🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

A small journal is about to appear these days, which I am not responsible for introducing to you. You will find it in the nature—of Saint-Germain-des-Prés—in a few days. You will notice a number of features that are peculiar to it, foremost among them the fact that, apart from my own, for reasons I explain, the articles are not signed.

Naturally, this fact has caused surprise and some stir, mainly in places where it should have been grasped almost immediately—I mean among those who, up until now, were the only ones informed that this is how the articles would appear. I mean not only psychoanalysts but, even more precisely, people who are members of my school and who, as such, should perhaps have an ear a bit more attuned to what is being said here.

In any case, I hope that after what follows in the order of what I teach you—namely what I am going to say today—the explanation, the underlying rationale of this accepted principle, that the articles will not be signed, may appear clearer to you, since it seems there are few people capable of taking the small step forward, even though it is already indicated, so to speak, by the entire preceding progression.

The striking thing is, of course, that in this little information bulletin, even though it was expressly stated that these unsigned articles did not mean that the authors would remain unknown—since it was clearly said that the aforementioned authors would appear in the form of a list at the end of each year—the term “unsigned articles” was immediately, by certain ears—ears of the kind like marine shells from which strange things emerge—peculiarly interpreted: that it was a matter of anonymity. I will spare you everything that has come out on this topic. For of course, if I have shared this with some only as a kind of instructive example—namely, how one thing can be transformed into another—there is obviously no worse deafness than that of someone who refuses to hear the first time.

There are others who have gone further and, in abundant personal correspondence, have made it clear to me to what extent this use of anonymity represented a way of using one’s collaborators like employees. Apparently, this happens in certain journals, which are not, for that matter, any worse for it nor less well-positioned. But still, from the outside, this is how one permits oneself to describe the fact that, for instance, in critical journals where it is not customary for the critic to sign his name, they are, it seems, nothing more than employees of the editorial board.

At that rate, who knows how far the notion of employee extends! In short, as they say, I have heard everything there is to hear, as I always do when I try to elicit a response at the level of an innovation in something that is extremely important—precisely, something that is beginning to come to the fore today, following The Psychoanalytic Act, namely what, from this act, results as the position of the subject called psychoanalyst, precisely insofar as this predicate must be assigned to him, namely the consecration of psychoanalyst.

This…
if the consequences we observe in the example I have just cited—
in the form of a rather evident stunting of the faculties of understanding—
if this were somehow demonstrated to be included in the premises…
as properly the consequence of what results from the inscription of the act
in what I have called the consecration in a predicative form…
this would certainly greatly relieve us in terms of understanding this peculiar effect that I have called stunting, without of course wanting to pursue any further what could be said about it at the level of those concerned themselves.

One sometimes uses, for example, the term “childish” as if it were truly to the child that one should refer when it comes to these effects. Certainly, as has been demonstrated in some very good places, children do fall into mental debility due to the actions of adults. But that is certainly not the kind of explanation we should refer to in the case at hand, namely that of psychoanalysts.

So let us return to what the psychoanalytic act consists of and state clearly that, today, we will try to move forward in the direction of the psychoanalytic act. Let us not forget the first steps we have taken in explaining it, namely that it is essentially inscribed as an effect of language. Admittedly, on this occasion we have been able to notice or at least recall that this is the case for every act, but of course that is not what specifies it.

We have developed what it entails, how the effect of language in question is ordered: it is, so to speak, on two levels.
It presupposes psychoanalysis itself precisely as an effect of language. It is, in other words, only definable at a minimum by including the psychoanalytic act as defined by the accomplishment of psychoanalysis itself.

And we have shown here… once again, we must, so to speak, double the division… that is to say, that this psychoanalysis precisely cannot be established without an act, without the act of the one who, if I may say so, authorizes its possibility, without the act of the psychoanalyst, and that within this act which is psychoanalysis, the psychoanalysing task is inscribed within this act. And already you can see appearing, in a way, this first structure of encapsulation.

But what is at stake… and this is what I have emphasized, and moreover, not for the first time: this distinction within the act itself… is the act by which a subject gives to this singular act its most peculiar consequence, namely that he himself is the one it institutes—in other words, that he positions himself as psychoanalyst.

Now this does not happen without demanding our attention at a high cost, since precisely what is at issue is that he takes this position, that he, in sum, repeats this act, fully knowing what follows from this act, that he becomes the holder of that which he knows the outcome of, namely: that by placing himself in the position of the analyst, he will ultimately come to be, in the form of (a), that rejected object, that object where the entire movement of psychoanalysis is specified, namely the one who, in the end, comes to take the place of the psychoanalyst, insofar as here the subject decisively separates himself, recognizes himself as caused by the object in question.

Caused in what? Caused in his division as subject, insofar as at the end of psychoanalysis he remains marked by that gap which is his own and which is defined in psychoanalysis by the term castration. That, at the very least, is the schema:

but of course with commentary, not simply summarized as I am doing for the moment, which I have given as to what results, what the effect of psychoanalysis is. And I marked it for you on the board as represented in what occurs at the end of the double movement of psychoanalysis, marked on this line by transference and on that one quite precisely by what is called castration, and which arrives, at the end, in this disjunction by V: the vel of -ϕ and of (a), which is here, and which comes to the place where—at the end of analysis—the psychoanalyst arrives by the operation of the psychoanalysand, an operation therefore that he has in a way authorized knowing what its outcome is, and an operation of which he constitutes himself, I told you, the end result, despite, so to speak, the knowledge he has of what this outcome is.

Here, the opening remains, so to speak, gaping, of how this might be operated—how shall we call it?—this “leap,” or again, as I did in a text that is properly speaking a proposition to explore what this “leap” is, what I more simply called the passe. Until we have looked more closely into it, there is nothing more to say about it except that it is very precisely—this leap, of course—this leap… many things are done, one could say that, all in all, everything is done, in the structuring of psychoanalysis to conceal that it is a “leap.”

Everything will be done on occasion, one might even make it a leap—provided that over what is to be crossed, a sort of covering is stretched that hides the fact that it is a “leap.” That is still the best case. It is still better than installing a small, convenient footbridge that then no longer makes it a “leap” at all.

But as long as the matter has not been effectively questioned, put to the test, within the analysis… and why delay further to say that my thesis is very precisely that the entire ordering, as I said earlier, of what is done, of what exists in psychoanalysis, is designed so that this exploration, this questioning does not take place… as long as it has not actually occurred, we cannot say anything more about it than what is said nowhere because, in truth, it is impossible for us to speak of it alone.

On the other hand, it is very easy to identify a number of points, a number of things that are, by all appearances, the consequences of the fact that this “leap” is placed in parentheses. Ask, for example, what the effects are, if one may say so, of the consecration—I will not say official but official-like—of consecration as office, …of what a subject is before and after this presumed accomplished “leap.”

That too is something that, after all, is worth questioning, for example, and that is worth making the question more pressing. I mean that it is not only worthy of being questioned, but that it is the prelude to an answer, insistence—so to speak—of the question.

If, of course, it turns out, for example, that in the very course of what I have called “consecration in office,” something becomes opaque concerning the fundamental presuppositions actually required for the psychoanalytic act—namely what I concluded with last time, designating it in its own way as what we call an “act of faith.”
An act of faith, I said, in the subject supposed to know, and precisely in a subject who has just learned what the subject supposed to know is, at least through an exemplary operation, which is that of psychoanalysis. Namely, that in no way can psychoanalysis be established as has been done so far with everything that constitutes the statement of a science—I mean that moment when the acquired knowledge of a science passes to the teachable, that is, professorial, stage—everything stated from a science never calls into question what preceded the emergence of knowledge: who knew it?

It has never even occurred to anyone, I must say, because it is taken so much for granted that there was, before, this subject supposed to know.
The statement of science, in principle the most atheistic, is on this point so firmly theistic—for what is this subject supposed to know, if not that?—that, in truth, I know of nothing serious that had been put forward in this register before psychoanalysis itself posed the question to us.

Namely, quite precisely this—which is untenable—that the subject supposed to know preexists its operation, when that operation consists precisely in the distribution between these two partners of what is at stake in what is being operated, namely what I taught you to articulate, to isolate in The Logic of the Fantasy, those two terms which are the S and the (a), insofar as, at the ideal end of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis which I will call “finite” is understood…
and please note that here I leave aside the emphasis that this term may carry in its usage in mathematics, namely at the level of set theory, the step that is taken from the level where one deals with a finite set to that where one can treat by proven methods, inaugurated at the level of finite sets, a set that is not—but for now let us stick with finite psychoanalysis… let us say that at the end:

—the psychoanalysand, we are not going to say he is all subject since he is precisely not whole, being divided. Which does not even mean that we can say, for that matter, that he is two, but only that he is subject, and that he is not, this divided subject, not without… according to the formula which I introduced, breaking the usage of a few who hear me, at the time when I was giving the seminar on Anxiety [1962–63]… that he is not without this object finally rejected to the place prepared by the presence of the psychoanalyst so that he may be situated in this relation as the cause of his division as subject.

—And that on the other hand, the analyst, we will say no more that he is all object, although at the end he is nothing but this rejected object, and it is indeed there that lies this I don’t know what mystery, which is, in sum, what all practitioners know well—namely what becomes established, finally, at the level of human relation, as the expression goes, after the end, between the one who has followed the path of psychoanalysis and the one who made himself his guide.

The question of how someone can be recognized otherwise than through the very paths by which he is assured…
that is to say, recognized otherwise than by himself, as qualified for this operation… is, after all, not a question specific to psychoanalysis. It is usually resolved, as in psychoanalysis, by election or by some form of choice, in any case.

From the perspective we are trying to establish, election or choice—all of that basically boils down to much the same order, insofar as it always presupposes intact, unquestioned, the subject supposed to know. In those forms of election that aristocrats declare to be the most idiotic—namely democratic elections—there is no reason to see why they would be more idiotic than others, simply that they assume that “the base,” as it is called—the voter, the element—knows a thing or two. It cannot rest on anything else. It is at his level that the subject supposed to know is placed. You see that as long as the subject supposed to know is there, things are always very simple—especially from the moment one begins to question it—because if one questions it, while still maintaining it in a certain number of operations, it becomes much less important to know where one places it, and indeed, it’s hard to see why one wouldn’t place it at the level of everyone.

It is precisely for that reason that the Church has long been the most democratic institution—namely: everything happens through election—because it has the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is an infinitely less stupid notion than that of the subject supposed to know.
There is only one difference to be noted in favor of the subject supposed to know: that, on the whole, one does not notice that it is always there, so that one is not at fault in maintaining it.
It is from the moment it can be called into question that we may begin to raise categories that I have just now, to tickle your ear a bit, presented under the term—which, of course, can in no way be sufficient—of stupidity.
It is not because one is obstinate that one is stupid; sometimes it is because one does not know what to do.

As for the Holy Spirit, I would point out to you that it is a much more elaborated function, of which I will not provide the theory today, but which, nonetheless, it is possible—for anyone who has reflected a little, or at least tried to—on what the function of the Christian Trinity is, to find quite precise equivalents for in terms of the functions that psychoanalysis allows us to elaborate, and quite specifically those I have highlighted in certain of my articles,
notably the one on Questions préalables à tout traitement possible des psychoses [Écrits, p.531]… under the term of Φ, except that Φ, precisely, is not a very tenable position except within the categories of psychosis.

Let us allow to surface, in a way, this detour which indeed has its interest, and return to transference in order, once more—and today this is particularly necessary—to articulate how much, since I have introduced it as constitutive of the psychoanalytic act, this analytic act is essential to the very configuration of transference. Of course, if the subject supposed to know is not introduced, transference remains entirely opaque. But from the moment the notion of the subject supposed to know as fundamental, and the fracture, if I may say so, it undergoes in psychoanalysis, are brought to light, transference becomes singularly clarified.

Which, of course, then makes it worthwhile to take a backward glance and to notice how, for example, every time transference is at issue, the authors—the good ones, the honest ones… and I must say there are many of this sort, doing everything they can—will evoke that the notion, the distancing that enabled the institution of transference in our theory, goes back to nothing less than that precise moment when, as you know, at the end of a triumphant hypnosis session with a patient, she throws her arms around his neck, so FREUD tells us. What is that?

Of course, one stops, one marvels—it’s that FREUD was not moved by it: “She takes me for another.”
We translate the way in which FREUD expresses himself: “I’m not unwiderstehlich, not that irresistible, there’s something else.” One marvels, as if there were something at that level to be amazed at.

Perhaps it is not so much that FREUD—as he expresses it in his own particular humor—did not believe himself to be the object in question.
It’s not a matter of whether one believes or does not believe oneself to be the object, it’s that when it comes to this—namely love—one believes oneself to be involved.

In other words, there is that sort of indulgence which, even the slightest bit, entangles you in that syrup we call love.
Because for now, we go about performing all kinds of operations, arabesques around what must be thought about transference.

We see people showing courage and saying:
“But of course, transference—we shouldn’t place everything on the side of the analysand, as the expression goes—we too have something to do with it.”
And indeed! And how much we have to do with it! And how much the analytic situation plays a role!

From there, another excess follows: it’s the analytic situation that determines everything, outside of the analytic situation there is no transference.
Well, you know the entire range, the variety, the dance that ensues, where each tries to demonstrate a bit more freedom of spirit than the others.

And then there are also some very strange things—someone who, at a recent congress where certain issues were raised, issues that had been questioned during the closed meeting here, wanted to know at what point, in speaking about the psychoanalytic act, I would connect all this with passage to the act and acting out. Of course I will do that!
In truth, the person who best articulated this question is someone who—as an exception—remembers what I had already articulated on this subject on a certain January 23, 1963 [seminar 1962–63: Anxiety].

The author, whose personality I had begun to introduce earlier, is someone who, when speaking of acting out…
no one had, strictly speaking, asked to be given a little lesson on transference on that topic…
gives a lesson on transference, according to that type of article that is now becoming increasingly common: things are articulated about transference that could not even be conceived if Lacan’s discourse did not exist.

Moreover, the article is dedicated to demonstrating that, for example, such a formulation that LACAN advanced in his paper Function and Field of Speech and Language [Écrits, p.237], namely that the unconscious is something missing from discourse and that it must, in a way, be supplemented, completed in history, so that history may be restored to its completeness for the symptom to emerge—etc., etc.—and naturally people sneer:

—“It would be so nice if it were like that—everyone knows that a hysteric doesn’t just get better because she remembers.”

That depends on the case, by the way, but what does it matter! The point continues to be made, to show how much more complex is what is at stake in the analytic discourse, and that we must distinguish here something which is not simply—so they say or believe, in an attempt to arm themselves against me—a structure of the statement, but that there is also the matter of knowing what it’s for, namely whether one tells the truth or not, and that sometimes, lying is, properly speaking, the way in which the subject announces the truth of his desire—precisely because there is no other path than to announce it through a lie.

This piece, written not long ago, as you can see, consists quite precisely in saying nothing but things I have myself articulated in the most explicit way. If I earlier referred to that seminar of January 23, 1963, it is because it is exactly what I said about the function of a certain type of statements of the unconscious, insofar as the enunciation implied therein is precisely that of the lie—namely the point that FREUD himself highlighted in the case of female homosexuality.

And that it is precisely thus that desire is expressed and situated, and that what is advanced on this matter as being the register where analytic interpretation plays out in its originality—

—that is to say, precisely what makes it so that what is revealed by properly interpretative intervention cannot in any way be posited as something that could have been known beforehand in a kind of anteriority,

—that is to say, what makes transference something altogether different from an already-there object, already somehow inscribed in everything it is going to produce, a pure and simple repetition of something that, already from before, would merely be waiting to be expressed therein, instead of being the product of its retroactive effect.

In short, everything I’ve been saying for three years now—of course, one should not believe it hasn’t nonetheless made its little way, through a sort of osmosis, only to be rediscovered later on, remembering only what I had said, for instance, ten years earlier, and making the second part an objection to the first.

In short, one arms oneself on occasion—and easily, and all too frequently—against what I formulate, with what I may have formulated after a certain structure had been built and traversed, with what I construct to allow you to orient yourselves in the analytic experience.
And one raises objections to what I said at a later date—as if one had invented it oneself—against what I said first…
which, of course, can be taken as partial, especially if it is isolated from its context…
but which, moreover…
for what concerns the effect of certain purely supplementary interpretations,
so to speak, of some fragment of history at the level of the hysteric…
had in fact been specified by me as being quite limited and not at all corresponding, even at the time I articulated it, to that notion that is in a way too objectifying of history, which would consist in taking the function of history in some other sense than as a history constituted from present concerns, that is, as any kind of existing history.

And quite precisely, I made this point with sufficient insistence in my discourse that is known as the “Rome Discourse,” namely that no kind of historical function can be articulated, can be understood, without the history of history,
that is to say, from the point at which the historian constructs.

I make this remark—
regarding a formulation that presents itself as a kind of poverty—
only to indicate something that is, after all, not without a certain relation to what I earlier called the structure of what happens in regard to the step that must be taken, the one I try to get psychoanalysts to take, namely what results from the questioning of the subject supposed to know.

What results from it—that means the mode of exercising the question, the formulation of a logic that renders something manageable, starting from the necessary revision at the level of this prerequisite, this presupposed, this pre-established, of a subject supposed to know
who can no longer be the same, at least not in a certain field, namely where what is at stake is how we can handle knowledge—there, in a precise point of the field, where it is not knowledge that is at stake, but something that for us is called truth.

To obtain that kind of response—precisely where my question can only be felt as the most troubling one, because the whole analytic ordering is constructed, very precisely, to conceal that question regarding the function of the subject supposed to know that needs to be revised—this very specific mode of response, which consists, for anyone who simply knows how to read, of fictitiously splitting my discourse into two stages in order to turn one against the other…
something which, moreover, is quite impossible to find in most cases and only results from the fiction that the author who expresses himself had discovered the second part himself, while I supposedly stuck to and limited myself to the first—
has something rather derisory about it, which after all is not unrelated to what may be said—
there as well, because one must recognize where things situate themselves in their reality—
about the very core of the question.

Because earlier, what did I do when I spoke of transference to bring it back to its simple, miserable origin? If I spoke on that occasion, poorly, about the terms of love, is it not because the core of the problem posed by transference in itself is this:

—it is neither that it is love, as some say,
—nor that it is not love, as others would readily assert,
—it is that it puts love, if I may say so, in the dock, and precisely in that derisory way which already allows us to see there, in the gesture of the hysteric upon exiting the hypnotic capture, to see what is at stake—what is indeed touched there, at the core, but touched immediately—and it is precisely that which defines what I say this thing is, so much richer and more instructive, and in truth: new in the world, which is called psychoanalysis.

The hysteric hits the mark straight away: FREUD, from whom she sucks the apple, is the object (a). Everyone knows that this is what the hysteric needs, especially after hypnosis, where things are somehow, so to speak, cleared out.
Of course, FREUD—and this is indeed the question raised by his case: how was he able to suspend so radically what is at stake in love?
Perhaps we can suspect this, precisely by identifying what is strictly involved in the analytic operation.

But the question is not there. That he suspended it allowed him to establish, from that original short-circuit, indeed, what he managed to extend to the point of giving it that disproportionate place in the entire analytic operation in which what is discovered? The whole human drama of desire—and in the end: what? With only, which is not nothing, all that immense acquisition, that entire new field opened up onto what subjectivation is—and in the end: what?

But the same result was reached in that brief instant, namely:
—on the one hand the S, symbolized by that moment of emergence, that sudden moment between two worlds of awakening from hypnotic sleep,
—and the (a) suddenly clasped in the hysteric’s arms.

If the (a) suits her so well, it is precisely because it is what lies at the heart of all the wrappings of love that attach to it, it is that…
I have already, I believe, articulated this sufficiently, even to the point of illustrating it on occasion…
it is around this object (a) that all the narcissistic coverings are arranged, are instituted, which support love.

The hysteric, she—that’s exactly what she needs, I mean what necessitates that “I want and I don’t want” that comes both from the specificity of that object and from its unbearable nakedness, so that it is rather amusing, incidentally, to think…
this will help us to think about it because it will put a number of things in their place…
in constructing the whole of psychoanalysis, this FREUD who, until the end of his life, kept asking:

“What does a woman want?”

without finding the answer—well, precisely that, what he created:

“a psychoanalyst!”

At the level of the hysteric at least, it’s perfectly true. What the psychoanalyst becomes at the end of analysis, if it’s true that he is reduced to this object (a), is exactly what the hysteric wants. We understand why, in psychoanalysis, the hysteric is cured of everything except her hysteria! This, of course, is only a side remark, and you would be mistaken to see in it more significance than what it precisely refers to.

But what must be seen—and what I will eventually manage to say, in order to make it perceptible to a number of those who have only recently been listening to these things here—is: is there not something in this expulsion of the object (a) that somewhat reminds us…
since “TV” shows it to us, it’s a small tendency we would rather willingly adopt…
of finding analogies between what we operate on and I don’t know what that might be situated at much more abyssal levels in biology, from the fact that it pleases biologists to express chromosomal terms in terms of messages, someone could come to…
as I’ve heard recently, because when there’s some idiocy to be said, we can be sure it won’t be missed!
…make this discovery: one could, all in all, say after that that “language is structured like the unconscious.”

Now that would be delightful! People who believed one had to go from the known to the unknown. But here, let’s go! Let’s go from the unknown to the known. That’s something that also happens quite often—it’s called occultism. That’s what FREUD calls the taste for the mystische Element. It’s precisely the reflection he had when the hysteric threw her arms around his neck. He speaks very precisely at that moment of the mystische Element. The entire meaning of what FREUD did consists precisely in advancing in such a way that one proceeds against the mystische Element, and not starting from it.

And if FREUD protests against the protest—because that is exactly what he does—that arises around him on the day he says that a dream is a liar, he repeats at that moment: if people are scandalized by the way in which the unconscious can be a liar, it’s because there’s nothing to be done, no matter what I’ve said about the dream, they will keep wanting to preserve in it the mystische Element, that is to say, that the unconscious cannot lie.

Whereas that doesn’t stop us from taking our little metaphor anyway, if this object (a), which at the end of the analysis must be expelled, which comes to take the place of the analyst—doesn’t that resemble something: the expulsion of polar bodies in meiosis, in other words, in what the sexual cells get rid of in their maturation?

Now that would be elegant! All in all, that’s what it would be, by which this comparison continues: what, then, becomes of castration?

But castration is precisely that, it’s the result, it’s the reduced cell, in a way. From there, subjectivation is achieved which will allow them to be, as they say, as God made them: male and female. Castration would really be the preparation for the conjunction of their jouissances.

From time to time, like that, on the margins of psychoanalysis—naturally, it carries no seriousness—but still, there are those who dream like that, and that has counted, people have said such things.

There is only one small misfortune: we are at the level of the subjectivation of this function of man and woman, and at the level of subjectivation, it is as object (a)—this expelled object (a)—that the one who is to be the sexual partner will appear in the real. This is where the difference lies between the union of gametes and what is involved in the subjective realization of man and woman. Naturally, at this level, one can see all the madwomen of the world rushing in.

Well, thank God, there aren’t too many in our field, of those who seek their references regarding I-don’t-know-what alleged obstacles to female sexuality in fear—a fear of penetration—that it might have been born at the level of the breach the spermatozoon makes in the capsule of the ovum.

You can see that it is not I who, for the first time, wave before you…
but to distinguish ourselves from it, to mark clearly in this respect the differences…
supposedly biological fantasies. When I say that it is in the object (a) that the sexual partner will always and necessarily be rediscovered, here we see arise the ancient truth inscribed at the corner of Genesis—the fact that the partner,
and God knows that this commits him to nothing, figured in the myth as Adam’s rib, thus the (a).

That is exactly why things have gone so badly since that time, concerning what is involved in this imagined perfection of the conjunction of two jouissances, and why, in truth, it is indeed from that first and simple recognition that arises the necessity of the medium, the intermediary of the corridors constituted by fantasy, namely of that infinite complexity, that richness of desire, with all its inclinations, all its regions, all that map that may be drawn,
all those effects at the level of those slopes we call neurotic, psychotic, or perverse, and which are inserted precisely into that forever established distance between the two jouissances.

That is how it is strange that at the level of the Church—where they aren’t that dumb, after all—they must surely realize that, there, FREUD is saying the same thing as what they are presumed to know to be the truth, given how long
they have been teaching that there is something wrong on the side of sex. Otherwise, what’s the point of that mind-numbing technical apparatus?

Well, not at all—their preference in that corner clearly goes to JUNG, whose position is clearly the exact opposite, namely that we are entering the sphere of gnosis, that is, of the obligatory complementarity of yin and yang,
of all those signs you see turning around one another as if they were forever there to be joined, animus and anima, the complete essence of the male and female.

Believe me if you like—the clergy prefer that! I raise the question whether it’s not precisely
for that reason: if they were in the truth like him, where would their magisterium go? That is not for the moment—I am not indulging in useless excesses of speech—simply for the pleasure of strolling in an inconvenient way through the field of what is called aggiornamento,
because of course these are remarks which, at the point we are now, I could just as well make at the Holy Office. I went there not long ago, and I assure you that what I said to them greatly interested them.
I did not go so far as to ask them: “Is it because it’s the truth that you don’t like it?
The truth you know to be the truth.”

I gave them time to get used to it. If I speak to you about it here, it’s for what reason? It’s to tell you that what is so disturbing
—perhaps at the level of power, in certain places where people have, after all, a bit more experience than we do—
might be something of the same order as what can happen at the level of that strange principality, of Monaco, of truth, which is called the International Psychoanalytical Association. There may be effects of the same order.

It’s not always so easy to know exactly what one is doing—especially since, in the end, perhaps we can dot the i’s on a certain number of things, namely that the analytic adventure, as far as it has allowed things to be articulated, very precisely what is called the unconscious, human desire, may be to bring something that gives a renewed impulse to what had begun down a certain slope of cretinization,
which accompanied the idea of obligatory progress dragged along behind science.

This renewed impulse of truth—it remains to be seen where it is located. I mean: if it is thus that the analytic experience is defined—to establish
those corridors, to establish that tremendous production that installs itself where? But in a gap that is in no way constituted by castration itself, of which castration, of course, is the sign, and I would say finally the most accurate temperament, the most elegant solution. But nonetheless, what remains? That we know very well that jouissance, itself, remains outside. We do not know a single word more about what is involved in feminine jouissance.

It is not a question that dates from yesterday, however—there was already a certain JUPITER, for example, subject supposed to know,
he didn’t know that. He asked TIRÉSIAS. Remarkable thing—TIRÉSIAS knew a bit more! He had only one fault: he said it. And, as you know, he lost his sight over it. You see, these things have been inscribed for a long time
in reality, in the margins of a certain human tradition. But after all, perhaps it would also be appropriate for us to realize, to understand better—and, moreover, what legitimizes our intrusion of logic into what is at stake concerning the psychoanalytic act,
is just as much what there is to encompass our bubble.

It is certainly not to reduce it to nothing to qualify it as a bubble, if that is where everything that makes sense, that is intelligible, and also senseless, happens—but after all, it would be appropriate to know where things are situated, for example
concerning feminine jouissance. There, it is quite clear that it is completely left outside the field.

Why do I begin by speaking of feminine jouissance? Perhaps it is already to clarify something—that the subject supposed to know in question, and God knows one must not be mistaken here—some might believe, because everything unfolds in confusion, that we would somehow know, on the side of the subject supposed to know, how one attains jouissance. I appeal to all psychoanalysts—those, at least, who still know what we’re talking about, and what can be aimed at and reached. We clear the ground in front of the door, but when it comes to the door, I believe we are quite incompetent.

After a very good analysis, let’s say that a woman can get her satisfaction. Still, if there is a small gain, it is precisely to the extent and in the case where, just before, she had taken herself for the Φ of earlier, for she was, of course, radically frigid. But that’s not all.

Do you also notice this: that FREUD very clearly observed, when it comes to libido as he defines it…
that is to say, precisely the field as it is at stake in analysis, libido as desire…
there would be only masculine libido, he says. That should alert us and show us precisely what I have already emphasized: that what is at stake is the relation of subjectivation concerning the thing of sex,
but insofar as this subjectivation results in the relation logically defined by S◊a, everyone here is equal.

As for libido, one can qualify it however one likes, as masculine or feminine. It is quite clear that what inclines us to think it is rather masculine is that, on the side of jouissance, as far as man is concerned, we must go back even further, because feminine jouissance is still there, from time to time, within reach of what you know. But as for masculine jouissance—at least in terms of analytic experience—strangely enough, no one ever seems to have noticed that it is reduced very precisely to the Oedipus myth.

Only, ever since I’ve been repeating that the unconscious is structured like a language, no one has yet noticed that the original myth, that of Totem and Taboo, Oedipus in short, is perhaps an original drama—no doubt—but it is an aphasic drama. The father enjoys all the women: such is the essence of the Oedipus myth, I mean under FREUD’s pen. Then there are some who don’t like it: they kill him and eat him. This has nothing to do with any drama.

If psychoanalysts were more serious, instead of spending their time tinkering with Agamemnon or Oedipus to extract I don’t know what—always the same thing—they would have begun by noting that what needs explaining is precisely that it was staged as a tragedy. But there’s something even more important to explain: why have psychoanalysts never explicitly formulated that Oedipus is nothing but a myth, by which they in some way set the limits of their operation. And it is so important to say this!

That is what allows us to place what is involved in the psychoanalytic treatment, within this mythical framework designed already to contain externally what will then be able to accommodate the realized division from which I started, namely that at the end of the analytic act, on the scene—
that scene which is structuring, but only at that level—
there is the (a) at that extreme point where we know it is at the end of the hero’s destiny in tragedy: he is nothing more than that,
and everything of the order of the subject is at the level of that something which bears that divided character that exists between the spectator and the chorus.

That is not a reason—and this is what must be looked at closely—because Oedipus came one day on stage so that one would not see that his economic role in psychoanalysis lies elsewhere, namely in the suspension of the enemy poles of jouissance, of male jouissance and female jouissance. Assuredly, in this strange division
which we already observe—and which, in my view, has never really been brought to light—of the difference:

—between the function of the Oedipus myth, that is, that of the father of the primordial horde who has no right to be called “Oedipal,” as you can see,

—and the figurative usage, at the level of the scene in question, when FREUD recognizes it, transposes it, and has it play out, whether it be the Sophoclean stage or that of SHAKESPEARE,

…there lies precisely what allows us to draw the distance between “what is really operated in psychoanalysis” and “what is not operated there.”

To be complete, in passing, and before continuing, I will add that you will notice that there is in FREUD’s text a third term, that of Moses and Monotheism, in which FREUD does not hesitate…
no more in this third case than in the previous two, which resemble each other in no way…
to claim that the father and his murder function in the same way.

Should that not begin to awaken in you some small suggestions, simply from having raised such questions, especially about this so evident tripartition of the function summarized as Oedipal in Freudian theory—and that not even the smallest beginning of elaboration at the true level of what is at stake has yet been made—and specifically, moreover, not by me, but you know why.

This is what I had prepared for you regarding the seminar On the Names-of-the-Father, having demonstrated at that time that if I began to enter this field… let’s say they seemed to me a bit too fragile to go into it—I speak of those who are interested and who already have quite enough to handle with their psychoanalytic field as here defined, which is in no way something that can claim to take up again the stage, nor tragedy, nor the Oedipal circuit.

What do we do in analysis? We become aware of the failures, the differences—differences with respect to what?—to something we know absolutely nothing about:
— with respect to a myth,
— with respect simply to something that allows us to order our observations.

We’re not going to say: in psychoanalysis, we are in the process of doing something like maturing the so-called pregenital. On the contrary, since it is through regression that we move forward into these fields of prematuration.

It is precisely…
as is glaringly obvious to anyone not absolutely mired in the things we must eventually address…
what was observed by women, precisely…
who are undoubtedly the most effective figures that psychoanalysis has produced, and in certain cases, the least stupid…
by women—by Melanie KLEIN. What do we do? What do we observe?

That it is precisely at the pregenital levels that we must recognize the function of the Oedipus. This is what psychoanalysis essentially consists in. Consequently, there is no Oedipal experience in psychoanalysis. The Oedipus is the frame within which we can regulate the play—I say “play” intentionally. It is a matter of knowing—and that’s why I am trying here to introduce some logic—which game is being played. It’s not customary to start a poker game and suddenly say, “Oh sorry! I’ve been playing whist for five minutes.” That just isn’t done—at least not in mathematics.

That’s exactly why I try, from time to time, to take a few references from there.

I won’t keep you longer today, especially since I feel that at this point, nothing is pressing us.
I don’t see why I should cut off here or there—I do so according to time.

I haven’t approached the question in the explicit terms in which I’m going to pose it, in terms of logic.
Why in terms of logic? Because in all of science—I give you here this new definition—
logic is defined as that which properly has as its aim to resolve within itself the problem of the subject supposed to know,
within itself alone—at least in modern logic, which is what we will begin from next time when
it will be a matter precisely of posing the logical question, namely that of those literal figures which are those through which
we can make progress in these problems, to figure in literal terms, in terms of logical algebra,
how the question is posed in terms of quantification as to what it means to say: “There exists a psychoanalyst.”

We will be able to make progress there where until now nothing has been done but something so obscure, so absurd as the endorsement of a qualification, like everything that has already been done elsewhere and that I was just now evoking, and which here, in following an experience so particularly grave concerning the subject supposed to know, takes on an aspect, an accent, a form, a value of relapse that precipitates its consequences so dangerously. These consequences, we will be able
to figure them in an implacable and, in a sense, tangible way, simply by having them borne by those traits, those figures,
those compositions of modern logic—I speak of those that introduce what I have already announced in name,
I dropped the word, just before a certain interruption of our seminar: the quantifiers.

Will that be useful to us? Know that it will be precisely in relation to what I said earlier, a definition which has, to be sure, never been given by any logician, since this dimension—precisely because they are logicians—is for them forever resolved, elided. They do not realize—each has their blind spot—that
the function of logic is precisely this: that the question of the subject supposed to know is duly resolved, elided. In logic, it simply does not arise.

There is no doubt whatsoever that before the birth of modern logic, there was certainly no one
who had the slightest idea of it, and within logic…
this is not the day to demonstrate it, but it would be easy, and in any case I propose the problem, the trace and the indication—it could be the object of a very elegant piece of work, more elegant than I myself could accomplish—
by a logician…
what founds, what legitimizes, what motivates the existence of logic is that infinitesimal point of defining the field
where the subject supposed to know is nothing. It is precisely because he is nothing there, and elsewhere he is fallacious, that we who are situated between the two—relying on logic on one hand and our experience on the other—can at least introduce
a question of which it is not certain…
“The worst,” as CLAUDEL says, “is never certain.”
…that it will forever remain without effect among psychoanalysts.