🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I will base myself today on something I took care to write.
There you have it! I am not saying this just like that, offhand.
It is not superfluous.

I will allow myself, perhaps casually, to purr something about this or that term in the written text,
but if you have sufficiently heard what I have addressed this year regarding the function of writing,
well, I will have no need to justify further—except in the fact itself, in the act.

It is indeed not indifferent that what I am about to say now is written.
It does not have at all the same scope if I simply say it or if I tell you that I have written:

“A man and a woman can understand each other. I do not deny it.
They can, as such, hear each other scream.”

This would be mere banter if I had not written it.
“Written” presupposes, at least for some of you, the suspicion of what, at one time, I said about the scream.
I cannot go back to it.

This happens—they scream—in cases where they fail to understand each other otherwise.
Otherwise, meaning, on a matter that guarantees their agreement.

Such matters are not lacking…
included among them, on occasion—the best of them—is understanding each other in bed.
These matters are certainly not lacking, then,
but it is precisely in this that they lack something,
namely, the ability to understand each other as man and woman—
which would mean, sexually.

Would man and woman then only understand each other by remaining silent?
That is not even the question.
For man and woman have no need to speak to be caught in a discourse.
As such…
in the same sense as the term I used earlier…
as such, they are facts of discourse.

A smile here would suffice, it seems to me,
to advance the idea that they are not only that.
No doubt—who would deny it?
But the fact that they are also that—facts of discourse—
freezes the smile.
And it is only thus, frozen by this remark, that the smile takes on its meaning—
the smile on archaic statues.
Self-importance, on the other hand, sneers.

It is, then, within a discourse that these beings—men and women, natural if you will—
have to assert themselves as such.

There is no discourse that is not of semblance.
If this did not admit itself naturally, I have already exposed the matter.
I recall its articulation:
semblance can only be stated starting from truth.
No doubt, one never evokes truth in science.
That is no reason for us to be more concerned about it.
It gets along just fine without us.
For it to be heard, it suffices for it to say, “I speak,”
and we believe it, because it is true: whoever speaks… speaks.

There is no stake…
I recall what I said about the wager, illustrating it with Pascal…
there is no stake except in what it says.

As truth, it can only speak semblance concerning jouissance,
and it is on sexual jouissance that it wins every time.

I will now put on the board, for the possible benefit of those who have not attended the last sessions,
the algebraic figures I thought fit to punctuate what is at stake
in the impasse one reaches when trying to write what pertains to the sexual relation:

– . !

– / !

The two bars placed over the symbols on the left…
which, in relation to the issue at hand,
encompass everything capable of responding to the semblance of sexual jouissance…
the two so-called negation bars,
are precisely such that they are not to be written,
since what cannot be written is simply not written.

One can say that they are not to be written: that it is “not of all x” that the function Φ(X) can be posited,

– and that it is from this “not of all x” that woman is posited: . !

– “there exists no x” such that it satisfies the function which defines the variable as being the function Φ(X): / !

There is none, and it is from this that what concerns man—male, I mean—is formulated,
but here, precisely, negation has only the function known as Verneinung,
that is to say, it is posited only after having first asserted that some man exists [: !]
and that it is in relation to “every woman” that a woman is situated [; !]. This is a reminder.

It is not part of the writing that I am revisiting.
Which means that…
since I see it is fairly widespread—you are right, indeed, to take notes…
this is the only value of writing: that afterward, you have to situate yourself in relation to it.

Well then, it would be good to follow me in my discipline of the name—n.o.m. I will have to return to it.
Especially next time, which will be the session in which we conclude this year.

The very essence of a name is to be a proper name.
Even for a name that has fallen, among other things, into common use,
it is not wasted time to restore it to its proper usage.

And when a name has remained proper enough, do not hesitate—take it as an example and call the thing by its name:
The Freudian Thing, for instance, as I have done—you know—I like to imagine it at the very least.
I will return to it next time.

Naming something is a call.
So much so that when I wrote it,
the Thing in question—Freudian—rose up and put on its show.
It is not I who dictate it.

It would even be quite restful…
that final rest to which so many lives constrain themselves in the semblance of…
if I were not, as a man—masculine—exposed there in the wind of castration.

Reread my text! Truth—she—my unf***able partner—
she is certainly in the same wind, she even carries it:
“to be in the wind”—that is what it is—
but this wind is neither hot nor cold for her.
For the reason that jouissance matters very little to her,
since the truth is that she leaves it to semblance.

This semblance has a name,
one that also hails from the mysterious time when mysteries were played out—nothing more—
when it designated the knowledge supposed to be tied to fertility,
and as such was offered for adoration in the form of a semblance of an organ.

The semblance denounced by pure truth is, let’s admit it,
quite phall-—quite invested…
in what, for us, begins through the virtue of coitus—
namely, the selection of genotypes, with the reproduction of the phenotype that follows…
quite invested, then, enough to deserve that ancient name: phallus.

Although it is clear that the legacy it now covers is reduced to the “acephaly” of this selection,
that is, the impossibility of subordinating so-called sexual jouissance
to what—sub rosa—would specify the choice of man and woman,
each taken as bearers of a precise set of genotypes,
since, at best, it is the phenotype that guides this choice.

In truth—if ever the phrase were apt—a proper name…
for it is still one, the phallus…
is only truly stable on a map where it designates a desert:
these are the only things on a map that do not change names.

It is remarkable that even the deserts produced in the name of a religion—which is not rare—
are never designated by the name that was devastating for them.
A desert is only renamed when it is made fertile.

That is not the case in sexual jouissance,
which the progress of science does not seem to conquer for knowledge.
On the contrary, it is through the barrier it constitutes
to the advent of the sexual relation in discourse
that its place there has been hollowed out—
to the point of becoming, in psychoanalysis, evident.

Such is…
in the sense that this word takes in Frege’s logical step…
Die Bedeutung des Phallus.

Which is precisely why…
I have my tricks, don’t I!
…it was in Germany—because in German—
that I delivered the message to which, in my Écrits,
this title responds—
and this, in the name of the centenary of Freud’s birth.

It was remarkable to witness, in this country chosen for that message to resonate, the stupefaction it produced.
One cannot quite imagine it now, because you all walk around carrying gadgets like these under your arms.
At that moment, it made an impression—“Die Bedeutung des Phallus!”
To say that I expected it would be saying nothing—at least coming from my mouth.
My strength is knowing what expecting means.

As for the stupefaction in question, I am not bringing into play here the 25 years of failed cretinization—
doing so would be to concede that those 25 years have triumphed everywhere.
Rather, I will insist on the fact that “Die Bedeutung des Phallus” is, in reality, a pleonasm:

there is no Bedeutung in language other than the phallus.

Language, in its function as an existent, connotes in the final analysis…
I said “connotes,” mind you!…
only the impossibility of symbolizing the sexual relation for the beings that inhabit it—
who inhabit language—
by virtue of the fact that it is from this habitat that they derive speech.

And let us not forget what I have said about the fact that speech is not, for that reason,
the privilege of those beings who inhabit it, who invoke it, speech,
through everything they dominate by the effect of discourse.
It begins, for instance, with my dog—the one I have spoken about for a long time—and it goes very, very far.

“The eternal silence—” as the other one said—“of infinite spaces…” did not…
like so many others, so many other eternities…
last more than an instant.
There is a great deal of chatter in the zone of the new astronomy,
the one that opened up right after this little remark from Pascal.

It is because language is constituted by a single Bedeutung that it derives its structure,
which consists in the fact that those who inhabit it can use it only:

– for metaphor, from which arise all the mythic insanities that sustain its inhabitants,

– for metonymy, from which they take “the little bit of reality” they have left,
in the form of the plus-de-jouir.

Now, this—this that I have just said—is inscribed only in history
and only from the appearance of writing,
which is never merely an inscription,
even in the guise of what promotes itself as “audiovisual.”
Writing is never…
from its origins to its latest protean techniques…
anything other than something that articulates itself like a bone,
of which language would be the flesh.

It is in this very sense that it demonstrates that jouissance—that sexual jouissance—has no bone,
a fact we might have suspected from the habits of the organ
that, in the speaking male, lends it a comical figure.

But writing…
not language—writing…
gives bone to all the jouissances that, through discourse,
prove to be open to the speaking being.

By giving them bone, it highlights what was indeed accessible there,
but masked—
namely, that the sexual relation is missing from the field of truth,
in that the discourse that establishes it proceeds only from semblance,
carving out a path only for jouissances
that parody—this is the precise word—
the one that is effective there but remains foreign to it.

Such is the Other of jouissance:
forever inter-dit—
that which language allows to be inhabited only by furnishing it…
why should I not use this image?…
with “diving suits.”

Perhaps this image speaks to you?
There are at least a few among you
who are not so caught up in their union duties
that they cannot still be moved by our lunar exploits.
Man has dreamed of the moon for a long time—
now he has set foot on it.

To truly grasp what this means,
one must do as I did: return from Japan.
That is where one realizes that dreaming of the moon
was truly a function.

There is a figure whose name I will not mention—
I do not wish to indulge in erudition here—
who is still locked away…
it is precisely him:
one clearly understands what persona means…
he is the person himself,
it is his mask that is locked away there,
inside a small Japanese cabinet,
shown to tourists.
One knows it is him—
at least from the spot ten meters away where he is displayed—
this is found in a place called the Silver Pavilion, in Kyoto…
he who dreamed of the moon.

We like to believe that he contemplated it in quite a phallic way.
We like to believe it—yet it still leaves us in some embarrassment; one no longer quite knows.
Was the path traveled not for the sake of inscribing it [the footprint on the lunar ground]?
To escape this embarrassment, one must understand that it is the accomplishment of the signifier of the barred A in my graph: S(A).

Well, all of this is mere banter. I beg your pardon.
It is a banter-signal—a signal for me, of course, warning me that I am skirting structuralism.
If I am forced to brush up against it, naturally, it is not my fault.
I will shift the burden—and it will be up to you to judge—onto the situation that I endure.

Time is passing, and naturally, I must hurry a little; I am forced to shorten things somewhat,
especially since my writing is about to become more difficult to follow.

But this situation I endure—I will pin it down.
I will pin it down with something that may not immediately appear to you,
but which I will have to speak of before we part in eight days:
I will pin it down with the refusal of performance.

It is a disease, a disease of the era, under whose yoke one must pass,
since this refusal constitutes the cult of competence—
that is, of a certain ideality,
to which I am reduced—like many other fields of science—to authorizing myself before you.

The result—well, here are some anecdotes—
for instance, my Écrits… one of them is being translated into English:
“Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage” is translated as The Language of the Self.
I have just learned that in Spanish, they have done something similar—
a translation of a certain number [of my writings], titled “Aspects Structuralistes de Freud,”
or something of the sort… but let’s leave it at that.

Competence exists only insofar as it takes root in incompetence,
proposing itself as an ideality for its own cult.
That is how it makes concessions,
and I will give you an example:
the sentence with which I began—
“A man and a woman can understand each other, I do not deny it…”
Well, there you have it—it was just to sugarcoat the pill!
And “the pill”—well, that doesn’t make anything better, does it!

The notion forged under the term “structuralism” attempts to extend the delegation once granted to certain specialists…
the specialists of truth…
the delegation of a certain void, which becomes apparent in the rarefaction of jouissance.

It is this void that existentialism had brought to light—without embellishment—
after phenomenology…
phenomenology, mind you: much more of a fraud…
had thrown in the towel on its breathing exercises.

It occupied the places left deserted by philosophy,
because they were not proper places.
At present, they are merely good for memorializing its contribution—
which is not negligible—to philosophy,
to the discourse of the Master,
which it has definitively stabilized with the support of science.

Marx or not…
whether he flipped philosophy onto its feet or onto its head…
it is certain that philosophy, in any case, was never “quite-phallic enough.”

Do not count on me to structuralize the matter of impossible life—
as if it were not from there that life had its chance to prove its real.
My astonishing prosopopoeia of “I speak…” in the text just cited—The Freudian Thing [Écrits, p. 409]—
even if it is credited rhetorically as “truth in person,”
does not cause me to fall from where I draw it: from the well.
Nothing there speaks of what speaking truly means:
the irreparable division between jouissance and semblance.

Truth is the jouissance of pretending,
and never confessing that the reality of each of these two halves
prevails only by asserting that it belongs to the other—
that is, by lying in alternating currents.
Such is the half-said of truth.

His astronomy is equatorial, meaning it was already completely outdated when it was born from the night-day pair.
An astronomy must be adjusted to submit to the seasons, to season itself.
This is an allusion to Chinese astronomy, which was equatorial as well, but which led to nothing.

The matter at hand is not his competence as a linguist—far from it—that paved the way for Freud.
What I am reminding you of is that these paths could only be followed by demonstrating—up to the point of acrobatics—
performances in language, and that here, only linguistics allows us to situate them within a structure,
insofar as linguistics itself adheres to a competence called “linguistic consciousness,”
which is remarkable precisely because it never eludes its own inquiry.

Thus, my formula, that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” implies, at a minimum,
that the condition of the unconscious is language.
But this takes nothing away from the scope of the enigma,
which consists in the fact that the unconscious knows more than it seems to—
since it was from this very surprise that one originally set out to name it as one did.
It knows things!

Naturally, things would have been cut short right away
if one had crowned it—the little unconscious—with all the instincts,
which, in any case, are always there like a snuffer:
read anything published outside my school.
The matter was sealed; it was now only a question
of sticking a label on it addressed precisely to truth,
which, in our time, jumps around quite a bit, if I may say so,
and does not shy away from the black market.

I threw a wrench into the rut of its clandestinity
by hammering home that the knowledge in question
can only be analyzed by formulating itself as a language—
in a particular language, even if it means hybridizing it—
which, by the way, is no different from what languages themselves
commonly permit on their own authority.

No one has followed up on what language knows—“sait,” as in s.a.i.t.—
namely: Die Bedeutung des Phallus.
I had said it, of course, but no one noticed—because it was the truth.
So, who is interested in truth?

Well, some people—
people whose crude image I have drawn,
which one finds in topology for family use.
Here is how it is drawn.
In this topology for family use,
this is how one draws the Klein bottle.

There is not—I return to this—a single point on its surface
that is not a topological part of the inversion
that is here represented by the circle,
drawn here as the only circle fit to give this bottle the bottom
that other bottles unduly boast of having.
The other bottles—mind you!—they have a bottom,
God knows why!

Thus, it is not where one thinks,
but rather in her structure as a subject,
that the hysteric…
I now come to part of the people I was just designating…
conjugates the truth of her jouissance
with the implacable knowledge she possesses:
that the Other proper to causing it—
which is the phallus—
is a semblance.

Who would not understand Freud’s disappointment
upon realizing that the step toward healing
he achieved with the hysteric
led to nothing more than making her demand
this so-called semblance,
suddenly endowed with real virtues,
for having been hooked onto this point of inversion,
which, while not unfindable on the body—
this is obvious—
is nonetheless a topologically incorrect representation
of jouissance in a woman.
But did Freud know this?
One may wonder.

In the impossible solution to her problem,
it is by measuring the cause as accurately as possible—
in other words, by making it a just cause—
that the hysteric consents
to pretending to be the bearer of this semblance:
“at least one,”
which I write—
do I need to rewrite it?—
“l’hommoinzin,”
matching the bone she requires for her jouissance
so that she may gnaw at it.

This approach to “l’hommoinzin”
can be written in three ways, can it not?

– There is the common orthographic way, since, after all,
I must explain it to you: “at least one.”

– Then, there is this: “l’hommoinzin,”
which has that expressive value
that I always know how to bring to structural plays.

– And then, on occasion,
you may even draw it closer and write it:
a moinzin [a -1],
as a way not to forget
that, on occasion,
she may function as object (a).

Her approaches to “l’hommoinzin”
can only take place by confessing,
at that very point of focus
he assumes according to her inclinations,
the deliberate castration she reserves for him—
her chances are thus limited.
One should not believe that her success depends
on one of these men—male—
who are either troubled by semblance
or who prefer it more frank.

Those whom I designate in this way—
they are the wise ones:
the masochists.
That situates the wise;
they must be brought back to their proper place.

To judge the outcome in this way
is to misunderstand what one can expect from the hysteric—
provided she agrees to inscribe herself in a discourse:
for it is to tame the master that she is destined,
and it is thanks to her
that he throws himself back into knowledge.

There you have it—I bring nothing else here, do I…
this is the value of this writing: that it generates all sorts of things,
but one must know where the key points are…
nothing else but to mark that the danger at this crossroads
is the same as the one I have just pinpointed—
to be warned of it, since that is precisely where I started earlier.
I return to the same point, don’t I? I am going in circles.

Loving truth—even the one the hysteric embodies, so to speak…
which means giving her what one does not have,
under the pretext that she desires it…
is, very precisely, to devote oneself to a theater
that clearly can now only be a charity event.

I am not speaking only of the hysteric;
I am speaking of that something that expresses itself in…
shall I say it as Freud did?…
“discontent in the theater.”
For it to still stand, it takes Brecht,
who understood that it could not hold
without a certain distance, a certain cooling-off.

This “it is clear,” which I have just said—
“that it can no longer be…”—
is, strictly speaking,
precisely an effect of Aufklärung,
barely believable, is it not?—
linked to the entrance on the scene, however faltering it may have been,
of the discourse of the analyst.

That was enough for the hysteric…
the qualified hysteric,
whose function I am in the process of approaching for you—
you can sense it…
that was enough for the hysteric
to renounce the luxuriant clinic
with which she furnished the gap of the sexual relation.

This is something to be taken as a sign…
it’s an example! [Laughter]
It may perhaps be taken as a sign directed at someone—[at least one]…
I am speaking of the hysteric…
that she is going to do better than this clinic!

The only important thing here
is what goes unnoticed—
namely, that I speak of the hysteric
as something that sustains quantification.

Something that, if one listens to me,
would be inscribed by an A inverted over X,
which is how I wrote it on the board: ;,
always apt in its unknown to function in Φ(X) as a variable: ;!.

That is indeed what I am writing,
and it would be easy, by rereading Aristotle,
to detect what relation precisely to woman—
whom he identified with the hysteric…
which actually places the women of his time in a rather good position—
at the very least, they were stimulating for men…
to detect what relation to woman,
identified with the hysteric,
allowed him—this is quite a leap—
to establish his logic in the form of Παν [pan: all].

The choice of:
– Πας [paz, each],
– Πασα [passa, each],
– Παν [pan],

the choice of this term rather than εχαστος [ekastos, each]
to designate the universal affirmative proposition—
as well as the negative one, for that matter—
this entire pan-talonnade
of the first great formal logic
is quite essentially linked to Aristotle’s idea of woman.

This does not prevent the fact that, precisely,
the only universal formula he would never have allowed himself to pronounce
would be “all women.”
There is no trace of it—
open the Prior Analytics.
No more than he…
whereas his successors rushed into it headfirst…
no more than he would have allowed himself to write
that incredible absurdity
upon which formal logic has lived ever since:
“All men are mortal.”
Which entirely presumes the future fate of humanity.

“All men are mortal” means that “all men…”
since this is something that is stated in extension…
“all men…” as “all” are destined for death—
that is, the human race is destined for extinction,
which is, to say the least, a bold claim.

That A of X [;] determines the step to be taken by a being,
by a “every woman” [;!],
that a being as sensitive as Aristotle
never once committed himself to this “every woman”—
this is precisely what allows me to assert
that “every woman” is the enunciation
through which the hysteric is decided as a subject.

This is why a woman is in solidarity
with a “papludun”
which properly lodges her in that logic of the successor
that Peano has given us as a model.

But the hysteric is not “a woman.”

The question is whether psychoanalysis, as I define it,
gives access to “a woman,”
or whether the advent of “a woman”
is a matter of δόξα [doxa]—
that is, whether, as was said
by those engaged in dialogue in Meno…
you remember Meno, don’t you? No? No?…
whether, just as virtue was…
this is what gives this dialogue its worth, its meaning…
whether virtue was that which could not be taught.

It translates as: that which, of her…
of a woman, as I am here defining her step…
cannot be known in the unconscious—at least, in an articulated way.
For finally, here I stop.

Someone who, precisely, keeps bringing up theater…
as if this were a matter worthy of truly absorbing great activity—
it’s a very well-made book—
a great activity as an analyst,
as if this were truly what an analyst should specialize in.
Someone, in a footnote, credits me with having introduced the distinction between truth and knowledge—
enormous, enormous!

I have just spoken to you about Meno…
naturally, he hasn’t read it—he only reads theater [André Green]…
but in any case, Meno is where I began to cross the first phases of the crisis
that set me against a certain analytic apparatus.

The distinction between truth and knowledge,
the opposition between επιστήμη [epistēmē] and δόξα [doxa]—true doxa,
the one that can found virtue—
you find it written there, raw, in Meno.

What I have emphasized is precisely the opposite:
it is their juncture—
namely, that the act, where it finally knots itself,
in what appears to be a culier circle,
the knowledge at stake in the unconscious
is the one that slips, that extends,
that at every moment proves to be knowledge of truth.

And this is where I now pose the question:
– does this knowledge actually allow us to advance beyond Meno?
– that is, to determine whether this truth, insofar as it is embodied in the hysteric,
is indeed capable of a shift supple enough
for it to be an introduction to a woman?

I am well aware that the question has risen a degree
since I demonstrated that there is something linguistically articulated
that, for all that, is not articulable in speech.
This is simply what desire is founded upon.

And yet, it is easy to decide.

It is precisely because it concerns desire,
insofar as it emphasizes the invariance of the unknown…
the unknown that is on the left,
the one that only appears under the sign of a Verneinung [. !]…
it is precisely because it emphasizes the invariance of the unknown
that the hollowing out of desire by analysis
could never inscribe it in any function of a variable.

This is the stumbling block
that separates, as such,
the desire of the hysteric from that which, nonetheless, does take place—
and which allows countless women to function as such,
that is, by making the papludun function of their being
through all their situational variations.

Here, the hysteric plays the role of a functional schema—
if you know what that is.
This is the scope of my formula of so-called unsatisfied desire.
It follows that the hysteric positions herself as introducing the papludun,
which institutes each woman through the pathway of:

“It is not of every woman that it can be said that she is a function of the Phallus.” [. !]

That it should be of every woman [;]—
this is what constitutes her desire,
and this is why this desire sustains itself as unsatisfied:
because a woman results from it,
but one who could never be the hysteric in person.
This is precisely how she embodies my truth from earlier—
the one that, after making her speak,
I returned to its structuralist function.

Analytic discourse is founded on this restitution of truth to the hysteric.
It has sufficed to dissipate the theater within hysteria.
This is why I say that it is not without relation to something
that is changing the face of things in our time.

I could emphasize the fact that
when I first began to articulate things that carried all this in potential,
I was immediately met with the splash of an article on theater in the hysteric.

“The psychoanalysis of today” has no recourse except for “the hysteric who is not up to date.”
When the hysteric proves that, having turned the page, she continues writing on the back and even onto the next one, no one understands.
And yet, it is simple—she is a logician!

This raises the question of the reference to theater in Freudian theory—no less than Oedipus.
It is time to confront what, from theater, was deemed necessary to maintain in support of “the other scene,”
the one I speak of, the one I was the first to speak of.

After all, perhaps sleep is enough for that.
That it should, on occasion, shelter the gestation of Fuchsian functions, as you know has happened,
could justify the desire for it to prolong itself.

It may be that the signifying representatives of the subject can increasingly do without being borrowed
from imaginary representation—there are signs of this in our time.
It is certain that the jouissance one must undergo castration for
has only apparatus-like relations with representation.

This is precisely why Sophocles’ Oedipus…
which holds this privilege for us
only because the other Oedipuses are incomplete
and, most often, lost…
is still far too rich and too diffuse for our needs in articulation.

The genealogy of desire, insofar as what is at stake is how it causes itself [sic],
belongs to a combinatory more complex than that of myth.
This is why we have no reason to dream about “what the myth was used for in its time,” as they say.

To engage in such a path is metalinguistic,
and in this respect, Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologies are a decisive contribution.
They demonstrate that the combination of nameable forms of the mytheme—
many of which have become extinct—
operates according to precise laws of transformation,
though of very limited logic—
or at the very least, it must be said that the least one can say
is that our mathematics enriches this combinatory.

Perhaps it would be worth reconsidering
whether psychoanalytic discourse has better things to do
than to devote itself to interpreting these myths
in a mode that does not surpass common commentary—
which, moreover, is entirely superfluous,
since what interests the ethnologist is the collection of the myth,
its pinned collation,
and its recollation with other functions—
whether of ritual or of production—
which are similarly recorded in a writing
where articulated isomorphisms suffice.

No trace of any supposition, I was about to say,
about the jouissance that is served there.
And this is entirely true, even considering the efforts made
to suggest to us the possible operation of obscure knowledges
that might lie buried within.
The note given by Lévi-Strauss in The Structures
on the parade function exercised by these structures
with regard to love is, here, a fortunate clarification.
That did not prevent it from passing well over people’s heads—
due to the analysts who were in favor at the time.

In sum, Oedipus has the advantage of showing
how man can respond to the demand of the papludun
that is in the being of a woman.
He himself would love papludune no more.
Unfortunately, it is not the same one—
it is always the same appointment,
the one where, when the masks fall:
“It was neither him nor her.”

Yet this fable is supported only by the fact
that man is never anything but a little boy.
And that the hysteric cannot let go of this
is something that casts doubt on the function
of the final word of her truth.

A step toward seriousness, it seems to me,
could be taken here by shifting onto man—
who, it will be noted,
I have given only a modest place up to this point in my exposition,
though I am one myself—
if indeed there is one here
who is making all this fine company speak!

It seems impossible to me…
it is not without reason that I stumble upon this word at the outset…
not to grasp the schize
that separates the myth of Oedipus from Totem and Taboo.

I will lay my cards on the table right away:
– the first [the myth of Oedipus] was dictated to Freud by the dissatisfaction of the hysteric,
– the second [Totem and Taboo] by his own impasses.

Neither of the little boy, nor of the mother, nor of the tragic passage from father to son—right?—
passage of what, if not of the phallus.

Of what may have made up the fabric of the first myth,
there is no trace in the second.
There, in Totem and Taboo, the father enjoys…
a term veiled in the first myth by power…
the father enjoys all the women, until his sons kill him,
not without having first reached an agreement among themselves.
Afterward, none of them succeeds him in his gluttony of jouissance.

The term imposes itself for what follows in return:
that the sons devour him, each necessarily having only a part,
and through this very fact, the whole forming a communion.
It is from here that the social contract is established:
no one shall touch—not the mother here…
it is clearly stated in Moses and Monotheism, in Freud’s own words,
that only among the sons, the youngest still figure in the harem…
so it is no longer the mothers but rather the women of the father as such
who are concerned by the prohibition.
The mother only comes into play precisely for her babies,
who are the seeds of heroes.

But if this, according to Freud,
is how the origin of the Law comes about,
it is not the law of maternal incest,
which is nonetheless given as foundational in psychoanalysis.
Whereas in reality…
this is merely an observation, is it not…
apart from a certain “Law of Manu”,
which punishes it with literal castration—
“he shall go west with his testicles in his hand”—
all that, well, this law of maternal incest is rather elided everywhere.

I do not at all contest the well-founded prophylactic nature of the analytic prohibition;
I am pointing out that at the level where Freud articulates something of his own—
Totem and Taboo—and God knows how much it mattered to him, does he not?—
he does not justify this prohibition mythically.
The strangeness begins with the fact that neither Freud, nor anyone else for that matter,
seems to have noticed.

I continue along my path.

Jouissance, in Freud, is elevated to the rank of an absolute,
which brings us back to the care of man…
I am speaking of Totem and Taboo…
of original man.
It is all openly stated.
I am speaking of the father—
the father of the primal horde.

It is easy to recognize in this the phallus:
the totality of what, femininely,
can be subject to jouissance.
This jouissance, I have just noted,
remains veiled in the royal couple of Oedipus,
but it is not absent from the first myth.

The royal couple is only brought into question
because of what is stated in the drama:
that it is the guarantor of the jouissance of the people—
which, for that matter, aligns with what we know
about all monarchies,
both archaic and modern.

But the castration of Oedipus has no other purpose
than to put an end to the Theban plague—
that is, to return to the people the jouissance
for which others will now serve as guarantors.
Which, of course, considering where one starts from,
will not come without some bitter twists for all involved.
Must I emphasize that the key function of the myth
is opposed in the two cases, strictly?

– Law first in the first myth—
so primordial that it exerts its repercussions
even when those guilty of transgressing it
have done so innocently—
and it is from the law that the profusion of jouissance emerges.

– In the second: jouissance at the origin,
law afterward—
and I will be spared from having to underline
the perverse correlates of this law,
since, ultimately, with the emphasis placed
on the promotion of sacred cannibalism,
it is indeed all women who are, in principle,
forbidden to the community of males,
which has transcended itself as such in this communion.

This is indeed the meaning of this other primordial law—
without which, what founds it?
Eteocles and Polynices are there, I believe,
to show that there are other resources.
It is true that they, at least, proceed from the genealogy of desire.

And yet, for the murder of the father to have constituted…
For whom? For Freud? For his readers?…
a supreme fascination,
no one has even thought to highlight
that in the first myth,
this murder happens—
without the murderer knowing it—
and that not only does he not recognize
that he is striking his father,
but that he cannot recognize it,
since he has another,
who, from all antiquity,
is his father,
having adopted him.

It is, in fact, expressly to avoid the risk
of striking his true father
that he has exiled himself.

What the myth suggests is that it reveals the place of the progenitor father in an era which, as Freud emphasizes, just like our own, makes the father problematic.
And so he would be, and Oedipus absolved, if he were not of royal blood—
that is, if Oedipus did not have to function as the phallus—the phallus of his people, not of his mother—
and for a time—this is the most astonishing part—it worked: the Thebans were very happy.

I have often pointed out that the turning point must have come from Jocasta.
Was it because she knew or because she had forgotten?
In any case, what does this have in common with the murder of the second myth,
which is implied to be an act of revolt or of a need that is, in truth, unthinkable—
even unthought—except as stemming from a conspiracy?

It is clear that I have only approached the terrain on which, ultimately—let’s say—a conspiracy, too,
has prevented me from truly tackling the problem,
that is, at the level of Moses and Monotheism,
the point where everything Freud articulated becomes truly significant.

I cannot even indicate here what would be necessary to bring you back to Freud,
but I can say that in revealing his contribution to analytic discourse,
he proceeds no less from neurosis than from what he gathered from the hysteric
in the form of Oedipus.

It is curious that I had to wait until now for such an assertion—
namely, that Totem and Taboo is a neurotic product—
before I could put it forward…
which is entirely indisputable…
without, for that matter, calling into question the truth of its construction in any way.

It is precisely in this that it bears witness to the truth.
One does not psychoanalyze a work, much less Freud’s than any other.
One critiques it, and far from a neurosis making its solidity suspect,
it is precisely what binds it together in this case.

It is this testimony, brought by the obsessional from his structure,
to that which, in the sexual relation, proves impossible to formulate in discourse,
that we owe Freud’s myth.

I will leave it there for today.

It is next time that I will give this its exact scope,
for I do not want there to be any misunderstandings.
The fact of articulating, in a certain way,
what Freud’s contribution is to the fundamental myth of psychoanalysis—
I emphasize—does not at all render it suspect by highlighting its origin;
on the contrary, quite the opposite.

It is simply a question of knowing where this may lead us.