🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(German, Turkish)

(All parts in English)

We are always on the boundary of desire. As I announced to you last time, I will speak to you about the Good.
The Good has always had to find itself somewhere on this boundary. Today, it will concern the way in which analysis allows you to articulate this position.

So, I will speak to you about the Good. Perhaps I will speak poorly of it—this is not a game—in the sense that I do not have “all the possible Good” to tell you about the Good. Perhaps I will not speak of it as well as I should, because I am not, today, entirely good enough myself to do so to the level the subject demands. However, the idea of nature, despite everything I will tell you about it, ensures that I do not linger on this accidental contingency. I simply ask for your forgiveness if, in the end, you do not find yourself entirely satisfied.

This question of the Good is as close as possible, after all, to our actions. Everything that operates as exchanges among people, and even more so an intervention of our kind, habitually places itself under the authority, under the justification, of the Good. This is the sublime perspective, even a sublimated one. You could see that regarding the function of sublimation—as much as I discussed with you last time about what FREUD articulates concerning the death drive, using an example of sublimation—that sublimation, after all, could, from a certain perspective, be defined as an opinion in the Platonic sense of the term, an opinion arranged in such a way as to reach what could be the object of science, where this object is, and where science cannot reach it.

A sublimation, whatever it may be—even as universal as the Good itself—can be momentarily considered, in this context, to be a counterfeit science. It is certain—everything in your experience, in the way it is formulated, suggests it—that this notion, this purpose of the Good, presents itself to you as problematic. What exact Good are you pursuing regarding your passion?

This is indeed a question that is always at the forefront, at the top of the agenda of our behavior at every moment: to know what our actual relationship must be with this desire for beneficence, with this desire to heal, of which we know speaks at every moment, at the most concrete level of our experience, as something we must reckon with as: – something that does not, far from it, signify itself,
– something that, in many cases, is instantaneous and liable to lead us astray.

I will go further: it is a certain paradoxical, even sharp, way of articulating our desire as a non-desire to heal. It is indeed something that has no other meaning than to warn us against the vulgar paths of the Good as they present themselves so easily to us, on the slope of beneficial trickery, of wishing the Good of the subject.

But then, what exactly do you desire to heal the subject of? There is no doubt that something absolutely inherent in our experience, in our path, in our inspiration—something we cannot separate ourselves from—is certainly to heal the subject of the illusions that hold them back on the path of their desire.

How far can we go in this sense? And after all, these illusions—even when they do not, in themselves, contain something respectable—still require the subject’s willingness to abandon them. Is the limit of resistance here simply an individual limit? This is where the question of the position of goods in relation to desire lies. Certainly, all kinds of tempting goods present themselves to the subject, and you know how imprudent it would be for us to allow ourselves to be required to be, for them, the promise of all these goods as accessible.

Yet, it is precisely in a certain cultural perspective—what I have called “the American way of our therapeutics”—that this approach, this arrival, this presentation of one’s demand to the psychoanalyst is situated in terms of access to the goods of the earth. We will see—I believe, in a way, I dare not say firmly enough—how far removed we are from the idea that things could be formulated so simply. Simply, before entering into this problem of goods, I wanted to outline for you this question of illusions on the path of desire and the following: that the breaking of these illusions is a question of science, of the science of Good and Evil, as the saying goes.

A question of science that is situated in this central field whose irreducible, ineliminable character I try to show you in our experience, precisely because, perhaps, it is tied to this prohibition, to this reservation which, during our previous explorations—especially last year, when I spoke to you about desire and its interpretation—I demonstrated as the essential feature in this “he did not know,” in the imperfect tense, as preserving the radical field of enunciation, of the most fundamental relationship of the subject with the articulation of meaning. This is to say that the subject is not the agent but the support, insofar as they cannot even estimate the consequences; it is in their relationship to this articulation of meaning that they, as subject, emerge as its consequence.

Let us turn now to something from that phantasmatic experience, the one I have chosen to bring before you to exemplify, in a way, this central field that desire occupies. Do not forget those moments of phantasmatic creation in SADE’s text, where it is explicitly articulated that the greatest cruelty facing the subject is precisely this: that their fate is flaunted before them—with their knowledge. It is in this way that this fate is expressed in terms of a diabolical jubilation, encountering a reading that is almost intolerable. It is in front of these unfortunate individuals that the conspiracy concerning them unfolds openly.

The value of the phantasm here is to suspend the subject, for us, in the most radical questioning, whose responsibility rests on a certain “he did not know” at its core. This expression, in the imperfect tense, already poses a question that surpasses the subject. I ask you here to recall the ambiguity revealed by linguistic experience concerning this imperfect tense. In French, when one says: “A moment later, the bomb was exploding,” it can mean two opposing things:
– either that it actually exploded,
– or that something intervened, preventing it from exploding.

Thus, here we are at the subject of the Good. This subject has been a stopping point for us not only recently, and we must note that the thinkers of past eras—whose preoccupations, God knows why, seem somewhat outdated to us—have nevertheless had, from time to time, rather interesting articulations on the matter. I do not hesitate to present them to you, however strange they may be, because I believe that, introduced here in their context, their apparent abstraction is not intended to hinder you. I mean that when Saint AUGUSTINE, in Book VII of his Confessions, writes the following, I do not think it should merely elicit an indulgent smile from you:
“That all that is, is good, being the work of God. I also understood that all things that are corrupted are good, and that they could not be corrupted if they were supremely good. It also could not happen that they be corrupted if they were not good. For, if they had supreme goodness, they would be incorruptible, and if they had no goodness, there would be nothing in them capable of being corrupted, since corruption harms that which it corrupts, and it can only harm by diminishing the good.”

Here begins the core of the argument:
“Thus, either corruption does no harm—which is untenable—or all things that are corrupted lose some good, which is indisputable. If they had lost all that was good in them, they would no longer exist at all. Otherwise, if they still subsisted without being able to be corrupted further, they would be in a state more perfect than before losing all that was good in them, since they would remain in an incorruptible state.”

I believe you grasp the core, even the irony of the argument, as well as the fact that this is precisely what we are questioning. If it is intolerable to realize that at the center of all things is subtracted all that is good in them, what can be said of what remains, which could still be something, or something else? This question resonates across centuries and experiences.

And in the same edition of SADE that I mentioned to you previously, from The History of Juliette, in Chapter IV, pages 29 and 30, we find a similar question—except that it is pursued, as it must be, along with the question of the Law, and this no less singularly, I mean strangely. It is this strangeness upon which I wish to focus your thoughts, because it is the very strangeness of the structure in question. SADE writes:

“It is never in anarchy that tyrants are born. You only see them rise in the shadow of laws, taking their authority from them.
Thus, the reign of laws is flawed; it is therefore inferior to that of anarchy. The greatest proof of what I am asserting is the obligation of governments to plunge themselves into anarchy when they wish to remake their constitution. To abolish their old laws, they are obliged to establish a revolutionary regime where there is no law. In this regime, new laws are eventually born, but the second regime is necessarily less pure than the first since it derives from it. It was necessary to enact this primary good, anarchy, to arrive at the second good, the constitution of the state.”

This is clear. I present this to you as a fundamental example. The same argumentation is reflected, in its singularity, in thinkers assuredly distant from one another in their concerns. Their repetition simply shows that there must be something here that compels this sort of logical stumbling along a particular path. For us, the question of the Good is, from the outset, articulated in its relationship with the Law by our experience. Nothing is, on the other hand, more tempting than to unreservedly elude this question of the Good behind some implication of a natural good, a harmony to be rediscovered on the path to elucidating desire.

And yet, what our daily experience demonstrates to us in the form of what we call the subject’s defenses is precisely the ways in which the pursuit of the Good first presents itself constantly, originally—if I may say so—to us, as some kind of alibi for the subject. These are the paths the subject proposes to you, the very paths through which the entire analytic experience is but an invitation toward the revelation of their desire.

This is why it is important that we closely examine this something that is entirely foundational, which appears to rearticulate the proposition to the subject and sees Good in the primitivity of a relationship that has shifted compared to everything that, until then, had been articulated for them by philosophers.

Certainly, it seems that nothing has changed and that the emphasis in FREUD remains within the register of pleasure. I have revisited and emphasized this throughout the year: necessarily, any meditation on the Good of humanity, everything that has been articulated since the origins of moralist thought, by those for whom the term ethics gained meaning—reflections of humanity on its condition and calculations concerning its own paths—has been carried out in reference to the indication of the index of pleasure.

From PLATO, through ARISTOTLE, and certainly via the Stoics, the Epicureans, and even Christian thought itself—in Saint THOMAS, for example—matters unfold most clearly along the lines of an essentially hedonistic problematic concerning the determination of goods.

It is all too clear that this is not without extreme difficulties, difficulties inherent in experience itself, and that in trying to resolve them, all philosophers have been led to distinguish—not between true and false pleasures, because it is impossible to make such a distinction—but between true and false goods that pleasure indicates.

Does the emphasis FREUD places on his articulation of the pleasure principle not bring us something new, something essential, which allows us precisely, at this level, to record an initial gain, a benefit, a benefit of knowledge and clarity, undoubtedly correlated to what humanity has been able to gain in the meantime regarding this problematic?

When examined closely, do we not see in FREUD’s formulation of the pleasure principle something fundamentally distinct from everything that had, until then, given meaning to the term pleasure?

This is what I want to draw your attention to first. I can only do so appropriately by pointing out here that the consideration of the pleasure principle is inseparable—it is truly a dialectical conception—from FREUD’s articulation of the reality principle.

But we must begin with one of the two, and I will simply start by drawing your attention to what FREUD articulates exactly in the pleasure principle. Observe its formulation, its articulation, from the Entwurf (Project for a Scientific Psychology), from which I have had you begin this year in articulating ethics, to its final articulation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The end illuminates the beginning, but already in the Entwurf, you can see the nerve point I want to dwell on briefly.

Without a doubt, pleasure—inasmuch as it is through its function that the reactions of the human subject’s psyche are ultimately organized—is apparently articulated based on the presuppositions of satisfaction. The subject is propelled by a lack, which is of the order of need, into its snares until it generates a perception identical to the one that first provided satisfaction. And indeed, the simplest and most crude reference to the reality principle is that one finds satisfaction in the paths that have already provided it.

But look closer. Is this really all FREUD says? Certainly not! From the very beginning, you see the economy of what he calls the libidinal investment, and this is where the originality of the Entwurf lies—in something that organizes the pathways governing the distribution of these so-called investments in such a way that a certain threshold is not exceeded, beyond which excitation would become unbearable for the subject.

It is in the introduction, in the economy of this function of pathways, that the germ of something emerges—a germ that, as FREUD’s thought develops (insofar as FREUD’s thought is rooted in his experience), will gain increasing importance. I have been criticized for saying, at one point, that all our experience—by which I mean the experience we are capable of directing, the plane within which we move—takes, from the perspective of history and ethics, its exemplary value from the idea that we place no emphasis on habit. We stand in opposition to that register, which belongs to the domain of human behavioral refinement through conditioning.

It is precisely this notion of pathways that has been cited against me in this context—a criticism I reject, in the sense that what seems to characterize FREUD’s position, the articulation that invokes pathways, has nothing to do with the function of habit as defined in the concept of ethos, of learning. In FREUD, it is not about the imprint as creative, but about the pleasure generated by the functioning of these pathways. The nerve of the pleasure principle in FREUD, as it will later take its full articulation, still resides at the level of subjectivity.

The pathway is not a mechanical effect; it is invoked as the pleasure of ease. It will later be taken up as the pleasure of repetition. The repetition of need—as someone articulated—functions in FREUD’s thought, in Freudian psychology, only as an occasion for something called the need for repetition and, more precisely, the repetition compulsion.

The core of Freudian thought, as we engage with it at every moment, as we analysts actively employ it—whether we attend seminars or not—lies in the fact that in FREUD, the function of memory as such, the fundamental recollection of all phenomena we encounter, is, strictly speaking—and this is the least that can be said—a rival to the satisfactions it is tasked with ensuring.

Memory carries its own dimension, the weight of which can extend beyond this satisfactory purpose. The tyranny of memory is what, for us, properly speaking, is elaborated in what we might call structure, in the sense that this term structure holds for us. This is the dividing point, the novelty, the rupture on which emphasis must be placed if one wishes to clearly see what is new in Freudian thought and experience concerning our conception of human functioning as such.

It is always possible, no doubt, for a way of thinking intent on bridging this gap to point out that nature exhibits cycles and returns. Today, I will not cry “Madness!” in response to such an objection. Instead, I simply indicate the terms within which you could, and can, reflect and respond to it.

The natural cycle, indeed immanent to all—perhaps—to all that exists, is something extremely diverse in its registers and levels. But I ask you to pause at the rupture introduced by this emergence within the order of the manifestation of the real, entailed by the cycle as such. Whether treated—and it is treated—by humanity insofar as humanity is the bearer of language, or in relation to a pair of signifiers, as, for example, in traditional thought where any form of symbolic schema is conceived. Consider the yin and the yang, two signifiers, one of which is envisioned as being eclipsed by the rise of the other, and its subsequent return. Or, equally validly—this is not about allegiance to yin or yang—consider the introduction of the sine and the cosine.

In other words, the structure engendered by memory must not obscure, in our experience as such, the structure of memory itself insofar as it is composed of a signifying articulation. For if you omit this, you cannot sustain or distinguish this essential register in articulating our experience—namely, the autonomy, the dominance, the instance as such of recollection, not at the level of the real but at the level of the functioning of the pleasure principle. I point this out in passing: what relationship and what fundamental distinction does this introduce? This is not a Byzantine discussion.

It is about the fact that, where we create a gap and an abyss, we may inversely bridge elsewhere what also presented itself as gaps and as abysses. The key difference is that here an idea is posited: it is here that one may glimpse where the birth of the subject as such might reside, something for which no other justification can account. As I have said before, the goal of the evolution of matter toward consciousness is, purely and simply, a mystical notion—elusive and, properly speaking, historically indeterminable. This is evident, moreover, in the fact that there is no homogeneity in the order of the appearance of phenomena, whether premonitory, preliminary, partial, or preparatory to consciousness, or in any kind of natural order. For even so, it is from its current state that consciousness manifests as a phenomenon in an absolutely erratic distribution—almost, I would say, fragmented.

It is at the most disparate levels of our engagement with our own real that the stain or touch of consciousness appears. There is no continuity, no homogeneity to consciousness, and after all, this is precisely where FREUD has, at multiple junctures, stopped to underscore the infunctional nature of the phenomenon of consciousness.

Our subject, in relation to the functioning of the signifying chain, however, has a place that is entirely solid and, I would say, almost identifiable—by which I mean within history. The appearance and function of the subject as such provide us with a completely new formula that is susceptible to objective identification. The definition of a subject, the original subject, a subject as it functions as a subject, a subject detectable within the chain of phenomena, is nothing other than this: that what a subject as such fundamentally, essentially, originally represents is that it can forget.

Remove this “it,” and the subject is literally, in its origin and as such, the elision of a signifier—the skipped-over signifier in the chain. This is the first place, the first person. Here, the subject’s appearance manifests as such, making it evident why and how the notion of the unconscious is central to our experience. Begin here, and you will find the explanation for many things, including the peculiar, identifiable feature in history called rites. By rites, I mean those practices through which people in so-called primitive civilizations believe themselves obliged to assist or accompany the most natural thing in the world—namely, the return of natural cycles.

If the emperor does not plow the furrow on a specific spring day, undoubtedly—you know I am referring to the Emperor of China—the entire rhythm of the seasons will be disrupted. If order is not maintained in the Royal House, the domain of the sea will encroach upon that of the land. We see echoes of this even into the early 16th century, in SHAKESPEARE.

What could this possibly mean if not precisely the essential relationship that binds the subject to significations and establishes them at the origin as responsible for forgetting? What connection could exist between humans and the return of the sunrise, if not for the fact that, as speaking beings, humans sustain themselves in this direct relationship with the signifier? This is tied to the notion, if you will, invoking SMITH, that we stop at nothing less than the original position of humanity in relation to nature, analogous to CHANTECLER in relation to his own crowing. This is a subject brought to us by a minor poet, who might have been better received if he had not first defamed the figure of Cyrano DE BERGERAC, reducing him to a farcical concoction with no relation to the monumental stature of this character.

Thus, we are led to pose, in these terms and on this level, the question of the Good. The question of the Good straddles the pleasure principle and the reality principle. From such a conception, there is no chance of escaping conflict when, assuredly, we have significantly displaced its center.

Here, I believe, it is impossible not to highlight something insufficiently articulated even within Freudian thought itself—namely, that this reality is not simply the dialectical counterpart of the pleasure principle. More precisely, it is not merely linked to it through a non-dialectical relationship, as many authors suggest, but instead consists in the fact that reality would only exist to force us to bump our heads against the false paths into which the pleasure principle leads us.

We make reality out of pleasure. This notion is essential and can be entirely summed up in the concept of praxis in the double sense this term has taken on throughout history:

• As the ethical dimension proper, that is, action as self-sufficient, not merely aiming at an ergon (work), but inscribed within an energeia (activity).
• On the other hand, as the productive dimension, the creation ex nihilo, which I mentioned last time—both of which, not coincidentally, are subsumable under the same term, praxis.

I now arrive at the level of ethics. It is undoubtedly here that the problem arises, and it is here that we must immediately observe how crude it is to assume that, within the order of ethics itself, everything could be reduced—as is too often the case in the theoretical elaborations of analytic authors—to social constraint, as if the mode or manner by which this social constraint is established did not, in itself, pose a problem for those who live within the dimension of our experience.

How is it that this social constraint has been exercised for so long? In whose name would it be exercised? Is it due to some collective inclination? Why, after all this time, has social constraint not managed to center itself on the most appropriate paths for satisfying individual desires? I said desires.

In an assembly of analysts, must I say more to convey the distance between the organization of desires and the organization of needs? Who knows—perhaps I need to insist. After all, I might receive a clearer response in front of a group of schoolchildren. At least they would immediately sense that the school system is not designed to allow them to masturbate under the best possible conditions! [sic!]

Still, I believe it should be apparent to the eyes of analysts that there is a particular realm of dreaming that we properly call—this is what is significant—the realm of utopia. This means, take for example, Fourier, whose writings, incidentally, are among the most hilariously entertaining, precisely because the buffoonery they exude should instruct us and sufficiently show how distant we are, in what is called “social progress,” from anything designed for the purpose—not of opening all the floodgates—but simply of conceiving any social order based on the satisfaction of desires.

This, for the moment, is the issue: to understand what this means and whether we can see more clearly than others. We are certainly not the first to venture down this path. I know there is a segment of my audience with Marxist leanings. Here, I believe they may evoke the intimate, profound connection woven through every line between what I am advancing here and the fundamental discussions of MARX regarding humanity’s relationship with the objects of its production.

To summarize—quickly and decisively—this brings us back to the point I left you at during a detour, I believe, in my penultimate lecture: Saint MARTIN cutting, with his sword, the broad piece of fabric in which he was wrapped on his journey to Cavalla. Let us take it precisely as it is, at the level of goods. To put it plainly, let us ask: what is this piece of fabric? This piece of fabric, insofar as it can be made into a garment—a utility value—is something that others, before us, have already contemplated.

And you would be mistaken to think that humanity’s relationship with the object of its production, in its primordial mechanism—even in MARX, who has delved quite deeply into this area—is fully elucidated.

I am not here to critique economic structures. However, I recently came across something amusing—one of those things I enjoy because it resonates with a dimension that often feels tangible yet remains more or less mystified. Apparently, in my last seminar, I alluded to a particular chapter in the latest book by SARTRE, The Critique of Dialectical Reason.

I quite enjoy this because I am about to reference it again, though only in connection with thirty pages I read for the first time last Sunday. Regarding SARTRE, I am unsure how to discuss his entire body of work, as I have only read these thirty pages, but I must say they are quite good. They concern the primordial relationships between humanity and the objects of its needs. It seems that SARTRE aims to push these considerations to their ultimate conclusion. If that is indeed his endeavor, and if he exhaustively succeeds, the work will certainly be useful.

At its core, this fundamental relationship is defined in terms of scarcity, which SARTRE emphasizes as the foundation of humanity’s condition, the very thing that establishes humanity in its relationship to needs. This seems to me an approach to thought that aspires to complete dialectical transparency yet remains, as a final concept, rather obscure. I wish to revisit this issue from a different perspective. Whether this fabric is rare or not, it reveals that we may have imparted a certain breath to it, causing it to flutter, thereby allowing us to situate it in a less opaque manner.

Analysts have distanced themselves from this fabric by attempting to discern its symbolism. They have told us that it simultaneously reveals and conceals, that the symbolism of clothing is a valid symbolism. Yet at no point can we determine whether the intent of this phallic fabric is to reveal or to obscure. The profound duality of all discourse on the symbolism of clothing is something I ask you to consider, as an exercise in grasping the impasse inherent in the specific handling of the notion of “symbol,” as it has thus far been employed in analysis.

If you have access to it, I urge you to examine The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, issue no. 2–3 of year 10, a large volume dedicated to the 50th anniversary of JONES, which contains an article by FLÜGEL on the symbolism of clothing. There, you will find these impasses presented even more vividly, almost caricaturally exaggerated, than in the latest issue of our journal, where I highlight JONES’s articulation concerning symbolism.

Regardless of the nonsensical things said about this symbolism, they still lead us somewhere. There is something hidden behind all this, and it is, apparently, something always revolving around that sacred phallus. We are brought back to something that perhaps should have been considered from the outset: the relationship between the fabric and the missing hair—not missing everywhere, of course! And here, there is indeed a psychoanalytic author who claims that this entire fabric is nothing more than an extrapolation, an extension of the female fleece, specifically in how it hides the fact that she does not have one.

Such revelations of consciousness always carry an element of comedy. Yet, they are not entirely absurd. I find this to be quite a charming allegory. Perhaps this would involve a touch of phenomenology concerning the function of nudity, in that nudity is purely and simply a natural phenomenon. Without a doubt, analytic thought demonstrates that nudity is not a natural phenomenon, precisely because its particularly natural, exalted, and self-signifying quality also conceals something beyond it. But we need not delve into phenomenology. I prefer fables.

The fable, on this occasion, is as follows: Adam and Eve, with the dimension of the signifier introduced by the Father in his benevolent instructions:

“Adam, give names to everything around you.”

Adam—those famed hairs of an Eve whose beauty we imagine as matching the grandeur of this inaugural gesture—plucks a single hair. Everything revolves around this hair, this frog’s hair, which, no doubt, underpins what I am trying to demonstrate here. A hair is plucked from the one destined to be your eternal companion, and the next day, after three turns of history, she returns to you with a mink coat on her shoulders!

Here lies the essence of the fabric. It is not because humans have less hair than other animals that we must delve into the tumult unleashed across the ages by this industry of ours. According to linguists, this industry resides within a structure outside which the first problem emerges: the problem of goods.

At the beginning, anything that is articulated—even if it is a chain of hairs—exists as a signifier. This textile is, first and foremost, a text. There is the fabric, and it is impossible—here I invoke MARX, even for the driest of minds—it is impossible, unless engaging in psychological fiction, to posit as the starting point some undefined cooperation of producers.

At the outset, there is inventive production. That is to say, only humans—and why humans alone?—begin to weave something, something not in the cocoon-like relationship of wrapping one’s own body, but something that will roam independently in the world as fabric, circulating. Why? Because this fabric holds the value of time. This is what sets it apart from all natural production.

One could compare it to creations in the animal kingdom, but fabric originates as something manufactured, subject to fashion, to antiquity, to novelty. It carries the value of use, of time. It is a reserve for needs, existing whether it is needed or not. Around this fabric unfolds the entire dialectic of rivalry and sharing, within which needs are constituted as such. To grasp this, contrast it with the horizon suggested by the Gospel, the astonishing statement where the Messiah shows humanity the nature of those who trust in the providence of the Father:

“They neither weave nor spin, yet they propose to humanity the imitation of the lilies of the field and the plumage of birds.”

A remarkable abolition of the text by the word! As I pointed out last time, this indeed characterizes this word: it must be torn from all text to be believed.

Yet human history continues within the text. And in the text, we have the fabric—the fabric and Saint MARTIN’s gesture, which originally signifies this: it is humanity as such—humanity with rights, therefore with forms—beginning to individualize itself. This happens insofar as holes are made in the fabric through which humans pass their heads and then their arms, thus beginning to organize themselves as clothed beings. That is, as beings who, once their needs are met, still ask:

“What might there be behind all this?”

In other words, what might they still desire despite it all? I say “despite it all” because from this moment onward, humanity knows less and less. What could they still, despite everything, continue to desire? Here we arrive at the crossroads of utilitarianism, the function of utility, and usefulness. The thought of Jeremy BENTHAM is not a pure and simple continuation of the gnoseological development to which an entire lineage has devoted itself, striving to reduce the transcendent, the supernatural, to a supposed elucidation of the progress of knowledge.

BENTHAM, as demonstrated in The Theory of Fictions (recently brought into focus within his work), is the figure who tackles the question at the level of the signifier. Regarding all institutions—specifically their fundamentally verbal, fictive nature—his inquiry is not about reducing to nothing the multiple, incoherent, contradictory rights exemplified in English jurisprudence. On the contrary, through the symbolic artifice of these terms, which are themselves text-creators, he seeks to identify what, in all of this, could be useful—specifically, what could become the object of sharing.

The long historical elaboration of the problem of the Good culminates in focusing on the question of what goods are, how they are created, and how they are organized—not from supposedly predetermined natural needs, but insofar as they provide material for distribution. This, in turn, gives rise to the dialectic of the Good as such, to the extent that it gains effective meaning for humanity.

Human needs reside in the useful, within the symbolic realm. Needs participate in what, within the symbolic text, can be deemed “useful.” At this stage and level, for BENTHAM, there is no doubt or problem. The maximum utility for the greatest number—that is the law according to which the problem of the function of goods is organized.

At this level, we are still before the subject has passed their head through the holes in the fabric. The fabric is designed for as many subjects as possible to pass their heads and limbs through. Yet, of course, this entire discourse would be meaningless if things did not start to function differently. It is precisely because, in this rare or not-so-rare object—in this produced thing, in this wealth that is ultimately correlated with some form of poverty—there is from the outset something other than its use-value or its utility for enjoyment.

It is clear that the Good is articulated in an entirely different manner. The Good is not about the fabric’s use. The Good resides in this: that a subject may dispose of it. The domain of the Good is the birth of power: “I can do good.” The notion of disposing of the Good is essential. When placed in the foreground, it brings to light the entire history of what humanity’s claim to self-disposition has meant—at a certain point in history.

It is not I, but FREUD, who took it upon himself to expose what this means in the context of historical affectivity: it means having the ability to dispose of one’s goods. And everyone knows that this ability does not come without a certain disorder, and that this disorder sufficiently reveals its true nature. To dispose of one’s goods is to have the right to deprive others of them. It is indeed around this point—there is no need, I think, for me to emphasize this further—that the course of historical destiny unfolds.

The entire question is to determine at what point one might consider this process to have reached its conclusion, because, of course, this function of the Good as such generates an entire dialectic. I mean that the power to deprive others is precisely where a very strong connection arises, from which the Other as such emerges. If you recall what I once told you about the function of privation—which, since then, has continued to provoke questions for some—I ask you to recognize that what I am presenting here is no coincidence. You will remember that in articulating privation, to contrast it with frustration and castration, I told you that privation is a function instituted as such within the symbolic order. In this sense, nothing is deprived of anything, which does not prevent the Good that one is deprived of from being entirely real.

But the important thing to know is that the one who enacts privation occupies an imaginary function. It is the little other as such, the semblable, as it is given within this relationship, partly rooted in nature and the mirror stage, and which presents itself to us at the level where things articulate within the symbolic. It presents itself to us as the privateur, the one who deprives. What is called “defending our goods” is—this is an experiential fact you must constantly recall in analysis—nothing other than one and the same thing: it has one and the same dimension as defending ourselves from enjoying them.

The dimension of the Good as such is what erects a powerful and essential wall on the path of our desire. It is the first thing we encounter, at every moment and always.

How can we conceive of passing beyond it?

How must we identify a certain repudiation of the most radical kind, a certain ideal of the Good, in order for us even to understand the path on which our experience unfolds?

This is what I will continue to explore with you next time.