Letting the feminine write itself as method: the writing of the impossible in psychoanalytic research

Abstract

This article proposes a research methodology in psychoanalysis, termed the “writing of the impossible,” designed to investigate the feminine as a clinical and conceptual operator, precisely due to its resistance to formalization and the logic of the whole. Instead of reducing the feminine to an object of conceptual representation, it is assumed that it inscribes itself as impossible, and it is precisely this logic that guides the method. Grounded in a theoretical-clinical approach, the writing of the impossible is structured around four guiding principles: (i) the Lacanian logic of the not-all, (ii) the Freudian temporality of the afterwards (Nachträglichkeit), (iii) the articulation with tensive semiotics, which guides a “reading-listening” sensitive to intensities, and (iv) the ethics of the “clinic of the written,” which navigates between listening and formalization. The methodology proposes a torsion from listening to reading, introducing the concept of the clinical (f)act as a construction and embracing non-knowing as an ethical axis of rigor and orientation of knowledge. Thus, the writing of the impossible asserts itself as a methodology that allows the feminine not just to be thematized, but to write itself as method, leading the research to embody, and not merely expose, the logic of its object.