The Cracks of the Soul
Lacan and Kabbalah
The Cracks of the Soul
The barred subject and the pathways of desire
When one begins to study Kabbalah, with its comings and goings and that language which never quite closes into a single interpretation, it is inevitable that we bind it to something we already know. This is how our mind works. We enter the unknown by using the forms of the known. One idea calls to another, one image finds another image, and, on occasion, two systems born apart begin, strangely, to speak to each other. The most interesting thing happens when the movement is reversed: after gazing long enough at the unknown through the forms of the known, the unknown begins in turn to alter that with which we had arrived.
This happens when one contemplates certain representations of the name of God. The four letters of YHVH, יהוה , placed vertically in a particular way, can take on the approximate form of a human body. Yod, He, Vav, and He become head, arms, torso (or a necktie), and legs. What is unsettling in that figure lies in its construction: the body that seems one is made of separate elements. The appearance of unity arises from fragments of language which, set side by side, manage to sustain a form.
The subject enters fractured
There the connection with Lacan begins. The subject enters language already fractured. A child learns, for instance, to call a figure "mother" long before knowing all that the word will come to mean. The word gathers distinct experiences under a single signifier and, in doing so, opens a distance between what happens and what can be said about what happened. The image of the mother, the experience of her presence or her absence, and the word that tries to name her never fully coincide. Something manages to pass into language, and something remains that cannot.
That distance thereafter accompanies every attempt to say who one is. Between the image someone builds of himself and the signifiers with which he tries to explain it, a remainder always lingers. Even when a sentence seems to express exactly what was meant, a part of the experience remains outside it. This is why Lacan writes the subject with a bar, $ . The unity we later call the Ego arises as a construction capable of producing a certain continuity among elements that never quite fit together completely.
The letters that form that strange body of YHVH can then be read as graphic vestiges of that fracture. In stacking the letters, one sees clearly the spaces between them. The body appears as one because its fragments have managed to articulate themselves despite the spaces that separate them. Unity, then, is an imaginary reconstruction of fragments.
Another kabbalistic representation then appears, one that seems to repeat the same intuition: the Tree of Life. There, too, a human figure is built from separate parts.
The nodes and the paths
The gaze is usually drawn first toward the sefirot, those ten spheres arranged in three columns that seem to hold the secret of the soul. But they can be seen in another way as well. Each sefirah can be imagined as a point of attraction for the desiring machine that we are, a position around which desire organizes itself, changes direction, and takes on a provisional form. Something is missing, something calls, something promises satisfaction, and desire begins to move among images, words, identifications, and possibilities. A sefirah would then be a position capable of giving form to desire , altering its direction, and reorganizing the course it runs through the Tree.
But no position exists in isolation. The sefirot are joined by paths, and it is precisely in those paths that the Tree begins to resemble a machine. We can imagine them as conducting filaments that allow something to circulate from one position to another. Desire does not remain arrested in a sefirah. It moves, returns, changes direction, passes through different configurations, and establishes relations among positions that never come to merge completely.
In this reading, one side of the Tree resonates with the Imaginary, with the images by means of which the subject tries to recognize himself and to give consistency to what he desires, while the other resonates with the Symbolic, with the words, the names, the law, and the differences by means of which that desire can be organized and expressed.
The paths allow those positions to enter into relation. Through them circulate images, signifiers, identifications, memories, and fantasies. But no course manages to contain completely what it sets in motion.
The incandescence of the Real
The Imaginary and the Symbolic can cross again and again, yet never manage to transmit completely what circulates between them. Something remains impossible to inscribe, something finds no definitive form, and, precisely for that reason, it insists. It returns in the distance between what is said and what was meant, between what someone imagines himself to be and what irrupts as something unknown of himself, finding no stable place within that image.
In every course the Real begins to make itself visible.
The paths of the Tree can then be imagined as the filaments of an incandescent lamp. Desire runs through them like a current, moving among different positions, but that movement never remains wholly enclosed within each filament. From them arise heat, light, and a glow that cannot be reduced simply to the current that circulates nor to the conductor that carries it.
That glow offers a possible image of the Real: it makes visible what the course produces without managing to contain it completely. Something exceeds the relation between the points that the path connects. Something breaks free of the very movement of desire.
If two positions of the Tree could coincide fully, the path would vanish, for there would no longer be any distance to traverse. But the distance is part of the design. Something remains separate, something stays unintegrated, and desire sets itself in motion once more. This is why the course repeats. Not only because it seeks to arrive somewhere, but because what it seeks is never satisfied by the path it has just traversed.
When desire meets a closed path
Let us imagine, for instance, a demand, marked in red, that sets out from Tiferet, the Ego, and moves toward Gevurah, the limit, framing some question or other: do you love me? From there, the demand tries to continue its course toward Chesed, expansion, permissiveness, love without limits. The subject has built a certain idea of the Other and expects to find in them a loving reply. Yet, in this example, the passage between Gevurah and Chesed is obstructed: the subject desires love, demands it, and even seeks it, but cannot bring himself to accept receiving it.
The demand leaves Tiferet, meets the closed path, and returns toward Tiferet as a reply, marked in blue. Not because Gevurah has properly answered the question, but because the impossibility of completing the course is received by the subject as a reply.
That return marks the beginning of the circuit. Gevurah cannot carry the operation as far as Chesed, and the tension flows back toward Tiferet. But Tiferet still needs a reply and so directs the demand toward other positions of the Tree. The question may descend toward Hod, Yesod, Netzach, or even Malkuth. Each position offers a different way of producing something that can return to Tiferet and take, provisionally, the place of a reply. Tiferet receives what comes back, tries to incorporate it, and confronts it once more with the original question. If what has been received does not suffice, the signal circulates again.
We are no longer, then, before a simple detour from one point to another. A pulsation appears. Tiferet becomes the place to which the signal returns again and again, marked in green, while the circuit alternates among judgment, search, reply, and verification. Each turn produces a small closure, but each closure opens again. The psyche finds something, tests it, obtains a certain satisfaction, and asks once more.
Here jouissance begins to appear.
Jouissance is not contained within Hod, Yesod, or Netzach, as though each sefirah stored a particular substance. It arises in the very repetition of the circuit, in the successive excitation of a constellation of positions, and in the constant return toward Tiferet. No reply manages to close the question definitively, yet each turn produces something sufficient to sustain the movement. There is tension, a partial discharge, a fresh tension, and another discharge. The circuit can accelerate until it takes on an almost orgasmic quality without any need to culminate in an orgasm: a satisfaction produced precisely by the movement that never manages to finish satisfying itself.
The figure shows three possible circuits of a single pulsation. In all three cases something similar occurs: the question sets out from Tiferet, finds the passage between Gevurah and Chesed closed, and returns without having obtained the reply it sought. From that moment on, the psyche tries to produce that reply by other courses of the Tree.
The red arrows show the question and its return after meeting the closed path. The blue ones represent the alternative courses by which one tries to find something that can return to Tiferet as a reply. The sefirot marked in green are those through which the circuit begins to pass with greater insistence. They are not three places where jouissance resides, but three different ways of setting a question in circulation that cannot close.
- In Jφ, phallic jouissance, the search descends toward Yesod and may extend as far as Malkuth. What could not be received directly as a loving reply begins to be sought in desire, in fantasy, in the body, and finally in something that can be felt as fulfilled. The question "am I loved?" may shift into other forms: "does he desire me?", "does he choose me?", "does he want my body?", "did it really happen?". The circuit thus tries to convert a question hard to resolve into something that can be verified, quantified, or realized. When something returns from Yesod or Malkuth, Tiferet may receive it for an instant as a reply, a confirmation about itself. But Gevurah interrogates it again, and the circuit starts over. Satisfaction lies not simply in the body or in the act, but in returning again and again to seek there a proof capable of answering the question.
- In JS, the jouissance of meaning, the course finds in Hod a far shorter way. Instead of seeking a proof in the body or in fulfillment, the question seeks an explanation. "He told me so", "now I understand why it happened", "this means yes", "at last it all fits together". Something finds meaning, and that meaning returns to Tiferet as a reply. For a moment it seems the question has been resolved. But the meaning may be thrown into doubt again. Gevurah interrogates once more what seemed clear, and the circuit returns to Hod in search of a new interpretation. Satisfaction then appears in that repeated movement of understanding, provisionally closing the question, and reopening it to produce a new meaning.
- In JA, the Other jouissance , the reply is no longer sought chiefly in an explanation or in a concrete verification. The circuit moves above all between Yesod and Netzach. Yesod introduces the scene of desire, the fantasy, and the implication of the body, while Netzach brings intensity, insistence, and affect. Here something can begin to be felt as true precisely by the force with which it is lived: "I had never felt anything like this", "this pierces me too deeply", "something so intense must mean something". The signal then returns to Tiferet charged not so much with an explanation or a proof as with an experience whose intensity seems to suffice in itself. Satisfaction lies more and more in letting oneself be pierced by that intensity and returning to it.
The three jouissances are, from this perspective, different ways of making the Tree pulse around a question that remains open . In all of them Tiferet appears repeatedly, for it is there that partial replies try to become a new form of "Ego". And Gevurah reappears, for the question that set the circuit going continues to demand a confirmation.
The symptom begins precisely there. A route created to answer an impossibility begins to produce enough jouissance to require its own repetition.
The question may remain unanswered, but around it the subject has learned to take jouissance.
The courses of the pathways of desire also allow us to think a fourth form of jouissance bound up with Da'at (Knowledge) . Da'at, though it is usually represented graphically as an additional sefirah in the upper triad, can also be understood as a state of global excitation of the Tree , the moment when Jφ, JS, and JA cease to pulse separately and begin to reinforce one another.
Then the reply no longer comes solely from meaning, from the body, or from intensity. The subject understands something, feels it, experiences it bodily in its fullness, and at the same time finds signs that seem to confirm it. Each circuit validates the others. Meaning confirms the experience, the experience confirms the intensity, and the intensity confirms what is thought. The result is no longer lived simply as "I understand it", "I feel it", or "I experience it", but as something far more powerful:
Da'at would be, in this sense, a kind of fourth jouissance, the jouissance that appears when the whole Tree momentarily enters into resonance and produces a total certainty. Knowledge emerges because many parts of the system seem to be saying the same thing at once.
If this text has resonated with you, leave a like.
Comments
Post a Comment