Interpretation Going Against the Enjoyment of the Blah Blah
Natalie Wülfing
Freud found that the interpretation that ignored factual events in the patient’s life, was not problematic, inclined to bet on a “becoming true”, on effects produced, thus already separating the notion of true and false from the effect of an interpretation, away from the verification of events in the reality of the patient.[1]
The separation of the signifier from the signified, which Lacan elaborated in his Return to Freud, went further to show the splitting off of meaning through interpretation, cutting the sentence before it seals the meaning produced by its end.[2] It is interruption and the cut, that unsettles the production of meaning and produces an isolation of the signifier. The isolated signifier is effectively that which produces a ripple effect in the words of the analysand. Interpretation is measured “by the material that emerges afterward”,[3] says Lacan, with the emphasis on “desire [that] can only be grasped in interpretation”.[4] The isolated signifier, made of “non-meanings”, is a signifying element nevertheless.[5] The ripple effect may perhaps be the issue involved in a certain endless procedure. Jacques-Alain Miller clarifies this further, saying “unconscious desire is its interpretation” and “interpretation is the unconscious itself”.[6]
It refers to Lacan’s last teaching and the prevalence of jouissance in the signifier, demanding meaning (encore), enjoying itself as meaning effects, as blah blah. The necessary of the doesn’t-stop-writing-itself would then be the target of interpretation.[7] An interruption of jouissance, a cutting. Not the more of material that emerges afterward, but the reduction, the change, the new, the possible as that which stops writing itself (Sem XXIV).[8] Lacan asks himself what would make this writing stop, and without a definitive answer refers to the joke and to poetry as writings that separate meaning effects from the signifier.
[1] Cf. Lacan’s discussion of Ernst Kris’s case in Lacan, Jacques, “Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power” [1958], Écrits, tr. B. Fink, Norton, New York/London, 2006, pp. 500-502/599-600Fr.
[2] Lacan, Jacques, “Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” [1953], ibid., pp. 197-265/237-322Fr.
[3] Lacan, Jacques, “Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power”, Écrits, op .cit., p. 497/595Fr.
[4] Ibid., p. 521/623Fr.
[5] Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, tr. A. Sheridan, Penguin, London, 1994, p. 250/226Fr.
[6– Miller, Jacques-Alain, “Interpretation in Reverse”, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, No. 2, London Society, 1999, p. 10.
[7] Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar, Book XX, Encore, tr. B. Fink, Norton, New York/London, 1998, p. 59/55Fr.
[8] Lacan, Jacques, Seminar XXIV, L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre, lesson of 17 May 1977, unpublished.