Desire caught again by the tail

During the dark years of the Occupation, Lacan and Picasso were in the same boat, the one called “Work, Family, Fatherland … and tightening the belt.” 

They are also in the same photograph, taken in March 1944, by Brassaï at the home of Michel Leiris, on the occasion of a performance among friends of Picasso’s play Le désir attrapé par la queue [Desire Caught By the Tail]. If at the time Picasso was catching desire by the tail, it was because he was hard up for money [“il tirait le diable par la queue”].

Some time before this, Lacan had seen, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, an installation by Prévert of match boxes within match boxes, a collection which, according to Lacan, was paradigmatic of sublimation, seeing that it was designed with discards elevated by accumulation to the dignity of the Thing. André Breton wrote: “Every bit of debris we come across must be regarded as a precipitate of our desire.”

In 1941, the year Picasso wrote his play, he painted “Bust of a Woman in a Hat”, in which the upper and lower halves of the face were so oriented as to be diametrically opposed, producing the illusion of movement, like in a blurred photograph.

“I do not seek, I find.”  Such was Picasso’s maxim, which Lacan cited numerous times. Indeed, he had found the Minotaure^[1] without ever having gotten lost in the labyrinth, this Picassian figure having opened up perspectives much wider than those of the academism of avant-garde, which had served as his springboard.

In 1978, Lacan ended by stating that he was, in fact, not finding, but he was, nevertheless, continuing to seek. Among his questions, there was one that is of particular interest to us: why does desire pass into love?

Translated by Devra Simiu

Kalimeros for 2014

“Radiant Himeros triumphs here, the desire born from the gaze of the waiting bride in bed”, says the Greek chorus.[1] Himeros is the brilliance of “victorious” desire, resolute desire, which makes Antigone the desiring desired. Himeros is the flower of desire that blooms in the field of the drive between two deaths. The heroine that Sophocles created is the paradigm of desire in act and she is the object cause of desire (particularly for Haemon, Creon’s son).

Himeros comes from the Greek verb himeirein, “to desire”. In mythology, Himeros is a god, twin of Eros, both of them present at the birth of Venus, the goddess of beauty. While Eros is the feeling of love, Himeros is sexual desire, properly speaking. Himeros is not desire as lack, aspiration or void of satisfaction, but rather the state of desire, of sexual excitation; desire in its assertiveness, becoming visible in the being-for-sex. Here, it is not about desire with impediments that are a consequence of its articulation with the Law, desire that is unsatisfied, forestalled or impossible, as in neurosis. This is not desire in its roaming, which leaps from object to object and is never satisfied because it is the metonymy of lack. Himeros is desire in its positivity, an assertive desire, desire in act – the foundation of the desire of the analyst.

Beginning with Lacan, psychoanalysis and art allow us to grasp the distinction between desire as lack, equivalent to the minus phi (-φ), and desire caused by the object a. The former is articulated with the law and impossibility; the latter with jouissance and the satisfaction derived from the presence of the object of surplus jouissance [plus-de-jouir]. Himeros is one of the names of desire in its assertiveness.

Beyond demand, here is desire and its real of jouissance: in the scopic field “desire on the side of the Other” [desir à l’Autre],[2] in the vocative field, “desire to the Other” [desir de l’Autre]. The gaze and the voice are the two modes [effaçons][3] whereby the subject vanishes in order to allow desire to shine.

The artist raises musical notes to the dignity of the voice as surplus jouissance [plus-de-jouir] – it is a “surplus voice ” [plus de voix] that makes itself heard. Just as the painter throws on the canvas a “surplus gaze” [plus de regard]. The artist’s act, realised in his resolute desire, puts into the work of art this something “of himself” that hardly belongs to him, that escapes him: the object a. There, the analyst must allow the artist to teach him.

The dawning of the light of day coming out of night’s darkness was a desired light for the Greeks. That is why the word for day is himera, as we have learned from Plato. “Good-day”, “kalimera!”, is literally, “Beautiful day”. Based on this, Lacan proposes a new salutation: “Kalimeros!” – “Good-day and Beautiful desire!”

Kalimeros for 2014!

Translation from Brazilian into French: Elisabete Thamer

Translation from French into English: Susan Schwartz

The paradox of desire and love

Playing with the delights of etymology and the dictionary, we read that the term ‘paradox’ comes from the Greek (para and doxos) and means ‘beyond what is credible’, and also refers to something opposed to ‘common opinion’. Currently the word ‘paradox’ has numerous meanings. Let us consider one of them, given the resonances it has with analytic practice: a statement whose veracity or falsehood is unsayable.

It is perhaps in the clinic of amorous life where the paradox of desire becomes singularly tense, shaping what we may also call the paradox of love. The latter, love – let it be clear from the start – is not desire: desire is its anchoring in the drive. Freud says that we are reluctant to conceive of love as another partial drive – we believe that we perceive in it an aspiration to a totality. The ego loves or hates, but the relation between the drive and the object is called fixation: the fixation to an autoerotic rim, or the perverse trait of neurosis. As a consequence love carries the ballast of its origins in the drive. When Freud establishes the foundations of his theory on love, he inverts the ‘common opinion’, which does not hit the target regarding the cause of love: one does not love because one desires; it is, rather, because one desires that one loves. Desire reveals that the structure is with a hiatus. Freud illustrates the point early under the guise of a mythical experience of satisfaction that inscribes the irreducible loss of the object whose result is the emergence of desire, the very first motion of a psychical nature. In the words of Lacan, in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, at stake there is ‘an unfortunate start”.

The unsayable, das Ding as the non-predicable nucleus of the Other, does not allow any identification. The Thing, as the vacuum of the saying, will nest on everything that can be said. Thus, the logic of the not-all is introduced in the saying, and of course in all amorous discourse. This is the paradox of the love that aspires at the totality, since it does not want to know anything about castration or, to put it in Lacan’s terms, about the impossibility of writing the sexual relation/proportion; yet, paradoxically, nothing makes so present this dimension of an impossible real than the amorous experience. Both in Freud and in Lacan we can find the use of this dimension as an original and fertile logical impossibility. That obscure ‘object of desire’, incompatible with speech, in amorous life, always appears with a certain dramatic tension: one is never more at the mercy of the other than when one loves… that is the tragicomedy of love…

The problematic question concerning the paradox of desire in the field of love opens the path to a large series of interesting articulations, one of which is the relation it has with what after Freud we call transference love. This is a modality of love that emerges in the transference, which Freud identifies as something ‘unwilling to accept the interpretation’, a recalcitrant and indomitable love, the erotomanic border of love that frequently appears in the clinic of some ‘women of elementary passions’. One could think that in this case an impasse of the unconscious manifests itself.

In its dimension of repetition, transference love veils the object of the trauma. In its beginnings, transference evolves in the direction of identification. In this process, Lacan proposes that what must be at work is the analyst’s desire, which leads precisely to the traversing of the plane of identifications, which does not takes place without the analyst’s desire as its operator:

In order to give you formulae-reference points, I will say—if the transference is that which separates demand from the drive, the analyst’s desire is that which brings it back.[1]

Thus, this is a desire that aims at revealing the origin of all demand in the drive, initially veiled by transference love itself. This desire is not a pure desire, and Lacan names it as the desire to obtain ‘absolute difference’. The question arises at that point as to how the subject experiences a crossing-over that is produced exclusively by an experience of analysis. In the testimonies of the pass it is verifiable that it is around the vicissitudes of the experience of love that decisive moments of inflection occur. At those moments the subject has to assume a position in the face of what of his desire and – to open a connection with another possible articulation of the topic – his jouissance has been elaborated in the analysis.

What articulations and differences could we establish between transference love and the Freudian ethical precept of the law of abstinence, and the analyst’s desire? Undoubtedly they are not the same thing.

We might say that in the work of Lacan, from Seminar XX onwards, there appear a widening and a few new developments as to how he conceived this absolutely essential dimension of human experience. Perhaps we may summarize this movement as an extension in which the precedent continues to be true, but the new developments compel us to include new perspectives that in their ensemble represent a certain re-evaluation of love.

Our next encounter, therefore, will be the occasion to ascertain the new lines of tension derived from the teaching of Lacan in the 1970s. It is interesting to note how Colette Soler summarizes the new perspective in her book Los afectos lacanianos:

Love comes to reveal the impasses of the unconscious as knowledge which remains unknown, obscurely learnt and presenting an obstacle to the sexual relation. Love is an index, not of an intersubjectivity, but rather of an inter-recognition between two speakingbeings, made of two lalangues.[2]

As from Seminar XX, Encore, there is a new approach to love: it becomes the sign of an affect of the unconscious. To conclude, I share with you the final paragraphs of that Seminar, so as to prepare the ambience for our Rendezvous of Paris, 2014:

[…] I will say that what is important in what has been revealed by psychoanalytic discourse – and one is surprised not to see its thread everywhere – is that knowledge, which structures the being who speaks on the basis of a specific cohabitation, is closely related to love. All loved is based on a certain relationship between two unconscious knowledges.

If I have enunciated that the subject supposed to know is what motivates transference, that is but a particular, specific application of what we find in our experience. I’ll ask you to look at the text of what I enunciated here, in the middle of this year, regarding the choice of love. I spoke, ultimately, of recognition, recognition – via signs that are always punctuated enigmatically – of the way in which being is affected qua subject of unconscious knowledge.

There’s no such thing as a sexual relationship because one’s jouissance of the Other taken as a body is always inadequate – perverse, on the one hand, insofar as the Other is reduced to object a, and crazy and enigmatic, on the other, I would say. Isn’t it on the basis of the confrontation with this impasse, with this impossibility by which a real is defined, that love is put to the test? Regarding one’s partner, love can only actualize what, in a sort of poetic flight, in order to make myself understood, I called courage – courage with respect to this fatal destiny.[3]

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Freud, S. (1950a [1895]). Project for a Scientific Psychology. SE 1:281.

Freud, S. (1900a). The Interpretation of Dreams. SE SE:4 & 5.

Freud. S. (1915a). Observations on Transference-Love. SE 12:159.

Freud, S. (1915c). Instincts and their Vicissitudes. SE 14:111.

Lacan, J. (1992). The Seminar, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. New York, Norton & London, Routledge.

Lacan, J. (1973-1974). The Seminar, Book XXI, Les non dupes errant. Unpublished transcript.

Translated by Leonardo Rodríguez

A new desire Some notations on the theme and a question: A new desire? What is the source of desire? The poet Reiner Kunze wrote about it plainly: “The poem resides in the extent of its wonderment, It is there that we go”.

Analysis wends its way from paradox to paradox, but in order to name, and even more “to rename anew the things of the world”, say F. Cheng, in responding to the unnameable, another name for the impossible: such is desire.

The subject is so prey to desire and its paradox that Lacan notes on page 558 of the Seminar Desire and its Interpretation: “Desire is at once subjectivity—it is at the very heart of our subjectivity, what is most essentially the subject—and at the same time it is its contrary, opposed to subjectivity as resistance, as paradox, a rejected kernel, refutable”.

Paradox of desire knotted to love and to the jouissance of the symptom.

The desire of the analyst comes from the act itself which both supports and dictates an ethic that governs the Saying, the One-saying, the Real. Crisscrossed threads, contrived, knotted, plaited like so many figures from which desire is deduced, not without guilt/cut [coupabilité],[1] in the sudden appearance of its cause.

A new desire that Lacan retranslated on the model of Ein neues Subjekt: it is new that there is a subject, and new that there is this desire that had been rejected. At the end and in what follows, this new desire is inscribed, is written, an effect of the resolution, of the reduction of the paradoxes of jouissance, of the paradoxes of love, and of the paradoxes of desire, because of the inexorable real. The desire of the analyst is a desire to know once the desire from knowledge and its love has fallen; this desire to know is the chance to give to the unknown the fullness that comes back to it; what remains is the unknown.

Translated by Susan Schwartz

The paradoxes of the desire of the analyst

Our next rendezvous in Paris has put us on the track of desire and its paradox: how to circumscribe desire through interpretation if it is logically incompatible with speech? Answer: not without another desire.

This leads to a wide range of clinical problems that open onto a particular ethical consideration, that of situating the coordinates of the desire of the analyst, this “special class of desire that is manifested in interpretation”,[1] this “postulate” at the base of all analytic formation.[2]

It is well known that Lacan himself first formulated the question of the desire of the analyst at the precise moment that he was situating the paradoxes of desire.[3] The topological formulation of desire in 1958 leads him inexorably to an ethics of the treatment that involves integrating “the Freudian conquests on desire” with a response “in act”.[4]

Ten years of teaching later ends with the account of the structure of the analytic act. And they enable us in this case to have recourse to a vast range of references reflecting the various aspects of the function “desire of the analyst” and some algebraic concepts that support them.[5] This recourse suggests a formulation: how can we say that the truth of every dream is in the realisation of a desire when it brings with it an “irrealisation” of this oneiric realisation. We could affirm that the meaning of the desire of the analyst is that of “realisation in act” because, being both an ethical and clinical operation, it is a notion that does not signify such and such a desire of such and such an analyst.

That is clear, but can we go so far as to maintain that this desire is exempt from paradoxes? What does the analyst do when faced with the paradoxical structure of desire? These questions refer to the clinic of the end of analysis and the pass and that opens the question of the links between desire and act, and also between jouissance and satisfaction that are sometimes correlative. For it is not enough to reach the end with the collapse of the truth of desire in the “I lie”, we also have to be able to situate the connection with the source of the drive and with the saying that names it. Even if this name were to be “Pinocchio”, that is not enough to situate the subject of the enunciation; it is equally necessary to verify if his heart is made of fantasy, and if his nose can really grow.

Translation from Spanish into French: Isabelle Cholloux

Translation from French into English: Susan Schwartz