ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 turns more explicitly to issues of practice, both in Chan or Zen Buddhism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. We offer the Chinese Taoist word Wuwei (无为), meaning “knowhow,” praxis, or savoir, as another way to theorize a form of transmission and realized activity based on emptiness as the source of the drives. The “original nonbeing” from which being is produced is a negative, a form of nonexistence or inexistence, something impossible, lacking reason or cause. The Wu of Wuwei contains two types of negation: binary and unary. Binary negation represents a negation of something while unary negation does not. Mu or Wu is a unary negation experienced through the unique intimacy between the student and teacher in Chan, and the analysand and analyst in psychoanalysis. To cross the barrier leading to intimacy with the teacher means to cross the barrier represented by ego ideals of enlightenment, or of fantasies about ideal enlightened egos. Intimacy in psychoanalysis is realized not as an imaginary oneness or fusion with the mother, nor as a phallic jouissance with the father, but as a Real trans-subjective form of jouissance facilitated by the signifier and shared by analyst and analysand. When the signifier separates the “i” of the ego of the analysand involved in the fantasies about the Other from the a [i (a)], then the objet a represents the Third jouissance that circulates between analyst and analysand.
