96

The psychoanalytic act is not the application of a theory to a practice. If there is a technique, it proceeds from a gesture of erasure, from a pathway that is not invented but commands invention. This is an inaugural gesture that has no words and that envelops the duration of a session; it is a renewed gesture that always remains to be invented. The analyst’s erasure repeats the mise-en-scène of primal repression—that is, the instance of loss of jouissance of the body in favor of the jouissance of words and of their repetitive poetry.