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(All parts in English)

Voilà, so it must begin to appear to you that “the reverse side of psychoanalysis” is precisely what I am advancing this year under the title of the Master’s discourse, of course not in an arbitrary way, this Master’s discourse already having, in the philosophical tradition, what I would call, well… its letters of credit.

Nevertheless, the Master’s discourse, as I am trying to extract it, takes on a certain accent due to the fact that we can say that in our time, it manages to be extracted in a kind of purity, through something we experience directly and at the level of politics.

What I mean by this is that it encompasses everything, even what believes itself to be “revolution.”
More precisely, through what is romantically called “Revolution” with a capital R, the Master’s discourse completes its revolution, in the other sense of “a turn that comes full circle.”

On the horizon of this emphasis…
a bit aphoristic, I admit, but which is made, as the aphorism is intended to do,
which is made to illuminate with a simple flash…
on the horizon of this, there is something that interests us—I mean you and me—there is the fact that this Master’s discourse has only one counterpoint: the analytical discourse, still so inappropriate.

I call it a counterpoint in the sense that its symmetry…
if there is one, and there is one…
its symmetry is not in relation to a line, nor in relation to a plane, but in relation to a point.
In other words, it is obtained through something that is the closure of this Master’s discourse to which I just referred.

In other words, what I have not been able—because it is beginning to tire me—to rewrite on the board, namely, the arrangement of the S: barred S̶, numbered S₁, S₂, and dual, as I reinscribed it last time and of which I hope that all of you, more or less, still have the transcription on your papers, this inscription that I did not have time to make, given that I cannot do everything, well, it quite sufficiently shows this symmetry in relation to a point, which makes this psychoanalytic discourse A be found precisely at the opposite pole of the Master’s discourse M. There.

As for the psychoanalytic discourse, we sometimes see certain terms serving as a phylum in the explanation, the term “father,” for example. We sometimes see someone attempting to gather its main data.
It is a tedious exercise, tedious when it is done within what is expected, at the point where we are now, from a psychoanalytic statement and enunciation—that is to say, from a genetic reference.

One believes oneself obliged, concerning the father, to start from childhood, from identifications,
and then it really becomes something that can lead to extraordinary gibberish, to a strange contradiction.
We will be told that primary identification is the one that binds the child to its mother; that indeed seems self-evident.

It is very curious, however, that if we refer to Freud, to the 1921 discourse called Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,
it is very precisely to identification with the father that we will refer as primary. And that is certainly very strange.
It is indeed very strange to see that, in short, what Freud points out there is that quite primordially, the father turns out to be the one who presides over the very first identification, and in this very sense, that he is, in an elected way, the one who deserves love.

This is certainly very strange and must oppose, must, if I may say so, contradict everything that the development of analytic experience certainly establishes regarding the primacy of the child’s relationship with the mother!
Strange discordances between Freudian discourse and the discourse of psychoanalysts!
Perhaps these discordances result from some confusion?

And the order I am trying to establish, with reference to what are, in a way, primordial configurations of discourse,
is there to remind us that it is strictly unthinkable to articulate anything ordered in the analytic discourse,
except by remembering that before extracting something from what we know so well to be the result of a reconstructive collaboration with the one who is in the position of the “analysand,” whom we help, whom we, in a way, allow to enter his career,
we must remember that what grounds this entire reconstruction, this very possibility of help in the form of interpretation,
this effort we make to extract, in the form of imputed thoughts, what has indeed been experienced by the one who, in this instance, truly deserves the title of “patient,”
is something which, in order to be effective, must not make us forget that subjective configuration,
through the signifying linkage, has a perfectly identifiable objectivity: there, at such a point of linkage, the very first one, from S₁ to S₂,
there it is possible for that gap to open which is called the subject.

(S1→S2)→(a↓”+”S)

And there, the effects of linkage—of linkage, in this instance, signifying—operate, such that somewhere this experience…
which is more or less properly called “thought”
…occurs or not, there occurs something that holds to a chain, exactly as if it were thought.
Freud never said anything else when he spoke of the unconscious.

This objectivity not only induces but determines this position called the position of the subject as the locus of defenses. Well, what I am advancing, what I am going to announce anew today, is that, in projecting itself toward the means of jouissance, which are what is called knowledge, the Master-signifier—I will return to what must be understood by this—the Master-signifier not only induces but determines castration.

Let us start from what we have advanced regarding the Master-signifier. What can this mean?
Assuredly, at the outset, there is none; all signifiers are in some way equivalent,
playing only on the difference of each one from all the others, by the fact of not being the other signifiers.

It is also through this that each one is capable of coming into the position of Master-signifier,
and very precisely in this:
that its possible function—it is in this way that I have always defined it—is to represent a subject for every other signifier.
Only, the subject, the subject it represents, is not univocal:
it is indeed represented, but it is also not represented.
Something at this level remains hidden in relation to this very signifier.

It is around this that the game of psychoanalytic discovery is played,
which is not, of course—like anything else—without having been in some way prepared by this hesitation,
which is more than a hesitation, which is this ambiguity sustained under the name of “dialectic” by Hegel,

– when he finds himself positing, in some way from the outset, that “the subject affirms itself as knowing itself,”

– when he dares to begin from Selbstbewußtsein in its most naive enunciation, namely, that all consciousness knows itself to be consciousness.

And yet, he weaves this same kind of beginning with a series of crises, of Aufhebung, as he calls it,
from which it results that this Selbstbewußtsein, itself the inaugural figure of the Master,
finds its truth in the labor of the Other par excellence,
of the one who only knows himself by having lost this body,
this very body on which he relies, for having wanted to keep it in his access to jouissance,
the slave, in other words.
How can we not attempt to break this Hegelian ambiguity?

How can we not be led to another path of inquiry,
starting from what is given to us from an experience to which it always pertains to return,
so as to grasp it more closely—psychoanalytic experience—and, most simply,
starting from this: that there is a use of the signifier that can be defined as originating essentially from the splitting of a Master-signifier with this very body we have just mentioned,
this body lost by the slave,
so that it becomes nothing other than the one where all the other signifiers inscribe themselves.

It is in this way that we could give form to this knowledge that Freud defines by placing it within this enigmatic parenthesis of Urverdrängt,
which precisely means: what has never had to be repressed because it has been so from the beginning,
this knowledge without a head, if I may say so,
which is indeed a politically definable fact in terms of structure.

From there, everything that is produced…
I mean in the proper, full sense of the word produced by labor…
everything that is produced concerning the truth of the Master,
namely what he conceals as a subject,
will join this knowledge insofar as it is split, Urverdrängt,
insofar as it exists and that no one understands anything about it.

This is something that—I hope—is not without resonance for you,
without your knowing, moreover, whether this resonance comes from the right or from the left,
and which, first of all, structures itself in what is called the mythical foundation of societies
that we can analyze as “ethnographic,”
that is to say, as escaping the Master’s discourse.

For the Master’s discourse begins with the predominance of the subject,
precisely in that it tends to sustain itself only from this ultra-reduced myth:
that of being identical to its own signifier myth: S = S₁.

This is why, last time, I pointed out to you what has an affinity in nature with this discourse,
which is what is called mathematics.
There, “A” represents itself, without needing a mythical discourse to give it its relations elsewhere.
It is in this way that mathematics represents the Master’s knowledge,
as constituted on other laws than mythical knowledge.

The Master’s knowledge is produced as knowledge entirely autonomous from mythical knowledge,
and this is what is called science,
and this is what I pointed out to you last time in a brief evocation of what is at stake in thermodynamics,
and further: in any unification of the physical field,
which rests on this:
the conservation of a unity that is nothing but a constant,
always rediscovered in counting…
I do not even say in quantification: in counting…
the manipulation of numbers that is defined in such a way
that it makes this constant appear in counting.
This, and only this, is sufficient,
this alone sustains what is called the foundation of physical science: energy.

This is what also gives it a support that allows it to easily grasp this: that mathematics can only be constructed from this:
– “that the signifier can signify itself,”
– that the A you have written once can be signified by its repetition of A [A=A: principle of identity].

A position that is strictly untenable regarding the function of the signifier: it can signify everything, except assuredly itself.

It is this infraction of the rule of this initial postulate [the signifier can signify everything, except itself]
that must be discarded for mathematical discourse to be inaugurated.

Between the two, from this original infraction to the construction of the discourse of energetics,
the discourse of science is sustained, in logic, only by making truth a play of values, by radically eluding all its dynamic power.
As you know, the discourse of propositional logic…
fundamentally—as has been emphasized—tautological…
consists of ordering composed propositions in such a way that they are always true,
regardless of whether the elementary propositions are true or false.

Is this not to say that it is about discarding what I was just calling the dynamism of the work of truth?
Well, the question, the question is precisely about this, which specifies and distinguishes analytical discourse by raising the question
of what use this form of knowledge is, the one that rejects, that excludes the dynamics of truth.

The first approximation is this:
it serves to repress what inhabits mythical knowledge, but at the same time, by excluding it, to no longer know anything of it
except in the form of what we find again in the guise of the unconscious, the form of a disjointed knowledge, a wreck of that knowledge.

It is not true that in any way what is to be reconstructed from this disjointed knowledge returns to the discourse of science,
nor to its structural laws. This is to say that here, I distinguish myself from what Freud states about it.
To this discourse of science, this disjointed knowledge, as we find it in the unconscious, is foreign.

It is precisely in this that it is striking that it imposes itself.
It imposes itself exactly in what I was stating the other day in this form,
for which one must believe that, to use it, I found no better: “that it doesn’t mess around,” because however dumb this discourse of the unconscious may be,
it responds to something that pertains very precisely to the institution of the discourse of the Master itself.
And that is what is called the unconscious.

It imposes itself on science as a fact.
This accomplished science, that is to say, artificial, cannot fail to recognize what appears to it as an artifact, it is true!
Only, it is precisely forbidden from being the science of the Master, from posing the question of the artisan,
and this will make the fact all the more factual.

Very early after the last war—I had already been born for a long time—I took into analysis three people from the highlands of Togo,
who had spent their childhood there. I was unable to find in their analysis any trace of the tribal customs and beliefs they had not forgotten,
that they knew, but from the ethnographer’s point of view…
which means, given who they were: brave little doctors trying to slip
into the medical hierarchy of the metropolis, about which we do not ignore—
we were still in colonial times—that everything was done to separate them…
what they knew of it, therefore, from the ethnographer’s perspective,
was about at the level of journalism.

But their unconscious functioned according to the proper rules of the Oedipus…
that is to say, it was the unconscious they had been sold along with the laws of colonization,
an exotic form of the discourse of the Master, entirely regressive in the face of capitalism
which is precisely what is called imperialism…
their unconscious was not that of their childhood memories—there, there was a connection—
but their childhood retroactively lived within our categories—write the word as I taught you last year—“fem-il-ial.”

And I challenge any analyst—
even one going into the field—to contradict me.
It is not psychoanalysis that can serve to conduct an ethnographic investigation, this being said,
that said investigation has no chance of coinciding with indigenous knowledge, except by reference to the discourse of science,
of which, unfortunately, said investigation has no kind of idea of this reference, because it would need to relativize it.

By saying that it is not through psychoanalysis that one can engage in an ethnographic investigation, I surely have the agreement
of all ethnographers. But I may have it less when I tell them that precisely, in order to have a small idea
of the relativization of the discourse of science, that is to say, to perhaps have a small chance of conducting a proper ethnographic investigation,
one must, I repeat, not proceed through psychoanalysis, but perhaps—it is to be seen if such a thing exists—be a psychoanalyst.

Here, at the crossroads, we state that what psychoanalysis allows us to conceive is nothing other
than along the path that Marxism opened, namely that discourse is tied to the interests of the subject.
This is what Marx occasionally calls the economy because these interests are, in capitalist society, entirely commercial.
Commodity is tied to the Master signifier, so that it resolves nothing to denounce it as such.
Commodity is no less tied to this signifier after the socialist revolution.

So what needs to be realized is that the proper functions of discourse, as I have stated them,
we will now write them out in full: the Master signifier, knowledge…

The establishment of a functioning discourse is defined by this division, by the distinction between the Master signifier and knowledge.
Notice that this is the question for anyone who would like to learn a little more about so-called “primitive” societies
as I classify them as not being dominated by the discourse of the Master.
It is quite probable that the Master signifier is identifiable there through a more complex economy.
This is precisely what the best so-called sociological research on the field of these societies leads to.

Let us rejoice all the more that it is not by chance that the functioning of the Master signifier is simpler
in the discourse of the Master, that it is entirely manageable in this relationship of S1 to S2 that you see written there:

The subject is very precisely that which in this discourse is linked—with all the illusions that it entails—to the Master signifier,
while insertion into jouissance is the function of knowledge. Well, what I state, what I bring this year is this:
that these proper functions of discourse can occupy different sites.

This is what defines their rotation among these four positions, which you do not see here, designated in letters in any way,
except by their placement, the ones I call on this occasion: “top left,” “bottom right,” here like this, somewhat belatedly,
to nonetheless clarify for those who will have designated them by the effect of their small discernment,
which is, for example:

— desire,

— and on the other side, the site of the Other. There is figured what, in an earlier register, I spoke about,
by saying that: “The desire of man, at a time when I was content with such an approximation, is the desire of the Other.”

— The position figured beneath desire is that of truth.

— Beneath the Other is the position where loss occurs, the proper loss of jouissance, from which we derive the function of surplus jouissance.

Hysteric’s Discourse – Master’s Discourse – University Discourse – Analytic Discourse

This is where the hysteric’s discourse gains its value: it has the merit of maintaining within discursive institution
what is at stake in the sexual relation, namely “how a subject can hold it,” or rather, how he cannot hold it.
Indeed, the answer to how he can hold it is this:
by giving speech to the Other, and precisely as the locus of repressed knowledge.

What is interesting is this truth: that what constitutes sexual knowledge is delivered entirely foreign to its subject.
This is what is originally called, in Freudian discourse, the repressed.

But what matters is not this, which, taken in itself, has no other effect, if one may say so,
than justifying obscurantism. The truths that matter to us—and not insignificantly!—are condemned to be obscure:
this is not so!
I mean that the hysteric’s discourse is not the testimony that the inferior is below.
On the contrary, it does not distinguish itself, as a battery of functions, from those assigned to the discourse of the Master.
And this is what allows it to be figured using the same letters that serve us, namely: S, S1, S2, a.

Quite simply, it reveals the relation of this discourse of the Master to jouissance in this: that knowledge, in this discourse of the hysteric,
takes the place of jouissance. The subject itself, hysterical, alienates itself from the Master signifier as being the one whom this signifier divides…
I said “the one” in the masculine, “the one” represents the subject…
the one whom the Master signifier divides, who refuses to make it his body.

For it is said of the hysteric that there is “somatic compliance.”
Even though the term is Freudian, can we not see that it is quite strange,
and that it is rather a refusal of the body that is at stake, following the effect of the Master signifier?

The hysteric is not a slave. And now, let us give it the gender of the sex under which this subject most often incarnates itself: “she”:
— “she” makes, in her own way, a certain kind of strike,
— “she” does not deliver her knowledge,
— “she” nevertheless unmasks the function of the Master, to whom “she” remains closely bound, precisely by highlighting what is Master in what is the One, with a capital O, from which she withdraws as the object of her desire.

This is the very function that we have long identified, at least in the field of my school,
under the title of the “idealized father.” So let’s not beat around the bush, let us recall Dora, whom I must assume is known
by all those here listening to me. Those who have not yet opened it, too bad! Simply, they should hurry!

One must read Dora, and through the “circumventing” interpretations—I use the exact term Freud gives for the economy
of his maneuvers—one must not lose sight of something that I dare say Freud covers with his prejudices.

I will make a small parenthesis. Whether or not you have the text in mind, refer back to it!
You will see sentences that to Freud seem self-evident:

— That a girl, for example, handles such incidents on her own, meaning when a man jumps on her.
She does not make a big deal out of it, “a proper girl,” of course. And why? Because Freud thinks so.

— Or even, going further: that a “normal girl” should not be disgusted when one makes a “good advance” toward her.
It seems self-evident. One must recognize the functioning of what I call prejudice, in a certain approach
to what is revealed there, by our Dora.

And if one reads this text, while keeping in mind at least some of the reference points
from which I am trying to break you, the word “circumventing” that I mentioned earlier—you will see—
will appear to you, I mean, it will not seem illegitimate for you to pronounce it yourselves.

The prodigious subtlety, the cleverness, of these reversals, which Freud explains in their multiple layers,
which refract, so to speak, through three or four successive defenses,
the “maneuver,” as I call it, of Dora in the matter of love,
perhaps, after all, echoes what Freud himself designated his text as in the Traumdeutung.
This may make you realize that it is from a certain mode of approach
that these contours depend.

Why not attempt—
in accordance with what I stated at the beginning of my discourse today—
that the subjective conjuncture of its signifying articulation acquires a certain form of objectivity,
and not start from this:
that the father, the pivot point of the entire adventure or misadventure,
is properly a castrated man,
I mean in terms of his sexual potency, that it is manifest that he is at the end of the road, very ill.

In all the cases of Studien über Hysterie, this very fact of symbolic evaluation,
mind you, for after all, even a sick or dying man is what he is,
considering him as deficient with respect to a function that he is not engaged in
is to assign him, strictly speaking, a symbolic status.

It is to forget that the father, or more precisely, it is to implicitly assert that “father” is not merely what he is,
what it means: it is a title—like “veteran”—it is “former progenitor.”
He is a father, like a veteran, until the end of his life.

It implies within the word “father” something that is always potentially creative,
and it is in relation to this, in this symbolic field, that one must note that the father,
insofar as he plays this pivotal role, this major role,
this master-role in the discourse of the hysteric,
is precisely the one who finds himself under this aspect of creative potency,
and yet, he sustains his position in relation to the woman while being powerless.

This is what specifically defines the function, in some way the relation to the father, of the hysteric.
It is precisely this that we designate as the idealized father.

Let us further note, in order to remain… I said I would not beat around the bush:
I take Dora, and I ask you, after me, to reread it, to see if what I say is true.

The one whom I shall curiously call here the third man, Mr. K—well, it is a matter of understanding
how—although I have been saying it for a long time—what suits Dora in him is ordered.
So why not simply adhere to the structural definition as we can formulate it using the discourse of the Master?
What suits Dora is the idea that he has the organ. I said the organ, huh!

Freud perceives this and indicates it very precisely: that this is what plays the decisive role in the first encounter,
the first “catch,” so to speak, between Dora and him, when she is fourteen years old,
and the other corners her in a doorway.
This does not alter the relations between the two families at all.
No one, after all, thinks of being surprised by it.

As Freud says, a girl always sorts out such things on her own.
What is curious is precisely that sometimes it happens—
it happens that she no longer sorts it out on her own and that she wants to involve everyone,
but only later. So why?

Certainly, it is the organ that gives value to this third man, Mr. K,
but not for Dora to make her happiness out of it,
if I may say so, but for another to deprive her of it.
What interests Dora is not the jewel…
even an indiscreet one—it is, as the first dream shows—remember that this observation,
which lasts three months, is entirely structured for us around two dreams…
it is not the jewel, it is the box.
The dream called “the jewel box,” the first of these two dreams, testifies to this:
it is the envelope of the precious organ—this alone is what she enjoys.

And she knows very well how to enjoy it by herself,
as evidenced by the decisive importance of infantile masturbation in her case,
of which nothing in Freud’s observation of Dora tells us the exact mode,
except that it is probable that it had some connection with what I shall call the fluid, flowing rhythm,
the model of which is found in enuresis, which we are told about quite precisely in her history,
as being induced belatedly by that of her brother, who, being a year and a half older than her,
had suffered from this enuresis until the age of eight,
and which, in a way, Dora takes over belatedly.

This is entirely characteristic—I am speaking of enuresis—
and is, if one may say so, the stigma of the imaginary substitution of the child for the father,
precisely as impotent.
I call upon all those who have encountered the child and this episode—
for which it is quite common to involve the analyst—
and who can recognize this from their experience.

Then, combined with all this, the theoretical contemplation—
— of Mrs. K—if I may put it this way—
as it unfolds in Dora’s stay, standing open-mouthed before the Madonna of Dresden,
— of her—Mrs. K—who knows how to sustain the desire of the idealized father,
but also how to contain and, at the same time, deprive Dora of a counterpart, so to speak,
which is thus doubly excluded from her grasp.

Well, this complex is, in itself, the mark of identification with a jouissance
as it belongs to the Master.

A small parenthesis: it is worth recalling the analogy that has been made between enuresis and ambition.
But let us confirm: the condition imposed on Mr. K’s gifts is that they must be a box.
He gives her nothing other than a jewel box—the jewel is herself.

His jewel, indiscreet as I said earlier, well, let it go nest elsewhere,
and let it be known: hence the rupture—
the significance of which I have been emphasizing for a long time—
when Mr. K says: “My wife is nothing to me.”

It is true that, at that moment, the jouissance of the Other is offered to her,
and it is she who does not want it,
because what she wants is knowledge as a means of jouissance,
but to make it serve the truth,
the truth of the Master that she embodies.

She embodies it as Dora. And this truth, finally put into words,
is that the Master is castrated.

And indeed, if jouissance…
the unique one representing happiness,
the one I defined last time as perfectly closed, the jouissance of the phallus…
dominated him, this Master…
you see the term I use: the Master precisely—
she can only dominate him by excluding him.

How, then, could the Master establish this relation to knowledge,
which is held by the slave,
this relation to knowledge whose benefit is the forcing of surplus jouissance?

Similarly, the second dream marks that the symbolic father is indeed the dead father,
whom one can only reach from an empty place, without communication.

Recall the structure of this dream,
and how, after receiving the announcement from her mother:
“Come if you want,” says the mother…
as an echo of what Dora [lapsus]… of what Mrs. K once told her,
to come to the place where the rupture with said husband is to occur,
of all the dramas we have spoken of…
“Come if you want, your father is dead, and we are burying him.”

And the way she goes there…
without it ever being known in the dream by what means she arrived…
how she goes there, to arrive at a place where she must ask
whether this is really where this gentleman, her father, lives…
as if she did not know!

Well, in the empty box of this deserted apartment—
deserted by those who left after having invited her to the cemetery on their side—
Dora finds, for this father, his substitute quite easily in a large book:
the dictionary, the dictionary where one knows,
where one learns what concerns sex,
marking clearly that what matters to her, even beyond her father’s death,
is what he produces as knowledge—
knowledge: not just any knowledge—
knowledge about truth.

This will suffice to make the analytic experience for her.
For this truth, to which Freud helps her—
preciously, and this is why he is attached to her—
she will have the satisfaction of making it recognized by everyone,
as well as what truly was the nature of her father’s relationship with Mrs. K,
just as her own with Mr. K.

All that others wanted to bury—
the episodes, though perfectly authentic, of which Dora was the witness—
imposes itself and is enough for her to close, with dignity,
what concerns the analysis,
even if Freud does not seem satisfied with its outcome regarding her fate as a woman.

There would be, in passing, a few small remarks to be made that are not in vain, given that things like this,
which pass for a metaphor, when Freud, for example, pausing in the analysis of the dream, tells us that we must not forget
that for a dream to stand on its two feet, it is not enough for it to represent a decision,
an intense desire of the subject concerning the present at the time.

The dream of the jewels, in which it is a matter of Dora leaving, quitting the place because of the impending fire,
Freud needs—he needs—something that gives the dream its support in a childhood desire.

And here, what matters to us is the reference he takes…
which is usually taken, as I often tell you, as an elegance…
of the entrepreneur, the entrepreneur of decision, of course, of the capitalist whose accumulated resources…
in short, the capital of libido…
of the capitalist who will enable this decision to be put into action.

Is it not amusing, after what I have told you…
— about the relation of the capitalist to the function of the Master,
— about the entirely distinct nature of what can be made of the accumulation process in relation to the presence of surplus jouissance,
— about the presence of this surplus jouissance itself as the exclusion of the good, solid “jouissance,”
the simple jouissance, the jouissance realized in sheer copulation…
Is it not precisely from here that the infantile desire draws its strength, its accumulative force with respect to this object,
this object that causes desire, from what accumulates as capital of libido precisely due to the immaturity of infancy,
the exclusion of the jouissance that others will call “normal”?

This is what suddenly gives its proper resonance to Freud’s metaphor when he refers to the capitalist.

But on the other hand, if through his lucid courage Freud was able to bring Dora to a certain success,
what, we might ask, indicates his clumsiness in retaining his patient?

Let one read these few lines where, despite himself in a way, Freud reveals an indefinable turmoil that is, after all,
overwhelming, poignant, in the fact that perhaps, had he shown more interest in her…
and God knows he does, as the entire observation attests…
he would no doubt have succeeded in leading her further in this exploration,
of which one cannot say, even by his own admission,
that he conducted it without error.

Thank God he did not! I mean that Freud, by granting her these satisfactions of interest,
in response to what he perceives as her demand, a demand for love,
did not, as is customary, take the place of the mother.

For one thing is certain: if this experience influenced his subsequent attitude,
it is not because of this that we owe the fact that, in a way,
he “drops his arms,” that he grows discouraged at realizing that what he has been able to do for hysterics
leads to nothing other than what he labels as “Penisneid.”

Which means, properly articulated, the reproach made by the daughter to the mother
for not having created her as a boy,
that is to say, the displacement onto the mother, in the form of frustration,
of what, in its significant essence,
and as it gives its place, its living function to the discourse of the hysteric
in relation to the discourse of the Master, splits into:
— on the one hand, the castration of the idealized father, which reveals the secret of the Master,
— and on the other, deprivation, the assumption by the subject, whether female or not,
of the jouissance of being “deprived.”

But why was Freud so mistaken to this extent,
when, if we are to believe my analysis today,
he literally only had to graze on what was being offered in his hand?

Why does he substitute, for the knowledge he gathered from all these golden mouths—
Anna, Emmy, Dora—this myth: the Oedipus complex?

The “Oedipus complex,” which plays the role of knowledge with pretensions to truth,
positions itself somewhere in this figure,
which is precisely not written,
which is that of the discourse of the analyst, namely:
a certain knowledge at the site
of what I earlier called that of truth:

Yes, it is strange that it did not become more quickly and completely clear
that if the entire interpretation became engaged on the side
of gratification or non-gratification, of the response or not to the demand—
in short, toward an ever-increasing elusion of the demand,
of what constitutes the dialectic of desire,
a metonymic sliding that aims to ensure the constant object—
this is probably due to the fact that the famous Oedipus complex
is strictly unusable.

And indeed: who uses it?
What place does this reference to the Oedipus complex hold in an analysis?

I ask all those who are analysts to respond:
— Those from the Institute, of course, never use it [Laughter],
— Those from my School make a small effort, of course,
but it leads nowhere; it’s the same as for the others [Laughter].

It is strictly unusable!
Except for this crude reminder of the mother’s role as an obstacle
to any investment of an object as the cause of desire.

And the extraordinary ruminations to which analysts arrive regarding
the so-called “combined parent,” as they put it, mean only one thing:
to construct a great A as the possessor of jouissance,
that is, what is generally called God,
with whom it is worth playing the all-or-nothing game of surplus jouissance,
which is to say, the functioning that is called the superego.

Ah, I’m spoiling you today, huh! [Laughter]
I had not yet tackled this story of the superego.

I had my reasons for this: I had to at least reach the point where I am now,
so that what I stated last year about Pascal’s wager could become operative,
and demonstrate that the superego is exactly—perhaps some have guessed it—what I began to articulate
when I told you that life, life, life, the provisional life,
which is played out in favor of a chance at eternal life, is the a,
but that it is only worthwhile if the A is not barred, in other words, if it is all at once.

Only, the “combined parent” does not exist; there is the father on one side and the mother on the other.
Just as the subject does not exist either: it is also divided into two,
as it is barred, so to speak,
and since this is the response designated in enunciation by my graph,
it follows that this seriously calls into question whether one can play the “double or nothing” game
of “surplus jouissance” with “eternal life.”

Yes, there is truly something sensational in this recourse to the Oedipus myth.
It is certain that this is worth our extending our discussion.

Today, I intended to make you feel the enormity of what is in Freud…
even in this last lecture, for example,
among those called: The New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis…
to believe that the question of rejecting religion from any acceptable horizon is settled,
to think that psychoanalysis plays a decisive role there,
and to believe it is concluded because he has told us that the support of religion
is nothing other than this father to whom the child turns in his infancy,
whom he knows is, in a way, “all love,”
who anticipates, who preempts whatever discomfort may manifest in him.

Is this not a strange thing when one knows what the function of the father truly is?
Certainly, this is not the only way in which Freud presents us with a paradox.
The idea of referring him to some kind of original jouissance of all women,
when it is well known that a father barely suffices for one woman—
and even then, he should not boast about it!

A father has with the Master…
I am speaking of the father as we know him, as he functions…
a father has only the most distant relation to the Master,
since, in sum, at least in the society Freud deals with,
he is the one who works for everyone.
He is responsible for the “femme-il” that I was speaking of earlier.

Is this not strangeness enough to suggest that, after all,
what Freud is in fact preserving—if not intentionally—
is precisely what he designates as the most substantial element of religion,
namely, the idea of an “all-loving” father?

And indeed, this is what is designated by the first form,
among the three that he isolates in the article I mentioned earlier on identification—
the identification of pure love to the father.
The father is love, and what is first to be loved in this world is the father.

A strange survival of something that Freud believes will dissolve religion,
when, in reality, it is the very substance of religion that he preserves
with this oddly composed myth of the father.

Certainly…
we will return to this, but already you can see its core…
that all of this leads to the idea of murder,
namely that the father, the original father, is the one the sons have killed,
after which it is from the love of this dead father that a certain order arises.

Does it not seem that this, in its enormous contradictions, in its baroque nature, in its superfluity,
is nothing other than a defense against what the proliferation of all myths
had already articulated clearly long before Freud,
and that by choosing this one, he narrows these truths?

It is this: that what is meant to be concealed is that the father…
as soon as he enters into this field of the discourse of the Master
in which we are in the process of orienting ourselves…
the father is, from the outset, castrated.

Such is the idealized form that Freud gives him.

That this is completely masked…
though, if not by words, at least by the configurations
that his experience with the hysteric offered him, which should have better guided him here…
that the Oedipus complex should be, at the very level of analysis itself,
what suggests that everything must be reconsidered,
that knowledge itself must be questioned at the site of truth—
this is precisely the aim of what we are attempting to unfold for you this year.