Act, gesture. Jacques Lacan and Werner Hamacher

Abstract

We propose that act and gesture relate Jacques Lacan’s and Werner Hamacher’s thought. By exposing a particular practical dimension of language, both terms allow the articulation of psychoanalytical praxis, understanding and literature, as these authors understand them. That is to say, founded on a  mistake or a failure. For Hamacher, the failure of epistemological intentions about language, as is what affirms its event dimension: language’s distance from itself, which is the unthinkable background of understanding. Literature, as a gesture in language, takes up and at the same time exposes this failure, by discovering and keeping language open in the caesura of its foundation. Lacan, for his part, will argue that the act is never as successful as when it is failed. If, from there, the psychoanalytic praxis finds the place that corresponds to it, it is because it rejects, as a condition, to relocate its subject under the protection of the forms of knowledge. Failure by itself achieve anything. It only exposes the significant dimension of mistake, implied in the function and concept of the unconscious. In the structure of mistake, the act will find the hiancia of the law that establishes and determines it, by illuminating the inaugural division of the subject.