Repetition and the “constant”

Gabriel Dahan

“The real, I will say, is the mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the "unconscious"1. We may claim that this is Lacan’s way to read the Freudian ´compulsion to repeat´ in every Triebhaft, described by him as : "[…] at once the most important and the most obscure element of psychological research".2 While Freud refers here to the encounter of the body and the "mental apparatus", Lacan’s reference is to the copulation of language and body.3

In letter 52 to Fliess Freud indicates regarding fixation, a Wahrnehmungszeichen, an inscription inaccessible to consciousness. 4 Hence, one cannot assume any version of repetition without some kind of "constant", while this "constant" must remain outside the "field of relations", as a "mystery" or an "obscure element", in order to enable this field to be constituted.

Lacan’s teaching strives for ´Yad’lun´, ´lalangue´, ´outside sense´, the real without law – all of which carry axiomatic traits that are inaccessible and outside any relation5, thereby enabling a field of relations to be framed and – according to the same logic formulated by Lacan and developed J.-A. Miller in his course 1989-906, where object a is what frames the field of reality as a field of relations, itself being outside it.7 Lacan in seminar XXIII explicitly says regarding object a, that any other object outside the absolute one that he calls a, sustain a relation.8

These elements express Lacan’s persistent striving toward a determining event, a traumatic occurrence, trou-matique, in which the given body and language copulate9, an occurrence whose real product is qualified as a singular constant outside any relation, that cannot be known in the Biblical sense, knowledge which Lacan places as a connaître, identified with "knowing how to do with ones symptom" [savoir y faire avec son symptôme].10 The symptom itself is a body-language event, just like the dream, and as repetition, as modes of know-how with the constant. This is the heart of the matter : as much as the constant is fixated, it is also constantly undone. The analytic clinic is a constant process concerning knotting and unknotting in reference to an enigmatic constant, which is why the clinic in its entirety is a clinic of the body-lalangue. Curiously, the creation of a relation as a mode of knotting, as the task of the psyche, is a creation with that which is outside any relation : such as jouissance in relation to object a11, such as the unconscious as how-knowing with lalangue.12 Such is also the dream as the copulating king’s bed of body-language. Repetition in this sense is also the ´automatonic´ savoir-y-faire which, when other means fail, ´hurries´ to the task of knotting.

References

1 Lacan J., Encore : The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, J.-A. Miller, ed., B. Fink, trans., New-York, Norton, 2016, p. 131.

2 Freud S., Beyond the pleasure principle, (1920), S.E., XVIII, p. 34.

3 Lacan J., Op. Cit., p. 103.

4 Freud S., Letter 52, December 6, 1896, S.E., I, p. 234.

5 Lacan J., The Sinthome, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, J.-A. Miller, ed., A.R. Price, trans., Cambridge, Polity, 2018, p. 50. ...or Worse, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, J.-A. Miller, ed., A.R. Price, trans., Cambridge, Polity, 2018, p. 118.

6 Miller J.-A., The Analysts Banquet, Course of 9/5/1990. Available at : https://jonathanleroy.be/.

7 Lacan J., Écrits, On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis, B. Fink, trans., 2006, New-York, Norton, 2006, p. 462.

8 Lacan J., The Sinthome, op.cit.

9 Ibid.

10 Lacan J., L’insu que sait de l’une bévue s’aile a mourre, (1976-1977), Lesson of 16-11-1976, gaogoa.free.fr/Séminaires

11 Lacan J., … or Worse, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, J.-A. Miller, ed., A.R. Price, trans., Cambridge, Polity, 2018.

12 Lacan J., Encore : The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, J.-A. Miller, ed., B. Fink, trans., 1999.