🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

τῷ τόξῳ ὄνομα βίος, ἔργον δὲ θάνατος.

HÉRACLITE (Fragment 48)

[For the bow—τῷ τόξῳ (a synonym for βιός: bow)—the name is life—ὄνομα βίος (life)—but the work is death—ἔργον θάνατος.]

---

When I read—my most recent reading of current affairs—in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, an article like that of Mr. Edward GLOVER titled Freudian or neo-Freudian, entirely directed against the constructions of Mr. ALEXANDER, when I perceive in it that sordid, stuffy odor, due to the fact that, in the name of outdated criteria, a construction like that of Mr. ALEXANDER—my God, I did not hesitate to attack it in the most formal way, already fourteen years ago, at the 1950 Congress of Psychiatry—but after all, it is the construction of a man of great talent—when I see the level at which this discussion is debated, countered, I grant myself this justice: that through all the vicissitudes that my discourse encounters here and elsewhere, one can certainly say that this discourse obstructs, makes an obstacle, to the experience of analysis being transmitted to you in an absolutely cretinizing manner.

I resume my discourse on the drive from this point. I was led to approach it at the moment… after having established that transference in the analytic experience is what manifests the activation of the reality of the unconscious insofar as it is sexuality. I find myself halted in pursuing what this very assertion entails: if we are certain that sexuality is present and active in transference, it is because it manifests itself at certain moments in the open under the form of love.

Now, this is precisely the question: does love represent the pinnacle, the accomplished moment, the indisputable factor that presents sexuality to us in the hic et nunc of transference?

To this, there is an obstacle, an opposition, an objection, in the clearest way, from a text that is certainly not isolated but chosen by me as central, and without any possible accusation of arbitrariness in this choice, since the text in question is Freud’s own text, which explicitly concerns Drives and Their Vicissitudes. This is the text I began to approach last time, trying to make you sense in what problematic form—that is, teeming with questions—the introduction of the drive presents itself.

I hope that at least a significant portion of my audience has had the chance, in the meantime, to refer to this text,
– whether they are people capable of reading it in German, which seems to me eminently desirable,
– or, failing that, that they have read it, always more or less improperly translated, in the other two cultural languages: English or French. The lowest grade is undoubtedly given to the French translation, without me lingering further on pointing out the outright falsifications with which it is riddled.

Nevertheless, even at the most summarily superficial first reading, you will have noticed that this article—although it does not announce it at the outset—is entirely divided into two aspects:
– first: the articulation, as well as the dismantling, of what I called the other day the drive, precisely as an assemblage,
– then, the second aspect: the examination of what must be conceived not as die Sexual, but, in accordance with the spirit of the article: das Lieben, the act of love.

And it is explicitly stated that love can in no way, in experience, be confused with or considered as the representative of what one might call Ganze, as what Freud articulates, questions, under the term der ganzen Sexualstrebung, that is, the tendency, the forms, the convergence of the sexual effort, insofar as it would culminate in Ganze, in a graspable whole that would summarize its essence and function.

“kommt aber auch damit nicht zurecht”
“That doesn’t work at all!” he exclaims when responding to this kind of ambient suggestion, which we analysts have rendered through all sorts of formulas that are as many deceptions, as if it were what justifies the function of apprehending the term of the Other, through a series of partial objectifications.

[The case of love and hate is of particular interest because it resists inclusion in our description of the drives. There can be no doubt about the intimate relationship between these two emotional opposites and sexual life, but one must naturally resist the idea of ​​regarding love as a special partial drive of sexuality like the others. One would rather regard love as the expression of the whole sexual drive, but one cannot cope with that either and does not know how to understand a material opposite of this drive. (Drives and the fate of the drives)]

[Der Fall von Liebe und Haß erwirbt ein besonderes Interesse durch den Umstand, daß er der Einreihung in unsere Darstellung der Triebe widerstrebt. Man kann an der innigsten Beziehung zwischen diesen beiden Gefühlsgegensätzen und dem Sexualleben nicht zweifeln, muß sich aber natürlich dagegen sträuben, das Lieben etwa als einen besonderen Partialtrieb der Sexualität wie die anderen aufzufassen. Man möchte eher das Lieben als den Ausdruck der ganzen Sexualstrebung ansehen, kommt aber auch damit nicht zurecht und weiß nicht, wie man ein materielles Gegenteil dieser Strebung verstehen soll. (Triebe und Triebschicksale)]

The entire article is designed to show us that, with regard to what one can consider—and what Freud, of course, considers as the final function of sexuality, namely reproduction—the drives, as they present themselves to us in the process of psychic reality, are remnants of the drives—relative to this final function defined in biological terms—remnants of partial drives.

Drives, in their structure, in the tension they establish, are linked to something we may, in this instance, call the economic factor. This economic factor depends on the conditions under which the function of the pleasure principle operates at a level that we will revisit, when the time comes in our discourse, under the term Real-Ich. Let us say right away that this Real-Ich—we can, in a quick approximation, but one you may already take as accurate—conceive of it as the nervous system, the central nervous system, insofar as it functions not as a relational system, but as a system intended to ensure, through internal tensions, a certain homeostasis.

It is because of this reality of the Ich, of the homeostatic system, that sexuality intervenes, comes into play only in the form of partial drives. The drive would be precisely this kind of assemblage through which sexuality participates in psychic life in a way that must conform to the structure of the gap that defines the unconscious.

In other words, if we place at the two extremes of what constitutes our analytic experience:

1. The repressed, the primordial repressed—this repressed is a signifier: what is constructed beneath to constitute the symptom, we can inscribe it, consider it as a scaffolding, always of signifiers. Repression and symptom are homogeneous and reducible to functions of signifiers. Their structure, however much it is constructed by succession, like any edifice, is still, in the final analysis, in its finished product, inscribable in synchronic terms.
2. The other extreme is that of our interpretation. This interpretation concerns that factor of a special temporal structure, which I have tried to define through metonymy. Interpretation, in its essence, does not primarily target the stages of construction but rather the desire to which—in a certain sense, in the sense of the vector that I am trying to make you feel here—it is identical. Desire is, in sum, interpretation itself. [Cf. Seminar 1958-59: Desire and its Interpretation]
3. In the interval, if sexuality—in the form of partial drives—had not manifested itself as dominating the entire economy of this interval, as introducing the presence of sexuality into it, then our entire experience would be reduced to a form of divination, where the neutral term of psychic energy might indeed be appropriate, but where, properly speaking, what constitutes its presence, the Dasein of sexuality, would be missing.

The legibility of sex in the interpretation of unconscious mechanisms is always retroactive. It would be merely interpretative in nature if, at every moment of history, we could not be assured that partial drives had intervened effectively in their time and place. And this not merely in the form that was initially believed in the early days of analytic experience, as something erratic, dispersed—an errant block of ice torn from what, in relation to the child’s development, is the great ice sheet, the sexuality of the adult intervening as seduction upon an immature subject.

If sexuality revealed itself immediately—and I must say, with a persistence that, in retrospect, can be surprising, in that from Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, FREUD was able to establish as essential what appeared to him then as polymorphous perversion, as aberrant sexuality, as a rupture in the charm of a so-called innocence, childhood innocence.
This sexuality, by imposing itself so early—I would even say too early—made us pass too quickly over the examination of what it represents in its essence. That is to say:

– that with regard to the instance of sexuality, all subjects are equal, from the child to the adult,
– that they are only confronted with what, of sexuality, passes into the networks of subjective constitution, into the networks of the signifier,
– that sexuality is only realized through the operation of drives insofar as they are partial drives, partial with respect to the biological finality of sexuality.

The integration of sexuality into a dialectic of desire occurs through the activation of what, in the body, deserves here to be designated by the term apparatus, if you will accept to understand by that what the body, in relation to sexuality, can equip itself with—which means that this is distinct from what bodies can pair with.

What stands out in reading this text by FREUD converges into an experience that has been given to us—incredibly early—as a datum, one that we have not had the time to elaborate upon. This also explains all the confusion in the discussion about drives—as sexual drives, as ego drives, and the shifting boundary between them.

What almost immediately resolves the paradox—scandalous to some—that it was necessary to go beyond the drives as they had been thought to be gathered under the title of life drives and death drives, is the fact that we do not see what the drive really is. That is to say, if it is true that the drive represents—but only partially represents—the curve of what the accomplishment of sexuality means in the living being, how can one be surprised that its final term is death, since the presence of sex in the living being is tied to this death?

And if today I have had this citation reproduced on the board:
τῷ τόξῳ ὄνομα βίος, ἔργον δὲ θάνατος.
More precisely, it is not a citation, but rather a fragment of HERACLITUS, collected in the monumental work where DIELS gathered what remains—scattered—of the pre-Socratic era:
βιός [bios], he writes [the bow: τῷ τόξῳ, the usual term, synonymous with βιός: bow]—and this emerges for us as one of those lessons of wisdom which, before all the detours of our scientific elaboration, go straight to the point—βιός [bios]—and with a single accent difference, it is not life (βίος) but the bow (βιός)—HERACLITUS tells us:

“To the bow is given this name, βιός [bios]—the accent would be on the first syllable if it were ‘life’—but its work is death.” [Cf. supra: note 74]

What the drive integrates—immediately, throughout its existence—is a dialectic of the bow, and I would even say of archery. It is only in this way that we can situate its place in the psychic economy, which is what matters to see in what FREUD introduces us to by a path that, I would say, is among the most traditional. He constantly makes use of the resources of language and does not hesitate to rely on something that is, however, characteristic only of certain linguistic systems, namely the three voices: active, passive, and reflexive.

Yet this is only a framework, within which we must distinguish one thing—the signifying reversal—and another thing—what clothes it, that is to say, at the level of each drive, the fundamental back-and-forth movement in which it is structured, between two poles which are remarkable in that they can only be designated in terms of that which is the verb:

– beschauen and beschaut werden: to see and to be seen,
– quälen and gequält werden: to torment and to be tormented.

But what he establishes from the outset, what he presents to us as fundamentally acquired, is that at no point in this trajectory can each partial drive be separated from its back-and-forth movement, from its fundamental reversal: the circular nature of the drive’s trajectory. I insist, in order to define the functioning of this mechanism that he initially introduces, on the dimension of this Verkehrung (inversion).

But when he illustrates it—and we will see that it is remarkable to note which drive he chooses to illustrate it, namely Schaulust, the pleasure of looking, and what he can designate only by the combination of the two terms “sadomasochism”—when he speaks of these two drives, and more specifically of the third, he takes care to emphasize that it is not about two phases in these drives but three.

It is crucial to distinguish what is merely this return in circuit of the drive [second phase] from what appears—but just as well may not appear—in this third phase, namely, the emergence of ein neues Subjekt, which must be understood not as meaning that there was already one, that is, the subject of the drive, but that it is something new to see a subject emerge. And this subject, which is properly the Other, appears insofar as the drive has been able to complete its circular course, and it is only with the emergence of the subject at the level of the Other that what constitutes the function of the drive can be realized. It is precisely this point that I now intend to draw your attention to.

This circuit, which you see here drawn by the curve of this arrow—Drang (impulse) at the origin—rising and descending, passing here through the surface that I defined for you last time as the “border,” considered in theory as the source, the Quelle, the so-called erogenous zone of the drive, this tension is always a “loop” and constitutes, in everything it sustains in the subject’s economy, something that cannot be dissociated from its return to the erogenous zone.

Here, the mystery of zielgehemmt (goal-inhibited) is clarified, of that form the drive can take, where it reaches satisfaction without having attained—what?—its “goal,” insofar as that would be defined by the biological function, by the effective realization of reproductive pairing. But that is not the goal of the partial drive. What is it, then?

Let us suspend that question for now, but let us focus on this term goal and the two meanings it can have, which I have chosen to differentiate using a language in which they are particularly expressive—English:
– aim—when you assign someone a mission, it does not mean telling them what they must bring back. It means telling them which path they must follow—”the aim” is the trajectory.
– goal—the goal in archery is not the bird you shoot down; it is having made the shot, having hit the target.

What defines the drive is this: if it can be satisfied without having reached what, from the perspective of a biological totalization of the function, would be the satisfaction in the finality of reproduction, if it can be something entirely different, it is because it is a partial drive, and its goal is nothing other than this return in circuit. And this is present in FREUD. Somewhere, he tells us that the ideal model that could be given for auto-eroticism is a single mouth kissing itself.

As with everything that appears under his pen: a luminous metaphor, dazzling even, but one that might require completion with a certain question:
In the drive, is this mouth not what one might call a sealed mouth, a stitched mouth, something in which we see, in analysis, appearing at its maximum in certain silences, the pure instance of the oral drive closing in on its own satisfaction?

In any case, what forces us to distinguish this satisfaction from pure and simple auto-eroticism of the erogenous zone is something that we too often confuse with what the drive closes upon.

This object, which is in fact nothing other than the presence of a hollow, a void, that can be occupied—FREUD tells us—by any object, and whose instance we only recognize under the function of the lost object (a), which must be said not to be the origin of the oral drive. It is not introduced as primitive nourishment; it is introduced because no nourishment will ever satisfy the oral drive except by circumventing this eternally missing object.

This circuit, the only question for us is to know where it is connected, and first:
– whether it is, in some sense, characterized by a spiral form,
– whether the circuit of the oral drive continues, generates itself, as continuing into the anal drive, for example, the one that is said to constitute, in relation to the oral drive, the next stage,
– whether, in other words, this lack, this central insufficiency, is the dialectical form by which opposition would generate progress.

This is already pushing the question quite far for people who have accustomed us to assuming, in the name of I don’t know what mystery of “development,” that the matter is already settled, inscribed in some way in the awakening of organic possibilities.
This appears to be supported by the fact that, indeed, when it comes to the emergence of sexuality in its “completed” form, we are indeed dealing with an organic process.

But there is no reason to extend this fact to the relationship between other partial drives. There is no generative relationship from one partial drive to the next: the passage from the oral drive to the anal drive does not occur through a process of maturation but through the intervention of something that does not belong to the field of the drive, through the intervention, the reversal, of the Other’s demand.

And if we introduce the other drives, whose series can be established and, after all, summarized to a relatively short number,
it is quite clear that you would be greatly troubled in attempting to establish, between Schaulust, the scopic drive, or even what I will later distinguish as the invocatory drive, any relation of deduction or genesis, to situate in a historical succession, definable in “stages,” its place relative to the drives I have just named.

There is no natural metamorphosis of the oral drive into the anal drive, and whatever appearances the play of the symbol may occasionally give us—in other contexts, the so-called anal object, namely feces, in relation to the phallus in its negative incidence—this does not, at any level, allow us—experience demonstrates this—to consider that there is continuity from the anal phase to the phallic phase, that there is a relationship of natural metamorphosis.

We must consider the drive, as FREUD indicates, under the category of konstante Kraft, which sustains it as a stationary tension. And even in the metaphors he uses to express these outlets—Schuss, he says, which he immediately translates with the image it evokes in his mind: that of a lava jet, a material emission from an energetic deflagration that occurs in successive stages, each coming, one after the other, to complete this form of returning trajectory.

Do we not see here, in Freud’s metaphor itself, the incarnation of this fundamental structure: something that emerges from an edge, which, if one may say so, redoubles the closed structure of the trajectory that returns to it, with nothing else ensuring its consistency except what constitutes the object, as something that must be circumvented? What follows from this?

It is that this articulation, which we are led to construct regarding the drive in its radical form, in what we might call its manifestation as the mode of an acephalic subject, reveals to us that everything in it is articulated in terms of tension and has a relationship to the subject only in terms of topological commonality.

It is to the extent that I have been able to articulate the unconscious as situated within those gaps that the distribution of signifying investments establishes in the subject, and which take shape in the diamond-shaped algorithm [◊] that I place at the core of every properly unconscious relationship between reality and the subject—it is because something within the apparatus of the body is strictly structured in the same way, it is due to this topological unity of the gaps at play, that the drive takes its role in the functioning of the unconscious.

Let us now follow FREUD, let us follow FREUD when he speaks to us of Schaulust, of seeing and being seen. Is this the same thing? How could it even be sustainable that it could be otherwise than by being inscribed in terms of signifiers? Or is there then some other mystery?

There is an entirely different mystery, and to introduce you to it, one need only consider what Schaulust is, how it manifests in perversion. I emphasize that the drive is not perversion. What constitutes the enigmatic character of Freud’s presentation is precisely that what he seeks to give us is a radical structure, one in which the subject is not yet placed. What defines perversion—we will return to this later—is precisely the way in which the subject places himself within it. He positions himself in a way that makes the structure of the drive more or less clear. In perversion, he positions himself in an entirely clear way.

And to see how Freud’s dialectic promotes, suggests, and introduces us to this, one need only carefully consider his text. The value of Freud’s texts in this field, where he pioneers, lies in the fact that, like a good archaeologist, he leaves the excavation work in place so that, even if it remains unfinished, we can still understand what the unearthed objects mean.

When Mr. FENICHEL deals with this, he does as was done in the past: he collects everything, stuffs it into his pockets and into display cases, without order, or at least in an entirely arbitrary order, so that no one can find anything anymore.

What happens in voyeurism? At the moment of voyeurism, at the moment of the voyeur’s act: where is the subject, where is the object? I have told you, the subject is not there insofar as it is about seeing, about the drive to see, but insofar as the subject is perverse. Insofar as he is perverse, he is situated only at the culmination of the loop, namely: in relation to what constitutes the object.

This is what my topology, written on the board, cannot make you see but allows you to admit: to the extent that the loop turns around the object, the object is there as a missile; it is with it that, in perversion, the target is hit. The object here is the gaze, and the gaze is the subject, the one who strikes the mark in the act of shooting at the target. I need only remind you of what I said in due time about Sartre’s analysis.

If this analysis brings forth the instance of the gaze, it is not at the level of the Other whose gaze surprises the subject peeking through the keyhole. It is because the Other surprises him, the subject, as entirely a hidden gaze. And here, you grasp the ambiguity of what is at stake when we speak of the scopic drive: the gaze is that lost object, suddenly found in the conflagration of shame, through the introduction of the Other.

Up until then, what is it that the subject seeks to see?
– What he seeks to see—know this well—is the object as absence.
– What the voyeur seeks and finds is nothing but a shadow, a shadow behind the curtain. He will fantasize any kind of magical presence there, the most graceful of young women, even if, on the other side, there is only a hairy athlete.
– What he seeks is not, as is often said, the phallus, but precisely its absence, hence the predominance of certain forms as the object of his search.
– What one looks at is what cannot be seen.

If already, through the introduction of the Other, the structure of the drive becomes apparent here, it is only truly completed in its reversed form, in its return, which is the true active drive in every drive: when it is completed. In exhibitionism, we see that what is targeted by the subject is what is realized in the Other. The true aim of desire is the Other as forced, beyond its implication; it is not merely the victim as closed off to some other observer.

Thus, in this text, we have the key, the knot that has so greatly obstructed the understanding of masochism.

FREUD here articulates in the firmest way that, at the outset, if one may say, of the sadomasochistic drive, pain is of no concern; rather, it is a matter of Herrschaft, of Bewältigung, of a violence exerted—upon what?—upon something so nameless that FREUD approaches it and at the same time retreats from considering the case—which aligns entirely with what I have explained to you about the drive—where we can find its primary model in a violence the subject inflicts upon himself, for purposes of mastery. He recoils from this, and for good reasons.

The ascetic who flagellates himself does so for a third party. But that is not what Freud seeks to grasp here; he merely wants to designate the pedicle, the return, the insertion upon the subject’s own body of the departure and the end of the drive.

“But at what moment,” Freud asks, “do we see introduced into the sadomasochistic drive the possibility of pain?”

The possibility of pain endured by what has become, at that moment, the subject of the drive. It is insofar as, Freud tells us:
– the loop has closed,
– there has been a reversal from one pole to the other,
– the Other has come into play,
– the subject has taken himself as the endpoint, the terminus of the drive,
…at that moment, pain enters into play, insofar as the subject experiences it from the Other.

He will become, or may become, in this properly theoretical deduction, a sadistic subject, insofar as the completed loop of the drive has brought the action of the Other into play, and insofar as what is at stake in the drive, which here is finally revealed, has taken place—namely, that the path of the drive is the only form of transgression permitted to the subject in relation to the pleasure principle.

The subject will realize that his desire is nothing more than a futile detour in the attempt to capture, to latch onto, the jouissance of the Other; insofar as the Other intervenes, he will realize that there is a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle. This forcing of the pleasure principle by the incidence of the partial drive—this is how we can conceive that these partial drives, ambiguous, installed on the threshold of an Erhaltungstrieb [preservation drive], of maintaining a homeostasis, of its capture by the veiled figure that is sexuality—this is how we begin to see, at what level, what is at stake begins to unveil itself.

It is because the drive bears witness to the forcing of the pleasure principle that it also testifies to the fact that, beyond the Real-Ich, another reality intervenes—one which we will see, by a certain return, is ultimately the very thing that has given this Real-Ich its structure and its diversification.

Discussions

Jacques-Alain MILLER

Would you say, in conclusion, that the drive only concerns the real by its limit—the limit of the real—that is to say, a relation that has its boundaries? In other words, that the relation of the drive to the real is not one of effort and obstacle, but one of interior and exterior, in a reversible space, a space that folds back onto itself, such that one could say that there are two spaces that exchange their exterior and interior, keeping only this stable opposition to distinguish them—namely, that one is marked by the sexuality of the other?

Then, could we characterize the relationship of the drive to the real in such a way that we could say: the drive is the relation to the real of a subject who has entered the real, whereas need is the relation to the real of a subject who has not entered it, that is, who, strictly speaking, does not exist or has not yet come into being, and that, when the subject begins to exist, his object ceases to exist?

What does it mean to “enter the real as a subject”?

The entry of a subject into the real must be understood as beginning to situate oneself in the space of the great Other, and the need of a subject thus situated in this space is identified in relation to the great Other, which means that the reality of the object of this need is thereby obliterated—that is, it becomes symbolic of a demand for love addressed to the great Other.

Thus, the object of the drive can be defined as the symbol of a demand to the great Other, this object being itself, if one wishes, a non-being, or absent, or negated into nothingness.

Can we further characterize this relation in another way—as a relation of selective borrowing, that is, the drive borrowing from real objects, this borrowing being characterized by the following traits:
– discontinuity, meaning that the borrowing is always composed of elements,
– metamorphosis, in the sense that this borrowing transforms what is borrowed,
– and combination, assemblage, composition.

Now, I would like this proposition to be corrected or contested. And then, I would like to put forth a kind of ultimatum, which would be to distinguish—by conceptual definitions of an identical form—on the one hand, the object of the drive, the object of the fantasy, and the object of desire.

And by “definition of an identical form,” I mean:

1. that you define the situation and behavior of the subject in relation to these objects,
2. that you determine the field in which each of these objects is situated, both for the object of the drive and for the rupture of demand,
3. that you define…

LACAN – Repeat the 1, 2, 3…

Jacques-Alain MILLER

1. The object of the drive, the object of the fantasy, the object of desire, and the situation of the subject concerning each of these objects.
2. The field of each of these objects, or the place of each of these objects.
3. The function of each of these objects.

LACAN

The object of the drive—I believe what I have presented to you today should allow you to situate it. If I say that it is at the level of what I have metaphorically called an “acephalic subjectivation,” a subjectivation without a subject, a bone [skeleton], a structure, a trace that, in sum, represents the other side of topology, which in essence makes it so that a subject—through his relationship to the signifier—is, if you will, a pierced subject: these holes, they do indeed come from somewhere.

What does FREUD teach us in his initial constructions, which can be drawn on the board—his first networks of signifying crossroads that stabilize—regarding something within the subject that is intended to maintain, as much as possible, what I have called homeostasis? This does not merely mean the surpassing of a certain threshold of excitation but also the distribution of pathways—and even, he employs metaphors that assign a diameter to these pathways—that allow for the maintenance and the always equal dispersion of a certain investment.

Somewhere, FREUD explicitly states: it is the pressure of what, in sexuality, must be repressed in order to maintain the pleasure principle that has allowed, based on this apparatus—let us even say, admirably rich, and there are too many of them, of course, too many cells in the central nervous system to accommodate everything we could place within it—but it is through the way they function as the site of what I have called this homeostasis, as the investment of the Real-Ich, that it has taken this form, which establishes within it these constant currents of diversion, this constant displacement of excitation, which means that, in some sense, the incidence that may come, that may biologically stem from the pressure of this X that FREUD calls “libido,” has allowed—FREUD articulates it somewhere, in precise terms—has allowed for the progress of the mental apparatus itself, as such, the establishment, for example, within the mental apparatus, of this possibility of investment that we call Aufmerksamkeit, the capacity for attention.

The determination, the progress of the functioning of the Real-Ich—at once satisfying the pleasure principle and at the same time being defenselessly invested by the rising forces of sexuality—this is what is responsible for its structure. At this level, we are not even required to take into account any proper subjectivation of the subject; the subject is an apparatus. This apparatus represents something lacunar, and it is within the gap that the subject establishes the function of a certain object as a lost object. This is the status of the object (a) as it is present within the drive.

The object of fantasy is not… though the subject may frequently be unnoticed within it, he is always there in the fantasy, wherever it presents itself—in dreams, in daydreams, in whatever more or less developed forms, more or less displayed—the subject situates himself as determined by the fantasy. The fantasy is the support of desire; it is not the object that supports desire.

The subject sustains himself as desiring in relation to a signifying network that is always much more complex, and this is clearly visible in the form of a scenario that it takes on, where the subject—more or less recognizable—is placed somewhere and, strictly speaking, schized, divided. He is usually double in his relation to this object, which frequently does not reveal its true form any more than he does.

Next time, I will return to what I have called the “structure of perversion.” It is, strictly speaking, an inverse effect of fantasy. It is the subject who determines himself as object in his encounter with the division of subjectivity.

I will show you—I could only stop here today because of time, and I regret it—that the subject, as he himself assumes this role of object, is precisely what sustains the reality of the situation called sadomasochistic drive, which is nothing but a single point within the masochistic situation itself. It is insofar as the subject makes himself the object of another’s will—we will also examine what the word will means on this occasion—that not only does this close, but it constitutes what defines the sadomasochistic drive.

It is only in a second phase, as FREUD indicates in this text, that sadistic desire becomes possible in relation to a fantasy. Sadistic desire exists in many configurations, including in neuroses, but that is not yet sadism. Sadism, as such, as it is lived by the sadist, and which can only be sustained by a deep reference to the Other, comes from a certain—not a complete reversal, but a quarter-turn—that has taken place in the position he occupies, at a specific point—I invite you to refer to it—which I have defined in my article Kant with Sade, published in Critique in April 1963: the sadist effectively occupies, properly speaking, the place of the object, but without knowing it, for the benefit of an Other, for whose jouissance he carries out his perverse action.

You can see here multiple possibilities for the function of the object, of object (a), which is never found as the target of desire. It is either pre-subjective:
– or as the foundation of an identification of the subject,
– or as the foundation of an identification denied by the subject. It is in this sense that sadism is only the negation of masochism.

And this formula will allow us to clarify many things concerning the true nature of sadism.

But the object of desire, in the common, everyday sense of the word—what we believe it to be—is:
– either a fantasy that is in reality the support of desire: it is not the object of desire,
– or a lure.

Regarding this issue of the lure, which simultaneously raises all the preliminary questions you have asked earlier concerning the relationship of the subject to the real, it is—a curious thing—precisely the area in which Freud’s own analysis of love will allow us to advance.

The necessity for FREUD to refer to the relationship of the Ich to the real in order to introduce the dialectic of love, whereas, strictly speaking, and in a certain way, the neutral real is the desexualized real—for that is what is at stake—has not been addressed at the level of the drive. This will be, for us, the most enriching point in what we must conceive concerning the function of love—namely, that it already indicates its fundamentally narcissistic structure.

That there is a real, there is absolutely no doubt. That the subject has a relationship, a constructive relationship with this real, only within the narrow dependence of the pleasure principle—the pleasure principle not forced by the drive—this is what, next time, will allow us to see that this is the source and origin, this is the point of emergence of this object of love.

The entire question is how this object of love can come to fulfill a role analogous to the object as I have just defined it for you—that is, to the object of desire.

Upon what equivocations, upon what ambiguities, does the possibility rest for the object of love to become the object of pleasure?

Have I shed some light on this subject for you through this exposition?

Jacques-Alain MILLER – Some light, and some obscurity as well…