🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

We are speaking about desire.
During this two-week interruption, I have personally tried to refocus the path that is ours this year, which, like any path, sometimes forces us into long detours. In my effort to recapture the origin as well as the aim of our discussion, I believe I have also attempted to provide you with this clarification, which is ultimately just another way of concentrating on the progress of our attention.

In essence, at the point we have reached, it is a matter of trying to articulate where our rendezvous lies:
– it is not merely the rendezvous of this seminar,
– nor is it only the rendezvous of our daily work as analysts,
– it is equally the rendezvous of our function as analysts and the meaning of analysis.

One cannot help but be surprised by the persistence of a movement such as analysis, if it were merely—among others in history—a therapeutic endeavor, more or less justified, more or less successful. There is no precedent for any theorization or psychic orthopedics to have lasted longer than half a century.

And certainly, one cannot fail to perceive that what gives analysis its longevity, what secures its place beyond its function, beyond its medical application—which no one ultimately disputes—is that there is something in analysis concerning humanity that is utterly new, serious, and authentic.
New in its contribution, serious in its significance, authenticated by what? Surely by something other than often debatable and sometimes precarious results.

I believe the most characteristic aspect of this phenomenon is the feeling one has about this thing I once called The Freudian Thing, that it is something being spoken of for the first time.

I will go further and say that what is simultaneously the most evident testimony and the clearest manifestation of this authenticity of the Thing is provided daily by the formidable verbosity surrounding it.
If you consider the sheer mass of analytic production, what stands out is this effort by the authors…
which ultimately always slides…
…to grasp, within their own activity, a principle.

But this principle, articulated in a way that throughout analysis never appears as closed, finished, complete, or satisfactory—this perpetual movement, this dialectical sliding, which is the movement and life of analytic research—is something that testifies to the specificity of the problem around which this research is anchored.

Alongside this, all the clumsiness, confusion, and even uncertainty in its principles that our research entails, all the ambiguities that its practice brings…
I mean the constant rediscovery, not only before us but within its very practice, of precisely its principle, what it sought to avoid, namely suggestion, persuasion, construction, even mystagogy…
All these contradictions within the analytic movement only serve to more sharply highlight the specificity of The Freudian Thing.

This Thing, we approach this year by hypothesis…
supported by the entire concentric progression of our previous research…
in this form: namely, that this Thing is desire. And at the same time, the moment we articulate this formula, we become aware of a sort of contradiction, stemming from the fact that all our effort seems to work toward stripping this desire of its value, its original accent, without us being able to pinpoint, or even have the experience show us, that it is indeed in its original accent that we are dealing with it.

Desire is not something we can consider as reduced, normalized, functioning through the demands of a sort of organic preformation that would predetermine the path we are to follow in bringing it back, in reintegrating it.

From the beginning of Freud’s analytic articulation, desire presents itself with this characteristic:
– in English, “lust” means both covetousness and lust, the same word found in the “lust principle.”
– And you know that in German, it retains the full ambiguity of “pleasure” and “desire.”

This “something” that initially presents itself in experience as a disturbance, as something that disrupts the perception of the object, something…
as well as the curses of poets and moralists…
that shows us, while it degrades, disorders, debases the object, in any case, shakes it, and at times even dissolves the very one perceiving it—that is, the subject.

This emphasis is undoubtedly articulated within the principle of Freud’s position, insofar as the foregrounding of Lust, as articulated in Freud, is presented to us in a way radically different from anything previously articulated concerning the principle of desire. And Freud presents it to us as being, in its origin and source, opposed to the reality principle. The emphasis is retained in Freud’s work from the original experience of desire as being opposed, contrary, to the construction of reality.

Desire is identified as being marked and emphasized by the blind nature of its pursuit, as something that appears as man’s torment, and that is indeed constituted by a contradiction in the pursuit of that which, up until now…
for all those who have attempted to articulate the meaning of man’s ways in his search…
of everything that has always been tied to the principle of “man’s pursuit of his own good.”

The pleasure principle, throughout philosophical and moralist thought across the centuries, has never, in any foundational definition by which any moral theory of man proposes itself, failed to affirm itself—whatever its form—as hedonistic. That is to say, man fundamentally sought his good, whether he knew it or not, and that it was only by some kind of accident that the experience of this error of his desire, of his aberrations, arose. For the first time in a theory of man, pleasure is articulated fundamentally as contradictory in its principle, with a different emphasis, and to the extent that the term “pleasure” itself, in Freud’s signification, is contaminated by the specific emphasis with which lust, die Lust, covetousness, and desire present themselves.

Thus, desire does not organize itself, does not compose itself into a sort of “preformed harmony with the song of the world,” as a harmonic, optimistic idea of human development might suppose. Analytic experience teaches us that things proceed differently. As you know, as we have stated here, it shows us something that is precisely what will engage us in a pathway of experience where, by its very development, we are led to lose the emphasis, the affirmation, of this primordial moment.

That is, the history of desire organizes itself into a discourse that unfolds in nonsense—this is the unconscious—
a discourse whose displacements and condensations undoubtedly correspond to what displacements and condensations are in discourse, that is, metonymies and metaphors,
– but metaphors that produce no meaning, unlike ordinary metaphor,
– displacements that convey no being and in which the subject fails to recognize something moving.

It is around the exploration of this discourse of the unconscious that the experience of analysis has developed;
it is therefore around something whose radical dimension we can call the diachrony of discourse.
What constitutes the essence of our inquiry, what situates what we are trying to grasp about this desire, is our effort to locate it within the synchrony.

We are introduced to this through something that makes itself heard every time we approach our experience.
We cannot avoid seeing, cannot avoid grasping…
whether we are reading the account, the textbook of the most original experience of analysis, namely Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, or whether we refer to any given session, a sequence of interpretations…
the indefinite deferral that characterizes any act of interpretation, which never presents desire to us in any form other than the articulated, but always assumes as its principle something that necessitates this mechanism of deferral from wish to wish,
where the movement of the subject inscribes itself, as well as this distance where the subject finds itself from its own wishes.

This is why it seems legitimate to us to express, as a hope, the reference to structure—a linguistic reference as such—insofar as it reminds us that there can be no symbolic formation unless, alongside…
and principally, primordially, to any exercise of speech called discourse…
there necessarily exists a synchrony, a structure of language as a synchronic system.

This is where we seek to pinpoint the function of desire.
Where does desire locate itself within this relationship that establishes this “something” of X, which we now call “man,” insofar as he is the subject of λόγος (logos), where he is constituted within the signifier as a subject?
Where, in this synchronic relationship, is desire situated?

What I believe will make you feel the fundamental necessity of this revisitation is that “something” where we observe analytic inquiry—when it overlooks this structural organization—becoming entangled.

Indeed, at the very moment I earlier articulated the contrary function established at the origin, fundamentally, by the Freudian experience between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, you could not fail to notice that we are precisely at the point where theory attempts to articulate itself in the very terms in which I stated that we could say desire does not compose itself.

Yet it does compose itself in the appetite that authors have to think of it, to sense it in a certain way, in a kind of “harmony with the song of the world.” Everything is done to try to deduce from a convergence of experience with a maturation something that one might at least hope to see as a completed development.

At the same time, it is quite clear that all of this would mean the authors themselves have abandoned all contact with their experience if they were indeed able to articulate analytic theory in these terms; that is to say, to find anything satisfying or classical in the ontological adaptation of the subject to their experience.

The paradox is as follows: the more one moves in the direction of this demand—through all sorts of errors, we must admit, revealing errors that show the need to articulate matters differently—the more one progresses in this line of experience, the more one arrives at paradoxes such as the following. I will take an example.

And I will take it from one of the finest authors we have, one of the most meticulous in striving for an accurate articulation—not only of our experience but also of the sum of its data—an effort to catalog our terms, the notions we use, and the concepts. I am referring to Edward Glover, whose work is unquestionably among the most useful for anyone who wishes to attempt,
first in analysis—this is absolutely essential, more so than in other disciplines—
to understand what has been done, and also the breadth of experience included in his writings.

I will take an example from one of his many articles, which you must read: the one published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, October 1933, Part 4: “The Relation of Perversion Formation to the Development of the Sense of Reality.”
Many aspects of this article are important for discussion, if only the initial terms he provides in the aim of correctly handling what he seeks to demonstrate to us, namely:

– The definition of “the sense of reality as that faculty whose existence we infer from the examination of the reality test.” It is quite significant for such matters to be formulated occasionally.

– Secondly, what he calls “the efficient reality test, for any subject beyond the age of puberty, is the capacity to maintain psychic contact with the objects that allow for instinctual gratification, including here the residual modified infantile impulses.”

– Thirdly, “objectivity is the capacity to correctly establish the relation of the instinctual drive to the instinctual object, regardless of the aims of this impulse, whether or not they can be gratified.”

These are principle-based premises of great importance and, assuredly, cannot fail to strike you as giving the term “objectivity” a character that is no longer the one it is habitually assigned.

Its nature will give us the idea that, indeed, something of the original dimension of Freudian inquiry has not been lost, as something can be disturbed in what, up until now, seemed to us to be the categories and orders necessitated by our worldview. One cannot help but be struck all the more by what our inquiry entails when starting from such premises. It involves, in this instance, a search for the meaning of the perverse relationship, understood here in the broadest sense, in relation to the “sense of reality.”

I tell you, the spirit of the article implies that perverse formation is conceived by the author as, ultimately, a means for the subject to cope with ruptures, with things that “fall flat,” with things that fail to articulate themselves coherently within reality for him. Perversion is quite specifically articulated by the author as
“a means of salvation for the subject to ensure a continuous existence for this reality.”
Assuredly, here we have yet another original perspective. I leave this to you, as what results from this form of articulation is a sort of omnipresence of the perverse function.

For indeed, as I attempt to retrace, so to speak, its chronological placements, I mean, for example, determining where it fits within a system of precedence and posterity where we might rank psychotic disorders as more primitive, followed by neurotic disorders, with drug addiction occupying, in Glover’s system, an intermediate role chronologically speaking—situated between the historically fertile attachment points and the developmental stages to which the origins of these various afflictions trace back. We cannot delve here into a detailed critique of this perspective, which is not without its criticisms, as is the case with any attempt to conduct a purely genetic mapping of analyzable afflictions.

From all of this, however, I wish to extract a paragraph that illustrates the degree of paradox one reaches with any attempt to reduce the function we encounter at the level of desire, the level of the principle of desire, to something like a preliminary, preparatory, not-yet-informed stage of adaptation to reality—a first form of relation to reality as such.

For it is by starting from this principle of classifying perverse formation in relation to the sense of reality that Glover, here as elsewhere, develops his thought. The implications of this approach I will indicate simply by referring to something you will recognize from countless other accounts but which here gains interest from being presented in an image-laden, literary, paradoxical, and genuinely expressive form. You will recognize something that is truly nothing other than what might be called the “Kleinian period” of Glover’s thought.

Indeed, this period is not so much defined by the theoretical struggle he believed he had to engage in with Melanie Klein, for on many points one could say that this perspective shares much in common with the Kleinian system. It concerns the period which, as he describes, corresponds to the stage where the subject’s so-called paranoid phase culminates in the “reality system” he terms “oral-anal,” which, he claims, would be the system within which the child lives during that period.

He characterizes it as: “the external world that represents a combination of a butcher’s shop, a public lavatory under shell-fire—and, perhaps more elaborately—a post-mortem room, a morgue.”
[“The external world has represented a combination of a butcher’s shop, a public lavatory under shell-fire, and a post-mortem room.” (p. 492)]

He explains that the particular resolution provided by the pivot and focal point of his argument at that moment transforms this world, as you indeed see, from one that is rather disrupted and catastrophic into: “a more reassuring and fascinating chemist’s shop, in which, however, the poison cupboard is left unlocked.”
[“And the drug addict converts this into a more reassuring and fascinating chemist’s shop, in which, however, the poison cupboard is left unlocked.” (p. 492)]

This is quite charming and picturesque and certainly evocative, but it also suggests some difficulty in conceiving that the encounter with reality is something we must imagine to be so profoundly, deeply lived, so immersed and implicit, that we must suppose the child’s early experience to resemble that of a butcher’s shop, a public lavatory under bombardment, or a morgue.

There is undoubtedly something here that, while initially jarring, is not reason enough to reject its principle outright; at the same time, however, it does legitimately raise some doubts about the accuracy of this formulation. This formulation certainly cannot intersect with any regular form of the development of the young child that might be characterized by the modes of the subject’s adaptation to reality.

Necessarily, such a formulation implies at the very least the articulation of a dual reality:
– one in which behaviorist experience might be inscribed,
– and another where we will be forced, reduced, to monitor the eruptions in the subject’s behavior; in other words, to restore from the outset something that implies the autonomy and originality of another dimension that is not primitive reality but is, from the very beginning, a beyond the subject’s lived experience.

I may need to apologize for dwelling so long on a contradiction…
which, once articulated, becomes so evident…
but we also cannot fail to notice what it implies, given that in certain formulations, it is masked. Indeed, we arrive at something that carries a significant equivocation regarding the term “reality.” If reality is considered to have anything that allows us to align it with a parallel development of the instincts—and this is indeed the most commonly accepted truth—we arrive at strange paradoxes, which inevitably have repercussions in practice.

If desire is present, it is precisely necessary to speak of it in its original form, and not in its masked form—namely, instinct—regarding what is at stake in evolution and what we encounter in our analytic experience. If this desire is inscribed within a homogeneous order, insofar as it is entirely articulable and assumable in terms of reality, if it belongs to the same order as reality, then indeed, we can understand the paradox implied in formulations drawn from the most everyday analytic experience. That is, desire situated in such a way implies that its maturation enables the world to achieve its objectivity. This notion forms, to a certain extent, part of the credo of certain analyses.

Here, I simply wish to pose the question of what this means concretely.

What is a world for us, the living? What is reality in the sense, for instance, of Hartmannian psychoanalysis—the one that gives due importance to the structuring elements involved in the organization of the ego, insofar as the ego is adapted to move effectively through constituted reality, through a world that is, for the moment, roughly identical to a fairly significant portion of our universe.

This implies that the most typical, most developed form of this world…
I, too, would like to take the liberty of offering images to help you grasp what we are discussing…
is adult reality. Let us identify it, for the sake of clarity, as “a world of American lawyers.”
The “world of American lawyers” seems to me currently the most developed, most advanced world that one could define in relation to what, in a certain sense, we must agree to call reality.

Namely, this world lacks nothing in a spectrum that spans from a fundamental relationship of essential, marked, and ever-present violence—ensuring that reality remains something we can say is never fully erased—to the procedural refinements that, in this world, allow for the insertion of all sorts of paradoxes and innovations, which are essentially defined by a relationship to the law, fundamentally constituted through the necessary detours required to achieve its most perfect violation. This, then, is the world of reality.

What relationship is there between this world and what one might call a mature desire—a mature desire in the sense we mean it, that is, genital maturation? What is it? The question can undoubtedly be addressed in several ways, one of which is empirical: examining the sexual behavior of “the American lawyer.”

To this day, nothing seems to confirm that there is a relationship, an exact correlation, between the perfect completion of such a well-managed world across all spheres of activity and perfect harmony in relationships with others—inasmuch as these involve success in what one calls the accord of love. Nothing proves this, and almost no one even considers supporting it. This remains, after all, merely a broad, illustrative way of showing where the question arises.

The question arises in the fact that a confusion persists at this level concerning the term “object,” between reality as we have just articulated it—where it would be situated—and the relationship of the subject to the object, insofar as it latently implies knowledge. In the idea that the maturation of desire simultaneously involves a maturation of the object, we are dealing with an entirely different object than the one we can effectively situate here. Objective identification allows us to characterize relationships with reality.

This object we speak of has been known to us for a long time, though it is entirely masked and veiled. It is the object called “the object of knowledge.” This is the object that is the goal, the aim, the endpoint of a long historical quest, the one behind the fruits of what we call science, which, for a long time, had to traverse paths rooted in a certain relationship between the subject and the world.

Rootedness—I mean this philosophically—in something whose field we cannot deny is where science originally took its departure.

And this is precisely what now distinguishes it…
like a child gaining independence but who was nourished by it for a long time…
from that relationship of meditation whose traces remain in what we call “theory of knowledge.”
In this domain, it came as close as possible to the idea of a relationship between the object and the subject, where “knowing” involves a profound identification—a relationship to a connaturality by which every grasp of the object manifests something of a principal harmony.

But let us not forget that this is only the result of a specialized experience, historically definable in multiple branches. Here, we will focus solely on the branch that is ours: Greek philosophy. This effort of assertion and delineation of what is called the object involves a principled attitude. It would be entirely wrong to consider that, now that the results have been obtained, we can dispense with it—as if its foundational position were irrelevant to its effects.

Certainly, we analysts are capable of introducing the question of what, in this pursuit of knowledge, is implicated in a position of desire. Here, as elsewhere, we merely rediscover something that has not escaped religious experience, which—while it may identify other ends for itself—has individualized this desire as the “desire to know”: cupido sciendi.

Whether we find more radical foundations for it in the form of some ambivalent drive such as scopophilia or even oral incorporation, this is merely a question of adding our touch. Yet one thing is certain: all this development of knowledge, along with its implicit notions of the function of the object, is the result of a choice. Every institution, every introduction to a philosophical position, has always, throughout the ages, been recognized as a position that involves the sacrifice of something.

It is to the extent that the subject enters into what is called disinterested inquiry—after all, its fruit, objectivity, has never been defined otherwise than as the attainment of a certain reality from a disinterested perspective, one that excludes at least in principle a certain form of desire—that the notion of the object, which we reintroduce, has been constituted: – because we know what we are doing, – because it is implicit in what we are doing when we reintroduce it, when we assume that in all our investigation of desire, we can, as virtual, as latent, as something to be rediscovered or attained, posit a correspondence of the object as the natural object of what we have explored in the perspective of desire.

Thus, there arises a confusion between: – the notion of the object as it has been elaborated over the centuries in philosophical inquiry—the object satisfying the desire for knowledge, – and what we might expect of the object of any desire.

This confusion leads us to easily posit a correspondence between a certain constitution of the object and a certain maturation of the drive.

It is by opposing this confusion that I attempt to articulate things differently for you, in a manner that I claim to be more faithful to our experience. Namely, I aim to enable you to grasp at every moment what the true articulation is between desire and what is occasionally called its object. This is what I call the synchronic articulation of the relationship between desire and its object, which I am attempting to introduce to you. It is the true form of the so-called object relation as it has been articulated to you up to this point. The symbolic formula $◊a, insofar as it allows you to give shape to what I call the fantasy—I call it here fundamental—means nothing other than this in the synchronic perspective: it provides the minimal structure that must support desire.

Within this minimal structure, two terms, whose relationship to one another constitutes the fantasy itself, remain complex because it is in a tertiary relationship with this fantasy that the subject constitutes itself as desiring.

Today, we take the tertiary perspective of this fantasy, allowing the subject’s assumption to pass through a, which is just as legitimate as letting it pass through $, given that desire is situated in the confrontation $◊a. You have already heard me articulate these matters at length, so I believe you will not be surprised or disoriented when I advance the claim that the object (a) is first defined as the support the subject gives itself insofar as it falters.

Here, let us pause for a moment. Let us begin by saying something approximate to make this clearer to you, in the sense that “it falters in its certainty as a subject.” Then I will rephrase it in a more precise term—
though one that speaks less intuitively, and which I have therefore hesitated to bring to you at first—
which is nonetheless the exact term: insofar as “it falters in its designation as a subject.” For the matter at hand rests entirely on what happens insofar as, as I have told you, the subject has this desire in the Other.

It is because, in the Other—in this discourse of the Other, which is the unconscious—something is lacking for the subject…
we will return to this shortly, as often as necessary, until the end…
it is because, by the very structure established by the subject’s relationship to the Other as the locus of speech, something at the level of the Other is lacking, which allows the subject to identify itself as precisely the subject of this discourse it produces. This something is what causes:

– the subject to disappear within it, insofar as this discourse is the discourse of the unconscious,
– the subject to employ for this designation something that is taken at its own expense…
not at the expense of a subject constituted within speech, but at the expense of a real subject, one that is indeed living…
that is to say, something which, by itself, is not at all a subject,
– and the subject, paying the necessary price for this recognition of itself as faltering, is introduced into that dimension always present wherever desire is concerned, namely, the necessity of paying the price of castration.

That is to say, something real, over which the subject has a hold in an imaginary relationship, is elevated to the pure and simple function of a signifier. This is the ultimate meaning, the deepest meaning, of castration as such. The fact that castration becomes relevant as soon as desire manifests itself clearly as such:
– this is the essential discovery of Freudianism,
– it is what was previously unrecognized,
– it is what has allowed us to develop all sorts of historical insights, which have been translated into various mythical forms and which, in turn, have been subsequently reduced to developmental terms.

The fertility of thought in this dimension is unquestionable. However, it should not deter us from exploring a dimension beyond that: not diachronic but synchronic. In other words, we must examine the essential relationship that is involved here. This relationship is as follows: the subject, paying (and here I am attempting to be as illustrative as possible, even if the terms are not the most rigorous)—paying with their person—must supplement this relationship, which is the relationship of the subject to the signifier, where they cannot designate or name themselves as subject.

This occurs through something that we can find an analogue for in the function of certain symbols of language, those that linguists distinguish under the term shifter symbols. I have previously alluded to the personal pronoun, inasmuch as its symbolic notion within the lexical system makes it something that designates the one who speaks when it is “I.” Similarly, on the plane of the unconscious—which is not a symbol but a real element of the subject—(a) is what intervenes to support the moment, in the synchronic sense, where the subject falters in designating themselves within an instance that is precisely that of desire.

I am aware of how exhausting the mental gymnastics of articulating at this level can be for you. Therefore, to offer some relief, I will illustrate this with terms drawn from our concrete experience. The (a), I have said, is the effect of castration. I did not say it is the object of castration. That object of castration, we call the phallus. What is the phallus?

It must be recognized that in our experience, when we see it emerge in the phallophanies—artificial as I described them last time—in analysis, it becomes evident that analysis is a completely unique and original experience. In no alchemy—therapeutic or otherwise—of the past had we seen it emerge. In the works of Hieronymus Bosch, for instance, we see an array of elements: dismembered limbs, the flatus (of which Mr. Jones later believed he identified a prototype), and all sorts of grotesque imagery, including the well-known flatus odorant. Yet even amidst such manifest depictions, the phallus rarely appears!

But we, we see it. We see it, and we also realize that it is not easy to pinpoint its precise presence. I will reference only one example here, taken from our experience of homosexuality. Our experience of homosexuality became defined the moment we began analyzing homosexuals. Initially, they were not analyzed. Professor Freud tells us in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that male homosexuality—he could not go further at that time—manifests itself as a narcissistic demand that the object must not be devoid of the attribute considered essential by the subject.

We began analyzing homosexuals. I urge you to consult the works of Bœhm, which began to take shape between 1929 and 1933 and beyond. He was one of the first. I highlight this because it is highly illustrative. I also referenced the bibliography of homosexuality when discussing the importance of certain articles.

The development of analysis shows us that homosexuality is far from being a primordial instinctual demand. It cannot simply be identified with a straightforward fixation or deviation of the instinct. We find, at a later stage, that the phallus, however it intervenes in the mechanism of homosexuality, is far from being the object. The phallus in question here is perhaps hastily identified with the paternal phallus, insofar as this phallus is found in the woman’s vagina. And it is because it is there, because it is feared there, that the subject is driven to extremes, even to homosexuality.

Thus, this is a phallus of an entirely different scope, function, and place than what we initially perceived. But that is not all. After having congratulated ourselves, so to speak, on catching this rabbit by its ears, we proceed with further analyses of homosexuals and come to realize that, ultimately—
and here I refer particularly to Bœhm’s works, which are especially illustrative and confirmed by substantial experience—
the image we encounter at a later date, in the analytic structurations of homosexuality, is an image that, while presenting itself as an appendage—we initially attribute it to the woman insofar as she is not yet castrated—upon closer scrutiny reveals itself as something that could be called the evagination, the outward projection of the interior of this organ.

This fantasy, which we have precisely encountered in the dream and which I analyzed at length for you, the dream of that reversed hood, an appendage made of something that is, in a sense, the exteriorization of the interior, is something that, within a certain perspective of investigation, turns out to be the ultimate imaginary term faced by the homosexual in question—and several such cases were analyzed by Bœhm—when it comes to revealing the daily dialectic of his desire.

What does this mean, if not that the phallus here appears in a radical form, insofar as:
– it is something that externally displays what is internally imaginary within the subject,
– and in the ultimate analysis, it is hardly surprising that a certain convergence arises between the imaginary function of what is here—in the imaginary realm—in a posture of extraposition, extirpation, nearly detached but not yet fully separated from the interior of the body. This is something that can most naturally be elevated to the function of a symbol, though it remains inseparably tied to its radical insertion, which makes it felt as a threat to the integrity of the self-image.

Having given this insight, I do not wish to leave you here, for this alone will not provide you with the meaning and function of (a) as an object in its full generality. I have told you, the object in the fantasy…
that is, in its most developed form, insofar as the subject is desire,
and the subject is therefore on the verge of this castrative relationship…
the object is what provides support to this position. Here, I want to show you how this can be articulated within a synchrony.

I emphasize synchrony because the necessity of discourse will inevitably give you a formulation that will be diachronic. That is to say, you might confuse what I am about to present with a genesis.

But it is nothing of the sort. What I aim to indicate through the relationships of letters that I will now inscribe on the board is something that allows us to situate this acquisition, and this object, in its relation to the subject as standing before imminent castration, in a relationship that I will provisionally call a ransom relationship to this position, while also accentuating what I mean by a support relationship.

How does this synchronic relationship arise?

It is as follows: if we start from the most original subjective position, that of demand…
as we find it, represented in the schema…
as the illustration, the observable example in behavior that allows us to grasp in its essence how the subject constitutes itself as it enters into the signifier. The relationship is established within the very simple algorithm of division.

A	D
St	D
Ⱥ	S
a	$
a‘
a”
a”’

It is essentially constituted by this vertical bar, with the horizontal bar occasionally appended, though it is not essential since it can be repeated at every level.

Let us say that it is insofar as the most primordial relationship of the subject, the relationship to the Other…
as the locus of speech…
is introduced to demand, that the dialectic is instituted, whose residue will give us the position of (a), the object.

I have told you that it is in terms of a signifying alternative that what interests us is articulated at the outset of this process. It is through this articulation that the subject’s need is structured, establishing everything that subsequently organizes the subject’s relationship to itself, which we call desire.

The Other, insofar as they are here someone real but addressed in the demand, is placed in the position of transforming this demand—whatever it may be—into another value: the value of the demand for love as such, insofar as it purely and simply refers to the alternative of presence-absence. I could not help but be surprised, moved, even touched to find this exact term, “presence-absence,” in Shakespeare’s sonnets, at the moment when he expresses the relation of love—with a hyphen.

Here, then, is the subject constituted as the Other is a real figure, as the one through whom the demand itself is laden with meaning, as the one through whom the subject’s demand becomes something other than what it explicitly asks for—namely, the satisfaction of a need.

There is—this is a principle we must maintain as an ever-present principle—no subject except for another subject:

– It is because the Other has been initially posited as the one who, in the presence of the demand, can or cannot play a certain role,
– and it is because, already, as in a tragedy, the Other is established as a subject.

From this point onward, it is when the subject, the individual, is introduced into the signifier that the process of subjectivization takes place. It is because the Other is a subject as such that the subject, at this moment, establishes itself and can institute itself as a subject. At this point, a new relationship with the Other is formed, through which the subject must be recognized as a subject—not merely as demand, not merely as love, but as a subject.

Do not think that I am attributing to some vague entity all the dimensions of philosophical meditation. That is not the case. But neither is it hidden; rather, it manifests itself in a very concrete and real form. Namely, it is something by which every function and functioning of the Other in reality—as responding to the subject’s demand—finds its guarantee, the truth of its behavior, whatever that behavior may be.

That is precisely this something at the core of the notion of truth, understood as intersubjectivity. It is what gives its full meaning to the English term “truth,” which is used both to express Truth with a capital T and, equally, what we call—in a decomposition of language that happens to arise from a linguistic system—”faith in speech.” In other words, it is that which allows one to count on the Other. This is what I mean when I say that “there is no Other of the Other.” What does this mean, if not precisely this: that no signifier exists to guarantee the concrete continuity of any manifestation of signifiers.

Here is where this term is introduced, manifested in the fact that, at the level of the Other, something emerges as a guarantor under the pressure of the subject’s demand. And yet, this guarantor first and foremost realizes itself as a lack, by which the subject must orient itself. This lack, note well, occurs at the level of the Other as the locus of speech, not at the level of the Other as real.

Nothing real on the side of the Other can compensate for this lack, except through a series of additions that will never be exhausted—additions I place in the margin, such as (a) or (a‘), insofar as they manifest themselves to the subject throughout its existence through gifts or refusals. Yet these will never do more than remain on the periphery of the fundamental lack found at the level of the signifier. The subject will be historically influenced by all these experiences with the Other—such as the maternal Other in this case—but none of these will ever exhaust the lack that exists at the level of the signifier itself, the level where the subject must orient itself to constitute itself as a subject, at the level of the Other. It is here that, insofar as the subject itself is marked by this failure, this lack of guarantee at the level of the truth of the Other, it must institute:

– this something that we have already attempted to approach earlier in the form of its genesis,
– this something which is (a),
– this something which is subject to the condition of expressing its ultimate tension, the remainder, the residue, which lies on the margins of all these demands and which no demand can exhaust,
– this something destined, as such, to represent a lack and to do so with the real tension of the subject.

This, if I may say so, is the backbone of the function of the object in desire. It is what appears as the price to be paid for the fact that the subject cannot situate itself in desire without castrating itself, in other words, without losing the most essential part of its life. It is also what structures this exemplary form of desire, one that Simone Weil already articulated as follows:

– “If one knew what the miser hides in his chest, one would know much about desire.”

Indeed, observe this essential dimension: it is precisely to preserve his life that the miser encloses (a), the object of his desire, in something, in a container. And through this very act, this object becomes mortified. It is because what is contained in the chest is removed from the circuit of life, extracted and conserved as a shadow of nothingness, that it is the object of the miser. This act illustrates the formula: “He who seeks to save his life will lose it.”

But this does not mean, so easily, that one who consents to lose it regains it directly. Where it is regained is something we will attempt to explore further next time.

Certainly, one of the key insights of the path we have taken today is that the path taken to regain it will inevitably confront the subject with what they consent to lose—namely, the phallus. If, as we have indicated, they have gone through the necessary step of mourning it, they can only glimpse or target it as a hidden object.

The term (a), as an opaque, obscure, and reductive term—reduced to a kind of nothingness—is the point beyond which the subject will seek the shadow of their lost life. It reflects the dynamic of desire, showing that the object is not merely the primitive object of some primordial impression, nor is it an object lost to be retrieved in a genetic perspective.

Rather, it is inherent to the very nature of desire to constitute the object within this dialectic. This is what we will revisit next time.