🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I will continue today, if I can, the exposition of what concerns the concept of repetition, as it is presented to us through FREUD’s indication and through the experience of psychoanalysis.

What I wish to emphasize is that psychoanalysis, at first glance well-suited to direct us towards idealism—and God knows it has been criticized for this: for “reducing the experience,” say some who urge us to find, in the harsh supports of conflict, struggle, or even “the exploitation of man by man,” the reasons for our deficiencies—is an experience directed instead towards I don’t know what ontology of entirely primitive tendencies, entirely internal, already given by the condition of the subject.

It is enough to trace back, from its very first steps, the course of this experience to see that, on the contrary, there is nothing within it that permits us to resolve ourselves to the aphorism expressed as “Life is but a dream”! Nothing is more centered, oriented towards what, at the core of our experience, constitutes the nucleus of the real. Where, then, do we encounter this real?

Indeed, it is in the structure of this encounter, in the nodal function, in the repetitive function of an essential encounter, a rendezvous to which we are always summoned with a real that eludes us, that lies the essence of everything psychoanalysis has discovered. And it is for this reason that I have written these few words on the board, which serve as a guide for what we seek to advance today. Namely:

• The τύχη [tuché] that we borrowed— as I told you last time—from ARISTOTLE’s vocabulary in his search for causes;
• The real beyond the αὐτόματον [automaton], beyond the return, the repetition, the insistence of signs, which is commanded by the pleasure principle.

…This is what always lies behind and what, in FREUD’s entire body of work, is so evidently his primary concern.

Recall the development of the Wolf Man, so central to us in understanding what truly preoccupied FREUD as the function of the fantasy became clearer to him: he pursued it, clung to it, and, in an almost anguished manner, interrogated what this real was, what this primal encounter might be, which we can assert and affirm lies behind the fantasy.

This real, we sense through all of these observations, so preoccupied FREUD—drawing the subject along with it and pressing it—that, after all, we can ask ourselves today whether this pressure, this presence, this desire of FREUD in the analysis of the Wolf Man was not what may have conditioned the late accident of his psychosis.

Thus, as we said last time, there is no reason to confuse the return of signs, reproduction, or modulation through behavior as if it were merely a re-enacted reminiscence. What is at stake in repetition should not be confused with this.

In psychoanalysis, something is always stolen from its true function, from its true nature, by a weakness in the conceptualization that analysts have given to the concept of transference, equating it in some sense with repetition. Yet this is precisely the point where distinction must be made. The relationship to the real that is at stake in transference has been expressed by FREUD in these terms: “Nothing can be apprehended in effigie or in absentia.”

[“It is undeniable that overcoming the phenomena of transference presents the greatest difficulties for the psychoanalyst, but it must not be forgotten that they render us the invaluable service of making the hidden and forgotten love-affects of the patient current and manifest, for after all, no one can be struck down in absentia or in effigie.” (S. Freud: On the Dynamics of Transference, 1912)
“I replied: It is scarcely possible to strike someone down in absentia.” (S. Freud: Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis, 1909)]

And yet, is not transference presented to us as an effigy, as a relationship to absence? This ambiguity of reality at stake in transference can only be untangled by grasping what is at play in the function of the real concerning repetition.

What repeats, as the entire analytic experience shows us, is always something whose relation to τύχη [tuché] is sufficiently designated by the expression that best images what we constantly confront: what halts us, what holds us back—whatever its apparent origin in experience, whether internal or external—what occurs “as if by chance.”

And yet, by principle, we analysts never allow ourselves to be deceived by it—or at least, we always mark this with the indication: we must not take the subject’s declaration at face value when they tell us that something happened that day that prevented them from fulfilling their intention, such as coming to the session.

This shows us that we must not take things at the subject’s word, for what we are dealing with, what we are confronted by, is this stumbling block, this snag, whose presence and formulation—mark my words—appear at every level. Not only the “flaws” of our experience but also the very structure we give to the formation of the subject will be found at every moment as the mode—the mode of apprehension par excellence—of what commands, for us, this new deciphering of the subject’s relations to everything that constitutes their condition.

This function of τύχη [tuché]—of the real as encounter, as a missed encounter, as something that would essentially be “presence” as “missed encounter”—is what first presented itself in the history of psychoanalysis in its initial form, one that alone suffices to draw our attention: that of trauma.

Is it not remarkable that, at its origin, the real—presented to us at the beginning of the analytic experience—manifested itself in the form of its inassimilable aspect, as trauma, determining the entirety of its development as something imposing an origin that appears accidental?

Thus, we find ourselves at the heart of what allows us to understand the radical and essential character of the notion of conflict introduced by the opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The reality principle cannot, by virtue of its ascendance, be conceived as giving the final word, encompassing in its “solution” the direction indicated by the function of the pleasure principle.

For if trauma is conceived as being “buffered” by the subjectivizing homeostasis that orients all functioning defined by the pleasure principle, what our experience then presents as a problem is precisely this: that within itself, within primary processes, we see preserved an insistence on reminding us—motivated by the pleasure principle—of this trauma, which reappears and often reappears unveiled. It poses the question: how, if the dream is defined as manifesting the wish—the Wunsch—that bears the subject’s desire, how can this dream produce what so often emerges as bringing back to life—and in repetition—if not the figure, then at least the screen behind which the trauma is once again indicated?

Thus, the system of “reality,” however long it develops, leaves in some way a crucial part, which is nonetheless to be referred to the real, as a prisoner caught in the nets of the primary process. It is this we must probe—this “reality,” so to speak, which represents for us, in a major form, that supposed presence deemed necessary for the development, the unfolding, and the disjunction, if you will, of the most recent theory of analysis—the one that a Melanie KLEIN, for example, represents to us as giving the movement of development—so as not to be reducible to what I called earlier “Life is but a dream.”

There is no other “sense of meaning” conceivable in this register than the necessity of these particular points, radical in a way, within the real, which I call the “encounter” and which leads us to conceive of reality as unterlegt, untertragen, or, if you will, in French, a word that translates directly yet ambiguously—its superb ambiguity in the French language [cf. seminar on “The Purloined Letter”]—as “suffering.” Reality is “in suffering,” presenting itself to us, in a way, as what is there, waiting.

And this Zwang, this constraint that FREUD describes, which he defines through Wiederholung [repetition], is something by which we are always brought back to the central point where it governs even the detour of the primary process. This primary process, which is none other than what I have tried to define for you in recent lessons as the unconscious, must once again be grasped in its rupture “between perception and consciousness,” as I mentioned before, in this place—this timeless place—that FREUD calls “einer anderen Lokalität,” which is another locality, another space, another scene.

This “between perception and consciousness” is something we can seize upon at any moment. Was I not awakened the other day from a brief sleep, during which I sought rest, by something knocking at my door before I had even woken? With these insistent knocks, I had already formed a dream—a dream that manifested to me something other than these knocks. And when I awoke, these knocks, this perception—if I became aware of them—it was only insofar as, around them, I reconstituted, I replaced my entire representation: I knew where I was, what time I had fallen asleep, and what I had sought in that sleep.

When the noise of the knock reaches not my perception but my consciousness, it is because my consciousness reconstitutes itself around this representation. I recognize that I am under the effect of waking—that I am knocked. But here, I must question what I am at this moment—immediately before and yet so separate—when I had begun to dream under this knock, which seems, in appearance, to be what awakens me. At that moment, I am, so far as I know, before I wake, this ne—called explétif—which, in its form, I had previously marked in one of my Écrits as designating the very mode of presence of this “I am” before awakening.

It is not truly explétif; rather, it is the fulfillment (explétion) of my immanence, each time it has to manifest itself, which is what the language—French—defines so aptly in the act of its use.

• I say: “Will you be finished before he does not come?” when it matters to me that you are finished, lest he come before!
• I say: “Will you pass before he comes?” because, by the time he arrives, you will no longer be there.

What I direct your attention to is the symmetry to which we are drawn, the structure that compels me, after the knock of waking, to pose myself and sustain myself in appearance only in relation to my representation—which, in its transparency, only makes me conscious: like a reflection, involutive in some sense, as within my consciousness, it is my representation that I seize.

But precisely, is that all? FREUD has told us enough to make it clear that he would have needed—though he never did!—to return to this function of consciousness. Perhaps we will better grasp what is at stake by understanding what nonetheless is there, motivating the emergence of this represented reality: namely, the phenomenon, the distance, the very gap that constitutes awakening.

And we can only do this by emphasizing—though I have left time for all of you, whether to read or to intervene, as I had hoped—the function that FREUD so strangely attributes, in Chapter VII of his work, to this dream I briefly described to you, just as briefly as FREUD described it.

Note how this dream is entirely structured around the incident, the noise, that determines the plight of the unfortunate father—who had gone to take rest in the room adjacent to the one where his deceased child lay, leaving the child in the care, as the text says, of a graying, elderly man. This man, startled, awakened by something not only from reality—a shock, the knocking of a sound meant to recall him to the real—but which, in the father’s dream, translates almost identically what happens: namely, the very reality of a candle overturned, setting fire to the bed where the child rests.

• Here, then, is something that seems poorly suited to confirm FREUD’s thesis in The Interpretation of Dreams—namely, that the dream is the fulfillment of a wish!

For the first time, perhaps, in The Interpretation of Dreams, we see emerge what FREUD presents as a secondary function: that the dream here satisfies only the need to prolong sleep. What, then, does FREUD mean by emphasizing here, in this place, that this dream, in itself, fully confirms everything he has told us about dreams?

This, which at first glance might seem so peculiarly—let us say, at least—ambiguous. If the function of the dream is to prolong sleep, if the dream, after all, can so closely approach the reality it suggests, could we not say, after all, that this reality might have been addressed without breaking sleep? After all, there are somnambulistic activities. And the issue—the question that all of FREUD’s prior indications allow us to raise here—is this: What is it that wakes?

Is this not another reality, the one that in the dream FREUD describes as follows:

“… daß das Kind an seinem Bett steht” : “that the child is standing by his bed,”
“ihn am Arme faßt” : “grabs him by the arm” and
“ihm Vorwurfsvoll zuraunt” : “whispers to him in a reproachful tone” :
“Vater, siehst du denn nicht” : “Father, do you not see,”
“daß ich verbrenne” : “that I am burning?”
(Nach einigen Stunden Schlafes träumt der Vater, daß das Kind an seinem Bette steht, ihn am Arme faßt und ihm Vorwurfsvoll zuraunt: Vater, siehst du denn nicht, daß ich verbrenne? – VII, Zur Psychologie der Traumvorgänge)

– Is there not more reality in this message than in the noise by which the father equally identifies the strange reality—on which we will immediately return—of what is happening in the neighboring room?

– Do these words not convey the missed reality that caused the child’s death?

– Does FREUD not himself tell us that in this sentence we must recognize something that, for the father, perpetuates these words forever separated from the dead child…
words which FREUD supposes might have been said to the father “perhaps due to the fever”, but who knows?
…words that perpetuate for him the question, the anguish, the remorse, of what FREUD points to as that which may perpetuate, in the father, the worry that the one assigned to watch over his child—the old man—might not have been “up to the task”. And indeed, he fell asleep.

(Vielleicht hatte selbst der Vater die Besorgnis mit in den Schlaf hinübergenommen, daß der greise Wächter seiner Aufgabe nicht gewachsen sein dürfte.)

This reference to the phrase attributed to the fever—does it not equally pertain to what, in one of my recent lectures, I called “the cause of the fever”?

– If, in this case, the action, as urgent as it seems, is apparently directed towards handling what is happening in the neighboring room, could it not also be felt as “in any case, now too late” in relation to the psychic reality that manifests itself in the uttered phrase?

– Is the pursued dream not essentially, if I may say so, a homage to the missed reality, which can only repeat itself indefinitely in a perpetually unreachable awakening?

What encounter could there now be with this inert being, forever lifeless—even as it is devoured by flames—except the one that happens precisely when the flame, by accident, “as if by chance,” comes to meet it? And where is the reality in this accident, if not in the fact that it repeats something even more fatal, through the reality, of a reality where the one tasked with watching over the body remains asleep—even, moreover, when the father, after waking, arrives?

Thus, the encounter, always missed,
– has passed between the dream and the awakening,
– between the one who remains asleep, whose dream we will never know, and the one who dreamed only to avoid waking.

If FREUD marvels at this as confirming the theory of desire, it is precisely because it concerns something other than a fantasy fulfilling a wish!
It is not even that in the dream the father sustains the belief that his son is still alive, but rather that this atrocious vision designates a beyond that resonates within it.

– It is that desire is made present there, through the most cruel image of the lost object.
– It is that in the dream, the truly unique encounter takes place, after which desire can only persist as mourning, and reality can only make sense as the clearing away of residue.
– It is that only a ritual, an endlessly repeated act, can commemorate this immemorial encounter, since no one can articulate what the death of a child means except the father as a father, that is to say, no conscious being.

For the true formula of atheism is not “God is dead”—even as FREUD, in grounding the origin of the paternal function on its murder, protects the Father. The true formula of atheism is “God is unconscious.”

“What might have been”—this must be sought, seen in reality, before awakening. Awakening shows us the emergence of the subject’s consciousness within the representation of what has occurred: namely, the unfortunate accident of reality, which one can only address after the fact.

But what was this accident when everyone was asleep…
– the one who wanted to take a little rest, the one who could not sustain the watch,
– and the one of whom, perhaps, someone well-intentioned might have said, standing by his bed: “He seems to be sleeping”?
…what was this accident when we know only one thing: that in this entire slumbering world, only the voice made itself heard: “Father, do you not see, I am burning?”

This phrase itself is a brand: by itself, it carries the fire wherever it falls. We do not see what burns, for the flame blinds us to what it consumes, to the unterlegt, to the ὑποκείμενον (upokeimenon), but not to the real.

And it is this that compels us to recognize in this phrase, in this fragment severed from the father in his suffering, the reverse of what will become—upon awakening—his consciousness. This, in turn, compels us to ask what in the dream is the correlative of representation.

What confronts him at this moment is all the more striking because we see it here truly as the reverse of representation: it is the imagery of the dream, it is what compels us to designate it as what FREUD, in speaking of the unconscious, identifies as its essential determinant, the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz. This means, not as has been translated in a diluted way, the representative representative, but the stand-in for representation. We will see its function as essential going forward.

Let us now return to our path.

If I have succeeded in making you grasp what, in the encounter as forever missed, is here nodal and truly sustains what, in FREUD’s text, appears absolutely exemplary in this dream: this point concerning the place of the real, which stretches from trauma to fantasy, in that fantasy is never more than the screen that conceals it, has something entirely primary, determining, in the function of repetition:
– this is what we must identify,
– this is what we must return to,
– this is what explains to us both the ambiguity of the function of awakening and the function of the real in this awakening.

The real can manifest itself through the accident, the little noise, the tiny fragment of reality that testifies to the fact that we are not dreaming. But on the other hand, this reality is not insignificant, because what wakes us is the other reality hidden behind the absence of that which serves as representation.

“It is the Trieb,” FREUD tells us. But let us be careful; we have not yet said what this Trieb is. And if—due to a lack of representation—it does not present itself, this Trieb in question, we may have to consider it as merely a Trieb to come.

And this awakening—how can we not see that it is double-sided? This awakening, which places us back into a constituted and represented reality, is doubled, overlapping with what designates to us:
– that it is beyond the dream that we must go, that we must seek it,
– that it is within what the dream has enveloped, wrapped around, concealed behind the absence of representation, of which it is merely a substitute,
– that it is towards this that we are drawn back, and that psychoanalysis points us toward a real that commands, more than anything else, our activities.

[diagram from the session of 13-05-64]

Thus, we can see that FREUD provides the solution to what, for the sharpest of soul-questioners before him—KIERKEGAARD—had already centered upon as the form of the question surrounding Repetition.

I invite you to reread this dazzling text, full of lightness and ironic play—a truly Mozartian text in its Don Juan-like mode of abolishing the illusions of love. This clarity of emotions, which, beyond reproach, is heightened by the fact that, in the love of the young man whose portrait KIERKEGAARD paints—both touching and derisory—this young man addresses only himself through the intermediary of memory.

Is there not, in fact, a deeper echo here of LA ROCHEFOUCAULD’s formula than this:

“How few would experience love if its modes, paths, and formulas had not been explained to them.”

Yes, but who started it? And does everything not essentially begin in deception? Who did the first person address when, in proclaiming the enchantment of love, they passed off this enchantment as an exaltation of the other, making themselves a prisoner of this exaltation to the point of breathlessness—creating, with the offer, the most false of demands, that of narcissistic satisfaction, whether it be the ideal of the ego or the ego that takes itself as the ideal?

No more in KIERKEGAARD than in FREUD does repetition rest on the natural or the return of need. The return of need aims at consumption placed at the service of appetite. Repetition demands the new. It turns towards the playful, which makes the new its dimension. And this, FREUD also tells us in the text of the chapter whose reference I provided in the last session. Everything that, in repetition, varies or modulates is merely alienation from its essence.

The adult—or even the more advanced child—demands, in their activities, something new in play.

But, as FREUD points out, this is only the sliding of what gives the true secret of play: the sliding of a more radical diversity, one that constitutes repetition itself. Namely, the kind that manifests in the child in their first movement, at the moment they form themselves as a human being, appearing as the demand that the story always remain the same, that its narrated realization be ritualized—that is, textually identical.

And this point, then, as it delineates a consistency distinct from the details of the narrative, forms a signifier of reference to the realization of the signifier, which can never be sufficiently careful in its memorization to designate the primacy of signification as such. To vary the significations in its development is, therefore, to escape it. Of course, this variation causes the aim of this signification to be forgotten by transforming its act into play, giving it blissful discharges in accordance with the pleasure principle.

But this repetition may well be grasped by FREUD in his observation of his grandson’s game, the repeated fort-da in the disappearance of the mother. FREUD may well emphasize that this tempers its effect by making the child its agent.

Yet, the phenomenon remains correlated with what WALLON highlights: namely, that this is only secondary.

So much so that the child watches through the door, keeping an eye on the door through which his mother has left, marking his expectation of seeing her return there. But earlier—before reaching this stage—it is precisely at the point where she left him, at the side she abandoned close to him, that he directs his attention. The gap introduced by the depicted absence remains perpetually open and becomes the cause of a centrifugal trajectory where what falls is not the other, as the figure onto which the subject projects, but this spool, connected to the child by a thread alone. Here, what detaches from him in this trial expresses a form of self-mutilation from which the order of signification will begin to take shape.

For the spool game is the subject’s response to the absence of the mother, which has created, at the boundary of his domain—namely, the edge of his cradle—a chasm around which his only recourse is to play at jumping: this spool is not the mother reduced to this small ball by some game akin to those of the JIVAROS. It is a small part of the subject, detaching itself while still being very much his own, still held on to. And of this, we must say—as ARISTOTLE says that “Man thinks with his soul”—that it is with this part that he leaps across the boundaries of this domain, now transformed, around which he begins his incantation.

For if it is true to say that the signifier is the subject’s first mark, how can we not apply this here? And by the mere fact that this game is accompanied by one of the first phonematic oppositions to appear, marking its involutive act—that is, restitutive alternations—how can we not recognize that this opposition, in action, designates the subject? Namely, in the spool, which we will later name in Lacanian algebra as (a).

The entire activity symbolizes repetition—not at all as a need that calls for the return of the mother and would simply manifest itself in a cry—but rather as the departure of the mother, causing a Spaltung (splitting) in the subject, one that is overcome by an alternative that is a vel: the fort-da, which is a “here or there,” aiming in its alternation only to be fort of a da, and da of a fort.

But what it targets is that which essentially is not there as a represented term, for it is the game that is the Repräsentanz of the Vorstellung. What will become of the Vorstellung when this Repräsentanz of the mother, once again marked in its outline, painted with the gouaches of desire, the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, is missing?

“I too have seen, seen with my eyes opened by maternal divination, how the child, traumatized by my departure despite an early, half-formed appeal of the voice—never renewed for months thereafter—I have seen, even long after, when I would take this same child into my arms, how he would let his head fall onto my shoulder to sink into the sleep that alone could give him access to the living signifier that I had become since the date of the trauma.”

This outline of the function of τύχη [tuché] that I have given you today, you will see, will be essential for us in interpreting, guiding, and rectifying what is the analyst’s duty in the interpretation of transference. Let it suffice for me to emphasize today that it is not in vain that analysis positions itself as radically modulating this relationship of man to the world, which for so long was taken as “knowledge.”

If, in theoretical writings, it is so often linked to something that is supposedly analogous to the relationship between ontogenesis and phylogenesis, let us not be mistaken: this arises from confusion. And as for psychological ontogenesis, we will show next time that the entire originality of analysis is in centering it not on these so-called stages, which literally have no identifiable foundation in observable biological development.

If this development is entirely animated by accident, by stumbling, by τύχη [tuché] […], it is because—and this is what I wished to highlight today—τύχη [tuché] and what it aims at bring us back to the same point where Presocratic philosophy sought to provide a motivation for the world itself.

It needed somewhere a clinamen, and DEMOCRITUS, when attempting to define it, positioning himself already as the opponent of a purely negative function in order to introduce thought into it, tells us:

“It is not the μηδέν (meden: zero) that is essential…

And showing us that from the very beginning, from the origin of what one of our students called ‘the archaic stage of philosophy,’ wordplay, the manipulation of language, was employed just as in the time of HEIDEGGER:

…it is not a μηδέν (meden: zero), it is a δεν (den: without).*”

Which, as you know, is a constructed word in Greek.

He did not say ἕν (èn: one) to avoid speaking of the ὄν (on: being). What did he say?

He said, in response to the question that is ours—the question of idealism:

“Nothing, perhaps?”

He did not answer:
“Perhaps nothing,”
but neither did he answer:
“Nothing.”