THE LETTER 58 Spring 2015, Pages 1-30

Over against the approach of witnessing which transforms the supposedly
established act of saying into the statement of a said and heard, it will be a
matter of starting from the said to rediscover a saying which on the one hand
is forgotten and which on the other hand cannot be expressed in the form of
a said. The task seems hopeless: we have saying and the said–heard (ditentendu)
in their opposition, the first is completely forgotten, we can only
start from the second and, what is more, we cannot exhibit saying in terms of
saids, or again in terms of truth, since the truth is always of the domain of the
said, more precisely of the half-said. In truth there is no saying.
Nevertheless it is indeed by restoring its saying that the discourse of analysis
would be constituted (AE [Autres Ecrits], p. 454). Not the discourse of the
analyst: starting from the personage of the analyst, it is rather the established
discourses which take on the consistency of saids. But the discourse of analysis
starts from the neutral speech which does not allow itself to be determined
either by a precise stating subject, nor by a fixed object of which one might
speak. Saying without saying who and without saying what. Neutrality is a
fundamental principle.
Does freedom of speech follow?
‘This saying (of analysis) is not free.’ Despite the neutrality of speech, saying
does not go without a said, the ‘saying’ aimed at in analysis relays other
saids (hysterical, master, academic) in the great roundabout of discourses.
Through this roundabout and through specific saids that are produced in it one
can hope to rediscover the saying proper to psychoanalytic discourse, but one
cannot isolate the discourse of analysis from the other discourses from which
it cannot free itself.
The roundabout of discourses ‘adds’ no doubt a structure which articulates
the discourses with one another. But, by going around in circles, it does not
cease to return sooner or later to the established discourse which it has left
and which, by force of repetition, acts as an immovable ballast. This roundabout
only ‘situates the loci by which saying is ringed’, it imprints the loci
without for all that touching directly on saying. The cartography …