Fixation beyond inertia

Rik Loose

In Seminar XI Lacan indicates that the drive is neither organic nor a myth but rather that it is a fiction in the Benthamite sense of the word.[1] It is interesting to note that he refers to Jeremy Bentham. With this reference he indicates that the drive is a construction, a fiction, that nevertheless indicates that something there ex-sists as for Lacan Bentham’s fictions are situated in the domain of the relationship between language and the real, between what IS and what EX-SISTS. He calls this drive a montage and not a model because a model is, essentially, a imaginarization of the real as a scientific attempt to approach the latter. Before he deconstructs this drive, he refers to Beyond the Pleasure-Principle where Freud writes that the drive is a manifestation of inertia in organic life, and he says that this idea of inertia could be linked to fixation. But, according to Lacan, doing so, would be a mistake.[2] From Seminar XI onwards the relationship between fixation and inertia begins to shift.

Linking fixation to inertia implies the Freudian impasse regarding the end of analysis because the end of analysis is still caught in an ontology of BEING in which the dialectics of articulation impotently try to dissolve what is fixated. It won’t stay this way for Lacan as fixation will become that which ex-sists in the form of the real of the drive as hole. Here we are in the domain in which signifiers hit the body and fixated there a singular form of jouissance that does not answer to the dialectics of language. This domain of the body-event that stands at the root of the symptom can only be reached to the point of the letter-without-meaning as that which forms the material of what became inscribed in the body. Interpretation here allows a circumscription of a jouissance-substance at the end of an analysis as the true cause of psychic reality according to Miller.[3] The subject remains fixated to this true cause of psychic reality but not in the form of inertia or symptomatic remainders but as something that can lead to a pass or the creative possibilities of the sinthome.

References

[1] Lacan, J. (1964-1965), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, New York: Norton, p. 163.

[2] Ibid. p. 162.

[3] Miller, J.-A. (2019), Being is Desire in The Symptom 18, https://www.lacan.com/symptom/being-is-desire-jacques-alain-miller/.