Orthography in Evidence: the grammatical, the ungrammatical and the equivocal in the teachings of Jacques Lacan

• Grant number: 15/05873-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: October 01, 2015
• End date: July 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Marcos Aurélio Barbai
• Grantee: Marcos Aurélio Barbai
• Host Investigator: Jacqueline Authier-Revuz
• Host Institution: Núcleo de Desenvolvimento da Criatividade (NUDECRI). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3, France

Abstract

While working with the archive and teachings of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, this research aims at elaborating three concepts within the history of ideas surrounding the concept of language: the grammatical, the ungrammatical and the equivocal. In order to comply with the symptom of normativity, we currently live in a position of theoretical, political and symbolic oblivion which results in a forgetfulness of the signifying dimension within the grammaticality of a language. We resort to orthography as a factual means of analysis; for we believe that the study of such a material occurrence in languages may allow us to contrast these concepts, thus producing a return to a discourse surrounding a language. As a structure which accounts for the relations between the written form and the language, orthography is a space of submission to a language, a manifestation act of the signifier. We support the idea that an orthographic error - a fact of phonographic and grammatical nature - is not only an abrasion inflicted into the language, but also a weave of nonsense within the consistency of the body of a language. Our main objective through this research is to place grammaticality within the rubric of the signifying operation. The grammatical, the ungrammatical and the equivocal are therefore discoursive means which dismiss the fact that there is a speech for which the logic is that of the incidence of a language in one's body. Through this work of investigation, we aim to build the idea that the unconscious is grammatical, and that the grammatical concerns what is not enunciable in a language. In articulating the field of Discourse Analysis with Psychoanalysis, we aim to search for traces within the Lacanian Corpus which can allow us to delve into the archive of Language Sciences in order to formulate practices of history analysis.