Profane Illuminations
[excerpt]

 

 

Jacques-Alain Miller

translated by Barbara P. Fulks

 

To resume again...

Profane Illuminations
J
- A MILLER

Detached Pieces
J
- A MILLER

Drawing
A
LAIN BADIOU

The Formulas of the Real
A
LAIN BADIOU

The Question of Democracy
A
LAIN BADIOU

The Sound of Silence:
Wagner with Stalin
R
EX BUTLER
SCOTT STEPHENS

A Letter Which Did Arrive
at its Destination
S
LAVOJ ZIZEK

Jean Claude Abreu
A
DRIAN DANNATT

Florencia Gonzalez Alzaga
J
OSEFINA AYERZA

[...]

I opposed the symptom to the sinthome and the opposition of truth and jouissance became apparent, since the sinthome affects everything, except a decoding of truth. I found the dichotomy opposing desire and drive in our usage of Freudo-Lacanian terms. There, too, the operation of decoding has a meaning concerning desire, but not when it is a matter of understanding or learning something about the drive.

[...]

The consequence of discourse is understood in two ways. First, there is the logician's artifice, which consists in detaching from spoken languages a zone which is an enclave, a zone where it is a matter of things as if. . .then. . ., of deductions, of demonstrations, of implications, of certain conclusions, with measured lexicons and grammars. In this zone, which is like an enclave in spoken language. That gave us, in effect, a certain knowledge of consequence, which perhaps one can find best represented in the utopia of a universal language such as, for example, the one the famous Bishop Wilkins dreamed about in the seventeenth century. It is in Borges-reprised by Lacan-that one hears first about Bishop Wilkins, who worked on the construction of an artificial language which he proposed for all nations. But Bishop Wilkins' universal language as this logical enclave in language is not a language, since no one speaks it; it is only a written and invented language.

And then, there is the consequence, in the sense of what discourse revives in the real. It is there that discourse would not be vain. The word "consequence" means here effect of the symbolic in the real. It is what we call structure, that is to say knowledge as cause. It is interesting that Lacan number 2 ended in making this niche in Lacan number 1, of defining structure as in the real and not in the symbolic. We believe, however, that we learned the contrary, but we learn it from Lacan number 1. Lacan number 2 considered as absurd that structure could be other than in the real.

[...]



L'orientation lacanienne, Paris, Autumn 2005 - text and notes in French edited by Catherine Bonningue and published in la Cause freudienne 62, Paris, March 2006.

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