🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I recall that, regarding an expression used by SCHREBER, about how the voices tell him that something is missing from them, I remarked that expressions like this do not emerge spontaneously, as their origins are often precisely documented in the history of language. This indicates a relatively advanced level of linguistic creation, suggesting that such expressions arose within circles deeply interested in questions of expression. These are expressions that appear to flow naturally from the given arrangement of signifiers, but they are indeed historically verified phenomena.

I mentioned that the expression “I am at a loss for words,” which seems so natural to us, is noted in SAUMAIZE as originating from the “ruelles des Précieuses” and was considered remarkable enough at the time for its appearance to be recorded by attributing it to SAINT-AMAND. At the same time, I pointed out that I had also compiled nearly a hundred similar expressions, such as:

• “She is the most natural of women.”
• “He is on bad terms with so-and-so.”
• “He has sound judgment.”
• “Contour of face, contour of mind.”
• “I know a bit about people.”
• “It’s a sure thing.”
• “Play it safe.”
• “He acts without pretense.”
• “He showed me a thousand kindnesses.”
• “This is quite to my liking.”
• “He doesn’t go into any details.”
• “He got involved in a bad affair.”
• “He drives people to the edge.”
• “Sacrifice one’s friends.”
• “That is quite something.”
• “Make advances.”
• “Make a mark in the world.”

All of these seem like the most natural and self-evident expressions, but they are recorded in SAUMAIZE and also in BERRY’s rhetoric from 1663 as creations originating from the circle of the Précieuses. This illustrates how misleading it can be to assume that a common expression is naturally shaped by a straightforward apprehension of reality, simply because it has become a common turn of phrase.

Far from it:

• All such expressions imply, more or less, a lengthy elaboration involving implications and reductions of reality.
• They presuppose what we might call a certain metaphysical progress, arising from how people have engaged with specific signifiers.

This suggests a variety of presuppositions. Indeed, the phrase “I am at a loss for words” itself carries numerous implications, starting with the presumption that the word exists in the first place.

Today, we shall resume our discussion and, following the methodological principles we have established, attempt to delve a little deeper into President SCHREBER’s delusion. To go further, we will rely on the document—there is nothing else available—and I pointed out that the document was written at a specific date, at an advanced stage of his psychosis, when he could articulate his delusion.

On this subject, I express some reservations, of course. Something more primitive, anterior, or original likely escapes us: the “lived experience,” the famous ineffable and incommunicable experience of psychosis during its primary or fertile phase, is something on which we are obviously free to fixate—hypnotizing ourselves into believing that we are missing the best part. Yet, believing that the best of something is lost is often a way to divert attention from what is at hand, which may deserve careful consideration.

Why, after all, should a terminal state be less instructive than an initial one, especially if we cannot be certain that the terminal state represents some form of diminution? To put it plainly, from the moment we assert that, in matters of the unconscious, the subject’s relationship to the symbolic is fundamental—when we abandon the implicit idea present in many systems that what the subject manages to put into words is inherently flawed, always distorted, by a reality supposedly irreducible—we shift away from such notions. This is the hypothesis underlying BLONDEL’s “The Morbid Conscience,” which serves as a useful reference for us on occasion. BLONDEL clearly illustrates this point.

For him, the lived experience of the psychotic or delusional person is something absolutely original and irreducible. Consequently, it gives us something inherently deceptive, something that leads us to renounce any attempt to penetrate this impassable lived experience. Unfortunately, this presumption of psychology, implicit in what we might call the mindset of our time, aligns with the widespread yet often misused notion of “intellectualization.”

Beyond intellectualization lies the idea—held particularly by some modern intellectuals—that something irreducible inherently escapes intelligence. BERGSON notably contributed to establishing this position, which has left us with a dangerous prejudice.

Indeed, one of two things must be true:

• Either delusion, or psychosis, falls entirely outside the domain of analysts—having no connection to what we call the unconscious;
• Or, if the unconscious is what we have come to understand in recent years—structured, interwoven, and chained through language—then the signifier not only plays as significant a role as the signified but is fundamental. For what characterizes language is precisely the system of signifiers and their complex interplay, raising questions that we touch upon but do not explore in depth here, as this is not a linguistics course.

Nevertheless, from what we have observed, you know that the relationship between signifier and signified is far from straightforward or bi-univocal, even within set theory. Moreover, the signified is not the raw material as if pre-existing in an open order awaiting signification. Signification arises from human discourse, which always refers to another meaning. This is how SAUSSURE presents discourse in his famous lectures on linguistics. In his diagram, he also represents meaning as a flux or stream: the significance of discourse as it sustains itself across its entirety.

And this is discourse as we understand it. It demonstrates that there is already an element of arbitrariness in how a sentence is segmented into its components. While words form units, upon closer examination, they are not so unified. Nevertheless, SAUSSURE represents it as such.

The key characteristic of his approach is the idea that segmenting the signifier relies on some correlation between the two systems—when both the signifier and the signified can be segmented simultaneously, invoking pauses or units. The schema itself is debatable because, relative to the entirety of language and its systemic sum, diachronic dynamics reveal:

• Over time, shifts occur;
• The evolving system of human significations constantly modifies the content of signifiers;
• The signifier assumes different usages.

This highlights examples I mentioned earlier: Over the ages, the same signifiers undergo shifts in meaning, demonstrating that one cannot establish a bi-univocal correspondence between the two systems.

The essential point for us is this: the system of signifiers—that is, the existence of a language with a certain number of identifiable units—exhibits unique characteristics in each language. These include:

• Not every syllable can equate to any other syllable;
• Certain syllables are not possible in some languages, and the uses of words differ, as do the expressions in which they combine.

That all of this already exists is something that, from the very beginning, conditions even the most original fabric of what happens in the unconscious. This is something I illustrate from time to time. If the unconscious is as FREUD described it, a pun in itself can be the essential hinge supporting a symptom. That is to say, even a pun that, in another linguistic system, in a neighboring language, does not exist. Of course, this is only one of those particular cases that highlight something fundamental.

This is not to say that the symptom is always founded on the existence of the signifier as such, but rather on the mode of a complex relationship from totality to totality, or more precisely, from system to system, from one universe of signifiers to another universe of signifiers. That there is always this fundamental relationship in the symptom is so central to FREUD’s doctrine that there is no other meaning to be given to the term “overdetermination” and the necessity he established: for there to be a symptom, there must be at least duplicity.

In other words, there must be at least two conflicts at play: one current and one past. This means nothing else. Indeed, without the fundamental duplicity of the signifier and the signified…
of the material preserved in the unconscious as tied to the old conflict, living there, preserved as a potential signifier, a virtual signifier, to be seized within the signified of the current conflict and to serve as its language—that is, as a symptom…
there is no properly psychoanalytic determinism conceivable.

Thus, when we approach delusions with the idea that they can be understood within the psychoanalytic register…
within the framework of Freudian discovery and the mode of thought it allows us to apply to these symptoms…
then you can clearly see that there is no reason to reject…
– as invalid,
– as the product of a purely verbal compromise, or, as some might still say, as a secondary fabrication…
the way delusion presents itself in its terminal state, the way someone like SCHREBER explains his world system to us, after years of extremely painful trials, where, undoubtedly, he cannot always provide us with an account that is entirely beyond criticism of what he experienced.

Certainly, we also know how to analyze and recognize the fact that, as the paranoid progresses, he retroactively reprojects, rethinks his past, and even goes back many years to locate the origins of persecutions, conspiracies, of which he believes himself to be the object. Sometimes he struggles greatly to situate an event, and one senses his tendency to renew it through a sort of mirror-game repetition, projecting it back into a past that itself becomes rather indeterminate, a past of eternal return, as he writes.

Undoubtedly, certain things, as we can clearly see in a text like SCHREBER’s, can be more or less reconstructed by the subject. But equally, and perhaps more importantly, the organization of signifiers in which the subject situates an extended written work like that of President SCHREBER retains full value for us, simply because we presume the continuous and profound solidarity of the signifying elements from the beginning to the end of the delusion. Something…
not only is it not unthinkable to think, but it is, from that point, entirely coherent to think…
something in the final arrangement of the delusion retains its full indicative value for us concerning the primary elements at play.

In any case, we can legitimately pursue this investigation. It seems possible to us that the analysis of this delusion as such might reveal to us the fundamental relationship of the subject to the register in which all manifestations of the unconscious are organized and deployed when they occur.

And perhaps, when we see the subject’s evolution reaching a certain degree, we might even grasp, in a certain way, if not the ultimate mechanism of psychosis, at least what the evolution of psychosis entails in relation to the subject’s most general relationship to that constitutive order of human reality, which is the symbolic as such.

In other words, perhaps in the evolution, we will be able to perceive how, in relation to the order of the symbolic, the subject situates himself throughout the evolution of his psychosis—
from its origin, through its various stages, and up to its final stage, to the extent that there is a terminal stage in psychosis—
how the subject positions himself in relation to the totality of this symbolic order:
– considered as an original order,
– considered as a milieu distinct from the real milieu,
– considered as a milieu with which man is always engaged, as an order essentially distinct from the order of the real and the imaginary.

From that point on, we feel much more grounded in working, with what I would call the utmost seriousness, on the details of the subject’s delusion. That is to say, we must ask ourselves what it means, and not start with the assumption that, simply because the subject is, of course, delusional—his system is inherently discordant, inapplicable, one of its distinctive signs, inapplicable within what is communicated in the society of his peers, and that “it is absurd,” as people say, or even, after all, quite disturbing.

This is the first reaction, even of the psychiatrist, when faced with a subject who begins to recount experiences in vivid colors: it is deeply unpleasant to hear a man make such peremptory statements about his experiences, which contradict everything one is accustomed to accept as the normal order of causality.

Too often, it is the psychiatrist’s own questioning that insists on “fitting the little pegs into the little holes,” as PÉGUY said in his final writings, speaking of the experience he endured and of those people who, even when the great catastrophe is declared, still want things to retain the same relationships as before: they still want the little pegs to remain in the same holes.

There is a way of questioning the psychotic that reflects this attitude: “Proceed in order, sir,” they say to the patient, as though the chapters were already written. For psychiatrists, it would often be better to start with the notion of totality, understanding that a delusion, like anything else, should first be judged as a field of meaning that has organized a certain signifier. Thus, the primary rules of a good interview, a good examination, a proper investigation of psychosis, might be to let the subject speak as long as possible, and only then form an idea.

It does not seem that, in the long history of psychosis—which you see displayed on this chart, now erased—things have ever been approached differently. I am not saying that clinicians have always proceeded this way in their observations, but they have managed to consider things quite well in their totality. Yet the notion of elementary phenomena, the distinctions between hallucinations, attention disorders, perception disturbances, and the major levels within the faculties of these phenomena have undoubtedly contributed to obscuring our relationship with delusional patients.

As for SCHREBER, he was allowed to speak for a good reason: no one interrupted him. He had all the time he needed to write his great book, and this will enable us to pose questions in the methodical manner I spoke of.

We began last time, and I read you a passage where the conjunction and opposition of what we called the nonsense of this activity of the voices already appeared in what I would refer to, to approach the matter, as their main current, insofar as they are the product of those various entities he calls “the Kingdoms of God.”

He introduces distinctions there. You will see more and more as we progress that this plurality of agents of discourse presents, in itself, a serious problem because this plurality is not conceived by the subject, for all that, as an autonomy. There are passages of great beauty in this text: there is a certain […] way of speaking about the various actors, these voices, which makes us feel the relationship with the divine background. We must avoid slipping into saying that it “emanates” from it because that would already be our own construction. We must follow the subject’s language: he did not speak of “emanation.”

In the copy I have in my hands, there are marginal notes left by someone who must have considered themselves very well-read because they had provided various explanations next to SCHREBER’s term “procession.” This person had probably heard of PLOTINUS from afar, but I believe that “procession” is a strictly Neoplatonic term used to explain the relationships between souls and the God of Gnosis. These are the sorts of hasty understandings with which we should exercise a little more caution. I do not believe it concerns anything like a procession, but to allow myself such notes, I would first need to fully understand what Plotinian procession is, which was beyond the scope of this person’s knowledge.

This […] and its various supports—the subject has clarified to us that it is characteristic of an indiscontinuous discourse.

In the passage I read to you, something stands out insistently in the subject’s speech: the noise made by the discourse is so moderate in its sonority that the subject calls it “a whisper.” However, it is something that is always present, something the subject can cover—and this is precisely how he expresses it—through his activities and his own discourse. But it is always ready to adopt or resume the same sonority in the middle of his sentences. This is where we left off last time.

Well then, let us resume this and ask ourselves what this discourse is. Of course, it is not a hypothetical state, not even as a starting principle today, as one might say, as a working hypothesis: let us posit that it is not impossible that, for the subject, it is sonorized.

That is already saying a lot, perhaps too much, but let us leave it at that for now.

For the subject, it is something that has a relationship with what we assume to be continuous discourse, memorizing, for every subject, their conduct at every moment, doubling, in a way, the subject’s life. This is not only something we are forced to admit because of what we earlier assumed to be the structure and fabric of the unconscious, but also something we have every reason, and indeed certain possibilities, to grasp as being something the most immediate experience allows us to seize.

Not long ago, someone told me about the following experience: a person, startled by the sudden threat of a car or motorcycle about to run them over, made—everything suggests—the necessary gestures to get out of the way. But what is interesting and most striking is that, mentally vocalized and isolated, the term “cranial trauma” emerged.

One cannot say that this operation properly belongs to the chain of good reflexes, as it were, to avoid an encounter, a collision that might result in cranial trauma. This verbalization is slightly distant from the situation; moreover, it presupposes in the person all sorts of determinations that make cranial trauma something particularly dreadful or perhaps simply particularly significant for them.

But here we clearly see the latency, so to speak, of this discourse, always ready to emerge, and which indeed intervenes on its own plane with a different significance compared to the overall music of the subject’s conduct, and at that moment, it makes itself heard. This discourse, then, with which the subject deals, and which presents itself to him at the stage of the illness he describes to us, occurs in this dominant Unsinn.

But this Unsinn, which is far from being a simple Unsinn, that is to say, something we might conceive of as purely and simply endured by the subject—it is described as being endured by the subject who writes it, but what speaks in the register of this Unsinn (God) manifests itself in a perfectly clear way.

And last time, I reminded you of this, and I showed it to you by presenting a text containing one of the things said in this nonsensical discourse, or Unsinn. It is that the subject who speaks…
and the one who writes and confides in us, as we well know they are not unrelated; otherwise, we would not call him mad…
this speaking subject says things like:

“All nonsense rises, cancels itself out, transposes itself…”

This is a term rich and complex in meaning, where it elaborates, contradicts itself, transforms—the Aufheben. It is indeed a sign of an implication, a search, a recourse inherent to this Unsinn. And this assertion is presented to us by the subject as being, with respect to everything said in the register of what he hears, the address, the thing spoken to him by his interlocutor as permanent.

So we can clearly see that this nonsense (Unsinn) is far from being, as KANT would put it in his analysis of negative values, a pure and simple absence of meaning, a pure and simple privation. It is a very positive nonsense. It is a very organized nonsense. These are contradictions that are articulated.

And, of course, the entire meaning, the entire richness of our subject’s delusion resides precisely in this. What makes SCHREBER’s discourse, his delusional novel, so fascinating is precisely what opposes, composes, continues, and articulates itself within this delusion.

And this Unsinn, which is Unsinn with respect to something—we will see with respect to what—is very far from constituting, by itself, a discourse empty of meaning. It is not a privation, far from it. To try to go further and tackle the analysis of this meaning, we will attempt to determine how we will approach the analysis of this discourse.

We can begin in various ways: for example, I could continue by focusing on the text of this discourse, on the demands and the responses, since I just told you that they are articulated at a certain level of reflection by the subject, who speaks through the voices in a perfectly identifiable way within the discourse itself. These are also interpreted by the subject who recounts these things to us as being significant.

This would lead us into enormous complexity, assuming a system of meaning that is already predetermined in its organization. It would not be impossible to do, but I have already started to pave this path last time by emphasizing the highly significant nature of the suspension of meaning, the fact that, in their rhythm, the voices leave one waiting and sometimes do not even complete their sentences. There is here a particular method of evoking meaning that undoubtedly leaves open the possibility of conceiving it as a structure.

I do not need to remind you of what I said when we spoke of the hallucination experienced by one of the patients we observed during a presentation: the one who, at the very moment she heard someone calling her a “sow!”, muttered under her breath, “I just came from the butcher’s shop.”

And you will recall the importance I gave to this allusive voice, to this indirect aim of the subject, which is indeed something we find here, and how we had already glimpsed something very close to the schema we offer for the relationship between:

• The subject who concretely speaks, who sustains the discourse,
• And the unconscious subject, who is literally present within this same discourse, even hallucinatory, and within its very structure, which we see as essentially aimed not at something beyond—because precisely this other is lacking in the delusion—but at something beneath, if we may say so, a sort of interior beyond.

This introduces, I believe—perhaps too quickly, if we wish to proceed rigorously—the hypotheses, the schemas, that must undoubtedly constitute something considered, with respect to the given material, as preconceived. Yet we already have, within the content of the delusion, enough data that are simpler to access, so we can proceed differently and take our time. Because, in truth, this is precisely the point: taking one’s time already indicates an attitude of goodwill, one that I insist is necessary to advance in the structure of delusions.

I would say that placing it immediately within the psychiatric parenthesis is precisely what I referred to earlier as the source of the misunderstanding that has persisted until now regarding delusion: one begins by positing that it is an abnormal phenomenon, and as such, one condemns oneself to not understanding it.

This is, moreover, a very strong reason, one that becomes quite tangible when one delves into something as captivating as President SCHREBER’s delusion. It’s simply that, as people say, they ask:

“Aren’t you ever afraid of going mad yourself?”

But this is entirely true! It’s true that for some of the esteemed masters we have known, God knows that was the feeling they might have had: where would listening to “these guys rambling all day long” about such singular things lead them, if one were to take it all seriously?

We psychoanalysts do not have as firm an idea as most people do about their own sense of balance, not to grasp the ultimate driving force behind all of this: namely, that a normal subject is essentially someone who places themselves in the position of not taking seriously the greater part of their internal discourse.

Observe this carefully in normal subjects, and consequently in yourselves: the number of essential things it is, in fact, your fundamental occupation to know nothing about. Perhaps this is indeed nothing other than what marks the primary difference between you and the psychotic. It is that, for many, the psychotic embodies—without even being aware of it—where it would lead us if we began to take seriously those things which, nevertheless, take form within us as questions.

Let us therefore, without excessive fear, take our subject seriously—our President SCHREBER. Since there is this peculiar nonsense here, which is not a privation of meaning, but something whose goal, articulations, and ends we cannot penetrate, let us attempt to approach what we can perceive of it from one particular angle. And this is not, after all, something in which we are entirely without guidance.

In this regard, we find particularly favorable and particularly graspable conditions for understanding this delusional discourse. First: is there an interlocutor? There is an interlocutor who even—this is what will determine how we approach it—at its core, is unique. This Einheit, which I must admit is rather amusing for a philosopher to consider.

If we recall the text I translated—which you will see—about the λόγος (logos) in the first publication of our journal La Psychanalyse, which identifies the λόγος (logos) with the Ἓν (Èn) of HERACLITUS, since precisely the question we ask ourselves is whether SCHREBER’s delusion is not purely and simply something that can be specified in a way I will not yet specify—because it must first be sketched out—but rather, a very particular mode of the subject’s relationship with the entirety of language as such.

From the very first pages, one must observe such formulations, meaning that this subject, in relation to the world of language—of which he is not, in a way, the narrator himself—feels alienated before this permanent discourse. In it, he expresses something that already reveals to us a fundamental relationship between:

• a unity that he perceives as such in the one who holds this discourse,
• and, at the same time, a plurality in the modes and secondary agents to whom he attributes its various parts.

But the unity is there, fundamentally present. It dominates, and, as I’ve told you, this unity he calls God. There, we can recognize something. He says it is God. He has his reasons. Why should we refuse him this term, whose universal importance we know well? This is even one of the proofs of His existence for some, and we know, furthermore, how difficult it is to grasp the precise content of what God represents for most of our contemporaries. So why should we deny the delusional subject credit when he speaks of it?

Especially since, after all, there is something very striking here, and he himself emphasizes its importance.

He tells us explicitly: he is a disciple of the Aufklärung (Enlightenment). He is even one of its last jewels. He spent his childhood in a family where such matters were never discussed, and he provides us with a list of his readings. And he offers this as one of the proofs—not of the existence of God, he does not go that far—but of the seriousness of what he experiences. That is to say, after all, he does not enter into a discussion about whether he is mistaken or not. He says:

“It is a fact, and I have the most direct proofs of it. It can only be God if the word ‘God’ has any meaning. But I had never taken this word ‘God’ seriously until then, and from the moment I experienced these things, I had the experience of God.”

And it is not the experience that guarantees God, but rather God who guarantees his experience. Since he speaks to us of God:

“I must have taken it from somewhere, and since I did not take it from my baggage of childhood prejudices, my experience is pure.”

And it is here that he introduces distinctions. And he is quite sharp here because not only is he, in sum, a good witness—he does not commit theological abuses—but he is also someone who is well-informed. I would even say that he is a good classical psychiatrist, and I will give you proof of this. I will show you in his text a quotation from the sixth edition of KRÆPELIN, which he meticulously analyzed himself. This enables him to make distinctions, such as this one, which is particularly insightful. It allows him to laugh at certain Kræpelinian expressions—for example, saying that it is astonishing to see a man like KRÆPELIN consider it strange that what the delusional subject experiences has such a highly convincing power, irreducible to what those around him might say.

*”Pay attention,” says SCHREBER, “this is not it at all. You can clearly see that I am not a delusional subject, as the doctors say, because I am entirely capable of reducing things, not only to what those around me say, but even to common sense.

*”For example, I distinguish very well, naturally, that there are phenomena of an extremely different nature,” says SCHREBER. “Sometimes I hear things like the noise of a steamship advancing with chains, which makes an enormous racket. What these psychiatrists claim to find explanatory value in is entirely valid, of course. The things I think about seem to inscribe themselves, in a way, into the regular intervals of the monotonous noise of the ship’s chains, or even the noise of a train. Like everyone, I modulate the thoughts running through my head on the noise we all know well when sitting in a railway car. But of course, this takes on a great deal of importance: at a certain point, the thoughts I experience find in this a kind of support that gives them a false prominence. But I distinguish things very clearly. That, I have. But what I have, and what I am speaking to you about, are voices, which cannot be something to which you would not grant its significance and meaning. It is entirely different; these are things I distinguish as such.”

In this analysis of the subject, we have the opportunity to critique certain genetic theories of interpretation or hallucination from within. I offer this example—it is almost crude, but it is very well emphasized in SCHREBER’s text. But there are others, and at the level where we will now try to situate ourselves, I believe we can introduce distinctions of no lesser importance.

This God thus revealed Himself to him. What is He? He is first and foremost “presence.” But I believe that in analyzing this presence, what functions as this presence, we can begin to see or recognize something. Earlier, we believed there was a confusion—one made by uncultivated minds—between the multiple incarnations they attribute to matter or the various engagements they have with matter.

These are things we observe in fields as diverse as psychiatry, where one cannot safely draw analogies between what happens on the pathological level and the normal level without risking confusion. Therefore, caution is required.

First, let us notice one thing: I do not need to search very far for examples to recall that a certain idea of God still positions itself on a plane we might call “providential.”

I am not saying that, from a theological point of view, this is the best way to approach the matter. But by chance, I recently opened a book attempting to discuss the gods of EPICURUS. The person introducing the subject begins—was it from an apologetic perspective?—with the following observation:

“Since people have believed in gods, they have been convinced that these gods govern human affairs. These two aspects of faith are interconnected. Faith was born from the thousand-fold repeated observation that most of our actions fail to achieve their intended goals. There always remains, necessarily, a gap between our best-conceived plans and their realization. Thus, we remain in uncertainty—the mother of hope and fear.”

This very well-written passage is from Father FESTUGIÈRE, an excellent writer and an expert on ancient Greece. It is clear that the style of this introduction, focused on the constancy of belief in gods, is somewhat inclined by its subject. Namely, by the fact that Epicureanism is entirely constructed around this question of the presence of gods in human affairs. Otherwise, one could not fail to notice the somewhat biased aspect of this reduction of the divine hypothesis to a purely providential function—that is, to the idea that we must be rewarded for our good intentions.

There is something truly striking: this subject, who maintains a constant, permanent relationship with the God of his delusion, does not bear the mark of an absence—the annotation of an absence is less significant, less decisive than the annotation of a presence. But I mean that, in the analysis of the phenomenon, the fact that there is not something is always subject to doubt.

In other words, if we had a little more precision about President SCHREBER’s delusion, we would have something that might contradict this. On the other hand, the annotation of an absence is also extraordinarily important for locating a structure.

Let us simply say that we cannot fail to note that, at the very least, we have in our hands the starting point for a definition we can begin to formulate, concerning how he is present before us.

We will not need to take anything else from this register into account, given that we know how—whether theologically valid or not—this notion of Providence, of this instance that rewards, is essential to the functioning of the unconscious and to its emergence into the conscious.

The subject never fails to demonstrate how essential this register is to him: when they are kind, good things must happen to them. This is entirely absent at all moments in the elaboration of a delusion that presents itself essentially as a delusion with theological content, with a divine interlocutor. There is no trace of this.

This is not saying much, but it is still saying a great deal. It is still worth noting that this divine erotomania, as one might call it in SCHREBER’s case, is something that—let us put it bluntly—certainly cannot immediately be interpreted within the register of the superego.

So here is this God, then. What are the modes of SCHREBER’s relationship with Him? We already know that He is the one who speaks all the time. I would even say that He is the one who never stops speaking without saying anything. This is so true that SCHREBER devotes many pages to this, where he examines, where he considers what it might mean that this God speaks without saying anything, and yet speaks incessantly. And this is indeed where we are going to delve a little deeper.

This God, who speaks without saying anything, nevertheless has relationships with SCHREBER, and these are far from being limited to this intrusive function. He has extremely precise relationships, whose motivation cannot be distinguished for even a single moment from His mode of presence, that is to say, from His speaking mode. It is within the same dimension that God is present there, chattering incessantly through these various representatives, and that He presents Himself to SCHREBER in an ambiguous relational mode, which is this:

I believe I can state that his fundamental relationship can be described as I am about to express it because it is, in a sense, present from the very origin of the delusion. In other words, I will tell you what constitutes the mode of relationship with this divine presence.

It is something we find noted from the very beginning, at a time when God had not yet revealed Himself, when the delusion still had extremely precise supports. These are the figures of the FLECHSIG type and, at first, FLECHSIG himself, whom I mentioned—his first therapist. And the German expression I am about to use is the expression that serves to express, for the subject, the mode of relationship with the fundamental interlocutor.

It is thanks to this expression that we will establish—and only after FREUD, because FREUD himself established it—a continuity between the first interlocutors of the delusion and the last. Namely, a continuity that we recognize:

– that there is something common between FLECHSIG and what he later called “the examined souls,”
– and then “the Kingdoms of God,” with their various earlier and later meanings, superior and inferior,
– and finally “the final God,” where everything seems, in the end, to be summed up with a kind of megalomaniacal installation of SCHREBER’s position.

The expression is as follows: the relationship of God, the fundamental character of the delusion, with the subject is this:
– whether it concerns the presence of God in a mode of voluptuous relations with the subject to which things ultimately lead,
– or whether it concerns, in the beginning, in this erotically colored imminence, a sort of rape or threat specifically to his virility, upon which FREUD placed all the emphasis, as being at the origin of the delusion. Whatever the case in this conjunction, they are considered absolutely revolting at the outset and entirely comparable to rape when it concerns FLECHSIG or another soul, as he puts it,
– or, finally, when it concerns a kind of voluptuous effusion in which God is supposed to find satisfaction even more so than our subject.

What happens is something that, in the beginning, is the threat. It is this that is considered revolting in the rape. At the end, and also in its realization, it is something the subject perceives as particularly painful and distressing, and that is that God, or anyone else, will—what the French translators have rendered, not without some justification, as “abandon him.”

The translation is not bad because it implies all sorts of sentimental and feminine connotations. In German, it is much less emphasized and also much broader than the “abandon” implied by the French translation. It is “to leave lying,” which truly appears here as a sort of musical theme of an extraordinary presence. It is almost the red thread that can be found in this or that literary or historical theme.

Throughout the SCHREBERIAN delusion, the threat of this “leaving lying” is something that recurs as truly the essential element. At the very beginning, it is part of the dark intentions of the violating persecutors, but it is something that must be avoided at all costs.

In other words, one cannot avoid the impression of an overall relationship between the subject and the entirety of the foreign phenomena to which he is subjected. This relationship essentially consists of this sort of ambivalent connection, such that no matter how painful, burdensome, intrusive, or unbearable these phenomena may be, maintaining his relationship with them—or, more precisely, his relationship with a structure—constituted a kind of necessity. Its abolition, disappearance, or rupture is conceived by the subject as absolutely intolerable.

It is so because it eventually becomes incarnate, and the subject gives us a thousand details about what happens at the moment when the initial state of this “liegen lassen” occurs, that is to say, every time the God with whom he is in relation on this double plane of audition, and a more mysterious relationship that doubles it, and which is that of His “presence”, of the “presence” of God linked to all kinds of phenomena that are ambiguous but which are undoubtedly connected to what he calls “the bliss of the partners”, and even more so that of his partner than his own. Whenever something happens that interrupts this state of realization, more or less accentuated, and when the withdrawal of divine presence occurs, all sorts of internal phenomena of tearing, of pain, variously intolerable, burst forth, which he describes to us with great richness.

This character he is dealing with, who is at once one of the rarest and with whom he has this very particular relationship, taken as a whole, as being the permanent characteristic of the mode of relationship that is established—how does he present himself otherwise to him?

There is one thing about which the subject also provides an extremely rich and developed explanation, and it is this: this character with whom he is in this double relationship, separate, distinct, and yet never disjointed, a kind of dialogue, and an erotic relationship, is also characterized.

And precisely, he is characterized by this: it is seen in his demands, and very precisely in his demands for dialogue. He is characterized by the fact that he understands nothing of what is properly human. This is a trait that is often quite striking in SCHREBER’s writing: the idea that for God to ask him the questions He asks, to incite him especially towards the mode of responses implied in these questions, and that SCHREBER never allows himself to provide because he says: “These are too stupid traps set for me.”

This is truly something absolutely characteristic and fundamental. This God, he tells us… and I would even say that he develops all sorts of fairly pleasantly rationalized explanations to show us both the dimensions of certainty and the mode of explanation… How can one conceive that God is such that He truly understands nothing, he says, of human needs?

How can one—he says at every moment—be so stupid, to believe, for example, that if I stop thinking for an instant, that if I enter into this nothingness whose appearance divine presence awaits only to withdraw definitively, how can one believe that because I stop thinking about something, I have become completely idiotic, or even that I have fallen back into nothingness? But I will show Him, and moreover, this is precisely what happens every time this risks occurring: I return to an intelligent occupation and manifest my presence.

And then he develops and comments: how can God, despite His thousand experiences, believe that a single moment of my relaxation would suffice for the goal to be achieved? This God is absolutely uneducable by any sort of thing that could arise from experience. And this side of God’s uneducability, His radical imperfection in the face of experience, is very amusing to observe. It is something he emphasizes and on which he provides developments that are far from foolish: he puts forward different hypotheses; he even goes so far as to offer arguments that would not seem out of place in a properly theological discussion. Because, in truth, he starts from the idea:

• that God, being perfect, is unimprovable,
• and that something unimprovable cannot be perfected,
• and that, consequently, even the notion of progress in the levels of experience is completely unthinkable within divine registers.

Nevertheless, he finds this a bit sophisticated because there remains this irreducible fact that this perfection we suppose is entirely unfit and blocked when it comes to human affairs, and that despite everything, this creates a gap. Then he explains to us again how God understands nothing, and that, in particular, it is absolutely clear that God only knows things superficially. We are here exactly opposite to the God who searches hearts and minds. He searches neither hearts nor minds; He sees only what He sees and records only those things of which acknowledgment is made, those which are collected by the recording system. This is always what is presented, but as for the interior, He understands nothing. He only finds something there because everything is recorded somewhere; it is through a function of totalization that everything is found again, that is to say, in the end… as everything internal will progressively be passed to the external, and as, on the other hand, it is noted somewhere on small cards… in the end, at the end of totalization, He will still be perfectly informed.

Similarly, he explains very well that it is quite obvious that God cannot interest Himself in Himself, cannot have the slightest access to such contingent, childish things as, for example, the existence on Earth of steam engines or the functioning of locomotives. But, he says, since souls, after death, rise towards beatitudes and must undergo a certain period of purification, they have recorded all this in the form of discourse, and this is what God collects, since He will integrate them progressively through these souls that return into the bosom of God.

God still has some idea of what happens on Earth in terms of small inventions, those ranging from the diabolo to the atomic bomb. It’s very charming because it’s a system that is at once coherent, and one has the impression that it is discovered through an extraordinarily innocent kind of progress, via the establishment of the development of the significant consequences of something harmonious and continuous across the various phases of development.

But what is serious, what is well-suited to suggest a direction for research, is that the question essentially lies in a sort of disturbed relationship between the subject and something that concerns the total functioning of language, of the symbolic order, and of discourse as such. The richness it contains is far greater than I can express to you.

There is a discussion on God’s relationship with games of chance that is extraordinarily brilliant:

“Can God foresee the number that will come up in the lottery?”

This is not a foolish question, and there are people here with a strong belief in God who might also ask themselves this question: the level of omniscience implied by shuffling all sorts of little numbers on small pieces of paper inside a very well-designed large sphere raises insurmountable difficulties. To explain how divine foreknowledge must know, in this mass so perfectly balanced to ensure strict equivalence on the level of reality, which number is the right one, assumes a relationship of God with the symbolic. After all, this question has never been fully raised as such.

For it is precisely for this reason that the sphere is designed—to ensure that, from the perspective of reality, there is no difference between the various small numbers. Therefore, it assumes that God enters into the discourse, for within these lottery tickets, all that remains is a symbolic difference between one and the other. This is an extension of the theory of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real.

But the question for us is more complex because all this is only the discovery of a painful and distressing experience. Yet, one thing remains: the intentions of God. These intentions are not clear. There is nothing more striking than to see how a kind of delusional voice—that is, this phenomenon that has emerged from an original experience—undeniably carries within this subject a kind of burning of language manifested by the respect with which he maintains omniscience. And also by the good intentions that he is, on a certain level, compelled to maintain as being truly too substantial to him.

And the fact that he cannot help but see—and this is particularly evident in the early stages of his delusion when distressing phenomena came to him through all sorts of harmful figures—that even God permitted all of this.

But He still allows all kinds of abuses. In truth, these abuses have given rise to even greater abuses, such that, in the end, the remedy becomes harsher than the ailment. The “divine presence” is so entangled in a kind of conjugation with itself that it ultimately becomes dependent on its object, which is none other than President SCHREBER himself.

In the end, something here gradually introduces a sort of fundamental disturbance into the universal order. There are extraordinarily beautiful elements in this discourse about the relationship with the world, including a particularly striking sentence:

“Remember that everything globalizing carries a contradiction within itself.”

It is the voices that say this. It has a beauty whose prominence I scarcely need to point out.

The God in question unquestionably pursues a policy that is utterly inadmissible. There is a kind of half-measure policy here. It is also a sort of half-teasing. He uses the word “perfidy,” slipping in divine perfidy.

But he adds a note to explain what he means by this: it is particularly ambiguous, given the divine presence, but it is something that inevitably raises questions.

Since we have limited ourselves today to the relationship of God as a speaking subject and as an essential interlocutor, we will stop here, and you will see the next step. That is, what we can glimpse from the moment we analyze the very structure of this divine person—in other words, the relationship of the entire phantasmagoria with reality itself—as long as the subject maintains at every moment the presence and agreement, at least by the end of his delusion, in a way that is not particularly disturbed in this mode of relationship.

In other words, with the symbolic register as it presents itself here, with the imaginary register, and with the real register, we will make a new step forward, which will, I hope, allow us to uncover the nature of what is truly at stake in the mechanism itself—in the structure and constitution of this subject—of delusional interlocution.