Per via di voutare

Claudia Iddan

Freud characterises the psychoanalytic technique using one of Leonardo da Vinci’s formulas on how to make art: per via de levare, that is, by a subtraction operation linked to interpretation. However, I would like to add another formula which seems more faithful to the thought of the last Lacan: per via di voutare, proposed by Gérard Wajcman [1] in connection with the ready-made of Marcel Duchamp. A formula which refers to the act of emptying [vider].

Two quotations from Lacan highlight this aspect in relation to interpretation:

A – “Interpretation […] is not interpretation of meaning, but plays on the equivoque […] it is through language that interpretation operates [….] Interpretation must always be a ready-made, after Marcel Duchamp […]. Our interpretation should aim at what is essential in wordplay in order not to be the one that feeds the symptom with meaning.”[2]

Keywords: equivoque, lalangue and ready-made.

By way of the ready-made interpretation, assemblage of the “daily” utterance of the parlêtre and lalangue, it is the equivocal that manifests, and with it the essential emerges: emptiness raised to the Dignity of the Thing [l’Achose] that does not add any meaning to the symptom. 

B – “When the l’esp of a lapse […] the space of a lapsus, has no further meaningful scope (or interpretation), only then is one certain of being in the unconscious.”[3]

Key words: space, without meaning or interpretation, unconscious.

When can we be sure of being in the unconscious? When there is no longer any meaning or interpretation, when there is a cut in the signifying chain which encircles the One. This highlights the fact that, at this moment, we are in a space emptied of meaningful articulation: a real. This empty space intersects with the emptiness of the object of the drive and that of the core of the symptom, and it is by the iteration of the One that these crossings delimit a hole, a voutare which touches or makes resonate the object a, “the inter-loan [l'entreprêt].” [4]

Translated by Joanne Conway

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[1] Lacan, Jacques, “The Third”, The Lacanian Review 7, “Get Real”, NLS, Paris, 2019, p. 98.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Lacan, Jacques, “Preface to the English Edition of Seminar XI”, The Lacanian Review 6, “¡Urgent!”, tr. R. Grigg, NLS, Paris, 2018, p. 23.

[4] Lacan, Jacques, Télévision, A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, W. W. Norton & Co., New York/London, 1990, p. 46.