🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

For those who, for example, return today after having followed my teaching for a time, I must point out what I have, in these most recent instances, managed to introduce in terms of new articulations.

One of these, an important one, which dates from our antepenultimate meeting, is certainly that I designated—explicitly, I would say… since, in any case, the thing was not inaccessible to those who listen to me… explicitly the place of the Other… or what, up to now, I mean since the beginning of my teaching, I have articulated as such… designated the place of the Other in the body.

The body itself is—from the origin—that place of the Other, insofar as it is there that—from the origin—the mark is inscribed as signifier. It was necessary for me to recall this today, at the moment we are about to take the next step in this logic of the fantasy, which—this will be confirmed to you as we proceed—turns out to be capable of accommodating a certain logical laxity. As a logic of the fantasy, it presupposes that dimension called fantasy, in the form where exactness is not required from the outset.

Moreover, whatever we may find to be most rigorous in the exercise of an articulation that deserves this title of logic, does indeed include within itself the progress of an approximation. I mean a mode of approximation that contains in itself not only growth, but growth as much as possible the best, the fastest that can be, toward the calculation of an exact value.

And it is in this sense that… referring ourselves to an algorithm of very great generality, which is nothing other than the one most proper to ensure the relation of an incommensurable ideal—the simplest there is, the most spaced out too—to tighten what it constitutes as irrational through its own progression.

I mean that this incommensurability of this (a)… which I only represent for the legibility of my text as the parameter of the Golden Ratio, because those who “know”, know that this kind of number, constituted by the very progress of its approximation, is a whole family of numbers and, so to speak… can start from anywhere, from any exercise of relation, on the sole condition that the incommensurable demands that the approximation have no end, while nevertheless being perfectly recognizable at every moment as rigorous.

This, then, is the matter at hand: to grasp that what we are confronted with in the form of fantasy reflects a necessity. In other words, the problem that for a HEGEL could be contained within the simple limit constituted by the certainty included in self-consciousness… [an external message is transmitted through the loudspeakers]

—this self-certainty, of which HEGEL can allow himself… can allow himself, given certain conditions which I will mention in a moment, which are conditions of History… to question the relation with a truth,

—this certainty in HEGEL, and it is therein that he concludes a whole process through which philosophy is an exploration of knowledge, if he can allow himself to introduce into it the τήλος [telos], the end, the goal of an absolute knowledge, it is insofar as, at the level of certainty, he finds himself able to indicate that it does not contain its truth within itself. [another message from the loudspeakers]

It is in this that we find ourselves, not able to simply take up the Hegelian formula again, but to complicate it: the truth with which we are dealing lies in this act whereby the foundation of self-consciousness, whereby subjective certainty, is confronted with something that—by its nature—is radically foreign to it and which is precisely this that… Couldn’t something be done to stop this interruption? [A long pause is necessary to stop this disturbance]

What needs to be introduced today, and all the more quickly as our time has been shortened, is this: the psychoanalytic experience introduces the fact that the truth of the sexual act is called into question in the experience. Of course, the importance of this discovery only takes on its full significance from the positioning of the term sexual act as such. I mean… for ears already sufficiently attuned to the notion of the prevalence of the signifier in every subjective constitution… to perceive the difference there is between:

—a vague reference to sexuality that can hardly be called a function, a dimension proper to a certain form of life, namely the one most deeply bound up with death, I mean interwoven, interlaced with death.

—That is not saying everything, since from the moment we know that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, from that moment it is clear that everything that brings the order of sexuality into play in the unconscious, only enters it through the questioning of the sexual act.

Is the sexual act possible? Is there this knot, definable as an act, in which the subject is founded as sexed—that is to say, male or female in being so in itself—or, if not, proceeding in this act to something that might—even if only at its conclusion—result in the pure essence of the “male” or the “female”? I mean: the disentangling, the division, in a polar form, of what is male and what is female, precisely within the conjunction that unites them in something… the term of which, at this hour, is not being introduced for the first time… in something I name as being jouissance, which I mean as long since introduced and explicitly in my seminar on The Ethics [1959–60]. It is in fact necessary that this term jouissance be stated and precisely as distinct from pleasure, as constituting its beyond.

What indicates this in psychoanalytic theory is a series of convergent terms, foremost among which is that of the libido, which represents a certain articulation, whose use we will have to define, at the end of these lectures this year, define in what way its use can be slippery enough not to support, but rather to undermine the essential articulations we are going to attempt to introduce today. Jouissance—that is, that something which has a certain relation to the subject, insofar as, in this confrontation with the gap left in a certain register of questionable act, that of the sexual act, the subject is suspended by a series of modes or states which are of dissatisfaction.

This alone justifies the introduction of the term jouissance, which is also what, at every instant—and explicitly in the symptom—presents itself to us as indistinguishable from this register of satisfaction, since at every moment for us the problem is to understand how a knot [the symptom], which is sustained only by discomfort and suffering, is precisely that by which the instance of suspended satisfaction is manifested—properly: that where the subject stands inasmuch as it tends toward this satisfaction.

Here, the law of the pleasure principle, namely that of minimal tension, only indicates the necessity of the detours of the path through which the subject sustains itself in the course of its search—its search for jouissance—but it does not give us the end of that path, which is this proper end. An end, however, entirely masked for us in its final form, insofar as one could just as well say that its completion, its completion is so questionable that one can:

—just as well begin from this foundation: “there is no sexual act,”
—as from this one: “there is only the sexual act” which motivates this entire articulation.

It is in this that I have wished to bring in the reference, which everyone knows I have used for a long time, the reference to HEGEL, insofar as this process… this process of the dialectic of the different levels of self-certainty, of the Phenomenology of Spirit as he called it… is suspended in a movement he calls “dialectical” and which assuredly, from his perspective, can be regarded as being only dialectical in the sense of a relation he articulates of the presence of this consciousness, insofar as its truth escapes it, in what constitutes the play of the relation of one self-consciousness to another self-consciousness: in the relation of intersubjectivity. Now it is clear, it has long since been demonstrated, if only by the revelation of this social gap, insofar as it does not allow us to reduce what presents itself as “struggle”—explicitly the “struggle of master and slave”—to a confrontation “of one consciousness with another consciousness.”

It is not even for us to critique what the Hegelian genesis leaves open—this has already been done by others… and explicitly by another, by MARX to name him… and it leaves the question of its outcome and its modes in suspense.

That through which FREUD arrives and resumes things—at a point only analogous to the Hegelian position—is already sufficiently inscribed in this term, in this term jouissance, insofar as HEGEL introduces it. The departure, he tells us, lies in “the life-and-death struggle of the master and the slave,” after which the fact becomes established that the one who did not want to risk—risk the wager of death—falls with respect to the other into a state of dependence, which nevertheless is not without containing the whole future of the dialectic in question.

The term jouissance intervenes here: jouissance—after this “life-and-death struggle of pure prestige,” we are told!—will be the privilege of the master, and for the slave, the path traced from then on will be that of labor. Let us look more closely, and this jouissance of which there is question, let us look in HEGEL’s text… which after all I cannot reproduce here, and even less so in the abbreviated form to which we are constrained today… what is it that the master enjoys?

The matter in HEGEL is clearly enough seen: the relation instituted by the articulation of the slave’s labor makes it so that, if perhaps the master enjoys, it is not absolutely. In the extreme, and by forcing things a little—which will be to our detriment, as you will see—we would say that he enjoys only his leisure, which is to say the disposition of his body.

In fact, it is far from being so—we will indicate this again shortly—but let us suppose that of all he has to enjoy as things, he is separated by the one charged with putting them at his disposal, namely the slave, of whom one can say from then on… and I have no need to defend this point, I mean: this sharp point, since already in HEGEL, it is clearly indicated… that there is for the slave a certain jouissance of the thing, insofar as not only does he bring it to the master, but transforms it in order to render it receivable.

After this reminder, it is fitting that I question myself with you, that I have you question yourselves about what—in such a register—the word jouissance implies. Nothing, assuredly, is more instructive, always, than the reference to what is called the lexicon, insofar as it is attached to aims as precarious as the articulation of meanings.

“The terms included in each entry…”

we read somewhere in the prefatory note of that magnificent work known as the Grand Robert…

“The terms included in each entry constitute so many cross-references, so many links, that should lead to the means of expressing thought.”
“The asterisk…

for indeed you will be able to observe that in each of these entries, which very adequately fulfill their program

…“The asterisk refers to the entries which develop at length an idea suggested by a single word.”

Accordingly, the entry jouissance begins with the word plaisir, marked with an asterisk. This is but one example, but the word, undoubtedly, does not present us with these paradoxes by chance.

Of course, jouissance was not first approached by the Robert; you can also study this word in the Littré: there you will see that its usage, its most legitimate usage, varies:
—from the side indicated by etymology, which links it to joie,
—to that of possession and what one holds in the final instance: the jouissance of a title.

The jouissance of a title, whether that title means a legal entitlement or a certificate representing a stock market value, to have the jouissance of something—of dividends, for example—is to be able to transfer it. The sign of possession is to be able to relinquish it. “To jouir de…” is something other than simply “to jouir,” and surely nothing more than these shifts in meaning, insofar as they are delimited in that apprehension I earlier called “lexical,” in its functioning in the dictionary, shows us to what extent the reference to thought is precisely what is most inappropriate for designating the function—radical, I mean—of any given signifier.

It is not thought that gives the signifier its effective and ultimate reference. It arises from the establishment resulting from the effects of the introduction of a signifier into the real. It is insofar as I articulate in a new way this relation of the word jouissance to what is, for us—in analysis—in play, that the word jouissance finds and can retain its ultimate value. And this, I mean today to make you feel in its most radical point.

The master enjoys something, whether it be himself—he is his own master, as they say—or also the slave. But what does he enjoy in the slave? Precisely: the slave’s body! As we read in Scripture, the master says, “Go!” and he goes. As I allowed myself—though I no longer know if I wrote it or merely stated it:

—if the master says: “Enjoy!”

—the other can only reply with this: “I hear” (j’ouis), I mean, “J, apostrophe” [Laughter], on which I amused myself.

I do not generally amuse myself at random; this means something…
It could just as well have been picked up by someone among those listening to me,
I too often regret that I gather nothing more than what forces me to do it myself.
…The question is this: that of which one enjoys…
if there is this jouissance inaugurated in the “I” of the subject insofar as he possesses…
that of which one enjoys—does it enjoy?

It seems, however, that this is the true question. For indeed, it is clear that jouissance is by no means what characterizes the master. The master…
insofar as he is the one who, in the City, could in no way be just anyone, but is marked by his function as master…
he has much else to do than abandon himself to jouissance. And mastery of his body—for it is not merely a matter of leisure—
is something that is pursued only through the harshest disciplines. In every era of civilization, he who is master has no time to let himself go, even in his leisure!

The types must be distinguished, but after all the type of the “ancient master” is not of such a purely ideal order that we lack its references. It is sufficiently inscribed, I would say, in the marks of the first philosophical discourse [Plato, Aristotle…],
so that one can say that HEGEL gives us sufficient testimony of it.

The question is precisely this: is it the case that… which, after all, is only just and consistent with the initial stake of the matter… the one who—according to HEGEL—was not able from the outset to bear the potential risk of the loss of life, which is indeed the surest way to lose jouissance, the one who held jouissance dearly enough to submit and alienate his body—why, then, would jouissance not remain in his hands?

We have a thousand testimonies of this… that a short-sightedness, some fantasy that wants everything always to be on one side, the whole bouquet in one hand… we have a thousand testimonies that what characterizes the position of the one whose body is placed at the mercy of another is that it is from there that what can be called pure jouissance begins.

And moreover, in glimpsing it, in following the clues that at least give us some cross-checking, perhaps certain questions would fade regarding the meaning of certain paradoxical positions, and namely that of the masochist. But after all, it is sometimes better that the most immediately opened doors not be crossed, because the fact that they are easy to cross does not mean they are the true ones.

I am not saying that this is the mechanism of masochism. Far from it! Because, assuredly, what must be said is that, if it is conceivable that the condition of the slave is the only one that gives access to jouissance, insofar as we can formulate it, as subjects we will never know anything about it.

Now the masochist is not a slave. On the contrary, as I will tell you shortly, he is a clever little one, someone very strong: the masochist knows that he is in jouissance. It is precisely with regard to him—about him, for your usage, for the sake of hearing what is at stake concerning him—that this whole discourse progresses. And to make it progress, it was appropriate to show that in HEGEL there is more than one flaw.

The first, of course, being the one that allowed me, before those who listen to me, to produce it, namely that even before I proposed it and spoke of it, with the mirror stage we had already marked that in no case was this kind of aggressiveness, which is of instance and presence, in “the life-and-death struggle of pure prestige,” anything other than an illusion, and hence rendered any reference to it as primary articulation null and void.

I am merely re-emphasizing in passing the problems posed—and left gaping—by the Hegelian deduction concerning the society of masters: how do they get along with each other? And then, my God, the simple reference to what it comes down to, namely:
—that the slave, for him to be made a slave, he is not dead!
—That the outcome of the “life-and-death struggle” is something that did not bring death into play.
—That the master has only the right to kill him, but that precisely—and this is why he is called Servus: the master servat, he saves him.
—And it is from there that the real question arises: what is it that the master saves in the slave?

We are brought back to the question of the primordial law, of what institutes the rule of the game, namely: the one who will be defeated, he can be killed, and if he is not killed, then at what price? At what price? That is precisely where we reenter the register of signification, what is at stake in the position of the master is this: the consequences—always—of the introduction of the subject into the real.

To assess what it is concerning its effects on jouissance, it is appropriate to establish, at the level of this term, a certain number of principles. Namely, that if we have introduced jouissance, it is under the logical mode of what ARISTOTLE calls an ousia, a substance, that is to say something, very precisely, which cannot be… thus he expresses himself in his book Categories… which cannot be either attributed to a subject or placed in any subject. It is something that is not susceptible to “more or less,” that cannot be introduced into any comparative, into any sign of “smaller or greater,” or even “less than or equal.”

Jouissance is that something within which the pleasure principle marks its features and its limits. But it is something substantial, and it is precisely important to produce it, to produce it in the form I am going to articulate in the name of a new principle:

“There is jouissance only of the body.”

Allow me to say that I consider the maintenance of this principle, its affirmation as being absolutely essential, to be of greater ethical significance than that of materialism. I mean that this formula has exactly the impact, the relief, that the affirmation “that there is only matter” introduces into the field of knowledge. For after all, you only have to observe how, with the evolution of science, this matter ultimately becomes so confused with the play of elements into which it is resolved, that it becomes, at the limit, almost indiscernible to know what it is that is playing out before you—whether it is these elements of the stoicheia, these final signifying elements, or those of the atom. That is to say, what they possess in themselves of the nearly indiscernible with the progress of your mind, the play of your research, but what it comes down to in the final instance is a structure that you can no longer relate in any way to what you have as common experience of matter.

But to say “There is jouissance only of the body” and specifically that this denies you eternal jouissances, that is exactly what is at stake in what I have called the ethical value of materialism, namely that which consists in taking seriously what happens in your everyday life, and if there is a question of jouissance, to look it in the face and not push it off to some ever-singing tomorrow… “There is jouissance only of the body”: this responds very precisely to the demand for truth found in Freudianism.

So here we are, leaving entirely to its wandering the question of whether what is at stake is being or not being, whether it is a question of being man or being woman, in an act that would be the sexual act. And if this is what dominates this entire suspense of jouissance, it is also this that we must take ethically seriously. That around which arises something we might call our right to gaze.

ŒDIPUS is not a philosopher. He is the model of what is at stake in the relation to what knowledge is, and the knowledge of which he is the bearer is at least indicated to us in the form of the riddle as a knowledge concerning what the body is. Through this, he breaks the power of a ferocious jouissance, that of the SPHINX, which is indeed strange in that it is offered to us in the form of a vaguely feminine figure, let us say half-beast, half-woman.

What he reaches after that—which does not make him, as you know, any more triumphant for it—is undoubtedly a jouissance. At the moment he enters it, he is already caught in the trap. I mean that this jouissance is the very one that already marks him, and in advance, with the sign of guilt.

ŒDIPUS did not know what he was enjoying. I raised the question of whether JOCASTA, for her part, knew. And even, why not: did JOCASTA enjoy letting ŒDIPUS remain ignorant? Let us say: what part of JOCASTA’s jouissance corresponded to the fact that she let ŒDIPUS remain ignorant?

It is at this level, thanks to FREUD, that serious questions now arise concerning what is at stake in truth. Now, the introduction I have already made of the function of alienation, insofar as it is coherent with the genesis of the subject as determined by the vehicle of signifiance, allows us to say that as for what concerns us and is first posited—namely that “There is jouissance only of the body”—it is that the effect of the introduction of the subject, itself an effect of signifiance, is precisely to place the body and jouissance in this relation I have defined by the function of alienation.

I mean that, as I have just articulated before you for half an hour, the subject, insofar as it is founded in this mark of the body which privileges it, which makes it the mark—the subjective mark—that from then on dominates everything that will concern this body: that it goes here and then there and not elsewhere, and whether it is free or not to do so, this is no doubt what distinguishes the master, because the master is a subject.

Jouissance is, in this primary foundation of the subjectivation of the body, that which falls into the dependency of this subjectivation, and, to put it plainly, is effaced. At the origin, the position of the master—and this is what HEGEL glimpses—is precisely renunciation of jouissance, the possibility of staking everything on this disposition or non-disposition of the body. And not only of his own, but also of that of the Other.

The Other is the ensemble of bodies, from the moment that the play of “social struggle” simply introduces that the relations of bodies are from then on dominated by this something that, also, is called the law. A law that can be said to be linked to the advent of the master, but only if one understands it as: the advent of the absolute master, that is to say, the sanction of death as having become legal.

This from then on allows us to glimpse that if the introduction of the subject as effect of signifier lies in this separation of the body and jouissance, in the division established between terms that only subsist from one another, it is there, for us, that the question must be posed, the question of how jouissance is manageable from the subject.

Well, the answer… the answer is given by what analysis discovers as an approximation of this relation to jouissance: no doubt in the field of the sexual act, what it discovers is the introduction of what I have called value of jouissance, that is: annulment of jouissance as such—the one most immediately involved in the sexual conjunction—what it calls castration.

This resolves nothing. Of course, this explains to us how it is that the simplest and clearest legal form of the sexual act, insofar as it is instituted in a regular formation called marriage, was at first—at its origin—only the privilege of the master. Not simply, of course, the master as opposed to the slave, but—as you know, if you know a bit of history, and Roman history in particular—even as opposed to the plebs. Access to the institution of marriage was not granted to just anyone, unless he was a master.

But, in any case, everyone knows… everyone knows—my God—from experience, as to what this marriage, which has since then been made accessible to all, still drags behind it in terms of heartbreaks… everyone knows that it does not go smoothly!

And if you open LIVY, you will see that there was a time, not so late in the Republic, when the Ladies… the Roman ladies, those who were truly marked by real connubium… poisoned their husbands for an entire generation, with a scale and persistence that left more than a few traces in memory and which LIVY records—they poisoned their husbands: and this was not without reason.

One must believe that the institution of marriage, when it functions at the level of true masters, must carry with it certain inconveniences, which are probably not linked solely to jouissance [Laughter], since it is rather the emphasized character of the hole introduced at this level—namely, the fact that jouissance has nothing to do with conjugal choice—from which these small incidents resulted.

When we speak of the sexual act at the level where it concerns us, we analysts, it is precisely insofar as jouissance is at stake. As I reminded you last time, God did not disdain to watch over it. It suffices that woman enters the game of being that object so well designated to us by the biblical myth, of being that phallic object, for man to be fulfilled. Which means exactly: perfectly deceived, that is to say, encountering nothing but his bodily complement.

The discovery of analysis is precisely to realize that it is only insofar as man is not deceived to the point of finding only his own flesh—no surprise, then, that there is only one flesh, since it’s his own!—it is precisely insofar as this operation of deception does not occur—that is, where castration is produced—that there is, yes or no, a chance that there is a sexual act. But then what does it mean to say what is at stake in jouissance, since the characteristic of a sexual act that would be founded would lie precisely in this lack of jouissance, somewhere?

This questioning of what is at stake in jouissance as a third function is very precisely what is given to us in another approach, an approach that is called… exactly the inverse of this step, this crossing, which is made in the direction of the sexual act… that is called… and precisely and solely because it goes in an opposite direction, concerning a certain progression, a logical progression… that is called, because of this: regression.

And it is here that our algorithm… that our algorithm as it confronts the little (a) with the 1, whether toward the inside as I have already drawn it, namely: little (a) folding back onto the 1, giving here the difference 1–a which is at the same time a².

There is also another way to address the question, the one suggested to us by the function of the Other, namely that this 1 which is here:

comes to inscribe itself here in (a), that it is the little (a) here—without folding back, that is, leaving between it and the big A the great interval of the One—which is at stake. You can only see that this privileged fact—that 1/a is precisely equal to 1 + a, and that it is this which gives the value of this algorithm—is precisely what gives us the place, the topology, of what is at stake concerning jouissance.

In the case of the slave: the slave is deprived of his body, how can we know what is at stake in his jouissance? How to know it, if not precisely in that which, of his body, has slipped beyond subjective mastery?

Everything that is at stake in the slave, insofar as his body goes and comes at the whim of the master, nevertheless leaves preserved those objects that are given to us as having emerged, precisely, from the signifying dialectic:
—those objects which are its stake, but also its fabrication,
—those objects taken at the borders,
—those objects that function at the level of the body’s edges,
—those objects that we know well in the dialectic of neurosis,
—those objects to which we will have to return again and again, in order to clearly define what gives them their worth and value, their exceptional quality.

I do not need to recall them concerning the oral and what is also called the anal, but also these others, higher, less well known, of a more intimate register, which in relation to demand is constituted as desire, and which are called “the gaze” and “the voice.” These objects, insofar as they can in no way be seized by the domination—whatever it may be—of the signifier, even if entirely constituted at the level of social domination, these are objects that by their nature escape it.

What does this mean, since for the slave, there is on the side of the Other only a supposed jouissance… HEGEL is mistaken in that it is for the slave that there is the master’s jouissance… but the question that matters, I asked you just earlier:

“Does that which one enjoys, enjoy?”

And if it is true that something of the real of jouissance can subsist only at the level of the slave, then it will indeed be in that place, for him, left at the margin of the field of his body, that the objects I just listed are constituted. It is there, it is at this place that the question of jouissance must be posed. Nothing can take from the slave the function:
—neither of his gaze,
—nor of his voice,
—nor also that of what he is in his function as nursemaid, since it is so frequently in this function that Antiquity presents him to us,
—nor even in his function as rejected object, as object of contempt.

At this level, the question of jouissance is posed. It is a question, and as you can see, it is even a scientific question. Now, the pervert… the pervert, well, that is what he is: perversion is the search for this point of perspective, insofar as he can make emerge the accent of jouissance. But he searches for it in an experimental way.

Perversion, while having the most intimate relation to jouissance, is like the thought of science: cosa mentale. It is an operation of the subject insofar as he has perfectly identified this moment of disjunction by which the subject tears the body from jouissance, but who knows that jouissance was not only, in this process, alienated jouissance—there is also this: that somewhere remains a chance that something escaped from it. I mean that not the entire body was taken up in the process of alienation. It is from this point, from the place of little (a), that the pervert questions—questions!—what is at stake in the function of jouissance.

By never seizing it except in a partial way, and if I may say so, in the perspective—I will not say of the pervert… because truly, one can say that psychoanalysts understand nothing of it… Wasn’t there one recently, who proposed this kind of equation, claiming that the pervert could not simultaneously be subject and jouissance, and that to the extent that he was jouissance, he was no longer subject!

The pervert remains subject for the entire duration of the exercise of what he poses as a question to jouissance. The jouissance he targets is that of the Other, insofar as he may be its only remaining trace, but he posits it through a subject’s activity.

What this allows us to trace back can only be done on one condition: that we realize that these terms—sadomasochism, for example—as they are tied together, have meaning only if we consider them as inquiries along the path of what the sexual act is. The relations we call sadistic between this or that vague unit of the social body have interest only in this: that they represent something concerning the relations between man and woman.

As I will tell you next time—since this time, alas, I have been cut short—you will see that in forgetting this fundamental relation, one misses every means of grasping what is at stake in sadism and in masochism. This does not mean, either, that in any way these two terms represent relations comparable to those of “male” and “female.”

A person of—let me say—astonishing naivety wrote somewhere this truth, that “masochism has nothing specifically feminine about it,” but the reasons he gives for this go so far as to formulate that, assuredly, if masochism were feminine, it would mean that it is not a perversion, since it would be natural for a woman to be masochistic.

Thus, from there one clearly sees that, naturally, women cannot be called masochists, since, being a perversion, it could not be something natural! That’s the kind of reasoning in which one gets bogged down. Not, to be sure, without a certain intuition—I mean the first, namely that a woman is not naturally masochistic.

She is not naturally masochistic, and with good reason! It is because if she were, in fact, masochistic, it would mean that she is capable of fulfilling the role that the masochist assigns to a woman. Which, of course, gives an entirely different meaning, in this case, to what feminine masochism would be.

She does not, the woman, have any vocation whatsoever to fulfill that role. That is what gives the masochistic enterprise its value.

This is why you will allow me to conclude today on this point, by promising you… as a point of arrival, as the tip of what is brought into question by this introduction of perversion… by promising to indicate to you as a final point that we will finally, I hope, bring some order—at least a little more clarity—to what is at stake when it comes to masochism.