Lacan Everyday No. 581 .

Selection of Texts - New Lacanian School

Number 581
I would not have missed a Seminar for the world – Philippe Sollers

We will win because we have no other choice – Agnes Aflalo

www.lacanquotidien.fr

DAbout “The reverse of biopolitics”

by Eric Laurent (I)
By François Regnault

“You provoke a new shudder” Victor Hugo, about

Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil

This book* is without a doubt an excellent orientation exercise.

“How to orient yourself in thought” is a question that Kant raised
in 1786, claiming the difference between the right and the left
(not in the political sense, I ask you to believe it). The Reverso of
labiopolitics by Éric Laurent is: How to orient yourself in
psychoanalysis? So, whoever says that psychoanalysis does not
concern him, then neither does this book. So, they will be wrong
not to see that it is precisely because this book is oriented in
psychoanalysis that it can turn around biopolitics, which today directs us, manipulates
us, enslaves us, and in the first place to our body . What would we gain by ignoring it?

Éric Laurent is therefore not one of those psychoanalysts - if there are any -
who only read works of psychoanalysis (work matters, in short) but reads
many others. So, it does not enclose itself in any past psychoanalysis that
would like to present itself as scholastic, and even less ignore the twists of
its “obverse” and the detours of its “reverse.”

“This book aims to show that Lacan proposes an orientation for

psychoanalysis on the status of the body in our culture of enjoyment” *p.
19]

So still, and I end with the so that , it takes into consideration the
orientation that Jacques-Alain Miller (whose course has been precisely
titled “the Lacanian orientation”) now gives to psychoanalysis (at least one
in doing so, if not the only one, as we will recognize), which means that
taking into account the “last Lacan”, psychoanalysis advances as it has
already advanced since Freud with Lacan, and as it should advance, if it
does not have an illusory future.

In this regard I often think of the Teatro nô , whose Western admirers

make us believe that they are ultra-codified ceremonies from their origin,
of which our theater would be incapable, while under the pretext of a
supposed immemorial fidelity, this Japanese art actually evolves. from
Master to Master, without anything university. I hope that this will always
happen with psychoanalysis, if it evolves, not under Amos, but at least
from Analyst to Analyst, just as I believe and verify that it does.

I do not want to summarize the chapters that could be considered

preliminary, necessary to situate the questioning that could open to
biopolitics, of which the author claims the attempt to reverse. Since here
the orientation is not the Kantian left-right, but the front-reverse scale *p.
61+: “taking it from the other side again”¹ where Lacan also denounces
what he calls, what “is certainly the S2 [knowledge] of the master, which
shows the core of the new tyranny of knowledge”².

The Reverse : We know that Lacan has titled one of his Seminars this way:
The Reverse of Psychoanalysis , to designate – denounce – the discourse of
the Master, of which, in his formulas of the four discourses, the analytical
discourse is the obverse, and that the term of the reverse , he related it to
Balzac's novel entitled The Reverse of Contemporary History (Lacan calls it
The Reverse of Contemporary Life³ ), a novel that he describes as boring –
to which (I ironically) “a sleepless night” (NT ,1) would be close after all, if
those who are in agreement at the moment in which I write realized for a
single moment that they are not so far from that excellent Madame de la
Chanterie who, in that little corner of Paris in the who has chosen a kind of
ashram , has gathered some repentants who agree, as they have always
done, to save the world around those she establishes as “The Order of the
Brothers of Consolation”, that says it all! This Lacan Seminar of 1969-70 is
also “contemporaneous” with the events of 1968, just as Éric Laurent's
book is revealed to be contemporary with that youthful desire to stand up
to biopolitics in which those who are also surely entangled They hope, in
effect, to console us from the world. “Participatory democracy itself, says
Éric Laurent, covers a participation of enjoyment in an imaginary of body
and meaning. It can also lead to delirium” *p. 238+

But let us briefly point out some significant references from the first
chapters:

1. Do you have that body? Is that true? About that, although Lacan
constantly maintains that we are not our body, he sometimes admits that
we have it : if man (LOM) has one: “if he has one, he writes here, in a
properly Joycean style, he has no other * …+ which I wouldn't think about
*…+ if that body you have really were one” ⁴. Or even more: “One has his
body, he is not one to any degree” ⁵, but also: “The parlêtre adores his
body because he believes he has it. In reality he doesn't have it, but his
body is his only consistency – mental consistency of course because his
body continually leaves.”⁶. We will see that this escape will go further in
Joyce.

2. The body is not full but empty, not without organs either, but exposed
to the external, alloextracorporeal, susceptible to suffering that trauma
that supposes the effect of the language (the mother tongue) on it,
because that body is "speaking", and of many ways.

3. Which in this multiple turn of the late Lacan, is the body of the
parlêtre , according to his definition: “The parlêtre [the speaking being if
you prefer] is a way of expressing the unconscious. The fact that man is a
speaking animal” *note 7 on p.10+

4. That “we believe we have a body” and that this body is approached by
a relationship to enjoyment prior to the image” [p.15]. The category of
jouissance then takes a predominant place , even if the body fails to
inscribe that jouissance, whether the latter submerges it or the former
avoids it.

5. Lacan characterizes this body as an empty set (Ø), which therefore

does not contain any element, and this is what opposes it to all the images
that (consumer) society wants to sell it. Empty body with respect to
enjoyment, since as one , it does not contain anything, it is a bag, whose
organs are reserved, if you want, for Medicine. As for the phallus itself:
“the common error does not see that the signifier is enjoyment, and that
the phallus is nothing more than its meaning”⁷.

6. That the object a , cause of desire, and that the subject, itself divided
($) no longer belong to the body. The subject is something punctual and
evanescent, it is neither in us nor about us. And its division is removed
from the supposed One of the body just like the four fateful objects: the
breast is separated from the mother's body, the anal object is not reduced
to excrement, the gaze is not the sight, and the voice is silent⁸. Include
there the “lamella” that comes off the body [p. 55-56]

The book could then be titled: Enjoyment and the body, as one would say
of a fable: The lion (linked to the symbolic, the imaginary and the real) and
the mosquito (the plus-of-enjoyment ), for example! NT, 2)

This turn of, and in, Lacan, you will then perceive in the following texts:
“Radiophony”, then the Seminar XXIII, with two texts on Joyce, “Joyce
elsymptom” I (June 16, 1975, republished in that Seminar XXIII) and “Joyce
the symptom” II (1976) recovered in the Other Writings – but the latter not
without the complete explanations that Éric Laurent gives about it in his
chapter “What makes a symptom for a body” and in the chapters that
continue, in which Joyce in turn has a predominant place, especially “Joyce
and the Pragmatics of the Holy Man” with this substitution of the stool for
the unconscious , with an air of farce , and this stool placed in the place of
the famous castration, which they will not want to take seriously,
mistakenly [p. 213]. Since the footstool, S. K. beautiful, (NT, 3) is the last
avatar of the nomination: “Joyza too much of the S. K. beautiful for that” ⁹,
*p. 85 et seq.+ “pedestal, says Miller, that allows him to rise to the dignity
of the Thing” ;: [p. 89]

This recourse to Joyce, an essential encounter for Lacan (if you only knew
the number of works he had on Joyce in his library!) invites Éric Laurent to
continue his search for what could result from it regarding this image of
the body to return visible his invisible flesh . And the fortune that smiles
upon him then invites Laurent to resort to three surprising examples: the
self-portraits of Rembrandt (the most beautiful are in the Louvre), the
immense canvases of Rothko, which are also self-portraits (abstract, but
precisely for that reason!) and the Frank Gehry's always curved structures.
I shamelessly confess the pleasure experienced in these analyses, as well
as the experience of the walk in Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao
proposed by Éric Laurent in the “space without the mirror” that Richard
Serra's metal walls constitute in his eyes [p . 188-189]. I have done it, you
will do it, and the author of this book who is your guide will become your
friend!

* Laurent É., L'Envers de la biopolitique. Une écriture pour la jouissance , Paris,

Navarin/Le Champfreudien, 2016.

NT1: Play on words between the expression used by Lacan: à duer debout , with the
nuit debout (literally, the night standing) slogan of a recent social protest movement in
France.
NT2: La Fontaine's fable whose moral is double: the most fearsome enemy is
sometimes the smallest, and you can lose in less dangerous situations after having
faced great undertakings.

NT3: In the original, I play with the homophony of the French term escabeau (footstool)
and SK, beau (beautiful, beautiful).

[1] Lacan J., The Seminario, book XVII, The Reverse of Psychoanalysis , Paidós,
Barcelona, 1992, p. 10.
[2] Ibid., p.32
[3] Ibid., p. 205.
[4] Lacan J., Joyce the symptom , in Other writings , Paidós 2010, p. 594.
[5] Lacan J., The Seminario, book XXIII, The sinthome , Paidós, B. Aires 2006, p.147.
[6] Ibid., p. 66.
[7] Lacan J., The Seminario, book XIX, …or worse , Paidós, 2012, p 17.
[8] Jacques-Alain Miller, Jacques Lacan and the voice , in Freudiana, nº21, Barcelona,
1997.
[9] Lacan J., Joyce the symptom , in Other writings , Paidós 2010, p. 593.
[10] Jacques-Alain Miller, The unconscious and the speaking body , published on the
AMP website ( www.wapol.org )

To be continued: part II, in a future Lacan Quotidien. Sign up to receive it

Translation: Faith Lacruz