proves to be an abstract ideal construct. And it also enables us to avoid the
‘principle of immanence’ on which structuralist linguistics is based, to reconnect
language and the world, to forget the ideality of the ideal system. The body
of phenomenological experience is not so far from the body of praxis, as the
work of Tran Duc Thao has shown. It is the body in which consciousness
and subjectivity emerge. But it is not the only body.
The third candidate is the erotic body. By this, I obviously mean the body
as psychoanalysis seeks to think about it. And, because we have read Lacan,
we know that this body has something to do with language. This body is
corporeal in a more precise sense than the phenomenological body, at least
such as linguists implicitly refer to it (we are not dealing with Merleau-Ponty’s
philosophy here). For we ask which body is the site of these cognitive and
enunciative operations that are sometimes dubbed ‘psycho-grammatical’. In
this respect, physical reductionism at least possesses the advantage of clarity.
As does psychoanalysis, with its conceptual apparatus of primary and
secondary processes, dream-work and the operation of jokes. And this
conceptual apparatus produces effects in the field of language. With the help
of the concepts of primary and secondary processes (more than a little tampered
with, it is true), the pre-Guattari Deleuze of Logic of Senseconstructed what
he called a ‘logical and psychoanalytical novel’, offering not only a general
conception of the functioning of language, but what is, in my view, the most
interesting theory of the construction of meaning available in a well-supplied
market.^5 I have myself attempted to show that Lacan’s famous texts on
language enable us to construct an agonistic pragmatics that is much more
interesting than Anglo-American irenic pragmatics.^6 In truth, Freud was a
great linguist, like his prophet Lacan: in the previous chapter, I used the
concept of nodal point [point de capiton] as the moment of the retrospective
provision of meaning (however, we must make it clear that this concept
pertains to the first Lacan – Lacan the linguist – and that thereafter, with the
development of his doctrine, it underwent a metaphysical drift rendering it
inapt for describing language). Finally, we can cite the work of Serge Leclaire,
with its inscription of the letter on the erotic body; that of Luce Irigaray
(another early work) on phantasy and the relations between subject and
178 • Chapter Seven
(^5) See Deleuze 1990a and see also Lecercle 2002.
(^6) See Lecercle 1987.