Sonécrit, the website of Jean Charmoille: Psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, psychologist, for tenor

Seminar 2008-2009

WITHOUT TWO (HORS DEUX)

The Point That We Are

Art Psychoanalysis Politics

What can easily be heard in the issue of our seminar "Image of Life, Life of Image" is that the reason why we find ourselves so attached to the image is that we are two-dimensional beings. Despite how things might appear, we lack a sense of volume.

The set rules defining thinking and thought lead them to turn in circles that compass a sphere. Time is issued from this same topography. As witnessed in the way French is able to articulate this, both it and space are made7 in our image. We have given this plane a vocation – naming.

We think, we write, more geometrico. Naturally we are able to imagine the three planes of Cartesian coordinates. But when the time comes to grasp them together as a whole we encounter the gravest of difficulties: it is depth that we are lacking.

The eternal reminder of this may be found in the lover’s embrace: What we love in our beloveds are their profiles, their silhouettes, their projections: that and never anything more.

The shine of the Imaginary is made of a gold that lulls us to sleep. It governs the stories of history that never stop being written and rewritten in the same way. Freud dubbed this necessary repetition.

That is until contact was made with an other space and an other time, a space-time of the Other in which the signifier is posited

It is strange to think this place was never unearthed prior to Psychoanalysis.

Since it cannot be grasped when flattened into two dimensions, experience remains the best means available for approaching it.

And yet Lacan manipulated rings of string and drew figures on the blackboard. Was he on the wrong path? It hardly mattered. He would return and ask for opinions. Some people thought he was mad, but nothing could stop him. He was invaded and overrun by this writing that the ordeal of the Borromean Knot enabled him to undergo.

In his youth he had searched in vain for this knot while dissecting cadavers in medical school.

Later, the rites of initiation seemed to serve this function. But actually the only thing we can ever really do is act like pencil pushers.

Then one day he realized something that was not on the order of being, was not situated in geometrical space, and which would forever refuse to leave him from that moment forward.

He realized that what is truly significant about the fact that space has three dimensions is that when the three of them are taken together they yield the possibility of con-sistency or, as he quipped it to his own great surprise, "corporal-sistency."

This knowledge (savoir) and its status already imply that the Other encompasses something on the order of this corporal-sistency and that "it must be taken… It is its cost that values it not via exchange but through use. This knowledge is worth just as much as it costs (coûte), and it is costly (beau-coût), because we need to pay in flesh for it, because of how hard… it is not to acquire it, but rather to enjoy it (20-March-1973).

"Enjoying knowledge" means catching hold of a bit of the Real that is no longer the third dimension alongside the other two, but that which makes them three as such. An unforgettable moment.

A three that coheres in a point where we are torn.

Our time is spent being torn between Symbolic, Imginary and Real.

The speaking-being is "trinite." This is the Truth of Religion, the True Religion, the Roman Religion, the Truth of its Trinity.

In the Beginning was the Point.

The Point is what we are, in the best of cases.

One day, this knowledge found me out, in a moment when I heard and enjoyed (j’oui/joui), in an instant when I said "yes" without even knowing it, when threeness "dinged" me with its "corporal-sistency," in the unheard of phrasing of the cry of Don Juan.

Ever since, my experience as a psychoanalyst has sailed alongside that of my time as an amateur lyric tenor: with Lacan and his bits of string as my guide, I have stretched vowels by singing in the register of 19th century Italian opera (Verdi, Donizetti, Puccini).

I have heard the sound of the knowledge of the body that "is enjoying."

Such was the call Lacan sounded to Psychoanalysts (at the Congrès de l’EFP, Paris 1978):

"How is it possible that the signifier as active ingredient enables some people to get better?...How do we whisper something to the subject who comes to see us in analysis that has the effect of making them better?"

Freud’s message, after listening to the stories of sexuality and love for the father told to him by his hysterical patients, was that the psychoanalyst’s only "active ingredient" is speech and speech alone.
What he meant was that that which is said by what he dubbed the "Unbewusst" was intimately connected to equivocation, that is to say the equivalency between sound and meaning that is the instigator of witticisms too.

Lacan achieved a degree of progress on the basis of Freud’s work, while at the same time taking a certain distance from the latter’s fantasm of hitching Psychoanalysis to the wagon of Science.

He interrogated the "saids" that inhabited Freud’s writings, and audaciously heard his act of saying therein.

Freud deciphered his patients, but Lacan chose not to remain content with Freud’s renderings.

He revealed something that cannot be shown but only read on the basis of that which is knotted up over and under, once, twice, up to six times.

He wove the knowledge of the "Unbewusst" as a "know-how" with "lalange:"
"The signifier is located at the level of ‘enjoying subjstance.’" (19/12/1972).

"What we hear is the signifier not the signified. The signified is the effect of the signifier" (9/01/1973).

Touching on the field of the enjoyment of the body of the Other, the signifier opens the limits of interpretation that it formalizes into four logical modes:

- the necessary, that which does not stop being written.
- the impossible, that which does not stop not being written.
- the contingent, that which stops not being written.
- the possible, that which stops being written.

Normally, the necessary encompasses the impossible, as witnessed in the cozy relationship between that royal couple the discourses of the Master and that of the University, and the by the speaking-being who goes around in their circles without knowing it, like "all" (‘tout’) men.

However as the French language makes clear an event may sometimes suddenly occur – love beckons from the horizon – in which "a" (‘une’) woman may reveal an impossible that is actually a ‘possible-in-waiting.’

Psychoanalysis is a new kind of knowledge that appeared at a time in the history of speaking beings when that which does not stop being written (necessary) actually stopped, making it possible for that which does not stop not being written (the impossible) to stop not being written (the contingent).

This discovery was the knowledge that enabled a knotting of the four modalities with the four formulas of sexuation.

Freud’s famous question, raised after thirty years of experience working with feminine souls, "What does the Woman want?", herein assumes its full meaning.

Lacan cautiously announced as much on 21-May-1974:

"The point where I am…has to do with the fact that there is a bond between sex and speech, but everything depends on knowing which bond it is."

The psychoanalyst’s only "active ingredient" is speech, and speech alone, but there is an Other thing that opens the door to the incalculable realm of the jouissance of the body, to the great consternation of science, which bases itself on the being of the discourse of the master/ego (m’être) and that of the university (uni-vers-cythère).

The psychoanalytic act emerges from a kind of "cornering without exit" between sex and speech, between the social bond and the political fact that analytic discourse is written with four letters.

"The sexed being only authorizes himself from himself and a few others."

Paris, 20-August-2008, Jean Charmoille

7 Tr: “made” = “s’fait,” which is consonant with “sphere.”

Seminar 2007-2008

Image of Life, Life of Image

Whereas the “media” would have us believe that images control our destiny; somehow they manage to lay claim to a different one for the speaking being. Why?

They history whose contours I am proposing to sketch begins 2000 years ago, with an unprecedented event that was styled as a mystery: the living incarnation of the father, the son as his visible image. A knowledge of life is presupposed as image. Patristic thinking, highly aware of the elusive stakes underlying this, encouraged interchanges to promote it.

This was too much for the temporal powers who knew nothing but the image’s political weight. Constantine I called the Nicene Council in 325 in order to put a stop to the development that had begun to take shape.
But the life of the image persisted outside the fixity of dogmas, it found refuge in Byzantium, in the secret of the visibility of icons.

In the midst of their flourishing, Constantine V surrounded himself with theologians and unleashed the first crisis of iconoclasm in 754, which would subside only after his death, at the Nicean Council II in 787. Thirty years later however, political power returned to the scene of the crime via Leon V. The arguments were subtle, the Church Fathers used Aristotle’s Organon to support their iconophilia.

Years passed, and Rome became the focus again. The Italian Renaissance and the Enlightenment Encyclopedists opted for Opsis. Other images emerged, which the Church and Political Authorities rejected.
Has our contemporary corporeal drive, which is driven by the spectacle of everyday visibilities, forgotten that the life of the image is the image of life, to be invisible?

Psychoanalysis would be the response that has been made for more than a century, insofar as in the transference a living articulation between sex and word may be created (Lacan, 21-May-1974). This is the wager made in my Seminar, which is open to all persons interested.

Paris, second Wednesday of the month at 21:15. First meeting October 10th.
4, place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 75006 - Paris

Visit www.sonecrit.com to listen to the seminars in the “Audio” section.



The following is a summary accounting of the Seminar “Image of Life, Life of Image,” in addition to a separate lecture I delivered on 8-December-2007 in Saint Paul de Vence (France).
Although the seminar lectures were given without written notes, they are recorded on video in the “original version” in which they were spoken, namely French.

The Enigma in Every Image*

Everything seems to want to make us forget the enigma that adheres in every image, because the omnipresence of the visual images we see before us – be they everyday, scientific, political, religious or cultural – in fact maintains us in the position of being seen, and rebelling against this will change little, because the act of rebellion is itself another way of being maintained as this being-there for and by the all-seeing Other.

Thus how to ek-sist in this “reality,” that the psychoanalysis of transference has revealed to be a reality of the fantasm, is not something that goes without saying.

The Psychoanalyst holds fast to something very specific in order to effect progress in this domain, namely the fact that there is no such thing as a reality that is pre-discursive. This wager of every transference – this assertion that there is no such thing as a pre-discursive reality – is what enabled my Seminar “Image of Life, Life of Image” and the lecture I gave on 8-December entitled “The Enigma in Every Image” to revisit the passage from idol to image traveled by the Greek Pagans – a passage which was also traversed by the Jews in going from oral law to written law. Such is the Psychoanalyst’s “a-theism.”

This way beckons to a closer examination of the failed encounter between the Chosen People and the Pagan World, via a re-examination of the concept of “incarnation” as something other than God revealed in human form for the purpose of redeeming Original Sin – this all the more true in that Christianity, which styles itself as the clear proof of this revelation, has frozen out all discussion of it by instilling it in dogmas.

The psychoanalytic wager compels us into an examination of the Gospels as we would any other discourse, secularly, from the “lay” perspective, using the Lacanian notions of Symbolic Imaginary and Real as points of reference, and thus meaning via the space of the speaking-being that language instigates forever anew, thereby eschewing the realm of the subject constituted by the gravity-laden, audible substances which comprise his histories and History writ large, always the same.

Thus in response to the “Enjoy” (Jouis!) issued by the commandment that fixates images in words, an enigmatic subject of the Law may say “I hear” (“J’ouis”), a response that relegates jouissance to a place in between the lines – the image is raised up into a painting.

Two questions: In what sense does the dialogue between Jacques Lacan and his brother Marc-François Lacan allow us to locate a Real of jouissance that may be heard, in the sub-text of the Gospels, as saying “yes” to the knowledge (savoir) that the praxis of analysis uses? In what sense is the enjoyment of knowledge (jouir du savoir) fundamentally what is at stake in Lacan’s teaching?


Paris 17-Feburary-2008

* Written in the aftermath of the talk given on 8-December-2007 and the seminar meetings recorded on video at www.sonecrit.com