Words Unaddressed
Peggy Papada
Psychoanalysis uses words as an object through which one can find a way to handle the unconscious. The unconscious does not reside in the deepest recesses of one’s soul but in the “concrete language that people talk.”[1] In analysis, the presence of the analyst is necessary to make the unconscious exist, through interpretation, which J.-A. Miller defines as such: “I’m telling you that you said something other than what you wanted to say.”[2] A space therefore may open up – for those who want to be interpreted – for exploration of the enigma that the formations of the unconscious constitute. Love for truth as the motor force of transference, supports the desire of the analysand to work towards its discovery before he or she realises the status of truth as lying. Yet there is also the growing phenomenon of a “cult of listening” that results in having to listen to what the other says, without being able to question it for it is presented as the truth, correct, “that it’s like that.”[3] This may take the form of auto-nomination or more colloquially of SelfID, a hashtag which is often trending on Twitter. Nomination has become an autonomous process bypassing the Other who is being unveiled as non-existent. Then what becomes of words, if not addressed to the Other?
The fall of the father and the rise of the object to the social zenith indicate that the object is at the place of the agent, therefore jouissance is at the place of domination.[4] The “dictatorship of the plus-de-jouir” invites the subject to go beyond its inhibitions, pulverising all semblants, going as far as to say it all, do it all, live it all.[5] In the absence of an appeal to the Other, knowledge in the place of truth takes the form of information transmitted in an unlimited, borderless, metonymic circulation of words and images that result in an evanescent truth (or lies) – insofar as nothing holds – or certainty, insofar as there is no dialectic. Words retain their power to ascribe being, but there is little room for metaphor which is always linked to misunderstanding.
In 1968, Lacan classified the mark left by the disappearance of the father under “the general notion of segregation” appearing at the backdrop of civilization’s ideal of universalism.[6] To this universalism we can add an emerging master signifier: inclusiveness. How to reconcile the underpinning equality for all with the radically singular modes of jouissance the object a delineates? Thus, inclusive language bumps into the object a as well as that part of jouissance not captured by it. After all, jouissance is measureless and antinomic to nomination. Isn’t the plus in LGBTQAI+, sequence ever increasing, not all, an example of the self-segregation that ensues?
The absence of an address to the Other the auto-nomination reveals, implies that there is no transference and hence no place for interpretation. Without the concept of the unconscious, the concrete language that people talk, becomes the concrete uni-dimensional language of the dico, “I say therefore I am.”[7] Yet much as “language imposes being upon us,” “being is what slips away the most in language,” Lacan says in Encore.[8] Can the subject ever be identical to its being? To the I am?
References
[1] Lacan, J., “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever,” The Lacanian Review, Issue 12, 2022, p. 25.
[2] Miller, J.-A. (2021) Listening With and Without Interpretation, Lacan Web Television: https://youtu.be/F56PprU6Jmk
[3] Ibid.
[4] See Miller, J.-A, (2004) “A Fantasy”, Lecture given at the 4th Congress of the WAP, available online: http://2012.congresoamp.com/en/template.php?file=Textos/Conferencia-de-Jacques-Alain-Miller-en-Comandatuba.html
[5] See for example #YOLO. According to the Cambridge dictionary, YOLO (= you only live once) is used, especially on social media, to mean that you should do things that are enjoyable or exciting, even if they are silly or slightly dangerous.
[6] Lacan, J., “Note on the Father and Universalism,” trans. R. Grigg, The Lacanian Review, Issue 3, 2017, p. 10.
[7] Miller, J.-A., intervention at “Question of the School”, École de la Cause freudienne, Paris, 22 January 2022, unpublished. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tqb9T134Ws
[8] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore (1972-73), ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. B. Fink, London/ New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 2006, pp. 44, 39.