Writing, Speech and Flesh in Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Of Unconscious Grammatology

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This book explores the place of the flesh in the linguistically-inflected categories of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, drawing explicit attention to the organic as an inherent part of the linguistic categories that appear in the writings of Freud and Lacan. Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’ famously involves a ‘linguistic turn’ in psychoanalysis. The centering of language as a major operator in psychic life often leads to a dualistic or quasi-dualistic view in which language and the enjoyment of the body are polarized. Exploring the intricate connections of the linguistic and the organic in both Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis from its beginnings, Zisser shows that surprisingly, and not only in Lacan’s late teaching, psycho-linguistic categories turn out to be suffused with organicity. After unfolding the remnant of the flesh in the signifier as a major component of Lacan’s critique of Saussure, using visual artworks as objective correlatives as it does so, the book delineates two forms of psychic writing. These are aligned not only with two fundamental states of the psychic apparatus as described by Freud (pain and satisfaction), but with two ways of sculpting formulated by Alberti in the Renaissance but also referred to by Freud. Continuing in a Derridean vein, the book demonstrates the primacy of writing to speech in psychoanalysis, emphasizing how the relation between speech and writing is not binary but topological, as speech in its psychoanalytic conception is nothing but the folding inside-out of unconscious writing. Innovatively placing the flesh at the core of its approach, the text also incorporates the seminal work of psychoanalyst Michèle Montrelay to articulate the precise relation between the linguistic and the organic. Writing, Speech and Flesh in Lacanian Psychoanalysis will be indispensable to psychoanalysts, literary theorists, rhetoricians, deconstructionists, and those studying at the intersection of psychoanalysis, language, and the visual arts. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of figures Acknowledgments Personal acknowledgments Introduction: ‘The smile is a cut’ Notes Chapter 1: Saussurean linguistics and its dis-contents A Lacan’s critique of Saussure B The sign and sexual difference C The phallic signifier D The phallus in the visual field: Self-portrait of an absence E The signifier as slash: Lacan with Fontana Notes Chapter 2: ‘Written in the sand of the flesh’: On modes of writing in the psychic apparatus A Introduction: Two primal scenes of psychic writing B Per via di porre : The writ(h)ing of jouissance a Sculpture and pain b The character typed by the drive c The erotics of the stereo-type d Copying jouissance: The unary trait C Per via di levare : On the hysterical inscription of the unconscious symbol a Myths of the origin of mnemonic writing: Phaedrus and Simonides b Sum-ballein: The symbol as a throwing together c Writing the symbol d Scouring and disappearing: The hysterical symptom and the unconscious signifier D Epilogue: On the unconscious inscription of inherited debt Notes Chapter 3: Speaking the written A Introduction: From writing in the flesh to speech under transference B The signifier in motion a Introduction: Freud with Aristotle b Bewegung : The motions of psychic writ(h)ing c Towards speech: From floating to syncopation and ex-pulsion d Anxiety and the topology of speech e Scheme: The choreography of speech C Of signifiers spoken in the real a Introduction b Psychosis: The unconscious phrase that enunciates itself 1 Introduction 2 The schizophrenic’s organ speech 3 Hallucination: The unspeakable object as heard word c Neurosis: The real forms of desiring speech 1 Introduction 2 ‘Get thee to a nunnery!’: The obsessional’s sign(ifier)-invective 3 Somatic compliance: The word that slaps the hysteric 4 The hysteric’s enunciation-thing Notes Epilogue: Chiselled from the real – The feminine signifier Notes Bibliography Index