🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I continue by attempting to guide you toward the function, in our analytical discovery, of repetition. I aim to demonstrate that this is not an easy concept to grasp in the approach, in the practice we ascribe to it. Wiederholung I told you, and already enough, to emphasize what it implies, in its etymological reference to “haul” again, with its tiresome connotation. “To pull” what? Perhaps, playing on the ambiguity of the French word “tirer”: “to draw lots,” this Zwang [compulsion] would then direct us toward something like the forced card, and after all, if there is only one card in the game, I can draw no other!

The ensemble character—in the mathematical sense of the term—that the significant battery possesses, which contrasts it with the indefiniteness of number, of integers for instance, allows us to conceive of a schema where this function of the forced card immediately applies.
If the subject is the subject of the signifier—determined by it—we can imagine the synchronic network as producing preferential effects in diachrony. And understand well, this is not about unpredictable statistical effects, but rather it is the very structure of this network that implies these returns. It is here that the notion appears to us, through the elucidation of what we call “strategies,” as the figure that Aristotle’s αύτόματον [automaton] assumes for us. Furthermore, it is through “automatic” that we translate this Zwang of the Wiederholung, Zwang: the compulsion to repetition.

I will present to you, in due time, the facts suggesting that, in observable phenomena, at certain moments of this infantile monologue imprudently and falsely labeled egocentric, there are games that are properly syntactic…
I repeat: I will show you this later, in places where it has been particularly ingeniously noted…
…and thus pertains to the field we call preconscious, which constitutes, if I may say so, the bedrock of the unconscious reserve—”reserve” in the sense of “Indian reserves”—within our social network. Syntax, of course, is preconscious, but what escapes the subject is that their syntax is constituted in relation to certain unconscious reserves.

In the effect of recollection, we say—memorialization, I would emphasize more precisely—that consists of the subject narrating their history, there lies latent what compels this syntax to advance, to become increasingly tightened in relation to—what? To what Freud, at the outset of his description of psychic resistance, refers to as a “kernel.” That this kernel initially presents itself as referring to something “traumatic” is, after all, only an approximation.

It is clear, first of all, that we must distinguish the resistance of the subject from this initial resistance of discourse, if it proceeds in the direction of this tightening around the kernel. For “resistance of the subject” too easily implies that we assume a “self,” which, at the approach of this kernel, is not something whose qualification as “self” we can still be certain remains justified.

This kernel, as I have told you, appears to us initially as needing to be designated as the real, the real insofar as the identity of perception is its rule. At the limit, it is founded on what Freud—when articulating and stating it—goes so far as to pinpoint as simply a sort of extraction that assures us we are in perception, through the feeling of reality that authenticates it.
What does this mean, if not—from the subject’s perspective—what is called awakening?

And this is what I have tried—I recall for those to whom my previous discourse may not have been sufficiently indicative, determining—to explain, which is why I return to say that if, the last time, I began to approach what is at stake in repetition through that dream, it is because this dream, so closed, so sealed, so doubly and triply sealed as it is—since it is not analyzed—is indicative only by the choice Freud made of it at the moment when the process of the dream, in its ultimate spring, is at issue.

Awakening, the reality that determines it, is it this slight noise against which the empire of the dream and desire is maintained, or something else expressed in the depths of the anguish of this dream, namely the most intimate relation between father and son that comes to emerge—not so much in that death, if I may say, but in its beyond, in what it is beyond, in its sense of destiny?

I say that something is represented by what happens “as if by chance,” when everyone is asleep—that is to say: the candle topples, and the bedclothes catch fire—there lies the same relationship… of nonsensical event, of accident, of misfortune to what is poignant in meaning, however veiled, in “Father, don’t you see, I’m burning?”
…there is the same relationship between the two as in what we encounter in a repetition that for us takes shape in the designation “neurosis of destiny,” “neurosis of failure”: what is missed is not adaptation, but τύχη [tuché], “encounter.”

Let us note in passing that what Aristotle formulates…

• that τύχη [tuché] is defined as being able to come to us only from a being capable of choice, of προαίρεσις [proairesis],
• that τύχη [tuché]—good or bad fortune [εὐτυχία or δυστυχία]—cannot come from an inanimate object or an animal,
  …is here contradicted: the very accident of this exemplary dream illustrates it. Aristotle here marks the same limit that stops him short of the extravagant, monstrous forms of sexual conduct, which he can only qualify as τερατῶδες [teratodes], monstrosities.

The closed aspect of the relation between the repeated accident and this veiled meaning, which is the true “reality” and which leads us toward the Trieb, the drive, is what gives us the certainty that there is something more in analysis for us than demystifying the artifact of what is called “transference treatment,” reducing it to what is claimed to be the supposedly simple “reality of the situation” [Bouvet, cf. p.d.a.].

It does not seem that any value, even preparatory, can suffice in this direction indicated by the reduction to the actuality, so to speak, of the session or the sequence of sessions, where there lies only an alibi of awakening; the proper repetition must be achieved in another direction, one we cannot confuse with the totality of transference effects, but which will be precisely our concern when we address the function of transference: how can transference lead us to the heart of repetition?

This is why it is necessary for us to found, to insert, this repetition into the very schism that occurs in the subject at the site of the encounter, in this characteristic dimension of analytical discovery and our experience, which makes us apprehend, conceive the real, in its dialectical incidence, as originally ill-fated [δυστυχία dustuchia], and understand how it is through this that it is most complicit with the drive in the subject.

The term we will eventually reach, for only by traversing this path can we fundamentally conceive of what the drive is about.

Because, after all:

– Why is the primal scene so traumatic?
– Why is it always either too early or too late?
– Why does the subject experience either too much pleasure there—as we first conceived the traumatic causality of the obsessive—or too little, as in the hysteric?
– Why does it not awaken the subject immediately, if it is overly libidinal?
– Why is the event so δυστυχία [dustuchia]?
– Why are we thus forced to recall that the so-called maturation of the so-called “instincts” is, in a way, trans-wired, trans-pierced, transfixed by what I would call the “tychic” (from the word τύχη [tuché])?

Of course, the “tychic” remains an opaque notion. Can it open for us the meaning of what might be its resolution?
And no less must we demand this before conceiving of what might constitute the satisfaction of a drive.
For now, our horizon is what appears artificial in the fundamental relationship to sexuality.

What is at stake in the analytical experience is to begin with this: just as the primal scene is traumatic, it is not sexual empathy that supports the modulations of what is analyzable, but rather an artificial fact like that which appears in the scene so fiercely scrutinized in the experience of the Wolf Man: the strangeness of the disappearance and reappearance of the penis.

Thus, let it be clearly understood that what I sought to articulate last time was to pinpoint where the subject’s schism lies. The very one that, after all, persists after awakening between the return to the real, the representation of a world that has finally landed back on its feet…
with arms raised: “What a misfortune! What has happened? What a mistake! What stupidity! What a fool the one who dared to fall asleep!”
…and the consciousness that weaves itself back together, that knows it is living all of this, let us say, as a nightmare, but which nonetheless clings to itself: “It is I who am living all this; I do not need to pinch myself to know I am not dreaming.”

And this schism is still only representative of another, deeper one that eludes this mapping—the schism that, in the dream, reveals the subject to this machinery of the dream, to the image of the child who approaches with that reproachful gaze, and on the other hand, what the subject succumbs to:
Invocation: the child’s voice [(a) “voice”: “invocatory drive”], the call of the gaze: “Father, don’t you see…” [(a) “gaze”: scopic drive].

This is why it is here that…
free as I am to pursue, along the path where I am leading you, the route through the times that seem most fitting to me…
…here, it seems to me, it is indicated—as I pass my curved needle through the tapestry—to leap toward the most pressing question, and first to offer it as an object, as an object of debate, as a crossroads, between us and all those who attempt to think about the pathways of the subject, namely:

– Whether this path, insofar as it is mapping, a search for truth, is to be sought within our style of adventure, with its trauma, reflecting in some way this artificiality,
– Or whether it is to be sought where tradition has always located it, at the level of the dialectic of truth and appearance, originating in perception, in what is fundamentally “ideic,” more aesthetic in a way, and centered on the visual.

It is no mere chance, related to the order of the purely “tychic,” that this week brings within your reach the posthumous publication of our friend Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible. Here is expressed, embodied, what alternated in our dialogue.
And I need not reach far to recall that congress in Bonneval, where his intervention was, for us, brought back to what was his path—the very one that broke at a point in this work, which nevertheless leaves it in a state of completion that prefigures—and prefigures above all—in that work of piety we owe to Claude Lefort. I wish here to render homage to him for the kind of perfection that, through a long and arduous transcription, he seems to have achieved.

This “visible” and this “invisible,” which, for us, can in some way indicate the moment of arrival of something I have called the “philosophical tradition” in this search for the real—this tradition that begins with Plato through the promotion of the Idea, which can be said to be determined by a starting point in an aesthetic world, by a necessity, an end, a purpose attributed to being conceived as the “Sovereign Good,” in a beauty that is also its limit, in something whose rector Merleau-Ponty surely did not recognize in vain as the “eye.”

The first outline of this work is given to us in an article he titled Eye and Mind. In the progress you will find in this work, which can be called both terminal and inaugurating, in The Visible and the Invisible, the title of this work, is the reminder and step forward in the path, in the trace, of what his Phenomenology of Perception formulated for us.

Namely, the regulation of form as needing to be recalled at the determining level of what, as philosophical thought progressed, had been pushed to such an extreme that it eventually posed for us a pressing question, the vertigo, the danger, the ever-imminent interrogation manifested in the term idealism:

“How can we ever make this doubling, which representation has become, join with what it is supposed to cover?”

Phenomenology, by referring us to this regulation of form over which not only the eye of the subject presides but also their entire expectation, grasp, emotion—not only muscular but also visceral, in short, their constitutive presence marked by a total intentionality, that of the subject—here [in The Visible and the Invisible], Maurice Merleau-Ponty takes the next step by—in a certain sense—pushing the boundaries of this very phenomenology. He does so through paths I will not retrace here, as I wish to lead you into a different field whose particular incidence I will designate shortly.

But I note that the essential—the reminder and the paths by which he will lead you—will not belong solely to the visual order. You will see, however, that it is a matter of interrogation and dialectic, reminding us—and this is the essential point—of the dependence of the “visible” on that which essentially places us under the gaze of the seer. Even this is saying too much, as this “eye” is merely a metaphor, something I might rather call “the thrust” of the seer, something prior to my eye.

What is at stake in the path he shows us is, in a way, the preexistence of a gaze:

I see only from one point, but in my existence, I am looked at from everywhere.

This “seeing” to which I am originally subjected—is this what must lead us to what appears to be the ambition of this work, a kind of ontological reversal, whose laws and foundations would need to be reconsidered within a more primitive institution of form?

This is precisely an occasion for me to define, to remind, what is assuredly not in my discourse. One of those…
…who has followed me closely enough since my Écrits to revise what such a note contains…
…might say that I appear to pursue the specific intention of seeking an ontological status for psychoanalysis on the foundations of a philosophical coherence in which every aspect of Freudian thought must be reinterpreted, particularly what is commonly labeled “naturalism.”

Despite the impasses it might seem to lead to, its preservation appears indispensable because this perspective represents one of the rare attempts, if not the only one, to give substance to the reality of the psyche without reifying it. Yet, of course, I would say, I have my ontology—why not?—like anyone else, at the level of a philosophy, whether naïve or elaborate.

But assuredly, what I attempt to sketch out in a discourse that, while it reinterprets Freud’s, nonetheless remains essentially centered on the specificity of the experience it delineates, is precisely something that does not at all claim to encompass the entire field of experience where it comes to constitute itself.

Even what might lie in this in-between opened by the apprehension of the unconscious—this in-between, as I have said, and as I emphasized at the beginning of my discourse this year—this in-between interests us only insofar as it is designated to us by the Freudian directive as that which the subject, as such, must take possession of. And this possession can only occur along these starting lines, the very ones where the subject is circumscribed as a split subject.

What will interest us here, within this field to which Maurice Merleau-Ponty—polarized to some extent by the threads of our experience—will ascribe an ontological status, is still something that will present itself in this field through its incidences, through what I would call its most artificial, even its most obsolete, aspects.

And the split that interests us is not the distance between the forms imposed on us by the world—toward which the intentionality of phenomenological experience can direct us in its essential openness—and the limits we will encounter within the experience of the visible. It is not between the invisible and the visible that we will have to navigate; it is within something we might also qualify as a “gaze,” but which, as you will see, presents itself to us only under the guise of a strange contingency, symbolic in itself of what we find on the horizon and as the boundary of our experience, namely the constitutive lack of the anxiety of castration.

The eye and the gaze—this, for us, is the split within which the drive manifests itself, representing for us—in this undertaking of the subject, which is ours—at the level of the scopic field. What we must refer to is this: in our relationship to things…
– as it is constituted,
– as it progresses through this path of vision that organizes things for us within the figures of representation,
…something slips, passes, is transmitted from one level to another, always to some degree elided, and this something is called “the gaze.”

To approach it, to make you sense it, there are more than a few paths. Were I to illustrate it, at its extreme, with one of the enigmas presented to us by reference to nature, it concerns nothing less than the phenomena called “mimicry.” Much has been said about this—you know it—and much of it absurd. The idea that the phenomena of mimicry could, in any way, be explained by an adaptive purpose. I need only refer you, among other things, to a small book, one many of you likely know, by Caillois, titled Medusa and Company, where these matters are critiqued with particular perceptiveness.

There, you see how fragile adaptive references are, at least in the sense of a selection whose operation is difficult to imagine, except by leaving the problem entirely unresolved: namely, that for mimicry to be effective—say, in insects—the determining mutation must occur immediately and from the start. Furthermore, the supposed selective effects are nullified by experience, which shows that in the stomachs of birds, particularly predators, one finds as many insects supposedly protected by mimicry as those that are not.

But the problem does not lie there. The most radical, fundamental problem of mimicry, if we must attribute it to some formative power of the organism that reveals its manifestations, is that we would first need to conceive of the circuit by which this organic force could be placed in the position of a “seer.” Not only regarding the body itself, which is to be mimicked—namely the form of its own organism—but also its relationship to the environment in which it operates, whether to distinguish itself from it or, on the contrary, to merge with it.

And to put it plainly—as CAILLOIS reminds us with great pertinence and even elegance—one realizes that for this or that form of mimicry, and more specifically those that might evoke their relation to the function of eyes, namely ocelli, it may be necessary to understand that if ocelli impress—and it is a fact that they do—the predator or the presumed victim that comes to look at them, does this mean it is because of their resemblance to eyes? Or are eyes themselves fascinating only because of their relationship to the form of ocelli?

In other words, must we—what indeed seems to be necessary—distinguish between the function of the eye and the function of the gaze?

What is at stake here in this distinctive example, chosen as such for its locality, for its artificiality, for its exceptional character, is precisely that in its distinctiveness, in the fact that, regarding the forms of the world as posed to us, it constitutes only a small part, a distinguished function, specifically that, let us name it, of “the spot.” It is precisely through this that it holds for us an exemplary suggestion: to mark the anteriority, the preexistence of a “given-to-be-seen” relative to the “seen.”

There is no need for us to refer to some vague supposition about the existence of a “universal seer,” for indeed, if this function is thus established in its autonomy—as it suggests to us—what is important for us in the field of our experience is to identify the origin of the function of “the spot” as such with that of the gaze, and to seek its course, its thread, its trace at all levels where the stages of a world’s constitution in a scopic field occur. This allows us to perceive that this function of the spot and the gaze operates both as the most secret guiding force and as something that always, more or less, escapes the grasp of this form of vision that satisfies itself by imagining itself as consciousness.

The manner in which consciousness can turn back on itself and seize itself, as in VALÉRY’s La Jeune Parque, “seeing itself see,” represents a sleight of hand, an ambiguity. To use a term by which it assures itself—borrowed from the domain of the visual—the term “evidence,” let us reverse the word in a play on words and say that this false evidence in “seeing itself see,” which affects consciousness, represents only an evasion, a process of avoiding the function of the gaze.

This necessitates that we identify it, that we seek it at all the levels we have just outlined in four terms, in the topology we constructed last time concerning the dream. This topology addresses the subject’s position at the moment when a world opens up to them, a world they access in the dream and its imaginary forms, which are given to them by the dream in opposition to those of another structure, determined by another horizon in the waking state.

Can we not—guided by these indicators—begin to perceive:

– That in this order, particularly satisfying to the subject, which analytical experience has connoted with the term “narcissism,” and in which I have endeavored to reintroduce the essential structure derived from its reference to the specular image, to the reflected image of the body, in what it diffuses of satisfaction, even complacency, where the subject finds support for such a fundamental misrecognition, there is something excluded that shows us just how far the empire of this misrecognition extends.

– That in this reference, where thought has established the line I have called the “philosophical tradition” of our inquiry, within this satisfying dimension, in this plenitude encountered by the subject in the mode of contemplation, can we not first grasp what is precisely eluded there: the function of the gaze?

I mean: where Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY emphasizes that we are beings looked at, within the spectacle of the world, within what makes us conscious by instituting and establishing us as speculum mundi, is there not concealed this satisfaction of being under a gaze—of which I spoke earlier with Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY—that surrounds us and first constitutes us as beings who are looked at, but without showing it to us?

The world, in this sense, appears to us—I mean its spectacle—as an omnivoyant entity. And this is indeed the fantasy we find in the Platonic perspective of an Absolute Being, transferred to it as the quality of omnivoyance, though even at the level of the phenomenal experience of contemplation.

This omnivoyant aspect is indeed that of the satisfaction of a woman who feels herself being looked at—but only on the condition that it is not shown to her. The world is omnivoyant, but it is not exhibitionist. When it begins to provoke such exposure, this is where the sense of strangeness begins. But what is this, if not precisely the elision of the gaze, the elision of the fact that not only does it look, but it shows—and in the field of dreams, what characterizes dream images is that they show.

“It shows,” but here too, some form of elision, some slippage of the subject, is demonstrated.

For refer yourselves to any dream text—not only the one I used last time, where, after all, what I told you may remain enigmatic—but any dream, and place it within these coordinates. It becomes evident that in the dream, this “it shows” comes to the fore, so much so that the characteristics by which it is coordinated—namely, lacking the horizon, the closure of what is contemplated in the waking state, the fact of being both emergence, contrast, a sort of spot, with more intense colors—what is our position in the dream if not, ultimately, that of fundamentally being the one who does not see?

The subject does not see where it leads; they follow. They may even detach themselves, saying, “This is just a dream,” but in no case can they seize themselves within the dream as, in the Cartesian cogito, they seize themselves as thinking. They may say, “This is only a dream,” but they cannot grasp themselves as the one who says, “And yet I am conscious of this dream.”

Likewise, TCHOANG-TSE dreams that he is a butterfly. What does that mean?

That means he sees the butterfly in its reality of the gaze because what are so many shapes, so many patterns, so many colors, if not this gratuitous given-to-be-seen, marked for us by the primitiveness of this essence of the gaze? It is, after all, a butterfly not so different from the one that terrorizes the Wolf Man, and Merleau-Ponty fully recognizes its significance and refers to it in a note not incorporated into his text.

“When Tchoang-Tse is awake, he may wonder whether it is not the butterfly that is dreaming it is Tchoang-Tse. And he is doubly correct:

• First, because it proves that he is not mad; he does not take himself to be absolutely identical to Tchoang-Tse.
• And second, because he speaks more truly than he realizes—or rather because he must have spoken so truly—namely, that it is indeed as a butterfly that he grasps himself at some root of his identity. It is as the butterfly that he was and that he is, the butterfly painted in its own colors, and it is in this ultimate root that he is Tchoang-Tse.

And the proof is that when he is a butterfly, it does not occur to him to ask whether, when he is the awakened Tchoang-Tse, he is not the butterfly dreaming of being himself. For dreaming of being a butterfly, he will undoubtedly later testify that he represented himself as a butterfly, but this does not mean he is captivated by the butterfly. He is a butterfly captured, but a capture of nothing, for in the dream, he is a butterfly for no one. And it is when he is awake—when he is Tchoang-Tse for others—that he is caught in the butterfly net.”

This is why the butterfly, if it is not Tchoang-Tse but the Wolf Man, may inspire him with the phobic terror of recognizing in its fluttering—so close to the diamond-shaped fluttering of causation [◊]—the primitive stripe marking his being, struck for the first time by the claw of desire.

We have reached the end of what I propose to elaborate on further in our next session: to better mark, to introduce you to the essence of scopic satisfaction. This gaze, which we have just grasped as capable of defining, in itself, this object (a) of Lacanian algebra, where the subject may come to fall, remains unnoticed in this fall because it is structurally reduced to zero.

That is to say, it is insofar as this gaze, as object (a), may come to symbolize the central lack expressed in the phenomena that are for us the endpoints, the boundaries of our experience of castration, that precisely because it is an object (a) reduced to a punctiform, evanescent function by its very nature, it leaves the subject in the ignorance so characteristic of all the progress of thought along this path constituted by the philosophical pursuit of what lies beyond appearance. And this pursuit has always missed the key character of the phenomenon glimpsed in castration.