Towards the 28th Study-Days of the EOL “LET’S TALK ABOUT THE UNCONSCIOUS, STILL…” / Buenos Aires – 30th November-1st December 2019

In order to speak – on the basis of my analysis and the experience of the Pass – about which unconscious is at stake in the end, I will make use of two definitions taken from two of Lacan’s seminars.

One is from Seminar 11, where he says that the unconscious shows us the gap where neurosis is spliced with a real; the other is from Seminar 24 when the title he gives to the seminar plays on the transliteration of Unbewuste to une bevue, allowing the unconscious to be defined as an equivocation.

Both refer to that which stumbles, to the fault, the fissure, the equivocation. In Seminar 11 Lacan while “showing” us the real leg, warns us not to close it with orthopedic care. In Seminar 24 he situates it in relation to a translinguistic game, showing in his way of saying that there is unconscious when one puts one’s foot in it, when there is error, and this, before we make sense of it, is an effort to situate the unconscious at the level of the real outside meaning. It is a question of lalangue as first equivoque, given that language, second in its condition, is an “elucubration of knowledge about lalangue.”

What relation is there between one fault and the other, that is, between the gap and the “one-blunder”, between one moment of the definition of the unconscious and the other?

To start with, let’s clarify that they are not opposed, but could refer to different moments in the analysis. There is a time when subjective myths become equivocal, when the text of history is holed, and another moment, when – as Lacan says in the Yale lecture – it is necessary for the subject to immerse himself in the hole opened in and by the unconscious, the hole of the blower as “fundamental navel”. The unconscious “one-blunder” is the closest thing to trauma, to that irruption of jouissance that makes a hole. This holes the text of the analysis. It then becomes possible for a letter outside meaning to be inscribed, which exceeds the dichotomies S1-S2, and signifier-object[1], as the dreams of some A.E.s show us.

If we say that an analysis produces an analyst, from that perspective, the analyst’s position also implies incarnating the gap.

[1] From the treatment given to object a from Lesson 10 of Seminar 23.

Translated by Roger Litten