Lacan's My Teaching and Bruce Fink's Lacan to the Letter

My Teaching summary: In a trio of colloquia delivered to separate audiences of asylum inmates, psychiatric interns, and medical faculty, Lacan both summarizes and enacts his thinking on the ways language constitutes the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real interface.

Lacan to the Letter summary, “Lacanian Technique:” Fink closely reads a seminar wherein Lacan takes neo-Freudian psychoanalysts to task for what he sees as slavish adherence to an imaginary, rather than symbolic, mode of analyzing

Passage for close reading: “Freud describes a dream as a certain knot, an associative network of analysed verbal forms that intersect as such, not because of what they signify, but thanks to a sort of homonymy....It is when you have found the word that concentrates around it the greatest number of threads in the mycellum that you know it is the hidden centre of gravity of the desire in question. That, in a word, is the point I was talking about just now, the nodal point where discourse forms a hole.” (28)

I chose this passage largely for the density of its metaphors. Within a discourse that is largely colloquial, the syntax of the three lectures often involves many short, seemingly simple sentences full of pronouns and articles that reach backwards and forwards, sometimes for pages, in search of an antecedent. This fluid interconnectivity is part of why this passage is so long: sifting out a truly independent clause was difficult to do without arbitrarily chopping off a chain of meaning. This passage stood out to me particularly for the recursive shifts in tone played out through the figurative language, where specialized terminology and rhetorical devices from the fields of linguistics and physics clash against one another, seemingly unresolved.

Lacan begins explicitly within Freud's thought, summarizing the latter's notion of dreams as “a certain knot.” Here, the adjective can be read in two ways: certain in the sense of positive or absolute, and certain in the sense of particular. Closely following this adjective phrase is another wherein the words “network” and “knot” reflect off each other as both metaphor and synecdoche: the dream as a “certain knot” is immediately clarified by the seemingly more direct, and more clinical term, “associative network,” signifying that the dream is a knot is a network, but also that the dream is a network made up of many subsidiary knots, or connections. By beginning with the implications within the word “certain,” which can denote specificity or universality, in contrast with the precision and singularity of “an associative network,” Lacan's text enacts homonymy prior to the word's appearance in the sentence.

The prepositional phrase modifying the “associative network” reinforces this recursive temporality, but shifts the metaphors into the discourse of mathematics to do so. In this phrase, “analysed” is a verbal in the past tense: these forms, as Lacan describes them, have always already been analyzed. The adjective here seems to encode a past progressive sense, in that the verbal forms are progressively analyzed as one moves outward along the radials of the associative network. The action of these forms, “that [they] intersect as such,” is also taken from the language of mathematics. The forms intersect, however, as specifically verbal forms, undergoing a kind of union that is unique to verbal rather than mathematical forms. This verbal intersection differs from the mathematical definition in that these forms intersect not on the basis of what they signify, in the way that numbers signify quantity and proportion, but “thanks to a sort of homonymy,” which has already been foreshadowed.

The word “thanks” here serves as a small, impacted instance of personification, an implied outside actor granting gratitude to the homonymy without whose actions the intersection would not be possible. While an alternate formulation like “due to” or “through” would signify teleological, mathematical necessity, “thanks” enacts the “weaker logic” Lacan discusses which is harder to make stick, but ultimately just as rigorous as the formal, unavoidable structure of “strong logic.” The logic of this homonymy functions through a relay of sameness, by unearthing the differences and hence the relations underneath the cover of sameness. By thanking homonymy for its efforts, the sentence asserts that the similarity in names is not an accidental detritus that must be brushed aside for meaning to take place, but the heart of the relationship, the node of the ability to relate, to make associations of meaning. Lest this sound too positivist, the sentence reminds that similitude also conflates, erases: makes a hole through which, in the creation of which, language and meaning can be born.

In the second sentence, the language makes a sharp turn towards the scientific as it outlines the dimension of this hole. The subject of this sentence is “you”, but this subject is buried within the second clause of an inverted declarative structure. In this way, the reader's—your—importance as the seeker of words is sidelined by the sentence beginning with the indefinite “it is.” “You” is granted primacy as the one who found the concentrated concept, but this importance is secondary, in time and grammatical structure, to the agency of the word that “concentrates around it the greatest number of threads.” If “concentrates” is the language of chemistry, “threads in the mycellum” is the language of botany, where the mycellum is a fungus, organized structurally as a web, or a mass, as opposed to the plant which is organized venally, with successive and directed branching patterns. While a plant has direction and (generally) upwards growth, a fungus has associations which pile up upon one another accretively and potentially contradictorily.

This network of associations, this seminal word one has found, both denotes and conceals the presence of a “hidden centre of gravity.” Gravity implies necessity, the unavoidability (but also weakness) of the force pulling lighter bodies towards heavier ones: one can't help but fall into the center of gravity once it has been found. The construction “center of gravity” as opposed to force of gravity also localizes the mechanism and as such suggests a gravity well, a place where the mechanics and mathematics collapse into themselves and where matter follows suit, creating, at the heart of the seemingly concrete metaphor of the mycellum a negative point where matter is drawn towards its inverse. The fact that this centre is hidden suggests that one could stumble upon it, could fall unwittingly into the well. The mycelium seems stable, dense, interwoven, but this very interplay creates and conceals a schism by means of the relationships among words.

The prepositional phrase: “of the desire in question” states the specific mathematical formula that the union of three or more words will both create and denote this centre of gravity of the desire, yet desire has not been mentioned in the passage as yet. By seemingly already existing so pervasively that an antecedent to “the desire in question” is not needed, desire becomes the backdrop of gravity in the way that space/time serves as the backdrop of and medium for gravity in the astrophysical sense. In this way, the center of gravity allows one to read the desire by bending it, modifying it, disrupting its shape. The homonymy of words curves around the edges of this sentence, reflecting meaning at oblique enough angles to make the desire readable in absentia.

In the third sentence, the word “point”is remarkable in a similar vein. There is no clear referent to “the” that allows one to elucidate which point he was talking about just now, or when “just now” refers to. The word “point” homonymically could refer to an element in a discourse, to an idea or a claim, or to a mathematical point, a spot which both locates and vanishes, in that a point has no dimensions? His clarification that the point he was talking about (which comes temporally later in the sentence) is a nodal point supports that mathematical argument and also echoes Freud's language, making this point occupy two registers and two discourses at once (Freud's and Lacan's) but also neither, since each point would have no dimensions, would be no-place. This homonymy serves to mesh together Lacan's thoughts with Freud's on the astonishing quality of words, but does so by conflating the rhetorical “point” as an element of discourse into the geometrical “point” as a vanishing point, as a mathematical certainty undermined by a mathematical ambiguity. This is the nodal point where discourse forms a hole, where the mathematics turns non-Euclidean and the meaning falls out the hole, the gravity-well, in the bottom of the basket, where the curvature of the basket itself and the power of gravity are necessary forces to reading the desires and the truths embedded in language.