More on the void

I found the passage below in this paper by Éric Laurent.

In the seminar on The Object of Psychoanalysis, he took up the first sentences from his first Seminar on the action of the Zen master: “Everyone knows, though one does not know what it means, that a Zen exercise has something to do with the subjective realization of a void [...] the mental void that it is a matter of obtaining and which would be obtained, this singular moment, in an abruptness following a period of waiting, sometimes provoked by a word, a sentence, a jaculation, even a rude remark, a snub, a kick in the ass. It is quite certain that these kinds of slapstick moments or clownish behavior have meaning only in the light of a long subjective preparation [...].”

Laurent is quoting from Lacan's Seminar XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis, which has not been published in English but is available in a bootleg version at Lacan in Ireland.

Later Laruent writes about the awakening that can happen when someone encounters the void (i.e., when there is a subjectivized experience of the void) .

This awakening is connected to the production of a real effect of meaning as the production of a subjective void.

An experience of the void, with what is there, but we don't know what "it" (the void) is, provokes the subject to create something. Perhaps we might call this something a new category, a new signifier, which retroactively reorganizes much of the already existing ways of understanding/signifying.

What strikes me about this passage is the way that Lacan identifies a particular sort of moment that snaps a person out of their autopilot way of being-in-the-world, producing a kind of void, an empty space in the habitual and automatic way of making meaning and orienting according to that meaning. This kind of void (empty space) is the experience of coming into contact with something that one can't categorize and thus does not know how to react to it.

Building on what I posted here, this experience of void can be traumatic, but it can also be productive.