Lutecium Blog

I am getting geared up for our March Lutecium immersion where Jacques Siboni and Robert Groome will be formally presenting to our candidates and faculty …….Lacan’s topology…Lacan’s later work. 

Recently I stumbled across the beginning of a paper entitled “The Aesthetic Illogic of the symtom”.  I had begun the paper ten years ago. I was looking for words to describe what ,in recent years, I realized that Lacan had already articulated. Lacan’s later work moves from privileging the symbolic to an interest in more closely representing how the REAL through the object a….. informs the symptom at the most basic level of drive and fixations mapped within the erogenous zones of the body.

A group of us in San Francisco were fortunate to have the later works of Lacan disseminated to us for the last 8 years… through the valliant efforts of Jacques Siboni. 

Lacan’s turn to topology was an attempt to utilize discourses more apt to represent that which can’t be seen or so easily logically deduced; those territories such as the universe and the cosmos that have traditionally been the domain of mathmeticians and topologists. Lacan, of course, believed that these findings would necessarily fold back into language to find their order within the symbolic. Lacan did, in fact, place his topological findings into language and taught it to others. Now Lacan’s findings continue to find their place in the symbolic through the third and now fourth generation of Lacanian psychoanalysis. I have been able to finish my paper which outlines the richness that culminates in his later work, and includes the feminist challenge to lack. Lacan made radical revisions to his understanding of phallic and feminine jouissance. These revisions offer so many jumping off points for those of us who have had a passionate social and political interest in understanding the Other beyond “cultural symbolic” restrictions that were inherant in the privileging of a phallogocentric symbolic.     

I believe that there are returns of knowledges, particularly complex knowledge of Lacan never fully finished…or revealed by any one person or group……it is through one voice, or another, perhaps many that hear the ressonance of a far reaching trace through knowledge that keeps certain knowledges resounding, moving through time,  revolutionized in order that they continue to return… Kierkegaard said that the testament to a great thinker were the numbers  and efforts of those who try to complete a tremendous thinkers’ thoughts. Certainly there is room for infinite vantage points in how we listen and ressonate to the words, concepts and the trace that Lacan left us with. He fanned our desire to know…beyond what has already been discovered. Lacan led us far….It is up to us to continue…..exploring.. returning to Lacan…..to explore the unconscious as Lacan returned to Freud….to explore the unconscious. The fourth generation returns to Lacan.

Preface to the forth coming publication 

The Clinic of the REAL;The fourth generation of Lacanian Psychoanalysis     

  “Seaweed, the symptom, becomes caught and swept into the hard bone of symbolic, inside a matrix of rock lace, and wears it into another pattern within, within the coral, another shaping, another shifting. Jouissance is underwater, jouissance is captive, but spills over through openings into a labyrinth of white and pink cartlige breathing under water. It rips open the symptom against the coral-the symbolic. There is a dark blue moving into turquoise or perhaps a sea green that plays with a magenta light refracting off the sheen of reef …blasting colors onto the shifts and waves of an origin. The sea from which we evolved. Outside of language before…the origin of the universe whose coordinates are best left up to numbers and geometry…we agree on this. We cannot locate the other side of our beginning, yet it is with us…this trace…of the universe of which we are matter…to which we belong which is best left up to numbers and geometry. We agree on this.
The symbolic, the coral shifts and returns to sand, it is sanded down it becomes the outside  as the sand moves into particles twirling in an undercurrent, the symbolic tears and breaks soon it becomes what lies outside of it. What conditioned it. What designed it. It moves back to its beyond. We agree on this.”                                                                                                            
Rebecca from The Illogical Aesthetic of the Symptom (1999)
  

What is the trace in transmission. A trace is the remainder of the object a that comes to us in a very nostaligic and particular way that “moves us deeply”.  The trace is of this world and not of this world since there is something that we are hit with that resides within our symlptom our jouissance that is not fully repressed but is foreclosed so that there is someething of this tear….this bodily jouissance that comes back to us through an event. Through something in this world. Lacan would suggest it could come to us through language. This trace…..but it cannot be anchored down or nailed down through signification….as the real escapes the events of this world. But the trace is what impacts the subjects relation to events so significantly. So how do I begin to incorporate the trace in transmission into the classroom. What happens when speech imparts a trace and is this full speech vs. empty speech because it is resonnating with the fourth register. The fourth register is the symptome so this would hold the real…..kernel of the real therefore when it is jostled through some sort of address as in poetry, art, that which attempts to trace traces……then another sort of an effect occurs. One walks away from such meeting with some sort of deep clammoring…not so much for approval….but for something more related to this chip of what almost feels like one’s self.  This trace of teh object a that lingers in some ways of writing and talking and speaking. This is what I long to translate or write about or offer…..but as Lacan began to recognize language becomes difficult….here..as a trace is a trace is a trace…that appears and dissappears and can’t be spoken.

 How would this effect love Aden and translation Kristopher.

The trace…..

Rebecca

Aden
As you know, in Lacan’s later work he laid out the symptomotology of the phallic jouissance as well as the feminine jouissance.  The earlier work is concerned with taking a look at how various character structures are moving around the symbolic/the law of the father.  The later  Lacan sees that the symbolic as symptomatic and lacking, and Lacan moves from priviledging the symbolic to priviledging the object a/REAL–I follow  his lead. Simply put there is inhibition, in the phallic exchange and there is imagination in the feminine jouissance both have their problems. Both are in someways defenses regarding the REAL. Both generate death and life to a certain extent.

In the later work Lacan moves to examine the relationship between the subject and his/her jouissance—while all of our  personal jouissances are going to in someway be informed by development.  How we bring in the gaze, how we bring in signfication which will always have imaginary identifications (logical language or poetic) is informed by the beyond of the object a that is first torn from us when we pass from existencce to non existence and then various factors will lay over onto that. It is the confrontation with this object a—that the fixations derail, and it is at this juncture when the subject understands the ground/the REAL that his/ symptoms pivot upon that something different can happen, a differerent movement of the symptom beyond fixation in the gaze that still haunts us in the symbolic.

This later work does returns us to the trace of object and The REAL of the body. Lacan’s later work was stimulated by writers like Joyce and Dumas, his exploration of how the writer turns symtpom to sinthome—this intimate wording and threading self jouissance back into the symbolic…..This is what he began to trace to understand another way to resolve symptoms besides compromise formation which has social and political and personal implications. Revolutions in thought move out of imagination…not inhibition…revolution in the symptom is what Lacan saw—a radical swing of the symptom into the sinthome–back into the symbolic/culture. 

So it is important to note that this is not necessarily a “repetition of the hysterics discourse”…..or an anarchy to turn against Lacan.  Rather it is a way to design and build a path that is worth walking within present culture. It is a path that also has been laid for us by Lacan and so many others that walk this way….a deeply personal, reflected, philosophical and aesthetic path that has classical roots and much language to add. It is a path of lineage of history, a path that others have thrown words towards allowing us to  continue on our way…..Lacans, Siboni, Fannon  and Cixous, Barthes of the world….it is in their vein and legacy that a path has been laid for us. Whose motherland do we speak of ? Whose motherland are we most tied ?  Who speaks to us most deeply ? At what pitch at what level do we wisht to speak to others ?  

It is an acceptance of the symptom and then how to move that into sinthome in order that one’s unique play of jouissance can have its effects in a more symbolic way. As this binds into the world rather than have this kind of jouissance sequestered in  some “cultures” symptom of let’s say “inhibition” or censorship from the more obsessive/anxiety side.. . . 

I am making a personal choice to accept my symptom and work through it as sinthome. I accept that these perturbations may incite. generate havoc…but want to demonstrate Lacan’s mapping of the psyche by living in the radical zone of speaking that I have been offered.  To me this is my only choice in participating and moving Lacan’s project. It is to deeply regard and accept my symtom so that I can participate in a lacanian project in full speach rather than hover around symptoms of the Other–imaginary identifications …that lose my continuing connection to object a…..through a certain style and type of language and speech.

Lacan demonstrates his work through voice, thought, through a willingness to be singular. I read, I listen, I follow, I take much closer direction here than what might meet the eye. I have marked myself as Lacanian through and through and some of my exercises and projects continue this in a more flagrant way. Particularly the exercise of loosening up and making sure we have the space to write..my idea of losing the audience to the desert was to allow us to really not be so pressured regarding thoughts and ideas to move into less appropriated zones in order that we might really speak to one another through texts as this is where the future of our work resides in what we carve out for each other and the next generation.

 ..at some point this is the type of writing that will have a chance of making something out of itself.   That will be able to move into the symbolic squarely and powefully. It is not severe inhibition which fosters the singular voice. In fact, where is our writing .It is tentative, it stops short, it hides out…..but any writing of psychoanalysis must be honest..and must take risk to demonstrate our times….us…..some of us…in it.

As far as decisions and choices regarding where one lives in their projects and thier work. For Lacan this would be up to each of us to take responsibility ……for…..choices one makes as one can’t live in both the phallic and feminine economy at exactly the same time..The imagination and inhibition need one another—its how one wants to play it.

While I keep an eye on the phallic economy to assure enought credibility to pursue my path. But not enought to breakdown my own speech and my own flight into words. Walking the tight rope. with the recognition that a breeze at anytime could knock me over..it does and it has and yet I crave love walking this line..it is my ode to the object a/REAL and the unconscious….. a line I continue through Lacan…and pass to others…a lineage….always through my sinthome.  As Jacques Siboni once said, “Psychoanalysis is my jouissance.” This is the ethic I follow. 

Rebecca     

rebecca, i want to respond and add.

 1-  i do not know a flower mister or mistress fit to invite besides myself.  let me be her.  i have texture and color and waterlogged fingers to show for it. 

2- the dessert, where no flowers grow.  yes.

3- This is scary mirroring of sympom/analysis, love/marriage.

scared.  your blog is regection of appropriation, privileging of ‘a.  i feel the same.  but we belong to the hysterical motherland, and we are forever nostalgic for it. is fear of appropriation a hysterical symtom? can we love it? 

this morning john gasperoni unpacked the path to hysteria… allow me to summarize:

for the hysteric, the origional object of satisfaction was unsatisfying, setting the precident for eternal dissatisfaction. no one, nothing, is satisfying.  and if this origional object was satisfied by the hyseric, as an object, this was unbearable.  ie: if i’m not satisfied, i sure as hell don’t want to satisfy you, fucker! passivity is intolerable.  this leads to the refusal of the right of the big O to give them a place in discourse.  THE REFUSAL OF APPROPRIATION, i believe.  all of our work, are we repeating and repeating this passionate refusal?  do i care?

but love, love, my lovesickness kicks in… my love… is ‘a.  this… the real… cannot be touched.  and i revel in that notion.