Eric Laurent's Seminar in Radio Lacan 2014-2015: Lacanian Studies at the ECF: "Speaking Lalangue of the Body”
"We start from the fact that the mystery, the point of Real, is 'the union between speech and the body', beyond the Freudian drive wich joined together libidinal charge and representation in the founding myth. From this point, we will advance in the exploration of the analysis of the speaking-being, to which Jacques-Alain Miller invites us in his closing presentation at the last WAP Congres. We will also keep in mind, throughout this study, the extent to which the contemporary cognitive paradigm in psychology aims at silencing the body, reducing it to a behavior in order to exalt the cognitive process, even if it is described as emotional. We shall also ask ourselves, during this year, about how this extension of the symptom allows to keep the bond with clinical disciplines that also make use of the word symptom." Each class will aim at the reading of a Lacanian text mentioned by Jacques-Alain Miller in his conference, or of a text resonating with it. Radio Lacan would like to thank Éric Laurent for having agreed to the broadcasting of his 2014-2015 Seminar: "Speaking Lalangue of the Body", delivered at the ECF in Paris. Éric Laurent's developments throughout this Seminar constitute an essential document for the preparation of the theme of the next WAP Congress: “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body”, Rio-2016.
Episode 1
First Lesson: Body and Jouissance - the time of "Radiophonie"
In this first class Éric Laurent used as a reference the interview with Jacques Lacan for the Belgian broadcaster in 1970. Text published in Autres Écrits, Ed. du Seuil, Paris, 2001, p. 403.
107:00 minutes | Audio in French | Recorded 25.11.2014
Episode 2
Second Lesson: The symptom beyond the hysterical symptom; Readings on “Joyce, the symptom”
After a first lesson focused on the body and joy, in this second lesson, Eric Laurent continues his work reflecting about the recent commentary of Lacan’s latest teaching gathered by J A Miller in his conference at the last Congress of the WAP. In this lesson, Eric Laurent accurately comments Jaques Lacan’s text, published in Other Writings ‘’Joyce, the Symptom”.
90:10 minutes | Audio in French | Recorded 16.12.2014
Episode 3
Third Lesson: ¿To know their symptom? - Reading the Seminar class from 16th November 1976: " L'insu que sait de l'une bévue"
And then, what is the meaning of knowing their symptom?” Lacan formulates in his lesson from 16th November 1976, and he adds: "to know means: - to know how to do with that symptom, -to know how to disentangle it,- to know how to manipulate".
Éric Laurent comments in detail the lesson from 16th November 1976 of Jacques Lacan’s Seminar: "L'insu que sait de l'une bévue s'aile à mourre". The lesson is published in French at Ornicar? Journal N°12/13, 1977, p.4.
99:33 minutes | Audio in French | Recorded 20.01.2015
Episode 4
Forth Lesson: The Escabeau and Sublimation. Reading "Joyce the Symptom"
"The escabeau is not a ladder, it's smaller than a ladder, but it's got steps. What is the escabeau? I mean the psychoanalytic escabeau, and not just the one that you use to reach books in a library. Generally speaking, it is what the parlêtre hoists himself onto, hauls himself onto in order to make himself beau. (...)The escabeau is a transversal concept. It provides a colourful translation for Freudian sublimation, but in its intersection with narcissism. And this is a connection that is specific to the era of the parlêtre. The escabeau is sublimation, but in so far as it is grounded on the first I'm not thinking of the parlêtre. What is this, I'm not thinking? It is the negation of the unconscious by which the parlêtre believes he is the master of his Being. And with his escabeau, to this he adds the fact that he believes himself to be a maître beau, a fine master. What we call culture is nothing but the escabeaus "in reserve" that one can draw on to brag and flout one's vanity”.
Jacques-Alain Miller, "Presentation of the theme for the Xth Congress of the WAP” - Río 2016.
101:52 minutes | Audio in French | Recorded 03.02.2015
Episode 5
Fifth Lesson: The remainder of the speaking-being, is the body s/he has. A reading of Seminar XXIII
You must indeed have realised that what I told you of the relationships of man to his body and which depend entirely on the fact that man says he has the body, his body. Already to say his, is to say that he possesses it, of course, like a piece of furniture. This has nothing to do with anything whatsoever that allows the subject to be strictly defined. The subject is only defined in a correct way in being represented by a signifier to another signifier.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar 23: “The Sinthome”, unpublished.
93:38 minutes | Audio in French | Recorded 05.03.2015
Episode 6
Sixth Lesson: The Escabeau And The Sinthome. From the "Epic Body" as a Joycean Solution in "Ulysses", to the Unsubcribed to the Unconscious in "Finnegan’s Wake"
"If Lacan was gripped by James Joyce, and especially by his work Finnegans Wake, it was because of the tour de force – or the tour de farce[26]– that it represents on account of having managed to make the symptom and the escabeau converge. Exactly, Joyce turned the symptom itself – in so far as it lies outside meaning, in so far as it is unintelligible – into the escabeau of his art. He created a literature whose jouissance is just as opaque as that of the symptom, and which none the less remains an art object, raised onto the escabeau of the dignity of the Thing".
88:33 minutes | Audio in French | Recorded 14.04.2015
Episode 7
Seventh Lesson: "The Unconscious as Elucubration of Knowledge on Lalangue of the the Speaking Body"
"What is a flight of fancy of knowledge? It is an articulation of semblants that detach themselves from the real at the same time as they clasp it. The main mutation that has touched the symbolic order in the twenty-first century is that it is now very widely thought of as an articulation of semblants. The traditional categories that organise existence have passed over to the rank of mere social constructions that are destined to come apart. It is not only that the semblants are vacillating, they are being recognised as semblants. Moreover, by a curious intersection, it is psychoanalysis that, through Lacan, is restoring the other term of the conceptual polarity: not everything is semblance, there is a real".
Jacques-Alain Miller, "The Unconscious and the Speaking Body".
98:23 minutes | Audio in French | Recorded 05.05.2015
Episode 8
Eighth Lesson: “The Speaking-Body and its Sinthome. Consequences on Clinical Equality, Transference, Supervision, the Pass”
"The consequence is what I might call a declaration of fundamental clinical equality between parlêtres. The parlêtres are condemned to feeble-mindedness by the mental itself, precisely on account of the imaginary, as the imaginary of the body and the imaginary of meaning. The symbolic will print semantic representations onto the imaginary body, which the speaking body then weaves and unweaves. It is in this respect that one's debility destines the speaking body as such to delusion. You wonder how someone who has done an analysis can still imagine themselves to be normal. In the economy of jouissance, one master-signifier has the same value as any other".
Jacques-Alain Miller, "The Unconscious and the Speaking Body".
93:39 minutes | Audio in French | Recorded 02.06.2015
Pierre Naveau