the sinthome, the symptom as body-event, is the only compass that our modernity has left us with...
The next quilting point in the aggiornamento of psychoanalysis in our community came when J.-A. Miller, in his 1998-1999 lecture series, decided to foreground a dimension of the symptom which had been thus far been left aside, although it is present in Freud’s 1926 text Inhibition, Symptoms, Anxiety. I am referring to the symptom as a body-event, which one often finds equated with sinthome in today’s literature. From our vantage point, we can see that this move by Miller initiated a complete reversal of the perspective which Freud, then Lacan until his last teaching, had given to psychoanalysis: where psychoanalysis was seen to stumble upon an irreducible real, something untreatable by language, and so to fail to some extent, Miller will gradually argue that the sinthome, the symptom as body-event, is the only compass that our modernity has left us with, to the extent that even the dispositif of the pass is to be rethought to take into consideration the fact that what Lacan called the pass in his Proposition of 1967 does not take the sinthome into consideration – in his 2011 lecture series, Miller suggested that we call this outrepasse. So what is this symptom as body-event? In the 1998-1999 Course, the symptom as body-event is apprehended in two ways: first, the symptom is a modality of libidinal satisfaction (which Freud notes in the 1926 text). Second, the symptom as body-event is an effect of the traces of discourse on the body of the speaking being (not a repressed representation, as with the conversion symptom). In what way does a re-definition of the symptom as a body-event help us to find a compass for our practice? It removes the symptom from the classical set of the formations of the unconscious, identified by Freud as distinct modalities for the repressed to return using the mechanisms of the signifying chain such as displacement, transference and condensation. It also amounts to recognizing that was Freud called the symptomatic residues, the unanalyzable, are not an effect of the subject’s virile or feminine protestation in the face of castration, as Freud hypothesized in Analysis Terminable and Interminable. The symptomatic residues are equivalent to the symptom as body-event.
Véronique Voruz. London Society of the new Lacanian School, 20 February 2016.