Body and psychoanalysis - thinking the body from the lacanian notion of discourse

Abstract

The society engendered by late capitalism postulates more and more ways of psychic satisfaction related to object idealization instead of object cathexis. The body, place par excellence of biopolitic's incidence, cannot escape from this dynamics. Increasingly target for publicity, science, medicine, academy, everyone are more and more concerned about it. It is not different with psychoanalysis; nonetheless, the increasing tendency in talking about the body, whether with body image disorders or psychosomatic, leads to hide the fact that this question was in the foundation of psychoanalysis itself. It is explicit in the progression Freud does, leaving behind the purely biological or merely medical body towards an erogenous and representational body. Now, if Lacan preached a "return to Freud", we defend the thesis that the concerning with the body was also in Lacan's horizon. If in a first moment the centrality of lacanian proposals about the body was in the "mirror stage", from 1968 and on, with the introduction of the notion of discourse, a new and non-trivial conception of body emerges - a historic one. Our aim is to investigate the emergency of the notion of discourse within Lacan's work to throw some light in this "non-trivial body" comprehension and thus in his conception of social bound. In order to do this: 1) we will do a conceptual genealogy of the notion of discourse in the lacanian theoretical corpus; 2) we will work in the boundaries with Linguistics, since the notion of discourse has some notability in this field, to which Lacan resorts with some frequency. (AU)