🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

We are going to move forward, and to avoid, perhaps, a misunderstanding, among other things, I would like to give you this rule of first approximation: the reference of a discourse is what it confesses to wanting to master; that alone is enough to classify it precisely within the kinship of the Master’s discourse.

And that is precisely the difficulty of the one I am trying to bring as close as possible to the analyst’s discourse: it must be positioned at the opposite of any will—at least any confessed will—of mastery. I say “at least confessed,” not that it has to be concealed; after all, it is always easy to slip back into the discourse of mastery.

To tell the truth, we start from there in what constitutes teaching, from the discourse of consciousness that has recovered itself, that recovers itself every day, indefinitely. Someone very close to me—of course, in psychiatry, one of my best friends—restored to it its finest touch: discourse of synthesis, discourse of consciousness that masters. It is to him that I was responding in certain remarks I made some time ago on Psychic Causality, remarks that are there to testify that, well before taking up the analytic discourse, I already had some orientation when I told him something along these lines:

“How could it be otherwise than to apprehend all this psychic activity, how could it be apprehended otherwise than as a dream, when one hears, a thousand and a thousand times throughout the day, that bastard chain of destiny and inertia, of rolls of the dice and of stupefaction, of false successes and unrecognized encounters, which form the common text of a human life?”

So do not expect anything more subversive in my discourse than not claiming to provide the solution.
Nevertheless, it is clear that nothing burns more than what in discourse makes reference to jouissance.
Discourse constantly touches upon it because it originates from it; it stirs it again as soon as it attempts to return to that origin, and in that, it contests any pacification.

Freud holds a strange discourse, it must be said, one most contrary to coherence, to the consistency of a discourse.
The subject of the discourse does not know himself as the subject holding the discourse.
That he does not know what he is saying—that is still acceptable; people have always made up for that.
But what Freud says is that he does not know who is saying it.

Knowledge…
for knowledge, I believe I have already insisted enough for it to sink into your minds…
knowledge is something that is said, that is spoken.
Well, knowledge speaks on its own—that is the unconscious.

That is where he should have been attacked by what is called, more or less diffusely, phenomenology.
It was not enough, to contradict Freud, to recall that knowledge knows itself ineffably;
it was necessary to strike at this:
it is that Freud emphasizes that which anyone can know,
it is that knowledge spills out, that knowledge enumerates itself, details itself,
and that is what does not go by itself,
it is that what is spoken—the rosary—no one speaks it; it unfolds on its own.

If you allow me, that is where I wanted to begin, with this aphorism. You will see why I hesitated.
I did as I usually do—fortunately, this time, I did it before twelve thirty-one,
so as not to delay the end of our meeting this time.

What I wanted to start with, if I were to start as I always want to, abruptly…
it is because I want to that I do not do it—I am taming you, I am sparing you the shocks…
the aphorism is this, which I hope will strike you with its obviousness,
because it is for this reason that Freud, despite the protests that, let’s be honest, greeted his entry into the marketplace of ideas,
what imposed itself was that Freud does not talk nonsense. [Laughter]
That is what gave him this kind of precedence that he has in our time.
It is probably also around this that there is another, one whom we know, despite everything, has survived quite well.
Both Freud and Marx—what characterizes them is that they do not talk nonsense.

This can be observed in the fact that, in contradicting them, one always risks slipping rather well into nonsense.
They disorganize the discourse of those who try to latch onto them;
they frequently freeze it into a kind of academic, conformist, reactionary recursion, irreducibly so.
Heaven forbid that these contradictors, if I dare say, should actually talk nonsense;
they would provide Freud with his proper continuation, they would be in a certain order,
the order of that which, after all, is at stake.

For after all, one wonders why, from time to time, someone is labeled an idiot.
Is it really such a devaluation?
Have you not noticed that when one calls someone an idiot, it actually means that they are not quite a passionate idiot?
What is disheartening is that we do not really know how they relate to jouissance;
that is why we call them that.

This is also what makes Freud’s discourse meritorious: precisely, he is up to the task.
He rises to the level of a discourse that stands as close as possible to that which pertains to jouissance,
at least as close as it was possible to get until him.

It is not easy, it is not easy to situate oneself at this point where discourse emerges,
or even—when it returns there—stumbles around jouissance.
Obviously, on this point, Freud sometimes eludes us, abandons us; he leaves unanswered the question of feminine jouissance.

According to the latest news, Mr. Gillespie…
a prominent figure who has distinguished himself through all sorts of bargaining operations
between the various currents that have shaped psychoanalysis over the last fifty years…
expresses, I don’t know what kind of elation, in the latest issue of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
a singular elation regarding the fact that, thanks to a certain number of experiments
carried out at the University of Washington on vaginal orgasm,
a bright light would be shed [Laughter] on the debate regarding
whether or not, in female development, jouissance is initially reduced
to the equivalent of male jouissance.
The work of one named Masters and another, Johnson, is, to be fair, not without interest.

But when I see appearing there…
I must say, without having been able to refer directly to the text, but through certain citations…
that the major orgasm, as it would be for the woman, pertains to “the total personality,”
I wonder in what way the use of cinematographic devices…
recording images in color [Laughter], inserted into an appendage meant to represent the introduced penis,
and thus capturing from within what happens on the wall surrounding it upon penetration…
I wonder how this apparatus can capture the perspective of “the total personality.” [Laughter]

It is perhaps very interesting, of course, as an accompaniment,
to be studied in parallel with what Freud’s discourse allows us to advance,
but this is precisely what gives meaning to the word déconner,
as in déchanter: you know what déchant is—it is something written beside,
in the margin of plain-chant, it can be sung as well, it can serve as accompaniment,
but ultimately, it is not quite what one expects from plain-chant.

And so, this is why there is so much déchant,
why it is necessary here to recall, in its brutal relief,
something that emerges from what I could call
the “attempt at economic reduction” that Freud applies to his discourse on jouissance.

It is not without reason that he marks it in this way;
you will see the effect it produces when it is stated directly.
But this is what I believed I had to do today, here, in a form that, I hope, will strike you,
even though it will teach you nothing new, except the right tone of what Freud discovers.

We are not going to speak of jouissance just like that.
I have already said enough for you to know that jouissance
is “the barrel of the Danaïdes,” and that once one enters it, one does not know how far it goes:
it begins with a tickle and ends with a gasoline blaze.
That, that is always jouissance.

I will approach the matter from another angle,
one that cannot be said to be absent from analytic discourse.
If you read, finally, the… the true anniversary corpus that this issue constitutes,
and which one can understand the authors take pride in for its solidity,
revealed by these fifty years…

I ask you to put it to the test:
take any issue from these fifty years,
and you will never be able to tell when it was published,
and it always says the same thing.
It is always just as insipid, and since analysis preserves,
it is always the same authors. [Laughter]
Simply, with fatigue, they have at times reduced their contributions:
there is one who expresses himself in a single page.

And they congratulate themselves that, in sum, these fifty years
have well confirmed these fundamental truths:
that the driving force of analysis is kindness,
and that what has been particularly emphasized over these years,
with the gradual fading of Freud’s discourse,
is the solidity and the glory of a discovery known as the autonomous ego,
that is, the ego shielded from conflicts.

This is what results from fifty years of experience,
by virtue of the injection of three psychoanalysts—
who had flourished in Berlin—into American society,
where this discourse of a solidly autonomous ego
was undoubtedly promising attractive results.
For a return to the Master’s discourse, indeed, one could hardly do better.
It gives us an idea of the feedback effects,
if one can call them “retrogressive,”
of any attempt at transgression—
which, after all, analysis was at one time.

So, we are going to put things a certain way,
and since you will easily find it on one page or another,
since I am telling you that this is also one of the common themes of analytic propaganda,
you will find it here in English: it is called “happiness.”
We call it in French le bonheur.

Happiness—unless one defines it in a rather dismal way,
namely, that it means being like everyone else,
which, after all, may well be what the autonomous ego amounts to—
happiness, one must admit, no one knows what it is.
But if we believe Saint-Just—Saint-Just, who said it himself—
happiness, since that time, the time of Saint-Just,
has become a factor of politics.

So let us try here to give substance to this notion through an abrupt statement as well, one that I ask you to take note of as being central to Freudian theory: there is no happiness except that of the phallus. Freud writes it in all sorts of forms, even in the naïve way of saying that nothing can be approached as a more perfect jouissance than that of male orgasm.

Only, where Freudian theory places its emphasis, is that it is only the phallus that is happy, not its bearer. [Laughter]
Even when—not out of selflessness, we might say, but out of sheer resignation—he carries it, the aforementioned phallus, within a partner who is supposed to despair at not being its bearer herself.

This is precisely what psychoanalytic experience teaches us positively: the bearer of the aforementioned phallus—if I may put it that way—struggles to make his partner accept this privation, in the name of which all his efforts of love, his small attentions, and his tender services are in vain, since he only reopens the very wound of privation. This wound, therefore, cannot in any way be compensated by the satisfaction the bearer might have in soothing it; rather, on the contrary, it is most certainly exacerbated by his very presence, by the presence of that which causes this wound through its absence.

This is exactly what was revealed to us by what Freud was able to extract from the discourse of the hysteric.
From this point, we understand that the hysteric symbolizes this primary dissatisfaction,
that her promotion of unfulfilled desire—the one I have emphasized, the one I have highlighted by relying on the most minimal example, namely, what I have commented on in that writing that remains under the title “Direction of the Cure and the Principles of Its Power”,
the dream—let us recall it—known as “The Beautiful Butcher’s Wife”…

Of the beautiful butcher’s wife and her husband, the fornicator, who, for his part, is a real fool in gold,
which is why she must show him that she does not care about what he wants to overwhelm her with on top of everything else,
which means that it will not change anything essential, despite the fact that she already has this essential. There it is!

What she does not see—because she, too, has her own limits, her own narrow horizon—
is that this essential aspect of her husband, if she were to leave it to another woman,
she, in turn, would find plus-de-jouir in it,
because this is precisely what the dream is about.
She does not see it in the dream, that is all we can say.
There are others who do.

Because Dora, this is exactly what she does.
She blocks, through the adoration of the object of desire that the woman has become in her horizon,
through that woman whom she wraps herself in—
the one who, in the case study, is called Madame K,
whom she adores under the figure of that Madonna of Dresden that she goes to contemplate—
she blocks, through this adoration, her phallic claim.

This is all that allows me to say that the beautiful butcher’s wife does not see that, in the end,
like Dora, she would be happy—
very precisely, this object—
in leaving it to another woman.
These are indications; there are other solutions.
If I mention this one, it is because it is the most scandalous.

There are indeed many other refinements in the way of substituting for this jouissance,
which the apparatus…
which is that of the social order…
this jouissance, which the apparatus that culminates in the Oedipus complex presents
as being the only one that would grant happiness.
Precisely because of this, this jouissance is excluded.
This is properly the meaning of the Oedipus complex.

This is precisely why what is of interest in analytic investigation
is how something, the origin of which we have defined from a source entirely different from phallic jouissance,
this localized, this, so to speak, gridded function of plus-de-jouir,
how it is brought in—this function of plus-de-jouir—
as a substitute for the prohibition of phallic jouissance.

I am here only recalling striking facts from Freudian discourse,
which I have emphasized many times,
and which I wish to insert here into their configuration—not at the center,
but in connection with—the situation I am trying to articulate
concerning the relationship between discourse and jouissance.

It is in this that I recall them and wish to place an additional emphasis—
if you will allow me—
an emphasis intended to somewhat shift the aura that, for you,
may still cling to the idea that Freudian discourse is centered
on this biological datum of sexuality.

I will take my measure here—it is something I must confess
I did not discover all that long ago,
and it is always the most visible things, those that are spread out before us,
that we see the least.

I suddenly asked myself:
“But how do you say ‘sex’ in Greek?”

The worst part is that I didn’t have a French-Greek dictionary, and besides, there isn’t one. Well, there are some small, ugly ones.
But still, I must acknowledge that I had found γένος (génos), which, of course, has nothing to do with sex,
since it means a whole lot of other things: race, lineage, descent, reproduction.
Then another word came to mind, though its connotations are certainly quite different: φύσις (phusis), nature.
But that is not at all what we mean when we say “sex”; it does not have that tone, that nuance.

This division of living beings—one part of them—into two classes,
along with everything we now realize this entails,
very probably including the irruption of death,
since the others—my God—those that are not sexually differentiated,
do not seem to die all that much.

The issue, of course, is not at all this biological reference.
This is precisely what shows that we must be very, very cautious before thinking that it is a reminder,
not only of some form of organicism but even of a biological reference,
which would foreground the function of sex in Freudian discourse.

It is here that we realize that sexe—
with the emphasis it carries for us, its usage, its meaningful dissemination—
is sexus. And when we say “compared to Greek,”
one would have to continue the investigation into other languages,
but in Latin, it is clearly connected to secare.

In sexus, the Latin word,
there is—implicitly—what I first highlighted,
namely that everything turns around the phallus,
and precisely as the phallus, and solely for that reason,
since, of course, the phallus is not the only thing in sexual relations.

Only, what makes this organ privileged
is that its jouissance can, in a way, be well isolated.
It can be conceived of as excluded—to put it bluntly,
I am not going to drown this in symbolism.
It has precisely this property that we can, moreover,
consider within the whole field of what constitutes sexual organs
as something very local, very exceptional.

There are not many animals for whom the organ,
the decisive organ of copulation, is something so well isolatable in its functions
of tumescence and detumescence, determining a curve,
called orgasmic, that is perfectly definable:
once it’s over, it’s over.

“Post coitum animal triste,” as Galen already said. [Laughter]
Though that is not necessarily true!
But it does indeed mark, well, that… that it feels frustrated, doesn’t it?
There is something in it that does not concern it.
It can take things differently, it can find it all very amusing,
but in any case, Horace found it rather sad,
which proves that he still had some illusions about the relation to Greek φύσις (phusis),
to the budding force that would constitute sexual desire.

So this puts things in their place:
seeing that this is, after all, how Freud presents things,
and that if there is anything in biology that could echo—
a vague resemblance, not at all a root—
this position, as we will now indicate,
the roots of discourse…
if there were something that, in waving “bye-bye” to the domain of biology,
could finally give us an approximate idea
of what this fact represents—
that everything plays out around this stake:
one does not have it, and the other does not know what to do with it—
then it would be something resembling what happens in certain animal species.

I recently saw—and that is why I mention it—
some very curious fish,
monstrous, as a fish must be where the female is about this size,
while the male is… [Lacan gestures between thumb and index finger].
He comes to latch onto her belly,
and he latches on so well
that their tissues become indistinguishable:
one cannot, even under a microscope,
see where the tissues of one begin and those of the other end.
He remains there, attached by the mouth like this,
and from there, he fulfills, so to speak,
his function as a male.

It is not unthinkable, indeed, that this greatly simplifies the problem.
It simplifies the problem of sexual relations
when the male is reduced to what remains,
after a certain amount of time,
in this little biological pocket,
which is primarily the testicles.
In the end, he is exhausted,
he absorbs his heart, his liver—
all of that disappears,
and he remains suspended there, in the right place.

The question is to articulate what is at stake
in this phallic exclusion within the grand human game
of our tradition,
which is that of desire.
Desire does not have an immediately proximate relation to this field.
Our tradition posits it for what it is: eros,
the presentation of lack.

And here, too, one might ask:
— How can one desire anything?
— What is missing?

One day, someone said:

“But do not trouble yourselves, nothing is missing; look at the lilies of the field, they neither toil nor spin, yet they are in their place in the Kingdom of Heaven.”

It is evident that, to make such truly defiant statements, one had to be precisely the one who identified with the negation of this harmony. At least, that is how it was understood, how it was interpreted when he was designated as “the Word.”

He had to be “the Word” itself to be able to deny evidence to such an extent.
At any rate, that is the idea people formed of him.
He never said as much. He said, if we are to believe one of his disciples:

“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

But the fact that he was made into “the Word” precisely marks that people still had some idea of what they were saying when they thought that only “the Word” could so thoroughly disavow itself.

It is true that the lilies of the field can well be imagined as a body entirely given over to jouissance.
Every stage of its growth identical to a sensation without form.
Jouissance of the plant.
Nothing, in any case, allows it to escape.
Perhaps it is an infinite suffering to be a plant.
But no one amuses themselves by dreaming about that, except me.

It is not the same for the animal, which has what we interpret as an economy:
the possibility of movement, above all, to obtain the least amount of jouissance.
This is what is called the “pleasure principle”:
let us not remain where we enjoy, because God knows where that might lead—
I have already told you this earlier.

Now, there is this thing: that jouissance, after all, we know the means of it.
I spoke earlier of tickling and of burning.
That, we know how to do.
That is even what knowledge is.
No one, in principle, wants to use it too far—
and yet, the temptation is there!

That is precisely what Freud discovered, around 1920,
and it is, in a way, the turning point of his discovery.
It is when, after having spelled out the unconscious—
of which I challenge anyone to say that it could be anything other than the recognition that
“there exists a perfectly articulated knowledge for which, strictly speaking, no subject is responsible.”

And that when a subject comes to encounter, to touch it,
he finds himself…
he finds himself, the one who speaks,
who suddenly encounters this knowledge he was not expecting…
he finds himself, indeed, quite disoriented.

That was the first discovery.
And that it necessarily led to this,
that Freud said to the subjects:

“Speak, speak then, do as the hysterics do,
we will see what knowledge you encounter,
and how you are drawn into it,
or on the contrary, how you push it away,
we will see what happens.”

It was there that he made this discovery, the one he called
“beyond the pleasure principle.”

It is this:
the essential thing—the essential thing that determines
what we are dealing with in the exploration of the unconscious—
is repetition.

That repetition does not mean:
what is finished is started again,
like digestion or some other physiological function.

Repetition is a notation,
a precise notation of a trait,
which I have drawn from Freud’s text as identical to the unary trait,
the “small stroke,” the element of writing,
a trait insofar as it commemorates an irruption of jouissance.

That is why it is conceivable
that pleasure should be violated in its rule and principle,
why it yields to displeasure…
there is nothing more to say—
not necessarily pain—
but to displeasure, which means nothing other than jouissance.

It is here that the insertion of generation,
of the genital, of the procreative,
within desire,
shows itself as entirely distinct from sexual maturity.

Speaking of premature sexualization is certainly of interest,
though one must acknowledge that what is called in humans
the first sexual surge is, in this respect,
very evidently what it is said to be—premature.

That, besides the fact that it may indeed involve a play of jouissance,
it remains no less the case
that what will introduce the division between libido and nature,
well, it is not only organic auto-eroticism.

There are other animals besides humans
that are capable of tickling themselves…
humans, that has not led them to any great elaboration of desire…
monkeys.

On the other hand:
what finds favor by virtue of discourse.

It is not just a matter of speaking about prohibitions,
but simply of a dominance of the woman as mother,

— the mother who speaks,
— the mother who is asked,
— the mother who orders,
and who, at the same time, establishes this dependence of the little human.

The woman grants jouissance the boldness to wear the mask of repetition.
The woman here presents herself as she is, as the institution of masquerade;
she teaches her child to parade, she carries him toward plus-de-jouir,
because she, the woman, like the flower, plunges her roots into jouissance itself.

The means of jouissance are opened by the principle
that it has renounced closed jouissance, the jouissance foreign to the mother.
This is why a vast social complicity must be inserted,
one that reverses what we might call, in its natural state,
the difference of the sexes into the sexualization of organic difference.

This reversal implies a common denominator:
the exclusion of the specifically male organ.
From then on, the male both is and is not what he is,
in relation to jouissance.

And from there, too, the woman is produced as an object,
precisely by not being what he is:

— on the one hand: sexual difference,
— and on the other hand: being that which he renounces as jouissance.

There it is.
These reminders are absolutely essential at this moment,
when, in speaking of The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,
the question arises regarding the place of psychoanalysis in politics.

Intrusion into the political sphere can only take place
by recognizing that there is no discourse…
and not just the analytic discourse…
no discourse except that of jouissance,
at least when one hopes to derive from it the work of truth.

The characterization of the Master’s discourse
as containing a hidden truth does not mean
that it hides itself, that it conceals itself.
The word “hidden” in French has its etymological virtues:
it comes from coactus, from the verb coactare, coactitare, coactitacare…
it means that there is something compressed,
something like a superimposition,
something that demands to be unfolded in order to be readable.

It is clear that its truth is hidden from it,
that a certain Hegel articulated that truth is delivered to it
through the labor of the slave.

Only, here is the thing:
this is a Master’s discourse—this discourse of Hegel—
which is based on the substitution of the State for the Master
through the long process of culture,
ultimately leading to absolute knowledge.

It seems to have been definitively refuted
by a few discoveries, those of Marx,
to which…
I am not here to comment…
I will not add an appendix here,
but I will simply show how, from the psychoanalytic viewpoint,
we are in a position to question, first of all,
this idea that labor engenders absolute knowledge on the horizon,
or even any knowledge at all.

I have already brought this up before you;
I cannot revisit it here,
but this is one of the axes along which
I ask you to situate yourselves
in order to grasp what is at stake in analytic subversion.

If labor [lapsus]…
If knowledge is a means of jouissance,
labor is something else.

Even if it is performed by those who possess knowledge,
what it engenders may certainly be truth,
but no labor has ever engendered knowledge.

Something stands in opposition to it,
which is what a closer observation reveals
about the relationship in our culture
between the Master’s discourse
and something that has emerged—
something that reopens the examination of what,
from Hegel’s perspective,
was coiled around that discourse:
the avoidance of absolute jouissance,
insofar as it is determined by the fact that,
in fixing the child to the mother,
social complicity establishes her
as the chosen site of prohibitions.

On the other hand, the formalization of knowledge,
which renders all truth problematic—
is this not what suggests
that something…
rather than what we are told about a supposed progress
resulting from the labor of the slave—
as if there had been any progress at all in his condition,
when in fact, quite the opposite is true…

— that something may give us an idea, instead,
of a transfer, a dispossession,
of that which was originally inscribed,
buried, within the world of the slave,
but in relation to which
it was the Master’s discourse that had to assert itself.

Which had to assert itself,
but which also, as a result,
in entering into the mechanism of its own repeated assertion,
came to apprehend the loss
of its own entry into discourse,
came to see emerge,
to put it plainly, this object (a)
which we have pinned to plus-de-jouir.

That is, in sum—
that, no more—
what the Master had to make the slave pay for:
as the sole possessor of the means of jouissance,
he was content with that little tithe,
a plus-de-jouir,
of which, after all,
nothing suggests that the slave was himself unhappy to give it.

It is something entirely different
when we look toward the horizon
of the rise of the subject-Master
within a truth that affirms itself
in its own self-equality,
within that je-cracy I once spoke of,
which seems, so it appears,
to be the essence of all assertion
within the culture
that has seen this Master’s discourse flourish above all others.

This subtraction from the slave of his knowledge—which, upon closer examination, constitutes the entire history of that dialectic whose steps Hegel follows one by one—is something peculiar, for he did not see where it led. And for good reason: he was still within the field of Newtonian discovery; he had not yet witnessed the birth of thermodynamics.

Perhaps, then, if he had been able to work through the formulas that, for the first time, unified this field now designated as thermodynamics, he might have recognized in them something of the pure reign of the signifier, of the signifier repeated on two levels, S1 and S1 again:
– The first S1 is the dam,
– The second S1 is what lies beneath—the basin that receives it and drives a turbine.

There is no other meaning to the conservation of energy than this mark of an instrumentation that signifies the Master’s power. What is collected in the fall must, to that extent, be preserved—this is the first of the laws (first law of thermodynamics: conservation of energy).

Yet, in the interval, something, unfortunately, disappears—
more precisely, something does not lend itself to being returned,
to being restored to its point of origin:
this is what is known as the Carnot-Clausius principle,
though a certain Mayer contributed greatly to it (second law of thermodynamics: entropy, the degradation of energy).

The analogy—
the analogy between such knowledge and a discourse that, in its essence, gives primacy to both beginning and end
while neglecting everything that, within an interval, might belong to knowledge—
this projection onto the horizon of the new world, of these pure numerical truths,
of what is accountable—
does this not signify something quite different from the emergence of an absolute knowledge?

Is it not the very ideal of a formalization where nothing counts anymore…
for energy is nothing other than what can be counted,
what, if you manipulate the formulas in a certain way,
always yields the same total…
this shift, this quarter-turn (counterclockwise),
which results in a radically new articulation being established in place of the Master (S1),
one that is entirely reducible, in formal terms, to knowledge (S2 → a).

In place of the slave (S2),
what is inserted is not something that, in any way,
could be integrated into the order of this knowledge,
but rather something that is its product (a).

→
(counterclockwise quarter-turn)

What Marx denounces—
what he denounces in this process of dispossession…
without realizing that the secret lies within knowledge itself…
is the reduction of the worker to nothing more than value itself:

plus-de-jouir elevated one level higher,
no longer plus-de-jouir but simply something inscribed as value,
to be recorded or deducted from the totality of what accumulates—
what accumulates in an essentially transformed nature.
The worker is nothing more than a unit of value.

A warning to those for whom this term might strike a familiar chord.

This is precisely what Marx denounces in surplus value—
this dispossession of jouissance.

Yet this surplus value is the memorial of plus-de-jouir,
an equivalent of plus-de-jouir.

The consumer society derives its meaning from this:
that what constitutes its “element”—
the element, in quotation marks, which is designated as “human”—
for these individuals, what is given is the homogeneous equivalent (general equivalent: money)
of any plus-de-jouir,
which is the product of our industry—
a plus-de-jouir of cheap imitation, to put it bluntly.

And still, this can take hold:
one can pretend to plus-de-jouir—
this illusion still captivates many.

If I wanted to give you something to dream about,
where this process—whose status is that of our science—begins,
I would tell you, since I recently reread it,
to amuse yourselves with The Satyricon.

I do not find what Fellini did with it bad.
He made a spelling mistake in writing Satyricon—
this will never be forgiven—
there is no “y.”
But apart from that, it is not bad…
though it is less good than the text.

It is less good than the text because, in the text, one is serious,
one does not stop at images,
and one sees what it is really about.

To put it plainly,
it is a good example for distinguishing
what pertains to the Master and what pertains to the wealthy.

What is marvelous, is it not, about discourses…
discourses of any kind,
even the most revolutionary ones…
is that they never state things bluntly,
as I have just attempted to do—
a little, at least…
well, I did what I could.

Considering how long economists have existed,
we can see to what extent this is of interest to us, as analysts,
because if there is anything to be done in analysis,
it is the establishment of this other energetic field,
which would require other structures.

You can unify as much as you like…
at least, if you are Maxwell: the field of thermodynamics and electromagnetism—
…but still, you will hit a dead end when it comes to gravity.
And it is rather curious because gravity is precisely where everyone started,
but in the end, what does it matter…

As for the field of jouissance…
which, alas, will never be called—because I surely won’t have the time,
not even to sketch out its foundations—will never be called “the Lacanian field”…
as for the field of jouissance, there are some observations to be made.

Well, it is quite curious that among the many authors
whose works I occasionally glance through,
there is even one called—well, whom we call—Smith,
who wrote something called The Wealth of Nations.

And then, when you open the book,
you see that among economists, he is not the only one;
they are all there, racking their brains—Malthus, Ricardo, and the others:
what is wealth?

And then they are all struggling to define what it is:
– Use value—surely that must count for something,
– And exchange value—because it was not Marx who invented all that…
One finds oneself quite embarrassed.

It is extraordinary that…
that no one, absolutely no one, not even for a moment—
I am not saying they should have dwelled on it—
but that no one even made the simple remark that wealth,
well, it is the property of the wealthy…
just as psychoanalysis—I once said it—is made by the psychoanalyst.
That is its principal characteristic:
one must start with the psychoanalyst…
so why, when it comes to wealth, would we not start with the wealthy?

And here—here perhaps intervenes,
and because I must be quick—I must stop exactly in two minutes,
for reasons, well, of scheduling…
I will still tell you something that emerges
from an experience that is not specifically that of an analyst,
but something anyone can observe.

The wealthy man—this is very important—has a certain property.
He buys, he buys everything in sum, well, he buys a great deal.
But I would like you to meditate on this:
he does not pay.

One imagines that he pays,
for accounting reasons tied to the transformation of plus-de-jouir into surplus value.
But first of all, everyone knows that surplus value,
he accumulates it for himself quite regularly.
There is no circulation of plus-de-jouir,
and very precisely,
there is one thing he never pays for: knowledge.

For there is more than just the dimension of entropy
in what happens on the side of plus-de-jouir;
there is something that someone noticed—
that knowledge implies an equivalence between this entropy and information.

Of course, it is not quite as simple as Mr. Brillouin says,
but still, what must be seen is that the wealthy man is a Master…
and this is what I ask you to go and see in the Satyricon…
only because he has redeemed himself.

The Masters at the horizon of the ancient world were not businessmen.
Look at how Aristotle speaks of them—it repulses him.

On the other hand, when a slave has redeemed himself,
he is a Master only in this:
that he begins to risk everything.

This is precisely how a character—
none other than Trimalchio himself—
expresses himself in the Satyricon.

That from the moment he is wealthy,
why can he buy everything without paying?

Because he has nothing to do with jouissance;
that is not what he repeats.
What he repeats is his redemption.

He redeems everything,
or rather, whatever presents itself—he redeems it.
He is well suited to be a Christian.
He is, by destiny, the redeemed one.

And why does one allow oneself to be bought by the wealthy?

One allows oneself to be bought by the wealthy
because what he gives you
partakes of his very essence as a wealthy man.

Knowing that by buying from a wealthy man,
from a developed nation,
you believe simply—
this is the true meaning of The Wealth of Nations—
that you will partake in the level of a wealthy nation.

Only, in this affair, what you lose is your knowledge,
which gave you your own status.

That knowledge, the wealthy man acquires it as well,
as an added bonus.
Simply, precisely—he does not pay for it.

Well, today we have reached the limit—
the limit of what I can say before vacating this room.

I wanted to introduce this:
what may come of the promotion—
at the level where the function of the wealthy operates,
for whom knowledge is nothing but an instrument of exploitation—
what may come of the return of the voice,
of what plus-de-jouir, of (a), entails.

This is where the function of the analyst, in a way,
gives us something like the dawn.

I will try to explain to you next time what its essence is.

That essence is certainly not to turn this element into an element of mastery.
Since, as I will explain to you, everything revolves around failure.