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IN THE FREUDIAN FIELD THE UNCONSCIOUS IS LACAN'S
Cancina Pura H.
"On top of Mount Nebo the law was given to us," says Lacan
citing Joyce(1) . If the commandments were given to Moses on top of Mount
Sinai, then which law was given to him on Nebus? Moses was sentenced not
to enter the promise land. His successor, Joshua (Icho-sua, Jahveh saves),
would do it. The Exodus was Moses', the promised land, Joshua's.
"Law of love and of perversion"(2) : the Father saves.
In the Freudian field the unconscious is Lacan's(3) , but Lacan is not
Joshua.
On top of his "noeud bo", what torsion does Lacan apply to the
law of love to the father and what is its consequence?
There is no promised land, as there was not one lost: the object is lacking,
missing in its origin.
In the Freudian unconscious, the first trace of joy, which operates as
signifying foundation of the web and as starting point of repetition,
is the trace of a sexual and incestuous joy. It holds on to the Lust of
the first encounter as model for the merger between the child and its
mother. The sexual drives and the formations of the unconscious push to
recuperate the lost joy of the first and most complete sexual merger.
The unconscious according to Lacan is grounded on his concept of repetition,
based on the revision of Aristotle that he made reading the Stoics. He
revises the relationship that Aristotle establishes between the automaton
-the web of signifiers- and what he calls tyche, which is, according to
Lacan, the encounter with the real. What is at stake here is the referent
in psychoanalysis, a question tied up with the object, which redresses
the one about the real. It is the concept itself that has been questioned.
It is after this revision that the Wiederholhungzwang is going to be translated
as "compulsion to repetition." The real is what, from now on,
rules in repetition: not the signifier's insistence; the weight must be
laid upon The Thing (das Ding) in the real. Beyond the return and insistence
of the signifier, ruled by the pleasure principle, the real dwells behind
the automaton: what repeats itself is the inassimilable .
According to the Stoics, in the suspense introduced between the antecedent
and the consequent in the hypothetical proposition of the type "if
... then" between signifier and signified, every assimilation is
yet to be established. Such notion of meaning effect is different from
the one of signified. On this interval, on this hiatus, rests the notion
of concept which Lacan exposes already in his 11th Seminar. The concept
is always established as an approximation: only as a leap, a step to the
limit, is the concept realized as such. Lacan says: " ... the limit
of the Unberwusste is the Unbergriff, not non-concept, but concept of
lacking." (4)
Limit of the unconscious, limit of the signifier and its elaborations
of knowledge.
To approach what is at stake in the analyst's deciphering function vis-à-vis
the ciphering of unconscious joy, it is convenient to stop at what Lacan
formulates as "pas-de-sens": meaning pass which implies a drift
towards no meaning. The joy retained by the symptom rests, then, as meaning
heard, marked by the phallus. Phallic signification is that depletion
of meaning of the signifiers which we call castration.
While according to Lacan castration is the mark of origin to be made subjective,
according to Freud it is still "hard rock" rejected towards
the future: specter of castration destined to be realized there where
the analyst incarnates the father. This affects his conception of the
direction of the cure guided by his commitment to the truth: historical
truth to be revealed (knowledge of the truth) and not a knowledge whose
processing is revealed as the truth of knowledge.
At this point, the kinship among psychoanalysis and religion must be made
explicit in order to better situate the difference. As regards to the
point we are arguing, do not Freud and Lacan share same orientation but
perform a different operation, even with the same orientation?
To Lacan it is a subversion of meaning by the orientation to the nonsense
of the real, which coincides strictly with the signifier as one, asemantic
signifier, meaningless signifier, one there where two are needed, letter
which writes where it never ceases being written: there is no sexual intercourse.
As a desire to obtain the absolute difference, the analyst's desire is
what holds this orientation by the real of the signifier together. Castration
ceases, stressing the comma as Lacan advises, being written as possible.
The religious knot, while sharing the same orientation as the one in psychoanalysis,
involves an operation of a different order. Performing the symbolic of
the imaginary is to aim at the truth and be left with the meaning. Religion
is the discourse of the true. To get out of it one has to enter the psychoanalytic
discourse. Symbolizing the imaginary of the real is the restart carried
out by the analytic operation: an agreement with the statute of lying,
which is what is really symbolic. What is symbolically real is not what
is really symbolic, Lacan says. What is really symbolic, i.e., what is
symbolically included in the real, is the lie. Stated here we have both
the character of knowledge and that to which the signifier leads in its
radical nonsense.
And this, Lacan says, "puts us, analysts, on the same levogyrate
orientation, by which, when we imagine the real in the symbolic, our first
step-made in mathmatics a long time ago-is the one to which we are led
by considering the unconscious, since that is where linguistics makes
its headway."(5) Imagining the real out of the symbolic would be
realizing that it is the signifier as radical nonsense, the signifier
as one.
It is an orientation by the real and not to the real: what produces this
orientation is the nature of analytical dialogue, where the analyst in
his neutrality, with meaning halted, hears another meaning and may then
respond in a different way.
The orientation by the real is the orientation of the real: encounter
with the nonsense which deciphers-de/cipher-the joy of the symptom and
commemorates the founding moment of the signifying cast: the signifier
as one, the meaningless signifier. A position in which a new signifier
may be the product and invention of the analysis: a signifier that, like
the real, would not have any sort of meaning.
Let us go back, with these puntuations, to the initial question.
The torsion that "ne-bo" exercises makes it become support to
athinking (l'appenée)(6) , so the bo-knot changes the meaning of
writing completely. It is a writing different from the one made by the
signifier's precipitation. The signifier is hooked to the "said-mension,"
to the "dit-mensionge"(7) : the saying need not be true.
As writing, the Borromean holds the object's bone (os-bject), object reduced
to letter, letter a; another (autre) writing which changes the meaning
of writing. Not lost object, but lack of object.
Pura H. Cancina
- Seminar Le sinthome, May 10, 1976.
- Ibid.
- The unconscious, then, is not Freud's: it is Lacan's. Which does
not prevent the field from being Freudian. J. Lacan, opening of the
Clinical Section.
- January 22, 1964.
- 22nd Seminar, November 13, 1973.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
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