🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I don’t know what you have been doing during this time that has separated us, but in any case, I hope you have made use of it in some way. As for me, I have made a discovery, and I am pointing it out to the person who so kindly wanted to point out to me that she was a student at the Sorbonne. I inform her that I have found it—I had brought over from Copenhagen the Sellin I told you about: s.e.l.l.i.n. That is to say, this little book from 1922, which later also carried some rejections from Sellin’s pen, and which is the book around which Freud built his certainty that Moses was “killed.”

Of course, the interest in having it… I am not aware that—apart from Jones and maybe one or two others—many psychoanalysts have taken an interest in it. It is clear that this Sellin, in his text, deserves to be examined, examined in the sense that Freud considered it to carry weight, so to speak.

It is naturally on this point that it is necessary to follow me in order to put this consideration to the test. This seems to me to be in line with what I have been advancing this year about the reverse side of psychoanalysis. But as I have only had this book for about five days, written in a rather dense German, far less airy than what we are accustomed to in Freud’s texts, you will understand that, despite the help I have received from a number of rabbis, great and small… well, after all, there are no small rabbis, there are Jews… well then, I am not yet ready today to give you an account of it, at least one that would satisfy me.

On the other hand, it happens that I have been solicited… I must say this is not the first time, this kind of solicitation is quite extensible… to respond on the radio—Belgian, to name it—and this, by a man who, to tell the truth, has earned my esteem. Mr. Georgin, to name him, has earned my esteem by having given me a long text which, at the very least, proves that he, contrary to many others, has read my Écrits!

He has—my God—drawn from them what he could [Laughter], but all things considered, that is not nothing, and in fact, I was rather flattered by it! This is certainly not something that makes me more inclined toward this exercise of being recorded on the radio. It always wastes a lot of time. Nevertheless, since it seems that he has arranged things so that it takes the shortest time possible, I may give in to it.

The one who may not give in to it, however, is him, given that in order to answer his questions, of which I will give you three examples, I did not think I could do better—not by giving myself over to the inspiration of the moment, to the exploration I engage in here each time I stand before you—but by relying on abundant notes. And that works, my God, because you see me in the grip of this exploration. That is perhaps even the only thing that justifies your presence here.

Is that a bird? [Laughter, in response to a whistling sound heard outside]

The conditions, however, are obviously different when you speak to tens of thousands—who knows, maybe even hundreds of thousands—of listeners, among whom the text, when presented abruptly without the support of the person speaking it, may produce different effects. Nevertheless, in any case, I will refuse to give anything other than these already written texts.

Thus, this implies great confidence in this condition because—you will see—the questions I am asked necessarily fall within the interval between what constitutes a constructed articulation and what is expected by what I will call “a common consciousness.” And a common consciousness also means a series of common formulas, this language that the Ancients, well, the Greeks, had already called in their language: κοινή [koïné].

Yes, I am not going to say that immediately in French, to transcribe it directly as “la couinée” [the squeaky one], it squeaks! I do not despise la couinée at all; I simply believe that it is not resistant to the introduction of certain effects of acceleration, to precisely introducing into it the most abrupt discourse possible. That is why today, it is not only to relieve myself of the effort… believe me, it will be a much greater effort for me to read you these texts than to proceed as I usually do… I am going to share with you my responses to three of these questions.

In order not to delay, I will articulate the first, which is this:

“In the Écrits—it is said—you assert that Freud anticipates, without realizing it, the research of Saussure and that of the Prague Circle. Could you explain this point?”

This is what I do, therefore, not off the cuff, as I warned you, by responding:

“Your question surprises me,” I say, “in carrying a pertinence that stands out from the pretensions to the interview that I have to dismiss. It is even a doubled pertinence, or rather one at two levels. You prove to me that you have read my Écrits, which apparently is not considered necessary in order to hear me. You choose from them a remark that implies the existence of another mode of information than the mediation of the masses. That Freud anticipates Saussure does not imply that some noise passed from the first to the second. Thus, by quoting me, you make me answer before I have decided to do so, which is what I call surprising me.”

Starting from the point of arrival:
Saussure and the Prague Circle produce a linguistics that has nothing in common with what was previously covered by this name, even if it found its keys in the hands of the Stoics. But what did they make of it! Linguistics, with Saussure and the Prague Circle, establishes itself through a rupture—one that is marked by the bar placed between the signifier and the signified—so that the difference by which the signifier is absolutely constituted prevails there, but also so that it is ordered by an autonomy that has nothing to envy from crystalline effects, for example, in the phoneme system, which was its first successful discovery.

One imagines extending this success to the entire network of the symbolic by admitting meaning only insofar as the network responds to it, and by recognizing the impact of an effect: yes, of a content: no. This is the wager that is upheld by the inaugural rupture. The signified will or will not be scientifically thinkable depending on whether or not a field of signifiers holds, a field that, by its very materiality, is distinguished from any physical field obtained by science.

This implies a metaphysical exclusion that must be taken as a fact of non-being. No meaning will henceforth be taken for granted—such as the idea that it is light when it is daytime, for instance, where the Stoics preceded us. But I have already asked: for what purpose?

Even if I must neglect certain repetitions of words, I will say “semiotics” for any discipline that takes the sign as its object, to mark that it is precisely this which stood in the way of grasping the signifier as such. The sign presupposes someone to whom it signals something. It is this someone whose shadow has obscured the entrance to linguistics. Call this someone whatever you like—it will always be nonsense.

The sign is enough for this someone to appropriate language as a mere tool. Language becomes nothing more than a support for abstraction, just as it becomes a means for discussion, along with all the advances of criticism—what am I saying?—of thought itself, as the key.

I would have to anticipate—repeating the word to myself—what I intend to introduce under the notation of the “a-thing”: L apostrophe, a, c, h, o, etc., to make one feel in what effect linguistics takes its position: it is not a progression but rather a regression. This is precisely what we need against the unity of obscurantism, which is already consolidating itself in order to preempt the “a-thing.”

No one seems to recognize what this unity is forming around, nor that in the time of the someone who gathered the “signature of things” (signatura rerum), cultivated stupidity was not presumed to the extent of daring to register language under the heading of “communication.”

The return to communication—if I may say so—protects the rear of what linguistics makes obsolete, by covering it with the ridicule that is often only detected a posteriori—namely, that which, in the occultation of language, appeared only as a myth under the name of “telepathy.”

A lost child, a beggar of thought—this is what boasted of transmission without discourse. And yet this myth succeeds in captivating Freud, who fails to unmask in it the king of that court of miracles whose cleansing he announces. Miracles is indeed the word for it, when everything traces back to the first operation of “telepathizing” from the same wood with which one makes a pact.

A social contract, in short—a communicative effusion of the promises of dialogue. What? “Every man—who does not know what this is?—is mortal.” Ah, let us sympathize in being placed in the same box!

Let us speak of “all”—yes, indeed!—of “all” together, except for what inhabits the syllogist’s head when he brings Socrates into the equation. For from there, it follows that death is undoubtedly administered—like everything else—by and for men, but without them being on the same side when it comes to the telepathy conveyed by a telegraphy whose subject remains a source of embarrassment each time we arrive at this crossroads.

That this subject is scarcely communicable must indeed determine that from which linguistics draws its force. And even to the extent of putting the poet—yes, the poet!—in its bag. For the poet arises from being—allow me to translate the one who demonstrates it, my friend Jakobson—eaten by verse, which arranges itself without concern—manifestly—for what the poet may have known about it.

Hence the consistency, in Plato, of the ostracism he imposes upon the poet in his Republic, and of the keen curiosity he shows in the Cratylus for those little creatures—words—that seem to do as they please. One sees how valuable formalism was in sustaining the first steps of linguistics.

But still, it is through stumblings in the steps of language—in what is called speech—that linguistics took its momentum. That the subject does not know what he is saying, even when something is indeed being said by the mouth in which he is lodged—certainly. But also through the clumsiness of a conduct that is attributed to his brain, which he only uses to the extent that it sleeps—this organ proving to hold its subjective significance solely from its function in regulating sleep.

This is what Freud unveils as the unconscious.

For my passage in this world, under the name of Lacan, will have consisted in articulating that this is it and that it is nothing else.

Anyone can ascertain this now, simply by reading me. Anyone who operates according to these rules and engages in psychoanalysis must adhere to them—otherwise, they will pay the price by falling into stupidity.

Thus, in stating that Freud anticipates linguistics, I assert that what imposes itself is the formula I now set free:

“The unconscious is the condition of linguistics.”

Without the irruption of the unconscious, there would be no way for linguistics to emerge from the dubious daylight in which the University—under the name of the human sciences—still eclipses science itself.

Crowned in Kiev through the care of Baudouin de Courtenay, it would no doubt have remained there. But the University has not yet spoken its last word—it will make a thesis subject out of this: “The influence of Freud’s genius on the genius of Raymond de Saussure,” demonstrating where the first got the wind of the second—before the existence of radio!

As if it had never done without it to deafen just as much.

And why would Saussure have realized—if I may borrow the terms of your citation, I say to Mr. Georgin—better than Freud himself, what Freud anticipated, notably the Lacanian metaphor and metonymy—the very places where Saussure begot Jakobson?

If Saussure never moves beyond the Anagrams that he deciphers in Saturnian poetry, it is because he knows their true significance.

Villainy does not make him a fool… it is because he is not an analyst.

In this position, however, the dishonest methods in which academic self-importance cloaks itself never fail to catch their man—there is something like a hope in this—and they throw him directly into a blunder, such as stating that “the unconscious is the condition of language,” when the goal is to make oneself an “author” at the expense of what I have said, or even drummed into the ears of those concerned—namely, that “language is the condition of the unconscious.”

I still laugh at the method that has now become a stereotype, to the point that two others—though for the internal use of a Society whose academic bastardization has killed it—dared to define passage à l’acte and acting-out in precisely the terms I had proposed to oppose them to one another, except by simply inverting what I attributed to each. A way, they thought, of appropriating what no one before had been able to articulate.

If I were to fail now, I would leave behind nothing but these selected scraps of my teaching, which I have set up as a barrier against “information,” of which it suffices to say that it spreads them. What I have stated in a confidential discourse has nonetheless shifted common reception to the point of bringing me an audience that bears witness to its stability by its sheer enormity.

I remember the unease of a young man questioning me, one who had attended the delivery of my Dialectic of Desire and Subversion of the Subject before an audience composed of members of “the Party”—the only one—among whom he had strayed as a Marxist.

I kindly—kindly, kindly as I always am—pointed out, following this scrap, in my Écrits, the stupefaction that it provoked in response:

“Do you really believe,” he said to me, “that it is enough for you to have said something, to have written letters on the blackboard, for you to expect a result?”

Yet such an exercise did have an effect—I had proof of it in the mere title of a scrap that gave it a right to my book. The funds of the “Ford Foundation,” which had motivated this meeting in order to absorb them, had, quite unimaginably, dried up in the process.

The effect that propagates is not a “communication” of speech—this is addressed to you—but a displacement of discourse.

Freud, misunderstood—even by himself—for having sought to make himself heard, is served less by his disciples than by this propagation. The very propagation without which history’s convulsions remain an enigma—like those of May, which confound those who attempt to reduce them to a servitude of meaning whose dialectic presents itself as derision.

There you have it!

If you are not too tired, I will now state my response to the second question, which is formulated as follows—you will see that it is important:

“Linguistics, psychology, and ethnology share the notion of structure. Based on this notion,” asks Mr. Georgin, “can we not conceive of a common field that will one day unite psychoanalysis, ethnology, and linguistics?”

I answer, and I believe this answer carries more weight than the first, which was impressionistic, to which I gave myself over. I answer this:

“Structure” is the word that indicates the entry into play of the effect of language, starting from this: that it is a begging of the question to make it an individual or collective function—whether as the support of a supposition in existence which, whatever it may be, “I” or an organism adapted for knowledge, implies the “someone” I spoke of earlier. A function, therefore, by which someone represents, if one can put it this way, the relations that constitute the real—this last term being posited as a Lacanian category.

On the contrary, we begin from the already-present-in-reality…
which is not categorical but given…
from presence—not of relations in the foreground, but of the formulas of relation that take body in language—in order to follow its effect, which is properly structure.

This is how a discourse can dominate reality without presupposing the consensus of anyone, for it is discourse that determines the distinction to be made as a barrier between the subject of enunciations and the subject of enunciation.

Nothing is more exempt from idealism.

No need, on the other hand, to corral the structuralists—unless one wishes to make them bear the legacy of the decay covered—I do not say caused—by existentialism.

Anyone must orient themselves by structure; in any case, they will fare well by it.

Anticipate here my response to the proposed assembly…
you recall: “psychoanalysis, ethnology, and I don’t know what else… linguistics.”
…to the assembly you propose to me.

Nota: The particularity of language is what subjects structure to the “crystalline effect” mentioned earlier.

To qualify this particularity as “arbitrary” is a slip that Saussure committed, for—reluctantly, to be sure, but thereby all the more susceptible to stumbling—he took it from that academic discourse whose concealed element I show to be precisely the signifier [S₁], which dominates the discourse of the Master: the signifier of arbitrariness.

One sees that speaking of body is not—when it concerns the symbolic—a metaphor, for the said body finds, for the body taken in its naive sense, a determinant. The first produces the second by incorporating itself into it.

Hence the incorporeal, which remains to mark the first in the time after its incorporation.

Let us do justice to the Stoics for having known how to name, with this term—the Incorporeal—the point at which the symbolic holds onto the body.

Incorporeals are what I am about to speak of, namely: the function—not that of the subject, but the one that makes mathematics a reality, the application of the same effect to make topology a reality, or analysis, in a broad sense, for logic.

But it is through incorporation that structure produces affect—neither more nor less—affect only insofar as it derives from what in being is articulated, for there is only being as fact, that is, as being said somewhere. By this, it becomes evident that, for the body, whether it is dead or alive is secondary.

Who does not know the critical point by which we date the speaking being in man: burial, that is, the place where a species affirms that, unlike any other, the dead body retains what in the living gave it the character of a body. Corpse—remnant—which does not become mere carrion, the body that speech inhabited, the body that language “corporealized.”

Zoology may begin with the claim that the individual constitutes the being of the living, but only to abandon this notion, if it merely follows him down to the level of the polyp colony.

The body—when taken seriously—is first of all that which can bear the mark proper to classifying it in a sequence of signifiers. From the moment it bears this mark, it becomes the support of a relation—not contingent but necessary, for even avoiding it is still to bear it.

Before any given time, minus-One designates the so-called place of the Other (with the sign of the capital A) by Lacan.

From this One-in-Less, a bed is made for the intrusion that advances from extrusion—this is the signifier itself.

Thus, not all flesh goes forth. Only from those that bear the imprint of the sign to negate them do the clouds rise—waters above, of their jouissance—laden with lightning, to redistribute bodies and flesh.

Perhaps a less calculable distribution, yet one in which it is rarely noticed that the ancient burial site figures as precisely that “set” which articulates our most modern logic.

The empty set of bones is the irreducible element by which other elements—tools of jouissance such as necklaces, goblets, weapons—are ordered: there are more sub-elements to enumerate in jouissance than to reintegrate it into the body.

Have I animated the structure?

Enough, I believe, to announce—regarding the fields that it might unite with psychoanalysis—that nothing specifically destines the two you mention for such union.

Linguistics may define the material of psychoanalysis, even the apparatus of its operation. It leaves blank the source of what makes it effective, that is, what—by articulating it as the psychoanalytic act—I thought would illuminate more than one other act.

A field is only mastered by an operator.

The unconscious may be, as I have said, the condition of linguistics.

This gives linguistics not the slightest hold over it.

I have experienced this firsthand, from the contribution I requested from the greatest of French linguists to illustrate the launch of a journal of my own making, one which, for this very reason, I would have liked to see more clearly specified in its title: La Psychanalyse—as it was called—to remind those who have made light of it.

From this request to the linguist, I had hoped for a step forward in the problem of antithetical words, which, as one might expect, I am not surprised that Freud introduced.

If the linguist can do no better—as it seemed—than to formulate that the comfort of the signified requires a choice within the antithesis, then this must give considerable trouble to those who, in speaking Arabic, have much to deal with such words—as much trouble as responding to an anthill’s uprising.

There is no lesser barrier on the side of ethnology.

An investigator who lets his indigenous informant regale him with tales of her dreams will be brought to order if he counts them as part of what is called the field.

And the censor—by doing so—as they call him, will not, in my view—even if he were Lévi-Strauss himself—be showing contempt for my domain.

Where would the field go if it were diluted in the unconscious?

No matter what one dreams of, this would not produce an effect of excavation but a puddle of our own making.

For an inquiry that is limited—by definition—to the gathering of knowledge is one that we would be feeding with a knowledge of our own vintage.

From psychoanalysis itself, one should not expect a catalog of myths that have conditioned a subject simply by the fact that he grew up in Togo or Paraguay.

For psychoanalysis—as I have already pointed out here—operates based on the discourse that conditions it, and which I am defining this year by taking it from its reverse side.

What will be obtained—by this very fact—is no other myth than what remains of it in our discourse: Freud’s Oedipus.

As for the material from which myth analysis is conducted, let us listen to Lévi-Strauss state that it is untranslatable—this, when properly understood, since what he literally says is that it does not matter in which language they are collected: they will always be analyzable in themselves, by theorizing from them “gross units”—this is Lévi-Strauss’s term—through which a definitive mythologization will articulate them.

Here one grasps the mirage of a “common level” with what I would call “the universality of psychoanalytic discourse” but…

And from the very one who demonstrates it—Lévi-Strauss, in this instance…

…without producing the illusion of it, for psychoanalysis does not operate by means of a game of mythèmes.

That it can only take place within a particular language—what is called a positive language—even if it involves playing with translation during the course of analysis—this guarantees that “there is no metalanguage,” according to my formulation.

The effect of language occurs only within linguistic crystallization.

Its universality is nothing other than the topology rediscovered, insofar as a discourse moves within it—a discourse specified by the fact that mythology is reduced there to its extreme.

Shall I add that myth, in the articulation of Lévi-Strauss—the only ethnological form that justifies your question, I say to Georgin—the assembly—

That myth, therefore, in this articulation alone, rejects everything I have promoted regarding The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious.

Myth operates neither by metaphor nor by metonymy.

It does not condense; it explains.

It does not displace; it lodges—even if it changes the order of tents.

It plays only at combining its heavy units, where the necessary presence of the couple demonstrates the weight of a knowledge.

And this knowledge is precisely what the appearance of its structure destroys.

Thus, in psychoanalysis—because it is so in the unconscious—man knows nothing of woman, nor woman of man.

To the phallus is reduced the single point of myth where the sexual is implicated in the passion of the signifier.

That this point seems to multiply elsewhere—this is what particularly fascinates the academic, in whose discourse this point is lacking.

Hence the recruitment of novices into ethnology.

Where an effect of humor is marked—black humor, of course—painted in the colors of a protected sector.

Ah! In the absence of a university that would be an ethnos, let us make a university out of an ethnos.

Hence the wager of this pursuit, which defines the field as the place where knowledge is inscribed in writing—despite its very essence being that it cannot be transmitted through writing.

Despairing of ever seeing the last class, let us recreate the first—the echo of knowledge that resides in classification.

“The professor only returns at dawn…” I would say in counterpoint to Hegel. You know… the story of the owl and the twilight…

I shall maintain the same distance in stating my own position on structure: in the name of what your question brings into play regarding psychoanalysis.

First of all, let it not be imagined that, simply because I have defined the signifier in a way that no one else has dared, the sign is not my concern! Quite the contrary—it was the first; it will also be the last. But this detour was necessary.

What I have denounced as an implicit semiotics—one that only confusion could have allowed linguistics to exist—does not prevent the need to reconstruct it, and under the same name, since, in fact, it is the one to be made that we displace onto the former.

If “the signifier represents a subject…”—says Lacan—not a signified—
and “for another signifier…”—let us insist: not for another subject—
then how could it fall into the sign, which, in the memory of logicians, represents something for someone?

It is the Buddhist that comes to my mind, as I seek to animate my crucial question—the very one I have just posed—the fall of the signifier into the sign.

I shall animate it with: “No smoke without fire.”

As a psychoanalyst, it is through the sign that I am warned.

If it signals to me the something I must address, I know—having found in the logic of the signifier a way to break the lure of the sign—that this something is the division of the subject. A division that holds because the Other is what constitutes the signifier—by which it can only represent a subject by being “One” only from the Other.

This division echoes the successive forms of the assault which, as such—this division—has encountered knowledge of the sexual, traumatically, because this assault is doomed from the outset to failure.

For the reason I have given: that the signifier is not suited to giving form to a formula that expresses the sexual relationship.

Hence my formulation: “There is no sexual relationship,” understood as: formulable within structure.

This something into which the psychoanalyst, through interpretation, introduces the signifier—certainly, I have exhausted myself for twenty years trying to prevent him from taking it for a “thing,” since it is a “gap,” and a structural one at that.

But his desire to turn it into someone is the same error, for this leads straight to personality in person, “total,” as filth itself occasionally sings.

Yet even the slightest recollection of the unconscious demands that we maintain in that place the “something two,” with this Freudian supplement—that it cannot be satisfied by any other union than the logical one, which is inscribed as “either One, or the other.”

If this is how the signifier, from the outset, veers toward the sign, then where can we now find the someone that must urgently be provided for it?

That is the hic, which becomes nunc only by being a psychoanalyst, but also a Lacanian.

Everyone knows that soon the whole world will be so—my audience is the prelude—so psychoanalysts will be as well.

It would suffice for the social ascension of the object I have named “little (a)” to reach its zenith, through the anxiety provoked by the emptying effect that our discourse produces—by failing to reproduce itself.

That it is through such a fall that the signifier collapses into the sign—this is evident among us.

For when one no longer knows to which saint to turn, in other words, when there is no longer any signifier to fry—this being precisely what the saint provides, as you know—one buys anything, a car, for instance, to make a sign of intelligence, if one may say so, of one’s boredom—that is, the affect of desire for something else, with a capital A.

Nothing is said here of the “little (a),” for it is only deducible to the extent of each individual’s psychoanalysis—which explains why few psychoanalysts handle it well, even after having received it from my seminar.

So I shall speak in parables—that is, to mislead.

Looking more closely at “no smoke…” if I may say so, one might even take the step of realizing that it is to fire that this “no” makes a sign.

What it signifies is consistent with our structure, for since Prometheus:

– A smoke is rather the sign [a],
– Of this subject [S],
– Represented by a matchstick, the first signifier [S1],
– For its box, the second signifier [S2].

And for Ulysses, upon reaching an unknown shore, a smoke, above all, suggests that it is not a deserted island.

Our smoke is therefore the sign… why not of the smoker?

But let us proceed with “the fire producer”—this will be more materialist and dialectical as desired.

Yet that Ulysses himself provides the someone is put into question when we recall that he, too, is “nobody” [οὔτις: outis].

In any case, he is nobody to the extent that he deceives a certain fate—Polyphemus.

But the evidence that it is not in order to make a sign to Ulysses that the smokers set up camp suggests that we should be more rigorous about the principle of the sign.

For it makes us sense—almost in passing—that what fails in seeing the world as “phenomenon” is that the noumenon, since it could then only make a sign to the νούς [nous], that is, to the “supreme someone,” always a sign of intelligence, demonstrates the very poverty from which yours proceeds, in assuming that everything makes a sign:

It is “someone from somewhere,” “from nowhere,” who must be behind it all.

That this may help us place “No smoke without fire” on the same step as “No prayer without God,” so that we may hear what changes.

It is curious that forest fires do not reveal the someone to whom the careless sleeper’s cigarette addresses itself.

And that it takes phallic joy—the primitive urination with which man, as psychoanalysis tells us, responds to fire—to put us on the path to “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…” [Hamlet]

Products, for example, whose quality—within the Marxist perspective of surplus value—producers could demand accountability for, not from the Master, but rather in terms of the exploitation they suffer.

When one recognizes the kind of plus-de-jouir that makes one say, “Now, that is someone!” we will be on the path toward a dialectical substance, perhaps more suited than flesh to the Party—well known for making itself history’s babysitter.

It could be the psychoanalyst if his passe were illuminated.

That is my response to the second question.

There is a third, which is as follows:

“Would not one possible articulation between psychoanalysis and linguistics be the privilege accorded to metaphor and metonymy—by Jakobson in linguistics, and by you in psychoanalysis?”

I will not read you the response I gave to this question because it is all the more impertinent for the fact that it pisses me off.

There has been enough rambling about whether or not I borrowed metaphor and metonymy from Jakobson.

When I introduced them, I at least assumed that among my audience, there were a few who knew who Jakobson was!

They only discovered him within the following fifteen days, simply because I mentioned him at the end of my thing.

And then I was told, “Ah, there’s Lacan, he doesn’t cite Jakobson.”

After which, they read Jakobson and realized that I had even less reason to cite him, since I was saying something entirely different.

And then they said, “Ah, but he distorts Jakobson, he twists him!”

Well, all of that—it’s just anecdotes!

Question IV:

“You say that the discovery of the unconscious leads to a second Copernican revolution. That—eh?—that shakes the heart…” [Laughter]

“In what way is the unconscious a key concept that subverts all theories of knowledge?”

Well, let’s go into it, and then we will part ways.

Your question teases hopes tinged with “scare me” [Laughter], which the meaning assigned to the word “revolution” in our time inspires.

One could note the shift of this word into a superegoic function in politics, into a role of Ideal in the scoreboard of thought.

I note that it is not I [but Freud] who plays on these resonances—resonances that only, I insist, a structural cut can counteract from fading away.

I say that only the structural cut can give the word revolution its full meaning.

Why not start from the irony of assigning revolution to the account of celestial revolutions, which do not quite set the tone?

What is revolutionary in the recentration of the sun around the solar world?

After all, in hearing what I articulate this year about the discourse of the Master, one might find that he quite neatly completes his own revolution.

A revolution which, through the loop taken by science, by επιστήμε [episteme], which I demonstrate to be its aim, returns to its starting point from an absolute master-signifier, which there is represented by the sun.

In common consciousness, the idea that it revolves around—that is heliocentrism.

What I love is that Gloria made a typo earlier—she typed this up this morning—she wrote hégocentrism, h.e.g.o., and I find that sublime!

And it implies that everything turns smoothly, with no need to look further.

Shall I credit Galileo with the political insolence of the Sun King?

The Ancients, on the other hand, found a dialectical use, so to speak, in the appearances resulting from the earth’s tilt on the ecliptic.

The images of light and shadow are there, lending themselves to an articulated discourse.

I would set against heliocentrism a photocentrism, which is far less enslaving.

The metaphor that Freud takes from Copernicus…

—and in his text, if you recall, he connotes it more as a fall than as a subversion—

…in fact, aims to reach centrism itself, precisely—the pretension inherited from a psychology which, if it was still untouched in his time, remains so in ours:

The pretension of consciousness to take inventory of what it has at its disposal within the register of representation.

It is clear, in reading him, that this all-encompassing figure—utterly indifferent, shall we say, to the demands of topology, simply because it ignores them—is what is targeted in the metaphor.

It is in deepening this metaphor that one encounters its pertinence—and that is why I take it up again.

For history, taken at the very point where the Copernican revolution is inscribed, demonstrates that it is not the change of center that constitutes its nerve—

to the point that, incidentally, for Copernicus himself, this was the least of his concerns.

What this knowledge revolves around—but precisely the word revolves should not be used—

what the effect of knowledge, in the process of recognizing itself as imaginary, orbits around—

is quite clearly…

—one can read it, taking Koyré along, from Kepler’s approach, from his journal—

…its struggle to rid itself of the idea that the circular form, being the most perfect, is the only one suited to celestial bodies.

To introduce the elliptical trajectory is, indeed, to assert that it tends toward the focus occupied by the master-body—

but also toward the other [focus], just as empty as it is obscure, from which it slows.

This is where Galileo’s importance lies—not in the ellipse itself, which did not seem to concern him much—

but at any rate, elsewhere than in the scuffle of his trial, whose stakes I pointed out earlier as being ambiguous, if not in terms of which side to take.

Its importance lies in the first steps it initiates in the study of the fall of bodies, through which this ellipse becomes illuminated.

What I mean is that if there is anything in history that, in the most opaque way, illustrates the definition I have given of structure, it is the formula that Newton ultimately establishes as the key to this fall of bodies, by definitively explaining through it the path of the stars.

For it is also the presence at every point of the real—in other words, in every element of mass—of the formula of attraction taken in itself, which is an equation of the second degree.

For this is precisely what we have succeeded in stifling, in ceasing to think about, in ruining the surprise and scandal attested by Newton’s contemporaries—that every point of the world is, at every instant, informed of the masses at play so as to attract it as far as this world extends.

Should it be recalled here that the gravitational field is distinguished by its weakness from other fields—such as the electromagnetic field—brought into play by physics, and that it also resists the ideal, nearly realized nonetheless, of field unification?

Whatever may be the return of “transcendental aesthetics”—I take these terms in Kant’s sense—that Einstein’s correction constitutes…

—in its substance: the curvature of space,
and in its justification: the necessity of a transmission that the limited speed of light does not allow to be nullified—

…it remains that the Newtonian revolution asserted itself as unthinkable. This is what Newton himself admits with his hypotheses non fingo, and it confirms my formulation that “the impossible is the Real.”

No need to emphasize that in the LEM—L.E.M—landing on the moon, it is the same formula, this time realized in an apparatus, that is at stake.

Hence, I underline the acosmism of present reality.

All of this is in no way to suggest that Newton should be placed at the head of structuralism, nor even within the framework of structure, but first to note that our science, within the field of the exact sciences, is already articulated with that which poses a problem in the field of the conjectural sciences.

And second, to highlight the form—one might say irreducible—that, in the theory of knowledge, is specified by psychology.

For if, as is claimed, Kant was motivated by the need to renovate a so-called cosmology based on Newton, how is it that nothing in it articulates the fact that Newton’s formulation of relation intrudes into the real?

The thing-in-itself, on the other hand—the one Kant requires—is simply nothing other than psychology, which, there, is expressed just as in Wolff, or even in Lambert.

Thus, the autonomous ego will likewise be brought back, headfirst, by the New York clique, despite the Freudian revolution.

Let us illuminate our understanding of this ego and this psychology:

The thing-in-itself is nothing other than the knowledge that the world has of itself.

It is not surprising that the forms of this knowledge are defined as a priori, since this world, by that very fact, is total.

But what do these forms have to do with Newton’s equation and what is deduced from it as acceleration?

It is not surprising that Pure Reason or Practical Reason are powerless to demonstrate more here than what they are as an organ—thus, like everything else, as intrinsically specularized as a solid may be when it is one of revolution, that is, belonging to an intuitive geometry and not revolutionary at all.

I note here that the revolution, however grand an R the French one may have been given, would nonetheless now be reduced to what it is for Chateaubriand: a return to the Master—this great one, our own, having done nothing more, for a historian worthy of the name—Tocqueville—than hasten the ideologies of the Ancien Régime, or for another—Taine—than constitute a madness fit for careful confinement until it subsides.

Not to mention the rhetorical debauchery meant to disqualify it.

So it would be, if Marx had not given it its titles of structure, by grounding it in the discourse of the capitalist, with the discovery that it contains—that of surplus-value, as foreclosed within this discourse, but in so doing, animating class consciousness, thus allowing for the political act that Lenin carries into passage à l’acte.

This is how my analysis of Freud reiterates Copernicus—but from another angle than that of metaphor.

Freud, in the unconscious, discovers the incidence of a knowledge—one that, by escaping consciousness, remains beyond its enumeration—

yet it is no less denoted as being properly articulated, structured, as I say, like a language, unthinkable otherwise in the effects by which it is marked.

But also, in no way implying that anything within it knows itself, in the double sense:

– of knowing itself as an artisan knows his craft, in complicity with a nature into which he is born at the same time as it,
– and of recognizing itself in the way consciousness makes one believe that no knowledge exists without knowing itself as knowing.

Such is this knowledge called “unconscious,” which—though I do not immediately endorse it—seems once again to be rejected into the real by the impossible.

If it exists, it is enough to disqualify the illusion of simple knowledge—not that it ceases to persist, but rather, as a contradicted mirage.

Knowledge is a function of nature, one that here recognizes itself only as a denaturation produced in relation to this knowledge, through a series of distortions—

the first affecting this knowledge itself by producing in it repressions of signifiers, an eminently negative figure—

to which is added the condition of representability, to which—despite being material—the very nature of the signifier resists.

Meanwhile, what returns—an expressly articulated reversal, which is what gives it its value—is denial…

—I emphasize the term, as it corresponds in Freud to Verleugnung—

…the denial that the unconscious brings to bear against any interpretation of its effects as conveying meaning.

Thus, the unconscious exults only in nonsense—precisely in “nonsense.”

Furthermore, it partakes of nature only to avoid encountering it.

I mention, as a mere reminder for the ignorant, those Lacanian boats that owe their inscription to me under the rubric of The Formations of the Unconscious.

And I emphasize this to say that, here, I have not yet articulated the neuroses.

If I must complete them, these boats, it is so that this game of the insistence of unconscious knowledge, deriving from a conceivable subject, may be rejected—to pronounce upon it what Freud calls the verdict—remember his terms: a judgment that rejects and condemns—so that, as I say:

Foreclosed from the symbolic, this knowledge reappears in the real of hallucination.

It was in order to fix these terms correctly that I had to, for years, roll at the feet of those for whom it was a daily experience—without tearing them away from dreams that were, for them, sufficiently representable that they could continue to sleep.

It was enough that, concerned with the possibility of waking up, they believed in my reality for them to cast me out from those symbolic delights.

Thus, returning to the real of the École Normale Supérieure—the Ens, the being, then—you may write that with a g if you like, of the pond (étang) of the École Normale Supérieure—

From the very first day, I found myself actually summoned to declare what being I granted to all this.

I replied that the question seemed inappropriate to me, that I did not believe I owed my audience any ontology.

For in breaking them into my logy, I was making them ashamed of its onto.

I have drunk up all onto, all onto long ago [Laughter], as my responses here testify.

I will not take four roads, nor forests in which to hide the tree:

“Being is born only from the gap produced when what is is spoken.”

A formula that relegates the author to putting the act in its medium.

This what is then needs time to be spoken.

This needs time is precisely what being demands of us in the unconscious.

It is indeed being that answers each time that “time will be needed.”

But listen: I am deliberately playing with the crystal of my language to refract the signifier, to decompose the subject.

“Y faudra le temps”—this is French that I’m speaking to you—huh? I hope… not sorrow.

What “will be needed” in “needs time” speaks “the gap” from which I started.

It is on the phrase “what will be needed” that I am playing.

And although usage, in a grammar…

—a grammar written to prevent Belgians from their Belgicisms—it is a book I hold in high regard—

…does not recommend this “faudra,” it does recognize it.

Otherwise, grammar would fail in its duties.

If “little is needed” for it to reach this point, you have in this little the proof that, in French, “falloir” shifts from lack to necessity.

Meanwhile, “estuet”…

—for that is how it was once said: “est opus,” “est opus temporis” in this case—

…this “estuet” has drifted away—if I may say so—into the estuary of Old French.

Conversely, this “falloir” returns to the gap—not by chance—of the subjunctive modality, to its deficiency: “unless it be necessary…”

At what level, for the articulation of the unconscious, is the link to be found between speech and being?

Certainly, what constitutes its fabric in time is not of an imaginary course.

But let us say that it is textile, made of knots that signify only the holes they contain.

This level has no “in-itself,” except for what “falls from it,” in masochism.

This is precisely what the psychoanalyst relays—by relegating it to a “someone,” who will bear the “needs time” for as long as is necessary, so that, through this speech, what is makes something be.

It is well known that I have sought—for a few months—to introduce the enormity of the psychoanalytic act.

This “someone,” raised by the psychoanalyst, is what determines the being to come, according to the way “someone” defines the path of truth.

This was the Stoics’ work, not without coherence…

No, I beg your pardon, I skipped something—I am tired—I skipped a small paragraph…

There is only one knowledge that mediates truth: logic.

And it only got off on the right foot by making truth and falsehood into pure signifiers—letters, V, F—or, as they are still called: values.

This was the work of the Stoics, not without coherence with the morality of a politicized masochism.

The refusals of Greek mechanics barred access to the mathematical logic from which alone a truth of pure texture could be built.

This is why the Stoics could be harassed by the Skeptics, whose critique paradoxically holds together only by supposing a truth of nature, even as they claim it to be inaccessible.

This is precisely what psychoanalytic experience refutes:

Everyone learns that truth of nature is reduced to the jouissance that truth of texture allows.

The interval in which someone plays at intervening in psychoanalysis can only be represented by the distance between writing and speech.

It is only from writing that a logic—mathematical logic, as it is called—could sustain itself, and the Skeptics would be surprised to see that it secures an irrefutable certainty of truth from assertions that are anything but empty, such as:

— A system defined as belonging to the order of arithmetic secures the consistency of always distinguishing between truth and falsehood only by confirming itself to be incomplete—that is, by requiring the indemonstrable in formulas that verify themselves elsewhere…

— Or again: this indemonstrable belongs, on the other hand, to a demonstration that determines it independently of its truth.

— Or again: there exists an undecidable, articulated by the fact that the indemonstrable cannot even be decided.

The cuts in the articulatory text of the unconscious must be recognized as having such a structure, namely, that they let it fall.

For here once again, I will draw from the “crystal of language” to observe that this “chu”, being “falsus” in Latin, binds the false…

—certainly, very distinct in its meaning from that which is opposed to the true—

…to our “faut du temps” and to its “faillir”, because it is the past participle of “fallere”, from which the two verbs “faillir” and “falloir” each derive by their own detour.

And note that I only bring etymology into play as a support for the homophonic crystal effect.

It is also because the dimension of the false must be corrected when it comes to interpretation.

It is precisely by being “falsa”, not even having fallen well, that an interpretation operates on the fact that being is beside itself.

Let us not forget that in psychoanalysis, the falsus is causal to being in its process of verification.

Freud, no doubt, in his time, had no other support in this field than Brentano’s, which is perfectly traceable, though discreet, in a text such as Verneinung.

It would be enough to indicate where the “someone” carries weight on the side of the analyst, even if I did not push the way, at last, to its purity as a logical diving bell.

But added to this, in Freud, is a trait that I believe to be decisive: the unique faith he placed in those Jews, from whom, moreover, he distanced himself in what must indeed be noted as his expressed aversion—occultism.

This unique faith was placed in them because they did not fail in the seismic shock of truth.

Why them and not others, if not because the Jew—and Freud ultimately ended up like them—is the one who, in all the centuries since the return from Babylon, wherever he has gone, has known how to read, and that the Midrash is his path.

The Midrash, this is what I am going to tell you.

Having the book of the most historical, the most anti-mythical style that exists—the Bible—the Hebrew people question it at the foot of each of its letters, and only from these letters, through an inflection of a declension, a play of inversion, a proximity not even assumed as preordained.

They interrogate the Book, for example, on what it could not say about the childhood of Moses.

Why, in this interval where Freud so clearly saw the false at play, did he feel the need to push the death of the father—

and not content himself—another crystal effect—only with the scythe of time?

[The text—read by Lacan in June 1970 on Belgian RTB—of the responses (here, only 3 out of 7) to Robert Georgin’s questions was published under the title Radiophonie in Scilicet 2/3, Seuil, 1970. It is available here in “mp3” format on UBUWEB.]