🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

This seminar does not at all seem to me to be engaged under unfavorable conditions[sic]. The reduction in your number is certainly conducive to what I would like, that is to say, that a few questions be exchanged here, and perhaps some answers or a clarification. This small number is probably due to various circumstances, including the fact that holidays are approaching, and also exam periods, and a thousand other factors. One can only regret that some of the seniors from my school who usually attend my seminars are not here; I hope they’ll show up because I’d like them to take action. But if they’re not here, we’ll do without them.

How should we proceed? I have received a certain number of letters responding to my request for questions. We could read a few of them: I have to choose because I’ve received quite a few. Is Mr. SOURY here? I’ll begin with his.

— “You have linked the effects of the signifier to the possibility of a consequence…”

This is indeed a citation—I don’t know if everyone noted it in passing—of one of my sentences. I didn’t have the time to check at what point, under what incidence, I said it, but that’s not too important. I must have, at the beginning of a lecture, emphasized… probably in response to some perceived contradiction… this term “consequence” and the fact that, to connote it with a biographical figure, the essence of what we put forward as testimony of our experience is that “events have consequences.”

It is quite certain that the term “consequence,” at the moment I used it, I must have used it with the connotation it takes on from everything brought to us by reflection, and from what it presents for us, which is that the very notion of consequence as we can apprehend it, insofar as we are taught to reflect, is linked to functions of logical sequence.

What primarily entails consequence is the articulation of a discourse with what it contains of sequence, of implication. One could say that the first field in which we have an apprehension of necessity is that of logical necessity. When we say something, it carries consequences, meaning that one can catch us out on a certain turn of phrase, point of fall, conclusion, way of closing and concluding—it is implicit in the discourse itself.

You tell me:

— “No, ‘consequence’ is usable for temporal succession, for deterministic objects… I don’t quite see what you mean by deterministic objects… for animal life…”

And you immediately cite, to articulate your point:

— “The consequence of the collision is that the particle has as momentum…”

Yes… I don’t know if that’s the best use of the word “consequence.” We try, as much as possible, to translate the effect of a shock, namely the transmission of momentum, into formulas that will involve as few consequences as possible, and “consequence” comes to take its place—we’ll talk about it. We would rather say, regarding the law of transmission of shock, that is, effect of action and reaction, that all of this will have consequences from the moment there is a need to speak about it.

In other words, what entails consequence in the analyzed, analyzable experience is indeed not at all situated at the level of effects conceived solely from a dynamic function, but at the level of a dimension of effects that implies a question posed at a level identifiable as that of linguistic consequences.

In other words, it is because a subject was not at all, in any way, able to articulate something primary, that their subsequent effort to give it—I won’t even say meaning or sense, but articulation in the proper sense in which this articulation is made in nothing other than a signifying sequence, a sequence which takes more precise form, an accent of consequence, from the moment where scansions are established therein.

It is within this dimension that the whole of this experience, which is the analytic experience, is displaced inasmuch as what it concerns is certainly all sorts of things that have effect in registers entirely other than those of pure and simple discourse, but inasmuch as what is in question is that the movement of what has effect is caught in this linguistic articulation, it is this that interests us, that raises questions, that we can grasp within the analyzable field.

To their duration, to their persistence, to their adhesive effect on what lasts, on what maintains itself in this effort of articulation, we can indeed indirectly measure what is displaced in the other field, which is precisely the field of real forces. But it is always through some knot of consequences, and of significant consequences, of significant articulations, that we gain a hold on what is at stake.

Of course, this cannot claim in any way to be self-sufficient. But since you seem not to be struck by what I simply wished to flash at that level, it is that the term “consequence” takes on its true scope, its resonance, its ordinary usage at the logical level, and that it is indeed because this is a resumption of a work, a logical elaboration, that we are dealing with something analyzable. This, at first glance.

Naturally, it is to the extent that we have been able to push things much further, to give a formulation of these effects that I call subject effects to the point of truly being close to giving them a status, that all of this holds up. But that was only a reminder. I’m telling you this as a way to rekindle attention, to attune the ear to the fire of a discourse.

You then articulate as if it were convincing: “A child is the consequence of a mating.” Logically, the use of the term “consequence” is suspect. On this subject, you might make an appeal to someone, that one must nonetheless have some foresight regarding the consequence of one’s actions. You’ll say this precisely because you’ve moved onto the ethical plane. At the level of the obstetrician, you’re not going to speak of pregnancy as a consequence—that would seem superfluous.

On top of that, you add some remarks that no longer have anything to do with my lecture but are personal to you. I read them since, after all, I don’t see why I shouldn’t take note of them:

— “Mathematics are hijacked as obscurantism because probably the rigor in handling the signifier becomes the alibi for the lack of rigor in the use of the signifier (social classification, salary indices, exam grades, statistics). The internal chain of demonstration of definitions is converted into lectures, a frenzy of lectures. Modern mathematics, with their structure, allow the formulation of these lacks of rigor, but this possibility is not used.”

What do you mean by that?

Pierre SOURY

That recent mathematics allow the formulation of abuses in the use of numbers. If one must make the obscurantist use understood, one example is the zero in class, which replaced the dunce cap. The modern school no longer puts on a “dunce cap” but gives zeroes. The zero comes from numbers and benefits from the prestige of numbers and the prestige of rigor associated with numbers.

How has the zero, born of this tradition, become an insult at the teacher’s disposal, an infamous label used against schoolchildren? The surprising shift is how a creation of rigor such as numbers, and zero in particular, became an insult against schoolchildren, a “dunce cap,” but one that is more respected than if a real “dunce cap” were given.

LACAN

Do you believe that we need to invoke modern mathematics to rise up against, or to pose some questions about the use of the zero? What I find interesting in what you say, what it suggests to me, is little points of history we don’t think about, indeed: since when has the use of zero in class existed?

There should be historical testimonies on this. It’s obvious that one could only begin putting zeroes in class since the time when zero functions in mathematics, which, as everyone knows, could only have happened with the adoption of Arabic numerals—that is, zeroes weren’t given in the time of Roman pedants since zero didn’t exist.

From when have we graded from 0 to 20—this could be interesting. Nevertheless, perhaps extending the disapproval that the zero conceived as a weapon inspires in you to something inherent to the use of mathematics seems problematic to me.

Pierre SOURY – Not inherent.

LACAN

But still, you’re alluding to the dimension of modern mathematics. I thought, in truth, that your remark was closer to something I suggested—not that structures allow the formulation of lacks of rigor, but that in the logic of this mathematics, we see emerging the necessity in which it found itself, carried by its very development, to elaborate its logic. We find ourselves faced with knots that are inherent to logic itself and that can, for us, appear as a kind of resonance with something that constitutes, in our field—the field of analysis—what we have to elaborate of a logic, of a register that is necessarily different because it applies to a completely different order…

Anyway, let’s not dwell on that.

I will take other questions. RUDRAUF, would you like to make a small selection from what you wrote to me?

Jacques RUDRAUF

In fact, I had taken up one of your formulations. You had, it seems to me—I experienced it that way—stigmatized a certain inversion of your formula “The unconscious is structured like a language.” Someone had said: “Why not? Language is structured like the unconscious.” To which you had clearly responded that logic requires us to go from the known to the unknown and not from the unknown to the known. That inversion of your formula had seemed to me to pose a problem of understanding the formula itself, in the sense that to say: “The unconscious is structured like a language” was to suppose language known and the unconscious unknown.

Since after all, this language—and which language?—in whose image we see the unconscious structured, was it so perfectly known? And this unconscious to which we refer, was it so perfectly unknown?

In a subsequent seminar, you made some remarks that seemed to me… where you said: “If I say that the unconscious is structured like a language, that doesn’t mean that I know it.” That clearly raises the entire question of the analyst’s knowledge or of knowledge through or by means of logical articulation.

But all people who are confronted with analytic problems are confronted with the problem of knowing what is happening, what the patient knows, what the patient and we ourselves learn about this X which is the unconscious. After all, this X, why say this X, why do I structure the unconscious here through X—that is to say through mathematical language or through a mathematical figuration?

LACAN

X is not in itself a formulation equivalent to “unknown.” It’s in the language of novels that one designates an “unknown” as Mr. X or Mr. Y. The mathematical usage of X is not at all something that stands for “unknown.” X designates what is called a variable. That’s not the same.

Jacques RUDRAUF – In a posed problem, X equals the unknown, in the language of a schoolchild.

LACAN

Fine. Let’s leave X aside. I don’t believe I ever designated the unconscious, insofar as I consider it—you put it very well—as, if not unknown, at least from the outset for us, in its function as unconscious much less known, and for good reason, than language. I have not for all that identified it with the function usually assigned to the letter in mathematics. On the other hand, you’ve drawn together two things which are obviously entirely legitimate to connect, which are the following: that I have said first that it’s not at all the same thing to say: “The unconscious is structured like a language,” or to say: “Language is structured like the unconscious.”

First, because the second statement really leads nowhere. Some have wanted to formulate things—and quite close to me—in a way that is much sharper, much more consequential, such that the order of the unconscious would be that upon which the possibility of language could be founded. That has greater pretensions than the other, and it is more dangerous, if I may say so—not less weak, but more insinuating.

On the other hand, when I say that I can involve in this dimension, in this path that is that of my teaching, this entire part of my position that is not knowledge, that’s a corrective. It’s more than a corrective, it’s an attempt to bring in the idea that there can be, when it concerns an analyst, a teaching that is sustained without containing this principle that somewhere there is something that entirely resolves the question: there is a subject supposed to know.

I say that we can indeed advance in this teaching and precisely insofar as it begins from this formula, without it implying that we too place ourselves in that position I have properly called professorial and which is the one that always evades the following: that the subject supposed to know is, in a certain way, there—that the truth is already somewhere.

Where is the point of your remark going once you’ve made this connection that I’ve told you I accept?

Jacques RUDRAUF

If I take up the text as I formulated it there, it leads to this: that to say “The unconscious is structured like a language” is to indicate that at the first hearing, the unconscious is represented as an existing field, according to another of your formulas—that is to say, existing before anyone knows it? Thus referring us to other reversible formulas, to ask: like what is the unconscious structured?

One could say:
— the unconscious is structured like symptoms, because we seek the psychoanalytic meaning of the symptom,
— that the unconscious is structured like the dream, of course one can say that the dream is structured like a language,
— that the unconscious is structured like a child’s drawing…

LACAN

If one contests that the unconscious is structured like a language, it doesn’t go very far. I assure you there are many more reasons to contest that the dream is structured like a language. If the dream is structured like a language, it is precisely because the dream is the royal road to the unconscious but is not the unconscious by itself. It is a phenomenon that has many other dimensions than being the royal road to the unconscious, and one can speak of the dream without speaking of the unconscious.
It is even regrettable that we do not focus more on the phenomenon of the dream once its relations with the unconscious have been isolated and extracted. There are all sorts of dimensions of the dream that would deserve to be explained.

When I see this or that figure…
who, fortunately, writes in an obscure journal, which saves me from having to struggle too much against a mode of objection that is truly quite lamentable
…when a figure brings forth a number of features to which he believes he can give consistency in the form that one of the effects of what he calls dream work is the violence it exerts on something which, ultimately, he does not contest at all that the given material is linguistic—it is a deformation, implied in a completely summary way, regarding the incidence of desire that characterizes the dream. He can find here and there, without any difficulty, in FREUD’s own texts, support for his remarks. But one cannot say that he brings anything that addresses the core of the question.

I do not deny at all that, in the dream, language…
if only by virtue of the Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit,
the consideration due to the necessity of representation and many other things as well
…undergoes extremely significant deformations, constructions, distortions—not only do I not deny it,
but who would think of denying it?

If the dream interests me insofar as it presents—and first of all—this mechanism that I have identified with metaphor and metonymy because it imposes itself, it is precisely to the extent that the dream is the royal road to the unconscious. It is nothing else.
It is not to exhaust what constitutes the substance of the dream, so it is not an objection to see something else intervene in it. So let’s not insist too much on this article, except to point out that the confusion between notions of endured violence and that of work is at the very least strange from a philosophical point of view.

The confusion of dream work with violence is something that would be a kind of representation which I do not deny ultimately has something akin to language, but whose entire interest would lie in presenting to us, in a distorted way, something completely singular and which, quite obviously, can only have its source in the fact of emerging from a place of work, if not of violence, where the principal aim is to distort what I say.

I wonder, moreover, how one could tend to distort anything if one didn’t have precisely as material what I say. It concerns Mr. RICŒUR’s course exactly.

Jacques RUDRAUF

I think that this question of the dream as the royal road to the unconscious is indeed directly tied to FREUD’s discovery that the dream speaks, that the dream is structured like a language, and that, to understand the dream, to interpret the dream, one must translate its language, transform what, until then, appeared as a series of images into a linguistically ordered series of signifiers.

The question I believed I was posing…
I have trouble reconstructing the synthesis of this question
…is this: this language that is at once the path through which we seek to reach the unconscious and also the object we seek—what is this language? And whose is it?
That brings us back to the question of the subject insofar as it is a fact of language, and of language insofar as it reveals the subject to us, act of the subject. This is more or less the level at which the question arises.

LACAN

Language is not at all the act of the subject. Discourse can occasionally be the act of the subject. But language, precisely, places us before something where it is quite a leap, and an abusive leap, to decide on this point—about which I am not saying either that we can assert the contrary. I alluded to dimensions, in particular one of them which is called the undecidable. Why not make use of it on this occasion?

I am not saying that we can demonstrate that it is not an act of the subject. The fact that we cannot demonstrate it, obviously settles nothing. But still, it does not allow us in any way to affirm that language is the act of the subject either, which is obviously implied by every so-called position of research, whatever it may be, into the origin of language, which consists in imagining this…
which no one has so far managed to imagine in a satisfactory way
…namely how it could have come to pass one day that there are people who speak.

I simply note that in the history of linguistics, it is precisely from the day a certain number of people gathered and committed themselves on their honor not to raise this question that linguistics could begin.

It is simply a historical fact. It has no more consequence than the fact that one day someone—his name was LAVOISIER—said to himself, in all these little manipulations of chemists, that one would weigh what was in the process at the beginning and at the end. That doesn’t mean that everything in chemistry is a matter of balance. Far from it, and the rest proved it.

But here, it is of the same order. It is a decisive initial act: precisely to refrain from thinking about all that could emerge from language as act of the subject. From that moment on, the extraordinary thing is that it turns out some worthwhile discoveries are still made in linguistics, whereas there hadn’t been any trace of such before. There were already people capable of saying things that weren’t too bad, but that certainly did not constitute, not even the beginning of, a science of language.

Linguistics was born from a certain moment which, like all moments of the birth of a science, is a moment of this kind, of the practical order. Someone began to fiddle with the material by imposing on themselves certain exclusive laws and limiting themselves to a certain number of operations. From that moment on, something became possible—not demonstrative. It begins to become demonstrative precisely from the moment we ask ourselves questions about what can be called the effect of subject, that is to say, the prohibition of a certain number of registers.

Their exclusion allows for a better determination of what operates as an effect of subject, which is by no means necessarily a subject homogeneous with the one we deal with in the ordinary, everyday use of language.

But we precisely forbid ourselves this thing which, when closely examined, comes down to limiting language—not at all to overcoming it, to inscribing in anything what is called a metalanguage or a metalinguistic structure—but on the contrary, to isolating certain fields of it, and then effects of subject occur, which are not necessarily speaking subjects either.

I think that the term “subject” to indicate the field of a science is not necessarily ill-chosen. I spoke of chemistry or linguistics. There is a subject of chemistry, of linguistics, just as there is also a subject of modern logic:
— it is more or less established,
— it goes more or less far,
— it is more or less fluid.

For us, it is absolutely crucial to take this kind of reference to understand what we are saying when we speak of the status of the subject. It is quite clear that the status of the subject we deal with in analysis is none of these subjects, nor any of the other subjects that can currently be situated in the field of a constituted science.

Jacques RUDRAUF

I would have liked to clarify that when I said, “language is an act of the subject,” I meant this: the language you give us, your act of discourse, is your act. But insofar as language is not the act of the subject, I think it must be defined as being the locus of the act of the Other.

LACAN

Yes, I would refer the question to our dear NASSIF, but NASSIF has done a piece of work tightening up everything I did last year, adding a note from which we still have much to draw. I wouldn’t want to impose on him here, nor on you, by asking him to respond to you on this subject. What you’ve just said is very bold, in any case—more than bold, it is debatable.

Unfortunately, our time is limited and I cannot give all this the full development it deserves. I would like—because I always feel a bit of scruple at making you come here without sending you away with something in your pouch—to try to take advantage of the fact that we are in a small group today.

I insist—it is more depreciating for me than for anyone else—on the absence here of a certain number of people who, at other times, are assiduous to what I present this year in this seminar. Why are they not here? Is it because I might perhaps have called on them to answer in my place what is being said here? Who knows? One doesn’t know, perhaps that’s the reason.

Perhaps it is also because they have such a sense of economy of their time that, if they believe they will only find something to nibble on in what I state here—since it will be nothing more than an effort of work—they think they won’t gain enough benefit from it. Who knows? Yet another possibility… In short, I regret it.

On the other hand, I am pleased by the presence of all those who have kindly come to hear something, and it is towards them—and because we are in a small group—that, after all, I would like to be able to convey certain things…
since there are also many people here whom I have gladly admitted, even though they are not analysts
…to convey the scope of a stake, and also what makes it so that I cannot say just anything in front of just any audience—that is to say, in front of an audience that I can identify less than I can by seeing all your faces, in front of the one I have here today.

We write on the board: All men love woman. All psychoanalysts desire to know. I do not think. I do not exist.

Precisely because we are dealing with subjects, here are subjects that are obviously much less manageable, and about which, fortunately, linguistics gives us some orientation. It is quite evident that we are already a bit oriented, thanks to our discourse—not thanks to my language—thanks to my discourse. Here, these are subjects that we find at first glance, designated in Greek as what is usually called the grammatical subject, the subject of the sentence.

It is, on occasion, the subject that can be quite easily introduced into propositional logic and the Aristotelian formulas of predicative logic can be found again with minimal modifications:
“All men are loving woman, all psychoanalysts are desiring to know,” for example.
The interest of the matter is that these are propositions which, due to the presence of “all,” fall under what I introduced this year—and not without reason—as the implication of what is called quantificational logic.

It is evident that to write “all men” or to write “all psychoanalysts” is a way that is distinct from the one that will be marked in the two other articulations below, to imply what?
What I have always called into question to distinguish it sharply: to imply in the statement the subject of the enunciation.
This is obviously where the logic of quantification interests us—it is at the level of what is called the universal.

And as soon as you bring in the universal, it is clear that what is interesting, what gives it its prominence, are things I’m presenting to you here in a familiar way—that is to say, this is not strictly rigorous from the point of view of demonstration, I mean that the remarks I am going to make before leaving you are more in the nature of things where I allow myself a certain laxity with respect to certain demands of rigor that are not in vain, to which I am absolutely obliged to submit in a broadly public discourse.

Here, on the terrain of camaraderie, I can say things like what I’m saying now, namely that it is quite evident that you must feel that what interests us in a formula like that—“all men, for example, are mortal”—is to point out that there is something always profoundly elided and which gives, in a way, the secret charm, the sticky side, the side that makes us adhere so much, nonetheless, that makes us so interested in those prodigiously silly things that are the exemplary syllogisms we are given.

If it were really only a matter of knowing that: “All men are mortal, and that Socrates being a man, Socrates is mortal,”
those who hear this only in that way say what has always been said:

— “What does that look like? It’s a begging of the question! If you just said that Socrates is a man, how could one deny that Socrates is mortal, unless one questions what you stated at the beginning?”

It was LOCKE who found that it was a begging of the question. That is utter nonsense—there is no begging of the question.
There is something whose interest lies entirely elsewhere. The interest is obviously in this…
it’s in the magician’s sleeves
…that it is not at all pointless to speak of SOCRATES on this occasion, since SOCRATES is not mortal in the same way as “all other men,” and that is precisely what, in the end, holds our attention and even excites us.

It is not simply through a lateral effect due to the peculiarity of the illustration, but because it really is what lies at the very heart of logic: always the question of how we could be done with that damn subject of enunciation, which is not easily dealt with, and especially not at the level of the logic of quantification, which is particularly resistant in this respect.

So it is not at all the same thing, then, this quantified subject, as that much more troubling subject who, in that case, qualifies himself, designates himself, entirely by name, and in a way that one can call unveiled, as the subject of enunciation—something linguists have indeed been forced to recognize by assigning to “I,” which is the shifter, in other words the index, of the one who speaks—in other words, “I” is variable at the level of each discourse, it is the one who utters it who is designated thereby, from which result all sorts of consequences, in particular that a whole series of statements that have “I” as subject are quite troubling.

People have lingered long over “I lie” through the ages.

That I, myself, added “I do not think” and “I do not exist” certainly has its significance, a significance that you are all capable of perceiving in all its developments. It is quite clear that it is far more interesting to pause at what is impossible in “I do not exist” than at “I lie,” which goes so much without saying that one can hardly even say it.

This “I do not exist” is worth pausing over, especially if we can give it a support that is quite precise regarding what it is about—namely, concerning the subject of the unconscious. It’s that, as soon as one has noticed…
I don’t know whether you’re there yet, but it might come to you
…it’s when one has noticed the impossibility of saying at all that “it is,” since “it is” precisely that “I do not exist.”

This is just as true for you as it is for me, and from the moment you have noticed it, the “I am” seems to become not unutterable—it is always utterable—but simply grotesque. Now, these things are worth realizing if they seem coherent and strictly coherent, from the introduction into a certain domain, which is that of the questions posed by the existence or nonexistence of the unconscious.

In any case, the question is, naturally, why I am this year concerned with the psychoanalytic act on the one hand, and with the psychoanalyst on the other, while being centered around this act—we are still in everyday language today: I repeat, “centered around” doesn’t mean much.

That “all men love woman,” obviously that’s false: we have, nowadays, enough experience—we’ve always known it, really. Let’s say that, in half of society—let’s be generous—that is not true, it’s false, but the fact that it’s false doesn’t solve anything. What’s important is not at all to know that it’s grossly false; what matters is realizing that if we can simply admit that it’s not true, it’s because some are mistaken.

I don’t know whether you fully realize this, but it seems to be the hypothesis of psychoanalysis—let’s even say this, let’s be precise, I don’t mean that psychoanalysis says that, in all cases, it’s because some are mistaken that they prefer something else. Psychoanalysis can very well—it’s an easy move here—afford all the caution it wants, it can say that there are some, male homosexuals, in whom it’s due to organic or glandular things or to anything else of that kind, it can say something like that. It costs it nothing.

In fact, what’s remarkable is the number of things that cost it nothing. But where it does pay a price, it is much less precise. It seems that it has never posed the question of what is involved, for those at least with whom it must intervene, in the hypothesis that, if it is not true, it is because—let me summarize—some are mistaken. That has its equivalent in analytic theory, but that is what is at stake.

This is where I would like to point something out: it is a matter of knowing whether or not this, to which we might give a subtler substance—“all men love woman.” You will notice that I wrote “woman,” that is, the entity of the opposite sex—that is something a psychoanalyst considers to be true. It is absolutely certain that he cannot hold it to be true, since what psychoanalysis knows is that all men love not woman but the mother.

This has, of course, all sorts of consequences, including the possibility that, in extreme cases, men cannot make love to the woman they love, since she is their mother, whereas, on the other hand, they can make love to a woman provided that she is a debased mother, that is to say, the prostitute. Let’s stay within the system.

I would like to pose the following question: in the case where a man can make love to the woman he loves…
—which happens too, he’s not always impotent with women, after all!—
…I would like to know this…
which implies the following question, which is a slight modification of the universal statement I wrote: “all men love woman”…
—is it true that “all men desire a woman”? Now it’s no longer woman, when she is presented to them—that is, as an object within their reach. Let’s suppose there are no impotent men, let’s suppose there’s no “debasement of love life.”

I pose a question that clearly shows the distinction between what I will call the naturalist foundation and what is called the organicist reserve, for it is absolutely not the same thing to say that, in the cases we deal with in psychoanalysis, there is something organic. It is not at all on that basis that we pose the question of whether it goes without saying…
—and here you will see that we are forced to introduce elements that quite clearly show the artificiality I’m raising, I mean removed from all context, namely from the context of her prior commitments, of her ties, that the woman has had with this or that…
—is there this: that it is a natural principle that in these situations—situations which it is quite remarkable that novelists must go to such great lengths to invent—that is, the situation I would call…
—I don’t know what to call it, it is unthinkable—
…it is the mountain cabin situation: a man, a woman, normally constituted, they are isolated, as the saying goes, in nature…
—one must always bring in nature on such occasions!—
…is it natural that they should have sex? That is the question. It’s about the naturalism of the desirable.
That’s the question I raise. Why?

Not at all to tell you things that will then go around Paris, namely that what LACAN teaches means that man and woman have nothing to do with each other. I do not teach that: it’s true! Literally, they have nothing to do with each other. It’s unfortunate that I can’t teach it without it causing a scandal, so I don’t teach it, I withdraw it. It’s precisely because they have nothing to do with each other that the psychoanalyst has something to do with—in writing, let’s put it on the board—“staferla.”

One must also know how to use writing in a certain way. Of course, I do not teach it. Why? Because even if it results in a way that follows strictly from everything psychoanalysis teaches us—namely, that it is never quia genus femina—I say femina, not even mulier—as “the woman” that she is desired, that desire must be constructed upon an entire order of mechanisms where the unconscious is absolutely dominant, and where therefore a whole dialectic of the subject is involved.

To state it in that bizarre way—that man and woman ultimately have nothing to do with each other—is simply to mark a paradox, but a paradox that has no more import and is of the same order as that paradox of logic I mentioned to you; it is of the same order as “I lie,” or Russell’s paradox of “the catalog of all catalogs that do not contain themselves.” It is of the same dependency. There is obviously no benefit to producing them as if it were precisely the only point where, occasionally, it would constitute not only a paradox but a scandal, namely if there were a naturalist reference there.

When someone writes in a small note or elsewhere that in the way LACAN reinterprets FREUD…
Apparently, it’s a FREUD–LACAN
…there is an elision of what would nonetheless be worth preserving—the naturalist reference—I ask instead what can at this moment still remain of the naturalist reference regarding the sexual act, after the articulation of everything laid out in Freudian experience and doctrine.

It is precisely by giving the terms “man and woman” a naturalist substratum that one comes to be able to state things that would, in fact, appear as madness. That’s why I don’t say them.
But what I do say today…
there is a remarkably insufficient number of psychoanalysts here
…is the following question: What does the clinician “instinctively” think…
—you understand well that a word like that could never come out of my mouth by accident—
…the clinician, in the name of his clinician’s instinct—it remains to be defined what a clinician’s instinct is!—about the mountain chalet?

You all only have to refer not just to your experience, but to your intimate intuition. The guy who comes to tell you that he was with a pretty girl in the mountain chalet, that there was no reason “not to go for it,” but simply “he didn’t feel like it,” you say: “Oh! There’s something, that can’t be right…” You begin by trying to find out whether this kind of breakdown happens to him often, in short, you launch into a whole speculation which implies that it should have worked.

This is just to show you that what it’s about is coherence, the consistency of things at the level of the analyst’s mindset. Because if the analyst reacts like that instinctively—clinician’s instinct—there’s no need to invoke the terms of naturalist resonance, namely that “man and woman are made to go together.” I didn’t say the opposite; I said: they can go together without having anything to do with each other. I told you they have nothing to do with each other.

If the clinician, the clinical essence, reacts with a certain twitch, it’s a matter of knowing whether this is something that is…
Maybe—why not? It exists
…simply of the order of common sense—I’m not against common sense—or whether it is something else, namely whether he allows himself, the analyst, who has every reason to, or whether this woman…
—who, I repeat to you, for the psychoanalyst, is not at all automatically desired by the male animal when that male animal is a speaking being—
…this woman believes herself desirable because that is the best she can do in a certain predicament.

And then it takes us just a bit further. We, we know that, for the partner, she believes she loves him—that is even what predominates. The question is why that predominates: because of what one calls her nature.

We also know very well that what truly predominates is that she desires him: that is even why she believes she loves him. As for the man, of course we know the tune—by now, it’s absolutely worn out: when it happens that he desires her, he believes he desires her, but what he is dealing with on that occasion is his mother, therefore he loves her. What does he offer her? The fruit of the castration linked to that drama. He gives her what he no longer has. We know all that.

It goes against common sense. Is it simply a matter of common sense that makes the analyst, with this clinician’s instinct, still think that if ever there is none of all that—because the novelist has done everything to make sure it no longer looms in the background—the mountain chalet, if it doesn’t work, then there is something?

I claim that it is not simply a matter of common sense. I claim that there is something which precisely establishes the psychoanalyst as, in a way, positioned, instituted within coherence. He is so for the very precise reason that “all psychoanalysts desire to know”: this is just as false as the statement above it, and one must understand why it is false. Of course, it’s not false because it is factually incorrect, since one can always write it, even if everyone knows it’s false. In both cases, there is, somewhere, a misdeal.

After having defined the psychoanalytic act, which I defined in a very bold way—I even placed at its center this notion of being rejected in the manner of the object (a), which is enormous, it is new, no one has ever said that—
naturally, from the moment I said it, it becomes tangible, it is tangible, someone could at least try to contradict me, to say the opposite, to propose something else, to raise an objection. It is curious that, since I said it…
—it wasn’t that long ago that I brought it to the forefront—
…no one has even begun to pipe up to say something against it, whereas, at bottom, it is absolutely enormous, one could scream out and say:

— “What is this story?
No one ever explained analysis to us like this—what kind of analyst is this who gets cast off like a piece of shit?”

Shit deeply disturbs a lot of people. Shit is not the only element in the object (a), but often it is under the sign of shit that the analyst is rejected. That depends entirely on the analysand: one has to determine whether, for him, shit is truly what it’s about. But it is striking that all these things I say—I can develop this discourse, articulate it, and one can begin to turn all sorts of things around it—before anyone thinks to raise the slightest protest and offer another indication, another theory on the topic of the end of analysis.

Strange, strange! This abstention is odd because, on the whole, it is something that carries all kinds of disruptive consequences. One might expect a kind of inventiveness in contradiction. But no, zero!
So, if no one raises the slightest contradiction, it is because, all the same, one senses very well, one knows very well that the misdeal—whether we are speaking of the first proposition or the second—centers on this: that the psychoanalyst, for his part, has to put in his two cents—that’s a metaphor, it means he has a say—only insofar as he enters the dance. I mean the psychoanalyst.

It is absolutely clear that we lose our way if we start from the idea that the psychoanalyst is someone who can know better than another, in the sense that, on the whole matter of what the sexual act is and the status resulting from it, he would have the distance that grants him knowledge of the thing.

That is absolutely not what it is about. It is also for that reason that he has no position to take on whether it is natural or not natural, in what case it is and in what case it is not. He simply establishes an experience within which he has to put in his two cents in the name of that third function which is this object (a), which plays the key role in the determination of desire, and which is indeed what the woman turns to in the embarrassment left to her by the exercise of her jouissance in relation to what the act is… I can go quite far, I can say “what is imposed on her”…
—besides, I may sound like I’m making a feminist claim, but don’t believe it,
it’s much broader than that, it’s structural—
…this thing that designates her, in the subjective dramatization of what the sexual act is, and imposes on her the function of object (a), insofar as it masks what it is about, namely a hollow, a void, that thing which is missing at the center, which is that thing I have tried to symbolize and of which one can say that it seems that man and woman have…
—and note the choice of words I used—
…nothing to do with each other.

In other words, since she has no reason, on her part, to accept this function of object (a), it simply happens, on this occasion, in the context of her jouissance and the suspension of it in relation to the act, that she becomes aware of the power of deception—but a deception that is not hers, that is something else, something precisely imposed by the institution, on the occasion, of the desire of the male.

The man, on his side, discovers nothing other than what there is in him of impotence to aim at anything other than what? Of course, knowledge. There is probably somewhere, from the very origin, if we are to indulge in developmental fantasies, a certain knowledge of sex. But that is not what this is about. It is not that all male or female children have sensations over which they have no grip and which they can more or less manage. What is at stake—knowledge of a sex—is precisely this: one never has knowledge of the other sex. As for the knowledge of a sex, on the male side, it goes much worse than on the female side.

Do not think that, when I say there is no sexual act, I am saying something that means everything unfolds under this title:
radical failure. Let’s say that, taking things at the level of psychoanalytic experience, it demonstrates to us—remaining at that level
—you see I am making a reservation here—that this knowledge of a sex for the male, when it concerns his own, leads to the experience of castration, that is to say to a certain truth, which is that of his impotence, of his impotence to accomplish, let’s say, something full, which is the sexual act. You see that all of this can go quite far, that is, this elegant literary balance:
— on the one side, the power of deception,
— and on the other, the truth of impotence.

There is a crossing-over. You can see, then, how easily all of this would slide into a kind of wisdom, even sexology, as one might say—anything that could be resolved by way of an opinion poll. What I would like to point out to you is that precisely what is at stake, in specifying what the psychoanalyst is, is realizing this: that he has no right to articulate, at any level whatsoever, this dialectic between knowledge and truth in order to make it into a sum, a balance, a totalization by recording some kind of failure, because that is not what it is about.

No one is in a position to master what is at stake, which is nothing other than the interference of the function of the subject with regard to what the act is, whose reference point we cannot even locate tangibly in our experience—I mean, analytic experience—not to say “natural,” since that is precisely where it fades, but its biological reference.

The point I am at when I tell you that the rule for the analyst to escape this wavering, which easily makes him slip into a kind of ethical teaching, is that he must become aware of what is at stake in the question, in the very place where its essential wavering is conditioned, namely object (a), and that rather than, at the end of his years of experience, considering himself as the clinician—namely the one who, in each case, knows how to cube the matter—
he gives himself instead…
—I pointed this out last time in my last talk, at the height of what I said in front of what I call a wider audience—
…this reference that I borrowed from the discourse of a previous year, namely—I won’t call it an apologue…
because I never make apologues—I show you the reality of what is at stake for the analyst, figured in other examples, and it is not surprising that these are examples taken from art, for example—
…namely, to have another kind of knowledge than that kind of fictional knowledge which is his and which paralyzes him…
—when he reflects on a case,
—when he takes its anamnesis,
—when he prepares it,
—when he begins to approach it,
…and, once he enters it with the analysis, seeks in the case, in the subject’s history…
in the same way that VELÁZQUEZ is in the painting Las Meninas…
…where he, the analyst, already was, at such-and-such a moment and at such-and-such a point in the subject’s history.

This would have an advantage: he would know what is at stake in the transference. The center, the pivot of transference, does not pass through his person at all. It is something that was already there. This would give him an entirely different way of approaching the diversity of cases.
Perhaps, from that moment, he might manage to find a new clinical classification other than that of classical psychiatry, which he has never been able to touch or shake—and for good reason, up until now, it’s because he has never been able to do anything other than follow it.

I would like to illustrate even more clearly what is at stake, and I would like to try to do so in the few minutes I allow myself and which I thank you for giving me.

People talk about private life.

I am always surprised that this phrase “private life” has never interested anyone, especially among analysts,
who should be particularly interested in it.

Private life… of what?

One could do rhetorical embroidery:
—What is private life?
—Why is this life so private?
That should interest you.

From the moment an analysis begins, there is no more private life. It must be said that when women are furious that their husbands undergo analysis, they are right. Even if it bothers us, analysts, we must acknowledge that they are right because there is no more private life. That doesn’t mean it becomes public. There is an intermediate sluicing—it becomes an analyzed or analyzing life. It is not a private life.

This is something that should make us think. After all, why is it that this private life is so respectable?
I’ll tell you: because private life is what allows those famous norms to remain intact, those that, regarding the mountain chalet, I was in the process of blowing up. “Private” means everything that preserves, on this delicate point of what the sexual act is and everything that follows from it—in the pairing of beings, in the “you are my wife, I am your man,” and other essential things—on another register that we know well: that of fiction.

It is what allows things to hold together in a field into which we, analysts, introduce an order of relativity which, as you can see, is not at all easily mastered and which could be mastered under only one condition: if we could recognize the place we occupy there, we, as analysts—not as “analysts, subjects of knowledge” but as “analysts, instruments of this revelation.”

On this point arises the question of the analyst’s private life. I mention it only in passing, since, naturally, there are books that are widely circulated, and one of them, which is among the most successful, states that the qualification, the pinning down of what the good analyst must be, the least that can be demanded, is that he have a happy private life. How adorable! And what’s more, everyone knows the author—I don’t want to start speculating… well…

But that an analyst, for example, could maintain what I have just defined as the status of private life, that’s something… It is precisely because the analyst no longer has a private life that it is better, in fact, that he keep many things protected, that is to say, that if he, for his part, has to know at what point he was already present in the life of his patient, the reciprocal is not at all necessarily required.

But there is an entirely different level on which this matter of private life operates, and it is precisely the one I have just raised, namely, that of the consistency of discourse. It is precisely because the analyst, up to now, is in no way able to support the discourse of his position that he ends up taking on any other. Anything will do.

He engages in that sort of teaching which is like all teaching, whereas his should resemble no other, namely: what is he a teacher of? Of what must be taught to those who are already being taught:
—that is, to teach them about the subjects at hand everything they already know,
—that is, precisely everything that is most off the mark.
All references suit him: he will teach everything, anything at all, except psychoanalysis.

In other words, that with which I took care to begin, by taking things at the most down-to-earth level—that which might seem the least objectionable—and showing us that psychoanalysis precisely contests it: it is impossible to write, except as a kind of provocation, the first two lines that are there.

What constitutes the status of the analyst is indeed a life that deserves to be called private life, that is to say, the status he grants himself is precisely that in which he will maintain…
—it is built for this: the authorization, the investiture of analysis, its hierarchy, the ascent of its gradus—
…in such a way that, at the level where, for him, this function of his can have consequences…
—the most compromising of all, which is that of occupying the place of this object (a)—
…it allows him nevertheless to preserve, stable and permanent, all the fictions most incompatible with what his experience of fundamental discourse, which institutes him as a fact, entails.

This is what I conclude for you today, and you will understand that I have reserved it for a more limited audience,
one not bound to extract from it a harvest of scandals, gossip, or idle chatter.

8 May: Since Lacan adhered to the strike order of the National Union of Higher Education (S.N.E.Sup.), he did not hold his seminar on May 8 and 15, but he was present.