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(All parts in English)

It seems that I may have been a bit hasty last time in referring to a remark by President SCHREBER and appearing to endorse its relevance: it concerned divine omnipotence and divine omnipresence.
I pointed out that this man, for whom the experience of God is entirely discursive, was precisely raising questions about what, in events, might be most closely linked to the use of what we call the symbol, in opposition to the real—that is, to everything introduced by the symbolic opposition.

In other words, I paused for a moment—briefly, admittedly, and perhaps without much precision—on the fact that it was remarkable that this was precisely what arrested the patient’s mind, namely, that in his register, in his experience, it seems difficult for him to grasp that God—since this is the example he chooses—foresees the number that will come up in the lottery.

This remark, of course, does not rule out all the criticisms that such an objection might provoke in someone inclined to respond: indeed, someone pointed out to me that these numbers are distinguished by spatial coordinates, which are nothing other than what ultimately serves as a basis for distinguishing individuals when addressing the problem of individualization.

In other words, why are there two individuals in the world who share the same type, and who, consequently, from a certain perspective, may seem to serve a dual purpose? It is as spatial a perspective as any other, and again, to raise the question, one must posit the principle of the primacy of essences as justification for existence.

What I simply wanted to point out is a certain sensitivity of the subject, in his reasoning part, to something he must necessarily distinguish—something of the order of the dialogue that constitutes his permanent inner dialogue, or more precisely, that kind of oscillation in which a discourse, perceived by him as foreign, questions and answers itself and, as such, manifests a presence.
This is indisputable when he communicates his experience to us, since it is from there, he says, that a belief arose in him for which nothing had prepared him.

And when it comes to perceiving what order of reality might correspond to this “presence”…
this “presence” which, for him, covers part of the universe, and not all of it, for I indicated to you that he distinguishes between the order in which God and His power advance and the one where they stop…
that it is precisely in this God of language who knows nothing of man except from the moment it is spoken…
where he even tells us that nothing from within man, nothing of his feeling of life, nothing of his life itself, is comprehensible or penetrable to God, who neither collects nor welcomes it except from the moment everything is transformed into an infinite notation…
it is precisely, however, within this same character…
this highly reasoning character confronted here with an experience that, for him, bears all the characteristics of reality, that he always distinguishes the specific, effective weight of this indisputable “presence”…
that it is this same character who, reasoning about the future, introduces this striking distinction by stopping precisely at a few examples where it is a matter of an artificial human handling of language, to say that there, without any doubt, God has no role to play.
It concerns a contingent future about which the question of human freedom—and, consequently, God’s inability to predict its effects—can truly be raised.

It is indeed a textual question and a distinction made between levels of language usage that are, for him, undeniably very different, and that bring this question to the fore.
The only perspective from which this question can actually make sense for us lies in the radically primary nature of symbolic distinction, of the symbolic opposition between plus and minus, in that they carry no weight. Yet they must have a material support, and they can be strictly distinguished by nothing other than their opposition.

Consequently, if nothing allows them to be conceived outside a material support, there is nonetheless something here that escapes any other kind of real coordinates, apart from the law of their equivalence in chance—that is, something that first posits that, from the moment we establish a symbolic alternation game, we must also assume that nothing distinguishes them in actual efficiency.

In other words, it is foreseen—not due to an a priori law—that we have equal chances of drawing + and −, and that the game will be considered fair precisely to the extent that it fulfills what was predetermined: it is the criterion of equality of chances; it is, strictly speaking, an a priori law.

And on this level, we can indeed say that, at least at one level of the epistemological apprehension of the term, the symbolic here gives an a priori law, even introduces into the real, by its very definition, a mode of operation that escapes anything we might deduce—even if we could reconstitute it—from a deduction of facts and the real order.

Ultimately, it is certain that if we venture onto the plane of this delusion, of course, it is not about commenting on it as delusion, with all its partial and closed character; we must at every moment ask ourselves how and why delusion interests us.

It interests us, we must still recall: if we are so attached to these questions of delusion, it is because it appears that there is something radical here, and though we may not wish to revive it at every moment, it nonetheless remains its most striking aspect.

To understand it, we need only compare it to the formula often used—imprudently—by some when describing the mode of action of analysis, where we claim to rely on “the healthy part of the ego.”
Is there not a more manifest example of the contrasted existence of a healthy part and an alienated part of the ego?

Without a doubt, delusions—namely, those singular phenomena traditionally referred to as “partial delusions”—is there any more striking example than the very work of President SCHREBER, who provides us with such a communicable, sensitive, engaging, and in any case, tolerant account of his worldview and experiences, while also manifesting with no less force the utterly inadmissible nature of his hallucinatory experiences?

Who does not know—this, I would say, is the fundamental psychiatric fact—that no reliance on “the healthy part of the ego” will allow us to gain even a millimeter over the manifestly alienated part? This is the primary psychiatric fact: to abandon all hope of glimpsing this curative point, through which the beginner becomes initiated into the very existence of madness as such. And so it has always been, until the arrival of psychoanalysis: whether one calls upon some other force, more or less mysterious, referred to as affectivity, imagination, or coenesthesia, to explain this resistance to any rational reduction aimed at bringing—what appears in delusion as fully articulated and, in appearance, accessible to laws—a coherence to the discourse.

What psychoanalysis brings is something that confers upon the psychotic’s delusion this particular sanction: it legitimizes it on the same plane where analytical experience usually operates—that is, it finds in the psychotic’s discourse precisely what it ordinarily discovers as the discourse of the unconscious.

It does not, however, bring success in the experience. And this is precisely where the problem begins: it is precisely a discourse that has emerged in the ego, that appears there, therefore, in whatever form it takes—and even if we admit it to be, to a great extent, inverted, marked with the sign of negation placed under the parenthesis of Verneinung—it remains no less articulated there. And as articulated as it may be, it is irreducible, unmanageable, and incurable.

We might make this remark to try to highlight the originality of what is at stake: that, in sum, the psychotic is a witness—if not a martyr—of the unconscious. And we give the term martyr its original meaning, which is that of being a witness, but even more so: indeed, it would be a martyr in the sense of a testimony that is, of course, open.

– The neurotic is also a witness to the existence of the unconscious, but he is a covered witness; one must uncover what he testifies to, one must decipher it.
– The psychotic, it seems in a first approximation, is an open witness. Yet, it is precisely in this sense that he seems fixed, immobilized in a position that renders him incapable of authentically restoring the meaning of what he testifies to, and in no way capable of sharing what he testifies to with the discourse of others.

What does this mean? If you will, to try to make you take a closer interest, it involves a homology, a transposition—not one of the usual kind—of what is meant by covered discourse or testimony as opposed to open discourse or testimony.

And you will see from the example we are about to take that we will perceive a certain asymmetry that already exists in the normal world of discourse, which in a way prefigures the asymmetry at stake in the opposition between neurosis and psychosis.

We live in a society where slavery is abolished—that is to say, it is not officially recognized.
It is clear, from the perspective of any sociologist or philosopher, that servitude has not, in fact, been abolished. This is even the subject of quite notable demands. But it is equally clear:
– That if servitude has not been abolished, it has, so to speak, been generalized.
– That the relationship of those referred to as exploiters in the world of labor is no less a relationship of servitude in relation to the entirety of the economy than that of the common worker.

In other words, the generalization of the master-slave duplicity within every participant in our society—that “fundamental servitude of consciousness,” as it has been called—is something striking enough to make us understand that there is a relationship between this unhappy state of consciousness and a discourse, which is a secret discourse, one that brought about this profound social transformation, a discourse we might call “the message of fraternity.”

Something new that appeared in the world…
not only with Christianity, but already prepared by Stoicism, for example…
In short, behind generalized servitude, there is a secret discourse embedded in a new message, a message of liberation that is, in a sense, in a repressed state.

Is the relationship entirely the same with what we will call the patent discourse of freedom?
Certainly not entirely the same. Some time ago, a sort of discord, an opposition was noticed between the pure and simple fact of revolt and the transformative effectiveness of social action.
I would even say that the entire modern revolution was founded on this distinction, only to discover:

– That the discourse of freedom was, by definition, not only ineffective but profoundly alienated from its purpose and object.
– That everything demonstrative attached to it is, strictly speaking, the enemy of all progress in the direction of freedom, insofar as it might aim to animate some continuous movement within society.

Nevertheless, this discourse of freedom is something that is articulated within each person as representing a certain right of the individual to autonomy, as constituting, at least in some opportunities, a certain affirmation of the individual’s independence—not only from any master but, one might say, even from any god.

Since a certain sphere seems indispensable to the mental breathing space of modern man—at least that of his irreducible autonomy as an individual, as an existence—it is indeed something that, in all respects, deserves to be compared to what we will call a delusional discourse. Not because it plays no role in the modern individual’s presence in the world and his relationships with others, but because, assuredly, if one were to ask each person to articulate or precisely define their share of, for example, what represents their inalienable freedom in the current state of affairs…

And even if you were to answer me with “the rights of man” or with the rights to happiness, or with a thousand other answers, we would not get very far before realizing that it is essentially, and in each case, an intimate, personal discourse, one that is far from coinciding with the discourse of one’s neighbor.

In short, the existence within the modern individual of a permanent discourse of freedom is something that constantly poses discouraging problems—not only of its agreement with the discourse of others but of its agreement with the conduct of others, should one attempt to abstractly base it on this discourse.

And at every moment, not only is there a negotiation with what each person effectively brings—solicitation, the necessity to act in the real—but it is much closer to the resigned attitude of the delusional individual who is forced to recognize, like our patient SCHREBER, at some point, the fact of the permanent existence of reality outside.
He can hardly justify why this reality is there, but he must admit that the real is indeed always there. He must accept that nothing has significantly changed or aged, and this, to him, is the strangest part, since it is a level of certainty lower than what his delusional experience provides him, yet he resigns himself to it.

Certainly, within each of us, there is far less awareness of the discourse of freedom. Yet, on many points, and as soon as it comes to acting in the name of freedom, our attitude toward what must be endured from reality, or the impassivity required to act collectively in the direction of this freedom, takes on entirely the character of:
a resigned abandonment, a renunciation, of what is nonetheless an essential part of our inner discourse—namely, that we have not only certain inalienable rights, but that these rights are founded on the fact that certain fundamental freedoms are inherently exigible for every human being in our culture.

This discourse does not leave us in peace. I would even say that if we sought, in a concrete way, not merely through the reconstructions of theorists, to understand what it means to “think,” there is something almost ridiculous in this perpetual effort by psychologists when it comes to giving meaning to the word “thought”…
– to reduce it, for example, to an action initiated or an action omitted or represented,
– to extract it from anything that would perpetually place man at the level of an experience confronted with an elementary reality, an object-reality that would be his own.

Yet it is far too obvious that thought constitutes something for each person—perhaps something not highly esteemed, something we might call a more or less futile mental rumination. But why needlessly deprecate it?

Everyone grapples with problems that at every moment relate to this notion of inner liberation, to the manifestation of something included within them by their very existence. Around this, indeed, they quickly reach a sort of deadlock in their own discourse—a carousel-like circular motion of their discourse—something inherent to every kind of living reality immersed in the cultural soul of the modern world. This results in the necessity of constantly returning to certain problems that, at the level of their personal action, undeniably appear as always limited, always hesitant. They only begin to label them “confusional” from the moment they truly take things into their hands as thinkers. But this is not everyone’s fate. Where does each person remain? It is at the level of this insoluble contradiction between:
– a discourse that is always necessary on a certain plane,
– and a reality to which, in principle and demonstrably by experience, this discourse does not correspond.

At this point, do we not see that every reference in analytical experience to something so deeply linked, so attached, to a double discourse as discordant as the ego of every subject we know, of every modern man as we encounter him in our analytical experience, carries something profoundly derisory?

Is it not manifest that analytical experience, its instrument, and its principles are entirely engaged in this fact:
– that, ultimately, no one, in the current state of interhuman relations in our culture, feels comfortable, feels honest, in simply facing even the slightest demand for advice encroaching—no matter how elementary—on principles,
– that it is not merely because we know too little about the subject’s life to be able to answer whether it is better to marry or not to marry under such circumstances, that we will, if we are honest, lean toward reservation. It is because the very question of the meaning of marriage remains, for each of us, an open question—one so open that, when applied to each particular case, we do not feel, in our role as spiritual guides, fully capable of answering.

This common fact, which each person can experience every time they do not abandon themselves in favor of a persona, every time they do not position themselves as an omniscient or moralistic character…
(which is also the first requirement one can legitimately demand of what we call a psychotherapist, insofar as psychotherapy has taught them the risks of such adventurous initiatives)…
it is precisely on a renunciation of taking sides, on the plane of common discourse, with its profound ruptures concerning the essence of morals, concerning the status of man as such, of the individual in our society—it is precisely by avoiding this plane that analysis initially set out to find something else, to limit itself to something elsewhere.

Namely, the presence of a discourse that it calls—rightly or wrongly—“deeper,” a discourse that is, in any case, assuredly different, one that is inscribed in the suffering of the being facing us, in something already articulated, something that escapes them in their symptoms, in their structure, insofar as obsessive neurosis is not merely a set of symptoms but is also a structure.

It is only by aiming elsewhere—at the effect of discourse within the subject—that psychoanalysis advances, that it takes risks. But it never does so by placing itself on the plane of evident problems, on the plane of the discourse of freedom, even though this discourse is always present, always constant within each person, with its contradictions and its discords, with its personal nature, all while being common in this sort of collective inner discourse that always presents itself as imperceptibly delusional.

At this point, does the experience of a case like that of SCHREBER—or any other patient who would provide us with such an extensive account of discursive structure—offer us something that allows us to approach more closely the problem of what the ego truly means?

Namely, not merely this “function of synthesis,” this coordinating factor under which we always enjoy defining it via some abstraction, but as something always inseparably tied within each person to this kind of dead hand, this enigmatic part that is the discourse both necessary and unbearable, which partly constitutes the discourse of the real man we deal with in our experience?

Assuredly, SCHREBER’s case is different from this foreign discourse within each person, inasmuch as he conceives of himself as an autonomous individual. He has a different structure. At one point, SCHREBER humorously notes at the beginning of one of his chapters: “They say I am a paranoiac.” Indeed, at the time, psychiatry was still heavily influenced by the initial Kraepelinian classification, which nonetheless classified him as “paranoiac,” despite symptoms that obviously go much further. However, when FREUD refers to him as “paraphrenic,” he goes even further, as “paraphrenic” is the term Freud proposed for schizophrenia.

Let us return to SCHREBER himself, who says:

“They say I am a paranoiac, and they say paranoiacs are people who relate everything to themselves. In this case, they are mistaken. It is not I who relate everything to myself; it is he who relates everything to me. It is this God who speaks incessantly within me through his various agents, actors, and extensions. It is he who has the unfortunate idea, whatever I may experience, to immediately point out to me that it concerns me, or even that it comes from me. I cannot play—for SCHREBER is a musician—a certain piece from The Magic Flute without him, who speaks, immediately attributing to me the corresponding feelings, but I do not have them myself.”

In other, quite different words, to take another example, President SCHREBER not only does not think this, but is greatly indignant that it is the voice that intervenes to tell him that he is the one concerned by what he is saying.

In other words, this important phenomenological element—of course, we are in a game of mirages—but it is not an ordinary mirage, this intervention of the Other—considered at this point as radically foreign, even as errant—which indeed intervenes to provoke, in the second degree, a sort of convergence toward the subject, an intentionalization of the external world that the subject himself, inasmuch as he struggles, asserts himself, and says “I”, repels with great energy.

Certainly, the fact that this is presented to us as so many hallucinations—I mean, they are not presented to us as such: when we listen to the account, we speak of hallucinations.
Do we absolutely have the right, in the current state of affairs, to speak of hallucinations? The definition of the term “hallucination”—that is, the generally accepted notion that it is something that arises in the external world, since the term “false perception”—any exaggerated representation imposing itself as perception—is something that always presents hallucination purely and simply as a disturbance, a rupture in the fabric of the real. In other words, it situates hallucination within reality.

The preliminary question is whether verbal hallucination does not, in any case, require certain preliminary remarks, a certain analysis of principle that casts doubt upon, that questions, the very legitimacy of introducing the term “hallucination” as it is usually defined, as we deeply understand it in the context of verbal hallucination.

Here, of course, we suddenly notice a path where perhaps I have already wearied you somewhat, namely…
– by reminding you of the very foundations of the order of discourse,
– by questioning its pure and simple reference as a “superstructure” to reality,
– by refuting the purely and simply sign-like nature of it, that is, the equivalence that would exist between naming and the world of objects,
…in short, everything that I constantly remind you about concerning the fundamental function of language.

Here we are once again forced to revisit this; let us try to approach it from a slightly different angle, one a bit closer to experience. We are dealing with a patient. We know that nothing is as ambiguous as verbal hallucination. Classical analyses already allow us to glimpse that, at least in some cases of verbal hallucination, we can perceive the element of initiative, the creation by the subject. I mean that it is something that has been called psychomotor verbal hallucination, those embryonic articulations that observers have joyfully collected in order to bring hope for a fundamental, deeply satisfying rational understanding of the hallucination phenomenon.

In short, we already see that these problems deserve to be addressed; they belong to this domain of the “mouth-to-ear” relationship, which does not exist simply from subject to subject, but equally within each subject himself, who—notably in these most general cases—at the same time he speaks, also hears himself.

When one has reached this point, one believes one has already made progress and can glimpse many things. In truth, I believe that the remarkably sterile analysis of the problem of verbal hallucination stems from the fact that this observation is insufficient. That the subject hears what he says is precisely what should not be dwelled upon. It is about returning to the experience of what happens when he hears another, or simply reflecting on what happens if you focus on the articulation of what you hear, its accent, even its dialectal expressions, anything that is literally part of the recording of your interlocutor’s speech.

It is entirely clear that it is enough to accentuate things a little in this direction—to add a little imagination, let’s say. For, of course, perhaps this can never be pushed to the extreme by anyone, except in the case of a foreign language—where the problem is already resolved. What you hear in speech is something other than what is acoustically recorded and reflected at the acoustic level of the phenomenon.

This observation seems extremely simple if we consider the case of the deaf-mute, who is also capable of receiving a discourse through visual signs conveyed by the classical finger alphabet, combined with other signs. It is quite clear that, for the deaf-mute, the question arises whether he focuses on the beautiful hands of his interlocutor or is fascinated by the fact that he holds a [message?] in his hand. It is clear that it is not the discourse conveyed by those hands that he records at that moment. I would go further: what he records—namely, the sequence of those signs as such, their opposition, without which there is no sequence, hence their organization—is, strictly speaking, comparable to the elementary phonemic opposition we took as the foundation of language. Can we truly say he sees it?

Naturally, here we have a temporal and visual support, just as elsewhere we have a vocal support. But we see that something happens, and what is heard is this succession; it is always on the plane of an articulated temporal synthesis, a temporal synthesis that is not continuous, entirely comparable to this sequence of signs.

Yet we cannot stop there, because assuredly the deaf-mute, even while recording the sequence presented to him, may very well understand nothing if he is addressed in a sign language he does not understand. He will have perfectly—just like someone listening to speech in a foreign language—heard the phrase, but that phrase will be a dead phrase. The phrase becomes alive from the moment it is truly heard, that is, from the moment it carries meaning.

What does this mean? If we have carefully avoided the principle of assuming that meaning always refers to something, if we are fully convinced that meaning is valid only insofar as it refers to another meaning, it becomes clear that the fact that the phrase lives is deeply tied to the fact that the subject, so to speak, listens, is attentive, and hears with this meaning that is intended for him. In other words, if he distinguishes the phrase as understood from the phrase as ununderstood—which does not prevent it from being heard—it is precisely this mechanism that the other day the phenomenology of the delusional case so clearly highlighted: namely, that it is a phrase the subject can always anticipate to some degree. It is in the nature of meaning, as it takes shape, to tend constantly to close in for the one who hears it. In other words, the participation of the listener—I mean the listener to discourse, with the one who emits it—is absolutely permanent.

In other words, there is a connection between hearing and speaking that is not merely external, as was the point we started from earlier—namely, that one hears oneself speak—but which exists only at the proper level of the phenomenon of language.
That is to say, at the moment when the signifier carries the signification, hearing and speaking are at this level—and not at the sensory level of the phenomenon—like the front and back of the same thing. Already, to listen to words, to lend one’s ear to them, is to be more or less obedient to them: “obedient” is nothing else; it is to go forth into an audition.

Where does this analysis take us, in which the movement—or in other words, the meaning—always moves toward something, toward another signification, toward the closure of signification? It always refers to something preceding or something that circles back upon itself, but there is a meaning in the sense of direction. Does this mean, once again, that we have no stopping point?
This is important because, in truth, I am sure that something always remains uncertain in your mind regarding the insistence I place on saying that signification always refers to signification—that there might be, in the end, something about this that irrevocably misses the point of discourse, which is not simply to cover over nor even to conceal the world of things, but from time to time to find support in it.

Where it stops, the notion that we could in any way consider the indication of the thing as a fundamental stopping point has long been refuted. Of course, we have seen the absolute non-equivalence of discourse with any indication. However reduced you might suppose the ultimate element of discourse to be, you will never be able to substitute it, nor simply replace it with an index.

Let us recall Saint AUGUSTINE’s very accurate observation: it is enough to recall that when pointing at something, when making a gesture that at any moment could be taken as equivalent to the final term of discourse, one can never know whether what my finger indicates is the color of the object, or the object simply as material, or whether it is a stain, a crack. In short, at whatever level we consider what pertains to the order of indication, there must necessarily be something else in the word that discerns it, something that constitutes the original property of discourse compared to any indication.

But we cannot stop there. The fundamental reference point of discourse, if we seek where it ends, is nonetheless always at the level of that problematic term we call being that we must find it.

I do not wish to make too profoundly philosophical a discourse here, but to stop simply at an example, to show you what I mean when I say that discourse essentially aims at something and is not, in its term of reference, referable to anything other than something for which we have no other term than “being,” I would ask you to pause for a moment at this: you are at the close of a stormy and exhausting day, and you observe the hour declining and the shadow beginning to engulf what surrounds you.
Is it not possible, in certain cases, for something to come to your mind, something embodied in the formulation “the peace of evening”? In the end, does this have an existence, or does it not?

That it has an existence—I do not think that anyone with a normal affective life would fail to recognize that this is something of value, and that assuredly it is something entirely other than the phenomenal apprehension of the fading of daylight, of the inner calm, of the softening of the outlines of passions. In “the peace of evening” there is something that is already at once both a presence and a choice within the whole of what surrounds you.

In other words, at the very least, the question arises of what connection there is between the formulation “the peace of evening” and what you feel, and it is not absurd to ask whether, outside this formulation, “the peace of evening” could exist for certain beings we might imagine not to distinguish it, to not bring it into existence as distinct from everything that can be drawn as different from this moment of decline in which you perceive it.

And at this moment, without the very verbal formulation that supports it, could it be distinguished from any other register under which temporal reality might be apprehended at that moment:
– from a panicked feeling, for example, of the world’s presence,
– from that certain something specifically agitated, which you might notice at exactly the same moment in the behavior of your cat, who seems to be searching every corner for the presence of some phantom,
– from the anxiety that we attribute, without truly knowing it, to primitive peoples at sunset, when we imagine they might fear the sun will not return, but which is not, however, something unthinkable,
…in short, from any insertion into that moment of an unease, a quest, an anxiety, a meaning that might be entirely different, and which leaves entirely open the question of what relationship this order of being, which has an existence largely equivalent to all sorts of other existences in our experience, which is called “the peace of evening,” has with its verbal formulation.

But even if we leave—and we do leave—this question unresolved, namely the question of this being called “the peace of evening” and its relationship with its verbal formulation, it nonetheless remains that we can observe something entirely different happening within us, depending on whether it is we who have called it, who have more or less prepared it in our discourse before offering it, or whether it surprises us, interrupts us, soothes us.

The motion of the agitations that inhabit us at that moment—and where we precisely realize that it is from the moment we do not articulate it, where we are not listening to it, where, in other words, it is outside our field—that suddenly it falls upon us, that it is at this moment that we tend to hear.
That is to say, that it surprises us with this formulation, more or less endophasic, more or less inspired, that comes to us like a murmur from the outside, which is this manifestation of discourse as it barely belongs to us, and which comes there in echo to what suddenly carries meaning for us in this “presence”—namely, the articulation of which we do not know whether it comes from outside or from within: “the peace of evening.”

Certainly, what we observe is the experiential fact that, without resolving the fundamental issue—namely, the essential relationship between the signifier as a signifier of language and something that otherwise would never be named for us—it becomes clear that the less we articulate it, the more it speaks to us. The more foreign we are to the “being” in question, the more it tends to present itself to us with this more or less pacifying accompaniment of a formulation that appears to us as indeterminate, as at the very limit of the field of our motor autonomy and of something said to us from the outside, something through which, at the limit, the world speaks to us.

When I raised the question of the stopping point of discourse, this gives us an idea: what does the being or non-being of language that is “the peace of evening” mean? Certainly, something that will singularly reverse its value of conviction in our discourse if we note that, to the extent that we neither expect nor wish for it, nor have even thought of it for a long time, it will essentially present itself to us as a signifier.

This is precisely something that analysis can in no way justify as existing, supported by any experimental construction. There is a given here, a certain way of taking this moment of the evening as a signifier, which is something to which we are either open or closed. And it is precisely to the extent that we were closed to it that we receive it with these singular echo phenomena, or with this initiation of the echo phenomenon, which consists in the appearance of something heard at the very limit of our grasp of this phenomenon, and which most commonly formulates itself for us in these words: “the peace of evening.”

In short, what this now aims at—now that we have reached the limit where discourse, if it leads to something beyond signification, opens onto a signifier within the real, whose perfect ambiguity we will never fully resolve, nor what it owes to its marriage with discourse—is that the more this signifier surprises us, that is, in principle, escapes us, the more it will present itself to us with a more or less adequate fringe of discursive phenomena. In other words, in the presence of “the peace of evening,” this term does not seem too inadequate to us.

What concerns us, what we aim at, is to seek—this is the working hypothesis I propose to you—what lies at the center of President SCHREBER’s experience, what he feels without knowing it, so that at the limit of the field of this experience, on its fringe, like the foam stirred up by this signifier that he does not perceive as such but which organizes, at its limit, all these phenomena I spoke of last time. Namely, that this continuous line of discourse is perpetually felt by the subject as testing his discursive capacities.
Not only as a test, but as a challenge, as a demand outside of which the subject would suddenly feel prey to that rupture from the only presence that still exists—in the moment of his delirium—in the world, that of this Absolute Other, of this interlocutor who has emptied the world of all authentic and real presence by reducing all those around him, his companions, to shadows of men.

What does this discourse mean, and the ineffable pleasure attached to it insofar as it is the foundation, the fundamental tone of the subject’s life? It is an exploration of what is at stake, a sort of analysis as it can be attempted in a case that appears particularly teratological, and I propose to you to sustain this inquiry. To open it, I will point out that this subject, whose observation is particularly lived, and who has an unbreakable attachment to the truth, notes what happens when this discourse—to which he is truly suspended, not without suffering—is interrupted.

When this discourse is interrupted, other phenomena occur, distinct from those of the continuous inner discourse, with its distressing slowing, its suspensions, its interruptions, to which the subject is forced to supply the complement of unfinished sentences. It happens that the ambiguous and dual God in question, who usually presents himself in his so-called lower form, withdraws. This is accompanied for the subject by intolerable painful sensations, but above all by four connotations that belong to the order of language.

First, there is the fact that the subject is at that moment subject to what he calls “the miracle of screaming”—that is, he cannot help but emit a sudden, prolonged, rather unsettling, even distressing cry, which grips him with such brutality that he himself notes:
– That if he has something in his mouth at that moment, it may just as well cause him to spit it out.
– That he must really restrain himself to prevent it from happening in public, and he is far from always being able to contain it.

This is a rather striking phenomenon if we see in this scream the most extreme, most reduced edge of the motor participation of the mouth in speech. If there is something through which speech comes to combine with an absolutely non-signifying vocal function—and yet contains within it all possible signifiers—it is precisely something that sends a shiver down our spine in the howl of a dog at the moon.

Another phenomenon is the cry for help, which is supposed to be heard from a more or less distant part, from the divine nerves that, at that moment, have separated from him, but which, even while separating, may leave behind them something like a comet’s tail, a sort of particle of these divine rays.

This resembles those intuitions of inorganic totality evoked throughout his delirium, on which he incarnates what he calls the souls, which, in an earlier time—one he defines by attachment to the earth—made it impossible for him, at that date, to have that kind of effusive communion with the divine rays without one or more of these souls, as he says, “God Hass”, leaping into his mouth.

But for some time, since a certain stabilization of the imaginary world, this no longer happens.
On the other hand, there are still distressing phenomena within this world of animated entities in which he lives. Certain entities, left trailing in this divine retreat, emit the cry: “Help!”

This is clearly distinguished from the phenomenon of the scream; it is something else. This phenomenon of the cry for help, which is articulated, carries meaning: the scream is nothing but a pure signifier, whereas the meaning, however elementary, of the cry for help is something that, on this occasion, is heard.

That is not all: all sorts of external noises…
whatever they may be—whether something happens in the hallway of the sanatorium, or a noise outside, a barking, a neighing, but always something with human meaning—are, he says, miraculous, because these noises are made at that very moment expressly for him. In other words, we observe, between an evanescent meaning—that of the scream—and this kind of articulated emission that is the cry for help, which is not even for him a call but something that surprises him from the outside, a whole spectrum of phenomena characterized by a kind of bursting apart of meaning.

That is to say, in this singular combination, he perceives very clearly that these are real noises, that they could not possibly be anything else. They are indeed noises perfectly cataloged among those he is accustomed to hearing in his surroundings—namely, the sound of steamships passing on the Elbe, people in the corridor. But he has the intuition, or the conviction, that they do not happen at that moment by chance but specifically for him, in direct relation to those intermediary moments: between absorption in the delusional world and the return of dereliction into the external world.

The other miracles, those for which he constructs an entire theory of divine creation, also occur. These other miracles consist of a certain number of living beings, which are generally birds—distinct from the talking birds that are part of the divine entourage. These are bird calls he hears in the garden, usually small birds, singing birds, which he recognizes as being no different from their usual species. The same applies to insects, which are not new species either. This detail is important because there is something connected to this in the subject’s family background, as he had a great-grandfather who was an entomologist.

It is thus a feeling that these birds, in those instances, are created specifically for the occasion, that this all-powerful divine word, which has the power to create beings, has created them there for his use.

In other words, a kind of fading away, a retrospective return of meaning, and this suspension in meaning, which until then had been the subject’s entire activity—half painful, half eroticized—in relation to his internal interlocutor, suddenly begins to illuminate his surroundings with a series of small patches.

Between these two extreme poles—the miracle of screaming and the cry for help—everything happens as if we were touching upon a kind of passage, a transition that itself defines a boundary, where one would see the passage from an absorption of the subject into an undeniably eroticized connection. The connotations are present: it is a feminine-masculine relationship with an exercise that, over time, the subject has extremely neutralized, reduced to its very exercise, a continuous play of significations, which he himself calls “Unsinnig”—nonsensical—but which, in their internal execution, operate instead on a contrary meaning, since they aim to fill phases.

And it is the submissive side of this exercise that he cannot help but endure. Any other way of responding is considered by him as something that would not be part of the game. But even if he could ask them, “What are you asking of me here?” or simply respond with a vulgarity, he must remain bound to this activity of the speaking beings, and especially of God himself, who questions him in His fundamental language—no matter how absurd or humiliating this interrogation may be, he says.

At the moment when the subject exits this enigmatic, eroticized field of signification, where the fundamental phenomenon of his delirium seems to have stabilized, when a reprieve is established, when the subject painfully feels himself detached from it and returns to what seems to be a state of respite that he might even desire, there always occurs a kind of hallucination, on the fringes of the external world, which traverses him with all its elements, like “dissociated” fragments. Through this intermediary, one might also think that he regains a new coherence that approaches him as speaking in his own name, through the various constituent elements of language:
– Namely, vocal activity in its most elementary form, accompanied even by a certain distress linked, for the subject, to a sense of shame.
– On the other hand, a meaning received by him, connoted as a cry for help, strictly correlating and paralleling the abandonment to which he is subject at that moment.
– Then, something else, which after our analysis will appear much more hallucinatory, in the end, than this phenomenon of language, which remains, after all, entirely mysterious. This is why he never calls them anything other than “inner words.”

He describes an entirely unique trajectory of the divine rays that precedes the induction of these divine words.

One of the strangest phenomena he manifests—isn’t this an odd testimony?—is what he describes as the arrival of divine rays, which here have transformed into threads, which he perceives visually, or at least spatially, and which always approach him through a movement, coming toward him from the horizon. They circle his head to invade him, to penetrate him from behind, and this phenomenon preludes what will, in him, constitute the activation of divine discourse as such.

This phenomenon, which everything suggests occurs in what one might call a “trans-space,” should perhaps be defined as being linked to these structural elements of the signifier and signification, namely within a certain spatialization prior to any conceivable dualization of the phenomenon of language as such.

There is something here different from what happens at the moment when this phenomenon ceases, and where reality is precisely denounced by the subject as the support of other phenomena entirely distinct from the first, phenomena that are classically reduced to belief: one might say he believes that God created this for him.

And if the term hallucination must indeed be referred to as a transformation of reality, it is only at this level that we have the right to maintain it, if we want to preserve a certain coherence in language—namely, in how we ourselves situate morbid phenomena. In other words, it is much more within the particular feeling at the boundary of the sense of reality and unreality, at this feeling of near-birth, of novelty—and not just any novelty, but a novelty intended specifically for him—an irruption into the external world, even if it corresponds to a reality that, for the subject, does not seem to have been particularly absent.

But in itself, at that moment, it simply appears to him—precisely as these novelties destined for him—as something belonging to an order different from what we perceive in relation to signification or meaning. Up to this point, what is genuinely hallucination, what we imagine as hallucination—that is, this created reality that emerges into reality as something new—is precisely what constitutes the support of what the subject experiences, even though he remains so profoundly attached to an element of his external world.

I believe I have conveyed to you the framework I attempted to outline today, with all the problems it may involve—that is, the question of the meaning that should properly be given to the term “hallucination.”
To classify them in a way that is consistent, I believe it is far more useful to observe them in their reciprocal contrasts, in their complementary oppositions—the ones the subject himself brings to these phenomena. These are not incidental events, nor are they random, for they are part of the same subjective organization. As such, being formulated by the subject himself, this opposition has a greater value than if it were made by the observer. Additionally, it is essential to follow their succession over time.

If we define this in a way that is not incompatible—starting from an approach to our own subjective field—I have tried to show you what is at stake with SCHREBER: this something always ready to surprise him, which ultimately never reveals itself to him, but of which we have the notion that it is situated within the order of his relationship to language. Insofar as it is always accompanied—that is, insofar as it is revealed by a phenomenon that globally surrounds it—this inner character, this linguistic phenomenon, is seized by the subject, grasped, handled, and to which the subject remains bound by a very particular compulsion, constituting the center where the resolution of his delirium finally converges.

And I believe it is not in vain, within the framework of a kind of subjective topology we are attempting to establish—one entirely based on what analysis reveals to us: that there can exist an unconscious signifier—to seek to understand how this unconscious signifier is situated in psychosis. It seems, in this context, external to the subject. But this exteriority is of a different nature than the one implied when hallucination and delirium are presented to us as disturbances of reality. It is an exteriority to which the subject remains bound—by what kind of erotic fixation?

This is what we must still attempt to understand. But it is a question concerning the speaking space that we must conceive as such, one that cannot be revisited without a kind of dramatic transition where, strictly speaking, hallucinatory phenomena appear—where reality itself presents as affected, also as signifying, where the subject is implicated. This topographical notion aligns with the question already posed about the difference between:
– Verwerfung, as potentially being at the origin of properly psychotic phenomena,
– and Verdrängung, insofar as it is located elsewhere, as it resides at the deepest level of what the subject may experience of language without knowing it.

It is in this opposition between the subjective localization of Verwerfung and Verdrängung, in this initial approximation of their opposition, that lies the meaning I have tried to make you understand today.