The title “Music, Significance and Jouissance” summarizes the core of the issues approached on this paper. It’ll be by questioning the ways in which anxiety in its certainty is “appropriated”, in relation to a dimension of the lack different than the phallic lack.
What kind of call comes from music? What is the relation of the body, its jouissance, with music and dancing? Why are women the first ones to hit the dance floor?
I will try to articulate these questions in relation to three quotes from Lacan’s Seminar.
I’ll begin with a statement from Seminar 10.
"To act is to rip from the anxiety its certainty. To act is to operate a transfer of anxiety”.
This formula presents anything but complications. Certainty is not certain as in truth, fact. It does not imply the value of true or false.
If anxiety is certainty, it is as in certain of the in-existence of the Other, experienced as absence of being. Before the caducity of the Other, the act presents the certainty of being, as non–being [de-ser]
When Lacan says that Freud founds his certainty in doubt -being at this point Cartesian- Lacan aims to Freud’s conviction that doubt points to the gap, the causal opening of the unconscious, linking certainty to the real of desire.
Second quote, from Seminar 22: "What is anxiety? It is what ex-sists, from inside the body, when something awakens, tormenting it. Take little Hans, for instance: if he precipitates into the phobia, is to lend a body to the pregnancy of the phallus, of the phallic jouissance that became tangled with his body.”
Lacan seems to go back to the first Freudian theorization: anxiety as transformed libido, anxiety as what ex-sists to the inner body when is overwhelmed by the phallic jouissance.
Third quote, from Seminar 20: “It cannot be ambiguous that the being, as conceived in the philosophical tradition, that is, the being based on thinking alone, which correlate is, as I’d oppose, that we are toys of jouissance.” “There is jouissance of the being.” “The being I oppose to this, is the being of the significance. I don’t see how this undermines the ideals of materialism by acknowledging the being of the significance, in the jouissance of the body”.
Lacan opposes to the being of thought, the being of jouissance of the significance. It is not a question of disjunction and parallelism of thought and body, but the jouissance of the body in the significance.
I authorize myself to read what follows:
To rip from the anxiety its certainty is to go beyond the phallic jouissance.
The act operating a transmutation of jouissance: from the phallic jouissance to the jouissance of the significance. And there, the music, as a possibility for the retrieval of that other jouissance.
Read it in this way, I affirm:
The excess of phallic jouissance in the body takes effect because of its phantasmatic ligature.
This may show a possible path to access to another kind of jouissance: the traversal of the phantasm, or at least shocking and stirring up the fantasy.
How to define, then, significance?
We understand that the notion of significance is formalized in Lacan’s mathema: S(/A) Signifier of the barred Other that brings into play a dimension of the lack, that is not the phallic lack.
It is worthy to articulate significance to the mark that ties the real of the desire to what “does not cease to fail to write”, what Freud defines as “the navel of the dream”. Something that Lacan underlines on his response to Marcel Ritter.
I would like to refer to Slavoj Zizek (1), although he doesn’t explicitly use the term significance: "music is at the crossing point between nature and culture; music posses us as it were "in the real" far more directly than the meaning of words."
In the same direction Alain Didier Weill (2) wonders:
"How to re-encounter the piece of language that precedes the signified? That symbolized, significance piece as coming from what is unexpected in music that makes sense without any project or ideology?”
This question introduces us to one of the types of the object: the voice.
The human voice, as in driven by mother tongue, enables the combinatorial functions of vowels, at the level of continuity, and consonants, operating at the plane of cut and discontinuity.
Music, dancing singing, even poetry, places us at the retrieval of the continuum ulterior to the cut. They constitute alternatives to a retrieval of jouissance.
When the music plays a metamorphosis occur or may occur. A metamorphosis from a dominant subjectification -built upon a paranoid position in relation to the fellow-other, cautious of the limits in which the subject winds up inhibited- to a state where the music is allowed to take possession, live in oneself, like a primordial affirmation (behajung), re-edition of a “yes” to a call.
Rescue of certainty in the wall of the uncertainties of language. Letting the music live in oneself comes near to a particular passive positioning or feminization.
Dancing and releasing the body to the effects of music-voice, enables to operate a certainty, a moment of ceasing the position for the search of confirmation-recognition, mandated-demanded, even mendicant-ing.
A brief caducity of the Other takes place, this time, without anxiety. Paradoxical caducity that does not exclude the conviction that restores the belief that "God" can live in that music, in that voice.
Women are the first ones to let the music and the dance take them, dragging some masculine semblant limited by its own logic. If this is repeated from ancient Greece to the present is because it denotes a structural fact in relation to the distribution of the sexes and their paradoxical logics. Male jealousy often reads this capture by the music and the dance as a phallic lack, a witchy business or sexual excesses. It is difficult for men to conceive that women could have another lack than the phallus.
God Dionysus arrives at the outskirts of the Greek city, plays the flute and women without distinction, fall prey to an intense frenzy, a state of possession, scene that we may find today in every social situation where music is present.
Music and dance don’t necessarily break the order of the logos, they supplement it. On that one, it may be supplementary jouissance, introducing the dimension of the unlimited in the limit of the law, the music in the word.
Weill says: "The mother's voice is the way through which this musical voice is transmitted. Prior to the perception of words and phonemes, the child perceives the tongue made of music.” The voice, the maternal cooing, if any, enables a relationship with the jouissance beyond the phallus, a retrieval of jouissance in relation to a simple interval of meaning.
The idea of the quilting point, import to the tie between signifier and signified, involves the phallic significance. In “Before”, on what can be logically situated as “previous to”, there is pure non-sensical significance, primordial crossing point between Real and Symbolic, before the imaginary plane, which introduces the signified.
It’s still pending to call into question another plane of the imaginary articulation which ties those primaries intersections. The primary repression -always incomplete since not everything enters in the register of the Other- leaves a sprout of the unlimited that enables a return, a turning back to the origin, unable to touch it.
If sexuation is a phallic function, it is second in relation to the significance. Second is no less important. It’s not but from castration that a definition of a logic time, results, just there, as prior. Sexuation takes a phantsmatic relevance. Phallic signification is knotted in the phantasm.
The distributions in the comedy of the sexes find, at this point, the translation of a logic in a scene that organizes and, at the same time, clots and limits the field of desire.
Situating oneself in relation to the significance is to go beyond the phantasm, is its traversal. Anxiety occurs when one goes beyond the phantasm, to the significance, to the "other" lack, other than the phallic lack.
A popular saying states that "music soothes the beasts". For the animal speaker, it’s another way of "ripping the anxiety its certainty.”
Eduardo Said.
NOTES:
(1) Slavoj Zizek - The voice on sexual difference - Collection Lacanian Orientation - 1997
(2) Alain Didier Weill - Freud's relationship with Judaism, Christianity and Hellenism - Homo Sapiens 1998
Translated by Pablo Xavier Benavides
