🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Let us bring in the simple-minded person, have them sit in the front row, and ask them what LACAN means.
The simple-minded person stands up, approaches the board, and explains:

“LACAN, since the beginning of the year, has been talking to us about das Ding in the following terms: he places it, if I may say so, at the heart of a subjective world that he has been depicting to us through Freud’s economy for years. This subjective world is defined by the fact that the signifier, in humans, is already enthroned at the unconscious level, intertwining its markers with the possibilities of orientation provided by the functioning of their natural living organism.”

By inscribing it in this way, essentially on the board—placing das Ding at the center and surrounding it with this subjective world of the unconscious organized through signifying relations—one already does something where the difficulty of topological representation becomes apparent.
For this das Ding, which stands there at the center, is precisely central in the sense that it is excluded; that is to say, it is actually posited as external. This das Ding, this prehistoric Other impossible to forget, of which Freud affirms the necessity of its primal position in the form of something entfremdet—alien to me, while simultaneously at the core of my being—is something that, at the unconscious level, is represented only by a representation.
This is not merely a simple tautology; the represented and the representation are two distinct things.

This distinction is precisely indicated in the term Vorstellungsrepräsentanz: that which, in the unconscious, represents (as a sign) the representation (as a function of apprehension), by which all representation represents itself insofar as it evokes the good that das Ding carries with it. Yet, this “good” is already a metaphor, already an attribute.

Everything pertaining to the order of representations qualified as good is caught in what we might call “refraction”: the system of decomposition imposed upon it by the structure of unconscious pathways, the multiplication and complexification within the signifying system of the elements through which the subject relates to what appears to them as their good on the horizon.
This good, ultimately, is already indicated as the meaningful resultant of a signifying composition, which is thereby summoned at the unconscious level—that is, at the level where the subject has no mastery over the system of directions and investments that govern, in the depths, their conduct.

To use here a term familiar to those who still recall the Kantian formulations of the Critique of Practical Reason, or to those who lack either sufficient familiarity or direct experience of that extraordinary book—I encourage you to fill in your knowledge or memory gaps accordingly.
I mean to say that it is impossible for us to make progress together in this seminar, at the level of questions posed by psychoanalytic ethics, without this reference point: this book, which I describe as “extraordinary” in more ways than one. Let me merely underline—if only to inspire in you the desire and attraction to consult it—that it is “extraordinary” surely from the perspective one might call humor.

To maintain the utmost conceptual necessity at its peak without fail, while simultaneously producing an effect of fullness, contentment, and an indescribable vertigo—where, at some point, you cannot help but sense, at a particular turn, the opening of an abyss of the comical—is something extraordinary.
And I see no reason why, after all, you would refuse to occasionally push open that door. In any case, shortly, we will see how we might do so ourselves in this context.

So, to put it explicitly, this is a Kantian reference—here, the term “Wohl”—that I will emphasize to designate the “good” I am referring to, the good at stake. It concerns this Wohl, this comfort of the subject insofar as it refers to das Ding, to its horizon, inasmuch as its maintenance on that horizon is a function within the subject of the principle of pleasure.
I mean pleasure insofar as it sets the law wherein a tension resolves itself, tied, according to Freud’s formula, to what we might call “successful lures” or, better yet, “signs” that reality either honors or does not.

This term “sign,” bordering almost on that of a representative currency, is something expressly evoked by the phrase I incorporated long ago into one of my early discourses on Psychic Causality, in the formula inaugurating one of its paragraphs:
“More inaccessible to our eyes, made for the signs of the exchanger.”
I continue with the image of “the signs of the exchanger”: this is what is already present at the foundation of the unconscious structure, governed by the laws of Lust and Unlust, according to the rule of the indestructible Wunsch, eager for repetition—the repetition of signs—which is how the subject regulates their initial distance from das Ding, the source of all Wohl, at the level of the pleasure principle.

This already provides, at its core, something we might—following the Kantian reference—qualify as that which psychoanalysts have consistently designated with their term:
Das Gute des Objekts, the “good object.”

Beyond the Wohl of the pleasure principle, already on the horizon, this Gute is delineated: das Ding, introducing at the unconscious level something that, in essence, forces us to reframe it in other terms—at the level of what I may call, here, a critique of practical reason—to reconsider the properly Kantian question of the causa noumenon.

At the level of unconscious experience, das Ding presents itself as that which already lays down the law. Yet, we must give this term, “the law,” the accent it takes on in the most brutal games of elementary society, as evoked in a recent book by Vailland. It is a law of caprice, of arbitrariness, of oracle too—a law of signs where the subject has no guarantees, no Sicherung (to use another Kantian term). For this reason, this Gute, at the level of the unconscious, is also, fundamentally, the “bad object,” about which Klein’s articulation continues to inform us.

However, it must also be said that das Ding is never, at this level, distinctly identified as bad. The subject has no approach to the bad object, as they already maintain their distance from the good object. They cannot endure the extreme good that das Ding may bring them; all the more, they cannot situate themselves concerning the bad. The subject may groan, burst out, curse—they do not understand. Nothing here is articulated, not even metaphorically. The subject develops symptoms, as we say, and these symptoms are, essentially, initially, symptoms of defense.

How, at this level, should we conceive of defense? Organically! The ego defends itself by mutilating itself, as a crab sheds its claw.
But in humans, defense operates differently from an animal’s self-mutilation—a difference introduced by the signifying structure of the unconscious. This human defense, this mutilation, takes the form of something with a name, something that goes beyond mere substitution, displacement, metaphor, or anything that structures its gravitation toward the good object. It becomes what is properly called the “lie about evil.” At the unconscious level, the subject lies. And this lie is their way of telling the truth.

The ὀρθός λόγος (orthos logos, “true discourse”) of the unconscious is articulated—as Freud wrote explicitly in the Entwurf—as πρῶτον ψεῦδος (proton pseudos, “first lie”) of hysteria.

Do I need to remind you, after these sessions where I’ve spoken of the Entwurf, of the example Freud gives of a patient, never mentioned elsewhere, named Emma (I believe this is coincidental and unrelated to the Emma of the Studien)? This Emma is a woman who has a phobia of entering stores alone, fearing that people will mock her because of her clothes.
This links first to an initial memory: when she was twelve, she entered a store, and the employees seemingly laughed at her clothing. One of them, who caught her attention, moved her in a peculiar way—unusual even for her, in the midst of early puberty.

Only later do we uncover the causal memory: that of a harmful aggression in a shop, involving an older man—a Greißler (a term translated in English with a peculiar awkwardness, and then rendered in French as boutiquier, following the English text). This elderly man pinched her somewhere under her dress in an aggressive and direct manner. This is the memory evoked, resonating with the idea of sexual attraction felt in the secondary memory.

It is to the extent that everything in the symptom revolves around clothing—mockery of clothing, an element both allusive and opaque—that the direction of truth is indicated under a cover, beneath the deceptive Vorstellung of clothing. This cover, notably absent from the initial encounter, relates to something that could not initially be apprehended, only becoming so afterward through this deceptive transformation—πρῶτον ψεῦδος (proton pseudos). Here, we find the mark of the subject’s relationship with das Ding as bad, a relationship they can only express or articulate as bad through the symptom.

This is what the experience of the unconscious contributes to our premises and forces us to add when reexamining the ethical question, as it has been posed at various times throughout history—most notably as it was bequeathed to us through Kantian ethics. At the very least, this remains, for our reflection if not our direct experience, the point at which these matters have been carried forward.

The path through which ethical principles are formulated:

• insofar as they are present in consciousness,
• insofar as they impose themselves, always ready to emerge from the preconscious,
• insofar as they act as commandments in moral experience,

…maintains the closest relationship with the second principle introduced by Freud as the dialectical correlate of the pleasure principle.

The one is not merely, as one might initially believe, the continuation or application of the other. It is truly its polar correlate, without which neither would have meaning within the other, namely, the reality principle. And once again, we are brought to question it—not merely because it is another occasion, but because it is an opportunity to delve deeper into this reality principle as I had previously indicated it could be formulated on the horizon of the paranoiac experience.

The reality principle, I told you, is not simply, as it appears in the Entwurf, this sampling process occurring at the level of the ω system or sometimes the Wahrnehmungsbewußtsein system—at the level where the subject samples from reality what gives them the sign of a present reality, allowing them to correct the deceptive emergence of the Vorstellung provoked by repetition at the level of the pleasure principle. It is something beyond that.

Reality asserts itself for humans—and this is where it becomes significant for them—as structured, as something that, in their experience, appears, as I mentioned during the discussion of President Schreber’s case, as “what always returns to the same place.”
The role and function of the stars in the delusional system of this exemplary subject serve as a compass, pointing to the polar star of this human relation to the real. This relationship, as the history of science shows us, is rendered plausible and remarkable: that it is through the observation of stars—by shepherds, Mediterranean sailors, and farmers guided by the return of the same celestial objects to the same position, such as the Pleiades, crucial in Mediterranean maritime navigation—that humans began structuring their understanding of reality.

The stars’ consistent return to the same position has persisted across ages, culminating in a structuring of reality that we now call the result of physics or science.
From the heavens of Aristotelian physics to Galileo, fertile laws descended to Earth. And from Earth—where Galilean physics rediscovered these celestial laws—we ascend back to the heavens, discovering:

• that the stars are not what they were initially believed to be,
• that they are not incorruptible,
• that they are subject to the same laws as the terrestrial world.

Even more, as a decisive step in the history of science was made by the admirable Nicolas of Cusa, one of the first to assert that the stars are not incorruptible, we now know even more: they might not always remain in the same place. Thus, the initial demand that drove humanity, throughout history, to chart and structure reality into this supremely effective yet supremely disappointing science has reached its extreme.

For das Ding gave us this initial demand: to find what repeats, what returns, what guarantees that something will always return to the same place. It has pushed us to this extreme where we can now question all positions. In this reality—which we have so admirably disrupted—nothing answers this quest or this call to provide the assurance of return.

Yet it is around this quest for “what always returns to the same place” that what we call “ethics” has developed throughout the ages. Ethics does not simply refer to obligations, chains of duty, or the laws of society, which bind and order us, giving rise to what we often reference here under the term “elementary structures of kinship,” as well as property and the exchange of “goods.”

Certainly, these structures are the very things to which “man,” as one might say, is bound. Yet it is purely mythical to make a “good” of them, as it is precisely the same thing that subjects humans unconsciously to the laws of the unconscious. This is why, in so-called “primitive” societies (understood as societies at their most basic level), humans themselves become signs of exchange, elements of exchange, objects within this supernatural order of structures that preside over generations. They become objects of a regulated exchange, whose “elementary structures,” as demonstrated by Claude Lévi-Strauss, exhibit a secure and relatively unconscious character.

Ethics begins beyond this point. It begins when the subject poses the question of this “good,” which they had sought unconsciously within the social structures. It is when the subject raises this question that they are simultaneously brought to discover the profound connection between what presents itself as law and the very structure of desire. Here, they discover—not immediately, but eventually—the ultimate desire Freud uncovered in his exploration: the “desire for incest.”

Initially, however, they uncover everything articulating their behavior in such a way that the object of their desire is always kept at a certain distance. This distance is not absolute; it is intimate and called proximity—a proximity that is not identical to themselves but is literally close, in the sense that the Nebenmensch (the fellow human) Freud discusses at the foundation of this Thing (das Ding) is the subject’s “neighbor.”

If something at the pinnacle of ethical commandment is articulated—so strangely at times, even scandalously, to some sensibilities—as “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” it is because it pertains to the law, to the human subject’s relation to themselves, that they must become, for themselves, in their relation to their desire, their own neighbor.

Concerning the relationship of the moral law as it connects to this aim of the real as such, of the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing (das Ding), I propose here what we might call the acme of the “crisis of ethics”—the one I have already pointed out to you and at the outset linked to the moment when Kantian ethics reached its culmination in the Critique of Practical Reason. It was at this point that the disorienting effect of physics emerged…

• at the moment it reached independence from das Ding,
• from the human das Ding,
• in the form of Newtonian physics.

It was precisely because Newtonian physics compelled Kant to undertake a radical revision of the function of reason as pure that we encounter an ethics whose rigor, in its contours, had never before been glimpsed. This is an ethics that explicitly detaches itself, as such, from any reference to an object, whatever that object may be—be it an object of affection or, as Kant calls it in his text, a pathological object, meaning, in this context, merely an object of any passion whatsoever.

No Wohl, no good—whether ours or our neighbor’s—should, as such, enter into the purpose of moral action.
The only possible definition of moral action is the one Kant gives us in his well-known formula:
“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
Thus, an action is moral only insofar as it is commanded solely by the motive that the chosen maxim is chosen based on its universal, allgemein, character.

To translate allgemein as “universal” poses, I must say, a small question. You know that allgemein is closer to “general” than to “universal.” Moreover, Kant explicitly uses the distinction between “general” and “universal,” expressed in Latin terms. This demonstrates that something here is left in a certain indeterminacy.

“Handle so, dass die Maxime deines Willens jederzeit zugleich als Prinzip einer allgemeinen Gesetzgebung gelten könne.”
(Act so that the maxim of your will can always serve at the same time as the principle of a general legislation.)

This formula, as you know, is the central formula of Kantian ethics. It is pursued and explored to its most extreme consequences. The radicalism of what it excludes—any relationship to a “good”—goes so far as to present the paradox that, in the end, the gute Willen (goodwill) establishes itself absolutely as exclusive of any action leading to a “good” or benefit.

This text, I believe, represents an exercise that every modern subject, deserving of the term “contemporary,” must inevitably confront.
Born into our age, any person with the fortune or misfortune of such a position cannot ignore this exercise. I stress this, though haltingly. One can dispense with everything—our neighbors on the right and left, volumetrically confined figures rather than true “neighbors,” often suffice to keep us upright and prevent us from collapsing. Yet it is entirely impossible to avoid the trial of reading this text and realizing the extremism, even the near madness, of the point to which it drives us—a point shaped by the presence, persistence, and insistence of science in history.

For, of course, no one—Kant himself had no doubt of this—has ever been able to put such a moral axiom into practice. Nevertheless, it is not insignificant to realize that at the point to which we have come—where another bridge has been built in our relation to reality—Kant’s aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason may now be questioned. Specifically, in the realm of that interplay of symbols where contemporary physics positions itself, a renovation or update of the Kantian imperative could be expressed as follows:

“Never act except in such a way that your action could be”—we might say, using the language of electronics and automation—“programmed.”

You can sense, I think, how this takes us a step further in the direction of a more pronounced detachment—perhaps the most pronounced detachment—from any relationship with what is called the “Sovereign Good.”

For understand this well: what Kant commands us, when considering the maxim governing our actions, is articulated in the following manner: we are to regard it, for a moment, as the law of a nature in which we would be called to live.

This is where Kant establishes the apparatus that will repel us in horror from any maxims to which our inclinations might willingly draw us. He provides examples—examples that, while they seemed evident to him, are not without interest for analysts to consider concretely. Perhaps we shall do so.

But observe when he speaks of the laws of “nature,” he does not refer to “society.” It is indeed this reference to reality that I mention, for clearly, were he to speak of a reference to society, it would be all too clear that societies function quite well—not merely without laws compatible with universal application but, as I mentioned last time, precisely through the transgression of those maxims. Societies thrive and adapt themselves quite well to this transgression.

We are thus dealing with the mental reference to an ideal nature, insofar as it is ordered by the laws of an object—let us call it an ideal object—constructed in response to the question we pose regarding the rule of our conduct.

You will see that this has remarkable consequences. However, for the purpose of producing the necessary shock or enlightenment that seems essential to our progress, I want to highlight this observation: if the Critique of Practical Reason appeared in 1788, seven years after the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, there is another work that appeared six years later, shortly after the Thermidorian Reaction, in 1795. That work is titled Philosophy in the Boudoir.

As you likely know, Philosophy in the Boudoir is the work of a certain Marquis de Sade, a figure famous on multiple counts. His initial fame as a scandalous figure was accompanied by considerable misfortune—indeed, one might call it outright abuse of power against him. It is said that he spent some twenty-five years in captivity, which is a significant amount of time for someone who, to the best of our knowledge, committed no essential crime. In our time, Sade has undergone a kind of ideological promotion in certain circles, though one might argue that this elevation is at least somewhat confused, if not excessive.

Undoubtedly, the works of the Marquis de Sade, while they may appear to some as mere invitations to certain amusements, cannot be said to be, strictly speaking, the most delightful reading. The most appreciated parts may strike some as the most tedious, but they cannot be accused of lacking coherence. Indeed, Sade explicitly employs Kantian criteria to justify the positions of what can only be called a form of anti-morality. With great consistency, he defends his paradox in this work titled Philosophy in the Boudoir, which includes a short section—likely the only one I would expressly recommend to you, considering the audience here—titled “Frenchmen, One More Effort if You Wish to Be Republicans.”

Following this appeal—
intended to resonate as a kind of revolutionary fervor stirring in post-Thermidor Paris—
the Marquis de Sade proposes, with extreme coherence, that we take as the universal maxim of our conduct the complete inversion of all that has hitherto been considered the minimum standard for a viable and coherent moral life. And, in truth, he defends it rather well. It is no coincidence that, in Philosophy in the Boudoir, the first and foremost thing praised is calumny.

Sade argues that calumny can never truly be harmful. Even if it attributes to our neighbor something far worse than they deserve, its merit lies in constantly alerting us to the potential dangers posed by others. Thus, he proceeds point by point, justifying the reversal of all that is considered the fundamental imperatives of moral law. He continues with incest, adultery, theft, and anything else you might add to the list. Simply invert all the laws of the Decalogue, and you will have a coherent account of something that, in its ultimate essence, articulates itself as follows:

We may take as the law, as the universal maxim of our action, the right to use others as instruments of our pleasure.

Sade demonstrates with remarkable consistency that this law, universalized, allows libertines the free disposition of all women, indiscriminately and regardless of consent. Conversely, it liberates women from all the duties imposed by a living and civilized society, particularly in marital and conjugal relations. This opens wide the floodgates of imagined possibilities at the horizon of desire, encouraging everyone to push their cravings to their utmost extremes and fulfill them. If such freedom is extended to all, Sade proposes, then we will see what kind of natural society emerges.

Our repugnance toward such a proposal, Sade argues, can quite legitimately be likened to the sentimental element Kant himself seeks to eliminate from the criteria of moral law. If Kant seeks to eliminate all sentiment from morality and dismisses it as an invalid guide, then, at its extreme, the Sadist world becomes conceivable. Even as its antithesis and caricature, it represents one of the possible outcomes of a world governed by radical ethics—by Kantian ethics, as inscribed and dated in 1788.

Believe me, the Kantian echoes within the moral articulation attempted by a vast libertine literature—dedicated to “the man of pleasure”—are unmistakable. You will find these echoes in works like The Lifted Curtain by Mirabeau. This text represents an equally caricatural and paradoxical form of the moral concerns that occupied the Old Regime, from Fénelon onward, regarding the education of young women. In The Lifted Curtain, this concern is pushed to its most humorously paradoxical conclusions.

Here, we encounter something significant: ethics, in its search for justification, grounding, and support in reference to the principle of reality, meets its own stumbling block—its own failure. An aporia emerges in the mental articulation that we call ethics.

As you know, it is quite clear that just as Kantian ethics has no other outcome than this gymnastic exercise—whose essentially formative function for anyone who thinks I have pointed out to you—so too, the ethics of Sade, of course, had no kind of social follow-through.

Understand well that the French, whether or not they truly made an effort to be republicans, certainly, like all other peoples of the earth—even those who made revolutions after them that were more ambitious, more radical, and bolder—have nevertheless left strictly unchanged the foundations I will call religious: those of what we know as the “Ten Commandments.” In fact, they have even pushed them to a degree where the puritanical emphasis has only grown sharper, culminating in a state of affairs where the leader of a great socialist state, visiting coexisting civilizations, was scandalized to see, somewhere along the shores of the Pacific Ocean, the dancers of the noble nation of America raising their legs a little too high.

Clearly, we are confronted here with something that nonetheless raises a question—the question of the relationship with das Ding. This relationship is sufficiently highlighted by two traits, particularly this one articulated by Kant in the third chapter of his discussion on the motives of pure practical reason:

Kant, after all, admits a sentimental correlate of the moral law in its purity. And very notably—let me emphasize this—it appears in the second paragraph of this third part, and it is none other than pain itself.

I will read you this passage, which seems significant to me given the exclusion of all sentimental criteria in the direction of the moral law and its motives:

“Thus, we can see a priori that the moral law, as a principle determining the will, by the mere fact that it infringes upon all our inclinations, must produce a feeling that can be called pain. And this is the first, and perhaps the only, case where we are permitted to determine, by concepts a priori, the relationship of knowledge derived from pure practical reason to the feeling of pleasure or pain.”

Kant agrees with Sade. For to absolutely reach das Ding, to open all the floodgates of desire, what does Sade place on the horizon? Essentially, pain.

The pain of others, and also the subject’s own pain—for these are, at times, one and the same. This extreme of pleasure, insofar as it consists of forcing access to the Thing, is something we cannot bear. This accounts for the derisive and—using a popular term—maniacal aspect that bursts forth before us in Sade’s fictional constructions. At every moment, something manifests itself to us of the unease within the living construction—the very unease that makes it so difficult for neurotics to confess certain of their fantasies, insofar as fantasies, at a certain degree, at a certain limit, cannot withstand the revelation of speech.

Thus, we return to the moral law, as it is supported, as it incarnates itself in a certain number of commandments. As I mentioned, it is worth revisiting these commandments. I indicated last time that this warrants a study. I would readily invite one of you, as a representative of some tradition or practice of moral theology, as it is called, in its various specifications. Many questions would not be insignificant.

The other day, I spoke of the number of commandments, their form, and the way they are transmitted to us in the text, in the future tense:
“Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not lie.”

This phrasing merits our attention. Here, I would gladly call on someone’s help—someone with sufficient knowledge of Hebrew to answer several questions. Is it also a future tense, or is it some form of volitive, as used in the Hebrew text of Deuteronomy and Numbers, where we first encounter the formulations of the Decalogue? This is certainly not a trivial matter.

What I wish to address today concerns the imperatives in question and their privileged character compared to what we are accustomed to considering as the structure of law.

The gathering at the origin—
not so deeply buried in the past after all—
of a people distinguishing themselves as chosen, and the gathering of these commandments, as I mentioned, deserves our extended attention. Today, I would like to pause on two of these commandments, setting aside the immense questions raised by the fact that these commandments are proclaimed by something that identifies itself as:
“I am…”

Not, as has been said, appealing to the text in the sense of a Greek metaphysical formulation:
“…He who is” or even “…He who am,” but rather, “I am that I am.”

The English translation is said by Hebraists to be the closest to the articulation of the verse’s meaning.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but not knowing Hebrew and thus relying on what might be provided to me as additional information, I believe that the best authorities are unequivocal.

The one who announces Himself as “I am” first reveals Himself to a small people as the One who delivered them from the miseries of Egypt, beginning with the articulation: “You shall have no other gods before Me, before My face.”

I leave open the question of what “before My face” means. It is certain that the texts leave open the possibility that outside the face of God—that is, outside of כנען (Canaan)—the worship of other gods is not inconceivable even for the Jewish faithful. A passage in the second book of Samuel, spoken by David, seems to confirm this.

Nonetheless, the second commandment—
the one that formally excludes not only all worship but also any representation of what exists “in the heavens, on the earth, and in the abyss”—
seems to me a point worth pausing on. It marks a distinction that introduces and prefigures the content, showing that what is at stake relates in a particularly unique way to human affectivity as a whole.

The elimination, to put it simply, of the function of the imaginary in what is about to be formulated appears to me—and I believe to you as well—as the principle of the relationship to the symbolic as such, in the sense we understand it here. In other words, it relates to speech, which I believe finds its principal condition here.

I set aside the question of the Sabbath rest, though we may return to it later. I believe this extraordinary imperative—which, in a land of masters, brings about a day of inactivity every seventh day—introduces a profound rupture. According to humorous proverbs, this inactivity leaves the common man no middle ground between the occupation of love and the bleakest boredom. This suspension, this emptiness, introduces into human life the sign of a void—a transcendence of something beyond the utility laws it momentarily suspends and refutes.

This appears to me closely connected to the path we are following here. I will leave aside the prohibition of murder, for we will return to it later when discussing the respective significance of the act and its retribution. I want to turn to the prohibition against lying, insofar as it connects with what we have identified as the essential relationship of humans—commanded as they are—to the Thing (das Ding). This is the relationship governed by the pleasure principle, the one we encounter daily in the unconscious: a fundamentally deceitful relationship.

“You shall not lie” is the commandment that, for us, most tangibly reveals the intimate bond between desire, in its most structuring function, and the law. For the truth is, “You shall not lie” is a suspended project designed to reveal the true function of the law. To make this point clear, I can compare it to the sophism that represents the peak of ingenuity most contrary to the Jewish and Talmudic tradition of discussion: the so-called paradox of Epimenides, who claims, “All men are liars.”

“What am I saying,” replies the sophist—advancing in line with the articulation of the unconscious I have given you—”what am I saying except that I myself am lying, and thus I can make no valid statement concerning not just the true function of truth but the very meaning of lying.”

“You shall not lie,” as a negative precept, functions to withdraw the subject of enunciation from the statement itself.

Recall the graph here: it is precisely in lying, in repressing, in being the liar who speaks, that I can articulate, “You shall not lie.” And within “You shall not lie” as law is included the possibility of lying as the most fundamental desire. I will offer a proof of this, one that, in my view, is no less valid. It is the famous formula of Proudhon: “Property is theft.”

Another proof lies in the outcries raised by lawyers whenever there is talk—often in forms as acrobatic as they are mythical—of introducing a lie detector into the interrogation of an accused person. Should we conclude that respect for human dignity is the right to lie? Undoubtedly, it is a question, and it is no answer to respond, “Yes, certainly,” as one might say—it is not so simple.

This revolt, this insurrection against the possibility of reducing the subject’s speech to some universally objectified application, precisely highlights the fact that speech, insofar as it does not know what it says when it lies, and yet in lying promotes some truth, operates within an antinomic relationship. This tension between law and desire conditions speech itself.

It is here, in this interplay, that lies the primary and primordial spring that makes this commandment, among the ten, one of the cornerstones of what we can call “the human condition,” insofar as it is deserving of respect.

As the hour advances, I will skip ahead to arrive at what constitutes the very heart and the sharp point of today’s reflection on the relationship between desire and the law. This is the famous commandment expressed as follows—a commandment that always elicits a smile, though upon further reflection, the smile does not last long:

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his servant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

Certainly, placing the wife between the house and the donkey has suggested to more than one person that this reflects the demands of a primitive society—Bedouins, perhaps, or other such tribes. But I do not think so. What I mean is that this law—still alive, in the end, in the hearts of men who violate it daily, particularly regarding the wife of one’s neighbor—must indeed have some relationship to our subject here, namely, das Ding.

For this commandment does not concern just any kind of possession. It does not concern the laws of exchange, which shroud human instincts with a legality that is, if you will, somewhat amusing—a social Sicherung. Instead, it deals with something that derives its value from the fact that none of these objects is without the closest connection to that which provides a resting place for the human being: der Trug.

Das Ding is not that which is one’s possession but that in which one rests. Moreover, it is the law—the law of speech in its most primitive origin—in the sense that das Ding was there at the beginning. It is the first thing to have been separated from everything that one began to name and articulate.

It is because das Ding is the very correlate of the law of speech that the coveting addressed in this commandment does not pertain to just anything one desires but rather to something insofar as it is the Thing of one’s neighbor.

It is because this commandment preserves the distance of the Thing as established by speech itself that it carries its weight and value. But where does this lead us? What, then, shall we say? Is the law the Thing? Certainly not. However, I came to know the Thing only through the law. Indeed, I would not have conceived of coveting it if the law had not said:
“You shall not covet it.”

But the Thing, on this occasion, produces within me all sorts of covetous desires thanks to the commandment. For without the law, the Thing is dead.

I myself once lived without the law. But when the commandment came, the Thing blazed into existence, and I was brought back to it, only to find myself dead. For me, the commandment that was meant to bring life instead brought death. Through the commandment, the Thing seized the opportunity to seduce me, turning my desire into a desire for death.

By now, I suspect that some of you may have realized that it is no longer I who am speaking. In fact, with only a slight modification—I have replaced “sin” with “the Thing”—I am quoting Saint Paul’s discourse on the relationship between law and sin:
Romans 7:7. I urge you to consult this passage. Whatever opinions you may hold, you would be wrong to think that the sacred authors do not make for excellent reading.

For my part, I have always found it rewarding to immerse myself in these texts, and I particularly recommend this one for your holiday reading—it will make for good company.

Indeed, this is where we find ourselves: the relationship between the Thing and the law could not be better defined than in these terms. This is where we shall take it up again.

It is around these fundamental terms that we can pose the question of whether Freud’s discovery—psychoanalytic ethics—leaves us suspended within this dialectical relationship between desire and the law:

• where our desire flares up only in relation to the law that turns it into a desire for death,
• where, without the law, sin—ἁμαρτία (hamartia), meaning in Greek “lack” or “failure to participate in the Thing”—acquires its hyperbolic, overwhelmingly sinful character only through the Thing.

We must explore what, over the course of ages, the human nous (νοῦς) has been capable of elaborating to transgress this law—a transgression that places us, along with our desire, in a relationship that surpasses this bond of prohibition and introduces, beyond our morality, an eroticism.

I do not think you should find such a question surprising here. After all, this is precisely what all religions and mysticisms have done—all of what Kant, with some disdain, refers to as Religionsschwärmereien. It is difficult to translate this term—it may mean “religious reveries” if you like.

What are these but ways of rediscovering, somewhere beyond the law, a relationship to das Ding? Undoubtedly, there are others. Undoubtedly, when speaking of eroticisms, we will need to address the rules of love that have been cultivated through the ages.

Freud himself, somewhere, said that his doctrine could essentially be described as an erotics. But, he added, he refrained from using this term because, as he put it, “to concede on words is to concede on things.” “I spoke of sexuality,” he said.

It is true. Freud placed at the forefront of ethical inquiry the simple relationship between man and woman.

Curiously, this did not lead to any advancement but rather left matters at the same point. The question of das Ding, insofar as it remains for us today suspended around Paul’s notion of “damnation” (dam) —something open, missing, gaping at the center of our desire—can, I suggest, be transformed into the question of “The Lady,” or “Our Lady.” (La Dame, Notre Dame)

And do not smile at this wordplay, for the language preceded me in doing so. If you trace the etymology of the word “danger”, you will find that the same equivocation underpins it in French. Danger, originally, comes from domniarum, domination. Over time, the word “dam” subtly contaminated this meaning, highlighting the fact that when we are under another’s power, we are indeed in great peril.

Thus, next year, we will attempt to venture further into these zones, which are undeniably perilous.