ABSTRACT
Verhaeghe opens this section with a playful comment that psychoanalysis renders the binary ‘body and soul’ less offensive by relabeling it sex and representation. He argues that Lacan’s final theory understands the gap between the body and soul as a circular, but not reciprocal, relationship. In early Lacan, we find the mirror stage. The infant acquires an organized bodily awareness by identifying with the image presented by the mother. The resulting self-consciousness – ‘I have a body’ – is deceptive because it originates outside the ‘self.’ In Lacan’s next period the accent was on the primacy of the drive, which Freud considered ‘a measure for the amount of work asked from the psyche because of its connection to the body.’ According to Lacan, this work is endless because the real part of the drive – object a – can never be represented. Compared to the first theory, the roles are reversed, as it is the organism that contains an original cause. It is the body that has an ‘I’. Causality is at the core of the final theory, where we find Lacan’s version of the immortal soul versus the temporary body. The organism functions as a cause, in the sense that it contains a primal loss and a tendency to remediate it; this is the loss of eternal life, which paradoxically enough is lost at the moment of birth, the moment that we are born as an individual with a particular sex. This primordial loss sets into motion a circular but not reciprocal process with the aim of undoing the loss and a return to the previous state of being. This ‘circular but not reciprocal process’ runs as follows: by becoming a body, we lose eternal life. In trying to undo this loss, we become a subject but lose our body. In trying to regain the body, we become a man or a woman. The accompanying phallic interpretation of the loss is applied retroactively to all the preceding instantiations, such that each loss gets interpreted in a phallic way. The original circular but not reciprocal relationship between life and death, between organism and body, between jouissance and subject, is reproduced and worked over in the relationship between man and woman.
