🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

You were able, the last time we met here, to hear what Jacques-Alain MILLER proposed to you. I was not able to add many observations due to time constraints.

I believe you may have noticed, in that presentation marked by a clear understanding of what, strictly speaking, was inaugurated—one can say, generally—as modern logic, through the work and achievement of BOOLE.

It may not be irrelevant to let you know that Jacques-Alain MILLER, who had not been present at my last… lecture, let’s say, and who also could not have had access to it, since I myself received the text only two days ago, thus found himself, by the path and the presentation he had chosen… and I think you could also clearly feel, at the moment I announced it at my last lecture, that I was not very certain about the subject he had chosen.

These remarks are of interest, precisely because of the extraordinary convergence, or if you prefer: reapplication, of what he was able to state before you—certainly, of course, knowingly, that is, being aware of the principles and, if I may say so, the axioms around which my development is currently revolving.

It is nonetheless striking that, with the help of BOOLE… in whom, of course, this major articulation is absent: “that no signifier can signify itself”… that by starting from BOOLE’s logic—that is, from that turning point where, in a way, one realizes, in having attempted to formalize classical logic, that this formalization itself not only allows for major extensions, but turns out to be the hidden essence on which that logic had been able to orient and construct itself, believing it was following something that was not really its foundation—believing it was following what we will try to pinpoint today in order, in a sense, to remove it from the field in which we are going to proceed, as far as we have announced the Logic of the Fantasy.

The surprising ease with which, from the blank spaces in BOOLE’s logic, MILLER rediscovered the situation, the place, where the signifier in its proper function is, in a way, elided—in that famous “-1” from which he admirably isolated the exclusion in BOOLE’s logic.

The way in which, through that very elision, he indicated the place where what I am trying to articulate here is located—this is something that, I believe, has its importance—not at all that I am here paying him a compliment—but that allows you to grasp the coherence, the straight line, into which this logic, which we are obliged to establish in the name of the facts of the unconscious, inserts itself—and which, as one must expect, if we are what we are, that is, rationalists, what one must expect is quite evidently not that prior logic is somehow overturned, but that it simply rediscovers its own foundations there.

You also saw, in passing, the indication that at this point, which requires for us the introduction of a certain symbol—this something that corresponds to the “-1” which BOOLE does not use or forbids himself from using, and of which it is not certain that this “-1” is the best one for use.

For the hallmark of a logic, of a formal logic, is that it operates, and what we have to extract this year are new operators whose shadow has, in a way, already been outlined in what, according to the capacities of the ears I was addressing, I already tried to articulate in a manageable way—manageable for what there was to handle, which was none other, in this case, than analytic praxis—but which this year we are pushing to its limits, to its very edges, forcing us to give more rigorous formulations in order to define what we are dealing with and which deserves, in certain respects, to be taken on and undertaken in the most general articulation presently available to us in terms of logic, namely: that which is centered on the function of sets.

I leave this subject—what MILLER thus contributed last time—less as an articulation of what I am developing before you than as confirmation, assurance, framing, at the margins.

It is not uninteresting to point out to you that in designating, in SARTRE, under the name of “the thetic consciousness of self,” the way in which he somehow occupies the place where this logical articulation resides—which is our task this year—what is really at stake is only what is called a “placeholder”—very properly so—that is to say: something which we, as analysts, have only to deal with in a way strictly equivalent to how we handle other “placeholders,” when we are dealing with what is an effect of the unconscious.

This is precisely why it can be said that in no way does what I can articulate about structure situate itself in relation to SARTRE, since this fundamental point around which turns the privilege he attempts to preserve for the subject is precisely this kind of “placeholder” which cannot, in any way, concern me—except in the register of its interpretation.

Logic, then, of the fantasy… It would be necessary almost today to recall—but we can do so only very briefly, as one might touch a bell lightly with a fingertip to make it vibrate for a moment—to remind you, on this point, of the still-unextinguished wavering of that which is connected to tradition, which the term “academic” will pin here… if we assign to it not anything that designates or disparages a geographical point, but the meaning of Universitas litterarum or, let’s say, of a cursius classici… it is not useless, in passing, to indicate that, whatever other meanings—much more historical ones, of course—one might assign to this term “university,” there is here some allusion to what I have called the universe of discourse.

At the very least, it is not in vain to bring the two terms into relation.

Now, it is clear that in that hesitation—recall the waltz—that the philosophy professor… in the course of the year, nearly all of you went through it, I think… would perform around logic, namely: what is it about?

— Is it about the laws of thought or its norms?
— Is it about the way it functions, and which we will extract scientifically, let’s say, or about how it must be conducted?

Admit that, given we are still at the point of not having resolved this debate, perhaps a suspicion may arise in us: that the function of the University… in the sense I just articulated… is perhaps precisely to avoid that decision.

All I want to say is that this decision—still speaking of logic—might be more involved, for example, in what is happening in Vietnam than in what pertains to thought, assuming it remains suspended in this dilemma between its laws, which then leaves us questioning: if it applies to the “world,” as one says, let us rather say to the real—in other words, if it is not dreaming?

I am not losing my psychoanalytic thread—I am speaking of things that concern us, we analysts, because for us, as analysts, to know whether the man who thinks is dreaming is a question that has the most concrete of meanings.

To whet your appetite, to keep you in suspense, know that I very much intend this year to pose the question of what is at stake in awakening: the norm of thought, at the opposite extreme—that is indeed something that interests us too!

And in its dimension not reduced by that little polishing job by which, generally, the professor… when it comes to logic in the philosophy class… ends up making these laws and these norms appear with the same “smoothness” that allows one to slide a finger from one to the other—in other words, to handle it all blindly.

For us—that is to say, for us analysts—this dimension titled the true has not lost its relief, insofar as, after all, it does not require, does not imply, in itself the support of thought, and that if we question what this “true” is about, in relation to which the fantasy of a norm is aroused, it clearly appears from the outset that it is not immanent to thought.

If I allowed myself—always for the ears that needed to be made to vibrate—to write one day, creating a figure that was not, moreover, very difficult for me to animate, that of “Truth emerging from the well,” as she has always been painted, to make her say:

“I, Truth, I speak.”

it was indeed to highlight that relief we must maintain, that to which—strictly speaking—our experience clings and which is absolutely impossible to exclude from the articulation of FREUD. For FREUD is placed there immediately up against the wall, and one does not need to intervene for that: he placed himself there.

The question of how the field of interpretation is presumed, the mode by which FREUD’s technique provides occasion for it, namely free association, leads us to the heart of that formal organization from which the first steps of a mathematical logic begin to take shape—a logic which has a name… and it cannot be that the tickle of it did not reach all your ears… which is called network—yes, and it is specified, but it is not my role today to specify or remind you of what is called a “trellis” or “lattice,” the English transposition of the word treillis.

This is what is at stake in what FREUD, both in his early sketches of a new psychology and in the way he subsequently organizes the handling of the analytic session as such, constructs—before the term existed, so to speak.

And when the objection is made to him, at a precise point in the Traumdeutung…
it so happens that I did not bring today the copy in which I had marked the page for you…
he has to respond to the objection:

“Of course, with your way of proceeding, at every crossroads you will certainly have the opportunity to find a signified that will form a bridge between two meanings, and with this way of organizing bridges, you’ll always be going from somewhere to somewhere else.”

It was not for nothing that I had posted the little sign taken from the ORUS APOLLO…
as if by chance, that is, from a 16th-century interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs…
in a now-defunct journal called La Psychanalyse: “The Ear and the Bridge.”

This is what is at stake in FREUD, and each point of convergence in this network or lattice, where he teaches us to ground the initial interrogation, is indeed a small bridge. That’s how it works, and what is objected to him is that in this way, everything will end up explaining everything.

In other words, what fundamentally opposes psychoanalytic interpretation is not any kind of “scientific criticism” in quotation marks…
as one imagines from what is ordinarily the only baggage that minds entering the field of medicine still carry from their year of philosophy, namely that science is founded on experience!
Of course, no one has opened Claude BERNARD, but the title is still remembered…
it is not a scientific objection; it is an objection that goes back to the medieval tradition, where people knew what logic was. It was much more widespread than in our time, despite the means of dissemination we now have.

Things have even come to the point that, having let slip recently in one of the interviews I told you about that my taste for commentary came from an old scholastic practice, I asked them to erase that—God knows what people might have concluded from it! [Laughter]

Anyway, in the Middle Ages they knew that: Ex falso sequitur quodlibet. In other words, that “it is a characteristic of the false to make everything true.” The characteristic of the false is that one deduces from it equally, with the same step, the false and the true. It does not exclude the true.
If it excluded the true, it would be too easy to recognize! Only to realize this, one must have done a minimum number of logical exercises, which, as far as I know, is not part of medical studies—and that is very regrettable!

And it is clear that the way FREUD responds brings us immediately onto the terrain of the structure of the network.
He does not express it, of course, in all the details, the modern precisions we could give it.
It would be interesting, by the way, to know how he was able—or not able—to benefit from the teaching of BRENTANO,
which he certainly did not ignore; we have proof of it in his academic curriculum.

The function of the structure of the network, the way in which the lines—of association, precisely—come to overlap, intersect, converge at selected points from which elective restarts occur, this is what is indicated by FREUD. It is well known, throughout the continuation of his work, the concern, shall we say, the genuine preoccupation, to be more precise, that he had for this dimension which is, properly speaking, that of truth.

Because from the point of view of reality, one is at ease! Even knowing that perhaps the trauma is only a fantasy. In a certain way,
it is even more certain—a fantasy, as I am currently showing you, is structural—but that does not leave FREUD,
who was quite capable of inventing this just as well as I, as you might imagine—it does not leave him any more at peace.

Where is—the question he asks—the criterion of truth? And he would not have written The Wolf Man if he had not been on this path, under this very demand: is it true, or not? “Is it true?”

He bears this out from what is discovered by interrogating the fundamental figure that manifests itself in the recurring dream of the Wolf Man.
And “Is it true?” does not reduce to knowing whether or not, and at what age, he lived something that was reconstructed with the help
of that dream figure. The essential thing—it is enough to read FREUD for you to realize it—is to know how the subject, the Wolf Man, was able to verify—that scene—verify it with his whole being. It is through his symptom.

This is what it means—for FREUD does not doubt the reality of the primal scene—this is what it means: how was he able to articulate it properly in terms of the signifier? You only need to recall the figure of the Roman numeral five, for example, insofar as it is at stake there, and how it reappears everywhere: in the spread legs of a woman, or the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings, to know, to understand that what is involved is the handling of the signifier.

The relation of truth to the signifier, the detour through which the analytic experience rejoins the most modern process of logic, consists precisely in this: that the relation of the signifier to truth can short-circuit any thought that supports it. And just as a kind of aim emerges on the horizon of modern logic—that which reduces logic to the correct handling of what is only writing—so for us, the question of verification, regarding what we are dealing with, passes through this direct thread of the play of the signifier, insofar as the question of truth remains suspended on it alone.

It is not easy to bring forward a term like that of the true without immediately resonating with all the echoes into which the most suspect “intuitions”—in quotation marks—slip, without at once provoking objections: it is a well-known experience that those who venture into these fields know all too well that they may—as scalded cats—fear cold water.

But who says that, because I have you say, “I, Truth, speak,” that by this I reopen its entry to the theme of Being, for example? Let’s at least look at it twice—just to be sure. Let’s be satisfied with that very deliberate knot I have just tied between truth… and in doing so, I did not indicate any person, except the one to whom I had made say these words: “I, Truth, speak.” No person, divine or human, is concerned apart from that one… namely, the point of origin of the relations between the signifier and truth.

What relation does this have to the point I started from just a while ago? What does it mean to say that, by leading you into this field of the most formal logic, I forgot the one where the fate of logic is being played out, according to what I said earlier?

It is perfectly clear that Mr. Bertrand RUSSELL is more interested than Mr. Jacques MARITAIN in what is happening in Vietnam. This fact alone can serve us as an indication. Besides, by invoking The Peasant of the Garonne—that is his latest dressing—I am not picking a target.

You didn’t know that The Peasant of the Garonne had come out? Well, go get yourself a copy. [Laughter] It’s the latest book by Jacques MARITAIN, a writer who has dealt a great deal with scholastic authors insofar as the influence of the philosophy of Saint THOMAS develops there, which, after all, has no reason not to be evoked here, to the extent that a certain way of positing the principles of being is certainly not without impact on what is done with logic: one cannot say that it prevents the use of logic, but it can, at certain moments, pose an obstacle.

In any case, I wanted to clarify—and I apologize for this parenthesis—that if I bring up Jacques MARITAIN here, and therefore, by implication, encourage you to find that his writing is not contemptible but far from uninteresting, I nonetheless ask you to refer to it in this spirit: of the paradox that is demonstrated there, of the persistence in this author, who has reached his old age—as he himself emphasizes—of a kind of rigor that allows one to see pushed, truly, up to a dead end… a caricatural dead end, within a very precise framework of all the relief of modern developments in thought… the persistence of the most unthinkable hopes concerning what ought to develop, either in its place or on its margins, in order to sustain what is his central adherence, namely what he calls “the intuition of being.”

He speaks in this context of “philosophical Eros,” and in truth, I do not need to repudiate, given what I am putting forward before you concerning “desire,” the use of such a term, but its use on this occasion—namely, in the name of the philosophy of being, to hope for the rebirth, correlated with the development of modern science, of a philosophy of nature—partakes, it seems to me, in an Eros that can only be situated in the register of Italian comedy! [Laughter]

This of course does not prevent that, along the way, in taking his distance and in repudiating it, a few remarks—more than one, in fact, and throughout the book—are pointed out, some of the most pertinent ones, concerning what is, for example, the structure of science. That, indeed, our science has nothing in common with the dimension of knowledge—that is indeed quite accurate, but it does not in itself contain a hope, a promise, for that rebirth of knowledge—of ancient knowledge—that was cast off, which is consolidated within our perspective.

So, returning after this parenthesis, to what we are to interrogate. There is no necessity for us to recoil from the use of those truth tables through which logicians introduce, for example, a certain number of fundamental functions in propositional logic.

To write that the conjunction of two propositions implies… a table, let me remind you—I won’t go through all of them—it is within everyone’s reach to see this… implies that if we assign values here to the two propositions, namely:
— to proposition p, the value true and the value false, that is, that it can be either “true” or “false”,
— and to proposition q, the value true and the value false,
…then in this case, what is called “conjunction,” that is, what they are when combined together, will be true only if both are true. In all other cases, their conjunction will result in something false.

This is the type of table in question, and I have no need to vary it before you because it suffices that you open the beginning of any volume on modern logic to find how, for example, disjunction, or implication, or equivalence is defined differently.

And this may serve us as support—but only as support and foundation—for what we have to ask ourselves, namely: is it legitimate… what we are handling, so to speak, through speech, what we say, to say that there is truth… is it legitimate to write what we say, insofar as writing it will be, for us, the foundation of our manipulation?

Indeed, logic—modern logic, as I have just said and repeated—intends to establish itself not from a convention, but from a rule of writing. And this rule of writing, of course, is based on what? On the fact that at the moment of constituting its alphabet, we established a certain number of rules, called axioms, concerning their correct manipulation, and this is in a way a statement we have given to ourselves.

Do we have the right to inscribe in the signifiers the T and the F of true and false as something logically manageable? It is certain that, whatever the introductory or premissive character of these “truth tables” in the basic treatises of logic you may come across, it is certain that the entire effort of the development of this logic will be directed toward constructing propositional logic without starting from these tables, even if, after constructing otherwise the rules of their deducibility, one returns to them.

But what interests us is also to know—let’s say at least—what it meant that they were used, here I say particularly in Stoic logic. A moment ago, I alluded to “Ex falso sequitur quodlibet”; it is of course something that must have appeared a very long time ago, but it is clear that it was nowhere articulated with such force as by the Stoics.

On truth and falsehood, the Stoics interrogated themselves through this logical path:
– namely, what is required for the true and the false to have a relation to logic in the proper sense in which we place it here,
– namely, where the foundation of logic is to be taken nowhere other than in the articulation of language, in the signifying chain. That is why their logic was a logic of propositions and not of classes.

For there to be a logic of propositions, for it even to function, how must propositions be connected with respect to true and false?
— Either this logic has nothing to do with true and false,
— or it does: the true must produce the true.

This is what is called the relation of implication in the sense that it involves nothing other than two propositional moments:
— the “protasis”; I say “protasis” to avoid saying “hypothesis,” which would immediately evoke in you the idea that we start to believe something. It is not a matter of believing, nor of believing that it is true; it is a matter of positing: “protasis,” that’s all. That is to say, what is asserted is asserted as true.
— And the second proposition, the “apodosis.”

We define implication as “something that may exist,” nothing more: a true “protasis” and a true “apodosis.” This can yield only something we place in parentheses and which constitutes a true connection. That does not mean at all that there can only be that! Suppose the same “protasis” is false, and the “apodosis” is true—well, the Stoics will tell you that this is true, because very precisely “Ex falso sequitur quodlibet”: from the false, both the true and the false may be implied and, consequently, if it is the true, there is no logical objection.

Implication does not mean cause. Implication means this connection in which, in a certain way concerning the truth table, the “protasis” and the “apodosis” are united.

The only thing that cannot hold—at least, according to the doctrine of a certain PHILON, who played an eminent role here—is that the “protasis” be true and the “apodosis” false. The true cannot imply the false: this is the most radical foundation of any possibility of handling, in a certain relation to truth, the signifying chain as such. We therefore have here the possibility of a table that, I repeat to you, is constructed in this way: namely, when proposition p is true, if proposition q is false, then the implication connection is marked as false.

What does this mean? Clearly: the most radical conditions of existence for a logic, as I have told you. The problem is quite obvious—it is what we have to deal with, when we are then to speak of what is there written, in other words: when the subject of enunciation comes into play. To bring this out, we only need to observe what happens when we say:

“It is true that it is false.”

Nothing shifts, meaning quite simply that the false perhaps takes on I don’t know what kind of luster, of framing, which makes it pass into radiant falsehood. That is not nothing, all the same.

To say: “It is false that it is true” has the same result—I mean, we establish the false. But is it quite the same thing? If only to indicate this: that we are more likely to say, “It is false that it be true.” The use of the subjunctive here shows us that something is happening.

To say, “It is true that it is true” also works and leaves us with an assured, albeit tautological, truth. But to say, “It is false that it be false” does not ensure, without doubt, the same order of truth. Saying “it is not false” is not for all that saying “it is true.” So we see again, with the dimension of enunciation, something being suspended that only asked to function in a wholly automatic way at the level of writing.

That is why it is quite striking to note the slippery nature of this point where the drama—if I may say so—arises precisely from this duplicity of the subject, which is the one that, I must say, I won’t hesitate to illustrate with a little story, to which I’ve already alluded several times because it hasn’t been without consequences—let’s say: the career of my little story—this kind of complaint, even demand, that one day sprang directly from the throat of someone deeply moved by what I was offering as the first articulations of my teaching, a touching ejaculation launched toward the Heavens:

— “Why,” said this person, “why doesn’t he say the truth about the truth?”

This sort of urgency, even anxiety, would already find, I think, sufficient answer under the sole condition of returning to the written signifier. The truth about the truth! The T over the T, the signifier cannot signify itself, except precisely in the case where it does not signify itself—that is to say, it makes use of metaphor. And nothing prevents metaphor, which substitutes another signifier for this T of truth, from thereby bringing truth to the fore, with the ordinary effect of metaphor, namely: the creation of a false signified. This happens all the time.

And concerning discourse, as rigorous as I attempt to make it today, it may still… in many corners of what one calls, more or less accurately, your brains [Laughter]… produce those kinds of confusions precisely linked to the production of the signified in metaphor.

Certainly, it is not surprising that I’ve heard it said that from the same source where that nostalgic invocation once arose, a recent statement took as its aim, concerning what FREUD teaches, what that mouth so elegantly articulated as “conceptual dilution.” There is, in fact, a certain kind of admission here, which precisely designates this: the close relation that the partial object has with the structure of the subject.

The ideal—or even simply the act—of admitting that it is possible in any way to comment on a text by FREUD by diluting his concepts irresistibly evokes what in no way can satisfy the function of the partial object: the partial object must be capable of being cut.

In no way can the mustard jar—the mustard jar that I once defined as necessarily empty—empty of mustard—be satisfactorily filled with what “dilution” sufficiently evokes, namely: soft shit. [Laughter]

It is extremely essential to see the coherence, precisely, that these primordial objects have with any correct handling of what is called a subjective dialectic. To return to those first steps concerning implication, it is necessary to see emerge this junction between truth and writing, namely: what can be written and what cannot. What does this “cannot” mean, whose definition, at the limit, remains entirely arbitrary? The only limit posed in modern logic to the functioning of an alphabet within a given system, the only limit is that of the given word, axiomatic and initial. What does the “cannot” mean?

It has meaning in the given, initial, interdictive word. But what can be written from it? The problem of negation must be posed at the level of writing, insofar as writing governs it as logical operation.

Here immediately, of course, appears to us the necessity that first gave rise to this use of negation in those intuitive images marked by the first sketch of what was not even yet known to be an edge: images, in a way, of a boundary—the one where the first logic, the one introduced by ARISTOTLE, the logic of the “predicate,” which marks “the field” where a class is characterized by a “given predicate,” and “the out-of-field” as designated by “not joined to the predicate.”

Of course, it is not perceived, it is not articulated at ARISTOTLE’s level, that this entails the unity of the universe of discourse. What does it mean—as I wrote somewhere about the unconscious, to make its absurdity felt—to say “there is black and then… everything that is not,” that this has meaning, that it is the very foundation of the logic of classes or of the predicate. It is precisely because of what this already contains as suspicious—if not as a dead end—that something else has been attempted to be founded.

It is not today, but certainly in the sessions to come, that I will try for you to distinguish in a complete way what the properly logical levels are, what is imposed, what writing itself imposes in distinguishing concerning negation.

It is by means of little letters, just as clear and once fixed on this blackboard, that I will show you there are four different scales of negation, of which classical negation—the one that invokes, and appears to be founded solely on, the principle of non-contradiction—is only one.

This technical distinction—I mean, what can be formulated strictly in formal logic—will undoubtedly be absolutely essential to allow us to question what FREUD says—and what, of course, has been repeated ever since he said it, without there ever having been even the slightest beginning of examination!—that “the unconscious knows no contradiction.”

It is quite sad that certain statements are launched in the form of illuminating arrows—for it truly puts us on the path of the most radical developments—and have remained suspended in that state. To the point that even a lady bearing the title—officially, in fact—of princess, could repeat it, believing she was saying something!

That is the danger of logic, precisely: that logic only holds where it can be handled through the use of writing, but that, properly speaking, no one can be assured that someone speaking of it is even saying anything. That is indeed what has made it be regarded with suspicion! It is also why it is so necessary for us to resort to the apparatus of writing. Nevertheless, our danger, our risk, is that we must become aware of the mode in which this negation emerges, elsewhere than in written articulation. Where does it come from, for example? Where will we be able to grasp it? Where will we be forced to write it, using only the apparatuses I have already presented to you here?

Let us take this implication: proposition p implies proposition q. Let us try to see what becomes of it starting from q, namely, what we can articulate about proposition p if we place it after proposition q. Well, we must write the negation before, or beside, or above, somewhere linked to q: p implies q indicates that: if not-q, then not-p.

I repeat: this is an example, and one of the most sensitive, of the necessity of the emergence in writing of something which one would be wrong to believe is the same as what was functioning earlier, under the label of the complementary, for instance—namely, that which by itself posited the universe of discourse as One. The two things go so little together that it suffices to decree it to disarticulate them from one another, to make each function distinctly.

Among the varieties of this negation, then, which are presented to us as to be interrogated from before what can be written, namely from the point where the duplicity of the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement is eliminated—or, if you prefer, from the point where this duplicity is maintained.

We will have first the function of negation, insofar as it rejects from any order of discourse, as discourse articulates it, that which it speaks of.

Namely—and I will point this out to you very precisely—what FREUD advances and what is misunderstood, when he articulates the first step of experience, insofar as it is structured by the pleasure principle: “as ordered,” he says, “by a ‘me’ and a ‘not-me’.”

We are so little logicians that we fail to notice that at this point it cannot be a matter of… this in a way that is all the more erroneous given that in FREUD’s text, the two levels are distinguished: the ego and the non-ego, insofar as they are defined in the opposition Lust-Unlust… and so far from being considered of the order of that complementarity imposed by the universe of discourse that FREUD distinguished them by placing on the first line: Ich aussen welt, which is not of the same register.

If ego and non-ego were meant at that moment to indicate “apprehension of the world within a universe of discourse”… which is properly what one evokes in considering that primary narcissism might intervene in the analytic session… this would mean that the infantile subject, at the point where FREUD designates him, already within the first operation of the pleasure principle, is capable of doing logic.

Whereas what is at stake is precisely the identification of the ego in what pleases it, in the Lust:
— which means that the subject’s ego here becomes alienated in an imaginary way,
— which means that it is precisely in the outside that what pleases is isolated as ego.

This first “no” that is foundational for the narcissistic structure, insofar as in FREUD’s development it will evolve into nothing less than this kind of negation of love, concerning which, when one encounters it—as has happened—in my discourse, one will not say that I speak the truth about the truth, but that I speak the truth about what FREUD says.

That all love is founded in this primary narcissism: this is one of the terms from which FREUD, starting out, urges us to understand what is at stake in this supposedly universal function, insofar as it lends a hand to that famous “intuition” of being, denounced earlier.

This is the negation we will call the “mē” [μὴ]—of misrecognition—which already poses its question to us and which must be distinguished from the complement, insofar as in the universe of discourse it designates—and can it designate?—the counterpart, what we will call, if you like, here “the counter,” rather than saying more and calling it “the opposite,” which is perfectly distinct from it, even in FREUD himself.

It is this, then, which will come into play further on, and is more manageable than it is in logical writing… that to which I alluded earlier in implication… insofar as, in regulating it through the appearance of those negations, entirely opaque in their reversal, one can name it within implication itself: the “not without,” in implication as defined by the Stoic tradition, which cannot be avoided, whatever its paradoxes may be.

For there is certainly some paradox in the fact that implication is constituted such that any propositions “p” and “q” form an implication if you join them together, and it is clear that to say:

“If Madam So-and-so has yellow hair, then equilateral triangles have such-and-such a proportion for their height.”

No doubt, there is some paradox in this use, but what is implied in the position of the reversal—namely that the condition becomes necessary to go back from what is the second proposition to the first—is this aspect of “not without” (this does not go without). Madam So-and-so may have yellow hair, that has for us no necessary connection with this: that the equilateral triangle must have such-and-such a property. Nevertheless, it remains true that the fact that she has or does not have yellow hair does not go without the thing that, in any case, is true.

Around the suspension of this “not without” are outlined both the place and the mode of emergence of what is called cause. If we can give a meaning, a substance, to that phantom being that has never been successfully exorcised from this junction—despite the fact that, manifestly, everything developed by science always tends to eliminate it and only achieves perfection in so far as one no longer even has to speak of it—it is the function of this “not without” and the place it occupies that will allow us to ferret it out.

And to close on what will be, in sum, the entire object and question of our next encounter: what does the term “no” mean? Can we even make it emerge:
— as a form of the complementary,
— nor as the form of the “mē” [μὴ] of misrecognition,
— nor as this “not without,” when it comes to be applied to the most radical terms on which I have made the question of the fact of the unconscious turn for you?

Namely, can it even occur to us that when we speak of “non-being,” it refers to something that would be, in a sense, on the outer edge of the bubble of being?

Is “non-being” all the space outside? Is it even possible to suggest that this is what we mean when we speak—indeed, quite confusedly—of this “non-being” that I would prefer on this occasion to name as what is at stake and what the unconscious puts into question, namely: “the place where I am not”?

As for “not thinking,” who will go so far as to say that this is something that could in any way be grasped within that which all predicate logic revolves around, namely that famous distinction—which is not one—between extension and comprehension?

As if comprehension constituted the slightest antinomy in relation to the register of extension, when it is clear that every step taken in logic in the direction of comprehension has always and only occurred when things were taken solely from the angle of extension.

Is that a reason for negation, here, to be able even to continue being used—without a fundamental questioning—concerning what is at stake, if it is to remain tied to extension? For there is for us not only this “not to be,” since equally the kind of “being” that concerns us regarding the subject is bound to thought. So, what does “not thinking” mean?

I mean: what does it mean to the point that we can write it in our logic?

That is the question around which, the “I am not” and the “I do not think,” I will focus our next discussion.