🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

The other day, we had a critically ill patient, a clinical case that I certainly did not choose, but one that was extremely interesting because it openly demonstrated the relationship of the unconscious and its difficulty in transitioning into analytic discourse. It demonstrated this openly because, due to exceptional circumstances, everything that in another comparable subject could have been integrated into the mechanism of repression was, in this case, supported by another language.

A language of quite limited scope, referred to as a dialect—namely, the Corsican dialect—had functioned for him under extremely particular conditions, effectively forcing the function of particularization inherent to the dialect. That is to say, since childhood, he had lived in Paris as an only child with a father and a mother, two figures extraordinarily enclosed within their own laws. He had lived with these two parental figures, confined to the exclusive use of the Corsican dialect.

Extraordinary things had happened between these two parental figures, specifically constant ambivalent expressions of their extreme attachment and their fear of allowing “the woman,” referred to as the foreign object, to intrude. These quarrels were conducted openly, directly plunging him into the most intimate aspects of his parents’ marital life. Yet, all of this unfolded in the Corsican dialect.

Nothing that happened in the household was conceivable outside the Corsican dialect. There were two worlds: the world of the elite, that of the Corsican dialect, and then what happened outside, which belonged to another register. The separation between the two was still present in the subject’s life, as he recounted to us the distinction in his relationships with the world: between the moments when he was facing “it” and the moments when he walked down the street. What resulted from this?

This is the most demonstrative case. Two things resulted:

– One thing became apparent during the questioning: the subject’s difficulty in recalling anything from the old register—that is, purely and simply expressing it in the dialect of his childhood, which was still the only language he spoke with his mother. He explicitly told us: “To the extent that you speak to me [in French], I cannot bring it out.” This was precisely what I was asking of him: to express himself in the Corsican dialect, to repeat to me the words he had exchanged with his father.

– But on the other hand, a neurosis was observable in him. There were traces of behavior that revealed what could properly be called a regressive mechanism—a term I always use with caution. We could see how, in a certain peculiar practice of his genitality, it was, on the imaginative plane, also clearly visible as a sort of regressive activity of excretory functions.

Yet, on the other hand, everything that would usually be repressed—that is, expressed through the symptoms of neurosis—was perfectly present and required no effort on my part. It expressed itself all the more easily because it was supported by the other language.

I have made this comparison to the exercise of censorship on a newspaper, not only with an extremely limited circulation but also in a language, a dialect, comprehensible to an arch-minimal number of people. The function of language as such—that is, the intervention of common discourse, the establishment of shared discourse, and I might almost say public discourse—within the subject is a significant factor in the proper function of the repression mechanism, which in itself stems from the impossibility of reconciling certain past elements of the subject’s speech tied to certain functions, particularly primary ones.

The speech linked to the unique world of their infantile relationships, as FREUD emphasized, cannot pass into common discourse. Yet it continues to operate within the field of recognition; it continues to function as speech in this distinct primitive language already available to the subject. This was distinct from the Corsican dialect in which he could say the most extraordinary things, such as telling his father: “If you don’t leave, I’m going to throw you into trouble.”

All the things that would have been the same in a neurotic subject, who would have had to construct their neurosis differently, were visible here, provided he remained within the register of his other language, which was not only dialectal but intra-familial.

What is repression for the neurotic? It is the construction of this other language through their symptoms—that is, for the hysteric or the obsessive, through the imaginary dialectic between themselves and the other.

You can see, then, that the neurotic symptom in its construction plays the role of the language that permits the expression of repression. This indeed allows us to grasp that repression and the return of the repressed are one and the same thing, the obverse and reverse of the same process.

This is not entirely unrelated to our problem because, as you know from the point we had reached, what will our method be regarding President SCHREBER? It is indeed to observe in a discourse that is not without participating in common discourse—since, as you will see today, it is within common discourse that he expresses himself to explain to us what happened to him and what still persists—a mode of relation to the world that we consider real.

And understand well that the analysis concerns his discourse itself, insofar as it testifies to transformations that undoubtedly pertain to reality as we call it—a reality that not only testifies within him but also through his testimony and in the actual structure. This testimony, of course, provides structural modifications, and this attestation, where the verbal dominates, is decisive since it is through the subject’s written testimony that we have our proof.

It is from the moment we understand the importance of speech in the structuring of psychoneurotic symptoms that we proceed methodically:
– we do not say that psychosis has the same etiology as neurosis,
– we do not even say that it is, like neurosis, a pure and simple fact of language—far from it,
but we know that psychosis, in the mode in which it can express itself in discourse, is highly fertile.

We have proof of this in the document left to us by President SCHREBER, which—having drawn our attention, as well as Freud’s almost fascinated attention—demonstrates to us, through internal analysis based on these testimonies, this structured world.

We wonder how far we will be able to go into the subject’s discourse and what will allow us to define and approach the constitutive mechanisms of psychosis. Understand well that at every moment, you must maintain a step-by-step methodological approach, avoiding jumping over the contours by seeing, in a superficial manner, the analogy with a neurosis mechanism. How many examples I could give you…
This has ultimately been done in the literature, particularly by an author, KATAN, who has taken a specific interest in the SCHREBER case.

It is taken as established that the central point of conflict in which President SCHREBER would have engaged not only all his strength and all his investments but would have gone so far as to subvert reality—
that is, after a brief period of the twilight of the world, he would have gone so far as to reconstruct an entirely new unreal world in which he would not have had to yield to this masturbation considered so threatening—
is in some way located in the struggle against threatening masturbation, triggered by erotic and homosexual investments that would have manifested themselves between SCHREBER and the figure who formed both the prototype and the nucleus of his persecutory system, namely Professor FLECHSIG.

Doesn’t everyone sense that the mechanism of such a struggle, if it operates at a certain point of articulation in neuroses, is something whose results would be truly disproportionate?
Isn’t it, on the contrary, apparent that when President SCHREBER gives us a very clear account of the antecedents, the early phases of his psychosis, when he attests that between the first psychotic outbreak—the so-called “pre-psychotic” phase, not without some justification—and the gradual establishment of the psychotic phase, at the peak stabilization of which he wrote his book, there emerges a fantasy:

“It would be a beautiful thing…”
he says, a thought that surprises him, whose indignant nature he emphasizes, and yet with which this thought is greeted.
…”It would be a beautiful thing to be a woman subjected to coupling,” “It must indeed be beautiful to be a woman subjected to coupling.”

Do we not have the feeling that there is here a kind of moral conflict? We are confronted with phenomena that have been too often forgotten in psychoanalysis in recent times because the term is no longer used, and therefore things are no longer categorized correctly. It is a phenomenon of the order of what FREUD introduces into the dynamics of the dream and which holds such importance in The Interpretation of Dreams: a preconscious phenomenon.

Far from distinguishing in this a conflict between the id and the ego, one has much more the feeling that it is something that at least originates from the ego. The emphasis placed on “It would be beautiful…” indeed has the nature of a seductive thought that the ego is far from ignoring.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, in a passage I will read to you, located within the critique of punishment dreams, FREUD very precisely admits that at the same level where unconscious desires intervene in the dream, he admits that, in a well-defined, well-limited manner—much rarer than these dreams referred to as “punishment dreams”—we are dealing with another mechanism, generally speaking:

“The mechanism of formation becomes much more transparent when one substitutes the opposition of the conscious and the unconscious with that of the ego and the repressed.”

This was written at the time of The Interpretation of Dreams, at a moment when the notion of the ego was not yet fully mastered, but you can already see that it was present in FREUD’s thinking.

“Let us note here only that punishment dreams are not necessarily linked to the persistence of distressing remnants of the day. On the contrary, they seem to arise most easily when these remnants are of a soothing nature but express forbidden satisfactions. All these forbidden thoughts are then replaced in the manifest content of the dream by their opposite…
The essential character of punishment dreams, therefore, seems to me to be this: what produces them is not an unconscious wish arising from the repressed…but a wish of contrary meaning, reacting against it, a wish for punishment which, although unconscious (more precisely, preconscious), belongs to the ego.” (PUF 1950 p. 458, PUF 1967 p. 475, PUF 2004 p. 612)

[Ich bemerke nur, daß die Strafträume nicht allgemein an die Bedingung peinlicher Tagesreste geknüpft sind. Sie entstehen vielmehr am leichtesten unter der gegensätzlichen Voraussetzung, daß die Tagesreste Gedanken befriedigender Natur sind, die aber unerlaubte Befriedigungen ausdrücken. Von diesen Gedanken gelangt dann nichts in den manifesten Traum als ihr direkter Gegensatz, ähnlich wie es in den Träumen der Gruppe a der Fall war. Der wesentliche Charakter der Strafträume bliebe also, daß bei ihnen nicht der unbewußte Wunsch aus dem Verdrängten (dem System Ubw) zum Traumbildner wird, sondern der gegen ihn reagierende, dem Ich angehörige, wenn auch unbewußte (d. h. vorbewußte) Strafwünsch.]

I believe that all those who follow the path I am gradually leading you along, drawing your attention to the distinct mechanism emerging at every moment in FREUD’s discourse, distinguish this from Verneinung.

You find once again that it is in the sense of the distinction between something that has been symbolized and something that has not been that we are led, regarding the incidence revealing the possibility of the appearance, at the very onset of the illness, within the ego—and, I repeat, in a non-conflictual manner—that “It would be beautiful to be a woman subjected to coupling” reveals this first emergence of something very much within the ego.

What is the relationship of this with the development of a delusion that will very precisely lead President SCHREBER to conceive that man would, so to speak, be “God’s permanent woman”? For this is where the delusion ultimately blossoms at its completed stage.

Bringing these two terms together:
– this initial emergence of the thought that crossed SCHREBER during the apparently healthy first interval of his process,
– this and the terminal state, the establishment of a delusion that motivates and situates him before an omnipotent figure with whom he maintains permanent erotic relations, as a completely feminized being—psychically, as much as his discourse can express it—a woman, as he says.

I would say that the relationship is not too simple for us not to see it clearly, but it is not, for all that, resolved.

It is clear that a fleeting thought, the glimpse of something that undoubtedly, legitimately appears to us as something that deserves our attention, requires us to pause at the stages, the steps, the crises that can transform such a fleeting thought into the establishment of a discourse and behavior as delusional as his.
But it is in this sense that the question arises—in the sense of analyzing mechanisms that are not, or at least are not said in advance to be, homogeneous with the mechanisms we usually deal with in neuroses, namely the mechanism of repression, which is itself entirely structured as a phenomenon of language.

What I am beginning to show you is that we are confronted here, with the paranoiac, with the psychotic that SCHREBER is, with a question that is perhaps: whether another specifically imaginary mechanism dominates the mechanism of psychosis, one that goes:
– from this first glimpse of an identification with himself, a first capture of himself in the feminine image,
– to the blossoming of an entire world system truly identical to this imagination of feminine identification.

Well. In which direction does our question arise? We have no means, except hypothetically, to resolve it unless we can manifestly grasp its traces in the only element we possess: in the document itself, in the subject’s discourse. That is why, last time, I introduced you to what must primarily set the terms, the foundations, the guiding lines, the orientation of our investigation, namely the structure of discourse itself. That is why, last time, I began to distinguish the three spheres of speech as such.

And you remember how, within the phenomenon of speech itself, we can integrate the three planes:
– the symbolic, the imaginary, represented by the signifier and the signified,
– and the third term, the real, which is indeed held in its diachronic dimension in the discourse. In other words, the subject, not simply as someone who possesses an entire body of signifying material—whether it is his mother tongue or not—but as someone who uses it, expresses it to convey meanings into the real. Because, of course, it is not the same thing to be more or less captivated, captured in a meaning, or to express that meaning in a discourse that is, by nature, intended to communicate it, to align it with other meanings received in various ways.

In “received” lies the key to what makes discourse common, a discourse commonly accepted.
You cannot ignore how fundamental this notion of “discourse” is because even for what we call objectivity, the world objectified by science, the element of this discourse of communication—that is, the fact that what is expressed in the order of scientifically affirmed objects is, above all, communicable, is embodied in scientific communications—is absolutely essential. Yet, we always lose sight of this world of science, because even if you constructed the most sensational experiment and succeeded in it, if another cannot replicate it after the communication you provide, it serves no purpose. It is by this criterion that we recognize that something is not “scientifically received.”

When I presented you with the three-entry diagram, I localized the different relationships in which we can analyze the discourse of the delusional subject. I did not give you a diagram of the world; I gave you a diagram that is the fundamental condition of every relationship. I told you: on the vertical axis, there is the register of the subject, of speech, and of alterity as such, of the Other. The pivotal point in the function of speech is the subjectivity of the Other—that is, the fact that the Other is essentially someone who, like the subject, is capable of pretending and lying. When I told you: in this Other, there must be a sector that contains entirely real objects.

It is clear that this introduction of reality is always a function of speech.
That is to say, for anything to refer, with respect to the subject and the Other, to some foundation in the real, there must be, somewhere, something that does not deceive. This is a correlative dialectic of this fundamental structure of speech from subject to subject, as speech that can deceive:
there must also be something that does not deceive.

This function, observe it carefully, is fulfilled very differently according to the cultural spheres in which speech, its eternal function, comes to operate. You would be entirely mistaken to believe that it is the same elements in the world—and even similarly qualified—that have always fulfilled this function. Namely, that what fulfills this function for you, people present here and contemporary, is the same as what fulfilled it for someone with whom we can perfectly communicate—for example, ARISTOTLE. It is quite clear that everything ARISTOTLE tells us is perfectly communicable, and yet there is an absolutely essential difference in the quality, in the position in the world, of what this non-deceptive element represented for him.

Whatever those who cling to appearances might think—which is often the case with strong minds—you would be entirely mistaken to believe…
even those who constitute the most positivist among you, even the most liberated from any religious idea…
you would be entirely mistaken to believe that, because you live at this precise point in the evolution of human thought, stable elements do not participate in what was so frankly and rigorously formulated in DESCARTES’ meditation as God, insofar as He cannot deceive us.

And this is so true—I have already reminded you—that a figure as lucid as EINSTEIN, when it came to managing the symbolic order that was essentially his, reminded us of it:

“God,” he said, “is subtle, but He is honest.”

The fact that everything rests on the notion that the sense of the real cannot—however delicate it may be to penetrate—play tricks on us, that it will not deliberately mislead us, is—though no one ever truly stops to consider it—essential to the constitution of the scientific world.

That said, what I admit, what I call the reference to the “non-deceptive God” as such, is that for us, the only principle considered as accepted—I would say founded on results obtained from science…
it is known, in fact, that we have never observed anything that could show us that, somewhere at the core of nature, there is a deceptive demon. But what you do not quite realize is, in a sense—a first approximation—just how necessary it was to make this act of faith in order to take the first steps of science and the constitution of experimental science.
What for us has now become a principle—that is to say, that matter itself—let’s go further—does not cheat. It does not show us things deliberately to undermine our experiments and cause us to build machines that explode. That happens, but it is we who are mistaken. It is out of the question that it deceives us.

Nevertheless, this was not achieved easily. Nothing less than the Judeo-Christian tradition was required for this step to be taken so confidently. It is not for nothing that the development of science as we have built it—with the tenacity, the obstinacy, and the audacity that characterize its progress—occurred within this tradition.

This, moreover, is reversible: if the question was posed so radically, it is also precisely because, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, a single principle is not only at the base of everything—I mean not only aligned with the laws of the universe—but, as you know, it is the question that has tormented and still torments theologians: the very existence of these laws. That is to say, it is not simply the universe that was created ex nihilo, but also the law itself. This is where the theological debate between a certain rationalism and a certain voluntarism comes into play, asking whether even the criterion of good and evil ultimately depends on what could be called God’s whim.

It is only because the question was carried to such a radical point by Judeo-Christian thought that something could be done so decisively—something for which the term “act of faith” is not excessive:
that “there is something that is absolutely non-deceptive.”

But the fact that this something is reduced precisely to this act and to nothing else is so essential that you only have to consider what would happen, at the pace we are going now, if we were to discover that not only is there a proton, a meson, etc., but also a “plus” we had not accounted for—a surplus element, a character who would lie within atomic mechanics. At that point, we would no longer find it funny at all.

But when I said that for ARISTOTLE things were completely different, it is indeed clear. Because, for him, there was only one thing in nature that could assure him of this non-lying aspect of the Other as real: it was the things that do not lie because they always return to the same place, namely the celestial spheres.

The notion of the celestial spheres as being what, in the world, is incorruptible—and which, as such, were considered to be of another essence and remained deeply ingrained in thought for an extremely long time—this notion still inhabits Christian thought itself because it remained indispensable until the moment when people consented, and as you can see, very late, to take the Judeo-Christian position literally—that is, to truly question the words of God and the world. Until then, it was impossible to separate from the thoughts of philosophers and theologians the idea that the function of the celestial spheres was of a superior essence, and that measurement was the materialized witness. But it is we who say this—it is the measure itself that serves as the witness to what does not deceive.

In themselves, these spheres are, indisputably for ARISTOTLE, divine. And, curiously, they remained so for a very long time in medieval Christian tradition, precisely because it inherited this ancient thought. And in inheriting it, it was not merely a scholastic heritage—it was something so natural to humankind that we now find ourselves in an exceptional position by no longer concerning ourselves with what happens in the celestial sphere. Until quite recently, this mental presence among all people of what happens in the sky—as an absolutely essential reference point for reality—is something attested in all cultures, except ours.

It is truly only our culture that exhibits this property, which, I believe, is an almost universally shared characteristic here, except for some who might have had particular astronomical curiosities. The fact is that we absolutely never think about the regular return of the stars, nor the planets, nor eclipses. It holds no importance for us. We know it all works on its own.

Nevertheless, observe the margin and the difference that can exist in what is poorly termed—using a word I dislike—“mentality” among people for whom the guarantee of everything happening in nature’s relations is simply a principle: that nature could not deceive us. In other words, ultimately, the affirmation of the “non-deceptive God”—that somewhere there exists something that guarantees the truth of what presents itself as real.

There is a world of difference between this and the normal, natural position—the most well-known one, which appears in the thinking of the vast majority of cultures, and I mean even the most advanced ones. For these cultures, astronomical observation has always testified to the advanced state not only of their reflection but also of their assurance that this guarantee of reality is in the sky, however it might be represented.

This is not at all unrelated to our subject because here we are, immediately immersed in our first chapter of President SCHREBER, which immediately places us within the synthesis of the stars—a rather unexpected article in the fight against masturbation. Either it has no connection at all, or if it does, it might not be a bad idea to understand it.

[Reading from the text of “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,” President Schreber, Chapter 1, pp. 23–27]

It seems that there are connections such that each nerve of the intellect, in particular, represents the entire spiritual individuality of man: in each nerve of the intellect, the totality of memories is, so to speak, inscribed.
This is an extremely elaborate theory, the position of which would not be difficult to encounter, even if only as a step in the discussion, in other otherwise accepted scientific works.

We are touching here on the notion in our neurotic subject, and undoubtedly not through an exceptional mechanism of imagination. We are touching here on the link between the notion of the soul and that of the perpetuity of impressions. The foundation of the concept of the soul in the requirement, the needs of a conservation of imaginary impressions, is evident here.

I would almost say that here lies the foundation—I do not say the proof—but the foundation of the belief in the immortality of the soul, of what is irrepressible in what happens when the subject, considering himself, cannot conceive of his existence but, even more, considers that it is impossible for an impression not to partake in the fact that it is forever something that is not elsewhere.

Up to this point, our delusional subject is no more delusional than a truly extensive sector—if not extensive—of humanity.

[Reading from the text of “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,” President Schreber, Chapter 1, pp. 23–27.]

We are not far from the Spinozist universe, in the sense that it is essentially founded on the co-extensibility of the attribute of thought and the attribute of extension. We are here in this dimension, which is also highly interesting for situating, so to speak, the imaginary quality of certain stages or certain steps of philosophical thought.

[Reading from the text of “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,” President Schreber, Chapter 1, pp. 23–27.]

He thus raises this question at the moment when he starts from this notion of a God. We will later see why this is necessary for him, which is certainly linked to his most recent discourse—the one in which he systematizes his delirium to communicate it to us. He approaches the experience and thus finds himself facing this dilemma:
The God in question, who is, if I may say so, the god of my delirium—as he almost says—he speaks of his individual experience, of this god with whom he has this perpetual erotic relationship, which, as you will see, consists in determining who will draw to himself the most rays—whether it is SCHREBER who will win God’s love to the point of endangering his own existence, or whether it is God who will possess SCHREBER and then abandon him.

I outline this for you in a somewhat humorous way, but there is nothing funny about it, since this is the text of a patient’s delirium. He raises here the dilemma of whether God is always something that, for him, is in a sense the reverse side of the world. And you can see that this is not quite the God I was talking about earlier. That one is linked to a whole certain conception of the equivalence of God and extension, but who is nonetheless the guarantee that extension is not illusory.

It is the dilemma between this god that he presents and then this something he testifies to as being part of the rawest experience, namely this God with whom he has relations as with a living organism—a living God, as he expresses it. The contradiction between these two terms, if it appears to him, is certainly not on a level that we can consider purely formal logic, because our patient, no more than anyone else, is not at that point. The famous contradictions of formal logic have no reason to be more operative in this patient than they are in us, who perfectly well allow the coexistence—in moments when we are not provoked into discussion, and where we then become highly sensitive about formal logic—of the most heterogeneous and even the most discordant systems in our minds, in a simultaneity for which formal logic seems completely forgotten. Let each person refer to their personal experience.

So, there is not a contradiction of formal logic here. There is a question very seriously posed by the subject, one he intensely experiences, and which is precisely a dimension of his experience: the God whose shadow he maintains, whose imaginary outline he sketches in the form of a god that I described to you as almost Spinozist, is in a lived, vibrant contradiction with this God he himself feels as having with him this erotic relationship that he perpetually testifies to.

This is where we pose the question—not a metaphysical one, namely: what is the reality of the psychotic’s experience? We are not at that point, and besides, the question may never have any meaning for us.
The question is to know: what allows us to structurally situate, within the subject’s relationships, the fact that such a discourse is expressed, one which itself testifies to a structured relationship in such a way that the equal—the figure with whom he has his relations, his erotic relations, the living God in question—is present.

It is the same God who, through all these emanations, through all these “divine rays”—for there is an entire procession of forms—speaks to him and communicates with him in a language that is at once destructured from the perspective of ordinary linguistic passage but also restructured upon more fundamental relationships. These relationships are the ones we will need to examine, and this is what he calls “the fundamental language.”

[Reading from the text of “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,” President Schreber, Chapter 1, pp. 23–27.]

And here we encounter a rather striking emergence within the overall discourse, of the oldest beliefs in the fact that God is “the master of the sun and the rain.” There is no less cause for reflection.

[Reading from the text of “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,” President Schreber, Chapter 1, pp. 23–27.]

We cannot fail to note here the link of the imaginary relationship with the divine rays, because it presents itself alongside remarks that, for example, we find expressed elsewhere.

I have the impression that there was a literary reference made by FREUD because what FREUD emphasizes is that in every mechanism of repression, there is this dual relationship of something:
– that is undoubtedly repressed, that is, pushed in one direction,
– but drawn in the other direction by what is already and previously repressed.

The emphasis on the proper dynamic, on intention, with this double polarity, which is certainly oriented in the same direction, is something whose striking analogy we cannot fail to recognize in the feeling expressed in the articulation of his experience as presented by SCHREBER.

Just as earlier I pointed out to you this sort of divergence he experiences between two demands of the divine presence:
– the one destined to respond to him, to justify maintaining the decor of the external world around him—and you will see how deeply meaningful this expression is for him,
– and the one of God, whom he experiences as the partner of this oscillation of a living force, which will now become the dimension in which he lives, suffers, and pulses,
…is something whose divergence resolves itself for him in these terms:

“The total truth may perhaps exist in the manner of a fourth dimension, in the form of a diagonal of these lines of representation, which is inconceivable for man.”

He gets away with it as people often do in the language of this communication that is too unequal to its object, which is called metaphysical communication, when one absolutely does not know how to reconcile these two terms—freedom and transcendent necessity—and one simply contents oneself with saying that there is a fourth dimension and a diagonal somewhere. Either one pulls at both ends of the chain—which is the distinction of the two planes—or the relationship with this dialectic of the two others, which is perfectly evident in every exercise of discourse, cannot escape you.

[Reading from the text of “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,” President Schreber, Chapter 1, pp. 23–27.]

We arrive at a point on which I will return with more emphasis next time: it is that, ultimately, God has a completely complete, real, and authentic relationship—despite his experience—only with corpses.
This is extremely remarkable, especially after the premises we have just heard—that is to say, that God, as he expresses it somewhere, understands nothing about living beings, or again, that God, the divine omnipresence, only grasps things from the outside, never from the inside.

These are propositions that do not seem self-evident either, nor should they be expected by a coherence…
I would say preconceived or pre-judged, as we might preconceive it ourselves…
of the system, and we will need to revisit them next time.

Simply observe today, in these first steps we are taking into the text and in the outline you see taking shape, namely the psychotic relationship at its ultimate stage of development, which presents itself as involving the introduction of this fundamental dialectic of deception in a dimension, if one may say, “transversal” in relation to the one that appears in the authentic relationship.

The subject can speak to the Other insofar as the matter between them concerns faith or pretense. Here, it is in the order of a subjugated imaginary, which is the fundamental characteristic of the imaginary as it occurs as a passive phenomenon, as the subject’s lived experience—something that will subvert the very term of any order, mythical or not, in thought itself, and which transforms the world…
as you will see even more clearly unfold in the subject’s discourse…
into what we call this phantasmagoria. But for him, it is the most certain part of his lived experience, which is precisely not with an Other, but with this primary being, with this very guarantor of the real, in a relationship of a game of deception.

It is essential to understand that this God of SCHREBER, as he reconstructs Him in an experience that he himself notes as being far removed from his initial categories—considering that he was, up until then, a person for whom such questions had no importance or existence whatsoever, and far more than an atheist in this respect, he was an indifferent.

This figure—God—is, above all, experienced by him as the infinite term, not as an Other, not as something similar to him, but as the exercise of perpetual deception. And if one can say that, in his delirium, God is essentially the opposing term, the polar term to his own megalomania, it is inasmuch as—if one can express it this way—this term, by its nature, is caught up in its own game.

For this is what SCHREBER’s delirium will show us: God is caught in His own game. God, for having wanted to tempt him, to capture his forces, to make SCHREBER into the waste, the filth, the carrion of all the destructive exercises He allowed His own intermediate mode—God’s mode—to ultimately carry out on SCHREBER, God is caught in His own game.
That is to say, ultimately, God’s great danger is to love SCHREBER too much.

This transversally transversal zone exists between the transformation of what guarantees the real in the Other—that is, the presence and existence of God’s stable world—and its relationship with SCHREBER, the subject as an organic reality, as a fragmented body. A large part of his fantasies, his hallucinations, his miraculous or wondrous construction, is composed of elements where all kinds of bodily equivalences are clearly recognizable, even including certain elements that we will borrow from analytic literature: we will show how far the hallucination of the “little men” goes, and we will see what it represents organically.

It is therefore here that the pivot is established; it is the meaningful relationship of this entire law within this imaginary dimension.
I call it transversal because it is precisely oriented along the diagonal, opposed to the subject-to-subject relationship, which is the one considered as speech by its efficacy.

This analysis is merely an outline, and we will continue it next time.