🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

FREUD remarks somewhere that if psychoanalysis, in the eyes of some, has raised concerns about excessively promoting the rule of instincts, it has no less emphasized the importance and presence of the moral instance. This is an evident truth, and naturally all the more certain, daily confirmed by our experience as practitioners. However, perhaps there is still insufficient appreciation, outside this context, of the exorbitant character of the instance of guilt playing out unbeknownst to the subject.

This unconscious guilt, these elements that present themselves in such a massive form, is what, this year, I believed it necessary to examine more closely and articulate in such a way as to highlight the originality of the revolution in thought brought about by the effect of Freudian experience concerning the realm of ethics.

Last time, I tried to demonstrate the importance and meaning in Freudian psychology, in the first text, the Entwurf, around which FREUD attempted to organize his first intuition regarding what is at stake in the experience of the neurotic. I endeavored to show you the pivotal function we must attribute to this something encountered in the detour of a FREUD text. But this detour is one that must simply not be missed, all the less so as I showed you that this detour recurs in various forms until the end, under the essential point of das Ding.

Das Ding is absolutely necessary for conceiving what he states, even in a text like the 1925 Verneinung, so rich in resources, so full of questions. Thus, das Ding is what at the initial point—logically, and at the same time chronologically—at the initial point of the organization of the world in the psyche, presents itself, isolates itself as the foreign term around which the entire movement of Vorstellung will revolve.

This movement of Vorstellung, then, which FREUD shows us as being directed, governed essentially by a regulatory principle called the pleasure principle, a regulatory principle tied to the functioning of an apparatus, specifically the neuronal apparatus. And this is what all adaptive progress pivots around, so particular in humans insofar as the symbolic process shows itself inextricably woven into it.

This das Ding, as I mentioned, is the same term we find in the formula we must consider essential, as it is placed at the center, and one might say, as the enigma point of the Verneinung. This das Ding must be identified with the term wiederzufinden, the tendency to rediscover, which for FREUD is what grounds the human subject’s orientation toward the object—toward this object, let us note well, which is not even explicitly described to us, since we can lend weight here to a certain textual critique that may sometimes, in its attachment to the signifier, take on a Talmudic turn.

Yet it is remarkable that this object in question is never articulated by FREUD. Furthermore, this object, since it concerns rediscovery, we qualify as a lost object. But this object has, in essence, never been lost, even though its rediscovery is essential. And in this orientation toward the object, the regulation of the web of Vorstellungen as they organize themselves, call one another according to the laws of a memory organization, a memory complex, a Bahnung—a facilitation, we might translate into French, or more forcefully still, a concatenation—of which the neuronal apparatus allows us to glimpse, in perhaps a material form, the play.

This Bahnung, in its functioning, is regulated by the law of the pleasure principle, which imposes these detours that maintain its distance from its end. For what guides it by the law of the pleasure principle is that what the pleasure principle governs is the search. The etymology here—even in French, which has replaced the obsolete term quérir—clearly reveals the circa, the detour. The very function of the pleasure principle is that something opposes the transfer of quantity from Vorstellung to Vorstellung, always maintaining it within a certain periphery, at a certain distance from the around which it essentially revolves, from this object to rediscover that gives it its invisible law, but which, on the other hand, does not regulate its paths, establish them, fix them, or undoubtedly model their return.

And this return is a kind of return maintained at a distance precisely because of this law that subjects it, in the end, to being something that ultimately has no other aim than to meet the satisfaction of the Not des Lebens, a series of satisfactions encountered along the way, undoubtedly linked to this relation to the object, polarized by this relation, and which at every moment shape, temper, and support its approaches according to the specific law of the pleasure principle. This law ensures that a certain quantity Qή, inherently different from the imminent and threatening quantity [Q] brought about by encounters with the external world, by external stimulation and excitation brought to the organism, forms a level that cannot be exceeded without instigating something that establishes, for this pleasure principle, its limit.

This is something distinct from the polarization of Lust-Unlust (pleasure-displeasure), which are precisely the two forms under which this single regulation called the pleasure principle expresses itself, which forms its limit.

This is the moment when—in some way or another, whether from within or from outside—the quantity surpasses what can metaphorically be called “the thing,” articulated by FREUD, and almost offered to us to take literally. This is expressed metaphorically—and what he expresses—through what can be accommodated by the width of the conduction pathways, the individual diameter of what the organism can endure. It is this diameter that, in a sense, regulates the admission of the quantity, imposing upon it this condition: beyond the limit, it transforms into complexity.

In some way, it is to the extent that a strong psychic impulse increases, surpassing a certain level, that it does not thereby become capable of progressing further, more directly, toward what would be its goal and endpoint. Instead, it becomes more complex, scatters, diffuses within the psychic organism. This phenomenon, increasingly expansive, spreads across the illuminated zone of the neuronal organism, lighting up, here and there, in accordance with the laws of a facilitation process—specifically that of associative facilitation. This results in constellations of representations, constellations of Vorstellungen, that govern the association of ideas, the association of unconscious Gedanken, in accordance with the laws of the pleasure principle.

The limit itself has a name. This limit is distinct from the Lust-Unlust polarity FREUD discusses. It represents the invasion of quantity insofar as, under certain conditions, nothing can act as it normally would, primitively, even prior to the entry into this function of the Ψ system. Normally, this function intervenes to regulate the invasion of quantity under the laws of the pleasure principle—that is to say, avoidance, flight, movement. Ultimately, it is motricity that:

• is conferred, granted, and delegated the function of keeping the tension level bearable and below a certain homeostatic threshold for the organism;
• provides the structuring of the human organism’s relation through the Ψ system. The nervous apparatus is essentially conceived as a center or locus of autonomous regulation.

This must be considered as such: as isolated, as distinct—with all that this entails in terms of discordance with life—from general homeostasis, which governs, for example, the equilibrium of bodily humors. The equilibrium of humors plays a role but does so itself as a set of stimuli coming from within. FREUD expresses this clearly: there are, relative to the nervous system, stimuli that come from within. He compares them to external stimuli. I would like us to pause for a moment at this limit of pain.

I once remarked that it did not seem entirely certain to me that the term motorisch (motor)—used by FREUD at some point as a mere slip of the tongue—this is what commentators who compiled the Letters to Fliess suggest—substituting for cell, nucleus, organ, secretorisch (secretory)—was really just a slip of the tongue.

Indeed, if FREUD tells us that the reaction of pain occurs in most cases insofar as the motor reaction, the reaction of flight, is impossible, fails—particularly in situations where it is impossible because the stimulation and excitation come from within.

It seems to me that this so-called slip of the tongue serves to indicate a profound homology, within a certain framework, between the relation of pain and this motor reaction. It points to something—something I hope will not seem absurd to you—that struck me a long time ago: in the organization of the spinal cord, one finds neurons and axons of pain at the same level, in the same location, at certain layers, where at other layers certain neurons and axons linked essentially to tonic motricity are found.

Thus, pain should not be taken purely and simply as part of the domain of sensory reactions. I would say that what physiological studies and the surgical treatment of pain have shown us is that pain cannot be considered simply as a quality of sensory reaction. Its complexity—so to speak—its intermediate nature between the afferent and efferent dimensions of pain, is something suggested to us by findings—remarkable findings, it must be said—of certain procedures. These findings include cases where pain perception persists in specific internal conditions—especially in cancer-related afflictions—while at the same time eliminating or suppressing a subjective quality that otherwise renders pain strictly unbearable.

In short, this phenomenon—still within the realm of modern physiological exploration, which does not yet allow us to fully articulate it—merely suggests that perhaps we should conceive of pain as something in the realm of existence. It might resemble a field that opens precisely at the limit where the being lacks the possibility to move.

Is there not something here, perhaps opened to us in some poetic apprehension, in the myth of DAPHNE transforming into a tree under a pressure she could no longer escape? Is there not something in living beings, when they lack the capacity to move, that suggests—through their very form—the presence of what one might call “petrified pain”?

And in what we ourselves create within the domain of stone—when we no longer let it roll, when we erect it, fix it into something immobile, creating architecture—is there not, in architecture itself, something that, for us, stands as a representation of pain?

Something seems to point in this direction. It is what happens, at the limit, at a moment in the history of architecture—the Baroque—under the influence of a historical moment that is also, as we shall soon see, related to the time we will revisit later. An attempt is made to transform architecture itself into—I know not what—a striving toward pleasure, to give it some kind of liberation that makes it blaze with what appears to us as such a paradox in the entire history of construction and building.

This striving toward pleasure—what does it produce, if not what we call, in our metaphorical language here (and this term is far-reaching as such), “tortured forms”? You will forgive me, I think, for this excursion, since, as I announced, it is not without launching some preliminary probe into something we will later be compelled to revisit in discussing what I have called for you “the era of the man of pleasure,” the 18th century, and the very particular style it introduced into the investigation of eroticism.

Let us return to our Vorstellungen and now attempt to understand them, to capture and arrest them in their functioning, so that we may perceive what is at stake in Freudian psychology. It concerns this imaginary composition, this imaginary element of the object, which constitutes what one might call “the substance of appearance,” the material of a vital lure, essentially an open appearance prone to disappointment—an Erscheinung, I might say, if I were to permit myself to speak German [sic]. It is what sustains appearance but also what constitutes the manifestation of the ordinary, the commonplace appearance:

• that which forges this Vor, this intermediary,
• that which emerges, that which originates from the Thing,
• that something fundamentally decomposed, the Vorstellung.

This is what Western philosophy has always revolved around since ARISTOTLE. In ARISTOTLE, it begins precisely with phantasia (ϕανταὓία).

The Vorstellung is taken by FREUD in its radical nature, in the form in which it is introduced into a philosophy essentially delineated by the theory of knowledge. FREUD extricates it from this tradition to isolate it in its function. This is remarkable. He assigns it, to the extreme, this character to which philosophers precisely could not bring themselves to reduce it: a hollow body, a ghost, a pale incubus of the relationship to the world, an exhausted enjoyment that, throughout the philosopher’s inquiry, constitutes its essential character. And this sphere, this order, this gravitational system of Vorstellungen—where does FREUD place it?

Where I told you last time it should be placed—if one reads FREUD closely—between perception and consciousness, as I described it, “between skin and flesh.” “W” stands for Wahrnehmung, perception, here the reality principle. And here—as we have said—Bewußtsein, consciousness. It is here, between perception and consciousness, that what functions at the level of the pleasure principle inserts itself, namely:

• the processes of thought insofar as they regulate, through the pleasure principle, the investment of Vorstellungen,
• the structure in which the unconscious is organized,
• the structure in which the underpinnings of unconscious mechanisms coagulate,
• what constitutes the clot of representation, namely, something that has the same structure—this is the essential point I emphasize—the same structure as the signifier.

This is not simply the Vorstellung but, as FREUD later writes in his article on the Unbewußt (The Unconscious), Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, which makes the Vorstellung an associative element, a combinatory element that organizes a world of Vorstellungen already structured according to the possibilities of the signifier as such. This is something that, even at the unconscious level, organizes itself according to laws that FREUD explicitly states are not necessarily:

• the laws of contradiction,
• the laws of grammar.

Instead, they are already:

• the laws of condensation,
• the laws of displacement

what I have called for you

• the laws of metaphor,
• the laws of metonymy.

What, then, is surprising about this? I mean here, between perception and consciousness, where these processes of thought occur, processes that, FREUD tells us, would never be anything to consciousness if they could not be brought to it via the intermediary of discourse, through what can be explicated and articulated in the Vorbewußtsein, the preconscious. What does this mean? Here, FREUD leaves no doubt. It is a matter of words. And, of course, these Wortvorstellungen that he refers to must also be situated concerning what we are articulating here.

It is not, of course—as FREUD tells us—the same as the Vorstellungen that we trace through the unconscious mechanism of superimposition, metaphor, and metonymy, as I just mentioned. It is something entirely different. It is the Wortvorstellungen that establish a discourse articulated upon the processes of thought.

In other words, we would know nothing—and indeed, we know nothing—about the processes of our thought if, up to a certain point, let me say this to emphasize my point, we did not engage in psychology. In other words, it is because we speak about what happens within us—because we speak of it in terms that are at once inevitable and, on the other hand, terms we know to be, strictly speaking, unworthy, empty, and vain—that from the moment we necessarily talk about our will as a faculty distinct from our understanding, as something that would also be a faculty, it is from that moment that we have a preconscious. It is from that point that we are indeed capable of articulating in a discourse something of the pathways through which we articulate ourselves within, justify ourselves, and rationalize for ourselves, in such and such circumstances, the trajectory of our desire.

It is indeed discourse we are dealing with here. And what FREUD emphasizes and articulates is—after all, we know nothing else about it—that this discourse, what reaches the Bewußtsein, is the Wahrnehmung, the perception of this discourse, and nothing else. This is exactly his thought. This is also why he tends to reject as superficial representations what one might call, in everyday language, what SILBERER refers to as “the functional phenomenon.” FREUD tells us that it is entirely correct that, in certain phases of the dream, there are things that represent to us, in a way, in an imagistic form, the functioning of the psyche, for instance, representing the layers of the psyche in the form of a game of goose. This is, incidentally, the example SILBERER has made well-known.

What does FREUD say? He says that such images are merely the production of dreams from a mind inclined toward metaphysics—understood here as psychology—inclined to represent and magnify what discourse imposes upon us as necessary when it is a matter of distinguishing something that represents nothing more than a certain scansion of our intimate experience. But, FREUD tells us, this lets slip away the deepest structure, the most profound gravitation, which is rooted at the level of Vorstellungen. However, these Vorstellungen, he asserts, their gravitation, their modes of exchange, their economy, the way they modulate—these operate, he articulates, according to the same laws we can recognize, if you follow my teaching, as the most fundamental laws of the functioning of the chain of signifiers.

Am I managing to make myself understood? I believe it is difficult, I think, to be clearer or more emphatic on this essential point. Here, we are led to distinguish the effective articulation of a discourse and the gravitation of Vorstellungen in the form of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz from these unconscious articulations. We must consider:

• That what we call Sachvorstellungen in certain circumstances operates in a polar opposition to wordplay, to Wortvorstellungen, but that at this level, it does not operate without Wortvorstellungen.
• That the function of das Ding, the Thing, as a primordial function located at the initial level of establishing the gravitation of unconscious Vorstellungen, has a distinct role.

Last time, I ran out of time to demonstrate to you the linguistic distinction between Ding and Sache in everyday language usage. It is quite clear that they are not used interchangeably in every case. And even in cases where both might be used, choosing one over the other gives a preferential emphasis to the discourse in German.

I would simply ask those familiar with German to refer to examples in the dictionary. You will see the contexts in which Ding is used versus those in which Sache is used: for instance, one might say Sache for matters of religion, but one would nonetheless assert that faith is not Jedermanding—not everyone’s thing. One might use Ding, as Meister Eckhart does, to speak of the soul—and God knows that in Meister ECKHART, the soul is a Großding, the greatest of Things. He would certainly not use the term Sache.

To give you a sense of the distinction—and to simultaneously show a broader reference to the way the use of signifiers diverges between German and French—I would offer this sentence that came to mind last time, which I refrained from sharing then. After all, I am not Germanic by nature, and I had to test it in the meantime on the ears of those for whom it is their native language. Here is the sentence: Die Sache, one might say, ist das Wort des Dinges. This could be said, and translated into French, it would mean: “Die Sache,” the affair, “ist das Wort des Dinges,” is the word of the Thing. It can be said.

It is precisely in passing into discourse that das Ding, the Thing, resolves itself into a series of effects. I would say effects, even in the sense that one might say meine Sache—my affairs, my belongings.

But das Ding, the Thing, to which we must now return, is something entirely different. Yet I do not think you will be surprised that, at this level—at the level of Vorstellungen—the Thing, I will not say, is nothing, but rather:

• That, literally, it does not exist,
• That it distinguishes itself as absent, as foreign.
• That everything articulated in terms of good and bad defines and divides the subject in relation to it, I would say irrepressibly, irremediably, and without any doubt, with respect to the same Thing.

There is no good object or bad object. There is good and bad, and then there is the Thing. Good and bad belong already to the order of the Vorstellung. Good and bad exist there as markers of what already orients, according to the pleasure principle, the subject’s position with regard to what will only ever be representation, a pursuit of a chosen state, a state of desire, a state of expectation for something that always remains at a certain distance from the Thing, even though it is governed by this Thing that lies beyond.

Thus, we see it, at the level of what we noted the other day as being the stages of the ϕ system: – Here, Wahrnehmungszeichen [signs of perceptions], – And here, Vorbewußtsein, – We find here the Wortvorstellungen [word representations], insofar as the Wortvorstellungen reflect, in a discourse, what occurs at the level of the processes of thought, which themselves are governed by the laws of the Unbewusst, that is, by the pleasure principle.

The Wortvorstellungen here oppose themselves as the reflection of discourse to what, here, is ordered according to an economy of words in the Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen, which FREUD also calls, at the level of the Entwurf, “conceptual memories.” This is merely a first approximation of the same notion.

Notice that what we have here at the level of the ϕ system—at the level of what occurs before entry into the Ψ system and the passage into the scope of Bahnung, the organization of Vorstellungen—is what occurs as a typical reaction of the organism insofar as it is governed by the neuronal apparatus: it is elision. Things are vermeidet, elided:

– Here, at the level of Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen, this is the chosen locus of Verdrängung [repression], – Here, it is the locus of Verneinung [denial].

I pause here for a moment to show you the significance of a point that remains problematic for some of you. I stop here briefly at Verneinung. As FREUD points out, it is the highly privileged mode of connotation, at the level of discourse, of what elsewhere, precisely in the unconscious, is verdrängt or repressed. It is a way in which, in spoken discourse, articulated discourse, in the discourse of Lautwerden [coming to light], what is hidden, what is verborgen in the unconscious, is situated. What is verneint is the paradoxical manner in which what is simultaneously present and denied for the subject is confessed.

In truth, it would be necessary to expand this study of Verneinung, of negation—as I have already begun to do before you—by extending it to a study of the negative particle and asking whether it is not precisely in this particle, in this small “ne,” that lies the key. I have shown, indicated, and taught you, following PICHON’s insights, how in the French language, the “ne” displays a subtly differentiated usage at the level of this discordant “ne,” whose placement I demonstrated between the enunciation and the statement. This placement makes it appear so paradoxically, as in cases where, for instance, the subject articulates their own fear: “Je crains”—not, as logic might indicate, “qu’il vienne” [that he comes]—but rather, “Je crains qu’il ne vienne” [that he might come], in French.

And this “ne,” so aptly placed, reveals its floating position between the two levels I have taught you to distinguish and to analyze using the graph I introduced to rediscover this distinction—the level of the subject’s enunciation, insofar as the subject says: “I fear something, which by enunciating I bring into my existence and, simultaneously, into its existence as a wish that it may come.”

It is here that this small “ne” is introduced, marking the discordance between the enunciation and the statement, and showing the true function of the particle. The negative particle can only emerge, can only exist, can only come to light from the moment I truly speak—not when I am spoken, as at the level of the unconscious.

This is undoubtedly what FREUD means. And I believe it is reasonable to interpret FREUD in this way when he says there is no negation at the level of the unconscious. For immediately after, he shows us that, of course, there is. That is to say, in the unconscious, there are all sorts of ways to represent negation metaphorically. In dreams, there are numerous ways to represent negation—except, of course, for the small particle “ne,” because this small particle belongs to discourse.

This begins to show us, through concrete examples, the distinction between what I am starting to differentiate for you on a precise topological point, namely the function of discourse versus that of speech.

Thus, Verneinung, far from being a simple paradox of what presents itself in the form of “no,” is not just any “no.” For there is, of course, an entire realm of the unspoken, the forbidden—inter-dit—since this is precisely the form in which the Verdrängt, the repressed, presents itself as unconsciousness. But, so to speak, Verneinung is merely the most pronounced peak of what I might call the “inter-said,” much like one speaks of an “interview.”

And indeed, if one were to delve into the sentimental spectrum of everyday language, considering everything that can be conveyed by simply saying, “I am not saying,” or, as expressed in RACINE: “No, I do not hate you.” Well, to grasp, in this “game of goose” where you see Verneinung representing the inverted form of Verdrängung from a certain perspective, the difference in organization between the two relative to the function of confession, I want to simply indicate here—for those for whom this remains a problem—that there is, correspondingly, what articulates fully here at the level of the unconscious, namely Verurteilung, and what FREUD identifies at the level of Letter 52, in the first significant sense of Verneinung, as Verwerfung.

One of you—LAPLANCHE, in his thesis on HÖLDERLIN, which I hope we will someday discuss here—questions what this Verwerfung might be and asks me whether it involves the Name-of-the-Father, as in paranoia, or rather, the Name-of-the-Father in a broader sense.

If it involves that, there are few pathological examples that place us in the presence of its absence or effective refusal. If it is the Name-of-the-Father, does this not lead us into a series of difficulties concerning the fact that there is always something signified for the subject, attached to experience, whether present or absent, of something which, I assert, in some capacity or to some degree, has come to occupy this place for the subject? Certainly, this notion of the signifying substance as such is something that cannot fail to raise questions for any thoughtful mind.

But remember this: at the primary level of the system of signifiers, within the system of Wahrnehmungszeichen (signs of perception), what we are dealing with is something proposing itself as the primitive synchrony of the signifying system. It is within this Gleichzeitigkeit (simultaneity)—insofar as multiple signifiers can present themselves to the subject at the same time—that everything begins. It is at this level that the Fort is correlative to the Da and that the Fort can only express itself in alternation. It is something that can only be expressed from a fundamental synchrony, and from there, an organization emerges in which it becomes apparent that the simple play of Fort and Da cannot suffice to constitute it.

I have already posed the problem before you: what is the minimal initial configuration of a battery of signifiers necessary for the domain, the order, and the register of the signifier to begin to play and organize themselves? [cf. the α, β, γ, δ in the seminar The Purloined Letter, Écrits, p. 11.]

It is precisely because there cannot be a “2” without a “3”—and surely, I believe, it must even involve a “4,” the quadripartite structure, the Geviert, as HEIDEGGER refers to it somewhere—that something, a term, is constituted. This term holds the system of words, its foundation, at a certain distance, within a certain relational dimension. It is precisely because this term can be refused that something is missing, toward which the true effort of supplementation, of signification, will desperately strive. This is what we will see develop across the entire psychology of the psychotic.

This “something,” which I have only briefly indicated here, I leave for now, hoping that we will return to it, with the remarkable elaboration LAPLANCHE has made on this point in relation to the poetic experience that illustrates, unveils, and sensitively elucidates it: the case of HÖLDERLIN. The function, the locus, the place where something retains the words—in the sense that “retain” means to hold back—where an articulation, a primitive distance, is conceivable and possible, introducing the synchrony upon which the essential dialectic can then unfold: the dialectic in which the Other can appear as the Other of the Other.

This Other of the Other, which exists only by its place, can find its position even if we cannot locate it anywhere in the real. Even if everything we find in the real to occupy this place is valid only insofar as it occupies that place, it cannot provide any further guarantee than being that place.

Thus, we arrive at another topology, the topology instituted by the relationship to the real. The relationship to the real, we can now define, articulate, and discern what is truly meant by what we call the reality principle.

And how it is to this principle that the entire function FREUD articulates with the term Über-Ich (superego) is linked. This, you must admit, would be a rather poor play on words if it were merely a substitute way of referring to what has always been called “moral conscience” or something similar.

If FREUD brings us a truly novel articulation, if he shows us the root and psychological functioning of what, in human constitution, weighs—and how heavily it weighs—on all these forms, none of which should be disregarded, up to the simplest one: what we call commandments, and even, I would say, the Ten Commandments.

And I will say that I will not hesitate—for I have already begun to address this—to question something on this plane. These Ten Commandments, which we might have thought we had understood to some degree, clearly function—if not within us, then at least in things—in a singularly vivid way. Perhaps it would be worth revisiting what FREUD articulates here.

I would state it in these terms, which seem to have been preemptively buried by all commentary meant to make us forget them. FREUD—let us not forget—brings to the foundations of morality: – The discovery, some will say, – The affirmation, others will claim, – The affirmation of the discovery, I believe, …that the fundamental law, the primordial law, the one where culture begins as it opposes nature—for in FREUD, these two things are fundamentally, perfectly individualized in a modern sense, in the sense articulated today by LÉVI-STRAUSS—is that the fundamental law is the law of the prohibition of incest.

The entire development—let me state this immediately—of psychoanalysis increasingly confirms this while emphasizing it less and less. I mean that everything that develops at the level of the inter-psychological relationship between mother and child, and is so poorly expressed in the so-called categories of frustration, gratification, and dependency, or whatever other terms you might use, is nothing more than an immense elaboration of the essential, fundamental character of the maternal Thing—the mother—insofar as she occupies the place of this Thing, of das Ding.

Everyone knows that its correlate is the desire for incest, which is FREUD’s great discovery, the novelty about which it matters little whether one points out its episodic presence in PLATO or mentions that DIDEROT discussed it in Le Neveu de Rameau or Supplément au voyage de Bougainville. What is significant is that at a particular moment in history, a man stood up to say: “This is the essential desire.”

In other words, we must grasp firmly that FREUD identifies the prohibition of incest as the principle of the fundamental law, the primordial law around which all other cultural developments unfold—they are merely consequences and branches—and at the same time, equates it with the most fundamental desire.

This is always, in some way, eluded, even when Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS, in his masterful study The Elementary Structures of Kinship, confirms the primordial nature of the law as such—namely, the introduction of the signifier and its combinatory mechanisms into human nature via the preferential laws of marriage governed by an organization of exchanges, which he terms “elementary structure,” to the extent that positive, preferential guidelines are provided for the selection of a spouse. This introduces an order into alliances, creating a new dimension alongside that of heredity.

Even as LÉVI-STRAUSS does this and elaborates at length on the question of incest to explain what renders its prohibition necessary, he goes no further than to indicate why a father does not marry his daughter—namely, that daughters must, as it were, be exchanged.

But why does the son not sleep with his mother? Here, something remains obscured. Of course, LÉVI-STRAUSS dismisses all the so-called biological justifications—the allegedly dire effects of such close crossings. He demonstrates that their consequences are quickly dismissed. Far from leading to the resurgence of recessive traits feared to introduce elements of degeneration or other alarming consequences, everything instead shows that such endogamy is commonly employed in all areas of domestication to improve a race, whether plant or animal. It is indeed within the realm of culture that the law operates and that the law unequivocally excludes this fundamental incest, the incest of son and mother, which is the central focus of FREUD’s emphasis.

Nevertheless, it remains true that everything around this point is justified, but the central point itself remains—and as a close reading of LÉVI-STRAUSS’s text reveals—the most enigmatic, the most irreducible. It is here that something resides, suspended between nature and culture, which finds no full justification from either perspective.

This is where I want to pause, to show you that, in a sense, what we find in the law of incest is something that fundamentally resides—and as such—at the level of the unconscious relationship with das Ding, the Thing. It is because the desire for the mother, let us say, cannot be fulfilled…

…because it constitutes the end, the termination, the abolition of the entire world of demand, which, precisely, most deeply structures, and as such, constitutes the unconscious of man.

…It is precisely to the extent that the function of the pleasure principle ensures that man is always seeking what must be rediscovered but can never be attained, that the essence lies in this dynamic, this relationship called: the law of the prohibition of incest.

After all, this deserves attention, at this level of metaphysical inspection, only if we can confirm it by relating it to the law of morality—if we are correct—insofar as it becomes articulated at the level of effective discourse. Discourse that may come to man at the level of his knowledge; discourse that I would call pre-conscious or conscious; that is, the effective law. That is, those famous “Ten Commandments” I mentioned earlier.

Are there ten commandments? Indeed, perhaps there are.

I have tried to recount them, going back to the sources. I retrieved my copy, the one by Silvestre de SACY—what we have in France most closely resembling what has exerted such a decisive influence on thought and the history of other peoples: the Bible, which inaugurated Slavic culture with Saint CYRILLE, and the authorized English version, of which one might say, if you do not know it by heart, you are entirely excluded.

We don’t have such a tradition, but nevertheless, I still recommend referring to the 17th-century version of the text, despite its inaccuracies and improprieties, for one reason: it was the version people read, the one that posed problems for them, the one over which generations of pastors wrote and argued about the interpretation of specific prohibitions, present or past, as inscribed in the texts. So, I turned to the text of this Decalogue, which God articulated before Moses on the third day of the third month after their departure from Egypt, amidst the dark clouds of Sinai, with lightning and strict prohibition for the people to approach.

And I must say, at this point, that one day I would like to yield the floor here to someone more qualified than I to discuss—to analyze—the series of transformations that the precise and significant articulation of these Ten Commandments has undergone over the ages. This would involve tracing them from the Hebrew texts to their rendition in the rhyming couplets of the catechism. That would indeed be an interesting exercise.

What I want to say is this: the Ten Commandments, negative as they appear—and we are always reminded that morality has not only a negative side but also a positive one—do not interest me so much for their prohibitive nature. Rather, I want to point out something I have already hinted at: that these Ten Commandments might be commandments of speech. By this, I mean the commandments that make explicit the conditions without which there can be no speech—not discourse—possible. I only offered this as a suggestion earlier, as I could not then go further.

Here, I will resume that thread. I pause and ask you to reflect. I want you to notice one thing: that these Ten Commandments, which constitute almost everything that has been received as commandments across all of humanity—civilized or not (although for the non-civilized, we know them only through a certain number of scriptograms, so let us stick to the civilized)—nowhere among these commandments is there any mention of not lying with one’s mother.

I do not think that the commandment to honor her can be taken as even the faintest indication in this sense, either positive or negative. Could it mean, as in the tales of Marius and Olive, to “show her respect”? The Ten Commandments—could we not, next time, try to interpret them as something that closely mirrors the mechanisms at work in the repression of the unconscious?

The Ten Commandments, destined to keep the subject—most profoundly—at a distance from any realization of incest, can be interpreted in this way, on one condition and one alone: if we simultaneously recognize that this prohibition of incest, as I have described it, is nothing less than the condition for the persistence of speech.

In other words, I believe this compels us to interrogate the meaning of the Ten Commandments insofar as they are most profoundly linked to what governs, what regulates, this distance of the subject from das Ding: – Insofar as this distance is precisely the condition for speech, – Insofar as speech, then, is abolished or erased, – Insofar as these Ten Commandments constitute the condition for the persistence of speech as such.

I am only approaching this shoreline. But already, I must insist: let no one stop at the idea that the Ten Commandments are, as is often claimed, the foundation of all social life. For in truth, how could we fail to notice, from another perspective, that merely stating them reveals them to be, in a sense, the catalog and chapter of our everyday transactions?

They are, in a way—if one might say so—the law and dimension of our actions as properly human. In other words, we spend our time violating the Ten Commandments, and this, I would argue, is precisely why society is possible.

I do not need to go to the extremes of Bernard de MANDEVILLE’s paradoxes in The Fable of the Bees, which demonstrates that private vices constitute public prosperity. It is not about that. It is about recognizing that, if the Ten Commandments exist with their pre-conscious immanence, they respond to something.

Well, this is where I will pick things up next time. But I will not do so without making another detour—one that appeals again to an essential reference I invoked when, for the first time, I spoke to you about what one might call the real. The real, as I said, is that which is always found in the same place.

You will see this in the history of science and thought. This detour is indispensable to bring us to what one might call the great revolutionary crisis of morality: the questioning of principles precisely where they must be questioned, at the level of the imperative as such—the Kantian and Sadist apex of the issue. Next time, we will see what I mean by this: how morality becomes, on one hand, a pure and simple application of the universal maxim, and on the other, a pure and simple object.

This point is essential to understanding the step FREUD takes.

What I want to indicate today in conclusion is this: somewhere, a poet who is a friend of mine wrote:

“The problem of evil is worth raising only as long as one has not resolved the idea of the transcendence of some good that could dictate duties to man. Until then, the exalted representation of ‘evil’ will retain its greatest revolutionary value.”

Well, one could say that the step FREUD takes at the level of the pleasure principle is this: he shows us that there is no Sovereign Good, that the Sovereign Good—which is das Ding, which is the mother, which is the object of incest—is a forbidden good, and that there is no other good.

Such is the foundation, overturned in FREUD, of moral law. It is a matter of understanding where this moral law, intact and utterly positive, comes from—a law that remains so firm and literal that we might, to borrow a term made famous in cinema, “bang our heads against the walls” rather than see it overturned.

What does this mean? It means—and this is the direction I urge you to consider—that what has been sought in place of this irretrievable object is precisely the object that one always finds in reality. It is because it has taken the place of this impossible-to-retrieve object, at the level of the pleasure principle, that something is found that is nothing other than what is always rediscovered. Yet it presents itself in a completely closed, completely blind, completely enigmatic form—that of the world of modern physics.

And around this, you will see, the crisis of morality indeed unfolded at the end of the 18th century, precisely at the time of the French Revolution.