🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I will try today to bring you into this arcane matter, which, while being trivial in psychoanalysis, is nonetheless an arcane—that is to say, something you encounter at every turn: that if the analyzed subject, if the analyzable subject, adopts what is called a regressive position or even a “pre”—pre-Oedipal, pre-genital, in short, pre-something—which would be quite desirable, and which, on this occasion, one might even be surprised is only designated as “post,” since it is precisely to evade the play, the incidence of castration, that the subject is supposed to take refuge there.

If I am trying this year to outline before you a structure that announces itself as logical… of a hazardous logic, possibly a very precarious one, where I am also sparing you, not too quickly giving you the forms on which I have relied in my own scribblings, but trying to show you the accessibility of an articulation in such a way, in this easy form that I have finally chosen among others, which consists very simply in seizing upon what is most incommensurable with 1, namely the Golden Ratio… and this, only with the aim of making tangible to you how, through such a path… where, I repeat to you, I do not pretend to give you the definitive steps, nor even to have taken them myself… but how preferable such a path is, which secures some truth concerning the subject’s dependency, rather than indulging in those painful exercises which are those of common analytic prose and which are distinguished by such kinds of contortions, of senseless detours, which always seem necessary to account for this play of libidinal positions.

The implementation of a whole population of subjective entities, which you know well and which are scattered everywhere: the ego, the ego ideal, the superego, the id, even… not to mention what can be newly and subtly added by distinguishing the ideal ego from the ego ideal—doesn’t all this inherently carry with it… even, as has been happening for some time in Anglo-Saxon literature, adding “the self,” which, manifestly added to remedy this ridiculous multitude, fails nonetheless, representing, in the way it is handled, only an additional entity. An entity, a being of reason, always inadequate from the moment we correctly introduce the function of the subject as nothing other than that which is represented by one signifier to another signifier.

A subject is in no case an autonomous entity; only the proper name can give that illusion. The “I,” it’s saying too much to claim that it is suspect—since I’ve been talking to you about it, it should no longer even be that—it is very precisely only that subject that—as a signifier—“I” represents for the signifier “walks,” for example, or for the pair of signifiers “the trap shuts”: “I shut the trap!”

You sense that if I have taken this formulation, it is to avoid the pronominal form “I fall silent,” which would certainly begin to take us very far if we posed the question of what “me” means in such a form, as in many others. You would see how its supposedly reflexive meaning fans out into a range that allows no degree of consistency to be given to it. But I will not elaborate, of course, in that direction, which here serves only as a reminder.

There is therefore a function, a subjective function, which is called castration, and it must be recalled that it is striking that we are given this—and this had never, I mean before psychoanalysis, ever been stated before—that we are given this as essential to the access to what is called “the genital.”

If this expression were appropriate down to the last detail—I mean it is not—one could marvel at something that, then, would be expressed thus: that, let’s say… well… how it would appear if approached from the outside, and after all, we are all still at that point… that the passage to the fantasy of the organ is… in a certain function, certainly privileged from then on: the genital precisely… necessary for the function to be fulfilled.

I see no way out of this impasse, except to say… and a psychoanalyst of notable importance in the political topography has employed this means: I mean that, at a turn of phrase, without even really realizing the weight of what he is saying, he asserts to us… that after all, castration, well “it’s a dream!”, in the sense that “it’s crazy talk.” But that’s not the case!

Castration is a structure—as I was just recalling—a thoroughly essential subjective structure, precisely so that something of the subject, however minimal, enters into this affair that psychoanalysis labels “the genital.” I must say that to this impasse I believe I have brought a slight opening, have—as one says—changed something about it, insofar as… my God, it’s not been very long: four or five of our meetings ago… I introduced the observation that it can only be a question of the introduction of the subject into this function of “the genital”… if indeed we know what we mean when we call it that… that is, of the passage from function to act, of the questioning of whether this act can deserve the title of sexual act.

Is there not? Is there? Chi lo sa? There may be… Perhaps one day we will know whether there is such a thing as a sexual act. That is why I have commented: sex—mine, yours, yours—rests upon the function of a signifier capable of operating within this act.

In any case, one cannot in any way escape from this which is affirmed not only by doctrine but which we encounter at every turn in our experience: …that what is capable of operating in the direction of the sexual act… I’m talking about something that resembles it and is not what I will attempt to refer to today, to properly introduce the register, namely perversion …what is capable of operating in a way that is not faulty, is only the subject, let’s say, castrated and… let us repeat, dictionary-style: a sense to be added to the word “castrated” …in order… it is no great stretch to express it like this …in order with that complex called the castration complex, which of course does not mean one is “complexed,” but quite the contrary… as all literature worthy of the name—psychoanalytic, I mean—which is not the chatter of people who do not know what they are saying—which happens even to the highest authorities—which in any healthy analytic literature truly means …that one is, shall I say, “normalized” with regard to the sexual act.

That does not mean one achieves it, it means, at the very least, that one is on the right track! In fact, “normalized” has a very precise meaning at the crossing from affine geometry to metric geometry. In short, one enters a certain order of measurement, which is the one I am trying to evoke with my Golden Ratio, which here, I repeat, is of course only metaphorical: reduce it to the term of the most spaced-out incommensurable with regard to 1.

Therefore, the castration complex—I say this, my God, I hope I only have to say it here for novice ears—can in no way be satisfied with the support of the little story like “Daddy said”: “We’re going to cut it off… if you claim to succeed your father.” First of all, because most of the time, as of course everyone has long since noticed, when it comes to this little story, this small remark: “it was Mommy who said it.” She said it at the very moment when Jean, or Jeannot, was in fact succeeding his father, but in that modest sense that he was quietly fiddling with himself in a little corner—quiet as Baptiste—he was fiddling with his little thing, obviously, just as Daddy had done at his age!

This has nothing to do with the castration complex. It is a little anecdote, which is not made any more plausible by the fact that guilt over masturbation is encountered at every turn in the genesis of the disorders we deal with. It is not enough to say that masturbation is physiologically harmless and that it is due to its place within a certain economy—subjective, we shall say precisely—that it takes on its importance.

We will even say, as I recalled one of these last times, that it can take on a quite clear hedonic value since it can—as I recalled—be carried as far as asceticism and that a certain philosophy can make of it… provided, of course, that one maintains total coherence in one’s conduct regarding its practice …can make of it a foundation of its well-being: recall DIOGENES, to whom not only it was familiar, but who promoted it as an example of how one should treat what remains, in that perspective, the small surplus of an organic tickling: titillation.

It must be said that this perspective is more or less immanent to any philosophical position and even encroaches upon a number of positions one could qualify as religious, if we consider the hermit’s retreat as something that, by its very nature, includes it. It only begins to take on its interest, thus occasionally its guilty value, at the point where one strives to attain the sexual act.

Then this appears: that jouissance, sought in itself, of a part of the body and which plays a role. I say “which plays a role,” because one must never say that an organ is made for a function.

We have organs… I’m telling you this… if you generalize a little, if you sometimes put yourself in the mold or in the skin of another beast and try to think about what it would be like if you were in what we can barely call their skin, then you would understand quickly enough that it is not function that makes the organ, but the organ that makes the function. But anyway, this is a position that runs too much against the so-called transformist obscurantism in which we are steeped, for me to insist on it. If you don’t want to believe me, go back to the mainstream.

It is therefore completely out of line to claim, according to moralizing tradition… in short, according to the way it is explained in the Divine Comedy, that masturbation is culpable and even a grave sin, because not only does “it divert a means from its end”… the end being the production of little Christians, or even—I return to this, even if it caused scandal the last time I said it— even little proletarians …well, whether it be a matter of elevating a means to the status of an end, that has absolutely nothing to do with the question as it must be posed, since it is that of the norm of an act, taken in the full sense—which I recalled—of the word “act,” and that it has nothing to do with the reproductive offshoots it may assume in the end of the perpetuation of the animal.

On the contrary, we must situate it in relation to this, which is the passage of the subject to the function of signifier, in this precise place… and entirely outside the ordinary field in which we are at ease with the word “act”… which is called that problematic point which is the sexual act.

That the passage of jouissance, where it can be grasped, is subject to such a prohibition—to stick to a word in use—to a certain negativation… to be more cautious and suspend this: that perhaps one could manage to formulate it in a more precise way… that this passage, in any case, has the most manifest relation to the introduction of that jouissance into a value function: that, at least, can be said without imprudence.

That experience—even an experience in which, if one may say so, a certain empathy of the listener is not absent—announces to us the correlation of this passage from a jouissance to the function of a value, that is to say its profound adulteration: the correlation of this with… I have no reason to refuse what literature provides here, because, as I just told you, the only access is “empathic,” it will have to be purified secondarily, but we do not refuse this access either, when we are on difficult terrain… thus this castration has the closest relation to the appearance of what is called the object in the structure of orgasm, inasmuch as—I repeat: we are still within empathy—it is identified as distinct from a jouissance… ah! how shall we call it? Auto-erotic? that’s a concession! …masturbatory—and that’s all!—given what is at stake, namely an organ, and a very specific one.

Because, as for auto-erotism, God knows what has already been made of it and therefore what will be made of it… and as you know, it is precisely this that is at issue, namely that this auto-erotism, which here indeed—could have—a very specific meaning: that of localized and manageable jouissance, like anything that is localized! …will soon be made into the oceanic bath within which all this must be located!

As I told you: whoever… whoever founds anything whatsoever on the idea of a primary narcissism and proceeds from there to generate what would be the investment in the object, is perfectly free to continue—since that is what psychoanalysis operates with throughout the world, as a guilty industry—but can also be sure that everything I articulate here is made to repudiate it absolutely.

Fine! I have said—therefore I have admitted—I have spoken of an object present in orgasm. Nothing is easier, from there, than to slip—and of course, this is never missed—into the childishness of the dimension of “the person”! When we copulate, we who have reached “genital maturity,” we show reverence to the person: this is how people used to express themselves some 25 or 30 years ago, especially in the circle of French psychoanalysts who—after all—have their share of investment in the history of psychoanalysis. Yes… well, nothing is less certain, because to raise the question of the object involved in the sexual act is precisely to introduce the question of whether this object is Man or a man, Woman or a woman.

In short, the interest of introducing the word “act” is to open the question… which is surely worth being opened, since it’s certainly not me who circulates it among you… to know whether, in the sexual act—for those among you for whom a sexual act has ever happened—it relates to the advent of a signifier representing the subject as sex to another signifier, or whether it has the value of what I have called in another register “The Encounter,” namely: the unique encounter, the one which, once it happens, is definitive!

Naturally, all this is talked about, talked about, and that’s what’s serious: it is talked about lightly. In any case, note that there are two distinct registers here, namely: if in the sexual act, the man reaches Man, in his status as man, and the woman likewise, that is an entirely different question from that of whether or not one has encountered one’s definitive partner, since that is what is at stake when “The Encounter” is evoked.

Strange!… Strange that the more poets evoke it, the less effective it is in the consciousness of each, as a question. That it should be “the person” in any case may well bring a soft smile to the face of anyone who has even a small insight into feminine jouissance! This is assuredly a first very interesting point to be placed entirely at the forefront, as an introduction to any question that may be asked concerning what is called “female sexuality,” whereas what is at issue is precisely “her jouissance.”

There is one very certain thing, which is worth remarking upon: it is that psychoanalysis seems—in a question such as the one I have just raised—to render all subjects situated in its experience—namely: psychoanalysts—incapable of facing it in the least… The males! The proof is more than abundant: this question of “female sexuality” has never made a single serious step forward from a subject apparently defined as male by anatomical constitution.

But the most curious thing is that the psychoanalysts—women—well they, manifestly when approaching this theme, show all the signs of a failure that suggests only one fact: it is that they are absolutely terrified by what they might have to formulate about it! So much so that the question of “female jouissance” does not seem, as of any day soon, to be truly taken up for study, since this is—my God—the only place where something serious could be said about it.

At the very least, to evoke it in this way, to suggest to each person—and especially to whatever there may be of the feminine in those gathered here as listeners—the fact that one can express oneself in this manner concerning “feminine jouissance,” suffices for us to establish a dimension which, even if we do not enter into it, for lack of being able to, is absolutely essential in order to situate everything else we have to say.

The object, then, is not at all given in itself by the reality of the partner! I mean the object involved in the normalized dimension, so-called genital, of the sexual act. It is much closer—in any case, it is the first point of access we are given—to the function of detumescence. To say that there is a castration complex is precisely to say that detumescence in no way suffices to constitute it.

This is what we have, with a certain heaviness, taken care to affirm from the start, now of course as a matter of experience, that it is not the same thing to copulate or to masturbate.

Nonetheless, this dimension that makes the question of the value of jouissance hinge upon, find its support, its pivot-point, where detumescence is possible, must not be neglected, because the function of detumescence… whatever we may think of it on the physiological level, royally neglected of course by psychoanalysts who, in this regard, have not provided even the slightest new clinical insight that is not already found in every manual on the physiology of sex—I mean, which wasn’t already floating everywhere before psychoanalysis came into the world—but no matter! This only reinforces what is at stake… namely that detumescence is present only for its subjective usage, in other words: to mark the limit known as the pleasure principle.

Detumescence… in being the characteristic of the functioning of the penile organ, namely, in the genital act, and precisely insofar as the jouissance it supports is suspended… is there to introduce—legitimately or not… when I say “legitimately,” I mean: as something real, or as a supposed dimension… to introduce this: that there is jouissance beyond. That the pleasure principle here functions as a limit at the edge of a dimension of jouissance insofar as it is suggested by the conjunction known as the “sexual act.”

Everything that experience shows us, what is called premature ejaculation and which would be better named in our register: premature detumescence, gives rise to the idea that the function—that of detumescence—can itself represent the negative of a certain jouissance.

A jouissance that is precisely this, and clinical experience shows it to us all too clearly: a jouissance before which the subject refuses, even evades, to the extent that this jouissance as such is too coherent with that dimension of castration, perceived in the sexual act as a threat.

All these precipitations of the subject with regard to this beyond allow us to conceive that it is not without foundation that, in these stumblings, these slips of the sexual act, what is at stake in the castration complex is precisely demonstrated—namely: that detumescence is nullified as a good in itself, that it is instead reduced to the function of protection against a feared harm… whether you call it jouissance or castration… as a lesser evil in itself, and from that point, the smaller the evil, the more it is reduced, the more perfect the evasion.

Such is the mechanism we clinically touch with our fingertips, in daily cures, in everything that can occur under the various modes of impotence, especially insofar as they are centered around premature ejaculation. Therefore, there is jouissance, in any identifiable way, only of the body proper.

And what lies beyond the limits imposed on it by the pleasure principle—it is not by chance but by necessity that, only appearing in the conjuncture of the sexual act, it is associated as such with the evocation of the sexual correlate, without us being able to say more about it.

In other words, for all those who already have an ear attuned to the usual terms in psychoanalysis, it is on this plane, and this plane alone, that Θάνατος [Thanatos] can in some way be connected to Ἔρως [Eros].

It is insofar as the jouissance of the body—I mean of the body proper—beyond the pleasure principle, is evoked, and is evoked nowhere other than in the act, in the act precisely that places a hole, a void, a gaping, at its center, around that which is localized in hedonic detumescence, it is from that moment on that the possibility of the conjunction of Ἔρως and Θάνατος is posed.

It is from that point that the fact becomes conceivable and is no longer a crude mythical fabrication, that in the economy of instincts, psychoanalysis has introduced what it is not by chance that it designates under these two proper names.

Well, all of this, as you can see, is still circling around!

God knows, however, that I’m putting in the effort so that it isn’t that way! So we must believe that if we are still circling around it, it’s because it’s not easy to enter! We can at least retain, gather these truths: that the sexual encounter of bodies does not, in its essence, pass through the pleasure principle.

Nevertheless, in order to orient oneself in the jouissance it involves… I say “it involves” as supposed, because to orient oneself within it does not yet mean to enter into it, but it is very necessary to find orientation within it—for that orientation, it has no other reference point than this kind of negativation applied to the jouissance of the organ of copulation, insofar as it is the one that defines the presumed male, namely the penis. And it is from there that the idea arises—these words are chosen—that the idea arises of a jouissance of the feminine object. I said: that the idea arises, and not the jouissance itself, of course! It is an idea, it is subjective.

Only, what is curious and what psychoanalysis affirms… only due to a failure to express it in a logically correct way, naturally no one realizes what it means, what it entails! …is that feminine jouissance itself can only pass through the same reference point, and that this is what is called in the woman the castration complex!

That is precisely why the subject-woman is not easy to articulate, and why, at a certain level, I propose to you “the Woman-man.” That does not mean that every woman is limited to that, precisely. There is such a thing as woman somewhere: “Odor di femina,” but she is not easy to find. I mean, to place in her position, since in order to establish a position there, one needs that reference, which organic accidents have arranged to be found only in what is called—anatomically—the male.

It is only from this suspension posed upon the male organ that an orientation for both—the man and the woman—can be encountered, that the function, in other words, takes its value of being—in relation to that hole, that gaping void of the castration complex—in a reversed position. A reversal is a direction. Before the reversal, it may well be that there is no subjectivable direction whatsoever!

And after all, it may be to that that we must relate the nonetheless striking fact I told you earlier, namely that women psychoanalysts have taught us nothing more than what male psychoanalysts had already been capable of concocting about their jouissance. Which is to say, very little!

From a reversal, there is an orientation, and be it ever so slight, if that is all that can orient the jouissance at stake, in the woman, in the sexual act, well then, we understand that until further notice, we must make do with it.

All in all, this leaves us at a point which has its own characteristic: we will say that as far as the sexual act is concerned, what can currently be formulated of it is the dimension of what, in other registers, is called good intention.

A right intention concerning the sexual act—that is—at least from where we are currently able to formulate it—that is what, reasonably, according to psychoanalysts, that is what we can, what we must, reasonably accept.

All this is very well expressed in the myth, the fundamental myth: when the Father, the primal Father, is said to “enjoy all women,” does that mean that the women experience jouissance in any way at all? The subject is left untouched. And I do not evoke it at this point solely with humorous intent—it is, as you will see, a key question!

I mean that everything I will have to articulate—I say in our next meeting—concerning what I am going to take up again, namely what I left open last time… that if we had to leave deserted and fallow the central field, that of the One, of sexual union, insofar as the idea of a process—whatever it may be—of partition, allowing for the founding of what is called “roles,” and what we call, for our part, the signifiers of man and of woman, proves to be somewhat derailed… that if what I left you at the threshold of last time, namely, an entirely different conjunction: that of the Other, the big Other… on the register, on the tablets upon which this entire adventure is inscribed—and I told you that this register, and its tablets, are none other than the body itself… that this relation of the Other, of the big Other, with the partner who remains to it, namely what we began from—and it is not for nothing that I called it little (a), that is to say your substance, your substance as subject, insofar as, as subject, you have none of it, other than this object fallen from the signifying inscription, other than that which makes this little (a) into this sort of fragment of the belonging of the big A on a stroll, that is to say you yourselves, who are indeed here as subjective presence, but who—as soon as I am done—will show your nature as object (a) by the sweeping exodus this room will take on! [Laughter]

Well, I will leave in suspension the question of what the phallic object is. Because it is necessary—and it is not a necessity imposed only upon me—that I strip it of the way in which it is supported as object. All this, precisely in order to realize that it itself is not supported. This is what the castration complex means: that there is no phallic object.

This is what leaves us with our only chance, precisely, that there might be a sexual act. It is not castration, it is the phallic object—which is the effect of the dream—around which the sexual act fails! There is no better illustration of what I am in the process of articulating than what is given to us by the Sacred Book, by the one Book, by the Bible itself.

And if you have been rendered deaf to its reading, go to the narthex of what is called the Church of Saint Mark in Venice, in other words the Doge’s chapel—it is nothing other—but its narthex is worth the trip: nowhere else, in image, can be expressed with more relief what is found in the text of Genesis.

And among others, you will see there—subtly magnified, I must say—what I shall call “this infernal idea of God”: when from the ADAM CADMOS… from the one who, since he was One, it was necessary that they be both, he was Man in his two aspects, male and female… “It is good,” said God [Laughter from Lacan], “that he have a companion”!

Which would still be nothing, if we did not see that in order to proceed with this addition… all the more strange in that it seems that until then, the ADAM in question—a figure made of red earth—had done quite well without it… God takes advantage of his sleep [Laughter] to extract from him a rib, from which, we are told, he fashions the first EVE!

Can there be any more striking illustrations of what is introduced into the dialectic of the sexual act by this fact, that man… at the precise moment when there is added—superimposed—the mark of divine intervention upon him… henceforth finds himself confronted, as object, with a piece of his own body?

Everything I have just said—the Mosaic Law itself, and perhaps also the emphasis added to it by underlining the fact that this piece is not the penis, since in circumcision it is in a sense incised, in order to be marked with this negative sign—does this not bring forth before us what I shall call the perverse gateway in the establishment, at the threshold of what the sexual act consists in, of this Commandment: “They shall be one flesh”?

Which means that in a field interposed between us and whatever it would be, whatever it might be of something that could be called the sexual act, insofar as man and woman assert themselves in it for one another—there will beforehand—and it is to be known whether this thickness is traversable—there will be the autonomous relation of the body to something that is separated from it, after having been part of it.

Such is the enigma, the sharp threshold where we see the law of the sexual act in its crucial givenness: that the castrated man might be conceived as one who should never embrace anything other than that complement, which he may mistake—and God knows he often does—for a phallic complement.

I pose today, in concluding my discourse, this question that we do not yet know—this complement—how to designate. Let us call it “logical.” The fiction that this object is other indeed necessitates the castration complex.

No wonder we are told… told in the mythical margins of the Bible, those margins, curiously, found in the little rabbinic additions… that we are told that something, which may indeed be the primordial woman, the one who was there before EVE, and whom they call—I say: the rabbis, it’s not me meddling in these stories!—whom they call LILITH.

That it may be she, perhaps, who in the form of the serpent and by the hand of EVE, presents to ADAM… what? The apple! An oral object and one which, perhaps, is there for no other reason than to awaken him to the true meaning of what happened to him while he was sleeping! Indeed, that is precisely how things unfold in the Bible, since we are told that from that point on, he enters for the first time into the dimension of knowledge!

It is precisely because in this dimension of knowledge the effect of psychoanalysis is this: that we have at least identified within it, under two of its major forms—and we may also say under the other two, although their link has not yet been made—what is the nature, what is the nature and the function of this object concentrated entirely in this apple.

It is only by this path that it may be possible for us to better specify… and precisely through a series of contrasting effects… what is at stake in this object, the phallic object, which I said must, in order to be finally articulated, be stripped down first.