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Contributing to the 50th anniversary of the Henri-Rousselle Hospital for the favor that my own and I received there, in a work whose ability I will point out, namely to pass the presentation, I pay homage to Dr. DAUMÉZON who allowed it for me. What follows does not prejudge—according to my custom—anything about the interest his address might take in it: my speech at Sainte-Anne was vacuous, just like Henri-Rousselle and—can one imagine?—for almost the same length of time, in any case preserving the value of that letter which, I say, always reaches where it must [cf. seminar on “The Purloined Letter”, Écrits p.11].

I start from crumbs, certainly not philosophical [cf. Kierkegaard], since they come into relief from my seminar of this year (at Paris I [Panthéon-Sorbonne]) [Seminar 1971-72: “…Or Worse”]. I wrote twice on the blackboard— a third time in Milan where, while itinerant, I turned them into a banner for a flash on The Psychoanalytic Discourse—these two sentences [the “crumbs”]:

– “What is said remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard.”

– “This statement, which appears assertive [absolute, categorical], in order to occur in a universal form, is in fact modal, existential as such: the subjunctive through which its subject is modulated [‘What is said…’] bears witness to it.”

If the “welcome”, which my audience extends to me sufficiently so that the term “seminar” is not too unworthy of what I bring there in speech, had not diverted me from these phrases, I would have wished to demonstrate the meaning they derive from psychoanalytic discourse [discourse A: a→S↓S1◊S2] in their relation of meaning. The opposition I evoke here [meaning-sense] will have to be accentuated further on.

I remind you that it is from logic that this discourse [psychoanalytic] touches the real by encountering it as impossible, [logic posits that truth can result from falsehood (Stoics), here that from the impossible: a→S, departure of discourse A, a truth might result about S1◊S2] in which it is this discourse [psychoanalytic] that carries it to its ultimate power [round of discourses]: science—I have said—of the real [“the real is the impossible”]. [The analytic discourse—fourth and last to arrive—takes its departure from the impasse of the master’s discourse (formula of fantasy: a◊S), it shows, through the production of asémantic S1s in a “swarm” and the impasse on S1◊S2, the impossibility of any discourse, because “this is not it”: production never reaches truth → reversal of discourse and passage to the next discourse → the “round of discourses” demonstrates the impossibility of any discourse under its 4 forms: inconsistency (discourse H), incompleteness (discourse M), undemonstrable (discourse U), undecidable (discourse A).] May those who are interested here forgive me if they do not yet know it. Were I still sparing them, they would soon learn it from events.

Meaning, by being grammatical, first ratifies that the second sentence concerns the first, making it its subject in the form of a particular. It says: “this statement,” then qualifies it as “assertive” for posing itself as true, confirming it by being in the form of what is called a universal proposition in logic: it is, in any case, that the saying remains forgotten behind the said.

But by antithesis—still on the same plane—in a second moment it denounces the semblance: affirming it by the fact that its subject is modal, and proving it by the fact that it is grammatically modulated as: “what is said.” It recalls this not so much to memory as, as is said, to existence. Therefore, the first sentence is not of that thetic plane of truth that the first moment of the second ordinarily assures by means of tautologies (here two) [the real as impossible is not of the register of truth to which it ex-sists]. What is recalled
– is that its enunciation is a moment of ex-sistence, [this enunciation responds to an ex-sisting real]
– is that situated from the discourse, it “ex-sists” to the truth. [the saying ex-sists to the speech, truth can only ever be half-said]

Let us recognize here the path by which the necessary comes about—in good logic, that is to say [thus “modal”]—the one that orders its modes of proceeding from which it accesses—thus that impossible, certainly modest, although thereby troublesome—that for a saying to be true, it still must be said [cf. the first sentence (“What is said…”), and “The Freudian Thing” (Écrits p.409): “I, the truth, speak.”], that there be something to say. In which grammar already measures the strengths and weaknesses of logics that isolate themselves from it, in order—through its subjunctive—to cleave them, and indicates itself by concentrating the power of all to pave the way. [The subjunctive is the mode of uncertainty, it shows the “possible” nature of an action → modal value of the subjunctive]

For, I return to it once again, there is no metalanguage such that any of the logics, in titling itself from the proposition, could make it its crutch, since each [of the logics] retains its imbecility, and if one believes to find it [the metalanguage] in my reference above to discourse, I refute it on the grounds that the sentence which there seems to serve as object for the second [sentence], nonetheless applies no less significantly to this one. For this second, however one states it, remains forgotten behind what it says. And this in a way all the more striking in that it is assertive, without remission, to the point of being tautological in the proofs it advances7: in denouncing the semblance in the first, it posits its own saying as nonexistent, since in contesting the latter as a statement of truth, it makes existence answer for its saying, not by making this saying exist, since it merely names it, but by denying its truth without saying so.

By extending this process, the formula, mine, is born: that there is no “universal” which must not contain within itself an existence that denies it [the universal: ;! permits the consistency of the “universe” it posits only by excluding (ex-sistence) the impossible that makes exception to it: :§]. Thus the stereotype that “all men are mortal” is not stated from “nowhere.” The logic that dates it is merely that of a philosophy feigning this “nullibiquity,” this to serve as an alibi for what I name the “master’s discourse.” Now it is not only from this discourse [M(S1)] but from the place [semblance] where others (other discourses) [H(S), U(S2), A(a)] “turn”—the place I designate as the “semblance”—that a saying takes its meaning.

This place is not for all, but it ex-sists them, and it is from there that the homology arises that all are mortal. They can only all be so, because at death they are delegated from this place [:§], “all” being necessary, since it is there that one watches over the marvel of the Good of all [;!]. And particularly when what watches there makes a “semblance” of the master signifier [S1 in discourse M] or of knowledge [S2 in discourse U]. Hence the ritornello of philosophical logic [Cf. supra: “the stereotype that ‘all men are mortal’”].

There is therefore no universal that does not reduce to the possible [Cf. supra: “which must contain within itself an existence that denies it”]. Even death, since it is the point [;! has as its condition of consistency the exclusion of:§] from which alone it is articulated, however universal one may pose it, remains only possible [because:§]. That law lightens [by this:§] its affirmation by claiming to be formulated from nowhere [ex-sistence of:§ source of dreams, slips, witticisms…], that is, to be without reason [nonsense] [“without rhyme or reason,” discourse M: S1 “ex-sisting” → without link with S2, S1 “asemantic”], further confirms where its saying starts from.

Before giving analysis the merit for this perception, let us settle our debt to our sentences, by noticing that the “in what is heard” of the first [What is said remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard.] also connects to the ex-sistence of the “remains forgotten” that the second brings out [“This statement, which appears assertive, to occur in a universal form, is in fact modal, existential as such: the subjunctive through which its subject is modulated bears witness to it.”] and to the “what is said” that it itself denounces as covering, this remainder. Here I note in passing the defect of the transformational attempt to make a logic of recourse to a deep structure that would be a layered tree [Chomsky] [“There is no hope of reaching the real through representation.”].

And I return to meaning to recall the difficulty philosophy has—the last to save the honor of being on the page from which8 the analyst marks the absence [ab-sens: the analyst absent from the philosophical page: impotence of meaning (S1◊S2)]—to perceive what is the everyday resource for the analyst: that nothing hides so much as what reveals [symptoms, slips, dreams…], that truth, ἀλήθεια [alèthéia] = Verborgenheit [concealment…] [cf. Heidegger]. Thus I do not deny the fraternity of this saying [Heidegger] since I only repeat it from a practice which, situated from another discourse [A], renders it incontestable [the impossible of analytic discourse relates to the undecidable → non-contestable, non-refutable (in Popper’s sense), cf. Gödel: incompleteness theorems].

For those who listen to me…Or worse, this exercise would only have confirmed the logic by which castration and Oedipus are articulated in analysis. FREUD puts us on the path that ab-sense designates sex: it is to the swelling [sphere] of this absex-sense [the support in the phallic function of the signification relation S1→S2 as sexual relation: enjoyment of (a) and not enjoyment of the Other] that a topology unfolds [spherical, of discourses M, U, H, in the phallic function] where it is the word that cuts [to have or not: the word of the symptom].

Starting from the phrase “ça ne va pas sans dire” [it goes without saying, but literally “it does not go without saying”], we see that this is the case for many things, for most things even, including the Freudian Thing as I have situated it to be the said of truth. “Not going without” means making a pair, that which, as one says, “does not go all by itself.” Thus, the said does not go without saying [the unsayable]. But if the said always posits itself in truth, even if it never surpasses a “half-said” as I express it, the saying couples to it only by ex-sisting, that is, by not being of the said-mension of truth. [The suspension of the relation of signification S1◊S2(A) allows the “showing” of the ab-sense in the emergence of the saying (S1: nonsense), but not its inscription in the symbolic as knowledge (S2).]

It is easy to make this sensible in the discourse of mathematics where constantly the said is renewed by taking subject from a saying [postulate] rather than from any reality, even if this saying imposes on it the properly logical sequence that it implies as said [sequence of logical implications]. No need for Cantor’s saying to grasp this. It begins with Euclid. If this year I have resorted to the first—that is, to set theory—it is to bring back the marvelous efflorescence [of forms of the “impossible”] which, by isolating in logic: the incomplete [M] from the inconsistent [H], the undemonstrable [U] from the refutable [cf. Karl Popper], even by adding the undecidable [A] [i.e. the 4 forms of the impossible], by failing to exclude itself from demonstrability, puts us sufficiently at the foot of the wall of the impossible for the “this is not it!” to be evinced, which is the wailing of the appeal to the real.

I have said “discourse” of mathematics, not “language” of the same [opposition between language/discourse]. One must be careful here, for the moment when I will return to the unconscious9, structured as a language as I have always said, because it is in analysis that it is ordered into discourse. It remains to point out that the mathematician has, with his language, the same embarrassment we have with the unconscious, to translate from this thought: that he does not know what he is talking about, even when assuring it to be true (Russell). To be the language most propitious to scientific discourse, mathematics is the “science without conscience” that our good Rabelais promised, the one to which a philosopher can only remain closed: “the gay science” [wordplay: “gay” in Old French meaning “joyful” but hinting at “lightness” or “frivolity”] delighted in presuming its “ruin of the soul” [the “gay science” ruins the “soul”—the underlying object of philosophical discourse—by unveiling the object (a) truth of discourse H]. Of course, neurosis survives there [this “unveiling” is not enough to resolve neurosis].

This being remarked, the saying de-monstrates itself, and escapes from the said. [“de-monstrates”: counterclockwise sense of the passage from the place of the Other to the place of the Semblant] From then on, this privilege is secured only by formulating itself in “saying no,” if—going to the meaning: it is the containment [M] that is grasped there, not the contradiction [H], the response [U], not the negating repetition, the rejection [A], not the correction.

To respond thus suspends what the said has of truth. This is illuminated by the slanting light that analytic discourse [A] brings to the others, revealing the four modal places [necessary, impossible, contingent, possible (impotence)] which their round completes.

I will metaphorize for now, with incest, the relationship that truth maintains with the real. The saying comes from where it [the real: the impossible] commands it [truth]. [the real (the impossible) de-monstrates (counterclockwise rotation) each discourse by its product: “this is not it!” → reversal: the Other comes to take the place of the semblant, and the semblant becomes truth…]

But could there not also be “direct saying”? “Saying what there is,” does that mean nothing to you, dear little ones of the guard room… probably named so because it is careful not to upset the patronage to which it aspires, whatever it may be… “saying what there is,” for a long time this raised a man up to that profession which now haunts you only by its void: the physician, who in all ages and on all the surface of the globe, pronounces on “what there is.” But it is still from this: that what there is has interest only in needing to be conjured. At the point where history has reduced this sacred function, I understand your discomfort. Not even possible for you—the time no longer being right—to play the philosopher, which was the last molt where, serving the emperors and princes, physicians survived themselves—read Fernel.

Know however—although analysis belongs to a different register, but that it tempts you, this is understandable [the impotence of U pushes toward A]—this is what I first bear witness to. I say it because it has been demonstrated without exception by those I have called my “dandies”: there is not the slightest access to Freud’s saying that is not foreclosed—and without return in this case—by the choice of such and such an analyst.

It is that there is no formation of the analyst conceivable outside the maintenance of this saying, and that Freud, for lack of having forged—with the discourse of the analyst—the link on which “psychoanalytic societies” might have relied, situated them in other discourses [Master, University] which necessarily bar his saying. This is what all my writings demonstrate.

Freud’s saying is inferred from the logic that takes as its source the said of the unconscious [symptoms, dreams, slips…: a→S↓S1→“nonsense” (S1◊S2)]: it is insofar as Freud discovered this said that it [the saying] ex-sists. To restitute this saying is necessary for the discourse of analysis to constitute itself—that is what I assist with—starting from the experience where it proves itself to ex-sist.

One cannot translate this saying into terms of truth since from truth there is only half-said [S2 within A], well cut off [from the saying], but that there is this clear half-said [of the Hysteric]—it conjugates itself in ascending: “you publish me [M], I speak ill [U]” [order of reversals of the round of discourses]—it only takes its meaning from this saying [A]11. This saying is not free, but is produced by relaying others that come from other discourses.

It is by closing upon itself in analysis [A closes the round of discourses]—cf. my Radiophonie, the issue just before of this aperiodical [i.e. Scilicet 2/3, Paris, Seuil, 1970]—that their round situates the places from which this saying is circumscribed. They circumscribe it as real, that is, of the impossible, which announces itself: “there is no sexual relation” [the impossible relation “Semblant→Other” results in each discourse in the impotence of the product to reach the truth from which the semblant takes support, and provokes its reversal because “this is not it” → appeal to the real (cf. supra)].

This supposes that of relation [Semblant→Other: S1→S2(M), S→S1(H), S2→a(U), a→S(A)], of “relation in general,” there is only statement, and that the real only secures itself by confirming itself from the limit demonstrated by the logical sequences of the statement [impotence]. [the “relation” Semblant→Other (impossible) has as logical sequence the impotence of the Product of each discourse to reach the Truth, the 4 “aporiae” of the wall of the impossible
– M: a◊S (incompleteness),
– H: S2◊a (inconsistency),
– U: S◊S1 (undemonstrable),
– A: S1◊S2 (undecidable)]

Here [discourse A] immediate limit [S1◊S2], of the fact that “there is” nothing to make relation from a statement. As a result, no logical sequence, which is undeniable, but which no negation suffices to support: only the saying that “nya” [a phonetic distortion of “il n’y a”, “there is not”].

“Nia” brings to it only the homophony needed in French to:
– from the past it signifies [:§ there existed an X who denied !(♂)],
– from the absence of any present existence it connotes [/§, there does not exist an X who denies! → X does not exist (♀)]
…mark that “nya” the trace.

But what is it about?

About the relation between man and woman inasmuch precisely as they would be proper—because they inhabit language—to make a statement of this relation [thus sexual]. Is it the absence of this relation that exiles them into habitat [language: “father’s house,” etc.]? Is it from inhabiting it that this relation can only be inter-dicted?

This is not the question: rather it is the answer, and the answer that sustains it—being what stimulates it to repeat—it is the real. Let us admit it where it is—there. Nothing to expect from going back to the flood, while already the flood recounts itself as retribution for the relation of women with angels [in Genesis (VI, 1-4) the flood is the consequence of sexual relations between certain angels and women].

Let us nevertheless illustrate this function [repetition] of the answer with an apologue, a “logue” at bay being furnished by the psychologist, since the soul is “at bay,” and even—to pronounce (a)—little a-(a)bay.

The misfortune is that the psychologist—in order to sustain his sector only through theology [the soul]—wants the psychic to be “normal,” whereby he elaborates what would abolish it, the “Innenwelt” and the “Umwelt” notably [adaptive norm], whereas he would do better to concern himself with the “man-turn” [man within the round of discourses] who makes the labyrinth from which man does not emerge.

The stimulus-response pair admits to the invention behind it. To call “response” that which would allow the individual to maintain life is excellent, but that it ends quickly and badly [death] opens the question which is resolved by the fact that life reproduces the individual, therefore also reproduces the question, which is said in this case to be repeated. This is exactly what is discovered from the unconscious, which thus proves itself to be a response, but of the kind where it is it that stimulates. This is also how—the psychologist notwithstanding—he falls into the “man-turn” of repetition, the one known to occur from the unconscious.

Life undoubtedly reproduces, God knows what and why. But the response becomes a question only where there is no relation to support the reproduction of life, except where the unconscious formulates: “How does man reproduce?” Which is the case. “In reproducing the question!” This is the response—or “to make you speak,” otherwise said—that the unconscious has, to ex-sist. It is from there [there is no sexual relation] that we must obtain two universals, two “alls” [♂ :;! and ♀ :.!] sufficiently consistent to separate—through the phallic function—within speaking beings, who, from “being of,” believe themselves to be “beings,” two halves such that they do not become too confused in copulation when they manage to get there.

“Half,” said in French means it is a matter of “moi” [self], the half chicken that opened my first reading book having furthermore paved for me the division of the subject. The body of speaking beings is subject to being divided among organs, enough to require finding functions for them. It sometimes takes ages: for a foreskin to find its use through circumcision, see the appendix waiting for centuries for surgery.

Thus from psychoanalytic discourse, an organ becomes the signifier [Φ the phallus]. The one that can be said to isolate itself, in corporeal reality, as bait, to function there (the function being delegated to it by a discourse):

a) as a phanere by virtue of its aspect of a removable plate accentuated by its erectility,

b) to be “bait,” where this accent contributes, in the various fishings [(a)] that constitute discourse [(a) oral as truth (H), (a) anal as product (M), (a) scopic as Other (U), (a) vocal as semblant (A)] of the voracities [partial drives] through which the inexistence of the sexual relation is cushioned [cf. chemistry].

One recognizes—even through this mode of evacuation [through the phallic function]—of course the organ that, being, let us say, “active” in the male, earns for the latter, in the saying of copulation [(aoral), (aanal), (ascopic), (avocal): → copula-action], the active voice of the verb. It is the same that its various names—in the language I use—quite symptomatically feminize [cf. The Purloined Letter].

Nevertheless, one must not be mistaken: for the function it holds from discourse, it has passed into the signifier. A signifier can serve many purposes just like an organ, but not the same ones.

– For castration [;!] for example, if it serves, it generally does not have the same consequences as if it were the organ.

– For the bait function, if it is the organ that offers itself, a hook for the voracities we just situated, let us say: of “origin,” the signifier on the contrary is the fish to be swallowed, what discourse needs to sustain itself.

This organ, having passed into the signifier [S1], hollows out the place from where the effect is produced for the speaking being [impotence of each discourse]—following it to what it thinks itself to be [S1: Semblant (M), Truth (U), Product (A), Other (H)]—the inexistence of the sexual relation [impossible].

The present state of the discourses [H, U, M, A], which thus feed on these “beings” [aoral (H), aanal (M), ascopic (U), avocal (A)], is thus situated by this inexistence, this impossible, not to be said, but which—pressed from all sayings—demonstrates itself for the real.

The saying of Freud thus posed:
– justifies itself first by its sayings—by which it proves itself: what I have said,
– is confirmed by having confessed to the stagnation of the analytic experience: what I denounce,
– would develop from the reemergence of the analytic discourse: what I am working toward, since—although without resources—it is within my scope.

In the confusion where the parasitic organism [I.P.A.] that Freud grafted onto his saying itself grafts its sayings, it is no small affair for a cat to find her kittens there, nor for the reader to find meaning. The mess is insurmountable from what is pinned there: from castration, from the paths through which love is sustained by incest, from the function of the father, from the myth where Oedipus is doubled by the comedy of the Orang-Father, of the blathering Outang.

It is known that I had—for ten years [seminars from 18-11-53 to 20-11-63]—taken care to make a French-style garden of these paths to which Freud clung in his design—the first—although from the beginning what they had of twisting was detectable for anyone who wanted to clear it up, regarding what substitutes for the sexual relation [phallic function].

It was still necessary that the distinction between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real came to light, for the identification with the “man” half and the “woman” half [resolution of the Oedipus]—where I have just evoked that the matter of the ego [a] dominates—not to be confused with their [sexual] relation. It is enough that the matter of the ego [a], like the matter of the phallus [Φ]—where one was willing to follow me just now—are articulated in language, to become a matter of subject [S◊a] and no longer be the sole domain of the imaginary.

Consider that since the year 1956 all this could have been considered acquired, had there been consent from the analytic discourse. For it is in “The Prior Question” from my Écrits—which was to be read as the response provided by the perceived in psychosis—that I introduce the Name-of-the-Father, and that in the fields—in this text rendered as graph—which it [the Name-of-the-Father] allows to organize psychosis itself, one can measure its power. There is nothing excessive, in regard to what experience gives us, in placing at the head of “being or having” the phallus—cf. my Bedeutung in the Écrits—the function [phallic] that substitutes for the sexual relation. Hence a possible inscription—in the sense where the possible is foundational—in the Leibnizian sense, of this function as !, to which beings respond by their “mode” of arguing [moi (a) → ♂ and ♀]. [Semblant (language) → Jouissance (speech) → /Plus-de-jouir (inscription) ◊ Truth (jouissance of the Other)]

This articulation of the function [;!] as proposition is that of Frege. It belongs only to the order of the complement—which I provide above to any position of the universal as such—that there must be at a point of discourse an existence [:], as is said, that is inscribed in falsehood against the phallic function [:§], for it to be posed as “possible,” which is the little whereby it may claim existence. It is indeed to this logic [;!(universal), :§(complement)] that everything regarding the Oedipus complex is reduced.

Everything can be maintained around what I advance about the logical correlation of two formulas which, by being mathematically inscribed ;! and :§, are stated:

– the first: for all X ! is satisfied, which can be translated by a V indicating truth value. This, translated into analytic discourse whose practice is to make sense, means that every subject as such, since this is the stake of this discourse, is inscribed in the phallic function to make up for the absence of the sexual relation; the practice of making sense [S1→S2] is precisely that of referring to this ab-sense [in analytic discourse the ἐποχή [epoché] of the said—free association and floating attention—permits the saying: making sense of the ab-sense].

– the second: there is by exception the case—familiar in mathematics: the argument x=0 in the hyperbolic function 1/x—the case where there exists an x for which !—the function—is not satisfied, that is, not operating, it is de facto excluded.

It is precisely from there that I conjugate the “all” of the universal… more modified than one imagines in the “for all” [;] of the quantifier… to the “there exists one” [:] that the quantifier pairs with it, its difference being obvious from what the proposition Aristotle calls “particular” implies. [the particular of Aristotle is inscribed homogeneously within the universal, whereas here it makes contradiction, exception, and thus limits the universal to the “possible”]

I conjugate them from the fact that the “there exists one” [:] in question, by making a limit to the “for all” [;], is what affirms or confirms it, which a proverb already objects to Aristotle’s “contradictory” [“the exception that confirms the rule”].

The reason is that what analytic discourse concerns is the subject, which as an effect of signification [and only thus], is a response from the real. I articulated this as early as April 11, 1956, by having a text collected from a citation about the asemantic signifier, for people who could have taken interest in feeling themselves called to a function of discharge [a → the analysts]. [Cf. Seminar 1955-56: The Psychoses…, (11-04-1956): “Ad usum autem orationis incredibile est, nisi diligenter attenderis, quanta opera machinata natura sit.”, which Lacan translated: “How many wonders the function of language conceals if you wanted to pay careful attention to it.” “Incredible, when one looks closely, is the care taken by nature to allow the use of speech” (Cicero: On the Nature of the Gods).]

Certainly, this path was not made for anyone who, by rising from the university discourse, diverts it into that hermeneutic slippage, even semiologizing, which I imagine myself responding to [target here is Paul Ricœur: “On Interpretation”], now streaming from everywhere, for lack of analysis having fixed its deontology.

That I state the ex-sistence of a subject [:§] by positing it from a “saying no” to the propositional function ! implies that it is inscribed from a quantifier [;] where this function finds itself cut [at one point], in that it has at this point no value [cf. 1/x] that can be noted as truth, which means as error, no more, the false only to be understood as “falsus” in the sense of “fallen,” on which I have already placed emphasis.

In classical logic—think of it—the false is only perceived as the reverse of truth, it designates it just as well. Therefore it is correct to write as I do ::§.

The one who ex-sists is the subject supposed by the forfeiture of the phallic function there [e.g. 0 for 1/x]. It is only a mode of access without hope to the sexual relation, the syncope [:§] of the function [;!] that can only sustain itself by seeming there—by semb-ling there, I would say [S1 → S2]—this cannot suffice, this relation, to inaugurate it, but on the contrary it is necessary to complete the consistency [1/x consistent on R* (or better here: R+*)] of the supplement it makes of it, and to fix the limit [excluded] where this semblant is nothing but de-sense [a-semantics, no sense, e.g. x = 0 for 1/x].

Nothing therefore operates except by equivocal signifier, that is, by the trick through which the ab-sense of the relation would be cushioned at the suspension point [the exception] of the function [the 4 objects (a): oral (H), anal (M), scopic (U), vocal (A)]. It is indeed the de-sense that, by attributing it to castration [“ex-sistence” of :§], I denoted as symbolic already in 1956, at the beginning of the year: “Object relation, Freudian structures”: there is an account [seminar 1956-57: “The Object Relation and Freudian Structures”], thereby distinguishing it from imaginary frustration and real privation.

The subject was already supposed there, just by grasping it from the context that Schreber—through Freud—had provided me with from the exhaustion of his psychosis. It is there that the Name-of-the-Father [:§], by making the place [Other] of its shore [littoral], demonstrated itself responsible according to tradition. The real of this shore [the impossible of the relation from Semblant to Other], by what the semblant fails there [S1→S2→a↓: but a falls → a fails to reach the truth of S1: a◊S], no doubt “realizes” the relation of which the semblant makes the supplement [S1 as “:§”] but it is no more so than fantasy [S◊a] sustains our reality—not little either since it is all—except for the five senses—if you believe me. [S1→S2 only realizes itself in the imaginary of fantasy: a◊S]

Castration [:§] indeed relays, as the link to the father, what in each discourse connotes virility [;!]. There are thus two dimensions of the “forall man” [♂ formulas of sexuation]:

– that of the discourse [saids] by which it “foralls” itself [;!],

– and that of the places [sayings] by which it “mans” itself [:§].

The psychoanalytic discourse draws inspiration from Freud’s saying to proceed first from the second, and from a de-sense established by taking departure from these (-) [ex-sistence of § as the place of saying, place of manning] to whom biological heritage [penis] makes largesse of the semblant. The chance that seems unlikely to be reduced soon in this distribution is formulated by the sex-ratio of the species, stable it seems, without one being able to know why, so these (-) are worth for one half: male luck to me.

The places of this “manning” are identified:

– by making sense of the semblant [sustaining S1→S2 as the possibility of the sexual relation, with S1 ex-sisting as §],

– through it: of the truth that there is no relation [the “relation” S1→S2 leads to a◊S → the impotence of a to reach the truth is demonstrated by false premises],

– of a jouissance that substitutes for it [S2 as jouissance of speech],

– and even of the product of their complex [S1→S2→a], of the effect said—by my office—as “plus-de-jouir.”

Without doubt, the privilege of these elegant paths would gain to be distributed by a dividend more reasoned than this heads-or-tails game—dosage of the sex-ratio—if it were not proven by the other dimension [♀] from which this “manning” [:§] “foralls” itself [. !], that it would aggravate the case.

The semblant of luck [:§ → fantasy], for one half [cf. supra “male luck to me”], indeed turns out to be of a strictly inverse order to the implication that promises it to the office of a discourse [;!]. I will confine myself to proving it from the fact that the organ itself suffers from it. Not only from the fact that its manning is a damage a priori, of making it subject in the saying of its parents, for the daughter it can be worse.

Rather, the more from the a posteriori of the discourses that await her, it is caught up—the “happiness” as they say in the U.S.A.—the more the organ has matters to bear:

– it is accused of being emotional [H]…

– “Ah! could it not have been better trained” [M]…

– I mean educated [U]…

[the “American way” in each of these discourses reduces the Φ of the phallic function [;!] to the organ, cf. ego-psychology and the “genital”]

For that, one can always run. It is clear in the Satyricon that being commanded, even implored, supervised from the earliest age, put into study in vitro, changes nothing of its moods, which are mistakenly attributed to its nature, whereas on the contrary it is only because it dislikes [“this is not it!”] what one makes it say, that it becomes stubborn [“this is not it!”].

It would be better to tame it with this topology from which its virtues derive, to be that which I spoke of to whoever wished to hear me while the plot intended to silence me continued—the year 61-62 on identification. I drew it with a cross-cap, or mitre as it is also called. That bishops adorn themselves with it is not surprising. It must be said that nothing can be done with it if one does not know, from a circular cut—of what? what is it? not even a surface—of nothing—of space—to separate: yet how it comes undone!

It is a matter of structure, that is, of what is not learned from practice, which explains—for those who know it—that it has only been known recently. Yes, but how? Precisely like that: un-knowingly.

It is indeed by the bias of this function that the bastardy of organo-dynamism bursts forth, even more than elsewhere. Does one believe that it is through the organ itself that the Eternal Feminine draws you upward, and that it works better (…or worse) when the marrow frees it from signifying?

I say this for the good old days of a guard room that in all this lets itself get lost, admitting that its reputation as a mess holds only to the songs howled there. “Fiction and song of speech and language,” yet even so could the boys and girls not allow themselves—against the “Father-Masters” who, it must be said, had the habit—the two hundred steps to take [inside Sainte-Anne Hospital] to come where I spoke for ten years [Sainte-Anne from 18-11-1953 to 20-11-1963]. But not one did among those to whom I was forbidden. After all, who knows? Stupidity has its ways that are impenetrable. And if psychoanalysis spreads it, I have been heard to profess that more good than harm results from it.

Let us conclude that there is a maldonne [male-giving, wordplay] somewhere. Oedipus is what I say [;!,:§], not what is believed. This from a slip that Freud did not know how to avoid, implicating…

in the universality of crossings in the species where it speaks, that is, in the maintenance, seemingly fertile, of the sex-ratio (half and half) among those who form the greatest number, with their mixed bloods

…the signifiance [S1→S2] he discovered at the organ, universal among its carriers [the confusion of the phallic function with the organ].

It is curious that the recognition—so strongly emphasized by Freud—of the bisexuality of somatic organs, where moreover he lacked chromosomal sexuality, did not lead him to the function of covering of the phallus [Φ] with regard to the germen [soma]. But his “forall-man” confesses its truth in the myth he creates in “Totem and Taboo”—less certain than that of the Bible [Adam’s rib] although bearing the mark—to account for the twisted paths by which the sexual act proceeds where it speaks.

Shall we presume that from “forall-man,” if any biological trace remains, it is because there is

– only a “race” to “man” itself [to pose itself as an exception ::§]

– and nothing to “forall” itself [to ignore universality :;!].

I explain myself: the race I speak of is not what an anthropology claims in calling itself physical, that which Hegel denoted by the skull and which still deserves, long after Lavater and Gall, the heaviest of its measurements.

For it is not there—as seen from a grotesque attempt to found a so-called 3rd Reich—that any race constitutes itself (nor is it there that racism lies). They constitute themselves by the mode in which, by the order of a discourse, symbolic places are transmitted:

– those by which the race “of masters” [S1 in M] is perpetuated and no less that of slaves [S2 in M],

– of pedants [teachers: S2 in U] as well, to which must respond, for the balance, the pedes [taught: a in U],

– of the scients [“scientists”: S in H] I would add, insofar as they are not without the sawed [S1 in H].

I thus perfectly dispense

– with the time of “serfdom,” of the Barbarians rejected from where the Greeks situate themselves,

– with the ethnography of primitives, and the recourse to elementary structures,

…to ensure what the racism of discourses in action is. I would rather rely on the fact that what we know most certainly about races is what comes from the horticulturist, or even from the animals living under our domestication, effects of art, thus of discourse: these races of men are maintained by the same principle as those of dogs and horses.

It is better to note beforehand that analytic discourse “forall” proceeds counter to the slope, which is understandable if it finds itself closing its loop on the real [discourse A closes the round of discourses that circumscribe the real]. For it is the one where the analyst must first be the analysand, if—as is known—it is indeed the order by which his career is traced. The analysand… even if it is only to me that he owes being thus designated. But what trail of gunpowder equals the success of this activation! …the analysand is indeed that whose cervix (oh, guard room), the neck that bends, must straighten itself [the round of discourses prevents any enslaving fixation].

Until now we have merely followed Freud on what of the sexual function is stated by a “forall” [;!], but likewise by remaining at one half, of the two that he himself measures by the same yardstick, assigning to them the same dimensions. This assigning to the other sufficiently demonstrates what the ab-sense of the sexual relation is. But it is rather that this ab-sense is forced. It is in fact the scandal of psychoanalytic discourse, and it is telling enough of where things stand in the “Society” that supports it, that this scandal is only translated by being smothered, so to speak, in daylight.

To the point that it is a whole world to stir up, this defunct debate of the 1930s, not that the thought of the Master was not confronted by Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch, even Ernest Jones, and others still. But the lid put on it since—since Freud’s death—has sufficed for not even the slightest whiff of it to filter through, which says much about the containment to which Freud—in his pessimism—deliberately resigned himself, to lose, by seeking to save it, his discourse.

Let it merely be indicated that the women named here appealed—it is their leaning in this discourse—to the unconscious through the voice of the body, as if it were not precisely from the unconscious that the body takes voice. It is curious to note—intact within analytic discourse—the disproportion between the authority women bring into effect, and the lightness of the solutions by which this effect is produced.

The flowers touch me, all the more because they are rhetorical, those of Karen, Helene… Which one?—no matter!—I now forget, because I do not like reopening my seminars …with which thus HORNEY or DEUTSCH furnish the charming dexterity of holding a reserve of water at the bosom, as it is brought to dating, that is, something from which it seems that a relation could be expected, if only from its saying [the “flowers of rhetoric” with which Karen Horney or Helene Deutsch furnish the sexual relation as the relation ♂→♀: “to have or not”].

As for JONES, the bias of cervix… Cf. last line before the last interval [i.e. “the disproportion between the authority women bring into effect, and the lightness of the solutions by which this effect is produced”]…he takes by qualifying woman by deutero-phallicity, sic, meaning exactly the opposite of Freud, namely that they have nothing to do with the phallus, all while seeming to say the same thing, namely that they pass through castration, this is no doubt the masterpiece by which Freud recognized that for the cervility to expect of a biographer, he had found his man.

I add that logical subtlety does not exclude mental debility which—as a woman from my school demonstrates [Maud Mannoni?]—stems from parental speech, rather than from native obtuseness. It is from there that JONES was the best among the goyim, since with the Jews FREUD was never sure of anything. But I digress in returning to the time when I chewed over this—chewed for whom?

The “there is no sexual relation” does not imply that there is no relation to sex. It is indeed precisely what castration demonstrates, but not more, namely: that this relation to sex is not the same in each half, by the very fact that it distributes them.

I underline: I did not say that it distributes them by distributing the organ, a veil where Karen, Helene, God rest their souls if it is not already done, went astray. For what is important is not that it stems from the titillations that the dear little ones feel in one half of their bodies, which must be rendered to their upper ego, it is that this half enters in empress, so that it only enters there as a signifier-being [S1] of this matter of relation to sex.

This, quite simply—here indeed Freud is right—regards the phallic function, in that it proceeds from a unique phanere to organize itself as a supplement, finding the Organon that I here revise. [Organon: logical work by Aristotle. Lacan revises it by articulating a universal: ;! to a particular: :§ which limits it, circumscribes it, and makes it “consistent”]

I do so because, by difference—since for women nothing guided him, and it is precisely this that allowed him to advance so much by listening to the hysterics who “make the man”—by difference, I repeat, I will not make it an obligation for women to measure at the shoehorn of castration the charming sheath that they do not raise to the signifier, even if the shoehorn [the phallus] on the other side not only aids the signifier but indeed also the “foot.”

To make footwear—it is sure—[the phallus as signifier: Saussure it is sure] for this foot, women… and may they forgive me among them, this generality [“women”] that I soon repudiate, but on this matter men are hard of hearing… women, I say, make themselves employed on occasion. That the shoehorn recommends itself thereby follows naturally, but that they might do without it must be foreseen, not only by the M.L.F. which is current today, but because there is no sexual relation, of which the current moment is only testimony, although—I fear—temporary.

In this respect, the Freudian elaboration of the Oedipus complex, where it makes the woman a “fish in water,” because castration in her is the point of departure—Freud dixit—painfully contrasts with the fact of the devastation that, in most women, the relation to the mother represents, from whom she seems to expect, as a woman, more subsistence than from her father—whose role is secondary in this devastation.

Here I lay down my cards to set the quantum mode under which the other half—the half of the subject—is produced by a function to satisfy it, that is, to complete it with its argument. [22] On two modes depends whether the subject proposes here to be called “woman.” Here they are: /§ and .!. Their inscription is not customary in mathematics. To deny—as the bar over the quantifier indicates—to deny “there exists one” [/] is not done, and even less so that “forall” [;] should be “notforall” [.]. [to deny: § (♂2) → /§ (♀2), and to deny ;! (♂1) → .! (♀1)]

Yet it is here that the meaning of the saying is delivered, from the fact that, in conjugating the nyania that resounds from the sexes together [nya-nia: n’y a (/→♀) – nia (§→♂)], it supplements [phallic function] that there is no relation between them.

This is not to be taken in the sense that would reduce our quantifiers to their reading according to Aristotle, equating “nexistsone” to “nullnest” of his negative universal, bringing back μή πάντες [mé pantes], the “not-all”… that he nevertheless managed to formulate [Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics: 1216b “…and if it is not the opinion of all men without exception…”] …to bear witness to “the existence—of a subject—to say no to the phallic function,” by supposing it from the contrariety said of two particulars.

This is not the meaning of the saying that is inscribed from these quantifiers; it is: that in order to introduce itself as half to be called “women,” the subject determines itself by the fact that, there being no suspension to the phallic function, everything here can be said, even if it comes from reasonlessness. [/§ (♀2) denies: §, which itself limited the universal ;! → resulting in an “all” not bounded, without ex-sisting exception, thus without consistency (reason)].

But it is an all from outside the universe, which is read immediately from the second quantifier as “not-all” [.].

The subject, in the half where it determines itself from the negated quantifiers [/ and . → ♀], is determined by the fact that nothing existing limits the function [/§ (♀2)] such that nothing from a universe could be secured. [the Universal of Aristotle—without the limit (exception: :§)—does not produce a consistent universe (e.g. 1/x in R)]

Thus founded from this half, “they” are “not-all,” with as consequence and from the same fact, that none is “all” either.

I could here, by developing the inscription I made through a hyperbolic function [schema I] of Schreber’s psychosis, demonstrate there, in what is sardonic about it, the effect of “push-to-the-woman” which specifies itself by the first quantifier: having clearly specified that it is from the irruption of a One-father as “without reason” [a :§ that would not be “ex-sisting”], that the effect felt as forcing precipitates itself here, into the field of an Other, to think of oneself as—in every sense—the most foreign [not delimited by exclusion (ex-sistence) of “:§” (Name of the Father) → no consistency → no spherical universe of signification]. But to carry the function to its extreme logical power would bewilder.

I have already measured the trouble good will took in trying to apply it to Hölderlin: without success.

How much easier it is—not to say delightful to promise oneself—to [23] attribute to the other quantifier [;] the singularity of a “confine” [“limit” :.], so that it provides the logical power of the “not-all” to inhabit the recess of jouissance that femininity conceals, even when it comes to conjoin with what makes “man” [from the semblant functionally of .! (♀1) with :§ (♂2)].

For this “confine” stated here from logic, is indeed the same one that Ovid shelters behind, figuring it through Tiresias in myth. To say that a woman is “not-all” [.!] is what the myth indicates to us by her being “the only one” whose jouissance exceeds that produced by coitus. It is also why she seeks to be recognized as “the only one” from the other side: and this is all too well known.

But it is also where one grasps what is to be learned, namely that, even if the demand of love were satisfied, the jouissance one has of a woman divides her, making solitude her partner, while union remains at the threshold.

For what better can man confess to serve, for the woman he wishes to enjoy, than to restore to her this jouissance of hers which does not make her “all” to him: to re-suscitate it in her. What is called “sex”—even the second one, when it is a fool—is properly, in supporting itself from “not-all” [.!], the Ἕτερος [heteros] that cannot be sealed by a universe [cf. “to quench one’s thirst” but also “to seal” → to close off].

[.! → no “consistent” universe (“nothing existing makes limit of the function”) → no possible unity, no One → “incompatibility of the One with Being” (cf. infra)]

Let us call heterosexual—by definition—whoever loves women, whatever their own sex. That will be clearer.

I said “loves,” not: is promised to them by a relation that does not exist. This is indeed what implies the insatiability of love, which is explained by this premise. That it took analytic discourse [and the round of discourses it shows] for this to come to be said, shows well enough that it is not in every discourse that a saying comes to ex-sist. [discourse A: S2 ex-sists → ab-sense]

For the question was beaten for centuries in terms of the intuition of the subject, who was quite capable of seeing it, even of making a big deal of it, without it ever having been taken seriously. It is the logic of the Ἕτερος [heteros] that is to be launched from there—remarkable indeed that it culminates in the Parmenides—starting from the incompatibility of the One with Being. But how can one comment on this text in front of 700 people?

Thus remains always open the career of the equivocation of the signifier:

– the Ἕτερος [heteros], by declining into the Ἕτερα [hetera: different], etherealizes itself, even becomes hetaïrized.

– [24] The support of two to make them—what the “not-all” seems to offer us—creates illusion, but the repetition, which is in sum the transfinite [ℵ₀], shows that it is a matter of an inaccessible, from which, since the enumerable is certain, reduction also becomes possible.

– Here it is that the semblable seems, I mean: sembles itself, which I alone have attempted to untangle from equivocation, having delved into the homosexual, that is, what was until now called “man” in shorthand, who is the prototype of the semblable—cf. my mirror stage.

It is the Ἕτερος [heteros], let it be noted, who—by semblance of discord—erects man into his status as the homosexual.

[the “all alike” (;!) has its condition of possibility (consistency) in the discord (:§) → the “not-all” is already operative]

Not by my doing, I emphasize: by that of Freud who gives this appendix in all letters.

[resolution of Oedipus by identification with the father → installation of the paternal signifier (Name of the Father → ex-sistence of :§) and the phallic function]

Thus it sembles only by a saying that has already advanced itself. What first strikes is how much the hommodit [wordplay on “homme-dit”: man-said] could suffice itself with the everyday of the unconscious, until the moment when, in saying it was “structured like a language,” I led to the thought that with so much talk, what is said is not heavy: that it talks, that it talks, but that is all it knows how to do.

I have been so little understood—so much the better!—that I can expect that someday someone will raise it as an objection.

In short, one floats from the phallus islet [“forall”: ;! and “manning”: :§] to what one withdraws from what withdraws itself [the “not-all” .!]. Thus history is made of naval maneuvers [“one floats…”] where ships perform their ballet with a limited number of figures [limited to the 2 ♂ formulas].

It is interesting that some women do not disdain to take rank there [as exception], it is even for this reason that dance is an art that flourishes when discourses hold their place, with the step belonging to those who have the congruent signifier (sic) [Φ].

But when the “not-all” comes to say that it does not recognize itself in those, what does it say, except what it finds in what I have brought it, namely:

– the quadripod of truth and semblant, of jouissance and of what from a surplus of (-) slips away by disavowing itself of defending itself [4: the morning] [discourse A: the analyst is in the place of a as “semblant,” the analysand is in “jouissance” (of speech) and produces S1 as “plus-de-jouir” from which he slips away by disavowing defending it as “jouir” (S1◊S2) → S1 “plus of (-),” signifier deprived of meaning, a-semantics];

– and the bipod whose gap shows the ab-sense of the relation [2: the half-said] [;! and :§ (the lost route)];

– then the tripod which is restored from the return of the sublime phallus [25] that guides man to his true bed, from the fact that he has lost his way [3: the evening] [from the imaginary phallus of the dual relation: “ϕ,” to the signifier phallus: “Φ” (the sublime phallus) is restored the human destiny in the “not-all” .! and his way in the /§].

“You have satisfied me, little man. You have understood, that was what was needed. Go, dizzy ones are not too many for you to recover the afternoon. Thanks to the hand that will respond to you when you call her Antigone, the same that can tear you apart because I sphynx my ‘not-all,’ you will even know towards the evening [3] to make yourself equal to Tiresias and like him, having made the Other, to guess what I have told you.” [Tiresias is blind but a “seer” → he does not see the path but can—as a seer—tell the truth in a half-said “oracular” manner]

It is that over-half [♀: /§] which does not over-half itself [.!] so easily as the universal conscience [;!, superego ::§]. Its sayings can only complete themselves, refute themselves, become inconsistent, undemonstrable, undecidable starting from what ex-sists of the ways of its saying [cf. the 4 forms of the impossible: inconsistency (H), incompleteness (M), undemonstrable (U), undecidable (A)].

Hence the analyst—from another source than from this Other, the Other of my graph, and signified by S(A): “not-all”—how could he find fault with the proliferation of logical quibbling where the relation to sex goes astray, by wanting its paths to go to the other half? [discourse A, by sustaining the relation of Semblant to Jouissance (a→S), leads to the production of S1 (“the proliferation”: a swarm of S1) as “Plus-de-jouir” and to S1◊S2 where “the relation to sex goes astray”: S1 as Plus-de-jouir cannot reach the Truth nor provoke the jouissance of the body of the Other: S2 (is this swarm “of them”?), → no continuity (no sexual relation) but a logical quibble between “the masculine half” (;!, :§) and “the feminine half” (.!, /§)]

– That a woman here serves a man only so that he stops loving another, [cf. Don Juan’s “mille et tre”];
– that failing to do so is retained by him against her when it is precisely by succeeding that she fails him;
– that clumsy, the same man imagines that by having two [cf. “La maman et la putain”] he makes her “all”;
– that the woman among the people is “the bourgeoise,” that elsewhere the man wants her to know nothing: how could he find his way among these niceties—there are others—except by the logic that denounces itself there and to which I intend to expose him? [the logic of ;!, :§ maintains the woman—on the masculine side—as object of the fantasy: S◊a, → overcoming this logic by the second turn of L’étourdit (the so-called turns) and the passage (quibble) to the “feminine” formulas: .!, /§]

It pleased me to note that Aristotle here strangely inclines to provide us with the terms that I take up from another deduction [the phallic function]. Even if it had no other interest, it would have mattered that he guided his world by the “not-all” to negate the universal. [no universe of language]

Existence at the same time would no longer wither from particularity [solitude of the exception: §], and for Alexander—his master—the warning could have been good: if it is from an ab-sense as “not-one” [nya: /§] that the universe would be negated, [the :§—ex-sisting exception—allows the consistency of a spherical and consistent universe, the /§ denies the possibility of a closed and consistent universe], if the “not-all” which ex-sists evades [if the :§ (already a “not-all”) evades (strips) into /§], he would have laughed first [S1], it’s the case to say it, at his plan [of S1] to “worsen” the universe.

[26] This is precisely where, fool or not, the philosopher plays all the better the air of the half-said because he can do it with a good conscience. [the philosopher (Aristotle) as “the king’s fool,” the place of truth in the master’s discourse: there is truth only of discourse → a half-said of truth] He is maintained to tell the truth: like the fool, he knows it is perfectly doable, provided he does not stitch (Sutor …) beyond his shoemaking.

Now comes a little topology.

Let us take a torus—a surface forming a “ring.” It is immediately clear that by pinching it between two fingers all along its length from a point to return there—the upper finger first being below in the end, that is, having performed a half-twist during the complete turn of the torus—one obtains a Möbius strip: provided that the surface thus flattened is considered as merging the two layers produced from the original surface. It comes to the point that the obviousness homologates the hollowing.

It is worth demonstrating it in a less crude manner. Let us proceed with a cut following the edge of the obtained band (it is known that it is unique). It is easy to see that each layer, once separated from the one doubling it, nevertheless continues precisely into it. Thus, the edge taken from one layer at a point is the edge of the other layer when a turn has led it to a conjugated point of being the same “side,” and when, after an additional turn, it returns to its starting point, it has, by making a double loop spread over two layers, left aside another double loop that constitutes a second edge. The obtained band therefore has two edges, which suffices to ensure it a front and a back.

Its relation to the Möbius strip it figured before we made the cut [“median”] is… that the cut produced it. There is the sleight of hand: it is not by sewing back the same cut that the Möbius strip will be reproduced since it was only “feigned” from a flattened torus, but it is by a sliding of the two layers over each other—and in both directions—that the double loop of one of the edges, being confronted with itself, its sewing constitutes the “true” Möbius strip.

Möbius strip bipartite Möbius strip

Where the band obtained from the torus reveals itself as the bipartite Möbius strip—from a cut not making a double turn, but closing with a single turn (let us make it median to grasp it… imaginatively) [cf. Möbius-video: experiment 2]. But at the same time what appears is that the Möbius strip [27] is nothing other than that very cut, the one by which from its surface it disappears. And the reason is that by proceeding to unite with itself, after a sliding of one layer over the other of the bipartite band, the double loop of one of the edges of this same band, it is all along the reverse face of this band that we sew it to its front face.

Where it is touched that it is not by the ideal cross by which a band twists with a half-turn that the Möbius strip is to be imagined, it is along its entire length that it is nothing but its front and its back. There is not one of its points where the one and the other do not unite. And the Möbius strip is nothing other than the single-turn cut, any one—although imagined from the unthinkable “median”—which structures it as a series of lines without points.

Which is confirmed by imagining this cut being doubled (being closer to its edge): this cut will give a Möbius strip, truly median, which, unfolded, will remain to make a chain with the bipartite Möbius strip [cf. Möbius-video: experiment 3] that would be applicable on a torus (this involving two rolls in the same direction and one in the opposite direction, or equivalently: being obtained from the same one, three rolls in the same direction): we see there that the ab-sense resulting from the simple cut makes the absence of the Möbius strip.

Hence: this cut = the Möbius strip. It remains that this cut has this equivalence only by biparting a surface that is bounded by the other edge: precisely of a double turn, that is what makes the Möbius strip. The Möbius strip is therefore what, by operating on the Möbius strip, brings it back to the toric surface.

The hole of the other edge can however be supplemented otherwise, namely by a surface which, having the double loop as its edge, fills it… with another Möbius strip, naturally, and that gives the Klein bottle.

• : →

There is yet another solution: to take this edge of the cutout into a disk which, when unrolled, spreads over the sphere [“the swelling”]. By making a circle there, it can be reduced to a point: a point outside of lines which, by supplementing the line without points [Möbius strip], is found to compose what in topology is designated as the cross-cap.

• → =

It is the asphere, to write it: L, apostrophe. The projective plane in other words, of Desargues, a plane whose discovery as reducing its horizon to a point, is specified by the fact that this point is such that [28] any line drawn to reach it crosses only by passing from the front face of the plane to its back face.

This point also unfolds from the elusive line whose tracing, in the depiction of the cross-cap, shows the necessary traversal of the Möbius strip by the disk with which we have just supplemented it so that it rests on its edge. The remarkable thing about this sequence is that the asphere—written L, apostrophe—starting from the torus—it presents itself there firsthand—comes to the obviousness of its a-sphericity only by being supplemented with a spherical cut.

This development must be taken as the reference—explicit, I mean already articulated—of my discourse as it stands: contributing to the analytic discourse. A reference that is in no way metaphorical. I would say: it concerns the fabric—the fabric of this discourse—if precisely it were not to fall here into metaphor. To put it plainly, I have already fallen into it, not by the use of the term just now repudiated, but by having—for the sake of being understood by whom I address myself—made an image throughout my topological exposition.

Let it be known that it could have been done with pure literal algebra, through the use of vectors by which this topology is ordinarily developed from one end to the other. Topology, is it not this space where the mathematical discourse leads us and which necessitates a revision of Kant’s aesthetics? No other fabric can be given to it than this language of pure matheme, by which I mean what alone can be taught: this without recourse to any experience, which, always—whatever it may claim—is founded in a discourse, permits the locutions that ultimately aim at nothing but—to establish this discourse.

What authorizes me in my case to refer to this pure matheme? I note first that if I exclude metaphor from it, I admit it can be enriched and that in this respect it is, on this path, only a recreation, which is how all sorts of new mathematical fields have indeed been opened. I therefore maintain myself within the order—which I have isolated—of the symbolic, to inscribe there what concerns the unconscious, in order to take reference from it for my present discourse [“structured like a language, etc.”].

[29] I thus answer my question: that first one must have the idea—which comes from my experience [analytic]—that not just anything can be said. And it must be “said.” In other words, it must first be “said.”

The “signified” of the saying is, as I believe I made felt from my opening sentences [Qu’on dise reste oublié…], nothing but “ex-sistence” to the said—here to this said: that not everything can be said. That is: that it is not the subject, which is an effect of the said. In our aspheres, the cut, closed cut, is the said.

It, makes the subject: whatever it circumscribes. Notably… [in the spherical topology (simple cut, discourse M): S1→S2→a◊S] as figured by the summation of Popilius [simple circular cut] to respond with yes or no [“it is the word that cuts”]… notably, I say, if what it circumscribes is the concept [a], by which being itself [S1] is defined: by a circle around, to be cut from a spherical topology, the one that supports the universal, the quantifying-all: topology of the universe.

The trouble is that being [S1] has, by itself, no kind of meaning [a-semantics, it needs an S2]. Certainly where it is, it is the signifier “m-being,” as demonstrated by philosophical discourse which, to remain at its service [of the master: truth in M], can be brilliant, that is: beautiful, but as for meaning, reduces it to the signifier “m-being” [Cf. cogito ergo sum]. Being a subject doubling itself to infinity in the mirror. [S1(cogito) → S2(cogito: ergo sum) → cogito: cogito ergo sum…]

I will evoke here the magistral survivance—how sensitive it is when it clings to “modern” facts—the survivance of this discourse… that of Aristotle and Saint Thomas [cf. οὐσία (ousia) (Aristotle) and the “actus essendi” (Thomas Aquinas) irreducible to the “concept”]… under the pen of Étienne Gilson, which is now no more than a pleasantness: “plus-de-jouir.” This is also why I give it sense from other discourses, the author as well—as I have just said. [cf. seminar 1960-61: L’identification, 06-12]

I will explain this—that which produces meaning—a little further. Being thus produces itself “notably.”

But our asphere in all its avatars testifies that if the said concludes from a cut that closes, there are certain closed cuts that do not make two parts from this asphere—two parts to be denoted by yes and no [as does the simple circular cut] regarding what it is—of being—of one of them. The important thing is that it is these other cuts that have the effect of topological subversion. But what to say of the change they bring about?

[30] We can denominate it topologically: cylinder, band, Möbius strip. But to find what it is in analytic discourse can only be done by questioning there the relation of the saying to the said.

I say that a saying there specifies itself from the demand [saying of the analysand] whose logical status is of the order of the modal [possible, impossible, contingent, necessary], and that grammar certifies it.

Another saying [saying of the analyst] according to me is privileged there: it is interpretation, which, for its part, is not modal but apophantic. I add that in the register of Aristotle’s logic, it is particular, in that it concerns the subject of particular sayings, which are not all (free association) modal sayings (demand among others). Interpretation—I formulated it in due time—concerns the cause of desire, a cause that it reveals, arising from the demand whose modal nature envelops the whole of the sayings [interpretation cuts through the modal envelope of the sayings and reveals (a)].

Anyone who follows me in my discourse knows well that this cause I embody in the object (a), and this object recognizes it… in that I stated it long ago, ten years ago, in the seminar 61-62 on identification, where I introduced this topology… I had already recognized it in advance in what I designate here as the supplementary disk which closes the Möbius strip, thereby composing the cross-cap.

It is the spherical topology of this said object (a) that projects onto the other, heterogeneous component constituted by the cross-cap. Let us “imagine” again, according to what is graphically depicted in the usual manner, this other part. What do we see? Its swelling [induced by the spherical topology of (a)]. Nothing is more apt to appear spherical. Nevertheless, however minimal the twisted part reduced to a half-turn may be, it is a Möbius strip, that is, the valorization of the asphere of the “not-all”: it is what supports the impossibility of the universe, that is—to take our formula—what meets the real. The universe is nowhere else than in the cause of desire, nor is the universal.

From there proceeds the exclusion of the real, of that real: that there is no sexual relation, due to the fact
– that an animal has a stabitat which is language,
– that inhabiting it is just as much what for its body creates organ, an organ which, in order thus to ex-sist, determines it by its function, even before it finds it.
It is even from there that it is reduced to finding
– that its body is not without other organs,
– and that the function of each presents a problem for it, [31] this being what specifies the schizophrenic saying, in that it is caught without the aid of any established discourse [phallic function].

I have the task of forging the status of a discourse, where I locate that there is… discourse, and I locate it from the social bond to which the bodies that inhabit this discourse submit themselves. My enterprise seems desperate—and is so by the same fact; that is the fact of despair—because it is impossible for psychoanalysts to form a group. [unlike the other three discourses where ordered and stable pairs can form (cf. above p. 14: M→”master-slave”, U→”pedants-pedes”, H→”knowers-sawn”) there is no stable “relation” between the analyst (a) and the analysand (S)→no ordered pairs→no group composition law]

Nevertheless, the analytic discourse—this is my forging—is precisely the one that can found a social bond cleansed of any necessity of a group. [social bond based on the impossible, on the real] As is known, I do not mince my words when it is a matter of highlighting an assessment which, deserving stricter access, must do without it, I will say that I measure the effect of the group by what imaginary obscenity it adds to the effect of discourse. All the less will it be surprising, I hope, to hear me say that it is historically true that the entry into play of the analytic discourse opened the way to practices called “group practices” and that these practices raise only one effect, if I may say, purified from the discourse itself that enabled their experience. No objection here to the so-called “group practice,” provided it is properly indicated (short statement).

The present remark on the impossibility of the psychoanalytic group is also what, as always, grounds its real. This real is this very obscenity: and it “lives”—in quotation marks—as a group. This group life is what preserves the so-called international institution, and what I try to proscribe from my School, against the remonstrances I receive from some who are gifted for that.

This is not what is important, nor that it is difficult for those who settle within a same discourse to live otherwise than in a group; rather, it is that it calls—I mean: to this rampart of the group—the position of the analyst as defined by his very discourse. How would the object (a)—insofar as it is of aversion, regarding the semblance where analysis situates it—how would it support itself with any other comfort [to comfort and to reinforce] than that of the group? [32] I have already lost a fair number of people over this: with a light heart, and ready for others to take issue with it. It is not I who will prevail, it is the discourse I serve. I will now say why. We are under the reign of the scientific discourse and I will make it felt.

Felt from where my earlier critique of the universal that “man is mortal” is confirmed. Its translation into scientific discourse is life insurance. [the product of scientific discourse is an S2: statistical knowledge about death] Death, in scientific saying, is a matter of probability calculation. It is, in this discourse, what it has of truth.

There are nevertheless, in our time, people who refuse to take out life insurance. This is because they seek from death another truth, one already secured by other discourses:
– that of the master, for example, which, according to Hegel, would be founded on death taken as risk,
– that of the university discourse, which would play on the “eternal memory” of knowledge.

These truths—as well as these discourses—are contested, being eminently contestable.
[a in H, S in M, S1 in U, → the truth of death as “probability,” as “risk,” as “eternal memory” is contestable]

Another discourse has emerged, that of Freud, for whom death is love [cf. Freud: Roma – amor].
[the truth of death is love → discourse A closes the loop of the other three (round of discourses) and reveals that love arises in the reversal of each discourse]

This does not mean that love does not also fall under the calculation of probabilities, which leaves it only the infinitesimal chance that Dante’s poem succeeded in realizing. It means that there is no such thing as life-insurance-love [no certainty of knowledge about love], because that would also imply life-insurance-hate.
Love-hate is what a psychoanalyst, even one not Lacanian, rightly recognizes only as ambivalence, that is, the single face of the Möbius strip, with the consequence…
linked to the comic that is proper to it [in the round of discourses, as in the Comedia (Dante), love is overturned at each reversal of a discourse]
…that in his “group life,” he never names anything but hatred.

I pick up again from before: there is even less reason for life-insurance-love since one can only lose at it, as did Dante, who in the circles of his Inferno omits that of the conjungo [union, marriage] without end.

Thus already too much “commentary” in the imagery of this saying that is my topology.
[the image is also “how to silence” (comment taire) the saying: only the absence of meaning allows the saying to be revealed → meaning (metaphor) masks, covers, veils the emergence of the saying]
A true analyst would understand nothing more in it than to make, of this saying—until something better is proven—the place of the real.

The place of the saying is indeed analogous, in mathematical discourse, to that real which other discourses tighten from the impossibility of their sayings [the impossibility of saying].
[33] This dimension of an impossible, which incidentally even includes the properly logical impasse, is what elsewhere [A, but also “structuralism”] is called “structure.”
Structure is the real [the impossible] that emerges in language.
[the logical “impasses”: inconsistency (H), incompleteness (M), unprovability (U), undecidability (A), that is to say “the wall of the impossible”]
Of course, it has no relation with “good form.”
[structure does not pertain to “good form,” to the harmonious equilibrium of the world’s dimension]

The organ-relation [the phallus and the (a)] of language to the speaking being is a metaphor [paternal metaphor].
It is still a stabitat which—from the fact that the inhabitant there becomes a parasite—must be supposed to deliver to him the blow of a real.

It is obvious that in “expressing myself thus”—as what I have just said will be translated—I slip into a “worldview,” that is, into the waste of any discourse.
This is precisely what the analyst could be saved from, by the fact that his discourse rejects even him, enlightening him as refuse of language [the fall of a at the end of analysis].
This is why I start from an ideological thread—I have no choice—
the one woven from the experience instituted by Freud. In the name of what—if this thread comes from the fabric best tested to hold together the ideologies [H, U, M] of a time that is mine—should I reject it? In the name of jouissance?

But precisely, it is the very property of my thread to extricate itself: it is even the principle of the analytic discourse [jouissance of speech], as it is itself articulated.
What I say has the value of the place where I set the discourse that analysis claims for itself: among the others [H, U, M] that share the experience of this time.
Meaning—if there is one to be found—could it come to me from another time: I attempt it—always in vain.

It is not without reason that analysis is founded on the subject supposed to know: yes, certainly it supposes questioning knowledge, which is why it is better that it knows at least a little.
[the truth of the analyst (S2) is not a “natural knowledge” → it “ex-sists” at the plus-de-jouir of the analysand (S1)]
I admire the prim expressions that confusion adopts over this, from the fact that [knowledge] I eliminate it [there is no “natural knowledge” of the analyst].

It remains that science started, clearly by letting go of the supposition…
which is fitting to call “natural” [cf. for example the “theory of signatures,” or the postulated congruence of the “word” to the “thing”]
…in that it implies that the body’s grasps on “nature” are what they are, which—by being contradicted—leads to an idea of the real
[as impossible] that I would indeed say is true.
Alas! “True” is not the right word for the real.
It would be better if it could be proven false, if by that it were understood: fallen (falsa), that is, slipping from the arms of the discourse that embraces it.
[(S1→ S2): → a↓ “+” S]

If my saying imposes itself, not as one says: by a model, but rather [34] by the purpose of topologically articulating the discourse itself, it proceeds from the defect in the universe [what has fallen away, ex-sists: :§, and permits the consistency of a “universe”: ;!] on the condition that it, too, does not claim to supplement it [the discourse A cannot replace the other discourses; through its instability (production of S1) it can only reveal their structure by the round of discourses].

From this “realization of topology,” I do not depart from fantasy even as I account for it [the discourse A (a→S) elucidates the discourse M: S◊a, thus “circumscribes” (a) and reveals S], but gathering it in bloom from mathematics, this topology…
that is, from what is inscribed in a discourse, the most emptied of meaning that exists [mathematical discourse: purely literal, without image or “how-to-silence”], devoid of all metaphor, metonymically of ab-sense…
I confirm that it is from discourse that the reality of fantasy is founded [the “mathèmes” of the discourse A], and that from this reality, what there is of the real is inscribed.
[“what there is of the real”: the “puncture” ◊ inscribes the path along the wall of the impossible, the round of the four discourses, the traversal of structure]

Why should this real not be number—and after all, simply so [arithmetical ideality]—which language conveys well?
But it is not so simple, it is the case to say so [because the One is incompatible with Being (Parmenides), because 1 is founded on 0 (Frege)…]…
a case that I am always quick to ward off by saying that “it is the case” [from Latin “casus” translated from Greek πτῶσις (ptôsis: fall)]…
for what is uttered from Cantor’s saying is that the sequence of numbers represents nothing other in the transfinite than the inaccessibility that begins at 2, whereby from them the countably infinite is constituted.
[cf. power of the continuum, ℵ1=2ℵ0…]

Thus a topology becomes necessary because the real only returns to it [to Cantor] through the discourse of analysis, to confirm it within that discourse, and that it is from the gap that this discourse opens, in closing beyond the other discourses [H, U, M, : A closes the circuit and provokes the round of discourses], that this real finds itself ex-sisting.
This is what I will now make palpable.

My topology is not of a substance to be posited beyond the real to which a practice [analytic] is motivated. It is not a theory.
But it must account for the fact that there are such cuts of discourse that they modify the structure that it originally accommodates.
[subversion of the simple cut (first turn) which reveals the saying within the said (interpretation), topological subversion of the double loop cut (second turn) on the cross-cap → subversion of the subject]

[the “formation” of an analyst requires having led the analysis to its end (double turn), up to the “perilous leap” of the detachment between a and S (S◊a→S◊a↓→S↔◊, cf. infra), the evasion before this leap consists of substituting a hierarchy of standard gradus, in the university mode (I.P.A.)]
It is pure evasion to externalize this real into standards, so-called “life” standards where subjects would be judged in their existence, speaking only to express their feelings about things, with the pedantry of the word “affect” changing nothing.
[“pedantry” refers to the domain of “pedants,” to pedagogy and university discourse]
How could this secondarity bite into the primary that is substituted there for the logic of the unconscious?
Would wisdom intervene there [= double Möbius turn (without evasion)?] to remedy it? The standards to which one resorts precisely contradict it.

But arguing within this banality already leads to the theology [35] of being [university psychology], to “psychic reality,” that which can only be validated analytically by fantasy [cf. cross-cap ↔ S◊a].

Surely analysis itself accounts for this trap and slippage, but is it not coarse enough to denounce itself everywhere that a discourse about what there is [S2 as “natural knowledge”] shifts the responsibility of producing it [the analytic discourse]?
For “it must” be said, [↓a] the unconscious is a fact, insofar as it is supported by the very discourse that establishes it [it is theory that allows the “capture” of the object, contrary to a phenomenological approach], and if only analysts are capable of rejecting the burden [of establishing the discourse], it is by distancing from themselves the promise of rejection that calls them there, according to the extent to which their voice will have made an effect there.
[the end of analysis supposes the fall of (a) → the rejection of the analyst in the place of (a), hence the fundamental question of the desire of the analyst regarding “the promise of rejection that calls them there”]

Let it be sensed from the “washing of hands” [Pontius Pilate] by which they distance from themselves the so-called “transference,” in refusing the surprising access it offers to love. [to “wash their hands” of founding the theory of transference allows them to ignore it and “to distance from themselves the promise of rejection…”] By doing without, in their discourse—according to the line of science—any know-how of bodies [S2◊a in A, any “natural knowledge,” any “saying what there is,” for “there is no sexual relation,” only a “metaphorical” sexuality supported by the metonymy of objects (a)], but for another discourse [that of the jouissance of speech, which allows the emergence of S1, signifiers of ab-sense, asemantic], analysis… evoking a metaphorical sexuality, metonymic as much as one could wish through its most common accesses, those called pregenital, to be read as “extra” [genital] … takes on the form of revealing the torsion of knowledge. [all knowledge aims at knowledge about sexual jouissance of the impossible sexual relation: the S2, truth of the discourse A]

Would it be inappropriate here to take the step toward the real that accounts for it, to translate it as a perfectly situable absence, that of the sexual “relation,” in no mathematization whatsoever? That is why the mathèmes… [Semblant→Autre→↓Prod◊V: sustaining as possible the impossible relation from Semblant to the Other leads to the impotence of the Product to reach the Truth (logical aporia) and triggers the reversal of the discourse (whatever it is) → a new love, and the round of discourses] through which the mathematizable is formulated into impasses [writing of the impossible writing], itself defined as what of the real can be taught… are of a nature to be coordinated with this absence seized from the real.

To resort to the “not-all” [. !], to the “hom-minus-one” [: §], that is, to the impasses of logic, is… to show the way out of the fictions of worldliness [; ! requires : § to make a world (consistency) founded on the fantasy: S◊a], … to make another fixion [other than the disk (a) which complements the Möbian S] of the real: namely of the impossible that fixes it from the structure of language.

It is equally to trace the path [◊] where in each discourse the real [◊: the wall of impossibles → the round of discourses] in which it is wound is rediscovered, and to refer the myths by which it is ordinarily supplemented.

But from there to profess that it lacks from the real that nothing is whole, the incidence of which upon truth [no truth possible] would lead straight to a more scabrous aphorism, or—to take it from another angle—to assert that the real necessitates verifications without object, is that only to resume the stupidity in pinning itself to the noumenon: that “being flees thought”…

Nothing overcomes this “being” [(a)] except a little more daphnizing, even laurificing it into this “noumenon,” [Cf. myth of Daphne, the laurel, etc., and the orifices of objects (a)] for which it is better to say that for it to sustain itself, there must be several layers [the four objects (a): oral, anal, scopic, vocal]. My concern is that the aphorisms—which, moreover, I am content to present in bud form—may reflower in the ditches of metaphysics, for the noumenon is mere jesting, futile subsistence.

I wager that they will prove to be more of “plus-de-nonsense”—more amusing to say—than what leads us [(a)] thus… to what? Must I startle, swear that I did not see it immediately while you already… these first truths, but it is the very text from which the symptoms of the great neuroses are formulated, of the two [hysteric and obsessive] which—taking normality seriously—tell us that it is rather male norm [Hysteric: ; !, obsessive: : § → phallic function and support of signification: S1→S2 on different modes (discourses M, U, H)]. This brings us back to the ground, perhaps not the same, but perhaps also it is the right one and that analytic discourse makes less leaden steps there [by lightening from signification: S1◊S2].

Let us now set in motion the matter of sense, promised earlier, of its difference from signification. The enormity of the condensation between “what thinks” in our time—with the feet we just mentioned—and the inept topology to which Kant gave body from his own establishment, that of the bourgeois who can imagine only transcendence: aesthetics as dialectic. This condensation indeed we must name—”in the analytic sense” according to the received formula.

What is this sense, if precisely the elements that condense within it are univocally qualified by a similar imbecility [S1 asemantic signifier]… even capable of boasting of it on the side of “what thinks” [Heidegger], whereas Kant’s mask, on the contrary, appears wooden in the face of the insult, except for his reflection upon Swedenborg… in other words: “Is there a sense of imbecility?” Here we touch upon the fact that sense is never produced except through the translation of one discourse into another. [Parmenides→Heidegger; Swedenborg→Kant, cf. the shift from one discourse to another in the round of discourses]

Provided we now have this small light, the antinomy trembles that arises between “sense” and “signification”: that a faint sense may emerge at the raking light of the so-called “Critiques”: “of Pure Reason,” and “of Judgment”… for practical reason, I have mentioned its frolic [37] by placing it on Sade’s side, he no more amusing, but logical [Kant with Sade]… as soon as their sense therefore rises, Kant’s sayings no longer have any signification. [the signification of the “said” silences the sense; the suspension of signification (imbecility) allows the emergence of a “saying” and of sense] They thus hold signification only at the moment when they had no sense, not even common sense.

This sheds light upon the darkness that reduces us to groping. Sense is not lacking in the so-called pre-Socratic vaticinations [Parmenides]: impossible to say which, but it is felt there [ça s’y sent]. And that Freud licked his lips over it [Ἔρως (Eros) and Θάνατος (Thanatos)]… not the best [vaticinations], moreover, since it is from Empedocles… no matter, he—Freud—had the sense of orientation; that suffices for us to see that interpretation is of sense and goes against signification. Oracular, which is not surprising given that we know how to link oral to voice, from sexual displacement. [from oral to vocal: displacement among the four objects (a): oral (H), anal (M), scopic (U), oracular (A), which supplement, through the phallic function, the absence of the sexual relation]

It is the misery of historians: to be able to read only sense where they have no other principle than to rely on the documents of signification. They too thus end up in transcendence, that of materialism for instance, which—”historical”—is alas… so much so that it irreparably becomes it.

Fortunately, analysis is there to reinflate the “historiole”: but achieving this only from what is taken within its discourse, within its actual discourse, it leaves us high and dry for what is not of our time, thereby changing nothing about the fact that honesty compels the historian to recognize as soon as he has to situate the slightest sacysent [where sense evades but is felt]. That he bears the burden of the science of embarrassment, it is indeed the embarrassing aspect of his contribution to science.

It thus matters greatly—to these [historians] as well as to many others [analysts, etc.]—that the impossibility of saying truth of the real be motivated by a mathème [by a writing, by a letter]—as I have defined it—by a mathème where the relation of saying to said is situated. The mathème is uttered from the sole real [impossible] first recognized within language: namely, number. [Frege – “Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik” – generates the sequence of numbers starting from zero as a contradictory concept: first “impossible” (real)]

Nevertheless, the history of mathematics demonstrates—it is the case to say [dé-montre: removes the image]—that it may extend to intuition, provided this term is as neutered as possible from its metaphorical usage [the image that creates sense]. There is thus a field here, whose most striking feature is that its development—contrary to the terms by which it is absorbed—does not proceed by generalization, but by topological remanipulation [evacuation, cut, revelation of (a)], by a retroaction on the beginning such that it erases its history [just as the number 1 erases the contradictory experience of 0 as the encounter with the real].

[38] No more certain experience to resolve the embarrassment [writing of a unary trait and reversal of discourse into another, etc.]. Hence its attraction [of mathematics for the scientific discourse (H)] for thought, where it finds the “nonsense” proper to being, that is, to the desire for a speech without beyond [a]. Yet nothing, in stating [spherical universe of “stabitat”], about being—as we thus enunciate it—escapes our benevolence.

Entirely different is the fact of the undecidable, to take the leading example recommended to us by the mathème: it is the real of the saying of number that is at stake when it is demonstrated of this saying that it is not verifiable, at that second degree where one cannot even assure it—as others already deserving of our attention do—of a demonstration of its indemonstrability, from the very premises it supposes, that is, from an inherent contradiction in supposing it demonstrable.

It cannot be denied that there is progress here compared to what in the Meno remains to be questioned regarding what makes something teachable. [only what emerges from the real into the symbolic, by stumbling on the impossible in each of the discourses (H, U, M, A), is teachable: the teachable is the path that skirts the “wall of the impossible”] Certainly, the last thing to say is that between the two there is a world [world of significations→imaginary]: what is at stake is that at this place comes the real, of which the world is only a derisory fall [a].

However, it is necessary to restrict the notion of progress here, since I do not lose sight of the regret that accompanies it, namely that the true opinion [ὀρθὴ δόξα (orthé doxa)] which in the Meno Plato gives sense to, now holds for us only an ab-sense of signification, something confirmed when referring it to that of our well-thinking contemporaries [I.P.A.]. Would a mathème have carried it, as our topology provides? Let us attempt it.

This leads us to the astonishment that we avoided sustaining our Möbius band with an image, this imagination rendering vain the remarks that another said [ἕτερος hétéros] would have necessitated had it been articulated there: my reader became other only insofar as the saying surpasses the said [double cut on the cross-cap (double loop of the single edge of the Möbius strip), second turn of L’étourdit, passage from the said (“dit-mension” of the two ♂ formulas: ;! and :§) to the saying through the “not-all” of the two ♀ formulas: .! and /§], this saying [the one that does not pass through the said] being to be taken from the said ex-sisting [:§], through which the real ex-sists (was ex-sisting) without anyone, because it was verifiable [S1◊S2→undecidable], being able to pass it to the mathème.

Is true opinion then the truth in the real insofar as it bars saying? [cf. above: “the impossibility of saying truth about the real”] I will test this by repeating it now. Line without points, I said of the cut, insofar as it is—it—the Möbius strip, such that one of its edges, after the tour by which it closes, continues into the other edge. [39] This, however, can occur only from a surface already punctured by a point I called outside the line [this point is of spherical topology], specifying itself by a double loop yet deployable onto a sphere: such that it is from a sphere that it cuts out, but from its double looping that it turns the sphere into an asphere or cross-cap.

What passes, however, into the cross-cap by borrowing from the sphere, is that a cut, which it makes Möbian in the surface it determines to render it possible, returns this surface to the spherical mode: because it is from the equivalence of the cut that what was supplemented into a cross-cap “projects itself,” as I said.

But since this surface, for it to allow this cut, can be said to be made of lines without points where everywhere its front side is sewn to its back side, it is everywhere that the additional point capable of being spherized can be fixed into a cross-cap. But this fixion must be chosen as a unique point outside the line, so that a cut, making a single and unique tour, resolves it into a spherically deployable point.

The point [a] thus is the opinion [the “particular”] which can be said to be true, because the saying that makes a tour around it [the saying encircles the real] indeed verifies it, but only because the saying is what modifies it by introducing δόξα [doxa] as real.

Thus a saying such as mine, it is from ex-sisting at the level of the said that it permits the mathème, but it does not, for me, make a mathème and is posed as:
– as non-teachable before the saying has been produced,
– as teachable only after I have mathematized it according to the Meno criteria which, however, had not certified it to me. [mathematized through the logical impossibilities (apories) of each discourse all along the “wall of the impossible”]

The non-teachable, I have made it a mathème by securing it through the fixion of true opinion, fixion written with an “x” but not [Meno, Meno…] without resource for equivocation [fiction]. Thus an object as easy to fabricate as the Möbius band insofar as it is imagined, brings within reach what is unimaginable [the saying of the a, the non-specular] as soon as its saying, by being forgotten, hardens into the said. Whence proceeds my fixion of this δόξα [doxa] point that I did not say [→not the said but the saying], I do not know it and therefore cannot—any more than Freud—account for it from what I teach, except by following its effects in the analytic discourse, [40] an effect of its mathematization which does not come from a machine, but proves to belong to the machinic [S◊a] once it has produced it.

It is notable that Cicero already knew how to use this term: “Ad usum autem orationis incredibile est, nisi diligenter adtenderis, quanta opera machinata natura sit.” (De natura deorum, II, 59, 149.), but even more that I made it the motto for the gropings of my saying as early as April 11, 1956.

Topology is not made to guide us in structure. This structure, it is—as a retroaction of the chain order of which language consists. The structure is the aspheric concealed in linguistic articulation insofar as an effect of subject seizes upon it. It is clear that, concerning signification, this “seizes upon” of the sub-clause, pseudo-modal, rebounds from the very object that, as a verb, it envelops in its grammatical subject, and that there is a false effect of meaning, a resonance of the imaginary induced by topology, according to whether:

– the effect of subject creates an aspheric swirl [Möbian round of discourse reversals all along the “wall of the impossible”],

– or whether the subjective of this effect is “reflected” [S◊a].

Here it is necessary to distinguish:
– the ambiguity that is inscribed in signification, that is, the loop of the cut [S1→S2→(a◊S) (fantasy)],
– and the suggestion of a hole [the “impossible”—thus ex-sisting—of each discourse], that is, of structure which from this ambiguity produces meaning.

Thus the cut, the cut instituted from topology—making it, by right, closed, it should be noted once and for all, at least in my usage—is “the said” of language, but so as not to forget to “say” it.

Of course, there are the sayings that are the object of predicate logic and whose universalizing supposition pertains only to the sphere, I say “the,” I say “sphere,” precisely because structure [S: Möbian→: §] finds there only a supplement [a: spherical→;!] which is that of the fiction of truth [the fantasy: S◊a→cross-cap].

[41] One could say that the sphere is what dispenses with topology. The cut certainly cuts it—by closing—the concept upon which the fair of language rests [(a) as lack], the principle:

– of exchange [substitutive objects, but “it is not that”→renewal],
– of value [+ of jouissance],
– of universal concession [by conceding the ex-sistence of the exception: §, one obtains a “consistent” universe of substitutive objects whose renewal (because “it is not that”) produces an accumulation of “dead” objects, of waste, of debris, the cemetery of market exchange].

Let us say it is only “matter” [production of substitutive a] for dialectics [S1→S2], business of the master’s discourse [S1→S2↓a].

It is very difficult to sustain this pure “said-mension,” because being everywhere, “pure” it never is, but the important point is that it is not structure. It is the fiction of surface [spherical: a] with which structure [Möbian: S] is clothed. That meaning is foreign to it, that “man is good”—and likewise the contrary statement—means strictly nothing that would have any meaning, one can rightly be astonished that no one has made of this remark—which once again, evidence sends back to being as hollowing out—a structural reference.

Shall we risk saying that the cut ultimately does not ex-sist from the sphere? For the reason that nothing forces it to close, since by remaining open it produces the same effect there, which can be qualified as the hole, but here the term can only be taken in the imaginary sense of “rupture of surface”: evident certainly, but reducing what it can designate to the emptiness of any possible, whose substance is only a correlative (compossible yes or no: issue of the predicate in the propositional with all the false steps one amuses oneself with).

Without Greek, then Arab, homosexuality [♂ spherical logic: ;!] and the relay of the Eucharist [thanksgiving→salvation] all this would have necessitated another recourse [: §] much earlier. But it is understandable that in the great epochs we have just evoked, religion alone ultimately constituted true opinion, ὀρθὴ δόξα [orthé doxa], could give to this mathème the foundation with which it was effectively invested [;!, a: spherical complement to the Möbian structure]. There will always remain something of it even if one believes otherwise, and that is why nothing will prevail against the Church until the end of time. Since biblical studies have saved no one yet. Only those for whom this cork [X] has no interest, theologians for instance, will work within the structure… if their heart inclines them, but beware of nausea.

What topology teaches is the necessary link established between the cut and the number of turns it comprises [1 or 2] so that a modification of the structure or the asphere [42] (L, apostrophe), the only conceivable access to the real, and conceivable through the impossible in that it demonstrates it, may be obtained. [only the Möbian cut makes the structure evident]

– Thus from the single turn [the said] which in the asphere creates a spherically stable shred [the result is a spherical shred of type (a) and the subject S disappears] by introducing into it the effect of the supplement it takes from the point outside the line [a], the ὀρθὴ δόξα [orthé doxa].

– The double loop, this turn [Möbian cut], obtains something quite different: the fall of the cause of desire [a] from which the Möbian band of the subject is produced [: a↓”+”S], this fall demonstrating [the S] as being nothing but ex-sistence [: §] at the double loop cut [the saying] from which it results. [which makes it appear]

This ex-sistence is “saying” [Möbian cut] and it proves it in that the subject remains at the mercy of its said [simple cut] if it repeats, that is—as with the Möbian band—finding its fading (vanishing).

Knot-point [“point-off-line” (a) and Möbian knot (S)]—it is the case to say it—is the single turn by which the hole is made, but only in the sense that from the turn, this hole is imagined, or machined [S◊a], as one prefers. The imagination of the hole [fiction] certainly has consequences: is it necessary to evoke its “pulsional” function [the orifices of the four objects (a)] or, better said, what derives from it (Trieb)? It is the conquest of analysis to have made it a matheme, when mysticism previously only bore witness to its ordeal by making it ineffable. But to remain with that hole [simple cut] is to reproduce the fascination by which the universal discourse [U discourse→sphere of significations] maintains its privilege—indeed it gives it body—against the analytic discourse.

With the image [S◊a: the imaginary that comes to “fill” the hole] nothing will ever be accomplished. The similar will become bored even with what is emblazoned there. [repetition of the object’s saying and loss of the subject’s saying: the object’s saying (simple cut→a) forgets the subject’s saying (Möbian cut→(a)↓”+”S)]. The hole is not motivated by the wink, nor by the mnemonic syncope, nor by the cry [the objects (a) substitutive acting as “hole mouth”]. That the word borrows itself from motus is not appropriate here from where topology is established. A torus only has a hole—central or circular—for whoever looks at it as an object, not for whoever is the subject of it, that is from a cut that implies no hole but obliges a precise number of turns of saying for the torus to become… “to become” if it is asked for, because after all a torus is better than a cross… to become—as we have prudently contented ourselves with imagining—a Möbius strip, or contraband if you prefer the word.

A torus, as I demonstrated ten years ago to people keen to swamp me with their own contraband, is the structure of neurosis insofar as desire can, from the indefinitely enumerable repetition of the demand, close itself in two turns. [two turns of desire (interlacing of two tori: “the desire of man is the desire of the Other”)]

It is under this condition at least that the contraband of the subject is decided—in this saying that is called interpretation. I only wish to make a point regarding the sort of incitement that our structural topology might impose. I said enumerable in its turns. It is clear that if the hole is not to be imagined, the turn only ex-sists from the number by which it is inscribed in the cut of which only the closure counts. [the hole is “imagined,” a torus has a hole only when observed from outside, the subject never encounters a hole on the torus→”the turn is not countable”: no need for “2 turns of desire + one turn of demand”]

I insist: the turn in itself is not countable, repetitive, it closes nothing, it is neither said nor to be said, that is, it is no proposition. [for the subject on the torus, the demands do not close, there is a non-denumerable continuity, no “cut”]

Hence it would be too much to say that it does not belong to a logic, which remains to be made starting from modal [logic]. [to show the structure: the double-loop cut reveals the subject S (Möbian: modal logic) when a falls (spherical logic)]

But if—as our first depiction of the cut by which from the torus the Möbius band is made assures—a demand suffices [and two turns of desire]—but which can be repeated being enumerable—it is as if it only matches the double turn from which the band is founded by posing itself from the transfinitude (Cantorian) [the demand that repeats reveals the transfinitude of desire].

It remains that the band can only be constituted if the turns of demand are of an odd number [for the turn to close]. The transfinitude remains required, since nothing—we have said—can be counted there except by the closure of the cut, the said transfinitude—like God himself of whom it is known he congratulates himself [Trinity]—is thereby summoned to be odd. [forgetting, missed act, slip…: the “reversing” saying]

This adds a saying-mension to the topology of our practice of saying. Must it not enter into the concept of repetition insofar as it is not left to itself, but that this practice conditions it, as we have also observed of the unconscious?

It is striking—even if already seen for what I say, let it be remembered—that the order—understand: the ordinal—that I effectively traced the way for in my definition of repetition and starting from practice, has gone entirely unnoticed by my audience in its necessity. I mark the point here for a future reprise.

Let us now say the end of the analysis of the neurotic torus. The object (a), falling from the hole of the band, is projected afterward into what we will call—by imaginary abuse—the central hole [44] of the torus, that is, around which the odd transfinitude of demand resolves itself from the double turn of interpretation [which shows the subject (Möbian)]. This is what the psychoanalyst has taken as function, to situate from his semblance [a].

The analysand only ends by making the object (a) the representative of the representation of his analyst. It is thus for as long as his mourning lasts, for the object (a) to which he has finally reduced him, that the psychoanalyst persists in causing his desire: rather in a manic-depressive mode. It is the state of exultation that BALINT, by taking it sideways, nevertheless describes well: more than one “therapeutic success” finds there its reason, and even a substantial one.

Then mourning concludes. What remains is the stable flattening of the phallus, that is, of the band, where analysis finds its end, the one that assures its supposed subject of knowledge:

– that the dialogue between one sex and another being forbidden because any discourse, whichever it may be [H, U, M, A], is founded on excluding what language brings to it of the impossible, namely the sexual relation [from the Semblant to the Other], results in some inconvenience for the dialogue within each (sex),

– that nothing could be said “seriously” (meaning to form a serial limit [thus ex-sistence]) except by taking meaning from the comic order, to which no sublime (even DANTE again) fails to bow,

– and that insult, if it proves through ἔπος [epos] to be the first and last word of dialogue (compare Homer [Iliad]), judgment likewise, even up to the “last,” remains fantasy [S◊a], and to say so only touches the real by losing all signification.

From all this he will know how to make a conduct for himself. There are more than one, indeed plenty, to suit the three so-called dimensions of the impossible as they unfold: in sex, in meaning, in signification. If he is sensitive to the beautiful—nothing obliges him to be—he will situate it between two deaths, and if any of these truths seem good to him to make heard, it is only to the “mid-saying” of the simple turn that he will trust.

These benefits sustained by a second-saying are nonetheless established, in that they leave it forgotten. There lies the cutting edge of our initial statement. [“That one speaks remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard.”] The first saying, ideally sprung forth from the analysand, has its structural effects only if the saying “appears,” in other words if the interpretation makes the “being” appear [S1→S2→a↓”+”S → “the being” (a) and the appearing (S)].

In what does the appearing consist? In that by producing “true” cuts: to be strictly understood as closed cuts [→Möbian cuts] to which topology does not allow to be reduced to the off-line point [a] nor—what amounts to the same—to being only an imaginable hole.

Of this appearing [S], I have no need to expound the status other than by my very trajectory, having already dispensed with denoting its emergence at the point—above—where I allowed it. To make a halt (re) in this trajectory would at the same time be to pene-trate it, to make it “be,” and even “almost” is still too much. [(a)↓”+”S: (a) is a fiction of being, to bring S to being (when S is revealed only when a falls) is to regress to the spherical logic of a at the very moment one is exiting it]

This saying that I recall to ex-sistence, [That one speaks remains forgotten…], this saying not to forget from the primary said, it is from it that psychoanalysis can claim to close itself. If the unconscious is structured like a language, I did not say “by” it. The audience—if by that is meant something like a mental acoustics—the audience I then had was poor, psychoanalysts having no better than others.

Lacking sufficient remark on this choice…
obviously none of these traits touched them, to dumbfound them [Name of the Father]—without more effect elsewhere…
I had to, with the university audience—which in this field can only be mistaken—spread circumstances preventing me from striking my own students, to explain why I let pass such an extravagance as to make the unconscious “the condition of language,” when it is manifestly through language that I account for the unconscious: “Language”—thus I had transcribed into the revised text of a thesis—”is the condition of the unconscious.”

Nothing is useful, when one is caught in certain mental forks, since here I am forced to recall the function—specified in logic—of the article that brings about the real of the unique, the effect of a definition—an article, itself a “part of speech,” that is to say grammatical, making use of this function in the language I use, to be defined as “defined.”

Language can designate only the structure from which language effects arise, these being multiple, opening the use of one among others which gives my “…like…” its very precise scope, that of “…like a language,” from which precisely common sense diverges from the unconscious. Languages fall under the blow of the “not-all” in the most certain way since the structure has no other meaning therein, and that is [46] why it relates to my topological recreation of today.

Thus, the reference by which I situate the unconscious is precisely the one that escapes linguistics, because as a science it has no use for the par-being [S], no more than it noumenizes [(a)]. But it does indeed lead us, and God knows where, but surely not to the unconscious, which by taking it into the structure, is derailed in regard to the real from which language is motivated: since language is precisely that, this drift [trieb].
[each discourse is “founded” on an impossible, which has as its derived consequence its reversal → the structure is the round of discourses, originating from the “wall of the impossible”]

Psychoanalysis only accesses it through the entry into play of an Other said-mention [the not-all], which opens from the fact that the leader (of the game) “pretends” to be the major language effect, the object by which the cut it permits is animated: it is the object (a) to call it by the sigil I assign to it. The analyst pays for this by having to represent the fall of a discourse [(S1→S2) → a↓ “+”S], after having allowed meaning to gather around this fall to which he devotes himself. This is denounced by the disappointment I cause many linguists, with no possible way out for them, although I have managed to disentangle it myself.

Who indeed cannot see from reading me — even from having heard me say it clearly — that the analyst is — since Freud — very much ahead of the linguist, of SAUSSURE for example who remains at the stoic access, the same as that of Saint AUGUSTINE? (cf. among others the “De magistro” for which, dating my support, I sufficiently indicated the limit: the “signans-signatum” distinction).
[cf. Seminar 1953-54: “The Technical Writings of Freud”, session of 23-06-1954]

Very much ahead… I said in what way: condensation and displacement preceding the discovery — with JAKOBSON’s help — of the effect of meaning from metaphor and metonymy. Provided that analysis sustains itself by the chance I offer it, this lead it keeps, and it will retain it according to the relay that the future may bring to my speech.

For linguistics — on the other hand — for analysis clears no way, and even the support I took from JAKOBSON is not…
contrary to what happens to erase history in mathematics
…of the order of après-coup, but of backlash, to the benefit — and second-saying — of linguistics.

The saying of analysis, insofar as it is effective, realizes the apophantic, which by its sole ex-sistence distinguishes itself from the proposition. Thus, it puts into place the propositional function, insofar as, I think I have shown it [;!, :§, .!, /§], it gives us the only support to compensate for the ab-sense of the sexual relation.

This saying is renamed there [the second turn of the said: the so-called turns: second turn of the double-loop cut, etc.]…
from the embarrassment betrayed by fields as scattered as the oracle [esoteric speech] and the off-discourse of psychosis [delirium]…
through the borrowing it makes of the term “interpretation.” It is the saying by which the cuts — which only sustain themselves as non-closed by being demands — reclaim desire.

Demands that pair:
– the impossible with the contingent, [/§, .!(♀)]
– the possible with the necessary, [;!, :§(♂)]
…challenge the pretensions of logic that calls itself modal.

This saying proceeds only from the fact that the unconscious, being “structured like a language,” that is to say, the language it inhabits, is subjected to the equivocation by which each language distinguishes itself. A language among others is nothing more than the integral of the equivocations that its history has allowed to persist therein. It is the vein by which the real — the only one for the analytic discourse to motivate its outcome: the real that there is no sexual relation — has been deposited over the ages.

This in the species that this real introduces to the One, that is to the uniqueness of the body which takes organ therefrom, and by this very fact creates organs torn apart by a disjunction through which no doubt other reals come within its reach, but not without the quadruple path of these accesses [the four objects (a): oral, anal, scopic, vocal, each specific to a discourse] being infinitized so that the “real number” may be produced.

Language thus, insofar as this species finds its place there, effects nothing other than the structure by which this incidence of the real is motivated. Everything that appears to be semblance of communication is always a dream, a slip, or a joke.
Nothing to be done, then, with what is imagined and confirmed at many points about animal language.
The real there is not to be dismissed from a univocal communication of which animals, by providing us the model, would make us their dolphins: a function of code is exercised there by which the negentropy of observational results is achieved.

Moreover, vital behaviors are organized there from symbols entirely similar to ours: erection of an object to the rank of master-signifier in the order of the migratory flight, symbolism of the parade both amorous and of combat, work signals, territory markings, with this difference: these symbols are never equivocal.

These equivocations, which inscribe themselves alongside an enunciation, concentrate around three knot-points where one will notice not only the presence of the odd — earlier deemed indispensable — but also that none imposes itself as the first, the order in which we are going to expose them being maintained by a double loop [S1→S2→a↓”+”S] rather than by a single turn.

I begin with homophony, on which orthography depends.
– That in the language that is mine, as I played with earlier, “2” is equivocal to “of them” [jeu de mots between “deux” and “d’eux”], preserves the trace of this play of the soul by which making two of them together finds its limit at “making two” out of them.
– Others are found in this text, from “parêtre” to “s’emblant”…

I hold that all blows are permitted here, for the reason that whoever is within their reach without being able to recognize themselves there, it is they who play us. Unless poets make a calculation out of it and psychoanalysts use it where appropriate. Where it is suitable for their end: that is, for — from their saying, which re-severs the subject — renewing the application represented on the torus, on the torus of which the desire specific to the insistence of demand consists.

If an imaginary swelling can here help with the phallic transfinitization, let us nevertheless recall that the cut no less functions to bear on that “crumpled” [jeu de mots: reference to “chiffonné”], of which I once gloried in Little Hans’s giraffe-like drawing. For interpretation here is seconded by grammar, to which — in this case as in others — Freud does not refrain from resorting.

I do not return here to what I emphasize about this confessed practice in many examples. I note only that it is what analysts modestly impute to FREUD as a slip into indoctrination. This, at dates (cf. that of the Rat Man) when he has no more back-world to offer them than the Ψ system prey to “internal excitations.”

Thus the analysts who cling to the guardrail of “general psychology” are not even capable of reading in these striking cases that FREUD has subjects “repeat their lesson,” in their grammar. Except that he reminds us that from each one’s said, we [49] must be ready to revise the “parts of speech” we thought we could retain from previous cases.

Of course, this is what linguists propose as an ideal, but if the English language appears suitable for CHOMSKY, I have marked that my first sentence stands against an equivocation that contradicts his transformational tree. “I am not making you say it.”
Is that not the minimum of interpretive intervention?

But it is not its meaning that matters in the formula that the language I use here allows me to give; it is that the a-morphology of a language opens up the equivocation between “You said it” and “I all the less take it upon myself that, such a thing, I have not had anyone make you say it.”

Figure 3 now: it is logic, without which interpretation would be imbecilic, the first to use it being, of course, those who — in order to transcendentalize existence with the unconscious — arm themselves with FREUD’s assertion: that it is insensitive to contradiction.
It surely has not yet reached them that more than one logic has claimed to forbid itself this foundation [principle of non-contradiction], and nonetheless remained “formalized,” meaning proper to the mathème.

Who would reproach FREUD for such an effect of obscurantism and the clouds of darkness immediately — from JUNG to ABRAHAM — accumulated in reply to him? Certainly not me, who also has, at that point (of my reverse side), some responsibilities [sic].

I will merely recall that no logical elaboration — from before SOCRATES and elsewhere than our tradition [India and China] — has ever proceeded other than from a core of paradoxes — to use a term receivable everywhere — with which we designate equivocations — situated at this point that — to come here as a third — is equally first or second.

Whom did I fail this year to make feel that the Fountain of Youth bath by which the mathème called logic has for us regained its grasp and vigor are these paradoxes, not merely refreshed by being promoted under new terms by a RUSSELL, but also new by originating from CANTOR’s saying?

Shall I speak of the genital drive as the catalogue [jeu de mots between “cata-logue”] of pregenital drives insofar as they do not contain themselves, but have their cause elsewhere, that is, in that Other to which “genitality” has access only in that it takes “bar” [S(A)] over it by the division effected by its passage into the major signifier, the phallus?

And for the transfinite of the demand, that is, repetition, shall I revisit that it has no other horizon than to give body to the fact that the 2 is no less inaccessible than it, starting merely from the 1 that would not be that of the empty set?
I want to mark here that there is only collection — endlessly fed by the testimony given to me by those whose ears I open — collection of what anyone can, as much as I and they, gather from the very mouths of the analysands, provided they have authorized themselves to take the place of the analyst [that is, that of semblance: a, and not that of the pontificating Other of his “knowledge” (discourse U)].

That practice over the years allowed me to make sayings and resayings, edicts and retractions, is indeed the bubble in which all men make for themselves the place they deserve in other discourses [M, U] than the one I propose. In getting themselves made into race-guides [M] for those who rely on the guided, pedants [U]… (cf. above). On the contrary, in acceding to the place from where what I enunciate is uttered, the condition originally held as first is to be the analysed, that is, what results from the analysand.

Still, for me to maintain myself at the sharp point of what authorizes me there, this process must always be recommenced. Where it is seized that my discourse is — compared to the others — against the grain, as I already said, and confirms my requirement of the double loop so that the whole may close upon itself. This around a hole in that real by which what is afterward testified by every feather is announced: that there is no sexual relationship.

Thus is explained this half-saying that we have come to the end of, the one whereby woman has always been a lure of truth. May heaven — at last broken open along the milky way we are opening — see to it that some, in being “not-all,” for the hommodit [wordplay: hommo-dit → “what man says”] come to strike the hour of the real. Which would not necessarily be more unpleasant than before. It will not be a progress, since there is none that does not bring regret, regret of a loss. But let it be laughed at [rien→rie en→en rie], the language I serve would find itself remaking there the “joke” of Democritus on the μηδέν [mèden: zero]: extracting it by fall from the μή [mè] of negation, from the nothing that seems to call it — just as our band does by itself — to its rescue.

[51]Indeed DEMOCRITUS gave us the ἄτομος [atomos], the radical real [a], by eliding the “not,” μή [mè], but within its subjunctivity, that is, this modal by which demand remakes consideration. Thus the δέν [den] was indeed the stowaway whose clamor [clam()] now makes our destiny [S◊a].

No more materialist [Democritus] in this than anyone sensible, than I or than MARX, for example. For FREUD I would not swear: who knows what seed of “stolen words” [Freud born in Moravia] may have sprouted in his soul, from a land where Kabbalah was walking. To all matter, much spirit is needed, and of its own kind, for otherwise where would it come from?

This is what FREUD felt, but not without the regret I spoke of earlier [to show sense, one must lose signification]. I therefore do not dislike certain symptoms at all, linked to the intolerable of Freudian truth. They confirm it, even to the point of seeming to gain force from me.

To borrow an irony of POINCARÉ on CANTOR, my discourse is not sterile, it engenders antinomy, and even better: it demonstrates it can sustain itself even from psychosis. Happier than FREUD — who, to approach its structure, had to resort to the wreckage of the memories of a deceased man — it is from a reprise of my own word that my SCHREBER is born (and even here bi-president, two-headed eagle).

Bad reading of my discourse, no doubt, but it is a good one: such is the case for all, in use. That an analysand arrives all animated to his session is enough for him to directly chain into his Oedipal material, as reports come back to me from all over.

Obviously my discourse does not always produce such happy rejections. To take it from the angle of “influence,” dear to university theses, this seems able to go quite far, especially regarding a whirlwind of semantophilia for which it would be held as a precedent with strong priority, which I would center around the “portmanteau word”…

One has been movalizing for a while beyond sight, and it is — alas — not without owing some of it to me. I neither console myself nor despair of it. It is less dishonoring for the analytic discourse than what happens with the formation of societies of that name. There, philistinism traditionally sets the tone, and the recent outbursts against the youth’s surges [May 68] do nothing but conform to it.

[52]What I denounce is that everything is good for the analysts of this lineage to dodge a challenge by which I hold they take existence, for it is a structural fact to determine them. The challenge, I denote it from abjection. It is known that the term absolute haunted knowledge [Hegel] and power [Louis XIV] — ridiculously, it must be said: there seemed, it seemed, hope remaining, that saints elsewhere represented. One must disillusion oneself. The analyst forfeits.

As for the love that surrealism would like words to bring about, does that mean it remains there? It is strange that what analysis demonstrates as hidden there has not made semblance spring forth.

To conclude — according to Fenouillard’s advice concerning the limit — I salute Henri-Rousselle, of whom, taking occasion here, I do not forget that he offers me a place for this game of saying-to-say, to make clinical demonstration.

Where better have I made it felt that the impossible-to-say is the measure of the real — in practice?

And date the thing: BELŒIL, July 14, 1972

BELŒIL where one can think that CHARLES I
— although not of my line — failed me, but not — let it be known —
COCO — necessarily “bel eye” — for inhabiting the neighboring inn, that is, the tricolor macaw who…
without having to explore its sex…
I had to classify as hetero, for it was said to be speaking.