Famous Performance: Egan Frantz -- Adrian Dannatt, Josephina Ayerza 9 May 2013 @ Jack Tilton Gallery

"A true opinion remains no less an opinion from the point of view of science, as Spinoza shows. If you understand, so much the better, keep it to yourself. The important thing is not to understand, but to attain the true. But if you attain it by chance, even if you understand, you don't understand. Naturally, I understand - which proves that we all have a little something in common with delusionals. I have within myself, as you have within yourselves, what there is that is delusional in the normal man. I've just been to the butcher's - if I am told that there is something there to understand I may well declare that there is a reference to pig. I didn't say Pig, I said Pork. She agreed entirely. That was what she wanted me to understand. It was perhaps also what she wanted the other to understand. Except that this is precisely what one must not do. What one has to be interested in is the point of knowing why she wanted the other to understand this, precisely, and why she didn't say it to him clearly, but by allusion. If I understand I continue, I don't dwell on it, since I've already understood. This brings out what it is to enter into the patient's game - it is to collaborate in his resistance. The patient's resistance is always your own, and when a resistance succeeds it is because you are in it up to your neck, because you understand. You understand, you are wrong. What it is, precisely, that has to be understood is why there is something there given to be understood. Why did she say, I've just been to the butcher's and not Pig? I limited my commentary, because of insufficient time, to pointing out to you that it contained a gem, and showed you the similarity with the discovery that consisted in observing one day that certain patients who complain of auditory hallucinations were manifestly making movements of the throat, of the lips; in other words, they were articulating them themselves. Here, it's not the same, it's similar, and it's even more interesting because it's not the same. I said - I've just been to the butcher's, and then she blurts it out to us, what did he say? He said - Sow! This is the final word - thread, needle, my soul, my life, things happen thus in our existence. "
—Jacques Lacan - December 7, 1955