🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

We are reaching the end of this year, a year that I have devoted, at my own risk as much as yours, to the question of desire and its interpretation. Indeed, you have seen that I have remained steadfast on the issue of the place of desire in the economy of the analytic experience, because I believe that every particular interpretation of any desire must begin there. This place, however, has not been easy to pinpoint.

Therefore, today, in a word of conclusion, I would like to simply outline the main terms, the cardinal points relative to what we have, I hope, succeeded this year in conveying to you about the importance of bringing precision to the function of desire as such.

You are aware that even the slightest experience you may have of modern analytic works, especially those constituted, for example, through an observation of analysis, will reveal as a constant feature… I am referring to any observation one chooses to communicate in the current analytic moment we are living, which began about twenty years ago… these are cases referred to, relative to the typical neuroses of older literature, as “neurotic characters,” cases that are borderline with respect to neurosis.

What do we encounter in the subject’s mode of approach? I have read a certain number of such observations recently, to take stock of where analytic thought stands concerning the core progress implied by the experience. Well, broadly speaking, one can say with surprising consistency that the current state of affairs—at the analytic moment in which we find ourselves—is dominated, regardless of the directive from which it derives, by the object relation. Everything converges toward the object relation.

What, under this heading, relates to Kleinian experience appears, after all, more as a symptom than as a center of diffusion—that is, as a zone where everything related to it has been particularly deepened. However, fundamentally, any of the other centers of organization within analytic thought that structure research are not so far removed from it.

For the object relation has come to dominate the entire conception we form of analytic progress. This is not the least striking observation that presents itself in this context. Nevertheless, in the concrete reality of an observation reported for the purpose of illustrating a given structure, which situates itself within the field of our nosological object, the analysis appears to proceed for some time along a line that one might call a “moralizing normativation.”

I am not saying that this is directly the direction in which the analyst’s interventions proceed—this depends on the case—but it is from this perspective that the analyst himself takes his bearings. The very way in which he articulates the specifics of the subject’s position relative to what surrounds him, to this object, will always involve an assessment of the subject’s apprehension of the object in analysis, and the deficiencies of this apprehension of the object in terms of a presumed norm of this approach to the Other as such.

In short, it will be shown to us that the analyst’s mind essentially dwells on the degradation of this dimension of the Other, which, after all, is identified as being constantly misrecognized, forgotten, or fallen in the subject’s own condition as an autonomous, independent subject, the pure Other, the absolute Other. That is all! It is one perspective among others on what is fundamentally at stake: granting, in every plenary life, this appreciation of the Other in its autonomy and prominence.

What is striking is not so much this… with all the cultural presuppositions it implies, it is an implicit adherence to what might be called a system of values that, although implicit, is nonetheless present… what is striking is, if one may say so, the haste of a certain turn. After having, with the subject, elaborated at length on the deficiencies in their affective apprehension of the Other, we generally see… whether this directly reflects some shift in the concrete analysis, or simply arises from a sort of rush to summarize what appears to the analyst as the final terms of the experience… we see an entire articulation of the observation, fundamentally moralizing, abruptly fall to a sort of lower level, finding its final reference in a series of extremely primitive identifications: those which, however they are titled, always more or less relate to the notion of good and bad objects—internal, introjected, or external, externalized, projected.

There is always a certain Kleinian tendency in this reference to the experiences of primordial identification. And the fact that it may be masked in other contexts by emphasizing the ultimate mechanisms attributed to fixations… whether these are named, in this context, with older terminology, with references to instinctual drives, or in relations, for example, to oral sadism as profoundly influencing the Oedipal relationship… and that the subject ultimately justifies this Oedipal drama’s accident, the Oedipal identification, it is always a matter of referring to something of the same order as the ultimate term.

These ultimate identifications, to which we ultimately relate the entire development of the subjective drama, whether in neurosis or even in perversions,

are precisely those identifications that leave the very notion of subjectivity in profound ambiguity.

The subject essentially appears here as an identification with what he may consider to be himself, to a greater or lesser extent. And the therapeutic process presents itself as a rearrangement of these identifications in the course of an experience […] that takes its principle from a reference to reality, to what the subject ultimately has to accept or reject about himself, in something that thus takes on an aspect that may seem extremely hazardous, for in the end, this reference to reality is nothing other than a reality.

And the reality assumed by the analyst, in the end, which reemerges in an even more implicit form this time, even more veiled, may indeed be entirely precarious, particularly when it implies an ideal normativity, which is, strictly speaking, that of the analyst’s ideals, as being the ultimate measure to which the subject is invited to align himself in an identificatory conclusion:

“I am, ultimately, what I recognize in myself as the good and the right; I aspire to conform to an ideal normativity that, however veiled or implicit it may be, is nonetheless what I ultimately recognize as having been designated to me after so many detours.”

Through a subtle—more subtle than other forms but ultimately not different—suggestive action, the action and interaction analyzed in this relationship take shape here. What I am striving to point out here, in this discourse I have pursued before you this year, is how this experience—

organized as it has been through a sort of gradual slippage from the primordial Freudian indication— is an experience that increasingly conceals within itself the question that I believe is essential, without which there can be no proper understanding of our analytic action: the question of the place of desire.

Desire, as we articulate it, has the effect of bringing back to the forefront of our interest— in a manner that is unambiguous but genuinely crucial— the notion of what we are dealing with, which is subjectivity. Is desire, or is it not, subjectivity?

This question did not await analysis to be posed. It has been there forever, since the origins of what we might call moral experience. Desire is at once subjectivity— it is what lies at the very heart of our subjectivity, what is most essentially subject— and at the same time something that is also the opposite, that opposes it as resistance, as a paradox, as a rejected core, as a refutable core.

It is from this point, as I have emphasized several times, that the entire ethical experience has developed, culminating in the enigmatic formula of SPINOZA:

• “Desire—cupiditas—is the very essence of man…” [end of Part IV of the Ethics]

Enigmatic in that his formula leaves open this: if what he defines is truly what we desire or what is desirable, it leaves open the question of whether these are one and the same. Even in analysis, the distance between what is desired and what is desirable remains fully open. It is from here that analytic experience is established and articulated.

Desire is no longer simply exiled, relegated to the level of action and the principle of our servitude—which it is up to that point—but is interrogated as being the very key or the driving force within us for a whole series of actions and behaviors understood as representing the deepest part of our truth.

And this is the peak point, the acme, from which, at every moment, the experience tends to descend. Does this mean, as has been believed for a long time, that this desire in question is a pure and simple recourse to a vital outpouring? It is very clear that this is not the case, since from the very first unfolding of our experience, what we see is that as we delve deeper into this desire, we find it less and less aligned with this pure and simple drive.

It decomposes; it disarticulates into something that always appears more distant from a harmonious relationship. No desire appears to us in the regressive ascent that constitutes the analytic experience. Moreover, it appears to us as a problematic element—scattered, polymorphic, contradictory—and, to put it plainly, far removed from any oriented coaptation.

It is therefore to this experience of desire that we must refer, as to something we cannot leave behind without probing further, to the point that we can establish something that anchors us in its meaning, that prevents us from turning away from what is absolutely original, absolutely irreducible, there.

Everything, of course, in the way analytic experience is articulated—as I have said—is designed to obscure this meaning of desire. This opening of pathways toward the object within the transference experience shows us, in some sense, that the negative aspect of what is at issue, the transference experience, if defined as an experience of repetition obtained through a regression dependent on frustration, leaves aside the fundamental relationship of this frustration to demand. And yet there is no other such relationship in analysis.

And only this articulation of terms will allow us to see that demand regresses because the elaborated demand, as it presents itself in analysis, remains unanswered. But already, an analysis, through a roundabout way, embarks on responding to guide the analysand toward the object! From which emerge all kinds of incredible ideas, one example of which I have often criticized is the so-called “adjustment of distance” I have mentioned.

Perhaps it plays a greater role in the French context, this adjustment of the object’s distance which, if I may say, in itself sufficiently demonstrates the kind of contradictory impasse into which analysis enters along a certain path when it narrows its focus too tightly on the object relation.

For assuredly, any relationship— whatever it may be, however we might suppose its norm— seems to presuppose, regardless of what is said, the maintenance of a certain distance. And, in truth, we can recognize here a sort of brief application, albeit one taken in the wrong direction, of certain considerations regarding the mirror stage, on the narcissistic relationship as such, which have been foregrounded by authors who have prioritized the reference to “analytic action.” This served as their theoretical toolkit during a time when they were unable to situate its place within broader references.

In fact, any form of reference within the analytic experience contains something that, ultimately, relies on the so-called reality of the analytic experience taken as a measure, as a standard, of what needs to be reduced in the transferential relationship.

Everything that, in addition, inserts into the complementary position of this action of analytic reduction a—

• more or less advanced,
• more or less analyzed,
• more or less criticized— distortion of the ego, tied to the notion of this distance in reference to this distortion of the ego, in relation to what persists in this ego as a potential ally of reducing analysis to a “reality.”

Everything organized in these terms merely restores this separation between doctor and patient, upon which a whole classical nosography is founded. This in itself is certainly no objection, but it also highlights the ineffectiveness of a subjective therapeutic approach characteristic of pre-analytic psychotherapy. This yields, so to speak, to the omnipotent norm of the doctor’s judgment what is at stake in the patient’s experience, making the relationship between doctor and patient into precisely this: one subject to a subjective structuring, that of a fellow being, certainly, but a fellow being caught in error, with all that this entails in terms of distance (precisely!) and irreducible misrecognition.

What analysis establishes is an intersubjective structuring that is strictly distinct from the preceding one in that, however distant the patient may be from our norms— even to the extremes of psychosis, of madness— we do not suppose him to be merely this fellow being to whom we are bound by ties of charity, of respect for our image.

No doubt this is a relationship that has its foundation in something that—

• undoubtedly represents progress,
• has constituted progress,
• and is a historical advancement in the way we behave toward the mentally ill.

But the decisive step established by analysis: do we consider it essentially in its nature, in its relation to the patient, as a speaking subject? That is, as such, taken—exactly like us, whatever his position may be—within the consequences and risks of a relationship to […]? This alone is enough to completely transform our relations with this passive subject in analysis, for from this point, desire is situated beyond the sense of an obscure and radical drive as such.

For if we consider this drive, the instinct, the cry, this drive holds value for us, exists, and is defined and articulated by FREUD only insofar as it is taken within a temporal sequence of a special nature: this sequence that we call the signifying chain. The properties and impacts of this chain on everything we encounter as a drive, as an instinct, disconnect the drive essentially from all that defines and situates it as vital. It renders it essentially separable from everything that secures its living consistency.

It makes possible—as Freudian theory articulates from the outset—that the drive can be separated from its very source, from its object, from its tendency, if you will. The drive itself is separated from itself, as it is essentially recognizable within this very tendency, which it takes in an inverse form. It is primitively, primordially decomposable, decomposed, to put it plainly, into a signifying decomposition. Desire is not this sequence.

It is the subject’s positioning in relation to this sequence, where he reflects himself in the dimension of the Other’s desire. Let us take an example, in its most primitive form offered by the analytic experience: the subject’s relationship with the newcomer to the family constellation.

What we call “aggression” in this context is not aggression; it is a wish for death—that is to say, however unconscious we may suppose it, it is something that is articulated: “Let him die!” And it is something that can only be conceived within the register of articulation, that is, where signifiers exist.

It is because it is expressed in signifiers, however primitive we may assume them to be, that aggression toward the fellow rival, that aggression toward the rival fellow, is articulated. The little fellow engages in aggressions, biting, pushing, or even expelling them from the space where they can access their nourishment.

The transition of primitive rivalry into the unconscious is tied to the fact that something so rudimentary as we might suppose it is articulated, which is not fundamentally different in nature from the spoken articulation “Let him die!” And it is for this reason that this “Let him die!” can remain beneath the surface of “How beautiful he is!” or “I love him,” which is the other discourse superimposed on the former.

It is in the interval between these two discourses that what we deal with as desire is situated. It is in this interval that, if you will, what the Kleinian dialectic has articulated as the bad object is constituted. Here, we see how the rejected drive on one side and the introjected object converge in a similar ambiguity.

Nevertheless, it is in the way this relationship is structured in the interval, this imaginary function as it is appended, attached to the two chains of discourse—the repressed chain and the manifest, apparent chain—that we are fundamentally called to clarify what must be raised in the articulation to determine at what level desire is situated.

Desire—you may have, on one occasion or another, thought or suggested that I am presenting here a phallocentric conception of it. Of course, it is entirely evident that the phallus plays an absolutely essential role in this framework, but how can we truly understand this function of the phallus except within the ontological markers that we are trying to introduce here? How can we conceive of the use made of the phallus by Mrs. Melanie Klein?

I mean at the most primary, the most archaic level of the child’s experience. This is at the moment when the child, caught in certain developmental difficulties that may occasionally be severe, at the very first turning point, is told by Mrs. Melanie Klein, interpreting for him this little toy he manipulates and is about to touch against another element of the play experience being established: “This is daddy’s penis.”

It is a fact that anyone, especially an outsider to such an experience, cannot help but be somewhat startled by the sheer, brutally bold nature of the intervention. But more so by the fact that, ultimately, it works! I mean that the subject may, in certain cases, surely resist, but if he resists, it is certainly—as Melanie Klein herself does not doubt—because something is at stake there, and there is no reason to despair of a future understanding.

And God knows she allows herself at times— I have been told of her experiences, all from the perspective of an outsider but faithfully reported— to insist!

It is clear that the phallic symbol enters the scene at this ultra-early stage as if the subject were simply awaiting it. When Mrs. Melanie Klein occasionally justifies the phallus as being a model of a more manageable and convenient nipple, we can see this as a peculiar assumption.

What remains in our framework, in our vocabulary, and justifies such an intervention, can only be expressed in these terms: it is that the subject accepts—manifestly, in any case—this object, of which, in most cases, he has only the most indirect experience, only as a signifier. It is as a signifier that the phallus’ significance is most clearly justified.

Whether the subject takes it as such at the age he is may remain an indistinguishable question. But certainly, if Melanie Klein uses this object—whether knowingly or not—it is because she has no better one as a signifier of desire, insofar as it is the desire of the Other.

If there is something that the phallus signifies— I mean, in its position as a signifier—it is precisely this: it is the desire of the desire of the Other. This is why it takes its privileged place at the level of the object. But I believe that far from adhering to this so-called “phallocentric position,” as some express it— those who adhere to the appearance of what I am articulating— this enables us to see where the real problem lies.

The real problem is this: the object we are concerned with, from the outset in relation to desire, far from being at any level this preformed object, this object of instinctual satisfaction, this object destined to satisfy the subject as its instinctual complement in some preformed vital way, is absolutely indistinguishable from this: it is the signifier of the desire of desire.

The object as such—the object (a) of the graph, if you will—is, as such, the desire of the Other inasmuch as, I would say, it reaches—if the term has meaning—the knowledge of an unconscious subject. That is to say, it is, of course, in relation to this subject, in a contradictory position: the knowledge of an unconscious subject.

This is not unthinkable, but it is something open. This means that if it reaches anything of the unconscious subject, it does so insofar as it is a wish for recognition, as it is a signifier of its recognition. This is what it means: that desire has no other object than the signifier of its recognition.

The character of the object, insofar as it is the object of desire, must therefore be sought where human experience designates and points to it in its most paradoxical form. I have named what we commonly call “the fetish”—this something that is always more or less implicit in all that commonly constitutes the objects of human exchange, though it is undoubtedly masked by the regular or regulated nature of these exchanges.

We have spoken of the fetishistic side of commodities, and after all, this is not simply a matter of homophony. By “homophony,” I mean there is indeed a shared sense in the use of the word “fetish,” but for us, what must take precedence in emphasizing the object of desire is that which first and foremost defines it as derived from the material of signifiers.

“I saw the Devil the other night…”

says Paul-Jean Toulet somewhere, “…and beneath his skin, protruded his two…” It ends with: “Not all of them fall, you see, the fruits of Knowledge!”

Well, let them not all fall for us in this instance either, and let us realize that what matters is not so much these hidden fruits that the mirage offers to desire, but rather the peel itself.

The fetish is characterized in that it is the peel, the edge, the fringe, the embellishment, the thing that conceals. It holds precisely because nothing is more suited for the function of signifying what is at stake here: the desire of the Other.

That is to say, what the child primitively encounters in relation to the subject of demand is what exists outside the demand itself—this desire of the mother, which as such, the child cannot decipher except in the most virtual way, through the signifier that we, as analysts, regardless of what we do in our discourse, will refer to as a common measure, to this central point of the signifying process, which is, on occasion, the phallus. For it is nothing other than the signifier of the desire of desire. Desire has no other object than the signifier of its recognition.

It is in this sense that it allows us to conceive of what happens and what deceives us when we notice that, in this subject-object relationship, at the level of desire, the subject has crossed to the other side.

The subject has shifted to the level of a, precisely in the sense that, at this final point, he is no longer anything other than the signifier of this recognition, no longer anything other than the signifier of the desire of desire.

What matters to preserve, however, is the opposition from which this exchange operates, namely, the grouping $ opposite a, $◊a— a subject undoubtedly imaginary but in the most radical sense, in that it is the pure subject of disconnection, of the spoken cut, insofar as the cut is the essential scansion upon which speech is built.

This grouping of the subject with a signifier—what is it?

It is nothing other than the signifier of the being with which the subject is confronted, inasmuch as this being itself is marked by the signifier. That is to say, the a, the object of desire, in its nature, is a residue, a remainder. It is the residue left by the being to which the speaking subject is confronted as such, in all possible demands. And it is in this way that the object joins the real. It is through this that it participates in it. I say the real, and not reality, for reality is constituted by all the halters that human symbolism, in varying degrees of insight, places around the neck of the real, making them the objects of its experience.

Let us note: the very nature of the objects of experience is precisely to leave out, as Monsieur De La Palice would say, everything in the object that escapes it. This is why, contrary to popular belief, “experience,” the so-called experience, is a double-edged sword. That is to say, when you rely on experience to resolve, for instance, a historical situation, the chances of error and serious fault are as great as the chances of success. The simple reason for this is that by definition, if you focus on experience, you thereby fail to recognize the new element present in the situation.

The object in question, insofar as it joins the real, participates in it because the real presents itself precisely as what resists demand, as what I will call the inexorable. The object of desire is the inexorable as such, and if it joins the real— this real to which I alluded during our analysis of Schreber— it is under this form of the real that it best embodies this inexorable, this form of the real which presents itself as that which always returns to the same place. This is why we have curiously seen its prototype in the stars.

How else could we explain the presence, at the origin of cultural experience, of this interest in the most disinterested object for anything vital, namely, the stars?

Culture and the position of the subject as such in the domain of desire— insofar as this desire is established— are fundamentally instituted within the symbolic structure as such. This can be explained as follows: of all reality, it is the most purely real.

Based on a single condition, that the shepherd in his solitude, the one who first began to observe these phenomena, having no other interest in them than to identify them as consistently returning to the same place, marks them in relation to what radically establishes him as an object—by a form, however primitive you may suppose it, of a notch that allows him to locate it when it returns to the same place.

Thus, we arrive at the point of asserting that the object of desire must fundamentally be defined as a signifier—a signifier of a relationship that itself is a relationship, in a way, indefinitely reflected.

Desire, if it is the desire of the desire of the Other, opens onto the enigma of what the desire of the Other as such is.

The desire of the Other as such is fundamentally articulated and structured in the subject’s relation to speech, that is, in the disconnection from everything that is vitally rooted in the subject. This desire is the central point, the pivot point of the entire economy with which we deal in analysis.

By failing to demonstrate its function, we necessarily find our bearings only in what is effectively symbolized by the term reality—existing reality, social context. It then seems that we fail to recognize another dimension, even though it is introduced into our experience and reintegrated into human experience, especially by Freudianism, as something absolutely essential.

Here, the facts I have often relied on take on their significance, regarding what results in analysis from any intervention that tends to crush the transferential experience in relation to what is called this seemingly “simple” reality, the current reality of the analytic session.

As if this reality were not an artifice in itself! Namely, the condition in which, most naturally—and for good reason, since this is what we expect of it—everything that the subject produces must manifest, everything that we undoubtedly need to address but certainly not reduce to any immediate reality.

This is why I have repeatedly emphasized, in various forms, the common feature of what occurs whenever the interventions of the analyst—too insistently or even too abruptly—aim to demonstrate, in this reactivation of an object relationship considered typical in the reality of analysis, what happens with a consistency that, while many observations attest to it, does not seem to have always been identified by analysts.

In any case, to stick to something that has been the subject of our critique here, the famous observation published in the Bulletin des Analystes Belges, which I referred to once and now refer to again insofar as it reveals a remarkable convergence with one of Glover’s articles. This article, specifically, is where Glover himself attempts to address the function of perversion in relation to the subject’s sense of reality.

One cannot help but be struck by this: in the case where the analyst is a woman— I refer to the first observation since she is its author, regarding the fantasies of the subject, that is, fantasies elaborated by the subject about sleeping with her— she responds textually as follows:

• “You are scaring yourself with something you know will never happen.”

Such is the style in which this analytic intervention is presented, marking in this instance something that need not be qualified with regard to the personal motivations of the analyst in this situation.

Undoubtedly, they are justified to the analyst in some way. And the analyst in question was supervised by someone to whom I have already alluded in today’s discourse, specifically regarding the theme of distance (Bouvet).

It is clear that, whatever such a panicked intervention represents in the context of analysis, it will attempt to justify itself through a proper apprehension of “reality,” namely, the relationships between the objects involved.

Certainly, the relationship is decisive, and it is immediately after this style of intervention that the event which forms the subject of the communication occurs—namely, this rejection, this kind of brutal eruption in the subject. This occurs in a subject who perhaps is not very well-diagnosed, as he seems closer to incipient paranoid illusions than to what was identified in the case, namely, a phobia. This subject becomes absolutely haunted by a shame of being too tall. Here, we encounter a series of themes associated with depersonalization, which should not be overemphasized.

What is certain is that this is a neo-formation.

This, in fact, is the object of the observation—not our assertion—to see the subject engaging in what is called “transient perversion,” which means rushing to a geographic location where he found particularly conducive circumstances for observation: through a slit, observing people—especially women—in a cinema while they are satisfying their urinary needs.

This element, which until then had played no role in the symptomatology, seems interesting only for the reason that on page 494 of the International Journal, Vol. XIV, October 1933, Part 4, in The Relation of Perversion Formation to the Development of Reality-Sense—that is, Glover’s article on the functions of perversion—we find a remarkably similar subject. Glover diagnoses this subject as leaning toward paranoia, though we might instead more willingly associate him with a phobia.

Due to undoubtedly similar interventions, Glover produces an analogous staging of a transient and occasional perverse eruption. There is no essential difference between these two cases.

For example, in my discourse on The Function of Speech and the Field of Language, I highlighted the intervention by Ernest Kris regarding his patient’s phobic fear of plagiarism. Kris explains to the patient that he is not a plagiarist at all, whereupon the patient rushes outside and orders a plate of fresh brains—to the analyst’s great joy, as it is seen as a truly significant reaction to the intervention. Yet we can say that, in a milder form, this represents, if you will, the reaction, the reformation of the subject’s own dimension every time the intervention tries to reduce, collapse, or compress it into a pure and simple reduction to what are called objective data—that is, to data coherent with the analyst’s prejudices.

If you permit me to conclude with something that introduces the position we, as analysts, must occupy in relation to desire, it is something that assuredly cannot proceed unless we form a coherent conception of our function concerning social norms.

These social norms—if there is one experience that should teach us:

• how problematic they are,
• how they must be questioned,
• how their determination lies elsewhere than in their adaptive function,

…it seems to be that of the analyst.

If, in this experience of the logical subject, which is ours, we discover this dimension—always latent but also always present—that sustains every intersubjective relationship and exists in a dynamic of interaction, of exchange with all that crystallizes into the social structure, we must arrive at roughly the following conception.

What we might call “something-culture”—a term I care little for—designates certain narratives of the subject in relation to the logos, whose agency may have long remained concealed throughout history. It is difficult not to see, in the era we live in—and it is for this reason that Freudianism exists—the gap, the distance it represents relative to a certain social inertia.

The relationship between what culture transmits to society can provisionally be defined as something that might be expressed adequately in terms of entropy, in that what culture transmits to society always includes some disintegrative function.

What appears as culture in society— in other words, as it is, in various ways, incorporated into certain latent, stable conditions, which can be called conditions of exchange within the flock— is something that establishes a movement, a dialectic, leaving open the same gap within which we try to situate the function of desire.

It is in this sense that we can qualify what manifests as perversion as the reflection, the protest at the level of the logical subject, of what the subject undergoes at the level of identification, inasmuch as identification is the relationship that orders and establishes the norms for the social stabilization of various functions.

In this sense, we cannot help but draw a connection between every structure resembling that of perversion and what Freud, specifically in the article Neurosis and Psychosis, articulates as follows:

• “It is possible for the ego to avoid the rupture of any side of what presents itself to it at that moment as conflict, as tension, by letting go of any claim to its own unity, and, if necessary, splitting and separating itself. Thus,”
  Freud states, in one of those insights that illuminate his texts compared to the more common literature we encounter in analysis,
• “we can perceive the kinship between perversions, inasmuch as they allow us to avoid repression, and the kinship they share with all the Inkonsequenzen, Verschrobenheiten, and Narrheiten of people.”

Freud refers most explicitly to everything that presents itself in the social context as “paradox,” “inconsistency,” “confusional forms,” and “forms of madness.” The Narr is the fool in the most common and ordinary text of social life.

Thus, we could say that something establishes itself as a circuit revolving between what we might call social conformism or socially conforming forms, cultural activity— here, the term “cultural activity” excellently defines all aspects of culture that are commodified and alienated within society— and, at the level of the logical subject, perversion, inasmuch as it represents, through a series of gradations, everything in conformism that manifests as protest within the dimension of desire, properly understood as the relationship between the subject and its being.

It is here that we arrive at the so-called “sublimation,” which we may begin to discuss next year.

For in truth, this is the most extreme notion, the one most justifying everything I am trying to advance before you, and it is what Freud introduced: namely, sublimation.

What is sublimation, in fact? What could sublimation be? How can we conceive of it if we can define it with Freud as: “A sexual activity inasmuch as it is desexualized”?

How can we even think of it? For here, it is no longer a question of the source, the direction of the drive, or the object; it is a matter of the very nature of what is called, in this instance, interested energy. I think it will suffice for you to read Glover’s article in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, where he attempts to address, with his characteristic critical concerns, the notion of “sublimation.”

What is this notion if we cannot define it as the very form into which desire flows? Since what is indicated is precisely that sublimation can be emptied of sexual drive as such—or more precisely, that the very notion of the drive, far from being conflated with the substance of the sexual relationship, is instead the very form it takes: the play of the signifier. Fundamentally, it can be reduced to this pure play of the signifier. And it is precisely in this sense that we can define sublimation.

It is that which— as I wrote somewhere—allows desire and the letter to become equivalent, insofar as we can see, in a point as paradoxical as perversion (in its most general form), what in human beings resists all normalization. It produces this discourse, this apparent empty elaboration that we call sublimation—something which, in its nature and in its products, is distinct from the social valorization later attributed to it.

The difficulties in associating the term “sublimation” with the notion of social value are particularly well highlighted in the Glover article I mentioned. Sublimation as such—at the level of the logical subject—is where all the work that can properly be called creative labor in the realm of logos unfolds, establishes itself, and is instituted.

And it is from there that what we call cultural activities, along with all the implications and risks they carry—including the reshaping, or even the rupture, of previously established conformities—find their place, more or less integrated at the social level. It is within the closed circuit formed by these four terms that we might, at least provisionally, identify something that must, for us, remain in its proper plane, its vital plane, concerning desire.

Here we return to the problem I left you with last year at the Royaumont Congress. This desire of the subject, as the desire of desire, opens onto the cut, onto pure being, here manifested in the form of lack. This desire for the desire of the Other ultimately faces what desire in analysis, if not the desire of the analyst? This is precisely why it is so necessary to keep before us this dimension of the function of desire.

Analysis is not a mere reconstruction of the past. Nor is analysis a reduction to preformed norms.

• Analysis is not an ἔπος (epos).
• Analysis is not an ἦθος (ethos).

If I were to compare it to anything, it would be a narrative in which the narrative itself becomes the site of the encounter that it describes.

The problem of analysis is precisely this: that the desire the subject must encounter, the desire of the Other—our desire—this desire that is far too present in what the subject assumes we are asking of him, is in a paradoxical situation. The desire of the Other, which is for us the desire of the subject, must be guided not toward our desire but toward another. We cultivate the subject’s desire for someone other than ourselves. We find ourselves in this paradoxical position of being intermediaries, midwives, presiding over the emergence of desire.

How can this situation be sustained? It can only be sustained by maintaining an artifice, which is the basis of the analytic rule itself. But the ultimate foundation of this artifice—does it not allow us to grasp where, within analysis, the opening onto the cut might occur? The cut, without which we cannot conceive of the situation of desire?

As always, it is both the most trivial truth and the most hidden truth: the essential in analysis— in this situation where we position ourselves as the one who offers himself as a support for all demands but answers none— is it only in this non-response, far from being an absolute non-response, that the foundation of our presence is found?

Do we not need to account for something essential in what recurs at the end of every session and in what is immanent to the situation itself, inasmuch as our desire must be limited to the void, to the space we leave for desire to situate itself: to the cut?

To the cut, which is undoubtedly the most effective mode of intervention and analytic interpretation. This is why we should most insist on this point: that this cut, which we make mechanical, pre-limited to a pre-established timeframe, is in fact something else entirely, located far beyond where we typically apply it. It is one of the most effective methods of our intervention and also one to which we should devote ourselves most attentively. But within this cut lies something, the very thing we have learned to recognize as the latent phallic object in every relation of demand, as the signifier of desire.

I would like— to conclude this year’s lesson and to offer a brief preview of what will inaugurate next year’s lessons in the form of a pre-lesson— to end with a phrase, presented as a riddle. Let us see if you are better at deciphering puns than I have found in my experiences with countless visitors.

A poet, Désiré Viardot, writing in a Brussels journal around 1951-52 under the title Phantômas, posed this little closed riddle. Let us see if a cry from the audience will immediately uncover its key:

• “The woman has in her skin a grain of fancy…”

This “grain of fancy” is undoubtedly what ultimately shapes and modulates the relationships of the subject to whoever he addresses his demand, whoever that may be. It is surely no coincidence that, on the horizon, we encounter the figure of the universal mother—a subject that contains everything—and that we sometimes mistake this relationship of the subject to the whole as something delivered to us by analytic archetypes. But it concerns something else entirely.

It is about the opening, the gap, onto something radically new that every cut in speech introduces.

Here, it is not only from women that we must hope for this grain of fancy, or this grain of poetry, but also from analysis itself.

Jean–Paul Toulet, Les Contrerimes (50)

I saw the Devil, the other night;
And beneath his skin,
It is not easy to decide
Whether to say: She, or: He.

His chest—seemed beneath the faille,
To tremble with desire:
As, in hands about to seize it,
A beautiful bird falters.

So, to thirst, in blue Blidah,
The sweet apple offers itself;
Or the orange, beneath the moss,
When the rain softly falls.

“Ah!” said Satan, and the silence
Shuddered at his voice,
“You see, not all of them fall,
The fruits of Knowledge.”