🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

There is a person in this assembly who deemed it appropriate—and I thank them for it—to take note of what I said last time regarding a certain disappointment that no one—no one, I said—had given me the pleasure…
the pleasure, as you know, is the law of least effort…
the pleasure of anticipating me on a path I would have opened.

The person in question…
I see that they are smiling, they are present, so why not name them: Marie-Claire Boons…
sent me a “separate print” from a very interesting journal, regarding which I must say that I have an excuse for not having read her article. It is a journal that, I can well say, seemed to exist only by presenting itself to the head of my teaching; it was called L’inconscient.

There were some very good things in it, I must say. Simply, paradoxically, perhaps precisely because of the principle that, at least in its editorial committee, it claimed as its authority, I was not sent a “complimentary copy.”
So, as my attention was drawn to this issue entitled La Paternité, issue number 5, I first read with great care Marie-Claire Boons’ article, and then another one by our friend Conrad Stein.

Regarding Marie-Claire Boons’ article, I am quite ready, if she wishes, to take it today as a text for discussion. And what might emerge from it is a certain number of questions that would arise regarding the path she chose in The Murder of the Father in Freud. In truth, I believe that it would be easily apparent that nothing in it surpasses, nothing anticipates what I had already put forward—at the time she published her work—and I said it very modestly—concerning the Oedipus complex.

There is another approach, which is that today I might indeed attempt to go further, by showing that this was already implied in the careful advance I have made so far. And then, perhaps, in a second phase, on the occasion of a subsequent discussion, what I would like to say might become clearer retroactively—
if only I were to hold you in suspense over the various points of an article that, in many respects, presents a kind of, shall I say, opening, a questioning, a preparation, if one will, for a second step.
One can express a preference for one or the other of these two approaches here. But if she does not explicitly declare that it is an exegesis of her article that we should proceed with, I leave the floor to her.

Marie-Claire Boons – I do not think that by beginning…

Well, I believe it is going to be the second way.
The death of the father, indeed, as everyone knows, seems to be the key, the central point of everything that is stated—
everything that is stated, and not only in a mythical sense—concerning what psychoanalysis deals with.

Marie-Claire Boons, at the end of her article, even suggests that many things stem from this death of the father, and namely that “something” which would make psychoanalysis, in a certain way, free us from the Law.
Great hope!

I am well aware, indeed, that it is in this register that a kind of libertarian attachment would connect itself to psychoanalysis.
I think, in truth—and this is the entire meaning of what I call The Other Side of Psychoanalysis—that such is not the case.

The death of the father, insofar as it resonates with that Nietzschean-gravity-centered statement, with that announcement, with that good news that “God is dead,”—
does not seem to me, far from it, to align. And the first solid ground for proving this is indeed Freud’s own enunciation—
which, quite rightly, Marie-Claire Boons points out at the beginning of her article, noting—
as I had already mentioned two seminars ago—that, in a certain way, this announcement of the father’s death is far from being incompatible with this motivation,
this motivation given by Freud as his own, as an analytic interpretation of religion:
that religion itself rests upon something which, rather astonishingly, he advances as primary—
namely, that the father is the one who is recognized as deserving of love.

Here already lies the indication of a paradox, a paradox that leaves the author I just named in a certain discomfort, regarding the fact that, ultimately, psychoanalysis would prefer to maintain, in some way to preserve, the field of religion.

I believe, precisely, that here we can also say that such is not the case. The very thrust of psychoanalysis is indeed atheism,
on the condition that we assign a different meaning to this term than that of “God is dead,”
which undoubtedly indicates—far from questioning what is at stake, namely the Law—
that it rather consolidates it.

It has been a long time since I pointed out that to the phrase of the old father Karamazov: “If God is dead, then everything is permitted,”
the conclusion that imposes itself, that imposes itself within the text of our experience, is that in response to “God is dead” comes:
“God is dead, nothing is permitted anymore.”

To clarify this horizon that I announce to you, let us start from the death of the father, insofar as it is indeed what Freud advances to us as being the key to jouissance, to the jouissance of the supreme object identified with the mother.
The mother targeted for incest—it is quite certain that it is not from an attempt to explain what “sleeping with the mother” means that this murder of the father enters into Freudian doctrine.
On the contrary, it is from the death of the father that the prohibition of this jouissance, as something primary, is established.

In truth, it is not only about the death of the father, it is…
as the person I am speaking about has also very rightly formulated in the title of their inquiry…
about the murder of the father.
It is there, in the myth of Oedipus as it is presented to us, that the key to jouissance lies.

And indeed, if we examine this myth closely, it is in this way that it is presented to us in the statement that I have said must be treated as what it is, namely, a manifest content, and thus, by the same token, must first be properly articulated.

The myth of Oedipus, at the tragic level where Freud appropriates it, clearly shows that the murder of the father is the condition for jouissance:
if Laius is not removed…
in a struggle where, moreover, it is not certain that Oedipus, by this very step, will succeed to the jouissance of the mother…
if Laius is not removed, this jouissance will not take place.
Is it at the price of this murder that he obtains it?
Here presents itself what is essential—what, in that the reference is drawn from a myth set into action in tragedy, takes on its full significance.

It is in having delivered the people from a question that was decimating its best, in their attempt to answer what presents itself as an enigma—
that is to say, what figures itself as being borne by that ambiguous being that is the Sphinx, where this double disposition of being—
like the mi-dire, made of two half-bodies—
properly incarnates itself, that Oedipus, in answering it, finds himself…
finds himself—
this is where the ambiguity lies—
abolishing the suspense that the question of truth thus introduces among the people.

Does this mean that in giving this answer—
an answer of which he assuredly has no idea to what extent it anticipates his own drama,
but also to what extent, in making a choice, his answer perhaps falls into the trap of truth,
by responding: It is man?
For what is it that knows what “man” is?

And is it saying everything to align him with this process—
so ambiguous in the case of Oedipus—
which first makes him walk on all fours, then on his two hind legs…
wherein Oedipus, like his entire lineage, is distinguished precisely—
as Claude Lévi-Strauss has very rightly observed—
by not walking straight (Oedipus = swollen feet)…
and finally, to end with the aid of a staff—
which, while it is not the white cane of the blind, must nonetheless have been, for Oedipus,
a most singular third element, to name it: his daughter, Antigone?

The truth has been displaced—what does this mean?

Is it to leave the field open for what will remain, for Oedipus, as the path of a return?
For indeed, it is in having sought, in the presence of a misfortune twice as great—
not decimating his people through the choice of those who offer themselves to the question of the Sphinx,
but striking them as a whole in that ambiguous form called the plague,
with all that it carries in the thematic of Antiquity—
this is where Freud designates to us that for Oedipus,
the question of truth is renewed and that it leads—to what?—
to something that, in a first approximation, we can at least identify with something related to the price paid by a castration.

Is that truly saying everything…
if, not that “the scales fall from his eyes”, but that his eyes fall like scales?
Is that truly saying everything, and is it not in this very object itself that we see Oedipus reduced—
not merely to undergo castration, but rather, I would say, to be castration itself—
that is, what remains when there disappears, disappears from him,
under this form of his eyes, one of the chosen supports of object (a)?

What does this mean, if not that the question arises of whether, in having ascended the throne—
not by the path of succession, but by the path of that choice that is made of him as the Master—
for having, for having erased the question of truth,
this is what he must pay for?
In other words—introduced as you already are to my formulation—
that what constitutes the essence of the Master’s position is to be castrated,
and if we do not find here, certainly veiled but nonetheless indicated,
that succession itself proceeds from castration?

If the son is…
as fantasy has always curiously suggested,
but never properly connected to the fundamental myth of the murder of the father…
if castration is what strikes the son, is it not also—
and this is indicated throughout our experience—
what makes him, through the proper path,
attain what pertains to the function of the father?

Is this not to indicate that it is from father to son that castration is transmitted?

Death, then, in presenting itself as being at the origin—do we not have here an indication that it may perhaps be a mode of concealment of what, though it has emerged, though it is experienced from the very position of the analyst—whose essential character, within the subjective process of this function of castration, nonetheless hides it, veils it in a certain way, places it, so to speak, under its aegis, and thus spares us from bringing to its sharpest point what is ultimately and most rigorously made possible…
what is made possible by properly formulating the position of the analyst? How does this happen?

Certainly, it is not in vain to recognize that the myth of the father, as essential, is first encountered in Freud’s work at the level of dream interpretation, where, according to him…
and this is something that, in a particular way, Conrad Stein’s article remarkably illuminates…
a wish, a death wish, is manifested. The author of the article produces a remarkable critique of this, demonstrating that the resurgence of these death wishes, at the very moment when death becomes real, and if it is true that for Freud The Interpretation of Dreams emerged—by his own admission—out of the death of his father, is this not also the mark—and the author returns to this, emphasizing it—that in wanting to see himself as guilty of his father’s death, what is actually concealed is precisely the wish that the father be immortal?

That is to say, this advances along the line of what is placed at the center of analytical psychologism.
Along this line, the statement—presented as a foundational presupposition—that what constitutes the essence of the infantile position is its grounding in an idea of omnipotence that would make it beyond death.

Now, if this interpretation is—if I may say so—consistent under the pen of an author who does not abandon his presuppositions…
who, on the contrary, has critically examined what is at stake in the essence of the child’s position…
then it follows that what concerns death wishes must be approached from another angle and that, if they conceal something, if they mask it, it is necessary to identify what is to be masked in this instance.

And why, first of all, would we think that, in no way, within what we have to articulate about subjective structure as dependent on the introduction of the signifier, could we place at the head of this structure anything that might be called the knowledge of death?

Reading Freud’s analyses of some of his major dreams from another perspective—
from the famous “Please close your eyes”, with the ambiguity—under a bar—of “one eye”,
which he also produces as the result of an alternative…
which, assuredly, Conrad Stein exploits most skillfully in the line of his interpretation,
an interpretation that is one of a denial of death in the name of omnipotence…
this may perhaps be capable, if we take the final dream of the same series to give it meaning—as I did in my time—
of drawing attention to the emphasis placed on a dream that is not one of Freud’s own, but that of one of his patients,
the dream that states…
and which I decomposed for analysis, aligning it along the two axes of enunciation and statement…
“He did not know he was dead.”

This reminds us that one of two things must be true:

— Either, indeed, death does not exist, there is something that survives, and the question remains unresolved as to whether the dead know that they are dead.
— Or, there is nothing beyond death, and it is quite certain that in that case, they do not know it.

This is to say that no one knows—at least among the living—what death is,
and it is remarkable that spontaneous productions that present themselves as belonging to the level of consciousness
are articulated precisely around this:
that for anyone, death is, properly speaking, unknowable.

I have indeed emphasized in my time that it is indispensable for life that something irreducible does not know…
I will not say that we are dead, because precisely that is not what must be said…
but that, insofar as we, we are not dead—not all together, at least—this is precisely where our foundation lies,
that something does not know that I am dead.
I am dead, precisely inasmuch as I am destined for death,
but precisely, in the name of that something which does not know it,
I too do not wish to know it.

This allows us to place at the center of logic the phrase “every man”,
this “every man” in “every man is mortal”,
whose very foundation is precisely this non-knowledge of death,
and at the same time, this something that makes us believe that “every man” actually signifies something.
Every man is born of a father whose very being—so we are told—lies, insofar as he is dead,
in the fact that he—the man—does not enjoy what he ought to enjoy.

The equivalence, in Freudian terms, is thus established between the dead father and jouissance. It is he who keeps it in reserve, so to speak.
The Freudian myth, as it is formulated—not at the level of the tragic, with its subtle flexibility,
but in the formulation of the myth of Totem and Taboo—is the equivalence of the dead father and jouissance.

This is what we may designate as a structural operator.
Here, the myth transcends itself by being articulated at the level of the real…
for this is what Freud insists upon: that it really happened, that it is the real…
that “the dead father is the one who holds jouissance in his keeping”—
this is the point from which the prohibition of jouissance originated, the point from which it proceeded.

This presents itself to us, in a way, as the very sign of the impossible:
that the dead father is jouissance.
And it is precisely in this sense, in the terms that I define as fixing the category of the real—
insofar as, in what I articulate, it is radically distinct from the symbolic and the imaginary—
that the real is the impossible.
It is this—not as a mere obstacle against which we bruise our foreheads,
but as the logical barrier, as that which, from within the symbolic, is properly articulated as impossible—
that makes the real emerge.

We clearly recognize here, beyond the myth of Oedipus, an operator—a structural operator,
that which is termed the real father…
with—I would even say—this property:
that in the position of a paradigm, it is also the promotion,
at the heart of the Freudian system, of that which is the father of the real as well…
this which marks and places at the center of Freud’s enunciation a term of the impossible.

This is to say, very precisely, that the Freudian enunciation has nothing to do with psychology,
that there is no conceivable psychology of this original father—
who is presented only as the one…
(I need not repeat the derision with which I treated this last time, I believe, in the last seminar…)
as the one “who enjoys all women”—a conceivable fantasy,
whereas it is all too clear, as is rather easily perceptible,
that it is already quite enough to suffice for one.

It is here that we are referred to an entirely different reference—
that of castration, from the moment we have defined it as the principle of the master-signifier.
I will return to this; more precisely, by the end of today’s discourse,
I will show you what this may mean.

The discourse of the Master presents jouissance as coming to the Other [S₁ → S₂].
It is he who possesses the means for it.
What is language obtains it only by insisting, up to the point of producing the loss from which surplus jouissance takes shape.
At first, language—even that of the Master—can be nothing other than demand, and demand that fails.

It is not from its success but from its repetition that something is engendered,
something of another dimension, which I have called loss,
where surplus jouissance takes shape.
This repetitive creation, this inauguration of a dimension from which is ordered
everything that will allow for the assessment of analytic experience,
this can just as well stem from an original impotence—
that of the child, to put it plainly—
far from being omnipotence.

If one has been able to recognize that what psychoanalysis demonstrates to us
is that “the child is the father of the man”,
it is because there must be, somewhere, something that mediates this.
And it is very precisely this insistence of the Master—
this insistence, insofar as it comes to produce—
and as I have said, from any signifier, after all—
the master-signifier.

The term I advanced in its time—that the father is real—
I advanced only because, at the time when I formulated
what is at stake in the object relation in its connections with Freudian structure,
I had first taken care to delineate what is distinct
in the essence of castration, frustration, and privation:

— Castration being an essentially symbolic function,
which can be conceived only from the articulation of the signifier;
— Frustration belonging to the imaginary;
— And privation, as is self-evident, belonging to the real.

It is here that we see what must be defined as the outcome of these operations:

— That at the level of castration, it is the enigma posed by the phallus—
as manifestly imaginary—that must be taken as the object of the first of these operations;

— That in frustration—why not?—there is always something very real at stake,
even if the claim that grounds it can, of course,
only imagine that this real is owed to one,
which is not at all self-evident;

— That privation, on the other hand, is clearly situated only in the symbolic,
for in what is real, nothing can be lacking:
what is real is real,
and it is from elsewhere that this introduction—
yet absolutely essential,
without which we ourselves would not be within the real—
must proceed, namely:
that something—
and this is precisely what first characterizes the subject—
is missing.

At the level of agents, I remained—at the time—not without indicating it—less explicit. The father, the real father…
and it is precisely this assertion of the real father as “impossible” that is meant to obscure something from us…
the real father is nothing other than the agent of castration.

“Agent”—what does this mean?
Of course, at first glance, we slip into the fantasy that it is the father who is the castrator.
It is quite striking that none of the forms of myth to which Freud was attached give any such idea.

It is not the case that the sons, in a hypothetical initial stage where they are still animals, are castrated because they do not have access to the herd of women—at least as far as I know.
Castration, as an articulated statement, as the articulation of something constituting a prohibition,
can in no way be grounded in anything but the second stage:
the stage of myth, the myth of the murder of the father of the horde.
And according to its own articulation, this myth does not originate from anything other than a common agreement—
that peculiar initium, whose problematic character I demonstrated last time.

Likewise, the term “act” is worth noting here,
worth noting, incidentally, to emphasize that if what I have been able to articulate at the level of the act—
when I addressed The Psychoanalytic Act—is to be taken seriously, it means:
– that there can be no act that does not arise within a context already filled with all that pertains to the incidence of the signifier, to its entry into play within the world;
– that there can be no act at the beginning—at least, not any act that could qualify as murder—and that the myth here can have no other meaning than the one I have reduced it to, that of a statement of the impossible;
– that there can be no act outside of a field already so completely articulated that the law is already inscribed within it.

There is no act except an act that refers to the effects of this signifying articulation,
and which fully encompasses the problematic:
– on the one hand, of what is entailed by the fall, by the very existence of anything that can be articulated as a subject;
– and on the other hand, of what preexists within it as a legislative function.

Does this mean that it is from the nature of the act that the function of the real father proceeds, inasmuch as he pertains to castration?
This is precisely what the term “agent”, which I have introduced, allows us to suspend.

The verb “to act” has more than one resonance in the language:
— starting with that of actor;
— of shareholder as well—why not?—since it derives from the same root as action,
and this shows you that an action may not be quite what one believes it to be;
— of activism as well, since an activist is not precisely defined as someone who sees himself as merely an instrument of something;
— of Actaeon—hmm?—while we are at it, that would be a good example for those who understand what it means in terms of my Freudian Thing;
— and finally, of what we simply call “my agent”.

You generally understand what “my agent” means:
“I pay him for that,”
or even less:
“I compensate him for having nothing else to do.”
“I honor him,” as they say,
pretending to start from the idea that he is capable of something else.

This is the level at which we must take the real father as the agent of castration.
He performs the work of the Master-agency.

We are becoming increasingly familiar with these functions of agent.
We live in an era where we know what they carry:
cheap trinkets, advertising, things that need to be sold.
But also, it is through this very mechanism that things function,
at the point where we now find ourselves,
in the flourishing, the paroxysm of the discourse of the Master
in the very society in which it is founded.

This might encourage us…
It is late, and surely, I will have to make a brief interruption here.
I mention it in passing because perhaps we will return to it:
it is something that has value for me,
a point that does not seem unworthy of the effort of clarification.

Since I emphasize this function of the agent in a very particular way,
I will eventually have to show you all the developments that arise from introducing the notion of the double agent—
a notion that everyone knows is, in our time, one of the most undeniable and certain objects of fascination.

The agent who repeats,
who does not merely want the small market of the Master—
which is the role of everyone—
this agent thinks that what he has come into contact with,
namely that everything that truly matters—
I mean in the order of jouissance—
has nothing to do with the meshes of this net.

He tells himself, well, my God,
that in the end, it is precisely this little job that preserves him.
A strange story—one that leads far!

The true double agent is the one who thinks that what escapes the meshes must also be arranged because if that is true, then the arrangement itself will become true, and at the same time, the first arrangement—the one that was evidently fake—will also become true.

This was most probably what guided a figure who—no one knows why—assumed the role of an agent,
a prototype agent of this discourse of the Master, inasmuch as he claims the right to keep something,
that something whose essence an author outlined with these prophetic words:
“Walls are good,”—Henri Massis, to name him.

Finally, Sorge, bearing such a Heideggerian name (care),
found a way to be among the Nazi agents while becoming a double agent—
a double agent for whom?
For the Father of the Peoples, the one whom everyone, as you all know,
hoped would be the one to ensure that the real would be just as well arranged.

This is ultimately a function for which it is no coincidence that I invoked the reference to the Father of the Peoples,
because it has a great deal in common with that of the real father as the agent of castration.

For the famous real father—whose Freudian formulation necessarily implies…
“necessarily”—he has no other choice, if only because he speaks of the unconscious…
necessarily implies starting from the discourse of the Master,
he can do nothing but the impossible.

Yet still, this real father—we know him, after all—we do know him: he belongs to an entirely different order.
First of all, generally speaking, everyone at least admits that he is the one who works, and “to feed his little family.”
If he is the agent of something within a society that, evidently, does not grant him a major role,
it remains nonetheless that he has extremely kind aspects: he works, and he would very much like to be loved.

There is something—
something that clearly shows that all this mystagogy,
which makes him out to be a tyrant, obviously resides elsewhere.
It is at the level of the real father,
inasmuch as the real father is an effect, a linguistic construction—
as Freud has always pointed out—
that the real father has no other real…
I do not say reality, because reality is something else entirely—
this is precisely what I was just speaking to you about—
he is nothing other than an effect of language.

I could even, right now, go a little further and point out that, scientifically,
the notion of the real father is untenable.
There is only one real father: the spermatozoon.
And as far as I know, no one has ever thought of saying that a man was the son of a particular spermatozoon. [Laughter]

Of course, naturally, some may object—
using blood tests,
Rh factors,
or what have you.
But this is all very new—
it has absolutely nothing to do with everything that has so far been articulated as the function of the father.

So if there is something that psychoanalysis could pose as a question—
I sense that I am venturing onto dangerous ground here—
but after all, the question is not one that arises only among the Aranda tribes:
one could also ask what, in fact, constitutes a father in a situation where a woman has become pregnant.

Why would it not be…
from time to time, there is suspicion of it…
why would it not be, within an analysis,
the psychoanalyst himself who is the father…
even if it was absolutely not him, not at all, who did it—
at least, not on the spermatozoic level? [Laughter]

Why would it not be the analyst…
why would he not be the real father,
since it was in relation to something—
let us put it modestly—
something tied to the analytic situation
that the woman ultimately found herself a mother?

So there is no need to be Aranda to ask questions about the function of the father.
And at the same time, we realize—
because this broadens our perspective—
that it is not even necessary to take the reference of analysis,
which I chose as the most burning example,
for the same question to arise, is it not?

It is entirely possible to conceive a child with one’s husband,
and yet—
even if one has not slept with another—
for the child to be someone else’s,
precisely that someone whom one would have wanted to be the father.

It is for this reason that one had a child, nonetheless.

So you see, it carries us away—
it carries us, a little, into a dream,
so to speak…

Only, I do it for one reason:
to wake you up!

Because if I have said that…
well, everything Freud has elaborated—not, of course, at the level of myth,
nor at the level of recognizing death wishes in the dreams of his patients…
if I tell you that this is a dream of Freud,
it is, of course, because it seems that the analyst should detach himself,
at least slightly, from this plane of the dream.

What the analyst encounters—
having been directed, guided by Freud’s introduction of something absolutely striking—
what the analyst has drawn from it has not yet been fully distilled.

Last Friday, in my presentation of patients,
I introduced a gentleman…
I see no reason to call him a patient…
to whom such things had happened
that his electroencephalogram—so the technician told me—
was always on the borderline between sleep oscillation and wakefulness,
so that one never knew when he would transition from one to the other, and it remained at that.

This is somewhat how I see the entirety of our analyst colleagues [Laughter]:
you see, the shock, the trauma of the birth of analysis leaves them in that state,
and that is why they flutter about in this way,
trying to extract from the Freudian articulation something more precise.

This is not to say that they do not approach it.
But what they should see, for example,
is that it is from the position of the real father…
this, this is something truly worth retaining…
as Freud articulates it, namely, as an impossible,
that it is necessary—that neither you, nor he, nor I, nor any of this—
that this very position imagines the father as a depriver.

It is not at all surprising that we encounter the imaginary father constantly;
this is a structural dependence on something that, precisely, eludes us—
namely, what the real father is.
And the real father, who is strictly excluded in an assured way—
except as an agent of castration—
which castration is not at all as it is necessarily defined
by anyone who psychologizes it.

We have seen this emerge not so long ago, apparently,
in a thesis defense jury, where someone
who had decisively taken the route
of turning psychoanalysis into the psychopedagogy we know,
said: “For us, castration is merely a fantasy.”

But no, no—
castration is the real operation introduced
by the incidence of the signifier—
whichever it may be—
into the relation to sex.
That it determines the father as that impossible real we have spoken of—
well, that goes without saying!

And now, the question is to understand
what this castration means—
this castration that is not a fantasy.

The result, of course, is that:
– there is no cause of desire that is produced by this operation [S◊a],
– and that the fantasy dominates the entire reality of desire,
which is to say, the Law.

As for the dream,
everyone now knows that it is the demand—
that it is the signifier, set free, which insists,
which prances, which tramples,
which absolutely does not know what it wants.

The idea of placing the all-powerful father of desire
at the principle of desire is more than sufficiently refuted
by the fact that the desire of the hysteric—
from whom Freud extracted his master-signifiers—
for let us not forget that this is where Freud started—
that is, what remained at the center of his question,
which he admitted—
and this was all the more preciously recorded
because it was recorded by a donkey who repeated it
without having the slightest idea what it meant—
this question: “What does a woman want?”

“A woman”, but not just any woman.
Simply posing the question already means that she wants something.
He did not say: “What does the woman want?”
Because the woman—
nothing says that she wants anything at all.

I will not say that she accommodates all cases;
she is inconvenienced by all the K’s:
Kinder, Küche, Kirche,
but there are plenty of others:
Kultur, Kilowatt, Kulbute, as someone put it,
Cru et Cuit—
all of that suits her equally, doesn’t it?
She absorbs them all.

But the moment you pose the question:
“What does a woman want?”
you situate the question at the level of desire—
and everyone knows that situating the question of desire for the woman
is to interrogate the hysteric.

It is quite clear what the hysteric wants…
(well, I say this for those who do not have the calling—
though there seem to be quite a few here who do)…
what she wants is a Master.

That is absolutely clear—
so much so that one must ask whether it was not from this very point
that the invention of the Master originated.

That would elegantly complete what we are in the process of tracing.

She wants a Master.

That is what lies there,
in the little corner at the top right—
to name it no otherwise.

She wants the Other to be a Master, to know many things, but still not to know enough to avoid believing that she is the supreme prize of all his knowledge. That is to say, she wants a Master over whom she reigns: she reigns, and he does not govern.

This is where Freud started, and it is she, the hysteric.
You must clearly recognize that this is not necessarily specified to one sex—
as soon as you pose the question “What does So-and-so want?”,
you enter into the function of desire, and you bring forth the master-signifier.

Freud produced a certain number of master-signifiers,
which he covered…
this goes without saying, it also serves to plug something…
under the name of Freud.

I am astonished that one could associate with this stopper,
which is a Name-of-the-Father, whatever it may be,
the idea that, at this level, there could be any kind of murder—
and that it is no longer in the name of a devotion to the name of Freud
that analysts are what they are.

They simply cannot extricate themselves from Freud’s master-signifiers.
It is not so much to Freud himself that they are attached,
but to a certain set of signifiers:
the unconscious, seduction, trauma, fantasy, the ego, the id, and whatever else you like.
There is no question of them stepping out of this orbit.
At this level, they have no father to kill.

One is not the father of signifiers;
one is, at most, a father because of something.
There is no problem at this level.

The real driving force is this:
jouissance separates the master-signifier—
insofar as one would like to attribute it to the father—
from knowledge, inasmuch as knowledge is positioned as truth.

Now, what is articulated—and this is where I will pick up next time we meet—
is that if we take the schema of discourse A, as the discourse of the analyst,
the step taken by jouissance is found here [◊]:

That is, between [◊]:
– what is produced, in whatever form, as master-signifier [S1],
– and the field available to knowledge, insofar as it is posited as truth [S2].

What allows us to articulate what castration truly is,
is that even for the child—whatever one may think—
the father is the one who knows nothing of the truth.