The Body and Its Adornments

Nathalie Laceur

The cult of the body 

This theme of the body and what adorns it may come as a surprise. After all, doesn’t psychoanalysis give priority to what is said rather than what is seen, so much so that it does not hesitate to invite the patient to lie on the couch? Was it not Lacan himself who, after initially focusing at the beginning of his teaching, on the jubilation of the infans seeing his specular image, shifted his attention to the symbolic satisfaction arising from the subject's relationship with the big Other?

Yes, and yet ... in his last teaching, Lacan seems to be returning to his first love. In 1972, he underlines that clothing is essential to man and not as accessory, as the expression l'habit ne fait pas le moine (the habit does not make the monk) would have us believe. He even went so far as to say that “the habit loves the monk.”[1] A little later, in 1974, he wonders why man is so infatuated with his image, and responds by evoking his mirror stage, emphasizing that this was not a prelude: “That man likes so much to look at his image, that's all there is to it – that's how it is.”[2]

Today, 50 years later, narcissism still triumphs – as social media testify. We like to share images of ourselves, refashioned, if need be, but also being mindful of what adorns them, of the decor, and so on.

The prevalence of the scopic field

As Jacques-Alain Miller shows us, Lacan's last teaching restores dignity to the imaginary, but not without criticizing its reduction to the specular.[3] When he discusses narcissistic satisfaction in Seminar XI, he draws attention to what is elided in the field of the visible and the vision that responds to it, in particular the object gaze. The field of perceptual reality can only maintain its consistency and engender satisfaction, or even complacency, on condition that this object a, the unspeakable and singular part of each one, his being of jouissance, his being looked at, is extracted from this field. This elision, which makes the subject lack-in-being [manque-a-etre], allows us to forget that before we can contemplate ourselves, we are first looked at.[4] The prevalence of the scopic field for the being who speaks therefore stems from the fact that “in this field we do not perceive, we do not feel, we do not see, we do not experience the loss of the object a.”[5]

Playing with masks

If the secret of the visual field is castration, as J.-A. Miller notes, the body image reflects the subject’s relationship with it.[6] Here are some examples. There is the masquerade by which woman seeking to be the object of a man's desire converts the lack of object into being, by appearing to be the phallus. Consider too the function of the body image in the hysteric as a response to the lack of a representative signifier in the Other. For the hysteric, it is not a question of bringing nothing into existence, as the phallus-woman [femme phallus] does, but rather to plug the gap by making herself “represented in the Other by the image of his or her own body, in such a way that this image and its manipulation act as a message to the Other, and, at the same time, depend on the message received from the Other.”[7] Last but not least there are the obsessionals who take extreme care of their body image to make it the equal of the signifier to which they want to reduce themselves.

These few examples illustrate the extent to which the dialectic between the eye and the gaze is the domain of lure.[8] What the subject of desire shows as a lack-in-being may feed the appetite of the eye of the beholder, but what it gives to see is always distinct from its hidden being.[9] This is where Lacan evokes the function of the screen, enabling the subject to play with the mask beyond which there is the gaze. The screen is thus the locus of mediation between the subject and his being of jouissance.[10]

Beauty and horror

“What lies under the habit, what we call the body,” as Lacan tells us in Encore, is merely a remainder, the fundamental waste of the subject. And, it is this remainder, this lost, hidden object, that holds the image together.[11]  However, for the psychotic subject, playing with the function of the screen can be complicated if not impossible, because the body is sometimes too strange to be able to conceal it.

Lucie, 15, with her radiant smile, meticulous make-up and well-chosen, often self-made outfits, is a feast for the eyes. Her room in the institution, which she likes to show off, is decorated with as much taste as care. When asked how she's doing, she invariably replies “great,” while sometimes slipping pieces of paper into the hands of the staff, repositories of morbid thoughts that assail her after dark. “In the evening, when I'm alone in my room, I start thinking as soon as I take off my mask,” she says. When the lights go out, stripped of her adornments and far from the others whose eyes she feeds, it is without mediation that she finds herself confronted with her “emptiness,” with “the unspeakable of this nakedness” – terms that we borrow from Lacan when he comments on the enigmatic experience of Lol V. Stein.[12] This is because the image with which Lucie identifies and which she gives to see, her mask as she calls it, is her body. She has no body other than what she is as an image.[13] With her beauty, the last rampart before the horror, she tries to domesticate the gaze of the Other, but once the mask is removed, that gaze appears in the open, sending her back to her being of waste. The scars of the cuts on this body that does not belong to her, bear witness to what she is trying to separate herself from.

Adornments and singularity

The body's adornments can hide what is most singular to each or … show it off brilliantly! It's impossible not to mention Lacan's adornments: the twisted cigars, the bow tie, the made-to-measure Mao shirt, the brightly-coloured jackets, and so on. J.-A. Miller refers to this in his Vie de Lacan, showing Lacan to be driven by a desire for “non-conformity,” revealed in his refusal to conform to the norm and to go unnoticed. If Lacan was “a sartorial original,” it was because he had “a primordial attitude of not blending in with the landscape but to make a mark on it,” which not only marked his teaching but inspired even the smallest things, such as his adornments.[14]

Références

[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, New York/London: Norton, 1999, p. 6.

[2] Lacan, J., “The Third,” The Lacanian Review 7, 2019, p. 96.

[3] Cf. Miller, J.-A., “The Sovereign Image,” The Lacanian Review 5, 2018, p. 49.

[4] Cf. Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan, New York/London: Norton, 1981, p. 75.

[5] Miller, J.-A., “The Prisoners of Jouissance,” Lacanian Ink 33, 2009, p. 50.

[6] Miller, J.-A., “The Image of the Body in Psychoanalysis,” Lacanian Ink 40, 2012, p. 23.

[7] Ibid., p. 22 [translation modified].

[8] Cf. Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XI, op. cit., p. 102.

[9] Cf. ibid., pp. 107 & 115.

[10] Cf. ibid., p. 107.

[11] Cf. Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XX, op. cit., p. 6.

[12] Cf. Lacan, J., “Homage to Marguerite Duras, on Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein,” in Marguerite Duras, trans. P. Connor, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987, p. 125.

[13] See also J.-A. Miller’s commentary on Lol V. Stein in his course, “L’orientation lacanienne: Les us du laps,” teaching delivered under the auspices of the Department of Psychoanalysis, University Paris 8, lesson of 14 June 2000, unpublished; also Marret-Maleval, S. (dir), Duras avec Lacan, Paris: Ed. Michèle, 2020, pp. 61–81.

[14] Miller, J.-A., “L’orientation lacanienne. Vie de Lacan,” teaching delivered under the auspices of the Department of Psychoanalysis, University Paris 8, lesson of 10 February 2010, unpublished.