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(All parts in English)

In a report set to appear in the next issue of our journal…
a report I delivered two years ago at Royaumont, a report that was somewhat hastily thrown together, as I explained, since I composed it between two seminars here. I will retain its improvised form while attempting to complete and rectify certain elements contained within it.

…I mention somewhere that the analyst must pay something to maintain their function, that they pay with words: their interpretations, and they pay with their person in this way—which can be said to be entirely neglected in the present evolution of analysis—that through transference, they are literally dispossessed of it. By this, I mean that, regardless of what the analyst thinks and whatever their panicked recourse to “counter-transference,” they must indeed undergo this process. It is not just them present in the encounter with the one they have committed themselves to. Lastly, the analyst must also pay by rendering a judgment concerning their action.

This is, after all, a minimal requirement. Analysis is a judgment. I would say that what the analyst does is required everywhere else and that, in truth—though it may seem scandalous to assert this—it is likely for a reason. The reason lies in the fact that, in some respect, they are acutely aware that they cannot fully grasp what they are doing in psychoanalysis.

There is a part of their action that remains veiled even to themselves. This justifies the point I wished to bring you to, the point I have brought you to this year. That is to say, if I proposed that you follow me this year on this issue, one that raises the question of what such a possibility—namely, the relationship to the unconscious as opened by Freud—entails in terms of general ethical consequences, it is, quite evidently, to bring us closer to our own ethics.

This is why there has been, inevitably, this detour, which must have appeared to you, concerning the interest in Kantian notions that were introduced last time. But before asking the one who spoke to you last time to provide some additional details that I consider useful, I find it equally necessary to reposition for you, ultimately, at this point where we are approaching the end of our detour this year, what this means.

I will briefly recall very simple things, articulated in the terms I have presented to you in previous years. The question is: what I intended to remind you of, before bringing you closer to the practice of analysis and the technical problems that cannot, in the current state of things, be resolved without such reminders. These are simple points I will remind you of immediately.

Firstly, is the goal of analysis what is being demanded of us? If what is being demanded, ultimately, must be called by a simple word—happiness—then that is indeed what is being demanded of us. This is nothing new. The demand for happiness, or “happiness” as English authors put it in their language, is precisely what is at stake.

In the report I mentioned earlier, in its current form for publication, it seemed—looking back—a bit too aphoristic. I try to smooth out the hinges. I allude to this without elaborating further. The matter is not made any easier by the fact, as has been said before, that “Happiness has become a factor of politics.” I shall say no more on this point.

I wish here to make you feel what this means. It is the same notion that led me to conclude the lecture that marked the end of a certain era of my activity within a certain group, from which we have since parted ways. I concluded with the statement: “Psychoanalysis, dialectics.” That was the title I gave to what I delivered that day. I ended with the following declaration: “There can be no satisfaction for any outside the satisfaction of all.”

My purpose, which was to re-center psychoanalysis around the concept of dialectics, serves to make clear to us that the goal—the aim—appears to be indefinitely postponed. It is therefore not the fault of psychoanalysis, if you will, that at present, the question of happiness cannot be articulated otherwise. I would argue that, as SAINT-JUST puts it:

“Happiness has become a factor of politics.”

This is a correlative; it is not new that matters stand thus. The question of happiness, for us, has no possible Aristotelian solution: it is not possible for anyone to isolate their happiness from the satisfaction of all.

What does this mean? It means that, with the entry of happiness into politics, matters concerning happiness are, for now, relegated to a necessary, preliminary, and primordial stage: the satisfaction of basic needs for all humanity.

The dialectic of the master…
as it allows ARISTOTLE to make a choice among the goods offered to the master and to tell him that only some of these goods are worthy of his devotion, namely contemplation…
is something that, for us, has been devalued—I emphasize this—for historical reasons, for reasons tied to the historical moment we are living in, which is expressed in politics by the following formula:

“There can be no satisfaction for anyone without the satisfaction of all.”

It is within this context that analysis—without us being able to precisely understand what justifies its emergence in this context—occurs; it is within this context that analysis unfolds, that the analyst offers themselves to receive—and they do receive, it is a fact—the demand for happiness.

Everything I have articulated this year has consisted in demonstrating, to the extent I could, by selecting among the most salient terms that could help you grasp the distance traversed since ARISTOTLE, let’s say. I have tried to show you how we approach matters from an entirely different level and how, ultimately, we are far removed from any formulation of a discipline of happiness.

For it is quite clear that, in ARISTOTLE—for instance, and he is deserving of the highest degree of such consideration, being exemplary—there exists a discipline of happiness. There are paths laid out by him, guiding anyone who follows his line of reasoning toward outcomes that, in each domain of human activity, fulfill a function of virtue. This virtue is achieved through a μεσότης (mesótes), which is far from merely a “golden mean,” a process tied to the principle of avoiding extremes on either side, but which enables a person to choose reasonably what is meant to allow them to achieve their own proper good.

Nothing similar exists in analysis. Observe carefully: what we claim to do, by methods that would seem astonishing to someone coming from the Lyceum (Λύκειον), so to speak, are approaches that are meant, in some way, to place the subject in a position where things might mysteriously—one could almost say miraculously—turn out well for them, so they handle matters the right way. God knows we can feel the darkness that lingers over such an ambition, such as the emergence of what we call “genital objectality” and, as is often imprudently added, aligning ourselves with a reality.

There is only one concept that refers to a potential happy resolution of tenderness, and that is the notion of sublimation.
I will not revisit today the various formulations of this concept, but it is entirely clear that, taking FREUD’s most exoteric formulation first—when he presents sublimation as eminently realized through the artist, for instance, through the activity of the artist—well, what does that mean?

In FREUD, it literally means—I don’t need to remind you of the passage, as I’ve gone over it with you thoroughly this year—that a person’s desires can be made commercial, marketable, in the form of books or other products, through an aesthetic activity, an artistic production. That’s what it means. I would say that the frankness, the cynicism of such a formulation, to my mind, retains an immense merit, of course, though it does not exhaust the core of the question: how is such a thing possible, naturally?

The other formulation tells us that sublimation is the satisfaction of a drive through the alteration of its object, without repression. A deeper definition, certainly, but one that seems to open, in my view, a more thorny problem—if what I teach you does not allow you, let’s say, to see where the rabbit lies.

The satisfaction in question, if it exists, could consist of its progress, its process, or of what is required for there to be, in a valid way, a drive accompanied by its change. For there to be, by definition, satisfaction of both the drive and the alteration of its object, the drive must indeed be connected to something that already places within it the rabbit that must be pulled out of the hat.

It is not a new object; it is the change of object itself. It is because the drive is already profoundly marked by the articulation of the signifier that it contains within itself something that makes the change of object possible.

In other words, it is because, in the graph, the drive is situated at the level of the unconscious articulation of a sequence of signifiers that constitutes it, fundamentally, as an alienation,

• that there can be something, in return, which connects by a common factor each of the signifiers composing this typical sequence,
• that this specifically metonymic relationship, from one signifier to the next, which we call desire, is precisely not the new object, nor the prior object, but the change of object itself,
• that the satisfaction in question—since, in the definition of sublimation, repression is eliminated—consists in the fact that here there is, implicitly or explicitly, a transition from not-knowing to knowing, in the form of the recognition of this: that desire is nothing but the metonymy of the discourse of demand, that desire is this change as such.

If you allow me to take an example, I will use one that came to mind as I was preparing these remarks for you. I searched for an example that could illustrate what I mean to help you understand sublimation—the transition, let us say, from a verb to what grammar calls its complement, or to what a more philological grammar might call its determinant.

Let us take the most radical verb in the evolution of the phases of the drive: the verb to eat. In many languages, this verb and its action are presented directly, as a matter of course, before specifying what it pertains to.

This reveals the secondary factor that composes the subject. We do not even have the subject here that would allow us to express the “something” that may be eaten. Let us say there is eating. What? The book.

When we see in the Apocalypse the image of “eating the book,” what does it mean, if not that something has endowed the book itself with the value of incorporation? In this powerful image, the book becomes the incorporation of the signifier itself. It becomes the medium of a truly apocalyptic creation. That is to say, the signifier, on this occasion, becomes God, the object of incorporation itself.

What we thus bring forward, to the extent that we dare to formulate something resembling satisfaction not paid for by repression, is the central theme, promoted in its primacy: what is desire?

In this regard, I can only remind you here—of what I articulated in its time—that fulfilling one’s desire always necessarily presents itself within a perspective of absolute condition.

This is because demand, as I have said, is simultaneously beyond and beneath itself, due to its articulation with the signifier. Demand always asks for something else, and in every satisfaction of need, it demands something more. The satisfaction articulated stretches and is framed within this gap, this hollow, and desire forms as that which sustains, as such, this metonymy—that is, what demand means beyond what it articulates.

It is not without reason, then, that the question of fulfilling desire is naturally formulated in what I will call a perspective of the Last Judgment. Try for yourself to ask what it might mean to “have fulfilled one’s desire,” if not to have fulfilled it, so to speak, in the end. This encroachment of death upon life is what gives dynamism to any question attempting to articulate itself on the subject of fulfilling desire.

To illustrate this point, let us say that to judge the question of desire, we place it directly within the framework of Parmenidean absolutism, which precisely negates everything that is not being.

“Being is,” he says, “non-being is not. Nothing exists,” he asserts, “of what has not been born, and therefore everything that exists lives only in the lack of being.”

FREUD posed the question of whether life can be like death—whether the support of this relationship to death underpins, like a bowstring, the arc of life’s ascent and descent, whether life has something to do, in sum, with death.

You know that FREUD, in the end, thought he could pose this question based on experience, and this fact proves that it is raised by our experience.

What I am telling you now is not about that death. It concerns the second death:

• the one that can still be aimed at, as I showed you through a concrete example in SADE’s text, after physical death has occurred,
• the one that all human tradition, after all, has never ceased to keep before it, seeing in it the end of suffering.

This is the same as saying that all tradition has never ceased imagining, likewise, a second suffering—a suffering beyond death, indefinitely sustained by the impossibility of crossing this boundary of the second death.

This is why the tradition of hell has always remained so vivid. As I have shown you, it is still present in SADE, with this idea of perpetuating the suffering inflicted on the victim—since there is this refinement, this detail, attributed to one of the heroes of the sadistic novel—by ensuring the damnation of the one brought from life to death.

Whatever the scope of this metapsychological imagination of the death drive may be—whether the fact of its formulation is justified or not—the question, simply by being posed, is articulated for us as follows:
How can man, that is, a living being, access this moment of death and come to know it?

The answer is straightforward: through the virtue of the signifier, and, I would say, in its most radical form. It is in the signifier, and insofar as it articulates a chain of signifiers, that one can touch upon the fact that something might be missing from the chain itself. In truth, it is as plain as day to say this. And, after all, the failure to recognize this or to promote it as the essential articulation of non-knowledge as a dynamic value—that is, to acknowledge this as the discovery of the unconscious—literally means, in the form of this ultimate utterance, only this:

“…they know not what they do.”

As simple as this may seem, it appears essential to recall when we observe that, from the theoretical standpoint, neglecting to assert it as a fundamental principle leads to the proliferation of references that resonate with a note of disorientation, like a jungle or an overwhelming downpour. To use a phrase from the Charente region, it “rains as if it’s being hurled down.”

I recently read—perhaps a bit hastily—the translation of BERGLER’s latest work made available to us. Assuredly, it is not devoid of sharpness or interest. Yet, one cannot help but feel the impression of a kind of delirious frenzy of uncontrolled notions. And so, to clarify what I mean when I speak of this response:
How can man, that is, a living being, access his own relationship to death?
Answer: through the virtue of the signifier. I wish to show you that this access is more tangible than that connotative reference.

This is what I have attempted to have you recognize, during these recent sessions, in a properly aesthetic form—one that is sensible—by asking you to see at this point the function of beauty. Beauty is precisely what reveals this place of the relationship between man and his own death, but it only reveals it in a moment of dazzling insight.

Last time, I asked Mr. KAUFMANN to remind you of the terms in which KANT himself, at the threshold of this stage of humanity’s engagement with happiness, sought to define the relationship of beauty. Undoubtedly, the points reached your ears, although I heard a complaint that the subject had not, in some sense, been animated with an example. Very well, I shall attempt to provide one for you.

Recall the four moments of beauty, as they were articulated for you last time. I will attempt to illustrate them step by step, through a process, showing how they can be illuminated and connected. For the first step, I will draw upon an event from my most familiar experience. My experience is not vast, as I often tell myself. Perhaps I have not always had the proper appetite for experience; things do not always seem entertaining enough to me.

Nevertheless, on occasion, there is always some resource to illustrate this intermediate path where I attempt to guide you. Let us say—unlike Monsieur TESTE—if stupidity is not my strong suit, I am no prouder for that.

Here is a small anecdote I will recount.

One day in London, I was staying in a kind of home, as they call it there, intended to host me as a guest at an institute dedicated to promoting French culture. It was in one of those charming, outlying neighborhoods in late October, when the weather is often radiant in London. I was offered hospitality in a delightful little building reflecting a certain convent-like style, albeit of the Victorian variety. The pleasant smell of toasted bread and the shadow of those inedible jellies customarily served there lent the house its character.

I was not alone. I was with someone who graciously accompanies me in life, someone whose hallmark is an acute attentiveness to the singular, and who, one morning, remarked out of nowhere: “Professor D. is here.”

This referred to one of my former mentors, someone who had taught me at the School of Oriental Languages. It was very early in the morning.

“How do you know?” I asked. The reply came—let me clarify that Professor D. is not an intimate acquaintance—“I saw his shoes.”

I must admit that this response sent a certain shiver through me, along with a shadow of skepticism. The idea that the highly distinctive character of an individual could be evident in a pair of boots left at a door did not strike me as sufficiently convincing. Moreover, nothing had led me to suspect that Professor D. might be in London. I dismissed the notion as mildly humorous and unimportant.

At that early hour, I walked through the corridors, thinking no more of it. To my astonishment, I then saw Professor D. himself emerging in a dressing gown—revealing, through the gap in its folds, a pair of distinctly academic long johns. Indeed, he was there in person.

This experience seems to me highly instructive. I mean that it is through it that I aim to bring you to the notion of what beauty is. It required an experience in which the following were as intensely intertwined: the universality inherent in the characteristic of shoes among academics and the absolutely particular given the person of Professor D., so that I might simply point out to you that…

Think now of VAN GOGH’s old shoes,
whose marvelous depiction he gave us makes them a work of beauty.
You must imagine Professor D.’s boots:
“ohne Begriff” (without concept), without the conception of the academic,
“ohne Begriff,” without any connection to his charming personality,
…for you to begin to see VAN GOGH’s boots come to life in their incommensurable quality of beauty.

That is to say, they are there, giving us a sign of intelligence, so to speak, situated precisely at that equal distance indicated to you last time: between the power of imagination and the signifier.

This signifier is no longer even one of walking, of fatigue, of whatever you might associate with it—passion, human warmth. It is solely a signifier of what a pair of abandoned boots signifies:
a presence and a pure absence at once,
a thing, if you will, inert yet made for everyone,
a thing, mute as it may be, that speaks,
a trace that emerges from the organic,
and ultimately, a refuse that evokes the beginning of spontaneous generation.

This is the something that transforms these boots into a kind of counterpart and analogue to a pair of buds, and it is this, as if by magic, that ensures they are not mere imitation to us. And this is what has always misled commentators on the pair of boots: the grasp of that something, through their position in a certain temporal relation, by which they themselves are the visible manifestation of beauty.

If this example does not seem convincing to you, seek others. What matters here is to show that beauty has nothing to do with what is called the “ideal of beauty.” It is from this apprehension of beauty, in this punctuality, this transition from life to death, that we can try to restore or restitute what the ideal of beauty is: namely, the function that can, on occasion, be taken by what presents itself to us as the ideal form of beauty—specifically, in the forefront, the famous human form.

If you read LESSING’s Laocoon, a valuable work rich with all kinds of premonitions, you will see him, nevertheless, stalled at the outset by the conception of “the dignity of the object.” He seems poised to make us feel that this famous “dignity of the object” has finally—thank God—been abandoned, for it always was. Everything indicates this. On this point, there are texts by ARISTOPHANES: the activity of the Greeks was not limited to creating images of gods; they paid high prices for paintings depicting onions.

Thus, it is not since the Dutch painters that people have realized any object can serve as the signifier in question—the one through which vibrates this reflection, this mirage, this more-or-less unbearable brilliance called beauty.

But since I have evoked the Dutch, let it serve as an occasion to remind you that if you take another example—still life—you will find precisely, in the opposite sense of the boots earlier, the same transition beginning to bud. As…
CLAUDEL demonstrated so admirably in his study of Dutch painting,
…it is because still life both shows us and deeply hides what within it threatens to unravel, to unfold, to decompose, that it presents beauty to us as a function of a temporal relation.

Similarly, the question of beauty, insofar as it engages the question of the ideal, can only be encountered, at this level, as a passage to the limit. That is to say:

It is because the form of the body is presented as the envelope of all possible fantasies of human desire; it is because, in this form—by which I mean the external form of the body—everything that blooms from desire can be enclosed in that particular vase whose boundaries we try to define…

…it is because this form is—or rather, was, for it no longer is—a divine form that the human form could still, in KANT’s time, be presented to us as the ideal (ideal ego: i(a), ideal of the ego: I, Erscheinung), as the limit of the possibilities of beauty.

Here is where we are brought: it is to establish the relationship of the body’s form—specifically, the image as I have already articulated it here within the function of narcissism—as precisely what represents, within a certain relationship of man, his connection to his second death, the signifier of his desire, ἐναργής (enargés). His visible desire: ἵμερος ἐναργής (himeros enargés).

This is where the central mirage lies:

• indicating both the place of this desire as a desire for nothing,
• which is man’s relation to his lack of being,
• indicating simultaneously this place and the one who prevents him from having it.

Here, something allows us to double back on this question. If this is so:

• is it the same place, the same support, the same image, the same shadow represented by the form of the body,
• is it this same image that acts as a barrier, nonetheless, concerning something beyond it, which is not merely this relationship with the second death, with man as required by language to account for the fact that he is not?

Well, there is libido. Specifically, what concerns us here is that which, at fleeting moments, carries us beyond this confrontation, making us forget it—this libido, as FREUD first articulated with such audacity and power: that, after all, the only moment of jouissance known to man occurs in the same place as the fantasies which, for us, represent the same barrier to access this jouissance, where everything is forgotten.

At this point, I wish to introduce a parallel to the function of beauty in relation to what we shall designate, for brevity’s sake, as the function of something I have already named here on several occasions, though never with much insistence, but which nonetheless seems essential to articulate. We shall call it, if you agree, Αἰδώς (Aidôs), in other words, modesty or shame.

The omission of this element that preserves direct apprehension of what lies at the center of the sexual conjunction—the omission of this barrier—seems to me the source of all sorts of dead-end questions, notably concerning what we can articulate about female sexuality. You see here that the indication—since this is a topic to which I have not been entirely a stranger—is precisely what is placed on the agenda of our inquiries.

What I wish to bring forward today is that, as we saw regarding the problem posed by the ending of Antigone—namely, this substitution of some inexplicable, blood-soaked image of sacrifice enacted through mystical suicide—this arises from a certain moment when we no longer know what happens in Antigone’s tomb. Everything suggests that the one who wounds himself on her does so in a crisis of μανία (mania), and everything indicates that he reaches the same level where AJAX and HERCULES also perish. I leave aside the meaning of OEDIPUS’s ending.

This leads us to a question for which I have found no better reference than the Heraclitean aphorisms preserved through the persecutory referencing of Saint Clement of Alexandria (Protrepticus, 34.5), who interprets them as signs of pagan abominations. Thanks to this, we retain the fragment that states:

“If, indeed, they did not lead processions and celebrate festivals for DIONYSUS by singing hymns—and here begins the ambiguity—
what would they do? The most dishonorable acts of homage to what is shameful.”

This is one way to read it, and—Heraclitus continues:

“Hades and Dionysus are the same, insofar as both are μαίνονται (delirious) and engage in the manifestations of hyenas.”
(εἰ μὴ γὰρ Διονύσῳ πομπὴν ἐποιοῦντο καὶ ὕμνεον ᾆσμα αἰδοίοισιν, ἀναιδέστατα εἴργαστ᾽ ἄν· ὡυτὸς δὲ Ἀίδης καὶ Διόνυσος, ὅτεῳ μαίνονται καὶ ληναΐζουσιν)

This cannot be translated otherwise. It refers to the processions linked to all kinds of trance forms, which are properly termed “bacchic processions.”

Thus, the Heraclitean position—opposed, as you know, to any radical religious manifestation—leads us to the identification, the conjunction, that if, ultimately, this is not a reference to HADES, then all this ecstatic manifestation, which he only distances himself from (though certainly not with the same detachment as Christianity or rationalism), would only be odious phallic displays and objects of disgust.

Yet, it is also uncertain whether we can limit ourselves to this interpretation, given the evident wordplay between αἰδοίοισιν (genitals), ἀναιδέστατα (shameless), and Ἀίδης (Hades/invisible). While Ἀίδης means “invisible,” αἰδοΐα signifies both “shameful parts” and “respectful, venerable.” Even the term “hymn” itself is not absent.

What I mean, ultimately, is that the point is to say that by rendering Dionysus this pomp and singing these hymns, his followers do so without truly seeing or understanding what they are doing in praising him. If Hades and Dionysus are one and the same, then this indeed is where the question arises for us:

• whether it is at the same level that the fantasy of the phallus and the beauty of the human image hold their legitimate place,
• or whether, on the contrary, there exists between them this imperceptible distinction, this irreducible difference that has thwarted the entire Freudian enterprise. It is around this point that Freud, at the conclusion of one of his final articles, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, ultimately speaks of an irreducible nostalgia: the patient’s aspiration toward the ultimate endpoint. This is precisely because the phallus, in no way, can simply be, and in order not to be, it can only have under the conditions of penis envy in women and castration in men.

This is what must be recalled when the analyst finds themselves in the position of responding to someone asking them for happiness. Asking for happiness—this cannot allow the analyst to forget that, ancestrally, this question for humans has always raised the issue of the Supreme Good. The analyst knows that this question is a closed one.

Not only does the analyst not have the Supreme Good—of course, they do not—but they also know that it does not exist. For there is nothing else to achieving the endpoint of analysis than having grasped, encountered, and collided with that limit where the entire problematic of desire is posed.

The novelty of psychoanalysis lies in the centrality this problematic takes on in any access to self-realization. Undoubtedly, along the path of this gravitation, the subject may encounter many benefits—everything they may do well, so to speak. Yet, we must not forget what we know all too well because we say it every day in the clearest terms:

At every moment, the subject must extract from their will what can rightly be called false goods—by exhausting not only the vanity of their demands, given that all such demands are, after all, regressive for us—but also by exhausting the vanity of their offerings.

Psychoanalysis situates the fulfillment of happiness entirely around the genital act. Its consequences must nonetheless be addressed. In this act, at a single moment, something can be achieved whereby one being, for another, occupies the living and dead place of the Thing. In this act, and at that moment alone, the being may simulate with their flesh the fulfillment of that which is nowhere. However, the possibility of this fulfillment, while polarizing and central, cannot be considered as merely punctual.

What the subject attains in analysis is not only access to this possibility—repeated though it may be—it is, within transference, something else that gives form to all that lives. It is their own law, which, if I may say so, the subject unveils through their exploration. This law is always, first and foremost, the acceptance of something that we properly call Ἄτη (Atè)—something that began to articulate itself before them, in preceding generations. This Ἄτη, while it may not always reach the tragedy of Antigone’s Ἄτη, remains nevertheless connected to misfortune.

What the analyst has to offer—unlike the partner in love—is no more than what the most beautiful bride in the world can surpass, which is to say: what they have. What they have is—like the analysand—nothing other than their desire, except that it is a desire informed by awareness. This entails the question of what such a desire may be, particularly the analyst’s desire.

Yet even now, we can say what it cannot be. It cannot desire the impossible. I will give you an example. If I read to you the definition provided by an analyst (Bouvet) in an English article—a definition more tightly framed than what they managed to give before their death—it concerns the analyst’s function, which they place as essential in the dual relationship with the analysand. This relationship, in turn, is the one I am addressing here.

While this dual relationship does not exhaust analysis, it does exist to the extent that we respond to the demand for happiness. The definition given for this distance is as follows: the gap separating:

• the way in which a subject expresses themselves, expresses their tendencies and instinctual drives,
• from how they might express them were it not for the process of arranging and modifying their expressions.

I believe you can sense, based on what I teach, the truly aberrant and dead-end nature of such a formulation.

If the drive, as I teach it to you, is the effect of the signifier’s imprint upon needs—their transformation through the signifier into something marked by fragmentation and disarray, the very essence of the drive—then what, indeed, can such a definition of distance mean?