The perverse materiality of language: The beauty of reading Jacques Lacan

This work examines the corpus of Jacques Lacan as a movement away from an institutional approach to psychoanalysis. The language forged by institutional discourse—is such that it constantly slips back into presuppositions of substances permeated with the function of being. On the level of its formation, what is built in relief of the institution, is a body of discourse that gives to itself the name of knowledge regardless of what Lacan will call its fictional origination. I argue that following the thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others, Lacan takes psychoanalysis to another opening, where, at whatever cost, all other discourses must be abandoned. Lacan's work separates itself from the devices of other discourses, (conceptual, grammatical, ideal, thematic, semantic, philological, symbolic, allegorical, etc.) in order to shift to a corresponding relation to the being that is before the speaking. I argue that the truth Lacan claimed to speak was also his strategy—a rhetorical strategy that follows the limits of the materiality of language through the rawness of the signifier that can be equated with a kind of historicity that itself is ethical. After establishing Lacan's relation to Freud and Saussure, I follow the reading of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's The Title of the Letter: A reading of Jacques Lacan in order to establish a distinction their philosophical approach has missed—namely, the relation of difference between l'ecriture and dire, writing and speaking. At the heart of this relation is the “I-don't-want-to-know-anything-about-it.” A relation that at once reveals, however obscurely, an ethics of historicity—a relation Lacan finds embodied in the figure of Antigone and in the speaking of subjects.