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Is the Unconscious Structured Like a Language? HARARI Roberto The maxim "The Unconscious is Structured Like a Language" has become integrated into the cultural values of a century marked by psychoanalysis. Through this statement, Lacan intended to clarify a defining, unchallengeable feature of the subject of the unconscious: the fact that the subject bears merely the effects of having been instituted as such insofar as he is a talking being. (1). Thus attached to language, can this maxim fully account for "Lacanian advances" over the Freudian concept of the unconscious? In my view, the answer to this rhetoric question should be negative, and what follows is my endeavour to validate this "no". On revisiting Joyce, Lacan is driven to devise his last review of what is implied by the effects of language on the subject’s position as well as the way in which the latter "reacts" to the said effects; a reaction which entails a jouissance that is no longer phallic or mystic. What is it about, in fact? It’s what his concept states: "unsubscribed to the unconscious". (2) If subscription binds the subject to pay in advance in order to obtain something that will -and he bets on this-provide him with a regular, periodic and recurrent retrieval of jouissance, termination of his subscription will indeed mean withdrawing his bet. Therefore, when putting a stop to the jouissance of the unconscious by which he is determined, (3) the subject, without sighs or nostalgia, resorts to the death drive in order to undo his ties and set himself free from an ensemble of signifiers that kept him, as S1, subsumed before the representation that represented him. Yes: untying, detachment, breach of the Automaton subscription so as to open up to indetermination, to some chance tuchic encounter. Seminar 21 already brought an unusual piece of self-criticism by Lacan: in it he declared that the supposedly unavoidable connection between two signifiers, the connection that couldn’t be ignored, was "an error".(4) As I see it, Lacan can pose this objection because the clinical practice resulting from borromean logic enables him to conceive of a type of chain that differs from the chain of signifiers. The borromean type calls for mutual independence of the first two rings, which are merely superposed and show a false hole between them (5), whereas the chain of signifiers is written as an olympic connection; that is to say, as intertwined. This is why the borromean chain accounts for the mobility and autonomy of the signifier’s material aspect -in other words, of the letter– which modifies the usual canonic mode that defines the subject. The subject actually represented a signifier before – or to – another signifier. Still, if the reference between signifiers is broken, the notion of subject it defines is annulled too. Thus it should not surprise us that at the same time as Lacan posits the unsubscription to the unconscious and nonolympic borromean logic, he brings up a notion written as LOM.(6) It is, indeed, a homophony for l’homme, "man". Is he then returning to an obsolete idea, one he has often derided as a prejudice inherent to humus? Is it a return to wholeness? It might be said that it is a return with a difference which becomes clear as we realise what the writing of LOM points to. It is a new signifier, which acquires substance in writing, for it does not sound different when uttered. Therefore, no unlimited splitting, but one that is restricted to the Symbolic, and autonomy for LOM to rescue the potential of language as an act, unsubscribed to the said register. The signifier LOM, in act, sets a boundary to the analyst’s action, inviting him to abstain from associating endlessly inside the ever-lasting polysemia of any signifier that has gained stability in the language. It rather teaches the analyst to undo and rearrange words, holding together "the phonic framework of language", as Jakobson would put it. (7) Again, Joyce shows Lacan the telescoping process, first used by L. Carroll, where words are tightly packed together till they become "mots-valises", portmanteau words, which merge sound and meaning in a disjunctive synthesis, (8) like "chaosmos" does. This points to the fact that it is insufficient to think in terms of mere opposites. It is well-known that Lacan’s self-criticism also reached the principle of dialectics when he admitted to "boasting" of having resorted to it all the time. (9) Then, neither opposites nor "an improved synthesis", but tight packing of letters, along with "mental jouissance", (10) that no longer depend on fragmentations of the body or restraints imposed by the code. It is lack of sense (or "ab-sens") that triggers off new signifiers. Hence it can be grasped how far this way of action lies from Freud’s dictum "to bring the unconscious (which was preconscious) into consciousness". Because we not only search for metaphor –the Symbolic realm–, because we do not only go by the question "what’s the meaning of...?", because our hearing is not guided only by translation rules, in 1973 Lacan pays homage to Joyce as the creator of Untranslation.(11) As from this time it is not just proper nouns that are not translated; Lacan himself raises Freud’s Das Unbewusste, "the unconscious", to the rank of untranslation when he renders it as l’une-bévue. So, interlinguistic untranslation. However, do we always need a minimal basis of bilingualism in order to untranslate? Well, no, we do not, since LOM is bifid even when he speaks only one tongue, for this one tongue always forks out into other tracks, always accepts –as well as demands- detours such as clinamen. (12) Aren’t the titles of Lacan’s Seminars 19 thru 24 untranslated and bifidly homophonic?
Lacan also criticised his own attachment to linguistics, (13) which he embraced practically from the very beginning. We can see how linguistics is replaced by linguisterie, a portmanteau word that packs together linguistics and hysteria. Then, the "object" of this quasi-parodical "new branch of knowledge" is called lalangue. Actually, when the definite article is abolished as an independent part of speech, the return to what is universal is also resigned. On the other hand, it ciphers the scope of the mother tongue – the one the mother speaks to her baby – signalled by lallation as written in the initial letters of this neologism. But if so, does lalangue make up the bottom of some bag in the unconscious, insofar as it stands for the remains of primitive, archaic marks? Is lalangue perhaps the elemental background of the language? Not at all, for Lacan’s directions are that we should treat each and every word in the way la langue – lalangue have processed them. He instructs us analysts to take up a different hearing mode, inviting us to carry out a specific analytic operation, where we cease to work with the Symbolic in general. Yes, lalangue is such owing to the analyst’s praxis with the Real in the language: the tips, the pieces, "regardless of rules and order", (14) implementing true forcing. (15) From the above, the reasons for "the last Lacan’s" sustained criticism of the unconscious – "lucubration", "supposed deduction", and so on –might be understood. His criticism finishes off in the following assertion, made in his Seminar 25: "The hypothesis that the unconscious may be an extrapolation is not an absurdity, and in it, precisely, lies the reason why Freud resorts to what has been called drive." (16) For drive actually allows new inscriptions, unbinding signifiers that anchor a symptomatic, parasitical jouissance, leading them along the lines of a system that the theory of chaos names as "a system of strange attractors."(17) Yes, an orderly chaos that questions the "balance" supported by the sympton’s phallic jouissance, encouraging its replacement by identification to the sinthome. (18) Bibliography.
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