“To want is a jouissance” [1] which in a woman can occasionally take the form of whim, “a Will outside the law.” Where the law tries to restrain the Will, whim suddenly appears, outside the chains of reasoning. In a rupture of all casual link, a statement emerges outside reason, “which deserves to be qualified as object a, whim-cause of what there has to be done. [2] This statement would be devoid of the articulation that links object and subject in the fantasy. In this case, it would be more of an acquaintance with the drive “a properly acephalous Will” where the subject disappears, where enunciation has no place.
As D. Holvoet advances in his argument, you need “desire to dress the Will to enjoy [jouir]” by passing this will to enjoy to the signifier, to a signifying chain that would say something about the subject and would write a trajectory of a statement to an enunciation.
In her last novel, Nathalie Kuperman [3] take us to the heart of the maternal changes that delight Agatha, an 11-year-old girl whose mother takes her to the seaside on a whim, a few days before the end of the school year: “the way that she predicted this beautiful trip gave me goosebumps.” From the little salamander to the overcooked macaroni, Agatha is adorned with little nicknames that designate her according to the maternal mood, going from the object of adoration to the object in excess. This “outgrowth, this little devouring beast” who was barely “detached from the mother’s body,” opened for her a bottomless chasm, had to create a fixation without the support of a signifier transmission.
This issue of Ombilic questions with precision, the salt of filiation which Lacan Indicates, that it is in the way in which the father and the mother offer to the subject knowledge, jouissance and the object a that there is something to be explored. The mode of presence under which it was presented to the child. [4] By bringing these three terms into play, he invites us to free ourselves from the imaginary in order to focus on the way in which the little subject will use knowledge to define jouissance. As Daniel Roy tell us, it is a matter of “enlarging the field of knowledge, of fiction (…) so that bits of the real can be inscribed, and, on the other hand, to ‘liberate’ the object, to separate it, so that strands of jouissance are condensed there.” [5]
Translation: Marcel Pereira
Review: Caroline Heanue
Photography: ©Nikonografik – Instagram
Bibliography
Lacan J., Seminar, Book IV, La Relation d’objet (1956-1957), text established by J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil, coll. Champ Freudien, 1994, p. 100-101.
[1] Miller J.-A., “The Theory of Caprice,” Quarto, n°71, August 2000, p. 6-12.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Kuperman N., “We Were Fish,” Paris, Flammarion, 2021.
[4] Cf. Lacan J., Seminar, Book XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre (1968-1969), text established by J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil, coll. Champ Freudien, 2006, p. 332.
[5] Roy D., “The Family: its Dangers, its Resources,” La petite Girafe, n°24, September 2006, p. 57.
