For the Oracles*
Laure Naveau
We have become accustomed to say that our practice of interpretation is oracular. Now, our oracle is for us Lacan’s saying about the sexual relation: There is no sexual relation. Jacques-Alain Miller later indicates that this oracle “enables us to put the fact of pornography in its rightful place”.[1] He puts forward this formula, “It is a symptom of the empire of technology that now extends its reign over the most diverse civilisations across the globe”.[2]
This pornographic fact, which has become a very particular fact of bodies, indeed requires psychoanalysis, interpretation. During the seventeenth session of his course entitled “Un effort de poésie” [“An Effort of Poetry”], J.-A. Miller evokes the disappearance of oracles in these terms: “The tragic Battle of Eros has now […] given way to therapeutic Eros. This moment of civilisation, where some deplore the disappearance of oracles, is the moment of civilisation where precisely, the meaning of tragedy is lost”. But, J.-A. Miller concluded that “loss does not imply nostalgia”.[3] It is at this point that he came to propose “an effort of poetry” which will become a “creationist effort” of interpretation.
I then referred to Plutarch and the short passage from his text, “The Oracles at Delphi” in which he speaks about the necessity for the oracle to be poetic. By associating it with the words of Heraclitus (taken up by J.-A. Miller and often quoted by Lacan) according to which, “The master to whom the oracle of Delphi belongs does not say or hide anything, he gives signs”, we grasp how the oracle does not say anything but makes a sign, that this can indeed give another dimension to analytical interpretation. This tells us that there is something to be said other than in the form of a saying [dit] of conversation, a saying that affirms, or that explains, or that hides. The saying that makes a sign has a poetic value because it makes a sign of something else.
Consequence – If the interpretation which is involved in an analysis of the parlêtre is not that which targets the unconscious or meaning, it must therefore find the use of a style of interpretation that is close to that of the oracles. How can an interpretation without meaning, which makes a sign of something else, aim at something touching the opaque jouissance of the symptom in the analysand?
The analyst is then invited, unlike the oracles, not to disappear before the addictive force of the devices of technology and the grip of the gaze that they summon, that swallow up speech. By the presence of the body, and by a silent saying, he must know how to reinvent a new art of interpretation, a half-saying, that touches the real of the body of the parlêtre, comprising, by that very fact, an unprecedented oracular dimension.
J.-A. Miller proposed in his last course on “The One All Alone”[4] that the analytical oracle, therefore, does not say, hide or touch, rather “brings about being”.[5]
Translated by Joanne Conway
* Text created from an interview with Anaëlle Lebovits-Quenehen, published on the WAP Blog for the 2016 Congress on The Speaking Body, related to Jacques-Alain Miller’s conference “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body”.
[1] Miller, Jacques-Alain, “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body”, in Scilicet, The Speaking Body: On the Unconscious in the 21st Century, WAP, NLS publication, Paris, 2015, p. 31.
[2] Ibid., p. 32.
[3] Miller, Jacques-Alain, “L’orientation lacanienne, Un effort de poésie”, teaching held under the auspices of the Department of Psychoanalysis, University Paris 8, lesson of 21 May 2003, unpublished.
[4] Miller, Jacques-Alain, “L’orientation lacanienne. L’Un tout seul”, teaching held under the auspices of the Department of Psychoanalysis, University Paris 8, lesson of 11 May 2011, [TN: Miller’s reference to Plutarch, De Pythiae oraculis, available at: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0247%3Asection%3D5, Plutarch, Moralia Vol. V., tr. Frank Cole, Loeb Classical Library, 1936].
[5] We refer in this perspective to the excellent articles published in the Hebdo Blog, No. 192, dated 24 February 2020.