How lalangue affects the body

Roger Litten

In his course of 12th March, 2008 ("Liquid Psychoanalysis") Jacques-Alain Miller outlines an approach to the body event on the basis of the distinction between the registers of language and lalangue.

He first considers the unconscious at the level of language, the unconscious structured as a language, indexed on the existence of the Other. He suggests that at this level the unconscious has the status of a hypothesis, is to be considered hypothetical with regard to lalangue. At the level of lalangue the unconscious might rather be considered in terms of a know-how with jouissance.

He outlines two modes of interpretation aligned with the distinction between language and lalangue, one indexed on the sense of desire, the other on the mode of enjoyment. These two modes of interpretation correspond to two uses of speech in analysis, one in the mode of communication and the other in the mode of satisfaction. "The distinction here between communication and satisfaction recovers the distinction between language and lalangue."

This leads him to consider two versions of the end of analysis, one considered as the resolution of the enigmas of desire, the other considered not so much in terms of a new meaning as of "a new satisfaction". It is here that he introduces the question of the affects, "affects which remain enigmatic and which are to be related to the presence of lalangue". Lalangue here is to be considered in terms of "the singular affects that it generates in the body".

Miller relates this question of the affects to the gap between "what the subject is able to state and those effects closed in on their enigma", quoting Lacan to the effect that "the effects of lalangue go well beyond anything the being who speaks is able to state". He suggests that it is to these affects, the effects of lalangue, that Lacan will later give their full development by implicating the events of the body, to be understood as events of jouissance.

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