*
Let’s start with the word “encounter” that the author pinpoints just as I do. And it’s not that trivial: at the end of his seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,[3] using the ancient Greek word (tuchè), Lacan makes a theory of encounter, especially with the French word “malencontre” which means accidentally (dustuchia). It is true that that the Freudian opening has been maintained and extended by Lacan with effects throughout culture, particularly in fine arts. (For example, Lacan brought up to date so many words; just one example: “obsolete” is no longer obsolete.) But it's clear to me that the opening is being closed by the Millerian interpretations of Lacan's discourse and, worse still, by the supporters of J.-A. Miller. This is clearly demonstrated by the overuse of assertive simplifications and misinterpretations in the official edition of Lacan's seminar “text,” distant from the stenography and also the recordings. This is why my final text will be a comment on the exhibition’s introductory texts that I call “placards” (in French, the word means a figurative veneer), which (I suppose) shaped the choice of artworks. The three “gaze regimes” that Bernard Marcadé considers clearly as the prelude to the exhibition are of course (1) the paintings that support Lacan's discourse (Carpaccio's “Saint George and the Dragon,” Holbein's “The Ambassadors,” Velázquez's “Las Meninas,” the work of Balthus, Marcel Duchamp, François Rouan... not to mention Courbet, Magritte, Zurbaran, etc.), in exactly the same way as there is a Freud “museum”; (2) the point of view of visual artists on "Lacan's thought ";[4] (3) and actually a link between certain artworks and "Lacan's thought" (Bernadac et al., p. 18). It’s true that “ça me regarde” in French (means both it looks at me and it concerns me) is essential for understanding how, as a subject, I am concerned by what I am in fact looking by myself, a situation of reversion established on a non-orientable space (as Lacan said, “aspheric” or non-spherical). Actually, I have worked on this reversion in fine arts.[5] Particularly in two situations: (1) The analysis of the voice in the painting based on the work of Jakob Jordaens,[6] and (2) the analysis of triplicity in “Las Meninas.”[7] I don't think that what emerges from the complex of gazes (which can be considered as Borromean, why not?) is something like a tapestry in topology (see Velázquez on Arachné, Les Fileuses) because a tapestry brings out a motif distinct from the technique used to make it. Instead, I got the impression of a veneer designed to illustrate Lacan's discourse (such as the passage from the signifier’s Phallus to penile representations—see Louise Bourgeois—which in my opinion are no more than a fetishised access to the phallus, or the sexual non-relation simply represented as dehiscence), to the detriment of Lacan’s support for the works or the “organic” links between art and psychoanalysis. When I say organic links, I consider only art worthy of its name (non-academic) and only psychoanalysis worthy of its name (neither mechanistic nor magisterial) that are grounded on their impredicativity.[8] So visual artworks, which do not go beyond discourse but merely put it into images, are only pale reflection (?) of what operates in a cure or a pass. That’s why I would go so far as to speak of facticities, as Lacan puts it at the end of his "Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste de l’École" (in Lacan, 2001). In my opinion, "facticity" is taken from Descartes's sixth Metaphysical Meditation and not from Heidegger's seminar on ontology, which is based on Faktizität. In the text that I comment on, the author speaks of weaving, which is what gives consistency to the cut or to the cuts of non-spherical topological objects in a topological structure. Among these cuts, there is the longitudinal cut, known as the median cut, in the form of a Jordan curve, constituting a Moebius strip. The choices of theory underlying this exhibition are undoubtedly above all Millerian. For example, Lacan, who died in 1981, was not a member of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (founded in 1992). As announced, I will be writing a special commentary on the “placards” (veneers) “explaining” the relation between Lacan's theory and the artworks on display. “Television” is similarly a written text that Lacan has “played” as if he were on stage (and I think that he was reading from a teleprompter) during his interview with Miller. To refer to the film director, Benoît Jacquot may harm psychoanalysis because he is accused by Judith Godrèche (and four other actresses) of "violent rape of minors under the age of 15."[9] And Gérard Miller's indictment does not make the view of ordinary people favorable to the concept of "sexuality" in psychoanalysis. About the gaze, I consider Lacan's interest in “Las Meninas” justified. But it's not just a matter of object a (the gaze), but of the whole structure. In my opinion, this painting is not made for an analysis of perspective (and Lacan's perspective is extremely complex, to the point that Lacanians who have tried to go along with it get entangled in this complexity), but for a topological analysis, such as the one I made. So—to sum up—this painting (and even if Velázquez knew nothing about it, and neither did J. Jordaens, as far as I have researched) spreads out a projective plane immersed in Boy's surface and based on three half-twists in terms of – the procreation of the royal couple, – the political expectation of a male heir who could take the future of Spain into his own hands, – and, to support these two options, the twists in the painting (at the very least, the same painting represented in reverse, not to mention the questions about the position of the royal couple in the room). Now I continue commenting on the concepts that the author of the article takes from the exhibition: these concepts are in no way representable. Thus I say that the object a is a transaction taken as an object—just as previously the passages from functions considered in intension to their materialization in terms of practicables that objectify them in extensions. Therefore, the object a can’t be reduced to its materializations: milk, breast, or feeding-bottle; shit, faeces, scybalum; a recordable voice; a gaze that can be captured photographically or in paint. A fortiori, the sadistic-anal object cannot be represented by droppings, supposedly provocative for the one who is seeing, and it’s not reliable to account for how the impredicativity implies such an object. Lacan's aim is neither pornographic nor scatological. And in the same vein: the Name of the Father, lalangue, the mirror stage, topology, jouissance, the absence of sexual rapport, masquerade, T̸he Woman (which does not exist), anatomy which is not destiny (to contradict Freud). The LGBT lobby has invaded Millerian positions, and the same thing happened to Jean Allouch.[10] And the psychoanalyst's office is not psychoanalysis. Lacan sufficiently argued against what the Californians said about transference based on reality: "There is no transference of transference" is one of Lacan's impredicative formulas.[11] The same reasoning can be made for each of the "illustrated" concepts: they are precisely nothing more than concepts founded recursively on what "is not" (Lacan said “C’est justement de ce qui n’était pas, que ce qui se répète procède” which means, “It is precisely from what was not, that what is repeated proceeds”[12]) as required by an impredicative theory of the signifier’s mode that contributes to their production (Lacan: "A signifier represents a subject for another signifier"[13]); and this is specifically Freud's représentance, which is as inaccessible as any function in intension.[14] For example, how can desire or jouissance, which are properly ungraspable even if markable[15] in facial expression, be expressed plastically?[16] A broader (and more grounded) work on representation is absolutely necessary, and the fact that the représentance is imperatively formatted tends to fix it, which misses (or erases) the dynamic. A raw representation gives and says nothing—a shift is necessary, like the very ironic one Annette Messager made for a time, concerning the feminine, death, love, sex... I'm also thinking of the photographs of Rita Renoir's face,[17] which are far more erotically expressive than any full-body nude photograph. The problem lies in the impredictavity of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, and that’s why they are ungraspable just like the signifier (including and primarily binary) on which these (functional) concepts are based: – repetition, I repeat (!), proceeds from what happens from an initial absence; – the transference, as I said, is impredicative: there is no transference of the transference;[18] – the drive is a matter of représentance, not very accessible, even if supported by a representation, and in a retrogredient way; – the unconscious, structured as a language—and through the use of speech—the unconscious is founded on the signifier (itself impredicative) and made up of impredicative logics rejected by canonical logic. This is the same situation for Wajcman's conception of art as an object. Of course artworks are objects (music, on the other hand, brings into play a unary signifiance that does not go as far as the signifieds), but fine arts objects—in my opinion—are nothing more than the consistency of what would otherwise be inaccessible: a dictionary does not mention signifiers, but words and meanings. Unlike Gérard Wajcman's choice, I will not say the artwork object is non-interpretable, but it is an interpreting. Nor can it be an object a. Rather, the unconscious of the one who produces the object is revealed through the object. It raises the question of aesthetics. So we can go back surely to Kant and his third critique: Critique of Judgment. If you decide to support only representation, you don't bring something operative into focus as représentance does, and hence the series (signifiance → (signifier → signified)) or (S1→ (S2→s). None of this is accessible in the way that a function in intension can be in itself, neither representable nor figurable, etc.: in order to become graspable, the function in intension needs to pass through (or: its representation, Vertretung) an extension. And Lacan's theory of the letter needs to be pushed at least to the littoral, and further to the passage to the signifier’s relation which supports the letter ("Lituraterre"). And it would be welcome to mention Freud's representation complex in his On Aphasia. Actually, we don’t have to divide up what appears to be as simultaneously and distinctly real, imaginary, and symbolic. Hence my choice to represent the Borromean knot as a tripod:
where the real is imaginary and symbolic, both imaginary symbolic and symbolic imaginary, the imaginary is really symbolic and symbolically real, the symbolic is imaginary real and really imaginary.
To go along with the author of the article, we can certainly define three periods in Lacan's teaching, depending on what he focuses on.
– The first concerns the imaginary and mirrors, supported by work on vectors and Markov chains.
– The second (from 1962) builds on the symbolic by using the topology of non-orientable surfaces.
– The third (from 1972) concerns reality and knots.
Of course, there are many entanglements and things are not so clear-cut.
As I gave a seminar that lasted several years at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, I worked on painting and I could tell that fine arts are grounded on topology (from emptiness to fullness...) but only if we consider what Lacan called for, to revise Kant's transcendental aesthetics in order to bring the non-orientability of topological varieties into play.
Art and literature certainly say the same thing as psychoanalysis, and perhaps, as Lacan said, art and literature have centuries of effectuation in advance. Art condenses what psychoanalysis lays flat, literature stages or puts language to work with its own means, what psychoanalysis rearranges in its own devices. For example, Marguerite Duras or François Rouan. But just as there is no psychoanalysis applicable to art or literature, there is no art or literature applicable to psychoanalysis. And it is certainly a question of bringing out (producing and emerging), a question of what psychoanalysis sets up, in and through art. Producing an articulation is a necessity. As Lacan conceives the theory of psychoanalysis only in terms of logic, its concepts as well as its practice, art can only be grasped (and acted upon in art) from the perspective of logic, which can remain unconscious. And, as I consider that the unconscious is not a dumping ground, it is constituted by impredicative logics that consciousness rejects. As a result, art can only stand impredicatively. A predicative art is of no interest, just like predicative literature. In my opinion, 1st order logics are only supported by 2nd order logics, implementing logics of logics, functions of functions.
Ultimately, the relation between art and psychoanalysis is reversevily littoral. And a littoral cannot be directly grasped. Only the fields that are separated and supported by the littoral enable that.
Translated from the French by Abdou Belkacem