🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I have indicated to you the type of problem we are dealing with. To be completely precise:
to understand why, in so-called hallucinatory phenomena, such as those gathered by SCHREBER…
those in which both disorder and a lack are expressed, and also, from our specifically analytical perspective, an effort toward healing, a restitution of a world as psychotic…
why we encounter certain forms which I pointed out last time, concluding that we could only truly grasp them by referring to something:
– something belonging to the dimensions of discourse,
– something that does not overlook the nature of this privileged act, which is the act of speech,
…and, to put it plainly, not to content ourselves with this mere reference.

Does the subject hear something with their ear that exists or does not exist?
It is quite evident that it does not exist and that, consequently, it belongs to the realm of hallucination, a false perception.

Is this explanation sufficient for us? Should we adopt, in this regard, a kind of massive conception of reality that ultimately leads only to a sort of mysterious explanation, where, in the gap caused by what analysts call the “refusal to perceive” in reality, what should emerge instead is a tendency, a drive, at that moment repressed, rejected by the subject? Why would something as complex, as structured, as rich as speech appear in this gap? Certainly, this represents a step forward compared to the classical conception of speech, which leaves the phenomenon entirely mysterious. It seems to us that we can go further and assert that the phenomenon of psychosis allows us to restore the proper relationship, increasingly overlooked within the broader field of analytic work.

The key lies entirely in the relationship between the signifier and the signified.

I recall some of these phenomena in the case of psychosis, particularly in the case of President SCHREBER.
I state that there is, at a certain moment, what can be called the end of the period of great disruption, of great dissolution of his external world. At the very end of this period—and I would say: rooted in this period—we see the emergence of a certain structuring in his relationships with what is significant to him.

This structuring broadly appears as follows: there are always, in all epochs, in all periods of his delusional experience, as he reports it so strikingly in this undoubtedly unique work in the annals of psychopathology, always, broadly speaking, two planes.

These two planes are endlessly subdivided within each of them. But the very effort he makes to construct in his delusional world, always to position something within a relationship that is first anterior and then beyond that relationship, something that is clearly imposed on him by his experience, guides us toward something truly fundamental in his structure. This is something I have occasionally demonstrated quite directly in clinical settings through the confessions and confidences of individuals like this man, during the interrogation of the delusional subject.

In the first plane, this is where something occurs, a kind of shift during the evolution of psychosis. We mainly observe phenomena that the subject considers neutralized, as regressing into something that increasingly signifies less in terms of a genuine other facing him.

These are words—he says very frequently—memorized by heart, drummed into those who repeat them to him. Moreover, those supposed to repeat them are themselves beings who do not know what they are saying:
“birds of the sky”—though the term “bird” leads us to the parrot—they merely play the role of transmitting something empty, tiresome for the subject, something that exhausts him. It is not simply at the limit of meaning, as we will see when these phenomena first arise, but rather contrary to it, the residue, the waste, an empty body, which, in another form, presents itself as something fragmented, interrupted, suggesting a continuation. That is, what a sentence or a meaningful pattern inherently implies—the unity at the level of the signifier, the full unity in the sentence, even if consisting of a single word. One cannot claim that the sentence, even in a meaningful way, is possible in each of its identifiable elements except when it is completed.

This may seem to take us a bit further, a bit too quickly. I will try today to illustrate its meaning for you with examples because I believe this is a very, very important point. In these interrupted sentences, these suspended sentences, generally stopped at the moment when the pivotal word of the sentence, the one that gives it meaning, is still missing or implied, it is in the subject’s commentary that we find the sentence’s intended meaning, what the subject hears, giving the sentence its full weight, its sense.

Examples abound; I have already revealed more than one to you. For example: “Are you still talking…?”
and the sentence stops. And it means: Are you still talking about foreign languages? And this holds an entire meaning.

What is called the concept of souls is this entire, much fuller dialogue that souls exchange with him about himself, allowing us to detect different types of thoughts:
– the thoughts below,
– and the thoughts of desire,
an entire psychology exchanged at a more recessed level, so to speak, with something with which he communicates.

Something that initially manifested through its modes of expression in the fullest sense, even ineffable, but nonetheless highly charged and flavorful, is what he seems to have encountered quite closely at the onset of his delusion, and which increasingly distances itself, becomes enigmatic, situates itself, recedes into the background—the God or the realms of God from beyond, posterior, on the levels where those surprising hallucinations occur. These hallucinations inevitably capture our interest, our attention, particularly during the more advanced stages of the delusion, when the nearby voices that disturb him, the voices that enunciate him, connote him, interrogate him—though always in an absurd manner—multiply. It can be said that behind these voices, there are other voices expressing themselves through certain striking formulas, some of which I have already shared with you, and others I will provide today. I will cite one that is among the most striking and that I have already mentioned:

“And now the principal thought is missing.”

Or again, Gesinnung: Gesinnung can mean conviction or faith. It is in the latter sense that the subject interprets it when he states:

“Gesinnung is something we owe to every good man, as well as to the darkest sinner, subject to the requirements of purification inherent in the order of the universe, which we owe him in exchange, within this kind of reference that should regulate our relationships with human beings.”

[From time to time it was also admitted in these words: “Fehlt uns die Gesinnung,” i.e., the kind of Gesinnung that we should essentially have toward every good person, and even toward the most depraved sinner, subject to the purifying means in accordance with the world order.]

It is indeed faith we are dealing with here, a minimum good faith implied by the fact that we recognize the existence of the Other.

We go even further at certain moments in his hallucinations, where we find the truly singular expression:

“With my consent, something must be.”

This is not “the solution.” It is not something extremely easy to translate. It is a rare word, one which, after consulting individuals familiar with such matters, I concluded refers to nothing other than what I call “the foundational word.” It is truly “the key.” It might resemble “the solution,” but it is rather “the final lynchpin,” “the foundational word.”

It is a term with a very particular connotation, a technical connotation in the art of hunting. It would be something hunters refer to using this German term commonly adopted in French, fumets, meaning the traces left by large game animals.

In short, if we pause briefly on these matters, I highlight what appears to me to be the essential feature, namely what I previously referred to as the migration of meaning, or the retreat of meaning, this evasion of meaning onto a plane that the subject is compelled to situate as a background. Furthermore, there is this opposition between two modes, two styles, two scopes, so to speak—I use the word “scopes” because it is closest to a term employed by linguists, scope. It could also be aims, the aimed style, hallucinatory, insofar as they concern the subject:

– On the one hand, this problematic style, this kind of scansion, of interruption, which plays upon the property of the signifier as such, and a kind of implicit form in the interrogative text, which the subject experiences, in the fullest sense of the term, including its sense of constraint.

And then this kind of meaning, which by its nature evades, even accentuates itself as something that evades, but which, in its evasion, becomes an exceedingly full meaning—a meaning of the limit, as if, in a sense, aspirating through its escape, its evasion, and through the pursuit that the subject experiences, providing the heart, the center, a sort of navel of the entire delusional phenomenon, apprehended as such.

You know that the term “navel” that I use is employed by FREUD, particularly to designate a specific point where the meaning of the dream seems to culminate in a kind of hole, a knot beyond which it truly connects to the core of being itself. FREUD expressed this in such terms.

For this phenomenological description—it is nothing more—try to derive something from it, the maximum. As for what is at stake here, I emphasize:

– it is about finding a mechanism: the explanation,
– it is about finding a mechanism: strictly speaking, to engage in scientific analysis on something whose registers, whose various modes of manifestation are not, as physicians and practitioners, familiar to us.

And I am here to tell you that familiarity with this is absolutely essential so that we do not let the entire analytic experience slide entirely to one side and lose its meaning. This phenomenal relationship is absolutely essential to preserve. It resides entirely in this distinction, highlighted a hundred times, between the signifier and the signified. As I bring it to light, without a doubt you must ultimately ask yourself:

“After all, when he speaks to us of the signified and these meanings, isn’t there always, more or less present within, something that is evidently of the signifier? And doesn’t the entire analytic experience show us how much the meanings that orient, polarize the analytic experience, derive from the signifier, simply by way of the body itself? Conversely, for some time now, when we speak of the signifier, this signifier from which an element may, in a sense, be absent, doesn’t this imply a kind of sleight of hand that supposedly has its own secret, where at the peak of the signifier, we are presented with something that is the fullest meaning, and thus always slipping, under some pretext, from one register to another for the purposes of his demonstration?”

I will go further. I will concede that there is indeed something of this nature, and it is precisely what I want to explain to you today. Because, in the end, the problem is to make you feel, in the most vivid way, this something that you must nonetheless have an overall intuition of. Last year, I showed you certain characteristic phenomena in the analysis of Freudian thought.

For example, certain phenomena of neurosis illustrated by these letters [α, β, γ, δ], which some have retained, or, this year, concerning psychosis, you must sense how important it is for this to remain an element always present in my experience as well as in our practice. Namely:
– if there are elementary meanings,
– if there is something we call “desire,” or “states,” or “feelings,” or “affectivity,” undoubtedly rather vague,
…these fluctuations, these shadows, even these resonances, form something within which we can define a certain dynamic and a certain economy.

We cannot disregard everything that occurs, everything within our reach as a phenomenon of this: it is that just as important as this proper dynamic…
which is so lacking in elements that would allow us to explain it, and so often forces us to introduce various kinds of presuppositions, more or less smuggled in, when we try to explain things purely on the level of this dynamic…
there is something else, which is precisely, strictly speaking, this level of the signifier:

– insofar as it is structuring,
– insofar as it does not merely provide us with the envelope, a container for what is pending: meaning,
– insofar as, strictly speaking, it polarizes it, structures it, installs it into existence.

And without this proper order of the signifier and an exact understanding of its properties—something that we are beginning here to attempt to articulate, to decipher—it is completely impossible to understand anything.
I am not saying this applies to psychology, for it suffices to define and delimit psychology in a certain way for this to no longer hold true. But certainly, it applies to the psychoanalytic experience.

This opposition between the signifier and the signified is, as you know, fundamental to Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic theory.
It is expressed somewhere in one of his explanatory chapters, in the famous diagram of the two curves.

It concerns precisely what I am talking about: the signifier and the signified, in the sense that nothing is more significant here than the ambiguity of Saussure’s vocabulary. At this point, he tells us, “we have the sequence of thoughts.” He says this without the slightest conviction, as his entire theoretical development aims to reduce this term “thoughts” to the much more precise term “signified,” as it is distinguished from the signifier and the thing.

The mere fact that he insists on the “amorphous mass” aspect of what is at stake—what we may temporarily call the “sentimental mass” of what occurs in the flow of discourse, in the confusion expressed there, where units appear: islands, an image, a feeling, a cry, an appeal, something composed of a sequence, a continuum.

And below [in Saussure’s model], the signifier is considered as the pure chain of discourse, as a succession of words, precisely emphasizing that, even within the signifier, nothing is isolatable from this chain.
This is what I want to show you today through an experiment.

Last night, after a week spent searching through works for references to the matter at hand, and which is central to us—the eternal difference between “I” and “me”—I searched among personal pronouns to see if the French language might illustrate for you…
– how this “I” and this “me” are distinct and different,
– how the subject can lose mastery over them, if not lose contact with them, in the experience of psychosis,
…moving further into the structure of the term itself. For as soon as one seeks the notion of the person and its functioning, one goes beyond this pronominal incarnation. It is the structure of the term itself that is at issue.

And it is clearly this term that must be sought, at least for our languages, when addressing the person of the subject. All this undoubtedly ensures the steps I want you to take today. I would say that, as of last night, I had accumulated such a mass of theory in this regard, considering the approaches of linguists in documents that are often contradictory, requiring so many plans to demonstrate their meaning, and why such authors addressed the matter…

In short, last night, reproducing on paper this double chain, this double thread of the discourse chain taken in its purely verbal and notable character of the other, indeed, it is something we deeply sense as always fluid, always ready to unravel.

We know, as analysts more than anyone, what this experience is, how elusive it is, how much hesitation there can be before engaging in it, always ready to return to it. We sense there is something here both irreducible and, at the same time, that provides the most authentic tools for attempting to convey what I believe allows us to move forward in our experience, to complete what this is, but also to give it truly usable meaning.

You know, Saussure attempts to define the segments and their lengths in which some form of correspondence can be grasped between these two “flows.” The mere fact that his experiment remains open—that is, leaves the phrase, the entire expression, problematic—shows us both the method’s meaning and its limits.

Well, I return to something and say this to myself: on what basis shall we start to take an example?
I search for a sentence, and somewhat in the manner of a character recreating the poetic process, who, having nothing to say, nothing to write, paces back and forth, starting by saying, “To be or not to be,” and lingers there for a long time, suspended, until he finds the continuation by returning to the beginning of the sentence: “To be or not to be.”

So, I begin with a “Yes,” and since I am not an English speaker but a French one, what comes to mind afterward is: “Yes, I come to His temple to worship the Eternal.” This means that the signifier is not isolatable.

It is very easy to grasp this immediately. If you stop at “yes, I,” why not? If you had an ear truly like a machine, at every instant the unfolding of the sentence would follow a meaning, and “yes, I” carries meaning.

That is probably what this text is about. Everyone wonders why the curtain rises on this “yes, I come…” People say: it is the continuation of the conversation. It is, first of all, because it makes sense! And I would say—without encroaching on what we are about to examine, namely the other side of the question—that this inaugural “yes” indeed has a meaning, which is precisely tied to this kind of ambiguity that remains within the word “yes” in French.

You know very well that it is not enough to recount the story of the worldly woman to realize that “yes” sometimes means “no,” and sometimes “no” means “maybe.” The “yes” in French appears late, after the “si,” after the “da” that we now kindly find in our era in the word “dac.” The “yes” is something quite particular, and because it derives from something that means “how right it is,” the “yes” is generally a confirmation, or at least a concession—most often, a “yes, but” is typical.

If you do not forget who the character is who appears here while slightly pushing himself forward, it is the one named ABNER: “yes…” is, indeed, there at the beginning, “…I come to His temple…” It is clear that a sentence exists only when completed because its anticipation, through which we will finally know in hindsight, absolutely requires that we have reached the end—that is, to that famous “Eternal” which is there, God knows why. But in truth, if you remember what this is about, namely an officer of the queen, ATHALIAH, who gives her name to the little story and dominates everything that happens enough to be the actual main character, the fact that a character begins by saying, “Yes, I come to His temple…” we have no idea where it will lead, and it could just as well end with anything:
“…I come to His temple to arrest the High Priest…” for example.

It truly needs to be completed for us to know what it is about. We are in the order of the signifiers. I hope I have made you sense what the continuity of the signifier is—that is, that in a signifying unity, a certain loop closes at the end, situating the various elements of the signifier.

This is what I had paused on for a moment, and in truth, everything I just told you does not seem to signify much. This small start has a much greater interest: it made me realize that the entire scene is a very nice opportunity to make you feel, in a much more effective and fuller way, the point where psychologists always ultimately stop. Because, of course, their function is to understand something they do not understand, while linguists stop because, although they have a marvelous method in their hands, they do not dare to push it to its conclusion.

We will try, ourselves, to go between the two and a little further.

JOAD, the High Priest, is cooking up the little plot that will lead to the ascension to the throne of his adoptive son, whom he rescued from the massacre at two and a half months old and raised in deep retreat. He listens to ABNER. You can imagine what feelings he must have while hearing this declaration:

“Yes, I come to His temple to worship the Eternal.”

And the old man might well echo, “What is he here for?” Indeed, the theme continues:

“Yes, I come to His temple to worship the Eternal.
I come, according to the ancient and solemn custom,
To celebrate with you the renowned day,
When on Mount Sinai the law was given to us.”

In short, they talk about it. And after leaving the “Eternal” somewhat aside—never to be mentioned again until the end of the play—they evoke memories; those were the good times:

“The Holy People crowded the porticoes.”

Finally, things have changed significantly:

“…of zealous worshipers, barely a small number.”

Now we begin to see the end, “a small number of worshipers.” We start to understand what it is about. It is someone who thinks it is time to join the Resistance.

Now, we are on the level of meaning. While the signifier continues its little path, “zealous worshipers” indicates what is at stake.

Of course, the High Priest’s ear does not—we can imagine—fail to catch this zeal in passing… “zeal” comes from Greek and means something like emulation, rivalry, imitation [from the Greek ζῆλος, “jealousy, fervor”]… because one only wins at this game by doing what is fitting, by imitating others.

In short, the point emerges at the end of the first speech, namely:

“I fear that Athaliah, to hide nothing from you,
Might herself have you dragged from the altar,
And finally complete her fatal revenge, etc.”

Here, a word of great importance arises: “fear”—etymologically the same word as “tremble,” and we will see fear appear.

Certainly, there is something here that shows the significant point of the speech: that is, to provide an indication with a double meaning. If we place ourselves at the higher register—that is, what Saussure calls “the amorphous mass of thoughts”—this is not merely an amorphous mass because the other must guess it; it is, in itself, an amorphous mass. We will see this as it unfolds. ABNER is undoubtedly zealous, but on the other hand, when later the High Priest grabs him a bit by the throat and says:

“Enough with the stories, what’s this about?
How can we recognize those who are truly more than just zealous?”

ABNER will clearly demonstrate how, after all, things are awkward: since the great fall of the one who manifested herself, God has not given many signs of His power, whereas ATHALIAH and her followers have shown their power, always triumphant up to this point.

So, when he brings up this new kind of threat, we are not entirely sure where he is going with it. It is two-edged: it serves as a warning, good advice, advice of prudence, even what one might call wisdom. The other has much shorter replies. He has plenty of reasons for this, primarily because he holds the upper hand—he has the trump card, so to speak:

“What brings you today,” he replies simply, “this dark foreboding?”

Here, the signifier aligns perfectly with the signified. But you can see that it reveals absolutely nothing of what the character has to say. At this point, ABNER develops further, beginning to enter the significant game, mixing flattery—“Do you think you can be holy and just with impunity?”—with tattling, which consists of telling us about a certain MATHAN who, in any case, is untamable unless one ventures far enough into denouncing the magnificent ATHALIAH, who remains his queen. There is a scapegoat conveniently positioned to keep the process moving, so to speak.

We still do not know exactly what he is aiming for, other than:

“Believe me, the more I think about it, the less I can doubt
That her wrath is ready to burst upon you.”

“I observed her yesterday”—now we are on the level of intelligence gathering—“and I saw her eyes
Casting furious glances at the Holy Place.”*

I would like to point out that, after all, despite these fine gestures ABNER offers as a guarantee during this scene, if we remain on the level of meaning, by the end of the scene, nothing will have happened, so to speak. Everything can be summed up, if we stay on the level of meaning, as a few hints.
Each knows a little more than they are willing to admit.

One of them, of course, knows much more—JOAD. He gives only a hint, nothing more, to respond to what the other claims to know: that there is something fishy, in other words, an ELIACIN in the sanctuary. Indeed, he knows something that falls within the realm of communication.
But since you have the vivid and even striking testimonies of how the named ABNER leaps at the hint—almost a provocation—inciting his anger:

“Ah! If in her fury she were mistaken,” he later says,

That is to say: “Did she miss part of the massacre?” In other words: “Could someone from that famous family of David still remain?”

This offer already shows that if ABNER is here, it is drawn by the scent of fresh blood. In the end, he knows no more or less at the conclusion of the dialogue than he did at the start, and this first scene, to fully reveal its significant richness and total effectiveness, could be summarized as: “I come to the Feast of the Lord.”
“Very well,” says the other, “join the procession and don’t speak out of turn.”

But that’s not it at all—on one condition: if you recognize the role of the signifier. If you notice the role of the signifier, you will see this: there are certain essential words, key words, underlying the characters’ dialogue, which partially overlap.
There is the word “tremble,” the word “fear,” and the word “extermination.” The words “tremble” and “fear” are first used by ABNER. He has brought us to the point I just indicated—that is, the moment where JOAD begins to speak. He takes the floor, and here are the first verses:

“He who puts a curb on the fury of the waves
Can also halt the schemes of the wicked.
Humbly respectful of His holy will,
I fear God, dear Abner, and I fear nothing else.”

He continues and builds upon this:

“I fear God, you say,” he retorts—though ABNER never said that—“His truth touches me.
Here is how this God answers you through my voice:”

And here we see the appearance of the word I highlighted at the start, the word “zeal”:

*”With the zeal for My law, what good does it serve you to adorn yourself?
Do you think to honor Me with sterile vows?
What profit comes to Me from all your sacrifices?
[…]
From among My people, eliminate the crimes,

A return to the theme of ‘extermination.’

And then you will come to offer Me your victims.”*

The victims in question should not be thought of as innocent victims in fixed forms at appropriate locations. When ABNER remarks:

“The holy ark is silent and no longer gives oracles.”

He is sharply retorted with:

“…Will the greatest marvels
Forever strike your ears without shaking your heart?
Must we, Abner, must we remind you
Of the famous wonders performed in our days?
[…]
The impious Ahab destroyed, and soaked in his own blood,
The field he had usurped through murder;
Near this fateful field, Jezebel slaughtered,
Trampled under the horses’ feet,
In her inhuman blood, the dogs quenched their thirst,
And from her hideous body, the limbs were torn apart.”

Thus, we know what kind of victim is being referred to. What he has just told us two lines earlier is revealed at the moment it is said that God is absent, that He does not intervene, with the phrase:

“Must we, Abner, must we remind you
Of the famous wonders performed in our days?”

Here are the two lines I skipped earlier:

“The famous disgraces of Israel’s tyrants,
And God found faithful in all His threats.”

In short, what is the role of what I call the function of the signifier? It is precisely the distinction that exists between fear, with its particularly ambivalent and fluctuating nature—something we analysts are not ignorant of, as it is just as much something that pushes you forward as something that pulls you back. It is something that essentially makes you a dual being and, when you express it in front of a character with whom you want to share fear, it constantly places you in the posture of being him and being yourself.

But opposite this, there is something synonymous called the fear of God. This is what JOAD speaks about at the very moment he is warned of danger. JOAD pulls out the signifier, which is rather rigid, and explains what the fear of God is.

The fear of God—I want to point out that this cultural term, absolutely essential within a certain line of religious thought, is not simply part of the general trend. The fear of God—or the fear of the gods, from which LUCRETIUS sought to liberate his companions—is something entirely different. It is something infinitely more multiform, more confused, more panic-stricken than this fear of God on which a tradition, dating back to SOLOMON, is founded as the principle and beginning of wisdom. Furthermore, it is far more than a tradition; it is, in fact, precisely our own tradition.

At the very foundation of the love of God, the fear of God is a signifier that does not crop up everywhere. Someone had to invent it and propose it to men as a remedy for a world filled with multiple terrors: the fear of a being who, after all, cannot exercise his punishments in any way other than those already present, multiply so in human life—namely, to replace countless fears with “the fear,” which, at its core, has no means of manifesting its power other than the very things feared behind those countless fears.

You might say: “Well, that’s certainly a priestly idea!” But you would be wrong! Priests did not invent anything of this sort. To invent such a thing, one must be a poet or a prophet. In other words, it is precisely because JOAD is somewhat of one—at least by RACINE’s grace—that he can use this signifier, this major and primordial signifier, in the way he does.

I have not been able to outline the cultural history of this signifier for you, but:
– it must be situated, and it is, strictly speaking, situated in this history,
– it is something absolutely inseparable from a specific structuring, one that is particular and not just any structure,
– and in itself—as I have indicated sufficiently—it is the signifier that dominates the thing, for when it comes to meanings, they have completely changed.

This famous fear of God, and what precisely makes it so ingenious, is that it transforms, in a moment, all fears into perfect courage—all fears, “I fear nothing else…” are exchanged for something called the fear of God, which is exactly the opposite of fear, however constraining it might be. By the end of the scene, what has occurred is precisely this: the fear of God, in the aspect we have just described, has been passed by JOAD to the other, properly and painlessly.

And ABNER leaves, entirely resolute, with this phrase echoing the God who is “faithful in all His threats.” It is no longer a matter of zeal. At this moment, he joins the faithful troop. In short, from this moment on, he himself becomes the support, the subject impaled upon, quite specifically, the bait or the hook where the Queen will come to be caught. For at this point, the entire play is already performed and finished. It is to the extent that ABNER says nothing about the real dangers facing the Queen that she will be caught on this hook that he now represents.

The important thing here is this: that by virtue of the signifier—meaning the word “fear”—its effectiveness was in transforming the initial zeal into the faithfulness at the end. This was achieved through a transmutation belonging, strictly speaking, to the order of the signifier as such. No accumulation, no superimposition, no sum of meanings taken together could suffice to justify it. It is in this transmutation of the situation by the intervention of the signifier as such that the progress of this dialogue resides. It takes a character from zeal—with all the ambiguity, doubtfulness, and readiness for reversal that the word entails—to faithfulness.

In other words, this scene would be a scene from the “second bureau” if it were not for this use of the signifier by the High Priest. What I call the function of the signifier in any discourse—whether it is a sacred text, a novel, a drama, a monologue, or any conversation—is something I will allow myself to represent through a kind of artifice, a spatializing comparison.

But we have no reason to deprive ourselves of this, as it is the true central point around which any concrete analysis of discourse must revolve. I will call it a “quilting point” (point de capiton), and this kind of upholsterer’s needle, which enters at the moment “God faithful in all His threats…” and exits when the man says, “I will join the faithful troop…” is the passage point indicating what, if we analyzed this scene as one might analyze a musical score, serves as the knot where:

– what belongs to the realm of “this amorphous and always fluctuating mass of meanings” about what is truly happening between these two characters,
– and something connecting it to this purely admirable text, ensuring that, instead of being a trivial piece of boulevard theater, it becomes a precisely Racinean tragedy.

The word “fear” is the signifier, with all its trans-significative connotations, around which everything radiates, everything organizes itself, like the small lines of force that form on the surface of a fabric around the “quilting point.” These are the points of convergence that retroactively and prospectively allow us to situate everything that occurs within the discourse in this sense.

Well, this notion, this idea, this schema, this image of the “quilting point”—this is what is at stake when it comes to human experience, and, strictly speaking, the minimum schema of human experience that FREUD gave us in the Oedipus complex. It retains for us its completely irreducible value and remains, after all, what might be called “enigmatic” to all who approach it.

Why, after all, does the Oedipus complex hold this absolutely privileged value? Why is it something FREUD always, so insistently, sought to rediscover? Why is it, for him, the knot that appears as the essential knot of the progress of his thought—so essential that he could never abandon it, not even in the smallest particular observation? It is because the notion of the “Father,” which is very close to the notion of “the fear of God,” provides the most sensitive essential element in the experience of what I have called the “quilting point” between the signifier and the signified.

That said, what does all this imply? I may have taken some time to explain it to you, but I believe it creates an image and represents an absolutely essential point to help you grasp and understand how, in a certain experience—namely, the psychotic experience—something can occur that suddenly presents the signifier and the signified in a completely divided form.

For we can say—and it has been said—that in psychosis, everything remains present in the signifier; everything seems to be there. President SCHREBER seems to have an excessively clear understanding of what it means, after all, to be “strung along” by Professor FLESHIG, especially since a few others come to take his place—nurses, etc. The issue for our theory is that, quite precisely, he expresses this in the clearest possible terms, so much so that one wonders why it provokes such great economic disturbances when he states it so plainly.

We must understand what happens in psychosis on another level. If you do not catch sight of what I will call, on this occasion, the impossibility, for some reason, of one of these x—because I do not know the number, but it is not impossible that it could eventually be determined… this number of x, these fundamental attachment points between the signifier and the signified necessary for a human being to be considered normal—then something, somewhere, is either never established or has come loose. Namely, this something manifests an independence long established between the signifier and the signified or, conversely, lets it explode, breaking, so to speak, the fundamental relations between the signifier and the signified.

This is quite crude. What I mean to convey is that this is the essential point of precision from which we can, next time, begin to ask about the role of the “personification” of the subject—how the subject says “I” or “me,” or says “you” or “he.” What is the role, what is the relationship, between this “personification” and this fundamental mechanism, this relationship between the signifier and the signified? This is precisely what I opened earlier by saying: this can be studied, grasped through the use of pronouns as well as through the use of verbs.

Of course—and this is the point I want to draw your attention to today—no particular language has a privileged position in this order of the signifier, because if we consider discourse in terms of what defines its signifying material, we must recognize that the resources of each language are extremely different and always limited. Yet, it is also clear that any language can serve to convey all kinds of meaning.

So, I pose the question to you: where, within the signifier, is the person?
How does a discourse hold together?
To what extent can it hold together, for example, in an impersonal form?
And to what extent can a discourse that seems personal, merely at the level of the signifier, carry enough traces of depersonalization that the subject does not recognize it as their own?

This is where the question of personalization or depersonalization in discourse arises. I am not saying this is the mechanism of psychosis itself; I am saying that the mechanism of psychosis is also there. I am saying that before we find, focus on, and pinpoint the precise mechanism of psychosis, we must train ourselves to recognize, at the various levels of the phenomenon, the points where the quilting point has failed.

If we make a complete catalog of these points, we can see that the subject does not depersonalize their discourse in just any way. We can also realize that this is an experience well within our reach; it suffices for something…
and CLÉRAMBAULT himself noticed this because he was interested in these matters. CLÉRAMBAULT alludes somewhere to what happens when we are suddenly caught by the affective evocation, strictly speaking, of something more or less difficult to bear from our past or from our memory. Referring to this kind of vanishing point, this loss of significant evocation, it involves something that is not at all commemorative. It is about the resurgence of an aspect as such, which means that:

– remembering anger, we are very close to the anger,
– remembering humiliation, we still experience the humiliation,
– remembering the breaking of an illusion, we literally live it as broken, that is, as the necessity of reorganizing our entire balance, our field of significance, in the strict sense of the social field.

At that moment, it is the most favorable moment for the release, for the emergence—which he calls “purely automatic”—of scraps or fragments of phrases that are sometimes drawn from the most immediate, the most recent experience, and which, strictly speaking, have no significant connection to the matter at hand. These phenomena of automatism are, in truth, admirably observed, but there are many others. This kind of concrete manifestation requires only that we have the proper schema to situate it within the phenomenon, no longer in a purely descriptive way but truly in an explanatory way.

This is the order of things to which I believe observations like those of President SCHREBER, with their extremely subtle notes, should guide us as much as possible. Next time, I will pick up where I leave off regarding the “I” and the “you,” not always as they are expressed, because there is no need for “I” and “you” to be in the sentence for it to be a sentence, as in “come!” which is a sentence and implies an “I” and a “you.”

The schema I gave you: the S, the small a, the a’ and the A—where are the “I” and the “you” within it?

No doubt, you might imagine that the “you” is there [A], and this is where we will begin next time: the “you” in its verbalized form, in its signifying form, is far, very far from coinciding with or even approximating the pole we have called the capital A—that is, the Big Other.