#surplus jouissance

Jacques-Alain Miller emphasises that Lacan’s teaching presents itself as a sustained attempt to articulate the two aspects of the Freudian discovery, namely the discovery of the unconscious as decipherable and the discovery of the drive as a source of satisfaction. The inaugural step of Lacan was to disentangle the theory of deciphering the unconscious from the theory of the drives. Interpretability is what, above all, defines the Freudian unconscious for Lacan. The study of the dream, the royal road to the unconscious, is complemented by the study of the slip of the tongue and the witticism. Lacan groups them under the term “formations of the unconscious”. In order that a phenomenon may be relatable to the unconscious, you have to be able to detect in it an intention of signification, a ‘want-to-say’ [vouloir-dire]. This ‘want-to-say’ goes hand in hand with a certain not being able to say, relating to repression.

At the beginning, then, all the emphasis is on deciphering, on meaning, on the ‘want-to-say’. From this perspective, there is no problem with the interpretability of the unconscious. It rather goes without saying. But the more Lacan’s teaching develops, the more interpretation becomes problematic. The unconscious will no longer be defined uniquely from the ‘will-to-say’. Lacan goes on to take into account that other aspect of the Freudian discovery, that of satisfaction, through the concept of jouissance, which is presented in successive paradigms. Jouissance will occupy an ever more central and primordial place. The ‘want-to-say’ will yield its place to the ‘will-to-enjoy’ [vouloir-jouir]. In the era of the ‘will-to-enjoy’, interpretation no longer goes without saying.

The interest and force of Lacan’s analyses seems to me to be due precisely to this: It seems to me that Lacan has been the only one since Freud who has sought to refocus the question of psychoanalysis on precisely this question of the relations between the subject and truth … Lacan tried to pose what historically is the specifically spiritual question: that of the price the subject must pay for saying the truth, and of the effect on the subject that he has said, that he can and has said the truth about himself. By restoring this question I think Lacan actually reintroduced into psychoanalysis the oldest tradition, the oldest questioning, and the oldest disquiet of the epimeleia heautou, which was the general form of spirituality.

Melancholia could thus be seen as a defence against the state of being a pure object open to every attack of an unloving and hostile world.

The Symbolic The Symbolic is one of the three registers that structures human existence, next to the Imaginary and the Real. It refers to the implicit laws that govern social exchange relations. Since the most basic form of exchange is speech, the Symbolic is essentially a linguistic dimension. The signifier is the elementary building block of the Symbolic.

The Imaginary The Imaginary is one of the three registers that structures human existence, next to the Symbolic and the Real. The imaginary is the field of the ego, which aims at building images of the world. It is the realm of imagination and illusions. The principal illusions of the imaginary are those of wholeness, synthesis, duality, and similarity.

Signifier and signified Lacan takes the term signifier from the work of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. It is the phonological element of the linguistic sign; not the actual sound but the mental representation of such a sound. A signifier is connected to a signified, which is the idea the linguistic sign expresses. At the level of the unconscious, signifiers play an important role: one signifier might be related to several signifieds.

Signifying chain In making up words from linguistic signs, and in articulating sentences, signifiers are combined in so-called signifying chains.

Desire People express themselves via speech, but language never finally denotes what we want. A remainder always remains unarticulated, which gives rise to desire. A key desire Lacan recognizes is that humans want to be desired by others. Unconscious desire takes shape through defences against articulating ideas and impulses. In the analytic experience, desire “must be taken literally,” as it is through the unveiling of the signifiers that support it, that desire can be made clear. Desires that have not be recognized and valued will insist through specific signifiers that recurrently pop up in speech. Desires that have been repressed—that is: actively excluded from conscious thought—typically get expressed in symptoms. This process is called the return of the repressed.

Transference In Freud’s theory transference mainly refers to the patient’s relationship to the analyst as it develops in the treatment. He subsequently used it to explain how, in psychoanalysis, the relationship between patient and analyst is affected by patients’ previous relational experiences. Lacan discerns a symbolic and an imaginary component to transference. The images the patient constructs about himself or herself, and about the analyst, make up imaginary transference. Affective reactions also belong to imaginary transference. Symbolic transference concerns the articulation of desire through signifiers. The broader the patient’s associations, and to more insisting signifiers come to the fore, the better the symbolic transference. Symbolic transference is fueled by a subject supposed to know. This means that it implies the belief that behind the insisting signifiers in the patient’s discourse an as yet hidden piece of truth about the patient can be found.

Stijn Vanheule and Gilles Arnaud, - Working With Symbolic Transference: A Lacanian Perspective. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.

As soon as man speaks, he is submitted to the question of his truth and his most intimate identifications come to respond to the paradoxes of his link to what he says and to what has been said to him.  The materiality of the unconscious is made, not of learning, but of things said to the subject, that have hurt him, and of things, impossible to say, that make him suffer.  The opposition between the principles of the nervous system’s functioning, arising directly from the laws of biology and physics, and the register of another causality for founding psychology, is thus posed. Unconscious memory parasites the living [being] and alters its potency.

Yet the unconscious is not there a priori in analysis; what is there from the beginning is the symptom and its trail of complaints; what is there as given is malaise, suffering, unhappy consciousness that seeks to pour out in the other, at the same time as it produces the other as the source of its troubles. These are the paradoxes of reflexive conscious- ness.....

The unconscious is the sum of the effects of speech on a subject, at the level at which the subject constitutes himself out of the effects of the signifier. This makes it clear that, in the term subject … I am not designating the living substratum needed by this phenomenon of the subject, nor any sort of substance, nor any being possessing knowledge in his pathos, his suffering, whether primal or secondary, nor even some incarnated logos, but the Cartesian subject, who appears at the moment when doubt is recognised as certainty – except that, through my approach, the bases of the subject prove to be wider, but, at the same time much more amenable to the certainty that eludes it. This is what the unconscious is.

With the acquisition of language, the speaking being (le parletre) is constituted as a divided subject, and a part of his being is alienated in the unconscious that is a product of this very division. Fundamentally, the only outlet for the subject’s desire is for that desire to become speech addressed to the other. The subject of desire, identified with the subject of the unconscious, is therefore hidden under the mask of the utterance, to whom this speech (what is said) seems to refer, and who can make him self understood by the other to whom this speech is addressed only in its enunciation (the act of saying).