🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Conference of Wednesday, June 19, 1968 (E.L.P.)

I am not a trickster. I do not want to give the impression that I will say a few words of address to close the current year, as the School’s paper puts it, to give you what is called “a seminar.” I will rather say a few words of a ceremonial nature.

This year, somewhere—if I remember correctly—I made an allusion to the sign marking the opening of the new year in traditional civilizations. This one is for the school year that is ending. One may regret that after having opened a concept such as that of the psychoanalytic act, fate had it that you were only able to learn half of what I had intended to say on this subject.

Half… in truth, a little less, because the entry procedure for something so new… never articulated as a dimension… as the psychoanalytic act, indeed required some time for an opening. Things, to be honest, do not proceed at the same speed; it is more akin to what happens when a body falls, subjected to the same force. During its fall, its movement—as we say—accelerates, so that you did not at all receive half of what there was to be said about the psychoanalytic act.

Let’s say you had a little less than a quarter of it. This is rather regrettable from certain perspectives because, in truth, it is not my custom to later complete—and in some way patch up—what has, for whatever reason, internal or external, been interrupted.

In truth, my regret is not without being accompanied, from another angle, by a certain satisfaction, for after all, in this case the discourse was not interrupted by just anything, and the fact that it was by something that engages—certainly on a very infantile level, but engages nonetheless—some dimension that is not entirely unrelated to the act, well, my God, that is not so unsatisfying.

Obviously, there is a small discordance in all this. The psychoanalytic act, this “dissertation” I had planned, was forged for psychoanalysts—so to speak—matured by experience. It was intended above all to enable them… and at the same time to enable others… a more accurate estimation of the weight they have to bear when something specifically marks a dimension of paradox, of internal antinomy, of profound contradiction, which is not without allowing one to grasp the difficulty represented for them in sustaining its burden.

It must be said clearly, it is not those who—this burden—they know better in practice, who showed the most keen interest in what I was saying. At a certain level, I must say they truly distinguished themselves by an absence that was certainly not a matter of chance.

Similarly, since we’re on the subject, I’ll incidentally tell you a little anecdote to which I’ve already alluded, but which I will now fully clarify: one of these people to whom I gallantly sent a note to ask if this absence was an act, replied to me:

— “What are you thinking! Not at all! Neither an act, nor a failed act. It just so happened that this year, I scheduled at eleven-thirty a long appointment (it was about getting dental work redone) with the appropriate practitioner, every Wednesday at eleven-thirty.”

As you can see, it’s not an act, it’s a pure coincidence!

This tempers for me the regret that something might remain somewhat in suspense in what I have to transmit to the psychoanalytic community, and very particularly to the one bearing the title of my school. On the other hand, a certain dimension of the act, which also has its ambiguity, which is not necessarily composed of failed acts, although of course it gives a hard time to those who would like to think about things in the traditional terms of politics—nonetheless, something did occur, as I just said, which the “babies” one fine day elevated to the status of an act, and which might well, in the years to come, give some people a hard time.

In any case, the question… and that is why today I wanted to say a few words to you… is precisely whether I am right to find here a sort of small balance or compensation, to feel myself, in a way, slightly relieved of my own burden.

Because after all, if it is in relation to psychoanalysis—or more exactly, on the basis it offered me, and because that basis was the only one—if it was not possible elsewhere to grasp a certain knot… or if you prefer, a bubble, something singular, not previously identified… in what nowadays cannot easily be given a label… given that a certain number of traditional terms are drifting somewhat aimlessly: man, knowledge, con-knowledge, as you will, but that is not quite the point here… this certain knot, on which over there, in red pencil, I was also able to inscribe on this kind of knot-bubble… which you know well, it is the famous interior eight that I have been brewing now for about eight years… to inscribe these terms: knowledge, truth, subject, and the relation to the Other, there you have it.

There is no word to bring all four of them together. Yet these four terms have become essential to something that is to come, a future that may concern us, we who are here, in an amphitheatre, not simply to declaim or to demand, but out of a concern for knowledge precisely. This teaching that has revealed I-don’t-know-what kind of dissatisfaction, perhaps we can be concerned with what, following this great tear, this obvious sign that something on that side no longer holds, that what used to be crowned by a term which is not at all arbitrary: the University—it derives its authority from the Universe—that is exactly what is at stake here.

Does the Universe hold? The Universe has made many promises, but it is not certain that it will keep them. The issue is whether something that presented itself, that was a kind of opening onto the gap of the universe, will be sustained long enough for us to see its final word. This question passes through what we have seen manifest in recent months, in a place that is, curiously, permanently recurring in history. We have seen a function of place revive.

It’s curious. It’s essential. Perhaps we would not have seen things crystallize so sharply if there had not been a place where they always returned to get beaten. You must not imagine that what opened up, what has opened up as a question in that place, is a privilege of our national fabric.

I was—for the sake of some fresh air—away for two days in Rome where similar things are not even conceivable simply because in Rome there is no Latin Quarter. That’s no accident! It’s funny, but well, that’s how it is. Perhaps they are all [Latins]. I saw there some things that I really liked. It’s easier to spot them over there, those who know what they are doing. A small group. I did not see many of them, but even if I had seen only one, that would have been enough.

They call themselves the Birds, Uccelli. As I said to some of my close ones, I am in Italy—to my astonishment, it must be said, that’s the term used, I’m ashamed!—popular. That means they know my name. They of course know nothing of what I’ve written! But, and this is what’s curious, they know that the Écrits exist.

It must be that they don’t need them, because the Uccelli, those Birds in question, for example, are capable of actions like this one, which obviously has the same relation to Lacanian teaching as the posters from the Beaux-Arts have to what is really at stake politically—but that means they have a completely direct connection.

When the Dean of the Faculty of Rome, accompanied by a prominent representative of Vatican intelligence, comes to address them all together… because there too, they have general assemblies, where one speaks to them, of course always in favor of dialogue, on the side where it serves… then the Uccelli come with one of those big things like the ones you find in country restaurants at the center of a round table, it’s a huge umbrella, they all gather underneath it, under shelter, as they say, from language!

I hope you understand that this gives me some hope. They haven’t yet read the Écrits, but they will! Do they really need to, since they’ve found this? After all, it’s not the theorist who finds the path, he explains it. Obviously, the explanation is useful to find the next part of the way. But, as you can see, I trust them.

If I wrote a few little things that might have been useful to psychoanalysts, they will serve others whose place, whose determination is entirely specified by a certain field, the field that is circumscribed by that little knot made in a certain way by cutting into a certain bubble, extraordinarily purified by the antecedents of what led to this adventure and which is what I have tried to identify before you as being the moment of the engendering of science.

So this year, concerning the psychoanalytic act, I had reached the moment when I was about to show you what it involves to have to take one’s place in the register of the subject supposed to know… and this precisely when one is a psychoanalyst, not that one is the only one, but that one is particularly well placed to know its radical division… in other words, this inaugural position of the psychoanalytic act which consists in playing on something that your act is going to contradict.

That is why I had reserved for years, kept sheltered, kept apart the term Verleugnung which FREUD certainly brought to light in relation to a certain exemplary moment of the Spaltung of the subject. I wanted to reserve it, to let it live where it is undoubtedly pushed to its highest point of pathos—at the level of the analyst himself.

Because of that, I had to endure, for years, the harassment of those beings who follow the trail of what I bring, trying to see where they might cobble together a little piece where I would stumble. So when I spoke of Verwerfung, which is an extremely precise term and perfectly locates what is at stake concerning psychosis, “they” would point out that it would be much more clever to use Verleugnung. One finds traces of all this in poor lectures and mediocre articles.

The term Verleugnung could have assumed, had I been able to speak to you this year [1963–64] as had been planned, its authentic place and full weight. That was the next step to take.

There were others that I cannot even indicate. Certainly, one of the things that struck me the most… over the course of a teaching experience on which you may well allow me to cast a backward glance today, precisely at this turning point… is the violence of the things I allowed myself to say.

Twice at Sainte-Anne, for example, I said that psychoanalysis had at least this going for it: that in its field—what a privilege!—scoundrelism could only turn into stupidity. I repeated this two years in a row, and I knew what I was talking about!

We live in a zone of civilization where, as they say, speech is free—that is to say, nothing you say can have consequences. You can say anything at all about someone who may well be at the origin of I don’t know what undecipherable murder; you can even make a play about it: all of America—New York, no more—rushes to see it. Never before in history would such a thing have been conceivable without the box being immediately shut. In the land of liberty, you can say anything, since it leads to nothing.

It is rather curious that, from the moment a few little paving stones start flying, for at least a moment everyone feels that the whole of society could be directly affected in its daily comfort and in its future. We even saw psychoanalysts questioning the future of their profession. In my view, they were wrong to raise that question publicly. They would have done better to keep it to themselves, because still, the people who saw them asking themselves that, precisely at a time when they were being asked about something entirely different, well, it made them laugh a little. In any case, one cannot say that psychoanalysis’ reputation increased!

I blame the General. He snatched from me a phrase that I had long held—and certainly not for the use he made of it—“the psychoanalytic mess.” You have no idea how many years I’ve wanted to give that as the title of my seminar. It’s ruined now! And I’ll tell you what: I don’t regret it, because I’m too tired—it’s visible enough as it is, I don’t need to add a comment on top of it.

Still, there is one thing I would like, not everyone would like it, but I would: the teaching of psychoanalysis at the Faculty of Medicine. You know, there are, just like that, some very excitable types. I don’t know what fly bites them, who rush to be there, in that place. I am talking about people from the École Freudienne de Paris.

I know well that at the Faculty of Medicine, they know the history of medical doctrines—that means they’ve seen plenty of things pass by which, in our eyes, with the hindsight of history, fall into the category of mystification.

But that does not mean that psychoanalysis as it is taught where it is officially taught… they talk to you about libido as something that flows in communicating vessels, as was expressed, back when I first began trying to shift things a little, by an utterly unbelievable character: a libidinal hydraulics… teaching psychoanalysis the way it is taught, let’s say the word: at the Institute, that would be marvelous—especially in the time we are living in, when, after all, the “taught,” as they say, are beginning to have some demands. I find that wonderful.

Let us see what can be done, from a certain angle, with psychoanalytic teaching, after having taken this little tour of the horizon and having shown you the promises of good times that the unfolding of these matters holds for some. You will tell me, of course, that the person in question, for example, could always start teaching Lacan! Obviously, that would be better!

But he would still have to be able to, because there is a certain article that appeared in the Cahiers pour l’Analyse on the object (a) about which… I regret to say it, and it will once again shock some of my closest and dearest colleagues… it produced nothing but a long little burst of laughter among those damned normaliens, as if by chance.

I myself was forced, in a discreet little note somewhere, just before the publication of my Écrits, to indicate that, whatever the need we have to work on psychoanalytic marketing, it is not enough to talk about the object (a) for it to really be that.

In any case, I would like to take things from a slightly higher point of view, and since I have prepared a few words… not these ones, I must say I let myself go a bit… given the heat, the familiarity, the friendship emanating from this atmosphere, namely these faces, not one of which I do not recognize from having seen it at the beginning of this year… since I have spoken of these four terms, let us recall them… for the sake of those who are a bit short-sighted and would not realize the quite critical importance of a certain conjuncture… let us recall their main articulations.

Namely: first, knowledge, because, in the end, it is still rather curious that on the side of knowledge up until now among the classics, one is wise, and part of being wise is obviously to keep quiet. That it is at the level—and as it is very rightly said, at a privileged level—of the transmission of knowledge that so many things are happening, it is perhaps worth benefiting from a bit of distance in one’s gaze.

There, there is a function… naturally, I apologize to those present here—there are few—who are here for the first time and who come to see a bit of what I might say if I were asked about “the events.” I will not be able to do the theory of the Other, and that is already what makes such a conversation, an interview, very difficult. It would be necessary to explain what the Other is. We begin with it because it is the key. So, for people who do not know what the Other is, I can say on the one hand that I strictly defined it as a place: “the place where speech comes to take place.” That does not reveal itself immediately, that: “place where speech comes to take place.”

But still, it is a topological function absolutely indispensable for uncovering the radical logical structure involved in what I earlier called that knot or that bubble, that hollow in the world concerning which the old notion of the subject is evoked, the old notion of the subject which is no longer reducible to the image of the mirror nor to anything of the order of an omnipresent reflection.

But indeed this bubble is still wandering, thanks to which this world is no longer, properly speaking, a world. This Other has been there for some time, of course. It had not really been uncovered because it is a good place, and something had been installed there which still remains there for most of you, called God: Il vecchio con la barba! He is still there.

Psychoanalysts have truly added very little to the question of whether—an essential point—he exists or does not exist. As long as that “or” is maintained, he will always be there. Nevertheless, thanks to the bubble, we can act as if he were not there. We can treat his place.

In his place, precisely, there has never been any doubt that lies what is at stake regarding knowledge. All knowledge comes to us from the Other. I am not speaking of God, I am speaking of the Other. There is always an Other where tradition is, accumulation, the reservoir. No doubt it was suspected that things could happen. That was called “discovery,” or even those variations in lighting, those ways of dispensing teaching which, in some way, changed its emphasis and its meaning—this is what made teaching hold together for some time.

Have you ever noticed that what gives teaching its grip may be precisely that, in a certain way of redistributing it, something is inscribed in its design, in its trace, in its structure, something that is not immediately stated, but that it is that which is heard?

Why, after all, would this string not appear a bit worn to those who sit on the benches? I mean that what is not said to be heard would still need to be something worthwhile and not simply hypocrisy, for example. That perhaps has something to do with the fact that it was at the level of the Faculties of Letters or again the Schools of Architecture that it began to ignite.

In this relation of the subject with the Other, psychoanalysis brings a radically new dimension. It is more than what I just now called, like that, “a discovery.” Discovery still retains something anecdotal; this is a profound reworking of the entire relation.

There is a word that I introduced here a few years ago into this dialectic: the word “truth.” And then, in truth, before articulating it precisely as I did here on a certain day… and as is marked in perfectly formalized fashion in the article in my Écrits: Truth and Science… I had given this word another function, in an article entitled The Freudian Thing, where one can read these terms:

“I, truth, I speak.” [p.409].

Who is this “I” who speaks?

This fragment—in truth, a prosopopoeia, one of those enthusiastic games—I happened to articulate it for FREUD’s centenary, and in Vienna. It was rather a cry of the order of what a MÜNCH so well conveyed in a famous engraving: that twisted mouth where we see the sublime annihilation of an entire landscape emerge.

A very long time ago, in Vienna, I said—especially there, where it had not been heard in a long time—the word “truth”: it is a very dangerous word, aside from the usage made of it when it is castrated, namely in treatises of logic. It has long been known that we do not know what it means. “What is truth?” [Cf. Pontius Pilate]

That is precisely the question that must not be asked. I alluded to it in Lyon, when I spoke there last October, to a certain passage by CLAUDEL, very brilliant, which I recommend to you. I didn’t have time to mark the pages for you before coming here—I didn’t know I would speak of it—but you will find it by looking carefully in the table of contents of CLAUDEL’s Proses, by searching under Pontius PILATE, of course.

That text describes all the misfortune that befalls that benevolent colonial administrator for having inappropriately uttered that question: “What is truth?” Among people who at the moment are, of course, situated in that futile zone of those oddballs to whom it is dangerous to speak the psychoanalytic truth, who give a terrible application to those words gathered at the turn of one of my pages: “I, truth, I speak.”

They go and tell the truth in places where it is not needed at all but where it strikes. It is very possible that something which had been so successfully muffled under the name “class struggle” suddenly becomes something quite dangerous. Of course, we can count on sound functions that have always existed for the maintenance of what is at stake, namely to keep things within the field of the sharing of power.

It must be said, people who know a bit about handling truth are not so reckless. They have the truth, but they teach: all power comes from God. All of it. That doesn’t allow you to say it’s only the power that suits them. Even power that is against God, it comes from God—for the Church.

DOSTOEVSKY had seen this very clearly. Since he believed in truth, God terrified him. That’s why he wrote The Grand Inquisitor. It was the conjunction, in sum, foreseen in advance, of Rome and Moscow. I think that at least a few of you have read that. But it’s practically done, my little friends, and you can see that it’s not so terrible! When one is in the order of power, everything gets arranged! That’s precisely why it is useful for truth to be somewhere, in a safe. The privilege of revelation—that is the safe. But if you take seriously the prosopopoeia “I, truth, I speak,” it can have, first of all—alas for the one who sets out on that path—great inconveniences.

Let’s nonetheless consider what we, analysts, may have brought that is new on this point. Obviously, our field is very limited. It is at the level of the bubble. The bubble—how is it defined? It has a very limited scope. If, after so many years, after having shown what its proper structure is, I am now speaking to you about logic, that is no accident: it is because, after all, it is clear that the knowledge that concerns us, we analysts, is properly only what is said.

If I say that the unconscious is structured like a language, it is because this unconscious that interests us is what can be said, and in being said, it engenders the subject. It is because the subject is a determination of this knowledge, that it is what runs beneath this knowledge, but that it does not run freely there, that it encounters impasses. It is in this—and in nothing else—that we are dealing with a knowledge. Anyone who says otherwise is led onto the paths I earlier called those of mystification.

It is because the unconscious is the consequence of what could be circumscribed, which showed that this relation to discourse has consequences much more complex than had previously been seen—namely, that the subject, being secondary in relation to knowledge, it appears that he does not say everything he knows, a point that had not been suspected, even though for a long time it had been suspected that he does not know everything he says. That is the point which made possible the constitution of the bubble; it resides very precisely in this: that on this topic we see how the dimension of truth is produced.

Truth—that is what psychoanalysis teaches us—lies at the point where the subject refuses to know: everything that is rejected from the symbolic reappears in the real. That is the key to what is called the symptom. The symptom is that real knot where the truth of the subject lies. At the beginning—very early on—in these little episodes, I told you: “They are the truth.” “They are the truth” does not mean that they speak it.

Truth is not something that is known just like that, without labor. That is precisely why it takes on this body called the symptom, why it shows where the dwelling place of what is called truth is. So, this rejected knowledge that you come to seek in psychoanalytic exchange—is it the knowledge of the analyst? Illusion!

The analyst may know something; he knows at least this, concerning the nature of truth. But as for the rest—namely, the rejected knowledge—there he does not know much. That is why the teaching of psychoanalysis, taken at the level of what would be substantial, would appear as what it is: a farce.

The libido I was speaking to you about earlier, for example—if it means what I call desire—it is rather striking that it was discovered, tracked in the neurotic, that is to say, in the one whose desire is sustained only insofar as it is supported by fiction.

To say “They are the truth” certainly does not mean to deliver it to you, nor to them. But it perhaps carries some weight to know this mechanism of an exchange—strange exchange—that is the one by which what is said by the subject—whatever it may be, whether he knows it or not—only becomes knowledge by being recognized by the Other. And that, precisely, is what is meant by the quite primitive notion, hewn roughly, called censorship. It is the Other, for a long time—during the times of authority—who always defined what can be said and what cannot.

But it would be quite futile to link this to configurations which experience shows were already obsolete when they were functioning, since they could become obsolete. It is in a structural sense that it is only at the level of the Other: — that what determines the subject is articulated into knowledge, — that enunciation—which is not necessarily made by the one who speaks—that enunciation by the Other, comes to designate the one who said it.

The Other was first the one who it always is when the analyst interprets, and who says to the subject: “You, I (that ‘I’ which is you), I say: that’s it.” And it happens that this has consequences. That is what is called interpretation. For a time, this Other, who was a philosopher, forged, himself, the subject supposed to know. It was already a deception, as anyone can realize by opening PLATO. He made the poor subject say whatever he wanted him to say. Eventually, the subject learned. He learned to say on his own:

“I say: black is not white,” for example.
“I say: either it’s true or it’s false.”

But the whole of what I say there is certainly true, for either it’s true or it’s false. Naturally, it’s “childish” like the March 22nd Movement. It’s not true that “Either it’s true or it’s false.” But it holds up. The subject learned to assume, from an “I say,” something for which he declared himself ready to answer in a debate whose rules were fixed in advance, and that is what is called logic.

Strangely, it is from what was purified from this path of the isolation of logical articulation, from the detachment of the subject from everything that can occur between him and the Other… and God knows things can happen, including prayer… that science emerged, knowledge. Not just any knowledge, but a pure knowledge that has nothing to do with the real, nor, consequently, with truth, for the knowledge of science is, in relation to the real, what is called in logic the complement of a language.

It functions beside the real. But it bites into the real. It introduces the bubble, which is, after all, something that, from the point of view of knowledge, is not much more significant than a gag. But it ultimately yields the only thing that truly embodies the laws of NEWTON, namely the first Sputnik, which is surely the best gag we’ve seen—since it messes up the world—the gag…arin. For what does that have to do with the cosmos… inasmuch as we have a relation to it… that one could go six times around the Earth in twenty-four hours, in a way that surely exceeded completely the understanding of those who believed that motion has something to do with effort?

In any case, the bubble has done other things since. But there remains a residue of it, in a way. It is that the one who speaks is not always capable of saying “I say,” as is proven by… and it is in this that we are witnesses, we, psychoanalysts… that we, psychoanalysts, who are capable of telling him what it is he says, are capable in a small number of cases—especially if they bring great good will, if they come to us and talk a great deal—there happens this: that we interpret something to them.

And what is it to interpret something? We never interpret the world to them; we bring them, just like that, a little fragment of something that seems to be something that had had its place in their discourse without them knowing it. From where do we, analysts, draw that?

There is something I would have liked to have you meditate on this year: the frozen words of RABELAIS. In truth, like many things, it was already written a long time ago, but no one noticed it. I put much emphasis on a certain Mr. VALDEMAR described by POE. I made use of it—if one may say so—satirically.

I spoke on that occasion of something that was nothing other than what I was denouncing here once again, namely that quasi-hypnotic survival of Freudian discourse and of the dead societies that it seems to keep speaking. It is a myth that goes further. What interpretation unleashes is not always clear in terms of whether it concerns realities of life or of death.

What I would have led you toward this year, had I been able to speak of the psychoanalytic act to its conclusion, would have been to tell you that it is not for nothing that I spoke to you of the desire of the psychoanalyst, for it is impossible to derive it from anywhere but the fantasy of the psychoanalyst… and that is what can certainly give a bit of a chill, but we are not too sensitive to that in the times we’re living in… that it is from the fantasy of the psychoanalyst—that is, from what is most opaque, most closed, most autistic in his speech—that the shock emerges which thaws speech in the analysand, and in which this function of repetition insists and multiplies, where we can enable him to grasp that knowledge of which he is the plaything. Thus it is confirmed that truth is made known by the Other.

This justifies that it has always been thus that it has emerged. What we additionally know is that it is in a relation to the Other, which has nothing mystical nor transcendental about it, that this takes place.

And the knot whose curve I have drawn on this board, in the form of that little loop there… and which with the slightest move, as you will see, could close back upon itself in such a way that it would no longer appear as anything but a circle, sealing itself in its double loop… is what experience gives us, namely that the subject supposed to know… where it truly is—that is to say, not us, the analyst, but indeed what we suppose this subject to know, this subject inasmuch as it is unconscious… is doubled with what practice—this practice being rather close to the ground—places in parallel to it, namely the “subject supposed to demand.” Did I not see someone who seemed quite proud to question a member of the March 22nd Movement—let us not name him—to ask: “What is it that you’re asking of us, analysts?”

I wrote somewhere that the analyst was that privileged, assuredly comical, character who, from offering, makes demand. It’s quite evident that here it didn’t work—but that doesn’t prove that we have nothing to do with what’s happening at that level. It means they are asking nothing of us. So what?

It is precisely the analyst’s mistake to believe that where we have to intervene—as analysts—is at the level of demand, which never ceases to be theorized, whereas what is at stake is very precisely this interval between the “subject supposed to know” and the “subject supposed to demand,” and in that which has long been known: that the subject does not know what he is asking.

That is what allows that afterwards he does not ask for what he knows. This interval, this gap, this Möbius strip—to recognize it where it is, in that little knot sketched as best I could on the board… in truth, I didn’t put much care into it… is what we call that residue, that distance, that thing to which the Other is entirely reduced for us, namely the object (a).

This role of the object (a), which is of lack and of distance and not at all of mediation, is what grounds, what imposes this truth which is the discovery—the tangible discovery—and may those who have touched it not forget it—that there is no dialogue, that the relation of the subject to the Other is essentially asymmetrical, that dialogue is a deception.

It is at the level of the subject insofar as the subject has been purified that the origin of science was instituted.

That at the level of the Other, there has never been anything truer than prophecy.

It is, on the other hand, at the level of the Other that science totalizes itself—that is to say, in relation to the subject, it becomes completely alienated.

The question is to know where, still at the level of the subject, something may reside that belongs precisely to the order of prophecy.