🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I present my best wishes for the new year, as they say. But why “new”?
It is like the moon—yet when it is finished, it begins again, and this point of ending and restarting could be placed anywhere, perhaps unlike the moon, which was made…
as everyone knows and as a familiar expression reminds us,
…not just for anyone.

There, at a certain moment, the moon disappears, which is reason enough to declare it new afterward. But for the year, and for many other things—generally, for what we call the real—it has no assignable beginning.
And yet, it must have one, from the moment it has been named “year,” due to the meaningful marking
of what we find, as part of this real, to define as a cycle.

It is a cycle not entirely precise, like all cycles in the real, but from the moment we have grasped it as a cycle,
there is a signifier that does not quite align with the real: we correct it, for instance, by speaking of a “great year” in reference to a small variation from year to year that eventually forms a cycle of 28,000 years. This is said, in short: we recycle.

And then, the beginning of the year, for example—where should it be placed? That is where the act lies.

At the very least, this is one way to approach what an act is, a structure that—if you look closely—you will realize has, all in all, been little discussed. The new year, then, gives me the opportunity to approach it from this angle.
An act is linked to the determination of a beginning, and quite specifically where there is a need to create one, precisely because there is none. That is why, in the end, it makes a certain sense that I began
by presenting my best wishes for the new year: it falls within the realm of the act.

Of course, it is just a small act, a very secular residue of an act, but do not forget that if we engage in these little formalities—more or less fading into obsolescence, yet persisting—this very persistence is what is remarkable. They echo things spoken of as if they belonged to the past, namely ceremonial acts that, in a framework one might call the Empire, consisted in—so the story goes!—
the Emperor, for instance, handling a plow with his own hands that day.

It was an act precisely meant to mark a beginning, insofar as it was essential to a certain imperial order that this foundation, renewed at the start of each year, be inscribed. Here we see the dimension of what is called a traditional act, one that is founded on a particular necessity: the transmission of something deemed essential within the order of the signifier. That it must be transmitted apparently implies that it does not transfer itself, that beginning is thus truly renewal.

This opens the door—not even through the path of opposition—to the idea that it is conceivable for the act to constitute…
if one may put it this way, without quotation marks…
a true beginning, that there may indeed be an act that is creative, and that this is the beginning. Now, merely evoking this horizon of how the act functions reveals that this is, quite evidently, where its true structure resides—this is perfectly apparent, obvious, and it also demonstrates, moreover, the fertility of the myth of Creation.

It is somewhat surprising that it has not become…
in a manner now common, accepted in general consciousness…
clear that there is a definite relation between the rupture that occurred in the evolution of science at the beginning of the 17th century and the realization—the advent—of the true scope of this myth of Creation, which took sixteen centuries to reach its real impact, what can, through that era, be called Christian consciousness. I cannot emphasize enough this observation, which, as I always point out, is not mine but that of Alexandre Koyré.

“In the beginning was the action,” says Goethe a little later. It is often believed that this contradicts the Johannine phrase: “In the beginning was the Word.” Yet this requires a closer look. If you enter the question through the path I have just tried to open for you, in a familiar form, it becomes entirely clear that there is not the slightest opposition between these two formulations: “In the beginning was the action” because, without an act, there simply can be no question of a beginning.
Action is indeed at the beginning because there can be no beginning without action.

If we realize, by some means, what has not or has never been fully brought to the forefront here as necessary:
— that there is no action that does not present itself with a signifying point, first and foremost,
— that this is what characterizes the act: its signifying point, and that its efficacy as an act, which has nothing to do with the effectiveness of mere doing, is something that pertains to this signifying point, then we can begin to speak of an act, simply, without losing sight of the rather curious fact that it is a psychoanalyst who, for the first time, can place this emphasis on the term “act.”

More precisely, what makes this feature strange and therefore problematic is twofold:
— on the one hand, that it is in the analytical field—namely, in relation to the missed act—that it has precisely appeared that an act that presents itself as missed is still an act and solely by virtue of being signifying;
— on the other hand, that a psychoanalyst quite specifically presides—let us limit ourselves to this term for now—over an operation called “psychoanalysis,” which, in principle, commands the suspension of all action.

You can sense that as we now engage on this path of interrogating, more precisely and more insistently than we could in the introductory sessions of the past trimester, what is at stake in the psychoanalytic act, I still want…
a bit more than I was able to do in these first months…
to point out that on our horizon, we have the question of what constitutes any act, of that act whose inaugural character I just demonstrated, and whose model, so to speak, is conveyed to us through that wavering meditation that continues around politics, through the act known as the “Rubicon,” for example. Behind it, others take shape:
the “Night of August 4,” the “Tennis Court Oath,” the “October Days.”

Where is the meaning of the act here? Certainly, we grasp, we sense that the point at which questioning first suspends itself is the strategic significance of one crossing or another. Thank God, it was not for nothing that I first evoked the Rubicon. It is a rather simple example, clearly marked by the dimensions of the sacred. Crossing the Rubicon did not have, for CAESAR, a decisive military significance; but crossing it meant entering the motherland, the land of the Republic, the land whose mere approach was a violation. This was something that had been crossed, in the sense of those revolutionary acts that I—surely not without intention—have sketched behind it.

Is the act at the moment when LENIN gives a particular order, or at the moment when the signifiers unleashed upon the world assign to a precise strategic success its already-traced meaning of a beginning—something in which the consequence of a certain strategy may come to take its place, to assume its value as a sign?

After all, the question is well worth posing here at a certain point of departure, for in the way I will advance today onto this terrain of the act, there is also a certain crossing—to evoke this dimension of the revolutionary act and to pin it down as something distinct from any mere effectiveness of war, as that which is called forth: the emergence of a new desire.

“A tap of your finger on the drum releases all the sounds and begins the new harmony.
A step from you, and the new men rise and march forward.
Your head turns: the new love!
Your head turns back—the new love!”

I believe none of you fail to hear this text by RIMBAUD, which I will not complete, and which is titled À une Raison.

This is the formula of the act. Can the act of positing the unconscious be conceived otherwise? And especially from the moment:
— when I recall that the unconscious is structured like a language,
— when, having recalled it without provoking any particularly deep disturbance in those concerned, I take it up again and speak of its disruptive effect on the cogito.

Here, I repeat, I emphasize: it so happens that in a certain field, I can formulate “I think,” and it bears all the characteristics of this statement:
— what I dreamed last night,
— what I missed this morning, or even yesterday, through some uncertain stumble,
— what I touched without intending to, in making what is called a witticism, sometimes unintentionally.

But in this “I think,” am I there?

It is absolutely certain that the revelation of the “I think” of the unconscious implies…
everyone knows this, whether they have studied psychoanalysis or not, it is enough to open a book and see what it is about…
something that, at the level of what DESCARTES’ cogito makes us grasp of the implication of “therefore I am,”
introduces a dimension I would call disarming, which means that where I most surely “think,” upon realizing it, I was there—
but exactly in the same way one says—
you know that I have already used this example; experience has taught me that repetition is not in vain—
in the same sense, according to the example taken from the remarks of the linguist GUILLAUME, as that very specific use
of the imperfect in French, which creates the entire ambiguity of the expression:
“A moment later, the bomb was exploding.”
Which precisely means that it did not explode.

Allow me to add, to apply this nuance to the German Wo Es war, which does not contain it,
and thereby to extend the renewed use that can be given to Wo Es war soll Ich werden:
— “there where it was”: where it is no longer except there, because I know that I have thought it,
— soll Ich werden: “here… —the Ich, as I have long emphasized, can only be translated as the subject— …the subject must come to be.”

But can it? That is the question. “There where it was,” let us translate: “I must become”—continue: “a psychoanalyst.”
Yet, given the question I have raised about this Ich translated as “the subject,”
how is the psychoanalyst to find his place in this conjuncture?

It is this conjuncture that last year I explicitly articulated under the title of The Logic of the Fantasy
through the disjunctive conjunction, a very particular disjunction that I introduced here more than three years ago,
by innovating with the term alienation—that is to say, the one that presents this singular choice
whose consequences I have outlined, namely that it is a forced and necessarily losing choice:

— “Your money or your life!”
— “Liberty or death!”

The last one we introduce here, which I bring back to show its relation to the psychoanalytic act:

— “Either I do not think, or I am not.”

If you add to it—as I did earlier with soll Ich werden—the term that is indeed at stake in the psychoanalytic act,
the term “psychoanalyst,” all it takes is to run this little machine:
obviously, there is no hesitation—if, in choosing one side, I am not a psychoanalyst,
then it follows that I do not think…

Of course, this is not merely of humorous interest; it must lead us somewhere,
and in particular to ask ourselves not only about our experience from last year,
but about what I would call that initial assumption constituted by this:
“Either I do not think, or I am not.”

How is it that this has not only proven effective but necessary to what I called last year a logic of the fantasy—
that is, a logic such that it retains within it the possibility of accounting for what fantasy is and its relation to the unconscious?
To be there as unconscious, it is necessary that I do not yet think it as thought.
What my unconscious is, there where I think it, is to no longer be at home, so to speak.

I am no longer there, precisely: I am no longer there, in terms of language,
in the same way as when one responds at the door:
“Monsieur is not in.”
It is an “I am not there” inasmuch as it is said, and this is precisely what gives it its importance—
it is, in particular, precisely what makes it so that, as a psychoanalyst, I cannot pronounce it:
you can imagine the effect it would have on the clientele.

This is also what traps me in the position of “I do not think”—
at least if what I am advancing here as logic is capable of being followed in its true thread.
“I do not think” in order to be, in order to be there where…
having drawn below the two circles and their intersection…
I have marked…
with all the quotation marks of caution and to tell you not to be too alarmed…
this “false being.”

It is the being of all of us. One is never so solid in one’s being as when one does not think—everyone knows this.
Only, all the same, I would like to mark the distinction of what I am advancing today.
There are two distinct falsehoods here. Everyone knows that when I entered psychoanalysis with a little broom called
the mirror stage, I began by identifying…
because after all, it was in FREUD—it has been said, repeated, hammered in—I took the mirror stage as a coat rack,
it was even immediately emphasized much more than I was ever able to do in statements that took sensitivities into account…
that there is no love that does not fall within this narcissistic dimension, that if one knows how to read FREUD,
what opposes narcissism, what is called object libido…
which concerns what is there [see diagram] at the bottom left corner, the object (a),
for that is object libido…
has nothing to do with love, since love is narcissism and the two are opposed: narcissistic libido and object libido.

Thus, when I speak of “false being,” it is not a question of what indeed comes to lodge itself there,
so to speak, on top, like mussels on a ship’s hull;
it is not a question of the bloated being of the imaginary.
It is a question of something beneath it that gives it its place.
It is a question of the “I do not think” in its structuring necessity,
as inscribed in this initial position, without which we would not have been able, last year,
to articulate the slightest thing about The Logic of the Fantasy.

Naturally, this “I do not think” is a convenient position.
Not only does the bloated being I just mentioned find its place there,
but everything does: the medical prejudice as a whole,
and the psychological or psychologizing prejudice no less.

Overall, observe this:
in any case, it is the psychoanalyst who is particularly subject to this “I do not think,”
for if he is inhabited by everything I have just pointed out, labeled as prejudices and qualified by their origin,
he has, in addition to others—doctors, for example—
the advantage, if I may say so, that when medical prejudice takes hold of him—
and God knows it does, for example, if we take that one alone—
precisely, he does not think about it. Doctors, at least, it troubles them. Not the psychoanalyst!

He takes it as it is, precisely, probably to the extent that he does have this awareness,
after all, that it is nothing but a prejudice.
But since it is a matter of not thinking, he is all the more comfortable with it.
Except in rare cases, have you ever seen a psychoanalyst, for instance,
question what PASTEUR represents in the history of medicine?
Surely, this should have already drawn someone’s attention.
I am not saying it has never happened, but it is not known.
PASTEUR is not exactly a trendy subject, but he could have been of interest to a psychoanalyst.
That has never happened. We shall see if it changes!

In any case, here we should propose this little exercise:
what is this initial point?
It is well worth asking the question,
if, as we glimpsed at the outset—and this is the axis of our progress today—
the act itself is always related to a beginning.
This logical beginning…
I deliberately refrained from posing the question last year,
because, in truth, as with more than one point in The Logic of the Fantasy,
we should have left it in suspense…
let us pin it down with ἀρχή [arché], since this is how we have entered today: through the beginning.

It is an ἀρχή, an initium, a beginning—but in what sense?
Is it in the sense of zero on a small measuring instrument,
a meter, for example, simply?

This is not a bad starting point for the question,
because already, it seems—it is even immediately evident—
that posing the question this way excludes the possibility
that it is a beginning in the sense of the unmarked.
We can even grasp directly that the mere fact
that we must interrogate this ἀρχή to determine
whether it is zero means that, in any case,
it is already marked.

And after all, this fits quite well,
because from the effect of the mark,
it appears highly satisfying to see unfold the:

“Either I do not think, or I am not.”

Either I am not this mark,
or I am nothing but this mark,
which means that I do not think.

For the psychoanalyst, for example, this would apply quite well:
he has the label, or he is not.

Only, one must not be mistaken:
as I have just marked it,
at the level of the mark,
we see only the necessarily resulting effect of alienation—
namely, that there is no choice between the mark and being.
So if it must be marked somewhere,
it is precisely at the upper left end [see diagram]
of “I do not think.”

The alienating effect has already taken place, and we are not surprised to find here, in its original form, the effect of the mark, which is sufficiently indicated in this deduction of narcissism that I have presented in a diagram—one that I hope at least some of you are familiar with—the one that establishes the relation, in their interdependence, between the ideal ego and the ego ideal.

Thus, the question remains suspended as to the nature of the logical starting point, insofar as it still holds within the conjunction prior to the disjunction—the “I do not think” and the “I am not.”

Certainly, last year, this was what we could not return to…
since it was our departure point and, if I may say so, the initial act of our logical deduction…
unless we had that which constitutes the opening, the gap that is always necessary to rediscover in any exposition of the analytical field. It was this that, after establishing those phases of The Logic of the Fantasy, led us, in the last trimester, to focus on a sexual act precisely defined by the fact that it constitutes an aporia.

Let us therefore resume, starting from the psychoanalytic act, this inquiry into what constitutes the initium of logic, of the logic of fantasy, which I needed to recall here. This is why I have written on the board today this phrase:
“Either I do not think, or I am not,” which I articulated last year in terms of:
— the operation of alienation,
— the operation of truth,
— the operation of transference,
to make them the three terms of what one might call a Klein group,
provided, of course, that one realizes that by naming them as such, we do not yet see their return,
which constitutes, for each, the:
— operation of return.

Here, as they are inscribed with these vectorial indications, this is, if I may say so, only half of a Klein group.
Let us take up the act again at the sensitive point where we observe it within the analytical institution,
and let us start again from the beginning, insofar as today this means that the act institutes the beginning.

To begin a psychoanalysis—yes or no—is it an act? Assuredly, yes. But who is the one who performs this act?
Earlier, we remarked on what it implies for the one who enters psychoanalysis—what it implies, precisely,
in terms of a resignation from the act. In this sense, it becomes very difficult to attribute the structure of the act
to the one who enters into psychoanalysis. A psychoanalysis is a task, and some even say, “it is a profession.”
It is not I who have said this, but rather people who, after all, know something about it.
One must be taught one’s profession—those people who, whether or not they adhere to some rule, however you define them.
In this domain, they do not refer to their profession as “psychoanalyzing”;
now they will, since the word is making its way, though that is indeed what it means.

Thus, it is clear that if there is an act, it must probably be sought elsewhere.
We do not need to push ourselves too hard to ask, to say that if it is not on the side of the analysand,
it must be on the side of the analyst—there is no doubt about that.
Only, this becomes one of the difficulties, because, after what we have just said,
does the act of positing the unconscious need to be repeated each time?
Is it truly possible—especially if we consider that, based on what we have just said,
to repeat it each time would mean giving ourselves, each time, a new occasion not to think?

There must be something else, a relation between task and act that has perhaps not yet been grasped,
and perhaps cannot be grasped.
Perhaps a detour is necessary. We immediately see where this detour is provided to us:
at another beginning, at that moment of beginning when one becomes a psychoanalyst.
We must take into account the fact—which is there in the given data, and, if we are to believe what is said,
we must indeed trust it in this domain—that beginning to be a psychoanalyst,
as everyone knows, starts at the end of a psychoanalysis.
We must take this as it is given to us if we want to grasp something.
We must start from there, from this point that, in psychoanalysis, is received by all.
So, let us start with things as they present themselves.

One has reached the end once, and it is from there that we must deduce the relation
this has with the beginning of every single time.
One has reached the end of one’s psychoanalysis once, and this act—so difficult to grasp at the beginning
of each of the analyses that we guarantee—must have a relation to this end, this once.

So then, what I put forward last year must serve some purpose—namely, the way in which the end of psychoanalysis is formulated within this logic. The end of psychoanalysis presupposes a certain realization of the operation of truth, meaning that if, indeed, it must constitute that kind of trajectory which, from the subject installed in his “false being,” leads him to realize something of a thought that includes the “I am not,” it is not without properly finding, in an inverted and crossed form, its truer place under the form of “there where it was,” at the level of “I am not,” which is found in this object (a)…
of which we have done much, it seems to me, to give you both the meaning and the practice…
and, on the other hand, that lack which remains at the level of the natural subject, the subject of knowledge, the “false being” of the subject—
that lack which has always been defined as the essence of man and which is called desire, but which, at the end of an analysis,
translates into that thing—not only formulated but incarnated—which is called castration:
this is what we are accustomed to labeling with the letter “-J.”

The inversion of this left-to-right relation, which aligns the “I do not think” of the alienated subject with the “there where it was” of the unconscious in discovery, and the “there where it was” of desire in the subject with the “I am not” of unconscious thought—
this reversal is precisely what supports the identification of (a) as the cause of desire
and of “-J” as the place from which the gap specific to the sexual act is inscribed.

It is precisely here that we must pause for a moment.
You see it, you grasp it directly—there are two Wo Es war, two “there where it was,”
which correspond, moreover, to the distance that theoretically divides the unconscious from the Id.

There is the “there where it was” here [diagram, top left], inscribed at the level of the subject,
and—I have already said this, and I repeat it so that you do not let it slip past you—
where it remains attached to this subject as a lack.

There is the other “there where it was,” which occupies an opposite place—
that of the lower right corner, the place of the unconscious,
which remains attached to the “I am not” of the unconscious as an object, the object of loss.

The lost object, original to the entire analytic genesis—
the one FREUD hammers home throughout the different stages of his articulation of the unconscious—
is there, this lost object that causes desire.
We will have to see it as being at the principle of the act.
But this is only an announcement; I will not justify it immediately.
We need to cover some ground before we can be certain,
for we must pause here for a moment.
One generally only stops for a moment to realize how much time has already passed without knowing it.

Shall we say… shall we say—precisely in order to correct ourselves—”passed”?
We have said that we have passed it,
but it would be better to say passing.
And if you will allow me to play with words,
this is precisely what I mean—not without knowing it,
that is, with knowledge we have passed it. But precisely…
because I was presenting to you the result of my little diagrams from last year,
which you are supposed to know—if indeed there is no presumption in that assumption…
it is with this knowledge that I have passed it—this time—
too quickly, that is, in that haste which, as you know,
is precisely what allows truth to slip away.
And this, after all, is what allows us to live.

The truth is that the lack at the top left [diagram]
is the loss at the bottom right,
but that loss, in turn, is the cause of something else.
We shall call it “the cause of itself,”
provided, of course, that you do not misunderstand.
“God is the cause of Himself,” SPINOZA tells us.
Did he know so well what he was saying? Why not, after all?
He was a formidable thinker.
It is quite certain that in granting God the status of “cause of Himself,”
he thereby dispelled all ambiguity surrounding the cogito,
which might very well lay claim to a similar pretension—
at least in the minds of some.

If there is one thing that analytic experience reminds us of,
it is that if this term “cause of itself” means anything,
it is precisely in indicating to us that the self, or what is so called—
in other words, the subject—
must necessarily be recognized as dependent on this cause
which renders it divided and which is called the object (a).

This marks what is so important to mark:
— that the subject is not “cause of itself,”
— that it is the “consequence of loss,”
and that it would have to situate itself within the consequence of this loss—
the one that constitutes the object (a)—
to know what it is that it lacks.

That is why I say that we were moving too fast in stating, as I did, these two points of the oblique from left to right and from top to bottom, the two terms torn apart by the initial division. The matter is assumed to be understood in the statement that “there where it was” is lack from the subject’s perspective, but it is truly so only if the subject becomes loss [bottom right].

Now, this is something he can only think by making himself be: “I think,” he says, “therefore I am.” He irresistibly throws himself into being, into that false act called the cogito [top left]. The act of the cogito is the mistake about being, as we see in the definitive alienation that results from it, in the body being cast into extension. The rejection of the body outside of thought is DESCARTES’ great Verwerfung; it is signed by its effect—its return in the real, that is, in the impossible: it is impossible for a machine to be a body. That is why knowledge proves it more and more by breaking it down into spare parts. We are caught up in this adventure, and I believe I do not need to make allusions. But let us leave DESCARTES aside for today and return to the sequence and the punctuation we must give to our progress today.

The subject of the analytic act—we know—can know nothing of what is learned through analytic experience, except for what operates there as what is called transference. Transference, I have restored in its full function by linking it to the subject supposed to know.
The termination of analysis consists in the fall of the subject supposed to know and its reduction to the emergence of this object (a) as the cause of the subject’s division, which takes its place.

The one who, in fantasy, plays the part with the analysand in relation to the subject supposed to know—namely, the analyst—is precisely the one who, at the end of the analysis, comes to bear the burden of being nothing more than this remainder, this leftover of the known thing, which is called the object (a). It is around this that our question must turn.

The analysand who has reached the end of analysis, in the act—if there is one—that carries him toward becoming a psychoanalyst, must we not believe that he only effects this transition through the act that restores the subject supposed to know to its place? We now see where this place is, because it can be occupied, but it is only occupied at the moment when this subject supposed to know has been reduced to this term: that the one who, up until then, guaranteed it by his act—namely, the psychoanalyst—has himself become this remainder, this object (a).

The one who, at the end of a so-called “didactic” analysis, so to speak, picks up the gauntlet of this act—
we cannot overlook the fact that he does so knowing what his analyst has become in the fulfillment of this act, namely, this remainder, this waste, this rejected thing.

In restoring the subject supposed to know, in taking up the torch of the analyst himself,
he cannot but place—whether or not he touches it—
the (a) at the level of the subject supposed to know,
that subject supposed to know which he can only take up again as the condition of any analytic act.
At that moment, in what I have called “the pass,”
he knows that this désêtre, this “dis-being,”
through him—the analysand—has struck the analyst’s being.

I said “without touching it”—
this is how he commits himself,
because this désêtre, instituted at the point of the subject supposed to know,
he—the subject in the pass—at the moment of the analytic act,
knows nothing of it, precisely because he has become the truth of this knowledge.
And, if I may say so, a truth that is reached “not without knowledge,”
as I said earlier, well, that is incurable:
one is that truth.

At the outset, the analytic act functions, so to speak,
with a falsified subject supposed to know,
because the subject supposed to know—
if it now turns out, as was quite simple to see right away,
that it is at the ἀρχή [arché] of analytic logic—
if the one who becomes an analyst could be cured of the truth he has become,
he would know how to mark what has changed at the level of the subject supposed to know.
This is what we have marked in our graph with the signifier S(A).

One must realize that the subject supposed to know is reduced,
at the end of analysis, to the same “not-being-there”
that characterizes the unconscious itself,
and that this discovery is part of the same operation of truth.

I repeat: the questioning of the subject supposed to know, the subversion of what is implied—
I would say—by every functioning of knowledge, and which I have already interrogated before you many times in this form:

— “So this knowledge, whether it be Cantor’s transfinite numbers or the analyst’s desire, where was it before one knew it?”

Only from there, perhaps, can one proceed toward a resurgence of being, whose condition is to realize that if its origin and its re-interpellation…
the one that could be made from the signifier of the Other, finally vanished toward what replaces it,
since it is from its field, from the field of the Other, that this was torn away—namely, this object called object (a)…
this would also mean realizing that being, as it may arise from any act whatsoever, is being without essence,
just as all objects (a) are without essence.
This is what characterizes them: objects without essence,
which may or may not be in the act to be re-evoked from this kind of subject who—
as we shall see—is the subject of the act,
of every act, I would say, insofar as—like the subject supposed to know—
at the end of analytic experience, it is a subject who, in the act, is not there.