🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

What I am going to introduce today – which, regarding its vocabulary, is unfortunately nothing unfamiliar to you – will be an attempt to give a certain number of these terms an articulation, a fundamental order, intended at least so that, when you encounter these said terms, the order in which I have arranged them for you will evoke a problem for you. These are, for instance, the most common terms such as: identification, idealization, projection, introjection.

These are not, evidently, terms that are convenient to handle – and you will, of course, observe – all the less convenient to handle properly because they carry meaning.

What could be more common than identifying? It even seems to be the essential operation of thought; it seems it could apply at every turn. Idealizing as well – undoubtedly, it might prove very useful from the moment the psychological position becomes more investigative. Projecting and introjecting, for some, may readily appear as two reciprocal terms, one of the other.

The fact that I have long since pointed out – perhaps it would be appropriate to notice – that one of these terms pertains to a field dominated by the symbolic, the other by the imaginary, which must mean that, at least in a certain dimension, they do not intersect, is certainly only a beginning of distinction. The intuitive use of these terms – I mean, based on the feeling of understanding them in isolation, as if their dimension unfolds within common understanding – is evidently the source of all the slips, of all the confusions; it is the common fate of all things in discourse.

In common discourse, the speaker – at least when expressing themselves in their native language – speaks with confidence and, ultimately, with such perfect tact that we even turn to the most ordinary users of the language – even to the uneducated – to determine the proper usage of a term. This suggests that as soon as a person merely wishes to speak, they orient themselves within this fundamental topology of language, which is entirely different from the simplistic realism to which some desperately cling, especially those who believe themselves to be comfortably grounded in the domain of science.

The natural use of terms – let us truly take them at random – “à part soi” (to oneself), “bon gré mal gré” (willy-nilly), or the difference between what constitutes an “affaire” (a matter or business) and something “à faire” (to do) – all this indicates how the total use of language involves a kind of enveloping topology in which the subject recognizes themselves when speaking spontaneously.

If I can address psychoanalysts about terms like those I have just enumerated, and invite them to identify the implicit topology each of these terms refers to in their usage, it is obviously because – I suppose, and it can be observed, despite their frequent inability, due to lack of instruction, to articulate these terms – they generally use them, with the same spontaneity as the common speaker, in an adequate manner. Of course, if they insist on forcing the results of an observation, if they try to understand where they do not understand, they will then use these terms improperly. In such cases, there will be few to correct them.

So today implies that I am referring to this tact within psychoanalytic usage regarding certain words, so as to connect them with the evidence of a topology that I have already introduced and described here – a topology, for example, embodied on the board in the form of those two registers, those two articulations I had inscribed last time and already distinguished:

– the field of the primordial Ich, the Ich that can ultimately be objectified in the nervous apparatus, the Ich of the homeostatic field,

– relative to which there are distinguishable fields surrounding it: a field of Lust – depending on how one chooses to translate its grammatical gender – let us say a field of Lust or pleasure, and a field of Unlust.

I emphasized that FREUD clearly distinguishes this level – he distinguishes it, for instance, in the article on the Triebe, on the Drives and Their Vicissitudes – by noting:

– that this level bears the mark of an organization that is narcissistic, and precisely in this measure, it is properly articulated to the field of the real,

– that in the real, it prioritizes only that which reflects itself in its field as Lust, as a return to homeostasis. Moreover, what does not favor homeostasis, what persists at all costs as Unlust, bites even more deeply into this field.

Thus, what pertains to the order of Unlust is inscribed there as non-me, as a negation of the me, as a chipping away of the me. The non-me does not merge with its surroundings, with the vastness of the real; the non-me stands out as a foreign body, fremde Objekt: it is there, located in the lunula [Unlust] formed by those two small Eulerian circles.

This, I mentioned at the end of my previous lecture, and that is where I resume. And you can see that this is a register – the register of pleasure – an objectifiable foundation that we can establish insofar as we understand it as foreign to the object whose functioning we observe.

But we are not just that; and even to be that, we must be the thinking subject. And insofar as we are the thinking subject, we are then involved, involved in an entirely different way, insofar as we depend on the field of the Other, which was there long before us, before we came into the world, and whose circular structures determine us as subjects.

Now, the matter at hand is to know in which field the different phenomena we deal with in the field of analysis occur. Well, certain things occur within the first field, while others – which must be distinguished from the first ones, for if they are confused, nothing can be properly understood – occur within the other field, whose essential articulations I have shown you through the two functions that concern the relationship of the subject to the Other as such, in the two functions that I have defined and articulated as:

– that of alienation: the first phase,
– implying a second phase, that of separation.

It is evident that the continuation of my discourse today presupposes that, since I introduced these two functions, you have reflected upon them – that is to say, that you have tried to make them work, to apply them to different levels, to test them.

In this field – the field of alienation – I have already pointed out some of the consequences of that very particular vel that constitutes alienation: namely, the suspension of the subject in meaning. Yet, the internal linkage that follows from this kind of wavering of the subject – indeed, the fall of meaning, which truly renews the menacing articulations I have tried to embody through familiar forms like “your money or your life” or “liberty or death” – reappears here, I would say, in a form of “being or meaning.”

I do not introduce these terms without a certain reluctance, nor without urging you not to hastily burden them with those meanings that might cause them to collapse under the weight of an impatience we must, above all, avoid in the progression of such discourse. Yet, I introduce them nonetheless, since the core of what will follow this year, and of my subsequent discourse, will be the attempt to articulate – if possible – something that, in the following year, should be titled: “Subjective Positions.”

Indeed, all this preparatory work regarding the foundations of analysis should logically culminate – since nothing can properly center itself without the subject’s position – in demonstrating how the analytic articulation that begins from desire can serve to illustrate it.

Subjective positions of what, then? If I were to rely on what suggests itself readily, on what might easily resonate and align with the most common analytic experience, I might say: subjective positions of existence – with all the allure of a term already floating in the air.

Unfortunately, this would only allow us a rigorous application at one level – not without some appeal, certainly a temptation – but only at the level of the neurotic. That is why I will likely be drawn toward subjective positions of being. After all, I do not promise in advance that this will be my final title; I may find a better one, but, in any case, that is what this will be about. So, let us move forward.

In an article I have previously referenced, in order to correct what seemed to me its inherent dangers, an attempt was made – an effort not devoid of merit – to give form to what my discourse introduced concerning the linguistic structure inherent in the unconscious. The result was a formula that essentially sought to translate the formula I had provided regarding metaphor, in a direction that, while well-intentioned, overlooked an essential point. For that formula is essential – and indeed usable – to demonstrate the dimension in which the unconscious appears, insofar as the operation of signifying condensation is fundamental.

Of course, this condensation of signifiers, with its metaphorical effect, can be observed in the open field of even the simplest poetic metaphor. That is why, when I sought to illustrate this, I chose an example drawn from poetry – as you may recall from my article in La Psychanalyse titled The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, which, if I am not mistaken, appeared in issue no. 3. For this illustration, I selected a poetic metaphor from a poem that, in the French language, perhaps more than any other, sings in the memory of many: Booz endormi (Boaz Asleep). Who, after all, has not, in their childhood, learned to recite Booz endormi?

And it is not, I must say, an unfit example for analysts to work with, especially given the context in which I introduced it – that is, the same context in which I was simultaneously introducing the paternal metaphor.

I will not revisit that entire discourse, but the core of it – relevant to our discussion here – was to show you how the designation of Booz, as the figure simultaneously embodying divine fatherhood and the instrument of God, brings forth a creation of meaning. What emerges in the poem – indeed, what constitutes the very essence of the poem – is encapsulated in the moment when Booz is described through the metaphor: “sa gerbe n’était pas avare ni haineuse” (“his sheaf was neither miserly nor hateful”).

The dimension of the dream, opened by this metaphor, is nothing less than what we encounter in the poem’s closing image: that of a golden sickle, carelessly cast into a field of stars. This dimension is more concealed in the poem than one might initially suspect. For it is not enough here to evoke the sickle with which Jupiter inundated the world in the blood of Chronos; the castration invoked here, seen through a biblical perspective, belongs to an entirely different order, one resonant with the historical echoes of Booz’s invocations to the Lord: “How can I, an old man, bring forth descendants?”

I am unsure whether you have noticed this… You might have grasped it more easily if I had managed, this year, to carry out the work I had planned on The Names-of-the-Father. But perhaps you have noticed that the Lord – whose name is unpronounceable – is precisely the one who watches over the childbearing of whom? Of barren women and men beyond their prime. The fundamentally transbiological nature – if I may use that term – of the fatherhood introduced by the tradition surrounding the destiny of the Chosen People is precisely that which remains, so to speak, originally repressed, continually resurfacing in the form of ambiguity, lameness, stumbling, and the symptomatic dystuchia (δυστυχία), the misencounter with the hidden meaning.

This dimension is one we repeatedly encounter, and if we wish to formalize it – as the author I referred to earlier attempted – we must handle it with greater caution than he did, given his somewhat reckless reliance on a fractional formalism to express the relationship between signifier and signified by means of an intermediary bar. It is not entirely illegitimate to suggest that, in certain contexts and modes of relation, this bar does indeed indicate the presence of a value similar to that which its fractional usage expresses in mathematics.

However, since there is another relationship between signifier and signified – namely, the effect of meaning – especially when it comes to the metaphorical production of meaning, one cannot simply adopt this fractional manipulation without caution. The transformation implied here cannot be taken as if it were a matter of proportionality.

Of course, from the expression A/B… from what results from the multiplication A/B .C/D, one can transform this product, when dealing with fractions, into a four-tiered formula such as: A/B / D/C. This is precisely what was done when it was claimed that the weight, within the unconscious, of the articulation of the final signifier, which comes to embody the metaphor along with the new meaning created by the use of metaphor, must correspond to some sort of pinning, linking one signifier to another within the unconscious.

It is quite clear that this formula cannot provide satisfaction. First, because it should be known that there can be no such relationship of the signifier to itself, for the very nature of the signifier is that it cannot – as I have often insisted – signify itself without generating the trap of some logical fallacy. One only needs to refer to the antinomies that appeared when attempts were made to create a complete logical formalization of mathematics to grasp the issue:
“the catalog of catalogs that do not include themselves” is obviously not the same as the catalog that does not include itself as the one introduced in the definition, and even less so when it becomes the catalog that is subsequently listed in that catalog.

It is far simpler to recognize that what we are dealing with here is the occurrence of a substitutive signifier that has come to occupy the place of another signifier, thereby producing the metaphor’s effect by displacing the signifier it supplanted to another position.

Yet precisely in trying to treat this through a fractional model, in trying to retain the possibility of such a manipulation, we are led to place the displaced, repressed signifier beneath the main bar, as the denominator of the newly appearing value, suppressed (unterdrückt). And it is quite incorrect to claim – as some have written – that interpretation is open to any meaning simply because it allegedly involves a random linking of one signifier to another, a sort of free-floating connection. To suggest that interpretation is open to any meaning is to concede ground to those who criticize the uncertain nature of analytic interpretation by granting the absurd notion that all interpretations are possible.

The fact that I have stated – as I did in my most recent discourse, or the one preceding it – that the effect of interpretation is to isolate and reduce, within the subject, a core (Kern, as Freud puts it) of nonsense, does not imply that interpretation itself is nonsensical. Interpretation is a signified, a meaning that is not arbitrary. It takes the place of the s in the formula and, in so doing, reverses the usual relationship whereby signifiers produce signifieds. Interpretive meaning, instead, evokes an irreducible signifier.

Interpretation, then, operates at the level of this s, which is not open to any meaning whatsoever; it cannot be just anything. It can only be an approximation, given the richness and complexity of the unconscious. Its function is to evoke irreducible, nonsensical signifying elements – precisely the kind of elements that Leclaire’s work illustrated so effectively.

In the same article, Leclaire introduces, regarding his obsessional patient, the phrase “POOR (d) J’e – LI”, which links the two syllables of the word licorne (unicorn), thereby introducing, within that sequence, an entire chain in which the patient’s desire is animated. And in later publications, you will see that the matter develops even further.

Thus, interpretation is clearly not open to all meanings; it is not arbitrary. It must be a meaningful interpretation that is not to be missed. And yet, this meaning is not what matters most to the subject; what truly matters is that the subject sees, beyond that meaning, the signifier – irreducible and traumatic – to which they, as a subject, are bound. That irreducible traumatic dimension is precisely the essence of trauma.

This understanding allows us to grasp what is materially evident in experience. I urge those who have not yet done so to read one of Freud’s great case studies – specifically, his greatest and most striking case, the one directly entangled with this problem: the case of the Wolf Man. Nowhere else do we see so clearly the intersection of fantasy and reality, the emergence of an irreducible, nonsensical element functioning as an originally repressed signifier.

In the Wolf Man case, to provide you with a guiding thread for your reading, consider the sudden appearance of the wolves in the dream’s window. This apparition plays – and I say plays – the role of the primordial repressed s. Of course, I say plays because this is only a relative designation; however, within Freud’s framework, the wolves’ sudden appearance represents the moment of the subject’s loss.

It is not merely that the subject is captivated by the wolves’ gaze – seven wolves, although, in his drawing, there are only five – perched in the tree. Rather, what fascinates them is their own gaze, mirrored in the wolves’ eyes. And what does Freud’s observation reveal? That, at every stage of the subject’s life, something derived from this primal signifier has continuously intervened to reshape the subjective dialectic of desire – desire, specifically, as desire of the Other.

Recall the succession of the father, the sister, the mother, and Groucha the servant. Each figure introduces a new modulation of the unconscious desire by adding signification to this relationship with the Other’s desire – adding new elements to the numerator.

Now, observe what happens at this inaugural moment – a moment whose logical necessity I ask you to consider. The subject’s constitution as X emerges only through Urverdrängung – the original repression – which requires the fall of the first signifier. This first signifier must fall because its persistence would render the subject’s position impossible, leaving only the representation of one signifier for another, rather than a subject.

In this X, we must distinguish two aspects. On one hand, we have the constitutive moment when the signifier falls into its unconscious position. On the other, we have the subsequent return effect – an effect that arises from the peculiar relationship suggested by the structure of language and which we must cautiously introduce. This relationship resembles what occurs with mathematical fractions: everyone knows that when zero appears in the denominator, the fraction loses its defined value; it becomes, by mathematical convention, infinite.

And then, in a certain way, this is one of the moments in the constitution of the subject: insofar as the primordial signifier is pure non-sense, it indeed becomes the bearer of this infinitization of the value of the subject, not in the sense of being open to all meanings but rather by abolishing them all, which is different and, if you will, justifies the fact that, in the relationship of alienation, I have been led more than once – and it is impossible to handle it without bringing it into play – to introduce the word “freedom.” For what grounds, in the radical sense and non-sense of the subject, the function of “freedom” is precisely this: from this signifier that kills all meanings.

This is why it was false to say earlier that the signifier in the unconscious is open to all meanings: it constitutes the subject in its freedom with respect to all meanings. But that does not mean, however, that it is not determined there, insofar as, in these numerators, in the place of zero – for it is a zero that I have written here – the things that have come to be inscribed are significations, significations dialectized in the relation to the desire of the Other, which give the relation of the subject to the unconscious a determined value.

It will be important, in the continuation of my discourse – I mean, not this year – to show how the experience of analysis, which compels us, forces us to seek along the path of a formalization such that the mediation of this infinity of the subject with what experience shows us of the finitude of desire, can only be achieved through the intervention of what, at its origin, at its entry into the gravitational field of what is called philosophical thought, KANT introduced with such “freshness” in the term “negative magnitude.”

The freshness here is important, of course, because between forcing philosophers to reflect on the fact that –1 is not 0, and the point where, with such a discourse, ears once again become deaf, thinking that it does not matter and that –1 is used in entirely different contexts, there is, evidently, a distance.

Nevertheless, and this alone is the utility of the reference to philosophical articulation, it shows us – since, after all, human beings survive only by constantly forgetting all their achievements, and I speak of their subjective achievements – at least to remind us of the moment when they became aware of these achievements. Of course, once forgotten, these achievements remain nonetheless achieved, but it is rather the people themselves who become conquered by the effects of these achievements. And being conquered by something one does not know can sometimes have formidable consequences, the first of which is confusion.

Negative magnitude, then: it is here that we find one of the supports for what is called “the castration complex,” namely, the negative incidence within which the phallic object enters. This is only a preliminary indication, but one I believe useful to give.

We must, however, continue to advance concerning what preoccupies us, namely: transference. How to resume our discussion here? I told you last time that transference is unthinkable unless we take as its point of departure the subject supposed to know; you now better understand what that means. But, after all, we must grasp more closely what is at stake here, not only from a phenomenological point of view but from the point of view of effectiveness, action, and experience. It is supposed to know what no one can escape once it is formulated: purely and simply, meaning.

This meaning implies, of course – and that is why, from the start, I introduced the dimension of its desire – that it cannot be refused. That, in a certain sense, this privileged point possesses the characteristic – the only one to which we can ascribe such a characteristic – of an absolute point of no knowledge.

It is absolute precisely in being no knowledge, but it is this point of attachment that binds its very desire to the resolution of what is to be revealed. The subject enters into this game of this fundamental support: that the subject is supposed to know, simply by being the subject of desire.

Now, what happens? What happens, in its most common manifestation, is what we call the transference effect, in the sense that this effect is love. It is clear that this love can be located – as FREUD indicates – like any love, within the field of narcissism: love is essentially the desire to be loved.

What emerges in the transference effect is indicated in the experience as being precisely what opposes the revelation at stake here, in the sense that love intervenes with its function – here revealed as essential – its function of deception.

Love, without a doubt, is an effect of transference, but at the same time, we all know – and this has been articulated: – that it is the face of resistance, – that we are simultaneously bound to await this effect of transference in order to interpret, – and that, at the same time, we know that it is what closes the subject off from the effect of our interpretation.

The effect of alienation, which essentially articulates the effect that we are within the field of the subject’s relation to the Other, is here absolutely manifest.

But then, it is appropriate here to highlight what is always eluded, namely what FREUD articulates – not as an excuse but as the reason for transference – that nothing can be attained in absentia, in effigie.

This means that transference is not, by its nature, the shadow of something previously lived.

Quite the contrary, in this essential time, which is the time of deceptive love, of the subject who, as subjected to the desire of the analyst, desires to deceive him regarding this subjection by making himself loved by him and by offering him that very essential falseness that is love, this shows that this effect of transference, as it is presently repeated here and now, is an effect of deception.

It is a repetition of what happened in such a way only to be of the same form: – it is not ectopy,
– it is not the shadow of its former deceptions of love,
– it is isolation in the present of its pure functioning of deception.

This is why, behind what is called “transference love,” we can say that what is real, what there is, is the affirmation of this link, of the desire of the analyst to the desire of the patient himself. But it is this that FREUD translated into a sort of rapid sleight of hand, a lure, by saying, after all, that it is only the patient’s desire, merely to reassure his colleagues!

It is the patient’s desire in its encounter with the analyst’s desire! This analyst’s desire, of which I cannot say I have not yet named it, for how can one name a desire? A desire is circled, but it is precisely about encircling it in its function relative to the desire of the Other. Many things, of course, in history, give us clues and traces here. Is it not singular, this echo that we find, if we take the trouble to stick our noses into it, of the ethics of analysis with the ethics of the Stoics?

What is Stoic ethics, at its core – and, of course, will I ever have the time to demonstrate this to you –
– if not the recognition of the absolute regency of the desire of the Other,
– if not that “Thy will be done,” later taken up in a certain Christian register?

Of course, we are called to a more radical articulation, and if I have opposed to you, within the alienating choice, the relationship between master and slave, the question may surely arise – it is indicated in HEGEL as resolved, though it strictly remains unresolved – of the relationship between the desire of the master and that of the slave.

Here, after all – my God – as I approach taking my leave of you for this year, since next time will be my last lecture, you will allow me to cast a few hints that might indicate the direction of our progress ahead.

The master, in the status assigned to him by HEGEL, and if it is true that he is situated solely in relation to an original assumption of death, I believe it is very difficult, within this pure status, to grasp a comprehensible relation to desire. I am speaking of the master in HEGEL, not the ancient master, of whom we have some portrait – notably the one I introduced last time under the figure of ALCIBIADES, whose relation to desire is quite visible.

He comes to ask SOCRATES for something he does not know, but which he calls ἄγαλμα [agalma] – everyone knows the use I once made of this term, and I will revisit it – this ἄγαλμα, this mystery which, undoubtedly, in the mist surrounding ALCIBIADES’ gaze, represents something beyond all goods. How can we see this other than as an initial sketch of the technique of identifying transference, in the fact that SOCRATES responds to him…

– not, as he said to him in his youth, “Take care of your soul,”
– but, facing the flourishing and hardened man: “Take care of your desire, mind your own business.”

Mind your own business here, and it is an extreme irony on PLATO’s part to have presented these words through a man who is both frivolous and absurd, a buffoon. I believe I was the first to point out that the verses PLATO places in his mouth concerning the nature of love indicate precisely this futility bordering on a kind of buffoonish demeanor that makes this AGATHON perhaps the least suitable object to hold the desire of a master. And, moreover, the fact that his name is AGATHON – a name to which PLATO assigns sovereign value – adds an additional, perhaps involuntary but undeniable, note of irony.

Thus, the desire of the master seems, from its very emergence in history, to be by nature the most misguided term. Conversely, I cannot help but pause at the fact that, when SOCRATES seeks to obtain his own answer, he addresses the one who has no right to assert his desire – the slave – and from whom he is always certain to obtain this answer.

“The voice of reason is low,” FREUD says somewhere, “but it always says the same thing.” [die Stimme des Intellekts ist leise, aber sie ruht nicht, ehe sie sich Gehör geschafft hat.] What we often fail to connect is that FREUD says exactly the same thing about unconscious desire. It, too, has a low voice, but its persistence is indestructible. Perhaps there is a connection between the two and that, in the sense of some transformed kinship, to be located with more exact coordinates, we will have to turn our gaze toward the slave when it comes to discerning what the analyst’s desire actually is.

However, I do not wish to leave you today without having laid down, in preparation for next time, two remarks founded on FREUD’s identification of the function of identification.

There are enigmas in identification, and even FREUD himself encountered them, as he seems surprised that the regression of love occurs so easily in the terms of identification. This, alongside the very texts in which he articulates:
– that love and identification, in a certain register, are, strictly speaking, equivalent,
– that the narcissistic aspect of love and the overestimation of the object, the Verliebtheit in love, are exactly the same thing.

I believe that if FREUD halted here – and I urge you to find and rediscover in the texts the various “clues,” as the English say, the traces, the marks left along the path – it is due to insufficiently distinguishing…

In the chapter “Identification” of Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, I emphasized the second form of identification for you to orient yourselves, to highlight and isolate the einziger Zug, the unary trait, the foundation, the core of the ego ideal.

What is this unary trait? Is it a privileged object within the field of Lust? No, it does not belong to this primary field of narcissistic identification to which FREUD relates the first form of identification, which he curiously embodies in a sort of primitive model function that the father assumes, anterior to the libidinal investment itself in the mother – a mythical time indeed, significant, as FREUD himself designates this as the time of identification, of Lust.

The unary trait, insofar as the subject clings to it, lies within the field of desire, provided one understands that this field of desire can only be constituted within the domain of the signifier, at the level where the relationship of the subject to the Other takes place, and where it is the signifier of the Other that determines it.

The function of the unary trait – insofar as it inaugurates a major phase of identification in the topography later developed by FREUD, namely idealization, the ego ideal – operates through the fact that a signifier, a signifier of this class, of this origin, signifier number 1, the first signifier insofar as it functions – I have shown you the traces of it on the primitive bone where the hunter makes a notch, counting the number of times he has hit the target – the unary signifier, insofar as it functions here in the field of Lust, that is, in the field of primary identification. It is in this intersection that we find the essential first spring of the incidence of the ego ideal.

And it is from the mirrored perspective of the ego ideal, from the being that the subject first saw appear in the form of the parent who holds them before the mirror, that the subject finds a reference point, the one who looks at them in the mirror and reveals, not their ego ideal but their ideal ego. This point, where they desire to take pleasure in themselves, is precisely where the function, the spring, the effective instrument that the ego ideal constitutes, is located.

To put it simply, not so long ago, a little girl told me quite innocently that it was high time someone paid attention to her so that she might find herself lovable. She was offering here a simple, innocent confession of the very spring that operates in the initial stage of transference. The subject has this relationship with their analyst, centered at the level of this privileged signifier called the ego ideal, insofar as it makes them feel as satisfactory as they feel loved.

However, there is another function, distinct, and one that operates entirely at the level of alienation, through which a form of identification of a singularly different nature is introduced – the identification constituted by what I have established as the process of separation in the subject.

– This privileged object, discovered by analysis, is an object whose reality, in the end, is purely topological.

– This object, whose pulsional movement, insofar as it is linked to this relationship between the subject and the Other – as I believe I have articulated sufficiently for you – traces its orbit.

– This object that bulges, if I may say, like a wooden egg in the fabric you are attempting to mend in analysis.

– This object (a) and its essential function, this object (a), insofar as it supports what, in the drive, is defined and specified by the fact that the entry of the signifier into human life introduces what gives rise to the sense of sex.

That is to say, for man, and precisely because he knows signifiers, sex – the meanings associated with sex – are always susceptible of presenting what is inherently tied to it: the presence of death. The distinction between the life drive and the death drive is valid insofar as it manifests two aspects of the drive, but only if we correctly conceive of these two facets.

And, if you will, to underscore today before you a formula I have written here, I would say that it is precisely at the level of these significations, within the unconscious, that all sexual drives are articulated – but only insofar as they, as drives, cause to emerge as a signifier, of course, and solely as a signifier – for can one, without caution, speak of a “being-for-death”? – the signifier, strictly speaking, of death.

Under what condition, under what determinism, can this signifier effectively be introduced and erupt, so to speak, fully armed, into the analytic cure? It is precisely what can only be understood through this articulation of relationships. The function of this object (a) – insofar as it is where the subject separates, where they are no longer bound to that vacillation between being and meaning which constitutes the essence of alienation – is sufficiently indicated to us by numerous traces.

I have previously demonstrated that it is impossible to conceive of the phenomenology of verbal hallucination unless we understand the very meaning of the term we use to designate it, that is: voices.

It is because the object of the voice is present there that the perceiving subject, the percipiens, is also present, strictly speaking. Verbal hallucination is not a false perceptum, but a diverted percipiens. The subject is immanent within their verbal hallucination. This possibility exists, and it compels us to question what it is we are trying to achieve in analysis with regard to the accommodation of the percipiens.

Until the advent of analysis, the path of knowledge had always been mapped out as one of purifying the subject, the percipiens. But we say that we establish the subject’s confidence through its encounter with the filth that may sustain it, with the object (a), whose presence is no less necessary than – think of SOCRATES – SOCRATES, with his inflexible purity and his atopia, which are correlated. At every moment, intervening, there is the demonic voice.

Would you say that the voice guiding SOCRATES is not SOCRATES himself? The relationship of SOCRATES to his voice is undoubtedly an enigma that attracted the curiosity of certain psychographers in the early 19th century – and it was, indeed, to their credit to have dared, since nowadays no one would dare venture there. It is precisely here that we encounter, once again, the trace that invites us to question and to understand what we mean when we speak of the subject of perception.

But, of course, do not make me say what I have not said: this does not imply that the analyst should hear voices.

And yet, if you read a good analyst, a solid one, such as THEODORE REIK – a direct and familiar pupil of FREUD – in his book Listening with the Third Ear (a title whose formula, to be honest, I disapprove of, as if two ears were not already enough to be deaf), you will find that this third ear is described by him as a certain voice that speaks to him, guiding him, according to a dialectic that remains somewhat primitive, though it belongs to that heroic era when people knew how to listen. He tells us that he hears a voice that reveals what lies behind the patient’s deception.

It is not because we have since advanced, having learned to recognize ourselves within these distortions and divisions, and having identified those points associated with the object (a) – still scarcely emergent, though much has been discovered since – that we are excused from interrogating the function of this object (a).

It is this point that I intend to address in greater depth next time.

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Discussion

Pierre KAUFMANN:
One senses that there is some kind of connection between what you’ve just said about Booz endormi and THEODORE REIK, and what you mentioned earlier concerning the father at the beginning of chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams.

LACAN:
It’s entirely clear: he is asleep, that’s all. There’s no need to insist – he is asleep so that we, too, may be asleep with him; that is to say, so that we only understand what is meant to be understood.

Pierre KAUFMANN:
There is more to say about this…

LACAN:
But yes, of course, there is more to say, naturally. There is an infinite amount to say about this BOOZ… But, well, I’ve said a little bit about it today. It’s a small compensation – not one I gave myself, but one I’ve given you in place of something missing, with at least one indication. I wanted to invoke the Jewish tradition in order to revisit certain matters – and we must say it – to resume where FREUD left off. For it is not without significance, in so rigorous a body of work as FREUD’s, that the pen fell from his hand precisely at the point of the division of the subject. And what had he just completed before that? Moses and Monotheism, a work involving one of the most radical challenges of all.

However historically contestable his claims may be – and of course, one can always contest historical arguments, since history, without a guiding thread, can only be reconstructed arbitrarily – the fact remains that his insertion, into the heart of Jewish history, of a radical and unmistakable distinction between the prophetic tradition and another message was a decisive gesture. He was fully aware of this, as he wrote and articulated repeatedly: it was his way of placing at the core of the analytic function the unavoidable entanglement with truth.

And yet, paradoxically, it is precisely by rejecting any collusion with truth that we are able to commit ourselves to our work as analysts.

There is something somewhat amusing here, given that we are, after all, among familiar faces, and since more than a few people here are not entirely unaware of the work taking place at the heart of the analytic community.

This morning, while listening to someone who came to present to me their “life,” let’s say, or rather their misfortunes, I was reflecting on how burdensome it can be, in a normal scientific career, to be, say, the academic advisor, the research supervisor, or the laboratory head of an agrégé whose ideas you must inevitably consider when thinking about your own future advancement. This, naturally, is one of the most cumbersome things from the perspective of the development of scientific thought. Very well.

Now, there is a particular field – that of psychoanalysis – where, fundamentally, the subject is only there to seek their own authorization for free inquiry, driven by a demand for truth, and can only genuinely consider themselves authorized from the moment they begin to operate freely. And yet, through a kind of peculiar vertigo, it is precisely here that they strive to recreate, as rigidly as possible, the very same hierarchical structure of academic authorization and to make their qualification dependent on another person already qualified.

And it goes even further. Once they have found their path, their mode of thinking, their way of navigating the analytic field through the teaching of a certain figure, it is often from others – whom they themselves regard as imbeciles – that they then seek the explicit authorization, the official qualification that certifies them as capable of practicing analysis.

I find this to be yet another illustration of the differences, the overlaps, and indeed the ambiguities between these two fields.

If we say that the analyst, in their present role – and not only as part of some collective, since “collective” means nothing more than the fact that they, as flesh-and-blood beings, are immersed in a social environment – if we say that analysts themselves are part of the problem of the unconscious, does it not seem to you that this here presents:

– a particularly vivid illustration,

– and here, a particularly rich occasion for analysis?