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Jacques-Alain Miller: Reading a Symptom
« Interpretation as knowing how to read aims at reducing the symptom to its initial formula, i.e. the material encounter between a signifier and the body, the pure shock of language on the body. So, admittedly, to treat the symptom you have to pass through the shifting dialectic of desire, but you also have to rid yourself of the mirages of truth that this deciphering brings you and aim beyond, at the fixity of jouissance and the opacity of the real. »
Jacques Lacan, from chapter XVII:
Hegel shows us that the status of the master is established in the struggle to the death of pure prestige, it is because it is to bring his choice through death that the master also constitutes his fundamental alienation. Certainly, one can say that the master is no more spared by death than is his slave, that he will always die in the end, and that this is the limit of his freedom. But to say this is insufficient for this death is not the death that constitutes the alienating choice of the master, the death of the struggle to the death of pure prestige. The revelation of the essence of the master is manifested at the moment of terror, when it is to him that one says freedom or death, and then he has obviously only death to choose in order to have freedom |
