🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I will return today, to articulate once again and with greater insistence, the operation I previously introduced under the term alienation. Alienation is, in what I am presenting to you, the pivotal point… and first of all in the sense that this term transforms the usage that has been made of it up until now… it is the pivotal point by virtue of which what can and must be maintained for us is the value of what one can call, from the standpoint of the subject, the Freudian establishment, the decisive step: what the thought of FREUD, and even more the praxis that continues under his patronage under the name of psychoanalysis, has—once brought to our attention—of decisive importance.

We will speak of a thought that is not “I”; such is—at first glance vague—how the unconscious presents itself. The formula is certainly insufficient, but it has the merit of placing—at the pivot of what FREUD produces for us as decisive—this term “I.”

Of course, this does not allow us to be satisfied with this vague, though poetic formula, which, moreover, is always extracted from its poetic context with a bit of abuse. It is not sufficient to simply assert: “I is another.” That is why it is necessary to provide a more precise logical articulation.

As you know, the function of the Other… as I write it with this capital O placed in the upper left corner of our diagram today… is the determining function.
— It is not only impossible to properly articulate the logic of thought as Freudian experience establishes it,
— it is also impossible to understand anything of what has been represented in the philosophical tradition as it has come to us up to FREUD,
— it is impossible to properly situate what has been represented by this step of placing at the center of reflection the function of the subject as such:
…if we do not bring into play this function of the Other, as I define it when I mark it with this capital O, if we do not remember that I call the Other, so marked, that which functions as the Place of speech. What does this mean?

We can never return to this enough, even though I believe I have already hammered it in somewhat: FREUD, when he speaks to us of “this thought that is not I,” for example at the level of what he calls “the thoughts of the dream”: the Traumgedanken, seems to tell us that this thought remains strikingly independent of all logic.

He emphasizes first: their system does not concern itself with contradiction. More than one trait is articulated: those [the traits] which at first glance say that negation as such cannot be represented there, and that likewise, causal articulation, subordination, conditioning, seem to evade what, in appearance, links these thoughts, and can only be retraced in its thread by the paths of the freest association. There is something here that I recall only because for many, this still remains the received idea of what is at stake in the order of the unconscious.

In fact, to speak of the loosened link that the thoughts we identify at the level of the unconscious would present—which are indeed those of a subject or must be—is only a first approach, which supposes something that is rather an antinomy with a preconceived real, or rather a preconception of what the relationships of any thought with the real should be. The real, we think—that is the proper and good order of all effective thought—should impose itself upon it.

In truth, this stems too much from the presupposition of a pedagogical logic which is founded on a schema of adaptation, not to both justify that FREUD, speaking to minds no more trained than were those of his usual audience, should refer to it, and also, for any reflection that considers what is different in the relation of any subject to the real… due to this: that the subject, himself, is only founded, only established insofar as there already exists in this real, and functioning as such, the powers of language… compels us to push our questioning further.

The step that FREUD makes us take certainly remains no less astonishing; in truth, it only takes on the value that grounds the astonishment that should be ours in hearing it, once we articulate more precisely what he renews in the relationships between thought and being. Assuredly, a theme that has since entered the agenda through the discourse of certain contemporary philosophers, foremost among them: HEIDEGGER.

But certainly, amid the noise surrounding what he articulates, it would be the most naïve form to translate what he calls “thinking”… as some kind of recall which, at this turning point where we are, should come from being itself to thought, so that it may be renewed, so that it may break with what, from the thread it has followed for some three thousand years, has led it to some sort of impasse where it no longer grasps itself in its essence, and where one could ask, as HEIDEGGER does: “Was heisst Denken?” “What does thinking mean?”… to expect the renewal of the meaning of this word “thinking” only from some trans-metaphysical accident, which would amount to a total overturning of everything that thought has traced.

Certainly, that is not the meaning of HEIDEGGER’s text, and for those who would stop there, one might evoke the humorous and derisory metaphor of the girl who knows no other way of offering herself than by sprawling across a bed, limbs akimbo, waiting for initiative to come from the one to whom she thus thinks she is offering herself. It is not such a rare adventure in a time of mediocre civilization, and everyone knows that the person faced with such a scene is not necessarily any more stimulated to act!

It would be appropriate that thought not have an image of the same order, but rather consent to recall that true conjunctions are not always formed without a little difficulty. It is indeed, in fact, something that must contribute to this problem of being, which the path traced by FREUD brings us. But not otherwise—I return to this—than by evaluating the juncture, the consequences of what results for thought from that decisive step, that sharp step which we have called, through a kind of historically grounded convention, the Cartesian step, namely that which limits the establishment of being as such to that of the “I think” of the cogito.

In other words, to the “I am” implied by the pure functioning of the subject of “I think” as such, insofar as it gives the appearance—for it is only an appearance—of being transparent to itself, of being what we could call a “self-thought.” Allow me, with this neologism, to translate or somewhat caricature what is usually called “self-consciousness,” a term that resonates poorly and insufficiently, compared to the usage permitted by the Germanic composition of Selbstbewusstsein.

But indeed, at the level of DESCARTES and the cogito, it is properly a matter of a “self-thought,” of this “I think” which is located only at the moment when it is supported solely by articulating “I think.” It is the consequence of this, as the decisive move, that is at issue. I mean that it is within a thought determined by this first step that FREUD’s discovery is inscribed.

I have spoken of the Other; it is clear that at the level of the Cartesian cogito, the consequences of this step are passed on to the charge of the Other:
— if the cogito ergo sum does not imply what DESCARTES writes in full in his Regulae, where the conditions that have entirely determined it as thought can be so clearly read,
— if the cogito is not completed by a sum, ergo Deus est, which certainly makes things far easier… it is untenable.

And yet, if it is untenable as an articulation—I mean: philosophically—it nonetheless remains that the benefit is secured. That from the approach which reduces being to this slender margin of the thinking being, insofar as it thinks it can be grounded in this thought alone, as “I am,” there remains something gained, whose consequences are visible—very quickly, moreover—in a series of contradictions.

For this is precisely the moment to point out, for example, that the supposed foundation of simple intuition, which would see the radically distinct separation of extended thing (res extensa) from thinking thing (res cogitans), is annihilated in very short order by Newtonian discovery, whose essential characteristic, I believe, is not emphasized enough: that the characteristic it gives to extension is precisely that at each of its points, so to speak, no mass “ignores” what is happening at that very moment in all the other points. An obvious paradox indeed, and one which gave contemporaries—and especially Cartesians—great trouble in accepting.

A resistance which has not dried up, and which demonstrates something that, for us, is certainly completed by this: that the thinking thing imposes itself on us, precisely from the Freudian experience, as being itself:
— no longer that thing always designated by an indestructible unification,
— but on the contrary as marked, as characterized by being fragmented, even fragmenting, bearing within it that same mark which is developed and in some way demonstrated throughout the entire development of modern logic.

Namely that what we call the machine in its essential functioning is what is closest to a combinatorics of notations, and that this combinatorics of notations is for us the most precious, the most indicative fruit of the development of thought. FREUD, here, contributes to demonstrating what results from the actual functioning of this face of thought. I mean of its relations not with the subject of mathematical demonstration, whose essence we shall recall immediately, but with a subject who is the one KANT would call the “pathological subject,” that is to say, with the subject insofar as, from this kind of thought, he can suffer. The subject suffers from thought, insofar as, says FREUD, he represses it. The fragmented and fragmenting character of this repressed thought is what our everyday experience in psychoanalysis teaches us.

That is why it is a crude and dishonest mythology to present as the background of our experience some supposed nostalgia for a primitive unity, a pure and simple pulsation of satisfaction, in a relation to the Other—which here is the only one that matters—and which is imagined, represented as the Other of a nurturing relation. The next step, even more scandalous—if I may say so—than the first, necessarily becomes what takes place, what is articulated in modern psychoanalytic theory in great detail: the confusion of this nurturing Other with the sexual Other.

There is truly no salvation—if I may say so—for thought, no possible preservation of the truth introduced by FREUD, but also, I would say, no technical honesty that can or must be founded on anything other than the rejection of this crude lure, of the scandalous abuse it represents: a kind of reverse pedagogy, a deliberate use of a capture, through a kind of illusion that is particularly untenable for anyone who casts a direct look at what psychoanalytic experience is.

To reestablish the Other in the only status that matters, which for it is that of the Place of speech, is the necessary point of departure from which everything, in our analytic experience, can regain its proper place. To define the Other as the Place of speech: — is to say that it is nothing other than the place where assertion is posed as truthful, — is to say at the same time that it has no other kind of existence, — but since saying it is already to appeal to it in order to situate this truth, it is to make it reappear each time I speak.

And that is why to say that “it has no kind of existence,” I cannot say it, but I can write it. And that is why I write S(A): S standing for the barred capital A, as one of the nodal points of that network around which the entire dialectic of desire is articulated, insofar as it opens up from the gap between the statement and the enunciation.

There is no insufficiency, no reduction to some gratuitous gesture, in the act of asserting that the inscription S(A) plays an essential pivotal role for our thought. For there is no other foundation for what is called “mathematical truth,” except the recourse to the Other, insofar as those to whom I speak are asked to refer to it—I mean: to the big Other—in order to see inscribed there the signs of our initial conventions concerning what it is that I manipulate in mathematics, which is precisely what Mr. Bertrand RUSSELL, an expert on the subject, even dared to designate in these terms: that we do not know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying contains the least bit of truth.

And indeed, why not? Simply, the recourse to the Other, insofar as in a certain field corresponding to a limited use of certain signs, it is undeniable that having spoken, I can write and maintain what I have written. If I cannot, at every moment of mathematical reasoning, make this back-and-forth movement between what I articulate through my discourse and what I inscribe as being established, there is no possible progression of what is called mathematical truth, and that is the entire essence of what is called in mathematics “demonstration.”

It is precisely of the same order that what is at stake here belongs. The recourse to the Other is, in every effect of thought, absolutely determining. The “I am” of the Cartesian “I think” not only does not avoid it but is founded upon it, is founded upon it even before this Other is forced to be placed at the level of divine essence.

Already, just to obtain from the interlocutor the continuation, the “therefore” of “I am,” this Other is directly called upon; it is to it, it is to the reference to this place as the place of speech, that DESCARTES turns, for a discourse that calls for the consent to do what I am doing before you: to exhort myself to doubt, you will not deny that I am. The argument is ontological from this stage, and certainly, if it does not have the cutting edge of Saint ANSELM’s argument, if it is more sober, it nonetheless carries consequences which are precisely those to which we will now come, and which result from having to write with a signifier that this Other is nothing else.

Saint ANSELM… I had asked you during the holidays to refer to a certain chapter, and so that the matter does not remain hanging in the air, I will recall here what kind of argument this famous one is, which is unjustly devalued and which is indeed suited to bring out the function of this Other in all its clarity. The argument in no way concerns—as is said in textbooks—this: that the most perfect essence would imply existence… Chapter II of Fides quaerens intellectum articulates the argument addressed to what he calls the “fool.” The fool who—the Scripture says—has said in his heart: “There is no God.”

The argument consists in saying: “Fool! Everything depends on what you call God, and as it is clear that you have called God the most perfect Being, you do not know what you are saying.” For, says Saint ANSELM:

“I know well, I, Saint Anselm, I know that it is not enough that the idea of the most perfect Being exists as an idea, for this Being to exist. But if you, you consider that you are entitled to have this idea, that you say this Being does not exist, what do you resemble if by chance He does exist? For you then demonstrate that by forming the idea of the most perfect Being, you form an inadequate idea, since it is separated from this: that this Being may exist and that as existing, He is more perfect than an idea that does not imply existence.”

It is a demonstration of the powerlessness of thought in the one who articulates it, through a certain angle of critique concerning the inoperativeness of thought itself. It is to demonstrate to him that in articulating something about thought, he himself does not know what he is saying. That is why what needs to be reconsidered lies elsewhere and quite precisely at the level of the status of this Other, where not only can I, but where I cannot do otherwise than to establish myself, each time something is articulated that belongs to the field of speech.

This Other, as a friend of mine recently wrote, no one believes in it: in our era, from the most devout to the most libertine—if that term still has any meaning—everyone is atheist. Philosophically, anything that would be founded on any form of existence of this Other is untenable. That is why everything is reduced, in the scope of the “I am” that follows the “I think,” to this: that this “I think” makes sense, but in exactly the same way as any nonsense.

Everything you articulate makes sense, on this sole condition, I have already taught you, that a certain grammatical form is maintained… do I need to go back over “green colourless ideas,” etc.? …everything that merely has grammatical form makes sense. And this means nothing other than that from this point I cannot go any further.

In other words, that the strict consideration of the logical scope involved in every operation of language affirms itself in what is the fundamental and certain effect of this which is called alienation, and which in no way means that we are entrusting ourselves to the Other, but on the contrary, that we realize the obsolescence of everything that is founded solely on this recourse to the Other, of which only what founds the course of mathematical demonstration can subsist, such as a reasoning by induction, the type of which is that if we can demonstrate that something true for n is also true for n-1. It suffices that we know what it is for n = 1 to be able to affirm that the same thing is true for the whole series of natural numbers. And then? …

This in itself entails no other consequence than the nature of a truth which I just now rather pointedly highlighted from Bertrand RUSSELL’s assessment. For us, we must posit… — since something comes to reveal to us the truth hidden behind this consequence, — since we have no reason whatsoever to shrink back from this which is essential …that the status of thought, insofar as alienation is realized in it as the fall of the Other, is composed of this, namely of that blank field to the left of the S, which corresponds to the status of the “I,” which is that of the “I” as it reigns—and this indisputably—over the vast majority of our contemporaries, and which is articulated in an “I do not think,” not only proud but even glorious in that affirmation!

Accordingly, what complements it is what I have designated there as the S and what I articulated last time as being a complement, certainly, but a complement which comes to it from the fallen part of that alienation, namely: from what comes to it from that place of the vanished Other, in what remains of it as the “non-I,” and which I have called—because that is how it must be designated—nothing but this: the grammatical structure.

This, certainly, is not the privilege of a Freudian to conceive of himself in this way; read Mr. WITTGENSTEIN: Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Do not believe that—because a whole school calling itself logical-positivist keeps hammering our ears with a series of the most insipid and mediocre anti-philosophical considerations—that the step taken by Mr. WITTGENSTEIN amounts to nothing. This attempt to articulate what results from a consideration of logic such that it can do without any existence of the subject is well worth being followed in all its details, and I recommend its reading to you.

For us Freudians, on the other hand, what this grammatical structure of language represents is exactly the same thing as what makes it so that when FREUD wants to articulate the drive, he cannot do otherwise than to pass through the grammatical structure which alone provides its complete and ordered field to what, in fact, when FREUD has to speak of the drive, comes to dominate—I mean, to constitute—the only two functioning examples of drives as such: namely, the scoptophilic drive and the sadomasochistic drive.

— It is only in a world of language that “I want to see” can take on its dominant function, leaving open the question of from where and why I am being looked at.

— It is only in a world of language, as I mentioned last time only in passing, that “A child is being beaten” has its pivotal value.

— It is only in a world of language that the subject of the action brings forth the question that supports him, namely: for whom is he acting?

No doubt, nothing can truly be said about what these structures are. Yet our experience assures us that it is they which dominate… and not what haunts some obscure hallway of the “Analytic Assembly,” namely a “genital” drive that no one would be able to define as such… that it is they which determine the law of the function of desire. But this cannot be said, except by repeating the grammatical articulations in which they are constituted, that is to say, by exhibiting, in the sentences which ground them, what can be deduced from the various ways in which the subject comes to situate himself there.

Nothing—I say—can be said of it, except what we actually hear, namely, the subject in his complaint. That is, insofar as he does not find himself there, that the desire he grounds there has for him the ambiguous value of being a desire he does not assume, that he wants only in spite of himself. It is precisely to return to this point that we articulate everything we have to lay out here before you. It is indeed because it is so, and because someone dared to say it, that it is necessary to examine from where this discourse could have started.

It could have started from this: that there is a point of experience from which we can see what is at stake in truth, in what I will call, as you wish: obscuration, strangling, impasse of the subjective situation, under this strange incidence whose final spring must be founded in the status of language. It is at the level where thought exists as “it is not I who thinks.”

This thought, as it is there, supported by that little shuttle [at the bottom left] that holds up the capital I, this thought which has the status of unconscious thoughts, implies this: that it cannot say, and this is its proper status: – neither “therefore I am,” – nor even the “therefore I am not,” which nonetheless complements it and which is its virtual status at the level of the Other.

For it is there, and only there, that this Other maintains its instance. It is there where the “I,” as such, comes to be inscribed effectively only by a “I am not.” A “I am not” which is supported by the fact: – that it is supported by as many others as there are to constitute a dream, – that the dream, FREUD tells us, is essentially egoistic, – that in all that the dream presents to us, we must recognize the instance of the Ich, under a mask.

But also, that it is insofar as it does not articulate itself there as Ich, that it is masked there, that it is present there.

That is why the place of all dream thoughts is marked here [diagram], on its right side, by that white area where it is indicated that the Ich as such is certainly shown to us in each of the dream thoughts to be found again, but what will constitute what FREUD calls Trauminhalt, namely, very precisely, that set of signifiers from which a dream is constituted, by the various mechanisms of the unconscious: condensation, displacement, Verdichtung, Verschiebung.

If the “I,” the Ich, the ego, is present in all of them, it is precisely in this: that it is in all of them, that is to say, that it is absolutely dispersed there. What does that mean? And what is the status that remains for the thoughts that constitute this unconscious, if not to be what FREUD tells us, namely, those signs by which each of the things… in the sense I mentioned last time: Sache—affairs, matters of encounter… play among one another this function of referral that makes us, in the psychoanalytic operation, lose ourselves for a time in their profusion as in a disordered world?

But what is the operation that FREUD carries out… and especially in that part of the Traumdeutung called “the work of the dream,” die Traumarbeit… if not to show us that what he articulates… what he articulates at the beginning of this chapter in the clearest and most explicit terms, despite what those who are reading me for the first time these days may say and who are surprised that for so many years I have been articulating that the unconscious is structured like a language… Der Trauminhalt—the content of the dream—is given: ist gleichsam, just like in a script made of images—which refers to hieroglyphs—whose signs are only zu übertragen, to be translated, in die Sprache—into the language of the dream-thoughts.

[Der Trauminhalt ist gleichsam in einer Bilderschrift gegeben, deren Zeichen einzeln in die Sprache der Traumgedanken zu übertragen sind. Man würde offenbar in die Irre geführt, wenn man diese Zeichen nach ihrem Bilderwert anstatt nach ihrer Zeichenbeziehung lesen wollte. Ich habe etwa ein Bilderrätsel (Rebus) vor mir: ein Haus, auf dessen Dach ein Boot zu sehen ist, dann ein einzelner Buchstabe, dann eine laufende Figur, deren Kopf wegapostrophiert ist u. dgl.]

And everything that follows: — on the Zeichenbeziehung, — on the comparison with a rebus, — on the fact that one only understands a rebus by reading and articulating it, for otherwise it is absurd, he tells us, to see an image composed of a house on top of which there is a ship or a person running with a comma in place of a head; all of this only has meaning in a language.

And after telling us that the world of dream-thoughts is of an illogical nature… I urge you to consult FREUD’s text… which is not simply to testify to what is truly blatant and coarsely illustrated on every page, namely that one is always speaking only of language, but to see that what FREUD articulates is all the ways in which, in that world “of things”—no doubt, but what does that mean? It means Bedeutung—of what it refers to, the meaning of the rebus. And what it refers to, that is, indeed, the images that constitute it, what does FREUD do, if not show us how, in a certain way of altering them—these images, for example—we can designate the clue by which, in their sequence, we recover all the grammatical functions initially eliminated.

And show us: — how the relation of a subordinate clause to a main clause is expressed—read the entirety of that massive Chapter VI of the Traumarbeit, — how a causal relation can be expressed, — how, likewise, the form of negation reappears.

And quite precisely, you will find things whose similarity with the diagrams I have given you here will appear evident to you, such as the function of the “either–or,” he says, which serves to express, because it cannot be done otherwise, a conjunction. And when you look closely, you will find exactly what I told you regarding the “either–or” suspended between two negations: you have exactly the same value as in the negation of that conjunction.

Certainly these “tricks,” if I may say so, will seem to you a bit more advanced in their results than those FREUD offers you, but FREUD gives you more than enough to encourage you to proceed along the same path. That is to say, when you take the dream “Sezerno,” or the dream where “one must close either one eye or two eyes,” you will realize what that means, in seeing that it means one cannot have at the same time one eye open or two eyes open, that it is not the same thing.

In short, the legitimacy of the logic of fantasy is precisely that something for which FREUD’s entire chapter—and I speak only of this one—prepares us, prepares us by showing that what FREUD charts the path toward is a logic of these thoughts, namely this, which means: it requires the support of the place of the Other, which very precisely, here, can be articulated only by a “therefore I am not.” Thus we find ourselves suspended, at the level of this function, in a “You are not, therefore I am not.”

Does that not tickle your ears in a certain way? Is that not the language—I would say the most importunate—of love itself? What does that mean? Should we press its meaning further, which, moreover, gives its truth: “You are only what I am”? Everyone knows and can recognize that if the meaning of love is indeed given by this formula, love, as much in its emotion, in its naive impulse, as in many of its discourses, does not recommend itself as a function of thought. I mean that if from such a formula—“You are not, therefore I am not”—emerges the monster whose effects we know all too well in everyday life, it is precisely insofar as this truth, that of “You are not, therefore I am not,” is in love rejected (verworfen).

The manifestations of love in the real, this is very precisely the characteristic that I describe as that of any Verwerfung. Namely: the most uncomfortable and most depressing effects—this is one more illustration of it—where the paths of love are nowhere to be designated as so easily drawn. Certainly, in DESCARTES’s time these laws were, of course, known to all. We were in the time of Angelus SILESIUS, who dared say to God:

“If I were not here, well it’s very simple: You, God, as existing God, You would not be there either.”

In such a time one can speak of the problems of our own, more precisely one can re-situate oneself there in order to judge what brings us to an impasse. What does FREUD tell us when we pursue further the examination of his logic?

If you still held the slightest doubt concerning the nature of this subversion, which turns the Bedeutung… insofar as we grasp it at the moment of its alteration, of its torsion as such, of its amputation, even its ablation… into the mechanism that can allow us to recognize in it the reestablished function of logic.

If you still had the slightest doubt, you would see those doubts vanish in observing how FREUD, in the dream, reintegrates everything that appears there as judgments, whether those judgments are internal to the lived experience of the dream, but even more so when they appear as judgments—apparently—upon waking.

When—he tells us in reference to the dream—something in the dreamer’s account is indicated as a moment of hesitation, of interruption, a gap—as I once said, back when I still gave some status to the notion of “gap”—Lücken, an Unterbrechung, a rupture in the account that I, the dreamer, can give of it, this very thing, FREUD tells us, must be reestablished as part of the dream’s text.

And what does this designate? It suffices for me to refer somewhere in what FREUD gives us as an example:

“I go,” says one of his dreamers, “with Fraülein K. in das Volksgartenrestaurant, into the Volksgarten restaurant… And there, it’s the dunkel Stelle, it’s the passage of which there is nothing more to say: he no longer knows, and then it resumes:… Then, I find myself in the salon of a brothel, in dem ich zwei oder drei Frauen sehe, in which I see two or three women, one in a chemise and underpants.”

Analysis: Fraülein K. is the daughter of his former boss, and what is characteristic is the circumstance in which he had to speak to her and which he designates in these terms:

“We recognized each other, man sich erkannte, gleichsam in a kind of equality, in seiner Geschlechtlichkeit, in his sexual qualification, as if to say: I am a man, Ich bin ein Mann und du ein Weib, and you a woman.”

This is precisely why Fraülein K. is chosen to constitute the entry point of the dream, but also undoubtedly to determine the syncope. For what follows in the dream proves to be precisely what disrupts this fine relation full of certainty between man and woman. Namely, that the three people who are connected, for him, with the memory of that restaurant and who also represent those he finds in the brothel’s salon, are respectively his sister, his brother-in-law’s wife, and a friend of the latter—or the former, it doesn’t matter, in any case three women with whom one cannot say that his relations were marked by a frank and direct sexual approach.

[Traumdeutung, VI: “In ganz ähnlicher Form kleidete sich eine analoge Reminiszenz eines anderen Träumers ein. Er träumt: Ich gehe mit Frl. K. in das Volksgartenrestaurant…, dann kommt eine dunkle Stelle, eine Unterbrechung…, dann befinde ich mich in einem Bordellsalon, in dem ich zwei oder drei Frauen sehe, eine in Hemd und Höschen. Analyse: Frl. K. ist die Tochter seines früheren Chefs, wie er selbst zugibt, ein Schwesterersatz. Er hatte nur selten Gelegenheit, mit ihr zu sprechen, aber einmal fiel eine Unterhaltung zwischen ihnen vor, in der man sich gleichsam in seiner Geschlechtlichkeit erkannte, als ob man sagen würde: Ich bin ein Mann und du ein Weib. Im angegebenen Restaurant war er nur einmal in Begleitung der Schwester seines Schwagers, eines Mädchens, das ihm vollkommen gleichgültig war. Ein andermal begleitete er eine Gesellschaft von drei Damen bis zum Eingange in dieses Restaurant. Die Damen waren seine Schwester, seine Schwägerin und die bereits erwähnte Schwester seines Schwagers, alle drei ihm höchst gleichgültig, aber alle drei der Schwesterreihe angehörig. Ein Bordell hat er nur selten besucht, vielleicht zwei–oder dreimal in seinem Leben. Die Deutung stützte sich auf die dunkle Stelle, Unterbrechung im Traume und behauptete, daß er in knabenhafter Wißbegierde einigemal, allerdings nur selten, das Genitale seiner um einige Jahre jüngeren Schwester inspiziert habe. Einige Tage später stellte sich die bewußte Erinnerung an die vom Traume angedeutete Untat ein.”*]

In other words, what FREUD demonstrates to us as always and strictly correlative with that syncope of the Trauminhalt, of the deficiency of signifiers, is exactly—precisely—that what is being approached is anything which, in language—and not simply the mirages of looking into each other’s eyes—would bring into question the matter of the relation between the sexes as such.

The original logical sense of castration, insofar as analysis has uncovered its dimension, rests in this: that at the level of Bedeutungen, of meanings, language—as it is what structures the subject as such—very mathematically fails, I mean: it reduces what the relation between the sexes is to what we designate as best we can, by this something to which language reduces sexual polarity, namely: a “having or not having” the phallic connotation.

This is precisely what represents—and only represents—the effect of analysis. No approach to castration as such is possible for a human subject except through a renewal… on another level, separated from the entire height of that rectangle I have drawn here… of that function I earlier called: alienation, that is to say: where the function of the Other intervenes as such, inasmuch as we must mark it as barred: A.

It is precisely insofar as analysis, through its work, comes to invert this relation, which made of everything pertaining to the subject’s status in its “I am not” a void field, a non-identifiable subject, that this field will, for that very reason, become filled here: in the lower left corner, the –ϕ of the failure in the articulation of Bedeutung—of sexual meaning—will then appear.

Die Bedeutung des Phallus… I titled—since I pronounced it in German—that lecture I gave on The Signification of the Phallus… from this point on, the question must be posed of what separates these two equally alienating operations: — that of pure and simple, logical alienation, — and that of the rereading of the same alienating necessity in the Bedeutung of unconscious thoughts.

With in both cases—as you can see—a different result, since they even seem—when viewed here, shaded—to strictly oppose one another. That is because the entire distance between one and the other of these operations lies in their starting field, one of which is that—reconstructed—from which I designate the foundation of the entire logical operation, namely, the choice offered of “either I do not think or I am not,” as being the truthful meaning of the Cartesian cogito.

That one leads to an “I do not think” and to the foundation of everything that, in the human subject, makes for a subject specifically subjected to the two drives I have designated as scoptophilic and sadomasochistic.

But if something else, related to sexuality, manifests from unconscious thoughts—that is precisely the meaning of FREUD’s discovery, but also what designates the radical inadequacy of thought to the reality of sex.

The question is not to cross that which is unthinkable here—unthinkable and yet salutary—for this is the whole nerve of why FREUD held so essentially to the sexual theory of the libido. One must read, under the truly shamanic, inspired pen—I don’t know how else to describe it—of JUNG, his astonishment, his indignation at receiving from FREUD’s mouth something that to him seems to constitute some kind of strictly anti-scientific bias, when FREUD says to him:

– “And above all, huh! You, Jung, don’t forget: one must hold to that theory.” – “But why?” Jung asks him. – “To prevent,” says FREUD, “the Schlammflut, the flood of filth!” – “Which?” – “Of occultism.”

…says FREUD, knowing very well what is involved in not having touched that precisely designated limit, because it undoubtedly constitutes the essence of language, in the fact that language does not dominate… from that foundation of sex insofar as it is perhaps the most deeply connected to the essence of death… does not dominate what there is of sexual reality. Such is the lesson of sobriety that FREUD gives us.

But then, why are there thus two paths and two accesses? Surely there is something that deserves a name in the operation we have not spoken of, the one that makes us pass from the level of unconscious thought to this logical, theoretical status.

Conversely, the one that can make us pass from that status of the subject, insofar as he is the subject of the scoptophilic and masochistic drives, to the status of the analyzed subject, insofar as for him the function of castration has meaning. – This, which we will call “truth operation,” because, like truth itself, it blows and it realizes itself where it wills, when it speaks…

– This, which was tied to the discovery, the irruption of the unconscious, to the return of the repressed…

– This allows us to conceive why we can find again the instance of castration in the core-object, in the object-core to say it in English, in the object around which turns the status of the grammatical subject…

– This can be designated and translated from that corner obtained from the fact that language is, by its very status, antipathetic, if I may say so, to sexual reality.

– This is nothing other than the site of the operation around which we will be able to define, in its logical status, the function of the object (a).