Table Of ContentWriting, Speech and Flesh in
Lacanian Psychoanalysis
This book explores the place of the flesh in the linguistically-inflected catego-
ries of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, drawing explicit attention to
the organic as an inherent part of the linguistic categories that appear in the
writings of Freud and Lacan.
Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’ famously involves a ‘linguistic turn’ in psycho-
analysis. The centering of language as a major operator in psychic life often
leads to a dualistic or quasi-dualistic view in which language and the enjoy-
ment of the body are polarized. Exploring the intricate connections of the
linguistic and the organic in both Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis
from its beginnings, Zisser shows that surprisingly, and not only in Lacan’s
late teaching, psycho-linguistic categories turn out to be suffused with orga-
nicity. After unfolding the remnant of the flesh in the signifier as a major
component of Lacan’s critique of Saussure, using visual artworks as objec-
tive correlatives as it does so, the book delineates two forms of psychic writ-
ing. These are aligned not only with two fundamental states of the psychic
apparatus as described by Freud (pain and satisfaction), but with two ways of
sculpting formulated by Alberti in the Renaissance but also referred to by
Freud. Continuing in a Derridean vein, the book demonstrates the primacy
of writing to speech in psychoanalysis, emphasizing how the relation between
speech and writing is not binary but topological, as speech in its psychoana-
lytic conception is nothing but the folding inside-out of unconscious
writing.
Innovatively placing the flesh at the core of its approach, the text also
incorporates the seminal work of psychoanalyst Michèle Montrelay to artic-
ulate the precise relation between the linguistic and the organic. Writing,
Speech and Flesh in Lacanian Psychoanalysis will be indispensable to psycho-
analysts, literary theorists, rhetoricians, deconstructionists, and those study-
ing at the intersection of psychoanalysis, language, and the visual arts.
Shirley Zisser practises Lacanian psychoanalysis in Tel Aviv, Israel. She is a
member of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (AMP) and an associate
professor of English at Tel Aviv University. Her work focuses on the interre-
lations between poetics, rhetorical and literary theory and psychoanalysis.
Her publications include The Risks of Simile in Renaissance Rhetoric (2001),
Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’: Suffering Ecstasy
(2005, ed.), Lacanian Interpretations of Shakespeare (2009, ed.) and Art,
Death and Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2018, with Efrat Biberman).
Writing, Speech and Flesh
in Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Of Unconscious Grammatology
Shirley Zisser
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 Shirley Zisser
The right of Shirley Zisser to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-48089-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-48088-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-03795-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037958
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Contents
List of figures vii
Acknowledgments viii
Personal acknowledgments ix
Introduction: ‘The smile is a cut’ 1
Notes 8
1 Saussurean linguistics and its dis-contents 11
A Lacan’s critique of Saussure 11
B The sign and sexual difference 14
C The phallic signifier 18
D The phallus in the visual field: Self-portrait
of an absence 22
E The signifier as slash: Lacan with Fontana 26
Notes 33
2 ‘Written in the sand of the flesh’: On modes of writing
in the psychic apparatus 38
A Introduction: Two primal scenes of psychic writing 38
B Per via di porre: The writ(h)ing of jouissance 42
a Sculpture and pain 42
b The character typed by the drive 45
c The erotics of the stereo-type 54
d Copying jouissance: The unary trait 55
C Per via di levare: On the hysterical inscription of the
unconscious symbol 63
a Myths of the origin of mnemonic writing:
Phaedrus and Simonides 63
b Sum-ballein: The symbol as a throwing together 72
vi Contents
c Writing the symbol 77
d Scouring and disappearing: The hysterical symptom
and the unconscious signifier 80
D Epilogue: On the unconscious inscription of
inherited debt 87
Notes 93
3 Speaking the written 103
A Introduction: From writing in the flesh to
speech under transference 103
B The signifier in motion 105
a Introduction: Freud with Aristotle 105
b Bewegung: The motions of psychic writ(h)ing 106
c Towards speech: From floating to syncopation
and ex-pulsion 108
d Anxiety and the topology of speech 111
e Scheme: The choreography of speech 113
C Of signifiers spoken in the real 119
a Introduction 119
b Psychosis: The unconscious phrase that enunciates
itself 120
1 Introduction 120
2 The schizophrenic’s organ speech 122
3 Hallucination: The unspeakable object as
heard word 122
c Neurosis: The real forms of desiring speech 128
1 Introduction 128
2 ‘Get thee to a nunnery!’: The obsessional’s
sign(ifier)-invective 130
3 Somatic compliance: The word that slaps the
hysteric 132
4 The hysteric’s enunciation-thing 135
Notes 137
Epilogue: Chiselled from the real – The feminine signifier 147
Notes 155
Bibliography 157
Index 164
Figures
0.1 Michal Na’aman, The Man Who Laughs with Cuts
(Crimson Joy) 2009 2
1.1 Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Self-Portrait, c. 1670 22
1.2 Annibale Carracci, Self-Portrait on an Easel, Italy, 1603–1604 23
1.3 Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in his
Studio (in the Dresden suburb Pirna, An der Elbe 26)
Painting, c. 1812 25
1.4 Pompei, Villa of Mysteries, detail of salon decoration 28
1.5 Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1964 31
1.6 Lucio Fontana, Taglio, Milan, 1964 32
2.1 Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622–1625 44
2.2 Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, 1647–1652 44
4.1 Michal Na’aman, Goulash, 2005 147
Acknowledgments
Figure 0.1: Michal Na’aman, The Man who Laughs with Cuts (Crimson Joy)
2009. Oil and masking tape on canvas, 160 × 190 cm, private collection.
Reproduced with the kind permission of the artist.
Figure 1.1: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Self-Portrait, c. 1670. Oil on can-
vas, 122 × 107 cm. © The National Gallery, London.
Figure 1.2: Annibale Carracci, Self-Portrait on an Easel, Italy, 1603–1604.
Oil on panel. 42.5 × 30 cm. © State Hermitage Museum. Reproduced with
the kind permission of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Figure 1.3: Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio
(in the Dresden suburb Pirna, An der Elbe 26). Painting, c. 1812. Oil on can-
vas, 51 × 40 cm. Berlin, SMB, Alte Nationalgalerie. © akg-image.
Figure 1.4: Pompei, Villa of Mysteries, detail of salon decoration.
Reproduced with the kind permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività
Culturali e per il Turismo – Parco Archeologico di Pompei.
Figure 1.5: Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1964. Water-based
paint on canvas, 73 × 92 cm, catalogue no. 64 T 10. © Fondazione Lucio Fontana.
Figure 1.6: Lucio Fontana, Taglio, Milan, 1964. 567 × 787 cm. Photo Ugo
Mulas © Ugo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved.
Figure 2.1: Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622–1625, Rome,
Galleria Borghese, MiBACT – Borghese Gallery/photo: Luciano Romano.
Reproduced courtesy of the Borghese Gallery, Rome.
Figure 2.2: Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, 1647–1652,
sculpture in marble, stucco, and gilt bronze, height 350 cm, Church of Santa
Maria della Vittoria, Rome, photo © Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-
Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome.
Figure 4.1: Michal Na’aman, Goulash, 2005. Oil on canvas, 30 × 40 cm,
artist’s collection. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
Epigraph featured at the start of Chapter 2 is taken from Jacques Lacan,
‘Geneva Lecture on the Symptom’, 1975, trans. Russell Grigg, Analysis 1,
1989, p. 24. Translation reproduced with the kind permission of Russell Grigg.
The first section in the third chapter of this book is a revised version of
‘The Signifier in Motion: The Movement of Language in Psychoanalysis and
in Aristotle’s Linguistic Theory,’ published in volume 28, number 3 (2016), of
Fractal: Revista de Psicologia, available at: https://periodicos.uff.br/fractal/
article/view/5140/4994.
Reprinted with kind permission of the editors.
Personal acknowledgments
This book is the product of a trajectory that has been long, at times excruci-
ating, but always exciting. It was propelled by a desire to learn something
more about the enigmas of language, spoken and written, in psychoanalysis,
and their intrication with the flesh of the subject who speaks, but sometimes
does not. The trajectory took me through the winding, often tortuous, but
always impassioning route of a personal analysis. It is, in many ways, a prod-
uct of this analysis and of the psychoanalytic formation and practice that
ensued. My deepest and sincere thanks are due first of all to the man who for
years and years has been silently listening and reading from behind the ana-
lytic couch, from the place of the cause, his attentive silences and precise
punctuations helping me chisel out a route for my life and my desire in what
sometimes seemed a momentous and opaque bloc of an undialectizable real
that at first knew how to speak only in inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties.
The style of theorizing that informs what has finally become an art object
in the world would not be as it is, were it not for the extraordinary brilliance
of my fellow dreamer and compagnon de route of many years, Stephen
Whitworth.
My thanks also to those few who were willing to read portions of this book
while it was in the making: Michal Na’aman, Zafra Dan, Tamar Gerstenhaber
and Keren Shafir. The rigour and medical knowledge of Atara Messinger
helped me refine my reading of Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology on
many important points. Efrat Biberman has been a wise and faithful com-
panion to this project as to many others, and her help with the graphic dimen-
sion of this book has been invaluable.
As this book makes its way to press, many parts of the world are under
quarantine. Travel is all but impossible. Nevertheless, part of the desire this
book speaks and speaks of is inseparable from the structure of displacement.
To use the words of John Donne, many portions of this book were written in
a breach that was at the same time an expansion – in London, Berlin, Rome
– cities woven closely into my subjective texture. While contingency prevents
the book’s ending where it began, in the beautiful green of South East
London, it is perhaps fitting that it should come to a close in my home in Tel
Aviv. For it is here that I can appropriately inscribe my most profound thanks
