🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

So, these four formulas are useful to have here as a reference. Those who attended my first seminar could hear the reminder of the formula that “the signifier, unlike the sign, is what represents… the term ‘represents’ being, of course, emphasized by the word ‘representing’ and the word ‘representation,’ which is why: …which represents a subject for another signifier.” Since nothing indicates that the other signifier knows nothing of the matter, it is clear that it is not a question of representation but of representing.

Accordingly, on that same date, I believed I could illustrate what I called the discourse of the Master. The discourse of the Master, insofar as, precisely, if we can see it reduced to a single signifier, this implies that it represents something, something that is already too much to call “something”; it represents x, which is precisely what needs to be elucidated in this matter.

For nothing indicates in what way the Master imposes his will. That some form of consent is required is beyond doubt! And that Hegel, on this occasion, could only refer, as to the signifier of the absolute Master, to death, is, in this case, a sign—a sign that nothing is resolved by this pseudo-origin, since, after all, for things to continue, no one has died: — neither the Master, who, after all, would only be demonstrated as the Master if he were resurrected, that is, if he had effectively passed through the ordeal, — nor the slave, for whom it is the same thing: he has precisely renounced confronting it.

The enigma of the function of the Master is therefore not immediately revealed. I have initiated—I indicate, I indicate because this is already on the path we do not need to pretend to discover, on the path that is not that of the theory of the unconscious, but rather the discovery of something that assures us that it is not self-evident that all knowledge, by being knowledge, knows itself as such.

Since what we discover in the experience of even the most basic psychoanalysis is that it is indeed something of the order, most precisely, of knowledge… not of understanding, not of representation, …but very precisely of that something which binds, in a network relationship, one signifier S₁, if you will, to another signifier S₂.

It is in such pulverulent terms that I can thus make heard—using metaphor—the emphasis that should be placed, in this context, on the term “knowledge.” It is in such a relationship… and precisely insofar as it does not know itself …that resides the foundation of what is known, of what is articulated calmly as the little Master, as the “I,” as the one who “knows a thing or two,” whom we nevertheless see, from time to time, come undone, and it is there that erupts the entire spectrum of slips, stumbling blocks, where the unconscious reveals itself.

But it is much better and much further, that in the light of analytic experience, we allow ourselves to read a biography: — when we have the means for it, when we have sufficient documents to attest to what it believes, — what it believed itself to have been as a destiny, step by step, even at times, how it believed it had sealed that destiny.

Nevertheless, it appears, in the light of this notion that “it is not certain that knowledge knows itself,” that we can read at the level of which unconscious knowledge the work was done that delivers what is effectively the truth of everything that believed itself to be, that… to operate within the schema of the discourse of the Master, of the great M, …it is invisibly the labor of the slave… the one who constitutes an unrevealed unconscious …which delivers from this life, which is worth discussing, that which, of truths, of true truths, has made so many detours, fictions, and errors emerge.

Knowledge, therefore, is placed at the center, on trial, by psychoanalytic experience. This, in itself, imposes on us a duty of interrogation, which has no reason to restrict its scope.

To put it plainly, the idea that knowledge could form… in no way, nor at any moment, be it in hope for the future, a closed totality, this, of course, did not need psychoanalysis to appear doubtful.

But in the end, it is clear that this doubt may have been approached from too low a standpoint when it comes to the Sceptics.

I speak of those who named themselves as such at a time when it constituted a school, something of which we now have only the faintest idea—of what it means to constitute a school.

But after all, what do we really know about it?

Of what remains to us from the Sceptics, perhaps, perhaps it is better to judge, knowing that we may only have what others were able to gather from them: those who did not know from where their formulas of radical questioning of all knowledge originated, even more so of its totalization.

It is an idea that shows how little impact schools have; it is an idea… that knowledge could form a totality …which, if I may say so, is immanent—immanent to the political as such. This has been known for a long time.

The imaginary idea of the whole, as given by the body, is part of political preaching, as relying on the proper form of satisfaction: that which makes a sphere, ultimately, what could be more beautiful, but also, what could be less open, what could resemble more the closure of satisfaction?

The collusion of this image with the idea of satisfaction: this is the very thing we encounter each time we come across something that forms a knot in this work that concerns the uncovering of something through the paths of the unconscious. It is the obstacle, it is the limit, it is rather the cotton in which we lose meaning and where we find ourselves obstructed.

It is important to know that it has always been used in politics and that it is strange, that it is singular to see that a doctrine, that of Marx, which established its articulation on the function of struggle, of class struggle, has not prevented the emergence of something that is for the moment precisely the problem that presents itself to us all—namely, the persistence of a Master’s discourse.

Certainly, not the structure of the old one, in the sense that it establishes itself from the place indicated under this great M,

U M

but rather that which, on the left, I mark with the U—I will tell you why—and where what occupies the place that we will provisionally call “dominant” is precisely this [S₂], which is specified as being not “knowing everything”—we are not there—but as being “all-knowing,” meaning that which asserts itself as being nothing other than knowledge, and which in common language is called “bureaucracy.” And it cannot be said that there is not something problematic in this.

If indeed we started from the fact that in my first statement, the one from three weeks ago, I had started from this: in the first status of the discourse of the Master, knowledge belongs to the slave.

That is why I believed I could indicate… I regret that a minor setback prevented me last time perhaps from returning to it to provide certain additional indications …I believed I could indicate that what occurs in the transition from the discourse of the ancient Master to that of the modern Master, who is called capitalist, is something that has been modified in the place of knowledge. I even believed I could go so far as to say that the philosophical tradition had its share of responsibility in this transmutation.

So if it is because he was dispossessed of something, it is first and foremost, of course, of communal property that the proletarian finds himself qualified by this term “dispossessed,” which justifies both the endeavor and the success of the revolution. But is it not evident that what is returned to him is not necessarily his share?

If the knowledge of which capitalist exploitation indeed deprives him by rendering it useless, that knowledge is restored to him through a form of subversion, then it is something else that is restored to him: a Master’s knowledge. And that is why he has merely changed Masters.

What remains is indeed the very essence of the Master, namely that he does not know what he wants. For that is what constitutes the true structure of the Master’s discourse.

The slave knows many things, but what he knows even better is what the Master wants, even if the latter does not know it, which is ordinarily the case, for otherwise, he would not be a Master. The slave knows it—that is his function as a slave.

That is also why it works, for after all, it has worked for quite a long time. The fact that all-knowing has taken the place of the Master, far from clarifying matters, only further obscures what is at stake, namely, truth.

Where does this notion of a Master signifier come from?

Here, the S₁ of the Master is truly nestled, revealing the bone of what constitutes the new tyranny of knowledge, and making it impossible for this place—which was perhaps the one where we hoped that, in the course of historical movement, the truth would appear—to still hold that function. This signifier is now elsewhere.

It must be produced by those who now find themselves substituted for the ancient slave, as themselves products, as they say… and as consumable as all others …in a so-called “consumer society”: the “human material,” as it was once formulated, to the applause of some who saw in it a form of tenderness. This deserves to be highlighted, since it concerns us just as much.

What concerns us now is to interrogate, to interrogate what is at stake in the psychoanalytic act. I will not take it at the level where I had hoped, two years ago, to close the loop, and which remained unfinished— the level of the act in which the psychoanalyst sits, in which he is instituted as such. I will take it at the level of experience and its interventions once the experience is established within its precise limits.

If there is a knowledge that does not know itself, as I have already said, it is to be situated at the level of S₂, that is, what I call “the other signifier.” I have insisted enough on this last year: this other signifier is not alone, the belly of the Other, of the great A, is full of them. This belly is the one that provides—like a monstrous Trojan horse—the foundation for this fantasy of an “all-encompassing knowledge.” Yet it is clear that its function implies that something must come to strike it from the outside, for otherwise, nothing will ever emerge from it, and Troy will never be taken.

What does the analyst institute?

I hear a lot of talk about the “discourse of psychoanalysis,” as if that meant something! There is… if we characterize a discourse by centering it on what is its dominant …there is the discourse of the analyst, and that is not to be confused with the discourse of the analysand, with the discourse actually spoken within the analytic experience.

What the analyst institutes as analytic experience can be stated simply: it is the hysterization of discourse, in other words, it is the structural introduction, by artificial conditions, of the discourse of the hysteric, the one here indicated with a great H:

H

The one I attempted to highlight last year by saying that this discourse existed and would exist in any case, whether psychoanalysis was there or not, that it was a discourse… I expressed it in an image because I gave it its most common support …the discourse from which our major experience has emerged, namely the detour, the winding path on which rests this misunderstanding that, in the human species, constitutes the sexual relation.

Since we have the signifier, we must make ourselves understood, and it is precisely for this reason that we do not understand each other: the signifier is precisely not made for the sexual relation. From the moment the human being is speaking, doomed, finished, is that something—which, incidentally, is impossible to locate anywhere in nature—that would be the perfect, harmonious character of copulation.

Nature presents infinite species, the majority of which, incidentally, involve no copulation at all, which obviously shows to what extent it was never in nature’s intentions that it should form, as I was recalling earlier, a whole, a sphere.

There is, in any case, one thing that is certain: if things go haphazardly for man, it is thanks to a trick that allows it, but that first renders him insoluble. That is what the discourse of the hysteric means, who, industrious as she is, if we take her as a woman… this is not her privilege: many men undergo analysis, and who, by this very fact, are also necessarily forced to go through the discourse of the hysteric, since it is the law, the rule of the game …it is a matter of knowing what can be drawn from it regarding the relationship between men and women. So we see the hysteric fabricating—as best she can—a man, a man who would be driven by the desire to know.

I posed the question in my last seminar, the question that arises from this: if we historically observe that the Master has slowly deprived the slave of his knowledge in order to turn it into a Master’s knowledge, it remains mysterious how desire… for as far as desire is concerned, if you believe me, things went quite well without it, since the slave fulfilled it even before he knew what he could desire …how desire could have come to him.

That is what my reflections last time would have focused on, if not for that charming thing that suddenly emerged from the real [Laughter]… I am assured that it is a real effect of decolonization: a hospitalized individual, a supporter of ours in old Algeria, and now stationed here, and as you can see, a delightful frolic [Laughter] …thanks to this, you will not know, at least for a certain time—since I must move forward— what connection I establish between philosophical discourse and the discourse of the hysteric, precisely in that it seems that it was the philosophical discourse that animated the Master with the desire to know.

What, then, could this hysteria in question be? There remains, nonetheless, a domain that should not be prematurely exposed. If there are those whose minds like to run a little ahead of what the speaker is saying, let them take this as an opportunity to exercise their talent—I assure them that the path, at least as I see it, is promising.

In any case, to provide a broader formulation than merely situating it at the level of the man-woman relationship, let us say that by merely reading what I inscribe here of the discourse of the hysteric, of course, we still do not know what this S₁ is. But if it is about her discourse, and if I say that it leads—when it comes to the man—to there being a man driven by the desire to know, it is because it is a matter of knowing—what?—what value she herself holds, this person who speaks.

As object (a), she is a fall, a fall resulting from this effect of discourse, whose contour is always broken somewhere. What, ultimately, the hysteric wants the man to know is in what way, through language, through this language that slips on the breadth of what, as a woman, she can open toward jouissance. This is not what matters to the hysteric. What matters to the hysteric is that the other—the other who is called the man—knows what precious object she becomes in this discourse context.

And after all, is that not the very foundation of analytic experience? If I say that to the other, it gives the dominant place in the discourse of the hysteric, it hystericizes his discourse, it makes him this subject who is asked to abandon all references other than those of the four walls that enclose him, and to produce signifiers that constitute this free association, which ultimately governs the entire field.

Saying anything at all—how can that lead to something, unless it is determined that nothing, in what may have emerged by chance, precisely as signifiers, fails to relate to this knowledge that does not know itself, and which is truly what is at work? Only, there is no reason why he should thereby know any more.

If the analyst does not speak, what can come of this abundant production of S₁? Many things, assuredly. The analyst who listens can record many things. With what an average contemporary might articulate if he is not careful, one could compile the equivalent of a small encyclopedia, producing an enormous number of keys.

If it were recorded, one could even later construct something from it, create a small electronic machine. Indeed, that is an idea some might have: to construct the electronic machine so that the analyst would merely have to pull a ticket to provide them with the answer. [Laughter]

This is what is at stake here in the discourse of the analyst… because in the analytic experience, it is he who is the Master. In what form—this, of course, is what I will have to reserve for our next discussions. Why in the form of (a)—only here do I mark it—I have already emphasized it elsewhere?

But what is remarkable is that, on his side, it is on his side that there is S₂, that there is knowledge. That this knowledge – he acquires it from listening to his analysand, – or that it is already acquired knowledge, identified at a certain level as what can be limited to analytic know-how. Only, what must be understood from these schemas, as was already indicated… – placing S₂ in the Master’s discourse, in the position of the slave, – and then placing it, in the modernized Master’s discourse [Disc. U], in the position of the Master, …this is not the same knowledge. M M “modernized”→U

Here, in what position is it? In the position that, in the Master’s discourse, Hegel… the most sublime of hysterics [Laughter] …HEGEL designates as being that of truth.

For it cannot be said that The Phenomenology of Spirit consists of starting from Selbstbewusstsein, supposedly grasped at the most immediate level of sensation, and implying that all knowledge knows itself from the outset. What would be the point of this whole phenomenology if it were not about something else?

Only, it must be said, what I call the hysteria of this discourse lies precisely in the fact that it eludes this minimal distinction that would allow one to realize that even if this historical progression… which is, in fact, nothing more than the march of schools …were to lead to “absolute knowledge,” this would only serve to mark the annulment, the failure, the vanishing of what alone motivates the function of knowledge: its dialectic with jouissance, the fact that “absolute knowledge” would be, purely and simply, the abolition of this term. Anyone who studies the text of The Phenomenology closely can have no doubt about it.

What, then, does this position of S₂ in the place of truth bring us?
What is truth as knowledge?
It is indeed the case to ask: how can one know it without knowing?

It is an enigma. Well, that is the answer: “it is an enigma,” among other things.
I will give you another example of what it can also be.
Both have the same characteristic, which is proper to truth: that it can never be stated in full.
If our dear “truth”—from the imagery of Épinal—that emerges from the well, it is never more than half-bodied.

I spoke about this in Italy…
in one of the conferences I was asked to give—I do not know why—
and which I delivered rather poorly—why?
…I mentioned the Chimera, in which precisely the original character of the discourse of the hysteric is embodied.

She poses an enigma to the man Oedipus…
who perhaps already had a complex, though not necessarily,
certainly not the one that was later named after him
…he answers her in a certain way, and that is how he becomes Oedipus.

What the Chimera asked him, there could have been many other answers: 4 legs, 2 legs, 3 legs.
He could have said: it is Lacan’s schema!
That would have produced an entirely different outcome!

He says: “It is a man,” and then he further specifies, “a man as an infant”:
– as an infant, he started on 4 legs,
– did he rise on two?
– or did he take up a third?

It is the infant, and at the same time, he shoots straight like a bullet into his mother’s womb!
This is, indeed, what is rightly called the Oedipus complex.

But I think you can see what the function of the enigma means here:
a half-saying, just as the Chimera appears as half a body, only to disappear entirely once the solution is given.
Knowledge as truth—this defines what the structure of what we call an interpretation must be.

If I have insisted at length on the difference in level between enunciation and statement,
it is precisely so that the function of the enigma may take on meaning,
but of another kind, which I will now discuss.

The enigma is precisely this: an enunciation—I leave it to you to turn it into a statement.
Deal with it as best you can, just as Oedipus did: you will suffer the consequences.
That is what the enigma is about.

But there is something else, which one hardly thinks about, which I have occasionally brushed against,
teased from time to time, because, truthfully, it concerned me often enough
for it to be inconvenient, for me to speak about it easily.

And it is called “the quotation.” A quotation consists, in the course of a text where you advance more or less well,
if you find yourself in the right places in social struggle,
suddenly citing Marx, and adding: “Marx said…”
— if you are an analyst, you cite Freud at that moment. That is crucial! [Laughter]
— The enigma is the enunciation… and you must handle the statement yourself!
— The quotation is: I pose the statement, and for the rest, I give you the solid backing of the author’s name,
which I leave in your charge.

And that is perfectly fine; it has nothing at all to do with the more or less shaky status of the author function.
When one cites Marx or Freud…
it is not by chance that I have chosen these two names
…it is according to the role their words play in a discourse for the supposed reader that one cites them.

This is the importance of the function of the quotation: in its way, it is also a half-saying.
It is a statement that one tells you is only valid insofar as you already participate in a certain discourse,
a structured discourse, at the level of the fundamental structures that are displayed here on the board.

You will notice that this is the only truly sensitive point…
but could I have explained it until now?
…that makes citation…
whether or not one cites an author
…potentially significant at a second level.

I will help you understand this—I hope you will not take it badly—by something entirely familiar.
Suppose that, at a second stage, one cites a phrase while indicating its source, from the author’s name,
Mr. Ricœur, for example. Suppose that one cites the same phrase, but puts it under my name.
It absolutely cannot, in both cases, have the same meaning. [Laughter]
I hope, through this, to make you feel what I mean by citation.

Well, these two registers, insofar as they precisely participate in the half-saying,
this is what provides the medium, and, if one may say so, the ethic, under which interpretation intervenes.
Interpretation…
here, those who use it are aware of it—
…interpretation is, just as much, and in equal measure, an enigma:

— an enigma as much as possible drawn from the fabric of the analysand’s discourse,
an enigma that you, as the interpreter, can in no way complete by yourself,
one that you cannot consider as an admission without lying,

— and quotation, on the other hand, meaning taken within the same text as a particular statement,
a statement that, in itself, might appear as an admission,
but only if you connect it to the entire context—
there, you call upon the one who is its author.

For what is striking about the institution of the analytic discourse,
and what is the driving force behind transference, is not…
as some have thought they understood, and from me!
…that the analyst is the one who is placed in the function of the supposed subject of knowledge.

If speech is given so freely to the analysand…
it is precisely in this way that he receives this freedom
…it is because he is recognized as being able to speak like a Master,
which is to say, like a starling,
and that it will yield results just as good as in the case of a real Master,
that it is supposed to lead to knowledge,
knowledge for which the one who agrees in advance to be the product of the analysand’s cogitations
becomes the guarantee, the hostage—
that is, very precisely, the psychoanalyst, insofar as, as this product,
he is ultimately destined to loss, to elimination from the process,
I mean that he must be able to assume this position.

If, at the level of the Master’s discourse, it is already clear in the simple functioning of the relations between the Master and the slave that the desire of the Master is the desire of the Other, since it is the desire that the slave anticipates, the question is quite different when it comes to what exactly the analyst takes the place of in order to unleash this movement of investment in the subject supposed to know, a subject who, by being recognized as such, is from the outset fertile ground for that something called transference.

Certainly, it is all too easy to see here the shadow of a satisfaction in being recognized.
But that is not the essential point: assuming that the subject knows what he knows…
even more so than the hysteric, for whom this is the truth of her conduct but not her very being…
he, the analyst, becomes the cause of the analysand’s desire.

What does this strangeness mean?
Should we consider it as an accident, a historical emergence, something that appeared for the first time in the world, anticipating what was to follow?

This is a path that may, perhaps, lead us on a long detour.
Yet you will notice that this function has already appeared before, and it is not for nothing that Freud so often turned to the pre-Socratics, to Empedocles among others, as you know.

For reasons related to the fact that I know that at 2 o’clock something takes place here in this amphitheater,
from now on, I will conclude, as I am doing today, at a quarter to two,
and I will see you again on the second Wednesday of January.