Derivas Analíticas Journal - Nº 20 - March 2024. ISSN:2526-2637

Sporadic testimonies of the not-whole

Heloísa Bedê
Psychoanalyst
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A continent, by definition, only appears to the eye once drawn by the asymptotic horizon of the sea. It is such specificity that perhaps allows those who take it as a metaphor at least two very distinct ways of reading. The first would consist of reading it from a distance, so that the waters draw a line there, delimiting a closed, turbid and distant set. The second would be to take the continent in what is alive and indelimitable, since it is bordered only in the fleeting dimension of its encounter with the waters of the ocean. Therefore, it depends on the proximity or distance with which the body is involved in this operation. After all, it is at the water's edge, and not at a distance (since, seen from afar, the coast always appears to be the same), that “ the encounter between water and sand produces several areas of active uncertainty” (Vieira, 2013, p. 71). It takes a body to read, in what is drawn from a continent, a littoral.

We know that, in the psychoanalytic field, the continent became one of the names of the feminine because of the Freudian metaphor relating it to the dark continent. The fate of this metaphor, however, is linked to the logical treatment we give it. In the field of neuroses, for example, it is not uncommon for speaking beings to try to approach the feminine from a borderline logic, rehearsing, with their bodies and symptoms, a safe distance against the manifestations of this jouissance that erupts in the body as radical alterity. In this regard, however, clinical practice has insistently made and makes any intended didacticism fall apart, teaching that any artifice of composing a closed set, of composing the Same linked to a Universal, as proposed by the masculine logic of sexual formulas, brings with it the threat of an Other jouissance that, although it is also produced in the body, is not experienced “as one’s own, as a possession, but as an exteriority that does not make an all” (FUENTES, 2012, p. 144). So, as I heard once: “That's it, there are times when the limit escapes me. Sometimes it's despair, a bottomless hole. Sometimes it's delicious. The fact is that, out of nowhere, it's about the body. There is no inside or outside, I am neither male nor female. It’s scary… It’s pure blur-experience.”

That is, there is something feminine that, when taken beyond the field of signifiers and attributes, makes the supposed didactic comfort undertaken by masculine logic waver. Therefore, taking the feminine as a continent according to this logic may be, precisely, falling back into the so-called didacticism, metaphorizing a border against the feminine, by imaginarizing this jouissance as a massive and unknown piece of lands beyond the reach of sight. An operation that would make it easier, in the theoretical field, to circumscribe the feminine by the field of femininity (a record of semblances, of gender attributes culturally associated with women), for example, by associating it with an enigma (HOLK, 2012) that would be kept by women. However, “the problem is that the feminine has no borders” (BASSOLS, 2017, p. 13).

Therefore, if we consider the continent as a borderline operation, we fall back into the segregative logic of inside-outside, good-bad, native-foreign, which glues feminine and femininity together and relegates them to the status of something to be unknown. However, with the Lacanian formulas of the 1970s – especially from the logic of sexuation, which produced “a radical break with the dominant and trivial conception of the universal” (SANTIAGO, 2012, p. 18) –, a new way of reading the continent as one of the names of the feminine opens up. This is a path that Freud may have stumbled upon, but it was necessary to go beyond Oedipus and castration, as Lacan found, to advance there. By proposing that, of the relationship between a speaking being and the feminine, we would only have “sporadic testimonies”, Lacan (1972-73/2008, p. 87) combines, with the continent, the contingent.

When formulating the fate of the castration complex in the psychic constitution, Freud (1925/2020) collects from his clinic an opposition between the fear of losing the phallus on men's side (since they believe they have it) and the desire to have the phallus on the women's side (since they believe they do not have it). The Lacanian reinterpretation of this issue brings to light a symbolic conception of castration, taking it as an operation of language and, thus, moving the issue from the imaginary axis of anatomy to different positions of jouissance in the face of the phallic function, with the feminine no longer taken as lack, but rather as a supplementary jouissance to the phallic one.

It is this new spelling of the feminine that allows psychoanalysis to go beyond the traditional reading of the phallic-castrated binary, since it starts from the same function, the phallic function, to two distinct logical functionings, relating to two modes of jouissance (phallic and not-all phallic) which, in turn, are not exclusive to males or females either. Thus, Lacan (1972-73/2008), by identifying “man” and “woman” less as binomials and more as modalities of jouissance, moves away from the common mistake of circumscribing the masculine Universe and, from this, deducing the feminine while its exact opposite.

Such a turn is proposed by Lacan in view of what the clinic of neuroses teaches about the way in which each person will equip their body for jouissance. Phallic jouissance allows us to believe in the possibility of access to the body of the Other by cutting out from it the object that condenses his autoerotic script of satisfaction, but, after all, he enjoys, there, only his own fantasy. The not-whole phallic jouissance, in turn, makes a speaking being Other to itself, insofar as it is produced in the body, but this body does not make a Whole, it has no unity, which shows that it is the feminine body itself which, in jouissance, is otherfied. If there is no point outside the body to locate jouissance, as is the case with sexual “men”, there remain the effects of limitlessness, “prescribed by the Not-Whole” (MILLER, 2015, p. 93).

The alterity-heterity of the feminine, therefore, is reiterated in two dimensions: it is an Other jouissance in relation to phallic jouissance and an Other jouissance in its own experimentation, insofar as it makes the speaking being Other to itself . Therefore, with sexuation, we have the feminine as a jouissance that cannot be territorialized, remaining refractory to the binarism implied in border logic. After all, the Lacanian not-whole “is not entirely made to install a reserve, a border, a limit” (MILLER, 2016, p. 3), it does not suppose mediation; it supposes a littoral (VIEIRA, 2020).

Founded in an open set, the feminine occurs through testimonies marked by contingency, only locatable in its dimension of encounter with the body. It is when the impossible happens, then, that the conjugation implied by not-whole jouissance becomes manifest, that between the phallic anchoring of the speaking being and their bumps into the Other as absence - that is, bumps into a jouissance that happens in the body and that does not find a signifier in the Other to describe it. This is what the psychoanalytic clinic teaches us about this meaningless articulation between jouissance, language and love: “where the discourse does not say, it bears witness” (MACEDO, 2010, p. 3). Thus, resuming the feminine from the notion of sporadic testimonies of the not-whole allows us to move from the continent-border to the continent-contingent, in a turn that deimaginarizes the opacity articulated in the field of femininity, since it transposes it to a modality of satisfaction that tells of a “non-coincidence between a subject and the raw and real jouissance that inhabits her/him” (LEBOVITS-QUENEHEN, 2022).

The not-whole is experienced through “sporadic testimonies” (LACAN, 1972-73/2008, p. 87), it is, therefore, the impossibility of a speaking being to settle there, on the “woman” side, their eventual visits (BROUSSE, 2020) to the not-all-phallic side of sexuation being nothing more than the effects of a pulsation, a flash, an irruption: “An event in my body, unprecedented. It lasted for a moment” (BROUSSE, 2020, p. 230). It is noteworthy, then, that the not-whole, regardless of its manifestations, as it does not occur permanently, does not lend itself to a way of being; it does not provide identification consistency so that the speaking being can remain there.

These are bumps into the limits of language, with the signifier of the Other “to the extent that, as Other, he can only always continue to be Other” (LACAN, 1972-73/2008, p. 87). Such a-grammatical experiences, therefore, make any predication a pure elocubratory effort. The feminine, in the radicality of Lacanian formulations, then, comes to name what in the clinic is insistently presented as “nonsensical”, “unlocalizable” and “undecidable” (JULLIEN, 2021, p. 40), that is, as a jouissance contrary to the logic of attributes and predicates. This is what the following fragment conveys to us: “Sometimes I realize that I happened. Just one slip, I'm dazzled by a voice, a touch, a something and then it's gone. The body melts and comes out overflowing, overflowing around.” However, the fact that there is no mode of being there does not mean that something cannot be produced in that space.

With Naveau (2017), we could name what is produced in the feminine with a term underlying the Lacanian way of defining contingency: the mark. Therefore, the sporadic would name the unforeseen possibility of the encounter of a speaking being with this jouissance that uncompletes her/him and that, when it ceases not to be written, leaves “a mark that is inscribed producing a bodily event” (FUENTES, 2012, p .126). Therefore, it is about making, for an instant, the impossible happen – and what happens we call an encounter –, so that “something that cannot be written comes, in the instant of the encounter, to be written” (NAVEAU, 2017, p. 102). This is what contingency is about: “something that was found and that could have been another way, while at this level it could only have been like that” (MILLER, 2015, p. 55).

It is parallel to the development of sexuation formulas, also at the beginning of the 1970s, that Lacan (1971/2003) introduced the notion of littoral in the psychoanalytic field, which renews the instance of the letter in his teaching and includes an interesting paradox: that of the impossible reconciliation of the radical heterogeneity of its elements (water and land) and the impossibility of delimiting one from the other (where water begins and land ends, for example). Thus, if we have, with the border, a failed effort to delimit and separate territories, with the littoral we have distinct elements that form a border due to their own heterogeneity, but whose limit is impossible to draw. On one side, impotence, on the other, impossibility.

The littoral logic, therefore, implies doing something between, between two heterogeneous registers, between two foreign territories. Thus, just as the littoral, whose distinctive feature is the fleeting combination between the heterogeneity of its elements and the impossibility of delimiting one from the other, the feminine finds its impossible to delimit because it is always in movement, in its advances and retreats over the phallic Universe, which prevent it from assuming an established form, transposable to a closed set. In place of the line erected by the continent-border, we see, here, an indelimitable line, woven only at the meeting of continental lands and water, pure conjugation.

Reading it this way, the continent as a metaphor for the feminine read from the contingent, allows a use that does not fall into the border logic and, furthermore, that implies the body by reiterating that there is only feminine in the encounter. It is not, therefore, a question of predicating the continent, but rather of what, on the continent, makes up littoral; including the body in that which is not fixed, but which makes a mark. Thus, whatever name is given to it, when dealing with this Other satisfaction, the subject can fall into the oceanic dimension that invites devastation, as well as try to operate from her/his fantasy, a border against this satisfaction, or it can also support the not-whole as a solution (not all phallic, not all non-phallic); an exit to always be (re)constructed, as it is only possible if one consents to the contingent advances and retreats of this jouissance over the body. We could perhaps call this last, littoral way, the bet of an analysis.

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English version by Ana Helena Souza.