The status of prosopopoeia in Lacan changes radically with the shift in the status of the analyst from being the stand-in for the \u201cbig Other\u201d (the symbolic order) to being the \u201csmall other\u201d (the obstacle which stands for the inconsistency, failure, of the big Other).<\/p>\n
The analyst who occupies the place of the big Other is himself the medium of prosopopoeia: when he speaks, it is the big Other who speaks (or, rather, keeps silence) through him; in the intersubjective economy of the analytic process, he is not just another subject, he occupies the empty place of death.<\/p>\n
The patient talks, and the analyst\u2019s silence stands for the absent meaning of the patient\u2019s talk, the meaning supposed to be contained in the big Other.\u00a0 The process ends when the patient can himself assume the meaning of his speech.<\/p>\n
The analyst as the \u201csmall other,\u201d on the contrary, magically transforms the words of the analysand into prosopopoeia, de-subjectivizing his words<\/strong>, depriving them of the quality of being an expression of the consistent subject and his intention-to-mean.<\/strong><\/p>\n The goal is no longer for the analysand to assume the meaning of his speech, but for him to assume its non-meaning, its nonsensical inconsistency, which implies, with regard to his own status, his<\/span> de-subjectivization<\/span>, or what Lacan calls<\/strong> “subjective destitution.”<\/span><\/p>\n Prosopopoeia<\/span> is defined as \u201ca figure of speech in which an absent or imaginary person is represented as speaking or acting.\u201d The attribution of speech to an entity commonly perceived to be unable to speak (nature, the commodity, truth itself \u2026) is for Lacan the condition of speech as such, not only its secondary complication.<\/p>\n Does not Lacan\u2019s distinction between the “subject of enunciation”<\/span> and the “subject of enunciated”<\/span>point in this direction?<\/p>\n When I speak, it is never directly \u201cmyself\u201d who speaks<\/span> \u2015 I have<\/em> to have recourse to a fiction which is my symbolic identity.<\/strong><\/p>\n In this sense, all<\/em> speech is \u201cindirect\u201d: \u201cI love you\u201d has the structure of: \u201cmy identity as lover is telling you that it loves you.\u201d<\/p>\n The implication of prosopopoeia is thus a weird split of which Robert Musil was aware: the \u201cman without properties\u201d (der Mann ohne Eigenschaften<\/em>) has to be supplemented with properties without man<\/strong> (Eigenschaften ohne Mann<\/em>), without a subject to whom they are attributed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n There are two correlative traps to be avoided here, the rightist and the leftist deviations. The first, of course, is the pseudo-Hegelian notion that this gap stands for a \u201cself-alienation\u201d which I should strive to abolish ideally and then fully assume my speech as directly my own.<\/p>\n Against this version, one should insist that there is no I which can, even ideally, assume its speech \u201cdirectly,\u201d by-passing the detour of prosopopoeia.<\/p>\n Wearing a mask can thus be a strange thing: sometimes, more often than we tend to believe, there is more truth in the mask than in what we assume to be our \u201creal self.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Think of the proverbial shy and impotent man who, while playing an interactive video game, adopts the screen identity of a sadistic murderer and irresistible seducer\u2015it is all too simple to say that this identity is just an imaginary supplement, a temporary escape from his real-life impotence.<\/p>\n The point is rather that, since he knows that the video game is \u201cjust a game,\u201d he can \u201creveal his true self,\u201d do things he would never do in real-life interactions\u2015in the guise of a fiction, the truth about himself is articulated.<\/span><\/p>\n Therein lies the truth of a charming story like Alexandre Dumas\u2019s The Man in the Iron Mask: what if we invert the topic according to which, in our social interactions, we wear masks to cover our true face?<\/p>\n What if, on the contrary, in order for us to interact in public with our true face, we have to have a mask hidden somewhere, a mask which renders our unbearable excess, what is in us more than ourselves, a mask which we can put on only exceptionally, in those carnivalesque moments when the standard rules of interaction are suspended? In short, what if the true function of the mask is not to be worn, but to be kept hidden?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The status of prosopopoeia in Lacan changes radically with the shift in the status of the analyst from being the stand-in for the \u201cbig Other\u201d (the symbolic order) to being the \u201csmall other\u201d (the obstacle which stands for the inconsistency, failure, of the big Other). The analyst who occupies the place of the big Other … Continue reading “subjective destitution 514”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,76,15,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-10005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dia-mat","category-sub-destitute","category-subjectivity","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10006,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10005\/revisions\/10006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}