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(All parts in English)

I must proceed and demonstrate, in the movement itself, what the nature of analytic knowledge is. Precisely how it happens that this knowledge passes—that it passes into the real.

This—that it “passes into the real,” does it not?—we posit that this happens increasingly, in proportion to the ever-growing pretension of the “I” to assert itself as fons et origo of being. This is what we have posited.

But this, of course, elucidates nothing of what I have just called “the passage” of this knowledge into the real. I am not here alluding to anything other than the formula I have given for Verwerfung, or “foreclosure,” which is that “whatever is rejected from the symbolic reappears in the real.”

This prevalence of the “I” at the summit of something that is very difficult to grasp without risking misunderstanding—saying “the era,” or even, as we have said, “the era of science,” always opens a bias to a tone one might rather well pin down by the term “Spenglerism,” for example. The idea of “human phases” is not present there, certainly, which may satisfy us and gives rise to many misunderstandings.

Let us start simply from this: that it is true that discourse has its dominion, and I believe I have demonstrated to you this: that psychoanalysis is only thinkable by situating the discourse of science among its antecedents. The question is where it positions itself in the effects of this discourse: inside, outside? It is there, as you know, that we try to grasp it as a kind of trembling fringe, of something analogous to those most sensitive forms in which the organism reveals itself. I am speaking of what is fringe.

However, there remains a step to take before recognizing there the feature of the animated, for thought, as we understand it, is not “the animated.” It is the effect of the signifier, that is to say, ultimately, of the “trace.” What is called structure, is this. We follow thought by the trace, and by nothing else, because the trace has always caused thought. The relationship of this process to psychoanalysis is immediately felt, even if one can only barely imagine it, or has experience of it.

That FREUD, in inventing psychoanalysis, introduced a method to detect a trace of thought where thought itself masks it by recognizing itself otherwise—otherwise than the trace designates it—that is what I have promoted. That is what no deployment of Freudianism as ideology will prevail against. Naturalist ideology, for example.

That this point of view—which is a viewpoint from the history of philosophy—should be brought forward these days by people who authorize themselves by the title of “psychoanalyst,” this clearly signals what will bring more precision to the answer required by the question I posed at the outset, namely: “how is it that analytic knowledge comes to pass into the real?”

The path through which what I teach passes into the real is none other—strangely—than Verwerfung, than the effective rejection we see occurring at a certain generational level, from the position of the psychoanalyst, in that “it wants to know nothing” of what is nonetheless its one and only knowledge. What is rejected from the symbolic must be focused in a subjective field, somewhere, in order to reappear at a correlative level in the real. Where? Here, no doubt. What does that mean?

This “here” concerns you, that is to say this point which is attested to by what journalists have already identified under the label of “structuralism,” and which is nothing other than your interest, the interest you take in what is said here, an interest that is real. Naturally, among you there are psychoanalysts, and there is—already present—a generation of psychoanalysts in whom will be embodied the just position of the subject, inasmuch as it is necessitated by the analytic act.

When the time of maturity of this generation has come, one will measure the distance traveled by reading the unthinkable things, fortunately printed so that they may bear witness, for those who know how to read, to the prejudices from which it was necessary to extract the pathway required for this realization of analysis. Among these prejudices and these unthinkable things will also be structuralism, I mean that which now bears this title of a certain value, quoted on the stock exchange of cogitation.

If those among you who lived through what characterized the mid-century—let us say its first half…the ordeals we endured of strange manifestations in civilization…if those had not been lulled to sleep, in its aftermath, by a philosophy that simply kept up its rattling noise, I would now have less work to do in trying to mark the necessary traits so that you are not entirely lost in the phase of this century that will immediately follow.

When FREUD introduces for the first time, in his own “Jenseits” [Beyond]: “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, the concept of “repetition” as a form of compulsion: Zwang, repetition: Wiederholung, this compelled repetition: Wiederholungszwang, when he introduces it to give its definitive status to the “subject of the unconscious,” do we truly grasp the scope of this conceptual intrusion?

If it is called “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, it is precisely in that it breaks with what until then had provided the module of the psychic function, namely that homeostasis which echoes the one required by the substance of the organism, which redoubles it and repeats it, and which, in the nervous system isolated as such, he defines by the law of “least tension.”

What Wiederholungszwang introduces is clearly in contradiction with this primitive law: the one that had been formulated in the pleasure principle. And it is as such that FREUD presents it to us. Immediately, we who—I presume—have read this text, we can follow it to its extreme, which FREUD formulates as what is called “death drive” (translation of Todestrieb).

That is to say that he cannot stop extending this Zwang, this compulsion to repeat, to a field that not only encompasses that of living manifestation, but overflows it, to include it within the parentheses of a return to the “inanimate.” He thus urges us to make persist as “living”… and here we must indeed put this term in quotation marks …a tendency that extends its law beyond the duration of the living.

Let us look closely, since this is what constitutes the objection and the obstacle in front of which rebels… so long, of course, as the thing is not understood …rebels at first glance, a thought accustomed to giving a certain support to the term “tendency,” a support precisely of the kind I have just evoked by placing the word “living” in quotation marks. Life then, in this thought, is no longer “the totality of forces that resist death”—as for BICHAT—it is the totality of forces in which it is signified that death would be, for life, its track.

In truth, this would not go very far, if it were only a question of the being of life, but of what we may, at a first approach, call: its meaning.

That is to say, something that we can read in signs of apparent vital spontaneity, since the subject does not recognize itself in them, but where there must nonetheless be a subject, since what is at issue could not be merely an effect of the fall-back, so to speak, of the bursting vital bubble, leaving the place as it was before, but rather something that, wherever we follow it, is formulated not as this simple return, but as a thought of return, as a thought of repetition.

Everything FREUD has grasped by trace in his clinical experience, that is where he seeks it, where the problem becomes acute for him, namely in what he calls the negative therapeutic reaction or what he addresses at that level as a fact—question mark—of primordial masochism, as that which, in a life, insists on remaining in a certain medium… let us dot the i’s, let us say: of illness or failure.

This is what we must grasp as a thought of repetition. A thought of repetition is a domain distinct from that of memory. Memory, to be sure, also evokes the trace. But how do we recognize the trace of memory? It has precisely the effect of non-repetition. If we try to determine in experience in what way a microorganism is endowed with memory, we will see it in that it does not react, the second time, to a stimulus as it did the first. And after all, this sometimes leads us to speak of memory, cautiously, with interest, with suspension, at the level of certain inanimate organizations.

But repetition is something else entirely! If we make repetition the guiding principle of a field, inasmuch as it is properly subjective, we cannot fail to formulate what unites, in the matter of a copula, the identical with the different.

This reimposes on us the use, for this purpose, of that unary trait whose elective function we have recognized in relation to identification.

I will recall its essential point in simple terms, having experienced that such a simple function seems astonishing in a context of philosophers, or of those pretending to be such, as I recently did, and that one could find obscure, even opaque, this very simple remark: that the unary trait plays the role of symbolic marker, and precisely excludes that it be either similarity, nor therefore difference, which are posited at the principle of differentiation.

I have already here sufficiently emphasized that the usage of the “1”… which is that “1” I distinguish from the unifying “One”, by being the countable 1 …is capable of functioning to designate as many “1”s, objects as heterogeneous as a thought, a veil, or any object within our reach here, and since I have listed three, to count them as “3”, that is to say: – to hold for null, up to their most extreme difference of nature, – to institute their differentiation from something else.

This gives us the function of number and all that is established on the operation of recurrence, whose demonstration, as you know, is based on this unique module: that everything that, being proven true for n+1, is true for n. It suffices for us to know what it is for n = 1, for the truth of the theorem to be assured.

This founds a being of truth, which is entirely made of slippage. This kind of truth which is, if I may say, “the shadow of the number,” remains without grip on any real. But if we descend in time, in what is here what is demanded of you today, to revisit the identificatory schema of alienation and see how it functions: we will notice that the basal “1” of the operation of recurrence is not “already-there,” that it is only instituted by repetition itself.

Let us resume. We do not need to note here that repetition cannot be dynamically deduced from the pleasure principle. We do so only to make you feel the relief of what is at stake. Namely, that the maintenance of the least tension, as a principle of pleasure, in no way implies repetition. On the contrary, the rediscovery of a situation of pleasure in its sameness can only be the source of increasingly costly operations, rather than simply following the bias of the least tension.

If we follow it like an isothermal line—if I may put it this way—it will eventually lead, from one situation of pleasure to another, to the desired maintenance of the least tension. If it implies some looping, some return, it can only be through the path, so to speak, of an external structure, which is not at all unthinkable, since I just now evoked the existence of an isothermal line. It is not at all in this way and from the outside that the existence of Zwang in Freudian Wiederholung, in repetition, is implicated.

A situation that repeats, as a situation of failure for instance, implies coordinates not of “more” or “less” tension, but of the signifying identity of the plus (+) or minus (–) as the sign of what must be repeated. But this sign was not borne as such by the initial situation.

Understand clearly that this initial situation was not marked with the sign of repetition, otherwise it would not be initial. Furthermore, one must say that it becomes—it becomes—the repeated situation and that by this very fact, it is lost as original situation: that there is something lost by the very fact of repetition. And this is not only perfectly articulated in FREUD, but he had articulated it well before being led to formulate Beyond the Pleasure Principle: already in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, we see emerging—emerging as impossible—the principle of rediscovery.

That there is, in the metabolism of the drives, this function of the lost object as such, even the most basic approach to clinical experience had already suggested its discovery and function to FREUD. It gives the very meaning of what emerges under the heading of Urverdrängung.

This is why it must be acknowledged that far from there being, in FREUD’s thought, any leap or rupture, there is rather a preparation through an anticipated meaning, a preparation for something that finally finds its ultimate logical status in the form of a constitutive law, even if it is not reflexive, constitutive of the subject itself, and which is repetition.

The graph—if one can say so—of this function, I think you have all seen its form, as I have given it as intuitive, imaginative support for this topology of return, so that it binds the part that is just as important as its directive effect, to that very effect itself as image, namely its retroactive effect, what I have just now called: what happens when, by the effect of the repeating, what was to be repeated becomes the repeated.

The trait from which what is repeated draws support, insofar as it is repeating, must loop back, must be found again at the origin: that trait—which thereby marks the repeated as such. This tracing is none other than that of the double loop, or again of what I called, the first time I introduced it, the inverted eight and which we will write as follows:

∞

there it is, looping back onto what it repeats and this is what, in the initial, fundamental operation, initiatory as such of repetition, gives this retroactive effect that cannot be separated from it, which forces us to think the third relation, which from the 1 to the 2 that constitutes the return, loops back toward this 1 to give this uncountable element I call the “1-more,” and which precisely… in being irreducible to the series of natural numbers, neither addable nor subtractable from this 1 and this 2 that follow one another …still deserves this title of the “1-too-many,” which I have designated as essential to every signifying determination and always ready, moreover, not only to appear but to be apprehended, elusive, detectable in lived experience, as soon as the counting subject (c.o.u.n.t.i.n.g.) must count itself among others.

Let us observe that this is the most radical topological form and that it is necessary to introduce that which, in FREUD, asserts itself under those polymorphous forms known under the term regression: whether they be topical, temporal, or formal, this is not homogeneous regression, their common root is to be found in this return, in this effect of return of repetition.

Certainly, it is not without reason that I have been able to delay for so long the examination of these functions of regression. It suffices to refer to a recent article, published somewhere on neutral, medical ground—an article on regression—to see the true gap it leaves open, when a thought accustomed to not too much illumination tries to conjoin theory with what psychoanalytic practice suggests to it.

The kind of curious valorization that regression receives in some of the most recent theoretical studies undoubtedly corresponds to something within the experience of analysis, by which, indeed, what may be a progressive effect of regression deserves to be interrogated, since, as everyone knows, it is essential to the very process of the cure as such.

But it suffices to see, to touch with one’s finger, the distance, which in a way truly leaves open everything that is on this topic re-evoked from FREUD’s formulas, compared with what is deduced from them concerning the use of practice… one should refer to this article which is in the latest issue of L’Évolution Psychiatrique… to feel to what extent the regression in question here is of a nature to suggest to us the question of whether it is not, in fact, nothing more than a theoretical regression.

In truth, this is indeed the major mode of that rejection which I designate as essential to the present position of the psychoanalyst. To resume such and such questions, again, at their origin, as if they had not already been resolved somewhere, is to prolong the pleasure! It is certainly not, in this matter, the pleasure of those for whom we take responsibility.

I will return to this in due course, for if, of course, in all these effects there is something of the order of clumsiness, this does not for all that eliminate any possible reference to something of the order of dishonesty, if such formulas happen to conjoin and legitimize a treatment goal which ends up covering the most blatant illusions of the ego, that is to say, what is most opposed to analytic renewal.

What does it mean, what we have introduced under the term of alienation, when we begin to illuminate it through this apparatus of the signifying involution—if I may call it so—of repetition?

We have first advanced that alienation is the signifier of the Other, inasmuch as it makes of the Other (with a capital O) a field marked by the same finitude as the subject itself, the S(A): S, open parenthesis, barred A. What finitude is this? The one defined in the subject by the fact of depending on the effects of the signifier.

The Other as such… I say: this place of the Other, insofar as it is evoked by the need for the assurance of a truth… the Other as such is… if I may say so, if you allow this word in my improvisation… fractured. In the same way that we grasp it in the subject itself. [Lacan points to the diagram]:

Precisely in the way it is marked by the double topological loop of repetition, the Other is also struck by this finitude. Thus is posited the division at the heart of the conditions of truth. Complication, let us say, brought to every Leibnizian-type demand of reservation of the aforesaid—I mean, of truth.

The “salva veritate” essential to every order of philosophical thought is for us… and not only due to psychoanalysis—manifest at all points in that elaboration which takes place at the level of mathematical logic… is for us a little more complicated. It excludes in any case, entirely, every form of “intuitive absoluteness,” such as the attribution, for instance, to the field of the Other, of the dimension—qualified as Spinozist as you like—of the Eternal, for example.

This permanent downfall of the Other is inextirpable from the given of subjective experience. It is this that places at the heart of that experience the phenomenon of belief in its ambiguity, constituted by this: that it is not by accident, by ignorance, that truth presents itself in the dimension of the contestable.

A phenomenon, therefore, that is not to be considered as a matter of defect, but as a matter of structure, and which is for us the point of prudence.

The point at which we are urged to advance by the most discreet step—I mean, the most discerning one—to designate the substantial point of this structure, is precisely so as not to lend ourselves to the confusion into which people rush, no doubt not innocently, in suggesting here a renewed form of positivism.

Rather, we should find our models in what remains so misunderstood and yet so alive from what tradition has handed down to us in fragmentary form from the exercises of skepticism, insofar as they are not merely those glittering jugglings between opposing doctrines, but, on the contrary, true spiritual exercises, which surely corresponded to an ethical praxis, which gives its real density to what remains theoretical for us under this heading and in this register.

Let us say that it is now a matter, for us, of accounting in terms of our logic for the necessary emergence of this “place of the Other” insofar as it is thus divided. For it is there that we are asked to situate not simply this “place of the Other”… the perfect “respondent” to this: that truth is not deceptive… but much more precisely, at the various levels of subjective experience that the clinic imposes on us, how it is possible for instances to be inserted—into this experience—which cannot be articulated otherwise than as demand of the Other: this is neurosis.

And here we cannot fail to denounce how abusive is the use of such terms as we have introduced, highlighted, such as the term “demand,” when we see it taken up under the pen of some novice, practicing himself on the plane of analytic theory and noting how essential it is—the youngster shows here his acuity—to place at the center and at the outset of the adventure a demand, he says, of actual exigency.

That is what has always been advanced, by revolving analysis around “frustration and gratification.” The use here of the term “demand”—which is borrowed from me—is only there to blur the traces of what constitutes its essence, which is that the subject comes to analysis not to demand anything from some present exigency, but to know what he is demanding.

This leads him very precisely to that path of asking that the Other demand something of him:
– the problem of demand is situated at the level of the Other.
– the neurotic’s desire revolves around the demand of the Other.
The logical problem is to know how we can situate this function of the demand of the Other, on this support: that the pure and simple Other, as such, is A (barred A).

Many other terms must also be evoked as needing to find their place in the Other: the anxiety of the Other, true root of the position of the subject as masochistic position. Let us say again how we must conceive this: that a “point of jouissance” is essentially identifiable as “jouissance of the Other.” A point without which it is impossible to understand what is at stake in perversion. A point, however, which is the only structural referent that can account for what in the tradition is grasped as Selbstbewusstsein.

Nothing else in the subject truly traverses itself, truly perforates itself, if I may say so, as such…
I will try one day to draw for you some childish model of it…
nothing else, except this point which, from jouissance, makes the “jouissance of the Other.”

It is not by an immediate step that we will advance into these problems. Today we must trace the consequence to be drawn from the relationship between this graph of repetition and what we have punctuated as the fundamental choice of alienation.

→

It is easy to see from this double loop that the more it sticks to itself, the more it tends to divide.
Supposing here that the distance from one edge to the other is reduced, it is easy to see that two small loops will come to isolate themselves.

What is the relation between this passage to the act of alienation and repetition itself?
Well, quite precisely, what one can and must call the ACT.

It is today from a logical situation of the act as such that I want to advance the premises.

This double loop, tracing of repetition: if it imposes a topology on us, it is because it cannot function as a boundary on just any surface.

Try tracing it on the surface of a sphere—I have shown this for a long time—you’ll see what I mean! Make it come back here and try to close it in such a way that it forms a boundary, that is to say, that it does not intersect itself: this is impossible!

These are only possible things—I have already pointed this out long ago—on a certain type of surfaces, those which are drawn here, for example:

Torus Cross-cap Klein bottle

– such as the torus,
– what I called in its time the cross-cap or the projective plane,
– or again the third, the Klein bottle, which you know, I think, if you still remember, from the little drawing by which it can be illustrated—it goes without saying that the Klein bottle has nothing that ties it specifically to that particular representation.

What is important is to know what results, in each of these surfaces, from the cut constituted by the double loop:

– on the torus, this cut will give a surface with two boundaries.

→

– on the cross-cap, it will give a cut with a single boundary.

What is important is: what is the structure of the surfaces thus constituted? The images that are on the left [at the top left of the board]… and that I already introduced last time so that you could draw them… show you what constitutes the most characteristic surface for us to imagine the function that we assign to the double loop.

It is, at the top and on the left, the Möbius strip, whose boundary—that is to say, everything in this drawing except this, which is a profile:

which is inscribed there, so to speak, only to bring forth in your imagination the image of the support of the surface itself, namely that here the surface turns to the other side—but this, of course, is not part of any boundary, so only the double loop remains, which is the boundary—the unique boundary—of the surface in question.

We can take this surface as symbolic of the subject, on the condition that you consider, of course, that only the boundary constitutes this surface, as it is easy to demonstrate in this: that if you make a cut through the middle of this surface, this cut itself concentrates in it the essence of the double loop. Being a cut which, if I may say so, “turns back” on itself, it is itself, this single cut, all by itself, the entire Möbius surface.

And the proof is that indeed, once you have made it, this median cut, there is no longer any Möbius surface at all! The “median” cut, so to speak, has withdrawn it from what you believed you saw there in the form of a surface. This is what the figure on the right shows you, which shows you that once cut through the middle, this surface, which previously had neither inside nor outside, had only one face, as it had only one boundary, now has an inside and an outside, which you see here marked by two different colors.

It is enough, of course, to imagine that each of these colors passes to the reverse side of the other, where, due to the cut, they continue. In other words, after the cut there is no longer a Möbius surface, but on the other hand, something that is applicable to a torus. This is what the other two figures demonstrate to you, namely that if you make this surface slide in a certain way: the one obtained after the cut to the reverse of itself, if I may put it that way, which is very well illustrated in the present figure:

You can, by laying out—if I may say so—the edges in question in a different way, thereby constitute a new surface, which is the surface of a torus, upon which the same cut, constituted by the fundamental double loop of repetition, is always marked.

These topological facts are extremely favorable for us to image something which is precisely the matter at hand, namely that, just as alienation was imaged in two directions of different operations:

– where one represents the necessary choice of the “I do not think” clipped from the Id of logical structure,

– the other element, which cannot be chosen in the alternative, which opposes, which conjoins the core of the unconscious, as being that something where it is not a matter of a thought in any way attributable to the instituted “I” of subjective unity, and which binds it to an “I am not,” clearly marked in what, in the structure of the dream, I have defined as the intrusion of the subject, namely as the unfixable, indeterminable character of the subject assuming the thought of the unconscious.

Repetition allows us to correlate, to align, two modes under which the subject may appear different, may manifest itself in its temporal conditioning, in a way that corresponds to the two defined statuses: – that of the “I” of alienation, – and that which is revealed by the position of the unconscious under specific conditions, which are none other than those of analysis.

We have, corresponding to the level of the temporal schema, the following: – that the passage to the act is what is permitted in the operation of alienation, – that, corresponding to the other term—by principle impossible to choose in the alienating alternative—corresponds the acting-out.

What does this mean? I mean the act, and not just some manifestation of movement. Movement, motor discharge—as it is expressed at the level of theory—that does not in any way suffice to constitute an act, if you’ll allow me a crude image: a reflex is not an act.

But in truth, we must extend this domain of the “non-act” much further. What is solicited in the study of the intelligence of a higher animal—the behavior of detour, for example, the fact that a monkey realizes what needs to be done to seize a banana when a pane of glass separates it—has absolutely nothing to do with an act. And in truth, a great number of our movements, as you certainly do not doubt—those you will execute between now and the end of the day—have nothing, of course, to do with an act.

But how to define what an act is? It is impossible to define it otherwise than on the basis of the double loop, in other words, of repetition. And it is precisely in this that the act is founding for the subject. The act is precisely the equivalent of repetition, in itself. It is that repetition in a single stroke, which I referred to earlier by that cut that it is possible to make at the center of the Möbius strip. It is in itself: the double loop of the signifier.

One might say—and one would be mistaken—that in its case the signifier signifies itself. For we know that this is impossible. Nonetheless, it remains true that this comes as close as possible to such an operation. The subject, let us say, in the act is equivalent to its signifier. It nonetheless remains divided.

Let us try to clarify this a bit and place ourselves at the level of that alienation where the “I” is founded by an “I do not think” all the more favorable for leaving the whole field to the Id of logical structure. “I do not think”… if “I” am, all the more so because I do not think, I mean: if I am only the “I” instituted by the logical structure, the medium, the trait, where these two terms can be conjoined, it is “I act,” this “I act” which is not, as I told you, a motor performance. For “I walk” to become an act, it must be that the fact that “I walk” means: that I am indeed walking, and that I state it as such.

There is an intrinsic repetition in every act, which is only made possible by the retroactive effect exercised by the incidence of the signifier placed at its core… and retroaction of this signifying incidence on what is called “the case” in question, whatever it may be.

Of course, it is not enough for me to proclaim that I walk! That is still, already, a beginning of action. It is an operetta action: “Let us march, let us march…” This is what is also called, in a certain ideology, commitment—this is what gives it its well-known comic character.

What is important to detect concerning the act is to be sought where “logical structure” provides us—and provides us as logical structure—the possibility of transforming into an act that which, at first glance, could only be a pure and simple passion: “I fall to the ground,” or “I stumble,” for example.

Consider this: that this effect of signifying doubling, namely that in my “I fall to the ground” there is the assertion that I fall to the ground: “I fall to the ground” becomes, transforms my fall, into something signifying. I fall to the ground, and by that I make the act in which I demonstrate that I am, as one says: shattered.

Similarly, “I stumble”—even “I stumble,” which so manifestly bears within it the passivity of failure—can be, if it is taken up again and redoubled by the affirmation “I stumble,” the indication of an act, insofar as I myself assume the meaning, as such, of this stumbling.

There is nothing here that goes against FREUD’s inspiration, if you recall that in a certain page of The Interpretation of Dreams, and quite precisely in the one where he indicates to us the first outlines of his research on identification, he himself emphasizes clearly…
legitimating in advance the intrusions I make of the Cartesian formula into the theory of the unconscious…
the remark that Ich has two different meanings in the same sentence, when one says: “Ich denke was gesundes Kind Ich war.”
“I think,” or: Ich bedenke, as he put it exactly: I reflect, I meditate, I dwell “on the thought of what a healthy child I am… I was.”

The essentially signifying character as such, and redoubled, of the act, the repetitive and intrinsic incidence of repetition in the act—this is what allows us to conjoin, in an original way and in a way that can then satisfy the analysis of all its varieties, the definition of the act.

I can only indicate here in passing—since we shall return to it—that what matters is not so much the definition of the act, as its consequences. I mean what results from the act as a transformation of the surface. For if I spoke earlier of the incidence of the cut in the topological surface which I draw as that of the Möbius strip, if after the act:
– the surface has one structure in such a case,
– if it has a different structure in another,
– or even if in certain cases it may not change at all,
…this, for us, will provide models, if you will, for distinguishing what the incidence of the act is, not so much in the determination as in the mutations of the subject.

Now there is a term that for some time I have left to the attempts and tastings of those around me, without ever frankly responding to the objection made to me—and made for a long time—that Verleugnung [denial], since this is the term in question, is the one to which one should refer the effects I have reserved for Verwerfung [foreclosure].

I have spoken enough of the latter in today’s discourse that I need not return to it. I simply point out here that what is of the order of Verleugnung is always what has to do with the ambiguity resulting from the effects of the act as such:

– “I cross the Rubicon”: that can happen on its own. It suffices to take the train at Cesena in the right direction—once you’re on the train, you can do nothing more about it, you cross the Rubicon. But that is not an act.

– Nor is it an act when you cross the Rubicon thinking of CAESAR; that is the imitation of CAESAR’s act. But you already see that imitation takes, within the dimension of the act, a structure quite different from what is usually assumed. It is not an act—but it can nonetheless be one! And there is even no other possible definition for such suggestions, otherwise as exorbitant as those titled The Imitation of Christ, for example.

Around this act, whether it is imitation or not, whether it is the act itself, the original one…
the one of which historians of CAESAR tell us the meaning indicated by the dream that precedes the crossing of the Rubicon, which is none other than the meaning of incest…
it is a matter of knowing, at each of these levels, what the effect of the act is.

This is the very labyrinth of the recognition of these effects by a subject who cannot recognize them, since he is entirely, as subject, transformed by the act—those are the effects—those effects!—designated, wherever the term is properly employed, under the heading of Verleugnung. The act, then, is the only place where the signifier has the appearance—the function in any case—of signifying itself.

That is to say, of functioning outside of its possibilities.
The subject is—in the act—represented as pure division. Division, let us say, is its Repräsentanz. The true meaning of the term Repräsentanz is to be taken at this level, for it is from this representation of the subject as essentially divided that one can feel how this function of Repräsentanz may affect what is called representation, that which makes Vorstellung depend on an effect of Repräsentanz.

Time stops us… It will be a question for us next time to know how it is possible for the element impossible to choose in alienation to be made present. The matter is worth postponing to a discourse that will be reserved for it, since it concerns nothing less than the status of the Other, where it is evoked for us in the most urgent way, not to lend itself to haste and error, namely the analytic situation.

But this model given to us by the act as division and ultimate support of the subject—a point of truth which…
let us say it before we part, in parentheses…
is that which motivates the rise, to the summit of philosophy, of the function of existence, which is assuredly nothing other than the veiled form under which, for thought, the original character of the act presents itself in the function of the subject.

Why has this act—in its instance—remained veiled, even in those who best knew how to mark its autonomy…
against ARISTOTLE, who had no notion of this—and with good reason…
I mean: Saint THOMAS?

It is undoubtedly because the other possibility of cut is given to us, in the part of alienation that is impossible to choose…
yet made accessible to us through the path of analysis…
the same cut intervening at the other summit, the one designated here, which corresponds to the conjunction: Unconscious–“I am not.”

This is what is called acting-out, and it is what we will attempt to define the status of next time.