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(All parts in English)

I will try today to define the meaning of this path along which I have led you this year under the title
“Of a Discourse That Would Not Be of the Semblant.” This hypothesis…
because it is in the conditional that this title is presented to you,
…this hypothesis is the one by which any discourse justifies itself.

Do not omit that last year I attempted to articulate into four typical discourses those discourses that you are confronted with, in a certain established order which, of course, is itself justified only by history. If I have broken them into four, it is because I believe I have justified it through the development I have given them and through the form that, in a written work called “Radiophonie”—paradoxically…
not so much so if you heard what I said last time—
…a certain order, then, whose terms this text reminds you of.

It is from the always syncopated slippage, from the slippage of four terms, of which there are always two that remain gaping,
that these discourses which I have explicitly designated:
– the discourse of the Master,
– the University discourse,
– the discourse that I have privileged under the term of the Hysteric,
– the discourse of the Analyst,
…that I have ordered them.

These discourses have the property of always having their point of arrangement, which is also the very point by which I pin them down, of being founded on the semblant.

→ → →

What is it that is privileged in the analytic discourse, that makes it the one that, in sum, allows us, by articulating them in this way,
to distribute them also into four fundamental dispositions?

It is paradoxical, it is singular, that such an enunciation should present itself as the outcome
of what the one who happens to be at the origin of analytic discourse—namely Freud—has made possible.
He did not make it possible out of nothing; he made it possible out of what presents itself—as I have articulated many times—as being the very principle of this discourse of the Master, namely, that which is privileged as a certain knowledge that illuminates the articulation of knowledge to truth.

It is, properly speaking, prodigious that those very ones who, caught in certain perspectives…
those we could define as positioning themselves in relation to society…
those, then, who in this perspective present themselves as infirm—let us be kinder, as lame…
and we know that beauty limps…
namely, neurotics, and specifically hysterics and obsessionals, that it should be from them that this lightning flash of illumination should have departed, that it should be from them that this stroke of light traversing the entire dimension conditioned by language should have originated: the function that is truth.

Even, on occasion…
everyone knows the place this holds in Freud’s enunciation…
even this crystallization that is what we know in its modern form, what we know of religion…
and specifically the Judeo-Christian tradition on which everything Freud articulated about religions is based…
this is coherent—I remind you—with this operation of subversion of what had hitherto been upheld
through an entire tradition under the title of “knowledge”, and this operation originates from the notion of “symptom.”

It is historically important to realize that the novelty of Freud’s introduction to psychoanalysis does not reside there:
the notion of “symptom”, as I have indicated multiple times,
and as it is very easy to identify in reading the one who is responsible for it, namely Marx.

What is fundamentally deceptive in the theory of knowledge, this dimension of the semblant introduced by the deception denounced as such by Marxist subversion, is the fact that what is denounced is precisely…
always within a certain tradition that reached its peak with Hegelian discourse
…that some semblant is instituted according to weights and measures, if I may say so, to be taken at face value.

And it is not for nothing that I use these metaphors, since it is around money, around capital as such, that the pivot of this denunciation turns, a denunciation that locates in the fetish that something which a return of thought must put back in its place, and very precisely as semblant.

The singularity of this remark is, after all, meant to make us realize that it is not enough for something to be enunciated in this denunciation that positions itself as truth…
in the name of which surplus value emerges and asserts itself as the driving force behind what reduced to its semblant that which had until then been sustained by a certain number of deliberate misrecognitions
…it is not enough, I would note, and history demonstrates it, that this irruption of truth occurs for that which is sustained by this discourse to be overturned as a result. [cf. L’étourdit, Sta p. 6, “Of course, neurosis survives it.”]

This discourse, which we could in this instance call that of the capitalist, insofar as it is a determination of the discourse of the Master, finds there, in fact, and rather, its complement.

It appears that, far from the capitalist discourse being weakened by this recognition as such of the function of surplus value, it nonetheless persists, since after all, a capitalism taken up within a discourse of the Master is precisely what seems to distinguish the political consequences that have followed…
in the form of a political revolution
…that have followed from the Marxist denunciation of what is at stake in a certain discourse of the semblant.

That is precisely why I will not dwell here on what concerns the historical mission thus devoted…
in Marxism, or at least in its manifestos
…devoted to the proletariat.

There is, I would say, a remainder of humanist entification there, which, in making the proletarian the one who, of course, in this mechanism, finds himself the most stripped of everything, nonetheless shows that something persists, that effectively makes him persist in this state of dispossession, and that the fact that he is the support of what is produced under the guise of surplus value is not, for all that, something that in any way liberates him from the articulation of this discourse.

That is precisely why this denunciation refers us back to a question about that something that might be more original, and that would be found in the very origin of all discourse insofar as it is a discourse of the semblant.

That is also precisely why what I have articulated under the term surplus-jouissance refers you back to what is questioned in Freudian discourse as calling into question the relation of something that is articulated—properly speaking and once again—as truth in opposition to a semblant, and this truth, this opposition, and this dialectic of truth and semblant are found—if what Freud said has any meaning—located at the level of what I have designated by the term the sexual relationship.

I have, in sum, dared to articulate, to incite awareness that if this revelation provided to us by the knowledge of the neurotic concerning something is nothing other than this: that it is articulated as “there is no sexual relationship.”

What does that mean? Not, of course, that language…
since already I am saying it: there is no sexual relationship,
it is something that can be said since now it is said
…but of course, it is not enough to say it; it must still be motivated, and the motives we take from our experience, followed along the thread of what clings to this fundamental gap, and this followed thread is tied…
there lies its central departure, coiled around this void
…in what I call the discourse of the neurotic.

Last time, I…
I made you feel it enough, underlined it enough
…attempted to initiate, from a writing, how what concerns the point of departure of this thread can be situated.

Today, I intend, not of course…
the matter is beyond, at the very limit of all that can be said of it in the constrained space of a seminar
…not to discuss what the neurotic indicates regarding his relation to this distance, but rather what the myths, from which was formed, if I may say so, not always under dictation but in echo to the discourse of the neurotic—the myths that Freud forged.

To be able to do this in such a short time, one must start from this central point, which is also the point of enigma in psychoanalytic discourse, insofar as it is here only in listening to this ultimate discourse, the one that would not be the discourse of the semblant. It listens to a discourse that would not be—and that just as well is not—
I mean that what is indicated here is nothing other than the limit imposed on discourse when it comes to the sexual relationship.

I have tried, for my part…
at the point where I stand, from where I advance everything that could be formulated further from it…
to tell you that it is from its failure at the level of a logic,
a logic that is sustained by what sustains all logic, namely writing.

The letter of Freud’s work is a written work.
But equally, what it traces out in these writings
is something that surrounds a veiled, obscure truth, the one that is formulated as follows:
a sexual relationship…
and as it passes into any accomplishment,
is supported, is seated, only by this composition between jouissance and semblant, which is called castration.

That we see it reappear at every moment in the discourse of the neurotic, but in the form of a fear, an avoidance,
this is precisely where castration remains enigmatic: that none, ultimately, of its realizations in diverse, shifting, shimmering forms,
nor even the exploration of the psychopathology of analyzable phenomena—
at least of this psychopathology, as excursions into ethnology allow—
none of this changes the fact that something remains, something that distinguishes everything evoked as castration,
and we see it—under what form?—always under the form of an avoidance.

If the neurotic, if I may say so, bears witness to the necessary intrusion of what I have just called
this composition of jouissance and semblant, which presents itself as castration,
it is precisely in that he shows himself, in some way, unfit for it.

And if all that concerns initiation rituals, which, as you know—
and if you do not know, refer to technical works, and to take two that are produced from within the analytic field itself,
I direct you respectively to:
– Problems of Bisexuality as Reflected in Circumcision, that is, Problems of Bisexuality as Reflected in Circumcision, by Herman Nunberg, published in Englewood, that is, ultimately,
at Imago Publishing in London (1949),
– and, on the other hand, the book titled Symbolic Wounds, Symbolic Wounds, by Bruno Bettelheim.

There you will see, unfolded in all its ambiguity, in its fundamental wavering,
the hesitation, so to speak, of analytic thought between
– an explanatory framework that attributes castration to a fear left entirely opaque and, in a sense, to sheer luck—or misfortune, as you prefer,
– and accidental occurrences in which something appears that, in this register, would be nothing but the effect of some unknown misunderstanding.

Through this thicket of prejudices, clumsiness, of something rectifiable,
or, on the contrary, of a thought that realizes there is indeed something constant here:
at the very least, the immense number of productions that we can record in all registers…
whether the catalogs are more or less well made, whether they belong to ethnology
or to the psychopathology I evoked earlier—there are others…
this confronts us with the fact that it is…
and Freud expresses this at times, he knows very well how to say it in Civilization and Its Discontents…
that it is in reference to something that, after all, does not make my formulation “There is no sexual relationship” seem so new.

He says that—he indicates, of course, in terms as clear as he usually does—
that undoubtedly, on this matter, very precisely regarding sexual relations,
some fatality is inscribed that renders necessary
what then appears as the means, the bridges, the pathways, the edifices, the constructions, to put it plainly,
that respond to the deficiency of the sexual relationship,
insofar as, after all, in a kind of inversion of perspective,
all possible discourse would appear only as the symptom,
which, within the sexual relationship, arranges…
arranges under conditions, under conditions that, as usual,
we relegate to prehistory, to extra-historical domains…
which, under those conditions, would in some way permit
the success of what could be established artificially as a supplement,
as a supplement to this lack inscribed, ultimately, in the speaking being.

Whether it is:
– because he is a speaking being that it is so,
– or, on the contrary, because the origin is that the relationship is not speakable,
that it is necessary for something to be elaborated for all those who inhabit language, that it is necessary for them to elaborate this something
which makes possible, in the form of castration, the gap left in this something that is nonetheless essential,
biologically essential to the reproduction of these beings as living, to the continued fertility of their race,
remains unknown.

This is indeed the problem that everything related to initiation rituals seems to confront.
That these initiation rituals include… let us call them manipulations, operations, incisions, circumcisions,
which target and place their mark very precisely on the organ that we see functioning as a symbol
in what is presented to us through analytic experience as going far beyond the privilege of the organ,
since it is the phallus.

And that the phallus, insofar as it is to this third term
– that everything is ordered which, in sum, leads jouissance into an impasse,
– that makes man and woman, insofar as we would define them by simple biological designation,
these beings who, very precisely, are in difficulty with sexual jouissance, and in an elective way among all other forms of jouissance.

This is indeed the matter at hand, and this is where we must return if we want to maintain a proper meaning
to what is inaugurated by analytic discourse.

And if it is, as we assume, something defined…
this is what we call castration…
which would have the privilege of addressing this something whose undecidability forms the core of the sexual relationship,
insofar as jouissance, it renders it ordered with regard to this…
which seems to me unavoidable, I am speaking of these statements…
of the dramaturgy of constraint which, just like that, constitutes the daily reality of analytic discourse,
which is entirely contrary…
this is an observation that highlights the value of the second book I pointed out to you, by Bruno Bettelheim…
is obviously entirely contrary to the only thing that matters:
it is not a question of relegating to prehistory what is involved in initiation rituals.

Initiation rituals, like everything we might wish to relegate to prehistory, are here,
they still exist, they are alive throughout the world:

– there are still Australians who undergo circumcision or subincision,
– there are entire zones of civilization that submit to them.

And to fail to recognize, in a so-called “enlightened” century, that these practices not only persist but thrive,
that they are doing quite well,
this is obviously where we must start to realize that there is no conceivable dramaturgy of constraint, whatever it may be,
that there is no example of it being merely a matter of constraint.

It is still necessary to know what constraint means: constraint is never merely
a matter of some supposed prevalence of a supposed physical or other superiority;
it is sustained precisely by signifiers.
And if it is the Law, the rule, that is such that a given subject consents to submit,
it is indeed for reasons, and these reasons are what concern us.

This is what concerns us, and this is where we must rather investigate what sort of complacency…
to use a term which, in leading us directly to the hysteric,
is no less of extremely general scope…
what sort of complacency ensures that what presents itself as something whose image alone would be unbearable
not only persists but persists in entirely historical times.

Perhaps it is indeed unbearable as such, and that is precisely the issue: to understand why.

This is where I pick up my thread.

It is by following this thread that we give meaning to what is articulated in language,
in what I will call this unprecedented speech…
for unprecedented until a certain time,
a time that is indeed historical and within our reach…
unprecedented speech, which in sum must always, in some part, remain so:
there is no other definition to be given of the unconscious.

Let us now turn to the hysteric, since I find it fitting to start from the hysteric in order to try to see where this thread leads us. The hysteric—until now, we have asked ourselves: “What is it?”

But precisely, this is the meaning, that in response to such a question…
“What is it?” What does it mean, the hysteric in person?
…I believe I have worked long enough from the imaginary to indicate that “in person”…
or rather, simply to recall what is already written in the term persona…
means “in a mask.”

No initial answer can be given to this meaning.
To the question “What is the hysteric?”, the response of the analyst’s discourse is “You will see for yourself!”
You will see for yourself precisely by following where she leads us.

Without the hysteric, of course, what I inscribe here would never have come to light…
since I inscribe it—at least I attempt to give you the first logical sketch of what is now at stake…
what I write as ΦX, which is to say that jouissance…
this variable in the function inscribed in x…
is situated in relation to this Φ, which here designates the phallus.

A central discovery, or rather a rediscovery, or, as you prefer, a rebaptism,
since, as I pointed out last time, it is from the phallus,
insofar as it is unveiled as a semblant in the “mysteries”,
that the term is taken up—not by chance,
since it is precisely in the fact that it is to the semblant of the phallus that the pivotal point is referred,
the center of everything that can be ordered or contained within sexual jouissance,
that, from the very first encounters with hysterics,
from the Studien über Hysterie, Freud leads us.

Last time, I articulated the following:
that, in sum, if we take things from the point that can indeed be questioned in relation to the most common discourse,
if we want—not to push to its limit what linguistics indicates to us—but rather to extrapolate it,
that is, to recognize:
– that nothing language allows us to do is ever anything but metaphor or metonymy,
– that the something that any speech, whatever it may be, momentarily claims to name
can only ever refer to a connotation,
– and that if there is something that can ultimately be indicated
as what, in all the apparatus of language, is denoted,
I said it last time, there is only one Bedeutung:
“Die Bedeutung des Phallus”—this alone is what, in language, is denoted.

Denoted, of course, but never with anything responding to it,
since if there is something that characterizes the phallus,
it is not, as some have believed they could hear in certain of my words, “the signifier of lack,”
but rather, without a doubt, that from it, no word ever emerges.

Sinn and Bedeutung—it is from here, as I recalled last time,
from this opposition articulated by that truly inaugural logician, Frege,
that Sinn and Bedeutung define models that go beyond those of connotation and denotation.
There is much to retain from this article in which Frege establishes both facets: Sinn and Bedeutung.

There is much to retain, and especially for an analyst.
For certainly, without a logical reference…
and one that, of course, cannot be satisfied with classical logic, with Aristotelian logic…
without a logical reference, it is impossible to find the correct point in the matters I bring forward.

Frege’s remark revolves entirely around this:
that when carried to a certain point in scientific discourse,
what we observe is, for example, facts such as the following:

Is it the same thing to say:
– “Venus”,
– or to call it by two different names, as it was for a long time designated—“the evening star” and “the morning star”?
Is it the same thing to say:
– “Sir Walter Scott”,
– and to say “the author of Waverley”?

I warn those who may be unaware that he is indeed the author of that work called Waverley. It is in the examination of this distinction that Frege realizes that it is not always possible to replace “Sir Walter Scott” with “the author of Waverley”.

It is in this that he distinguishes the following:
– that “the author of Waverley” conveys a meaning, a Sinn,
– and that “Sir Walter Scott” designates a Bedeutung.

It is clear that if we assume—if we assume with Leibniz—that salva veritate, saving truth, requires us to posit that everything designated as having an equivalent Bedeutung may be interchangeably replaced, and if we put this to the test as I am about to do following the very path laid out by Frege himself, that King George III…
it does not matter whether it is George III or George IV, in this case, it is of little importance…
was inquiring, seeking to know whether “Sir Walter was the author of Waverley.”

If we replace “the author of Waverley” with “Sir Walter Scott”, we obtain the following sentence:

“King George III was inquiring to know whether Sir Walter Scott was Sir Walter Scott.”

Which, quite obviously, does not have the same meaning at all.

It is from this simple remark, a logical operation,
that Frege establishes, inaugurates his fundamental distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung.
It is entirely clear that this Bedeutung refers, of course, to an ever more distant Bedeutung.
For him, of course, he limits himself to the distinction between what he calls “oblique discourse” and “direct discourse.”

Since it is in a subordinate clause that it is King George III who is asking, we must here maintain the Sinn in its rightful place and in no case replace “the author of Waverley” with “Sir Walter Scott.”

But this, of course, is an artifice.
It is an artifice that, for us, puts us on the path of the following: namely, that “Sir Walter Scott”, in this instance, is a name.

And just as when Mr. Carnap revisits the question of Bedeutung, he translates it by the term nominatum,
which is precisely where he slips where he ought not to have slipped.
For this, which I am beginning to outline, may allow us to go further,
but certainly not in the same direction as Mr. Carnap—
it is the direction of what the name means, the name: n.o.m., I repeat it, as I did last time.

It is very easy for us here to make the connection with what I indicated earlier.
I pointed out to you that the phallus is what puts us on the path of this point that I designate, here emphasized:
it is that the name…
the name as “name” and the name as “noun”, but things are best seen at the level of the proper name…
the name is what calls—but calls to what?—it is what calls to speech.

And this is precisely what constitutes the privilege of the phallus:
one may call upon it endlessly, and it will always say nothing.

Only, this then gives its meaning to what I once called “the paternal metaphor”,
and this is where the hysteric leads.

The paternal metaphor…
of course, where I introduced it, that is, in my article
on the Preliminary Question to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis…
I inserted it into the general schema drawn from the comparison
between what linguistics tells us about metaphor and what the experience of the unconscious gives us of condensation.

I wrote S/S1, multiplied by S1/s, I…
just as I also wrote in The Instance of the Letter…
strongly emphasized this aspect of metaphor, which is to generate meaning.

If “the author of Waverley” is a Sinn, it is precisely because “the author of Waverley” replaces something else,
which is a specific Bedeutung, the one that Frege believes he must pin down under the name of Sir Walter Scott.
But after all, I have not considered the paternal metaphor only from this angle.

If I wrote somewhere that “the Name of the Father is the phallus”…
God knows what shudders of horror this evoked in some pious souls…
it is precisely because, at that time, I could not articulate it any better.

What is certain is that it is indeed the phallus, of course, but that it is still the Name of the Father.
What is named Father, the Name of the Father—if it is a name that has an efficacy—
it is precisely because someone stands up to respond.

From the perspective of what occurred in Schreber’s psychotic determination,
it was as a signifier, a signifier capable of giving meaning to the mother’s desire,
that I could rightly situate the Name of the Father.

But at the level of what is at stake when it is—let us say, the hysteric—who calls upon it,
what is at stake is that someone speaks.
I would like to point out here that if Freud at times tried to approach more closely this function of the Father,
which is so essential to analytic discourse that, in a certain way, one could say it is its very product…

If I write for you the analytic discourse: a/S2,
that is, the analyst over what knowledge [presumed] he has according to the neurotic,
who questions the subject in order to produce something,
one could say that the master signifier of analytic discourse, until now,
is indeed the Name of the Father.

It is extremely curious that it took analytic discourse for these questions to arise.
What is a Father? Freud does not hesitate to articulate: “It is the name that, in essence, implies faith.”
That is how he expresses it.
Perhaps we could still wish for a little more.

After all, taking things at the most basic biological level,
one could perfectly well conceive that the reproduction of the human species…
this has already been imagined, it has already emerged from the mind of a novelist [Orwell: 1984]…
could occur without any intervention itself designated under the name of the Father,
artificial insemination would not be there for nothing.

What is it, then, that has ensured the persistence, from a time that is not yesterday, of this essence of the father?
And after all, do we, as analysts, even know what it is?

I would like to make you notice something:
in analytic experience, the Father is never anything but referential.
We interpret such and such a relation to the father.
But do we ever analyze someone as a father?
Let someone bring me an observation.

The father is a term in analytic interpretation. Something refers to him.

It is in light of these remarks—and I must be brief—that I would still like to situate for you
what is at stake in the myth of Oedipus.
The Oedipus myth is, in a way, troubling, is it not?
Because it supposedly establishes the primacy of the father,
which would be some kind of patriarchal reflection.

I would like to make you feel something… or at least what, to me, makes it seem not at all a reflection of patriarchy. Far from it. It reveals to us only this: first, a point through which castration could be grasped from a logical approach, and in the way I will designate as numerical.

The father is not only castrated, but he is precisely castrated to the point of being nothing more than a number. This is indicated quite clearly in dynasties: earlier, I was speaking of a king, and I no longer knew what to call him—George III or George IV.

Think about it: this is precisely what seems to me most typical in this presentation of paternity, namely that, in reality, this is how it happens: George I, George II, George III, George IV. But then, it is quite evident that this does not exhaust the question, because there is not just the number—there is a count.

To put it plainly, I see in it the point of apprehension of the series of natural numbers, as the expression goes. And it is not such a bad expression! Because, after all, it is very close to nature. I would like to point out to you…
since it is always evoked on the horizon of history,
which, of course, is a reason for extreme suspicion…
I would simply like to point out the following:
that matriarchy, as the expression goes, has no need to be pushed to the margins of history.
Matriarchy essentially consists in this: as far as the mother is concerned, in terms of production, there is no doubt.

One can, on occasion, lose one’s mother in the subway, of course,
but in the end, there is no doubt about who the mother is.
There is also no doubt about who the mother’s mother is, and so on.
The mother, in her lineage, I would say, is innumerable.

She is innumerable in every literal sense of the term;
she is not to be counted because there is no starting point.
The maternal lineage, however necessarily ordered, cannot be made to start from nowhere.

I could also point out something else,
which seems to be the most commonly observed fact,
because, after all, it is not rare:
it is not at all rare for one to have, as a father, one’s grandfather[sic].
I mean as a real father. And even one’s great-grandfather.

Yes! Because people lived, as we are told in the first lineage of the patriarchs, for about 900 years.
I recently revisited this—it is quite amusing.
It is an absolutely sensational piece of fabrication:
everything is arranged so that Noah’s two most direct ancestors die just as the flood occurs.
You can see it—it is finely crafted…

But let us set that aside; it is simply to place you in the perspective of what the father is.
From this, you see, what follows…
I am forced to go a bit quickly, because time is advancing…
is that if we define the hysteric by what defines—not uniquely her, but the neurotic—
namely, the avoidance of castration,
there are several ways to avoid it.

The hysteric has this simple method:
she unilateralizes it to the other side, to the side of the partner.
Let us say that, for the hysteric, the partner must be castrated.

That he is castrated is, clearly, the very principle of the possibility of the hysteric’s jouissance.
But even that is too much:
if he were castrated, he might still have a small chance…
since castration is precisely what I put forward earlier
as what allows the sexual relationship…
he must be nothing more than what stands in the place of the phallus.

Now, since Freud himself tells us…
I am not going to tell you on which page either…
he tells us himself that everything he elaborates as myth—this in reference to Moses—

“I will not critique it here…”
he says of what he himself wrote, at the time he published it in 1938,
regarding his historical hypothesis—the one he revived from Sellin:

“For all the acquired results,” says the translator,
“constitute the psychological deductions that follow from it and continually refer back to it.”

As you can see, this means nothing.
In German, however, it does mean something:

– “denn sie bilden die Voraussetzung”—for they form the assumption,
– “der psychologischen Erörterungen”—of the psychological manifestations, which, from these data,
– “von ihnen ausgehen”—derive and, time and again,
– “auf sie zurückkommen”—refer back to them.

I begin by summarizing the results of my second study, the purely historical one on Moses. They will not be subjected to renewed critique here, for they form the prerequisite for the psychological discussions that derive from them and continually refer back to them. (Chapter III, Preface II, June 1938)

It is indeed under the dictation of the hysteric that—not elaborated,
for Oedipus was never truly elaborated by Freud—
but rather indicated, in a way, on the horizon,
rising, as it were, in the smoke of what is elevated as the sacrifice of the hysteric.

But let us carefully observe what this naming means,
this response to the call of the father in Oedipus.
If I told you earlier that it introduces the series of natural numbers,
it is because here we find what, in the most recent logical elaboration of this series—
namely, that of Peano—has proven necessary,
which is not simply the fact of succession.
When one attempts to axiomatize the possibility of such a series,
one encounters the necessity of zero in order to posit the successor.

The minimal axioms of Peano…
I will not dwell on what has been produced in commentary,
on the margins, as refinements…
but the final formula is the one that posits zero as necessary for this series,
– without which it could in no way be axiomatized,
– and without which it would therefore be innumerable, as I said earlier.

The logical equivalence of the function is precisely this:
that this function I have used is too often linked…
I can only address this briefly and in passing…
I would like to point out that we will enter the second millennium in the year 2000, as far as I know.

If you simply accept this…
on the other hand, you may just as well not accept it…
but if you simply accept this,
I will point out that it makes necessary the existence of a year zero after the birth of Christ.

This is what the authors of the Republican calendar had forgotten:
in the first year, they called it Year 1 of the Republic.
This zero is absolutely essential to any natural chronological reference.

And so, we understand what the murder of the Father means.
It is curious, singular, is it not,
that this murder of the Father never appears—
even in dramas, as someone who wrote a rather decent chapter on this subject pertinently observes:

“Even in dramas, no playwright has ever dared—”
so the author expresses himself—
“to present, to stage, the deliberate murder of a father by his son.”

Pay close attention to this:
even in Greek theater, this does not exist,
at least not of a Father as such.
However, it is still the term murder of the Father that appears
at the center of what Freud elaborates from the data
constituted—due to the hysteric and her margins—
by the refusal of castration.

Is it not precisely insofar as the murder of the Father here is the substitute
for this refused castration that Oedipus was able to impose itself upon Freud’s thinking
through his engagement with the hysteric?

It is clear that, from the hysteric’s perspective,
it is the phallus that fertilizes,
and that what it engenders is itself, so to speak.
Fertility is phallic forgery,
and it is precisely in this sense that every child is a reproduction of the phallus,
insofar as it is, if I may put it this way, pregnant with its own engendering.

But then, we also glimpse…
since it is from “pas plus d’un” that I have inscribed for you
the logical possibility of choice in this unfulfilled relation of the sexual relationship…
that it is from “pas plus d’un” that I have designated it for you.

It is through this that Freud’s incredible indulgence toward a monotheism—
for which he seeks a model, in a very curious move,
far beyond his own tradition—
demands that it be Akhenaten.

Nothing is more ambiguous, I would say, on the sexual level,
than this solar monotheism,
radiating all its rays endowed with tiny hands
that reach out to tickle the nostrils of countless small human beings,
children of both sexes,
of whom, in this imagery of the Oedipal structure,
it is striking—literally—that they resemble one another like brothers,
and even more so, like sisters.

If the word sublime can have an ambiguous meaning, it is certainly here.
For it is not for nothing that the last monumental images…
those I was able to see the last time I left Egyptian soil…
of Akhenaten are not only castrated but outright feminine.

It is absolutely clear that if castration has a relation to the phallus,
this is not where we can designate it.
I mean that if I were to make the little diagram corresponding to
“not all” or “not every”,
as designating a certain type of relation to ΦX,
it is indeed in this sense that it is to ΦX, nonetheless,
that the elect are related.

The passage, the transition to mediation—in quotation marks—
is none other than that of this at least one
which I have emphasized and which we will find again in Peano,
through that ever-repeating n+1,
the one which, in a way, presupposes that the n preceding it is reduced to zero.
By what? Precisely by the murder of the Father.

Through this marking, so to speak, this detour,
the way—
to use Frege’s own term, quite appropriately in this case—
“oblique”, “ungerade”,
in which the meaning of the murder of the Father refers to another Bedeutung.

This is where I will have to stop today,
apologizing for not having been able to push things further.
That will be for next year.
I regret that things this year had to be necessarily truncated in this way,
but you will see that Totem and Taboo, on the other hand…
namely, what places the original jouissance on the side of the Father…
is something that is met with an avoidance
strictly equivalent to what castration entails,
strictly equivalent.

In this, something is clearly marked:
that the obsessional…
in response to the formula ¬∃x (x ∈ ΦX)—
“There is no x that exists which can be inscribed in the variable ΦX”…
the obsessional withdraws.

He withdraws simply from this: from not existing.
That is something to which—why not?—
we will reconnect the continuation of our discourse.
The obsessional, insofar as he is in the debt of not existing
in relation to this no less mythical Father,
the one of Totem and Taboo—how?

It is there that everything concerning a certain religious edifice is truly attached,
and in which, unfortunately, it is irreducible,
not even to what Freud ties to his second myth,
that of Totem and Taboo,
namely, no more and no less than his second topology.
This is something we will be able to develop later.

For take note: the second topology—
its great innovation is the superego.
What is the essence of the superego?

It is on this point that I can conclude,
by placing something in the hollow of your hand,
something you can attempt to manipulate for yourself.

What is the structure of the superego?

Precisely, it originates from this original Father,
more than mythical, from this call as such to pure jouissance,
which is to say, also to non-castration.

And what does this Father say, at the decline of Oedipus?
He says what the superego says.

What the superego says…
it is not for nothing that I have never really addressed it until now…
what the superego says is: “Enjoy!”

Such is the command, the command impossible to satisfy,
and which, as such, is at the origin of everything that is elaborated—
as paradoxical as this may seem to you—
in terms of moral conscience.

To fully grasp the play at work here, I would even say the derision,
you must read Ecclesiastes:

“Enjoy while you are in this world, enjoy…”

says the enigmatic author—
as you know—
of this astonishing text,

“Enjoy with the woman you love.”

And this is the height of paradox,
because it is precisely from loving her that the obstacle arises.