Destining his word

Reading Pascal to approach Lacan

Abstract

This article is a reflexion on the various ways of directing one’s word to another person.

By paying attention to nuances and different modalities of this direction, we attempt to identify the effects of this act of directing one’s word to another person, on that word and on the subject who utters it. I’ll be asking myself whether directing one’s word can – if not undo, at least bend – something of the subject’s destiny. To try to think about this, I purpose to study two ways of directing one’s word, no longer to a fellow human being but to a big Other: Pascal’s way in the spiritual texts, and the analysand’s way in the analytical treatment as Lacan sees it. My aim is to try to identify unexpected convergences between the theological practice of language and the analytic experience of word, so that we can also pinpoint where they diverge and where they are irreducible.