Around the corner of a London street, a waft of jasmine suddenly cuts through the thread of my thoughts. I was walking, absorbed in the day’s programme, when the scent of flowers comes in and quietly throws everything off. From this apparently banal scene, a question reopens: what difference does it make to say “I am very sensitive to smells” or to say “I have a body with heightened senses”? Between an “I am” that glues the subject to a quality and an “I have a body that…” which introduces a gap, an actual working space appears.
In that space, another question arises: what about our breathing? And what is at play here, now, in resonance with my last yoga class at the École du Souffle, and with that analysand’s sentence: “sorry, I’m just catching my breath”?
Do we know how to breathe in? Do we really know how to fill these lungs, beyond the vital reflex, to be inspired by what surrounds us? The equivocation is everywhere: to inhale, to be inspired, to be able to breathe. What kind of saying is at stake here? A particular way of telling ourselves what passes through us, of giving shape, through language, to what cuts us, diverts us, sets us back in motion.
This is where the references knot together differently. When Lacan, in La Troisième, speaks of psychoanalysis as an “artificial lung” that allows us to find “just enough jouissance in speaking for history to go on”, he is not only describing a technical device: he is pointing to this passage from breath to speech, from respiration to narrative. The jasmine at the street corner becomes a kind of micro‑setup: a slice of the real that hits the body, cuts the chain of thoughts, and opens the possibility of another discourse. On his side, Merleau‑Ponty is not just a name for the “sensible body”: his work on flesh, the perceived world, embodied experience, sheds light on this scene where “something is felt, something shifts”.
The friendship between Merleau‑Ponty and Lacan takes here the form of a discreet dialogue: between a body that breathes the world in and a subject sustained by a saying, between the sensible and the unconscious. Between breath, the body that feels, the fantasy that organises, and the saying that supports it, the very concrete magic of summer in London, a city‑garden, a scent at the corner of a street, becomes the place where these questions are replayed: how, exactly, do we breathe within our own discourse? What do we allow ourselves to be inspired by? And how can a simple “I’m just catching my breath” already say something about our singular way of inhabiting language and the real?