Editorial
We continue our undertaking to publish over six issues back to back, the
full text of Christian Fierens’ Second Reading of Lacan’s L’Etourdit (2012).
This project we began in 2014 with Issue 57. Four issues later, we bring you
Chapter 4 The Stuff of the Psychoanalytic Discourse and its Cut. This issue
has an additional international feel with contributions from Marc Darmon and
Michael Plastow who participated in work-exchanges in Dublin during 2015.
Issue 61 also carries contributions from two of our colleagues Helen Sheehan
and Marion Deane in addition to an essay on Joyce, addressed through the
prism of three of Lacan’s seminars, from Daniel Bristow.
Fierens reminds us that the philosophical discourse and the psychoanalytic
discourse come of the same stuff – these we name saids, which, at this stage
of our engagement with L’Etourdit and Fierens’ two Readings, we, at a minimum,
understand to be distinct from saying. The philosopher ‘will always
remain at the dit-mensions of the said, the truth does not get away from the
said and does not touch saying.’ It’s not enough (then) for the ‘haughty analyst’
to want to have nothing to do with the philosopher, as both, we have to
admit, when speaking about psychoanalysis ‘side by side, situate themselves
perfectly in the arena of the (half-)said’. Hence, when we (psychoanalysts)
talk about our subject, we remain firmly in the domain of saids – having ‘not
left the philosophical discourse by a sliver’ – and the philosopher, like us, can
‘very well explain the theoretical corpus of psychoanalysis’. Where does that
leave us? Surely with an urgency to speak about how to differentiate the master
discourse qua philosophical from the psychoanalytic discourse in action.
The emphasis in this chapter is on topology, on how the torus, that ever circling
‘dynamo’ of saids, is transformed by means of a cut-stitch. Fierens’
metaphor of the torus as a giant digestive tract with an input and output of
saids and demands that we repeat, synthesise and interweave around the axis
of desire is helpful. ‘By actively refusing to remain with the satisfaction of the
said’, the breakdown of the system, sex-absens, must be produced, not simply
to bring about a disorder of the viscera or to pause the movement of the gut in
order simply to get things going again. The cut is not enough. There… Continue Reading
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