Stasis

“Naïve mouth… open up again to hear me. No need to close your eyes”, Lacan addresses an imaginary interlocutor in The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1966/2002, p. 55). Pressed on his devotion to the concept of the subject-‘Whatever you mean by this, Dr. Lacan, in any case, we already know it, the individual, subjective experience, psychoanalysis is on the side of the subject’-he takes the supposed subject and reduces it to a mouth, maybe also eyes. I don't want to talk about the subject. Lacan goes on to do so in this essay for a number of pages. What I'm quite taken by is his desire that one open one's mouth in order to hear, particularly since we rather close one in order to open the other, more often than not, as psychoanalysts.

Is this merely Lacan's infamous hostility, reducing the other to a part object? Is it some sort of surrealistic game? Why, in the middle of a paper that wants to tackle the question of speech and language in psychoanalysis, would he designate his reader as a mouth and one that he would like to remain open? His hope, he'll say a few pages later, is that if it opens then some truth might fall out of it.

It seems to me that Lacan's thought, despite his passion for linguistics or hypothetical over-intellectualization of Freud, is deeply rooted in the body. A phrase like the above, if it hits home, does so precisely there. The logic of dreams also seems to contain this disembodied address not so much to the individual that Lacan's interlocutor designates as the subject, but to the subject beyond this one which has more to do with the body than not. In Freud's dream after his father's death he is requested to close an eye (Freud, 1900). In Irma's injection, ‘the mouth opens’ (Freud, 1900). In the wolf man's dream the window opens of its own accord and with a flash of recognition he sees that “my eyes suddenly opened” (Freud 1918, p. 34)

For Lacan, the turbulence of the body flows beneath and animates language, a