What Is Knowledge?

Let me begin this evening by noting that what is at work in the transference as a discursive experience is the fact that the unconscious, insofar as it is impossible to say what it is because it ek-sists, is not something that may become conscious.

The unconscious, as Lacan said in his seminar Encore, “is not only a being that thinks, but one that gets off on speaking (jouisse en parlant) and does not want to know anything more about it, meaning does not want to know anything about it at all.”

What is this dimension of jouissance, as distinct from the pleasure-unpleasure principle, which Lacan first introduced in 1973 as a way of accounting for the relationship to the body which is written by mathemes? One possible answer to this question was furnished the following year, at the beginning of the seminar meeting on the 21^st of May, when Lacan, in just two short lines, points out that whereas the unconscious before then had been related to the act of speaking as such; once he began to explore the dimension of discursive experience he had instead come to believe it was a supposition based on the mutual articulation between speech and the sexuated being.

Something stemming from language arises in the transference between analyst and analyzand, and on this point I am treading lightly, something that can be heard (ouï) that establishes a continuity between the Real of the unconscious and the Real of the body, once the speaking being begins to speak.

How else can we begin to depict this, insofar as this something inevitably leads us in the direction of a (une) jouissiance that supplements the phallic one, a (une) feminine jouissance. Otherwise put, there is no such thing as The Woman, like there is The Man, because we can only encounter a (une) “singular” woman at a time, one by one (une par une). And what is more (encore), there is a (une) feminine part of every speaking being, regardless of whether he or she calls himself or herself man or woman, whose key enigma is related to the way it touches this Real of the unconscious.

In order to better portray the stakes involved here, I believe we should follow in the footsteps of Casanova. By this I don’t mean Casanova the skirt-chaser, but Casanova the man who wrote Story of My Life, at the time when said life was drawing to a close. Two questions:

Why did he write it in French even though he spoke Italian, Venetian, German and was alone at the time in Duckhov, in Bohemia? Why did Casanova, who loved France and adored Paris begin writing in French during the period when the French Revolution had just broken out?

The hypothesis I will pursue in my presentation at the Sorbonne conference on January 27th entitled “The Century of Mozart and Casanova, in the Shadow of the Enlightenment Philosophers and the French Revolution,” is that Casanova’s act of writing in French makes us realize there is something in the French language, foreign to him since it came to him in the mode of writer and poet, that is heard (s’ouit), something that can be heard in particular in the following statement Lacan made, tinged with a certain amount of terror: “the more the man leads the woman to confuse him with God, which gets her off, the less he is, the less he hates, the less he loves (moins il est, moins il hait, moins il aime).”

Casanova made this the central motif of his great work, two years after meeting Mozart in Prague, before the opening of Don Giovanni in September 1787, before Mozart had written its Overture.

My points of departure are Venice and the Renaissance. As a result of the diffusion of ideas which had occurred following the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century, something was instituted based on the fact that men no longer gazed towards God in expectation of all things, because they were making observations instead. The opsis furnished them with a (way of) knowing (connaissance) their fellow creatures (semblables) and the laws of nature.

Thus Creation itself was put under a microscope and Greek culture reappeared, was re-born (re-naissance). But what interests us in this shift is the way in which a certain knowledge (savoir) managed to emerge at that time which also made an (albeit different) appearance at the end of the 19th century, when Freud invented psychoanalysis on the basis of hearing what speaking beings had to say.

In 1789, at 64 years of age, Casanova bore witness to this certain something by commencing to write his Story of My Life (Histoire de ma vie). At least this would appear to be the case if we listen to him speak with his pen, which creased the paper and made heard that there is something Other there than what he described in these histories (Histoires), (written with a capital H), something that lifts the fixity of meaning and reveals what lies beneath, the dimension of “I hear meaning” as “J’ouïe-sens.”

“I am speaking to the air…I am not only a monotheist but a Christian, strengthened by Philosophy which never spoiled anything. Can we hear it, still (encore)?”

There was something in the 18th century, which psychoanalysts today would most likely call a Real, that exceeded the reasonable limits between debauchery and good conduct. What if the Revolution used the ideas of the Rights of Man to covertly silence this Real? It’s a question worth raising. What if the Terror was this Real’s way of avenging this suppression?

Phillippe Sollers continues to raise these questions today.

The power of the French language was omnipresent in Europe. Is it possible to infer from this that what Casanova’s writing, which he hid prior to making his own final exit in 1798, actually bears witness to is his act of transmitting, to the ‘good listener’ to come, the jouissance of language (langue) which is at the heart of the experience of the transference?

Is it possible, still (encore), to imagine what it was that sustained him, what retained him, what retains the body invisibly and what retains us in his company?

This would not have been possible before roughly 1960, meaning the year when the French manuscript, written in his own hand, was unearthed. Prior to that all we possessed was a French translation by Jean Lafforges, himself a professor in French literature, of an initial German translation of this manuscript.

Even just the path this text of Casanova’s took in itself transmits the importance of the way in which censorship covers over jouissance. This is something that needs to be thought in its connections with the appearance of the French rev-olution as a kind of dream-olution (rêve-olution), the signifying of a (une) jouissance covered over by censorship, beyond our own knowledge, to wit the disappearance of inequalities, after which they found themselves just one step away from some serious consequences…

What was it therefore that was being signified in this manuscript related to the “I hear meaning” (J’ouïe sens) of the French language? The existence of a knowledge that freed him from the fixity that had imprisoned him in a kind of stupefied dumbness. Thus he knew on some level during his life, and even more so at the end of it, that he would have to furnish an accounting of this knowledge to the Supreme Master, the Real that is, who would then no longer have to avenge itself, above all not during his imprisonment at “I piombi” (“The Leads”).

It turns out Story of My Life would therefore definitely be something Other than what it is normally thought to be! A testament to the presence of this something Other, before Freud heard it in the discourse of women hysterics, and before Lacan named it as that which knots together the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary of the body?

When he was eight years old Casanova uncovered a knowledge we know he was never to forget, because he never forgot where it led him to, once it was passed on to him by a woman, a witch, a woman who loved him, his grandmother, and by the experience of the feminine part of all speaking beings that was transmitted to him by the poet Baffo.

This gift, the gift of signifyingness, was free, and it guided him in his relationship to the Other, especially as concerns those angst-ridden moments when he would draw near to the question of what the Woman wants, “Was will das Weib?” – the great question before which even Freud bent his knee.

This gift of new life, from his pen, the enigma of feminine jouissance, which today’s technical knowledge is forever trying to take away from us, is the experience of an awakening that itself awoke the young Giacomo, and stunned him.