For the Imaginary
There is a stable and recurring theme that runs throughout Jacques Lacan’s work: the “supremacy of the symbolic order” over the Imaginary. There is no doubt that the Symbolic comes first in the formation of the unconscious: without language, there can be neither Imaginary nor Real. But this historical and logical antecedence in no way implies the primacy of the signifier over the signified: Lacan moves here from an observation to an aporia. Admittedly, a postulate is often necessary for the development of reasons; but an anteriority does not necessarily have to be metamorphosed into a (First) Commandment.
In an article entitled “Lacan Iconoclast” (1), the philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux showed the importance of Lacan’s postulate of the supremacy of the letter, acquired at the cost of a constant and fundamental depreciation of the image. He draws a striking parallel between the Exodus of Moses and Lacan’s thought process: Moses fled Egyptian polytheism and the imagination consubstantial with hieroglyphics, as Sigmund Freud remarked in a note in Moses and Monotheism, to go to the Promised Land where a Name reigns supreme (an unpronounceable Name, another note by Freud), forbidding it to be represented or decorated with imaginary finery: the Name is stripped of all substance and quality. In the same way, Lacan walked towards the Law, that is, towards the matheme, (2) the Promised Land where there can be no images. The epic of Moses is also an itinerary that leads from a primordially logographic script to an alphabet, abstracted from things and ideograms. It should be noted here that the Egyptians also had an alphabetical transcription, intended for foreigners and slaves, i.e. the Hebrews.
For Freud, the Exodus represented the progress from matriarchy, linked to the image, to patriarchy, the spiritual abstract: “paternity is more important than maternity… This is why the child has to have the father’s name and inherit after him.” (3)This allows Jean-Joseph Goux to identify the Lacanian symbolic order, centred on the phallus subtracted from the patriarchy, and consequently to paint Lacan as a phallocrat, as people have often mistakenly done.
CASTRATION AND RESSURECTION
What then of the status of works of art in the theory? Lacan referred to a certain number of paintings which he no doubt appreciated as a seasoned amateur. I would argue that the works he refers to are illustrations, in the strongest sense of the term, which does not make Lacan an iconodule; on the contrary, the decryption must be understood against the stable background of iconoclasm. I would stress that it seems pointless to me to hold Lacan’s interpretations against him: admittedly, we shall see that they are reductive, but they are consistent from an analytical and theoretical point of view, the only one that mattered to him in the final analysis.
My first example, The Ambassadors (1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger, appears on the cover of Seminar XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. (4) The painting immortalises the meeting of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, ambassadors of Francis I to Henry VIII at the court of London. This meeting took place in April 1533, during Easter week; the religious context is evoked by several objects: the half-masked crucifix in the top left-hand corner, a hymn book, the cross of the Order of St. Michael around Jean de Dinteville’s neck, and the clerical garb of Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur. Critics have long since catalogued the fabulous iconographic richness of this painting. It is saturated with emblems of the quadrivium ( arithmetic, geometria, musica and astronomia), the arts of numbers which, together with the arts of language (added to the curriculum during the Carolingian Renaissance), formed the seven arts of knowledge: knowledge and science, as practised in the West from Plato until the sixteenth century. These coats of arms refer to the whole of the known world, illustrated in particular by the terrestrial and celestial globes to Jean de Dinteville’s right. Lacan’s reading dismisses all these emblems to focus on a single message: there is no doubt that the painting is also a vanity ( vanitas), a reminder of human mortality in the face of which all our endeavours are stamped with the seal of insignificance.Three coats of arms illustrate this message: the Crucified One halfhidden in the top left-hand corner, Jean de Dinteville’s motto embossed on the medal of his beret ( memento mori: remember that you will die) and, finally, the famous anamorphosis of the skull and crossbones between the two friends’ feet. We recall that, for Lacan, “interpretation is not open to any and all meanings.” (5) In the name of which the images, the very imaginary of Holbein’s painting, the tension that arises between the abundant emblems and the vanitas, are reduced to the “right” analytical interpretation. For Lacan, the skull and crossbones, the only element he comments on, are analogous to Salvador Dalí’s melting clocks and represent castration. At the very heart of the exuberance of the emblems, the supremacy of the symbolic order and its two consequences, castration and death, ensure the victory of iconoclasm. But this interpretation comes at a price: the whole dialectic between images and castration is erased. In particular, the religious context falls by the wayside: Easter week is not only the week of the Crucifixion, but also, and above all, the week of the Resurrection, the week of life beyond death.
BODY AND SOUL
Seminar XX. Encore (6) also features a celebrated work of art on its cover, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1645-1652) by Bernini. It is a staging of mystical pleasure: not an immortalising petrification of the intense and fleeting moment of ecstasy, but rather the time when marble becomes flesh and Life. Bernini followed Saint Teresa’s description very closely: “I saw an angel close by me, on my left side... He was not large, but small of stature, and most beautiful—his face burning, as if he were one of the highest angels, who seem to be all of fire… I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that
I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one.” Lacan’s reading (very brief, less than a page long) takes place in two stages; first, the recognition of pleasure and ecstasy: “[...] for Saint Teresa—you need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand that she’s coming. There’s no doubt about it. What is she getting off on? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it, but know nothing about it.” The second stage is the one in which the ecstasy of the flesh is dismissed, despite what Saint Theresa says (“the body has its share in it, even a large one”): “What was attempted at the end of the last century, in Freud’s time, what all sorts of decent souls around Charcot and others were trying to do, was to reduce mysticism to questions of cum ( affaires de foutre). If you look closely, that’s not it at all.” (7) For Lacan, the statue shows and demonstrates the radical difference between phallic jouissance, which is always dependent on a lure emblematised by its object, and feminine jouissance, the “God face.” This is the God of Abraham and Isaac, the God who forbids images. In spite of what she claims, Saint Theresa is therefore subject to the iconoclastic prescription; her pleasure is bodiless, without words or figures, and the tension between body and soul is thus erased. For Lacan, then, the two examples cited are decoys, as is Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866), which he owned but to my knowledge never mentioned. These decoys conceal/disguise castration, the absence of sexual intercourse, a hole in the representation that the scopic drive (“means of avoiding castration”) works to mask whilst simultaneously indexing it. In this way, the image is dismissed from itself, and its pleasure excised. The issue of prescribing the primacy of the symbolic is not, therefore, to privilege any kind of “phallologocentrism,” it is much broader: the symbolic order is clearly on the side of death, towards which the essential thinning and extinction of the letter is directed, whereas the imaginary, sustaining desire and its fantasies, its sublimations (in the work of art in particular), is on the side of life and its sexual reproduction. For both sexes.
LAW AND DESIRE
Lacan did not hesitate to characterise his theoretical undertaking as psychotic: “The psychic is a test of rigour. Thus, I would say I am psychotic. I am psychotic for the single reason that I have always tried to be rigorous [...] Logicians, for example, who strive towards this goal, geometers too, share a form of psychosis in the final analysis.” (8)This is a very lucid statement: the expansion of the letter, the weakening of the flesh and the image are very close to mental illness, and can even lead to it (see the case of the mathematician Cantor, quoted by Lacan). In other words, Lacan thought it necessary to find a barrier to the expansion of the symbolic. First of all, in his practice as an analyst, his objective was one of simple ethical common sense: “An analysis should not be pushed too far. When the analysand thinks he’s happy to be alive, that’s enough.” (9) But also in the ultimate stage of the matheme, the Borromean knots. There is no longer any question of the supremacy of the symbolic order over the imaginary; on the contrary, the three instances of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary (RSI) have no pre-eminence over one another: “The minimum required was that, of these three terms, imaginary, symbolic (i.e. chitchat), real, each was strictly equal to the other two, knotted in Art & Language. Study for Index VII: Now they are. 1992. (Coll. Philippe Méaille, Château de MontsoreauMusée d’art contemporain)
such a way that they were equal parts.” (10) Let’s introduce a little ethics into the logic of knots. Let’s imagine their dissociation; the symbolic alone leads to mental illness. An imaginary dissociated from the law, as we see every day, results in all kinds of excesses, identity-based, racist and ideological. And an autonomous real would mean a war of all desires against all others. Let us not minimise the equivocations, contradictions and dialectics of law and desire; to erase them is to give free rein to the infinite extension of the mad superego.
“Love is a who knows what, That comes from who knows where, That enters from who knows where And brings death who knows how.
It’s a delicate touch
That strikes without sound
And sometimes deprives us of meaning Without any idea of how it was produced. And without our knowing how it happens, It moves towards an unknown goal,
It enters from who knows where
And brings death who knows how.
It is always in a fixed place
And immediately at the right moment, It moves like fire
From the depths of the firmament,
But though it be in a fixed place,
No one knows where it comes from,
For it moves from who knows where And brings death who knows how.
It makes a divine wound
That causes a glorious death.
And it is in such a way
That we die and remain with life,
That we see God and we don’t see him. I know not how he hides,
I know not where he enters from
And he brings death who knows how.” Saint John of the Cross
Translation: Juliet Powys
Taken from the proceedings of a conference I organised at Louisiana State University, Lacan and the Human Sciences, published by Nebraska University Press in 1991. 2 Algebraic formatting of analytical concepts. 3 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 1939. 4 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis [1973], State University of NewYork Press, 1995. 5 Ibid., p. 31. 6 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX. Encore [1975], W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. 7 Ibid, p. 77; emphasis added. 8 Scilicet no. 6/7, 1975, p. 9 (our translation). 9 Ibid., p. 15; emphasis added: the analysand thinks, i.e. imagines that he is happy to be alive. 10 Ibid, p. 40.