🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Today, we will attempt to advance a bit further into the territory of the relationships between what I have called the significant insistence and the Freudian notion of the death instinct. The questions you asked me last time did not seem poorly directed. They all touched on very sensitive points of what we are attempting to clarify here.
I believe that, along the way, you will recognize how the continuation of our path addresses a certain number of these questions; at least, I will try not to forget to make you notice it in passing.

You have clearly seen it: where we are arriving, the crossroads that, incidentally, brings us to a truly radical point in the Freudian position—I will even say, and you will see why—that this is a crossroads, this point where we are, where we place ourselves. And I would say that, to a certain extent, it is a point where one could almost say anything, and yet this “anything,” precisely, is not just anything, in the sense that whatever one says will always be rigorous to those who know how to understand it.

The point we are reaching is, in fact, nothing other than this: the notion of what could be called—there is no word—an anthropology, if you like, or equally well, a cosmology, at the same time, at the point where we are, or anything that begins to take form and originates from desire. Now, this is precisely what we always tend to forget because the fact that this is the core of what FREUD calls us to understand in the phenomenon of mental illness is something that, in itself, is so subversive that one can only think of turning away from it.

Let us understand well what you are in the midst of, for one very simple reason: you have the theoretical notions that guide you when you try to think about this experience, and naturally, you encounter there the necessity of every theory that must fit within certain necessary frameworks of conceptualization and the formulas through which it unfolds.
Thus, a notion has been established, one that has taken center stage on the theoretical level: that of libido. This libido is the way to talk about desire in terms that involve a certain sequence and also involve relative objectification.

This does not mean, of course, that this is where your action resides. It is necessary for you to arrive at the notion of the object, their being, their articulation, their arrangement—something that is. But if everything were so neatly arranged and followed one another so well, I do not see how your intervention could take place at the level where it does, namely through the sole intervention of speech. I will try to make you feel this.

Let us start with libido. Libido is, if you will, the unit of quantitative measurement. Up to a certain point, of course, you do not know how to measure this quantity. But you always assume it is there, and it is through its variations, through something unified by this quantitative notion, that you can give cohesion to the succession of qualitative effects. These qualitative effects, indeed—let us understand what this means—it means that there are states, changes of state, and that, to explain their succession, their transformation, you always, more or less implicitly, resort to the notion of a threshold, and at the same time a level, and consequently, a notion of constancy, which explains:
– That effects can be changed,
– That something can be established that appears as something new,

…as long as this quantitative unity, remaining undifferentiated in the notion itself, in the way you use it, in the way you promote it, was unable, in one state, to discharge itself, to spread, to find its normal expansion, its balance, its economy, its closed cycle, without there being an overflow, a phenomenon of exceeding.

From there, other states manifest themselves, relying on something supposed, which is always this x—force or energy—but in any case, a quantity capable of entering into a relationship of equivalence. It is always about the transformations, regressions, fixations, sublimations of libido—a single term, I repeat, that we cannot conceive of otherwise than in a quantitative form and which is called libido.

This notion, before being used in this way—that is, to unify, in a way, the field—it is a form of unification of the field of psychoanalytic effects—this notion of libido gradually emerged from the Freudian experience, from the points on which this experience initially placed emphasis.

Thus, originally, it does not carry this usage, of returning to what it originated from in experience. But to reach this elaborated use I am referring to, which is the one you now commonly and most legitimately use, this libido—a single term that unifies the field of the different structures of the phases of sexuality, oral, anal, genital, for example—this is indeed the first form in which the theory of libido was put into play. This is based on the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which, as you know, dates back to 1905.

But do not forget that this unitary theory of the libido field only appears much later. In other words, the part of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality relating to it dates from 1915, approximately at the same time when this theory of the field was already becoming extremely complicated since the intervention of narcissistic investments already introduced a much more complex dimension.

Where did this notion of libido come from? A few reminders are now in order. It is clear that if its conceptual, noetic use is and can only be in the traditional line of any theory—that is, something that is entirely projected, viewed, a world that in itself—this is the goal, the terminus ad quem of classical physics—tends to achieve—this is the ideal of a physics we would call Einsteinian—a notion of a completely unitary field. Of course, we are not yet able to map our modest little field to this universal physical field, but it has the same ideal. Things are what they are. They articulate with each other in a determined way.

Ultimately, any kind of knowledge, at any given moment, of the entirety of this field would allow us to generate from there both its entire past and its entire future. It is, strictly speaking, a field that is not without reason called theoretical, that is, derived from a theôria, an intuition, even contemplation. In truth, there is no room here for what would properly be a new realization, a Wirken, an action in the strictest sense.
The subject is always unique and purely ideal.

It is quite clear that nothing is further from what Freudian experience brings us than this. Freudian experience is, by its very essence, by definition, entirely part of a notion exactly contrary to this theoretical perspective.
It begins by positing a world of desire. It posits this world of desire before any kind of experience. This world does not arise from any preliminary consideration that the world presented is a world of appearances, a world of an appearance behind which lies something more real that would be the world of essences.
It is not a world of things; it is not a world of being; it is a world of desire as such.

This is the starting point. Desire is instituted within the Freudian world, the world where our experience unfolds. It is instituted within this world to constitute it. And this cannot be erased at any point, not even for the briefest moment, in how we handle our experience when we speak of the famous object relation, which we currently tend to glorify.

It is very clear that all the ambiguity arising from the use of this object relation, namely the tendency to make it a kind of model, a pattern for regulating and adapting the subject to their normal objects, is so contrary to what experience suggests under this term “object” that, naturally, such usage is always somewhat abusive.
Even in the writings of the authors who use it, the true meaning of the term “object relation” reappears, at least to the extent that it can be applied within the analytical experience, namely:
– That it is precisely libido on which the structure, maturity, fullness, and completion of this object depend.
– That if we speak of the evolution of libido, of pregenital stages compared to genital stages, it is because, at the genital stage, this libido is supposed to bring forth in the world an object that represents fullness, a possible completion, a sort of full reality of the object, which was previously considered unattainable, as also representing another structuring of the object, literally another type of existence of the object, one that depends on the subject’s own desire.

This has absolutely nothing to do with what is traditional in the theory of man’s relationship to the world, which would reside on the side of the question of appearance versus being. There is nothing like that here. There is something that, I would even say, precedes all of this in the classical theoretical perspective of a coaptation, of a co-naissance (co-knowing) — to use the pun that retains its full value and which places the theory of knowledge at the heart of any kind of elaboration of man’s relationship to his world — and always more or less an adequation to the thing:
– Of whatever approaches it in any way,
– Of something within the subject that must align with the thing,
– A relationship of being to being,
– A relationship of a subjective, noetic being — but one that is still a being — with a real being, of a being that knows it exists.

It goes even further: it is entirely impossible to eliminate from the classical position the concept of a being that knows it exists, in relation to a being that is also known to exist.

It is clear that the field of Freudian experience is situated and begins to establish itself in an entirely different register of relationships. The relationship of desire, which is the starting point, the fundamental point, is undoubtedly a relationship of being to an essential lack:
– To a lack, a lack of being, strictly speaking,
– To a lack that is not a lack of this or that,
– But essentially a relationship of being to a lack through which it precisely exists.

This lack is truly beyond anything that can represent it, and it is never presented except as a reflection upon a veil.

The specific characteristic of libido is, in a way, no longer in its theoretical usage as a quantitative quantity but in the sense that it animates the fundamental conflict we find, not on the margins of human action and experience, but one we can only perceive on the margins because, at the center, we must believe that things are simply “there.”

But what does Freudian experience teach us? It is precisely that nothing that happens in the field called consciousness — which operates at the level of recognizing established, solid objects — that none of this is truly what it is about. What being seeks is precisely something in relation to which all of this can not only be misleading but is also inherently misleading.

The very notion of libido, insofar as it creates the different stages of the object, is precisely this: these objects are never “that,” except from the moment when they are entirely “that.” But the very fact that this is centered on genital libido, as it represents an abyssal conjunction in the themes and in the sense we have of the unique character of this experience, of its borderline quality that defies all expression, of its ineffable nature — it must be said — in analysis, is because, as soon as we articulate it, structure it, we fall back into all kinds of contradictions, including the deadlock of narcissism and all that relates to it.

The characteristic of the function, the notion of desire, as central to all human experience, is precisely this: it is a desire for nothing nameable.

And it is this desire that is, at the same time, the source of all forms of animation. Because it is precisely in this lack that being, strictly speaking — and we should not be surprised by this — comes not simply to be… for if it were merely what it was, there would not even be room to speak of it.
Being comes to exist precisely because of this lack.

It is within this experience of desire that we can understand very well, indeed, how being comes to exist and can even reach a “sense of self” in relation to being, precisely because of this lack.

It is from the experience of this lack, from this pursuit of a beyond that is nothing, that, starting from this sense of self in relation to the being it lacks, it returns to the sense of a self-aware being, which is merely its own reflection in the world of things, as a companion to all those other beings that are there before it and who, in fact, do not know themselves.

In short, there is a confusion between this power of fundamental distress by which being rises as a presence but against a background of absence and what we commonly call the power of consciousness — the act of becoming aware — which is, in fact, nothing more than an abstracted form of the entire array of possible illusions.

It is inevitable that this has always been of particular interest.
Nonetheless, what Freudian experience leads us toward, as something in the midst of which a world of interrelations between human beings is truly established, is something situated beyond the field of consciousness — and that is precisely why it is called the unconscious — and at that level, it concerns desire as the primitive structuring of this human world.

It is perfectly clear that the fundamental notion, the decisive step, the “Copernican revolution,” is ultimately, as you can well see, a poor term, a crude metaphor, because, of course, COPERNICUS indeed performed a revolution, but specifically in that world of things that exist, that are determined and perfectly determinable.

But it is a revolution, I would say, in the opposite direction, because ultimately, the pre-Copernican world was structured as it was precisely because much of man was already inscribed in it. It has never been fully decanted, but sufficiently so with the Copernican revolution.

FREUD, for reasons that are not at all limited to the simple obsolete experience of having to treat this or that patient, represents a step truly correlated with a revolution that takes place across the entire field of philosophy — we must call it by its name — across the entire field of what man can think about himself and his experience. This revolution places him as a creator, while at the same time risking that he might see himself entirely dispossessed of this creation, which he carried out so cheerfully, which he seemed to carry out so cheerfully for a certain period, thanks to a trick that is always brushed aside in classical theory, which is that “God is not deceitful.”

This is so essential that Mr. EINSTEIN, about whom much is spoken, nevertheless returned to it. He said:

“The Lord, the Almighty, is certainly a bit cunning, but He is not dishonest.”

The fact that EINSTEIN returned to this was not simply to please journalists; in fact, he was not only saying this to journalists; he wrote it, and it was essential to his position, to his organization of the world, that God was not deceitful.
He remained at the same point as DESCARTES.

If we are within a certain perspective, we must start from the idea that God is not deceitful.
But that, precisely, we know nothing about! The decisive point of Freudian experience could be summarized as follows: let us remember that consciousness is not universal.

FREUD wrote this very well in Civilization and Its Discontents. It never consists of anything other than operating on the organs supposed to represent it socially, the newspapers, for example — which is something entirely different from that kind of assumed, diffuse power, that sort of super-decantation of the world, where some force would supposedly remain involved — precisely, the “force of progress” that would have brought it there through a kind of conception that sees it as the culmination of a natural evolution finding its final term there and retaining all its power there.

Nothing could be more contrary to our experience, to modern experience, if one may say so — this kind of awakening from a long fascination with “the property of consciousness,” with “the virtues of consciousness,” which is constituted by the reintroduction of human existence into its own structure, which is that of desire, the only point from which it can be explained that there are what? Humans!
Not humans, of course, as a herd, but humans in the sense that there are humans who speak, and that this speech introduces into the world something as weighty as all reality.

Revisit, re-examine the constant use we make of the notion of sexual desire, whether in the way we elaborate our experience, think about it, or in the way you read any Freudian text. You will see that this very term “desire,” when introduced and handled effectively, with its full, ongoing meaning…
It is not a matter of qualifying it as emotional or not — you are not necessarily moved every time you use the word “desire”…
…it is truly what permeates, gives weight, and lends significance to everything that is deduced.

In the way we articulate our experience, we assume that this desire is not merely something we abstractly define as being determined by a behavioral cycle, a sort of x, in the purified manner in which we eventually came to use the word “force” in physics. It is something assumed to underlie the accomplishment of a certain cycle that finds its end and termination there.

Desire is not objectified in any way. It serves us, and is quite convenient, so that we can describe a certain biological cycle, or more precisely, a certain number of cycles more or less linked to biological apparatuses. But the use we make of it is assumed to be entirely real, effective. It is because the subject truly desires something, and not because he is the more or less apparent support of a desire, that we can observe its fruits, its results. It is always because the subject is truly there, desiring, that something happens, and it is this that we are dealing with.

In other words, the desire in question precedes any kind of conceptualization. Every conceptualization emerges from it.
And, moreover, we are accustomed to thinking of things this way, since we assume that most of what the subject believes he holds, in a more or less coherent way, as reflective certainty:
– Is something that is purely and simply the entirely superficial arrangement, as we say, secondarily rationalized, justified, of what his desire foments, which gives its essential curvature to everything around him,
– Is something that is the most important, that is, the point closest to what constitutes and structures his world, namely his very action, the very way in which he can make use of what he is supposed to have at his disposal, namely his own apparatuses.

There is thus a fundamental ambiguity in the use we make of the term desire, which is alternately something we objectify — because we must do so, I would almost say, if only to talk about it — and at the same time something whose presence, whose instance, we admit as something that is primitive relative to any kind of objectification.

It is quite clear that it is essential for us to remind ourselves of this, not to forget it, despite our tendency to do so, to think that we have landed on our feet again, that we have returned to the world of science, that it is simply a matter of changing the conditions of what exists to obtain different effects and results.
In that case, of course, if this were true, then we would no longer need to conduct analysis at all because—except, as they say, by entering into “magical thinking”—it is absolutely unclear why sexual desire and its objectified cycles could be influenced in any way by an experience of speech. That libido is something determinant in human behavior was not discovered by FREUD.

Even ARISTOTLE provided a theory of the hysteric based on the idea that the uterus was “a small animal living inside a woman’s body,” which stirred quite violently when it wasn’t given something to eat. If he chose this example, it is obvious that he avoided taking a much more evident one, namely the male sexual organ, which does not need any kind of theorist to call attention to itself through its antics.

Everyone has known for a very long time that the objective facts of libido manifestation are something that has a certain relationship with human experience. But from there, ARISTOTLE never thought that things could be arranged by talking to “the little animal inside the woman’s belly.” In other words, to quote a cabaret singer who, in his obscenity, was sometimes seized by a kind of sacred fury bordering on prophecy:

“It doesn’t eat bread, it doesn’t speak either, and it doesn’t understand, it doesn’t listen to reason.”

The question is, do we know what we are doing? Have we managed to make them listen to reason? It is very clear that we have not. By definition, it does not listen to reason. If an experience of speech has any effect in this domain, it is because we are operating elsewhere, that the desire in question is something that is, of course, not unrelated to that desire.
This is the whole question, but if it is not really that desire, then you see where we stand: we are precisely at the question of understanding why, at the level where the problem of desire is situated in Freudian experience, we are still called to embody it in that desire. After all, that is what it is about.

This is what exists, dear Mr. VALABREGA, when you mention that there are certain “satisfactions of desire” in dreams. I naturally suppose that the desires of children, as they are realized in dreams, are something present in your mind, as is any kind of hallucinatory satisfaction of desire.

But there is one very striking thing. First, at the level of FREUD himself, of what he tells us. He says: it’s agreed, desire is much less elaborated; it is clear that it is about the desire of the child because there is no elaboration. He bluntly expresses that he wanted cherries during the day, and at night he dreams of cherries.
Yet it is no less astonishing to see that Mr. FREUD still emphasizes that even at this infantile stage, the desire manifested, whether in a dream or in a symptom, will be a sexual desire.

This is absolutely essential, and he will never back down from it. See The Wolf Man, the particularly suggestive moment when we return to something entirely different from the classical theory, plain classical theory, the theôria.
We move toward something entirely different, to the soul — that is, with Mr. JUNG, libido drowns itself in the interests of the soul, which becomes the great dreamer, the center of the world, the ethereal incarnation of the subject.

FREUD absolutely opposes this, radically. He says, and we adhere to what FREUD says, he never backs down from what he says, and he does not back down at a moment extraordinarily precarious for him, where he is tempted to yield to the Jungian reduction since he realizes at that moment that, after all, the entire perspective of the subject’s past might well be nothing more than fantasies. The door is opened to move from desire as oriented and captivated by mirages to the notion of a universal mirage. It is not the same thing.

FREUD’s insistence on preserving the term sexual desire whenever it concerns desire takes on its full significance precisely in cases where it becomes clear — for example, like the child dreaming of cherries — that it is about something else, a hallucination of needs, something that seems entirely natural: why shouldn’t needs be hallucinatory?
It is even easier to believe since there is, indeed, a kind of second-degree mirage, called “the mirage of the mirage,” since we have the experience of the mirage; it seems entirely natural for it to be there.

But from the moment we reflect, we must be astonished by the fact, first by what we see, and then ask why there are mirages. We must be astonished by the existence of mirages, not just by what they show us.
On the other hand, let us set aside FREUD and the reasons why he insists on maintaining that the desire in question—as the creator of an entire part of the field of human experience—is sexual desire as such, how he holds on to it against all reasonable appearances:

“It would be so convenient, we would get along so well if you would return to the notion that, after all, it is about interests in general. Open the door! Do you really insist so much on this sexual desire?”

[To Jean-Paul Valabrega] — Wait a moment, VALABREGA…

Furthermore, there is the experience, which often goes unnoticed: whether it’s the hallucination of the child’s dream or the hallucination of the hungry person, a small detail escapes notice: when the child wanted strawberries during the day, they don’t just dream of strawberries, whatever one may say.
And to quote little Anna FREUD — since it concerns her, if I recall correctly, in her childish language where certain consonants are missing — she also dreams of flan or cake, indeed an entire array of things, exactly like the starving character does not dream of a mere crust of bread or a glass of water but of gargantuan feasts.

Octave MANNONI — It’s not the same dream, the one about cherries and the one about cake.

LACAN

Precisely, the desire in question, even the desire said to be unelaborated, in a form that already shows a character that transcends the coaptation of need, is precisely dimensionally correlative to the manifestation of desire, the one at the center, at the heart of Freudian experience.
This desire, in any case, is a deeply problematic desire, even the simplest of desires.

Ultimately, the libido in question is the “Aeneadum genitrix hominum divumque voluptas.”

This is what it’s about with FREUD. It is the re-entry of something that is the same as what was expressed at one point on the level of the gods, and this nonetheless requires some precautions before turning it into an algebraic sign, for example, as it is not necessarily equivalent. Algebraic signs are extremely useful, but only on the condition that their dimensions are restored. This is what I am trying to do when I talk to you about machines. For a long time, people said deus ex machina; well, when I talk to you about a machine, it’s because I’m trying to pull it ex deo, but it’s still about the same thing.

And this is where we stand with Freudian experience. This places us at the heart of our problem.
When FREUD speaks to us of a Beyond the Pleasure Principle, when does this happen?
At the moment when analysts have embarked on the path of what FREUD taught them and, at the same time, they believe they know because FREUD tells them that desire is sexual desire. They believe it.
And that is precisely their mistake. Because they do not understand what this means, namely that the entire problem lies there.

Why, ultimately, is desire most of the time something other than what it appears to be?
Is it this something that FREUD calls sexual desire? Not without reason, but this reason is, in fact, veiled.
It is just as veiled as it is to the one subjected to sexual desire, as it is beyond what he seeks, behind an experience that is also subjected, across all of nature, to all the lures that this experience entails. If there is something that…
on the level, not just of lived experience but of experimental experience…
gives us the opportunity to demonstrate in animal behavior the effectiveness of the lure, it is sexual experience.

Nothing is easier than deceiving an animal about the connotations that make any object or appearance something towards which it will advance as if towards its partner. The entire notion of the displacement of captivating gestalten, of triggers, of innate triggering mechanisms, all of this falls within the register of display and pairing.
Similarly, we find ourselves facing an analogous phenomenon at the level of knowledge. At the very moment when FREUD maintains that sexual desire is at the heart of human desire, all those who follow him believe it, make it into a science, and think that it’s quite simple: since it’s sexual desire, it’s a constant force. All one has to do is remove—what?—the obstacles.

If we remove the obstacles, if it’s nothing but another lure, it should work on its own. All one needs to say is:
“You don’t realize it, but the object is there.” That is, ultimately, what initially presents itself as the interpretation.

Only, we see that it doesn’t work. At that moment, here comes the turning point: we say that the subject resists.
We say he resists—why? Because FREUD said it too. He called it “resisting.” Then:
– We didn’t understand what he meant when he said it was sexual desire,
– We didn’t understand when he said “resist.”

We think we have to push. And that’s where we enter into a mechanism. It’s not for nothing that I use the term “insist,” it is not without foundation. It is simply the moment when the analyst himself succumbs entirely to the lure because, as I have already shown you, what insistence means from the perspective of the suffering subject, the analyst places himself on the same level. He insists as well, in a much more foolish way, of course, since his insistence is conscious.

But this is indeed where things were bound to arrive once they were set on a certain path.
We will see where this leads us, to very specific things.

A conception such as that of obsessive neurosis, which has gradually been allowed to emerge in our circles, our environments, and regarding the way it should be treated and the significance of the analyst’s action at this level, is certainly something that becomes clear enough—as we are currently doing—to see the immense dangers and what is actually done when one embarks on a certain path, when one has a particular way of understanding it.

For now, I simply indicate the point where this development can be resumed concerning a proper critique of the technique of analysis, the way the famous object relation is conceived in the relationship between the analyst and the analysand, at the level of obsessive neurosis, and what we are trying to explain.
I would like, however, to point out the following: in the perspective I have just opened for you, resistance is something you provoke.
Resistance, in the sense in which you understand resistance — that is, resistance that resists — resists because you press on it.
It is about releasing the insistence that exists in the symptom; ultimately, there is no resistance on the part of the subject.

What FREUD himself calls inertia on this occasion is not resistance. Inertia, like any kind of inertia, is a sort of ideal point. It is you who assume, to understand what is happening, that there is this inertia.
This assumption is correct in the hypothesis. If you want to understand correctly what is happening in the case of the subject when there is resistance, you must realize that it simply means there is a process, that to understand this process, one must imagine a zero point, and resistance only begins to exist from the moment you try to make the subject move forward from that zero point.

In other words, resistance is the current state of an interpretation of the subject. It is the way the subject interprets, at that very moment, the point where he stands. This resistance is an abstract ideal point. It is you who call it resistance, which means that he cannot move faster. You have nothing to say about that. He is at the point where he is.
The question is whether he moves forward or not. It is clear that, in fact, he has no tendency to move forward.

But as little as he speaks, as little value as what he says might have, you must consider what he says as his interpretation of the moment and the continuation of what he says as the collection of his successive interpretations.
Resistance, in the true sense, is the abstraction you impose on it, meaning the introduction of the idea that there is a dead point and that if progress is to occur, there must be a force. You call this dead point resistance, provided you are operating correctly.

If you then move to the idea of “eliminating resistance,” as it is repeatedly written, you are simply advancing toward sheer absurdity, as if, having created an abstraction, you then said it must disappear — in other words, as if you said inertia must not exist.

There is only one resistance, and it is the resistance of the analyst. The analyst resists when he does not understand what he is dealing with.
He does not understand what he is dealing with when he does not see that from the moment he introduces a pure and simple abstraction—that is, when he introduces an interpretation believing it to be something objective, believing it is simply a matter of showing the subject that what he desires is this or that sexual object—and if he thinks this is what analysis is about, that this is what operates in analysis, well, he is mistaken.

He is mistaken because it is he who is in a state of inertia and resistance and who does not understand that what is at stake is not showing the subject this or that object that serves as the current object of his desires, but teaching him to name, to articulate, to bring into existence this desire which, literally, in itself, as desire, lies below existence.

That is why he insists. It is a desire, to put it bluntly, that not only does not dare to speak its name but does not dare to say it for a good reason—it has not yet brought this name into existence.

It is at the level of the essential relationship of speech, of the introduction of a term, a term that is a new presence in the world, and in relation to which the following will be structured and organized:
– Whether this is or is not a term that introduces presence as such, and consequently creates absence as such,
– That it is at this level that the effective action of analysis occurs,
– That it is not about the recognition of something already given, ready to be co-opted,
– That it is at the level of the creation of something which, by being named, properly speaking, is brought into existence,
– That it is at this level that the action of interpretation is conceivable and only conceivable.

We have, in FREUD’s own text—to return to it, since by a kind of oscillation it is always between text and experience that we situate ourselves—the opportunity to recognize this. I want to illustrate this, and then we will refer to FREUD’s text, and we will see whether, ultimately, it is indeed about something that is beyond any instinctual cycle definable by these conditions, whether this is what FREUD means in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. We will see this by referring to FREUD’s text.

But for the moment, to illustrate and give substance to what I am trying to articulate before you, I told you that we had an example. I chose this one because it came to hand—the example of what lies beyond Oedipus, of Oedipus when the Oedipus complex has been fulfilled.

That it has been fulfilled, that OEDIPUS is the eponymous hero of the Oedipus complex, is no accident. Another hero could have been chosen, but it is not by chance that it is this one in particular. All the heroes of Greek mythology are not unrelated to this central myth; they embody it in different forms, they reveal other aspects of it. It is reasonable to believe that FREUD was not accidentally guided toward this figure. But what matters for our consideration at the moment is that OEDIPUS, in his very life, is entirely this myth, that he is nothing other than the passage of the myth itself into existence.
Whether he existed or not matters little to us, since he exists in each of us in a more or less reflected form, pushed into one or another of its labyrinthine paths; he is present everywhere. Therefore, he exists far more than if he had actually existed.

One can say an expression like that: “actually existed.” However, I was surprised to see one of our colleagues, in reference to the standard cure, use the term “psychic reality” as opposed to “true reality.” I am not against the term psychic reality, but true reality—I believe I have sufficiently conditioned you all to find this term contradictory in itself.

On the other hand, one can say that something exists or does not exist actually. At the same time, one can see how little it matters whether it actually exists. Something can perfectly exist, in the full sense of the term, even if it does not actually exist, because that is precisely the definition of existence: that every existence carries within it something so improbable that we are indeed in perpetual questioning about its reality.

So OEDIPUS exists, and he has fully realized his destiny. He has realized it to the point where he is nothing more than something identical to this kind of total lightning strike, this tearing, this laceration by himself, where he is absolutely nothing anymore.
And it is at that very moment, indeed, that he says the words I mentioned to you last time:

“Is it at the moment when I am nothing that I become a man?”

This is a phrase I have torn from its context. And I must return it to that context to prevent you from falling into any illusion—for example, the idea that the term man in this instance has any particular significance. It has absolutely none, precisely because OEDIPUS has achieved the full realization of that statement, which has been there from the beginning, which was present in the oracles that already designated his destiny, even before he was born. For it was before his birth that his parents were told the things that ensured he would be hurled toward his fate, that he would be exposed, hung by one foot, at the moment of his birth.

And moreover, it is from this initial act that everything becomes possible, meaning that he realizes his destiny. Everything is, therefore, already perfectly written. And it is to the extent that everything written has been fulfilled to the end—and that OEDIPUS confirms it through his act, not in the moment of the unconscious acts he performed—he himself says:

“I had nothing to do with it. This woman was given to me; the people of Thebes, in their exultation and exaltation, gave me this woman as a reward for having freed them from the worst of evils: the Sphinx. As for that man, I didn’t know who he was. I broke his face; he was old, he fell apart, I couldn’t help it, I hit a little too hard, I was strong at the time.”

He accepts his destiny at the moment he mutilates himself. Furthermore, he accepts his fate the moment he accepts being king. From that moment, he accepts being the one upon whom all the weight is transferred, the weight of the one thing that makes him king, the one thing that indeed made him a man—it is speech.

It is as a king that he can always attract curses upon the city. From this point on, there is an order of places, a law of retribution, of punishment. From this moment, it is entirely natural that it should fall upon OEDIPUS, since he is the central knot of speech. The question is whether he will accept it or not. He accepts it, since he tears himself apart, mutilates himself.
He accepts it to the very end. He believes, after all, that he is innocent. But it is when he speaks to men, when it is simply a matter of letting him sit in Colonus, in the sacred enclosure of the EUMENIDES, that he fully realizes speech. And it is at that moment that he realizes that in Thebes, the chatter continues—that is to say, people of Thebes are told:

“Be careful, hold on there, you’ve gone a bit too far, according to the laws of a human world that is always the same, a world fundamentally bare, desperate, and without the shadow of charity. It was from that moment that you went wrong. It was all well and good that Oedipus punished himself. Only, from that moment, you found him disgusting and put him to death. Yet the destiny, the future life of Thebes, depends precisely on this incarnate speech that you failed to recognize when it was there, with its human effects of annulment, of the tearing apart of man, and there you exiled him, cast him out. Beware, Thebes, if you do not bring him back—if not within the borders of the territory, then at least close enough so that he does not escape you. For if the speech that is his destiny goes wandering away, it takes your destiny with it.
It is Athens that will gather the sum of true existence, ensuring upon you all superiority and triumphs.”

From that moment on, they chase after him. OEDIPUS must be brought back, an effort must be made to realize that OEDIPUS is the principal figure, in the form in which he currently exists. This is why OEDIPUS, when he learns that he will indeed receive numerous visits, all kinds of ambassadors, wise men, politicians, fanatics, and his son, says:

“Is it at the moment when I am nothing that I become a man?”

This is where the continuation of the story begins, the beyond the pleasure principle. The beyond the pleasure principle is precisely this: what happens when someone has fully realized this speech, when speech is completely realized, when OEDIPUS’s life has entirely passed into his destiny? What remains of OEDIPUS?
It is still OEDIPUS, to endure all of this.

If there had been no Oedipus, there would have been neither the story of OEDIPUS nor the Oedipus complex. The question is what happens next. This is what Oedipus at Colonus shows us. It is already what I hinted at earlier in recognizing the fascination, or the complete absence, in the ultimate realization of the most raw form of the essential drama, of destiny, this total void, this absolute absence of charity, of fraternity, of anything relating to what we call human feelings.

The theme of Oedipus at Colonus is held in two terms:
– What the chorus says: “Better, in the end, never to have been born. And if one is born, to die as quickly as possible.”
– What OEDIPUS says: “May there be upon posterity and upon the city—for which, ultimately, I was offered as a holocaust—the most radical, the most total, the most absolute curse.”

One must read the curses addressed to POLYNICES, his son, who comes to him saying: “Get me out of this, things are going very badly,” to fully understand what Oedipus at Colonus is about.

And then there is the denial of speech… Where does it happen? In what? At what point? In an enclosure on the edge of which the entire drama unfolds, which is precisely the enclosure of the place where speech is not permitted, where the vengeful goddesses are, the goddesses who do not forgive, those who catch human beings at every turn. There is a central point where silence is mandatory. OEDIPUS is coaxed slightly out of this place every time they want to extract three words from him because if he speaks them there, things will go badly. You will see what “things will go badly” means.

It is clear that the sacred always has its reasons for being; there is always a place where words must stop.
Why? That is the whole question. Perhaps so that they may persist within this enclosure. It is there that he will draw the one to whom he will say what cannot be revealed to anyone, not even to his closest ones, not even to his sons, who are there and who have helped him to continue his miserable life due to the order of the gods. This is what he will repeat to THESEUS.

What happens at that moment? It is the death of OEDIPUS. It occurs under extremely particular conditions, such that the one who has followed the two men from a distance as they move toward the center of the sacred place turns around, after having taken a few steps in that direction, and at that moment sees only one of the two men, veiling his face with his arm in an attitude of sacred horror.

And later in the text, there is an allusion to the fact that something must have stopped there. There is a sense that it was not something very pleasant to look at. There is, in truth, the impression that what is at stake in this kind of volatilization of the presence of the one who literally spoke his last words—I do not know what it represented for the ancient imagination, given that I believe Oedipus at Colonus here alludes to something we have never known, something shown in the “mysteries” that are always in the background.

But for our imagination, for us, if I had to provide an image, I would look for it where I have found examples to help you understand these things: in Edgar POE.

Edgar POE was always touching upon the relationship between life and death, and in a way that is not without significance. If there is something I would place in analogy or echo with this story of the liquefaction of OEDIPUS, I would say it is the story of the famous case of Mr. VALDEMAR, of which I remind you of the terms.

It is, indeed, about this suspension of the subject in speech, through what was then called magnetism, which is the theoretical form of hypnosis. It involves hypnotizing someone in articulo mortis and seeing what happens: it is not about someone uttering their last words, but about someone at the very end of their life.

Poe’s imagination exceeds our timid medical attempts. Indeed, under hypnosis, the subject passes from life to death, but then remains for several months in a sufficient state of aggregation to still represent something acceptable—a corpse on a bed, and, on top of that, a corpse that occasionally speaks to say, “I am dead,” in a way that still manages to slightly unsettle the listeners.

This kind of situation, maintained through all sorts of artifices and nudges to reassure oneself, lasts until the moment when it no longer has any reason to persist in this way, and we will see that it leads to awakening. Awakening is achieved through passes, passes contrary to those that induce sleep, and a few more cries are extracted from the unfortunate man, who exclaims:

“Hurry up or put me back to sleep, or do it quickly, it’s awful!”

It has been six months since he already said he was dead, and since, after all, a door must either be open or closed: they wake him up. And then, Mr. VALDEMAR is nothing more than a sort of disgusting liquefaction:

– Something that has no name in any language,
– The figure that lies in the background of all imaginings of human destiny,
– The figure impossible to look at directly,
– A figure that is never seen except in a veiled manner,
– Something even beyond any kind of qualification, for which the word carrion is completely inadequate,
– The bare, pure and simple, brutal appearance, the total collapse of this sort of swelling of life, of a bubble that suddenly bursts and dissolves into purulent, inanimate liquid.

It is unquestionably about this in the case of OEDIPUS.
OEDIPUS—as everything has shown us since the beginning of the drama and the tragedy—is no longer anything but the refuse of the earth, the waste, the residue, the thing emptied of any kind of specious appearance, truly a character horrible to behold.

And when he is truly exhausted of human presence, all that this accession to the existence of speech represents, which he is destined to bear to the extent that it concerns an exemplary fate, where this fate is the same as this speech, and where being is entirely contained in this speech articulated by his fate, in the face of human existence, there is nothing more than this kind of conjunction of life and death—a life that is death, and death that is exactly there beneath life—which is what FREUD’s text leads us to, the long text in which FREUD insists on telling us: do not believe

– that life is a very pretty power, a sort of exalting goddess that emerged one day from the world to culminate in the most beautiful, the most exalted of forms,
– that there is in life the slightest force that could by itself be called a form of fulfillment, of realization, or of progress.

This is FREUD’s text. Life is a swelling, as I said earlier, it is a mold, something characterized by nothing other than—as certain others have written and said, not just FREUD—by its aptitude for death.
Life is this: something that in itself is nothing but a kind of detour, an obstinate detour, and by itself, it is exactly obsolete, precarious, transient, devoid of meaning as life itself. Life is this.

And what is at stake is understanding why—at a certain point of these manifestations, at this point called man—why something thinks, something happens, something insists through this life, and which is called meaning, a meaning that we call human.

But after all, are we so sure about this? Is this meaning, as it presents itself to us, really so human?
It presents itself as an emergence, an emergence of something that is not essentially characterized as human, but essentially as meaning:

– That is to say, an order,
– That is to say, something that emerges,
– Something that comes to light,
– Something into which a life insists on entering, but which perhaps expresses something entirely beyond this life, because in this life, when we go to its root, and behind this drama of passage into existence, we find nothing other than this life as such, essentially conjoined with death.

This is what it is about. This is where Freudian dialectic leads us. And why? One might have believed, up to a certain point, that everything relating to death, after all, could be included within the libidinal order considered as defined by its object relations. There were simply occasional errors. The other object, as everyone knows, which is there before us, so that we might break its head—we were mistaken—the subject identified, as they say, with the other, and it was against himself that he turned this gentle aggression conceived as a libidinal object relation, as an aggression based on what is called ego instincts, the needs, ultimately, for order and harmony.

One must eat, after all. When the pantry is empty, one eats one’s fellow. This theory is acceptable up to a certain point within Freudian theory. But what is truly important is the entire inter-aggression within the libidinal adventure conceived as objectified within the order of the living. The living was defined as an object like any other, in which there remains a small corner of mystery, undoubtedly, namely: “Why is it alive?”
But still, it follows the succession of its determinations, its conditioning before it, something entirely explainable with the data of desire conceived as adequate desire, as desire adapted to an object.

The meaning of FREUD’s text in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is:

– That this is not enough,
– That masochism is not merely an inverted sadism,
– That this is not simply carried out on the plane of imaginary identification,
– That one cannot account for all the coalescence of libido with activities that are either external to it or seemingly contrary: aggressiveness, destruction.

It is about something else because there are a number of paradoxes, the central paradox, the one on which his text insists, is the paradox of transference as such.

This cannot in any way be explained within a libidinal economy considered as closed, regulated purely and simply by the return to equilibrium and the pleasure principle. That primordial masochism, expressed in the fact that the last word of life as such, of life beyond all life, of life when it has been literally dispossessed of its speech, can only be this final curse expressed in the term Oedipus at Colonus.

This is what FREUD tells us: life, by itself—let us illustrate it in another way—does not want to heal.
The negative therapeutic reaction is the most fundamental thing. Healing is the realization of the subject in existence through speech, through speech that is ultimately always a speech coming from elsewhere and passing through him.

Life, the real one, the one in which we are captives, is essentially an alienated life, ex-sisting. It is a life in the other, and in another that is beyond all these veils that stop it and where it may deceive itself, but whose lures also show it the way, and whose lures are one of its moments. But beneath it, what seeks to come into existence is this life, essentially and as such conjoined with death, always returning to death, and which is drawn into ever larger and more diverted circuits by this something that FREUD calls in his text “the elements of the external world.”

This notion of vital progress, somehow endured through the series of stimulations in which this life, ultimately, does not think… I intentionally say “does not think” because indeed, this is where we are, at the subjective level evoked by this relationship between life and death: one understands what is meant by the desire for sleep, which you spoke of the other day, VALABREGA, which is precisely this something through which life seeks only to rest as much as possible. In the meantime, it is this something which, at the beginning of the infant’s existence, consumes its time in hourly sectors, allowing it, from time to time, to open a little eye: it must be dragged out of there with considerable effort so that it can arrive at this rhythm through which we attune ourselves to the world. The desire for sleep—it is no coincidence that at this level precisely, the nameless desire can appear—is because it is indeed an intermediate state. This drowsiness remains the most natural vital state.

…this life, therefore, ultimately, thinks only of dying.

“To die, to sleep… to dream perhaps,” [Hamlet, III, 1], as a certain gentleman said, precisely at the moment when it was about this:
“to be or not to be.”
Only, “to be or not to be” is precisely a completely verbal affair. A very clever comedian once tried to show us how SHAKESPEARE must have found it by scratching his head: to be or not and then repeating to be or not, to be…

Yet it is at this moment that the entire dimension of language emerges—and that’s why it’s funny.
It is at this same level of emergence that the phenomenon of the dream and the witticism are situated.
And one does not need to work hard to connect them, because one phrase—which is not particularly funny, but it is striking enough to know that in the greatest dramatist of Antiquity, it appeared in a religious ceremony—states:
“Better never to have been born.” [μή ϕῦναι: mè phunai, Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus]

Imagine if someone said that at mass! It was said at mass! So it must have had quite an effect.
In fact, one expected it to have an effect. It’s not difficult to return from there to what I am talking about.
Humorists immediately took it upon themselves:

– “Better indeed never to have been born…” – “Unfortunately,” replies the other, “this happens barely once in a hundred thousand times.”

Why is this witty? Firstly, because it plays on words—the indispensable technical element—it must be about words. But it also concerns precisely this something at the junction between the moment when there are no words and the moment when they appear. Better never to have been born, of course!

And after all, indeed, it means that there is a unity there, unthinkable, and about which there is absolutely nothing to say before the passage into existence, where it can indeed insist. But after all, one could conceive that it does not insist, and that everything sinks back into universal rest and silence—even, as Mr. PASCAL said, the stars.

At this point, it is clear why wit is wit. Wit is wit because of this something that is truly close to our very existence, what we project into these nullifying aspects of laughter. Why? Because it is true—it can be true at the very moment it is said: “Better never to have been born.”
What is ridiculous is precisely saying it. And what is ridiculous, what makes one laugh, is that, with all the necessary nuances and precision: there is barely one case in a hundred thousand.

We enter here into the realm of probability calculation, which is to say, into something that doesn’t help us at all.
Because from the moment we speak of this, from the moment one is born, at the very least—and it is in this zone that all these phenomena are situated—whether they are those of the dream, or of the psychopathology of everyday life, or even of the witticism.

Therefore, it is very important that you read the book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. You should already be able to guide yourself with what I have provided and understand why, ultimately, what FREUD seeks with a kind of rigor that leaves one astonished—when one considers that, in the end, he does not quite give this final word—is that everything that properly belongs to wit occurs at the wavering level where speech exists. And one realizes that the entire question is nothing other than this: that it is there, and that if it were not there, nothing would exist.

Take the most foolish of stories, the story of the man who, in a bakery, claims he has nothing to pay.
He extended his hand and asked for a cake, returned the cake, and asked for a glass of liquor. He drank it.

He was told: “Pay for the glass of liquor.”
He said: “I gave a cake in exchange.”
He was told: “But that cake, you didn’t pay for it either!”
“But I didn’t eat it either!”

It’s funny because, indeed, there is an exchange. But how could the exchange begin?
At some point, something had to enter the circle of exchange. Therefore, the exchange must already be established. In the end, one is always left paying for the little glass of liquor with a cake one hasn’t paid for—because it had to start somewhere.

Matchmaker stories are funny for the same reason. All matchmaking stories are absolutely sublime:

– “The one you introduced me to has an unbearable mother.”
– “Listen, you’re not marrying the mother, you’re marrying the daughter.”
– “But she’s not very pretty and not very young anymore.”
– “She’ll be all the more faithful to you.”
– “But she doesn’t have much money.”
– “Do you expect her to have all the qualities?”

And so on. What does this mean? It’s something else.
It’s obviously the idea that the matchmaker character—it goes far—that the one who connects, connects on a plane entirely different from reality, since it has nothing to do with reality, the most human of commitments, love. In fact, the matchmaker can, by definition, never fall upon grotesque realities.
The matchmaker—unlike DESCARTES—is certainly a deceiver, paid to be so. And I’ll point out to you that this is precisely why it is wit.

It is always at this joint, at this level of appearance, of emergence, of the eruption of speech, that the phenomenon of consciousness occurs as such, the manifestation of desire as desire, at the moment it incarnates itself in speech that is desire, at the moment when, through it and from it, symbolism emerges as such. For symbolism as such, do not forget, because here too, we are always captivated by what is given in our experience: experience, the place where we carry our little lamp, trying to shed light on things.

Of course, symbolism converges with a certain number of natural signs, with things related to what captivates the human being through lures, particularly with a certain number of fundamental objects. Naturally, there is an initiation of symbolism even in the instinctual capture of one animal by another.

But what constitutes symbolism is not the symbol itself; it is the fact of using what can become a symbol in this Merken that symbolizes—that is to say, precisely within the order it establishes—to bring into existence what does not exist, to mark the six sides of a die, a playing die, with these symbols, and to roll the die. And from this rolling die, something new emerges: it is the desire at stake when we speak of desire par excellence. I do not even say human desire because, ultimately, the man who plays with these dice is far more captive, more imprisoned by this desire thus set into play, than he knows of its origin.

We know nothing about its origin. These desires, which roll with the symbol written on the six faces, represent the passage, the introduction into the world of the order of the symbol. Why is it only humans who play with these dice? Why don’t the planets speak?

This is a question that, for today, I will leave open before you.