🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

We will today resume our discussion at the point where we left off last time, namely at the point concerning a sort of operation, which I had formalized for you in terms of a subjective division within the demand. We will revisit this insofar as it leads us to examine the formula of fantasy, insofar as it serves as the support of an essential relation, a pivotal relation, the one I am attempting to promote for you this year within the functioning of analysis.

If you recall, last time I presented the following letters to you: imposition, proposition of the demand in the locus of the Other, as the primary ideal stage.

This is, of course, a reconstruction, yet nothing is more concrete, nothing is more real, since it is to the extent that the child’s demand begins to articulate itself that the process is generated—or at least we claim to demonstrate that the process is generated—from which emerges this Spaltung (splitting) of discourse expressed in the effects of the unconscious.

If you remember, last time we… following this initial positioning of the subject in the act of the first articulation of demand… made reference to what emerges as the necessary counterpart of the position of the real Other, as the one who is omnipotent in responding to this demand.

As I have told you, this is a stage we evoked that is essential for understanding the foundation of the initial relation to the Other, to the mother, as establishing in the Other the first form of omnipotence.

But as I have said, it is by considering what happens at the level of the demand that we will continue the process of logical generation which occurs from this demand.

Thus, what I expressed the other day in the form that introduced the Other as a real subject… I am not certain whether it was in this form or another that I wrote this on the board… is that here the demand takes on another significance, that it becomes a demand for love, and insofar as it is a demand for the satisfaction of a need, it is imbued at this level with a sign, with a bar that fundamentally alters its significance.

It matters little whether I used these letters or not—these are indeed the ones I used—since this is precisely what can generate an entire range of experiences for the subject, insofar as they will be inscribed within a certain number of responses that are either gratifying or frustrating and are evidently crucial for inscribing a particular modulation of their history. But this is not what is pursued in the synchronic analysis, the formal analysis we are now undertaking.

It is to the extent that… at the subsequent stage to that of the position of the Other as a real Other responding to the demand… the subject questions it as a subject… that is to say, where the subject appears to themselves as a subject insofar as they are a subject for the Other… it is in this relation of the first stage, where the subject constitutes themselves in relation to the speaking subject, that they orient themselves within the fundamental strategy that is established as soon as the dimension of language appears, a dimension that only begins with language itself.

It is insofar as the Other, having been structured within language, thereby becomes a possible subject of a strategy [or tragedy] in relation to which the subject themselves can constitute themselves as a subject recognized within the Other, as a subject for a subject. There can be no other subject than a subject for a subject, and furthermore, the primary subject can only be established as such as a speaking subject, as a subject of speech.

Thus, it is insofar as the Other is itself marked by the necessities of language… that the Other is established not as a real other, but as the Other, as the locus of the articulation of speech… that the first possible position of a subject as such emerges, a subject who can grasp themselves as a subject, who grasps themselves as a subject within the Other, insofar as the Other thinks of them as a subject.

You see, as I pointed out to you last time, nothing is more concrete than this. It is not a stage of philosophical meditation but rather something primitive that is established in the relationship of trust.

• To what extent, and to what degree, can I rely on the other?
• What reliability exists in the behaviors of the other?
• What continuity can I expect from what has already been promised by them?

This is precisely what one of the most primitive conflicts… perhaps the most primitive from the perspective that concerns us… in the relationship between the child and the other revolves around. It is something we observe as fundamental to the establishment and very foundation of the principles of their history, as well as something that repeats itself at the deepest level of their destiny, governing the unconscious modulation of their behaviors. This does not arise merely from pure and simple frustration or gratification. It is insofar as they can rely on some other that, as you know, what we encounter in analysis emerges, even in the most mundane experience of analysis: that which is most radical in the unconscious modulation of the patient, whether neurotic or not.

Thus, it is insofar as, before the other as a subject of speech, as speech is primarily articulated, it is in relation to this other that the subject constitutes themselves as a speaking subject—not as the primitive subject of knowledge, not the subject of philosophers, but the subject as they present themselves as seen by the other, as capable of responding to them in the name of a shared tragedy, as a subject who can interpret everything the other articulates, conveys from their most profound intention, from their good or bad faith.

At this level, essentially—if you allow me a play on words—the S truly presents itself not only

• as the S inscribed as a letter,
• but also at this level as the Es from the topical formula that FREUD gives for the subject: Id (Ça).
  Id, in an interrogative form, or also in the form where, if you place a question mark here, S? articulates itself as “Is it?”

At this level, this is all the subject formulates about themselves. They are, in their nascent state, confronted with the articulation of the Other, insofar as it responds to them, but responds beyond what they have articulated in their demand.

The S is, at this level, where the subject is suspended and, at the next stage…
that is, insofar as they take that step where they seek to grasp themselves beyond speech, they are themselves marked by something that fundamentally divides them from themselves as a subject of speech…
it is at this level, as a barred subject ($), that they can, must, and intend to find the answer.

And yet, they do not find it insofar as, at this level, they encounter within the Other that hollow, that void which I articulated for you by saying that “there is no Other of the Other,” that no possible signifier guarantees the authenticity of the chain of signifiers, that it essentially depends on the goodwill of the Other, and that nothing, at the level of the signifier, guarantees or authenticates in any way the chain or meaningful speech.

And it is here that the subject produces something:

• something they draw from elsewhere,
• something they summon from elsewhere,
• something they bring from the imaginary register,
• something they draw from a part of themselves engaged in the imaginary relationship with the other.

And it is this (a) that appears here, that emerges in the place where the interrogation of $? arises about what they truly are, about what they truly desire. It is there that the emergence of what we call (a) occurs.
(a), insofar as it is the object, the object of desire without a doubt—not because this object of desire would directly align with the desire, but because this object enters into play within a complex that we call “fantasy,” fantasy as such.

That is to say, insofar as this object is the support around which, at the moment the subject vanishes in the face of the lack of a signifier that answers from its place at the level of the Other, they find their support in this object.
In other words, at this level, the operation is division. The subject attempts to reconstitute themselves, to authenticate themselves, to reunite themselves within the demand directed toward the Other. The operation ceases.

It is to the extent that, here, the quotient the subject seeks to achieve…
insofar as they must grasp, reconstitute, and authenticate themselves as a subject of speech…
remains suspended here, in the presence, at the level of the Other, of the appearance of this remainder, by which the subject themselves compensates, provides the ransom, and replaces the deficiency at the level of the Other, of the signifier that answers them.

A	D
St	D
Ⱥ	S
a	$

It is insofar as this quotient and this remainder remain present here, one alongside the other, and, if one might say, sustain one another, that fantasy is nothing other than the perpetual confrontation of this $…
this $ insofar as it marks that moment of the fading of the subject, where the subject finds nothing in the Other that guarantees them in any certain or definitive way, nothing that authenticates them, nothing that allows them to situate or name themselves at the level of the discourse of the Other, that is to say, as a subject of the unconscious.
…it is in response to this moment that this imaginary element (a) emerges as a substitute for the missing signifier…
what we call a in its most general form,
insofar as it is a correlative term within the structure of fantasy,
…this support of $ as such, at the moment it tries to indicate itself as the subject of unconscious discourse.

It seems to me that I need not say more about this here. Yet I will elaborate further to remind you what this means in Freudian discourse, for instance, the famous: “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (“Where it was, there I must become”).

This is quite precise. It is the Ich that is not das Ich, not the ego, but an Ich, the Ich used as the subject of the phrase.
“Where it was, where It speaks,” that is, where a moment ago something existed that is the unconscious desire,
there I must designate myself, there “I must be” this “I” which is the goal, the endpoint, the culmination of analysis before it names itself, before it forms itself, before it articulates itself—if indeed it ever does. For even in the Freudian formula, this “soll Ich werden” (I must become) carries the ambiguity of “must I become?” making the subject of becoming and the obligation it entails a question posed to us.

We must reconquer this lost domain of the subject’s being, as FREUD expresses it in the same sentence, with a beautiful comparison: as the reconquest of Holland from the Zuiderzee, lands offered to peaceful conquest.
This field of the unconscious, on which we must prevail in achieving the Great Analytic Work,
this is precisely what is at stake.

But before this is accomplished—”where It was”—what indicates to us the place of this “I” that must come into being?

What designates it for us is the index—of what?—precisely of that which is at stake: desire. Desire, insofar as it is both a function and the ultimate term of what is at stake in the unconscious. And desire is here sustained by the opposition, the coexistence of the two terms $◊a, with $, the subject, at this limit where they lose themselves, where the unconscious begins.

This means there is not, purely and simply, a privation of something that might be called “consciousness.”
Rather, another dimension begins, where it is no longer possible for the subject to know, where they are no longer consciencia.

Here ends all possibility of naming oneself. But within this point of cessation lies also the index, the indicator brought forth, which serves as the major function—regardless of the appearances of what, at that moment, is presented before the subject as the object that fascinates them, but which is also what holds them back from the pure and simple annihilation, the suspension of their existence.
And this is what constitutes the structure of what we call fantasy.

It is on this that we will focus today. We will examine what generality of application this formula of fantasy entails. Furthermore, we will address it as we stated last time: in its synchronic function, that is, in the place it occupies within this reference of the subject to themselves, to what they are at the level of the unconscious when—not to say they question what they are—but when they are, in a sense, carried by the question of what they are, which is the very definition of neurosis.

Let us first turn to the formal properties…
as analytic experience allows us to recognize them…
of this object (a) insofar as it intervenes in the structure of fantasy.

The subject, as we say, stands on the threshold of this failing nomination, which plays a structural role at the moment desire is directed.

And they are at the point where they endure, if I may put it so, at the maximum, at an acme, what can be called the virulence of the λόγος (logos), insofar as it coincides with the supreme point of the alienating effect of their implication in the λόγος.

This engagement of man within the fundamental combinatory that gives the essential characteristic of λόγος [logos] is a question that others, besides myself, must resolve: what it might ultimately mean.

I mean, what it means that man is necessary for this action of λόγος [logos] in the world. But what concerns us here is the outcome of this for man, how man confronts it, how he sustains it.

The first formula that may occur to us is that he must sustain it in reality, sustain it through his reality, through himself as real, that is to say, through what remains for him the most mysterious aspect of himself.

A digression here would not be inappropriate: it would involve trying to apprehend…
and this is something that some of you have been questioning for quite some time…
what, ultimately, the use of the term real might mean in our discourse, insofar as we oppose it to the symbolic and the imaginary.

We must acknowledge that if psychoanalysis, if the Freudian experience, emerges in its time, in our era, it is certainly not insignificant to note that this is due to what I might call a crisis, either of the theory of knowledge or of knowledge itself.

Finally, the point on which I attempted to draw your attention last time concerns what the adventure of science signifies…
how it was created, grafted, branched onto this long cultural tradition…
which involved a particular stance, partial enough that we may call it selective, a retreat of man to specific positions in relation to the world—initially contemplative positions. These positions did not imply the stance of desire—certainly, as I pointed out to you—but rather the choice, the election of a certain form of desire: the desire, as I said, to know, the desire to understand.

We can undoubtedly specify this as a discipline, an ascetic practice, a choice. And we know what emerged from it—namely, science, our modern science, a science that distinguishes itself, for us, through its exceptional grasp on the world. In some respects, this grasp reassures us when we speak of reality.

We know that we are not without a grip on the real, but what kind of grip, after all?
Is it a grip of knowledge?

Here, I can only at least pose the question for you.

Does it not seem…

on a first approach, at the initial apprehension of what results from this process, that surely at the point where we now stand, at the stage of development particularly of physical science—the field in which the success of symbolic chains exerting their grasp on something we call constructed experience has gone the furthest—

…does it not seem that less than ever do we have the sense of reaching that which, in the ideal of nascent philosophy, of philosophy at its beginnings, was proposed as its goal, the reward for the philosopher’s or sage’s effort—namely, that participation, that knowledge, that identification with being that was aimed for and represented in the Greek perspective, in the Aristotelian perspective, as the ultimate goal of knowing?
In other words, the identification, through thought, of the subject—
which at that time was not yet called “subject”—
of the thinker, the one pursuing knowledge, with the object of their contemplation.

What do we identify with at the end point of modern science? I do not believe there is a single branch of science:

• whether it is one where we have achieved the most perfect, most advanced results,
• or whether it is one where science is attempting to take its first steps, as in the terms of a psychology called behaviorism.

In both cases, we are certain to be disappointed, ultimately, in regard to what there is to know.

Even when we find ourselves within one of the nascent forms of this science…
which pretends to imitate, like the small figure in Dürer’s Melancholia, the little angel
who, beside the great Melancholy, begins to draw its first circles:

…when we begin a psychology that claims to be scientific, we establish from the outset that we will practice simple behaviorism, meaning we will merely observe, deliberately refusing from the very beginning any ambition that entails assuming or identifying with what is in front of us. Beyond the method, this essentially involves rejecting the belief that we could eventually achieve the goal set forth by the ancient ideal of knowledge.

There is undoubtedly something genuinely exemplary here, something that ought to provoke reflection on what happens when, on the other hand, a psychology…
which, of course, if we do not posit and articulate it as a science, still presents itself as paradoxical in relation to the scientific method as traditionally defined…
Freudian psychology tells us that the real of the subject cannot be conceived as a correlative of knowledge.

The first step where the real is situated as real, as the term of something in which the subject is invested,
is not positioned in relation to the subject of knowledge. This is because something within the subject articulates itself that is beyond their possible knowledge and yet is already the subject, and more than that: the subject who recognizes themselves in being the subject of an articulated chain.

That something exists of the order of discourse from the very beginning—sustained by some kind of support, a support that is not inappropriate to describe with the term “being”…
if, after all, we give the term “being” its minimal definition…
if “being” means anything, it is the real insofar as it is inscribed in the symbolic, the real implicated in this chain that Freud tells us is coherent and governs, beyond all motivations accessible to the realm of knowledge, the behavior of the subject.

This is indeed something that, in the full sense, deserves to be called of the order of “being,” because it is already something that positions itself as a real articulated in the symbolic, as a real that has found its place within the symbolic, and that occupies this place beyond the subject of knowledge.

It is at the moment, I would say—and this closes the parenthesis I opened earlier—it is at the moment:

• when something in our experience of knowledge eludes us, something that has unfolded along the “tree of knowledge,”
• when something in this branch called science reveals itself, manifests itself to us as having deceived the hope of knowledge.

And yet, while one could also say that it may have gone much further than any kind of expected outcome of knowledge, it is simultaneously and at that very moment that…
in the experience of subjectivity, in what is established within confidence, within analytic trust…
Freud shows us this chain, where things articulate themselves in a manner structured homogeneously with any other symbolic chain, with what we know as discourse. However, this chain is not accessible—in the sense of contemplation—not accessible to the subject as something where they could rest, as an object where they could recognize themselves. On the contrary, fundamentally, they misrecognize themselves.

And to the extent that they attempt to approach this chain, to name themselves there, to orient themselves, this is precisely where they do not find themselves. They are present only in the intervals, in the gaps. Every time they try to grasp themselves, they are never more than in a gap, and it is for this reason that the imaginary object of fantasy—upon which they attempt to support themselves—is structured as it is. This is what I now want to show you.

There are indeed many other things to demonstrate regarding the formalization $◊a, but I want to show you how (a) is constructed.
As I have said, it is as a cut and as an interval that the subject encounters themselves at the terminal point of their questioning.
And it is precisely as a form of cut that (a), in all its generality, reveals its shape to us.

Here, I will simply group together certain common traits that you already know concerning the different forms of this object. For those here who are analysts, I can move quickly, leaving room to delve into details and revisit later if needed.

If the object in the fantasy is to be something that takes the form of a cut, where shall we be able to recognize it? Frankly, I would say that, at the level of the result, I believe you will already be ahead of me—at least, I dare hope so.

In this relationship where the $—at the point where it questions itself as $—can only find support in a series of terms that we refer to here as (a), insofar as they are objects in the fantasy, we can, as a first approximation, identify three examples. This does not imply that these examples are entirely exhaustive, but they are almost so.

I say they are not entirely exhaustive because approaching the matter at the level of what I would call the result—that is, of the constituted (a)—is not a particularly legitimate procedure. I mean that starting from this point merely places you on familiar ground, allowing you to take an easier path. It is not the most rigorous approach, as you will see when we reconnect with this term via the more structured pathway—starting from the barred subject, who raises, who provokes the notion of the object.

However, we will start with the object because it is the point where you will most readily recognize yourselves.

There are three types identified in analytic experience, fully recognized as such up to now:

• The first type is what we usually call, rightly or wrongly, the pre-genital object.
• The second type is the kind of object involved in what is called the castration complex, which you know, in its most general form, to be the phallus.
• The third type…
  this may be the only term that surprises you as a novelty, but in truth, I think that those of you who have studied closely enough what I have written on psychoses will not find yourselves fundamentally disoriented here…
  the third type of object, fulfilling exactly the same function with respect to the subject at the point of its failure, its fading, is nothing more, and nothing less, than what is commonly called delusion—and, very specifically, what Freud, from almost the beginning of his insights, wrote:
  “They love their delusion as they love themselves” (Sie lieben also den Wahn wie sich selbst).

We will revisit these three forms of the object insofar as they allow us to grasp something about their form that enables them to fulfill this function: to become the signifiers the subject draws from its own substance to stand before, precisely, this gap, this absence of the signifier at the level of the unconscious chain.

As a pre-genital object, what does (a) mean?

In the realm of animal experience, insofar as it is structured through images, should we not evoke here the very term by which more than one materialist reflection has summarized what, after all, the functioning of an organism is—even a human one—at the level of material exchanges?

Specifically—and this is not my invention—this animal, human as it may be, is, after all, nothing more than a tube with two openings: one where things go in and another where they go out. And indeed, it is through this schema that the so-called pre-genital object constitutes itself insofar as it comes to fulfill its signifying function within the fantasy.

It is to the extent that what the subject consumes separates itself from them at a certain moment—or even, on occasion, when the position is reversed, as in the “sadistic-oral” stage—they themselves cut it off, or at least make an effort to sever it and bite.

Thus, the object as an object of weaning, meaning quite literally an object of severance on one hand, and on the other hand, at the other end of the tube, insofar as what is rejected separates itself from them—and as they are taught the rites and forms of cleanliness—they learn that what they expel, they sever from themselves.

It is essentially in this sense that what we observe in common analytic experience forms the fundamental shapes of the object in the so-called oral and anal phases, namely:

• The nipple, that part of the breast that the subject can hold in their oral cavity, and from which they are also separated.
• Likewise, excrement, which at another moment becomes for the subject the most significant form of their relationship to objects.

These are taken and chosen precisely because they are particularly exemplary, manifesting in their form the structure of severance. They are engaged to play this role of support at the level where the subject themselves is situated as such within the signifier, insofar as they are structured by the cut.

This explains why these objects, among others and in preference to others, are chosen. For one cannot help but observe:

• If it were simply a matter of the subject eroticizing this or that function as vital,
• Why, for example, is there no more primitive or seemingly more fundamental phase linked to a function just as vital as that of nutrition—one involving respiration? Why is there no phase associated with breathing, just as there are with ingestion through the mouth and excretion from the intestinal opening?

Yes, but respiration nowhere involves this element of severance. Respiration does not sever itself, and when it is interrupted, it inevitably engenders some form of drama. Nothing is inscribed in a severance of respiration except in exceptional cases. Respiration, as rhythm, is pulsation; it is vital alternation. It is nothing that allows, on the imaginary plane, the precise symbolization of what is at issue: namely, the interval, the cut.

This is not to say, however, that nothing passing through the respiratory orifice can be marked or punctuated. Indeed, it is through this same orifice that the emission of the voice occurs, and the emission of the voice is something that can be cut, that can be punctuated. And it is for this reason that we will encounter it later, specifically in relation to the third type of (a) we have called the subject’s delusion.

To the extent that this emission is not punctuated, to the extent that it is simply πνεῦμα (pneuma), breath or flatus, it is remarkably significant—and here I invite you to refer to the studies of Jones—that from the perspective of the unconscious, it is not individualized as something belonging to the respiratory order.

Rather, due to the imposition of the form of severance, as seen at the deepest level of our unconscious experience—and it is to Jones’ credit that he identified this—it is the anal flatus that paradoxically, and with the kind of unpleasant surprise analytic discoveries often bring us, emerges as the most profound symbol of what is at stake whenever the phallus symbolizes the subject at the unconscious level.

At the second level, [–ϕ], and I emphasize that this is purely an expository artifice—there is no first or second level as such. At this point, as we move among these terms, all the (a) objects serve the same function. They fulfill the same role; the question is why they take one form or another. But in the synchronic structure we are describing, what we aim to extract are the traits, the shared characteristics.

Here, at the level of the castration complex, we find a different form: that of mutilation. Indeed, if it is about severance, it suffices that the subject separates from some part of themselves, that they are capable of self-mutilation.

After all, this phenomenon—which analytic authors have observed—is not so novel in its initial aspect. They have noted, regarding mutilation and its significant role in all forms and manifestations of humanity’s access to its own reality, particularly in the consecration of man’s fullness as a human being. History, ethnography, and the observation of initiation practices all show us how, through various forms of stigmatization, humanity has sought to define access to a higher level of self-realization. The function of mutilation, in this sense, is well-documented, and I need not reiterate its catalogue or scope here.

It is sufficient for me to remind you, merely to highlight it on this occasion, that in another form, this too concerns something we can call “severance.” And it does so precisely because it establishes the transition to a signifying function, for what remains of this mutilation is a mark.

This is what allows the subject who has undergone mutilation as a particular individual within a group to bear the mark of a signifier, one that extracts them from an initial state and elevates or identifies them with a different, superior “power of being.” This is the meaning of all forms of initiation rites, insofar as we understand their significance at the level of the castration complex as such.

I note, in passing, that this does not exhaust the question, for over the course of our discussions on the castration complex, you must have noticed the ambiguities surrounding the function of the phallus. In other words, even if we simply acknowledge that the phallus is marked, that it is designated as a signifier, it remains true that the form of castration is not entirely contained within external manifestations, such as the results of certain rites or deformative practices like circumcision.

The mark borne by the phallus is not an extirpation or a particular negation imposed on it by the castration complex. This point cannot be fully addressed at this level of exposition; we will return to it, I believe, next time, when we delve into what I will merely indicate today: the problem that arises as we revisit and inventory these issues.

Specifically, how and why Freud could initially establish such a monumental link between the castration complex and something that, upon closer examination, appears far less connected—namely, a dominating, cruel, tyrannical figure of an absolute father. This is undoubtedly a myth, and, as with everything Freud introduced—miraculously so—it is a myth that endures. We will attempt to explain why.

Nonetheless, at their fundamental level, initiation rites—marked and inscribed through various forms of stigmatization and mutilation—fulfill the role of (a). They are intended by the subjects undergoing them to effect a transformation in their nature.

What, up until that point, in the freedom of pre-initiatory stages characteristic of primitive societies, had been left to the indifferent play of natural desires, these initiation rites alter the meaning of these desires. From that point on, they are given a function:

• One where the being of the subject is identified and designated as such, where they become, if one may say so, fully “man” or “woman.”
• One where mutilation serves to orient desire, to assign it a function as an index of something realized, which can only be articulated or expressed within a symbolic beyond—what we today call being, a realization of being within the subject.

On this occasion, we might make some lateral observations and note that if something lends itself to being marked, to the signifying inscription of the initiation rite, it is certainly not by chance that it is anything that might be offered as an appendage. You know as well that the phallic appendage is not the only one employed in this context. Undoubtedly, the relationship the subject can establish with themselves, in any reference to their own being—especially one where we can conceive that lived apprehension might be the most striking—namely, the relationship of tumescence, prominently designates the phallus as something that offers itself in a privileged way to this function: as something that can be subjected to severance and, more than any other object, is fraught with dread and delicacy.

Here, insofar as the function of narcissism is the subject’s imaginary relation to themselves, it must be taken as the point of support where, centrally, the formation of the significant object is inscribed. At this juncture, we might also notice the importance of the experience we have at the level of the mirror stage:

• Specifically, the inscription, the situation in which the subject can place their own tension, their own erection, in relation to the image beyond themselves that they perceive in the other.

This allows us to see the legitimacy of certain approaches that the tradition of philosopher-psychologists had already undertaken concerning the apprehension of the function of the ego.

I refer here to what Maine de Biran brought to us in his fine analysis of the role of the feeling of effort:

• The feeling of effort insofar as it is a “thrust,” apprehended by the subject on both sides at once,
• Insofar as the subject is the author of the thrust, but also the author of what contains it,
• Insofar as the subject experiences this thrust as originating within themselves.

When we compare this with the experience of tumescence, we can clearly see how something might situate itself there and function at this same level of experience—namely, as that through which the subject experiences themselves without ever being able to grasp themselves, because here there is, properly speaking, no possible mark, no possible severance.

There is something here, I believe, whose link must be identified insofar as it assumes symbolic, symptomatic value at the same level of experience we are analyzing here—one that is paradoxically related to fatigue.

If effort cannot, in any way, serve the subject—since nothing permits it to bear the signifying mark of severance—then inversely, it seems that this “something,” whose illusory, unobjectifiable character you know from the erotic experience, is what we call the fatigue of the neurotic:

• That paradoxical fatigue that has nothing to do with any muscular fatigue we might record on the level of facts,
• That fatigue, insofar as it corresponds to and is, in a way, the inverse, the aftermath, the trace of what I would call an “effort of signification.”

It is here, I believe, that we might find—importantly, in passing—this “something” that, in its most general form, relates to the tumescence, to the subject’s thrust as such, giving us the limits at which the possible consecration of the signifying mark dissolves.

Now, we come to the third form of this little (a) insofar as it can serve as an object.

Here, I would like to stress that there should be no misunderstanding. Admittedly, I do not have enough time here to emphasize what I will attempt to isolate in all its details.

What I think is most effective in helping you grasp what is at stake and how I mean it—beyond a careful rereading, which I encourage, of what I have written on the subject A Preliminary Question Concerning Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis—is what I articulated regarding what Schreber’s delusion allows us to articulate, in such an advanced and elaborate way. This will enable us to understand the function of voice in delusion as such.

I believe it is:

• Insofar as we seek to understand how the voice in delusion specifically meets the formal requirements of (a),
• Insofar as it can be elevated to the signifying function of severance, of the interval as such, that we can grasp the phenomenological characteristics of this voice.

The subject produces the voice, and more: we will have to invoke this function of the voice insofar as it brings into play the weight of the subject, the real weight of the subject in discourse. In the formation of the superego instance, the “big voice” must be introduced as something representing the instance of an Other manifesting as real.

But is it the same voice that is at issue in the voice of the delusional subject? Is the delusional voice the same “something” whose dramatic function Jean Cocteau tried to isolate in The Human Voice (La Voix humaine)? It suffices to refer to the experience we can have of it, in fact, in an isolated form where Cocteau, with great insight and sensitivity, demonstrated its pure impact: that is, over the telephone.

What does the voice teach us as such, beyond the discourse it conveys over the telephone? Surely, there is no need to provide a kaleidoscope of the various experiences that might arise from this.

Let me invite you to consider a situation where, trying to request a service from a business or anything else, you find yourself on the phone with one of those voices that reveals enough about indifference, unwillingness, or a determined effort to evade any acknowledgment of the personal or immediate nature of your request. This is precisely the kind of voice that tells you, unmistakably, that you can expect nothing from the person you are addressing—one of those voices we might call a “foreman’s voice,” a term so magnificently crafted by the genius of language. Not because it is “against the master,” but because it truly is the opposite of a master.

This voice, this form of embodying vanity, nonexistence, or bureaucratic emptiness that some voices convey, is this what we are referring to when we speak of the voice in the function we assign it at the level of (a)? Absolutely not.

If, in this case, the voice presents itself as pure articulation—and this is precisely the paradox of what the delusional subject communicates when questioned—it is that something about the nature of voices always seems to elude explanation. Nothing is firmer for the delusional subject than the consistency and existence of the voice as such. And of course, this is precisely because the voice is reduced to its sharpest form, to the pure point at which the subject can only grasp it as imposing itself upon them.

This is why, in analyzing the delusion of President Schreber, I emphasized the cutting nature of the voices he heard. These voices, as Schreber describes, are exactly fragments of sentences: “Sie sollen werden, etc.” They are precisely significant words that break off, that push forward, leaving in the wake of their interruption an appeal to meaning.

The subject is indeed implicated here, but strictly speaking, in a manner where they disappear, succumb, and are entirely engulfed by this meaning, which addresses them only in a global sense. It is in this phrase—”it implicates him”—that I would summarize, as I conclude today, the essence of what I have attempted to grasp and convey to you.

I admit that today’s session may have been one of the most difficult I have delivered to you. I hope you will find it rewarding next time, as we will proceed along less arid paths.

Today, however, I asked you to focus on the notion of interest—that is, the subject:

• as being in the interval,
• as existing within the interval of the discourse of the unconscious,
• as being, strictly speaking, the metonymy of this being expressed in the unconscious chain.

If the subject feels eminently captivated by these voices, by the nonsensical phrases of delusion, it is for the same reason that, in all other forms of this object I enumerated today, the fascination lies at the level of the cut, at the level of the interval. The subject fixes on this point to sustain themselves at the instant where, strictly speaking, they aim at and question themselves as a being, as a being of their unconscious.

This is the core of what we are questioning here. And I would not wish to end—at least for those joining us for the first time—without emphasizing the significance of such an analysis, of this small link in the chain of my discourse today, in relation to those that have preceded it.

What is at stake is understanding what we must do with regard to this fantasy. For I have shown you here the most radical and simplest forms of this fantasy, those in which we know it constitutes the privileged objects of the subject’s unconscious desire. But this fantasy is mobile; if we prod it, it will not simply drop one of its elements. There is no instance of a properly challenged fantasy failing to respond by reasserting its form. Moreover, we know the extent of complications that fantasy can reach, especially when, in its so-called “perverse” form, it insists, maintains, and complicates its structure in an increasingly determined effort to fulfill its function.

Should interpreting the fantasy, as the phrase goes, simply reduce the subject to a present moment defined by our standards? To the actuality of reality as we, as scientists or as individuals who imagine that everything is reducible to terms of knowledge, can define it?

It seems that much of analytic technique leans in this direction: to reduce the subject to the functions of reality. This is the reality I mentioned last time—a reality that, for some analysts, appears articulable only as what I have called “a world of American lawyers.”

Is it not, without any doubt, the case that this endeavor is beyond the reach of a certain kind of persuasion? Does the place occupied by fantasy not require us to see that there is another dimension where we must account for what might be called the true demands of the subject?

Specifically, this is not the dimension of reality or a reduction to the common world, but a dimension of being, a dimension where the subject carries within them something—God knows—that may be as burdensome to bear as Hamlet’s message. Yet, while it may be something destined for a fatal outcome, it is also not merely something that we, as analysts…
if indeed we, as analysts, can find in the experience of desire more than a simple accident, more than something that is ultimately quite inconvenient but about which we might simply wait for it to pass, for old age to arrive, and for the subject to naturally rediscover “the paths of peace and wisdom”…
this desire points us, as analysts, toward something else.

And this “something else” that it designates for us:

• How are we to work with it?
• What is our mission?
• What, ultimately, is our duty?

This is the question I raise when speaking of the interpretation of desire.