To Interpret Un-corps
To Interpret Un-corps
Florencia F. C. Shanahan
For Lacan, interpretation only forms a binary with the body as presence. This is one of the reasons why analysis is not possible unless analyst and analysand meet in the flesh. This does not mean, however, that the analyst interprets with his body, but rather that he interprets not without his body. There is no body to body in analysis.[1] The topology proper to the analytic act is articulated to the poetic function, to “the moterialism which in its centre closes around a void.” [2] The analyst, when there is an interpretation, embodies this void.
One could say that the interpretation that has an incidence on the economy of the speaking-being is, not interpretation encore, but interpretation in a body and of a body [un-corps and en-corps]. “An act of saying raised to the level of an event” [3] can then give access to a new use of the signifier that acts on the symptom and extinguishes something of it.
My analysis ended on the production of a new signifier: ring of fire. It emerged in the place of the name that I had believed the Other had not given me. It was also the place I had believed that I did not have in the world. This belief sustained the not wanting to know about the impossible adequation between name and cause.
The analyst’s vociferation, in one of the last sessions, of a thunder-like “What?!?” responded to the “corporized writing of the symptom” from “a place conceived and named by Lacan as being the burnt ring in the bush of jouissance...”[4]
The search for being via meaning ceased at the precise and contingent juncture of the “voice of no one” [5] and the “place of no-longer-anyone.” In my first testimony I referred to the incorporation of the voice[6] in a topology that necessitated the “making of a ring of the hollow that is the void at the centre of one’s being.”[7]
A dream after the pass proves that the end of analysis is not the end of interpretation, but rather it is interpretation put at the service of the analytic discourse.
The text of the dream is as follows: [8] Twelve women dance and turn into smoke leaving a circle-shaped trace of fire. Knowing how to count, in the orography[9] where the scar between body and speech lies, signals the “limit in interpretation whereby is ensured, like for number, the real.”[10]
The analytic experience may bring one to the point of verifying (beyond any fiction of being) what cannot be turned into smoke, that which would not be a smoke-screen: the Un-corps as Other.
February 2020
[1] Cf. Laurent, Éric. interviewed by Cors Ulloa, R. for the NEL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14qrGohWfoo
[2] Laurent, Éric., Interpretation: From Truth to Event, argument of the 2020 NLS Congress, tr. P. Dravers and F.F.C. Shanahan, The Lacanian Review, Issue 8, NLS, Paris, December 2019, p. 116.
[3] Lacan, Jacques, Seminar XXI, Les non-dupes errent , lesson of 18 December 1973, unpublished.
[4] Laurent, Éric., Interpretation: From Truth to Event, op. cit., p. 130.
[5] Valéry, P., The Pythoness [La Pythie], in The Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 1: Poems, Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 163. Cf. F.C. Shanahan, F., “First Testimony: Dejar que pase…”, in The Lacanian Review, Issue 9, “Still Life?”, NLS, Spring 2020, pp. 95-104.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Lacan, Jacques, Seminar XVI, From an Other to the other, lesson of 18 November 1968, unpublished.
[8] Cf. F. C. Shanahan, Florencia, “Turning Oneself Into Smoke”, Blog of the 2020 WAP Congress, to be published.
[9] Lacan, Jacques, “Report on Seminar XIX”, in Seminar XIX … or Worse, ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. A.R Price, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2018, pp. 217-218. Orography: (from the Greek όρος, hill, γραφία, to write) is the study of the topographic relief of mountains [from Wikipedia]. Lacan’s reference aims at the relief of a writing in the locus of S of A barred, the One-all-alone, and anticipates the distinction proposed in Seminar XX between that which of jouissance is written, and that which of jouissance is counted.
[10] Ibid., p. 219.