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(All parts in English)

Small reference : We are going to reflect on yesterday’s extraordinary conference.
How do you feel about it? Did you, yourselves, find a bit of reflection in it?

Overall, it was of very high quality. The discussion was remarkably undissonant, undivergent, as discussions in such conditions often are. I was very satisfied. But finally, do you clearly see where the heart of the problem lies, and, I would say, the irreducible distance at which MERLEAU-PONTY remains, what I am trying to show you as truly the original point, the distinction between the analytical field and analytical experience?
I do not know if many of you—I have assumed this thing not only to be known but integrated—have a very present understanding of Phenomenology of Perception, which in itself is an entire program. Who among you finds it very much alive?

Jean HYPPOLITE

The Structure of Behavior seems to me a much more original work than Phenomenology of Perception.

LACAN

There is a term that identifies the point on which the discussion could have technically focused if we had had before us much more than the time of an evening meeting at Sainte-Anne, and that term is Gestaltism. I do not know if you noticed it in passing. It emerged at one point as truly the measure, the standard of encountering the other and reality… also the term consciousness. Very evidently, the discourse here was ordered within an experience that also leads to another term, which is really at the core of everything MERLEAU-PONTY teaches, and more particularly what currently occupies him, what he ultimately articulates: the term understanding.

And with all the distance he tries to maintain from what he calls the liberal, traditional position, well, as was rightly pointed out to him, he does not stray very far from it. Because, in the end, his only step forward is to acknowledge that there are things hard to swallow, difficult to understand.
You can clearly see what I am alluding to. It is no coincidence that he took his reference point from contemporary political experience. You know how deeply he is troubled by this rupture of dialogue with communism; it preoccupies him to the utmost. It represents, for him, the critical example of human experience, a historical crisis we are undergoing.

He observes, simultaneously, that we do not understand each other, and he reaffirms that we must understand, as he articulated in the title of one of his somewhat literal, even journalistic literary manifestations, in a recent article published in a weekly newspaper: We must understand communism, which is highly paradoxical. And he observes that his point of view cannot be understood.
It was the same thing last night; that is the meaning of what he told you. And it is curious that he did not notice precisely, in establishing this parallel, what was at stake.

Perhaps he did not push as far as one might have wished, also due to not being sufficiently familiar with the terrain of analysis, the inquiry into whether the term understanding applies. In other words, whether analysis, this kind of field, is ultimately, if not immediately homogeneous, can at least arrive at homogeneity—that is to say, whether everything can be understood, which is the question as posed by Mr. Jean HYPPOLITE, who we regret was unable to say last night what he said about MERLEAU-PONTY’s conference immediately afterward:

“Can we say, yes or no, that Freudianism is or is not a humanism?”

That MERLEAU-PONTY’s position is essentially humanist, I believe that is what Mr. HYPPOLITE was saying just now. And we can see, moreover, where this leads him—or more precisely, to which path he refers, one might almost say clings.
It is a notion—all the notions of totality, of unitary functioning, everything that precisely tends to resolve the problem, the distinction, the explanation, the elaboration of the mechanism—through this reference.

We find a unity that would be given, accessible to a speech that establishes itself, to a grasp that ultimately reduces itself to an instantaneous, theoretical grasp, a contemplative grasp, for which the experience is so ambiguous—I say ambiguous in this theorization that is Gestalt psychological—thus, in short, a semblance of experimental support.
I say semblance, not, of course, that it does not correspond to measurable facts, to a whole experimental richness, which certainly serves as an essential linchpin of our conception of living phenomenology, the notion of good form.

But where the difficulties begin is in determining whether this is a theoretical spring that does not rely solely on playing upon a fundamental ambiguity. These ambiguities have already been emphasized enough that I need not recall them here.
It lies entirely in something where physics merges with phenomenology, the same phenomenology that places on an equal footing the droplet of water, insofar as it takes on a spherical shape, and also that something which always inclines us toward the circular, the approximate form we see. There is something here that certainly creates an image, whose correspondence, whose mode of formation, we can even conceive to a certain extent.

But certainly, it is this ambiguity that makes one elide the essential problem.
If, indeed, there is something that tends to produce, at the back of the retina, for example, this good form, we can grasp its relation to the fact that, in the physical world, there is something that tends to realize certain analogous forms. But if we want to relate one to the other, I believe that this is certainly not a way to resolve the experience in all its richness.

But we can no longer make consciousness that something which is essentially maintained at the heart of phenomenology in the existential, lived sense, as MERLEAU-PONTY promises us, that is to say, this primacy of consciousness.
Consciousness ultimately becomes a mechanism in itself. And it plays, without him realizing it, the function that I propose here as being the first stage upon which the dialectic of the self is founded, precisely in order to separate itself from it.
Only for MERLEAU-PONTY, everything lies there, in consciousness, and in the fact that a contemplative consciousness constitutes the world in a series of syntheses, exchanges, which structure it, situate it at each instant within a more enveloping totality, always renewed, which always originates in the subject, in man, in the man who looks at himself.
[To Jean Hyppolite] Don’t you agree?

Jean HYPPOLITE: I am listening to the movement that you are developing from Gestalt.

LACAN:

Ultimately, you will see it in a moment, we will talk about it again, it is a phenomenology of the imaginary, what we call here the imaginary.

Octave MANNONI:

It can still go beyond the plane of the imaginary. I see the origin of Gestalt in thought, the germ of Gestaltist thought, in the fact that DARWIN failed. When he replaces variation with mutation, he discovers a nature that produces good forms. At that moment, it poses a problem. It seems that Gestalt is a movement to recover this existence of forms that are not simply mechanical, but which are precisely more than mechanical.

LACAN:

Of course. What you are saying here is a step further, which I am not taking, because I do not want to ascribe it beyond the plane where MERLEAU-PONTY stands. It is that we return to the mysterious creative force, to a vitalism ultimately—the whole question lies there.

Isn’t the entire anthropological discovery made by FREUD—and this is the direction in which I am leading you for the moment—not directed, and this in accordance with a strictly historical progress, in a radically opposite direction to any kind of vitalism, to that kind of dirigisme that he [Freud] designates throughout his work always to explicitly repudiate it, and which would fundamentally be called the tendency towards vital progress, towards the creation of ever superior forms, everything he rejects from the notion of a realization, an ever-greater harmony of organisms, ever more elaborated, by which nature would produce something ever more perfect, ever more integrated, ever better constructed, in the direction of a harmony, as was said last night.

A mind as little inclined as his to choose based on philosophical positions, positions of principle…
Let us say—and I am more than willing to admit it—that it is his experience of man that orients and directs him.
Well, precisely, his experience of man, from which he started, is his medical experience, from the very moment his mind was shaped. This unique thing he did was to understand the meaning…
which he suddenly situated within the register of a certain type of human suffering and illness… of this fundamental conflict.

In order not to bring it forth […] any thought of immanent progress in the movement of life, of creative evolution, of this tendency to realize forms…
here we even rediscover Gestalt, but precisely in its ambiguity,
that is to say, at the point where the word Gestalt meets the word form in its broadest sense…
any tendency to create superior forms considered as a mode of explanation, whatever it may be, of the world, is for him absolutely to be rejected, because it is something that is opposed to the essential conflict that his experience of man provides him.

And the essential conflict, as he sees it play out in the human being, leads him to a category that is undeniably metaphysical.
I do not know if they are philosophical or not; they are certainly metaphysical, and they lead him to a fundamental dualism, and a dualism, properly speaking, that expresses itself as conflict.

Precisely because it is not simply at the roots of the human being who emits it that it leads to something that surpasses man, it is in this way that he is truly projected into something, at the level of the Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
– which cannot fail to be a category, the headings, metaphysical or ontological,
– which, strictly speaking, emerges beyond the limits of the properly human field in the organic sense of the term.

The human being here opens onto a conflict that surpasses him. It is not a conception of the world; it is an order, it is categories of thought that he brings to us, as something to which every experience of the concrete subject cannot fail to refer.

Jean HYPPOLITE:

I do not dispute at all the crisis described by FREUD. But when he speaks of the death instinct, he opposes it to libido, and he defines libido as the tendency of an organism to group with other organisms, as if it were a sort of progress, of integration. Moreover, he regrets this, and he says, concerning inert matter, that there would be a return, a sort of dissociation, a regression. We cannot say the same about life, although there is […] Platonic. We would very much like to admit that it is rather a return to something that has already been given in its totality. However, we cannot say this—it is myth.

There is, therefore, in him—independently of this undeniable conflict that you speak of, which does not make him optimistic from a vital, human point of view—a certain conception of libido, moreover poorly defined, in relation to the discovery of the death instinct. He indeed asserts this ever-greater integration of organisms; he states it clearly. I am speaking of FREUD’s actual text, and not of the conflict in spirit, regarding which I completely agree with what you have just said.

LACAN:

I understand… Observe carefully that this “tendency to union”—that is what he says: ἔρως (erôs) tends to unite—is never grasped except in relation to the “tendency to division,” to rupture, to redispersion, and very specifically of inanimate matter. The two are strictly inseparable. There is, therefore, no notion that is less unitary. He precisely conceives ἔρως (erôs) only in relation to this tendency of return to demultiplication.

Let us take this step by step. We will better understand what meaning to attribute to it. The last time, I left you with the problematic engendered by the introduction of energetic notions. And this insofar as it is correlative to something that is a historical fact, something we can handle, something interposed in HEGEL or FREUD: the advent of a world of the machine, which began to pose, in characteristic terms, with an exceptionally symbolic precision, the notion of energy.

I indicated to you…
I do not want to lead you too far today, and I will try to give you general outlines within which, subsequently, through the commentaries on texts—the first of which I entrusted today to ANZIEU—these commentaries must find their place.
…I will try to illuminate, not completely, but sufficiently, my lantern a little more than I did last time.

The deadlock we have reached is something that is beyond the pleasure principle and yet presents itself to all, within this peculiar ambiguity, even confusion, with the pleasure principle.

If the pleasure principle is this restorative tendency towards an equilibrium for an organism already exactly conceived as a machine, this return to a certain state of equilibrium, this restorative tendency, we have seen, is not easily distinguished at first glance in FREUD’s text from this repetitive tendency, which is assuredly what is new. And what his text brings that is original, the deadlock we reach, is this: what is the distinction between this repetitive tendency and this restorative tendency?

The means are very peculiar in this text because they are circularly dialectical. He perpetually returns to a notion that always seems to escape him, and whose only resistance is indicated by the fact that he does not stop, that he continues to try at all costs to maintain the originality of this repetitive tendency. Is it an extrapolated, fundamental permanence of the pleasure principle? It is certainly about something else, and without a doubt, this something, in the order of categories or perhaps simply images, was missing for him to make us truly feel the relief, the originality, the distinction between the repetitive tendency and the restorative tendency.

It is at this point that I brought the problematic question as Mr. HYPPOLITE kindly articulated it after the conference. This is the point we had reached. Let us immediately observe something that is precisely very ambiguous in this application of the pleasure principle, considered from the beginning to the end of FREUD’s work. Each time, something is revealed that essentially means this: faced with a stimulus brought to this living apparatus, the nervous system represents, in a way, the essential delegate of this homeostat, the essential regulator—specialized, one might say—this homeostat thanks to which the living being persists and to which corresponds a tendency to reduce excitation to its lowest point.

If you read analytical authors, you will see their extreme embarrassment: you will see them constantly sliding down this slope, which is precisely offered to them by the very way FREUD dialecticized the question. FREUD offers them an opportunity for yet another misunderstanding. All of them, in unison, rush into it, in their panic, when they arrive at this point. The excitation that must be brought to its lowest point—what is it?

Because “the lowest point” can mean two things, and all biologists will agree:
– tension reduced to the lowest level, given a certain definition of the equilibrium of the system,
– or tension reduced to the lowest level, quite simply, that is to say, concerning the living being:
there is no lower tension to which one can arrive other than death, all tensions will be brought—
from the perspective of the living being—to zero.

However, this is not entirely accurate. Because if we do not precisely establish a sharp distinction, we might consider that the processes of decomposition that follow death will directly prolong what we have defined.
And we will arrive at defining that the pleasure principle finds its terminal fulfillment only in the complete and definitive dissolution of the living being, that is to say, after an entire field, an entire space traversed, which would occur between the passage from the state of corpse and the concrete dissolution of the corpse.

There is something here, obviously, whose abusive character cannot immediately be seen. This aspect of “bringing tension to the lowest point” cannot, in itself, if posed as a regulatory principle of the living being as such, be considered as what is designated by the pleasure principle, as a principle regulating its functioning.
Yet you will see, I can immediately cite several articles, and in the principles of these articles, “bringing tension to the lowest point” designates nothing other than the death of the living being:
– which is to suppose the problem solved,
– which is to confuse the pleasure principle with what one believes FREUD designated under the term death instinct.

I say “what one believes”: if you read FREUD, you will see clearly that when FREUD speaks of the death instinct, he designates something fortunately less absurd, less anti-everything, anti-biological, anti-scientific, the opposite of coherence.
This implication made of the pleasure principle, what he aims at is this: distinct from the pleasure principle and tending to bring all the animate back to the inanimate. This is how he expresses himself, and this is what he tries to grasp. This means, more precisely:
– that he is forced to think about this.
– He is forced by things that have nothing to do with the death of living beings.
– He is forced to think about it by manifestations that exist in man.

Let us not forget, what we are seeking here is why, through manifestations that exist in man, human experience, human exchange, intersubjectivity, he cannot escape this necessity to go beyond the limits of life.

One must indeed consider a principle that leads libido back to death, but it does not lead it back just any way, because if it were to lead it back by the shortest routes, the problem would be resolved. It leads it back only through the pathways of life, precisely. It is behind this—the necessity for the living being to pass through the pathways of life, and it can only happen this way—that the principle bringing it back to death is located, is identified. It cannot proceed to death by just any path.

In other words, the machine maintains itself, traces a certain curve, a certain persistence, and it is through this path of subsistence that something else manifests, but which is, in some way, supported by this form of existence that is there, which indicates its passage to it. So, what is it, once again?

There is a question that must be asked immediately because, if we have seen something that happened between HEGEL and FREUD, we cannot admit an essential mechanism, an essential articulation, the first one in evidence, under this humorous form: “When one pulls a rabbit out of a hat, it’s because one has put it there beforehand.”
This formulation, for some time, was the last word in metaphysics. It has a name for physicists: “the first principle of thermodynamics.” In other words, the conservation of energy. In other words: for there to be something at the end, there must have been at least as much at the beginning.

But there is the second [principle of thermodynamics], which means that in the manifestation of this energy, there are—I will try to illustrate it for you—noble modes and ignoble modes. In other words, things happen in such a way that one cannot reverse the current, so to speak, and when work is done, during its operation, part of this work is expended as heat. This is demonstrated in central experimental illustrations, and this heat cannot be converted back into an equal quantity of work; it remains at its level. There is a fall, a loss. And this is called entropy.

FREUD himself makes an allusion to this—and repeatedly throughout his work—that the phenomenon we are witnessing, whether it concerns a precise and concrete phenomenon in physical logic… He talks about it at the end of The Wolf Man, and when I lectured on The Wolf Man, I indicated FREUD’s meaning in this introduction. I might revisit it someday.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he returns to it. Of course, this kind of second appeal, this circular search that characterizes his approach, without being able to stop there—this is why we are here—fails to fully penetrate the mystery that lies not within entropy; there is no mystery in entropy, it is a symbol, something written on a board, and you would be wrong to believe that it actually exists.

Entropy is a capital E, absolutely indispensable to our thought, and even if you do not care about this capital E, the fact remains that a man named Julius Robert VON MAYER, a naval physician, meditated on these matters, which are now the very principle of everything: one cannot ignore it when organizing a country, a factory, atomic or not. Mr. Julius Robert VON MAYER began to think seriously about it while performing bloodlettings on his patients…
sometimes the paths of thought are obscure, the Lord’s ways are unfathomable…
this man established this principle, and it is another question that we will address another time.

It is nevertheless striking that, for having produced this, which is assuredly one of the great emergences of thought, he—how shall we say—“dried up” afterward, and became an extremely diminished man. It is peculiar, as if it seemed—and this is not unrelated to our subject—that the birthing of this great E, which seems insignificant, had somehow imprinted itself on his nervous system. You would be wrong to believe that when I adopt positions commonly thought to be anti-organicist, it is because, as someone I like once said, “the nervous system bores me.” These are not at all sentimental reasons that guide me.

I believe that common organicism is stupidity, but that there is another form, one that does not at all neglect material phenomena, something to which I am specifically pointing at this moment and which leads me to say to you, in all good faith—
if not in all truth, because truth requires precisely a certain reflection to trace its marks in experience—
concerning the adventure of Mr. Julius Robert VON MAYER, that I believe it is not without effect on the unfortunate individual who was entrusted by I know not what…
the sacred LANGUAGE, as Mr. VALÉRY said (Cf. Paul Valéry: Charmes, La Pythie, last stanza)…
to be the one who makes the great E survive. This perhaps does not happen without damage.

I point out in passing that Mr. Julius Robert VON MAYER’s life certainly had two parts:
the one before, and the one after, where nothing else happened. He had said what he had to say, as they say.

Well, this entropy, that is to say, this principle of the degradation of energy, which FREUD encounters and of which he feels clearly that it has a certain connection with his death instinct, without being able, of course, to find his foundation there either—I mean the place where he could settle down for a while to rest—he continues, throughout his article Beyond the Pleasure Principle, his little infernal dance, like DIOGENES searching for a man with his lantern.

This means that he is telling us that where he could have anchored this, something was missing.
Something was missing, which naturally would be too simple if I were to tell you—I will tell you—it is by adding a capital F to the capital E, or a capital I. It is certainly not that, because it is something that is not yet fully elucidated.

But modern thought is in the process of trying to grasp it, often through ambiguous, even confusing paths…
but you cannot ignore that you are contemporaries of its birthing, and I will go further: you are all, insofar as you are here following my seminar, tipping into this very birthing, into something essentially tied to this dimension in which thought tries to order itself…
to find its correct symbol and its capital F succeeding the capital E.

This something, currently, in the present state of things, is the quantity of information.
– There are those whom this does not surprise.
– There are others who seem blown away by it.
I am not going to go much further in this direction today.
I will simply remind you that, according to the latest updates—and seemingly, in a way that is almost correct, although it still leaves much to be desired—the elaboration of every category, constant quantity, the sum of experiences, and the concrete things accumulated in research around communication—and, of course, apparently at a certain distance from what interests us—the great adventure, so to speak, whose beginning we can never pinpoint precisely, let us say that it found one of its significant moments at the level of telephone engineers.

The issue was about making savings at the Bell Telephone Company, that is to say, ensuring that the greatest possible number of communications could pass over a single wire. When one is in a country as vast as America, saving a few wires becomes very important, being able to transmit the nonsense that usually travels through these kinds of communication devices over as few wires as possible. It was from this point that people began to quantify communication, meaning that they started from something that—you can clearly see—was seemingly the farthest thing from what we call here speech.

It was not at all about knowing whether what people were saying to each other made any sense. Of course, what is said over the telephone, as you have likely noticed through experience, strictly speaking, never has any meaning. But communication still happens; that is to say, what matters is recognizing the modulation of a human voice and having this appearance of comprehension, which results from the fact that one recognizes already-known words.

It was about determining under what most economical conditions this phenomenon occurred—namely, that people recognize words. Meaning, of course, no one was concerned with meaning. This is exceedingly important because it emphasizes the point I stress here: that language—this language which is the instrument of speech—is precisely something material, a point that is always forgotten.

When this matter was investigated, it became clear that there was no need for everything inscribed on a small sheet of a more or less sophisticated device—electronic in the meantime—which ultimately always remains a Marey device oscillating and representing the modulation of the voice. In fact, it suffices to take a small slice of it, which reduces the entirety of the oscillation—I believe significantly, by an order of magnitude of 1 to 10, or even much less—and it works perfectly. Meaning that not only does one hear, but one recognizes the voice of the beloved dear one or that specific dear person at the other end. The emotional aspect, the convincingly individual communication from one person to another, seems to pass entirely intact.

So, people began to codify quantities of information. The quantity of information absolutely does not mean that fundamental things happen between human beings. It concerns what runs through the wires and what can be measured. Yet, through this fact alone, an essential step was taken, meaning that the entirety of this dialectic began to be posed at the level of information: namely, a dualism of whether it passes [1] or whether it does not pass [0]. In other words, at what point does it degrade, at what point is it no longer communication?

This is what, in psychology, is referred to by the American word “jam”, a word I ask you to remember because it is the first time that confusion appears as such, as fundamental reality, that is to say, this tendency within communication to cease being communication, to communicate nothing at all.

So, here is a new symbol added. The introduction of this new symbol allowed people who are called mathematicians… indeed, in the domain of mathematics, we have the notion that initiation or not into a certain symbolic system enables or prevents people from accessing entire orders of reality that touch us most closely, namely, what actually happens between human beings. Lacking the correct handling of these capital E and capital F, there are people either qualified or disqualified to speak about human relations.

And it is indeed an objection we could have made last night to Mr. MERLEAU-PONTY: that at a certain point in the development of a symbolic system, not everyone can speak with everyone else. And when one speaks to him of closed subjectivity, and he said:

“If we cannot speak with them, the essence of language vanishes, and the essence of language is to be universal.”

Of course! But one must first be introduced into this circuit of language and know what one is talking about when speaking about communication. And you will see that this is essential when we speak about the death instinct, which seems opposed to this.

What is at stake resides in this direction—I was telling you—that the mathematicians qualified to handle these symbols, because they know how to use them and because, for them, it is the center of what has not merely coordinated but organized an entire series of experiences, make information appear today as something that, in our reality, seems most plausible as moving precisely in the opposite direction to entropy.

In other words, I remind you, for illustration—there are thousands of ways to illustrate it—that the transfer:
– from one system to another,
– or from one state of a system to the next,
…of any given quantity of information is precisely something that goes in the opposite direction, that cancels out, but has this general tendency indicated by the degradation of energy, as it is conceived in the absence of this notion that information serves a purpose.

In other words, when people began to approach thermodynamics—that is, how their machine would pay for itself—they omitted themselves. That is, they took the machine the way a master takes a slave: the machine is there, at a distance, and it works. They forgot only one thing: that they had signed the purchase order. Now, merely the fact of having signed the purchase order turns out to have considerable importance in the realm of energy. And this is what is at stake in the rate [of information?] when it comes to information.

To make it clear, let us tell this small parable: the “Maxwell’s Demon.” It is nothing other than an illustrated depiction of the fact that if information enters the circuit of energy degradation, it can perform miracles. That is, if Maxwell’s demon stops all atoms moving too slowly and keeps only those with a slightly frenetic tendency, he will reverse the general slope of energy. In other words, with this, he could entirely recreate, with what would have been degraded into heat, a work equivalent to the one that had been degraded.

This seems far from our subject. Yet, I must situate its marker. You will see how we will find it again. Now let us return to our pleasure principle, let us suddenly make ourselves naïve again, let us plunge back into ambiguities.

The pleasure principle is something—as ANZIEU will tell you next time—when FREUD speaks to you about what happens at the level of the nervous system, a stimulus, everything operates, everything is set into motion: the efferent [centrifugal] pathways, the afferent [centripetal] pathways, all of this comes into play so that the living being regains rest.
I do not know if you notice that there is, nonetheless, at the level of intuition, a sort of discordance between the pleasure principle, defined in this way, and what it still evokes in a cheerful way: the pleasure principle, with everyone chasing after their respective partners. Until now, this was how it was seen; in LUCRETIUS, it was clear. In short, it’s rather joyful, rather stimulating!

And even, from time to time, analysts, somewhat desperate about having to incorporate categories that seem so contradictory to them, remind us that, after all, there must indeed be…
one only needs to look at how things happen: a young animal there, seemingly so happy to be alive…
there is a pleasure in activity, a taste for stimulation. In the end, we seek—though what is given to us by theory seems to suggest the opposite—ultimately, to distract ourselves, we are captivated by play.

There is something here that seems to be given subjectively, not only primordial but which cannot even be said to lack a certain resonance—for example, the naive sentiment that might arise from the fact that FREUD introduced an absolutely essential elementary function, the notion of libido, into human behavior. There is also a tendency to think that this libido is, after all, something rather libidinous: people seek their pleasure… Well!

It is still quite striking, quite curious to see that this theoretically translates into the pleasure principle, which essentially states this: what is sought, ultimately, is the cessation of pleasure.
Of course, everyone suspected this, because we all know that this is, after all, the end, the curve of pleasure. But you see that the theoretical perspective here goes in the strictly opposite direction to subjective intuition, that, essentially, pleasure is something that, by definition, in the pleasure principle, tends towards its end. The pleasure principle is that pleasure ceases. Do you agree?

Look, from this perspective, at what the reality principle becomes. The reality principle is precisely introduced through this simple observation: that in seeking pleasure excessively, all sorts of accidents happen—you burn your fingers, you catch gonorrhea, you fall flat on your face…

This is generally how we are told the genesis of what is called human learning.
Then we are told that the pleasure principle opposes the reality principle. From this perspective, this obviously takes on another meaning.
The reality principle, ultimately, is the striking, singular term—it consists in the fact that the game lasts, that is to say, that pleasure is renewed, that is to say, that the fight does not end for lack of fighters. The reality principle consists of preserving our pleasures, these pleasures whose tendency and end are precisely to arrive at cessation.

This is how the problem is posed. And we must still introduce this: analysts are also trying…
because do not believe, of course, that psychoanalysts are completely satisfied with this way of thinking about the pleasure principle, which is fundamental, absolutely essential, from start to finish, to the entire theory. If you do not think about the pleasure principle within this framework, there is no point in introducing it into FREUD; it is absolutely determinant. The mere introduction of the notion that there is a kind of pleasure inherent to activity introduces into analytical theory—for example, playful pleasure—it topples all our directives, all our positions, all the categories of analytical thought.

From that moment, what are we even doing with this technique? If it is simply a matter of teaching people gymnastics and music, and whatever else you want—formative, pedagogical, educational procedures are totally of a different order than analytical experience. I am not saying they do not have their function, their value, or that they cannot play an essential role in The Republic. One only needs to refer to Platonic categories to understand how important this is.

It is about:
– integrating man into a certain happy natural functioning,
– enabling him to reach the stages of his development,
– granting him the free blossoming of what, in his organism, occurs at each stage,
at its time, at a certain maturity, granting each of these stages its time for play,
and then, essentially, its time for adaptation, for stabilization, until a new vital emergence.

These are categories that are perfectly conceivable, around which an entire anthropology can be organized.
It is a matter of knowing whether this justifies psychoanalysis or not—that is, putting them on a couch to tell us nonsense. It is a matter of knowing whether this is the relationship between this and that—whether PLATO, with gymnastics and music, would have understood what psychoanalysis is.

He would not have understood it, despite appearances, because there is an abyss, a chasm. And that is what we are trying to explore, with this Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Because, to build the bridge, the relationship between our psychoanalysis and psychology, there is still something I am trying to introduce: trying to make understood the relationships that exist between our experience as analysts and notions such as learning.

These notions are brought to us, and in a rather seductive way, certainly metaphorical. It is a matter of knowing whether it is a good metaphor.

What do people say? That analysis, for example, is a learning of freedom. Admit that it sounds rather strange: “learning of freedom.” Still, at the point we’ve reached, in this historical era, as Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY said yesterday, one ought to be cautious. But let us simply reflect: what is the implicit notion of learning in the analytical experience? What do the initial discoveries of analysis give us: trauma, fixations, repetition, transference—what do all these mean?

I am speaking about the field. Because I am not saying that analysands are incapable of learning. In limited fields, one can certainly heighten the appearance of learning phenomena. But first, as with the other example, like the purchase order for a machine, if someone is to decide to learn the piano, the piano must exist.

But people are isolated between four walls, and they are taught little musical tunes. And we observe all sorts of properties: that while they are playing the piano, including having learned on pianos with large keys, they can then play on pianos with small keys, on a harpsichord, etc.

It always concerns specific segments of human behavior, and not, as with FREUD, the level of the whole human being, the level of their destiny, their conduct, which means that when the piano lesson is no longer there and they go to see their sweetheart, the characteristic of learning, as we observe it within the analytical experience, is roughly that of GRIBOUILLE.

You know the story of GRIBOUILLE: he goes to a funeral and says, “Happy Feast Day.” He gets scolded, bad things happen to him. They pull his hair, he goes home: “Look, one doesn’t say ‘Happy Feast Day’ at a funeral; one says, ‘God rest his soul.’” He goes out again, comes across a wedding: “God rest his soul,” and once again, trouble follows. Well, that is learning as demonstrated by analysis. That is it. This is what we deal with in the notion of fixation, repetition, and transference as we observe them.

In the analytical experience, we seek what is called this presence, this intrusion of the past into the present. It is something of this order. It is always about someone learning to do better next time. And when I say they will do better next time, it means they will have to do something entirely different.

The unveiling within analysis is the unveiling of this fundamental, absolutely radical discordance of essential human behaviors in relation to everything one lives. The dimension uncovered by analysis is the opposite of something that progresses by adaptation, approximation, or refinement. It is something that happens through jumps, through leaps, which is always the strictly inadequate application of certain total symbolic relations.

And by this, I mean relations that involve several tones interacting with one another, in relations of one to another, which are precisely those that no longer include this kind of…

The interference, for example, of the imaginary within the symbolic, or vice versa. Are you following this, ANZIEU? It’s troubling, isn’t it? I simply want to point out this: the difference between any investigation or somewhat in-depth discovery of what happens in the human being—and I am even speaking at the laboratory level—and what happens at the animal level. I cannot give you an exhaustive recap of animal psychology nor of learning experiments in laboratories, but I want to simply point out:

On the animal side, the kind of fundamental ambiguity in which we move between instinct and learning—as soon as we attempt to do this, which is now quite scientifically advanced, as we are getting much closer to the facts—the preformations of instinct in animals are not at all exclusive of learning.

Moreover, learning possibilities are continually found in animals within the frameworks of instinct. Furthermore, it is discovered that the emergences of instinct could not happen without this sort of environmental appeal, as it is called, which in some way stimulates and triggers the crystallization of forms, behaviors, and conduct.

When one observes between which categories the experimenters navigate, one gets precisely the sense of a convergence, of a kind of crystallization, of something that gives the impression—of course, no matter how skeptical we may be about these terms—of a kind of pre-established harmony. Naturally, like all pre-established harmonies, it is susceptible to all sorts of pitfalls and misguidances.

None of this prevents anything, but still, it changes nothing. The notion of learning is absolutely indistinguishable from the maturation of instinct. And what is observed is that something indeed applies here, which naturally brings forward, as guiding markers and categories, Gestaltist categories. The animal recognizes its sibling, its fellow, its sexual partner. At specific stages of instinctual development, it finds its place in the environment, in paradise. It shapes it, too. It imprints itself upon it.

The stickleback fish makes a number of small holes that seem entirely gratuitous. One feels clearly that it is its leap that marks, its leap for which its whole body serves as a support; it fits itself into it. There is a certain adaptation. And precisely, it is an adaptation that has its end, its limit, its boundary.

Do you see where I am going with this? There is something in this animal learning that precisely exhibits the characteristics of a finite refinement, an organized refinement.

You can see the difference, the gap, between this and what is uncovered by the same research—or so one believes!—the fact of learning in humans, which they have highlighted. This, you know well because it is repeated to you, but without fully emphasizing its meaning. Namely, that the privilege in the subject, from the perspective of their internal tensions, their desire to return to it, is precisely the opposite of what we observe in animals.

Unfinished tasks, which a certain Mr. ZEIGARNIK refers to—not, I would say, incorrectly, but invoked without truly understanding his response—tell us that the memorization of a task will be all the better if, under certain conditions, it has failed.

Do you not grasp that this goes not only entirely against what we find in animal psychology, but also against the notion we might have of memory as a register, a stack of engrams, of impressions, of things where the being forms itself? It is precisely—if I may say so—the bad form that prevails, meaning that to the extent that a task remains unfinished, the subject returns to it. To the extent that a failure has been intense, the subject remembers it better.

So then—let us not, however, place ourselves at the level of being and destiny—it is within the confines of a laboratory that this thing has been measured. But measuring is not enough; one must also attempt to understand.
We are speaking here of two categories of learning, two modes of adaptation that proceed by strictly opposite paths.
I am well aware that the mind is always fertile in ways of “understanding.” I often tell those whom I supervise:

“Above all, be very careful not to understand the patient; nothing will lose you more completely than that.”

The patient tells you something, which you report to me, and it makes neither head nor tail. And in reporting it to me, you say:

“Well, I understood—someone tells me—that he meant this.”

That is to say, in the name of intelligence, as people commonly say, there is a simple elision of what ought to stop us, of what is not comprehensible. So here, of course, one also understands the Zeigarnik Effect.
Everyone understands this: a painful failure or an unfinished task. Everyone understands this.

We all remember MOZART—do you recall the cup of chocolate? He drank the cup of chocolate, and he came back to strike the final chord.
What people don’t understand is that this is not an explanation. Or if it is an explanation, it means precisely that we are not animals, and that being a musician does not mean being one in the way my little dog becomes pensive when I play certain records. It means that a musician is always a musician of his own music. Always, in some way, in any case, if he is MOZART, he composes his own music, and there are very few people outside those who compose their own music—that is, those who have their distance from this music—who return to strike their final chord.

So, in the Zeigarnik Effect, this is precisely what is at stake, and this is what I will try to give you as one last reference today, to help you understand at what level this need for repetition is situated.

Well, once again, it is at a certain distance that we will find the reference for this…
something, I will point out in passing, that is most closely related to a certain Mr. KIERKEGAARD,
who, as you know, was a humorist…
what Mr. KIERKEGAARD called the difference between the pagan world and the world of grace,
the drama as Christianity introduces it in its perspective.

You can clearly see where the question arises: this convergence of learning, this recognition of its natural object, which is given in the animal, and in man too, to the extent that there is something from which this same register is present:
a capture in form, a grasp in play, an entrapment in the mirage of life.

All this is exactly what a theoretical, contemplative, Platonic thought refers to.
And it is not without reason that at the center of all his knowledge, PLATO places recollection.
If the natural object, the harmonic counterpart of the living being, is thus recognizable, if all roads lead to Rome, so to speak, it is because we already know that Rome is there, that its figure is already outlined.
And for it to be outlined, it must have already been within the one who will merge with it. This is the relationship of the dyad.
And all theories of knowledge in PLATO—Jean HYPPOLITE will not contradict me—are dyadic.

But there is a man who notices that, for certain reasons, a certain shift, a certain reversal has occurred.
And that in the triadic category, which is that of man in his orientation towards man, in his fundamental sin, the path of recollection can never be lost, and it is in repetition that he finds his way.
This is precisely what puts him on the path of our Freudian intuitions. This is not a simple homonymy.

This little book by KIERKEGAARD is called Repetition. I recommend its reading to those who are already somewhat advanced.
But they will greatly enjoy it. You need to know quite a bit about KIERKEGAARD to navigate through it.
For those who don’t have much time, at least read the first part and the humorous form that Mr. KIERKEGAARD seeks out in Berlin in Repetition.

He wants to escape, at that moment, from problems that are precisely his problems, essentially those of accession to a new order, before which he encounters all the barriers of his recollections, of what he believes he is and of what he knows he cannot become.

He tries to experience repetition. He returns to Berlin. During his last stay, he had experienced immense pleasure there.
He retraces his steps, and you will see what happens to him as he seeks his happiness in the shadow of his pleasure!
You will see that the experiment fails completely.

But when he indicates what follows—because the arrow remains aimed and completely elucidates the meaning of repetition in this very amusing little work—he leads us toward our problem, namely: how and why everything that constitutes essential progress in the human being must pass through this path of obstinate repetition, a repetition that is always the repetition of something at a moment and in an ectopic text, where what is brought back to the start is not adapted, no longer means anything, and must mean something else at that moment.

Well, I return to the image, the model with which I want to leave you today, to indicate to you in which direction these converging clues lead us, or more precisely, what small image will allow you to glimpse what the need for repetition means in man.

I think—you have seen it, as I indicated to you last time—that everything is precisely in the intrusion of the symbolic register. Only, I am going to show it to you in a particularly illustrative way.

Precisely, as far as this science of communication progresses—which could only begin to be developed from a certain moment of refinement, and, I would say more, from a transformation in the order of machines—there is something new, and models are very important.

Not, of course, because they mean something—they mean nothing. But we are like this; it is our animal weakness: we need images.

And in the absence of images, it happens that symbols fail to emerge. Generally, it is the symbolic deficiency that is serious, that is critical. The image comes to us from an essentially symbolic creation, that is to say, from a machine—the most modern of machines—something everyone here knows is far more dangerous for humanity than the atomic bomb: the calculating machine. People tell you this, you hear it, and, of course, you do not believe it:
“The calculating machine has a memory.”
No one will make you believe that a machine has a memory.

It amuses you to say this, but you do not believe it has a memory.
You are mistaken: it does have a memory. At the very least, it has a mode and a form of memory that is bound to make us think deeply and completely question all the images we had previously formed about memory.

Because, as you know, the best thing we have come up with so far to imagine the phenomenon of memory is something that doesn’t date back to yesterday; it is the Babylonian wax seal, a little gadget with some small reliefs and lines that you roll over a wax tablet—what is called an engram.

The seal is also a machine; we just don’t realize it. The Babylonian wax seal—this is still where we stand when it comes to memory. For machines to remember every question—which is necessary in certain cases…
questions that have been posed to them previously…
and these are machines that would not at all conform to the genius of these recent machines…
something cleverer, more ingenious, has been devised. That is, what pertains to the first experience or first question posed to the machine circulates within the machine as a message.

In other words, imagine I send a telegram from here to Le Mans, with instructions for Le Mans to forward it to Tours, from there to Sens, from there to Fontainebleau, and from there to Paris, and so on indefinitely. The only requirement is that by the time I reach the tail of my message, the head hasn’t yet caught up. The message must have time to circulate. It circulates incredibly fast, it never stops turning, it goes in circles.

Does it not start to shine a little in your mind, what is happening here? It’s funny, this thing that comes back upon itself like this—it should, nonetheless, make you say, “We’ve seen something like this before.”
This is what is called feedback. It must have something to do with the homeostat.

You know this is how the steam supply is regulated in a steam engine. If it heats up too quickly, a governor records it, and two things move apart under centrifugal force. The admission of steam is then regulated, and thus the homeostatic operation of the steam engine is controlled. Here, however, it is not quite the same thing. It’s more complex. You call this a message, and you must realize that this too is very ambiguous.

What is a message inside a machine?
Let us simply say it is the difference between a quantitative regulation of the type I was speaking about, with a threshold, but a continuous threshold.
There is no sharp cut-off in this threshold; there is an oscillation around a point of equilibrium.

This is something somewhat different from what circulates as a message inside a machine, something that operates through opening or non-opening, like what is called an electronic valve.

The important thing is that it operates on yes or no, isn’t that right?

X: I don’t think so.

LACAN:

You can tell me next time. The important thing is that this message is something articulated, and it gives us the feeling that it is something of the same order as the fundamental oppositions of the symbolic register. This something that circulates must, or must not—if I can put it this way—at some point enter the game. Do you agree?

X: Yes, yes.

LACAN:

That is to say, in short, it is always ready to provide an answer and to complete itself in the very act of responding, that is to say, precisely to cease functioning as an isolated and revolving circuit, to enter into a general game, whether or not it concerns a specific mode on which you will have the pleasure of revisiting me regarding this yes or no of the small relay. This is the important element.

You see that there is something here of an entirely different order, a completely different model of what can be called memory, and which closely resembles what we might conceive of as this mechanism or, more precisely, this Zwang, this compulsion to repetition.

But what does this mean? As soon as one has this little model, one begins to realize many things: that inside—I mean in the very anatomy of the cerebral apparatus—there are things like this that return upon themselves.

We constantly see models of this, even in certain animals, like a certain octopus in which I have been particularly interested. I thank RIQUET for pointing me towards a book by an English neurologist. It seems that the octopus has a rather reduced nervous system, yet it contains beautifully isolated functions, such as a nerve that controls what is called the propulsion of liquid.

Thanks to this, the octopus has that particularly graceful way of moving forward. There are very large nerves, and one might believe that its memory apparatus is reduced to something like this, to a circulating message, like the example I gave you earlier, where a message travels from Paris to Paris and is reduced to very small points in the nervous system.

But the important thing is this: return to what we were saying last time, or even in previous years, to those striking correspondences in certain texts by FREUD in the realm of what is called…
it has not been called that since, because we are now on a path that will inevitably lead to absurdities…
what he himself calls “telepathy.”

This refers to the way very important things are accomplished in the domain of transference between two patients correlatively, whether one is in analysis and the other is barely touched by it, or whether both are in analysis. But I have shown you, at least for those who attended those text commentaries at the time… telepathy regarding a dream, which I showed you to be precisely proof of being an integrated agent, a link, a support, a ring in the same circle of discourse. Subjects, at the same time and equally, see the emergence of a certain symptomatic act, or even simultaneously recall a certain memory.

In other words, what I am suggesting to you today, in perspective, at this point of our exposition where we have arrived, is that what is at stake in the need for repetition as it concretely manifests in the subject—for example, in analysis—in the form of behaviors that apparently reproduce a past pattern of behavior and which emerge in a way so little aligned with any vital adaptation, is precisely where the emphasis lies.

It is because, insofar as we find here what I have already indicated to you—namely that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other—you can see this discourse of the Other organizing itself here. This is not the discourse of the abstract other, of the other in the dyad, of my correspondent, nor even simply of my slave. It is the discourse of an entire circuit in which I am integrated because I am one of its links. It is the discourse that is the discourse of my father, for example, insofar as my father made mistakes that I am absolutely condemned—everyone knows this—to repeat. This is what is called the super ego.

I am condemned to repeat them because I must resume this discourse that he bequeathed to me, not simply because I am his son, but because the chain of discourse cannot be stopped. And I am precisely tasked with transmitting it in all its aberrant and poorly formulated form to someone else—that is, with posing to someone else the problem of a vital situation where there is every chance they will stumble as well.

That is to say, this discourse ultimately forms this sort of small circuit where an entire family, an entire clique, even an entire camp, an entire nation, or half the globe might find themselves trapped, and which we call this circular form of a certain speech.

Precisely because it lies exactly on the boundary between sense and nonsense, which makes it problematic speech—that is to say, something is posed which is a problem, which is the solution to a symbolic question that has been asked.

What we find in the need for repetition, as we see it emerge beyond the pleasure principle, is precisely what wavers beyond all mechanisms of balance, harmonization, and adjustment on the biological plane. It is something that is introduced by the register of language, the function of the symbol, and the problematic of “the question” in the human order.

How is this literally projected by FREUD onto a plane that seems, at first glance, to belong to the biological order?

This is precisely what we will need to return to in future sessions.

This is where I will show you that there is indeed something that approaches a certain problem of life, but which approaches it only fragmented, decomposed, captured within this entire symbolic dialectic, which means that it is precisely only in the existential order, where the human being himself lives this register of life—that is to say, to the extent that this life is broken, fragmented, diseased, that he is partly outside of life, that he participates in the death instinct—that the human being can approach this register of life.