🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

It is difficult for me to clear a path for you in a discourse that does not interest all of you. I will say “not all” and I will even add: only as “not all.” One thing is evident, it is the key character in Freud’s thought, of the “all.”

The notion of the crowd which he inherits from that fool named Gustave Le Bon serves him to reify this all. It is not surprising that he discovers there the necessity of an “there exists,” of which, on this occasion, he sees only the aspect he translates as “the unary trait,” der einziger Zug.

The unary trait has nothing to do with the “Yad’lun” [wordplay: “il y a de l’un,” meaning “there is some one/oneness”] that I am trying to grasp this year, since there is nothing better to do, which I express by: …or worse, which is not for nothing that I said to put it adverbially. I indicate right away, the unary trait is that by which repetition is marked as such. Repetition does not ground any “all” nor does it identify anything, because tautologically, if I may say so, there cannot be a first of it.

This is why all this psychology of something that is translated as “crowds”: “psychology of crowds,” misses what one might see there with a bit more luck, the nature of the “not all” that founds it, a nature which is precisely that of “the woman” in quotation marks, who for Father Freud constituted, until the end, the problem, the problem of “what she wants.” I have already spoken to you about this.

But let us return to what I am trying to spin out for you this year. Anything – it is true – can serve to write the 1 of repetition. It is not that it is nothing, it is that it is written with anything, so long as it is easy to repeat in figures.

Nothing is easier to represent… for the being whose task is to make it so that, in language, there is speaking …nothing is easier to represent than what it is made to reproduce naturally, namely, as they say, its like or its type. Not that it knows how to make its figure from the start, but it is marked by it, and that it can return, return to it the mark which is precisely the unary trait.

The unary trait is the support of what I started from under the name of the mirror stage, that is to say, imaginary identification.

But not only this pointing out of a typical support, that is, imaginary… the mark as such, the unary trait …does not constitute a value judgment, as it was reported to me – it has been said – that I was making, a value judgment of the type: – imaginary: “yuck!” – symbolic: yum! yum!”.

But everything I have said, written, inscribed in the graphs, schematized in the optical model on occasion, where the subject is reflected in the unary trait, and where it is only from there that he locates himself as the ideal ego, all of that insists precisely on the fact that imaginary identification is operated by a symbolic mark.

So, whoever denounces this Manichaeism: “value judgment, yuck!” in my doctrine, only demonstrates what he is, for having heard me that way from the very beginning of my discourse of which he is nevertheless contemporary. A pig, to stand on its legs and play the upright pig, is still the pig it was from its roots, but only it imagines that one remembers.

To return to Freud, of whom I have here only commented on the function he introduced under the name of narcissism, it is truly from the error he made in linking the ego as a relay to his Massenpsychologie that the incredible nature of the institution to which he projected what he calls “the economy of the psyche” arises, that is to say, the organization to which he thought he should entrust the renewal of his doctrine. Why did he want it that way? To constitute the safeguard of a core of truth.

This is how Freud thought of it, and this is also how those who turn out to be the fruits of this conception express themselves—even if they declare this core to be modest—in order to attract consideration to themselves. Which, from the point where things now stand in public opinion, is comical. It suffices to make this appear to indicate what this kind of guarantor implies: a school of wisdom. That is how, always, one would have called it. Is it so? Question mark.

Wisdom… as appears from the very book of patience…[slip: sapience] which is the “Ecclesiastes”… what is it? It is, as it is clearly stated there, the knowledge of enjoyment.

Everything that presents itself as such is characterized as esotericism and it can be said that there is no religion—except Christianity—that does not adorn itself with it, in both senses of the word.

In all religions… Buddhist as well as Mohammedan, not to mention others… there is this adornment and this way of adorning oneself, I mean of marking the place of this knowledge of enjoyment. Do I need to evoke the tantras for one of these religions, the Sufis for the other?

This is what also legitimizes the pre-Socratic philosophies, and it is with this that Socrates breaks, who substitutes for it—and one may say so by name—the relation to the object (a), which is nothing other than what he calls “soul.” The operation is sufficiently illustrated by the partner given to him in the “Symposium” under the perfectly historical guise of Alcibiades, in other words, of sexual frenzy, to which the discourse of the master normally leads, if I may say, absolutely, that is, which produces nothing but symbolic castration.

I recall “the mutilation of the Herms”; I have mentioned it in its time when I used this “Symposium” to articulate transference. The knowledge of enjoyment, from Socrates on, would only survive at the margins of civilization, not of course without civilization feeling what Freud modestly calls its “discontent.”

A madman now and then bellows at finding himself there, in the thread of this subversion. It only marks a date if he is able to make it heard in the very discourse that produced this knowledge… the Christian discourse, to be clear… since, let us not doubt, it is the heir of the Socratic discourse.

It is the discourse of the master “up to date,” the latest-model master and the little model-model girls who are his offspring. I am assured that in this genre, the one I call the “model-model”… who now adorns himself with various initials, but which always begin with “M”… he comes here in droves.

I know it because it is told to me. Because from where I am, it is not enough for me to look at you to see them, because from the outset they are not “all” model-models. Yes, let us note it.

It certainly makes an impression when this observation that there has been subversion, and I said that it marks a date, is pronounced by a Nietzsche. I simply point out that he can only pronounce it—I mean, make himself heard—by articulating it in the only audible discourse, that is, the one that determines the up-to-date master, as his descendant.

All this beautiful company revels in it, naturally, but that changes nothing. Everything that has been produced is part of it from the outset, and of course the initials themselves, which were just mentioned, have also been there from the start, only discovered nachträglich. I do not think it useless to point out here that the “not all” has naturally slipped into “not all [feminine].” That’s what it is for.

All the bla-bla of which I produce today only that one can point out some movement in the emergence of discourse, is only to mark that the meaning remains problematic, notably in what should not be understood in what I have just said, namely a meaning of history, since like any other meaning it is only illuminated by what happens, and what happens depends only on “fortune.”

Yet this does not mean that it is not calculable. Starting from what? From the 1 that one finds there. Only, one must not be mistaken about the 1 that is found. It is never the one that is sought. That is why, as I said after another who is in my situation: “I do not seek,” he said, “I find” [wordplay: the act of finding instead of seeking], the only way not to be mistaken is, starting from the finding, to ask oneself what there was—if one had wished—to seek.

What is the formula by which I once articulated transference? This—since then famous—“subject supposed to know,” my artifacts of writing demonstrate a pleonasm there. One can write: subject of S, which recalls that a subject is always only a supposed, ὑποχείμενον [upokeimenon]; I use the redundancy only starting from the deafness of the Other.

It is clear that it is knowledge that is supposed, and no one has ever been mistaken about that. Supposed for whom? Certainly not for the analyst but for his position. On this point, one can consult my seminars, for this is precisely what strikes one when rereading them, with no blunders, unlike my “Écrits.” Yeah, that’s how it is! It’s because I write fast. I had never said that to myself. But I noticed it because it happened that I recently spoke to someone.

I did this since the last time some of you heard me at Sainte-Anne. I advanced some things from set theory, invoked here to call into question that One I was just speaking about, a moment ago. I always take my risks, one cannot say that time I did not take them with all the necessary humor.

2^aleph_0-1, two to the power aleph zero, minus one. I think I have sufficiently emphasized for you the difference between the index…[slip] the index 0 and the function of 0 when it is used in an exponential scale.

Of course, that is not to say I did not irritate the sensibility of mathematicians who might have been in my audience that night. What I meant… and while waiting for something to come back to me from it, it was a challenge… what I wanted to say is that, subtracting the 1, this whole edifice of numbers should… if one hears it as the product of a logical operation, namely, the one that proceeds from the position of 0 and the definition of the successor… unravel the whole chain, right back to its beginning.

It is curious that I had to expressly call upon someone for, from his mouth, I recovered the validity of what I also stated last time, namely that this involves not only the 1 that arises from 0, but another, which as such I marked as identifiable in the chain, in the passage from one number to another when it is a question of counting its parts. It is on this point that I hope to conclude.

But for now I will simply note that the person who thus confirmed this for me… it is she who, in a dedication she did me the honor of making for an article in which she herself had stated… that I write quickly. It had never occurred to me because what I write, I rewrite ten times, but it’s true that the tenth time, I write it very quickly.

That is why there are still smudges, because it is a text. A text, as the name indicates, can only be woven by making knots. When you make knots, there is something that remains and dangles.

I apologize, I have never written except for people supposed to have heard me, and when, by exception, I wrote first—the congress report, for example—I never gave more than a discourse on my report. If one consults what I said in Rome, for the so-called congress, I made the written report as is known, and it was published at the time, but what I said I did not include in my writing, but certainly, one will be more at ease with it than with the report itself.

Those for whom, then, I had done this work of logical resumption, this work that starts from the Rome Discourse, as soon as they abandon the critical line resulting from it, from this work, to return to the “beings”… from which I precisely demonstrate that this discourse must abstain… to return to these “beings” and make them the support of the discourse of the analysand, do nothing but return to chatter. That is why those very ones who turned away from this discourse—as soon as said, so soon done!—completely lost its meaning.

That is exactly why, with regard to my “subject supposed to know,” it has happened, finally, that they express, even put it down in black and white, which is even more significant… precisely as they realize they are peeling away from where I was leading them, from the line on which I was keeping them… that they no longer knew anything. On this basis, I repeat, they went on to say that, by supposing this knowledge at the position of the analyst, “it is very naughty,” because it implies that the analyst is pretending.

There is only a small flaw here that I already pointed out a moment ago: the analyst is not pretending, he occupies… he occupies with what: this is what I will return to… he occupies the position of semblance. He occupies it legitimately because, in relation to jouissance… to jouissance as they have to grasp it in the words of the one whom, as analysand, they validate in his statement as subject… there is no other tenable position, for only from there can one perceive how far the jouissance of this authorized enunciation can go without too notorious damage.

But semblance is not nourished by jouissance… which it would mock, according to those who revert to the discourse of the rut… it gives, this semblance, to something other than itself, its mouthpiece, and precisely by showing itself as a mask… I say openly worn, as in the Greek scene… semblance takes effect by being manifest: when the actor wears the mask, his face does not grimace, it is not realistic.

The pathos is reserved for the “Chorus” which, it must be said, gives itself to it with all its heart. And why? So that the spectator—I mean the one of the ancient stage—finds in it his own communal plus-de-jouir. That is exactly what gives cinema its value for us. There, the mask is something else, it is the unreality of the projection.

But let us return to ourselves. It is by giving voice to something that the analyst can demonstrate that this reference to the Greek stage is appropriate. For what does he do, in occupying as such this position of semblance? Nothing other than demonstrating precisely, being able to demonstrate, that the terror felt from the desire that organizes the neurosis, what is called defense, is—in regard to what is produced there as labor in vain—only a pitiful conjuration.

You find at both ends of this sentence what Aristotle designates as the effect of tragedy on the listener. And where did I say that the knowledge from which this voice proceeds is one of semblance? Must it even appear to be so? Take an inspired tone?

Nothing of the sort, neither the air nor the song of semblance befits the analyst. Only, as it is clear that this knowledge is not the esoteric of jouissance, nor merely the know-how of grimace, it is necessary to resolve to speak of truth as fundamental position, even if of this truth we do not know everything, since I define it by its half-saying, by the fact that it can only half-say itself.

But then what is the knowledge that assures itself of truth? It is nothing other than what results from the notation that comes from positing it from the signifier—a maintenance that is rather harsh to sustain—but which is confirmed by providing a non-initiatory knowledge because it proceeds—not to offend anyone—from the subject [S] that a discourse [U] subjugates as such to production:

This subject, for whom there are mathematicians to qualify as creative and to specify that it is indeed the subject that is in question, which overlaps with the fact that the subject, in my logic, exhausts itself by producing itself as an effect of the signifier, naturally while remaining as distinct as a real number from a sequence whose convergence is assured rationally.

To say “non-initiatory knowledge” is to say knowledge that is taught by voices other than those, direct, of jouissance, all of which are conditioned by the founding failure of sexual jouissance. I mean that by which jouissance constitutive of the speaking being distinguishes itself from sexual jouissance.

Separation and distinction, whose efflorescence is certainly brief and limited, and this is why one has been able to catalogue it, precisely starting from the analytic discourse in the perfectly finite list of drives. Its finitude is connected to the impossibility that is demonstrated in the true questioning of the sexual relation as such. More exactly, it is in the very practice of the sexual relation that the link we promote is asserted—we, as speaking beings—promote everywhere else, of the impossible and the real. Namely, that the real has no other attestation.

All reality is suspect of being, not imaginary as is imputed to me… for in truth it is quite evident that the imaginary, as it arises from animal ethology, is an articulation of the Real… what we have to suspect of all reality is that it is phantasmatic.

And what allows one to escape from it is that an impossibility… in the symbolic formula that we are permitted to extract from it… demonstrates the real, and for which it is not for nothing that here, to designate the symbolic in question, the word term is used.

Love, after all, could be taken as the object of a phenomenology. The literary expression of what is emitted from it is abundant enough that one might presume something could be drawn from it.

It is still curious that, apart from a few authors, Stendhal, Baudelaire… and let us leave aside the amorous phenomenology of surrealism, whose moralism cuts it short, so to speak… it is curious that this literary expression is so brief, so that it cannot even appear to us that the only thing that might interest us is the strangeness, and that if this suffices to designate all that is inscribed in the novel of the 19th century, for all that is before, it is the opposite.

It is—refer to L’Astrée, which was no small thing for contemporaries—that we understand so little what it could have been for contemporaries that we feel nothing but boredom from it. So it is very difficult for us to create this phenomenology and, in resuming what would make up its inventory, one can deduce nothing but the misery of what it is based on.

Psychoanalysis, for its part, went into this entirely innocently. Of course, what it first encountered is not very cheerful.

It must be recognized that it was not limited to that, and what remains of what it first blazed as exemplary is this model of love as given by the care of the mother for the son, which is still inscribed in the Chinese character hǎo, which means “the good,” or what is good. It is nothing other than this: which means “son,” tseu, and that nǚ: which means woman.

好 子女 hǎo tseu nǚ

To extend this to the daughter cherishing the senile father, and even to what I allude to at the end of my “Subversion of the Subject,” namely, the minor whom his wife massages before he sleeps with her, this is not what will enlighten us much about the sexual relation. Knowledge about truth is useful to the analyst to the extent that it allows him to broaden a bit his relation to these effects of subject precisely, and which I have said he validates by leaving the field open to the discourse of the analysand.

That the analyst should understand the discourse of the analysand does indeed seem preferable. But knowing from where is a question that does not seem to impose itself, from the simple notation that he must be in the discourse [A] to occupy the position of semblance.

It must of course be emphasized that it is as (a) that he occupies this position of semblance. The analyst can understand nothing except in the register of what the analysand says, that is, of seeing himself, not as cause but as effect of this discourse, which does not prevent him in principle from recognizing himself in it. And that is why it is better that he has gone through it, in didactic analysis, which can only be certain by not having been engaged as such.

There is an aspect of knowledge about truth that draws its strength from totally neglecting content, from affirming that the articulation of the signifier is so much its time and place that something which is nothing but this articulation, whose demonstration in the passive sense takes on an active sense and imposes itself as demonstration to the being, to the speaking being who on this occasion can only recognize—the signifier—not only to inhabit it, but to be nothing but its mark.

For the freedom to choose one’s axioms, that is, the chosen starting point for this demonstration, consists only in undergoing as subject the consequences, which themselves are not free. Only from this, that truth can be constructed only from 0 and 1, which was only achieved at the beginning of the last century, somewhere between Boole and Morgan, with the emergence of mathematical logic.

In which it must not be believed that 0 and 1 here note the opposition between truth and error. This is the revelation that takes its value only “nachträglich,” by Frege and Cantor, of the fact that this 0, called error, which encumbered the Stoics, for whom that was it, and which led to that charming madness of material implication, for which it is not for nothing that it was refused by some, since it posits that implication is true which makes the formulated truth result from the formulated error.

Error implying truth is a true implication. There is nothing similar in the position of this: (0 → 1) → 1 with mathematical logic. That “0 implies 1” is a notable implication of 1, that is, of the true. 0 has just as much truth value as 1, because 0 is not the negation of truth 1, but the truth of the lack which consists in that at 2, one is missing 1. Which means, on the sole plane of truth, that truth can only speak by affirming itself occasionally, as has been done for centuries, to be the double truth, but never to be the complete truth.

0 is not the negation of anything—notably not of any multitude—it plays its role in the building of number. It is very convenient, as everyone knows. If there were only 0s, life would be easy! But what it indicates is that when there should be 2, there is never more than 1, and that is a truth. 0 implies 1, the whole implying 1 [(0 → 1) → 1], is to be taken not as the false implying the true, but as two truths, one implying the other. But also as the affirmation that the true is never anything but lacking its partner.

The only thing 0 opposes, but resolutely, is having a relation to 1 such that 2 can result. It is not true—which I mark with the proper bar—that 0 implying 1 implies 2.

How then to grasp what this 2 is, without which it is clear that no number can be constructed? I did not speak of enumerating them, but of constructing them.

That is exactly why, last time, I led you as far as aleph [א], it was in passing to make you feel that in the generation from one cardinal number to another, in the counting of subsets, somewhere, something is counted as such which is another One, which I indicated with Pascal’s triangle, pointing out that each digit found on the right, marking the number of parts, is made from the addition of what corresponds to it as parts in the previous set.

It is this 1, this 1 that I characterized when it is a question of 3 for example, that is, the ab opposed to c, and the ba that comes likewise. For there to be 4, it is necessary that to ab, to ba, to ac, there is abc, the juxtaposition of the elements of the previous set, their juxtaposition as such, which is counted only as 1.

This is what I have called “the sameness of difference.” Because it is inasmuch as nothing else in their property is but difference, that the elements that here support the subsets, that these elements are themselves counted in the generation of the parts that are to follow. I insist, what is in question is what is at stake in the enumerated, it is “the One more” inasmuch as it is counted as such in the enumeration, in the aleph [א] of its parts at each passage from a number to its successor.

It is by being counted as such from difference as property, that the multiplication expressed in the exponential 2^n-1 of the parts of the higher set, of its bipartition, is revealed in the aleph [א]—what?—to be put to the test of the countable. That is where it is revealed as a One, the One in question, it is another that is in question, that what is constituted from 1 and 0 as the inaccessibility of 2 is only delivered at the level of aleph zero [א0], that is, of actual infinity.

I will, to finish, make you sense it, and in a very simple form which is this: what can be said about integers concerning a property which would be that of accessibility.

Let us define it thus: that a number is accessible in being able to be produced — either as a sum, or as an exponentiation, of numbers smaller than itself.

In this respect, the beginning of the numbers is confirmed as being inaccessible, and very precisely up to 2. This concerns us especially regarding this 2, since from the relation of 1 to 0, I have sufficiently emphasized that 1 is engendered from what 0 marks as lack.

With 0 and 1, whether you add them, or put them to each other—or even one to itself—in an exponential relation, 2 is never reached. The number 2, in the sense I have just set, that it could be engendered from a summation or an exponentiation of smaller numbers, the test is negative: there is no 2 engendered by means of 1 and 0.

A remark by Gödel is enlightening here: it is precisely that aleph zero [א0], that is, actual infinity, is what is found to realize the same case. Whereas for all that concerns the integers from 2 onwards, start at 3: 3 is made with 1 and 2, 4 can be made by putting 2 to its own exponentiation, and so on, there is not a number that cannot be produced by one of these two operations from numbers smaller than itself. This is precisely what is lacking and where, at the level of aleph zero [א0], this gap is reproduced which I call that of inaccessibility.

There is properly no number that—whether one uses it to make indefinite addition, even with all its successors, or to raise it to as great an exponent as one wishes—ever reaches the aleph.

It is remarkable—and this is what today I must leave aside, perhaps to take it up again if it interests a few, in a more restricted circle—it is quite striking that from Cantor’s construction, it results that there is no aleph which, starting from aleph zero [א0], cannot be considered accessible.

It is nonetheless true that, in the opinion of those who have advanced this difficulty in set theory, it is only by the supposition that among these alephs, there are some that are inaccessible, that what I would call consistency can be reintroduced into what concerns the integers.

In other words, without this supposition—that the inaccessible occurs somewhere among the alephs [א]—that which is at stake and from which I started is what is meant to suggest to you the usefulness of there being “some One” [wordplay: il y ait d’l’Un], so that you may understand what is at stake in this ever-elusive bipartition, this bipartition of man and woman.

Is everything that is not man, woman? One might tend to admit it. But since woman is not “all,” why should everything that is not woman be man?

This bipartition, this impossibility of applying to this matter of gender something that would be the principle of contradiction—so that nothing less is required than to admit the inaccessibility of something beyond the aleph for non-contradiction to be consistent—so that it is justified to say that what is not 1 is 0, and that what is not 0 is 1, this is what I indicate to you as what should enable the analyst to hear… a little further than through the lenses of the object (a)… what here results as effect, what is created as One, by a discourse that rests only on the foundation of the signifier.