- in 1991, at a symposium on psychoses, at the invitation of the Ecuadorian Freudian School (EFE) in Quito,
- in 2005 at a symposium to mark the centenary of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, held here in Mexico City at the invitation of Mexico's Red Analítica Lacaniana (REAL),
*
I'll be talking about jouissance (plural) following his book—the only one on this theme on the theoretical market of psychoanalysis. And I'll emphasise this point with elements relating to jouissance: politics, the letter, and Lacan's objet a. But first of all, I warn the reader against understanding too quickly the notion of jouissance: it goes beyond the obvious sexual side and concerns the entire existence of the subject.*
1.- N. Braunstein's First Approach to Jouissance Before reading Nestor's book on jouissance, [1] and for convenience, I will propose my interpretation of the theme implied in my title. In "the human race," jouissance and speech are concomitant. I would say that they are in continuity, without anything primary (p. 7). In a way, one implies the other. And we wouldn't even be able to talk about jouissance on the human level if it weren't for speech. In my opinion, speech is an intensional function par excellence: nothing is more intensional than speech, which is not without effect. So the object a can be indicated as a speech in extension. It can be grasped, even though it is itself difficult to grasp outside its metaphorical materialisations. Nestor Braunstein uses the term Genuβ, which dictionaries translate as "jouissance." However, I think this term is less appropriate than Lust, which Freud uses to emphasise a “principle of jouissance,”[2] much more than a “principle of pleasure,” because jouissance does not always give pleasure (far from it). So I agree with N. Braunstein—following Goethe and Freud who takes the formula from the latter: "In the beginning was the act"—when he connects jouissance, speech, and act (p. 7). A borromean diagram would have been pertinent. And N. Braunstein rightly notes that Genuβ was never a concept in Freud. Of course not, since Freud's concept of jouissance was rendered by Lust. After those first considerations, I will continue with Braunstein's approaches to speech and the object a. As the object of desire, I consider that the object a is nonetheless an object of jouissance. Moreover, Lacan specifies it as Lustgewinn (plus-de-jouir), surplus jouissance (here we find Lacan's propensity to consider Lust in terms of “jouissance”). And N. Braunstein connects Freud's two essential texts of 1905, The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (published secondarily in 1906). "The body is an effect produced in the flesh by the speech that inhabits it." (p. 23). It is constituted by the incorporeal incorporation of the saying and the speech.[3] Like the speech, the body is a function of exchange;[4] so the object a, derived from Freud's partial object, is the practicable that allows the exchange transformed into an objectalised transaction to be grasped. Because the subject's own (?) body is the first Other he encounters. And the drive is inscribed right there in reversion from the somatic to the psychic (Freud) and from the saying to the body (Lacan). Like the Other, the body presents itself as real, in the form of object a, as imaginary, in the specularity of the subject reduced to the ideal self, and as symbolic, the one who supports the signifiers S2 which are the Other’s fundamental components. "Sexuality—in 1905’s thesis—has a genealogy, the one of demand and desire’s dialectic between the subject and the Other" (p. 23). And Nestor Braunstein adds: "The subject is the function of articulation between the body and the Other, the body as Other and the Other as body. Affect is an effect of incorporation into the structure" (pp. 23–24). Hence the non-orientability of "to take": "Let the speech take the body and the body take the speech" (p. 24). To N. Braunstein's question, "Does jouissance emanate from the subject or from the Other?" (p. 24), I respond with alacrity: jouissance cannot be imprinted in both or emanate from both at the same time. Because the subject brings into play what is known as phallic jouissance, which is attached to signifiance (in my opinion, this is Freud's Repräsentanz, and similarly Lacan's unary signifier S1), and the Other supports and states a jouissance (in the literal sense of a non-dynamic stabilisation), the two being linked by a complex negation: "If there were another one [than phallic jouissance], it would not have to be this one,"[5] where I understand this "other jouissance" to mean the jouissance of the Other. I would argue that this negation (I'm not trying here to unravel its complexity: unreal (irrealis) conditional, discordance, deontic implying a forclosure... a complexity established on the phallic function) leads to politics and sustains its development, phallic jouissance being neither appropriable nor exploitable, whereas the jouissance of the Other, in reverse, tends to be exploitable because of its possible appropriation by anyone (i.e., by certain subjects, which means something other than none). To complete Nestor Braunstein's diagrams (p. 24), I underline the continuity of the subject and the Other through speech as an exchange:
And it's true that pleasure is the jouissance’s barrier.
But rather than talking about "the relationship between jouissance and castration, which is, we might say, the fundamental opposition in the Lacanian clinic as well as the axis on which the direction of the analytic cure is articulated" (p. 26), I argue that jouissance depends on castration. Thus the castration complex reaches out to the primordial Father insofar as it embodies jouissance. And the jouissance’s incorporation or rather its built-in emergence (p. 25), in situ, based on what constitutes its signifier’s ground, takes on the value of castration effects, which can be specified as bringing into play (subjectal) jouissance in the Other (castrated from l’Un-en-moins phallique, the phallic One-in-less), or Ⱥ, coming to the detriment of the subject's existence. The Other, constituted by S2, indicates that the S1 (with phallic value), escapes the Other by constituting it:
(S1 → S2)
and the repetition (S1 → (S1 → S2’)) and (S1 → (S1 → (S1 → S2’’))), etc., implies that the S2 , S2', S2'' accumulate in an Other who does not, however, grant them a productive side, because productivity is the signifier’s "swarm" made of an S1 reproduced again and again. Speaking of "jouissance from the origin [!], jouissance of la Chose, jouissance prior to [symbolic] Law" (p. 26), N. Braunstein evokes the "refused" jouissance that is "jouissance of the Other," which, according to him, comes as a third party to the pair associating phallic jouissance and jouissance of the Other. From the jouissance of the third party, he makes a jouissance of being, which is problematic and about which I will talk particularly in the third part of this paper. He developed this theme in his third chapter. But I won't go into the dense nature of his book here (which is an appraisal and in no way pejorative, just to underline the complexity of the work). Anyway, transition from jouissance to politics is what matters to me—as it does to N. Braunstein. His insistence on speaking of “beginning” (Im Anfang) in various forms dissatisfied me, because I cannot conceive of any construction of a signifier that is not founded, by an unreal (irrealis) conditional, precisely on and from what is not (in other words, without origin) and which the subject supplements by a function of hypothesis that is not without consequence (impredicative, I say it now and I'll come back to it in the central part of this presentation): castration (despite Nestor Braunstein's position, p. 40) is indeed a threat (i.e., a hypothesis) affecting its reality. And the threat is indeed "salvation" (N. Braunstein), but precisely as a hypothesis functioning, coming to the rescue of what is not. Beginning with this, I come back to Nestor Braunstein’s aphorism: "The unconscious is a work whose raw material is jouissance and whose product is discourse" (p. 35). Why not? Jouissance is a work and represented by its dynamic. But this “work” is carried out by logics that are not exactly superimposable on canonical logic. These are all the logics that W. V. O. Quine describes as deviant—which I conceive of as impredicative: made up of modalities, deictics, indicators of subjectivity, fields of intensional expressions, conditionals contrary to reality (and therefore made up of suppositions), non-standard negations (like the one related to jouissance, which we mentioned), intuitionisms, etc. We shall see the political futures of such a categorisation, and the opposition between canonical predicative logic (spherical) and impredicative logics (non-spherical, but still making room for canonical logic) makes it possible to conceive of that which, like psychoanalysis, art, poetry, etc., does not enter into politics in the standard sense. However, I will not follow N. Braunstein’s saying "unbridled jouissance of the One" which is not pacified by the Other: an "intervention of the Other that is received as a salvation with regard to the Other jouissance, this non-dialectical jouissance, which is the jouissance ... of the One" (p. 45). In my opinion, this is a dialectic (including a Borromean dialectic with three terms) that includes phallic jouissance (I think this is the jouissance of the One, the One being worth the phallus, as the Father, or the One-Father, is distinguished from the maternal Other) and the jouissance of the Other, insofar as it is also the jouissance other than the so-called phallic jouissance. I'll come back to this point which is by no means insignificant, but it seems to be highly problematic. According to N. Braunstein, the instance of Law (the capital letter specifying the symbolic) is the fact of the Other (p. 50). But this is not precisely how I figure it: Law is the fact of the Father (the recursive instance organising signifiance insofar as this signifiance, precisely, makes law) or, in other words, Law of the One-Father, and, without further metaphor, Law of the One coming in opposition to the Other, even if there’s a circumvention of the opposition.
In a projective plane, the One and the Other are united by a moebian link (with a few changes, my schema is modelled on Lacan's R-schema).
I consider that having recourse to an "original jouissance" (p. 51) is not necessary to establish the dialectic between One, the Other and the subject, since there is no other origin than that of precisely paternal and phallic absence (castration). The lack of being is not an insufficiency. The lack concerns the subject, radically, and specifies that we cannot establish anything about any ontology. Establishing itself recursively, the signifier divests itself of any ontology. As for the subject, he’s founded as cleaved, on this lack-to-be.
Now I return to the link between speech and jouissance (p. 61ff).
As N. Braunstein asked, is speech the “diaphragm” of jouissance? Diaphragm is to be understood as the one of a photographic lens, not as a feminine contraceptive (cf. p. 61). In my opinion, speech modulates signifiance, and thus jouissance. I would say it’s an exchange that participates in utterance and saying.
So I insist: Lacan's lack-to-be is not the observation of an insufficiency of being, but rather the taking into account of a radical absence of any being. And I won't say as Braunstein does: "From the jouissance of being, through the necessary intrusion of the Other of his Law that demands that this jouissance be delivered on the market of exchanges, there remains a lack-to-be: desire." This sentence seems to contain assertions, implicit or not, with which I immediately disagree:
- there is no “jouissance of being”[6] if there is no being;
- the Law is not that of the Other, but it emerges from the antinomy between One and the Other, that is, from alienation. Indeed any (real, imaginary, symbolic) alienation is expressed by having recourse to such an accommodation of demand, of desire, both of the subject of primordial narcissism and of the Other in their dialectic: (Un →( Un → Ⱥ)). According to Lacan, the subject's desire is the desire of the Other, and every subject receives its own message in an inverted form from the This pattern is aspherical (or non-spherical) where the drive identifies and distinguishes (this is how I interpret the punch [poinçon], here and in the fantasy, where the punch identifies and distinguishes the subject and the object a: ($ ◊ a)) the subject and the Other which is implied by its demand: ($ ◊ D).
And beyond that, speech and jouissance not only modulate themselves reversively, but modalize meaning according to a change in the register of modalization, passing from the ontic modalization (jouissance as subjectally necessary) to the deontic modalization (speech as obligatory and itself also imperative as the jouissance of speaking). "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" is how Freud writes this modal transaction.
Let's just say that Nestor Braunstein and I have different assessments of the same material. I would have to repeat each sentence, but that is not possible. Thus, if the Lustprinzip is a basic principle of jouissance, the “Real-Ich” is not its other name (p. 65). The problem with these concepts is that Freud's position is not constant from one period to the next. At the time of his Metapsychology, the Real-Ich preceded the Lust-Ich. At the time of his “Negation” it was the other way round. Freud's contradiction? I don't think so, but rather that, as the support and effect of the drive ($ ◊ D), the subject (Ich) is dependent on the link from the real to the symbolic (which is the Lust) and also in the other direction, from the symbolic to the real, in a reversive way.
But the "signifier of the ... forbidden jouissance" (p. 65) is not the signifier for the symbolic phallus but for the jouissance of the Other. On the contrary, receiving the phallic jouissance with open arms sustains the subject himself. Moreover, phallic jouissance is identified with the subject by constituting itself from its cleavage—as Freud notes in his text on Ichspaltung, about the link between jouissance and castration. And, in order to figure out this relation, we need to bring the phallus metaphor (in its complex link between the Oedipus complex and the castration complex) related to the void which is necessary for the entire signifier’s organisation: as speech, the phallus escapes from and into discourse, just as signifiance escapes into the signifier it induces. I use the neologism “escape into...” [échapper dans]. Thanks to Marx's montage, we can imagine the aphanisis function: labour power escapes into the object produced and it is maintained in it (in order to give its value) by vanishing into it, just as the Borromean knot dissolves into the constituted knot. A contrario, it underlines that every void is structured, as twentieth-century physics demonstrates. So there is no solipsistic speech as there is no solipsistic subject (according to Émile Benveniste): as speech, the subject requires interlocution (see J. M. Itard's wolf child, and as many cases of autism demonstrate), an interlocution that can be in abstraction and generalized into a relation to the Other. So, contrary to a certain scholasticism, there is no such thing as "inner speech." And any thought is already a proposition, bearable orally or in writing, but without necessarily leading to the verbalisation—in exactly the same way as certain delusions are content with a so-called psychomotor hallucination as if the persecutor is activating the subject's vocal cords without producing any audible verbalisation. The object a is not so much the bearer of "the function of castration" (p. 65), but the holder of the transaction between the emptiness and the fullness that makes it worthwhile. This entire chapter of Nestor Braunstein's book would merit a detailed commentary that unfortunately cannot be included here.
However, we can figure out how the subject is founded on a discourse by including all the dialectical elements that connect phallic jouissance—in its antinomy with that of the Other—and that connect to signifiance. And Nestor Braunstein’s question: "What comes first, jouissance or the verb?" (p. 71) can only be answered: neither, so to be sure that the one is in continuity with the other. By the way—and despite Braunstein’s quotation of Lacan (p. 72)—there is no primordial real prior to “significantisation.” The real and the symbolic constantly go hand in hand in continuity, knotted together by the imaginary in a Whitehead knot.
And I think that it is better not to use “Thing” because it’s a bad concept.[8] Theory needs only logic; metaphors and myths are merely illustrations. I would say that there is no such thing as an "absolute" (p. 73: "the Thing, the absolute object of desire … "). So there's no need to resort to an absolute. No wonder N. Braunstein associates and completes the jouissance of an ontology: "The Thing, absolute object of desire, opens thought to the unusual and abysmal dimension of a jouissance of being prior to existence" (p. 73; emphasis by N. Braunstein). Rather, I would say it is the death drive, as a reference to that which is not which founds the entire existence of the signifier.[9] And this absence of an assured antecedence implies the recursivity of signifiance: signifiance can only be founded on what it induces.
As far as he refers to the death drive, I agree with N. Braunstein. I quote him: the mustard pot’s apologue "illustrates the creative function of the signifier produced by the void as being this Thing that would have been there before (which is false), and presents the object as being what can fill (deceptively) this void" (p. 75).[10] To distinguish between the Thing and the object a, Braunstein uses the figure of the torus: the Thing is situated at the level of the central hole of the torus, and the object a, reiterated, at the level of the soul.
2.- Jouissance as the Subjectification of the Letter
I will now explain what my title puts into play theoretically. I consider that the letter operates as the underpinning of the signifier (as a way to underline a certain etymological mode—I refer to Freud's Niederschrift, far more fundamental than an inscription or a note-taking). So when I say “the letter,” I mean the character of whatever type, and the littoral (in a way that goes much further than Lacan says: in my opinion, the littoral is a passageway between two domains and not just their distinction), hence the signifier’s relation that Lacan talks about. So, when he defines the subject as "the signified of the pure signifier’s relation"[11] I consider that such a subject is first and tributary of the letter, and this tribute is a jouissance, organised on the erasure of the letter in and under signifiance. In other words, phallic jouissance leans on this organisation of castration. This is what I mean by “subjectivation of the letter” specified as jouissance. The letter escapes into the signifier’s relation which means the letter still participates in this relation.
On the basis of this subjectivation, I emphasize the impact of jouissance in political ties, or rather the use and misuse of jouissance related to the function of the letter, as Lacan talks about it in “Lituraterre.”[12]
In this regard, the subject is concerned by a double movement the topology of which I will specify later:
- Iconsider that the subject is both "the signified of the pure signifier’s relation," which is S1,
- and the subject is the referent (defined from below, but in fact retrogrediently [par rétrogrédience] from the metaphor, as the subject of this relation), the referent of the "lettered" and subjectivised organisation of signifiance.
In other words, the subject of speech (both, subjectal and subjective) implies a phallic jouissance depending on whether the subjective subject happens to take the floor or to give it back to the interlocutor: the subject implies only a jouissance of being able to speak, and its pulsation of presence and absence is phallic (comparable to the imaginary fetishisation of the turgid or flaccid penis).[14]
A (subjectal) subject defining itself as both referent (through the letter) and signified (from the signifier’s relation) reveals the Borromean asphericity (non-spherical) and encloses the S2 signifier between reference and a signified effect. And if, at the same time, both referent and signified are maintained and also situated "between" the other two (respectively signifier and signified, or: referent and signifier), we obtain a strictly Borromean mode of stacking, such that each ring is situated between the other two—and this applies to all three in the three-consistency Borromean knot.
These signifying concepts can still be situated differently in the spaces of the three-consistency Borromean knot, a laid flat knot (and differently than Lacan laid them out):
Above all, in the third party’s structure of speech (cf. die dritte Person in the Witz), the subject is in a littoral position, between, reversively, the character as itself a referent of the subject and the signifier’s relation itself. The subject is the organizer of the asphericity (non-spherical) between those relations.
In other words, speech involves the subject as referent, littoral and signified.
($ → ($ → $)),
or (referent →( subject → signified)).of the unconscious
=
textual knowledge S2
In politics, the subject gives way to the object: from referent it passes under the object a, and (in the order of a transformation from subject to collective—Lacan said: "The collective is nothing but the subject of the individual"[15]—and from the collective to the group), the object a passes from the surplus jouissance [plus-de-jouir] (Lustgewinn) to the surplus value; from a signified that bears meaning to Bedeutung (or, according to Frege, the path of the values of the function, here, jouissance), or signification. At the same time, jouissance shifts from its phallic quality (Lust) that can be related to the subject to a cotation[16] that brings into play the jouissance of the Other as harmful (Unlust). So the object a becomes the subject's referent in fantasy. While social and economic spheres deal with goods (production, circulation, consumption, distribution, etc.), politics aims to “deal” with jouissance. And yet it is not possible: jouissance cannot be grasped as some kind of good, or even as a commodity, nor can it be grasped massively; it can only be lived as singular, corporatised. Thus jouissance can only be plural—which is contradictory—related to the jouissance of the Other, the harmful side of which I remind you. So let us first redefine jouissance more precisely.In my opinion, (phallic) jouissance is existence: we only live from what brings us jouissance, physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Breathing, eating, sleeping, speaking, making love—everything that bears fruit and that the subject enjoys is likely to bring jouissance and thus to sustain the subject, in his existence as in his life. Because what we enjoy is already supernumerary to the calm [étale] state (Freud's nirvana) of existence, and from this supernumerary, this gain in jouissance (Lustgewinn), both (phallic) jouissance and therefore the subject, are sustained by retrogredience. Death drive is such a jouissance, not to be confused with life but to be considered as what precedes life, just as the letter precedes and carries the signifier. However, it can be conceived also concomitantly, without anything first, neither the letter nor the signifier, neither the real nor the symbolic, neither the death drive nor the subject of life, the one of the fundamental narcissism. Therefore, I would draw the following parallel:
In order to hold the surplus jouissance [plus-de-jouir] up again, passing from the jouissance of the Other to phallic jouissance is meant to restore a meaning to the written word, in order to produce from the text a different kind of saying, as Lacan obliges every reader to do.
Let's return to the links between jouissance and the letter. I'll simply say that the phallic function—using the void in the signifier’s network, a void that the function mobilises by organising links based on it—the phallic jouissance is littoral. Or, precisely, phallus is the signifier that specifies, with a time ahead, the littoral passage from character to signifier relation. Hence the subject is the signified: of the phallus, of the littoral, in other words, of unary signifiance. Thus—by going back to Freudian representation, which may be accessible in terms of representation (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, or, in my opinion, the binary signifier)—phallic jouissance articulates the drive not in terms of representations but in terms of letters that stand in the way (enstasis = “instance”) of the flux [fluence] of unary signifiance S1. That’s why Lacan defines the drive—in reversion of the "mode by which the somatic passes to the psychic"—as the mode by which the saying is embodied. This is illustrated as follows:
The phallus is eminently the “psychic” function (i.e., the unconscious, the primordial repression, the primordial narcissism, the primordial Father function...) operating in intension through its various avatars (more numerous than I have indicated), operating in reversion of the extensions.
So we can oppose—like surplus jouissance [plus-de-jouir] to surplus value—phallic jouissance to politics. Phallic jouissance sustains existence and productivity, in other words, it can be called the living capital of labour power (taken altogether), and politics basically concerns only dead capital. Following my logical choices, the living impredicativity of transcendentalism (in my opinion, as a signifier)—it can be read in J.-Y. Girard[17]—is opposed to the dead predicativity of objects, of goods, that brings us jouissance only materially, which is not essential, even if life is easier. That's something, certainly. So we have to distinguish between the letter (productive) and the object (amorphous—unless, like the object a, split, and it functions as an objectalised transaction from its cut).[18] All in all, Kantian transcendentalism is the foundation of the signifier’s recursivity. Recursivity is a word coming from Gödel, who took it from Herbrand, with the meaning of a function based only on what it is supposed to induce. It occurs when passing from the function in intension to the function in extensions (real, imaginary, symbolic) on which the first depends reversively [réversivement]. The passage is itself the “representance” (Frege's Vertretung) and is specified as impredicative and predicative, in equivalence with recursivity. Therefore extensions are impredicatives and predicatives, but they can be strictly predicatives (and predicated) if they are cut off from intension, hence Lacan's facticities (in pathology, groups, camps, and the segregative sciences), with the help of ontology.
*
The third party’s structure of speech—as founded on the letter that unites the character that gives it consistency, the littoral that assures this (real) ex-sisting passage and the signifier’s relation as symbolic to establish the signifier:
The third party’s structure can be written as an ordered pair, written in the mode (JΦ →( JΦ → JȺ))
which implies reversion
comparable to the capitalist production:
Labour power draws its energy from its difference with the dead mechanistic capital. A dynamic is necessary for putting technique to work, and labour power is part of the living capital that the drive valorizes through speech (or saying, according to Lacan, or "that one says" [“qu’on dis”]).
But the precariousness of the capitalist mode of production is not only due to the crises which are consubstantial and necessary to revalorize circulating capital with a consequent rate of profit by sidelining a part of this capital that was proving to be of insufficient return (“rotten” capital). No, precariousness stems from the very exercise of labour power as (living) capital: the subject, then reduced to his labour power (unless he, himself, is sidelined from production by unemployment, illness, etc.), is no more than a part of the capitalist system. And because of the identification that founds the group (Freud) as it founds the factory, his surplus jouissance [plus-de-jouir] which is a priori impossible to cede or add to others, becomes summable, as are the self-identifications in the group with the common object and hence with a single ideal. All the subjects are put in tune with a standard object (via ideals and objects, and from there the selves) and the surplus jouissance [plus de jouir] is disguised as a surplus value, which can then be capitalised. In so doing, the social structure that Freud founds on the murder of the primordial Father is established and welded together by passing from living capital to death.
However, jouissance must remain open (phallic) in order for the subject to feel good; if jouissance is closed (and corresponding to what the Other requires) then it forgets the subject and is nothing but harmful for him, this negative jouissance being worthless except for the system of production in abstracto, to the profit only of its own reproduction, forgetting people, which is to say valuable only for its own reproduction. Capitalism psychotizes by foreclosing subjective desires and jouissance, but also by bringing facticities into play, still in the sense of Lacan.
*
In reference to Nestor Braunstein’s book, I will now discuss some of his positions. 3.- Politics of Jouissance In 1968—with subversive May 68 and the seminar on The Psychoanalytic Act—Lacan cut off with the ontology of being, even if he did maintain this vocabulary (and unfortunately, because it was a source of confusion).[19] So I won't go along with Nestor Braunstein when he says repeatedly, the "jouissance of being" in his book (p. 123 ff). There’s no need for this reference every time: either "being" is real and reduced practically to the jouissance of the Other, or "being" is symbolic and in this respect, phallic jouissance is enough. And even if it were necessary to put the subject back on track in the dialectic of jouissance between the phallus and the Other, meaning is enough (as Lacan says homophonically, “j'ouis-sens”) (p. 101). Lacan makes no mistake introducing the meaning into the three-consistency of a Borromean knot. Actually, because of phallic jouissance, we could at best (?) consider "being" as Dasein, especially since before Heidegger, when Dasein meant "existence" (Kant: Dasein Gottes, "the existence of God"). But rather than "being," becoming is foundational (Freud: ... "soll Ich werden" where it was, "Wo Es war...," I consider that’s the letter). Also Sollen (the noun) is better translated as "must become” (duty to become) rather than "must be" (duty to be) in order to make duty an auxiliary. So I think that "being" makes barrier to jouissance. If three jouissances are needed to be knotted together Borromeanically, as Lacan already does (JΦ, JȺ, meaning), there is no need to resort to a fourth one (de facto) that would be a symptom as an ontological seeding and a facticity in the jouissances’ recursivity. As Lacan well said: "If there were another one [than phallic jouissance], it wouldn't have to be this one."[20] It is an unreal (irrealis) conditional that falls apart as soon as it is uttered, in order to give recursive reason (for not existing a priori) back to the phallic jouissance, but only according to a hypothetical reason, the signifier’s sequence of which is organised in a multidimensional network. Even considered as conditional, the interdiction of "it wouldn’t have to be" is the negative counterpart of phallic jouissance (or, more simply, of the phallic function). The interdiction is marked by its imperative, only to return immediately via a falsus to "have to fall apart.” (The interdiction “il faut” in French has two meanings: imperative and to fall apart.) So when Lacan speaks of the “parades of jouissance,” forced to pass between the walls of speech, Nestor turns it into a “diaphragm.” Surely creativity (which is impossible with a vaginal diaphragm) takes a hit [bat de l’aile]: (l’aile is the homophone of “l'elle,” as Lacan said, in L'insuccès... ).[21] Whatever the diaphragm meant for him, I consider that it’s related to the enstasis of the letter, as a restriction: the letter constitutes an obstacle in the path (or flux) of the signifiance S1 while being energised by it because of their continuity.
And the ensuing repetition:
It's easy to figure out how the letter implies signifiance—hence all the political issues surrounding the letter’s character (the choice to go back to Antiquity during the French Revolution, the choice of the Gothic under the Nazis, the choice of this or that “lettering” in information technology, etc.).
Continuity (operating in this figuration as a strange attractor in the mode of Edward Lorenz) represents the littoral between the One and the Other (a littoral which is cleavage, Spaltung, in the Freudian mode which leads to a passage from the One to the Other)—the littoral is blocked (schizophrenic barrier) which is called schize according to Bleuler, with the same vocabulary of Spaltung. Thus continuity is “blocked” regarding the signifiance’s intension, and thus no longer possible in terms of functional dynamics, hence the extensional fixation as catatonia in schizophrenia, athymhormia in chronic psychoses, “mental automatism” in delusions, particularly hallucinatory delusions, and “idée fixe” in interpretative delusions.
By the way, that’s how politics psychoticizes, by stifling recursivity. Politics’ modus operandi is “as if” (als ob in Freud):
- as if being existed,
- as if things were given (predicatively) in advance (ontologically assured) thank the letter’s character to the detriment of littorality’s
*
Note on the Transcription of Lacan’s Discourse, which can be a Source of Errors Despite the fact that "there is jouissance of being"is written in the Encore seminar published by Seuil édition, I consider that there is no "jouissance of being": but the quote refers to the "being of signifiance" that can be recognised "in the jouissance of the body."[23] Hence, I'm not contradicting Lacan, because the "being of signifiance" only underlines the operative void corresponding to signifiance which depends on the substitution of the void by a hypothesis at work.[24] Usually, the official text of Lacan's seminar is different from what Lacan says, making him say what he does not say. Therefore, I will compare Seuil édition’s text and Staferla's transcription.[25] Above all, I think my nitpicking is appropriate just as Lacan valorized the same level of detail in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Le titre de la lettre. Lacan also refers to being, even though it is unfounded. He stammers or unnecessarily complicates his sentence: "The least [!] that I can say is to be [!] at least [!!], to be able at least [!!!] to suppose [!] to have made you admit [!], at least [!!!!] admit [!!] that I admit [!!!] that as far as being [!!...] is concerned, it's to suppose myself [!!], ... to suppose myself [!!!] an ontology or, what amounts to the same thing, a system." But Lacan needs neither system nor ontology. And further on: "...this being ... that stands in thinking itself, supposed to be its correlate, ... To this, I oppose [this is very clear!]:- that, in this very affair, we are played by jouissance,
- that thought is jouissance,
- that what the analytic discourse brings is what was already begun in the philosophy—in inverted commas—of ‘being,’ namely that there is jouissance of ‘being.’”
(jouissance [of being] → (jouissance [of signifiance] → jouissance [of the body])),
or, in other words,(phallic jouissance → (jouissance of the S1 → jouissance of the Other [S2])).
And the Other is marked by the jouissance of the body: that is, a jouissance of the Other, an Other made up of signifiers S2, but whose metonymic link between signifiers is presented transcribed as objects a these being valid for the objects partialising the body whose integrity, or fullness, if it exists, cannot bring jouissance (neither subjectively nor—by aiming at it—objectively). The Other is here in opposition to the phallus, without any confusion between their jouissances. Translated by Abdou BelkacemBibliography
Althusser, L. (1976). Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État : Notes pour une recherche. In Positions (1964-1975) (pp. 67–125). Éditions sociales. (Original work published 1970) Braunstein, N. (2005). La jouissance. Un concept lacanien (D. Koren, Ed.). Point hors Ligne/érès. (Original work published 1990) Girard, J.-Y. (2016). Le Fantôme de la transparence. Allia. Lacan, J., (1975). Le séminaire. Livre XX, Encore (1972–1973). Seuil. Lacan, J. (1976–1977) L'insuccès de l'Une-bévue s'aile à mourre [Seminar]. Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits. Seuil. Lacan, J. (2001). Autres écrits. Seuil. Lew, R. (2014). La "chose" en psychanalyse. Lysimaque. Lew, R. (2015). Politique du corps et de l'écriture. Lysimaque. Lew, R. (2018a). Imprédicativité de l'acte psychanalytique. Lysimaque. Lew, R. (2018b). L'après Mai 68 de Lacan: sa rupture avec l'ontologie et ses attendus. In Dimensions de la psychanalyse (Ed.). L'impact de Mai 68 sur la psychanalyse. Lysimaque. Lew, R. (2023). Pulsion de mort et pulsion de destruction. Lysimaque.Notes
[1] All my quotations are taken are taken from the second French edition of the book (Braunstein 1990/2005). [Eds: All parenthetical citations throughout the text pertain to Braunstein’s text.] [2] See Lew, 2023. [3] Lacan, 2001, p. 409. [4] This is the body of the Father function incorporating itself as incorporeal and structurally positioned in intension from which extensions are organised. This corporeality (or incarnation) is at once real, imaginary and symbolic (properly speaking). This is the whole difference between Einverleibung and Verkörperung. See the theory of this in Christology. [5] Lacan, 1975, p. 56. [6] See section below in the present text, “Note on the Transcription of Lacan’s Discourse.” [7] See section below in the present text, “Jouissance as the Subjectification of the Letter.” [8] See Lew 2014. [9] Here we need to contrast two approaches: nominalism and realism. Choosing nominalism, as I do, only implies an inflection of the real or, at least, of the reals (an inflection prior to any real), without founding anything on/from an absolute real, as the Lacanians seem to maintain. [10] Lacan says the “creationist” function [créationniste]. [11] Lacan, 2001, p. 580. [12] See Lew, 2015. [13] As Freud speaks of the Mischung/Entmischung of drives, I use the French words: intrication/désintrication, a translation based on the fabric topology in terms of “combing” or entanglement of weft and warp threads. In English, entanglement is used and related to a particular topology (that of the spaghetti dish). I would add that it implies that the symptom is either normal (good alloy—“bon aloi,” as we say in French) or pathological (bad alloy— “mauvais aloi”). The French word aloi refers to both the metal mixing and to appropriateness. [14] But this example has the disadvantage of bringing back the imaginary when we want to get rid of it in order to refer preferentially to the phallic function as symbolic. [15] Lacan, 1966, p. 213n. [16] Lacan, 2001, p. 418: "cote comme valeur." [17] Girard, 2016. [18] See Lew, 2018a. [19] See Lew, 2018b. [20] Lacan, 1975. [21] Lacan, 1976–1977. [22] Althusser, 1970/1976. [23] Lacan, 1975, pp.66–67. [24] To make a hypothesis is to assume. In German, hypothesis is called Annahme, just like admission. See the following quotation. [25] See pp. 62–63 in the Staferla edition of Lacan’s Seminar 20, available here: http://staferla.free.fr/S20/S20.htm.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.).