Idiom: Traducción / Transducción

To Néstor Braunstein

In memoriam

By translation the work of thought is found

transposed into the spirit of another language, and thus suffers an

inevitable transformation. But this transformation

can be fertile, since it makes the fundamental position of the question 

appear in a new light[¹]

—Martin Heidegger, Questions I et II

The assertion that the task of translation is part of the work of psychoanalysis is an old idea—as old as psychoanalysis itself—that is repeatedly made and rarely challenged, although it is questionable. This is likely due, surely, to the fact that Freud himself, in the origins of his work, introduced translation as a procedure enacted on the passage from the unconscious into consciousness, and in a certain measure as one of the essential aspects of the analyst’s work. And in effect, isn’t the psychoanalyst’s task and prerogative to clarify the unconscious meanings of the discursive productions of the analysand? Doesn’t his knowledge enable him to elucidate the enigmatic obscurity of the unconscious representations in conscious content? Isn’t that the objective that appears to emerge from some of the diverse “translations” of the highly renowned “Wo es war soll Ich werden”?[2]

Reflecting on translation in psychoanalysis, as Heidegger rightly states, makes “the fundamental position of the question appear in a new light.” We are thus inevitably led to the inquiry: Which similarities and which differences exist between the operation of the translation by a translator and by the psychoanalyst? But this leads us to a different, falsely naïve question: Does the psychoanalyst translate? Our title anticipates that we propose a different question,[3] that doesn’t rule out the first, but displaces it. What is the crux of this “transformation” that the act of translating brings about? To address this question supposes, at the same time, that “the fundamental position of the question” that interests us will not only be the act of translating and its implications, but also the conditions that make  the act itself possible. In effect, every translation is carried out from a text (whose nature will have to be specified). But it is necessary, on the other hand, for the act to be carried out by an agent who will bring into effect the action of transposition, of “translation” or “transduction”? What is the desire that animates those who lend themselves to such an action?

Returning to our original question: admitting that the psychoanalyst “translates,” could this operation limit itself to the simplistic image of the transposition of one language (unconscious) to another (preconscious-conscious)?[4] Certainly no, and even less if it is thought of as the “simple” restitution of a specific meaning. In reality, the translator’s procedure of translation confronts him with all the difficulties of translation as they have been made explicit by the best authors.[5] The psychoanalyst is confronted with these difficulties… and others. However, it is not because of the bias of technical problems that we will address the issue. Not because there doesn’t exist a broad field of inquiries around this topic (relating, for example: meaning, reference, the different types of interpretation/translation: intralingual and interlingual, intrasemiotics and intersemiotics, rewording, etc.). What interests me here is the interrogation, in the first place, of the conditions of the operation itself, to later shift the focus onto the “agent”: the translating subject. What desire is at play in the one who devotes themselves to the delicate, subtle, difficult, even arduous, task of translating?

Freud and Lacan, Translators?

Many of the references are known. The first, foundational, is the letter to W. Fliess dated 6.12.1896, known originally as “Letter 52.” In reality, it is the 112th in the complete correspondence (Freud, Cartas a Wilhelm Fliess, p. 218). Freud points out that the passage from unconscious contents to consciousness would involve a translation from one system to another, a fundamental point that would be revisited twenty years later in the metapsychological texts. This conception of Freud was, as is well known, reformulated in chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams. Translation is thus, from the very beginning, implicated in the very core of the inquiry into psychic functioning. From this point on, two problems immediately arise. First, the question of the nature of this translation. Translation from what and to what? Can it be considered that this is the same type of difficulty as that of translation from one language to another? Could we speak of an Unconscious language and a Preconscious-Conscious language? What type of processes would be considered in this translation?

On the other hand, the second question: What is it that enables the “translative” procedure? Is it the analyst who is in charge of carrying out this translation? And, in that case, what properties/elements/utilities/means does the analyst rely on?

Freud does not provide unequivocal, clear answers in his work, despite having maintained consistency in his core ideas. In regard to Lacan, as we’ll see, he will effect a change of direction. If from the very beginning of his elaborations, his inquiries (and above all his answers) closely followed Freud’s theorizing, Lacan had also stated, in parallel, another dimension, not equivalent to that of translation. His teaching took a progressively different avenue that led him to marginalize a certain idea of translation and to orient himself in another direction, which seems to us to answer the most profound and radical aspects of Freudian interrogations.[6]

From a theoretical point of view, to the first conception of a system change—from the unconscious system to the Preconscious-Conscious system—Freud proposed an answer whose complexity still accompanies us: that of proposing that the change of system supposes a change of type of representation at stake. In other words, “translation” operates between one type of representation and another: in Freud’s terms, the passage from the thing-representation (Sachvorstellung) to the word-representation (Wortvorstellung). Remember that the two representations are, in Freud’s view, of a different nature. The thing-representation is above all visual and characterizes the functioning of the unconscious system, while the word-representation is essentially of an acoustic order. The link between the two would characterize the Preconscious-Conscious system. The thing-representation is originally conceived as close to the mnemic trace.[7] But with time, a difference is introduced: “The thing-representation consists of an investiture, if not of direct mnemic images of the thing, at least of more distant mnemic traces derived from them” (Freud, 1915, pp. 197-198). While the word-representation is presented, from the “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” as a liaison between verbalization and awareness, the mnemonic image could acquire the index of quality of consciousness. In “The Unconscious,” Freud will return to this conception, insisting that the conscious representation includes the thing-representation and the corresponding word-representation, whereas the unconscious representation would be the thing-representation alone. Let us add that for Freud the passage, the link between one representation and the other, consists of a change of investiture between one system and another. There is then a passage from one type of representation to another, but there is also a modification in the economic equilibrium of the charge in psychic energy. And, until 1920, according to Freud, the analyst is the one who brings to light the liaison between both systems, who “translates” from one system to another, despite their heterogeneity.

In fact, if we momentarily leave aside the theoretical-metapsychological aspects to turn to the clinical, it is necessary to recognize that for Freud translation was, in the vast majority of cases, the work of the psychoanalyst, of a psychoanalyst who operates from his knowledge and his know-how (savoir-faire). There is in Freud, at least to a certain point in his work, a flagrant and quasi-systematic assimilation of interpretative action and translation, both being almost equivalent. In order to avoid the multiplication of quotations, we refer the reader back to the different and numerous references.[8]

With the passage of time, with the progressive appearance of difficulties—in particular linked precisely to interpretation and its limits—and the inevitable reworking of theory, the notion of translation tends to disappear from the Freudian vocabulary. As if the limits of interpretation, explicitly indicated from “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” opened up another space for interrogation and another problematic (corresponding to what is not yet called jouissance). A space in which the claim of a “simple” translation of unconscious contents into conscious ones by means of therapeutic clarification was no longer sufficient, neither from a clinical nor a theoretical point of view. Another psychic force is at work and acts not only beyond the pleasure principle but also beyond meaning.

In a flagrant way, in those two great texts at the end of Freud’s work, “Analysis: Terminable and Interminable” and “Constructions in Analysis,” there is no longer any talk of translation.[9] Indeed, if the translation is made from the repressed to the conscious, the recognition that there is an inaccessible repressed, that there are repressed elements that do not reappear as a return of the repressed but that do not cease to produce effects, it is necessary to look at the practice from another angle. Hence the Freudian proposition about “constructions.” But this is not the only alternative, as we will see later. This evolution of Freud’s work and practice will have a different echo in Lacan’s teaching, which will lead to a different consideration of the place of translation in psychoanalysis, in what will appear as a relationship of proximity and difference with literary translation. We will return to this later.

What is the different perspective that Lacan opens up? We find an interesting and explicit formulation in the lecture of November 29, 1967 of his seminar on “The Psychoanalytic Act”:

It is between these two terms that the suspense of what is at stake for us in the analysis takes place, a retranslation… I say “re” because in this case, the first significant inscription is already the translation of something… Is the signifiying organization of the unconscious, structured like a language, that to which our interpretation applies? Or, on the contrary, is our interpretation in some way an operation of a completely different order that reveals a design (dessin) that was previously hidden? (p. 26)[10]

Lacan clearly outlines two possible and different strands of deciphering: one by translation, and another, to say it briefly, by revelation. Without a doubt, the conception of Heidegger’s alatheia had been present for a long time in Lacan’s elaboration; however, until a certain point in its teaching,[11] translation was considered from an angle close to the Freudian vision, while at the same time keeping another perspective open. Without the need to multiply the quotations (Lacan, 1975, p. 81, 1978, p. 523, 1986, p. 31, 2001, pp. 101, 132, 176) it is possible to affirm the presence of a double movement. For Lacan, on the one hand, translation was a task proper to the analyst, with a standing akin to interpretation. Faced with the lack of knowledge of the subject “we are led, in the presence of what is analyzable, to a mantic operation, of translation to put it another way, which aims to reveal, beyond the subject’s language, which is ambiguous on the level of knowledge, a truth” (Lacan, 1975, pp. 249-250). A position that doesn’t prevent him from asserting a bit later in the same seminar: “What does Freud mean by Übertragung? It refers to the specific phenomenon whereby, for a certain repressed desire of the subject, no possible translation exists”; And continues:

The subject’s desire is discursively prohibited (interdit) and cannot be acknowledged. Why? Because among the repressed elements there exists something that partakes in the ineffable. There are essential relations that no discourse can adequately express—what I have designated as in “between-the-lines”. (Lacan, 1975, p. 269)

Hence, there’s in Lacan a tension between two poles that indicate two different types of “translation.” On one hand, a signifying organization “structured like a language” and that would tend to seek an “Other signification,” via the passage from one signifying chain to another. That’s why, as he states in his seminar “Le Transfert”, “For something to signify, it is necessary that it to be translatable in the place of the Other” (Lacan, 2001, p. 285). The passage through the Other’s alterity, is what allows the transition from a statement to the space of the enunciation. But, as in all translation, this involves a journey along abrupt paths where it is essentially a matter of making a truth emerge that goes beyond a translation of meaning. That is why there is a confrontation with the untranslatable. There is, says Lacan, at the base of all neurosis, something that is closer to a refusal (Versagung) than to a frustration, an original rejection. And he adds: “It is obvious that this untranslatable Versagung is only possible in the register of the sagen, insofar as the sagen is not simply the operation of communication, but the saying, the emergence as such of the signifier insofar as it allows the subject to refuse”; to conclude: “this original, primordial refusal, we analysts operate, in that register of rejection” (Lacan, 1975, p. 382).

The second pole would then bring together the saying that borders on the untranslatable and that which is beyond communication and meaning. A point of the unsayable that nevertheless points to a form of truth. How to achieve it? For this it is perhaps necessary to first re-examine the position of the translator and the type of translation. Before continuing our reading from psychoanalysis, we will make a detour and see briefly how this essential question has been approached from the neighboring terrain of translation. We will see how the type of questioning of certain translation theorists produces surprising echoes in the work of the psychoanalyst.

Ethics and the Translator’s Desire

In the introduction we pointed out that it is not the technical problems of translation that interest us here, but the question itself about the act of translating and about the desire of those who accept to risk the possible realization of this act.

To speak of the translator’s desire is to echo, in the first place, the title of Walter Benjamin’s (2000) famous and fundamental article: “La Tâche du Traducteur.” The translator and not the translation, which is its consequence. For there to be translation, it is necessary that the task be embodied and assumed by a subject. On the basis of this observation: What can be said of the desire of the subject who presides, who guides, who pushes to translation?

Every author that we will mention faces this issue implicitly or explicitly. In what follows we will rely particularly on the elaborations of Antoine Berman, who has addressed this problem in the broadest and most acute way. Berman’s conception of translation is based on a rich conceptualization that distinguishes, among other aspects, the point of view of translation, the horizon of translation, the “translating subject,” the translation of the letter. These elements lead to Berman’s formulation of a pair of concepts that can only attract the attention of the psychoanalyst: an “ethics of translation,” in solidarity with that of a “translator.” These two terms may be surprising; they are less so if we know that Berman’s work was marked by his interest in psychoanalysis in general and in Lacan’s work in particular, in which he found multiple resonances with his own interrogations.[12]

It is not for nothing that Berman uses the very specific term “translator’s ethics.” It must be understood as an ethics proper to translation. Now, if this ethics has as its object the “literary fact,” it is founded on a desire. Berman, a scholar of Lacan’s work, uses this term to specify the high points of the act and the commitment of the translator subject. In Lacan’s eponymous seminar, L’ethique de la psychanalyse, he states that the latter is an ethic of desire. How would this ethic involve the translator?

In the same way, his contribution of the “translator’s desire” is that of a concept that opens up multiple perspectives. This syntagma, echoing Lacan’s “desire of the psychoanalyst,” introduces in the same movement a double question: what is it that specifies the translator and guides him in his action, and what is it that unites and distinguishes these two desires, insofar as it is said (or presupposed) that the analyst is himself a translator? We leave these essential questions in abeyance here, to which we will return later. Let’s first define what are the axes that organize Berman’s journey and lead to this ethics and this desire of the translator. For this, Berman’s contribution must be considered as articulating the deployment of four essential axes.

In the first place, the “ethics of translation,” which would consist of “clarifying, refining and defending the pure purpose of translation as such” (Berman, 1948, p. 17). Translation cannot be defined solely in terms of communication, message transmission or extended rewording. We will see later that this ethics essentially presupposes “foreignness,” that is, a radical form of otherness.

The second axis, as important as the first: Berman advocates an “analysis of translation.” The translator must “enter into analysis,” detect the systems of deformation that threaten his practice and operate unconsciously at the level of his linguistic or literary choices. These systems simultaneously involve the registers of the translator’s language, ideology, culture, literature and psyche. Berman draws a suggestive parallel in this regard, speaking of “Psychoanalysis of Translation” just as Gaston Bachelard spoke of a “Psychoanalysis of the scientific spirit”: the same asceticism, the same self-scrutinizing operation (Berman, 1948, p. 19).

Third axis: what Berman, following Novalis, defines as “the other aspect of the text,” that is, that the translation, beyond the gain or loss that it brings to the work, brings out another aspect that does not appear in a manifest way in the original, operating a “potentialization” of the work (Berman, 1948, pp. 20-21).

The fourth and last axis is what Berman defines as the “drive to translate,” a drive whose function would be to transmit “the desire to translate that constitutes the translator as such” (Berman, 1948, p. 23). This last point must be considered as a biased response to Walter Benjamin’s (2000) proposal in his article “La Tâche du Traducteur.” W. Benjamin considers that the translator embarks, in their endeavor, in the search, beyond empirical languages, for the “pure language” that each language carries within itself.[13] For Berman, this search should be considered as metaphysical rather than ethical, insofar as, in a Platonic way, it points to a “true” “beyond” of natural languages. Berman considers, contrary to W. Benjamin, that the question must be posed in a different way, precisely from an ethical perspective. For him, the “impulse to translate” has a purpose whose essence would be to “denaturalize” the mother tongue. To quote Schleiermacher, the translation drive would be the opposite of what he called “das heimisches Wohlbefindem der Sprache,” the intimate well-being of language. According to Berman, the translation drive always postulates Another language as ontologically superior to one’s own language. This leads to the introduction of a distinction. In an interesting formula, Berman (1948) suggests that “it could be said that the metaphysical purpose of translation is the failed sublimation of the translation drive, while the ethical purpose would be its overcoming (dépassement)” (p. 23). In this “overcoming,” the manifestation of the desire to establish a dialogical (dialectical?) relationship between the foreign language and one’s own language would be at stake. Let us note that this does not prevent us from establishing, as we think, an irreducible margin between the two.

These four axes are fundamental; to these there should be added a supplementary aspect regarding this “ethic of translation”: the term “foreign/er,” which has the function of radically accentuating the question of otherness. This notion, which is at the very heart of the act of translation, creates an intermediate space, a “between-two,” something that designates an object (according to Berman), but which could also be considered as a space that is neither the text to be translated nor the text translated. We will see later that this position is close to that of the transference situation. The very term “foreign/er” is extracted by Berman from the mythical figure of the “supplicant” who, in certain religious traditions, would be a form of intermediation between men and the divine.

Berman makes a detour not through Lacan but through Levinas (Totalité et infini) to try to answer the question that every translator of literary work should ask himself: how could an “I” enunciate something about another (in this case the literary text) if this other overcomes, overflows this “I” in a radical way? The question—and the dilemma—of the translator would be how to enunciate a text that is infinitely foreign to his words. Levinas’s answer to this question—an answer that Berman makes his own—that is, to this tension between the Self and the Other, is that the Self says nothing about the Other but speaks to this Other. To speak to him, that is, as we understand him: he questions him. Applied to the work of the translator, this means that the translator should recognize that he or she is constantly at risk of being overwhelmed in his or her work, that the text is always placed in excess of the possibility of translating, at the same time that the translation, if it is effective, can be placed in excess of the original text. That is why Berman invents this notion of “Foreign/er,” a figure that acts as an intermediary between the translator and the work or text to be translated.

But this conception goes even further: the fact of addressing the Other that surpasses us, that radically overwhelms us, presupposes, on the part of the translator, an effort of poeticity (poeticité), to be differentiated from the poetic. The translator’s effort at poeticity is a forcing of language as the place of the Other, of language as, according to Berman’s beautiful expression, “shelter of the foreign(er)”.[14]

This “effort of poeticity on the part of the translator,” a point to which we will return later, must be considered as an element that occupies a strategic place. Henri Meschonnic (1993), in addressing “translating what words do not say but only what they do” (p. 138), defines it in a radical way:

Poetics seeks to achieve, through what words say, to go towards what they show but do not say, towards what they do – which is more subtle than what contemporary pragmatics has tried to reveal – is the action of language. He acts upon us, even when we do not know what he does to us. And he starts again. And we do not know what, on the level of language, the speaker does not know and does not need to know about how it works in order to be spoken. (pp. 140-141)

It is on this point that Meschonnic evokes the “personal prosodies,” which seem to us to have an important link with Serge Leclaire’s “experiences of exquisite difference” that we will address in a moment.

As we can see, we are confronted with an equation of two unknowns: one that concerns the “nature” of translation, and more particularly the very subject matter of the translation process. If we return again to the domain of psychoanalysis: from the unconscious to the conscious, from Sachevorstellung to Wortvorstellung, from statement to enunciation, from signifier to signification (rather than to meaning), always with the permanent and problematic background of the question of meaning. We note that, as with translators, the different conceptual and theoretical options of the analyst have a direct impact on the translation itself. Is the unconscious translated in the same way in the Kleinian, Winicottian, Bionian or Lacanian perspectives? Certainly not, and we will give an example of this later.

This brings us to the second unknown: that of the translator. The examination of the propositions of the different authors, Berman in particular, inspired by Lacan, clearly shows that this is the question that radically interrogates the position of the subject, the ethics and the desire of the translator, whether literary or psychoanalytic.

We made reference to the fact that we perceive a turn in Lacan from Seminar VIII, Le Transfert, which leads to the double question we cite from Seminar XV, L’acte Psychanalytique. Between the two, there was an event that we consider as a turning point, which seems to us to illustrate, in an exemplary way, this other space to consider in relation to translation in psychoanalysis. We will call it “the Poor d’ Je Li moment.”

The Poor d’ Je Li Moment

Poor d’ Je Li is the condensation, in the form of an exclamation, of the syntagmatic elements of the fundamental phantasm of a subject, proposed by Serge Leclaire based on the analysis of his “dream of the unicorn.” The timestamp (“moment”) indicates the character that we accord to it: not only that of a paradigmatic example but also, for this reason, that of presenting an essential turn in relation to the subject matter that concerns us.

This dream, its analysis and the consequences that derive from it, was presented and developed consecutively in four stages. It was first presented as one of the strands of the joint contribution of S. Leclaire and Jean Laplanche “L’inconscient: un étude psychanalytique” at the Bonneval Colloquium on “The Unconscious” organized by Henri Ey in 1960. This first version was published the following year in issue 183 (July 1961) of the journal Les Temps Modernes, before being reprinted in the proceedings of the Colloquium (5 years later). Leclaire made a second presentation in the framework of a closed seminar on Lacan in 1965 (Le Séminaire XII—Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse—1964-1965); in that exhibition mention was made for the first time to the exclamation Poor d’ Je Li. The definitive text was published in 1968 in Leclaire’s book: Psychanalyser – Un essai sur l’ordre de l’inconscient et la pratique de la lettre.[15] Here we will be more interested in the presentation made in Lacan’s seminar on January 27, 1965, as well as in the debate that took place during the seminar classes of the 24th and 31st of March that year[16] (Lacan, 1964-1965).

I will not attempt to summarize Leclaire’s presentation; due to its exceptional nature, both for the complexity of the subject and for the openings it introduces, it requires a thorough and detailed reading to which we refer the reader. For our purpose here, I will limit myself to “trimming” the points and sequences that I deem essential. The fundamental nucleus is that of a double “translating” time: that of the analysis of the material of the dream that clears up a significant series and, from this, that of the appearance of the formula “Poor d’ Je Li,” an exclamation that is suspicious in its condensation of the fundamental phantasm of the subject, intimately linked to the first movement (and opens up to other questions, such as, for example, the unconscious incidence of the proper name and, through this, the Name of the Father).

From the work on the unconscious text of the dream, as well as the associations of the analysand, the signifying chain is revealed:

Lili – beach – thirst – sand – foot – horn

Let us point out that in French the first syllable (Li) and the last word (corne – horn) make up “Licorne,” the Unicorn of the dream.

Presented in this way, in isolation, this series appears enigmatic. Hieroglyphic text composed of the unconscious signifying chain; we abstract, as we have said, from Leclaire’s detailed development of the different moments of dream analysis as well as from the metaphorical and metonymic mechanisms of condensation and displacement that lead, as Leclaire emphasizes, to the clearing of “this absurd, hieroglyphic, composite and extravagant but insistent and unbreakable signifying chain” (Lacan, 1964-1965, p. 70). It condenses the cipher of the singularity of the subject, as if marked by fire “and where we recognize the empty mask of the unconscious” (Lacan, 1964-1965, p. 70).

The key point appears at that moment of the analytical work. Leclaire stresses that he could have interrupted the analysis of this sequence with the elucidation of this signifying chain. From a strictly Freudian perspective, this singularization of fundamental elements could appear to be sufficient in the attempt to “translate” the subject’s unconscious in relation to the determination of subjective history. If he goes further, if he pushes the analysis further, it is because he succeeds in situating what he calls “experiences of exquisite difference” in which the unconscious element itself appears as the connotation of a sensory experience of difference, the connotation of an experience of differential distinction as such. This takes the form of a series no longer of signifiers but of phonemes, which refer, according to Leclaire, to the articulation of the fundamental phantasm of the subject. A secret exclamation, a jubilant formula, a joyful onomatopoeia that concentrates on the formula already mentioned: Poor d’ Je Li. Let us add that it is on this point that it seems possible to us to establish a point of contact with the “personal prosodies” of which Meschonnic spoke. In a more radical way, it can be said that it is also here that the change of register appears, which marks the difference with the “simple” level of translation.

Leclaire acknowledges that it is very rare for an analysis to clear up this type of formula, the most recondite. The next step will be to try to show the articulation between the subject’s own name, the signifying chain, and the phantasm condensed in the exclamation Poor d’ Je Li. We agree with him, and we refer the reader once again to Leclaire’s text that provides the necessary developments and details.

Let us now examine some of the provisional conclusions that can be drawn; Leclaire himself proposes a few that seem to us extremely important. On the one hand, he rightly believes that this example illustrates the unique style of the analytic task “in its essence, its paradoxes, and its rigor” (Lacan, 1964-1965, p. 70). On the other hand, such a level of analysis necessarily raises and even demands the precision of the criteria according to which it is possible to distinguish, isolate, underline, this or that significant or phonematic element. In this regard, Leclaire proposes three particularly relevant criteria. It would be necessary to consider, in each situation: (a) the repetitive instance of the signifying elements, that is, “such a singular, unique, irreplaceable, differential and ‘symbolic’” feature; (b) the difficulty in the “confession” (aveu) of these traits, an index of the proximity to the fundamental phantasm, to the singularity of the subject; and (c) his “index of vitality,” his active and constant presence that signals, which underlines his irreducibility. Finally, and particularly important for the topic at hand, “this level of analysis highlights above all the constitutive absence of a ‘logical relationship’ between the primary, unconscious level and the secondary, preconscious-conscious elaboration. What we commonly find in analysis are, in fact, unconscious replicas of the fundamental phantasm” (Lacan, 1964-1965, p. 71).

Leclaire shows how it would have been possible, once the signifying series had been isolated, to remain with a formula “translated into language,” that is, the language variants of the different signifying elements, when it is a matter of not believing too quickly in the path of a supposed “analytical understanding” (the path of meaning) and that most of the time leads to a sort of translation of this or that language construction into phallocentric language. “The important thing here is to see that our interpretation tends to be constituted (se porter) in general (le plus souvent) as a ‘faulty (fautive) translation into language’ of the fundamental phantasm. Such is the fascination and privilege of the sense-already-known over the in-sense“[17] (Lacan, 1964-1965, p. 71). Indeed, the crucial point is: what fate to assign to the key signifiers that reveal the singularity of the subject? It is not a question of turning them into elements of a “normative” interpretation (even if it is of an “Oedipal” nature, for example), supposedly endorsed by theoretical justifications.

Leclaire’s presentation sparked an intense, exciting and passionate debate, to which we refer. We underline three central points. The first (contributed by Conrad Stein, who had already commented on Leclaire’s intervention in Bonneval), is that “Poor d’ Je Li ” is constructed like a dream, subjected to the same mechanisms of transforming images into words: condensation and displacement. The dream and the phantasm treat words as if they were images or, as we have already pointed out according to Freud’s proposal, treat the representations of words as representations of things. Stein insists on the problematicity of the term “representation in language,” and points out, quite rightly, that “if we look closely, this would appear to us to be on a different level than that of translation [emphasis added]” (Lacan, 1964-1965, p. 73). This leads Lacan to question Stein to specify that in this case there is a “strict application of the method, namely, the prevalence of the signifier over the image” and that “this allows us to delimit the singularity of the subject” (Lacan, 1964-1965, p. 73).

The second point, addressed by several participants (Valabrega, Major, Mannoni) points to the question of whether or not Poor d’ Je Li is the phantasm, or whether the formula contains only the signifying elements at the base of the fundamental phantasm. For his part, Mannoni points out that Leclaire exposes the “non-sens” of the fundamental phantasm in the sense of “translations into language” (or language), and that this presents a real knot of extremely important problems. Especially with regard to “translations into language” and the change of register, which seems to us to be the fundamental element at stake.

To these critical comments Lacan will respond from a distance, in another text, which strongly emphasizes the fundamental point:

To dispute Leclaire’s right to consider the unicorn sequence as unconscious, on the pretext that he is conscious of it, means that the unconscious has no meaning but within the field of the Other—and even less that which results from it: that it is not the effect of meaning that operates in interpretation, but the articulation in the symptom of the signifiers (without any meaning) that are imprisoned there. (Lacan, 1996, p. 821)

Thus, the “Poor d’ Je Li moment” is of particular, even critical, importance. It can be said that Leclaire puts into practice a radical approach to the analytic cure. This “moment” illustrates in an exemplary way that beyond interpretation as translation, all the more important to point out since Leclaire himself confesses that he could have remained at the level of the analysis of the signifying series. Incidentally, it can be considered that there is here an anticipation of certain developments of Lacan on the letter, but this is not the fundamental thing. The fundamental thing is that a process of analysis is clearly shown in which a “beyond translation” is outlined, beyond what will have to be specified. This “beyond” does not contest what Freud has called or considered translation, but it introduces a significant difference.

Translation / Transduction?

This difference is then at stake, at least this is the hypothesis that we submit to the discussion, on the verge of a change of register. Translation can be considered as that movement that introduces or allows a reading of discrete elements of the unconscious. It is an evident part that highlights its relevance in clinical practice. However, and as Leclaire points out at one point in his presentation, the analyst should be attentive to those features of absolute difference that push the analyst not to be satisfied or to take refuge in the comfort of what the knowledge of the theory indicates to him (a little of Oedipus, a little of castration…), which would constitute a death trap for the practice.

Two moments should thus be considered, structurally close and yet different and not necessarily contiguous. We would have, on the one hand, translation. There would be nothing to add in this respect to what Freud first, and the first Lacan later, were able to advance. The translation in this case, always close to a certain conception of interpretation, consists in enunciating “Otherly” what emerges from the subject’s words as a discrete element of the unconscious: dreams, lapses, forgetfulness, failed acts, jokes (Witze). Lacan has indicated to us its limit, to which he made us sensitive even against Freud. This sensitive point is that of meaning.[18] In this interpretation/translation there is always present the risk of agreeing and even imposing a meaning (in all the… “senses” of the term) to the patient’s occurrences. A whole current of psychoanalysis has incurred, and even today incurs in this type of attitude. We have recognized that it is inevitable in certain circumstances; the risk arises when the analytical task is limited to that. That is, when the analyst is not a subject-supposed-to-know but a “sapient,” who “knows” the meaning of his patient’s words. Or when the analyst operates according to “obedience” to a doctrine instead of forgetting what he knows during the time of the session to privilege the method. It is flagrant in the case of analysts who make Kleinian, Winnicottian, Kohutian or Lacanian readings.[19] Obviously, this does not prevent therapeutic effects from being produced by transference. Effects that are often closer to suggestion than to true analytical effects. Fortunately, most analysts (at least that is what I want to believe) when producing interpretations as translations, make readings of what the patient’s associations allow us to hear, often beyond what the analysand himself is willing (or able to) hear. If done correctly, that is, respecting the literality of the analysand’s words, important clarifications can be obtained about discrete elements that appear in the diachrony of the sessions. Sedimentations that, with the passage of time, can precisely allow another type of process to take place.

We see then that the possibility of translation resides essentially and not fortuitously in the position of the agent. Let us remember that W. Benjamin, A. Berman, H. Meschonnic clearly indicate the involvement of the translator in his act. There is an ethics and a desire at work at the moment of approaching the “text,” literary or unconscious. This is not reduced to a technical procedure; it rests essentially on the decision of the (literary) translator subject, who finds himself in an essentially conflictual and potentially “transgressive” relationship in relation to the limits of the “source” language versus the “blank” language. The example of Leclaire’s Poor d’ Je Li shows that, as far as the practice of the psychoanalyst is concerned, there is something of the same order and at the same time different. A difference that entails a series of modifications and clarifications in relation to Freud’s first position. Let us remember that Freud uses the notion of translation on numerous occasions to characterize both the action of translating unconscious elements into the domain of consciousness, making use of different notions (from perception-consciousness to mnemic traces and conscious representations in letter 52, to the passage from representation-thing to representation-word in the metapsychological article on “The Unconscious”). Let us remember above all, precisely, that the use of this notion of translation literally disappears from the Freudian text after 1920, as if Freud himself, concomitantly with the discovery of the limits of interpretation, conceived that what is at stake is another type of action, not completely alien to translation but of a different nature. From our point of view this implies a triple perspective and a triple difference: with respect to interpretation, with respect to transference, with respect to the desire for analysis.

Interpretation, as we have seen, always runs the risk of being locked into the production of meaning. We insist: it is a common procedure that is part of the analytical task, it is ineliminable.[20] The constant risk is to limit oneself—and the analysis—to that perspective. Yes; Sometimes interpretation aims and has to point to a production of meaning that is necessary and welcome. This does not mean that another perspective of interpretation, more radical and more important, should be forgotten or set aside. That which, according to Lacan’s (1976) saying, aims at “faire des vagues” (p. 35; to make waves/to mobilize, to shake). It is what Lacan indicates in the passage of the “L’acte psychanalytique” to which we alluded, which was already implied in Lacan’s recourse to the notion of Aleteia, to which also corresponds the interrogation of the “last Lacan” about a possible “new signifier.” Interpretation, from this point of view, does not and cannot correspond to the translation of a meaning that would be “already there,” which would proceed by transcribing a certain number of representations to another chain that would reveal a secret meaning, written but ignored. This procedure is analogous to that of Champollion, that of finding the equivalent string that would allow reading via transcription.

What Lacan—and the late Freud—propose to us is a different procedure. In this case there would be an emergence of a meaning by “unraveling [denouement] of meaning” that emerges properly from the “insu,” from the “unknown,” from the not known, from what is ignored by the subject… and by the analyst.

It is here that the impact of the paradigm shift introduced by Lacan with respect to transference is measured: the subject-supposed-to-know.

According to Freud’s indications, the analyst, thanks to his knowledge, thanks to his knowledge of the unconscious processes (condensation, displacement, figurability, censorship, etc.) is the one who is in a position to propose a translation of those repressed elements, the unconscious representations that are manifested in the patient’s discourse, whose meaning (it would be preferable to say: signification, and better yet: signifying) escape him because of resistance, his defense mechanisms or his complexes (to reissue that old term that has fallen into disuse).

Lacan’s elaboration produces a radical change in this respect (so integrated that it no longer attracts attention). In fact, the motor and nucleus of transference is the assumption of knowledge made to the Other, addressed to another, an incarnated Other, precisely by someone who does not take himself as such. If the analyst accepts this imposture in either of its two aspects (embodying and occupying the place of the Other or of the “semblance of object a“) it is because his own traversal of the analytic experience has allowed him not only to distinguish and unveil the constituent mirages of his imaginary and to reveal the illusions of understanding and meaning, but also to discover that there is a beyond meaning. It opens up to the multiplicity of possible meanings (of possible translations) that lead to highlighting not only the relative inconsistency of knowledge, but also its limits. Limits that allow us to approach or “reveal” (Heidegger) a truth that, like the navel of the dream, like the bottom of Irma’s throat, indicates a Real unattainable to the representation that is situated at the limit of the nomination. A limit that Pascal Dusapin (2009) enunciates in a limpid way, although in another sphere, that of music, and more precisely at that precise moment, limit, in which music is silent:

It is not that it (music) does not designate anything, but when it is silent, on each occasion, only a living, almost uncomfortable, delicately painful feeling subsists in us. Like a shame. The music shines and dissipates, like an illusion. But its echo always comes too late. Music is the incessant mourning of the instant. (p. 106)

Of the instant of truth, one would only have to add.

For this delicate operation to take place, and for which we consider the example Poor d’ Je Li to be paradigmatic, it is necessary, it is an essential, unavoidable condition, that the analyst be in agreement with his desire for analysis.[21] It is this desire that allows him to embody this function of subject-supposed-to-know in the two aspects that we indicate. We reiterate what has been said so many times: knowledge operates as an assumption. The analyst is not the owner, he does not possess knowledge about the analysand, about his unconscious or about his truth. It is here that we must insist, with Freud, on the psychoanalytic method. The analyst only knows that he must put his knowledge in parentheses, that his task is to create the conditions by means of the analytical device that will eventually allow the analytic experience to take place.

Lacan referred on one occasion (Lacan, 1996, p. 695) to an old Jewish story in which a rabbi tested a Gentile (goy, not a Jew) who was stubborn in wanting to learn the Talmud. The test consisted of solving a problem of logic: in the case where two people descended together through the same chimney, one of them leaving with a dirty face and the other not, which of the two would wash their face? Regardless of the story, as subtle as it is hilarious, I think it pertinent to insist that if the analysand and the analyst descend the same chimney together (a situation that evokes very à propos the “chimney sweeping” of Freudian beginnings), the necessary dissymmetry of the situation must be considered: it is the analyst who provides the chimney duct, but it is essential that the soot be that of the analysand.

Now, when we define the process in those terms, are we still talking about “translation”? I think not, and that the process in question would be more rigorously defined (following here, as we said, a terminological suggestion by N. A. Braunstein) of a transduction. The term is very close to translation, but it introduces an important difference. This word is used in various fields, from electricity to genetic biology. In the first case, the principle of transformation of one energy into another is defined. In the second, it is defined (quoting Larousse) “the transfer of genetic information from one cell to another through the intermediary of a vector“. In another definition (Webster) “Action or process of converting something, and especially energy or a message, into another form.” Literally now, from the Latin Ductuo, from Ducere: to lead. Transduction then: drive through, or on our terms; a register transformation that operates by transfer thanks to a vector. Is this not what is aimed at with the discourse of the analysand under transference? And is this not the essential function of the psychoanalyst? That of allowing psychoanalytic action, through the device, to lead the subject to pass from one register to another. From the complaint of the symptom to the demand and from this to the convoluted, tortuous and bifurcated paths of the desire that animates it, to reach its limits. That which allows “jouissance to be reached on the inverted ladder of the Law of desire”  (Lacan, 1996, p. 807).

We open here a digression to point out a major difference between the interlingual translation action (according to the distinction proposed by Jakobson, “Linguistic aspects of translation” 1959; as quoted by Eco (2006, p. 285)) that is, between different languages and, let us add, textual, that is, the translation of text to text. In fact, two fundamental differences must be considered between the translation of a written text and the psychoanalytic “text.” The written text, the “source” text is a fixed, immovable text. “BeReshit bara Elohim et Ha Shamayim ve et Ha Aretz“; “In a place in La Mancha, whose name I don’t want to remember…”, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” or “Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure.” The translations will vary, it will be discussed whether “BeReshit” should be translated “At the outset,” “At the start,” “In the beginning”; the original text will continue to state “BeReshit.” The text will multiply, it will be enriched by the accumulation of the different readings and successive translations. The same is not true of the psychoanalytic text, an oral text, whose variation can only be reduced by clearing away a certain number of invariants, that is, of fundamental signifiers. The psychoanalytic “text,” as we have seen through the example “Poor d’ Je Li,” is a text to be constructed. From the magma of associations coming from the discourse of the analysand, deployed throughout the diachrony of the sessions, the series of privileged signifiers that weave the fabric of the unconscious text may appear. But this text is a living and moving substance, like the word itself. In order to constitute it, it is necessary to go through a series of criteria, such as those proposed by Leclaire. Or, to quote Dusapin again, as a composition (musical in Dusapin’s case, that of the unconscious text of the analysand for us) that is perhaps a translation, but a translation of that which did not exist before. To compose, says Dusapin “as if it were a matter of inventing the fissures, the interstices and differences from which other music will escape” (Pascal, 2009, p. 106).

As Leclaire himself said, this does not occur in all analyses but, in some cases, that essential leap is achieved from which a series of fundamental signifiers can emerge and, in it, the unconscious cipher of the fundamental phantasm.

In this operation, is the analyst the translator? The transductor? I would say both, depending on the moment of the cure and the transference opportunity, but not simultaneously. It is the operator who, like a catalyst, allows it to take place. But this does not assign the analyst to a passive role. Quite the contrary.

It is now that we can take up again what, on the side of the translators, we glimpse with Berman and Meschonnic: the effort of poeticity to which the analyst, like the translator, is summoned. The analyst is not the mere recipient of the discourse of his analysand. Its listening, which is less of knowing than of resonance, should lead, in the best of cases, to listening to what has never been heard before, to formulating what could never be expressed before, to reaching the confines of what, in the words of a subject, can be “meaningful.” In this, the action of the analyst is essentially poetic, and therein lies its limit as well. Lacan painfully noted this at the end of his life:

The cunning of man is to fill all this, I have told you, with poetry that is the effect of meaning but also the effect of a hole. There is only poetry, I told them, that allows interpretation, and it is in this that I can no longer sustain it, in my technique: I am not pueta enough (pouâte), I am not pueta-enough. (Lacan, p. 73)

Lacan’s observation applies to all analysts. But isn’t this perhaps the greatest challenge for a psychoanalyst?[22]

Translation from the Spanish by Fernando Castrillón and Esteban Jijon