KNOWLEDGE, TRUTH AND JOUISSANCE: THE WALL OF LANGUAGE AND THE POETIC FUNCTION

ABSTRACT:

This article proposes a link between knowledge, truth and jouissance as a writing on the wall of language, inquiring about the possibility of transposing this wall through the poetic function. Such function, in its articulation with the logic of the inexistence of sexual relation, which contravenes the logic of non-contradiction, shows us a way to overcome the phallic signification. Thus, it seems possible, by means of the poetic function, that a tension between sense and sound is able to produce a new signifier through the ab-sense, so that this signifier can place itself as a love letter that maintains itself by the resonance of the cause of the desire.

Keywords:
knowledge; truth; enjoyment; poetic function; logic; sense.

Resumo:

Este artigo propõe uma articulação entre saber, verdade, gozo como uma escrita no muro de linguagem, interrogando acerca da possibilidade de sua transposição a partir da função poética. Tal função, em sua articulação com a lógica da inexistência da relação sexual, a qual contraria a lógica da não-contradição, nos aponta uma via para ultrapassar a significação fálica. Assim, parece-nos possível, pela via da função poética, uma tensão entre sentido e som que possa produzir um significante novo pelo ab-senso, de modo que esse significante possa se posicionar como carta de amor que se sustenta pela ressonância da causa do desejo.

Palavras-chave:
saber; verdade; gozo; função poética; lógica; sentido.

INTRODUCTION

This article derives from inquiries regarding the Seminary The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969-1970/1992), where Lacan points the relation between truth, knowledge and jouissance. In this seminary, truth is taken as a structure of fiction that it’s only accessible by being half-said (mi-dire), in a way that we could only reach a half-truth. The knowledge will also be put in question by psychoanalysis, pointing up its character of non-totality:

The knowledge, thus, is put in the center, under scrutiny, by the psychoanalytical experience. This itself imposes the duty of a question that has no reason to restrict its field. To say it at once, the idea that knowledge can form in any way or at any time, even as a hope for the future, a closed totality — here’s what had not waited for psychoanalysis to look dubious. (LACAN, 1969-1970/1992, p.31)

At this moment, Lacan accentuates that doubting the knowledge was an investigation taken by the skeptics¹, based on the doctrine of not having any certainty about truth, which suggests permanent questioning about metaphysical, religious and dogmatic phenomena. The psychoanalyst is similar to the skeptic when handling the analysis without the endeavor of finding a spherical and closed knowledge in the unconscious, for knowledge can’t be known in the level of S2, which is called the other signifier. Even tough the big Other is plenty of signifiers, a knowledge-totality will never be reached, or, in other words, “Troy will never be taken”, as the author tells us. And he adds:

In my first remarks three weeks ago, we started from the fact that knowledge, in the initial statute of the master’s discourse, is the slave’s share. I think I was able to indicate, without being able to develop it the last time by a small setback — which I regret —, that which operates between the discourse of the antique master and the modern master, who is called capitalist, is a modification on the place of knowledge. (LACAN, 1969-1970, p.32)

Lacan (1969-1970/1992) follows his lecture questioning what teaches us the S2 in the position of truth in the psychoanalyst discourse. He tells us that the psychoanalyst occupies the place of a, supported by a knowledge, S2, that could be whether knowledge acquired by the speech (dire) of the analysand, whether knowledge acquired by the experience of one’s own analysis or studies, not unrelated to one’s own savoir-faire, which can be associated with the position of learned ignorance.

Supported by this knowledge, the analyst puts the subject to work. The subject, when occupying the place of the agent in the hysteric discourse, which can be linked to the scientific discourse, produces a man with desire to know, who will search for knowledge that is not known.

Following that, the author questions: what is truth as knowledge? His answer: truth as knowledge is connected with an enigma. Recapitulating a passage of his seminar (ibid, p.37): “I believe that you see here what the function of the enigma means — it’s a half-said, such as the Chimera makes a half body appear, ready to disappear completely when the solution is given”. And he adds: “knowledge as truth — which defines what the structure of what is called an interpretation should be”. Thereafter, it’s concluded that knowledge as truth has a structure of interpretation, as we can see in the discourse of the psychoanalyst presented below, where knowledge, S2, as we just said, occupies the place of truth.

For the author, the interpretation is handled by the analyst seeking to make it possible for the analysand to construct an enigma, an enigma that is in relation with the enunciation (énounciation). Hence, it is now required for us to analyze the statute of the enunciation in the teaching of Lacan.

BETWEEN THE ENUNCIATION AND THE STATEMENT ²

If we consider that Lacan (1972/2011) was in the position of the analysand when he pronounced his teaching, marking that his speech, on the occasion, was distinct from his discourse, we can relate his speech to that of the sophists³. Build on this affirmation (LACAN, 1964-1965/2006), the author says that the psychoanalyst is the presence of the sophist in our times, although with another statute, since the sophists were expelled from the discursive field.

Assuming that Lacan’s speech was settled in the hysterical discourse, could we say that on the place of the semblance was the intention of enjoying the production of knowledge by the other, which is in the order of impossibility? Could we assume that when Lacan mentions that his discourse is different from his speech, he is pointing that his discourse refers itself to the position of the object a in the place of the semblance in order to cause the desire of the subject that is addressed to him? Could herein lay the question of Lacan’s teachings incomprehension? What’s the statute of enunciation in his style? It seems to us that Lacan chose the transmission style of a sophist, which is in connection with the enunciation.

Considering that we start from the idea that this discussion refers, primarily, to an articulation between psychoanalysis and philosophy, and between psychoanalysis and science, the research on enunciation has a key role in such process. Especially if we consider that philosophy and science were both founded under the primacy of the statement.

Therefore, we need to understand Lacan’s phrase: “That one might be saying remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard”⁴ (LACAN, 1972/2003, p. 448). From this formulation, we can articulate that the enunciation is in the order of all possible representations, which opposes the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction, by being able to operate through contradiction, without which one cannot say anything. In Aristotelian logic, we locate the act of expulsion of the sophists.

In Lacan’s last teaching, we see the primacy of enunciation. The author postulates that all statements that are dissociated from the enunciation cannot be out of alienation, which corresponds to the loss of the self, which is thought of as the very tragedy of the subject, if we take tragedy as the narrative of a calculated failure, necessary to knowledge. We would have, in the diachronic axis, not only the enunciation, but also the phonetic of speaking.

Regarding phonetics and the relationship between statement and enunciation, we can refer to the works of the grammarians Pichon and Damourette (1911, apud MACHADO, 2012), which not only took care of studying the relationship between language and psychoanalysis, but also the relationship between language and unconscious. Their main work on this field, which greatly influenced Lacan in his studies of linguistics, called Des mots à la pensée: essai de grammaire de la langue française, is considered a major compendium which is engaged in dealing with examples collected from the everyday life of the French, literature, and numerous diachronic stages of that language. A curious fact is that, besides being a linguist, Pichon was also a psychoanalyst, being the first linguist to engage in this practice, writing pioneer texts on the interface between linguistics and psychoanalysis. His pioneering spirit was also noted in his special attention to the problem of enunciation within the facts of language, which will be used by Lacan in his developments on the question of enunciation and its articulation with the psychoanalytic field.

Lacan will use the theory of the grammatical person and the analysis of the use of negation in French, approaching the foreclusive and the discord aspects — which served to investigate Freud’s notion of Verwerfung, in an attempt to understand the psychoses field. His approach to the statute of negation and the issue of foreclosure is associated with a central problem: the subject of enunciation.

In the seminar Desire and its interpretation (1957-1958/unpublished), Lacan will approach the signifier’s duplicity amid the statement and the enunciation. The distinction of the subject amongst these two processes is best elucidated by Freud’s negation concept and by the grammar of Pichon and Damourette.

In the text Negative (1925/2007), Freud points out that the Verneinung is an index of repression related to not wanting to know about Bejahung, the primordial affirmation. In this case, we must discard the denial of the phrase and stick to its content, which is very close to formulations made by the grammarians cited above in regard to the French’s ne éxpletif, that assumes a discord inflection on the subordinated sentences. This tells us something that is already known, but it never hurts to remember: the repressed content often returns in the form of the desire’s denial. This would be a good example of contradiction, since something denied in speech (parole) is desired by the subject at the same time, which counters the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction, according to classical logic.

The lacanian analysis, then, is focused on negation and it will serve the studies on this matter, distinguishing its current use from its discord and foreclusive use in speech. This is presented in Lacan’s seminar (1957-1958, p. 58): “The ne per se, left to itself, expresses what he calls disagreement, and this discordance is precisely something that is between the process of enunciation and the process of the statement.” With that, Lacan approaches Pichon and Damourette within a linguistics of enunciation, as they posit that the ne éxpletif in discord mode delimits the disagreement between the enunciation and the statement (MACHADO, 2012).

Even tough to Lacan (1959-1960/2008) this ne éxpletif delimits the disagreement between enunciation and statement, it will also refer to the subject of the unconscious, for it is bounded to the subject of enunciation. The moment this ne appears, it means that it is the subject who is speaking, not the Other, that is, the subject is not spoken by the Other. In Lacan (1959-1960/2008, p. 81): “the negative particle ne appears only at the moment I speak truly, and not when I am being spoken, if I’m on the unconscious level.”

The subject of enunciation is present in various stages of Lacan’s work, as in the seminaries The psychoses (1955-1956/2008), Desire and its interpretation (1957-1958/unpublished), The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-1960/2008) and Identification (1961-1962/2011). In the seminar Desire and its interpretation, Lacan points out that the negation brings something in the level of the statement to put it immediately as non-existent and located between the enunciation and the statement.

A good example of the use the ne éxpletif is the phrase je crais qu’il ne vienne, which appears in formulations in the Seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-1960/2008). The author explains that je crais could indicate that one fears something, causing it to appear in its existence as a vote. In the seminar Identification (1961-1962/2011), this example will appear again. Lacan points out that this phrase marks the distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement on an absence, thus linking this delimitation to the dialectics on the field of the Other.

However, it is important to demarcate the difference between the enunciation/statement undertaken by linguistics and by lacanian psychoanalysis. Generally, we find linguists pointing the subject of enunciation as the agent and not as the support, unlike the psychoanalytic field. In addition, enunciation and statement are mostly combined within the discourse of linguistics, while for Lacan both are well detached.

Commonly in linguistics, enunciation is confused with the act of making a statement, and the object of study, which should be this act, becomes the content of the statement, as Benveniste (2006 apudMACHADO, 2012) highlights. Also, this author points out that enunciation may be an act of appropriation and usage of the language by the subject, as the speaker shapes it in his or her own way, taking it as an instrument in the enunciation process.

However, whereas for this author the dimension of the other as an interlocutor emphasizes a relation in which the other is a partner in the act of enunciating, Lacan (1957-58/ unpublished) notes that the partner in the enunciation process is the Other of the unconscious.

Thus, the lacanian formulation of the subject of enunciation is primarily coincident with the studies of Pichon and Damourette on the function of the ne expletif on the discord mode, imposing a disjunction between what the subject desires and what it is likely to be or what it is more possible. Therefore, if what is at stake is actually not an intellectual opposition, but rather a manifestation of a psychological state of whoever enunciates, as the two grammarians postulate, the sense is considered to have a primacy in influencing this act, which demonstrates the effort of linguistics to articulate questions about the subject and the language (MACHADO, 2012). Such articulation brings us to the subject of the unconscious and the primacy of the enunciation, since the function of the ne on discord mode is related to the contradiction between enunciation and statement. This discussion is set on L’étourdite (1972/2003), where Lacan opposes the principle of the inexistence of sexual relationship, which derogates the contradiction, to the Aristotle’s non-contradiction principle, an opposition that is a theme very close to psychoanalysis. However, before we go further on this theme, it is necessary to return to the discussion about the relationship between knowledge, truth and jouissance, because the tension between enunciation and statement is linked to these three concepts. For Lacan (1969-1970/1992), what motivates the function of knowledge is its dialectic with jouissance, which leads us to the lacanian articulation of knowledge as a mean of jouissance in its relation with truth, which will be further elucidated below.

KNOWLEDGE, TRUTH AND JOUISSANCE: FROM THE WALL (MUR) TO THE LETTER OF LOVE (LETTRE D’AMOUR)

Pacheco (2008) tells us that between knowledge and truth there is a fictitious marriage and that truth pays a dowry to the jouissance to marry with knowledge. Here, she shows us that the peculiarity of this union does not happen by love, but by interest, considering there is inaccessibility by the bride’s side and impotence by the groom’s side. To understand this relationship, the author reveals that the true lover of truth is Sade, which leads us to conceive truth as jouissance’s sister, or rather de la jouissance, which is a woman. And it is precisely this “sister-in-law” that promotes the disjunction between knowledge and truth.

The jouissance is an interdict to all the speaking beings and can only be accessed through the phallic jouissance, which can be shared and calculated. However, there is also the Other jouissance, which is out of the language, in the register of the Real, and can not be accessed through the knowledge and the signifier. In this marriage, the unconscious knowledge tries to reach the Other jouissance, The Woman, who would be the very inaccessible truth. Still, paradoxically, knowledge as a mean of jouissance, operating by repetition, promotes a loss of jouissance and builds an obscure sense: the truth. The author tells us that there is no other way for the subject to access the register of the Real except for the fictitious marriage between knowledge and truth, that is, through the way of fantasy, and only psychoanalysis promotes its construction and crossing.

Lacan, in the years 1971 and 1972, gave a series of lectures in the chapel of Sainte-Anne Hospital, which he named The knowledge of the psychoanalyst. These lectures were inspired by all the discussion raised by Bataille’s formulations about not-knowing. In this seminar, the author is articulating knowledge, truth and jouissance again. Its formulation brings us the truth as the not-knowing. This shows us the question regarding the position that the analyst must occupy to sustain the knowledge of the psychoanalyst, placing the analyst’s discourse at the sensitive border between truth and knowledge.

On this occasion, Lacan inquires about the misunderstanding of his teaching and even if he is talking to someone. He concludes he is speaking to the walls, but the wall makes something else sound, because his speech certainly would interest someone, aside from returning his own voice to him, which must be tuned when directed to the walls. And, starting from that development, Lacan tells us that language can be found on the wall.

With such a formulation, he adds that on the wall we have the presence of the discourses, referring to the four terms, S1, S2, barred subject ($) and the object a, also placing the subject as supposed from the signifier. Beyond that wall there is the possibility of building a sense referred to the truth, the semblance, the jouissance and the surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir). Also emphasizes that the wall (mur) can always serve as a muroir, a neologism built with miroir (mirror) and mur (wall).

At that point, refers to a poem by Antoine Tudal:

Between man and woman
There is love
Between man and love
There is a world
Between man and world
There is a wall⁵

From this passage, the author ensures that the love that exists between a man and a woman unites them. In turn, the existing world between man and love makes something “float”. The reference to the wall that is between man and the world brings a between, an interposition. Resuming what is between a man and a woman — love — the author situates it in a tube that rolls upon itself, referring to the topological figures of the Klein bottle and the Moebius band, in a way that places man on the right side of that tube and woman on the left. Continuing his formulation, Lacan indicates that the world between man and love would be the world in the biblical sense. In other words, a world that bears a knowledge that would cover both the side marked as the man’s side as well as the woman’s side. Furthermore, the author retrieves the existing wall between man and the world as the turnaround on the junction between truth and knowledge, and, also, as the place of castration, bringing knowledge to keep the field of truth unchanged.

Love, in turn, is related to the proposed wall. Lacan adds that one cannot speak of love, but can write about it. In this writing, we would have the lettre d’amur⁶, which means that between the man and the wall there is a love letter. In such way, what appears in the relationship between man and woman is the very castration, which could be demonstrated by logic and topology.

And how can we think about the possibility of a writing that refers to a love letter or to a new love? Could this path be possible through an attempt to cross the wall of language, which may have a reverberation function? Therefore, we should analyze the enunciation’s statute along the passage of the Aristotelian non-contradiction principle to the principle of the non-existence of the sexual relation, using logic for such discussion.

FROM THE PRINCIPLE “THERE’S NO CONTRADICTION” TO THE PRINCIPLE “THERE’S NO SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP”

According to Lacan, the operation over speech can be handled from a built enigma. Moreover, he tells us that this enigma exists in relation with sense. This formulation brings us closer to the text L’étourdit (1972/2003), where Lacan takes a step further and points a direction from the ab-sense equivocation and the homonyms, proposing psychoanalysis as bewilderment and the principle of non-sexual relationship opposed to the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction, as tells us Cassin (2013). Thus, the subject of enunciation is submitted to the principle of the inexistence of the sexual relationship, which arises out of the formulation of the not-all logic, built in this period of his teaching.

For Cassin (2013) we can speak only for the pleasure of speaking. This affirmation counters the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction and indicates that the subject may or may not be implied in the pronounced speech.

Modern science, guided by the Aristotelian logic, is based on a univocal perspective represented by an attempt to build an absolute truth. However, psychoanalysis goes against this principle, even when making use of it just to subvert it (the rotation of the discourses is a good example of this subversion), taking into account that, from the lacanian perspective, we have the aphorism “there is no metalanguage”, which means that the speeches are equivalent. Because of that, there is no discourse that supports a unique truth.

In L’Étourdit (1972/2003), Lacan brings truth as an interpretation that produces senses in its effects. Here, he abandons the notion of hermeneutics and uses a proposition of proliferation of senses, which includes a relation of uncertainty, promoting the castration of the big Other of philosophy.

As Cassin says (2013), Lacan undertakes a desconstruction of metalanguage or of an ideology of metalanguage and of discursive hierarchy, the latter as a producer of social effects. This announces that it is impossible to reconstruct the word through metalanguage, which prevents alienation forms of the subject in language, or a fixation on a single meaning; therefore, on a unique truth. In this manner, this results in a relationship of passivity and uncertainty of the subject with the word.

Lacan (1972/2003) leads us to a way that goes beyond the statement, with the assumption of the primacy of the enunciation: “That one might be saying remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard.” (p. 448). From this, we would have languages as mathematical integrals of numerous equivocations. So, we recognize that these intractable equivocations, which are linked to the undecidable, cannot be thought in accordance with the Aristotelian logic. These equivocations can only be thought as being derived out of lalangue, a term coined by Lacan in a Freudian slip with the word “lalande”, when he wanted to refer to something that was beyond language, but not without it, since language foments a proliferation of senses, that is, it expels senses. This articulation stresses that there is no sexual relationship for language, because it is dependent of the signifier’s primacy. In this case, with regard to the clinic, in an analysis situation, the analysand can be located on the poetical pole (poiesis⁷) and the analyst on the aesthetic pole (Aisthesis⁸).

With this new discursive regime of lalangue and the principle of the inexistence of the sexual relation, there’s a new relationship with the jouissance: a jouissance operation outside the phallic regime and with another subject at stake. However, a question is imposed: what is the relationship between lalangue and speech?

Lalangue seems to work in a vowel separation regime, which is different from the patriarchal discursive regime, a referential regime in which the consonants take precedence, putting into question the letter, with its prevalence of the sound function. As in Cassin (2013, p. 17): “It is due to this double operation of equivocation and writing that The Étourdit is located in the ab-sense that it produces.”

What is the relationship between the letter and the voice in lalangue? On this, Cassin (2013, p. 19) comments that “the symbols of animal language are never equivocal; the symbols of human language, which are on the sounds of voice and, even more disturbing in words (in the letter), they are.”

Resuming L’Étourdit:

I begin with homophony, on which orthography depends. The fact that in the language which is mine, which I played on above, deux is an equivoque of d’eux (of them), guards a trace of this game of the soul by which to make of them two-together finds its limit in the “make two” of them (“faire deux” d’eux). {…} One finds others in this text, from parêtre (resemblance) to s’emblant. {…} I hold that all the blows are permitted in it for the reason that whoever being within their reach without being able to recognize themselves there, these are those we play with. Save insofar as poets make a calculus of it and as the psychoanalyst serves himself there where it is suitable. (LACAN, 1972/2003, p. 493).⁹

Considering the new discursive regime of lalangue, where the sound function prevails over the referential function, we ask ourselves: from this new language regime, is it possible to transpose the language wall? It seems that this operation is related to the poetic function of language as formulated by Jakobson (1960/1969), in which the sound function prevails, enabling the production of a new sense, along with Lacan’s consideration that psychoanalysis can use the homophony toward the equivocation, when suitable. The topology can help us think about this issue in an attempt to articulate poetic and logic in analytic experience.

THE LOGIC OF THE NON-EXISTENCE OF SEXUAL RELATION AND THE POETIC FUNCTION

Trying to approach this relationship from what Lacan proposes, we resort to the study of Bousseyroux (2013), in which he presents the “three word states”, which the matter also has. However, these states are neither physical nor mental, but topological, namely: the empty word, which refers to the phallic signification, the whole word, which refers to the duplicity of meanings and to the undecidable, and the poetic word, which suspends the sense. The state of the poetic word is what interests our analysis now, which has an important function for the psychoanalytic clinic, according to Lacan.

At various times of his work, he refers to poetry, showing the style that was already being outlined even before the beginning of his teaching in the 50s. However, to understand what the author articulated about poetry, we must first understand what he says about the word, and then understand what he says about one of its states, the poetic word.

In the seminar Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953-1954/2009), Lacan tells us that the word or the concept is the word in its own materiality, articulating that the word deals with the thing itself, i.e., the word is the thing. Moreover, the word is structured as something that moves in the dimension of truth: “the word, as soon as it is established, travels in the dimension of truth. Except, the word does not know that it is itself that makes the truth. {...} it is in relation to truth that lies the signification of everything that is expressed”(Lacan, 1953-1954/ 2009, p. 295).

The word, when referring to the truth, exceeds the one who enunciates, and that concerns the enunciation and the statement. When inquiring about the structure of this word, which is beyond discourse, Lacan emphasizes its three dialectical movements: Verdichtung, condensation, Verneinung, denial, and Verdrangung, repression, the latter being the only movement that interrupts speech, since in it words are missing to the speaker.

When referring to Verdichtung, Lacan tells us that

{Vernedichtung} proves to be nothing other than the polyvalence of meanings in language, their encroachments, their criss-crossings, through which the world of things is not recovered by the world of symbols, but is taken up once more as follows — a thousand things correspond to each symbol, and each thing to a thousand symbols (LACAN, 1953-54/2009, p. 305).

According to Garcia (2010), Lacan prepares the concept of metaphor from the Verdichtung, conceiving the metaphor as the primary function of the signifier. Dichtung, without the Ver prefix, corresponds to the act of poetizing, rhyming, but it also means “to tight”, such as Drang, which refers to Verdrangung. Thus, we can articulate that repression does not occur without condensation.

The etymology of the word Dichten concerns the composition of a work of oral or spoken art. Dichter means poet, while Ver corresponds to the act of compressing something into a language, being a prefix that can be used in the formation of nouns and adjectives or in the formation of verbs (OXFORD & DUDEN, 1985 cited by Garcia, 2010). Jakobson (1960/1969) will assert that the poetry is articulated with a problem: what makes verbal language a work of art? The main object of poetics would be as differentia specifica between the verbal art and the other kinds of verbal arts and behaviors. Hence, it is possible to think that the analysand makes art with speech when articulating the signifiers, producing metaphors and using the poetic function.

Still in the seminar Freud’s papers on technique (Lacan, 1953-1954/2009), Lacan announces that the word only appears on speech deriving out of the fundamental rule of free association, since it suspends the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction, which was exposed in regard to the statute of the enunciation, considering the ne explétif. In this case, Lacan postulates that the realization of the being occurs in so far as this word is revealed, i.e., it only exists virtually, which subsequently is in line with the formulation that the subject is only produced in analysis.

In his style, throughout his teaching, Lacan used the poetic word. Perhaps this is why many complained that Lacan did not make himself understandable. In 1929, he wrote a poem called Hiatus Irrationalis, where there is a verse that says: “But, no sooner have words perished in my throat /Things, whether begotten from blood or forge/Nature, — than I lose myself in element flux”¹⁰ or “On evil blind and deaf, on god meaningless”¹¹. At the time of this writing, he already seems to be talking about the insufficiency of the word in dealing with sense or, as says Bousseyroux (2013, p. 4), “what prelude, what prediction is pronounced! Irrationalis hiatus, hiatus of a no-reason, hiatus of an extrasense, the /esp/ of laps — this is precisely the unconscious from which, much later, Lacan will reinvent the real.”

In the same year he publishes Hiatus irrationalis, he also publishes the article entitled The problem of style, in the surreal and bataillian magazine Minotaure, in which he speaks of a possible theoretical solution to the problem of style, including the artistic style. With this example of articulation, Bousseyroux (2013) points out that we can perceive the lacanian style as poetic. And this, for Lacan, is indispensable for interpretation in psychoanalysis, which is demonstrated by the various references he makes about poetry in his work. In addition, Bousseyroux (2013) inquiries about the possibility of a theoretical solution through topology for this poetic style.

Lacan himself, post-joycean (1976/2003, p. 568), says: “I was born a poem, but non-poet.” That’s different from saying “I am the own identification with the symptom”, as that which is “tangent to the native interface of the speaking-being (parlêtre) with ‘lalangue’”, according to Bousseyroux (2013, p. 6). Lacan, by saying that he is not enough poet, but a poem, refers to a topological question rather than to an ontological, stating that his poem signed as Lá-quand, which plays with the homophony in relation to his own name, points the signifier as an indication that responds to the Real.

This can mark what a poem in lalangue is, being lalangue the intercessor of the unconscious knowledge, since it does not ascend to S1, even though it allows to operate on the One, which is incarnated in lalangue, indicating the presence of jouissance. “Lalangue makes us born poem”, tells us Bousseyroux (2013). When we are born, we are poem as a speaking-being (parlêtre). However, there is not a poet yet, because what is presented is knowledge without subject of the unconscious-lalangue. It is a poem without a subject.

Lacan tells us that Léon-Paul Fargue, a French poet and writer, brings up to us the desire we be not non-poet {pas papouète}. This author presents assonant signifiers of lalangue in his poem, with groups of homophones phonemes, poésie, pouasie, papou, papouasie, condensing themselves and producing a new meaning: pas papouète. This double negation results in introducing the effect of non-sense and a new sense: “not non-poet” {pas papouète}. This effect operates with the sound of lalangue and signals that what remains is only the “tweet” of the signifier (Bousseyroux, 2013, p. 7) as a suspension of sense, a white sense {sens-blanc}, which has a close connection with the poetic function.

We can understand this function trough Jakobson (apud Bousseyroux, 2013), as he formulates that it is anchored in the sense-determinative function of sound and that sonorities play a preponderant role in the structure of the poem. The sounds, being distinctive features of language, have the function of discriminating sense. However, there is also another function of sound, which is to determine the sense, transposing dualisms of the language, which are: the dualism of the linguistic sign between signifier and meaning, and between sign and referent; and the dualism between the paradigmatic axis of metaphor by replacement, and the syntagmatic axis of metonymy by contiguity, dualisms that are maintained with the primary discriminative function of the sense. The second dualism makes it possible to point out the similarity and non-similarity of two verbal units endowed with sense, preventing the ambiguity of language from the use of homophony.

According to Bousseyroux (2013, p. 9), this poetic determination of sense occurs through phonic possibilities of language, using the figures of phonic equivalence such as paronomasia, anagram, onomatopoeia and synesthesia. These figures of phonic equivalence consider the appearance of an effect of sense that starts from the tension between sense and sound, taken as “the actuality of the facts of the real of lalangue and not the temporal effect of the signifier retroaction on the symbolic” (p. 9). To this extent, Lacan appealed to the poetic function as formulated by Jakobson but introduced lalangue as what brings the dimension of the Real of language. This can be exemplified when he says that, as speaking-beings (partlêtres), we are born poems, and not poets, since what one has is a knowledge without subject of the unconscious-lalangue. In such way, the operation over the One through the suspension of sense by the poetic word is enabled.

Still in consonance with Bousseyroux (2013), Lacan (1977) had contact with the Chinese poetic writing through Francois Cheng’s work, finding the importance of tone and tonema in Chinese poetry, as it is the tonal unit that decides significance during the modulation of the sound. This means that for the octave and the melodic curve of the voice, or in the pronunciation of a sound, four tones are considered: a flat tone and three kinds of oblique tones, which are the rising tone, the departing tone and the entering tone. However, the tone is not the sound. It is neither the signifier nor what resonates from it.

François Cheng said the Chinese poetry is a chanted writing {tz’u} in which the poet blows a gap between the words, or the blowing of the empty median Tao. This sung poetry and the Chinese octave, in which the tonal counterpoint is at stake, has musical effects, so that from the tone to the modulation arises a slippage that produces a chant. It is this effect that drives Lacan to the claim that the analytical interpretation must be poetic.

In the seminar L’insu que sait de l’une bévue s’aile à mourre (1976-1977), the author tells us that poetry is the resonance of the body or a “condancetion”, as quoted in Joyce, the Symptom (1976-1977), in a way that the condensation of condensation itself promotes a dance of signifiers, the dance between sound and sense. Hence, we have poetry as an effect of sense and as a hole {trou} effect, a hole that promotes the resonance of the body through the voice instrument, using not only the traumatic language, but also the trou-matic lalangue.

It is an indication that from ab-sense equivocation, promoted by the principle of the non-existence of the sexual relation in language, with a conflict between sense and sound, something is offered to poetic creation (Bousseyroux, 2013). In the Seminar The Formations of the Unconscious (1957-1958/1999), Lacan indicates joke (witz) as a displacement between truth and sense, producing an effect of no sense. This was resumed in the Seminair L’insu que sait de l’une bévue s’aile à mourre (1976-1977), when he suggests joke as a possibility to go beyond the unconscious, towards the ab-sense.

In this manner, it is understood that the psychoanalyst may use the poetic function so that, from the ab-sense equivocation permitted by the logic of “there’s no sexual relation”, the analysand can produce a new signifier, making something else resonate. Perhaps, this is the path indicated to work with the real of lalangue, amidst the tension between sense and sound, in direction of doing more than speaking: with holes, produced by the speech (parole) of the subject, and cuts, from the analyst’s saying, in a passage that goes from the wall of language toward the letter of (a)mur as a “new love”, echoing the lyre of desire.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

From the relationship between knowledge, truth and jouissance as components of the writing of discourses on the language wall, we have considered that the possibility of transposing this wall, which offers itself to reverberation, aiming at the writing of a word/letter of love or (a)mur, should essentially take into account the logic of the principle of the non-existence of sexual relation, which derogates the non-contradiction, as Lacan points out. Based on the aphorism “there is no sexual relationship,” Lacan teaches us that there is no metalanguage. Therefore, we enter a new language regime: the one of lalangue, where there is the primacy of the sound function over the referential function of language, in order to break the phallic signification that holds a truth value in the fundamental fantasy related to the symptom. Thus, through this operation, we have an opening to the poetic function, causing tension between sound and sense and producing a new signifier via the ab-sense, or ab-sex sense, as Cassin (2013) tells us. This represents a love letter or a lettre d’(a)mur as a poetic writing by the resonance of the body, bringing into play the tone and modulation that move in the direction of a chant and of a condancetion of signifiers, which refer to the cause of desire.

Referências

• BADIOU, A. & CASSIN, B. Não há relação sexual: duas lições sobre “O aturdito” de Lacan. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2013. 96p.
• BOUSSEYROUX, M. Au risque de la topologie e de la poésie - Élargir la psychanalyse. Toulouse: ERES, Collection Point Hors Ligne, 2011.
• BOUSSEYROUX, M. Os três estados da palavra: topologia da poesia. Conferência ministrada na Universidade de São Paulo, USP em 25 de abril de 2013. Inédito.
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• 1
  Skepticism: derives from the Greek skepsis and means “to examine”. The skeptic is one who presents a hesitating spirit and uses critic to compose his arguments. Beyond that, they affirm that there can be only one certitude: nothing can be known, leading to a categorical denial.

• 2
  Statement stands for the French énouncé, the product of the act of enunciation. T.N.

• 3
  With the advent of democracy in ancient Greece, the philosophical questions do not converge anymore to the explanation of the being of things, for the importance is settled on the rhetorical in order to enforce certain argument on the assemblies. So, to meet such interest, emerge the sophists, who aimed at persuasion by the means of speech, with the object of defeating the argument of an adversary in a debate. They would offer their work, claiming they were bearers of an universal knowledge, but their speech did not necessarily demonstrate a relationship between words and things, as it sought refutation. In this way, the Sophists did not intend to reach an absolute truth, but convince their audience about what they were discoursing.

• 4
  “Qu’on dise reste oublié derrière ce qui se dit dans ce qui s’entend”.

• 5
  Entre l’homme et la femme // il y a l’amour // Entre l’homme et l’amour // Il y a un monde // Entre l’homme et le monde // Il y a un mur.

• 6
  Lacan seizes various senses through the homophony possible in the expression “love letter” in French, precisely with the words love (amour) and wall (mur), letter (lettre) and word (lettre). T.N.

• 7
  Poiésis: the action of producing something in a creative way.

• 8
  Aisthésis: the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of beauty and art’s bases.

• 9
  Je commence par l’homophonie, d’où l’orthographe dépend. — Que dans la langue qui est la mienne, comme j’en ai joué plus haut, soit équivoque à « d’eux », garde trace de ce jeu de l’âme par quoi faire d’eux deux-ensemble trouve sa limite à « faire 2 » d’eux. — On en trouve d’autres dans ce texte, du «parêtre » au « s’emblant »…Je tiens que tous les coups sont là permis pour la raison que quiconque étant à leur portée sans pouvoir s’y reconnaître, ce sont eux qui nous jouent. Sauf à ce que les poètes en fassent calcul et que le psychanalyste s’en serve là où il convient.

• 10
  Mais sitôt que tout verbe a péri dans ma gorge/ Choses, que vous naissiez du sang ou de la forge, / Nature, — je me perds au flux d’un élément.

• 11
  Au mal aveugle et sourd, au dieu privé de sens.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Aug 2017

History

• Received
  27 Jan 2014
• Accepted
  20 July 2014