🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I intended to delve into the essence of madness, and I thought there was indeed a kind of madness there. But I reassured myself by thinking that what we are doing is not such an isolated and therefore risky endeavor, but that we do have some examples in this regard. These examples have taught us that there is something to be gained from the phenomenon and that it is, therefore, also in embracing this research on the phenomenon that our path lies. This, at least, reassures us.

However, this does not mean that the task is easy. Why? Because, in a sort of singular inevitability, every human endeavor, especially the most challenging ones, always tends toward a kind of fallback—in other words, toward that mysterious something called laziness.

It is enough to measure this without prejudice, with an eye and an understanding cleansed of all the noise we hear around analytical concepts, by rereading FREUD’s text, to realize once again that it is an extraordinary text, and one that does little more than reveal to us the path to the enigma.

Ultimately, the entire explanation he gives us of President SCHREBER’s delusion converges and forms around this notion of “narcissism”—which is certainly not something that can be considered, at least at the time he wrote it, as fully elucidated. It demonstrates to us that it is not about reducing the problem, pretending that all of this is understood, as if narcissism were something self-explanatory: before turning towards external objects, there would be a stage where the subject takes their own body as an object. Indeed, this is a dimension and a framework in which the term “narcissism” takes on its meaning. But does this mean, however, that it is exclusively and solely in this way and in this sense that the term “narcissism” is employed?

Yet the autobiography of President SCHREBER, as FREUD introduces it in relation to this notion, shows us that what fundamentally repelled his narcissism was adopting a feminine position towards his father, which involved castration. This is something that finds greater satisfaction in this relationship grounded in what can fundamentally be called a delusion of grandeur, namely that castration no longer affects him from the moment his partner is God. In short, the schema that FREUD gives us could be summarized in a way consistent with the formulas provided in this very text:

• “I do not love him,”
• “It is God that I love,”
• and, by reversal: “It is God who loves me.”

We would only be strictly applying the formulas FREUD provided regarding the general notion of paranoia in this very text, summarizing what ultimately happens, which is, in essence, the flowering and the meaning of this delusion.

I have already pointed out to you enough times that this may not be entirely satisfying, just as FREUD’s formulas, no matter how illuminating they are, are not completely so. For just as we observe in the delusion of persecution that the reversal—”I do not love him,” “I hate him,” with the counter-reversal “He hates me”—is something that provides a key, a sort of cryptogram that allows us to conceive something about the mechanism of persecution: it is quite clear that, in the meantime, this “he” has now become someone who hates me. This is where the entire problem lies, because the multiplied, neutralized, seemingly hollowed-out character of “I don’t know what” that we will attempt to articulate is nothing other than his subjectivity.

The character of endlessly repeated signs taken on by the persecutory phenomenon—and the persecutor insofar as he supports it—is something that designates its enigma, namely what has become of the other, the partner, throughout the transformation. The persecutor has become the shadow of the persecuting object.

This is no less true for this God who is at stake in the flowering of President SCHREBER’s delusion. I have also pointed out to you in passing the almost ridiculous distance—so obvious it is scarcely worth mentioning—between President SCHREBER’s relationship with God and anything even remotely resembling such a relationship of the subject to a transcendent being, even from the most superficial glance at the slightest production of mystical experience.

God, here too, though He is named God, elaborated, and described as such—and even with great meticulousness—leaves us no less perplexed about the nature of this unique divine partner whom SCHREBER gives himself at the end of his delusion.

We therefore immediately sense that the problem at hand, while not straying far from what FREUD told us—namely, this withdrawal of the libido’s interest from the external object—remains indeed at the heart of the issue. But it is also a matter for us to attempt to elaborate what this might mean, on what plane this withdrawal operates, since:

• On one hand, we clearly sense that something deeply affects the object,
• But on the other hand, it is not enough to simply tell ourselves that there is a withdrawal of the libido, since we constantly speak of the displacements of the libido. This is, in fact, at the core of the mechanisms of neurosis.

How can we conceive of it? What are the planes and registers that might allow us to glimpse these transformations in the character of the other, which are always, we feel, the core of the essence of alienation, of madness? Here, I will allow myself a brief step back to attempt to frame the problem, and to also look with fresh eyes at certain aspects of phenomena that are already familiar.

Let us take something that is not a psychosis. Let us take the almost inaugural case of properly psychoanalytic experience as elaborated by FREUD: the case of Dora. Dora is someone who is a hysteric. As such, she has peculiar relations to the object, and you know how much ambiguity in this notion creates discomfort in his observation, as well as in the continuation of the cure, namely: what exactly is her object of love?

In the end, FREUD recognized his mistake, saying that it was undoubtedly because he failed to recognize what was Dora’s object of love that the entire affair failed—that is to say, that the therapy broke off prematurely, without allowing a sufficient resolution of what was at stake. In other words, the conflictual relationship that FREUD believed he detected—namely, Dora’s inability to detach herself from the primary object of her love, her father, and turn towards a more “normal” object, another man—was not at all the issue. The object for Dora was no one other than the woman referred to in the observation as Mrs. K., who was precisely her father’s mistress. Let us start with the observation; I will comment afterward.

You know that, in essence, the story unfolds in a kind of minuet involving four characters: “Mrs. K.,” “the father,” “Dora,” and “Mr. K.” Mr. K. essentially serves as Dora’s ego. In other words, it is through Mr. K. that she can effectively sustain her relationship with Mrs. K., as the entire observation demonstrates.

I simply ask that you follow me, that you trust me. I have written sufficiently in an intervention concerning Dr. LAGACHE’s report on transference for you to refer to it easily. This position is significant in that it allows Dora to maintain a bearable relationship, which is entirely clear because she only consents to treatment once something has been altered in what I referred to as the “four-person minuet.” One can understand that the situation is much more sustainable—without saying more for now; there are much deeper reasons to justify it—but, generally speaking, I would put it this way: the situation is far more sustainable in this quadrilateral relationship than if Mr. K. were absent.

In other words:

• It is not because the object of her affection is of the same sex as she is that this mediating fourth party is essential to maintaining the situation.
• It is because if she were in rivalry with her father, with whom she has the most deeply motivated relations—relations of identification, further accentuated by the fact that the mother in the parental couple is an entirely effaced figure—it is because something is particularly unbearable in this triangular relationship that the situation has been maintained not only in a bearable relationship but effectively sustained within this group composition.

What proves this is what happens on the day Mr. K. utters this fateful phrase:
“My wife means nothing to me.”

From that moment, the situation becomes quite literally intolerable and no longer tolerated, because Mr. K.’s explicit statement warns Dora that Mr. K. is not a sufficient support; he is not interested in Mrs. K. at all. It is exactly as if, at that moment, everything happens as if she responds:

“Then what can you possibly be to me?”

She slaps him instantly after this sentence, whereas until then she had maintained with him a sort of ambiguous relationship, precisely the one necessary to sustain the four-person group. This is exactly where the situation’s balance ruptures. What I want to emphasize is one of its most evident aspects: Dora is merely a little hysteric. She has few symptoms, and they are interpreted rather lightly within these registers.

I think you remember the emphasis I placed on that famous “aphonia” that occurs only during moments of tête-à-tête and confrontation with the object of her love and which is certainly linked, at that moment, to a very specific eroticization of the relationship as such. The oral function is withdrawn from its usual uses to the extent that it approaches too closely the object of her desire—namely, Mrs. K.

But all of this amounts to little: a brief aphonia during Mrs. K.’s absences is not something that would have driven her to FREUD, nor would it have made the situation appear sufficiently intolerable to her entourage to push her there.

What happens quite clearly, however—from the moment the situation destabilizes, and the fourth character exits—is a small syndrome of persecution, simply put, of Dora in relation to her father. After all, until then, the situation was somewhat precarious, but it did not exceed certain boundaries, nor was it perceived otherwise than as what we might call a “Viennese operetta.”

Dora behaved admirably, as all subsequent observations emphasize, to avoid any trouble, so that her father could have a relationship with this beloved woman—since the nature of these relations remains somewhat obscure—under normal circumstances. Dora behaved in such a way that things went smoothly; she covered the entirety of the situation and did not make a great fuss about it. In the end, she was relatively at ease with it.

But from the moment the situation destabilizes, she formulates, claims, and asserts that her father wants to prostitute her and hand her over to Mr. K. in exchange for maintaining his ambiguous relationship with Mrs. K.

Should I say that Dora is a paranoiac? I have never said that, and I am quite scrupulous when it comes to diagnosing psychosis. I was brought here to see a patient who obviously had a very difficult, conflictual relationship with her surroundings. Essentially, I was called in to say that it was a psychosis and not simply, as it appeared at first glance, an obsessive neurosis.

I refused to make a diagnosis of psychosis for one very decisive reason—and one that I believe we must insist upon when making such a diagnosis: certain disturbances, those that are precisely the object of our study this year and to which I am trying to introduce you—those disturbances of alienation in the order of language—are what we must learn to distinguish. They represent the general formula that would allow us to delineate a boundary, to grasp a limit. It is not enough:

• To have identified, through the claim against figures presumed to act against you,
• To enter into a conflict of claim towards a figure from the external environment,

…for us to therefore be dealing with psychosis.

This may be an unjustified claim, partaking in the delusion of presumption; it is not, however, psychosis, though it is not unrelated to it either. The proof is that, up to the point I am presenting to you today—up to this provisional limit I propose we adopt as a convention—there has been a consistent continuity drawn between one and the other, and we have always known how to define the paranoiac as:
“A man who is sensitive, intolerant, suspicious, and in a state of verbalized conflict with his surroundings.”
In other words, there is something else—there is a slight delusion, for one might even go so far as to call it that.

Dora experiences a significant phenomenon towards her father. It remains, within certain limits, an interpretative phenomenon, even hallucinatory. It does not go so far as to produce a delusion, yet it is something extremely close to that ineffable, intuitive relationship of hostility, of another’s ill intention, concerning precisely the situation in which the subject had participated in the deepest, most essential, and most elective way to maintain that situation. This is a phenomenon whose presence is indeed significant enough to hold our attention.

What does this mean? This means that, due to the failure of the elements of the quadrilateral in question, something has shifted in what one could call the level of “alterity” of such a character. The situation deteriorates due to the absence of one of the components that had allowed it to be sustained.

Indeed, if we know how to handle it with care, we can make use of this notion of “distancing,” a term often misused. But this is no reason to reject its use altogether, provided that we try to apply it in a way that aligns more precisely with what we can see and judge in the facts. This brings us to the heart of the problem of “narcissism.”

What notion can we form of narcissism once our entire body of work has led us to elaborate on it? We consider the relationship of narcissism to be the central imaginary relationship for interhuman rapport. What emerges from all of this? What has the analyst’s experience concentrated and crystallized around this notion?

Above all, it is its ambiguity:

• It is both an erotic relationship: it is through the narcissistic relationship that every erotic identification, every capture, every grasp through the image of the other in a rapport of erotic capture or captivation occurs.
• It is also the same relationship that serves as the foundation for what we can call aggressive tension.

This cannot fail to strike us, and I would even say that, maintained in this state of—let’s call it—elementary elaboration, without delving further into what this aggressive relationship is, or what particular mode it takes in the human register, we already have something undeniable: it is from the moment the notion of narcissism enters analytic theory that, increasingly and progressively, the theme of aggressiveness becomes central to the concerns of analysts—and I would even say to the technical concerns of analysts.

What I believe is important is to try to go further. You know this is exactly what the mirror stage serves: to highlight the particular nature of this aggressive relationship, to reveal what it signifies. It is to show that this aggressive relationship is not incidental to the matter and to what is called the ego:

• It is constitutive of the formation of what is called the ego.
• The ego is, in itself, already another, and it establishes itself in an internal duality within the subject.
• The ego is this sort of master that the subject finds in another, a master that the subject establishes as a function of mastery at the core of himself.

Thus:

• In every relationship with the other, there will be this ambiguity for the subject, a kind of choice: “It’s either him or me.”
• In every relationship with the other, even an erotic one, there will be some echo of this relationship of exclusion, which arises from the moment the human being is constituted as a subject on the imaginary plane in such a way that the other is always close to reclaiming this position of mastery over him. Meanwhile, within him, there is an ego that is always, in part, something foreign to him—a kind of “master implanted within him,” above all his tendencies, behaviors, instincts, and drives.

This is nothing other than a slightly more rigorous way of expressing, by highlighting the paradox, that there are conflicts between the drives and the ego, and that one must make a choice between them. Some are good, some are bad; some are adopted, some are not. What we call the “synthetic function” of the ego—though we do not know why, since this synthesis never truly occurs—is something that might be better called the “function of mastery.” And where is this master? Inside? Outside? It is always both inside and outside, and this is why every purely imaginary balance with the other is always marked by a fundamental instability.

In other words, let us draw a small comparison here with animal psychology.

We know that animals…
—at least we believe this based on what we observe, and it seems self-evident enough that animals have always served as a point of reference for humans—
…animals have lives far less complicated than ours. They interact with others when they feel like it. There are two reasons to feel like it: to eat them, or to mate with them.

This occurs according to a rhythm called natural, which is referred to as the rhythm of instinctual behaviors. The relationship of animals with their peers is maintained within a purely imaginary rapport: willingly or unwillingly.

This has been revealed by highlighting the fundamental nature of the image precisely in triggering these cycles. It has been particularly demonstrated in these two registers, and it has been shown that hens and other poultry enter a state of panic at the sight of a specific profile—the silhouette of a bird of prey to which they may be more or less sensitized. This profile can provoke a reaction of flight, chirping, and screeching in said poultry, whereas a slightly different profile does not produce these reactions.

The very highlighting of these profiles shows us just how essential the imaginary character is. The same observation applies to the behavior related to sexual triggers, where both the male and female stickleback fish can be deceived. The dorsal part of the stickleback fish—a fish species—takes on a certain color in one of the two partners during courtship, which can trigger in the other the entire sequence of behavioral actions leading to their final union.

But this phenomenon can go much further, even to a kind of assistance given to the female’s nesting, which constitutes the entirety of sexual behavior. This borderline point between éros and the aggressive relationship has no reason not to exist in animals.

No one seems to have emphasized, with the appropriate focus, the importance of courtship displays. LORENZ begins with a very striking image where the stickleback is placed in front of a mirror. The male stickleback was indeed confronted by LORENZ with its own image, and it exhibited very strange behavior. All the details are in the book; to clarify them, I must simply say that LORENZ does not highlight them because he did not participate in my seminars. Nevertheless, it is curious that he thought it necessary to highlight this image—the most enigmatic one—at the beginning of his book.

On the other hand, if we look at the text, we find the explanation. Indeed, here is what we can read in the book. This boundary between éros and the instinct of aggression can indeed manifest and even externalize itself spatially in the stickleback. The stickleback, after all, has a territory—not always, but particularly during the courtship period followed by the spawning period I mentioned earlier. In a certain space, a certain field, everything I indicated to you with the female takes place. One certain fact remains: all of this requires a specific space in the more or less grassy riverbeds where this happens.

Now, let us assume this space exists. One thing seems certain: there do not appear to be direct connections, even with the act of this kind of “nuptial flight,” because, indeed, there is a true dance. Everything that happens within this framework has its function:

• First, it is about charming the female,
• Then gently inducing her to submit,
• Then guiding her to nest in a small tunnel that the male has previously built for her.

But there is something not easily explained: after all of this is done, the male still finds time to dig many small holes here and there. I don’t know if you remember the phenomenology of the hole in “Being and Nothingness,” but you know the importance SARTRE gave it in the psychology of the human being—and particularly of the bourgeois man amusing himself on the beach. He saw in it something that verges on one of the artificial manifestations of negativity.

I believe that, in this regard, the stickleback is not far behind. It too digs its little holes and imprints its own negativity on the external environment. I would even say that these holes give us every reason to believe that this is indeed about that: an impression made by the animal in what can be called something it appropriates in a very manifest way. There is no question of another male entering the area marked by these small holes, because as soon as this happens, combat reflexes are triggered.

Every erotic manifestation of negativity represented by the holes dug by the stickleback strikes us in another way as well: curious experimenters have tried to determine the limits of this combat reaction. They have done this in two ways: by varying the proximity of a rival male and by reducing the rival male essentially to a mere representation of a possible male counterpart—that is, by replacing the attacking figure with decoys.

These are the two ways to try to define the limits of the attack reaction. In both cases, they observed something striking: these holes are dug during courtship and even beforehand. It is an act essentially linked to erotic and sexual behavior:

• When the male is truly a male, if an invading stickleback approaches a certain distance from the defined territory, the attack reaction occurs.
• When it is at another certain distance, the reaction does not occur.

There is, therefore, a kind of boundary point where the stickleback-subject finds itself between “attack” and “not attack.”

Perhaps, indeed, if the passage or transition from “not attack” to “attack” does not occur, it is not simply a matter of more or less—it is the presence or absence of a certain boundary behavior. We have defined this boundary through the difference in distance or characterized it sufficiently, and at the threshold where the characterization becomes slightly insufficient, a peculiar phenomenon occurs. It manifests as the displacement of this part of erotic behavior, which is precisely about digging holes.

In other words, when the male stickleback does not know what to do in terms of his normal relationship with his counterpart of the same sex, when he does not know whether to attack or not to attack, he starts doing something he does when it is supposed to be time for love.

I have given you this reaction concerning the stickleback, but it is not at all specific to the stickleback. It is very common among birds for a fight to suddenly stop so that one bird starts frantically preening its feathers, just as it usually does when trying to please a female.

This kind of displacement, which has not failed to strike ethologists, holds precisely the same significance as what I wanted you to pause on—without emphasizing it more explicitly—that it is exactly about the image. What the male stickleback was doing in front of the mirror: it lowers its nose, adopting this oblique position, tail raised and nose down, which is precisely the position it never takes throughout all the behavioral sequences we observe, except when it dips its nose into the sand to dig its holes.

In other words, its image in the mirror is certainly not something that leaves it indifferent, nor is it something that fully integrates it into the cycle of erotic behavior. Instead, it has the precise effect of placing it in that borderline reaction between érôs and aggressiveness, which is precisely marked by this act of digging holes. This significant phenomenon is, as you can see, so curiously illustrated even in the animal realm. To the extent that the stickleback is accessible to the enigma of a lure, I mean placed in a distinctly artificial, ambiguous situation, it already displays this sort of disruption, this displacement of behaviors, manifesting in a peculiar way.

We are probably far less surprised once we have grasped the importance of the mirror image for humans, to the extent that this image is functionally essential for them. You know why I told you that this image becomes functionally essential: it is because it is in this form, and in an alienated way, that it is given to them, so to speak, as the orthopedic complement to a sort of insufficiency, a disconcertedness, a constitutive discord linked to their essence as a prematurely born animal. They are never fully unified precisely because this unification occurred through an alienating pathway, in the form of a foreign image that constitutes an original psychic function within the principle of activity generated by the discord, the conflict, the aggressive tension of this “me or the other,” which is absolutely integrated into every type of imaginary functioning in humans.

This is what it’s about; this is the point we must try to grasp: what consequences this implies for human behavior in a mythical sense—mythical in itself, completely imaginary—because human behavior is never purely and simply reduced to the imaginary relationship.

But let us suppose for a moment that a human being exists in a sort of reverse Eden, where they are entirely reduced, in their relations with their peers, to this assimilating and at the same time dissimilating capture—perhaps occupied simultaneously by the two poles of their functions modeled on the image of their peer. What results from this?

To better illustrate this, I have already referred to the realm of small machines, noting that, for some time now, we have been amusing ourselves by building machines that resemble animals. Of course, they do not resemble them at all. There is an entire series of mechanisms very cleverly assembled to study certain behaviors and observe what happens. Over this, you place a little fox skin—it changes nothing about the machine’s structure. Nevertheless, we are told that it resembles animal behavior. This is true in a certain sense, and indeed, part of this behavior can be studied as something unpredictable. This holds some interest in covering the conceptions we might have of a self-sustaining system.

Let us take this as our starting point, and from there, we might imagine what the representation of this human imaginary relationship would look like if we were to build a machine. It would also involve sketching out a sufficiently established model.

In this sense, it would very obviously be something that could only lead to a general system blockage. In other words, we would have to imagine a machine lacking internal self-regulation mechanisms—except in a fragmented manner. The organ responsible for moving the right leg could only harmonize with the organ responsible for moving the left leg if some more or less photoelectric receiving device were to place, at the very moment it needed to function, the image of another operating harmoniously as an essential condition for internal harmony in the determined subject.

In other words, if we imagined a certain number of these machines in a circuit, much like what happens at fairs when we see small cars speeding around in an empty space—the main amusement being their collisions—it is undoubtedly no coincidence that these kinds of rides bring so much pleasure. Indeed, the act of colliding must be something deeply fundamental for human beings. But what would happen in the case of such small machines, each being somehow unified and regulated by the vision of the other? It would not be entirely impossible to establish the general mathematical equation for such a scenario.

By imagining this scenario, it becomes clear that this could only result in a concentration at the center of a carousel of all these little machines, each respectively blocked in a sort of singular conglomeration. This would have no other limits to its reduction than the external resistance of the machines themselves. In other words, it would lead to a kind of general crushing in a fundamental collision tied to the very situation.

This serves merely as an allegory to illustrate that, within this essential ambiguity, fundamentally sustained in an imaginary relationship of the human being to the other, it is inscribed in the very nature of this deficiency or gap in the imaginary relationship. It is essential that there be something else to maintain precisely what would not otherwise be preserved. Whether or not my allegory holds entirely, it is meant to help you understand what is at stake: that it is essential for something else to sustain relation, function, and distance.

This is not yet to say anything new—it is the very meaning of the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex means this: every relationship is fundamentally incestuous and inherently tense, conflictual on the imaginary plane. The natural relationship in humans is, in itself, destined for conflict and ruin.

For human beings to establish the most natural relationship—the relationship between male and female—something must happen through the mediation of a third party functioning as an image, as a model of something successful, representing a harmony that allows for the establishment of a natural relationship in the sense of being simply viable. However, this relationship is not natural in the sense that it inherently contains a law, a chain, a symbolic order, and, to put it plainly, the intervention in the human order of something called the order of law. In other words, which amounts strictly to the same thing, the order of speech.

That is to say, it is because the father is not merely the natural father but is called “the father,” and because a certain order is founded on the existence of this name, “father.” It is from this point that something becomes possible—something that does not always lead to collision, explosion, and the rupture of the overall situation.

I repeat this because, after all, it is something absolutely essential. What is essential to highlight for you is the extent to which the symbolic order must be conceived as something superimposed—as something without which there would be no simply possible animal life for this odd sort of subject that is man. That this is, in any case, how things have been given to us, and that everything suggests that it has always been this way for absolutely evident reasons.

Every time we find something resembling a human skeleton, more or less related to humanity, we call it human when we find it in a tomb. That is to say, in something that is entirely “mad”—in other words, what reason could there possibly be for placing this kind of remnant of life, a corpse, in some sort of stone enclosure?

For this to happen, an entire symbolic order must already have been established—namely, that a gentleman had been Mr. So-and-so in the social order. This fact necessitates that something be placed around him to simply recall this, as it should, on the stone of the tombs: that he was called So-and-so, and that the fact he was called So-and-so is something that transcends him in itself.

This does not presuppose any belief in “the immortality of the soul.” It presupposes that his name has nothing to do with his living existence, and that his name, in itself, is something that perpetuates itself beyond this existence. This was worth reminding you of because if you do not see that it is the originality of analysis to have brought this aspect into relief, one might wonder what you are doing in analysis.

Only from the moment we have clearly established that this is the essential mechanism, can it become interesting […] like the text we have to read, which will show us in an exemplary way something we must grasp within the structural phenomenology as it presents itself. Because we only stop at things when we consider them as possible. Otherwise, we simply say, “this is how it is,” but ultimately we avoid recognizing that it is how it is.

If you first have this schema in your mind—that is, the fundamental nature of the articulation of law, of a symbolic order that must be considered as existing somewhat outside each subject, distinct from their very existence—you will not be surprised when you encounter a lengthy observation, undoubtedly exceptional and remarkable, but certainly not unique.

It is, in the end, probably unique only due to a certain number of coincidences:

• The fact that President SCHREBER was able to publish his book, albeit censored,
• The fact also that FREUD took an interest in it.

In this text, you will see the correlation of something that is a true invasion of everything that can be called “imaginary subjectivity,”:

• By a striking dominance of a mirrored relationship,
• By a striking dissolution of the other as an identity,

…because you will see this intensify at every moment.

All the characters he speaks of—once he is able to speak about them, for there is a long period during which he is not allowed to speak about them (we will return to the significance of this long period)—once he begins to talk about them, he describes his peers in two categories, which, despite everything, belong to the same side of a certain boundary:

• Those who apparently live, move about—his guards, his nurses—are “shadows of hastily cobbled-together men,” as PICHON described in his translation.
• The more significant characters, who play a role, who are so invasive that they penetrate SCHREBER’s body at a certain moment, are souls.

And most souls—and increasingly, all souls—are, in the end, dead. It matters little whether they remain there sometimes, whether one encounters them, whether they show their appearance—they are merely appearances, substitutes.

To speak, for example, of FLECHSIG: FLECHSIG is dead. The subject himself is nothing more than a second-rate version of his own identity. At one moment, he has the revelation that something must have happened the previous year, which was nothing other than his own death—an event announced to him by the newspapers. SCHREBER remembers this former colleague as someone who was more gifted than himself. He is another.

This dissolution of identity, this fragmentation of identity—for he is another, yet still himself, remembering the other—all of this marks, with its distinctive seal, everything that belongs to the imaginary plane and the relationship with his peers.

He also speaks at other times of FLECHSIG. He too is dead and has thus ascended to where only souls properly exist, and souls as they are human—that is to say, to a beyond where they are gradually assimilated into the great divine unity. But of course, not without having progressively lost their individual character. To reach that point, they must undergo a kind of trial that frees them from an impurity that is nothing other than their passions. Everything in them that signifies their desire, in the strictest sense, because that is precisely what it is about, is specifically articulated by SCHREBER. It is all aimed at achieving access to these higher spheres of liberation.

This detachment from what is impure in these so-called souls does not occur without literal fragmentation. The subject, without any apology, was perhaps meant to be shocked by this blow to the notion of self-identity, the identity of the self. But that is how it is:

“I can bear witness,” he says, “only to the things that have been revealed to me.”

And this is why, throughout his narrative, we see a fragmented FLECHSIG, a superior FLECHSIG, a luminous FLECHSIG. I am glossing over many vivid details that I would like you to take enough interest in so that we could follow them in detail. Then there is a kind of lower part which, at one point, becomes fragmented into forty to sixty little souls.

In short, this style takes on an extremely formulated character with that great force of assertion whose essential characteristics I outlined for you the other day in reference to delusional discourse. It is something that cannot fail to strike us by its converging nature with the notion that there is something in the imaginary identity of the other that is deeply connected to the possibility of fragmentation, of breaking into pieces, a conception of the other as something structurally duplicable and multipliable—something that is manifested and affirmed in delusion.

There is something much deeper and far more striking: it is the very idea, the image, of what might be called the collision of these images with one another in this kind of purely imaginary interrelation, which is developed in the delusion and expressed in two ways:

• The relationships that SCHREBER has with these fragmented images, these multiple identities of the same character,
• Or conversely, these entirely enigmatic little identities about which—though he testifies to their presence and even to their operations, which are diverse, gnawing, and harmful within him—he speaks of what he calls, for example, “the little men.” This image has greatly struck the imagination of psychoanalysts who have wondered whether these were children, spermatozoa, or something else. Why shouldn’t they simply be little men?

Everything that happens concerning these identities, all conceived as a phantasmatic construct, and which have, in relation to his own identity, a value of instance or function—these can essentially penetrate him, divide him, invade him, and inhabit him. The notion he has of his relationship with these images is such that it suggests to him that these images, by themselves—and for many of them, he notes the phenomenon—must, in some way, increasingly dissolve, diminish, and be absorbed by his own resistance—SCHREBER’s resistance.

And for them to maintain their autonomy—which means, for him, that they can continue to harm him, as they are generally extremely harmful images—they must perform the operation he himself calls “attachment to the lands.” These are things of fundamental value. “Attachment to the lands” does not mean only the soil but also planetary lands, astral lands, and very specifically the register I referred to earlier in my “magic square” as the stars—which, by the way, I did not invent for this occasion.

For a long time, I have been speaking to you about the function of the stars in human reality, which is certainly not accidental. Since always, in all cultures, the names given to constellations have played an essential role in establishing a number of fundamental symbolic relationships. These relationships are sometimes extremely distant and all the more evident when we are dealing with a culture we would call “primitive.” It is to the extent that a fragment of a soul becomes attached somewhere:

• CASSIOPEIA plays a very significant role,
• There are the brothers of CASSIOPEIA…

This is not at all a fanciful idea, because all of this is tied to stories of student confederations. The brothers of CASSIOPEIA were at the same time people who belonged to student confederations during their academic years. Their connection to these fraternities, whose narcissistic and even homosexual character seems sufficiently evident in analysis, allows us to recognize a characteristic mark of the imaginary antecedents in SCHREBER’s history.

This gives us a fairly clear idea of the nature of these things. But what is particularly interesting is to see precisely how, even within this socializing schema of the imagination, the idea exists that everything does not suddenly reduce to nothing—that the entire web of imaginary relations developed in delusions does not suddenly fold up and disappear into a sort of gaping black void. This black void is something from which, at the outset, SCHREBER was not very far—a total end, or at least the erasure of this entire veil.

This seems quite suggestive to me because one might say that the way this veil covers, sketches, and forms a network is absolutely essential to maintaining a certain sensitivity of the image in interhuman relations on the imaginary plane.

But what is by far the most interesting is not this. This is undoubtedly what psychoanalysts have focused on the most. They have even refined all these relationships involving the dissolution and fragmentation of subjects. They have speculated endlessly, with an extraordinary number of details, about the significance of what could be happening within what is assumed to be the libidinal investments of the subject:

• That at one moment FLECHSIG is dominant in the delusion,
• That at another moment it is a divine image, variously situated in the different levels of God,

…because God, too, has his levels. There is an anterior one and a posterior one. How deeply all of this has fascinated psychoanalysts, and how many conclusions have been drawn from it!

But of course, all of this is not unsusceptible to a certain number of interpretations. Yet there is something that seems to have escaped everyone’s attention, which is that:

• No matter how rich this phantasmagoria may be,
• No matter how amusing it may be to develop,
• No matter how flexible it may be in allowing us to rediscover the various objects with which we pursue our little analytical game,

…the fact remains that, overshadowing all these phenomena, throughout SCHREBER’s entire delusion, there are auditory phenomena that are extremely nuanced. These range from a faint whisper, a trembling, to the voice of the waters when he is confronted at night with AHRIMAN.
Later, he corrects himself, saying that it was not only AHRIMAN who was present but also ORMUZD, since the two gods of good and evil cannot be dissociated, cannot be isolated.

And with AHRIMAN, there is a moment of confrontation that he perceives with the eye of the mind and not in the same way as certain other visions, which possess a kind of photographic clarity.

Thus, he stands face to face with God, and God speaks the significant word. He puts things in their place, like the divine message par excellence. God says to SCHREBER—SCHREBER, the only man who remains after the total twilight of the world:

“Carrion.”

Let us take this word in its German sense. It is the word used in the French translation, but in German, it is a more familiar term than it is in French. It is rare in French for people, even among friends, to call each other “carrion,” except in particularly expressive moments; other words are used instead.

In German, it is more common. It does not carry quite the same annihilating connotation. There are underlying nuances that bring it closer to something better aligned with the feminization of the character. Perhaps it would be better translated into French with the phrase “sweet decay.”

The important point is that this word, “carrion,” which dominates the unique moment of the face-to-face encounter between God and SCHREBER, is not at all an isolated occurrence. It is, in fact, very frequent in everything that happens between SCHREBER and what we might call the other side of this imaginary world—the counterpart, so to speak, which is absolutely essential. In this realm occurs:

• Everything that is an erotic relationship—if we do not wish to immediately plunge into the pathos of it,
• Everything upon which SCHREBER’s struggle and conflict hinge,
• Everything that truly matters to him,
• Everything he is up against,
• Everything of which he is the object, namely the divine rays with their immense development.

It is here that his certainty resides—and this is where I will conclude and introduce the lesson for next time—where, in a form both composed and decomposed, but also extraordinarily rich, we find the entire domain of language.

Here you have reached the highest point of speech, because annihilating insult is one of the peaks of the act of speech. Around this peak, all the mountain chains of this verbal field will unfold before you in a masterful perspective by SCHREBER. This is what I want to draw your attention to.

Everything one can linguistically imagine as a decomposition of the function of language is encountered in what SCHREBER experiences and differentiates with a delicacy of nuance that leaves nothing to be desired in terms of information when he speaks to us of things that, strictly speaking, belong to “the fundamental language.” That is to say, what regulates the real relationships he has with the one and only being who henceforth exists—namely, this singular God.

He names and distinguishes them when they possess what he calls, on one hand, “echt,” which is almost untranslatable insofar as it means authentic, true. This is always conveyed to him in verbal forms that, in themselves, deserve our attention, because there are several types, and they are highly suggestive, as we can understand them through the function of the signifier.

Alongside this, there are others that he describes with great nuance and detail as memorized forms that are instilled, inoculated, into certain peripheral elements of divine power—some even fallen from divine power—and which are presented with a total absence of meaning, serving only as a refrain intended to obscure him.

Between these two, he adds a variety of modes of an oratorical flow that allow us to isolate and pause for a moment—since we would never have the opportunity to do so otherwise unless we were linguists—on the different dimensions in which the phenomenon of the sentence develops. I am not saying the phenomenon of meaning, because here we can grasp the function of the sentence in itself, insofar as it is not compelled to carry its meaning with it.

For example, the phenomenon of the interrupted sentence occurs very often—I would say almost always—during a certain period of his life, constantly emerging within his subjectivity as something undeniably given as such: as an interrupted sentence. That is to say, leaving a suspension of meaning, which is simultaneously given. Yet what is auditory is a sentence cut off in the middle. The remainder, which is not present in the literal sentence, is implied as meaning, as the fall of the sentence.

There was, in this, an emphasis on the symbolic chain in its dimension of continuity. That is to say, in the sense of an interrupted sentence that calls for a certain fall. This fall can span an indeterminate range, but it cannot be just anything. In the other case, in the dimension of assimilation to the “birds of the sky,” identified with young girls, it is something entirely different:

• With them, continuous things have no meaning whatsoever. FREUD is certain from this point that it is indeed a dialogue with women.
• With them, there is no need to exert effort; the only goal is to produce a gentle murmur. And what is absolutely striking is this kind of decomposition.

This, too, deserves our detailed attention—the evolution, as such, of the subject’s relationship with language. For a long time, there is, for him, the same thing as in the imaginary world: a perpetually perceived danger that the entire phantasmagoria will reduce itself to a unity that ultimately annihilates—not his existence, but rather the existence of God, who is essentially language. He writes this explicitly. He says: “The rays must speak.”

The fact that, therefore, there must be at every moment phenomena of diversion so that God does not fully become SCHREBER, entirely absorbed into the central existence of the subject, is not something we should take for granted. It illustrates, in any case, something fundamentally true about creative relationships.

That is to say, since it is creative, the act of withdrawing its function and essence leads us to the conception of a kind of correlative nothingness, which is its counterpart. Speech occurs or does not occur. If it occurs, it happens to a certain extent through the subject’s arbitrariness. And in some way, the subject is creative, strongly so, in relation to the Other:

• Not as an object,
• Not even as an image,
• Nor as the shadow of an object,
• Nor as an imaginary correlate,

…but truly to the Other in its essential dimension, which we always more or less elide, though it remains decisive for the constitution of the human world. That is to say, to this Other as something irreducible to anything else other than the notion of another subject. In other words, to the Other as himself.

Because what characterizes SCHREBER’s world is that this “him” is lost, but the “you” remains.

This is something very important, but it is certainly something very insufficient. The notion of the subject correlates to the very existence of something about which one can say: “It is he who does this,” not the one I see there, who, of course, feigns indifference, but the “it is he”:

• The existence of a dimension within the Other as such,
• The existence of this being who is the counterpart of my own being, without whom my own being itself could not even be an “I,”
• This relationship with him, insofar as his drama underlies the entire dissolution of SCHREBER’s world,
• This kind of reduction of the “he” to a single partner, ultimately to a God who is both asexual and polysexual, and who encompasses within himself everything that still exists in the world with which SCHREBER is confronted, presenting two very enigmatic facets on this subject.

Assuredly, thanks to him, there remains someone who can speak a true word, and it is from him and to him that this word is suspended. But this word has the characteristic of always being extremely enigmatic. This is the defining feature of all the words of the “fundamental language.” On the other hand, this God also seems to be the shadow of SCHREBER, meaning he is affected by this imaginary degradation of alterity, which results in him being a character who—like SCHREBER—is marked by this kind of feminization that lies at the origin.

This is where we must center our study of the phenomenon. Of course, we have no means—since we do not know this subject and cannot delve deeply into it except through the phenomenology of his language. It is therefore around the phenomenon of language, the phenomena of language—hallucinated, parasitic, strange, intuitive, persecutory—that are at issue in the case of SCHREBER that we have a pathway to initiate what might illuminate us.

It is through this that he brings a new dimension, one not previously clarified in the phenomenology of psychoses.