🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I would not want to start my seminar today without briefly addressing what I think is of interest to you regarding what was discussed yesterday at the scientific meeting of the Society. I would simply like to say what I did not have the opportunity to express yesterday: that, all in all, we witnessed a remarkable presentation.

I would simply like to draw your attention to the sense in which it was remarkable. It was delivered by someone who, given their position, was not expected to revolutionize the field of hysteria, nor to bring us an immense, accumulated, or even original experience. This is someone whose psychoanalytic career is just beginning. Nevertheless, I feel it is necessary to point out that, in this very comprehensive presentation you heard, which was perhaps, as has been noted, overly rich, there is something you can, I believe, honestly grasp with clarity: the extremely articulated nature of what was proposed to you.

This is not to say that there is nothing to be reconsidered. If I had felt compelled to force matters by intervening after what may have been a somewhat premature interruption of the discussion, I would certainly have corrected certain points that were advanced. I might even have highlighted specific aspects, particularly concerning the relationship of the hysteric with the ideal ego and the ego ideal. I believe that, on this subject, the author of the presentation—this is a point that precisely warrants further clarification in discussion—made assertions that may stem from a certain vagueness in the reciprocal function, opposition, and concatenation of these two functions.

What I want you to notice in a presentation of this kind is the extent to which it allows for articulating things with remarkable precision, based on categories that clearly prove themselves to be not only manageable but also intended to introduce a clarity that matches the dimensions of our experience. Regardless of the minor points that may invite discussion on certain assertions made, you can see how theoretical notions, by their very motion, so to speak, come alive and connect with experience and its level.

The relationship of the hysteric with the signifier is discussed. This is something we can observe in clinical experience at every moment. In other words, what is presented to you—and you will see this even more clearly when you have the text, which I hope you will soon—is a series of points open to the critique of experience, but in the dimension, I would say, of a functioning mechanism, of something that was animated before you.

Truly, if anything allows us to grasp the value of a certain number of theoretical notions that I have endeavored to promote before you for years, it is this convergence, this coming together of the notion with the structure we deal with—a structure defined by the fact that the subject must situate themselves within the signifier.

We see this “It speaks” happening before us. This “It speaks” emerged, so to speak, from the theory itself, making us converge with and align with the most everyday critical experience in the traits brought to you. We see the hysteric animated in their dimension—not in reference to a set of obscure forces distributed unevenly in a space that is otherwise non-homogeneous, as is typical in the so-called “analytic” discourse. It is only labeled “analytic” insofar as it tries to alienate itself in various references to disciplines that, while certainly estimable—more than estimable in their own domains—are often invoked in a way that does nothing but highlight the theorist’s awkwardness in navigating their own field.

This is not merely a tribute to the work you heard, nor just a prelude to what I am attempting to continue before you. Rather, I see it as part of my effort this year to articulate and bring to life before you the ethical dimension of analysis with the means at my disposal, which are simply those of my experience. I claim to do nothing other than what I have done in previous years, presenting this elaboration which has progressively, from the initial reference to speech and language, provided you—skipping intermediate steps—with last year’s attempt to clarify the place and function of desire in the economy of our experience, insofar as it is guided by Freudian thought.

I want to emphasize that, in this commentary on Freudian thought, I do not proceed as a professor. The general practice of professors, regarding the thought of those who have taught something throughout history, typically involves framing that thought in such a way that it appears only in its most limited and partial aspects. This is why one always feels a sense of breathlessness when returning to the theses, to the original texts—I speak of those texts that are worth it, the ones I have referred to more than once in my statements.

When I say that one does not surpass figures such as DESCARTES, KANT, MARX, HEGEL, and others that I enumerate in the same sentence, it is indeed because they mark the direction of an inquiry, they set an orientation, and that orientation, if it is genuinely established in that manner, is not something one surpasses so easily.

One does not surpass FREUD either. Nor does one take an interest in summarizing or assessing his work quantitatively. Instead, one uses it, navigates within it, and is guided by the directions he provided. What I offer you here is an attempt to articulate the meanings of an experience insofar as it has been guided by FREUD. This is not a method of encapsulating, quantifying, or summarizing FREUD in any way.

But the fact that this ethical dimension is our very experience—don’t you see that you have testimony of this precisely in those kinds of implicit ethical deviations found in supposedly objectifying notions that have gradually been introduced and deposited during the analytical elaboration through different eras of psychoanalytic thought? Is there not an implicit ethical notion embedded in the concept of “oblativite” that you often see me critique before you?

Implicitly, I would say, through goals that are barely formulated and only tenuously admitted—such as “the reformation of the subject in analysis.” When I say reformation, it is to avoid saying reform, with all the implications this carries within analysis, which are often openly acknowledged in the notion of remaking the subject’s ego. Is there not implicitly this ethical dimension which, as I have presented it to you, is inadequate, failing to correspond to your experience or to the real dimensions in which FREUD indicates, by the very nature of the meaning he opened for us, that this problem is situated?

Thus, in bringing you this year into the field of the ethics of psychoanalysis, we have reached a certain point, a certain frontier, a certain limit upon which I have centered you and invited your reflection. I illustrated this with a kind of confrontation, a highlighting of one by the other—paradoxical as this may seem—namely, KANT and SADE.

I brought you to a point that we might, if you will, call the point of apocalypse or revelation of something called what? Transgression. By noting that this point of transgression is closely related to what is at stake in our problem, in our ethical inquiry, namely the meaning of desire as such.

This is the point at which my elaboration in prior years has brought you, positing that the meaning of desire is something that, in Freudian experience as such, in this experience which is also our daily experience, must be distinguished and structured within a certain field where terms like need must be positioned—not as their pure and simple root, but as something distinct from them. In other words, it is not possible to deduce the function of desire purely and simply, in the articulation of analytic experience, by reducing it entirely, through some artifice, to the dimension of need.

If I pause for a moment to emphasize something that I believe is essential to grasp—the framework within which our inquiry unfolds—I return to something I might almost call contingent in the remarks I have made before you. During one of my presentations, I made a kind of paradoxical, even whimsical excursion, contrasting two forms: those of the left-wing intellectual and the right-wing intellectual. Speaking of these two terms—and, in a certain sense, setting them against each other—I may have seemed to exhibit an imprudence that encourages a certain indifference in matters of politics.

In short, I may have been reproached for emphasizing, in a term I chose deliberately, that FREUD’s ethics—here I refer to FREUD writing Civilization and Its Discontents—was humanitarian. This, which is not precisely to say he was a reactionary, does articulate that he was not, on the other hand, a progressive. This observation, while not disputed in terms of its pertinence, has seemed dangerous to underline for some. I am surprised that such an issue could arise, especially given the politically oriented perspective from which it was brought to me.

I would simply encourage those who may have been surprised in this dimension to consider something that is always useful for regulating the movements of sensibility: perhaps to inform themselves more precisely by reading certain brief and accessible texts. I have brought one. I have brought Volume One of Karl MARX’s Philosophical Works, translated by MOLITOR and published by Alfred COSTE. I recommend that they read, for example, the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, or simply the curious little work titled On the Jewish Question. Perhaps they will gain a more pertinent understanding of what MARX in our time might think of what is called progressivism. I mean, of a certain style of generous ideology widely disseminated, let us say it openly, within our bourgeoisie.

The way MARX would evaluate it is something that will become entirely evident to anyone who chooses to refer directly to this source, to this good and sound standard of a certain intellectual honesty.

Thus, in saying that FREUD was not progressive, I in no way meant, for instance, that he was uninterested in the, let’s use the term, Marxist experience. However, it is a fact—and here I am dotting the “i’s”—that when I said FREUD was not progressive, I was making a statement that was in no way a political imputation about him.

I meant that he did not, in sum, participate in a certain orientation that could be characterized as belonging to certain types of bourgeois prejudices. That said, it is a fact that FREUD was not Marxist. I have not emphasized this because, in truth, I do not see, strictly speaking, the relevance or the significance of such a statement. Because, if you will, I reserve for later the demonstration of what value the dimension opened by FREUD might hold for a Marxist—a point that might indeed be much more challenging to introduce right away since, so far, it does not seem that Marxists—if there still are any—have much noticed the direction in which FREUD’s indicated experience unfolds, opens, and articulates itself.

Let us say that FREUD’s contribution lies precisely here: if MARX takes up the thread of thought that culminates in the work I mentioned earlier as having been the subject of MARX’s most pertinent remarks, namely, The Philosophy of Right by Hegel, in which something is articulated from which we have not yet, as far as I know, emerged, namely: the foundations of the state, the bourgeois state, as it establishes the rules of human organization based on need and reason. In this dimension, MARX exposes, makes perceptible, tangible, the partial and insufficient nature of the solution provided within the framework of the bourgeois state. He shows that this solution, this harmony placed at the level of “need” and “Reason,” is, in the bourgeois state, merely an abstract and dissociated solution.

It is “in law” that need and Reason are harmonized. But in practice, each individual is left prey to the egoism of their particular needs, to the anarchy, to the materialism—as MARX puts it—of the fundamental anarchy, which presupposes and aspires to a state where, as he expresses it, human emancipation will occur not just politically but truly. That is to say, humanity will find itself in a non-alienated relationship to its own organization. It is precisely along this path—which, as you know, despite the openings history has given to the enterprise, to the march, to the direction indicated by MARX—we do not seem to have entirely achieved the realization of the integral human.

Along this path—in this sense, FREUD does not surpass MARX—FREUD shows us something, this accident, so to speak, that arises from the fact that, however far the articulation of these terms, “Reason” and “need,” has been pushed within the tradition of classical philosophy, they remain insufficient to enable us to grasp the field at stake concerning human realization.

It is within the structure, at a deeper level, that we encounter a certain difficulty, which is none other than the function of desire. And the function of desire, insofar as—let me clarify how I articulate this for you here—paradoxically, curiously, yet necessarily from the perspective of experience, reason, discourse as such, and signifying articulation as such are there from the outset, ab ovo, from the beginning, the moment the structure of human experience as such can be articulated.

It exists unconsciously before the emergence of anything in human experience. It is there in a buried, unknown, unmastered state, unknown even to the one who is its very support. And it is in relation to a situation thus structured that humanity must, secondarily, in a second moment, identify and situate the function of its needs as such. On the other hand, due to this primitive, fundamental nature of humanity’s capture within this unconscious field, insofar as:

• it is already a logically organized field,
• this Spaltung (split) persists throughout development,
• it is in relation to this Spaltung that desire as such must be articulated, situated, and understood in its function,
• this desire as such presents certain sharp edges, a certain stumbling block, which is precisely where Freudian experience complicates the project, the goal, the direction given to humanity for its own integration.

This is the problem of jouissance, insofar as it is something buried in a central field, with characteristics of inaccessibility, obscurity, opacity, and, ultimately, a field encircled by a barrier that renders access to it for the subject not just difficult but perhaps inaccessible. Jouissance presents itself not merely as the satisfaction of a need but as the satisfaction of a drive in the sense that this term necessitates all the complex elaboration I attempt to articulate here before you.

Drive, properly speaking, is so complex that—as you heard last time—anyone approaching it with focus, attempting to understand how FREUD articulates it, will find that it is not even reducible to the complexity of “tendency” in its broadest sense, in the sense of energetics.

It contains a historical dimension, the true significance of which we must discern. This historical tendency is defined as such by the fact that the drive presents itself with a certain insistence, insofar as it relates to something memorable because it is memorized.

This dimension of recollection, of fundamental historicization, extends to the emergence and functioning of the drive as such within what we call the human psyche. It is also here that destruction as such is recorded, becomes part of the register of experience. This is what I will attempt to bring to life and illustrate for you. It is for this reason that I have introduced you to the domain of what I might call, if you will, not “myth,” because the term would not be exactly appropriate, but the fable of SADE.

SADE, at a specific point in his work—which, depending on issues of chaptering and pagination, can be located in Volume VII of Juliette, or, in the edition most accessible to you, that of Jean-Jacques PAUVERT, in Volume IV, page 78, in what is called “The System of Pope Pius VI,” since it attributes the theories in question to Pope Pius VI—presents, through the mouth of one of his characters, the following notion: that through crime as such, humanity collaborates—according to something that the supposed interlocutor animates in this sense—with nature in clearing the way for new creations.

The idea is, in essence, the following: that the pure momentum of nature is obstructed by its own forms, that the three kingdoms of nature, in manifesting forms and fixed forms, chain nature within a limited cycle, a circle that is all too evidently imperfect in the chaos, confusion, conflict, and fundamental disorder visible in their mutual relationships. And therefore, the deepest concern one might attribute to this hidden subject, in the sense of the most profoundly concealed, which nature would represent, is something that, by clearing the slate, allows it to restart, to attempt a new momentum.

What I am showing here, through the articulation of statements that are manifestly, one could say, literary in nature, that have no scientific foundation, that are poetic in character, is nonetheless something I can, despite the interruptions that the dimension of reading often brings to sustained attention, illustrate as occasionally erupting within the luxuriant chaos that is SADE’s work. These eruptions, which some might consider tedious digressions, are, as you will see, capable of sustaining reading.

“Without destruction,” he says, “there is no nourishment for the earth and, consequently, no possibility for humanity to reproduce itself—this would only occur if it harmonized perfectly within the reign of Nature. A fatal truth, no doubt, as it invisibly proves that the vices and virtues of our social system are nothing and that the vices are more necessary than the virtues since they are creators, and the virtues are merely created—or, if you prefer, that the vices are causes while the virtues are effects. […] That too perfect a harmony would bring even greater inconveniences than disorder; and that if war, discord, and crime were to be banished from the earth, the empire of the three kingdoms, becoming too dominant, would in turn destroy all other laws of nature. Celestial bodies would all come to a halt, influences would be suspended by the excessive dominance of one among them; there would be no more gravitation, no more movement. It is thus the crimes of humanity, which introduce turmoil into the influence of the three kingdoms, that prevent this influence from reaching a level of superiority that would disrupt all others, maintaining in the universe that perfect balance Horace called rerum concordia discors. Crime is therefore necessary in the world. But the most useful crimes, without a doubt, are those that cause the greatest disruption, such as the refusal to propagate or destruction itself. All others are insignificant—or rather, only these two merit the name of crimes—and these crimes are essential to the laws of the kingdoms and… to the laws of nature. An ancient philosopher called war the mother of all things. The existence of murderers is as necessary as that of this scourge; without them, everything in the universe would be disrupted…”

And it continues:

“…This dissolution serves nature since it is from these destroyed parts that it recomposes. Therefore, every change operated by humanity on this organized matter serves nature far more than it opposes it. Alas, to serve nature, far more complete destructions would be necessary than those we are capable of performing; it is atrocity, it is scale that nature desires in crimes. The greater the extent of our destructions, the more pleasing they will be to nature. To serve it even better, we would need to oppose the regeneration that results from the corpses we bury. Murder removes only the first life of the individual we strike; we would need to take away the second to be even more useful to nature, for it is annihilation that it desires, and we are incapable of infusing our murders with the full extent that it desires.”

The essence, the nerve, of this final part of the statement, I believe you have grasped. It takes us to the heart of the issue that, last time, regarding the death drive, was articulated as the point of divergence between what can simply and purely be called the “Nirvana principle,” or principle of annihilation, insofar as it relates to a fundamental law that could be identified with something given to us by energetics—namely, the tendency to return, if not to a state of absolute rest, at least to a certain limit state of universal equilibrium. The gap, the split, I say, between this and what must be distinguished as what FREUD introduces and articulates as the death drive, is precisely something to be situated within the historical domain.

To the extent that this is articulated at a level definable only in relation to the chain of signifiers—that is, as a reference point that can be established in relation to the functioning of nature, to something beyond where nature itself can be captured and grasped within a fundamental memorization—what can be articulated is that everything can be reconsidered, not merely within the movement of metamorphoses, but beginning, so to speak, from an initial intention.

I hope you clearly understand what I am articulating here by summarizing, schematizing, and revisiting what you heard last time. What you heard then consisted of a highly complete and successful summation of the work of BERNFELD and FEITELBERG, showing us the three levels at which the question of the death drive is articulated, provided we wish to give meaning to what FREUD articulated for us. These levels extend from non-living material systems to the material organization within living organisms, involving the activation of a tendency that moves irreversibly in a specific direction, articulated in energetics as entropy.

This entropy operates in the sense of reaching a terminal equilibrium state. This is one of the concepts FREUD engages with when discussing the death drive. But is this truly the essence of the death drive? The articulation by BERNFELD and FEITELBERG, in its most pertinent form—specifically where it adds something to FREUD’s text—emphasizes the difference introduced by the living structure as such.

I would draw your attention to the need to distinguish between physical systems or dimensions involved in energetic formulas, where the dimensions of intensity and extensivity are homogeneous, and the living organization, which is characterized by the constant presence of a structural element.

What BERNFELD clarified is the distinction introduced by living organization, which establishes a polarity. This polarity, at its most basic level, is exemplified—though not necessarily accurately—by the relationship between the nucleus and the protoplasm, or in higher organisms, by the relationship between the neurological apparatus and the rest of the structure.

Regardless of specific examples, what matters is that something intervenes by introducing this structural element, understood in the Goldsteinian sense of the organism’s structure. This structural element renders the two poles, or terms of the energetic equation—intensity and extensivity—heterogeneous. This distinction differentiates the living organism from the non-living one. This heterogeneity between the factors of intensity and extensivity introduces conflict into the living structure.

Here lies the limit of the field explored by the Bernfeldian investigation into FREUD’s death drive. BERNFELD explicitly states: “Here, I stop.” He also observes that, for this reason, he will not call what FREUD articulates a “drive” in the proper sense. It is a general tendency of all systems, insofar as they can be grasped within an energetic equation, toward returning to an equilibrium state.

This tendency can be called a trend, but it is not yet, strictly speaking—and this is an assertion from an orthodox Freudian—a “drive” as understood in the psychoanalytic framework. The drive as such, and particularly the death drive as a drive for destruction, must be something beyond this tendency toward the inanimate. What could it be, if not a direct will to destroy, as an illustration of what I mean?

Do not, however, focus on the term will. Whatever interest FREUD’s readings of SCHOPENHAUER may have aroused, this is not about a fundamental Wille (will or intention). I use this term momentarily to emphasize the difference in registers.

A will to destruction…
A will to begin anew, as one might say, from scratch.
A will toward something else, insofar as everything can be called into question starting from the function of the signifier. For it is only insofar as the signifying chain exists that everything implicit, immanent, and present within the chain of natural events can be understood as subject, in this sense, to a so-called death drive.

If the death drive is presented, as indeed it must be, at this juncture of FREUD’s thought, as a drive for destruction that calls into question all existing entities, then what it also represents is a will to create from nothing—a will to restart.

This dimension is introduced as such the moment the historical chain is isolated, the moment history appears as something memorable, as something memorized in the Freudian sense: something recorded, suspended, retained in the existence of the signifier.

To put it simply, the convergence, the illustrative nature of what I am showing you now by citing this passage from SADE, is not to claim that what FREUD brings us is, in itself, a scientifically justifiable notion. Instead, it is to make you grasp that it belongs to the same order as a dream, or, if you will, the System of Pope Pius VI in SADE. As in SADE, this notion of the death drive as such is a creationist sublimation. It is linked to that structural element which ensures that, whenever we are dealing with something—anything in the world—under the form of the chain of signifiers, there is somewhere—but assuredly outside the realm of nature—something we must, and can only, posit as the beyond of this chain of signifiers, the ex nihilo upon which it rests, founds itself, and articulates itself as such.

In other words, I am not telling you that the notion of the death drive or death instinct in FREUD is not, in itself, something highly suspect—just as suspect and, I would say, nearly as absurd as SADE’s idea. Consider it. SADE’s ideas measured something as poor and wretched, after all, as the totality of human crimes, which can neither positively nor negatively contribute, so to speak, to the maintenance of something as cosmic as the rerum concordia discors.

And it is doubly suspect because, in the end, it substitutes a subject for Nature. A subject such that, no matter how we construct it, this subject turns out to be supported, in some sense, by a knowing subject—in this case, FREUD himself, since it is FREUD who discovers this Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

Yet FREUD remains consistent with himself: what he indicates here, on the horizon of our experience, is precisely this final term within a field where, if the subject persists, it is unquestionably—and this is the entire meaning and core of Freudian investigation—the subject insofar as it does not know, at a point of ignorance that is ultimate, if not absolute. I am not claiming, either, that at this speculative point where we arrive, the notions in question necessarily make sense. I merely wish to indicate the perspective from which this articulation of the death drive in FREUD becomes suspect. That is all I wish to say; I assert nothing further: it is neither true nor false; it is suspect.

But it suffices that it was, for FREUD, necessary—that it brought him back to a kind of abyss, a profoundly and radically problematic point—to reveal a structure of the field: this point which I alternately designate as the impassable, or as the Thing, where FREUD deploys his sublimation concerning the death instinct, in that this sublimation is fundamentally a creationist sublimation. This is also where lies the essence, the nerve, of this warning that I have often given you, which is this: beware of the register of thought called evolutionary.

Beware of it for two reasons, and what I am about to tell you may seem more apparent than real in its dogmatism.

The first reason is that there is—despite the historical affinities and contemporaneity of evolutionary thought and Freudian thought—a fundamental contradiction between the hypotheses of evolutionism and Freudian thought. What I am attempting to articulate before you is something that shows the necessity of a point of creation ex nihilo so that what is properly historical in the drive can emerge. “In the beginning was the Word”—that is to say, the signifier. Without the signifier, at the beginning, it is impossible to articulate the drive as historical, and this suffices to introduce the dimension of ex nihilo into the structure of the analytic field as such.

The second reason may seem paradoxical, but it is nonetheless essential—at least in my view, and within the framework I have developed for you. It is that the creationist perspective, as such, is the only one that allows for the radical elimination of God as such from a thought process. Paradoxically, it is within the creationist perspective—and only there—that the ever-reemerging elimination of creative intent, as supported by a person, can be conceived.

It is conceivable because, in the domain of absolute beginning, which marks the distinction and origin of the chain of signifiers as a distinct order, evolutionist thought, while avoiding naming God anywhere, renders Him literally omnipresent. Evolution, which obligates itself to deduce the ascending movement that culminates in consciousness and thought from a continuous process, necessarily implies that this consciousness and thought were present at the origin. It is only within a perspective that includes the distinction between the memorable and the memorized as such, as dimensions that must be distinguished, that we avoid perpetually making this implication of “being within the existent,” which lies at the core of evolutionary thought.

In other words, what I am telling you is not that it is impossible to derive what we call “thought,” when identified with consciousness, from an evolution of matter. That is not the difficulty. The real difficulty in deriving from an evolution of matter is simply homo faber—production as such, the producer as such. It is because production is an original domain, a domain of creation ex nihilo, in that it introduces into the natural world the organization of the signifier, that we can effectively locate thought—not in an idealistic sense, as you can see, but thought in its manifestation, its presence in the world. We can only find it in the intervals of the signifier.

This leads to the notion, the perspective of the field I call the field of the Thing:

• A field where something projects beyond, at the origin of the chain of signifiers,
• A place where everything that can be is put into question, a locus of being where what we have called the privileged site of sublimation occurs, exemplified most vividly in FREUD’s work,
• The locus of the work that humanity distinctively begins to court.

This is why the first example I gave you in my discussion this year was drawn from what is known as the elaboration of courtly love.

Admit that placing a creature like woman in this position of beyond-being is indeed an incredible idea! This is not, of course—by articulating it in this way—a depreciatory judgment on these particular beings. Let no one here be alarmed. In our cultural context, being placed in the position of beyond the pleasure principle and the absolute object, they are at no risk. Let them return to their own problems, which are of the same nature and equally arduous as ours. That is not the issue here.

If this incredible idea could indeed emerge—that of placing woman in this position, in the place of being—it is obviously not as “woman” but as the “object of desire.” And this is precisely what gives rise to all the paradoxes of this celebrated courtly love, around which people endlessly wrestle, attributing to it all the requirements of a love that clearly has nothing to do with this historically situated sublimation. They cannot reconcile how all the evidence we have for courtly love conveys such fever, even frenzy, so clearly coextensive with the domain of desire—lived desire, a desire that is anything but platonic.

And this is coupled—this is what so puzzles historians, whether poets or scholars, who have tackled the problem—with a fact that is entirely manifest in the poetry of courtly love: the being to whom desire is addressed is evidently nothing else—and there can be no doubt about this, given the content of the texts—but what I will call, using terminology fully consistent with our discourse, “a being of the signifier.”

The utterly inhuman character of the object of courtly love is glaringly apparent. It is too clear to miss. These poets, consumed by the signs of a love that led some of them to acts bordering on madness, addressed themselves to beings who were, of course, named and living individuals. Yet these beings were, of course, in no way present in their physical reality, in their historical reality—perhaps something else entirely. At the very least, they were, in their being of reason, beings of the signifier.

This is precisely what defines and gives meaning to that extraordinary text I read to you, namely, the remarkable sequence of ten-line stanzas by the poet Arnaud DANIEL. The shepherdess responds to the shepherd, the woman who, for once, answers from her place and, instead of following the game, warns the poet—at the extreme degree of his invocation to the signifier—of the form she may take as a signifier:

“I am nothing more,” she tells him, “than the void within my cloaca—for lack of a better term. Blow into it a little, and we shall see if your sublimation still holds.”

I believe those present here remember this sensational text preserved by historical tradition. This is not to say that this singular situation, this solution offered to the perspective of the field of the Thing, has no alternatives. The other solution—and one that is also historically situated—is, curiously enough, from a time not far removed from the one just mentioned. It is perhaps a slightly more serious solution: the one that, in SADE—I still prefer closer, more vivid references to distant ones—is called the “Supreme Being of Wickedness.”

This Supreme Being of Wickedness is not merely an invention of SADE. It stems from a long historical tradition—and, to not go further back, from Manichaeism and various other obscure references in history. This reference already existed in the era of courtly love. There were already groups, to whom I have alluded briefly, called the CATHARS, who had no doubt that the Prince of this world was something quite comparable to this Absolute, if not Supreme, Being of Wickedness. The Grimmigkeit (severity) of Boehmian God, the fundamental wickedness as one dimension of supreme life, demonstrates that this notion was not only evoked within libertine and anti-religious thought.

The CATHARS, as I mentioned in passing, were not Gnostics; they were, in fact, good Christians. Everything indicates this. The practice of their sole sacrament, known as the consolamentum, sufficiently proves it. Their idea of salvation was this, which is ultimately not distinct from the fundamental message of Christianity: that there is a word that saves, and the consolamentum is nothing other than the transmission of this word from one subject to another, the blessing of this word.

We are dealing with people who indeed, and unequivocally, placed all their hope in the coming of a word. That is to say, we are dealing with people who took the Christian message absolutely seriously.

The problem, of course, is that for such a word to be not only effective but viable, it must be wrested from discourse. And nothing is more difficult than separating the word from discourse. You place your faith in a salvific word, but the moment you do so, all discourse comes chasing after you. This is something the Cathars did not fail to realize, particularly in the form of ecclesiastical authority, which—momentarily manifesting as a wicked word—taught them that even Puritans must explain themselves. They were indeed Purs—the Pure.

When one begins to be “questioned” by discourse, even if it is that of the Church, everyone knows that this “questioning” has but one end: the moment when you fall definitively silent. Thus, we are brought to this limit, to this field where access to the center, to the core of what concerns desire, comes into play. How does one approach it more closely? How does one interrogate this field? What happens when one does not project into it, in a more or less sublimated way, these contents, these dreams, this thematic material to which even the most steady, ordinary, and scientific minds—not excluding a certain bourgeois of Vienna—are reduced?

What happens every time the hour of desire strikes for any one of us?

What I will explain to you next time can be summarized as follows: one does not approach… and for the best reasons! This, if you will, will be the subject of my next discourse. One does not approach—precisely for the reasons that structure the domain of the good. This domain of the good, in its most traditional sense, has always been tied to pleasure, and not without reason.

It has long been known that it was not the advent of FREUD that introduced, into the ancient perspective concerning the good and its derivation from avenues of pleasure, a radical revolution. What I will attempt to show you next time is the historical point at which matters stood when FREUD emerged—a crossroads to which I am merely bringing you back. This historical crossroads is that of utility.

And this time, I hope to provide you with a definitive and radical assessment of how the ethical dimension of utilitarianism positions itself within the Freudian perspective. That is, insofar as FREUD dares—quite decisively—to surpass it, to grasp what the utilitarian reference truly means, to identify what fundamentally validates it, and at the same time, to delineate its boundaries and absolutely define its limits.

In short, I will attempt to develop for you the perspective not merely of the progress of thought but of the evolution of history, aiming to demystify the Platonic and Aristotelian perspectives of the good—even the concept of the supreme good—and bring it to the level of the economy of “goods.” It is essential to reclaim this within the Freudian framework of the pleasure principle and the reality principle, so that from there, we can understand and conceive what constitutes the true novelty of FREUD’s contribution to the field of ethics.

I will show you that beyond this chain—this locus of restraint that is the chain and circuit of goods—there lies, nonetheless, a field open to us. This field allows us to approach the central field insofar as it is targeted by the good, which is not the sole, nor the true, nor the only barrier separating us from it. This barrier—which I will address in the continuation of my discourse and which I announce to you now—is something that will likely seem entirely natural to you once I articulate it, though it is not, after all, so self-evident. It must be stated explicitly, especially as it pertains to a domain about which FREUD always expressed the utmost reserve. It is indeed curious that he did not identify it.

I will attempt to show you that the true barrier, insofar as it stops the subject before the field of desire—the field that is properly unnameable and radical—before desire as the field of absolute destruction, destruction beyond even decay, is none other than what is called the aesthetic phenomenon, insofar as it is identifiable with the experience of the beautiful.

The beautiful in its radiant splendor. This beautiful, which has been described as the splendor of the true, is clearly so precisely because the true, as such, is not very pretty to behold. If beauty is not the splendor of the true, it is, at the very least, its covering. In other words, what I will demonstrate in the next stage of our exploration is that, on this scale that separates us from the central field of desire, if the good constitutes the first barrier, beauty comes closer and stops us very seriously.

It stops us, but it also points out the direction in which this field of destruction is encountered.

Thus, in this sense, that beauty, aiming at the center of moral experience, is closer, so to speak, to evil than to good should not, I hope, surprise you. It has long been said: “The best is the enemy of the good.”