Bodily Effects of Language ?
Florencia F.C. Shanahan
“On the basis of the jaculation Yad’l’Un, the body thus appears as the Other of the signifier,
qua marked, in so far as the signifier makes an event there and so [...]
this body event that is jouissance appears as the true cause of psychic reality.”[1]
What a pain to speak of effects! It makes one feebleminded and believe that one may grasp the cause. Should we speak of affects then? … or worse.
When an analysis produces an analyst, it does so in so far as it allows for separation: separation from sense, from meaning (always Oedipal), from truth as fiction that with its fixion in the fundamental fantasy obturates the point of the cause as real. In the instant of the fall, the lightning, that destitution and dis-being are at the end of analysis, lies the impossible adequation between the name and the cause.[2]
It is not just about separating oneself from the stories of mammy and daddy, the little sister, the big brother. Although it is desirable that that also occurs, separation must go farther. And the question is how that can happen...
The issue of the weight of my body emerged in many sessions. I had often heard: “you were born with such a low weight! barely one kilo...” This tied the shadow of death to my bodily consistency.
My analysis thus oscillated between how to stop making myself weigh - so heavy and so dense that there was no place for any(thing) Other - and how not to disappear in my attempt at emptying, always excessively attracted by the “unbearable lightness of being.”
“[…] it is evident therein that nothing gets spoken without leaning on the cause. Now this cause is what is covered over by the soll Ich […] which, in inverting its meaning, brings forth the paradox of an imperative that presses me to assume my own causality. Yet I am not the cause of myself.”[3]
Commenting on this sentence, Jacques-Alain Miller[4] states that this is not an imperative correlative to any freedom but on the contrary to the determinism of “I am caused”. The question is whether one assumes it or not. “This is why Lacan, in this text, takes a detour through the Thing (Chose). The Chose goes with the Cause. It is about the problematic of the first position of the subject in relation to the Thing, that with regard to which the subject refers first, and where this relation is formulated precisely in terms of faith, belief, aversion, attraction or compulsion. With regards to this first term Other, the subject is in a relation as such pathetic. It is in relation to which he takes his first distance […] this distance that Freud called defense [...] Lacan, at the time, spoke of it in terms of "a primary affect prior to any repression." This primary affect prior to any repression designates the level of Bejahung where the orientation of the subject is played out and where affect and consent are found in a primordial way. What this term of cause is about is the connection between affect and [the subject’s] modes of [saying] yes.”[5]
I am at a WAP Congress. I collect my luggage from the cloakroom before the last plenary session begins, so I can be first and fast to leave when the crowd disperses. My suitcase is nearly as big as I am, and I carry it up the steps of the amphitheatre. I have to hold it with both arms, it is so heavy.
Suddenly, I lift my head and meet my analyst. He is standing right in front of me and staring at my disbelieving eyes. He gesticulates in a ridiculous and exaggerated manner, mimicking with his hands up in the air the movements of my body carrying all this weight, and puffing noisily, as if gasping for air. Then he keeps on walking. I am left frozen on the steps, not knowing whether to cry or to laugh.
It was in this flash that I first glimpsed that the Other and the other (the pair, the couple, the partner) were never anyOne (twin sister, mother, lovers, husband), but this body and its writing.
References
[1]Miller, J.-A., “Being and the One”, The Lacanian Orientation, Teaching delivered at the Department of Psychoanalysis of the University of Paris 8, 11 May 2011, trans. P. Dravers, unpublished. www.nlscongress2021.com/fragments
[2] Laurent, É., El nombre y la causa [The Name and the Cause], Ed. M. Gómez, Córdoba: IIPsi - Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas [CONICET y UNC], 2020.
[3] Lacan, J., “Science and Truth”, Écrits, W.W. Noton & Co., 2006, p. 734.
[4] Miller, J.-A., Causa y consentimiento [Cause and Consent], Lesson of 25/11/1987, Ed. Paidós, Bs. As., 2019, pp. 39-39.
[5] Ibid.