Notes on 'The body in psychoanalysis' by Alexandre Stevens

 - "It is the very principle of the signifier that makes present against a background of absence and absent against a background of presence" : It appears what is being referred to here is the principle of law and its constitutive exception. This, as psychoanalysis has shown us often if not only works retroactively - in the sense that we are alerted to or made aware of a law only in terms of its effects, that is only when a constitutive exception forces them to reveal themselves. Indeed this was Lacan's decisive insight which allowed him to break from Freud, the minimal degree of sublation necessary to move from the name of the father to the symbolic order. A transition whose possibilities it may be stated, Freud, especially the latter Freud of 'Civilization and its Discontents' was not entirely blind to. Yet, let us tarry a step back for a moment. What does it mean to speak of a structure apparent only in its effects? What kind of causality are we then speaking of? In other words, the question remains an Althusserian one, ie. what is a structural causality? 

1. Literature (psychic/character, plot, form, narrative) 2. Philosophy (causality, models, inferences, induction) 3. Sociology (custom, kin, polity, ideology) - as possible sites where this may be identified. 

- What is the relation between the unconscious and the id, or table manners gone wrong. The place of the critique of political economy. The necessity of sublation because the unconscious is situated on the basis of the signifier. The signifier would hence serve as a basis of separating the id from the unconscious, perhaps hence producing non-pathologically the stability of the ego. 

- Jouissance, even in Lacan was for a long time linked to what was forbidden - and deferrals do make much of this; too.  ..."In other words it can be obtained only if it is refused."

Jouissance however changes when no longer attached to a prohibition. it becomes a body event. Lacan: the body is insofar as it has not enjoyed itself. It was only in these terms that Lacan was able to formulate feminine jouissance. 

- Miller: The body appears here as the Other of the signifier, which is what Lacan implied by saying that the Other is the body. ....interesting how much this sentence would change with a small 'o' ... But without the prohibition, paternal or otherwise we lose the link between the Other of the signifier and the Other of truth, as in a hole in the symbolic order - if not another one - which is to say another logic. This is the meaning of the paternal metaphor; without meaning, we are left with merely the corpus.