ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan refuses the rights to affect and warns that it tricks even while saying the truth. Could it be a paradox? This chapter is based on the exposition of Lacan’s readings on Freud’s original literature about affect. Affect, as proposed by Lacan, “comes to the body”—it never arises from the body itself, it is never primary but always secondary to the discourse. That is the Lacanian resumption of Freud’s definitive sentence that “there is no unconscious Affect”. For Lacan, the unconscious is a discourse. Though alternative to the official speech of the ego, fragmented and dispersed, the unconscious discourse is still a discourse and, likewise, it may produce affects or feelings, but it does not contain them. Affect will be considered as the effect of the fact that the real in one’s life does not really fit into it. This real exceeds and sometimes collides with our own existence.
