🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

“The same parallel is possible due to the omission of various relations that, in both cases, must be supplemented by context. If this conception of the method of representation in dreams has not been followed so far, this, as one must understand from the outset, should be attributed to the fact that psychoanalysts are entirely ignorant of the attitude and the mode of knowledge with which a philologist must approach such a problem as the one presented in dreams.”

I believe this text is quite clear, and the apparent formal contradiction that you might gather from the fact that FREUD says that dreams express themselves in images rather than anything else is immediately, I think, restored and put back into place because he will immediately show you what kind of images they are. That is, images as they intervene in a writing, meaning not even for their own proper sense, for as he says, there are some that will be there not even to be read but simply to provide to what must be read a sort of exponent that he situates, which would otherwise remain enigmatic.

This is the same as what I wrote on the board the other day when I gave you the example of Chinese characters. I could have taken examples from ancient hieroglyphs, where you would see that what serves to depict the pronoun in the first person, drawn with two small signs having a phonetic value, can be accompanied by an image—more or less intricate depending on whether the individual is depicted as a small figure—which is there to give the other signs their meaning conveyed by their signification. However, the other signs, which are no less ideographic than the little figure, must be read in a phonetic register.

In short, the comparison with hieroglyphs is all the more pressing, evident, in the formula FREUD gives us in this paragraph, as it is diffuse in The Interpretation of Dreams. The comparison with hieroglyphs is all the more valid, certain, because—all texts affirm it—he repeatedly returns to it. You are not unaware that FREUD was not ignorant of what hieroglyphic writing truly is. He was passionate about what pertained to the culture of ancient Egypt. Very often, he makes references and comparisons to the mode of thought, the style, and the very specific signifying structure of hieroglyphs, sometimes contradictory, superimposed with the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians.

He readily refers to it in a very natural way to indicate to us, to give us the most expressive image of this or that mode of coexistence of concepts within the contradictory system of neurotics, for example, which is entirely familiar to him. At the end of the same text, we find […] regarding this language, which is that of symptoms. He speaks of the specificity of this signifying structure in the different forms of neuroses and psychoses. He suddenly brings together, in a striking shortcut, the three great neuro-psychoses:

“It is thus,” he says, “that it is indeed a matter of a signifier, which must be related to be understood as a whole. For example:
– What a hysteric expresses by vomiting,
– An obsessive will express by taking very painstaking protective measures against infection,
– While a paranoiac will be led to complaints and suspicions.
In all three cases, these are different representations of the patient’s wish to bring forth what has been repressed into their unconscious and their defensive reaction against this fact.”

This is to get us started. Let us get into our subject. We are not far from it, regarding this desire to be pregnant, the theme of procreation. The theme of procreation, as I told you, being fundamentally at the root of the symptomatology of the SCHREBER case, is something we will not yet directly address today.

I would like, by another approach, and concerning what you may have heard last Monday evening from our friend Serge LECLAIRE, to revisit this question of what I call the ultimate signifier in neurosis, to show you, of course, that while being essentially a signifier, and that it is in the order and the realm of the signifier that it must be understood, it is, of course, not a signifier without meaning.

What I emphasize is that it is a source of meaning and not dependent on meaning. The themes of death and the themes of the two poles of sexuality, male and female, are not givens, they are nothing we can deduce from experience. Now, could the individual find himself if he does not already have the system of signifiers as establishing the distance that allows him to see as an enigmatic object, at a certain distance from himself, what is the least accessible thing to approach, namely his own death?

What is not less difficult to approach… if you think about it, if you consider precisely how much a long, properly dialectical process is necessary for an individual to return to it, and how much all our experience is made of the excesses and deficiencies of this approach… that is to say, what is fundamentally the male pole and the female pole of a reality about which we can ask the question: is it even graspable outside the signifiers that isolate it and specify it, in other words, the male and female polarity?

The notion we undoubtedly have of a reference to reality as something around which the failures, the stumbling blocks of neurosis revolve should not distract us from this observation: the reality we deal with is deeply sustained, woven, by this braid of signifiers that constitutes it, and the human being’s relationship with this signifier as such is something from which we must detach the perspective, the planes, the specific dimension, to know only what we are saying when we say, for example, in psychosis, that something is missing in the subject’s relation to reality.

It concerns a reality structured by the presence within this reality of a certain signifier:
– Which is inherited,
– Which is traditional,
– Which is transmitted by what?

Naturally, not merely due to the fact that we talk around him. What experience, as well as the theory that guided FREUD, has demonstrated is that there is a certain way to engage with this prominence, which is the fundamental signifier, that the Oedipus complex exists precisely for that purpose, for something. The fact that we now accept as an established experiential fact that failing to go through the Oedipus ordeal… that is, failing to see the conflicts and impasses unfold before oneself and failing to resolve them in a certain manner through a certain integration, which is not merely the integration of its elements within the subject but also the incorporation of the subject into its elements provided externally… if we so easily admit that failing to undertake this ordeal leaves the subject in a certain deficiency, a certain incapacity to achieve the proper distances that constitute human reality, it is because we hold precisely that the term “reality” involves this integration into a certain system of signifiers. I am merely formulating here what is implicitly acknowledged by all within the analytic experience.

We have seen, we have indicated along the way, what we can characterize as the hysterical position. It is a question—and a question that pertains precisely to this reference to the two significant poles of male and female—that the hysteric poses with their entire being: “How can one be male or female?” This implies, of course, that they nonetheless have the reference. That is how the question is posed.

The obsessive responds, one might say, in a certain way, or more precisely through their mode of response…
The question is what the entire structure of the hysteric introduces, is suspended upon, and is sustained by, with their fundamental identification to the individual of the opposite sex, through which, in a way, they question their own sex. To the hysteric’s way of responding, “either… or…,” the obsessive opposes a response of negation:
to this “either… or…” they respond with “neither… nor…,” neither male nor female.

The negation is made against the backdrop of mortal experience, absence, the withdrawal of their being from the question, which is a way of remaining suspended in it. What defines the obsessive is precisely this: if you find neither one nor the other, one might also say that they are both at once. I move on, for all this serves only to situate what happens in the psychotic, as it contrasts with the position of each of the subjects in the two major neuroses in relation to the question.

If we—through repeated returns to it—have come to understand well that the history of neuroses, as presented by Freudian theory and experience…
what I called in my discussion on FREUD two weeks ago “inhabited language,” language as it is inhabited, that is, necessary for the subject who literally takes it—though more or less—takes it up with their entire being, which is to say, in part unbeknownst to them…
how can we fail to see, merely in the phenomenology of psychosis, merely in the fact that every psychosis, from what we observe from beginning to end, is composed of a certain relationship of the subject to this language, which all of a sudden is elevated to the forefront of the scene, which all of a sudden speaks on its own, comes out aloud, in its noise, in its fury, in their head, in its neutrality, and certainly comes—contrary to the formula—how, if the neurotic inhabits language—and that is how they must be conceived—there, truly, the psychotic is inhabited and possessed by language.

Something comes to the forefront…
which reveals a certain confrontation, a certain distinction, a certain trial to which the subject is subjected, and which is essentially the problem of some fault concerning this ongoing discourse, which we must conceive as supporting the everyday, the ordinary flow of human experience… all of a sudden, of action, of situation, of attitude, of behavior, of affection.

This correlative, textual stage of what we might call “the perpetual monologue,” something appears, something stands out, in a sort of multi-voiced music whose structure is worth pausing on, asking why it is composed as it is. Since it is precisely something that is one of the phenomena appearing to us most immediately structured, since the very notion of structure is borrowed from language, failing to recognize it, reducing it as is often done—under the pretext that these are precisely structural phenomena appearing—to something that might be merely a mechanism is as demonstrative as it is ironic.

For indeed, all the traits of the mechanism are apparent at the level of what CLÉRAMBAULT identified under the name of “elementary phenomena of psychosis”…
– This repeated thought,
– This contradicted thought,
– This commanded thought…
what else is it but this doubled discourse, taken up again in antithesis?

Yet, because we have this appearance of purely formal structuration—and CLÉRAMBAULT is absolutely right to insist on it—how can we fail to see that deducing from it, implying from it, that we are faced with mere mechanical phenomena of delay, of something entirely insufficient alongside the fact that the commentary on something else is nothing but an echo, that the antithesis, the contradiction, even the dialogue itself is established. It is something we must rather conceive of in terms of an internal structure to language. That is what is most fertile.

But conversely, the fact of having demonstrated its structural character, prevalent within structure—that is, what CLÉRAMBAULT in his language calls “ideally neutral.” What he simply meant by this was that it was in full discordance with the affections of the subject, and no affective mechanism suffices to explain it. This is a highlight of the investigation, which CLÉRAMBAULT emphasizes.

This happens to be indeed what was fertile in his clinical investigation. The more or less weak character of the etiological or pathogenic deduction matters little compared to the value of what he highlights: namely:

– That it is a relationship of the subject to the signifier as such, in its most formal aspect, in its aspect as pure signifier, to which the core of psychosis must be linked, and that everything constructed revolves around it,

– That the affective reactions themselves are reactions of affect to a phenomenon that is a primary phenomenon of relation to the signifier.

I would say that if the psychotic is thus inhabited by language, we must conceive that this strikingly external relationship is the one that all clinicians, in some way, have emphasized. The influence syndrome still leaves certain things vague, while the external action syndrome, however naïve it may seem, sharply highlights the essential dimension of the phenomenon. This external relationship that exists, if one can put it this way, between the psychotic and the entirety of the language apparatus is something that raises the question: in the end—within this language, within this language that inhabits the psychotic—has the psychotic ever truly entered?

The notion we may have of what is called “the antecedents of the psychotic” is indeed something that many clinicians have studied, that certain experiences allow us to appreciate, and that a certain personality style, through analytical investigation, allows us to understand.

We have the notion—highlighted by Hélène DEUTSCH, on which I once made some remarks—of a certain “as if” that seems to mark the early stages of development in those who, at some point, will more or less fall into psychosis. This involves a certain relationship that never fully enters the game of signifiers, a kind of external imitation, a lack of integration of the subject into this register of the signifier.

This gives us a direction in which the question of the precursors to psychosis can be posed. Certainly, it is a question that can only be solved through analytical investigation. It happens that we take pre-psychotic individuals into analysis, and we know what results: it produces psychotics.

There would be no question of contraindications to analysis if our experience did not make us notice… if we did not all have in our memory certain cases from our own practice or that of our colleagues where a full-blown psychosis—a beautiful and proper psychosis, by which I mean a beautiful and proper hallucinatory psychosis (not a precipitated schizophrenia)—is triggered in the course of one or two rather intense initial sessions of analysis. Here, the brilliant analyst quickly becomes a transmitter: the subject analyzes, hears all day long what they should and should not do. Do we not, in our experience, touch upon precisely the core of the reasons for entering psychosis, without needing to look further?

After all, the issues as they arise here, put into play for a man’s “being-in-the-world,”
– are not so present,
– are not so urgent,
– are not so premature
that he is necessarily wrong to confront this task, perhaps the most arduous task that could be proposed to a human being—what is called “taking the floor,” by which I mean taking one’s own, not merely saying “yes, yes, yes” to that of a neighbor.

Naturally, this does not always mean expressing oneself in words. What we see in the clinic is precisely that at this moment, when we know how to look closely, when we know how to seek it at extremely different levels, sometimes it is a very small task of “taking the floor” for a subject who has lived until then in their cocoon, like a moth. It happens. This is the form that CLÉRAMBAULT describes so well:
“mental automatism” in old maids, for instance—I think it was he who described this, the frequency of mental automatism among old maids, delusions of persecution, etc.—this marvelous richness characterizing his style. How could CLÉRAMBAULT himself have stopped at mere facts?

There was truly no reason to focus particularly on these unfortunate beings, whose existence he describes so well, forgotten by all: at the slightest provocation, one sees this phenomenon of mental automatism arise, this discourse that, in them, had always remained latent, unexpressed.

I believe we must here connect this failure of the subject at the moment of approaching genuine speech—if this is truly something where we can situate the entry, the slide into the critical phenomenon, into the inaugural phrase of psychosis. Our focal point, if I may say so, you should already glimpse from the phenomenology. The notion of Verwerfung, which I introduced as fundamental, is there to indicate that there must indeed be something prior, something missing in the relationship to the signifier as such.

There is a first entry, a first introduction to the fundamental signifiers, which must be lacking in the sequence. This is, quite evidently, the kind of thing that can only be absent in all experimental research. There is no way to grasp, at the moment it is missing, something that is missing—something that is, let us say, in the case, for instance, of President SCHREBER, precisely the absence of this initial core, this first spark, which could be called the signifier as such. This is the something to which President SCHREBER could seem, for years, to equalize himself—to fulfill his role as a man: to appear to be someone like everyone else.

It is true that virility meant something to him, as it is always the object of his very vehement initial protests at the invention of the delusional phenomena. From the very beginning, it presents itself as a question about his sex, as an appeal coming to him from the outside, as in this fantasy: “It would be beautiful to be a woman undergoing coupling.” It thus seems that we see here two planes, something that the entire development of the delusion expresses, namely, that there is no other way for him to realize, to assert himself as sexual, except by admitting and recognizing himself as a woman, and therefore as transformed into a woman. This is the permanent thread, the pivotal axis, the bipolar line of the delusion.

There is thus something that distinguishes this:
– this progressive revelation of a certain lack,
– and the necessity to reconstruct the entire world—I mean the entire cosmos, the entire organization of the world—around this: that there is a man who can only be the woman of a sort of universal god.

This is indeed the matter at hand. There is a distance between this and the fact that this man appeared in his ordinary discourse up to a certain point— a critical point in his existence—as, like everyone else, a man. And also, what he calls somewhere his man’s honor protests strongly when it is suddenly tickled rather sharply by the entry into play of this enigma, this absolute Other, which presents itself in the first ringing bells of the delusion.

In short, we are guided by our approach, by the very form our inquiry must take, towards this distinction that serves as a criterion, a framework for everything we have thus far deduced as necessary from the structuring of the analytic situation itself: namely, the difference that exists, in relation to the subject, between what I have called the little other…
– the other with a lowercase “o,”
– the imaginary other,
– the mirrored alterity that makes us dependent on the form of our counterpart,
…and this other, which is the absolute Other:
– the one we address beyond this counterpart,
– the one whose point, center, and endpoint we are forced to admit beyond the mirage relationship,
– the one who accepts or refuses us in front of us,
– the one who, on occasion, deceives us and of whom we can never know whether or not they deceive us,
– the one to whom, in fact, we always address ourselves, and whose existence is such that the act of addressing them—having, so to speak, a language with them—is more important than anything that may serve as stakes between them and us.

Observe closely that this distinction between the two others—though omnipresent in analysis yet often misunderstood—is the source of all the false problems that have arisen, particularly since we have shed light on and emphasized the enormous primacy, the primordial object relationship you know of, which establishes an evident discordance between:
– the Freudian position of attributing an object, a human object—in other words, a newborn—to its entry into the world, a relationship called auto-erotic, which is to say, a relationship in which the object does not exist,
– and the observation opposed by clinical evidence: that this opposition is entirely inconceivable, for certainly from the very beginning of life, we have all kinds of signs that all sorts of objects exist for the newborn.

This can only be resolved by distinguishing:
– this imaginary other insofar as it can indeed—and structurally is—the origin, the form, the field in which a multiplicity of objects is structured for the human newborn,
– and the existence or non-existence of this absolute Other, this Other with a capital “O/A,” which is undoubtedly what FREUD aimed at and what analysts subsequently neglected when he spoke of the original non-existence of any Other.
There is a good reason for this: it is because, as FREUD says, “This Other truly is entirely within itself, yet at the same time, it is entirely outside itself.”

This possibility of an ecstatic relationship with the Other is a question that does not date from yesterday, but one that, having been left in the shadows for centuries, deserves from us, as analysts, constant attention—and that we revisit it. This concerns the difference between what, in the Middle Ages, was called:
– the so-called “physical” theory of love,
– and the so-called “ecstatic” theory of love.

This raises the question of the subject’s relationship to this absolute Other, in which, according to the “ecstatic” theory, true love, the true existence of the Other, may be situated. Let us say that to understand psychoses, we must overlay:
– on our schema of this a’, the little a, and the capital A, this Other which situates love in its value as a relationship to an Other as radically Other,
– with [a’→a], the possible mirrored or reflective situation of everything in the order of the imaginary, of the animus and anima, which are situated differently according to gender.

It is in this relationship to an Other, in the possibility of the amorous relationship,
– insofar as it abolishes the subject,
– insofar as it acknowledges a radical heterogeneity of the Other,
– insofar as this love is also death,
…that lies the problem, the distinction, the difference between someone who is psychotic and someone who is not.

I will, to help you grasp what I mean…
for it may seem to you a curious and singular detour to resort to a medieval theory of love to introduce the question of psychosis…
I will point out one thing: it is so true that it is impossible to conceive of madness without introducing this dimension of its nature. If you reflect sociologically on the forms observed, recorded, and attested in the culture of enamoration, in the phenomenon of falling in love, I think you will not find that I hold my position too rigidly in pointing out that posing the question in this way simply aligns with what is on the agenda in the most common stance of psychological pattern analysis.

[A page is missing in the stenography]

…fallen into the ridiculous, and the precisely alienated and alienating nature of the entire process with which we play—no doubt increasingly from the outside, increasingly distant—sustains an entire mirage, moreover increasingly diffuse. The thing, if it no longer takes place with a lady or a Dame [cf. Courtly Love], happens instead in the relationship of the spectator in the darkened room with an image on the screen, with which everyone communicates and participates.

But this belongs to the domain of what I want to emphasize: this dimension that clearly leans toward madness in the strict sense, a pure mirage, which occurs insofar as the original relationship, the fundamental accent of that amorous relationship, is lost. This relationship—what seems to us today almost comedic—involved the total sacrifice of one being to another, systematically pursued by people who, naturally, had the leisure to do nothing else but this, but which assuredly possessed the character of a spiritual technique. A technique, as you know, with its modes and registers, which we can barely glimpse, given our distance from those practices. Yet even so, we can identify a number of highly specific—and indeed very peculiar—practices, which might interest us as analysts, including that kind of ambiguity between sensuality and chastity, technically sustained through a sort of unique concubinage, without relations, or at least with deferred relations, that constituted what was undoubtedly the detailed foundation of the practice of love to which I allude.

The important point is to show you that the alienating and mad nature, the degradation, connoting the debris—so to speak, the remnants—of something lost on the sociological level, gives us an analogy for what happens in the subject’s psychosis. It lends meaning to FREUD’s statement, which I quoted to you the other day, that “The psychotic loves their delusion as they love themselves.”

This shadow of the Other, which can only be grasped in relation to the signifier as such, attaches to nothing but a shell, an envelope, the form of speech. It is in the absence of speech that the eros of the psychotic resides; it is there that the psychotic finds their supreme love. Within this framework, many things become clear.

For instance, the peculiar way SCHREBER entered into his delusion, his psychosis, with this strange phrase… one that analysts, nonetheless, can interpret with some clarity: the phrase he uses, soul murder, as being the initial, introductory event of his psychosis. Admit it: within this framework, it is a striking echo of the language of love—in the technical sense I have just highlighted to you—in the way one spoke of entering into love in the era of La Carte du Tendre.

This soul murder, with all its sacrificial, mysterious, and symbolic connotations, is something in which we cannot fail to recognize an echo of an entire language, especially at the point where that language—no coincidence that I mention La Carte du Tendre, even the Précieuses, since the term soul murder emerges within the précieux language—appears at the threshold of psychosis.

In sum, if there is something we can perceive as representing the entry into psychosis, it is that at the measure of a certain call [A] to which the subject cannot respond, something occurs at the level of the little other. This is something we might call:
– a kind of proliferation of modes of being, of relationships to the little other, an imaginary proliferation,
– a proliferation that supports a certain mode of language and speech (delusion),

…which must be analyzed and taken as such. I have already indicated several reference points within these, which we will try to revisit today and introduce in the form of some chapter headings, which we will attempt to expand upon subsequently. From the very beginning of SCHREBER’s delusion, I pointed out, marked, and emphasized the opposition between the entry, the intrusion of what he calls the fundamental language, which is indeed affirmed as a kind of particularly full set of signifiers.

SCHREBER’s terms are almost identical to those I use. This old German language is rich in resonance due to the nobility and simplicity of its phrasing. Hence the emphases SCHREBER places to give all its objectivity and linguistic character, in its most precious, most resonant nature, as corresponding to the fundamental phenomenon. The entry of the fundamental language is entirely singular. I will read passages where the matter extends much further, where SCHREBER speaks of the misunderstanding with God as something rooted in the idea that God cannot distinguish between this fundamental language, which, as he says, corresponds to human nerves. We have already noted that his conception of human nerves or the nerves of souls aligns almost exactly with what we might call discourse. He says: “God is incapable of distinguishing between what expresses the true feelings of little souls.”

Thus, both the subject—or the real discourse in which they commonly express themselves during their activities, their interactions with others—and SCHREBER’s text itself traces the distinction quite literally:
– between unconscious discourse and common discourse,
– between what the subject expresses of their being everywhere and what I call language.

And if we can doubt this for a moment, this seemingly superfluous detail compared to other elements SCHREBER provides helps us understand that God understands nothing. As FREUD says somewhere, what is at stake is that there is more psychological truth in SCHREBER’s delusion—this is the wager FREUD makes—than in everything psychologists might say about it. That is, it suffices to read it to see:
– that the psychotic experience confronts a reality that it reveals and provides,
– that, as SCHREBER says, he knows much more about human mechanisms and emotions than psychologists do, and FREUD agrees.

I say: as if something more were needed to confirm this within this fundamental language, where God immediately recognizes what He takes as “the entirety of man,” because He understands nothing else. He does not concern Himself with all the daily needs of man; He understands nothing of man because He understands too much. The proof is that He includes in this fundamental language what happens while man is asleep—that is, his dreams—precisely, as though He had read FREUD and had been introduced to the analytical perspective.

To this, and from the very beginning, stands opposed one aspect of the signifier, which is presented to us for its intrinsic qualities, its own density—not for its meaning, but its signifiance. We have the empty signifier; we also have the signifier valued for its purely formal qualities, as these serve to create series and similarities, for example: Jesum Christum. In short, the language of the vestibules of heaven, or, put differently, the birds of the sky, those we have identified as young girls, to whom SCHREBER attributed the privilege of speech without meaning.

It is between these two poles that the register is situated, so to speak, within which the entry into psychosis unfolds in its entirety: the universe of the revealing word, by which I mean the word as it opens a new dimension, giving that feeling of ineffable understanding, which, moreover, covers nothing previously experienced. It is something entirely new being offered, while on the other hand, it manifests as the universe of refrains and repetitions.

This bipartition, and the process within it, unfolds as the subject progresses in the reconstruction of this world that has entirely collapsed into confusion with what I call “the ringing bell” marking the entry into psychosis. As he reconstructs his world, we follow him step by step. He rebuilds it in an attitude of progressive, ambiguous, and hesitant consent—reluctant, as the English say.

He gradually admits that, after all, it is conceivable, that one might admit, that it may be the only way out: that he must conceive, in a certain way, that he is a woman. If that is the only mode in which he can save a certain stability in his extraordinarily intrusive, invasive, desiring relationships—those he experiences with the myriad entities that, for him, sustain this unleashed language, this inner clamor—he eventually admits: “Isn’t it better to be a woman of spirit than a stupefied man?”

And he accepts the possibility of being transformed into a woman, feeling his body progressively invaded by these images to which he himself gives entry—he says so and writes it. He opens the door to them through this imaginary design he now applies to his own body. He explains very clearly how he does it: he allows the images of feminine identification to enter, lets them take hold, allows himself to be possessed by them, and considers it a preliminary remodeling. Somewhere, in a note, he mentions the notion of letting these images enter him.

It is from that moment—dates are noted, as there are crises—that he can, albeit enigmatically, recognize and admit that, on the other hand, the world outside does not seem to have changed all that much, at least outwardly, during the months that this crisis has lasted. This opens the question, in other words, of a certain undeniably problematic, enigmatic sense of reality.

I highlight this point, which I will return to, to indicate that what is important from our perspective—in this particular field that we are trying to illuminate, as it has not been illuminated so far—is the occurrence of what I call “the migration of meaning.” Namely, it is not in the […]

First come the “full” manifestations of speech, rewarding, fulfilling, and satisfying as they remain for him, as his world is reconstructed on the imaginary plane. On the real plane, the symbolic meaning of speech—the support—withdraws, receding to other places. Initially, this occurred—he says so—in what he calls “the realms of prior God,” which are equivalent to the realms of God that lie ahead, before him.

Then, with the idea of retreat, distance, Entfernung, remoteness, which corresponds to the first great meaningful intuitions, this sense withdraws ever further. For as he reconstructs his world, what is near to him—what allows him to be understood, what he interacts with, namely, the prior God with whom he has this peculiar relationship, indeed, a sort of image of copulation: the first dream of invasion marking the psychosis—what is near to him enters the universe of droning refrains, of emptiness, objectification, and what he calls the conception of souls.

Within a kind of perpetual vibration of introspection—but an introspection that is constructed, elaborated—he responds at every moment to his own thoughts, annotating them with this curious and constant accompaniment he calls “the taking of notes.” This, at every moment, connotes and situates all his psychological mechanisms, individualizing them, authenticating them, endorsing them, and recording them.

This phenomenon of displacement, so to speak, of the subject’s relationship to speech, is the point on which, next time, I wish to draw your attention. I want to emphasize and highlight, through precise examples, the distinction that exists within the spoken and hallucinatory phenomenon itself between one type of relationship to the other and another type. I aim to show that the relationship to the great Other is always present and always veiled in what remains alive in his hallucinatory spoken phenomena.

By this, I mean those phenomena that retain for him a sense always in the register of interpellation, irony, challenge, and allusion. In short, these phenomena consistently allude to the Other with a capital “O/A,” as something that is simultaneously there yet never seen, never named, except indirectly. This is the phenomenon that appears absolutely essential to highlight. You will see that it will lead us to linguistic observations, for I believe that this phenomenon can only be grasped and understood through a philological analysis—through something always within our reach and yet never fully apprehended.

I am referring, for instance, only to this: the two different and entirely distinct modes of using personal pronouns, which are completely separate. There are personal pronouns that can be declined: “I, me, you, him, or it,” because this entire category of personal pronouns is capable of being elided.

There is a certain way of using them with “me,” “you,” “him,” which cannot be declined.
You can see the difference: “I want it,” or “I want him,” or “I want her”—these are not the same.

We will leave it at that for today.