🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

“Every man is an animal, except insofar as he doesn’t man.”

I put this up on the board for you, just to get you going since I myself am not very much in motion, really.
This little formula doesn’t claim to be a piece of thought. It may still serve as a point of attachment, a pivot, for a certain number of you who, for instance, will understand nothing of what I say today—this isn’t unthinkable. They won’t understand anything, but that won’t stop them from dreaming of something. I’m not insulting you—I don’t think that’s the general case—but let’s just say it’s an average!

The dreamy aspect that always occurs in any kind of utterance with a claim to thought, or believed to have one, must always be taken into account—and why not?—given a little point of attachment.

Suppose, for example, that my teaching, namely what may pass for being thought, were to have…
as has already happened to many people and on a greater scale than myself…
no continuation. Little things like this will remain. And upon that, something occurs.
In the animal kingdom, there’s a very special kind of fauna, those little creatures of the insect class, beings with elytra. There are many of them that feed on corpses; in forensic medicine, they’re called the death squads.

It takes about ten generations to consume what’s left of a human remnant—when I say generations, I mean different species that come in successive stages. That’s more or less what the employment of a number of academic activities around these remains of thought looks like: death squads.

There are already some who are busy, for instance…
without waiting for me to be dead, nor for anyone to have seen the result of the things I’ve, over the years, stated before you…
measuring at what point, in what I’ve managed to sweep together under the title of Écrits,
I begin to really speak about linguistics, at what point and until when what I say overlaps with what JAKOBSON said. You’ll see—it’s going to unfold.

Besides, I don’t believe at all that such an operation reflects on my merits. I believe it’s a fairly deliberate operation, coming from those who are directly interested in what I say and who would like the people whose job it is to do so
to immediately begin proliferating on what can be extracted from my statements under the heading of “thought.” That will give them a little anticipation of what they hope for—namely, that what I state, which isn’t necessarily thought,
will have no consequence—for them, that is. Now that’s nourishment!

Nevertheless, you’ll see that this has a certain relevance to what I’m going to say to you today.
We are still, of course, on the subject of the psychoanalytic act. Why, after all, do I speak of the psychoanalytic act?
It’s for psychoanalysts. They’re really the only ones involved. And that’s the whole point.

Today, I’m advancing into a territory that is obviously not made for such a wide audience—that is, into how the psychoanalytic act can operate to realize that something we shall call the identification of the psychoanalyst.
It’s one way of taking the question, which has at least the merit of being new. I mean that, up until now,
nothing sensible or solid has been articulated about what it is that qualifies someone as a psychoanalyst.
We do speak, of course, about rules, procedures, modes of access, but that still doesn’t tell us what a psychoanalyst is.

The fact that I’m speaking about the psychoanalytic act…
which is what I hope can allow a step forward in what is called the qualification of the psychoanalyst…
that I’m led to speak about the psychoanalytic act before an audience that is only partially concerned, like this one—
that in itself raises a problem, a problem which, moreover, is not at all insoluble since,
after all, I want once again to point out what justifies—not what conditions…
what conditions it is a series of positional effects, on which, precisely, within our discourse today, what we will be able to push forward may perhaps allow us to clarify something…
but whatever the conditioning may be, what justifies speaking of the act before a wider audience
than the one directly concerned by it—namely, properly speaking, psychoanalysts—is obviously this: that the psychoanalytic act has a particularity.

I could indulge in another scribble on the board to show what’s at stake in the famous quadrangle, the one that begins with: “Either I do not think or I am not,” with its components of “I do not think” which is here,
and “I am not” which is here.

You know that the psychoanalytic act takes place along this axis…
with, as its outcome, this ejection of the (a), which ultimately falls under the responsibility of the psychoanalyst who has set, has permitted, has authorized the conditions of the act, at the cost of himself coming to bear this function of the object (a).
…the psychoanalytic act is evidently what gives this support, what authorizes what will be carried out as the psychoanalysing task, and it is insofar as the analyst gives this act his authorization that the psychoanalytic act is accomplished.

Now, this is something absolutely singular: this act, whose trajectory must, in a way, be fulfilled by the other and with this result—at least presumed—that what is properly speaking an act, insofar as we might be led to ask ourselves what an act is, is evidently not to be found in this condition, nor in this entirely atypical trajectory…
which should at least be outlined on this quadrangle…
but in that one, meaning insofar as the psychoanalysing subject, for him, having arrived at this realization which is that of castration, -ϕ, it is a return accomplishment toward the inaugural point:
— the one he has in truth never left,
— the one that is statutory, the one of the choice, of the forced choice, of the alienating choice between “either I am not or I do not think”
…who should through his act accomplish that something which has been, by him, finally realized—namely, that which divides him as subject, in other words that he accomplish an act in full knowledge of why this act will never fully realize him as subject.

The psychoanalytic act, then, as it presents itself, is of such a nature that, because it introduces another dimension of this act that does not act by itself, so to speak, it may allow us to shed some light on what there is of the other one,
the one I just sketched out sideways, the unqualified act, since I am not going to call it “human” after all.

I am not going to call it “human” for all sorts of reasons, of which that little point of attachment I cited at the beginning may give you a hint, since it founds man in principle, or rather it re-founds him, or re-melts him each time the act in question, the act plain and simple, the act I do not name, takes place—which does not happen often.

On that note, naturally, I have nonetheless tried to give a few definitions so that one knows what we are talking about, namely that the act is a fact of the signifier…
that’s precisely where we started when we began stammering around…
a fact of the signifier through which takes place the return of the effect called “subject effect” that is produced by speech, in language of course, the return of this “subject effect” insofar as it is radically dividing.

This is the novelty brought forth as a challenge by the psychoanalytic discovery which posits as essential that this subject effect is an effect of division. This effect of division means that once it is realized, something of it can return, that there can be a re-act, that we can speak of act, and that this act which is the psychoanalytic act, which itself posits itself in such a singular way as to be altogether different in the sense that nothing imposes that it occur after what, in psychoanalysis, brings the subject into the position of being able to act, nothing implies that this (a), now isolated…
through the action of the other who guided him in his analysis,
through an analysis whose act made it possible for the task to be accomplished…
nothing explains that this leap…
through which this act that made the task realizable, the psychoanalysing task…
that the psychoanalysand, so to speak, assumes what? The program.

With regard to the act…
this is a small reflexive parenthesis I’ll make here at the beginning and which is important, which moreover relates to the words I started with concerning the future of all thought…
all ordered thought is situated in a bivium or stems from a bivium which nowadays is particularly clear:
either it rejects this subject effect I’m talking about, by knotting it once more to itself in a moment that claims to be original—that’s the meaning historically taken on by the cogito, the cogito is its model, and an honest model, so to speak:
it is honest because it posits itself as origin.

When you see someone begin to speak of the fantasy of the origin, you can be sure he is dishonest.
There is no fantasy graspable except hic et nunc, here and now: that is the origin of the fantasy.
After that, we can speak about it once we have found it there, when we are with it.

For the cogito, it did not posit itself as origin—nowhere does DESCARTES tell us: “At the origin, he who thinks brings forth being.”
He says: “I think, therefore I am.” And from there, that’s one good thing settled, there’s no need to concern oneself with it further. He completely cleared the way for the entry of science, which will henceforth absolutely never concern itself with the subject, except of course, at the inevitable limit where it encounters this subject again—when, after a certain time, it has to realize what it operates with, namely the mathematical apparatus, and at the same time the logical apparatus.

It will thus do everything, within this logical apparatus, to systematize it without dealing with the subject—but that won’t be easy.
In truth, it is only at its logical frontiers that the subject effect will continue to make itself felt, to present itself and to pose a few difficulties for science. But otherwise, thanks to this initial step of the cogito, one can say that science was given everything—and, all in all, in a legitimate way, everything was handed to it within the bounds of an immense field of success.

But it is in a sense at this price that science has absolutely nothing to say on the subject of the act—it imposes none, it allows many things to be done, not everything one might wish: it can what it can, and what it cannot, it cannot.
But it can a lot. It can a lot, but it motivates nothing—or more exactly, it gives no explicit reason for doing anything. It presents itself only as a temptation to act, an irresistible temptation, to be sure.

All that we can do with what science has conquered over the past three centuries is not nothing, and we do not deprive ourselves of doing it.
But it is in no way said that any act will be up to its measure. Where it’s a matter of the act, where something is decided, where one uses it knowingly for ends that seem motivated, we are dealing with an entirely different mode of thought.
This is the other side of the bivium: there, thought gives itself over in the dimension of the act, and for that, it suffices that it touches the subject effect.

Example: the fundamental remark within a doctrine which is, I think, easy for you to recognize, that the subject does not recognize himself—that is, is alienated within the order of production that conditions his labor—this, due to the subject effect that is called exploitation…
no need to add “of man by man” because we have seen that one must be somewhat wary of “man” in such occasions, and besides, everyone knows how that phrase has been twisted into a few witty quips…
this, then, due to the subject effect, which is at the foundation of this exploitation—this has consequences of act: it is called revolution.

And in these consequences of act, thought has the greatest difficulty in recognizing itself, as is demonstrated to you, I think, ever since you’ve existed…
since for a number of you, it had even begun before your birth…
the difficulties that what is called the intelligentsia has had, and continues to have, with the communist order.

All thought, then, of this category which touches the subject effect, partakes of the act.
To formulate it indicates, so to speak, the act and its reference. Only, as long as the act is not set in motion, it is a reference, of course, that is difficult to sustain, to the extent that it is isolated only at the end—everyone knows that.
Every thought that in the past has founded a school…
the things that remain, so to speak, pinned in university herbariums, the Stoic school for example…
had that end of the act. It sometimes comes to an abrupt halt…
I mean, for instance right now, in the circuit to which I alluded…
the act that in our time is pinned with the label “revolutionary.” The outcome is not yet there.

It is not isolated nor isolable, this reference to the act, but still, for the STOICS such as I evoked a moment ago, the fact is that it came to a halt—that at a certain point, nothing more was to be drawn from it than what had already been drawn by those who had engaged in that line of thought. From that point on, the necrophagy I mentioned earlier can begin—and thank God, that too cannot be eternal, since not much remains in terms of wreckage, in terms of debris, of that Stoic thought. But still, it keeps people busy!

That said, let us return to our psychoanalytic act and pick up again this little cross-structure that is shown on the board, about which I’ve already made repeated comments:
— that you should not assign any privileged value to the diagonals,
— that you should rather, to get a correct idea of it, view it as a sort of tetrahedron in perspective.
That will help you see that the diagonal has no privilege. The psychoanalytic act consists essentially in
this kind of subject effect which operates by distributing, so to speak, what will serve as its support, namely the divided subject, the S, insofar as that is the acquisition of the subject effect at the end of the psychoanalysing task.

It is the truth that, through the subject—whoever he may be, and under whatever pretext he engaged in it—is conquered; namely, for example, for the most banal subject, the one who comes with the aim of being relieved: here is my symptom, now I have its truth.
I mean, it is to the extent that it was not at all what it had been for me, it is to the extent
that there is something irreducible in this position of the subject…
which is called, in the end, and is quite nameable: the incapacity to know it all…
that I am here, and that, thank God, the symptom which revealed what remains masked in the subject effect where a knowledge resonates,
what is masked—I have had its lifting, but certainly not complete.

Something remains irreducibly limited in this knowledge.

It is at the cost—since I spoke of distribution—of this: that the entire experience has revolved around this object (a) of which the analyst has made himself the support, the object (a) insofar as it is what, from this division of the subject, is, has been, and remains structurally the cause.

It is insofar as the existence of this object (a) has been demonstrated in the psychoanalysing task…
And how? But you all know: in the effect of transference!
…it is insofar as the partner is the one who has come to occupy—through the structure instituted by the act—the function…
that ever since the subject has operated as a subject-effect, that caught in the demand, that establishing desire, he has found himself determined by those functions that analysis has pinpointed as being those of the nurturing object: of the breast, of the excremental object: of the scybala, of the function of the gaze and that of the voice…
…it is insofar as it is around these functions, inasmuch as in the analytic relationship they have been distributed to the one who is the partner, the pivot, and to say it all: the support, as I said last time: the instrument, that the essence of what concerns the function of S could be realized, namely the impotence of knowledge.

Shall I evoke here the analogical dimension that exists, in this distribution, with the tragic act? For one senses that, in tragedy, there is something analogous, in the tragic fiction as it is expressed in a mythology in which
it is by no means excluded that we may perceive truly historical, lived, real implications—I mean that the hero…
anyone who, in the act, engages alone…
…is destined to this fate of being, in the end, nothing more than the waste of his own undertaking. I have no need to give examples, the mere level I have called that of fiction or of mythology suffices to indicate its structure entirely.

But still, let us not forget, let us not confuse tragic fiction…
I mean the myth of OEDIPUS, of ANTIGONE, for example…
…with what is truly one meaning—the only valid, grounded one—of tragedy, namely: the representation of The Thing.

In representation, we are evidently closer to that split as it is sustained in the psychoanalysing task. At the end of analysis, we can, with the division of the psychoanalysing subject having been realized, support it by the division that, in the area where tragic representation could be played in its purest form, allows us to identify this psychoanalysand with the divided and relative couple of “spectator” and “chorus,” while the hero…
there is no need for there to be thirty-six of them—there is never more than one…
…the hero is the one who, on stage, is nothing but the figure of waste where every tragedy worthy of the name comes to a close.

The structural analogy hovers so evidently that it is the reason why it was massively introduced, so to speak, under FREUD’s pen, and why this analogy haunts, so to speak, the whole of analytic ideology—only with an effect of excess bordering on the grotesque, which reveals, moreover, the total incapacity of what is called “analytic” literature to do anything else, around this mythical reference, than a sort of circular repetition, extraordinarily sterile, with from time to time at least the feeling that there is something there of a division whose radical insufficiency, making us inadequate to it, we do not see.

It strikes some. It does not strike the worst among them. But it leads to results that cannot go much further than barking. Let us not forget Oedipus, nor what Oedipus is, nor to what extent he is “internally,” integrally linked to the structure of all our experience, and once this reminder has been produced, there is no need to go much further.

That is precisely why I do not consider myself to be harming anyone by having sworn never again to take up
the theme of the Name-of-the-Father in which, seized by I know not what vertigo—thankfully subdued—I once said to myself that
I would commit to it for the circuit of one of my seminar years. Things taken at that level are hopeless,
while we have a far surer path to trace concerning the subject-effect, and one which has to do with logic.

If I have brought you to the crossroads of this properly logical effect—defined so well by modern logic under the term of the function of quantifiers—it is clearly for a reason closely linked to what I announced to you as today’s question, namely the relation of the psychoanalytic act with something of the order of a predication, namely: what is it… what can we say locates the psychoanalyst?

Let us not forget: if it is at the end of an experience of the division of the subject that something called the psychoanalyst can be instituted, we cannot rely on a pure and simple identification of the term, the kind that lies at the principle
of the definition of the signifier: “That every signifier represents a subject for another signifier.”

Precisely: the signifier, whatever it may be, cannot be all that represents the subject.

Precisely—as I showed you last time—because in the function we pinpoint, everything arises from a cause that is none other than the object (a), if this object (a) has fallen into the interval that, so to speak, alienates complementarity,
I reminded you of this last time, of what it is concerning the subject represented by the signifier: of the subject S, with the S whatever it may be, a predicate that can be instituted in the field of the Other.

So what is at stake, through this effect, with the “all” insofar as it is enunciated, concerns something quite other than that toward which, if I may say so, identification does not proceed—namely, recognition coming from the Other, since that is what it’s about: that in nothing we may inscribe of ourselves in the field of the Other, can we recognize ourselves.

The “all” that represents us, in this appeal to recognition, might have to do with this void, with this hollow, with this lack. But that is precisely what is not the case. It is that at the origin of the institution of this “all” required every time we enunciate anything universal, there lies something other than the impossibility it masks—namely, that of being recognized.

And this has been confirmed in the analytic experience in what I will articulate in a condensed manner because it is exemplary: that sex is not all, for that is the discovery of psychoanalysis. Never mind the kinds of compilations being put together by people tasked with gathering a number of texts about what is at stake in that famously strange and specially preserved, reserved field called psychoanalysis.

A research grant is given to a man named BROWN, who wrote something not so bad: Eros and Thanatos, some time ago. He took the opportunity to say some quite sensible things about Mr. LUTHER, and since it was on behalf of Wesleyan University, all of that was fairly well justified.

But finally, no longer knowing any bounds to these compiling operations, he publishes something called The Body of Love, which is accompanied by a note talking to us about Freudian pansexualism. Now precisely…
if what FREUD said means anything, it is indeed that there was a reference to what one might expect from the sexual conjunction—namely, a union, an “all”…
but if anything is imposed at the end of the experience, it is that—in the sense I indicate to you and in which I make it resonate for you—sex is not “all.”

The “all” comes to its place, which does not at all mean that this place is the place of the “all.”
The “all” usurps it by making it seem, if I may say so, that it, the “all,” comes from sex.

Thus the function of truth changes in value, if I may express myself in that way, and what is found to align quite well—which is encouraging—with certain discoveries made in the field of logic, what can be expressed as follows, brings us to grasp that the “all,” the function of the “all,” the quantifier “all,” the function of the universal, that the “all” must be conceived as a displacement of the part.

It is insofar as the object (a) alone motivates and gives rise to the function of the “all” as such that we find ourselves, in logic, subjected to this category of the “all,” but at the same time that a number of singularities are explained which isolate it within the whole of logical operations—I mean that field where the quantifier apparatus reigns—that isolate it by making strange difficulties arise, strange paradoxes.

Of course, it is greatly in your interest, as many of you as possible—and I say this as much for each as for all—to have a certain logical culture. I mean:

— that no one here has anything to lose in going to train themselves in what is taught in places where the already constituted fields of the progress of present-day logic are addressed…

— that you have nothing to lose in going very precisely to train yourselves there, in order to hear what I am attempting, to outline a logic functioning in an intermediate zone, insofar as it has not yet been handled in a proper manner.

You have nothing to lose in grasping what I allude to when I say that even though the logic of quantifiers has succeeded in obtaining its proper and indeed quite rigorous status…
I mean, having every appearance of excluding the subject,
I mean, being manageable by means of the pure and simple rules that fall under the handling of letters…
nonetheless, if you compare the use of this logic of quantifiers with this or that other sector, segment of logic, as they are defined in various terms, you will notice that it is singular, that while for all other logical apparatuses, one can always provide a number of interpretations…
geometrical, for instance, economic, conceptual—I mean that each of these manipulations of logical apparatuses is entirely multivalent in terms of interpretation…
it is, on the contrary, striking to see that whatever the rigor to which the logic of quantifiers has ultimately been brought, you will never manage to subtract from it that something which is inscribed in grammatical structure—I mean in ordinary language—and which brings into play these functions of the “all” and the “some.”

The matter has consequences, none of which could be brought to light except at the level of logicians, I mean where one knows how to make use of what deduction is—namely, that wherever we uphold a system, an apparatus such that it involves the use of quantifiers, we cannot create algorithms such that it would suffice for it to be predefined that every problem is purely and simply subject to the application of a fixed rule of calculation: that from the moment we are within this field, we will always be capable of bringing forth the undecidable.

A strange privilege. For those here who have never heard of the undecidable, I will illustrate what I am saying with a small example. What does “undecidable” mean? I apologize to those for whom what I am about to say will seem like a worn-out refrain. I will take an example—there are many. You know—or perhaps you don’t—what a perfect number is: it is a number such that it is equal to the sum of its divisors.

Example: the divisors of the number 6 are 1, 2, and 3; 1 + 2 + 3 = 6. The same is true for 28.
These are not prime numbers; these are divisors, meaning: given a number, into how many equal parts can you divide it? For 28, that gives 14, 7, 4, 2, and 1. That makes 28.

You see that these two numbers are even numbers. Many like this are known. No odd number is known to be perfect. That does not mean that none exist. What’s important is that we cannot demonstrate that it is impossible for one to exist. That is what the undecidable is. The undecidable whose link with the structure, with the logical function known as that of quantifiers, is not something that I, here, have the role of making you grasp—let’s say, strictly speaking, that could be reserved for the closed seminar. I will ask that someone join me in that task whose profession it is more than mine.

But this privilege of the function of quantifiers, insofar as it concerns us most profoundly, you will see it immediately—this privilege…
I raise—let’s call it for now the hypothesis… this impasse, insofar as it is—note it well—a fruitful impasse, for if we had the slightest hope that everything could be subject to a universal algorithm, that in every case we could decide whether a proposition is true or false, that would be rather a closure…
the hypothesis I raise consists in this: that this privilege of the function of quantification hinges on the essence of the “all” and its relation to the presence of the object (a).

There exists something that functions:
— so that every subject believes himself to be “all,”
— so that the subject believes himself to be “all” subject,
— and thereby subject of the “all,”
— thus entitled to speak of everything.

But what the analytic experience reveals is this: that there is no subject whose totality is not an illusion, because it pertains to the object (a) insofar as it is elided.

We will now try to illustrate this, showing in what way this concerns us most directly, how properly expressed is what pertains to the properly analytic dimension, if not this: not all knowledge is conscious.
The ambiguity, the problematic, the fundamental split introduced by a “for all…” [;] and an “there exists…” [:]
consists in this: it admits—but at the same time questions—this, that if we say:
“It is not true that for all… what follows… it is in such and such a way,”
this implies that it is said that there is, of this “all,” something that “does not…”
because if it is not true that for “all,” then there are those that “do not…”

In other words, because a negation bears on the universal, something arises from the existence of a particular,
and likewise, because “not all” is affected by a “not…,” something even stronger, there are some (as one says) who…
bringing forth a particular positive existence from a double negation—one of a truth which, being withdrawn from the “all” of not being, would make a particular existence emerge.

Now, would it be enough that it is not demonstrated that “all… something,” for there to exist something that “does not…”?
You feel it clearly—there is a trap here, a question that, on its own, suffices to render highly suspect this use of negation, insofar as it would suffice, on its own, to ensure the link, the coherence, of the reciprocal functions of the universal and the particular.

With regard to knowledge, given that “not all knowledge is conscious,” we can no longer admit as fundamental that “knowledge knows itself”—does this mean it is correct to say that there is an unconscious?
That is precisely what, in that article collected in my Écrits called Position of the Unconscious,
I tried to convey by employing what I could at the time, namely a little parable that was nothing other
than a way to give image to something under a guise which, if I remember correctly, I even called…
since I rather enjoy playing with the word homme…
the “hommelette,” and which is none other than the object (a).

Of course, this might provide the opportunity for a future scholar to imagine that when I wrote my Position of the Unconscious,
I had not the faintest idea of logic—as if, of course, the order of my discourses did not consist precisely in adapting them for a certain audience, which is not even fully that, for we know well what psychoanalysts’ ears are capable of receiving, and of not receiving, at any given moment.

As for qualification, it has long been the case that, regarding all that pertains to knowledge, constructive reflection around ἐπιστήμη [epistēmē] has called into question the status of the practitioner when it comes to knowledge, just as at the level of PLATO, whenever it is a matter of securing knowledge in its status, it is the reference to the craftsman that prevails, and nothing seems to preclude the assertion that every human practice…
I say “practice” because it is by no means the case that, since we make the act prevail, we reject reference to it…
every practitioner presupposes a certain knowledge, if we are to advance into what pertains to ἐπιστήμη [epistēmē]. Every structural knowledge—this is what will, for us, define the carpenter.

This secretly implies that the framework knows itself as art…
I am not saying as material, of course…
what this implies for us, as analysts, is that every knowledge of therapeutics qualifies the therapist, which implies, and in a more dubious manner, that therapeutics knows—or makes—itself.

Now, if there is something that most—pardon me for saying it!—instinctively repels the psychoanalyst, it is the idea that all psychoanalytic knowledge qualifies the psychoanalyst, and this is not without reason, quite precisely because of this—not, of course, that it tells us more thereby about what a psychoanalyst is, but that all psychoanalytic knowledge is so thoroughly suspended in what concerns the reference of the experience to the object (a), inasmuch as, at the end, it is radically excluded from any subsistence of a subject, that the psychoanalyst is in no way entitled to posit himself as summing up the experience of which he is, properly speaking, only the pivot and the instrument.

Any knowledge that depends on this function of the object (a) assuredly guarantees nothing, and precisely in not being able to answer for its totality except by reference to this instrumentation, it certainly imposes that there be nothing that could present itself as the “all” of this knowledge, but precisely this absence, this lack, in no way compels the deduction that there is, or that there is not, psychoanalysis.

Reflection, the rebound of negation at the level of the “all,” implies no consequence at the level of the particular, such that the status of the psychoanalyst as such rests on nothing other than this: that he offers himself to sustain, in a certain process of knowledge, this role of object of demand, of cause of desire, which makes it so that the knowledge obtained can only be regarded for what it is: signifying realization bound to a revelation of fantasy.

If the “not all” that we include in the phrase “not all knowledge is conscious” represents the non-constitution of “all knowledge”…
this, at the very level where knowledge necessitates itself…
it is not true that there necessarily exists unconscious knowledge such that we could formulate it into a theorem based on any logical model whatsoever.

Is it for the psychoanalyst that the psychoanalysand is, at the end of his task, what he is? An entire mode of presenting theory—because it implies a way of thinking it—introduces into psychoanalytic action this factor which intervenes as a parasite.
The psychoanalyst has the last word on what must be thought of it, that is to say:
— that he is the one who has the thought of the entire affair,
— that the psychoanalysand, in the end, would be regularized, which implies that he posits in “being” a certain subjective conjunction, that he reposes anew in a “I do not think” renewed only by moving from the restricted to the generalized.

Is it thus? Never!

It is not a mere enigma that the psychoanalyst—who knows it better than anyone from experience—might come to conceive, in this form of “science fiction” (the expression is apt), the fruit that he himself obtains from it.

So is it in the order of the “for itself” that the psychoanalysing trajectory concludes?

This is no less contradicted by the very principle of the unconscious, by which the subject is condemned not only to remain divided from a thought that can assume itself in no “I am,” that thinks, that posits an in-itself of “I think,” irreducible to anything that thinks it “for itself,” but of which it is precisely at the end of analysis that he realizes himself as constituted by this division—
this division where every signifier, insofar as it represents a subject for another signifier, contains the possibility of its own inefficacy, precisely in carrying out this representation, of its failure in the role of representative.

There is no “psychoanalysed”; there is a “having been psychoanalysing,” from which results only a “subject made aware” of that which he cannot think himself as the constituent of any action of his own. To conceive what this “subject made aware” must be, we have no existing type. He can be judged only in relation to an act that is yet to be constructed:
— such as that in which, through its reiteration, castration is instituted as passage to the act,
— just as its complement, the psychoanalytic task itself, reiterates in annulling itself as sublimation.

But this tells us nothing of the status of the psychoanalyst because in truth, if his essence is to assume the place where, in this operation, the object (a) is situated, what is the possible status of a subject who places himself in this position?

The psychoanalyst in this position may have—not the slightest idea—of all that I have just elaborated, that is, of what conditions this position—not the slightest idea of science, for example, which is even common. In truth, it is not even required of him to have one, given the field he occupies and the function he is to fulfill within it.
But from the logical support of science, on the other hand, he would have much to learn.

Yet if I have referred, in his regard, to various practitioner statuses, is it excluded that in none of these statuses…
as they have been evoked for us since Antiquity, from reflection on science, but also still present in a number of fields…
is there not something, some relevance, some value, which—no doubt in the light and only the light of psychoanalysis—can be defined in such a function of practice as “hollowing out,” as bringing forth the presence of the object (a)?

Why, at the end of the year on the Crucial Problems of Psychoanalysis, did I place such emphasis here on the function of perspective?
It seems to be a theory, an operation that concerns only the architect—unless it be to show that…
had he not always already isolated it himself, I mean since the time when we do not really know how to justify the ideal that guided, for example, what has been handed down to us from the grammatical schemas of a VITRUVIUS…
that what is at stake, what dominates what we would be quite wrong to reduce—given the presence of ideals—to a utilitarian function, such as construction.

What dominates is a reference that is the very one I tried to explain to you in its relation to the subject effect
at the moment when perspective, in its proper structure, arises at the level of DESARGUES, that is to say, where it institutes
this other definition of space called projective geometry.

And this questioning of what is the very domain of vision, insofar as at first glance it would seem
that it could be entirely supported by a grid-like operation—but in which, on the contrary, appears this closed structure, the one from which I tried to isolate and define for you…
among all others, and because it is the most neglected in the psychoanalytic function…
the function of the object (a) called the gaze.

Is it for nothing that, at the end of that same year, around the painting Las Meninas, I gave you a presentation—undoubtedly a difficult one, but which must be taken as an apologue, as an example, and as a guideline for the psychoanalyst?
For what is at stake in the illusion of the subject supposed to know is always around what is so easily admitted regarding the entire field of vision.

If, on the contrary, around that exemplary work that is the painting Las Meninas, I wanted to show you the inscribed function
of what is at stake in the gaze, and what it has in itself to operate so subtly that it is at once present and veiled, it is—
as I pointed out to you—our very existence, as spectators, that it calls into question, reducing it
to being, in a sense, nothing more than shadow, in the face of what is instituted in the field of the painting, in an order of representation that properly speaking has nothing to do with what any subject can represent to himself.

Is this not the example and the model where something of a discipline bound to the very core of the psychoanalyst’s position could be exercised?

Is this not the trap into which yields, in that peculiar fictive representation I was just trying to give you as the one where the psychoanalyst ends up—regarding his experience, which he calls clinical—by coming to a halt?

Could he not find there the model of a reminder, of a sign, that nothing can be instituted in the world of his experience without his being necessarily obliged to make present there—and as such—the function of his own gaze?

Surely this is no more than an indication, but one given—as I often do at the end of this or that of my discourses—
very much in advance, and which pertains to this: that if in psychoanalysis…
I mean in the operation situated within the four walls of the office where it is carried out…
everything is put into play regarding the object (a), it is with a very singular reserve, and one that is no accident, concerning what is at stake in the gaze.

And here, I would like to indicate before leaving you today:

— the particular accent that what is at stake in the object (a) takes on,

— a certain immunity to negation which may explain what leads, at the end of psychoanalysis, to the choice made that brings about the institution of the psychoanalytic act, that is to say, what is undeniable in this object (a).

Observe the difference in this negation when it bears, in predicate logic, on the “non-man,”
as if that existed—but it can be imagined, it can be sustained.

— “I do not see,” the negation holds; something indistinct—whether it is a defect in my sight or a defect in the lighting—motivates the negation.

— But “I am not looking,” does that, on its own, bring forth more complementary objects than any other statement?

I mean, whether I am looking at this or that: “I am not looking,” it is certainly that there is something undeniable there,
since I am not looking at it.

And the same applies in the four other registers of the object (a) that would be embodied

— in a “I do not take” for what concerns the breast, and we know what that means, the appeal that it realizes at the level of mental anorexia…

— in “I do not let go,” and we know what that means at the level of that structurally desire-shaping avarice.

— And shall I go so far as to evoke, at the end of what I have to say to you today, what we make heard in a “I do not say”? It is generally understood as: “I am not saying no.” Do you hear it yourself that way: “I do not say”?