A/GAIN
Florencia F.C. Shanahan
A/GAIN1
“First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good.[…]”2
Again, again, again. The hammering we subject ourselves to when we spend our day behind the couch and for the time we lied on it.
“I can get no satisfaction” Is it a complaint? A demand? A confirmation that brings relief? It depends… “Repetition and its failure” Does it verify that we are doomed? Does it promise us eternal impotence? Does it open up the gap for what is new?
Body and words. How to get in? How to get out? At the core of Freud’s discovery, the unconscious. And its real. The hole of an impossible. Sexuality. Death. No pre-existing knowledge to tell us how to deal with it. Which does not mean no knowledge at all. No possible writing of the sexual rapport. Which does not mean no possible writing.
Moreover, the real at stake for all plays its part for each in a way that is incomparable. Outside of meaning means outside of common meaning, that is to say, outside of what is organised by phallic signification, which is for us the function of the fundamental fantasy. An analysis provides a chance to elucidate this singularity, that which of the symptom is not decipherable and feeds on meaning. And to invent a new way to make do with it.
In the knotting between love, desire and jouissance, analysis may lead to a redistribution of the satisfaction involved in fixation and repetition. The satisfaction of the symptom may become sinthome once the object a is detached from its function as plug. The object separated from the demand (drive) comes to function as cause of desire, and the love at stake in the artificial neurosis that transference sustains, becomes a new love, in which what is at stake in a new relation with solitude and the void that it makes possible. "What Lacan called true love is born of the signs of what in each of us marks the path of our exile."3
That a body? Yes. Say that a body. Somehow standing. In the dim void. A place. Where none. A time when try see. Try say. How small. How vast. How if not boundless bounded. Whence the dim. Not now. Know better now. Unknow better now. Know only no out of. No knowing how know only no out of. Into only. Hence another. Another place where none. Whither once whence no return. No. No place but the one. None but the one where none. Whence never once in. Somehow in. Beyondless. [...]4
The gain that can be expected from analysis is not only a gain in knowledge - which is not be disdained. It is a gain that gives access to a different type of limit or stop which, paradoxically, opening up to a certain boundlessness, allows for a way to cut the again of repetition, if only at times, contingently and not-all.
References
1 Excerpt of the paper presented at the 10th Annual Study-Day of ICLO Society of the NLS, “I can’t get no satisfaction. Repetition and its failure”, 7th May 2022, Dublin.
2 Beckett, S., Worstward Ho, http://www.samuel-beckett.net/w_ho.html
3 Millot, C., ”La logica y el amor”, UNSAM, Tyché, 2021.
4 An interesting study on Beckett’s penultimate novella suggests: “At the opening of the book the mind whose workings are being observed is minimal. In the course of paragraphs of dense elliptical language the narrator’s mental scope is to be gradually narrowed even further. The narrator proceeds through manipulating the dim images evoked at the beginning of the book, systematically reducing them until they are nothing but pinpoint-size specks literally almost vanishing in the surrounding void: “At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther.” At the end of the book, the narrator’s mind is filled completely with a great all but void: the image of an almost featureless universe. Despite the bleakness of the vision the tone of the penultimate paragraph, heralding the end, is one almost of satisfaction: “Best worse no farther”. The last words of the paragraph dwindle away along with the last of the narrator’s intellect: Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on. If there is at this last stage no evidence of any joy or bliss experienced (a sense of joy is anticipated earlier in the text), it is because there are no words left to express this experience.” Hisgen, R., Interpreting Samuel Beckett's 'Worstward Ho', 1998, www.hdl.handle.net/1887/4924