Florencia F.C. Shanahan

If the speaking being must pay for his access to the group, for his inscription in the field of discourse, for his participation in the human community and for his invention, that which is able to make up for what there is not, this inaugural loss can become an excess if one does not find a way of consenting to what there is. What there is, the One, gives the style and tone to each person’s singular way of being in life, which is not of the order of the same.

Does an analysis produce a new life? It can produce a new pact with life. With the life that we have. And if this pact includes something new in the register of love, it is not without the subject consenting to a new way of living solitude, which is not loneliness, as it allows for Otherness.

Against a background of impossibility, it is this solitude, says Lacan, that is written. “That which speaks deals only with solitude, regarding the relation I can only define by saying […] that it cannot be written. That solitude, as a break in knowledge, not only can be written but it is that which is written par excellence, for it is that which leaves a trace of a rupture in being.”[1]

Rupture in being could also be a name for the unconscious, at the antipodes of the market of well-being that invades all orders of life with its fierce imperative of empathy and compassion. These signifiers carry the semantic, etymological, and real load of the ways of obturating, silencing, refusing the otherness that inhabits us. This otherness is not determined, it does not come from the Other, the symbolic coordinates and the imaginary productions we build our defences with. It comes from the pure shock of language and the body.

Clarice Lispector’s short story, entitled Love[2], gives us, in a five-page tear, a glimpse of this. A woman on a tram meets the gaze of a blind man, meeting “something that does not see us.” The dreaded and expected encounter is enough to make her whole reality waver, and with the unsettling beauty that characterises Lispector’s writing, she brings us to the zone of experience beyond the security that the fundamental fantasy provides, that the symbolic orders in everyday lives. Something remains outside of it, she calls it “the dangerous hour”, and in that encounter she is seized by Otherness, there where she thought “she had pacified life so well, taken such care for it not to explode,” a chance encounter confronts her with that which of “life made her shiver, like a chill.”

The subject of psychoanalysis implies the “inmixing of an Otherness.”[3] It is, according to Lacan, its prerequisite. Transference is the artifice offering a possibility to bring about this subject, a new social bond animated by the peculiar desire to produce the absolute difference that constitutes each speaking-being, and a way to bear the singularity of one's mode of jouissance. There is here no promise of harmony, of peace and quiet. But unveiling the mortifying effects of rejecting it, this real (as an individual and also as a collective) may bring about something new to our way of being in life, and in love.

References

* Excerpt of the Seminar Towards the NLS Congress, London Society of the NLS, 23 September 2024.

[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, New York/London: Norton, 2000, p. 120.

[2] Lispector, C., Complete Stories, trans., K. Dodson, London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2015. Available online.

[3] Lacan, J., “Of Structure as the Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatsoever”, in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structural Controversy, ed., R. Macksey and E. Donato, Blatimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970.