Lacan the Poem [excerpt]

translated by Asunción Alvarez

[...]

I would have entitled this homage "Lacan the Poet," had I not read this in the Preface to the English edition of Seminar XI: "What hierarchy might confirm that he [the analyst] is an analyst, a seal of approval? I was what a Cht told me, born. I reject this certification: I am not a poet but a poem. Which is written, even if it seems to be a subject." What is this Cht? The silent voice saying "shhh!" to the poet: "Tu vates eris,"or, "You shall be a poet"? But, in this context, should "a poem" not be ironically understood, as in "Oh, that kid, he's a real piece of work!" Thus it is true that Lacan was a poem for us when we met him at rue d'Ulm. We had never seen anything like him there!

Thus, in a slightly indefensible disorder, I will glean some poetic fragments from the Poem in the Écrits [...]

The second epigraph that opens the "Rome Speech," after the Lichtenberg quotation, is only there to announce that we, the audience, will be surprised that, although beasts are carnal, we are made of suns, that is, of the luminous signifiers that share our body: "[Man] thinks because of a structure, the structure of language—the very word entails it—because a structure carves up his body and has nothing to do with anatomy."

The start of a T.S. Eliot poem appears in the second chapter [...]

Eliot is thinking about empty men, creatures of the void, to whom he opposes their approaching fate in the Kingdom of the Dead. Lacan here quotes Eliot regarding language and the circumvolutions in the brain in order to say that the vanity of our words, writings, recordings, etc. constitutes "culture" for "normal" people, who nonetheless mistrust verbosity, and that "the question of language is not entirely comprised in the area of circumvolutions in which its use is reflected in the individual." An early critique of cognitivism? Why not! Cognitive science forgets that we empty men mostly talk in order not to say anything, not in order to communicate…

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