🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I believe I proved to you last time that I can endure quite minor trials: the lamp, like that, turning on and off, right! In the past, in bogeyman stories, they explained what methods were used to bring people, in certain places, to their self-criticism. That was its purpose.

Well… It was less unpleasant for me than for you, I must say, because I had it above me and you had it in your eyes. You could see that it is not these kinds of minor inconveniences that are capable of deflecting my discourse.

That’s precisely why I hope you will not attempt to refer to any fact of vain personal tickling, the fact that today will not be a celebration, even though it is the season. I am warning you right now: I will not give today the seminar I had prepared for you.

I apologize, for those who perhaps postponed something in their vacation plans to benefit from it. At the very least, no one will have come entirely for nothing, since I hope each of you has the small copy which I am offering you as an end-of-year gift. I didn’t go as far as to write a dedication for each of you, not knowing enough of your names, but anyway that can always be done!

We have reached the moment where I am going to formulate, regarding the unconscious, formulas that I consider decisive, logical formulas of which you saw last time appear on the blackboard the inscription, in the form of: “either I do not think, or I am not,”

With this caveat that this “either” is: – neither a vel, the “or” of union: one, the other, or both, – nor an aut: at least one, but not more, a choice must be made. It is neither one nor the other.

And it will be the occasion for me to introduce—hopefully—in a way that will be received within logical calculus, another function: one that, in truth tables, would be characterized by this operation that would need to be called by a new term, even though there is one I have already used, but which, having other applications, may be ambiguous—no matter!—I will draw the connection.

It is nothing other—I tell you, I am not here to play mysterious games—than what I once referred to here by the term alienation, but no matter! It will be up to you to make the choice.

In the meantime, let us call this operation Ω [omega] and in the truth table, let us characterize it as follows: among the propositions on which it operates, if both are true, the result of the operation is false. You will consult the truth tables at your disposal, and you will see that none of those currently in use—from conjunction to disjunction, to implication—fulfill this condition. When I said that the conjunction “from true to true” yields, through this operation, the false, I mean that every other conjunction is true: “from false to false,” “from false to true,” “from true to false.”

The relation of this to what pertains to the nature of the unconscious is what I hope to articulate before you on January 11, where, in any case, I hereby give you an appointment. You surely understand that if I am not doing it today—on that point, I think you trust me…—it is because my formulation is not yet ready, nor what I could limit it to today.

Nevertheless, if indeed it is due to a certain fear of presenting it before you in all its rigor, on a day when I am somewhat ill at ease, which has caused me to spend the last hours questioning something that is nothing less than the advisability or not of continuing this: what we all are gathered here for at the moment, which is called my seminar.

If I ask myself this question, it is because it is worth being asked. This little volume Language and the Unconscious that I gave you… and which seems to me to deserve being brought back to your attention just before I provide a logical formula that will allow, in some way, to firmly and certainly secure what pertains to the reaction of the subject caught within this reality of the unconscious… it is not in vain that this volume testifies to you what the difficulties of this residence are, for those whose praxis and function is to be there…

perhaps it is due to a failure to grasp the relation between this “being there” and a certain necessary “not being there”…

this volume will testify to what was an encounter around this theme of the unconscious.

Two of my students participated in it and had an eminent role, among those most dear to me, and others as well… everything is there, even the Marxists from the C.N.R.S.

You will see on the first page, in very small characters, a very peculiar manifestation. Anyone here who is an analyst will recognize in it what is technically called, what FREUD refers to at one point in the five major psychoanalyses… I leave it to you—that will allow you to leaf through them again a bit—to find that point… what FREUD and the police, with one voice, call “the gift” or “the calling card.”

If one day it happens that your apartment is visited in your absence, you may find that the trace left by the visitor is a small piece of shit. We are here on the level of the object little (a). No surprise that such things occur in relations with subjects whom you track through your discourse along the paths of the unconscious.

In truth, there are great and strong excuses for the deficiency that today’s psychoanalysts show in holding to the theoretical level demanded by their praxis. For them, the function of resistances is something you will see that… the formulas I want to be as sure of myself as possible about, on the day I try to give them to you in their essential and true instance… you will see the necessity that clings to resistance and that it can in no way be limited to the non-analysed.

Likewise, from the schema I will try to give you of the relation, not of unthought and of non-being—do not take me for sliding into mysticism—but of “I am not” and “I do not think,” which will allow, for the first time I believe, and in a perceptible way, to mark not only the difference, the non-overlap between what is called “resistance” and what is called “defense,” but even to mark, in an absolutely essential way, although it has not yet been stated as such, what “defense” is, which is precisely what encircles and exactly preserves the “I am not.”

It is for lack of knowing this that everything is displaced, misaligned, in the aim where each fantasizes what the reality of the unconscious might be. This something that we lack, and that makes treacherous what we are faced with, not due to some contingency, namely: — this new conjunction of being and knowledge, — this distinct approach to the term of truth, …makes FREUD’s discovery something that is in no way reducible or criticizable by means of a reduction to any ideology whatsoever.

If time allows, I will take here… and if I announce it to you, it is not out of vanity to wave some rags to entice you on this occasion, but rather to indicate to you what you would not lose anything by reopening DESCARTES first, since this is indeed the pivot around which I make this necessary return to the origins of the subject revolve, thanks to which we can take it up again, take it up again in terms of subject.

Why? Precisely because it is in terms of the subject that FREUD articulates his aphorism, his essential aphorism… around which I have learned to turn, not only for myself, but for those who listen to me… the “Wo es war, soll Ich werden.”

The “Ich,” in this formula and at the time it was articulated—in the New Lectures, as you know—can in no way be taken as the function “das Ich” as it is articulated in the second topology, as I translated it:

— “Where it was, there must I… — I added ‘as subject’ but that’s a pleonasm, the German ‘Ich’ here is the subject — …come to be.”

Just as I reawakened before you the meaning of the cogito, placing quotation marks around the “I am” that illuminate it, [in the same way] I will go into FREUD’s aphorism.

We may engrave a formula more worthy of stone than the one he dreamed of: “here was discovered the secret of the dream,” the “Wo es war, soll Ich werden”… if you engrave it, don’t forget to remove the comma… it is there, as FREUD wished, that Ich must come to be.

Which means… at the place where FREUD places this formula, final place in one of his articles… which means… that what is at stake in this indication is not the hope that all of a sudden, in all human beings, as expressed in the language of vermin, “the ego must dislodge the id”… which means that FREUD indicates there nothing less than this revolution of thought that his work necessitates.

Now, it is clear that this is a challenge, and a dangerous one for anyone who steps forward, as I do, to uphold it in his place: “Odiosum mundo me fecit logica.” A certain ABELARD—as perhaps some of you still have ringing in your ears—once wrote these words: “Logic made me hateful to the world.” And it is on that ground that I intend to lay down decisive terms, which no longer allow for confusion about what is at stake when it comes to the unconscious. We shall see—or not—whether anyone can articulate that here I am straying outside, or trying to divert from it…

To grasp what the unconscious is about, I want to emphasize… so that, in a way, you may prepare your mind for it through some exercise… that what is forbidden to us there is precisely that kind of movement of thought which is properly that of the cogito, which, just as much as analysis, requires the Other with a capital O. Which in no way requires the presence of some imbecile.

When DESCARTES publishes his cogito, when he articulates it within the movement of the Discourse on Method, when he develops it in writing, he is addressing someone, he is leading him down the path of an ever more pressing articulation. And then suddenly, something happens, which consists in detaching from that traced path, in order to make emerge that other thing which is the “I am.”

There is here this kind of movement which I will try to define for you more precisely, one which is found only occasionally in the course of history, and which I could point out to you:

— the same in the Seventh Book of EUCLID, in the demonstration to which we are still bound, for we have found no other, and it is of the very same order: to demonstrate, whatever formula you might—should it be found—give for the genesis of prime numbers, that it would be necessary—no one has yet found this formula, but should it be found…—that it necessarily follows that there would be others which this formula cannot name.

— It is this kind of knot where the essential point is marked of what a certain relation of the subject to thought is. If I touched last year on Pascal’s wager, it was with the same aim.

— If you refer to what appears, in modern mathematics, as what is called “diagonal apprehension,” in other words what allows CANTOR to establish a difference between infinities, you always have the same movement.

— And more simply, if you will kindly, by next time, obtain for yourselves in this form or another: Fides quaerens intellectum [“Faith seeking understanding”] by Saint ANSELM, chapter II—so that I won’t be forced to read it to you—you will read, even if you must make some effort to get your hands on this little book… this is the translation by KOYRÉ, which was published by VRIN, I don’t know if any copies remain, and surely there won’t be any left!—you will read chapter II, to go back through, as an exercise, what it is about what academic stupidity has discredited under the name of “ontological argument.” It was believed that Saint ANSELM didn’t know that it is not because one can think the most perfect being that it therefore exists. You will see in this chapter that he knew it very well, but that the argument has an altogether different scope, one that belongs to this kind of procedure I am trying to indicate to you, which consists in leading the adversary down a path such that it is from his abrupt detachment that a previously unnoticed dimension emerges.

Such is the horror of the relation to the dimension of the unconscious as this impossible movement: everything is permitted to the unconscious except to articulate “therefore I am.” This is what necessitates other approaches, and properly the logical approaches that I will try to lay out before you, approaches which cast into their nullity and futility all that has been articulated in the murky terms of psychologists around self-analysis.

But if, assuredly, the difficulty I may have in reviving, within a field whose function asserts and crystallizes itself, precisely difficulties—let us call them “noetic,” if that suits you—of the theoretical approach to the unconscious, is not too incomprehensible, it does not exclude that, in this setting, a junction may take place on the level of technique and precise interrogations. It is precisely, for example, about being able to demand that the terms justifying didactic psychoanalysis be reopened there.

A question, for me, that may arise concerning the consequences of a discourse, the circumstances, and also the intention I had of using their detour, the detour imposed on me by these circumstances, to open this discourse on FREUD to a broader audience.

The courteous man whose signature is at the bottom of what I called the gift, writes:

— “Is it fitting, under the pretext of liberty, to tolerate that the forum be turned into a circus?”

If the gift is precious to me, truth emerges even from incontinence. Would it be I who, precisely in this volume, would substitute “the circus” for the forum: God bless me if I had truly succeeded!

Sure! In that little article on the unconscious, I indeed had the feeling, while writing it, that I was exercising myself in something both rigorous and breaking boundaries, if not those of the circus tent, then at least those of acrobatics, and why not of clowning—if you like—to substitute something that indeed has no relation to what I may have said in that forum at Bonneval, which was like all forums, a fair! [Lacan throws the brochure on the table]

The precision of a circus act is all the less accessible to everyone since what I am in the process of demonstrating to you, when I speak to you about the cogito, is something that indeed has the form of a circus, except that the circuit doesn’t close, that somewhere there is that small jolt which makes the “I think” pass into the “I am,” which also causes, on such and such a date, how rare, the revolutions of the subject, to cross a crucial step.

The one I took—the most recent—is that of CANTOR. Know that enough spittle was hurled at him [Lacan throws the brochure on the table again] for him to end his life in an asylum. Don’t worry, that won’t be my case! [Laughter] I am a little less sensitive than he was to the articulations of colleagues and others. But the question I ask myself is whether… now that I articulate in a dimension that is carried by the rather astounding sales of these Écrits, I thus articulate this discourse… will I have to—or not!—deal with the fair.

Because of course, I cannot copy those whose profession it is to promote themselves… by snatching, in passing, any little bit they can hook onto in LACAN’s discourse, or in someone else’s… to make a paper where “he” demonstrates his originality.

Between the Bonneval congress [30 Oct.–2 Nov. 1960] and the moment when I came here [E.N.S. rue d’Ulm, 15 Jan. 1964], I lived in the middle of a fair. A fair where I was the beast: I was the one on sale in the market. It didn’t bother me. First, because those operations didn’t concern me—I mean: in my discourse—and then because that didn’t prevent the very same people who handled this “service” from coming to my seminar and scratching down everything I said—I mean writing it down carefully—with all the more care because they knew very well that it wouldn’t last long, given their own plans. So it’s not just any fair we’re talking about.

What’s coming now regarding the fair will be all sorts of other things, which will consist—as has already been done and even before the publication of my Écrits—will consist in seizing on any one of my formulas to make it serve God knows what! “They” were going to prove to me that I don’t know how to read FREUD! …For thirty years I’ve done nothing else!

[Lacan throws the brochure on the table a third time]

So, what’s to be done? That I respond? That I have others respond? What a fuss! Maybe I have more useful things to do? Namely, to concern myself with the point where these things may bear fruit, that is, among those who follow me in praxis. In any case, as you can see, this question does not leave me indifferent. And it is precisely because it does not leave me indifferent that I found myself confronting it with the greatest acuity.

I must say that only one thing keeps me from settling it in the way you see it taking shape here: it is not your quality, Ladies and Gentlemen, even though I am far from not feeling honored to have among my listeners—today or at other times—some of the most educated people, and among those for whom it is not in vain for me to present myself to their judgment.

Nevertheless, would that alone suffice to justify what, just as well, can be transmitted through writing? After all, at the level of writing, it sometimes happens that something worthwhile floats to the surface, although of course, in a university like the French University, where for nearly a hundred years they’ve been Kantian, the officials—as I already pointed out to you in one of my notes—have not… in the course of those hundred years during which they led and pushed crowds of students ahead of them… they have not managed to produce a complete edition of KANT.

What makes me hesitate, what makes it so that maybe—maybe if I feel like it—I will continue this discourse, is therefore not your quality but your number. Because after all, that’s what strikes me. That’s why this year, I gave up on that closure of the seminar that happened in previous years: a short trial period and the opportunity to demonstrate its ineffectiveness.

It is because of that number, of that something unbelievable that causes people, a good part of those who are here, people… whom I salute since, after all, they are here to prove to me that there is something in what I say that resonates, that resonates enough for those people to come and hear me, rather than the discourse of this or that one of their professors on topics that interest them, because it’s part of their curriculum… they come to hear me, who am not part of it.

This nonetheless gives me the sign that through what I say, which certainly cannot be mistaken for demagoguery, there must indeed be something in which they feel interested.

It is through this that I can assuredly justify myself, if it comes to it, in continuing this public discourse. This discourse, indeed, which—just like during the 15 years it has already lasted—is a discourse in which, assuredly, not everything is given in advance. What I have constructed, and of which entire parts remain scattered in memories that will make of it, well, what they will, still contains elements that would deserve more and better.

I will refer to the “witticism” in what I will say to you about the formula of what I earlier called “the omega operation.” For three months, in front of people who couldn’t believe their ears, who wondered whether I was joking, I spoke of the “witticism.”

I invite you, since you are going on vacation, to obtain for yourselves, if by chance it’s possible… because one never knows… FREUD’s works too are impossible to find… to obtain The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, and to immerse yourselves in it. If I happen to have to take a vacation myself, that will be the first thing—from my past seminars—for which I will try to provide a written equivalent.

With that, you are now equipped, for this interim period, with what I wanted to say: it’s not always “a celebration.” In any case, not always for me. The last time I alluded to celebration, it was in a short piece of writing, which wasn’t a writing at all, since I insisted that it reflect the state of the discourse I delivered before a fairly large medical audience. The reception of that discourse was one of the experiences of my life. Not, moreover, an experience that surprised me.

If I don’t renew it more often, it’s because I already know its results well in advance. I must tell you that I couldn’t resist making a modification that really has nothing to do with the discourse: that allusion to the celebration, to the celebration of the Banquet… if it was an allusion, the audience will better recognize it in the bulletin of my little School, no doubt, than in that of the College of Medicine where it will otherwise be published, the allusion to the celebration of the Banquet.

It concerns the one where appear—one as a beggar, the other as a stray—two allegorical characters you know, named Πόρος [Poros] and Πενία [Penia]. Between the Πόρος of psychoanalysis and the Πενία of the university, I am in the process of wondering how far I can let obscenity go. Whatever is at stake, the matter is worth a second look, I mean: even if the stake is what “the other” quite comically calls “philosophical Eros.”

Happy holidays!