Writing what is not written
Natalie Wülfing
The effect of language on the body can be found in Freud’s early works, where the phenomena of hysterical conversion, somatic compliance and the symptom as a message based on identification, to be interpreted, were rooted in the signifiers of the Other.
The relationship between the symptom and the signifier was worked and reworked from so many angles by Lacan, until it occupied, at the time of Seminar XX, a place in which the real in language determines the articulation.
Eric Laurent in his book, The Other Side of Biopolitics, poses the question in this way:
“What is the unconscious at which Lacan arrives in his last teaching, that is no longer based on the Other as the field of signifiers and on the identification that makes this field exist?”[1]
The emphasis placed on both the undecipherable and writing on the basis of a contingent encounter decomplete this Other as a field of signifiers and focus on the perceivable effect of lalangue on the body.
In Seminar XX Lacan asks “[… ] can’t the formalisation of mathematical logic, which is based only on writing, serve us in the analytic process, in that what invisibly holds bodies is designated therein? […] Their very writing constitutes a support that goes beyond speech, without going beyond language’s actual effects”.[2]
In this formulation, the articulation of the body, language and writing takes account of the effects, which are perceived in the body, beyond speech. The Lacanian algebra is a formal writing of these effects that are commemorated as trauma, the writing of what is not written – as a symptom.
This offers a beyond of the meaning effects of the signifier in which deciphering has its prevalence and opens towards the One of infinitude, the jouissance of the body without the Other.
The real dimension of the unconscious corresponds with lalangue, and its pure equivocations, with which the body deciphers the trauma of an encounter with what cannot be written.
The symptom, as relation and knotting of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real, outside of meaning or knowledge – is not a message to and from the Other, no longer interpretable, but a necessary result of the encounter of the body with lalangue.
Revision: Joanne Conway