(Re)-Turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies

Introduction to Volume VII of (Re)-Turn

This issue addresses several myths of today's theoretical and cultural scene such as a possibility of autonomous resistance against the identity politics and politics of gender normativity, or, even more popular today -- the myth of bio-technological solutions and the opposing myth or, rather, a nostalgia for the times when medicine and science in general did not participate in reproductive practices: "We will not place ourselves on the side of the enemies of Science by respectinga supposed state of nature which has never existed," Gueguen states.

". . . the real lies," Jacques-Alain Miller opens his lesson by which we continue publication of his course Responses of the Real (1983-1984). It is, in his own word, "a scandalous proposition." One way of understanding it, Miller suggests, is "the subject is, for psychoanalysis, a response of the real and it is first in this form that the real lies because it shows itself in psychoanalysis as a response of the subject." In the course of this lesson, Miller investigates the relation of this lie to the truth. The ambiguity of both a lie and the truth is again at play here: it is precisely in dreams, slips of the tongue, missed acts, witticisms, that the subject of in the analytic experience comes to be a subject of the unconscious real.

In the essay "When a Body Event is Produced," Pierre Naveau reads the story of Lucien from Stendhal's unfinished novel Lucien Leuwen (1834). The young man falls in love with Bathilde de Chasteller, who is also in love with him, but the two cannot talk about their feelings due to their intense blushing and slips of the tongue, or lapsus. In his reading of the novel, Naveau refers to Jacques-Alain Miller's Seminar "Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body,"¹ where he distinguishes between the notions of being and having a body. As Miller suggests, "The subject is not his body. He does not identify himself with it." Instead, the subject has a "disarranged" body since it carries the traces left by the events of discourse. In this sense, Naveau identifies blushing as such a symptom that produces events of the body.

Incapable of "overcoming" this sudden, but repetitive irruption of jouissance, Lucien interprets it as his lack of courage when it comes to talking to Bathilde about love, which makes him very disappointed. Throughout the literary text, Naveau discusses an episode from his own practice, the case when a similar symptomatic blushing arises: "[The female patient] was troubled all the more by the very fact that when she blushed (rougissement), she drew others to look at her. She, then, made a lapsus and said: 'I was overwhelmed by my roaring (rugissement).' Certainly she meant to say 'by my blushing.' 'Yes,' I said to her, 'you were blushing rather than roaring like a lion.'" The blushing was stopped by his intervention in order to "unmake" the patient's lapsus.

These examples demonstrate the way the symptom functions. In "Σ (x)," Miller emphasizes that a symptom is different from other formations of the unconscious such as a dream, joke, or slip: "It is never 'only a symptom' (as we can say about a dream, i.e.)" and it is due to "the resistance of the symptom."² He defines the symptom "not as a formation of the unconscious, but as a function of the unconscious -- a function that carries a formation of the unconscious into the real." At the beginning of his essay, Naveau clarifies Lacan's formula of the symptom as a function f(x) by quoting Miller's idea that the variable x in this formula is "what, of the unconscious, is susceptible to being written as a letter." Naveau concludes by reminding us that in "the word that wounds," a "relation between the unconscious, the symptom, jouissance, and the letter "which is written and which, because of that, is to be read," produces the body, "relative to the contingency of a saying (dit) . . . at the instant when a saying attains its target, [it] has an impact on the real."

In "How Psychoanalysis Functions," David Hafner addresses the question of psychoanalytic technique and by extension, the question of ethics. The two come together in psychoanalysis when the analyst treats the patient not only without judgment, but also without an attempt of "making sense" of the analysand's speech; instead, the analyst pays a special attention to signifiers and the materiality of speech, i.e. repetitions, slips of the tongue, pauses, and so on. All because, to quote Lacan himself from "L'étourdit," "the fact that one says remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard" (31), unless the analyst take the analysand`s speech literally, to the letter. Hafner emphasizes that in the course of an analysand's work, the analysis operates on the chain of signifiers, targeting the subject that constantly modifies its subjective position. He also focuses on different aspects of the psychoanalytic technique, while giving an elegant reading of the role of preliminary interviews, the function of incomprehension, and the use of a short session, paying special attention to the technique of differential diagnosis.

Eve Watson's essay "Unruly Hysterics: 'Borderline' as Post-Modern Hysteria" is focused on the "panacea-like clinical configuration" of a contemporary category of 'borderline' disorder. The essay addresses the question of the current state of psycho-diagnostics: today, shortly after the release of the DSM-5 on May 18 of last year, there have been many concerns raised by the "synergy between pharmacological research and the development of the DSM's nosographic categories."³ Among other things, the DSM overlooks the broad clinical picture in the process of diagnosis, when a psychiatrist is simply guided by his or her diagnostic categories.

In her essay, Watson provides a historical overview of the category of 'hysteria' from pre- Freudian psychiatrists such as Emil Kraepelin and Richard Von Krafft-Ebing to Freud's emancipation of hysteria from all of a patient's symptoms of where it was earlier thought of as a certain -- innate or acquired -- predisposition. Watson points out that although the early Freud did not make a distinction between neurosis and psychosis, he nevertheless distinguished between the types of repression of traumatic events that patients suffered earlier in their lives. Besides, Watson claims, Freud suggested that, in some cases, hysteria and psychosis are somewhat inter-mixed (the cases he identifies as 'hysterical psychosis'): Mad hysterics, or those subjects whose symbolic and imaginary registers do not defend well enough against the impressions of the real and therefore, are unable to maintain the consistency of a border. Such patients, Watson argues, are the subjects that remain "dependent on and terrified of the Other."

As far as the directions for treatment go, Watson insists on the structural value of borderline that belongs rather to a psychotic than a neurotic structure, despite the fact that the patients initially may present seemingly neurotic symptoms. Because these patients are often involved in harming themselves (i.e. by cutting or consuming alcohol) in "an attempt to install a border," the goal of an analyst has to be in bringing them to speak (instead of acting).

Leander Pasqual elaborates on Lacan's formula of the hysteric's desire -- "desire is the desire of the Other" -- and focuses on the question of how the subject comes to be installed starting from a dialectic with the Other. His essay "The Hysteric and the Question of Desire" explores the process of the formation of desire discussed in Lacan's Seminar V (1957-I958). Pasqual reads the graph of desire to demonstrate the crucial role of the phallus as a result of the paternal metaphor for the articulation of the hysteric's desire. He notes that the hysteric's very existence as a subject is possible due to her ability to attain the lack in the Other; while at the same time, her dependence as a semblance, her fantasmatic relation to it, allows her to sustain the question of desire, of which the Freudian case of Dora is a representative example.

Joyce Bacelar Oliveira examines the establishment of the analysand's demand in the analytici experience, taking into account his or her position as desiring subject in the wake of castration. She demonstrates that it is crucial to examine the subject of the unconscious in relation to his or her demand: since the primal demand is repressed, the signifiers that represent the deman make it possible for the subject to articulate the repressed signifiers. Oliveira's essay "The Place Of Demand in the Transference: A Lacanian Perspective looks into the place of demand in the transference by considering aspects that are relevant to the clinical work, such as the maneuvers of the analyst in the development of the analysis. On That basis, the author investigates the trajectory of Lacan's elaborations on the concept of transference and its applicability in the psychoanalytic clinic.

In "The Child and its Mother," Pierre-Gilles Gueguen focuses on the challenging opportunities open to consumers of technological development and science that entice new fantasies and desires. While the child has always been "objectified," has always been considered a means of satisfaction to parental narcissism and a projection of the parents' desires, in today's circumstances of a biotechnological lab, it literally becomes a product of consumption. In his discussion of the case of a small boy, Benoît, Gueguen formulates the task of psychoanalysis as the elaboration for a subject of the passage from the position of object of jouissance to the object of love, or in other words, "a passage from filial love to love of the Other," which, in fact, is not a direct path but aroute with many detours that open themselves up for deciphering by psychoanalysis.

By focusing on the position of the mother, he distinguishes between 'woman' and 'mother,' terms that are often erroneously linked by banal thinking; here Gueguen comes to the important conclusion that "the position of mother is deduced from the woman and that one does not become a woman by becoming a mother."

Jorge Alemán's essay on "Gays and Culture: Foucault and 'Constructionism'" addresses critical readings of Lacan and psychoanalysis in general done by theorists of feminist, gay, queer, and lesbian studies, especially those who build their critique drawing on Foucault's thought. Alemán examines the major arguments of such critique to demonstrate that most of the points brought up by the critics, are as much Foucauldian as they are Lacanian. He suggests that because Lacan's work preceded Foucault's, many of the themes commonly associated with the latter come directly from Lacan's oeuvre: "the examination of the subject of the cogito, of the ethical aporias of Kantian law, of the alibis and impasses of Absolute Knowledge; the Lacanian teachings on the diverse modes of the historicizing function of speech, his critique of biologism, of evolutionary development, and of naturalism as a primary given of psychoanalysis," along with Lacan's "references to the presence of madness in the cogito, of Eros in the Greek symposium, and to the way the law is libidinized in the imperative; his attack on the foundations of various utopias of accomplishment, his references to Borges and to Las Meñinas, and his radical distinction of the psychoanalysis of Freud from any kind of humanism." Moreover, Alemán challenges Foucault's model of the "ceaselessly modifiable function" of subjectivity that Foucault sees as separate from the experience of the real. Despite its ethical desirability and noble character, as Alemán demonstrates, the Capitalist discourse arrests and exploits what can be called Foucault's emancipatory 'constructivism.' Drawing on the later Lacan, Alemán argues that instead of Foucault's constructivist model that envisions multiple identities and genders, the deconstruction of phallocentrism consists in exploring the logic of the "not-all" developed in Lacan's Seminar XX (1972-1973) and his further teaching.

In "What Is a Picture?" Henry Krips works with Lacan's discussion ontrompe l 'oeil in Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trompe l' oeil is known as an art technique used to create the optical illusion of inexistent three-dimensional objects. In traditional art history, the difference between the two is clear: paintings reveal the truth beyond representations, while trompe l 'oeil, just by merely being untrue, tricks a viewer by a perfect imitation of reality. However, Lacan observes a structural similarity between paintings and trompe l'oeil based on the effect of double deception they both produce in order to comfort their viewers, to satisfy them. As a result, viewers surrender, or rather, they surrender their gaze before a painting, which Lacan terms by dompte-regard. To follow Lacan in Seminar XI (1964), this effect is typical for paintings: in other words, any painting is to a certain extent a trompe l' oeil.

However, as Krips observes, Lacan approaches paintings rather selectively in terms of their time period or style, or, as Krips also points out, he sometimes simply classifies certain paintings as trompe l' oeil for the sake of his argument (for example, Parrhasius' work), which does not allow him to articulate an important difference between paintings and trompe l' oeil, in addition to their similarity. Krips puts this distinction in Zizekian terms: "trompe l' oeil charms the spectator by telling a lie in the form of the truth, whereas the paintings in question disrupt the spectator's sensibility by telling the truth in the form of a lie." This distinction, he argues, "opens up the possibility of pictures' leading subject-spectators into a disruptive confrontation with the Real," which Lacan's further work suggests. Such confrontation with the Real by means of a painting , as Lacan argues in Seminar XI, produces an effect of psychoanalysis as it reveals the structure as a split between the gaze and vision; the structure separate from the visible itself; the structure "on which the entire installation of the subject is founded" (Seminar XIII, 1966-1967, L'objet de la psychanalyse).⁴ If one reads Krips' question regarding the object a, the gaze, the Other, and the primordiality of the drives when they appear as objects of desire there where there might be nothing (cf. Jacques Lacan Seminar X (1963), Anxiety, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans by Adrian Price New York: Norton & Co., 2014), Krips might find further answers to his questions in so far as these objects create danger and horror and are installed prior to speech.

Today, when the world is becoming more and more difficult to comprehend, when humanity is in the midst of an ecological crisis, when nature, as Miller says, is no longer the name of the real, as it can no longer be the basis for the law, when the real is itself in disorder, it is clear that neither man nor the planet where men dwell occupy the central place in the universe. This realization has been achieved rather slowly: as Freud notes, in the 16^th century, the work of Nicolaus Copernicus questioned the central position of the Earth; then Charles Darwin demonstrated that "man is not a being different from animals or superior to them." He places the discovery of the unconscious alongside the two discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin in order "to describe how the universal narcissism of men, their self-love, has up to the present suffered three severe blows from the researches of science." After Freud, the theme of the Copernican discovery goes through the entirety of Lacan's work, from his Seminar I (1952-1953) to Seminar XX, given almost twenty years later and Radiophonie (1970). However, as David Hafner notes in "Lacan's perspective on the drei schwere: Kränkungen and Copernicus' circle," his later discussion of the Copernican revolution differs from Freud's: he admits that the Copernican revolution was less subversive than the Freudian discovery: "the Copernican revolution was less subversive than the Freudian discovery," while the discovery of the unconscious is understood as being of higher significance. Hafner parallels Lacan's critique of Copernicus' heliocentric model as a structurally centric model and the critique of the model by the historians of science and philosophers from Alexandre Koyré to Otto Neugebauer. Lacan, as we know from his different texts and Seminars, opposed Copernicus' spheric model to Kepler's elliptical model of planetary motion: "Copernicus' model involved an idealized static symbolic order. By continuing to refer to the orbs as avenues for the planets, he remained in the ancient perspective. There was no destabilizing intrusion of the gravitational real," Hafner quotes.

The discovery of the unconscious by Freud means the discovery of the real, which in Freud manifests itself as symptoms; and this is what makes Lacan privilege Freud's discovery over Copemicus': "Copernicus' world is of a complete symbolic lacking the hole of incoherence or impossibility characteristic of the Lacanian real." Besides Kepler, in "Radiophonie," Lacan distinguishes the discoveries of Newton that led, in the words of Hafner, to "the apparition of the real in the cosmological symbolic." Hafner reads Newton's gravity theory as "manifestations of a real in the theory of physics: no observable medium for gravitational force or no quantum of gravity and no upper limits of the gravitational lead to singularities." The latter observation allows Hafner to propose to group, on the one hand, Lacan and Newton, and on the other hand, Freud and Copernicus.

Similar to James Joyce, Virginia Woolf attempts to forge her sinthome, the forth register of the Borromean knot, via her writing, in the realm of the real. Einav Ketraro-Deutsch looks at Woolf's The Voyage Out as the writer's "working space." Taking on Woolf's own suggestion to disregard the narrative structure and to get involved with her writing itself, Ketraro-Deutsch reads the novel (and the sinthome) backwards -- from the end to the beginning, performing a topological reading that is not bound by linearity or chronology. Ketraro-Deutsch identifies Woolf's sinthome, "a precondition and a product of her writing," as having the topological structure of a torus. The writer's solution is manifested in her work as a series of rooms that mutate by changing form and size even as they indeed obey the laws of "rubber geometry." The examination of the circular movement through the realms of the real -- Woolf 's rooms, reveals the toric structure, which, however, fails.

Notes

¹ La Cause freudienne, no.44, p. 44; in English, the fragments of the seminar are available in Lacanian Ink 18 at http://www.lacan.com/frameXVIII2.htm and the previous issues of (Re)-Turn.
² See: The Symptom 5 at http://www.lacan.com/newspaper5.htm.
³ For more information, see, for example, the interview with Patrick Landman by Christopher Lane in Psychology Today, available at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201303/why-dsm-5-conscerns-european-psychiatrists.
⁴ Unpublished seminar; qtd. in Gerard Wajcman, "From Tableau ('Painting')" in Critical essays on Jacques Lacan, ed. by Ellie Ragland, New York: G.K. Hall and Co., Macamillan, 1999, 144.

Ellie Ragland and Svitlana Matviyenko