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Chinese Poetry and Psychoanalysis – Lacan in Beijing – Macau Today

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Chinese Poetry and Psychoanalysis – Lacan in Beijing – Macau Today

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By: M. Angela Andrade

What is so unique about the form of Chinese poetry that De Miéville compares its texture to the art of “frying fish without ruining it”? There is a hint of its lightness and subtlety. But the technique also involves exercise through repetition, since the Chinese have always imitated and repeated poetic codes, myths, and ancestral rituals.

What makes poetry irresistible, beyond technique and technique, is style and uniqueness, as embodied in Chinese calligraphy. What we can learn is that repetition requires something new. In the structure of temporary poetry, the anxiety of existence is always evaded. It is therefore “fragile poetry, always on the verge of collapse on the path to obliteration, always able to avoid disappearance, threatened by extinction, but always reborn. It is, after all, indestructible because it touches the contrast of language itself, from which language is born.”

Before going on to read how Albert Nguyen illustrates the relationship between Chinese poetry and psychoanalysis, it is worth noting the historiographical data on Lacan’s relationship with China, his language and thought: Jacques Lacan had always been attracted to the Far East and, as is known, had studied Chinese at the School of Oriental Languages ​​during his career. In 1969, while developing a theory of discourse based on Wittgenstein’s “Speaking and Showing”, he once again enthusiastically devoted himself to the study of Chinese language and philosophy.

Another time, I tried to deal here with the references to Chinese in the Lacan seminars, mainly the 18th. In this work, I tried to present Lacan’s allusions to Chinese poetry: “If you are a psychoanalyst, you will find that psychoanalysts can make other things resonate by forcing, not meaning. (….) Meaning, this buffer; but with the help of so-called poetic writing, they can have the dimension of analytical interpretation. It is absolutely certain that writing is not poetry, the resonance of the body, expressing itself through writing. In fact, it is completely surprising that Chinese poets express themselves through writing, and what we need is to know what poetry is from Chinese writing. Not all poetry… is what we can imagine through writing, through Chinese poetic writing, but perhaps you will feel that there is something different, besides what makes Chinese poets do nothing but write…”

Yet Chinese poetry can only be read if one understands the context in which it arose, that is, the philosophical foundations on which it is based, especially Taoism. Again, in terms of context: the soil in which these traditions flourished produced a peculiar combination of heterogeneous philosophical currents, which, however, proved to be completely assimilated into Chinese culture.

Nguyen also mentions the works of Isabelle Robinet and François Julien, which indisputably demonstrate the influence and power of these doctrines in poetry as well as in Chinese strategy and politics. This article focuses on three great Chinese poets to illustrate each tradition: Wang Wei (Buddhism), Li Bai (Taoism), and Du Fu (Confucianism). For this exhibition I chose to use Wang Wei’s poems for illustration.

Cut through the ancient forest; no trace

In the heart of the mountain, a bell rings; where does it come from?

In the afternoon, on the deserted lake, meditating,

Someone trapped the poisonous dragon.

In TV, Lacan talks about the provisional status of poetry, making it a transcendental art, as practiced by the poet Wang Wei. The encounter between Chinese poetry and psychoanalysis produces disturbances and divergences. Nguyen emphasizes resonance (equivalent to disturbance) as the goal of psychoanalytic interpretation. Disturbance or resonance is:

1. Nature, in Chinese poetry, refers to an empty place, a hole. “A place of resonance, a place of disturbance: without a hole there can be no resonance: that which constitutes the symptom of analysis in knowledge, that which makes the poem and the book unfinished, that which inspires the rupture of tradition in the Basho frog, which launches itself in the well, poof! and many other signs of this disturbance of resonance.”

2. Relationship with reality. This second disturbance is based on the place given to the real. The relationship with reality in psychoanalysis is different. In Chinese poetry, the real appears as the ultimate reality, synonymous with the Tao. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, gives the subject an independent status, explicitly isolated from the whole world and all cosmology. Therefore, the separation, the exclusion of the subject, is relative to the integration of Taoism. Perhaps we can approximate the relationship with the real in Taoism with tonal music and the relationship with the real in psychoanalysis with atonal music. Even Badiou said: “For Lacan, the real appears with the absence of meaning. But what we need to fully understand is that for Lacan, the absence of meaning does not mean meaninglessness. The meaning of the real has a function, which is the absence of meaning. The absence of meaning, the subtraction of meaning, is not meaninglessness. It is important to understand the difference between lack and non-existence.

sense (ab-sens) and senselessness (non-sens).”

3. The mixture, hybridization (métis) of language or of real and symbolic language. It is a kind of monolingualism opposed to the phallic unity; intermarriage favors spiritual plasticity.

Subject effect, loss of visibility, or a temporary, fleeting state of being? The meaning of “temporary poetry” involves the path that existential anxiety is always an escape route.

From this perspective, the analyst and the poet would be a poetic effect. Ruan ends his work with what he calls the “Chinese Lacan”. He says: “How do we locate the possibility of Lacan taking an extra step towards Taoism and poetry? The answer is twofold. On the one hand, Lacan, in formulating the structure, did not neglect to examine the record of the results (developed in the same seminar). Causes not only have effects, but also have consequences. On the other hand, this extra step is authorized by what I call the “Chinese Lacan” to designate the place in his teaching that always marks the Chinese reference throughout.

Lacan begins his teaching with Zen, and everyone knows the reference to the Indian and Thor of Pajapati in the writings, but this comes mainly from the seminar on “Pain,” a seminar on the precise effects of pain that is central to his elaboration of the theory of “pain.” Because, Lacan, from the void and the feminine—because it is also a seminar on how to approach women and try to imagine a person who transcends Freud’s castration rock at the end of analysis—with Guanyin, the feminine mystery from which he extracts the gaze as cause, a gaze of absence, an empty gaze, begins to mark the insistence on Chinese references. ”

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