Body Event and End of Analysis
Anne Lysy
I approach the theme “Bodies and Resonances”[1] with a question that has been on my mind for some time: what is a “body event” and is there no reason to distinguish it from what is more commonly called a “body phenomenon”? Or rather: what used to be called, because it seems to me that today the use of “body event” is becoming generalised and tends to be confused with “body phenomena.” This may seem to be splitting hairs, but on the horizon, it concerns what the analytical operation is about, its end and its means, interpretation.
So I propose to first resituate this notion of the body event, and then I will tell you what some pass testimonies have taught me about it, or how they have challenged me. These testimonies give us a view of analytical practice today and what an analysis can lead to.
Body Event / Body Phenomena
The phrase “body phenomena” has flourished in our clinic of psychoses and has extended to a wide variety of phenomena, roughly speaking to everything that happens to the body – hysterical conversion symptoms, psychotic phenomena, psychosomatic phenomena, strange pains and all kinds of oddities. What status do they have? For example, the one who is seized with vertigo when he is told of his brother’s death; the one whose eyes get infected every time he speaks in public; the one who is overwhelmed with shivers as he talks about his story. It is indeed something that happens to the body, but will we call it a body event?
A first pathway. During a Clinical Conversation,[2] J.-A. Miller distinguished between “eclipse phenomena and permanent phenomena”: “Body phenomena are called ‘sinthomes’ when they settle permanently and order the life of a subject.”
Sinthome – written with TH : it is a neologism, the new way of writing that Lacan gives the symptom, to mark that we are moving to a new regime of the relationship between the signifier and the body.
Lacan defines the symptom as “an event of the body” in his 1976 text “Joyce le Symptôme.”[3] This is the only time the expression arises, but J.-A. Miller has extracted it to make it a key notion of Lacan’s last teaching and to situate it in the series of new concepts introduced by the reversal of perspective in Seminar xx, Encore, where the signifier has effects of jouissance and no longer of mortification: the parlêtre, lalangue, and the sinthome. The sinthome is “something that has happened to the body because of lalangue.”[4]
J.-A. Miller opposes the symptom as the formation of the unconscious, which is decipherable and reveals unconscious desire, to the symptom event of the body that belongs to the register of indecipherable jouissance, “opaque jouissance that excludes meaning,” writes Lacan.[5]
Jouissance presupposes the body; a living body, which is not the specular image, but which is defined as “that which isenjoyed” [ce qui se jouit]; not a natural, primary jouissance, but by the impact of language.
The body event is the “percussion” of language on the body,[6] it is the trauma of language.
This emphasis on jouissance – and therefore on the body – is reflected in analytical practice, which becomes “a discipline of jouissance,”[7] where the question “what does it mean?” is subordinated to another: “what does it satisfy?” “Seek where it enjoys”[8]! In an analysis, then, one certainly deciphers the symptoms, but it is to aim at the real of the symptom, beyond meaning, beyond the detours of desire. Reading a symptom, says J.-A. Miller, “aims at this initial shock”, “aims at reducing the symptom to its initial formula, that is to say to the material encounter of a signifier and the body, to the pure shock of language on the body.” It is to aim at “the fixity of jouissance and the opacity of the real.”[9]
The body event is situated at the level of Freudian fixation, where the trauma fixes the drive to a point that will be the foundation of repression. The analytical experience thus leads to a “below the repression,”[10] to the zone of the Urverdrängung, which is a repression that is never annulled, an opaque point, a hole, Lacan will say.[11] The clash of lalangue and body is of the order of a real without law.[12] J.-A. Miller specifies: “This leftover is what lies at the very origin of the subject. It is in a way the original event, and, at the same time, a permanent event, one that is ceaselessly reiterated.”[13] We find the notion of permanence again. It is initial, but it iterates, not in the manner of the return of the repressed, but as an iteration of the same One of jouissance. The sinthome as an event of the body is, in the strong sense, a condition of the parlêtre, constitutive, it is in a way the umbilical point of the subject, opaque, out of meaning, ineffaceable, incurable, “the most real thing that many people have,” says Lacan.[14]
One enters a slippery terrain, when one uses the word “at the origin.” Is it a question of “finding it again”? Is the initial shock of the body event identifiable as such? Is it said? Or is it felt – like feminine jouissance, impossible to say? What is the One of jouissance: a sensation, a letter, a word that has struck, a sound?
The analysis can lead to a point of unsayable singularity. We can hear in some testimonies of the pass that what is initial this time is “beyond,” “in addition to [outre]”[15]: the sinthome is located beyond that which supports meaning, fantasy, major identifications.
The Clinic of the Pass
The testimonies of the past touch us and strike us by their diversity. It is therefore not a question of forcing them by reading them as an application conforming to a theory – even if we cannot pretend that there is no theory at the end of the analysis! The important thing is not to fall into the trap.
Many who pass are witnesses to something that happens to their bodies at the end of the analysis. Often this is associated with a “vivification”, a “more of life [plus de vie].” The examples are singular, surprising; they bring us into the lalangue of each subject.
For Jérôme Lecaux, whose first AS testimony we heard at the “Questions of School” Day in Paris in January (2016), it is a story of pillar and backbone. Here is a man who dedicated himself to embodying the stone stick put in the crocodile’s mouth of his mother; he made himself the pillar, of her and of many others, at the price of great mortification and constant exhaustion (always “exhausted”!). The defusing of this fantasy allows a separation from the mother and is accompanied by a “body event.” He had always perceived a hole in a vertebra, where there was a lack of a father, a “foundation in life.” Suddenly, not only did he have the sensation of a tightening of the pelvis, which gave his body a new solidity, but an “opening of the floodgates” took place, a vital energy spread throughout his body, giving the impression of living flesh. The body, from dead weight, became a source of energy.
This vivification is, let us note, the result of an operation to defuse the fantasy. It is not the appearance of a repressed signifier, but a sensation – a body, in fact, “you feel it in your bones,” writes Lacan.[16]
Other AS have reported “sensations” and phenomena of the same kind to the sinthome-event of the body, in the sense of the initial percussion of language on the body. Hélène Bonnaud for example[17] relates the sensation of the falling body, from which she has to tear herself away each time, to the impact of the signifier “throw” in the paternal phrase that suddenly appeared at the very end of the analysis: “if it’s a girl, we’re going to throw her out of the window.”
I myself reported a bodily sensation of bubbling, a “full of energy”, that was interpreted as “you’re a runner!” This sensation is my oldest “memory,” but it cannot be dated, it has no form or scenario. It could become a driving force at the end of the analysis, when the detachment of the Other, the “tutor,” took place. As I have pointed out, “runner” is not, however, the rediscovery of the word that would have struck, nor an identification that fixes, nor the unique name that would say the thing.[18]
The first testimony of Véronique Voruz[19] gives different sides of the speaking body, whose status varies and which deserve to be commented on one by one. I will mention four of them.
Firstly, the family story is reduced to a few signifiers, catastrophe, monster, curse, “primary marks”, she says. I would add: they are left by “words that hurt”[20] – what Lacan called “the so-called first, oracular marks”[21] – for example: “you have the body of a wicked woman,” or “you are the envoy of the prince of darkness.” These are “signifiers of destiny,” she said, which can be defused after the construction of the fantasy.
This was also the case for a persistent symptom, resistant to interpretation, which occurred during the course of the analysis once she could risk making herself visible, speaking in public in her name: her eyes became instantly infected, turning red. Until the day when, disfigured, she rushed to the analyst and began : “This is my eye story” [C’est mon histoire d’yeux], the analyst “roared”: “God! I hear it at last!” [Dieu ! Enfin je l’entends] and cut the session short. This “exorcism through equivocation” made the identification with the devil fall and made the symptom “quasi reasonable.”
She also describes the montage she had to invent in order to separate herself from the analyst – she who never managed to separate herself without tearing herself away, living as the “extension of the body of the other.”
At the end, precisely, she makes the discovery, extracted from a dream, from a nomination of her way of life: “I’m always a bit uprooted” [je suis toujours un peu à l’arrache]. It’s a word of destiny that has been defused, which she can use again – her mother had torn her leg off in a mountain accident and in this last dream Véronique climbs a mountain path “uprooting [à l’arrachage],” making stones come crashing down; she turns around and sees below, among the stones, a leg torn off [une jambe arrachée].
These different examples lead me, in conclusion, to propose three paths to explore.
These stories of “bodily sensations”, of vivification, require us to take up the question of affect anew. Lacan had evoked the affects at the end of the analysis correlated with the traversal of the fantasy, the “manic-depressive”[22] and the “depressive position,”[23] or even enthusiasm.[24] Now it is the body which is “sensitive.”[25] How can we relate these affects of the body to the “it feels” of his writing on Joyce, or to the “effects of affect” of lalangue in Seminar XX: “Llanguage [Lalangue] affects us first of all by everything it brings with it by way of effects that are affects”[26]?
Let us not obsess over the body event “at the origin”! Rather, I would suggest that analysis produces events – to the extent that “a saying makes an event.”[27] It is a saying, which creates; a nomination. Inventing “words that carry some weight,”[28] lodging at the opaque junction of lalangue and body, analysis is creationist,[29] as Éric Laurent points out. I would propose the hypothesis that analysis produces a singular real for each person, rather than finding, by recalling to the dregs, the real that was there “at the origins.” Testimonies of the pass often transmit these singular nominations (throwing, running, who-lives, tearing, etc.), opaque umbilical points in the weft of the narratives, which are like clues to what escapes the narrative. They are not the “last words”, nor the words of the origin, of the initial shock that can never be directly reconstructed; they can only circumscribe the impact, they trace its edge.[30]
What about interpretation-events? Of those “words that carry” and have effects of jouissance, that “provokes a gut reaction”[31]? Analysis manages to “undo by speech what has been done by speech,”[32] but it does so again and “in body” [en corps].
Translated by Alasdair Duncan and Janet Haney.
References
[1] This text is the complete version of a paper presented at the ACF-Belgium Journée, 20 February 2016, “Corps et résonances” and was published in Quarto 112/113, pp. 116-118.
[2] Miller, J.-A., et. al., “Conversation sur les embrouilles du corps”, Bordeaux, 1999, Ornicar ?, No. 50, 2002, p. 235, emphasis added.
[3] Lacan, J., “Joyce the Sinthome”, trans. A.R. Price, The Lacanian Review, No. 5, 2018, p. 17.
[4] Miller, J.-A., “Spare Parts”, trans. A.R. Price, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, No. 27, pp. 87-117.
[5] Lacan, J., op. cit., (trans modified) p. 18.
[6] “Shock”, “percussion”: terms used by J.-A. Miller, notably in his course “L'Être et l’Un”, 2011 (unpublished).
[7] Miller, J.-A., “The Warsaw Lecture”, trans. A.R. Price, Hurly Burly, No. 2, 2009, p. 177.
[8] Miller, J.-A., “L’économie de la jouissance”, from the course “Choses de finesse en psychanalyse”, 2008-2009, La Cause freudienne, No. 77, p. 169.
[9] Miller, J.-A., “Reading a Symptom”, intervention at the IXth Congress of the NLS, London, 3 April 2011, trans. A.R. Price, Hurly-Burly, No. 6, 2011, p. 152.
[10] Miller, J.-A., Course “L'Être et L’Un”, 30 March 2011, unpublished, and “Reading a Symptom”, op. cit.
[11] Lacan, J., “Conférences et entretiens dans des universités nord-américaines”, Scilicet 6/7, Paris, Seuil, 1976, p. 59.
[12] Miller, J.-A., “A real for the 21st century”, Scilicet, A real for the 21st Century, A New Lacanian School Publication Paris, 2014, p. 34 and trans. R. Litten in Hurly-Burly, No. 9, 2013.
[13] Miller, J.-A., “Reading a Symptom”, op. cit., p. 152.
[14] Lacan, J., “Conférences et entretiens dans des universités nord-américaines”, op. cit., p. 41.
[15] This is the “zone” that J.-A. Miller has designated as the “outrepasse”; see in particular the course “L'Être et l’Un”, 4 April 2011.
[16] Lacan, J., “Joyce the Symptom”, op. cit. p. 14.
[17] Bonnaud, H., “Réel, résistance, restes”, Quarto, No. 109, Dec. 2014, pp. 68-69.
[18] See in particular: Lysy, A., “Knowing How to do with One’s Symptom”, trans. B. Bertrand, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, No. 25, 2012, and “Ma petite chansonnette. Variations sur l’événement de corps” (2012), Quarto, No. 103, Dec. 2012.
[19] Voruz, V., “Se séparer sans s’arracher”, Journée “Questions d'École”, Paris, 23 January 2016.
[20] The expression is of J.-A. Miller, in an intervention on interpretation: “Les mots qui blessent”, La Cause freudienne, 72, 2009, pp. 133-136.
[21] Lacan, J., “Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire”, Écrits, London, Norton, 1966/2006, p. 684 : “The first words spoken decree, legislate, aphorize, and are an oracle; they give the real other its obscure authority.”
[22] Lacan, J., “L’étourdit”, Autres écrits, op. cit., p. 487.
[23] Lacan, J., “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School”, trans. R. Grigg, Analysis, No. 6, 1995.
[24] Lacan, J., “Italian Note”, trans. R. Grigg, Analysis, No. 7, 1997.
[25] Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XXIII. The Sinthome, trans. A.R. Price, Cambridge, Polity, 2016, p. 9.
[26] Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XX. Encore, trans. B. Fink, London/New York, Norton, 1998, p. 139.
[27] Miller, J.-A., “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body”, trans. A.R. Price, Scilicet The Speaking Body, A New Lacanian School Publication, 2015, p. 39, & Hurly-Burly, No. 12, 2015, pp. 119-132
[28] Lacan, J., “The Lacanian Phenomenon” (conférence in Nice, 30.11.1974), trans. D. Collins, The Lacanian Review, No. 9, 2020, p. 25.
[29] Laurent, É., transcribed interview, “Ça parle du corps avec … Éric Laurent”, e-mail sent before CPCT Paris Day, September 2015.
[30] Lysy, A., “Un trognon de réel en fin d’analyse”, Le réel mis à jour, au XXIe siècle, AMP, Ecole de la Cause freudienne, collection rue Huysmans, Paris, 2014, pp. 80-82.
[31] Miller, J.-A., “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body”, op. cit., p. 42.
[32] Lacan, J., “Une pratique de bavardage”, Le moment de conclure, 15 November 1977, Ornicar ? 19, 1979, p. 6.