🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I would first like to announce to you…
an announcement that will hold value only for those familiar with my habits, which usually involve my absence during what used to be two of my seminars, to partake in a form of ritual rest, now customary, called “winter sports,” which some of you might have expected to occur around the same time.
…I have the pleasure of announcing this year that this will not be the case, as the absence of snow has provided me with the excuse to forgo this obligation.

The randomness of events has thus allowed me to announce another event, which I am delighted to share with a broader audience: as it happens, by declining the opportunity to give some funds to the travel agency, I was greatly thanked because, in compensation, they had received a request for a trip from eight members of the French Society of Psychoanalysis! I must say that I take even greater pleasure in bringing this to your attention because it constitutes what is called a genuinely good deed, the kind of which the Gospel says, “Let not the left hand know what the right hand does.”

Thus, eight of the most prominent members of the faculty are in London to discuss ways to counter the effects of my teaching! This is a very commendable concern, as it is evidently carried out in the interest of the French Society of Psychoanalysis, making a communication relevant only to its members—I apologize for that—but we will see that for those currently leading it, this is a very important trip.

The “Society” spares no expense for their care and protection—unless, of course, and here I wonder: perhaps, out of reciprocity, the English society has covered the costs of this trip as we used to cover the costs of their members when they came to take a close interest in the workings of our Society. Having thus concluded this, I have spent five minutes on it due to this announcement, which I thought I ought to make, so that the songs of gratitude might overshadow some slight signs of nervousness that have likely emerged in connection with this expedition.

Last time, I spoke to you about the concept of the unconscious. I believe I achieved at least something that gives you a sense of what the true function of this concept is—namely, to be a concept profoundly, initially, and inaugurally related to the function of the concept itself, of the Unbegriff or the Begriff of the original unity of the concept, that is, of the cut. This cut, I have deeply tied to the inaugural function—and as such—of the subject, of the subject in its most initial, constitutive relationship to the signifier itself. It may seem—it seems, and rightly so—new that I referred to the subject when discussing the unconscious.

However, I believe I managed to make you feel validly that, as far as the subject is concerned, and as far as the unconscious is concerned, they operate in the same place: that place which, concerning the subject, gained what could be called an “Archimedean” value through Descartes’ experience, insofar as it was the pivot that allowed science to take a completely new direction, notably starting with Newton, by reducing, so to speak, the foundation of inaugural certainty to a single point.

That I assign this function to the unconscious…
while pointing out this function, in a somewhat pulsative manner that I have consistently emphasized in my previous remarks—the necessity of vanishing, which seems to be inherently linked to it: everything that appears momentarily within its cleft seems destined, through a sort of preemption, to close up again, as FREUD himself used the metaphor, to slip away, to disappear.
…Whether this is the point to which I have assigned this same function, thereby signaling, in a sense, the hope—toward which more than one step has already been taken—that in this different direction, there will be a renewal, a reconstitution of this type of crystallization, equally sharp, equally decisive, equally inaugural, as the one that occurred in physical science, but now in this other direction, which we will call “the conjectural science of the subject.”

Let me remind you that there are fewer paradoxes here than it might initially seem. Did FREUD not, from the very start, tell us, did he not orient himself within this material into which he ventured with truly unprecedented boldness, when he understood that it was in the field of dreams that he had to find, locate confirmation of what his experience with the hysteric had taught him? What does he then tell us, specifically regarding the unconscious, which is affirmed as essentially constituted not by what consciousness can evoke, extend, locate, bring out from the subliminal, but by what is, by essence, denied to it.

How does FREUD name it, if not with the same term Descartes uses to designate what I referred to earlier as his “pivot point”: “thoughts”—Gedanken. There are “thoughts” in this field beyond consciousness. This is not an argument!
I have articulated it for you in a more precise way, namely that it is impossible to represent these “thoughts” other than within the same homologous determination where the subject of the “I think” finds itself in relation to the articulation of the “I doubt.”

DESCARTES grasps his “I think” in the enunciation of the “I doubt,” not in its enunciated form, which still carries everything from the knowledge to be doubted. Am I suggesting that FREUD takes one step further—one that sufficiently designates the legitimacy of our association—when he tells us to integrate into the dream text, for example, what I will call “the colophon”?

When the colophon is placed in the margin of the dream text…
The colophon, in an old text, is this small pointing hand: it is printed—or it was printed back when typography was still used. Well, he says: take it into account, the colophon of doubt is part of the text.
…He indicates to us, with this small sign in an emphatic manner, as he indicates through all his remarks regarding the way to consider this account, which, despite being always open to doubt, is provided to us about the dream.
…He indicates that he places his certainty—Gewissheit, as I told you last time—in the sole constellation of signifiers, as they result from the account, the commentary, the association, no matter the retraction. Everything contributes to providing the signifier upon which he relies to establish his own Gewissheit.

Because I emphasize that experience only begins with its methodical approach, this is why I compare it to the Cartesian method.
I am not saying that it is “the entry into the world of the subject”—let us underline “the subject” as distinct from “psychic function” in the proper sense, that myth, that nebulous confusion—I will not say that FREUD introduces it, since it is DESCARTES who introduced it, but I will say that FREUD addresses it [his Gewissheit] to say this, which is new:

“Here, in the field of the dream, you are at home.” “Wo es war, soll ich werden.”

This does not mean, I don’t know what crude translation like “The Ego must displace the Id”! Can you imagine how FREUD is translated into French when it comes to a formula like that, which is equal in its structure, depth, and resonance to those of the pre-Socratics?

It is not about the ego in this “…soll ich werden.” It is about what the Ich is, in FREUD’s writings, from the beginning to the end, when one knows, of course, how to recognize its place, precisely the complete, total locus of the network of signifiers—that is, the subject.
“Where it was…” always: the dream, where the ancients recognized—what?—all sorts of things, including messages from the Gods. And why would they have been wrong? They made something of these messages from the Gods. And as you might see as my argument progresses, it is not excluded that these Gods are still there, except that now, we do not care.

What FREUD tells us in this field, what interests us, is the fabric that envelops these messages, the network where—on occasion—something is caught. Perhaps the voice of the Gods makes itself heard, but it has been a long time since we returned our ears to their original state regarding them, a state in which, as everyone knows, they were made “not to hear” [Jeremiah, V, 21: “…They have ears and hear not.”]

But the subject, for its part, is there to find itself “Where it was…”—and I anticipate: the real—and I will justify what I just said shortly. Furthermore, those who have been listening to me for some time know that I often use the formula, “The Gods belong to the field of the real.”
…”Where it was, the Ich, the subject—not psychology—the subject must come to be.” And to know that one is there, that one finds oneself there, there is only one method: to map the network. And how does one map a network—when it is a network? It is by retracing, by returning, by crossing paths; it is by finding that it always intersects in the same way.

And there is, in Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams, no other confirmation of FREUD’s Gewissheit than this:
“Speak as much as you like, gentlemen, about this element of chance. Let it be said that we rely on asking the subject to associate freely, drawing from their speech this or that which suits us. In my experience, I find no figure, no arbitrariness; it intersects in such a way that it escapes chance.”

I may need to return again, to recall, to hammer this point home… I will content myself with revisiting, for those who have already heard my lessons on this topic, FREUD’s Letter 52 to FLIESS, which comments on the diagram—the diagram that will later be called in The Interpretation of Dreams the “optical” one. That is, it represents this image, this model, this model-fact in the image of certain layers that would be permeable to something analogous to light, which changes its index of refraction from one layer to another.

The only difference between the diagrams in Letter 52…
which someone in the front row commented on in one of our recent sessions, and since they are present here…
and the diagram to which I urge you to refer, is that there—and FREUD even says it!—this locus, where the matter of the subject of the unconscious unfolds, is not a spatial locus, not an anatomical layer.

Otherwise, how could we conceive of it as it is presented to us, situated between perception and consciousness, as they say, “between skin and flesh”:
…a vast expanse, a special spectrum stretched out between these two elements…
which later, when the second topography is established, will be the acceptance of perception-consciousness, Wahrnehmung-Bewusstsein.
…But here, in the meantime, lies the locus, the locus of the Other, where the subject is constituted.

And in the first diagram, the one FREUD gives us in Letter 52, he tells us that there must be a time, a stage, where these Wahrnehmungszeichen [Wahrnehmung: perception, zeichen: mark]…
to which, based on what I have taught you, we must immediately give their true name: signifiers. And this is specified, as he tells us that the Wahrnehmungszeichen—”traces of perception”—how do they function?
Through the necessity, derived from his experience, that FREUD gives us: the absolute separation of perception and memory. That is, for it to pass into memory, it must first be erased in perception, and vice versa.
…He designates for us a time when these Wahrnehmungszeichen must be constituted in simultaneity: what is this, if not the synchronicity of signifiers?

And of course, he says this all the more so because he does not know he is saying it fifty years before the linguists. But when he returns to it in The Interpretation of Dreams, we see that he even goes so far as to designate, in an equally striking way, other layers: there they will be constituted “by analogy.” We find, it seems, the contrasts, the same functions of similarity, so essential in the constitution of the metaphor introduced from a diachrony. In short, I will not dwell further, as I need to move forward today.

We find in FREUD’s articulations an unambiguous indication of what is at stake, not merely a network of signifiers, not constituted by chance associations or contiguity, but formed in this way due to a very defined structure, a very defined possibility of the temporal element, of a constitutive and oriented diachrony.

The only point I wish to emphasize further, to draw your attention to what he indicates exists—with a character that, for us, is almost miraculous—at the level of the deepest layer of the unconscious, where the diaphragm functions, that is, where these pre-relations are established between primary processes and what will be grasped, collected, and utilized at the level of the preconscious:
“It must, he says, have a relationship with causality.”

For us, too, these intersections assure us of rediscovering, without knowing whether our path, our threads of Ariadne, come from there. Because, of course, we read it before developing the theory we give of the signifier, but we read it without always being able, at the moment, to understand it.

And if it is through the necessities of our experience that we placed at the heart of the structure of the unconscious this causal gap, finding its enigmatic, unexplained indication in FREUD’s text is also for us an indication that we are progressing on the path to his certainty. For let us see clearly, this “subject of certainty” at the point where I pause, is divided. Certainty, that is FREUD’s.

And it is in this direction that the heart of the issue I am raising becomes apparent: is psychoanalysis—implicitly, as of now—a science?

Can this question even be raised while FREUD—manifestly—remains tied to what distinguishes modern science, not from the one that immediately preceded it, which I am not discussing for the moment, but from science at its inception?

In the Theaetetus, there is a discussion of what distinguishes one from the other: it is that in science—when it emerges—there is the presence of a master. Now, it is manifest that, with FREUD as master, it is evident—if all that is written as analytic literature is not pure and simple nonsense—it is evident that he remains relevant and functions as a master. It is even around this that a question arises: “Will this dependency ever be lightened?”

Opposing his certainty is the subject I mentioned earlier, who has been waiting there for some time, since DESCARTES. That is to say, I dare to state as a truth—which, I think, will ruffle no feathers—that the discovery of the unconscious, the Freudian field, would not have been possible until some time after the emergence of the Cartesian subject.

In this, which is assumed to be established in my discourse…
not demonstrated, of course, but this is a field that is not mine; it belongs to others. Nonetheless, it is widely accepted enough in the domain of the history of science for us to take it as a given:
…that modern science only begins after DESCARTES took his inaugural step.

However, this is the condition upon which we can call the subject to return to itself within the unconscious: it remains important to know whom we are calling. It is not the “soul” of old—neither mortal nor immortal—nor shadow, nor double, nor ghost, nor even the so-called psycho-sphere, the shell, locus of defenses, and other schematics that we must, on this occasion, rightly put in their place.

First, and initially, it is the subject that is called; hence, only the subject can be chosen. There may be—as in the parable—“many are called, but few are chosen,” but surely there will not be any who are chosen without having been called.
To situate and understand Freudian concepts, one must start with this foundation: it is the subject that is called [“Wo es war, soll ich werden”].

The subject, as I have just defined it, as derived from its Cartesian origin, is not found in those indiscriminate crowds, in all that has been brought forth over centuries of experience, not just historical experience, but the same repeated experiences. The Gods we spoke of earlier—simply, they knew—among the minor roles, in those crowds—they were being smuggled back in.
One must act knowingly and state it openly; this is the essence of the scientific method. And since this concerns the subject, this gives its true function to what is called, in analysis, recollection: recollection is not Platonic “reminiscence.” It is not the return of a “form,” an imprint, an eidos of beauty and goodness coming to us from the beyond, from a supreme Truth.

It is something arising from structuring necessities, something humble, born at the level of the most mundane encounters, from all the noisy confusion of speech that precedes us, from the structure of the signifier, from a language and languages spoken in stammering, stumbling ways, but which cannot escape a certain kind of necessity, whose echoes, model, and style are curiously found in the constructions established in place of this reflection aimed at eliminating all intuition—on which mathematics is situated today.

Thus, as you have seen with the notion of intersections, the function of return—Wiederkehr—is essential. This is not merely Wiederkehr in the sense of “what has been repressed.” Moreover, the very constitution of the unconscious field ensures this Wiederkehr, and it is here that FREUD establishes his certainty.

However, it is evident, as is also clear in the text, that if this is where he establishes it, it is not from there that it comes to him. Rather, it comes from what he recognizes there…
And here I address the one who, after my first seminar, questioned me about my hesitation regarding what he called—what puzzled him—the apparent “psychologism” in my discourse: I was speaking of FREUD’s discourse…
…It becomes clear, at this level, that in order to correlate and balance with this certainty he advances within the subject, what is at stake is:
– that he recognizes there the law of his own desire, FREUD’s own,
– that he could not have advanced with this wager of certainty had he not been guided—as the texts attest—by his self-analysis.

And what is his self-analysis if not the brilliant identification—the first identification—of the law of desire suspended on the Name-of-the-Father?
The certainty of this subject—supported by the act of discovering the subject—FREUD advances into it, supported by a certain relationship to his desire and by his act, namely the constitution of psychoanalysis.

I will not elaborate further, although I am always hesitant to leave this ground, where I ought to insist further to show that there is no way to escape this conception: that FREUD’s notion of hallucination—a process of regressive investment on initial perception—implies that the subject must be entirely subverted by it.

Indeed, this happens only in extremely fleeting moments, but it leaves entirely open the question of its relationship to true hallucination. Namely, that the subject does not recognize itself as subverted, but there is a time, a moment, a mode under which FREUD conceives it as sufficient, as possible—and perhaps, after all, this is merely a mythical pinning down—it is not certain that one can purely and simply speak of desire, hallucinatory psychosis, and the confused, as he too quickly outlines it, as manifestations of the imperceptible regression of desire arrested. But that he can conceive of it shows the extent to which he identifies the subject with what is originally subverted by the system of the signifier.

Let us now leave this time of the unconscious, and, as little as we can today, let us move forward into what is written on the board—that is, toward what I must now address: the question of what repetition is. This will be the subject of more than one of our discussions.

What I have to tell you is so new, although evidently also assured from the outset of what I have articulated about the signifier, that I thought I should, without keeping anything up my sleeve, tell you today how I intend to situate, for you, the function of repetition.

This function of repetition has nothing to do with the open or closed nature of the circuits I earlier referred to as Wiederkehr.

My thesis—to be clear and to let you know where I am leading you, so you know where I am leading you—is that this repetition, under the term where FREUD articulates it for the first time—not introduces it for the first time, but articulates it for the first time—in the 1914 article Erinnern, Wiederholen, Durcharbeiten (Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through), the very article upon which the greatest stupidity in analysis has been founded, leads to Chapter V of Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle).

Try to read it in a language other than French. I hope you’ve read it already, but I urge you to reread Chapter V, line by line.

And for those who do not know German, read it in the English translation, where you will—this being said in passing—find much to amuse you. For example, you will see that the insistence on translating Trieb as “instinct” and Triebhaft as “instinctual” creates such difficulties for the translator that, although this translation is consistently maintained without exception—thus making the entire edition a study in complete misrepresentation, as there is nothing in common between Trieb and “instinct”—the discord becomes so pronounced that it is impossible to finish the sentence by translating Triebhaft as “instinctual.” A footnote is required: “Triebhaft: at the beginning of the next paragraph, the word Triebhaft is much more revealing of urgency than the word instinctual.”

The Trieb pushes you more forcefully, my little friends; that’s the entire difference from the so-called “instinct”! Such is the manner in which psychoanalytic teaching is transmitted!

Let us see how this Wiederholen is introduced. It is because Wiederholen relates to Erinnerung, “recollection.” The subject within themselves, the memorializing of biography, all of that works up to a certain limit called the real. If I were to forge a Spinozist formula before you concerning this matter, I would say: Cogitatio adaequata semper vitat eamdem rem.

I said: an adequate thought as thought—at the level we are at—always avoids, always veers away from—even if only to find itself afterward—the same thing [the real]. The real in this text being what has necessitated my formula, which, moreover, is not greatly contradicted by the history of human thought: “it is what always returns to the same place,” the same place where the subject, as thinking cogito, as dreaming cogito, does not encounter it.

The entire history of the discovery of repetition as a function in FREUD’s thought explains this structural motif and can only be defined by highlighting this relationship. It was beautiful in the beginning—because we were dealing with hysterics—that the process of recollection! How convincing it was with the first treated hysterics!

This is why it was noted in passing, in the last two sessions, that what is at stake in this recollection could not be known at the outset: that the desire of the hysteric was the desire of the father, to sustain it in its status. It is no wonder that, for the one who takes the father’s place, things are recollected down to the dregs.

Let me point out here the difference—which FREUD’s texts never oscillate on—between “repetition” and “reproduction.” Wiederholen is not Reproduzieren. Reproduction was what was believed possible in the beginning, during the great hopes of catharsis. The primal scene was to be reproduced, just as today one can have reproductions of master paintings for 9.50 Francs.

But what FREUD indicates to us as he takes his subsequent steps—and it does not take him long—is that no [primal scene?] can be grasped, destroyed, or burned except, as they say, symbolically: in effigie, in absentia.

Repetition first appears in this form that is unclear, that does not go without saying, that will not immediately allow us to settle ourselves: it is a reproduction, a presentification in act. That is why I wrote “The act?” with a large question mark at the bottom of this board to indicate that this act will remain—so long as we speak of the relationship between repetition and the real—on our horizon.

For the simple reason that—whether in FREUD or his epigones—it is curious that there has never even been an attempt to recall what, regarding the act, is within everyone’s reach. Let us add “human act,” if you wish, since, as far as we know, there is no act but that of humans. It would be a matter of understanding why an act is not a behavior, not a conduct.

Let us fix our gaze, for example, even if we need to revisit it, on this: an act—unambiguously so—is an act: for instance, one cannot open one’s own belly except under certain conditions.

Whether it is called 腹切り [hara-kiri] or 切腹 [seppuku], they do it because they believe it will deeply disturb others, and in the structure, it is an act in honor of something. Let us wait; let us not rush to judgment before knowing. Let us note this: that an act, a true act, always involves a structural concern, a real that is not self-evident within it.

Wiederholen [to repeat], nothing has remained more enigmatic—
and especially regarding this dichotomy so structuring of all psychology—
if I say Freudian psychology—between the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle.
…Nothing has remained more enigmatic than this Wiederholen, which, according to the most cautious etymologists, is close to “hauling,” as one does on towpaths, close to the “hauling” of the subject, who always drags their thing around a certain path they cannot escape.

And why did repetition first appear at the level of what is called “traumatic neurosis,” in something characterized—and here FREUD, contrary to all neurophysiologists, pathologists, and others, clearly noted—that if it is problematic for the subject to reproduce in a dream the memory, for example, of the intense bombardment from which their neurosis originated, this seems, in the waking state, to leave them entirely indifferent!

What is this function of traumatic repetition if nothing—far from it!—seems to justify it from the perspective of the Pleasure Principle? To master the painful event? Who masters? Where is the master to be mastered here?
Why speak so quickly when we do not even know where to situate the agency that would attempt to master in this context?

FREUD, at the conclusion of the series of writings of which I have presented the two essential ones to you, points out in the latter that we can only conceive of what occurs at the level of dreams in traumatic neurosis by considering the most primitive level of functioning, one where the goal is to establish the binding of energy.

Let us not presume in advance that this involves some kind of divergence or distribution of functions like those we might find at a level infinitely more elaborated in the real, where we see that the subject, indeed, cannot approach without dividing themselves into several agencies. This division allows us to say what is said of a divided kingdom: that any unity of the psyche, the so-called “totalizing,” “synthesizing” psyche—understood to lean toward consciousness—perishes in this conception of the psyche.

Finally, what do we see in these initial moments of experience, where recollection gradually replaces itself, always approaching a kind of focus, a center where every event seems destined to unfold? Precisely at that moment appears what I will also call…
within quotation marks, because the meaning of the following three words must be entirely altered to give them their proper weight…
“the subject’s resistance,” which at that moment becomes repetition in act.

It is through what I will articulate next time that I reserve the opportunity to show you how we can appropriate for this purpose the admirable Chapters IV and V of ARISTOTLE’s Physics. In these chapters, he examines and manipulates two terms that absolutely resist his theory—the most elaborated theory ever conceived of the function of cause—namely, what are improperly translated as “chance” and “fortune,” which he calls αὐτόματον (automaton).

And we, who know today—at this point in modern mathematics and the development of machines—precisely what this network of signifiers entails, find ourselves at home here. It concerns, as you will see, revising and redefining the relationship, entirely differently from ARISTOTLE, who nevertheless speaks of it admirably, between:

– the αὐτόματον (automaton),
– and what he designates as “fortune,” the τύχη (tuché), which must be precisely defined as the encounter with the real.