🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

What is it that all those things called, at the last moment, “structuralisms” have in common? It is that they make the function of the subject dependent on the articulation of the signifier. That is to say, after all, this distinctive sign can remain more or less elided, and in a sense, it always is.

Of course, I know that some of you might find that, in this regard, the analyses of LÉVI-STRAUSS leave precisely this central point unresolved, leaving us, in short, before this question… insofar as for several years now it has been centered on myth, this analysis …should we finally think that honey was waiting—I mean: had always been waiting—in tobacco, for the truth of its relationship with ash?

In a certain sense [Lacan’s laughter]… it’s true! And that’s why, from any similar approach, the suspension of the subject follows. And that is enough for us to contribute to something that is not a doctrine, but merely the recognition of an efficacy that appears to be of the same nature as that which founds science.

Nonetheless, a class notion such as would imply “structuralisms” in the plural, with a minimum of characteristics, would not in any way be able to conjoin a certain number of researches into a set—inasmuch as, to take mine for example, after all it is only as an office, as an auxiliary apparatus, that it first had to encounter—for the purpose of articulating it—this necessity of the subjective articulation within the signifier.

In a way, it is merely the preface to it: nothing could be correctly thought within it without this. Yet it is not without reason that we must finally produce what in the same field has been articulated too hastily, which is the fundamental relation of the subject thus constituted with the body. This… from which it follows that symbolism always ultimately means bodily symbolism… this, which I am arriving at, had to be dismissed by me for years, precisely because it has always been this way, because traditionally this is how symbolism had been articulated—that is, in a way that missed the essential, as often happens, for being too hasty.

“The limbs and the stomach”! A long time ago… I have always evoked, on the horizon, the fable of MENENIUS AGRIPPA. It wasn’t so bad! Comparing the nobility to the stomach is better than comparing it to the head, and besides, it puts the head back in its place among the limbs… Still, that goes a little too fast.

And if we know it, it is due to the fact that what is at the center of our research—we analysts—is something that undoubtedly only passes through the paths of structure, through the incidences of the signifier in the real, insofar as it introduces the subject there, but whose center… and it is a sign that I can only recall it with this force at the very moment when, properly speaking, I install my discourse in what I can legitimately call “a logic,” that it is at that moment I can recall… …that everything turns for us around what must be called the difficulty—not of being, as the other one said in his old age—the difficulty inherent in the sexual act.

There are other difficulties that have foreshadowed this one. Introducing this function of difficulty is no small thing! The day when the difficulty of social harmony took that legitimate name—class struggle—a step was taken. The difficulty of the sexual act can carry a certain weight, if one pauses to consider it. I mean: if everything we have to articulate in this field truly centers on this difficulty.

I suspect that one of the reasons why psychoanalysts prefer to stick to what it means to posit the Thing—with a capital T, if you will—to posit the Thing at the center, from which light radiates over an entire zonal region, I suspect that, aside from something I will have to point out shortly, it is above all a logical difficulty.

One might in this respect take it as an indication that the institution of marriage reveals itself as all the more—not “solid,” I wouldn’t say—it’s much more than that: resistant, in that our society grants the right to articulate itself to all aspirations—as psychologists say—to all aspirations toward the sexual act.

If it so happened that something was overcome in the clarification of the difficulty of social harmony, it is indeed quite striking: that it is not specifically there that the right to articulate aspirations toward the sexual act has been more opened, that marriage shows itself there—I won’t say more resistant, it has nothing to resist—more instituted than elsewhere, and that in the field where aspirations are articulated in a thousand effective forms, in all fields of art, of cinema, of speech, not to mention that of the great neurotic malaise of civilization, marriage, of course, remains at the center, having not budged an inch in its fundamental status.

In other words, to sum up this institution, to see that it is founded on this sole enunciation, once uttered, which I have used—in another way!—as an example to indicate the structuring of the message in itself: “You are my wife,” which does not even need to be doubled by another declaration, which renders almost purely formal the question of whether she agrees.

To this is linked—and in all the forms in which this institution persists, at least for the moment—to this is linked the inauguration of what we shall call a couple defined as productive. This is not quite to say merely that it concerns the couple in the sense of the sexual pair. Of course, it is required, but we must note that we can say its product is something other than the child reduced to the symbolic offspring, to the effect of the reproductive function. And that is what we mean by designating as (a) that which we have to interrogate, from the outset of its entry into the sexual act.

It is already the product of it, and not merely as biological offspring, this (a), which I have told you can be roughly—if you absolutely want to place it in your philosophical boxes—identified with what the residue of that tradition has arrived at in its final term, after having carried to perfection the isolation of the function of the subject, and having had to remain silent beyond that.

Nonetheless, before waving us off: “Bye, bye, now sail on into what succeeds me and where you are somewhat immersed, in this world that stirs, that is about to release its last contradiction, it begins…” At that moment too, it still told you that a small residue remained, from this beneficial dialectic to which total order, absolute knowledge had been offered in advance, and which is called Dasein.

This residue of presence, insofar as it is linked to subjective constitution, is in fact the only point through which we remain in continuity with the philosophical tradition; we collect it from its hand, we who rediscover it precisely as the byproduct of that something which had remained concealed in the dialectic of the subject, namely that it has to do with the sexual act.

This subjective residue is already there at the moment the question arises of the way it is going to function in the sexual act. If all human discourse is thus structured in such a way that it leaves gaping the very possibility of the subjective establishment implicated in the sexual act, all human discourse has already produced—not in each subject, at the level of its subjective effect in itself—this rain, this trickle of residues [cf. Lituraterre] that accompanies each of the subjects involved in the process.

And it happens—I think you remember, because it is from this approach that we have already touched on it—that this residue is ultimately the most secure junction, however partial it may be in its essence, the most secure junction of the subject with the body. That this little (a) presents itself—certainly as body, but not as one says as total body—as fall, as stray in relation to the body it depends on according to a structure that must be firmly maintained if one wants to understand it.

One can only understand it by referring to the center. And this is indeed what certain indications maintain, such as the fact that the incidence of these objects I call little (a) are all linked… one doesn’t say to the act, of course, since I was the first to say it… to something nonetheless that is destined for it, since it is entirely around… not only biological prematuration, insofar as it invokes that appeal made to the body toward the place of the act… not only prematuration or its attempt: pre-puberty, we are told, first surge which, in emerging, indicates the future and the horizon, and on its own… but not without invoking a whole conjunction, a whole social circumstance of repression, of evaluation, at the very least of discursive reference, of demand and of desire… already “pre-forms,” makes the subject arrive as little (a), as a byproduct of this central point of difficulty, to the difficulty itself.

Perhaps the relative deficiency… and which, even if it is relative, nonetheless remains radical—I say: perhaps… of psychoanalysts, with regard to their task, lies in the fact that they do not pose themselves as engaged in experiencing to the extreme the difficulty of the sexual act.

For didactic psychoanalysis, if of course it is more than required for—for them—let’s say to heal the effects of chance, as they exist in everyone, of this difficulty, it is not to say that it [psychoanalysis] in itself constitutes the fact of experiencing this difficulty!

It is rather convenient, once crossed—call it what you will—the cleansing, the preliminary purification, to return to one’s slippers, which are—notwithstanding what is said—not the chosen place of the sexual act!

Certainly, it is already an achievement to be in a position to think desire. Would you believe [Lacan’s laughter] that I’m giving you this rallying cry that one must “think the sexual act”? An act—note this if you recall the way I introduced it—does not need to be thought in order to be an act. The question even arises whether that’s not precisely why it is an act!

I won’t go any further in that direction, which only too easily favors the semblances of act. The matter is not simple, but it is certain—whether or not it must be thought—that one can only think it afterward! The nature of the act is that it must first be committed. Which perhaps does not exclude that it can be thought. This is to say that, if one starts from the difficulty of the sexual act, it is not to place within arm’s reach the time to think it.

So, let us begin again at the most basic level, how it presents itself: if it is an act, the constitution in act of a signifier… from some motion, let us say, invoking only the register of movement, something measurable in the weighing of a body… there must be, if the signifier is reduced to the simplest chain, that opposition I already inscribed on two small unexpected plaques in one of my articles, and which we will retranslate here as the—I don’t even say “I”—“am a man,” and its relation to “am a woman.” That is to say, we return to what earlier presented itself as the message in an inverted form.

Is it not absolutely fabulous that we cannot in any way—absolutely not!—account for a link between these terms that would justify our taking them to be—in relation to one another—inverse?

And it is therefore necessary that we interrogate them as they are, that is… as you know and as it is articulated on every line of FREUD… in the total incapacity to give them any secure correlate whatsoever: activity, passivity, for example, are only substitutes whose character FREUD, each time he uses them, underlines as—I won’t say inadequate—suspect.

So, let us reframe the questions with the apparatuses our good little tradition of handling the subject has provided us. It must be possible to put it to the test here, and even if it proves useless, the way it is repelled by the object may teach us something concerning the object itself, its elasticity for instance!

The being-male, to take it first—but equally the being-female: they are, at this level of discourse, exactly in the same position—we are going to find something for it analogous to what our handling of the subject has led us to; there must indeed be two sides here as well, it is immediately obvious!

There is an “in-itself” and then a “for…,” a “for something”! But what is immediately apparent is that it is not at all a matter here of “for-itself,” due precisely to the fundamental requirement of the sexual act: it cannot remain “for-itself,” but let us not say that it is “for” the one who makes up the pair! That is where the introduction of the function of the big Other must serve us.

What corresponds here to our questioning, as opposed to this rather slippery “in-itself,” which corresponds to being-male and even more so to being-female, is a “for the Other,” with a capital O. That is, what we were indeed forced to evoke at the outset, that is, the place from which the message returns to him in an inverted form.

I point out to you that this is a small reminder, I will emphasize it more next time, but I can only begin to hint at it here, in passing, to this alternative whose scope I have extended by showing that it is not simply that of alienation, since it already allowed us, in the first trimester, to institute this logical operation of alienation in its relation with two others, which you may have forgotten, that together with it form something I interrogated in the manner of a Klein group [Cf. 21-12-1966].

In short! the point of departure of that little rectangle [Cf. 11-01-1967] where I located the fundamental alienation of the subject, precisely in its relation with a possibility that was nothing other than the marked place of the sexual act under the logical form of sublimation.

This alternative: either “I do not think,” or “I am not,” a seductive choice as you can see, is the starting point of what is offered to the subject as soon as the perspective of an unconscious is introduced, insofar as it is made of this difficulty of the sexual act. You see here how it is repaired: the “I do not think,” is assuredly the for… in-itself [Lacan corrects his slip] the “in-itself,” if it ever manifests, of being-male or being-female. The “I am not” being on the other side, namely on the side of the “for the Other.”

What the sexual act is called upon to assure, since it is founded there, is something we can call a sign, coming from “where I do not think”: from where I am as not thinking, to arrive “where I am not”: there where I am as not being.

For if “I am where I do not think” and if “I think where I am not”—this is indeed the occasion to recall it—in this relation that, however much it arrives “where I am not”—that is to say, I, male: at the level of the woman—it is nonetheless there that… whatever the philosophers’ claims may have been to separate to phronein [I think], from to khairein [I enjoy]… it is still there that my very destiny, at the level of to phronein, is played out. The fact of having dialogued with SOCRATES has never prevented anyone from having obsessions that tickle, that greatly disturb his to phronein!

So the next step is this one offered to us—and this is why I recalled it—by the function of the message: it is that it is a fact, that imprudently and absolutely not knowing what I am saying, I announce myself as being “man” where “I do not think.” And this form of “You are my wife,” where “I am not,” still has the merit of giving the woman the possibility to announce herself, she too. And it is this that requires her to be there as subject, because she becomes one, she as much as I, from the moment she announces herself.

This encounter, in its pure form—all the more pure, I insist, because we absolutely do not know what we are saying—this is what puts at the very forefront the function of the subject in the sexual act. And it is even as pure subject that we notice, precisely at the level of the foundation of this act, that this pure subject is situated at the joint—or better said, the disjoint—of the body and of jouissance.

It is a subject to the extent of this disjoint. How, here, is this best seen?

Of course we know it by tradition, since earlier I evoked the Philebus in particular, where this to phronein [I think] and this to khairein [I enjoy] are subjected to this operation of separation, with a rigor which is precisely why, on the eve of the last holidays, I recommended you to reread it.

But here, even if you already wanted to tell me that after all, this act, we can well do without its demands as an act, that perhaps one doesn’t need the sexual act to screw in a perfectly acceptable way! The matter, indeed, is to know, within the relief of the act, what it is that the subject demands there. It is perhaps saying too little to say that everything depends on the opposition of the signifiers man, woman, if we do not even yet know what they mean.

And indeed, where the incidence of the subject is seen, it is not so much in the word “woman” as in the word “male.” Jouissance, I have remarked, is an ambiguous term: it slips. From this, which leads one to say that there is only jouissance of the body and which opens the field of substance where are inscribed those severe limits, where the subject is contained, of the incidences of pleasure. And then that sense in which to enjoy—I have said—is to posit the “my…”: I enjoy something. Which leaves hanging the question of whether that something—which I enjoy—enjoys.

There, around the “my…,” is very precisely that separation of jouissance and the body. For it is not for nothing that I introduced you to it last time, by recalling that articulation, fragile for being limited to the traditional field of the genesis of the subject, of the Phenomenology of Spirit, of master and slave.

“My…” I enjoy your body from now on, that is to say that your body becomes the metaphor of “my” jouissance.

And HEGEL, all the same, does not forget that it is only a metaphor. That is to say, if I am master, my jouissance is already displaced, as it depends on the metaphor of the slave. And it remains the case that for him, as for what I question in the sexual act, there is another Jouissance that is adrift. And do I need, once again, to write it on the board, with my little bars?

This body of the woman, which is “mine,” is henceforth the metaphor of my jouissance. The question is what is there in the form of my body—of course, I do not even think, innocent as I am, to call it “mine”—it too will have its relation of metaphor, which would assuredly ground everything in the most elegant and effortless manner, with the jouissance in question, which constitutes the difficulty of the sexual act.

You will say to me: “Why is it at the level of the woman that it becomes problematic?” We will say it very quickly and very simply right away, all psychoanalysts know this; they may not know how to say it, but they know it! They know it, in any case, by this: that men or women, they have not yet been capable of articulating the slightest thing that holds together on the subject of feminine jouissance!

I am not saying that feminine jouissance cannot take this place, I am stopping you at the moment when it is a matter of not going too fast in saying that this is the difficulty of the sexual act! And this reference, which was less unbearable only because it is a myth, that I took last time from the relations of master and slave, namely of jouissance adrift, you can easily imagine when it is the slave who is concerned, [Lacan writes on the board Jouissance] namely that there is no reason why jouissance should not always be there, and all the more so since he did not have, like the master, the idiocy of placing it in risk!

So why would he not have kept it? It is not [a reason] because his body has become the metaphor of the master’s jouissance that his own jouissance should not continue its little life! As everything proves it! If you read ancient comedy, if you reread dear TERENCE for example, who is not precisely a primitive, quite the contrary, of whom one can even say that things are pushed so far, so exhausted, that it surpasses in simplicity all that we can cogitate.

Much simpler than a film by Mr. ROBBE-GRILLET, even when it’s botched! [Laughter] But it isn’t botched! It’s just that we absolutely no longer perceive what it is about! There is a certain story of Andria, for example… You’ll read it and you’ll say: “My God, what a story!”

All of that because of a boy who has a father and who must or must not marry a girl who may be from good or bad society. And in the end, the one from bad society turns out to be from good—because of that eternal story of recognition, that she had been kidnapped very young, and yada yada… What a story! And what a stupid story! Only, what’s unfortunate is that if you reason like this, you miss one thing, which is that there is only one interesting character in the entire comedy and his name is DAVOS! And he is truly a slave. Because you can take him quite seriously, he who manages everything, he who is the only intelligent one among all these people, and there’s not even the slightest suggestion that the others could start to be so:

— The father plays the paternal role to the degree, let’s say… of desirable idiocy, truly… superfluous, right? [Laughter]
— The son is a poor little thing, completely lost! [Laughter]
— The girls in the story? We don’t even see them, nobody’s interested in them! [Laughter]
— There is a slave, who fights for his master, except that at any moment—it’s written—he could be crucified! And he handles the matter with mastery, so to speak! [General hilarity]

That’s what ancient comedy is about. Except that it holds for us only one interest, namely to show you that there can be a question of what becomes of jouissance when there has been this little movement of displacement, of Verschiebung, which is properly constituted as soon as the function of the subject is introduced between the body and jouissance.

It is not with jouissance proper to a body in the sense that this jouissance defines it! A body is something that can enjoy. Only here’s the point: one makes it become the metaphor of the jouissance of another! And what becomes of its own? Is it exchanged? That’s the entire question! But it is not resolved. It is not resolved—why? Still, we analysts, we know this. That is to say, we can always say it!

It is a general observation, I’m not going to repeat it constantly! Let’s write this… We’ll do it like this, yes, for the body, it will be more fun, and it looks like my little plaques, on which, in one of my articles, I wrote “Men,” “Ladies”: the kind you see at the entrance of urinals… [Laughter]

A small plaque can serve us as a body, with a certain number of things inscribed on it—indeed, that is the function of the body, ever since we recalled that it is the place of the Other.

So, we make the same little bar, so you won’t be confused, and here we write “J” to mean “jouissance.” Then, there is a question mark here because it’s that jouissance and we do not ultimately know whether it comes here, whether the male body is truly—surely—what the male claims it to be, because he merely affirms it, and that’s where we start with “You are my wife,” namely that the woman’s body is the metaphor of his jouissance. That’s it! It’s enough to add a stroke to make this little articulation expressive.

Indeed, for reasons that pertain… that pertain to the fact that there is not only the couple at stake in the sexual act, namely that… as other structuralists working in other fields have reminded you… the relation between man and woman is subject to functions of exchange, which thereby also imply an exchange value, and that the place where something that is in use is marked by this negation that makes it into an exchange value, is here… for reasons drawn from the natural constitution of the function of copulation… is here taken from male jouissance insofar as, it—we know where it is. Or at least, so we believe! It’s a little organ that one can grab. That’s what the baby does immediately, and with the greatest ease.

Ah—that I can tell you, by the way, I really must show it to you—they brought me a little romantic book about masturbation… With illustrations! It’s something so… well, so delightful that I can’t believe that if I circulate it here, it will come back to me! [General laughter] So I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do, there must be… there must be devices, where one can project objects like this and open it to the right page…

Well, in any case, you must see this. It’s called The Book Without Title and it’s made for… there are at least twenty-five illustrations, well… or around twenty, that demonstrate the ravages [Lacan laughs] caused to an unfortunate… to any unfortunate young man, of course—you know how bad the reputation of masturbation was at the start of the last century—the ravages and the… the horrors, in short, that it produces! And all of that, with line drawing and colors! [Laughter] To see the unfortunate young man, the poor young man vomit blood! Because that is one of the consequences… well, it’s something sublime. I beg your pardon, this has nothing to do with my discourse, absolutely nothing to do! This is going to cost me terribly! That’s also one of the reasons I don’t want to part with it! [Renewed general laughter]

Yes, and it’s of a beauty that surpasses everything… if there are devices that can project it, even without it being transparent, I’d like to show it to you… I’ve never seen anything like it! [Laughter] Anyway! Anyway, you know it, this embargo, right, on male jouissance, insofar as it is apprehensible somewhere, that’s something structural—though hidden—for the foundation of value.

If a woman, who is a subject nonetheless, in the sexual act… I would even go further, I’ve just articulated that there can be no sexual act if she is not, from the outset, founded as subject… for a woman to be able to take on her function as exchange value, she must take on something that is already instituted as value and which psychoanalysis reveals under the name of the castration complex.

The exchange of women—I’m not telling you that it translates easily into the exchange of phalluses! Otherwise, one doesn’t see why ethnologists wouldn’t just draw their structural diagrams using the actual names for things!

It is the exchange of phalluses, as symbols of a jouissance subtracted as such—that is to say, not the penis, but what, since the woman becomes the metaphor of jouissance, makes it possible to take another metaphor in her place, namely that part of the body—negated—which we call the phallus, to distinguish it from the penis.

And this does not in any way close off the problem we have just articulated! In other words, something is instituted, upon which another process—the process of social exchange—lays its foundation for the material—so to speak—destined for the sexual act. This nonetheless leaves open whether we can—due to this external element—locate something concerning the woman in her function as metaphor, in relation to a jouissance that has passed into the function of value. Which is expressed in many myths. I don’t need to remind you of ISIS and her eternal mourning, for what concerns that final part of the body she had to reassemble.

I merely point out, in passing, that in this extreme myth, where precisely the goddess is defined as being—she—what distinguishes her from a mortal woman—pure jouissance, certainly also separated from the body, but why? Because it is not a question for her of what constitutes a body in its status as a mortal body.

This does not mean that the gods do not have bodies—simply, as you well know, they change them! Even the God of Israel has a body! One must be mad not to notice it: this body is a pillar of fire by night and of smoke by day. This is told to us in the Book, and what is at issue there is, properly speaking, His body.

It is, as with my other story—this is a parenthesis—one of those things I would have developed more fully if I had been able to hold a seminar on The Name-of-the-Father.

The goddess is jouissance, it is very important to recall this. Her status as goddess is to be jouissance, and to misrecognize that is properly to condemn oneself to understand nothing about jouissance. And that is why the Philebus is exemplary, where one reply tells us that in no case do the gods concern themselves with jouissance; it would not be worthy of them.

That is, so to speak, the weak point at the origin of philosophical discourse: it is to have radically misrecognized the status of jouissance in the order of beings. I make these remarks only in passing, to remind you of the scope of this reading of the Philebus, insofar as it allows us to locate, with exemplary precision, the limited field within which everything develops that will concern the status of the subject and what the return, the recovery, of the questions that were, by its fact, isolated, means.

So here we are again around the question of what jouissance is in the sexual act.

Let us say, to introduce what is the end of this discourse—but which it is essential, first of all, to articulate with the most extreme scansion—what is the end of this discourse is to allow us to locate how the acts that are placed—and legitimately—within the register of perversion concern the sexual act.

If they concern the sexual act, it is because, at the point where jouissance is at stake… and you will see that, from the fact that there is such a point, it may nonetheless be at stake at the level of the woman’s body, but that it is by a secondary path that we can approach it… given that the grasp, the model given to us of what will appear in the attempts at solution, is over there to the right, in the institution of the value of jouissance:

That is to say, in the fact that the function of a certain organ is negated, the very organ through which nature, by offering pleasure, ensures the copulating function—but in a way that is perfectly contingent, accessory… in other animal species, nature ensures it quite differently, for example with hooks… and nothing can assure us that in this organ there is anything that concerns, properly speaking, jouissance.

Here we have this term through which value is introduced. It is by this path that, at the level where the question of jouissance lies, very precisely, jouissance comes into play in the form of a question. To pose the question of feminine jouissance, well, is already to open the door to all perverse acts. This results in… that is why men appear to have, at least in appearance, the privilege of the grand perverse positions. And the question is raised—it is already something that the question can be raised—whether woman herself even suspects it.

Of course, through the reflection of what this lack of the man’s jouissance introduces in her, she enters into this field, via the path of desire, which, as I teach, is the desire of the Other—that is to say, the desire of the man. But it is more primitively that—for man—the question of jouissance arises. It arises in the fact that he is interested, from the outset, at the foundation, in the possibility of the sexual act. And the way he is going to interrogate it is by means of objects. These objects are precisely those I call little (a), insofar as they are marginal, insofar as they escape a certain structure of the body.

Namely, the one I call specular, which is the mirage by which it is said that “the soul is the form of the body,” that everything from the body passes into the soul: that is where what can be retained lies, that is where the image of the body lies, that is the path through which so many analysts believe they can grasp what is at stake in our reference to the body. Whence so many absurdities.

For it is precisely in that part of the body, in that strange limit which, as I will say in commenting on these images, form globes or symphyses, in those parts of the body that we will call, in relation to the specular reflection, anesthetic parts, it is there that the question of jouissance takes refuge. And it is to these objects that the subject for whom this question arises—in the first place: the male subject—it is to these objects that this subject addresses himself to pose the question of jouissance.

Of course, this, at the moment I leave you, may seem to you a closed formula. And it is true. At the very least, it would be necessary, for each of these major objects I have just evoked—those which I designate under the name of objects (a)—to demonstrate this in an exemplary fashion. But what I will demonstrate to you—that will be for our next session—is how these objects serve as questioning elements. This can only be given to us beginning from what I have already articulated, last time as well as again today, as the constitutive separation of the body and jouissance.

Do I even need to begin to indicate something about it for your thoughts to immediately turn toward the drive that is called—wrongly called—“sadomasochistic,” but which is nonetheless, along with scopophilia, one of the only terms FREUD uses as a pivot when he properly sets out to define the drive.

That the sadomasochistic drive plays out entirely in a game where what is at stake lies there, at that point of disjunction, sufficiently marked by my symbol or algorithm, whichever you prefer, of the signifier of the barred Other, S(Ⱥ), namely the disjunction of jouissance and the body—it is inasmuch as—and you will see this in all its details next time—that the masochist, and it is from him that I will begin, interrogates the completeness and rigor of that separation and sustains it as such, it is by that means that he “extracts,” if I may say so, from the field of the Other, what remains available to him from a certain play of jouissance.

It is insofar as the masochist provides a solution that is not the path of the sexual act but that takes place upon that path, that we will be able to properly situate what has always been spoken of in approximate terms regarding this fundamental position of masochism, insofar as it is a perverse structure and that at its level—for having articulated it at its proper time, which is primordial here—he alone allows us to distinguish, because they must be distinguished, what pertains to the perverse act and what pertains to the neurotic act.

You will see this; I am pointing it out because I have the feeling that I haven’t told you much today and after all time is pressing. I point it out inasmuch as it may already serve some of you as a theme for reflection: we must radically distinguish the perverse act from the neurotic act: — the perverse act is situated at the level of this question concerning jouissance, — the neurotic act, even if it refers to the model of the perverse act, has no other aim than to sustain something that has nothing to do with the question of the sexual act, namely the effect of desire.

It is only by posing the questions in this radical way—and it can only be radical if it is articulated, logical—that we can distinguish the fundamental function of the perverse act, I mean: we can recognize that it is distinct from everything that resembles it, because those things borrow from it their fantasy. That’s it!

Until next time.