Orientation 2
“The huge advantage of the developments of neuroscience is that these allow us to be even more precise as to what the Freudian unconscious is not: it is not the subconscious, is not the unconscious of the unconsciousness, and it does not relate to inscribed automatisms by which we would have to have a consciousness in the cognitive sense.”
Éric LAURENT, Conference in Geneva, 2012
Translation: Raphael Montague
Orientation 3
“It is because language exists that truth exists, as everyone can come to see. Why should something that manifests itself as a living pulsation and that can happen at as vegetative a level as you like be more true than everything else? The dimension of truth is nowhere, for the very good reason that we are not just talking about a biological scuffle.”
Jacques LACAN, My Teaching
Orientation 4
“That the subject is not the one who knows what he says, when effectively something is said by the word that fails him, but also in the blunder of a conduct he believes his own, such does not render it easy to place him in the brain by which he seems best helped when it sleeps (a point that current neurophysiology does not dispute), there clearly is the order of facts that Freud calls the unconscious.”
Jacques Lacan, Radiophonie
Orientation 5
“It is quite clear that even if Freud borrowed from biology, […] it is not from biology that we can isolate the death drive. It can only be done as a function of discourse, that is to say, […] under the species [sous les espèces] of the function of repetition.
It [Ça] does not in the least bit imply a negation of the real of the body, it does not even imply a negation of the real of mental schema, even if it is imaginary, it implies, I would say in generalising a proposition of Lacan’s, it implies that the integrations are always piecemeal [parcellaires].
Lacan says it about the image of the body […] the access to the total form of the body does not annul the initial parcelling-out [morcellement] of the relation to the body, and therefore the specular integration is never total, it is contradictory. […] Far from the fact that there is a function of total mental synthesis, mental integration is always piecemeal, and what we call subject, it’s precisely what is parcelled-out by this integration.”
Jacques-Alain MILLER, Tout le monde est fou
Translation: Raphael Montague