🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I could very well start right away by skipping over my title, which after all, in a while, you will clearly see what it means. Nevertheless, out of courtesy, since it is indeed meant to catch attention, I will introduce it with a commentary about itself: “…Or worse”.

Perhaps, all the same, some of you have understood it—“…Or worse” is, after all, what I can always do. It’s enough that I show it to get right into the heart of the matter. I show it, after all, at every moment. In order not to remain within that meaning which—like all meaning, as you can sense—is an opacity, I will therefore comment on it textually.

“…Or worse”: it has happened that some people misread it; they thought it meant “or the worst.” That’s not the same at all. Worse is tangible; it’s what we call an adverb, like “well” or “better.” One says: “I do well,” one says: “I do worse.”

It’s an adverb, but disjointed, disjointed from something that is supposed to be in some place—namely the verb, the verb which is here replaced by the ellipsis. These three dots refer to usage, to ordinary usage meant to indicate… it’s curious, but it’s visible in all printed texts… to make space, an empty space.

It emphasizes the importance of that empty space. And it also demonstrates that it’s the only way to say something with the help of language. And this remark—that the void is the only way to grasp something with language—is precisely what allows us to penetrate its nature, that of language.

Also—this you know—as soon as logic came to confront something, something that supports a reference to truth, it’s when it produced the notion of a “variable.” It’s an apparent variable. The apparent variable x is always constituted by this: that x, in what’s at stake, marks an empty space.

The condition for it to work is that we place exactly the same signifier in all the reserved empty slots. It’s the only way language gets at anything, and it’s why I expressed myself in the formula “there is no metalanguage.” What does that mean?

It might seem that in saying this, I am merely formulating a paradox, because where would I be saying it from? Since I say it within language, that would already be enough to assert that there is one—from which I could say it. That is obviously not the case, however.

Metalanguage, as of course it is necessary to elaborate as a fiction every time logic is involved, consists in forging within discourse what is called an “object-language,” by means of which it is language that becomes “meta”—I mean common discourse, without which there is no way to even establish this division.

“There is no metalanguage” denies that this division is tenable. The formula forecloses within language that there should be discordance.

What then occupies this empty space, in the title I devised to hold your attention? I said: necessarily a verb, since there is an adverb. Only, it is a verb elided by the ellipsis. And that, in language, from the moment it is interrogated logically, is the one thing you cannot do.

The verb in this instance is not hard to find, you just need to flip the letter that begins the word pire (worse), and it gives: dire (to say).

Only, in logic, the verb is precisely the only term from which you cannot make an empty space, because when a proposition is being made to function, it is the verb that does the functioning, and it is from what surrounds it that you can make arguments.

By emptying this verb, then, I make it an argument—that is, some substance. It’s not “to say,” it’s “a saying.”

This saying, the one I take up again from my seminar last year, is expressed like any saying in a complete proposition: “there is no sexual relationship.”

What my title asserts is that there is no ambiguity, that once you move away from that, you will only state, you will only say, worse. “There is no sexual relationship” is thus put forward as a truth.

But I have already said of truth that it can only be half-said, so what I am saying is that, all in all, the other half says worse. If there were no worse, how much simpler things would be! That’s exactly the point.

The question is: doesn’t it already simplify them, since if what I started from is what I can do, and that it is precisely what I do not do, doesn’t that suffice to simplify them? Only, there it is: it cannot be that I could not do this worse. Just like everyone else.

When I say that there is no sexual relationship, I am stating very precisely this truth about the speaking being: that sex defines no relation there.

It is not that I deny the difference that exists, from the earliest age, between what is called a little girl and a little boy. That is even where I start from.

You immediately grasp, just like that, that you don’t know—when I start from there—what I am talking about. I am not talking about the famous little difference which is the one for which, to one of the two it will seem, when he is sexually mature, it will seem entirely in the spirit of a joke, a witty remark, to exclaim: “Hurrah! Hurrah for the little difference!”

The fact that it is funny is enough to indicate, denotes, refers to the complexual relation… that is, to the fact fully inscribed in the analytic experience, and which is what the experience of the unconscious has led us to, without which there would be no witty remark… to the complexual relation with this organ, the little difference, already detached very early as an organ, which already says it all: ὄργανον [organon], instrument.

Does an animal have the idea that it has organs? Since when has that been seen? And for what purpose?

Will it suffice to state: “Every animal…”… it’s a way of revisiting what I recently stated concerning the supposition of so-called sexual jouissance as instrumental in animals, I told that elsewhere, here I will say it differently… “Every animal that has claws does not masturbate.” [Laughter]

That is the difference between man and the lobster! [Laughter] There you go, it always has its little effect.

By which you miss what is historical about that phrase. It’s not at all because of what it asserts… I say nothing more: it asserts… but because of the question it introduces at the level of logic.

It’s hidden there… but that is the only thing you did not see in it… it’s that it contains the “not-all” which is very precisely and very curiously what Aristotelian logic elides insofar as it produced, as it produced and detached, the function of the prosdiorisms… which are nothing other than what you know, namely the use of “all,” “not,” “some”… around which Aristotle took the first steps in formal logic.

Those steps are heavy with consequences; they are what made it possible to elaborate what is called the function of quantifiers. It is with “All” that the empty place I was speaking about earlier is established.

Someone like Frege does not miss, when he comments on the function of assertion, before which he places the assertion in relation to a function—true or false—Φ of x, he requires, for x to have the existence of an argument, placed here in that little hollow, image of the empty place, that there be something called “all x” which fits the function.

The introduction of the “Not-All” is essential here:
– the “Not-All” is not that universal negated,
– the “Not-All” is not “none…,” it is not namely: “No animal that has claws masturbates,”
– it is “No, not all animals that have claws…” and thereby necessity follows.

There is organ and organ, just as there is bundle and bundle, the one that delivers the blows and the one that receives them.

And this brings us to the heart of our problem, because you can see that by merely sketching the first step, we thus slip to the center…
without even having had time to turn around…
to the center of something where there truly is a machine that carries us. It is this machine that I dismantle.

But—and I note this for the benefit of some—it is not to demonstrate that it is a machine, even less so that a discourse might be taken for a machine, as some precisely do when they attempt to engage with mine, my discourse. [reference to Deleuze and Guattari]

In this, what they demonstrate is that they do not engage with what makes a discourse, namely the Real that passes through it. Demonstrating the machine is not at all the same as what we have just done—that is, going without further ado to the hole of the system, that is, to the place where the Real passes through you. And how it passes—since it flattens you!

Naturally, I would like, I would really like, I would much rather, I would like to save your natural roguishness which is indeed what is most endearing, but which alas, “alas ever beginning again” as the other one says [Sisyphus?], ends up being reduced to stupidity by the very effect of this discourse which is the one I demonstrate.

In this you must feel, in the moment, that there are at least two ways of demonstrating this discourse. It remains open that mine may still be a third way.

One must not force me to insist, of course, on this energetics of roguishness and stupidity, to which I only ever refer distantly. From the point of view of energetics, of course it doesn’t hold. It is purely metaphorical. But it is of that vein of metaphor by which the speaking being subsists—I mean that it makes for him both the bread and the leaven.

I have thus asked your forbearance on the matter of insistence. It is in the hope that theory might make up for it… you hear the subjunctive mood, I isolated it because, because it might otherwise have been covered over by the interrogative tone—think about all of that, like that, at the moment it passes, and especially so as not to miss what now arrives, namely the relation of the unconscious to truth… the good theory, and it is it that clears the path, the very path where the unconscious had been reduced to insisting.

It would no longer need to do so if the path were well cleared. But that does not mean that everything would be resolved thereby—far from it.

Theory, since it would offer such ease, should itself be light, light to the point of seeming not to touch it, it should have the naturalness that up to this day only errors have. Not all! Once again: of course! But does that make it more certain that there are some which uphold that naturalness which so many others only pretend to?

So then, I maintain that for those others to be able to pretend, there must be among these errors, upholding the natural, at least one, homoinzune [a neologism combining homo (man/same) + un (one) + a Germanic suffix –zune, possibly playing on keine (none) or Eins (one) = [wordplay indicating a singular exception or function]]. Recognize what I already wrote last year, with a different ending, precisely concerning the hysteric and the “homoinzun” she demands.

This “homoinzune,” the role—obviously—could not be better supported than by naturalness itself. That is where I denied at the start… [slip of the tongue]

That is where, on the contrary, that is where I did not deny at the start the difference that exists, perfectly noticeable and from the earliest age, between a little girl and a little boy, and that this difference, which imposes itself as native, is indeed in fact natural—that is, it corresponds to this: that what is real in the fact that in the species that names itself… like this, daughter of its own deeds, in this as in many other things… that names itself “homo sapiens,” the sexes appear to be distributed into two roughly equal numbers of individuals, and that quite early—earlier than one expects—these individuals distinguish themselves. They distinguish themselves, that is certain.

Only…
I point it out to you in passing, it is not part of a logic…
only they recognize themselves, they recognize themselves as speaking beings only by rejecting this distinction through all sorts of identifications, of which it is common currency in psychoanalysis to realize that it is the major driving force behind the phases of every childhood.
But that is a mere parenthesis.

What is logically important is this: it is that what I did not deny—this is precisely the slippage—is that they are distinguished. It is a slippage; what I did not deny is precisely not that: what I did not deny is that they are distinguished, it is not that they distinguish themselves.

That is how people say:

“Oh! the real little guy, how you can already see he is completely different from a little girl, he’s anxious, investigative—eh!—already seeking a bit of glory.”

Whereas the little girl is far from resembling him. She already thinks only of playing with that kind of fan that consists in stuffing her face into a hole and refusing to say hello.

Only, here’s the thing: people marvel at that only because it’s like that—that is, exactly as it will be later, conforming to the types of man and woman as they will be constituted by something entirely different, namely, as a consequence of the value that the little difference will have taken on later.

No need to add that “the little difference, hurrah!” had already been there for the parents for quite a while and that it may already have had effects on the way “little guy” and “little lady” were treated. It’s not certain, it’s not always like that.

But there is no need for that for the recognition judgment of the surrounding adults to rest on an error, the error which consists in recognizing them—certainly for what they are distinguished by—but recognizing them only according to the criteria formed under the dependence of language, insofar as, as I propose, it is precisely from the fact that the being is speaking that there is a castration complex.
I add this to insist, so that you clearly understand what I mean.

So, it is in this that the homoinzune of error gives consistency to the otherwise undeniable naturalness of this premature vocation, if I may say so, that each person feels for their sex.
It must also be added, of course, that in cases where this vocation is not apparent, it does not shake the error since it can be easily completed by attributing it to nature as such, this, of course, no less naturally.

When it doesn’t match, we say “she’s a tomboy,” don’t we? And in that case, the lack has every ease in being considered a success, insofar as nothing prevents attributing to that lack a surplus of femininity.
The woman, the real one, the little lady, hides behind that very lack—it’s a refinement entirely, moreover fully in keeping with what the unconscious teaches us: that nothing succeeds better than failing.

In these conditions, to access the other sex one must truly pay the price, precisely that of the little difference, which deceptively passes into the real through the intermediary of the organ, precisely at the point where it ceases to be taken as such, and in the same stroke reveals what it means to be an organ:
an organ is an instrument only by means of that on which all instrumentality is based, namely, that it is a signifier.

Well, it is precisely as a signifier that the transsexual no longer wants it, and not as an organ.
In this he suffers from an error, which is precisely the common error.

His passion, the transsexual’s, is the madness of wanting to free himself from this error, the common error that does not see that:

– the signifier is jouissance,

– and that the phallus is only its signified.

The transsexual no longer wants to be signified as phallus by the sexual discourse, which—I state—is impossible.
His only fault is to want to force it, the sexual discourse…
which as impossible is the passage of the real…
to want to force it through surgery.

There you go, it is the same thing I stated in a certain program for a certain “Congress on Female Sexuality.” Only, I said…
for those who know how to read, of course…
only, I said, the homosexual woman—written here in the feminine—upholds the sexual discourse with complete security.

That is why I invoked the testimony of the Précieuses…
who, as you know, remain for me a model…
the Précieuses who, if I may say so, so admirably define the Ecce Homo…
allow me to pause on the word: “the excess in the word” [wordplay: “Ecce Homo”/“excès au mot”]…
the Ecce Homo of love, because—they—they are not at risk of taking the phallus for a signifier.

“Ф then!” so signiФ—only by breaking the signifier in its letter can one come to grips with it in the final term.
It is unfortunate, however, that this amputates for her, the homosexual woman, the psychoanalytic discourse, because this discourse, as a fact, places them, the dearly beloved, in total blindness regarding what feminine jouissance is about.

Contrary to what one may read in a famous drama by Apollinaire, the one that introduces the word “surrealist,”
Thérèse returns to Tiresias…
I’ve just spoken of blindness, don’t forget…
not by letting go, but by recovering the two birds called “her weakness”…
I quote Apollinaire for those who haven’t read him…
namely the small and large balloons that, in the theater, represent them and that are perhaps…
I say “perhaps” because I do not want to distract your attention, I’m content with a “perhaps”…
that are perhaps that through which woman knows how to enjoy only in an absence.

The homosexual woman is not at all absent in what remains for her of jouissance. I repeat, this makes the discourse of love easy for her, but it is clear that it excludes her from the psychoanalytic discourse, which she can scarcely do more than stammer.

So let’s try to move forward. Given the time, I will only be able to briefly indicate this: that regarding all that is posed as this sexual relation—instigating it, instituting it through a sort of fiction called marriage—the rule should be that the psychoanalyst says to himself, on this point: “Let them manage as best they can.”

That is what he follows in practice. He does not say it, nor even says it to himself, due to a kind of false shame,
for he believes himself obliged to compensate for all the dramas.
It’s an inheritance of pure superstition: he acts the doctor.
Never had the doctor involved himself in ensuring conjugal happiness, and since the psychoanalyst has not yet realized that there is no sexual relation, naturally the role of “household Providence” haunts him.

All this, does it not…
the false shame, the superstition, and the inability to formulate a precise rule on this point,
the one I have just stated here: “let them manage”…
comes from ignorance of what his experience repeats to him,
I could even say hammers into him: that there is no sexual relation.

It must be said that the etymology of “seriner” [to drill, to repeat] leads us directly to siren.
It’s textual, it’s in the etymological dictionary, it’s not me suddenly launching into a similar song here.

It’s undoubtedly for this reason that the psychoanalyst—like Ulysses does in such a circumstance—remains tied to a mast.
Yes, naturally, for it to last, what he hears as the sirens’ song, that is, by remaining enchanted,
that is, by hearing it all wrong.

Well, the mast…
that famous mast in which you naturally cannot fail to recognize the phallus,
that is, the major, global signified…
well, he stays tied to it, and that suits everyone.

That suits everyone, at least in this: that it has no unfortunate consequences, since it is made for that—
for the psychoanalytic ship itself, that is, for all those who are in the same boat.
It remains nonetheless that he hears this repetitive drill of experience all wrong, and that is why, up to now,
it remains a private domain, “a private domain”: I mean for those who are on the same boat.

What happens on this boat, where there are also beings of both sexes, is nonetheless remarkable: what I happen to hear about it from the mouths of people who sometimes come to visit me, from these boats…
I, who am—my God—on another one, governed by different rules…
would nevertheless be rather exemplary, if the manner in which I catch wind of it were not so particular.

To study what emerges from a mode of misrecognition of what constitutes the psychoanalytic discourse,
namely the consequences it has on what I will call “the style” of what pertains to “the liaison.”
Since, after all, the absence of the sexual relation is very manifestly what does not prevent—far from it—“the liaison,”
but what provides its conditions.

This might perhaps allow a glimpse of what could result from the fact that the psychoanalytic discourse remains housed on those boats where it currently sails and of which something leads one to fear it might remain a privilege.
It could be that something of this style might come to dominate the register of liaisons
in what is improperly called “the wide field of the world,” and in truth that is not reassuring.

It would surely be even more regrettable than the present state, which is such that it is to this misrecognition
that I have just pointed, that it is from it that results what, after all, is not unjustified,
namely what one often sees at the entrance of psychoanalysis: the fears manifested, indeed, by subjects…
who know only this, ultimately: to believe in the institutionalized psychoanalytic silence
on the point that “there is no sexual relation”…
which evokes in these subjects, these fears, namely—my God—of all that might shrink, affect
the interesting relationships, the passionate acts, even the creative disturbances necessitated by this absence of relation.

I would therefore like, before leaving you, to initiate something here.
Since this concerns an exploration of what I have called “a new logic,” one that is to be constructed out of what is happening,
of this to first posit: that in no case can anything that happens, as a consequence of the instance of language,
lead to the formulation of the relation in any satisfactory manner.

Is there not something to be taken from what…
in logical exploration, that is, in questioning…
from what, to language, not only imposes a limit in its apprehension of the Real,
but demonstrates within the very structure of that effort to approach it…
that is, to locate within its own operation…
what Real might have determined language?

Is it not appropriate, probable, suitable to be induced, that if it is at the point of a certain fault in the Real…
strictly speaking unspeakable, since it would be what determines all discourse…
that lie, that lie the lines of those fields that are those we discover in psychoanalytic experience?

Does not everything that logic has traced, in relating language to what is posited as real,
allow us to locate, within certain lines to be invented…
and it is this theoretical effort that I designate with that ease which would find an insistence…
is it not possible here to find orientation?

I will do, before leaving you today, no more than point out that there are 3 registers…
strictly speaking already emerged from logical elaboration…
3 registers around which my effort will revolve this year to develop what follows from this, posited as first: that there is no sexual relation.

Firstly, what you have already seen indicated in my discourse: the prosdiorisms.
Today, in the course of this first approach, I have encountered only the statement of the “not-all.”

That one, already last year I believed I isolated for you—very precisely: . !—near the very function
which I leave here completely enigmatic, the function not of the sexual relation,
but of the function which precisely renders access to it impossible.

It is this one to define, in short, to define this year—imagine it: jouissance.
Why should it not be possible to write a function of jouissance?

It is in the testing that we shall see whether it is sustainable, so to speak, or not.

The function of the “not-all,” already last year I could not advance it…
and certainly from a point much closer in terms of what was at stake,
I am today only beginning to approach our terrain…
last year I advanced it through a negative bar [.], placed above the term which, in the theory of quantifiers, designates the equivalent…
it is only the equivalent, I would even say more:
the purification with respect to the naïve use made in Aristotle…
of the prosdiorism “all” [;]. What is important is that today I have put forward before you the function of the “not-all.”

Everyone knows that concerning what is called in Aristotle the “particular” proposition,
what emerges from it, if I may say naïvely, is: “there exists something” that would correspond to it.

When you use “some,” indeed it seems self-evident. It seems self-evident, and it is not.
Because it is quite clear that it is not enough to negate the “not-all” for the existence of each of the two parts,
if I may express myself that way, to be affirmed. Of course, if existence is affirmed, the “not-all” occurs.

It is around this “there exists” that our advancement must take place.
For so long now ambiguities have been perpetuated around this, that we have arrived at
– confusing essence and existence,
– and even more astonishingly, believing that it is more to exist than to be.

It is perhaps precisely that “there exist” indeed men and women…
and to say it all, who do nothing more than exist…
that is the whole problem.

Because after all, in the correct usage to be made from the moment logic permits itself to lift off a bit from the real…
the only way, truly, it has with respect to the real to be able to orient itself…
it is from the moment where it assures itself only of that part of the real where a truth may be possible…
that is, a mathematics,
…it is from that moment that one can clearly see that what a general “there exists” designates is nothing other,
for example, than a number satisfying an equation.

I do not decide whether the number is to be considered or not as of the real.
So as not to leave you in ambiguity, I can tell you that I do decide: that number is part of the real.
But it is that privileged real in regard to which the handling of truth advances logic.

Be that as it may, the mode of existence of a number is not properly speaking
what can assure us of what is meant by existence every time the prosdiorism “some” is put forward.

There is a second plane on which what I am here only pinning down as a landmark…
of the field into which we will have to advance…
of a logic that would be favorable to us, is that of modality.

Modality, as everyone also knows, upon opening Aristotle, is what concerns the possible, what may be.
I will here only point out its entrance as well, its frontispiece. Aristotle plays with four categories:
— the impossible, which he opposes to the possible,
— the necessary, which he opposes to the contingent.

We will see that nothing in these oppositions holds, and today I simply point out to you
what a formulation of necessity consists in, which is properly this: “not being able not to.”
“Not being able not to” is precisely what, for us, defines necessity.

Where does it lead?
– From the impossible: “not being able,”
– to “being able not to”: is that the possible or the contingent?

But what is certain is that if you want to take the reverse path, what you find is being able not to be able,
that is to say, that it joins the improbable, the perishable, of that which may occur, namely:
– not that impossible to which one would return by closing the loop,
– but quite simply powerlessness.
This simply to indicate, as a frontispiece, the second field of questions to be opened.

The third term is negation.
Does it not already seem to you, even though what I have written here about what completes it in the formulas noted last year on the board—: !—namely, that there are two entirely different forms of negation possible,
already intuited by grammarians? But in truth, since it was in a grammar that claimed to go “from words to thought,” that says it all: the embarkation into semantics is a guaranteed shipwreck!

The distinction nonetheless made between foreclosure and discordance must be recalled at the outset of what we will be doing this year.
Still, I must clarify…
and this will be the object of the sessions to follow,
to give to each of these chapters the development it requires…
foreclosure cannot, as Damourette and Pichon say, be inherently linked
– to “pas,”
– to “point,”
– to “goutte,”
– to “mie,”
– or to some of those other accessories that seem to support it in French.
Nevertheless, it must be noted that what goes against this is precisely our “not-all”: our “not-all” is discordance.

But what is foreclosure?
Certainly, it is to be placed in a register different from that of discordance.
It is to be located at the point where we have written the term called “the function.”

Here, the importance of saying is formulated: there is foreclosure only of the saying.
That of that something which exists, existence already being promoted to what we must undoubtedly grant it as status: that something can be said or not—that is what foreclosure is about.
And from the fact that something cannot be said, assuredly, no conclusion about the real can be drawn from that alone.

For now, the function Фx, as I have written it, means only this: that for everything concerning the speaking being,
the sexual relation is a question. That is indeed our entire experience, I mean the minimum we can draw from it.

That to this question, as to every question…
there would be no question if there were not a response…
that the modes under which this question arises, that is, the responses,
are precisely what is to be written in this function—that is what will undoubtedly allow us to establish a junction
between what has been elaborated in logic, and what can, on the principle…
considered as an effect of the real…
on the principle that it is not possible to write the sexual relation, on this very principle to found what is at stake in the function,
the function which governs all that there is in our experience, in this: that by making a question, the sexual relation…
which is not, in the sense that it cannot be written…
this sexual relation determines everything that is elaborated from a discourse whose nature is to be a broken discourse.