Body Event
Anna Pigkou
The term “body event” appears in Lacan’s later teaching. It further clarifies the concept of the analytical symptom. We encounter it once in Joyce the symptom, where we can read “let the symptom be what it is: a body event.”[1]
J.-A. Miller tells us that when we speak of a body event “in effect, this always regards discourse events that have left traces on the body.”[2] And this happens because “the signifier does not only have signifying effects, but it also has effects of affect in a body.”[3]
In the course of an analysis, we have the experience of discourse events. On the one hand, the analysand discovers that a word heard during childhood, represents an event that has marked the body. On the other hand, the analysand notices that through the course of free association, certain words that emerge, under transference, create the trauma of a cut and mark a before and an after in relation to one's history.
Therefore, the body event has to do with trauma, the traces of cut, the accident. It is in its nature connoted since the first time and is opposed to “the medical symptom that is a reproducible fact.”[4]
In analysis, J.-A. Miller tells us, “we are relieved to the extent that we learn to read the body event. But it is realistic to recognise that we always stumble on the illegible.”[5] This “illegible” constitutes, we can say, the residue of the traumatic event that supports, case by case, the singular tone of the well-saying and at the end of the cure, leads the parlêtre towards “there where it was.”[6]
Translated by Yannis Grammatopoulos
Reviewed by Caroline Heanue
References
[1] Lacan J., «Joyce the symptom,» in Autres écrits, Paris, Le Seuil, 2001, p.569.
[2] Miller J.-A., «Lacanian Biology and the Body Event» in La Cause freudienne, n°44, February 2000, p. 7-59.
[3] Idem.
[4] Dewambrechies-La Sagna C., «To have a body or to have a wall for support,» in La Cause du désir, no 100, p. 91.
[5] Miller J.-A., «The Lacanian Orientation. Spare Parts,» teaching delivered in the framework of 1st December 2004, Department of Psychoanalysis, Paris VIII University, course 25 May 2005, unpublished.
[6] « Wo Es war, soll Ich werden » Sigmund F., Lecture 31, The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,“ 1933, S.E., Volume XXII, transl. Strachey J,. The Hogarth Press, Vintage, London, 2001.