🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Why is this anamorphosis here? It is here, of course, to illustrate my thoughts.
Last time, I made a kind of shortcut about something that could be called the meaning or purpose of art, in the common sense we currently give to this term: “the Fine Arts.”

I am not the only one concerned with this in analysis. I referenced Ella SHARP’s article on this same subject of sublimation. As you know— you can refer to that article—she starts with the walls of the Altamira cave, which is the first decorated cave ever discovered.

In the end, if we begin from what we describe as this central place, this intimate exteriority, this extimacy that is the Thing, perhaps this will shed light on what still remains a question or even a mystery for those interested in prehistoric art.

This is specifically its location: in an underground cavity, one is surprised that it was chosen precisely for the extreme difficulties it must have posed for working, lighting during the work, and even the observation that was, in some sense, required by the very act of creating these striking images on these walls. To go and contemplate them must not have been an easy task under the lighting conditions one assumes for primitive people.

Thus, I would say that, right from the start, it is around a cavity, on the walls of a cavity, that what one might call— in the double sense of the term, subjective and objective—this sort of “trials” are cast, which appear to us as these first productions of primitive art. By “trials,” I mean both for the artist—suggesting the idea of revealing a certain creative possibility—and for the work itself. These images, as you know, often overlap one another, as if, in a consecrated place, each artist or subject capable of undertaking this exercise drew or projected anew what they had to manifest on what had previously been created.

Similarly, “trials” in the objective sense, as we see here a series of attempts always within terms that undoubtedly seize us with their deep connection to something simultaneously tied to the closest relationship to the world…
I mean to the very subsistence of populations that seem primarily composed of hunters.
…But also to that “something” in their subsistence, presenting itself with the quality of something beyond the sacred. This “something” is precisely what we try to capture in its most general form with the term “the Thing.”

Primitive subsistence, I would say, viewed through the lens of the Thing. Here, one might say, there is a line that can be traced to the other end of this exercise, infinitely closer to us. This anamorphosis—a creation probably from the early 17th century—illustrates this continuity. I mentioned earlier the interest taken during that period by constructive thought and artistic minds in such exercises. I tried to briefly explain how one might sketch its genesis.

Namely, from the cavity and the wall, insofar as the exercise on the wall consists of fixing the invisible inhabitant of the cavity:
– We see the chain establish itself from the temple, as an organization around emptiness and in relation to this emptiness, where this emptiness precisely designates the place of the Thing.
– Then we see, as I mentioned, on the walls of this emptiness itself—as painting gradually learns to master this emptiness and even to grasp it so closely that it dedicates itself to fixing it in the form of the illusion of space—the progressive introduction, throughout the history of painting, of mastery over the illusion of space, around which the history of painting can be organized.

I am moving quickly. This is a kind of rapid sketch, which can simply be considered by you as something to put to the test of what you might read subsequently on this subject.

You are well aware that, prior to the systematic establishment of what we properly call the geometric laws of perspective, formulated at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries, painting went through a phase in which certain artifices were used to structure space. The double band, for instance, observed in the 6th and 7th centuries on the walls of Santa Maria Maggiore, is one way of handling certain stereognostic effects. But let us set that aside. The important point is that, at a certain moment, the illusion emerges.

This is, moreover, where a sensitive point remains—a point of rupture, a painful point, a turning point in the entire history of art, both as the history of art itself and as one in which we are implicated. It lies in the fact that the illusion of space is something other than the creation of void, and this is what the emergence of anamorphoses at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries represents.

I have often spoken to you about Jesuits; the last time was a slip of the tongue. I verified in the excellent book on anamorphoses by Jurgis BALTRUSAITIS—published by Olivier Perrin—that it was, in fact, a Minims convent, both in Rome and Paris. I don’t know why I also placed those Ambassadors by HOLBEIN, which are at the National Gallery, in the Louvre.

You will find, in that painting of the Ambassadors, an entire study to illustrate what I mentioned last time—this strange object, the skull. As the author articulates with great refinement, if one passes by the painting, exiting the room through a door designed specifically to allow this perspective, one can view it in its grim truth at the moment when the spectator glances back one last time while moving away from the painting.

Thus, I say, the interest in anamorphosis is described as this turning point where the artist completely reverses the use of spatial illusion, striving to reintegrate it into its original purpose. This purpose is to make it the medium of a reality concealed—the ultimate aim of art, insofar as art is always, in some way, about encircling the Thing. This, it seems to me, allows us to approach a little more closely what remains for us, even now, an unresolved question regarding the ends of art—just as it was for PLATO, who asked whether the purpose of art is to imitate or not to imitate.

Does art imitate what it represents? [Sign or signifier?]

When one frames the question in this way, one is already caught in the trap, and there is no way out—no way to escape the impasse in which we find ourselves between figurative art and so-called abstract art. To a certain extent, we can merely sense the aberration expressed in the philosopher’s position, which is implacable: PLATO consigns art to the lowest rank of human creations, for he asserts that everything that exists:

• Exists only in its relation to the Idea, which is real.
• Is already but an imitation of something more than real—a sur-reality.

And if art imitates, he tells us, it is but “a shadow of a shadow,” an imitation of an imitation. You can see, then, the vanity that, in his view, resides in a work of art, in the painter’s craft.

Yet, of course, and in an opposing sense, one must resist entering this trap to understand that, naturally, works of art do imitate the objects they represent, but their purpose is not merely to represent those objects. By imitating the object, art transforms it into something else. It only pretends to imitate objects. It is precisely because the object is placed in a certain relationship with the Thing that it is created to encircle, to presentify, and simultaneously to absentify the Thing.

And this, ultimately, is common knowledge—that when painting once again turns strikingly upon itself, as in the moment when CÉZANNE paints apples, it is evident that in painting apples, he is doing something entirely different from merely imitating them. Even though his method of imitating them at that stage is the most striking and the most directed toward a technique of presentifying the object, the more the object is presentified in its imitated form, the more it opens up for us a dimension where illusion itself, as such, aiming at something beyond itself, breaks apart.

Everyone is aware that the mystery sometimes surrounding CÉZANNE’s way of painting apples has a significance that has never yet been fully understood. When CÉZANNE approached it through a certain relationship to the real, it marked a renewal within art—a new way of making the object emerge, one that is purifying, a restoration of its dignity. In this, if I may say, those imaginary insertions are danced anew, precisely at the moment in art history in which certain of these imaginary insertions are selected. As has been observed, these cannot be separated from what was previously composed by artists who came before, through their earlier efforts to realize the ultimate aim of art—what was selected and reinterpreted in another way.

There is much to be said on this subject, particularly regarding how the notion of historicity cannot be employed here without the utmost caution. The term “history of art” is one of the most deceptive. One might say that each emergence of this mode of operation always consists of overturning the illusory operation, turning it back toward its original aim, which is to project a reality that is not that of the object represented, but a reality toward which this way of treating the object is oriented.

We would see that in the “history of art,” there is, on the contrary—by the very necessity that supports it—only a substructure. Even with regard to the history of the time, I mean the time in which it manifests itself, the artist is always in a contradictory relationship. It is always against reigning norms and schemas—political ones, for example, or even schemas of thought—that art tries, in a sense, to re-enact its miracle, always going against the current.

This, in sum, is why we find ourselves here, before a practice that might indeed seem rather vain as an exercise, considering the operational refinements required for this small technical success.

And yet, how can one not be moved, even touched, by something that I might describe—if I were to indulge in an image—as resembling some sort of apparatus for drawing blood, an apparatus to extract the blood of the GRAIL? If you recall that the blood of the GRAIL is precisely what is missing from the GRAIL, this image might resonate.

If I bring this up today, at the point we have reached in our exposition, it is because, however localized its emergence and tendency may be, it surely has a function in the history of art. Take only its metaphorical use:

• Because what I want to expose to you today is the possibility of this form of sublimation that arose at a certain moment in the history of poetry and interests us so profoundly in relation to what Freudian thought has placed at the center of our interest in the economy of the psyche—namely, Eros and eroticism.
• Because, ultimately, you could almost articulate and structure this around anamorphosis itself. What I outline for you in the ethics of psychoanalysis rests entirely on this foundation, which we will explore further. For now, I merely indicate it: the forbidden reference that FREUD encountered at the ultimate point of what we might call his Oedipal myth. It is striking, indeed, that the experience of what occurs in the neurotic propelled him immediately to the plane of a poetic creation of art—to the drama of OEDIPUS—as something historically dated in cultural history.

You will see, when we examine Moses and Monotheism or approach Civilization and Its Discontents, which I asked you to read during this interval, how, in FREUD, there is, so to speak, no distance from the foundations of the Judeo-Greek experience, by which I mean the one that characterizes our culture in its most modern form.

That FREUD could not help but carry his analysis of MOSES to the ultimate point, his meditation on what we might call “the origins of morality,” is something that must strike us.

When you read that astonishing work, Moses and Monotheism, you will see how much its text reveals—regarding what I have shown you throughout these years as being the essential reference, the Name of the Father and its signifying function—how much FREUD, in this text, cannot refrain from revealing what we might call the duplicity of his reference.

I mean that formally, in his text, he introduces this structuring recourse—the paternal power—as a sublimation as such. In the same text, where he leaves on the horizon the primordial trauma of the murder of the father, and without worrying about the contradiction, he asserts that the paternal power emerges historically on the foundation of the apprehension—sensitive and visible—that it is the mother who engenders.

And, he tells us, there is a genuine spiritual progress in affirming that the father—
namely, the one whose role is never certain and whose recognition requires a mental elaboration, a reflection—
the fact of introducing the father’s function as primordial represents, as such, a sublimation. FREUD immediately raises the question: how precisely can we conceive of this leap and progress, since to introduce the father’s authority, function, and reality, something external must already manifest itself to institute it?

FREUD emphasizes here the impasse created by the existence of sublimation—an impasse that we cannot historically justify except through the myth to which he returns, but at this point, the myth’s function becomes entirely latent. I mean that this myth is nothing more than what inscribes itself in the most sensitive spiritual reality of our time: namely, “the death of God.”

It is in relation to “the death of God” that the myth of the father’s murder, representing it in the most direct way, is introduced by FREUD as a modern myth—a myth possessing all the properties of myth as such.

For, of course, this myth, like any other myth, explains nothing. The myth and its function are always—as I have shown you on every occasion and articulated by leaning on LÉVI-STRAUSS in this context, and particularly on what nourished his own formulation—this kind of signifying organization, or sketch if you will, which structures itself to support the antinomies of certain psychic relations at a level that is neither merely temperamental nor reducible to individual anxiety. It is also not exhausted by any construction assuming collectivity as such, but instead reaches its full dimension.

Here, we suppose that the subject in question pertains both to the individual and to the collective. The two do not present any opposition at the level where this occurs. It concerns the subject precisely as they suffer from the signifier, and it is in this passion for the signifier that the critical point emerges, where anxiety occasionally plays the role of an affect functioning as a signal.

We are thus brought into the very locus where FREUD poses the question of the source of morality, introducing the invaluable notion he called Civilization and Its Discontents. This refers to something unbalanced, a certain psychic function—the superego—that seems to exacerbate itself, a kind of breaking of the brakes that ensured its proper incidence.

What remains—even within this very imbalance—is the question of how and to what extent we can conceive what FREUD shows us at the core of psychic life: that the tendencies may find their appropriate sublimation. But first, what is this possibility of sublimation?

I cannot, within the time allotted, guide you through the nearly insurmountable, almost absurd difficulties faced by authors every time they attempt to give meaning to this term, sublimation. However, there is one thing I would like one of you to undertake someday: to go to the National Library and consult an article in Volume VIII of Imago by BERNFELD, titled Bemerkungen zur Sublimierung (Remarks on Sublimation). It would take twenty minutes for someone to summarize it for us here.

BERNFELD was a particularly incisive mind of the second generation, and the weaknesses that ultimately emerge in how he articulates sublimation are nonetheless highly instructive for us. He is, to begin with, quite uncomfortable with FREUD’s reference to the operations of sublimation always being ethically, culturally, and socially valued. This external criterion of the psyche leaves him in significant uncertainty, and indeed, such a reference merits, due to its extra-psychological nature, being highlighted, emphasized, and, ultimately, critiqued. We shall see that this aspect is less problematic than it seems at first glance. Nevertheless, it remains one of the key issues.

Moreover, the contradiction between the Zielablenkung (goal-deflection) of the impulse, tendency, or drive (Trieb) and the fact that this occurs in the domain of object libido (Objektlibido) also creates numerous problems for him. He resolves them with extreme awkwardness, characteristic of everything said about sublimation in psychoanalysis up to that point. His resolution is that sublimation is the portion of the drive that can be utilized—according to his understanding in Volume VIII, likely dating to around 1923–1924—for the purposes of the ego (Ichziele), which must be defined as sublimation.

He provides examples whose naivety, to me, is glaring. For instance, he discusses a young Robert WALTER, who, like many children, engages in poetic exercises even before reaching puberty. What does he tell us about this? That it is an Ichziel, an ego-goal, to become a poet. That, because this aspiration is fixed very early in the child, the subsequent course of development can be judged—namely, how, at puberty, the sensitive yet clinically evident transformation of his libidinal economy becomes progressively integrated into this Ichziel, merging what was initially very separate, such as his poetic activity and, for instance, his fantasies. Thus, he claims, we must assume the primordial and primitive nature of the goal this child set for himself: to become a poet.

This type of reasoning recurs in his other examples, which are equally informative, particularly regarding the function of Verneinungen (negations) that spontaneously arise among groups of children. He was deeply interested in this topic, as he was, at that time, involved in publications on youth-related issues.

What is important here—and what recurs in all formulations, including those by FREUD on the subject—is this: FREUD points out how the artist, having operated on the level of sublimation, ultimately becomes the beneficiary of their operation, insofar as their work, once recognized, allows them to reap, in the form of glory, honor, or even money, precisely the phantasmatic satisfactions that originally motivated the tendency. Through sublimation, and by way of sublimation, these tendencies find their fulfillment.

All of this is well and good, provided we accept, as something already established externally, the idea that there is a function of the poet. That a young child might adopt as an ego goal the aspiration to become a poet might seem self-evident, particularly in those whom BERNFELD calls hervorragender Mensch, “eminent men.”

It is true that BERNFELD quickly adds a parenthetical remark, explaining that, in using the term hervorragender Mensch, “eminent man,” he seeks to strip it as much as possible of any value connotation. However, this is undoubtedly one of the strangest things one could say once one has introduced a notion such as eminence. To put it plainly, the dimension of eminent personality is inextricable from the origins of certain elaborations. We see, for example, in Moses and Monotheism, that FREUD does not eliminate this idea but places it at the forefront.

What is at stake here is originally to describe and situate the possibility of a function like the poetic function within a social consensus that exists as a structural fact. This must be justified, not merely by the secondary benefits that may accrue to individuals who engage in and test themselves in such pursuits.

Now, what we observe at a certain moment in history, which interests us insofar as it introduces most directly the principle of an ideal—that of courtly love—is how it came to serve as the foundation for a certain circle, however limited we might assume it to be, establishing principles of morality, a series of behavioral measures, ideals of loyalty, service, and exemplary conduct. All of this revolves around what? An eroticism.

This is an eroticism all the more surprising in that it emerged at a specific historical moment—probably the mid or even early 11th century—and continued through the 12th century, and in Germany, even into the early 13th century.

I refer here very specifically to the tradition of the singer-poets, who in one part of Europe called themselves troubadours in the south, trouvères in northern France, and Minnesänger in the Germanic regions. Peripheral regions, such as England or certain Spanish domains, were only secondarily affected by this tradition. These poets engaged in a highly specialized poetic technique and craft that emerged during this period and later faded, even in centuries where only a faint memory of them survived.

There is a peak period, roughly from the early 12th century to the first third of the 13th century, during which this highly specialized technique of the poets of courtly love played a significant role and function. At this point, we cannot fully measure its scope or impact. What we do know is that certain “circles”—
as their name suggests, circles within the context of courtly love, meaning courtly or noble circles occupying elevated social positions—
were certainly among those most profoundly and precisely affected by it and actively participated in it. Indeed, it has even been questioned whether these so-called courts of love actually existed.

Undoubtedly, the account provided by Jean DE NOSTRE-DAME [lapsus: Michel de Nostre-Dame, or NOSTRADAMUS] at the beginning of the 15th century, describing the jurisdiction exercised by ladies whose flamboyant, Occitan-sounding names he gives, cannot fail to evoke in us a certain frisson of strangeness.

This account has been rightly criticized, but it was faithfully reproduced by STENDHAL in his book On Love, which remains an admirable work on this subject. At the time, it was closely aligned with the romantic interest in rediscovering and reviving this entire tradition of courtly poetry, known then as Provençal poetry, though it was much more Toulousian or even Limousin in origin. The existence and functioning of the casuistic courts of love that Jean DE NOSTRE-DAME evokes are debatable and debated. Nevertheless, judgments were indeed rendered.

We have surviving texts, particularly those brought to light and published in 1817 by RAYNOUARD in his comprehensive work on the poetry of the troubadours. Among these texts is the work of André LE CHAPELAIN, whose abbreviated title is simply De arte amandi. This title mirrors that of OVID’s treatise, which clerics had continuously transmitted. In this 14th-century manuscript, extracted from the National Library by RAYNOUARD, we find the text of judgments rendered by ladies, historically identifiable figures such as Aliénor D’AQUITAINE, who was successively—
and this “successively” involves significant personal participation in the drama that ensued—
the wife of Louis VII “the Young,” and later of Henry PLANTAGENET, whom she married while he was Duke of Normandy and who subsequently became King of England, with all the ensuing territorial claims on French domains. Her daughter, too, was involved, marrying Henry I, Count of Champagne [Marie de Champagne].

All of this is well and good, provided we accept the historical traceability of the figures mentioned. In this manuscript, all are said to have participated, in some form, in jurisdictions of amorous casuistry, which most clearly assume—since we find them documented in texts, in the poems of courtly love that we have—markers that are perfectly typified.

These are not vague or approximate terms; they are extremely precise, carrying connotations of ideals to be pursued and codified conduct. I would like to take this opportunity to provide a few typical examples. We can borrow them indifferently from either the southern or Germanic domains, with the only distinction being the signifier—d’oc in one case and Germanic language in the other—since this poetry developed in vernacular languages. Apart from the signifier, the overlap, systematization, and reciprocal relationship of the terms are consistent.

It is the same system, organized around various themes. One primary theme, for example, is that of mourning, even mourning unto death. As expressed by one of those who, in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century, brought to light the characteristics of courtly love, it is a scholasticism of unhappy love.

There are terms defining the framework within which we encounter what might be called “the values of the Lady.” These values include certain norms governing exchanges between the participants in this singular ritual, such as the notions of reward, clemency, grace (gnade), and felicity.

The point here is simply to indicate the dimensions of a phenomenon that you could, if interested, study in detail—an organization of extraordinary refinement. Its complexity is comparable to what might be easier for you to recall, albeit in a much-diminished form, as the Carte du Tendre. This map, from another moment in history, was a product of the Précieuses, who revived a certain social art of conversation. Here, however, the phenomenon is all the more surprising because it emerged in a historical period whose coordinates seem, on the contrary, far removed—indeed, quite opposed—from what one might call the promotion or liberation of women.

To illustrate, let me evoke an example from the very flowering of courtly love: the story of the Countess of COMMINGES, daughter of a certain Guillaume DE MONTPELLIER. As such, she was the natural heiress to the county of Montpellier. A certain Peter of ARAGON, King of Aragon and highly ambitious to establish himself north of the Pyrenees—despite the obstacle posed at that time by the initial historical push of the North against the South, namely the Albigensian Crusade and Simon DE MONTFORT’s victories over the Counts of Toulouse—desired her solely because she was the rightful heir to Montpellier upon her father’s death.

The countess herself appears to have been far removed from these sordid intrigues. Everything suggests that she was an extremely reserved individual, perhaps even close to sainthood in the religious sense. Indeed, she ended her life in Rome, in the odor of sanctity. Nevertheless, through political machinations and under pressure from a powerful lord, Peter of ARAGON, she was forced to leave her husband. A papal intervention compelled her husband to take her back, but after her father’s death, all restraints collapsed, and events unfolded according to the will of the most powerful lord.

She was indeed repudiated by her husband, who had experienced other such situations, and subsequently married Peter of ARAGON. However, he mistreated her so severely that she was forced to flee. She ended her life in Rome under the pope’s protection, who, at the time, acted as the sole protector of persecuted innocence.

This narrative serves simply to illustrate the actual position of women in feudal society. They were, strictly speaking, what elementary structures—the elementary structures of kinship—reveal: a correlate of social exchange functions, a bearer of a certain number of goods and symbols of power.

She is, truly, nothing else. And nothing—save reference to a specific domain, that of religious law—can preserve her from being essentially identified with a purely social function, leaving no room for her individuality, no space for her personal freedom.

It is within this context that the very curious function of the poet of courtly love emerges—a poet whose social situation it is important to understand. Indeed, their position sheds light on the fundamental idea, the schema, that Freudian ideology offers regarding the way in which the artist seems, in some form, to delay their function.

These are, as FREUD tells us, satisfactions of power. This makes it all the more remarkable that, within the tradition of the Minnesänger, for example—
there are, I believe, 126 poets cataloged in the so-called Maness Manuscript (Codex Manesse), which, at the beginning of the 19th century, was housed in the National Library of Paris, where Heinrich HEINE paid homage to it as the very origin of Germanic poetry. Since 1888, through means I do not know but entirely justified, this manuscript was returned to Germany and is now housed in Heidelberg—
a significant portion of these poets held positions no less illustrious than those of emperors, kings, or princes.

The first of the troubadours was Guillaume DE POITIERS, 7th Count of Poitiers and 9th Duke of Aquitaine. Before dedicating himself to poetic pursuits—
and he holds an inaugural position in the history of courtly poetry—
he appears to have been a fearsome bandit of the kind that, let us admit, any self-respecting nobleman of his era might have been. In various historical circumstances that I will spare you, we see him act according to the most egregious norms of extortion, profiting unjustly from the services expected of him.

Yet, at a certain point, he became a poet of this unique form of love, for which I can only refer you to works containing thematic analyses of what might be called an entire ritual of love. What I wish to convey to you is how we, as analysts, might situate this phenomenon.

In passing, let me point out:

1. A somewhat depressing book in its tendency to resolve difficulties by neatly eluding them, but nonetheless full of resources and citations, making it valuable. It is La Joie d’Amour by Pierre BELPERRON, published by PLON.
2. In another vein, a collection worth reading, as it concerns less courtly love itself than its historical lineage. This is Benjamin PÉRET’s delightful anthology, Anthologie de l’Amour Sublime, though he does not always articulate clearly what is at stake.
3. A book published by Hachette by René NELLI, titled L’Amour et les Mythes du Coeur, which I criticize only for its somewhat moralizing tone but which contains numerous relevant facts.
4. Finally, a book I mentioned to one of you, Henry CORBIN’s L’Imagination Créatrice, published in the Homo Sapiens collection by FLAMMARION. This work on creative imagination will take you far beyond the limited domain within which I wish today to articulate what I aim to show.

What, then, is at stake in this rebellion? It is poetry—a poetry bound to its historical moment, with entirely traceable themes that I cannot elaborate on now due to time constraints but will revisit later in examples where I will demonstrate the need to sensibly locate their origin, which I might call their conventional origin. This is the value of such a study: to reveal what these conventional themes are.

On this point, I will say, historians are unanimous: courtly love was, essentially, a poetic exercise, a way of playing with a set of idealizing themes that, so to speak, had no concrete correspondence in the reality of the time. Nonetheless, these ideals—foremost among them the ideal of the Lady as such, with all it entails—persist. I will explain this now.

These ideals reappear in subsequent eras, and even in our own, they have entirely concrete effects on the sentimental organization of contemporary humanity. In sum, they perpetuate their trajectory—a trajectory that must be recognized as deliberate, originating in a systematic and intentional use of the signifier as such.

All efforts made to demonstrate, for example, the kinship of this apparatus—the organization of the forms of courtly love—with some religious or mystical intuition, something situated at the center of this focus, this Thing exalted in the context of courtly love, have proven—experience has shown—destined to fail. While there are apparent affinities in what might be called the economy of the subject’s reference to the object of their love—apparent in foreign mystical experiences, for instance…
as has been noted, which is why I recommend Henri CORBIN’s book to you…
even in Hindu or Tibetan contexts—these parallels are fraught with significant difficulties, even critical impossibilities, due to reasons as basic as historical dating. Analogies highlighted between certain poets of the Iberian Peninsula, for instance, and Muslim poetry are complicated by the fact that the themes in Arabic poetry are posterior to what appears in the works of Guillaume DE POITIERS.

What is clear, by contrast, is that, from a structural perspective, we can say that at this time, a creative poetic activity exercised a determining—but historically secondary—impact on social customs. At a moment when the origins and key themes of this activity were forgotten, its function could only be assessed through structural markers.

Here, the object—specifically the feminine object, which, as I have mentioned, enters through the singular gateway of deprivation and inaccessibility—is the Lady to whom devotion is directed. This is true regardless of the social position of the poet…
sometimes emerging from the lower classes, such as servants (sirvens) from their place of birth. Bernard DE VENTADOUR, for instance, was the son of a servant at the castle of Ventadour, whose lord, Ebles DE VENTADOUR, was himself a troubadour…
regardless of the poet’s position, the inaccessibility of the object is foundational. It is impossible to sing of the Lady in her poetic position except under the presumption of a barrier, something that isolates and surrounds her.

On the other hand, this object—the Domnei, as it is called—
notably addressed so frequently in masculine terms, as in mi Dom, meaning “my lord”…
this Lady, as anyone who reads courtly poetry carefully will notice, is presented with depersonalized characteristics. As I mentioned earlier, some authors have even remarked that all these poems appear to address the same person.

The fact that, occasionally, her body is described as “g’ra delgat e gen”—that is, slender and graceful—should not mislead you. Though plumpness was part of the era’s ideal of sexual appeal, “e gen” signifies graceful. However, this object is consistently referred to in this manner. The object in question—specifically the feminine object—within this poetic field is, strictly speaking, emptied of all real substance.

This is precisely what makes it so easy for a metaphysical poet like DANTE, for example, to equate a person known to have existed—namely, Beatrice…
about whom we know he fell in love when she was nine years old, and who remained the central figure of his song from Vita Nuova to the Divine Comedy…
to equate her with philosophy, or even ultimately with sacred science. His appeals to her grow more sensuous as she becomes more allegorical, as if the more she is transformed into a symbolic function, the more overtly love is expressed in its rawest terms.

What we see here, functioning in its purest form, is what I believe falls under the domain of sublimation’s tendential focus: the central point where what man desires, what he can only desire, is to be deprived, strictly speaking, of something real.

It is, in sum, that something articulates this center, this place that one among you—when speaking to me—referred to in a way I find rather charming and do not entirely reject, though, as you will see, what gives it its charm is a quasi-histological reference. This person, referring to what I am attempting to demonstrate to you about das Ding, called it “the vacuole.”

Indeed, it is something of this nature that is at stake—if, that is, we allow ourselves to indulge in the most precarious reveries of contemporary speculation, which speak of communication in terms of what is organically transmitted within an organic structure, such as a primordial cell.

Well then, indeed, if you wish to accept that in a unicellular organism, something can—represented in the transmission of a pseudopodic function—be organized as a system of communication, except that it may be impossible to speak of communication in this instance or to explain why one might refer to communication when communication as such does not exist, then it is because this communication could theoretically organize itself schematically around “the vacuole,” targeting the function of “the vacuole” as such, that we might indeed schematize what is at issue here in representation. Why?

To return to solid ground and frame things as they present themselves, where “the vacuole” is truly created for us: it is created at the center of the system of signifiers, to the extent that this ultimate demand to be deprived of something real is intrinsically tied to that primitive symbolization which entirely resides in the meaning of the gift of love.

In this respect, I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that, in the terminology of courtly love, the term domnei is employed. Its verb form, domnoyer, has a meaning entirely different from “to give.” Instead, it means something like “to caress” or “to trifle,” and in the vocabulary of courtly love, it represents, strictly speaking, this relation to what?

Domnei, despite its phonetic echo with don (gift), has nothing to do with that word. It essentially refers to the same concept as la Domna, the Lady, that is, the one who, in this context, dominates. This might amuse us if we consider it worth exploring historically, examining the norms and plethora of metaphors surrounding the term donner (to give) in courtly love. If giving could be situated in any direction or sense in the dynamic between the partners, it might stem solely from what I could call here a contamination of signifiers surrounding the term domnei and the use of the word domnoyer.

What the creation of courtly poetry aims to do is to situate, in place of the Thing—
and in a historical period whose coordinates reveal to us a discord in the particularly harsh reality relative to certain underlying demands, a certain discontent in culture, and within the mode of sublimation proper to art—
this object, which I will call, to illustrate my point equivalently, an overwhelming object, an inhuman partner.

Indeed, everything about this object characterizes it in this way. The Lady is never qualified by any actual or concrete virtues—wisdom, prudence, or even relevance. If she is described as wise, it is only insofar as she participates in a kind of immaterial wisdom that she represents rather than embodies. Instead, her essential characteristic is to be as arbitrary as possible in the trials she imposes upon her servant. This arbitrariness led, in later echoes of this ideology, to her being called cruel and, as later descriptions would have it, likened to the Tigresses of Hyrcania.

Indeed, reading the authors of this period, such as Chrétien DE TROYES, reveals the extremes to which arbitrariness is pushed in the dynamics governing this couple in courtly love. In short, what I wish to emphasize here—after highlighting the artificial nature of the courtly construction, and before showing how these artifices proved durable, complicating rather than simplifying, far from it, the relations between the idea of man and the service of woman—is that the anamorphosis before us today will serve to refine and clarify something still vague in our perspective: the function of narcissism.

You know that what I deemed necessary to introduce regarding the function of the mirror—as structuring and as exemplary of imaginary structure—relates to the narcissistic relation. It has been clearly demonstrated that narcissism, with its implicit ideal exaltation, is expressly targeted within the ideology of courtly love. Here, I will say that the small image represented by the anamorphosis I presented for your consideration today helps us see what kind of mirror function is involved.

This is a mirror beyond which the subject’s ideal is projected only accidentally. Occasionally, the mirror may imply mechanisms of narcissism, particularly the destructive dimension, which we will later revisit, namely aggression. But the mirror also serves another role: that of a boundary. It is an impassable limit, participating solely in organizing the inaccessibility of the object, though it is not the only participant.

There is a series of motifs—briefly, as I can only outline them—that constitute the premises, the organic data of courtly love as such. For example, the object is not only inaccessible but separated from the one who languishes to reach it by various opposing and malevolent forces, which the elegant Provençal language calls, among other terms, lauzengiers. These are the jealous and also the slanderers. This opposition is found in all forms articulating this theme.

Another important theme is what we might call the theme of secrecy. This is absolutely essential and involves several layers of misunderstanding, one of which is that the object is never named directly but rather through an intermediary known as the Senhal. This practice is also found in Arabic poetry on similar themes, where the same ritual, with its peculiarities, continues to intrigue observers. The forms of the Senhal are sometimes extraordinarily meaningful, particularly in the case of the remarkable Guillaume DE POITIERS, who at one point in his poems refers to the object of his sighs as Bon Vezi, meaning “Good Neighbor.”

Historians have indulged in conjectures about this and concluded that it refers to a Lady whose territories bordered those of Guillaume DE POITIERS, a woman known to have played a significant role in his life and who seemed to be quite spirited.

For us, I think it is far more important than this reference to “Good Neighbor,” who may have been the Lady Guillaume DE POITIERS flirted with, to focus on the connection between the entirely foundational origin of the Thing, as FREUD identified it in his psychological genesis, and the link between das Ding and the Nebenmensch (fellow human), or Minne in the vernacular. This connection develops into what, in the specifically Christian context, becomes the apotheosis of the “neighbor.”

In short, what I intended to convey today is that this is an artificial, even artful organization of the signifier as such, which at a certain point establishes the directions of a particular asceticism. This asceticism introduces a new meaning and prevents us from framing this meaning in terms of the psychic economy related to the detour. The detour, in the psyche, does not always serve solely to regulate the transition or access between what is organized in the domain of the pleasure principle and what is proposed as the structure of reality.

There are also detours and obstacles that organize themselves specifically to reveal, as such, this domain of the vacuole. In essence, what is projected here is a certain transgression of desire. And this is where we see, quite explicitly, the emergence of what I will call the ethical function of eroticism. Freud’s framework perpetually alludes to this productive dynamism of eroticism within ethics, though it does not explicitly formulate it as such.

Yet, within the specific techniques involved—
for these techniques delve deeply into what might have been experienced as sexual inspiration within this eroticism—
what emerges is a technique of restraint, a technique of suspension, of amor interruptus.

The stages proposed by courtly love—
before what is referred to, very mysteriously, as the “gift of mercy,” about which we ultimately know very little—
are articulated as follows: they correspond almost entirely to what FREUD describes in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality as belonging to the realm of preliminary pleasure. The paradox of what might be called, from the perspective of the pleasure principle, the effect of Vorlust (anticipatory pleasures) is precisely that they persist contrary to the momentum and direction of the pleasure principle.

It is in the sustained enjoyment of desire—meaning, in its strictest sense, the pleasure of experiencing displeasure—that we can speak of the sexual valorization of the preliminary states of the act of love.

In the erotic techniques of courtly love, the stages preceding this fusion—
which we can never fully identify as either a mystical union or a distant recognition of the Other, since in many cases it seems that functions such as greeting, or salutation, represent the ultimate gift for the lover of courtly love: a sign of the Other’s presence as such, and nothing more—
have been the subject of far-reaching speculations. Some have even equated this salutation with the one that governed, in the consolamentum, the highest grades of Cathar initiation.

Before reaching this culmination, the stages are carefully articulated and distinguished, progressing:

1. From “seeing” (le voir)
2. To “speaking” (le parler)
3. To “touching” (le toucher), which is divided into two parts:
   a. The “services” (les services)
   b. The “kiss” (le baiser), or osculum, which is the final stage before
4. The “union of mercy” (la réunion de merci).

All of this, of course, is presented to us with an eminently enigmatic character. To shed light on it, some have compared it to specific erotic techniques from Hindu or Tibetan traditions, which seem to have been codified in the most precise manner and represent a form of asceticism. In this asceticism, the lived substance of pleasure, as it might emerge for the subject from this discipline, is pursued as an end in itself. However, I believe that it is only through extrapolation that we can suppose anything similar was practiced by the troubadours. Frankly, I personally do not believe it at all.

I believe, however, that the influence of poetry was decisive, and we do not need to assume so much identity between practices borrowed from different cultural areas to acknowledge this.

What strikes me most, after the clear failures of various attempts to trace the genesis of this particular mode of idealizing the feminine object in our culture through external influences, is that, ultimately, it may be to a libertine work, OVID’s Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), that some of the most ascetic, singular, and paradoxical texts used in the register of courtly love can be traced.

OVID wrote, in sparkling verse, a sort of libertine manual explaining where in Rome one might meet the most charming ladies. He develops this theme in three books, ending with a direct evocation of what can only be described as “a wild romp in the sheets.”

Amidst this, we encounter phrases such as arte regendus amor—”love must be governed by art.” And here we are, ten centuries later, where these magical words have been taken literally and transformed into a genuine act of artistic incantation by a group of poets. Elsewhere we read, militiae species amor est—”love is a kind of military service,” which for OVID simply means that Roman women were not easy to win over. And now, in the context of chivalry, this idea resonates as a call for armed service in defense of women and children. In other words, these terms echo in the very framework so charmingly outlined by DON QUIXOTE.

You can easily understand the importance I attach to these matters, which, as analogies, are undeniable and well-attested. It is certain that in clerical circles—and this is why some have proposed a clerical genealogy of courtly love—the Ars Amatoria of OVID was never forgotten. We know that Chrétien DE TROYES produced a translation of it. Through this act of reinterpretation, we see what the function of the signifier as such means in this context. It is here that I would like to place the most extreme point of my argument: that courtly love was created much like the fantasy evoked earlier, something that emerges within the very structure of the syringe.

This does not mean, however, that it is not something entirely fundamental and absolutely essential, which is why André BRETON, in our own time, could celebrate Amour fou (Mad Love) in the terms of his preoccupations, connecting it to what he called “objective chance.”

A curious configuration of meaning: for someone reading these things out of context, a century or two from now, the term “objective chance” might imply events that occur with a fullness of meaning precisely because they seem situated in a space where no rational or causal schema can account for their emergence in reality. In other words, BRETON, too, situates Amour fou in the place of the Thing.

Now, as I take my leave today and invite you to reconvene in three weeks, I would like to end with something that came to mind this morning, a memory resurfacing from another surrealist poet, Paul ÉLUARD. In his verse, he expresses precisely that border, that limit, which I am trying in this discourse to help us locate and feel.

Here are these four lines:

On this dilapidated sky, on these panes of fresh water,
What face will come, resonant shell,
To announce that the night of love touches the day,
Mouth open tied to the closed mouth.