Given at the French Institute of Milan on 18th December 1967 at 6.30pm
In English
Bilingual, translated by Scott Savaiano, see www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan (154. Autres Écrits/ De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la réalité)
In French
– www.École Lacanienne.net /pas tout Lacan, available http://ecole-lacanienne.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1967-12-18.pdf or De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la réalité, 18thDecember 1967
– Scilicet n° 1 pp. 51-59, Paris, Seuil, 1968
– Also p351‐359of Autres Écrits : 2001 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (20010101 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
Citations
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– Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body : 12th & 19th May 1999 (Paris VIII) : Jacques-Alain Miller. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Miller or Index of Other Authors texts)
P12 of Jacques-Alain Miller’s text, And so Lacan can say, in his text “De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la realité”[5] that the body reduced to thought, was profoundly misunderstood by Descartes. The constitutive misunderstanding of the reduction of matter and body to thought is in separating the body from its jouissance. But one must state at that the misunderstanding is also found in the operations to which we currently submit the body more and more frequently.
I read a kind of prophesy in what Lacan wrote in 1967 on this subject: “with the shocks of the imminent excesses of our surgery, we are disposed to make the body into its own pieces.” It is not only that the being of life, when the body is a speaking being, is this body in pieces. This is not the profusion of Diderot: “We are all polypariums, we are all colonies of animalcules badly individuated.” It is the One put in question by the body in pieces.
P12 Footnote 5. De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la réalité, Scilicet n° 1 pp. 51-59, Paris, Seuil,
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P10 of Scott Savaiano’s translation, The reality of the Freudian departure [l’écart Freudien] forms a barrier to knowledge, like pleasure defends access to jouissance.
This is a chance to remind us of what there is between them, in the presence of the body, that establishes itself as disjunctive junction.
The strange thing is that to which the body reduces itself in this economy. So profoundly misrecognised by Descartes that he reduces it to being mere extension, it would require that the imminent excesses of our surgery be applied to it in order to lay out for all to see that we dispose of it only in rendering it into its proper pieces, only insofar as it is dislodged from its jouissance.
Third “beyond” in relation to jouissance and to knowledge, the body makes the bed of the Other through the operation of the signifier.
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– Drive and Fantasy : June 1994 : Pierre Skriabine. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Skriabine).
p6 of Skriabine, I will attempt to define the drive by means of a ten-point commentary. …
5. In the fifth place, I will approach the fantasy by means of the question of reality. Reality, to repeat an expression of Lacan’s, is controlled by the fantasy. For the speaking being, reality is what results from the cutting that the signifier has already carried out on the real – already, for the Other is always already there; reality therefore immediately brings alienation – the forced choice of the Other, i.e. of the signifier – into play. As a consequence, the divided subject is caught in the metonymy of the signifying chain, and, for this desiring subject, the motor of its psychic reality will be the fantasy. The fantasy – and this is another way of bringing out the idea – therefore coordinates signifier and jouissance; it fixes jouissance and tames the real by means of the instrumentation by the object that it allows; for the desiring subject, it thus gives its frame to reality. This means that the fantasy is a montage by which reality is regulated and coordinated to the real; this montage protects the subject from this real and “covers,” as Lacan says, “what is properly the real, which is always glimpsed only partially.[*]” Lacan highlights the fantasy’s regulating and protective value at various points, especially in 1966 and 1967, in his Seminar XIV[**], La logique du fantasme, and in the text entitled De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la réalité, published in Scilicet 1[***]. The fantasy sustains and thus gives its framework to this veil – this dressing-up by the signifier and the imaginary – that constitutes reality, and which covers over the real.
[*] Probably Seminar XI The Four Fundamental Concepts (1963-1964) : from 15th January 1964 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan, though the exact reference has not been found.
Jacques Lacan uses drive in relation to montage twice in Seminar XI.
i 8th May 1964, p169 of Alan Sheridan’s translation : Let me say that if there is anything resembling a drive it is a montage.
…
The montage of the drive is a montage which, first, is presented as having neither head nor tail – in the sense in which one speaks of montage in a surrealist collage. If we bring together the paradoxes that we just defined at the level of Drang, at that of the object, at that of the aim of the drive, I think that the resulting image would show the working of a dynamo connected to …..
ii 13th May 1964, p176 of Alan Sheridan’s translation, It is because of the reality of the homeostatic system that sexuality comes into play only in the form of partial drives. The drive is precisely that montage by which sexuality participates in the psychical life, in a way that must conform to the gap-like structure that is the structure of the unconscious.
The references to the function of covering are given on P71, P155, p192, p270 of Alan Sheridan’s translation of Seminar XI.
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[**] Seminar XIV The logic of phantasy (1966-1967) : from 16th November 1966 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /Lacan (19661116)
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[***] this text, possibly p10-11 of Scott Savaiano’s translation, We shall call them: jouissance, knowledge and truth.
Thus it is from jouissance that truth is found to resist knowledge. This is what psychoanalysis discovers in that which it calls symptom – truth that makes full use of the disparagement of reason. We, psychoanalysts, know that the truth is that satisfaction not obviated by pleasure except as it exiles itself to the desert of jouissance.
Without a doubt the masochist knows how to call this jouissance back from the desert, but does so merely to show (precisely to reach it only so as to excite a demonstrative figure with his simulation) that he is in it an “all” (TN: tous – why not “tout”?) of the body, precisely that he is this desert.
Reality, given this, is controlled by fantasy insofar as the subject produces (se réalise) himself through it in his very division.
Satisfaction lends itself to this only in the upsurge of the drive, this being the detour that yields enough of its affinity to instinct that it needs to in order to disparage it, to metaphorize the circle of catgut that a bent needle would use to sew together two large lips. … P11-12, The psychoanalyst is the one that manages to stage the subject’s “I think” as alienation, meaning he uncovers the phantasm as the motor of the psychic reality of the divided subject. [358]
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– The Body in the Teaching of Jacques Lacan : May 1984 : Colette Soler. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Soler or Index of Other Authors’ texts)
p9, p2 of Soler : Instead, I will come back to this: that reality is not a primary given, it is already, I will use this term, a superstructure; that is to say that the relations which define the signifying structure are already inscribed in it, inhabit it, as Lacan says. That means that there is a beyond of reality. This theme of a beyond, as you know, is the title of an article by Lacan called “Beyond the reality principle”.[2] He did not take it very far. He said so himself when he presented that selection of his writings. But he took up the theme much later in an article in Scilicet 1, which is called, “La psychanalyse dans ses rapports à la réalité” [Psychoanalysis and its relations to reality], at the French Institute in Milan.[3] In this article, he takes up the expression of “beyond the reality principle” to say that what is beyond the reality principle is science. Science, as such, aims at the real. Thus, since I have introduced the term “reality”, I now introduce that which is its counterweight, if I can put it that way, in Lacan, which is that of the “real”. He defines it, as you know, on the basis of the impossible; that is to say, on the basis of a signifying impasse, more precisely, an impasse of formalisation.
[2] J. Lacan, “Au-delà du principe de la réalité”, Écrits, French edition, pp. 73-92. See Écrits : October 1966 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19661001 or 19360801 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
[3] 18.12.1968, pp. 51-59.
Footnote 3, this text, p9-10 & 11 of Scott Savaiano’s translation, Let’s examine more closely why the speaking being devitalizes the body so much that the world has for so long appeared to him to be in its image. In view of which the body is a microcosm of it. Our science has put an end to this dream, the world is not a macrobody. The notion of the cosmos evaporates with this human body that, equipping itself with iron lungs, launches itself to draw that line in outer space that, unheard of by the spheres, never before appeared anywhere save in Newton’s papers as a gravitational field. A line wherein the real at last constitutes itself out of the impossible, for that which it traces is unthinkable: Newton’s contemporaries heard the first shot (ont marqué le coup).
It suffices to recognize in the knowledge of science the sensibility of a beyond of the reality principle, in order for the beyond of the pleasure principle that has occupied much of psychoanalytic experience to be illuminated by a more general relativity.
The reality of the Freudian departure [l’écart Freudien] forms a barrier to knowledge like pleasure defends access to jouissance.
This is a chance to remind us of what there is between them, in the presence of the body, that establishes itself as disjunctive junction.
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