🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I referred last time to the French grammar by Jacques DAMOURETTE and Édouard PICHON, published by D’ARTREY. What I mentioned about negation, the “forclusive,” and the “discordantial” is distributed across two sections of this grammar, specifically in the second volume, where an entire article on negation is gathered, laying out the foundations of the “forclusive” and the “discordantial.”

This “forclusive,” which is so singularly embodied in the French language by terms like “pas,” “point,” or “personne,” “rien,” “goutte,” “mie,” inherently carries the mark of its origin in trace, as you can observe. For all of these are words that designate the trace; it is there that the action of “forclusion,” the symbolic act of “forclusion,” is rejected in French, with the “ne” remaining reserved for what it is more originally, namely, the “discordantial.”

Negation, in its origin, in its linguistic root, is something that migrates from the enunciation to the utterance, as I tried to demonstrate last time. I showed you how this could be represented on the small graph we use. Last time, we stopped at this positioning of terms, of the elements of the dream: “He did not know he was dead,” and it was around the phrase “according to his wish” that we had pinpointed the real point of incidence, insofar as the dream both marks and bears desire.

We must now continue to advance and ask ourselves how and why such an action is possible, and I had concluded by indicating the focal point around which I intended to interrogate this function of desire as articulated in FREUD, namely, at the level of unconscious desire.

I intended to interrogate it around this formulation, which is the one to which everything we have demonstrated about the structure of this dream, about what it consists of, leads us: namely, this confrontation: the subject is another—a small other in this instance. The father reappears alive in relation to the dream and within the dream, and he finds himself, in relation to the subject, in that relation whose ambiguities we have begun to question, namely:

• He is the one who causes the subject to bear what we have called the pain of existence.
• He is the one whose soul the subject saw in agony, whose death he wished for, wished for insofar as nothing is more intolerable than existence reduced to itself, this existence beyond everything that can sustain it, this existence upheld precisely in the abolition of desire.

And we indicated that we could sense, in this distribution, I would say, of intra-subjective functions, the idea that the subject takes on the pain of the other, projecting onto the other what he does not know and which, in this case, is nothing other than his own ignorance.

This ignorance, in which it is precisely the desire of the dream that the subject wishes to sustain himself, to maintain himself, and here, the desire for death takes on its full meaning: the desire not to awaken, not to awaken to the message that is precisely the most secret one, carried by the dream itself, which is this: that the subject—through the death of his father—is now confronted with death, from which, until then, the father’s presence had protected him.

That is to say, confronted with something linked to the father’s function, namely, that which is present in this pain of existence, that something which is the pivot point around which revolves everything FREUD discovered in the Oedipus complex, namely the X, the significance of castration. Such is the function of castration.

What does it mean to assume castration?
Is castration ever truly assumed?

This kind of point around which the final waves of the finite or infinite Analysis, as FREUD puts it, come to break: “What is it?”

And to what extent, in this dream and concerning this dream, is the analyst not merely entitled but also in the position, in the capacity, in the power to interpret it?

This is where, at the end of what we discussed last time about this dream, I left the question open: the three ways for the analyst to reintroduce the “according to his wish.”

The way according to the subject’s speech, according to what the subject wanted and clearly remembers, which has not been forgotten—that is, the “according to his wish”…

…restored there, on the upper line…

…the “according to his wish” restored there, at the level of the hidden statement of unconscious memory, brings back the traces of the Oedipus complex, the infantile desire for the father’s death…

…which is that something of which FREUD tells us, in all dream formations, that it is “the capitalist.”

…This infantile desire…

…on the occasion of a current desire that needs to be expressed in the dream, and which is far from always being an unconscious desire…

…finds the entrepreneur.

This “according to his wish,” restored at the level of infantile desire, is it not something that is, in essence, positioned to align with the dream’s desire?

Since it involves interposing…

…at this crucial moment in the subject’s life, which is realized through the father’s disappearance…

…since the dream involves interposing this image of the object and, undeniably, presenting it as the support of a veil, of perpetual ignorance, as a foundation given to what was, until then, essentially the alibi of desire.

Since, moreover, the very function of the prohibition conveyed by the father is something that lends to desire, in its enigmatic, even abyssal form, that element from which the subject finds himself separated, this shelter, this defense, which ultimately is—as JONES insightfully perceived…

…and today we will see that JONES had certain extraordinarily keen insights into specific aspects of this psychic dynamic…

…this moral pretext to avoid confronting his desire.

Can we say that the pure and simple interpretation of Oedipal desire is not here something that, in essence, latches onto some intermediate stage of the dream’s interpretation?

Allowing the subject to do what, exactly? To do, quite precisely, something whose nature you will recognize with the designation “to identify with the aggressor.” Is this anything other than the interpretation of Oedipal desire, at this level and in these terms: that you wanted your father’s death at such a time and for such a reason?

In your childhood, somewhere in your childhood, this is “the identification with the aggressor.” Have you not typically recognized that, as one of the forms of defense, this is essential?

Is there not something that presents itself precisely where the “according to his wish” is elided? Does not the “according to” and its meaning represent, for us, a full interpretation of the dream?

Without a doubt!

This, apart from the opportunities and conditions that allow the analyst to reach this point: they will depend on the duration of the treatment, the context of the subject’s response in dreams, since we know that in analysis the subject responds to the analyst—at least to what the analyst has become in the transference—through their dreams.

But essentially, I would say that in the logical positioning of the terms, does the “according to his wish” not pose a question to which we always risk giving some form of rushed response, some premature answer, some evasion offered to the subject regarding the matter at hand, namely:

• The impasse created by this fundamental structure, which makes the object of every desire the support of an essential metonymy,
• And something in which the object of human desire, as such, presents itself in an evanescent form and where, perhaps, we can glimpse that castration turns out to be what we might call the ultimate temperance.

Thus, we are led to take up the matter from the other end, that is, from the side that is not given in dreams, to more closely examine what human desire means and signifies.
And this formula, I mean this algorithm: $◊a, the $ confronted, placed in the presence of, placed face to face with (a), the object…

…and we introduced it in this context through the images of the dream and the meaning revealed to us there…

…is this not something we can attempt to put to the test of the phenomenology of desire as it presents itself to us, curiously, in the desire that has always been there, that lies at the heart of […]?

Let us try to see in what form this desire presents itself to us, as analysts.

This algorithm will allow us to proceed together on the path of an inquiry that pertains to our shared experience, to our experience as analysts, concerning the way in which, in the subject…

…in the subject who is not necessarily nor always a neurotic subject…

…there is no reason to presume that in this regard their structure is not included, as it reveals a more general structure.

In any case, it is beyond doubt that the neurotic finds themselves situated somewhere within what represents the extensions, the processes of an experience that, for us, has universal value. This is indeed the point on which the entire construction of Freudian doctrine unfolds.

Before entering into an inquiry about certain ways in which this dialectic of the subject’s relationship to their desire has already been approached—and specifically what I mentioned earlier regarding JONES’s thought, a thought that was left incomplete, which undoubtedly glimpsed something, as you will see—I would like to refer to something drawn from the most common clinical experience, to an example that recently came up in my practice and which seems quite apt for introducing what we seek to illustrate.

It concerned a case of impotence. It is not a bad starting point, considering impotence, to begin questioning what desire is. At least we are certain of being at the human level. This was a young subject who, of course, like many impotent individuals, was not at all impotent. He had engaged in sexual activity quite normally throughout his life and had had a few relationships. He was married, and it was with his wife that things no longer worked.

This cannot simply be attributed to impotence. Being specifically localized to the object with whom relations are most desirable for the subject—since he loved his wife—the term seems inappropriate. Here is approximately what emerged—after some time of analytic work—from the subject’s statements.

It was not entirely that he lacked all desire, but if he allowed himself to follow an impulse one evening…

…or another evening during the current period of his analysis…

…could this impulse sustain him? Matters had gone quite far in the conflict brought about by this deficiency he had been experiencing: was he entitled to impose yet another ordeal, another episode of attempts and failures, upon his wife?

In short, this desire, whose presence was undeniably felt in every aspect, and which was by no means absent from all possibility of fulfillment—was this desire legitimate? And while I cannot delve further here into the specifics of this particular case—which, for various reasons, I cannot share with you, not least because it is an ongoing analysis, among many other reasons—and this is always the drawback of referring to ongoing analyses…

…I will borrow from other analyses this entirely decisive term in certain evolutions, sometimes leading to deviations, even to what is referred to as “perversions” of a different structural importance than what appeared starkly in the case of impotence.

I will therefore evoke this relationship that arises in certain cases, in the experience and the lived reality of subjects, and which becomes apparent in analysis. An experience that can have a decisive function and that…

…as in other contexts…

…reveals a structure, the point at which the subject confronts the question, the problem: “Does he have a sufficiently large phallus?”
From certain angles, under certain conditions, this question alone can lead the subject to an entire series of solutions, which, layering over one another, succeeding, and accumulating, can take him very far from the field of a normal execution of what he already has all the elements for.

This “sufficiently large phallus” or, more precisely, this “phallus” essential to the subject, at a certain point in his experience, finds itself forclosed. This is something we encounter in countless forms—not always, of course, apparent, explicit, or manifest. It is precisely in cases where, as one might say, it is “out in the open,” that we can see it, grasp it, and also assess its significance.

The subject, if I may put it this way, can be observed more than once in confrontation, in reference to this something that must be grasped at a moment in his life—often at the turn and awakening of puberty—when he encounters its sign. The subject is here confronted with something that, as such, belongs to the same order as what we just mentioned earlier. Desire—is it legitimized, sanctioned by something else?

In a certain way, what appears here in a flash is refracted […] in the phenomenology through which the subject expresses it. The phenomenology through which it is expressed could be framed in the following way: Does the subject possess the ultimate weapon or not? Failing to possess the ultimate weapon, he finds himself drawn into a series of identifications, alibis, games of hide-and-seek that…

…I repeat to you, we cannot fully elaborate upon their dichotomies here…

…can lead him very far.

The essential point I wish to highlight is this:

• How desire finds the origin of its vicissitudes at the moment when the subject “alienates” it in something that is a sign, a promise, an anticipation—one that, moreover, inherently carries the possibility of loss.
• How desire is tied to the dialectic of a lack, subsumed within a time that, as such, is a time that is not present, just as the sign, in this instance, is not desire.

What desire must confront is the fear that it may not persist in its current form, that, as artifex—if I may phrase it this way—it may perish. But, of course, this artifex, which is the desire that man feels and experiences as such, can only perish in relation to the artifice of his own speech. It is in the dimension of speech that this fear is articulated and stabilized.

This is where we encounter that surprising term, so curiously overlooked in analysis, which is…

…as I tell you, the one JONES introduced as a basis for his reflections…

…the term ἀϕάνισις (aphanisis). When JONES pauses and meditates on the phenomenology of castration…

…a phenomenology—which, as you can well see from experience and publications—remains increasingly veiled in modern analytic practice…

…JONES, at the stage of analysis where he is confronted with various tasks different from those that modern experience presents…

• a certain relationship to the patient in analysis, which is not the same as that reoriented later under other norms,
• a certain necessity of interpretation, exegesis, apologetics, explanation of FREUD’s thought…

…JONES, so to speak, attempts to find this intermediary, this means of being understood regarding the castration complex, stating that what the subject fears being deprived of is his own desire.

It is no surprise that this term ἀϕάνισις (aphanisis), which means disappearance, and specifically the disappearance of desire…

…in JONES’s text, you will see that this is indeed what is at stake, that this is what he articulates…

…this term serves as his introduction due to a problem that—poor man—gave him much concern, namely the question of women’s relation to the phallus, which he never managed to resolve.

Straight away, he employs this ἀϕάνισις (aphanisis) to place under the same common denominator the relations of men and women to their desire, which inevitably leads to an impasse, since it ignores the fact that these relations are fundamentally different and only…

…since this is what FREUD discovered…

…in their asymmetry in relation to the phallic signifier. This, I believe, I have sufficiently conveyed for us to consider—at least provisionally today—that this is something established.

This use of ἀϕάνισις (aphanisis)—whether it is the origin of the concept or merely a subsequent development—marks a kind of inflection that, in essence, diverts its author from the true question, namely: What does this possibility of ἀϕάνισις (aphanisis) signify within the structure of the subject?

Does it not compel us, precisely, toward a structuration of the human subject as such—precisely insofar as this is a subject for whom existence is assumed and assumable beyond desire, a subject who ex-sists, who sub-sists outside of what constitutes their desire?

The question is not whether we must objectively account for desire in its most radical form, the desire to live, the instincts for life, as we say. The question is entirely different. It is that what analysis reveals to us—what it shows us as being at play in the subject’s lived experience—is this very thing: not merely that human existence is sustained by desire (as we might naturally suspect), but that the human subject takes account of it, so to speak, that they calculate with desire as such, that they fear, if I may phrase it this way, that the “vital impulse”…

…this cherished “vital impulse,” this charming incarnation—this is truly a case of anthropomorphism…

…of human desire in nature…

…that precisely this famous “impulse,” with which we try to prop up this “nature” we understand so little, when it comes to it, when the human subject confronts it, they fear that it may be lacking.

This alone suggests the idea that we would not do badly to impose certain structural demands, for in the end, this involves something quite different from “reflections of the unconscious.” I mean the immanent subject-object relationship, if I may put it that way, within the pure dimension of knowledge. And as soon as desire is involved—as Freudian experience shows us, I mean—it raises significantly more complex problems.

Indeed, since we began with impotence, we may now move to its opposite pole. When the human subject, in the presence of their desire…

• occasionally satisfies it,
• or anticipates it as being satisfied…

…it is equally remarkable to observe those cases where, within reach of satisfaction—meaning not incapacitated by impotence—the subject fears the satisfaction of their desire. And it happens more often than not that they fear this satisfaction, as it now appears dependent precisely on the one or the other who will fulfill it—that is, the Other.

This phenomenological fact is an everyday occurrence; it is, in fact, the very fabric of human experience. There is no need to invoke the great dramas that have served as examples and illustrations of this problematic to observe how a biography, throughout its course, unfolds in successive avoidances of what has always been punctuated as the most compelling desire.

Where lies this dependency on the Other, this dependency on the Other, which in fact constitutes the form and the fantasy under which appears that which the subject fears and which causes them to divert from the satisfaction of their desire? Perhaps it is not merely what we might call the “fear of the Other’s caprice.” This “caprice” which—whether you realize it or not—has little connection with the vulgar etymology in LAROUSSE’s dictionary that links it to the goat. “Caprice,” capriccio, means “shiver” in Italian, from which we borrowed it; it is nothing other than the same word Freud so cherished: sich sträuben, “to bristle.”

And as you know, throughout his work, this is one of the metaphorical forms in which, for Freud, resistance is embodied in the most concrete terms—whether he is speaking of his wife, of Irma, or of the subject resisting in general. It is one of the most tangible forms in which he conveys his understanding of resistance.

It is not so much that the subject depends essentially on the Other as such, on the Other’s caprice. Rather—and this is what remains concealed—it is precisely that the Other does not mark this caprice with a sign, that there is no sufficient sign of the Other’s goodwill toward the subject, except in the totality of signs where the subject subsists. In truth, there is no other sign of the subject than the sign of their abolition as a subject. This is what is written as follows: $.

This shows us that, concerning their desire, “Man” is, in essence, untrue, because however much or little courage they muster, the situation escapes their control entirely.

In any case, this disappearance, this “something” that someone, after my last seminar, referred to in a conversation with me as this “ombilication of the subject at the level of his will.” I willingly adopt this image of what I sought to convey to you around the S confronted with the object (a) [$◊a].

Even more so because it aligns strictly with what FREUD identifies when he speaks of the dream: the point of convergence of all the signifiers where the dreamer ultimately implicates himself so fully that he calls himself the unknown. He has not recognized that this Unbekannt (unknown)—a very strange term under FREUD’s pen—is precisely the point through which I have tried to show you what constitutes the radical difference of the Freudian unconscious, namely:

• It is not simply that it constitutes itself, that it institutes itself as unconscious merely in the dimension of the subject’s innocence with regard to the signifier, which organizes and articulates itself in its place.
• It is that, in this relationship between the subject and the signifier, there exists this essential impasse—this, and I am reformulating, that there is no other sign of the subject than the sign of its abolition as a subject.

You can well imagine that matters do not stop there. After all, if it were merely a matter of an impasse, as one says, it would not take us very far. The unique aspect of impasses is precisely their fertility, and this impasse is of interest only insofar as it reveals what it develops as ramifications—those into which desire effectively engages itself.

Let us try to grasp this ἀϕάνισις (aphanisis). There comes a moment, one which must occur in your experience—by which I mean your experience not only of analysis but also of the mental frameworks you use to think about that experience—at the point of the Oedipus complex where it appears like a flash. This moment arises when we are told that in the inverted Oedipus, that is, when the subject perceives the solution to the Oedipal conflict in purely and simply attracting the love of the most powerful figure, namely, the father, the subject withdraws, as we are told:

• To the extent that their narcissism is threatened by it,
• To the extent that receiving the father’s love involves castration.

This is self-evident, because, naturally, when a question cannot be resolved, it is treated as comprehensible. This is what usually renders it less clear: that the subject links this moment of potential resolution—a resolution all the more feasible because it will, in part, be the path taken, as the introjection of the father in the form of the ego ideal will indeed resemble this.

There is participation by the so-called “inverse” function of the Oedipus complex in the normal resolution—a moment highlighted by various experiences and observations, particularly in the problematics of homosexuality, where the subject perceives the father’s love as essentially threatening, as carrying the menace we qualify as narcissistic, for lack of a more appropriate term.

Ultimately, this term is not so inappropriate. Fortunately, terms in analysis have retained enough meaning, fullness, and dense, concrete character to guide us. One can sense and identify the presence of narcissism in the matter, and that this narcissism is deeply involved in this detour of the Oedipus complex.

Above all—this will be confirmed by the later stages of the dialectic—when the subject is drawn into the paths of homosexuality. These paths, as you know, are far more complex than a simple and summary demand for the phallus in the object, but fundamentally, that demand is concealed within. This is not the direction I wish to pursue here. It merely introduces us to this proposition: that in confronting this suspension of desire, on the threshold of the problematic of the signifier, the subject will have before him more than one stratagem, so to speak.

These stratagems primarily concern, of course, the manipulation of the object, the (a) in the formula. This appropriation of the object within the dialectic of the subject’s relationship with the signifier must not be taken as the principle for articulating the relationship I have tried to develop with you in recent years, for it is evident everywhere and at all times.

Is it necessary to remind you of that moment in Little Hans’s life where, regarding all objects, he asks: Does it or does it not have a phallus? One need only observe a child to recognize, in all its forms, this essential function operating so openly.

In the case of Little Hans, it concerns the act of urinating, the Wiwimacher. You know at what period, for what reason, and at what juncture, at the age of two, this question arises for him regarding all objects, defining a kind of analysis that FREUD mentions in passing as a mode of interpreting this phobia.

This, of course, is not a position that, in any way, merely translates the presence of the phallus into the dialectic. It does not inform us in any way about its use, its purpose—which I attempted to demonstrate to you in its time—nor about the stability of the process. What I simply want to indicate to you is that we constantly receive evidence that we are not straying, namely, that the terms at play are indeed the following:

• The subject, and that through its disappearance,
• Its confrontation with an object, something that, from time to time, reveals itself as the essential signifier around which the entire relationship of the subject to the object is played out.

And now, to quickly evoke in which sense, in the most general sense, this incidence concerning the object—the (a) of our algorithm—occurs, from the perspective of what might be called instinctual specificity, from the perspective of need.

We already know what happens in an impossible relationship, if one may say so, made impossible by the object’s presence, by the interposition of the signifier, insofar as the subject must remain present in relation to the object.

It is clear that the human object undergoes this kind of volatilization that we, in our concrete practice, call the possibility of displacement. This does not simply mean that the human subject, like all animal subjects, sees their desire move from one object to another, but that this very displacement is the point where the fragile equilibrium of their desire can be maintained. Ultimately, what is the issue? I would say it is a question of, on the one hand, preventing satisfaction while always retaining an object of desire.

In a certain way, this is yet another mode, if one can say so, of symbolizing satisfaction metonymically, and here we enter directly into the dialectic of the treasure chest and the miser. It is far from the most complicated, though one can scarcely see what is at stake. It is that desire must persist in this context, in a certain retention of the object, as we say, invoking the anal metaphor.

However, it is because this retained object is not itself an object of any enjoyment that this retention becomes the support of desire… it is worth stating! Juridical phenomenology bears its traces: one says one “enjoys” a property. What does this mean, except that it is entirely conceivable, humanly speaking, to possess a good without enjoying it, and for it to be another who enjoys it? Here, the object reveals its function as a guarantee of desire, so to speak, not to say a hostage.

And if you want us to attempt to bridge this with animal psychology, we can evoke what has been said—in ethology, by one of our colleagues—of the most exemplary and vivid illustrations. I am personally inclined to believe it. I noticed this with someone who has just published a small book…

I did not want to mention it because it might distract you…

…this pamphlet has just been published; it is called The Order of Things. Fortunately, it is a small book published by PLON, authored by Jacques BROSSE, a previously unknown figure. It is a sort of natural history…

…that is how I interpret it for you…

…a “natural history” tailored to our times.

I mean that:

• It restores to us something so subtle and charming, which we find in BUFFON’s writing and never again in any scientific publication, even though we could very well indulge in such exercises. Despite our vastly greater knowledge of animal behavior and ethology than BUFFON had, specialized journals are unreadable.
• What is said in this little book, you will find expressed in a style I must say is very remarkable. You will particularly enjoy the section in the middle, titled Parallel Lives: The Life of the Tarantula, The Life of the Ant.

I thought of this little book because its author shares something with me: for him, the question of mammals is resolved. Outside of man…

…an essentially problematic mammal—just consider the role mammary glands play in our imagination…

…there is only one truly serious mammal apart from man: the hippopotamus. Everyone agrees on this, provided they have a bit of sensitivity. The poet T.S. ELIOT…

…who has rather poor metaphysical ideas, though he is nonetheless a great poet…

…symbolized the militant Church in The Hippopotamus at first glance. We shall return to this later.

Returning to the hippopotamus: what does this hippopotamus do? We are pointed to the difficulties of its existence.

They are large, it seems, and one of the essential things is that the hippopotamus marks the boundaries of its grazing area…
because, after all, it needs to have some reserve resources…
with its excrement. This is an essential point: it marks what we call its territory by delineating it with a series of markers, points sufficiently clear to anyone who needs to recognize them—namely, its kind—that here, this is its domain.

This is to say that we are well aware that animals are not devoid of symbolic activity. As you can see, it is a symbolism that is very specifically excremental in mammals. If, after all, the hippopotamus marks its grazing area with its excrement, we find that the progress made by man…
and truly, this question could not even arise without the peculiar intermediary of language—which, as we do not know where it comes from, introduces an essential complication into the matter. That is, it has brought us to this problematic relationship with the object…
is that man does not mark his grazing area with excrement. Rather, it is his excrement that he keeps as a token for determining the essential grazing area.

And this is the dialectic of what is called anal symbolism, of this new revelation of the Chymical Wedding, so to speak, of man with his object. This is one of the absolutely unsuspected dimensions revealed to us by Freudian experience. Ultimately, I simply wanted to indicate here the direction and reason for what happens, which is essentially the same question MARX posed without resolving in his polemic with PROUDHON, and for which we can at least offer a preliminary explanation: how is it that human objects transition from use-value to exchange-value?

You should read this passage from MARX because it is an excellent intellectual exercise. It is titled The Poverty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Poverty. He addresses PROUDHON, and in a few pages during which he ridicules this dear PROUDHON for having decreed that this transition from one to the other occurs through a sort of pure decree of cooperators—whose motivations for becoming cooperators and the means by which they achieve it remain unexplained. The way MARX dissects him over some twenty or thirty pages—without even counting the rest of the work—is something quite healthy and educational for the mind.

So, this is what happens with the object, of course, and the meaning of this volatilization, of this valorization, which is also a devalorization of the object. That is, the tearing of the object from the pure and simple realm of need. This is, after all, a reminder of the essential phenomenology, the phenomenology of the good, properly speaking, and in all senses of the word “good,” if you will.

But let us leave that aside for now as a mere starting point. Let us simply say that from the moment when the object in question is the other—the other, the sexual partner in particular—this, of course, entails a number of consequences. These consequences are all the more palpable because we were just now speaking on the social level. It is quite certain here that what is at stake lies at the very foundation of the “social contract,” insofar as we must take into account “the elementary structures of thought,” insofar as the female partner…

…in a form that itself is neither without latency nor without return…

…is, as LÉVI-STRAUSS has shown us, an object of exchange.

This “exchange” does not happen on its own. Put simply, we could say that, as an “object of exchange,” the woman is—if one may say so—a very poor deal for those conducting the operation. Because all this inevitably leads us to a kind of real mobilization, so to speak, called the provision or leasing of phallic services.

We place ourselves here, naturally, within the perspective of “social utilitarianism,” and as you know, this does not come without presenting certain inconveniences. It is from here, in fact, that I started earlier.

That the woman undergoes a very troubling transformation from the moment she is included in this dialectic—as a socialized object—is something that is quite amusing to see how FREUD, in the innocence of his youth, can discuss it. This can be found on pages 192-193 of volume I of JONES’s work.

The way FREUD speaks, in connection with the emancipatory terms regarding women in MILL—whom FREUD translated at one point, under the encouragement of GOMPREZ—how MILL discusses these emancipatory themes, and how FREUD, in a letter to his fiancée, describes the purpose of a woman, a “good woman”—it is worth “a thousand” when you think that he was at the height of his passion!

This letter concludes by asserting that a woman must remain in her place and render all the services not at all different from the infamous Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church).

I am thinking of the time when FREUD willingly made himself the […] potential spokesperson for his wife. The text ends with a passage I must read to you in English, as it has never been published in another language:

“Neither law nor custom has much to offer to women that has not previously been taken from them. But fundamentally, the position of women must surely remain what it is in youth: a dear beloved, an adorable little piece of furniture, an angelic vase; and in her maturity, a cherished wife.”

This is something that is not without interest for us, as it shows us the starting point of FREUD’s experience and also lets us glimpse the path he had to traverse. The other possible aspect—and it is no coincidence that we have entered here into the social dialectic—is that, in the face of this problematic position, there is another solution for the subject. This other solution, as we also know from FREUD, is identification.

Identification with what? Identification with the father. Why identification with the father? As I have already indicated: because he is perceived, in some way, as the one who has successfully overcome this impasse, namely, the one who is presumed to have truly castrated the mother. I say “presumed” because, of course, he is only “presumed,” and, moreover, there is something here that is essential: the problematics of the father.

Perhaps if I return to this subject today with some insistence, it is because of a topic raised last night at our “Scientific Meeting,” namely, the function of the father, the lordship of the father, the imaginary function of the father in certain spheres of culture.

It is certain that there is a problematic here that presents all sorts of possibilities for slippage because what must be recognized is that the solution prepared here is, so to speak, a direct solution: the father is already a “type”—in the proper sense of the term—a “type” undoubtedly present in temporal variations.

What interests us is not so much the existence of these variations, but rather that we cannot conceive of the matter here except in its relationship with an imaginary function. This involves denying the relationship of the subject with the father, this identification with the ideal of the father, through which, perhaps ultimately, we may say that, on average, wedding nights succeed and turn out well—although no strictly rigorous statistics have ever been compiled on the subject.

This is obviously connected to factual realities but also to imaginary realities, and it resolves nothing for us in terms of the problematic…

…neither for us nor, of course, for our patients. And perhaps, on this point, we find ourselves in alignment…

…it resolves nothing of the problematic of desire.

Indeed, we will see that this identification with the image of the father is merely a particular case of what we must now approach as the most general solution…

…I mean, in the relations, in this confrontation of $ with the (a) of the object [$◊a]…

…the introduction, in its most general form, of the imaginary function.

The support, the solution, the pathway of resolution offered to the subject by the dimension of narcissism, which situates human Eros in a specific relationship with a particular image [i(a)]—an image that is nothing other than a particular relationship with one’s own body—and within which this exchange, this inversion, can occur. It is this that I will try to articulate for you: the way in which the problem of the confrontation of $ with the (a) is presented.

It is on this point that we will resume—since it is already a quarter to two—after the holidays. I will continue on January 7, as I have not been able to take things further today.

You will see how, through this (a), we will finally have the opportunity to define it in its essence, in its function—namely, the essential nature of the human object, which, as I have already outlined extensively in previous seminars, is fundamentally marked, like every human object, by a narcissistic structure, by this profound relationship with narcissistic Eros.

How this human object, as marked by this, finds itself, in the most general structure of fantasy, normally receiving the most essential of the subject’s Ansätze—namely, nothing less than its affect in the presence of desire. This fear, this immanence in which I pointed out earlier what essentially holds the subject at the edge of their desire. The entire nature of fantasy is to transfer this to the object.

We will explore this by studying and revisiting several fantasies, including those whose dialectics we have developed thus far—beginning, if only, with one fundamental example, because it was one of the first discovered: the fantasy A child is being beaten. In this, you will see the most essential features of this transfer of the subject’s affect in the presence of their desire onto the object as narcissistic.

Conversely, what the subject becomes, the point at which they are structured, and why they are structured as the ego and the ego ideal—this will only, ultimately, be delivered to you…

…by recognizing its absolutely rigorous structural necessity…

…as the return, the referral, of this delegation that the subject has made of their affect to this object, to this (a), which we have never yet truly discussed as being this referral.

I mean, how the subject must necessarily position themselves not as (a), but as the image of a, the image of the other, which is one and the same as the ego—this image of the other being marked by this index of a capital I, an ego ideal (Idéal du moi) insofar as it is itself the heir of a primary relationship of the subject not with their own desire, but with the desire of the mother, the ideal taking the place of what, in the subject, has been experienced as the effect of being a desired child.

This necessity, this development, is what inscribes itself into a certain trace, forming the algorithm that I can already write on the board to announce for the next session:

i(a)_I◊a($)

In a certain relationship with the other, insofar as it is marked by an other—that is, by the subject themselves as affected by their own desire. This, we will explore in the next session.