Last year, in connection with the theme of the SLP [Scuola Lacaniana di Psicoanalisi] Congress XXII, The Clinic of Romantic Ruptures, I happened to, randomly, listen to a track by Ennio Morricone: "The Crisis". The track revolves around a particularity: an out-of-tune note that, unchanging, repeats in dissonance with the orchestral arrangement.
As the minutes pass, the dissonance becomes less disturbing and strident, until it becomes more listenable, but nonetheless forever discordant with the background; then it closes the track, alone, standing out in the silence.
"The Crisis" has the quality of transmitting, in its structure, the impossible consistency with the Other that the singularity of each person calls upon, and that in love is always a bit veiled.
A singularity that supports itself in a void of meaning, which music is able to say without words: from the There is no sexual relation pulsates the one alone, in an irremediable disharmony.
The logic of the two sexes finds its foundation here, namely the relationship to language, from which one determines one's own sex and the Other's sex: the phallic function of language and the alterity of jouissance that supplements it.
The discordance1 is the alterity, the not-all inherent to every speaking being, supplementary to the orchestra of the Other of language.
Music has the quality to resonate with this, which has nothing to do with sense or meaning, but rather with the modes of jouissance of the body, with something that appears as strange; with that singular note that, out-of-tune and discordant, in the analytic experience, thanks to the love in the transference and its κρίσις [Greek: separation, dissolution], can move from being unbearable to a unique invention, turning each one's real into a novelty that is enacted.
[1] Cf.: Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XIX, …or Worse, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. AR. Price, Cambridge, Polity, 2018, p. 14
