🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

It must be said, “dying of shame” is a rarely achieved effect. [Laughter]
And yet, it is the only sign…
I have been talking to you about this for a while: how a signifier becomes a sign…
…the only sign whose genealogy can be assured, namely: that it descends from a signifier.
Any sign, after all, can always fall under suspicion of being a mere sign, that is to say, obscene.
Twenty scenes, if I may say so, serve as examples, and not staged for laughs—“dying of shame,” then.

Here, the degeneration of the signifier is certain, certain of being produced by a failure of the signifier, that is, being-for-death,
insofar as it concerns the subject—and who else could this being-for-death concern?—or the business card by which
“a signifier represents a subject for another signifier”—I hope you’re starting to know that by heart—
this business card never reaches its destination, for the reason that, to carry the address of death, it must be torn, this card.

“It’s a shame,” as people say, which ought to produce an “hontology,” finally spelled correctly.
In the meantime, “dying of shame” is the only affect of death that deserves—deserves what?—deserves it.
It has long been left unsaid. Speaking of it, in fact, is to open up this recess—not the last one—
the only one that sustains what can honestly be said of the “hon-nest.” Honest:
one who holds to honor—all of this is shame and companion—has the “heur” not to mention shame,
precisely because “dying of shame” is for him—for the honest—the impossible.
You know from me that this means the real.

“It’s not worth dying for,” people say about anything, reducing everything to the trivial.
Said as it is said, for that purpose, it elides that death can, in fact, be deserved.
Yet it is not about eliding the impossible in this instance, but about being its agent:
which is to say that death can be deserved, at least for the time it takes to “die of shame,” so that it may not be.

If it happens now, well, that was the only way to deserve it. That’s your chance.
If it does not happen—which, considering the previous surprise, is bad luck—
then you are left with life as a shame to be drunk, because it does not deserve that one should die from it.
Is it worth my speaking of it when, from the moment one speaks of it, the twenty scenes I mentioned earlier
demand nothing but to take it up again in buffoonery?
Precisely, Vincennes: they were apparently pleased with what I said there, pleased with me,
but the feeling is not mutual: I was not very pleased with Vincennes.

Despite a kind person who tried to fill the space in the front row, to “do Vincennes,”
there was obviously no one from Vincennes there, or very few, just the most worthy ears to award me a gold star.
That is not quite what I expected, especially after—so I hear—my teaching had been spread at Vincennes.
There are moments like that when I can be sensitive to a certain void.

Anyway… there was still just enough there to remind us—
it is a memory of which I do not know how I myself became aware—
of the point of convergence that can exist between Minute and Les Temps modernes. [Laughter]
I only mention it because—as you will see—it touches on today’s subject:
how to behave with culture?
Sometimes all it takes is a small thing, like this, to cast a light.
Once you recall the publication of a certain tape recording in Les Temps modernes,
the connection with Minute becomes glaring.

At that point, try it—it’s fascinating!
I did: you cut out paragraphs from both newspapers,
stir them around somewhere, and draw one.
I assure you, apart from the paper itself, you wouldn’t find your way so easily.
That is what should allow us to approach the question differently,
in response to the objection I raised earlier about touching things in a certain tone, with a certain word,
for fear that buffoonery might sweep them away.
Rather, let us start from the fact that buffoonery is already there,
and that perhaps, by putting a little shame in the sauce—who knows?—it might hold it back.

In short, I play the game that you hear me, that I am addressing you.
Otherwise, there would rather be an objection to your hearing me,
for it is clear that, in many cases, it prevents you from hearing what I say.
And that is a shame, because at least the young among you have long been—when it comes to what I say—
just as capable of saying it without me.
All that is missing for you is, precisely, a little shame.
It could come to you.

Of course, you won’t find it under a horse’s hoof, much less under a hobbyhorse,
but the furrows of the alèthosphère, as I put it,
which treat you and even soyousent you alive already,
that might already be quite enough as a grasp of shame.
Recognize why Pascal and Kant squirmed, like two valets about to turn into Vatel, before you.
There was a lack of truth up there for three centuries.
Well then, the service has arrived nonetheless, reheated to perfection,
and even musical from time to time, as you know.
Don’t grumble, you are served: you may say there is no more shame.

You know that those jars, which, when said to be emptied of mustard, made you wonder what was bothering me—
well, quickly stock them up with enough shame so that, when the celebration comes, it won’t be too lacking in spice.

You’re going to say to me: “Shame, what advantage is that? If that’s the reverse side of psychoanalysis, we want no part of it.”
I answer you: “You have more than enough to spare. If you don’t know it yet, cut yourself a slice, as they say.”

That stale air of yours—you will see it stumble at every step upon a shame of life, gratiné. That is what psychoanalysis uncovers.
With a little seriousness, you will realize that this shame justifies itself by not dying of shame,
that is, by maintaining with all your strength a perverted master discourse: the university discourse.
“Re-Hegel” yourselves, I would say—I’ll come back to it.

I went back to that damned pamphlet The Phenomenology of Spirit this Sunday,
wondering if I had misled you last time by dragging you into my reminiscences, which I myself might have indulged in too much.
Well, not at all: it’s dizzying, isn’t it!

You will see that the vile consciousness is the truth of the noble consciousness.
And it is presented in such a way as to make your head spin.
The more ignoble you are…
I do not mean obscene, of course, that is no longer the question—it hasn’t been for a long time…
the more ignoble you are, the better it will go.

This truly sheds light on the recent university reform, for example:
all “units of value” packed into your satchel,
the baton of a devilishly marshal culture—be it medals, huh, like at livestock competitions—
which will pin upon you what they dare call “mastery.”
Fantastic, you will have it in abundance!
Perhaps having shame for not dying from it would set a different tone,
one that concerns the real.

I said the real and not the truth,
because, as I explained to you last time, it’s tempting: to suck the milk of truth.
But it’s toxic: it puts you to sleep, and that’s exactly what is expected of you.

There is a charming person who, upon my recommendation of The Disillusioned Man by Baltasar Gracián…
who, as you know, was a Jesuit living at the junction of the 16th and 17th centuries…
wrote this great piece at the beginning of the 17th century.

All in all, that is where the worldview that suits us was born:
before science even reached our zenith, it was already sensed coming.
It’s curious, but that’s how it is.
It is something to record for any truly experimental appreciation of history:
the Baroque, which suits us so well…
it is to be assimilated to modern art, figurative or not—it’s the same thing…
began either before or at the very same time as the first steps of science.

In this Criticón, which is a kind of allegory in which, for example,
the plot of Robinson Crusoe is already included—
most masterpieces are crumbs of other unknown masterpieces—
in this Criticón, in the third part, at the slope of old age—since he takes up this graph of the ages—
in the second chapter, there is something called The Truth in Labor.

She is in labor somewhere in a city inhabited only by beings of the greatest purity.
That does not stop them from taking flight—
struck with sheer terror—
when they are told that truth is a child’s labor.

I wonder why I am asked to explain this,
when this discovery was already made for me—because, in truth, I did not spot it myself—
unless one did not attend my last seminar.
Because that is precisely what I said there.

This is where one must hold firm,
because if you want your words to be subversive,
be very careful that they do not get too bogged down on the path of truth.

What I properly wanted to articulate last time,
in placing here these things I cannot keep redrawing all the time,
is obviously the S1, the Master-signifier,
which constitutes the secret of knowledge in its university setting.
It is very tempting to cling to it…
and one remains caught there.

Whereas what I am pointing to—
perhaps the only thing some of you could retain from this year—
is to also focus on the level of production,
of the production of the university system,
insofar as a certain production is expected from it,
while perhaps it is a matter—
in order to produce an effect—
of substituting another production for it.

On this point, simply as a step, as a relay,
and because, after all, I marked them last time before you,
I will nonetheless read you three pages…
I apologize to the few people to whom I have already tested them…
three pages responding to a question from that funny Belgian—
that funny Belgian who, all in all, has asked me questions that hold my attention quite a bit—
as you can see—
to the point that I wonder whether I did not dictate them to him myself without knowing it.

At any rate, he certainly deserves at least the merit of having prepared himself to hear them, if that’s how it is.
Here, then, is the sixth one, just like that, of a charming naïveté:

“In what way are knowledge and truth…
everyone knows that I have tried to show how these two virtues are stitched together…
In what way are knowledge and truth incompatible?”

I say to him:

“To express myself as it comes to me, nothing is incompatible with truth: one pisses, one coughs, one spits into it.
It is a passageway, or rather, an evacuation site—for knowledge as for the rest.
One can remain there permanently and even develop a taste for it.
It is worth noting that I have warned the psychoanalyst against connoting love with this place
to which he is betrothed by his knowledge.
I tell him right away:

‘One does not marry truth; with it, there is no contract, and even less free union.
It tolerates none of that.
Truth is seduction first, and it is there to dupe you.
To not be taken in by it, one must be strong—
and that is not your case.’”

Thus I spoke to the psychoanalyst, this ghost whom I call out to, whom I even haul in,
against the exultation of urging you to the hour, to the day,
unchanged since those times when I stake for you the wager that he hears me.
So it is not you whom I am addressing;
you do not run the risk of being bitten by truth.
But—who knows?—
should my forgery come to life,
should the psychoanalyst take up my relay,
on the limits of the hope that it does not come to pass,
it is him whom I warn:
that there is everything to learn from truth—
this commonplace condemns anyone to lose themselves in it.

That each person knows a fragment of it will be enough,
and they would do well to stick to that.
Better yet would be that they do nothing with it,
for there is no instrument more treacherous.
We know how a psychoanalyst—
not the psychoanalyst—
ordinarily gets by:
he leaves the string of this truth to the one who was already burdened by it,
and who, by that very fact,
becomes truly his patient,
whereby he cares about it as much as a fig.

All the same, it is a fact that, for some time,
certain people have made it their business to feel more concerned by it.
Perhaps that is my influence.
Perhaps I have had something to do with this correction.
And that is precisely what obliges me to warn them not to go too far,
because if I have achieved it,
it is by having given no impression of touching it.
But that is precisely what makes it serious.
Of course, some pretend to feel a certain terror from it.
It is a refusal,
but refusal does not exclude collaboration.
Refusal itself can be one.”

Well then, with those who listen to me on the radio—
who do not have, as I was saying just now,
the obstacle to hearing what I say,
which is the fact of hearing me—
I will go further here.
And that is why, after all, I am reading this to you,
since if I can say it at a certain level of mass media,
why not make the attempt here?

And then,
it is possible that the principle I adopted
in these first four responses—
which left you so bewildered here
and which, apparently,
passed much better than expected on the radio—
has confirmed the principle I have followed,
which also aligns with what I would like to leave you with today.
It is one of the methods, after all,
that could serve to act upon culture.

It is that, when by chance
one is taken at the level of a large audience,
one of those masses that a type of medium delivers to you—
well then,
why not, precisely,
elevate the level,
in some proportion to the presumed inaptitude—
which is pure presumption—
of this field?
Why lower the tone?
Whom do you need to gather?

It is precisely the game of culture to engage you in this system,
by which the goal is achieved:
that not even a cat could find her kittens.
So here,
even though it is still entirely speakable in this room,
I state what is remarkable—
that it is not remarked—
about my formula of the “subject supposed to know,”
placed at the principle of transference.

“The supposed knowledge,
which, according to me,
the psychoanalysand transfers,
I never said that the psychoanalyst is any more supposed to know the truth.
Let that be considered,
to understand that adding this complement would be fatal to transference.
But just as well,
let it not be considered,
if understanding it would precisely prevent its effect from remaining true.

I savor the indignation
of a person who dresses up what I denounce
with the little knowledge that transference produces.

It is up to her alone to furnish this with something other
than the chair she claims she is ready to sell,
should I be right.
She renders the matter insoluble
only by refusing to stick to her means.

The psychoanalyst, for his part,
is only concerned with not being entangled in his being.

The famous non-knowledge,
about which so much fuss is made,
only matters to him
insofar as it is nothing to him.
He recoils from the fashion
of unearthing a shadow
to feign it as carrion,
of making himself rated as a hunting dog.

His discipline imbues him with the understanding
that the real is not primarily there to be known—
and in parentheses,
this is the only dam against idealism.

Knowledge is added to the real—
that is precisely why
it can make the false exist,
and even exist a little there.

I Dasein wildly on this occasion—
one needs help for that.

To speak truthfully,
it is only from where it is false
that knowledge concerns itself with truth.

Any knowledge that is not false
could not care less.”

In proving itself, it is only its form that is surprising—surprise of questionable taste, moreover—when, by the grace of Freud, it speaks to us in language, since it is nothing but its product. This is where the political incidence takes place.

It is there, in action, that the question arises: by what knowledge is law made?
When it is uncovered, it may happen that things change.
Knowledge falls to the rank of symptom when viewed from another perspective.

And there, truth arrives. One fights for truth.
Which, all the same, only occurs through its relation to the real.
But whether it occurs matters far less than what it produces.
The effect of truth is nothing but a fall of knowledge.
It is this fall that generates production, soon to be resumed.

The real, for its part, is neither better nor worse off.
Generally, it shakes itself off until the next crisis.
Its benefit for the moment is that it has regained some luster.

This would even be the benefit one might expect from any revolution:
this luster that would shine in place of the truth—
a place that has always remained troubled.
Only, this luster—one never sees more than a mirage.

That is what I had thrown into a corner the day after the last seminar,
clearly for you, since it is no longer a question of adding it to my little radiological raft.
What must be understood,
what is terrifying in truth,
is what it puts in its place.

If you look at this little four-letter diagram:
of course, the locus of the Other,
as I have always said,
is made so that truth may be inscribed there.
But that belongs to the fair game of speech and language.
That is indeed where truth is inscribed—
that is to say, everything of that order—
which means, the false, even the lie,
which exists only upon the foundation of truth.

But in this schema of the quadripod,
which presupposes language
and holds as structured what is called a discourse—
that is to say, what conditions any speech that may arise within it—
what does this truth put in its place?
It puts the truth of that discourse, namely what it conditions.

How does the Master’s discourse hold?
That is the other face of this function of truth—
not its overt face,
but the dimension in which it becomes necessary
as a debt of something concealed.

Our furrows of the aléthosphère trace themselves
upon the long-deserted surface of the sky.
But what is at stake
is what I once named
with a word that tickled enough of you
to make you wonder what had gotten into me:
the lathouse.

I did not invent this dimension of truth—
that it is hidden,
that it is Verborgenheit that constitutes it.

In short,
things are such
that it makes one suppose
that it has something in its belly.

You see as well as I do
that it is not useless to recognize
that very early on,
some sharp minds noticed
that if it were to come out,
it would be abominable.

It probably is abominable,
just so that it fits better into the landscape.

Now, it is equally possible
that this is the entire trick:
that it must be terrifying if it comes out.

If you spend your time waiting,
that is when you are done for.

One must not, in sum,
tease the lathouse too much.
For to engage in it
is always to guarantee—what?—
what I keep trying to explain to you:
to guarantee the impossibility
of what, thanks to you,
is effectively real.

If it is on the side of truth
that your quest attaches itself,
the more you uphold
the power of the impossible—
those impossibilities I enumerated last time:
governing, educating, analyzing when occasion demands.

In any case, for analysis,
it is obvious, isn’t it?

The subject supposed to know—
it is scandalous,
when I merely approach truth.

Well then, my little quadripod schemas—
I tell you today,
so that you take great care:

– they are not the spinning table of history,
– it is not necessary that everything always passes through them,
– nor that it always turns in the same direction.

They are only a call to orient yourselves
in relation to what we might well call radical functions,
in the mathematical sense of the term,
where the decisive step was taken
somewhere around the time I already mentioned earlier:
around what is common between

– Galileo’s first step,
– the emergence of integrals and differentials in Leibniz,
– and also the appearance of logarithms.

What is a function?
It is something that enters the real—
something that had never entered it before—
and that corresponds to this:

– not to discovering, experimenting, delineating, isolating, extracting,
– but to writing two orders of relations.

Let’s exemplify, shall we,
that from which the logarithm arises.

In one case, the first relation is addition.
Addition—
even that is intuitive:
there are things here,
things there,
you put them together,
it makes a new set.

Multiplication, though, is not the same thing.
The multiplication of loaves is not the same as the gathering of loaves.
It is about making one of these relations apply to the other.

You invent the logarithm, and it starts galloping wildly through the world on little rules that seem like nothing,
but do not think that the mere fact that they exist leaves you—any of you here—
in the same state as before they emerged. Their presence is what matters.

So, these little, more or less zealous terms: S1, S2, a, S—
I tell you that they can serve in a great number of relations.
One simply needs to familiarize oneself with them.

For instance, knowing that the unary trait,
for as much as one can be content with it,
allows one to question the functioning of the Master-signifier—
well, it is entirely usable.
If only one establishes it structurally,
one realizes that there is no need to add anything more:
the whole grand comedy of the “life-and-death struggle for pure prestige” and its outcome is already there.

There is no contingency…
contrary to what one concludes when interrogating things on the level of “natural truth”
…there is no contingency in the position of the slave.
There is the necessity of this:
that in knowledge, something occurs that functions as a Master-signifier.

Of course, one cannot help but dream of knowing who did it first,
and then, at last, one finds this way the beauty of the ball tossed back and forth between Master and slave.
But perhaps it was simply someone who was ashamed,
who pushed themselves forward in this way.

What I have brought today—this dimension of the knot—
is not easy to put forward,
because this is not the kind of thing one speaks about most easily.
Perhaps that is precisely the hole from which the Master-signifier springs forth.

If that were the case,
it might not be entirely useless
to measure just how close one must approach it
if one wants to have anything to do with the subversion—
or even merely the rotation—of the Master’s discourse.

But in any case, one thing is certain:
this introduction of S1, the Master-signifier,
is within your reach in even the most minimal discourse—
it is what defines its readability.

There is language, and there is speech, and there is knowledge, indeed,
and all that seems to have functioned in the Neolithic era.
But we have no trace of a dimension having existed that is called reading.
Not yet the need for writing, nor for printing—
not that these were not already present for a long time,
but rather in a kind of retroactive effect.

The connection that concerns what allows us to always ask,
when reading any text,
what distinguishes it as readable—
we must look for it on the side of what constitutes the Master-signifier.

What I would have you notice:
as literary works,
we have only ever read things that put one to sleep standing up.

Why does it hold together? Why is it that…
I don’t know, in my last misstep—
I adore them—
I happened to read The Reverse Side of Contemporary Life by Balzac.
It is truly something that puts one to sleep standing.

If you have not read it,
you may well have read everything else you wanted:

– about the history of the early 19th century and the end of the 18th,
– that is, the French Revolution, to call it by its name,
– you may even have read Marx,

but you will understand nothing,
and something will always escape you—
something that is only there,
in this story designed to make you sweat:
The Reverse Side of Contemporary Life.

Refer to it, I beg you.
I am sure that not many of you have read it—
it is one of Balzac’s least-read works.

Have you read it, Philippe?
You haven’t read it?
You neither? You see!
It’s crazy! Read it!

Read it and write an assignment—
exactly the same kind
as the one I attempted to give
to the people I spoke to at Sainte-Anne
about the first scene of the first act of Athalie.

All they took from it was “the quilting point.”
I am not saying it was an excellent metaphor,
but all the same, it was S1, the Master-signifier.

God knows what they made of that quilting point!
They carried it all the way to Les Temps Modernes.
Yes, it was Les Temps Modernes, not Minute.

It was the Master-signifier.
It was a way of asking them to realize
how something that spreads through language like wildfire—
that is readable—
that is, it catches,
it creates discourse.

I still maintain that there is no metalanguage—
that is precisely what is important:
that everything one might believe to be
of the order of a “meta” search in language
is simply—always—a question of reading.

Only, if ever— and this is a pure supposition—if I were asked for my opinion on something in which I am not involved,
something from my position… which, one must say, is quite peculiar in this regard,
I would be surprised if I were to lay it out so openly today—
my position concerning the University.

But if others, those who are indeed within it,
and for reasons that are far from negligible—
reasons that become all the more evident when one refers back to my little letters—
find themselves in the position of wanting to subvert something in their university,
then, of course, they can search in the direction

– where everything is threaded onto a small stick,
– where one can place the little (a) that they are,
– and then others, others who—by the nature of the progression of knowledge—are dominated.

For so long now, they have let us glimpse—almost as if it were a myth—that there could be such a thing as savoir-vivre!
I am not here to preach that to you. I have told you instead: the shame of living.

With my little schemas, they may find justification for the idea
that the student is not mistaken in feeling himself a brother—
not to the proletariat, but to the sub-proletariat.
The proletariat is like the plebs—
the Roman plebs were very distinguished people.

The class struggle perhaps contains, from the outset, this small seed of error:
that it does not at all take place on the plane of the true dialectic of the Master’s discourse.
Class struggle is situated on the plane of identification. Senatus Populusque Romanus.
They are on the same side.
And the whole Empire—those are the others, the surplus.

It is a matter of understanding why students identify with the surplus.
They do not seem to have any clear idea of how to escape from it.

I would like to point out to them that a crucial aspect of this system is production—
the production of shame.
This translates into impudence.

That is why it might not be a bad idea not to follow that path—
to properly designate something that so easily inscribes itself into these little letters:
what is being produced?

What is produced is something cultural.
But when placed directly in line with the University,
what is ultimately produced is a thesis.

It always relates to the Master-signifier—
not merely because it is conferred upon you,
but simply because it belongs to the presuppositions
that anything of this order of production must be associated with an author’s name.
It is highly refined at the university level.

There is a kind of preliminary procedure at the threshold—
one will have the right to speak there,
with this strict convention:
that one will be forever pinned to one’s thesis.

That is what gives weight to one’s name—
yet at the same time,
one is in no way bound by what is in the thesis for the future.

Ordinarily, one is content with this.
But after that, one may say whatever one pleases,
as long as one makes a name for oneself,
since one has already been admitted to the name.

That is what plays the role of the Master-signifier.

How shall I put it?
I do not wish to attribute too much importance to what I have done,
but this is how I came to conceive of a thing
you no longer hear much about these days: Scilicet.

It did strike some that I said it was to be a place
where things should be written unsigned.
Do not think that my own writings there are any more signed—
if you have seen what I wrote in it.

I wrote what sings on its own
from a painful experience—
that of what I have had, precisely,
with what is called a School.

I brought forward propositions—
so that something might be inscribed there,
which did not fail to be inscribed,
with some effects of catalepsy.

The fact that it bears my signature
would only be of interest
if I were an author.

I am not an author at all.
No one even considers such a thing when reading my Écrits.

For a long time,
they remained carefully confined within an organ
that, in the end, had no other purpose
than to be as close as possible
to what I attempt to define
as something applied to a questioning of knowledge:

what does analytical knowledge produce as disasters?

That is what was at stake—
and what remained at stake
for as long as they were not all itching to become authors.

It is quite curious that this—
the unsigned—
should appear paradoxical,
when, for centuries,
all honest people
have always at least pretended
that their work had been snatched from them,
that their manuscript had been taken away,
that they had been the victim of some dirty trick.

They did not expect to be greeted
at publication with congratulatory notes.

In short,
if anything could emerge
from a serious questioning
of what knowledge is,
as it is dispensed and propagated
within the established framework of the University,
there is truly no reason
why, in some small refuge—
a place such as this—
that which presents itself should do so
not to promote a certain Monsieur,
but to say something structurally rigorous,
no matter what may come of it.

That could have a greater reach than one might expect.

I went searching in my library…
which is extraordinary, really,
because I see no reason why I would have done so—
I had no need to—
but, all the same, it was to reassure myself of the dates…

A man like Diderot, after all,
published Rameau’s Nephew—
and let it fall from his pocket.

Someone else carried it to Schiller, who barely knew what Diderot was.
Diderot never concerned himself with it again.

It was in 1804 that Schiller passed it on to Goethe, who translated it immediately,
and we did not have—until 1891…
this, I can tell you because I have the volume…
until 1891, a French retranslation of Goethe’s German translation—
which Goethe, by the way, had completely forgotten had been published a year later,
or perhaps never even knew…
We were in the midst of the Franco-German quarrel, weren’t we?
The Revolution, and so on…
and all the same, this revolutionary intrusion was rather poorly tolerated.

In short, Goethe’s translation went completely unnoticed.
I tell you: Goethe himself did not know it had been published.

That did not prevent Hegel from making it one of the pivotal elements
of that booklet full of humor to which I have recently referred—
The Phenomenology of Spirit.

You see, then, that there is no great reason to worry
that what emerges from you carries the label of what concerns you,
because I assure you: that is a major obstacle
to anything decent coming out at all.

If only because, within the very things
you might naturally be interested in,
you feel obliged—under the laws of the thesis—
to refer it back to the author:

– He must have had genius—of course—
especially if he did not say anything outrageously stupid
and contributed something important,
which may have nothing to do with him personally.

– You are absolutely required to think he was a profound thinker.

And with that, you are ruined for a long time
when it comes to anything related to psychology.

It is entirely obvious that, in the order of things that illuminate…
I do not know…
The Reverse Side of Contemporary Life,
which I spoke to you about earlier—
there is not a shadow of psychology in it.

It is entirely a small construction
that holds its value by its Master-signifier—
or rather, that is worth being readable.

No need for the slightest psychology.

Finally, to say everything—to absolve myself—
I will add that what nonetheless saves my Écrits
from the accident that befell them—
namely, that they were read immediately—
is that, after all, they are a worst-seller. [Laughter]

Well, in any case,
I will not prolong—
in this heat—
this discourse,
which is the last I will give you this year.

It is quite clear that much is missing.
But certainly, if there is anything not in vain in being specified,
it is that your presence here—so numerous—
which so often embarrasses me—
at least has reasons
that are a little less than ignoble,
to borrow Hegel’s expression.

Of course, it is a matter of tact,
as others would say.
In fact, it seems—not too much,
but just enough.

I hope…
Well, if what I bring forth is not entirely incomprehensible—
to be honest, given what it is I put forth
before most of you—

…it is that not too much, but just enough,
I sometimes manage to make you feel ashamed.