your comments remind me of something lacan was reputed to have said when asked about why he wrote in so dense and elliptical a style. he retorted that he was trying to write in such a way so as to force the reader into an encounter with their own unconscious, that to get what he was trying to say one had to go through the text as if going through a labyrinth. as a working clinician, he was always wrestling with the clinical phenomena in front of him with the intent of working through what makes psychoanalysis work/what is the work of psychoanalysis. his expositions, regardless of form or venue, were his attempt to communicate what he had found to date. for myself, as a parochial american who does not read french, german, greek and latin, have been left with a different problem to solve, for i take to heart lacan’s injunction to the students in the 1968 events. what is available to me is what i have had to work with. at times, it has been like the characters in well’s journey to the center of the earth, going into the unknown following the traces left along the unmarked path of the two initials and an arrow (i.e., JL—>). Given the turns lacan took, given the various people who have been involved along the way, and given the schisms that have occurred for numerous reasons, i find myself trying to work the second half of newton’s experiment in optics, to institute myself as a refractionating prism that could cause the spectrum of light to re-cohere into a single white beam, so that i could have some sense of what was originally emitted by lacan (a task that is impossible because of my impotence). i have been reminded of lacan’s reference to the story of prajapati in the upanishads (i think at the end of field & function) where parjapati says “da” and each hears and understands according to his station, each taking away a different message (unique, specific unconscious determinants/referents) but prajapati confirms that all have heard him truly. each has heard some “truth”of lacan, have found a way to put this into practice with a given population, and consider themselves lacanian. to go back to newton, each has received some frequencies of the visible spectrum and have taken this to be “correct” or “the real message” of lacan when it is only partial. this misunderstanding was the motivation to “re-write” psychoanalytic knowledge in graphs, mathemes, and topological figures. to speak of the objet a as such is an attempt to look at the structure underneath the manifestations, but the manifestations, as derivatives, are what make themselves known in the clinic and are keys to understanding the structural faults that the sinthomatic knottings are trying to compensate for, as well as how well knotted the knots are.

so, to the heart of the matter. at what point is the subject instituted, when does the form of this subject take on durable dimensions in time and space? what is the join between the organism and the body, or the real of the existence of this subject with the jouis-sens of this body as a set of markings on a surface? (and here, it is the punctuation/cut that marks the closure of the set and not anything internal and common to the elements so marked off by the cut, which is why there is body dysmorphic disorder, self-mutilation, and certain forms of transexualism. one could even read autism as a radical disjunction between the phantasy of the maternal other of who this child is to become for her versus the real of this child.) those who come to us suffer from an excess. they either act this out in some way that is creating other problems for them that they aver that they do not want or they talk about it. and by talking, things change. it goes back to the graph of sexuation: the one on the masculine side deals in phantasy; the one on the feminine side searches for the phallus unveiled. phantasy fails, the phallus fails (as it is never able to rise to the task), and only then might the subject turn to face the absolute lack of the other, an inescapable real. enough for now, more later.

Topology restricts the imaginary relies on the evolution of forms to inscribe the Real. Siboni says that topology exists in the symbolic and the Real..it offers us news/new of the complexity of existence that surpasses the surpasses the capacity of the written word..but Lacan also insists that it be spelled out in language and transmitted in order that it can evolve the sybolic. The way he shifted his work from his interest in the imaginary and the symbolic to the subjects confrontation with the real…(in his later work) as the divide that eventually has to be encountered to fit with his understanding of how to evolve psychoanalytic knowledge.

Some call it perhaps the feminization of Lacan…but it is through the psychoanalytic work..that the subject moves beyond the phallic jouissance.and the symptom inherant in an insistance on the imaginary phallus as reality…and here is the Lacanian cut where the subject falls into the fragility of the imaginary upon which the symbolic rests..and it is here that the Real makes its appearance..as the imaginary is what covers the body…this was Lacan’s ,as declerq notes, return to Freuds drive..return to the body fixation..The oedipal turns on not three but four…the unconscous …the concretization of this story..while significant as a story is not the entire story for Lacan..the concept of this reality happening in the womb is a good story but not the wnole story. there is a materiality to the unconscious that is constantly being refused when the body is taken as something that can be “worded”….it is beyond the symbolic..and the symbolic is not the Real..it can offer a consensus reality..but reality is not the Real.. .

This fall away enables the subject a greater possibility of the new..new signification..of evolving beyond the S1…as there is a release from the Other..the Law…not in a sense of transgressing .law but in the sense of the feminine jouissance which is in excess of Law…this is where lacan begins to understand the movement from the feminine jouissance which may travel at times from the imaginary to the Real..and still move through forms..that can evolve…in this capacity to both subscribe to law and also move into the imaginary not so tethered to it.

Lacan in his latter work pointed us in the dIrection of poetics and topology his fascination with writes and with the higher math..forms…indicates to me his fascination with truth of the Real ..of which he pursues relentlessly…he is constantly unpunctuating..constantly.getting us out of the academic discourse..he is constantly setting teh social symolic not as something to inform..or dissolve the imaginary in order for the subject to adapt but he recognized this was too close to a superego rendtion of things and moved out of his second stage of theorizing..in order to make sure that there could be evolution of thought through less of a bind to the existing symbolic..so Siboni says that topology exists between the symbolic and the Real…I believe that poetics exists between the imaginary and the Real..I believe the academic discourse since most of the time in the symboblic..I believe the later Lacan offers us a trail and a path of a hot pursuit. of that which is new..not yet produced …a work in progress..a place for a fifth generation…to teach us..something new.. . .perhaps the offspring of the marriage between poetic and topology.

Topology restricts the imaginary relies on the evolution of forms to inscribe the Real. Siboni says that topology exists in the symbolic and the Real..it offers us news of the complexity of existence that surpasses the surpasses the capacity of the written word..but Lacan also insists that it be spelled out in language and transmitted in order that it can evolve the sybolic. The way he shifted his work from his interest in the imaginary and the symbolic to the subjects confrontation with the real…as the divide that was eventually have to be encountered beings to fit with his understanding of how to evolve psychoanalytic knowledge.

Some call it perhaps the feminization of Lacan…but it is through the psychoanalytic work..that the subject moves beyond the phallic jouissance.and the symptom inherant in an insistance on the imaginary phallus as reality…and here is the Lacanian cut where the subject falls into the fragility of the imaginary upon which the symbolic rests..and it is here that the Real makes its appearance..as the imaginary is what covers the body…this was Lacan’s as declerq notes return to Freuds drive..return to the body fixation..

This fall away enables the subject a greater possibility of the new..new signification..of evolving beyond the S1…as there is a release from the Other..the Law…not in a sense of transgressing .law but in the sense of the feminine jouissance which is in excess of Law…this is where lacan begins to understand the movement from the feminine jouissance which may travel at times from the imaginary to the Real..and still move through forms..that can evolve…in this capacity to both subscribe to law and also move into the imaginary not so tethered to it.

Lacan in his latter work pointed us in the dIrection of poetics and topology his fascination with writes and with the higher math..forms…indicates to me his fascination with truth of the Real ..of which he pursues relentlessly…he is constantly unpunctuating..constantly.getting us out of the academic discourse..he is constantly setting teh social symolic not as something to inform..or dissolve the imaginary in order for the subject to adapt but he recognized this was too close to a superego rendtion of things and moved out of his second stage of theorizing..in order to make sure that there could be evolution of thought through less of a bind to the existing symbolic..so Siboni says that topology exists between the symbolic and the Real…I believe that poetics exists between the imaginary and the Real..I believe the academic discourse since most of the time in the symboblic..I believe the later Lacan offers us a trail and a path of a hot pursuit. of that which is new..not yet produced …a work in progress..a place for a fifth generation…to teach us..something new.. . .

What is left of such a work..is perhaps a sense of closeness even intimacy with that which had initially appeared so foreign..a higher tolerance for that which doesn’t add up and match cognito..in fact a curiosity about where one hasn’t traveled before..a delight in spontaneaty and potential of possibilities that exist in the moments that pass before us…

while i would mostly agree with your responses to these inquiries, there is one point on which i would differ with you, that being what is the primordial object for the infans? following the lines laid out by Didier Anzieu in The Skin Ego and John Mueller in Beyond the Psychoanalytic Dyad, i would contend that the primordial object is the voice for the following reasons. as Anzieu has demonstrated, the organism that will become the body of the subject forms in the womb of the maternal other, with those tissues that will become skin and brain/nerves originating from the same stock, underscoring Freud’s statement that the first ego is the projection of a surface. the ears begin to function at about 16 weeks of gestation, such that the subject to be, while still in the womb, begins to hear the resonances of sound through the amniotic fluid. this means that the speaking of the maternal other and those around her begin to be “heard” by the developing fetus, establishing rhythm, beat, pulse, timber, tone, intonation and the flow of absence and presence before there is an infans. this is what has led to Wily Apollon talking about the radical intrusion of the “father’s voice” that ruptures the symbiosis with the mother before birth. Mueller has used Trevarthen’s neonatal research (that neonates show a significant differential response to noise, any human voice, and the mother’s voice in terms of attending to and focusing on the locus of the sound) to underscore how it is that immediately after birth the neonate is listening. paranoids think they are being watched (the gaze), but psychotics hear someone more real speaking a truth to them (the voice). this can have a structuring effect only if the child to be is “alive” in the maternal other’s unconscious, which goes back to her experiences of her mother and grandmother’s interactions, the words exchanged by them, and her play as a young girl with her dolls. the majority of girls who play with dolls or doll substitutes (a favorite stuffed animal) already have the notion of an objet a as separable and possessable prior to a comprehension of their bodies as sexual and able to produce a child. they are deriving jouissance from the doll in the imaginary phantasy of being like their mother, and then transfer this identification onto their child. this is also why psychoanalysis is a practice of speech/speaking in the symbolic register and not the imaginary, as Ferenczi & Jung would have it. given that we al are possessed by our unconscious, this makes the object relations notion of projective identification become one of resonances of the unresolved hearings in the unconscious of the “analyst” as regards their own objet a, and not a usable communication in the treatment as the significance is different for the two partners (who will never be as one). this, as you may have guessed, also encapsulates my general problem with object relations: they get to the party way too late after the symbolic has already done its work but long for a never to be had fusional state.

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