Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

The violence of the ethical encounter: listening to the suffering subject as a speaking body

  • Published:
Continental Philosophy Review Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

How does the clinical encounter work? To tackle this question, the present study centers on the paradigmatic clinical encounter, namely, psychoanalysis, paradigmatic in that it is structured by the encounter itself. Our question thus becomes: how does the clinical encounter work, when its only modality is speech? By reading Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas together, we better identify how speech sets up as subjects those who address one another and how this subjectivation touches the suffering body specifically. In this framework, a definition of the encounter is put to work: The encounter of a sufferer and a listener, that is, the clinical encounter, is the opening of an inter-human space beyond suffering. This conception of the encounter permits a specifying of the violence it avoids—respecting the transcendence of the other irreducibly other—but also the violence that it mobilizes—through a presumption of subjectivity imposed upon the other, by which the subjectivation at work in the encounter is, by definition, a subjection to the other. This outlines, then, an ethics of the clinical encounter: a relationship of man to man commanded by one sensing body to another, i.e. a minimal and therefore radical ethics that is structured as a sensible ethics between speaking bodies.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Lacan (2006d, p. 206).

  2. Levinas (1981, p. 77).

  3. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 71).

  4. Lohmar and Brudzinska (2012), Brockelman and Hoens (2013), Geymant and Popa (2015), Legrand and Trigg (2017, in press).

  5. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 71).

  6. Freud (1953, p. 266).

  7. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 71).

  8. de Saint Aubert (2017, in press), Mooney (2017, in press), Phillips (2017, in press), Legrand (2017a, in press).

  9. Notice that speech remains the ineliminable ingredient of all clinical practice, including in techno-scientific contexts.

  10. Lacan (1988, p. 108).

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Legrand (2015d).

  15. Levinas (1998, p. 93).

  16. Ibid. (p. 94).

  17. Ibid.

  18. Iibd. (p. 93).

  19. Iibd. (p. 94).

  20. Ibid. (p. 93).

  21. Levinas (1979, p. 238).

  22. Ingerslev and Legrand (2017, in press).

  23. Levinas (1979, p. 53). Here, Levinas speaks particularly of the work of memory “Memory recaptures and reverses and suspends what is already accomplished in birth—in nature. […] By memory […] I assume today what in the absolute past had no subject to receive it and had therefore the weight of a fatality. By memory I assume and put back into question. Memory realizes impossibility: memory after the event, assumes the passivity of the past and masters it” (Ibid.). We reroute the remarks in the setting of the present reflection; we are leaning on the fact that, in analysis at least, the work of the encounter and the work of memory are indissociable from one another.

  24. Lacan (2006d, p. 241).

  25. Ibid. (p. 245).

  26. Lacan (2006b, p. 176).

  27. Ibid. (p. 177).

  28. Legrand (2015a).

  29. Lacan (Lacan 2006d, p. 247).

  30. Ibid. (p. 248).

  31. Lacan (Lacan 2006b, p. 178).

  32. Freud (2014, p. 3).

  33. Lacan (1988, p. 108).

  34. Quoted by Maldiney (2007, p. 64); all translations of this text by M. G. Butler. See also Binswanger (1975).

  35. Kleinberg-Levin (1999, 2008).

  36. Fuchs and De Jaegher (2009), Fuchs and Koch (2014).

  37. Merleau-Ponty (1968). Here, Merleau-Ponty expresses this in ontological terms: We are “two entries to the same being” (Ibid., p. 82).

  38. Merleau-Ponty (2012, p. 304).

  39. Ibid. (p. 354).

  40. Ibid.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Ibid. (p. 305).

  43. Ibid. (p. 358).

  44. Ibid. (p. 355).

  45. Ibid. (p. 354).

  46. Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 29).

  47. Maldiney (2007, p. 68).

  48. Ibid. (p. 67).

  49. Lacan (1988, p. 108).

  50. Ibid.

  51. Levinas (1979, p. 195).

  52. Ibid.

  53. Legrand (2017b, in press).

  54. Derrida (1991, p. 131); for this text, translations by M. G. Butler. See also Derrida (2000).

  55. Ibid. (p. 131).

  56. Legrand (2015c).

  57. Levinas (1981, p. 112).

  58. Ibid.; translation modified; emphasis added.

  59. Ibid. (p. 122).

  60. Ibid. (p. 106).

  61. Ibid. (p. 112).

  62. Ibid. (p. 53).

  63. Lacan (2006a, p. 66).

  64. Lacan (1988, pp. 239–240).

  65. Levinas (1979, p. 195).

  66. Lacan, 1998, p. 182; translation by M. G. Butler.

  67. Ingerslev and Legrand (2017, in press).

  68. Lacan (Lacan 2006c, p. 515).

  69. Lacan (2006c, p. 627).

  70. Ibid. (p. 525).

  71. Levinas (1981, p. 74); emphasis added.

  72. Levinas (2000, p. 170).

  73. Ibid.

  74. Ibid. (p. 169).

  75. Ibid. (p. 170).

  76. Levinas (1979, p. 79).

  77. Levinas (2000, p. 171).

  78. Ibid. (p. 170).

  79. Ibid.

  80. Ibid.

  81. Levinas (1979, p. 79).

  82. Legrand (2017b, in press), Legrand (2015b).

  83. Lacan (2006a, p. 72).

  84. Ibid.

  85. Ibid.

  86. Freud (1954, p. 379).

  87. Ibid.; emphasis added.

  88. Lacan (1999, p. 51).

  89. Levinas (1979, p. 79).

  90. Translator’s note: I have rendered sensibilité and sensible interchangeably as sensitivity/sensibility and sensitive/sensible respectively, depending on context.

  91. Legrand (2017b, in press).

  92. Levinas (2005, p. 33).

  93. Ibid. (p. 33).

  94. Levinas (1981, p. 77).

  95. Derrida (1998).

  96. Levinas (1979, p. 265).

  97. Levinas (1979, p. 265).

  98. Levinas (1981, p. 51).

  99. Levinas (2000 p. 171).

  100. Levinas (1981, p. 86).

  101. This description of the horizon is loosely inspired by Anthony Poiraudeau, a historian of art who works on the “engineering of place” and who discusses the position of George Didi-Huberman on this point in particular: The concept of the horizon. For Didi-Huberman, the horizon is a limit, that which is far off, transcendent, beyond oneself, and inaccessible. See: Poiraudeau (2007).

  102. Levinas (1979, p. 258).

  103. Levinas (1981, p. 137).

  104. Fédida (2012, pp. 10–11); translation of this text by M. G. Butler.

  105. Ibid. (p. 11).

  106. Ibid.

  107. Ibid.

  108. Levinas (1981, p. 126).

  109. Ibid. (p. 127).

  110. Ibid. (p. 139).

  111. Ibid. (pp. 13–14).

  112. Levinas (1979, p. 219).

  113. Derrida and Kamuf (2002, p. 240).

  114. Ibid. (p. 254).

  115. Ibid.

  116. Ibid.

References

  • Binswanger, Ludwig. 1975. Being-in-the-world, selected papers. Tr. J. Needleman. London: Souvenir Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brockelman, Thomas, and Dominiek Hoens. 2013. Special issue: The object of psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan’s ‘object a’. Continental Philosophy Review 46: 2.

    Google Scholar 

  • Derrida, Jacques. 1991. Responsabilité et Hospitalité. In Autour de Jacques Derrida: Manifeste pour l’hospitalité, ed. Mohammed Seffahi. Paris: Paroles d’aube.

    Google Scholar 

  • Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Monolingualism of the other, or, the prosthesis of origin. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Derrida, Jacques, and Peggy Kamuf. 2002. Without alibi. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • De Saint Aubert, Emmanuel. 2017. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the unconscious in the late manuscripts. In Unconsciousness between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Contributions to phenomenology, ed. Dorothée Legrand, and Dylan Trigg. Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fédida, Pierre. 2012. Corps du vide et espace de séance. Paris: MJW Fédition.

    Google Scholar 

  • Freud, Sigmund. 1953. On psychotherapy. In The standard edition of the complete works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 7, 257–268 (trans: James Strachey). London: The Hogarth Press.

  • Freud, Sigmund. 1954. Project for a scientific psychology in the origins of psycho-analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, drafts and notes, 1887–1902, 347–445 (trans: James Strachey). Imago.

  • Freud, Sigmund. 2014. Psychical (or mental) treatment. New York: White Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fuchs, Thomas, and Hannah De Jaegher. 2009. Enactive intersubjectivity: Participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8: 465–486.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fuchs, Thomas, and Sabine Koch. 2014. Embodied affectivity: On moving and being moved. Frontiers in Psychology 5 (508): 1–12.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geymant, Maria, and Delia Popa (eds.). 2015. Approches phénoménologiques de l’inconscient. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, Europaea Memoria.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ingerslev, Line, and Dorothée Legrand. 2017. Clinical response to bodily symptoms in psychopathology. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 3: 23.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kleinberg-Levin, David Michael. 1999. A responsive voice: Language without the modern subject. Chiasmi International 1: 65–103.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kleinberg-Levin, David Michael. 2008. Before the voice of reason: Echoes of responsibility in Merleau-Ponty’s ecology and Levinas’s ethics. New York: SUNY Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lacan, Jacques. 1988. The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 1, Freud’s papers on technique 1953–1954. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lacan, Jacques. 1998. Seminaire IV: La relation d’objet. Paris: Seuil.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lacan, Jacques. 1999. The seminar of Jacques Lacan on feminine sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge (encore) (Vol. Book XX) (trans: Bruce, Fink). New York: WW. Norton & Company.

  • Lacan, Jacques. 2006a. Beyond the reality principle. In Écrits: The first complete edition in English, 58–74 (trans: Bruce, Fink). New York: WW. Norton & Company.

  • Lacan, Jacques. 2006b. Presentation on transference. In Écrits: The first complete edition in English, 176–188 (trans: Bruce, Fink), New York: WW. Norton & Company.

  • Lacan, Jacques. 2006c. The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power. In Écrits: The first complete edition in English, 489–542 (trans: Bruce, Fink). New York: WW. Norton & Company.

  • Lacan, Jacques. 2006d. The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis. In Écrits: The first complete edition in English, 197–268 (trans: Bruce, Fink). New York: WW. Norton & Company.

  • Legrand, Dorothée. 2015a. Comment l’interlocution de la rencontre clinique œuvre-t-elle sur la souffrance psychique ? Perspectives Psychiatriques 3 (54): 214–221.

    Google Scholar 

  • Legrand, Dorothée. 2015b. Le corps assujetti. In Approches phénoménologiques de l’inconscient, ed. Maria Geymant, and Delia Popa, 211–227. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, Europaea Memoria.

    Google Scholar 

  • Legrand, Dorothée. 2015c. The body and its image in the clinical encounter. In Philosophy of mind and phenomenology. Conceptual and empirical approaches, ed. D. Dahlstrom, A. Elpidorou, and W. Hopp, 79–97. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Legrand, Dorothée. 2015d. The living body and the lived body in the clinical encounter: How does the body shape ethical practice? In Handbook of the philosophy of medicine, ed. T. Schramme, and S. Edwards, 1–19. Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Legrand, Dorothée. 2017a. Is there a phenomenology of unconsciousness? Dialogues with Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas. In Unconsciousness between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Contributions to phenomenology, ed. Dorothée Legrand, and Dylan Trigg, 1–19. Berlin: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Legrand, Dorothée. 2017b. L’éthique est une poignée de mains entre Maurice Merleau-Ponty et Emmanuel Levinas. In Phénoménologie de la vie, ed. Yves Charkes. Zarka, Paris: Hermann.

    Google Scholar 

  • Legrand, Dorothée, and Dylan Trigg (eds.). 2017. Unconsciousness between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Contributions to phenomenology. Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levinas, Emmanuel. 1979. Totality and infinity (trans: Alfonso Lingus). Hague: M. Nijhoff.

  • Levinas, Emmanuel. 1981. Otherwise than being: Or, beyond essence (trans: Alphonso Lingus). Hague: M. Nijhoff.

  • Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Useless suffering. In Entre nous, thinking of the other, 91–102 (trans: Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav). Columbia University Press.

  • Levinas, Emmanuel. 2000. God, death, and time (trans: Bettina Bergo). Stanford University Press.

  • Levinas, Emmanuel. 2005. Humanism of the other (trans). Nidra Poller University of Illinois Press.

  • Lohmar, Dieter, and Jagna Brudzinska (eds.). 2012. Founding psychoanalysis phenomenologically. Phenomenological theory of subjectivity and the psychoanalytic experience. Phaenomenologica. Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maldiney, Henri. 2007. Penser l’homme et la folie. Paris: Million.

    Google Scholar 

  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Metaphysics and the novel. In Sense and nonsense, 26–40 (trans: Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus). Northwestern University Press.

  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The visible and the invisible (trans: Alphonso Lingis). Northwestern University Press.

  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1994. Phenomenology and psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s L’œuvre de Freud. In Merleau-Ponty and psychology, ed. Keith Hoeller, 67–72 (trans: A. Fisher). New Jersey: Humanities Press.

  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of perception (trans: Donald Landes). Routledge.

  • Mooney, Timothy. 2017. Repression and operative unconsciousness in phenomenology of perception. In Unconsciousness between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Contributions to phenomenology, ed. Dorothée Legrand, and Dylan Trigg. Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Phillips, James. 2017. Merleau-Ponty’s nonverbal unconscious. In Unconsciousness between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Contributions to phenomenology, ed. Dorothée Legrand, and Dylan Trigg. Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Poiraudeau, Anthony. 2007. Erotique du Paysage, de l’image et de la marche. In Vagabondages, Nicolas Frémiot. Pomponne: Trans photographic Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Archives Husserl, CNRS, Ecole normale supérieure, Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University, 75005, Paris, France

    Dorothée Legrand

Authors
  1. Dorothée Legrand
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dorothée Legrand.

Additional information

Translated from the French by Michael George Butler.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Legrand, D. The violence of the ethical encounter: listening to the suffering subject as a speaking body. Cont Philos Rev 51, 43–64 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9405-1

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9405-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation