A Stain in the Picture

Jean Luc Monnier

It is a relatively common expression in French, with an English equivalent: “stain in the picture.” It designates the same experience – because it is an experience – of a sensation that entails the body in the sense that Lacan underlines in “Joyce the Sinthome”: the body, “you feel it in your bones [it is] sensed” [“ça se sent”].[1]

Think, for example, of the moment when we accidentally come across our own image in a mirror we hadn’t anticipated in a department store aisle. For a brief moment, we experience a sensation of strangeness.

Or about what happens – it doesn’t happen to everyone, but it does happen – when we enter a reception where we do not know anyone, a restaurant we are not used to, a bar, an auditorium we have to walk through; we lose the sense of what we are doing, or even what we’re saying. We might stumble, bump into a corner of a table.

This “stain in the picture” we are talking about is related to the image, the image of the body which seems to become denser, heavier, surrounded by a thousand gazes, or by a single but all-seeing[2] one whose anguishing presence we suddenly feel, “fixed” at the centre of a world whose circumference is nowhere.[3] What's more, “stain in the picture” is the body that “escapes” from the image that usually cloaks it. When our image appears in the unexpected mirror at the corner of the aisle of a department store, it's a foreign and enigmatic body that suddenly clutters all the space allocated to us without us even thinking about it.

The subject, or more precisely the parlêtre, is then “absorbed” by his body – “what is most myself in the outside” [ce qu’il y a de plus moi-même dans l’extérieur] [4] – his body condensed into an object that Lacan calls object little a.  In other words, this object that must be extracted by the symbolic operation (emptied of libido) if our world is to be a stable and liveable one according to the pleasure principle. Indeed, if this is not the case, if the object is not separated and handed over to the Other who becomes its depositary, the reality that the subject produces is a capricious, shifting, even hostile one. Just think of the paranoid subject who is always threatened, walled in [rempardé], or of the schizophrenic subject whose body is constantly affected and escaping him. But think also of the obsessional subject, who in his fantasy, but also a stuntman “in reality”, sometimes takes crazy risks in order to be applauded by an Other who is but his own creation; this obsessional of whom Lacan says that “it is particularly difficult [...] to wrench […] away from the stranglehold of the gaze”;[5] the obsessional who, often in the secrecy of his mortifying thoughts, at the spectacle of his own funeral, counts the number and quality of the people attending. But think also of the hysteric who is "struck" by her father's gaze during a sexual encounter, or “fascinated” by the exhibitionist she runs into in the street or park.

In this way, “stain in the picture” finds itself at the junction of the two clinical perspectives proposed by Daniel Roy in his presentation of the Congress: the return of the object gaze on the body and the return of the gaze object in the real.

And, of course, think of the little scene that Lacan recounts in Seminar XI – Petit-Jean the fisherman and his sardine can.[6] Jacques-Alain Miller's commentary on this little scene is illuminating. I quote from his course:[7] "He [Lacan] is at sea with Petit-Jean. Petit-Jean shows him a tin can, and says: You see this can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn't see you! [...] He [Petit-Jean] thought it was funny, but I didn't think it was all that funny. He analyses: this can is looking at me from the point of light, from the point where I centre my gaze on it, it's the point of light that is itself looking at me, and at that moment I realise that I stand out, that I'm the ridiculous character in this Breton setting. [...] And he is struck by the fact that he is one too many. [...]. And deep down, when he says: Not so funny as all that, it's a moment of anxiety, let's call it what it is: I don't know what I am in the desire of the Other.”

Because "stain in the picture" is not without anxiety, even if we are not immediately aware of it; “stain is the picture" is the image that, to a certain extent, leaves the body bare.

Patients regularly speak of this embarrassment, to use a term Lacan uses in his Seminar on Anxiety, in the first lesson of 14 November 1962, when they suddenly feel like cumbersome strangers in a world made up of gazes of which they are the object.

To be a “stain in the picture” is to abolish the cut between the barred subject and the object, in this case the object gaze. It's a drive surge that invades the subject's being and, in a way, reduces it to pure existence.[8] The subject is reduced to its own cause, to that which is most alien to it: extimate, according to Lacan’s word. In Seminar XI, Lacan specifies – J.-A. Miller does not use this term again in his commentary – that he was making a “painting,” [faire tableau] and even that he was “making a stain in the painting” [faisait tache dans le tableau].  In other words, the subject who makes a stain makes – in the same movement – of the world around him, a painting in which he finds himself, anguished at being reduced to a gaze, without an image, reduced to a point of the real, or even to a real point.

This painting, of which he makes himself both the most central element, illuminated by a thousand lights, and the most heterogeneous substance, has constituted itself as an opaque, impenetrable screen[9] onto which is projected the enigmatic desire of the stain to which the subject has been reduced.

References

[1] Lacan, J., “Joyce the Symptom”, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. R. Price, The Lacanian Review 5, 2018, p. 14.

[2] 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.

[3] Cf. Hermès Trismégiste, Liber XXIV, proposition taken up by many philosophers, including Nicolas de Cues and Blaise Pascal, see article by Emmanuel Falque [in French]: https://www.cairn.info/revue-des-sciences-philosophiques-et-theologiques-2014-1-page-37.htm#no80

[4] Miller, J.-A., “L’orientation lacanienne. III, 6”, teaching delivered under the auspices of the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris 8, lesson of 2 June 2004, unpublished.

[5] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. R. Price, Cambridge: Polity, 2016, p. 9.

[6] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, op. cit., p. 95.

[7] Miller J.-A., “L’orientation lacanienne. Les us du laps”, teaching delivered under the auspices of the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris 8, lesson of 4 June 2000, unpublished.

[8] Here I refer to the concepts of being and existence which Jacques-Alain Miller develops in his 2011 course, “L’orientation lacanienne. L’Un-tout-seul,” teaching delivered under the auspices of the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris 8, unpublished.

[9] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, op. cit., p. 96.