The Other of the Body and the Language of the Margins

Abstract

But the true travelers are those, and those alone, who set out only for the journey’s sake, and with light balloon-like hearts they never swerve from their destiny, but, without knowing why, keep saying “Let us fare forward!” Those whose desires are shaped like clouds, and who, like the conscript dreaming of his cannon, have visions of boundless, ever-changing, unexplored ecstasies which the human mind has never been able to name. —Baudelaire, The Voyage The Other of the body is one among the various terms Lacan uses to talk about the register of the Real. 1 The Real is the structure of psychic functioning that resists symbolization, thereby introducing gaps, inconsistencies, and holes in it. It exceeds any representation, such as images (the register of the Imaginary) or words (the register of the Symbolic). The closest Freud came to speaking of the Real was in his concept of the kernel of the dream that cannot be assimilated into the latent or manifest content, but instead leaves any interpretation incomplete, lacking. Another reference to something approximating Lacan’s Real occurs in Freud’s (1920) work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” where the Real of the trauma insists on returning as it resists representation. In his earlier essay “The Uncanny,” Freud (1919) also refers to the notion of the Real as the intruder who appears from without, unable to fit the established unconscious patterns