“A Practice Without Value”[1]
Rik Loose
In Seminar XXIV, Lacan says that “art is beyond the symbolic (…). I believe that there is more truth in the saying that is art than in any amount of blah-blah-blah”.[2] If that is the case then art, yet again, opens the door for psychoanalysis in that it can also function as a compass for interpretation, that is to say, in how to make the move from aiming for truth to affecting the body (event) with the effects of astonishment and stunning. But how? When Lacan is looking for a new signifier he says that it is to have resonance beyond what is beautiful and he finds this resonance in jokes.[3] He says that, according to Freud, jokes are held together by an economy or value.[4] However, what Lacan was looking for is “a practice without value”. So why then refer to jokes as a compass for interpretation when these are based on value, for example, in the form of saving on the expenditure of energy? He says jokes also “consist of using a word for another usage than that for which it was created”.[5] The operative effect of a word, he continues, resides in the rumpling of a word. Blah-blah-blah is meaningful, but this rumpling of a word is something entirely different. What is it? I think it concern the use of a failure. Indeed, something like the rumpling one does of a piece of paper after failing to write what one hoped or expected to write on it. It seems to me that here we encounter an affinity with art. Art invites the viewer to experience the inherent failure of language – the trauma it causes – in the subject. The singularity of this failure can be transmitted such that it can affect the subject and his or her body. In that sense art and interpretation share the same aim.
[1] Lacan, Jacques, Seminar XXIV, L’insu que sait de l’une-bevue, s’aile a mourre, lesson of 19/04/1977, unpublished.
[2] Ibid., lesson of 18/01/1977.
[3] Ibid., lesson of 19/04/1977.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., lesson of 17/05/1977.