Lacan's Whore House

Forwarded from Symptoms

In the organism and in the global metabolism of an organism, language isolates organs and gives them their functions. One may sometimes even be aware of this in childhood. For example, I have a memory like this: when one is a child, and ill, and the adult asks you questions to find out, “What’s wrong with you?”, “Do you feel sick?”, “Does your liver hurt?”, “Does your stomach hurt?” How can the child from the start reply to such a question, given that the child may be able to localise a stomach on the surface, but as for the liver and the heart, what are they for a child coming into language? It is only once he has truly succeeded in framing this language and slipping into it, that he will be able to reply, “I feel sick.” [Literally, “My heart hurts.”] And it happens that for a long time he gets confused. So this fragmentation, which is taken to be a vexatious fragmentation of the image, is correlative to the functional working of the signifying body. You can see the corollary of this, precisely Freud’s thesis that Lacan denies the truth of: that is, “anatomy is destiny”. (S. Freud, “The dissolution of the Oedipus complex”). He says this, obviously, when speaking of the anatomy that differentiates the sexes: man or woman.

Colette Soler, The Body in the Teaching of Jacques Lacan (1995)

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In the organism and in the global metabolism of an organism, language isolates organs and gives them their functions. One may sometimes even be aware of this in childhood. For example, I have a memory like this: when one is a child, and ill, and the adult asks you questions to find out, “What’s wrong with you?”, “Do you feel sick?”, “Does your liver hurt?”, “Does your stomach hurt?” How can the child from the start reply to such a question, given that the child may be able to localise a stomach on the surface, but as for the liver and the heart, what are they for a child coming into language? It is only once he has truly succeeded in framing this language and slipping into it, that he will be able to reply, “I feel sick.” [Literally, “My heart hurts.”] And it happens that for a long time he gets confused. So this fragmentation, which is taken to be a vexatious fragmentation of the image, is correlative to the functional working of the signifying body. You can see the corollary of this, precisely Freud’s thesis that Lacan denies the truth of: that is, “anatomy is destiny”. (S. Freud, “The dissolution of the Oedipus complex”). He says this, obviously, when speaking of the anatomy that differentiates the sexes: man or woman.

Colette Soler, The Body in the Teaching of Jacques Lacan (1995)

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