🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

The analysis may be endless, but a course cannot be. It must indeed come to an end. So the last one of this year will take place next Wednesday. That makes today the second-to-last. This year, I decided there would be no closed seminar. Nevertheless, I made room—at least, I apologize if I forget anyone—for at least two people who brought their contribution here.

Perhaps, at the beginning of this second-to-last lecture, there is someone among you—one or several—someone who would perhaps like to tell me what they would like to see me—who knows—emphasize a bit more, or provide an answer to, or initiate a reprise for the future, either in this second-to-last lesson or in the final one.

Well… I’ll see if I can respond to that today. I’ll at least try to indicate in which direction I could respond, or—who knows—not respond, next time. In short, if a few of you would be willing, right here, right now, quickly, to give me, so to speak, some indications of your wishes, of what I may have left to be desired for you regarding the field I have articulated this year on The Logic of Fantasy, well, I would be very grateful.

Well then, the floor is open. To whom? We mustn’t dawdle, on the other hand. Who wants to speak? Alright… It’s heating up! Well, alright, let’s drop it, at least for the moment. Those who have l’esprit de l’escalier may perhaps send me a little note… My address is in the directory, it’s on rue de Lille. I don’t think you’ll hesitate: as far as I know, I’m the only one—at least in this spot—identified as Doctor LACAN. Well… Then, let’s continue.

I’m going to pick up where we left off, and since we don’t have much time left to wrap up what may appear to constitute a certain field, circumscribed by what I’ve said this year, I will—my God—try to indicate to you the final reference points in as simple a way as I can.

Of course, I’ll try to keep it simple, which means I must warn you about what that simplicity can mean.
You can clearly see that at the conclusion of this logic of fantasy—a conclusion well justified by the fact, which I will once again re-emphasize today—that fantasy is, in a much narrower sense than anything else in the unconscious, structured like a language, since ultimately: fantasy is a sentence with a grammatical structure.

It therefore seems appropriate to articulate the logic of fantasy, which means, for example, posing a certain number of logical questions that, simple as they may be, have—some of them—not been articulated very often… I’m not saying: “for the first time by me,” but: “perhaps for the first time by me,” in the analytic field… the relation between the subject of the statement—for example—and the subject of the enunciation.

That does not exclude that, at the conclusion of this initial clearing-up, this indication, this directional sense given, could be developed in the future in a fuller, more articulated, more systematic way. This logic of fantasy—I claim only to have opened the furrow for it this year. Not only does that not exclude it, it clearly indicates that somewhere this logic of fantasy connects, inserts itself, suspends itself within the economy of fantasy. That is precisely why, at the conclusion of this discourse, I have brought in the term jouissance.

I have introduced it by underlining it, by emphasizing that it is a new term, at least in the function I assign to it, and that it is not a term that FREUD put at the forefront of theoretical articulation. And if my teaching, in sum, could find its axis in the formula “to uphold FREUD’s doctrine,” then that is indeed something which implies, precisely, that I announce there, that I initiate there, such a function, such a reference point, that is, in some sense, circumscribed, outlined, demanded, implied…

To uphold FREUD is to do what I always do. First, as one says, “to render unto Freud what is Freud’s.” Which does not exclude some other allegiance, such as, for example, upholding him in view of what he indicates, of what he entails concerning the relation to truth.
I would even say that, if something like that is possible, it is precisely to the extent that I never fail to render unto Freud what is Freud’s, that I do not appropriate him. This is a point which, I must say, is important, and perhaps I will have time to return to it at the end.

It is rather curious to see that for some, it is by appropriating—that is, by not returning to me—what they most obviously owe me—anyone can notice it—in their formulations, that what matters is not that. It is this something, this “failure to return it to me,” that prevents them from making the next step—which would be in many areas quite easy—right away, instead of—alas!—always leaving it to me to take it, only to—afterwards—despair that I have, so it seems, pulled the rug out from under them.

So then, let us approach this function of fantasy.

Let us approach it then, and first, in order to notice, to simply state, as the very starting point of our question, something that jumps out at us: it is something closed. It presents itself to us, in our experience, as a closed signification, for the subjects who usually, most commonly, most habitually for us, bear it—that is, the neurotics.

Let us note… as FREUD emphatically does, in the exemplary examination he made of one of these fantasies: “A child is being beaten,” which I already discussed, if you remember, when I introduced the first schemas of this year—which, of course, I advise you, once you’ve gathered what you may have more or less extensively taken down as notes, to which, I believe, you will refer again, in order to grasp the path that has been followed here… that something closed, then, is to be located—and doubly so—in these two terms that I have emphasized, one as the correlate of the choice constituted by the “I do not think,” in which the “I” is constituted by the fact that the “I” precisely comes in reserve, if I may say so, like a notching in negative within the structure: “Ein Kind ist geschlagen.”

This fantasy… not “a child is being beaten,” for instance, but to be strict: “a child is beaten,” as it is written in German… this fantasy… it is indeed this structure that, at the level of the only possible term of the choice as it is left by the structure of alienation—the choice of “I do not think”… this fantasy appears as this sentence, grammatically structured: “Ein Kind ist geschlagen.”

But as I have told you, this structure, the only one offered to us: the forced choice, at the level of “either I am not, or I do not think,” is there only insofar as it can be called upon to reveal the other, to reject it, and that at the level of the other, that of “I am not,” it is the unconscious Bedeutung that comes to correspondingly bite into this “I” insofar as it is not.

And the relation to this Bedeutung is precisely this signification, insofar as it escapes, this closed signification, this signification that is nevertheless so important to highlight insofar as, if one may say so, it is what gives the measure of understanding, the accepted measure, the received measure, the intuition, the experience, which one invokes, when engaging in those deceptive discourses that appeal to understanding, as opposed to explanation: sanctity and philosophical vanity, Mr. JASPERS in the front row.

The gut-level point at which he aims to make you believe that you sometimes understand things, that’s it, it’s that little secret, isolated thing you have inside yourself in the form of fantasy, and that you believe you understand because it awakens in you the dimension of desire.

That is quite simply what is at stake in what is called understanding. And to recall it here is important. Because it is not because, on average, all of you, I say for the majority, are somewhat neurotic around the edges, that fantasy gives you the measure of understanding, precisely at that level where fantasy awakens desire in you… which is not nothing at all, because it is what centers your world, but it is not for that reason that you should imagine that you understand what alone delivers the logic of fantasy, namely: perversion.

Do not imagine that for the pervert, fantasy plays the same role. That is what I am trying to explain to you: the rooting of what the pervert does, who can only be defined in relation to the term I have introduced, also new in the emphasis I have given it, which is called: the sexual act. So, you see, there are connections here that must be distinguished.

To articulate what is at stake in the jouissance involved in perversion, in relation to the difficulty or the impasse of the sexual act, is to offer something that has, in relation to the fantasy… the fantasy as it is given to us in its closed state—and that is why I recalled earlier this example of A child is being beaten in the Freudian text… the function of this fantasy, which cannot as such present, be anything other than strictly this formula “Ein Kind ist geschlagen.”

It is not because it may be of interest, in the sense that it has a configuration that you can pinpoint, relate to the economy of perverse jouissance by matching certain terms of one to certain terms of the other, that it is in any way of the same nature! In other words… to immediately recall this sharp point that is nevertheless not difficult to pick up along the way in this very clear text of FREUD, it is for example this… that it does not have such specificity in the cases of neurosis where he encountered it.

In the structure of a neurosis, this fantasy—to take this one since we must take something in order to know where to focus our attention—this fantasy is not specifically tied to one person or another. Now that is something that could, for a moment, hold our attention!

Finally, as far as the structure of symptoms is concerned, I mean what symptoms signify in the economy, here we cannot say that the same arrangement occurs in one neurosis as in another. I will never repeat it enough, even if I seem surprised when, among those who trust me enough to come for supervision, I strongly object, for instance, to the use of terms such as: “hystero-phobic structure.” Why is that? A hysterical structure is not the same as a phobic structure! No closer to one another than to the obsessive structure. The symptom represents a structure.

This is where the striking point lies, that—as Freud shows us in very different structures—this fantasy may be there, wandering, with the privilege of being here more unavowable than anything else. I read FREUD, I repeat it here for now. “Unavowable” contains many things. One could dwell on that. In any case, to remain at the level of the rough approach that was that of the year 1919, when this was written, let’s say that hanging from it, like a cherry on a stalk, is the feeling of guilt.

This is in any case where FREUD stops, in order to relate it to what he calls “a scar.” That is precisely, the scar of the Oedipus complex.

This is indeed enough to make us say that, in the way it has arisen in our experience, fantasy partakes of the experimental aspect of the foreign body. That we have been led—this by virtue of a true theoretical bridge from FREUD—to sense that this closed signification was connected to something else, much more capable of development, much richer in potentialities, which is properly called perversion.

It is not because FREUD made that leap very quickly, that we, ourselves, should not reestablish the distances, the proper relation, question ourselves—after, all the same, a great deal of acquired experience—on what perversion is. Perversion, then, I said, is something that is articulated, presented, as a path of access specific to the difficulty that arises, let us say: “from the project”—and place that word in quotation marks, meaning that it is only analogical here, I am using it as a reference to a discourse other than my own—to be more precise, the questioning that is situated in the angle of these two terms: “there is no…”, “there is only…”, “sexual act”, “the sexual act”.

There is no sexual act, I have said, insofar as we are incapable of articulating its resulting affirmations. Which does not mean, of course, that there are not some subjects who have accessed it, who can legitimately say: “I am a man,” “I am a woman.”

But we, analysts, [Lacan’s laughter] that is what is striking, it’s that we are not able to say it. Yet, it is only that act, suspended at this level, that accounts for that something which, after all—the matter not only has remained but still remains ambiguous—could be separated from it, which is called perversion. Why?

If it were a perversion in the absolute sense, in the sense in which ARISTOTLE takes it for example when he excludes—τέραϲ [teras]: those are monsters—from the field of his Ethics a certain number of practices, which perhaps, why not, were more manifest, more visible, even more vivid in his world than in ours, where, incidentally, one must not think they are not still there, such as the example he gives us of bestial love, or even, if I remember correctly, the allusion to the fact that some tyrant of Phalerum, if I remember correctly, rather enjoyed putting some victims—whether friendly or unfriendly to him—through I don’t know what kind of machine in which they were steamed for a certain time. ARISTOTLE excludes this from the field of Ethics. This is not, of course, for us, a univocal model, since in his Ethics the sexual act, precisely, as in no ethics of the Greek philosophical tradition, the sexual act has no central value—I mean acknowledged, patent. It remains for us to read it.

It is not the same for us, thanks to the inclusion of the Judaic Commandments in our morality. But assuredly, with FREUD, the matter is firm: the interest we have in sexual perversion, even if we find it more convenient to slacken its chains, in the form of a reference to I don’t know what endogenous development, I don’t know what stage we claim, for unknown reasons, to be biological, it remains that perversion only takes on its value by being articulated with the sexual act.

I say: with the sexual act as such. And that is why I chose this small model, this little model of incommensurable division par excellence, of this petit(a), the widest to develop its incommensurability, which is defined by 1/a = 1 + a, and allows us to inscribe it in a schema, in the form of a double development. Must I inscribe it again today?

I indicate only this being 1, there is a way to fold back here the petit(a), then what remains of it, which happens, as if by chance, to be the square of (a), itself equal to 1 – a, it is not difficult to verify this immediately, to produce here an a³, which folds back upon the preceding a² to form here an a⁴, which a⁴, etc., and results here in a sum of odd powers which turns out to be equal to a², while the sum of the even powers turns out in the end to be equal to (a). By which, what you first saw projected into the 1, namely (a) on the left, a² on the right, ends up being definitively separated in an inverted form.

A schema which it would be easy for us—though in a purely metaphorical way—to show that it can fairly well represent what, of the sexual act, may present itself to us in a manner conforming to FREUD’s presentiment, namely: realizable, but only in the form of sublimation.

It is precisely to the extent that this path and what it implies remain problematic that I am excluding it this year. For to say that it can be realized in the form of sublimation is to move away precisely from what we are dealing with, namely that in its field arise, structurally, the whole chain of difficulties that unfold, which are included in a major gap, and a gap that remains, that is, that of castration.

It is insofar… on this point, the common vote, so to speak, of the authors, of those who have experience with it, is clear: it is at a minimum, one can say, along a path that is the inverse of the one that leads to the limit of castration, that what is perversion is articulated.

The interest of this schema is this: it is to show that this measure petit(a), here first projected onto the 1, can also be developed externally. Namely, that the ratio 1/1+a is also equal to that fundamental ratio designated by petit(a), which here means, as I previously reminded you: a/1.

That what is at stake at the level of perversion is this: it is that insofar as the One… presumed, not of the act but of the union—of the pact, if you will—sexual… insofar as this One is left intact, where partition does not occur, that the subject called “perverse” comes to find, at the level of this irreducible that he is, of this original petit(a), his jouissance.

What makes this conceivable is the following: — That there can be no sexual act—no more than any other act—except in reference to the signifier, which alone can constitute it as an act. — That this signifying reference, by that very fact, does not concern two natural entities, male and female. — That from the mere fact that it dominates, because it is a low field of the sexual act, this signifying reference introduces these beings—whom we cannot in any way maintain as natural beings—only in the form of a function of the subject. — That this function of the subject, as I have articulated in previous sessions, has the effect of a disjunction between the body and jouissance, and that it is there, it is at the level of this partition, that perversion most typically intervenes.

What perversion emphasizes in attempting to rejoin them, this jouissance and this body, separated due to the signifying intervention, is precisely what situates it along the path of a resolution of the question of the sexual act. It is because in the sexual act, as I showed you in my schema last time, there is—for whichever of the two partners—a jouissance, that of the other, which remains in suspense.

It is because the intertwining, the required chiasmus, which would by full right make each body the metaphor, the signifier of the jouissance of the other, it is because this chiasmus is in suspense that we cannot, from whichever side we approach it, do anything but see this displacement which indeed places one’s jouissance in dependence on the body of the other. As a result, the jouissance of the other remains, as I said, adrift.

Man—for the structural reason that it is from his jouissance that a subtraction is made which elevates it to the function of a value of jouissance—man finds himself, more electively than woman, caught in the consequences of this structural subtraction of a part of his jouissance. Man is effectively the first to bear the reality of this hole introduced into jouissance.

That is also why, it is he for whom this question of jouissance is, not of course more weighty—it’s just as much so for his partner—but such that he can articulate solutions to it. He can, by virtue of this: that there is in the nature of this thing called the body, something that duplicates this alienation, which is—from the structure of the subject—an alienation of jouissance.

Alongside subjective alienation—I mean, dependent on the introduction of the function of the subject—which bears on jouissance, there is another, which is that embodied in the function of the object (a). EURYDICE, one might say, lost twice over. Jouissance, that jouissance which the pervert finds again, where is he to find it?

Not in the totality of his body, the one where a jouissance is perfectly conceivable and can be demanded, but where it is clear that that is where it becomes problematic when it comes to the sexual act. The jouissance of the sexual act can in no way be compared to that which the runner may experience from that free and lofty stride.

Nowhere more than in the field of sexual jouissance… and it is not for nothing that it appears there as prevalent—nowhere more than in this field does the pleasure principle… which is properly the limit, the stumbling block, the term imposed on any form situated as excess of jouissance… nowhere does it appear more clearly, that the law of jouissance is subject to this limit.

And it is there that the field is to be found especially for man—as I have said, for him the castration complex already articulates the problem—that his field is to be found. I mean that there are objects which, in the body, are defined as being in some way, with respect to the pleasure principle, outside the body. This is what the objects (a) are.

The petit (a) is that ambiguous something which, however little it may belong to the body, to the individual object itself, it is in the field of the Other… and for good reason, because that is the field in which the subject is outlined… that he has to make the request for it, to find its trace.

— The breast, that object which must be defined as something which, though it is stuck on, attached like a surface element, parasitically, in the manner of a placenta, remains that something which the child’s body can legitimately claim as its belonging. We see it clearly: an enigmatic belonging, of course, I mean that through an accident of the evolution of living beings, it appears that thus, for some of them, something of them remains appended to the body of the being that engendered them.

And then the others, we’ve already mentioned them:

— The excrement, scarcely needing emphasis as to what it has, with regard to the body, of marginality, but not without being extremely connected to its functioning: it is quite clear to see in its full weight what living beings add to the natural domain of these products of their functions.

— And then those I have designated under the terms of the gaze and the voice. Seeking at least for the first of these two terms… having already articulated here at length what it entails in the relation of vision: the question always remains suspended, the one which is so simple to articulate, and which one can say, despite everything, the phenomenological approach—as proven by MERLEAU-PONTY’s final work, The Visible and the Invisible, 1964—cannot resolve, namely, what is at stake in this root of the visible, which must be found again in the question of what the gaze radically is.

The gaze which cannot be grasped any more as a reflection of the body than any of the other objects in question can be re-grasped in the soul, I mean in that regulative aesthesis of the pleasure principle, in that representative aesthesis where the individual finds himself and supports himself, identified with himself, in the narcissistic relation in which he affirms himself as individual.

This remainder, and this remainder which only arises from the moment the limit that founds the subject is conceived, this remainder which is called the object (a), that is where the jouissance that does not fall under the rule of the pleasure principle takes refuge. It is also there, it is by being there, it is from the fact that the Dasein, not only of the pervert but of every subject, is to be situated in this outside-the-body, this part already drawn by that something sensed in advance that is found somewhere in the Philebus, in that passage I asked you to go and look up, and which SOCRATES calls, in the relation of the soul to the body, this anesthetic part. It is precisely in this anesthetic part that jouissance dwells, as shown by the structure of the subject’s position in those two exemplary terms, defined as those of the sadist and the masochist.

To acclimate you, if I may say so, to this pathway of access, need I evoke for you the most elementary puppet imaginable of the sadistic act? Except, of course, that I have secured my premises from the outset, and I ask you to clearly grasp that here, I ask you to stop at something other than what for you—I’ve said it: more or less vacillating on the edges of neurosis—may awaken in you some vague empathy, the slightest little fantasy of this order.

It is not a matter of “understanding” what might be moving in such a practice, imagined or not, that belongs to this register; it is indeed a matter of articulating this, which will spare you questions about the economy—in that function—of pain, for example, on which I do hope we’ve stopped beating our heads, what the sadist plays with is the subject, shall we say. I will not make a prosopopoeia out of that. First of all, I have already written something on this, titled Kant with Sade, to show that they are of the same vein.

He plays with the subject. What subject? The subject, shall I say—as I have said somewhere that one is subject to thought or subject to vertigo—the subject to jouissance. Which, as you clearly see, introduces this inflection that leads us from the subject to what I have marked as its remainder, to the object petit (a).

It is at the level of the Other, with a capital O of course, that he operates this subversion, by regulating—I say regulating—what philosophers have always sensed as worthy of qualifying what they disdainfully called the relations of the body to the soul, and which in SPINOZA bears its true name: titillatio, the tickle.

He enjoys the body of the Other, apparently.

But you can clearly see that the question must be shifted to the one I formulated in a field where things are less captivating, when I illustrated the “master-slave relationship” by asking: “That which is enjoyed, does it enjoy?” So you can clearly see the immediate relation with the field of the sexual act.

Only, the question at the level of the sadist is this: that he does not know that it is precisely to this question that he is attached, that he becomes its pure and simple instrument, that he does not know what he himself does as subject, that he is essentially in Verleugnung, that he may feel it, interpret it in a thousand ways, which he certainly does. Of course, he must have some articulating power, which was the case with the Marquis de SADE, whereby, legitimately, his name remains attached to the matter.

SADE remains essential for having well masked the relations of the sadistic act to what jouissance actually is, and for having… when he attempted, in a derisory fashion, to articulate the law under the form of a Universal Rule worthy of KANT’s articulations, in that famous French piece, Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, if You Would Be Republicans, the subject of my commentary in the article I mentioned earlier… shown that this law can only be articulated in terms not of “jouissance of the body”—note this well in the text—but of “parts of the body.”

Each person, in that fantasmatic State—with a capital S—that would be founded on the right to jouissance, each person being obliged to offer to whomever expresses the intent, the jouissance of such “part,” the author writes—and this is not written in vain—of his body. Refuge of jouissance, this “part” which the sadistic subject does not know is precisely what constitutes—his Dasein, that he realizes its essence through it. That is what is already given as a key in SADE’s text.

Of course, I don’t have time—because, my God, time is passing—to rearticulate what results from this resumption, from this reordering of the One in relation to the Other, of jouissance and the subject, and how close it is to fantasy—clearly articulated immediately by SADE—of jouissance where it is pushed to the absolute in the Other, very precisely in that part of the 1 that is furthest to the right, where we saw, at the beginning of the problem, jouissance slip away, left without support, the one in question, and for which SADE must construct—he, an atheist—that figure, nonetheless the most manifest and the most manifestly plausible of God: that of the jouissance of an absolute malevolence.

This essential and sovereign evil, of which then—and only then—carried away, so to speak, by the logic of fantasy, SADE confesses that the sadist is only the servant: that he must, for the radical evil that nature constitutes, forge the paths of a maximum destruction. But let us not forget, this concerns only the logic of the thing. If I developed it in Kant with Sade or suggested you refer to its sources, in the character so manifestly futile, farcical, in the character always miserably abortive of sadistic enterprises, it is because it is from this appearance that the truth is better revealed.

The truth which is properly given by masochistic practice, where it is clearly evident that the masochist… in order to extract, so to speak, to steal, from the only place where it is manifestly graspable, which is the object petit (a)… delivers himself—deliberately—to this identification with this object as rejected: he is less than nothing, not even an animal, the animal that is mistreated, and at the same time, a subject who, from his function as subject, has relinquished by contract all privileges.

This search, this almost relentless construction of an impossible identification with what is reduced to the most extreme of waste, and that this is tied for him to the capture of jouissance: here is where the economy in question appears bare, exemplary. There, let us observe… without stopping at the sublime verses [Lacan laughs] that humanize, if I may say so, this maneuver:

“While the vile multitude of mortals,
Under the whip of Pleasure, that merciless executioner,
Gathers remorse at the servile feast…”

All that is nonsense! It is regret carried over the law of pleasure, pleasure is not a “merciless executioner.”

Pleasure keeps you within a rather buffered limit, precisely in order to be pleasure.

But what is at stake, when the poet expresses himself thus, is very precisely to mark his distance:

“…My Pain, give me your hand, come this way, Far from them…”

Flute song… to show us the charms of a certain path, and which is obtained, through these tones, thus inverted. If we are dealing with the masochist, the sexual masochist, let us observe the necessity of our schema. What REIK underlines, with a clumsiness one can truly call “enough to make your head spin,” about the character of what he calls “imaginary” or “fanciful”—exactly phantasiert—about masochism.

He hasn’t really grasped—although everything he provides as examples sufficiently points to it—that what is at stake is precisely what we projected there, at the level of the 1, to the right, namely the absolute 1 of sexual union, insofar as, on the one hand, it is that pure jouissance—but detached—of the female body.

This, Sacher MASOCH, just as exemplary as the other [Sade] in having delivered to us the structures of the masochistic relation—incarnates in a woman, essentially in the figure of a woman, that Other, from whom he must steal his jouissance, that “Other jouissance,” absolute but completely enigmatic, there is not even a moment where it is suggested that this jouissance might, for the woman—if I may say so—be pleasurable! That is the last of the masochist’s concerns! That is precisely why, likewise, his wife… whom he had saddled with a name she didn’t have, the name of WANDA from Venus in Furs… his wife, when she writes her memoirs, shows us just how baffled she is by his requests, about as much as a fish would be by an apple.

On the other hand, what’s the point of racking one’s brain over the fact that this jouissance—imaginary, as I’ve told you—must be embodied, occasionally by a couple, precisely because—this is manifest—it is required by the structure of that Other, insofar as it is only the flattening of that undivided 1 in the sexual division.

There is no need, all things considered, to rack one’s brain, to delve into Oedipal evocations, to see that it is necessary for this being, who represents this mythical jouissance, here referred to feminine jouissance, to be occasionally represented by two supposedly sexual partners, who are there for the theater, for the puppet show, and alternate.

The masochist then—he manifestly—situates himself and can only situate himself in relation to a representation of the sexual act, and defines, by his place, the location where jouissance takes refuge. That is even what is derisory about it. And it is not only derisory for us, it is derisory for him. That’s where this double aspect of mockery is explained—I mean: toward the outside—insofar as he never fails to insert in the staging, as someone who knows what they’re talking about—Mr. Jean GENET—noticed, that little element which marks, not for an eternal audience, but for any onlooker who might show up and not be mistaken—it’s part of jouissance—that all this is trickery, even comedy.

And that other face one could properly call “self-mockery,” which is turned toward himself, which one only has to have reread… since you now have it within your reach thanks to the admirable Presentation [of Sacher Masoch] by Gilles DELEUZE… Venus in Furs: see that moment where this character, nonetheless rather lordly as Sacher MASOCH was, imagines this character of his novel, whom he makes into a grand seigneur who, while playing the role of valet whipping behind his lady, struggles desperately not to burst out laughing, even though he adopts the most sorrowful expression. He can barely hold back his laughter.

And this is to introduce again—therefore as essential—this: the side that I will call… and which also struck REIK, without him fully accounting for it… the “demonstration” side of the thing, which is part of the masochist’s position, that he demonstrates, like I do on the blackboard: it has the same value, that he demonstrates that there, and only there, is the place of jouissance.

That is part of his jouissance, to demonstrate it. And the demonstration is not for that reason any less valid. The whole of perversion always has this demonstrative dimension. I do not mean that it demonstrates for us, but that the pervert himself is the demonstrator. And it is he who has the intention, not perversion itself, of course.

From this starting point, the questions about what we more or less cautiously call “moral masochism” can be properly posed. Before introducing the term masochism at every turn of our discourse, we must first have clearly understood what masochism is at the level of the pervert.

I indicated clearly enough earlier that in neurosis, the way it is connected to perversion… which is nothing other than that fantasy which, within its own field, neurosis, fulfills a very specific function, one that, it seems, has never truly been questioned… it is only from there that we will be able to assign its proper value to what we might introduce—with more or less justification—at such and such a turning point in neurosis, by calling it masochism.

I’m running out of time today and, literally, what I am telling you—my inability to continue on neurosis—is split in two. That’s tied to the fact that, of course, I always poorly estimate how much I can tell you in one go. But today, I have clearly articulated what constitutes the driving force of perversion in itself, and at the same time, I’ve shown you that sadism is in no way to be seen as a reversal of masochism, for it is quite clear that both operate in the same manner, except that the sadist operates in a more naive way.

Intervening in the field of the subject, insofar as he is subject to jouissance, the masochist, after all, knows well that he cares little for what happens in the field of the Other. Of course, the other must play along, but he knows the jouissance he has to extract. For the sadist, he is in truth a servant of that passion, of that necessity, to bring under the yoke of jouissance what he targets as being the subject.

But he does not realize that in this game, he himself is the dupe, making himself a servant of something entirely outside him, and most of the time remaining halfway to what he aims for, but on the other hand, not failing to actually realize… I mean he, without knowing it, without seeking it, without situating himself in it, without placing himself there… the function of the object (a), that is to say, to be objectively, really, in a masochistic position, as the biography of our “divine Marquis”—as I emphasized in my article—demonstrates clearly enough: what could be more masochistic than to have entirely delivered himself into the hands of the Marquise de Merteuil. [Cf. Les Liaisons dangereuses. The Marquise de Sade was born Marquise de Montreuil]