🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Things are such that, since this year I intend to speak to you about the One, today I will begin by stating what is to be said about the Other.

Of this Other, with a capital O, regarding which I once gathered the unease… the unease marked by a Marxist to whom I owed the place from which I was able to resume my work… the unease which was as follows: that this Other was that third party which, when brought forward in the relationship of the couple, he—the Marxist—could only identify with God.

Did this unease, subsequently, progress enough to inspire in him an irreducible mistrust regarding the trace I might leave behind?

That is a question I will leave aside for today, because I am going to begin with the simple unveiling of what is at stake with this Other, which I indeed write with a capital O. The Other in question, the Other is that of the sexual couple—precisely that one—and that is exactly why it will be necessary for us to produce the signifier that can only be written insofar as it bars it, this capital O: S(O).

‘One’—it is not easy, is it… ‘One’—I emphasize without dwelling on it because I would not get anywhere… ‘One enjoys only from the Other.’

It is more difficult to proceed here, where it might seem self-evident, because what characterizes enjoyment… after what I have just said… would slip away: should I go further and say ‘one is only enjoyed by the Other’?

This is indeed the abyss that the question of the existence of God offers us, precisely that one which I leave on the horizon as ineffable.

Because what is important… it is not the relation with that which enjoys, from what we might believe to be our being… what is important, when I say that ‘one enjoys only from the Other’, is this: it is that one does not enjoy from it sexually—there is no sexual relation—nor is one enjoyed by it.

You see that ‘lalangue’—lalangue, which I write as a single word—lalangue, which is nonetheless a ‘good girl’, here, resists. She puffs up her cheeks.

One does enjoy from it—it must be said—from the Other: one enjoys from it ‘mentally’. There is a remark in this Parmenides, after all, is there not, which here serves as a model, that is why I recommended you go cleanse yourselves a bit with it. Naturally, if you read it through the commentaries made at the University, well, you will place it in the lineage of philosophers, you will see that it is considered a particularly brilliant exercise. But after this brief salute, they tell you there is not much to be made of it, that Plato simply pushed, there, to its ultimate degree of acuteness, what will be deduced for you from his theory of forms.

Perhaps it must be read differently. It must be read with innocence. Notice that from time to time something may touch you, even if it is only, for example, this remark, when he addresses, just like that, quite incidentally, at the beginning of the seventh hypothesis which starts from ‘if the One is not’, quite on the margins he says: ‘and what if we said that the Non-One is not?’ And there he strives to show that the negation of anything, not only of the One, of the non-great, of the non-small, that this negation as such is distinct from not negating the same term.

This is indeed what it is about, the negation of sexual enjoyment, which I just now asked you to pause and consider. That I write this S parenthesis of the barred capital O: S(O), which is the same thing as what I have just formulated: that ‘from the Other one enjoys mentally’, this writes something about the Other, and as I have said: as a term of the relation which, by vanishing, by not existing, becomes the place where it is written, where it is written as these four formulas are here written, to transmit a knowledge.

Because I have already, it seems to me, made sufficient allusion to it, knowledge in this field, this knowledge may be taught, but what is transmitted is the formula.

It is precisely because one of the terms becomes the place where the relation is written, that it can no longer be a relation since the term changes its function, it becomes the place where it is written and the relation consists only in being written exactly in the place of this term.

One of the terms of the relation must be emptied to allow this relation to be written. This is indeed why this ‘mentally’ that I mentioned earlier in quotation marks, which speech cannot utter, this is what radically withdraws from this ‘mentally’ any scope of idealism.

This idealism, incontestable when one sees it develop in the writings of Berkeley, with remarks which I hope you are familiar with, which all rest on this: ‘that nothing which is thought is anything but thought by someone.’

That is indeed an argument, or more precisely an irreducible argumentation, and one that would have more bite if it dealt with, if it confessed what is at stake: enjoyment. You only enjoy your fantasies. That is what would give significance to idealism, which, moreover, no one, although it is incontestable, takes seriously. The important thing is that your fantasies enjoy you and this is where I can return to what I was saying earlier, it is that, as you see, even lalangue ‘which is a good girl’ does not let this word easily come out.

That idealism maintains that it is only a matter of thoughts, to get out of it, lalangue ‘which is a good girl’, but not such a good girl after all, might perhaps offer you something, which I still won’t need to write in order to ask you to make this ‘que’ resonate differently.

Finally… if I must make you hear it: q.u.e.u.e., ‘queue of thoughts’ [French wordplay: ‘queue’ means both ‘tail’ and ‘penis’], this is what the good girliness of lalangue in French allows… it is in this language that I express myself, I don’t see why I shouldn’t take advantage of it, if I spoke another, I would find another trick… this ‘queue of thoughts’, it is not, as the idealist says, inasmuch as we think them, nor even simply that we think them ‘therefore I am’, which is a progress nonetheless, but that they think themselves truly [cf. ‘I think therefore I enjoy’].

It is in this that I classify myself… insofar as that has the slightest interest, because I do not see why I should classify myself philosophically… myself through whom emerges a discourse which is not the philosophical discourse, the psychoanalytic discourse namely… the one whose scheme I have reproduced on the right [disc. A]… which I qualify as ‘discourse’ for this reason that I have emphasized, it is that:

‘nothing acquires meaning except from the relations of one discourse to another discourse’.

disc. H disc. M disc. U disc. A

That of course presupposes this exercise, with which I cannot say, nor hope, that I have truly accustomed you. All of this, of course, flows over you like water off a duck’s back since… and besides, that is what constitutes your existence… you are firmly inserted into discourses that precede, that have been there for a long time, the philosophical discourse included, insofar as it is transmitted to you by the university discourse, that is, in whatever state… you are very solidly settled there and that forms your foundation.

Those who occupy the place of this Other, of this Other that I am bringing to light, you must not think that they are so much more privileged than you, but still, they have been handed a set of furniture that is not easy to handle. In this furniture, there is the armchair, the nature of which has not yet been very clearly identified.

The armchair is nevertheless essential, because the particularity of this discourse is to allow that something which is written over there at the top right, in the form of the S, and which, like all writing, is a truly delightful form…

that the S should be what Hogarth gives as the trace of beauty, it is not quite by chance, it must have some meaning somewhere, and then that it should need to be barred, that surely also has a meaning… but whatever the case, what arises from this barred subject is something that is curious to see that I write it in the same way [i.e., ‘S’ as well] as what occupies, in the discourse of the Master, another place, the dominant place.

This S of 1 [S1] is precisely what I am trying, as I speak here, what I am trying to produce for you. In which, as I have already said many times, I am in the same place… and it is in this that it is teaching… I am in the place of the analysand.

What is written, has it been thought? That is the question.

It can come to the point where one can no longer say by whom it has been thought, and this is, in all that is written, what you are dealing with. The ‘queue of thoughts’ [French wordplay: ‘queue’ means both ‘tail’ and ‘penis’] I was talking about, it is the subject itself, the subject as hypothetical of these thoughts… this hypothetical, your ears have been so thoroughly drummed with it since Aristotle, of the ὑποχείμενον [upokeimenon] which was, however, quite clear, such a thing has been made of it that, as they say, a cat would not find her kittens in it anymore… I will call it ‘the train’, the train precisely, this queue of thoughts of that something real which makes this ‘comet’s tail effect’ that I called the ‘queue of thoughts’ and which may well be the phallus.

If what happens there cannot be reconquered by what I have just called the train… which is only conceivable because the effect that it is, is as salient as its advent, namely the disarray, if you allow me to call the disjunction of the sexual relation that way… if what happens there cannot be reconquered nachträglich [afterwards], if what has been thought is open, within reach of the means of a re-thinking, which consists precisely in realizing, by writing it, that these were thoughts… because the written, whatever may be said, comes after these thoughts, these real thoughts, have occurred… it is in this effort of rethinking, this nachträglich, which is this repetition that is the foundation of what the analytic experience reveals to us.

That it is written is the proof… but only proof of the effect of resumption, nachträglich… that is what underpins psychoanalysis.

How many times in philosophical dialogues do you see the argument ‘if you do not follow me up to this point, there is no philosophy.’ What I am going to tell you is exactly the same thing, one of two things:

– either what is still accepted in common, in everything written about psychoanalysis, in all that flows from the pens of psychoanalysts, namely that what thinks is not thinkable, and then there is no psychoanalysis,

– [or] for there to be psychoanalysis, and to say it all, interpretation, what the ‘queue of thoughts’ starts from must have been thought—thought as a real thought.

That is exactly why I made such a to-do about Descartes for you, the ‘I think therefore I am’ means nothing if it is not true. It is true because ‘therefore I am’ is what I think before knowing it and—whether I like it or not—it is the same thing.

The same ‘thing’, that is precisely what I have called ‘the Freudian Thing.’ It is precisely because it is the same thing… this ‘I think’ and what I think, that is: ‘therefore I am’… it is precisely because it is the same thing, that it is not equivalent.

Because that is why I spoke of the Freudian Thing, it is because in a Thing, two faces… and write it however you like: ‘face’ or ‘faça’… two faces is not only not equivalent, that is, not substitutable for each other in speech, it is not equivalent, it is not even the same.

That is why I spoke of the Freudian Thing only in a certain way. What I wrote, it can be read. It is even curious that it is one of those things that force one to reread it. That is, in fact, why it is made that way.

And when one rereads it, one realizes that I am not talking about the Thing… because one cannot speak about it, talk about it… I make it speak for itself, the Thing in question states:

‘Me, the truth, I speak.’

And of course, it does not say it just like that… but it must be evident, it is even for that reason that I wrote it… it says it in every way, and I would dare to say that it is not a bad piece:

‘I am apprehensible only in my concealments.’

What is written about the Thing must be considered as what is written from it, not from the one who writes. This is exactly what makes ontology… in other words the consideration of the subject as being… ontology is a shame if you allow me [‘honto-logy’].

So you have clearly heard it – haven’t you? – one must know what one is talking about:

– Either the ‘therefore I am’ is only a thought, demonstrating that it is the unthinkable which thinks.

– Or it is the act of saying it that can act on the Thing, enough for it to turn differently.

And it is in this that every thought thinks itself from its relation to what is written from it. Otherwise, I repeat: there is no psychoanalysis. We are in the ‘i.n.a.n.’ which is currently the most widespread, the unanalyzable.

It is not enough to say that it is impossible, because that does not exclude it being practiced. For it to be practiced without being ‘inan’, it is not the qualification of ‘impossible’ that matters, it is its relation to the impossible that is at stake, and the relation to the impossible is a relation of thought. This relation could not have any meaning if the demonstrated impossibility is not strictly an impossibility of thought because it is the only demonstrable one.

If we ground the impossible in its relation to the real, we are left to say this which I give you as a gift… I have it from a charming woman, distant in my past, who nonetheless remained marked by a charming scent of soap [Laughter], with the Vaudois accent she knew how to take on—in spite of having rid herself of it—knowing how to reclaim it:

‘nothing is impossible for man… as she used to say—I cannot imitate the Vaudois accent for you, I was not born there… what he cannot do, he leaves’ [Laughter].

This, to center for you what the impossible is as a term that is acceptable for someone sensible. Well then, this annulment of the Other occurs only at this level where it is inscribed in the only way it can be inscribed, namely as I inscribe it:  of X and the bar above [§]. Which means that one can only write what makes an obstacle to it, namely that the phallic function is not true. So, what does that mean?

Namely, there exists X such that it could be inscribed in this negation of the truth of the phallic function [:§]. This is what deserves us to articulate it in terms of time, and you see well that what we are going to question is very precisely this status of existence, insofar as it is not clear. I think that for a long enough time now your ears, your understanding, have been hammered with the distinction between essence and existence, for you not to be satisfied with it.

That there is, in what the analytic discourse allows us to bring in terms of meaning to the preceding discourses [disc. H, U, M], this is something that I can, ultimately, from the connection of these formulas, pin down only by the term of a motivation whose unrecognized aspect is what engenders, for example, the Hegelian dialectic, which because of this unrecognized aspect, dispenses with it—if I may say so—by considering that discourse as such governs the world. Yeah…

Here I come upon a small side note. I do not see why I should not take it up again, this digression, especially since that is all you ask for, you ask for it because if I go straight ahead, it tires you.

What leaves a shadow of meaning in Hegel’s discourse is an absence, and very precisely this absence of surplus-value as it is derived from enjoyment in the real of the Master’s discourse. But this absence nonetheless marks something: it really marks the Other not as abolished, but precisely as impossibility of correlation, and it is by making this impossibility present that it colors Hegel’s discourse.

Because you will lose nothing by rereading, I don’t know, simply the preface to the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ in correlation with what I am presenting here… you see all the vacation assignments I am giving you: ‘Parmenides’ and the ‘Phenomenology,’ at least the ‘Preface’ because the Phenomenology, naturally, you never read. But the preface is damn good. It is worth, by itself, the effort of rereading it. And you will see that it confirms, that it takes on meaning from what I am telling you.

I do not yet dare to promise you that the Parmenides will do as much: take on meaning, but I hope so. Because it is the hallmark of a new discourse to renew what gets lost in the whirling of old discourses: precisely meaning.

If I told you that there is something that colors this discourse of Hegel, it is because here the word color means something other than meaning. The promotion of what I am advancing, precisely removes the color, completes the effect of Marx’s discourse, where there is something I would like to underline and which sets its limit.

It is that it contains a protest, which happens to consolidate the discourse of the Master by completing it, and not just with surplus-value, by inciting… I sense that this will cause a stir… by inciting woman to exist as equal.

Equal to what? No one knows, since one could just as well say that man equals zero, since he needs the existence of something that negates him in order for him to exist as ‘all’.

In other words, the sort of ‘confusion’ [i.e. the ‘all’ that ‘confuses’ them] that is not unusual, we live in confusion and it would be wrong to think that we live from it, it does not go without saying, I do not see why the lack of confusion would prevent one from living. In fact, it is very curious that people rush into it, it is really the case to say: they throw themselves into it.

When a discourse such as analytic discourse emerges, what it proposes to you is to have a backbone firm enough to sustain the conspiracy of truth. Everyone knows that conspiracies—eh?—they soon collapse. It is easier to make so much blah-blah-blah that you end up being able to spot all the conspirators very well. We mix up, we rush into the negation of sexual division, of difference if you will:

– If I said ‘division,’ it is because it is operational.

– If I say ‘difference,’ it is because it is precisely what this use of the sign ‘equals’ claims to erase: woman = man.

What is remarkable, isn’t it, what is remarkable—I will tell you—it is not all that nonsense—what is remarkable is the obstacle that these things pretend to transgress with that grotesque word. I have taught things that did not pretend to transgress anything, but to circumscribe a certain number of knot-points, points of the impossible. As a result, of course, there are people whom this disturbed, because they were the representatives, the ‘seated’ ones of psychoanalytic discourse in practice, who pulled one of those moves that weakens your voice.

It happened to me through a charming fellow, physically, just like that… he did that to me one day, he is a sweetheart! …he put such courage into it! He did it ‘despite the fact that’ I was at the same time under threat… from a thing I did not particularly believe in, but anyway I pretended as if I did… from a revolver.

But the guys who cut my voice off at a certain moment, they did not do it ‘despite the fact,’ they did it ‘because’ I was under threat of a gun, a real one, not a toy, like the other. That consisted in submitting me to examination, that is, to the standard precisely of people who wanted to hear nothing of analytic discourse, even though they occupied the ‘seated’ position in it.

So, ‘what would you have me do?’ [Laughter]. From the moment I did not submit to this examination, I was condemned in advance, wasn’t I, which naturally made it much easier to cut off my voice… Ha! Because a voice does exist. That went on like that for several years I must say, I had so little voice.

Nevertheless, I do have a voice from which were born the ‘Cahiers pour la psychanalyse,’ a very, very, very good literature, I definitely recommend them to you, because I was so entirely occupied with my voice that, as for me, these Cahiers pour la psychanalyse, to tell you everything, I can’t do it all, I can’t read the Parmenides, reread the Phenomenology and other things [Laughter] and then also read the Cahiers pour la psychanalyse.

I had to get my strength back! Now I have, I read them, from beginning to end, it’s fantastic! [Laughter] It’s fantastic but it’s marginal because it wasn’t done by psychoanalysts. Meanwhile, the psychoanalysts were chattering, there was never as much talk of transgression around me as during the time when I had the [gesture with finger indicating cut throat] Pfuit! There you go! Yeah…

Because imagine, when it’s a matter of the true impossible, of the impossible that is demonstrated, of the impossible as it is articulated, and that, of course, takes time.

Between the first scribblings that made it possible for a logic to be born with the help of questioning language, and the fact that it was realized these scribblings encountered something that existed… but not in the way that was believed until then, in the way of being, that is, of what each of you believes himself to be, believes himself to be, on the pretext that you are individuals… it was realized there were things that exist in the sense that they constitute the limit of what can stand from the advance of the articulation of a discourse.

That is the real! Its approach by way of what I call the symbolic, which means the modes of what is enunciated by this field, this field that exists of language, this impossible as it is demonstrated, cannot be transgressed. There are things that for a long time have served as reference points, perhaps mythical reference points, but very good ones. Not only for what is at stake with this impossible but for its motivation. Very precisely, namely that the sexual relation is not written.

In this domain nothing better has ever been done than, I won’t say religion… because as I will tell you, I will explain it to you at length, one does not do ethnology when one is a psychoanalyst, and to drown religion like that in a general term is the same thing as doing ethnology… I can’t say either that there is only one, but there is the one in which we are immersed, the Christian religion. Well, believe me, the Christian religion manages your transgressions damn well.

That is even all it wants, that is what consolidates it: the more transgressions there are, the better it suits it. And that is precisely the issue, it is about demonstrating what is true in what holds up a certain number of discourses that entangle you.

I will finish today… I hope I haven’t damaged my ring… [Laughter] …I will finish today on the same point where I started.

I began with the Other, I haven’t left it, because time passes and then, after all, don’t think that at the moment the session ends, I myself am not fed up. So I will tie back together what I have said, a local feature, concerning the Other, leaving for later what I have yet to bring you about what is the pivot point, the point I am aiming for this year, namely the One.

It is not for nothing that I have not tackled it today, because you will see, there is nothing as slippery as this One. It is very curious, in terms of something that has faces such that they are not countless but singularly divergent, you will see, it is indeed the One.

The Other, it is not for nothing that I must first take support from it.

The Other… understand it well… it is thus an IN-BETWEEN: the Between that would be at stake in the sexual relation, but displaced and precisely to Other-place itself.

To Other-place oneself, it is curious that in positing this Other, what I have had to advance today concerns only woman, and it is indeed she who, from this figure of the Other, gives us the illustration within our reach, of being, as a poet wrote,

‘between center and absence’

– Between the meaning she takes in what I have called this ‘at least one’ where she finds it only in the state of what I have announced to you—announced, nothing more!—of being nothing but pure existence.

– Between center, and the absence that becomes—what?—for her precisely this second bar that I could only write by defining her as ‘not-all’ [.]: the one who is not contained within the phallic function without, however, being its negation.

Her mode of presence is between center and absence,
– between the phallic function of which she participates, particularly in that the ‘at least one’ who is her partner in love renounces it for her,
– which allows her to leave that by which she does not participate in it, in the absence which is no less enjoyment, of being ‘jouissabsence’ [French wordplay: jouissance + absence].

And I think that no one will say that what I state about the phallic function stems from a misunderstanding of what feminine enjoyment is. On the contrary, it is from the ‘jouisspresence’—if I may express myself thus—of the woman… in this part that does not make her ‘not-all’ open to the phallic function… it is from this ‘jouisspresence,’ that the ‘at least one’ is eager to inhabit her, in a radical misunderstanding of what requires her existence.

It is because of this misunderstanding which means
– that he can no longer even exist,
– that the exception of his very existence is excluded,
that then this status of the Other—made of not being universal—fades away and the man’s misunderstanding is necessitated. This is the definition of the hysteric.

This is where I will leave you today. I put a full stop, and I will see you again in eight days. The Sainte-Anne session falls on such a day—the first Thursday in April—that I am informing those here so that they let the others who attend Sainte-Anne know: it will not take place.