The Psychoanalytical Act and the Causation of the Sensitive in Analysis^*

O Ato Analítico e a Causação do Sensível em Análise

Abstract

In this article, we will work on the articulation between the psychoanalytical act and the experience with the sensitive in an analysis. For this, we will initially approach the logical operations of causation of the subject in order to understand what being we are talking about when we maintain that the psychoanalytic act gives rise to the certainty of existing. Then we will unfold the experience of the sensitive from the notion of a living body, voice and resonance of the real. In the end, we understand that the analysis calls us to sustain a sensitivity beyond reason, one that consents to the resonance of the real and opens us to the power of life, of the act.

Keywords:
psychoanalytic act; body; sensitive; real; being

Resumo

Trabalharemos no presente artigo a articulação entre o ato analítico e a experiência com o sensível em uma análise. Para isso abordaremos inicialmente as operações lógicas de causação do sujeito para compreendermos de que ser falamos ao sustentarmos que o ato analítico faz advir a certeza de existir. Em seguida desdobraremos a experiência do sensível a partir da noção de corpo vivente, voz e ressonância do real. Ao fim, compreendemos que a análise nos convoca a sustentar uma sensibilidade aquém e além da razão, aquela que consente com a ressonância do real e nos abre para a potência da vida, do ato.

Palavras-chave:
ato analítico; corpo; sensível; real; ser

Knowing that a psychoanalytic process is entangled in the expectation of the ascension of the being in its relationship with the analyst’s desire, it is worth questioning which being we are talking about. If we do not speak about it as an ontological essence, but of that which comes as a certainty at the moment of the psychoanalytic act, could we think of analysis as a way of experiencing a sensibility implicated in the existence of this being? Aiming to problematize this hypothesis, we will discuss in the present text the relation between the act of the analyst and the causation of the sensitive from the resonance of the real.

It is precisely in order to answer the question about the being of the subject that Lacan makes use of the logical operations alienation and separation. He deals with them in particular in the 1964 Seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts and Position of the Unconscious, and later in the Seminars, The Logic of the Phantasm (Lacan, 1966) and The Analytic Act (Lacan, 1967-68). It is important to emphasize that in these two indicated moments he explored differently such operations, while in the 1964 texts his focus was on the constitution and the status of being of the subject, in the following ones his attention was directed to think the logic of the analytic device, that is, how alienation and separation operate in the entry, exit and effects of an analysis, locating the affirmation of the being as the product of such process.

The following excerpt, taken from “The Position of the Unconscious”, shows us the link between the desire and the psychoanalyst’s act with the logical operations of the subject’s causation, because in them we find the technique “for it is insofar as the analyst intervenes by scanding the patient’s discourse that an adjustment occurs in the pulsation of the rim through which the being that resides just shy of it must flow.” (Lacan, 1964/1998, p.716). That is, by intervening in the discourse of the analysant, the analyst, from this act, will scan where this being of the subject, who remains below the rim, will come from. From there, we will be guided by the purpose of answering: then to which being is the psychoanalyst’s act directed to?

Before going into these questions, we emphasize that the context of production of these concepts, especially the political and institutional transformations in vogue, also mark a change in Lacan’s conceptual formalization. Until then he worked with the linguistic-structuralist paradigm combined with the Hegelian theory, in which the subject of the unconscious would be equivalent to the lacanian maxims “the unconscious is structured like a language” and the “signifier represents a subject for another signifier” However, from that moment on, with the conceptualization of objet petit a, the interval position of the subject will no longer be enough to think about it, since it will be, from now on, an empty set capable of subjectifying its cause, “Strangely, cause and effect, in the Lacanian teaching of this period, are not reciprocal concepts: the subject is an effect of the signifier, however its cause is not the signifier itself, but the objet petit a.” (Dunker & Assadi, 2004, p.87).

It will be, therefore, in the face of the heterogeneity between cause and effect that, from this period onwards, Lacan will use logic and topology to operationalize the constitution of the subject and clinical management. We emphasize, therefore, that this turn in the Lacanian construction does not lead to the abandonment or replacement of the logic of the signifier. It coexists simultaneously with the topological formalization. We will, therefore, discuss, in the next topics, the causation of the subject of the unconscious by the logic of set theory and the experience of analysis by Klein’s quadrangle, aiming to unfold the effects of the psychoanalytic act in the causation of the sensitive and in the certainty of existing.

Causation of the Subject: Alienation and Separation

Over time, the subject we receive in analysis is surprised to recognize the presence of the Other in his speech, in his way of dressing, in the tone of his own voice, in the most subtle and apparently very private gestures. It is strange to hear how familiar our constructions are, and that this familiarity involves the foreigner who is not me. It is noticed with the sliding of the words in free association that the traits of the Other inhabit and determine our unconscious choices even though, sometimes, great effort is made in not following in the same footsteps. The constructions under analysis show us that the constitution of the subject is not without the Other.

There is something that should always have given us pause, namely that this subject - in so far as it introduces a hidden unity, a secret unity into what is apparent to us at the most banal level of experience, our profound division, our profound fragmentation, our profound alienation with respect to our own motives - that this subject is other. (Lacan, 1957-58/1999, p.51).

The assertion of an identity that defines the subject is a philosophical ideal questioned by Lacan, already reaping the effects of the Freudian unconscious, when questioning proposals that start from the idea that there is some essence that says about the subject, that is, that says what he is by himself. Hence Lacan (1964/1998) defending that the Cartesian subject is the presupposition of the unconscious, it was he who opened the doors for the unconscious to have a possible substrate in the field of ideas to be invented by Freud. Descartes sought to find the certainty of being and he found it, but not in the subject who is at the same time he thinks, “I think, therefore I am” (Descartes, 1637/2013), but in the path of doubt that led him to a God who does not deceive and who knows, knows absolutely. Therefore, the certainty concluded by Descartes is a certainty of a knowledge, however, a knowledge that is not in itself, because I am wrong, but God is not.

When analysants tell us about their identifications with the Other, they are bringing us what Eidelsztein (2009) called imaginary alienation, an effect of the logical operations alienation and separation. That is, what the subject can recognize as coming from the Other, mannerisms, traits, subtleties, are already the outcome that each one managed to produce in the face of separation from the Other. We consider it necessary to bring this differentiation so that we do not reduce the logical operation to its phenomenon, equating alienation with dependence and separation with freedom (Eidelsztein, 2009), so that giving another destination to the traits arising from the other does not establish the subject’s independence, otherness is fundamental and irremediable.

The operations alienation and separation are ordered by a circular and non-reciprocal relationship and even though alienation is referred to as the first and separation as the second, we understand that it is precisely these two highlighted elements, circularity and non-reciprocity, that configure them in a logical time where it is not possible to place them in a linear sequence of overcoming one by the other. They encompass two fields, the field of being and the field of the Other, being the choice for the field of the subject impossible without first choosing the field of the Other (Lacan, 1964/1998).

Thus, if the field of the Other is the one in which the subject necessarily has to link himself to find the signifiers in which he will make himself exist in order not to succumb to the choice for being, the Other is, for the subject, the place of his cause, making him not the cause of himself. Here we see the source from which we extract the statement that the subject is not without the Other and is determined by him by the signifying inscription that causes him.

In short, alienation puts into operation the division of the subject who, in order to exist between signifiers, disappearing in the metonymic chain due to its appearance always between another place, chooses through meaning in order to restore the real constitutive lack of being. But for this real lack to be ratified it is necessary that another one, a symbolic lack, cover it up:

This lack takes up the other lack, which is the real, earlier lack, to be situated at the advent of the living being, that is to say, at sexed reproduction. The real lack is what the living being loses, that part of himself qua living being, in reproducing himself through the way of sex. This lack is real because it relates to something real, namely, that the living being, by being subject to sex, has fallen under the blow of individual death. (Lacan, 1964/2008, p.201).

The being is here understood as the sexed being, split by the loss of knowledge about sex instinctively pre-established in the animal kingdom. The being is, therefore, pulsional and partial. But for this loss - a real lack - to be symbolized, another lack must come to cover it. Nevertheless, alienation is a circular operation to separation, which means that for the lack to be logically represented, the separation must take place.

This logical moment can be translated by the instant of recognition of the lack in the Other. Let’s incarnate this Other in the figure of the mother and illustrate her interpellations to the baby: Are you crying? Oh don’t cry, mommy is here! Are you hungry? Come, I’ll breastfeed you. It is, therefore, in the intervals of this discourse that the child asks himself, after all, what does she want? Something in the Other’s discourse remains ungraspable precisely at the moment when it shows signs of not knowing. It is by putting the Other to the test that the subject recognizes his inconsistency, that is, his essential flaw, I don’t know everything about him and he doesn’t know everything about me either.

And as a first way out of the question about the lack of knowledge of the Other’s desire, that is, about the lack of the Other, the subject will respond with his own loss, “Can he lose me? The phantasy of one’s death, of one’s disappearance, is the first object that the subject has to bring into play in this dialectic ...” (Lacan, 1964/2008, p.210). In this way, insofar as the subject offers himself as a loss to the Other, what he finds again is but the return to that first time, to alienation, when the subject made himself split, cut by the signifier’s incision when choosing for the field of meaning, visiting the thin edge that separates him from the lost being.

His “can he loses me?” is, no doubt, the recourse he has against the opacity of the desire he encounters in the other’s locus, but it merely brings the subject back to the opacity of the being he receives through his advent as a subject, such as he was first produced by the other’s summoning. (Lacan, 1964/1998, p.858).

When we talk about lack, we are not talking about the lack enclosed, but about how, from a lack, we can do something with another lack, that is, how to operate with the lack of the Other from the lack itself and vice versa (Eidelsztein, 2009). That is, the two operations, alienation and separation, operating in a circular manner, without chronologically recommending which precedes which, establish the dialectic of desire between the subject and the Other, since it is in the return of one lack over the other that the subject’s desire is the desire of the Other, and that the subject recognizes himself as the object of the Other’s desire, “... what is at the origin is not the subject; at the origin there is no existence but the objet petit a.” (Sirelli, 2012, p.156).

In other words, if there is an existence of being, it is an existence referred to the objet petit a, a divided existence conditioned to surrender to the Other. This delivery demands consent. The speaker must consent to the resonance of the real conveyed by the voice. May the real then vibrate and resonate in the body, making the necessary agreement between language and the body, instituting, at the same time, in an act, the opening that is both a loss and a creative split. The subject, however, does not have the recognition of this gap and the power that sustains it. The analysis is, thus, one of the ways, like art, of making itself touched, via the psychoanalytical act, by this resonance.

We started this article by asking ourselves which being an analysis process is aimed at. In view of what has been presented so far, we think that it can only be found in the retroaction, logical torsion, of the two operations of causation of the subject. Therefore, if the analysis is directed towards this being who is based on real lack, we can no longer speak of a forced choice as in the mythical time of its causation, we speak of a subject who makes the choice to be there under analysis.

In view of what has been said, the direction of an analysis aims not only at the experience of the lack of being, which presents itself in the free association, but from the torsion instituted by the psychoanalytical act, it aims to re-update the being of the subject, the being that underlies on the edge of the unconscious, a pulsional being and sectioned by language, the being of irrevocable loss. Finally, the psychoanalytical act relocates the subject in the place of object, surrendering to the resonance of the real.

Subjective Destitution and Object Position

While in the 1964 texts Lacan focused on the logic of set theory to work on the causation of the subject of the unconscious, in the texts close to 1968 he resorted to Klein group to approach the course of an analysis from its entry to its exit. He also made use of the Cartesian cogito, this time subverting it with Morgan’s Law of Denial, he was an eminent mathematician and logician considered the father of formal logic who developed Morgan’s well-known first and second Laws. Through the first, used by Lacan, two propositions linked by “and” are denied by linking them with “or”. Making use of this law, from “I think, therefore I am” (Descartes, 1637/2013) and the Cartesian certainty about the being of the individual in the act of thinking, Lacan will seek the certainty of being starting from the impasse that exists between being and thinking, “either I don’t think, or I am not” (Lacan, 1967-68/n.d., p. 79).

It is, therefore, in this double “or” that precedes the subject in the action of thinking and being that the irremediable human condition of loss is registered. If the unconscious is the effect of the cut between the subject and the Other, the objet petit a as a product/rest of this section highlights the impossibility of reciprocity and continuity between thought and being, “there where I am thinking I do not recognize myself, I am not - this is the unconscious. There where I am, it is all too clear that I am lost.” (Lacan,1964/2008, p.103).

Where, then, can we place the subject if he is neither in the unconscious (thinking without a subject) nor in the Id (being without a subject)? To question the existence of the subject is precisely the Lacanian intention, because, as we have seen, we have no essence that defines and qualifies it. Hence, we understand why the path towards the unconscious, thinking without a subject, experienced in speech in free association, is so contrary to what is expected by the speaker, given that he is faced with his own loss in the act of thinking. According to Lacan (1967-68), the psychoanalytic act is involved in sustaining free association, because, at the same time, it causes the destitution of the subject, which he calls lack of being, and causes the objet petit a to emerge, a remnant of the being.

Sustaining the task is only possible because the analyst already has knowledge, conquered in his own analysis, about the lack of being of the subject supposed to know. We are saying that the unconscious is the via princeps so that the speaker has an experience of the falling in the expectation of a subject who is responsible, beforehand, for the knowledge. The experience with the lack of a subject with that previous knowledge comes with all the confusion that is characteristic of it. He will come across a knowledge of another order, a knowledge that comes without a subject and happens at the moment of creation, in act.

There is a destabilization of the symbolic order in which the speaker was supported. A new element settles in and makes a home, hence the bewilderment during “thinking without a subject” (Lacan, 1967-68/n.d., p.79) and the experience with the unconscious. Since this path tends to be rejected by the speaker, something needs to act so that the partners continue the experimentation despite all the inherent discomfort, we are talking about the analyst’s desire, the one who operates in the transference.

However, if the transference and the analyst’s desire direct the analysand along the path of truth in the experience of the unconscious and lack of being, this is not the end of it. The truth operation, therefore, composes the course of an analysis, but it is not what is at its ultimate point. For this reason, we find something beyond the lack of being. Lacan, at this point in his theory, is structuring a certainty about the being, demanding more from the process of an analysis, thus: “... it could seem that psychoanalysis is exactly the promotion of ‘I think and I am not’, when, in fact, the Lacanian perspective is that psychoanalysis must give way to an ‘I am and I don’t think’.” (Brodsky, 2004, p.73).

Thus, a certainty about being disarticulated from thought is outlined. We can think this through subjective destitution and what comes in its place, the position of the object cause of the Other’s desire. The speaker places himself in the position of what causes him, the objet petit a, because he knows what he lacks. But what does he know anyway? At this point, he carries out the suspension of all possible knowledge, he assures the “I am” by rejecting knowledge (Lacan, 1967-68/n.d.).

This instant is, as Lacan tells us (1967-68/n.d.), of the order of horror. There is no subject or Other there. There are no guarantees of what will come next. The analyst, as a subject, also resists this moment, also slips into places other than objet petit a, walking through the places of subject, being master and sometimes visiting the place of waste (déjet/déchet). And if there is something that sustains him and sends him to the position of cause of desire, it is precisely the analyst’s desire, a desire that enjoys existing and making exist.

Such desire does not clean the field of experience and sanitizes it of the horror that it can bring. On the contrary, the desire insists where there is a refusal: “The resistance of the psychoanalyst in this structuring is manifested by the act, which is altogether constitutive of the analytic relation - that he refuses to act.” (Lacan, 1967-68/n.d., p.117). This desire also tells us about the consent to experience the real in resonance guided by the only present knowledge, that which is not presented in thought, but in the body. It is the sensitive that is at stake, causing and summoning us to participate in the act.

The living body and the forgotten dimension of the sensitive

It is interesting the terms used by Lacan in the course of his teaching to refer to life, considered to be the most unknowable and mysterious (Lacan, 1974). In the text “Position of the Unconscious” (Lacan, 1964/1998) he talks about the living substance as that mysterious substance that is a sign of a time prior to the incorporation of language. In the Seminar XX, “Encore”, when he brings the living body, he also talks about the speaking being, indicating that this being is without predicate, because there is no essence that defines it. It can only be an effect of what is said (dit): “Being is presupposed in certain words, individual for example, or substance.” (Lacan, 1972-73/2008, p.126).

At another point, he tells us that supposing something beyond language is an intuitive, but inescapable, reference, “From this perspective, isn’t it true that language imposes being on us, and, as such, obliges us to admit that we never have anything of this being?” (Lacan, 1972-73/2008, p.44-45). It seems to us that expressions such as living body, speaking body, living substance, speaking being and later parlêtre insist on making present this lost dimension of being, of the living being, because in the experience something of it persists as inescapable.

The body is a body because it is bathed in the network of signifiers and lalangue, that is, the organism is no longer there, it is a body from the beginning, since from the beginning it was apprehended by the other’s discourse. It is also an imaginary consistency anticipating a unified arrangement at a time when we are still a bag of organs and perceptibly loose body parts. However, on this side and beyond this represented body of imaginary consistency, there is another consistency that exists in the symbolic: the real consistency. We quote Lacan (1975-76/2007, p.19): “It nevertheless remains that an empty sac remains a sac, in other words one which is only imaginable from the existence and the consistency that the body has, that the body has by being a pot”. The real consistency that ex-sists insists on presenting itself only through its effects, in the only-after.

It is all the same difficult not to consider the Real, on this occasion as a, as a third. And let us say that that what I may seek as a response belongs to something which is an appeal to the Real, not as linked to the body, but as different. That far from the body, there is a possibility of what I called the last time a resonance, or consonance. And it is at the level of the Real that there can be found this consonance. That the Real, with respect to these poles constituted by the body and on the other hand language, that the Real is here what brings about harmony. (Lacan, 1975-76/2007, p.40).

The real in its power of encounter resonates and updates the re-encounter of language with the body. There is a point of reality in language, lalangue, which touches the body and reminds us of its origin, lost, of course, but present in effects that give ex-sistence to the living body. These effects are not of sensations and emotions that can be transcribed to the field of representations, either through words or feelings, they are effects that we will only hear about through the hole in the symbolic or even through its refusal to be pierced, as in the case of autistic people (Vivès, 2012).

The body is imaginary and has traces of the incorporation of lalangue. This body touched by the real makes the living body ex-sist, so, instead of assuming a real body, it makes sense to think of the real that touches the body, bringing out what remains of the living being. This is effectively outside the symbolic, ex-sisting (Lacan, 1975-76/2007), caught, however, by the real that touches it.

By giving way to a body touched by the real outside the symbolic-imaginary body, we are not refusing the materiality of the body that enjoys itself, “the body enjoys itself”, a thesis echoed by Lacan (1974, p.11) from the text The Third. We intend, however, to open these established notions a little more, bringing via topological logic the presence of the living body as an effect of resonance of the real and not just as the material body that enjoys (jouissance), as we understand it to have been worked by Lacan (1972-73/2008).

The reading we make of the term living body seems to us to affirm at a single stroke the irrevocable loss of the living and, at the same time, the life that insists and makes itself visible through its confrontation with the real. In other words, we touch the speaking body, smell it, caress it, hurt it, but not the living body. The living body is not palpable, but it is, through the encounter of this speaking body and the real, moved to make itself experienced. We therefore propose that through the encounter of this real dimension with the speaking body, the lost, but not eliminated, living being is summoned to come, awakening us to a sensitive that is sometimes forgotten.

The voice in resonance, sounding the sensitive

The object of the drive pulsional registers the separation between the body of one and the body of the other. It is the in-between that this fallen object makes itself seen. In this way, such objects and, primarily, the voice, establish the dynamics of becoming a subject. It is interesting to think that the voice, while demarcating a loss and separation from the Other, also promotes the link. Thinking about the initial times, the mother’s voice, adorned with desire for the baby, addresses itself with a cadence and timbre summoning the subject to come, or rather, invoking him.

According to Vivès (2012), the subject to come must consent to lose the voice object so that he can then engage in the enunciation, that is, so he takes the voice for himself. In this sense, the voice is the first object that the subject needs to agree to lose so that from then on, all the others enter in the wake of the lost objects. The voice is, therefore, since its fall, what supports the subject’s enunciation, because only with the concession of the subject in losing it will he be able to address the question of his being to the Other.

The voice is, in the origin, the continuity that makes us lose the dimension of time, it is enough to remember a deafening and anguish-provoking cry to have access to this experience of abolition of time, since it is represented through its intervals, seconds that count themselves, days that go by. The scream has an unbearable continuity that forces us to react and cut, being this the unbearable effect of the real face of the voice (Vivès, 2012).

In order to better exemplify this bodily event, we have the video of Troy Andrews¹ playing the trumpet. In this one, for more than three minutes, the artist incessantly blows the same notes, making them meet in a continuous circle that is unbearable for those who are there with their body. The applause comes as an attempt to make a hiatus, to give pause to the annihilating continuity of the dimensions of time and space, as a request for him to stop.

This unbearable experience of being gives us news of the real point of the subject, of the pulsional point, a sign of the living being. Orrado and Vivès (2020) located this point as the timbre, which does not have a unit of measurement, and therefore escapes attempt at quantitative apprehension. Paradoxically, however, the timbre is immediately recognized, sounds with the same pitch, intensity and duration will not be the same because they have different timbres, it is what makes the voice of each speaker vibrate in a unique way (Orrado & Vivès, 2020).

The timbre resonates carrying the pulsional, a sign of the living, touching the body from the voids left by the loss of the object of the drive (Orrado & Vivès, 2020). Thus, the pierced body finds no shelter from what approaches and comes from the Other, carrying with it the pulsional weight of the speaking being. According to the authors in vogue, there are, however, some cases of bodies that remain as shells, whole shields, to protect themselves precisely from this dimension of the voice, which they find unbearable, as is the case of the autism. The bodies in analysis, however, are not protected from the voice in resonance (Orrado & Vivès, 2020).

Finally, to approach the notion of resonance, we will start by dialoguing with the field of music. In this field, the experience of being touched by something that passes unnoticed by consciousness is easily recognized. This is the case, for example, of musical tonality, as explained by Maurray Schafer (2010) in the classic book “Le Paysage Sonore”, as a composition that is perceived, but not noticed. For him, the senses of touching and hearing are mixed, because even if some low-frequency sound waves are not consciously perceived, they vibrate and reach the body of those who listen without knowing that they are listening.

Lacan (1971-72) is equally captured by what touches us and does not permeate what is of the order of reason. He wonders if the cause of what resounds is not what is at the origin of the res, das ding, the Freudian name for the first lost object. That is to say, if what is at the origin, even if mythical, is the real, what is of the resound (réson) order is sustained above all in this real.

The psychoanalyst Isabelle Orrado (2018) in her doctoral thesis “La résonance comme concept psychanalytique: Les médiations thérapeutiques: une mise en résonance de la jouissance pour un traitement par l’art” ² proposes to elevate the notion of resonance to the status of one of the operative concepts of clinical practice. In her studies, she found that for such a phenomenon to occur, it is necessary to place a wavelength and a sensitive body with their own frequencies in contact, after which we will have an unprecedented movement. This body, as we have already said, needs to have spaces, voids, through which molecules can stir, move and propagate. In the words of Orrado (2018, p.11): “Letting be could, in fact, be another way of naming resonance. This phenomenon can be understood as the response to an excitation, and we propose to bring this response closer to a phusis: the resonance makes movement become”³.

The expression used by the author “Faire laisser être” is quite interesting and difficult to translate without sounding strange to us and without losing the original meaning. We translate it as “make let be”, a grammatical structure that is not recurrent in our language, but which at the same time conveys the necessary activity and conveyance so that what was not there can come. A decision in the conveyance is needed for the being to come.

This idea of a decision in surrender sounds beautiful and challenging, since we are talking about surrendering to the contingency of an encounter with the real and, as Orrado and Vivès (2020) tell us, our psyche is used to defending itself from this encounter by placing itself under its cover. Hence, they propose art as a possible mediation, since it is a way of treating the real through the symbolic. In clinical practice this also happens, because we have the symbolic as a resource. It is through the word that the subject goes around the voids that can be seen, or rather, resonated.

Alain Didier-Weill (2010) also addressed the theme of resonance in the book “Un mystère plus lointain que l’inconscient” to bring the experience of revelation. According to Didier-Weill (2010), the human body is a flute, another image, like a resonance box, used to represent the holes in the body. The revelation is of the dimension of the act, of this silent but luminous irruption, which breaks with the references that frame the subject’s world; there is no time or space.

Walking with him, we arrive at the idea of a real human, of an original pulse that is not inaccessible to civilized man, often dormant, but that can be awakened (Didier-Weill, 2010). This original pulsation that constitutes what is most human is called by him the “inner drum”. As humans, we would therefore share the power to make our sensitivity and creative power sing when we allow this instrument that persists within us to awaken.

If this instrument is here within us, how do we go about playing it again or not stopping playing it? Didier-Weill gives us a clue: “... we all know that it is possible for us to stop reasoning so that our inner drum stops not to ‘resonating’⁴” (Didier-Weill, 2010, p.21), that is, it is necessary to give life to the inner pulse. He brings us the example of the experience of revelation lived by Rilke when touching the marble of a sculpture. In this experience, the effect of the touch would have awakened his inner drum, silenced by the melancholy state he was in, restoring the lost vitality.

That was Rilke’s awakening. Of course, each speaker becomes more sensitive to certain experiences than to others. And as Didier-Weill (2010) tells us, the body’s ability to resonate and awaken our living being can be discovered in the smallest experiences, whether with the rhythm of light, sound or marble. Where there is pulsating life, that is, a trace of the human, of this living being lost in our history, the drumming can happen, the revelation of the real.

To a disposition to make oneself sensitive to awakening, to make oneself surrendered, faire laisser être. It is worth mentioning, when we talk about a decision on conveyance, we are not reducing this choice to the rational field. We speak of a decision of the order of being, something that transcends and transfigures the variables of consciousness. We would say that this choice takes place in the act, that is, in the very moments in which what belongs to the order of being, of the living body, comes to surface, transmitting to the subject the certainty of its existence.

The certainty of existence would come, contrary to what we expect, with what we do not know how to define

He would not know how to say it, he only knows one thing: in him resonates a real of which he did not suspect the existence of, and which suddenly removes him from the doubt that he could have about reality (Didier-Weill, 2010, p.39).

If we consider that this certainty in existing is where we meet with the sensitive, we can also live it in the experience of analysis. In these terms, wouldn’t free association be an invitation to experience much more than the rain of thoughts, words and feelings, an invitation addressed to the speaking being in making itself felt? A call to the sensitive? As Lacan (1967-68) said, if the demand is, in fact, the analyst’s, it is because from his analytical process as an analyst to come, he has been experiencing the flavors of this real in resonance, making himself, since then, host from other drum wheels. Thus, implicit in the analyst’s demand for the analysand to associate freely, there would be an invitation to experiment with the sensitive of the lack of being.

We have been talking about an aesthetics of the sensitive capable of invoking the living as an effect of the awakening of the inner drum. We will now approach it punctually, thinking about what this aesthetic has to offer in an analysis and beyond it.

For an Aesthetics of the Sensitive and the Undoubted Gift of Existing

The state of grace she was in wasn’t used for anything. It was as if it came just to let you know you really existed. In this state, besides the tranquil happiness that would shine from people remembered and from things, there was a lucidity that Lóri was only describing as light in weight because in grace everything was so, so light. It was a lucidity of someone who’s no longer guessing: who, without effort, knows. Just that: knows. Don’t ask what, since the person could only answer in the same childish way: without effort, you know (Lispector, 1998, p.135).

And there was a physical beatitude to which nothing could be compared. The body was transforming itself into a gif. And she felt that it was a gift because she was experiencing, from a direct source, the unquestionable blessing of existing materially (Lispector, 1998, p.135).

Lóri couldn’t explain why, but she thought that animals entered the grace of existing more often than humans. Except they didn’t know, and humans realized it. Humans had obstacles that didn’t get in the way of animals’ lives, like reason, logic, understanding. While animals had the splendor of something that is direct and moves directly (Lispector, 1998, p.136).

The voice is by Clarice Lispector (1998) in An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures. Lóri bites an apple, enjoys the state of grace and ascends to paradise. Such a state intimates the body, intimidates reflection and opens two frontiers that were not there until then, Lóri before and Lóri after the apple.

Our sensitivity has competitors, obstacles are imposed by habit and condition. It was and is necessary for our psychic structuring the efforts to represent reality, that is, if initially we were beings of feeling, it was essential for us to also be beings of thinking. It is interesting to see that this kind of duplicity was present even in the history of aesthetics as a field of knowledge.

According to Renato Barilli (1994) in “Curso de Estética”, initially the term aesthetic proposed by Baumgarten referred to feeling, not with the heart and feelings, but with the senses and perceptions of the body. Over the years, however, what had been born as the ability to perceive was transmuting and approaching to the thinking process and to the intellect.

Accordingly, the conception of an aesthetic linked to perception and a kind of cognition was worked on by Vivès (2018) in “Un exemple de cognition corporelle et de son utilisation: le travail de l’acteur”, whose central proposition is that there is a bodily intelligence dissociated from a psychic subjectivation. To support his point of view, he resorts to the actor’s performance in the theater, since the artist surrenders to be guided by the knowledge of the body, silencing the knowledge already established by what he calls “psychological montages”. According to Vivès (2018, p.1), theater requires its actors to maintain a permanent game between being inside/outside the character, in a state of possession and dispossession of the self; “this paradox can only be resolved, as we will see, by establishing a relationship with the body that is not only represented, but also felt⁵”.

The actor’s act asks the body to partially put in parentheses the activity of thinking while activating feeling through bodily sensations. The manifestation of bodily knowledge requires, however, that the subject renounce the imaginary and scopic dimension of the body. Vivès (2018) exemplifies this through the actor’s performance and the case of a young man who tried to imitate the pose of Gustav Eberlein’s sculpture, “Spinario” or “Boy with Thorn”. In this one, the boy was hooked by the fascination of his image, imprisoning himself to the gaze and to the trap of the image.

The pregnancy of the image, as the case demonstrates, prevents the young person from forgetting about the appearance body in order to open up to feeling, essential for the body to be able to reactivate by itself the coordinates of a time before the empire of the image, the pulsional body. This instinctual body of self-knowledge is experienced at the very moment when it gives itself to be felt and invented. The contrast made by Vivès between the body captured by the image and the body freed from the drive takes us back to what we said about the willingness to surrender to the resonance of the real.

Thus, this surrender and self-abandonment speak of separation with the expectation of a powerful other to instruct me on how to be and do. This process also composes the path of an analysis because there we are gradually discovering the voices of others in us, their commandments and directions; we start separating ourselves from those who are so close to whom we were alienated to. We began to be interested in what is on the other side, on the other shores. The act of separating also happens in the relationship with the analyst, because the psychoanalytical act makes us see that knowledge is not with the other, nor with me, but in the instant in which it is created.

We conceive creation in a general way as everything that gives breath to life because it leads us to a disposition of “joie d’être” (Audi, 2010). The philosopher in question explains to us that this joy of being has nothing to do with an affective state, but with an act. A decision in the belief that happiness can be experienced, even if in fact it is not, is thus an act of faith, “... not in the sense of carpe diem, but in the sense that what is at stake is not so much your salvation as... ‘your skin’!” ⁶(Audi, 2010, p.123).

And what Audi (2010) conveys to us is that in this state we experience a certainty because we put our skin, our body at stake. This certainty comes from a knowledge that is completely different from the knowledge of conscience, “... a knowledge whose certainty comes from a source quite different from the one that waters the eyes of the spirit”⁷ (Audi, 2010, p.142), because we do work not of the flesh, but with the flesh. And creating is nothing more than opening the field of possibilities, giving life to the unprecedented.

Through the psychoanalytical act, like the creative act, we prove the undoubted certainty of existing. Certainty that comes with the body that life cannot be all that you live. There is so much more to explore, to invent. We speak, therefore, of a process of analysis as an aesthetic experience. It brings us the new, gives us rhythm and the perception of a body that pulsates in search of satisfaction.

Conclusion

The analytic act is, according to the proposed route, cause and effect of the encounter with the potency of life, since its effect is the hole in the symbolic, which makes possible the creation. It is in the body-to-body that we have the possibility of encountering life, as that which is most real, and from there we can experience its power of renewal. As Audi (2010) tells us: “Creating gives the creator the ability to live beyond what life has the possibility to make him live, and it also gives him the ability to experience more than his life has the possibility to make him experience”⁸ (Audi, 2010, p.15).

Well, if in this life we are not going to survive, but to live beyond what life itself offers us, we have the path of creation. Only creation can establish new ways of feeling, thinking and imagining (Audi, 2010). The psychoanalytical act establishes this power, but not without a field in which bodies confront and vibrate.

Colette Soler (2019) tells us in “El en-cuerpo del sujeto”⁹ that the living contains what the human background is somehow connected to. We go one step further, because we believe that the living being is what is most human, since with him the loss is inscribed and the creative power and sensitivity in life comes to light.

Finally, our focus is not what remains decolonized by language, something that is certainly untouchable by representation or showing. On the contrary, we want to affirm what is lost because only then do we have the chance to give life to what was not there. The living being reminds us of that which is no longer there but can be found again with the encounter between speaking bodies, an encounter that creates the space of resonance and assumption of life and the act. This living being, therefore, is an effect of the resonance of the real, it does not exist a priori.

The experimentation with this living being asks us, however, for a decision, as we saw in the initial topic. We speak of a decision of the order of being, something that transcends and transfigures the variables of consciousness. We would say that this choice takes place in the act, that is, in the very moments in which what belongs to the order of being, of the living body, comes to light, transmitting to the subject the certainty of its existence.

We take up what we have already said to reinforce that, in this experience, there is a disagreement between reason and the resound of the real that makes agreement between the body and language, “... if it resonates with the music and its rhythm, it is because it is able, without knowing, to say ‘yes’ without rationalizing. To resonate without reasoning is the mystical act par excellence.” ¹⁰(Didier-Weill, 2010, p.49). We see, therefore, the apparition of a very particular sensitive in which we do not take what has happened in our hands, we are taken by it. Thus, from a trivial experience with laughter to the psychoanalytical act as an invoker of creation, a particularity insists: it invites a sensitive beyond and below reason.

Well, there are experiences in life where there is no way out: either we consent to feel it, or we stop feeling it to understand it. The ironic and surprising thing about this is that when we abandon the impulse to understand, there we find certainty. There is amazement in this certainty since it occurs without the mediation of reason and understanding used to dominate the scene. As humans we have access to an aesthetic that short-circuits our sapiens, reminding us of the power to relight the living that ex-sists within ourselves and opens us to the unexpected, to creation.

References

• Audi, P. (2010). Créer: Introduction à l’esth/éthique Éditions Verdier.
• Barilli, R. (1994). Curso de estética (Trad. I. T. Santos). (2. ed.). Editorial Estampa.
• Brodsky, G. (2004). Short Story: Os princípios do ato analítico (Trad. V. A. Ribeiro). Contra Capa.
• Descartes, R. (1637/2013).Discurso do Método L&PM.
• Didier-Weill, A. (2010). Un mystère plus lointain que l’inconscient Flammarion.
• Dunker, C. I. L. & Assadi, T. C. (2004). Alienação e Separação nos Processos Interpretativos em Psicanálise. Psyche, 8(13), 85-100.
• Eidelsztein, A. (2009). Los conceptos de alienación y separación de Jacques Lacan. Desde el Jardín de Freud, 9, 73-86.
• Lacan, J. (1957-58/1999). O Seminário, livro 5: As formações do inconsciente (Trad. V. Ribeiro). Zahar.
• Lacan, J. (1964/1998). Posição do inconsciente (Trad. V. Ribeiro). In J. Lacan, Escritos (843-864). Zahar.
• Lacan, J. (1964/2008). O Seminário, livro 11: Os quatro conceitos fundamentais da psicanálise (Trad. M. D. Magno). Zahar.
• Lacan, J. (1966). O Seminário, livro 14: A lógica do fantasma (Trad. A. Lyra, C. B. Fleig, D. A. L. Araújo, I. Chaves, I. Corrêa, L. P. Fonsêca, L A. Tavares, M. L. Q. Santos e M. Fleig). Centro de Estudos Freudianos de Recife.
• Lacan, J. (1967-68/n.d.). O seminário, livro 15: O ato analítico Inédito.
• Lacan, J. (1971-72). Seminário: O saber do psicanalista (Trad. A. I. Corrêa, L. P. Fonsêca, N. Z. Frej). Centro de Estudos Freudianos do Recife.
• Lacan, J. (1972-73/2008). Seminário, livro 20: Mais, ainda (Trad. M. D. Magno). Zahar
• Lacan, J.. (1974). A terceira (Trad. A. T. Ribeiro). In J., Lacan, VII ème Congrès de l’École freudienne de Paris, Conferência, Roma. Recuperado de: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GtS2m-SHuKNJfVgsMnSuev-MzL5BBeqH/view
  » https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GtS2m-SHuKNJfVgsMnSuev-MzL5BBeqH/view
• Lacan, J. (1975-76/2007). Seminário, livro 23: O sinthoma (Trad. S. Laia e A. Telles). Zahar.
• Lispector, C. (1998). Uma aprendizagem ou o livro dos prazeres Rocco.
• Orrado, I. (2018). La résonance comme concept psychanalytique: Les médiations thérapeutiques: Une mise en résonance de la jouissance pour un traitement par l’art [PostgraduateThesis, Université Côte d’Azur]. https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02074498
  » https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02074498
• Orrado, I. & Vivès, J. M. (2020). Autisme et Médiation: Bricoler une solution pour chacun Arkhé.
• Schafer, R. M. (2010). Le Paysage sonore: Le monde comme musique Wildproject.
• Sirelli, N. M. (2012). “Ou não penso Ou não sou”: Uma discussão sobre o sujeito. Psicanálise & Barroco em revista, 10(2), 142-163.
• Soler, C. (2019). O em-corpo do sujeito: Seminário 2001-2002 Ágalma.
• Vivès, J. M. (2012). A voz na clínica psicanalítica Contra Capa.
• Vivès, J. M. (2018). Un exemple de cognition corporelle et de son utilisation: Le travail de l’acteur. Cahiers de psychologie clinique, 2018/1, 30,75-89.

• *
  Support: CAPES, MEC - funding code 001, CAPES Print Application n. 41/2017.

• 1
  Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nEtknoOdxI
• 2
  Our translation: “Resonance as a psychoanalytical concept: Therapeutic mediations: resonance of jouissance for treatment through art”
• 3
  Original text: “Faire laisser être pourrait, en effet, être une autre façon de nommer la résonance. Ce phénomène peut être entendu comme la réponse à une excitation et cette réponse nous proposons de la rapprocher de la phusis: la résonance fait laisser être le mouvement.” (Orrado, 2018, p.11).
• 4
  Original text: “… nous savons tous qu’il nous est possible de cesser de “raisonner” pour que notre tambour intérieur cesse de ne pas ‘résonner’” (Didier-Weill, 2010, p.21).
• 5
  Original text: “Ce paradoxe ne pouvant se résoudre, nous allons le voir, qu’en instaurant un rapport au corps non seulement représenté mais senti.” (Vivès, 2018, p.1).
• 6
  Original text: “… non pas dans le sens du carpe diem, mais du sens où ce qui s’y joue n’est pas tant son salut que… ‘sa peau’!” (Audi, 2010, p.123).
• 7
  Original text: “… un savoir dont la certitude lui vient d’une source toute différente que celle qui irrigue le regard de l’esprit.” (Audi, 2010, p.142).
• 8
  Original text: “Créer donne au créateur de vivre au-delà de ce que sa vie a la possibilité de le faire vivre, et il lui donne aussi d’éprouver plus de choses que ce que sa vie a la possibilité de lui faire éprouver.” (Audi, 2010, p.15).
• 9
  Portuguese Title: “O em-corpo do sujeito”. English Title: “The In-body of the subject”.
• 10
  Original text: “… s’il résonne à la musique et à son rythme, c’est parce qu’il est capable, sans le savoir, de dire ‘oui’ sans raisonner. Résonner sans raisonner est l’acte mystique par excellence.” (Didier-Weill, 2010, p.49).

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  08 May 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  12 Mar 2022
• Accepted
  02 Sept 2022