{"id":283,"date":"2016-02-05T11:07:56","date_gmt":"2016-02-05T11:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/repsychoanalysis\/?p=283"},"modified":"2016-02-08T14:56:39","modified_gmt":"2016-02-08T14:56:39","slug":"2-the-baroque-is-the-regulating-of-the-soul-by-corporeal-radioscopy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/repsychoanalysis\/2016\/02\/05\/2-the-baroque-is-the-regulating-of-the-soul-by-corporeal-radioscopy\/","title":{"rendered":"2. “The baroque is the regulating of the soul by corporeal radioscopy”"},"content":{"rendered":"

REFRAMING PSYCHOANALYSIS presents the second\u00a0in our series of\u00a0SPEAKING LACANESE<\/a>\u00a0posts by\u00a0Will Greenshields<\/a>\u00a0that seek to make legible Lacan\u2019s various aphorisms and neologistic puns. If you disagree with the\u00a0interpretation offered, have a suggestion as to how it might be improved, or would like to see a particular Lacanian phrase discussed here, please don\u2019t hesitate to\u00a0contact Will<\/a>, or leave a comment below.<\/em><\/p>\n

By Will Greenshields<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our second bit of Lacanese comes from p. 116 of Seminar XX: Encore <\/em>(New York and London: Norton, 1998):<\/p>\n

The baroque is the regulating of the soul by corporeal radioscopy.<\/p>\n

One of the things that I most enjoy about reading Lacan is that the subject matter of his seminar sessions very often depended upon some contingent encounter (in this instance, a visit to Rome). The twenty-eight books of the S\u00e9minaire <\/em>are neither the components of a philosophical Weltanschauung<\/em>, nor a coherent, consistent and synthesised theoretical edifice. However, this is not to suggest that they are a scatty and ill-disciplined mess: what most often resulted from the numerous interdisciplinary confrontations between Lacan\u2019s psychoanalytic insight and a cultural event or artefact was something precise. In his editorial preface<\/a> to a series of books titled \u2018Short Circuits\u2019<\/a>, Slavoj \u017di\u017eek outlines the precepts of a mode of reading that is both anarchic and focused:<\/p>\n

A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network \u2013 faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network\u2019s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion) and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a \u2018minor\u2019 author, text, or conceptual apparatus (\u2018minor\u2019 should be understood here in Deleuze\u2019s sense: not \u2018of lesser quality,\u2019 but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a \u2018lower,\u2019 less dignified topic)? If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions. This is… what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality (short-circuiting the highest ethical notions through the lens of the unconscious libidinal economy). What such a reading achieves is not a simple \u2018desublimation,\u2019 a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libidinal cause; the aim of such an approach is, rather, the inherent decentring of the interpreted text, which brings to light its \u2018unthought,\u2019 its disavowed presuppositions and consequences<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In Lacan\u2019s aphorism it is pretty clear between which crossed wires a short circuit is taking place: corporeality and the soul. As for the reading that spawned this aphorism, Lacan appears to have repeated the Freudian procedure: namely, \u2018short-circuiting the highest ethical notions\u2019 \u2013 the religious ecstasy, stimulated by God\u2019s grace, that is exhibited by baroque sculpture \u2013 \u2018through the lens of the unconscious libidinal economy.\u2019 There are moments, however, when Lacan\u2019s reading does not quite conform to what \u017di\u017eek\u00a0wants to call \u00a0\u2018simple \u201cdesublimation\u201d\u2019. Having just returned from his sojourn around Rome\u2019s collection of contorted marble bodies, Lacan bluntly told his audience that he had the impression of being confronted with an \u2018orgy\u2019 (SXX: 113).\u00a0However, as we shall see from Lacan’s more considered observations, this is a very peculiar orgy, an orgy in which the sexual rapport is absent.<\/p>\n

Before we concentrate on the aphorism itself, it\u2019s worth briefly taking a look at some of Lacan\u2019s other comments on the baroque. Whilst there is certainly a place for the transcendent and immaterial in Christian doctrine (e.g. the Holy Ghost or souls), it is also the case that it chiefly concerns \u2018the incarnation of God in a body\u2019: \u2018Christ… is valued for his body, and his body is the means by which communion in his presence is incorporation \u2013 oral drive \u2013 with which Christ\u2019s wife, the Church as it is called, contents itself very well, having nothing to expect from copulation.\u2019 (Ibid: 113) Hence the cheap wine and tasteless wafers. In this regard, the Church\u2019s conservative parish and celibate priests are more enlightened than those of us who do have something to expect from copulation and, to reverse one of Lacan\u2019s most famous pronouncements, do believe that the sexual rapport \u2013 the faultless (comm)union of desirous subjects \u2013 exists.<\/p>\n

That belief in the sexual rapport is a belief that the very same lack that has been caused by language (i.e. the impossibility of ontological unity for a subject that speaks, and is spoken of, with differential signifiers that interminably displace meaning) can be made good by language (i.e. the immaculate vocalisation of one\u2019s own desire and the perfect comprehension of the Other\u2019s desire). There is, in Lacan\u2019s appraisal, a certain admiration for what we might call the Catholic Church\u2019s polymorphous perversity, its renunciation of normative, genital sexuality in favour of the \u2018oral drive\u2019. It is through the consumption of a partial object that \u2018Christ\u2019s wife\u2019 supports a perverse rapport and derives jouissance<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It is precisely this jouissance <\/em>without copulation that Lacan witnesses in the baroque \u2018orgy\u2019:<\/p>\n

In everything that followed from the effects of Christianity, particularly in art \u2013 and it\u2019s in this respect that I coincide with the \u2018baroquism\u2019 with which I accept to be clothed \u2013 everything is exhibition of the body evoking jouissance<\/em>… but without copulation. If copulation isn\u2019t present, it\u2019s no accident. It\u2019s just as much out of place there as it is in human reality, to which it nevertheless provides sustenance with the fantasies by which reality is constituted…<\/p>\n

[As an aside, it\u2019s worth noting that Lacan is not contending that nobody copulates, just as when he says \u2018il n\u2019y a pas de rapport sexuel<\/em>\u2019 he is not contending that nobody has sexual relations: \u2018copulation\u2019 or the \u2018rapport sexuel<\/em>\u2019 are simply bywords for a normative ideal \u2013 a perfect union of partners that negates lack and results in an ontological One \u2013 that cannot exist.]<\/p>\n

…Nowhere, in any cultural milieu, has this exclusion been admitted to more nakedly… I will go so far as to tell you that nowhere more blatantly than in Christianity does the work of art as such show itself as what it has always been in all places \u2013 obscenity. (Ibid: 113)<\/p>\n

This last observation is not that of a miffed Protestant, made rancorous by Roman excess: art, according to Lacan, is obscene because it offers both the artist and the viewer a jouissance <\/em>that is, to cite one of his puns, \u2018a<\/em>-normal\u2019 \u2013 a jouissance <\/em>derived not from copulation but from an object (a<\/em>) that covers an irreducible void at the heart of being. If bored by his priest\u2019s monotone incantations, the church-goer can indulge his scopic drive, gazing at this exhibition of bodily jouissance<\/em> as he picks the last bits of wafer (qua <\/em>oral object) from his teeth. What is particularly obscene about baroque art is that it not only provides the viewer with a jouissance <\/em>not derived from copulation but that this jouissance <\/em>is so obviously its subject (\u2018everything is exhibition of the body evoking jouissance<\/em>… but without copulation.\u2019).<\/p>\n

Lacan\u2019s primary reference here is Gian Lorenzo Bernini\u2019s The Ecstasy of St Teresa <\/a><\/em>(1645-52). The artist\u2019s tableau is very much an exhibition: Bernini\u2019s clients, the Cornaro family, look on, as if occupying boxes in a theatre, while the Spanish nun experiences the rapturous jouissance <\/em>\u2013 an affect somewhere between pleasure and pain \u2013 that she had described in her book of heavenly visions and visitations.<\/p>\n

\"Speaking<\/a><\/p>\n

Here, most vividly, \u2018[t]he dit-mension<\/em>\u2019 \u2013 the dimension of what is said (dit<\/em>) \u2013 \u2018of obscenity is that by which Christianity revives the religion of men\u2019, converting subjects not through coercion and dry scripture but through an overwhelming spectacle of divine jouissance <\/em>(Ibid: 113).<\/p>\n

Whilst Lacan\u2019s aphorism (\u2018The baroque is the regulating of the soul by corporeal radioscopy\u2019) is hopefully starting to make a little more sense, we ought still ask what exactly he means by \u2018the soul\u2019. For Lacan, Aristotle\u2019s decision in De Anima<\/em> to align the activity of thinking with the soul (as separate from the body) was problematic because \u2018Man does not think with his soul… He thinks as a consequence of the fact that a structure, that of language[,]… carves up his body… Witness the hysteric… Thought is in disharmony with the soul\u2019 (Lacan, Television<\/em>, p. 6).<\/p>\n

In other words, discordant unconscious thought \u2013 the Lacanian unconscious that has the \u2018structure… of language\u2019 and is comprised of signifying chains obscurely knotted to traumas that these chains cannot assimilate \u2013 emerges at the level of the body in the form of psycho-somatic symptoms from which the subject derives a mixture of pleasure and pain: a jouissance <\/em>without copulation. The unified and coherent body of which the ego, following the Mirror Stage, believes itself to be master, is \u2018carve[d] up\u2019, fragmented and disharmonious. \u2018[T]he soul is what one [consciously] thinks regarding the body\u2019; it is this imagined unity that egoic subjects believe themselves to be \u2013 not a body affected<\/em> by thought but a body supposed<\/em> by thought \u2013 and, as such, it is always in disharmony with unconscious thought (SXX: 110).<\/p>\n

\u2018Witness the hysteric\u2019, witness Bernini\u2019s St Teresa<\/em>: the baroque\u2019s visions of bodily jouissance <\/em>(its \u2018corporeal radioscopy\u2019) literally provided novel and Church-sanctioned regulations for the soul: out with ascetic self-discipline and in with uninhibited ecstasy. In much the same way, Charcot\u2019s demonstrations provided a shocking insight into the extent to which the harmony between body and thought can unravel. In this sense the baroque is really more of a deregulation of the soul by corporeal radioscopy. I\u2019d also note that the translator\u2019s decision to render the French \u2018scopie<\/em>\u2019 as \u2018radioscopy\u2019 is perhaps an unnecessary complication; it\u2019s more likely that Lacan had in mind the Greek, skop\u00e9o<\/em> , simply meaning to \u2018look upon\u2019 or \u2018inspect.\u2019<\/p>\n

Finally, I\u2019d like to return to the highly suggestive parenthetical remark that Lacan made in the long passage quoted above: his acceptance of being clothed in \u2018baroquism\u2019. He makes this same observation in an even more explicit fashion earlier in the session: \u2018I am situated essentially on the side of the baroque.\u2019 (SXX: 106) This declaration has always puzzled me and I\u2019ve never managed to reach an entirely satisfactory conclusion: is it an allusion to Lacan\u2019s own Catholic upbringing, a salacious admission of his own \u2018obscenity\u2019 or a reference to Freud\u2019s theorisation of polymorphous perversity (and the concomitant refutation of the ideal of sexual normality qua <\/em>\u2018copulation\u2019) on which Lacan builds? In Sensible Ecstasy, Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History<\/em> (2002), Amy Hollywood provides an alternative explanation:<\/p>\n

Baroque, as a seventeenth century style of artistic expression, is an art of excess in which the materiality of the signifier and\/ or of representation constantly threatens to supersede signification and mimesis. Similarly Lacan\u2019s baroque style impedes interpretation, suggesting that what is crucial in his work is not signification but that which goes beyond. Lacan here makes clear that the ultimate goal of psychoanalysis is not scientific knowledge but the eruption of affect in and through language. (162)<\/p>\n

Baroque art sought not to inform the subject but to move him. In a happy coincidence, Hollywood cites, as an example of Lacan\u2019s baroque style, the very same aphorism that we examined in the previous entry: \u2018I demand that you refuse what I am offering you… because: it is not that.\u2019 Here, \u2018that\u2019 should be thought of as equivalent to \u2018copulation.\u2019 We saw how the effect of this peculiar knotting of verbs goes beyond signification by enabling the object to \u2018arise.\u2019 Interestingly, the very same evidence that critics provide in support of the claim that Lacan was a sort of cult leader (i.e. his carefully cultivated baroque style) is precisely the evidence that absolves him: after all, a cult leader would demand that you accept<\/em> what he is offering because it is<\/em> that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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