🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I will ask for assistance today because I am feeling slightly under the weather. I will make a few remarks about last night’s session. There was evident progress in the first part, in the sense that—as you may have noticed—we managed to sustain the dialogue a little longer than before.

I have received testimonials—which I will not disclose here—about the movements and hesitations this provokes in the subjectivity of each person: – “Shall I intervene, or shall I not?” – “I did not intervene,” etc.
This seems to raise many issues.

Nonetheless, I would like to lay out something specific. You must have realized, if only from the way I conduct them, that these sessions should not be considered analogous to so-called “scientific” communication sessions.

It is in this sense that I urge you to take note of the following: in these open sessions, you are not at all in a performative space, despite the presence of foreign guests, sympathizers, and others. This should not in any way intimidate you; that is to say, you should not strive to say things that are overly polished or meant to showcase your brilliance or increase the esteem that may already exist for you.

This truly does not matter in any way. Nothing compels you to make perfectly balanced contributions. You are here primarily to engage with matters that, it is clearly understood, will not fully come to you within the confines of one of these meetings. For instance, you will not learn about the relationship between ethnography and psychoanalysis in a single session. You are precisely here to open yourselves to things you have not yet encountered, to unexpected matters, in principle.

So why not, if I may say so, give this openness its fullest resonance by posing questions at the deepest level where they can reach you, even if this results in questions that are somewhat hesitant, vague, or even baroque? In other words, the only criticism I would have for you—if I may be so bold—is that you all try too hard to seem intelligent. Everyone already knows that you are. So why try to appear so? And, in any case, what importance does it hold, whether in being or in seeming?

That being said, those who did not manage to vent their bile—or the opposite—last night are encouraged to do so now, because the interest in these discussions lies precisely in their continuities.

At this point, we turn to Mr. ANZIEU, whom I thank for being willing to share his thoughts.

Didier ANZIEU

First, a justification: if I did not speak last night, it was because you steered the discussion in a particular direction, while my question was headed in a divergent one.

LACAN: That was all the more reason to raise it.

Didier ANZIEU

The direction taken in the discussion concerned the relationship one can discern between psychoanalysis and the perspectives offered by Mr. LÉVI-STRAUSS in terms of the content of results, deep societal structures, and so on.

The remark I wanted to address to Mr. LÉVI-STRAUSS, on the other hand, concerned language, specifically the formal categories he used. I wanted to ask him whether these were deliberately chosen or, conversely, whether they constituted a kind of vernacular language he was employing—and, if so, to justify this choice.

Furthermore, I wished to highlight that this language seemed to be one to which we, as psychoanalysts, are accustomed.

Indeed, Mr. LÉVI-STRAUSS sought to pay us the compliment of beginning and concluding with psychoanalysis, demonstrating that FREUD had already discovered what he himself rediscovered twenty or thirty years later, influenced by his own deep personal motivations.

However, I believe there is a fairly significant error regarding FREUD: the note to the “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” references “Totem and Taboo” because it was written after the text of the “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” “Totem and Taboo” dates from 1913 to 1914. Moreover, much of what FREUD discovered about the personal repercussions of family structure reveals itself to be sociologizing upon closer examination.

Yet, it seemed to me that where Mr. LÉVI-STRAUSS sought to emphasize the convergence between psychoanalysis and ethnology, it was not the most interesting point. Rather, in the formulations he employed, he mentioned that in regions where female infanticide prevails, this custom is explained by polyandry. Here, he invokes a mechanism of individual psychology familiar to us—the mechanism of compensation, which can range from overcompensation to reaction formation.

Later, he demonstrated that the institution of polyandry persisted even as the custom of infanticide ceased under the colonial influence of the English. Here was a phenomenon of persistence with parallels familiar to us in the form of repetition automatism and the persistence of maladaptive behavior—precisely the hallmark of neurotic behavior.

Finally, when he unveiled the essence of his discovery [cf. “The Elementary Structures of Kinship”], he showed us that all family structures, despite their contingencies, revealed a fundamental symbolic necessity. This necessity dictates that, for society to thrive, it must protect itself against the family. He seemed to introduce a finality here that is, in a characteristically distinctive way, unconscious among the individuals who promote it, yet it nonetheless produces results.

And when you yourself later made the connection with the notion of the unconscious, it is evident that it is exactly the same mechanism we find when the unconscious expresses itself, giving meaning to behavior—meanings of which the subject recognizes that they concern the subject.

Finally, when you, going—or thinking you were going—in the direction of Mr. LÉVI-STRAUSS, demonstrated that the more marriage is possible between relatives, between close cousins, and consequently the more the domain of incest is restricted, the more the prohibition of incest is reinforced.

LACAN

I did not explain myself well on that point, because it was impossible to do so given that the discussion did not fully engage. It is the distinctly phantasmatic element, the imaginary creation, that is more or less manifest, more or less latent, in the individual as we know them through analysis. There is nothing more to say. It is quite clear that we only know it within a certain cultural sphere. This is, of course, the concrete presence of what DURANDIN specifically alluded to when he raised the question:

“How can we explain the violence of what we observe?”

He did not specify this enough. What we observe, he seemed to imply, was self-evident—that the violence of the prohibition of incest was somehow measurable, expressed in a certain number of overt, apparent social acts. This is not true. Because it had to be discovered first, through neuroses, and then within a much larger circle of individuals beyond those properly within the realm of neuroses.

What is at stake, then, is the presence of the imaginary instance, the Oedipus complex as such. That is what I stated we could conceive of—and that it was difficult to conceive of otherwise—starting from LÉVI-STRAUSS’s systematization:

• That, if you will, we must conceive of the instances of the Oedipus complex with the intensity we have discovered in it, with the importance and presence it holds in the subject we deal with;
• That, to put it simply, we must conceive of it as a recent, terminal phenomenon, if you will, relative to what LÉVI-STRAUSS describes, and not as an original phenomenon. This is the point on which I focused my interpretation.

Didier ANZIEU

So, it seemed to me to be a whole bundle of remarks that applied to mechanisms of society, and for which we could find equivalences…
Unless my associative thoughts also stem from personal relations…
It seemed to me that equivalences could be found in the mechanisms of symptom formation, its transformation, reinforcement, displacement, persistence, etc.

I would have liked to ask Mr. LÉVI-STRAUSS if he would have recognized himself in this interpretation I gave of his language, if he would accept it. And secondly, if he accepted it, whether he would accept the following consequence: since he wanted to position himself from the point of view of collective psychology, whereas he thought we positioned ourselves from the point of view of individual psychology.

If, therefore, the mechanisms—since we must use this term of psychology—are judged by him to be the same, whether they pertain to collective psychology or individual psychology, is it because he is sufficiently versed in psychoanalysis that he employed this concept? Or is it because we are dealing here with a psychology that, if not popular, is at least sufficiently widespread among scholars in the social sciences?

Do his other colleagues also use similar language, or is it particular to him?
And if there were an affirmative answer—that is, if he indeed found psychoanalysis to be a perhaps privileged experience, where psychological dynamics could be observed and analyzed—could it then, in some way, serve as a model for the constitution of collective psychology? That is the question I would have liked to ask him.

LACAN

Have you read—because for all the time I have been speaking to you about The Elementary Structures of Kinship, I was surprised to discover that many of those I would have trusted to have at least opened the book had avoided doing so—have you read it?

Didier ANZIEU

I read it a year after its publication and have not refreshed my memory since.

LACAN

What did it bring you at that time? Was it at the end of your analysis?

Didier ANZIEU – …

LACAN

I believe ANZIEU’s question provides a measure of what must be reestablished in all this. It is truly not easy—as I see from experience—to achieve a stereoscopic view of the problems here.

How can you, dear ANZIEU, attach so much importance to the fact that Mr. LÉVI-STRAUSS uses terms such as compensation in his language, for example, in the case of those Tibetan or Nepalese tribes where, indeed, they begin to kill baby girls, resulting in more men than women? Ultimately, you can sense that the term compensation really only holds a statistical value.

This must still be taken into account. We cannot deny the importance of numerical elements in the constitution of a community. It is a fundamental element that must always be considered. A gentleman by the name of Mr. DE BUFFON made very accurate observations on this.

What is troublesome is that, on the evolutionary ladder of primates, as one ascends to a higher rung, one forgets the lower rungs or allows them to rot. Consequently, only a fairly limited field is always taken into account in the overall conception. Yet it would be wrong not to recall extremely accurate observations that remove the significance of various pseudo-teleological questions, such as those BUFFON made regarding the role statistical elements play, functioning as such, in a group of individuals or a society.

These considerations go very far and show that there are many questions one need not ask because they dissolve on their own due to the spatial distribution of numbers. Such problems still exist and are studied at certain demographic levels to which LÉVI-STRAUSS made a distant allusion. BUFFON wondered why bees make such beautiful hexagons. He observed that if one wants a surface to be entirely occupied, no other polyhedron is as practical or aesthetically pleasing. It is a kind of spatial pressure for occupation: it must be hexagons. There is no need to pose scholarly questions such as, “Do bees know geometry?”

You see the sense the word “compensation” can have in such a case: if there are fewer women, there will inevitably be more men. But it goes further when you talk about the notion of finality in this kind of—suddenly—soul, which, according to you, he seems to attribute in his discourse to society, which wants the circulation between families to exist, arranged from right to left or left to right.

It is clear that we are not going to revisit the entire question of the very usage of the term finality and its relationship with causality. There is much to say on this. And it is almost a matter of intellectual discipline to pause on it for a moment.

It is quite certain that finality is always more or less implicated, in a variably latent form, within any causal notion itself—except in cases where, precisely, emphasis is placed, in what is called causalist thought, on something that expressly opposes it and affirms that it does not exist. The very fact that emphasis is placed on this proves that the concept is difficult to handle.

But ultimately, what is at stake?
What is the originality of the thought LÉVI-STRAUSS brings to The Elementary Structures of Kinship?

He emphasizes from beginning to end that one cannot understand anything about what happens in the observable, recorded, and long-collected phenomena concerning kinship and family—one cannot draw anything from them, and all that is fundamental is missed—if one attempts in any way to deduce them from some kind of natural or naturalizing dynamic.

That is to say—and this is very explicitly expressed in this book, do you agree, MANNONI?—that there is no such thing as a natural sense of horror concerning incest. I am not saying that this is the foundation we can rely on; I am saying that this is what LÉVI-STRAUSS states.

There is no biological reason, particularly genetic, to justify exogamy. He shows, after an extremely precise discussion of the scientific data we have on the subject, that in a society—for example, we can consider societies other than human societies—a permanent and consistent practice of endogamy would not only pose no inconvenience but would, after a certain period, eliminate the so-called defects.

There is truly no possible deduction on the natural level for the formation of this elementary structure called “preferential order.” For it is on the positive emphasis of the matter, on the positive aspect and orientation of alliance, that he places emphasis: every positive orientation, every preferential orientation simultaneously involves negative emphases, that is to say, minimum preferences—things that are absolutely to be avoided. And what does he base this on?

On the fact that, in the human order, we encounter the total emergence—I mean encompassing all of the human order in its entirety—of a new function. It is not new as a function. The symbolic function has precursors outside the human order, but they are merely precursors. The human order is characterized by the fact that the symbolic function intervenes at all moments and on all levels of its existence.

In other words, everything is interconnected. To conceive of what happens, of what is presented to us in the field of observation—the domain proper to the human order—we must start from the idea that this order constitutes a totality. And totality in the symbolic order is called a universe and is first given in its universal character, meaning that it is not gradually constituted somewhere as a precursor of a symbolic relation, a first symbol: as soon as the symbol appears, there is a universe of symbols encompassing the entire matter. If you like, the question could be asked:

“At what point, numerically, does the symbolic universe come into being?”

It is unlikely that this question can be resolved so easily. Currently, it remains an open question [Cf. α, β, γ, δ, the seminar on “The Purloined Letter”]. But no matter how small the number you might conceive at the origin, at the emergence of the symbolic function as such in human life, these symbols imply the totality of all that is human. Everything is categorized and ordered in relation to the symbols that have emerged, once they have appeared. Do you understand this clearly?

This is what constitutes the symbolic function in humans. It creates a universe within which everything human must be ordered. This is perfectly evident in the fact that the further back we go to what are called “elementary structures”—let us not say “primitive”; it is no accident that he called them elementary: elementary is the opposite of complex. Yet, curiously, he has not yet written The Complex Structures of Kinship. Complex structures are what we represent; they are characterized by being much more amorphous.

M. BARGUES: He has spoken about complex structures.

LACAN

Of course, he touches on them; he indicates their points of insertion, but he has not treated them comprehensively. He wrote the volume on complex structures of speech, and naturally, he speaks of them. They are much more amorphous than the elementary structures.

What the elementary structures show is the absolutely tight link between manifestations that might be considered luxurious, namely: an entire wealth of interrelations, prohibitions, commandments, and preferential pathways that presuppose a properly symbolic world…
here, I use it in the technical sense of an extraordinarily elevated nomenclature system.

You see, therefore, that what becomes apparent is that the kinship terms regulating alliances, punctuated by an entire system of preferences and prohibitions, cover a much broader and more extensive field in elementary forms than in complex forms.

All this shows that the closer we come—not to the origin but to the element—the more the structuring, breadth, richness, and interconnection of the properly symbolic nomenclature system reveal themselves as vast and extensive. In other words:
there are far more kinship terms, a broader nomenclature of kinship and alliances in elementary forms than in what are called “complex” forms, which are elaborated within much wider, more expansive cultural cycles.

This is the scope of LÉVI-STRAUSS’s remark, a fundamental observation demonstrating its fertility in this book, in the sense that from it, we can hypothesize that this symbolic world…
since it always presents itself as a symbolic organism forming a universe unto itself, and even constituting the universe as such, distinct from the world…

that each of these universes, since it is a whole, must also be structured as a whole, meaning it must form a dialectical structure that holds together and is complete.

This is what he demonstrates in this book, where you see that the entire kinship system is ordered according to the fundamental hypothesis that some are more or less viable:

• Some lead to small impasses, strictly speaking, of an arithmetic nature, which consequently presuppose occasional crises within society, producing dead-ends, but with accompanying ruptures and then new beginnings.
• Others may function more or less effectively over a longer period.

It is based on a genuinely arithmetic study…
if by arithmetic, you mean not only manipulating collections of objects but also understanding the scope of these combinatorial operations…
of everything that goes beyond any experimental data that could be deduced from a sort of vital relationship of the subject with the given, which is properly speaking, also at the level of the emergence of the symbolic world as such.

It is on essentially arithmetic and combinatorial data that LÉVI-STRAUSS begins to organize, to put in order, to demonstrate that there is a classification—not natural in this instance, since it is not about nature—that is correct, adequate, and consistent with what the elementary structures of speech present to us.

This therefore presupposes—as you clearly see, and this is the meaning of the question I posed to him—the functioning…
and the functioning from the very beginning; this is the meaning of the remark I made in the same sense as the unconscious in the individual, as we discover and manipulate it in analysis…
the functioning of these symbolic instances in society from the moment it appears as a human society.

This is precisely where we can say there was some wavering in LÉVI-STRAUSS’s response last night.
For indeed, when I posed this question to him, he…
and this is common among those introducing new ideas…
exhibited a kind of hesitation in fully maintaining the sharpness of his position, almost reverting to a psychological framework.

It is quite certain that the question I posed to him did not carry the meaning of an entity within a “collective unconscious,” as he used the term. It absolutely does not concern a collective instance. Specifically, the word “collective” in this context provides us with absolutely no solution. The collective and the individual are exactly and strictly the same thing. It is not a matter of psychologically reifying, of claiming that there is somewhere some kind of common soul in which all these things occur. Why?

That is not at all the issue. The issue is that the symbolic function, as such, has absolutely nothing to do with a reification, with any sort of aspiration or a more or less para-animal formation of a kind of totalizing image that would turn all of humanity into a kind of great animal. Ultimately, that is the collective unconscious. There is absolutely nothing of the sort in such a question.

If the symbolic function functions, we are compelled to see it; we are inside it. I would even say more: we are so entirely inside it that we cannot step outside of it.

And a large part of the problems we encounter when we try to scientify—meaning, to impose order on a certain number of phenomena, certainly not the most accessible ones, with the phenomenon of life being at the forefront—always comes down, in the end, to the paths of the symbolic function leading us far more than any direct apprehension.

Nevertheless, it is always in terms of mechanisms that we will try to explain the living being. And the first question that arises for us analysts, as a primary concern…
and here we might provide an escape route for the debate engaged in a kind of controversy between vitalism and mechanism…
is the question: why are we specifically led to think of life in terms of mechanism?

Perhaps it is this question that will reveal something much deeper about our own structure. In other words, the question I raise here is to understand how, in fact, we, as humans, are akin to machines.

Jean HYPPOLITE: Mathematicians, the passion for mathematics?

LACAN

Indeed! There is a reason why machinism satisfies us. And now you can even see something emerging that, of course, I will show you much later, but I will still indicate it to you now in this perception. A whole segment of the criticism directed at properly mechanistic research, from a certain commonly called “philosophical” perspective, argues that machines show themselves to lack freedom.

It would be very easy to demonstrate to you that the machine is much freer than the animal, that the animal is a blocked machine, if you will. In this perspective, the animal is a machine whose parameters can no longer vary—and why?—because it is precisely the external environment that determines the animal, fixing it as a type.

If you also consider that, insofar as we are machines relative to the animal—meaning something decomposed in human terms—we manifest greater freedom in this sense, provided we understand freedom as a multiplicity of possible choices. This is a perspective that is never brought to light.

Jean HYPPOLITE

I wanted to ask whether the word “machine,” which corresponds to the entire symbolism itself, has not profoundly and sociologically changed in meaning. If the machine, once simply an energetic system with initial conditions evolving now in external conditions that can intervene, if this notion of machine itself has not fundamentally changed in meaning from its origins to cybernetics.

LACAN

That is exactly the point. I agree with you. I am, for the first time, trying to insinuate to them, as it is said, that the machine is not what some vain people think, that the meaning of the machine is in the process of completely changing.

What I also want to point out to you—and whether I explain it to you or not, it remains equally true—is that whether or not it is emphasized, the meaning of the machine, the very use you make of machinistic terms, is changing for all of you, regardless of whether you have opened a book on cybernetics or not. I would say, if you like, that the situation remains the same. You cannot imagine to what extent the people of the 18th century, whom you believe introduced the first form of the machine—the kind it is now fashionable to abhor, those little lifeless machines—they are the ones who invented it. Monsieur de LA METTRIE, Man-Machine—I cannot recommend this reading enough—they are the ones who introduced the mechanism whose historical importance you know and believe you have surpassed. Those people who lived it, who wrote about it, introduced the notion of the “man-machine” as it could be conceived at the time. You would be astonished at how much they were still burdened and entangled in prior categories that genuinely dominated their minds.

You must truly read the thirty-five volumes of the Encyclopedia of Arts and Techniques in their entirety, which reflects the style of that era, to realize to what extent the scholastic psychological notions of the time—although the term “psychology” was not part of their vocabulary—dominated their subjective experience. They were making this attempt to reduce and functionalize everything happening on the human level based on the machine. For them, this was something far ahead of the continuities that persisted in their mental functioning when they approached any given theme.

Look, simply open the Encyclopedia to the word “love” or “self-love,” to see how these problems were posed, to what extent their sentiments were distant from what they emphasized, from what they tried to present and construct relating to the knowledge of man. In other words, the term “mechanism” only much later, in our minds or those of our forebears, took on its full meaning—its entirely refined, stripped-down, exclusive sense, free from any other interpretative systems.

Essentially, what it means to be a precursor is this: not—as is entirely impossible—to extrapolate or anticipate the categories that will come later, those that have not yet been created. Human beings are utterly incapable of such foresight; they are always immersed in the network, the cultural context, of which they are part, and they cannot have notions other than those of their contemporaries.

To be a precursor is not to be ahead of one’s contemporaries but to see what they are in the process of constituting as thoughts, as consciousness, as action, as techniques, as political forms—to see them as they will be seen a century later. That, yes, is possible.

This is a small observation I am making in connection with what I am telling you about the mutation currently underway in the notion and function of “machine.” Whatever happens, this transformation is taking place in an entirely different form, within a completely different framework, and with promises of entirely unexpected fertility.

For those who remain stuck in criticism of the old mechanistic model, there are two ways of looking at it:

• To observe it while following the movement in its exact, confused form, which is precisely what we now call cybernetics—a field where, currently, there is both substance and fluff—but it is heading in a certain direction.
• To be just slightly ahead is to perceive what it truly signifies: a complete reversal, for instance, of all the classic objections to the use of properly mechanistic categories. It takes an entirely new form, with entirely different outcomes as well. I believe I will have the opportunity to show this to you this year, as an outcome of what we are working on together, namely, The Ego, Precisely in Freudian Theory and Analytical Technique.

Does anyone have a question?

Octave MANNONI

I will not speak of machines, but of something that interested me: fundamentally, I had the impression that the way LÉVI-STRAUSS approached the problems of nature and culture—where he remarked that, for some time now, the distinction between nature and culture is no longer clearly seen—illustrated his analysis of the concept. The interventions that took place—DURANDIN, PERRIER—continued to hesitate, trying to locate nature somewhere. They sought it in affectivity, impulses, or something that would clearly be the very foundation of being, the natural basis of being.

What led LÉVI-STRAUSS to question nature and culture was his observation that a certain form of incest, for instance, appeared to be both universal and contingent. This apparent contradiction led him to a sort of conventionalism that disoriented quite a few listeners, who sensed there must be something fundamental underlying this conventionalism, and they were searching for it.

I made the following remark: indeed, this problem of the contingent and the universal is troubling, because it is not necessarily found in institutional realms, for example. It is similar to the opposition between right-handed and left-handed people: right-handedness is a universal form, yet it is contingent—it could just as well be left-handedness. No one has ever been able to prove whether it is social or biological. We are faced with a profound obscurity of the same nature as what we encounter with LÉVI-STRAUSS.

To go further and show just how grave this obscurity is, consider mollusks of the helix genus, which are certainly not institutional. There, too, we find a universal coiling that is contingent, since it could coil in the opposite direction, and some individuals do coil the other way.

Thus, it seems to me that the question raised by LÉVI-STRAUSS indeed far surpasses the classical opposition between the natural and the institutional. It is unsurprising that he, too, now hesitates to determine where the natural and institutional aspects lie, just as everyone did yesterday.

This strikes me as extremely important. We are dealing here with something that dissolves both the old idea of nature and the idea of institution.

Jean HYPPOLITE: Because it is a kind of universal preference?

Octave MANNONI: I do not know.

Jean HYPPOLITE: It would be a universal contingency.

LACAN

I think you are nonetheless introducing elements that perhaps were not implicated in the notion of “contingency” as LÉVI-STRAUSS introduced it in his question. I believe that contingency, as he introduced it, stands opposed to the notion of necessity. Moreover, he explicitly said that what he introduced in the form of a question—which we might ultimately describe as a naive question—is the distinction between the universal and the necessary.

This also raises the question of what we might call the necessity of mathematics, to which I alluded earlier. It is quite clear that this deserves a special definition, and it is precisely for this reason that I spoke earlier of universes.

Regarding the proper introduction of the symbolic system, I believe the answer to the question LÉVI-STRAUSS raised yesterday is this: the Oedipus complex is both universal and contingent because it is purely and solely symbolic.

Jean HYPPOLITE: I do not believe so.

LACAN

The contingency that MANNONI introduces now is entirely of a different order. And it is precisely the value of the distinction that LÉVI-STRAUSS introduces with his Elementary Structures of Kinship to allow us to distinguish the universal from the generic. The universal we spoke of earlier has absolutely no need to extend across the surface, to encompass the surface of the universe, for the very good reason, by the way, that there is not yet, as far as I know, anything that creates this unity.

To clarify what I mean, this unity of humanity across the globe—meaning human beings across the entire surface of the earth—there is nothing concretely realized as universal in this sense. And yet, as soon as any symbolic system forms, it is, by its very nature, universally valid as such.

If we continually confuse what is universal with what is generic, if we call universal what is found everywhere—for example, the fact that humans, with rare exceptions, have two arms, two legs, and a pair of eyes, which they share, moreover, with animals, and even more specific traits, as someone [Plato] once said: “a featherless biped,” “a plucked chicken”—all this is generic; it is absolutely not universal. You are introducing here your helix mollusks coiled one way or the other. I am not saying it is a question that cannot be posed, but it is a question of a different nature, one that arises concerning the natural type. This question of type is important.

Octave MANNONI

It is not absolutely certain; that is what I question. I mean that until now, humans have opposed to nature a pseudo-nature. This pseudo-nature consists of the human institutions they encounter. One encounters the family as one encounters the oak or the birch, and they have agreed that these pseudo-natures are a fact of human freedom, in one way or another, or of man’s contingent choice.

Consequently, they attached the greatest importance to a new category, to culture as opposed to nature. In studying these questions, LÉVI-STRAUSS comes to no longer know where nature ends and culture begins, because precisely, one encounters problems of choice not only in the universe of nomenclatures but also in the universe of forms. In the symbolism of nomenclature, as in the symbolism of all form, nature speaks—it speaks by coiling to the right or to the left, by being right-handed or left-handed. It is its way of making contingent choices, just like families or arabesques. At this moment, indeed, I find myself standing at a watershed, unable to see how the waters divide. And I wanted to share this confusion. I bring no solution, only a difficulty.

Jean HYPPOLITE

It seems to me that you quite rightly opposed the universal to the generic earlier, saying that universality is fundamentally tied to symbolism itself, to the modality of the symbolic universe created by man. But then it is a pure form. Your term “universality” means, profoundly, that when we consider a human universe, it necessarily assumes the form of universality; it aspires to a totality that universalizes itself.

LACAN: That is the function of the symbol.

Jean HYPPOLITE

Does that answer the question—that is, does it simply show us the formal character that a human universe assumes?

LACAN

The word “formal” has two meanings:

• The sense that exists in the term and the use of the term “mathematical formalization,” meaning a set of conventions from which one can develop an entire series that, as you know, constructs and elaborates itself from consequences and theorems. These follow one another, giving a particular type of relational structures established within a set a specific type, a law, strictly speaking.
• And then there is “a form” in the Gestaltist sense of the term, in the sense of a totality that holds together and is realized—what is called a “good form,” meaning something that forms a totality, but an isolated totality.

Jean HYPPOLITE: Is it the second meaning that you intend, or the first?

LACAN: The first, unquestionably!

Jean HYPPOLITE: But you have spoken of totality, so this symbolic universe is purely conventional. It assumes the form, in the sense that one might say, “a universal form,” without being generic or even general. I wonder if this isn’t a formal solution to the problem raised by MANNONI.

LACAN: The problem MANNONI raises has two facets. There is the problem he poses, which consists in revisiting the question in the form of signatura rerum—the idea that things themselves display a certain asymmetry. That is the matter at hand since he immediately stumbled upon problems of symmetry, or rather a certain asymmetry.

Thus, there is something here that we might articulate—it would merit a very specific discussion—namely, that there is a real, a given, and this given is structured in a certain way. The question is exactly how this given has been elaborated, and whether, in the course of development and progression of knowledge in which we find ourselves, we are moving closer and closer to grasping the mysterious meaning—this is precisely the appropriate term here—of these natural asymmetries.

I would point out to him that there is an entire human tradition, one we all know well, called “natural philosophy,” which has been precisely devoted to this sort of reading. And we know where that leads. It never goes very far. It ends up with things that are ultimately ineffable, but in essence, it quickly reaches an impasse—unless one decides, with a bit of good will (which is never lacking), to plunge wholeheartedly into what is commonly called delusion.

This is certainly not the case for MANNONI, whose mind is far too sharp and dialectical to pose such a question except as a problematic inquiry. The second issue is whether this was what LÉVI-STRAUSS was aiming at last night when he said that ultimately, he found himself at the edge of nature, suddenly seized by vertigo, wondering whether this might indeed be where the roots of his symbolic tree should be found.

That is the issue.

But my personal dialogues with LÉVI-STRAUSS allow me to clarify this for you: believe me, this was not at all the kind of question MANNONI is raising. Instead, it concerns LÉVI-STRAUSS’s hesitation before this sharp division, this clear bipartition that he establishes and feels is methodologically valuable and creative as a method for distinguishing between registers and, consequently, between orders of facts.

He oscillates around this point for a reason that might seem surprising but is entirely acknowledged by him: he fears that under the guise of this autonomy, so to speak, of the symbolic register and the symbolic function, a kind of hidden, latent transcendence might reappear—one tied, in the stricter psychological sense of the term, to affinities that he personally finds fearful and repellent. In other words, he fears that, after we have driven God out through one door, we will bring Him back through another.

That is the issue.

He does not want the symbol—even in the extraordinarily refined form in which he presents it—to merely be a reappearance of God in disguise. This, I believe, is at the root of the hesitation that LÉVI-STRAUSS displayed when he raised the question challenging the clear methodological separation between the symbolic plane and the natural plane.

Jean HYPPOLITE: Nonetheless, the symbolic universe does not resolve, simply by invoking the term “symbolic universe,” the very question of the choices made by humanity.

LACAN: Certainly not.

Jean HYPPOLITE: I mean that what was called institution, which implies a certain number of contingent choices, enters a symbolic universe. But invoking this symbolic universe does not, in itself, provide an explanation for those choices.

LACAN: It is not a matter of explanation.

Jean HYPPOLITE: Yet we are still left with a problem.

LACAN: Exactly! The problem of origins.

Jean HYPPOLITE: Even within the symbolic function itself. I do not deny that the symbolic relationship played this role and imprinted the mark of systematic universality, but this framework requires its own explanation. This framework does not eliminate the problem raised by MANNONI.

Octave MANNONI: It is very complicated; I am losing the thread.

M. BARGUES: I wonder if we might revisit this problem and shift it, in a sense, between culture and nature, specifically on the level of the symbolic and the imaginary. I was struck when you mentioned, at a certain point in our contemporary society, the law, which is, in a way, somewhat degrading.

At that moment, there is the impression that when one approaches incest, from the perspective of the imaginary, there is an extremely strong formation, a reaction, which seems to emerge profoundly when one comes close—if I may say so—to nature.

It is on the imaginary level that something occurs. I am reminded—let me bring this back to something more clinical—of the patient presentation you conducted last time. You emphasized that homosexual boy, noting that his family had very close allies, and that it was, in a way, a closed system.

I believe that at such a moment, we find—and I have observed this in other cases—predisposing factors for neuroses, where the Oedipus complex emerges in different forms, manifesting on a highly violent level, as DURANDIN described yesterday. This happens when one, so to speak, brushes against nature. At that moment, the imaginary plays a destructive role in a personality.

LACAN

BARGUES’s question is nevertheless oriented in the direction of the questions we are posing. If I do not wish to leave this question as you have just posed it—which is, in the form you just presented it, at a metaphysical level—it becomes necessary to explain the function of the symbolic universe.

Jean HYPPOLITE

Excuse me, but a critique: in what way does the use of the term benefit us, and what does it bring? That is the question. I do not doubt that it is useful. But how does it add, and what does it add?

LACAN

It serves me in articulating the analytic experience as such. You could see this last year, for instance, when I attempted—if I may say so, I believe I demonstrated—that it is impossible to properly organize the various aspects, the different functions of transference, without starting from an essential definition, positioned at the apex of a kind of pyramid, that would categorize the different manifestations of transference.

This does not mean that essentially transference…
The function that serves as the vanishing point, the perspective point where everything converges in the different functions of transference—a function that is, strictly speaking, creative and foundational, and that exists in a specific type, in a particular full function of speech…

That is what allows us to situate what transference is when it occurs on a level that is refracted, imperfect, multiplied—where we observe it in practice and grasp it in its different psychological, personal, interpersonal aspects—without a sort of radical stance on the function of speech as such.

Transference is purely and simply inconceivable. I would even say more: it is inconceivable in the proper sense of the term. There is no concept of “transference”; there is only a multiplicity of facts, linked by a vague and inconsistent connection. This is an example of what I believe I can demonstrate to you this year. In our next session, I will introduce the question of the ego in the form I have chosen: the relationship between the notion and the function of the ego and the pleasure principle.

What I hope to show you is that to conceive of all of Freud’s metapsychology, namely the function he designates under the term ego, it is equally indispensable to employ this image, this distinction of planes and relations expressed through the terms symbolic, imaginary—introduced here, based on our most everyday experience, by BARGUES—and real. In other words, to clarify and provide an example, which, after all, is what you are asking me: what is its use?

Jean HYPPOLITE: I do not doubt, moreover, that it is useful.

LACAN

It is useful in the sense that an experience, which is in any case a particularly pure symbolic experience, that of analysis, provides an example. I will give you an example by foreshadowing the question I will address regarding the ego. The ego, in its most essential aspect…

This is something that is a discovery of experience, not, if you will, a category I would almost describe as a priori, like the symbolic category as I isolate and articulate it. The ego is an imaginary function.

And through this point, I would almost say, through this point alone, we find in human experience an open door to this element of typicality which, of course, appears on the surface of nature but always in a form—this is what I wanted to emphasize in discussing the failure of various natural philosophies—that is disappointing. It is also disappointing in terms of the ego’s imaginary function. But it is a disappointment we are deeply engaged with, insofar as we are the ego.

Not only do we experience it, but this imaginary function is just as much a guide for our experience as the various registers referred to as “guides of life,” such as sensations. Here lies a structure that is fundamentally and centrally part of our experience, properly belonging to the imaginary order. I believe we can even go further and specify, as precisely as possible, to what extent this imaginary function is already distinct in humans from what it is in the rest of nature.

This imaginary function is encountered in myriad forms, such as in all Gestaltist captures related to sexual display, which are so essential for maintaining sexual attraction within the generic—that is, the genus or species. Do you agree? This ego function presents distinct characteristics in humans, and this is the great discovery of analysis: that even at the level of this typical, generic, imaginary relationship tied to the life of the species, humans function differently.

There is already a fissure here, something inherently linked to a profound disturbance of what might be seen as a fundamental vital regulation. And this is the importance of Freud’s concept of the death instinct—not that the death instinct is, in itself, something luminous or transparent, but it expresses the necessity Freud encountered at a certain moment to introduce it. I will attempt to explain it to you, to make it clear, to bring us back to a sharp element of his experience at a moment when it was beginning to fade or be lost.

As I pointed out earlier, it always happens that, at a certain moment, when there is a heightened perception about the subject’s structure and the structure of the universe, there is always a moment of decline where this understanding tends to be lost or abandoned. This is what happened in the Freudian circle.

I will show you the moment when the meaning of the discovery of the unconscious recedes into the background, is no longer understood, and there is a return to a kind of confused, unified, naturalist position—because that is what is at stake today—regarding humanity, and consequently the ego, and consequently the instincts.

The meaning of the article Beyond the Pleasure Principle is precisely that FREUD, in a truly extraordinary way—and this is why I ask you all not only to read it but to read it several times, because without doing so, what I will try to explain to you, in so far as it will be a literal critique, showing you the necessity that brought FREUD’s thinking to this article, as incredibly ambiguous and even confusing as it is—it becomes clear how it is precisely to recover the true meaning of his experience that FREUD is oriented toward those final paragraphs of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. These paragraphs are ultimately so […] that you know the role and fate they have been given in the general analytical community: it is said that no one understands them.

Even when the phrase “death instinct” is repeated after FREUD, I believe it is repeated with no greater understanding than that which Pascal attributed to the Jacobins, so beautifully pierced by his wit in The Provincial Letters, regarding “sufficient grace.” The final paragraphs of Beyond the Pleasure Principle are literally a “sealed letter and closed mouth” and have not yet been elucidated. They can only be understood if one grasps what FREUD’s experience sought to convey.

It is clear, from the very outset, that he sought to save a dualism at all costs at a moment when this dualism was dissolving in his hands, and when, ultimately, the ego, the libido—all of it—formed a kind of vast “whole” that reintroduced us into a philosophy of nature. He absolutely wanted to preserve a dualism. I cannot elaborate further.

But I think it is essential to see this orientation, this meaning of the article, that this dualism is none other than what I am discussing with you: the autonomy of the symbolic as such. This is not immediately apparent in the article, because FREUD never articulated it.

Nor do I say that this is necessarily the case. To make you understand this, a certain number of correlations, comparisons, confirmations, and a critique and exegesis of FREUD’s text will obviously be needed. I cannot, at this stage, consider as proven what remains to be proven. But I believe I will have to demonstrate it in a way that will give you a completely different understanding of the use I make, in this instance, of symbolic action—a notion far removed from that of an empty category or a kind of unfounded apparatus.

Jean HYPPOLITE

That is not what I was suggesting. The symbolic function, as I understand it from you, is a function of transcendence: it is a function of transcendence. I do not mean “transcendence” per se. I was referring to a function of transcendence in the sense that, at once, we cannot remain within it, nor can we escape it. I want to understand its purpose; we cannot do without it, yet neither can we fully dwell within it.

LACAN: Yes, of course, naturally. It is presence in absence and absence in presence.

Jean HYPPOLITE: I wanted to understand what there is to understand.

LACAN

But, pardon me! If you want to maintain what you are bringing to me here on a phenomenological level, I have no objection to it. But I believe it is insufficient.

Jean HYPPOLITE: Undoubtedly, I also believe so.

LACAN: And to be quite honest, remaining purely phenomenological does not advance us much.

Jean HYPPOLITE: I think so as well.

LACAN

This can only slightly obscure the progress we need to make in this regard, by somewhat anticipating the coloration that, ultimately, must remain. Is the use I make of the symbolic register within a certain dialectic, which is the concrete framework of analysis, something that must purely and simply culminate in situating this transcendence that, after all, must exist?

Is that the issue? I do not believe so. The references I made at the beginning of today’s discussion to a completely different use of the notion and term of “machine” may indicate this to you.

Jean HYPPOLITE

My questions were just questions. I was asking what was fundamentally at issue, what allowed one to not answer MANNONI’s question by saying that it did not require an answer, or at least that answering it would lead astray.

LACAN

I said that I do not believe it is in this sense that one can say Mr. Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS is returning to nature.

Jean HYPPOLITE: Refuses to return…

LACAN

I also indicated that, ultimately, we must, of course—and how could we not?—take into account this formal aspect of nature, in the sense that I described it as pseudo-significant asymmetry, because it is precisely this that humans seize upon to create their fundamental symbols.

There are things in nature. The important thing is to begin with these forms and assign them symbolic value and function—that is, as functioning in relation to one another, for it is humans who introduce the notion of asymmetry. It is clear: nature is neither symmetrical nor asymmetrical—it is what it is. That is to say, what matters—you will see—is that all my lessons will be shifted by one…

I wanted to address next time: the ego as function and as symbol. This is where the ambiguity arises: the ego, which is this imaginary function, only intervenes in psychic life as a symbol. We use the ego as the BORORO use the parrot; just as the BORORO say, “I am a parrot,” we say, “I am me.”

All of this has no real significance. What matters is the function attributed to it. It has greater importance for the ego, as the ego is linked to an image somewhat close to us.

Octave MANNONI

After LÉVI-STRAUSS, one has the impression that the notions of nature and culture can no longer be used. They can no longer be employed. He dismantles them. Similarly, the idea of adaptation, which we often discuss: to be adapted means to be alive. And likewise, the notions of nature and culture can no longer be used.

LACAN

There is some truth in that, but we are not quite there yet. Certainly, what you are raising is a question analogous to the one I just posed when I said that, at a certain point, FREUD wanted to defend a specific dualism at all costs. It is of the same order. Indeed, due to the rapid evolution of analytic theory and technique, FREUD found himself confronted with a decline in tension analogous to what you perceive in what is happening in LÉVI-STRAUSS’s thought, though perhaps it is not yet fully completed in his case.