The Letter, Issue 58, Spring 2015, Pages 1 - 30
THE PSYCHOANALYTIC DISCOURSE. A SECOND READING OF LACAN’S L’ÉTOURDIT
Christian Fierens
C. Fierens, Le discours psychanalytique. Une deuxième lecture de L’Étourdit de Lacan. Toulouse, Point hors ligne, Erès, 2012. Trans. C. Gallagher 2014.
TABLE OF CONTENTS[1]
CHAPTER 2
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE
PSYCHOANALYTIC DISCOURSE
Over against the approach of witnessing which transforms the supposedly established act of saying into the statement of a said and heard, it will be a matter of starting from the said to rediscover a saying which on the one hand is forgotten and which on the other hand cannot be expressed in the form of a said. The task seems hopeless: we have saying and the said–heard (ditentendu) in their opposition, the first is completely forgotten, we can only start from the second and, what is more, we cannot exhibit saying in terms of saids, or again in terms of truth, since the truth is always of the domain of the said, more precisely of the half-said. In truth there is no saying.
Nevertheless it is indeed by restoring its saying that the discourse of analysis would be constituted (AE [Autres Ecrits], p. 454). Not the discourse of the analyst: starting from the personage of the analyst, it is rather the established discourses which take on the consistency of saids. But the discourse of analysis starts from the neutral speech which does not allow itself to be determined either by a precise stating subject, nor by a fixed object of which one might speak. Saying without saying who and without saying what. Neutrality is a fundamental principle.