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(All parts in English)

NASSIF

LACAN

Someone who, already alerted last time thanks to the efforts of Mr. Charles MELMAN… who kindly agreed last time to take the place here for the closed seminar at the end of January… found himself solicited by him, and in a way all the more legitimate since Jacques NASSIF, who is in question, kindly agreed to write, for the Bulletin of the École Freudienne, the summary of my seminar from last year, the one on The Logic of the Fantasy.

He kindly responded to this call, which consisted in asking him whether there was something to say, or to question, or to present, that would give an idea of the way he understands the point we have reached this year. I am entirely grateful to him for having given this response, that is, for having prepared something that will serve as an introduction to what is going to be said today. Already, I can say in what sense this brings me satisfaction:

— first of all, for the pure and simple fact that he prepared this work, that he prepared it competently, being perfectly up to date with what I said last year… — and then it turns out that, from this work, what he extracted—I mean what he emphasized, what he isolated in relation to the content of what I said last year—is, strictly speaking, the logical network and above all its importance, its emphasis, its meaning in what may perhaps be defined, indicated as the orientation of my discourse, finally its aim, its goal, to say the word.

That we are precisely at the point where, in this elaboration, this question I am posing on the analytic act, which presents itself as something profoundly implicating for each of those here listening to me in the capacity of analysts, we have indeed reached the point where I will place even stronger emphasis than I have placed up to now, precisely so as not simply… on this something that can be understood in a certain way as “In all things, there is a logic.”… no one really knows what that means… to say that there is an internal logic to something, that we are simply trying to find the logic of the thing, that is to say that the term “logic” would here be used in a somehow metaphorical way.

No, that is not quite what we are coming to, and last time, at the end of my discourse, there was an indication of it in this certainly audacious affirmation, and one which I do not expect in advance will find an echo, resonance… I hope at least sympathy… in the ear of one or another of those I may have in my audience, here present in the capacity of logicians.

Finally, what I indicated is this, that there must be… and of course, I hope to show myself capable of providing some argument in this direction… some relation, even some possibility of defining as such logic… logic in the precise sense of the term, namely that science which has been elaborated, specified, defined… and in saying “defined” this does not mean that it was defined from the first step, in one stroke.

Let us say at least that perhaps it is its property that it cannot properly speaking be established except from a very articulated definition already.

This is indeed why, in fact, we do not properly begin to distinguish it except with ARISTOTLE, and we already, right from the start, have the sense that it is immediately carried to a kind of perfection, which nevertheless does not exclude that there were very serious shifts, even detachments, which in some way allow us to deepen what is at stake.

The other day I posited that there might be a definition to which no one had ever thought until now, and which we will try to formulate in a completely precise way, which could be articulated around this: what is attempted through logic… and this “one” here also deserves to be retained and, in some way, marked with parentheses as a point to be elucidated later… is something that would be of the order—of what?—of mastery or of riddance, which are sometimes the same thing, precisely at the point of what we, in our practice as analysts, are designating as the subject supposed to know: a field of science which would have precisely as its end… and even here it would not be excessive to say “as its object” for the word “object” here takes on all its ambiguity of being internal to the operation itself… let us say it straight away, to exclude from something, though not only articulable but articulated, to exclude as such the subject supposed to know.

It is an idea, to define it this way, that can obviously only arise from the point where we now stand… at the very least, where we now stand… I have sufficiently accustomed you to posing the question in this way, namely to realizing that in psychoanalysis—and this is truly the only sharp point, the only knot, the only difficulty—the point that at once distinguishes psychoanalysis and deeply puts it into question as a science, is precisely this thing, which, moreover, has never been properly criticized, taken on as such, namely: that what knowledge constructs—this is not self-evident—someone knew it beforehand.

Curiously, the question seems superfluous everywhere else in science. It is quite clear that this is due to the way this science itself originated. You will see that in what Mr. NASSIF will tell you shortly, there is a precise identification of the point where, indeed, one can say that this is how science originated.

Only, it is, according to what I articulate, precisely what is not instituted in this way for psychoanalysis—the specific question of psychoanalysis, the one that constitutes, or at the very least around which is instituted, this obscure point that we are trying this year to bring into a certain light—is the psychoanalytic act.

In other words, it is not possible to make the slightest advance, the slightest progress regarding this act itself, because it is a matter of the act, and this is the grave tone of this discourse—that it is not a thought about the act, it is a discourse that is instituted within the act and, if one may say so, this discourse must be ordered in such a way that there can be no doubt, that it cannot be articulated otherwise.

This is indeed what is most difficult and most precarious, and what does not at all allow it to be received in the way that philosophical discourses are generally received, which are understood in a way we know well, which is this: what kind of music can one make around it!

Since after all, on the day of the exam, one must put philosophers also where they belong, that is, on school benches, that’s all that’s being asked of you—it’s music around the professor’s discourse. But I am not a professor because I precisely question the subject supposed to know. That is exactly what the professor never questions since he is essentially, as a professor, its representative. I am not talking about scholars; I am talking about the scholar at the moment he begins to be a professor.

My analytic discourse, moreover, has never ceased to be in this position which precisely constitutes its precariousness, its danger, and also its series of consequences. I remember the genuine horror I provoked in my dear friend Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY when I explained to him that I was in the position of saying certain things, which have now become music, of course, but which, at the moment I was saying them, were nonetheless said in a certain way, always from this bias—it wasn’t because I hadn’t yet posed the question as I do now, that they were not already really instituted as such.

And what I was saying about analytic material was that it has always been of such a nature that it precisely passes through this split, this fissure that gives this discourse its character—so unsatisfying because one does not see things neatly arranged there, in the positivist construction, with floors, and it rises to a peak, —which is obviously quite reassuring, —which corresponds to a certain classification of the sciences that remains dominant in the minds of those entering into anything: medicine, psychology, and other fields, but which is obviously untenable from the moment we are in the psychoanalytic practice.

So, as this kind of discourse has always engendered, of course, some kind of discomfort due to the fact that it is not a professor’s discourse, this is what generated on the margins those kinds of rustlings, murmurs, commentaries that resulted in formulas as naïve as this one… all the more disconcerting as they were uttered by people who should have been the least naïve… from the famous editorial board pillar, just like that, who should nevertheless know a thing or two about what is said and what is not, to get from him that child’s cry I reproduced somewhere, namely: “Why doesn’t he say the truth about the truth?”

It is obviously rather comical and gives a bit of an idea of the measure, for example, of the variously experienced, tormented, even panicked or on the contrary ironic reactions I could gather… these are the terms in which I expressed myself to MERLEAU-PONTY… as early as the afternoon of the very day I spoke.

There, I have the privilege of having this sampling, this cross-section of my audience, that is, people who come onto my couch to communicate to me the first shock of this discourse. The horror, as I expressed it, which immediately manifested in my interlocutor—MERLEAU-PONTY on that occasion—is in itself truly significant of the difference between my position in this discourse and that of the professor. It rests entirely on the questioning of the subject supposed to know, because everything is there.

I mean that even when one adopts the most radical, the most idealistic, the most phenomenologizing positions, there remains nonetheless one thing that is not put into question… even if you go beyond the thetic consciousness, as it is called, if, by placing yourself in non-thetic consciousness, you take this step back from reality which seems to be something entirely subversive—in short, if you take the existentialist step—there is one thing you still do not put into question, namely: whether what you are saying was true beforehand.

That is precisely the question for the psychoanalyst, and what is most striking is that any psychoanalyst—I would even say the least reflective—is at least capable of sensing it; he even goes so far as to express it in a discourse, for example, which I referred to last time: the “character” who is certainly not in my wake, since he precisely feels obliged to express it in opposition to what I say, which is truly comical, for he could not even begin to express it if my discourse had not existed beforehand. This is what I alluded to when speaking of that article which, moreover, is part of a conference that has not yet appeared in the Revue française de psychanalyse, where it will surely be published one day.

Now, after this introduction, you will see that the discourse of NASSIF, to which I will add what is appropriate, is going to come to the point intended to gather together what could constitute the essence of what I articulated last year as The Logic of the Fantasy, at the moment when, precisely, my discourse this year—this presence of logic… and not this logical elaboration… this presence of logic as an exemplary instance which, insofar as it is expressly made to rid itself of the subject supposed to know, perhaps… and this is what in the course of my discourse this year I will try to show you… gives us the path, the indication of a trail, in a sense, which is the one predestined for us, this trail which, in a sense, it already prefigures for us to the extent that its variations, its vibrations, its pulsations—those of this logic—and precisely since the time… correlated with the time of science, not without reason… when it itself began to vibrate, to no longer be able to remain on its Aristotelian base, the way, in short, in which it cannot rid itself of the subject supposed to know, if that is indeed how we must interpret the difficulty in establishing this logic that is called mathematical logic or logistics.

There is something there from which we can trace the manner in which the question presents itself to us, regarding what is at stake in the analytic act, because it is precisely at this point—that is, where the analyst must situate himself; I do not say only recognize himself in act, but situate himself—that we can find support, at least so I have thought, from logic, in a way that clarifies for us at least the points over which we must not slip, must not let ourselves fall into any confusion, concerning what constitutes the status of the psychoanalyst.

I give you the floor.

Presentation by Jacques NASSIF

First, I must apologize, because you undoubtedly did not expect, and neither did I for that matter, to have to listen to a scribe speak, which of course risks making him stammer quite a bit.

In the end, I was myself rather rushed, and a rushed scribe runs the risk of being even less heard, so what I am going to say to you may sound a bit too written—but also written because, on the one hand, I am led to repeat things you may have all already heard, and which nevertheless still risk seeming allusive.

In short, I am caught in this paraphrase, despite myself, of LACAN’s discourse, and I would like, to begin then, to leave you with these two epigraphs I draw from Edmond JABÈS. He has one of his imaginary rabbis say these two things a few pages apart:

“When, as a child, I wrote my name for the first time, I became aware that I was beginning a book.” And several pages later: “My name is a question, and my freedom lies in my leaning toward questions.”

I believe that, if a discourse on psychoanalysis is possible, it is situated between these two questionings of the name: — it is not about writing a book,
— it is not simply about being a question.

I believe that, if last year’s seminar is titled The Logic of the Fantasy, it is because it attempts to produce a new negation that allows for hearing and situating FREUD’s formula: “The unconscious knows no contradiction.”
This formula, it must be said immediately, is caught within a preconception concerning the relationship between thought and the real which made FREUD believe, precisely, that what he articulated had to be situated as a scene prior to any logical articulation.

Now, the logic to which FREUD refers when saying that thought does not apply its laws is based on a schema of adaptation to reality. That is why this term “contradiction” must be shaken, and that is what led LACAN to this other formula: “There is no sexual act.”, which requires that a new negation be produced, be confronted with repetition, to provide us with a concept of the act.

My first part could precisely be titled: The Theme of Negation

In order to isolate the different negations that the term contradiction encompasses — “the unconscious knows no contradiction” — it is first necessary to separate those domains which, in fact, overlap, but which only formal logic allows us to distinguish, namely grammar and logic. The most common sense of negation is the one that operates at the level of grammar. It is bound to the affirmation: “There is a universe of discourse,” and serves precisely to exclude from it what cannot be sustained, one might say, without contradiction. It is thus given to intuition, in the image of a boundary, and supported by the gesture that consists in characterizing a class by a predicate, for example “black,” and from then on in designating as not joined to the predicate that which is not black.

If what is built on this definition of negation, which LACAN calls “complementary negation,” keeps us at the level of grammar, it is because one grants oneself, without even saying it, a metalanguage that allows negation to function as both concept and intuition. But there is something more serious: upon this use of negation is grafted an entire tradition from which FREUD, according to some, inherits with his notion of the ego, and which ties the first steps of experience to the functioning, the emergence, of an autonomous entity, in relation to which: — that which would be admitted or identified would be called ego, — that which would be excluded or rejected could be called non-ego.

Such is not the case, for the reason that language in no way admits such complementarity, and what is taken here for a negation is nothing other than what functions in the misrecognition from which the subject alienates himself in the imaginary, the narcissistic. This second negation of misrecognition establishes within it a perverted logical order, and very precisely indeed what he entitles the fantasy as the fabric of desire, and which thus leaves us, once again, at the level of grammatical articulation. This will be seen much more precisely further on. Nevertheless, this negation of misrecognition is distinguished from complementary negation in that it is correlative to the institution of the subject as referent of lack.

This negation, once redoubled in the Freudian Verneinung which one could here define as the misrecognition of misrecognition, indeed allows the symbolic level to surface, and permits the logical function of the subject to operate as such, namely, let me remind you of its definition: what a signifier represents for another signifier, or what refers lack in the form of the object (a).

But this logical function of the subject that I have brought forth here can only emerge as such… calling into question this “universe of discourse” which grammar, so to speak, secretes… in that it does not take into account the duplicity of the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation. Therefore, this logical function of the subject can only emerge if writing is thematized as such.

And my second part is titled: Logic and Writing

It is not about that purely instrumental and technical writing which, in the philosophical tradition, is described as a signifier of a signifier, but about that play of repetition which, positing itself as “I,” strips what is logical of the grammatical shell that encases it. The subject is indeed the root of the function of repetition in FREUD, and writing: the enactment of this repetition which precisely seeks to repeat what escapes, namely the primal mark which cannot be duplicated and which necessarily slips out of reach.

This concept of writing indeed allows us to see what is at stake in a logic of fantasy that would be more principial than any logic capable of grounding a theory of sets. In fact, the only support of this theory is that everything that could be said about a difference between the elements of this set is excluded from the written “I,” in other words, that no other difference exists than that which allows me to repeat the same operation, namely to apply to three objects, however heterogeneous you like, a unary trait.

But precisely this unary trait is necessarily concealed in any universe of discourse that can only confuse the countable 1 and the unifying One. To this end, it will grant itself the possibility of axiomatizing this essential relation between logic and writing such as the emergence of the subject allows it to be instituted, by positing:

“No signifier can signify itself.”

This is RUSSELL’s axiom of specification, and therefore the question of what a signifier represents in the face of its repetition passes through writing. This axiom in fact formalizes the mathematical usage that dictates that, if we posit a letter “a,” we then take it up again as if the second time it were always the same.

It appears in a formulation where negation intervenes: no signifier can signify itself, but it is in fact the exclusive “or” that is thus designated. It must be understood that a signifier—the letter “a”—in its repeated presentation signifies: — only as functioning the first time, — or as functioning the second time.

Now, we will see that it is around the relations between disjunction and a certain concept of negation that things become entangled, and that the thematization of the act becomes indispensable.

But what this analysis already allows us to see is that if writing, defined as a field of repetition of all marks, can be distinguished from the universe of discourse, whose characteristic is to close itself, it is also only through writing that a universe of discourse can function, by excluding something that will be precisely posited as not being able to be sustained in writing. The concept of “logic”… although perhaps burdened by a rather heavy philosophical past as well… does not present the inconvenience of the ambiguity linked to the concept of writing. But this implies, if we want to speak of a “logic of fantasy,” that the relations of this concept to the concept of truth must be elucidated.

Hence my third part: Logic and Truth, the “not without”

Thus arises the problem of whether it is legitimate to inscribe within signifiers a true and a false, logically manipulable, by means of truth tables for example. At the level of classical logic… which is nothing other than the grammar of a universe of discourse… the solution invented by the STOICS remains paradoxical. It consists in asking how propositions must be connected with respect to the true and the false, and in setting up a relation of implication that introduces two propositional times, the protasis and the apodosis, and that allows the establishment that the true cannot imply the false, without preventing, however, that from the false one may deduce either the false or the true. This is the adage: ex falso sequitur quod libet.

To highlight this paradox of implication is in fact to elucidate the negation that functions in it. It is enough, indeed, to reverse the order of the proposition p implies q, to see emerge: if not p, then not q, and thereby a negation. This negation has nothing to do with complementary negation because it does not operate at the level of the predicate but at the level of what ARISTOTLE calls a proprium.

Let me remind you of this distinction. For example, I can give as a definition of man: man is “man and woman.” That is a proprium. The correct definition to give is: man is a rational animal. “Man and woman” is a proprium, and this proprium is not sufficient to define in ARISTOTLE. On the contrary, I believe that modern science provides only definitions by the proprium.

This third negation, then, LACAN calls the “not without.” Its model would be the formula: “there is no truth without falsehood.” For it is, in fact, to the principle of bivalence that it gives place, and in every way, in ARISTOTLE, this refusal to provide definitions by the proprium is linked to the necessity of producing an extensional discourse in which precisely the principle of bivalence would not be called into question. We will also see that this third negation allows us to perfectly grasp the problem of the act as it is expressed in this simple sentence: “there is no man without woman.”

Finally, one could reproduce in more rigorous terms than that of misrecognition what takes place at the level of the grammar of fantasy in certain inference phenomena underlying the process of identification in all its forms. But above all, the “not without” makes it possible to understand that the mode of free association, through which the field of interpretation is presumed, confronts a dimension that is not that of reality but of truth.

Indeed, when one objects to FREUD that with his method he will always find a signified to bridge two signifiers, he is content to reply that the lines of association come to intersect at selective points of departure which, in fact, sketch for us the structure of a network. And thus the limping logic of implication is relayed by the truth of repetition. What is essential, therefore, is not so much to know whether an event really took place or not, but to discover how the subject was able to articulate it in signifiers—that is to say, by verifying the scene through a symptom where this did not go “without” that, and where truth is bound up with logic.

At this point, it would be possible to build a bridge between logic and truth thanks to the concept of repetition, which underlies these two parts, which would immediately lead to a thematization of the act. I will rather follow the order adopted by LACAN, who begins by providing an empty model, forged to account for the true foreclosure given in the Cartesian cogito from which science is empty.

Thus I come to my fourth part: Empty Model of Alienation: S(A)

This model, which is that of alienation as an impossible choice between “I do not think” and “I am not,” will especially allow us to exhibit the most fundamental negation, the one that functions in relation to disjunction, as it is designated in MORGAN’s formula: Not(a and b) is equivalent to Not a or Not b. [that is: ⌝(a ⋀ b) = ⌝a ⋁ ⌝b].

Now, once it is posited that a and b designate “I think” and “I am,” and that it is the same negation that functions on both sides of the equivalence sign, one must admit that this fundamental negation is the one that causes the Other to emerge, as a consequence of the refusal of the question of being that the cogito institutes, exactly like what is rejected by the symbolic reappears in the real.

But one must also admit that this primordial Verwerfung, which institutes science, institutes an exclusive disjunction between: — the order of grammar in its entirety, which thus becomes the support of fantasy,
— and the order of meaning, which is excluded from it and becomes effect and representation of things. I will go over this again slowly.

There is thus equivalence between: not (I think and I am), and either (I do not think) or (I am not). And it is on the first term of this equivalence that I would now like to focus, for it will allow us to rigorously pose the distinction between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation. If, indeed, “therefore I am” must be placed in quotation marks after “I think,” it is first because the function of the third party is essential to the cogito.

It is with a third party that I argue, making them renounce one by one all paths of knowledge in the “First Meditation,” until catching them at a turning point by making them admit that I must indeed be myself to lead them through that path, to the extent that the “I am” they give me is none other, in the end, than the empty set, since it consists in containing no element. The “I think” is therefore in fact the operation of emptying the set of the “I am.” It thereby becomes an “I write,” the only one capable of performing the progressive evacuation of everything that was within the subject’s reach in terms of knowledge.

The subject—and this is absolutely fundamental for the conceptualization of the act—is not only in the position of the agent of the “I think” but in the position of a subject determined by the act itself which is at stake, as is expressed in Latin by the middle diathesis, for example loquor. Now, every act could be formulated in these terms insofar as the middle voice, in a language, designates this gap between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation.

But since it is not meditor, which is moreover the frequentative of medeo, but cogito that DESCARTES uses, and since it is essential to this cogito to be repeatable at each of its points, at each point of experience, whenever necessary—and DESCARTES insists on this—it may well be that we are dealing here with the negative of any act.

Indeed, the cogito is on the one hand the place where this constitutive repetition of the subject originates, and on the other hand the place where recourse to the big Other is instituted, the Other itself caught in misrecognition insofar as this Other is supposed to be unaffected by the mark, that is to say, this God is assumed not to write. In effect, the cogito is not tenable unless it is completed by a sum, ergo Deus est, and the correlative postulate according to which nothingness has no attribute. DESCARTES thus assigns to an “Other” who would be unmarked the decisive consequences of this step that institutes science.

They are not long in coming: — on the one hand, the Newtonian discovery, far from implying a space partes extra partes, gives extension the essence of having each of its points connected by its mass to all others, — as for the thinking thing, far from being a point of unification, it bears on the contrary the mark of fragmentation, which is in some way demonstrated throughout the development of modern logic, culminating in making the res cogitans not a subject but a combinatory of notations.

To therefore place the negation—this negation I am trying to bring forth—upon the union of “I think” and “I am” amounts to acknowledging these consequences and translating them by writing that there is no Other.

The symbol S(A) is in fact a recognition that there is no locus where the truth constituted by speech is assured, no place that justifies the questioning by words of what is only word: the entire dialectic of desire and the network of marks it forms are hollowed out in the interval between statement and enunciation. Thus, everything founded solely on recourse to the Other is rendered obsolete. Only what takes the form of reasoning by recurrence can remain. The non-existence of the Other in the field of mathematics corresponds, in fact, to a limited usage of signs—it is the axiom of specification and the possibility of back-and-forth between what is established and what is articulated.

The Other is thus a field marked by the same finitude as the subject himself. That which makes the subject dependent on the effects of the signifier at the same time causes the place where the need for truth is assured to be fractured into its two phases of statement and enunciation. This is why the union of “I think” and “I am,” though necessary, must in its principle be negated by this fundamental negation.

It should not escape you that this negation, which for now provides us only with an empty model, is in fact induced by sexuality as it is lived and as it operates.

Thus I come to a fifth part: Foreclosure and Denial

Sexuality can indeed be presented in general, as it is lived and as it operates, as a “defense” against following through with this truth that “there is no Other.” This model is in fact supported by the truth of the object (a), which is ultimately to be referred to castration, since the phallus, as its sign, precisely represents the exemplary possibility of the lack of object.

Now, this lack is inaugural for the child when he discovers with horror that his mother is castrated, and the mother designates nothing less than this Other who is called into question at the origin of every logical operation. Therefore, philosophy… and every attempt to reestablish within legitimacy a universe of discourse… consists—once it has given itself a mark through writing—in erasing it in the Other, in presenting this Other as unaffected by the mark. Now, this mark that permits this rejection into the symbolic is in fact only the placeholder of that trace, inscribed on the very body, which is castration. It is therefore here possible to present this foreclosure of the mark of the big Other as a motivated and continually renewed refusal of what constitutes an act.

But this act, itself taken within the logic governed by negation—this fundamental negation—is not itself a positivity, as you might suspect. In fact, it can only be inferred from that other logical operation that is denial, which indeed consists in placing in parentheses the reality of the compromise and the grammar founded upon it, but which nonetheless yields this other consequence of the barred big Other: the disjunction between the body and jouissance.

If indeed the object (a) is foreclosed in the mark by the philosopher, it is identified as the locus of jouissance by the pervert, but it then appears precisely as part of a totality that is not assignable, since there is no Other. And the pervert, like the philosopher, believes himself obliged to invent a manifestly theistic figure—for example, in SADE, that of absolute malevolence—of which the sadist is only the servant.

If there is no Other, it is precisely because both positions are untenable: — the “man-woman” pair, which is positivized in one case,
— that of the philosopher; the “(a)–big Other” pair, which is positivized in the other,
…are two parallel ways of refusing the sexual act,
— either conceived as real and impossible,
— or as possible and unreal.

There no doubt remains a third form: that of acting out (passage à l’acte). One should not imagine that this leap makes us exit the alienation described above. On the contrary, it will allow us to articulate its terms even more rigorously.

To do so, I will move to the second part of the equivalence: either (I do not think), or (I am not), and this sixth part will be titled: Grammar and Logic

The non-union in the Other of “I think” and “I am” is simply translated into a disjunction between two non-subjects: either (I do not think), or (I am not).

Thus, without speaking further of act, it may be useful to remain with the empty model. This will allow us to construct a theory of that negation of the subject which the negation of the big Other presupposes, and it will give us the possibility to better articulate the disjunctions between grammar and logic by assigning grammar its status.

What logic gives us to think is that we have no choice, precisely in this: from the moment the “I” has been chosen as the institution of being, it is toward “I do not think” that we must go, because thought is constitutive of a questioning of non-being, and it is this that is brought to an end with the inauguration of the “I” as subject of knowledge in the cogito. Thus, the negation that is to be thought in alienation is no longer the one at work in the refusal of the question of being, but the one which, bearing on the Other that emerges from it, bears on the “I” that withdraws from it.

Now, connected to the choice of “I do not think,” something arises whose essence is “not-I.” This “not-I” is the Id (Ça), which can be defined by everything in discourse that is not “I”—that is, precisely by all the rest of the grammatical structure. Indeed, the scope of the cogito is reduced to this: that “I think” makes sense, but in exactly the same way as any nonsense, provided that it has a grammatically correct form. Grammar is no longer… in this logic governed by negation alternately bearing on the Other and on the subject… anything more than one branch of the alternative in which the subject is caught when he acts out, and if grammar is defined as everything in discourse “that is not I,” it is precisely because the subject is its effect.

It is exactly in this that fantasy is nothing other than a grammatical montage in which the destiny of the drive is ordered, following various inversions, to such an extent that there is no other way to make the “I” function in relation to the world than by passing it through this grammatical structure, but also that the subject, as “I,” is excluded from the fantasy, as can be seen in A Child is Being Beaten, where the subject appears as beaten only in the second phase, and this second phase is a significant reconstruction through interpretation.

It is important to note: — just as reality—this major compromise on which we have agreed—is empty,
— so too is fantasy closed upon itself, the subject who acts out having shifted in his essence as subject into what remains as articulation of thought, namely the grammatical articulation of the sentence.

But this concept of “pure grammar”… far from being articulated as in HUSSERL with the logic of contradiction, which itself is articulated with a logic of truth… insofar as these concepts of logic and grammar as I am using them here, insofar as this “pure grammar” allows us to locate fantasies and the ego that is their matrix, this concept of “grammar” must therefore function in the reverse way, that is, it must allow us to recognize that there is something agrammatical—something HUSSERL would therefore reject—which is nonetheless still logical, and that the well-formed language of fantasy cannot prevent those manifestations of truth that are the joke, the slip, or the dream—manifestations in relation to which the subject can situate himself only on the side of an “I am not.”

Indeed, what is at stake in the unconscious—which must therefore be distinguished from the Id—does not stem from that absence of meaning where grammar leaves us, since it is characterized by surprise, which is indeed an effect of meaning, and this surprise that every true interpretation immediately brings forth has as its dimension, as its foundation, the dimension of I am not.

It is in this place where I am not that logic appears in its purest form, as non-grammar, and that the subject is once again alienated as a “thought-thing,” which FREUD articulates in the form of thing-presentations, of which the unconscious—whose characteristic is to treat words as things—is composed.

Indeed, if FREUD speaks of dream thoughts, it is because behind those agrammatical sequences there lies a thought whose status is to be defined, insofar as it cannot say either therefore I am or therefore I am not, and FREUD articulates this very precisely when he says that the dream is essentially “egoistic,” implying that the dreaming Ich is present in all the signifiers of the dream and absolutely dispersed within them, and that the remaining status of unconscious thoughts is that of being things.

These things, however, come into contact and are caught up in a logical “I” which constitutes the function of referral and which can be read through shifts in relation to the grammatical “I,” precisely, and that is what this grammatical “I” is for—just as the rebus is read and articulated in relation to a language already constituted.

In any case, it is upon this non-grammatical “I” that the psychoanalyst relies, and every time he makes something function as Bedeutung, acting as if representations belonged to things themselves and thus bringing forth those holes in the “I” of the I am not, where what concerns the object (a) manifests. For, ultimately, what the entire logic of fantasy seeks to supplement is the inadequacy of thought to sex—or the impossibility of a subjectivization of sex.

This is the truth of I am not. Language, in fact, which reduces sexual polarity to a matter of having or not having the phallic connotation, fails mathematically when it comes to articulating this negation I am in the process of elucidating, this negation which is ultimately the one that functions in castration. Now, it is language that structures the subject as such, and in the dream thoughts where words are treated as things, we are then directly confronted with a gap, a syncope in the narrative.

Thus, while the “not-I” of the grammatical Id revolves around that core object where we may locate the instance of castration, the “not-I” of the unconscious is simply represented as a blank, as a void in relation to which the entire logical “I” of Bedeutung refers. It is at this very point that the necessity is felt to collapse logic back onto grammar and to articulate, by means of repetition, the possibility of an effect of truth—an effect of truth where the failure of Bedeutung to articulate sex reveals the -ϕ.

Now, what makes it possible to think the subject either as a product of grammar or as an absence referred to by logic is the concept of repetition as articulated by FREUD under the term Wiederholungszwang. This obliges us to introduce the empty model of alienation into the element of a temporality that only the concept of act allows us to grasp.

My seventh part: Alienation and the Act

It is to the extent that the object (a) can be thought of as real—that is, as a thing—that the subject’s relation to temporality can be elucidated precisely through the relation of repetition to the unary trait. We thus remain in the element of a logic where temporality and trace are joined, in an attempt to structure lack in the form of an archaeology where repetition and displacement succeed one another.

In FREUD himself, repetition indeed has nothing to do with memory, where the trace has precisely the effect of non-repetition. A microorganism endowed with memory will not react to a stimulus the second time as it did the first. That is the atom of memory.

On the contrary, in a situation of failure that repeats itself—for example—the trace has an entirely different function. The initial situation not being marked with the sign of repetition, one must say that if it becomes the repeated situation, it is because the trace refers to something lost through the repetition, and here we find again the object (a). This is why what presents itself as displacement in repetition itself has nothing to do with similarity or difference, and here again, in the field of the subject, we find the unary trait as symbolic marker. This trait, I recall, allows for the identification of objects as heterogeneous as can be, ignoring even their most explicit difference in nature, in order to enumerate them as elements of a set.

But one must descend into time to observe, on the one hand, that the truth thus obtained—and which is nothing other than what mathematicians call effectiveness, hence the fact that a model allows one to interpret a domain—that this truth has no hold on the real. On the other hand, we find again here the model of alienation that could be represented in the form of a “neither the same nor not the same.” Now, this is nothing other than the graph of the double loop which has long served in LACAN to represent the solidarity of a directive effect with a retroactive effect.

This third-party relation is indeed found again, allowing us to make the unary trait emerge when, in passing from 1 to 2 which constitutes the repetition of 1, there appears a retroaction effect where the 1 returns as non-enumerable, as 1 extra or 1 too many. It is the same in every signifying operation where the trait sustaining what is repeated in the mark returns as repeating upon what it repeats, provided the counting subject has to count himself within the chain—and that is precisely what takes place in the passage to the act. There is indeed a correspondence between: — alienation as the inescapable choice of I do not think, — and repetition as the inescapable choice of the passage to the act.

Indeed, the other term impossible to choose is the acting-out correlating with I am not. It is that the act, far from being defined as some manifestation of movement ranging from motor discharge to a monkey’s detour to grab a banana, can only be defined in relation to the double loop where repetition comes to found the subject, this time as an effect of cut.

Let me recall here a few topological landmarks: the Möbius strip may be taken as symbolic of the subject, a double loop constitutes its unique pole. Now, a median division of this strip removes it but generates a surface applicable to a torus. Yet the cut that generates this division follows the path of the double loop, and one may say that the act is itself the double loop of the signifier.

The act indeed presents itself as the paradox of a repetition in a single trait, and this topological effect makes it possible to present the subject in the act as identical with his signifier, or that the repetition intrinsic to every act operates within the logical structure by the effect of retroaction.

The act is thus the only place where the signifier has the appearance or even the function of signifying itself, and the subject in this act is represented as the effect of the division between the repeater and the repeated, which are nevertheless identical. To clearly see that this structuring of the act comes to fill the empty model of alienation, we must take one final step.

FREUD, in his text Beyond the Pleasure Principle, sets up this foundational conjunction for the entire logic of fantasy between repetition and satisfaction. Here, indeed, the compulsion to repeat encompasses the functioning of the pleasure principle; this is why there is nothing in that inanimate material that life gathers that life does not return to its inanimate domain—but it only returns it in its own way, FREUD tells us. This manner is to go back over the paths it has taken, satisfaction being defined precisely as the act of retracing those same paths.

But as we have just seen, repetition, insofar as it engenders the subject as effect of cut or as effect of the signifier, is bound to the inevitable fall of the object (a), so that the metaphor of the path is radically inadequate. Moreover, the model of satisfaction that FREUD proposes is certainly not an organic model, for instance that of the replenishment of a need, such as drinking or sleeping, where satisfaction is precisely defined as untransformed by the subjective instance… we are not dealing with that solidarity of an active and retroactive effect… but precisely with the point where satisfaction proves most distressing for the subject—that of the sexual act—and it is in relation to that satisfaction that all others must be subordinated within the structure. It is at this point that the loop closes.

In the reading I propose to you, the conjunction of sexual satisfaction and repetition functions nonetheless as an inexorable axiom, since nothing less than a river of mud would threaten anyone who deviated from it. What we are dealing with, once again, is nothing but a new translation of S(A), for which we have already given several equivalents, and which here reprises the disjunction between body and jouissance in the form of a temporal disjunction between satisfaction obtained and repetition pursued.

It is now clearer that if this satisfaction passes through what presents itself as an act, it can only be thought of as act in terms of the inescapable ambiguity of its effects. If an act presents itself as a cut, it is insofar as the incidence of this cut on the topological surface of the subject modifies its structure—or, on the contrary, leaves it identical. From this point, we find here the structural link between the act and the register of Verleugnung.

Indeed, the aim under this concept is to think the labyrinth of recognition by a subject of effects he cannot recognize, since he is entirely, as subject, transformed by his act. The passage to the act is therefore, in relation to repetition, nothing but a kind of Verleugnung confessed, and acting-out, a kind of Verleugnung denied. It is a doubling—Verleugnung denied—that I present as correlating, at the level of the subject, with the doubling of misrecognition by which I defined Freudian denial.

And this alternative of alienation is once again to be placed precisely in relation to the (a) that the subject of the sexual act necessarily is, since he enters it as product and can only repeat within it the Oedipal scene, that is, the repetition of an impossible act.

If you have followed me—and without needing to revisit all that has been said here about the impossibility of giving the signifiers “man” and “woman” any assignable connotation—it has now become evident that the formula “the unconscious knows no contradiction” is rigorously identical to the equally misleading, but more accurate, formula according to which there is no sexual act.

[Applause]

LACAN

I was pleased that these applauses prove that this discourse was to your liking. So much the better. Besides, even if it hadn’t been, it would remain nonetheless what it is—that is to say, excellent… I would even say more than that.

I would rather not let it be altered by corrections or improvements that the author might bring to it. I mean that, just as it is, it holds its interest, and for all those who attended today’s session, it will certainly be very important to be able to refer back to it in regard to everything I will say from here on.

Now, my function being precisely, by virtue of the place I defined a moment ago, not to exclude this or that appeal to interest at the level of what I just called taste, I will simply add a few words of commentary.

I expressly underline that, apart from those who are already invited and already in possession of a card, no one will be invited to the last two closed seminars unless they have sent me within eight days a question, about which I have no need to specify how I will find it pertinent or not—truthfully, I suppose it can only be pertinent from the moment it has been sent to me!

I will make the following remark. We spoke here of a new negation.

Indeed, what we will deal with in the coming seminars is nothing other than the use, precisely, of negation—or more precisely, of this: this step in logic that has been constituted by the introduction of what is most crudely and improperly called—I dare say it, and I think no sensitive logician would contradict me—“quantifiers.”

Contrary to what the word seems to indicate, it is essentially not a matter of quantity in this usage of quantifiers. On the contrary, I will have to demonstrate to you—and this beginning next time—the importance this usage holds, at least in a very enlightening way, by having been linked to the turning point that made the function of the quantifier appear in the form of double negation, precisely in that which is within our reach… it is quite singular that it is at the level of grammar that it is most perceptible… that it is in no way possible to fulfill what is at stake in double negation by saying, for example, that it is an operation that cancels itself and brings us back to pure and simple affirmation.

Indeed, this is already present and entirely perceptible, even at the level of ARISTOTLE’s logic, insofar as, by placing us before the four poles constituted by the universal, the particular, the affirmative, and the negative, it clearly shows us that there is another position, that of the universal and the particular, insofar as they can be manifested through this opposition between universal and particular, through the use of a negation, or that the particular can be defined as a not all, and that this is truly within our grasp and within the scope of our concerns.

At the point where we are in our formulation concerning the psychoanalytic act, is it the same thing to say:

“Not every man is a psychoanalyst,”
the founding principle of the institutions that bear this name, or to say:
“Every man is a non-psychoanalyst”?

It is absolutely not the same thing. The difference lies precisely in the not all, which introduces the fact that we suspend, that we set aside the universal—this being what defines, on this occasion, the particular.

It is not today that I will go further into what is at stake in this context, but it is quite clear that we are dealing here with something I have already indicated, something that has already been introduced to you through several features of my discourse, when I have—for example—insisted on the fact that in grammar, the subject of enunciation is nowhere more perceptible than in the use of this ne that grammarians do not understand, because, naturally, grammarians are logicians, and that is what leads them astray. This leaves us with hope that logicians might have the slightest idea of grammar.

That is precisely where we place all our hope, namely, that this is what brings us back to the psychoanalytic field. In short, they call this ne “expletive,” which is expressed so well in the phrase, for example: “I will be there…” or “I will not be there…” “…before he comes,” used in a sense that would be exactly: “before he comes,” because that is the only place where it takes on its meaning.

It is “before he comes” that introduces here my presence as subject of enunciation, that is to say, insofar as it interests me; indeed, it is precisely where it is indispensable: that I am invested in whether he comes or does not come. One must not believe that this ne can only be grasped there, in that strange point of French grammar where no one knows what to do with it and where it may as well be called expletive—which means nothing more than this: that, after all, it would have the same meaning if it were not used.

But in fact, everything hinges on this: it would not have the same meaning. Likewise, in this way of articulating quantification, which consists in separating its characteristics, and even—to mark the point clearly—in expressing quantification only through those written symbols which are “∀” for the universal and “∃” for the particular.

This presupposes that we apply it to a formula which, placed in parentheses, can generally be symbolized by what is called a function.

When we try to formulate the function corresponding to the predicative proposition—and it is precisely by this path that things entered into logic, since it is upon this that the initial statement of Aristotelian syllogisms is based—we are led to introduce this function… or at least, let us say historically, it was introduced within the parenthesis affected by the quantifier, very precisely at the level of the first written formulation where PEIRCE advanced the attribution to MITCHELL [Oscar Howard Mitchell], who, moreover, had not exactly said that, of a formulation which is the following: to say that every man is wise—everyone knows this is a truism—we place the quantifier ∀… it was not admitted as an algorithm at the time, but no matter… and we place within the parenthesis: +, …, that is to say, the union, the non-confusion, the opposite of identification, which I write in the form more familiar to you: V. Thus, we have:

∀i (¬H(i) ∨ S(i))

which means: for every object i, it is either not a man or it is wise.

Such is the significant mode by which the order of “quantification” is historically and in a qualified manner introduced—a word I will never pronounce without quotation marks until something comes to me, like a visitation, the same sort I had when I gave its title to my little journal, that may perhaps allow logicians to accept I don’t know what other designation that would be far more striking than “quantification,” to the point it might serve as a replacement.

But truly, in this regard, I can only leave myself waiting, in gestation: either it will come to me on its own, or it never will.

In any case, you find again here the point of emphasis I have already introduced precisely in relation to a schema from the period when PEIRCE was himself, in a sense, in gestation with respect to quantification—namely what allowed me, in the quadripartite schema I wrote out the other day concerning the articulation of every trait as vertical, with this remark I pointed out to you, that it is properly on the basis of the non-trait that the entire articulation of the opposition between universal and particular, between affirmative and negative, was grounded in the schema—at least the one given by PEIRCE, the Peircean schema I have long highlighted in certain articulations, around the non-subject, around the elimination of what causes ambiguity in the articulation of the subject in ARISTOTLE.

Although, when you read ARISTOTLE, you see that there is no doubt at all that the same suspension of the subject was already emphasized there, that the ὑποκείμενον (hypokeimenon) is by no means to be confused with the οὐσία (ousia).

It is around this questioning of the subject as such—namely, around the radical difference concerning this kind of negation that it maintains with respect to negation insofar as it bears upon the predicate—it is around this point that we will be able to revolve several essential issues in subjects that concern us in an absolutely essential way, namely the one at stake in the difference between:

“Not all are psychoanalysts (non licet omnibus ‘psychanalystas’ esse)”
or else:
“There is no one who is a psychoanalyst.”

For those who may find that we are in a forest that is not their own, I would still like to point out something regarding the subject of this relation, of this great knot, of this loop traced by our friend Jacques NASSIF, in uniting the following: this disturbing fact that FREUD stated when he said that the unconscious does not know contradiction, that he dared, just like that, to cast this arch, this bridge, toward that central point of the logic of fantasy on which my discourse of last year concluded in saying that there is no sexual act. There is indeed here a connection—and the closest one—between this gaping hole in discourse at stake in representing the relations of sex, and this gaping void, pure and simple, which was defined through the pure progress of logic itself, because it is through a purely logical procedure that it is demonstrated… and I will remind you of this in passing for those who may have not the slightest idea… that there is no universe of discourse.

Of course, for discourse, it is excluded—the poor thing!—to become aware that there is no universe, but it is precisely here that logic allows us to demonstrate in a very easy, very rigorous, and very simple way that there cannot be a universe of discourse.

So it is not because the unconscious does not know contradiction that the psychoanalyst is authorized to wash his hands of contradiction—which, I must say moreover, concerns him only in a completely distant way.

I mean that, for him, it seems like a seal, a blank check, the authorization to cover by any means that suit him, to cloak under his authority pure and simple confusion. That is the pivot around which this kind of language effect implied by my discourse turns.

I illustrate. It is not because the unconscious does not know contradiction… this is not surprising, we can put our finger on it, how it happens, it doesn’t happen just any old way: immediately, I touch on this, because it lies at the very principle of what is inscribed in the earliest formulations of what is at stake regarding the sexual act… it is that the unconscious, we are told, is this: the Oedipus—the relation between man and woman—it metaphorizes.

That is what we find at the level of the unconscious in the relations between the child and the mother, the Oedipus complex, that’s it to begin with, that metaphor. That is still no reason for the psychoanalyst not to distinguish them, these two modes of presentation. He is even here for that, expressly. He is here to make the analysand hear the metonymic effects of that metaphorical presentation.

He may even, further along, be in a position to confirm, with regard to a certain object, the contradictory mechanism inherent in every metonymy, the fact that what results from it is that the whole is but the phantom of the part, the part as real. The couple is no more a whole than the child is a part of the mother. This is what psychoanalytic practice makes palpable, and it is a profound corruption of it to affirm the contrary in the name of the fact that this is what it’s about—namely, to designate in the child-mother relationship what is not found elsewhere, where one might expect to find it, namely, the fusion-unity of sexual copulation.

And it is all the more mistaken to represent it through the relations of the child and the mother, given that at the level of the child and the mother it exists even less. I have sufficiently emphasized this point by remarking that it is a pure fantasy of psychoanalytic delusion to imagine that the child fits so well into that. What do you actually know about it?

One thing is certain: the mother does not necessarily find herself entirely at ease there, and indeed a certain number of phenomena occur—on which I need not insist—known as feto-maternal incompatibilities, which clearly show that it is not at all obvious that this should be considered the natural biological foundation for the point of beatific unity.

And so I must take the opportunity, because it may be the last, to remind you of the Japanese prints—that is to say, more or less the only manufactured, drawn works of art known to us in which an attempt is made to represent… what you must in no way believe I am devaluing… the fury of copulation. It must be said: this is not within everyone’s reach. One must be within a certain order of civilization that has never engaged in a certain dialectic which I will try, incidentally and someday, to define for you more precisely as the Christian one. It is very strange that every time you see these figures embracing with such genuinely gripping force—and which has nothing to do with the truly disgusting aestheticism of the usual representations of what takes place at that level in our painting.

Curiously, you very often—almost always—see, in a little corner of the print, a small third figure. Sometimes it appears to be a child, and perhaps the artist, just for a laugh… For after all, you will see that it hardly matters how one represents it, this third figure. We suspect that what is at stake there is precisely something that supports what I call the object (a), and very precisely in the form in which it is truly substantial—where it marks that, in interhuman copulation, there is something irreducible, something precisely tied to the fact that you will never see it reach its completeness, and which is simply called the gaze.

And that is why this little figure is sometimes a child and sometimes, quite oddly, enigmatically for us who are peering at it behind our glasses, simply a little man, entirely a man, constructed and drawn with the same proportions as the male figure who is there in action, only greatly reduced.

A palpable illustration of something truly banal and that forces us to revise the principle of non-contradiction, at least concerning the field of what is at stake here—a radical point at the origin of thought, which would be expressed, to use a colloquial phrase: “never two without three.” You say that without thinking. You just believe it means that if you’ve already had two annoyances, a third is surely coming. No! That’s not at all what it means!

It means that in order to make two, there must be a third. You’ve never thought about that!

And yet, it is on this basis that it becomes necessary to introduce into our operation something that takes account of this intercalated element, which we will be able to grasp, of course, through a logical articulation, because if you expect to catch it in reality, just like that, in a corner, you will always be deceived, precisely because reality, as everyone knows, is constructed on your “I,” on the subject of knowledge, and it is precisely constructed so that you never find it.

Only we, as analysts, that is our role. We have that resource.