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(All parts in English)

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蓋
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也
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蓋非也 請 拒 收 我 贈

gàifēiyěqǐngjùshōuwǒzèng.

I’m asking you to refuse what I offer you, because it’s not that.

You love lectures, which is why I asked last night…
with a little note I took to him around a quarter past ten…
I asked my friend Roman Jakobson, whom I hoped would be here,
I asked him, then, to give you the lecture he didn’t give you yesterday,
since after announcing it to you…
I mean after writing on the blackboard something equivalent to what I’ve just done here…
he thought he should stay within what he called generalities,
thinking no doubt that this is what you preferred to hear, namely: a lecture.
Unfortunately—he called me early this morning—he had a lunch appointment
with linguists, so you won’t have a lecture.

Because the truth is, I don’t give lectures.
As I’ve said elsewhere, very seriously, I amuse myself: serious amusements or pleasant ones.
“Elsewhere”—that is, at Sainte-Anne—I tried out the pleasant amusements.
No need for commentary.
And if I said—and I said it over there—that perhaps this too is an amusement,
here I say that I stay within the serious.
But still, it is an amusement.
Elsewhere, I’ve connected this, instead of pleasant amusement,
with what I called “the letter of a-mur” [a pun in French: “amur” evokes “amour” (love) while “mur” means wall].
Well, here’s one—it’s typical:

“I’m asking you to refuse what I offer you…”

Here we pause, because I hope there’s no need to add anything
for it to be understood.
That’s exactly it—the letter of a-mur, the real one: “to refuse what I offer you.”
We can add, for those who, by chance, have never understood
what the letter of a-mur is:

“…to refuse what I offer you because it’s not that.”

You see, I slipped—I slipped because—my God—it’s you I’m speaking to,
you who love lectures: “it’s not that.”
There’s this addition: “n’.”
When the “ne” is added, it doesn’t need to be expletive
for it to mean something—namely, the presence of the enunciator, the real one, the proper one.
It’s precisely because the enunciator would not be there
that the enunciation would be complete, and it should be written:

“…because it’s not that.”

I said that here the amusement was serious—what could that possibly mean?
In truth, I searched, I inquired how “serious” is said in various languages.
For the way I conceive it, I haven’t found anything better than our own, which lends itself to wordplay.
I don’t know the others well enough to have found what in them might be equivalent,
but in ours, “serious,” as I mean it, is “serial.”

As I hope some of you already know, without me having to tell you,
the principle of the serial is that sequence of whole numbers,
which no one has found a better way to define than to say:
a property is transferable from n to n+1, which can only be the one transferred from 0 to 1—
that’s what is called reasoning by recurrence, or mathematical induction.

Only, here’s the problem I tried to approach in my recent amusements:
what on earth can be transferred from 0 to 1?
That’s the tricky part!
And yet it’s exactly what I’ve set as my goal this year—to pin down… or worse.

Today I won’t move forward into that interval—which at first glance is bottomless—
of what transfers from 0 to 1.
But what is sure and what is clear is that if we take things one by one,
we need to be clear about it.
Because despite every effort to logicize the sequence, the series, of whole numbers,
no better definition has been found
than to designate their common property—the only one!—
as being that of what transfers from 0 to 1.

In the meantime, you were—well, those of my School—
informed not to miss what Roman Jakobson
was supposed to bring you in terms of enlightenment
about what analysis of language entails,
which, truth be told, is very useful to understand where I’m taking the question now.

It’s not because I started from that point, to come to my present amusements,
that I should remain bound to it.
And what certainly struck me—among other things!—in what Roman Jakobson brought you
is something that concerns this historical point: that language
has been on the agenda for quite some time.

He spoke to you, among other things, about a certain Boetius Dacus,
whom he emphasized as being very important, because he articulated
the Suppositiones.
I think that, at least for some of you, this resonates with what I’ve long been saying
about what is at stake with the subject—the subject radically—what the signifier supposes.

Then he told you that it so happened that for some time this Boethius…
this Boethius who is not the one you know, that one extracted images from the past, Daccus
is his name, which means “Danish,” he’s not the right one, not the one in the Bouillet dictionary…
he told you he disappeared just like that over a small question of deviationism. In fact, he was accused of Averroism, and in those days, you couldn’t exactly say it was unforgivable, but it might not be forgiven when attention was drawn to something that seemed a bit solid, such as, for example, speaking of “Suppositiones.”

So it’s not quite accurate to say that the two things are unrelated, and that’s what strikes me.
What strikes me is that for centuries, when one dealt with language, one had to be careful.
There is a letter that appears only marginally in phonetic composition—it’s this one: H,
which is pronounced hache in French.

Don’t touch the axe—that was the prudent thing for centuries when one dealt with language.
Because it so happened that for centuries, when one touched on language,
in public, it had an effect—an effect other than amusement.

One of the questions that wouldn’t be bad for us to glimpse, just like that, right at the end…
even though where I amuse myself in a pleasant way,
I’ve already pointed it out in the form of that famous wall…
it might not be a bad idea for us to glimpse why now linguistic analysis is part of scientific research. What could that possibly mean?

The definition—and here I let myself be carried away a little—the definition of “scientific research,” is exactly this—
you don’t have to look far—it is well named in that it’s not about finding,
in any case not anything that might disturb precisely what I was talking about earlier, namely the public.

I recently received from a faraway land…
I’d rather cause no trouble to anyone, so I won’t tell you where from…
a question of scientific research—it was a “Scientific Research Committee on Weapons.” Word for word!
Someone, not unknown to me…
that’s precisely why I was consulted on his case…
was proposing to carry out research on fear.

There was talk of granting him a subsidy for that, a subsidy which—converted into old French francs—would gently exceed one million, with which he would spend…
it was written in the document, the document itself—I can’t give it to you, but I have it…
there was talk of his spending three days in Paris, [Laughter] twenty-eight in Antibes, nineteen in Douarnenez, fifteen in San Montano—
which I believe…
Antonella, are you there? San Montano must be quite a pleasant beach, right? Or am I mistaken?
No, you don’t know? Well, maybe it’s near Florence, anyway, we don’t know…
fifteen days in San Montano, and then three days in Paris.

Thanks to one of my students I was able to summarize my assessment in these words: “I bowled over with admiration.”
Then I drew a big cross through all the detailed evaluations they asked me for on the scientific quality of the program, its social and practical implications, the competence of the person concerned, and everything else that followed.

This story is of only mediocre interest, but it comments on what I was pointing out—it doesn’t go to the heart of scientific research, but there’s still something it denotes, and that might be the only real point of the affair: it’s that I had initially proposed over the phone, to the person who—thank God—corrected me: “I bowled over.” You don’t know, of course, what that means. I didn’t know either [Laughter]. Bowl, b.o.w.l., means the ball. So I am bowled. I’m like an entire set of pins when a good ball knocks it all over.

Well, believe it or not, what I had proposed on the phone—me, who didn’t know the expression “I bowled over”—was: “I’m blowed over, I’m blown away.” It was, of course, completely incorrect, because “blow”—which does indeed mean “to blow,” that’s what I’d come up with—“blow” gives “blown,” not “blowed.” So if I said “blowed,” is it not because “without knowing, I knew” that it was “bowled over”? [Laughter] That’s where we enter the slip of the tongue, that is, into serious matters.

But at the same time, it shows us—just as Plato had already glimpsed it in the Cratylus—
well, that the signifier might be arbitrary, that’s not so certain, since after all, bowl and blow—right?—
it’s no accident they’re so close, since that’s exactly how I barely missed bowl.
Anyway, I don’t know how you would describe this amusement, but I find it serious.

With that, we return to linguistic analysis, of which, certainly, in the name of research,
you will hear more and more. It’s difficult to find one’s path there, where the division is worth the effort.
You learn things—for instance, that there are “parts of speech.”
I’ve steered clear of them like the plague—I mean, from dwelling on them—to avoid bogging you down.
But since, certainly, research will start to make itself heard, as it already does elsewhere, I will start from the verb.

They tell you the verb expresses all sorts of things, and it’s difficult to disentangle action from its opposite.
There is the intransitive verb, which clearly poses an obstacle here; the intransitive becomes very hard to classify.
If we stick to what’s most emphasized in that definition,
they will talk to you about a binary relation in the case of the typical verb where, it must be said,
the same meaning of the verb is not classified the same way in all languages:
– There are languages where one says “the man beats the dog.”
– There are languages where one says “there is beating of the dog by the man.” It’s not essential, the relation is still binary.
– There are languages where one says “the man loves the dog.”

Is it still so binary when, in this language—because here, there are differences—
one expresses it as: “the man loves to the dog” to say not that he “likes” it,
in the sense of loving it like a trinket, but that he has love for his dog?

“To love to someone”—that has always delighted me.
I mean, I regret speaking a language where one says “I love a woman” just as one says “I beat her.”
“To love to a woman” would seem more fitting to me.

It’s even to the point that one day I realized—since we are speaking of slips, let’s continue—that I had written:
“you will never know how much I loved you.”
I didn’t put an “e” at the end, which is a slip, a spelling mistake if you will, unquestionably.
It was in reflecting on this that I told myself if I wrote it like that,
it must be because I was feeling “I love to you.” But anyway, that’s personal. [Laughter]

Be that as it may, we carefully distinguish from these first verbs those defined by a ternary relation:
“I give you something.” That could range from a slap to a trinket, but in any case, there are three terms.
You may have noticed that I’ve always used “I you…” as the element of the relation.
That already leads you in the direction I’m taking you, since here, you see, we have:

“I ask you to refuse what I offer you.”

It’s not self-evident, because one can say: “the man gives the dog a little pat on the forehead.”
This distinction between “the ternary relation” and “the binary relation” is absolutely essential.
It is essential in this:
that when the function of speech is schematized for you, they talk to you—small d, big D—about the sender and the Addressee.
To this, they add the relation that, in the usual schema, is identified with the message,
and of course it is emphasized that the addressee must possess the code for it to work.
If they do not possess it, they will have to acquire it, they will have to decipher it.

Is this way of writing satisfactory?
I claim, I claim that the relation—
if there is one—but you know the matter can be questioned—if there is a relation that takes place through speech…
implies that the ternary function must be inscribed, namely, that the message is distinguished there, and that it nonetheless remains true that,
since there is a sender, an Addressee, and a message, what is stated in a verb is distinct.

That is to say, the fact that this is a request—de who is there—deserves to be isolated, in order to group the three elements, it is precisely in this that it becomes evident…
and only evident when I use je and te, when I use tu and me…
it’s that this je and this te, this tu, this me, are precisely specified by the statement of speech.

There can be no ambiguity here of any kind. In other words, it’s not just what is vaguely called “the code”…
as if it existed in only one spot…
grammar is part of the code, namely this tetradic structure I’ve just marked as being essential to what is said.

When you draw your objective communication model: sender, message, and on the other end the addressee,
this objective model is less complete than grammar, which is part of the code.
That is precisely why it was important that Jakobson gave you this generality:
that grammar too is part of meaning, and that it’s no accident that it is employed in poetry.

This is essential—I mean clarifying the status of the verb—because soon nouns will be filtered
according to whether they carry more or less weight. There are heavy nouns, if I may say so, called concrete,
as if there were anything else among nouns but substitutes.
But in the end, substance is needed, whereas I think it’s urgent to note first that we’re only dealing with subjects. But let’s leave that aside for now.

A critique that, curiously, only reaches us in a reflective manner, of the attempt to logicize mathematics,
takes shape in the following—where you’ll recognize the relevance of what I’m advancing—
it’s that, if we take the proposition as a propositional function, we will have to identify the function of the verb,
and not of what is made of it, namely the predicate function.

The function of the verb—let’s take the verb to ask:

– I ask you…: F – I open the parenthesis, x, y are I and you… F(x, y, …
what do I ask you?
…to refuse… another verb.

Which means that, in place of what could be here the little pat on the dog’s head, that is to say z, you have
for instance f and again x, y: F(x, y, f(x, y)). And there, are you required to finish, that is, to insert here z?
That is in no way necessary because you may very well have… for instance, I’ll use a φ—let’s not use 
because later on that would create confusion—I’ll use a small φ, and again x, y: …what I offer you…
Which gives us, in the end, three parentheses to close: F(x, y, f(x, y, φ(x, y))).

What I am leading you to is this: it’s not to know—you’ll see—not how meaning emerges,
but how it is from a knot of meaning that the object emerges, the object itself, and to name it,
since I named it as best I could, the object little(a).

I know that… it is very captivating to read Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein, throughout his life, with admirable asceticism, stated the following, which I’ll summarize:

“what cannot be said, well, let’s not talk about it.”

As a result, he could say almost nothing. At every moment he would step down from the sidewalk and into the gutter,
which is to say, he would climb back onto the sidewalk, the sidewalk defined by that demand.
It’s certainly not because my friend Kojève explicitly formulated the same rule…
God knows he didn’t observe it!
…but it’s not because he formulated it that I would feel bound to stick to the demonstration,
to the living demonstration given by Wittgenstein.

It is precisely, it seems to me, about “this” which one cannot speak, when I designate with “that’s not it” what alone motivates a request such as “to refuse what I offer you.”
And yet if there is something that can be felt by everyone, it’s indeed this “that’s not it.”
We encounter it at every moment of our existence.

But then let’s try to see what it means, because this “that’s not it” we can leave in its place, in its dominant place, in which case obviously we will never get to the bottom of it. But instead of cutting it off, let’s try to place it inside the statement itself. “That’s not it”—what? Let’s put it in the simplest form: here the I, here the you, here I ask you: D,
to refuse me: R, what I offer you: O, and then there’s some loss: Ç.

But if it’s not what I offer you, if it’s because “that’s not it” that I ask you to refuse,
then it’s not what I offer you that you refuse, so I have no reason to ask it of you. And now here too it breaks off [at R].

So, if I don’t need to ask you to refuse it, why do I ask you? That also breaks off here [at D].

Therefore, to resume in a more accurate diagram:

where the I and you are here, the Request here, the Refusal here, and the Offer here. That is, a first tetrad which is this:

– I ask you to refuse.

A second:

– to refuse what I offer you.

Perhaps—what will not surprise us—we can see, in the distance between the two distinct poles of the request and the offer, that it’s perhaps there that the “that’s not it” lies.

But, as I have just explained to you, if we must here say that it is the space that exists, that can exist, between:
– what I have to ask you,
– and what I can offer you,
from that moment on, it is equally impossible to maintain the relation
– from the request to the refusal,
– and from the refusal to the offer.

Do I need to comment on this in detail? Perhaps it still won’t be useless.
For this reason first:
you might ask yourselves how it is that, after all, I’m giving you a spatial diagram for all this.
It’s not space we’re dealing with, it’s space insofar as we project our objective schemas into it.

But that already tells us enough.
Namely, that our objective schemas perhaps determine something of our notion of space,
I would say, even before it is determined by our perceptions.
I know very well, we are inclined to believe that it’s our perceptions that give us the three dimensions.

There was a man named Poincaré, who is not unknown to you, who made a very elegant attempt to demonstrate it.
Nevertheless, this reminder of the primacy of our objective schemas may not be useless in more accurately assessing the scope of his demonstration.

What I want—what I would rather insist on—is this:
– it is not merely the rebound from “that’s not what I offer you,”
– to “that’s not what you can refuse,”
– nor even to “that’s not what I ask you,”
it is this: that “what is not it,”
– may not at all be “what I offer you,” and that we are getting things wrong from that starting point,
– it is “that I offer you.”

Because what does “that I offer you” mean?
It doesn’t mean at all that I give, as a moment’s reflection shows.
It doesn’t mean either that you take, which would give meaning to “refuse.”

When I offer something, it is in the hope that you will give something back to me.
And that’s precisely why the potlatch exists.
Potlatch is what drowns, what overflows the impossibility there is in offering, the impossibility of it being a gift.

That is exactly why the potlatch, in our discourse, has become completely foreign to us.
Which makes it unsurprising that in our nostalgia we have made it into what sustains the impossible, namely the real.
But precisely: the real as impossible.

If it is no longer in the “what” of “what I offer you” that the “that’s not it” resides,
then let us observe what results from questioning the offer as such.

If it is not “what I offer you,” but “that I offer you” that I ask you to refuse, remove the offer…
that famous “verbal noun” which would be a lesser noun, yet it is still something…
remove the offer, and we see that the request and the refusal lose all meaning,
because what could “to ask to refuse” possibly mean?

It will only take a little exercise for you to realize that it is strictly the same
if you remove from this knot—“I ask you to refuse me what I offer you”—any of the other verbs.
For if you remove the refusal, what could an offer of a request mean,
and as I told you, it is in the nature of the offer that if you remove the request, refusal no longer means anything.

This is why the question we must pose is not to determine what the “that’s not it” means at each of these verbal levels,
but to realize that it is by untying each of these verbs from its knot with the other two
that we can discover what lies behind this effect of meaning, inasmuch as I call it the object (a).

A strange thing—as, with my geometry of the tetrad, I was pondering last night
how I would present this to you today, it so happened…
while dining with a charming person who attends the classes of Mr. Guilbaud…
that like a ring on the finger [sic], I was given something I am now going to, I want to show you—
something which is nothing less, apparently—I learned this last night—than the coat of arms of the Borromeo.

It takes some care, that’s why I’m setting it up now. And there you have it!

You can recreate the thing.
Didn’t you bring string?
Well, you can recreate it with strings.

If you copy this carefully—I made no mistake—you’ll notice this:
that—pay close attention—this one, the third one, now you no longer see it…
you can make a bit of effort, it’s accessible…
you no longer see it.

You may notice that the other two—you see, this one goes over the one on the left
and it also goes over that one. So they’re separated. Only because of the third one do they hold together.
That, you can try out—if you lack imagination, try it with three little pieces of string. You’ll see they hold.

But there’s no way around it—right?—just cut one, and the other two…
even though they look as knotted as in the case of what you know well,
namely the three rings of the Olympic Games, which do stay joined
when one of them takes off…
well, these ones—finished!

It’s something that still has its interest, because you must remember that when I spoke of the signifying chain,
I always implied this concatenation.

What is very curious…
what will also allow us to return to the binary verb…
is that with binaries, it seems no one has noticed that they have a special status very, very closely related to the object little (a).

If instead of taking man and dog, those two poor animals, as an example, we had taken I and you,
we would have realized that the most typical instance of a binary verb is, for example:
“I piss you off,”
or:
“I look at you,”
or:
“I talk to you,”
or:
“I eat you up.”

These are the 4 species, so to speak, the 4 species [of the (a)] which have value only in their grammatical analogy,
namely in being grammatically equivalent.

From then on, don’t we have here, in reduced, in miniature form, this something
that allows us to illustrate the fundamental truth that all discourse holds its meaning only from another discourse?
Certainly, the request alone is not enough to constitute a discourse, but it has its fundamental structure,
which is to be, as I have said, a quadruped.

I have emphasized that a tetrad is essential to represent it, just as a quaternion of letters: f, x, y, z, is indispensable.
But “request, refusal, and offer”—it is clear that in the knot I presented today before you, they only take their meaning from one another,
and that what results from this knot, as I have tried to untangle it for you,
or rather, in taking the trial of its untying, to tell you, to show you that it never holds with two alone,
that this is the foundation, the root, of what constitutes the object little (a).

What does that mean?
It means I have given you the minimal knot.
But you could add others.

“Because that’s not it”—what?—that I desire.
And who does not know that the very nature of the request is precisely to be unable to locate what the object of desire is?
With this desire, what I offer you which is not what you desire, we could easily complete the loop
with what you desire that I ask of you. And the letter of a-mur [wordplay: amour/love and mur/wall] would then extend indefinitely.

But who does not see the fundamental character, for analytic discourse, of such a concatenation?
I once said…
a very long time ago, and there are still people who cling to it…
that an analysis ends only when someone can say:
– not “I speak to you,”
– nor “I speak about myself,”
– but “it is of myself that I speak to you,”
…that was an initial sketch.

Is it not clear that what grounds the analysand’s discourse is precisely this:

“I ask you to refuse me what I offer you, because that’s not it.”

That is the fundamental request, and it is the one that, when neglected, the analyst only makes more pressing.
I once mocked: “with offering, he creates demand.”

But the request he satisfies is the recognition of this fundamental thing: that what is asked for “is not that.”