1.- The Letter and the Signifier
I agree with Elsa Andrade when she translates accurately Lacan's “parlêtre” as a “
hablaletra,” or a “parle-lettre.”
[1] I consider that writing and speech existed simultaneously—and when I say speech, I don’t mean just an articulated, verbalised speech but above all, speech as a function of exchange—writing existed even before its graphic invention. Indeed, the entire signifier’s concatenation is made up of littorality thanks to Lacan's littoral letter; in other words, it is established (and the signifier too) on the letter. I won't go into a logical explanation of what constitutes the signifier’s concatenation. But for sure, a signifier exists neither predicatively nor ontologically, and it doesn't benefit (would that be a benefit?) from any extrinsic foundation in regard of his connection to the representance (Freud
dixit, speaking of the drive) with another signifier that has no more ontological existence, no signifier is grounded on itself. Hence the function of the Other, which ends up absorbing signifiers, and as Lacan said, it becomes the “treasure of signifiers.” But when a signifier vanishes (and thus the subject in its alienation) as soon as it has been effective in inducing a consequent on which it depends in return for its existence, is such an expression appropriate? Indeed, there is no catalogue of signifiers, and dictionaries only list words with their standard meanings, put into use by conscious and collective determinations that have nothing to do with the poetic inventiveness of signifiance, which brings into play the signifier’s creationism, the unconscious. That’s why Lacan maintains that the Other does not exist, which does not stop him from acting from his non-existence, precisely by supplementing it with functional hypotheses.
Speech’s writing is based on Lacan's logical time, being a hypothetical foundation that fills the lack of any extrinsic definition of speech (which would imply, for example, an exchange only to be useful), a definition that is intrinsically hollow, void, not to say literally “
vide” in French.
Hence the littoral is implied in speech and writing, because the littoral operates through scansions (
enstasis, which, as obstacles, are the occurrence of the letter’s character), through repetition, through ruptures... I insist on this point when Lacan said: "It
is precisely from what was not that what is repeated proceeds," a definitely recursive structure.
[2] This is why we put God in the empty place of the primordial one, making man in His image, that is to say, grounded on what is not, i.e., the absence that is thereby presentified (hence the mythical and metaphorical function of Freud's primordial Father). God is in the place of the primordial narcissism, which is related to the secondary and specular narcissism as the ego ideal, and which, according to Lacan, means to tend towards the Father, in French “
père-version.”
And again, according to Lacan (in the seminar
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), the signifier’s creationism only operates
ex nihilo, from nothing, or from what does not exist. And also according to Lacan, psychoanalytic discourse concerns the unary signifiance (unary because of being identified with zero), also worth S
1, the Lacan's unary signifier, a signifiance that is vital for the subject, vital means its existence, the subject is identified as the "signified of the pure signifier’s relation,
[3] which is precisely signifiance. There is no way that psychoanalysis means being ready to die or a catharsis but thanks to Oedipus as the function of the Father, an existence is produced and therefore implemented through speech; moreover, this existence is grounded on the castration complex, which means the inaugural void, “
perpetué”—the French word sounds like the father who has been killed—passed on to every subject. Therefore, psychoanalysis is a construction. Freud put forward the death drive’s concept—a death that precedes life—which founds a constructive psychoanalytical approach, but (despite his choice of vocabulary) only if the death
drive (which is the void passed on as a cut, a cleavage of the subject and a re- splitting of the signifier, a division that can be grasped as an object) doesn’t mean death or destruction. (Sabina Spielrein chose the wrong path. Unfortunately, psychoanalysis followed her, rather than Freud inaugurating the concept of the death drive.)
[4] Hence, the death drive supports life.
In this situation, asking what is writing in psychoanalysis implies several answers, which are not limited to the translation of what is said into what is written (even if utterance—as cleavage and concatenation, both associated—is writing). Transference is a translation that operates between the analysand and the analyst, a translation of one’s schematism into the other one´s schematism, and reversively [
réversivement]. So the whole of psychoanalysis is writing (and any writing is always rewriting): cure, pass, cartel... The analysand's discourse is inseparable from his interpretation. And Lacan's separation (in counterpoint to alienation) is a production:
se parere. This production implies psychoanalysis in its devices: cure, pass, cartel, which are themselves modes of writing in their real, and fundamentally of writing the void. Hence psychoanalysis brings into play recursive functions,
[5], based on the reading that such writings require.
[6]
But reading means what is expressible (the Stoic
lecton), which passes from the grapheme (whatever its mode) to signifiance, and then to the signifier, and to the signified. Derrida's choice of such a grapheme is nothing more than a “scientific delirium,” according to Lacan, apropos the introduction of
Le verbier de l'Homme aux loups d’Abraham et Torok
. Writing can’t be considered as an inscription (and Freud's reference to the magic Notepad is inappropriate); however, as Lacan says, writing does support the signifier, which is why I consider a use other than note-taking, but rather Freud's concept of the
Niederschrift.
The littoral of letter
[7] implements a particular
topos (ranging from rhetoric to Grothendieck's topos, via vectorisation, lattices, and topology) that enables a passage (always reversive) from time to space, which cannot simply be a place (because this “place” is already the
topos), just as a place in the structure, as Lacan says, “displaces [
déplace]” the conception of the positions of structure. Because such positions of the subject in the structure
[8] involve their specification and the problem of psychoanalysis’ extraterritoriality, which is in no way extraterritorial. Of course, we have to read Lacan openly and in a secular way. In the 1970s, I remember that his speech in the seminar was simple and his vocabulary very accessible; whereas the same speech, transcribed in writing, makes he who executes (that's the word!) his will the founder of a Church, a clergy and an army. Hence José Eduardo Tappan Merino is right when he recalls Nestor Braunstein's position that Lacan should be read in a “secular” way (this word comes in reference to Freud).
Consequently, we understand that existence is not life, and that when life is over, existence continues through transmitted words; as in writings to be deciphered (Lacan).
But I'm less inclined to follow Nestor Braunstein in his distinction between positive sciences and negative sciences—I'd rather say discordant sciences and foreclosure sciences (that exclude the subject), such as the Nazi “medicine” of the extermination camps. That’s why I speak of impredicative sciences or predicative sciences—as in the difference between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics, the latter being more mechanistic. Impredicativity (one signifier represents a subject for another signifier) and recursivity go hand in hand, bringing into play the rhematic (functional), when the theme is predicative (bringing into play
forclosure, which means clearly nothing more than nouns in French).
I consider that dying well or badly is an objectifying dilemma, not that of a signifier. We have better bring the signifier (and therefore the subject) back into the equation, because it is the subject who dies, while the body corrupts, especially after death. And the signifier is everyone's business, just like psychoanalysis which is for anyone who wants to participate (which is neither a doctrine, nor a method, nor a technique...), despite the labels it has been given. In other words, psychoanalysis is new each time and what is merely repetitive is not analytical, and not the application of a technique.
In this case, speaking of politics is appropriate and can only bring jouissance into play, through the opposition between the subject's own phallic jouissance and the jouissance of the Other—or even (worse) between surplus-jouissance (Freud's
Lustgewinn) and surplus-value.
If politics does concern the relation between surplus-jouissance and surplus-value, nonetheless, politics eradicate phallic jouissance,
because, surplus value dominates to the detriment of phallic jouissance and to the subject
which disappears. Beyond that, counsciousness acts like a screen while the unconscious escapes.
The first session of the
Encore seminar—better said than transcribed with errors and misunderstandings in the official text published on Seuil édition—is anyway a reference for the question of void, jouissance, Oedipus and compactness, for example, Lacan’s saying "
Rien de plus compact qu'une faille" which means nothing more compact than a fault.
*
2.- The Letter’s Jouissance Is in No Way a Jouissance of Being
According to Lacan, jouissance of being is only that of signifiance, and I think that the letter’s jouissance underlies signifiance.
[9] It could be harmful to speak of jouissance of being with the meaning of my own philosophy, my schematism and, in psychoanalysis, my practice based on ontological position that, according to Lacan,
[10] is the source not only of logico-positivist ideologies and, more broadly, cognitive-behavioural ideologies, themselves sources and consequences of the exploitative societies that have been the only ones to exist in History and even to constitute it. But if theory and practice are grounded on signifier’s schematism (in Lacan's mode), a schematism based on the letter,
[11] we can only implement a recursive and impredicative schematism which encompasses and transcends ontology by renewing metaphysics in a non- spheric, dialectical, and littoral way, in accordance with the revision of transcendental aesthetics that Lacan called for. In addition to my initial text, I'm going to take up here certain elements of the discussion, particularly assertions that preceded mine. Let's just say that I’m going to clarify my theory of psychoanalysis as an impredicative science. In doing so, I also posthumously discuss with Lacan. I will reconsider my notes of 25–26 or even 27 January.
If we are willing to consider that Aristotle's
philia is not just a matter of friendship, but that it underpins every position of the subject in relation to a collective: family, friends, organized groups, etc., transference in psychoanalysis, then we are talking about love more than friendship, and therefore philia integrates friendship into all its effects, and politics takes on a new dimension.
As the signifiance, the void is the only “thing” that is transmitted (electively in psychoanalysis) and it founds the order of signifier’s organization in a multidimensional network. Consequently, the only thing transmitted is signifiance, and I consider that to be S
1 (which Lacan did not specify):
But what is transmitted is neither of the surroundings of the void nor of the commemorations of its constitution that involves negations that deconstruct the world, a world constituted of (extensional) objects in relation to the intensional void (Augustine's
intensio/intentio) of signifiance, nor is the structure of this void. In other words, the choices that are based on this void and that found non-spherically the void itself will not be transmitted. More precisely, the void is transmitted without its foundations, but not without consequences.
In the same vein, if we look at poetry, what poetry transmits can only be attributed to what it induces: both a modification of the subject (and, overall, a new subject) and a modification of reality. But the fact that there are so many cursed poets does not mean that you have to want to be cursed in order to be recognized as a poet. And even if you only exist in proportion to the number of your enemies. The importance of poetry lies into the void’s productivity. Thanks to its recursive structure, the creationnist void produces a structure with its dynamics and when it is operative. Beyond that, the void is implied in all production as what escapes from this functional structure in the finished product. And this productivity of the void is grounded on the letter and the littoral that has nothing tangible, but is merely the immaterial grasp of a link or a relation, that can be, respectively, seen as a metaphor or a metonymy.
All the dependencies of the subject on the other and on the Other, and
vice versa, are based on these relations. So we need to tell the difference between concepts of the group and the collective and those of individuality. Each time a different link to the subject is involved. This is why I also speak of construction of the real (from the signifiance’s intensionality) and, reversively, of deconstruction, going “back” from the objectal extensions onto the functional intension. The two meanings are used concomitantly to assert and constantly activate this constructivity, which can even be reversively presented as a deconstruction of objects and the world, and because of the negative constructivity of functions, God is not needed.
On this basis, the very organization of signifiers properly called S
2 develops, binary in that each systematically returns to at least one other, in order to support its existence on the other, which is devoted solely to that, rather than being the bearer of a signified; and at the same time, these signifiers are binary because they are symbolically grounded on a representation, a perception, a memory as their imaginary approach. Hence the fundamental cell of psychoanalytic theory: (S
1 → S
2), and its metonymic access (which underlines the relational reason of the arrow transiting the signifier S
1 in terms of S
2): [(S
1→S
2)
→a]. Then it is metaphorised in subject: {[(S
1→S
2)
→a]→ $} . And, because of its constitution, this sequence is unbreakable: no S
2 without S
1 and vice versa; and no access to (S
1→S
2) without metonymy and then metaphor. Any attempt to modify this sequence is a paralogism. In other words, there can only be four discourses (i.e., 4 concepts rotating in 4 places, not a factorial 4!). Moreover, Lacan's attempts to give a capitalist discourse and a discourse of science by modifying the sequence came to nothing, and he abandoned the idea of elaborating and using them.
Precisely, let's start from the Saussurian matheme that Lacan has reversed in order to give primacy to the signifier:
S/s. The signifier is specified as the unary signifier S
1 (the signifiance operating in globality) and the binary signifier S
2 (is a signifier with a local value):
In other words, logic comes before all metaphors. Thus the primordial Father of the primal horde is merely the metaphor for what I call the "Father function" (fP) of being both the absence (an operative void) of having been killed, assassinated, and the persistence of this absence, still active in the presence, over the generations, of having been ingurgitated, incorporated. So in
S/s, S is distinguished between S
1 and S
2. The signified of S
1 (as signifiance, the pure signifier’s relation,
[12] is $ ("the subject is the signified of the pure signifier’s relation"), and the signified of S
2 is
a, founding the S
2/
a structure. All in all, the master's discourse indicates only the mastery of the subject by language: S
1 / $ and S
2/a → [S
1/$
→S
2/
a].
In fact, you don't know what you're saying unless you base it on such a logical schematism— in this case, whatever discourse is held ideologically by the capitalist—a schematism that enables the difference between a classical, mechanistic science and an impredicative and chaotic science (as quantum physics is). Therefore psychoanalysis is a science but an impredicative one (as are recursive and impredicative mathematics, quantum physics, the economics of life...). It contradicts the founders of the set theory, Poincaré, Russell, Zernelo, Peano, etc., who rejected what they called "paradoxes'' and "vicious circles." Along with all the impredicative logics rejected by W.V.O. Quine, these logics are essential to specify the schematism of unconscious that is distinct from the predicativity of consciousness. For the record (I've written about this), because of his Nazism, Heidegger appears to be a simple defender of predicativity. (See his article “
Logos,” referring to Heraclitus and translated into French by Lacan).
All in all, depending on the schematism you stand up for, you will defend one psychoanalysis or another one and you will act accordingly in practice. Therefore, psychoanalysis is by no means unequivocal.
Without “jouissance of being”—a concept that I have no hesitation to qualify as a Nazi one, because it follows Heidegger’s point of view (see the
Cahiers noirs)—there are only two jouissances, to which Lacan added a signified effect as “
j'ouis-sens.”
So there cannot be three superegos. At most, about the superego, Freud made the difference between a subject ideal (
Ich-Ideal) and ideal of the subject (
Ideal-Ich), mistranslated as ego ideal and ideal of the ego.
Graphically, I indicate that a fork in topology [
la patte d’oie]
is the reduction of a modal square. The modal square results from flattening one of the two tetrahedra. These tetrahedra help figuring out one mode or another of flattening a Borromean knot with 3 armillary consistencies which forms a knot immersed into the plane (I use the word: scalarly, according to the “direction” of a spiral staircase, i.e., helicoidal), either dextrorotatory or levorotatory, each summing up by connecting the four points of view of space (organized in a tetrahedron) from which we obtain the same immersion of the Borromean:
But phallic jouissance (JΦ) is recursively dependent on surplus-jouissance [
plus-de-jouir] (
Lustgewinn):
and surplus-jouissance is the object that causes the desire, the object
a.
Considering a threefold taxonomy of jouissance gets jouissance to work in the place of alienation (
Entfremdung in Freud,
Veräuβerlichung in Marx): (Un → (Un→Ⱥ)) and se-paration: (S
1→(S
1→S
2)).
All in all, we need to tell the difference between capitalism and the market. And it wasn't only Marx who made this distinction, Fernand Braudel,
The Dynamics of Capitalism, is also very explicit.
In “substance,"
Todestrieb is the
Lustprinzip.
Translated by Abdou Belkacem
Bibliography
Braunstein, N. (2005).
La jouissance. Un concept lacanien (D. Koren, Ed.). Point hors.
Lacan, J. (1966).
Écrits. Seuil.
Lacan, J. (2001).
Autres écrits. Seuil.
Notes
[1] And Ana-Claudia Delgado suggests "
habletra" or "
parlettre."
[2] Lacan, 1966, p. 43.
[3] Lacan, 2001, p. 580.
[4] And even Freud had considered a destructive death drive, which continues to this day as the "death instinct" in the
doxa.
[5] The example of the so-called "jouissance of being" clearly highlights equivocations and errors induced by any tendency towards predicativity.
[6] For example, the pass grounded on a third-party’s structure that overcomes the void inherent in the non-relation to the object through the speech which is symbolic. An identifying relation is made with the Other that plays the troublemaker [
tiers gêneur]. In the same way, as a specific interlocution, the cure presents the structure of a Moebius strip in which speech is situated in the globality as a surrounding of the void.
[7] Lacan, 2001, p. 14.
[8] This is the modal structure of signifier’s organization, in which the subject is inscribed in various positions.
[9] This second paragraph is dated 11 February 2024.
[10] See the note attached to the tribute to Nestor Braunstein.
[11] See my seminars this year and the two years before: 2021 → 2024
[12] Lacan, 2001, p. 580.
Bio
René Lew is a psychiatrist by training. He has always worked as a psychoanalyst, both privately and in institutions including hospitals. He was medical director of the Medical-Psycho-Pedagogical Center of Ivry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne) for 35 years, and at the same time he developed his practice at the Esquirol Hospital in Saint-Maurice (formerly Charenton) for 47 years. He practices with children, adolescents and adults. Currently he works in a Medical-Educational Institute for young autistic people. He is interested in philosophy, logic, mathematics, physics, literature and art in their links with psychoanalysis. Since 1981 he has directed several seminars, the latest with the general theme “The commitment of psychoanalysis”. He created the journal Cahiers de lectures freudiennes as well as the Lysimaque Association in 1982, which continues today in the publishing of numerous books, as in the organization of conferences and seminars. With a few colleagues, he founded the Dimensions of Psychoanalysis association in 1994, which promotes various activities in collaboration with other associations, including different methods of training psychoanalysts (cartels, seminars, passes, etc.). Dimensions of psychoanalysis is a member of Convergencia, Lacanian Movement for Freudian Psychoanalysis, which brings together multiple Latin American and European psychoanalytic associations, without forgetting the Chengdu Psychoanalytic Center. He has written numerous articles, and regularly presents presentations each year in conferences and other possibly academic events. In 2014 he started publishing of his works (around twenty works to date, in the Organon collection of psychoanalysis of Lysimaque editions.).
Translator's Bio
Abdou Belkacem is a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. He wrote articles about the letter and languages in psychoanalysis. Contact: belkacemabdou@gmail.com
Publication Date
September 20, 2024
