418 – 2011/2012 VERS TEL AVIV 40 – Réflexions 17 / TOWARDS TEL AVIV 40 – Reflections 17

“…between knowledge and jouissance, there is a littoral which only turns to the literal insofar as this turn, we might take it the same at any instant. It is from this alone that you can take yourself for the agent who sustains it” Jacques Lacan, “Lituraterre” Notes on reading, the letter and psychosis[1]

Florencia Fernandez Coria Shanahan* It is in Lituraterre that we find the threads for the postulation of a new status of the letter.Besides it being the “material support of the signifier”, and “that which precipitates from the signifier”, the letter becomes “that which sketches the edge of the hole in knoweledge”. This hole, Lacan proposes, cannot be evoked without a reference to the jouissance that would (if the sexual relation existed) fill it up. The question remains (it is the direction proposed by this écrit) of “how the unconscious [an effect of language] commands the function of the letter”. From much earlier, the symptom had already been defined as being “inscribed in a writing process”. Between language and the body, the function of the symptom, “wildly’ writing the One by means of a letter,” does not cease to be written. The jouissance included in it thus ciphered, namely, given a meaning, and the unconscious remains at work in the endless slope of the transferential production of sense. The unconscious as discourse is a knowledge which ciphers, interprets the letter of jouissance, which in turn institutes the symptom by inscribing contingency as necessity. The symptom conceived as letter of jouissance, support of each existence, “a letter that repeats itself without saying anything to anyone”, brings about the question of the operation able to reconduct the signifier to the letter that supports it. In other words, what the analytic act proper would consist in. “Reading, knowing how to read, consists in putting distance between speech and the meaning it carries, based on writing as outside-meaning […] Whilst […] the interpretation that stays purely at the level of speech only swells up meaning, the discipline of reading targets the materiality of writing, i.e. the letter in so far as it produces the event of jouissance that is decisive for the formation of symptoms.”[2] It is by means of uncoupling the symptom and the unconscious, that Lacan produces a “bifurcation from that One (through which the symptom, via the letter, touches the Real): towards S2, the unconscious; towards the letter, the symptom”. The clinic shows us that, sometimes, the response required to do with this event of jouissance,with the encounter with a foreign jouissance with which the speaking-being is confronted, is not the unconscious as not wanting to know, namely, the subscription to a discourse with the consequent division in being and loss (also localisation) of jouissance. She wakes up frozen, in the garden, in the middle of the night. She cannot tell whether she is dreaming or awake. Reality is blurred. It happens every time that her husband insinuates or demands a sexual encounter. The following morning she will find her armsburned, having responded to the insulting voice. Still in the dark, she would have taken photographs of her house and of her children, ‘to remember who Iam’. The kitchen floor covered with dozens of pages, from where a writing she cannot attribute to herself will tell her the words of her madness. If the sexual is displaced in the ciphering of the unconscious, how to conceive the outside-meaning when the sexual realises in a cipher that is not order, repetition, but non-entity, or even “return of the One in perception, in language or in the passage to the act”? References: Arenas, Gerardo, “En busca de lo singular” Iddan,Claudia, “L’hétéro et le réel du symptôme. Commentaire de quelques extraits de la Conférence à Genève sur le symptôme de J.Lacan” Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits. The First Complete English Edition, W.W Norton, 2007 Lacan, Jacques, “Lituraterre”, Autres Ecrits, Seuil, 2001 Lacan, Jacques, Seminar RSI, unpublished Miller, Jacques-Alain, “Reading a Symptom” Miller, Jacques-Alain, “Joyce avec Lacan », in Lacan.com Miller, Jacques-Alain, “Los signos del goce”, Paidos, 1998 Molina, Olga, “Funcion del escrito y psicosis”, in Virtualia * Member NLS, ICLO-NLS, Dublin