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(All parts in English)

Coming back to speak at Sainte-Anne, what I had hoped was that there would be some “interns” there, as they are called, who in my time were called asylum interns, but now they are “psychiatric hospital” interns, not to mention the rest. It was this audience that, upon returning to Sainte-Anne, I had in mind. I hoped that some of them would make the effort to come. If any of them are here—I’m talking about practicing interns—would they do me the pleasure of raising their hands? It is an overwhelming minority, but in the end, they are quite enough for me. From there—and as long as I can maintain this breath—I will try to say a few words to you. It is clear that these words, as always, I am improvising; that does not mean I don’t have a few little notes here, but they have been improvised since this morning, because I work a lot. But you shouldn’t feel obliged to do the same.

One point I have insisted on is the distance that exists between work and knowledge, for let us not forget that tonight, it is knowledge that I am promising you, so there is really no need for you to tire yourselves. You will see why; some already suspect it, having attended what is called my seminar.

To get to knowledge, I pointed out a long time ago the following: that ignorance can be considered—in Buddhism—as a passion. This is a fact that is justified with a bit of meditation, but since meditation is not our strong suit, there is only one way to make it known: through experience. This is an experience I had—a striking one!—a long time ago, precisely in the doctors’ lounge.

Because I have been frequenting these walls for quite a while—not these ones in particular at that time—and it should be, it’s recorded somewhere around 25-26, and the interns at that time… I am not speaking about what they are now …the interns, both of the “hospitals” and what were called “asylums,” it was probably a group effect, but as for sticking to ignorance, well, they were rather there, it seems! One might consider that it is linked to a particular moment in medicine, and that this moment necessarily had to be followed by the current wavering.

At that time, after all, this ignorance… don’t forget that when I speak of ignorance, I have just said it is a passion, it is not for me a devaluation, nor is it a deficit, it is something else… ignorance is linked to knowledge. It is a way of establishing it, of making it established knowledge.

For example, when one wanted to be a doctor in an era that, of course, was the end of an era, well, it was normal to want… at that time there was still a bit of orientation …to want to benefit, to show, to manifest, an ignorance, if I may say, that was consolidated.

That being said, after what I have just told you about ignorance, you will not be surprised if I point out that “learned ignorance,” as a certain cardinal put it… at a time when that title was not a certificate of ignorance, …a certain cardinal called “learned ignorance” the highest form of knowledge. That was Nicholas of Cusa, to mention him in passing.

So the correlation between ignorance and knowledge is something we essentially have to start from, and see that, after all, ignorance, in this way, from a certain point on, in a certain area, brings knowledge to its lowest level—it is not ignorance’s fault; in fact, it is quite the opposite.

For some time now in medicine, ignorance is no longer learned enough for medicine to survive on anything other than superstitions. On the meaning of this word, and specifically concerning medicine, I may come back to it later, if I have time.

But in the end, to point out something that belongs to this experience with which I am very keen to reconnect the thread after these—my God!—these forty-five years of frequenting these walls… it’s not to boast, but ever since I consigned some of my Writings to “garbage publication” [wordplay on poubelle and publication], everyone knows my age, that is one of the disadvantages …at that moment, I must say that the degree of passionate ignorance that reigned in the doctors’ lounge at Sainte-Anne, I must say, is irrevocable.

It is true that these were people who had a vocation, and at that time, to have a vocation for asylums was something rather particular. In that same doctors’ lounge, four people arrived at the same time whose names I do not find unworthy of recalling, since I am one of them. The other whom I would like to bring up again tonight was Henri Ey.

It can indeed be said, can it not, with the passage of time, that Ey was the civilizer of this ignorance. And I must say that I salute his work. Civilization, after all, does not rid us of any discomfort, as Freud pointed out, quite the contrary, Unbehagen, unease, but all the same, it has a precious side.

If you thought there was any degree of irony in what I just said, you would be gravely mistaken, but you can only be mistaken, because you cannot imagine what things were like in the world of asylums before Ey put his hand to it. It was something absolutely fabulous!

Now history has moved forward and I have just received a circular expressing alarm that exists in a certain sector of said world, regarding this movement promising all kinds of sparks that is called “anti-psychiatry”. There is a desire that a stance be taken on this, as if it were possible to take a stance on something that is already an opposition. So I must say, I do not know if it would be fitting to make a few remarks on this, some remarks inspired by my old experience, the one I have just mentioned precisely, and on this occasion to distinguish between Psychiatry and psychiatrery [psychiatrerie, with the suggestion of mere practice or trade].

The question of the mentally ill or, more precisely, of what are called psychoses, is a question not at all resolved by anti-psychiatry, whatever illusions may be maintained on that subject by a few local ventures.

Anti-psychiatry is a movement whose meaning is the liberation of the psychiatrist, if I may put it that way. And it is quite clear that it is not going in that direction. It is not going in that direction because there is a characteristic one must not forget in what are called revolutions, which is that this word is admirably chosen to mean: a return to the starting point.

The cycle of all this was already known, but is thoroughly demonstrated in the book called “Madness and Civilization” [Naissance de la Folie, literally “Birth of Madness”], by Michel Foucault: the psychiatrist indeed has a social function. He is the creation of a certain historical turning point. The one we are experiencing is not about to lighten this burden, nor to reduce his place, to say the least. So this leaves the questions of anti-psychiatry a little at odds.

In short, this is an introductory indication, but I would like to point out that as far as doctors’ lounges are concerned, there is something quite striking in my eyes about their continuity with the most recent ones: it is to what extent psychoanalysis has—in view of the biases knowledge takes on there—psychoanalysis has improved nothing. The psychoanalyst… in the sense in which I raised the question, in the year 67-68, when I introduced the notion of “the psychoanalyst”, preceded by the definite article, at a time when I was trying before an audience—at that time rather large—to recall the logical value, that of the definite article. Anyway, let’s move on… the psychoanalyst does not seem to have changed anything about a certain foundation of knowledge.

After all, all of this is regular. These are not things that change from one day to the next, the foundation of knowledge. The future is in God’s hands, as they say, that is, to the good fortune of those who had the inspiration to follow me. Something will come out of them, if the little pigs don’t eat them [reference to the French idiom]. That is what I call good luck. For the others, there is no question of good luck. Their fate will be settled by automatism, which is quite the opposite of luck, whether good or bad.

What I would like tonight is this: that those, those whom I devote to what they are found good for, for what the psychoanalysis they use leaves them no chance, I would like to avoid for those ones that there should arise a misunderstanding, in the name, so to speak, of something that is the effect of the goodwill of some of those who follow me.

They have understood fairly well—as well as they can—what I have said about knowledge as the correlate of ignorance, and so this has somewhat, somewhat troubled them. Among them there are some… I don’t know what literary bug has bitten them, a literary bug like that, things that linger in the writings of Georges Bataille for example, because otherwise I think it would have occurred to them… there is “non-knowledge”. I must say that Georges Bataille once gave a “conference on non-knowledge”, and that it perhaps turns up in two or three corners of his writings.

After all, God knows he did not make a big deal out of it, and especially on the day of his lecture, there in the Geography hall at St Germain des Prés… which you know well because you are cultured …he did not utter a word, which was not a bad way to make a display of non-knowledge. There was snickering. People were wrong to do so, because now non-knowledge is fashionable. It floats around, doesn’t it, in all sorts of mystics, it even comes from them, it is even among them that it has a meaning.

And then, of course, you know I have insisted on the difference between knowledge and truth. So if truth is not knowledge, it is non-knowledge. Aristotelian logic: “everything that is not black is non-black,” as I pointed out somewhere. I pointed it out, that’s certain: I articulated that this sensitive border between truth and knowledge, it is precisely there that the analytic discourse is situated.

So there it is, the road is wide open to proclaim, to raise the flag of “non-knowledge.” It is not a bad flag. It can even serve as a rallying point for what is, after all, not excessively rare to recruit as a clientele: crass ignorance, for example. That exists too, well, it is increasingly rare.

Only, there are other things, there are aspects to laziness, for example, which I have not talked about for a very long time. And then there are certain forms of institutionalization, camps of the Good Lord, as they used to say inside the university, where these things are well received because they are fashionable. In short, there is a whole pantomime, isn’t there, “After you, Madame Truth,” the hole is there, you see, that’s your place. After all, it’s a discovery, this non-knowledge…

To introduce definitive confusion on a delicate subject, namely the one that is precisely the question at stake in psychoanalysis, what I have called “this sensitive border between truth and knowledge,” you could not do better. I do not need to date it. In fact, ten years before, another discovery had been made which was not bad either, at the level of what I must call my discourse. I had started by saying that “the unconscious is structured like a language.”

A wonderful thing had been found: the two people best placed to work along these lines, to follow this thread, had been given a very pretty job: Vocabulary of Philosophy. [slip of the tongue] What am I saying? Vocabulary of Psychoanalysis! You notice the slip, don’t you? Well, it’s as good as Lalande.

“Lalangue” as I write it now—I don’t have a blackboard—well, write: Lalangue as one word, that’s how I will write it from now on. See how cultured they are! [Laughter] So, nothing can be heard! Is it the acoustics? Would you please make the correction? It’s not a “d,” it’s a “gu” [Lalande/Lalangue].

I did not say the unconscious is structured like “Lalangue,” but is structured like “a language,” and I will return to this shortly. But when those “respondents” I spoke of earlier were set on the Vocabulary of Psychoanalysis, it was obviously because I had put on the agenda this Saussurian term: “Lalangue,” which—I repeat—I will henceforth write as a single word. And I will justify why.

Well, Lalangue has nothing to do with the dictionary, whatever the dictionary may be. The dictionary… as you would understand just from hearing the word …the dictionary has to do with diction, that is, with poetry and with rhetoric, for example. That is not nothing, is it? It ranges from invention to persuasion, in short, it is very important. Only, it is precisely not this side that has to do with the unconscious.

Contrary to what—I think—the majority of candidates believe, but which an important part already knows, already knows if they have listened to the terms in which I have tried to convey what I say about the unconscious: the unconscious deals first of all with grammar.

It also has a bit to do with—a lot to do with, everything to do with—repetition, that is, the aspect quite the opposite of what a dictionary is for. So it was quite a good way to divert those who could have helped me at that time to make my path. Grammar and repetition, it is a completely different aspect from the one I mentioned a moment ago, invention, which is certainly not nothing, nor is persuasion.

Contrary to what is— I do not know why— still very widespread, the useful side in the function of “Lalangue,” the useful side for us psychoanalysts, for those who deal with the unconscious, is logic. This is a small parenthesis which connects to the risk of loss in this absolutely improvised and mythical promotion, to which I have truly given no occasion for anyone to make a mistake, the one that launches itself from non-knowledge. Is it necessary to demonstrate that there is in psychoanalysis— fundamentally and primarily— knowledge? This is what I will need to demonstrate to you.

Let us approach it from one end, this massive primary character, the primacy of this knowledge in psychoanalysis. Do I need to remind you that when Freud tries to account for the difficulties encountered in clearing the way for psychoanalysis… an article from 1917 in Imago, if my memory serves me right, and in any case which was translated, it appeared in the first issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis: “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” as it is titled …the point is that the knowledge in question does not pass so easily.

Freud explains it as best he can, and it is even in this way that he gives rise to misunderstanding— it is not by chance— this famous term “resistance” which I believe I have managed, at least in a certain area, to put to rest, but it is certain that there is a place where— I have no doubt— this famous term “resistance” still flourishes, which is obviously for him a constant preoccupation.

And so I must say— why not dare to say it— that we all have our slips, and it is especially “resistances” that favor slips. Some will be discovered in what I have said, but after all, that is not so sure. Anyway, Freud falls into a trap.

He thinks that against resistance there is only one thing to do, which is revolution. And so, he ends up completely masking what is really at stake, namely the very specific difficulty of bringing a certain function of knowledge into play.

He confuses it with “doing,” which is labeled as “revolution in knowledge.” It is there in that little article… he will take it up again later in “Civilization and Its Discontents” …that you find the first major section on the Copernican revolution.

It was a commonplace of academic knowledge at the time. Copernicus— poor Copernicus!— had made the revolution. It was he— as they say in the textbooks— who put the sun at the center and the Earth revolving around it. It is quite clear that despite the diagram which indeed shows this in “De revolutionibus etc.,” Copernicus himself had no particular position on it, and no one would have thought to take him to task over it.

But it is a fact, indeed, that we moved from geocentrism to heliocentrism, and that this is supposed to have dealt a blow— a “blow” as it is put in the English text— to I don’t know what supposed cosmological narcissism. The second “blow,” which is biological, Freud brings up at the level of Darwin on the pretext that, as with the matter of the Earth, people took some time to get over the new announcement: the one that placed man in a cousinly relation with modern primates.

And Freud explains “resistance” to psychoanalysis as follows: what is affected is, properly speaking, this consistency of knowledge which means that when you know something, the least you can say is that you know that you know it. Let us leave aside what he brings up in this regard, for that is the crux, what he adds— namely the painting in the form of the ego that is made around this, namely that the one who knows that he knows, well, that is “me.” It is clear that this reference to the ego is secondary to this: – that a knowledge knows itself, – and that the novelty is that what psychoanalysis reveals is a knowledge unknown to itself.

But I ask you, what would be new there, or even likely to provoke resistance, if this knowledge were of the nature of a whole world— precisely animal— where no one is surprised that, broadly, the animal knows what it needs to know, that is, if it is a terrestrial animal, it does not go plunging into water for more than a limited time: it knows it is not good for it.

If the unconscious is something surprising, it is because this knowledge is something else: it is this knowledge of which we have the idea, however little founded it may have been from the very beginning, since it is not for nothing that inspiration and enthusiasm have always been evoked, always, and that is to say that the unknown knowledge in question in psychoanalysis is a knowledge that is indeed articulated, is structured like a language. So here, the revolution, if I may say so, highlighted by Freud, tends to obscure what is at stake: that this thing which does not pass—revolution or not—is a subversion that occurs—where?—in the function, in the structure of knowledge.

And this is what does not get through, because in truth, the cosmological revolution, one really cannot say, apart from the trouble it caused a few Doctors of the Church, that it is in any way something that, as the saying goes, makes man feel in any way humiliated.

This is why the use of the term revolution is so unconvincing, because the very fact that there was a revolution on this point is actually rather exalting for narcissism. It is exactly the same for Darwinism: there is no doctrine that elevates human production more than evolutionism, it must be said. In either case, cosmological or biological, all these revolutions nonetheless leave man in the position of the flower of creation.

This is why one can say that this reference is truly ill-conceived. It may even be designed precisely to obscure, to pass over what is at stake, namely that this knowledge, this new status of knowledge, is what must bring about a wholly new type of discourse, which is not easy to maintain and—up to a certain point—has not even begun yet.

The unconscious—I have said—is structured like a language, a language: which one? And why did I say a language? Because as far as language goes, we are beginning to know a little: – one speaks of object-language in logic, mathematical or not, – one speaks of metalanguage, – for some time now, one even speaks of language in biology, – people speak of language left and right,

To begin with, I say that if I speak of language, it is because it is a matter of features that are found in lalangue, lalangue itself being subject to great variety, yet there are constants. The language in question, as I have taken the time, the care, the trouble, and the patience to articulate it, is the language in which one can distinguish the code from the message, among other things.

Without this minimal distinction, there is no place for speech. That is why, when I introduce these terms, I title them “Function and field of speech… for speech, it is the function …and of language… for language, it is the field.

Speech defines the place of what is called truth. What I indicate from its outset, for the use I wish to make of it, is its structure as fiction, that is to say, also as lie.

In truth—and it is the case to say it—truth tells the truth—not halfway!—only in one case: when it says “I lie.” This is the only case in which one can be sure it is not lying, because it is supposed to know it. But Otherwise, that is to say Otherwise with a capital O, it is very possible that it still tells the truth without knowing it.

This is what I have tried to indicate with my capital S, parenthesis of the capital A precisely, and barred: S(A). That at least, you cannot say is not in any case a knowledge… for those who follow me …that must be taken into account as a guide, even if only for the short term. This is the first point of “the unconscious structured like a language.”

The second, you did not wait for me—I am speaking to psychoanalysts—you did not wait for me to know it since it is the very principle of what you do as soon as you interpret. There is not an interpretation that does not concern—what?—the link of what, in what you hear, manifests as speech, the link of this to jouissance.

It may be that you do this in a sense innocently, that is, without ever having realized that there is not an interpretation that ever wants to say anything else, but in the end, an analytic interpretation is always this: whether the benefit is secondary or primary, the benefit is jouissance.

And this, it is perfectly clear that the thing emerged under Freud’s pen, not immediately for there is a stage, there is the pleasure principle, but in the end, it is clear that one day what struck him is that whatever one does, innocent or not, what is formulated… from this play, a truth is stated …what is formulated, whatever is done with it, is something that is repeated.

“The instance—I have said—of the letter,” and if I use “instance,” it is, as with all the uses I make of words, not without reason, it is that instance – resonates just as well: at the level of jurisdiction, – it also resonates at the level of insistence, where it brings up that module I have defined as the instant, at the level of a certain logic.

This repetition, it is there that Freud discovers “Beyond the pleasure principle.” Only, if there is a beyond, let us speak no more of the “principle,” because a principle that has a beyond is no longer a principle, and let us leave aside at the same time the reality principle. All of that clearly needs to be reconsidered.

There are not, after all, two classes of speaking beings: —those who govern themselves according to the pleasure principle and the reality principle, —and those who are Beyond the pleasure principle, especially since—as they say, and rightly so—clinically, they are indeed the same.

The primary process is at first explained by that approximation which is the opposition, the bipolarity pleasure principle—reality principle. It must be said, this sketch is untenable and only made to fool those who could be fooled among the contemporary audience of those first formulations, which are… I do not wish to abuse the term …bourgeois ears, that is, those who have absolutely not the slightest idea of what the pleasure principle is.

The pleasure principle is a reference from ancient morality: in ancient morality, pleasure, which consists precisely in doing as little as possible, “otium cum dignitate,” is an asceticism that one could say joins that of the swine, but not at all in the sense in which it is understood today.

The word “swine” did not mean in Antiquity to be piggish, it meant that it bordered on the wisdom of the animal. It was an appreciation, a touch, a note, given from outside by people who did not understand what it was about, namely the ultimate refinement of the morality of the Master.

What can that possibly have to do with the idea the bourgeois has of pleasure, and, moreover, it must be said, of reality?

In any case—this is the third point—what results from the insistence with which the unconscious delivers what it formulates to us is that if on the one hand our interpretation never has more than the sense of highlighting what the subject finds there, what does he find? Nothing that should not be catalogued in the register of jouissance. That is the third point.

Fourth point: where does it reside, jouissance? What does it require? A body! To enjoy, one needs a body. Even those who promise eternal beatitudes can only do so on the supposition that the body is conveyed there: glorious or not, it must be present. A body is needed. Why?

Because the dimension of jouissance, for the body, is the dimension of descent toward death. That is, very precisely, the sense in which the pleasure principle in Freud signals that he already knew, from that moment, what he was saying, because if you read him carefully, you will see that the pleasure principle has nothing to do with hedonism, even if it is handed down to us from the oldest tradition, it is in truth the principle of displeasure. It is the principle of displeasure, so much so that in stating it at every turn, Freud slips.

“Pleasure, in what does it consist?” he tells us, is to lower tension. But what is this tension, if not the very principle of everything that goes by the name of jouissance, of something to enjoy, if not that a tension be produced?

That is precisely why, when Freud is on the path of the “Jenseits,” Beyond the pleasure principle, what does he state for us in Civilization and Its Discontents, if not that very probably, well beyond so-called social repression, there must be a repression—he writes it verbatim—organic.

It is curious, it is regrettable that so much effort must be made for things said with such obviousness, and to make this perceived: it is that the dimension by which the speaking being distinguishes itself from the animal is assuredly that there is in him this gap through which he loses himself, through which it is permitted for him to act on the body or bodies—whether it is his own or that of his fellow beings, or that of the animals that surround him, —to bring forth from them, for their or his benefit, what is properly called jouissance.

It is certainly stranger than the pathways I have just highlighted… those that lead from that sophisticated description of the pleasure principle to the open recognition of what is at stake in fundamental jouissance …it is stranger to see that Freud, at this level, believes he must resort to something he designates as the death instinct.

Not that this is false, only to say it in such a learned way is precisely what the scholars he engendered under the name of psychoanalysts absolutely cannot swallow.

This long cogitation, this rumination around the death instinct, which is what characterizes, one can say, in the end, the whole of the international psychoanalytic institution, this way it has of splitting, dividing, partitioning itself: —does it accept, does it not accept, —“here I stop, I do not go that far…” …these endless mazes around this term which seems chosen to give the illusion that in this field something has been discovered that can be called analogous to what in logic is called paradox, it is astonishing that Freud, with the path he had already opened up, did not think he should point to it plainly and simply.

Jouissance, which is really, in the order of erotology, within the reach of anyone—it is true that at that time the publications of the Marquis de Sade were less widespread, that is why I thought it necessary, just to mark a date, to indicate somewhere in my Écrits the relation of “Kant with Sade.” If by proceeding in this way, I still think there is an answer, it is not at all certain that for him, any more than for any of us, he knew everything he was saying.

But instead of telling stories about the primitive death instinct… –coming from the outside or coming from the inside, –or turning from the outside onto the inside, –and, in the end, manifesting itself late in aggression and fighting, …one might have read this in Freud’s death instinct, which may suggest that the only act, after all, if there is one, that would be a completed act… understand that I am speaking, as last year I spoke of “A discourse that would not be semblance” [wordplay on semblant and semblance] in both cases there is none, neither such a discourse nor such an act …that then would be, if it could exist, suicide.

That is what Freud tells us. He does not tell us so bluntly, so clearly, as one can say now, now that the doctrine has made a bit of headway and it is known that there is no act except a failed act and that it is even the only condition for any semblance of success.

This is precisely why suicide deserves objection: one does not need it to remain an attempt for it to be, in any case, a failure, a complete failure from the point of view of jouissance. Maybe the Buddhists, with their cans of gasoline—because they are up to date— we don’t know, because they do not come back to bear witness.

It is a beautiful text, Freud’s text. It is not for nothing that he brings us back to soma and germen. He senses, he sniffs that it is there that something must be delved into.

Yes, what needs to be delved into is the fifth point that I set forth this year in my seminar and which is stated as follows:

“there is no sexual relation.”

Of course, it seems a bit nuts, a bit offbeat. It would be enough to screw really well to prove the opposite to me.

Unfortunately, it is the only thing that demonstrates absolutely nothing of the sort because the notion of relation does not coincide at all with the metaphorical use that is made of this word plain “relation”: they had relations, that is not quite it.

One can seriously speak of relation not only when it is established by a discourse, but when one states it, the relation. Because it is true that the real is there before we think it, but the relation is much more doubtful: not only must it be thought, it must be written. If you are not able to write it, there is no relation. It would perhaps be quite remarkable if it turned out, long enough for things to begin to become clear, that it is impossible to write what the sexual relation would be.

The thing is important because, precisely, we are, through the progress of what is called “science,” in the process of pushing very far a whole lot of minor matters that are situated at the level of the gamete, at the level of the gene, at the level of a certain number of choices, of selections, called as you wish—meiosis or otherwise—and which seem to elucidate something, something that occurs at the level of the fact that reproduction, at least in a certain area of life, is sexual.

Only, this has absolutely nothing to do with what is at stake in the sexual relation, insofar as it is quite certain that, for the speaking being, there is around this relation, as founded on jouissance, an utterly admirable range in its spread, and two things have been brought to light in this by Freud—by Freud and analytic discourse—namely, the entire spectrum of jouissance, I mean everything that can be done by properly treating a body, even one’s own body, all of this, to some degree, participates in sexual jouissance.

Only, sexual jouissance itself, when you try to lay your hands on it, if I may put it this way, is no longer sexual at all, it vanishes.

And this is where everything built around the term Phallus comes into play, which is precisely what designates a certain signified, a signified of a certain signifier that is perfectly evanescent, for as far as defining what it is to be a man or a woman, what psychoanalysis shows us is precisely that it is impossible, and that to a certain extent, nothing specifically indicates that it must be toward the partner of the other sex that jouissance should be directed, if jouissance is considered, even for a moment, as the guide to what is at stake in the function of reproduction.

We are confronted here with the explosion of the, let’s say, notion of sexuality. Sexuality is at the center, without any doubt, of everything that happens in the unconscious. But it is at the center in that it is a lack.

That is to say, in the place of anything that could be written as the sexual relation as such, there are substituted the impasses that are generated by the function of specifically sexual jouissance, as it appears as this kind of mirage point, which somewhere Freud himself notes as absolute jouissance.

And it is so close that precisely it is not, absolute. It is not in any sense, firstly because as such it is doomed to those various forms of failure that constitute – castration for masculine jouissance, – division for what concerns feminine jouissance, and furthermore, what jouissance leads to has absolutely nothing to do with copulation, inasmuch as the latter is, let us say, the usual mode—it will change—by which reproduction takes place in the species of the speaking being.

In other words:

— There is a thesis: “there is no sexual relation”—it is the speaking being I am talking about.

— There is an antithesis, which is the reproduction of life. This is a well-known theme. It is the current banner of the Catholic Church, in which one must salute its courage. The Catholic Church asserts that there is a sexual relation: it is the one that results in making little children. This is a completely tenable assertion, it is simply indemonstrable. No discourse can sustain it, except religious discourse, in that it defines the strict separation that exists between truth and knowledge.

— And thirdly, there is no synthesis, unless you call “synthesis” this remark that there is no jouissance except that of dying.

These are the points of truth and knowledge by which it matters to punctuate what is at stake in the knowledge of the psychoanalyst, except that there is not a single psychoanalyst for whom this is not a dead letter. For the synthesis, you can count on them to maintain its terms and see them entirely elsewhere than in the death instinct. Drive out nature—as they say, don’t they—it returns at a gallop.

It would nevertheless be appropriate to give its true meaning to that old proverbial formula. Nature, let’s talk about it, that’s exactly what is at stake. Nature is everything that dresses itself in the livery of knowledge—and God knows that is not lacking—and a discourse made solely so that knowledge serves as “livery,” that is the university discourse. It is entirely clear that the clothing in question is the idea of nature. It is not about to disappear from the stage.

Not that I am trying to substitute another one for it. Do not imagine that I am among those who oppose culture to nature. First of all, if only because nature is precisely a fruit of culture.

But ultimately, this relationship between knowledge and truth, or as you wish: truth and knowledge, is something to which we have not even begun to adhere in the smallest degree, just as with what is at stake in medicine, in psychiatry, and a whole host of other problems.

We are going to be overwhelmed before long, within four or five years, –by all the segregative problems that will be titled or denounced under the term “racism,” –all the problems which are precisely those that will consist in what is simply called the control of what happens at the level of the reproduction of life, among beings who, because they speak, end up having all sorts of problems of conscience.

What is absolutely unheard of is that it still has not been noticed that problems of conscience are problems of jouissance. But at least, we are only just beginning to be able to speak of them.

It is not at all certain that this will have the slightest consequence, since we know, in fact, that interpretation, in order to be received, requires, as I said at the beginning, work. Knowledge itself is in the order of jouissance. There is absolutely no reason why it should change its bed.

What people expect, and denounce under the name of intellectualization, simply means this: they are accustomed by experience to realizing that it is by no means necessary, it is by no means sufficient, to understand something in order for anything whatsoever to change.

The question of the knowledge of the psychoanalyst is not at all whether it is articulated or not; the question is to know in what position one must be to sustain it.

It is obviously on this point that I will try to indicate something of which I do not know whether I will succeed in giving it a transmissible formulation. I will try, nonetheless.

The question is to know to what extent what science… the science which psychoanalysis, currently just as in Freud’s time, can do nothing more than follow in its wake, …to what extent science can reach what concerns the term real.

The symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. It is very clear that the power of the Symbolic does not need to be demonstrated. It is power itself. There is no trace of power in the world before the appearance of language.

What is striking in what Freud sketches of the pre-Copernican era is that he imagines that man was entirely happy to be at the center of the universe and believed himself its king. That is truly an absolutely fabulous illusion!

If there was something whose idea he took from the eternal spheres, it was precisely that there lay the last word of knowledge. What knows something in the world—it takes time for this to pass— …are the ethereal spheres: they know. That is precisely why knowledge has been associated from the beginning with the idea of power.

And in that little notice that appears on the back of the big packet of my Écrits, you see it… because—why not admit it—it is I who wrote that little note. Who else but me could have done it, you recognize my style, well it’s rather well written! …I invoke the Enlightenment.

It is quite clear that the Enlightenment took some time to become clear. At first, they completely missed their target. But, like Hell, they were paved with good intentions. Contrary to all that has been said, the aim of the Enlightenment was to state a knowledge that would pay homage to no power.

Only, it is regrettable to have to note that those who took up this task were a bit too much in the position of lackeys with respect to a certain type… I must say rather fortunate and flourishing …of masters, the nobles of that time, for them to have been able to achieve anything other than that famous French Revolution which had the result you know, namely the establishment of a race of masters more ferocious than anything seen at work until then.

A knowledge that can do nothing, the knowledge of impotence—this is what the psychoanalyst… from a certain perspective, a perspective that I would not call progressive …this is what the psychoanalyst could convey.

And to give you a sense of the direction in which I hope to pursue my discourse this year, I am going to give you the title, the scoop… lick your chops …I am going to give you the title of the seminar I will be giving, in the same place as last year, thanks to a few people who kindly took it upon themselves to preserve it for us.

It is written like this, before pronouncing it: —that is an O, —and that a U, —…three dots, you will add whatever you like, and I will leave it to your meditation.

This ou, it is the ou that is called vel or aut in Latin: “…Or worse.”