🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I finished my last discussion by marking the point where I had led you, with this topological schematization of a certain partition, of a perimeter that is not only common but destined to fold back onto itself, and which constitutes what is ordinarily and improperly called “the analytic situation.”

For what this topology aims at is to make you center everything that can be articulated about this so-called “situation” from a certain trans-subjective point; it is precisely to conceive where this point is—at once a point of disjunction and conjunction, of union and boundary—that can only be occupied by the desire of the analyst.

Before going further, before showing you how this orientation is indeed necessitated by all the detours of concepts and practices that our long experience of analysis and its doctrinal articulations has already allowed us to accumulate, before going further, in practice, I have seen that I could not—at least for those who, up to now, have not been able to follow my previous discussions for reasons of sheer circumstance—that I could not proceed further, at least without beginning today by putting forward the fourth concept that I have announced to you as essential to the analytic experience, namely the concept of drive.

What I will attempt today is an approach, an introduction—to use FREUD’s term, Einführung—this introduction, we can only carry it out by following FREUD. For, as you know, this notion in FREUD is an absolutely new notion, I mean, one that certainly, in relation to all prior uses of the term Trieb, has a long history—not only in psychology or even physiology but also in physics itself, in the past usages of the German language. Surely, it is not by pure chance that FREUD chose this term.

But he gave it such a specific, essential usage, so integrated into our thought concerning practice, that in a way, it goes without saying—it is so deeply embedded in analytic practice itself that its past has been effectively obscured, forgotten:

• just as much as the past of the term “unconscious” weighs upon the use of the term “unconscious” in analytic theory,
• so too, with regard to Trieb, everyone employs it as the designation of a sort of fundamental given, as if it were one of the basic coordinates or goals of our experience.

And one would almost—sometimes one does—invoke it, for example, and especially against the doctrine that is mine concerning the unconscious, referring there—through its reference to the signifier and the effects of the signifier—to what is called, rightly or wrongly, it does not matter, an intellectualization. If one knew what I think of intelligence, perhaps one might reconsider this reproach, pointing there to some supposed negligence of that something which every analyst, in some way, knows from experience—namely what is called “the drive-related,” that something we encounter in experience with its irrepressible character, even through repression: if repression must exist, it is because there is something beyond that “pushes.”

And of course, one does not need to go very far in an adult analysis, nor to be a practitioner of children, to recognize this element that constitutes the clinical weight of each case we have to handle, to treat, and which is called the drive.

And here—this reference to a final given, to something about which I tell you that, in order to understand the unconscious, there is every reason to renounce, to put aside: the archaic, the primordial—here, it seems that this ultimate recourse is something that cannot in any way be overlooked when it comes to approaching and describing the unconscious. Is this even a valid objection?

The question, moreover, is secondary; what matters is to know whether—concerning the drive—what is at stake belongs to the domain, to the register of this primal, of this weight of the organic. Is this how we should interpret what—in a text by FREUD found in Jenseits des Lustprinzips—the drive, Trieb, would represent—he says—die Äußerung der Trägheit, some manifestation of inertia in organic life? [Jenseits des Lustprinzips, V: Revision der Trieblehre. Ichtriebe und Sexualtriebe]

Is this, then, the simple notion that would be appended to the reference to some anchoring of this inertia, which is precisely what we would occasionally and opaquely refer to here as some given, fixation, Fixierung? Not only do I not think so, but I believe that a serious examination of FREUD’s elaboration of this notion of drive contradicts it: The drive is not simply the push; Trieb is not Drang.

If only—and this is quite evident—because, when FREUD, in an article written in 1915, that is, one year after Einführung zum Narzissmus (you will see the importance of this reminder in a moment), writes in the article Triebe und Triebschicksal, which I would have been tempted, in homage to a book by our friend Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, to translate as “Drives and the Avatars of the Drive.” But after all, it is precisely to avoid avatar, which does not seem to me a very good translation: if it were Triebwandlungen, it would be “avatars,” whereas Schicksal means “adventures, vicissitudes.” Well, in this article, he states that in the drive, it is important to distinguish four terms:

• let us put Drang first, the push, which is only one part of it,
• Quelle: the source,
• Objekt: the object,
• Ziel: the goal.

And of course—I will thus write it in French—and of course, one may, upon reading this enumeration, find it entirely natural. My point is to show you that the entire text is constructed to demonstrate that it is not so natural at all. This thing that seems self-evident—describing, in a way, the trajectory of an exchange between the organism and, let us say, the object of its need—is precisely something that everything we will be able to read before and after this statement in FREUD’s text contradicts.

It is essential, first of all, to recall that FREUD himself designates at the outset of this article that this is a Grundbegriff, a fundamental concept. He makes the remark—and in this, FREUD proves to be a good epistemologist—that one must expect, from the moment he introduces it into science, that from then on, anything is possible.

One of two things: either it will be retained, or it will be rejected. It will be retained if it functions, one would say today—I would say, if it carves its path into the real that it seeks to penetrate, just like all other Grundbegriffe in the scientific domain. And here, we see emerging what is most present—for that time—in FREUD’s mind, namely the fundamental concepts of physics and the stage of development that physics had reached.

A point always highlighted by FREUD through the fact that his masters, the men of his school in physiology, were those who promoted the realization of programs—such as BRÜCKE’s—aiming at integrating physiology into the fundamental concepts of modern physics, and particularly into those of energetics. And how much, throughout history, has this notion of energy, as well as that of force, been able to shift, in a certain way, due to the progressive expansion or, more precisely, the generalization of their thematic reapplications onto an increasingly encompassing reality! This is precisely what FREUD foresaw:

“Progress in knowledge,” he says, “tolerates no Starrheit”—I would say—no fascination with definitions.

Elsewhere, he states that the drive, in a certain way, belongs to our myths. I will discard this term “myth” concerning the drive. Moreover, in this very text and in its first paragraph, FREUD employs the term Konvention, convention, which is much closer to what is at stake and which I would call, using a “Benthamite” term that I have at some point identified and made known to those who follow me: a fiction.

A term, I add in passing, that is entirely preferable to that of “model,” which has been overused, and which is distinct in the following respect: you know that a model is never a Grundbegriff [fundamental concept]. What a certain style of empiricism in theory—which characterizes English physics—has introduced under the term “model” is essentially something that, concerning what is to be operated upon within a certain field, can accommodate several models functioning correlatively. This is not the case for a Grundbegriff, a fundamental concept, nor for a fundamental fiction.

And now, let us ask ourselves what appears first when we take a closer look at these four terms concerning the drive. To be brief, these four terms—if we closely examine what FREUD says about them—can only appear as disjointed.

First, the push—we shall see…
If, at the moment it is introduced, we refer to the beginning of FREUD’s statements in the article…
…the push will be identified as a pure and simple tendency toward discharge, that is, as what occurs due to a stimulus, namely the transmission of the admitted portion of energy at the level of the stimulus, the famous quantity “Qή” from the Project for a Scientific Psychology.

Except that FREUD immediately makes a remark about this, one that goes very far in delineating what is at stake.

Undoubtedly, there is also stimulation here, excitation—to use the term FREUD employs at this level: Reiz, excitation.
The Reiz, at first reading, the Reiz in question concerning the drive, differs from any stimulation coming from the external world; it is an internal Reiz.

What does this mean? To clarify, we have the notion of need—and indeed, it appears in the text: Not—as it manifests in the organism, at various levels, and first at the level of hunger, of thirst. This is sufficiently explicit in what seems to be meant by distinguishing internal Reiz, internal excitation, from external excitation.

It must be stated and weighed that it is from the very first pages, from the very first lines, that FREUD defines and establishes this truly inaugural point, in the most articulated and formal manner, that it can in no way be a matter of the pressure of a need such as Hunger, hunger, or Durst, thirst: that this is absolutely not what is at stake in Trieb! What he refers to, immediately posing for us the question of what is at stake: in Trieb, is it a matter of something whose instance operates at the level of the organism, in its entirety, in its overall state?

Does the real make its irruption here, in the sense that the living must necessarily be involved in what is at stake, namely the Freudian field?

No, it is always and especially a matter of this very field itself, and in the most undifferentiated form that FREUD initially gave it—which, referring back to the Project for a Scientific Psychology that I just mentioned, that I just designated—at this level is called the Ich, the Real-Ich.

The Real-Ich is first conceived as being supported, not by the entire organism, but by the nervous system as a whole,
inasmuch as—its fabric and what it receives: stimuli—what regulates its discharge.

The Ich in question has the character of a planned subject, an objectified subject, a field whose surface characteristics I emphasize precisely by treating it topologically in the form of a surface, attempting to show you how, when taken in this form, it meets all the needs of its manipulation. This is essential because when we look more closely, we will see that the Triebreiz is that by which certain elements of this field are, as FREUD states, Triebbesetzt, drive-invested.

This shows us that what is at stake—to express myself in a way that would undoubtedly deserve further development, but I must not let myself be carried too far and must stay close to FREUD’s text, which, moreover, provides me here with all the necessary elements—is that if we are required to conceive something that lingers in FREUD’s text because it is articulated, it is because this investment places us in the domain of energy, and not just any energy, but potential energy. For what is striking is that FREUD articulates it in the most pressing way: the characteristic of the drive is that it is a konstante Kraft, a constant force, and that he cannot conceive of it as a momentane Stosskraft.

What does momentane Stosskraft mean?
On this word Moment, we already have an example of a certain historical misunderstanding: the Parisians, during the siege of Paris in 1870, mocked a certain psychologische Moment that BISMARCK had supposedly used. It seemed utterly ridiculous to them because the French have always been fussy—until a more recent era that accustomed them to everything—about the precise use of words. This entirely new “psychological moment” seemed to them an occasion for laughter.
It simply meant the psychological factor.

This momentane Stosskraft here, which is perhaps not to be taken entirely in the sense of factor but in the sense of “moment” in kinematics, and this Stosskraft, impact force—I believe it is nothing other than a reference to force vive, to kinetic energy. Here, it is not a matter of kinetic energy; in other words, it is not something that will be regulated by movement, the discharge in question is of an entirely different nature and on an entirely different plane.

Whatever the case may be at the level of the push—and, more strikingly, of this constancy, which so radically opposes any possible assimilation to another function, that is, to a biological function, which necessarily follows a rhythm.
The drive—the first thing FREUD says about it is, if I may put it this way, that it has neither day nor night, neither spring nor autumn, neither ascent nor descent: it is a “constant” force.

One must still take texts into account, as well as experience. Because if, on the other hand—at the other end of the chain—we realize that what is at stake, and what the handling of this function of the drive serves us for, is always the reference to what FREUD, here as well, explicitly writes, but with a pair of quotation marks: “Befriedigung,” “satisfaction.” This is where the question arises for us: what does “drive satisfaction” mean?

For you will say to me: “Well, it’s quite simple, drive satisfaction is reaching its goal, its Ziel. The beast comes out of its den, and when it has found what it can sink its teeth into, it is satisfied, it digests.” The very fact that such an image can be evoked shows well enough, in the end, that one allows it to resonate in harmony with this mythology—then: strictly speaking—of the drive.

There is only one thing that immediately objects to this…
and it is, moreover, quite remarkable that, for so long, this has been posed to us as a riddle which, like all of FREUD’s riddles, is one that has been maintained as a challenge, until the very end of FREUD’s life, and even without FREUD ever deigning to explain himself further.
He probably left the task to those who could have done it…
It is one of the vicissitudes, one of the four fundamental vicissitudes that FREUD lays out for us from the outset, and it is curious that there are also four vicissitudes, just as there are four elements of the drive. It is the third, the one that immediately precedes the fourth—on which FREUD, in this article, does not elaborate, as he defers it to the following article, namely Repression—the third is sublimation. [cf. “La Troisième,” Rome74]

Now, in this article—and a thousand times elsewhere—FREUD explicitly tells us that sublimation also provides drive satisfaction, even though it is zielgehemmt, inhibited with respect to its goal—in other words: even though it does not reach it. Nevertheless, it is still drive satisfaction, and this without repression.
In other words, for the moment, I am not having sex; I am speaking to you. Well, I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were having sex. That is what this means. This is what raises, moreover, the question of whether, in fact, I am having sex.

It is between these two terms that the extreme antinomy is posed, if one may say so, which consists first of all in this: reminding us that the use of the function of the drive has no other significance for us than to put into question what “satisfaction” is.
As soon as I introduce it, as soon as I promote it, all those who are psychoanalysts must feel how much I am bringing here the most essential level of accommodation.

That is to say, it is clear that those we deal with—the patients—do not satisfy themselves, as we say, with what they have.
And yet, we know that everything they are, everything they live—even their symptoms—falls under the register of satisfaction.
They satisfy something that undoubtedly goes against what they might find satisfying, or perhaps more accurately, one could say: they satisfy something. They are not content with their state, but still, by being in this state—so little content in itself—they do find contentment. And the whole question is precisely to know: what is this “self” that is being satisfied here?

Overall, and as a first approximation, we will even go so far as to say that what they satisfy through the pathways of displeasure is—
we know it, and indeed, it is commonly accepted—the law of pleasure.
Their activity, if one may say so, at a certain level, is clearly dedicated to this kind of satisfaction. Let’s say they “go to great lengths,” and up to a certain point, it is precisely this “too much effort” that is the only justification for our intervention.
One cannot say that, with regard to satisfaction, the goal is not reached.
This is not about taking a definitive ethical stance.
It is about knowing that, at a certain level, this is how we analysts approach the problem.

Since we know a little more than others about everything concerning the normal and the abnormal, we know that the forms of arrangement that exist between what works well and what works poorly form a continuous series and that what we have before us is a system where everything arranges itself and which has reached its own kind of satisfaction.

If we intervene, it is insofar as we think there are shorter paths, for example. In any case, when we refer to the drive, it is insofar as we understand that it is at this level of the drive that the state of satisfaction—one that no doubt needs to be rectified—
which we deal with, takes on its meaning, its scope, and its stasis.

This satisfaction is paradoxical because when we look at it closely, we notice—and this is what I wanted to indicate as the insertion point for this year’s discussion—something that will, as we proceed, fully unfold into something new:
it is the category of the impossible.
It is—at the foundations of Freudian conceptions—absolutely radical.

The path of the subject—to use this term here, in relation to which alone can be situated this term “satisfaction”—
the path of the subject passes between—if I may say so—two walls of the impossible.
This function of the impossible should not be approached without caution, like any function that presents itself in a negative form.

I would simply like to suggest to you that, like all other notions that present themselves in a negative form,
the best way to approach them is not to take them through negation, because that will lead us to the question of the possible.
And the impossible is not necessarily the opposite of the possible, or else, since what is opposed to the possible is undoubtedly the real,
we will be led to define the real as the impossible.

I see no obstacle to this, for my part, and even less so given that, in FREUD, it is under this form that the real appears—
at least in appearance—namely as the obstacle to the pleasure principle.
The real is the clash, the fact that things do not immediately arrange themselves as the hand reaching out toward external objects would want them to.

I believe this is a completely illusory and reductive conception of FREUD’s thought on this point.
The real is distinguished there, as I said last time, by its separation from the field of the pleasure principle,
by its desexualization, by the fact that its economy, for this very reason, admits something new precisely.
This something new is the impossible.
And this means that the impossible is present in the other field as essential.
The pleasure principle is characterized by the fact that the impossible is so present there that it is never recognized as such.
The idea of the function of the pleasure principle satisfying itself through hallucination is there to illustrate this.

But this is only an illustration of the fact that, once assumed within this field—the field of the drive—
the drive, grasping its object, somehow learns that, well, it is precisely not in this way that it is satisfied!

For if, at the outset of this dialectic of the drive, one does not distinguish Not, necessity, from Bedürfnis, need—
which we will examine in a moment—
if one does not distinguish need from the demand of the drive,
it is precisely because no object of any Not—no need-object—can satisfy the drive.

Because, no matter how much you stuff the mouth, that mouth which opens within the register of the drive, of the oral drive, it is not with food that it satisfies itself, but, as one says, with the pleasure of the mouth. And this is precisely why it will recognize itself, why it will encounter itself, ultimately and within the analytic experience, as an oral drive, precisely in a situation where it does nothing other than dictate the menu. This is indeed done with the mouth, which is at the principle of satisfaction; what goes into the mouth returns to the mouth and exhausts itself in this pleasure that I have just referred to—using common terms—as “pleasure of the mouth.”

And indeed, this is what FREUD tells us. Take the text:

“As for the object in the drive, let it be well understood,” he tells us,
“that it has, strictly speaking, no importance. It is totally indifferent.”

One must never read FREUD without keeping one’s ears sharply tuned. When one reads so many similar statements, they should at least make one’s ears twitch a little.
The object—how should it be conceived? The object of the drive—how should it be conceived so that one can say that, in the drive—whichever it may be—it is indifferent?
What this designates for us, then—to take, for example, what I have just mentioned concerning the oral drive—it is quite clear and evident that it is not a matter of food, nor of the memory of food, nor of an echo of food, nor of the mother’s breast—whatever one may think—but of something called “the breast,” which seems to go without saying simply because it belongs to the same series.

If we are given this remark that “the object in the drive has no importance,” it is probably because the breast—since this is how we designate it in the oral drive—must be entirely reconsidered in terms of its function as an object.
It is precisely because, in its function as an object—the object (a), as I have undoubtedly elaborated in my own theoretical contributions—it is because the breast, object (a), as the cause of desire, is something to which we must assign the function that FREUD originally attributed to it, a function such that we can determine its place in the satisfaction of the drive.
We will say that the best formulation seems to be this: that the drive circles around it.

We will find this applicable to other objects as well. “Circle” should be taken here in both senses—the ambiguity that the French language provides—both in the sense of turn: form around which one turns, and in the sense of trick, a “sleight of hand.”

As for the source, which I have introduced last, since certainly each of the four terms can serve as an initial point, at least heuristically, to which we can first cling.

It is certain that, from the point of view of what one might call vital regulation, which we would like at all costs to reintegrate into this function of the drive, one might initially say that it is here that we must find it. And why?

• And why are the so-called erogenous zones recognized only in these points, which differentiate themselves for us, in terms of their function, only by their structure as a border?
• Why does one speak of the mouth and not of the esophagus, the stomach, when they are just as involved in the oral function?

Yet, at the erogenous level, we speak—and not in vain, not at random—of the mouth, and not just of the mouth, but more specifically of the lips and teeth, of what HOMER calls “the enclosure of the teeth.”

Similarly, regarding the anal drive, it is not enough to say that a certain biological function here assumes its role, integrated into a function of exchange with the world in which excrement would be the medium. There are other excremental functions.
There are other elements that participate in it beyond the margin of the anus, which, however, is specifically what we also define as the source and starting point of a certain drive.

I may not have ventured very far today, but only to this extent: to suggest to you that if there is something that, for us, the drive first resembles, something through which it presents itself, it is a montage. But not a montage in the sense that, even when one tries to reduce the function of finalism, it still develops within a reference to finality, as it is established in modern theories of instinct.

Here too, the appearance, the play, the mere presentation of an image of montage is quite striking: the mechanism, the specific form that makes the hen in the farmyard crouch on the ground if you pass a piece of paper cut in the shape of a hawk a few meters overhead—something that triggers a reaction that is, in sum, more or less appropriate, and whose cleverness lies in making us notice—of course, since one can use a decoy—that it is not necessarily appropriate.

Is it this kind of montage that I want to emphasize when I speak of montage in relation to the drive? No, it goes much further.
I would say that the montage of the drive is a montage that, at first glance, appears to us as having neither head nor tail, like a montage in the sense in which one speaks of montage in a surrealist collage.

If we bring together the paradoxes that we have just defined at the level of the Drang, the object, and the goal of the drive, I believe that the image that might come to mind is something that would show:

“the operation of a dynamo connected to a gas outlet, with, somewhere, a peacock feather emerging and tickling the belly of a beautiful woman who is there, simply for the beauty of the thing.”

The thing begins to become interesting precisely because of this: what FREUD defines for us by the drive is all the ways in which such a mechanism can be inverted. I do not mean reversing the dynamo or unwinding its wires: it is the wires themselves that become the peacock feather, the gas outlet passes into the mouth of the lady, and a tail-feather emerges in the middle.

This is what he presents as a developed example.

Read this text by FREUD by the next time, so that I may take it up again. You will see at every moment the abrupt transition between the most heterogeneous images. And all of this occurs solely through grammatical references, whose artifice will be easy for you to grasp next time.

That is to say, unless one knows what one is talking about—what is, so to speak…
and I put it in quotation marks because I believe the word is not valid…
the “subject” of the drive—how can one simply and plainly say, as he is about to tell us:

• that exhibitionism is the opposite of voyeurism,
• or that masochism is the opposite of sadism,

…statements he puts forward for reasons that are purely grammatical, based on an inversion of subject and object,
as if grammatical subject and object were real functions,
whereas it is easy to demonstrate that they are not,
and that referring to our structure of language is enough to render such a deduction impossible.

But what he conveys to us through this play, concerning what constitutes the essence of the drive,
the necessary point, the topological point where something occurs that is indeed satisfaction—
a satisfaction that must be placed at a level of the subject,
a level of the subject where we are certainly required to see something other than its determination,
another way of reaching itself, of realizing itself, of satisfying itself—
this is what, next time, I will define for you as “the tracing of the act”:

this is what now presents itself before you as your “task.”