The body: beyond the image, the phallus and the castration

Abstract

The equation of the three dimensions of the word: real, symbolic and imaginary, allows Lacan to conform a notion of body apt to propose the significant misunderstanding as a privileged mode of analytic interpretation. The thread of alterity makes it possible to see that meaning -as a partenaire of the signifier- yields its place in its last seminars to the jouissance substance, that mystery which -as real- articulates words with the body. In this way, as the phallus relinquishes its place as the ultimate referent of signification, the symptom is reduced to a writing that communicates nothing. Here the nomination does not describe, only accompanies the nothing that the disjunction between the three registers draw in the Borromean knot. Not in vain, Lacan observes that the body is a hole of which we have no idea, with all the metaphysical load that such word implies as available representation to the vision of thought, imaginary residue of the Aristotelian perspective that gave breath to the imaginary castration . The body that Lacan proposes responds to a non-specular imaginary, product of a saying that the feminine field (the female neighbor) updates beyond all universal.