Maybe we have to say, in the beginning was the Real or maybe we might say in the beginning was the jouissance. When we opt for the Real , we embrace a limit. This limit is from our position. This limit is a limit of understanding. It is in this morass that we have the chain of signifiers. It is apophatic morass. It is only through these signifiers that we enter the register of imaginary and the symbolic. There is vibrant interplay of the Real, the imaginary and the symbolic. Imaginary stays in the play in the field of jouissance like the infant in front of mirror while the symbolic conjugate life by subjecting it to a common yoke of the big Other.
The signifiers work like the image in the mirror and we being animated by jouissance. We invest meaning into our experience through the signifiers. Each signifier stands for other signifier. We attach sense, signification and meaning to the signifier. It through the play of signifiers that slide at the point de capiton that life becomes meaningful to us both communally and individually. It is through our jouissance of the signifier, we to belong to the language.
It said that there is only jouissance for the being who speaks and because he/she speaks. Words make jouissance possible even as they restrict and denaturalize it. It is referred and circumscribed by words. But language itself is ruptured. It is raptured by the Real. It is only through this raptured or Real-ed language that we can make sense of the world and our role within it. Real, thus, cannot be viewed as a positive entity. It is nothing/ no-thing. It is an excess that remains beyond our grasp but reside in everything that we are, we do and we speak.
It is within this elusive Real of all dialogical dialogues and dialogical dialogue of the Real that we may trace the jouissance of dialogue especially in the work of Raimundo Panikkar and Francis D’sa. One can locate the mythos of Panikkar in the Real of Lacan. Here we do not translate or substitute the mythos of Panikkar with the Real of Lacan but keep them side by side to generate some surplus sense that refuses to be closed into a fixation of meaning. It is in a way an excess that we find in both these thinkers. Mythos is an excess in Panikkar and Real is the same in Lacan.
Mythos cannot be translated into logos. Hence, one can think that it is the morass that houses the chain of signifiers that are in free play. But it the mythos that becomes the point de capiton for the leap into the world of logos, the symbolic and the imaginary . Like the Real that raptures the imaginary and the symbolic, the mythos raptures the logos resulting into understanding and misunderstanding of everything.
The jouissance of dialogue can be recognized at the logos which produces the speaking and understanding only because of its relations to the mythos. Mythos also houses the pathos and only by investing in the signifiers / words that we can speak, listen, dialogue and seek healing to our pathos. The jouissance of dialogue, therefore, is therapeutic. It is a talking and listening cure in best sense of psychoanalysis. When we open ourselves to the mythos of the other and step into the mythos, we begin to understand the other. It results into what Hans George Gadamer names as fusion of horizons. Dialogue is, therefore, possible only when it is Real-ed or related to mythos of the other.
Real-ed dialogue is entry in the mythos of the other. It is only when the Real of dialogue (Real-ed dialogue/ mythos of the Other ) come to inhabit our dialogical encounter that we have real/ true dialogue. As usual, the jouissance of dialogue also follows the law of loss. It thus, does not follow the market and look for profit. One who dialogues has to unlearn or give up circumscribed semantic Kataphosis and embrace fullness of Apophosis. This divesting of one’s world (world of signifiers) and enter the de-semantified chain of signifiers, de-mirrorized morass of the Real that we can enter into dialogue with the Other. But we immediately, we have to leap back into semantic Kataphosis to dialogue with the Other.
The jouissance of dialogue, from Lacan’s point of view is discourse of the Other that fascinates us. We have the challenge to transcends this discourse of the Other that operates at the level of our unconscious and rise to a conscious and deliberate level of dialogical dialogue. This means we have the challenge to leave dialectical dialogue propelled by the unconscious that works like the discourse of the Other and open ourselves to what Panikkar calls dialogical dialogue. This dialogue off Panikkar is truly reciprocal and therapeutic. But, it can move from diatropical hermeneutics to pluritrocal hermeneutics.
