NLS MESSAGER 227: « The Symptom is the Social Link » Omri Bichovski

It’s reasonable to assume that the symptom is related to the social, but what grounds the symptom itself as the social link? This question is all the more pressing against the background of the movement ofLacan’s teaching from emphasizing the symptom as carrying truth addressed to the Other, towards the symptom as Real, namely as a jouissance that is addressed to no one.

From a chronological perspective one can view the symptom first as a message offering its ciphered truth to be deciphered. Later the symptom can be viewed as theground on which is established the relation of analysand to analyst – this is the basis for Freud’s transference neurosis. The symptom is attached by means of transference signifier to the analyst. Finally the symptom is a ring in the borromean knot with the two options that Miller designates: as a 4th element in a borromean knot or as a supplement when the knot fails[1].

Those constructions don’t rule each other out, rather they find their way to join in the new conception. For example it is within transference that the symptom has its truth value – that what it wants to say is heard. But they join under a different topology: that of the knot instead of Freud’s topology of the sack – a topology that enables to situate the symptom as that which ties.

In my view the question of the social link should be read radically. Wittgenstein paves the way to such a radical reading.

Wittgenstein states in the Tractatus that « The subject is a limit of the world »[2]. He elucidates it by an analogy to the relations between the eye and the visual field.  » But really you do not see the eye, » he adds, « And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye[3]. With Wittgenstein’s reasoning we are confronted with the following two problems: a. How can the subject be in any reflexive relation with and through the world (i.e. how can a subject know itself?). b. how can a relation be established between one subject and another? In my opinion the consequences are as actual today as they were in 1922, namely, you can’t put, so to speak, two subjects in the same world (chamber) – contrary to the communication utopia of « intersubjective psychoanalysis ». Wittgenstein goes on to say that no part of our experience is at the same time a priori. His reasoning leads him to infer solipsism because there is a disconnection between the subject and the world. But the subject is not outside the world. Rather it is its limit. Itechoes the way Laurent[4] situates the subject in Russel’s paradox, which means that when included in the set it is ejected, and as it is not included it is in the set. It is in this paradox that, as Wittgenstein says: « The self[5] of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension »[6].

« Symptom abolishes the symbol »[7], says Lacan. The symbol, according to Wittgenstein, belongs to the world; the subject is a limit of the world. thus the split is located between the subject and the symbol. Therefore only by abolishing the symbol can the paradoxicalabyss between the subject and the world be traversed. An analogy can be drawn from one of Borges’ story ‘The Other’, in which what crosses the impossibility of the meeting between younger and older Borges is a coin that succeeds where, we might say, language fails. By the same token the symptom – this two-faced Janus: truth and real[8] – crosses the impossible terrain between the subject and the world due to the fact that it is not entirely a being of language.

Although nothing enables us to infer the seeing eye from the visual field, the former can beeffected, even ache, by the visual field. There, at this littoral[9], the symptom materializes this « point without extensions ».

*member of the NLS, GIEP-NLS.