2”? As conditioned by the unconscious, structured like a language, knowledge comes to the place of the agent. This implies that the so-called “drive to know” becomes exposed as a supposed knowledge of the drive, which is evident given the position of the master signifier. What is dominant in the university discourse amounts to knowledge as condensed and universal, that is to say inarticulated. It takes on a form of a treatise, a quotation, a referential knowledge, in short a meaning that has a life of its own. What else is there in the university discourse and where is the subject? As a result of this knowledge presenting itself as a unit, a meaning, the subject becomes divided but not straight away. It is a division that in the early days of the university was marked by the difference between the established and orthodox knowledge and the one for which there is no place at the university even if it is also taught in the university, namely a knowledge of an analyst. Given what de Cusa says about desire, there is no reason why not to assume that there is another kind of knowledge that is being constructed in parallel to the academic one. Let’s take an example, a subject may want to know from the doctor about his father’s illness. Is it cancer and if so is it malicious, terminal? He wants to know but at the same time he wants not to know. The doctor replies, well, it is like coming into the last one hundred metres on

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

149

a running track. Well, asks the son, but how long will it take to run it, how many years, months? The doctor knows that it is a finite number but he does not know what the number is. The son may well insist, you are the doctor, you are supposed to know …, but he does not because he realises that it is the kind of real knowledge that is impossible. So he asks for the approximate figure given the father’s age, state of health, etc. At which point the wise doctor is at liberty to use statistical data, which does not satisfy the son because it is approximate and general … The knowledge passed between the doctor and the son of the ill father, is the knowledge of anguish, its coordinates, the parameters of pacification of anguish. This knowledge, which is an analyst’s knowledge, existed long before Freud invented psychoanalysis of which Nicholas de Cusa gave us a clear indication under the term docta ignorantia. The analyst’s knowledge, rooted in de Cusa’s doctrine, reveals an autonomous category of the undetermined number between zero and infinity wherein lies the limit. I keep coming back to this limit because one can find it in every discourse Lacan constructed. The limit in question is strictly situated at the heart of infinity. This limit-knowledge can be effectively called what Lacan designated under the term of the hole in the real. The hole in the real is produced by the signifier that becomes subsequently saturated by the real and inhabits it. That’s why the transmission of knowledge by way of teaching, as Leguil (2002) remarked, is not a matter of the body soaking up the liquid. The transmission of knowledge is not even a matter of being taught as this would amount to being soaked up by knowledge. It is only the master who can choose to be taught in this way, namely attend a course of study with a badge or a diploma to be handed in at the end. As for the rest of us we continue to learn and formulate en route the contingent effects of learning. In the transmission of knowledge as experience of the real, there will always be the impenetrable or the unsaturatable that supports the topological operations. I will come back to it at the end. According to Lacan the function of the university discourse revolves around elucidation of the master discourse. This implies that when the master discourse encounters difficulties, then it is the function of the university discourse to account for it. What are these difficulties? Lacan is very precise in pointing to the fact that at the university it is the student who is expected to have knowledge and is treated on this account as an object. This arouses anxiety, producing as a result the subjective

150

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

division under the bar. Where can we find ignorance in this respect? In the university discourse ignorance appears to relate to the fact that it is the student who is supposed to know—not only supposed to know but also to cause desire to know. The doctor or professor offers the student the conditions in which to facilitate a flourishing of the latter’s ideas to inspire the exhausted routine of a lecture churning academic. This is what Lacan suggests. Not that this is in some way absurd because its logic is certainly no more absurd than in the case of the parent who tells the child off for the bad behaviour, asking the poor youngster, “Why are you behaving like this?” By means of testing and exams, the student is placed in the position of the one supposed to know, which amounts to subjecting him to the demand to know for the benefit of the professor and with the view to this having a desire effect. Instead, the superegoic effect it does have, feeds the anxiety provoked by the professors in the student but since the former went through this process, why shouldn’t the latter go through the same process, too? In what way does the university discourse “account for” the difficulties Lacan envisaged in the master’s discourse? This has to do with the growing systematisation of knowledge around what continues to be unaccounted for in the master’s discourse, namely what concerns sexuality. And this, Lacan says in Encore in 1972 in the lesson “To Jakobson” (1998a), ensures the movement from one discourse to another. Lacan insists that this movement is conditioned upon the psychoanalytic discourse, which, in turn, arises out of an analyst’s knowledge. This knowledge of the analyst existed long before Freud and even before the birth of the university. What marked it as a distinct category resulted from philosophy meddling in the affairs of the discourse of religion over centuries and ending up swamped by it. Not that philosophy has ever been seriously preoccupied with the God of religion, let alone with the jouissance of God, but by way of negative theology its concerns have from the pre-Socratics been rooted in an idea of a totality. It is for this reason that Lacan called himself an anti-philosopher. And this is the stage the structure of the university provides. In the university the philosophers find the familiar ground of being able to create a semblance of a debate that, nevertheless, can only take place with a totality at the backdrop. And this did not make Lacan’s task of showing himself as anti-philosopher any easier. But he did make some paramount distinctions I already mentioned in the opening chapters of the previous volume. In Seminar XI (1977) Lacan raised the question of ethics

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

151

versus ontology, and whether the question of the drive as sexual reality is ontological or ethical with the implications of responsibility. And he asks there: must we consider the question of ethics (drive, sexuality) against the backdrop of a totality? Psychoanalysis is very remote from this idea except that it provides a framework for the imaginary relations as unity with an image, and in this sense some specular “wholeness”. The work of the signifiers goes always in the direction of a division, fragment, and lack. The idea of a totality and nothing else, is indeed philosopher’s and master’s refuge, and the university discourse comes crushing down on every recalcitrant student who refuses to satisfy the master in this respect. But Lacan also makes an important reference to science, and specifically to the nineteenth century scientist MarieFrançois Bichat, to tell us about the reverse side of what is called totality. Bichat is said to have defined life as a totality of forces that oppose death. In this view life is not an underlying and indestructible force but a resistance. Lacan doubtless opposes the imaginary totality of Gestalt to the real number of what is organised as a totality around a hole. Life is resistance, life is ignorance, life is impossibility. Life is fragmentary. These seem to be the premises on which discourse rests. In Seminar XVII The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (2007), where “other side”, envers, signifies the topological reversal or the inside-out side, Lacan states that it is the only discourse where a thinking being as the subject is an effect of production. This “unheard-of pretension” of the subject as produced, rather than producing, allows him or her to perceive themselves as the master of knowledge. What does it mean? It means that the subject as produced acquires the power of mastery by making alliance with the master signifier, also under the bar, that is in the place of truth. The divided subject thus becomes produced by the anguish of the student only in order to latch on to the master signifier to make up for the division. Since the establishment of university around thirteenth century as a new cathedral of knowledge, and after centuries of dispersion of knowledge among churches and monasteries, the systematisation of knowledge became its home. What did not change was the master/slave dialectic now turning into the dialogue between the teacher and the student. This new habitat for episteme coincides with the new perspectives emerging in painting and architecture at the dawn of Renaissance when, Giotto among others, comes to introduce and inscribe in the field of perception the third dimension. Someone well informed in this

152

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

breakthrough drew my attention to this. The Medieval masters could do perfectly well with two dimensions because they sufficed for an image to be constituted as image, while the dialectic was taking off at the same time. With the arrival of trecento, we witness an introduction of the new dimension, that of depth and opaqueness that throws a completely new light on the epistemological movement of language where a new temporality emerges. It is a dimension of what is distant and blurred, just like the past, and just like that which has been repressed, while being present hic et nunc, that comes to open a new epistemological perspective. In other words, a dimension of the uncertainty of the future comes to be marked there. Freud, as we know, held a view that an illusion has a long future. In this case, what I have in mind is the future of the past, namely the retroactive effect that emerges at the dawn of trecento.

Knowledge in the real: from the master signifier to das Es The experience of discourse, as Lacan constructed it, allows us to recognise four dimensions to the extent that they concern the subject that cannot see itself except for being represented, speaking, dit-mension, and what in speaking does not have a structure of signifier. In the master discourse, which is also the discourse of the unconscious, S1, the master signifier, is dominant. This S1 resonates in French as essaim, a “swarm”. Although one, S1 is not the only one. There are many of them, like birds of feather, one after one after one, but each one being all alone. In his elaborations of Freud’s intuitions in the Entwurf, the master signifier stands out as the signifier of identification in the discourse of the unconscious. S1 is the site of the unary trait that is the building block of identifications. There are, as Jacques-Alain Miller stressed, no non-identifying subjects in the discourse of the unconscious. S1 is the signifier the subject depends on as the one to present him to the Other, namely to the other signifier. We thus have Es one the subject clings to in his primary identifications, while remaining ignorant of the knowledge, Es two, for which he is represented. I say “ignorant” in the sense I have already elaborated, namely that what is not represented in the subject aims at knowledge. According to Lacan the Es one as the signifier of identification should be treated as a representation of jouissance. Ergo, the master signifier, Es one, already serves as a modality of knowledge outside Es two.

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

153

Es one arises in a relation Lacan calls “copulation” when he speaks of the subject’s copulation with knowledge. What knowledge? The knowledge imbued with jouissance. And this brings me to the third modality of knowledge in Lacan’s teaching, developed by him in the 1970s. The first modality revolved around the register of the imaginary, namely méconnaissance, miscognition. The second conception focused on the subject supposed to know as a new love, in psychoanalysis called transference, that is both the condition of knowledge and its refusal. What is in question in the third modality of knowledge is how this infusion of jouissance in the speaking being allows us to formalise the real that knows or of such knowledge of jouissance that the subject can manage with in life. Lacan had a term for it, savoir y faire, which places knowledge in the real. It is not without the mother tongue that such knowledge would serve its purpose, having resisted the signifying illuminations of S2. Es one would thus stand for a semblant of such a knowledge. Recoiling back to the early Freud, Lacan reminds us not to lose perspective on the difference between representation and the representative. This of course is crucial in formulating the discourse. The signifying representation, Vorstellung—the one all alone among ones—is in need of an agent that would represent it, an ambassador or an attaché. Strictly speaking, it is this representative as attaché that, according to Lacan, has a function of the signifier in the chain. And it is around this signifier where knowledge in discourse as S2 will be constructed. This is clearly evident in the discourse of the university where S2 represents S1. We can write it as an algorithm. S2 Es one And this is also what Lacan perceived and referred to as the function of the university discourse, namely the elucidation of the master’s discourse from which it remains inseparable. We now have two modalities of knowledge in discourse, although only one attaché. To the extent that the identification with the Es one, or Es ones, is imbued with scraps of the primary experience of satisfaction, what Freud called Befriedegungerlebnis, of the mother tongue, the ignorant subject aims at a knowledge of the real to manage with it. Thus Lacan goes further than Freud, knotting knowledge and jouissance. The supposed “drive to know” becomes reversed in the sense of Lacan’s envers, putting the inside out,

154

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

which will become evident in the analyst’s discourse. In other words, in the quaestio with relation to knowledge, the quest is for the real as the One knowledge. We can make this deduction following Lacan’s elaboration on the logic of discourse. And Lacan even says it bluntly in Seminar XVII on discourses when stating that desire for knowledge has nothing to do with knowledge in the sense that it does not lead to knowledge. Where does it lead to then? As we have seen in each of the discourses desire is oriented towards a different aim because it is caused by the object passing through different places. Lacan’s assertion is in this regard radical as it subverts, but also reverses, the pathways of epistemology based on the “natural” inclination to know. In fact, we could say that with this assertion Lacan writes a new book of distribution of knowledge based on jouissance experienced in discourse by the subject. The question of what can be known, of power of knowledge, has different vacillations with the particular satisfaction at stake. What does the subject’s quest for satisfaction indicate to us from this perspective? Firstly, it points to the loss, which Lacan designated as invariable, a constant place in the discourse. And, secondly, it mobilises fantasy as a way in which the subject in its relations with the object a attempts to make up for the loss-es. Having written it in this way, continues to open the dimension of writing as a scene where the entanglement of the primary signifier and loss is played out. And this brings us to Freud’s primary satisfaction. The loss of satisfaction reveals the dimension of discourse the subject in analysis engages in when he speaks about his first love, first experience of the gaze, voice, etc. In short, the analytic experience points to the mother tongue as the zone of intoxication of jouissance. The analysand can evoke in the session his mother’s expression reiz Fieber, raised pitch/fever, with which she depicts the bowel movement she has in the morning. The signifier, which does not belong to the mother tongue of his mother, is nevertheless assigned to the term “mother tongue” because it designates the primary level of language. And this is what Lacan referred to as lalangue as pre-existing a particular lexicon or grammar. The loss of the primary satisfaction, circumscribed by the primary signifier leads to the rise of the value and of the status of the S2 that functions as an ambassadorial representative who, after all, acts on the instructions of the home government. This “act” occurs in the place of the “agent” as it has a representative function. The true status of S2 lies in the way it relies on the signifying instructions. And since S2 appears

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

155

as the first signifier of repetition, its task lies in seizing something of the Es one. It is in this sense that I would approach what Lacan says in Encore about lalangue. He calls language a scientific way to depict lalangue. What the linguists call “language” is but an adornment and an icing on the lalangue. In this sense lalangue is the grit of language, the clay sediments and the slime that has no meaning in the structure. If in the discourse, the S2 attempts to seize something of the Es one, it is because the latter remains interwoven with the jouissance of the maternal tongue. In lalangue we can no longer distinguish a phoneme from a word from a phrase from a sentence but only the loops and the intervals between the Es ones. a $ → S2 // S1 Discourse of the analyst Hence in the case of the analyst’s discourse—regarded in the university as the most supreme of all—knowledge S2 can be found in the place of truth, namely where it stumbles on a lie, to wit a misunderstanding, a misheard message, which is simply the unconscious. For the analyst this unconscious knowledge is always active in the way I would call applied ignorance. And why not? After all the analyst, having come to this place through his analysis and taken his position in it as his analysis’ product, remains at the service of the gift of transference through which the subject supposes knowledge the analyst does not have. But he might have an idea and a way to say where it may be found, subject to the demand for analysis. The analyst’s knowledge therefore consists in not having to make sense, whether by supporting its production or by not denying it, or to understand the unknown knowledge that the subject, the analysand, in speaking about himself to him (if he does not speak to himself, as Lacan notes), addresses another. While the desire to know is supported by the analyst incarnating the object that has effects of causing it, the desire to know, Lacan tells us, does not lead to knowledge. And this would allow us to separate desire from knowledge, which is what Lacan does by placing them above and under the bar in the analyst’s discourse. The focus in this regard, is not on knowledge, which is the associative chain, but on the Es ones that in the course of production in the bottom right corner can be isolated from the loss-es. The analyst at least cogitates that the x of the Other’s desire is unknown,

156

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

which allows him to assume a function of a dummy. Misunderstandings multiply with regard to this term and hopefully this will continue. But it is one thing to have all the available cards on the table, and another to know how to play them. In some way the analyst must remain ignorant of that knowledge, not to interpret it, for the play to continue. And it is the knowledge of how to play that Lacan famously refers to as savoir y faire, know-how. At this point, present rather than interpreting, the dummy is no longer there. But while it is there, the analysand may well work through the causes and draw from the unconscious whatever comes his way. It is the experience Freud himself describes in “Letter 73” (1950a [1892–1899]) to Fliess. We cannot know all the Es ones. And since this is not possible, the subject may feel forced to appeal to S2, to make sense, to understand those that he can know by trying to find out what he is saying in all this. Does he know what he is saying? It happens all the time in analysis because this is how the unconscious becomes manifest. It is how it speaks without knowing. The analyst’s ignorance, both learned and applied, resembles the Socratic position, as I proposed earlier, but only up to a point. Socrates says that he knows. The analyst does not even say he does not. But what exactly does Socrates know? Nothing that would allow him to cease to question the subject by wrong footing and frustrating him till he is blue in the face. Socratic interrogation can have that real effect. Socrates says he only knows that he does not know. What does that mean? It means that he ends there, with the ideal in his pocket, saying: look, you see, you cannot know this, I do not know this, that’s all I know, that there is nothing there. All he knows is that there is nothing there to know. The analyst’s ignorance goes further. It takes him to the same place of the ideal where the truth is parading as the master signifier that has always imposed its rule on the subject’s life. And then the analyst pulls his pockets inside out … to say what? That there is nothing there on either side. In other words, he reminds us that the unconscious is what we say or that the unconscious is not friendly or unfriendly, as Lacan remarked, pleasant or hostile, but topological. That’s the topological operation Lacan performs. In effect, as I will come to this in a moment, the master signifier that imposes its rule and the lost object swap places. Following the infinite play of the signifiers, the appeal to meaning and interpretation, the ideal of knowledge, the promise of the hidden secret, the crisis of tears, the helplessness, powerlessness—all this and more converges on the point

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

157

of the topological operation of Lacan who shows us this push to the real, to jouissance, namely to the point where the Es ones can resonate in the echoes of lalangue. Ignorance, as whatever remained left from the decline of the Name-of-the-Father, appears as a mode of silence where the Other jouir. “My desire wilted”, the analysand says, and countless years later he discovers that he actually willed it—“I willed-it”—and the subject goes where das Es was. He hears it as a moment of his destiny, which it is to the extent that it marks his ethical position in relation to the desire of the Other as wilting, crumbling, which is the place he steps in to provide the support. It is not so much the subject’s desire that wilts and crumbles, but that of the Other, the always ill mother, the victimised and inflicted underprivileged, that makes the subject step in to support … what if not the Other’s desire. What does that mean? It is a conclusive point in many respects. It is the moment of turning where, following endless repetitions and appeals, the saying undergoes what could be called a deinfinitisation. Analyst’s applied ignorance allows for the deinfinitisation of the sequence of Es ones, as evoked by the echoes of lalangue, which is not its only function in the context of the infinity of the session. Analyst’s ignorance is thus placed where his desire is, namely as a lost object for which object a is a semblance that causes the subject’s desire to seek it. In this way the analyst allows to deinfinitise the unceasing repetition of the unknown knowledge in the symptom, while elevating the object as lost to the place of the cause. Lacan articulated this on numerous occasions, and returns to it in the opening lesson of the seminar on discourses. What deserves to be called the Socratic frustration, appears to be organised around the lost object. This object as lost opens a gap that in turn opens up to something that is uncertain, Lacan says. What is uncertain arises as a question of whether it represents the lack in the jouissance. In other words, is the object a a hole in the real, given it is the knowledge, S2, that supports it from below? I will leave this question open for the time being. There is no access to the unconscious knowledge other than through discursive quest involving subject’s lalangue. Unlike de Cusa’s docta ignorantia, learned or studied, that belongs only to the analyst to the extent that it emerges as a product of analysis, applied ignorance is put at the service of supporting the discourse in which those, who while paying with the gift of love, seek through what an analyst embodies the answer about the loss. Applied ignorance is manifest not so much as a lack of knowledge but as a knowledge of the loss: a over S2.

158

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

Discourse of the analyst and Humpty Dumpty Learned or applied, the unknown knowledge is the spring for the subject to reach to the real which is under his nose but supposedly located, as every hysteric knows, where the Other jouir. In the analyst’s discourse, knowledge, S2, is in the position of truth. This is also the place of the unconscious as guaranteed by truth. Above the place of truth, in the dominant position, figures the semblance of the object a. That’s what serves as the analyst’s ignorance, not the lack of knowledge but the knowledge hollowed by loss. This is what appears above the bar: a → $. It is what he acts with, causing division and by this very stroke the desire to refind the lost object that used to be where the master signifiers are now. This object a, the remainder of an analysis, which one cannot make head or tail about, is not without a link to the loss that is most particular in an analysis. Following the loss a production of master signifiers takes place and paves the way, as Lacan marked it, for the reversal, I mentioned earlier. What is this reversal, the inside out, envers of the title of the seminar on discourses, if not a swapping, not of places, but of two the a and Es one, the former emerging as the latter’s remainder, the little a?

In the university discourse ignorance draws its power from putting knowledge in the place of the agent as student, underlined by the master signifier in the place of truth. It is what Jacques-Alain Miller brought to our attention when he said that the master of jouissance remains subject to capricious vacillations. Humpty Dumpty is an example of such a capricious position because for him words mean what he pleases them to mean, which is the position of the master. But because his understanding is done on a whim he is also hoodwinked by jouissance that pushes him towards the hysteric’s position. When Alice asks him whether he can make words mean other things he obviously refuses to confirm it. But in asking him this she gives us an indication of an analyst’s position. Thanks to the analyst’s discourse, the discourse of the master evolves into either the university discourse, by a quarter turn to the left, or to the hysteric’s discourse by a quarter turn to the right.

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

159

But the axis, as Lacan states, derives from the discourse of the analyst because it is the product of the psychoanalytic experience. It is from this position that Lacan started his elaboration with each place being marked as the letter and therefore as an effect of discourse at work. Kant’s categorical imperative is another example of how things pan out in the university discourse. Kant put forward his formula on the assumption that it has a universal application. Thus, value is confused with application, and the knowledge of the singular subject is confused with knowledge of all. Nietzsche, who questioned the universal use of Kant’s imperative, just like Alice questioned Humpty-Dumpty’s caprices, said that it was cruel to expect of every human being to get up at five o’clock because one individual does so. For Nietzsche Kant’s imperative had a value of a demand that cannot be satisfied. Why to demand the same for everyone, especially that the master signifier of the imperative may be underlined by the mores and habits of everyday revolutions of a particular speaking being like the philosopher Kant? Nietzsche wanted to be a thorn in Kant’s system, and did this with great success by showing that everyone should pay the price and take responsibility for their “philosophy”. In short, Nietzsche’s response to the cruel demand of the Other exposes professor’s ignorance to the whimsical jouissance of the master. It also highlights subject’s singularity and the confusion of the universal value of the signifier with its particular application. The commandment by which an academic is bound seems to be: you will speak only if what you say can serve as a rule for all. And this new imperative, if we could call it an imperative, derives from the one that supports it, and which concerns Humpty Dumpty as a master: The words you say will only mean what you please them to mean. Each discourse could thus have an imperative that serves as its motto. These modes of ignorance, perhaps most striking because formulated into all-encompassing universal propositions called imperatives, successfully employ the jouissance of the Other, which leads to the confusion of the subject’s symptom with the demand of the Other. And this is what Lacan puts to a test in the seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992) where he examines Kant’s two apologues from Critique of Practical Reason (1997). For Kant the desire for knowledge remains linked to the Other’s demand and to the universal rule, formed and formalised into an envelope of the symptom. The desire to know—and why not to suppose it exists?—becomes the key to jouissance, and therefore the key to the

160

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

question of life, death, and sexuality, because jouissance concerns the body as sexed and not merely the death drive. Since Lacan did not believe in the “natural” drive to know he retranslated the relation to knowledge in the discourse. It is worth noting the reasons of Lacan’s position. He did not believe in the drive to know, unlike Freud, not only because the knowledge in question stops half way on the way to jouissance. Nor because the satisfaction produced by the quest for knowledge makes the jouissance of the tongue slip out. Nor for any other reason that would be suggested to us by the golden aphorisms of agnosticism, cynicism, stoicism or other “isms” for this matter. Lacan questioned the subject’s relation to knowledge when he came to a conclusion that the desire to know does not lead to knowledge. The desire to know, Lacan says, leads to the discourse of the hysteric. It is where knowledge, S2, finds its channels of transmission that were already found before Freud and the birth of psychoanalysis. And since Freud located in the hysteric the treasure of speech that does not make sense, Lacan took it up as an analytical route whose singularity is well off the beaten track. In fact, this assertion of Lacan is radical as it inaugurates a redistribution of knowledge or surpasses the systematisation of knowledge by the university discourse since the time when university became the last cathedra of episteme since the thirteenth century. Of course there were not only analysts then but the hysterics, too, such as for example Socrates himself. There is no way out from this transepochal maze except for following its four discursive turns until it begins to show signs of being, in one ward, a-mazing. For Lacan the structure of discourse settles any doubts about the genesis and origin of das Ding as incongruous. And this was already inscribed in Lacan’s response to Miller who himself took it up later in his text Jacques Lacan and the Voice. The inquiry into the origin of language fails at the first turn because from the structural perspective the Freudian Thing, ergo our most intimate neighbour, remains for centuries and millennia, enmeshed and implicated in the master Es one. We thus end up with a maze of discourse and a knot of knowledge. What could we say about the knot of knowledge? It is a knot made of the Symbolic and the Real, like that of ignorance at the beginning of Lacan’s teaching. Lacan highlighted this implication by showing that in the desire to know there is already a desire for satisfaction because something passes from the Other’s jouissance to the subject’s desire. The division of the subject thus remains

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

161

extimately, that is to say, topologically, inscribed in the writing of the knot. And this is what emerges for me as the third modality of knowledge in Lacan’s teaching. These are the paradoxes of knowledge in discourse. Every discourse wants to lay claims to knowledge, make uses of it, and even overvalue it as in the case of the university discourse. And then they turn up a cropper which is the point of ignorance, a knowledge hollowed by the loss or impossibility that forms a hole. Only in the analyst’s discourse, which was for Lacan the axis for other discourses, does ignorance become a negative positivised into an active force in analysis, having re-emerged as what Lacan called a passion. The subject is represented by the master signifier, S1, for another signifier, S2. But the subject is also absorbed into the Es one which is not without the Other. And this now leads me to say that the unconscious does not know. Earlier I said that the unconscious knows because it always has an answer for those who believe in it. But Lacan also considers the reverse when he says that the Other knows nothing, and that because God knows nothing he cannot be hated. What Lacan was pursuing throughout his teaching was a relation of love and knowledge, and how “the Other knows nothing” he states in his later teaching translates into love. The unconscious does not know because there is no representation of the Woman, and because the unconscious does not know how to think death and how to write the relation between the sexes. But it is not without the unconscious as that which does not know that the sexual relation cannot be written or does not cease not to be written. And this is how Lacan designates the impossible. If knowledge is supposed, and with it a subject, it is because the unconscious is supposed and remains a hypothesis. And until it is supposed as a hypothesis, we have to manage with Es ones all alone. This Es one is a ring with which the knot is tied, as Lacan showed us in the case of Joyce. What the unconscious as supposed knows is the name of ignorance, namely the signifiers without knowing why and when and where. In short, the unconscious is ignorant of how to know. Know what? The unconscious knowledge it inhabits and in which it opens a hole. In this sense knowledge remains an enigma—an enigma of the hole in the Other, which was for Lacan the true enigma in psychoanalysis. With a tooth missing in the mouth of the Other, it will not have to, so to speak, grind to a stop.

162

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

Not to know, to teach, to learn Where is an analyst in all this, and in particular in relation to the enigma of knowledge? He guards it and preserves it. It is just that there is nothing to guard. There is even no “nothing” to preserve. But the Lacanian envers shows that a transformation is possible, which Lacan spoke of in the interview above by saying that what can be known is situated within the limit called language, and that the operations in it are a matter of logic. To try to preserve what there is not, an analyst would have to be dumb. And it is true that, in this sense, Lacan spoke of the analyst having a function of a dummy, as I mentioned earlier. From this perspective, there is no discovery in saying that the analyst’s position vacillates between the two main characters in the film Dumb and Dumber. One of them finds a suitcase left by a woman he adores, who is also his boss, and together with his friend they embark on a trip across the United States, and through the film, to deliver it to her without realising that the suitcase is full of money. The analyst’s knowledge, what Lacan called his agalma, what he does not know he has, will never be opened in the way one opens a suitcase. But he can be opened for whatever cards can be found up his sleeve. The analyst is more often asked “what do you mean?” than “ah, that’s what you are saying”. Who knows what he is saying and whatever he is saying he still does not say what he means. It is not for him to know what he is saying but what effects he causes. He can cause love effects because the product of his own analysis led him to this. And he can cause desire, which is not the same thing. The analyst’s place, whether in speaking or in silence, is that of saying without saying what he means. His docta ignorantia is not a mere strategy because as a strategy it reflects the impossibility of the sexual relation not ceasing not being written. If the analysand does not recognise this impossibility as impossibility, it is because he continues to plough and dig the unconscious in his speech with a sense of preoccupation that forms his work and, in this sense, keeps him busy as it kept Schliemann busy. Every time the session takes place, there is a repetition which is a loop. This loop constitutes the one. A series of sessions can be marked in this way, namely as one, one, and so on. In the course of this series there is a contingency that offers itself as what may be seized half-way, or between the lines, a little eureka. The contingency makes the subject humble because where there is a little eureka there is also a sign of loss. The humbleness and discretion of the analyst marks

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE OR FOURFOLD IGNORANCE

163

a new place because destitution becomes a new position with regard to desire as caused by this loss. Not only is the analyst’s strategy of ignorantia constantly reminiscent of loss and of knowledge hollowed by the loss, but it is also a reminder of castration as a disempowering of the subject. The position of the analyst remains relative to his strategy, and this will become even more pertinent when in the next and concluding chapter I am going to take up the ends of analysis in Lacan’s teaching. Suffice it to say by a word of conclusion that ignorance serves as a vital instrument in teaching. We call psychoanalytic teaching a transmission—a strange word especially if one takes into account the fact that transmission is what has been received or what has taken place. It therefore adheres to the ideal of saturation, as Leguil proposed, whereby the subject is supposed to be soaked in knowledge that permeates the body. How do we transmit psychoanalysis? How is transmission possible, given that what is to be transmitted amounts to the absolute singularity of the analytic experience of the real? It fails. Then one transmits something of this failure, a little detour and a discourse around the hole in the real from which the sting was taken out. Analysis takes the sting out of jouissance attached to the master signifier, putting a wedge between the Es ones so that they can subsequently be tied up. Freud discovered the unconscious, and Lacan invented the school. But the school is not a place where psychoanalysis is taught because only a master basks in the pleasure of being taught and then awarded a degree as masters do. That’s a successful transmission. Is analyst a master? That’s what they say at the university. But Humpty Dumpty and the idiots from Dumb and Dumber are not on the same level. One is duped by the belief in meaning, and the other by the duty to serve and to make the Other jouir. The Lacanian school is in this sense neither a place to disseminate beliefs nor to satisfy the Other that does not exist. One discovers in the Lacanian school a place to learn, which is to work, because learning makes a mark of a failed transmission. In other words, learning marks the site of the real knowledge coming into an encounter with the real as impossibility, both the inexistence of absolute truth, S (A /), and the loss, a. To learn may be an indication of what in the analytic experience of the above mentioned detour comes to be acquired by way of desire that takes place of the heart. One learns by heart only if one learns by desire, even if it does not make sense. For me this learning “by desire” translates into learning or working with desire. Lacan also

164

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

spoke of acting in accordance with desire. But acting in accordance with desire is also acting with desire. What can I know? In the analytic school this translates into “what can I learn where transmission fails?” which falls under Lacan’s scrutiny as it directs us towards the sting of the signifier and the logic within it.

CHAPTER SIX

To conclude—the ends of analysis in the teaching of Lacan (1)

Lacan’s teleology Ergo the end of analysis is a matter of logic. Why ergo? Because language is the limit, Lacan says, not in order to limit the unlimited of Anaximander but because it is inherent in the infinity of the real Lacan spoke of, namely the real as lawless and without order. What adds to the difficulty is that the logic of the end of analysis does not necessarily obey the logic of the beginning. But how does one avoid the trap of the banality that what has a beginning has an end? Nor, it seems to me, does the end take place because of some massive retroaction that would send us all the way back to the beginning, to the very first trace of transference, for a loop to close and for this to be a mark of the end. Done. Finished. Now I know. Now I have understood. These, precisely, seem signals of analysis as not having reached a conclusive point of an analyst being produced, rather than producing, but of going through an impasse that could be called an impasse of understanding. Not that there is no room for understanding in analysis but this has proved to be inconclusive. What is its conclusion then? Lacan addressed the quaestio of the end of analysis throughout his teaching, and I have singled out seven moments in the course of his 165

166

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

teaching, including the time before he started his seminars, where Lacan grapples with what is called the end either as the end game or end as the final cause. It has to be said again that the final cause is not the cause that Lacan situated as the axis of the analytic experience. He linked psychoanalysis to the material cause, which makes Lacan’s teleology intriguing. According to the classical teleology of Aristotle analysis starts in order to reach the end. What has a beginning has an end. This logic has permeated the modern and hypermodern times and its various points of reference like the cult film Matrix. What was built is to be destroyed, what comes to life comes to perish, and so on. This logic of Aristotle has always tried to capture the beginning by means of an end. It has tried to assuage the anguish of the origin by subsuming it under the order of the end as the final cause. Then it would be possible to say that the end determines the beginning, to wit what came to perish was once alive, and what was destroyed must have been created. In the same vein we would say that the effect illuminates the cause, and in death there is something of birth. But the analytic experience knows nothing of death, as no one has lived to tell the tale, which is why Lacan situated it in the register of the imaginary. There are legion stories to be told on that, and we frequently hear about death in analysis, which Freud situated in the death drive, jouissance as such, developed already in his theory of narcissism. What does the psychoanalytic experience tell us about the end? It tells us that sometimes the analytic process does not come to an end. Sometimes it starts in order to never end, as it may be in the case of psychosis. Lacan’s teleology in psychoanalysis has this subversive effect—what has a beginning does not always come to an end. Aristotle says that when you embark on the construction of a ship it is in order to have a floatable vessel ready at some point or other to sail the oceans or at least across a river. And it is irrelevant whether a ship is built in the forest or in the dockyard because according to the Aristotle’s doctrine of the final cause a ship is constructed in order to become a ship. But Lacan says that sometimes a subject builds a ship and this building never ends. He invites others to have a look at his work and to take interest in it. Sometimes the subject leaves the construction site and then returns to resume work, and so on. If building a ship has a symptomatic function in the sense of what Lacan called sinthome, then building a ship with the support this task needs, namely constructing it ad infinitum, developing, pausing, resuming, and so on,

TO C O N C L U D E

167

will never stop. This is Lacan’s teleology. It is concerned with and aims at the end but it goes about it endlessly and without an end. Lacan introduced a new dimension of teleology in psychoanalysis. It follows from his clinical experience of psychosis, especially the one he devoted an entire year to, namely that of Joyce. Jacques-Alain Miller called this seminar the most haunting one of Lacan’s seminars, and invited us to be possessed by it. What does to be possessed imply here? In his excellent work on the Greeks and their idea of the irrational, Dodds (1951) speaks of different forms of haunting and possession the Greeks called μανιας. He isolates four forms of haunting he refers to as prophetic, as inspired prophecy, associated with Apollo and knowledge, telestic, concerned with the cathartic aspect of religious ritual and Dionysus, poetic as inspired by the Muses as carriers of truth (“Give me an oracle”, says Pindar, “and I will be your spokesman”), and erotic, the madness of love aroused by Aphrodite and Eros. These were the Plato’s passions that led to different forms of possession. But what does being possessed by the seminar of Lacan mean? Does it mean perhaps to live with it, sleep with it, dream it, think it, speak it, and so on, in short to allow ourselves to be permeated to the core of our speaking being by the discursive effects of Lacan’s teaching that has come to us in form of written seminars? We experience the haunting of Lacan, of the desire of Lacan in this way, by being imbued with what in his teaching does not reach the final destination and does not come to close. Lacan’s unending teleology in this sense answers to the Apollonian prophecy of Dodds, a prophecy of the day, any day, every day perhaps, because its poetic gravitas does not go away nor does it come to the last concluding word. Where did it start then? And, in this vein, where—not when—do analyses start? This brings me to the work Lacan produced prior to his seminar teaching. From the start Lacan presents the end of analysis from the logical perspective and approaches it as a logical problem. One goes to see an analyst because of suffering, a difficulty one cannot live with as it does not go away. It does not leave us and therefore the subject does not leave it, remaining tied up to it, attached to it, and even inhabited by it. The subject is haunted, possessed by a morbid and alien condition, and the idea of an analyst who would listen, who would be all ears, focused and attentive without reserve on what the subject has to say about his condition already appears as a satisfying idea. This suffering

168

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

or difficulty presents itself first as a complaint against something or someone. And I would only stress that this is already a little distinction, a little separation from that which causes suffering. And although the complaint is not yet a symptom, its presentation already contains and makes use of the four elements in the discourse. We already have here the one who speaks, the means of speech, the one who is addressed and what the speaking is about. The logic of the beginning of the treatment involves a first subjective extraction under transference and a formulation of the symptom. The beginning of analysis is already a step, therefore, and a courageous one, from a complaint to a symptom. Subsequently, it marks a passage from a patient to an analysand to the extent that the analyst is there to receive him and to support, if not to push him to the discourse. As an analysand the subject assumes responsibility for his symptom. It is a logical step in so far as in this formulation, and in the assumption of ethical position, lies inscribed the end point. What does this responsibility imply? That for eternity I will always come back to this point to identify with the cause of my suffering. Not that I am responsible for my suffering, which I am, but that I am responsible for my symptom and for the position it opens in relation to the desire of the Other. For example, the subject’s position may be to step in and support desire where it is wilting and crumbling, and where the Other sways or hesitates or resigns from desire. This may be related to women he had relationships with, and involve a limping for the subject, which reveals castration as a sign of loss. How is the symptom supported? It can be supported in the way in which a shell supports a grain of suffering by enveloping it and closing it in without ever opening it to expose it. The mechanism of repression is constructed in a similar way. To some extent responsibility involves an unknowledge, the docta ignorantia, I spoke about in the previous chapter, in so far as the subject can address knowledge as hollowed by the loss. Responsibility involves an identification with such perforated knowledge without having to know to the end as to what it is. It is a desire to know and leads to the hysteric’s discourse. Responsibility is also to be distinguished from guilt. Lacan touches on it in the seminar on Ethics. Guilt is an abrogation of responsibility, and an alibi for refusing it. In some cultures guilt plays a dominant role, engenders endless trials, ceaseless prosecutions and dialogues of blame and shame. For Lacan, guilt was an abrogation of desire. As for shame he called it a secret, the most extimate of affects, the innermost jouissance that is not for the public lest it leads to guilt

TO C O N C L U D E

169

and blame. And this is perhaps the grain I mentioned. In the shell of the symptom, there is a grain of shame. But the shell and the grain of sand inside it, coated with a mother pearl, is not a symptom, not according to what we call analytic symptom, in the sense Lacan elaborates it in his later teaching, namely as sinthome. The symptom is not a literary metaphor but language as the literal limit and as real in one. Even the most alluring reflection by Valéry (1977) on the shell fails to grasp the analytic experience of the symptom that implicates the subject loss as caught by the signifier but it may have sufficed for the poet. In analysis no poet will do, only a poem can give inklings and hints, and the teaching of Lacan was such a poem. It gives us inklings, allusions, indications, a cornucopia of unsaid sayings between the lines, and part fledged truths. What is said and what is unsaid in them at the same time haunts us. The symptom, while subject to the paternal metaphor by way of contingency, follows the haunting of the Lacanian poiesis, namely the construction as a poetic possession, and in this sense without an end, as it was in the case of Joyce. This is Lacan’s teleology of analysis without an end, inconclusive and unfinished. And this, by way of detour brings me back to the question of the logic of the end. Without doubt, not every analysis is inconclusive and without an end. Some analyses come to an end, and it is from the perspective of another analysis that we speak about them.

The end of analysis as a logical problem In what way is the end of analysis a matter of logic? In what way is there a limit point in analysis, which is a different matter, and which Lacan linked to the phallic function? Lacan’s formulations of this logical problem take us to those moments of his work and concerns that precede his seminar teaching. And then he will return to the same problematic throughout his teaching. And every time he will do so, he will also mark it with a stamp of novelty. We could isolate, as I have proposed, at least seven moments in his teaching marked in this way. I will start with presenting Lacan’s early take on the logic of the end in analysis as elaborated in the Prisoner’s dilemma. If the problem concerning the end of analysis is entirely logical, it should have a logical solution. Starting with this premise Lacan approached the conclusion of analysis as a logic of the end game and therefore as a sophism. In 1945 Lacan was asked by Zervos to contribute to Les Cahiers d’Art. He responded

170

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

by considering the aporia of the prisoner as providing a ground for the problem that interested Lacan. How is analysis concluded, finished, brought to an end? The pertinence of this problematic sheds light on how analyses begin. In approaching it Lacan took up the question of the logic of time dividing it into three moments, that of seeing, understanding and the moment to conclude. The prison’s governor decides to give three prisoners a chance to shorten their misery. He informs them he has five discs at his disposal, three white and two black. He will attach one disc only on the back of each prisoner. Assuming none of them can see the colour of their own disc, he now invites them to work out their colour on the basis of the colour of the discs worn by the other two. But what they see, is only part of their key to freedom, for there is only one case, and one permutation, that will lead one of the prisoners to certainty, which is the issue here. In all other cases the logical solution must be presented at the exit, and only then will it open the door to freedom. Thus a moment of seeing is followed by that of understanding and of conclusion. After a short while, all three make a step to the exit presenting the solution in the following way: “I am a white because, if my mates were whites, then had I been a black, each of them would be able to conclude as follows: If I too am a black, the other would have quickly realised that he was a white and would have left immediately. Therefore, I am not a black. And both would have left together, convinced they were whites. As they did nothing of the kind I must be a white like them. At this point I make my way to the door to present my conclusion.” Since all three arrive at the same solution and come to the door simultaneously, this solution deserves to be called an ideal one. In fact, it is a solution for all as one. Lacan goes on to call it a “perfect solution” for every subject. The formulation of the sophism revolves around the dimension of subjective certitude in relation to other subjects. Subject’s certitude is his conclusion. But a conclusion can only be reached if it follows from the times of seeing and understanding. Once the process of deduction has been completed there is a hastening to the door—an act to be formulated retroactively or testified to as Lacan will say some years later. The emphasis of the sophism is on a slice of analysis, an instant in time. The gesture of hastening, the raised leg, the body ready to move at the signal of completed deduction, amounts to an act of certainty. The subject acts on this certainty. Alongside the

TO C O N C L U D E

171

particularity of an account given by a subject at the end of analysis, there is a universality of certitude. After analysis there is, supposedly, freedom. That’s the logic of imprisonment. But there is no act imbued with more freedom, which is also an act of courage, than the one of going to analysis to begin to subject the alienations of the signifier to an interrogation called free associations. In this sense, freedom turns out to be a semblance of what I would prefer to call liberation. Who cares about freedom? Liberation is what it is all about—from intrusive thoughts, unbearable anxieties, foreign occupation at the time of war or “mass” immigration, discontents in society, nagging spouses, oppressive superego, and so on. What does freedom have to do with all this? It is only an idea. We can see that it is the liberation to various degrees and in different forms that runs through not only the early developments of the movement of psychoanalysis but in Freud’s initial modus operandi. Liberation depends on certainty, and Lacan’s reading of the prisoner’s dilemma hinges on the little step that follows the logical deduction. So it is not only about courage whereby the subject steps forward, not knowing yet what to say and how, but only to declare his existence. The certainty Lacan speaks about is not only about courage or logic, for the same happens in love. In this vein, and in the spirit of certainty, the lovers’ aim is not to do with truth and reality as with certainty of love and of being loved. I have already mentioned an arranged marriage as serving this purpose. But this also applies to the sphere of hypermodern love that runs counter to any permanent arrangement between spouses. This is what happens at the time of internet love, dating, and increasingly random encounters with love. Whatever happens at the end of any chatting, flirting is the certitude, albeit this time not of love but of the subject’s “freedom” that has nothing to do with liberation but with returning to where the subject was before the encounter. No one really seeks love anymore, no one is possessed by love or gives oneself to it truly, madly, deeply. What these encounters aim to preserve and affirm comes down to the certainty of the subject’s singularity. No one seeks love anymore because it can only be found, discovered as a haunting, whereas the internet dating provides space for the momentary jouissance of an encounter so that we can then return to where we were. And where were we? The prisoner’s dilemma gave Lacan an insight into what was at stake in the subject’s freedom, especially when the invaders were ubiquitous at the time. It gave rise to liberation and its logic. The time

172

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

of crisis, for example what Lacan called a “crisis of tears” in the time of the hysteric, or the crisis of uncertainty, or the crisis in love, leads to the cathartic experience turned method, which is where Freud started. How distinct was this Dionysiac experience, as discerned by Dodds, from the inspired prophecy of the signifying parapraxes and the poetic invention of the symptom in the later teaching of Lacan. Indeed, but first Lacan introduced us to the logic of a predicament, such as the dilemma of incarceration or of occupation. Approaching it from this perspective, Lacan was already advancing the as yet unformalised registers of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, which in some way derive from the logic of time. From the beginning the symbolic is for Lacan the key term, the chief coordinate of these crises that involve an encounter with the real and inscribe the failures of the encounters with the real. As for the register of the imaginary it appears linked to the instant of seeing, of perceptum, where it plays a part. Before the symbolic reaches and percolates into the real by penetrating into it, the symbolic is first absorbed into the imaginary. What does this mean? This is what Lacan elaborated already in the late 1930s under what became his hallmark, namely the mirror stage. There is an implicit, if not explicit, connection between the mirror stage and the predicament of the prisoner who, in deducing his exit strategy, has to first come to recognise what is what, tell black from white. In other words, the implicit connection concerns the subject as not capable of any move without first having to come into existence in effect of the specular formations that give the “I” its necessary mastery. Once the ego becomes the master of the imaginary relations with the other, the “I” can lay claims to mastery of speech. In the crisis of occupation, desire for certainty leaned for Lacan on what could be called the symbolic par excellence, the symbolic as such, namely the Other as a place of law or in this case the law of logic. The function of the Name-of-the-Father was already operative in this symbolic as such, and was even its very embodiment. Before the symbolic as such took the floor, the imaginary was ubiquitous and in charge in so far as it was guided and directed by the symbolic as the signifier. Lacan’s mirror stage and the specular investment in the image of the other as a precondition to the emergence of the ego, le moi, are already oriented by the symbolic function. But the laws of logic and of the logical function as such, elaborated by Lacan in the predicament of incarceration, make use of the specific

TO C O N C L U D E

173

variety of the symbolic, namely, the symbolic as such, which already presents itself as a movement, namely as a symbolisation of the symbolic. I will come back to it. Lacan noted that this had a real effect of the symbolic as deluded by the process of symbolisation. One could call the field of mathematics a kind of symbolic delusion from which the subject is excluded. What is the symbolisation of the symbolic in the case of the subject imprisoned by language if not an appearance of the real effect that introduces the subject as a prisoner into a process, to wit an analysis engaging in a progression of a plurality of logical operations? The same will happen to the Name-of-the-Father when Lacan goes on to pluralise it. As for the logic of incarceration it will undergo pluralisation, too, as it no longer provides one universal and conclusive solution for all called freedom, but a plethora of solutions responding to subject’s movement of liberation as facilitated by the psychoanalytic field. The problem of certitude, encapsulated by desire for certainty, so characteristic of every lover, inevitably took Lacan from the presentation of the problem as a sophism to the search in the plural for certainty that involved an encounter with and a crisis of the real. What does a “crisis of the real” mean here? It implies that in its relation with the real, the symbolic is not as successful and triumphant as it can be with the imaginary. If the symbolic is successful in its collaboration with the imaginary, this produces ideal effects, namely the ideal ego as formed in the process of the imaginary identification supported by the symbolic function of the paternal metaphor. With the foreclosure of the metaphor, there emerges a failure of the imaginary as a failure of the stable body image that the ideal ego fails to hold leaving it to either a fragmentation or slipping away, as in the case of Joyce, as Lacan showed. At the time of taking up the “prisoner’s dilemma” as a problem of certitude relative to freedom in 1945, Lacan proposed to seek a solution or plurality of solutions exclusively by way of the symbolic means as organised by the agency of the Name-of-the-Father. For each and every one of us, to the extent that we are all, one by one, prisoners of language, it is a question of finding a way of a desalienation from the master signifier, which can be logicised as a certain exit strategy. The signifier doubtless constitutes our prison and the conditions of liberation, which is why Lacan presented this paradox first as a paradox of overlapping circles, hence alienation, and later as a knot. In this sense the exit strategy I have just

174

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

mentioned leaves the subject uncertain as what he will come to find on the other side of the exit door is a different matter.

From the beginning to the end: analysis as a process With this uncertainty arising out of nowhere on the horizon of topology, we can move now to Lacan’s second elaboration of the end of analysis. I have linked it with his text “The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real” (2013b), completed in 9 July 1953, and shortly before the “Rome Report”. Symbolic, Imaginary, Real—it is in this order that Lacan situates the registers of which there are not two or four but three. And he does so by having followed through the primacy of the symbolic as I have stressed above. In particular, the primacy of the symbolic promotes the Name-of-the-Father as a universal agent for all the neurotic subjects. According to this logic of the paternal metaphor, or of the paternal logic, the law of the signifier serves as a guarantor of any algorithm, including the one that determines the steps of the three times or moments in the logic of time. The passage from the moment of seeing to the moment of understanding is crucial because within it can already be found the precarious vacillations in the relations between the symbolic and the imaginary. From the point of view of the moment of understanding, the time of seeing must have already occurred. If it did not, then the moment of understanding will not have taken place, that is to say, it will not have percolated to experience to produce the experience of satisfaction to allow the passage to the third and last moment to conclude. The real plays a part here and pulls back the primacy of the symbolic that has now turned into its supremacy. Having said this, can we go further and assert with respect to the paternal law that counting, the one, two, three of time, or the one, two, three times, owes its existence to the law of the father? In short, can we say that desire for certainty is determined by and depends on the universal function of the paternal law? It is this assertion, paradoxical in its premises and meaning, that Lacan will first stand on its head, and then pluralise it, as we have already seen. Once the door to freedom is reached, another process is about to unfold. Since the real as satisfaction, or not, interferes in and impacts on the process where the subject is implicated, Lacan will be led to seek a more even distribution between the realities of the subject. And he will introduce such a distribution by bringing in the triad of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real.

TO C O N C L U D E

175

With the uncertainty emerging on the horizon where the symbolic rules supreme, and with the experience of satisfaction somewhat colouring the pristine waters of the algorithm, desire for certainty assumes a different status. It must—and we have to follow this new direction—belong to the singular logic of the particular subject, who is faced with the deficit of the symbolic guarantees from the Other, and will himself pursue the contingent designations. With the arrival of the triad S, I, R, we thus encounter a certain rectification of the supremacy of the symbolic father. And this also has specific implications for the analytic clinic. For the first time Lacan identifies, locates and includes into the analytic process three registers. He is no longer concerned solely with the dialectic vacillations between the imaginary and the symbolic, as in the prisoner’s dilemma, but also with the real. The only sign of the real in the logic of incarceration/liberation was that of hastening, of arriving at the time to conclude and, then and only then, rushing to the door. And this would constitute a fourth step, namely an act. With the SIR triad, we could say, Lacan depurifies his own construction. Not that he nullifies the symbolic terms but this way of approaching the analytic experience—which, after all, forms our focus—will lead either to the loss of grip on the experience called analytic or will allow for the real to enter the scene. In fact the real has always been at the scene as it has never asked permission to do so. It crashes every party, stands things on the head, and leaves no trace on the way out. That’s why I said that reaching the exit door of language tells us nothing about the “other” side, and that every exit strategy in this sense is a failed one. One will have to introduce figures of topology already at this point to reorganise and rewrite the whole opposition of imprisonment/liberation in order to arrive at the point of reversal where the particular elements come to swapping places. Suddenly we find ourselves faced with the new reality or realities in analysis. Lacan’s elaboration of the S, I, R, presents analysis for the first time as a process that has a beginning, middle and end. The logical sophism is not a process leading from one point to another, but a subjective singular moment of searching for certitude and the uncertainty looming beyond it. As a process involving the registers of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real, it will from thereon orient Lacan’s teaching to the end. With these three registers Lacan maps out the analytic process. He gives us subsequently the coordinates of analysis itself, which is a

176

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

kind of map of the psychoanalytic experience. These coordinates on the map of an analytic process, called Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, are thus marked by Lacan as capital letters. The spaces between them are the actual processes, not one process but three, namely symbolisation, imaginarisation, and realisation, marked with small s, i, and r. The map now consists of the coordinates, processes between them but does not yet have direction that on the map is designated by a vector. The direction and the orientation are provided by the analytic experience itself to the extent that we are indeed duped by where we go. This quo vadis can easily accompany the itinerary of the subject who moves in accordance with the pleasure principle as much as a principle of uncertainty. It is the combination of the two, what we call a surprise, a little eureka, that allowed Lacan to sketch out the chart of analysis. There is no need to say more at this point except for asking, again and again, that one goes to see the analyst because of the suffering that sometimes goes away and then keeps coming back. This strange partnership, as one of many reasons for going to see the analyst to break away or even divorce from the painful partner, is not legible on the map from the start. First the analyst must be introduced to this unlikely yet necessary relationship in which he will play a part but not as a friend. The analyst, unlike a friend or a Samaritan or, some would say, a good priest, appears as a symbolic figure, that is to say, as a place from which anyone who comes to analysis can speak. And this signifies an expectation of a knowledge that can be asked for even if it cannot be promised. There is a reason why the analyst must refuse to perform the task of a Samaritan or else analysis will stall at the starting point. This reason has to do with the unconscious that, once the transference has been established, holds the key to the subject’s partnership with the repetition of suffering. In short, the key has been forged among the effects of the analyst’s own analysis. Other than that, there is no knowledge to say what the criteria of becoming an analyst are or what makes a “good” analyst. Who knows? If there is one, he or she will know. The analyst’s function does indeed appear to be that of the prison’s director who moves in and out of the prison, carrying with him as much certitude on the outside as on the inside. And this is a paradox of the analyst’s position. Therefore, the way he responds to the demand for cure, or at least to a demand to change the subject’s life, or at least one of the partners in it, depends on the place from which this demand is addressed. In this sense, it is not by accident that Lacan situated the very beginning of the analytic process,

TO C O N C L U D E

177

which consists of several subprocesses, as we shall follow, at the point of an encounter with an analyst, the symbolic instance par excellence but not only. Let’s follow Lacan’s steps.

At the beginning was the analyst. At least this would be our take on the beginning. What follows differs from case to case. We start then with an encounter with the analyst, which Lacan designates as the realisation of the Symbolic (rS). It is a good encounter in so far as the analyst receives the one who comes, whatever the reason, explicit or implicit, irrespective of sex and age, and listens without reserve. Anyone who has gone through this experience, will take with him this little memory. Not only does the analyst listen but he can also demonstrate it and, such is the assumption, understand the issues involved in an “objective” way. Speaking to the analyst, it seems, does not take place without the scientific pretences—there is always one assumption or another, the other one being equally obvious, which I commented at the beginning, namely that of a confession. One way or the other the analyst is placed in the position of an all knowing authority, someone who should know the truth, who is endowed with a prophetic insight to know the way to the future. And if the scientific and religious prejudices are not enough, there is always room for other expectations worthy of Pythia. Lacan took every indication of the supposition of knowledge as an indicator of transference, and was led later to speak about the desire of the analyst. In this way he marked an uncharted land on the map of science and religion. The realisation of the Imaginary (rI), which is the next step, involves an introduction of a narcissistic image into the process which amounts to the libidinal investment in the image of the ego, which is how the subject sees himself. And it was not without significance when presenting the prisoner’s dilemma that Lacan included a condition for solving

178

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

the problem, namely that the prisoner cannot see his own disk. This direction qua the Other implies the symbolic order based on the signifier of which logical deduction is a relative. The narcissistic investment introduces the subject to resistances to the work of the unconscious. For Lacan there are resistances only to the unconscious. This is further developed by the imaginarisation of the Imaginary (iI), a phase Lacan links with the subject being captivated by the image of the ego in the way in which the birds of feather fly together, to wit recognise one another as members of the flock and as partners to mate. It is also a good feeling to know that among ourselves we are all analysands, and sometimes even see the same analyst. The imaginary passion for the image has for Lacan the implications of a momentary immobilisation of the subject as a speaking being, namely as a desiring subject which implies a lack. This phase shows the ideal ego that Lacan placed at the bottom of the graph of desire and marked i (a). Further, we have the imaginarisation of the Real (iR), where, in addition to resistance, we can locate here any signs of the negative transference, which is still transference and sometimes even more powerful than the positive one, which can also give us a clue where it is positivised. In this sense this phase also includes moments of doubts and desupposition of the analyst and of analysis. The conjunction of the imaginary and the real at this point establishes a prototype of what Lacan of the 1970s will call the imaginary jouissance and situate it on the Borromean knot. This intersection can also be approached as a vehicle of hatred, or an underside of love Lacan called “hateloving”, hainamoration. The iR forms an area of narcissistic aggressivity where the image of the imaginary other becomes the basis of the death drive. But Lacan also spoke of the mystics whose experience of jouissance is located outside the influence of the signifier. If the subject is not psychotic, Lacan says, analysis will not remain as infinite at this point but will move beyond it to iS, namely the imaginarisation of the Symbolic. At this level the symbol is imaginarised. What kind of symbol? A dream, for example, or daydreaming. A recounting of a dream leads to symbolisation and in effect to a superimposition of the signifiers between which a new set of variables and plays on meaning will result. The iS designates what Lacan calls “analysis proper”. The analyst must recognise what he is for the analysand, what he is taken for, how he is loved, seduced, hated, taken in, and lured in this game of transference. What follows from there comes as the symbolisation of the Symbol (sS), and with it

TO C O N C L U D E

179

the symbolisation of the image (sI). The sS gives us the coordinates of the place and work of interpretation. The symbolisation of the signifiers, which are symbols, of the recounting of dreams, of relishing fantasies, constitutes an interpretation. But in this respect, we have learnt our lesson with Jacques-Alain Miller (1999) that it is not the analyst who interprets but the unconscious. It is here, in the sS, where the analyst, in so far as he has his symptom, his culture, which Lacan insists on, and follows the desire of the analyst, lends his hand not to the analysand but to the unconscious. This phase in the analytic process takes account of the parapraxes, slips, mistakes, which are symbols of the unconscious, to be interpreted, that is to say, symbolised. And since interpretation includes equivocation, the use of nonsense and punctuation, Lacan situates the sS beyond the point reached by the psychotic. A new stage in analysis is thus introduced. Having followed the cycle of analysis Lacan designed for us in those early or even opening years of his teaching, I am now left with two moments which deserve some attention. The first one of these falls on the symbolisation of the Real (sR). Lacan calls it the goal of “health”, which is ironic as psychoanalysis does not promote “health” but in this case, Lacan suggests, that it is time to reflect on the goals of analysis in terms of the symptom. It is not the adaptation to the reality of the Other as tradition, culture, universal morality that serves as the goal of analysis but how to manage with the symptom, on the one hand, and how to have the subject’s real organised and recognised as the subject’s desire in a diverse community. Subject’s particularity, and at times exceptionality, forms its points of orientation to the extent that the real Lacan speaks about has a stake in the particularity of the symptom that envelops it. The subject has been pushed all this way in analysis to grasp something of the real, to have some knowledge of the cause of his suffering, so that his castration and the loss therein can be realised. The symbolisation of castration can thus be designated as the lack in the Other or as barred Other, S (A /). What is the Real in question, Lacan asks? It does not refer to a general happiness of all in the style of John Stuart Mill, or to any other totality such as the mass happiness of the individual, to which the lazy subjects resign themselves, and which the cynics call “adaptation” (Zeller, 1980). The Real does not refer to cynicism either because when the latter comes into play, analysis is not over, has not come to an end. In this respect it is worth noting that for the cynic all ends are the same, all ends have the same value and purpose,

180

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

namely that they have no value and no purpose at all. This would be the cynic’s teleology and credo, namely that every end has the same aim that amounts to aimlessness. But Lacan knew his roses and was not a cynic. He recognised every end with respect to and from the perspective of the different effect it produces. For Lacan every end serves a different cause, which was already plain to Aristotle, which strikes us especially in the case of one called the end of analysis because the product of analysis is distinct to the effect of professional training offered, for example, by the school of dentistry. Whereas cynicism gives resignation on one’s desire a taste of success, the Lacanian telos remains a mystery in relation to the analytic end to the extent that it gives guidance to the symptom but not entirely, not completely, which means that not all has been said. Although an analysis has reached its logical conclusion, its end, it interweaves the dimension of the impossible to say, and therefore of fantasy, as well as a thread of the nonanalysable about which questions can be asked as it belongs to the order of practical knowledge. And in this sense it is clear that savoir faire is not savoir vivre. The end of analysis from the perspective of the S, I, R triad aims to give precise coordinates of the analytic process or cycle that will subsequently run several times over and overlap as many. And it is from the fabric of the threads that Lacan pulls out, one by one, the strings of the subject’s destiny in the analytic experience. He will then, twenty years later, tie up those strings into the knot that holds, or not, for the subject as one. The realisation of the Real (rR) appears to be the last stop on my journey on Lacan’s chart of the analytic process. The rR signifies a dimension where every signifier has the same dignity and value, which is the value of the one. Any signifier can represent the subject, which is the analyst’s position in transference, as Lacan says in the “Proposition of the 9 October 1967 on the psychoanalyst of the school” (1995). This obviously is not the case when one dream seemed more meaningful and important than another, and one fantasy generated infinitely more jouissance than another. This logical moment designates what Freud marked as an equal distribution of attention in the treatment of the clinical material in the session, which in effect favours an equal distribution of interventions relative to the subject’s discourse. I would take this “every signifier has the same dignity” in a twofold way. This is certainly not the case throughout the analytic process, which is why Lacan designated a certain cluster of signifiers as S1, as master signifiers that dominate the discourse. In this sense, the “same dignity” reminds us that because

TO C O N C L U D E

181

among the dominant signifiers none is dominant or, to put it differently, every signifier in the subject’s discourse has been dominant, dictating the direction of discourse. Firstly, then, the “same dignity” implies that as a result of the impact of language, of the signifier, on the body, the dignity of the subject rests on its raising from the object of the Other’s fantasy. Having thus become separated from the Other’s demand, the subject can exist as a desire that is incomplete, namely unrealisable, and in this sense unsatisfied. It is not so much that it is unsatisfied and therefore incomplete, like for Dora, but the other way round. Secondly, the equal dignity between signifiers at the moment of rR, reminds us of the order of equivalence between the Other and the symptom I spoke of earlier. In this sense each serves as a subject’s support, and a representation. In the principle of equivalence we can recognise Lacan’s formulations of transference. If analysis reaches the point of all signifiers being equivalent to one another in their value, then this determines the analyst’s position in transference. What is crucial for us in addition to this, will also provide support to what Lacan defined as the desire of the analyst. While in transference the analyst can be taken for anyone, and his authority on truth can be engendered by the most spectacular of expectations, the analyst’s desire strictly adheres to the equivalence of the signifiers because this is how it paves the way for the difference, even for the one Lacan called “absolute”. This difference marks the particularity of the subject, each one being different and unique absolutely, because for each one encounters differently the real and how it is enveloped in the analytic experience. It seems to me in this sense that the analytic process reaches the rR as a conclusive point in reaching this intersection of equivalence of the signifiers as a pivot of the analyst’s desire for difference in the subject’s articulations, and, on the other hand, of the symptom that determines the difference between the analyst and the analysand, and of which he is a partner, for better or for worse, because in the end everyone comes to have one’s own.

The literary end or beyond fantasy I want to move on to Lacan’s seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (2007), where he works on what I would call the “literary end”, which he approaches and elaborates in the last part of the seminar devoted to Antigone. “Literary” does not simply mean the letter but the literary figure, partly mythical, which in the eyes of Lacan does not make

182

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

her less real or unreal, although her desire is not, strictly speaking, an effect of subject’s articulations in the process called analysis. “Literary” also refers to fiction that had for Lacan the structure of truth as real. Although, to be precise, Lacan says that truth is structured like a fiction, it is clear that the fiction of the Greek tragedy introduces the dimension of truth of the real or truth as real, which is where Lacan situates Antigone. In this sense she is the one that goes all the way to the end, vanishes in it, and ends up without leaving any testimony of how she got there except for her act, and whether at the end of the road she succeeded in reaching freedom from the prison of her desire. In other words, and in Lacan’s terms, she completes her “pass” beyond death without giving us any testimony of it. Sophocles (1986) does it in lieu. In short, Antigone follows her desire to the death and, on another level, to the letter. In the final part of the seminar Lacan’s preoccupations gravitate towards what he calls the tragic dimension of psychoanalysis. And this is what interests me in connection to this third modality of the end I called “literary”. What does Lacan designate as tragic? What is the tragic dimension of analysis if not that the place where the subject is going all the way to the end, all the way to the letter, also happens to be the one that is distinct for everyone and never in accordance with the expectations one has of it? The tragic hero is subject to the error, hamartia, which even represents the hero, guiding and preventing her in some way from letting it all end well. This means that it always ends badly for anyone of us because the error is also the master key to the door leading to the place from which there is no way out. I do not mean this in the Sartrean sense of the word of the human choice presenting itself as an alternative to the fatum of the divine prophecy. The choice is only one, neither divine nor humanist, and has to do with the unconscious signifier that precedes us as we follow it. This gap remains to the end, and even Oedipus did not close it. Hence Lacan’s choice of Antigone—not to be identified with if you want to come to the end of analysis. In considering her actions—she reflects first, warms herself up to committing the act, she does not thoughtlessly leap to actions— Antigone is divided between guilt and desire. Her brother Polyneices is dead so she grants him a rite of burial to prevent his body from being ravaged by animals. Soon she will join him. She follows the desire of the gods, which is what Lacan calls the desire of the Other, to the death. She wants to die, has no one and nothing to live for. She only has her

TO C O N C L U D E

183

desire. This is the radicalism of Antigone who suffers as she will never have a brother, will never have her own off-springs. Following Lacan we have to present the two events in this order, namely first the act of burial, then the act of transgression. Why in this order? Because desire in its most profound dimension of the desire for death comes first. And because transgression happens as a side effect. What happens to Antigone as a subject, namely as the one who reaps the yield of her acts? She assumes her dignity through lament over the loss to become a subject. That’s a whole new chapter, a whole new book even. In accordance with Lacan’s logic of all the reals being equivalent and having the same dignity, she can find her place among many, could be anyone, which is why she was so special for Lacan. What is the logic of the end according to Antigone? Antigone dies the death of absolute solitude by being walled up alive in a crypt. Nobody knows what goes on in her tomb that becomes her body. All alone she is caught between life and death. The logic of the passage between life and death is shrouded in the logic of enigma. The logic of the end as Antigone enacts it, is that that it is to the end and to the death. At the end of analysis there is an enigma that lies beyond the dialectic of ciphering/ deciphering of the symptom. It is the illegible of the symptom that the subject lives with and survives. We could say here that the enigma is an effect of what Lacan called the “second death”. We learn from the psychoanalytic experience that one death is not enough. The subject can fantasise about death ad infinitum like the obsessional and the effect is exhaustion. It is only the second death, as Lacan names it, where the subject succumbs to the opacity of the hollow arising from the loss. The second death places the subject on the reverse ladder of her relationship with death which is the end. The first death can only be imagined by the subject, we could now say as the imaginarisation of the symbol of the end of life. Death is a symbol, the signifier par excellence, as wrested from signified. The imaginarisation of the symbolic must be distinguished for this reason from the symbolisation of the symbolic where, as Lacan’s logic of the S, I, R shows us, the impossible to say resounds as a lament and as a cry. For Lacan the second death is the symbolic death that arrives in the gap of the real. It can only be experienced as the work of the symbolic, as a symbolisation of the loss in the gap of the real that is without law. That’s where Lacan is taking us following Antigone. What happens at the end of analysis from the perspective of that relation? It is a moment when the subject assumes

184

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

finitude, which is not the same as limit, in relation to that void where the logic of enigma remains in abeyance. The subject reconciles with the impossible to say while saying it every time. The tragic dimension of psychoanalysis lies in the irreconcilability between the reality of the Other and the subject’s desire, of which Antigone appears as a striking example, indeed as éclat or radiance. There is no happy ending for the analysand who seeks happy solutions at the end of analysis. This is Lacan’s conclusion in this seminar. There are solutions that happen but they are not happy ones as a speaking being has not been made to be happy, as Freud already remarked. The end happens. And from the perspective of “the end happens” it is a happy end. Every end is happy. It comes to an end, it is finished. It is done. The enigma at the end of analysis, according to Lacan, is the enigma of the Other’s desire with which the subject will have lived at the point of the second death. Which is why what accompanies desire is anguish because anguish is an experience of the presence of the desire of the Other. Is this desire for Antigone the desire of her brother? The object a as a sign of anguish reminds the subject that the Other’s desire does not serve to heal a narcissistic wound but to remind him of the gap in his articulation when addressing the desire that causes his own. That’s why desire, as Lacan often repeated, remains unsatisfied, he even says unrealisable, as it guides the subject to the end which is the limit of what is bearable in the gap. Lacan chose Antigone because she did not waste time brooding over it but took desire all the way to the end. In this sense, Lacan’s insistence on psychoanalysis as an ethics rather than ontology stems from his ethics of desire as an instance of a singularity of the finitude and of the enigma of the Other’s desire. And we are familiar with Lacan’s motto not to give up on desire but to act in accordance with it. Why? Because if you turn away from your desire and do not live in accordance with it, you will still act in accordance with your desire. And this will show through guilt. Guilt is what the Catholic religion situated in the place of truth, and this was Lacan’s reckoning with regard to the final cause. In religion guilt takes the place of the final cause. For a Catholic, in the end there is guilt. According to Lacan, truth in religion assumes the value of guilt as final cause. And Lacan pointed to the truth in religion as a final cause when he spoke of the eschatology of the Last Judgment. Guilt as final cause provides a bridge to the Last Judgement as the place of the Other. But Lacan also found in guilt the traces of desire and this is what he exposed in his reading of Antigone.

TO C O N C L U D E

185

In this way Lacan’s teleology in his teaching on the ends of analysis subverts this eschatology of the Other as the ultimate punishment or reward, evil or good, and translates it into the subject’s responsibility for not understanding what the judgement called the last one will have supposedly touched on, namely some morbid jouissance of all. That’s why in his overview of the relation between psychoanalysis and religion, Lacan calls the latter in Seminar XI (1977) a “fundamental imposture” in the place of enigma. In the end Lacan narrows down his reading of Antigone and zooms in onto this one point, that of desire. And because she does not flinch from it and from the anguish that accompanies it, there is no trace of guilt in her. If anguish appears to be desire’s companion, the little trepidation that makes itself felt when we come to face the unknown in the Other, guilt is something else. It is a symbol of flinching, of withdrawal and cowardice. Lacan makes this implication when he introduces his aphorism of desire and tells us what happens when you give up on it. Not only are we then covered in guilt but this guilt is the very indication that we have, paradoxically, acted in accordance with our desire. The manifestation of guilt completes the paradox. It comes down to the refusal of subjectivity of desire that comes from the Other. How does one recognise this desire and what constitutes the refusal? One recognises it at the level of guilt, that is to say at the level where the demand of the Other is understood as a request that generates a compulsion to owe and to pay to the Other. One calls it obligation and it clearly indicates a different level to that of desire where, once I assume responsibility for it, I owe nothing to the Other. Acting in accordance with one’s desire implies an assumption of responsibility, which is tantamount with subjectivity. To fulfil an obligation and to give something away as a result, often leads to saying “and now back to reality”, in the sense that the wish I lived a moment ago is no longer mine. This resignation from the reality of desire in favour of the reality of another desire, appears to Lacan as the exact reversal of what he said from the beginning, namely that man’s desire is the desire of the Other. Have we ever asked what Lacan meant by this? What Lacan implies is a position of derivation and of inheritance of desire from the Other that may be refused and returned to the Other before being received. Not to receive, what I called to refuse to assume responsibility for it, are the same thing. Sometimes the subject would rather give some of his desire back to the Other, so to speak, than act on it. This giving desire back to the Other, or transferring it to

186

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

the Other, constitutes for Lacan the axis of the logic of guilt in the sense that by refusing a gift from the Other one also refuses to give to the Other. There is no “back to reality” without something being refused, perhaps abandoned as if it was the very object that causes desire which was abandoned before it is lost. I could add that Lacan may have chosen the cynic for the one who resigns. As I said earlier, the cynic turns the failure into success giving all ends the same value. But the cynic is no lesser hypocrite than the one he challenges as he has given up on the particularity of his own telos and of his own quo vadis which he is quick to impute that they belong to the Other of tradition. Was Creon such a cynic? Lacan depicts Creon’s position as the one who says: “back to reality”, back to the law that will sort things out for all of us. Back to the universal. His legislation puts him in the position of someone who owes and displays guilt. Topologically speaking, guilt and desire are neighbours to the extent that guilt can be found on the underside of desire, as we can see on the Moebius strip. But desire and anguish are the truly intimate, Lacan says extimate, partners as neither comes to life without the object a. Lacan’s take on what the end of analysis may be in accordance with Antigone’s desire, leads him to assert her decisiveness and intransigence, which should not be confused with stubbornness. She acts to the end, having crossed the fantasy of reconciliation with the reality of the Other. She enters the beyond as if she has always been there, always all alone. She has no one, feels deserted by her sister, her father is long gone and she will remain childless. Despite these tragic trappings of desire, the end of analysis approached from the perspective of acting upon one’s desire is a good end, because it is good to reach the end although it ends badly for Antigone.

Where is the object a at the end of analysis? In my fourth step, I would like to approach what could be called the object end in Lacan’s teaching, which he elaborates in Seminar XI The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Apart from the concepts called fundamental, for me this seminar is above all about love and object a. Nowhere else in his teaching does Lacan address this connection, this couple in this way—love through the object a. For Lacan, it is in some way “back to love”. After everything he said about love as the narcissistic love, the demand for love and to be loved, love’s perpetual reciprocity and as a gift of what one does not have, he now arrives,

TO C O N C L U D E

187

in this vein of “back to love”, at the junction of love and object a. But he arrives at this point having first traversed through what is new in Lacan’s exploration of love, in analysis called transference, which he situates around the subject supposing another subject to have knowledge. Lacan arrives then at this point of the epistemological love with the question that I would formulate as follows: how to speak to the one you love about the one you love? From the psychoanalytic perspective this could appear as the most fundamental question about love and will take a separate study. For our purpose, suffice it to say the question directly arises from Lacan’s formulation of love in transference. How to obtain knowledge from the one you love, by supposing he has it, about the one you love? The subject supposed to know as the invention of Lacan, although not without echoes to Augustine’s question about how to love the unknown, namely what does not have a meaning, accompanied Lacan throughout Seminar XI (1977) until the point when he was left with just the two: love and object a. This pair concludes his seminar, leaving us with some indications as to in what direction analysis may unfold and go towards the end. If Lacan situates transference around the unconscious as an enactment of it, and if he also calls transference there an enactment of the “sexual reality”, the question of what happens to this love of knowledge on the one hand, and the object a, on the other, becomes all the more pertinent. The term Lacan brings to the fore in these articulations is “liquidation”. Surely he is not speaking about the liquidation of the unconscious as it remains after the end of analysis, well beyond analysis. The liquidation of the supposition of knowledge is not tantamount with the liquidation of the unconscious. What does Lacan say about liquidation? In the “Preface to the English edition” (1977), written twelve years after he gave the seminar but placed at the ante to it so that we can always come back to it on the way out at the other end, Lacan states that liquidation of love called transference simply makes the unconscious all the more solitary. Liquidation of transference does not imply its disappearance or elimination but a dilution. Love becomes diluted as an effect of knowledge rendering the subject, and its signifier, solitary in the community of analysts. In the “Preface” love is friendship, filia, and knowledge turns into a new form of solitude that can be shared and transmitted as a failure of satisfaction of the subject supposed to know. To liquidate the presumption leaves Lacan with the solitary love for knowledge. And this step of going beyond

188

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

love of knowledge as a jouissance of supposing knowledge in the other, gives the object a what Lacan calls “a special status”. What is this special status Lacan gives to the object a if not a special status he gives to love beyond the liquidation of the supposition of knowledge in which he situates the deception that tends to liquidate, Lacan says “to close”, the unconscious? We have here a separation of love and the unconscious, and with it, of knowledge and the Other where this supposition has been situated in the first place. What is left in the gap between love and the unconscious is the object a, the remainder of the deception and confusion that held the subject hostage to the assumption he deserves to be loved.

Love

a

the Unconscious

This is what Lacan says at this point in his teaching on the object a as a formulation of the end of analysis. Lacan leaves us with an open question that I do not propose to answer here. What do you love in the Other if not the object a that, since it constitutes the major obstacle to knowledge, it becomes the aim of loves’s force in an act of destruction Lacan calls mutilation? This is how we can read Lacan’s question. Where there is a liquidation there is also a mutilation—but is it in that order? It’s a part and parcel of the special status Lacan attributes to the object a. What remains after the liquidation is a diluted love of deception and the settled sediment of the object. But because the object a now stands in the way to love, there is a mutilation. What does Lacan mean by that? The object a does not change. What changes is the place and the status it holds for the subject in the passage from the mutilation that comes with the discovery of the oral status of the object, where the satisfaction of gnawing at the body of the Other becomes legitimised and a norm, to the liquidation of the mirage of being the object of love. In analysis the patient gives himself up and over to the analyst by personifying the gift the analyst is supposed to recognise as worthy of love, Lacan says, because it embodies a part of flesh that was lost like that of

TO C O N C L U D E

189

shit or indeed of the nipple. How will it be refound and taken up in the psychoanalytic experience? At this moment of his teaching Lacan states that his only contribution to psychoanalysis was to discover the object a. Leaving the modesty— and the boldness—of this statement aside, let’s ask again where the object a is to be found. It is to be found, obviously, at the other end of the Seminar XI, in fact in its very last part, which is also the other end of Lacan’s elaboration of the drive. But it also heralds a new love after the liquidation of the supposition of knowledge in the other, whereby the subject assumes a radical disparity from the object a because it no longer constitutes a key to the phantom of unity but a mark of separation. First, then there are Freudian drives, oral and anal, to which Lacan adds the scopic and the vocal. In this way he makes another contribution to psychoanalysis. Each of these partial drives, indestructible as Freud called them, veils that part of the body where the real object is lost. Lacan mentions the nipple, faeces, the gaze, the voice, and further the phoneme, the imaginary phallus, the urinary flow, and the nothing. These objects, lost for ever from the start, will function as missing, veiling, lacking, leading desire by the nose or, as we say, causing it. This is what Lacan teaches us about the body whose image is constructed in psychoanalysis. It is constructed on the basis of the partial drives producing partial objects that are lost. It is not a whole body, therefore, a term that will become useful to Lacan some years later. Lacan calls this list of objects an impossible one. Why if not because each and every object on it carries something of the impossibility in it, of the real as lost and, therefore, of the order of the unrealisable, fragmentary, partial that sets desire in motion? In the end Lacan establishes a link between each of these objects and love to which they lead. Each of them provides a coordinate as to what direction love will take in the subject’s fundamental relation to the Other. It can be a nipple, the object through the loss of which the subject seeks his reward in the closeness of a woman when clinging, touching, expecting proximity and for this reason rejection. This breast love is accompanied by adoration and all the insignia of courtship Lacan found in the courtly poetry. Breast love reveals the oral status of dissemination of the message in the community of lovers, which is also the psychoanalytic community, because only here does one speak about love where castration—is it of the subject or of the Other?—has been realised first. Hence Lacan’s reference to the oral dimension transmitted by the Troubadours in the tradition

190

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

of the sung poetry. Breast love provides us also with the connection to some of the forms of haunting or possession, mania, I mentioned earlier, explored by Plato in Phaedrus (1973). In this case the vociferousness of the poetry’s transmission can lead to a more condense form, namely that of prophesy. The oral transmission of courtly love in the Middle Ages appears therefore as a reinstalment of the pre-Homeric mythos. But for the subject it always starts at the radical moment of experience of his first encounter with the Other’s body, which assumes its oracular status following the effects produced by the object loss. Or will it be the scent of the Other’s body to which is connected the disgust of the anal object, as Eric Laurent (2014) remarked, the faeces, but also the farts, the stench of the body secretions, which opens up, through more or less fetishised objects, a zone of the love discourse between lovers which revolves around the hygiene, routines of cleanliness, washing, fragrance, perfumes, house cleaning, etc.? The veil of fantasy is constructed in this way until the scent no longer protects the subject from the real but sends him off to another scent and in this way steers clear of the maternal das Ding to desire, albeit not without the fetishisation of the woman as an object. But it can also be the scopic object, namely the search for an illusion and a deception Lacan points to as a false transference. This nevertheless provides the subject with a lure of safety and security of being looked after. And it may push the subject like Don Juan in the direction of the beautiful he found in each woman beyond the attributes other men may find themselves preoccupied with, namely age, size, weight, height, etc. Or, it may be the voice that the subject seeks in order to be told stories of right and wrong, good and evil, terrifying and appeasing, and in the course of these be forbidden, ordered, rebuked, and then wanting not to hear what the Other says, namely about the Other’s desire, and which, on another level, is wanting not to know. As if this was not enough, once these impossible objects keep falling and dividing the subject, he will soon, if not before be faced with another question that arises in analysis: what was he for the Other? Was he, in the past tense, a piece of shit floating on the oceans of eternity his mother reproached her husband for aiming at? Or is he the one to be seen, the image always renewed and yearned for in his parents’ eyes and in his relation to him? Or is he heard so that the slightest nuances in his raspy or coughing voice turn into the question about his entire wellbeing? Or is he someone his mother clings to for comfort, having

TO C O N C L U D E

191

always complained she never had it from his father even if he never hesitated to give hugs to his own mother? This is what arose in analysis for the subject from the direction in which Lacan takes us. And he says in this respect, which is what the above contortions and confusions produce, that there is more in love than love, and there is more in you than you—the object a. This is Lacan’s orientation at the conclusion of the Seminar XI where the object a as both lost and supportive of fantasy, may be added as the fifth concept. I am following Lacan’s modesty here to inscribe the object a into the psychoanalytic clinic of love. Having incorporated the drive into desire, which can be seen on the graph of desire as a demand coming from the Other, Lacan now inserts the drive into the clinic of love where the Freudian choice of the love object leads to the place the object occupies in the structure of the Lacanian discourse. This will be my next step. To mark this one, we could say that the object a embodies the one who gives himself over to the hands of the analyst, at which point the analyst puts the interpretation in the hand of the unconscious, as Jacques-Alain Miller (1999) proposed. The logic of excess, of drive excess, remains relevant to the end of analysis for a man in so far as the fall of the object as real involves the libidinal excess of the drive as nonsexual. When the object falls, if it does, then, structurally speaking, the lack arises in that place. It is not the real lack, as in the 1970s when Lacan will say that women do not lack anything. On that occasion he will refer to the jouissance of the body women are never short of, and even have it in abundance. Lacan thus implies that when it comes to the lack in castration, it is an entirely man’s affair. In Seminar XI, however, it is the lack that Lacan, strictly speaking, calls the object little a, and he italicises it. As italicised, the object little a and as real is situated behind the veil of fantasy that appears as imaginary. For example, an old retired singer may embark on the path of refinding his voice and will attempt to reduce his daughter to just that—the object-voice. As imaginary and supportive of fantasy, the object a, always italicised by Lacan, veils what is lacking in the subject’s relentless pursuit for satisfaction. In this sense, the object arises to the one that causes subject’s desire in his relations with women. Lacan did not give men any concessions here by relegating their relations with women to the object relations. A woman may thus appear as a-veil-able. The end of analysis according to Seminar XI (1977) may thus be formulated as a two stage process. Firstly, the subject’s demand for love

192

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

and the drive satisfaction are brought together through interpretation, which will lead him to the logic of excess. Thus, the unconscious facilitates the isolation of the object a as incarnated by the analyst. And, secondly, when love and the unconscious become separated, the analyst as an object incarnation becomes dropped, as Laurent says in his “Manifesto” of psychoanalysis in 2006 upon taking on the presidency of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, although the subtlety of quitter got overlooked in favour of “end of analysis” which in fact may be the case of “lost”, not only in translation. So the process of analysis moves from alienation to separation. What kind of desire therefore is it, the desire of the analyst, that it takes on its full function at the moment when the analyst is dropped?

At the end there is a discourse In some way Seminar XI can be approached as an introduction to Seminar XVII (2007) because the latter gives a social function to the object a. And it is from this perspective that I wish to take up the fifth modality of the end in analysis. The seminar on discourses turns the object a into a particular object in the social exchange whereby it is always omitted view except for the discourse of the analyst who incarnates it. The relation analysand/analyst remains part of the social bond but in a different way than in other discourses Lacan elaborated. In every discourse, the object is always in another room. But if you go to see the analyst, then the object is somewhere in the same room, too. We could approach the discourse from the perspective of the object. We do not have to approach it solely from the perspective of the signifier or ignorance parading as knowledge. The object a occupies a place in the discourse because discourse, unlike speech, involves an element and a part that is situated as internally excluded. It both belongs to the discourse as a surplus of jouissance produced and overproduced, and it is external to it, supposedly in another room. Lacan constructed the discourse to give an abode to the object as that which in the relations of the speaking being remains missing albeit the subject does not cease to talk about it. He talks to the Other, through the signifier about what? That which is not here, perhaps in another room, a different historical epoch, another country, another human being, in an opposite sex, and so on. The function of the a in this sense is externally included in the discourse but, to be sure, its place and function, and semblance, differs

TO C O N C L U D E

193

in the master discourse, also called the discourse of the unconscious, from the discourse of the analyst. In Seminar XVII the end of analysis could be formulated in terms of the crucial moment of a passage from the analysand to the analyst. To grasp the logic of the passage from the analysand to the analyst does not imply that the analyst, once he assumed his position in transference in relation to the subject’s desire, is no longer an analysand in relation to knowledge. For Lacan the passage I mentioned amounts to a change of the position in relation to the object a. What does he mean? In relation to knowledge an analyst remains an analysand. The resistances are on his side, as Lacan reminds us, he has his politics, he does not know that he knows. In other words, in relation to knowledge called applied ignorance an analyst remains an analysand without the analyst, assuming the latter was dropped. But why dropped? What happened to that love in the transference to knowledge and work that was liquidated, and to the unconscious as unliquidatable? In Seminar XVII Lacan proposes that the passage from the position of the analysand to that of the analyst is an effect of the change of the function of the object a in the discourse. That’s why Lacan singles out the analyst’s discourse as the one from the experience of which arise other discourses, namely those of the master, the hysteric, and the university. In accordance with my proposal that at the beginning was the analyst, we can see that at the start of an analysis is a subject intimating, in a more or less obstreperous and scurrilous way, a complaint directed to the one who was there before him, the analyst, because speech is the only medium of the complaint. The analyst, the symbolic medium par excellence, refuses to reply at the level of need, naturally, so that what can emerge at the level of demand, and therefore signifier whose ambiguous status must be thus retained, is a demand for analysis because there are clearly indications in all this that something the signifying chain circumscribes appears as missing, lacking—and where else if not in the subject? Based on the lesson of the Seminar XI on love and object a, we are in the position to say that the relation of one signifier, S1, to another, S2, is insufficient to account for the structure of the analytic process or even of the analytic session. This insufficiency arises from the way in which Lacan brings the sexual reality into the equation of the discourse. What is left from the loss of the real object emerges as a veil of the object, a trace of the thing, offered to the subject to make up for the loss with four object choices I have just spoken about. And because the real object

194

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

was lost, its production or reproduction does not cease which has the real effects. In the discourse, then, the S1 represents the subject who loves the other, and who attempts to intimate to the other about what he, the subject, loves in the other, namely the image of his ego or me, which is a sign of a lack. It is in the discourse, following Lacan’s lesson on love and object a in Seminar XI, that the object comes knocking on the door. And in the master discourse it does so at the moment when the subject intimates to the Other what he lacks. The lack may be experienced as a surplus jouissance, produced every time the master signifier fails to represent the subject in its entirety. But this is obviously not the case when the object a appears in the position of the agent, namely as that qua which the analyst responds to the demand for an answer. S1 → S 2 $ a The Master’s discourse

a → $ S2 S1 The Analyst’s discourse

What is the analyst according to Lacan? Someone who was there before me. And who for this reason might not know me until I tell him. Other than that the analyst is a product of his analysis. He is not a result of a training as a dentist might be. The analyst appears on the scene through that which his analysis reduced him to, a doctoral thesis reduced to a crumpled piece of knowledge he does not know, the suitcase whose contents he carries without having to open it. So it is not just a passage from the analysand to the analyst that stands out here because Lacan always spoke from that position of the analysand, never knowing where he will go, turn to or aim at. The passage from the analysand to the analyst may well reflect the logical moment when it turns out that speech, (S1—S2), as addressed to the other in transference, does not suffice although may be enough to give a problem a logical solution. If in the beginning was the analyst, who was there before me, in the end there is a discourse. From this perspective, in the end, there is a room for the analyst as analysand who is yet to be invented as the object a will have been produced. We could say from the perspective of Lacan’s seminar on discourses that the analyst was in the beginning because Lacan derives all discourses from that of the analyst. For this reason the analyst’s position as that of the semblant of object a, derives

TO C O N C L U D E

195

from the object being produced. In the end there is a discourse as a social relation of which that of the analyst and the analysand remains in some way primary and formative. What Lacan brings to our attention is that the emergence of the analyst has nothing to do with a production of knowledge. The analyst does not safeguard the production of knowledge which is left up to other discourses to do. What the analyst’s discourse produces are the master signifiers that are popping up here and there before they are processed and in some way recycled. If they are recycled it is because due to the real impinging on the speaking being, there is a failure in the transmission of the absolutely singular experience of the subject. In this sense the failure to transmit becomes integrated into the transmission and becomes integral element of any transmission called psychoanalytical. In the end only the analyst, who does not emerge as an effect of the production of knowledge, causes desire with his own desire as a result of castration. The remainder from the analysis I mentioned earlier comes down to a blank piece of paper that will never be filled in and the impossible to say that will be said over and over again. Lacan said that he always said the same thing. Nobody knows what this thing was but we can take his word for it. It is related to the object a as that which remains, and which the analyst embodies. First, then, the analyst, the one who was there before me, is dropped, Laurent said quitté— which signifies not only “left” but also “vacated”—and then reinserted into the discourse, into the place of the agent where, as dropped and vacated, and therefore as analyst incarnating the object, can cause desire by acting on the subject: a → $. While being in the same room as the analysand the object is also in another room.

The end of analysis according to the relation between the sexes In my sixth step, I propose to approach the end of analysis from the perspective of the nonexistence of the sexual relation. This approach will help us distinguish the end of analysis according to the sexes. What does it mean to say that at the end of analysis “there is no sexual relation”? It implies, among other things, that the end of analysis is different for a man and different for a woman. In other words, from the perspective of the nonexistence of the sexual relation, there are different sexual positions for the speaking beings at the end of analysis. In the course

196

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

of analysis the subject undergoes a process that produces an effect of feminisation. Lacan by no means tries to say that at the end of analysis we are all women. But he implies that at the end the subject is feminised because he is divided and responsive to the desire of the Other, to the body, to the lack in a way that shows an effect of transformation that can be called feminisation. He has dropped his daily compulsions and the brooding over only one thing. He can enjoy other things too. The loners become less lonely, the hesitant more decisive, the perfectionists can finally make mistakes, and those who have always made the same one, can at last make a different one. The single ones become mothers and fathers, the masters no longer feel tested and prodded by the hysterics, and the hysterics can put up with the nonexistence of the knight on the white horse, leaving it for their daughters. And they do not have to make ado about the desire that will never by satisfied and find another satisfaction. Once there is room for emptiness and void, the signifier can produce multiple meanings, the old jouissances can fall in favour of new pleasures, and this can have an effect of feminisation on the subject, which is tantamount with its particularisation. Analysis changes subject’s relation to truth and to mastery. Men rely less on the idea, and women less on the jouissance. In other words, analysis changes the subject’s relation to the Other sex and to sexual relations. The nonexistence of the sexual relation can imply, to be precise, that, in effect, the subjective position will determine whether the subject’s sexual position at the end of analysis be a masculine position, otherwise called phallic, Φ (a), or a feminine one, i.e., that of having access to a different jouissance beyond the phallus. In Seminar XX Encore (1998a), Lacan proposes that the ends of analysis for a woman and for a man are different. The disparity between their positions lies not in the opposition of one to the other, which is the position of science, but in the disparity between each, a woman and a man, in relation to the jouissance each of them has come to serve. For the speaking being, Lacan implies, it is the jouissance that makes a man or a woman. For a man, in so far as he is the bearer of the phallus, he succumbs to a limit and finitude, and therefore to a limit-jouissance. Lacan stresses, when dealing with the man, that in effect of castration, which itself is operative thanks to the phallic function, man’s jouissance follows the phallic limit to his endeavours in relation to the Other sex. The exception pertains, Lacan suggested, to a mystic, not every mystic, but a saint whose relation to God produces jouissance different to the one regulated by the phallus. This jouissance

TO C O N C L U D E

197

makes people ask him, Lacan amusingly notes in Television (1990), about what he really gets out from it or gets off on. That led Lacan to speak of an analyst as a saint not in the sense of the epitome of the Good or as a martyr but as the one who subverts the symbolic order of the Name-ofthe-Father he found on the doorstep to analysis. The saint may indeed be a “hero” the world has not heard about but not in the sense of a leader of a mass movement, and only as the one who does not have to enjoy what the others do. As I proposed, every Benedictus has his Franciscus. But I do not wish to propose that becoming a saint could become a ground on which to formalise the end of analysis. The woman takes her exemption from the phallic function in a different way. And Lacan takes a further step to say that the woman does not have to follow the phallic ways. She may satisfy herself, if she so chooses, with the pursuit of the phallic signifier, which was the only way for Freud. But there is another way Lacan brought to our attention and he called it the feminine way. The woman, as the Woman that does not exist, has a relation with the Other as lacking, S (A /), and Lacan says that this relation opens her to infinity to the extent she is not-whole [pas-tout]. The woman has access to the castrated Other as the one who is suffering, dying, the old man whose relation to his body is outside his mastery. It is in this way that Lacan refers to Bernini who seems to have captured Santa Teresa as the woman over a sapless male body that does not cease to die, while carrying to infinity the wound of an incomprehensible passion of death. For Bernini, at least, it all came down to the grimace of the lips we call ecstasy of the woman he encountered. For Lacan this was not the end. I will conclude by noting that Lacan’s lessons of the seminar Encore come to discern two different ways in which the formula “the sexual relation does not exist” can be inscribed at the end of analysis, different for a man and different for a woman. Lacan reformulated Freud’s Oedipus, or even his own Oedipal logic that we can still find at the end of the seminar on Ethics. He subsequently reformulated Freud’s idea of the end of analysis but not just because for Freud the dissolution of Oedipus complex marked the end of analysis. As we know this did not prevent Freud from distinguishing an incomplete analysis from an unfinished one. In the end, “the sexual relation does not exist” accounts for the impossibility of writing a relation with the Other jouissance that does not exist, J (A), that is to say, cannot be written in conjunction or as added to the phallic jouissance, J (Φ), of which we have a taste thanks

198

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

to language and therefore symbolise it. The Other jouissance remains nameless, and radically outside the symbolic order in which things are written with the signifier. If Lacan included the other jouissance in the writing of the Borromean knot, because the knot is to be written, it was to show that it cannot be symbolised and belongs to another dimension, that of the junction of the Imaginary and the Real. Can analysis come to an end on the point of jouissance that cannot be symbolised? Everyone can start analysis as a man but not everyone has to finish it as a man.

The sinthomatic end For my seventh step on the itinerary across the ends of analysis in Lacan’s teaching, I propose the one we could call a sinthomatic end. At the very end of his teaching Lacan was preoccupied with the topological realities. In particular—and I have touched on this in more detail earlier—his work on Joyce led him to deploy what he had already discovered a few years earlier when working with the demand of the hysteric. What Lacan put to use in his formulation, first of the hysteric’s symptom, and then of a psychotic subject, was a Borromean knot. Joyce did not need analysis, had never gone to see an analyst. He had his writing, his incomprehensible art that allowed him to hold himself as a knot. It was not analysis but writing that provided him with that tool with which one does things, for example sutures the holes, makes up for the losses or ties up the loose rings. Lacan showed us how the fault in the knot that consists of three rings can be tied up. If one of them falls out, which for Joyce in particular was that of the Imaginary that consists in giving a body image its firm place in the structure of subjectivity, then they all may collapse. But Joyce persevered without the Name-of-the-Father and to hold as a knot, invented the fourth ring, which was his writing and his ego. Lacan called this device as he called his seminar—Sinthome. Thanks to the sinthome the Imaginary becomes reinserted into the other two, and the knot holds. And this use of Lacan of the Borromean knot shows us that he found a new way to work with the registers of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. If they get untied, the purpose of the sinthome is to buckle them up. What is the difference between the symptom and the sinthome? The latter does not respond to the structure of substitutions governed by the Name-of-theFather. It only responds to what remains from the failure to substitute, from the real unaccounted for, the Nameless, and from the unconscious

TO C O N C L U D E

199

that is not repressed. The sinthome accounts for the real by way of the letter where jouissance finds its shelter, and in the end its abode. Jacques-Alain Miller went to quite a length to differentiate between the sinthome conceived in this way and the unconscious to which Joyce does not subscribe. The sinthomatic end in lieu of analysis must therefore be conceived as treating jouissance in the literary way, not in the way Sophocles treated the story of his heroine, subjecting his verse to the canons of a tragic play, but in the way jouissance finds its abode in the conjunction with the letter. For Lacan Joyce was held up by his artwork thanks to the topological, or specifically sinthomatic, intervention in his subjective structure. This was Lacan’s new way of responding to the real where the Nameof-the-Father is missing to account for the failure of subscription to the unconscious. The sinthomatisation of the fault in the structure of the registers is perhaps the new and last name of the end of analysis without analysis. The sinthome of Joyce is for Lacan a symptom without, or even outside, analysis in the sense Miller spoke of analysis without a cure. In this sense we can also speak of such an analysis without cure as an analysis without an end. What kind of haunting does Joyce’s sinthome present, what kind of possession takes over him? The sinthomatic treatment conceived as art that has no cure, and no end, which by Joyce’s own admission elevates his Art to eternity in the form of centuries to come, makes his haunting that of a prophecy. It is a kind of prophetic bet that can only be put to a test by the university discourse Joyce inadvertently addresses. This prophetic possession Joyce gives himself to presents itself as an analysis without analysis, without cure, without end and without, we could add, the beginning. There is a treatment, by way of knotting, but there is no analysis, that’s Joyce’s proposal. From the perspective of the end I call sinthomatic, we can consider by way of conclusion what kind of disjunction Lacan established between the sinthome and the unconscious. This disjunction manifests itself in Lacan’s commentary as a form of detachment, which is not without a link to the sensation about his body Joyce felt as a young man. For Joyce the sinthome becomes detached from the unconscious. And this, in effect, inserts the sinthome in a different mode of infinity than the infinity of the unconscious in the discourse. The infinity of the sinthome is the infinity of production that preserves units of the couple sealed by the letter and jouissance. To the extent that Lacan situates the symbol in

200

M O R E L ACA N I A N C O O R D I N AT E S

relation to the function of speech and life of the signifier, the sinthome annihilates the symbol. To be precise the sinthome abolishes the symbolisation of the symbol, which is sustained in the interpretation that takes an auditory notice, so to speak, of the signifier. This difference, as highlighted by Miller, between the sinthome and the unconscious, could be taken up as Freud did separating the vicissitudes of the drive. It’s not whether Joyce’s path of literal production falls under sublimation that bypasses repression, but that it goes the whole circle to the point where the sinthome no longer has any links to repression which was central for Freud in his formulation of the symptom formation. With Joyce we have a symptom without repression. Sinthome is a symptom without repression and therefore without the symbolic connection to the unconscious. Next year, in 1976, Lacan gave Seminar XXIV under the title L’insu que sait de l’une bévue, s’ail à mourre (1976–1977) where he asks about the end of analysis. The end of analysis comes down to knowing how to manage with one’s symptom. This implied for Lacan a knowledge of separating the rings, the symbolic, the real, and the imaginary, in order to put them to use one by one. Having gone all this way to distinguish the symptom and the sinthome, can we now say, in these last years of Lacan’s teaching, that they are equivalent? To manage the symptom, like Pythia, like Joyce. I finish here. What kind of telos is the end of analysis? In the end, does one manage the symptom or crossing the fundamental fantasy? I have distinguished a few such logical moments in Lacan’s teaching, between the fantasy and the symptom, those where analyses end and those where they do not end. The question of the end haunted Lacan to find a way in which to verify the analytic process, to testify to the experience of conclusion he called the pass. When there is an anticipation, the question remains open.

REFERENCES

Aristotle (1941). McKeon, R. (Ed. & Trans.) The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House. Aristotle (1984). Ross, D. (Trans.) The Nicomachean Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Augustine (1991). Rotelle, J. E. (Ed.), Hill, E. O. P. (Trans.) The Trinity. New York: New City Press. Barthes, R. (1979). Howard, R. (Trans.) A Lover’s Discourse. London: Jonathan Cape. Blanchot, M. (1981). Davis, L. (Trans.) The Gaze of Orpheus. London: Station Hill. Camus, A. (1983). O’Brien, J. (Trans.) The Myth of Sisyphus. London: Penguin Books. Dodds, E. R. (1951). The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Duras, M. (1986a). Seaver, R. (Trans.) The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein. New York: Pantheon Books. Duras, M. (1986b). Bray, B. (Trans.) The Malady of Death, Grove Press: New York. Duras, M. (1990). Bray, B. (Trans.) Practicalities. London: Collins. Duras, M. (2006). Bray, B. (Trans.) The Lover. Harper Perennial: London. Freud, S. (1891b). On Aphasia: A Critical Study. S.E., 1. London: Hogarth.

201

202

REFERENCES

Freud, S. (1900a). The Interpretation of Dreams. S.E., 4 & 5. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1909d). Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis. S.E. 10: 151–318. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1910i). The psychoanalytic view of psychogenic disturbances of vision. S.E. 11: 209–218. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1913i). The disposition to obsessional neurosis. S.E. 12: 311–326. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1914c). On narcissism: an introduction. S.E. 14: 67–102. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1916–1917). Lecture XXII: Some thoughts on development and regression—aetiology. In: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. S.E. 16: 339–357. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1917c). On transformations of instinct as exemplified in anal erotism. S.E. 17: 125–133. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1921c). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. S.E. 18: 65–143. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1923e). The infantile genital organisation: an interpolation into the theory of sexuality. S.E. 19: 139–145. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1924e). The loss of reality in neurosis and psychosis. S.E. 19: 147–153. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1930a). Civilisation and its Discontents. S.E. 21: 59–146. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1950a [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology. In: Pre-psychoanalytic publications and unpublished drafts. S.E. 1: 283–397. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1950a [1892–1899]). Extracts from the Fliess papers. In: Prepsycho-analytic publications and unpublished drafts. S.E. 1: 283–397. London: Hogarth. Graves, R. (1996). Greek Myths. London: The Folio Society. Greer, G. (1999). The Whole Woman. London: Doubleday. Heidegger, M. (1971). Hofstater, A. (Trans.) The thing. In: Poetry, Language, Thought. (pp. 165–186). New York: Harper & Row. Jaspers, K. (1966). Manheim, R. (Trans.) Anselm and Nicholas de Cusa. London: A Harvest Book. Joyce, J. (1977). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Granada. Joyce, J. (1992). Finnegan’s Wake. London: Minerva. Kafka, F. (1992). Pasley, M. (Trans.) Before the law. In: The Transformation and Other Stories. (pp. 165–166). London: Penguin Books. Kant, I. (1964). Meredith, J. C. (Trans.) Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. (1997). Gregor, M. (Trans.) Critique of Practical Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

REFERENCES

203

Kierkegaard, S. (1995). Hong, H. V. & Hong, E. H. (Trans.) Works of Love. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lacan, J. (1976–1977). Le Seminaire, Livre XXIV: L insu que sait de l une bévue s aille à mourre. Unpublished. Lacan, J. (1977). Miller, J. -A. (Ed.), Sheridan, A. (Trans.) Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. (1964). London: Penguin. Lacan, J. (1979). Evans, M. (Trans.) The individual neurotic’s myth. (1953). Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 48. Lacan, J. (1988). Forrester, J. (Trans.) Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique. (1953–1954). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacan, J. (1990). Copjec, J. (Ed.) Hollier, D., Krauss, R., & Michelson, A. (Trans.) Television. New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (1992). Miller, J. -A. (Ed.) Porter, D. (Trans.) Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. (1959–1960). London: Routledge. Lacan, J. (1993). Miller, J. -A. (Ed.) Grigg, R. (Trans.) Seminar III: The Psychoses. (1955–1956). London: Routledge. Lacan, J. (1995). Grigg, R. (Trans.) Proposition of 9 October on the psychoanalyst of the school. (1967). Analysis, 6: 1–13. Lacan, J. (1998a). Miller. J. -A. (Ed.), Fink, B. (Trans.) Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Encore. (1972–1973). New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (1998b). Miller, J. -A. (Ed.) Le séminaire: livre V, Les formations de l’inconscient. (1957–1958). Paris: Seuil. Lacan, J. (2005). Miller, J. -A. (Ed.) Le séminaire: livre XXIII, Le sinthome. Paris: Seuil. Lacan, J. (2006a). Miller. J. -A. (Ed.), Fink, B. (Trans.) Logical time and the assertion of anticipated certainty. (1945). In: Ecrits, (pp. 161–175). New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (2006b). Miller. J. -A. (Ed.), Fink, B. (Trans.) Position of the unconscious. (1960). In: Ecrits, (pp. 703–721). New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (2006c). Miller. J. -A. (Ed.), Fink, B. (Trans.) The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire. (1960). In: Ecrits, (pp. 671–702). New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (2007). Miller, J. -A. (Ed.) Grigg, R. (Trans.) Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. (1969–1970). New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (2011). Miller, J. -A. (Ed.), Le Séminaire, Livre XIX, … ou pire (1971–1972). Seuil: Paris. Lacan, J. (2013a). Miller, J. -A. (Ed.) Le séminaire: livre VI, Le désir et son interprétation. (1958–1959). Paris: Editions de la Martnière. Lacan, J. (2013b). Fink, B. (Trans.) The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. In: On the Names-of-the-Father. (pp. 1–52). London: Polity.

204

REFERENCES

Lacan, J. (2014). Miller, J. -A. (Ed.), Price, A. R. (Trans.) Seminar X: Anxiety. (1962–1963). Cambridge: Polity. Laurent, E. (2014). Price, A. (Trans.) Speaking through one’s symptom, speaking through one’s body. Hurly Burly, 11: 138–153. Leguil, F. (2002). Menzies, H. & Dachy, V. (Trans.) The pass and teaching. Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 8: 149–161. Miller, J. -A. (1999). Voruz, V. & Wolf, B. (Trans.) Interpretation in reverse. Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 2: 9–16. Miller, J. -A. (2000). Jauregui, J. (Trans.) The six paradigms of jouissance. The Lacanian Ink, 17: 10–47. Miller, J. -A. (2001). Dravers, P. & Voruz, V. (Trans.) The sinthome, a mixture of symptom and fantasy. Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 5: 9–31. Miller, J. -A. (2004). Wolf, B. (Trans.) Equivalence between the Other and the symptom. Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 12: 7–25. Miller, J. -A. (2013). Miller, J. -A. & Jaanus, M. (Ed.), Price, A. (Trans.) Everyone is mad. Culture/Clinic, 1: 17–42. Nancy, J. -L., & Lacou-Labarthe, P. (1992). Raffoul, F. & Pettigrew, D. (Trans). The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan. SUNY Press: Albany. Plato, (1973). Hamilton, W. (Trans.) Phaedrus. London: Penguin. Rank, O. (1989). Tucker, H. Jr. (Trans.) The Double. A Psychoanalytic Study. London: Karnac, Maresfield Library. Rilke, R. M. (1980). Leishman, J. B. (Trans.) Selected Works. Volume II: Poetry. London: The Hogarth Press. Rougemont, D. de (1972). Belgion, M. (Trans.) Love in the Western World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sophocles, (1986). Fagles, R. (Trans.) Antigone. In: The Three Theban Plays. London: Pelican. Valéry, P. (1977). Paul, D. (Trans.) Man and the sea shell. In: Anthology. (pp. 108–135). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Zeller, E. (1980). Palmer, L. R. (Trans.) Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy. New York: Dover Publications.

INDEX

Baroque 147 Barthes, Roland 6, 8–9, 16 beauty 44–45, 47, 56 Befriedegungserlebnis (experience of satisfaction) 153–154 Being 70 belief 67, 70 Bernini 16, 30, 197 Bichat, Marie-Francois 151 Blanchot, Maurice 93 blindness 146 body 64, 120, 146 psychosis in 110, 119–120 Borromean knot 66, 98, 101, 106, 198 Brentano, Franz 128

Abelard 136 Abraham 29 Aeschylus 49 agalma 162 Agamemnon 30 Aimée (Huguette Duflos) 95–96 alienation 59 anal object 72, 80–81 anamorphosis 44, 46 Anaximander 47, 125, 165 Anaximenes 126 Antigone 41–62, 84, 146, 181–185 anxiety 31–32 Aphrodite 129, 167 Apollo 167 Aristotle 18–20, 28, 45, 90, 125, 128, 139–140, 166, 180 Augustine 22, 25, 27, 30, 59, 141 Aurillac, Gerbert de (Pope Sylvestre II) 135

Camus, Albert 68 Cantor, Georg 15–16, 18, 67 caritas 38–39, 57 Carrabino, Riccardo 98

205

206

INDEX

Cassandra 32 castration 23, 80–81, 83–85, 91, 147, 179, 196 Cathars 136 Catholicism 38, 184 cause 126–127, 146–149, 166, 184 Christ 39 Clérambault 95 commandments 38 creationism 11 Creon 45, 50, 55–58, 90, 186 Cusa, Nicholas de 141, 147–148, 157 cynicism 179–180, 186 Dali, Salvador 45 death 79–80 two deaths 51, 62, 183 debt 71, 73 deception 137 délire à deux 95–96 Delphi 146 delusion 49, 113 demand 55, 65, 76, 79, 86, 133, 137, 159, 176, 185, 191, 193 Democritus 13 Descartes, René 21 désêtre 27 desire 53, 56, 62, 84, 134, 154–155, 164, 168 analyst of 69, 157, 181 death for 45, 62, 182 deculpabilitation of 53–54, 58, 84 giving up on 185–186 hysteric of 65–66, 87–90 obsessional’s 65, 75, 79 Other of 21, 86–87, 89–90, 157 Ding, das 35–36, 46, 58 Dionysus 167 discourse 129–130, 140, 144, 147, 192 analyst of 89–90, 155, 158, 161– 162, 195 hysteric of 64, 88, 90, 142, 160

master of 88, 91, 139, 144–145, 152, 194 university of 141, 148–151, 153, 158 dizziness 48 docta ignorantia 149, 157, 162 Dodds, E. R. 167, 172 dominanta 145 Dora 91, 120, 133 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 128 dream 178 drive 55, 83–84, 136–137, 191 pregenital organisation of 76–77 death drive 166 demontage of 106 Dumb and Dumber 162–163 Duras, Marguerite 6–8, 15, 21, 26 ego 60, 83, 116–117, 120, 122, 141 Entwurf (Project) 32 epiphany 50 equivocation 120, 123 Eros 167 erotomania 79, 87, 95 Es 152–154, 160–161, 163 Eurydice 25, 134–135, 137 ex nihilo 29 extimate 140 family romance 71 fantasy 43, 46, 48, 50–52, 84–85, 89, 117 feminisation 196 fetish 190 Flaubert, Gustav 41 Fliess, Wilhelm 156 Freud, Sigmund 9, 27–29, 32–34, 38– 39, 45, 54, 58, 63–64, 70–74, 80–81, 87–89, 92, 99, 102, 114, 116, 119, 122, 126, 128, 136, 140–141, 146, 152–153, 156, 160, 172, 180, 184, 197, 200

INDEX

generosity 75–76 globalisation 16–17 God death of 37 particle 13 unconscious as 146 Goethe, Wilhelm 6, 31 good 53 Gracian 136 Graves, Robert 68 Greer, Germaine 17, 22 guilt 53–54, 68–69, 168, 184–185 Hades 25, 135 hatred 28, 39 Hegel, G. W. F. 123 Heidegger, Martin 12–13, 27, 48, 143 hero 50, 182 Holbein Ambassadors 45 Humpty Dumpty 158–159, 163 hysteric 142–143 hysterisation 87, 90 ignorance 45, 116, 125, 129–131, 137–140, 143, 147, 193 analyst of 129, 134, 155–157 hysteric of 145–146 professor of 150, 159 illusion 44 image totality of 75 imaginary 9, 132, 172 interpretation 135–136, 179 Ismene 50 Jacobson, Roman 1, 100 Jason 42 Jaspers, Karl 96 jouissance 8, 22, 24, 30, 48, 50, 70–72, 103, 134, 144, 196 discourse in 153–154

207

feminine 8, 16 Other of 32–34, 53 phallic 29–30, 90–93 surplus as 55 Joyce, James 14, 54, 98–99, 104–105, 109–110, 112, 114, 117–123, 128, 167, 198–200 Juan, Don 8, 190 Jung, Karl 112 Kafka, Franz 70 Kant, Immanuel 36–39, 47–49, 56, 159 Keats, John 31 Kierkegaard, Soren 34 Kleene, Stephen Cole 108 knowledge 90, 125, 127–130, 139, 148, 152–153, 159–160 analyst’s 149–150 and belief 133 miscognition (méconnaissance) as 35, 46, 131–132 real as (savoir y faire) 153, 180 unconscious as 126, 133–135 Lacan, Jacques, throughout lack 11, 61, 87, 122, 179, 191 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 20 Lady 10, 93 lalangue 87, 113, 115, 129, 154–155, 157 language 21–22, 62, 67, 117, 121, 127, 155 Laurent, Eric 20, 121, 190, 192, 195 law 55 Lear 61, 129 Leclaire, Serge 129 Leguil, Francois 149, 163 Leibniz, Gotfried 13 letter 1, 118, 120–121, 136, 199 libido 64, 102 lie, lying 32 life 151

208

INDEX

limitless 47, 49 lips 74 loss 142, 154, 157–158, 162–163 reality of 116–117 love 5–7, 9, 14, 22–24, 29–30, 36, 87, 91, 147, 171 and hate (hainamoration) 19–20 and knowledge 25, 32, 187 and object a 186–187, 191 neighbour of 33–34, 38–40 lure 45 Luther, Martin 92 Lysistrata 143 master 88–90, 143, 149 Masters & Jones 25 materialism 59, 121–122 meaning 62, 101, 114, 121 Medea 42 metonymy 100 Mill, John Stuart 179 Miller, Jacques-Alain 14, 19–20, 42, 45, 54, 60, 65, 71, 84, 99–100, 103–106, 115, 135, 139, 152, 158, 160, 167, 179, 191, 199–200 mirror stage 131, 172 Morgan, Augustus de 107–108 mother 82 phallic as 91 myth 68–69 name pluralisation of 98 Name-of-the-Father 34, 66, 78, 96, 99–103, 116, 121, 139, 157, 173–174, 197–198 Nancy, Jean-Luc 19 narcissism 76–78, 83 Nebenmensch 117 negation 131 neurosis 66, 97, 116

obsessional 33, 63, 75, 84, 89, 117 hysteria 53, 64–66, 88–90 Nietzsche, Friedrich 58, 159 nothing 68 object a 7, 21, 46, 50, 83–86, 88–89, 134, 188–189, 191–192, 194–195 cause of desire 4, 62, 157–158 gaze 26, 80–81, 190 voice as 190–191 Oedipus 14, 33, 59, 102, 197 One 5, 13, 25–29, 115 oral object 86, 188–189 Orpheus 25, 134, 137 Other 75–77, 79, 81, 84, 100–101 inconsistent as 86, 144 equivalence as 103–104, 114, 181 Other of 118, 138 paternal metaphor as 96–101, 103–104, 113–115, 121 Other sex 3–4, 7–8, 25–26 pain 51–52, 65 Papin sisters 95 paranoia 96, 99, 132 Paris 129 parlêtre 129 passion 44–45, 129–130, 140, 147 penis 81 Pericles 103 perversion 52, 97 phallus 2–3, 11, 21, 23–24, 67, 78, 81–84, 93, 196 phallic object 46 philosophy 150 Pindar 167 Plato 21, 125, 139, 167, 190 pleasure 74 Plouto 74 Polineices 182 Prometheus 74, 110

INDEX

Proust, Marcel 117 psychoanalysis 60, 66, 69, 126 beginning 168 ethics of 38, 151 logic of end 166 process as 175 teaching of 163, 194–195 tragic dimension of 182, 184 without end 166, 199 psychosis 66, 95–97, 104, 106, 116– 117, 166 ordinary psychosis 99 schizophrenia 122 punishment 80 fantasy of 72 Rank, Otto 79 Ratman 63, 65, 70–80, 82 reading 1 real 37, 44–45, 48–49, 100–101, 130, 134, 137–138, 142, 172 regression 76 repetition 45–46 representation (Vorstellung) 92, 153 representative of 154 repression 116–117, 200 resistance 133–134 responsibility 151, 168, 185 Rilke, Rainer Maria 47 Rougemont, Denis de 10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 58, 103 rubber logic 109 Rumplestiltskin 17 sacrifice 29 Sade, Marquis de 37–38, 51–53 saint 196–197 Saussure, Ferdinand 1 Schliemann, Heinrich 162 school 163–164 Schreber, Daniel 95, 99, 113–114, 121–123

209

science 69, 126 scopophilia 73 Searle, John 22 semblance 11, 22, 99 sexual position 196 relation as nonexistent 3–4, 195–197 sexual revolution 70 sexuation 90 shame 168 Sharpe, Ella 46 Shrek 17 signified 101 signifier 1, 12, 100, 115, 120–121, 180 master signifier 88–89, 138–139, 145, 148, 151–152, 195 of the lack 4, 21, 29 sinthome 29, 98, 101–102, 111–115, 120–122, 198–200 Sisyphus 68, 79 Socrates 133, 156, 160 Sophocles 57, 182, 199 structure 135 subject 2, 39, 59, 66, 126–127, 136, 138, 144, 170, 179, 195 certainty of 170–175 divided as 64–65 happy as 32, 61, 137 supposed to know as 132–135 sublime 47–49 substitute (ersatz) 116–117 superego 78 maternal 33 suppléance 113–115, 117 symbolic 99–103, 130, 172 symptom 28, 45–46, 50, 166–169, 200 formal envelope of 102, 130 partner-symptom 104–105 Tantalus 74, 79, 87 teleology 166–167, 185

210

INDEX

Thales 125 thinking time 152 logical time 170, 174 topology 69, 93, 117–120, 156–157 transference 9, 68, 133, 136, 187 psychosis in 104, 112 trilitteral 106, 115 Troubadours and courtly love 9–11, 189 truth 32, 45, 91, 134, 137–138, 182 unconscious 11, 44, 54, 112, 118, 123, 143–144, 146, 156, 161, 179, 199–200 understanding 131–132, 165

Valéry, Paul 169 veil 43–44, 56 Verdrängung 113 Verwerfung 96, 113 Xenophanes 27 Wahrnehmunszeichen (signs of perception) 21 woman not-whole/not-all as 8, 15–16, 197 phallic as 46, 197 writing 110, 112, 198 Zeus 74