🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I left you last time on a first traversal of the rectangle, which is here repeated as a support, evocative for you as an indication that it is always necessary to refer back to it concerning the foundation of what we are trying to construct this year, a logic of fantasy.

That the choice placed at the principle of the development of its logical operations is this very special kind of alternative, which I am trying to articulate under the proper name of alienation, between a “I do not think” and a “I am not,” with what it entails as forced in the choice it imposes, which naturally leans toward the “I do not think.” This is where we resume.

We have certainly covered enough ground to now know how the analytic reference is situated with respect to the discovery of the unconscious, insofar as this discovery provides the truth of this alienation.

Something has already been sufficiently indicated regarding what supports this truth, under the term often repeated before you, the object little (a). Certainly, all of this is only possible because I have long spoken to you about this object little (a), and it can already represent for you some kind of support.

Still, the articulation it has with this logic has not been pushed—not by any means!—to its conclusion. Simply, I wanted to indicate, at the end of our last session, that castration is certainly not unrelated to this object, that it represents the following:

– that this object, as the cause of desire, dominates everything the subject is capable of circumscribing as field, as grasp, as apprehension of what is properly called, in the essence of man, desire. Needless to say, here, the essence of man is a Spinozist reference, and I do not give to this term “man” any more emphasis than I usually do,
– that this desire, insofar as it is limited to this causation by the object little (a), is exactly the same point which necessitates that, at the level of sexuality, desire is represented by the mark of a lack,
– that everything is ordered and originates in the sexual relation as it occurs in the speaking being due to this: around the sign of castration, namely from the outset around the phallus, insofar as it represents the possibility of a lack of object.

Castration then, is something like awakening to the fact that sexuality… I mean: everything of it that is realized in the psychic event …is this, namely something that is marked by the sign of a lack.

For example, by the fact that the Other—the Other of the inaugural experience of the child’s life—must at some point appear as castrated. And undoubtedly, this horror linked to the first apprehension of castration, as being supported by what we designate in analytic language as the Mother… that is, what is not simply to be taken as the character assigned various functions in a certain typified relation at the origin of the small human being’s life, but equally as something that has the deepest relation with this Other which is put into question at the origin of this entire logical operation …that this Other be castrated, the correlative and regular horror, so to speak, that arises at this discovery, is something that brings us to the heart of what is at stake in the subject’s relation to the Other insofar as it is founded there.

Sexuality, as it is lived, as it operates, is at this point something fundamentally… in everything we trace through our analytic experience …something that represents a “defending oneself” from following through with this truth “that there is no Other.” This is what I have to comment on for you today. For certainly, I approached the philosophical tradition in order to pronounce “This Other does not exist,” and in doing so to evoke the atheist correlation that this profession entails.

But of course, this is not something we can stop at. And we must indeed ask ourselves, go further in the direction of posing the question: this fall of the capital A: S(A)… which we posit as being the logically equivalent term of the inaugural choice of alienation …what does that mean?

Nothing can fall except what is here A, such that if A is not, we posit that there is no place where the truth constituted by speech can be assured.

If it is not words that are empty, but rather… if it must instead be said that words have no place that would justify the common consciousness’s constant questioning of what are merely words, as it is said, then what does this formulation mean: S(A), which I give you as the key that allows us to begin—begin with a correct step that we can sustain long enough—concerning the logic of fantasy? If it is an algorithm of the mathematical type that I use to support this S(A), it is undoubtedly in order to assert that there is another, deeper meaning to be discovered.

If really, as I say, modern consciousness—whether it be that of the religious or of those who are not—is in its entirety atheist, would affirming this non-existence of the capital A not be something like blowing a shadow, merely? Is there not, behind this, something else at stake?

There are indeed many ways to notice that something else is at stake. What does capital A marked with a bar mean: A̶? Well, I just said it, I don’t need to look any further: it is marked.

The meaning of what PASCAL called the “God of the philosophers”… of that reference to the Other so essential in Descartes, and which allowed us to begin from it in order to secure our first step …is it not precisely that the Other… the Other of what Pascal calls the “God of the philosophers,” the Other insofar as it is indeed so necessary for the edification of all philosophy …does it not characterize him most of all, best of all… and even, indeed, if we go further, among the mystics contemporary to the same phase of reflection on this theme of the Other …does it not characterize him essentially by not being marked? Negative theology…

And what does this perfection invoked in the “ontological argument” mean, if not precisely that no mark affects it? In this sense, the symbol S(A)—capital S, parenthesis of barred A—means that we can only reason our experience starting from this: that the Other is marked. And indeed, this is what it is all about from the outset, this primitive castration affecting the maternal being: the Other is marked. We notice it very quickly, through small signs.

If it were necessary, before I pronounced it here, before you, in a magistral way… which is always somewhat an abuse of the credit given to the speech of the one who teaches …to try to see it through such small signs, which are visible in what one does when translating: if I were speaking in German, you could ask yourself the question of how I would translate it, this Other… that you have been granting me for so many years, because I have hammered it into your ears …“das Anderes” or “der Andere”?

You see the difficulty that arises from the sole fact—not, as is often said, that there are languages where the neuter would constitute the unmarked in terms of gender. This is completely absurd! The notion of gender is not to be confused with the masculine-feminine polarity. The neuter is also a gender and precisely marked. What characterizes languages where it is not marked is that there can be something unmarked that regularly takes shelter under the masculine. And this is what allows me to speak to you of the Other, without you having to ask yourselves whether it must be translated as “das Anderes” or “der Andere.”

This entails—you may notice it—if a choice has to be made… I would have to speak—I didn’t have the time before building these reflections for you today—I would have to speak with some English speaker, there is no lack of them in my audience but… I wanted to do it last night, time was short …why, in English, there is some tension—I noticed it during my last speech in Baltimore—in translating it as “the Other”? Apparently, it doesn’t come so naturally in English; I imagine it is because of the completely different value that “the,” the definite article in English, has. And so I had to pass—when speaking of this Other, my Other—through “the Otherness.”

It was always a matter of moving toward the unmarked. One took the path one could, in English. We went through… a quality, an uncertain quality: the otherness, something that essentially slips away, since, wherever we reach it, it will always be other. I cannot say that I am very comfortable in finding there a representative of the meaning I want to give to “the Other,” and certainly, those who proposed this translation to me are not either!

But this, this in itself is quite significant of what is at stake, and very precisely of the repugnance there is in introducing into the category of the Other the function of the mark. Then, when you are dealing with the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” then there, you are not deprived of the mark! That is precisely why it does not come so easily and equally why those who still deal, indirectly, personally, correlatively, with this kind of Other, also have a destiny that is very much marked.

I had dreamed—for the few “little ones” of this tribe who surround me—of rendering them the service of clarifying a little the question concerning their relationship with the Name—of God… the God with the unpronounceable Name—the one who expressed himself in the register of the “I,” it must be said. Not: “I am he who is”—a pale transposition of a Plotinian thought—but: “I am what I am,” quite simply.

Yes, I had thought—I have said it, and I will always come back to it—of rendering them this service, but we will remain stuck at that point so long as I have not taken up again this question of the Name-of-the-Father… I have spoken of the “little ones”; assuredly, there are also the “great ones.” The great Jews who have no need of me to confront their God.

But we, we are dealing here with the Other insofar as the field of truth. And that this Other is marked—whether we want it or not, as philosophers—that it is marked at the outset by castration, this is what we are dealing with today and what, from the moment analysis exists, nothing can prevail against. That is why I consider that there is every reason to break off on a certain terrain: that there are speculations to which one must not give in to the temptation, not even of judging, as I have been accused of, but simply of going to seek in them what they testify to involuntarily, of the truth they miss.

Because to point it out there… in the thought, for example, of some contemporary philosopher …that at such and such a point, something comes to take the place of a lack, precisely, and that it is expressed more or less awkwardly, for example as “thetic consciousness of self,” of which there is really nothing to say, except that it is not a Unsinn, for a Unsinn is not “nothing in terms of Sinn,” as we know, but that it is properly speaking—I said “non-thetic consciousness of self,” didn’t I—that it is properly speaking sinnlos, and even that is saying too much, for it concedes that this point could be the mark of the very place that would be that something indicated as lacking.

But it is nowhere, it is in nothing of the sort, it is not in that unthinkable anteriority of what is established as the point of Selbstbewusstsein, that we must seek this nodal point, if it is necessary to define—and it is necessary to define because it is findable, you will see it—this nodal point, which would be for us, in the position in which we have placed ourselves, the turning point where to rediscover the link of the cogito.

It is not nothing, however, that the Other reappears, for example in such and such a speculation, insofar as I invoke it here. And if I speak of it, it is to show that even in the details pursued, only rupture can respond to the previously traced search. How, for example, not to notice that this thought I invoke here… without wishing to give it its label, precisely to underscore that what is at stake, in what we have to decide on this path of thought, …could in no way be authorized by any label, and least of all by mine rather than by another.

Look where this thought leads us, when it is a matter of the disarray of the voyeur, for example: this emphasis placed, this gaze also, this thought that directs itself, to justify it, toward his surprise—the voyeur’s—by the gaze of another precisely, of an arriver, of someone who comes upon him, while he has his eye to the keyhole.

So that this gaze is already sufficiently evoked by the small sound announcing this arrival when—very precisely—what is at stake concerning the status of the voyeur’s act is indeed this something that we must also name the gaze in question, but which is to be sought elsewhere entirely, namely precisely in what the voyeur wants to see, but in which he fails to recognize that it is what looks at him most intimately, what freezes him in his fascination as voyeur, to the point of making him himself as inert as a painting.

I will not retrace here the outline of what I have already extensively developed. But the radical wandering that is the same as the one expressed à huis clos in this formula: that hell is our image forever fixed in the Other.

Which is false: if hell is somewhere, it is in the “I.”

And in all this wandering there is no “bad faith” to invoke, as excusing in the end as the Christian apologetic trick of “good faith,” made to tame the sinner’s narcissism.

There is the right path or there is the false path. There is no transition; the stumbles of the false path have no value unless they are analyzed, and they can only be analyzed starting from a radically different starting point on the occasion.

On the occasion: the admission, at the base and at the principle of the unconscious, and the search for what constitutes its status as such. What substitutes for the lack of Selbstbewusstsein can in no way be situated as its own impossibility. It is elsewhere that we must seek its function, if I may say so, since it will not even be the mother function.

Regarding what is at stake in this trace that I now leave behind and on which I had to dwell, in the name of some confusion in which it seems almost necessary to be implicated… since I have heard from the mouths of analysts that there was nonetheless something to retain in the comparison that, from outside, one attempted to establish between the emergence of a certain thought and the supposedly philosophical background it claimed to attack or even subvert… it is very surprising that the possibility of such a reference could be admitted, even by someone who is, for example, an analyst, as one of those simple possible effects of what is called, in this context, alienation.

I heard this statement, and from someone who certainly does not always err, certainly at a time when perhaps I had not yet, in their ears, sufficiently resounded what must truly be thought regarding the term “alienation.”

Alienation has absolutely nothing to do with what results from distortion, from loss, in all that concerns communication… even, I would say finally, in the most traditional way, and since now this is sufficiently established …from a thought that is called “Marxist.”

It is clear that alienation, in the Marxist sense, has nothing to do with what is, properly speaking, mere confusion. Marxist alienation, moreover, absolutely does not suppose the existence of the Other; it simply consists in this: that I do not recognize, for example, my work in this thing… which has absolutely nothing to do with opinion and which no sociological persuasion will modify in any way …namely, that my work—mine, my own—comes back to me and that I must pay for it at a certain price.

This is something that cannot be resolved by any direct dialectic, which requires the play of all sorts of real chains, if one wants to modify not the chain, nor the mechanism that is impossible to break, but the most harmful consequences.

It is the same with what is at stake regarding alienation, and this is why the importance of what I state here concerning alienation gains its significance not from the fact that this or that person remains more or less deaf to the meaning of what I articulate, but very precisely from its effects on those who understand it perfectly, on the sole condition that they are primarily concerned by it.

And this is why it is at the level of analysts that sometimes, concerning what I state in more advanced terms, I gather signs of an anxiety, let us say, which may go as far as impatience, and which simply, the last time for example, when I was able to state in a sort of lateral way, meant to shed proper light on what I defined there as the position of the “I am not” insofar as it is correlative to the function of the unconscious, and where I articulated at that point the formula as the truth of what love here allows itself to formulate, namely: “If you are not, I die,” says love—this cry is known—and I translate it: “You are nothing but what I am.”

Is it not strange that such a formula… which certainly goes much further in what it traces as an opening to love, for the simple reason that it indicates there that the Verwerfung it constitutes proceeds precisely only from this: that love does not think… but that it does not articulate—as FREUD does, purely and simply—that the foundation of Verliebtheit, of love, is the Lust-Ich, and that it is nothing else—for this is affirmed in FREUD—than the effect of narcissism …how then, to a formula… which is immediately seen to be infinitely more open, to go no less far than to this remark implied in a certain commandment that—I think—is not unknown to you—that it is in the most secret part of yourself that the spring of love for the neighbor must be sought …how then can such a formula—in an analytic ear, I insist!—evoke I know not what alarm, as if what I had pronounced there were derogatory, as if—as I heard it—I were committing some imprudence of the kind:

“That to an audience of 25-year-olds, I would allow myself to advance a statement that would reduce love to nothing.” A singular thing, at the level of the 25-year-olds, I received in this session… to my knowledge, of course, but there are a few who come to me in the following week to make confidences …only singularly lively reactions, I would say. As austere as the formula may be, it appeared salutary to many.

What, then, could possibly condition the unease of an analyst, if not very precisely what I marked here on this formula: in that little hook that shifts the “nothing” by a nothing: “You are only that nothing that I am.”

Which is no less true, in fact, than the previous formula, insofar as it brings us back to the key function, which returns in the status of this “I” of the “I am,” to the little (a), which indeed makes the whole question… and this is where I want today to linger a little longer …and which, it is easy to see, indeed concerns the analyst.

For in the operation of analysis… insofar as it alone allows us to go far enough into this relation between thought and being at the level of the “I,” so that it is indeed analysis that introduces the function of castration …the little (a) in this operation must be completed with a signifying tail: the little (a), in the path traced by analysis, is the analyst!

And it is because the analyst has to occupy this position of the little (a) that, indeed, for them the formula—very legitimately—arouses the proper anxiety, if we recall what I formulated about anxiety: “that it is not without an object.” And this indicates that it is all the more well-founded in that, with this object, the one who is called by the signifying operation that is analysis, finds himself in that very place summoned to take an interest, at the very least to know how he assumes it—these are matters still rather far from the consideration we could bring here.

How could one not recognize that there is nothing more disorienting here than what was long ago formulated… through the aphoristic short-circuit routes of a wisdom certainly lost but not entirely without echo …in the form of तत्त्वम्अस [Tat tvam asi: you are that]: recognize yourself, you are this.

Which, of course, could only remain opaque from a certain bias of the philosophical tradition. If the “this” can in no way be identified with the correlate of representation—in which the subject is increasingly established in that tradition—nothing is emptier than this formula. That “I” should be my representation is only that something of which it is all too easy to say that it corrupts all modern development of a thought under the name of idealism, and the status of representation as such must be re-examined by us.

Assuredly, if these words have a meaning, whether they are called “structuralism”—I don’t wish to give them other names—or even “New Criticism,” they must of course begin by articulating something regarding representation.

Is it not perfectly clear… by simply opening a volume such as the latest one of Mythologiques by Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS …that if the analysis of myths—as it is presented to us—has any meaning, it is because it completely displaces the function of representation. Assuredly, we are dealing with dead material, toward which we have no longer any relation of “I.”

And this analysis is a game, a game that is fascinating for what it reminds us of, and of which you can find testimony, just to take this latest volume, from the first pages—it is titled Honey to Ashes—and we see articulated in a certain number of myths, the relations of honey… conceived as a nourishing substance prepared by beings other than man, and in a way prior to the distinction between nature and culture …with what operates beyond the raw and the cooked in cuisine, namely what dissolves into smoke: tobacco.

And we find under the author’s pen, this peculiar something, attached to a few small remarks he links to certain texts, for example medieval ones, about the idea that before tobacco reached us, its place was in a way already prepared by this opposite of “ashes,” which was already indicated in relation to “honey,” that in some way “the thing-honey,” for a long time—for always—had been awaiting “the thing-tobacco”!

Whether you follow or not the analysis of Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS in this direction, is it not made to suggest to us what we know in the practice of the unconscious and what allows for pushing further the critique of what FREUD articulates under the term Sachevorstellungen?

From the idealist perspective, one thinks—and after all, why would FREUD not have written in this sense—“representations of things” in the sense that it is the things which are represented. But why would we be reluctant to think of the relations of things as bearing some representations that belong to the things themselves?

Since the things signal one another… with all the ambiguity you may attach to this expression: “they signal each other” …that they may call and await one another, and organize themselves as the order of things, that without a doubt it is upon this that we rely every time that, interpreting as analysts, we make something function like Bedeutung.

Certainly, that is the trap. And it is not analytic work either—however amusing the game may be—to find in the unconscious the network and weave of ancient myths. On that front, we will always be well supplied! As soon as Bedeutung is involved, we will find whatever we wish in terms of the structure of the mythical era. That is precisely why, after a certain time, the game bored the analysts. They realized it was too easy.

The game is not easy when it concerns collected, attested texts of existing myths. They are not—precisely—not just any texts. But at the level of the subject’s unconscious, in analysis, the “I” is much more flexible. And why? Precisely because it is untied there, because it comes to be conjoined with an “I am not,” where there manifests quite clearly—as I said last time—in those forms that are, in dreams, omnipresent and never fully identifiable, the function of the “I.”

But what must hold our attention is something else! It is precisely the gaps, the holes, in this game of Bedeutung. How has no one noticed this, which is nonetheless of blinding presence—that is to say, the “blocked” side of Bedeutung, if I may put it that way, under which everything that pertains to the object little (a) is manifested.

Of course, analysts do everything to relate it to some primordial function they imagine to have founded in the organism, such as, for example, when it concerns the object of the oral drive. That is why, just as well, they will quite incorrectly speak of good or bad milk, whereas it is nothing of the sort, since it concerns the breast.

It is impossible to link milk to an erotic object—which is essential to the status as such of the object little (a)—whereas it is quite evident that, in regard to the breast, the objection is not the same. But who does not see that a breast is something—my friends, have you ever thought about it?—that is not representable!

I do not believe I have here too small a minority of people for whom a breast may constitute an erotic object, but are you capable, in terms of representation, of defining in the name of what? What is a beautiful breast, for instance? Even though the term is commonly spoken, I defy anyone to provide any support at all to this term of beautiful breast.

If there is something that the breast constitutes, it would require, for that, as one day a poet’s apprentice [?] not very far away, put it at the end of one of the little quatrains he composed, under these words: “The cloud”… “The dazzling cloud of breasts.”

There is no other way, it seems to me, than to play within this register of the cloudy, adding something more from the order of reflection—that is, of the less graspable—by which it might become possible to sustain in the Vorstellung what is at stake in this object, which rather has no other status than what we can call, with all the opacity of these terms: a point of jouissance.

But what does that mean? I would say that it is what I was saying, somewhat… I don’t know how I manage to get these things across, but no matter, perhaps I’ve written it in other terms …but as I was trying to center, for you to feel it, what I call on this occasion that “syncopation of Bedeutung”… since it was to show you that this is the point which Sinn comes to fill …where suddenly it appeared to me that what is most apt to support this role of the breast-object in the fantasy, insofar as it is, truly, the specific support of the “I”—of the “I” of the oral drive—but it was nothing other than the formula… since you are all here more or less initiates, practitioners, even aficionados of my discourse …and the formula I have used a hundred times to illustrate the purely structural character of Sinn—Colourless green ideas… these ideas without color and green as well, why not? …sleep furiously! There you have the breasts! [Laughter]

Nothing, it seems to me, better expresses the privilege of this object, nothing expresses it in a more adequate way—that is, on this occasion, poetically: that they sleep, furiously on occasion, and that waking them should not be, for us, a trivial matter. That is indeed all that is at stake when it comes to breasts.

This is meant to set us on a path. Namely, the one that will bring us closer to the question of suspending what may allow us to substitute for Selbstbewusstsein. Because, of course, it is nothing other than the object little (a).

Only, one must know how to find it where it is. And it is not because one knows its name in advance that one encounters it—and besides, encountering it means nothing except some occasion for amusement.

But what does FREUD articulate for us—if we take things at the level of the dream? We will assuredly be struck by what he lets slip, if I may say so, to indicate a certain wakeful side of the subject, precisely within sleep.

– If there is something that characterizes well this Other or this lack of the Other that I designate as fundamental to alienation,
– if the “I” is nothing more than the opacity of logical structure,
– if the non-transparency of truth is what gives the style to the Freudian discovery,
…is it not strange to hear him say that such-and-such a dream that contradicts his theory of desire signifies nothing other than the desire to prove him wrong?

Is this not sufficient, both
– to show the accuracy of this formula I articulate, that “desire is the desire of the Other,”
– and to show in what suspension the status of desire is left, if the Other precisely can be said not to exist?

But is it not even more remarkable to see FREUD… at the end of one of the sections of that Chapter VI on which I insisted last time …specify that it is with great assurance that the dreamer arms and defends himself against this: that what he dreams is only a dream.

Regarding which he goes so far as to insist on this: that there exists an agency that always knows—he says, “that knows”—that the subject is sleeping, and that this agency, even if it may surprise you, is not the unconscious, but is precisely the preconscious, which represents, he tells us on that occasion, the desire to sleep.

This will give us something to reflect on concerning what happens at awakening. Because if the desire to sleep is found, through the mediation of sleep, so complicit with the function of desire as such, insofar as it is opposed to reality, what guarantees us that, upon emerging from sleep, the subject is any more defended against desire, insofar as it frames what he calls “reality”? The moment of awakening is perhaps never more than a brief instant: the one where the curtain changes. But let us leave aside this first suspension, to which I will return, but which I nevertheless wanted to touch upon today, since you have seen that I wrote here the word: awakening.

Let us follow FREUD: to dream that one dreams must be the object of a quite certain function, for us to be able to say that this always designates the imminent approach of reality! That something can become aware that it shelters behind a function of error, in order not to recognize reality—do we not see that here there is… even if it proceeds by a path exactly contrary to the assertion of this: that an idea is transparent to itself …the trace of something that deserves to be followed?

And to make you feel how to understand this, it seems to me that I can do no better than to follow the path offered to me by a fable, well known to be drawn from an old Chinese text, a text of CHUANG TZU. God knows what has been attributed to the poor man, and namely in connection with this dream, this well-known dream, of what he is supposed to have said—regarding having dreamed—of having dreamed himself to be a butterfly. He is said to have asked his disciples how to distinguish: – CHUANG TZU dreaming he is a butterfly,
– from a butterfly who, even though believing itself awake, is only dreaming it is CHUANG TZU.

It is needless to say that this absolutely does not have the sense usually attributed to it in the text of CHUANG TZU, and that the sentences which follow show clearly enough what is at stake and where this leads us.

It concerns nothing less than the formation of beings. That is, of things and paths that have long escaped us to a great extent—I mean in terms of what was precisely thought by those who left behind the written traces of it. But this dream, I will allow myself to suppose, was inaccurately reported. CHUANG TZU, when he dreamed himself to be a butterfly, said to himself: “it is only a dream,” which is entirely consistent with his mentality. He does not for a single instant doubt that he will overcome this minor problem of his identity as CHUANG TZU.

He says to himself: “it is only a dream,” and it is precisely in this that he misses reality, because inasmuch as something that is the “I” of CHUANG TZU rests in what is so essential to every condition of the subject—namely: that the object is seen—there is nothing that allows us better to overcome the treacherous nature of this world of vision, insofar as it would support this kind of gathering, whatever we may call it—world or extension—of which the subject would be the only support and the only mode of existence.

What gives consistency to this subject inasmuch as he sees—that is, inasmuch as he has only the geometry of his vision, inasmuch as he can say to the Other: “this is to the right,” “this is to the left,” “this is inside,” and “this is outside”—what allows him to situate himself as “I,” is nothing other than what I have already, in due time, pointed out to you: – that he is himself a picture in this visible world,
– that the butterfly is nothing other than what designates him himself as a blot, and as what is original in the blot in the emergence, at the level of the organism, of something that will become vision.

It is precisely inasmuch as the “I” itself is a blot on a background, and that what he will question in what he sees is exactly what he cannot find and what withdraws from him—this origin of the gaze—how much more sensitive and manifest it is, when articulated for us, than the light of the sun, to inaugurate what belongs to the order of the “I” in the scoptophilic relation.

Is it not there that “I only dream” masks the reality of the gaze, insofar as it is to be discovered? It is at this point that I wanted to bring you today, concerning this reminder of the function of the object (a) and its close correlation with the “I.” Yet, is it not true that whatever the link supported, indicated—as its framework—by the “I” of all fantasies, we still cannot grasp, among a multiplicity, moreover, of these objects little (a), what gives it this privilege in the status of the “I” insofar as it posits itself as desire?

There is only what will allow us to designate, to inscribe more precisely, the invocation of repetition. If the subject can inscribe within a certain relation—a relation of loss with respect to the field where the mark is traced and secured through repetition—it is because this field has a structure, which we have already introduced under the term of topology.

To rigorously establish what the object (a) means in relation to a surface, we have already approached it through the image of something that is cut out on certain privileged surfaces in such a way as to let something fall.

This falling object that has detained us, which we have felt the need to represent through a small fragment of surface, is assuredly still a coarse and inadequate representation. Neither the notion of surface should be rejected, nor the notion of the effect of the mark and the cut. But of course, it is not through the form of this or that scrap, however apt this image may appear to be when compared with what is used in analytic discourse under the term partial object, that we should be satisfied.

In regard to surfaces that we have defined not as something to be considered from the spatial perspective, but rather as something whose every point precisely testifies to a structure that cannot be excluded from it—that is to say, at every point, it is insofar as we are able to articulate certain effects of the cut there that we will come to know something of those evanescent points which we can describe as objects little (a).