Reflections on the semblant

MUTCHINICK Daniel

The concept of semblant is an essential articulation in the development of psychoanalysis ,such as we understand it.

The semblant is a proposal of how to interrogate the truth. How to play the game of convoking the truth without wishing it.

Wherein Lacan warns us that the truth is only said if it is unchained, he further advises us that there is no better way to enchain it than desiring it. To this very point converge-without contradiction between them- two phrases that Lacan quotes from others: " I do not seek for, I find " and later : "I don’t find, I seek for".

Outlining thereon the place of the analyst in the transference, is thus solidary to the place of lover not loved which Lacan explains in his teachings on transference.

His theoretical antecedent is freudian notion of abstinence but the semblant advances over this concept, detaching it from any postfreudian adherence regarding passive neutrality. This is to mean that the concept of semblant can be understood as an articulation between Freud’s idea of transference and that of Lacan, to the extent that it gives reason of the operation of Lacan’s invention of the object a in the analytical dispositive. Moreover, it accounts for how this semblant is the agent that is operating in the cure. The name "floating attention" was given by Freud to this subordinated link of the analyst in relation to the discourse of an analyzant. Lacan goes further in the sense that he considers this subjection as a place generated by this discourse, which, sometimes is occupied by the analyst. A place written by the saying of the text which the analyzant ignores to carry.

The semblant is a product which , in turn, produces. It is the loss effect deriving

from the signifier action, in its double track of halfsaying the truth and installing the object a in the place of the lack, in the point of the constitution of the subject.

It is generated in the line that the jouissance lost by the action of the language is recovered, in some way, in the saying, in the production of the surplus jouissance. This is probably one of the reasons for the insistence of Lacan, who,

till the end of his work, stresses that analysis is a practice of the word. Possibly

because his teaching inscribes as no other one, that it is this practice that enables to recover in part, by speaking, what is lost for being able to speak, and thus giving testimony of this loss. Inaugural loss that is inscribed as the enunciation readable in the enunciated.

The semblant is subordinated to the writing of discourse because that writing determines the place which is sometimes occupied by the analyst. This is an

unknown courtesy , a courtesy arising from a writing that the analyzant ignores to carry with.

The subject of courtesy is submitted to what his acts write in a choreography of signs and at the same time it is a subject determined by what is written. The

choreography is of this order.

Therefore, the semblant is a product that generates places. It is in this sense we may say that the analyst sometimes occupies the place of object in the semblant. Perhaps the mode of this occupation, generated, in the diversity of reading approaches to Lacan’s teachings, one of the strongest differences among those who consider themselves his followers. Different readings that thus originated different clinical approaches, which set up strong questions about the ethics thereby intervening. So it is that we may read, for instance, an interpretation as follows :" But, in principle –states this reader of Lacan-

dramatizations from him,bring forth to the scene (…) what we may assume to call an acting-out, but with one difference, that perhaps, in this case,the

produced,because the last one is not controllable." This understanding of the concept of semblant is the basis of a clinical approach where the analyst does not accupy the place of the semblant, on the contrary it composes it. The semblant is performed in the same manner of hysteria and moreover, the analyst imagines, hopes with being able to control this hysterical escenification .

This conceptual adulteration places the analyst in the preparation of the transference, time stage pertinent to the positive science. This preventive preparation is an interesting harmonious point with postfreudian frame, besides

announcing an analysis of doubtful termination.This encounter of two clinical approaches-supposedly on opposite ends-implies sharing the same ethics and would add its reasons to unthinkable alchemies in psychoanalytical politics.

The theatrical concept of appearance is a formula of false appearance and implies the idea of calculation in the representation of the object by the analyst

who already knows the writing to be characterized. What an ethical abism we find, then, compared with the idea of a clinical approach that promotes a time of waiting that perhaps places the analyst in the occupation of the place of the semblant as a product of an unknown writing of the object a.

It can thus be stated that the distance going from the semblant that the analyst occupies, to the appearance of the hysterical masquerade, is solidary to the difference between the desire of the analyst and that desire which is instituted with the subject. Good occasion, indeed, for the dis-being of the analyst to be

verified or not. If we can assert that discourse is that of the semblant, the question which arises is which discourse are we dealing with in psychoanalytical clinic. What discourse is being displayed thereby ? The question is if the analyst pays or not with his own discourse the price of promoting that it is not

his Thing which is being resembled.

Resembling represents the Thing in the real, starting from an empty space, and this inscribes an ethical premise because of the impossibility in relation with the knowledge that this emptiness imposes. To do know about this gap is what differences the semblant that sustains that impossibility from the false appearance that falls into the imposture of knowing it. In this sense, we can affirm that the idea of semblant is solidary with the transference as representation of that loss which Freud inaugurates as "agieren" in "Remembering, Repeating, elaborating"

Perhaps, from the varied forms in which the fact of presentation of the semblant may take place, a privileged one is its occupation by means of the

‘ occurrence ’. We may think that the semblant finds in the contingency of events the elements which are propitiatory , and so the ‘occurrence’ of an analyst in an analysis is an indication of that production. The invention is a wise form of coping with that which is contingent. Otherwise, what is impossible, oppresses.

When we talk about an occurrence we are thinking of its double sense of what in fact occurs, how the semblant happens to take place, and , on the other hand, we refer to that unexpected saying which comes out to be an interpretation. The occurrence, as a form of analytical action, is well related to the truth, in the sense that there is no certainty attributed to it. An occurrence is a bet to the unconscious and it founds an ethic. There simply exists that what is said or what is done, which by its mere occurrence, are valid to generate expectation for what these may cause. The occurrencce is in the line of the joke and keeps independent from the Other, who does not exist, but who is definitely vigorized if one reverts to the Other to authorize oneself to speak.

The occurrence may be considered as a modality of the position of the analyst,

produced by the sayings of the analyzant. As a contingency of that impossible to say. As a manner of occupying a place which may give way to the semblant,

a semblant of the object of jouissance and, that which appears as surplus

jouissance. It may well be that this intercross between clinic and occurrence allows for Lacan to warn us to keep in mind that phrase from Nietzsche :