🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

This drawing is imperfect, but let us not waste time. It is imperfect in the sense that it is not finished, that the same length that defines the field of the little (a) [in the 1 of the One] should be reproduced here [in the 1 of the Other].

I have already sufficiently indicated to you that these two segments, namely this one [1 of the One], and the one that is not completed [1 of the Other], are, if you will, qualifiable as the One and the Other: the Other in the sense in which I ordinarily understand it, the place of the Other, A, the place where the signifying chain is articulated and what it supports in terms of truth. These are the terms of the essential dyad in which the weave of the subjectivation of sex is to be forged. That is to say, what we have been talking about for a month and a half.

“Essential”: for those who have an ear trained to Heideggerian terms – which, as you will see, are not, by reference, privileged – nevertheless, for them I mean: not essential dyad in the sense of what is, but in the sense of what – it must be said in German – of what “west,” as HEIDEGGER expresses it, moreover in a way already strained with regard to the German language. Let us say: of what operates as Sprache, that is, the connotation HEIDEGGER has left to the term language. This concerns nothing other than the economy of the unconscious, even of what is commonly called the primary process.

Let us not forget that for these terms… the ones I have just proposed as those of the dyad, of the dyad from which we begin, the One and the Other…
– the One, as I precisely articulated it last time and which I will, moreover, take up again,
– the Other, in the usage I have made of it from the beginning…
let us not forget, I say, that we have to start from their effect.

Their effect has this ridiculous quality, that it lends itself to the coarse metaphor that it is he, the child. The subjectivation of sex begets nothing, unless it be misfortune. But what it has already produced, what is univocally given to us in psychoanalytic experience, is this waste from which we begin as the necessary support point for reconstructing the entire logic of this dyad.

This, by letting ourselves be guided by what this object is the cause of – you know it, properly speaking – is the cause, namely: the fantasy.
Logic – if it is true that I may pose as its initial thesis what I do: that there is no metalanguage – this is logic: that from language one can extract, namely, the places and the points where, so to speak, language speaks of itself.

And it is indeed thus that it flourishes nowadays. When I say “flourishes nowadays,” it is because it is obvious: you only have to open a book on logic to see that it does not pretend to be anything else.
Nothing ontic in any case, scarcely ontological. On that point, still, refer – since I will leave you with a fifteen-day interval – to the reading of the Sophist – I mean: Plato’s dialogue – to see how accurate this formula is, I mean: concerning logic, and that its origin does not date from today, nor from yesterday.

You will understand that it is in fact from this dialogue, The Sophist, that Martin – I mean: Martin HEIDEGGER – starts for his restoration of the question of Being. And after all, it will not be a less wholesome discipline for you to read… since my lack of information meant that, having only recently received it through a press service, it is only today that I can advise you to read Introduction to Metaphysics, in the excellent translation given by Gilbert KAHN.

I say “excellent” because, in truth, he did not attempt the impossible and, for all the words for which it is impossible to give an equivalent, except perhaps an equivocal one, he calmly forged or reforged French words, as best he could, with a glossary at the end providing the exact German reference. But all this is merely a parenthesis.

This reading… easy, which, perhaps, could be contested regarding other texts by HEIDEGGER, but I assure you – this one – extraordinarily easy, even with a tone of distinctly sharp ease: it is impossible to make more transparent the way in which he intends the question of Being to be posed again at our historical detour.

It is certainly not that I believe this concerns anything other than an exercise in reading and, as I said a moment ago, a matter of salubrity. It cleanses many things, but it is no less misdirected in giving the sole instruction of a return to PARMENIDES and HERACLITUS, however brilliantly he may situate them, precisely at the level of that meta-discourse of which I speak as immanent to language. That is not a metalanguage. The meta-discourse immanent to language, which I call logic, is indeed something that deserves to be refreshed through such a reading.

Certainly, I make no use—as you may notice—of the etymologizing method through which HEIDEGGER admirably revives the so-called pre-Socratic formulations. It is also the case that the direction I intend to indicate differs, differs from his precisely in this irreversible point marked by The Sophist… a reading that is also extraordinarily easy and that does not fail to make its reference to PARMENIDES… precisely to emphasize how far and how sharply it went against that caution which PARMENIDES expresses in these two verses:

Οὐ γὰρ μήποτε τοῦτο δαμῇ εἶναι μὴ ἐόντα˙
ἀλλὰ σὺ τῆσδʹ ἀφʹ ὁδοῦ διζήσιος εἶργε νόημα˙ [VII, 1 and 2]

“No, never shall you bend the non-beings by force to be.
Rather, from this path of inquiry, turn away your thought.”

It is precisely the road opened—opened already in The Sophist—that imposes itself upon us, properly speaking: upon us analysts, if only we know what we are dealing with. If I had succeeded in producing a literate psychoanalyst, I would have won the game. That is to say, from that moment on, the person who is not a psychoanalyst would, thereby, become illiterate.

Let the many literates who populate this room rest assured—they still have their little remainder! Psychoanalysts must come to conceive the nature of what they handle as: this “dross of Being,” this “rejected stone,” which becomes “the cornerstone,” and which is properly what I designate by the object (a), and that it is a product—I say product—of the operation of language, in the sense that the term product is necessitated in our discourse by the emergence, since ARISTOTLE, of the dimension of the ἔργον [ergon] exactly: of the work.

It is a matter of rethinking logic from this little (a). Since this little (a), if I have named it, I have not invented it: it is precisely what has fallen into the hands of analysts, starting from the experience they have traversed in what concerns the sexual thing—everyone knows what I mean, and what’s more, they speak only of that.

This little (a), since analysis, is yourselves—I say: each of you—in your essential core. It puts you back on your feet—as the saying goes—it puts you back on your feet from the delusion of the celestial sphere, from the subject of knowledge. That being said, it explains—that is the only valid explanation—why, as everyone can see, analysis begins with the child. It is for reasons properly speaking metaphorical: because the little (a) is the metaphorical child of the One and of the Other, insofar as it is born as the waste of the inaugural repetition, which, in order to be repetition, requires this relation of the One to the Other, repetition from which the subject is born.

The true reason for the reference to the child in psychoanalysis is therefore in no way the seed of “G’I,” the flower destined to become the happy bastard who appears to Mr. Erik ERIKSON as the sufficient motive for his cogitations and labors, but only this problematic essence: the object (a), whose exercises astonish us—of course not just anywhere: in fantasies, and quite sufficiently enacted by the child.

That it is at their level that we see the games and the most clearly traced paths: for that, it is necessary to gather confidences that are beyond the reach of child psychologists. In short, it is what makes the word “soul” have, in the slightest of the child’s sexual stirrings, in his “perversion” as it is called, the only, the unique, and the sole worthy presence that should be accorded to that word: the word “soul.”

So, as I said last time: the One is simply, in this logic, the entry into play of the operation of measure, of the value to be given to the little (a) in this operation of language which will be, in sum—what else is available to us?—an attempt to reintegrate this little (a)—into what?—into this “universe of language,” of which I already posited at the beginning of this year—what?—that it does not exist! It does not exist, why? Precisely because of the existence of this, the object little (a), as an effect.

Thus, a contradictory and desperate operation, of which, fortunately, the very existence of arithmetic, even elementary arithmetic, assures us that the undertaking is fruitful. For even at the level of arithmetic, it has been discovered—recently, it must be said—that the universe of discourse does not exist. So, how do things appear at the outset of this attempt?

What does it mean to write, since we need this 1 and since we will content ourselves with it for the measure of the object little (a), this: 1 + a = 1 / a ?

You surely suspect that as soon as my theory begins to be the object of serious inquiry by logicians, there will be much to say about the introduction here of the three signs, which appear as plus, equal, and also the bar between the 1 and little (a): (+), (=), (–).

These are tests to which, for the time being—so that my lecture does not stretch on indefinitely—you must, provisionally, entrust yourselves to the fact that I have conducted them on my own behalf, revealing here only their tips, at the level where they may be of use to you.

It must be noted, however, that if… because it comes by itself and because it is truly more convenient… we still have quite a distance to travel… I simply write here the formula which happens to cover what I have called the greatest incommensurable, or again, the Golden Ratio, which designates, quite precisely, this: that of two magnitudes, the ratio of the greater to the smaller—of 1 to a in this case—is the same as that of their sum to the greater, that if I proceed in this way, it is certainly not to pass along—too quickly, moreover—hypotheses that it would be quite regrettable for you to take as decisive, I mean for you to believe too much in this paradigm, which merely aims to have the object little (a) function for a time, for you, as incommensurable with what is at stake: its reference to sex.

It is in this respect that the 1—this sex and its enigma—is tasked with covering them. But nothing in the formula, moreover, indicates that we may at once introduce the mathematical notion of proportion. So long as we have not explicitly written it, what this writing, as it stands, implies for someone reading it at the level of their usual mathematics is the following:

So long as this 1 [in blue] is not inscribed, the formula can be considered as much less constrained. It indicates nothing other than this: that it is from the approach of 1 to little (a) that we intend to see something emerge. What? Why not, in this instance, that the 1 represents little (a). [Form Sant/Sé] I do not employ symbolizations lightly. And if those here can remember those—symbolizations—that I gave to the metaphor,

they will recall that, after all, when I write the sequence of signifiers, with the indication that underneath it this chain contains a substituted signifier, and that it is from this substitution that it results that the new signifier substituted for the capital S, let us call it S’—from what it conceals of the signifier it replaces—takes value from this something—that I have already named as such, takes value as the origin of a new signified dimension which belonged neither to one nor the other of the two signifiers in question:

Does it not appear that something analogous… which would be here properly nothing other than the emergence of the dimension of measure or of proportion, as original signification… is implied in that moment of interval which, after having written 1 + a = 1 / a, is completed by the 1 that was absent from it, although immanent, and which, by being distinguished in this second step, takes on the figure of the function here of the signifier sex insofar as it is repressed.

It is to the extent that the relation to the enigmatic 1, taken in its pure conjunction: 1 + a, can in our symbolism imply a function of the 1 as representing the enigma of sex as repressed, and that this enigma of sex will present itself to us as capable of realizing the substitution, the metaphor, covering with its proportion little (a) itself. What does that mean?

The 1, you will object, is not repressed, as here, where sticking to an approximate formula, I have made a chain of signifiers of which it would be appropriate that indeed none reproduce this repressed signifier—that is exactly why I must distinguish the repressed—here this 1 from the first line, does it go against the articulation I am trying to give you of it?

Surely not, in that, as you know… and you have taken the trouble to exercise yourselves a little in what I have shown you of the appropriate usage of little (a) in relation to the 1, that is, having marked its difference and performed its subtraction from the 1, to observe, as I have told you, that: 1 – a is equal to nothing other than a² (or a squared), 1 – a = a², which is followed… provided that you fold this a² back onto the a, here brought into the first operation, which is followed by an a³, which is reproduced here upon a², by the same mode of operation, to obtain here an a⁴. All the even powers [a² + a⁴ + a⁶ + …] on one side, meeting the odd powers on the other [a³ + a⁵ + a⁷ + …] which will be arranged here, and their total realizing this sum, this figure of the 1. [a² + a⁴ + a⁶ + … + a²ⁿ = a ; a³ + a⁵ + a⁷ + … + a²ⁿ⁺¹ = a² ; a + a² = 1]

What we thus have at the top of this proportion is nothing other than: a + (a² + a³ + a⁴ + …) and so on. What begins from a² to infinity being strictly equal to the capital 1. It results then that you have here a rather good figure of what I have called in the signifying chain the metonymic effect, and which I have long since and already illustrated by the slippage in this chain of the figure little (a).

That is not all. If the measure, which is thus given in this play of writing—for it is nothing else—is exact, it immediately follows that it is enough for us to pass this total block of 1 + a into the function of the 1 to which it imposes itself as a substitution, to obtain this:

that I may very well afford myself the luxury—just to keep amusing you, I mean—of not writing the final 1, reproducing at its level the maneuver from earlier, which would allow me to write in sequence 1 / a:

which, if you continue to proceed along the same path, continues with the formula: a / (1 – a), which (1 – a) being equal to a², is nothing other than a / a², that is to say, a.

The final identification, in a way, sanctions that through these detours—detours that are not nothing, since it is there that we can learn to make operate precisely—the relations of little (a) to sex lead us purely and simply back to this identity of little (a).

For those to whom this remains somewhat difficult, do not omit that this little (a) is something entirely real! I haven’t done so until now, but I can write its value for you—everyone knows it, don’t they?

It is (–1)/2. And, if you want to write it in numbers, if my memory serves me, it is something like this: 2.236068…
[Lacan will correct this at the beginning of the next session: the value of (–1)/2 is 1.618 033 988… In fact, the Golden Ratio equals (+1)/2 = 1.618 033 988.]

In short, I do not guarantee that number, it’s a memory… In my time, one used to know a certain number of figures by heart. When I was 15 years old, I knew by heart the first six pages of my logarithm table. I will explain to you another time what it’s used for, but it is certainly not one of the worst selection methods for candidates to the function of psychoanalyst. We are not quite there yet… I have such trouble getting the slightest thing to stick on this delicate subject, that I haven’t even suggested, up until now, using this criterion. It would be well worth all those currently in use!

We shall thus return, in this formula, to these moments to designate, properly speaking here in 1 + a, the point of these formulations that best designates what we can call the sexual subject. If the 1 designates, in its initial moment of enigma, the signifying function of sex, it is from the moment when the 1 + a arrives in the denominator of the equation as we see it here develop:

still the same, that there arises—as you can see, even if I have not imprudently written it—on the higher level, this famous 2 of the dyad, which one cannot write in the form of a 2 without first warning that it requires some further remarks regarding, in this case, what is called the associativity of addition. In other words, that I detach the second 1 here insofar as it is in this parenthesis, to group it in the same parenthesis with the other 1 that precedes it, but which has a different function.

Now, it is not difficult to notice, in these three terms: this 1, this 1, and this little (a), the three intervals at stake here, namely those which place little (a) in question with regard to the two other 1s. What could all this mean? To confront little (a) with unity—which is merely to institute the function of measurement—well, this unity, one must begin by writing it. It is this function that I have long introduced under the term unary trait. Unary, I said, because my voice sometimes lowers.

So then, where is it written, this unary trait essential to operate the measure of the object little (a) with respect to sex? Well, certainly not on the back of the object little (a), since no object little (a) has a back. This is precisely what serves— I think you’ve always known this—what I have called “the place of the Other,” insofar as it is here precisely represented, as called by this entire logical approach.

That is to say, “the place of the Other,” first insofar as, as such, it introduces the duplication of the field of the 1, that is to say… even though we have here nothing other, properly speaking, than the depiction of what I have articulated as the original repetition… as that which makes the first One—that One so dear to philosophers and which yet presents some difficulty to their manipulations—that this One only arises in a kind of retroaction from the moment when a repetition is introduced as signifier.

This unary trait…
I recall the desperate cries of one of my most subtle listeners, when I simply picked it up in a text by FREUD, the einziger Zug, where it had gone unnoticed by this interlocutor who would have much liked to make the discovery himself…
do not believe, however, that it exists only there; FREUD did not discover the unary trait.

And if you wish, simply, among other things—of course, naturally, I will speak shortly about the Greeks—but just to remain in the present moment, open the latest issue of the excellent journal called Arts Asiatiques, you will find there the translation of a very lovely little treatise on painting by a painter—of whom, fortunately, I have the joy of owning some small kakemonos—named SHITAO, and who—this unary trait—indeed, makes a great deal of it: he speaks only of that, yes, he speaks only of that over a small number of pages.

This is called in Chinese—and not just for painters, for philosophers speak much of it—yi, which means One, and sua, which means trait. It is the unary trait. It functioned greatly, I assure you, long before I began to hammer it into your ears here.

But what is important also, then, is to recognize here in this essential function… which requires as its opposing, as its mirror, the field of the Other to this field of the enigmatic 1… properly speaking what has long been depicted in my graph by the connotation: signifier of the barred capital A: S(A).

This also allows, in that article I entitled Note…, which gives the formula for what is called in psychoanalysis and in Freudian texts, one of the forms of identification: identification with the ego ideal, whose trait I have precisely placed in the Other, as indicating at the level of the Other this mirror reference, from which precisely begins, for the subject, the vein of all that is identification.

That is to say, what is especially—in the field we are discussing today: the dyad—to be distinguished as situating itself, and situating itself as distinct from the two other functions, which are respectively that of repetition—we place identification in the middle—and finally the relation—I told you last time what to think of it—concerning anything that might claim to be authorized by the sexual dyad. I called that relation “buffoonish,” the one people speak of as though it had the slightest consistency when it comes to sex.

I would simply like to make a remark here. At the very time—just after that of the Sophist—when ARISTOTLE intervenes, when he establishes in a way that it is fair to say… whatever dissolution we have since been able to effect on the operations of logic… that it is fair to say that his Categories retain an unshakable character. I have already strongly encouraged you to take up that little treatise again.

It is purely admirable for all that concerns this exercise which can allow you to give meaning to the term subject. The enumeration of the categories… I won’t repeat it for you, those of place, time, quantity, how, why… is it not striking that after an enumeration so exhaustive, we notice that precisely, ARISTOTLE did not introduce among the categories this kind of relation that one could write… but give it a try, you’ll let me know what you find out… the sexual relation?

All logicians are used to exemplifying the different types of relations they distinguish—transitive, intransitive, reflexive—illustrating them, for instance, with terms of kinship: if So-and-so, if A is the father of B, B is the son of A, and so on. It is rather curious, at least as curious as the absence in Aristotelian categories of the sexual relation, that no one ever ventures to say that if A is the man of B, B is the woman of A.

That relation, however, of course, is part of our question concerning what is at stake, namely the question of the status that could ground those terms, which are, properly speaking, the ones I just advanced in the form of man and woman. To do so, it is entirely vain to project—to use a term that psychoanalysts misuse right and left—to project the 1 that comes to mark the field of the Other into what I will now call x, to clearly indicate that this 1 was nothing else, up to now, than a designation.

That one must name from the 1 of the unary trait what lies there between little (a) and the big Other, is what can only be abusively considered as—this field x—unifying it, making it unitive indeed! Of course, it is not since yesterday that this slippage has occurred, and it is not the privilege of psychoanalysts! The confusion of a Being—which Being?—Supreme with the One as such, is what is eminently embodied, for instance, in the writing of a PLOTINUS. Everyone knows this.

The prevalence of this median function—which is not nothing, since it operates—I have called it the fundamental one of the ego ideal, inasmuch as an entire cascade of secondary identifications depends on it, namely that of the ideal ego, which is the nucleus of the ego. All this has been laid out and remains inscribed in its place and in its time, and on its own already raises the question of what motive necessitates the multiplicity of these identifications.

It is clear that it suffices to refer back to the little optical schema I provided which—yes—is only a metaphor, whereas this here is nothing metaphorical, since it is the metaphors themselves that are precisely operative in the structure!

In short, that the link from the One to the Other by identification, especially if it takes on that reversible form which makes the One the Supreme Being, is, properly speaking, typical of philosophical error. Of course, if I told you to read The Sophist by PLATO, it is because one is far from falling there into that One, and that PLOTINUS is here the best reference by which to put it to the test.

I would only oppose to it the mystics, insofar as they are those whom we can define as having advanced, to their own cost, from little (a) toward that Being who—He—has done nothing other than declare Himself as unpronounceable, unpronounceable with regard to His name, by nothing other than those enigmatic letters which reproduce—does one know?—the general form of “I am… not he who is, nor he who exists, but… what I am.” That is to say, keep on searching!

You do not see there anything particularly specific… even though it deserves to be specified on another level for the reference that is made of it to the father… the God of the Jews, because in truth, the Tao is enunciated, as you know, in our time when Zen runs the streets—you must have picked it up somewhere—that “The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.” In any case, we are not here to amuse ourselves with those old jests. When I speak of mystics, I simply speak of the holes they encounter.

I speak of The Dark Night, for example, which proves that, as to what might be unifying in the relations of the creature to whatever it may be, there can always be found—a stumbling block—even with the most subtle and rigorous of methods.

The mystics, all things considered—that is, I must also say, the only point by which they interest me. I am not presenting to you, as I believe you clearly perceive, the sexual act as some kind of quote-unquote “mystical theory”—one speaks of mystics to signal that they are less stupid than philosophers, just as the ill are less stupid than psychoanalysts.

This is due solely to this: it is one of the renewed alternatives of what I have already several times given as the formula of alienation: “Your money or your life?”, “Liberty or death?”, “Stupidity or villainy?”, for instance. There is no choice! When the question “Stupidity or villainy?” arises—at least at the level of philosophers or psychoanalysts—it is always stupidity that wins; there is no way to choose villainy.

In short, to take this field which lies between little (a) and the big A, you see that I have drawn two lines:

—one, composed of a dotted line then a solid line, made simply to mark that little (a) equals, in its first part, what little (a) is externally, and that there remains this residue of a².
—But I have drawn a second line, a second line which may well be the only one, to indicate to us that this point, this field, is to be considered—I say for us, analysts—as being in its entirety something at least suspect of participating in the function of the hole.

And I cannot do otherwise—if only out of gratitude for the contribution that Mr. GREEN was kind enough to bring, I believe two sessions ago, to my work—than to introduce here—why not?—the reference he saw fit to attach to it. It is the one he introduced, I must say—do not get carried away—very remarkably, in the form of that cauldron, that cauldron of the Id, which he went and extracted from where enough of us already know it, around the 31st or 32nd of Freud’s New Introductory Lectures.

The cauldron, in a certain image one might form of it, is expressed something like this: “It’s boiling in there.” In truth, in Freud’s text, it is indeed that which is at stake. With what irony Freud could let such images pass—that is something, of course, that would need to be studied. It is not within our reach right now. One would first have to undertake—well…—a thorough scouring operation, as I have often noted, of what covers the text: the oil slick…

Let us not say too much about that, except after all this: that one of the most essential things to distinguish—I would like you to retain the formula—is the difference between rot and shit. Failing to make an exact distinction, one does not realize, for example, that what FREUD designates is that something rotten in jouissance.

And it is not I who invent this term: […] it already circulates in courtly literature, it is the poetic vocabulary used in the romances of the Round Table, and we see it taken up—we find our treasures where they are—under the pen of that old reactionary T.S. ELIOT, in the title The Waste Land. Read The Waste Land, it’s still a very good read, and I must say, quite entertaining, if less clear than HEIDEGGER! He knows very well what he is talking about!

It is nothing other, from beginning to end, than the sexual relation! One of the most useful things would be, obviously, to decant this field of rot, of the shitty coaltar—I say: properly speaking, given the privileged function played in this operation by the anal object—with which current psychoanalytic theory covers it.

So, in place of what I had defined as the Es of grammar—you will see later what grammar is at issue—Mr. GREEN reminded me that I must not forget the existence of the cauldron. Cauldron, inasmuch as it goes “bubbling, bubbling, bubbling, psshhh…” The question is essential and in truth I pay full tribute to him, that he took a path very close to mine, immediately making function what he modestly called the association of ideas, and which was the reference to the Witz, to remind us of the other use FREUD makes of the cauldron, namely that, concerning this famous cauldron we are accused of having returned with a hole in it, the exemplary subject commonly replies:

—firstly, he did not borrow it,
—secondly, that it was already pierced,
—and thirdly, that he returned it intact.

A formula which certainly has all its value of irony and of Witz, but which is here particularly exemplary when it concerns the function of analysts, because the use that analysts make of that place—which I willingly concede must be represented by something like a cauldron—on the condition, precisely, of knowing that it is a pierced cauldron, that it is therefore entirely vain to borrow it to make jam in, and that in any case we do not borrow it.

The whole of analytic technique, as it is wrongly not noticed, consists precisely in leaving that place of the cauldron empty. As far as I know, people don’t make love in the analyst’s office! It is precisely because this place and what is to be measured in it is operated upon from what is there, on the right and on the left, from little (a) and from big A, that we might perhaps say something about it.

So, I would say that these three amusing references to the embarrassment of the debtor of the cauldron do nothing but cover, on the part of the analysts, a triple refusal to recognize what is precisely at stake:

—Firstly, that they did not borrow the cauldron: they deny this “not” and imagine that they actually did borrow it.
—Secondly, it seems they want to forget, as long as they can, that—as they very well know—the cauldron is pierced, and that to promise to return it intact is something quite adventurous.
—It is only from there that one can begin to realize what is at stake at the level of the phenomena which are these phenomena of truth, that I have tried to pinpoint in the formula: “Me, truth, I speak.”

This is true, whatever psychoanalysts may think of it. Even if they wish to think something that does not force them to plug their ears to the words of truth. Here, what does the very element of psychoanalytic theory teach us, if not that to access the sexual act is to access a guilty jouissance, even and especially if it is innocent!

Full jouissance, that of the king of Thebes and of the savior of the people, of the one who raises the fallen scepter no one knows how, is without descendants—why?—We have forgotten. In short, this jouissance which covers—what?—the rot, that which finally explodes in the plague. Yes, King OEDIPUS accomplished the sexual act, the king reigned.

Rest assured, moreover, it is a myth. It is a myth, like almost all the other myths of Greek mythology; there are other ways to accomplish the sexual act: they generally find their sanction in the underworld. That of ŒDIPUS is the most “human,” as we say today, that is, in a term for which there is not quite an equivalent in Greek, even though the wardrobe of humanism is to be found there.

What ocean of feminine jouissance—I ask you—must it have taken for the ship of ŒDIPUS to stay afloat without sinking, until the plague finally revealed what the sea of his happiness was made of? This last sentence may seem enigmatic to you. That is because there is, in fact, a need to preserve here the character of enigma that a certain knowledge must properly retain, the one that concerns the span I marked here by the hole.

Likewise, there is no possible entry into this field without the crossing of the enigma. That is, as you know, what the myth of ŒDIPUS designates. Without the notion that this knowledge—which is represented only by the enigma, whether or not it is reasoned—that this knowledge, I say, is intolerable to truth—for the SPHINX is what appears each time truth is at stake—truth throws itself into the abyss when ŒDIPUS solves the enigma. Which means that he shows there—properly—the kind of superiority, of ὕβρις [hubris], as it was called, that truth cannot bear. What does that mean?

—It means jouissance insofar as it is at the principle of truth.
—It means what is articulated at the place of the Other, so that jouissance—of which we must know where it is—emerges as questioning in the name of truth.

And it must indeed be in that place in order to question—I mean: at the place of the Other—for one does not question from elsewhere. And this indicates to you that the place I introduced as the place where the discourse of truth is inscribed is certainly not—whatever this or that person might have understood—that kind of place the STOICS called incorporeal. I will have to speak of what it is, namely precisely: that it is the body. That is not where I will venture today, in any case. ŒDIPUS knew a thing or two about what was posed to him as a question, and the form of that question ought, in our turn, to engage our insight.

Doesn’t the simplistic figure of the answer deceive us, for centuries now, with: its four paws, its two legs, and then the cane of the decrepit added at the end? Is there not in these numbers something else, whose formula we might better find by following what the function of the object little (a) will indicate to us?

Knowledge is thus necessary for the institution of the sexual act. And that is what the myth of ŒDIPUS says.

Just imagine, then, what power of concealment JOCASTA had to deploy, since along the paths of the encounter, of τύχη [tukhé], which is the one you only meet once in a lifetime, the only one that can lead to happiness, since ŒDIPUS could fail to know the truth sooner.

For indeed, all those years that his happiness would last, whether he made love at night in bed or during the day, never, never, did ŒDIPUS ever have to recall that strange scuffle that occurred at the crossroads with that old man who succumbed there? And furthermore, the servant who survived it, and who, when he saw ŒDIPUS ascend to the throne, took off!

Come on now, come on… Doesn’t this whole story, this flight of all memory, this impossibility of encountering it, still seem made to evoke something for us? And besides, if SOPHOCLES gives us the whole story of the servant, to prevent us from thinking about the fact that JOCASTA, at the very least, could not not have known, he still couldn’t avoid—here, I brought it to you—having JOCASTA cry out at the moment she tells him to stop:

—“For your own good, I give you the wisest advice.”
—“I’m beginning to have enough!” replies ŒDIPUS.
—“Unfortunate one, may you never know who you are!”

She knows it, she knows it of course already. And that is why she kills herself—for having caused the downfall of her son. But what is JOCASTA? Well then, why not the lie incarnate in what pertains to the sexual act? Even if no one until now has seen it or said it, it is a place to which one only gains access by having set aside the truth of jouissance. Truth cannot be heard there, for if it does make itself heard, everything collapses and the desert emerges. And yet it is a place usually populated, as you know—deserts!

Namely, that field x into which only our measurements penetrate. Normally it’s swarming with the insane: masochists, hermits, devils, ghosts, empuses and larvae. It is enough that one begins to preach there, namely the psychoanalytic prattle, for all that world to clear out! That is what’s at stake. Where, then, to speak of it?

Well, from where all, in good faith, make jouissance enter. For jouissance—as I have told you—is not there! What is there is the value of jouissance. But this is said very well in FREUD, precisely through myth, when it reveals the final meaning of the Oedipus myth: guilty jouissance, rotten jouissance, no doubt. But that still says nothing if one does not introduce the function of the value of jouissance, that is, of what transforms it into something of another order.

The Master, from the myth that he—FREUD—fashions, what is his jouissance? He enjoys, so they say, all women. And what does that mean? Is there not some enigma there? Those two sides of the meaning of the word “to enjoy” that I spoke to you about last time, subjective and objective sides:
—is he the one who enjoys by essence? But then, all the objects are, in some sense, slipping out of the field.
—or in what he enjoys, is what matters the jouissance of the object, namely that of the woman?

This is not said; it slips away for the simple reason that it is myth, that the point is to designate in this place, in this field, where the original function of an absolute jouissance—which the myth says clearly enough—only functions when it is a killed jouissance, or if you prefer, an aseptic jouissance. Or again, to use a word that, reading Mr. DAUZAT or Mr. LE BIDOIS, I have learned the Canadians employ, they use the word can, which as you know is a jerrycan for example, and they use the word canned. That’s some good Franglais, once again! A “canned” jouissance—that is what FREUD, in the myth… in the myth of the primal father and his murder… points out to us as being the original function without which we cannot even begin to conceive what is now going to be our problem.

Namely, what operates in the mechanisms by which the functions of jouissance are exchanged, economized, and transferred as we must confront them in psychoanalytic experience.

It is following what I have laid out for you today that I believe I am bringing to a close—though still preparatory—that toward which we shall move forward starting from May 10.