Argument of the 2020 NLS Congress by Éric Laurent – “Interpretation: From Truth to Event”

Speech delivered in Tel Aviv, 2 June 2019

        As soon as one evokes interpretation a misunderstanding arises. The binary between the text and its interpretation misleads us. We immediately fall into the illusion that the language of the unconscious exists and that it calls for a metalanguage: interpretation. Lacan did not stop hammering home that the experience of psychoanalysis allowed him not only to affirm that there was no such thing as a metalanguage, but that saying so gave him the only chance of orienting himself correctly in this experience. Two fundamental propositions follow from this. Desire is not the metalinguistic interpretation of a previous indistinct drive. Desire is its interpretation. Both things are situated at the same level. A second proposition must be added to this: “Psychoanalysts are part and parcel of the concept of the unconscious, as they constitute that to which the unconscious is addressed.” [1] The psychoanalyst can only hit the target if he aligns himself with the interpretation performed by the unconscious, already structured like a language. Still, we must not reduce this language to the mechanical conception that linguistics can have of it. We must add to that the topology of poetics. The poetic function reveals that language is not information, but resonance, and emphasizes the matter that links sound and meaning. It reveals what Lacan called moterialism, which in its center closes around a void. …