🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I read somewhere last night—or maybe some of you may have come across it too—this peculiar title:
“Knowing Freud Before Translating Him.”

Enormous!…
As said by a gentleman I don’t claim to resemble, since I don’t walk around like him with a cane, though sometimes with a hat
…Enormous!

In any case, it is clear to me that attempting to translate him is certainly a path that imposes itself as a prerequisite for any claim to know him. That psychoanalysts say they know psychoanalysis, that still passes, but to know FREUD before translating him invincibly suggests this stupidity: to know him before having read him. This, of course, assuming all the necessary broadening of the notion of translation.

Because certainly, what strikes me is that I don’t know whether we can ever advance anything that resembles this claim of knowing FREUD. Do you fully grasp what it means…
from the perspective of thought once it has reached the end of its development, what FREUD offers us
…do you really grasp what it means to have proposed to us the model of subjective satisfaction in sexual conjunction?

Was not the experience, the very experience from which FREUD himself started, precisely that it was the place of subjective dissatisfaction? And has the situation improved for us?
…Frankly, in the social context dominated by the function of employment of the individual…
employment, whether it is adjusted to the measure of pure and simple subsistence, or to that of productivity
…what margin in this context is left to what would be the proper time for a culture of love?
And doesn’t everything testify, for us, that this is indeed the most excluded reality of our subjective community?

No doubt it was not this that led FREUD to articulate it, this function of satisfaction, as a truth,
but rather what no doubt seemed to him to be sheltered from that risk he confessed to JUNG, of seeing a somewhat deep theory of the psyche fall back into the ruts of what he himself called “the muddy river of occultism.”

It is precisely because with sexuality…
which, over the centuries, had presided over what seem to us such madnesses, such deliria, of gnosis,
of the copulation of the sage and of σοϕία [sophia]—by way of what path!
…it is precisely because in our century and under the reign of the subject, there was no risk whatsoever that sexuality could claim to be
any sort of model for knowledge, that no doubt he began this tune of the game master, so well illustrated by
that GRIMM tale he liked, of the Pied Piper leading behind him that audience of which one can truly say that,
as for the paths of any wisdom, it represented the dregs of the earth.

For surely, in what I called earlier the path he traces for us, and from which we must begin from what is its end, namely: the formula of repetition,
we must properly measure what separates the πάντα ῥεῖ [panta rei] of the ancient thinker, when he tells us:

— that nothing ever returns to its own trace,
— that one never bathes in the same river,
— and what this means as a profound tearing of a thought that can grasp time only in that something which moves toward the indeterminable, at the cost of a constant rupture with absence.

To introduce here the function of repetition, what is that adding? Well, certainly nothing much more satisfying, if it is only a matter of endlessly, incessantly, renewing a certain number of tricks. The pleasure principle certainly guides toward nothing,
and less than anything, toward the retrieval of any object.

The pure and simple notion of discharge, insofar as it would take its model from the established circuit of the sensorium, also has something rather vaguely defined as being the motor:
the stimulus-response circuit, as it’s called—what can it account for?

Who does not see that, if we stick to this, the sensorium can only be the guide of what, in fact, at the most basic level, the frog’s irritated leg does: it withdraws… It does not reach out to grasp anything in the world, but flees from what harms it.

What ensures the defined constant in the nervous system by the pleasure principle—what is it?

The equality of stimulation, isostim I would say—to imitate the isobar or the isotherm I spoke of the other day—or isoresp, isoresponse. It is difficult to ground anything on isostim, because isostim is no longer a “stimulus” at all. Isoresp, the “feeling out” of equal resistance, that, in the world, can define this isobar which the pleasure principle will lead the organism to follow. Nothing in all of this, in no case, impels one toward seeking, grasping, or constituting an object. The problem of the object as such is left intact by this entire—organic—conception of a homeostatic apparatus. It is quite astonishing that no one has until now pointed out its flaw.

FREUD here, undoubtedly, deserves credit for indicating that the search for the object is something only conceivable by introducing the dimension of satisfaction.

Here, we stumble again on the strangeness of this: that although there are so many organic models of satisfaction… starting with digestive repletion and also with a few of the other needs they evoke, though in a different register, since it is remarkable that it is precisely insofar as these schemas in which satisfaction is defined as untransformed by the subjective instance—oral satisfaction is something that can lull the subject to sleep, ultimately, but certainly it is conceivable that this sleep is the subjective sign of satisfaction …how infinitely more problematic it is to indicate that the true order of subjective satisfaction is to be sought in the sexual act, which is precisely the point where it proves most torn.

And this, to the point that all the other orders of satisfaction… those we have just listed as indeed present in the Freudian evocation… only gain their meaning when placed in a certain dependency… which I challenge anyone to define, to make conceivable, otherwise than by formulating it in terms of structure… in a dependency—I say—let’s say crudely: symbolic, in relation to sexual satisfaction.

Here are the terms in which I propose the problem I am taking up again today and which consists in attempting to give you the signifying articulation of what is involved in the repetition implied in the sexual act, if it is truly what I have said it is, what language promotes for us and what our experience certainly does not refute, namely: an act.

After insisting on what the act intrinsically entails as conditioned, first by the repetition internal to it, concerning the sexual act I will go further, at least I believe it necessary to go further to grasp its scope. The repetition it implies contains… if we follow at least FREUD’s indication… an element of measure and harmony, which is undoubtedly what is evoked by the guiding function FREUD assigns to it, but which is surely what, for us, still needs to be specified.

For if there is something that any of the analytic formulations produces, promotes, it is that in no case can this harmony be conceived as being of the order of the complementary, namely the conjunction of male and female, as simply as the people imagine it, in the manner of the conjunction of key and lock, or of anything that appears in the habitual modes of gamic symbols [♂,♀].

Everything indicates to us… here I only need to mention the fundamental function of that third element that revolves around the phallus and castration… everything indicates that the mode of measure and proportion implied in the sexual act is of an entirely different structure and, to put it plainly, more complex. This is what I had begun to formulate, the last time as I was leaving you, by evoking—since we are speaking of harmony—the so-called anharmonic ratio: that which means that on a simple drawn line, a segment can be divided in two ways:

— by a point that is internal to it: a central point a and b yielding any given ratio, for example: 1/2.

— which another external point can realize in the segments determined between it, this point d, for example with points a and b—the initial segment—the same ratio: 1/2.

Already this had seemed more suitable to ensure what is at stake, according to all our experience, namely: the relation of one term with another term, which presents itself to us as the locus of unity, of unity, I mean: of the couple.

That it is in relation to the idea of the couple, where it is found, I mean: effectively, in the subjective register, that the subject has to situate himself in a proportion that he can manage to establish, by introducing a mediation external to the confrontation that he constitutes—as subject—with the idea of the couple.

This is only a first approximation and, in a way, the simple schema that allows us to designate what is at stake, namely: the function of that third element which we see appearing at every corner of what may be called the subjective field, in the sexual relation, whether it concerns—as we pointed out last time—what subjectively, undoubtedly, appears there in the most distant manner, namely its always possible—organic—product, whether considered desirable or not.

Whether it be this element, at first glance so different, so opposed, and yet immediately joined to it through analytic experience, namely that demand for the phallus, which appears so internal, in our experience, to the sexual relation insofar as it is subjectively lived. The equivalence child–phallus—is that not something whose relevance we might perhaps attempt to designate, in whatever synchrony we may discover there, and which of course does not mean simultaneity?

What is more, does this third element not have some relation to what we have designated as the division of the Other itself: S(A)? It is to lead you down this path that I bring today the relation which is of a structure of a quite different order than the simple harmonic approach I indicated at the end of my last discourse.

Namely, what constitutes the true “mean and extreme ratio” which is not simply the relation of one segment to another, insofar as it can be defined twice—internally in their conjunction, or externally—but the relation that posits from the outset the equality of the ratio of the smaller to the greater (a/1), equality, I say, of this ratio to the ratio of the greater to the sum of both:

a/1 = 1/(1+a)

Unlike the indeterminacy, the perfect freedom of that anharmonic ratio—which is not negligible when it comes to establishing a structure, for I remind you that this anharmonic ratio we already had occasion to evoke last year as fundamental to any so-called projective structure—but let us leave it now, to focus on this, which makes the ratio of “mean and extreme reason” not just any ratio… however guiding, I repeat, this one might be in the manifestation of projective constants… but a perfectly determined and unique ratio, I say: numerically speaking.

I have placed, on the board, a figure that allows us to give what I am stating here its support.

Here, on the line, are the segments in question: the first one I have called little a, which will for us be the only element sufficient to construct everything involved in this ratio of measure or proportion, on the sole condition of assigning to its corresponding segment, which you see here: from this point [red line] to this point [blue line]… I do not wish to assign letter names to these points, to avoid confusion, to avoid making your ears spin from their naming… I designate from here [red line] to here [blue line] we have the value 1.

On the condition of assigning this value 1 to this segment, we can suffice, in what concerns us, namely the so-called ratio of “mean and extreme reason,” by simply assigning it the value a/1. Which means, in this instance, that we have posited that the ratio a/1 is, moreover, equal, is the same as the ratio: 1/(1+a).

Such is this perfectly fixed ratio, which has extremely important mathematical properties, which I neither have the time nor the intention to elaborate for you today. Simply know that its appearance in Greek mathematics coincides with the decisive step toward bringing order into what pertains to the commensurable and the incommensurable. Indeed, this ratio is incommensurable.

It is in the investigation of the way in which one can define how the succession of points given by the staggered series of two units of measure, incommensurable with one another, might overlap—that is, what is most difficult to imagine—the way in which they intertwine, if they are incommensurable.

The defining feature of the commensurable is that there is always a point where they will fall together again—the two measures—on the same footing. Two commensurable values will always end up, through some multiple—different for each one—constituting the same magnitude; two incommensurable values: never.

But how do they interfere with each other? It is along the line of this inquiry that the method has been defined which consists in folding the smaller segment into the field of the larger and asking what becomes, from the point of view of measurement, of the remainder. For the remainder, which is here, and which is clearly 1–a, we will proceed in the same way: we will fold it back inside the larger one.

And so on ad infinitum, I mean: without it ever being possible to bring this process to an end. It is precisely in this that the incommensurable nature of a relation nonetheless so simple consists. Of all the incommensurables, this one is the one that… if I may say: within the intervals defined by the rationality of the commensurable… always leaves the greatest gap. A simple indication that I can no longer elaborate on here.

Be that as it may, you can see that what is at stake, in any case, is something which, in this order of the incommensurable, is specified by a particular sharpness, as well as a certain purity of relation. Much to my regret… because I suspect all the guts of occultism will shudder at this occasion… I am obliged—out of honesty—to tell you that this “little a” ratio is what is called the golden number.

As a result of which, of course, your cultural subconscious—particularly regarding aesthetics—will resonate with the evocation of anything you like: cathedrals, Albrecht DÜRER, the alchemical crucible, and all the other analogous fiddlings!

I hope, however… through the seriousness with which I have introduced the strictly mathematical character of the matter and, more precisely, the problematic quality it has, which in no way suggests a measurement easily conceived… I have made you feel that it concerns something else entirely.

Let us now examine some of the remarkable properties of this little a. I have written them on the left, in black. You can already see that the fact that 1+a is equal to the inverse of a, that is to say 1/a…

…was already sufficiently assured in the premises given by the definition of this ratio, since the notion that it consists in the ratio of the small to the greater, as equal to that of the greater to the sum, already gives us this formula, which is the same as this fundamental one:

a/1 = 1/(1+a)

From there, it becomes extremely easy to observe the other equalities, whose outdated character… and in truth, of little importance to us for the moment… is marked by the fact that I have written the following equalities in red. The only important point to note is:

— that the one minus “little a” here can be equated to a², 1–a = a², which is very easy to demonstrate,
— and on the other hand, that 2+a—how easily one can deduce that 2+a represents this: 2+a = 1/a + 1,
— namely what happens when, instead of folding the segments inward upon themselves, one develops them outward.

That is to say, the 1/2+a… that is to say what earlier corresponded to our external segment in the anharmonic ratio: it is equal to 1, being obtained by outward development of the 1 which represents the greatest length… the 1/2a has the same value as that initial value from which we started, that is, “little a,” that is, 1/(1+a).

1/2+a = a = 1/(1+a)

Such are the properties of the “mean and extreme ratio” insofar as they will allow us to understand something about what is at stake in genital satisfaction. I told you, “little a” is one of the arbitrary terms of this genital relation. I say “one of the arbitrary terms” whatever the sex may be. The girl just like the boy, in the sexual relation… the experience of the subjective relation, insofar as analysis defines it as Oedipal… the girl just like the boy enters it first as a child.

In other words, as already representing the product… and I do not use this term at random: we will have to return to it later… insofar as it allows us to situate, as different from what is called creation, that which nowadays circulates, as you know, everywhere and even indiscriminately, under the name of production.

It is indeed the most pressing, the most current problem presented to thought, this relation—which must be defined—of the subject as such to what is involved in production. Whatever it may be—I say: in a dialectic of the subject that can be advanced, where one cannot see how the subject himself could be taken as production, all of this is of no value to us. Which does not mean that it is so easy to establish, from this root, what production consists of.

It is so little easy to establish, that if there is something that a truly unprejudiced mind might well be astonished by, it is the remarkable silence—the silence of the “No comment”—in which psychoanalysis stands, concerning this delicate question, which is nevertheless… I must say, which “simmers” at least a little, in our journalistic, political, domestic, daily life, and everything else you wish, even commercial, and which is called birth control. One has never seen an analyst say what they think about it! That is still curious, in a theory that claims to have something to say about sexual satisfaction!

There must also be something on that side, which most intimately concerns—I must say, in a rather troublesome way—what may be called “the religion of the Word,” since, surely, after very astonishing hopes concerning the liberation from the Law—which corresponds to the Pauline generation within the Church—it seems that thereafter, many dogmatic declarations have been inflected. In the name of what? But of production, of the production of souls! That which, in the name of the “production of souls,” announced itself as the very near passage of humanity into beatitude, has undergone—it seems to me—a certain postponement.

But one should not believe that the problem is limited to the religious sphere. Another proclamation having been made, concerning the liberation of Man, it seems that the production of proletarians played some role, in the precise forms that socialist societies found themselves taking… that they ended up taking, from a certain idea of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man.

On the side of that kind of production, it does not seem that we have arrived at a much clearer measure of what is being produced.
— Just as the Christian field, in the name of the “production of souls,” continued to show to the world beings whose quality—at the very least—can be said to be marked by a certain anemia…
— Likewise, in the name of the production of proletarians, nothing else seems to come to light than something certainly respectable, but which has its limits, and which one might call: the production of cadres.

So, this question of production and the status of the subject as product is presented to us here at the level of something that is indeed the first presentation of the Other, insofar as that is the mother.

We know the unifying function of the presence of the mother. We know it so well, that the entire analytic theory—and practice—has literally tipped into it and has completely succumbed to its fascinating value: the principle, from the start, and this going so far… you were able to hear it here, when it was defended in a debate that concluded our last year… the entire analytic situation was conceived as ideally producing, I mean, as founded on the ideal of that unitive fusion, or that founding unification, as you prefer… [Laughter] which is supposed to have united for nine months—I recalled it last time—the child and the mother. Surely…

A female voice—We can’t hear well, very poorly…
Lacan: You can’t hear me very well… I’m sorry that all this is working so poorly, but thank you very much for telling me. I’ll try to speak louder. Thank you.
The same voice—The microphone!
Lacan: It’s not working at all today.

…which therefore unites the child and the mother. It is precisely not to make of this union of the child and the mother—however we qualify it: whether we make it the function of primary narcissism, or simply the chosen site of frustration and gratification—it is precisely this we are concerned with, that is to say, not to repudiate this register but to restore it to its proper place, that our theoretical efforts are directed here.

It is insofar as it is somewhere… and I say: at the level of sexual confrontation… that this first affirmation of the unity of the couple occurs, as constituted by what religious enunciation has formulated as “one flesh.” What a derision! Who can affirm, in any respect, that in the so-called genital embrace, man and woman become one flesh? Unless it is that religious enunciation here resorts to what is identified by analytic inquiry, to that which in the sexual conjunction is represented by the maternal pole.

I repeat it, this maternal pole, which—in the Oedipal myth—seems to merge, to purely and simply provide the partner of the little male, in reality has nothing to do with the male-female opposition.

For both the girl and the boy must deal with this maternal locus of unity, as representing for them what they are confronted with at the moment of encountering what is at stake in the sexual conjunction. For the boy as for the girl, what they are as product, as little (a), must be confronted with the unity established by the idea of the child’s union with the mother, and it is in this confrontation that the –ϕ emerges, which will bring us this third element, insofar as it also functions as a sign of a lack, or, if you prefer, to use the humorous term, of the “little difference”—the little difference that comes to play a crucial role in what the sexual conjunction represents for the subject.

Of course, common humor, or common sense, as you wish, makes this little difference the fact that, as people say: “some have one” and “others don’t.” This is not what it is about, in fact. Because the fact of not having it plays, for the woman—as you know—an equally essential role, an equally mediating and constitutive role in love, as it does for the man.

What’s more, as FREUD emphasized, it seems that her actual lack grants her a few advantages in that domain. And that is what I will now try to articulate for you.

Indeed—indeed!—what do we see, if not that, as we said earlier, the “extreme reason” of the ratio… in other words, what reproduces it outside itself… is going to serve us here in the form of the “One,” which gives—which reproduces—the proper proportion, the one defined by little (a), outside the relation thus defined as the sexual relation.

For one of the partners to pose themselves with respect to the other as a “One” in equality… in other terms, for the dyad of the couple to be instituted… we had here, in this ratio thus inscribed, in the measure of the “mean and extreme reason,” the support, namely that second “One” which is inscribed on the right and which, with respect to the whole, restores the proportion, on the condition that the third term of little (a) is maintained there.

This is, of course, where lies the following: we can say that in the sexual relation, and insofar as the subject manages to make themselves the equal of the Other, or to introduce into the Other itself the repetition—the repetition of the 1—they find themselves in fact reproducing the initial ratio, the one that constantly maintains this third element, which here is formulated by little (a) itself. In other words, we find here the same process I once inscribed in the form of a division bar, as forming part of the subject’s relation to the big A.

Insofar as in the mode where a division occurs, the barred A [A] is given, that with respect to this big A, it is a barred S [S] that comes to be instituted, and that the remainder is given there by a little (a) which is the irreducible element of it.

A | S
Ⱥ | $
a |

What does this mean? It means that we are beginning to conceive how it may be that an organ so local, if I may say so, and in appearance purely functional, like the penis, can come to play a role here, in which we can glimpse something of the true nature of satisfaction in the sexual relation.

Something indeed, somewhere in the sexual relation, can symbolize—if one may say so!—the elimination of that remainder. It is insofar as the organ is the seat of detumescence that, somewhere, the subject may have the illusion—undoubtedly deceptive, but though deceptive no less satisfying—that there is no remainder, or at least that there is only a perfectly vanishing remainder.

This, truthfully, would simply belong to the order of the comic, and surely does belong there, since it is also what imposes its limit on what one may call jouissance, insofar as jouissance would be at the center of what is at stake in sexual satisfaction. The whole schema that fantasmatically supports the idea of discharge, in what pertains to the tensions of the drive, is in reality supported by this schema where one sees, based on the function of detumescence, this limit being imposed on jouissance.

Certainly, this is the most disappointing face that satisfaction can be supposed to have, if indeed what was at stake were purely and simply jouissance. But everyone knows that if there is something present in the sexual relation, it is the ideal of the Other’s jouissance, and likewise what constitutes its subjective originality.

For it is a fact: that if we restrict ourselves to organic functions, nothing is more precarious than this interlacing of jouissances. If there is one thing experience reveals to us, it is the radical heterogeneity of male jouissance and female jouissance.

That is precisely why there are so many good souls, more or less scrupulously occupied with verifying the strict simultaneity of their jouissance with that of their partner: to how many failures, illusions, and deceits this lends itself, it is certainly not today that I will, here, unfold the entire range of it.

But the point is that it is something altogether different from that little exercise in erotic acrobatics. If something… we know it well enough, and we also know what place it has held in a certain psychoanalytic verbiage… if something comes to be founded around the jouissance of the Other, it is insofar as the structure we have articulated today brings forth the specter of the gift. It is because she does not have the phallus that the gift of the woman takes on a privileged value with respect to being [the phallus], and this is called love, which I have defined as “the gift of what one does not have.”

In the love relation, the woman finds a jouissance that is, if one can say so, of the order precisely of causa sui, in that what she gives in the form of what she does not have is also the cause of her desire. She becomes what she creates in a purely imaginary fashion, and precisely this—what makes her object—insofar as in the erotic mirage she can be the phallus, be it and not be it at the same time. What she gives, by not having it, becomes—as I just said—the cause of her desire: only—one may say—because of this, does the woman satisfactorily complete the genital conjunction.

But of course, to the extent that, having supplied the object she does not have, she does not disappear into that object. I mean that this object disappears—leaving her to the satisfaction of her essential jouissance—only through the mediation of male castration. So that in the end, she loses nothing in it since she puts in only what she does not have, and she literally creates it.

And it is precisely for this reason that it is always through identification with the woman that sublimation produces the appearance of creation. It is always in the mode of a genesis—obscure, of course, before I set out its outlines for you here—but very strictly linked to the gift of feminine love, insofar as it creates this vanishing object—and moreover, insofar as it is lacking—that is the all-powerful phallus. It is in this that there can be, somewhere, in certain human activities… which we will still have to examine, depending on whether they are mirage or not… what one calls creation or poetry, for example.

The phallus is indeed, if you like—on one side—the penis, but it is inasmuch as its deficiency with respect to jouissance constitutes the definition of subjective satisfaction, to which the reproduction of life is handed over. In fact, in copulation, the subject cannot truly possess the body he embraces. He does not know the limits of possible jouissance—I mean, of that which he could have from the body of the Other as such—because these limits are uncertain. And this is everything that constitutes that beyond defined by scopophilia and sadism.

That the phallic failure always takes on the renewed value of the vanishing of the being of the subject—this is the essential point of male experience, and what leads to comparing this jouissance to what is called “the return of the little death.” This vanishing function… it, much more direct, directly experienced, in masculine jouissance… is what grants the male the privilege from which the illusion of pure subjectivity emerged.

If there is a moment, a somewhere, where the man can lose sight of the presence of the third object, it is precisely in that vanishing moment where he loses—because he fails—not only his instrument, but for both him and the woman, the third element of the couple’s relation. It is from here that all the illusions of knowledge have been constructed… even before the advent of what we here call the status of pure subjectivity.

The imagination of the knowing subject, whether before or after the scientific era, is a male fabrication—and of the male insofar as he partakes of impotence, insofar as he denies the “less something” around which the effect of the causation of desire takes shape by taking this lack for a zero. We have already said it: taking the lack for a zero is proper to the subject, and the “proper name” is made here to mark the trace.

The rejection of castration marks the delirium of thought—I mean: the entry of the thought of the “I,” as such, into the real, which is precisely what constitutes, in our first quadrangle, the status of the “I do not think” insofar as—alone—it is supported by syntax.

Such is the structural framework of what can be constructed from what FREUD points out to us regarding sexual satisfaction in its relation to the status of the subject.

We will stop here for today, indicating for next time what we now have to advance concerning the function of acting out.