🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

This morning I was given, this morning someone brought me, this morning I was gifted, this: a little pen.
If you knew how hard it is for me to find a pen that I like, well, you’d feel how much pleasure it gave me, and the person who brought it to me, who may be here, I thank them.

It’s someone who admires me, as they say!
Me, I don’t give a damn about being admired. [Laughter]
What I like is being treated well!
Only, even among those people, that rarely happens.

Well, in any case, I immediately used it to write, and that’s where my reflections begin.
It’s a fact that, at least for me, it’s when I write that I find something.
That doesn’t mean that if I didn’t write, I would find nothing, but in any case, maybe I wouldn’t notice.

In the end, the idea I have of this function of writing…
which, thanks to a few clever folks, is now the topic of the day and on which I maybe haven’t wanted to take a stand too much, but they’re forcing my hand. Why not?
…the idea I have of it basically…
and that’s perhaps what, in some cases, has caused confusion
…I’m going to say it like this, straight out, bluntly, because precisely today I told myself
that writing can be very useful for me to find something.

But writing something to spare myself here, let’s say the fatigue or the risk, or other things still
that I want to talk to you about, that doesn’t ultimately produce very good results.
It’s better that I have nothing to read to you.

Besides, it’s not the same kind of writing
– the kind of writing where I occasionally make some discoveries,
– or the kind of writing where I can prepare what I have to say here.

Then there’s also writing for publication, which is something entirely different, that has nothing to do with it,
or more precisely, it’s dangerous to believe that what I might have written once in order to speak to you
constitutes a fully acceptable piece of writing that I would collect.

So I take the risk of saying something like this, that takes the leap.
The idea I have of writing, to locate it, to start from there, we could discuss it afterwards, well, let’s say it:
it’s the return of the repressed.

I mean that it is in this form…
and that’s maybe what caused confusion in some of my Écrits precisely
…it’s that if I may have seemed at times to suggest that I equate the signifier and the letter, it’s precisely because
– it’s as a letter that it affects me most, me as an analyst,
– it’s as a letter that I most often see the signifier return, the repressed signifier.

Whereas I illustrate it in “The Instance of the Letter…”, well with a letter, that signifier,
and I must say, it’s all the more legitimate since everyone does it that way,
the first time we properly enter into logic…
we’re talking about Aristotle and the “Analytics”
…well, we use the letter too, not quite in the same way as when the letter returns in the place
of the signifier that comes back. It comes there to mark a place, the place of a signifier that, itself, is a wandering signifier,
that can at least wander everywhere.

Alright. But we can see that the letter is made, in some way, for that,
and we realize it’s all the more made for that because that’s how it first manifests.

I don’t know if you’re fully aware, but anyway I hope you’ll think about it, because it still presupposes something that isn’t said in what I’m putting forward. There must be a kind of transmutation that takes place
from the signifier to the letter – when the signifier is no longer there, is adrift, isn’t it, has cleared off – and we’d have to
ask how such a thing could happen.

But that is not where I intend to go today. I might go there another day. Yes!
Still, one cannot avoid that, on the subject of this letter, we are involved in a field called mathematics, in a place where one cannot write just anything. Of course, it’s not…
I’m not going to go into that either.

I’m simply pointing out to you that this is where that domain stands apart,
and it is probably even this that constitutes what I haven’t yet alluded to here—that is to say, here in the seminar—but that I have brought up in a few remarks where undoubtedly some of those present here have attended,
namely at Sainte-Anne, when I raised the question of what one might call a matheme,
already stating that it is the pivotal point of all teaching, in other words, that there is no teaching other than mathematical, the rest is a joke.

This of course has to do with a different status of writing than the one I initially gave.
And the junction, finally, within the course of this year of what I have to tell you, is what I’ll try to achieve.

Meanwhile, my difficulty…
the one in which, all things considered, I persist,
I don’t know whether it comes from me or rather from your collaboration…
my difficulty is that my matheme, given the field of discourse I have to construct, well, it always borders on stupidity.

That goes without saying with what I’ve told you, since basically what’s at stake is that the sexual relation: there is none.
It should be written h.i-h.a.net bait [French pun: hi-han appât sounds like a donkey’s bray], with two p’s, a circumflex, and a t at the end: “hi-han appât.”

Naturally, don’t confuse: sexual relations, that’s all there is, but sexual encounters always miss, especially and above all when it’s an act. Well, let’s move on…[Laughter]

That’s what still drew a remark like that to me. I’d like, while there’s still time…
because we’ll have to see it, we’ll at least have to see some things around it,
it’s a very good introduction, it’s something essential, and it’s Aristotle’s Metaphysics
…I really want you to have read it, so that when I get to it, I don’t know, at the beginning of March,
to see its relation with our matter, you’ll have read it thoroughly.

Naturally that’s not what I’ll be talking to you about. It’s not that I don’t admire stupidity, I’ll go further: I prostrate myself before it. You, you don’t prostrate yourselves, you’re conscious and organized voters, you don’t vote for idiots,
and that’s what ruins you! [Laughter] A happy political system ought to allow stupidity its place, and besides,
things only go well when stupidity rules. That said, that’s no reason to prostrate oneself.

So, the text I will take is something that is an exploit, and an exploit like many others that are,
if I may say so, unexploited: it’s Plato’s Parmenides that will be of use to us. But to understand it well,
to finally grasp the sharpness of this text that isn’t stupid, you have to have read Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

And finally I hope, I hope because when I suggest reading the Critique of Pure Reason like a novel [slip]
…of Practical Reason, it’s something full of humor, I don’t know if anyone ever actually followed that advice
and managed to read it as I did.

No one’s ever told me about it, it’s somewhere in Kant with Sade which I never know whether anyone has read.
So I’ll do the same, I’ll tell you: read Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and I hope that, like me,
you’ll feel that it’s really dumb. [Laughter]

Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on that too long, these are just little side comments of course,
that come to me, it can only strike everyone when reading it, when reading the text, of course.
It’s not about Aristotle’s Metaphysics in its essence, in the signified,
in everything that’s been explained to you based on that magnificent text, that is to say all that has constituted metaphysics
for this part of the world where we are, because everything came from there, it’s absolutely fabulous.

They talk about “the end of metaphysics,” in the name of what? As long as that book exists, one can always make more!
That book, it’s a book—it’s very different from metaphysics—it’s a written book I was just talking about. A meaning has been given to it that we call metaphysics, but we still have to distinguish the meaning from the book.

Naturally, once all that meaning has been given to it, it’s not easy to find the book again.

If you really find it again, you’ll see what people—people who have a discipline…
and which exists, and which is called method,
the historical method, critical, exegetical, whatever you like—
…people who are capable of reading the text with, obviously, a certain way of stepping aside from the meaning,
and when you look at the text, well obviously doubts arise.

I would say that, quite naturally, because this obstacle of everything that has been understood about it can only exist at the university level, and since the University hasn’t always existed—after all, in Antiquity, three or four centuries after Aristotle—
doubts began to be expressed, naturally the most serious ones, about this text, because people still knew how to read.
Doubts were expressed, it was said that this was a series of “notes” or that it was a student who did this,
who gathered some stuff together.

I must say that I am not at all convinced.
Maybe it’s because I just read a book by someone named Michelet…
not ours, not our poet—when I say “our poet,” I mean that I place ours very highly—
…this was a guy who was at the University of Berlin, who was also called Michelet,
who wrote a book on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, precisely on this subject.

Because the historical method that was flourishing at the time had poked at him a bit with those doubts that had been expressed,
not without foundation since they go back to the highest Antiquity.
I must say that Michelet does not share this opinion, and neither do I.
Because truly, how shall I put it, stupidity makes a case when it comes to authenticity.

What dominates is the authenticity, if I may say so, of stupidity.
Perhaps this term “authentic” which is always a bit complicated with us,
with those Greek etymological resonances—there are languages where it is better represented, it’s echt,
I don’t know how you make a noun from that, it must be Echtigkeit or something like that, whatever.
In any case, there is nothing authentic but stupidity.

So this authenticity may not be the authenticity of Aristotle, but Metaphysics—I’m speaking of the text—
is authentic, it cannot be made of scraps or fragments,
it is always up to the level of what I must now call, and justify calling: stupidity.

Stupidity is this, it is what one enters when one poses questions at a certain level,
which is precisely that level determined by the fact of language [S1→ S2],
when one approaches its essential function,
which is to fill in everything that remains gaping from there being no sexual relation,
which means that no writing can in any way give an account of it in a satisfactory manner,
a writing that would be written as a product of language [S1→ S2 ↓a].

Because, of course, ever since we have seen gametes, we can write on the board:
“man = carrier of spermatozoa.” Which would be a somewhat silly definition because he’s not the only one who carries them,
there are tons of animals! Those spermatozoa, human spermatozoa then—let’s start talking biology!

Why are human spermatozoa precisely those carried by man?
Because, since it’s human spermatozoa that make the man, we’re caught in a spinning circle there! But whatever, one can write that.

Only it has nothing to do with anything that could be written, so to speak, sensibly,
that is to say, that has a relation to the real. It is not because it is biological that it is more real:
it is the fruit of a science called biology.

The real is something else:
– The real is what governs the entire function of signifiance.
– The real is what you encounter precisely: that in mathematics, you cannot write just anything.
– The real is what concerns this: that in what is our most common function, you are immersed in signifiance.

Well, you cannot catch all the signifiers at once, huh! That’s forbidden by their very structure: when you have some, a bunch, you no longer have the others, they are repressed.
That doesn’t mean you don’t say them anyway: precisely, you say them inter—they are inter-dicted [play on words: “interdits” means “forbidden,” but also “inter-said”].

That doesn’t stop you from saying them, but you say them censored:
– or else everything that psychoanalysis is has no meaning and should be thrown in the trash,
– or else what I am telling you here must be your primary truth.

So this is what it will be about this year: the fact that by placing oneself at a certain level…
Aristotle or not, but in any case the text is there, authentic…
when one places oneself at a certain level, things don’t go smoothly.

It is fascinating to see someone so sharp, so knowledgeable, so quick, so lucid,
start floundering there in this way. Because why? Because he questions the principle.
Naturally he has not the slightest idea that the principle is this: that there is no sexual relation.
He has no idea of it, but we see that it is only at this level that he poses all the questions.

And then what comes out of him like a bird flying from the hat where he simply put a question
whose nature he doesn’t know: you understand, it’s like the magician who thinks he has placed…
well, of course we have to introduce the rabbit, which must come out…
and then a rhinoceros comes out! It’s exactly like that for Aristotle.

Because where is the principle?
If it’s the genus, well then if it’s the genus he becomes furious because: is it the most general genus or the most specific genus?
– It’s obvious that the most general is the most essential,
– but still, the most specific is what gives what is unique in each individual.

So, without even realizing it…
Thank God, because thanks to that he doesn’t confuse them…
because this story of essentiality and this story of uniqueness, it’s the same thing or more precisely
it’s homonymous to what he’s questioning—thank God, he doesn’t confuse them—it’s not from there that he draws them out.

He says to himself:
– is the principle the One?
– or else is the principle Being?

Then at that moment, it really gets tangled up!
Because it’s absolutely necessary that the One be, and that Being be One, and that’s when we lose our footing.
Because precisely, the way not to talk nonsense is to separate them strictly, and that is what we will try to do afterwards. Enough about Aristotle.

I announced to you…
I already took the step last year…
…that this non-relation, if I may put it that way, must be written, it must be written at all costs,
I mean, to write the other relation, the one that blocks the possibility of writing this one.

And already last year, I put on the board some things that, after all, I don’t think it’s bad to lay out first.
Naturally, there is something arbitrary in that. I’m not going to apologize by taking shelter behind the mathematicians,
the mathematicians do what they want, and so do I.

Still, simply for those who need to give me excuses, I can point out that in Bourbaki’s “Elements”
they start by putting in the letters without saying absolutely anything about what they might be used for.

I’m speaking… let’s call them written symbols, because they don’t even resemble any letter, and these symbols represent something that can be called operations, and absolutely nothing is said about what these are; only twenty pages later will we begin to be able to deduce it retroactively from the way they’re used.

I won’t go nearly that far. I’ll try right away to question what the letters I would have written mean. But since, after all, I think it would be much more complicated for you if I introduced them one by one, as they come to life, as they take on the value of a function, I prefer to set these letters down as that around which I’ll have to revolve later.

Already last year I believed I could posit what this is about: Φx, and which I believe…
for reasons that are attempts…
can be written as in mathematics, namely:
the function constituted by the fact that there exists that jouissance called sexual jouissance
and which is precisely what blocks the relation.

That sexual jouissance opens the door to jouissance for the speaking being, and here listen a bit,
realize that jouissance, when we call it that plainly,
may be jouissance for some—I don’t rule it out—but really it’s not sexual jouissance.

That is the merit we can attribute to Sade’s text: naming things by their name:
– to enjoy is to enjoy a body,
– to enjoy is to seize it, to extinguish it, to break it into pieces.

Legally, to have the enjoyment of something is precisely that:
it is to be able to treat something as a body, that is, to destroy it, isn’t it.
It’s the most regular mode of jouissance; that’s why these statements always have a Sadean resonance.
One must not confuse Sadean with sadistic, because so much nonsense has been said
specifically about sadism that the term has been devalued!
I won’t go further into that point.

What this relation of the signifier to jouissance produces is what I express by this notation ΦX.
That means that X designates only a signifier. A signifier can be any one of you,
each of you precisely at the narrow level at which you exist as sexed beings.

It is very narrow in thickness, if I may say so, but much broader in surface than among animals,
in whom, when they are not in heat, you don’t distinguish what I called in the last seminar,
the little boy and the little girl—lion cubs, for instance, they resemble each other completely in their behavior.
Not you, because precisely it is as signifiers that you are sexed.

So this is not about making the distinction, marking the signifier “man” as distinct from the signifier “woman,” naming one X and the other Y, because that is precisely the question: it’s about how one distinguishes oneself.

That is why I place this X in the place of the hole I make in the signifier,
that is, I put it there as an apparent variable. Which means that each time I deal
with this sexual signifier, that is, with this something that pertains to jouissance, I will be dealing with ΦX,
and there are some, a few, specified among these X, such that one can write: for every x whatsoever: ΦX,
that is, what functions is what is called in mathematics a function Φ, which means that this, this can be written:;!

So I will tell you right away, I will shed light—well “shed light”: you will be the only ones enlightened, of course,
well, you will be enlightened for a little while. As the Stoics used to say, didn’t they: “when it is day, it is bright.”
As I obviously am, as I wrote on the back of my Écrits, of the party of Enlightenment: I shed light, in the hope of D-Day, of course. Only, it’s precisely that day which is in question—D-Day is not tomorrow.

The first step to take regarding the philosophy of Enlightenment is to know that day has not broken,
that the day in question is that of some small light in a perfectly obscure field.

With that, you’ll believe it’s bright when I tell you that ΦX means the function called castration. Since you think you know what castration is, I think you’re satisfied, at least for a moment! [Laughter]

Well, imagine that if I write all this on the board, and that I’m going to continue, it’s because I have no idea at all what castration is!

And I hope, with the help of this game of letters, to come to the point where finally, precisely, “the day breaks,” namely, that we come to know that castration is something we must go through, and that there will be no sound discourse… that is: one which does not leave half of its status and conditioning in the shadows… until we come to know this, and we will only know it after having made certain letters play out at different levels of topological relations, in a certain way of shifting them and seeing how things get distributed. Up to now you’ve been reduced to little stories, like: “Daddy said, ‘We’re going to cut it off’…” Well, as if that weren’t the very definition of stupidity!

So there is somewhere a place where we can say that everything articulated as signifier falls under the effect of ΦX, of this function of castration. There’s a small advantage in formulating things this way. It may occur to you, precisely, that if earlier I… not without intention—I’m more cunning than I look… brought up, as a remark on the subject of the inter-dit, namely: “that all signifiers cannot be there all at once”—never—that maybe there’s a connection:
– I didn’t say that the unconscious = castration,
– I said that it has a lot to do with it.

Obviously, to write ΦX like this is to write a function of a reach, as Aristotle would say, incredibly general. That this should mean that the relation to a certain signifier… you see I haven’t yet said it, but let’s say it… a signifier that is, for example, “a man”… all this is exhausting, because there’s a lot to dig through, and since no one before me has ever done it, it risks collapsing on my head at any moment… “a man,” I didn’t say “the man”: it’s rather amusing nonetheless that, in the use of the signifier like that, we say to a guy, “be a man,” we don’t say “be the man,” no, we say “be a man”—why? What’s curious is that we don’t often say “be a woman,” but on the other hand we speak of “the woman,” with a definite article. Much has been speculated about the definite article. But anyway, we’ll return to that when the time comes.

What I simply want to tell you is that what ΦX writes means—not even those two signifiers precisely—but those and a certain number of others which articulate with them, thus have the effect that one can no longer dispose of the entire set of signifiers, and that this might well be a first approach to what castration is, from the point of view, of course, of that mathematical function which my writing imitates.

For now, I ask no more of you than to recognize that it’s an imitation. That doesn’t mean that, for me who has already reflected on it, it doesn’t go much further.

Still, there is a way of writing that ∀X, it functions.
This is proper to a mode of writing that stems from the first logical inscription for which Aristotle is responsible, and what gave him his prestige comes from the fact that logic is tremendously jouissive, precisely because it pertains to this field of castration.

After all, how could you explain, throughout history, that a period so broad in time, so burning with intelligence, so prolific in production, as our Middle Ages, could have gotten so excited over these logical matters—and Aristotelian ones!

For it to have put them in such a state…
because it stirred up crowds, because through the logicians it had theological consequences where logic dominated the theo quite a bit—which is not like in our time, where nothing remains but the theo, still firmly in place in its stupidity, and where logic has evaporated a bit… it’s clear that this whole story is jouissive.

It’s also from that that comes all the prestige which, in Aristotle’s construction, reflected onto that famous “Metaphysics,” where he completely unhinges.

But at that level…
since today I am not going to give you a history lecture on logic…
if you simply want to look into the “Prior Analytics,” more precisely what are called the “Earlier Analytics,” even for those who—naturally the majority—will never have the courage to read it, even though it’s fascinating, I still recommend—what is called Book I, chapter 46, isn’t it—to read what Aristotle produces on what is at stake in negation, namely on the difference between saying “man is not white,” whether that is truly the contrary of “man is white,” or whether…
as many people believed, and already believed in his time—it didn’t stop him for all that…
or whether the contrary is to say “man is non-white.”

It’s absolutely not the same thing.
I think that simply stating it like that, the difference is perceptible.

Only, it is very important to read that chapter because so many things have been said to you about predicate logic, at least those who have already tried to engage with the places where such things are discussed,
that you might imagine the syllogism is entirely encompassed by predicate logic.
That’s a small side note I’m making.
As I didn’t want to dwell on it, maybe I’ll have time to return to it one day.

I simply want to say that there was—for me to be able to write it this way—at the beginning of the 19th century, an essential shift: it was the attempt to apply this logic to that which, as I’ve already pointed out earlier, has a special status,
namely the mathematical signifier. That gave rise to this mode of writing whose prominence and originality I think I’ll have time later to help you grasp, namely that it no longer says at all the same thing as the propositions
—for that’s what they are—propositions that function within the syllogism.

Namely, as I already wrote last year: . !, the sign of negation placed at the level where there is the big A [∀], is a possibility that is opened up to us precisely by this introduction of quantifiers,
in the usage of those quantifiers generally called quantificators, and which I prefer to call just that…
I’m neither the only one nor the first, because the important thing
is that you know the obvious: that it has absolutely nothing to do with quantity,
it’s called that simply because no better term has been found, which is telling in itself…
finally, this articulation of quantifiers allows us something that has never been done within this logic of quantifiers,
it’s what I do because I consider that for us it may be very fruitful: it is the function of the “not-all.”

There is a set of these signifiers that substitutes for the function of the sexed, that substitutes for it in relation to jouissance,
at a point where it is “not-all” that functions in the function of castration. I continue using the quantifiers.
There is a way of articulating them, it is to write ∃X, which means “there exists.” There exists—what?—a signifier.

When you deal with the mathematical signifier, those that have a different status than our little sexed signifiers,
which have a different status and which bite differently into the real, perhaps it would be worth trying to make prevail
in your mind that there is at least one real thing, and that it is the only one we’re sure of: it is number.

What we manage to do with it! Quite a bit, indeed! To go so far as to construct the real numbers,
that is precisely those that are not real, the number must be something real.
Anyway, I say this in passing to the mathematicians, who may throw baked apples at me,
but no matter, they’ll do it privately because here I intimidate them.

Let’s return to what we have to say: “there exists.”
The reference I just made is not simply a discretion but rather a digression, rather to say
that “there exists,” that is where it has meaning, it has a precarious meaning: it is indeed as a signifier that you all exist.
You exist, you certainly exist… but it doesn’t go far. You exist as signifiers.

Try hard to imagine yourselves like that, stripped of all that business, you’ll tell me what you think.
After the war, as it were, we were urged to exist in a strongly contemporary manner. Well, look at what remains of it.
You understand, I would dare say that people had at least a little more on their minds
when they demonstrated the existence of God. It’s obvious that God exists, but no more than you, it doesn’t go far.
Anyway, this is just to clarify what’s at stake in existence.

What could possibly interest us regarding this “there exists” in terms of the signifier?

That would be that there exists “at least one” for whom this whole business of castration does not function[:§], and that is precisely why it was invented, that’s what is called the Father. That is why the Father exists at least as much as God does—that is to say, not much.

So naturally there are a few clever ones… I’m surrounded by clever ones, those who transform what I put forward into intellectual pollution [Laughter], as one of my patients said—whom I thank for having provided me with that, she came up with it herself because she is a sensitive one, huh?—besides, in general it’s only women who understand what I say… so there are some who discovered that I was saying the Father is a myth, because it’s quite obvious in fact that ΦX doesn’t work at the level of the myth of Oedipus.

The Father is not castrated, otherwise how could he have them all? Can you imagine! They don’t even exist there as “all,” because it’s women for whom the not-all applies, but anyway, I will comment on that further next time.

So from the point that “there exists one,” it is from there that all the others can function, it is in reference to that exception, to that “there exists.” Only here’s the thing, to understand clearly that one can write the rejection of the function: ΦX negated [§], “it is not true” that castration happens—that’s the myth. Only, what the clever ones failed to notice is that this is correlative to existence, and that it posits the “there exists” of that “it is not true” of castration.

Well, it’s two o’clock! So I will simply mark for you the 4th way to make use of what there is regarding negation based on quantifiers, which is to write /: “there does not exist.”
“There does not exist”—who, what?—for whom it would not be true that the function ΦX is what dominates what is at stake in the usage of the signifier.

Only, is that what it really means? Because earlier I distinguished existence from exception for you, and if negation there were to mean / §, without the exception of that signifying position, it could fall under the negation of castration, into rejection, into the “it is not true” that castration dominates everything.

It is on this little enigma that I will leave you today, because in truth, it is very illuminating for the subject. That is to say, negation is not something that one can use, just like that, in as simply univocal a way as it is done in propositional logic, where everything that is not true is false, and where—a huge thing—everything that is not false becomes true.

Well, I leave things at the moment when time cuts me off as it should, and I will resume things on the second Wednesday of January at the precise point where I have left them today.