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(All parts in English)

I left you with the operation I defined as “alienation”, if you remember, in the form of a forced choice where it takes the image of bearing on an alternative that results in an essential lack. At the very least, I told you that I would take up this form again in relation to the alternative through which I translate the Cartesian cogito, and which is the following: “Either I do not think, or I am not.”

This transformation, a logician trained in symbolic logic will recognize it… will recognize it as representing the formula brought to light in the register of symbolic logic, for the first time by de MORGAN in the middle of the last century… insofar as what it stated, which represented a genuine discovery, which had never been formulated in this way until then, was first expressed like this: that in the propositional relationship which consists in the conjunction of two propositions… what is expressed, at the top right of these white sheets, on which I wrote in black to make it more visible… the conjunction of A and B: A ∩ B, if you negate it as a conjunction: . If you say that it is not true, for example, that A and B are jointly tenable, this is equivalent to the union:

Union means something other than intersection. Intersection is—if you represent, if you picture, the field of what is stated in each of these propositions as a circle covering an area—the intersection is this [in white]:

Union is this:

As you can see, it is not addition, because there may be, in each of the two fields, a common part.

Well, de MORGAN’s statement is expressed as follows: that in the whole formed by these two fields, here covered by the two propositions in question, the negation of the intersection, namely what it means for A and B to be together, is represented by the union of the negation of A: let’s write A here: its negation is this part of B [in white]:

…and of the negation of B, that is, of this part of A:

You see that something remains in the middle that is excluded:

…which is the complement of the union of these two negations and corresponds strictly speaking to what is denied, that is to say, to the field of the intersection of A and B.

This very simple formula came to take on such significance in the developments of symbolic logic that it is considered fundamental under what is called the principle of duality, which is expressed as follows in its most general form: namely, that if we do not refer things to this attempt at literalization of the handling of propositional logic, but if we refer it to the level of what underlies the formulation of mathematical development, namely set theory, set theory in a veiled form introduces something that is precisely what allows it to serve as the foundation of what is the development of mathematical thought.

It is that, in a veiled way one could say, what I have taught you to distinguish from the subject of the statement, as being the subject of the enunciation, is found—in primary statements, in the definition of the set as such—the subject of the enunciation is in a certain way frozen there… it is handled there, it remains involved there, insofar, of course, as set theory is what allows for the unfolding of the exposition of the development of mathematical thought, to ensure its coherence.

Something else, of course, is the progress of invention, the specific path of mathematical reasoning, which is not one of tautology, whatever people may say, which has its own fecundity, which breaks away from the purely deductive plane, and through that spring which is essential to it and which is called “reasoning by recurrence” or again, to use POINCARÉ’s term, “complete induction.”

This, which, in order to be highlighted, requires recourse to temporality, to the progression of reasoning insofar as it is punctuated by that something which is precisely what constitutes reasoning by recurrence, unfolds as being founded on a procedure that is indefinitely repeatable. But at the level of set theory, we only need to look for a mechanism that allows us to symbolize what is ensured by the development of mathematics and, for that, what, in the act of enunciation, is isolated as subject: the subject of the enunciation insofar as it is different from that peak in the statement where we can recognize it. It is this which, in the notion of set, and very precisely insofar as it is based on the possibility of the empty set as such, it is this in which the existence of the subject of enunciation is, in a veiled way, secured.

At the level of set theory, de MORGAN’s transformation is expressed as follows: that in any formula where we have
— a set, some set,
— the empty set,
— the union sign,
— and the intersection sign,
by exchanging them in pairs, that is, by substituting:
— for the set, the empty set,
— for the empty set, a set,
— for the union, the intersection,
— for the intersection, a union,
…we preserve the truth value that could have been established in the initial formula.

This is, fundamentally, what it means when we substitute for “I think, therefore I am” that something which requires that we look at its functioning more closely but which—quite bluntly, massively, blindly, I would say—can first be articulated as something in which the “or” of the union must be looked at more closely and which joins a “I do not think” with a “I am not”.

Moreover, these two “not”s are not well understood: from the moment this dimension of the empty set is introduced… insofar as it supports that something defined by the enunciation, to which nothing may correspond, but which is established as such… this empty set, as representing the subject of enunciation, forces us to consider, under a value that needs to be examined, the function of negation.

Take “I do not desire”. It is clear that this “I do not desire”, by itself, is made to make us wonder what the negation is about:

— what is a transitive “I do not desire” implies the undesirable, the undesirable on my part: there is something specific that I do not desire,
— but also, the negation may mean that it is not I who desires, implying that I am divesting myself of a desire which may also be what moves me while not being me,
— but still, this negation may mean that it is not true that I desire, that “desire”, whether of me or of not-me, has nothing to do with the matter.

This tells you that this dialectic of the subject… insofar as we try to organize it, to delineate it, between subject of the statement and subject of the enunciation… is a truly useful task, and especially at the level where we today revisit the interrogation of DESCARTES’s cogito, insofar as this is what may allow us to give true meaning, exact positioning, to what is modified by FREUD and, to say it right away, which presents itself to us in these two forms too easily superimposed and confused, which are respectively called the unconscious and the id, and which are what we need to distinguish in light of this interrogation that we begin with the examination of the cogito.

That the cogito is still debated, this is a fact in philosophical discourse. It is indeed what allows us to enter into it ourselves, with the use we intend to make of it, since, in fact, this certain wavering that may remain in it is exactly what testifies to something in it that still needed completion. If the cogito, in the history of philosophy, is a foundation, why is that? It is because, to put it at the very least, it replaces the pathetic relation, the difficult relation which had constituted the entire tradition of philosophical questioning, which was none other than that of the relation of thinking to being.

Go open, not through the commentators but directly… of course, it will be easier for you if you know Greek, if not, there are good translations, very adequate commentaries in English, of ARISTOTLE’s Metaphysics. There is a French translation by TRICOT, which in truth does not fail to bring the veil and mask of a perpetual Thomist commentary.

But insofar as, through these distortions, you can try to reconnect with the original movement of what ARISTOTLE communicates to us, you will realize how much, but only afterward, everything that may have accumulated as criticism or exegesis around this text… of which this or that scholiast tells us that such a passage is debatable, or that the order of the books was disrupted… how much, for a first reading, all these questions truly appear secondary compared to something I know not what, something direct and fresh, which makes this reading—on the sole condition that you remove it from the atmosphere of the school—into something that strikes you from the register of what I earlier called the “pathetic”.

When you see, at every moment, this interrogation of what is at stake in the relation between thought and being renewed and resurfacing within something that still seems to bear the trace of the very discourse in which it was formulated. And when you see such a term arise, like τὸ σεμνὸν [to semnon], that which is worthy, dignity, the dignity that must be preserved in “thinking” with regard to what should elevate it to the level of what one seeks to grasp, namely: it is not only “the being” or “what is” but that through which being manifests itself.

What has been variously translated as “Being as being,” it has been said. A very poor translation for those three terms I took care to note at the top left of this board, and which are properly:

— First, the Τὸ τί ἐστι [to ti esti] which means nothing other than “what is it?” It seems to me that this is as valid a translation as that of the “quid,” to which people usually believe they must limit themselves.

— The Τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι [to ti en einai], which is indeed, in my opinion, one of the most striking features of the liveliness of the language that is ARISTOTLE’s. Because it is certainly not—here even less so—“being as being” that suits it as a translation, since, if you know even a little Greek, you can read this thing which is a common turn of phrase in Greek, and not only a literary one, which is clearly that trait of origin of the Greek verb, and which it shares precisely with what the imperfect tense means in French—on which I so often pause in the course of what I have left traces of in my writings—this “it was,” which means: “it has just disappeared,” while at the same time it can also mean: “it was about to be.”

This Τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι [to ti en einai], which is the same thing as what is said in EURIPIDES’s Hippolytus [Line 359], when it is said: Κύπρις οὐκ ἄρ’ ἦν θεός, namely: “Cypris—Aphrodite, for you, was not a goddess.” Which means that:

• for having behaved as she just did, certainly what she was flees and escapes us,
• and also that we must put into question everything about what it means to be a goddess or a god.

This Τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι, the “what it was to be”: “what it was to be” when? Precisely before I speak of it. It is that kind of sentiment found in the very language of ARISTOTLE, of “being” still inviolate, and insofar as it was already touched, with this νοεῖν [noein], with this thinking, whose entire stirring is about knowing to what degree it can be worthy of it, that is to say, rise to the height of being [τὸ αὐτὸ νοεῖν καὶ εἶναι (to auto noein kai einai): “the same, thinking and being”].

This is the original trajectory, whose root, of a sacred order, you cannot help but somehow feel—this is where the first articulation of the philosopheme attaches itself: at the level of what there is, we might say, the first step of a positive science to introduce.

— As for the Τὸ ὂν ᾖ ὄν [to ôn hêi on], indeed this last term means “the being, insofar as it is being,” that is again that something which points toward being.

And everyone knows that the… free movement of the philosophical tradition represents nothing other than the progressive distancing from this source of discoveries, from this first invention, which has ended up, through increasingly successive schools, reducing to mere logical articulation whatever could be retained of this original interrogation. Now, DESCARTES’s cogito has a meaning: it is that to this relation between thought and being, it substitutes purely and simply the establishment of the being of the “I.”

What I want to bring before you is this: it is that insofar as the experience—which is only an experience that is itself the continuation and effect of that crossing by thought that finally represents something that can be called “rejection of the question of Being”… and precisely insofar as this rejection has generated that continuation, that new opening of access to the world, which is called science… that if something, within the effects of this crossing, occurred which is called the Freudian discovery, either at the level of the one who introduced it there, or his thought, even his thought on thought—the essential point is that this, in no case, means “a return to the thought of being.”

Nothing in what FREUD brings, whether it concerns the unconscious or the id, constitutes a return to something that, at the level of thought, places us again on the plane of the interrogation of being. It is only within, and remaining within the consequences of that threshold-crossing, that rupture by which, to “the question that thought poses to being,” is substituted—and in the mode of a refusal—the sole affirmation of the being of the “I,” since it is within this that what FREUD introduces takes on its meaning, both from the side of the unconscious and from the side of the id.

It is to show you this, to show you how it is articulated, that I advance this year into the domain of logic, and that we now proceed. In the cogito itself… which deserves, at this point, to be reconsidered once more… we are going to find the seeds, the seeds of the paradox introduced by recourse to the Morganian formula, as I initially presented it to you, and which is the following: is there a being of the “I” outside of discourse?

This is indeed the question that the Cartesian cogito settles, but we still have to see how it does so.

It is to pose this question that we introduced quotation marks around the “ergo sum,” which subvert its naive import, so to speak, and make of it a cogitated “ergo sum,” whose being, in sum, lies solely in that “ergo” which, within thought, presents itself for DESCARTES as the sign of what he himself articulates on several occasions… both in the Discourse on Method and in the Meditations and in the Principles… namely: as an “ergo” of necessity.

But if only this “ergo” represents that necessity, can we not see what results from this: that “ergo sum” is nothing but a refusal of the arduous path from “thinking” to “being,” and of the knowledge that must traverse—that path. It takes, this “ergo sum,” the shortcut of being the one who thinks.

But to think that there is not even a need to interrogate the being on the path where it holds its being, since the question already assures itself of its own existence—does this not mean placing oneself as ego, outside the grasp by which being might seize thought? To posit oneself as ego, “I think,” as pure “thinking-being,” as a subsisting substitute for being, the “I” of a local “am not,” which means: “I am only inasmuch as your question of being is elided, I do without being, I … am not”…

— except where necessarily I am, in order to be able to say it,

— or better: where I am, in order to be able to have you say it,

— or more precisely: to have it said by the Other,

…for that is indeed the process, when you follow it closely in DESCARTES’s text.

It is in this, moreover, that it is a fruitful process, and that it has—properly speaking—the same profile as that of reasoning by recurrence, which is in a way this: to lead the other a long way along a path, a path that is here, properly speaking, the path of renouncing such and such, and soon all, paths of knowledge, and then, at a turning point, to surprise him with this admission: that there, at least, for having made him traverse this path, it must be that “I am.”

But the dimension of this Other is so essential in it that one can say that it is at the core of the cogito, and that it is what properly constitutes the limit of what can be defined and secured, at best, as the empty set that the “I am” constitutes, in this reference where “I,” as “I am,” is properly constituted by this: containing no element.

This framework holds only insofar as the “I think,” I think it, that is to say, I argue the cogito with the Other. “Am not” means that there is no element of this set that exists under the term “I”: Ego sum, sive ego cogito, but without there being anything that fills it. This encounter makes clear that the “I think” is but a similar clothing.

If it is not from the level of “I think”—which prepares this admission of an empty set—that we are speaking, it is of the emptying of another set. It is after DESCARTES has subjected all accesses to knowledge to testing, after he has founded this thought that is properly that of the hollowing-out of being, to be eager only for certainty, and which results in what we have already called “emptying,” and which—that term—through this interrogation, leaves open whether this very operation, as such, is not sufficient to give to the ego its only true substance, it is indeed from there, and insofar as we grasp its importance, that it only then becomes thinkable, as if along a guiding thread, what is at stake when FREUD brings us… what?

What, if not what results in what he calls, to use his own terms, not “mental functioning,” as it is falsely translated when German is rendered into English, but the psychische Geschehen, the psychic event.

As we are about to see, nothing remains—in what FREUD interrogates—of anything that could rekindle or revive the thought of being beyond what the cogito has now assigned to it as a limit. In fact, being is so thoroughly excluded from everything that may be at stake that, to enter into this explanation, I could say—by taking up one of my familiar formulas, that of Verwerfung—that we are indeed dealing with something of that order, and if something is articulated today that can be called the end of a humanism… which of course does not date from yesterday, nor the day before yesterday, nor from the moment Mr. Michel FOUCAULT may have formulated it, nor myself, which is something long since done… it is very precisely in this that the dimension is opened to us which allows us to discover how operates, according to the formula I have given, this Verwerfung, this rejection of being:

“What is rejected from the symbolic,” I have said since the beginning of my teaching, “reappears in the real.”

If this something called “the being of man” is indeed what, from a certain date onward, has been rejected, we see it reappear in the real and in a form that is entirely clear. “The being of man,” insofar as it is fundamental to our anthropology, has a name in which the word être appears in the middle, and which it suffices to put in parentheses: [d(être)itus].

And to find this name, as well as what it designates, one only needs to leave one’s house, one day in the countryside, to go for a walk and, crossing the road, you come upon a “camping” site, and on the “camping,” or more exactly all around it, marked by the circle of a foam, what you encounter is this “being of man,” inasmuch as, verworfen, it reappears in the real, it has a name: this is called the “d(être)itus.” [Laughter]

It is not from yesterday that we know that “the being of man,” as rejected, is what reappears in the form of those small twisted iron rings—of which we do not know why they are there, around the usual place of campers—where we find a certain accumulation. If we are even slightly prehistorians or archaeologists, we must presume that this rejection of being must have something that did not first appear with DESCARTES, nor with the origin of science, but perhaps marked each of the essential thresholds that allowed the constitution—under forms that were perishable and always precarious—of the stages of humanity.

And I do not need to try to re-articulate before you, in a language I do not practice and which makes it quite unpronounceable for me, what is designated, what is pinned as the signal of such or such phase of this technological development, in the form of those heaps of shells found in certain areas, in certain zones of what remains to us of those prehistoric civilizations.

The detritus—this is indeed the point to retain—which represents… and not merely as a signal, but as something essential… that around which, for us, will now turn what we have to interrogate in this alienation.

Alienation has an evident face, which is not that we are the Other, or that “the others,” as is said, in taking us back, disfigure or distort us. The fact of alienation is not that we are reabsorbed, remade, represented in the Other, but it is essentially founded, on the contrary, on the rejection of the Other, insofar as this Other, the one I designate with a capital O, is what has come to take the place of that interrogation of Being, around which I essentially articulate today the limit, the crossing of the cogito.

Would to Heaven then that alienation consisted in us finding ourselves, instead of the Other, at ease! For DESCARTES, it is assuredly what allows him the elation of his procedure. And in the early Regulae, which represent his original work, his youthful work, the manuscript of which was later rediscovered—and indeed still remains lost—in the papers of LEIBNIZ, the sum ergo Deus is exactly the extension of the cogito ergo sum.

Of course, the operation is advantageous, which leaves entirely to the responsibility of an Other—who guarantees nothing other than the establishment of being as being the being of the “I” of an Other—that the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition facilitates by being the One who presented himself as: “I am that I am.”

But assuredly, this fideistic foundation, which remains so deeply anchored still in thought at the level of the 17th century, is precisely the one that is no longer so tenable for us, and it is from the fact that it is subjectively erased that we are truly alienated. Which I have already illustrated with this: “Freedom or death.” A marvelous injunction, no doubt… Who, in that injunction, would not indeed refuse that Other par excellence which is death, by virtue of which, as I pointed out to you, what remains is the freedom to die? It is the same with what, already, the Stoic formulates in:

“Et non propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.”

But for us to “lose them,” are you going to lose your life? Things are already not clearly readable here. But for us, what is at stake is to know what will become of this “Either I do not think, or I am not”—I mean: “I” as “am not.” What will be the result? The result where we have no choice! We have no choice, from the moment this “I,” as the instatement of being, has been chosen, we have no choice—it is toward the “I do not think” that we must go.

For this instatement of the “I” as the sole and unique foundation of being is very precisely what, from then on, puts an end—a definitive end, I mean—to any interrogation of νοεῖν [noein], to any procedure that would make something else of thought than what FREUD, with his time and with science, makes of it.

Das Denken [thinking], he writes in the formulations on the dual principle of the psychic event, is nothing more than a formula, a trial formula and in a sense a foraging, which is always to be carried out with the least psychic investment, which allows us to interrogate, to measure, to trace as well the path by which we are to find satisfaction for what presses upon and stimulates us—through some motor impulse—to inscribe a path in the real.

This essential “I do not think,” that is where we must question ourselves: what results from it, concerning the loss resulting from the choice, the “I am not”—of course, in itself, such as we earlier founded it, namely as the very essence of the “I” itself—is that what the loss of alienation amounts to? Certainly not! Precisely something appears which is a form of negation, but a negation that bears not on being but on the “I” itself, insofar as it is founded in “am not.”

Connected to the choice of “I do not think,” something emerges whose essence is to not be “I,” in the very place of the ergo, insofar as it is to be placed at the intersection between “I think” and “I am,” in what alone sustains itself as being of cogitation: this ergo, then, in that very place, something appears that subsists by being “not-I.” This “not-I,” so essential to articulate in order to be so in its essence, is what FREUD brings us at the level of the second step of his thought and what is called the second topography, as being the id.

But it is precisely here that lies the greatest danger of error, and that also, in approaching it myself—as far as I have been able to do so, when I spoke of the “wo es war…”—I was unable to—due to the lack of the logical articulation that would allow it to take on its true value—make properly felt where the essence lies of this “not-I” that constitutes the id, and that renders so ridiculous what anyone inevitably seems to fall into who remains, on this subject, within the psychological tracks—that is to say, insofar as they inherit from the tradition of ancient philosophy: making of the soul or of the Ψυχή [psuché] something that is.

The id, for them, will always be what some fool bellowed into my ears for ten years of neighborhood: “the id is a bad ego.” It cannot, in any way, be formulated in such a manner! And to conceive of it, it is extremely important to realize that this id, in that strange, anomalous positivity it takes on by being the “not” of that “I” [not-I] which by essence “…am not” [I am not], one must know what that could mean—what strange complement might be involved in this “not-I.”

Well, it must be articulated and said, as indeed the entire delineation of what is at stake in the id articulates it for us. The id in question is assuredly, of course, in no way the “first person,” as it is a genuine mistake… to be cast into the realm of the grotesque, it must be said, whatever respect we may carry, in the name of history, for its author [Georges Politzer]… to have been led to produce the claim that FREUD’s psychology was a psychology in the first person.

And that one of my students… during that brief report that is part of the booklet I distributed to you last time… that one of my students believed himself obliged to go back over that path, momentarily holding to the illusion that it was even a path along which I would have led you to formulate it—that, as is naturally required after having heard me, he is forced to formulate the contrary, is it not—this in itself is a sort of bluff and swindle, for this has nothing to do with the question.

The id is neither the first, nor the second person, nor even the third, insofar as, following the definition given by BENVENISTE, the third would be the one of whom one speaks.

The id, we approach it a bit more with statements such as “It shines,” or “It rains,” or “It moves.” But it is still a mistake to believe that this It, would be that insofar as it utters itself! That is still something which does not give sufficient relief to what is at stake.

The id is, strictly speaking, that which, in discourse, as logical structure, is exactly everything that is not “I,” that is to say, all the rest of the structure. And when I say “logical structure,” understand it as grammatical. It is no small thing that the very support of what is at stake in the drive—that is to say, the fantasy—can be expressed as follows: Ein Kind ist geschlagen, A child is beaten.

No commentary, no metalanguage will account for what is introduced into the world in such a formula! Nothing can duplicate or explain it! The structure of the sentence “A child is beaten” cannot be commented on; simply, it shows itself. There is no φύσις [physis] that could account for a child… being beaten. There may be something in physis that requires the child to bump into something, but that he is beaten is something else entirely!

And that this fantasy should be something so essential in the functioning of the drive is something that simply reminds us of what I have demonstrated to you about the drive, concerning the scopophilic drive or concerning the sadomasochistic drive: that it is “scripted,” that it is a “scripted montage,” a grammatical montage, whose inversions, reversals, complexities, are ordered in no other way than through the varied application of various reversals—Verkehrung—of partial and selected negations, that there is no other way to make the relation of the “I” function as being-in-the-world, than by passing through this grammatical structure, which is nothing other than the essence of the id.

Of course, I will not repeat that lesson today. I have a sufficient field to cover such that I must content myself with marking what is the essence of the id, insofar as it is not “I”: it is all the rest of the grammatical structure.

And it is not by chance that FREUD notes that—in the analysis of Ein Kind ist geschlagen, in the analysis of A child is beaten—never does the subject, the Ich, the “I,” which should nonetheless take its place there… for us, in the reconstruction that we make of it, in the Bedeutung that we are going to give it, in the necessary interpretation: namely, that at one moment it is he who is the beaten one… but in the statement of the fantasy, FREUD tells us, that moment—and for good reason—is never confessed, because the “I” as such is precisely excluded from the fantasy. We can only realize this by marking the line of division between two complements such as “I beat” or the “not-I,” where this being that it is—refusal of being—tips, along with what remains as articulation of thought, which is the grammatical structure of the sentence.

This, of course, only gains its significance and interest when it is brought into relation with the other element of the alternative, namely: what is going to be lost there. The truth of alienation is shown only in the lost part, which is nothing other, if you follow my articulation, than the “I am not.” Now, it is important to grasp that this is indeed the essential point of what is at stake in the unconscious. For everything that pertains to the unconscious is characterized by what doubtless only one disciple—only one disciple—of FREUD managed to preserve as an essential trait, namely by surprise.

The foundation of this surprise, as it appears at the level of any genuine interpretation, is nothing other than this dimension of “I am not,” and it is essential to preserve it as a revealing feature—if one may say so—in this phenomenology. That is why the witticism is the most revealing and most characteristic of the effects of what I have called the formations of the unconscious. The laughter in question occurs at the level of this “I am not.” Take any example, and to take the first one that appears at the opening of the book, that of the famillionnaire—is it not manifest that the effect of derision in what Hirsch-Hyacinthe says, when he says that with Salomon de ROTHSCHILD he is in a “quite famillionnaire” relation, resonates at once with the nonexistence of the position of the rich man, insofar as it is only fictional, and with that of something in which the one who speaks—or the subject—finds himself in that very nonexistence, reduced himself to a kind of being for whom there is no place anywhere?

Is it not manifest that this is where the derisive effect of that famillionnaire lies? But here, on the contrary, quite the contrary of what happens when we define the id—and where you could recognize, in this reference to grammatical structure, that it is a question of an effect of Sinn or meaning—we are dealing with Bedeutung.

That is to say, where “I am not,” what occurs is something we must identify through the same kind of inversion that guided us earlier. The “I” of “I do not think” is also inverted, alienated into something that is a “thing-thinking.” This is what gives its true meaning to what FREUD says of the unconscious: that it is constituted by thing-presentations, Sachevorstellungen. This in no way prevents the unconscious from being structured like a language, because it is not a question of Das Ding, the unnameable Thing, but of the perfectly articulated part—yet, indeed, inasmuch as it takes precedence—as Bedeutung—over anything that might order it.

To designate what is at stake in the unconscious, regarding the register of existence and its relation to the “I,” I would say that:

— just as we have seen that the id is a thought bitten by something that is not the return of being, but rather of a kind of “un-being,”
— so too the inexistence at the level of the unconscious is something bitten by an “I think” that is not “I.”

And this “I think” that is not “I,” and which, in momentarily bringing it together with the id, I have indicated as a “It speaks,” is nevertheless, as you will see, a short-circuit and an error. The model of the unconscious is, to be sure, a “It speaks,” but only on the condition that one clearly realizes that it concerns no being whatsoever. That is to say, the unconscious has nothing to do with what PLATO still, and further after him, was able to preserve as being the level of “enthusiasm.” There may be some god in the “It speaks,” but what precisely characterizes the function of the unconscious is that there is none.

If the unconscious, for us, must be circumscribed, located, and defined, it is because the poetry of our century has nothing more to do with that which was, for example, the poetry of a PINDAR. If the unconscious has played such a role of reference in all that has been inscribed in a new poetry, it is very precisely due to that relation of a thought which is nothing but to not be the “I” of “I do not think,” inasmuch as it comes to bite upon the field defined by the “I” insofar as “I am not.”

And so?… If I told you earlier that—the full field here [(1)] of the id—I might have, in the “It speaks,” given the impression that it covers the unconscious, this is precisely what I want to conclude with today: it is that they do not, in fact, cover each other.

If the two circles, the two fields we have just opposed as representing the two terms, of which only one reaches access in the real of alienation, if these two terms oppose each other as constituting different relations of the “I” in thought and existence, it is so that, by looking more closely at the circles within which this now comes to be circumscribed, you may see that, in a later time, what concludes this operation, in a fourth term—a quadripartite term that is to be situated here [(2)]—is that this “I do not think,” as correlating to the id, is called to be conjoined with the “I am not,” as correlating to the unconscious, but in such a way that they eclipse, occult each other, by overlapping.

It is in the place of the “I am not” that the id will come, of course, positing it as a “I am that” which is nothing but pure imperative, an imperative that is quite precisely the one FREUD formulated in “Wo es war, soll Ich werden.” If this “Wo es war” is something, it is what we said earlier: but if Ich, soll (must) werden there—should I say verdere there?—it is because it is not there!

And it is not for nothing that I recalled just now the exemplary character of sadomasochism: rest assured that the year will not pass without our having to interrogate more closely what is at stake in this relation of the “I” as essential to the structure of masochism. And I remind you—simply—here of the connection I have drawn between Sadean ideology and KANT’s imperative.

This “soll Ich werden” is perhaps just as impracticable as the Kantian duty, precisely because the “I” is not there, because the “I” is called—not as has been ridiculously written (may the reference at least serve us here!)—to “evict the id,” but rather to lodge itself there, and, if you allow me the equivocation, to lodge itself within its logic.

Conversely, what may also happen is that here, in the passage—where one circle is in a way occulted, eclipsed by the other—this occurs in reverse, and the unconscious, in its poetic essence and in its Bedeutung, comes to take the place of this “I do not think.” What it then reveals to us is precisely that which, in the Bedeutung of the unconscious, is struck by I-don’t-know-what kind of obsolescence in thought.

Just as in the first type of occultation, what we had was, in the place of the “I am not,” the revelation of something that is the truth of the structure—and we will see what that factor is, we will name it: it is the object (a)… Just so, in the other form of occultation, this fault, this flaw in thought, this hole in Bedeutung, this which we were able to access only after the path fully laid out by FREUD, of the process of alienation, its meaning, its revelation, is this: the incapacity of any Bedeutung to cover what is at stake in sex.

The essence of castration is what, in this other relation of occultation and eclipse, manifests itself in this: that sexual difference can only be sustained by the Bedeutung of something missing, in the form of the phallus.

Thus today I have given you the outline of the apparatus around which we will be able to revisit a certain number of questions. May you have glimpsed the privileged role played therein, as operator, by the object (a), the sole element still left hidden in today’s explanation.