🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I will try today to speak to you about the Thing, das Ding. It is, I believe, that certain ambiguities, certain insufficiencies regarding the true meaning, in FREUD, of the opposition between the reality principle and the pleasure principle—that is, the path I am attempting this year to lead you on to make you understand the importance, for our practice as an ethics—toward something that ultimately belongs to the order of the signifier, to the very linguistic order, that is, to a concrete, positive, and specific signifier.

Namely, I do not see what, in the French language, could correspond—and I would be grateful to those whom these remarks might interest or stimulate enough to suggest a solution—to the subtle opposition in German, not easily brought to light, between two terms that signify “the Thing”: das Ding and die Sache. We have only one word, this word “chose,” derived from the Latin causa, which indicates to us, by its juridical etymological reference, what appears to us as the envelope and designation of the concrete.

The Thing, make no mistake, is no less, in the German language, referred to in its original sense as an operation, deliberation, or juridical debate. This is attested if we conduct a more precise etymological inquiry: das Ding can refer, not so much to the judicial operation itself, but to the gathering that conditions it, the Vollversammlung. Do not think that this promotion…

…consistent with what FREUD continually reminds us—the search, the linguistic deepening to trace the accumulated experience of tradition, of generations, as the most certain vehicle for transmitting an elaboration that marks psychic reality…

…do not think that such etymological insights or probes are by any means what we primarily rely on to guide us. Identifying the usage of the signifier in its synchronic dimension is infinitely more valuable to us, and we place far greater importance on how Ding and Sache are commonly used. Indeed, if we turn to an etymological dictionary, we will also find for Sache that it originally referred to a juridical operation, that the Sache is the thing questioned juridically, or, in our vocabulary, the transition to the symbolic order of this debate, of this conflict among men. Nevertheless, the two terms are absolutely not equivalent.

For instance, you might have noted in the remarks of Mr. LEFÈVRE-PONTALIS last time the citation—commendable since he does not know German—of the terms that he brought into his presentation at a specific moment to pose the question—I will say against my doctrine—particularly evoking this passage from The Unconscious (Unbewußte), where “the representation of things” (Sachvorstellungen) is each time opposed to that “of words” (Wortvorstellungen).

I will not today delve into the discussion of what might respond to this passage cited for us, at least as a question mark, by those of you whom my lessons prompt to read FREUD, often invoked in their minds as a question mark, concerning what might oppose in such a passage the emphasis I place on the signifying articulation as providing the true structure of the unconscious. This passage seems to go against it, emphasizing, opposing Sachvorstellung as belonging to the unconscious to Wortvorstellung as belonging to the preconscious.

However, I would like—since perhaps not the majority of you will delve into FREUD’s texts to verify what I propose here in my commentary—since those who stop at this passage, I ask them to read in one go, without pause, the article Die Verdrängung (Repression), which precedes this article on The Unconscious, and then The Conscious itself, before reaching this passage. I indicate for others that it explicitly refers to the question FREUD poses regarding the schizophrenic attitude, in other words, the extraordinarily manifest prevalence of word affinities in what might be called “the world of the schizophrenic.”

Everything preceding, up to this precise point, seems to me to lead in only one direction: namely, that all upon which Verdrängung, that is, repression, operates is signifiers, and that it is around a relationship of the subject to the signifier that the fundamental position of Verdrängung is organized. It is only from this point that FREUD highlights that it is possible to speak, in the analytic sense of the term, in the rigorous sense, in what we would call the “operational” sense, of unconscious and conscious.

Subsequently, FREUD realizes that the particular position of the schizophrenic confronts us, more acutely than in any other neurotic form, with the problem of representation. This is indeed something we may have the opportunity to revisit later while following his text. However, this text itself underscores that in offering the solution it appears to provide—by positing an opposition between Wortvorstellung and Sachvorstellung—there is a difficulty, an impasse he highlights and articulates, which I believe finds its solution quite simply in what he could not, given the state of linguistics in his time, not understand—because he understood it admirably—but formulate, namely, the distinction:

• Of the operation of language as a function, namely at the moment when it articulates itself and plays an essential role in the preconscious,
• And of the function of language as structure, that is, insofar as it is according to the structure of language that the elements engaged in the unconscious are ordered.

Between these, there are established these coordinations, these Bahnungen (pathways), this chaining that dominates its economy.

But I have made a detour that is far too long. I want to limit myself today to this remark: FREUD, in any case, speaks of Sachvorstellung and not Dingvorstellung.

And it is not without significance that these Sachvorstellungen are tied to the Wortvorstellung, showing us—what is quite certain—that there is a relationship, that the chaff of words only appears to us as chaff insofar as we have separated it from the grain of things, and that it is this chaff that originally carried the grain.

I mean to say: what is too obvious—I do not intend here to elaborate a theory of knowledge—is:

• That the things of the human world are things of a universe structured in words,
• That language dominates,
• That symbolic processes govern everything.

What we strive to probe, at the limit between the animal world and the human world, is this phenomenon, which can only appear to us as a subject of wonder: namely, how the symbolic process as such is ineffective in the animal world. And indeed, it shows us at the same time that merely a difference in intelligence, a difference in flexibility and complexity of apparatuses, cannot be the sole mechanism that allows us to designate this difference.

That man is caught in symbolic processes in a way that no animal can access in the same manner cannot be resolved in terms of psychology. This is something that requires us first to have a complete, strict, and focused understanding of what this symbolic process means.

The Sache, I will say, is indeed this “thing,” the product of industry, so to speak, of human action insofar as it is directed and governed by language. These “things” are, in essence, on the surface, always accessible to being explicated, no matter how implicit they may be at first in the genesis of this action.

The a that falls as a product of the operation of language (S1 → S2) is of the type “die Sache.” The das Ding is the impossible to reach, except in the “mode” of fantasy: (a ◊ $), which is at the principle of “human action,” always reiterated.

Indeed, we are dealing here with the fruits of an activity of which one can say that, insofar as it is underlying and implicit to all human action, it belongs to the order of the preconscious, to something that our interest can bring to consciousness, provided we pay enough attention to it, provided we remark upon it. This is where the reciprocal positioning of the word takes place, as it articulates itself, as it comes here to explain itself in relation to the thing, insofar as an action—dominated by language, indeed by command (S1 → S2)—has detached and brought forth this object.

Sache and Wort are so closely linked that they form a kind of pair. The same applies to das Ding, to The Thing, where this marking, this weight, is situated.

This das Ding, The Thing, is what I wish to show you today in life. It is to show you that in the reality principle, as FREUD introduces it at the start of his thought and carries it through to its conclusion—because this das Ding (of which I will show you the original indication in a specific passage of the Entwurf) is found again at the end of all the evolution of his thought on the reality principle, in die Verneinung (denial), as something like an essential point.

This das Ding is situated elsewhere than in this reflective relationship, insofar as it is explicable, which makes man question his words as referring to the things that those words have nonetheless created. There is something else in das Ding.

What is in das Ding is the true secret. For there is a secret of this reality principle in FREUD, which LEFÈVRE-PONTALIS showed you last time as a paradox.

For if FREUD speaks of the reality principle, it is, as LEFÈVRE-PONTALIS rightly emphasized, in some sense to show us that it is always thwarted, only asserting itself at the margins, through a sort of pressure. If the matter did not go infinitely further, one might say it is the pressure FREUD calls—not, as it is often poorly described, to emphasize the role of the secondary process—“vital needs,” but in the German text: Not des Lebens, die Not des Lebens. An infinitely stronger formulation.

Something that signifies need—not needs—pressure, urgency. The state of Not is the state of life’s urgency.

It must be noted that “Not des Lebens”—which I wrote on the board last time while LEFÈVRE-PONTALIS was speaking—refers to something that intervenes at the level of the secondary process, but at a level deeper than the corrective activity upon which both LEFÈVRE-PONTALIS and I have insisted. It serves to determine the level of QηˊQή, the quantity of energy borne, so to speak, preserved, and sustained by the organism, as necessary for the preservation of life in proportion to its responses. Take note of this: it is at the level of the secondary process that this necessary determination is exercised.

Let us return to the reality principle, then, which is invoked in terms of its incidence and necessity, guiding us toward what I call its secret. The secret is this: as soon as we attempt to articulate the reality principle and link it to the physical world—which FREUD’s thought and intent seem to demand—it strikes us that the reality principle itself functions by isolating the subject from reality.

And here we find nothing other than what biology indeed teaches us: that a process of homeostasis, of isolation from this reality, dominates the structure of a living being. Is that all FREUD tells us when he speaks of the functioning of this reality principle? On the surface, yes.

What he shows us is that neither the quantitative element nor the qualitative element of reality enters into what could be called the domain—indeed, this is the term he uses, Reich—of the secondary process. The external quantity, as I mentioned the other day, insofar as the apparatus FREUD calls the ϕ-system encounters it at its endpoint—that is, the apparatus directed outwardly from the neural ensemble, essentially the nerve endings at the level of the skin, tendons, and even muscles or bones, the deeper sensitivities—is concerned with this.

Everything is structured so that this quantity QQ is clearly blocked or halted relative to what is sustained from QηˊQή, another quantity, the one determining the level that distinguishes the ϕ-apparatus within the neural ensemble. The Entwurf is the theory of a neural apparatus in which the organism remains external, by theoretical position alone, just as does the external world.

As for quality, it is explicitly stated that the external world does not entirely lose its quality, but that this quality is inscribed, as we know—the theory of sensory organs demonstrates—in a discontinuous way, along a spectrum truncated at both ends, shortened depending on the various fields of sensoriality involved. It is always observable that the sensory apparatus as such does not merely play the role of extinguisher or dampener, as we have just seen in the ϕ-apparatus in general, but also acts as a sieve, as FREUD puts it. Thus, the question becomes what value we can assign to these perceptions.

Here, FREUD does not venture further into solutions belonging strictly to the physiologist, such as those presented by M. PIÉRON in Sensation: Guide of Life. The question of whether the selection is made in one way or another in the field of visual, auditory, or other perceptions is not otherwise addressed. However, even here, we have the notion of a profound subjectivization of the external world—of something that sorts, sieves, and results in reality being perceived, at least in a natural, spontaneous state, by humans, only in a deeply selected form. What humans encounter are curated fragments of reality.

And, in truth, in the economy FREUD presents to us, this enters only into a function localized within the overall economy, not as quality informing us more profoundly, as something reaching an essence, but as signs. FREUD introduces them only as Qualitätszeichen (quality signs). The function of signs, however, does not operate in relation to the opaque and enigmatic quality itself.

Instead, it is the function of signs insofar as these signs inform or alert us to the presence of something effectively linked to this external world, signaling to consciousness that it is indeed dealing with the external world. How and in what manner it deals with this external world—this is the issue humans have grappled with since they began to think and attempt a theory of knowledge. FREUD does not delve further into this problem, except to state that it is undoubtedly very complex and that we are far from even sketching out a solution for what might organically determine its precision, its particular determinations, and its genesis.

But then, is this truly what FREUD refers to when he speaks of the reality principle? Is it merely something that, according to a formula often implied in the expressions of certain behaviorist theorists, represents the collisions of an organism with a world in which it undoubtedly finds sustenance and elements for assimilation, but which, in principle, appears as a world of randomness, of chaos, of “encounters”?

Is this truly all FREUD articulates when he discusses the reality principle? This is the question I raise before you today, introducing the notion of das Ding. Before delving into it, I return to draw your attention to the small two-column diagram I presented two weeks ago.

1 – Subject
Pleasure Principle (ICS) ⇄ Reality Principle (Cs)

2 – Process
Thoughts ⇄ Perception-Consciousness

3 – Object
Unknown ⇄ Known

This refers to the opposition set out in the two-column diagram: on one side, the Lustprinzip (pleasure principle) and, on the other, the Realitätsprinzip (reality principle). This begins with the observation that it is on the side of the pleasure principle that the unconscious functions as such. The pleasure principle governs and dominates something that—whether conscious or preconscious—is, in any case, part of the realm of reflective, articulable, and accessible discourse emerging from the preconscious.

I pointed out to you that thought processes, insofar as they are dominated by the reality principle, are, FREUD emphasizes, profoundly inaccessible and unconscious in themselves. They only reach consciousness to the extent that they can be verbalized—that is, brought back through a process of reflective articulation to the sphere of the reality principle, to a consciousness perpetually awakened and invested in attention, striving to grasp something as it occurs to orient itself with respect to the real world.

I would say that it is within his own words that the subject, in an often precarious way, manages to grasp the mechanisms through which his thoughts—those enigmatic chains of ideas that emerge—are arranged and connected. Between these ideas, the necessity of speaking them and articulating them introduces a frequently artificial order, one that FREUD often emphasized. FREUD remarked on how we always find reasons for the emergence of certain moods or dispositions, one after another, but nothing confirms that our explicit justifications reveal the true mechanisms behind their successive emergence. This, precisely, is what analysis contributes to our experience.

Not only are there more reasons than we can grasp, but there is an overabundance of reasons leading us to believe in some form of rationality in the succession of our endopsychic forms. Yet, as we know—and in how many cases? In the majority of cases!—the true connections are found elsewhere.

Thus, the thought process, insofar as it provides access to reality, is sustained by the Not des Lebens (the urgency of life), which maintains the apparatus’s investment at a certain level. This thought process belongs to the unconscious realm and is accessible to us only through an artifice, which FREUD highlights by stating:

It is because relationships are spoken, because there is Bewegung (movement)—movement of speech—that we hear ourselves speak, in other words. And this movement, FREUD tells us, reveals something, for there is always “something” in every movement. He uses a term not commonly found in German (Bewegung), emphasizing the strangeness of the notion he insists upon. He refers to the strangeness of the concept as it unfolds within the system, represented here by the symbol ω (omega), which I have placed here and will explain shortly.

It is through this movement, which seems palpable, that something becomes recognizable. To some degree, it inserts itself into the circuit at the level of the ϕ-apparatus, whose primary aim is to maintain the lowest possible tension by discharging energy into movement (Abfuhr). Insofar as something within this process of discharge (Abfuhr) is engaged, it falls under the influence of the pleasure principle. The subject—specifically, the conscious subject—perceives something only when there is a centripetal aspect to the movement, only when there is, in a sense, the feeling of movement, the sensation of effort.

This would be limited to a vague perception, capable of opposing only the two great qualities FREUD described as monotonous: the immobile and the mobile, the movable and the immovable. I referenced this distinction in discussing movement versus immobility. However, within these movements are those we may call movements of a different structure—articulated movements of speech. Around these, something remains monotonous, pale, lacking in color, yet it is through them that all processes of thought—those minute steps of progression from Vorstellung to Vorstellung (representation to representation), around which the human world organizes itself—reach consciousness.

It is because something within the sensation-motor circuit interacts with a certain level of the Ψ-system in a particular way that retroactive perception becomes possible, emerging in the form of Wortvorstellung (word-representation). This means the system of consciousness (the ω system) can register something of what occurs within the psyche, capturing elements of the endopsychic reality. FREUD alludes to this repeatedly, cautiously and sometimes ambiguously, as endopsychic perception. Let us emphasize further what is at stake here in the ϕ-system.

From the Entwurf onward, FREUD isolates a system of the Ich (ego): this “Ich,” whose metamorphoses and transformations we will explore later in the development of his theory. This “Ich,” which, from the outset, already carries the ambiguity FREUD would later emphasize by stating that the Ich is, to a large extent, unconscious.

Here, the Ich is strictly defined: when FREUD speaks of die Einführung des Ichs (the introduction of the ego), he refers specifically to a system uniformly invested with something characterized by Gleichbesetzung (equal distribution of investment). FREUD does not explicitly use the term Gleichbesetzung, but I believe I am faithfully capturing his meaning by employing this term to describe an equal, uniform investment.

Within the ϕ-system, there is something that constitutes the Ich, insofar as this Ich represents something in the system—a “group of neurons that is constantly invested, thus corresponding to the reserve carrier required by the secondary function.” The term Vorrat (reserve) is particularly emphasized. It serves to maintain this investment, which characterizes a regulatory function within the system.

Here, I speak of function. If there is unconsciousness, it is indeed the Ich as it functions unconsciously here, and it is regulated by this Besetzung (investment), this Gleichbesetzung (equal distribution of investment), that we encounter it. This allows us to identify the significance of the decussation I emphasize and which we will see maintained in its duality as FREUD’s thought develops.

The system that perceives and records—the one later named Wahrnehmungsbewußtsein (perceptual consciousness)—is not situated at the level of the ego, which maintains the Besetzung (investment) as equal, uniform, and as constant as possible, regulating the functioning of thought. That consciousness lies elsewhere. It is an apparatus that FREUD must invent, forge, and describe as an intermediary between two systems—the ω-system and the ϕ-system—while the text makes it clear that this apparatus should not be placed at the limit here. The ϕ-system directly penetrates, albeit through an apparatus, branching directly into the Ψ-system, where it only deposits a portion of the quantity it carries.

Thus, this ω-system functions elsewhere and, in a position that is relatively isolated and less locatable than any other apparatus. FREUD states that “it does not in any way derive its energy from external quantities” and that, at most, “it appropriates the period (sich die Periode aneignen), recording the period.”

This is what I referred to earlier when discussing the sensory apparatus’s role. Here, too, the role of guidance and contribution is played, brought about by Qualitätszeichen (quality signs), enabling every smallest step—each departure individuated by attention to a specific chosen point in the circuit—to facilitate a better approximation relative to the process, which the pleasure principle would otherwise automatically seek to optimize.

However, something strikes us the moment FREUD attempts to articulate this system’s function. This duality, this apparent coalescence of Wahrnehmung (perception) with Bewußtsein (consciousness), expressed in the symbol “W-Bw,” becomes evident when we try to observe its operation at this primary level of apprehension within FREUD’s psychic system.

Everything indicates that here… and I urge you to refer to Letter 52, which LEFÈVRE-PONTALIS noted last time as something I frequently referenced. In this letter, FREUD, in his confidences with FLIESS, begins to introduce the conception of how the unconscious operates as such… FREUD revolves his entire theory of memory around the succession of Niederschriften (inscriptions). For him, the fundamental requirement of this system is to organize what he observes functioning in memory traces, arranging its diverse fields within a coherent conception of the psychic apparatus.

And what do we see at the level of Letter 52? We see this: Wahrnehmung (perception), meaning the raw impression of the external world, is primal, original, and outside the realm corresponding to an experience that is notable—that is, effectively inscribed in something. It is striking that, at the origin of his thought, FREUD describes this as a Niederschrift (inscription), as something that not only impresses or imprints but also signifies—something belonging to the order of writing.

I did not make him choose this term. The first Niederschrift occurs at a certain age—according to FREUD’s initial approximation, before the age of four. It does not matter here. At this level, an “a” is followed, by the age of eight, by a “b,” which appears as something more organized—a second Niederschrift, structured according to properly conceptual memories, which seems to constitute, more specifically, an unconscious.

It does not matter whether FREUD was mistaken at this point or not, whether we have since discovered that the unconscious, as such, with its organization of thought, can be traced back much earlier. What matters to us is this: that subsequently, we have the level of the Vorbewußtsein (preconscious), corresponding to a later stage, and then the level of Bewußtsein (consciousness), which is no longer an indication of time but of a term.

In other words:

• All the elaboration that allows us to progress from a signification of the world to speech that can be articulated,
• The entire chain extending from the most archaic unconscious to the articulated form of speech in the subject, all of this occurs, so to speak, between Wahrnehmung (perception) and Bewußtsein (consciousness), as one might say, “between the leather and the flesh.”
• It is ultimately somewhere—not so much something essentially identifiable from the perspective of subjective topology with a neural apparatus—where the progress FREUD is interested in takes place.

Indeed, what occurs between Wahrnehmung and Bewußtsein must, as FREUD represents it, have to do with the unconscious, not merely in its function but—as he himself expresses by introducing a contrast—in its Aufbau (construction) or structure.

In other words, it is because the signifying structure mediates between perception and consciousness that the unconscious intervenes, that the pleasure principle intervenes, not as Gleichbesetzung (equal investment) serving to maintain a specific investment, but as something concerning the Bahnungen (facilitations). It is the structure of accumulated experience that lies there and remains inscribed.

At the level of the Ich (ego) and the unconscious in function, something is at play, something regulated, which tends to exclude the external world, retaining it outside. In contrast, at the level of Übung (exercise), what comes into play is Abfuhr (discharge), rediscovering here the same intertwining of what one might call the “total economy of the apparatus.” Structure regulates the discharge; function retains it and supports its reserves—what FREUD also calls the Vorrat (supply or reserve). Here, we find the same term he used to describe the Vorratskammer (supply chamber) of his own unconscious.

This is the same term FREUD employs to describe the Ich (ego) I am speaking of, the Vorratsträger (bearer of the reserve). It is the support of quantity and energy insofar as it constitutes the heart and center of the psychic apparatus. It is on this basis that we now encounter what we will see functioning as the subject’s first apprehension of reality as such.

Here, without ambiguity, we encounter a reality I discussed last time, perhaps somewhat obscured or even overlooked by LEFÈVRE-PONTALIS, in the form of something most intimately connected to the subject in the concept of the Nebenmensch (the fellow human being). This striking concept articulates the combination of proximity and similarity alongside separation and identity, marking the fundamental experience of the subject. Following what? I would need to read the entire passage to you, but instead, I will select its most crucial point, the culmination:

“It is not the Nebenmensch complex that splits into two parts, one of which asserts itself as a constant apparatus while the other remains together as the Ding.”

This, incidentally, is what is entirely lost in the rather deplorable French translation you are dealing with, which renders it as: “Something remains as a coherent whole.” Far from referring to a “coherent whole,” in the sense of a mere nominal transformation from verb to noun, it is, on the contrary, in the Ding (thing) itself that we find the element isolated by the subject at the origin of the Nebenmensch experience. It is isolated as something inherently foreign (fremde).

In this sense, the second part of this object complex becomes distinguishable. FREUD tells us there is a division, a distinction at this level of judgment, whereby everything constituting the object’s qualities can be formulated as its attributes or predicates, while something else, then, becomes part of the investment of the Ψ-system, constituting the primitive Vorstellungen (representations) around which the entire destiny of the subject unfolds. This destiny is regulated according to the laws of Lust (pleasure) and Unlust (unpleasure), in what we might call the “primitive entries of the subject.”

This is something entirely different. It represents an original division given to us as the proper experience of reality as such, which we will rediscover in Verneinung (denial). I urge you to refer to FREUD’s text, where you will find it presented in the same scope and function, as being essentially that which, from within the subject, is originally projected outward. This outward projection, FREUD tells us, has nothing to do with the reality in which the subject will later locate the Qualitätszeichen (quality signs) indicating they are on the right path toward satisfaction.

Before the test of this search, something establishes the goal and aim of that search. This is what LEFÈVRE-PONTALIS referred to the other day as being expressed enigmatically to a certain degree.

This is what FREUD designates when he says:

“The first and most immediate aim of the reality test is not to find an object in real perception that corresponds to what the subject represents at that moment but rather to rediscover it, to confirm that it is still present in reality.”

The notion of das Ding—this Ding as fremde (foreign), as alien, and at times even hostile, but in any case as the first external reality—is what orients the entire path of the subject, which, without question, is always a path of control, a path of reference. Reference to what? The world of the subject’s desires! The subject tests that something, after all, is indeed there—something that, to some degree, might serve. But serve what? Serve nothing other than as a reference point for that world of wishes and expectations oriented, on occasion, toward attaining das Ding.

When this object is there, when all the conditions are fulfilled—that is, ultimately, as you well know… but because, of course, it is clear that what is sought cannot be found again, since the nature of the object is that it is lost as such… it will never be recovered, leaving only something that waits—waiting for something better, or worse, but waiting nonetheless.

The system of the Freudian world—meaning the world of our experience—is one in which this object, das Ding, as the absolute Other of the subject, is what must be rediscovered. At most, it is rediscovered in a state of regret. It is not das Ding itself that is found, but its coordinates of pleasure: the state of wishing for it, of expecting it, wherein, according to the pleasure principle, this optimum tension is sought—below which, of course, there is no longer perception or effort. And if, in the end, nothing hallucinates this object as a reference system, no perceptual world can organize or constitute itself in a human and valid way. This perceptual world is given to us as correlative, as dependent, as a reference to this fundamental hallucination, without which no attention would be available.

Here, we arrive at the notion of the “specific action” (spezifische Aktion) FREUD discusses repeatedly, which I wish to clarify. For there is also ambiguity in the Befriedigungserlebnis (experience of satisfaction). Indeed, what is sought is the object relative to which the pleasure principle operates. This operation forms the fabric, the framework, the support on which all practical experience relies. So, how does FREUD conceive of this experience, this specific action?

To understand its significance, one must read his correspondence with FLIESS—specifically Letter 52, which, as you can see, has not yet finished revealing its secrets. FREUD writes, “The hysterical attack is no discharge.” It is not a discharge. This is a warning for those who consistently emphasize the role of quantity in the function of affect. There is perhaps no better field than hysteria to show how, in the sequence of psychic events, causality is often contingent.

It is not at all a discharge but rather an action (eine Aktion), an action inherent to all action: being a means to procure pleasure (Mittel zur Reproduktion von Lust). Here, we see illuminated what FREUD calls an “action”: the fundamentally original nature of all action is to be a Mittel zur Reproduktion (a means of reproduction).

This is it: das ist er, der hysterische Anfall wenigstens in der Wurzel—this is it, at least in its root. Elsewhere, FREUD writes, “sonst motiviert er sich vor dem Vorbewussten mit allerlei Gründen”—it can motivate itself through all kinds of reasons drawn from the preconscious. But what is its essence? FREUD tells us immediately afterward and simultaneously illustrates what is meant here by action as a Mittel zur Reproduktion.

In the case of hysteria, the issue is a crying spell. Everything is calculated, regulated, and directed toward den Anderen (the Other)—meaning, above all, what FREUD calls “that prehistoric, unforgettable Other whom no one will ever reach again later.” Here, we find articulated a preliminary understanding of the nature of neurosis, enabling us to grasp the correlatives and the regulatory term.

If the specific action that aims at the experience of satisfaction is an action whose end is to reproduce the state, to rediscover das Ding, the object, we can better understand many modes of neurotic behavior—particularly the conduct of the hysteric. For in the hysteric’s conduct, the aim is to recreate a state centered on the object, insofar as this object, das Ding, is both the center and the foundation of an aversion, as FREUD writes somewhere.

It is because the primal object is an object of dissatisfaction that the specific Erlebnis (experience) of the hysteric is ordered and organized. Similarly, in obsessive neurosis, through a distinction FREUD was the first to identify and which must not be abandoned, das Ding—the object around which the fundamental experience of pleasure is organized—is an object that, FREUD perceived from the outset, literally brings too much pleasure.

If you examine the obsessive neurotic’s behavior in all its pathways and tributaries, you see something remarkable. In the ways the obsessive represents and signals his behavior, there is always something aimed at ultimately avoiding what he often sees quite clearly as the goal and endpoint of his desire. And this avoidance is motivated with extraordinary radicality, for the pleasure principle, as FREUD presents it, is precisely a mode of functioning that seeks to avoid excess—to avoid too much pleasure.

To move quickly…
as quickly as FREUD does in his initial insights into ethical reality, properly speaking, insofar as it functions in the subject he addresses…
do not forget that in one of the references I presented to you—which I do not have immediately on hand but will easily provide next time—FREUD’s positioning of the subject within the three major categories he initially discerns: hysteria, obsessive neurosis, and paranoia.

In paranoia, interestingly, FREUD introduces a term that I invite you to contemplate in its primordial emergence: Versagen des Glaubens (failure of belief). Concerning this first foreign entity to which the subject must initially refer, the paranoiac does not believe in it. This invocation of the term “belief” seems to me accentuated in a less psychological sense than it might initially appear. I mean that this mode of relationship—the most profound human connection to reality—articulated through the term “faith” seems to me implicated in what FREUD identifies as the paranoiac’s most radical stance.

And here, it seems evident how naturally this aligns with another perspective—one that converges with it. I have already highlighted this by stating that the mechanism of paranoia fundamentally involves the rejection of a certain grounding in the symbolic order, a specific support around which, as we may observe, the relationship to das Ding divides into two aspects.

If das Ding is originally what we might call “the outside of meaning,” it is in relation to this “outside of meaning”—and through a poignant relationship by which the subject maintains distance and constitutes itself in this mode of relation, as a primary affect preceding all repression—that the initial articulation of the Entwurf is established.

Repression, let us not forget, still presents itself as a problem at this level. Everything FREUD later articulates about repression cannot be understood, even in its extraordinary complexity, without recognizing it as a necessity—a need to specifically understand how repression relates to all other forms of defense.

Here, then, it is in relation to this original das Ding that this first orientation, this initial choice, this foundational positioning of subjective orientation occurs—a phenomenon we may call Neurosenwahl (the choice of neurosis). This first instance establishes the framework that will govern the function of the pleasure principle. What remains for us to observe is that at the same locus, something else takes shape—something that is, in a way, its opposite, its reverse, yet also its identical counterpart.

This is what ultimately replaces the mute reality that is das Ding: namely, the reality that dictates and orders what, in the end, becomes a focal point in the philosophy of someone who, better than anyone else, glimpsed the function of das Ding—though only through the pathways and experiments of the philosophy of science. That person is KANT.

Ultimately, we might conceive that das Ding presents itself:

• as pure signifying structure,
• as a universal maxim,
• as the thing most stripped of any relation to the individual.

With KANT, we must recognize this as the focal point, the aim, and the convergence by which an action is presented as moral—a rule of a certain Gut (Good)—though paradoxically, this action defines itself as such.

Today, however, I wish only to emphasize that the Thing (la Chose) presents itself to us only insofar as it makes a mark (fait mot), as one might say it “hits the mark.” The way the foreign and the hostile manifest in the subject’s first experience of reality—and the way FREUD presents it in his text, as I have stressed—is through the cry.

This cry, I would argue, is something we do not need. Here, I would like to reference something more embedded in the French language—every language has its advantages—than it is in German.

In German, “das Wort” means both “the word” and “speech.” In French, the word mot carries a particular weight and sense. Mot is essentially: “No response, not a word…” as LA FONTAINE says somewhere.

Mot is what remains silent. Mot is precisely that to which no word is spoken.

The matters at hand, which some might oppose as having been elevated by FREUD to a level beyond the world of signifiers—these matters, which I argue are the true mechanism of the primary process in humans—are mute things. And mute things are not quite the same as things that bear no relation to speech.

I ask you only to evoke a figure—a figure that, I think, will resonate vividly with each one of you: the figure of the silent, the terrible mute, from the four MARX Brothers: HARPO. Is there anything that can pose a more pressing, more present, more gripping, more unsettling, more nauseating question—anything more likely to plunge into the abyss and annihilate everything happening before it—than the expression on the face of HARPO MARX? That smile, whose nature remains uncertain: is it one of utter perversity or complete naivety? By himself, this mute character suffices to sustain the atmosphere of questioning, of radical annihilation, which forms the fabric and object of the formidable farce of continuous, relentless jokes that give meaning to the entirety of this exercise.

But one more word. A word that will now emerge. And since today I have spoken to you about the Other as das Ding, I want to conclude with something much more accessible to our experience. This is the isolated use of the French language, where, once again, it reserves certain specialized forms for a particular mode of address. What does it mean, and what does it represent, when out of our voice erupts this “you” (toi), which may come to our lips in a moment of disarray, distress, or surprise—stemming from something I would not hastily call death but undoubtedly the presence of a privileged Other for us, around whom our greatest concerns revolve, though not without unsettling us?

I do not believe this “you”—this “you” of devotion where, at times, all other expressions of the need to cherish falter—I do not believe it is simple. I think there is also, within it, something attempting to tame this Other, this prehistoric Other, this unforgettable Other who risks suddenly surprising us and hurling us from the heights of its appearance. This “you,” which contains I know not what form of defense—I would say that, in the moment this “you” is uttered, it is entirely within this “you,” in its eruption, that resides what I have presented to you today as das Ding.

And to avoid concluding with something that might appear overly optimistic, I will juxtapose this with the use, meaning, weight, and identity of the thing and the word as we can find them in another isolated usage of the word, one particularly specific. To this “you,” which I have called “the taming you”—a you that tames nothing, a futile incantation, a vain connection—there is also something else that may occur when a command reaches us from beyond the apparatus in which swarms that which, with us, confronts das Ding.

It is what we answer when something is attributed to us—either as a charge against us or in our favor: “Me?” (moi?) What is this “me,” this solitary “me”? What is it, if not a “me” of exclusion, a “me” of rejection, a “me” of “not for me”? Thus, from the very moment of its emergence, from its origin:

• The me expels itself by an opposing movement,
• The me as defense, as a “me” that first and foremost rejects, denounces rather than announces itself—this me, in this isolated experience of its emergence, which perhaps ought to be considered as its original decline.

Here, the me articulates itself.

And it is from this point that we will return next time to explore further how the axiom and morality present themselves as experiences of satisfaction.