Nothing to Say

This article looks at the effects of the irruption of silence within the psychoanalytic encounter, as both a refusal of all storytelling and the rejection of the transferential address that therapy presupposes, to ask what position the therapist should adopt once s/he has been summarily dismissed from the position of addressee. The question is explored through reading a famous 'poem about nothing' written by Guillaume IX, the first known troubadour. In this poem, lyric poetry puts itself in relation to the muteness of what Jean-François Lyotard, after Lacan, calls the Thing. Literature, I will argue, transmits the intractable resistance of this inarticulate 'nothing

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Nothing · Phrase · Poetry · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Silence · Storytelling · Computer Science · French Literature and Criticism · Medieval European Literature and History · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research · Psychology