Transmissions of ‘Bits of Real’ in a Lacanian Criminology Workshop (LRO 312) : 29th September 2021 : René Raggenbass

Circulated by New Lacanian School Messager, as [nls-messager] 3997.en/ LRO 312: “Transmissions of ‘Bits of Real’ in a Lacanian Criminology Workshop”, on 29th September 2021
Published by The Lacanian Reviews Online, https://www.thelacanianreviews.com/transmissions-of-bits-of-real-in-a-lacanian-criminology-workshop/
Also available with notes from www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Other Authors A-Z (Raggenbass)

Background – that of a working group

Quote Raggenbass : A group of people active in the field of justice, education, the police, the magistracy and health care have been organizing a monthly workshop on Lacanian criminology in person since 2004. The workshop consists of a practical presentation of situations drawn from each field of activity supported by a theoretical text.

References

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Francesca Biagi Chai, « Le cas Landru à la lumière de la psychanalyse », Imago, Paris, 2007, p. 222. From the internet, details of the English translation:

Case study of a Serial Killer: Henri-Désiré Landru by Francesca Biagi-Chai (2011) Routledge-Cavendish.

ABSTRACT

The Landru case exploded in 1919. Henri-Désiré Landru, then age 50, was accused of murdering 10 women and one young man, whose bodies he disposed of by burning them in his stove. The case brought to light the scams and murders of the one the press came to name, in turn, ‘the Bluebeard of Gambais’, ‘the Sire of Gambais’ and ‘the Lady Vanisher’. The crimes, which started with a century full of the promises of its second industrial revolution, ended in the wake of the most deadly war France had ever known. Was it madness or perversion? The Landru enigma intrigued all levels of society and all were aware that the case would leave an indelible mark upon history. To attend this resounding trial journalists, writers, artists, comedians, songwriters and sketch artists jostled in the ‘Landru train’, described in great detail in L’illustration:

The ‘Landru train’ leaves the Invalides station at 11h40 … It carries the stream of magistrates, lawyers, witnesses, court journalists, photographers … and people moved by mere curiosity who, every day, go to the palace of justice at Versailles. People talk of the case. They debate the articles published in the morning. 1

Everyone speculated about the personality of the ‘mystery man’. Was he a sadistic killer or a madman? The question was on everyone’s lips. Landru’s wife and children, in shock, also tried to understand and remember the husband and father they had always known. Shortly after his arrest, they independently recounted an identical and moving tale. These stories were hastily told, with emotion and pain. They are precious, because they interweave biographic details with subjective elements that never surfaced in Landru’s own accounts.

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Reference 2

Raggenbass : In 1974 Lacan questioned his audience: “You listen – yes. But do you catch something that resembles the real?” [2]. This is what occupies the workshop. To transmit bits of real. This is also why this year the participants will produce a short text about their experience in order to contribute to the text’s support.

Jacques Lacan, « Conférence de presse du Docteur Lacan », Rome, VIIème Congrès de l’Ecole freudienne de Paris (1974), Lettres de l’école freudienne, n°16, novembre 1975, p. 15.».

Press Conference at the French Cultural Centre, Rome (The Triumph of Religion) : 29th October 1974 : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19741029 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts) or www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan (191. English translation of Jacques Lacan’s Press Conference in Rome, 29th of October 1974)

P6 of Scott Saviano’s translation

Lacan – The analyst on the other hand is another thing entirely. He inhabits a kind of coming-of-age moment. For a short period of time, we caught sight of what the intrusion of the Real really is. The analyst remains tied to this point. He is there like a symptom and can only endure as a symptom. But you shall see, the day will come when humanity will be cured of psychoanalysis. This symptom will eventually be repressed by dint of its being drowned in meaning, religious meaning of course. Do you get it? Has some small corner of your faculty of judgment been enlightened? Does this position of mine seem immoderate to you?

Mme Y. – I’m listening.

Lacan – Ah yes. You are listening. But in the process are you picking up on anything that might resemble the Real?

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Reference 3

Raggenbass : To inscribe them in a social bond by means of a “historization of the real” implies, like Éric Laurent writes, a certain “forcing” of the real of jouissance in the field of language [3.]

Éric Laurent, « Une vision du ruissellement de l’Un », La Cause du Désir n° 107, Mars 2021, p. 62-69. [A vision of the streaming (trickle-down) of the One]

See A Vision of the Streaming (ruissellement – trickling down) of the One : 1^st March 2021 : Éric Laurent, on this site /5 Authors A-Z (Laurent)

P49 of Laurent, On the other hand, he introduced a quasi-mathematical use of the letter to note functions that would move away from the reading of Freud, and thus guide this reading. The two uses of the letter, the literary use, and the mathematical use, are distinct, and occasionally enter into opposition. According to Lacan, the dit-mansion* of the letter implies a certain instance) a certain insistence, a certain forcing in order to be included in the signifying weft and the significations that are deduced from it.

NOTE dit-mansion literally translates as ‘said-house/mansion’ and derives from dimension.

Laurent uses this neologism again in Éric Laurent : Interpretation : From Truth to Event : 2^nd June 2019 (Tel Aviv). See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Laurent or Index of Authors’ texts), quote, On the most radical horizon of this new perspective, Lacan will be led to base the very possibility of interpretation on a new dit-mansion*, a heterogeneous mixture of signifier and letter. It is this new dimension (as a specific contribution of psychoanalysis that adds to language functions unperceived by linguistics, even by Jacobson, who was so sensible to the poetic function) that links interpretation to the definition of the symptom as a body event. Interpretation thereby becomes an event of saying, which can be raised to the dignity of the symptom or, according to Lacan’s cryptic expression, extinguish it. It is this line of development that I will be exploring in this article.

From The Agency (Insistence or Instance) of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud (Sorbonne, Paris) : 9th May 1957 : Jacques Lacan, this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19570509), P169 of Alan Sheridan’s translation : For the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension* before it.

* This is almost certainly a translation of the neologism ‘dit-mansion’

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Reference 4

Raggenbass : This forcing is not done by simple listening, but by the use of interpretation which is neither about being moral, nor about making the other reasonable, nor a prohibition or other meaning enunciations. Interpretation is first and foremost a “I’m telling you that you said something other than what you wanted to say” addressed to the other [4].

Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan Web TV, broadcast of 15.5.2021, « L’écoute avec et sans interprétation ».

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mc8x9avBTw

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Reference 5

Raggenbass : With Lituraterre [5], Lacan frees himself from the primacy and dependence on the signifier. The letter of which he speaks does not have as etymology “Littera” (literature) but “Lino” (the coating, the erasure, the correction, the stain or the waste, the ordure in Joyce – Litter). What there is to grasp is that the letter makes a hole in the symbolic; it does not name, it does not speak, it is silence like a mathematical formula.

Jacques Lacan, « Seminar XVIII, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant », Paris, Seuil, 2006, Chapter VII, lesson of the 12 mai 1971, p. 113.

See Seminar XVIII, On a discourse that might not be a semblance [semblant] (1970-1971) : from 13^th January 1971 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19710113 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts). Note : Lituraterre is the published version & the following the transcript from unedited tapes.
pVII 1-2, 12.5.1971, of Cormac Gallagher’s translation,

Lituraterre

This word that I have just written gives its title to what I am going to offer you today. Because needs must, since you have been summoned here, that I should throw out something to you. It is obviously inspired by current event. It is the title with which I strove to respond to a demand that was addressed to me to introduce an issue that is going to appear on Literature and psychoanalysis.

This word, lituraterre, which I invented, is legitimised by Ernout et Meillet^, since there are perhaps some people here who know what it is; it is a Latin dictionary that is described as etymological. Look up lino, litura, and then liturarius. It is clearly specified that this has nothing to do with littera, the letter. I don’t give a damn about the fact that it has nothing to do with it. I do not necessarily submit to etymology when I let myself go in this word play with which from time to time one constructs a witticism, the art of the spoonerism [contrepet – literally ‘against fart’], which is obvious on occasion, coming to my lips and upsetting the ear. It is not for nothing that when you learn a foreign tongue, you put the first consonant of what you hear second and the second first.

So the this dictionary, you should consult it, is a lucky omen for me, because of being grounded on the same starting point that I took in a first movement. You should understand starting point in the sense of restart, a starting point from an equivaocation with which Joyce, I am talking about James Joyce, slips from a letter to a litter, from a letter, I am translating, to ordure.

(114) There was, perhaps you remember, but very probably you know nothing about it, there was a rich patron who wanting, to do him a good turn, offered him a psychoanalysis, and she even offered to pay for him to do it with Jung. From the word play that we are recalling, he would have gained nothing from it because he went straight away, with this a letter, a litter, straight to the best thing that one can expect at the end of an analysis.

^ Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, Ernout et Meillet, Klincksieck, 2001. https://archive.org/details/DictionnaireEtymologiqueDeLaLangueLatine/page/n3/mode/2up

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Reference 6

Raggenbass : This is difficult because it is totally contrary to the common sense of erasure which implies that there is something before it comes to be crossed out. Well, forget that! Lacan breaks with what precedes. The erasure of which he speaks is that “of any trace that was there before, this is what makes a land of the littoral” [6].

Jacques Lacan, « Séminaire XVIII, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant », Paris, Seuil, 2006, lesson of the 12 mai 1971, p. 121.

pVII 11-12, 12^th May 1971, of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, There you are, this is how it invincibly appeared to me in a circumstance that must be remembered, by the fact that it is necessary then that there should be distinguished erasure. Namely, that between the clouds, there appeared to me the trickling down which is the only trace to appear by operating in it still more than indicating the relief at the latitude in what one could call the Siberian plain. A plain that is really desolate, in the proper sense of (121) the word, of any vegetation, except the reflections, the reflections of the is streaming which push into a shadow what does not reflect.

What is this trickling? It is a bouquet. It acts like a bouquet, in the fact that elsewhere I distinguish by its first feature and from the fact that it effaces. I said it one time, but people always forget a part of the thing, I said it in connection with the unary stroke, it is from the effacing of the stroke that the subject is designated. This is noticed then in two phases. It is necessary therefore that erasing should be distinguished from it.

Litura, lituraterre. The erasing of any trace that was there before, this is what makes a land of the littoral. Litura pure, is the literal. Here, to produce this erasing, is to reproduce this half by which the subject subsists.

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Reference 7

Raggenbass : Finally, the human condition that we can deduce in Lacan is that of a significant addition to a surface without traces: “The vision of the flow of the One according to Lacan is that of the letter which comes to be added to the world, disturbing it. In this vision, the erasure dominates, which can equally well take the form of isobars, or highways which are like gliders from the sky, like a violation of natural laws. In all things of the world and of language Lacan sees the irregularity, the equivocation” [7].

Éric Laurent, « Une vision du ruissellement de l’Un », La Cause du Désir n° 107, Mars 2021, p. 68-69.

See A Vision of the Streaming (ruissellement – trickling down) of the One : 1^st March 2021 : Éric Laurent, on this site /5 Authors A-Z (Laurent)

In the notes to Laurent’s text is a reference to Lituraterre, which is the published version of Seminar XVIII 12^th May 1971. The following is the nearest quote in Seminar XVIII.

pVII 13014, 12^th May 1971, of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, Well then, what is evoked in terms of enjoyment because of the fact that a semblance is broken, this is what in the real – this is the important point – presents itself in the real as furrowing (ravinement). This defines for you the way in which writing can be said to be in the real the furrowing of the signified, in other words the amount of semblance that has rained down in so far as it is what makes the signified. Writing does not trace out the signifier. It only goes back to it be taking a name, but exactly in the same way as this happens to all the things that have been named by the signifying battery after it has numbered them. Since, of course, I am not sure that my discourse is being understood, I am going, all the same, to have to pin it down by an opposition. Writing, the letter, is in the real, and the signifier, in the symbolic. Like that, this can act as a little jingle for you.

I come back to a later moment in the aeroplane. We are going to advance a little like that: I told you that it was on the return journey. So then there, what is striking is to see them appearing. There are other traces that one sees for their part being sustained in isobars; obviously, traces that are of the order of an embankment, anyway, in general, isobars. This makes them normal to those whose slope, one could say, stands out in the clearest relief, and is marked by curves.

Where I was, it was very clear, I had already seen at Osaka how the auto-routes seemed to come down from the sky, that is the only place that they were able to set them up like that, one above the other.

Julia Evans2026-05-22T13:26:48+01:00