462-463 / 536
THE SPEAKING BODY
Xth Congress of the WAP,
Rio de Janeiro 2016
463
462
II /c. Speaking Body
II /c.1 Écrits
Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis
(1948),
[É]
“One need but listen to the stories and games made up by two to five year olds,
alone or together, to know that pulling off heads and cutting open bellies are
spontaneous themes of their imagination, which the experience of a busted-up
doll merely fulfills.”
p. 85
The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function
(1949),
[É]
“This fragmented body –another expression I have gotten accepted into the
French school’s system of theoretical references– is regularly manifested in
dreams when the movement of an analysis reaches a certain level of aggressive
disintegration of the individual. It then appears in the form of disconnected
limbs or of organs exoscopically represented, growing wings and taking up arms
for internal persecutions that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch fixed for all time
in painting, in their ascent in the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith of
modern man.”
p. 78
“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”
(1953),
[É]
“Here speech is driven out of the concrete discourse that orders consciousness,
but it finds its medium either in the subject’s natural functions –provided a
painful organic sensation wedges open the gap between his individual being and
his essence, which makes illness what institutes the existence of the subject in
the living being– or in the images that, at the border between the
Umwelt
and
the
Innenwelt
, organize their relational structuring.
A symptom here is the signifier of a signified that has been repressed from the
subject’s consciousness. A symbol written in the sand of the flesh and in the veil
of Maia, it partakes of language by the semantic ambiguity that I have already
highlighted in its constitution.”
p. 232
“Speech is in fact a gift of language, and language is not immaterial. It is a subtle
body, but body it is. Words are caught up in all the body images that captivate
the subject; they may ‘knock up’ the hysteric, be identified with the object of
Penisneid
, represent the urinary flow of urethral ambition, or represent the feces
retained in avaricious jouissance.”
p. 248
“Seminar on
The Purloined Letter
” (1955),
[É]
“Such is the signifier’s answer, beyond all significations: ‘You believe you
are taking action when I am the one making you stir at the bidding of the
bonds with which I weave your desires. Thus do the latter grow in strength
and multiply in objects, bringing you back to the fragmentation of your rent
childhood. That will be your feast until the return of the stone guest whom I
shall be for you since you call me forth’.”
p. 29
“On My Antecedents” (1966),
[É]
“If Freud reminds us of the relationship between the ego and the perception-
consciousness system, it is only to indicate that our reflective tradition –we
would be wrong to think that it has had no social impact insofar as it has served
as a basis for political forms of personal status– has tested its standards of truth
in this system.
But it is in order to call these standards of truth into question that Freud
links the ego, on the basis of a twofold reference, to one’s own body –that is
narcissism– and to the complexity of the three orders of identification.”
p. 54
II /c.2 Seminars
[S. XI]
“Nevertheless, when articulated in this way, this experiment is interesting,
indeed is essential, in enabling us to situate our conception of the psycho-
somatic effect. I will go so far as to formulate that, when there is no interval
between S1 and S2, when the first dyad of signifiers become solidified,
holophrased, we have the model for a whole series of cases –even though, in
each case, the subject does not occupy the same place.”
p. 237
[S. XVII]
“
This is the hollow, the gap that no doubt a number of objects initially come
and fill –objects that, in some way, are adapted in advance, designed to be used
as stoppers. This is no doubt where a classical analytic practice stops, with its
emphasis upon these various terms, oral, anal, scopic, not to mention vocal.
These are various names by which we can designate, as an object, the
a
– but
the
a
, as such, is strictly speaking what follows from the fact that, at its origin,
knowledge is reduced to an articulation of signifiers.”
p. 50
Jacques Lacan