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(All parts in English)

Non licet omnibus adire… Puisque personne ne finit : …Corinthum.

I pronounced the first word in Latin to suggest to you this translation: “this is not the omnibus to go to Corinth.” [Laughter]
The adage, transmitted to us in Latin from a Greek phrase, means more—I believe—than the remark that in Corinth the prostitutes were expensive!
They were expensive because they initiated you into something. Thus, I would say that it is not enough simply to pay the price. That is rather what the Greek phrase meant to convey.

It is not open to everyone, either, to become a psychoanalyst. And such has been the case, for centuries, regarding what it means to be a geometer: “Let none enter here— you know the rest—except he who is a geometer.”

This requirement was inscribed on the pediment of the most famous philosophical school of Antiquity, and it clearly indicates what is at stake: the introduction to a certain mode of thinking, which we can further specify, by one more step: namely, that it concerns categories (in the plural).
Categories means, as you know, in Greek, the equivalent of the Latin word “predicaments”: that which is most radically predicable in defining a field. That is what carries with it a specified register of demonstration.

It is for this reason that we have heard, in the wake of the Platonic requirement, the recurring assertion of the intention to demonstrate “more geometrico,” which testifies to how much that said mode of demonstration represented an ideal.

It is known—and it is hoped that you know this, I point it out to you as much as I can, that is to say within the limits of the field that is, for me, reserved—that meta-mathematics, which now comes…
across the range of categorical reflections that have historically marked the concepts of the geometric
…that this meta-mathematics—I say—comes to further radicalize the status of the demonstrable.

As you know, more and more geometry distances itself from the intuitions that founded it, spatial ones for example, to focus
on being no more than a specifiable form, and one furthermore stratified in various ways, of demonstration. To the point that ultimately, meta-mathematics is concerned only with the order of this stratification, in the hope of achieving, for demonstration, the most radical requirements.

Suppose a science that can begin only with what, in the aforementioned reflections, constitutes their terminal point in a certain field. It is unnecessary for such a science to stammer out a preliminary surveying—
at first—through which an initial familiarity with the measurable would be ordered, even the transmission of the most crude formulas of the future, emerging singularly under the guise of the secret of calculations.

I mean to say: it is unnecessary for it—at the very least misleading and vain—to stop at the Babylonian stage of geometry.
This is because every standard of measurement encountered at the outset carries with it the taint of a mirage impossible to dispel.

This is what we initially pointed out in our teaching, denouncing—without yet naming it by the term with which we later pinned it down as the imaginary—the deceptions of narcissism, when we established the function of the mirror stage.
To encounter such an obstacle has indeed been the lot of many sciences. This is even where the privilege of geometry lies.
Here, of course, we are presented, almost immediately, with the purity of the notion of magnitude. That it is not “what a vain people believes”
need not detain us here. For the science we are supposing, it is quite another scale: it is not only that the standard of measurement is inoperative, it is that even the very conception of unity limps along, so long as the sort of equality in which its element is instituted has not been realized, that is to say, the heterogeneity hidden within it.

Let us recall the equation of value, at the first steps of Capital…
by MARX, for those who might not know [Laughter]—you never know, there may be some who are distracted—
…in its evident spirit, this equation concerns the proportion that results from the prices of two commodities: so much of such equals so much of such, the inverse ratio of price to the quantity of commodity obtained.

Now, it is not a matter of the patent, but of what it conceals, of what the equation retains within itself, which is the difference in nature of the values thus conjoined and the necessity of that difference. It cannot, in fact, be the proportion—the degree of urgency, for example—of two use-values that grounds the price, nor that—clearly not—of two exchange-values. In the equation of values, one appears as a use-value and the other as an exchange-value. It is known that a similar trap reappears when the question is that of the value of labor.

What matters is that it is demonstrated in this critical work [Capital: Critique of Political Economy (subtitle)] as it calls itself, …that constitutes Capital, that by failing to recognize these traps, any demonstration remains sterile or goes astray. The contribution of Marxism to science—it is certainly not I who did this work—is to reveal this “latent” as necessary from the outset—at the very outset, I mean—of political economy.

It is the same with psychoanalysis, and this kind of latent is what I call—what I myself call—what I call: STRUCTURE. My reservations are directed at all efforts to dilute this notion… by tightening the necessary beginnings within a certain field that cannot be defined otherwise than as the critical field …to drown this in something I poorly identify under the vague name of “structuralism.”

One must not believe that this “latent” is missing in geometry, of course! But history shows that it is at its end: now that one can simply notice it, because the prejudices surrounding the notion of magnitude, stemming from its handling in the real, have not incidentally hindered its logical progress. Yet it is only now that we can know this, by observing that the geometry that has been done no longer has any need of measurement, of metric, or even of so-called real space.

It is not so, as I told you, for other sciences, and the question is:

“Why are there some that cannot begin without having elaborated these facts?”

I say these facts—which can be called ultimate, as they are structural—perhaps we can already pose the question as pertinent, if we know how to render it homologous to those facts. In truth, we are ready for this, since this structure, we have noted it as much as we have practiced it, encountering it in our psychoanalytic experience, and our remarks… if we introduce them from some perspective, however trivial: I’m stating the obvious here concerning the order of the sciences …our remarks are not without aiming toward such results that it becomes necessary for this order—I say: the order of sciences—to accommodate itself to them.

Structure, I have taught—since I have taught, not since I have written, since I have taught—structure is that the subject is a fact of language, is a fact of language. The subject thus designated is that to which the function of speech is generally attributed. It is distinct in introducing a mode of being which is its own energy—I mean: in the Aristotelian sense of the term ἐνέργεια (energeia)—this mode is the act in which it falls silent. Tacere is not silere, and yet they overlap at an obscure boundary.

To write, as has been done, that it is vain to look in my Écrits for any allusion to silence, is foolishness.
When I inscribed the formula of the drive—at the top right of the graph—as barred S diamond D (demand) S◊D, it is when demand falls silent, that the drive begins.

But if I have not spoken of silence, it is precisely because silence is not taceo. The act of falling silent does not liberate the subject from language. Even if the essence of the subject, in this act, culminates—if it enacts the shadow of its freedom—this “falling silent” remains laden with an enigma that weighed heavily, for so long, on the presence of the animal world. We no longer have any trace of it except in phobia, but let us remember that, for a long time, gods could be housed there.

The eternal silence of anything—of everything you know—no longer frightens us more than halfway, due to the appearance that science gives to common consciousness, of presenting itself as a knowledge that refuses to depend on language, without, however, this so-called consciousness being struck by the correlative fact: that it simultaneously refuses to depend on the subject.

What actually happens is not that science does without the subject, but that it “empties” the subject from language—I mean: expels it—that it creates for itself formulas of a language emptied of the subject. It begins with a prohibition on the effect of subject produced by language. This has but one result, namely to demonstrate—in effect—that the subject is nothing but an effect, and of language, but it is an effect of emptiness.

From then on, emptiness surrounds it at the most stringent point of its essence, that is to say: it reveals it as a pure structure of language, and this is the meaning of the discovery of the unconscious. The unconscious is a moment where, in place of the subject, pure language speaks: a sentence whose question is always to know who is saying it.

The unconscious, its status—which can rightly be called scientific, since it originates from the fact of science—is that the subject…, that it is the subject who, rejected from the symbolic, reappears in the real, thereby presenting… what is now done in the history of science, I mean to say: accomplished …thereby presenting its only support: language itself. This is the meaning of the emergence within science of the new linguistics.

What does language itself speak of when it is thus unmoored from the subject, but thereby representing it in its radicalized structural void? This we know: broadly speaking, it speaks… it speaks of sex. Of a speech, whose act I am about to address—the sexual act—in order to interrogate it—of which the sexual act represents the silence.

That is to say—and you will see how necessarily so—of a tenacious, obstinate speech—this silence, and for good reason—trying to force it. I would take the time, still… I would take the time here to dispel, in a way I do not believe useless, the first prejudice to appear—it is not new, of course—but shedding new light on it always has its impact.

The first prejudice to arise in the psychologizing context… the distinction here being made in reference to the enunciation we have just offered—the only true one—of the unconscious …could be formulated from the fall, in our statement, of an essential index of structure.

In the name of sex, as I said, this unconscious would speak! Here, the frivolous mind—and God knows there are many!—swallows this “of”: the unconscious speaks sex, it bellows, it moans, it coos, it meows! It’s not of the order of all the vocal noises of speech: it’s a “sexual aspiration”… Such is, in fact, the meaning supposed, at best, by the use made of the term “life instinct” in psychoanalytic rumination. Every erroneous use of discourse on the subject has the effect of degrading that very discourse to the level of what it fantasizes in place of the subject: this psychoanalytic discourse I speak of is itself a moan.

It moans in calling forth the figure of an Eros that would be a unifying power and, moreover, with a universal impact. To regard as of the same essence what holds together the cells of an organism—I mean of the same essence!—and the force presumed to push the individual thus composed to copulate with another, belongs properly to the realm of delusion, in an age where meiosis—I think—is sufficiently distinguished from mitosis, at least under the microscope! [Laughter] I mean with regard to all that the anatomical phases of metabolism they represent presume.

The idea of Ἔρως [Eros] as a soul with ends contrary to those of Θάνατος [Thanatos] and acting through sex, is a discourse of a “springtime schoolgirl,” as the late and now largely forgotten Julien Benda used to say, who for a time embodied that kind of fencer produced by an intelligentsia become useless. [Laughter]

If something were needed to place the lost ones back on the axis of “the unconscious structured like a language,” is it not enough to point to the evidence provided by those objects never before specified as we can now do: – the phallus,
– the various partial objects?

We will return to what results from their intrusion into our thought, to the turn taken by the fumes of this or that vague contemporary philosophy, more or less labeled existentialism. For us, these objects testify that the unconscious does not speak sexuality, nor does it sing it, but that in producing these objects it is precisely—what I said—speaking of it, since it is through being in a relation of metaphor and metonymy to sexuality that these objects are constituted.

As strong, as simple as these truths may be, one must believe they generate quite a strong aversion, since it is in the attempt to keep them from remaining central, from being any longer the pivot of any articulation of the subject, that there arises this sort of pale freedom, to which I have already alluded more than once in these recent sentences and which is characterized by a lack of seriousness.

What can be said of what the unconscious says about the sexual act?

I could say, if I wanted to indulge here in BARBEY D’AUREVILLY style: “What is…”
one day, he imagined having one of those demonic priests he excelled at portraying say…
“What is the secret of the Church?” “The secret of the Church…
you know it, well suited to frightening old provincial ladies…
It’s that there is no Purgatory.” [Laughter]

So I might amuse myself by telling you something that might still have some effect on you, and after all, it is not for nothing that I emphasize what I am going to say at this point: “The secret of psychoanalysis, the great secret of psychoanalysis, is that there is no sexual act.”

This would be defensible and illustrable, if you recall what I have called the act, namely that doubling of a motor effect as simple as “I walk,” which simply, by being spoken with a certain accent, finds itself repeated and, from this doubling, takes on the signifying function that allows it to be inserted into a certain chain to inscribe the subject within it.

Is there, in the sexual act, something by which—in the same form—the subject would inscribe itself as sexed, thereby establishing, in that same act, its conjunction with the subject of the sex called opposite?

It is quite clear that everything in psychoanalytic experience speaks against this: that nothing in that act testifies to the possibility of instituting anything but a discourse in which this third element matters, which I earlier sufficiently indicated by the presence of the phallus and the partial objects, and whose function we must now articulate in such a way that it demonstrates to us the role it plays, this function, in that act.
A constantly slippery function, a function of substitution, which is nearly equivalent to a kind of juggling and which, in no case, allows us to posit within the act—I mean: the sexual act—man and woman as opposed in some eternal essence.

And yet, I will erase what I said about the “great secret” being that there is no sexual act, precisely on this point:
– that it is not a great secret!
– that it is obvious!
– that the unconscious keeps screaming it out loud
– and that it is precisely for this reason that psychoanalysts say:

“Let’s shut it up when it says that, because if we repeat it with it, no one will come see us anymore!” [Laughter]

What’s the point, if there is no sexual act?
So emphasis is placed on the fact that there is sexuality. Indeed, it is precisely because there is sexuality that there is no sexual act! But perhaps the unconscious wants to say that it is missed! In any case, it certainly seems so!… Only, for this to take on its full weight, it is necessary to emphasize first that the unconscious says so.

You remember the anecdote about the priest who preaches, right? He preached on sin. What did he say? He was against it… [Laughter]
Well, the unconscious—which also preaches in its own way on the subject of the sexual act—well: it’s not for it!
That is the starting point, for grasping what is at stake when one speaks of the unconscious.

The difference between the unconscious and the priest still deserves to be noted at this level: it’s that the priest says sin is sin, whereas perhaps it is the unconscious that makes sexuality into a sin. There’s a small difference. On this point, the question will be how this presents itself to us: that the subject must come to terms with the difficulty of being a sexed subject.

That is why I introduced in my recent logistical remarks this reference…
which I believe I have sufficiently emphasized in terms of what it aims at: to establish the status of the object little (a)
…the one called the Golden Number, inasmuch as it properly gives, in a readily manageable form, its status to what is in question, namely: the incommensurable.

We begin with the idea—to introduce it—that in the sexual act there is absolutely no question that this little (a), in which we designate that something which is in some way the substance of the subject…
if you understand this substance in the sense in which ARISTOTLE designates it in οὐσία [ousia], namely—and this is what is forgotten—that what specifies it is precisely that it cannot in any way be attributed to any subject, the subject being understood as the ὑποκείμενον [upokeimenon]
…this object little (a), insofar as it serves us as a module to interrogate the one supported by it, does not have to seek its complement in the dyad: what is missing to make two, which would certainly be desirable.

It is because the solution to this relation, through which the two may be established, lies entirely in what follows from the reference of the little (a)—the Golden Number—to the “1,” insofar as it generates this lack, which is inscribed here by a simple effect of displacement and, simultaneously, of difference: in a form: 1–a which, in calculation… a very simple calculation that I have already written on this board enough times for me to ask you to retrieve it yourselves …is formulated as a squared: 1–a = a².

I recall it here only to place at the threshold of what I want to introduce what is essential to articulate for you, as I said earlier, first, at the starting point of our science, namely what necessarily, though paradoxically, introduces the sexual knot, where the act that is currently our question slips away and eludes us.

The link of this little (a) inasmuch as:
– here, you see, it represents, darstellt, supports, and presents first of all the subject himself,
– it is the same which will appear in the exchange, whose formula we are now going to demonstrate, as able to serve as that object which we touch in the dialectic of the cure, under the name of the partial object,
…the relation, then, of these two faces of the function little (a) with this marker, this form of the object which is at the root of castration.

I will not close this cycle today, which is why I wish to introduce it with two formulas responding to a kind of problem that we pose a priori: what value should be given to this object little (a)…
if it is indeed there to represent, in the sexual dyad, the difference
…in order for it to produce two results between which our question is currently suspended?

A question that can only be approached by the path to which I am leading you insofar as it is the logical path, I mean: the path of logic. The dyad and its suspensions—this is what, from the beginning, if one knows how to follow its trace, logic itself elaborates.

I am not here to retrace for you the History of logic, but let it suffice for me to evoke, at its dawn, that the Aristotelian Organon is indeed something other than mere formalism, if you know how to probe it. At the very first point of predicate logic is established the opposition between contraries and contradictories. We have made, as you know, many advances since then, but that is no reason not to take interest in what constitutes the value and status of their entry into History.

It is not, moreover—I say this in parentheses, for those who sometimes open logic books—to forbid us—when we retrace what ARISTOTLE stated, even at the same time, not even in the margins—from introducing what, for example, LUKASIEWICZ has since added.

I say this because in the book—excellent, by the way—by the KNEALEs, I was struck by a protest, just like that, which arose at the turn of a page, because to state what ARISTOTLE says, Mr. LUKASIEWICZ, for example, comes to distinguish what pertains to the principle of contradiction from the principle of identity and from the principle of bivalence! There it is!
– The principle of identity is that A is A. You know it is not clear that A is A. Fortunately, ARISTOTLE does not say it, but pointing that out still has its interest!
– Secondly: that something could be both, at the same time be A and not A, that is something else entirely!
– As for the principle of bivalence, namely that a thing must be either true or false, that’s yet a third thing!

I find that:
– pointing it out actually helps clarify ARISTOTLE,
– and pointing out that ARISTOTLE surely never thought of all these niceties has nothing to do with the question!

Because that is precisely what allows us to bring into focus what I now return to: this crude affair of contraries.
First, inasmuch as for us…
I mean for what is not in ARISTOTLE but what is already indicated in my past teaching
…we will designate it with the “not without.” That will serve us later. Don’t worry! Let me guide you a little…

The contraries—that is what raises the whole logical question of whether or not the particular proposition implies existence—has always caused great scandal. In ARISTOTLE, it undoubtedly implies it: it is even what his logic rests upon.
It’s curious that the universal proposition does not imply it!

I can say: “Every centaur has six limbs.”
It is absolutely true, simply that there are no centaurs. That is a universal proposition.

But if I say, in ARISTOTLE: “There are centaurs who have lost one,” that implies that centaurs exist, for ARISTOTLE.
I am trying to reconstruct a logic that is a bit less limping, on the side of the centaur. [Laughter] But this does not concern us for the moment. Simply, “There is no male without female.” That belongs to the order of the real. It has nothing to do with logic, at least not nowadays. And then there is the contradictory, which means this: if something is male, then it is not non-male.
[Lacan writes on the board “If male then non-male,” then strikes through the “n” in non-male]

It is a matter of finding our path between these two distinct formulas. The second belongs to the symbolic order, it is a symbolic convention, which has a name, precisely: the excluded third. This must be enough to make us feel that it is not on that side that we will be able to manage, since from the start, we have sufficiently emphasized the function of a difference, as being essential to the status of the sexual dyad. If it can be founded—I mean: subjectively—we will need that third term.

Let us try, or rather let us not try… let us not make the vain grimace of pretending to attempt what we have already introduced, namely the logical status of the contrary. Of the contrary insofar as here “both” is opposed to the “either or” over there.

This “both,” that is the intersection, I mean the logical intersection: male and female. If we want to inscribe this “both” under the form of the intersection in Boolean algebra, it means: that little spatial overlapping crescent [in gray]:

of which I am absolutely dismayed to have to present to you the figure once more, because, of course, you can see clearly that it does not satisfy you in the least. What you would like is for one to be male and the other female, and that from time to time, they step on each other’s feet!

That is not what this is about. It is about a logical multiplication. The importance of reminding you of this Boolean figure is to remind you, in contrast to what we have here, which is that very important place in the “heads or tails” game…
which I tried to teach to those who followed me in the first years, at least for a trimester, in order to make them hear what a signifier was
…as opposed to the “heads or tails” game…
which is inscribed entirely as a succession of + or –,
…the relation of both is inscribed in the form of a multiplication, I mean a logical multiplication, a Boolean multiplication.

What value—since that is what this concerns—can we suppose for the element of difference, so that the result is clearly the dyad? But of course, it’s really within everyone’s reach to know that. You’ve all at least retained this dye of the mathematics you were taught, however stupidly, if you’re over 30, or if you’re 20, you may perhaps have had the chance to hear about it in a slightly different way—no matter!

You are all on equal footing regarding the formula (a + b) · (a – b). There is the difference:
– one has it in the plus,
– the other has it in the minus.
If you multiply them, it yields a² – b². What is needed for a² – b² to be clearly equal to 2, to the dyad?

It’s very easy, you simply need to set equal what is written here:

— b to the square root of minus one, b = √–1 = i, that is to say, to a numerical function called the imaginary number, which now appears in all calculations, in the most common way, to found what is called—the extension of real numbers—the complex numbers.
— a—if it is to be specified in two opposite ways, with plus something, and with minus something, and the result is 2—just set it equal to 1.

That is how, usually, this so-called imaginary function is written in a much more convenient abbreviated form.

Do not believe that what I am explaining here should serve us for nothing! I am introducing it here, at the threshold of what I have to indicate to you, because it will serve us later, and because this lies at the heart of a convergence that presents itself to us as another possibility—namely, if we ask ourselves in advance what is appropriate to obtain. Which perhaps has its own interest for us as well!

For it is also very interesting to know why, why in the unconscious—concerning the sexual act—well precisely, what tightens, what marks the difference—first and foremost of which is the subject himself—well, not only are we forced to say that this remains in the end, but it is required, for it to be a sexual act, that it remains in the end!
In other words, that: (a + b)(a – b) = a!

For this to equal a, when a, of course, naturally is not the a from here [(a + b)(a – b) = 2] that I’m speaking of, the a here, we will—just like earlier, when it was a matter of obtaining 2—we will set it equal to 1. It is clearly understood that it is (1 + i)(1 – i) that is equal to 2.

(1 + a)(1 – a) gives a, provided that a is equal to the Golden Number—it is worth repeating—that I use to introduce for you the function of the object little (a). Check it: when little (a) is equal to the Golden Number, the product of (1 + a)(1 – a) = a. [1 + a = 1/a; 1 – a = a²; (1 + a)(1 – a) = (1/a)a² = a]

It is here that I suspend, for a time—the time needed to finish the lesson—what I wanted to propose to you as a logical framework.
Let us now come to consider what is at stake concerning the sexual act. What will serve us in addressing it is what justifies the fact that earlier I introduced MARX’s formula. MARX tells us, somewhere in the Philosophical Manuscripts, that the object of man is nothing other than his very essence taken as object, that the object also to which a subject relates—by essence and necessarily—is nothing other than the subject’s own non-objectified essence.

People, among whom I count some of those listening to me, have indeed demonstrated the side I would call primary in this Marxist approximation. It would be curious if we were far ahead of this formulation. This object in question, this proper essence of the subject, but objectified—is it not we who can give it its true substance?

Let us begin with this, upon which we have long relied: that there is a relation between what psychoanalysis states on the subject of the fundamental law of sex and the prohibition of incest, insofar as, for us, it is another reflection—and already a sufficiently telling one—of the presence of the third element in every sexual act, inasmuch as it demands the presence and foundation of the subject. No sexual act—this is the entry into the world of psychoanalysis—that does not bear the trace of what is improperly called the traumatic scene, in other words, a fundamental referential relation to the parental couple.

How do things present themselves on the other end? You know it—LÉVI-STRAUSS: The Elementary Structures of Kinship—the order of exchange upon which the order of kinship is instituted, it is woman who pays the price: it is women who are exchanged.

Whatever it may be—patriarchal, matriarchal, no matter!—what the logic of inscription imposes upon the ethnologist is to see how women travel between lineages. It seems that, from one to the other, there is a certain gap. Well, that is what we will try today to indicate: how this gap, for us, is articulated—in other words, how, in our field, it is filled.

Earlier, we marked that the origin of the unmasking, of the economic demystification, is to be found in the conjunction of two values of different natures. This is precisely what we are dealing with here. And the entire question is this, for the psychoanalyst: to realize that what, in the sexual act, constitutes a problem, is not social, since it is there that the principle of the social is constituted—namely, in the law of an exchange.

The exchange of women or… no, that does not concern us yet. For if we realize that the problem is of the order of value, I would say that already everything begins to become clear enough simply by naming it.

At the root of what redoubles—what is duplicated in its structure—value at the level of the unconscious, there is this something which occupies the place of exchange value, insofar as from its false identification with use value results the foundation of the commodity-object. And we can even say more: that capitalism is required in order for this thing, which long preceded it, to be revealed.

Likewise, it is necessary to have the status of the subject, as forged by science, of this subject reduced to its function of interval, for us to realize that what is at stake in the equalization of two different values is held here between use value—and why not? We will see that shortly—and enjoyment value. I emphasize: enjoyment value plays the role of exchange value.

You must immediately sense that this really concerns the very heart of analytic teaching—this function of enjoyment value—which perhaps is what will allow us to formulate, in a completely different way, what is at stake in castration.

For indeed, if anything is emphasized in the very notion—however confused it still remains in theory—of drive maturation, it is precisely this: that there is no sexual act—I mean in the sense in which I have just articulated its necessity—that does not involve—strangely enough—castration. What is called castration? It is certainly not…
as in the formulas so pleasantly advanced by “Little Hans”…
that the little faucet gets unscrewed! It must, indeed, remain in its place.

What is at issue, and what spreads everywhere in analytic theory, is that it cannot take its enjoyment in itself.
I am at the end of my lesson today, so here—do not doubt it—I will be brief. I will return to this next time.
But this is simply to emphasize the following, from which I would like to start: namely, what is essential for us in this equation of the two values, called use and exchange.

Suppose man were reduced to what must be said—he has never yet been reduced to it institutionally—to the function that the stud has among domestic animals. In other words, let us use English, where, as you know, one says she-goat to mean a female goat, which literally means a “she-he-goat.”

Well then, let us call man as he should be: a he-man. That is entirely conceivable, instrumentally. In fact, if there is anything that gives a clear idea of use value, it is what one does when one brings in a bull for a number of couplings. And it is quite peculiar that no one has thought of inscribing the elementary structures of kinship in this circulation of the all-powerful phallus!

Curious thing: it is we who discover that this phallic value is represented by the woman! If enjoyment—I mean penile enjoyment—bears the mark called castration, it seems that it is so that—in a way we shall call, with BENTHAM, “fictive”—the woman becomes that which is enjoyed. A peculiar claim, which opens for us all the ambiguities proper to the word “enjoyment,” insofar as, in the terms of the legal development it entails from that moment on, it implies: possession.

In other words, here is something inverted: it is no longer the sex of our bull—use value—that will serve this kind of circulation wherein the sexual order is established, it is the woman, inasmuch as on this occasion she has herself become the place of transfer of this value subtracted from the level of use value, in the form of the object of enjoyment. That is very curious!

It is very curious because it takes us further: if earlier I introduced for you the he-man, here I am…
and moreover, in a way very much in keeping with the genius of the English language, which calls woman “woman,” and God knows how much literature has poked fun at this wo, which signifies nothing good [Laughter]—I will call her: she-man, or in French, from this word—which will surely give rise, from the moment I introduce it, to some mockery and, I suppose, many misunderstandings: L apostrophe, homme-elle. I hereby introduce the homme-elle! [Laughter] I present her to you, I hold her by the little finger, she will serve us greatly. [Laughter]

The whole analytic literature stands as testimony that everything which has been articulated about the place of the woman in the sexual act has only been to the extent that the woman plays the role of the homme-elle. Let the women present here not take offense, for in truth, it is precisely to preserve, where it stands, the place of that Woman (with a capital W) of whom we have been speaking from the beginning, that I make this remark.

Perhaps everything that has been indicated to us concerning feminine sexuality…
where, moreover, in accordance with eternal experience, masquerade plays so eminent a role…
namely, the way in which she makes use of an equivalent of the phallic object, which has always made her the bearer of jewels—
“The Indiscreet Jewels,” says DIDEROT somewhere—we may perhaps finally learn how to make them speak.

It is quite peculiar that, from the subtraction somewhere of a form of enjoyment that is chosen only for its conveniently manageable character,
if I may designate penile enjoyment this way, we see introduced here, with what MARX and we ourselves call “the fetish,”
namely this use value, extracted, fixed—a hole somewhere—the only necessary point of insertion for all sexual ideology.

This subtraction of enjoyment somewhere—that is the pivot.

But do not believe that the woman…
there where she is the alienation of analytic theory and of FREUD himself, who is a sufficiently great father of that theory to have perceived this alienation in the question he repeated: “What does woman want?”
…do not believe that the woman, on this subject, fares any worse!

I mean that her enjoyment—hers—remains at her disposal in a way that entirely escapes this ideological capture.

To become the homme-elle, she never lacks for resources, and it is in this that even the feminist claim contains nothing particularly original—it is always the same masquerade continuing, simply adjusted to current tastes. Where she remains unassailable, unassailable as woman, is outside the system called the sexual act.

It is from there that we must assess the difficulty of what is at stake concerning the act, with regard to the respective status of the original sexes, man and woman, in what the sexual act institutes, insofar as it is a subject that might find its foundation there—here they are brought to the maximum of their disjunction, by the point to which I have led you today.

For if I have spoken to you of the “homme-elle,” the “homme-il,” on the other hand: vanished! Right? There is no longer any! Since he is precisely as such, extracted from use value. Of course, that does not prevent him from circulating in reality. Man, as penile value, circulates very well.
But it is clandestine! Whatever essential value this may indeed play in social ascent. [Laughter]
Generally by the left hand!

I will say more: we must not omit this—that if the “homme-il” is not recognized in the status of the sexual act in the sense that it is, in society, foundational, there exists a “protective society of the homme-il.” That is even what is called male homosexuality.

It is on this point, in a somewhat marginal and humorously pinned-down way, that I will stop today, simply because the hour brings to a close what I had prepared for you.