Struggling with Lacans Ltourdit and Fierens Second Reading

STRuggLIng wITH LACAnS LTouRdIT AnD

fIEREnS SEcond REadIng 1

Mary Cullen

The paper outlines a circling around LEtourdit and Christian Fierens second
reading of it in order to find a way in. Starting from a place of sense- that
of the universal, language, and current public discourse attention is then
brought to focus on the rigour of the requirement of an analytic formation.
The work of Winnicott towards the end of his life in attempting to describe
the place where life begins is juxtaposed with the Real of Lacan, leading to
a grappling with the effect of the structure coming from the unconscious and
an outline of progression to date in understanding Fierens second and third
formulae of sexuation.

Keywords: public discourse; modal structure; Winnicott; second formula of

sexuation; third formula of sexuation.

Lacan ..it is uniquely by equivocation that interpretation works. There

must be something in the signifier that resonates2

Sunset Hails a Rising

Dying by inches, I can hear the sound

Of all the fine words for the flow of things
To mark the path into the killing ground
The poets and philosophers have used
Perhaps their one aim was to give words wings,
Or even just to keep themselves amused

1
Lacan, J. The First Turn of LEtourdit (1972) in The Letter Irish Journal for Psychoanalysis, 41,
Summer 2009. Fierens, C. Le discours psychanalytique. Une deuxime lecture de LEtourdit de
Lacan. Toulouse, Point hors ligne, Ers, 2012. Translated by Cormac Gallagher (2014) The Psy-
choanalytic Discourse. A Second Reading of Lacans LEtourdit c.f. www.lacaninireland.com, and
The Letter Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Issues 57, 58 and forthcoming issues.
2
Lacan, J. Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX111 Joyce and the Sinthome 1975-1976. Translated by
Cormac Gallagher, c.f. www.lacaninireland.com. Session of 18th November 1975, p.10.

39
 Struggling with Lacans Ltourdit and Fierens Second Reading

These lines by Clive James, from the last poem in his recent publication,3 -
written as he believed himself to be dying - evoked for me the notion of the
signifier that resonates.

What we have been trying to do in the work of our cartel4 for this year is to
understand something of the wings of words - the said and the structure
coming from the unconscious which might reveal the track of the unspoken
saying, the attention to equivocations and homophonies, every differance
of speech and of silence in analysis - and a great deal more besides.

A first way in through public discourse

Searching for a way in to make some headway with Lacans LEtourdit and
Christian Fierens interrogation of it, mainly his second turn around it, I no-
ticed that something was being brought to my attention which referenced, in
public discourse, the place of the void or absence. A review in March of this
year in The Irish Times of a play by Simon Stephens - The Sea-Wall5 - out-
lines the protagonists terrifying confrontation with the Real. He finds himself
swimming, floating out to the sea-wall, meeting the indescribable abyss of
the fall beneath. In the reviewers words The play is about absence, about
nothingness, about unfathomable depths. You cannot depict nothing but you
can try to trace the void.6 In Seminar XXIII Lacan writes that language only
appears as making a hole in that in what one can situate as Real. Language,
moreover eats this Real7 hence the requirement for circling around it. That
same month, I visited an Art Exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy in
Dublin with the title The Untold Want. In April I noticed another exhibition
of paintings by Tim Goulding in the Doswell Gallery in Cork with the title
Patching the Void. And then a review of Tom McCarthys Satin Island - sub-
sequently short-listed for the Booker prize in which this and the authors
previous novel, The Remainder, are hailed as a deconstruction of subjectiv-
ity where McCarthy reads all subjectivity as an illusion8or as Christian Fi-

3
James, C. Sentenced to Life. Picador, 2015. p.56. (emphasis in bold is mine)
4
Marion Deane, Mary Cheyrou-Lagreze, Patricia McCarthy, James OConnor and Plus One, Chris-
tian Fierens.
5
Stephens, S. The Sea-Wall. Methuen 2008.
6
Crawley, P. Irish Times review, March 2015.
7
Lacan, J. Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX111 Joyce and the Sinthome 1975-1976. Op.cit. ses-
sion of 9th December 1975, p. 5.
8
Gildea, K. Irish Times, May 2nd 2015.

40
 Struggling with Lacans Ltourdit and Fierens Second Reading

erens put it in a very different context, always selection, perception is always

hallucination.9

Noticing these references in public discourse means that I had already found
something of what I was looking for. A gleaning of the import of Christian
Fierens text spurred me on to continue my circling around this something.
In the Observer10 another article caught my eye, in which Brian Allen - a for-
mer director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and who in
December 2015 will deliver a lecture at the LSE on Art, Law and Crises of
Connoisseurship - decried the loss of true scholarship and the art of connois-
seurship in Britain. This he ascribes to the fact that British art scholars are
losing the rigours of a conventional classical education. He further bemoans
the failure of British art colleges, because of their contemporary emphasis on
the social history of art, to school their students in the requisite skills, labori-
ously acquired, which would enable them to recognise the tiniest stylistic
quirks in a painting, thereby allowing them to identify the work of a master,
his assistant, or a forgery. I was struck by how this failure might also apply to
psychoanalysis, where the crucial importance for psychoanalysis to stick to
its last11 has its proper emphasis. This is located by Freud and Lacan as the
requirement that the analyst undergo a formation that would allow him work
clinically with language, sexuality and the unconscious, the modal structure
a formation that is demanding of an unimaginable rigour and resilience.

A second way in through Winnicott

Reading Winnicott provided a second way in to what, in Lacans and Fi-

erens work, I was beginning to circle. Something of Winnicotts interroga-
tion of memory, his conceptualisation of what he called human nature and
his pursuit of what exists before what he called the state of aloneness had a
resonance with the reading in progress in our cartel. The state of aloneness
theorised by Winnicott is paradoxical (one of Winnicotts many paradoxes).
What he calls health cannot be arrived at without having first lost the state
of aloneness a state that, unless it is lost, cannot be returned to as a nec-
essary launching-pad from which to set off again. Towards the end of his
9
Fierens, C. Presentation, Introduction and Chapter 1 of The Psychoanalytic Discourse. A Second
Reading of Lacans LEtourdit (2012) Translated by Cormac Gallagher (2014) www.lacaninireland.
com. p. 20. and The Letter Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis Issue 57, Autumn 2014. p.19.
10
Alberge, D. Is it a Canaletto or a Bellotto? Dont ask an art historian in The Observer November
15th 2015.
11
Sutor, ne ultra crepidam Cobbler, not beyond the sandal or stick to what you are trained to do

41
 Struggling with Lacans Ltourdit and Fierens Second Reading

life Winnicott was pre-occupied with the non-communicating self, forever

isolated and alone which, he writes, must never be breached.12 Borrowing
from Francois Villas essay13 on Winnicotts posthumously published work,
Human Nature14 - a prcis of lectures he had given to social work students at
the LSE - I became interested in possible convergences in Freuds, Lacans
and Winnicotts work where each grappled with the points wherein psychic
life resists thoughts grasp.15 With this concept, Winnicott was attempting
to describe the place of the beginning of life. This empty space that Win-
nicott struggled to articulate had for me a confluence with the empty space
of Lacans lack-of-sense designating sex, or ab-sense.16 This is the space of
the Real without the Symbolic and the Imaginary, without words, the place
in analysis of a stoppage of sense. Fierens writes that its meaning is much
broader than simply a stoppage of associations. It is above all the forgetting
of everything that can carry sense.17 Although very different conceptualisa-
tions are at stake, the juxtaposition of Winnicotts non-communicating self
forever isolated and alone, with the empty-space of LEtourdit, lead to my
catching of something which might draw me in further to LEtourdit - not-
withstanding the fact that Winnicott never referred to the phallus.

As far as Ive got in understanding fierens Second Reading

Sex ab-sense (sexe ab-sens) / sense-absex (sens-absexe)
the saying/the said

Contrary to sexuality, which is valid as an already established given, sexua-

tion is always under construction, in process, in function.18

12
Winnicott, D.W. Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Oppo-
sites (1963) in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London, Karnac.
Winnicott Trust. 1984.
13
Villa, F. Human Nature, A Paradoxical Object. Between Winnicott and Lacan. A Clinical Engage-
ment. edited by L. Kirshner. London, Routledge 2010. p.151.
14
Winnicott, D.W. Human Nature (1954) Free Association Books.1988.
15
Villa, F. op. cit. p.153.
16
Fierens, C. Chapter 2 of The Psychoanalytic Discourse. A Second Reading of Lacans LEtourdit
(2012) Translated from the French by Cormac Gallagher (2014) c.f. www.lacaninireland.com. p.
39. and The Letter Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis Issue 58, Spring 2015. p.10.
17
ibid. p. 39. and p. 11.
18
Fierens, C. First Turn Chapter 4: The Phallic Function and the Formulae of Sexuation in Reading
LEtourdit Lacan 1972. Translated from the French by Cormac Gallagher Lecture de LEtourdit
Lacan 1972 (2002) Paris, LHarmattan, 2002. www.lacaninireland.com. p. 92 and The Letter, Irish
Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis Issue 53, 2011. p.1.

42
 Struggling with Lacans Ltourdit and Fierens Second Reading

The place of the sex ab-sense referred to in the previous paragraph may
be construed as a place without language or thought; it is a breakdown of
sense. The sense-absex flees from this pure structure of the empty space
and fills it with Symbolic and Imaginary sense leaving behind sex, and the
ab-sense of the sexual relationship in the Real19. In analytic experience the
sense ultimately meets the wall of the Real, the place of silence, the abyss
where all meaning fails. Once entering into language and thought, we are in
the universal. I is the universal of what is indicated by the I.20

The said of language is what we hear in the universal but behind the said
there is the saying. The subject of stating (not the person) ex-sists out-
side the said of language. This constitutes the negation of universality, the
exception, but because it ex-sists it also contains the universal.21 The cut of
sense (sex ab-sense) ex-sists in the pure structure of the Real and puts us on
the track of (Freuds) inference of saying.22

The phallic function and the second formula of sexuation

The challenge to the exception in Aristotles rule of logic that Lacan explicat-
ed allows for the broken down signifier of the phallus to serve as a point of
failure in the psychoanalytic discourse thereby providing a launching pad for
a phallic re-launch. The subject ex-cepts itself and finds its consistency by
precipitating itself onto the exception. In order to sustain itself for a phallic
re-launch it must dispute the validity of the phallic function 23 - in excepting
itself, it nias or denies the phallic function. Coming ephemerally into being
at this point of suspension - precisely at this point, a fleeting gestation, the
point of semblance starting from the signifier where failure of sense and of
meaning necessitates the plugging of the nya of the void - the nia, the excep-
tion, is a response which geometrises the locus and renders it tangible.24 But

19
a comment of Christian Fierens in his capacity as Plus One in our cartel
20
Fierens, C. Presentation, Introduction and Chapter 1 of The Psychoanalytic Discourse. A Second
Reading of Lacans LEtourdit (2012). op. cit. The Letter, Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanaly-
sis. 57, 2014. p. 13. and www.lacaninireland.com. p.14.
21
ibid. p. 21 and p. 23.
22
Fierens, C. Chapter 2 of The Psychoanalytic Discourse. A Second Reading of Lacans LEtourdit
(2012). op.cit. The Letter, Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis. 58, 2015. p.7. and lacanini-
reland.com. p.37.
23
Fierens, C. Chapter 3 of The Psychoanalytic Discourse. The Logics of Sexuation. A Second Reading
of Lacans LEtourdit.. c.f. www.lacaninireland.com. op.cit.
24
ibid. p.72.

43
 Struggling with Lacans Ltourdit and Fierens Second Reading

what escapes in this phallic re-launch is outside phantasy making a cut in

sense.25

The phallic function and the third formula of sexuation

Following onwards on this path of saying which inevitably falls into the
incest of the saying and the said26, the third of the four formula of sexuation
introduces a new value of creation27 into logic. The sex ab-sense flees from
sense to the void, to the radical empty locus, to the nya. This nya, this radi-
cal absence, belongs to the Real. This absence always forgotten and always
underlying every said cannot be negated. Every equivocation in speech, ev-
ery differance of language, lends itself to the wings of words, allowing for a
possible repudiation of the incest between the saying and the said.

It is the empty space of the nya, (il ny a pas there is not). The third of the
four formulae of sexuation the forgotten, unloved one introduces the unde-
cidable, within which one will not be fixed either in contradiction or non-
contradiction.28 The nya only subsists in the differance, in the equivo-
cation of what might attempt to fill it to allow.. the structure to speak.29 The
cut is the undecidable, the impossibility of any principle whatsoever30 and
reproduces exactly the matheme of psychoanalysis; it is that but it is not
that.31 The phallus as signifier of the psychoanalytic discourse takes on a new
function, that of a broken down signifier, the cut at the wall of the impossible
where meaning and sense fails. From here on in, the third formula of sexua-
tion, the nya introduces the fourth formula the not-all and a new reading
of the psychoanalytic discourse where the phallus functions as a phallic re-
launch comes into play.

no substance of the feminine

For the woman, being from the outset already castrated, the nya of the void,
may leave her without resource in the relationship with her own mother from

25
ibid. p.76.
26
Fierens, C. Chapter 2 of The Psychoanalytic Discourse. A Second Reading of Lacans LEtourdit
(2012). op. cit. The Letter, 58, p. 30.
27
ibid.
28
ibid. p. 22
29
ibid. p. 23
30
ibid. p. 27
31
ibid. p. 28

44
 Struggling with Lacans Ltourdit and Fierens Second Reading

whom she expects something of a feminine, her own, substance. She assumes
that her mother has this to give and that her father has not. This substance is
not forthcoming and thus complicates her relationship with her mother. There
is much more to be said about this. For the girl, sex as cut is more accessible
for her than the phantasy, and the question of saying is closer to her than
the dimensions of the said. However the designation boy girl is only a
manifestation of the complex knot that one imagines as castration.32 There
is no substance of the feminine, not even the void of an already completed
castration.33

The saying

The perfectly teachable matheme of saying is, always unique and can be
heard in the empty space and in the equivocation of the said.34 To return to
our opening quote of Lacans from Seminar XXIII It is uniquely by equivo-
cation that interpretation works. There must be something in the signifier that
resonates. The ear cannot be shut, hence the importance of the voice.35 The
structure of saying coming from the unconscious interferes with the meaning
of the signifier. It hovers in the space between an apparition of the subject and
an ephemeral catching of it. This is the place of the exception. It is already
disappearing before it can be caught. The signifier then changes meaning and
its sense is renewed, in a phallic re-launch. Structure is the real that comes to
light in language36. There is a beyond of sense to sex. Each turning around
the real its not that, the differance, is repeated in a circulation of meaning
sense and sex. In this roundabout a breaking down of the subject emerges,
an almost uncatchable movement within which in order to remain sensitive
to this value of the beautiful, rampart of the terrible, one must place oneself
like Antigone, between- the- two- of two dit-mensions destined to die.37

This is something Antigone can teach us.

32
bid. p. 8.
33
Fierens, C. Chapter 3 The Logics of Sexuation. The Psychoanalytic Discourse. A Second Reading
of Lacans LEtourdit (2012). www.lacaninireland.com. op.cit. p. 84.
34
Fierens, C. Chapter 6 The Structure of the Psychoanalytic Discourse is Interpretation. The Psy-
choanalytic Discourse. A Second Reading of Lacans LEtourdit (2012). www.lacaninireland.com .
op.cit. p. 159.
35
Lacan, J. Seminar XXIII, Joyce and the Sinthome 1975-1976. op. cit. p.10.
36
Fierens. C. Chapter 5 The Sense of the Psychoanalytic Discourse. quoting Lacan (AE, p.476) op.cit.
p. 134.
37
Fierens, C. Chapter 6 The Structure of the Psychoanalytic Discourse is Interpretation. op.cit. p.164.

45
 Struggling with Lacans Ltourdit and Fierens Second Reading

..from Antigones point of view life can only be approached, can

only be thought about, from the place of the limit where her life is al-
ready lost, where she is already on the other side. But in that place she
can see it and live it in the form of something already lost.38

Conclusion

The tentative tone of this presentation cannot be avoided, representing as it

does my own question about the extent to which public discourses, the theo-
risation of Winnicott - while offering ways of speaking about the Real - fall
short of Lacans theory of the discourses, the phallus and the nya (il ny a pas
de rapport) and what the implications of this might be.

The struggle with LEtourdit continues in the second year of our work. Thanks
to our Plus One Christian Fierens and to the members of the cartel group.

To help me carry on, I will end with lines from a song from the Villagers
recent CD

And the one thing I long for is the one thing I lack.
When will I get there? Will I ever get back?39

e-mail address for correspondence: mecullen48@gmail.com

38
Lacan, J. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Book V11 1959-1960. Edited by J-A. Miller. Norton
&Company Inc. 1992, Routledge 1992. Session of June 8, 1960. p. 280.
39
So Nave in Darling Arithmetic sung by Conor OBrien, Villagers (2015), Domino Records.

46