🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

The difficulty we are dealing with is not a recent phenomenon. It belongs, after all, to those upon which the entire moralist tradition has speculated: the problem of fallen desire. I do not need to summon from the depths of the ages the bitterness of sages or pseudo-sages regarding the disappointing nature of human desire.

The question takes on an explicit form in analysis insofar as the first analytic experience reveals to us the partial nature of drives. The relation to the object presupposes a complexity, a complication, and an incredible risk in the arrangement of these partial drives, making the connection to the object dependent on these arrangements.

The combination of partial drives truly shows us the fundamentally problematic nature of any access to the object. This reveals a theory that, to put it plainly, is the most contrary to what we might initially conceive of the notion of instinct, which, in any case, even if we allow for an extremely flexible teleological hypothesis, remains… whatever it may be: any theory of instinct is, so to speak, a theory of the centering of the object.

That is to say, the process in the living organism ensures that an object is gradually fixed in a certain field and captured in a specific behavior—a process that, in itself, presents as a form of progressive concentration of the field.

The process and the dialectic that analysis shows us, however, are entirely different. On the contrary, progress is made through addition and combination of these partial drives, leading to the conception of the emergence of a satisfying object… one that corresponds to the two poles of masculinity and femininity… at the cost of synthesizing all kinds of interchangeable, variable drives and combinations—which are very diverse to achieve this success.

This is why, in a certain way, you might think that by defining the $◊a, as placed here in the schema or graph we use to explain and expose the position of desire in a speaking subject, there is, after all, nothing more than a very simple notation: in desire, something is required, which is the relationship of the subject with the object, where a is the object, the great $ is the subject, and nothing more.

Nothing more original in this notation than this little bar, which reminds us that the subject, at this acme of the presentation of desire, is itself marked by speech. And after all, it is nothing more than something that recalls that the drives are fragmented.

It is important to note that the scope of this notation is not limited to this. This notation designates not a relationship of the subject to the object, but the fantasy—a fantasy that sustains this subject as desiring, that is, at this point beyond its discourse where the real is at stake.

This notation signifies that in the fantasy, the subject is present as the subject of unconscious discourse. The subject is present there as represented in the fantasy by its essential function of cut, a cut in discourse—and not just any discourse, but discourse that escapes it: the discourse of the unconscious.

This is essential, and if you follow its thread, you cannot fail to be struck by what it highlights—dimensions always omitted when it comes to perverse fantasies. I have already pointed out to you the other day the caution with which we must approach what we call perverse fantasy.

Perverse fantasy is not perversion. The greatest error is to imagine that we understand perversion… all of us, as we are, that is, to the extent that we are more or less neurotic on the edges… insofar as we have access to these perverse fantasies. But the understanding we have of perverse fantasy does not provide, in itself, the structure of perversion, even though it somehow calls for its reconstruction.

And if you allow me some liberty in today’s discourse, to indulge in a small foray outside, I would like to evoke for you this book stamped with the seal of our contemporary era, called Lolita.

I do not impose on you the reading of this work any more than a series of others that seem to indicate a certain constellation of interest around precisely the mechanism of desire. There are better-crafted works than Lolita, theoretically speaking. But Lolita is nonetheless quite an exemplary production.

For those who open it, nothing will seem obscure about the function assigned to an i(a). And obviously, in a manner all the less ambiguous since, curiously, the author places himself in a quite articulated opposition to what he calls “Freudian charlatanry,” and yet repeatedly, in a way that truly escapes his notice, provides the clearest testimony to this symbolic function of the image of the other (i(a)). Including the dream he has, shortly before approaching her decisively, in which she appears to him as a hairy and hermaphroditic monster. But that is not the important point.

The important point in the structure of this work is that it exhibits all the characteristics of the relationship of the subject to desire, to the properly speaking neurotic fantasy, for the simple reason that is evident in the contrast between the first and second volumes: – the dazzling nature of desire as long as it is meditated upon, occupying some thirty years of the subject’s life, – and its prodigious downfall in a bogged-down reality—no means even of reaching the partner—which constitutes the second volume and the miserable journey of this couple across the beautiful America.

What is important and somewhat exemplary is that, by the mere virtue of constructive coherence, the perverse subject reveals itself, so to speak, appearing in another.

Another:

• who is more than just the double of the subject,
• who is indeed something else entirely,
• who literally appears as their persecutor,
• who appears on the margins of the adventure as if—and indeed, this is most explicitly acknowledged in the book—the desire in question for the subject could only live in another, and in a place that is literally impenetrable and entirely unknown.
• The character who, at a certain moment in the plot, replaces the hero,
• the character who is, properly speaking, the perverse one,
• who actually attains the object, is a character whose key is revealed to us only in their final moans as they fall under the hero’s gunfire.

This sort of negative counterpart to the main character… who is the one in whom the relationship to the object effectively resides… has something truly exemplary about it and can serve as a schema for us to understand that it is only at the cost of an extrapolation that we can grasp the perverse structure.

The structure of desire in neurosis is something of an entirely different nature from the structure of desire in perversion, and nevertheless, these two structures stand in opposition.

In truth, the most radical of these perverse positions of desire, the one placed by analytic theory as both the most original point at the basis of development and the terminal point of the most extreme regressions—namely, masochism—can we not here recall and make evident through fantasy to what extent essential planes are overlooked in the way we hastily formulate in analysis, using collapsed formulas, the nature of what we are confronted with?

I bring up masochism here because it will serve as a pole for this approach to perversion.

And everyone knows that there is a tendency:

• to reduce masochism, in its various forms, to a relationship that, in the final term, would present itself as a completely radical relation of the subject to their own life,
• to conflate it, based on the valid and valuable insights FREUD provided on this subject, with a “death instinct” that manifests immediately, even at the level of the drive, as something contrary to the organization of instincts.

Undoubtedly, there is something here that, at its limit, offers a focal point, a perspective on which it is by no means indifferent to focus when posing certain questions.

In short, do we not see… in positioning, as indicated here on this schema by the letters representing their relationships, the position of essential desire, in a division of the subject’s relationship to discourse… something that appears strikingly and is wrongly neglected within the very heart of what is called the masochistic fantasy?

This masochism, which, even as it is made the outcome of one of the most radical instincts, analysts undoubtedly agree cannot exceed a certain limit of suffering.

Certain traits, when highlighted, are, I believe, made to shed light for us at least on a medium, on something that allows us to recognize here the subject’s relationship to something essential—to something that is, properly speaking, the discourse of the Other.

Is it necessary to have heard the confidences of a masochist?

Is it necessary to have read even one of the many writings dedicated to them… some of which, of varying quality, have been published recently… to recognize an essential dimension of masochistic enjoyment tied to this peculiar form of passivity that the subject experiences and enjoys, representing their fate as being played out above their head, among a number of people present around them, who literally disregard their presence, with all that is prepared for their destiny being discussed in front of them without their slightest input being taken into account?

Isn’t this one of the traits, one of the most eminently salient and perceptible dimensions, and one on which, moreover, the subject insists as being a constituent of the masochistic relationship?

Here, then, we have something where it is grasped, where it appears and can be touched upon, that it is in the constitution of the subject as a subject…

• and insofar as this constitution is inherent to discourse,
• and insofar as the possibility is pushed to the extreme that this discourse, as such—here revealed, unfolded in fantasy—regards the subject as nothingness, …that we find one of the first steps.

A “step”—God help us!—quite significant since it is from this step that a certain number of symptomatic manifestations will develop. A “step” that will allow us to see on the horizon the relationship that may exist between:

• the death instinct considered as one of the most radical agencies,
• and something in discourse that provides the support without which we could not access it anywhere—this support of this non-being, which is one of the original, constitutive, implicit dimensions rooted at the very basis of all symbolization.

For we have already, over the course of an entire year—the year dedicated to Beyond the Pleasure Principle—articulated this function inherent to symbolization, which lies essentially in the foundation of the cut, thus what binds the current of original tension, whatever it may be, into a series of alternatives that introduce what can be called the fundamental machine, which is precisely what we rediscover as detached and isolated in the principle of the subject’s schizophrenia, where the subject identifies with the discordance of this machine relative to the vital current, with this discordance as such.

In this sense, I would like to point out in passing that here you can touch upon, in an exemplary, both radical and entirely accessible way, one of the most eminent forms of the function of this Verwerfung (rejection). It is inasmuch as the cut is both constitutive of and at the same time irreparably external to discourse, inasmuch as it constitutes it, that one can say that the subject, insofar as it identifies with the cut, is verworfen (rejected). It is precisely through this that the subject apprehends and perceives itself as real.

Here, I am merely indicating another form… I do not believe it to be fundamentally distinct, but assuredly articulated and developed in a wholly different manner… of the “I think, therefore I am.” I mean that it is insofar as the subject participates in this discourse… and this differs from the Cartesian dimension in only one aspect: this discourse is one that escapes the subject, and it is “two” without knowing it… it is inasmuch as the subject constitutes the cut in this discourse that it attains the supreme degree of “I am,” which has this singular property in reality—truly the final reality where a subject perceives itself—namely, the possibility of making a cut somewhere in the discourse, of introducing punctuation.

This property, wherein lies its essential being, its being where it perceives itself as the sole radical real intrusion it contributes to the world as a subject, nevertheless excludes it from all other living relations, to the extent that it takes all the detours we analysts know to reintegrate “I” into them.

Last time, we briefly spoke about how things occur in neurotics. We said: for the neurotic, the problem passes through the paternal metaphor, through the fiction, real or not, of someone who enjoys the object peacefully. At what cost? At the cost of something perverse.

For we have said that this metaphor is the mask of a metonymy: behind this metaphor of the father as the subject of the law, as the peaceful possessor of enjoyment, lies the metonymy of castration. And if you look closely, you will see that the son’s castration here is merely the continuation and equivalent of the father’s castration, as all myths—including the Freudian myth of the primal father and the primitive myth of the father—clearly indicate:

• CHRONOS castrates JUPITER,
• JUPITER castrates CHRONOS before achieving celestial kingship.

The metonymy in question ultimately holds in this: there is only ever one phallus in play. And this is precisely what, in the neurotic structure, must be hidden from view.

The neurotic can only be the phallus in the name of the Other. Thus, there is someone who possesses it, someone on whom their being depends. They do not have what everyone knows as the “castration complex,” but if no one possesses it, then naturally, they have it even less.

The desire of the neurotic… if you allow me to summarize something I wish to convey to you here… is such that it is entirely suspended, as the entire development of FREUD’s work indicates to us, upon this mythical guarantee of the good faith of the signifier, to which the subject must cling to live other than in vertigo. This allows us to arrive at the formula for the neurotic’s desire.

And everyone knows that there is a close historical relationship between the anatomy Freudism provides of this desire and something characteristic of a certain era we are living in—an era whose ultimate outcome or collapse into some vaguely predicted human form, prophesied by various thinkers, we cannot yet discern.

But what is certain is that something becomes perceptible in our experience, provided we do not hesitate to articulate it: that the neurotic’s desire—shall I say in condensed form—is what arises when there is no God. Do not make me say what I did not say! That the situation is any simpler when there is one!

The issue is this: it is at the level of this suspension of the Supreme Guarantee, which the neurotic harbors within themselves, that this neurotic desire arises, halts, and suspends itself. This neurotic desire is a desire only on the horizon of all their behaviors. Because—and allow me to share with you a formula to recognize the style of a behavior—we might say that, relative to this desire in which they are situated, the neurotic is always on the horizon of themselves, preparing its emergence.

The neurotic… if you allow me an expression I believe mirrors various things we observe in daily experience… is always busy packing their bags, or examining their conscience (which amounts to the same), or organizing their labyrinth (which also amounts to the same). They gather their bags, forget some, or place them in storage, but it is always about baggage for a journey they never take.

This is absolutely essential to consider if we are to realize that there is a stark contrast, despite the claims of lazy thinking that crawls like a snail along the phenomenon, unwilling to assemble any perspective, even momentarily.

We must oppose to this the structure of perverse desire. In the pervert, of course, it is also about a gap. It can only concern this fundamental relationship—the subject abolishing their being in the cut. The question is how, in the pervert, this cut is lived, experienced, and endured.

Well, here, assuredly, the long work of analysts over the years… insofar as their experiences with perverse patients have allowed them to articulate sometimes contradictory, poorly connected, yet suggestive theories reflecting the difficulties they face… is something we can, in a way, take note of.

I mean something we can speak of as material that itself betrays certain structural necessities—those, strictly speaking, we are attempting to formulate here. I would say, therefore, that in this effort we are making here to establish the real function of desire, we can include even the discreet delusion, even the well-organized delusion that those who have approached this subject through the path of these behaviors have arrived at—namely, psychoanalysts. Let me take an example.

I believe that currently, all things considered, no one has spoken better, I believe, about perversion than a man as discreet as he is full of humor, Mr. Gillespie. I recommend to those who read English—it will be most beneficial:

• Gillespie’s first study addressing this topic through fetishism, in the form of an article: “Contribution to Fetishism,” October 1940, I.J.P.
• Then the notes he devoted to “Analysis of Sexual Perversions,” in Volume XXXIII, 1952, Part 4,
• And finally, the last one he provided in the July-October 1956 issue (Volume XXXVII, Parts 4 and 5): “General Theory of Perversions.”

Something will emerge from these for you: that someone who, in short, is so free and weighs fairly well the various avenues through which one has attempted to approach the question—clearly more complex, naturally, than one might imagine from a summary perspective—can show that perversion is not merely the drive revealing itself uncovered. This is not to say either, as has been claimed, that perversion can be reduced to an approach that tends, ultimately, to homogenize it with neurosis.

I will go straight to what needs to be expressed, to what will henceforth serve as a reference for us in examining perversion in various respects. The notion of splitting is essential here, already demonstrating something we could applaud… and do not think I am rushing into this point… as encompassing, in some way, the function, the identification of the subject with the fissure or cut in discourse, which is where I teach you to identify the subjective component of fantasy.

It is not exactly that the kind of haste implied by this recognition has not already presented itself and provided the occasion for a sort of self-conscious insight—perhaps a slightly embarrassed one—among certain writers who have addressed perversion. I need only refer to the third case to which Mr. Gillespie refers in the second of his articles. It concerns the case of a fetishist. Let me outline this case briefly.

It concerns a thirty-year-old fetishist whose fantasy, after analysis, is explicitly revealed to be of being split in two by the teeth of the mother, whose penetrating bow, so to speak, is represented here by her bitten breasts and by the fissure he has just penetrated, which suddenly transforms into a creature resembling a hairy gorilla.

In short, there is a whole process of decomposition-recomposition. What Mr. Gillespie calls castration anxiety is related to a series of developments involving both the primitive demands or regrets of the mother and, on the other hand, a conception—admittedly undemonstrated but ultimately assumed by the analyst at the end of the analysis—a Kleinian conception involving identification with the fissure.

Let us say that at the end of the article, Mr. Gillespie writes of this kind of insight, or this half-assumed, questioning intuition, which is, in my opinion, entirely significant of the extreme point reached by someone who follows with attention—after a temporal development, after the explanation that only analysis provides—what lies at the deepest level of perverse structure:

• “The configuration of the material at this moment led us to speculation around the fantasy associated with this split ego…”

The “split ego,” if we accept this term, often used to describe this splitting upon which Freud, in a sense, concluded his work.

For, as you know, I believe, Freud’s unfinished article on the splitting of the ego—the pen fell from his hand, so to speak, leaving it incomplete—was discovered after his death.

This splitting of the ego led Mr. Gillespie to speculate about the fantasy associated with the split ego and the split object. The same term can be used here: “split ego” and “split object.”

• “Is the female genital organ,” Gillespie wonders, “not the split object par excellence? And could the fantasy of a split ego not arise from an identification with the genital organ, which is a fissure, the split female genital? I take into account,” he says, “that when we speak of the splitting of the ego, the splitting of the self, and the corresponding object, we refer to the mental mechanisms presumed in the phenomenon.”

By this, he means that we are doing science, that we move within scientific concepts.

• “…and the fantasy belongs to a different level of discourse,” Gillespie continues, “yet our fantasies, no less than those of our patients, must always play a role in how we conceptualize these underlying processes. It seems to us, therefore, that the fantasy of being oneself split in two pieces, just as the vulva is split, could be quite appropriate to the mental mechanism of the splitting of the object and the introjection of the split object leading to the splitting of the ego. This is implicit, of course, in such a fantasy of the vulva as a split object that was once intact, and the splitting is the result of a sadistic attack, either by the father or by oneself.”

It is clear that we are dealing here with something that, for a mind as cautious and measured as Mr. Gillespie’s, cannot fail to strike as something in which he himself ventures to the extreme of thought by reducing, so to speak, to a sort of primordial identificatory schema what might then serve as an explanation for something that is, in this case, nothing less than the very structure of the subject’s personality. For what is at stake throughout this article—of which this is not the only case to cite—is something highly sensitive, something that decomposes within the transference with perverse individuals, namely the splittings that might commonly be referred to as true divisions of personality.

Projecting, in a sense, the division of the perverse personality onto the two halves of an original organ of fantasization is something that, on occasion, might elicit a smile or even perplexity.

But in truth, what we indeed find… and this must be understood at all levels and in extremely different forms of the personality development of perverse individuals… is something we have already indicated, for instance, in one of our articles, the one we wrote regarding the case of André Gide, remarkably studied by Professor Delay.

It is also something that manifests as an opposition between two identificatory facets: one linked more specifically to the narcissistic image of oneself, i(a) on one side, which governs the illustrious patient whose confidences are shared with us in countless forms within his work… and undoubtedly, we must take into account the dimension of this work, as it adds something to the subject’s equilibrium… but this is not the point I wish to fully develop here. After all, the year’s time is drawing to a close, and we must prepare for what comes next, setting forward some initial leads based on the insights we have gained.

It is the relationship found in the title I have placed at the forefront here, particularly prominent: that between desire and the letter. What does this mean, if not that it is in this sense that we must seek, properly speaking, the reconversion of desire into this production expressed within the symbol—which is not the super-reality it is believed to be but is, on the contrary, fundamentally composed of its breaking apart, its decomposition into signifying parts.

It is—in this reconversion of the impasse of desire into this signifying materiality—that we must locate the process of sublimation as such, if we wish to give the term its proper meaning.

Our André Gide undoubtedly deserves to be situated in the category that poses to us the problem of homosexuality. And what do we see?

We see this dual relationship to a divided object, as reflected in that awkward, even “disgraced” boy—so described by a writer in this context—that the young André Gide originally was. And in this furtive relationship to a narcissistic object, the presence of the phallic attribute is essential.

Gide is homosexual. But it is impossible—and this is the merit of this work in demonstrating it—it is entirely impossible to center or concentrate the vision of the subject’s sexual anomaly without confronting—something he himself bore witness to—this formulation: if I may say, “you do not know what the love of an Uranian is.”

And here, it concerns his love for his wife, that hyper-idealized love which I attempt, without difficulty, to summarize in this article by bringing together what is carefully outlined in Delay’s book, namely the entire genesis through which this love for his wife is tied to his relationship to his mother. Not merely the real mother as we know her, but the mother as she conceals a structure whose true nature he knows must now be uncovered. A structure, I will say immediately, where the presence of the bad object—and more specifically, the topology of this bad object—is essential.

I cannot linger on a lengthy development that would retrace point by point the entire history of André Gide, as his work, through its various stages, has carefully revealed:

• “But to show how far astray a child’s instinct can go, I want to indicate more precisely two of my themes of enjoyment: one was provided to me […] in that charming tale of Gribouille, who throws himself into the water on a rainy day—not to shelter himself from the rain, as his nasty brothers tried to make others believe, but to escape their mockery. In the river, he struggles and swims for a while, then lets himself go; and as soon as he lets himself go, he floats; he feels himself becoming very small, light, strange, vegetal; leaves begin to grow all over his body; and soon the river water can lay on the bank the delicate oak branch that our friend Gribouille has become. – Absurd!”

exclaims the writer to his interlocutor,

• “…But that is precisely why I tell it; it is the truth I speak, not something to my credit. And no doubt the grandmother of Nohant had little thought of writing something corrupting there; but I testify that no page of Aphrodite could trouble any schoolboy as much as that metamorphosis of Gribouille into a plant disturbed the ignorant little boy that I was.”

I add this to revisit it, because its dimension must not be overlooked, along with another example of this provocative fantasy of his primitive enjoyments:

• “There was also, in a silly little play by Madame de Ségur: The Dinners of Mademoiselle Justine, a scene where the servants take advantage of the masters’ absence to feast; they rummage through all the cupboards; they stuff themselves; and then, while Justine bends down to remove a stack of plates from the cupboard, the coachman secretly pinches her waist; Justine, ticklish, drops the stack; crash! All the dishes break. The damage made me swoon.”

If you need more to grasp the connection, the second fantasy with that utterly primordial element articulated in the subject’s relationship to the cut, should I quote you… this is entirely common with such subjects… that one of the fundamental fantasies in masturbatory initiation was, for instance, the fantasy of a verbal revelation concerning something imagined in the fantasy, such as sexual initiation itself, taken as the theme of fantasy as it exists?

The relationship, discerned in the first of these fantasies of the subject, to something detached and gradually flourishing, is remarkable inasmuch as it presents to us something demonstrated by hundreds of analytic observations: namely, the now widely accepted and common theme of the subject’s identification with the phallus as it emerges from a fantasization of an internal object of the mother. This structure is commonly encountered and, for the moment, poses no difficulty in being accepted and recognized as such by any analyst.

What is important—here we see it—is manifested as such in the fantasy, taken in the fantasy as the support of something representing for the subject one of the experiences of their initial erotic life. What matters for us is to determine more precisely the kind of identification involved.

As we have said, the metonymy of the neurotic is essentially constituted by this: that they are, ultimately… that is, at a point they will reach in the receding perspective of their symptoms… only insofar as they do not have the phallus. This is what must not be revealed.

This means that, as analysis progresses, we encounter in the neurotic an increasing anxiety of castration. In perversion, there is something we might call a reversal of the process of proof. What the neurotic must prove—the subsistence of their desire—becomes, in perversion, the basis of proof. See it as akin to a form of reasoning in analysis that we call reductio ad absurdum.

For the pervert, a conjunction occurs, uniting into a single term… through the slight opening allowed by a very particular identification with the other… the phrases “he is it” and “he has it.” This requires only that the “he has it” become, in this case, “she has it,” that is, the object of primitive identification. They will have the phallus, the object of primitive identification, whether it has been transformed into a fetish in one case or into an idol in another.

We observe the entire spectrum from the fetishistic form of these homosexual loves to the idolatrous form illustrated by Gide. The link is established, so to speak, in the natural support.

We might say that perversion presents itself as a kind of natural simulation of the cut. It is in this sense that Gillespie’s intuition serves as an indicator:

• What the subject does not have, they have in the object.
• What the subject is not, their ideal object is.

In short, a certain natural relationship is taken as the material for this subjective cut, which must be symbolized in perversion just as in neurosis. The subject is the phallus, as the internal object of the mother, and they have it in their object of desire. This, approximately, is what we see in the male homosexual.

In the female homosexual… Recall the case articulated by Freud, which we analyzed here in comparison with Dora’s case. What happens at the turning point where Freud’s young patient plunges into homosexual idealization? She is the phallus, but how? As the internal object of the mother as well!

This becomes very clear at the peak of the crisis, when, throwing herself over the railway barrier, Freud identifies that in this niederkommen (giving birth), there is something akin to an identification with this maternal attribute. She becomes the being in this supreme act of giving to her idol—her suicide.

She falls as an object. Why? To give her love object what she does not have, to elevate them to the maximum idealization, to give them the phallus, the object of her adoration, with which homosexual love, for this singular person who is the object of her love, identifies.

If we attempt to apply this to each case, making an effort of inquiry in each instance, we will rediscover what I propose as a structure. You can always find it, not only in perversion but especially in this form—obviously polymorphic, as is often pointed out with good reason—namely homosexuality. Especially given the broad use of the term homosexuality, how many diverse forms does experience present to us!

Nevertheless, might it not also be worthwhile to situate, at the level of perversion, something that could constitute the center as such, even while admitting that various peripheral forms exist, intermediate between perversion and, for instance, psychosis, drug addiction, or other nosographic forms?

Homosexuality, compared with what we attempted to formulate last time as the point upon which the neurotic’s desire for desire is based—namely, the relationship to the image of the other that establishes the entire play of substitution, where the neurotic never has to prove what is at stake: namely, that they are the phallus, Φ◊i(a). We might say that here we have something that represents a certain relationship between primitive identification (I) and the narcissistic, specular identification (i(a)).

It is insofar as something already exists, that a schism is already delineated…
between the accession of the identificatory, symbolic subject—a primordial relation to the mother—and the first Verwerfungen (rejections)…
it is insofar as this is articulated with the second imaginary identification of the subject to its specular form, namely i(a), that this is utilized by the subject to symbolize what, along with Gillespie, we will call the fissure—
namely, that in which the subject intervenes in its fantasmatic relationship.

Here, the phallus is the essential signifying element, insofar as it is what emerges from the mother as the symbol of her desire:

• this desire of the Other that terrifies the neurotic,
• this desire in which the neurotic feels they risk everything.

This is what forms the center around which the entire construction of the pervert will be organized.

Moreover, this desire of the Other is also what experience shows us in the pervert’s case, as something further removed and more difficult to access. It is precisely this that forms the depth and complexity of these analyses that have been made possible:

• from the primitive access granted via infantile experience,
• from the constructions and speculations especially tied to primitive objectal identifications.

Naturally, had Gide subjected himself to this process—at his own expense—there is no guarantee the enterprise could have been carried far enough. Gide did not submit himself to analytic exploration.

Yet, no matter how superficial an analysis might ultimately be when developed only within the so-called sublimated dimension, we are offered here strange indications. And I believe that no one, to my knowledge, has given due consideration to this small detail that appears as a singularity of behavior, marked almost symptomatically, pointing to what is at stake: namely, what lies beyond the maternal figure, or more precisely, within her—her very heart. For this heart of primitive identification is found at the core of the structure of the perverse subject themselves.

If, in the neurotic, desire lies on the horizon of all their long-winded and literally interminable demands, we might say that the desire of the pervert is at the very heart of all their demands. And if we read it in its unfolding, undoubtedly tied around aesthetic demands, nothing could strike us more than, I would say, the modulation of the themes around which it revolves.

From the very first lines, the subject’s relationship with a fragmented vision appears: a kaleidoscope occupying the first six or seven pages of the volume. How can one not feel carried to the furthest reaches of fragmenting experience? But there is more: the notion, the perception that the subject takes at one moment, which they articulate themselves: there is, no doubt, reality and dreams, but there is also “a second reality.”

And further still…
this is what I wish to address, the smallest of clues,
but everyone knows that for us, these are the most important…
the subject tells us the story of “the knot in the wood of a door.” In the wood of this door, somewhere in Uzès, there is a hole because a knot has been removed. And at the bottom of this hole:

• “It’s a little ball,” they are told, “that your father slipped in there when he was your age.”

The subject recounts—for the admiration of character enthusiasts—that from those holidays onward, they spent an entire year growing the nail of their little finger long enough to extract this small ball during the next encounter with the door. And indeed, they succeed, only to find themselves holding a grayish object in their hand, too ashamed to show it to anyone. Following this, as they say, they put it back in its place, cut their little fingernail, and confide it to no one—except to us, the posterity that will immortalize this story.

I believe it would be difficult to find a better introduction to the notion, rejected within a magnificent […] yet marked by a persistence that presents the form of the perverse subject’s relationship to the internal object, an object situated at the heart of something. The relationship of this object, as such, insofar as it belongs to the imaginary dimension of desire—in this case, the primordial desire of the mother—plays the decisive role, the central symbolic role, allowing us to consider that here, at the level of desire, the pervert is identified with the imaginary form of the phallus.

This is what we will address in our final lesson on desire for this year.