Beyond the Other, the Body
Dossia Avdelidi
Once the subject has finished with the Other, he finds himself with what Freud called symptomatic remainders. But Jacques-Alain Miller explains to us that these "remainders" are only the One of jouissance. It is about jouissance as a body event, and which constitutes the true cause of psychic reality. It is this causality linked to the percussion of the body by the signifier and to what he calls the initial shock. It is about the contingent encounter with jouissance, an encounter which is always traumatic, and which implicates the body.
The symptom of the parlêtre then, is an event of the body, an emergence of jouissance. This jouissance is maintained beyond the resolution of desire. It is a remainder that the subject accommodates.
As early as 1967, Lacan affirmed that the Other is the body. He says in The Logic of Fantasy that "the body is made to inscribe something called a mark. The body is made to be marked.” And a little further on he adds: "When this One (1) irrupts into the field of the Other, that is to say at the level of the body, the body falls to pieces, the body is fragmented. This is what our experience shows us to exist at subjective origins." (2)
It was necessary to get out of the meanderings of desire of the Other before I could glimpse this dimension of the body. Yet, during the first few years of my analysis, I spoke continuously of the ideal body that I did not have, of the ideal woman that I was not, of the jealousy that I felt towards thin women who possessed something that I did not have. All of this was undoubtedly linked to the gaze that the Other (and especially the maternal Other) carried on my body. With my body I provoked the gaze of the Other but I also escaped it. But, it was only an imaginary approach. So at the start of the analysis that would lead me to the end, I said to the analyst, "I'm not going to travel 3,000 kilometres to speak to you about my weight." As a result, I had ignored a dream whereby the analyst who had transformed into a woman, was feeding me.
It took the traversal of the fantasy to find that which constituted trauma for me, so an encounter with jouissance which was at the root of my fantasy. This initial shock had forever marked my body and my style of jouissance.
I took the other side (l’envers) of the signifier anorexic that was granted to me by the Other, by turning it into appetite and especially into an appetite for life. An appetite, for all that is on the side of life characterises me. This meeting of the signifier and the body has forever marked my jouissance, a kind of destiny, that remains even after the traversal of the fantasy. It is the remainder of jouissance with which the parlêtre is called to make do with.
Translation: Caroline Heanue
References
(1) In this passage, the One for Lacan “represents the sexual act at the level of the body.“
(2) Lacan. Jacques., The Seminar Book XIV, The Logic of Fantasy, lesson of 10 May 1967. Unpublished.