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(Explaining Lacan’s Freudian Thing)

Vienna, 7 November 1955

In these days when Vienna, to make itself heard once again through the voice of the Opera, reprises in a poignant variation what has always been its mission at a cultural convergence point that it has managed to turn into a concert,
I do not believe I am out of season in evoking here the election by which it will remain, this time forever, linked to a revolution in knowledge on the scale of COPERNICUS’ name: understand, the eternal site of FREUD’s discovery,
if one can say that, through it, the true center of the human being is no longer located where an entire humanist tradition had assigned it. Doubtless, even for prophets whose country was not entirely deaf to them, the moment must come when their eclipse is observed, even if this happens after their death.
A certain reserve is appropriate for foreigners regarding the forces that bring about such a phase effect.

Moreover, the return to FREUD, of which I am here the harbinger, situates itself elsewhere: precisely where it is sufficiently summoned by the symbolic scandal that Dr. Alfred WINTERSTEIN, present here as President of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, was able to highlight as it unfolded—namely, at the inauguration of the commemorative plaque marking the house where FREUD elaborated his heroic work. The issue is not that this monument was not dedicated to FREUD by his fellow citizens, but that it was not due to the international association of those who live under his patronage.

This symptomatic failure betrays a renunciation that does not originate from this land, where FREUD, by virtue of its tradition, was but a passing guest, but rather from the very field he bequeathed to us, and from those to whom he entrusted its guardianship. I mean the psychoanalytic movement, where things have come to such a point that the rallying cry of a return to FREUD signifies a reversal. Many contingencies are knotted in this history, ever since the first sound of the Freudian message resonated with its echoes in the Viennese bell, spreading its waves far and wide. These waves seemed stifled in the muffled collapses of the First World War. Their propagation resumed with the immense human rupture fomented by the Second, which became their most powerful vehicle. Tocsin of hatred and tumult of discord, panic breath of war—it was on their pulse that FREUD’s voice reached us, as we witnessed the diaspora of those who carried it, whom persecution did not target by chance.

This train was destined not to stop until the boundaries of our world, where it reverberated in places where it is not fair to say that history loses its meaning, since it finds its limit there; where it would be a mistake to think history is absent, since, already knotted over several centuries, it is even heavier with the abyss drawn by its too-short horizon. But it is where history is denied with a categorical will that lends its style to enterprises: a historical vacuum of culture, peculiar to the United States of North America.

It is this historical vacuum that defines the assimilation required to be recognized in the society constituted by this culture. It was to this summons that a group of emigrants had to respond—emigrants who, in order to be recognized, could assert only their difference, but whose function presupposed history at its foundation, since their discipline was the one that had re-established the bridge uniting modern man with ancient myths. The conjuncture was too powerful, the opportunity too tempting, not to yield to the offered temptation: to abandon the principle and let the function rest on difference.

Let us fully understand the nature of this temptation. It is not one of ease or profit. It is certainly easier to erase the principles of a doctrine than the stigmas of its origin, more profitable to subordinate its function to demand. But here, reducing its function to its difference means succumbing to an internal mirage of the function itself, one that grounds it in this difference. It means reverting to the reactionary principle that covers the duality between the one who suffers and the one who heals, the opposition between the one who knows and the one who is ignorant.

How can one not apologize for holding this opposition as true when it is real? How can one not slip from there into becoming managers of souls in a social context that demands such service? The most corrupting of comforts is intellectual comfort, just as the worst corruption is that of the best.
This is how FREUD’s words to JUNG, as reported directly from him, resonate. When both men, invited by Clark University, approached the port of New York and the famous statue lighting the universe:

“They do not know that we are bringing them the plague.”

…these words return to sanction a hybris whose antiphrasis and darkness do not extinguish its disturbing brilliance. Nemesis needed only to seize upon this word to entrap its author. We might fear that she included a first-class return ticket. In truth, if something of this nature occurred, we have only ourselves to blame. For Europe seems rather to have faded from the concern, the style, if not the memory, of those who departed from it, with the repression of their bitter memories.

We will not complain about this oblivion if it leaves us freer to present to you the project of a return to FREUD, as it is proposed by some in the teaching of the French Psychoanalytic Society. This is not about a return of the repressed but about leveraging the antithesis represented by the phase the psychoanalytic movement has traversed since FREUD’s death, to demonstrate what psychoanalysis is not, and to seek with you the means to restore what has continued to sustain it, even through its deviation—namely, the primary meaning that FREUD preserved through his mere presence and which it is now our task to elucidate.

How could this meaning be lacking when it is attested to us in the clearest and most organic work imaginable? And how could it leave us hesitant when the study of this work shows us that its stages and turns are commanded by the concern—unfailingly effective in FREUD—to maintain it in its initial rigor?

Texts comparable to those which human veneration, in other times, has endowed with the highest attributes, in that they withstand the test of this discipline of commentary, whose virtue we rediscover by employing it according to tradition—not merely to replace a statement in the context of its time, but to measure whether the answer it offers to the questions it poses is or is not surpassed by the answer we find there to the questions of the present.

Will I teach you anything by telling you that these texts…
to which I have been dedicating a two-hour seminar every Wednesday from November to July for four years now, without having yet covered more than a quarter of them, even assuming that my commentary presupposes their entirety…
have offered both me and those who follow me in this task the surprise of genuine discoveries?
These discoveries range from concepts left unexplored to clinical details uncovered through our exploration, testifying to how much the field FREUD experienced exceeded the avenues he undertook to open for us, and to what extent his observation—sometimes giving the impression of being exhaustive—was in fact little constrained by what he had to demonstrate. Who among the practitioners of disciplines foreign to analysis, whom I have guided to read these texts, has not been moved by this research in action—whether it is the one we follow in The Interpretation of Dreams, in the observation of the Wolf Man, or in Beyond the Pleasure Principle?

What an exercise in forming minds, and what a message to lend one’s voice to! What a validation, too, of the methodological value of this training and of the truth-effect of this message, when students to whom you transmit these texts bring you testimony of a transformation—sometimes occurring overnight—in their practice, which becomes simpler and more effective even before it becomes more transparent to them.

I cannot give you a comprehensive account of this work in the brief address I owe to the kindness of Professor HOFF for offering me this space of high memory, to the agreement of my views with those of Dr. Dozent ARNOLD, who had the idea to present it now before you, or to my excellent and long-standing relations with Mr. Igor CARUSO, who could anticipate the welcome it would receive in Vienna. But I cannot forget the listeners I owe to the graciousness of Mr. SUSINI, director of our French Institute in Vienna.

And this is why, when it comes to the meaning of this return to FREUD, which I profess here, I must ask myself whether, given that they are less prepared than specialists to hear me, I risk disappointing them.

THE ADVERSARY.

Here, I am certain of my answer: “Absolutely not, if what I am about to say is indeed as it must be.” The meaning of a return to FREUD is a return to the meaning of FREUD. And the meaning of what FREUD said can be communicated to anyone because, even addressed to everyone, each person will find themselves personally concerned: one word will suffice to make this felt—FREUD’s discovery puts truth into question, and there is no one who is not personally affected by truth.
Admit that this is a rather strange proposition—to throw at you this word that almost carries a bad reputation, as if it were proscribed from polite society. Yet I ask whether it is not inscribed at the very heart of analytic practice, since this practice continuously rediscover the power of truth within us, even within our very flesh.
In what way, indeed, would the unconscious be more worthy of recognition than the defenses that oppose it in the subject, with a success that makes them appear no less real?

I am not here engaging in the trade of Nietzschean trinkets about the lie of life, nor am I amazed that one believes they believe, nor do I accept that mere willingness suffices to will. But I ask: where does this peace come from, this peace that establishes itself in recognizing the unconscious tendency, if it is not truer than what constrained it in the conflict?
Is it not also true that this peace has, for some time, shown itself to be an incomplete peace, since not content with having recognized as unconscious the defenses attributed to the ego, psychoanalysts increasingly identify their mechanisms—displacement with respect to the object, reversal against the subject, regression of form—as part of the very dynamic FREUD analyzed in the tendency, which thus seems to continue there, with only a change of sign.
Is it not the height of irony when one admits that the drive itself can be brought to consciousness by defense to prevent the subject from recognizing themselves in it?

I am still using, to translate the exposition of these mysteries into a coherent discourse, words that, despite myself, re-establish the duality that supports them. But it is not that I lament the trees of technical progression obscuring the forest of theory—it is that we are so close to believing we are in the Forest of Bondy, precisely because what slips behind each tree is the question of whether there must be trees truer than others, or, if you will, whether not all trees are bandits. Otherwise, one would ask: where are the bandits that are not trees?

This slight thing, then, on which everything depends in this occasion—perhaps it deserves to be explained? This truth, without which it is no longer possible to discern the face from the mask, and outside of which it seems there is no other monster than the labyrinth itself—what is it? In other words, in what way do they differ among themselves in truth, if they are all equally real?
Here the heavy boots advance to trample on the dove’s feet on which, as we know, truth walks—and perhaps, in passing, to swallow the bird whole: “Our criterion,” they exclaim, “is simply economic, you ideologue.” Not all arrangements of reality are equally economic. But at the point where truth has already flown, the bird escapes and emerges unscathed, along with our question: “Economic for whom?”
This time the matter goes too far. The adversary sneers:

“We see what it is: Monsieur is dabbling in philosophy… Enter Plato and Hegel. These signatures are enough for us. What they endorse belongs in the wastebasket, and even if—as you said—it concerns everyone, it does not interest us specialists. It doesn’t even fit into our documentation.”

You think I am mocking in this speech. Not at all—I agree. If FREUD brought nothing more to the knowledge of man than this truth that there is such a thing as the true, then there is no Freudian discovery.
FREUD would then take his place among the moralists who embody a tradition of humanist analysis, a Milky Way in the sky of European culture where Baltasar GRACIÁN and LA ROCHEFOUCAULD shine as stars of the first magnitude, and NIETZSCHE as a nova, dazzling yet quickly receding into darkness.

Last among them, and no doubt driven by a specifically Christian concern for the authenticity of the soul’s movement, FREUD precipitated an entire casuistry into a map of the tendre, where one has no need for orientation in the purposes it serves.

Psychoanalysis is the science of the mirages that form in this field. A unique experience, ultimately quite abject, but one that cannot be too strongly recommended to those who wish to grasp the principles underlying human madness. For, by demonstrating kinship with an entire spectrum of alienations, it sheds light on them.

This language is measured; I am not the one who invented it. A zealot of so-called classical psychoanalysis once defined it as an experience whose privilege is strictly tied to the forms that regulate its practice—forms that cannot be altered by so much as a line because, obtained by a miracle of chance, they hold the key to a transcendent reality that surpasses historical contingencies. In this reality, the love of order and the appreciation of beauty, for instance, find their permanent foundation—namely, in the objects of the pre-Oedipal relationship: excrement and horns up the backside. This position cannot be refuted because its rules justify themselves by their outcomes, which are held as proof of the rules’ validity. Yet our questions proliferate anew.

How did this extraordinary chance event occur?
Where does this contradiction arise between the pre-Oedipal muddle in which the analytic relationship is now confined by our moderns and the fact that FREUD was never satisfied with it until he had returned it to the Oedipal position?
How can the sort of greenhouse osculation to which this new-look experience confines itself be the final term of a progress that initially seemed to open countless pathways across all fields of creation—or, posed in reverse, if the objects revealed in this elective fermentation were discovered by a method other than experimental psychology, is this discipline authorized to rediscover them by its own means?

The answers we receive from those involved leave no doubt. The driving force of the experience, even when described in their terms, cannot simply be this mirage of truth reduced to the truth of a mirage.
Everything originated from a particular truth, from a revelation that made reality no longer what it was before for us, and this is what continues to anchor the insane cacophony of theory at the heart of human affairs, just as it prevents practice from degrading to the level of those unfortunate souls who cannot find their way out (understand that I use this term to exclude cynics).

A truth, it must be said, is not easy to recognize once it has been accepted. Not that there are no established truths, but they so easily blend with the reality surrounding them that, for a long time, the only artifice found to distinguish them was to mark them with the sign of the spirit and, in paying them homage, to consider them as having come from another world.
It is not enough to attribute to some kind of human blindness the fact that truth is never so radiant as when the light raised by her arm in the proverbial emblem catches her naked.

And one must play the fool a little to pretend to know nothing of what happens afterward. But stupidity remains brazenly honest in asking where one might have sought her before, the emblem scarcely helping to indicate the well—a place improper, even malodorous—rather than the treasure chest where every precious form should be preserved intact.
[Truth lies at the bottom of a well (Democritus)]

THE THING SPEAKS FOR ITSELF.

But here comes truth, and in FREUD’s mouth, she takes the beast by the horns:
“So, I am for you the enigma of the one who disappears as soon as she appears, you who are so eager to conceal me beneath the tatters of your conventions. Nonetheless, I admit that your embarrassment is sincere, for even when you make yourselves my heralds, you are no more worthy to bear my colors than those garments which are yours—garments as ghostly as you yourselves are. Where then have I passed within you? Where was I before this passage? Perhaps one day I shall tell you. But for you to find me where I am, I shall teach you how to recognize me. Men, listen, I give you the secret: I, truth, speak.”

“Should I point out that you did not yet know this? Certainly, a few among you, who took it upon themselves to be my lovers—no doubt following the principle that in such boastful claims, one is never better served than by oneself—had ambiguously asserted, not without the maladroit pride that exposed their self-interest, that the errors of philosophy (understand: their errors) could not persist without my support.
But by persistently embracing these offspring of their thoughts, they eventually found them as insipid as they were vain and returned to mingling with common opinions, following the habits of ancient sages who knew how to put these opinions in their proper place—be they storytellers, advocates, cunning tricksters, or even liars. Yet they also knew where to seek them: at the hearth, in the forum, at the forge, or in the marketplace.

They then realized that by not being my parasites, these opinions seemed to serve me far better—who knows? Perhaps they were my militia, the secret agents of my power. Several cases observed in the game of pigeon vole—sudden transformations of errors into truths, which seemed to owe nothing but to the effect of perseverance—put them on the trail of this discovery.

The discourse of error, its articulation in action, could bear witness to the truth, even against self-evidence itself.”

It was then that one of them attempted to elevate the cunning of reason to the status of an object worthy of study. Unfortunately, he was a professor, and you were all too happy to turn against his words the donkey ears you had been adorned with at school, which since then have been fitted with horns for those among you whose pages are a little stiff. So stick to your vague sense of history and leave the clever ones to build, on the guarantee of my future firm, the global market for lies, the commerce of total war, and the new law of self-criticism.
If reason is as cunning as Hegel said, it will carry out its work just fine without you.

*”But you have neither made obsolete nor indefinite your deadlines concerning me. They are dated from yesterday and before tomorrow. And it matters little whether you rush forward to honor them or to evade them, for in either case, they will seize you from behind. Whether you flee me in deceit or think you can catch up with me in error, I meet you in the misunderstanding against which you have no refuge. Where even the most cautious word stumbles slightly, it is in its treachery that it falters—I declare it now, and from this point on, it will be a little trickier to pretend as if nothing happened, whether in good society or bad.
But there is no need to exhaust yourselves trying to be more vigilant.

Even if the joint jurisdictions of politeness and politics were to decree inadmissible everything that claims to come from me when presented in such an illicit manner, you would not be off the hook so easily, because even the most innocent intention is unsettled when it can no longer deny that its failed acts are its most successful ones and that its failure rewards its most secret desire. Besides, is it not enough to judge your defeat by seeing me first escape from the dungeon of the fortress where you thought you held me most securely—not within you, but within being itself? I wander in what you hold to be the least true by essence: in the dream, in the defiance of the sharpest Gongoric point, in the nonsense of the most grotesque pun, in chance—not in its law but in its contingency. And I never proceed more surely to change the face of the world than by giving it the profile of Cleopatra’s nose.*

“You may therefore reduce traffic along the paths you exhausted yourselves in illuminating with the rays of consciousness, which were once the pride of the ego, crowned by Fichte with the insignia of its transcendence. The long-haul commerce of truth no longer passes through thought: strangely enough, it now seems to pass through things—rebus, it is through you that I communicate, as Freud formulates it at the end of the first paragraph of the sixth chapter devoted to the dream work, his work on dreams, and what dreams mean.

*”But here, pay attention: the difficulty this man had in becoming a professor will perhaps spare him your negligence, if not your confusion,” says Truth. Understand well what he said, and, as he said of me—the Truth who speaks—the best way to grasp it is to take it literally. Undoubtedly, here, things are my signs, but I repeat to you, they are signs of my speech.

Cleopatra’s nose, if it changed the course of the world, did so because it entered discourse, for to change it—whether long or short—it sufficed, but it had to be a speaking nose.

“But now you will have to use your own, though for more natural ends. Let an instinct more certain than all your categories guide you in the race where I provoke you: for if the cunning of reason, however disdainful it may have been of you, remained open to your faith, I—Truth—will be the great deceiver against you, because it is not merely through falsehood that my paths pass, but through the fault line, too narrow to be found in the flaw of pretense, through the inaccessible cloud of the dream, through the unmotivated fascination of the mediocre, and the seductive dead-end of absurdity. Search, you hounds that you have become by hearing me, bloodhounds that Sophocles preferred to unleash on the hermetic traces of Apollo’s thief [Hermes] rather than on the bloodied trail of Oedipus, certain as he was to find, with him, at the sinister meeting point of Colonus, the hour of truth. Enter the arena at my call and howl at my voice.

Already you are lost—I contradict myself, I challenge you, I slip away: you say that I am defending myself.

PARADE.

The return to darkness, which we consider anticipated at this moment, gives the signal for a murder party initiated by forbidding anyone to leave, since, from then on, everyone can hide the truth under their cloak—or even, as in the gallant fiction of “The Indiscreet Jewels” [Diderot], in their belly.

The general question is: “Who is speaking?”—and it is not without relevance. Unfortunately, the answers come a little too hastily. Libido is first accused, which points us in the direction of the jewels, but we must realize that the ego itself, while placing obstacles in the way of libido’s satisfaction, is sometimes the object of its endeavors. At this point, one feels it is about to collapse at any moment when the crash of breaking glass alerts everyone that an accident has just occurred at the grand mirror in the drawing room—the golem of narcissism, hastily summoned to assist, having thereby made its entrance.

The ego is then generally assumed to be the murderer, unless it is considered the victim, whereby the divine rays of the good President SCHREBER begin to spread their net over the world, and the sabbath of instincts grows significantly more complex. The comedy, which I am suspending here at the beginning of its second act, is kinder than one might think, since by casting upon a drama of knowledge the buffoonery that belongs only to those who play it without understanding it, it restores to them the authenticity from which they always fall further.

But if a graver metaphor is appropriate for the protagonist, it is the one that would show us FREUD as an ACTAEON perpetually pursued by hounds, detected from the outset and relentlessly driven to renew the chase, unable to slow the pursuit led solely by his passion for the goddess. A passion that drives him so far that he cannot stop until he reaches the caves where the chthonic DIANA, in the damp shadows that merge them with the emblematic dwelling place of truth, offers to his thirst, along with the smooth surface of death, the almost mystical boundary of the most rational discourse the world has ever known. This is where we recognize the place where the symbol substitutes itself for death to seize the first swelling of life.

This boundary and this place, as we know, are still far from being reached by his disciples—if indeed they do not refuse to follow him there. And so, the ACTAEON who is torn apart here is not FREUD himself, but rather each analyst, according to the measure of the passion that inflamed him and that—following the meaning that Giordano BRUNO drew from this myth in his “Heroic Furies”—has made him the prey of the hounds of his own thoughts.

To grasp this tearing apart, one must hear the irrepressible clamor that rises from the best as well as the worst, trying to call them back to the beginning of the hunt with the words that truth gave us there as provisions for the journey: “I speak,” followed by: “There is no speech except through language.” These words are immediately drowned out by the chorus: “Logomachy!—such is the stanza on one side—What do you make of the pre-verbal, of gesture and mimicry, of tone, of the air of the song, of mood and of affective contact?”

To which others, no less animated, reply with the antistrophe:
“Everything is language: language is my heart beating faster when fright grips me, and if my patient faints at the roar of an airplane at its zenith, it is to speak of the memory she kept of the last bombardment.”
“Yes, eagle of thought, and when the shape of your mechanical semblance appears in the illuminated oval of the night, painted by the beam of the spotlight, it is heaven’s reply.”

Yet no one was disputing, in attempting these premises, the use of any form of communication to which anyone could resort in their endeavors—not signals, not images, neither background nor form, not even if that background were one of sympathy, and the virtue of no good form was ever questioned.

One simply kept repeating, after FREUD, the word of his discovery: “It speaks.” And undoubtedly where it was least expected—there, where it suffers. If there was once a time when it was enough to respond by listening to what it said—for in hearing it, the answer was already there—then let us assume that the great figures of the origins, the giants of the armchair, were struck by the curse promised to titanic audacity, or that their seats ceased to conduct the good word with which they had been invested by sitting there before.

In any case, since then, between the psychoanalyst and psychoanalysis, meetings have multiplied in the hope that the Athenian might encounter ATHENA, emerging fully armed from FREUD’s brain. Shall I mention the jealous fate, always the same, that thwarted these meetings? Beneath the mask where each came forward to meet their counterpart, alas! thrice alas!—and a cry of horror at the thought—another had taken her place, and he who was there was no longer himself either.

Let us therefore calmly return to spelling out, with truth, what it has said about itself. Truth said: “I speak.”
For us to recognize this “I” by the fact that it speaks, perhaps it was not the “I” that we should have seized upon, but rather the edges of speaking where we should have stopped. “There is no speech except through language” reminds us that language is an order constituted by laws, from which we could at least learn what they exclude.

For example:
– that language is different from natural expression and is not a code either;
– that it does not merge with information—you’ll understand this if you study cybernetics;
– and that it is so far from being reducible to a superstructure that even materialism itself was alarmed by this heresy—“bubble” of STALIN to see here.* [Stalin: On Marxism in Linguistics, Pravda, 20-06-50]

If you want to know more, read SAUSSURE. And since a bell tower can sometimes hide even the sun, let me clarify that this is not the signature one encounters in psychoanalysis, but Ferdinand, who can rightly be called the founder of modern linguistics.

THE ORDER OF THE THING.

A psychoanalyst should easily be able to grasp the fundamental distinction between the signifier and the signified and begin to apply it with the two networks they organize in different dimensions.

The first network, that of the signifier, is the synchronic structure of the material of language, in which each element takes on its precise function by being different from the others. This principle of distribution alone governs the function of the elements of language at its various levels, from phonemic oppositional pairs to compound phrases, whose stable forms it is the task of modern research to uncover.

The second network, that of the signified, is the diachronic collection of concretely spoken discourses, which reacts historically upon the first, just as the structure of the first dictates the pathways of the second.
Here, what dominates is the unit of meaning, which proves never to resolve itself into a pure indication of the real but always refers to another meaning. In other words, if meanings grasp things, it is only by constituting their whole by enveloping them in the signifier, and if their weave always covers this whole enough to overflow it, it is because the signifier, in its entirety, signifies nothing. This confirms that language is never a signal but a dialectical movement.

From this point alone, one can notice that any verbal denunciation of disorder participates in the disorder against which it protests, in that disorder has established itself through its discourse. HEGEL, in his dialectic of the beautiful soul, had already shown that this observation is tautological only if one fails to recognize the tauto-ontic effect in which it is rooted. In other words, being is primary to the disorder from which the beautiful soul lives in all the senses (including the economic sense) that one can attribute to the term “from which to live”. And in denouncing disorder, the beautiful soul engages in a mediation of conduct through which it subsists, even though it remains unacknowledged.

This dialectic did not seem able to penetrate beyond the delusion of presumption to which HEGEL applied it—that is, beyond the trap offered by the mirage of consciousness to the “I”, infatuated with its sentiment and assuming it as the “law of the heart.” But precisely, the “I” that HEGEL critiques is a legal being, and as such, it is more concrete than the real being in which one had previously sought to ground it by abstraction, as becomes immediately apparent when one recognizes that this being implies a civil status and an accounting status.

It was left to FREUD to demonstrate that it is within this legal being that certain disorders manifested by man in his real being—that is, in his organism functioning as a totality without any graspable relation between its elements—finally found their counterpart. And he explained the possibility of this by the congenital gap presented by man’s real being in his natural relations, and by the reappropriation, sometimes for ideographic use but also phonetic or even grammatical, of the imaginary elements that appear fragmented within this gap.

The insights that immediately emerged regarding the omnipresence of the symbolic function in the human being made intuitively evident what characterizes the position of the speaking subject in society, or what distinguishes human society from animal societies: namely, that the individual is taken as a unit within a sequence of exchanges, more or less circular (with more or less extended intervals), according to the laws of a combinatory system of gift-giving, whose principle escapes him and which has no immediate, nor even direct, relation—ethnologists seem to tell us—with his needs.

The conflict of order, in any case, is evident within the individual, and given the depth to which the symbolic order penetrates him, it can resonate to limits that are pushed back a little further each day into the organic realm. Psychoanalysis is nothing other than the recognition of the symbolic chain in which these effects are arranged, because it is the only means by which the truth they symbolize can come to be recognized. This does not abolish all conflict but transfers its burden to the subject, who can assert this truth in the struggle. The very terms in which we formulate this goal make it clear that analysis does not lead to an individualistic ethic.

However, its practice in the American sphere has been so crudely reduced to a means of achieving “success” and a mode of demanding “happiness” that it is necessary to specify that this constitutes a betrayal of psychoanalysis. This betrayal results, for too many of its practitioners, from the pure and radical fact that they have never wanted to know anything about Freud’s discovery and never will, not even in the sense of repression: for in this case, it is a mechanism of systematic misrecognition, one that simulates delusion, even in its group forms.
A more rigorous reference of analytic experience to the general structure of the semantics in which it is rooted would nevertheless have allowed them to be convinced before needing to be defeated.

For the subject we were speaking of a moment ago, as the legatee of recognized truth, is precisely not the ego perceived in the more or less immediate givens of conscious enjoyment or laborious alienation. This factual distinction is the same one found in the a of the Freudian unconscious, insofar as it is separated by an abyss from preconscious functions, up to the ω of Freud’s testament in the 31st of his Neue Vorlesungen:

“Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.”
[Preceding the famous last sentence of the 31st lecture: “Es ist Kulturarbeit etwa wie die Trockenlegung der Zuydersee.”]

A dazzling formula in its brevity, so coextensive with the property of the meanings to which it refers, that the signifiers take on the weight of a consecratory utterance. Let us analyze them, then. Contrary to the form that the English translation—“Where the id was, there the ego shall be”—cannot avoid, Freud did not say das Es, nor das Ich, as he usually did to designate these agencies, which he had organized in his new topography for over ten years. Given the inflexible rigor of his style, this choice in their usage in this sentence lends them a particular emphasis.

In any case, without even having to confirm through internal critique of Freud’s work that he did indeed write Das Ich und das Es to maintain this fundamental distinction between the true subject of the unconscious and the ego, constituted at its core by a series of alienating identifications, it becomes clear here that it is at the place: “Wo”, where Es: a subject deprived of any das or other objectifying article, war: “was”. It is a place of being that is at stake, and at this place: soll, a duty in the moral sense is announced there, as confirmed by the single sentence that follows to close the chapter: “Es ist Kulturarbeit etwa wie die Trockenlegung der Zuydersee.”

“Ich”, I, there must I (as it was once said: “this am I” before it was said: “it is I”) werden, become, which means not arise, nor even occur, but come into the light of this very place as a place of being.

Thus, we would consent—against the principles of significant economy that must govern a translation—to slightly force the forms of the signifier in French in order to align them with the weight that German conveys better here, with a meaning still resistant. For this, we might draw on the homophony between the German es and the initial letter of the word subject.
By the same step, we would come to a momentary indulgence for the first translation given of the word es as self. The id, which was later preferred, does not seem much more appropriate to us, since it responds to the das of the German was ist das? in das ist, it is. Thus, the elided “c’” that would appear if we adhered to the conventional equivalence suggests to us the production of a verb: “to be oneself,” where the mode of absolute subjectivity would be expressed, as Freud properly discovered it in its radical eccentricity:

“There where it was, one might say—’There where it had been,’ we would wish it to be understood—it is my duty to come to be.”

You understand well that it is not within a grammatical conception of the functions where I and ego appear that we must analyze whether and how je and moi distinguish and overlap in each particular subject.

What the linguistic conception, which must form the analyst in their foundational initiation, will teach is to expect the symptom to prove its function as a signifier—that is, by what distinguishes it from the natural index, which the same term commonly designates in medicine.

To meet this methodological requirement, the analyst must recognize its conventional usage in the meanings elicited by the analytic dialogue—a dialogue whose structure we will attempt to describe—but even these meanings must be regarded as impossible to grasp with certainty except in their context, in the sequence constituted for each meaning by the one that refers to it and the one to which it refers within the analytic discourse.

These fundamental principles are easily applied in technique, and by illuminating it, they dissipate many of the ambiguities that, by persisting even in the major concepts of transference and resistance, render their use in practice ruinous.

RESISTANCE TO THE RESISTANT.

If we consider only resistance, whose usage increasingly overlaps with defense, and everything it implies in this sense as maneuvers of reduction, we can no longer be blind to the coercion they exert. It is good to recall that the first resistance analysis must confront is that of discourse itself, insofar as it is initially the discourse of opinion, and that any psychological objectification will inevitably be tied to this discourse.

This is indeed what motivated the remarkable simultaneity with which the burghers of analysis reached an impasse in their practice around the 1920s: they knew both too much and too little to make their patients—who knew scarcely less—recognize the truth.

But the principle, adopted from that moment, of granting primacy to the analysis of resistance is far from having led to a favorable development. Because prioritizing an operation does not suffice to achieve its objective if one does not fully understand what that objective is. Yet it was precisely toward a reinforcement of the objectifying position in the subject that the analysis of resistance was directed—to the point that this directive now openly appears in the principles governing the conduct of a standard cure.

Far from needing to keep the subject in a state of observation, we must understand that in engaging them there, we enter a circle of misunderstanding that nothing can break—neither within the cure nor in critique. Any intervention in this direction could only be justified by a dialectical end, namely, to demonstrate its dead-end value.

But I will go further and say: you cannot simultaneously proceed with this objectification of the subject and speak to them as you should. This is not simply because, as the English proverb says, “you cannot eat your cake and have it too”—that is, you cannot adopt two approaches toward the same objects whose consequences mutually exclude one another. Rather, it is for the deeper reason expressed in the maxim “no man can serve two masters”—that is, one cannot align one’s being with two actions oriented in opposite directions.

For objectification in psychology is fundamentally governed by a law of misrecognition, which governs the subject not only as observed but also as observer. This means that it is not of him that you must speak to him, because he is sufficient for this task, and, in doing so, it is not even to you that he speaks.

If you must speak to him, it is literally about something else—that is, something other than what he is referring to when he speaks about himself. It is the thing that speaks to you, a thing that, no matter what he says, would remain forever inaccessible to him if, by being a word addressed to you, it could not evoke in you its response. And if, having heard the message in this inverted form, you could not return it to him, offering him the double satisfaction of having recognized it and of having its truth recognized by him.

This truth that we thus know—can we not truly know it?

“Adæquatio rei et intellectus” (Truth is the adequation of the intellect and the thing —Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica), such has been the definition of the concept of truth since there have been thinkers to lead us along the paths of their thought. An intellect like ours should indeed be up to the task of comprehending this thing that speaks to us—or even speaks within us. And even if it hides behind the discourse that says nothing except to make us speak, it would be remarkable if it failed to find someone to speak to.

This is indeed the grace I wish upon you: to speak of it—for that is now the matter at hand—and the floor belongs to those who put the thing into practice.

INTERLUDE.

Do not expect too much here, for ever since the psychoanalytic thing became an accepted thing, and since its servants now visit the manicurist, the housekeeping they do accommodates sacrifices to good taste. This is rather convenient for ideas, which psychoanalysts have never had in excess. Ideas on sale for all will balance out whatever is missing for each individual.

We are sufficiently well-versed in these matters to know that “thing-ism” is not well regarded, and there you have our ready-made pirouette.

“Why are you looking for anything other than this ego you distinguish, while forbidding us from seeing it?” they retort. “We objectify it, fine. What harm is there in that?”

Here, with stealthy steps, finely polished shoes approach to deliver the following sly kick: “Do you truly believe that the ego can be taken for a thing? We do not eat that kind of bread.”

From thirty-five years of cohabitation with the ego under the roof of Freud’s second topography—ten of them rather stormy—finally regularized by the stewardship of Miss Anna FREUD into a marriage whose social credit has only continued to grow, to the point where I am assured it will soon seek the Church’s blessing—in short, from the most sustained experience of psychoanalysts, you will derive nothing more than this drawer.

It is true that it is filled to the brim with old novelties and new antiquities, whose accumulation is not without a certain amusement: the ego is a function, the ego is a synthesis, a synthesis of functions, a function of synthesis.

It is autonomous! That one is truly rich. It’s the latest fetish introduced into the sanctum sanctorum of practice, legitimized by the superiority of the superior. It serves its purpose just as well as any other in this role, everyone knowing that for this function—one that is entirely real—it is the most outdated, filthy, and repellent object that always does the job best.

If this one earns its inventor the veneration he enjoys wherever it is employed, so be it. But the best part is that it grants him, in enlightened circles, the prestige of having brought psychoanalysis back under the laws of general psychology. It is as if His Excellency the AGA KHAN, not content with receiving the famous weight of gold—which does no harm to his standing in cosmopolitan society—were to be awarded the Nobel Prize for distributing, in return, the detailed regulations of the pari-mutuel betting system to his devotees.

But the latest discovery is the best: the ego, like everything we have been handling lately in the human sciences, is an o-pe-ra-tion-al notion. Here I appeal to my audience, whose naive thing-ism keeps them so well-behaved on these benches, listening to me despite the ballet of service calls, to join me in stopping this o-pe. How does this o-pe rationally distinguish what is done with the notion of the ego in analysis from the common usage of any other thing, such as this lectern, to take the first example that comes to hand?

So little that I am confident I can demonstrate that the discourses concerning them—and that is what is at stake—coincide point by point. For this lectern, no less than the ego, is dependent on the signifier, that is, the word which, by assigning its function in general, allows it to stand by the quarrelsome pulpit of memory and the noble pedigree of the TRONCHIN furniture. This means it is not merely wood felled, carpentered, and glued back together by a cabinetmaker, intended for commerce tied to the fashion cycles of needs creation, which support its exchange value under the condition of a careful balance that does not too quickly lead it to satisfy the least superfluous of those needs in its final use dictated by wear and tear: namely, as firewood.

On the other hand, the meanings to which the lectern refers yield nothing in dignity to those the ego concerns itself with. The proof is that they occasionally envelop the ego itself, if it is through the functions that Mr. Heinz HARTMANN attributes to it that one of our fellows can become our lectern: namely, by maintaining a proper position with a more or less deliberate intention. An operational function, undoubtedly, which will allow said fellow to scale within himself all the possible values of the thing that is this lectern: from the costly rental that kept and still maintains the reputation of “the little hunchback of Quincampoix Street” [sic, cf. Paul Féval: Le Bossu], above the vicissitudes and even the memory of the first great speculative crash of modern times, descending through all the services of practical convenience, spatial furnishing, commercial transfer, or usufruct, down to the use—and why not? It has been seen before—of fuel.

That’s not all, for I am ready to lend my voice to the real lectern so that it might deliver a discourse on its existence, which—utensil though it is—is individual; on its history, which, however radically alienated it may seem to us, has left documentary traces with nothing lacking for what the historian requires: documents, texts, supplier notes; on its destiny itself, which, however inert it may be, is dramatic, since a lectern is perishable, it was born of labor, it has a fate subject to chance, misfortune, adventures, prestige, even fatality, of which it becomes the inter-sign, and it is promised an end of which it needs to know nothing for it to be its own, since it is an end that is already known.

But there would still be nothing extraordinary if, after this prosopopoeia, one of you were to dream that he is this lectern, endowed or not with speech. And since the interpretation of dreams is now a known—if not commonplace—practice, it would not be surprising if, upon deciphering the signifier role that this lectern has taken in the rebus in which the dreamer has enclosed his desire, and upon analyzing the more or less equivocal reference that this use entails for the meanings his awareness of this lectern has concerned itself with, with or without its discourse, we were to reach what one might call the preconscious of this lectern.

Here I hear a protest, which, although it is as neatly arranged as sheet music, I do not quite know how to name. For, to tell the truth, it belongs to something that has no name in any language, something that generally announces itself under the black-and-white motion of total personality, summarizing everything that deafens us in psychiatry with pseudo-phenomenology and in society with stationary progressivism. A protest of the beautiful soul, no doubt, but in forms appropriate to that being who is neither flesh nor fish, with an air half-fig and half-grape, walking the twilight line between dog and wolf—the modern intellectual, whether of the right or the left. Indeed, it is from this side that the fictitious protest of those who arise from disorder finds its noble kinships.

Let us rather listen to its tone. The tone is measured but grave: the preconscious, no more than consciousness, we are told, does not belong to the lectern but to ourselves, who perceive it and give it its meaning with all the less difficulty since, after all, we made the thing. But even had it been a more natural being, we must never carelessly reduce, within consciousness, the higher form which—whatever our weakness in the universe—assures us an inalienable dignity (see “reed” in the dictionary of spiritualist thought).

It must be acknowledged that here FREUD incites me to irreverence by the way, somewhere in passing and as if in jest, he speaks about the modes of spontaneous provocation that are standard in activating universal consciousness. And this removes any discomfort I might feel in pursuing my paradox. Is the difference between the lectern and us, with regard to consciousness, really so great, if it so easily acquires its appearance when placed between me and you, to the point that my sentences have allowed such confusion? Thus, when placed with one of us between two parallel mirrors, it will be seen reflected endlessly, which means that it will resemble the observer far more than one might think. For seeing its image repeat itself in the same way, the observer, too, sees himself through another’s eyes when he looks at himself; for without that other—that image—he would not see himself seeing himself.

In other words, the ego’s privilege over things must be sought elsewhere than in this false infinite recurrence of reflection, which constitutes the mirage of consciousness. Despite its utter emptiness, it still excites those who deal in thought enough for them to see in it some supposed progress of interiority, when in fact it is a topological phenomenon whose distribution in nature is as sporadic as the purely external arrangements that condition it—assuming that humanity has not spread them with an immoderate frequency.

How, on the other hand, can we exclude the term preconscious from the attachments of this lectern, or from those that exist potentially or actively in any other object, which, by adjusting themselves so precisely to my affections, will come to consciousness along with them? That the ego is the seat of perceptions and not the lectern, we willingly accept, but in doing so, it reflects the essence of the objects it perceives, not its own essence, as if consciousness were its privilege—since these perceptions are, for the most part, unconscious.

It is not without reason, moreover, that we trace the origin of the protest we must address here to these bastard forms of phenomenology, which cloud technical analyses of human action, especially those required in medicine. If their cheap material (to use a term that JASPERS himself specifically applies in his assessment of psychoanalysis) gives his work its style, as well as weight to his statue as a director of conscience in cast iron and a master thinker in tinplate, they are not without their use—and indeed, it is always the same use: to create diversion.

For example, it is employed here to avoid confronting the fact that the lectern does not speak—a fact that the proponents of false protest refuse to acknowledge because, in conceding this to me, their lectern would immediately become a speaking lectern.

THE DISCOURSE OF THE OTHER.

“How, then, does the ‘ego’ you treat in analysis prevail over the lectern that I am?” it might ask them.

For if its health is defined by its adaptation to a reality considered uniformly to be proportional to it, and if you must ally yourselves with “the healthy part of the ego” to reduce, in the other part presumably, discordances with reality—discordances that appear such only because of your principle of considering the analytic situation as simple and harmless, and which you will not rest until you have made the subject see them through your own eyes—isn’t it clear that there is no other discrimination of the healthy part of the subject’s ego than its agreement with your viewpoint? And this viewpoint, assumed to be healthy, becomes the measure of things, just as there is no other criterion for cure than the subject’s complete adoption of this measure, which is your own.

This is confirmed by the frequent admission among serious authors that the end of analysis is achieved with the subject’s identification with the analyst’s ego.

Certainly, the conception that spreads itself so calmly, and the reception it meets with, leads one to think that, contrary to the cliché that the gullible are imposed upon, it is even easier for the gullible to impose upon others.

And the hypocrisy revealed in the declaration—whose repentance appears with such curious regularity in this discourse—that one must “speak the subject’s language” offers even more to reflect on regarding the depth of this naivety.

One must also overcome the disgust evoked by the suggestion of “baby talk”, without which well-meaning parents would not believe themselves able to guide their little ones with their lofty reasoning—a reasoning that must, after all, keep them quiet! Simple courtesies, supposedly owed to what analytical idiocy projects into the notion of “the weakness of the ego” in neurotics.

But we are not here to dream between nausea and vertigo. It remains true that, lectern though I may be as I speak to you, I am the ideal patient, since there is not so much effort to be made with me—the results are achieved at once; I am cured in advance. Since it is only a matter of substituting your discourse for mine, I am a perfect ego, as I have never had another and I rely on you to inform me about those things to which my adjustment mechanisms cannot directly adapt me—namely, all those that are not your diopters, your stature, and the dimensions of your papers.

That, it seems to me, is rather well-spoken for a lectern. Undoubtedly, I mean to amuse myself. In what it said, in my opinion, it had no say. For the reason that it itself was a word, it was me in the sense of a grammatical subject.
Look at that—a rank gained, and ready to be picked up by the occasional soldier from the ditch of a purely eristic claim, but also to provide us with an illustration of Freud’s motto, which, when expressed as: “Where it was, there I must become,” would confirm for our benefit the weakness of the translation that reifies the Ich by passing a t into the must of soll and fixes the course of S at the rate of a C-cedilla A. [See “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.”]

The fact remains that the lectern is not an ego, no matter how eloquent it may have been, but rather a means within my discourse.
But after all, when considering its virtue in analysis, the ego too is a means, and we can compare them.
As the lectern pertinently remarked, it has the advantage over the ego of not being a means of resistance. And it is precisely for this reason that I chose it to support my discourse and thereby lighten the resistance that greater interference from my ego in Freud’s speech might have provoked in you. I would already be satisfied if what remains with you despite this erasure leads you to find what I say “interesting”.
This phrase, whose euphemism is not without reason, designates what moderately interests us and completes its loop in its antithesis, whereby “disinterested” is used to refer to speculations of universal interest.

But let us see if what I say comes to interest you—as one says, redundantly filling the antonomasia—personally, the lectern will soon be in pieces, serving us as a weapon. Well! All this also applies to the ego, except that its uses appear reversed in relation to its states.

A means of addressing you with the unconscious speech of the subject, a weapon for resisting its recognition, it carries speech fragmented, and it serves, whole, to not hear it.

It is indeed in the disintegration of the imaginary unity that constitutes the ego that the subject finds the signifying material of his symptoms.

And it is from the kind of interest the ego awakens in him that come the meanings that divert his discourse.

THE IMAGINARY PASSION

This interest of the ego is a passion whose nature had already been glimpsed by the line of moralists, who called it “self-love,” but whose dynamics have only been analyzed by psychoanalytic investigation in its relation to the image of one’s own body. This passion imparts to every relationship with this image—constantly represented by my fellow man—a significance that interests me so intensely, that is, that makes me so dependent on this image, that it binds all the objects of my desires to the desire of the other more closely than to the desire they themselves arouse in me.

It concerns the objects insofar as we expect their appearance in a space structured by vision—that is, the characteristic objects of the human world. As for the knowledge on which the desire for these objects depends, human beings are far from confirming the saying that they cannot see beyond the end of their nose. On the contrary, their misfortune is that it is precisely at the end of their nose that their world begins, and that they can only apprehend their desire through the same medium that allows them to see their nose itself—namely, in a mirror.

But as soon as they discern that nose, they fall in love with it, and this is the first meaning through which narcissism envelops the forms of desire.

This is not the only one, and the rising prominence of aggressiveness at the forefront of analytic concerns would remain obscure if we stopped here.

This is a point that I believe I have contributed to clarifying by conceiving the dynamics known as the mirror stage as a consequence of a premature birth, generic to humans, which results, at the appointed time, in the jubilant identification of the still-infant individual with the total form into which this reflection of the nose integrates itself—namely, the image of his body.

This operation—achieved by sight, so to speak (and rightly so)—is roughly equivalent to the “aha!” moment that illuminates us about the intelligence of a chimpanzee, a miracle that still fills us with wonder when we detect it on the faces of our peers. However, this operation does not fail to bring with it a regrettable aftermath.

As a sharp-witted poet aptly remarks: “The mirror would do well to reflect a little more before sending back our image.” [Jean Cocteau, Le Sang d’un poète] For at this moment, the subject has seen nothing yet. But if the same capture occurs in front of the nose of one of his peers—the nose of a notary, for example—God knows where the subject will be led by the nose, considering the places where these ministerial officers are accustomed to sticking theirs.

Furthermore, everything we have left—hands, feet, heart, mouth, even the eyes that hesitate to follow—faces an imminent rupture of alignment, whose announcement in the form of anxiety can only lead to drastic measures. Rallying!—that is, a call to the power of that ego image whose honeymoon with the mirror brought jubilation, to that sacred union of right and left that asserts itself there, however inverted it may appear if the subject happens to inspect it more closely.

But what better model of this union than the image of the other itself, that is, of the notary in his role? It is thus that the functions of mastery, improperly referred to as “functions of ego synthesis,” establish, on the foundation of a libidinal alienation, the development that follows, namely what we once called the paranoiac principle of human knowledge, according to which its objects are subject to a law of imaginary reduplication, evoking the homologation of an indefinite series of notaries, owed not at all to their professional association.

But the decisive meaning for us of the constitutive alienation of the Urbild of the ego appears in the relation of exclusion that henceforth structures, within the subject, the dual relationship of ego to ego. For if the imaginary coaptation of one to the other should distribute roles complementarily—between the notary and the notarized, for example—the subject’s precipitate identification of the ego with the other results in a distribution that never constitutes even a kinetic harmony but instead establishes itself on the perpetual “you or me” of a war in which the existence of one or the other of the two notaries within each subject is at stake.

This situation is symbolized in the “You are another” of the transitivist quarrel, the original form of aggressive communication. [Cf. “The Quarrel of Images”]

We can see what the language of the ego is reduced to: intuitive illumination, recollective command, retaliatory aggressiveness of verbal echo. To this, we can add what falls to it from the automatic debris of common speech: educational repetition and delirious refrains—modes of communication that can be perfectly reproduced by objects barely more complicated than this lectern: a feedback mechanism for the former and a gramophone record, preferably scratched in just the right spot, for the latter.

Yet, it is within this register that the systematic analysis of defense claims to sustain itself, provided it remains coherent with its principles.

One grasps the structure that opposes any resolution to such analysis, even if forced. This is why the strict analysis of object relations leads either into reality through an acting-out that signals resistance to suggestion, or into transient paranoia through the kind of megalomaniacal intoxication that our friend Michael BALINT—whose pen, so friendly to truth, makes him all the more our friend—describes as the indicator of the termination of analysis, or into the psychosomatic symptom through a hypochondria where the laws of Kleinian phantasmatic dynamics are revisited.

The theory of a two-ego analysis can, therefore, only account for its own results insofar as it remains untenable.

ANALYTIC ACTION

This is why we teach that there are not merely two subjects present in the analytic situation but two subjects, each endowed with two objects: the ego and the other, the latter being indexed by a lowercase a.

Now, due to the peculiarities of a dialectical mathematics with which we must become familiar, their union in the pair of subjects S and A consists, in total, of only four terms. This is because the relation of exclusion that operates between a and a’ reduces the two pairs thus noted to a single one in the confrontation of the subjects.

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In this fourfold dynamic, the analyst will act on the significant resistances that weigh down, slow, and deflect speech, bringing into the quartet the primordial sign of exclusion connoting the “either-or” of presence or absence [1,0], which formally reveals the death included in narcissistic Bildung (education).

Let us note in passing that this sign is missing in the algorithmic apparatus of modern logic, which calls itself symbolic, demonstrating thereby the dialectical insufficiency that still renders it incapable of formalizing the human sciences.

This means that the analyst intervenes concretely in the dialectic of analysis by “playing dead,” by cadaverizing his position, as the Chinese say—either through his silence, where he is the Other with a capital A, or by annulling his own resistance, where he is the other with a lowercase a.

In both cases, and under the respective incidences of the symbolic and the imaginary, he presents death. Yet it is necessary for him to recognize and therefore distinguish his action in each of these two registers, to know why he intervenes, when the opportunity presents itself, and how to act. The primary condition is that he must be deeply aware of the radical difference between the Other to whom his speech must be addressed and this second other—the one he sees and by whom and through whom the first speaks to him in the discourse that unfolds before him. For it is in this way that he will know how to be the one to whom this discourse is addressed.

The allegory of my lectern and the common practice of the discourse of conviction will show him well enough, if he reflects upon it, that no discourse—regardless of the inertia on which it relies or the passion to which it appeals—ever addresses itself to anyone other than the attentive listener to whom it brings its salvation.

What is called the ad hominem argument itself is regarded, by those who employ it, as nothing more than a seduction intended to secure from the other, in their authenticity, the acceptance of a speech—a speech that constitutes, between the two subjects, a pact, whether acknowledged or not, but which, in either case, lies beyond the reasoning of the argument.

Ordinarily, everyone knows that others, just like themselves, will remain inaccessible to the constraints of reason unless there is a principled acceptance of a rule of debate, one that cannot exist without an explicit or implicit agreement about what is called its foundation. This almost always amounts to a pre-agreed consensus on its stakes.

What is called logic or law is never anything more than a body of rules laboriously adjusted at a duly dated moment in history and stamped with an origin seal—whether that be an agora, a forum, a church, or even a party.

I will therefore expect nothing from these rules except the good faith of the Other, and as a last resort, I will use them—if I judge it appropriate or am compelled to do so—only to entertain bad faith.

THE PLACE OF SPEECH

The Other is therefore the place where the “I” is constituted—the “I” who speaks with the one who hears, where what one says was already the response, and the other decides, in hearing it, whether or not the one has spoken. But, in return, this place extends as far into the subject as the laws of speech reign there—that is, far beyond the discourse that takes from the ego its orders of command, ever since FREUD discovered the unconscious field and the laws that structure it.

It is not because of some mystery of the indestructibility of certain infantile desires that these laws of the unconscious determine analyzable symptoms. The imaginary molding of the subject by their desires—fixed or regressed to varying degrees in their relation to the object—is insufficient and partial to provide the key.

The repetitive insistence of these desires in transference and their permanent recollection in a signifier seized by repression—in which the repressed returns—finds its necessary and sufficient reason if one admits that the desire for recognition dominates, in these determinations, the desire that is to be recognized, maintaining it as such until it is indeed recognized.

The laws of recollection and of symbolic recognition are, in fact, essentially and manifestly different from the laws of imaginary reminiscence—that is, from the echo of feeling or the instinctual imprint (Prägung)—even if the elements ordered as signifiers by the former are borrowed from the material to which the latter gives meaning.

To grasp the nature of symbolic memory, it is enough to have once studied, as I have had done in my seminar, the simplest symbolic sequence: that of a linear series of signs connoting the alternative of presence or absence, each being randomly chosen, regardless of whether one proceeds in a pure or impure mode.

If one then applies the simplest elaboration to this series—marking the ternary sequences into a new series—syntaxic laws will emerge, imposing on each term certain exclusions of possibility until the compensations required by their antecedents are resolved. [See Seminar on “The Purloined Letter,” Introduction]

. . 1 2 3 3 2 2 3 3 2 2 2 1 2 3 2 1 1
. . . . α δ β β δ δ β β γ δ γ α γ α δ

At the heart of this determination of symbolic law, FREUD immediately positioned himself through his discovery. For in this unconscious, about which he repeatedly tells us has nothing to do with anything previously designated by that name, he recognized the agency of the laws upon which alliance and kinship are founded, establishing, as early as The Interpretation of Dreams, the Oedipus complex as its central motivation.

And it is this that now allows me to tell you why the motifs of the unconscious are limited—a point on which FREUD declared himself from the start and never wavered—to sexual desire.

It is indeed essentially on sexual connection, and by aligning it with the law of preferential alliances and forbidden relationships, that the first combinatory system of women exchanged between nominal lineages finds its foundation, in order to develop into an exchange of gratuitous goods and an exchange of key words—the fundamental commerce and concrete discourse that support human societies.

The concrete field of individual preservation, on the other hand, through its connections not to the division of labor but rather to the division of enjoyment and labor, already evident from the first transformation that introduced a human significance into nourishment, up to the most advanced forms of the production of consumable goods, clearly shows that it is structured within that master-slave dialectic, where we can recognize the symbolic emergence of the imaginary life-or-death struggle in which we earlier defined the essential structure of the ego. It is therefore no surprise that this field reflects itself exclusively therein.

In other words, this explains why the other great generic desire, that of hunger, is not represented—as FREUD always maintained—in what the unconscious preserves in order to make it recognized. In this way, the intention of FREUD becomes ever clearer to those who do not content themselves with mechanically repeating his text. At the moment when he introduced the topology of the ego, his goal was to restore with rigor the separation—even in their unconscious interference—between the field of the ego and that of the unconscious, which he first discovered, by demonstrating the crosswise position of the ego relative to the unconscious. The ego resists recognition through the incidence of its own meanings within speech.

It is precisely here that lies the contrast between the meanings of guilt, whose discovery in the subject’s actions dominated the first phase of the history of analysis, and the meanings of affective frustration, instinctual deficiency, and imaginary dependence of the subject, which dominate its current phase.

That the prevalence of the latter meanings, as they are now consolidating with the forgetting of the former, promises us a propaedeutic of generalized infantilization—this is putting it mildly—when psychoanalysis already allows itself, on principle, to authorize large-scale practices of social mystification.

SYMBOLIC DEBT

Will our action, then, repress the very truth it carries in its exercise? Will it return this truth to slumber, a truth that FREUD, in the passion of The Rat Man, would forever keep available for our recognition—even if we were increasingly to turn our vigilance away from it? Namely, the truth that it is from forfeitures and false oaths, broken promises and empty words, that the constellation governing a man’s birth was assembled; that it is The Stone Guest—kneaded, as it were—who comes to disturb the banquet of his desires through his symptoms.

For the sour grape of speech, by which a child receives too early from a father the authentication of the nothingness of existence, and the cluster of anger that responds to the words of false hope with which his mother misled him while nourishing him with the milk of her true despair, irritate his teeth far more than having been weaned from an imaginary enjoyment or even deprived of certain real care.

Will we extract ourselves from the symbolic game in which real fault pays the price of imaginary temptation? Will we divert our study from what happens to the law when, having been intolerable to a subject’s fidelity, it was misrecognized by him already when it was still unknown, and from the imperative which, having been presented in imposture, is rejected by him even before it is discerned? In other words, from the springs that, in the broken mesh of the symbolic chain, give rise from the imaginary to that obscene and ferocious figure in which one must see the true meaning of the superego?

Let it be understood here that our critique of analysis, which claims to be that of resistance and is increasingly reduced to the mobilization of defenses, focuses only on the fact that it is as disoriented in its practice as in its principles, aiming to bring it back to the order of its legitimate ends. The dual complicities in which it engages, in pursuit of happiness and success, can only gain value in our eyes from the minimal resistance of the meanings that involve the ego in these effects, to the speech that reveals itself at a given moment in analysis.

We believe it is in the avowal of this speech, whose transference is its enigmatic actualization, that analysis must rediscover its center and its gravity. And let no one imagine from our earlier remarks that we conceive of this speech under some mystical mode evocative of karma.

For what strikes us in the pathetic drama of neurosis are the absurd aspects of a bewildered symbolization, whose misunderstanding, the deeper one penetrates it, appears all the more derisory. Adæquatio rei et intellectus: the homonymic enigma that we can draw from the genitive rei, which, without even changing its accent, can also be that of the word reus, meaning “the party at issue in a trial,” particularly the accused, and metaphorically, “the one in debt for something,” surprises us by ultimately providing the formula for the singular adequation we posed as a question for our intellect, and which finds its answer in the symbolic debt for which the subject is responsible as a subject of speech.

THE TRAINING OF FUTURE ANALYSTS

Thus, it is to the structures of language, so evidently recognizable in the primarily discovered mechanisms of the unconscious, that we will return to resume our analysis of the modes by which speech can recover the debt it generates. That the history of language and institutions, along with the resonances—attested or not in memory—of literature and the meanings implied in works of art, are necessary for an understanding of the text of our experience is a fact so massively testified by FREUD, from whom he drew his inspiration, his methods of thought, and his technical tools, that one can grasp it merely by flipping through the pages of his work.

However, he did not deem it superfluous to make this a condition for any institution of psychoanalytic teaching.
That this condition has been neglected, even in the selection of analysts, cannot be unrelated to the results we now observe, and it indicates that it is only by technically articulating these requirements that we can hope to meet them.

It is through an initiation into the methods of the linguist, the historian, and—I will say—the mathematician that we must now prepare a new generation of practitioners and researchers to recover the sense of the Freudian experience and its driving force. In doing so, they will also safeguard themselves against the psychosociological objectification, where the psychoanalyst, in his uncertainties, seeks the substance of what he does. Yet this approach can offer only an inadequate abstraction, in which his practice becomes mired and dissolves.

This reform will be an institutional undertaking, for it can only be sustained by constant communication with disciplines that would define themselves as the sciences of intersubjectivity, or perhaps under the term “conjectural sciences”—a term I suggest for those capable of recognizing the emerging order of research currently restructuring the human sciences.

But it is also an undertaking that only genuine teaching—that is, teaching constantly renewed by its inspiration—will maintain on course, for it must govern itself from within the very experience it seeks to regulate. From this experience arises the harvest of compelling facts that draw us back to more or less latent modes of “magical thinking.”

It is not I who insist on this point, nor am I the one who uses this term. Rather, let us say: it concerns ensuring that the thoughts of power, which stalk us in every action, do not devour its measure, a measure here more tightly bound than in any other to truth.

It is to this measure of truth that FREUD refers when he declares the impossibility of the three great wagers, which he lists as follows:

• educating children,
• governing men,
• and assisting them, as is our task, in a self-recognition they can only find on the margins of themselves, since it is there that truth speaks, as discovered by FREUD.

For truth is revealed there as:

• complex by essence,
• humble in its offices,
• foreign to reality,
• unsubmissive to sexual choice,
• kindred to death,
• and, all things considered, rather inhuman.

DIANA perhaps… ACTAEON, too guilty in pursuing the goddess, prey to the shadow you become, let the pack run without hastening your step; DIANA will recognize the hounds by their worth…