Justine Junius – Deafness facing the speaking subject
Armelle Guivarch reminds us that Lacan’s response to the theory of “organo-dynamism” of Henry Ey is that “the phenomenon of madness is inseparable from the problem of signification for the being in general, that is to say of language for man” (1).
In this newsletter one can discern that once the dimension of “language for man” is occulted, we descend into various pitfalls. Here are two already: belief in adaptation/ normality and belief in localisation in the body.
Luisella Mambrini reports on how the notion of drive is understood by Antonio Damasio in his theory of somatic markers; in misrecognition of the function of language in its mortification of the body and thus endowing the body with an “incorporeal that has nothing to do with materiality of the organism”; which in any case cannot be photographed.
Along these lines, A. Guivarch Lorient also resonances as the exhibition in Paris, Du regard à l’écoute, which recounts the path taken by psychoanalysis from the visual observation of symptoms up to finding “its specificity and its efficacy in refusing the image “(2) in favour of listening.
As for Marco Mauas, he analyses the book, The Disordered Mind by Dr. Eric Kandel, – winner of the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his discoveries on memory – and introduces a challenge via Lacan and Miller in this respect, in reference to the dimension of speech and language.
I leave the last word to Professor Moustache (3), a cartoon character, one of the few in the Sciences section on Arte (European Culture Chanel, Strasbourg) that does not seek to occult the human condition: “With that, for sure, you die less stupid, but hey, you’ll die anyway.”
Happy reading!
Translation by Raphael Montague
- Lacan J., “Presentation on Psychical Causality”, in Écrits […], London and New York, W.W. Norton and Co., 2006, p. 135.
- https://www.mahj.org/fr/programme/sigmund-freud-du-regard-a-l-ecoute
- Cartoon created by Amandine Fredon: https://www.arte.tv/Sciences/
