THE LISTENING, THE ECLIPSE AND LIGHTNING
(Between "The Sounds of Silence" and "The Windmills of your Mind")

INI Cintia


"As Freud, I have the right to communicate my dreams to you. As opposed to those of Freud, my dreams are not inspired by the wish to sleep, the desire to awaken drives me more". J. Lacan,

A neverending awakening.

These words echo in my mind after 20 years in the practice of psychoanalysis, and perhaps as a good commemoration of such years. It causes me to locate the updatedness of this desire to awaken as something endless, as it never ceases not to be produced, in other words, I believe that the challenge of psychoanalytic clinics is that of a permanent re-awakening. Morpheus cherishes the fact of embracing us in his drowsiness once and once again.

"I am driven by a desire to awaken" , if this desire reflects its cause (Lacan’s cause) it is precisely because it deals with an impossible in practical clinics, the impossibility of remaining awake. Perhaps we are asleep most of the time and it is only a few sparkles here and there push us to wake up.

We know that what awakens us in clinics is the irruption of a real When we don’t understand something that’s when we wake up, according to Lacan. At the same time he refers to clinics as "that real which is impossible to bear"

I believe that such impossible to bear of the Real in clinics amounts to the revolving door which makes us point to the rejection of contingency, if we rotate in one direction, covering ourselves from the surprise, of the unexpected, of uncertainty. This anodine easiness does not spare us a certain concommitant discomfort, or a lethargy as an exacerbation of such discomfort. (Lethargy as a return of this forecluded remainder)

To revolve in the opposite direction implies the analyst’s desire function as a desire that twists the inertia of that tendency, it is a desire to awaken that would overcome this rejection to confront the risk of becoming the recipient of a real, of what irrupts, squashing all intuitive comprehension. But, on the other hand, what is this desire based on? What causes it? Could we think that it is precisely that impossible in clinics that becomes the cause?

In these terms, I believe that this double option to the revolving door is centered, on the one hand, in the trend to occlude the regulations of the impossible, making a fiction out of clinics of the possible in which everything adapts to the concept in which the analyst has no doubt as to his or her efficiency (maximum state of sleepliness condition).

The opposite direction would be that of preserving the regulations of the impossible of clinics, which would act as a certain condition for us to face part of this, as a kind of Ariadne’s thread which in the midst of the inevitable entanglement gives us some orientation as to the path of awakening, subject to being warned that there is no such condition, nor such path. "The Awakening is the Real under its aspect of the Impossible" (1). The impossible is awakening.

This rather drastic bifurcation is a device to think on the one hand on two types of clinics, but in being more precise, for the abovementioned reasons I am interested in highlighting as inherent to every analyst to be questioned by these two provisions, since the analyst’s desire is not a pure one. Not everything in the analyst is the "analyst’s desire". I believe it is one of the reasons for Lacan to think that going through the pass was not done once and for all.

J.Allouch once more takes Lacan’s affirmation as to clinics being an impossible real to bear, and adds: "other than in writing". (2) while explaining that it is not its written format that makes it more bearable, but rather that it becomes the bearer of its impossibility regulations, enforcing it as such as it is unendingly unwritten. (We’ll get back to the subject of writing).

THE REAL, IN LISTENING

I believe that the most immediate consequences on these hesitations befall the analyst’s listening and its concomitant eclipses.

How to measure in this respect the analyst’s aversion to the emergence of the Real in clinics under its contingency modes, or under its impossibility mode?

On the one hand a certain avoidance to be "uncautious" , to remain in an "open" position to surprise, intercepting "amazedness", taking refuge in an already constituted knowledge. The contingent does not remove the crystallizing heaviness of "what is necessary".

This appears in a resistance to allow oneself to be siderated in oue listening, wrapped in the seductive "harmony" that closes off the permeability leading to the perception of "dissonance and modulations independent from the unifying tonal hierarchy" (3), preventing a glimpse of the multiple substractive causing the explosion of the One refuged in the den of Sense (unifying tonal hierarchy).

THE SENSE would be the privileged ally of these resistances, we obviously work with it, but THE REAL is precisely what ex-sists SENSE, therefore this mortal and soporific joy-sense becomes a perfect guardian intercepting the passage of the Real and neutralizing its effects.

To cause a vibration from the analysts’s perception of the poliphony lying in speech would silence the imperative address of Sense, as Lacan said "making something other than sense sound there", come out of the "yoke of the tonal hierarchy" eclipsing the distony of a real at stake there.

To be awake, for example, to immediately capture the vibration of an error which, such as Pandora’s box we ignore a priori where it leads us to, what triggering force inhabits it in Language that could unravel from it. It is not coincidental that Lacan was forced to insist more than once throughout his last seminars, as well as in "Television" and "L’Etourdit". As to the key resulting from error as a reduction way of sense, he may have cautioned that this was an unresolved point of resistances for analysts, and of the decision required to be subject to Language.

The analyst needs to perform a suspension of Knowing and to "bring down sense as much as possible" to allow itself to be crossed by the lightning tearing it (the sense) allowing for the emergence of the Language camouflaged in it. This is not an operation going along the path of natural intuition, it requires a Forcing, of a going "Against-Nature" to touch the ends of this Real, in the face of what makes sense.

Lacan on TV says that it is this real that allows to effectively separate the consistency of the symptom, a consistency made of "a knot of significants...knots constituted to make a chain of the significant matter....these chains are not made of sense but of joy-sense".

Jouis-sens joy-sense

J’ouis I-heard

Oui Yes

It is condensed in jouis-sens: Audio(yes)joy-sense, these are the terms Lacan submits

on TV. It becomes necessary to un-listen, not-listen the (sens) sense, to remove oneself from the hypnotic power involved in every address.

It is an un-listening to listen to the inaudible letting go part of that joy carried in sense. This is the way I interpret part of what Lacan calls counter-nature.

Lacan delves into poetry searching for winged freedom to orient his inspiration, a treatment of TheLanguage (LaLangue) (joined by the knowledge of the unconscious) to make it "flexible", to "elongate" it. The analyst as a craftsman prepares a tapestry with the threads of R.S.I. through a work of patience separating, dislocating sound and sense as to rearticulate them extracting the Language bearing joy, modifying its conditions. To read with the text is to decode the unconscious encoding through which TheLanguage (LaLangue) precipitates in Language.

"The Language" it is only there that we have access to the Real, Joy of the Other" (4) (impossible in its nonexistance).

Francisco Quevedo, a master of "Letters" (Literature), made a bet. In order to win it, he had to have the courage to tell the Queen that she was lame.

Quevedo approaches the Queen with a bunch of flowers and says to her "Between the Dahlia and the Rose, your Majesty will choose(T.N.: The original text in Spanish reads "escoja", meaning choose. "Es coja" means is lame)

Quevedo in his flowering language can produce there the elimination of the S mentioning what "is lame" in the Other in a veiled manner, thus excepting himself through the homophonic error, of remainining in the situation of sacrificial enjoyment while supporting the existence of the Other, all of which would have happened had he exposed himself to offend the Queen.

IN CONCLUSION...

Lacan’s teaching has to do with an ability of perseverant and obstinate interrogation as to the analyst’s position, hammering on sites of impossibility.

This way of approaching the boundaries of our clinical practice repeatedly is after all one of the ways of coming close to castration, causing the effect of an vivifying engine that allows us to awaken now and then.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  1. J.Lacan. Sem. 24 Unedited.
  2. J.Allouch Letter by Letter.Ed.Edelp
  3. Debussy.
  4. J.Lacan. La Troisieme.