The Other of the body

Lacan speaks about the body as Other in his last teaching. Who is this Other and when we might think of the body as Other in our clinical practice and analysis?

 “The Other of the signifier One, without meaning, is the body” (Alexandre Stevens). The Other of the signifier in the last Lacan is the body, and not the Other of truth. Maybe we might say that the Other of the body is before the Other of the signifier with meaning, the Other of the paternal metaphor. With regards to this, may we think that if we have a touch of that there is no Other of the Other, then our body might appear as Other?

There is something shocking to think about the body in such terms. “The Other of the body is the place where the effect of jouissance of the S1 is written“(Alexandre Stevens). As if the very writing of S1 makes the body as real a bearer of something from the symbolic, thus appearing as Other. The way I can think of this is through what Alexandre Stevens writes, citing Miller. It is that without leaving the field of language, we should “attune ourselves to its material part, to the letter”. There are some words which engrave into the body, and they have an effect  of a body event. “It is no longer the body conceived as mortified by the signifier, but the body as a place where the impact of the signifier produces an effect of jouissance” (A. Stevens).

Now language has an effect of real, and not to create meaning. And the symptom in its root appears to be a result of “the material encounter between a signifier and the body”, “the pure shock of language on the body”, a body event. Then it develops as meaning, we give a meaning to it due to the equivocation of the signifiers. The sinthome is written in the body. “The reading of the symptom aims at this initial shock” (Miller.) This body event is not on the side of dialectics, and should not be considered on the side of meaning. „It is a letter of jouissance“ says Alexandre Stevens, and also: „There is such a thing as One“, “pure real of the signifier One all alone, without meaning”. “The sinthome is located beyond that which supports meaning, fantasy, major identifications” (Body Event and End of Analysis, Anne Lysy). It is one initial event, which has not been subject to repression, and which iterates. Lacan calls sinthome this “pure reiteration of the One of jouissance”. “The One is repeated in the iteration and there is the body that appears as Other” says Alexandre Stevens. And maybe it is the body as Other that makes it possible something of this One of jouissance and its iteration to be spoken in our discourse while in analysis? The body is a “writing surface”, which could be read by reading the letter, the one that does not change, as opposed to meaning, and is one of the most real things for the subject.

Valentina Milcheva