The Invocatory Drive: What We Learn from the Deaf...

Résumé 0

What can those who speak with hands and hear with eyes teach us about “lalangue” and the “voice”? Clinical psychoanalysis testifies that some deaf people also hear voices in verbal hallucinations, thus highlighting the “aphonic” quality of the voice as objet a, invented by Jacques Lacan. Rather than joining ranks with the sanitary approach of our advanced neoliberal societies which incessantly invent new pathologies and official documents which silence the subject, this article sides with the layman and suggests learning from what makes the “speaking-being” ( parlêtre) begin to speak. The article, based on clinical psychoanalysis focusing on French sign language, demonstrates the existence of a two-way loop, hand/eye allowing the deaf to speak and to speak themselves. The importance of gestural signifier chains, visual and tactile, is emphasised, and certainly not only for these subjects. Jacques Lacan’s explicit invitation in 1963 to consider the situation of the deaf thus opens up an understanding of eyes and the symbolic effect of the human gesture, centring on “ways other than the voice to receive language.”