When the Imaginary clears off
Luc Vander Vennet
"The body enters the economy of jouissance through the image of the body. That was my starting point. If there is something that clearly underlines that the relation of man, or what goes under this name, to his body is imaginary, it is the scope taken on by his image."[1]
The equivalence of body and imaginary remains constant in Lacan, but the status of this imaginary changes fundamentally between his early and later teaching.
In early Lacan the image in the mirror provides the body with a unity that supports the Ego. This imaginary, and the jubilant jouissance of a good form (la bonne forme), is subordinated to the primacy of the Symbolic. The imaginary disorder is destined to be elevated in the symbolic which puts an order on it, and resorbs jouissance.
In the Borromean perspective, there is a hole in the Symbolic that only appears in the gravitation of the signifiers around a jouissance which is impossible to say.[2] From then on what holds things together is no longer the structure of the symbolic but the consistency of the imaginary.[3] The adoration of the body itself - the principle of imagination[4]- provides the parlêtre with the idea of having a body. This idea of self as a body, what is called the Ego,[5] is nothing more than pure mental consistency, which veils that the body is always foreign to us and clears off at any moment.[6]
This is what we are told by those in whom a rupture of the Ego, by default of the belief in a mentality, liberates the imaginary relation[7] Like this subject, for example, who walks down the corridor and sees, as he advances, his body moving further and further away from him, in a corridor that goes on forever.
There is a short film by Jérémy Clapin, called Skhizein. It’s 15 minutes long and is available on YouTube. A meteorite crashes on the body of the main character. As a result the Imaginary clears off. From that moment on, his body is exactly 91 cm away from him. This requires a complex reorganization of his world. Also of his analyst's office! This disturbed relationship to the body was already present in Clapin’s first film, Backbone Tale(Une histoire vertébrale). His latest film, I lost my body, shows us that this theme has become his escabeau.
Translated by Christos Tombras & Eva Reinhofer.
References
[1] Lacan J., ‘The Third’, Lacanian Review 7, 2019, p. 97.
[2] Zenoni A., ‘Image du corps – corps imaginaire’, Le corps parlant. Sur l’inconscient au XXIe siècle, Collection rue Huysmans, Paris, 2015, p. 144
[3] Miller J.-A., ‘Pièces détachées’, Revue La Cause freudienne, n° 60, 2005, p. 168
[4] Lacan J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2016, p. 52
[5] Ibid., p.129
[6] Ibid., p.52
[7] Ibid., p.133