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Diagrams are not included in translations, see FRENCH DOCX FILE.

Table

I – Freud and Saussure

II – Structure and Psychoanalysis

III – Metaphor and Metonymy

IV – Unconscious and Knowledge

V – Knowledge and Knowing

VI – Knowing and Truth

VII – Impossible and Real

QUESTIONI [04’ 02’’]

Jacques Lacan, you assert in the Écrits that Freud anticipates, without realizing it, the research of Saussure and that of the Prague Circle. Could you explain this point?

Your question surprises me by carrying a pertinence that stands out from the usual pretensions to “interviews,” which I generally tend to dismiss. It is even a doubled pertinence, in two ways rather:
– you prove to me that you have read my Écrits, which, apparently, is not considered necessary in order to claim to understand me,
– and then, you select from it a remark that implies the existence of another mode of information than mass mediation: that Freud anticipates Saussure does not imply that a noise has passed from the first to the second.
Thus, in quoting me, you make me respond before I have even decided to do so—this is what I call “surprising me.”

Let us start from the final point.
Saussure and the Prague Circle produce a linguistics that has nothing in common with what was previously covered by this name, even if it were to rediscover its keys in the hands of the Stoics… but what were they doing with them?

Linguistics, with Saussure and the Prague Circle, is established through a break, which is the bar placed between the signifier and the signified, so that the difference, by which the signifier is constituted absolutely, prevails there, but also so that it is effectively ordered by an autonomy that has nothing to envy in the “crystal effects”: for instance, the system of the phoneme, which is its first discovery success.

One thinks of extending this success to the entire network of the symbolic by admitting as meaning only that which the network accounts for ,
– in terms of the incidence of an effect: yes,
– in terms of content: no.

This is the wager sustained by the inaugural break.
The signified will or will not be scientifically thinkable depending on whether a field of signifiers holds or not, a field that, by its very material, is distinguished from any physical field by the science obtained.

This implies a metaphysical exclusion, to be taken as a fact of non-being.
No meaning will henceforth be taken as self-evident:
that it is bright when it is daytime, for example, where the Stoics preceded us.
But I have already questioned earlier: to what end?

Even if I must overlook certain word repetitions, I will call semiotics any discipline that starts from the sign…
not from the signifier…
from the sign taken as object, to mark that this was what obstructed the grasp of the signifier as such.

The sign presupposes a someone to whom it signals something.
It is this someone whose shadow has obscured the entry into linguistics.
Call this someone whatever you like—it will always be nonsense.

The sign suffices for this someone to appropriate language as a mere tool.
Language becomes nothing more than a support for abstraction, a means for discussion,
along with all the progress of critique—what am I saying?—of "thought," as the key.

I would have to "anticipate"…
borrowing the word from myself to myself [cf. "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty," in Écrits, p. 197]—
…what I intend to introduce under the notation of l’achose…
l’achose: l, apostrophe, a, c, h, o, etc.
…to make it felt in what effect linguistics takes its position. It is not a progress; rather, a regression.

This is what we need against the unity of obscurantism that is already coalescing to preempt l’achose.
No one seems to recognize around what this unity is forming,
and that, in the time of the someone who collected "the signature of things," cultivated stupidity was not presumed to such a degree
as to dare inscribe language in the register of "communication": that is our doing.

The recourse to "communication" protects, if I may say so, the rear of what linguistics renders obsolete, by covering it with the ridicule that often only becomes apparent in hindsight. Namely, that which, in the initial occultation of language, appeared as nothing more than a myth under the name of telepathy.

Lost children, beggars of thought—those who prided themselves on transmitting thought without discourse.
Yet this myth manages to captivate Freud—you know this—who does not unmask in it the king of that "court of miracles" whose cleansing he announces.

A miracle, indeed, when they all trace back to the first that takes place: that we tele-suffer from the same wood with which we pactize—a social contract, after all, an effusion of communication, the promises of dialogue, no less!

"All men—who does not know this?—are mortal": ah! let us sympathize in being placed in the same box! Let us speak of Everything—quite literally—let us speak of Everything together, except for what inhabits the syllogist’s mind when inserting Socrates into the equation ["Socrates is a man..."].

For from this, it follows that while death is no doubt administered like everything else, by and for men, they are not on the same side when it comes to the telepathy that a telegraphy conveys, whose subject never ceases to pose an obstacle whenever one arrives at this crossroads. That this subject is hardly communicable, though well-determined, is what gives linguistics its strength, a strength that even extends to putting the poet—yes, the poet!—in its bag.

For the poet comes into being by being…
allow me to translate the one who demonstrates it: my friend Jakobson…
…by being eaten by verse, which finds its arrangement among itself without concern, it is manifest, for what the poet may have known of it.

Hence the consistency, in Plato, of the ostracism with which he strikes the poet in his Republic, and the keen curiosity he shows in the Cratylus for those little creatures that words appear to be, doing as they please. One sees how precious formalism was in supporting the first steps of linguistics.

But it is, all the same, from stumbling over the steps of language…
over what is called speech…
that linguistics gained its momentum—for us psychoanalysts.

That the subject is not the one who knows what he is saying, when indeed something is being said,
– by the mouth where he is lodged, certainly,
– but also in the clumsiness of a behavior attributed to him,
– in the brain, from which he only benefits when it is asleep—this organ proving to hold its subjective scope only in that it regulates sleep,
…this is what Freud unveils in the unconscious.

For my passage in this world—under the name of Lacan—has consisted in articulating that it is this and nothing else:
– anyone can now verify it, merely by reading it,
– anyone who operates according to its rules, in psychoanalysis, must abide by it—unless they wish to pay the price of falling into stupidity.

Thus, in stating that "Freud anticipates" linguistics, I say less than what imposes itself,
which is the formula I now release: "the unconscious is the condition of linguistics."
Without the eruption of the unconscious, there is no way for linguistics to emerge from the dubious daylight in which the University, under the name of "human sciences," still eclipses science.
Crowned in Kiev [lapsus: Kazan] through the care of Baudouin de Courtenay, it would no doubt have remained there.

But the University has not had its last word: it will proceed to
– make this the subject of a thesis: "The Influence of Freud’s Genius on the Genius of Raymond [lapsus: Ferdinand] de Saussure,"
– demonstrate from where the first received the wind of the second. Before radio even existed!

As if it had never done without it, always making just as much noise.
And why would Saussure have "realized," to borrow the terms of your quotation, any better than Freud himself what Freud was anticipating—most notably, the Lacanian metaphor and metonymy, those very places where Saussure engendered Jakobson?

If Saussure does not publish the anagrams he deciphers in Saturnian poetry, it is because he knows their true significance. The trickery does not make him a fool; it is because he is not an analyst.

In this position—that of the analyst, on the other hand—the dubious methods in which academic self-importance cloaks itself never fail to target their man… there is in this something like a hope, though one does not know for whom… and they throw him straight into a blunder, such as saying that the unconscious is the condition of language.

This, when it is a matter of making oneself an "author" at the expense of what I have said, or rather drummed into those concerned—namely, that "language is the condition of the unconscious."

I still laugh at the procedure, now become a stereotype, to the point that two others… but for the internal use of a "Society" whose academic bastardization has killed it… dared to define "passage à l’acte" and "acting out" in the very terms I had proposed to them, in order to oppose one to the other, but simply by reversing what I attributed to each. A way, they thought, of appropriating what no one before had known how to articulate.

If I were to falter now, I would leave behind no work other than these selected scraps of my teaching, which I have made into a stumbling block for information—about which it suffices to say that it merely circulates it.

What I stated in a confidential discourse—at Sainte-Anne—nonetheless shifted common reception, to the point of bringing me afterward an audience that testifies to its stability in its sheer enormity.

I recall the discomfort with which a young man questioned me, having attended the presentation of my Dialectic of Desire and the Subversion of the Subject before an audience composed of members of the "Party"—the only one—among whom he had wandered in as a Marxist.

I kindly…
kindly, as I always am…
pointed out, following this scrap collected in my Écrits, the astonishment that was its response from that audience.

And the young man:
"Do you really believe," he said to me, "that it is enough for you to have said something, to have written letters on the blackboard, to expect a result?"

Yet such an exercise did have an effect. I had proof of it in the title alone of the scrap that gave it a right to appear in my book—the funds of the Ford Foundation, which had motivated that meeting, had to be drained, those funds having, inconceivably, dried up at the very same moment.

This is because the effect that spreads is not one of communication of speech, but of displacement of discourse.

→ → → ...

Freud, misunderstood—even by himself—for having sought to be heard, is served less by his disciples than by this very propagation: the one without which the convulsions of history remain an enigma, like those months of May that throw off course those who strive to render them servants to a meaning—Marxist, in this case—whose dialectic presents itself as sheer derision.

QUESTION II [20’ 25’’]

Jacques Lacan, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and ethnology share the notion of structure.
Starting from this notion, can we not imagine the formulation of a common field that would one day unite psychoanalysis, ethnology, and linguistics?

"Structure" is the word that marks the entry into play of the effect of language.

Starting from the fact that it is a petitio principii to make it a function, whether individual or collective…
that is, one that would be the attribute of a supposed [sub-posed: sub-jectum, ὑποκείμενον] in existence,
which—whatever it may be—whether "ego" or an organism adapted for knowledge, necessarily implies the someone I spoke of earlier…
…a function whereby, therefore, someone represents to themselves the relations that constitute the real—
this last term being posited as a Lacanian category.

On the contrary, we begin from the already-present in reality—
which is not a "category" but a "given"—
the presence, not of relations in the foreground, but of the formulas of relation,
which take shape in language,
in order to follow their effect, which is properly structure.

This is how a discourse can dominate reality, without presupposing consensus from anyone.
For it is discourse that determines the difference that erects a barrier between
– subjects of statements, in the plural,
– and the subject of their enunciation, in the singular.
Nothing could be further from idealism than what I am saying here!

No need, moreover, to herd the structuralists into a pen.
A dark scheme to saddle them with the legacy of decay—
I do not say caused but covered—by existentialism.
Anyone can orient themselves by structure and will find it beneficial.
Anticipate here my response to the grouping of chapters you propose to me.

Nota

That being said, what is particular to language is that by which structure falls under the "crystal effect" mentioned earlier.
To qualify this particularity as "arbitrary" is a lapsus committed by Saussure ["the arbitrariness of the sign"],
precisely because—reluctantly, of course, but thereby all the more prone to stumbling—
he took it from that university discourse [U] in which I show that what is concealed [S₁ Truth of U] is precisely that signifier [S₁]
which dominates the master's discourse [M],
that of arbitrariness [S₁ asemantic → no meaning].

U → M

One sees that speaking of body is not, when it comes to the symbolic, a metaphor.
For the so-called "body" [symbolic] proves, in relation to the body in its naïve sense, to be determining:
the first [the symbolic body] causes the second [the body in the naïve sense] to incorporate itself into it [S₁ → S₂ → fall of (a), etc.].
Hence the "incorporeal" that remains to mark the first, after the time of its incorporation.
Let us do justice to the Stoics for having known how to inscribe, through this term [incorporeal],
the way in which the symbolic pertains to the body.

Incorporeal are:
– the function that makes mathematics a reality,
– the application of the same effect in topology,
– or analysis, in a broad sense, in logic.

But it is incorporated that structure produces… affect, neither more nor less—
only as derived from what of being is articulated,
there being no being except as a fact, that is, as being spoken of from somewhere.
Thus, it becomes evident that, for the body, whether it is dead or alive is secondary.

Who does not know the critical point by which we date in man the speaking being: burial—
where a species affirms itself as one in which, unlike any other,
the dead body retains what gave character to the living: body.
Corpse, remains—it does not become carrion,
the body that speech inhabited, the body that language corpified.

Zoology may start from the individual’s claim to constitute the being of the living,
but only so that it may cut it down to size, if it merely pursues it to the level of the polyp colony.

The body, taken seriously, is first and foremost that which can bear the mark that places it within a sequence of signifiers.
From the moment of this mark, it becomes the support of a relation—not contingent but necessary,
for even escaping it still means bearing it.

Before any date, -1 designates the place called the Other—with the symbol of the capital A—as introduced by Lacan.
From the One-in-Less, the bed is made for the intrusion that advances from extrusion: this is the signifier itself.

Thus, not all flesh follows this course:
only that which the sign imprints, by negating it, rises…
from the fact that bodies separate from it…
as clouds, the upper waters of their jouissance [cf. Lituraterre], heavy with lightning bolts ready to redistribute body and flesh.

A distribution perhaps less measurable,
but one that people seem not to notice already figures, in ancient burial rites,
the very set whose articulation shapes our most modern logic [set theory].

The empty set [Ø] of bones is the irreducible element
from which the other elements are ordered—
the instruments of jouissance: necklaces, goblets, weapons,
more sub-elements to enumerate jouissance than to reintegrate it into the body.

Have I animated structure? Enough, I think, to…
in the domains it would unite with psychoanalysis…
declare that nothing specifically predestines the two you mention [Freud and Saussure] to each other.

Linguistics, first of all, may define the material of psychoanalysis, even the apparatus of its operation.
But it leaves blank [it is semblance] the very point from which [S₁] what renders psychoanalysis effective is produced—
that is, what I sought to articulate in The Psychoanalytic Act [seminar 1967-68],
hoping to shed light on more than just that act.

A domain can only be mastered through an operator.
The unconscious may be, as I have said, the condition of linguistics,
but this gives linguistics not the slightest hold over it.

[Linguistics, as the discourse of science (H), leaves blank (a),
that is, from where a as semblance makes the analytic discourse effective (S₁ as product):
what is left blank by linguistics (and by the discourse of science in general)
is at the very heart of analytic discourse.]

H → A

I was able to test this when I requested a contribution from the greatest of French linguists
to illustrate the launch of a journal of my own making [La Psychanalyse, no. 1],
which, for that reason, I would have preferred to have a more specific title—
it was called La Psychanalyse—as a reminder to those who have so easily dismissed it.

From this approach, I had hoped for a step forward on the issue of "antithetical words,"
which should not be surprising that Freud introduced, if one understands me.

If the linguist can do no better than to formulate that the comfort of the signified requires a choice in antithesis,
this must present as much difficulty to people…
who, in speaking Arabic, must face a great number of such words…
as responding to the uprising of an anthill.

There is no lesser barrier on the side of ethnology:
an investigator who lets his informant whisper sweet nothings about her dreams
will be called to order—to be accounted for as fieldwork.

And in doing so, the censor—be it even Claude Lévi-Strauss—
would not seem to me to be encroaching disrespectfully on my territory.
Where would "the field" go if it were soaked in the unconscious?
No matter what one dreams of, it would produce no effect of excavation,
but rather a puddle of our own making.

For an inquiry that limits itself to gathering knowledge
is one that we would end up nourishing with a knowledge of our own making.

One should not expect psychoanalysis itself to compile the myths that have conditioned a subject simply because he grew up in Togo or Paraguay,
for psychoanalysis operates based on the discourse that conditions it…
and which I define this year by taking it from its reverse side [seminar 1969-70: The Reverse of Psychoanalysis]…
so no other myth will be obtained from it than what remains within this discourse: the Freudian Oedipus.

As for the material with which myth is analyzed, let us listen to Lévi-Strauss declare that it is untranslatable.
This should be well understood, for what he means is that no matter in which language they are collected,
they remain always equally analyzable, theorized in large units that a definitive "mythologization" articulates.

One can grasp here where the mirage of a level common to the universality of psychoanalytic discourse comes from,
but also, and because of who demonstrates it—without, however, producing the illusion of it.
For psychoanalysis does not operate through a play of mythemes.

That it can only take place within a particular language…
what is called positive, even when one attempts to translate it…
serves as a guarantee that "there is no metalanguage," according to my formula.

The effect of language occurs there only as crystallingual.
Its universality is nothing but the topology rediscovered,
insofar as a discourse moves within it.
A discourse specified by the fact that mythology is reduced there to an extreme.

Shall I add that myth, in Lévi-Strauss’s articulation…
that is, the only ethnological form that justifies your question…
rejects everything I have promoted regarding the instance of the letter in the unconscious:
– it operates neither through metaphor nor even through metonymy,
– it does not condense, it explains,
– it does not displace, it situates—even if it changes the arrangement of the tents.

It functions solely by combining its heavy units,
where the complement…
ensuring the presence of the couple…
demonstrates the weight of a knowledge.
And this knowledge is precisely what collapses upon the emergence of its structure.

Thus, in psychoanalysis, because likewise in the unconscious:
– man knows nothing of woman,
– nor woman of man,
the phallus sums up the mythical point through which the sexual is implicated in the passion of the signifier.

That this point seems to multiply elsewhere [S₁ in swarms of disc. A]—
this is precisely what fascinates the academic,
in whose discourse it is lacking [S₁ in the place of Truth → inaccessible in U].
Hence the recruitment of ethnology’s novices.
Here is marked an effect of humor—black humor, of course—painted with the sector’s favors.

U → A

Ah! In the absence of a university that would be an ethnos, let us make an ethnos into a university.
Hence the wager of this fishing expedition,
whereby "the field" is defined as the place where one makes a written record of a knowledge
whose very essence is that it is not transmitted through writing.

Despairing of ever seeing the final class, let us re-create the first:
the echo of knowledge that exists in classification.

The professor returns only at dawn…
that is, far later than the rise of Hegel’s owl.
I shall try to keep the same distance—
to speak of my own in relation to "structure"—
in the name of what your question brings into play concerning psychoanalysis.

First, just because I have defined the signifier as no one else has dared to,
one should not imagine that the sign is not my concern!
Quite the contrary—it was the first, and it will also be the last.
But this detour was necessary.

What I have denounced as an implicit semiotics, one that only a state of disarray could have allowed linguistics to emerge from,
does not mean that this semiotics should not be reconstructed—under the same name—
since, in reality, it is the one that remains to be built that we project onto the old one.

If the signifier represents a subject...
says Lacan, not a signified...
and for another signifier...
let us insist: not for another subject...
then how can it fall under the sign,
which, from the logician’s perspective, represents something for someone?

It is the Buddhist that comes to my mind,
when I seek to animate my crucial question of "No smoke without fire."
As a psychoanalyst, it is from the sign that I take my cue.
If it signals to me the something I must address, I know...
by having found, in the logic of the signifier, how to break the illusion of the sign...
that this something is the division of the subject—
a division that stems from the fact that the Other is what constitutes the signifier,
by which it can only represent a subject by being One only from the Other.

This division reverberates through the avatars of the assault that, in its very nature,
has confronted it with knowledge of the sexual—
traumatically so, given that this assault is doomed to failure in advance,
for the reason I have stated:
the signifier is not suited to giving form to a formula for the sexual relation.
Hence my formulation: "There is no sexual relation,"
meaning: none that is articulable within structure.

This something into which the psychoanalyst, through interpretation, introduces the signifier,
I have, for twenty years, exhausted myself trying to ensure he does not mistake it for a thing,
since it is a gap—and a structural one.
But that he wants to turn it into someone is just the same,
since this leads to personality as a "total person,"
as the scum of the earth sings on occasion.

Yet the slightest memory of the unconscious requires maintaining, in this place,
the "some two" [cf. "someone"],
with this Freudian supplement:
that it can satisfy no other union than the logical one inscribed as
"either one or the other" [i.e., the exclusive "or"].

If this is how it stands from the outset, where the signifier turns into the sign,
where now can one find the someone that must urgently be provided to it?
This is the hic, which only becomes nunc by being a psychoanalyst—
but also by being Lacanian.
Soon, everyone will be, as my audience foreshadows—so, the psychoanalysts as well.

It would suffice for the object I have named petit a to rise to the social zenith,
through the effect of anxiety provoked by the voiding produced by our discourse,
in its failure to produce itself.
[Analytic discourse, which starts from the analyst’s silent position (a), questions the subject (S),
who in return produces master signifiers (S₁), empty of meaning (S₁◊S₂).]

That it is from such a fall that the signifier drops to the sign
[S₁ as a meaningless product represents something for someone]
is evident in our field: when people no longer know which saint to turn to…
in other words, when there is no longer a signifier left to fry—
which is what the saint provides—
then they buy anything at all, a car, for instance,
as a way of signaling—if one may put it so—
their boredom, which is the affect of the desire for something else,
with a capital A.

This says nothing of petit a,
because it can only be deduced in proportion to each person’s psychoanalysis,
which explains why few psychoanalysts handle it well,
even after receiving it from my seminar.

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

Taking a closer look at "no smoke…", if I dare say so,
perhaps one might cross the threshold of "no" itself
by realizing that it is to fire that this "no" points.

What it signals is consistent with our structure,
– since, ever since Prometheus, smoke has been more a sign of that subject
whom a match represents to its box,
– and since, for an Odysseus approaching an unknown shore,
smoke is, above all else, an indication that it is not a deserted island.

Our smoke, then, is a sign—why not of the smoker?
But let us go further: "the producer of fire"—
that will be more materialist and dialectical as one could wish.

That Odysseus gives the someone is cast into doubt
when one recalls that he is also "nobody."
He is, in any case, "nobody" [οὔτις: outis],
to the extent that a certain fated Polyphemus is deceived by it.

The obvious fact that smokers do not set up camp to signal Odysseus urges us to be more rigorous in our principle of the sign.
For it makes us sense, almost in passing, that what is flawed in viewing the world as a phenomenon is that the noumenon,
being then only able to signal the νοῦς [nous], that is, the supreme "Someone"…
always a sign of intelligence…
demonstrates just how impoverished yours [your intelligence] must be if you assume that everything makes a sign:
it is the "Someone" from nowhere who must be orchestrating it all.

May this help us place
"no smoke without fire"
on the same footing as
"no prayer without God"
so that we may hear what changes.

It is curious that forest fires do not reveal the someone to whom the smoker’s reckless sleep addresses itself.
And that it takes phallic joy…
that primitive urination with which man—psychoanalysis tells us—responds to fire…
to set us on the path of
"there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Such things as, for instance, the products whose quality…
from the Marxist perspective of surplus value…
producers might hold to account not before the master,
but rather as evidence of the exploitation they endure.

When people recognize the kind of plus-de-jouir
that makes one say "now that's someone",
they will be on the path toward a dialectical substance
perhaps better suited than flesh—
to that Party so well known for babysitting history.

It could be the psychoanalyst,
if his "pass" were illuminated [cf. Proposition of October 9, 1967].

[0 42’ 14’’]

QUESTION III [44’ 04’’]

Jacques Lacan, would one possible articulation between psychoanalysis and linguistics not be the privilege accorded
to metaphor and metonymy—by Jakobson in linguistics and by you in psychoanalysis?

I believe that, thanks to my seminar at Sainte-Anne, from which Jakobson’s French translator emerged,
more than a few of our listeners at this moment know how metaphor and metonymy are situated, according to Jakobson,
in the signifying chain:
– substitution of one signifier for another in the case of metaphor,
– selection of a signifier in a sequence in the case of metonymy.

From this results—and only from this results (here it is I who emphasize):
– similarity in one case [metaphor],
– contiguity in the other [metonymy].

It is clear that this concerns something other than the λεκτόν [lecton], the specification of the signified—
which is not nothing, when it is Stoic. I will move on…
This is what I believed I could illustrate with the "quilting point",
to make way for what I shall call the "Saussurean effect of the distinction between signifier and signified",
and to specify that this quilting point corresponded quite well
to the compre-noire of the mattress-audience that was reserved for me—
of course, at Sainte-Anne—I am speaking of analysts.

There was no need to raise one’s voice among people who were there only for various forms of self-exoneration,
in accordance with the style [sic] that was required for that era—
and that era has long since passed!—
a necessity brought about by the heroism of the preceding one.

And it is no coincidence that I introduced my "quilting point"
through the play of signifiers in the responses given by Joad to "Abner the Collaborator"
in Act I, Scene 1 of Athalie:
the properly analytic undercurrent of that discourse, naturally,
could—as is usually the case—only elude those most concerned.

Hence, a few decades later, one of them rushed to make the "quilting point"…
which must have preoccupied him more than he thought…
into the "anchoring point" by which language takes hold in the unconscious.

This so-called unconscious…
in the most impudent opposition to everything I had properly articulated
regarding metaphor and metonymy…
this so-called unconscious being inscribed in the grotesque figuration
of Napoleon’s hat appearing in the foliage of a tree—
that is, in the drawing that represents it.

One sees here how Hitler was drawn from childhoods
born of the trenches suffered by their fathers,
amid the meudonneries of the Front Populaire.

Metaphor and metonymy, in opposition to this promotion of a botched figurativity,
provided the principle from which I generated the dynamism of the unconscious.

The condition for this is precisely what I have just said about the Saussurean bar:
– which cannot be taken as a sign of intuitive proportion, like a fraction bar—such a use would be, properly speaking, delusional,
– but rather as what it is for Saussure: a real barrier, one to be leapt over, between the signifier and the signified.

This is what metaphor operates, achieving an effect of meaning…
not of signification…
from the entry of a signifier as such into the field of the signified.

Of course, this signifier is henceforth missing from the signifying chain only in a way that may itself be called metaphoric,
when it comes to what is called poetic metaphor, insofar as it belongs to a poiein, hence called poetry.

Just as it is made, it can be unmade.
From this, one realizes that the effect of meaning it produced was in the direction of non-sense:
"the sheaf was neither miserly nor hateful,"
for the simple reason that it was a sheaf like any other—dumb as hay.

Something entirely different is the effect of condensation,
insofar as it is linked to a repression that originates from the impossible,
to be conceived as the limit from which the category of the real is established by the symbolic.

On this subject, a professor…
obviously guided by my propositions,
though he believes he is countering them, when in fact he relies on them against the abuse made of them…
has written admirable things.

Beyond the illustration of the hat to be found in the foliage of the tree,
it is from the feuil-lure [leaf-gap] of the page that he effectively materializes a typographic condensation—
one in which the folds of the flag spell out "golden dream",
the words breaking apart so that they might lie flat as "October revolution".

Here, the effect of non-sense
– is not retroactive in time, as is the order of the symbolic,
– but truly immediate, as is the fact of the real.

This is because the signifier resurfaces as a "discordant note" within the signified of the chain above the bar,
thus signaling that if it has fallen from it,
this is because it belongs to another signifying chain—
one that must in no case be cut from the previous one,
for if it were to form discourse with it,
this discourse itself would be altered in its very structure as discourse.

This alone is more than enough to justify recourse to metaphor,
to make clear how, in operating in the service of repression,
it produces the condensation Freud noted in the dream.

For here, instead of poetic art, what operates are reasons.
Reasons—that is, effects of language, insofar as they precede the subject’s signification,
but by which they nonetheless render it present,
precisely in not yet playing the role of representation.

This intransitive materialization—shall we say—of signifier upon signifier,
is what is called the unconscious—
which is not an "anchoring," but a deposit of language, alluvial layers.

For the subject, the unconscious is what unites the condition:
"either he is not, or he does not think."

If, in the dream, he does not think,
it is because he is in a state of "perhaps."

In this, it is demonstrated what he remains upon waking—
and thereby, the dream is indeed revealed as the royal road
to knowing where his law lies.

Metonymy, on the other hand, does not play with a meaning prior to the subject [φ],
that is, with the barrier of non-sense [φ◊Φ];
it plays with jouissance, where the subject is produced as a cut,
which thus constitutes his fabric—
but only insofar as jouissance is reduced to a bodily surface,
which is itself the doing of the signifier.

Not, of course, that the signifier anchors—a, n—or inks—e, n—into tickling,
it is always the same trick, but that it allows it, among other things, as the signification of a jouissance,
whose problem is precisely
– to know that it actually determines it,
– to recognize that beneath every inscription, the passion of the signifier slips—
which must be called "jouissance of the Other" because it is taken from a body from which it has been wrested,
which from there can become the locus of the Other.

Metonymy operates a metabolism of jouissance, whose potential is regulated by the subject’s cut,
and it assigns a "value" to what is produced from it.
The "thirty sails" that announce a fleet, in the famous example made a rhetorical commonplace,
may well veil thirty times over the body of promise carried by rhetoric or fleet,
but nothing will ever make a grammarian or a linguist recognize in them "Maya’s veil."

Nor will anything make a psychoanalyst admit that,
in passing off his trickery without lifting this veil on the role he plays in it,
he is reduced to the rank of a mere magician.
There is no hope, then, that he will approach the mechanism of metonymy when,
in making a catechism out of questioning Freud,
he wonders whether the inscription of the signifier does or does not split from the existence of the unconscious.

A question to which no one—
except within my commentary on Freud, that is, within my theory—
could give any meaning.

Would it not, however, be the interpretative cut itself—
that which, for the droning outsider,
poses a problem in the formation of consciousness—
that would reveal the topology at stake in a cross-cap
or what is called a Möbius strip?

For it is only from this [Möbian] cut that this surface—
which until then was accessible from any point to any other without needing to cross an edge—
a surface with only one side, in other words—
is soon after endowed with a front and a back.

The double inscription [of the signifier], then,
is not a matter of any Saussurean barrier,
but of the very practice that raises the question,
namely, of what transfers the unconscious into the conscious—
which is to say:
– the more the unconscious is interpreted,
– the more it confirms itself as an irreducible reverse side.

To the point that only psychoanalysis discovers that discourse has a reverse side—
provided that it is interpreted.
[For S₁ is asemantic: S₁◊S₂.]
[Psychoanalysis is the reverse side of the master’s discourse;
it starts from the aporia where that discourse ends—
the logical "possible" of the formula of fantasy: a◊S.]

M → A (reverse side of M: two quarter-turns)

I can say these difficult things precisely in proportion to the inaptitude of my audience—
who nonetheless grasp them without difficulty.
But that it is a flaw of today’s psychoanalyst to want to be "the master,"
and that from this, he is just as inept at what he does,
this brings him even less success.
This is what makes each of my Écrits so circuitous—
to block, from whichever way one approaches it,
the "gaping maw" of the analyst.

For indeed, the desire to be "the master"
is the only one that causes one to miss what is properly psychoanalytic:
that the cause of desire is not its object.
Something within the grasp of the linguist’s metonymy—
provided it is used by anyone other than a psychoanalyst.
The poet, for instance, who, in so-called realism,
makes prose his instrument.

I once demonstrated that the oyster to be swallowed—
evoked by the ear that Bel-Ami practices charming—
changes nothing in the fact that what is at stake is securing his jouissance as a pimp.
But without the metonymy [of a], which here turns this shell into a mucous membrane,
there would be no one left—on Bel-Ami’s side—
to pay the toll that the hysteric demands:
namely, what constitutes the cause of her desire—
a jouissance truly Other.

Here we know that the passage from linguistic fact to symptom is an easy one,
and that the testimony of the psychoanalyst remains caught within it.
One is convinced of this as soon as he begins to exalt his "listening"—
the hysteria of his middle age.

The shell, too, has its own form of listening, as is well known,
which one takes to be the sound of the sea—
surely because one knows that it was the sea that once stripped it bare.

Those who wanted me to pay greater homage to Jakobson for how I made use of him had not yet arrived at this point.
Since then, they have objected that my usage did not conform in regard to metonymy.
The slowness with which they realized it shows what earwax separates them from what they hear—
for them to turn it into a parable.

They will not take it literally that metonymy is indeed what determines, as an operation of credit…
Verschiebung means: transfer…
…the very mechanism of the unconscious, even though it is the jouissance-reserve against which one draws.

As for the signifier that summarizes all this, I apparently misspeak—
so they say—when I specify what it displaces,
when I translate "displaces" as entstellt, on page—I do not know, 11 perhaps—of my Écrits.
"It disfigures," says the dictionary, this is the correct translation,
and they send it to me expressly, even as a trial balloon.

It is always the same trick with the figure and with what one can grope around in it.
A pity that, in this return to Freud where they would like to set me straight,
they ignore that passage in Moses where Freud settles the matter:
it must not be translated as anything other than "displaces,"
because—archaic as this sense may be—it is the primary meaning.

To transfer jouissance into the unconscious—
that is, into accounting—is, indeed, quite a displacement.
Moreover, if one refers back [cf. Écrits, index p. 909]
from the word Entstellung to the passages in which I make its usage revolve [Écrits, p. 11, 511, 629, 662, 663, 668],
one will see that I translate it as is appropriate to each context.

This is because I do not metaphorize metaphor, nor metonymize metonymy,
to claim that they are equivalent to condensation and displacement in the unconscious.
Rather, I shift along with the displacement of the real into the symbolic—
as one must do in following the unconscious by its trace.

[58’ 40’’]

QUESTION IV [59’ 36’’]

Jacques Lacan, you say that the discovery of the unconscious leads to a second Copernican revolution.
In what way is the unconscious a key notion that subverts all theory of knowledge?

Yeah… Your question teases out the hopes—tinged with "scare me if you can"—
that the meaning assigned to the word "revolution" in our time tends to inspire.
One could note its shift into a superegoic function in politics,
its role as an ideal in the ranking of thought.

I note that it is not I who plays on these resonances—
resonances that, as I say, only the structural cut can counteract
in its dampening effect.
Why not start with the irony of counting revolution among the celestial revolutions,
which—so far as I know—do not set the tone for it?

What is revolutionary about the re-centering of the solar world around the sun?
After all, listening to what I articulate this year about the master’s discourse,
one may find that it perfectly closes its revolution there—
which, through the loop science has taken [disc. H],
through the ἐπιστήμη [episteme] that I demonstrate as its aim,
returns to its starting point of an absolute master signifier [disc. M]—
here, in the figure of the sun.

In common consciousness, the idea that "it revolves around something"—
this is heliocentrism,
and it implies that everything runs smoothly,
with no need to look any further into it.
Shall I then attribute to Galileo the political insolence
figured in the Sun King?

The Ancients, on the other hand, demonstrated a dialectical use, so to speak,
of the appearances resulting from the Earth's tilt on the ecliptic.
Images of light and shadow lend themselves well to an articulated discourse.
I would take the opposition of a photo-centrism as less enslaving.

The metaphor Freud takes from Copernicus…
and which he rather connotes as an effect of fall than of subversion…
aims to strike at centrism itself.

Exactly the same pretension…
received from a psychology that can all the more rightly be called untouched in its time,
since it remains so even now…
the pretension of consciousness to be able to inventory what it possesses in the register of representation.

It is clear from reading Freud that this encompassing figure…
perfectly indifferent, we might say, to the demands of topology, simply by ignoring them…
is what his metaphor targets.

It is by delving deeper into this metaphor that one encounters its relevance,
and this is why I take it up again.
For history, as traced through the texts in which the Copernican revolution is inscribed,
demonstrates that it is not the change of center that forms its core—
to the point that, incidentally, for Copernicus himself, this was the least of his concerns.

That around which things turn…
but precisely, that is the word not to use…
that around which the effort of a knowledge in the process of situating itself as imaginary revolves,
is quite clearly…
one can read it, by engaging with Koyré, in Kepler’s journal…
a struggle to extricate oneself from the idea that the circular form,
being the most perfect, can alone befit the movement of celestial bodies.

To introduce the elliptical trajectory, in effect,
is to make it turn toward approaching the focal point occupied by the master body [F₁ solar focus],
but also toward the other [F₂: the second focus of the ellipse],
just as empty as it is obscure, from which it slows down.

This is where Galileo’s importance lies:
– not in the turmoil of his trial,
which I just pointed out as having an ambiguous stake,
if not an ambiguous side to take,
– but in the first steps he takes toward gravitation,
by which this ellipse will become illuminated.

What I mean is that if there is anything in history that most opaquely illustrates
the definition I have given of structure,
it is the formula that Newton finally places at the heart of the fall of bodies,
which, through it, definitively explains the path of the stars.
For it is also the presence, at every point of the real—
in other words, in each element of mass—
of the formula taken in itself, of attraction,
that is, of a second-degree equation:

We have stifled within ourselves the surprise, even the scandal,
that Newton’s contemporaries attest to—
that every point in the world should be instantly informed
of the masses at play in attracting it,
as far as the world extends.
Should it be recalled that the gravitational field
distinguishes itself by its weakness from other fields,
such as the electromagnetic field,
which physics brings into play,
and that it resists, moreover,
the almost-realized ideal of field unification [cf. Einstein]?

Whatever the return of transcendental aesthetics may be…
I mean these terms in the Kantian sense…
that is constituted by the Einsteinian correction…
– in its fabric: the curvature of space,
– and in its justification: the necessity of a transmission time
that the limited speed of light prevents from being annulled…
…what remains is that the Newtonian revolution
– asserted itself by being unthinkable—
as Newton himself admits in his "hypotheses non fingo",
– and that it confirms my formula: "the impossible is the real."

No need to emphasize that in the LEM landing on the moon
[Apollo XI, 20-7-69],
it is the same formula—
this time realized in apparatus—
that is at stake,
which is why I underscore the "a-cosmism" of present reality.

None of this is to say that Newton should be placed
at the head of structuralism, nor even counted within structure—
– but first, that our science, within the field of the exact,
is already articulated by the very problem posed within the field of the conjectural,
– and second, to highlight the irreducible form
that, within the theory of knowledge,
is specified by psychology.

For if, as is claimed, Kant was motivated
by a so-called cosmology to be renovated after Newton,
how is it that nothing in it articulates what Newton produced—
the formula of relation as an intrusion into the real?

The "Thing-in-itself", on the other hand,
as conceived by Kant,
is a psychology stated exactly as in Wolff and Lambert.
Thus, the "autonomous self"
will be brought back, headfirst,
by the New York clique,
despite the Freudian revolution.

Let us shed light on this:
the noumenon is the knowledge that the world has of itself.
It is not surprising that the forms of this knowledge
define themselves as a priori,
since this world—de facto—is total.
But what do they have to do
with Newton’s equation
and what is deduced from it
as acceleration?

There is nothing surprising in the fact that Reason, whether Pure or Practical,
is entirely incapable here of demonstrating anything more than what it already is as an organ—
in this regard, as intrinsically specular as anything else,
just as a solid can be when it is "of revolution" [cf. solids of revolution],
that is, belonging to an intuitive geometry and not revolutionary in the slightest.

I note here that revolution, whatever grand "R" the French one may have been given,
would now be reduced to:
– what it is for Chateaubriand: a return to the master, like all the others,
– "the Great One" merely accelerating, for a historian worthy of the name—Tocqueville—
the ideologies of the Ancien Régime,
– or even, for another—Taine—a madness best suited for cautious confinement
until it calms down,
– not to mention the rhetorical debauchery meant to discredit it.

Yes… All this, had Marx not given it its structural credentials,
motivating this revolution from the discourse of the capitalist,
with the discovery that it contains surplus value
as something foreclosed within this discourse,
but thereby animating class consciousness,
thus making possible the political work
that Lenin translates into a passage à l’acte.

This is how my analysis of Freud reiterates Copernicus
from another angle than that of metaphor.
Freud, in the unconscious, discovers the incidence of a knowledge
that escapes consciousness,
that is beyond the grasp of its inventory—
and yet it nonetheless denotes itself as properly articulated,
"structured," I say, "like a language."
The effects that mark it would otherwise be unthinkable,
but neither do they imply that anything within it knows itself, in either sense:
– of knowing itself as the craftsman knows his trade,
complicit with a nature into which he is born at the same time as it,
– and of recognizing itself in the way consciousness
makes one believe that "there is no knowledge that does not know itself as knowing."

Such is this so-called "unconscious knowledge",
which seems—
without my immediately sanctioning the claim—
once again to be what the impossible
casts back into the real.

If it exists, it is enough to disqualify the illusion of simple knowledge—
not that this illusion disappears, but it persists as a mirage contradicted.
"Knowledge" is a function of "nature",
which, here, only knows itself through a denaturation—
produced in relation to this knowledge
through a series of reversals:

– The first affecting knowledge itself,
producing repressions of signifiers,
in a form that is eminently negative,

– Adding to this the condition of representability,
which, material as it may be,
the very nature of the signifier resists—
yet it nonetheless returns, explicitly articulated,
and this is what constitutes its value:
the refutation brought by the unconscious
against any interpretation of these effects as meaning.
Thus, the unconscious exults only in non-sense—
in nonsense, precisely.

– Further still: it only participates in nature
by avoiding any encounter with it.
I recall here—only for the record,
and for the ignorant—
those Lacanian boats that owe it to me
that they now fall under the rubric of
"formations of the unconscious."

I must complete them:
it is in the rejection of this game of the insistence
of unconscious knowledge…
starting from a subject capable of pronouncing
what Freud calls "the verdict"…
that, as I put it:
"foreclosed from the symbolic, it reappears in the real as hallucination."

To properly define these terms,
I had to spend years rolling at the feet of those
for whom it was daily experience—
without pulling them from their dreams,
dreams quite representable enough
for them to go on sleeping.

It was enough that,
concerned with a possible awakening,
they believed in my reality
for them to cast me out
from those symbolic delights.

Thus, returned to the real of the E.N.S.—
of being, then (ens in Latin)…
write that with a "g" (étang [pond])
if you prefer [cf. "caïman"]—
thus back at the École Normale Supérieure,
I found myself, from the very first day,
formally summoned to declare
what being I attributed to all this.

I replied that the question seemed improper to me,
that I did not believe myself bound,
in regard to my listeners,
to any ontology whatsoever.

For in failing to break them into my logy,
I merely played the shameful
with its onto.

I have long since drunk my fill of onto, as my responses here attest.
I will not beat around the bush, nor hide the tree in the forest:

being is born only from the gap produced by the existent in saying itself.

A formula that relegates the "author" to falling in act, as a consequence of this very means.
If, then, this existent requires time to say itself,
this requires time is precisely what makes being call upon us in the unconscious.
It is indeed being that responds there, each time that time will be required.

["Falloir" (to be necessary) and "faillir" (to fail) both yield "il faut" in the present indicative and "il faudra" in the future indicative (second form for faillir).]

But listen—
I am deliberately playing with the crystal of my language,
where the signifier refracts to decompose the subject:
"Y faudra le temps"—I am speaking French to you, and I do hope—not sorrow.

What "faudra" from "faut du temps" speaks of the gap from which I set out,
and although its use is not recommended in grammars meant to keep Belgians from their Belgianisms,
it is nonetheless acknowledged:
"Grammar otherwise would fail in its duty."
["Faudrait": second form of "faillir" in the present conditional.]

If "peu s’en faut" that we are at this point,
you grasp, in that "peu",
the proof that it is indeed from lack that, in French, falloir shifts to necessity,
while "estuet"—"est opus temporis" here—
has drifted into the estuaries of Old French.

Conversely, this falloir returns to faille—
not by chance—
through the subjunctive mode’s modality,
to défaillance: "à moins qu’il ne faille..."
At what level, for the articulation of the unconscious,
can we find the attachment of speech to being?

Certainly, what time weaves for it
is not of some short-lived imaginary,
but let us say that this fabric is textile,
woven of knots that signify only the holes within them.

This level has no in-itself,
except for what falls from it as masochism.
It is precisely this that the psychoanalyst takes up,
by relaying it from "someone."
He will bear the "faut du temps" [a]
as long as necessary,
until, in saying itself, the existent brings something into being.

It is known that, for a few months,
I sought to introduce the enormity of The Psychoanalytic Act [seminar 1967-68].
This "someone", taken up by the psychoanalyst,
is what the being-to-come determines
according to the way "someone" defines the path of truth.

There is only one knowledge that mediates truth: logic.
And it set off on the right foot only when it made truth and falsehood pure signifiers,
letters, or as they say: "values."
This was the work of the Stoics,
not without coherence with the morality of a politicized masochism.

The refusals of Greek mechanics blocked access to mathematical logic,
from which alone a truth of pure texture could be built.
This is why the Stoics could be harassed by the Skeptics,
whose critique holds together only through the supposition of a "truth of nature",
a truth that, indeed, was acknowledged as inaccessible.

It is precisely this that psychoanalytic experience refutes—
each person, in their analysis, learning that "truth of nature"
reduces to the jouissance allowed by "truth of texture."

The interval in which someone plays their intervention in analysis
can only be figured by the distance between writing and speech.
It is only through writing that a logic—
the so-called "mathematical logic"—
could be sustained,
a logic whose rigor would astonish the Skeptics,
as it secures an irrefutable certainty of truth through assertions
that are anything but empty, such as:

– A system defined as belonging to the order of arithmetic
attains consistency—
the ability to always distinguish true from false—
only by confirming itself as incomplete,
that is, by requiring the indemonstrable from formulas
that are, however, verifiable elsewhere.

– Or again: this indemonstrable pertains, elsewhere,
to a demonstration that decides it independently of its truth.

– Or: there is an undecidable that articulates itself
from the fact that the indemonstrable cannot be decided.
[cf. Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems]

The cuts in the articulatory text of the unconscious
must be recognized as having this very structure—
that is, according to what they let fall.

For here, once again, I will take advantage of the "crystal of language" to note that this "chu",
being falsus in Latin, links "false"—
certainly quite distinct in its meaning of opposing "true"—
to our "faut du temps" and to its "faillir",
because it is the past participle of fallere,
from which the two verbs "faillir" and "falloir" each derive in their own way.

Observe that I only invoke etymology in support of "the homophonic crystal effect."

It is also because the dimension of falsehood must be adjusted when it comes to interpretation.
It is precisely by being falsa, even if not well-positioned,
that an interpretation operates in such a way that being is "off to the side."
Let us not forget that in psychoanalysis, the "falsus" is causal to being in the process of verification.

Freud, in his time, surely had no greater support in this field than Brentano.
This is perfectly traceable, though discreetly so, in a text like Verneinung.
This alone would suffice to indicate where "someone" holds weight on the side of the analyst,
if I did not finally force the path toward its purity as a logical buoy.

But in Freud, there is also a feature that I believe is decisive:
his singular faith in these Jews—
whom, on the other hand, he rejected with what must be noted as his expression of aversion: "occultism."
This singular faith was in their refusal to fail in the face of the seismic force of truth.

Why them and not others?
Except that the Jew—and Freud ultimately ended up like them—
is the one who, across all centuries, from the return from Babylon, wherever he may have gone,
has known how to read, and that the Midrash is his path.

For having the most historical, the most anti-mythical Book there is,
the Hebrew people interrogate it—
from the foot of each of its letters, and from these alone—
through an inflection of an ending,
a play of inversion,
a proximity not even held to be preconceived—
they interrogate the book on what it could not say,
on the childhood of Moses, for example.

Why, in this interval where Freud so clearly saw falsehood at play,
did he have to push to the death of the father,
rather than content himself with the crystal effect
and conclude here with the "faux du temps"
[1st and 2nd person present indicative of faillir]?

Note [121’ 07’’]

I would like it to be understood that this text does not claim to account for "the Copernican revolution", in quotation marks,
as it is articulated in history,
but rather for the mythical use made of it—precisely on this occasion, by Freud.

It is not enough to say, for example, that heliocentrism was—
as I put it—"the least of Copernicus’s concerns."
How then should it be ranked?

On the contrary, it is certain—
it is well known that I have been trained in Koyré’s writings on this—
that he found it admirable that the sun should be in the place he assigned to it,
because from there it best played its role as a luminary—
it is he who says so.

But is that what is subversive?
For he does not place it at the center of the world,
but in a rather nearby position—
which, for the admired purpose and for the glory of the creator, works just as well.
It is therefore false to speak of heliocentrism.

The strangest thing is that no one—
and let this be understood: among specialists outside of Koyré—
ever points out that the "revolutions" of Copernicus do not concern the celestial bodies,
but the orbs.

It is self-evident to us that these orbs are traced by the bodies.
But—one blushes at having to recall it—for Ptolemy,
as for all since Eudoxus,
these orbs are spheres that carry the celestial bodies,
and the course of each is regulated by the fact that multiple orbs
support it simultaneously:

– perhaps five for Saturn… I do not recall exactly,
– three, to my recollection, for Jupiter.

What does it matter to us!
Just as it matters little that Aristotle adds those orbs
to buffer between two celestial bodies—
for instance, the two just mentioned: Saturn and Jupiter—
to account for the expected effect of the orbs of the first on those of the second.
For Aristotle, after all, wants a physics that holds together.

Who should fail to notice this—
not merely by reading Copernicus, for whom there exists a phototypic reproduction,
but simply by spelling out his title: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium?
Yet this does not prevent well-known translators—
people who have translated the text—
from titling their translation: On the Revolutions of the Celestial Bodies.

It is literal—
which here is equivalent to saying: it is true—
that Copernicus is a Ptolemaist, that he remains within Ptolemy’s framework,
that he is not Copernican in the invented sense that has since come to define the term.

Is it justified to stick to this invented sense to accommodate a metaphorical usage?
This is the very problem posed by any metaphor.
As someone more or less said:
"With the arts, one amuses oneself; with lizards, one muses."

We should not miss the opportunity to recall the cretinizing essence of meaning
to which the word "common", in "common sense", so well applies.
Nevertheless, it remains a sterile achievement
if no structural connection can be discerned.

To an interviewer’s question, an improvised answer.
On first impulse, what came to me—
emerging from a depth of information that I assure you is not negligible—
was, first, the remark by which, against heliocentrism,
I contrast a photocentrism of lasting structural importance.

From this perspective, one sees to what level of naïveté Copernicus falls.
Koyré magnifies this naïveté by linking it to the mysticism propagated by Marsilio Ficino’s circle.
Why not, indeed?
The Renaissance was occultist—
which is why the University classifies it among the eras of progress.

The true turning point is due to Kepler,
and—I insist—
it lies in the only subversion worthy of the name,
which he paid for dearly:

– the shift from the imaginary of the so-called perfect form, that of the circle,

– to the articulation of the conic, in this case, the ellipse, in mathematical terms.

Then—does it not follow—
in my response, I admittedly collapse what belongs to Galileo,
but it is clear that Kepler’s contribution eluded him.
And yet, it is Kepler who already held in his hands the elements
from which Newton would forge his formula—
by which I mean the law of attraction,
as Koyré isolates it from its hyper-physical function,
from its syntactic presence.
One may refer to Koyré’s book, Études newtoniennes, page 34, where he expresses it in these terms.

Thus…
in confronting it with Kant, of course…
this Newtonian formula, I emphasize, finds no place in any critique of imaginary reason.
And in fact, this Newtonian formula is the stronghold
whose siege maintains, within science,
the ideal of "universe", by which it persists.
The Newtonian field does not allow itself to be reduced to it.

And finally, I would readily take advantage of this
to find confirmation of my formula:
"the impossible is the real."
In short, it is from this point—once reached—
that our physics radiates.

On the other hand, in my response,
by inscribing science within the register of the hysteric’s discourse,
I have, of course, suggested more than I have stated.

It was to be developed—it still remains so—
but I initiated something of it in my seminar of 1969-70.

Let us conclude. I close this note with the following formula:

the approach to the real is narrow.

[127’ 58’’]

QUESTION V [129’ 13’’]

If there is a "Copernican revolution", what are its consequences—first, in the realm of science,
then in philosophy, and more specifically in Marxism, or even communism?

Your question, which follows a predetermined list, deserves my noting that it does not go without saying
after the response I have just given.
It seems to assume that I have agreed with the statement:
"the unconscious... subverts all theory of knowledge",
to quote you—though I elide a few words to separate them:
"Is the unconscious a key notion that..." and so forth.

I say: the unconscious is not a notion.
Whether it is a key—that is judged by experience. A key presupposes a lock.
There certainly exist locks, and even ones that the unconscious turns properly.
To lock them, to open them?
It does not go without saying that one implies the other—let alone that they are equivalent.

It should suffice for us to posit that the unconscious is, no more, no less.
That is more than enough to keep us occupied for quite some time still—
after how long this has already lasted—
without anyone, until me, having taken a step further.

For Freud, each case had to be taken up from a blank slate: a blank slate…
– not even regarding what it is [the unconscious]; he cannot say,
beyond his reserved appeal to an organic recourse of pure ritual,
– but regarding what it is in each case—that is what he means.

In the meantime, nothing is certain except that it is,
and that Freud, in speaking of it, engages in linguistics.
Yet no one sees this,
and everyone attempts, against him, to reintegrate the unconscious
into a preexisting notion—
from before Freud stated that it is,
without it being this, and certainly not the Id either.

What I have answered to your question means that the unconscious subverts
the theory of knowledge all the less so because it has nothing to do with it,
for the very reason I have just stated: namely, that it is foreign to it.

It is without any doing of its own that one may say
that the theory of knowledge does not exist,
for the reason that there is no knowledge
that is not an illusion or a myth.

Of course, this is to give the word a meaning
that makes it worth maintaining beyond its mundane sense—
where "I know him" simply means
"I have been introduced to him",
or "I know what he does by heart",
as one might say of a writer or any so-called author.

A note, for those who might be tempted to use
"Γνῶθι σεαυτόν" (gnôthi seautón—"know thyself")
as a muleta in this instance—
for it is nothing else—
that this pursuit of mastery excludes any theory,
ever since the command was brandished by the Delphic deceiver.

Here, the unconscious brings neither support nor disappointment—
but only the fact that σεαυτόν (seautón)
will inevitably be split in two,
in case one still worries about something resembling it
after having put "his" unconscious to the test in psychoanalysis.

So let us break off here:
– no knowledge, in the sense that would allow you
to wrap together the categories in which you now attempt
to frame your question,
– no knowledge other than the myth I denounced earlier—
a myth whose theory therefore falls under mytho-logy
(which must be hyphenated),
requiring at most an extension of structural analysis,
as Lévi-Strauss applies it to ethnographic myths.

No knowledge, but know-how—yes,
by the shovelful, overflowing the cabinets,
so much that one no longer knows what to do with it.

From this, certain know-hows [without a subject] latch onto you in passing.
It is enough that they be animated by one of those discourses
whose structure I have put into circulation this year [H, U, M, A].
To be made the subject of a discourse
can make you subject to knowledge.

If no discourse wants it anymore,
one may start interrogating a knowledge on its outdated usage—
one may turn it into archaeology.
This is more than mere antiquarian work
if it is done in order to reactivate its structure—
structure itself being a notion—
to elaborate what follows from it in reality,
from the presence within it of formulas of knowledge—
the advent of which, as a notion,
I marked earlier in relation to structure.

There are know-hows whose consequences may remain in suspense or fall into obsolescence.
There is one that no one had conceived of before Freud,
and that no one after him has yet grasped—
except by holding onto what I provide as the way to take hold of it.

So much so that I could say earlier
that it is in relation to other know-hows
that the term unconscious, in this case, functions as a metaphor.
From the moment it is said to be "structured like a language",
people trust me on this—and it bears fruit.
Still, one must not be mistaken about this:
it is rather it—
if it is not an abuse to pronominalize it—
it, the unconscious, that takes hold of you by this handle.

If I insist on marking the delay in contrast to your haste,
it is because you must remember that when I illustrated
the function of haste in logic,
I underscored the illusionary effect it can lend itself to.
It is only correct when it produces this time: "the moment to conclude."

Yet one must beware of putting it in the service of the imaginary [of revolution].
What it gathers is a set—
the prisoners in my sophism and their relation
to an exit structured from an arbitrary decision—
but not a class.

It happens that haste, when it wanders in this sense,
fully serves this ambiguity of outcomes—
an ambiguity I hear resonating within the very term "revolution."
For it is not since yesterday that I have ironized about the tradition of revolution.

In short, I would like to highlight the usefulness of distinguishing oneself,
in this trace, from "seduction" [of fantasy: a◊S],
when it is a matter of "production" that takes a turn—
a Möbian turn, of course—
where I point to the step of Marx.

For he places us before a wall,
and what is surprising is that there is nothing to recognize but this wall [the real, the impossible],
for something to be overturned—not the wall, of course,
but the way of turning around it.
[Turning in circles (a simple cut that does not undo anything),
or turning in an inverted figure-eight (a Möbian cut, a double loop,
which "undoes" the cross-cap)].

The effectiveness of glottal strikes at the siege of Jericho
leads one to think that here, the wall was an exception—
though, to be fair, sparing nothing in the number of turns required.
It is that, on this occasion,
the wall is not found where one believes it to be—
not of stone, but rather made of the inflexible nature of an extraneous vagueness ["ex-sistence"].

And if this is the case,
we rediscover the structure
that is the very wall we speak of—
defined by relations articulated in their order [H→M→U→A...],
and such that to take part in it
is only ever done at one’s own expense:
– at the expense of life or death—that is secondary,
– at the expense of jouissance—that is primary.
[The real—the wall of the impossible—of logical dead ends:
Inconsistency (H), incompleteness (M), the undemonstrable (U), the undecidable (A).]

Hence the necessity of surplus jouissance
for the machine to keep running—
jouissance appearing here only so that it may be erased in this way,
as a hole to be filled.

Do not be surprised that here I linger,
when I usually move swiftly—
it is because here, in retracing an inaugural cut that redoubles itself,
in gathering what falls from it, I am not repeating it—
I am showing it.

[The production of a: the fantasy a◊S in the master’s discourse,
is resolved in analytic discourse through the Möbian interpretative cut,
a double loop that “lets a fall” and “reveals” the subject S.
(cf. L’Étourdit: "how, however, it comes undone!")]

For Marx, surplus value, which his chisel, in detaching it,
restores to capitalist discourse,
is the price one must pay to deny—
as I do—that any discourse could find peace in a meta-language,
such as Hegelian formalism, in this case.

But this price, he paid—
by binding himself to following the naive discourse of the capitalist at its ascendant—
and by the living hell he made of his own life.

[The Other is irreparably lacking;
no signifier and no language can ensure its completeness here—
neither “object language” (Russell),
nor logical branching (Chomsky),
nor the Hegelian formalism of The Phenomenology of Spirit.

The gap, the void, is only "veiled" by the fantasy a◊S (symbolic-imaginary),
an illusion that brings the subject S closer to a "perhaps"—a.]

This is precisely the moment to verify what I say about surplus jouissance.
Mehrwert is Marxlust, Marx’s surplus jouissance,
the shell forever pressed to Marx’s ear [a seashell at the ear]—
this is the cowrie with which the Argonauts of a rather unpeaceful ocean trade—
the ocean of capitalist production.

For this cowrie, surplus value, is the cause of desire
on which an economy bases its principle:
that of extensive production, and thus of the insatiable generation of lack-of-jouissance:

– it accumulates, on the one hand, to increase the means of this production, under the title of capital,
– it expands consumption, on the other, without which this production would be futile,
precisely due to its incapacity to provide a jouissance capable of slowing it down.

Someone named Karl Marx—
here we have the calculated position of the black focal point
of the ellipse mentioned earlier—
but one that is just as capital, if I may say so, as the capitalist himself.

Moreover, whether he [Marx] occupies the other focal point of a body that jouit of a plus,
or of a surplus jouissance that makes a body—
this is the false calculation necessary
for capitalist production to ensure the revolution
suitable for sustaining its harsh desire—
to quote the poet it deserved.

What is instructive is that such remarks are widespread,
apart from the logic I provide them with, of course.
That they emerge in the form of a malaise,
which Freud merely anticipated—
should we attribute this to the unconscious? Certainly, yes!
It designates itself there—something is at work.

And this will be an opportunity to observe
that this in no way bends the implacable discourse,
which, when supplemented by the ideology of class struggle,
only induces the exploited to compete in the very principle of exploitation,
thus sheltering their overt participation in the thirst for lack-of-jouissance.

So what can we expect from this song of malaise?
Nothing—except testimony to the fact that the unconscious speaks,
all the more willingly since, with nonsense, it is in its element.
But what effect can we expect from it,
since, as you see, I emphasize that it is something that is,
and not "a key notion"?

Referring to what I have established this year—
a radical articulation of the master’s discourse
as the reverse of the psychoanalyst’s discourse—
with two other discourses shifting between them by a quarter-turn:
– on one side, the discourse of the hysteric,
– on the other, the university discourse,
…what follows from this is that the unconscious is only at play
in the dynamic that precipitates the tilting of one discourse into another.

Now, rightly or wrongly, I have thought it possible to distinguish them
by the slippage:
– from a chain articulated by the effect of the signifier [S₁ → S₂ → a],
considered as truth,
– onto structure, as a function of the real,
within the dispersion of knowledge [S₂].

→ → →

It is from here that one must assess what the unconscious can subvert.
Certainly not a discourse—
where at most it appears as a deficiency in speech [slips, omissions, etc.].

Its dynamic instance is to provoke the tilt
by which one discourse turns into another—
by shifting the position where the effect of the signifier [S₁ → S₂ → a] is produced.

Following my roughly hewn topology,
we rediscover Freud’s initial approach—
in that the progress to be expected from the unconscious is censorship.

In other words, as concerns the course of the present crisis,
everything indicates that what I define as university discourse
should—against all appearances—
be held as an illusion,
the rise of its management being, in this case, misleading.
It is the master’s discourse itself,
but reinforced with obscurantism.

Conversely, it is through an effect of regression [cf. above: "progress"]
that the shift toward the hysteric’s discourse takes place.
I indicate this only to respond to your question
regarding the consequences of your so-called notion in relation to science.

As paradoxical as this assertion may seem,
science takes its momentum from the hysteric’s discourse.

We would need to approach, from this angle,
the correlates of a sexual subversion on a social scale—
along with the incipient moments [from Latin incipio: it begins]
in the history of science.
This would be a rigorous test for a bold thought.

It is indeed fitting to conceive it starting from this: the hysteric is the divided subject—
in other words, the unconscious in action—
who forces the master to the wall to produce a knowledge.
Such was the ambition instilled in the Greek master under the name of ἐπιστήμη [epistēmē].

Where δόξα [doxa] guided him in the essentials of his conduct,
he was summoned—
and explicitly so by a Socrates—an avowed hysteric—
who claimed to know nothing except in matters of desire,
a claim made patent by his pathognomonic symptoms—
summoned to demonstrate something that could measure up
to the τέχνη [technē] of the slave
and justify his master’s powers.

Nothing to settle regarding his success,
when an Alcibiades shows only the lucidity of admitting, himself,
what captivates him in Socrates: the object (a)—
which I have recognized in the ἄγαλμα [agalma] mentioned in The Symposium—
a surplus jouissance, free and of a more fleeting consumption.

What is remarkable is that it was the trajectory of Platonism
that resurfaced in our science with the Copernican revolution.
And if one must read Descartes and his promotion of the subject—
his "I think, therefore I am",
one must not omit his note to Beeckman:
"On the point of stepping onto the stage of the world, I advance masked."

[*Preamble to the Cogitationes Privatae, note from January 1, 1619:
"Ut comœdi, moniti ne in fronte appareat pudor, personam induunt,
sic ego hoc mundi theatrum conscensurus, in quo hactenus spectator exstiti, larvatus prodeo."
"Actors, called to the stage, so as not to let the blush on their foreheads be seen, put on a mask (personam induunt).
Like them, as I prepare to step onto the theater of the world, where until now I have only been a spectator, I advance masked."]

Let us read the cogito, translating it according to Lacan’s formula
for the message in the unconscious.
It then becomes:
"Either you are not, or you do not think,"
addressed to knowledge.
Who would hesitate to choose?

The result is that science is an ideology
of the suppression of the subject—
something that the gentleman of the rising University knows very well,
and I know it just as well as he does.

The subject, in reducing itself to the thought of its doubt,
makes way for the return in force of the master signifier (S₁),
doubling it, under the rubric of extension,
with an exteriority entirely manipulable.

That surplus jouissance, in providing the truth of the work to follow,
should receive an iron mask—
this is precisely what the "larvatus prodeo" refers to.
How can one fail to see
that this means entrusting divine dignity—
and Descartes fulfills this obligation—
with being the sole guarantor of a truth
that is now nothing more than a matter of signifier?

Thus is legitimized the dominance of the mathematical apparatus,
and the fleeting infatuation with the category of quantity.
If quality were not so burdened with signifieds,
it would be just as suited to scientific discernment—
as evidenced by its return in the form of the signs (+) and (-)
within the edifice of electromagnetism.
And mathematical logic—thank God, if I may say so—
returns us to structure within knowledge.

But you see that if "knowledge" has not yet regained consciousness,
it is not because of the unconscious that it has lost it.
And there is little chance that it will be the unconscious that revives it.

Just as it is known that:
– knowledge erred in physics for as long as it sought to insert itself
from any aesthetic starting point,
– the theory of motion remained tangled
for as long as it failed to disentangle itself
from the feeling of impulse,
– it was only with the return of the repressed signifiers
that the equivalence of rest and uniform motion was finally revealed,
…so too does the hysteric’s discourse demonstrate
that there is no aesthesis [from Greek αἴσθησις, aisthēsis: sensation]
of the opposite sex—
no knowledge—
in the biblical sense—
to account for the so-called sexual relation.

The jouissance on which this so-called relation relies—like any other—is articulated through surplus jouissance,
by which, in this relation, the partner is never reached:

1. For the vir, only by identifying the partner with object (a)—
   something long since indicated in the myth of Adam’s rib,
   the very myth that caused such laughter—
   and for good reason—in the most famous letter-writer of female homosexuality:
   Mme de Sévigné, to name her.
2. For the virgo, this surplus jouissance—
   only by reducing it to the phallus,
   that is, to the penis imagined as the organ of tumescence—
   in other words, the exact opposite of its real function.

Hence the two impasses:

1. Castration, where the signifier "woman" is inscribed as privation.
2. Penis envy, where the signifier "man" is experienced as frustration.

These are the stumbling blocks
that put at the mercy of chance the access—
promoted as natural by certain psychoanalysts—
to genital maturity.

For this is the bastardized ideal of those who call themselves "modern",
concealing the fact that here the cause is an act,
animated by an ethics—
with its possible political rationale.

It is also what the discourse of the hysteric demands of the master:
"Let’s see if you’re a man!"
But the "thing representation," as Freud calls it,
here is nothing more than the representation of its own lack.
Omnipotence is not—
that is precisely why it is thought.

And there is no reproach to be made of it,
as the psychoanalyst stubbornly insists—stupidly so.

The point is not to mourn the essence of the male,
but to produce the knowledge
by which the cause determining this very challenge is located.

On this point, it will be said—
not without reason—
that these psychoanalysts in question want nothing to do with politics.

The trouble is that they are hardened enough to make it their own profession,
and that the reproach comes to them from those
who, having placed themselves within the discourse of the master—Marx—
make it their duty to uphold the insignia of conjugal normalization—
which ought to embarrass them,
especially on the thorny point at hand.

A mere detail, compared to what concerns us:
which is that the unconscious will not subvert our science
by compelling it to make amends with any form of knowledge.

That it sometimes pretends to—
that the mockery it introduces there
should resemble that of the nocturnal specters
haunting the collapsed wing of the castle of tradition—
if the unconscious is a key,
it will only be so to shut the door
that might gape open within this hole in our bedroom.

Initiation enthusiasts are not our guests.
Freud, on this matter, did not trifle—
he pronounced the anathema of disgust against such sorcery,
and had no intention of allowing Jung
to echo in our ears the sounds of mandalas.

That will not prevent the rituals from being conducted
with cushions for our knees—
but the unconscious would contribute nothing more
than laughter of a rather indecent kind.

For domestic use,
it could be recommended as a litmus test
to identify the entire spectrum of what is reactionary in matters of knowledge.

It restores to Hegel, for instance,
the price of the humor he deserves,
while revealing its total absence
from all philosophy that follows him—except for Marx.

I will mention only the latest example that has come to my attention—
this incredible return to the power of the invisible,
all the more unsettling for being posthumous,
and for me, from a friend [Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)]—
as if the visible still had, for any gaze,
the appearance of being.

These phenomenological antics
all circle around the phantom tree of supranormal knowledge—
as if there were ever such a thing as normal knowledge.

No clamor of being or nothingness fails to be extinguished by what Marxism has demonstrated through its effective revolution:
that there is no progress to be expected, neither in truth nor in well-being,
but only the turning point from imaginary impotence to the impossible—
which turns out to be the real—by grounding itself solely in logic*:
that is, where I caution that the unconscious resides,
but not to suggest that the logic of this turning point should not hasten the act.

[*"The impossible" of logical dead ends: inconsistency (disc. H), incompleteness (disc. M), the undemonstrable (disc. U), the undecidable (disc. A).]

For the unconscious plays just as well in another sense:
that is, from the impossibility by which sex is inscribed in the unconscious,
it sustains as desirable the law that connotes the impotence to enjoy.
It must be said: the psychoanalyst has no side to take here,
but only to record the facts.

This is why I testify that no rigor I may have applied
to marking the failures of suture has ever met—
from the communists I have dealt with—
anything but an outright refusal.

I account for this by the fact that, in constituting themselves within the bourgeois order as a counter-society,
as someone has written,
they merely counterfeit everything that the former prides itself on:
"work, family, homeland."
They traffic in influence and weaponize the syndicate against anyone
who might, through their discourse, hollow out its paradoxes.

In demonstrating these paradoxes as a factor of pathology—
ever since my Remarks on Psychic Causality—
wherever my efforts might have unsealed the psychiatric monopoly,
I have never received from them a response
that did not align with the hypocrisy of the university—
which would be another matter entirely to predict the expansion of.

It is evident that now they use me just as much as the university does,
though with less cynicism in not naming me—
"These are honorable men."

[155’ 00’’]

---

QUESTION VI [155’ 11’’]

"Knowledge and truth"—you affirm in the Écrits—"are, up to a certain point, incompatible."*
In what way are they incompatible?

"Incompatible"!

What a nicely chosen word—
one that could allow us to answer the question
with the derision it deserves:
"But of course, they do sympathize!"

That they suffer together—and from one another—is the truth.

But what you mean, if I understand you correctly,
is that truth and knowledge are not complementary,
that they do not form a whole.
Forgive me, but that is not a question I concern myself with,
since there is no whole.
And since there is no whole, nothing is whole!

The whole is the index of knowledge.
I have said enough, it seems to me,
that in this respect it is impossible to point to it.

That will not stop me from spontaneously adding
that truth suffers everything:
one pisses, one coughs, one spits into it.

"My word!" she cries—
in the style I have sketched elsewhere—
"What are you doing? Do you think you're at home?"

This means that she indeed has a notion—
a key notion—of what you are doing.
But you do not have a notion of what she is—
and that, finally, you see,
is what the unconscious consists of.

To return to truth, which concerns us for the moment,
to say that "she suffers everything"—
dew of discourse!—
might also mean that it neither warms nor chills her.
And this leads one to think
that she is manifestly blind or deaf,
at least when she looks at you,
or when you summon her.

To tell the truth—that is, to measure oneself against it—one will always do better to approach it armed with a heavy knowledge.
So, more than compatible, it is a matter of accounting—if that is what first interests you—
since knowledge can settle the costs of a deal with truth, should the desire take you.

Settle them up to what point? That, "one does not know!"
Indeed, it is precisely in this that knowledge is forced to rely only on itself to carry any weight.
Thus, knowledge serves as a dowry.

What is admirable is the pretense of one who would wish to be loved without this cushion:
he offers his bare chest.
How adorable his "not-knowing" must be, as people are all too eager to say in such cases!
Are you surprised that one emerges from this holding—like a good dog—
his own carcass between his teeth?

Naturally, this no longer happens, but it is still known.
And because of this, there are those who play at doing it—but only in semblance.
You see everything that is being trafficked from the claim that knowledge and truth are "incompatible."
I only think of it because it is a lure that, I believe,
was devised to justify an amok directed at me:
let us assume that a person who complains of being bitten by truth
would be revealing themselves to be a damned psychoanalyst.

More precisely, I have articulated the topology
that sets a boundary between truth and knowledge
only to show that this boundary is everywhere,
and that it establishes no domain except by causing one to love what lies beyond it.
The paths of psychoanalysts remain clear enough
that the experience needed to illuminate them is still only at the stage of a program.
That is why I will begin from where everyone makes their approach a strangulation—
exemplary in being exempt from experience.

Is it not astonishing that, of the formula I have promoted for more than a decade—
the one called the subject supposed to know,
to account for transference—
no one…
not even over the course of this year,
when the thing was spread out on the board,
more evident still as the slot was inscribed separately from the ball meant to fill it…
no one, I say, has raised the question:

"Is it ‘supposed’ that this subject knows the truth?"

Do you see where this leads?
Above all, do not think about it—you might kill the transference.

For in the knowledge of which transference makes a subject (subject supposed to know),
it turns out, as the analysand works at it,
that it was nothing but a "knowing how to deal" with truth.

No one dreams that the psychoanalyst is married to truth.
It is even for this reason that his wife trembles—
his real wife—
certainly not to be shaken too much,
but who must be there as a dam.

A dam against what?
Against the ultimate supposition:
that which would make the psychoanalyst "engaged" to truth.

For with truth, there is no possible relation of love—
neither marriage nor free union.
There is only one certainty,
if you wish for it to truly have you:
castration—
yours, of course—
and from it: no pity.

Knowing that this is how it is does not prevent it from happening—
and of course, even less from being avoided.
But when one avoids it, one forgets it—
whereas when it happens, one knows it no less.

This, it seems to me, is the height of compatibility.
One would grind one’s teeth to not make it into comblatibility—
so that the sound of a theft returns to you,
making a "pat", and quite patibular indeed.

For with truth, one does not need to learn everything—
a fragment suffices—
which, given the structure, is expressed as "knowing a piece of it."

On this point, I have managed to lead certain individuals,
and I am surprised to say as much on the radio.
But here, those who listen to me do not have—
in hearing what I say—
the obstacle of understanding me.

[Cf. L’Étourdit: "What is said remains forgotten behind what is being said in what is heard."]

Where it appears to me that this obstacle holds, it is because elsewhere I must calculate it.
Yet, I am not here to train the psychoanalyst but to answer your questions—
which, in doing so, are put back in their place.

His discipline...
insofar as he follows me—the psychoanalyst—
penetrates him with this: that the real is not there first to be known.

As truth, it is indeed the dam that dissuades even the slightest attempt at idealism.
And yet, by failing to recognize this dam,
idealism takes its place under the most contradictory banners.

But it is not a truth—it is the limit of truth.
For truth is located in the supposition
that what in the real functions within knowledge
is precisely that which knowledge adds to the real.

It is indeed from this point that knowledge carries the "false into being",
and even into being-there—that is, Dasein,
to assail you until all the participants in the ceremony are left breathless.
To tell the truth, it is only about this "false into being"
that one concerns oneself with truth as such.

Knowledge that is not false has no care for truth.
There is only one place where truth appears as a surprise.
And this is why it is considered to have a dubious taste,
when in fact it is from the grace of Freud
that it produces a few pataquès in discourse.

It is at this joint with the real
that the political incidence is found—
where the psychoanalyst would have a place,
if he were capable of it.

Here would be the act that puts into play
what kind of knowledge should make the law.
A revolution occurs when a knowledge is reduced
to making a symptom—
as seen through the very gaze that it has produced.
Its only recourse then is truth, for which one fights.

Thus, it is articulated that the effect of truth
relies on what falls from knowledge
[from S₁ → S₂, what falls as product: a]—
that is, on what it produces—
which, however, is powerless to sustain the said effect of truth.
[The product (a) does not access the truth of the barred subject (S̷)
and leads only to the mode of fantasy: a ◊ S̷,
where it vanishes (aphanisis).]

A circuit no less fated to be unable to sustain perpetual motion
than any other movement—
from which is also demonstrated here another real of energy dynamics.

It is this real—once the hour of truth has passed—
that will stir itself again until the next crisis,
having recovered its luster.
One might even say that this is the "festival" of every revolution:
that the disruption of truth is cast into the shadows.
But to the real, nothing is ever seen but fire,
even when so illustrated.

[2 05’ 03’’]

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QUESTION VII [2 05’ 08’’]

"To govern, to educate, to psychoanalyze"—you say—"are three wagers impossible to uphold."*
Yet, this perpetual contestation of all discourse, including his own—
the psychoanalyst must indeed cling to it.
He clings to a knowledge—the analytical knowledge—that, by definition, he contests.
How do you resolve—or not—this contradiction?
Status of the impossible? The impossible is the real…

Forgive me if, once again,
I only reach the answer by dressing the question in my own hands.

To govern, to educate, to psychoanalyze are indeed wagers,
but in calling them impossible, one merely assures them—prematurely—
of being real.
The least that can be demanded of them is to prove themselves.

This does not amount to contesting what you call their discourse.
Why would the psychoanalyst have the privilege of doing so,
if he did not find himself adjusting them by the step
[a quarter-turn]—
the same step he receives from the real,
pushing his own discourse forward?

Let us note that this step,
he establishes through the very act by which he advances it—
and that it is to the real, of which this step functions,
that he subjects the discourses he aligns to the synchrony of the said.

By settling itself upon the step it produces,
this synchrony has no other origin than its own emergence.
It limits the number of discourses it subjugates—
as I have structured them, in the shortest way,
to the number of four—
in a non-permutative revolution,
within their position of four terms.
The step of the real that sustains it
is thus univocal in both its progress and its regression.

The operative nature of this step is that a disjunction disrupts the synchrony between terms that are different each time, precisely because it is fixed. In truth, there is no lysis to be made in its name—what, in the proverb you invoke after Freud, is called "healing", and which provokes far too much cheerful laughter (gai rire).

To govern, to educate, to heal, then—who knows?—through analysis, with the fourth reduced to playing Lisette’s role:
this is the discourse of the hysteric ("pas de ça, Lisette...").
But what! Would the impossibility of the last two serve as an alibi for the first?
Or rather, would it resolve them into impotence?

Through analysis, there is no lysis—
allow me this play on words once again—
but only the impossibility of governing what one does not master,
translated into the impotence of our terms’ synchrony (discourse A):
commanding (S₁) knowledge (S₂),
with discourse A stumbling over S₁◊S₂.
For the unconscious, it’s a tough one!

impotence

For the hysteric, it is the impotence of knowledge (S₂)
that their discourse provokes, animated by desire (a),
which reveals how education (discourse U)
fails (discourse H: S₂◊a → discourse H is the reverse of discourse U).

impotence

A striking chiasmus, yet not the right one,
except in denouncing how impossibilities so easily serve as alibis.
How can they be forced to demonstrate their real,
when it is the very relation that, by its presence,
functions as the impossible?

Now, the structure of each discourse necessitates an impotence,
defined by the barrier of jouissance,
which differentiates itself as a disjunction—
always the same—
between its production and its truth.

In the discourse of the master,
it is surplus jouissance (plus-de-jouir)
that satisfies the subject only by sustaining
the reality of a single fantasy (a◊S).

←
Master’s Discourse ← Hysteric’s Discourse

In the university discourse,
it is the void into which the subject (S)—
whom it produces—
is drawn, requiring that an author be supposed
for the knowledge.

→
University Discourse → Analyst’s Discourse

These are truths,
but truths that still function as traps,
fixing you in place on the path
where the real comes to take shape.
For they are only consequences of the discourse that produces them.

But this discourse emerged from the tipping point
where the unconscious—
as I have said—
acts dynamically,
forcing it into a function of progress—
which, at its worst, moves against
the discourse that precedes it in a certain rotational direction
(counterclockwise).

Thus, the master’s discourse finds its justification
in the hysteric’s discourse:
in becoming the agent of omnipotence,
the master renounces responding as a man,
while the hysteric, in demanding that he be,
obtains only knowledge.

It is to the knowledge of the slave
that the master then entrusts the production
of surplus jouissance—
since, from his own knowledge,
he had not obtained that woman
should be the cause of his desire—
I do not say object.

←
Master’s Discourse ← Hysteric’s Discourse

Thus, it is confirmed that
the impossibility of governing will only be grasped in its real
by working regressively
through the rigor of a development
that necessitates a lack of jouissance at its origin,
provided it maintains it at its end.

Conversely, it is in progressing beyond the university discourse
that the analyst’s discourse might allow us
to circumscribe the real
that functions within its impossibility—
that is, by submitting to the question
of surplus jouissance,
which already has its truth within a knowledge,
the passage of the subject
to the signifier of the master.

→
University Discourse → Analyst’s Discourse

This supposes the knowledge (S₂) of structure,
which in the analyst’s discourse
occupies the place of truth.

This reveals the suspicion
that must be maintained
toward everything that presents itself in that place.

For impotence is not the guise
under which the impossible would be truth—
but neither is it the opposite:
impotence would be useful
for fixing one’s gaze,
if truth did not see itself there so clearly
as to take flight.

We must put an end to these games
in which truth pays the price—
a price far too trivial.

It is only by pushing the impossible
to its limits that impotence takes power—
turning the patient into the agent.

Thus, it comes into act in each revolution,
where structure has a "step" to take,
so that impotence changes mode—
of course, nothing more.

This is how language innovates,
revealing jouissance
and producing the fantasy that it briefly realizes.

It only approaches the real
to the extent that discourse
reduces the said to making a hole in its calculus.

At present, there are not many such discourses.