🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I brought you a certain number of statements last time. I formulated some of them such as, for example, “There is no sexual act.”

I believe the news is currently making its way through the city… But in any case, I did not present it as an absolute truth… I said that it is what is properly articulated in the discourse of the unconscious. That said, I framed this formula and a few others within a sort of reminder — I must say a rather dense one — of what gives them their meaning and also their premises.

This lecture was a kind of milestone marked by points of convergence, which might perhaps serve as a written introduction to something that I am continuing — that I want to continue today — I would say in a perhaps more accessible form, in any case conceived as an easy walk, a first way of untangling the articulations into which I am going to move forward, which are always those I have already presented to you over the course of the last two or three of my lectures, namely, this third articulation between: — the (a), — a value 1, which is there only to give meaning to the value (a), given that the latter is a number, strictly speaking the golden number, — and a second value 1.

Of course, I could once again rearticulate them in a way I could call apodictic, demonstrating their necessity. I will proceed differently, intending rather to begin by exemplifying the use I am going to make of them, even if it means taking things up again later in the necessary way, from which I will therefore depart. I will do this in a mode that could be called eristic. This, then, with those in mind who do not know what it is about.

It is about psychoanalysis. It is not necessary to know what psychoanalysis is to benefit from my discourse. But it is still necessary to have practiced this discourse for some time. I must suppose that this is not the case for everyone, especially among those who are not psychoanalysts.

If I am concerned about those who should be introduced to what I have called my discourse, it is, of course, not without thinking of the psychoanalysts, but it is also because, to a certain extent, it is necessary for me to address those I have just defined… and whom I once found myself labeling as “the number”… it is necessary for me to address them so that my discourse returns, in some sense from a point of reflection, to the ears of the psychoanalysts.

It is indeed striking — and intrinsic to what is at stake — that the psychoanalyst does not enter fully into this discourse, precisely insofar as this discourse concerns his practice and is demonstrable… the continuation of my discourse, and of today’s discourse, will emphasize why it is conceivable that the psychoanalyst finds in his very status — I mean in what institutes him as a psychoanalyst — that something which offers resistance, especially at the point I introduced, inaugurated in my last discourse.

To say the word: the introduction of the value of jouissance raises a question, at the very root of a discourse, of any discourse, that could be entitled discourse of truth. At least to the extent — understand me — that this discourse would enter into competition with the discourse of the unconscious, if this discourse of the unconscious is indeed, as I told you last time, truly articulated by this value of jouissance.

It is peculiar to see how the psychoanalyst always has a little touch-up to make to this competitive discourse. It is precisely where its possible statement is true that he always finds something to take up again. And it is enough to have a bit of experience to know that this objection is always strictly correlative — when it can be measured — to this sort of gluttony that is in some way linked to the psychoanalytic institution, and that is constituted by the idea of gaining recognition on the level of knowledge.

The value of jouissance, I said, is at the root of the economy of the unconscious. The unconscious, I said again — emphasizing the article the — speaks of sex. Not “speaks sex” but “speaks of sex.” What the unconscious shows us are the paths of a knowledge. One must not, in order to follow them, want to know before having walked the path.

The unconscious speaks of sex. Can we say it says sex? In other words: does it speak the truth?
To say that it speaks is something that leaves suspended what it says.
One can speak to say nothing — that’s even common — that is not the case of the unconscious.
One can say things without speaking — that is not the case of the unconscious either.

This is even the relief, of course unnoticed like many other features that depend on what I articulated at this starting point: that the unconscious “it speaks.” If one had even a bit of an ear, one would deduce from it that it is obliged to speak in order to say something!

I have never yet seen anyone isolate this, although in my Rome Discourse it is said in at least a dozen forms, one of which was recently brought to my attention during conversations with some very sympathetic young people, quite hooked by at least part of my discourse, concerning my famous formula, which has had some fortune… all the more, of course, because it is a formula: beware, always wanting to gather everything into a formula …when I said: “When the analysand speaks to you the analyst, he speaks of himself, and when he will speak of himself to you… all will be well.” Formulas like this one, which have the fortune of being picked up, must be placed back into their context, otherwise they lead to confusion.

So then, does the unconscious speak the truth about sex? I did not say this, and FREUD — remember — already raised the question. This, of course, needs to be clarified: it was about a dream, the dream of one of his patients, obviously made — this dream — to mislead him, FREUD, to make him take bladders for lanterns.

The generation of disciples back then was fresh enough that it had to be explained to them as a scandal. In truth, one gets away easily: the dream is the royal road to the unconscious… but it is not, in itself, the unconscious. Posing the question at the level of the unconscious is a different matter entirely, which I have already tackled — I mean: those very sleeves — as I always do: very quickly, and leaving no room for ambiguity, when… in my text called The Freudian Thing, written in 1956 for FREUD’s centenary …I brought forth this entity that says: “I, the truth, I speak.” [Écrits p.409]

Truth speaks. Since it is truth, it does not need to speak the truth. We hear truth, and what it says is only heard by those who know how to articulate it. What does it say where? In the symptom, that is, in something that is not right. Such is the relationship of the unconscious, inasmuch as it speaks, with truth.

Nevertheless, there is a question that I opened… opened last year, in my first lecture, which appeared… when I say “last year,” I do not mean last November: I mean the November before that …the one published in the Cahiers pour la psychanalyse, under the title Truth and Science. The question remains open there as to why the statement by LENIN that introduces this journal, why “theory will triumph because it is true.” What I just said earlier about the psychoanalyst, for example, does not immediately provide that statement with a convincing validation.

MARX himself on this matter — like so many others — lets something pass that is not without raising an enigma. Like many before him, in fact — starting with DESCARTES — he proceeded, with respect to truth, with a singular strategy, which he states somewhere in these biting words:

“The advantage of my dialectic is that I say things little by little, and as they believe — in the plural, ‘they’! — that I have reached the end, hastening to refute me, they do nothing but display their stupidity.”

It may seem peculiar that someone from whom proceeds the idea that “theory will triumph because it is true” expresses himself in this way. A politics of truth and, to put it plainly, its complement in the idea that, in short, only what I earlier called the number — namely that which is reduced to being only the number, that is, what is called in the Marxist context “class consciousness,” insofar as it is the class of number …cannot be mistaken!

A peculiar principle nonetheless, on which all those who deserve to have carried forward the Marxist truth have never wavered. Why would class consciousness be so certain in its orientation… I mean: even when it knows nothing or very little …of the theory, when class consciousness functions… according to the theorists, even at the uneducated level …if it is strictly reduced to those who belong to the level defined in this context by the term “the class excluded from capitalist profits”?

Perhaps the question concerning the force of truth is to be sought in this field into which we are introduced, which is the one — metaphorical — that we can — I repeat: metaphorically — call the market of truth. If, as you may glimpse from last time, the driving mechanism of this market is the value of jouissance, then something is indeed exchanged, which is not truth itself. In other words, the link between “who speaks” and “truth” is not the same depending on the point where one sustains their jouissance. This is precisely the whole difficulty of the psychoanalyst’s position: what does he do, what does he enjoy at the place he occupies? This is the horizon of the question, which I have only just introduced, marking it at its point of fissure, under the term the desire of the psychoanalyst.

Truth, then, in this exchange that is transmitted through a speech whose horizon is given to us by analytic experience, is not itself the object of exchange. As is seen in practice. Those among the psychoanalysts who are here testify to this through their practice. Of course, they are not here for nothing, they are here for: whatever of truth may fall from this table, even what they may do with it by fiddling with it a bit.

Such is the necessity imposed on them by the fact of a status that is constrained regarding the value of jouissance attached to their position as psychoanalysts. I have had, I can say, “confirmation” of it, and I will certainly have it again. I will take an example. Someone who is not a psychoanalyst — Mr. DELEUZE, to name him — presents a book by Sacher MASOCH: “Presentation de Sacher Masoch.” He writes on masochism what is indisputably the best text that has ever been written! I mean: the best text, compared to everything that has been written on this theme in psychoanalysis.

Of course, he has read these texts, he does not invent his subject. He starts first from Sacher MASOCH… who, after all, has a thing or two to say when it comes to masochism! I know well that people have chopped his name a bit, and now say “maso.” But still, it is up to us to mark the difference between “maso” and “masochist,” even “masochian” or simply MASOCH.

Whatever the case, this text — to which we will surely return — literally, I can say… as on a subject on which I have not remained silent, since I wrote Kant with Sade, but where there is, literally, only a glimpse, namely on this point, that sadism and masochism are two strictly distinct paths, even if of course, both must be identified in the structure …that not every sadist is automatically a maso, nor every maso a sadist in denial. It is not a glove turned inside out.

In short, it may be that Mr. DELEUZE — I will swear all the more since he quotes me abundantly — made use of these texts. But is it not striking that this text truly anticipates everything I will now have to say on the subject, along the path we have opened this year. While not one of the analytic texts is not entirely to be revised and redone in this new perspective. I took care to have it confirmed by the author I am quoting — himself — that he has no experience of psychoanalysis.

These are the points I wish to mark here at their proper time, because after all, with time they may change, the points that take on exemplary value and deserve to be retained, if only to require of me that I fully account for them, I mean in detail.

With that, what remains is to enter into the articulation of this structure, whose — very simple — feature, shown on the board, gives the base and foundation, and of which you already are not without having heard from my mouth some clarification on the way it is going to serve. Nevertheless, I repeat, the small (a) here is what already, regarding the object thus designated, I was able to make you sense as being in some way what one might call “the mounting,” the mounting of the subject. A metaphor which implies that the subject is the jewel, and the mounting is what supports it, what holds it, the frame.

Already, I remind you nonetheless, we have defined and illustrated the object little (a) as that which falls in the structure, at the level of the most fundamental act of the subject’s existence, since it is the act from which the subject as such is engendered, namely repetition. The fact of the signifier, signifier that it repeats, that is what engenders the subject and something falls from it.

Recall how the cut of the double loop — become a mental object called the projective plane — carves out these two elements which are respectively:

— the Möbius strip which for us figures as the support of the subject [“Möbian” structure],
— the disk [(a)] which necessarily remains [“spherical” structure], which is ineliminable from the topology of the projective plane.

Here, this object little (a) is supported by a numerical reference to represent what is incommensurable about it, incommensurable with what is at stake in its functioning as subject, when this functioning operates at the level of the unconscious, and which is nothing other than sex, quite simply. [a in place of the sexual relation which does not exist]

Of course, this golden number is there only as a support chosen for having this privileged feature… which makes us retain it, but simply as a symbolic function …for having this privileged feature… which I have already indicated to you as best I could, for lack of being able to give you — it would really carry us away — the most modern and rigorous mathematical theory …of being, if I may say so, the incommensurable which compresses the least rapidly the intervals within which it can be localized.

In other words, the one which, in order to reach a certain limit of approximation, requires from all the forms… they are multiple and, I think, almost infinite …of the incommensurable, to be the one which demands the greatest number of operations.

I remind you at this point what it concerns, namely that if the little (a) is here mapped onto the 1, allowing the difference 1 – a to be marked from a². This is due to its own property of little (a): that it be such that 1 + a is equal to 1/a, from which it is easy to deduce that 1 – a = a²; do a small multiplication [by a] and you will see it immediately. The a² will then be mapped onto what is here in the 1 — here, for example… — and will generate an a³, which a³ will be mapped onto the a², so that at the level of difference an a⁴ emerges, which will be mapped likewise so that here appears an a⁵.

You see that on each side unfold, one after the other:
— all the even powers of a on one side,
— and the odd powers on the other.

Things being such that by continuing them to infinity, for there will never be a stop nor an end to these operations, their limit will nonetheless be:
— a, for the sum of even powers, a² + a⁴ + a⁶ + … = a
— a², namely the first difference (1 – a = a²), for the sum of the odd powers, a³ + a⁵ + a⁷ + … = a²

It is therefore here that will be inscribed, at the end of the operation, what in the first operation was marked here as the difference. Here, to a, a² will come at the end to be added, realizing in its sum, here, the 1, constituted by the complementation of a by that a². What here has been constituted by the addition of all the remainders, being equal to the first a, from which we started.

I think the suggestive character of this operation does not escape you, all the more so since it has been quite a while — at least a month or a month and a half — since I pointed out to you how it could support, make an image for the operation of what is realized in the path of sexual drive under the name of sublimation.

I will not return to it today because I must move forward. Simply, by indicating it in this way, to give you the aim of what we are going to have to do using this support: as you will see and as you can already anticipate, it will not be sufficient for us.

Everything indicates to us — the very success, as sublime as it is, of what it presents to us — that if things were thus: that sublimation made us reach that perfect 1 [sic], itself placed on the horizon of sex, it seems to me that after all the time it has been talked about, this 1 ought to be known by now.

There must remain, between these two series of even and odd powers of the magical little (a), something like a gap, an interval. Everything, in any case in experience, indicates it.

Nevertheless, it is no bad thing to see that with the most favorable support for such traditional articulations, we already see the necessity of a complexity that is the one from which, in any case, we must begin. Let us not forget that if the first 1, the one upon which I have just projected the succession of operations, is there, it is there only to represent the problem with which, precisely, as such, the subject has to be confronted, if this subject is the one who is articulated in the unconscious, namely: sex. This middle 1, of the three elements of my little pocket meter, this middle 1 is the place of sexuality. Let us stop there! We are at the threshold.

Sexuality, huh! it’s a genre, a moiré, a puddle, a “black tide” as they say these days. Stick your finger in it, you carry it on the tip of your nose — there, you sense what it’s about. It pertains to sex when one says “sexuality.” For it to be sex, something a little firmer would have to be articulated.

I don’t know, here, at what point in a bifurcation to commit myself. Because it is a point of extreme dispute. Should I here and now give you the idea of what it could be, if it worked, the subjectivation of sex? Obviously, you can dream of it. You do nothing else, because it is what constitutes the text of your dreams!

But that is not what it’s about. What could it be, if it were?… if it were… and if one gives meaning to what I am developing before you… a signifier, in this case what one calls… and you will immediately see how we will be embarrassed, because if I say “male” or “female,” still, right?… that’s really animal! so, all right, I accept… “masculine” or “feminine.”

There, it immediately becomes apparent that FREUD, the first who advanced in this path of the unconscious, on this point is absolutely unambiguous: there is not the slightest way… I say: it’s not that I say to you who are here in front of me “to what degree are you masculine and to what degree feminine?”, it’s not about that, nor is it about biology, nor about WOLFF’s and MÜLLER’s organs… it is impossible to give meaning, I mean analytic meaning, to the terms “masculine” and “feminine.”

If a signifier, nevertheless, is that which represents a subject for another signifier, this ought to be the chosen ground. Because you can see how things would be nice, would be pure, if we could place some subjectivation, I mean pure and valid, under the term male. We would have what suits. Namely that a subject manifesting as male would be represented as such, I mean as subject, in relation to what? — to a signifier designating the term female and of which there would be no need that it determine the slightest subject! The reciprocal being true.

I emphasize that if we question sex in terms of its possible subjectivation, we are not thereby demonstrating any obviously exorbitant demand for intersubjectivity. It could very well hold that way. It would even be not only what is desirable, but what, quite clearly… if you question what I earlier called class consciousness, the class of all those who believe that man and woman, they exist… it could not be anything other than that.

And like that, it would be very fine, if it were. I mean that the principle of what is comically — I must say that here the comic effect is irresistible — called “the sexual relation,” if I could… in an assembly like this, which is becoming familiar to me, an assembly where I can make heard, just as it should be, “that there is no sexual act,” which means: there is no act at a certain level, and it is precisely for this reason that we have to search how it is constituted… if I could make it so that the term “sexual relation” would take in each of your heads exactly the ludicrous connotation that this phrase deserves, I would have achieved something!

If the sexual relation existed, this is what it would mean: that the subject of each sex could touch something in the other, at the level of the signifier. I mean that this would involve in the other neither consciousness, nor even unconsciousness, simply accord. This relation of signifier to signifier, when it occurs, is certainly what amazes us in a certain number of striking small points… tropisms, in animals.

We are far from that when it comes to man. And perhaps also, for that matter, in the animal, where things happen only through the mediation of certain markers of phanera, which certainly must give rise to a few mishaps!

Whatever the case, the virtue of what I have thus articulated is not entirely disappointing. I mean that these signifiers, made so that one presents and represents to the other, in pure state, the opposite sex — well, they exist at the cellular level! This is what we call the sex chromosome! It would be surprising if we could one day, with any chance of certainty, establish that the origin of language — namely what happens before it engenders the subject — has some relation with these games of matter that offer us the aspects we find in the conjunction of sexual cells. We are not there, and we have something else to do!

Simply, let us not be surprised that, at the distance where we are from that level, where would manifest, in sum, something that is not at all made not to seduce us, at that level where it could designate something I would call “transcendence of matter”… believe me: I did not invent this, it has already occurred to a few other people… only, if I designate this extreme point… while expressly emphasizing that it is entirely unresolved, that the bridge has not been made… it is simply to mark for you that — by contrast — in the order of what is more or less properly called thought, throughout the course of the centuries — at least those known to us — nothing has ever been done other than to speak as if this point were resolved!

For centuries, knowledge, in a more or less masked, more or less figurative, more or less smuggled form, has done nothing other than parody what it would be if the sexual act existed, to the point that would allow us to define what it is, as the Hindus say, of Purusha and Prâkriti, of animus and anima, and of the whole lyre!

What is required of us is to undertake more serious work. Work necessitated simply by this: that between this play of primordial significations, such as they might be inscribable in terms — I emphasize — implying some subject, well, we are separated from them by the entire thickness of something that you may call as you wish, “flesh,” or “body,” provided you include in it what our condition as mammals specifically brings to it.

Namely, a condition entirely specified and by no means necessary, as the abundance of an entire kingdom proves to us — I speak of the animal kingdom — nothing implies the form that the subjectivation of the sexual function takes for us, nothing implies that what comes into play there symbolically is necessarily tied to it. One only has to reflect on what it might be in an insect, and likewise, by the way, the images that may depend on it — do we not make use of them to make certain singular traits of our relation to sex appear in fantasy?

Well then, I’ve taken one of the two paths that were available to me just now. I am not sure I was right to do so. Now I must take up the other. The other is to indicate to you why the 1 appears here to the right of the (a) at this point which I have designated as representing — here locally — through a signifier, the fact of sex.

There is here a surprising convergence between what is truly at stake — that is, what I am in the process of telling you — and what I will on the other hand call the major point of psychoanalytic abjection. I must say that you owe it solely to Jacques-Alain MILLER — who made a reasoned index of my Écrits — that you have not been presented with the alphabetical index which I had — I must say — taken a bit of pleasure in imagining beginning with the word “abjection” [smile]. That was not the case. That is no reason for the word not to find its place.

The 1 I place there, by purely mathematical reference, I mean that it simply figures this: that to speak of the incommensurable I must have a unit of measure, and there is no unit of measure better symbolized than by 1. The subject, in the form of its support the little (a), is measured — is measured — against sex. Understand this as one would say that it is measured by the bushel or the pint. That is the 1, the sex-unit, nothing more. Well, it is not nothing, that 1.

It is a matter of knowing to what extent it converges, as I said earlier, with that One which reigns at the mental foundation — up to this day — of psychoanalysts, in the form of a unitive virtue, which would be at the principle of everything they unfold in their discourse on sexuality.

It is not enough to rely on the vanity of the formula that sex “unites”; the primordial image must also be given to them through the fusion from which the enjoyer of “jouissade” would benefit. [Laughter] The little baby in its mother’s womb, where no one has been able to testify that it is in a more comfortable position than the mother herself in carrying it — and in which would be exemplified what you heard again here, last year, in the lecture by Mr. Conrad STEIN, whom we have not seen again since, and whom I regret not seeing again — as necessary to the psychoanalyst’s thinking, as representative of this lost Paradise of fusion between the self and the non-self, which — I repeat: according to the psychoanalysts — would be the “corner stone,” the cornerstone without which nothing could be thought of the economy of libido.

For that is what it’s about! I believe there is a true touchstone here, which I allow myself to point out to anyone who wishes to follow me: that anyone who remains in any way attached to this schema of “primary narcissism” may well pin to their lapel all the Lacanian carnations they wish — such a person has absolutely nothing to do, neither closely nor remotely, with what I teach. I do not say that the question of primary narcissism in the economy of theory is not something that raises a question and deserves one day to be brought to the fore.

Today, I am beginning precisely to point out that if the value of jouissance originates in the lack marked by the castration complex… in other words, the prohibition of auto-eroticism bearing on a specific organ, which plays there no role and function other than to introduce this element of unity at the inauguration of a status of exchange, upon which everything that will subsequently be economy depends, in the speaking being in question in sex… it is clear that the important thing is to see the reversal that results from it.

Namely: it is to the extent that the phallus designates this something elevated to value by the minus that the castration complex constitutes, this something which precisely makes the distance from the little (a) to the unit of sex. It is from this point, as all experience teaches us, that the being who will come to be brought to the function of partner in this trial, in which the subject is placed — of the sexual act: the woman, to image my discourse — will take, she herself, her value as object of jouissance.

But at the same time and by the same token, look at what has happened: it is no longer about “he enjoys,” but about “he enjoys something.” Jouissance has shifted from the subjective to the objective, to the point of slipping into the sense of possession in the typical function, as we must consider it deducible from the incidence of the castration complex, and — this I already brought up last time — it is constituted by that turning point which makes the sexual partner a phallic object.

To the extent that I highlight this here, in the direction from “man” to “woman” — both in quotation marks — it is only insofar as this is where the operation is, if I may say so, the most scandalous. For it is certainly articulable, just as much, in the other direction, with the difference that the woman does not have to make the same sacrifice, since it is already accounted for from the start.

In other words, I emphasize the position of what I will call the male fiction, which could roughly be expressed like this: “you are what’s there” …there is nothing more content than a guy who has never seen beyond the end of his nose and who tosses you the formula, just like that, provocatively: “to have or not to have”… “you are what’s there”… “what’s there”: you know what that is.

And then, “You have what is.” The two things go together. “What is” is the object of desire: it is the woman. This fiction — simplistic, I must say — is seriously being revised. For some time now, it has become clear that it’s just a little more complicated.

But although in a paper entitled Direction of the Cure, the principles of its power… I believed it necessary to rearticulate it with care, it seems people have not quite understood what is involved in what I would oppose to this male fiction as being, to use one of my terms from last time, the male-she value: “you are not what you have.”

It’s not quite the same sentence, pay attention, huh: “You are what’s there,” but “you are not what you have.” In other words, it is insofar as the man has the phallic organ, that he is not it. Which implies that on the other side, one can even be “not what one has”: what one does not have. That is to say, it is precisely in that she does not have the phallus that the woman can take on its value.

These are the points that are extremely necessary to articulate at the outset of any induction of what the unconscious says about sex, because this is precisely what we have learned to read in its discourse!

Only, when I speak of the castration complex, with of course all the contentiousness it entails — for the least one can say is that it lends itself a bit to mistaken identity, especially on the male side, concerning what Genesis describes so well, namely: woman conceived as that something of which man’s body has been deprived. That is called, in the chapter you know well: “a rib.” That’s out of modesty…

What needs to be seen is that, in any case, where I speak of the castration complex as original in the economic function of jouissance, the psychoanalyst loves to gargle with the term “object-libido.” What is important is to see that if there is anything that deserves that name, it is precisely the displacement of this negated function which is founded in the castration complex: the value of jouissance forbidden at the precise point, the organ-point constituted by the phallus — it is that which is displaced as “object-libido.”

Contrary to what is said, namely that so-called “narcissistic” libido would be the reservoir from which what will become “object-libido” must be extracted. That may seem to you a subtlety. “Because after all,” you will say to me, “if in narcissism, libido is invested in one’s own body, well — even though you specify the matter — it is from a part of this libido that we are talking,” you’ll say to me. In what I am now stating, that is not the case!

Very precisely in this: that to say one thing is extracted from another would require assuming it is purely and simply separated from it by means of what one calls a cut — but not only by a cut, by something that then plays the function of an edge. Now this is precisely what is questionable… and not only what is questionable, but what is already decisively refutable… it is that there is no homomorphism, there is no structure such that “the phallic shred,” if one can say so, would be graspable as a part of narcissistic investment.

It is that it does not constitute that edge, the one we must maintain between what allows narcissism to construct that false assimilation of one to the other, which is doctrine in the traditional theories of love. The traditional theories of love do, in fact, keep the object of the Good within the limits of narcissism, but the relation truly at stake — the economy of jouissance — is distinct.

Object-libido, insofar as it introduces something which, if I may say so, leaves us desiring the exact note of the act that claims to be sexual, is of a nature — the phrase is apt — properly speaking, sharp-cut, distinct. This is where the live point lies, around which it is essential not to waver. For, as you will see in what follows, it is only around this point that everything which takes place in the field of the analytic act — whether it concerns the analysand-analyst relationship or the effects of regression — can find its proper place.

I apologize for leaving this in suspense: the law of my discourse does not allow me to bring it to a close at the point of resolution that would always suit me.

Time interrupts us here, today. I will continue next time.