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(All parts in English)

Speaking of the psychoanalytic act, I have, if I may say so, two ambitions—one long and one short—and necessarily, the short one is the better.
— The long one, which cannot be disregarded, is to clarify what the act consists of.
— The short one is to understand in what way there is the psychoanalyst.

Already in some past writing, I have spoken of the psychoanalyst, not “of the,” in the sense of breaking down de le psychoanalyst. I stated that I only started from this: that there is du psychoanalyst. The question of whether there is the psychoanalyst is not at all to be suspended either; rather, it is the question of how there is a psychoanalyst, which is a question posed in nearly the same terms as what is called in logic the question of existence.

The psychoanalytic act, if it is an act—that is precisely where we started from last year—is something that compels us to articulate it, to express it, which is legitimate and even, going further, something that entails consequences of an act, insofar as the act itself, by its very dimension, is a saying: the act says something. That is where we began. This dimension has always been perceived; it is present in fact, in experience. One only needs to evoke, even briefly, some formulas—formulas that are compelling, formulas that have had an effect, such as acting according to one’s conscience—to grasp what is at stake.

Acting according to one’s conscience—this is indeed a kind of midpoint around which one can say the history of the act has revolved, or which one can take as a starting point to center it. Acting according to one’s conscience—why, and before whom? The dimension of the Other, inasmuch as the act comes to bear witness to it, demonstrates that something is no more eliminable.

Does this mean, of course, that this is the true turning point, the center of gravity? Can we even sustain that for a moment from where we stand—that is, from where consciousness itself is questioned? Questioned in terms of what measure it can provide—to what?

Certainly not to knowledge, nor to truth. It is from here that we take our bearings again:
— from what is not yet defined,
— from what is not yet truly grasped,
— from what is only introduced here, not even supposed: the psychoanalytic act, in order to re-examine this point of equilibrium around which the question of what an act is arises.

On the horizon, of course, we know it, there is a vast murmur—a murmur that comes from afar, that reaches us from what are called the classical times or from what is still referred to as our Antiquity, where we surely know that everything that has been said about the exemplary act, the meritorious act, about Plutarchism if you will, already carries a bit too much self-regard in entering the game. And yet, are we so far removed from it?

If we think that today it is around a discourse, a discourse on the subject, that we take up the act again, and that our advantage can rely on nothing other than the fact that we have narrowed the pivot point of this subject by imposing upon ourselves the strictest discipline—by insisting on holding as certain only that dimension by which it is the grammatical subject—then let us be clear that this is nothing new. Last year, in our exposition on the Logic of the Fantasy, we marked in its place—at the place of I do not think—this form of the subject, which appeared as an erosion at the edge of the field reserved for it, this properly grammatical dimension that allowed the fantasy to be literally dominated by a sentence, a sentence that cannot be sustained, that cannot be conceived otherwise than through the grammatical dimension: Ein Kind wird geschlagen, A child is beaten, we know it.

This is the most certain given point around which…
… in the name of the fact that we also posit, as a disciplinary principle, that there is no metalanguage,
… that logic itself must be extracted from this given that is language.

It is around this logic, however, that we have structured this triple operation, to which, through a kind of attempt, a venture into divination, a risk, we have given the form of Klein’s group—an operation we first identified in the original path by which we approached it, in terms of alienation, truth, and transference.

Certainly, these are merely reference points, and when traversed in certain ways, at least to find our bearings, to sustain what these operations may represent for us, we are compelled to give them another name. But, of course, only on the condition that we realize that it is the same trajectory.

So, it is from the subversion of the subject… which we have already articulated sufficiently for about ten years now, so that one may grasp the meaning this term takes when we say that it is from the subversion of the subject… that we must take up again the function of the act, so that we may see that it is between this grammatical subject—the one that is inscribed there, one might say, within the very notion of the act, in the way it is made present to us, the “I” of action—and this subject articulated in those elusive terms, always ready to escape us through a shift, a leap to one of the summits of this “tetrahedron,” which I already reproduced last time by recalling these functions and these terms to you.

— Here, the position of the “either-or” from which the original alienation begins, the one that leads to “I do not think,” so that it may even be chosen—and what does this choice mean?
— There, the “I am not,” which articulates its other term. These vectors, or more precisely these directions in which the fundamental operations are taken, being those I just recalled under the terms of alienation, truth, and transference—what does that mean, where does it lead us?

We posit the psychoanalytic act as consisting in this: in sustaining the transference…
we do not say who sustains it—implicitly, it is the one who performs the act, the analyst.
…this transference, which would be pure and simple obscenity, I might say, doubled with gibberish, if we did not restore to it its true knot within the function of the subject supposed to know.

We have already done this for some time, by demonstrating that everything articulated in its diversity as an effect of transference can only be ordered by being related to this truly fundamental function, present everywhere in every aspect of any progress in knowledge, and which takes on its value precisely because the existence of the unconscious puts it into question—a question never posed because there is always an answer, so to speak, implicitly, even an unnoticed answer: that as soon as there is knowledge, there is a subject, and that it takes some displacements, some fissures, some upheavals, some moments of play within this knowledge for one to suddenly take notice of it, for knowledge thus to renew itself. Who knew it before? This is barely acknowledged at the moment it happens, but it is the field of psychoanalysis that makes it inevitable.

What about the subject supposed to know, given that we are dealing with this kind of unthinkable, which, in the unconscious, situates for us a knowledge without a subject? Of course, this is something one cannot fail to notice: to continue considering that the subject is implicated in this knowledge is simply to let slip away everything concerning the efficacy of repression, which is otherwise inconceivable except in the following terms:
— that the signifier present in the unconscious and capable of returning is precisely repressed in that
— it does not imply a subject,
— it is no longer what represents a subject for another signifier,
— it is something articulated with another signifier without thereby representing a subject,
— there is no other possible definition of what truly constitutes the function of the unconscious, insofar as the Freudian unconscious is not merely this implicit, this obscured, this archaic, or this primitive, but that the unconscious always belongs to an entirely different register.

Within the movement established as “doing” in this act of sustaining or accepting—whichever you prefer—the transference, the question is: what becomes of the subject supposed to know? I will tell you that the analyst, in principle, knows what becomes of it: it surely falls. What is theoretically implicated—I have just told you—in this suspension of the subject supposed to know, this mark of suppression, this bar over the S that symbolizes it in the becoming of the analyst in analysis, manifests itself in the fact that something occurs, and at a place that is certainly not indifferent to the analyst, since it is at his very place that this thing emerges. This thing is called the object (a). The object petit a is the realization of this sort of désêtre that strikes the subject supposed to know.

That it is the analyst—and as such—who comes to this place is beyond doubt and is marked in all the inferences, if I may say so, in which he has felt implicated to the point of being unable to do anything but bend the thought of his practice in the direction of the dialectic of frustration, as you know, bound around the fact that he himself presents himself as the substance that is at play and manipulated in the analytic “doing.”

And it is precisely by failing to recognize what is distinct between this doing and the act that permits it—the act, if I may say so, that institutes it, the one from which I started just now by defining it as that acceptance, that support given to the subject supposed to know, to that which, however, the psychoanalyst knows is doomed to désêtre—and which therefore constitutes, if I may say so, an act in disequilibrium, since there is no subject supposed to know, since there cannot be one: because if there is anyone who knows it, it is the psychoanalyst above all.

Must it be now, or just a little later… but why not now, why not immediately, even if it means returning to what is at stake afterward? I hope to make all this more familiar to you by reminding you of its coordinates in other registers, in other formulations… must I remind you that the psychoanalytic task, insofar as it is outlined from this point—that is to say, from the already alienated subject, in a certain sense naïve in his alienation, the one whom the psychoanalyst knows to be defined by I do not think—that what the analyst puts him to task with is an I think which takes on its full significance precisely from the fact that he knows the I do not think to be inherent in the subject’s status:

He puts him to the task of a thinking that, in a way, presents itself in its very formulation, in the rule that he gives him, as admitting this fundamental truth of I do not think:
— that he associates freely,
— that he does not seek to know whether he is there entirely as a subject, whether he asserts himself there.

The task to which the psychoanalytic act gives its status is a task that already implies within itself this destitution of the subject.

And where does that lead us? One must remember—one must not spend time forgetting what is articulated in Freud explicitly—the result. It has a name, and Freud did not sugarcoat it for us… it is something that, I must say, deserves to be emphasized all the more,
as, in terms of subjective experience, it had never been done before psychoanalysis…
it is called castration, which must be understood in its dimension of subjective experience, insofar as nowhere else, except through this path, does the subject fully realize himself as lack. This means that subjective experience leads to what we symbolize as –ϕ.

But if every use of the letter is justified by demonstrating that it is enough to manipulate it correctly to avoid mistakes…
provided one knows how to use it, of course [Cf. D. Lagache]
… it nonetheless remains that we are at least entitled to attempt to place within it the there exists that I evoked earlier regarding the psychoanalyst at the beginning of today’s discourse, and that this there exists in question—this there exists of a lack—must be embodied in that which effectively gives it its name: castration. That is, the subject realizes therein that he does not have the organ of what I would call—since one must choose a term—the unique, unary, unifying jouissance.

It is precisely about what constitutes one jouissance in the conjunction of subjects of opposite sexes—that is, the very point on which I insisted last year in emphasizing that there is no possible subjective realization of the subject as an element, as a sexed partner in what he imagines as unification in the sexual act.

This incommensurability, which I attempted to grasp before you last year by using the golden ratio, insofar as it is the symbol that allows for the broadest play…
this is something I cannot insist upon, as it belongs to the mathematical register…
this incommensurability, this ratio of the petit a to 1—since it is the petit a that I deliberately took up again to symbolize this golden ratio—this is where what appears as subjective realization at the end of the psychoanalytic task is played out, namely, this lack, this does not have the organ.

This, of course, is not without its background if we consider that the organ and the function are two different things—and so different that one could say, as I return to from time to time, that the problem is knowing what function should be attributed to each organ. That is the true problem of the adaptation of the living. The more organs there are, the more entangled one becomes.

But let us suspend here.

So, we are dealing here with a limited experience, a logical experience—and after all, why not? Since for a moment, we leaped onto another plane, onto the plane of the living being’s relation to itself, and we only approach it through the schema of this subjective adventure. We must indeed recall here that from the perspective of the living being, all this may, after all, be considered an artifact, and the fact that logic is the locus of truth changes nothing in this, since the question—the question that lies at the end—is precisely this one, to which we shall be able to give its full emphasis in due time: What is truth?

But then, it is important for us to see that between these two lines—the one I designated as the task, the path traveled by the analysand as he moves from the naïve subject, who is just as much the alienated subject, to this realization of lack, inasmuch as I pointed out to you last time:
— this lack is not what we know to be in the place of I am not; this lack was there from the very beginning,
— that we have always known that this lack is the very essence of what is sometimes called man,
— that, as has already been said, desire is the essence of man, and simply, this lack has made progress in articulation, in its function as ὀργανον (organon), a fundamentally logical progress in this very realization of phallic lack.

But it follows that the loss…
insofar as it was there at the outset, at that same point, before the path was traveled and simply for us, who know…
the loss of the object, which is at the origin of the status of the unconscious—and this has always been explicitly formulated by Freud—is realized elsewhere. It is realized precisely—this is where I started—at the level of the désêtre of the subject supposed to know.

It is insofar as the one who provides the support for the transference—the one there beneath the black line—who, himself, knows where he starts from, not that he is there—he knows all too well that he is not there, that he is not the subject supposed to know—but that he is joined by the désêtre undergone by the subject supposed to know, that in the end, it is he, the analyst, who gives body to what this subject becomes, in the form of the objet petit a.

Thus, as one might expect, as is consistent with every notion of structure: the function of alienation, which was there at the beginning, and which meant that we started only from the top-left vertex of an alienated subject, is found at the end to be identical to itself, if I may say so, in the sense that the subject, having realized himself in his castration through a logical operation, sees himself alienating, handing over to the Other, relinquishing, if I may say so—and this is precisely the function of the analyst—this lost object from which, in its genesis, we can conceive that the entire structure originates. Hence the distinction: the alienation of the petit a, when it comes here, separates itself from the moins phi (–ϕ), which, at the end of analysis, ideally, is the realization of the subject. This is the process in question.

There is a second moment in this enunciation that I continue before you today. I open a parenthesis here to situate that before which I paused earlier. What I could have made an introduction, I will now turn into a reminder, which is this: it is no coincidence…
a schoolroom exercise, an idea of taking up a familiar point from what has been used to titillate our brains in secondary education…
that I refer to Descartes’ cogito, for it contains within itself an element particularly suited to relocate within it the Freudian detour—not, of course, to demonstrate some supposed historical coherence, as if all this were to be pieced together from century to century in a kind of progress, when it is all too evident that if there is anything this evokes, it is rather the idea of a labyrinth. But no matter, let us leave that aside…

Looking closely at Descartes’ cogito, observe well that the subject supposed to be there may well be the subject of thought—but of what kind of thought, after all? Of this thought that has just rejected all knowledge.

This is not about what those after Descartes do, who, meditating on the immediacy of I am to I think, establish an evidence that they render either consistent or elusive at their convenience. It is about the Cartesian act itself, inasmuch as it is an act. What is reported and said about it is precisely that it is an act, that it is this moment where the suspension of all possible knowledge is brought to completion. That this is what secures the I am—is it by being the thought of the cogito, or is it by the rejection of knowledge?

The question is well worth posing if one considers what is called, in philosophy manuals, the successors, the posterity of a philosophical thought, as if it were simply a matter of reworking bits of molasses into another blend—whereas each time, it is a renewal, an act that is not necessarily the same. And if we apprehend Hegel, of course, once again, as everywhere else, we find the suspension of the subject supposed to know—except that it is no coincidence that this subject is destined, at the end of the adventure, to give us absolute knowledge.

But to see what this means, one must examine it more closely—and why not examine it from the very start? If The Phenomenology of Spirit expressly establishes itself by engendering itself from its function as an act, is it not visible in the mythology of the “struggle to the death for pure prestige” that this knowledge of origin…
in having to carve its path all the way to becoming that unthinkable absolute knowledge, in which one might even wonder, since Hegel formulates it, what could possibly serve in its place—even for a single moment—as subject…
that this initial knowledge, which is presented to us as such, is the knowledge of death, that is to say, another extreme and radical form of suspension as the foundation of this subject of knowledge?

Do we not find it remarkable, and worth re-examining in terms of its consequences, that it is now easy to perceive that what analytic experience presents as objet petit a…
in the trajectory of my discourse, insofar as it does nothing but summarize, highlight, and give its sign and meaning to what this experience articulates everywhere, even in the disorder and confusion it engenders…
this objet a, do we not see that it takes the same place as:
— at Descartes’ level, this rejection of knowledge,
— at Hegel’s level, this knowledge as “knowledge of death,” whose function we assuredly know?

And that this “knowledge of death,” articulated precisely in this struggle to the death for pure prestige, inasmuch as it founds the status of the master, is what produces this Aufhebung of jouissance, that it accounts for it, that it is by renouncing—in a decisive act—jouissance in order to become the subject of death that the master institutes himself, and that it is also here for us—as I emphasized at the time—that the objection arises, which we can make to this, through a singular paradox, an unexplained paradox in Hegel: that jouissance would return to the master from this Aufhebung.

Many times, we have asked, why?
— Why, if it is in order not to renounce jouissance that the slave becomes a slave, why, why does he not keep it?
— Why would it return to the master, whose very status is precisely to have renounced it, unless in a form for which, perhaps, we may demand something more than the sleight of hand of Hegelian mastery to account for it?

It is no small test if we can discern in the Freudian dialectic a more rigorous, more precise, and more experientially consistent handling of what becomes of jouissance after the first alienation. I have already indicated this sufficiently in relation to masochism for it to be clear here what I mean and that I am merely pointing to a path to be pursued.
We certainly cannot dwell on it today, but it was necessary to mark its introduction in its place.

To continue our path and pursue it in relation to what the psychoanalytic act entails, we have done nothing so far—I mean, in what I have said about it earlier—except to demonstrate what it engenders through its doing.
To take one step further, let us now come to the only point where the act can be questioned: at its point of origin.
What is it that we are told? I already evoked this last time: it is at the end of a supposedly completed psychoanalysis that the analysand may become a psychoanalyst. This is not at all about justifying the possibility of this connection. It is about positing it as articulated and putting it to the test of our tetrahedral schema.

As you can observe, it is the subject who has completed the task, at the end of which he has realized himself as subject in castration, inasmuch as it is a defect made to the jouissance of sexual union—it is he whom we must see…
through a rotation, if you will, or a tilt by a certain number of degrees, here, as this figure is drawn, by 180 degrees…
we must see him pass, return to the starting position, once he has realized himself here, except that, as I have already emphasized, the subject who arrives here [at the top right] knows what subjective experience consists of, and that this experience also implies, if I may say so, that to his left remains what has become of the one whose act is responsible for the path traversed. In other words, for the analyst, as we now see him emerging at the level of his act, there is already knowledge of the désêtre of the subject supposed to know, inasmuch as this désêtre is, in all this logic, the necessary starting position.

That is precisely why, as we said last time, there is a question about what this act means for him—the act we earlier defined as an act in disequilibrium. What is, if you will, the measure of the illumination of his act, since of this act, insofar as he has traversed the path that makes this act possible, he is already himself the truth?

This is the question I posed last time by saying that a truth conquered “not without knowledge” is a truth that I described as incurable, if I may put it that way. Because if we follow what results from this shift of the entire figure—the only one through which the transition from conquest, the fruit of the task, to the position of the one who crosses the act from which this task can be repeated may be explained—this is where the S reappears, the S that was there at the start, in the either-or of: either I do not think or I am not. And indeed, insofar as there is an act that intermingles with the task, that sustains it, what is at stake is properly a signifying intervention.

Where the psychoanalyst acts, however little it may be—but where he acts properly within the course of the task—it is by being capable of this signifying immixture, which, strictly speaking, is not susceptible to any generalization that could be called knowledge. What analytic interpretation engenders is something that, from the perspective of the universal, can only be evoked in a form that I ask you to notice is, in comparison with everything that has hitherto been qualified as such, fundamentally opposed to it: it is, if one may say so, this kind of particularity called a universal key, the key that opens all boxes.
How on earth is one to conceive of it? What does it mean to present oneself as the one who possesses what, at first, can only be defined as an arbitrary particularity?

Such is the question that I leave here only in its initial formulation—what is the status of the one who, at this point of the subject S, can bring into existence something that responds within the task, and not in the foundational act, that responds in the task to the subject supposed to know? This is precisely what initiates the question: What must be possible for there to be an analyst?

I repeat (in the upper left corner of the schema): what we started from is that, for the entire schematization to be possible, for the logic of psychoanalysis to exist, there had to be the psychoanalyst. When he places himself there…
after having himself traversed the psychoanalytic path…
he already knows where the path he must traverse again as an analyst will lead him: to the désêtre of the subject supposed to know, to being nothing but the support of that object called objet a.

What does this psychoanalytic act delineate, given that one of its coordinates is precisely the exclusion of any act, any injunction to act, from the psychoanalytic experience?

What is recommended to what is called the patient—the analysand, to name him as precisely as possible—is that he wait to act. And if something characterizes the position of the psychoanalyst, it is precisely that he acts only within the field of signifying intervention, which I have just delineated.

But is this not also, for us, an opportunity to recognize that the status of every act is thereby entirely renewed? For the place of the act—any act whatsoever…
and it will be up to us to recognize, by tracing what we mean when we speak of the status of the act, even without being able to add human act to it…
is that if there is a place where the psychoanalyst both does not know himself, yet which is also the point where he exists, it is precisely inasmuch as he is assuredly a divided subject, even in his act. And the endpoint at which he is expected—namely, objet a—is not his own object, but rather the one that, from him as Other, the analysand requires so that, with him, it may be rejected from him.

Is there not here a figure that opens up for us what is at stake in the destiny of every act, in various forms? Since Antiquity, the hero has always been the figure in which an attempt was made to encompass, in all its magnitude and drama, the nature of the act—not that, at the same time, knowledge did not orient itself toward other traces, because this was also…
and it is worth remembering…
the time when, regarding the wise act, there was an effort—and, in truth, there is nothing here to disdain—to seek its reason in a Good: the fruit of the act, which seemed to provide the first measure of Ethics. I took this up in its time [1959-60] in my commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. That work starts from the premise that there is first the Good at the level of pleasure and that following a proper path within this register of pleasure will lead us to the conception of the Supreme Good. It is clear that this was, in its own way, a kind of act, one that has its place in the trajectory of what is called a philosophical act. The way we may judge it here is of no importance. It is a moment in time.

We know that an entirely different interrogation was at stake here—the tragic interrogation of what the act was—but that if this interrogation deferred to an obscure divine force, if there was one dimension, one power that was not supposed to know, it was precisely that of the ancient ἀνἀγκη (anankè), insofar as it was incarnated by those sorts of raving mad beings that were the gods. Measure the distance covered from this conception of the act to that of Kant!

If there is something that, in another way, makes it necessary to articulate the act as a saying, it is precisely the measure Kant gives it, in that it must be regulated by a maxim that can have universal scope.

Is this not also—some of you, I hope, will remember—what I was quite happy to caricature by conjoining such a rule, as it is formulated in the phantasmagoria of Sade? And is it not also true that, between these two extremes—I speak of Aristotle and Kant—the reference to the Other, taken as such, is found in that equally comical formulation given by at least one classical form of religious authority? The measure of the act in the eyes of God would be given by what is called “right intention.”

Could there be a more established form of deception than to place this measure at the principle of the act’s value? In any way whatsoever, could “right intention” in an act, even for a single moment, resolve for us the question of what its outcome is?

It is certain that Freud was not the first to provide us with a way out of these closed loops, and that, to suspend the value of good intention, we already have an entirely effective, explicit, and practical critique in what Hegel articulates for us concerning the law of the heart or the delirium of presumption: that it is not enough to rise up against the disorder of the world in order not to become, by that very protest, its most enduring support. Thought—the very thought that succeeded the act of the cogito—has indeed given us many models of this.

When the order that emerged from the “law of the heart” is destroyed by the critique in The Phenomenology of Spirit, what do we see if not the return of what I can only describe as an offensive of the cunning of reason?

It is here that we must recognize that this meditation has very specifically led to something called the political act, and that it is surely no trivial matter that what was generated not only by political meditation but by political act—in which I make no distinction between Marx’s speculation and the way it was…
at this or that turning point in revolution…
put into act—could we not situate an entire line of reflections on the political act, inasmuch as these were indeed acts, in the sense that they were sayings…
and precisely, sayings in the name of Someone…
that brought about a number of decisive changes?

Is it not possible to re-examine these acts within the same register that today would encompass what is emerging in the psychoanalytic act—there, where it both is and is not—an act that may be expressed in virtue of the imperative Freud gives to the analysis of the unconscious?

“Wo Es war,” he tells us, “soll Ich werden.”

And last time, I taught you how to reread it: “Wo S war,” and you will allow me here to write this Es as a barred letter—where the signifier acted, in the double sense that it had just ceased and was about to act—not “soll Ich werden” but “muß Ich,” I who act, I who—as I said the other day—launch into the world this thing to which one might address oneself as reason, muß Ich petit (a), muß Ich (a) werden, I—by the very thing I introduce as a new order in the world—I must become the waste.

This is the new form in which I propose that we frame a new way of interrogating, in our era, the status of the act, insofar as this act…
so singularly akin to a certain number of original introductions, first among them the Cartesian cogito…
insofar as the psychoanalytic act allows us to reframe the question.