Deferred Interpretation
Bogdan Wolf
The festival of idiots is over. “It got done.” By contrast, analytic interpretation defers ad infinitum one solution for all. Long live the transnational School of Lacan where interpretation does not stop from being inscribed in infinity.
This year we celebrate interpretation in the NLS, the WAP, the School. It’s where Lacan placed its practice, precisely in the hole of the universal. I heard the story from the horse’s mouth. Lacan once asked one of his analysands to tell him about his patients. “But I don’t have any,” came the reply. “It doesn’t matter,” Lacan said. A void produced by a collapse of sense became the pivot for a provocation that nudges to elaboration, to circumscribe the hole: I don’t have it.
What is the direction of analysis? When an analysand interprets her failure to understand everything her mother always claimed she did, a cut that follows makes a hole emerge as, “There are things you don’t have to understand.” It forms a “mysterious link between the unconscious and jouissance and the actual emptiness which it is a question of producing.”[1] This happens each time the link between mother and woman is cut and sends the daughter to solitude of the cause, unsupported by the good old aletheia.
Analysis can produce a deferred one, S1, before reaching the delusion point of knowledge, S2. What emerges is an ignorance: scraps, marks, threads of jouissance outside sense. Éric Laurent stresses this point: interpretation goes beyond the “false shimmers of the belief in the symptom.”[2] In effect, it goes beyond the belief itself. The new deferred unknowledge can testify to a poiesis of the body’s vociferation and scribble. The oral and the written in analysis can be as intimate as the analytic couple. What stops it from becoming an autistic one, is it interprets: the language that belongs to no one. And when it doesn’t work interprets, a leap to lalangue can follow: “wrrrrrrr!” resonated by “raaaaa!” It’s an event. On occasion the analysand raises a question of how to contribute to the communal truth and the universal for all.
[1 ] Laurent, Éric, Interpretation: From Truth to Event, tr. P. Dravers and F. Shanahan, in The Lacanian Review No. 8, “¡Urgent!,” NLS, Paris, 2019, p. 120.
[2] Ibid., p. 132.