Abstract

VALENDINOVA, Kristina. Moments of collapse: psychosis and testimony.Translated byLuís Gustavo Burza. Estud. psicanal. [online]. 2014, n.41, pp.111-123. ISSN 0100-3437.

Testimony’s vow of authenticity raises the question of what happens to subjects whose suffering can make no such claims to so-called historical objectivity, but who nevertheless assert their right to stand witness to the truth of their experience. Early on, Freud approaches psychosis as a particular regime of truth, where the psychic material revealed by the symptom is either subject to little symbolic elaboration (hallucination) or, to the contrary, obfuscated by the brutal interventions of the ego (in delusion). In this text, I discuss two of Lacan’s propositions regarding testimony. First, his idea of the psychotic as “a witness of the unconscious” in Seminar III, where he also comments on the testimonial discourse as a speech marked by the subject’s a relationship to a particular object, terrifying in its otherness and threatening him with dissolution. Secondly, his suggestion from Seminar XX, that the testimonial task is a demand that “jouissance be avowed, precisely insofar as it may be unavowable.” It would seem that one may only testify, if we are to insist on this verb as an activity engaging the dimension of truth, to something which has had the effect of one’s undoing: to an encounter with the enigma of one’s jouissance, of the body’s primacy over language.

Keywords : Psychosis; Testemonial; Primo Levi; Schreber; History.

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