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(All parts in English)

JAKOBSON

It is half past noon and I thank you for coming in such large numbers today, even though we are – as no one can ignore anymore – on a day of strike. I thank you all the more because I must also – to some – offer my apologies, since it is based on the announcement I had made – until a recent day and hour – that I would give today what is called my seminar, that certainly part of the people who are here, are here for that.

Indeed, I intended to do it, and to do it on the humorous theme I had already written… at the top of the blank pages I use to compensate for the poor lighting of the blackboard… I had written this “cogito, ergo Es” which, as you suspect from the change of ink, is a pun and plays on the approximate homophony, homonymy of the Latin “es” and the German “Es,” which refers to what you know in FREUD, namely what has been translated into French as the function of the Id.

On a logic… that is not a logic, a totally unprecedented logic, a logic to which I have not yet given, have not wanted to give – before it is established – its designation. I have one, which seems valid to me, privately, yet it has seemed appropriate to wait until I have given it sufficient development before giving it its name… on a logic whose curious departure arises from this alienating choice, which is offered to you from a “I do not think” to a “I am not,” one can still ask what room there is – given that we are here – for something that might well be called a “we think!” That already would lead us far, since this “we” – surely you feel it – in the paths I venture into, which are those of the barred Other [A], raises a question.

In any case, it is certainly not without being a reason for such a large audience, that I am doing something which strongly resembles leading you into the paths of thought. So this status of thought would well deserve to be, in some sense, at least indicated as being a question, based on such premises.

But today, I will limit myself to this: that, like every man who engages – imagines himself, in any case, to be engaged – in this operation of thought, I am a great friend of order and that one of the most essential foundations of our order… of the existing order, which is always the only one to which we must refer… is the strike! Now, this strike being followed – I unfortunately learned this a bit late – by the entire civil service, I have no intention of making an exception. [Laughter]

That is why I will not give today the lecture you might have expected and specifically not, unless I announce it as such, on this “Cogito, ergo Es.” I do not regret, however, being here… for a cause… the one that perhaps made me blind, a little later than it should have, to the fact that it was better for me not to give my lecture… which is the following thing, namely the presence among us today of Professor Roman JAKOBSON, to whom you all know what debt we owe, with regard to what continues here as teaching.

He was supposed to arrive in Paris last night, Paris where he does me the honor of being my guest, and I was certainly delighted at the thought of giving my usual lecture in front of him. He fully agrees with me, and indeed entirely, on this point: that it is better for me not to give it. At the very least, he has come here. And if anyone has a question to ask him, he is quite ready to answer it, an act of courtesy that has nothing to do with the continuation, today, of our gathering.

So, I will say a few more words, to give you time to compose yourselves. If someone has the good sense to have – ready – a question to pose directly and as to him personally, to Professor Roman JAKOBSON – who is here in the front row – he has time, while I still amuse the floor with a few more words, to simmer it, to simmer it in order to take this opportunity to say something that – if indeed the question is a genuine question – may be of great interest to everyone. There you have it!

On this note, to keep you on your toes, I will indicate what path – you have, I think, already sensed it: why else would you be here so faithfully, if you did not foresee at what more or less burning moment the continuation of our discourse leads us!

As I had already, then, anticipated that next Wednesday – this, for reasons of personal convenience – is linked to what is called the break period, transformed this year into rather long holidays for Mardi Gras, I would not be giving my seminar either, know this, and this time know it in advance: I will not give it next Wednesday.

So it is on February 15th that I will see you again. I hope that the thread will not have become too slack from what unites us this year on a shared line of attention.

To still point out what it is about: this “Cogito, ergo Es” – you can clearly see in what direction it leads us. And that it is a way of posing again the question of what exactly this famous “Es” is, which, all the same, does not go without saying, since I have allowed myself to call imbeciles those who find their way in it all too easily, who see in it a kind of other subject, and, frankly, an otherwise constituted self, of suspicious quality, an “outlaw” of the ego, or as some have bluntly said, a “bad ego.”

Of course, it is not easy to give such an entity its status! And to think that it is appropriate to substantiate it simply from what comes to us from an obscure internal drive, is by no means to dismiss the problem of the status of this “Es.” Because, in truth, if that were the case, it would be nothing other than what, since always and very legitimately, has constituted that kind of subject called the ego.

You can clearly feel that it is from the barred Other [A] that is at stake, that we will not have to rethink it, but simply to think it. And that this barred Other [A], insofar as we start from it as the place where the affirmation of speech is situated, is indeed something that calls into question, for us, the status of the second person.

Since always, a kind of ambiguity has been established, from the very necessity of the approach that led me to introduce, through the path of “Function and Field of Speech and Language” [Écrits, p.237], what is at stake concerning the unconscious.

The term “intersubjectivity” certainly still lurks and will continue to lurk for a long time, since it is written out in full in what was the trajectory of my teaching. It is never without being accompanied by some reservations – but reservations that were not, for the audience I then had, intelligible – that I made use of this term “intersubjectivity.”

Everyone knows that it is all too easily accepted, and of course it will remain the fortress of everything that, precisely, I fight against in the most precise way. The term “intersubjectivity,” with the ambiguities it maintains in the psychological domain, and primarily, the one that I have always pointed to as one of the most dangerous to highlight, namely the status of reciprocity, the bulwark of all that, in psychology, is most suited to establish all the misunderstandings regarding psychic development.

I wanted to symbolize it, to mark it, in a way, with an image that is both striking and crude: I would say that the status of reciprocity… insofar as it marks the statutory limit where the subject’s maturity would be established somewhere in development, is represented, if you will, for all those who have seen that something – and I think there will be enough in the assembly for my words to be understood, let the others find out – for those who have read or seen the film adaptation of The Confusions of Young Törless… I would say that the status of reciprocity is what gives the solid footing to that college of professors who supervise, and who in the end want to know nothing, to have nothing to do with that atrocious story, which only makes more evident that when it comes to education… to the formation of an individual, but especially of a child… educators would do better to inquire into what are the best ways that allow him to situate himself, by his very existence, as the prey of the fantasies of his little comrades, before trying to determine at what point, at what stage, he will be able to consider that “I” and “you” are reciprocal.

This is obviously what is at stake in what we are moving forward with this year under the name Logic of Fantasy. It concerns something that carries with it significant implications. Of course, this goes in no way in the direction of solipsism, but rather precisely in the direction of understanding what is at stake regarding this big Other. This big Other whose place has been upheld in philosophical tradition by the image of that divine, empty Other, which PASCAL designates under the name of the “God of philosophers,” and with which we can no longer be satisfied at all.

This, not for reasons of thought, or of free thought: Free Thought is like free association, let’s not even talk about it. [Laughter] If we are here to follow the thread and the trace of FREUD’s thought, I take this opportunity to say it, namely to put an end to I don’t know what form of gadfly [t.a.o.n] of which I might, on occasion, find myself the designated victim: it is not FREUD’s thought in the sense that the historian of philosophy can – even with the most attentive textual criticism – define it, in the sense – ultimately – of minimizing it.

That is to say, to point out: – that at this or that point FREUD did not go any further, – that he can be credited with nothing other than I don’t know what kind of flaw, gap, poorly handled “return” at some turning point in what he stated.

If FREUD holds our attention, it is not because of what he thought as an individual at such and such a turn of his effective life. What interests us is not FREUD’s thought, it is the object that FREUD discovered.

FREUD’s thought holds importance for us in that we observe there is no better way to recover the edges of this object than by following the trace of this thought of FREUD. But what legitimates the place we give it is precisely that at every moment these traces do nothing but mark for us… and in a way all the more wrenching, that these traces are torn… what object it is a question of, and bring us back to this, to this which is what is at stake, namely that it is a matter of not misrecognizing it.

Which is assuredly the irresistible and natural tendency, in the current state of things, of all constituted subjectivity. This is what doubles the drama of what is called “research,” and which surely you also know, that its status—for me—is not without being suspect. We are very close to returning to it and to posing again the question—I think I will do it next time—of the status we can give to this word “research,” behind which, among us, the greatest bad faith ordinarily hides.

What is research? Nothing other, assuredly, than what we can found as the radical origin of FREUD’s approach concerning his object, nothing else can provide it to us than what appears as the irreducible starting point of the Freudian novelty, namely repetition. Either this research is in some way itself repeated by the question raised by what I will call our relations, namely what it is of a teaching which presupposes that there are subjects for whom the new status of the subject, which the Freudian object implies, is realized. In other words, which presupposes that there are analysts.

That is to say, subjects who would uphold in themselves something that comes as close as possible to this new status of the subject, the one commanded by the existence and the discovery of the Freudian object. Subjects who would be those who are up to this: that the Other, the traditional big Other, does not exist and that nevertheless it truly has a Bedeutung. This Bedeutung… for all those who have followed me so far enough so that, for them, the words I use—I say: that I use—have a meaning… this Bedeutung, let it suffice that I pin it here as this something that has no other name than this one, namely: the structure, insofar as it is real.

If I had these little images displayed [diagrams on paper pinned to the board] on which today’s lesson was supposed to run, and you will recognize once again the Möbius strip,
– the Möbius strip cut in two insofar as this does not divide it,
– the Möbius strip once cut in two, which slips, in a way, onto itself, to double itself in the easiest manner, as you can observe, if you know well how to copy what I took the trouble to draw
– and therefore ultimately, to obtain this something which is perfectly closed, which has an inside and an outside and which is the fourth figure, which is there: that of a torus.

Structure is that something like this is real. I am not saying that this, all by itself, is the structure. I am telling you:
– that what is real under the name of structure is exactly of the nature of what is drawn there,
– and that there is, in a way, a structural substance,
– that this is not a metaphor,
– and that it is to the extent that, through this, is possible that something which we can gather as a set under the word “cut,” that what we are dealing with is existent.

What about a teaching that also presupposes the existence of what, assuredly, does not exist? For there is still, by all appearances, no analyst who can claim to uphold within himself this position of the subject. And this does nothing less than pose the question: what authorizes me to speak as if addressing these as-yet non-existent subjects?

You see that things are not without being borne—as one observes while snickering—by a few suppositions, of which the least that can be said is that they are dramatic, yet it is not to make them into psychodrama! For we must close it with a logical closure, that is what our object is this year. Assuredly, whatever it is that authorizes me, and perhaps we will be able to say a bit more on that point, it is clear that I am not alone.

If I were to pose a question myself to Professor Roman JAKOBSON… but I give you my word that I didn’t even hint it to him, while coming in the car. It’s not that it’s occurring to me now, but it’s now that it occurs to me to ask him… I would ask him whether he, whose teaching on language has such consequences for us, whether he also thinks that this teaching is of a nature to require a radical change of position at the level of what constitutes, let us say, the subject in those who follow it.

I would also ask him the question—but it is a very ad hominem question—whether, due to what it entails in terms of inflections… I don’t want to use big words and I refrain from words that could suggest the ambiguity attached to the word “asceticism,” or even to words that crop up in science-fiction novels… like “mutation” [Lacan punctuates with a laugh] surely we are not at that nonsense! …it is a matter of the logical subject and of what it entails, of what it entails in terms of a discipline of thought in those who, to that position, are, by their thought, introduced.

If, for him—for Professor JAKOBSON—the consequences of what he teaches go that far, does the word “disciple” have any meaning for him? I would say, for myself, that it has none, that in principle it is literally dissolved, evaporated, by the mode of relation inaugurated by such a thought. I mean that “disciple” must be distinguished from the word “discipline.” If we establish a discipline, which is also a new era in thought, something sets us apart from those who came before us, in that our speech does not require disciples. If Roman wants to begin by answering me, if he feels like it, let him do so!

Roman JAKOBSON – You think that maybe it would be better if several questions are asked? And then I respond all at once?

LACAN – Agreed. Who has a question to pose to Roman JAKOBSON?
Mme AUBRY [introducing herself] – Doctor AUBRY, who is a psychoanalyst
LACAN [to Roman Jakobson] – And whom you know… and a specialist in child psychiatry.
Mme AUBRY
I wanted to ask Mr. JAKOBSON…
since I am particularly interested in the problems of reading and writing difficulties, of access to written language, of its symbolic value… whether in these difficulties, and aside from errors that can be identified as slips, he thinks that certain structures of language relate to the very structure of the subject, or more precisely to their position in relation to the Other. I will explain with clinical examples: I don’t read German and I haven’t been able to read Kindersprache, which I believe is soon to be translated.

From what I have been told, for example, the confusions of phonemes: B–P, D–P, M–N are confusions that exist during the learning of speech, as the child learns phonemes in a determined order, starting with the minimal consonantal and vocalic system common to all languages, then expanding their register in a constant order according to the characteristics of their native language.

And I was thinking, based on certain clinical signs, that the persistence of such confusions at the age of learning to read could mark the child’s desire to remain in that infantile position. That, for instance, this might also relate, to some extent, to the failure to reach the mirror stage, understood as primary narcissistic identification, and prior to the emergence of the “I.”

Now maternal deficiencies, that is to say, to some extent the absence of discourse from the Other, between 6 and 18 months, determine the inability to access the mirror stage, to the image of one’s own body, and naturally to identifications. They have as constant correlates a deficiency in language, often irreversible, and certain particularities of language structure.

When the unity of sound, of the word, of the sentence is not respected in oral language as in written language, if this rupture is not that of a slip, would it not evoke the fragmented image of the body and this pre-narcissistic stage?
Likewise, errors concerning the use of personal pronouns would pertain to the incapacity to distinguish between “I” and the other, the incapacity to distinguish state verbs from action verbs, being from doing, would correspond to this status—not of subject—but of an object acted upon by the Other.

That is the very definition of alienation. All these questions I ask myself not only for dyslexia, but for other problems, particularly for childhood psychoses before the stage of language. Finally, there is one last thing, which is the inversion within syllables of two or three letters, effectively indicating a difficulty in temporal-spatial organization, since a letter placed to the right must be read afterward, differently than… Well!… But any child who cannot distinguish between right and left on their own body and that of the other is likely to have difficulties in writing. But this is even more evident in those who write in mirror script.

And one may also suppose that the left-handed child, who always encounters the other in mirror image—since their dominant hand meets in mirror the dominant hand of the right-handed person, and not diagonally—will have more difficulty in overcoming this step. And that at the level of writing, and probably not only at the level of writing, left-handedness favors inversion. Finally, the moment of access to written language is in principle contemporaneous with the resolution of the Oedipus complex, where the child, in the triangular situation, has accepted and recognized the law of the father and its symbolic representation, at the same time as social law.

When this development does not take place, is it not a refusal or an incapacity to access knowledge and symbolic representation? These are the questions, perhaps of a more practical nature and closer to daily clinical practice, that I would have been pleased to pose to Mr. JAKOBSON.

LACAN

Who else has a question? Since Mr. JAKOBSON prefers to have them all gathered together…
Mademoiselle Luce IRIGARAY? Madame! Pardon…

Luce IRIGARAY – I would like to ask Mr. JAKOBSON how he… [her voice fades out]

LACAN – Speak as loud as you can, with your full voice, otherwise he won’t hear you!

Luce IRIGARAY

I would like to ask Mr. JAKOBSON how he articulates the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement, that is to say, between the subject who produces the message and the subject realized within the message.

LACAN [repeating for Professor Jakobson’s benefit]

…between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement, namely the one who—in the statement—designates himself… etc. Well…

Luce IRIGARAY [continuing]

And furthermore, to ask him whether he doesn’t think a differentiation could be made among the “shifters,” based on this articulation between enunciation and statement.

LACAN [repeating for Professor Jakobson’s benefit]

…whether you don’t think a differentiation could be introduced among the…? What did you say?

Luce IRIGARAY – The “shifters”! To use them, to differentiate them according to this articulation from enunciation to statement.

LACAN [repeating for Professor Jakobson’s benefit]

…whether you think that among the “shifters” one could be more closely tied to the subject of the enunciation and the others to the subjects of the statement…

Jean OURY

It’s just a question, a clarification I’d like to ask Mr. JAKOBSON. It’s because for some time now, in analyzing problems of group dynamics within institutions, we haven’t had many tools, theoretical concepts, and we sometimes make use, perhaps haphazardly, of linguistic notions. Precisely for some time, I’ve been trying to introduce the notion of context to try to see more clearly into what we might call the effects of meaning within a group. Now this notion of “context,” I would like for us to be able to specify it more precisely.

I just want to give a few reference points. I was struck by the rather practical use one can make, for example, of your article on poetics. It seemed to me that this article on poetics was something that could be very useful in understanding what happens in groups. But on the other hand…

LACAN – Say a bit more in what way, for part of the audience who doesn’t… Even just a little, give some indication…

Jean OURY

For example, it seems to me that what is at stake in an institution are poetic messages, that is, a sort of critique of phonologism, and the establishment of messages that take syntax into account, in other words, the notion of syntactic message. This raises the problem of the relationship between the semantic level and the syntactic level.

Is there here a real problem, or a series of false problems? In particular with all the current notions of operators being used between the semantic and syntactic planes. In other words, the syntactic reworking—it’s an image—of a group’s structures changes the message and gives a certain meaning to what is being done in the institution.

Remaining within this perspective, is it possible to more precisely define the notion of the subject of the enunciation?

Can the notion of subject of the enunciation be clearly articulated with this notion of context on one hand, and of syntactic message?

Lucien MÉLÈZE

I would like to take a bit of advantage of Mr. JAKOBSON’s presence to ask him a question that is more of a request for information: if this relates somewhat to musique concrète, that is, the possibility of hearing many things that were not anticipated—it concerns the vocal support—and if, beyond what could be a rebus in a vocal utterance, for example a hum or an inflection clearly referred—if the vocal support has been studied somewhere as representing a position of the subject in relation to the body of the Other […] It’s a request for information.

[Lacan has just written on the blackboard “LA GRÈVE N’AUTORISE LA FUMÉE” Laughter]

LACAN – That’s addressed to the smokers.

Mme AUBRY – The “not” is missing…

LACAN

“…Does not authorize smoking,” yes. We’ll have to add it: “Does not authorize smoking.”
Or: “Let those for whom smoking is not absolutely indispensable kindly make a point of doing without it.”

Who else has a question to ask?

Dr. STOIANOFF:

Historically, could the prolonged dependence of one ethnic group on another influence the language of the former in such a way that we get this very particular indirect discourse you described? In the Bulgarian language, for instance, when one says: “a boat… swaminer,” in other words, one says “he left,” or “swaminer?”—he really left. In short, are there historical factors of dependence that could explain this introduction into the language of a mediating perspective?

LACAN

It’s good that everyone is taking this opportunity to rid themselves of a few thorns in their side, thanks to the presence of Mr. Roman JAKOBSON. [Laughter]

Who else has a question to ask? [Roman Jakobson gestures that he has had enough]

That will be enough, because Mr. Roman JAKOBSON has quite a bit to say to you.

If you will, perhaps you could answer from there? [Lacan invites Roman Jakobson to come up to the lectern]

It’s like when one is about to say Mass [Lacan fastens the microphone to Roman Jakobson’s neck] these are new instruments. [Laughter]

[Roman Jakobson steps up to the lectern.]

Roman JAKOBSON

I must say that I find myself in a rather difficult position because I wasn’t expecting to speak. Because I didn’t expect, first of all, that I would have to be the “strike breaker.” Since there’s a strike, it’s me who should speak, but as someone outside the context. [Laughter] I don’t know what this strike is, I don’t know what “la grève” means.
Well… I’ll try to answer and I will respond rather in bulk. I’ll say: the question that seems to me most to bring the question of linguistics and psychoanalysis together is really the question of the development of language in the child. There are problems there where we will have to work together. Each of the two fields sees its own questions; they are questions that are in a relationship of complementarity. Well, we need to exchange views, we need to grasp both aspects.
Because as we now come into the field of child language, what we see more and more is the number, the great number, the large percentage of universal phenomena: universality dominates. That completely changes even the problem of language teaching. Because we now see that to grasp any language, to learn any language, every child is prepared, and prepared by a certain innate model. Because at that point, the boundary between nature and culture shifts position.

One used to think that in animal communication it was solely a matter of instinct, solely phenomena of nature, whereas for humans it was solely a matter of education, a matter of culture. But it turns out that the question is much more complex: that in animals, learning plays a major role, and on the other hand, in human children there is an enormous role played by this innate model, by these predispositions, by this possibility of learning language that exists at a certain age in the child, that exists a few months after birth: the possibility of acquiring a code.
And on the other hand—and this is perhaps a much more curious and unexpected phenomenon—at a certain age the child loses the ability to learn their first language. If the child were in an artificial situation, where during the first years of life they had not encountered human language, they could still fully regain it, if placed in a normal situation, up to—approximately—7 years of age. After 7, they will never again be able to learn the first language.
All these phenomena are important, and all these phenomena show us that we must analyze each stage of language acquisition from the perspective of biological, psychological, and intrinsically linguistic phenomena.
Allow me to stop at two or three other problems that have been touched upon here. When the child begins to speak, to use words, there are two phenomena that are absolutely revolutionary from the point of view of the child’s mentality. One of these stages is the stage of acquiring personal pronouns. […] It’s a huge generalization, it’s an enormous exchange, it’s the possibility of being “me” in an instant, and of hearing the Other become “me.”
You know that conversation between children who, when learning pronouns, say: “It’s not you who are me, it’s me who is me, and you are only you,” etc… And on the other hand, the incapacity of some children, once they have learned the first-person pronoun, to speak of themselves and to say their own name, because the child, to themselves, is only “me.”
All these things change the child completely.
I remember when Professor and Mrs. KATZ, German psychologists who were in Stockholm at the beginning of the last war and who were very involved in child psychology… showed me a child who was egocentric in a striking way, he wanted to dominate everything, he inhabited every house, he wanted all the toys for himself, etc… So I studied this child a bit from a linguistic point of view. I saw that he had no trace of personal pronouns. I said: teach him the personal pronoun, he will learn his limits because he will know that he is not the only one. There is exchange, there are different moments, when one is “me” and the other is “me,” etc. The “me” is nothing but the author of the given message. And truly, it worked.

Now, there is another operation, another operation which seems to me another question of change in a child’s linguistic life, which is an enormous change. There is a well-known case, found in the most varied accounts, in the most varied countries. A three-year-old child runs up to his father and says: “The cat barks”—or whatever!—“the cat: woof, woof.”

– So if the father is “religious,” if the father is “pedantic,” he says: “No, it’s the dog that barks and the cat that goes meow.” The child cries, his game has been destroyed.
– If the father, on the contrary, says: “Yes, the cat barks, mommy goes meow…” the child is very happy.

I told this story to Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS, and shortly thereafter, it happened with his son who had just turned three at the time, who came with the same thing. LÉVI-STRAUSS wanted to play the liberal father. He said… [Laughter] Well, it didn’t work! Because his son saw this game as a child’s privilege! [Laughter] The father had to speak differently.
So let us now analyze: what is at stake here? What is it about? It is about this enormous discovery that the child makes at a certain age, the discovery of predication. That not only can one name given situations with phrases, a word: one can attach a predicate to a subject. And the essential thing is that one can attach to the same subject various predicates and the same predicate can be used with various subjects: the cat runs, sleeps, eats, so the cat can also bark.
Yes, the question is simply this: the child understands that predication is no longer the dependency of a code, predication is already an individual freedom. So the child uses this freedom in an exaggerated way. The child does not know the definition of freedom given by the Russian Empress, CATHERINE: that freedom is the right to do what the laws allow.
So, the cat barks!

It is a very interesting phenomenon, because we encounter the same issue in aphasia, we encounter the same issue in anthropology, because we find that in a large number of cultures the act of attributing human actions to animals, or attributing the actions of one kind of animal to another, is considered a sin. A sin which, for example among the DAYAKS, is punished in the same way as incest, because it is precisely there and then that freedom breaks—or seeks to break—the law.
So, when one discusses the question of phonological development, we are faced with the same problems, we are faced with the problems of these different stages. And I could, in a more detailed discussion, show you what the stages are, what the universal rules are, where one has the possibility to develop a certain freedom, because there is no universal rule. There is, here too, a very important issue, which is the question of temporal order—not of acquisitions—but the temporal order of a sequence, of a series, of a group, of laws where metathesis is impossible.

Now: about reading. With reading, we are entering a new domain. We must not forget that reading and writing are always a superstructure, a parasitic secondary structure. If one cannot speak, it is pathology; if one cannot read or write, it is illiteracy. And this phenomenon exists, according to the latest UNESCO statistics, in sixty percent of the world population.
So here we must not forget that these are completely different phenomena, that is to say, writing and reading already refer back to the foundation that is spoken language. But that does not mean that writing is simply a mirror of spoken language. There is here a range of new problems that arise, and one of these problems, as has been well said, is the question of space: writing is not only temporal but also spatial.
And what appears here is the question of up-down, right-left, etc. And this introduces a number of new principles. For example, from the point of view of the structure of writing, what is most interesting is precisely the analysis of different forms of dyslexia and agraphia, which show very clearly what the entire mechanism is and what the individual, personal deviations are, and with what other mental deviations these deviations are related.

Now on the question of the relationship between the semantic problem and syntactic problems. I believe that, more and more, we see that the opposition between these two phenomena risks becoming too rigid, that what is at stake here—in the syntactic domain—is the order of combinations. The grouping is done, but each combination stands in opposition to another possible combination, and the relationship between these two syntactic phenomena is necessarily a semantic phenomenon.

So here we are also, necessarily, at once, in the domain of the semantic and the syntactic and the grammatical. It is impossible to separate this. I would say that for a linguist in general, there is no phenomenon in language that does not possess a semantic aspect. Meaning is a phenomenon that concerns every level of language.

You know that this issue was posed in a very beautiful way—perhaps still the most beautiful—by the ancient doctrine of the grammarians and philosophers of language of India, such as PATANJALI or others: namely, that language has multiple articulations, and, particularly, an articulation according to this ancient Indian terminology, the double articulation of elements, of elements that are not meaningful but that are necessary to construct meaningful units.
Well, these elements that are not meaningful, they are… as PANINI and PATANJALI and the other Hindus very rightly said, and as was repeated in the Middle Ages and in modern linguistics… “Mahanagari” [?]. That these elements are distinctive, therefore they participate in meaning. If these elements are not respected, the result is the effect of homonymy, etc. So meaning begins from the outset, and the phenomenon or the distinctive feature are also signs, signs of another level, auxiliary signs, but nonetheless signs. Well, that is with regard to syntactic and semantic phenomena.

I am in complete agreement: if I were asked what is the most current issue in linguistics, the interdisciplinary issue, with regard to psychology, with regard to psychoanalysis, with regard to ethnology… it is the issue of context. And context has two aspects:
– it is the verbalized context, that which is given in discourse,
– and the non-verbalized context: the situation, the non-verbalized but always verbalizable context.
Well, I think that this question of verbalization…
I will not say that psychoanalysis is reduced to the problem of verbalization, but this is what psychoanalysis has in common with linguistics…
…that the problem of verbalization plays the essential, primary role in both fields.

Now: subject of the enunciation and subject of the statement. Yes, in order for this distinction to be reached… Indeed, the child needs to develop personal pronouns, but it is an even more complex problem. It is generally a problem of enunciation, which involves quotations. And, in truth, when we speak: either we state it openly—“Jean said that,” or “as Jean says, it’s this and that…,” “it is claimed that…”—or we don’t quote, but we say things that we haven’t seen ourselves and which, in certain utterances, must have special suffixes, special verbs: “we heard it said,” “we did not see how Julius Caesar was killed,” but if we speak about it, it’s because we are quoting.

If we analyze our enunciations, we see that the question of quotation plays the primary, essential role. Oratio directa, oratio obliqua—these are problems that extend far beyond the scope attributed to them by classical grammar. It is one of those problems that has not yet been fully clarified. It is a question on which psychoanalysts and linguists must work together.

Now precisely, a very curious phenomenon is that in Bulgarian, as was mentioned here, there are different verbal forms to indicate events that one is certain of, that one has witnessed, and events that are assumed, heard about.
So, the question posed: why, specifically in Bulgarian, was this developed?

Yes, there are historical reasons. How it emerged. It is a phenomenon. It is precisely the influence of one language on another language: it is the influence of Turkish on Bulgarian and on certain other Balkan languages. And I must say that this is a question that is interesting not only from a historical point of view, but from a structural point of view. Each verbal account, each language, is not a monolithic language: every language implies several sub-codes. And for bilinguals, there is the possibility of speaking in two different languages, and there is no iron curtain between the two languages being used—there is interaction, the play of both languages.

And there is a very frequent, very important phenomenon, which plays an enormous role: how the language of bilinguals is changed under the influence of the other language. There are many such possibilities. It is the issue of our differing attitudes toward the languages we speak.
It is curious, for example, if I speak of my generation, of Russian intellectuals, I must say that for our generation, we could be bilingual, or have several languages, we could speak Russian and German, Russian and English, etc., but it was impossible within the Russian code to use both Russian and English, Russian and German, in the same utterance. To introduce German expressions into a Russian sentence was considered a comical phenomenon. Whereas one could introduce into that sentence many French words into Russian, as you perhaps know from War and Peace by TOLSTOY—it was possible. So it may seem jarring in France, but when I say: “From the point of view of my generation of Russian intellectuals, French was not a language, it was simply a style of spoken Russian.” [Laughter]
And these relationships between languages are important! They show a different attitude. It goes without saying that this has, that it plays an enormous role in our whole attitude not only toward these languages and their structure, but toward culture, toward countries… Well, I think—there you go!—this question of the complexity of the code plays a very essential role. For example, what does this Bulgarian phenomenon mean? What does this Bulgarian phenomenon change?

Listen, among the grammatical phenomena we use, the grammatical phenomena that appear in our language, each has its own function, but if we speak another language, we can very well express what is absent in the grammar of the first language. If I speak, instead of Bulgarian, French or Russian, I can very well say: “I saw the boat coming,” or: “I believe the boat has arrived.” These are two different sentences, but there is a huge difference. A huge difference:
if it is provided by the grammar, or if it is merely a possibility, to be explained by lexical means.

To illustrate this difference I always use a very simple example. If I say in English that I spent the evening “with a neighbour”—that is, with a male or female neighbor—because there is no gender distinction. And so,
if someone asks me: “Who was it—a man or a woman?” I have the right to answer: “It is our affair and not your business.” [Laughter]
Whereas if I say it in French I must say whether it was a male or a female neighbor: I must be completely sincere! [Laughter]
The same goes for German and the same for Russian. And you know, the fact of what we are obliged to say all the time and what we can omit… I don’t need to explain here, in this audience, the enormous difference between these phenomena. [Laughter]

Now, the question from my friend whom I admire so deeply, and whose work is for me always a source of instruction, as I feel myself—to use Dr. LACAN’s word—I feel myself his “disciple.” I must still say that I have great difficulty answering his question. I would like him to formulate it more briefly, because otherwise, the way it was phrased [Laughter], it requires as an answer a book at least as long, as voluminous, as his latest book. Otherwise, I promise to answer this question upon my next visit to Paris.

LACAN

Do you find, do you think that a linguist among your students, someone profoundly trained in linguistic disciplines, does that produce in him such a mark that his approach to all problems, including moral problems, bears a completely original stamp?

Secondly, insofar as you are the one who transmits this kind of discipline, precisely because it is not just any other discipline—this one precisely, which is the most like ours, psychoanalysts—does this mode of relation, brought about in you by being the one who transmits this discipline, is it something that creates, for you, the dimension of what it means to be a disciple, and is it something essential, something required, and something that matters to you?

Roman JAKOBSON:

I must say that I could answer this question in the same way I responded to the question about the difference between the grammatical structures of various languages. That is to say: it is possible for a linguist to try, at certain moments, to cease being only a linguist and to look at problems from another side, another perspective: from the perspective of a psychologist, from the perspective of an anthropologist, from the perspective of a biologist, etc. All of that is possible, but the pressure of the discipline is enormous.

What is the mental type of the linguist? It is very curious that a linguist… it is almost… it almost doesn’t exist… that one becomes a linguist! Psychologists have shown that mathematics, music, linguistics, these are passions or preoccupations, capacities that appear at a very early age, at the age of childhood.
If you read the biographies of linguists you see that they are already seen as predisposed to become linguists at six, seven, eight years old. It seems to be the case for many, for a great number of linguists. What does that mean?

Well, I allow myself to say: the vast majority of children know very well how to paint and draw, but at a certain age, most lose this ability, and those who become painters retain a certain infantile acquisition, a certain childlike trait.
I think the linguist is someone who retains a childlike attitude toward language, that language itself interests the linguist as it interests the child, that it becomes for him, so to speak, the most essential phenomenon in a complex tangle of threads, and that this allows the linguist to see very clearly the internal relations, the structural laws of language.

But there is also a danger here: that the relations between what is language and other phenomena can be easily distorted, precisely because of the somewhat overly one-sided emphasis placed on language. And this is, I believe, the great necessity of the work referred to by that rather ambiguous, rather vague, but at the same time important term: the term interdisciplinary.
And it has always been, since my experiences in New York during the last war and my encounters with psychoanalysts, when we used to discuss together—the psychoanalysts, an anthropologist like LÉVI-STRAUSS, myself, and a few other linguists—when we discussed our problems, I saw that it is very important to become, for an instant, the disciple of these other disciplines in order to be able to see language from the outside, as one sees the Earth from the outside when rising up in a Sputnik.

[long ovation]
LACAN

I will not speak again after Roman JAKOBSON, except to thank him on behalf of all of us, and to renew for him, quite simply, the thanks you have just given him with your applause. I say to you: see you on February 15!