In her fine book 'Lacanian Affects,' Colette Soler writes the following:
"Affects drift in the chain of signifiers, except for those that are not related to
signifiers but rather to the unspeakable object; anguish is the first among the
latter, insofar as it is moored to this object. But anguish is related to
the temporality of the moments at which encounters occur, whereas
the affective palette that is signified in everything the subject says is
a constant of joui-sense.
"On the contrary, the discordance of certain unpredictable affects –
affects that are discordant with respect to discourse as well as to
fantasy, and that inevitably surprise the subject himself – turns out
to have a different origin, these affects originating in knowledge of
lalangue that will forever be unknown." p 106
This approach may be confusing to people who are not acquainted with Lacanian analysis and post-modern philosophy and so on, but the idea is as follows: We have certain emotional and psychological disturbances, symptoms, and problems of our character and/or our inner nature that we cannot solve so easily by superficial methods like going to the gym, just talking to a counselor, re-arranging our house, journaling, even meditating. Coming from a Freudian tradition, Lacan (see his excellent 'Four Fundamental Concepts') and his students like Soler, have uncovered the phenomena showing that the source of these psychological problems lie in an unconscious region that is not easily or directly accessible to rational and wide-awake self-conscious penetration. But the unconscious elements which are at least partly at the source of our deep-rooted psychological problems and the pain, fear, distress, and so on that accompanies them, CAN come to consciousness in a symbolic way, or in a linguistic way that can be understood by the rational mind to a certain degree and can provide clues for healing. But right at the source of these symbolic or linguistically arranged elements, there is a black hole or a primordial aspect that escapes consciousness. Yet, because it lies right in the doorway of the unconscious spring, it is hanging around in the background of every psychological aspect that comes to light. Lacan has a lot of fun ways of trying to describe its nature by showing how it is embedded in the playful origins and creative etymological elements of language itself. He calls the function of this productive black hole, or this unknown actor that hangs around backstage, the object little a - or objet petit a. The emotional or 'affective' partner of this black hole is jouissance or orgasmic enjoyment, which also can transform into depression and pain. Soler's point here is that the feeling or affect of anguish seems to be directly connected to this unknown director or actor hanging out behind the curtains in the black hole of our psyche. So the riddles of enigmas of such deep feelings (which are structured in a psychological-symbolic language or lalangue - the French word for tongue or language). Joui-sense is the fun linguistic way of pointing to how there is a play of meaning or sense that arises through the enjoyment and pain that is attached to our psychological and character difficulties or fetishes, and so on. In French there is such a strong connection between the notion of sensing or smelling something with our body and creating meaning or knowledge in consciousness through thinking.
We can make a transition to spiritual scientific research, analysis, and experience by extending Soler and Lacan in a new direction. For it is truly the case that the affective part of the soul connected to lust, desire, pleasure, animal sensation, and smell has its relations to the mineral body and also to the images in the etheric body, and the way that thinking and its linguistic correlates are organized rationally or irrationally in the etheric body and nervous and lymphatic systems.
Now the difference is that one who is developing Imaginative consciousness in the anthroposophical manner can begin to see with spiritual organs in a clear fashion what is happening behind the surface of what Lacanian analyses are uncovering. You can see that Soler and Lacan still set up a kind of Kantian limit of consciousness and knowledge - they say that there are some things that cannot be accurately conceptualized or grasped in clear thinking. But following Rudolf Steiner's indications and our experience we want to use pure thinking (without images and outside the subjective pictures in the head) to grasp any phenomenon, whether mineral, representational, psychological, or spiritual (See Rudolf Steiner's "Truth and Knowledge" for more on this). Because the world connects to the life that is at the center of thinking, we can meet the essence of the world in pure thinking. In this I find myself in a center of the world's activities.
But the fine clue given in Soler is the emotion of anguish. We can follow the existential anguish that we find in ourselves at the border of knowledge, and painful self-knowledge, when we look at ourselves like a stranger. Tolstoy's fictional writings are great teachers of such an honest self-examination, by the way. I experience that I am partly a mature and serious spiritual researcher who has truly grown, but also one who has elements of animalistic, chaotic, selfish, aggressive tendencies in myself that are very hard to change. I am only partly human at this point. This split in my soul, my life, my hopes and my self - instead of depressing me too much - can instead lead one beyond one's own personal or character troubles. The anguish gives me a thread to the unseen other. To remain truthful, we can follow this thread into my own memory fields. These memory fields are also connected to the historical events in the earth - so I can follow their light and life beyond my own lifetime into the center of the 20th century. This can lead us to the Event of the 20th century, described by Ben-Aharon in his first book. I see and feel connected to the fact that the potential of the highest spiritual development, gentleness, wisdom, and goodness is shining into the human project, but I also see that the most evil and demonic elements are also trying to create an anti-human - the most cunning animal who uses machines for selfish purposes. In spiritual-historic reality, the greatest light was shining into the spiritual worlds while below people were murdering each other with vast machines in the most barbaric way. In reality, all humans are connected spiritually throughout history, therefore I am also morally and karmically connected to this 'past' historical fact.
But in being connected to things larger than my personality, I am also healthily woven into the various rhythms of the world: in breath and out breath, the pulse of my heart, day and night, warming and cooling, the rotation of the moon, eclipses, comets, asteroids, planetary rotation, the stars moving ever so slowly, the turning of the earth, the seasons, the work and growth of people, animals, plants, life and death, etc. And not in an abstract sense - I am directly and minutely connected to just this particular plant, to just this way that the sun shines at dawn on my little house, to just my community, to this turkey in my backyard at this hour. This must be kept in the highest aristotelian and scientific precision of individualities. And there are specific spiritual and elemental beings who are connected with each hour, location, season, type of animal, stone, plant, folk.
These world-rhythms can be quantitatively understood - the patterns can be expressed by numbers. In the soul world, I am woven out of living rhythms, or numbers, a geometry of soul life. We can paraphrase Rudolf Steiner in this way. The zodiacal life that is unique can show up in the images and linguistic elements that arise in a symbolic way during psychological analysis. And I am connected to the Spirit-Word that does indeed weave my Spiritual Nature out of the Highest Christ-like element beyond the Angels and Zodiacal Beings. In this way, we see that Lacan's linguistic healing games are a much lower reflection of this living Word activity.
The inner gestures of my heart as a spiritual organ produce an Imaginative landscape in devotional and reverential knowledge, that is connected with a thinking that is awake to its spiritual life in the world (outside the head). This gives rise to new concepts and ideas (and not merely to visions and feelings of ecstasy inside the mind's eye). I gently open the black hole at the center of my existence to Christ and in powerlessness but hope ask that His Spirit may fill and transform me. In this resurrected heart-thinking, Michael works with Christ's growing appearance, as Ben-Aharon writes in his recent books, such as The Three Meetings.
In such an experience, one can see, feel, and experience that any twelvefold experience in the heart is not just made up of geometrical lines or visions of transcendent geometry, but rather one is pulsing in a moral world, made up of the highest sensitivity of beauty, gentleness, humaneness, and love. Thus what could be called a Qualitative Geometry of Schiller's highest hopes can arise - an artform that he is searching for in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. I am living in a eurhythmic group expression of gesture in an art of creating concepts of my I AM. My imageless meaning life arising through intuitive thinking then can become world-wide colored Imaginations, like on the ceiling of the Goetheanums. Each side of this heart-human dodecahedron is simultaneously a doorway to the inside-out. Each edge of each side is a different color, mood, sound. Some are more rounded, some are more narrow. I do not have to stop at the mere 3-dimensional geometrical representation of a pentagonal dodecahedron, as I lower it into my heart, following Rudolf Steiner's acts of the laying of the Foundation Stone. Instead the rich, colored, singing life of the spiritual worlds speaks into my heart in a new language, and gives me the impetus to grow, grow, grow!
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