🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Ladies and Gentlemen,

To start on time and allow you to settle in, I will begin today’s talk with the reading of a poem that, in truth, has no direct relation to what I am about to tell you, but does bear a certain connection… and I even believe that some of you will find its deepest resonance with what I discussed last year in my seminar concerning the mysterious object, the most concealed object: that of the scopic drive.

It is this short poem, found on page 70 of Le Fou d’Elsa by Aragon, entitled “Counter-song”:

Your image vainly comes to meet me
And does not enter where I dwell, merely revealing it.
Turning toward me, you will only ever find
On the wall of my gaze your shadow, dreamt of.

I am that wretch comparable to mirrors
Which can reflect but cannot see.
Like them, my eye is empty, and like them inhabited
By the absence of you, which creates its blindness.

I dedicate this poem to the nostalgia that some of you may feel for this interrupted seminar and for what I developed there, especially last year, regarding the problems of anxiety and the function of the object (a).

I think those who followed that seminar will grasp—excuse me for being so brief, elliptical, and allusive—they will grasp the flavor of the fact that Aragon, in this admirable work where I am proud to find the echo of the tastes of our generation (the one that forces me to turn to my peers of the same age as myself to still hear this resonance in Aragon’s poem), followed it with these enigmatic lines:

“Thus said An-Nadjî once, when invited to a circumcision.”

At this point, those who attended my seminar last year will rediscover the correspondence between the diverse forms of the object (a) and the central symbolic function of the -ϕ here evoked by this singular—and certainly not coincidental—reference that Aragon attributes to what I might call the “historical” connotation of the utterance by his character, the mad poet, of this “Counter-song”.

There are some here—I know—who are being introduced to my teaching. They approach it through writings that are already dated. Before I introduce today’s subject, I would like them to understand:

– That one of the indispensable coordinates for appreciating the direction and meaning of this early teaching lies in the realization that they cannot, from their position, imagine to what degree—shall I say—of contempt or mere disregard for their instrument practitioners could arrive…

– That it required years of my effort to revalue, in their eyes, this instrument: speech. To restore to it—if I may say so—its dignity and to ensure that for them, speech was no longer merely those already devalued words that forced their gaze elsewhere in search of something that would respond.

Thus, for a time at least, I may have appeared, in my teaching, to be haunted by I don’t know what philosophy of language—perhaps even Heideggerian—when in reality, this was nothing more than preparatory work.

It is not because I am speaking here [Salle Dussane, École Normale Supérieure, Rue d’Ulm] that I will speak more philosophically, nor because I am addressing a matter that deeply concerns psychoanalysts, that I will be any less at ease in naming it: what we are dealing with here is something I will call nothing other than the refusal of the concept.

This is why, as I announced at the end of my first lecture, I will attempt today to introduce you to the major Freudian concepts, which I have isolated as being four in number and which precisely fulfill this function.

The few words written here on the blackboard under the heading of Freudian concepts represent the first two:
– “The unconscious” and “repetition,”
– While the other two are “transference” and “the drive.”

Today, I will attempt to advance as far as possible in explaining what I mean by the “function” of these concepts, namely the unconscious and repetition.

As for transference, I hope to address it in the next session, where it will directly introduce us to the algorithms I felt compelled to incorporate into practice, specifically for the purpose of implementing analytic technique itself.

The drive remains such a difficult and, frankly, so unexplored subject that I do not believe we can do more than revisit it briefly this year—after we have discussed transference. Only then will we address the essence of analysis and, in particular, its deeply problematic yet guiding feature: the function of didactic analysis.

It is only after covering this ground that we may—perhaps at the end of the year, and without minimizing to ourselves the difficulty, the volatility, or even the precariousness of approaching this concept—tackle the drive. This, I might add, is in contrast to those who may venture into it relying on incomplete and fragile references.

The two small arrows you see here indicate—after the unconscious and repetition written on this blackboard—not what lies on the other side of the line but the question mark that follows. In other words, the conception we form of the concept implies that it is always approached in a manner not unrelated to what is imposed on us, as a form, by infinitesimal calculus: that is, if the concept is shaped by an approach to reality, a reality it is meant to grasp, it is only by a leap, a passage to the limit, that it achieves realization.

Consequently, we regard it as our duty, in a sense, to articulate something about how the elaboration known as the unconscious, or repetition, may culminate—so to speak—as a finite quantity.

The two terms written at the end of this line concern two essential references, with regard to the question posed last time:

“Can psychoanalysis, with all its paradoxical, singular, and aporetic aspects, be considered among us as constituting, to any degree, a science—or merely a hope for science?”

It is in relation to these two terms—the subject and the real—that we will be led to give shape to this question.

First, I will take the concept of the unconscious. The majority of this audience recalls, or at least has some notion of, what I have advanced: “The unconscious is structured like a language.” A perhaps smaller yet still very significant portion of my listeners here today, and of my regular audience, knows well that this relates to a certain field that is far more accessible and open to us today than it was in Freud’s time. To illustrate this with something firmly grounded on a scientific level, I will use as an example this field—though I will not attempt to delimit it—that is being explored, structured, elaborated, and has already revealed itself to be immensely rich. This field is the one Claude Lévi-Strauss has aptly titled The Savage Mind.

Before any individual experience or deduction, even before collective experiences—which can only be linked to social needs—are inscribed within it, something organizes this field and establishes its initial lines of force. This is the function that Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his critique of totemism, shows to be its truth—a truth that reduces the apparent function of totemism to what is fundamentally a primary classificatory function.

This “something” ensures that, before relationships are organized as properly human relationships, the connection between one world and another is already established:
– Of certain human relationships determined by an organization,
– And the terms of that organization, which are drawn from all that nature offers as a support, organized within themes of opposition.

Nature—if we may call it such—provides signifiers, and these signifiers inaugurally organize human relationships, provide their structures, and shape them. The crucial point is this: we observe here a level where, prior to the formation of the subject—of a subject that thinks and positions itself—things count, are counted, and within this “counted,” the counter is already present! The subject must then recognize itself within this, and recognize itself as the one “counting.”

Take, for instance, the naïve stumbling block over which the “mental level measurer” marvels when he poses the question to the child: “I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest, and myself. What do you think of that?” The child thinks nothing of it for the very reason that it is entirely natural! The three brothers—Paul, Ernest, and myself—are first counted, and I, at the level of what is presented for reflection, am me. And it is me who counts.

It is this structure, asserted as foundational for the unconscious in the historical period where we are forming a science—a science that may be labeled “human” but must be clearly distinguished from any psychosociology, a science modeled on the combinatorial play that linguistics allows us to grasp within a certain field, operating spontaneously and autonomously, in a pre-subjective manner—that provides the unconscious with its contemporary status. It is this field, at any rate, that ensures us there is something qualifiable under this term, something undeniably accessible and entirely objectifiable.

But does this mean that, when I invoke psychoanalysts, when I lead them, when I urge them not to ignore this terrain—this field that is their own, that offers solid support for their elaborations—does it mean that I think we can fully encompass the concepts historically introduced by Freud under the term unconscious?

Well, no! I do not think so. The unconscious, as a Freudian concept, is something else entirely, and this is what I would like to attempt to convey to you today. It is not enough to say that the unconscious is a dynamic concept, for this merely substitutes the most common order of mystery for a specific mystery: force, in general, serves as a designation for a locus of opacity.

I would like to introduce today’s discussion by referring to the function of the cause. I am well aware that, from the perspective of philosophical critique, this ventures into a domain that evokes a world of references. This is enough to make me hesitate in choosing among these references, but we will have to make a choice.

At least a portion of my audience will likely remain unsatisfied if I merely point out that, around 1760—perhaps even as early as 1763—in Kant’s Essay on Negative Magnitudes, we can observe how closely the crisis, or rather the gap, inherent in the function of the cause has always been linked to conceptual apprehension.

In this Essay I refer to, it is more or less stated:
– That it is a concept ultimately unanalyzable, one that cannot be comprehended by reason, insofar as the rule of reason (Vernunftregel) always involves some comparison (Vergleichung) or equivalent.
– That essentially, there remains within the function of the cause a certain gap—a term employed in Prolegomena by the same author.

Moreover, I will not hesitate to point out that this problem of the cause has perpetually been a source of difficulty for philosophers. It is not even straightforward to see how Aristotle’s four causes balance against one another. However, I am not here to philosophize, nor do I claim to bear the weight of such a task through these references. I mention them merely to clarify what I insist upon.

I will state that the cause—whatever modality Kant may ultimately inscribe it within the categories of Pure Reason, or more precisely, how he places it within the framework of relations between the inherent and the communal—the cause is not thereby, for us, made more rationalized.

It remains distinct from what is determinant in a chain, in other words, from law. To exemplify this, I would say: think of what is visualized in the function of action and reaction. There is, if you will, only one continuum: one does not exist without the other. A body that crashes to the ground—its mass is not the cause of what it receives in return from its kinetic energy. Its mass is integrated into the force that returns to it, dissolving its coherence through an effect of feedback. Here, there is no gap—except, perhaps, at the end.

Every time we speak of cause, there is always something anti-conceptual, something undefined, within the term.
– “The phases of the moon are the cause of the tides”: this feels alive; we know at that moment that the word “cause” is appropriately used.
– “Miasmas are the cause of fever”: this means nothing.
In this case, there is, essentially, a gap, and something that oscillates within that interval. There is only cause where there is something amiss. Between the cause and what it affects, there is always a discord.

(Diagram of the 1965-66 seminar: L’Objet… session of June 1).

Well, the Freudian unconscious is situated precisely at that point—which I am attempting to direct you toward by approximation. The key issue is not that the unconscious determines neurosis. On this point, Freud is quite willing to perform the Pontius Pilate gesture of washing his hands: perhaps someday something will be found—humoral determinants, for example… it doesn’t matter. He is indifferent.

But the unconscious, precisely, points us toward this domain of gap where I tried to recall the essential dimension of this notion of cause. The unconscious shows us the gap through which, ultimately, neurosis connects to a real that may itself remain undetermined. In this gap, something appears, something happens. Once this gap is sealed, is neurosis cured? You know, after all, that this question remains perpetually open. Only it transforms, sometimes into a simple infirmity, a “scar,” as Freud says elsewhere—not a scar of the neurosis, but of this unconscious.

As you can see, I am not presenting this topology to you in a very scholarly manner because I do not have the time. I leap into it, and what I designate here in these terms—I believe you will find it guiding you when you go to Freud’s text. And when you observe where he begins—specifically with the etiology of neuroses—what does he find in this gap, this fissure, this characteristic void of the cause? Let us try to spell it out.

What he finds is something of the order of the unrealized. People speak of refusal: this is rushing things, as has been the case for some time now; when one speaks of “refusal,” one no longer knows what one is saying. The unconscious, first and foremost, manifests to us as something that stands in a state of waiting within the realm, I would say, of the “unborn.”

That repression pours something into it is not surprising; this relates to the limbo of the “angel-maker.” This dimension must be evoked within this register, which is neither unreal nor de-realized, but unrealized. It is never without danger, after all, to stir something within this zone of larvae. Perhaps, after all, it is the analyst’s position—if they truly hold it—to be genuinely besieged by those whose world of larvae [specters] they have evoked, without always being able to bring them into the light.

No discourse there, of course, is harmless, and the very discourse I deliver—and have delivered over the past ten years—finds some of these effects, these returns, tied to the explanation I indicate here for these returns. It is not in vain that, even in public discourse, one targets subjects and touches them at what Freud calls the navel, writing in reference to dreams, the “navel of dreams,” which he designates as the ultimate center of the unknown. He states that this is nothing other than, as the anatomical image he refers to suggests and which proves to be the best to represent it, the very gap we are discussing.

The danger of public discourse lies in its addressing what is closest. Nietzsche knew that a certain type of discourse could only address the farthest. Indeed, this dimension of the unconscious that I am discussing—all of it—was forgotten, just as Freud had perfectly anticipated. The unconscious had closed over its message, thanks to the efforts of those active orthopedists who became the analysts of the second or third generation. By psychologizing analytic theory, they worked to suture this gap.

Believe me, I myself never reopen it except with caution. I have better things to do, for in the domain of cause, I stand—in my time, in my era—in the position of introducing the law, the law of the signifier where this gap occurs. Nonetheless, if we wish to understand what psychoanalysis is about, we must revisit this concept as it was forged in Freud’s time, for it can only be completed by pushing it to its limit.

I will pass over the usual considerations where the Freudian unconscious merely provides one paragraph among others in discussions of unconsciousness. It has nothing to do with the so-called “forms of the unconscious” that preceded it, accompanied it, or still surround it. To see what I mean, open the Lalande Dictionary and read Dwelshauvers’ lovely enumeration in a book published forty years ago by Flammarion. There are eight or ten forms of unconsciousness that teach nothing to anyone, merely designating the not-conscious, the more or less conscious, and in the field of psychological elaboration, one finds a thousand additional varieties.

It can be noted that Freud’s unconscious is not at all the romantic unconscious of imaginative creation, nor the place of the deities of the night where some still believe they can reveal the Freudian unconscious. This is not entirely unrelated, of course, to the place toward which Freud’s gaze turns. But the fact that Jung—who relapsed into the terms of the romantic unconscious—was repudiated by Freud tells us clearly enough that what Freud introduces is something else.

To claim that the unconscious—this unconscious, itself so haphazard and heteroclite, elaborated throughout his life as a solitary philosopher by Eduard von Hartmann—is not Freud’s unconscious, would also be rushing matters. Freud, in the seventh chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung), references von Hartmann in a note. This means we must examine more closely to distinguish what, in Freud, diverges from this.

As I have said, I do not simply state that Freud’s unconscious stands apart from all those unconscious formulations, more or less tied to an obscure will considered primordial, or something preceding consciousness. What Freud opposes is the revelation:

– That here, something—entirely homologous to what happens at the level of the subject—functions.
– That here, it speaks, completely overturning the perspective, revealing that at the level of the unconscious, it functions as elaborately as at the level of what appeared to be the privilege of consciousness.

I know the resistance that this simple remark still provokes, even though it is apparent in the slightest text by Freud. Read, for example, the section of the seventh chapter titled Forgetting in Dreams, where Freud explicitly refers to the play of the signifier in the most evident manner.

From this perspective, you have already had a sense of its dimensional indication in your ear. But I am not content with this broad reference. I have spelled out, point by point, the functioning of the unconscious.

In the phenomenon that Freud first presents to us as the field or register of the unconscious—dreams, parapraxes, witticisms—what strikes us first? It is the mode of stumbling under which it appears: stumbling, failure, fissure [cf. skandalon]. This is what strikes first. In a spoken or written sentence, something falters. Freud is magnetized by these phenomena; it is there that he seeks what will manifest as the unconscious.

There, something else demands realization, appearing as intentional, certainly, but with a strange, let us say, temporality.

What occurs—in the fullest sense of the term “to occur”—in this gap, in this fissure, presents itself as discovery. [From the fissure (skandalon), an astounding and scandalous “thing of language” (S1) escapes.] This is how Freud’s exploration first encounters what happens in the unconscious.

“Discovery,” which is at the same time “solution,” not necessarily complete, but however incomplete it may be, it possesses that “je ne sais quoi” that touches us with the particular resonance so admirably highlighted—and merely highlighted, for Freud had remarked upon it long before—by Theodor Reik: namely, the element of surprise, the way in which the subject feels overtaken. They discover both more and less than they expected, but in any case, it is always, relative to what was anticipated, of unique value.

Now, this discovery—as soon as it appears—manifests as rediscovery, establishing the dimension of loss. Moreover, this discovery is always ready to slip away again. To indulge in metaphor, I would say Eurydice lost twice over. Such is the most sensitive image the myth can offer us of itself, illustrating the relationship of Orpheus the analyst to the unconscious. In this, if you permit me to add a touch of irony, the unconscious finds itself at the strict opposite of love, of which everyone knows that it is always unique, and for which the phrase “one lost, ten regained” finds its most fitting application.

Discontinuity: such is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon. In this discontinuity lies something that manifests as a vacillation, and this leads us to question its foundation, given its nature as discontinuity. If this discontinuity possesses an absolute character—which we seem to attribute to it in the text of the phenomenon—this inaugural character in Freud’s path of discovery, should we, as analysts have tended to do since then, attribute to it the foundation of a kind of necessary apprehension of totality?

Is the “One” anterior to it? I do not think so! And everything I have taught in recent years has aimed, if I may say so, at overturning this demand for a closed “One,” a mirage tied to the reference to that sort of double of the organism that would be the psyche, an envelope within which this false unity would reside.

You will agree with me that the one introduced by the experience of the unconscious is precisely the one of the gap, of the mark, of the rupture. Here emerges, let us say, a misunderstood form of the one:
– Let us say, if you will, that it is not a unifying “One,” but the one of the mark (trait) of the Unbewusste (unconscious).
– Let us say that the limit of the Unbewusste is the Unbegriff (Begriff: concept)—not a non-concept, but a “concept of lack.”

And what did we just see emerge earlier, if not its relationship to this vacillation that returns to absence? Where is the foundation? Is it absence? No, it is not! The rupture, the gap, the trace of the opening makes this absence emerge like a cry that, instead of being isolated or outlined against a background of silence, brings forth silence itself.

If you grasp and hold onto (Begriff) this initial structure, you will be more certain not to fixate on only one partial aspect of what concerns the unconscious—for example, that it is the subject, insofar as it is alienated within its history, at the level where the syncope of discourse coincides with its desire.

You will see:
– That, more radically, it is within the dimension of synchronicity (“always already there”) that you must situate the unconscious.
– That it is at the level of being, but as being that can extend to everything.
– That it is at the level of the subject of enunciation insofar as—this you know well—depending on phrases and modes, it is as much lost as it is found. In an interjection, in an imperative, in an invocation, or even in a failure, it is always the subject that poses its enigma to you, that speaks. In short:
– That it is at the level where everything that unfolds spreads, as Freud says about the dream, like a mycelium around a central point, which relates to the unconscious.

It is always about the subject as indeterminate.
– Oblīvium (oblīviō: a metaphor of erased writing, from oblinere: to erase, to strike out—see Ernout and Meillet, Klincksieck, 2001, p. 455)—it is lēvis (with a long “ē”) meaning to polish, to smooth, to render even (Ernout and Meillet, p. 353).
– Oblīvium is what erases: the relationship of forgetting with the erasure of something that is the signifier as such (S1).

This is where we find the basal structure, the root of the possibility of something we must conceive of as operative—the possibility of something assuming the function of barring, of crossing out something else. This operates at a structurally more primordial level than repression, which we will discuss later. Indeed, we see that the reference to this operative element of erasure is what Freud designates from the outset in the function of censorship.

The modes under which he emphasizes that we must conceive of it as the work of the censor—redactions with scissors, Russian censorship, or as Heinrich Heine describes it at the beginning of De l’Allemagne [(1855), p. 48], caricaturing German censorship:
“Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So are pleased to announce the birth of a child as beautiful as liberty. Dr. Hoffmann strikes out the word ‘liberty.'”

And surely, one might question the effect of the word “liberty” resulting from this strictly material censorship. This is another issue, but it is also what Freud identifies as the most efficient manifestation of the dynamic of the unconscious.

To take an example never sufficiently explored—the very first one on which Freud based his demonstration—forgetting, the memory lapse involving the name “Signorelli” after his visit to the paintings in Orvieto.

Can one fail to see emerging from the text itself, imposed upon us, not metaphor but the reality of disappearance, suppression, Unterdrückung, of descent into the depths—and impossible to recover!—of the term “Signor,” or “Herr.” The Signor, the Herr, the absolute master, as I once said—death, to put it plainly—has vanished. But do we not also see, behind this, the entire framework that necessitates Freud’s recourse to the myths of the father’s death to regulate his desire?

And, after all, if he finds common ground with Nietzsche in stating, in his own way and through his own myth, that “God is dead,” it may well be based on the same reasons. Namely, that the myth of “God is dead”—a myth I, personally, find far less assured than most contemporary intellectuals—may merely serve as a refuge against a threat particularly present due to a series of temporal and epochal correlations: the threat of castration.

Specifically, the one referred to—if you know how to read them—in the apocalyptic frescoes of the Cathedral of Orvieto. And if you doubt this, if you do not know how to interpret them, then read the train conversation: with his interlocutor, precisely the one in whose presence Freud fails to recall the name “Signorelli.” The conversation, during the half-hour or hour preceding this exchange in a train traveling somewhere near Dubrovnik or a similar location, concerns nothing other than the end of sexual potency, which his interlocutor—a doctor—describes as dramatic for those who are typically his patients.

Thus, the unconscious always manifests as something that falters within a rupture of the subject, from which emerges a discovery that Freud equates with desire—a discovery we will, for now, situate within the bare metonymy of the discourse in question, where the subject grasps (Begriff) itself at some unexpected point.

Let us not forget that when speaking of Freud and his relationship with the father, all his efforts led him only to admit that for him the question remained unresolved. He expressed this to one of his female interlocutors: “What does a woman want?”—a question he never answered. Here, we refer to his actual relationship with women, to the uxorious character, as Jones discreetly puts it, that marked his life. We might say that Freud would undoubtedly have made an admirable, passionate idealist if he had not devoted himself to the other, in the form of the hysteric.

I have decided always to end punctually: twenty minutes to two, for my seminar. As you see, I have not concluded today what concerns the function of the unconscious. Let us, therefore, pause before reaching the terms I had set for what I hoped to complete: the unconscious. Today, I have not addressed repetition. What I have to say about the unconscious is closely tied to what we will discuss regarding the second concept, that of repetition, in our next session.