Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real by Arka Chattopadhyay

Author:Arka Chattopadhyay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

FIGURE 3.2 Schema of alienation (from Seminar XI: 211)

The materiality of word thus never stops insisting on death. Insofar as the subject enjoys this materiality and is enjoyed by it, it brings them into distressing proximity with the thing. This inclusive exclusion turns jouissance towards death drive. The corporeal edge of the word leans on das Ding and the jouissance that comes out of it is full of Real anxiety.

In Lacan, ‘erogenous zones’ are consistent with this cut in the signifier, opening towards das Ding. Drives are operationalized by anatomic cuts of eye, ear, mouth and anus. These orifices have a ‘rim like structure.’ They glimpse the body’s Real by sketching its threshold:

The very delimitation of the ‘erogenous zone’ that the drive isolates from the function’s metabolism […] is the result of a cut that takes advantage of the anatomical characteristic of the margin or border: the lips, ‘the enclosure of teeth’, the rim of the anus, the penile groove, the vagina, and the slit formed by the eyelids, not to mention the hollow of the ear. (2006: 692)

These anatomic cuts puncture body’s Imaginary totality. Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ generates the Imaginary fiction of a whole body when the ego is grounded in specular identification. In opposition to the Imaginary capture of body in the mirror as a whole, this anatomical conception of corporeal rims crystallizes Real body as a hole. Lacan reflects:

Man is captivated by the image of his body. This point explains many things, the first of which is the privileged position that this body holds for him. His world […] his Umwelt, what there is around him, he corpo-reifies it, he makes it a thing in the image of his body. He does not have the slightest idea, of course, of what happens inside this body. (1989: 9)

In the schism between the corporeal exterior viewed in the mirror image and its unknown interior mechanism, what gives lalangue its disturbing jouissance is the location of the tongue (la langue as ‘the tongue’ in French) at the partition between the body’s interior and exterior: ‘Everything that creates meaning in lalangue proves to be linked to the ex-sistence of this tongue, namely that it is outside the business of the life of the body’ (Seminar XXI: 11.6.1974). The tongue as the organ that generates lalangue is fittingly placed at the cusp of the inside-outside border of the body. It is inside the mouth and yet just outside the space of body’s internal mechanism. This ‘extimacy’ of something both inside and outside marks Real body as a cut between the within and the without. Jouissance of lalangue is allied with this drive-body as a Real body of fragments. When the subject enjoys lalangue in the signifying cut, the homologous anatomic cuts formalize drives and extract a disturbing Jouissance from them.

When the subject speaks, words have an effect on their body. Lacan defines drive as ‘the echo in the body of a fact of saying’ (2016: 9). While speaking, the subject enjoys the speech act from different parts of the body, and the body enjoys it too.

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