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(All parts in English)

Lituraterre

This word that I have just written titles what I am going to offer you today.
It is necessary, since you have been summoned here, that I throw something at you.

It is obviously inspired by current events. It is the title with which I have tried to respond to a request that was made to me to introduce an issue that is about to be published on Literature and Psychoanalysis.

This word, lituraterre, which I have invented, is legitimized by Ernout and Meillet, as there may be some here who know what that is—it is an etymological dictionary of Latin that is not too stupidly done.

Look up linō, litūra, and you will find, and then litūrārius.
It is clearly specified that it has nothing to do with littera, the letter. [Ernout and Meillet, p. 363: “Littera: lītera is due to a false association with linō.”]
That it has nothing to do with it—I couldn’t care less.

I do not necessarily submit to etymology when I let myself indulge in this wordplay, which at times produces what is called a mot d’esprit, a contrepet—in this case, an obvious one—that comes to my lips, and the inversion to my ear.

It is not for nothing that when you learn a foreign language,
– you put the first consonant of what you have heard second,
– and the second: first.

Thus, this dictionary—to which we may refer—provides me with the auspices of being grounded in the same departure that I took from the outset…
I mean departure in the sense of distribution…
…the departure of an equivocation from which Joyce—
it is James Joyce I am speaking of—
…from which James Joyce slides from “a letter” to “a litter,” from a letter—I translate—to trash.

There was…
you may perhaps remember, though most likely you have never known it…
there was a patron who wished him well and who offered him psychoanalysis, and indeed, it was with Jung that she offered it to him.

In the game we are evoking, he would have gained nothing from it, since he went straight ahead…
with this a letter, a litter,
…straight ahead to the best that one can expect from psychoanalysis at its end.

To make litter of the letter—is it still Saint Thomas…
you may remember, if you ever knew: sicut palea—
…is it still Saint Thomas who returns to Joyce, as his work testifies throughout,
or is it psychoanalysis that attests to its convergence with what our era denounces as an unbridling of the bond,
the ancient bond, whose pollution is contained within culture?

I had embroidered upon this, by chance, a little before May of ’68, so as not to fail, that day,
the lost soul of those gatherings that I now find myself shifting when I visit somewhere: it was in Bordeaux.

“Civilization,” I recalled there as a premise, “is the sewer.”

It must be said, no doubt…
it was shortly after my Proposition of October ’67 had been received as we know…
it must be said, no doubt, that in playing with this, I was a little weary of the garbage can to which I have riveted my fate.

Yet, it is known that I am not the only one whose share is the avouère—
the avouère, to pronounce it in the old way—
the avoir, which Beckett counterbalances with the debt that makes waste of our being.
This avouère saves the honor of literature and, which pleases me quite well,
relieves me of the privilege I might believe I hold from my position.

[The analyst, “weary of the garbage can” of the subject supposed to know, weary of being haloed by the position of the Other as the locus of knowledge, may “avow” to occupy in analysis only the position of object (a): waste, refuse, litter, and thus be “relieved of the privilege” of those who believe they occupy the place of the Other, in the same way that—from this position—have declared themselves relieved:
– Joyce, with a letter, a litter,
– or Thomas Aquinas, with sicut palea,
– or Beckett, avowing literature as “trash” (cf. Endgame) and thereby “saving its honor.”]

The question is whether what manuals have seemed to display ever since they have existed—I am speaking of literature manuals—is this: that literature is nothing but an accommodation of remains.

Is it a matter of connotation in writing, of what would have originally been song, spoken myth, dramatic procession?
[“Remains” of a feast preceding “writing,” from prehistory (oral) to history (writing): partial objects fallen, fragmented: literature of “scraps” (Rimbaud) and waste.]

For psychoanalysis, being appended to the Oedipus of myth does not in any way qualify it to find its way in Sophocles’ text. That is not the same thing! Freud’s invocation of a text by Dostoevsky is not enough to say that textual criticism, until now the protected hunting ground of academic discourse, has gained more breathing room from psychoanalysis.

Yet, if my teaching has a place in a shift in configuration that currently…
under the guise of current events [Cf. the “debate” Lacan-Derrida]
…currently presents itself under a slogan promoting writing.

But this shift—other indications…
for example, that it is in our time that Rabelais is finally being read…
—show that it may rest on a literary displacement to which I better align myself.

As an author,
– I am less involved than one imagines,
– my Écrits a more ironic title than one might think,
since in sum,
– they are either Reports, which are functions of congresses,
– or—let’s say, I would like them to be heard as such—“open letters” in which I no doubt raise questions each time about an aspect of my teaching, but in the end, that gives them their tone.

Far from compromising myself in that literary rubbing and scraping, which marks the psychoanalyst lacking in invention,
I denounce there the inevitable attempt to demonstrate the inadequacy of his [analytic] practice to justify even the slightest literary judgment.

Yet it is striking that this collection of my Écrits I opened with an article that I isolate by extracting it from its chronology…
chronology being the rule there…
and that it concerns a tale—one that, it must be said, is quite peculiar in that it cannot fit into the ordered list…
you know, the one that has been made…
…of dramatic situations. But let’s leave that aside…

The tale, it is made of what happens to the delivery of a letter-missive, of who is aware of these “forwardings,” and on what terms I can say of this letter—say of it: “that a letter always arrives at its destination.”

And this, after the detours it undergoes in the tale, the accounting—if I may say so—rendered without any recourse to its content, of the letter. This is what makes remarkable the effect it has on those who, in turn, become its holders…
as ardent as they may be for the power it confers, to claim it…
that this effect of illusion can be articulated—as I do—as an effect of feminization.

This is—to excuse myself for returning to it—precisely to distinguish…
I speak of what I do…
…“the letter” from the “signifier” itself, insofar as here it prevails, it prevails in its envelope,
since it is a letter in the sense of the word epistle.

Now, I claim that I do not make metaphorical use of the word “letter” here, since precisely the tale consists
in the way the message slips through like a nutmeg,
and it is its writing—thus properly the letter—that alone constitutes the peripeteia.

If my critique is to be considered literary, then it can only—so I attempt—
concern what Poe does, as a writer himself, in shaping such a message upon the letter.

It is clear that by not saying it as such, as I say it,
– it is not insufficiently,
– it is all the more rigorously that he avows it.

Nevertheless, the elision of this message could not be elucidated by means of any feature whatsoever of his psycho-biography, for it would only be obstructed by it, this elision. A psychoanalyst who, as one may recall, scoured through Poe’s other texts, here throws in the towel with her mop. She doesn’t touch it, Marie! So much for Poe’s text…

But as for my own text, could it not be resolved through my own psycho-biography?
The wish I might formulate, for example, of being read properly one day.
But for that—for it to be of value—it would first be necessary to develop, for the one undertaking this interpretation to develop what I mean by saying that the letter carries [a trace of jouissance], in order to always reach—I say so—its destination.

Perhaps it is here that I am, for the moment, in league with the devotees of writing. [Cf. the “debate” Lacan-Derrida]
It is certain that, as is customary, psychoanalysis here receives from literature [from Edgar Poe],
and it could first take from it this seed, which would be: from the domain of repression, a less psycho-biographical idea.

As for me, if I propose Poe’s text—with what lies behind it—to psychoanalysis,
it is precisely because it can only approach it by demonstrating its own failure.
It is through this [through its failure, where it misses] that I illuminate psychoanalysis, and this is known…
it is known that I know that in doing so, I invoke: it is on the back of my volume [Écrits, Seuil, Paris, 1966]
…I invoke enlightenment. And yet, I illuminate it by demonstrating where it makes a hole, psychoanalysis.

[“The Enlightenment” being the historical moment of the emergence of Reason, of classical rationality, of self-transparent consciousness, etc. Lacan objects to it with “reason since Freud,” the one that illuminates the holes of classical rationality (dreams, slips, forgettings… and symptoms!)]

There is nothing illegitimate about this; it has already borne fruit—it has long been known in optics,
and the most recent physics, that of the photon, arms itself with it.

It is by this method [“where it makes a hole”] that psychoanalysis could better justify its intrusion into literary criticism.
This would mean that literary criticism would effectively be renewed in that psychoanalysis is there
so that texts measure themselves against it, precisely because the enigma remains on its side, because it remains silent.

[The enigma of the symptom, of the slip, of the failed act… as hieroglyphs, but also the enigma of the “4, 2, 3” of the Sphinx:
τί ἐστιν ὃ μίαν ἔχον φωνὴν τετράπουν καὶ δίπουν καὶ τρίπουν γίνεται
“What being, having a single voice, first has four legs, then two legs, and then three?” (Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, III, 5, 8)
Or the enigma of “being”:
Ἐπάμεροί τί δέ τις! τί δ’ οὔ τις? σκιᾶς ὄναρ ἄνθρωπος.
O man of a day: What is being, what is non-being? You are but the dream of a shadow. (Pindar, Pythian Odes VIII, 99, trans. Faustin Colin)]

But those psychoanalysts…
of whom it is not slanderous to suggest that rather than practicing psychoanalysis, they are practiced by it…
…mishear my words, at the very least in failing to take them in their flesh.

[Lacan compared these institutions to the Church, where one performs an “office” with its rituals “at fixed hours” (“saying mass”), where there are sacred texts whose meaning is authorized by the “Doctors of the Church,” and where one must blindly obey and reproduce the doctrine (Perinde ac cadaver).]

I oppose, in their regard, truth and knowledge.
– The latter is the one in which they immediately recognize their office,
– whereas it is their truth that I am calling to account.

I insist—correcting my aim—on saying “knowledge in failure,” for this is where psychoanalysis shows itself at its best.
“Knowledge in failure,” as one says “figure in abyss,” does not mean failure of knowledge.

[The analytic discourse results in the production of S1, a signifier devoid of meaning, severed from all knowledge (S2): a→S→/S1◊S2 → knowledge in failure.
But this is not failure of knowledge: there exists an unconscious knowledge whose failures, its misses (slips, forgettings…), are successes that persist, → truth.
(Cf. the first sentence of L’étourdit: “What is said remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard.”)]

Immediately, I learn that one believes oneself exempt from demonstrating any knowledge…

Would it be a dead letter that I placed in the title of one of those pieces I called Écrits, of the letter, the instance as reason of the unconscious?

Is it not enough to designate in the letter that which [jouissance], by necessity of insisting, is not there by full right, however forcefully reason may advance?
To state this reason, whether moderate or extreme, is indeed to show—as I have done before on occasion—the bifidity in which every measure engages itself.

But is there nothing in the real that does without this mediation? This could be the border.
The border—separating two territories—has but one flaw, but a significant one:
it symbolizes that they are of the same ilk, so to speak, at least for anyone who crosses it.

I do not know if you have paused on this, but it is the very principle upon which one named Von Uexküll once fabricated the term Umwelt.
It is constructed on the principle that it is the reflection of the Innenwelt; it is the promotion of the border to ideology.

It is evidently an unfortunate starting point for a biology…
for it was indeed a biology he sought to establish with it, Von Uexküll…
a biology that, from the outset, grants itself the very fact of adaptation, in particular, which underlies this coupling of Umwelt–Innenwelt.

Of course, “selection,” “selection” fares no better under the title of ideology:
it is not because it sanctifies itself as “natural” that it is any less so.

I am going to propose something to you, just like that, quite abruptly, as a follow-up to a letter, a litter.
I will say to you:

“Is the letter not the literal to be founded in the littoral?”

For that is something other than a border. Besides, you may have noticed that the two never coincide:
the littoral is what establishes an entire domain as forming, with another, if you will, a border,
but precisely in that they have absolutely nothing in common, not even a reciprocal relation.

Is the letter not properly littoral?
The edge of the hole in knowledge, which psychoanalysis designates precisely when it approaches it:
is the letter not what traces it?

The curious thing is to observe how psychoanalysis compels itself…
in a way, by its very movement…
to misrecognize the meaning of what the letter, nevertheless, states to the letter—literally, as the phrase goes—from its very mouth,
when all its interpretations reduce to jouissance.

Between jouissance and knowledge, the letter would form the littoral.
All this does not prevent what I have said of the unconscious, remaining there,
from having precedence nonetheless, without which what I put forward would have absolutely no meaning.

What remains to be known is how the unconscious…
which I say to be an effect of language, since it presupposes its structure as necessary and sufficient…
how it commands this function of the letter.

That it is the proper instrument for the inscription of discourse does not at all render it unfit to serve the purpose I assign to it,
when in The Instance of the Letter, for example, which I mentioned earlier, I employ it to illustrate the play
of what the other—Jean Tardieu—calls “the word taken for another,” even “the word taken by another,”
in other words, metaphor and metonymy as effects of the sentence.

She therefore easily symbolizes all these effects of signifiers, but that in no way imposes that she herself—the letter…
in these very effects, for which she serves me as an instrument…
that she be primary.

What must be examined is not so much this primacy, which is not even to be supposed, but rather what in language calls for the littoral in the literal.

Nothing of what I have inscribed with the help of letters—formations of the unconscious…
to reclaim them from what Freud formulates them as: utterances—more simply, effects of language…
nothing permits the confusion—which has indeed occurred—between the letter and the signifier.

What I have inscribed with the help of letters—formations of the unconscious—does not authorize making “the letter” a signifier,
nor assigning it, moreover, a primacy in relation to the signifier.

Such a discourse of confusion could only have emerged from the discourse that concerns me,
and precisely because it concerns me within another discourse, one that I pinpoint at the timely moment of academic discourse, namely…
as I have sufficiently emphasized over the past year and a half, I believe…
namely, the knowledge [S2] put to use based on semblance.

The slightest awareness of the experience I equip myself with can only be situated in a discourse other than that one,
which should have prevented it from producing this discourse—which I do not designate further—without admitting it to be derived from me.
I have been spared that, thank God! Yet, in concerning myself with it—in the sense I have just mentioned—I am nevertheless importuned.

Had I found acceptable the models Freud articulates in a Project from which he describes the clearing,
the drilling, of impressional pathways, I would not for all that have adopted the metaphor of writing.
And it is precisely on this specific point that I do not find it acceptable: writing is not impression,
despite all the chatter that has been made about the famous Wunderblock.

That I make use of the letter called the “52nd,”
– is to read in it what Freud could only articulate under the term he coined as WZ: Wahrnehmungszeichen,
– and to identify that this was the closest he could find to the signifier at a time when Saussure had not yet brought it back to light,
that famous signifier, which, nonetheless, does not date from him, since it dates back to the Stoics.

That Freud writes it there with two letters, just as elsewhere I write it with only one,
proves in no way that the letter is primary.

I will therefore attempt today to indicate to you the very core of what seems to us to produce the letter as a consequence,
and of language itself, precisely by what I say: that it inhabits whoever speaks.

I will borrow its traits from what an economy of language allows to be outlined in what promotes, in my view,
that “literature” may be in the process of turning into “lituraterre.”

Do not be surprised to see me proceed with a literal demonstration,
since this is to walk in the very same step with which the question itself advances.

One may perhaps see there, see affirmed, what such a demonstration that I call literary might be.

[By stripping the literary of its meaning, one brings to light the letter, its trajectory, and the drive-based dispositif (as Edgar Poe did in The Purloined Letter).]

I am always somewhat at the edge—so why not, this time, throw myself in?

I have just returned from a journey I had long awaited to make to Japan, from what I had already experienced of the littoral on a first journey.

One may understand me from what I said earlier about Umwelt, which I rejected precisely for this reason:
that it renders the journey impossible, which—if you follow my formulas—would be to ensure its real.

[Not, as with Umwelt-Inwelt, a journey through a homogeneous space with passage through a border,
but rather the impossibility of departure from the symbolic, toward the real that cannot be reached.]

Only, there it is—this is premature: it is departure that it renders impossible, unless one sings, “Let’s go, let’s go…”
And that, in fact, happens quite a lot. [A reference to Marchons, marchons…?]

[Only discourse A, by making an “economy” of signification (S1◊S2), provokes the reversal of discourses and the journey of the letter,
allowing for the highlighting (monstration) of the drive-based dispositif through departure (departure, partition…):
a letter, a litter → the literal structure.]

I will note only one moment from this journey, the one I happened to take in—of what?—of a new route,
one that I happened to take simply because of this: that the first time I went, it was simply forbidden.

I must admit that it was not on the way there, along the Arctic Circle that traces this route for the plane,
that I read—of what?—of what I saw of the Siberian plain.

I am in the process of giving you an attempt at Sibériétique.
This attempt would never have come to light if the Soviets’ distrust had not…
it was not aimed at me, but at the planes…
if their distrust had not let me see the industries, the military installations that make up the value of Siberia.

But after all, this distrust is a condition we may call accidental—why not even occidental,
if we put a bit of occire into it: the accumulation of southern Siberia is what hangs over our heads!

The only decisive condition here is precisely the condition of the littoral.
For me, because I am a bit hard of hearing, it only played its role on the return, in being quite literally what Japan, through its letter,
had undoubtedly given me just a little too much of a tickle—just enough for me to feel it.

[The phallic function does not allow access to the Other, nor to its jouissance (S1→ S2 impossible),
but only to the “same,” to the partial objects of the fragmented body (a: oral, anal,
scopic, vocal) → murder of the Other → the accumulation of substitute objects (a) = accumulation of occire (occidental),
whereas Japan, in its specific relationship to the letter (cf. calligraphy), seems to minimize signification in favor of form (formalism),
thus highlighting the literal structure and its “littoral condition.”]

I say “for me to feel it” because, of course, in order to pinpoint it, to anticipate it, I had already done that here when I spoke to you
a little about the Japanese language, about what—this language—properly constitutes it, which is writing; I have already told you that.
But for this, for that “little too much,”
it was undoubtedly necessary that what is called art should represent something.

It comes down to the fact that Japanese painting demonstrates its union with the letter,
and very precisely in the form of calligraphy.

These things that hang fascinate me…
掛物 Kakémono, that’s how it’s called over there.

…these things that hang on the walls of every museum there, bearing inscribed characters,
of Chinese origin, which I know a little—very little—but however little I know them,
it allows me to measure what is elided in the cursive,
where the singularity of the hand [→ letter] crushes the universal [the form],
that is, precisely what I have taught you to recognize as belonging only to the signifier.

[The universality of the form (kanji) is appropriated by each individual in a singular mode, just as the signifier of language → lalangue.]

You remember: a stroke is always vertical;
this is always true unless there is no stroke.

So in cursive, I do not recognize the character, because I am a novice.
But that is not what matters, because what I call this singularity can reinforce a firmer form.

What matters is what it adds. It is a dimension—or, as I have taught you to play with this—
a “dit-mansion,” the place where dwells what I have already introduced to you, I believe,
in some seminar before the last before last, a word I write for my own amusement: papludun [: §].

It is the dit-mansion that, as you know, allows me…
I will not repeat it all: the little mathematical game of Peano, and the way Frege
must go about reducing the series of “natural numbers,” in quotes, to logic…
…the one, then, in which I establish the subject in what I will call once again today,
since I am engaging in literature and am in a playful mood—you will recognize it—I had written it in one form recently, this one: the Hun-en-peluce.

It is quite useful, isn’t it?
It takes the place of what I call the Achose with a capital A,
and it stops up the petit (a),
which perhaps is not by chance reducible in this way—to what I designate—as a letter.

At the level of calligraphy, it is this letter that becomes the stake of a bet—but which bet?—
a bet that is won with ink and brush.

Thus, it was in this way that it appeared to me, irresistibly—in a circumstance worth noting: namely, from among the clouds, there appeared to me the shimmering flow that is the only trace to emerge from the operation taking place there, even more than indicating the relief under that latitude, in what is called the Siberian plain—a truly desolate plain, in the literal sense—
devoid of any vegetation except for reflections, reflections of this shimmering flow, which cast into shadow whatever does not glisten.

What is this shimmering flow? It is a “bouquet.”
It forms a bouquet, from what I have elsewhere distinguished from the first trait [S1] and from what erases it [S1→ S2→/a and the splitting (Spaltung) of the subject: a◊S].

[The experiment of Bouasse (of the inverted bouquet) is reworked by Lacan as the “experiment of the overturned vase”: the spherical mirror produces a real image of the hidden vase: i(a),
which seems to “contain” the flowers and which, reflecting in the flat mirror (the Other) as i’(a), becomes perceptible for whoever is positioned above the flowers (objects (a) outside the visual field).
Since a is of a “non-specular” nature, it cannot be inscribed in the place of the Other, where only the virtual image i’(a) is reflected; it is therefore erased, crossed out.
This “optical schema” shows a barred subject (S) radically severed from a: S◊a, and only able to sustain itself through the mode of fantasy and the substitute objects that will come to “fill” i’(a).]

I stated it in its time, but one always forgets part of the matter—I said it in reference to the unary trait:
it is from the erasure of the trait that the subject is designated.

It is thus marked in two moments so that what is crossed out—litura… lituraterre—can be distinguished there.
– Erasure of any trace that might precede it: this is what makes the terre (land) of the littoral.
– Pure litura: this is the literal.

To produce this erasure is to reproduce that half,
that half upon which the subject subsists.

Those who have been here for a while…
though there must be fewer and fewer of them…
may remember that one day I recounted the adventures of a half-chicken.

To produce erasure alone, definitively,
this is the feat of calligraphy.

You can always try—try to simply…
what I will not do because I would fail, first because I have no brush…
try to make that horizontal stroke, drawn from left to right, to figure in a single stroke the unary 1
as a character, plainly.

You will take a very long time to grasp what erasure it takes aim at,
and what suspension it comes to a halt upon,
so that what you produce will be pitiful; it is hopeless for a Westerner.

A different movement is needed, one that can only be caught by detaching from whatever scratches you out.

Between center and absence [ab-sens: S1], between knowledge [S2] and jouissance [S1],
there is a littoral that only turns literal when you can take that turn,
the same at every instant.

It is only from this that you can hold yourself as an agent sustaining it.

What is revealed by my vision of the shimmering flow,
in that erasure dominates there,
is that in emerging from among the clouds, it conjugates itself to its source.

It is indeed to The Clouds that Aristophanes calls me to find what pertains to the signifier,
that is, semblance par excellence,
if it is from its rupture that rain falls—effect of what precipitates there—
what had been matter in suspension.

You should know that the Japanese painting I mentioned earlier,
which intermingles so well with calligraphy,
is overflowing with this,
and that clouds are never absent from it.

It was from where I was at that moment that I truly understood
what function these golden clouds serve,
which literally block,
conceal an entire part of the scenes unfolding in places,
places that are things that unfold in a different direction
[Makemono unfold horizontally, Kakemono vertically]…
those ones are called 巻物 Makemono…
…and preside over the distribution of the small scenes.

Why—how can it be—that these people, who know how to draw, feel the need to interweave them with these masses of clouds,
if not precisely because it is this that introduces the dimension of the signifier?

And the letter that creates erasure distinguishes itself there by being a rupture—therefore, a rupture of semblance,
which dissolves what constituted form, phenomenon, meteor.
This is precisely what I have already told you—what science operates from the very beginning,
in the most tangible way, upon perceptible forms.

But at the same time, it must also be that this expels what, from this rupture, would produce jouissance,
that is, it dissipates what sustains this hypothesis—if I may put it this way—of jouissance,
which, after all, is what makes the world,
for the idea of the world is precisely this:
to think that it is made of such drives that even the void can be figured from them.

Well, what is evoked of jouissance when a semblance is ruptured—
this is what, in the real…
and this is the crucial point: in the real…
…presents itself as ravinement.

This is how you can define how writing may be said, in the real, to be the ravinement of the signified,
that is, what has rained down from semblance, inasmuch as it is this that constitutes the signified.

Writing does not trace over the signifier; it only retraces it in taking a name,
but in exactly the same way that this happens to all things that the signifying battery comes to name,
after having counted them.

Since, of course, I am not sure my discourse is being understood,
I must nevertheless highlight an opposition:
– Writing, the letter, is in the real.
– And the signifier is in the symbolic.

This way, it may at least serve you as a refrain.

I return now to a later moment in the plane; we will move forward like this.
I told you that it was on the return journey.

Now, what is striking is seeing them appear.
There are other traces that can be seen holding up as isobars. [More precisely: isopleths—contour lines]
Obviously, these are traces of an embankment order, essentially isobars,
which thus make them normal to those whose slope, which one might call the supreme slope of the relief,
is marked by curves.

Where I was, it was very clear; I had already seen in Osaka how highways seem to descend from the sky—
only there could they have been placed like that, one above the other.

There is a certain Japanese architecture, the most modern, which knows very well how to retrieve the ancient.
Japanese architecture consists essentially of the beating of a bird’s wing.

This helped me to understand, immediately, that the shortest path from one point to another
would never be shown to anyone if there were no cloud.

How does a road come to be?
No one in the world ever follows a straight line—
neither man, nor the amoeba, nor the fly, nor the branch, nor anything at all.

According to the latest findings, even the ray of light does not follow it,
remaining entirely in solidarity with universal curvature.

And yet, the straight line inscribes something within all this.
It inscribes distance—but distance, as per Newton’s laws, is absolutely nothing
but an effective factor of a dynamic that we shall call “cascading,”
the very one that ensures that everything which falls follows a parabola.

Thus, there is:
– No straight line except in writing.
– No surveying except from the sky.

But these two things…
precisely in their role of sustaining the straight line…
are merely artifacts that dwell solely in language.

One must not forget:
our science operates only from a shimmering flow of small letters and combined graphics.

Under the Mirabeau Bridge…
certainly, just as under that of a journal that was once mine,
where I had placed as a signboard an ear-bridge borrowed from Horus Apollo…
under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine… the primitive Seine.

It is such a scene, do not forget—reread Freud:
– That the Roman V of the fifth hour may beat there (it’s in The Wolf Man),
– But just as well, that one does not enjoy it—it is the hour of interpretation.

That the symptom institutes the order in which our politics proves itself [a symbolic-imaginary order, excluding the real]…
this is the step it has taken…
implies, moreover, that everything articulated within this order is liable to interpretation.

This is why it is entirely justified to place psychoanalysis at the head of politics.

And this might not be without consequences for what has thus far taken shape as politics,
if psychoanalysis were to prove itself more astute.

Perhaps it would suffice, to place our hope elsewhere…
as my littérateurs do, if I may call them my companions…
perhaps it would suffice if, from writing, we were to derive something other than platforms or tribunals,
so that different words might be played out there,
to make ourselves—ourselves—into their tribute.

I have said it, and I never forget it: “There is no metalanguage.”
Every logic is distorted by taking as its starting point the “object-language,”
as it inevitably has done up until now.

There is, therefore, no metalanguage…

But the writing that is fabricated from language could, perhaps,
be of a force sufficient to change our discourse.

I see no other hope for what is currently sharpening itself:
is it possible, in sum, from the littoral,
to constitute a discourse that is characterized—
as I pose the question this year—
by the fact that it does not issue from semblance?

This is evidently the question posed only by so-called avant-garde literature,
which itself is a littoral phenomenon,
and thus does not sustain itself through semblance,
but which, for all that, proves nothing,
except in demonstrating the rupture that only a discourse can produce.

I say produce, bring forth with an effect of production—
this is the schema of my quadripods from last year.

→ → →

What literature seems to aspire to, in its ambition…
this is what I pinpoint with lituraterrir…
is to order itself according to a movement it calls “scientific.”

It is indeed a fact that, in science, writing has worked wonders,
and everything suggests that this wonder is not about to run dry.

However, physical science finds itself,
and will continue to find itself,
brought back to considering the symptom in the facts—
through pollution…
there are scientists who are sensitive to this…
through the pollution of what, in relation to the terrestrial,
is uncritically referred to as “environment.”

This is Uexküll’s idea: Umwelt,
but behaviorized, meaning completely cretinized.

To lituraterrir myself here,
I point out that in speaking of ravinement,
I have indeed used an image,
but no metaphor:
writing is this ravinement.

What I have written here is included within it.

When I speak of jouissance,
I legitimately invoke what I accumulate in terms of audience,
and no less naturally, what I deprive myself of.

Your influx occupies me.

I have prepared the ravinement.

That there should be, included within the Japanese language—
and this is where I return—
an effect of writing:
– The important thing is what it offers us as a resource to take lituraterrir as an example.
– The important thing is that the effect of writing remains tied to writing.

That which carries the effect of writing is itself a specialized form of writing,
in that in Japanese, this specialized writing can be read in two different pronunciations:

In 音読み on-yomi…
I am not trying to dazzle you here,
I will say as little Japanese as possible…
on-yomi: that is what it is called,
and its pronunciation in character,
it is pronounced as such, distinctly,
[a literal, phonetic reading of the character as a syllable → without meaning].

In 訓読み kun-yomi…
kun-yomi: the way it is said in Japanese,
what the character means.
[Reading the character as a signified].

But naturally, you are going to get it all wrong—
that is, under the pretext that the character is a letter,
you are going to believe that I am saying that in Japanese,
“the wreckage of the signifier drifts along the river of the signified.”

It is the letter, and not the sign, that here serves as support for the signifier—
but like anything else, according to the law of metaphor,
which I have recently recalled as constituting the essence of language.

For language is always, moreover, where it is:
it is from discourse that it takes anything at all into the net of the signifier—
and thus, writing itself.

Only, from there, writing is promoted to the function of a referent,
as essential as all other things—
and this is what changes the status of the subject:
it is in this way that the subject finds support in a constellation-filled sky,
and not merely in the unary trait, for its fundamental identification.

Well, precisely, there are too many supports—
too many is the same as having none at all.

This is why the subject takes support elsewhere—on the “you.”

In Japanese, one sees all grammatical forms for even the simplest utterance.

To say something—anything at all—
there are ways of saying it that are more or less polite,
depending on how I implicate it in the “you.”

“I implicate it,” that is, if I were Japanese.
Since I am not, I do not do it—it would tire me out.

When you have seen—
and really, anyone can learn Japanese—
that even the slightest thing there is subject to variations in utterance,
which are variations of politeness,
you will have learned something.

You will have learned that, in Japanese,
truth reinforces the structure of fiction that I denote there,
precisely by adding to it the laws of politeness.

Strikingly, this seems to result in there being nothing to defend of the repressed,
since the repressed itself finds a place through this reference to the letter.

In other words, the subject is divided by language,

– but one of its registers can be satisfied by reference to writing,

– and the other by the exercise of speech.

This is undoubtedly what gave my dear friend Roland Barthes
that intoxicated feeling that, with all its refined manners,
the Japanese subject envelops nothing.

At least, that is how he puts it,
in a way I highly recommend to you,
for it is a remarkable work: Empire of Signs, he titles it.

Titles often involve an improper use of words—
one does this for publishers.

What he obviously means is Empire of Semblances—
it is enough to read the text to realize it.

The mythical Japanese—the ordinary little Japanese, I have been told—
does not take well to it,
or at least, that is what I heard over there.

And indeed, as excellent as Roland Barthes’ writing is,
I will oppose to it what I am saying today:
that nothing is more distinct from the void carved out by writing than semblance—
first and foremost in that it is the very first of my receptacles,
always ready to receive jouissance,
or at the very least, to invoke it through its artifice.

…

According to our habits,
nothing communicates less of itself than such a subject—
which, in the end, hides nothing.

It has only to manipulate you—
and I assure you, it does not hold back.

For me, this was a delight—
because, in the end, I love it:

you become just another element
in the ceremonial where the subject is composed
precisely by its ability to decompose itself.

The 文楽座 bunraku…
perhaps some of you saw it when it was in Paris…
the bunraku…
I went to see it again over there, where I had already seen it the first time…
well, the bunraku—this is its mechanism:
it reveals the very structure that is entirely ordinary
for those whose customs it itself provides.

You know that one sees, right alongside the puppet,
fully exposed, those who operate it.

Just as—
as in the bunraku—
everything spoken in a Japanese conversation
could just as well be read by a reciter.

That must have been what reassured Barthes…

Japan is the place where it is most natural to rely on…
I did it—I practiced it for a moment…
an interpreter—
who could just as well have been one—
an interpreter.

One feels completely at ease; one can double oneself with an interpreter, and this in no way requires an interpretation.

Can you imagine how relieved I was! [Laughter]

Japanese is the perpetual translation of language phenomena.

What I love, to conclude on this point, is that the only communication I had there…
aside from Europeans, of course, with whom I manage to get along according to our cultural misunderstanding…
well, the only one I had with a Japanese person is also the only one that, there as elsewhere, can truly be a communication—
by not being a dialogue—
and that is scientific communication.

I went to see an eminent biologist, whom I will not name,
out of respect for the rules of Japanese politeness.

This led him to show me his work, naturally, in the place where it is done: on the blackboard.

The fact that, due to lack of information, I understood nothing of it
in no way prevents what he wrote—his formulas—
from being entirely valid…
just as mine are, where they stand…
valid for the molecules through which my descendants will become subjects,
without my ever having had to know how I transmitted to them
that which made it plausible that I classify myself among living beings.

An asceticism of writing takes nothing away from the advantages we can derive from literary criticism.

It seems to me…
to close the loop on something more coherent, given what I have already put forward…
it seems to me that this can only proceed by joining that “it is written”—
that impossible, from which may one day be established the sexual relation.