Ruminations

A criticism I sometimes get is that my writing is complex, sometimes too technical. My few readers find difficult words here and there and I lose them. But what exactly is it that loses them? Is it the diction or the sentence structure or the weightiness of the content of the sentence? I find this odd. Why is it that meaning is lost and why is it that the more I say the less it is grasped?

I’ve often come to the conclusion that if I were to let go of words as a writer, if I “dumb” myself down to a degree-0 usage, I’d be inauthentic. My relation to the world is linguistic. Some people’s is romantic. Others’ sexual. Even others’ financial. But mine is linguistic. Which as far as I know is a good way to relate to the world, because what is our world if not held up by language. There is no social movement without slogans, no ideas that cannot be said and thus which cannot be put into words and which do not enter into some linguistic or symbolic ecology where those words inspire, let’s say, civic action.¹ Indeed it seems to me that prior to eating or fucking, which are certainly not linguistic activities, we have to expend some words. We have to communicate with words a time and place to eat for lunch and we have to convince and seduce with words while having drinks afterwards. Wouldn’t you say that words carry on or even enhance the experience of eating or fucking?

One of my favorite ideas from Lacan is the idea that during the analytic session (this is, for my readers, the literal visit to the therapist), it is not just the therapist and patient who make up the members of the session. There is a third: the discourse itself or what Lacan would call the big Other.

I love this idea because I see it as precisely the element that introduces chaos into any supposedly stable dyad. In a way it’s almost reminiscent of classical mechanics in which the physical relationships between two bodies are predictable, but which become chaotic when a third element enters the system. In the consultation room it’s not just Dr. Lacan and me. It’s Dr. Lacan and me and our speech. Think of the repercussions this has in other dyadic relationships like the romantic: it’s not just boyfriend and girlfriend, but boyfriend and girlfriend and their speech, this last element being often that which upsets. “My boyfriend speaks too much,” “he has too many political opinions,” “he said something I’m not sure he didn’t mean last night.” Have you ever wondered if your significant other liked their speech more than they liked you?

You can even transfer this situation to the literary world. Is there not a dyad in the writer and the reader? And is not the third element the book in front of the reader? A lot of literary theory has gone into investigating this relationship, into whether when we read we should pay attention to the author or to the text, whether the intention of the author is in the text, or whether the text is something altogether outside and independent of the author. Hell, we’ve even asked if the Author was dead and if it was actually the reader who writes the text in front of them (see Roland Barthes’ work for this).

What Lacan does is dignify speech and language.² But this dignity comes at a price: Lacan makes us recognize that discourse, speech, text are torn from the inside and that it is from these tears in the fabric of language that the strange magnetisms of the unconscious, of the real, exert their pull. Furthermore, if we are our speech and the fabric of speech is itself all quite torn, doesn’t this imply that we too are all torn?

Of course it does, Lacan says. And so what does he do? He submits. He writes the Écrits, or rather, he collects the writings that comprise the Écrits into that big tome and what we find upon reading it is a veritable flayed body of a text. Cuts, digressions, allusions, holes, sometimes inscrutable and perhaps even useless maths, symbolicizations and inside jokes. The text is a nightmare.³ (Let alone the Autres écrits.) But this was the difficulty with which he thought he would teach Psychoanalyst Jr. to deal with the resistances that they would encounter with their future patients.⁴ Again, who knows if this worked?

But I do find it inspiring. I do think that there’s a freedom to be displayed when one sits down to write the unreadable, which isn’t at all, as some very poor critics continue to say, a condescension to the reader, but an initiation of the reader into the possible that writing can be. Is this difficulty not then his originality? Is it not his authenticity? Is it not precisely freedom in a pure sense, a statement that when it comes to style and art one must not compromise?

Notes

1 As the author and journalist Samantha Allen wrote in her book Real Queer America, “Social progress, I realize, happens not just through the sort of revolutionary actions that generate Oscar-baiting biopics but through the underestimated power of conversation—through small exchanges of generosity and goodwill, through questions asked in good faith, through love expressed with no preconditions or expectations of return. I have spent a week doing nothing but talk to people. But talking is far from nothing. Words are the literal stuff of change.” (Little, Brown and Company, 2019, p.89).

2 Jacques Derrida would criticize him by saying Lacan dignified speech over language, and there’s some truth to this since, after all, Lacan was in the business of hearing people speak. But Lacan does criticize fellow psychoanalyst Fenichel for a “slip of the pen” in his first Seminar, which implies an awareness that the unconscious works as much in the text-text as it does on the tongue. (Lacan, Seminar I, Norton 1988, p. 16)

3 “Writing is in fact distinguished by a prevalence of the text in the sense that we will see this factor of discourse take on here–which allows for the kind of tightening up that must, to my taste, leave the reader no other way out than the way in, which I prefer to be difficult.” (Lacan, Écrits, Norton 2006, p. 412) Imagine that! They way into Lacan is the difficult one!

4 “All of my rhetoric aims at bolstering the training effect that I must nevertheless provide that audience.” (Lacan, Écrits, Norton 2006, p. 606) And what a difficult audience it was.