Entre l’homme et la femme,
Il y a l’amour.
Entre l’homme et l’amour,
Il y a un monde.
Entre l’homme et le monde,
Il y a un mur.[1]
Jacques-Alain Miller comments on Lacan’s statement in “...or Worse” according to which “transgression does not hold out when it has to do with the true impossible”[2] and points out that “the true impossible is the real”[3].
This impossible which can be demonstrated and cannot be transgressed has been the central issue of my experience, from the beginning of my analysis to its end. I lived this impossible as a wall against which I kept bumping over and over. The more I tried to pull it down, or go through it -desperately trying to write the sexual rapport which does not exist- the more I gave it consistency.
The wall made up the room around which I went round and round. It took a series of operations to pass from my powerlessness faced with this wall to the evidence of an impossible. The real of this impossible remains the same but I have stopped desperately trying to go over the wall, which was what had been paving the way for my conjugal troubles. At the age of puberty I was struck by a statement of my mother[4] which I had understood as the promise that the sexual rapport did exist and nurtured on the infinite as I had been and with a propensity for it, on the verge of a superegoic push to enjoy, I did not loosen my grip – even if it meant clinging to the Other- so as to make true the dream of the complementarity of the two, of love and desire combined. My mistake! My efforts were in vain and the analysis was necessary for this wall to be pulled down for it meant refusing to admit that love cannot cipher the sexual non-rapport [5]. Skirting round, encircling, tightening this “(a)mur”[6] is to pass from love to the wall, from the lack of castration to the “it does not work”, from the wall of the “sexual non-rapport ” to the wall of language. The neurotic wall of repetition took the form of a fierceness sustained by the phantasy which fixed my position of making myself be seen as a rejected object, and this, as a consequence of my clinging to the Other. Once the fundamental fantasy had been gone through, and with it the fall of the object a, the real of the impossible “sexual rapport” still remained.
It was only when I reached the hatred the target of which is the real, a hatred hidden by the ideal but prior to love[7] – a hatred directed at the “jouissance of the Other”[8]– that I became able to grab jouissance One and to consent to the impossible at last. The wall then vanished and the inconsistency of the Other deduced from it. “What is spoken has to do with solitude only, on the point of the relation (…) (which) cannot be written”[9]. From my wall-rounded solitude, I managed to attain to a solitude which opens out to an undreamt of freedom, the kind which frees itself from demand and from the analyst as well.
Translated by Catherine Massol
[1] Poem by A. Tudal, quoted by J. Lacan, in Je parle aux murs, text established by J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil, 2011, p. 98.
[2] Lacan J., Seminar, book XIX … Ou pire, text established by J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil, 2011, p. 119.
[3] Miller J.-A., « L’orientation lacanienne. L’Un-tout-seul », course delivered within the framework of the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII, lesson of 2 March 2011, unpublished.
[4] Developed in my first testimony and the following ones : La Cause du désir n°101 and 103, Quarto n°123 , Mental n°40, and Cf. « The Amur of Amour », in The Lacanian Review, Issue 07, June 2019.
[5] Cf. Fajnwaks F., « Love after Love », course delivered within the framework of the École de la Cause freudienne, lesson of 22 April 2020, unpublished.
[6] Lacan J., Je parle aux murs, op. cit. p. 103.
[7] Laurent É., « Disruption of jouissance in fits of madness under transference », L’Hebdo-Blog, n°133, 15 April 2018, published on line (www.hebdo-blog.fr).
[8] Miller J.-A., « The Lacanian orientation. Extimity », course delivered within the framework of the department of psychoanalysis of the University of Paris VIII, lesson of 27 November 1985, unpublished.
[9] Lacan J., Le Séminaire, livre XX, Encore, text established by J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil, 1975, p. 109.