Bodily Products of Language
Geert Hoornaert
Psychical and cultural effects of language have long since covered almost the entire scope of psychoanalysis. Language, by tracing out tracks, routes and routines, has a regulatory function for the subject and his body; but it also causes a fragmentation which rips the subject from all immanence to itself. The Freudian inventory of what language traces is well-known: modern neuroses (1908); discontent (1930); complications in eros through the introduction of a beyond of the pleasure principle (1920); loss of reality (1924); inhibitions, symptoms, anxiety (1926); compulsions (1907); fantasies (1908); dreams (1900); family romance (1913); infantile theories (1908); religions (1927); taboos (1912) - and so on. Our title Bodily Effects of Language also refers to this paradox, to this subjectively harrowing confluence of language as regulation and language as disruption.
It also goes beyond this. If the Freudian inventory gives us the 'cathedrals' that the structure places on the paths of life, this title invites us not to lose sight of what language and signifiers induce by detaching themselves from the structure: currents of jouissance that seep and worm their way into the cracks and corridors of what the structure is building.
It emphasises the signifier’s product of jouissance, more consistent than the signified effect, which is evanescent.[1] This product is a permanence of libido, its konstante Kraft. “The jouissance in question is of the order of a sheet [nappe],[2] a sheet traversed by waves, waves that measure, for each one, their distance from the sexual relation that does not exist”.[3] Resounding in these waves is the crack that the impact of the signifier has produced in the bell.[4]
Thus, the waves of jouissance worm their way in everywhere. If the hazardous encounter between the body and the signifier has mortified the body, it has also "detached from it a pound of flesh whose palpitation animates the entire mental universe. The mental universe only serves to refract the palpitating flesh ad infinitum in the most carnivalesque guises, expanding it until it gives it the articulated form of this great fiction that we call the field of the Other".[5]
The theme of our Congress thus invites us to take up the fundamentals of psychoanalysis, but the other way round [à l’envers].
Translation: Philip Dravers
References
[1] Miller J.-A. « L’économie de la jouissance », La Cause freudienne 77 (2011), p. 154.
[2] [T.N. ‘une nappe d’eau’ is a sheet or shallow body of water used in experiments to measure the property and frequency of waves, as in a ripple tank.]
[3] Ibid. p. 164
[4] Ibid. p. 146
[5] Miller J.-A., « Parler avec son corps », Mental, Revue internationale de psychanalyse, 27-28 (2012), p. 132.