Page 167 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 14: The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious—Jacques Lacan: Detailed Study

labyrinth of a case which so far has only been used as a source of demolished fragments. We should Notes
be struck too, by the fact that it is in the coextensivity of the development of the symptom and of its
curative resolution that the nature of the neurosis is revealed: whether phobic, hysterical, or obsessive,
the neurosis is a question that being poses for the subject "from where it was before the subject came
into the world" (Freud's phrase, which he used in explaining the Oedipal complex to little Hans).
The "being" referred to is that which appears in a lightning moment in the void of the verb "to be"
and I sad that it poses its question for the subject. What does that mean? It does not pose it in front
of the subject, since the subject cannot come to the place where it is posed, but it poses it in place
of the subject, that is to say, in that place it poses the question with the subject, as one poses a
problem with a pen, or as Aristotle's man thought with his soul.
Thus Freud introduced the ego into his doctrine, by defining it according to the resistances that
are proper to it. What I have tried to convey is that these resistances are of an imaginary nature
much in the same sense as those coaptative lures that the ethology of animal behavior shows us in
display or combat, and that these lures are reduced in man to the narcissistic relation introduced
by Freud, which I have elaborated in my essay on the mirror stage. I have tried to show that by
situating in this ego the synthesis of the perceptual functions in which the sensori-motor selections
are integrated, Freud seems to abound in that delegation that is traditionally supposed to represent
reality for the ego, and that this reality is all the more included in the suspension of the ego.
For this ego, which is notable in the first instance for the imaginary inertias that it concentrates
against the message of the unconscious, operates solely with a view to covering the displacement
constituted by the subject with a resistance that is essential to the discourse as such.
That is why an exhaustion of the mechanisms of defense, which Fenichel the practitioner shows us
so well in his studies of analytic technique (while his whole reduction on the theoretical level of
neuroses and psychoses to genetic anomalies in libidinal development is pure platitude), manifests
itself, without Fenichel's accounting for it or realizing it himself, as simply the reverse side of the
mechanisms of the unconscious. Periphrasis, hyperbaton, ellipsis, suspension, anticipation,
retraction, negation, digression, irony, these are the figures of style (Quintillian's figurae
sententiarum); as catharsis, litotes, antonomasia, hypotyposis are the tropes, whose terms suggest
themselves as the most proper for the labeling of these mechanisms. Can one really see these as
mere figures of speech when it is the figures themselves that are the active principle of the rhetoric
of the discourse that the analysand in fact utters?
By persisting in describing the nature of resistance as a permanent emotional state, thus making
it alien to the discourse, today's psychoanalysts have simply shown that they have fallen under
the blow of one of the fundamental truths that Freud rediscovered through psychoanalysis. One
is never happy making way for a new truth, for it always means making our way into it: the truth
is always disturbing. We cannot even manage to get used to it. We are used to the real. The truth
we repress.
Now it is quite specially necessary to the scientist, to the seer, even to the quack, that he should be
the only one to know. The idea that deep in the simplest (and even sickest) of souls there is
something ready to blossom is bad enough! But if someone seems to know as much as they about
what we ought to make of it … then the categories of primitive, prelogical, archaic, or even magic
thought, so easy to impute to others, rush to our aid! It is not right that these nonentities keep us
breathless with enigmas that prove to be only too unrealizable. To interpret the unconscious as
Freud did, one would have to be as he was, an encyclopedia of the arts and muses, as well as an
assiduous reader of the Fliegende Blatter. And the task is made no easier by the fact that we are at
the mercy of a thread woven with allusions, quotations, puns, equivocations. And is that our
profession, to be antidotes to trifles?
Yet that is what we must resign ourselves to. The unconscious is neither primordial nor instinctual;
what it knows about the elementary is no more than the elements of the signifier.
The three books that one might call canonical with regard to the unconscious - The Interpretation
of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious
- are simply a web of examples whose development is inscribed in the formulas of connexion and

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