Sky Designs

Our body never stops speaking. To doctors, its signs indicate whether the machine is functioning well or poorly. The body can, however, say much more, as it is also our living history, the result of our encounters and of what has marked us and constituted us, even before birth.

That’s what Freud discovered, as well as that when we touch these sayings, made up from more than words, but also of sensations and image fragments, we affect the body’s life itself and its jouissance.

What, of this veritable rain of speaking that falls upon us, will count though? What will be part of us, constituting us as subjects? The very unit of the body is not given from the beginning. We need somebody, a mother or somebody who looks after us, to give it consistency, little by little. Only when I am capable of experiencing the swarm of sayings that cross this body as my own, does this body that thus far was spoken of, become a speaking body, my body.

Today, all that is used to support the unity of imaginary identification tends to be replaced with the legion of pieces of knowledge from Google, that befall children. We have reason to ask whether something has changed in the Other’s mirror.

(corps morcelé) The notion of the fragmented body is one of the earliest original concepts to appear in Lacan’s work, and is closely linked to the concept of the MIRROR STAGE. In the mirror stage the infant sees its reflection in the mirror as a whole/synthesis, and this perception causes, by contrast, the perception of its own body (which lacks motor coordination at this stage) as divided and fragmented. The anxiety provoked by this feeling of fragmentation fuels the identification with the specular image by which the ego is formed. However, the anticipation of a synthetic ego is henceforth constantly threatened by the memory of this sense of fragmentation, which manifests itself in ‘images of castration, emasculation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body’ which haunt the human imagination (Ecrits 11). These images typically appear in the analysand’s dreams and associations at a particular phase in the treatment—namely, the moment when the analysand’s aggressivity emerges in the negative transference. This moment is an important early sign that the treatment is progressing in the right direction, i.e. towards the disintegration of the rigid unity of the ego (Lacan, 1951b:13).

In a more general sense, the fragmented body refers not only to images of the physical body but also to any sense of fragmentation and disunity: ‘He [the subject] is originally an inchoate collection of desires—there you have the true sense of the expression fragmented body’. Any such sense of disunity threatens the illusion of synthesis which constitutes the ego.

The concept of the speaking body is the join between the Id and the unconscious. [Lacan] calls to mind how the signifying chains that we decipher in a Freudian manner are plugged into the body, and they are made up of an ‘enjoying substance’. Freud said that the Id was a great reservoir of libido, and this moves over to the speaking body which, as such, is enjoying substance. The objects a are taken from the body; the jouissance for which the unconscious labours is drawn from within the body.

An interpretation is an act of saying that targets the speaking body and does so in order to produce an event, in order to provoke a gut-reaction, said Lacan. This is something that can’t be anticipated, but which is verified retroactively, for the jouissance-effect is incalculable. (…) When one analyses the unconscious, the meaning of interpretation is the truth. When one analyses the speaking body, the meaning of interpretation is jouissance. This displacement from truth to jouissance sets the measure of what analytic practice is becoming in the era of the parlêtre.

All speech is a request or demand for something missing, as lacking in some respect. Ultimately, as Lacan puts it, all speech constitutes a demand for love. Whenever we speak, we are unconditionally asking to be heard, we are asking for our request to be recognized, we are asking to be responded to, we are asking to be loved.

From the simple dividing line between the adaptational and the drive-related sphere (the sexual), arises what Laplanche later refers 
to as the ‘fundamental anthropological situation’, the situation in which every human being finds himself or herself inserted by the mere fact of
 being born in a world saturated with enigmatic signifiers, with compromised messages, compromised, that is, by the repressed sexual of the other, of the adult. In human beings, the sexual order thus always already overlies the 
vital order…

Signs are what produce a body - and the artist knows it well - if he doesn’t produce his music or his art or his sculpture, he would be, quite simply, ill or not alive. Symbolic production’s power to constitute soma and to give an identity is completely visible in modern texts.

In speaking of depression, we are led once again into the swampy regions of the Narcissus myth. This time, however, we shall not be concentrating on its brilliant and fragile amorous idealization. On the contrary, we shall be concerned with the shadow cast over the fragile ego, barely dissociable from the other: a shadow cast, precisely, by the loss of this necessary other - a shadow of despair.

Rather than seeking the meaning of despair (which is evident or metaphysical), let us acknowledge that there is no meaning aside from despair. The child-king becomes irremediably sad before uttering his first words. It is being separated from his mother, despairingly, with no going back, that prompts his attempts to recuperate her, along with other objects, in his imagination and, later, in words. The semiology interested in the degree zero of symbolism is unfailingly led to pose questions to itself not only about the amorous state but also about its sombre corollary- melancholy. This entails recognizing, in the same movement, that no writing exists that is not amorous, nor can there be an imagination that is not, manifestly or secretly, melancholic.

Psychoanalysis is not a treatment of anxiety in itself, yet it is the only way to dissolve neurotic anxiety. But there is no chance of a psychoanalytic treatment of neurosis if the subject does not offer up his anxiety in the analytical transference, in the link with the Other. Why? Because anxiety is the way to approach what causes the failure of the phantasy. Thus, in psychoanalysis, we tend to see anxiety as a healthy function, a wake-up call to the subject, who wants to continue sleeping in the arms of the pleasure principle. There is, however, a flip side to this ‘useful’ aspect of anxiety. On the one hand, anxiety affects the subject, alerting him to his internal conflict – to his division from jouissance. But on the other hand, it confronts him with the opaque and disturbing presence of a little piece of the Real, which destitutes him and stops him naming the cause and the reason for his state.

I attempt to address the following problem: if the depressed person rejects language and finds it to be meaningless or false, how can we gain access to his pain through speech, since psychoanalysts work with speech? That is why I have emphasized the importance of the voice and of other signs that are not linguistic even though they are communicated through language. Indeed, such signs may offer the surest route toward understanding the depressed person. I also believe it is important to show how much the depressed person, who experiences a pain that often remains silent, is secretly emotional and cunningly impassioned. In brief, one could describe melancholia as an unnamable and empty perversion. Our job is to raise it to the level of words—and of life.