🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

You are the one who follows me best.
You are the one who follows me like a little dog.
You are the one who was following me that day.
You are the one who followed me through trials.
You are the one who follows the law, the text.
You are the one who follows the crowd.
You are the one who has followed me.
You are the one who followed me.
You are the one who is.
You are the one who is.

I do not think this is any more futile than listing and categorizing the symptoms of psychosis. It is something else, and I believe it is perhaps an indispensable prerequisite, at least from the perspective we have chosen. In short, your profession as a psychoanalyst is certainly worth taking a moment to reflect on what speaking truly means, because, after all, this exercise is not entirely of the same nature—although it might appear similar— as the neighboring exercise of mathematical recreations, which are never given enough attention. These have always served to shape the mind.

Here, one always feels that it goes beyond a little jest; here, you are precisely beyond what is at stake, namely, that this is, of course, not something that can be entirely objectified or formalized. You are at the level of what slips away, and it is precisely there, of course, that you are least inclined to pause, yet it is nonetheless the crux of what happens when you are engaging with someone else’s discourse, and the result has its lowest sense. It is not absolutely certain that this is always the best way to respond to it.

Let us now return to where we left off last time, at the level of the future tense of the verb “to follow”: “You are the one who will follow me” and “You are the one who will follow me.” We will try to indicate in which direction the difference lies. We had even begun to mark the true double meanings that arise depending on whether or not one passes through the screen of “You are the one who followed me” and “You are the one who has followed me.”

To whom does the demonstrative belong? It is nothing other than the famous third person, which, in all languages, is formed with demonstratives. This is, moreover, why it is not a verb’s person. It is a matter of understanding what it means for the “you” to pass—or not pass—through this screen of demonstratives. In any case, you can see that what appears is already at the level of “You are the one who will follow me,” and “You are the one who will follow me,” defined by the more or less pronounced presence of this “you” to whom I am addressing myself, of an ego that is there more or less personified, or, as I will say shortly, invoked, provided we give its full meaning to this sense of invocation.

I had emphasized the opposition between:
– the inescapable character of “You are the one who will follow me,” in the third person, the persecutory aspect of the observation in “You are the one who will follow me,”
– opposed to something entirely different, to this kind of mandate or delegation, or call, that lies in “You are the one who will follow me.”

Another term could just as well serve to manifest the diversity and opposition between the terms of “prediction” and “forecasting,” which would also deserve our attention and is, in some way, only perceptible precisely in a sentence that embodies the message.

If we abstractify it, prediction is different. It is not the same—we can see this well—when it comes to making verbs agree or, more precisely, to personifying them, to “empersonating” them. “You are the one who followed me” in the past, or “You are the one who has followed me,” clearly presents a kind of analogous diversity.

I would say, in a certain way, you can see that time, this kind of aspect of the verb that is not reduced to mere consideration of the past, present, and future, is implicated in a wholly different way when it involves the second person. I would say it concerns an action in time in the first case, the case where “you followed me” is in the second person, “You followed me” in the time that was present at that moment. It is an action that was temporalized, an action considered in the act of being accomplished, which is expressed by the first formula.
In the other, “You are the one who followed me,” it is a perfect, a completed thing, and so well-defined that one might even say it borders on definition among others: “You are the one who followed me.”

You can also sense quite well that whether the “me” is there or not, it is evidently of the verb and of meaning, insofar as everything opposed to it specifies and defines it, that this agreement will depend. There is undoubtedly a rule, but a rule that requires numerous examples to grasp, and the difference between “You are the one who follows me best” and “You are the one who follows me like a little dog” is there to allow you to begin the exercises that follow, to fill in the blanks.

“You are the one—it is an imperfect—who was following me that day.” “You are the one who, at one time, was following me through trials.”
All the difference between constancy and fidelity seems to me to lie in these two formulas: let us say, even if the word constancy may create ambiguity, all the difference between permanence and fidelity produces this difference between the agreements.

Similarly, the “me” does not need to be there. “You are the one who follows the law,” “You are the one who follows the text,” seems to me to be of a different nature and inscribes itself differently than “You are the one who follows the crowd”: in the first case, “follows,” and in the second, “follows.” These two formulas, strictly from the perspective of the signifier—that is, an organic group whose significant value is organized from the beginning to the conclusion—are perfectly valid sentences.

M. PUJOL
They are not phonetically identified, but only orthographically.

LACAN
These examples are grouped; they do not seem too contrived to be valid, but I pointed out last time that at the end of this rule of verb agreement in the relative clause, when there is an antecedent in the main clause that is personified in the first or second person, it is in these two cases that we have the possibility of setting it at the level of “you” or “I,” because “I am the one who will follow you” differs from “I am the one who will follow.” This is not without reason.

M. PUJOL
When one says “You are the one who has followed me” or when one hears it, it is the other who adds the “s,” not the one who speaks.

LACAN
That is something else. You are entering the heart of the matter, which is where I wish to lead you today. Indeed, it concerns the consideration of what happens in others or, more precisely, what your discourse assumes. And you have, in fact, gone to the core of this problem by pointing out what I have just indicated, that behind:
– this “you” to whom I address myself from the position I occupy as the Other, myself with a capital O,
– this “you” to whom I address myself is not at all something that must purely and simply be considered as correlative,
– this “you,” precisely in these examples, demonstrates that there is something beyond it, namely, this ego of which you speak, this ego that sustains the discourse of the one who follows me, for instance, when they follow my speech, who is here invoked, and whose presence, more or less, whose intensity, more or less, determines that it is I who speak and not him.

Of course, it is he who sanctions, and it is precisely because the sanction depends on him that we are here, that we pay attention to the difference in these examples. It is this ego that lies beyond this “You are the one…,” it is the mode under which this ego is called upon to orient itself that defines the case:
– in one case, it is “he” who will indeed follow, making the “one” obsolete: he will follow, he will follow “him,” it is “him” he will follow,
– in the second case, it is not “him” who is at stake; it is “me,” the gravitation of an object that cannot fail to follow me or cannot currently be considered as anything other than having followed me.

The point, to put it plainly, is to show you that what supports this “you”—in whatever form it appears in my experience—is an ego that formulates it and can never be completely considered as fully supporting it. In other words, each time I call upon this sort of message, this delegation from the other, when I designate it explicitly as being:
– the one who must…
– the one who will do,
– the one to whom I appeal as an ego, but even more so:
– the one to whom I announce what they will become,
…there is always, implied in this very announcement, the fact that they sustain it, and at the same time something entirely uncertain, problematic in the literal sense of the term, in this sort of communication, which is fundamental communication, the announcement, not to say, as I mentioned the other day, the annunciation.

Notice that what results from this is that by its essentially elusive nature, which never fully sustains the “you,” the “I” in question, therefore, whenever it is thus called or provoked, is ultimately—whenever it is we who receive this “you”—in a position to justify itself as an ego.

And I might say—though we will return to this shortly and approach it from another angle—that this is indeed one of the most profoundly defining characteristics of what is called the mental foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition: that speech there always profiles itself quite distinctly as its ultimate foundation, the being of this “I,” which ensures that in all essential matters, the subject always finds itself more or less in the position of being summoned to justify itself as “I.”

Behind all the most essential dialogue lies this opposition between “you are the one who is” and “you are the one who is” (in the sense of “him who is”), which warrants pausing for consideration. Indeed, only the “I” that is absolutely alone, the “I” that says “I am the one who is,” is the one that absolutely and radically sustains the “you” in its call. This is the fundamental difference between the God of the tradition from which we emerge and the God of the Greek tradition. If the God of the Greek tradition is capable of expressing itself in the mode of any “I,” it is certainly one that must say, “I am the one who is.”

However, this is absolutely not in question. For if there is something somewhere that might conceivably take this semi-flesh, semi-fish form of something that could say, “I am the one who is,” it is this arch-diluted form of the Greek God, which is not at all something to mock, nor to consider as a kind of prelude to the atheistic fading of God:
– the God in whom VOLTAIRE was deeply interested, to the point of considering DIDEROT a fool, is evidently something of this order of “I am the one who is,”
– but ARISTOTLE’s God is certainly one of those concepts your mind does not readily grasp because it has become, strictly speaking, unthinkable for us.

To try to correctly situate the question of the subject’s relationship to the Absolute Other, attempt, for a time, by means of a kind of application or mental meditation—which is the mode of this medeor I spoke of last time, the original verb of your medical function—to meditate for a moment on what the relationship to the world might be for a disciple of ARISTOTLE, for whom God is the most immutable sphere of the heavens. What, precisely, is this sphere?

It is not something announced in any verbal manner, in the order of what we have just been evoking in speaking of this Absolute Other. It is something that is simply the part of the starry sphere, encompassing the fixed stars. It is precisely this sphere, which in the world does not move, that constitutes God.

What this involves in terms of the subject’s situation in the world is something I must say that, unless one applies oneself properly from this starting point, from what it entails as a relationship with the Other who is absolutely foreign and unthinkable to us, and even much more distant than that which we may amuse ourselves with, rightly or wrongly, around the idea of punitive fantasy, simply no one dwells on it.

Nor does anyone dwell on this: that at the core of the religious thought that has shaped us—the one…
I repeat this because I mentioned it earlier, and because it ties into our most common experience…
…the one that makes us live in “fear and trembling” and that ensures that, at the heart of all our psychological experience of neuroses—without being able to prejudge what they may become in another cultural sphere—the coloring of guilt is so fundamental that it is through this lens that we have approached it and realized that neuroses are structured in a subjective and intersubjective mode.

It is no coincidence that this coloring of guilt forms an absolute foundation, and consequently, it is entirely appropriate to question whether our relationship with the Other—absolutely as it is fundamentally influenced by a certain tradition, the very one announced at a given point in history with this formula flanked by a small tree, we are told, ablaze: “I am the one who is”—does not correspond precisely to a mode of agreement and relationship that is correlative with the divine.

We are not so far removed from our subject, because this is exactly what is at stake in President Schreber: it is about a mode of constructing the Other, God. This corresponds to a mode of relation to that God, and you will see in an entirely comprehensible and straightforward way to what extent, for us, the word “atheism” has a meaning different from the one it might have in reference, for instance, to the Aristotelian deity. In reference to the Aristotelian deity, it involves a certain relationship—accepted or not—with a “being” that is superior, a “being” that is the supreme, the absolute of all “beings” of the so-called “starry sphere.” And I repeat, this is sufficient to cast an entirely different light on everything we might think, everything that is approached from this basis in the world.

Our atheism, precisely, you can see how it is situated in another perspective, on another path, in another ambiguity, if I may say so, and how it is precisely linked to this always-elusive aspect of the “I” of the Other. The fact that an Other could announce itself as “I am the one who is” is very precisely already the proclamation of a God who, in and of himself, by the very form of his proclamation, is a God beyond and a hidden God, a God who in no way reveals his face.

It could be said that, in a certain way, from the Aristotelian perspective, our departure is an atheist departure. This is a misconception, but while it is strictly true in their perspective, it is no less true in our experience for the reason that the problematic nature of anything that announces itself as “I am the one who is” is very precisely the heart of how the question is posed for us—that is to say, in a way that is essentially unsupported and, one might almost say, unsustainable, sustainable only by a fool.

Reflect on this “I am” of “I am the one who is.” This is what constitutes the problematic scope of this relationship to the Other in our tradition, which is connected to an entirely different development of the sciences, an entirely different way of engaging with “beings” and objects. This distinction characterizes our science much more profoundly than its so-called experimental nature. The ancients experimented no less than we do; they experimented with what interested them.

The question is not, of course, about experimentation itself; it lies in how the ancients approached others, the little others, in a certain light of the ultimate Other, the absolute Other. This completely differentiates our way of considering the world, fragmenting it, breaking it into small pieces, compared to the way the ancients approached it, referencing a kind of ultimate pole of “being,” in relation to what? In relation to something that normally hierarchizes itself and situates itself within a certain scale of consistency of “being.”

Our position is entirely different since it already radically calls into question the very being of what announces itself as being, and not as “beingness.” “I am the one who is,” reflect on this, as we are in no position to respond according to the first formula. For if the second is the formula of deism, and therefore not a response to this “I am the one who is,” the first is impossible to provide because who are we to respond to “the one who is,” “the one who is I”?

Indeed, we know this all too well. And, of course, some scatterbrained individuals—one still encounters them; in truth, many flocks of such scatterbrains come to us from across the Atlantic—I recently encountered one, and after several disciples, he confidently asserted: “But after all, I am myself!”

This seemed to him the ultimate certainty. I assure you that I had not provoked it and that I was not there at all to engage in psychoanalytic or anti-psychological propaganda; it simply came about that way.

In truth, if there is something that is truly minimal in experience, something that does not need to be that of the psychoanalyst but could belong to anyone—just the slightest contribution of inner experience—it is that assuredly, as I said last time, we are all the less “those who are,” because within ourselves, we are well aware of the noise, the dreadful chaos, and the incessant, varied objections that we can experience within us on every occasion, at every turn, in response to any impression.

Thus, we come to realize tangibly that in the coherence of this essential form of speech, whether it is announced or we announce it ourselves as a “you,” we find ourselves in a complex world, in the relationship of subject to subject, as it is structured by the properties of language and by an essential distinction in which the term “signifier” must be considered as produced.

I have kept you engaged long enough for us to be able to conceive of and identify its specific role. I would like to return you to some very simple properties of the signifier and to clarify what I mean when I tell you that there exists here a series of terms which, after having demonstrated to you, if you will, the most radical relationship of subject to subject, I must now lead toward a kind of ultimate relationship. This ultimate relationship, if I may say so, is a sort of questioning on the margins of the Other as such, with the understanding that this Other is, strictly speaking, elusive and cannot, and will never, fully uphold the wager we propose to it.

Conversely, the other phase of this approach, from this perspective, from what I am attempting to argue before you, includes, I would say, a certain materialism of the elements in question. In the sense that when I speak to you about the function and role of the signifier, these are indeed signifiers—I would not even say embodied, materialized—they are words that circulate. But it is precisely as such that they perform their role as anchors, which I had already introduced in my penultimate discussion.

I will now, to give you some respite, attempt to bring you through a kind of metaphor or comparison—naturally, “comparison is not reason,” and it is precisely because I have illustrated this with somewhat more rigorous examples that what I am about to say now might bring you something else.

Remember that it was in the context of Racine and the first scene of Athalie that I addressed this function of the signifier by showing you how all the progress of the scene lies in the substitution of the interlocutor, Abner, with the fear of God. It obviously has no more connection to Abner’s fears, or Abner’s voice, than “…followed me” in the first instance or “…followed me” in the second sentence.

Let me open a parenthesis. I read in issue no. 7, dated May 16, an article about Racine, where the originality of this tragedy is defined as Racine’s ability and skill in introducing into the framework of tragedy—almost without his audience realizing it—characters of a sort of high courtesanship.

You can see, regarding the distance between Anglo-Saxon culture and ours, what becomes of this matter in a certain perspective. The fundamental tone as it appears in Andromaque, Iphigénie, etc., is the example of a high courtesanship! Nevertheless, this does not render our reference to Athalie useless.

It is noted along the way that Freudians have made an extraordinary discovery in Racine’s tragedies. I have not noticed this so far, which I regret. With all the emphasis and indulgence we have placed, beginning with Freud, on seeking in Shakespearean plays the illustration and exemplification of a certain number of fundamental analytical relationships, it seems to me that it is high time to bring to light some references from our own culture and perhaps find something else there—perhaps even things that are no less illustrative, as I attempted to do last time, of the problems posed to us regarding the use of the signifier.

Let us turn to the example I want to give you to explain what one might understand, or mean, when speaking of the establishment in this field of the Other’s relationships, of the signifier in its gravity, its own inertia, and its properly signifying function.

Look for an example that materializes well, that emphasizes the sense of materialization. I mean there is no need to look far for an illustration of the signifier that fully deserves to be taken as such. I would say it is the road, the main road you travel with your various locomotion tools, the road as it is called—the road, for example, from Mantes to Rouen. I do not mention Paris because it is a very particular case.

The existence of a main road from Mantes to Rouen is something that, on its own, offers itself to the researcher’s meditation, immediately providing obvious materializations of what we can say about the signifier. For suppose—as happens in southern England, where these main roads are only available sparingly—that you want to go from Mantes to Rouen and must pass through a series of small roads leading from Mantes to Vernon, then from Vernon to wherever you wish.

It is enough to have had this experience to realize that it is not at all the same as a succession of small roads compared to a main road; it is something entirely different. In practice, it is something that, on its own, slows down and completely changes the meaning of your behavior concerning what happens between the starting point and the destination. Even more so if you consider, for example, that an entire landscape, an entire country, an entire region is simply covered by a network of small paths and that nowhere exists that unique entity that is immediately recognized when you emerge from anything—a trail, a thicket, a roadside, a small village path—you immediately know that this is the main road.

The main road is not something that merely stretches from one point to another; it is something that has an existence in itself, a dimension unfolded in space, a presentification of something original. Why do I choose this concept of the main road? Because, as Mr. De La Palice might say, it is a means of communication. And you might feel that this is an excessively banal metaphor, that nothing could affect this main road except what travels upon it, and that the main road is merely a way of getting from one point to another. That is entirely incorrect.

What distinguishes a main road from, for instance, the trails that elephants supposedly carve out with their movements in the equatorial forest is precisely that they are not the same: those trails, however significant they may seem, are exactly pathways that are beaten by passage, nothing more than the path of the elephants. It is something that is not nothing, something supported by the physical reality of elephant migration, something that indeed has a particular orientation. I do not know whether these paths lead, as is sometimes said, to cemeteries, but those cemeteries seem to remain mythical. They appear more like bone deposits than proper cemeteries. But let’s leave the cemeteries aside. Elephants, to be sure, do not linger on these paths.

The difference between the main road and the elephants’ path is that we, on the main road, stop—but precisely where we choose. And here, the Parisian experience takes center stage: we stop there to the point of clustering, to the point of rendering this thoroughfare viscous enough to verge on impasse. Let us not focus exclusively on this phenomenon, as it is clear that many other things happen elsewhere, such as the fact that we deliberately and intentionally take a walk on the main road, retracing the same route within a certain time but in the opposite direction—toward something that has, quite literally, led us nowhere.

This back-and-forth movement is also something entirely essential. It leads us to the realization that the main road is a site, something around which all sorts of dwellings and places of habitation gather, something that polarizes, as a signifier, the meanings that cluster around the main road as such.

One builds one’s house along the main road; the house sits on the main road, tiered and scattered without any other function than to look out at the main road. And, to put it bluntly, in human experience, it is precisely because the main road is an indisputable signifier that it marks a stage in history—and especially so insofar as it bears Roman imprints, something that has the deepest relationship with the signifier and distinguishes everything created from the moment the road was conceived as such. The Roman road established something in human experience with an entirely different consistency from those paths or even relay tracks with fast communication networks that were able to sustain empires in the East for some time.

Everything marked by the Roman road has adopted a style that goes far beyond the immediate effects of the main road—something that leaves a nearly indelible imprint wherever it has been, with all that it has developed around it. This includes interhuman relations of law, methods of transmitting written materials, and ways of promoting human appearance and statues.

Mr. Malraux is correct in saying that, from the perspective of the eternal museum of art, there is no true link worth retaining with Roman sculpture. Yet the notion of the human being represented in sculpture as such remains fundamentally tied to the vast diffusion of statues in Roman sites.

There is a whole mode of development of relationships with the signifier that is essentially tied to this. It makes the main road an example that is far from negligible—an example particularly tangible and enlightening of what I mean when I speak of the function of the signifier as polarizing, as anchoring, as grouping meanings into a bundle. To put it plainly, there is a genuine antinomy here between the function of the signifier and the induction it exercises in the grouping of meanings.

It is the signifier that polarizes; it is the signifier that creates the field of meanings.

Compare three types of maps on a large atlas:

• The physical map of the world: Here, you will find things inscribed in nature where elements are already arranged to play their role, but where they are, in a sense, in their natural state.
• Consider, alongside it, a political map: Here, you will see something marked by traces of alluvium, sediment—something that represents the entire history of human meanings—with points where these meanings maintain themselves in a sort of equilibrium, forming more or less enigmatic figures known as political or other boundaries between defined lands.
• Take a map of major communication routes: Observe how the route is drawn from south to north, passing through segments of countries to connect one basin to another, one plain to another, crossing a mountain range and organizing itself via bridges. You can clearly see that this is, in essence, what best expresses the relationship between humanity and the earth—what we call the role of the signifier. For it is indeed historically true—not, as someone naively marveled, that rivers happen to pass through cities, which would be a comparable misunderstanding to failing to recognize that cities formed, crystallized, and established themselves precisely at the junctions of routes. That is, at points where a given meridian intersects a given parallel, connected to specific road functions. It is at the crossroads of these routes, with some slight historical variation, that something emerges, becoming a center of meaning, a city, a human agglomeration dominated by the signifier.

What happens when we lack this main road and are forced to travel from one point to another by linking together a series of small paths—in other words, through more or less fragmented modes of grouping meanings? This situation leads us to the word Father, which I now wish to address.

This arises from the moment when, between two arbitrary points, we must pass through all possible elements of a network. When there is no main road, what results? The result is that, to travel from one point to the other, we will have a choice among different elements of the network:
– we can take this route,
– or we can take that route,
for various reasons of convenience, wandering, or simply error at a crossroads.

From this, several conclusions can be drawn. One conclusion is that if the signifier in question—and this is where we come to President Schreber—is something connected to what we have already begun to explore (and which I will develop next time as the meaning of procreation), you will see that this fundamental signifier will take us very, very far.

For now, however, it must be accepted that this signifier is at the heart of what will be suspended by the inaugural crisis: the signifier of procreation in its most problematic form—precisely the form that Freud himself tells us, in reference to obsessional patients, concerns fatherhood and death, the two central signifiers.

This word is taken from a text that—if one knows how to search—holds the utmost interest for the obsessional. And this form, more problematic than procreation, is not the form of being a mother; it is the form of being a father. For a simple reason, which deserves a moment’s pause for reflection: the function of being a father is absolutely unthinkable in human experience without introducing the category of the signifier as an essential foundation for any construction or elaboration of human relations. After all, being a father—I ask you to reflect on what this phrase could mean.

You might enter into scholarly ethnological or other discussions to determine whether savages who claim that women conceive when placed at certain locations, or whether spirits do or do not have the idea of scientific reality (namely, that women become fertile after proper copulation), possess this knowledge.

Such inquiries have appeared to many as perfectly absurd, for it is difficult to imagine human beings so ignorant as not to realize that, to have children, one must copulate. But that is not the question. The question is that copulating with a woman, who then carries something in her womb for a time and eventually gives birth, is something that, when juxtaposed, will never add up to constitute the idea that the man—the male subject—has of what it means to be a father.

I am not even speaking of the entire cultural framework represented by the term being a father. I am speaking simply of what it means to be a father in the sense of procreating. In other words, for the notion of being a father, culturally elaborated in a signifying way, to emerge—for there to be this kind of retroactive effect that gives the act of copulation the real, actual meaning it has (but for which there is no possible imaginary access)—
– that it is he who has procreated,
– that this child is as much his child as it is the mother’s,

…for this retroactive effect to occur, the following is required:

– That the notion, that the elaboration of the notion being a father, must, in some way, have been elevated to the status of a primary signifier through a process that occurred elsewhere.

– That this process be defined by a network of cultural exchanges giving a certain meaning—verbal, nominal, or otherwise—to the term being a father.

– That this signifier possess its own consistency and status, so that, from there, the act of copulating truly and actually carries the meaning of procreating. And that the subject, who may very well understand themselves as part of the necessary causal chain for the existence of a child, becomes something that establishes the function of procreating as a signifier.

I grant you that here I have not yet completely unveiled the matter, but that is because I am leaving it for the next time. Each time, you can feel the connection between this notion of “procreation” and the perception or apprehension of the relationship to the experience of death, which gives its full meaning to the term “procreation,” and this applies to both sexes. In any case, the signifier “being a father” is something that either does or does not create the main road between sexual relations with a woman and the fact that, for the subject, for the being in question, what matters lies in the relationship of procreation, considered as a fundamental signifier.

Suppose that the main road does not exist. We will then find ourselves with a number of small, elementary paths—for example, those I just mentioned, such as copulating and then a woman carrying something in her womb, which, from that moment on, becomes a source of difficulties and problems.

You can see this clearly enough in the case of President Schreber, who, by all appearances, lacks this fundamental signifier called “being a father.” He was forced into this kind of error, tangling things even further, where—starting from the examples I’m providing today—we can conceive of the mechanism: the second part of the path, in which he imagines carrying something himself, like a woman.

It is rather curious, after all, that President Schreber, for whatever reason, imagines, or can do nothing other than imagine, himself as a woman, carrying something in his womb, completing in pregnancy the second part of the path necessary for the function of “being a father” to be realized through their sum. If you wish, to push the analogies a bit further, I will pause for a moment to tell you that none of this is surprising.

It is so unsurprising that it is attested to by various experiences. For instance, the practice of “couvade,” however problematic it may seem to us, can quite simply, in this general case, be situated as something that, through an uncertain, incomplete assimilation of the function of “being a father,” indeed responds to the subject’s need to imaginatively, ritually, or otherwise complete the second part of the path, ensuring that “being a father” does not remain halfway to what is important for him to accomplish in the relationship of procreation.

To extend my metaphor and its usefulness a little further, let me say: in the end, how do you address what are called “road users” when there is no main road and you must travel small paths to get from one point to another? You place signs at the side of the road. That is, where the signifier does not function independently, words begin to speak on their own at the edge of the main road.

Where there is no main road, words appear on signs. Perhaps that is the function of the small auditory or verbal hallucinations of our hallucinatory subjects. They are the signposts at the edge of their little paths; they must be there because they lack the general signifier.

If we suppose that the signifier continues its path entirely on its own, whether or not we pay attention to it, there exists within us—more or less avoided precisely by maintaining the meanings that interest us—a sort of humming, a genuine chaos of diverse [signifiers?], those with which we have been overwhelmed since childhood.

Why not conceive that, at a precise moment when, somewhere, these junctions—what Saussure calls the “amorphous mass of the signifier”—this stitching together of the “amorphous mass of the signifier” with the amorphous mass of meanings and interests, begins to falter or prove deficient?

Why not see that, at that moment, the signifier and its continuous flow regain their independence? Then, within this kind of buzzing—so often described by hallucinatory subjects during such moments—or this continuous murmur of phrases and comments, which are nothing but countless little paths, they begin to speak or sing on their own. It is, after all, fortunate if they vaguely indicate the direction.

Next time, we will attempt to show everything in President Schreber’s case that aligns itself on different levels, orchestrates itself, organizes itself within different registers of speech—how all this, without proper distribution, in its stratification as well as in its texture, reveals this fundamental polarization of the sudden, newly perceived lack of a signifier.