🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I will first inform you, much to my regret, that I will not be giving this course, or seminar, as you prefer to call it, next Wednesday. The reason being that there is a strike, which I personally intend to respect, in addition to the inconvenience we would face from the announcement that all electricity will be cut off—something I have worked hard to make function here for your benefit and mine, which would be rendered useless.

So, it will have to be rescheduled before the end of this session, so that people arriving late will not be unaware that there will be no upcoming seminar—as we call it—until fifteen days from now. Today is, I believe, May 10, which makes it the 24th. See you on the 24th.

Does anyone have any remarks to make about what I communicated to you in the last session? Or has anyone had any thoughts particularly involving—let me clarify—what I wrote on the board?

Apparently not… And I don’t know whether to breathe a sigh of relief or not!… Is it because of the deep distraction with which what I write is received? But in any case, I got extremely anxious upon returning home, for having written on the board the formula for little(a), of course, (–1)/2, and then, right after that, the value of: 2.236… well, and something more.

Then I made a few jokes about the table of logarithms. But I certainly should have specified to you that what I was writing there was not the value of little(a), but of .

Let no one think that little(a) is two point something! Because on the contrary, little(a) is less than one. It’s a figure that is a little above six tenths, which is not useless to know for when you want to mark these lengths or these lines I use, and place the length of little(a) next to the length defined to be equivalent to one in an approximately accurate proportion.

The second mistake I made was that after a long series of equalities, namely the one written as: 1+a/1, for example, I ended up writing at the end: equals little(a), whereas it should have been 1. Well, anyway… for those who copied these formulas, let them correct them!

We continue to advance in our subject of this year and, of course, this logic that I am elaborating before you under the name of a logic of fantasy, toward an end that I have defined several times and which finally must come to be applied. To be applied to something which can only be, of course, a work of filtering or even properly speaking of critique, against what is put forward at a certain level of experience and in a theoretical form which, at times, proves defective.

To that end, I have opened—or rather reopened—for your use, a work that struck me as important at the time it appeared, and it is accessible to you all since it was translated into French under the title La névrose de base, by someone who certainly lacks neither talent nor analytical insight and who is called Mr. BERGLER. It is a work I recommend to you—since you will have another fifteen days ahead—as an example, an occasional support for what our work here can serve.

By recommending it to you as an example, of course, I do not mean as a model… it is nonetheless, as I have already said, a work of great merit… it is certainly not by these paths that we will in any way come to illuminate the nature of neurosis, but this does not mean that some essential mechanism is not glimpsed there.

The notions of structure that are advanced here… and which, moreover, in the sense in which I am currently using the word, are not the exclusive privilege of this author… what is usually expressed through the notion of layers… which for the same reason are arranged: superficial or deep, or conversely: deep or superficial… those, namely, from which the author starts, namely that in the cases he considers… but it must also be added that he considers them to be by far the most numerous in neurosis… the cases defined, in his view, by what he calls “oral regression,” are defined by something which, after all, I have no reason—since it is summarized in a few lines—not to borrow directly from his text… That will be safer:

“Oral neurotics constantly bring forth the situation of the triple mechanism of orality as follows: First: I will create for myself the masochistic desire to be rejected by my mother…”

Can someone write [on the board]:

1. “to be rejected,”

right up in the corner, top right. Muriel? If you would be so kind, you’d be doing me a favor. Take those big things [the markers] that are there for that.

“Secondly: I will not be… Let me finish the first paragraph—I will create for myself the masochistic desire—so—to be rejected by my mother, by creating or distorting situations in which some substitute for the pre-Oedipal image of my mother will refuse my desires.”

This is the deepest layer, the one whose access is the most difficult, the one against whose revelation the subject will defend himself the most forcefully and for the longest time. I say this for the most novice listeners in this room.

“Secondly: I will not be aware of my desire to be rejected and of the fact that I am the author of this rejection. I will only see that I am right to defend myself, that my indignation is well justified, as is the pseudo-aggressiveness I display in the face of these refusals.”

2. Pseudo-aggressiveness.

Write only these words [on the board], please.

“Thirdly, after which I will pity myself on the grounds that such an ‘injustice’—in quotation marks—can only happen to me, and I will once again enjoy a masochistic pleasure.”

I will skip what BERGLER adds to this, what he calls “the clinical point of view,” a peculiar differentiation, moreover, that he makes between this which he considers as summarizing the genesis of the disorder—the genetic element—and this form or clinical aspect defined for him by the intervention of a superego, whose vigilance consists precisely in maintaining the presence of the element which he here designates as masochistic, as an element that is always active in sustaining the defense.

This second point of view is in itself debatable, and I will not address it today. What I am advancing today on this subject is this: that nowhere is articulated in what way this… which, for the rest, is accurate: that in the oral position the subject, let’s say, wants to be refused… why it is not true to say that the oral drive consists in wanting to obtain, namely the breast.

If the observation is grounded in its radical position, at no point in BERGLER’s work is there any account, in any way, of what this means in regard to a drive defined as oral, and why—in a sense from the start—what seems to be its, let’s say, natural tendency is thus reversed. Yet this is an important point in that, precisely, it is from its natural position that the subject will argue in order to sustain this aggressiveness which BERGLER, quite rightly, labels “pseudo,” because it is not genuine. This, of course, leaves open the question of what is at stake at the level of an aggressiveness that would not be “pseudo.”

Since, on this topic, I have introduced a register which is properly that of narcissism… equivalent to what, in the ordinarily accepted theory, is called “secondary narcissism”… since I have identified aggressiveness as its constitutive dimension and, in this sense, as distinct from pure and simple aggression, we find ourselves here in a range of notions: — from that crude one of aggression, which is suitable in almost no case, — when it comes to neurotic phenomena: that of narcissistic aggressiveness, — finally to this pseudo-aggressiveness that BERGLER specifies as arising, at a certain level, from oral neurosis. I am merely indicating these distinctions, without yet giving them their full development.

In any case, the question arises of what should be maintained as the status, up to now defined as “aggressive,” of a certain moment of the oral drive and why, in oral neurosis, this emphasis on “being refused” is posed by BERGLER as being the most radical.

The sole scope of my remark is not to decide on the facts… besides, of course, that to decide on them would imply trying to determine what he is talking about, namely which neurosis, at what moment of his approach… but about this, which is missing in a theoretical text, namely whether one should not reflect, precisely here, at the point where things come to a stop, on what the term “being refused” means and why it is relevant: — “being refused” suggests a questioning suspension. — “being refused” in what respect? — “being refused” as what?

After all, it is not for us—supposing ourselves at the threshold of analytic theory—something new, what occurs when we present ourselves in a relationship, for example, that one might call “intersubjective.”

You know that in this regard, what has been advanced in a certain mode of thought, which is the Hegelian one—from which SARTRE himself, separating a branch, highlighted the emphasis it can take at a certain level: the one that has been characterized as the “radical and mutual exclusion of consciousnesses,” of the incompatible nature of their coexistence, of this “either him or me” that arises as soon as the dimension of the subject properly appears.

This is also enough to show how much this emphasis falls under the scope of the criticisms that can be made against the genesis originally taken from “the struggle to the death,” a “struggle to the death” which takes its status from that radical conception of the subject as absolutely autonomous, as Selbstbewusstsein. Is it something of this order that is at stake? It certainly doesn’t seem so, since everything that analytic experience brings us concerning the so-called oral stage involves quite different dimensions, and namely, that bodily dimension of oral aggressiveness, of the need to bite and the fear of being devoured.

Is “being refused,” then, to be taken on this occasion as concerning the object? In truth, one could easily see the justification emerge in this: that “being refused” would be, in this register, properly speaking, saving oneself from the engulfment by the maternal partner. It would perhaps also be a bit too simple to answer the question of the status of “being refused” in this way.

And to say that it is too simple is sufficiently emphasized by this—this, twice repeated in the lines I’ve just read to you from BERGLER—which associates with this oral neurosis, as being essential to it, the dimension of masochism.

The “being refused” in question is a refusal of defeat, is a “humiliating refusal,” the author also writes elsewhere, and it is in this that he allows himself to introduce the label of masochism, which he qualifies as “psychic masochism” on this occasion. Thus consecrating, in a way, a vulgar usage of the term masochism, which I do not deny may have, in certain texts of FREUD, some pretext for its introduction, but which, extended and taken in this usage where it is now increasingly common, is, properly speaking, ruinous. The allusion to the reference to the object, at the level of this refusal, is here the only thing that could justify the introduction of the dimension of masochism at this level.

It is inaccurate to say that what characterizes masochism is the painful aspect, assumed as such, in a situation. Approaching things from this angle results in the abuse—some people do it—of making the sadomasochistic dimension the essential register, for example, of the entire analytic relationship. There is a true perversion here, as much of FREUD’s thought as of the theory and the practice. And this is, properly speaking, untenable, so much is the dimension of masochism precisely defined, no doubt by the fact that the subject assumes a position of “object,” in the most emphasized sense we give to the word “object,” to define it as this effect of fall and waste, of remainder from the advent of subjectivity.

The fact that the masochist establishes a situation arranged in advance and arranged in its details, which may go as far as making him stay under a table, in the position of a dog: this is part of a staging, a scenario, that has its meaning and its benefit and which, unquestionably, is at the origin of a gain of jouissance, whatever note we may add to it or not, concerning the maintenance, respect, and integrity of the pleasure principle.

That this jouissance is closely linked to a maneuver of the Other, I would say, which most commonly expresses itself in the form of a contract… when I say “contract,” I mean: a written contract… of something that dictates just as much to the Other—and much more to the Other than to the masochist himself—his entire conduct. It is this that must instruct us, concerning the relation that gives its specificity, its originality, to masochistic perversion, which is highly apt to illuminate for us, down to its core, the part played in it by the Other in the sense in which I understand this term. I mean: — the Other with a capital O, — the Other: the place where is deployed, on the occasion, a speech that is a speech of contract.

To reduce the use of the term “masochistic,” after this, to something that presents itself simply as an exception, an aberration, in access to the most basic pleasure, is something of a kind to generate all sorts of abuses.

Of which the first—the first!—is this, for which, my God, I do not believe I am using a term too strong nor inappropriate in pointing out in the lines of BERGLER—from one end to the other of this remarkable book, filled with very detailed and all very instructive observations—yet pointing out this something I would call “an exasperation” that is not far from constituting a mean-spirited attitude toward the patient, all these people he calls—he calls them, as if it were a great fault of theirs—“collectors of injustices”! As if, after all, we were in a world where justice is such an ordinary state that one must really go out of one’s way to have something to complain about!

These collectors of injustices in whom he certainly detects their most secret operation in the fact of being rejected. But after all, can we not ourselves suggest, against BERGLER, the idea that in certain cases, after all, being rejected… as we have, moreover, sufficiently shown… in fantasies, it is something else: I am speaking here of reality… perhaps it is better, from time to time, to be rejected than to be accepted too quickly! The encounter one may have with such and such a person who is eager to adopt you is not always… the best solution is not always not to escape it!

Why this partiality which, in a sense, implies a serene… that it would be normal, in the order, in the nature of things, in their proper direction, always to do everything necessary to be accepted? This supposes that “being accepted” always means being accepted at a benevolent table. This, assuredly, is not without being somewhat unsettling and without occasionally seeming to us to point toward noticing that such and such a thing that may be happening in the world, for example, quite simply for now in a certain small district of Southwest Asia, is that… what is it about?

This is about convincing certain people that they are quite wrong not to want to be admitted to the benefits of capitalism! They prefer to be rejected! It is from that point on, it seems, that questions should be raised about certain meanings. And namely this one, for example, which would show us… which would no doubt show us, but it is not today that I will take even the first steps in that direction… that if Freud wrote somewhere that “anatomy is destiny,” there may come a time when, once we have returned to a sound perception of what Freud revealed to us, we will say—not even that “politics is the unconscious”—but, quite simply: the unconscious is politics! I mean that what binds men together, what opposes them, is precisely to be motivated by what we are currently trying to articulate in terms of logic.

Because it is for lack of this logical articulation that these slippages can occur, which make it so that before realizing that in order to be rejected—for “being rejected” to be essential as a dimension for the neurotic—this is needed in any case: that he offers himself.

As I wrote somewhere: just as much the neurotic as what we ourselves do—and with good reason, since these are the paths we follow—it consists precisely, with offering, in trying to make a demand, and clearly such an operation, neither in neurosis nor in the analytic cure, always succeeds, especially if it is carried out clumsily.

This, too, by the way, is of a nature… because no analytic discourse is without offering us the occasion—by interrogating it—the occasion to realize what it implies in a certain innocent trajectory, where it never knows itself—I mean: this analytic discourse—how far it goes in what it articulates… this would indeed allow us to realize that if the key to the neurotic position lies in that close relation to the demand of the Other, inasmuch as he [the neurotic] tries to bring it forth, it is precisely, as I just said, because he offers himself and thus we see here the fantasmatic and therefore obsolete character of that myth, of that myth introduced by analytic sermonizing, and which is called oblative love. It is a neurotic’s myth.

But what motivates these needs which are expressed in these paradoxical and always so poorly defined ways—if they are related purely and simply to the benefit—gained or not as a result—within reality, —if this first essential step is omitted and only in the light of which—I mean: the step—what results in the real can be judged? It is the logical articulation of the position—neurotic in the present case, and equally of all others. Without a logical articulation that does not involve any prejudice as to what should be wished for the subject: what do you know about that? —What do you know, if the need… if the subject needs to marry this person or that? —And if he missed his marriage at such and such a turn, what if that was, for him, a stroke of luck? —What business is that of yours, in other words?

Whereas the only thing you have to deal with is the logical structure of what is at stake, of what is specifically at stake in the case of a position that might be called the desire to be rejected. You first have to understand what the subject, at that level, is pursuing: what is, for the neurotic, the necessity and perhaps the benefit of being rejected?

And to attach to it, moreover, the term “masochistic” is simply, on this occasion, to introduce a pejorative note, which is immediately followed—as I pointed out earlier—by a directive attitude from the analyst that may, on occasion, go so far as to become persecutory.

That is why it is absolutely necessary to take things up again as I intend to do this year and, since we are here, to recall that if I started this year from the sexual act in its structure as act, it is in relation to this: that the subject comes into being only through the relation of one signifier to another signifier and that this requires—I mean of these signifiers—material. To perform an act is to introduce that relation of signifiers whereby the conjuncture is consecrated as significant, that is to say, as an occasion for thought.

Emphasis is placed on the mastery of the situation because it is imagined that it is will that presides over the fort-da, for example—the famous one—of the child’s game. It is not the active side of motor activity that is the essential dimension here. The active side of motor activity is deployed here only within the dimension of play, p-l-a-y.

It is its logical structure that distinguishes this appearance of the fort-da, taken as exemplary and now turned into a “cliché.” It is because it is the first thematization in signifying terms—in the form of phonemic opposition—of a certain situation, which one can qualify as active, but only in the sense that from now on we will only call it “active” if there is, in the sense I have defined it, the structure of the act, the bringing into question of the act in that so-distorted relation: that is excluded, cast into shadow!

What is the relation between two beings belonging to two classes, which are definitive for civil status and for the conscription board, but which our experience has precisely taught us to see as no longer at all self-evident in family life, for example, and quite confused in secret life… in other words, what defines man and woman.

It is theory, it is analytic experience, that here brings the notion of “satisfaction.” I mean as essential to that act. Satisfaction—in the text of FREUD, Befriedigung—which introduces the notion of a peace that follows. Is this satisfaction the satisfaction of discharge, of detumescence? A simple satisfaction in appearance and quite fit to be received.

Nevertheless, it is clear that everything we develop—in more or less proper or improper terms—implies that satisfaction… since we distinguish, for example, that which would be of the pre-genital order from that which is genital… implies another dimension: the one involved precisely in that very difference. That a term like “object relation” has imposed itself here is certainly self-evident. Which does not take away from the ridiculous nature of what happens when one tries to classify under that term, to vary it, to grade it, according to the greater or lesser ease with which the relation is established.

Because we are dealing with nothing else when we distinguish the genital relation by these two traits: — on the one hand, the so-called “tenderness,” which one could easily, readily—I pride myself on doing so—argue is in no case other than the reversal of contempt, — and on the other hand, what is emphasized in it about the supposed essence of rupture, even of mourning.

Thus, the progress of the relation—I mean: the “sexual relation,” in quotation marks—insofar as it becomes genital, would be that one would feel all the more at ease thinking about the partner: “You can drop dead!”

Let’s approach things again from another level of certainty: what does the sexual act satisfy? It is quite evident at first that one can legitimately answer, simply: pleasure. I know of only one register in which that answer is fully tenable: it is an ascetic level, historically held by DIOGENES, who made the public gesture of masturbation as the sign of that theoretical assertion of a hedonism called—due precisely to that mode of expression—“cynical,” and which can be considered as a treatment, Behandlung, a medical treatment of desire: it does not come without a certain price.

Since earlier I introduced the political dimension—a curious and very striking thing: this philosophical type excludes himself, as is seen not only in the anecdotes but in the character’s position in his barrel—even if he had a visitor like ALEXANDER—who pays with an exclusion from the dimension of the city. I repeat: there is something here one would be wrong to mock; it is, properly speaking, an ascetic side, a way of life. It is probably not as common as it seems. I can say nothing about it: I haven’t tried.

— Oh! someone exclaims at the back of the room. — Can you hear or not? You can’t hear? Then what’s the use of all this stuff? [Lacan points to the sound equipment] — Oh, come on! someone else says. [Laughter]

So, one must not forget this place of pleasure, of the slightest… tension. Fine. Only it’s clear that this place is not sufficient, that many other modes, that a very wide variety of modes, appear, of satisfaction at the level of the search implied by the sexual act. Our thesis—the one embodied by this year’s course—is this: the impossibility of grasping the whole of these modes outside of a logical scrutiny, the only one capable of gathering, in both variety and scope, the different modes of this satisfaction. The whole in question establishes what we shall call—for now and with reservation—a masculine being and a feminine being, in that founding act we evoked at the beginning of our discourse this year, in calling it the sexual act.

If I said that “there is no sexual act,” it is in the sense that this act would unite, under a form of simple distribution, the one evoked in technique—for example in common mechanical techniques, such as in locksmithing—by the designation of a “male part” or a “female part.” This simple distribution would constitute the inaugural pact by which subjectivity would be engendered as such: male or female.

I stated, in its time and place, the famous “You are my wife.” Well, it’s quite clear that it’s not enough for me to say it for me to remain her man. But anyway, even if it were enough, it would solve nothing! I establish myself as “her something.” It is a vow of belonging which is heavy with a pact, at the very least a pact of preference.

That situates absolutely nothing of the man or the woman. At most one can say they are two opposing terms and that it is essential there be two, but what each is—or neither—is entirely excluded from being grounded in speech.

As for what concerns union, marital if you like, or any other: that a certain dimension carries it to the level of sacrament changes absolutely nothing… absolutely nothing about what is at stake, namely: the being of the man or the woman.

It leaves in particular so completely aside the category of femininity—since I used the example of “You are my wife”—that it is never a bad thing to refer to this example, which comes from the very master of psychoanalysis, of whom one can say that for him this pact was extraordinarily prevailing… the thing struck all who approached him: uxorious, as they say in English, uxorieux, as Jones calls him, following many others… but of whom, after all, it is no mystery either that his thinking stumbled until the end on the theme: “What does a woman want?” Which comes down to saying: “What is it to be a woman?”

I must also add that since then, 67 years of psychoanalytic surgery have not made us know more about what is at stake in feminine jouissance, even though of the woman or of the mother—we’re never quite sure how to phrase it—we speak constantly.

That is nonetheless something worth pointing out.

That is why it is important to recognize… and this heuristic diagram I gave you in the form of those three lines: of the little (a), of the One that follows—of the perforated One, and of the Other… simply reminds us of this, which is the common currency of what we articulate in the course of the day, namely that the sexual act implies a third element at every level.

Namely, for example:

– what is called the mother, the mother in the Oedipus complex, onto whom are hooked all the degradations of amorous life, in any case who remains ever present in desire for that reason

– or else the phallus insofar as it must be lacking in the one who has it, that is to say, in the man, insofar as the castration complex means something, something that has not yet at all been brought to light, since it implies that we must invent, in its regard, the scope of a special negation: for after all, if he does not have it—in the register and insofar as the sexual act may exist—that is not to say either that he loses it (the subject of this negation, I hope, can be addressed before the end of this year), that this phallus, moreover, becomes the being of the partner who does not have it.

It is here that we undoubtedly find the reason why ARISTOTLE, as I recalled last time, supposedly so bound to grammar—we are told—developed the range, the list, the catalog of the Categories: curiously, after having said everything: quality [ποιον: poion], quantity [ποσον: poson], when [ποτε: pote], where [που: pou], the what [το τι: to ti], and everything else in the shack, he did not breathe a word… even though the Greek language, like ours, is entirely subject to what PICHON calls “sexusemblance,” namely that there is le fauteuil and la photo… as, by the way—look, just for fun, try reversing the spelling, it will teach you a lot about a dimension quite hidden in the analytic relation: photeuil (p, h, o) and fauto (f, a, u), it’s very amusing… anyway, whatever the case, ARISTOTLE never thought to assert, concerning any being—which was just as pressing in his time as in ours—whether there might be a category of sex.

One of two things must be true: – either he was not as guided by grammar as is claimed, – or else there is, in that omission, some reason.

It is probably related to this: when I spoke earlier of being masculine or being feminine, there was a faulty usage there, namely that perhaps, being is—as PICHON again expresses it—“sexless,” that the το τί [to ti], the quiddity of sex, is perhaps lacking, that there is perhaps only the phallus. That would in any case explain many things.

In particular, this wild struggle that establishes itself around it and which assuredly gives us the visible, if not the ultimate, reason for what is called “the battle of the sexes”! Only, I believe again here, that the battle of the sexes is something upon which, moreover, History shows it is the most superficial psychoanalysts who have fixated.

Nevertheless, there remains a certain ἀλήθεια [alētheia]… to be taken in that sense, with the accent of Verborgenheit [hiddenness] that HEIDEGGER gives it… which may, properly speaking, be instituted with regard to what is at stake concerning the sexual act.

This is what justifies my use of this schema, which I emphasize in passing so as not to cause confusion with other things I’ve said in other contexts, and namely concerning the structure and function of the cut… about which I have sometimes told you that, as I symbolize it when I make it operate on what is called “the projective plane,” I claim not to be making a metaphor, but properly speaking, to be talking about the real support of what is at stake… which is of course not the same in this very simple little schema:

– of this One, which I rendered last time as “dotted” and “perforated,”
– of this Other,
– and of this little (a).

It is this very simple triplicity, around which a certain number of points can and must be developed, that we have to bring into relief in this regard, concerning what is at stake in relation to sex, all that pertains to the symptom, and of which, this year, I intend to lay out—certainly in a repeated manner, and I cannot repeat enough when it comes to new categories—repeat what will serve us as a foundation.

The One, to begin from the middle, is the most contentious. The One concerns this so-called sexual union, that is to say, the field where the question arises of whether the act of partition can occur that would be required by the distribution of functions defined as “male” and “female.”

We have already said, with the metaphor of the cauldron that I recalled last time, that there is—in any case here, provisionally—something we can designate as the presence of a gap, a hole if you prefer. There is something that does not hold, that does not go without saying, and which is precisely what I was recalling earlier: the abyss that separates every promotion, every proclamation of the male and female polarity, from everything experience gives us concerning the act that founds it.

I want to say here, for today, in the time allotted to me at noon, that it is from there, from this field One, from this fictive One, from this One to which an entire analytic theory clings—and of which you have heard me, repeatedly, denounce the fallacy—that it is important to assert that it is from there, from this field designated One, numbered One, not assumed as unifying—at least until we have demonstrated it—that it is from there that all truth speaks.

Insofar as for us analysts… and for many others, even before we came along—though not very long ago—for a mode of thought that we can, after all, call by its name: the Marxist turn… truth has no other form than the symptom. The symptom, that is, the signifiance of the discordances between the real and that for which it presents itself. Ideology, if you like, on one condition: that for this term, you go so far as to include perception itself.

Perception is the model of ideology. Since it is a sieve with respect to reality. And besides, why be surprised? Everything that has ever existed in the realm of ideologies, since the world has been full of philosophers, has after all always been constructed on an initial reflection that concerned perception.

Let me return to it: what FREUD calls “the river of filth,” concerning the vastest field of knowledge, all that absolutely overwhelming part of knowledge from which we are barely emerging, to pin it down with the term mystical knowledge: at the base of everything of that order that has manifested in the world, there is only the sexual act. The reverse of my formula: there is no such thing as the sexual act.

The Freudian position, it is entirely superfluous to claim any relation to it whatsoever, if it is not to take literally this: at the base of everything that has brought—my God—any satisfaction until now, knowledge… I say: knowledge, I pinned it as mystical to distinguish it from what has been born in our times in the form of science… of all that pertains to knowledge, at its principle, there is nothing but the sexual act.

To read in FREUD that there are desexualized functions in the psyche means—in FREUD—that one must look for sex at their origin. It does not mean that there is what is called in certain places, for political purposes, the famous “non-conflictual sphere,” for example: an ego more or less strong, more or less “autonomous,” that might have a more or less aseptic apprehension of reality.

To say that there are relations to truth—I say the truth—that the sexual act does not concern, is precisely what is not true. There are none! I apologize for these formulations, whose sharpness I suggest might be felt a little too harshly, but I’ve made the following observation to myself:

– first, that all this is implied in everything I have ever stated, insofar as I know what I’m saying.

– But also this remark: that the fact that I know what I’m saying, that’s not enough! It’s not enough for you to recognize it as such. Because, in the end, the only confirmation of “I know what I’m saying” is what I do not say! This is not my personal fate, it is the fate of all who know what they are saying.

That’s what makes communication very difficult. Either you know what you’re saying and you say it, but in many cases, it must be considered useless, because no one notices that the core of what you are trying to convey is precisely what you never say.

It is what others say that continues to make its noise and, even more so, that produces effects. That’s what forces us, from time to time—and even more often than our share—to get to work sweeping up. Once you’ve engaged on that path, there is no reason to ever stop.

There once was, long ago, a man named HERCULES who apparently completed his work in the stables of a man named AUGEAS. That is the only case I know of cleaning stables, at least when it comes to a certain domain!

There is only one domain, it seems—and I’m not even sure of that—that has no relation to the sexual act insofar as it concerns truth: mathematics, at the point where it merges with logic. But I believe that this is what allowed RUSSELL to say that one never really knows whether what is proposed there is true. I don’t mean “truly true,” simply true. In fact, it is true based on a definitional position of truth: if such and such axioms are true, then a system develops, which must be judged as to whether it is or is not consistent.

What is the relation of this to what I have just said, namely to truth, insofar as it would require the presence, the questioning as such, of the sexual act? Well, even after having said that, I am not even sure that this marvelous, this sublime modern unfolding of logical mathematics, or mathematical logic, is entirely unrelated to the suspension of whether or not there is a sexual act.

It would suffice for me to hear the lament of a CANTOR, for it is in the form of a lament that, at a certain moment in his life, he states that one does not know—that the great difficulty, the great risk of mathematics is that it is the place of freedom. We know that CANTOR paid dearly for that freedom!

So the formula that “truth concerns the real insofar as we are engaged in it by the sexual act”… by that sexual act of which I first maintain that we are not even sure it exists, though it is the only thing that concerns truth… this formula seems to me the most accurate, at the point where we now arrive.

So the symptom—every symptom—is tied up in this place of the pierced One. And it is in this that it always contains—however surprising that may seem to us—its face of satisfaction… I say: of the symptom.

Sexual truth is demanding, and it is better to satisfy it a bit more than not enough. From the point of view of satisfaction, a symptom, in this respect, we can conceive as more satisfying than the reading of a detective novel. There is more of a relation between a symptom and the sexual act than between truth and the fundamental “I don’t think,” of which I reminded you at the beginning of these reflections, in which man alienates his “I am not,” which is too little bearable.

Compared to which, our earlier alibi of “being rejected,” although not so pleasant in itself, may seem more bearable. So? That’s it for now with the One. It had to be stated.

Let us now turn to the Other, as the place where the signifier is situated. Because I have not yet told you that this is where the signifier is: – because the signifier exists only as repetition, – because it is the signifier that brings forth the thing that is at stake as true.

At the origin, one does not know where it comes from. It is nothing—as I told you last time—but this mark that is also a cut, from which truth may arise.

The Other is the reservoir of material, for the act. The material accumulates, very probably because the act is impossible. When I say that, I do not mean that it does not exist. That’s not enough to say it, since impossibility is simply the real, pure real. The definition of the possible always requires a first symbolization. If you exclude that symbolization, this formula will appear much more natural to you: “The impossible is the real.”

It is a fact: the possibility of the sexual act has not been proven in any formal system. You see I insist, right? I’m coming back to it! What does it prove, that we cannot prove it, now: – that we know very well that “non-computability,” even “non-decidability,” do not at all imply “irrationality,” – that we define, we delineate perfectly well, we write entire volumes on this domain of the status of non-decidability, and that we can perfectly define it logically.

At this point, then, what is it? What is this Other, the great There, with a capital O? What is its substance, eh?

I have been told… though in truth, I must say I let myself be told less and less, since it is no longer heard… well, I no longer hear it: it no longer reaches my ears… I was told for a time that I was camouflaging under this place of the Other what is pleasantly called—and after all, why not—the Spirit. The annoying thing is that it’s false.

The Other, in the end, and if you have not yet guessed, the Other, there, as it is written, is the body! Why would something like a volume or an object, as subject to the laws of motion, in general, be called a body? Why would we speak of the fall of bodies? What a curious extension of the word “body”!

What relation is there between a small ball falling from the Tower of Pisa and the body that is ours, if not starting from this: that it is first the body, our presence as an animal body, that is the first place to bear inscriptions, the first signifier, as everything in our experience tends to suggest—except, of course, that we always dramatize things: when one speaks of a wound, one adds “narcissistic,” and immediately thinks that it must greatly bother the subject, who naturally is an idiot!

It doesn’t occur to anyone that the interest of the wound lies in the scar. Reading the Bible could serve as a reminder of this, with the reeds placed at the bottom of the stream where Jacob’s flocks graze
– that the various methods of imposing a mark on the body date back quite far and are absolutely radical,
– that if one does not begin with the idea that the hysterical symptom, in its simplest form, that of the rhagade, is not to be considered a mystery, but rather as the very principle of all signifying possibility, there is no need to rack one’s brains,
– that the body is made to register something that one calls “the mark”—this would save many from much trouble and from repeating many foolish things.

The body is made to be marked. It always has been. And the very first beginning of the gesture of love is always, just a little bit, to more or less sketch out this gesture. There!

That being said, what is the first effect, the most radical effect of this irruption of the 1 insofar as it represents the sexual act at the level of the body? Well, it is what gives us an advantage over a certain number of dialogued speculations on the relation between the 1 and the multiple. [Cf. Plato’s Dialogues: Parmenides, Timaeus…] We, we know that it’s not at all as dialectical as that: when this 1 irrupts into the field of the Other, that is to say, at the level of the body, the body falls into pieces.

The fragmented body: this is what our experience shows us to exist at the origin of subjectivity. The child dreams of dismemberment; he breaks apart the beautiful unity of the empire of the maternal body. And what he feels as a threat is being torn apart by it.

It is not enough to discover these things and to explain them by a little mechanism, a little ball game [Fort-Da]: aggression reflects, reflects again, returns, rebounds! What started it?

Before that, it might be useful to suspend its function—of this fragmented body—namely the only approach through which it has interested us in fact, namely its relation to what truth might be, insofar as truth itself is suspended from ἀλήθεια [alētheia] and Verborgenheit [concealment], from the concealed character of the sexual act.

From there, of course, the notion of Ἔρως [Eros] in the form I recently mocked… of being the force that would unite by an irresistible attraction all the cells and organs gathered in our skin sack: a conception at the very least mystical, for they put up no resistance at all when one extracts them, and the rest fares no worse! …it is clearly a compensatory fantasy for the terrors linked to that Orphic fantasy I just described to you.

Moreover, it is not at all explanatory. Because it is not enough that terror exists for it to explain anything. Rather, it is the terror that should be explained, in order to better find our way in the direction of what I call a logically “consistent system,” because indeed we must now reach this point: why is there this Other, with a capital O?

What is this position of that strange double assumed—take note—by the simple, for the Other—with a capital O—is not two. This position, then, of double assumed by the simple, when it comes to explaining that curious One that, for its part, is tied in the beast with two backs, in other words in the embrace of two bodies.

Because that is what it is about; it is not about that odd 1 that is, itself, the Other. Even stranger, there is between them—I mean: this field of the One, this field of the Other—no link, but on the contrary, a total disjunction. That is even why the Other is also the unconscious, that is, the symptom without its meaning, deprived of its truth, but on the other hand increasingly charged with what it contains as knowing. That which cuts the One off from the Other is very precisely what constitutes the subject.

There is no subject of truth, except through the act in general, of the act that perhaps cannot exist as sexual act. This is very specifically Cartesian: the subject knows nothing of himself, except that he doubts. Doubt… doubt, as says the jealous man who has just seen, through the keyhole, a rear end in confrontation with legs he knows well.

Precisely if it is not God and his soul that are the foundation of Descartes’ subject, its incompatibility with extension is not a sufficient reason to identify body with extension, but its exclusion from subject is, on the other hand, thereby founded to approach it by the path I am presenting to you. The question of its intimate union with the body—I mean of the subject, not of the soul—is no longer a question.

It suffices to reflect on this: that there is—watch out now, those who aren’t used to this [laughter]—with regard to the signifier, that is to say to structure, no other support—even of a surface, for example—than the hole it constitutes by its edge: that alone defines it. Elevate things by one degree, take things to the level of volume: there is no other support of the body than the cut that governs its segmentation. These are topological truths, of which I will not here determine whether or not they bear a relation to the sexual act.

But any possible elaboration of what is called “an algebra of edges” requires this, which gives us the image of what the subject is at that juncture between what we have defined as the One and the Other: the subject is always, structurally, one degree below what constitutes his body. This also explains why, in no way, can his passivity—that is, the fact by which he depends on a mark upon the body—be compensated in any way by any activity, even if it is his assertion in act.

So, of what is the Other the Other?

I am quite sorry about this: time, a certain excess, perhaps also a certain paradoxical use of the cut… but in that case, take it as intentional… will result in my leaving you here today, with the end of the hour.

The Other is the Other only of this—which is the first term of my three lines—namely, the little (a).

It is from there that I started during our recent sessions, to tell you that its nature is that of the incommensurable, or rather that it is from its incommensurability that every question of measure arises.

It is on this little (a), object or not, that we will resume our discussion next time.