J.-A. Miller: Introduction to the Reading of J. Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety (2004) (part 2)
“INTRODUCTION TO THE READING OF J. LACAN’S SEMINAR ON ANXIETY” (2004) - J.-A. MILLER (Part 2)
In April, May and June 2004, J.-A. Miller comments on Seminar X, On Anxiety, which had just been published. Two texts collate this work and are of the highest interest for us since they highlight the “body with organs” in opposition to the body as a surface of the mirror stage. We present here the second of two fragments which are like two appetizers for these texts.
"Introduction to the Reading of Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety", translated by B. P. Faulks, Lacanian Ink, 27, Spring 2006, pp. 34-35.
"Through its most profound phase, the Seminar goes thus from anxiogenic apparitions of the object to erogenous separations. (...) This is most evident in the way the Seminar puts into play two different statuses of the body. In the first movement it is the specular body, that of the mirror stage, in its totality, apprehended as a form, a good form, and even the best of forms, since, if we believe its construction, it imposes on the speaking being the perceptive world of its objects. it's a Gestalt. The first movement plays on this gestalt, since it shows how it can be disturbed, doubled, depersonalized, made strange by the incongruous irruption of an object structured differently. But one finds the specular object in the second movement having a different structure; somehow one finds in its place and perfectly informed this object petit a. These objects petit a do not stop at five. In their proliferation you find some kinds that you might have trouble designating, which are certainly not of the order of good form - like the placenta; the coverings of the foetus; the gaze, which cannot be a good form except as falling under the category of the eye; the voice, which is not inscribed in the visual field. We are in a register in which it is not a matter of form but rather of zone. It is a matter of the body with erogenous zones, which is not the visual body. It is, in the use Lacan makes of it, the body as organism, comprehended completely outside of the mirror, a body at the least a-specular, delivering objects conforming to the topological structure of the Moebius strip, or more precisely, of its minimal surface. It is the body of erogenous zones, that is to say, of surface zones, the zones that Freud put into function in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. This is the body which returns."
Translated by Fred Baitinger & Roger Litten