What is the Real?
JACQUES- ALAIN MILLER
Beyond Prince Charming
& Pink Swords
MARIE HÉLÈNE-BROUSSE
Note on the Treatment
of the Symptom
by the Analytic Act
PIERRE-GILLES GUÉGUEN
Lacan's Legacy:
From the Universal to
the Particular
NATALIE WULFING
Lacan as Analysand
ÉRIC LAURENT
The Real
& the Semblance
JACQUES- ALAIN MILLER
Everlasting Couch
MARIE HÉLÈNE-BROUSSE
The Emperors Heron
FRANÇOIS REGNAULT
[...]Lacan even said once, in his overture of the Spring Awakening, that boys wouldn’t have any kind of relation with girls if they didn’t have their dream to guide them. What an absurd declaration it seemed, as a proposition in the era of sexual liberation. And now today in the era of hypermodernity, where little boys watch pornographic films from the age of 12 on and have access to all the information. Nevertheless, whatever the degrees of the democratization of pornography, of putting women’s bodies in all possible positions at the general disposable of the general population, it does not correspond with the experience of sexuality. If it weren’t for the dream, there would be no way to place the two sexes in relation. In abolishing the distance between perception and the dreamer, the dream introduces a world where a possible mingling of bodies can be approached. In the dream mode of articulation between invisible jouissance, the world of representation takes shape. It marks a passage from the invisible to what is an unformed symbol At the same time, precisely something that is not the form of the body.
John Updike and Martin Amis, two novelists, approached this. Updike, in his classic, elegant, precise prose, wanted to describe what the sexual experience was beyond any common roles. He had the ability to convey the nature of erotic experience in a way that was quiet special among modern novelists. Martin Amis said two things about him, first, that Joyce said that certain things are too embarrassing to be written down in black and white. Updike was congenially unembarrassable, and we are the beneficiaries of that. He took the novel to another plane of intimacy. And the second thing he said, commenting about his project, his new novel, The Pregnant Widow, “I wanted to write sexual memoirs and this is impossible.” Updike tried it. He went into the bed with precision instruments, something like a Japanese camera crew with hi-definition cameras, but even with this it didn’t work.[...]