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(All parts in English)

That the analytical discourse…
at the level of structure where we attempt this year to articulate it, closes the loop of the three others, respectively named—I recall this for those who come here sporadically—named:
– the discourse of the Master,
– that of the Hysteric, which I have placed in the middle today,
– finally, the discourse that interests us here to a high degree, since it is the one situated as the University discourse.

…That this analytical discourse closes what I have just called the quarter-circle shift by which the three others are structured,
does not mean that it resolves them, that it allows one to pass to the “reverse”; it resolves nothing: the reverse does not explain any place.

It is a matter of a relationship of “weave,” of “text,” of “fabric” if you will.
Nevertheless, this fabric has a relief, and it catches something—certainly not everything, of course, since this word…
which exists only through language…
…language precisely shows the limit: that even in the world of discourse, nothing is “whole,” as I say,
or better still, if you prefer: that the “whole” as such is refuted, is even supported by the necessity of being reduced in its use.

This is to introduce us to what today will be the object of a quite essential approach,
at the end of this demonstration, regarding what a reverse is.

“Reverse” resonates with “truth,” “in truth”: there is something that deserves to be emphasized from the outset.
It is not an easy word to handle outside of this context: in logic, in propositional logic, where it is made a value,
a value reduced to inscription, to the manipulation of a symbol, ordinarily the capital V, its initial.
We will see that this usage is particularly devoid of hope, which is precisely what makes it salutary.

Nevertheless, everywhere else, and notably among analysts—I must say it, and for a reason—female analysts, it provokes
a curious shiver, akin to the one that has been pushing them for some time now to confuse analytical truth with revolution.
I have already pointed out the ambiguity of this term, which can just as well mean “revolution” in its use in celestial mechanics,
namely, “a return to the starting point.” In certain respects, this is indeed what analytical discourse [A], as I initially stated,
can accomplish with regard to the three other orders [H, U, M], situating three other structures.

That is why it is to women…
since it is not by chance that they are less confined than their partners in this cycle of discourses:
man, the male, the virile, as we know him, is a creation of discourse—
nothing, at least nothing that can be analyzed about him, can be defined otherwise—
of course, the same cannot be said of the woman,
nevertheless, no dialogue is possible except by situating oneself at the level of discourse.

…That is why, before shivering, the woman animated by the revolutionary virtue of analysis could say to herself
that far more than “man,” she stands to benefit from what we shall call “a certain culture of discourse.”

It is not that she lacks talent for it, quite the contrary: when she is animated by it, she becomes an eminent guide in this cycle.
This is what defines the hysteric, and this is why, on the board, breaking the usual order of what I write there, I have placed her at the center.
It is clear, however, that it is not by chance that the word “truth” provokes in her this particular shiver.

Only, truth is not, even in our context, easily accessible. Like certain birds…
of those I was told about when I was little…
like certain birds, it can only be caught by putting salt on its tail.
Of course, it is not easy.

My first reading book had as its first text a story entitled…
it was true, that is what it talked about—
…”The Story of a Half-Chicken.”

It is not a bird easier to catch than the others when the condition is to put salt on its tail.

What I have been teaching since…
since I have been articulating something about psychoanalysis…
could very well be titled “The Story of a Half-Subject.”

Where lies the truth of the relationship between this story of a half-chicken and the story of a half-subject?
One can approach it from two angles:
— The story, my first reading, determined the development of my thought, as one would say in an academic thesis,
— and then the structure, namely, the story of the half-chicken, may well have represented for the author who wrote it
something in which was reflected—I do not know what kind of premonition, not of psychoanalysis as it is called in
Le Paysan de Paris, but of what concerns the subject.

What is certain is that there was also an image. In the image, the half-chicken was in profile from the right side.
One did not see the other, the cut side, where it probably was, since what was visible on its right side:
without a heart but not without a liver, in both senses of the word. [Laughter]

What does that mean?
It means that truth is hidden, but perhaps it is nothing more than absence.
That would make everything easier if that were the case: we would just need to know everything there is to know.

And after all, why not? When we say something, there is no need to add that it is true.
An entire problematic of judgment revolves around this.

You well know that Mr. Frege presents assertion in the form of a horizontal stroke
and distinguishes it from what happens when one asserts that it is true—
by placing a vertical stroke at the left end, it then becomes affirmation.

Only, what is true? Well, my God, it is what has been said. And what has been said is the sentence.
But the sentence can be borne by nothing other than the signifier, insofar as it does not concern the object,
unless, like a logician whose extremism I will soon bring forward,
you propose that there is no object except for the pseudo-object.

For us, we hold to this: the signifier does not concern the object but meaning. As for the subject of the sentence, there is only meaning.
Hence the dialectic from which we started, which we call the “step of meaning,”
with all the ambiguity of the word “step”—
the one that begins with the “non-sense” forged by Husserl: “green is a for.”
Which can very well have a meaning if, for example, it concerns a vote,
with green balls and red balls.

Only, what carries us along…
because what is at stake in being is held in meaning, and what has the most being…
…well, in this path, it is in this path, at least, that one has taken this “step of meaning,”
to think that what has the most being cannot not exist.

Meaning, if I may say so, is charged with being; it has no other meaning.
Only, it has been noticed for some time that this is not enough to carry weight,
precisely the weight of existence.
A curious thing: from “non-sense,” it does have weight; it takes hold of the stomach,
and particularly, this is the step taken by Freud—
to have shown that this is what is exemplary about the witticism, the phrase without head or tail.

That does not make it any easier to put salt on its tail: truth flies away, truth flies away precisely
at the moment when you no longer wanted to grasp it.
Besides, since it had no tail, how could you have?
Stupefaction and illumination [Cf. Freud: Verblüffung and Erleuchtung].

As you remember, a little story, quite flat by the way, of replies about the Golden Calf,
may be enough to wake it up, this calf that sleeps standing.
Then one sees that it is, if I may say so, of filth.

Between “The hard desire to endure” of Éluard
and the desire to sleep, which is indeed the greatest enigma—
though no one seems to take notice of it—
that Freud advances in the mechanism of the dream, for let us not forget:
“Wunsch zu schlafen,” he says…
he did not say “Schlafen Bedürfnis”: “need to sleep”—that is not what it is about—
…it is “Wunsch zu schlafen” that determines the operation of the dream.

It is curious that he complements this indication with the following:
that a dream that wakes one up does so precisely at the moment
when the dream could let go of the truth.
So that one wakes up only to continue dreaming, to dream in the real—
to be more exact, in reality.
All of this strikes, it strikes with a certain lack of meaning.
Truth, like nature, comes galloping back—
a gallop so fast that the moment it crosses our field, it has already disappeared to the other side.

The absence I spoke of earlier has—in French—produced a curious contamination:
if you take sans, s.a.n.s., supposedly coming from the Latin sine…
which is highly improbable since its earliest form was something like s.e.n.z.…
we realize that absentia, in the ablative, used in legal texts,
is where this “s” comes from, which terminates sans—s.a.n.s.

“Without head or tail”—we have already produced this little phrase
since the beginning of what we are stating today.
But then what: sans, sans, and then sans—eh! powerful!
Is it not a matter of a power?
One entirely different from this “in power” of an imaginary virtuality,
which is only powerful in being deceptive—
but rather about what being has in meaning,
which must be taken otherwise than as being full meaning,
which is rather what—regarding being—escapes it,
as happens in the witticism properly spoken,
as well as, as we well know, it always happens in the act.

The act—whatever it may be—
what escapes it is what matters.
That is also the step taken by analysis,
in the introduction of the “failed act” as such,
which, after all, is the only one of which we know for sure that, unfailingly,
it is always a successful act.

There is, around this, an entire play—
a play of litotes, whose weight and emphasis I have tried to show
in what I call the passans:
– anxiety is not without an object,
– we are not without a relationship with truth.

But is it certain that we must find it intus—inside?
Why not beside: Heimlich–Unheimlich?
Everyone who has read Freud has been able to retain what lies in the ambiguity of this term,
which precisely emphasizes—by not being inside yet evoking it—everything that is strange.

On this matter, languages themselves vary strangely.
Have you noticed that homeliness in English means “without fuss”?
Yet it is indeed the same word as Heimlichkeit.
It does not carry quite the same emphasis.

That is also why sinnlos is translated into English as meaningless,
that is, not the same word, which, to translate Unsinn, will give us non-sense.

Everyone knows that the ambiguity of English roots lends itself to peculiar evasions.
On the other hand, English—curiously and in an almost unique way—will call without, the sans: “with… being outside.”
Truth indeed seems foreign to us—I mean, our own truth.

It is with us, no doubt, but without concerning us as much as one might claim.
All that can be said—and this is what I was saying earlier—is that we are not without it,
a litote meaning, in sum, that while within our reach, we would gladly do without it.
From there, we move from sans to pas-sans and from there to s’en passer (“to do without it”).

I will take a small leap here, just like that, and turn to the author who most strongly articulated
what results from this enterprise:
the proposition that there is no truth except as inscribed in some proposition,
the attempt to articulate what, in knowledge as such…
knowledge being constituted by a foundation of propositions…
what, in all rigor, in knowledge, can function as truth,
what, of anything proposed, can be said to be true and sustained as such.

This concerns a man named Wittgenstein.
Can I say he is easy to read? Certainly, try it.
If you can be content to move through a world that is strictly one of cogitation,
without seeking any fruit therein—which is your bad habit:
you insist on picking apples under an apple tree, even gathering them from the ground;
anything is better for you than picking no apples at all.

Dwelling for a certain time under an apple tree,
whose branches can assuredly be enough to captivate your attention very closely,
provided you oblige yourself to do so,
will nonetheless have this characteristic:
you will not be able to derive anything from it,
except for the affirmation that nothing else can be called true except conformity to a structure…
which I will not even situate—stepping for a moment out of the shade of this apple tree—as “logical”…
…no, but rather as the author himself affirms: “grammatical.”

Which, for this author, constitutes what he identifies with the world.
Grammatical structure—this is what the world is.
In sum, nothing is true except a composed proposition
that includes the totality of facts constituting the world.

If we choose, within the whole, to introduce the element of negation that allows articulation,
we will, of course, derive an entire set of rules that constitute a logic.
But “the whole,” he tells us, is tautological—
which is to say, as foolish as this:
– that whatever you state is “either ‘true’ or ‘false,'”
– and that stating that this is “either ‘true’ or ‘false'” is necessarily true,
but also, this cancels meaning.

All that I have just said, he concludes in Proposition 6.54—since he numbers them—
all that I have just stated here is, strictly speaking, Unsinn,
that is, it cancels meaning.
Nothing can be said that is not tautological.
What is at stake, after passing through this long sequence of statements—
which, I assure you, each one is extremely compelling—
is that the reader must rise above everything that has just been stated to conclude:
that there is nothing else to say,
but that all that can be said is nothing but non-sense.

I may have been a bit quick in summarizing Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for you.
Let us add just this remark:
that nothing can be said that is not vain yet true,
except on the condition of starting from the idea…
from the approach that is Wittgenstein’s…
that truth is an attribute of “the raw proposition.”

I call “raw proposition” what elsewhere would be placed in quotation marks,
in Quine, for instance—
that is, where one distinguishes the statement from the enunciation,
which is an operation that…
having precisely constructed my graph on this foundation…
I do not hesitate, nevertheless, to declare arbitrary.

For it is clear that it is defensible…
as is Wittgenstein’s position…
to say that no sign of affirmation needs to be added
to what is pure and simple assertion.
Assertion announces itself as truth.

How then can one escape Wittgenstein’s conclusions
except by following him precisely where he is led—
namely, toward the elementary proposition,
whose notation as true or false
must, in any case, ensure…
whatever it may be, whether it is true or false…
the truth of the composed proposition?
Whatever the facts of the world,
I would go further—
whatever we state about them—
the tautology of the totality of discourse,
this is what makes the world.

Let us take the most reduced proposition,
I mean grammatically.
It is not for nothing that the Stoics had already based themselves on this,
to introduce it in the simplest form of implication.
I will not even go that far—
I will take only the first member.
Since, as you know, an implication is a relation between two propositions,
“It is daytime” is indeed the minimum:
— “It”: neutral,
— “It is”: it makes,
occasionally, it has the same meaning.

Just as Wittgenstein upholds the world as consisting of facts…
— nothing, unless supported by a fabric of facts,
— nothing—moreover—that is inaccessible,
…only the fact is articulated.

This fact—that it is daytime—is nothing more than what has been said.
Truth does not depend…
this is where I must reintroduce the dimension that I arbitrarily separated…
truth depends only on my enunciation, that is, whether I state it appropriately.

Truth is not internal to the proposition, in which only the fact is announced—the artificial construct of language.
It is true that it is a fact, a fact that consists in my saying it,
on the occasion that it is indeed true.
But that it is true is not a fact if I do not explicitly add that, moreover, it is true.

But as Wittgenstein very rightly points out, it is actually superfluous for me to add this.
Only here is the issue:
what I must say instead of this superfluous addition is that I must have a real reason for saying it,
which will become clear in due course.

Precisely, I do not say that I have a reason, I continue the sequence,
that is, my deduction, and I integrate “It is daytime”…
perhaps as a fallacy, even if it is true…
into my incitement, which might be to take advantage of it to make someone believe
that they will see clearly regarding my intentions.

The stupidity, if I may put it this way, is to isolate the artificial nature of “It is daytime.”
It is a stupidity that is prodigiously fertile,
because from it emerges a foundation, and very precisely this:
the consequence of pushing to its ultimate conclusions what I myself have taken as a foundation,
namely, that there is no metalanguage.

There is no other metalanguage than all the forms of trickery,
if by that we mean those curious operations that follow from this:
“That the desire of man is the desire of the Other.”
That all this trickery rests on this:
the desire to be the Other—I mean the big Other—of someone,
where the figures are drawn in which their desire will be captured.

Thus, this Wittgensteinian operation is nothing but an extraordinary parade,
a detection of philosophical trickery.

There is no meaning except that of desire…
this is what one can say after reading Wittgenstein…
no truth except in what it hides—that very desire—in its lack,
so as to make nothing of what it finds.

And under no clearer light does it appear what results from the fact that logicians have, from the beginning,
dazzled us with the paradoxical air of what has been called “material implication”…
you know what it is; it was only recently called “material”—it is implication, plain and simple.
It was called “material” recently because suddenly, people rubbed their eyes
and began to understand the enormity of what implication entails—
I am speaking of the one supported by a certain Stoic.

That is to say, that three implications are indeed legitimate:
— that the false implies the false,
— that the true implies the true,
— but that it is by no means to be ruled out that the false implies the true,
since ultimately what matters is what is implied,
and if what is implied is true, well, the whole implication is true as well.

Only, this means something!
Why could we not, by slightly shifting the word “implies,”
realize what is striking here—
something that was very well understood in the Middle Ages:
“ex falso sequitur quodlibet”—
that the false, on occasion, contains the true,
which also means that the true follows—from anything.

But if, on the other hand, we reject the idea that the true contains the false,
that it could have a false consequence…
for that is what we reject,
otherwise, no articulation of propositional logic would be possible…
we arrive at this curious observation:
— that truth therefore has a genealogy,
— that it always traces back to an initial truth from which it can no longer decline.

This is such a strange indication,
so contested by our entire existence—
our existence as subjects, I mean—
that by itself, it would be enough to call into question
whether truth can in any way be isolated as an attribute,
an attribute of anything that can be articulated as knowledge.

Thus, the analytical operation is something distinct from advancing into this field
in a way different from what I would call “incarnated” in Wittgenstein’s discourse—
that is to say, a psychotic ferocity—
beside which the well-known “Occam’s razor”…
where it is stated that we must admit no logical notion except what is necessary…
is nothing.

The truth—let us return to the principle—is certainly inseparable from the effects of language taken as such.
No truth, of course, can be localized anywhere other than in the field where it is enunciated, where it is enunciated as best it can.
So it is true that “There is no truth without falsehood.” At least in its principle, this is true.

But “there is no truth without falsehood” [slip of the tongue], I beg your pardon:
“There is no falsehood without truth”—this is false.
I mean that truth is found only outside of any proposition.
To say that truth is inseparable from the effects of language taken as such is to include the unconscious within it.

To advance, on the other hand…
as I recalled last time…
that the unconscious is the condition of language takes on its meaning here, in the sense of wanting an absolute meaning to emerge from language,
and as one of the authors of this discourse on “The Unconscious,” subtitled “A Psychoanalytic Study,” once inscribed,
this is something to be placed under a bar—incidentally, arbitrarily treated in light of what I have made of it—
this superimposition of an S—crossed by a bar—upon itself, this designation of a signifier whose meaning would be absolute.

Where is this indicated? Very easy to recognize, for there is only one signifier that can respond to this position:
it is the “I,” the “I” inasmuch as it is transcendental, but also inasmuch as it is illusory.
This is the ultimate root operation, the one that is irreducibly ensured precisely,
and this is what shows that it is not by chance that I designate it in terms of the articulation of university discourse.

The transcendental “I” is the one that anyone, in enunciating knowledge in a certain way, conceals as truth: the S₁, the “I” of the Master.
The “I” identical to itself is very precisely that from which the S₁ of pure imperative is constituted,
that is to say, very precisely the one where the “I” evades, for the imperative is always in the second person.

But the myth of the “ideal I,” of the “I that masters,” of the “I” through which at least something is identical to itself—namely, the enunciator—
is very precisely what university discourse cannot eliminate from the place where its truth resides.

Of course, no philosophy is reducible to this. From every university enunciation of any philosophy whatsoever…
even if it were the one that could, at the limit, be labeled as the most opposed to it,
namely—if it were philosophy—Lacan’s discourse…
irreducibly arises the “I-cracy.”

For philosophers, the issue has always been much more flexible and pathetic. Recall what it is about—
they all more or less admit it, and some among them, the most lucid, admit it outright: they want to save the truth.
This led one of them, indeed, quite far—to refuse, like Wittgenstein, to reach this conclusion: that in making it the rule
and the foundation of knowledge, there is nothing left to say, nothing in any case that concerns it as such.
To avoid this rock,
this rock where the author, assuredly, is close to the analyst’s position in that he eliminates himself completely from his discourse.

I spoke earlier of psychosis. It is such a point of convergence between the most assured discourse and something striking
that indicates itself as psychosis, simply by feeling its effect,
that it is remarkable that a university—such as the English university in particular—gave it a place,
a place somewhat “apart,” as the saying goes.
A place of isolation, in which the author himself collaborated perfectly,
so much so that from time to time,
retiring to a small country house,
he would return and continue this relentless discourse, of which one can say
that even the discourse of Russell’s Principia Mathematica was contradicted by it.
That one did not want to save the truth.
“There is nothing that can be said about it,” he said.
Which is not certain, since we deal with it every day.

But how does Freud define the psychotic position in a letter I have often cited?
Precisely by what he calls “Unglauben”: the refusal to know anything about the place where truth is at stake.
Strangely enough, this is so pathetic for the university world that one can say that Politzer’s discourse,
“On the Foundations of Concrete Psychology”,
which was prompted by his approach to psychoanalysis, is a fascinating example of it.

Everything is driven by this effort to break out: he clearly feels that there is some kind of ramp there,
through which, from the university discourse that has shaped him from head to toe, he might emerge.
One must read this little work, reissued as a paperback, though as far as I know,
there is no proof that the author himself approved of this reissue.
Everyone knows the drama of the overwhelming flowers that covered what was initially posed as a cry of revolt.

Scathing pages on what psychology is, particularly university psychology,
are strangely followed by an approach where, certainly,
one can say that the essential thing that made him grasp that this was the barrier to be crossed,
his hope of emerging from this psychology,
is that he emphasized something—something no one had done in his time—
that the essence of the method, of the Freudian method for approaching the formations of the unconscious,
is to rely on the narrative: the emphasis on this fact of language,
from which, truly, everything could have started.

One would not go so far as to say that at the time—this is just a minor historical detail—
that at the time, it was unthinkable that someone,
even a caïman from the École Normale,
would have the slightest idea of what linguistics was.
But all the same:
to have approached the idea that this was the spring,
the spring that gives hope to what he strangely calls “concrete psychology,”
is quite remarkable…

You must read this little book! If necessary, I will read it with you: one day, I will make it the subject of another discussion here. But I have enough to say not to linger on something whose striking peculiarity each of you can perceive: it is that, step by step, in trying to escape from university discourse, one inevitably ends up re-entering it.

For what objections will he raise against the statements…
I mean: against the terminology of the mechanisms that Freud advances in his theoretical progress…
if not that, by being formulated around isolable facts, around formal abstractions—as he expresses himself confusedly—
he lets slip what, for him, is the essential requirement in the field of psychology: that no psychic fact be enunciated
without preserving what he calls “the act of the I,” and even more, the continuity—this is what is written—
“the continuity of the I.”

A term that undoubtedly allowed the rapporteur I mentioned earlier,
who introduced this small reference to Politzer,
perhaps in an attempt to win over the audience he had at the time—
it is always useful, after all, to refer to a university scholar who also happened to be a hero;
what a good opportunity to bring him up.

But that is not enough if, instead of demonstrating the irreducibility of university discourse,
in relation to analysis itself,
one merely takes advantage of this reference—
in this kind of singular struggle that this book testifies to.
For he cannot fail to sense just how close analytical practice truly is
to something that he ideally sketches out as being completely outside the realm
of everything that has been done so far in psychology.
Yet, he cannot help but fall back onto this demand for the “I.”

Not that I myself see anything there that is irreducible.
The rapporteur in question dismisses it all too easily
by simply stating that the unconscious is not articulated in the first person.
And he arms himself for this with certain of my own statements,
concerning the fact that the subject’s message is received from the Other in its inverted form.
That is certainly not a sufficient reason.
Elsewhere, I have indeed said that truth “speaks I”: “I, truth, speak.”

Only, what neither this author nor Politzer ever considers
is that the “I” in question may well be innumerable,
that there is no need for the continuity of the “I” for it to multiply its acts.
But let us leave that aside; it is not the essential point.

Faced with this use of propositions,
before we part ways, should we not present the following: A child is beaten?
This is indeed a proposition that constitutes the entirety of this fantasy.
Can we assign it anything that falls under the terms of true or false?

Here, in this case, we have an exemplary instance of what cannot be eliminated from any definition of a proposition,
as we grasp the following: that this proposition has an effect—of what?—
of sustaining itself through a subject, certainly, but—as Freud immediately analyzes—
one divided by jouissance.

Divided, meaning that the one who enunciates it is also that child who wird, verdit, verdoie,
who turns green from being beaten, geschlagen.
But let us play a little further: this child who turns green from being beaten,
who jests with virtue, these are the misfortunes of the “vers-tu,”
the one who strikes him, who is not named, regardless of how the sentence is enunciated.

This “You beat me” is that half of the subject whose formula ties it to jouissance.
It receives, indeed, its own message in an inverted form:
which means, its own jouissance in the form of the Other’s jouissance.
And this is precisely what is at stake when the fantasy meets the image of the father,
joined to what was at first another child.

It is the fact that the father enjoys beating him that sets the emphasis of meaning here,
as well as the emphasis of this truth that is only half-formed.
For equally, the one who identifies with the other half—the subject of the child—
was not actually that child, except, as Freud says,
insofar as we reconstruct the intermediate stage…
never, of course, in any way through memory, substantialized…
where, indeed, it is he who makes this sentence the support of his fantasy,
who is the beaten child.

We are thus brought back to this fact: that a body may be without a figure,
for the father or the Other—whichever it may be…
who here plays the role, the function, who grants the place of jouissance…
is not even named.

A God without a figure—yes, that is indeed the case,
but nevertheless, not graspable except as a body.
What has a body and yet does not exist? Answer: the great Other.
And if we believe in this great Other,
it has a body, ineliminable from the substance of the one who said, “I am what I am,”
which is an entirely different form of tautology.

And it is in this…
allow me, before we part, to advance this idea…
that I will state the following, which is so striking in history
that, truly, one wonders why it has not been more sufficiently…
or even at all… emphasized:
it is that materialists, as experience has proven…
I speak of their most recent historical eruption in the 18th century…
are the only authentic believers. Their god is matter.

Well yes, why not?
That holds up better than all the other ways of grounding it.

Only, for us, this is not enough, because we have precisely logical needs—if you allow me the term—because we are beings born from plus-de-jouir, the result of the use of language. When I say “the use of language,” I do not mean that we employ it: it is we who are employed by it; language employs us, and it is through this that it enjoys.

And that is why the only chance for the existence of God is that “He”—”He” with a capital “H”—”He” enjoys, that “He” is jouissance. And that is why, for the most intelligent of materialists, namely Sade, it is clear that the aim of death is in no way the inanimate. Read the words of Saint-Fond around the middle of Juliette, and you will see what it is about. If he says that death constitutes nothing other than an invincible collaboration with the natural operation, it is because, of course, after death, everything remains animated for him—animated by the desire for jouissance, the jouissance of what he may well also call “Nature,” and of which it is evident, from the entire context, that it is the jouissance—of what?—of a singular being who has only to say: “I am what I am.”

And why is this so? How does he sense it so clearly?
This is where something plays out: that in appearance, he is sadistic, but in reality, he refuses to be what he is and what he states himself to be. By making this furious appeal to a being given over to Nature, in its murderous operation from which new forms are always reborn, what is he doing if not seeing his own impotence to be anything other than the instrument of this divine jouissance? That is Sade the theorist.

Why is he a theorist? Perhaps, at the last minute— as I usually do—I will have time to tell you.
The practitioner, on the other hand, is something else entirely.
The practitioner, as you know from a number of stories—of which, indeed, we also have written testimony from his own hand—is simply a masochist. This is the only clever and practical position when it comes to jouissance, because exhausting oneself in being the instrument of God is exhausting! [Laughter]

Whereas the masochist, for his part, is a delicate humorist.
He does not need God for this; his valet suffices. He takes his pleasure in jouissance within naturally wise limits, and like every good masochist—as one can see by simply reading them—he laughs. He is a Master humorist.

So why, for heaven’s sake, is Sade a theorist?
Why this exhausting wish—because it is completely beyond his reach, and this is written, explicitly designated as such:
those particles where the fragments of lives are scattered,
some of them torn, shredded, dismembered
after the most extraordinary imagined acts—
for them to be fully destroyed, they would truly have to be struck by a second death.

And whose reach is that within?
Of course, it is within our reach; I have stated this long ago in relation to Antigone.
Only, as a psychoanalyst, I can recognize that the second death comes before the first, and not after, as Sade dreams it.

Sade is a theorist. And why? Because he loves the truth. It is not that he wants to save it—he loves it!
And what proves that he loves it is this: that he refuses it,
that he does not seem to realize that in declaring this God dead, he exalts Him,
that he testifies to Him in this way: that he, Sade, reaches jouissance only through those little means I was speaking of earlier.

What could it mean, that by loving the truth, one thus falls into a system so evidently symptomatic?
But here, something is designated: that by posing itself as the residue of the effect of language…
as that which makes it so that from jouissance, the effect of language only extracts
what I previously described as the entropy of a “plus-de-jouir”…
is it not that we see truth as external—outside discourse?

But what, then? It is the sister of this forbidden jouissance.
I say “it is the sister,” in that it is related only in this way: that if the most radical logical structures
are indeed connected to this pedicle torn from jouissance,
then conversely, the question arises:
to what jouissance do these conquests of our time in logic respond—
those which state, for example, that no logical system, however weak it may be,
can be consistent except by marking its strength through facts of incompleteness,
where its limit is inscribed?

This way in which the very foundation of logic proves to be dehiscent—
to what jouissance does it respond?
In other words, what is truth here?

It is not in vain nor by chance that I designate this relationship as one of sorority—
the position of truth in relation to jouissance.
We will have to develop it, to enunciate it in the discourse of the hysteric.

Curiously, very recently…
this thing that everyone already knew…
someone went to give a lecture in the Americas to say that Freud had what is publicly, prudishly called an affair—”an affair”—with his sister-in-law.

And so what?
It has long been known that Mina Bernays had a place in Freud’s concerns.
Backing this up with a few Jungian rumors changes nothing. [Laughter]

But this position of the sister-in-law—is it not for this reason…
I will leave you with this question…
is it not for this reason that Sade—of whom everyone knows how much the Oedipal prohibition…
as the theorists of courtly love have always said: “There is no love in marriage.”
…separated him from his wife—
is it not because of his sister-in-law that Sade loved—loved so much—the truth?