🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Today we are close to reaching the top of this hill, sometimes a little steep, that we have been climbing all year. This is the moment when we approach a summit. Nothing tells us that from the top of this summit we will have a truly panoramic view of what we have traveled.

Today, I am going to ask you to pause for a moment, to make a sort of stop, a halt, at the precise moment when I am about to address what I outlined last time—that is, the relationship, the knot, between Beyond the Pleasure Principle expressed in the term Wiederholungzwang, improperly translated into French as repetition compulsion, for which I believe I offer a better equivalent with the notion of insistence, on which you saw me build my entire development last time—of repetitive insistence and significant insistence.

So, the relationship between this Beyond the Pleasure Principle, expressed in this term as an insistence of a certain signification of something whose problem, whose question, you can see arises at the very root of language itself, of the function of language as it brings—not a new dimension to the world, I would not say that—but this new dimension which makes a world possible, a world being precisely an universe subject to language.

The relationship between this and the notion to which FREUD is led by his meditation—also insisting in Beyond the Pleasure Principle—namely, the function of death. I would not say as such, because that means nothing—the function of death insofar as it is that against which life resists. Therefore, the conjunction, in the human world, of this function of speech: – With that something which exists beyond the fact that it dominates its destiny,
– With that something whose place we do not know how to situate in FREUD’s thought, whether it is on the level of the real, the imaginary, or the symbolic—namely, very precisely, death.

Well… – Before knotting, or trying to knot, these two terms in a way that will allow you, once again—and I hope this time: even more—to grasp the meaning of Freud’s discovery, to grasp not only the position of Freudian thought but of our experience, insofar as it is the analytical experience, insofar as it is that through which we are given the ability to assist the subject in the revelation they make of themselves, to themselves, in the analytical experience,
– Before attempting to knot these terms in front of you in the two upcoming seminars,
– Before I give the final lecture, which I have labeled Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics on June 8th, and see you one last time so that we may discuss together what we will do next year…

…today, I will pause for a moment.

I will pause for a moment because, after all, I have had some reflections which, as you will see, severe as they may be, are not disillusioned. I reflected that teaching is something highly problematic and that, ultimately, from the moment one takes—or is led, pushed to take—the place I occupy behind this little table, there is no example of anyone being truly sufficient in appearance, at least. In other words, as the highly deserving American poet Mr. […] very well remarked:

A professor has never failed out of ignorance.

That has never been seen, and indeed it is profoundly true. In other words, one always knows enough to fill the forty, or double, minutes during which one assumes the position of someone who knows. It’s something akin to a kind of empirical professional competence. I suppose he also means something factual from experience—that one has never seen someone run short once they have assumed the position of the one who teaches.

This leads me to think that there is no true teaching except that which also succeeds in awakening this sort of insistence in those who listen, this desire to know, which is precisely something that can only emerge when they themselves have grasped the fertile dimension, the fertile measure of ignorance as such, as it is itself fertile, and equally on the side of the one who teaches them.

It is for this reason that today, before I offer the few words that will appear conclusive for those who hold to the formal apparatus of things—and which also, I hope, for others will not be conclusive but rather an additional opening—I would like—why not, after all?—each and every one of you today to ask me a question. A question that would be defined as follows, which would essentially be my question.

In other words, in a way unique to each individual, each of you would tell me—at levels that may vary greatly but must ultimately reduce to this, if there truly is communication and dialogue here—the idea they have of where I am trying to go. In other words, how it takes shape for them, after everything I have said this year: – How it closes for them,
– Or how it already concludes for them,
– Or how it already resists for them, or defends itself, or opposes itself in some way,
– How the question, as I pose it, takes shape for them.

I would like to emphasize right away that this is merely a focal point. Each of you may remain at whatever distance you wish from this point, which to me seems to be, normally, the point of convergence of all the questions that might arise in your minds. In other words, nothing obliges you to aim for it, this ideal focal point, and any question you may have for me, even if it appears partial, local, or even indefinite, should still normally have a certain relation to what I call the point of convergence or the focal point of the question as it may have taken form in your mind after these successive discourses.

If, likewise, something seemed to you to have been eluded, left aside, undeveloped, or abandoned along the way, you can just as well bring it up on this occasion. It will still be a way of evoking the idea of continuity that might have appeared to you in the path I have led you along so far. I insistently ask you to do this. First, because that’s the way it is. Today, I will not accept any other way of filling the seminar hour than through this precise experience.

It is possible that I will immediately give some indications to some, while to others I will group, hold back, or highlight the scope of the question they ask and its more or less distant relationship with the conclusion I intend to give to this fundamental theme of emphasizing Beyond the Pleasure Principle as essential to any authentic understanding of psychoanalysis.

We will proceed by calling upon good will. Those who wish to submit themselves to this test, which is truly the minimum I can ask of you—to expose yourselves before the others. If you are incapable of doing this, as analysts, what are you capable of? Let those who feel ready to articulate something already on their minds or at the tip of their tongues express it immediately. This will give others time to compose themselves and also approach, in turn, in whatever form seems best to them, what I will call today the session or the seminar of the question to be asked to me.

Clémence RAMNOUX

After reading FREUD’s chapter, I had succeeded in forming for myself the idea of the ego as a defensive function—a defensive function that should be situated, let’s say, on the surface, not in depth, on the surface, and which operates on two fronts: that is, both against traumas coming from the outside and against impulses coming from within. After your lectures, I could no longer quite represent it that way, and I wondered, what would correspond best as a definition? I thought it would be something like a fragment of a common discourse. Is that it?

And the other question. I had also succeeded in understanding why FREUD called what produces repetitive symptoms a death instinct. I had succeeded in understanding it because this repetition carries a sort of inertia. Inertia is a return to an inorganic state. Therefore, it is the return to the most distant past, to the inorganic past. So, I understood why this could be likened to the death instinct. But after reflecting on your last lecture, I rather saw that all these compulsions stem from a sort of infinite, multifaceted, objectless desire—a desire for nothing. What I no longer understand very well is death.

LACAN

It is quite certain that everything I teach you is indeed meant to question the position of the ego in the topology as it is usually imagined. This position, which places the ego at the center of perspective in the current orientation of analysis, is only one of those returns to which any form of questioning of man’s position is exposed whenever this occurs. I would say, in this form of discourse about man, which is called humanism.

There have been as many humanisms as there have been revisions. We have difficulty forming an idea of what happened every time there was a revision of the discourse about man because the characteristic of each of these revisions is that, over time, it is always dampened, softened, so that currently—and indeed always—the word humanism designates a sort of sack in which the corpses of these successive revolutionary perspectives on man quietly rot, piled on top of one another. This is precisely what is happening in psychoanalysis.

I cannot better compare it than with something suggested to me this morning while reading the newspaper, one of those exhibitions we periodically face whenever, nowadays, in the case of a crime—somewhat motiveless—the question of responsibility is raised. The psychiatrist’s panic-stricken fear, his desperate recourse, his terrified clinging to the thought that he might reopen the door to mass slaughter by not emphasizing just how much the person—who obviously did something out of the ordinary, although the possibility arises at every moment—that one could simply crush someone on the side of the road and stab to death the person to whom one is most tenderly connected.

The psychiatrist, suddenly confronted with this opening, this gap, in which he is summoned to take a stand—it happened, improbably as improbable things do happen, one in a million, revealing the chance drawn as in all other cases—the psychiatrist, faced with his responsibility to give his opinion, to explain to people that it is always possible and that it is not enough to say that the subject is fully responsible to resolve the issue…

Then we hear this astonishing discourse, where the subject twists his mouth as he speaks, saying: – That the subject has all possible emotional disorders,
– That he is unquestionably an abominable character,
…yet that it is nevertheless clear that what he did falls precisely within common discourse and must fall under the rigor of the laws.

We are witnessing something quite similar in psychoanalysis. This return to the ego as the center, the point of perspective, the common measure of everything that might appear is, I believe, not at all implied in FREUD’s discourse. Quite the contrary, in fact, because the more this discourse advances, and the further we enter into the third stage of his work, the clearer it becomes that everything he shows us is meant to show us: – The ego as a mirage,
– The ego as a sum of identifications,
– The ego as something undoubtedly situated at the rather poor point of synthesis to which the subject is reduced when presenting himself, although he is also something else, and also something located elsewhere, coming from elsewhere.

And precisely from this point beyond the pleasure principle, where we can ask ourselves: what is captured in this symbolic weave, in this fundamental phrase that insists beyond everything we can grasp about the subject’s motivations—what is caught in there?

There is, obviously, discourse—and, as you say, discourse that is common discourse. As I showed you—although perhaps in a way that was not the most direct and might have been enigmatic—when I spoke to you about The Purloined Letter, when I said to you for a time that this letter…
For a time, within the limits of the small scene, of the Schauplatz, as FREUD says—the little puppet show POE shows us, within the limits of this scene—was the unconscious.

For a time, the unconscious of the various subjects who succeed one another as possessors of the letter is the letter itself, this phrase written on a piece of paper as it circulates. Yet, it is entirely evident, I think, after the demonstration I gave, of the color, so to speak, that the subjects successively take on as the reflection of the letter—situated there in the background—passes over their face, over their stature.

You might still be left a little unsatisfied. But do not forget that, to take the example I suggested last night when I spoke about Oedipus, Oedipus’s unconscious is indeed this common discourse—or not common, but fundamental—which means that, for a long time and always, the entire story of Oedipus has been written there as we know it, that is, with its meaning, and that Oedipus is entirely ignorant of it, even though he is completely played by it from the beginning.

This goes very far back. I am only referring to the fact of the first appearance of the oracle, the one that frightens his parents. He is exposed, he is cast away, and from there, everything unfolds according to the oracle, and also according to the fact that he truly is something other than what he will now be able to realize as being his own story—that he is the son of Jocasta and Laius and that he goes through life ignorant of it.

Nevertheless, it remains that, very precisely, in accordance with common discourse, it is in this total veiling of discourse, which is at once reality and absolutely not reality for him, that all the pulsation, all the realization, all the unfolding of his drama and his destiny will reside, from beginning to end.

Perhaps, when we speak again about death, I will try to show you the end of Oedipus’s drama as it is presented to us by the great tragedians. I can attempt to show you through a few details the significance of Oedipus at Colonus. What, in the end, is truly recognized, admitted by the poet as being precisely the final word on this relationship of man to this discourse he does not know, which is precisely the recognition that it is death.

I believe that one must indeed go as far as poetic expression to show to what intensity this identification between this veiled past and death as such can be realized, in its most horrifying aspect, in an unveiling that does not even allow for a moment beyond, that extinguishes all speech.

I believe that reading Oedipus at Colonus is something you should do before the next lecture, for example. It is very important because I do not know how many of you have already read it, but it seems to me difficult for an analyst not to have read it. It is not by chance that the Oedipus complex, and consequently the tragedy of Oedipus the King, is an exemplary work. Analysts cannot avoid knowing this continuation, this sort of beyond the drama, to make a parallel with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which is achieved in the tragedy of Oedipus at Colonus. It is a fragment of common discourse, it is true. It is that Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

And how can one arrive at saying that the ego participates in that? I believe that is the question your remarks open today, and I find it extremely well-posed and highly suggestive. In the end, there is, in this subject-individual relationship with: – this decentered subject,
– this subject beyond the subject,
– this subject who is the subject of the unconscious,

…which I posed to you as a question at the beginning, a sort of mirror relationship, if one might say. And where we can best grasp the nature—not of the individual, but of the ego—is inasmuch: – as it is itself one of the significant elements, precisely, of this common discourse which is the unconscious discourse,
– as it is itself, as such, as an image, caught in the chain of symbols,
– as it is itself an indispensable element in the insertion of symbolic reality into the reality of the subject,
– as it is linked to a sort of primitive opening or gap in the human subject,

…and that in its original sense, the ego, if you will, is one of the appearances—at any rate, the closest, the most intimate, the most accessible to us—of death as such in the psychological life of the human subject.

The relationship between the ego and death as such is extremely close, and this precisely at the level where the ego is a certain point of intersection, a certain crossing point between: – this common discourse in which the subject is caught and, if you will, from a certain point of view: alienated,
– and his psychological reality.

The ego, to clarify matters, is tied to a certain biological relationship as such—the one I have already pointed out to you several times—the imaginary relationship as it is deviated in man. The subject undergoes a sort of subduction, a deviation of his function insofar as this gap arises where death becomes presentified for man, and as such.

It is in this, you will see—and I will clarify it next time—that this point of intersection occurs between: – the world of the symbol, insofar as it is alienating for the subject, more precisely in that it ensures the subject always realizes himself elsewhere, that his truth is always, in some part, veiled from him,
– the relationship that exists between this, which is the principle, the very foundation of the phenomenon of significant insistence, of repetitive insistence—it is here, at the point of intersection between symbolism and reality, that it precisely passes at the level of the imaginary.

It is here that the function of the imaginary, the inflection of symbolism toward the image, toward something that resembles the world, if one might say, that resembles nature, that gives the idea that in this fundamental symbolism, there is something archetypal.

There is no need to add arche-; it is simply, in fact, typical. But it is quite certain: – that it is not at all about something substantialized, as Jungian theory offers, delivers, gives us under the name of archetypal,
– that these archetypes themselves are always something symbolized, something that, in the end, is caught up in what you have called common discourse, a fragment.

I agree—it is a very fine definition. I would even say it is a term I will use, something that is very closely linked to the definition of the ego as such.

As for your second question, a return from the most distant past, inertia—I believe that last time I tried to make you feel the difference that indeed exists between the term symbolic inertia and something strongly suggested by FREUD’s description. It is more than inertia. I tried to show you the difference between inertia—as what best corresponds to it is the term resistance—and this insistence. Inertia is a notion that, when deepened and meditated upon, clearly reveals the ambiguity in the term resistance, an ambiguity that must absolutely be dispelled to handle it correctly.

Resistance—if it is truly what it is, inertia, and this is precisely what it corresponds to in analytical treatment—resistance has the property of containing no kind of resistance in itself. Resistance is exactly, in the common image it evokes, parallel—and not exactly proportional—but identical to the application of a force on this inertia. In other words, we must understand, when we analyze resistances, that resistance—in the sense evoked by the term Widerstand, obstacle, effort, the profile of the effort it suggests and evokes—should not be sought anywhere other than in ourselves. It is the one who applies the force who provokes resistance. Nowhere, at the level of inertia, is there any kind of resistance. The resistance we deal with in analysis is inertia.

Indeed, it is something entirely different from the dimension of everything connected to transference, for example, which is something entirely different, something that belongs to the order of insistence, something on an entirely different level, an entirely different register. You have very clearly understood what I meant when I referred last time to desire, desire as revealed by FREUD at the level of the unconscious as a desire for nothing.

Last night, you may have heard the manifestation of an illusion that is not at all rare among readers of FREUD—namely, that ultimately one always arrives at the same meaning, of rather limited scope, as if indeed what FREUD designates for us, for example in The Interpretation of Dreams, as being the desire of the dream, were something we could, in the end, summarize in a list—indeed a rather short one—of drives.

This is not the case. I simply ask you to read The Interpretation of Dreams properly, straight through, to convince yourselves of the contrary. Even though FREUD, in a thousand ways, demonstrates the empirical forms that this desire takes, there is not a single analysis covering the entirety of The Interpretation of Dreams that concludes with the formulation of a desire. Desire is never, in the end, fully unveiled. Everything happens on the steps, the stages, the different levels of the revelation of this desire.

And very explicitly, somewhere in a passage I will find again, FREUD mocks the illusion of those who, after reading The Interpretation of Dreams, after a few years of dissemination of this book, of his experience, and of his methods, come to believe that what we seek in the dream, the reality of the dream, would be the continuation of what he calls the latent thoughts of the dream. FREUD himself says this is entirely an illusion because if it were only that, this reality found behind it would literally have no interest. What is interesting are all the stages of the dream’s elaboration. It is there that something is revealed, that something manifests itself—something which is precisely what we seek in the interpretation of the dream.

It is at the level where this x, this desire for nothing, ultimately operates—because we never know what it is, this desire. Nowhere in The Interpretation of Dreams will you find a passage that concludes with: the subject desires this. You will object with the dreams of children. That is precisely the only fundamental misunderstanding in The Interpretation of Dreams. I will return to it, and I will try to show you—it is very easy to show—how this point of confusion is simply tied, in FREUD, to the same inclination, the same tendency, which is the most outdated aspect of his presentation and his work: the frequent recourse to a genetic point of view.

The fact that the child’s dream seems to express itself very simply is not at all an objection to the central fact I am emphasizing here. I do not wish to dwell on it now. I will show you how this objection is refuted—that desire, as soon as it is manifested by FREUD, indicated by FREUD as being the driving force behind a series of formations, those he studies, which are symbolic formations—all of them, from the dream to the various phenomena described in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, up to the joke—whenever one speaks of desire, it is precisely about that moment when what emerges through the symbol into existence is not yet and therefore cannot in any way be named.

In other words, behind everything that is named, there is something unnameable. And it is precisely because it is unnameable, in all the resonances you can give to this term and to this name, that it has the kinships and echoes, as we shall see, with the unnameable par excellence, that is to say, with death.

You must reread The Interpretation of Dreams to notice this at every step. Everything revealed as nameable is always at the level of the dream’s elaboration, that is to say, of the passage to a symbolization with all its laws, which are precisely the laws of signification as such—the laws to which I referred last night when I spoke to you about signifying partition, about polyvalence, about condensation, about all the terms FREUD uses to express what is at stake, the order of phenomena he targets, the meaning of what he addresses. It is always in the order of overdetermination—or, if you prefer, in the order of significant motivation.

And nothing begins to exist, because from the moment it has already entered into this—meaning, when it has already entered into the dialectic—desire is already captured from beginning to end in alienation, and from beginning to end, desire itself expresses itself as such in the desire for recognition and in the recognition of desire. Why would this be death? That is precisely what I leave at the limit of your question, which seems to me an excellent question, one that proves, in any case, that you have heard what I said.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

Concerning what you just said about the dream. Both are true, nonetheless. I believe you are right, on one hand, to emphasize the elaboration of the dream.

LACAN: FREUD explicitly says that it is the only important thing in the dream.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

But it is not the only thing, after all. He also says that, in the dream, there is indeed the realization of desire. And I believe you are right to then also emphasize elaboration because it is in the elaboration that one can find the dream’s meaning. Otherwise, there would be keys to dreams, and FREUD has sufficiently refuted that idea. Yet, the realization of desire must not be neglected. One can find an example of it not only in children’s dreams but also in the consideration of hallucinatory dreams, of dream hallucination.

LACAN

It is the same question. Do you consider hallucination and the hallucinatory function of the dream as such deserving, properly speaking…

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

At first approximation, yes, there is no doubt about it; on the level of description as the realization of desire, it is indicated in The Interpretation of Dreams. But it is obvious that when the entire elaboration of the dream reaches the hallucinatory formula, one must not stop there. One must not stop there: the entire work of the dream has no other purpose than […] it refers back to the entire elaboration. One must speak as you do! Then there is the consideration of the desire to sleep. It can be interpreted, and it brings renewed interest. I have seen interesting things about […] on this topic. It is simultaneously one of the primary motives of the dream and one of the final motives if we consider things before elaboration because it does not concern secondary elaboration. Elaboration exists only in the dream that is present, that is recounted, after a certain narration.

And then, finally, one of the meanings of the dream, after falling asleep, when the dream is completed, is one of its significations—the desire to sleep is one of the terminal meanings of the dream. Therefore, the realization of desire is at one end, and the desire to sleep at the other. I believe that the more modern interpretations—which are either merely hinted at in The Interpretation of Dreams or in later texts—interpret the desire to sleep as narcissistic desire. This interpretation goes in that direction, that is, it aims to recognize the two realities present in the dream: the reality of the realization of desire, which in your recent remarks you seem to somewhat dissolve, and then the other reality, on which you place all the emphasis, which is elaboration. The dream would thus be situated between the two.

But I believe that one must not neglect the realization of desire, which can be found at both ends—before and after elaboration—and everything refers back to these two extremities of the dream: the initial realization of desire, sleep, and the final narcissistic realization, or a return or repetition of a previous state, in the most modern interpretations I know. It is in a global view of these two elements—the realization of desire and signifying elaboration—that one could present a comprehensive view of the psychology of the dream.

LACAN

Yes… In short, there are two entirely opposed terms in what you just said. I will return to the first, namely, to what the term realization of desire might mean, as it seems that paradoxically, you have not fully grasped how much realization contains reality, and consequently how realization can only ever be metaphorical, illusory realization. In other words, no more than in any hallucinatory satisfaction can we see the function of desire in anything other than a highly problematic form.

What is desire, from the moment it becomes the driving force behind hallucination, the driving force behind illusion, the driving force behind a satisfaction that is the opposite of satisfaction? No hallucinatory satisfaction can, by definition, satisfy desire, if we give the term desire its functional definition—that is, the x, the tension activated by a cycle of behavioral realization, whatever that may be. If desire is inscribed in a cycle—and in a biological cycle—desire aims at satisfaction.

There is here another register of desire, one that is satisfied elsewhere than in satisfaction, desire as the fundamental source, the fundamental introduction of fantasy as such. This is another order, which aims at no objectivity, which precisely in itself defines the questions posed by the register of the imaginary.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

That is why the concept of disguise is employed. That is why, immediately after the first proposition—“the dream is the realization of desire”—in The Interpretation of Dreams, the concept of desire as a disguised realization is employed. But this is nonetheless a real realization, a disguised one, yes, but still a realized one under a disguised form. It is one of the modes of disguised satisfaction.

LACAN
What do you mean by disguise?

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

The language of the dream is a disguise. And all the mechanisms of dream elaboration—displacement, condensation, overdetermination—all these mechanisms of the dream. I do not believe that one can, when dealing with a double concept like disguised realization, interpret it while neglecting one of the two terms. Disguised realization: it is indeed disguised, but it is nonetheless a realization. Otherwise, one loses sight of FREUD’s entire approach, which consists of specifying progressively. It truly is the realization of desire: the realization of the desire to sleep, then disguise, then repression. And the richness of the explanation emerges progressively. But if afterward, one reduces everything!

LACAN

That is the whole question—the question of disguise. What term are you translating as disguise? I do not think it is what we usually translate as displacement, is it?

Jean-Paul VALABREGA
It is in the chapter “Disguise and Censorship.”

LACAN

It is not the essential notion. It is merely a metaphor. The term disguise leaves the question intact: What is satisfied in symbolic satisfaction? That is the entire question. We are placed precisely in the field from which we cannot escape. Because what you call the realization of a desire is precisely that which means, in the end, that there are desires that will never find any satisfaction other than through being recognized—that is to say, admitted.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

That depends. The notion of substitute satisfaction could usefully be compared to the notion of disguised realization, just as the dream can be compared to the symptom.

LACAN

What I want to tell you is that there are two registers here, and particularly this: what you referred to as substitute satisfaction belongs to an entirely different order than symbolic satisfaction. And if there is something that exemplifies this, it is this: in animal behavior, the sudden emergence, during an interrupted instinctual behavior cycle, of an ectopic fragment from another behavioral cycle.

For example, birds who, in the middle of a fight—with all the fascinating play-character that animal combat between similars always takes on, with the very evident intervention of the imaginary in the display of stature, the spreading of wings, feathers, a whole maneuver of intimidation to which we must assign its proper function, and which ensures that part of the combat unfolds at a distance. In many cases, the combat ends with a retreat behavior, without any actual physical confrontation. This can be observed across the entire animal hierarchy, even in fish, which display highly elaborate behavior in inter-aggression scenarios.

We are not so superior to animals in this order. All we manage to do better in civilized aggression is to reproduce this behavior, which ensures that, after all, two fish can engage in a sort of duel simply through what happens at the level of their lateral plates, where they perceive the vibrations of the wave movements of their opponent’s more or less enveloping maneuvers, and in the end, one yields because ultimately, the goal of aggression is summarized at the conclusion. In the middle of behavior like this, suddenly, in the bird, there is the inclusion, the emergence, of careful feather smoothing, which is an ectopy of sexual display. One can indeed speak here, if we place ourselves at the level of aroused tension, of a kind of engagement with another circuit, which can effectively lead to a cycle of resolutions giving the image of substitute satisfaction.

The question is whether symbolic satisfaction as such is something of this order, and to what extent, in what measure, or even whether it is at all? That is the crux of the matter.

The notion of disguise is merely metaphorical. It explains nothing. It does not allow us to grasp in any way what symbolic satisfaction might be as such. It leaves entirely intact the question of the meaning of this disguised satisfaction if one adheres to that term.

As for the other term you just addressed, namely the desire to sleep: of course, this is something extremely important, which FREUD emphasized, especially in connection with what he calls secondary elaboration. This appears in the final chapter of the section on dream elaboration, where there are immensely valuable points concerning the intervention of the ego as such in the dream.

I believe there are two things that must still be distinguished. The need to maintain sleep for a certain duration—a need that, in any case, is assumed to underlie the duration of the dream, the duration of sleep, against and despite any external or internal incitement that might disturb it. We have here the notion of a need. The question is to what extent this need appears precisely in an agency that we can recognize as the agency of the ego of the subject—in other words, as participating in a certain vigilance, which is precisely the vigilance of the ego at the level of maintaining this state of sleep. The dream indeed shows us that this is one of the emergences of the presence of the ego in the dream.

It is far from being the only one, and what is striking, if you recall well the chapter you referred to on this occasion, is that it is at the level of this chapter—and at the level of this chapter alone—that the notion of the unconscious fantasy appears for the first time in Freudian thought. In other words, it is at this point, at the level of secondary elaboration, that everything belonging to the register of the ego, of the ego as a vigilant agency, occurs. But at the same time, it cannot be separated from the phantasmatic function as such, in which the ego is integrated. There is a very nuanced series of interrelations here to distinguish them precisely from the dream itself and from reverie.

And this is to rediscover—conforming to this sort of mirrored interrelation that ensures that roles are exchanged at a certain moment—to rediscover the echo of this reverie, this function of reverie as such, and as it appears at the level of the ego. Reverie, which precisely, is imaginary satisfaction, illusory satisfaction of desire, to indicate the very localized function of this reverie, as Mlle RAMNOUX just said, on the surface, and the relationship between that and a reverie situated elsewhere, precisely within tension.

This is the first appearance in FREUD’s work of the notion of the unconscious fantasy as such. This demonstrates the complexity contained at this level by the intervention of the desire to maintain sleep as such. It is perhaps at this level that the greatest complexity appears, if you will, and that the hide-and-seek game with the ego—to determine where it is—demonstrates itself at its peak.

Because ultimately, it is only at the level of the ego that we see the function of reverie as such appear in the structuring of the dream. And it is also only from the ego that we can extrapolate and imagine that somewhere there exists a reverie without ego—to put it bluntly, that there are unconscious fantasies. It is only through the detour of the ego that the notion of unconscious fantasy arises, along with phantasmatic activity as such. Are you following? Do you see what I mean? This will, moreover, be something we will attempt to include in the concluding terms I propose to address in the upcoming sessions.

Colette AUDRY

My question is very close to that of Clémence RAMNOUX because it also concerns the ego. However, the conversation between you two pushes me in another direction because, while the ego might be a fragment of common discourse in analysis, prior to analysis, the ego is not a fragment of common discourse. It remains precisely a pure imaginary mirage. Then, this fragment of common discourse, which emerges from analysis—and in which the subject recognizes himself, takes responsibility for himself—equates to a demystification, in a way, of this prior imaginary.

So, we arrive at this point: that once demystification is accomplished, one finds oneself in the presence of death. There is nothing left to do but wait and contemplate death. My question may seem extremely practical or utilitarian, but it appears this way to me.

LACAN

Why not? In Oedipus at Colonus, OEDIPUS says this: “Is it now that I am nothing, that I become a man?” This is the end of Oedipus’s psychoanalysis because Oedipus’s psychoanalysis does not conclude until Colonus. It is very clear that at the moment he tears out his eyes—an absolutely essential point, of course, to give full meaning to the story of OEDIPUS—from OEDIPUS’s point of view, this is an acting-out. Moreover, he says it when he is at Colonus: “After all, I was angry.”

Colette AUDRY
But “I am nothing” does not necessarily mean death.

LACAN

That is precisely the question we are going to attempt to open. It is the distinction between this “I am nothing” and death.

Colette AUDRY
Is it between “I am nothing” and death that what might substitute for humanism must pass, then?

LACAN
Yes, exactly, that something different across the ages, which makes the word humanism so difficult to handle.

M. DURANDIN
I would like to ask a question. But it’s not very legitimate for me to do so because I haven’t attended your seminars regularly.

LACAN
And I’m going to ask you for an explanation about your deverbalization from last night.

M. DURANDIN
My story about deverbalization isn’t very mysterious; it doesn’t go very far. It falls somewhat within the immediate data of consciousness. Language isn’t merely an expression of something already known; it’s a mode of communication, the instrument through which a child’s thought is formed. Because the child lives in society, their segmentation of the world is done through language, hence verbal realism. One believes that there is something where there is a word, and if there is no word, one believes that nothing exists and doesn’t bother looking for anything. If there’s no word, there’s nothing. It seems precisely that the usefulness of analysis lies in leaving the subject stranded in the form of something like, Do I have a neurosis of this or that?

LACAN
But here, precisely: give substance to what you have just articulated. If I heard correctly, your question last night was, for example, a type of question like: Did I do this out of generosity or cowardice?

M. DURANDIN
These are questions my patient often asks me: Is it this or something else? It wouldn’t be possible to answer because these two things between which he hesitates are hollow concepts that don’t correspond to reality. He needs to label what he feels and thinks. And even if it were less hollow, this need to place and label things is still something rigid, something half-dead. In most cases, these are pre-made thoughts. And insofar as one encourages the subject to make contact, one responds evasively to encourage him to continue.

LACAN
Do you consider that it’s enough to take away his ready-to-wear outfit so that he might have a tailor-made suit?

M. DURANDIN
That’s not enough, but first to encourage him to see himself naked, to become aware of it. That doesn’t eliminate the importance of speech, of language, which will follow afterward. The expression deverbalization might not have been well-chosen. But what seemed important to me is that language is the mold in which our thought, our concepts, our use of the world, are formed.

LACAN
What you are saying seems to imply that there are two kinds of thought: those you call pre-made thoughts and those that are not. And that the characteristic of thoughts that are not pre-made would be, as you say, that they are not quite thoughts—they would be deverbalized thoughts. In other words, I ask you this: you have taken an example that is quite clear and evident in our experience—the questions the subject asks themselves in the register of the psychology of La Rochefoucauld: Is the good I do done for my own glory, for my self-love, or is it done for something beyond?

M. DURANDIN
It is entirely within that register.

LACAN
But why do you believe there is something here that you can link, as such, to a kind of improper speech, or hollow speech, or empty speech? Do you believe that this is not a question that remains entirely whole, that is perfectly authentic, and about which I would say that as soon as you place yourself in the register where La Rochefoucauld places himself…
And it is not for nothing that La Rochefoucauld places himself there. It is not for nothing that the ego becomes such an important question in La Rochefoucauld’s time…
…it is a question that retains, whatever you do with it, and in whatever form you handle thought—which, whether you like it or not, will always ultimately be a spoken form—it will retain its full value.

It is the fact of posing the question at this level that ensures it retains and will always retain its value. That is to say, effectively, insofar as the subject places themselves in the register of the ego, everything is indeed dominated by the narcissistic relationship. That is to say, indeed, it is what we mean when we say that in every kind of gift, for example, there is a narcissistic dimension that is absolutely ineliminable. And do you believe that because you have not answered the subject, he will eventually find his way by abandoning the question? And why?

M. DURANDIN
By reformulating it and becoming aware of it.

LACAN
But how? That is precisely what I am asking you. What idea do you have of how he might reformulate the question?

M. DURANDIN
If he asks himself the question in terms of generosity or cowardice, it’s probably because he takes the concept seriously, as if they were things.

LACAN
He can take them seriously without taking them as things.

M. DURANDIN
That’s not easy.

LACAN
What you are saying is correct. There is indeed a tendency towards reification.

M. DURANDIN
Then an exercise of language can be an exercise of reformulating thought. And starting from what? Starting from experience, from the fact that we then fall into things that are a bit mysterious and ineffable. Ultimately, it is reality. Reality is understood by segmenting it, by articulating it, but it still exists as something before being named.

LACAN
It is unnameable.

M. DURANDIN
What happens in the guts is unnameable, but it ends up being named.

LACAN
But I would say that until everything you feel, even in your guts, as you rightly put it, takes on its sequence of vagosympathetic reactions, as they are called, it will do so only based on the chain of questions you will have introduced into this matter. You are precisely a human being in this: it is through the way questions have been introduced at each moment of your history—and in your historized, historicizing history—from the moment you learned to speak, it is from that moment that all the particularities, all the attitudes, all the oddities, all the singularities, all the rhythms of your vagosympathetic reactions will be shaped.

You understand, this goes far beyond what we call training formation. That is not what it’s about at all. It is based on the significant character under which, for example, something that FREUD frequently refers to—let’s say the moment you soiled your pants at the age when that commonly happens—it might happen again later in life, at an age when it no longer happens at all. It is due to the historical value that this took on at that moment. That is to say, for example, as FREUD shows in The Wolf Man, if I recall correctly, on several occasions—how, precisely at that moment, it was interpreted as a sign. The child may have truly lost face, for example, or conversely, it might have been linked to an intense erotic emotion.

But it’s not an extreme connection, not even a connection of meaning, to the extent that this release took on at that moment a value in the sentence—a symbolic value, a value as a symbol. It is through this that, later on, it will continue—or will not continue—to have this symbolic value, and this is how a differentiation can be established at the level of the guts and the digestive tract that ensures that, forever, the chain of effects and causes will not be the same as if this initial visceral reaction had not taken on this symbolic value.

If that is not what psychoanalysis teaches us, then it teaches us nothing at all.

Wladimir GRANOFF
Just a question to further clarify what DURANDIN just said, on another level, and to draw his attention to the fact that he seems to endorse an aerodynamic streamlining of analysis even more advanced than what ALEXANDER gives us. ALEXANDER stops at this notion—at this point, he hesitates and ultimately does not venture down the path you seem to be taking so lightly.

M. DURANDIN
Would you like to clarify?

Wladimir GRANOFF
At the beginning of his little book, he asks the question on the level of teaching—of uniqueness or multiplicity—and one can almost see the beginning of the discussion you just launched. But he doesn’t go into it. He remains very cautiously where we are now. You go much further than ALEXANDER in the development you give to your thought—further than he ever went in any development of his life.

LACAN
Ultimately, the thought included in the term deverbalization is this: can we even imagine that it is through a sort of reprise of the subject’s speech, through the idea that all their words establish only false problems, that the solution to anything in a question such as the subject poses might be found? Or is it in the opposite direction—to push these questions, concerning in this instance self-love, to their final term? That is to say, indeed, to make the subject understand why, and to what extent, it is in the dialectic of self-love, insofar as it has been part of their discourse up until then, that it is indeed true: such or such of their gifts, such or such form of their generosity, are indeed cowardice.

But to make them restitute this fully in their history, to realize that indeed, this is how their ego plays this role due to their history, in all their human relationships, and particularly that of giving. That it is entirely authentically that they pose this question. And that the position of the obsessional subject, for example, in this regard—where really everything related to giving is absolutely caught up in the narcissistic network from which they cannot escape—if it is in the opposite direction, that is to say, in exhausting this dialectic of narcissism to its ultimate term, that the outcome might be found.

In other words, whether it is in the subject completely retreating, never articulating another word again, or whether it is, on the contrary, in pushing discourse to its ultimate term, in a way that encompasses the entire history that I have indicated more than once—the fundamental history of the obsessional subject, entirely alienated to a master whose death he awaits, and who is already dead, such that he cannot take a single step—if it is in making him realize this, that is, what he is truly a prisoner and slave of, precisely that, the dead master as such, that you can hope for a solution.

That is to say, not in abandoning discourse, but in pursuing discourse to the final degree of its dialectical rigor, to make him understand how, indeed, he is always and already frustrated by everything in advance. And I would say, the more he grants himself things, the more he grants them precisely to the other, to this dead master, and as such, always and eternally deprived of any capacity to enjoy the thing. And if he doesn’t understand this step, there is no chance that you will ever get out of it.

It is not because you will manage to say that this is a fine segmentation. And then what? Do you believe that this philosophy has cathartic value in itself? Certainly not. Because whatever your contempt for the question, you cannot prevent it from reproducing eternally. There is no reason for the subject to ever reach a point where they have no ego unless it is in those extreme positions we mentioned earlier: Oedipus at the end of his life.

No one has ever studied the final moments of an obsessional subject. It would certainly be worth it. Perhaps at that moment, there is a kind of revelation. If you must achieve a slightly earlier revelation, it is certainly not through abandoning speech.

Jean-Bertrand PONTALIS
I sense a certain discomfort in the various questions asked. Here, we speak a lot about the symbolic and the imaginary, but not much about the real. And the last questions show that we have slightly lost touch with the real. What Colette AUDRY said is striking: thankfully, Oedipus did not know too soon what he only learned at the end. Because he still had to live his life. That is to say, while it is very well to see that many things initially perceived as real—others’ awareness, absolutes, objects—all of these are part of a network, a system with multiple entry points, in which “I” occupies a place. The principle of reality: where does reality situate itself if not in a movement between all these dimensions? In other words, the recognition of desire must necessarily pass through a series of mediations, avatars, imaginary formations, and symbolic misrecognitions. Is this, ultimately, what you would call reality?

LACAN
Without a doubt, that is what everyone calls reality.

Jean-Bertrand PONTALIS
Another question about the difference between real and illusory satisfaction. Because there is still something—if not in reality as a thing, then in reality as a category, a norm—something more than what exists in the other orders. Reality is not the entirety of the symbol.

LACAN
I’m going to ask you a question. Have you noticed, for example, how rare it is that love fails because of the real qualities or flaws of the loved person?

Jean-Bertrand PONTALIS
I’m not sure I can answer no. I’m not sure it’s not a retrospective illusion.

LACAN
I said it was rare. And in fact, when it comes to that, it seems much more like something that belongs to the order of pretexts, motivations we give ourselves, rather than this reality being truly reached.

Jean-Bertrand PONTALIS
But that goes very far. Because it amounts to saying that there is never a true conception, and that we move only from corrective to corrective and from mirage to mirage.

LACAN
I believe that, indeed, in the order of intersubjectivity, in which all our experience is situated, the real—a real as simple, I would say, as this kind of limitation of individual capacities—is what one aims to reach, for example, when attempting to establish a psychology. And obviously, it’s not easy to reach. I mean that the field of measurement finds it very difficult to locate its benchmarks in the order of what we call individual qualities.

As soon as these are placed at a sufficiently high level, as soon as one tries—as all psychologies attempt—to find a certain number of constants there (this is what we call constitutions, temperaments, all that is used to qualify individual differences as such), well, what I’m saying is not a remark on the fundamental impotence that characterizes spontaneous psychology.

Every man, insofar as he is a psychologist and evaluates, assigns grades to his contemporaries—and experience proves that he is perfectly capable of doing so—something is achieved by questioning a collective about a specific individual, by saying: Give a score, a 1 or a score out of 20, on this or that supposed quality or flaw.

I am not invalidating the approach to the real in intersubjectivity. The scope of my question is this: the lived field of the human drama as such is situated entirely outside these assessments.

I do not mean that they are useless there. The realization of each individual’s drama, as such—that is to say, what we deal with insofar as it produces certain effects, for example, pathological or simply alienating effects—that is, what our entire analysis is directed against—is situated entirely elsewhere than in the order of this assessment of the real.

I am therefore not questioning the existence of the real. I think there are all kinds of real limitations at our fingertips. I think it’s entirely true that I cannot lift this table with one hand. There are a lot of measurable things we encounter all the time.

Jean-Bertrand PONTALIS
You only see the real in its aspect of adversity, of what resists, of what obstructs.

LACAN
It doesn’t bother me not to be able to lift it. The fact that it forces me to take a detour is just as obvious. It doesn’t bother me to take a detour. That, I do not believe, is the meaning of what I teach you in this distinction between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real—an essential distinction in human experience: the most important, the one that is, properly speaking, the experience of the subject, that by which the subject exists.

This will almost be a tautology, which I will state now, situated at the level of the emergence of the symbol. That is to say, the subject has an essential responsibility in establishing these “tables of presence”—to use a term and register that echoes the formation of scientific thought, Baconian echoes—“tables of presence.”

One never thinks about this: that it implies the emergence of a dimension entirely different from that of the real.

What you connote as presence is something you already set against the background of its possible inexistence. And this, which I present to you in a tangible form for someone who is questioning realism, is a position that has nothing idealist about it—the one I am advancing here.

It is not at all about saying that the real did not exist before. It is about knowing that nothing has emerged that is effective in the field of the subject—to the extent that the subject exists, maintains themselves in existence, poses the question of their existence, is invested in their existence. This subject, with whom you are in dialogue in analysis, this subject whom you heal through the art of speech, it is at this level that their essential reality is located—at the junction of reality and the appearance of the tables of presence.

This does not mean that it is he who creates them all. What I keep trying to tell you is that they are already made.

You understand: the game is already played, the dice are already cast! They are already cast:
– Because, apart from this: that we can pick them up and cast them again,
– Because the game has been ongoing for a long time,
– Because everything I emphasize to you already belongs to a history about which all possible and imaginable oracles can be pronounced.

That is why augurs cannot look at each other without laughing: it is not because they say to themselves, “You are a joker,” but because there is something laughable if Tiresias finds himself in the presence of another Tiresias. But precisely, he cannot find himself in such a presence because he is blind, and that is not without reason. But suppose he were not blind—there is something utterly ridiculous in the fact that, already, like this, the dice are cast. Do you follow?

Jean-Bertrand PONTALIS:
But that does not answer my question.

LACAN:
We will return to it. What is striking is the extent to which a certain vacillation—entirely apparent, because, on the contrary, it leaves things in remarkable stability and leads us to seek it where you are not accustomed to looking—a certain vacillation in ordinary relations brought about by the function of the symbol in its relationship with the real can still throw you into a certain disarray.

To put it bluntly, if I had to characterize you—it’s not you I’m talking about, but the people of your time—I would say that what strikes me is the number of things they believe in. I came across a very curious ordinance from 1277, from those ages of darkness and faith, when it was necessary to issue certain decrees against people who sat on school benches, at the Sorbonne and elsewhere, particularly about the fact of openly blaspheming the names of Jesus and Mary during Mass.

I would point out that you no longer do this. It would no longer even occur to you to blaspheme the names of Jesus and Mary. I have personally known very surrealist people who would rather have been hanged than publish a blasphemous poem against the Virgin because they thought that something might actually happen to them as a consequence.

There is something else that struck me. The most severe punishments were decreed against people who played dice on the altar during the holy sacrifice. I still believe that the possibility of such things having existed in an era we barely understand suggests the existence of a dimension or an effective register that is conspicuously missing in our time. It is not without reason that I speak to you about dice, nor that I make you play the game of odd or even.

Without a doubt, there is a certain scandal in introducing this game of dice on the altar table, and even more so during the holy sacrifice. But I believe that the fact that it was possible suggests the restitution of a capacity that is far more obliterated than we think in the milieu we inhabit, a capacity that is simply called critical possibility.