Of saying as practice

Chapter 5 : Of Saying as Practice Saying psychoanalysis: The effects of writing : We take up the gauntlet that Lacan threw down to us in Létourdit , when he identified psychoanalysis as “a practice of speaking”. There is a politics in writing that always skews speaking to one side or the other, that places emphasis and executes omissions and distortions, that fixes – what had no such pretension – in a conceptual mode that coheres, that editorialises, that textualises, that establishes. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Lacan could not have accompanied Derrida in his “there is nothing outside the text”. It is not about that writing. In psychoanalysis, the text is already a political operation. But writing will be something else in psychoanalysis, it will be “the letter that kills without any intervention from the spirit” – that’s what we call the unconscious. There is a practice of saying that Freud inaugurates, which is not the same as saying that he creates or invents it, or perhaps it is, if we expand the notion of creation or invention, to taking something from one field to another, to those small and not insignificant shifts, displacements by which something from one supposed field is trafficked to another, not without consequences. Something of that way of saying already inhabited poetry and saying, a mundane way of saying that Freud radicalises, pointing, perhaps knowingly or not, toward its (im)possibility. Psychoanalysis and literature: Genealogy of an unresolved tension : The relationship between literature and psychoanalysis is not obvious. Our focus is rather on a productive tension that must not be resolved. Writing, saying, signifier, letter, semblance and enjoyment, enunciation, discourse, are set in motion in a game of multiple, non-dialectical relays, in a signifying progression-digression toward a real hole that makes any claim to mastery over that which speaks to us impossible. Literature then becomes liture-land, erasure and lifting, trace and footprint between enjoyment and knowledge … shore and remainder.