🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I have the intention today—this does not mean that I will have the time to follow through—to lead you from love, at the threshold where I left things last time, to libido.

I will immediately announce what will be the key point, the novelty of a certain elucidation regarding how libido must be conceived, by telling you:

“Libido is not something elusive, fluid, that is, something that distributes itself, accumulates, like a magnetism in the crystallization centers offered to it by the subject. Libido must be conceived as an organ, organ in both senses of the word, ‘organ’ as a part of the organism, or ‘organ’ as an instrument.”

I apologize if—as I have been told—in the intervention last time, along the paths where I lead you, there were different tempos and certain obscurities. I believe this is characteristic of our field. Let us not forget that it is common to represent the unconscious as a cellar, if not a cave, to evoke Plato’s.

What I will tell you today is that this is not the right comparison: it is rather something closer to a bladder.

And this bladder, it is precisely a matter of showing you that, provided that a small light is placed inside, it can serve as a lantern, and that is by no means an error. But why be surprised if the light sometimes takes a little time to catch, to ignite? Of course.

By leading you last time to something that I believe I articulated, namely that, to represent the subject in question, insofar as alternately, through the pulsation of the unconscious, the subject shows itself and hides.

In this subject, we grasp only partial drives. The ganzen Sexualstrebung, the representation of the totality of sexual pressure, Freud tells us that it is not there.

On this result, where I lead you after him, I tell you where you may go to see for yourselves. I affirm that everything I have learned from my experience is “convenient” there.

To all those here, I cannot ask for full agreement, as it is lacking for some. But the very fact that I guide you along this path presupposes—of course—and your presence here presupposes, in response—a certain trust placed in what we will call—in the role I occupy in relation to you: that of the Other—good faith.

Of course, this good faith is always precarious, assumed, because this relationship of the subject to the Other—where does it ultimately end?

This difficult relation of the subject, which is the one along whose paths analysis leads us, is to be understood in the sense that, as a subject, the subject is nothing less than in uncertainty, for the reason that it is divided—this subject—by the effect of language.

And this is what I tell you, what I teach you, I, as Lacan, no doubt following the traces of Freud’s excavation, as I call it, as I called it last time.

Through the effect of speech, the subject always realizes itself more in the Other, but at that point, it already pursues only half of itself—you will see that I will bring you back to this—it will find its desire only ever more divided, pulverized, in the discernible metonymy of speech.

The effect of language is always interwoven with that something which is at the core of the analytic experience: the actualization of the fact that the subject is only subject by being subjected, subjected to the field of the Other.

A synchronous subjugation within this field of the Other: if it is from there that it originates, it is also for this reason that it must escape from it, extricate itself, and in this extrication, in the end, it will know that the other real must extricate itself just as much as itself, must manage to get out of it.

This is precisely where the necessity imposes itself of that good faith founded on the certainty that this same implication of difficulty, in relation to the paths of desire, is also present in the Other.

Truth, in this sense, is what chases after truth, and that is where I run, where I lead you—like Actaeon’s hounds—after me: when I have found the goddess’s lair, I will no doubt transform into a stag, and you will be able to devour me. But we still have some time ahead of us!

Freud, then—did I not present him last time in the figure of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as Léon Bloy represents them in Le Salut par les Juifs, under the form of those three—equally—old men, who, according to one of Israel’s vocations, are there, around I know not what tarp, engaged in that fundamental occupation called second-hand dealing? They sort. There is something they put on one side, and something else on the other.

Freud, on one side, places partial drives, and on the other, love. He says, “It is not the same”: drives necessitate us in the sexual order—this comes from the heart.

To our great surprise, he teaches us that love, on the other side—at least this is how he expresses it in this article (I urge you to refer to it and read it)—something like this: “That, that comes from the belly, that’s what is yum-yum.”

This may come as a surprise. But it sheds light on something, something fundamental in the analytic experience: that the genital drive, if it exists—or rather, this is precisely what Freud teaches us: to examine the genital drive—is that, as a drive, it is not at all articulated like the others, despite appearances, despite ambivalence.

Thus, in its premises and in its own text, Freud explicitly contradicts himself when he tells us that this [ambivalence] could pass as one of the characteristics of Verkehrung, of the reversal of the drive.

When he examines this ambivalence—where, only in his initial approach, he designated it in the ambivalence of love-hate—he tells us, “It is not at all the same as the reversal of the drive.”

If, then, the genital drive does not exist, it might as well go get itself f… fashioned elsewhere. Elsewhere, on the other side, rather than on the side where there is the drive—on the left, on my diagram over there—of the erogenous zone.

You can already see it taking shape in that bundle that I just called something floating like a veil, a bladder—that it is on the right, in the field of the Other, that the genital drive has to go to be shaped. Well, what does that align with? Well, precisely what analytic experience teaches us! That is, the genital drive is subject to:

• the circulation of the Oedipus complex,
• the elementary and other structures of kinship,
• something that is insufficiently designated as the field of culture, since this field of culture is precisely founded on that no man’s land, undoubtedly where genitality as such must subsist, but where it is undoubtedly dissolved, not gathered.

Nowhere is this ganzen Sexualstrebung graspable within the subject. But although it is nowhere, it is nonetheless diffused throughout, and that is precisely what Freud attempts to make us feel in this article.

For everything he says about love—and, to emphasize, precisely insofar as it concerns delineating the drive—is that love, in order to be conceived, necessarily requires reference to another kind of structure. He divides this structure into three levels:

• the level of the real,
• the level of the economic,
• the level of the biological, lastly.

The oppositions that correspond to these are threefold:

• At the level of the real: what is of interest and what is indifferent.
• At the economic level: what gives pleasure and what causes displeasure.
• Only at the biological level does the opposition activity-passivity present itself in its proper form, as you will see, the only one valid in its grammatical sense: the position “to love—to be loved.”

We are quite explicitly invited by Freud to consider that love, in its essence, is to be judged only as the sexual passion of the gesamt Ich. Now, gesamt Ich is here in his work a hapax to which we must give the meaning of what is outlined when he accounts for the pleasure principle.

[Daß ein Trieb ein Objekt »haßt«, klingt uns aber befremdend, so daß wir aufmerksam werden, die Beziehungen Liebe und Haß seien nicht für die Relationen der Triebe zu ihren Objekten verwendbar, sondern für die Relation des Gesamt-Ichs zu den Objekten reserviert. (Triebe und Triebschicksale)]

The gesamt Ich is this field, the field that I invited you to consider as a surface—and a limited surface—that the blackboard may be suitable for representing it, that everything may be laid out on it, as they say, on paper.

Whether it be this network represented by arcs, lines linking points of convergence, marking within this closed circle what must be maintained there in terms of homeostatic tension, of minimal tension, of not exceeding a threshold of tension, of necessary derivation, diffusion of excitation through a thousand channels, each time it might become too intense in one of them.

This filtration, from stimulation to discharge, is that apparatus, that cap—if you like, horny—to be circumscribed on a sphere, where what he calls the stage of the Real-Ich is first defined. It is to this that he will in his discourse attribute the qualification of auto-erotisch.

From there, analysts have concluded that—since this had to be located somewhere within what is called development—it is quite clear, they think, that since Freud’s word is gospel, the infant must consider everything around it as indifferent.

One wonders how things can hold within a field of observers for whom articles of faith have such an overwhelming value compared to observation.

For indeed, if there is one thing an infant does not give the impression of, it is of being disinterested in what enters its perceptual field. That there are objects from the earliest time of the neonatal phase is beyond doubt.

Auto-erotisch absolutely cannot have this meaning. And if you read Freud in the text, you will see that the second stage, the economic stage, consists precisely in this: that the second Ich, the second in right, the second in logical time, if you will, is the Lust-Ich, which he calls purifiziert-Lust-Ich (purified Lust-Ich), that this one establishes itself precisely in the external field outside the cap in which I designate the first Real-Ich from Freud’s explanation.

Outside, in the objects—and this is what auto-erotisch is—and Freud himself emphasizes that there would be no emergence of objects if there were not objects that are “good for me.”

Here is constituted the Lust-Ich and the field of Unlust: the object as remainder, the object as no longer “good for me,” but foreign—and as such, moreover, the object good to know, and for good reason, for it is the one that is defined in the field of Unlust.

At this level appears, as such, lieben, to love: the objects of the field of Lust-Ich are lovable. Hassen [to loathe], with its deep link to knowledge, is the other field.

At this level, there is no trace of any other drive function than precisely those that are not true drives—what Freud’s text calls Ichtriebe.

And his entire text—I urge you to read it carefully—consists in founding the level of love at this level and stating that what is thus divided, thus defined at the level of the Ich, only acquires sexual value, a sexual function, only transitions from Erhaltungstrieb (self-preservation) to Sexualtrieb (sexual drive) by virtue of the appropriation of each of these fields, and its grasp by one of the partial drives is defined elsewhere.

I could show you this in every line of the text. If, after three times that I have spoken about it, you still have not read it, well, too bad. For of course, this text would be worth—perhaps it is done elsewhere—would be worth an entire year of commentary.

That is why I ask you to read it, so that you may later confirm what I am telling you by reading this text.

Freud explicitly says that vorhebung des Wesentlichen, bringing out the essential here, is in a purely passive, non-drive-related way, in this field of love, that the subject registers the äußeren Reize [external stimuli], what comes from the external world, that its activity arises only “in relation.”

And conversely, he calls it active durch seine eigenen Triebe, through its own drives. Here, what is at stake is the diversity of partial drives.

[Das Ich verhält sich passiv gegen die Außenwelt, insoweit es Reize von ihr empfängt, aktiv, wenn es auf dieselben reagiert. Zu ganz besonderer Aktivität gegen die Außenwelt wird es durch seine Triebe gezwungen, so daß man unter Hervorhebung des Wesentlichen sagen könnte: Das Ich-Subjekt sei passiv gegen die äußeren Reize, aktiv durch seine eigenen Triebe. Der Gegensatz Aktiv-Passiv verschmilzt späterhin mit dem von Männlich-Weiblich, der, ehe dies geschehen ist, keine psychologische Bedeutung hat. Die Verlötung der Aktivität mit der Männlichkeit, der Passivität mit der Weiblichkeit tritt uns nämlich als biologische Tatsache entgegen; sie ist aber keineswegs so regelmäßig durchgreifend und ausschließlich, wie wir anzunehmen geneigt sind. (Triebe und Triebschicksale)]

It is in this that we are led to the third level that he introduces, that of activity-passivity.

But before marking its consequences, the emphasis—I must point out to you—the character, if I may say, “traditional,” classical, of this conception of love: “to will good for someone.”

Is it necessary to underline that this is exactly equivalent to what is called in tradition “the physical theory of love,” the velle bonum alicui of Saint Thomas? For us, due to the function of narcissism, it has exactly the same value.

I have long emphasized the deceptive nature of this so-called altruism, which is satisfied with preserving the good—of whom? Precisely of the one who is necessary to us. This is where Freud intends to establish the foundations of love.

It is only with the activity-passivity relation that what properly pertains to the sexual relationship comes into play. But does it cover it, this relation of activity-passivity? So little so that it is on this occasion—but also, in more than one other—I urge you to refer to such passages in The Wolf Man, for example, or scattered across other sections of the Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis—that Freud tells us that the polar reference of activity-passivity is there to designate, to cover, to metaphorize what remains unfathomable—the term is not his…

But the fact that he never says anywhere that psychologically the masculine-feminine relation can be grasped in any way other than through this representative of the opposition activity-passivity, insofar as the masculine-feminine opposition as such is never attained, this sufficiently designates the importance of what is repeated here in the form of a particularly sharp verb to express what is at stake in this opposition of passivity-activity: verschmilzt, he says, something like “merges,” “molds itself,” “infiltrates itself.” It is an arteriography, and even the relations of masculine-feminine do not exhaust it.

[Der Gegensatz Aktiv-Passiv verschmilzt späterhin mit dem von Männlich-Weiblich, der, ehe dies geschehen ist, keine psychologische Bedeutung hat.]

Of course, it is well known that one can account for many things in the domain of love with this opposition of activity-passivity. But then, what we are dealing with is precisely this injection, if I may say so, of sado-masochism, which is by no means to be taken, as far as the properly sexual realization is concerned, at face value.

Of course, in the sexual relationship, all the intervals of desire will come into play. What is the value of my desire for you? An eternal question posed in the dialogue of lovers.

But as for this supposed value, for example, of masochism—of so-called feminine masochism—it must be placed in the parentheses of serious interrogation. For it is part of this dialogue, of what, in many respects, can be defined as a masculine fantasy.

Many things suggest that it is a form of complicity on our part to sustain it. But in order not to yield ourselves entirely—I mean, not to yield ourselves entirely—to the findings of Anglo-Saxon investigations—which on this subject, I believe, would not yield much—if we were to say that there is some form of consent from women in this, which means nothing—we will limit ourselves, more legitimately, as analysts, to the women who are part of our group.

And it is quite striking to see that the representatives of this sex within the analytic circle are particularly inclined to uphold this fundamental belief in feminine masochism. No doubt there is a veil here, which should not be lifted too quickly, concerning the interests of sex.

An excursion in our discussion, moreover, an excursion deeply connected—you will see, we will have to return to what this connection consists of.

Be that as it may, a remark arises here: nothing serves us—here, at the maximum of this field, as it has just been defined as the field of love—nothing serves us from this narcissistic framework, of which Freud, in his own terms, in this article, tells us that it is precisely constituted by the articulation of this autoerotisch—to feel, as I indicated to you, that is, as the criterion of emergence, the distribution of objects—to this insertion of auto-eroticism into the organized interests of the ego, which are called narcissism.

This means that if there is a representation of objects in the external world, a choice, a discernment, and a possibility of knowledge—in short, everything within which classical psychology has exercised itself—nothing yet—and this is precisely why all so-called affective psychology failed until Freud—nothing yet represents the radical Other, the Other as such, the Other precisely in that which sexuality designates for us as two fields, two poles, two opposed worlds, in the masculine and the feminine.

At most, they will be represented by something different even from this activity-passivity opposition I spoke of earlier: the virile ideal and the feminine ideal. These belong properly to a term that I am not the one to introduce—precisely to acknowledge a point to our female colleagues—which was introduced by a psychoanalyst, concerning the role of the feminine sexual attitude, by a term called “masquerade.”

Masquerade is not what comes into play in display—the necessary display at the level of animal mating, and indeed, adornment is generally revealed there on the side of the male. Masquerade has another meaning in the human domain: it is precisely to play at a level that is no longer imaginary but symbolic.

It is from this point that we now have to show that sexuality as such makes its return, exercises its proper activity, through the intermediary—however paradoxical it may seem—of the partial drives.

Everything Freud tells us about it, everything he spells out, everything he articulates about it, shows us this movement that I drew on the board last time: this circular movement of something in the drive’s push, which exits through the erogenous border only to return to it as its target, after having circled around something (x), which I call the object (a).

I posit that it is through this that the subject comes, attempts to reach what is properly the dimension of the Other (with a capital O). And that a meticulous examination of this entire text—subjected to careful scrutiny, like hard pieces tested by the teeth, according to the image I evoked earlier—will reveal to us, in the very examination of Freud, and even in the failures of this examination, the truth of what I am advancing here.

That is, the radical distinction between “loving oneself through the other,” which leaves no transcendence to the object within this narcissistic field, no transcendence to the included object, to what happens in this “circularity of the drive,” where even the heterogeneity of going and returning reveals a gap in its interval.

For what do seeing and being seen have in common? And likewise, the way Freud is led to articulate it in tables and characteristics.

Let us take Schaulust, the scopic drive: he opposes it to itself—beschauen: “looking at a foreign object,” to “being looked at—the proper object—by a foreign person”: beschaut werden.

[Beispiele für den ersteren Vorgang ergeben die Gegensatzpaare Sadismus–Masochismus und Schaulust–Exhibition. Die Verkehrung betrifft nur die Ziele des Triebes; für das aktive Ziel: quälen, beschauen, wird das passive: gequält werden, beschaut werden eingesetzt. Die inhaltliche Verkehrung findet sich in dem einen Falle der Verwandlung des Liebens in ein Hassen. (Triebe und Triebschicksale)]

For an object and a person are not the same. At the end of the circle, let us say that they loosen, or that the dotted line slightly escapes us.

Moreover, to link them, it is at the base—where origin and endpoint meet—that Freud must grasp them in his hand and attempt to find their union, precisely at the point of return, and tighten it again by saying that the root of the scopic drive is entirely to be taken in the subject, in the fact that the subject sees itself.

Only here, because it is Freud, he does not get it wrong. It is not—him—seeing himself in the mirror; it is selbst ein Sexualglied beschauen, he looks at himself—I would say—through his sexual organ. Only, here too, this does not work, because this must be identified with its inverse, which is quite curious, and I am surprised that no one has pointed out the humor in it: this is equated with Sexualglied von eigener Person beschaut werden, meaning, in a way, “number two delights in being odd,” the sex or the little penis delights in being looked at.

[Diese Vorstufe ist nun dadurch interessant, daß aus ihr die beiden Situationen des resultierenden Gegensatzpaares hervorgehen, je nachdem der Wechsel an der einen oder anderen Stelle vorgenommen wird. Das Schema für den Schautrieb könnte lauten:
α) Selbst ein Sexualglied beschauen = Sexualglied von eigener Person beschaut werden,
β) Selbst fremdes Objekt beschauen (aktive Schaulust),
γ) Eigenes Objekt von fremder Person beschaut werden (Zeigelust, Exhibition).]

Who has ever truly grasped the genuinely subjectivizable nature of such a feeling? In fact, the articulation, the link of this knot, of this loop, which is that of the back-and-forth movement of the drive, is quite well obtained by changing only one of Freud’s terms:

Not “eigenes Objekt,” the own object, which is indeed, in fact, what the subject is reduced to—an object, nor “von fremder Person,” the other, of course, nor “beschaut,” but “werden,” not machen; what is at stake in the drive is “making oneself seen.”

In this “making oneself,” the activity of the drive is concentrated, and by transposing this onto the field of the other drives, we may perhaps grasp some illumination.

I must move quickly, unfortunately, and not only abbreviate but also fill in—the very striking, very remarkable—gaps that Freud left open in his enumeration of the drives.

After “making oneself seen,” I will introduce another: “making oneself heard,” which he does not even mention. And I must very quickly point out this difference that should be noted between “making oneself heard” and “making oneself seen.” You do have ears, after all: ears are that kind of orifice—the only one in the field of the unconscious—that cannot be closed.

So I think you will hear what I want to tell you by marking that “making oneself seen” is indicated by an arrow that truly curves back in this way, and listen a little to “making oneself heard”—it is there, it is merely an indication for later—“making oneself heard” moves toward the other, whereas “making oneself seen” moves toward the subject. And this has a structural reason, which I needed to mention in passing.

Let us now come to the oral drive. What is it? One speaks of fantasies of devouring. “Being gobbled up,” everyone knows that this is indeed it, and bordering on all the resonances of masochism, this is what we observe: the term, the term that has become othered in the oral drive.

But why not put things to the test, precisely in what we are constantly stirring up? And since we refer to the infant and the breast, and since feeding, the breast, is sucking, it is “being sucked,” it is the vampire.

Which also sheds light on what this singular object is—an object I strive to separate in your minds from the metaphor of nourishment—the breast.

The breast is also something that is affixed and that sucks—what?—the mother’s organism.

At this level, it is sufficiently indicated what the demand is, in a way—and this sets us on the track of what I am about to show you—the demand by the subject for something separate from him but belonging to him, something that is meant to complete him.

At the level of the anal drive, listen—a little relaxation, naturally—here, it seems no longer to work at all. And yet, “being bored to death” does have meaning.

When one says, “Here, we are terribly bored,” in relation to the eternal nuisance! It becomes all the more interesting that everything within the field of the anal drive, within the economy of that famous object which one is quite wrong to purely and simply identify with the function, variously specified, assigned to it in the metabolism of obsessive neurosis—

One would be quite wrong to amputate it from everything it represents, that famous scybale, as well as from the gift, occasionally, from the entire relation it fundamentally has to filth, to purification, to catharsis—to not see that undoubtedly this is where, and for good reason, this notion originates, that this is where the function of oblativité is located.

And to put it plainly, the object here is not far at all—which brings us quite well, back to the cycle of the formula that I placed there, as an epigraph—to the domain called that of the soul.

What does this brief overview indicate to us, reveal to us?

In this flow, this reversal represented by the pouch of the drive, as if it were in a way invaginating itself through the erogenous zone, as if it were charged with going somewhere, seeking something, which each time responds in the Other to the drive.

And I will not repeat the sequence: let us say that at the level of Schaulust, it is the gaze, but I mention this only to say that I will return to it later, regarding its effects on the Other in this movement of appeal.

Let us mark here this polarity of the drive cycle with its relation to something always designated at the center, which is an organ, to be understood here in the sense of an instrument of the drive.

This organ, this object, in a different sense than it had earlier, as instituted in the sphere of induction of the Ich, this ungraspable object, is an object that we can only circumvent, and to put it bluntly, this “false organ”—this is what now deserves interrogation.

I say, [this false organ] is situated in relation to something that is the true organ, and to make this felt, and to say that this is the only pole that, in the domain of sexuality, is within our reach, is capable of being apprehended, I will permit myself to present before you a myth for which I will take historical sponsorship from what is said in Plato’s Symposium, in the mouth of Aristophanes, concerning precisely what he questions—the nature of love.

This, of course, presupposes that we grant ourselves the leisure, that we grant ourselves the permission to use, in the judo of truth, this apparatus—this apparatus that, before my earlier audience, I have always refrained from using.

– I gave them the ancient models, and specifically within the field of Plato, but I merely provided them with the apparatus to excavate this field. I am not one of those who say, “My children, here, there is a treasure,” whereby they will then plow the field.

– I gave them the plowshare and the plow, that is to say, “the unconscious is made of language,” and at a moment—a peak moment—that took place about three and a half years ago, this resulted in at least two very good works, even three.

But now it is a matter of saying: “The treasure, that which is to be found, can only be named through the path that I announce.”

This path, which partakes of the comic, is absolutely essential for understanding even the slightest of Plato’s dialogues, all the more so what is in The Symposium, and even—if you like—the hoax, for of course, the fable of Aristophanes is nothing other than this.

It is a challenge to the centuries, for this fable has passed through them without anyone trying to do better.

I will try.

Precisely, striving to take stock of what was said at this Congress, the Congress of Bonneval, I was arriving at something that will be expressed as follows: “I will speak to you about the lamella.”

If you want to emphasize its hoax-like effect, you may call it the hommelette.

This hommelette, you will see, is easier to animate than the primordial man, in whose head we must always place a homunculus to make him walk.

Every time the membranes of the egg rupture, from which the fetus, on the verge of becoming a newborn, will emerge, imagine for a moment that something flies away from it—something that can be done with an egg just as well as with a man, namely, the hommelette or the lamella.

The lamella is something extraordinarily flat and moves like an amoeba, only it is a little more complicated. But it passes everywhere.

And since it is something—I will tell you shortly why—that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is—just as the amoeba is in relation to sexed beings—immortal, for the reason that it survives every division, that it subsists beyond every fission intervention. And it runs.

Well, that is not reassuring! Because suppose for a moment that it comes to envelop your face while you are peacefully sleeping. I find it hard to see how we would not enter into struggle with a being capable of such properties. But it would not be a very convenient struggle.

This lamella, this organ whose characteristic is not to exist, but which nonetheless remains an organ—and I could elaborate further on its zoological place—I have already indicated to you, it is libido.

Libido, as I have told you, as pure life instinct, is to be understood as something that is withdrawn from life…

– from immortal life, from irrepressible life,
– from life that needs—itself—no organ,
– from simplified and indestructible life,

…from that which is precisely subtracted from the living being by its submission to the cycle of sexual reproduction.

It is this that has its possible equivalents in all the forms that can be enumerated of the object (a). They are nothing but representatives, figures. The breast, as an equivocation, as a characteristic element of mammalian organization, the placenta, for example, truly represents that part of itself that the individual loses at birth and which may serve to symbolize the deeper lost object.

For all other objects, I could invoke the same reference, and then it becomes clear what is at stake, what is designated in the lower part of the drawing I made on the board, marking the relationship of the subject to the field of the Other, beneath it—here is its origin:

If it is true that the subject does not emerge into the world, does not exist—for, after all, in the world of the Real-Ich, the ego of knowledge, everything can exist just as it does now, including you and consciousness, without there being, for that reason, whatever one may think, the slightest subject—

If the subject is what I teach you, namely, the subject determined by language and speech, this means that the subject in initio begins in the place of the Other, insofar as there emerges the first signifier.

Now, what is a signifier? What have I been repeating to you for quite some time now, I believe, so that I need not articulate it here once again? It is that a signifier is what represents a subject—for whom? Not for another subject, but for another signifier.

If you discover a stone covered in hieroglyphs in the desert, you do not doubt for a moment that there was a subject behind it to inscribe them. But that each signifier is addressed to you—that is an error, and the proof of this is that you may not understand a word of it.

However, you define them as signifiers precisely because you are certain that each of these signifiers relates to each of the others. And this is what is at stake in the subject’s recall to the field of the Other.

The subject is born, insofar as the signifier emerges in the field of the Other. But by this very fact, what was previously nothing—as a subject to come—becomes, freezes into a signifier, which does not surprise us.

If this relation to the Other is precisely what brings forth what is represented here by the lamella, that is, not the sexual polarity, the relationship of the masculine to the feminine, but the relationship of the subject, the living subject, to what it loses in having to pass through the sexual cycle for reproduction.

This explains the essential affinity of every drive with the domain of death.

If I reconcile these two faces of the drive—of presenting sexuality in the unconscious and of being, in its essence, representative of death.

If I have spoken to you of the unconscious as something that opens and closes, it is because its essence is to mark this time, the origin of the subject, through which, by being born with the signifier, it is born divided—a subject incontestably attested in the Other, and a subject that identifies itself with this emergence at the level of what, just before, previously, as subject, was nothing, but which, barely appearing, freezes into a signifier.

From this relation, from this effort, from this conjunction, from this recall of the subject—there, where it is in the field of the drive, toward the subject, where it evokes itself in the field of the Other—from this effort to rejoin itself, depends the possibility of a support for the ganzen Sexualstrebung.

There is no other.

That is why, it is only there, that the relation of the sexes is represented at the level of the unconscious.

For the rest:

– It is left to the contingencies of this field of the Other,
– It is left to the explanations that are given to it, that are taught, about how one should go about it,
– It is left to the old woman who must—this is no vain fable—teach Daphnis how one must make love.

Discussions

François Wahl: This force that is libido, which is prior to every drive, that is, if libido—if you weigh libido…

Lacan: Libido is the lamella, it is an organ.

François Wahl:

How do you justify the loss in relation to this, the passage through sexuality? At what point does the articulation of activity-passivity introduce itself in relation to it?

Lacan:

Perfect, you underline very well one of the gaps in my discourse.

You will also grant me, given the time we are at, that I do not give a very long answer.

1) This kind of “lamella body”, with its insertion somewhere, for this lamella, it has an edge, it comes to insert itself where I have placed it, written on the board, namely, on the erogenous zone, namely, on one of the orifices of the body, insofar as these orifices—our entire experience—are linked to the opening-closing of the gap of the unconscious.

They are linked to it because it is there that the presence of the living being is knotted.

If we have discovered something that connects the so-called oral and anal drives to the unconscious—to which I add the scopic drive and the one that should almost be called the invocatory drive, which has the privilege, as I incidentally mentioned to you—nothing I say is mere jest—of having the property of not being able to close—this is where the lamella is inserted.

Thank God, I did not just say it, but I wrote it. It is on the board.

2) The relationship of the drive with activity-passivity:

I believe I have made myself sufficiently understood in stating that, at the level of the drive, this is purely grammatical. It is a support, an artifice that Freud employs to make us grasp the back-and-forth movement of the drive. But I have returned to this subject four or five times: we cannot simply and purely reduce it to reciprocity.

There is none at the level of the drive, and I have articulated as clearly as possible today that, in relation to the set of three stages—you will see the text (a), (b), (c), through which Freud articulates each drive—it is important, it is necessary to substitute the formula “to make oneself… something,” “to see,” “to hear,” etc., along with the entire list I have provided.

This fundamentally and essentially implies activity, which aligns with what—in the passage I cited to you—Freud himself articulates when he distinguishes between the two fields: the field of the drive on the one hand, and on the other hand, the narcissistic field of love. He states that—there—at the level of love, there is reciprocity between “to love” and “to be loved,” whereas in the other field, it is a pure activity durch seine eigene Triebe, for the subject. Do you follow?

In fact, it is evident that even in their so-called “passive phase,” the exercise of a masochistic drive, for example, requires that the masochist go through hell—if I may put it that way.