🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

If psychoanalysis is to be constituted as a science of the unconscious, the foundations—you know this—are that it is necessary to start from the fact that: the unconscious is structured like a language. From this, I have deduced, and I am developing before you, essentially a topology, whose aim is to account for the constitution of the subject.

In this regard, there was a time—which I hope is now past—when it was objected to me that in doing so—by giving dominance to structure—I neglected that dynamic so present in our experience, even going so far as to say that, in doing so, I managed to elude the principle affirmed in Freudian doctrine that this dynamic, in its essence, from beginning to end, is sexual. I believe, I hope, that the process of my development this year, and namely at the point where it reached a sort of culmination last time, shows you that this dynamic is far from being lost.

I recall—perhaps intentionally so that those who were absent from that session last time will know—that I was able to emphasize there—the first essential thing I will say—that I added an element, I believe, entirely new to this dynamic, and we will see later how I will make use of it, which is the second thing I will recall.

The first is to emphasize that in this distribution of the field that I establish, to oppose, in relation to what we will call “the entrance of the unconscious,” the two fields of the subject and the Other,
– The Other with a capital O, in so far as it is the place where the chain of signifiers is located, in so far as it governs everything that can first be presented from the subject,
– the other as the field of that living being where the subject must appear.
And I said: on the side of that living being called to subjectivity, that is where the drive essentially manifests itself.

Every drive being—by the very essence of drive—a partial drive, no drive represents—what FREUD evokes for a moment, to wonder if it is love that realizes it—the totality of the Sexualstrebung, of the sexual tendency, as it could be conceived, as it is conceived at the limit, but precisely in a field that is excluded from our experience, as having to—if it were to enter—present, in the psyche, the function of Fortpflanzung, the function of reproduction.

This function—who would deny it on the biological level? What I assert, what I advance—according to FREUD, who testifies to it in every way—is that it is not represented as such in the psyche, that in the psyche nothing is sufficient by which the subject can situate themselves as “being male” or “being female.”

In their psyche, the subject situates only equivalents: activity and passivity, which are far from representing it in an exhaustive manner. FREUD highlights this, emphasizes it, even adds the irony of saying properly that this representation is neither so constraining nor so exhaustive, durchgreifend, ausschliesslich, in the two terms he uses, the polarity of being, of male and female, is represented only by:
– the polarity of activity, which represents, which manifests itself through the Triebe,
– whereas the other term of polarity, passivity, is only passivity vis-à-vis the external gegen die äusseren Reize.

Only this division essentially—and it was on this that I concluded last time—makes necessary what was first presented, brought to light by the analytical experience: that the ways of what one must do, as man, as woman, are entirely, if I may say so, abandoned to the drama, to the model of a scenario that is placed in the field of the Other, which is properly the Oedipus.

I emphasized it last time by telling you that what one must do as man or as woman, this human being—that we approach in the field of their psychic reality—ultimately has to learn it, entirely, always from the Other. And I evoked there the old woman in the tale of Daphnis and Chloe, a fable that represents to us that there is a final field, and that is precisely the field, the summit of sexual accomplishment, where, in the end, the innocent does not know the paths.

That it is the drive—the partial drive—that orients them there, that directs them there, that only the partial drive is the representative, in the psyche, of the consequences of sexuality, is the sign that in the psyche, sexuality is presented, is represented through a relation of the subject:
– which is deduced from something other than sexuality itself,
– which is established in the field of the subject through a path that is the path of lack.

Two lacks overlap here:
– One that pertains to the defect, to the central defect around which turns the dialectic of the advent of the subject to their own being in the relation to the Other, due to the fact that the subject depends on the signifier, in so far as the signifier is first in the field of the Other.
– And this lack comes to cover, comes to take up another lack, which is the real lack, prior to us situating it at the advent of the living being, at sexual reproduction. This lack is what the living loses of its part of living in being this living that reproduces through the sexual path, it is this lack that relates to something real, which is this: that the living, by being subject to sex, has fallen under the blow of individual death. This pursuit of the complement, which the myth of ARISTOPHANES illustrates for us in such a pathetic and misleading way: that it is the other, that it is their sexual half that the living seeks in love.

In this mythical way of representing “the mystery of love,” analysis, the analytical experience, substitutes the search, not for the complement, the sexual complement, but the search for that part of itself forever lost in the living being, which is constituted by the fact: that it is only a sexed living being and that it is no longer immortal.

This is what the drive attaches itself to, and what it makes us grasp—that the drive—the only one: the partial drive—has this fundamental side, at the very principle of what makes it serve to induce the living being by a lure, in its sexual realization, it is from the outset that it is a drive—a drive that FREUD called the “death drive”—that it represents in itself the part of death in the sexed living being.

It is for this reason that, defying perhaps for the first time in history this myth endowed with such great prestige—which I evoked under the heading where PLATO places it—of ARISTOPHANES, I substituted for it last time, this myth made to embody that missing part, this myth that I called that of the lamella, which has this new importance, from which we will see in practice what support it will bring us, to designate the libido as to be conceived, not in the form of a field of forces but in the form of an organ.

The libido is the essential organ for understanding the nature of the drive. If this organ is only “the lost part of being” in this specification that it is a sexed being that ensures… is it an unreal organ? I would have, in more than one way, to show you on this subject that the unreal here is not imaginary, that the unreal is defined by articulating itself with the real in a way that certainly escapes us, and it is precisely this that necessitates its representation being mythical, as we do it. And I can immediately point out to you that, from the fact that it is unreal, this does not even prevent an organ from incarnating, and I will immediately give you its materialization.

One of the most ancient forms to embody this unreal organ in the body, there is no need to look far for it, it is tattooing, it is scarification. Indeed, this incision, by incarnating itself to the point of proliferating in the form of tattoos, has this function where this organ comes to culminate in this relation of the subject to the Other, to be for the Other, where this tattoo, this primitive scarification comes to:
– situate the subject, to mark their place, in the field of relations between all the members of the group, between each and all the others,
– and at the same time to have in an obvious way this erotic function that all those who have approached its reality have perceived.

In this relation, in this fundamental relation of the drive, movement is essential whereby the impulse, the arrow that shoots towards the target, only fulfills its function by truly emanating from it, to return to the subject. The pervert, in this sense, is the one who, in a short circuit, more directly than any other, succeeds in his aim, by integrating the function of the subject more deeply into his existence of desire.

This is something entirely different from the variation of ambivalence that makes the object pass from the field of hatred to that of love—and vice versa—depending on whether or not it benefits the well-being of the subject: it is not when the object is not good in its aim that one becomes masochistic, it is not because her father disappoints her that FREUD’s little patient, called “the homosexual,” becomes homosexual; she could have taken a lover. It is something else that manifests itself every time we are in the dialectic of the drive.

This direction is fundamentally distinct from what is “love as what belongs to the field of the subject’s good.” What belongs to “the drive as what belongs to the field of its effort to realize itself in its relation to the Other” is radically to be placed at the principle of this field into which we are advancing.

That is why today I want to return to emphasize this tension—to always maintain it as the most fundamental—of the realization of the subject in its signifying dependence as being first in the place of the Other, and this is what I intend to return to today to distribute it to you into two fundamental operations, the dialectic.

That it is true that everything arises from the structure of the signifier implies that what I first called “the function of the cut” is now structured in the development, in what I called “the topological function of the edge”: the relation of the subject to the Other is entirely generated in this process of gap.

Everything could be there without this—the relations between beings in the real and even including you who are here, the living beings—everything could be generated in terms of reciprocally inverse relations. This is what psychology and a whole sociology strive for, and they can succeed in it, insofar as it concerns only the animal domain. The capture of the imaginary is enough to motivate all sorts of behaviors of the living being.

What analysis reintroduces—singularly, since after all, to maintain this dimension, the philosophical path would have sufficed: in which it showed itself insufficient, for lack of a sufficient definition of the unconscious—what is remarkable in psychoanalysis is that it reminds us that the facts of human psychology could not be conceived, that they could not exist in the absence, as such, of this “function of the subject,” the subject being defined as the effect of the signifier.

Here, where the processes are to be defined, certainly as circular, I am aiming between the subject and the Other:
– from the subject called to the Other,
– to the subject of what they themselves have seen appear in the field of the Other,
– from the Other returning there…
this process is circular but by its nature without reciprocity; to be circular it is asymmetrical.

You can sense well that today, I am advancing here, I am bringing you back to the terrain of a logic whose essential importance I hope to emphasize to you. The schema that I wrote on the board the other time—there is nothing today that I have written on the board but I will put something there—from the apodictic starting point that I gave you as a reminder of what distinguishes the signifier from the sign.

For the sign, if it is true as they say, we can adhere to this definition that it is “that which represents something for someone,” all its ambiguity lies in this, that this “someone” can be many things:

• it can be the entire universe, insofar as we have been taught for some time now that information circulates within it, in the negative, as they say, of entropy,
• any knot where signs concentrate insofar as they represent something can be taken for a someone.

What must be emphasized in contrast, because this is the line along which we can advance the process, here, of our interest, is what I had written on the board last time and what I evoke: “that a signifier is that which represents a subject, there, for another signifier.”

The signifier, produced in the field of the Other, causes the subject to emerge from its signification, but it is, it functions as a signifier only for that point, about which I have just told you enough regarding the someone, that it can be all sorts of things; if it is that point, the one where what is going to be called to speak as a subject is located, it only functions:

• by reducing the subject to an instance,
• to being nothing more than a signifier,
• to petrifying it in the same movement where it calls it to function as a subject.

There lies precisely the temporal pulsation where what is the starting characteristic of the unconscious as such is instituted: this closure. What some analysts—one of them at least—felt at another level, to make it emerge, trying to signify it, in a term that was then new and, moreover, has never been exploited in the field of analysis, ἀϕάνισις [aphanisis], the disappearance. What JONES—who invented it—took for something, if I may say so, quite absurd: the fear of seeing desire disappear, must be situated more radically at this level where I place it for you, the subject: in its field as a subject, it manifests, in this movement of ἀϕάνισις [aphanisis] that I have called lethal, and in another way at the very point, the fading of the subject.

Let me insist here for a moment, to make you feel just how much it is always possible to rediscover at every moment of concrete experience and even observation, provided that this mechanism directs it and lifts from it its blind spots. I will return to this, perhaps, if the future gives me the opportunity to speak before you again, I will return to it in the field of what is called psychological dissertation. The profound error, the Piagetian error—for people who might believe this to be a neologism, I emphasize that it concerns Mr. PIAGET, I mention this because, for some time now, I have been used to hearing that people remain stuck on a term I thought was easily understandable—the error that lies—I will not be able to insist much on it today, but I indicate it—in the notion of what is called the “egocentric speech” of the child, defined as the stage where it would lack what appears to this “alpine psychology,” the lack of reciprocity, whereas reciprocity, at that moment, is far from the horizon of what must concern us.

The notion of “egocentric speech”—if you observe well under what conditions it occurs, it is observable—is a misunderstanding. The child, in this famous speech that can be recorded on a tape recorder, does not speak for himself as they say. No doubt he does not address the other—to make here this theoretical distinction that is deduced from the function of I and you—but there must be others present: it is while they are there, all together, for example engaging in small operational games, as they are given in certain—say—methods of active education, that they speak. That they do not address this one or that one is not what is important, he speaks, if you allow me the expression, “to the gallery.” This egocentric speech is an “all who can hear, listen up!”

But this also allows us to point out, to rediscover there, this construction of the subject in the field of the Other, as indicated by that little arrow on the board.

Here, being seized, caught in its birth in the field of the Other, the characteristic of the subject of the unconscious is defined in this, where we find it again in the same field of the Other, of the other scene, for example, in the dream, that under the signifier that develops its networks, its chains, and its history, the subject is in an indeterminate place.

More than one element of the dream, almost all, can be the point where, in the interpretation, we will situate it differently. This is what is taken—on the outside when nothing has been understood, it must be said that psychoanalysts do not explain themselves very well—what is taken for the “pliability” to any meaning of interpretation: it is not pliable to any meaning, it designates only a single sequence of signifiers, but the subject can indeed occupy various places, depending on whether it is placed under one or another of these signifiers.

But now, I come to my two operations that I intend to articulate today in this reference of the subject to the Other. Border process, circular process, it is to be supported by that little diamond of which—you know—I use as an algorithm in my graph precisely. Precisely because it is necessary to integrate into some of the finished products of this dialectic:

• it is impossible not to integrate it, for example, into the fantasy itself, it is the $◊a,
• it is not possible not to integrate it also into that radical knot, where demand and drive are joined, the one designated by $◊D, and which could be called the cry.

But for now, let us stick to this little diamond: border, functioning border: it is enough to provide it with a vectorial direction, the sense of which, here counterclockwise, depends on the fact that at least in our writings, you read things from left to right.

The little lower V, where the diamond is divided here—these are supports for your thought, which do not come without artifice, but there is no topology that does not require some artifice to support it, this is precisely the result of the fact that the subject depends on the signifier, in other words, on a certain impotence of your thought—the little V at the bottom, it is the vel, constituted by the first operation, where I intend to suspend you for a moment.

You may perhaps find, in the end, that these are rather silly things, but logic always is a bit: if one does not go to the root of the simpleton, one is inevitably precipitated into foolishness, as it is easy to provide examples. The so-called antinomies of reason, you know: “The catalog of all catalogs that do not include themselves.” And one arrives at a dead end, which gives—for reasons unknown—logicians vertigo.

While the solution is very simple: the signifier with which one designates the same signifier is obviously not the same signifier as the one by which one designates the other, which happens to be the same in this case; it is obvious: the word “obsolete,” insofar as it can signify that the word “obsolete” itself is an obsolete word, is not the same word “obsolete” on one side and the other.

Thus, this should encourage us to refine this vel that I am introducing to you: it is the vel of the first essential operation where the subject is founded, which, in fact, is not at all devoid of interest to develop here, before a fairly large audience, because it concerns nothing less than that operation which we can call alienation.

As for this “alienation”—my God—I cannot say that it is not circulating: nowadays, whatever we do, we are always a little more alienated, whether it is in the economic, the political, the psychopathological, the aesthetic, and so on, it might not be a bad idea to see what the root of this famous alienation consists of.

Does this, for example, mean what I seem to advocate, namely: that the subject is condemned to emerge, in initio, only in the field of the Other? Could it be that? Well: not at all, not at all, not at all!

Alienation consists in this vel which—if the word “condemned” does not call for objections on your part, I will use it again—condemns the subject to appear only in this division, which I have just—I believe—articulated sufficiently, by saying that if the subject appears on one side as meaning produced by the signifier, on the other, it appears as ἀϕάνισις [aphanisis].

Here is a vel that is well worth illustrating, to differentiate it from other uses of vel: of the “or.” There are two, you know, I think, already from your minimum education in logic:

• there is the exhaustive vel: I will go either here or there. If I go here, I do not go there; one must choose.
• There is also another way to use vel: I go one way or the other, it doesn’t matter, it’s equivalent.
  These are two vel that are not the same.

I will try to teach you that there is a third one, and right away, to avoid confusing you, I will tell you what it is meant to serve. Symbolic logic—very useful, for what it has been introduced for nowadays, and for the clarity it has brought to this delicate domain—has taught us to distinguish the scope of this operation that we call “union,” as we say when it comes to sets, that is, a collection of objects: it is one thing to add two collections or to unite them.

I will immediately make you feel this. If in this circle, the one on the left, there are five objects and in the other there are five more, adding them makes ten. But since there can be objects belonging to both, you clearly see that the union is different from the addition, because if there are, here for example, two that indeed belong to each of the two circles, uniting them will consist, in this case, of not doubling their number; in the union, there will only be eight objects.

I apologize if this seems childish in these reminders, but this is done to give you the notion that this vel that I will try to articulate to you is supported only by this basis of the logical form of union. The vel of alienation is defined by a choice whose properties depend on this, that in the union there is an element which implies that, whatever choice is made, it results in a “neither one nor the other.” The choice, therefore, is only about knowing whether one intends to keep one of the parts.

The other disappears in any case. Let’s illustrate it with what interests us: the being of the subject, the one that is there under meaning.

• We choose being: it disappears, it escapes us, it falls into nonsense.
• We choose meaning: meaning persists only truncated by that part of nonsense which is, strictly speaking, what constitutes the unconscious in the realization of the subject.

In other words: it is of the function, of the nature of this meaning, as it comes to emerge in the field of the Other, to be, in a large part of its field, eclipsed by the disappearance of being, induced by the very function of the signifier.

This, as I told you, has a completely direct implication in what is all too often overlooked: that interpretation does not have its ultimate spring—and when I tell you, you will see that it is obvious, only it is an obviousness that is not seen—it does not have its ultimate spring in delivering to us the meanings of the path along which the psyche in front of us proceeds. It has that scope, but it is only a prelude. Interpretation does not so much aim at meaning as at delimiting, at reducing the signifiers in their nonsense, and we can rediscover the guides, the determinants of the subject’s entire conduct.

And I allow myself, for some, for those who have read, in particular what my student LECLAIRE presented at a certain congress in terms of an application of my theses to the examination of those around him, and I ask you to refer to it to see in what respect it is undeniable that what he presented, what he isolated, precisely not, as was believed in the discussion, the entire meaningful dependence of his sequence—simply in this case the sequence of the unicorn—but precisely in the irreducible and senseless character of this chain of signifiers. One cannot return enough, one cannot emphasize enough the importance of something like what I have just described here.

This alienating “or” is not an arbitrary invention, and as they say, a figment of the imagination. It is in language. This “or” exists. It is so much in language that it should nevertheless be recalled that when doing linguistics, it would be appropriate to distinguish it, this alienating vel. I will give you an example, right away: “Your money or your life”:

• If I choose the money, I lose both.
• If I choose life, I have life without the money, that is to say, a diminished life.
  I see that I have made myself sufficiently understood. I will not insist further, at least not immediately.

When HEGEL introduces us to the principle of alienation—it is indeed there that I legitimately found the justification to call it the “alienating vel“—what is it about? Let’s save our strokes. It is about generating the first alienation, the one by which man enters the path of slavery. “Freedom or life”:

• if he chooses freedom—snip!—he loses both immediately.
• If he chooses life, he has life amputated of freedom.

It’s curious, there must be something particular in this. We are going to call this particular thing a “lethal factor,” the one that results, in certain other distributions shown to us by this play of signifiers that we sometimes see at work at the heart of life itself: these are called chromosomes. Sometimes, there is one that has this lethal function, that’s why I’m bringing it up here.

We will find its verification in something somewhat specific: introducing, in one of these fields, death itself. For example, it will be: “freedom or death.” Well, in this case—precisely because death comes into play—something of a slightly different structure occurs: it is exactly that in both cases, I will have both.

Freedom, you know, after all, it’s like the famous freedom of labor, for which the French Revolution apparently fought; it can just as well be the freedom to starve, and indeed, that’s where it led throughout the 19th century. That’s why, since then, certain principles had to be revised. You choose freedom, well, it’s the freedom to die.

Curiously, in the conditions where you are told “freedom or death,” the only proof of freedom you can offer, under the circumstances indicated to you, is precisely to choose death, because there you demonstrate that you have the freedom of choice. This entirely different distribution of outcomes—incidentally, this is also a Hegelian moment, for it is what is called the so-called “Reign of Terror”—this entirely different distribution is meant to highlight for you what I have called the essential aspect of the alienating vel: the lethal factor.

The second operation—at this point, I can only introduce it, given the late hour—I will at least announce its title to you, and also announce what this next session will demonstrate to you, because if it completes the circulus, the circularity of the subject’s relation to the Other, it will do so by demonstrating to you an essential torsion.

Just as this first operation is based on the sub-structure of union, the second is based on the sub-structure of what is called—in the same set theory logic, if you will, or symbolic logic—not union but intersection or product. The intersection or product of two sets is precisely located in that same lunula where you find the form of the gap, of the edge. This intersection or product of two sets consists of those elements that belong to both sets.

It is here that the second time will occur, where the subject is led by this dialectic. This second time, this second operation, as essential as the first, must be defined because this is where we will see the field of transference emerge. It is what I will call—introducing here my second new term for today—separation.

Separare, “to separate,” I will immediately go—not towards the ambiguity of se parare, of “adorning oneself” in all its fluctuating senses in French, which means both “to dress” and “to defend oneself,” “to arm oneself with what is necessary to be on guard”—I will immediately go further, as Latin specialists authorize me, towards se parere, “to engender oneself,” which is relevant in this context.

How, from this level, the subject must “procure for itself,” because—and I will return to this—this is the origin of the word in Latin used to designate “engendering.” Originally, it is legal, as indeed, curiously, in Indo-European, all words—including parere—that designate “bringing into the world” are. The word “parturition” itself thus originates from a word whose root means nothing other than “to procure a child for the husband,” a legal and—let’s say it—social operation. It is not here to reintroduce, except to motivate it, this extraordinary symbolic leap that makes us so pleased to introduce into the subject’s fantasies this term that makes one dream: “to give birth to oneself”; it is indeed something else that is at stake in this separare, in this separation.

I will try to show you next time how, following what we have seen as radically different in the function of the alienating vel compared to other vel defined so far, there is a use to be made of this notion of intersection, as it can show us how it arises from the overlap of two lacks: it is insofar as a lack will be encountered by the subject in the Other and in this very intimation that the Other makes to it through its discourse, namely, the intervals of its discourse, that is, what arises in the child’s experience and is fundamentally identifiable, which is essentially this: “He tells me this, but what does he want?”

In these intervals cutting through the signifiers and which are part of the very structure of the signifier, there lies what, in other registers of my development, I have called metonymy. It is there that crawls, there that slides, there that flees, like the ferret, what we call desire. The desire of the Other by the subject, as soon as it emerges, is apprehended in what doesn’t fit, in the gaps of the Other’s discourse. And all the child’s “why?” questions are less addressed, as one believes, to a kind of hunger for the reason of things, than they constitute a test of the adult, a “why are you telling me this?” always renewed, always resurrected from what is at the heart of this “why?,” namely, the enigma of the adult’s desire.

Now, in responding to this grasp, the subject, like GRIBOUILLE, will bring forth the response of the antecedent lack of its own disappearance, which it comes here to situate at the point of the lack perceived in the Other. The first object it offers to this parental desire, whose object is unknown, is this: its own loss. “Can he lose me?” “Lose me,” the fantasy of its death, of its disappearance, is the first object that the subject, in this dialectic, has to put into play, and indeed does: we know this from a thousand facts, not least from, for example, anorexia nervosa. And we also know that the fantasy of its death is commonly stirred by the child in its love relationships with its parents.

This indication of one lack covering another, and whose essential aspect is that it will be able to engender the dialectic of the objects of desire, insofar as it links the subject’s desire to the Other’s desire—I told you long ago that it was the same—this dialectic passes through what is essential to retain:

• that it is not answered directly,
• that it is a lack engendered from the preceding time that serves to respond to the lack elicited by the subsequent time.

I believe I have sufficiently emphasized the two essential elements I have attempted to advance today in this new, fundamental, logical operation: non-reciprocity, first, and this element of torsion in the return that makes what one returns to a displaced use of what was initially formed.

Discussion

Jacques-Alain MILLER

I still have the impression that this work—somewhat obscure to us—you clarify and position it in relation to your previous work.

LACAN – Yes, that’s the purpose.

Jacques-Alain MILLER

You have, in a way, given the clearest definition of both the subject and its constitution. You characterized the process of this circular and asymmetrical constitution—circular, it seems to me, since from the field of the signifier, one could not definitively say whether it is born there, and the stages of the subject’s trajectory are not, and cannot be, distributed in a time without torsion.

Now, this circularity of the process does not diminish the sovereignty of the big Other, since the subject, merely by entering into its field, is necessarily a vassal. Moreover, you have especially, it seems to me, shown in the process of this constitution that the process was unitary, but that one could distinguish stages within it, and that sexuality in particular did not constitute a separate parade from that of the signifier—a parade that would be real while the parades of the signifier would be symbolic.

On the contrary, you have shown that sexuality is linked to the subject through the discourse of the big Other and from that discourse, and thus that sexuality positions itself as one of the structures—isomorphic and yet offset—through which the parades of the signifier are constituted.

And it is from this passage that the Subject receives all its being, meaning that its being is precisely the gift of the signifier, with the understanding that at the same time it receives its being, it also receives its lack of being, and that this gift is, in a way, unique.

And now, I’m getting to…

LACAN

May I simply interject something on the side here, something that is… I would need to revisit what you’ve just told me: “isomorphic.” I’m not sure we can absolutely say that. Isn’t that so?

This means that sexuality comes to engage in the parades of the signifier through its lethal factor. It’s not because we observe this lethal factor that it is clarified within that context, no more than “being-toward-death” is, for us, entirely common currency, whatever people may say, right? It is introduced into the circuit, but it is not completely mastered there. After all, it isn’t even absolutely resolved.

That it certainly serves as a corrective of sex, it does within the subject, indeed—that’s what I wanted to add.

Jacques-Alain MILLER

I’m now going to ask you a question about this context of alienation that finally appeared at the end and which it seems you wanted to address last.

LACAN

At the end? No, I feel like I placed it in the middle. The whole thing may have naturally been pushed toward the end because I never quite have enough time, but still, I wrapped up what I had to say about the concept of alienation. I even introduced the other concept—separation.

Jacques-Alain MILLER

Do you mean that the alienation of a subject, who has received this definition—that it is at once born into, constituted by, and ordered toward a meaning that is external to it—cannot, in a radical sense, have the structure of the alienation of “self-consciousness”? That is, should we understand this gap as LACAN versus HEGEL?

LACAN

That’s very well put, what you’ve just said there, because it’s exactly what GREEN had just said to me. He came over, shaking my hand—at least morally—and said to me: “Death of structuralism, you are the son of HEGEL.” I disagree!

But then, I think that by saying “LACAN versus HEGEL,” you are much closer to the truth. Although, of course, it’s not at all a philosophical debate, and since, in sum, two questions present it equally, perhaps next time—with the time I still need to calculate to wrap up what I have to tell you this year—I’ll put a few dots on the i’s regarding this.

André GREEN – Sons kill fathers.