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(All parts in English)

Lacan writes on the board: “L’achose.”

Am I?
Am I present when I speak to you?
The thing, about which I am addressing you, would have to be there.

But that is enough to say that the thing can only be written as “l’achose,” as I have just written it on the board,
which means that it is absent where it holds its place.

Or more precisely, that the object (a) which occupies this place, removed—“removed”: this object (a)—
leaves in that place only the sexual act as I emphasize it, that is to say, castration.

I can testify from there—allow me—that “analysis” is anything at all, but only from there,
from what concerns “it”—I say “concerns it”: “it,” castration—it must be said: “Oh! là là!” [Laughter]

Philosophical babble is not nothing—babble churns—I am not speaking ill of it,
it has long served some purpose,
but for some time now, it tires us.
It has led to producing “being there,” which is sometimes translated into French more modestly as “presence,”
whether or not one adds “living” to it,
in short, what scholars call “Dasein.”

I found it again with pleasure in a text…
I will tell you which one in a moment, as well as when I reread it…
a text of mine,
I was surprised to realize that it has been quite a while since I formulated this expression at the time for people like that, a bit hard of hearing: “Eat your Dasein.”
What does it matter! We will come back to it shortly.

Philosophical babble is not so incoherent.
It only embodies this presence, this being-there, within a discourse that it begins precisely by disembodying through ἐποχή [epoché].
You know this, the ἐποχή, the bracketing, that is simply what it means,
which is still better, because it does not quite have the same structure, it is still better in Greek.
Thus, it is evident that the only way to be there occurs only by placing oneself in parentheses.

We are approaching what I essentially have to say to you today.
If there is a hole at the level of l’achose,
this already allows you to sense that it is perhaps a way of representing this hole,
that it only happens in the mode of what?…
let’s take a rather trivial comparison…
only in the mode of that retinal stain in which the eye has no desire whatsoever to entangle itself
when, after having fixed on the sun, it then moves across the landscape.

It does not see its being there, that eye is not foolish.
For you, there is a whole crowd of Klein bottles of the eye.

No philosophical babble, which you can well sense serves only its academic function here,
whose limits I tried to show you last year,
at the same time, moreover, as the limits of what you can do from the inside,
even if it be revolution.

Denounce…
since that’s done…
denounce as logocentric the so-called “presence,”
the idea, as they say, of inspired speech,
in the name of the fact that inspired speech, of course, one can laugh at it,
attribute to speech all the stupidity in which a certain discourse has gone astray,
and lead us toward a mythical archi-writing,
solely constituted of what is rightly perceived as a certain blind spot,
which one can denounce in all that has been thought about writing—
all that does not get us very far.

One only ever speaks of something else in order to speak of l’achose.
What I said, back in the day…
let’s not exaggerate, I have never had my mouth full of “full speech,” and I still think that the vast majority of you have never heard me invoke it in any way…
what I said about full speech is that it fulfills…
these are the findings of language, and they are always rather lovely…
it fulfills the function of l’achose, which is on the board.

Speech, in other words, always surpasses the speaker; the speaker is a spoken being—this is, after all, what I have been stating for some time now.
How does one become aware of this? That is what I would like to indicate, in this year’s seminar.
Can you imagine, I am at the point of saying “I would like,” after twenty years of this…

Naturally, it is like this because, after all, I have not “not said” it: it has been evident for a long time.
It is evident, first of all, in the fact that you are here, so that I may show it to you.
Only, if what I say is true, your being-there is no more conclusive than mine.
What I have been showing you for quite some time is not enough for you to see it; I must demonstrate it.

To demonstrate, in this context, is to say what I was showing. Naturally, not just anything.
But I was not showing you l’achose just like that; l’achose, precisely, cannot be shown—it must be demonstrated.
So, I could draw your attention to things I was showing, inasmuch as you did not see them, for what they might demonstrate.

To play the card at stake today, we shall call it, with all the ambiguity this may carry: writing.
Writing—though one cannot say that I have overwhelmed you with it…
I mean that it truly had to be extracted from me, those writings I one day gathered [Écrits, 1966],
in the end, in the face of my almost total inability to make myself heard by psychoanalysts—
I mean even those who remained attached [sic], simply because they had not managed to embark elsewhere.

In the end, it became clear to me that there were so many others, beyond them, who were interested in what I was saying,
a small beginning of your absent being-there,
that I let go of those Écrits.
And, well, they were consumed within a much broader circle than, ultimately, what you represent,
if I am to believe the figures my publisher gives me.

It is a peculiar phenomenon, and one well worth pausing over,
especially since, to remain consistent with my usual approach, it is precisely based on a perfectly identifiable experience,
which, in any case, I have endeavored to articulate—specifically in recent times, last year—
by trying to situate within its structure what characterizes the discourse of the analyst.

It is therefore in relation to this use—my own—which lays no claim to providing a worldview,
but simply to saying what seems self-evident to be able to say to analysts.
Around this, for ten years, in a rather well-known place called Sainte-Anne,
I developed a discourse that certainly did not claim to use writing in any way other than a very specific one,
which is precisely what I will try to define today.

Those who remain as witnesses of that time cannot object…
there are not many left in this room, of course, but still a few.
Oh, but one surely cannot count on the fingers of one hand those who were there in the first months…
they can testify that what I did there—with patience, with care, with gentleness,
with flourishes of the arms, with flourishes of the legs—
was to construct for them, piece by piece, bit by bit, things called graphs.

There are a few that are still floating around; you can find them quite easily thanks to the work of someone
whose dedication I pay tribute to, and to whom I gave complete freedom to create a reasoned index,
within which you can easily locate the pages where these graphs appear.
That will save you from having to dig.
But you will see—it is immediately noticeable, just by doing this—that there are elements unlike the rest of the printed text.

These graphs that you see there are not, of course, without presenting a certain difficulty—of what?—
of interpretation, of course.
Know that, for those for whom I constructed them, there could not even be a shadow of doubt:
before indicating the direction of a line, its intersection with another,
or the small letter I placed at that intersection,
I would speak for half an hour, three-quarters of an hour, justifying what was at stake.

I insist, of course, not to take credit for what I did…
deep down, because I enjoyed it—no one was asking me to do it, quite the opposite, in fact [Laughter]…
but because, with this, we enter the heart of the matter regarding writing, or even écriture…
which, believe it or not, is the same thing:
we speak of écriture as if it were independent of writing,
which sometimes makes discourse rather awkward.

Besides, this term “ure,” just like that, which gets added, really makes one feel, in the end, what a strange kind of bender is at play in this case.
What is certain is that, to speak of l’achose as it is there, well, that alone should already make it clear to you that I had to take—let’s say nothing more—as an apparatus, as a support for writing, the form of the graph.

The form of the graph is worth looking at. Let’s take it—I don’t know, any one of them, the last one there, the big one, the one you’re going to find—I don’t even remember where, where it is, where it’s floating—I think it’s in Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire.

The thing that goes like this, in which letters are added in parentheses:
– Spoinçon◊ and the capital D of demand: S◊D,
– and here the capital S of the signifier, the bearer-signifier, functioning as A: S(A).

You surely understand that if writing can serve any purpose, it is precisely because it is different from speech, from speech that can “rely on” something. Speech does not translate S(A), for instance.
Only, if it relies on that—even if only on this form—of course, it must remember that this form does not stand without the other line intersecting the first being marked at these points of intersection of the set of A itself: s(A).

That there is a capital I here…
I apologize for these encroachments, but after all, some have this figure well enough in their minds for it to be sufficient for them, and for the others—my God—let them refer to the right page…
what is certain is that one cannot fail—at least through this, through this figure—to feel, let’s say, solicited to respond to the demand it imposes when one begins to interpret it.

Everything, of course, depends on the meaning you will assign to capital A.
One meaning is proposed in the writing where I happened to insert it.
And then, the meanings that impose themselves on all the others are not free to stray too far.

What is certain is that this is the very essence of what—I believe—has certainly appeared to you, by now, as sufficiently defined, namely that this graph…
this one, like all the others, and not just mine—I will tell you this in a moment…
that this graph, what it represents, is what is called, in the advanced language that the questioning of mathematics by logic has gradually provided us with, what is called a topology.

There is no topology without writing.
You may even have noticed—if you have ever really gone to open Aristotle’s Analytics—
that there is a small beginning of topology there, and that it consists precisely in making holes in writing.

“All animals are mortal”: you erase “animals,” and you erase “mortal,”
and in their place, you insert the pinnacle of writing, here a simple letter: ∀.
Perhaps it is indeed true that they were facilitated in this by some particular affinity they had with the letter—
one cannot quite say how.

On this point, you can refer to things that are very, very engaging, as Mr. James Février put it,
on I don’t know what kind of contrivance, trickery, or coercion that constitutes, in relation to what one can quite sanely call
“the norms of writing”…
the norms, not the enormous, though both are true…
in relation to “the norms of writing,” the invention of logic.

I suggest to you in passing, today, the following: that it has something to do with the fact, let’s say, of Euclid.
There you have it—because I can only throw this at you in passing, since after all, it must be verified,
and I see no reason why I, too, shouldn’t—
even with people who are very well-versed in a certain field—
from time to time,
offer up a little suggestion, which they might laugh at, because they may have realized it long ago.

Indeed, one does not see why they would not have noticed—why they would not have noticed that a triangle…
since that is the starting point…
that a triangle is nothing other than…
but absolutely nothing other than…
a writing, or more precisely, a written form.

And the fact that one defines “equal” as “metrically superimposable” does not go against this.
It is a written form, in which what is metrically superimposable is something to be jabbered about.
What does not depend on the written form at all—what depends on you, the jabberers.

However you write the triangle, even if you do it like this,
you will prove the story of the isosceles triangle—namely, that if it has two equal sides, the other two angles are equal.
It is enough that you have made this small written form, because there is never any better way to do it
than the way I have just written it—the figure of an isosceles triangle.
These were people who had a knack for writing, huh! But that’s not a big deal!

Perhaps we could go a bit further.
For now, let us at least take note of this: they were well aware that it was only a postulate,
and that it has no other definition than this: it belongs to demand…
to the demand made to the listener: “One must not immediately say ‘stop!’”
…in that demand, it is what does not impose itself upon discourse solely by virtue of the graph.

The Greeks, then, seem to have had a very clever handling, a subtle reduction of what was already circulating throughout the world in the form of writing.
It was tremendously useful.
It is absolutely clear that there is no question of empire,
and, if you allow me the word, not even the slightest empiricism,
without the support of writing.

If you will allow me here an extrapolation beyond the vein I am following,
I mean that I will point out to you the horizon, the distant aim, that guides all of this.
Of course, it is only justified if the perspective lines indeed converge.
It is the continuation that will show you.

“In the beginning, ἐν ἀρχῇ [en archēi],”

as they say—something that has nothing to do with any temporality whatsoever, since temporality follows from it—

“In the beginning was the Word.”

But speech—there is every chance that, for a time that was not yet measured in centuries…
imagine, they are only centuries to us, thanks to radiocarbon
and a few other retrospective contrivances of this kind, which all stem from writing…
well, during a stretch of something we could call—not time—the αἰών [aiôn],
the aiôn of the aiôns, as they say, there was a time when people gargled with such things.
They had their reasons; they were closer to it than we are.
After all, speech produced things,
things that were surely less and less distinguishable from it, from what they—these things—were as its effects.

What does writing mean?
We must at least attempt to define it.
It is absolutely clear and certain, when we look at what is commonly called writing,
that it is something that, in a way, reverberates onto speech.

About the habitat of speech, I believe we have already said enough in recent sessions to see that our discovery,
at the very least, articulates tightly with the fact that there is no sexual relation, as I have defined it.
Or, if you prefer, that the sexual relation is speech itself.
Admit it—this is somewhat unsatisfactory, though I believe you already have some sense of it.

That there is no sexual relation—I have already formulated it in this way:
there is no relation, in any current mode.
Who knows? There are those who dream that one day it will be written—why not, huh?—with the progress of biology…
Is Mr. Jacob still around, at least a little?

Perhaps one day, there will no longer be the slightest question about the sperm and the ovum;
they will be made for each other,
it will be written, as they say.
This is where I ended last session’s lecture.
And at that point, you will have something to tell me, won’t you?

One can do science fiction, huh?
Try writing that—it’s difficult.
Why not? That’s how things move forward.

Whatever the case may be at present, what I mean is that it cannot be written
without bringing into function something rather amusing—
because precisely, one knows nothing about its sex—
something called the phallus.

If all that we manage to write—
and I thank the person who gave me the page where, in my Écrits,
there is what concerns man’s desire, written as capital phi of (a): Φ(a),
Φ being the phallic signifier—
this, for those who believe that the phallus is “the lack of a signifier”—
I know this is debated in the cartels.
There you have it!

And woman’s desire…
I couldn’t care less about the Écrits, huh?
…it is written as barred A with phi in parentheses: A̅(φ)—
which is the phallus, there where one imagines it to be:
the little peepee.

Here is what we manage to write at best after—my God!—something that we will simply call what it would be, like that, to have reached a certain scientific moment.
A scientific moment is characterized by a certain number of written coordinates, foremost among them the formula that Mr. Newton wrote regarding what is at stake under the name of the gravitational field, which is pure writing.

No one has yet managed to provide any substantial support, any shadow of plausibility, to what this writing states, which so far seems somewhat rigid, as it cannot be absorbed into a framework of other fields where, like that, we have more substantial ideas.
The electromagnetic field provides an image, doesn’t it?
Magnetism is always somewhat animalistic; the gravitational field, however, is not. It is a strange thing.

When I think that those gentlemen—and soon those ladies—who strolled around that absolutely sublime place, which is undoubtedly one of the incarnations of the sexual object, the moon, when I think that they go there simply carried by a written form, it gives one a lot of hope.
Even in the field where it could be of use to us, namely, desire.
But, well, that’s not for tomorrow, huh?
Despite psychoanalysis, it’s not for tomorrow.

So here we have writing, inasmuch as it is something we can talk about.
In what way?

There is something I find surprising, though it appears under the pen in a remarkable book published by Armand Colin—
after all, it is one of the easiest things to find—it is in some congress of synthesis, I don’t remember which number,
and it is called, quite simply and sweetly, L’écriture.

It is a collection of reports, beginning with one by Métraux,
dear, late Métraux, who was an excellent and truly astute man.
It begins with a piece by Métraux, where he speaks extensively about the writing of Easter Island—
it is, after all, delightful.

He starts simply from the fact that he himself understands absolutely nothing about it,
but that there are a few others who have done slightly better,
that, naturally, it is debatable,
but at least his efforts…
which were clearly and entirely unsuccessful…
nevertheless allow him to speak about what others have managed to extract from it, with, let’s say, debatable success.

It is a truly wonderful introduction, perfectly suited to placing you on the plane of modesty,
after which countless contributions discuss various forms of writing.

And after all—my God—it makes quite a bit of sense.
It makes quite a bit of sense, it certainly does…
after all, it didn’t come right away,
it didn’t come right away,
and we will see why it did not immediately occur to anyone to say reasonable things about writing.

Surely, in the meantime, there must have been serious effects of intimidation,
those that result from that sacred adventure we call science,
and there is not a single one of us in this room—
myself included, of course—who has the slightest idea of what will come of it.
Well! Anyway, let’s move on…

We are going to stir a little around pollution, the future, a certain number of such nonsense,
and science plays a few tricks,
for which it might not be entirely useless to see, for example,
what its relationship with writing is.
That might come in handy.

Whatever the case, reading this great collection,
which is already over ten years old, on writing,
is something that—compared to what gets produced in linguistics—is truly refreshing.
One can breathe.
It is not absolute stupidity; it is actually quite wholesome.

It is not even conceivable, after reading it,
that it would occur to you that the matter of writing is anything other than this…
which may seem like nothing, just like that,
but since it is written everywhere and no one reads it,
it is still worth saying…
that writing consists of representations of words.

That should still ring a bell—Wortvorstellung.

Freud writes this, and he says that…
but naturally, everyone laughs,
and we can clearly see that Freud does not agree with Lacan…
that it is the secondary process.

It is still quite annoying that,
in the circulation of what may pass through your thoughts…
– of course, you have thoughts,
– some of you—even a little backward—have knowledge…
…so you imagine that you represent words to yourselves.

That is absurd!
Because let’s be serious: the representation of words is writing!

And this thing, as simple as can be,
it seems that no one has drawn from it the consequences that are nevertheless plainly visible:
that of all the languages that use something which can be taken for figures,
which are then called—I don’t know how—“pictograms,” “ideograms,”
it is incredible,
this has led to absolutely insane consequences:
there are people who imagined that with logic…
that is, with the manipulation of writing…
one would find a way to have—what?—
“new ideas.”

As if there weren’t already enough of them as it is.

But anyway, whatever it may be—this pictogram, this ideogram—if we study a writing system, it is solely in this:
there is no exception—it is that, by the very fact that it appears to depict something, it is pronounced in such a way.
Because it looks like it represents your mother with two breasts, it is pronounced 恶 wu.
And after that, you can do whatever you want with it—anything that is pronounced wu.
So what does it matter if it has two breasts and if it is your mother in figure?

There was a man, I forget his name, 许慎 Xu-Shen,
this was not just yesterday, you understand—you will find this roughly at the beginning of the Christian era.
It is called the Shuowen 说文解字,
which means precisely What is spoken, insofar as it is written.

Because 文 wen means “written,” right? There you have it!
Try to write it down, because for the Chinese, it is the symbol of civilization.
And besides, it is true.

So “representation of words” means something—it means that the word is already there,
before you make its written representation, with everything that entails.

What that entails is what the gentleman from the Shuowen had already discovered at the beginning of our era,
which is that one of the most essential mechanisms of writing is what he calls…
what he thinks he ought to call—because he still has his biases, the dear fellow—
he imagines that there are written signs that resemble the thing the word designates.
For example, this: 人—
I would need space to write it out.
This—this, huh? What is this?

— It’s a man!

Ah! How much they know! They’ve already been taught!
It’s obvious: that’s a man, is it?
What exactly is being represented?

— My teacher said so…

What?

— My teacher said so…

Your teacher told you! What I want to know is: in what way is this an image of a man?

— It’s a phallus…

Well, I don’t mind—why not? There are dreamers…
I, for one, rather see it as a crotch.
Why not?

There’s something funny, huh? The fact is, we’ve had these signs since the Yin…
the Yin, that’s quite some time ago, huh?
That takes us back another two thousand years, but even before that, huh…
and we still have some of these signs.

Which proves that, when it comes to writing, they knew a thing or two.
We find them on turtle shells.
There were people, diviners, people like us [Laughter],
who scribbled these onto turtle shells,
alongside other things that had happened,
to comment on them in writing.
It probably had more of an effect than you might think.
But whatever!

But there is indeed something that vaguely resembles…
I don’t know why I’m telling you this.
I’m telling you this because I let myself get carried away,
I still have things to tell you,
I’m letting myself get carried away anyway…
well, never mind! It’s done, so be it!
…So there is something you see like this, that could very well pass, huh?
Ah, how cute…

Well, we follow it because, you know, writing doesn’t just vanish overnight.
If you’re counting on audiovisual media, you’d better hold on—
you’re going to have writing around for quite a while yet,
since I’m telling you that it is the very support of science.
Science is not about to abandon its support just like that.

Your fate, just like in the time of the Yin,
will still be played out in little scribblings—
little scribblings made by people in their corners,
people like me—there are plenty of them.

So, you follow me,
you follow me from era to era,
you descend to the Zhou—the Zhou 1, the Zhou 2—
and then after that, you have the Qin, the era when books were burned.
Now that was a guy! He burned books…
He had understood some things, that Qin.
He was an emperor—it didn’t last twenty years.

As soon as writing reemerged, it came back all the more refined.
Well, I’ll spare you the various forms of Chinese writing,
because the essential relation of writing to what serves to inscribe it—the reed pen—is absolutely magnificent.
But I don’t want to get ahead of what that tells us about the instrumental value of the reed pen.

Well, we follow this, huh, and then, in the end, what do we find?

Not at all the one you were expecting, the dear little darling they call Wen 文.

Am I pronouncing it correctly or not?
In any case, I didn’t get the tone right, and I apologize for that—
if there’s a Chinese person here,
they are very sensitive to that.
The tone is, in fact, one of the ways to prove the primacy of speech—
because, out of the four common ways of saying…
and let’s be clear, this applies only to the common ways of saying it—
that doesn’t mean in the whole Chinese world…
out of the four common ways of saying hi,
well, it means four different things at once,
and they are not at all unrelated.

Well, I won’t let myself get carried away—maybe I’ll tell you about it, maybe I’ll mention it often,
once I’ve properly practiced their four pronunciations of hi: there’s ì, í, î, there’s ï, there you have it.
And it does not mean the same thing at all, but I’ve heard from a very learned man that it holds a place in linguistic consciousness.

I mean that tone itself—and this is why one must look at it more than once before speaking of arbitrariness…

— Louder!

…that tone itself…

— Can you hear me, Jenny?

…that tone itself has, for them, an indicative, substantive value, and why resist that,
when there is a language much more within our reach—English—whose modulating effects are, of course, entirely captivating.

Naturally, it would be completely excessive to say that this has a relationship with meaning,
but for that, one would have to assign to the word “meaning” a weight it does not have,
since the miracle, the wonder, the very thing that proves that there is something to be done with language…
I mean wit…
rests precisely on nonsense.

Because after all, if we refer to some other writings that have been thrown into the trash,
one might have thought that it is not for nothing that I wrote The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious.
I did not say the instance of the signifier, that dear Lacanian signifier, as they say, as they say, as they say, as they say,
when they want to claim that I unduly stole it from Saussure.

Yes, Freud says that the dream is a rebus,
and of course, that is not going to make me budge one bit from the claim
that the unconscious is structured like a language.
Only, it is a language within which its writing has appeared.

This does not mean, of course, that one should place the slightest faith—
and when would we ever place faith, huh?—
in those figures that wander through dreams,
now that we know they are representations of words,
since it is a rebus,
which is how it is translated into what Freud calls the thoughts—
the Gedanken—of the unconscious.

And what could it possibly mean for a slip of the tongue, a failed act,
some failure from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
what could it possibly mean for you to call, three times within the same five minutes…

I mention this because it is not an example where I would be revealing one of my patients,
but, well, in fact, not long ago, a patient of mine,
for five minutes straight, each time correcting himself and laughing about it,
though it didn’t faze him in the slightest, huh,
kept calling his mother “my wife.”

“It’s not my wife, because my wife, etc.”
And he kept going like this for five minutes—he repeated it a good twenty times.

But what exactly is “failed” about this speech?

When I keep saying that this is, in fact, a successful speech act.

Come on!
He called her that because his mother was his wife!
He called her exactly as he should have!

So, what is “failed” about it?

Failed in relation to what?

In relation to what the shrewd little minds of archi-writing…
writing, which has always been there in the world…
prefigure of speech.

Funny exercise, huh? I don’t mind!
It is part of the function of university discourse to shuffle the deck like that.
So, everyone plays their role, and I play mine—it has its effects too, I hope.

So now, we have a new figure of progress—
that is, the outcome in the world, the emergence…
a substitute for this idea of evolution,
which, as you know, leads to the peak of the animal hierarchy—
to this consciousness that characterizes us,
thanks to which we shine with the brilliance you are well aware of.

And now, it appears in the world of programming.

But I will only take up this remark—
that indeed, no programming would be conceivable without writing—
to point out, on the other hand,
that the symptom, the slip of the tongue, the failed act,
the psychopathology of everyday life,
is sustained,
has meaning,
only if you start from the idea that what you have to say is programmed,
that is to say, written.

Of course, if he writes “my wife” instead of “my mother,”
there is no doubt that it is a slip—
but a slip of the pen, even when it is a slip of the tongue.

Because language itself—it knows exactly what it is doing.

It is a little phallus, perfectly teasing and ticklish.

When it has something to say—well, it says it.

A certain Aesop had already said that it was both the best and the worst.
That means quite a lot.

Anyway, believe me if you will, given the state of fatigue you must surely sense in me,
after having gone through those things on writing from beginning to end…
because that’s what I do, huh? I feel obliged to do that—
the only thing I have never dealt with is the superego [Laughter]—
I feel obliged to read it all the way through. That’s how it is!

…to be sure, absolutely sure, of things that my most ordinary experience has taught me, has demonstrated to me.
But still, I have respect for scholars.

There might be one out there who has discovered something that contradicts my experience.
And after all, why not?
It is such a limited, narrow, short experience—to confine oneself to the analytic office,
in the end, that there might still be some need to stay informed.

Well, I must say, I can’t impose that on anyone, but generally, it’s frowned upon.

There is another thing: The Debate on Writings and Hieroglyphs in the 17th and 18th Centuries.
I hope you’ll rush to find it,
though you might not,
because I myself had to order it from a library.

It’s part of the General Library of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, 6th Section,
and I see the notation S.E.V.P.E.N.,
which must be some publishing organization—13 Rue du Four, Paris—
if it still exists, that is.

Well, this work by Madeleine David…
you should really, from time to time, make the effort to read something.
You could read this—
but anyway, let’s move on.

Because what I want to finish telling you—
which is where we will leave things for today—
is that writing, in the end, is something that, by being this representation of speech…
which, as you can see, I have not particularly insisted on…
representation also means repercussion.
Because it is not at all certain that without writing, there would be words.
Perhaps it is the representation that constitutes them as such—these words.

Once you’ve had a bit of contact with a language like the one I’m also learning now…
and indeed, in this case, I am not entirely sure that it is a superego effect…
the Japanese language—
well, then you will realize how a writing system can work on a language.

And the way it is constructed, this melodious language, which is wonderfully flexible and ingenious…
when I think that it is a language where adjectives conjugate,
and that I have waited until this age to have that at my disposal,
I really don’t know what I have been doing all this time.

Me, I aspired to nothing more than this: that adjectives conjugate.
…and a language where inflections have this absolutely marvelous trait—
that they move around freely.

What is called the moneme, there in the middle, you can change it.
You can impose on it a Chinese pronunciation, entirely different from the Japanese pronunciation,
so that when you are faced with a Chinese character, you have…
if you are initiated—but naturally, only native speakers truly know…
you pronounce it either on-yomi or kun-yomi, depending on the case,
which is always very precise.

And for someone arriving there like me,
there’s no way to know which one to choose.

On top of that, you can have two Chinese characters.
If you pronounce them kun-yomi—that is, in the Japanese manner—
you are absolutely incapable of saying:

– which of these Chinese characters the first syllable of what you are saying belongs to,
– and which the last syllable belongs to,
– and, of course, the one in the middle even less, isn’t that so?

…because it is the combination of both Chinese characters
that dictates the multisyllabic Japanese pronunciation,
which is perfectly heard,
a pronunciation that corresponds to both characters at once.

Because do not imagine, just because a Chinese character, in principle, corresponds to a syllable
when pronounced in Chinese—on-yomi—
that when reading it in Japanese,
one should feel compelled to break this word representation into syllables.

In the end, this teaches you a lot about this:
that the Japanese language has nourished itself from its writing.

It has nourished itself in what way?

In a linguistic sense, of course—
that is, at the point where linguistics reaches language—
which is always in writing.

Because you must understand that, naturally, what is blatantly obvious is that
if Mr. de Saussure found himself in a position to qualify signifiers as “arbitrary,”
it was solely for this reason:
that they were written representations.

How could he have drawn his little bar with the things below and the things above…
which I have used and abused quite enough…
if there had been no writing?

All this to remind you that when I say there is no metalanguage, it is obvious.
I only need to give you a mathematical demonstration:
you will clearly see that I am forced to discourse about it because it is a written form; otherwise, it would not pass.

If I speak about it, it is not at all metalanguage.
What is called—what mathematicians themselves, when presenting a logical theory, call discourse,
common discourse, ordinary discourse—is the function of speech,
insofar as it applies, of course,
not in a completely unlimited, undisciplined way…
which is what I called earlier “demonstrating,” of course…
but language—this is what is at stake.
Writing is what is at stake, what we are speaking about.

There is no metalanguage in the sense that we never speak of language except from the standpoint of writing.

Now, I’m telling you all this, and I must say, it does not tire me out—
although, if you like, it does tire me out a little.

Believe me if you will, but what I said to myself this morning upon waking up…
after reading Madeleine David until one o’clock…
I said to myself that it was not for nothing that my Écrits began with The Seminar on “The Purloined Letter.”

The letter, in this case, is taken in a different sense than in The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious:
the letter as in epistle.

I am not exactly fresh—I went to bed late, past midnight.
But anyway, Gloria can attest that from 8:00 to 9:30,
I slogged through rereading The Seminar on “The Purloined Letter.”

It was worth it; it is quite a clever piece.

I never reread myself, but when I do, you have no idea how much I admire myself! [Laughter]

Obviously, I put effort into it—I had done something fairly refined,
something that was not bad,
which passed when I presented it—I don’t remember the date,
but it was always in front of the riffraff at Sainte-Anne.

Anyway, I worked hard on that piece in a place I mention at the end,
because I am conscientious: San Casciano, near Florence.
It ruined my vacation quite thoroughly.

But you know, I have a tendency to that—to ruining my vacations.

Listen, it’s late, isn’t it? And after all, I think it’s better if I talk about it next time.

But still—who knows?—perhaps you will be tempted to read it.
And despite everything,
it would be better not to tell you where to go right away—
but I’m going to do it anyway.

I am going to do it anyway because some might not realize, until the end,
that in speaking of The Purloined Letter,
when I talk about this—the function of the letter—you might remember,
this letter that the Queen receives…
perhaps you have read Poe’s tale in question.

The Queen receives it—
it is a rather peculiar letter, after all…
we will never know what is inside.

That is precisely what is essential:
that we will never know what is inside.

And furthermore, nothing contradicts the possibility
that she is the only one who knows in the end.

After all, to set the police on its trail, you understand,
she must have been quite certain
that under no circumstances could it provide any information to anyone.

There is just one thing: it is certain that it has a meaning.

And since it comes from a certain Duke of I-don’t-know-what
who has addressed it to her,
if the King—her good Master—
gets his hands on it,
even if he does not understand it either,
he will say to himself:

“Still! There is something fishy here!”

And God knows where that could lead.

I miss the old stories that such things used to create—
back then, it could send a Queen to the scaffold, things like that.

Now, about that,
I cannot recreate here the work I did on what Poe did
under the title The Purloined Letter,
which I translated, somewhat approximately, as The Letter in Suffering.

Well, read that before next time, huh?

Because that may allow me to continue pulling out,
to emphasize for you what you can see converging in today’s discourse,
from page 31 of the Écrits to the end.

What I am speaking about,
in speaking about what is at stake,
you may have vaguely heard about the effects of the letter’s movements,
of its changes of hands:

You know, the Minister snatched it from the Queen,
after which Dupin—
Dupin, Poe’s genius,
the cleverest of the clever,
who is not so clever after all,
but Poe is—
that is, Poe is the narrator of the story.

I’ll ask you a little question—
here, I open a parenthesis:

“The narrator of the story—this has a very general scope—is he the one who writes it?”

Ask yourself this question, for example, when reading Proust.
It is absolutely necessary to ask it—otherwise, you’re doomed.
You’ll end up believing that the narrator of the story is just some ordinary fellow,
a bit asthmatic, and, all in all, rather stupid in his adventures—
well! Let’s be honest about it!

Only, when you’ve truly engaged with Proust,
you do not at all have the impression that it is stupid.

It is not what Proust says about the narrator—
it is something else that he writes.
But anyway, let’s move on.

From page 31 [of the Écrits] to a certain page,
you will see that when I speak of the letter, of its transmission:

– of the way the Minister took it from the Queen,
– or of how Dupin takes over from the Minister,
– and of what it means to be the holder of this letter.

It is a strange word, isn’t it?
Perhaps it means having the possibility of relaxation—this letter.

You will see that from this page to that page, what I am speaking about…
I am the one who wrote it—did I know what I was doing?
Well, I won’t tell you.

…what I am speaking about is the phallus.
And I will go even further: no one has ever spoken about it better.

That is why I urge you to refer to it—
it will teach you something.