“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” summary: Objecting to the gloomy formalism of contemporary psychoanalysis, Lacan demonstrates the necessity of orienting Freud's concepts within language structures, by expanding the notion of the subject beyond his “subjective” experiences toward the intersubjectivity of his own unconscious as the other's discourse.
“The Signification of the Phallus” summary: Lacan expounds upon his notion of the phallus, neither as a fantasy nor as an organ, but rather as a signifier which serves to uncover the relations between mind, soul, and man's desire as structurally unsatisfiable.
“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” summary: Lacan characterizes the moment of the child recognizing himself in the mirror as a linguistically-structured series of asymptotic approximations toward his becoming, subjectively, I.
Passage for close-reading:
“Naïve mouth—whose eulogy I shall spend my final days preparing—open up again to hear me. No need to close your eyes. The subject goes far beyond what is experienced 'subjectively' by the individual; he goes exactly as far as the truth he is able to attain—which will perhaps come out of the mouth you have already closed again” (219).
This passage occurs in “The Function of Field and Speech” immediately after a section in which Lacan has been explicating Freud's treatment of the Other, specifically within the confines of the Wolf-Man case. At the end of the explication, Lacan concludes by asserting that the case makes clear how love is realized: through the state of grace instantiated in the intersubjective agreement. At this moment, the dialogue Lacan is constructing between himself, Freud, and the readers or attendees of his seminars is interrupted by the cry of an imagined “impatient auditor” whom Lacan, seemingly uncharacteristically, pauses to address.
The categorization “impatient auditor” make a synecdoche of the questioner, his own subjective experiences concentrated to the location of his ears, and their apparently imperfect listening skills. Frustrated and demanding clarification, the auditor is literally all ears, both in the aspect of his being Lacan illuminates for us, and in the content of his question, “What, then, is this subject that you keep drumming into our ears?”
The bodily synecdoche carries over int the text of Lacan's response, although the location of the focus shifts as Lacan addresses the erstwhile auditor as an interlocutor, as a “naïve mouth.” As the auditor's identification shifts to his mouth, the function of that organ shifts to incorporate that of the ears, as Lacan ceremoniously enjoins the auditor's mouth to “open up again to hear me.” With this direct address to the naïve mouths of the audience, Lacan embeds the impatient auditor into his own explanation, smoothing out the knots and opening a space in the network so that the voice of the impatient auditor emerges from within, effectively enacting the internalization of the desire of the other within his own discourse. Likewise, the gentle imperative sentences “open up again to hear me” and “No need to close your eyes” suggest a childlike auditor who requires developmentally and pedagogically appropriate lessons.
The passage is punctuated with instances of a resigned paternalistic tone. Naïve mouth as a form of direct address takes on the connotation of a diminutive for a child, particularly in light of the innocent associations of naivete, and the fact that the mouth represents the center for the earliest of the infantile libidinal stages, the oral. In this way, Lacan's address to the impatient auditor, in order to soothe his impatience, functions by operating on the auditor's body, training him in the proper poses to adopt in order to gain the clarity he seeks. If Lacan's interjection operates on a pedagogical level towards the auditor, this pedagogy is also spiritual. The image of the subject with open mouth—the better to listen with—and closed eyes is not only that of a child, but of a communicant, waiting with open mouth for Father Lacan to drop the wafer on his tongue that will provide him with the knowledge he seeks. With his mild injunction, “No need to close your eyes,” however, Lacan upsets this receptive mode of learning, refusing, characteristically, to give his teaching in the form of a little pill. Rather, he retrains and decenters his interlocutor's bodily responses, shifting the seat of these synecdoches in order to re-situate the place of the subject within his own body. He who has ears, let him see. He who has lips, let him hear.
Within this pedagogical moment of engaging with the subject's body, Lacan speaks to his original query by asserting that the subject exceeds the bounds of his own subjectivity in direct proportion to the amount of “truth he is able to attain” from a discourse outside himself. At this moment, Lacan again breaks off his own discourse to attend to the interlocutor's body for the second time, with an ironic adverbial phrase whose tone suggests a parent gently reprimanding a child for losing concentration. The auditor's mouth has already closed again, suggesting that in falling out of the bodily relationship in which Lacan is training him he is, temporarily, closed to the potential of receiving or transmitting, close-mouthed and hence unable to either listen or speak according to Lacan's slippery bodily identification.
Yet within this discursive shift which draws attention to the interlocutor's lack of bodily discipline, Lacan casts the auditor as the Other, who, in the intersubjective agreement, can futurally serve as the unconscious of the subject, the discourse of the other. The ironic “perhaps” fails to completely erase the future surety of the “will come out,” leaving open the perennial possibility of the mouth's reopening, of the bodily training progressing. IN this way, while the interlocutor's mouth has slipped closed in the immediate past of this clause, the possibility for its reopening can be forever anticipated, allowing the doubting auditor to successively approximate the truth of subjectivity—so long as he keeps his mouth open.
What a wonderfully vivid moment to choose. I love you connection to the communicant, thence the wafer to the pill, though I wonder whether the pill or the wafer is similarly synecdochal in a way that might contribute more to your interpretation? I also am struck by the displacement from ear to mouth to eye, a transposition that you implicitly play on but do not comment on. Is the intersubjective therefore also a kind of synaesthesia? What does the combining of hearing and eating suggest about Lacan's topography of the subject--is there interiority here? Is this moment one that contributes to an understanding of the subject without boundaries (in the way contrary to how we habitually think of the subject--in other words as a traversal rather than a monad)? What of the "rent nature" the tear or split in the subject? how does that figure into the bodily imagery here?
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