WOMAN...THE MISTIC ENJOYMENT

de ESPINOZA Maria Isabel

Lacan has spoken about love. It is always present in his discourse. Love might enclose all imaginary deceipts but, nevertheless, it is the way out in the end of the analysis. The whole transit of an analysis.

Love, says Lacan, is the passion for the ignorance of desire but... it cannot be deprived from reaching it; though it is fulfilled by Two: One! Desire shows the error since it depends on the essence of the signifier that introduces the cut, the "hiancia".

Therefore, the analitical discourse circles that error, that is there is no sexual relation, it is impossible to write about it, so we can talk about what replaces it in a discourse.

The speech brings us this being of the same class to which love aims at. The being is the sexless enjoyment of the body and it is satisfied by the bla...bla. And women’s bla bla is one of their main characteristics, as they always talk about love. Freud approached Psychoanalysis from this view, from this saying that introduces an enjoyment.

Lacan is also interested on women from his beginnings, and this interest will never abandon him, it represents the way in which he returns to the freudian writing. He is adressing different authors to advance in his questioning: What does he read? He reads the enjoyment of him who had written it, he reads the symptom, an erased mark; by approaching it, he will find its meaning because the symptom tries to let an interdicted word pass.

The feminine enjoyment represents the culminating point in the lacanian theory, as I think, since it surrounds the freudian unknown. What does a woman want? To own it, to possess at least a piece of the real in order to embroide her thoughts around it. He studied the formula Woman searches love. He says: "Nothing to say about enjoyment but she knows a lot about love! No connection with the sexual relation".

As the sexual relation is impossible: body, enjoyment, and death, all of them belonging to the real, give an answer. They knot themselves round this unverifiable impasse of sex.

In order to progress in the feminine enjoyment, he directs towards the mysticism, a way that allows him to understand the formulation of the enjoyment and which he will use in the process for the cure. The woman is the symptom, she has to be turned into a symptom.

That love, if it exists, is based on the enjoyment of God, which is expressed through mysticism: Saint Theresa and many others. The enjoyment (X) goes through the corporal pleasure. What do they enjoy? Certainly, mistics say that they feel it but that they know nothing about it. The real field, there is no word to express it.

Women will talk about this enjoyment of God, when becoming One in God. This One’s nature is not represented by an object, it is not a second class good.

I read from the Movimiento de las Beguinas [Beguinas’ Movement] certain passages of these mistics which I could use. Therefore in the books by Margarita Porete, Matilde de Magdeburgo, and Hadjewich de Amberes –mistics of the XIII century- we find that they have written at the time of mystical ecstasy and erotism when they become One in God.

This movement was very important as it allowed these religious texts to be known by the common people, they wrote in popular language and not in latin. They are also known by the literary value of their works. Hadjewich de Amberes is known as a distingueshed flemish poet. Margarita Porete and Matilde de Magdeburgo are considered as the most important works of art of the French and German literature, respectively.

It is important to take into account what these artists have put on stage, using words which reach the margin of audition. It is on the "surface of words" where, in their discourse, we can seize these items of the impasses where the real presents itself. As there is no word that could name it, the rest will name that absence making it real, trying to erase it.

Women express themselves in this way on sacred field. They exposed themselves to be excommunicated, some even died at the stabe but did not renounce their believes. This union with God, without a mediator, made them dangerous for the Church, which saw in them an enchanting force and therefore pursued them with the Inquisition or forbidden their books, only theologists were allowed to read them. It is once again put on stage, at this cultural moment, this which once you reach certain central points in the enjoyment, only the initiated, as Alcibíades says, can hear.

These devoted women, says Don Poriom, illustrated in their own bodies, by visible stigmas, the union they made with Christ’s Eternity. Besides the ecstasy and visions, they showed an outburst of pleasure which overpowered them: laughs, claps, turns and dances, expressions of an irresistible joy. But their most worthy characteristic is that they abandoned themselves to get lost in the Simplicity of the Divine Creature, let their look sunk in the divine nature, testifying it is visible to the inside eye if it finds its original nakedness.

Matilde de Magdeburgo says that the last point in the spiritual life is the night of love which is death by sacrifice.

I cannot condemn it enough.

Margarita Porete calls what is left outside of our reach, the "Most", we must reach the "Most". The Divine Void, this pure void is the desert of uncreated things. It is outside humanity, its desire points up over words. And they go in that direction without fear or compassion as only martyrs can do, says Lacan.

These women show the impotence of the linguistic code, then a vindication of the outburst which from that moment makes a total language, from a fire syntax, where one phrase does not understand the measure, the shout is ordered by God, the crying replaces what the established order could prohibit. A new language which the body can produce, and emotion can feed. There is a total indifference to any material condition. There is no desire, the being turns passive in the inactive beatitude of this state of lovely delight, the hope and the fear have disappeared. There are no differences, they are absorbed by the instant which eternizices them. Ignorance of the signifier which introduces time. It appears the desire of living without living or dying without dying, the desire of a supreme condition, the exacerbation of life that Saint Theresa described firmly: "I die because I don’t die".

What remains outside the phallic enjoyment. Lacan believes in this statement.

It is possible to find in the religious jaculatories this exceptional relationship which appears through time, that is the indescribable of the enjoyment, when the insight is urgent. Why cannot we question the aspect of the Other, the aspect of God, as the feminine enjoyment has a support? This leads us, according to Lacan, to existance. An important issue to take into account to advance on Lacan’s theory, to reach one more step in the freudian theorizing.

María Isabel S. de Espinosa

e-mail: albespin@cvtci.com.ar

Fundación Discurso <> Freudiano Escuela de Psicoanálisis

Translated by Mercedes Monteverde.