🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

There is no other existence of the One than mathematical existence

There you have it! It all revolves around what analysis leads us to formulate as this function!, around that in relation to which the question is whether it exists, whether there exists an X that satisfies the function[:!]. So, naturally, that presupposes articulating what it could mean for existence to be.

It is almost certain that, historically, this notion of existence only emerged with the intrusion of the mathematical real as such. But that proves nothing, because we are not here to write the history of thought, there can be no history of thought, thought is an escape into itself. It projects under the name of memory, does it not, the misrecognition of its own surface.

None of this prevents us from trying to make some identification and… to start from what is not by chance that I wrote in the form of functions… I started to state something which I hope will be useful to you, something which, if I write it, is in a certain sense, in the sense that it is a function unrelated to anything that would found d-apostrophe-e-u-x-One.

So you see that the whole trick lies in the subjunctive that belongs both to the verb ‘fonder’ (to found) and the verb ‘fondre’ (to melt)[wordplay: fonder/fondre]. D’eux is not melted into One, nor 1founded by 2. This is what Aristophanes says in a very pretty little fable in the Symposium:

They were separated in two, at first they were in the form of a ‘beast with two backs’, or a beast with the back of two.

Which, of course… if the fable were to entertain for even a moment the idea of being anything other than a fable, that is, of being consistent… would in no way imply that they wouldn’t make new little ones with two backs, with the back of two, which no one remarks on, and fortunately so, because a myth is a myth and that one says enough, it’s the one I first projected in a more modern form, under the form of !.

It is, in sum, what, concerning sexual relations, presents itself to us as the kind of discourse… I am speaking of the mathematical function… the kind of discourse… at least, I offer it to you as a model… that on this point would allow us to found something else: semblance,… or worse.

Well! This morning I started off in the worst way and in spite of everything, I don’t find it superfluous to share this with you, if only to see where it could lead. It was about this little power outage, which I don’t know how long you experienced, but I had it until ten o’clock. It bothered me a lot, because it is at that time that I usually gather, rethink these little notes, and that did not make it any easier for me.

Besides, because of the same outage, someone broke a toothbrush glass that I was very fond of. If there are people here who love me, they can send me another one. That way I might have several, which will allow me to break them all except the one I like best. I have a little courtyard made just for that.

So, I was thinking, considering that of course this outage didn’t come from nowhere, it came from a decision by the workers… I have a respect that you can hardly imagine for the kindness of that thing called an outage, a strike. What delicacy to stop there! But there, it seemed to me that, given the hour…

What?!

X in the room – We can’t hear anything.

We can’t hear? We can’t hear! I was just saying that a strike is the most social thing in the world, representing a respect for the social bond that is something fabulous.

But here there was a sharp edge to this power outage that carried the meaning of a strike, that it was exactly the time when, just as for me, who was preparing my kitchen to speak to you now, how annoying must it have been for the one who… after all, being at times the worker’s wife… is called, by the worker himself—since I do know some!—is called “the bourgeois woman”! It’s true, that’s what they call them!

And so I found myself dreaming anyway. Because it all fits together. They are workers, the exploited. It’s still indeed because they prefer this to the sexual exploitation of the bourgeois woman! There you have it, that’s worse, it’s the …or worse.

Do you understand? Because, what’s the point of making distinctions about things on which nothing can be done? The sexual relation appears, one can only say, in the form of exploitation, it’s before: that’s why exploitation gets organized, because there isn’t even that form of exploitation. There you have it, that’s worse, it’s the …or worse.

It’s not serious, it’s not serious even though it’s clear that this is where “a discourse that would not be of semblance” ought to go, but it’s a discourse that would end badly. It wouldn’t be a social bond at all, as that is what a discourse must be.

Well, so now it’s about the psychoanalytic discourse, and it’s about ensuring that the one who functions as (a) holds a position… I already explained this to you last time, of course naturally it slid off you like water off a duck’s back, but at least some seemed a bit, let’s say, dampened… holds the position of semblance.

Those who are really interested in this, I’ve heard echoes, it moved them. There are some psychoanalysts who have something that torments them, that anguishes them from time to time. That’s not why I’m saying this, why I insist on the fact that the object (a) must hold the position of semblance, it’s not to give them anxiety, I’d even prefer if they didn’t have any.

Still, it’s not a bad sign if it causes them anxiety, because that means that my discourse is not completely superfluous, that it can have meaning. But that’s not enough, it absolutely doesn’t guarantee anything for a discourse to have meaning, because at the very least that meaning must be locatable, right?

If you do that, well, Brownian motion, at every instant, it has a meaning. That’s exactly what makes the position of the psychoanalyst difficult, it’s because the object (a), its function is displacement. And since it wasn’t about the psychoanalyst that I brought down from the sky for the first time the object (a), I started in a little graph… which was made to give bone, or marker, to the formations of the unconscious… to pin it down at a point where it couldn’t move.

In the position of semblance it’s much less easy to stay there because the object (a) takes off from between your legs in no time because it’s… as I already explained when I began—concerning language—to talk about it… it’s “il court, il court, le furet…” [French nursery rhyme: “He runs, he runs, the ferret…”; a wordplay] in everything you say, at every moment it’s elsewhere.

That’s why we try to apprehend from where something could be situated that would be beyond meaning, beyond that meaning which means that, just as well, I can achieve no other effect than anxiety where it is not at all my aim. That’s why we are interested in having this real anchored, this real that I say—not for nothing—to be mathematical, because, all things considered, in the experience of what is at stake, of what is formulated, of what is written on occasion, we see, we can put our finger on the fact that there is something there that resists, I mean something about which you cannot say just anything. You cannot give any meaning at all to mathematical real.

It is indeed quite striking that those who, in a recent era, have approached this real with the preconceived idea of making it account for its meaning on the basis of truth… There was such an immense eccentric, whom you surely know by reputation, because he made a little noise in the world, whose name was Bertrand Russell, who is at the heart of this adventure and it is, after all, he who formulated something like this:

“that mathematics is something articulated in such a way that in the end, one does not even know if what is articulated is true, nor if it has any meaning.”

That does not prevent, precisely, it proves this: that you cannot just give it any meaning, – neither in the order of truth, – nor in the order of meaning, and that it resists to such a point that, to achieve this result, which I consider as a success… the very success, is it not, the mode under which it imposes itself, that it is real… is that precisely neither “truth” nor “meaning” dominate there, they are secondary.

And from there, the position… this secondary position, to those two things called truth and meaning… remained unusual to them, indeed it makes people dizzy when they take the trouble to think. That was the case with Bertrand Russell, he thought. It was… an aristocrat’s habit, wasn’t it, and there is really no reason to think that is an essential function.

But those who construct… I am not being ironic… set theory have quite enough to do in this real to find time to think about something else. The way one has engaged on a path not only from which one cannot get out, but which leads somewhere, with a necessity and moreover a fecundity, means that one is dealing with something completely different [the real] than what is nevertheless used [the “small letters”].

What was at work in the initium of this theory was to interrogate everything there was of this real, because that is where we started because we could not avoid seeing that number was real, and that for some time, after all, there had been trouble with the 1.

It was not a small matter to realize that the real number, one could question whether it had anything to do with the 1, the 1 like that, the first of the whole numbers, of the so-called natural numbers. It is that, from the 17th century to the beginning of the 19th century, there had been time to approach the number a little differently than the Ancients had.

If I start from this, it is indeed because that is the essential point. Not only “Yad’lun” [wordplay: il y a de l’Un/there is of the One], but it is visible from this: the One, it does not think.

It does not think: “therefore I am,” in particular. When I say: it does not think: “therefore I am,” I hope you remember that even Descartes does not say that. He says: it thinks “therefore I am” in quotation marks.

The One, it does not think itself, not even alone, but it says something, that is even what distinguishes it, and it did not wait for people to ask themselves about it, about its relations, the question of what it means from the point of view of truth. It did not even wait for logic. For that is logic. Logic is to identify in grammar what takes the form of the position of truth, what in language renders it adequate to produce truth. Adequate does not mean that it will always succeed, so by searching its forms thoroughly one thinks one is approaching what there is of truth.

But before Aristotle noticed this, namely the relation to grammar, the One had already spoken, and not for nothing. It says what it has to say: in the “Parmenides” it is the One that is spoken. It is spoken – it must be said – aiming to be true, whence naturally the panic that results.

There is no one among those who cook up knowledge who does not feel each time they get hit by it. It breaks the toothbrush glass! That is why after all… even though some have shown a certain good will, a certain courage to say: “after all it can be accepted although it’s a bit far-fetched”… we have not yet gotten past this thing that was nevertheless simple: to realize that the One, when it is truthful, when it says what it has to say, you see where that goes: in any case to the total rejection of any relation to being.

There is only one thing that comes out when it is articulated, and it is precisely this: there are not two. I told you, it is a saying. And you yourselves can find, right there at hand, the confirmation of what I say, when I say that

“truth can only be half-said.”

Because you only have to break down the formula: to say it, it can only say – either “there is,” and as I say: “Yad’lun” [wordplay: il y a de l’Un/there is of the One], – or “not two,” which for us immediately translates as: “there is no sexual relation.”

So it is already, you see, within our reach… of course, not within the reach of the unitary hand of the One… to make something of it in the direction of meaning.

That is exactly why I recommend to those who want to hold the position of the analyst… with what that entails, knowing not to slip away from it… to get up to date with what, of course, could for them be read simply by working on the Parmenides, but that would still be a bit short, you break your teeth on it.

Instead, something else has happened which makes it absolutely clear… if, of course, one persists a bit, if one gets used to it, if one even breaks oneself on it… which makes absolutely clear the distinction that exists – between a real that is a mathematical real, – and any of these idle amusements that stem from that “I don’t know what,” which is our nauseating position called “truth” or “meaning.”

Of course, naturally, that does not mean it will have no effect… effect of massage, effect of reinvigoration, effect of blowing, effect of cleaning… on what will seem to us required with regard to truth or to meaning.

But precisely, that is what I expect from it: – that by training oneself to distinguish what the One is, – simply by approaching that real in question, in that it supports number, already that will allow much for the analyst.

I mean that it may come to them… in this approach where it is a matter of interpreting, of renovating meaning… to say things which, as a result, are a little less short-circuited, a little less “shimmering,” than all the nonsense that can come to us and of which earlier – …or worse, like that – I gave you a sample starting simply from what, for me, was only the annoyance of the morning.

I could have embroidered like that about the worker and his bourgeois wife and made a mythology out of it. That made you laugh, moreover, because in that genre there is… the field is vast, meaning and truth, there’s no shortage, it has even become precisely the academic feeding trough… there are so many, there is such a range that one will be found, someday, to make from what I tell you, an ontology, to say that I said that:

“speech was an effect of filling that gap which is what I articulate: there is no sexual relation.”

It goes all by itself like that. Subjectivist interpretation, isn’t it? It’s because he can’t tickle her that he sweet-talks her. That’s simple, that’s simple!

What I am trying, is something else. It is to make it so that in your discourse, you put less nonsense – I am speaking of the analysts. For that, that you try to air out “meaning” a bit with elements that would be a bit new. So after all, it is not a requirement that does not impose itself, because it is very clear that there is no way to distribute two arbitrary series – arbitrary, I say – of attributes that would make – a male series on one side, – and on the other side the female series. I have not said man at first so as not to make a confusion, because I will embroider on that again to remain in the worst.

Obviously, it is tempting, even for me. I amuse myself. And I am sure I amuse you by showing that what is called “the active”… if that is what you base yourselves on because, naturally, that is the common currency… that this is “the man”: he is active, the dear little one! In the sexual relation, then, it seems to me that it is rather the woman who, in fact, puts in the effort. Well…

And then just look, in positions that we will in no way call primitive, but it’s not because you find them in the Third World… which is “the world of Monsieur Thiers,” isn’t it?… that it’s not obvious that in normal life… I am not talking, of course, about the guys from “Gaz et Électricité de France” who, for their part, have distanced themselves, who have thrown themselves into work… but in a life like that, let’s just call it what it is, what it is everywhere… except when there has been a great Christian subversion, our great Christian subversion… the man takes it easy, the woman grinds, she crushes, she sews, she shops and still manages, in these solid civilizations that are not lost, she still manages to wiggle her backside afterwards for… I am talking about a dance, of course, right!… for the jubilant satisfaction of the guy who is there!

So as for what is active and what is passive, allow me to… It’s true that he hunts! [Laughter] And there’s nothing to laugh about, girls, it’s very important! Since you provoke me, I’ll go on amusing myself. It’s unfortunate because that way, I won’t get to the end of what I had to tell you today about the One. It is two o’clock!

But still, since it makes you laugh, hunting… I don’t know, I don’t know if, after all, it is not absolutely superfluous to see in it precisely the virtue of man, the very virtue by which he shows himself, he shows himself at his best: being passive. Because, from everything we know, still, I don’t know if you really realize, because of course you are all “good-for-nothings” here, and if there aren’t any peasants here, no one hunts, but if there were peasants here: they hunt badly.

For the peasant… it’s not necessarily a man, eh, the peasant, whatever is said… for the peasant, the game is driven in: bang! bang! Everything is brought to him. That’s not at all what hunting is! Hunting, when it exists, just look at what trances it put them in, because we know, after all, we have little traces of everything they offered as propitiation to the thing—whatever it was—that was no longer there.

You understand, they were not crazier than us, a killed beast is a killed beast. Only, if they had not been able to kill the beast, it is because they had so well submitted themselves to everything of its movement, its tracks, its limits, its territory, its sexual preoccupations, because they had, precisely, substituted themselves for what is not all that, for the non-defense, for the non-closure, for the non-limits of the beast, for life—let’s say the word. And that when they had to take away this life, after having become so much themselves, that very life, it is easily understood, of course, that they found not only that it was ugly but that it was dangerous. That it could very well happen to them as well.

That could be one of those things that made some people think, because these things still can be felt, and I have heard it myself, formulated in a curious way by someone exceedingly intelligent, a mathematician: that… but then here he extrapolates, but anyway I offer it to you because it is exciting… that the nervous system in an organism was perhaps nothing other than the result of an identification with the prey, right?

Well, I toss the idea out to you like that, I give it to you, you’ll do with it what you will, of course, but you could make up a new theory of evolution that would be just a little bit funnier than the previous ones. I give it to you all the more willingly: – first, [because] it’s not mine, it was passed on to me as well, – but I’m sure it will excite the ontological minds.

It’s true as well for the fisherman. In fact, in all the ways in which man is woman. Because the way a fisherman slides his hand under the belly of the trout under its rock—there must be a trout fisherman here, there’s a chance, he must know what I’m talking about—that, that’s something!

In the end, none of this puts us on the subject of active and passive, in a clearly defined division. So I am not going to dwell on it, because all I need to do is confront each of these usual pairs with any attempt at a bisexual division to arrive at equally ludicrous results. So what could it possibly be?

When I say “Yad’l’Un” [wordplay: il y a de l’Un/there is of the One]… I still have to sweep my doorstep, and I don’t see why I wouldn’t leave it at that since I will be speaking to you then on Thursday, Thursday, June 1st I believe, something like that. You realize, the first Thursday of June I am forced to return from a few days of vacation so as not to miss Sainte Anne! …so I will, all the same, make the remark that “Yad’l’Un” does not mean… it seems to me that, for many, this must already be known, but why not?… it does not mean that there is such a thing as the individual.

That is exactly why, you see, I am asking you to root this “Yad’l’Un” in where it comes from. That is to say

“that there is no other existence of the One than mathematical existence.”

There is a One something, a One argument that satisfies a One formula.

And an argument is something completely emptied of meaning, it is simply the One as One. That is what, from the beginning, I intended to make clear to you in set theory. Perhaps I will at least be able to indicate it before leaving you. But first, this must also be settled: that not even the idea of the individual, that in no way constitutes the One.

Because, you can still see, that it might be within reach, as regards the sexual relation, on which, in the end, quite a few people imagine it is based: there are as many individuals on one side as on the other… in principle, at least among the speaking beings, the number of men and women except for exceptions, isn’t it, I mean the little exceptions: – in the British Isles, there are a little fewer men than women, – there are the great massacres, of course of men, well! But still, that does not prevent that each has had their each… that is not nearly enough to motivate the sexual relation, for them to go one by one.

It is still amusing that you have seen it, that there is there a kind of impurity of set theory around this idea of biunivocal correspondence, it is clear how the set connects to the class and that the class, like anything that pins an attribute, is something that has to do with the sexual relation.

But it is precisely this that I am asking you to be able to apprehend thanks to the function of the set. It is that there is a 1 distinct from this [One] which unifies, as attribute, a class.

There is a transition through the intermediary of this biunivocal correspondence. There are as many on one side as on the other and some base the idea of monogamy on this. One wonders in what way this is tenable, but after all it is in the Gospel.

As there are as many, up until the moment when there will be a social catastrophe, that, apparently, happened in the middle of the Middle Ages in Germany, it was possible it seems at that moment to establish that the sexual relation could be something other than bi-univocal.

But it is quite amusing, this, that the sex ratio, there are people who have asked the problem as such: are there as many males as females? And there has been a literature on this, which is really quite striking, very amusing, because this problem is, after all, a problem that is most frequently solved by what we will call chromosomal selection. The most frequent case is obviously the distribution of the two sexes in an equal number of reproduced individuals in each sex, equal in number.

But it is really very nice that the question was asked about what happens if an imbalance begins to occur. One can very easily demonstrate that in certain cases of such imbalance, this imbalance can only continue to increase, if one sticks to chromosomal selection, which we will not call random since it is a distribution. But then the very elegant solution that was given to it, is that in this case it must be compensated by natural selection. “Natural selection” is seen here, to appear naked.

I mean that this can be summed up by saying this: that the strongest are necessarily the least numerous, and that since they are the strongest, they prosper and thus they will join the others in number. The connection of this idea of natural selection with precisely the sexual relation is one of the cases where it is clear that what is most at risk in any approach to the sexual relation is to remain at the level of a witticism.

And in fact, everything that has been said about it belongs to this order. If it is important to be able to articulate something other than something that makes one laugh, it is precisely what we are seeking to ensure the analyst’s position as something other than what it appears to be, in many cases: a gag.

The starting point can be read in this in set theory: that there is a function of the element. To be an element in a set is to be something that has nothing to do with belonging to a register that can be called universal, that is, to something that comes under the heading of an attribute. It is the attempt of set theory to dissociate, to disarticulate once and for all the predicate from the attribute.

What, up to this theory, characterizes the notion in question in what concerns the sexual type… insofar as it would initiate something of a relation… is precisely this: that the universal is founded on a common attribute.

Here as well is the beginning of the logical distinction of the attribute from the subject, and the subject, from there, is founded: it is to what something that is distinguished can be called attribute. From this distinction of the attribute, what results, quite naturally, is this: that you do not put in the same set dishcloths and napkins, for example.

Opposite this category called “the class,” there is that of “the set” in which not only the dishcloth and the napkin are compatible, but in a set as such of each of these two kinds, there can only be one.

In a set there can be… if nothing distinguishes one dishcloth from another… there can only be one dishcloth, just as there can only be one napkin.

— The 1 as pure difference is what distinguishes the notion of the element.

— The One as attribute is thus distinct from it.

The difference between the “1 of difference” and the “One attribute” is this: it is that when you use, to define a class, any attributive statement, the attribute will not, in this definition, come in as surplus. That is to say, if you say: man is good, and in this regard… which can be said, for who is obliged to say it?… to assert that man is good does not exclude that one must account for the fact that he does not always correspond to this designation.

Besides, one always finds enough reasons to show that to this attribute he is capable of not responding, of failing to fulfill it. It is the theory that is constructed and where one indulges… one really only has… one has all of meaning at one’s disposal to, to face it, to explain that from time to time he is bad but that changes nothing of his attribute… that if one were then to have to balance from the point of view of number… – how many hold to it, – and how many do not correspond to it?… the attribute “good” would not come into the balance in addition, on top of each of the good men.

This is precisely the difference from the “1 of difference,” it is that when it is a matter of articulating its consequence, this “1 of difference” as such must be counted in what is stated about what it founds, which is a set and which has parts. The “1 of difference,” not only is it countable, but it must be counted among the parts of the set.

I arrive right on time, Two precisely. So I can only indicate to you what will be the continuation of what – as usual – I am led to cut off, that is to say very often in nearly any manner, and today, no doubt precisely because of another interruption, which is that of my electricity this morning, with its consequences, I am thus led to only be able to give you the indication of what, on this statement, this pivot-statement, will be taken up there.

This is it, the relation of this One which must be counted “in addition” with that which, in what I state as, not a substitute, but unfolding in a place “in the stead of the sexual relation,” is specified by “there exists” [:], not !, but the saying that this ! is not the truth : :§, that it is from there that the One arises which makes it so that this :§ must be placed… and it is the only characteristic element …must be placed on the side of that which founds man as such.

Does this mean that this foundation specifies him sexually? That is precisely what will have to be called into question in what follows, for it goes without saying that the relation ;! is what defines man, there attributively, as “every man.”

What is this “every” or “all”? What is “all men” inasmuch as they found one side of this articulation of supplementation?

That is where we will take up next time when I see you.

The question “all”: “what is an all,” must be entirely re-examined from the function articulated as “Yad’l’Un.”