🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

What I am doing with you this evening is obviously not… no more so than it was last time… obviously not what I intended, this year, to give as the next step of my seminar. Like last time, it will be a conversation.

Everyone knows – though many ignore it – the emphasis I place, for those who seek my advice, on preliminary interviews in analysis. It has, of course, an essential function for analysis. There is no possible entry into analysis without preliminary interviews.

But there is something that approaches it, in the relation between these interviews and what I am going to tell you this year, with the difference that it cannot absolutely be the same, given that it is I who am speaking, it is I who am here in the position of the analysand.

So what I was going to say to you… I could have taken many other approaches but, in the end, it is always at the last moment that I know what I choose to say… and for this conversation today, the occasion seemed fitting because of a question posed to me last night by someone from my School.

It is one of those people who take their position somewhat to heart and who asked me the following question, which has, of course, the advantage in my eyes of letting me immediately get to the heart of the matter. Everyone knows that this rarely happens for me; I approach things with cautious steps.

The question that was asked is as follows: “Is the incomprehension of Lacan a symptom?”

I therefore repeat it verbatim. It is a person to whom, on this occasion, I easily forgive for having put my name… which is understandable since she was facing me… instead of what would have been appropriate, namely “my discourse”.

You see that I do not evade the point, I call it “my” discourse. We will see shortly whether this “my” deserves to be maintained. No matter. The essential thing in this question was what it concerns, namely whether the incomprehension of what is at stake—however you may call it—is a symptom.

I do not think so. I do not think so, first because, in a sense, one cannot say that something… which does have a certain relation with my discourse, which is not identical, which is what one could call my speech… one cannot say that it is absolutely misunderstood, one can say, at a precise level, that your number is proof of this. If my speech were incomprehensible, I do not quite see what you would be doing here, in such numbers.

All the more so as, after all, this number is made up largely of people who return, and, at the level of a sample that nevertheless reaches me, it happens that people express themselves in such a way that they do not always understand well, or at least that they do not feel they understand… to recall one of the last testimonies I received about this, in the way everyone expresses it… well, despite this feeling, somewhat “of not being there,” it nevertheless remains… as was told to me in the last testimony… that it helped, the person in question, to find themselves in their own ideas, to clarify, to clarify themselves on a certain number of points.

One cannot say that, at least as regards my speech… which is obviously to be distinguished from discourse—we will try to see how… there is not, strictly speaking, what one calls incomprehension. I emphasize immediately that this speech is a teaching speech. So, in this instance, I distinguish teaching from discourse.

As I am speaking here at Sainte-Anne… and perhaps, through what I said last time, one can sense what this means for me… I have chosen to approach things at the level, let’s say, of what is called the elementary. It is completely arbitrary, but it is a choice.

When I went to the Société de Philosophie to give a talk on what I called at that time my teaching, I made the same decision. I spoke as if addressing people who were very far behind: they are not any more so than you are, but it is rather my idea of philosophy that makes me do this. And I am not the only one.

One of my very good friends, who recently gave a talk at the Société de Philosophie, gave me an article on the foundations of mathematics where I pointed out to him that his article was at a level ten or twenty times higher than what he had said at the Société de Philosophie.

He told me that I should not be surprised, given the responses he had received. That is indeed what he proved to me as well, because I received answers of the same kind at the same place, and that reassured me for having articulated certain things—things you can find in my Écrits—at the same level.

So, in certain contexts, there is a choice less arbitrary than the one I am making here. I make this choice here on the basis of memorial elements linked to the following: in the end, if, at a certain level, my discourse is still not understood, it is because, let’s say, for a long time, it was in an area where it was forbidden, not to hear it—which, as experience has shown, would have been within reach for many—but forbidden to come and hear it.

This is what allows us to distinguish this incomprehension from a number of others: there was something forbidden. And, after all, the fact that this prohibition came from an analytic institution is certainly significant. What does significant mean?

I certainly did not say signifier. There is a great difference between the signifier-signified relation and signification. Signification points to a sign; a sign has nothing to do with a signifier.

A sign is… I set this out in a corner, somewhere in the latest issue of this Scilicet… a sign is, whatever one may think, always the sign of a subject.

Which addresses what? This is also written in that Scilicet, I cannot go into detail now, but this sign, this sign of prohibition, surely came from real subjects, in every sense of the word, subjects who obey in any case. That a sign should come from an analytic institution is something meant to make us take the next step.

If the question could be asked of me in this form, it is in relation to this: that incomprehension in psychoanalysis is considered as a symptom. This is accepted in psychoanalysis; it is—if one can say so—generally admitted. The matter has come to the point that it has passed into common consciousness.

When I say that it is generally admitted, it is beyond psychoanalysis, I mean beyond the psychoanalytic act. In certain consciousness… there is something that gives the mode of common consciousness… things have come to the point where one says, or hears said: “Go get psychoanalyzed” when… when what? When the person saying this considers that your conduct, your remarks are, as Mr. de Lapalisse would say, a symptom.

I would point out to you that, all the same, at this level, through this means, “symptom” has the sense of “truth value” [valeur de vérité]. This is where what has passed into common consciousness is more precise than the idea that, unfortunately, many psychoanalysts have. Let us say that there are too few who know the equivalence of “symptom” with “truth value”.

It is rather curious, but, moreover, it has this historical resonance, which demonstrates that this meaning of the word symptom was discovered, stated, before psychoanalysis came into play. As I often emphasize, it is, strictly speaking, the essential step taken by Marxist thought that is this equivalence. Truth value: to translate the symptom as a truth value, we must, here, once again, grasp what it presupposes for the analyst to know, namely, that he must, indeed, interpret in his own knowing.

And to make a parenthesis here, simply in passing… this is not in the thread of what I am trying to get you to follow… I must note, I do note, however, that this knowledge is, if I may say so, presupposed of the analyst.

What I have emphasized about the subject supposed to know as grounding the phenomena of transference, I have always underlined that this does not bring any certainty, for the analysand, that his analyst knows much, far from it.

But this is perfectly compatible with the fact that the analyst’s knowledge may be considered highly doubtful by the analysand, which, moreover, it must be added, is frequently the case for very objective reasons: analysts, all in all, do not always know as much as they should, for the simple reason that often they do not do much.

This changes absolutely nothing in the fact that knowledge is presupposed in the function of the analyst and that it is upon this that the phenomena of transference rest. The parenthesis is closed.

So here is the symptom with its translation as truth value. The symptom is truth value and… I point this out to you in passing… the reverse is not true: truth value is not symptom.

It is good to notice this at this point for the reason that truth is nothing of which I claim that its function can be isolated. Its function—and notably where it takes place: in speech—is relative. It is not separable from other functions of speech. All the more reason for me to insist on this: that even when reduced to value, it never in any case coincides with the symptom.

It is around this point, of what the symptom is, that the early days of my teaching revolved, for analysts at this point were in such a fog that the symptom… and after all, perhaps it is owed to my teaching that this is no longer so easily spread about… that the symptom is articulated—I mean: in the mouths of analysts—as the refusal of the so-called truth value.

This has nothing to do with that equivalence in only one direction—I have just insisted on it—of the symptom with a truth value. It brings into play what I will call… what I will call so because we are among ourselves and because I said this was a conversation… what I will call, without further formality, without worrying whether the terms I am about to put forward are already in use at the most advanced point of philosophy… it brings into play the being of a being.

I say being… because it seems clear to me, it seems established—by now—that philosophy goes around in circles on a certain number of points… I say being because it concerns the speaking being.

It is from being-speaking… excuse me for the first being… that it comes to being, in the end, that it has the feeling of it. Naturally it does not arrive there, it fails. But this dimension suddenly opened up of “being,” one can say that for a good while it weighed upon the system, at least for philosophers.

And it would be wrong to make fun, because if it weighed upon the system of philosophers, it is because they weigh upon the system of everyone, and what is indicated in this denunciation by analysts of what they call “resistance,” this around which I waged, during a whole stage of this teaching—of which my Écrits bear the trace—I waged battle for a whole stage, it was indeed to interrogate them on whether they knew what they were doing by bringing in, on the occasion, what one could thus call this: that the being of that damned being of which they speak… not quite indiscriminately, they call it “man” from time to time, in any case it is called less and less so [thus] since I am one of those who make a few reservations about it… this being does not have, with regard to truth, any special tropism. Let us say no more.

So there are two senses of the symptom: the symptom is truth value, it is the function that results from the introduction, at a certain historical time—which I have dated sufficiently—of the notion of symptom. The symptom is not cured in the same way in Marxist dialectic and in psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis, it has to do with something that is the translation, into words, of its truth value.

That this gives rise to what is felt by the analyst as a being of refusal in no way allows us to decide whether this feeling deserves in any way to be retained, since, in other registers as well, precisely the one I evoked earlier, it is to quite different procedures that the symptom must yield.

I am not giving preference to any of these procedures, all the less so since what I want to make you hear is that there is another dialectic than the one attributed to history.

Between the questions:
— “Is psychoanalytic incomprehension a symptom?”,
— and “Is the incomprehension of Lacan a symptom?”,
I would insert a third:

— “Mathematical incomprehension… this is something that can be identified, there are people—and even young people, since it is only interesting to young people—for whom this dimension of mathematical incomprehension, it exists… is it a symptom?”

It is certain that when one is interested in these subjects who show mathematical incomprehension, still fairly widespread in our time, one has the feeling… I have used the word feeling just as before, for what analysts made of resistance… one has the feeling that it arises, in the subject prey to mathematical incomprehension, from something like dissatisfaction, a mismatch, something experienced precisely in the handling of truth value.

Subjects prey to mathematical incomprehension expect more from truth than the reduction to those values called… at least in the first steps of mathematics… deductive values. The so-called demonstrative articulations seem to them to lack something that is precisely at the level of a demand for truth.

This bivalence: true or false, certainly—and let’s say it, not without reason—leaves them bewildered, and up to a certain point one can say that there is a certain distance from truth to what we may call here the figure. The figure is nothing other than the written, the writing of its value.

Whether the bivalence is expressed in different cases as 0 and 1 or as T and F, the result is the same. The result is the same because of something that is required or seems required in certain subjects, of whom you may have noticed I did not speak just now as being in any way a content.

On what grounds would one call it by this term, since content means nothing as long as one cannot say what it is about? A truth has no content, a truth that is said to be one: it is truth or it is semblance [semblance: wordplay with French ‘semblant’ meaning both appearance and simulacrum], a distinction that has nothing to do with the opposition of true and false, for if it is semblance, it is semblance of truth precisely, and what mathematical incomprehension arises from is precisely that the question is raised as to whether truth or semblance, it is not… allow me to say, I will return to this more thoroughly in another context… it is not all one.

In any case, on this point, it is certainly not the logical elaboration that has been made of mathematics that will come into opposition here, for if you read at any point in his texts Mr. Bertrand Russell, who moreover took care to say it in so many words:

“Mathematics is very precisely concerned with statements of which it is impossible to say whether they have a truth, nor even whether they mean anything at all.”

[Bertrand Russell: “Mysticism and Logic”, Paris, Vrin, 2007: “Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”]

This is indeed a rather strong way of saying that all the care he has taken to the rigor of the form of mathematical deduction is certainly something that addresses anything other than truth, but has an aspect that is nonetheless not without relation to it, otherwise there would be no need to so forcefully separate it!

It is certain that—unlike what is the case with mathematics—logic, which precisely strives to justify mathematical articulation with regard to truth, ends up or, more exactly, asserts itself, asserts itself in our era in this propositional logic, of which the least one can say is that it seems strange that, with truth posited as value, as value that marks the denotation of a given proposition, it is posited within the same logic that this proposition can only engender another true proposition. That implication, to put it simply, is defined there by this strange genealogy from which it would follow that, once truth is reached, nothing that it implies could in any way revert to the false.

It is absolutely clear that, however slim the chances may be that a false proposition—which, on the other hand, is quite admitted—engenders a true proposition, after all the time that has been spent on this “going” that we are told is “without return,” by now there should long since have been only true propositions!

In fact, it is singular, it is strange, it is only tolerable by virtue of the existence of mathematics, of their existence independently of logic, that such a statement can even stand for a moment. There is somewhere here a muddle, the kind that certainly leaves mathematicians themselves so little at ease on this point, that all that has actually stimulated this logical research concerning mathematics, all of it, at every point, this research has proceeded from the feeling that non-contradiction could in no way suffice to found truth, which does not mean that it is not desirable, even required. But that it is sufficient—certainly not.

But let us not go further into this—tonight—since this is only an introductory conversation for an approach which is precisely the one I propose this year to have you follow. This muddle around mathematical incomprehension is of a nature to lead us to this idea that here the symptom, mathematical incomprehension, is, in short, love of truth—for its own sake, if I may say so—that conditions it.

It is something else than that refusal I spoke of earlier; it is even the opposite, at a point where, so to speak, the pathetic aspect has been entirely managed to be sidestepped. Only, it does not happen like this at the level of a certain way of presenting mathematics, which, to illustrate that I have made the effort called logical, is nevertheless presented in a manageable, everyday way and without any other logical introduction, in a simple and elementary manner where, as it is said, evidence allows many steps to be skipped.

It is curious that… at the very point, among the young, where mathematical incomprehension appears… it is doubtless from a certain void felt about what is true in what is articulated, that these phenomena of incomprehension arise, and it would be quite wrong to think that mathematics is something that has, in effect, managed to empty everything concerning the relation to truth, its pathos.

Because there is not only elementary mathematics and we know enough history to know the pain, the distress engendered at the moment of their ex-cogitation by the terms and functions of infinitesimal calculus, just to limit ourselves to that.

Even—later—the regularization, the ratification, the logicization of the same terms and methods, even the introduction of a higher and higher, more and more elaborate number of what we must at this level call mathemes. And to know that, certainly, these so-called mathemes in no way involve a retrograde genealogy, they do not involve any possible account for which the term historical would have to be used.

Greek mathematics shows very well the points where even where it had the chance, by the so-called exhaustion procedures, to approach what happened at the moment of the advent of infinitesimal calculus: it nevertheless did not reach it, it did not take the step.

And if it is easy, starting from infinitesimal calculus—or, better said, its perfect reduction—to situate, to classify, but afterwards, what were at once the demonstration procedures of Greek mathematics and also the dead ends that were from the outset perfectly identifiable in hindsight, if that is so, we see that it is absolutely untrue to speak of the matheme as something that in no way would be detached from the demand for truth.

It is indeed through countless debates, debates of speech, that the emergence at each moment in history… and if I spoke of Leibniz and Newton implicitly, even of those who… with incredible daring in I do not know what context of encounter or adventure for which the term “tour de force” or “stroke of luck” comes to mind… preceded them, an Isaac Barrow for example.

And this was repeated in a time very close to our own, with the Cantorian breakthrough, when assuredly nothing was done to diminish what I earlier called the dimension of the pathetic, which in Cantor could go as far as madness—a madness that I do not believe is sufficiently explained simply by saying it was due to career disappointments, oppositions, even insults that Cantor received from the reigning academics of his time. We are not accustomed to finding madness motivated by objective persecutions—certainly everything is done to make us question the function of the matheme.

Mathematical incomprehension must therefore be something other than what I called that demand, that demand which would in some way result from a formal void. Far from it, it is not at all certain, judging by what happens in the history of mathematics, that it is not from some relation of the matheme—even the most elementary—with a dimension of truth that incomprehension arises.

It may be that the most sensitive are those who understand the least. We already have a kind of indication, a notion of this, at the level of dialogues—of what remains of them, of what we can surmise of them—of the Socratic dialogues. After all, there are people for whom, perhaps, the encounter precisely with truth plays that role which the so-called Greeks borrowed as a metaphor; it has the same effect as the encounter with the torpedo fish [note: play on torpedo/torpillage/Greek ‘narke’ meaning both fish and numbness]; it numbs them.

I would point out that this idea, which proceeds—I mean within the metaphor itself—from the contribution, confused no doubt, but that is indeed the function of the metaphor, it is to bring forth a meaning that goes far beyond its means: the torpedo fish and then the one who touches it and falls stiff, it is obviously… one does not yet know it at the moment when the metaphor is made… it is obviously the encounter of two fields not in accord with each other, “field” taken in the strict sense of magnetic field.

I would also point out that everything we have just touched on, which leads to the word field… it is the word I used when I said: Function and field of speech and language… the field is constituted by what I called the other day, with a slip, “lalangue.” This field considered in this way, making incomprehension as such the key, it is precisely this that allows us to exclude all psychology from it.

The fields in question are constituted of the Real, as real as the torpedo fish and the finger—that just touched it—of an innocent. The matheme, it is not because we approach it by the paths of the Symbolic that it is not a matter of the Real.

The truth at stake in psychoanalysis, it is what by means of language—I mean by the function of speech—approaches, but in an approach that is in no way that of knowledge, but, I would say, of something like induction… in the sense that this term has in the constitution of a field… induction of something that is entirely real, even if we can only speak of it as signifier. I mean those which have no other existence than that of signifier.

What am I talking about? Well, nothing other than what are commonly called men and women. We know nothing real about these men and these women as such, for this is what it is about: – it is not about male and female dogs, – it is about what it really is for those who belong to each of the sexes from the perspective of the speaking being.

There is not the slightest shadow of psychology here. Men and women, that is real, but we are not, concerning them, able to articulate the slightest thing in lalangue that has the least relation to this Real.

If psychoanalysis does not teach us this, then what does it say? For it does nothing but go over the same ground! This is what I state when I say that there is no sexual relation for speaking beings.

Because their speech, as it functions, depends on, is conditioned as speech by the following: that this sexual relation is, quite precisely, as speech, forbidden from functioning in any way that would make it possible to account for it.

I am not giving priority to anything in this correlation:

—I am not saying that speech exists because there is no sexual relation, that would be quite absurd,

—I am not saying either that there is no sexual relation because speech is there.

But there is certainly no sexual relation because speech functions at that level which, through psychoanalytic discourse, is discovered as specifying the speaking being, namely the importance, the preeminence, in everything that will make—at its level—sex the semblance, semblance of “guys” and “good women,” as people used to say after the last war. They were not called otherwise: good women. That is not quite how I would speak of them because I am not an existentialist.

In any case, the constitution by the fact that the being, of which we spoke earlier, that this being speaks, the fact that it is only from speech that proceeds this essential point—which is entirely, in this context, to be distinguished from the sexual relation—which is called jouissance, the jouissance called sexual, and which alone determines in the being I am speaking of what is at stake to obtain, namely coupling.

Psychoanalysis confronts us with this: that everything depends on this pivotal point called sexual jouissance and which happens to be—it is only the statements we gather in psychoanalytic experience that allow us to affirm this—which happens to be unable to be articulated in any coupling that is even somewhat lasting, or even fleeting, except by demanding to encounter this, which has dimension only in lalangue and which is called castration.

The opacity of this core called sexual jouissance—and I would point out that its articulation in that register to be explored, called castration, dates only from the historically recent emergence of psychoanalytic discourse—this, it seems to me, is what truly deserves that we set about formulating its matheme, that is to say, that something can be demonstrated otherwise than suffered, suffered in a kind of shameful secret, which, even though it has been made public by psychoanalysis, nonetheless remains just as shameful, just as without resolution.

It is a matter of knowing that the entire dimension of jouissance, namely the relation of this speaking being to his or her body, for there is no other possible definition of jouissance, no one seems to have noticed that it is at this level that the question lies.

What is it, in the animal species, that enjoys its body and how? Certainly we have traces of this among our cousins the chimpanzees, who deparasitize one another with every sign of keenest interest. And then what?

What is it that makes, for the speaking being, this relation of jouissance called sexual so much more elaborated, on account of the following, which is the discovery of psychoanalysis: that sexual jouissance emerges before the maturity of the same name.

This seems enough to make “infantile” everything in that range—short, no doubt, but not without variety—of jouissances described as perverse.

That this is closely related to that curious enigma which means that one cannot act on what seems directly linked to the operation at which sexual jouissance is supposed to aim, that one cannot in any way engage on that path whose routes speech holds without it being articulated in castration.

It is curious, it is curious that never, never before—I do not mean an attempt, because as Picasso used to say, “I do not seek, I find, I do not try, I cut”—before I cut that the key point, the knot point, was lalangue, and in the field of lalangue: the operation of speech.

There is not an analytic interpretation that does not serve to give to any proposition one encounters its relation to a jouissance.

What does psychoanalysis mean? That this relation to jouissance is what speech assures as the dimension of truth.

And even so, it remains assured that it can never fully say it, it can only—as I say—half-say this relation, and forge semblance from it, precisely what is called—without being able to say much about it, precisely one makes something of it but cannot say much about the type—the semblance of what is called a man or a woman.

If, about two years ago, I arrived, on the path I am trying to trace, at articulating what there is of four discourses—not historical discourses, not mythology… the nostalgia of Rousseau, even the Neolithic, these are things that only interest the academic discourse. That discourse is never so much at home as at the level of knowledges that no longer mean anything to anyone, since academic discourse consists in making knowledge into a semblance… what is at stake here are discourses that tangibly constitute something real. This frontier relation between the Symbolic and the Real, we live in it, it’s fair to say.

The Master’s discourse still and always holds! You can see it, I think, clearly enough that I don’t need to point out what I could have done if it amused me, that is, if I were seeking popularity: to show you the tiny turn somewhere that makes it the capitalist’s discourse. It’s exactly the same thing, simply better put together, it works better, you are even more duped! In any case, you don’t even think about it.

Just as for academic discourse, you are in it up to your neck, thinking you are making a stir, the stir of May! Let’s not even mention the hysteric’s discourse, it is scientific discourse itself. This is very important to know in order to make small predictions. It does not diminish at all the merits of scientific discourse.

If there is one thing that is certain, it is that I could only articulate those three discourses [H, U, M] in a kind of matheme because the analytic discourse [A] emerged. And when I speak of analytic discourse, I am not talking to you about something of the order of knowledge; for a long time now, one could have noticed that the discourse of knowledge is a sexual metaphor and drawn its consequence, namely that since there is no sexual relation, there is also no knowledge.

We lived for centuries with a sexual mythology, and of course, a great number of analysts ask for nothing better than to revel in those cherished memories of a time that had no consistency. But that is not what it’s about. What is said… I write in the first line of something I am thinking through to leave with you in a while… what is said is by the fact of being said. Only there is the stumbling block, the stumbling block: everything is there, everything comes from it.

What I call the Hachose [wordplay: ’la chose’ (the thing) with an added H to suggest a gap or break]… I put an H in front so you can see there’s an apostrophe, but really I shouldn’t put one, it should be called la Hachose… in short, the object (a): the object (a) is certainly an object, only in the sense that it finally replaces any notion of the object as supported by a subject. This is not the relation called knowledge.

It is quite curious, when one studies it in detail, to see that this relation of knowledge ended up making one of its terms, the subject in question [S], nothing but the shadow of a shadow, a perfectly vanished reflection.

The object (a) is only an object in the sense that it is there to assert that nothing of the order of knowledge exists without producing it. [S1 → S2 ↓a] This is something completely different from knowing it. That analytic discourse can only be articulated by showing that this object (a), in order for there to be an analyst, requires that a certain operation, which is called the psychoanalytic experience, has made the object (a) appear in the place of semblance:

Naturally, it could not possibly occupy this place if the other elements, reducible within a signifying chain, did not occupy the other places. If the subject [S], and what I call the master signifier [S1], and what I designate as the body of knowledge [S2], were not distributed at the four points of a tetrahedron—which, for your peace of mind, I drew on the board for you as little things that cross like this, inside a square missing one side—it is clear that there would absolutely not be any discourse.

And what defines a discourse, what opposes it to speech, I say… because this is what is the matheme… I say that it is what determines, for the speaking approach, what is determined by the Real.

And the Real I am speaking of is absolutely unapproachable except by a mathematical path, that is, by locating… for this there is no other path than this discourse, the latest of the four, the one I define as analytic discourse and which allows, in a way that it would be excessive to call consistent—quite the contrary—through a gap, specifically that which is expressed in the theme of castration, that one can see from where the Real is secured, upon which all this discourse is based.

The Real I speak of, and this in accordance with everything that is received—but as if by the deaf—received in analysis, namely that nothing is assured about what seems to be the end, the aim of sexual jouissance, that is, copulation, without those steps—very confusedly perceived but never isolated in a structure comparable to that of a logic—which are called castration.

It is precisely in this that the logician’s effort must serve us as a model, even a guide. And don’t make me talk about isomorphism, right? And if somewhere there is a fine little rascal in the university who finds my statements about truth, semblance, jouissance, and surplus-jouissance to be formalist, even hermeneutic, why not?

What is at stake is what is called in mathematics, rather—curiously enough, it is a coincidence—a generating operation. This year we will try, and elsewhere than here, to approach it prudently, from afar and step by step, because on this occasion one should not expect too many sparks to fly, but that will come.

The object (a) I spoke to you about earlier is not an object, it is what allows us to tetrahedrize these four discourses, each of these discourses in its own way.

And of course, this is what cannot be seen—who cannot see it?—curiously enough: the analysts, it is that the object (a)… it is not a point that is localized somewhere among the other four or among the four that they form together… it is the construction, it is the tetrahedral matheme of these discourses.

So the question is this: from where are the “achosic” beings, the aincarnate beings that we all are in various ways, most prey to incomprehension of my discourse? That, it is true, can be asked. Whether it is a symptom or not is secondary.

But what is very certain is that theoretically it is at the level of the analyst that incomprehension of my discourse must predominate. And precisely because it is analytic discourse.

Perhaps this is not the privilege of analytic discourse. After all, even those who have… the one who went the farthest… who obviously missed it because he did not know the object (a)… but who took the Master’s discourse the farthest before I brought the object (a) into the world: Hegel, to name him.

He always told us that if there was someone who understood nothing of the Master’s discourse, it was the Master himself. In which, of course, he remains within psychology, because there is no Master, there is the master-signifier, and the Master follows as best he can.

This in no way promotes the understanding of the Master’s discourse in the Master. In this sense, Hegel’s psychology is correct.

It would also, of course, be very difficult to maintain that the hysteric, at the point where she is placed, that is, at the level of semblance, is best positioned to understand her own discourse. Otherwise, the turn toward analysis would not be needed.

Let’s not talk, of course, about academics! No one ever believed they had the nerve to uphold an alibi as prodigiously manifest as all of academic discourse.

So why should analysts have the privilege of being accessible to what, in their discourse, is the matheme? On the contrary, there are every reason for them to settle into a sort of status whose interest precisely… but these are not things that can be achieved in a day… whose interest could in fact be to demonstrate what results from those inconceivable theoretical elaborations that fill the journals of the psychoanalytic world.

That is not what is important. What matters is to take an interest, and I will no doubt try to tell you what this interest may consist of. It must absolutely be exhausted from every angle.

I have just indicated what the status of the analyst at the level of semblance might be, and it is of course no less important to articulate it in its relation to truth.

And the most interesting thing… it’s the case to say it, it’s one of the only meanings one can give to the word interest… is the relation this discourse has to jouissance. Jouissance, ultimately, is what sustains it, conditions it, justifies it, justifies it precisely by the fact that sexual jouissance…

I would not want to end by giving you the idea that I know what man is. There are surely people who need me to throw them this little fish. I can throw it to them after all, because it does not imply any kind of promise of progress “…or worse.”

I can tell them that it is most probably this, indeed, that specifies this animal species: it is a completely anomalous and bizarre relation to its jouissance. This may have some small implications for biology, why not?

What I simply note is that analysts have not made the slightest progress in the biologizing reference of analysis, I very often emphasize this. They have not advanced it in the least, for the simple reason that it is precisely at the anomalous point where a jouissance—something incredible, there have even been biologists who, in the name of this limping and so mutilated jouissance, castration itself which seems in man to have some relation to copulation, to conjunction then, of what biologically, but of course without it conditioning anything at all in semblance, what in man leads to the conjunction of the sexes—there have been biologists who extended this perfectly problematic relation and spread out for us… there was a whole big book on it, which immediately received the happy patronage of my dear comrade Henry Ey, of whom I spoke last time with the sympathy you could perceive… perversion among animal species.

On what grounds? That animal species copulate, but what proves to us that it is in the name of any jouissance, perverse or not? You really have to be a man to believe that copulating gives you jouissance!

So there are whole volumes on this to explain that there are those who do it with hooks, with their little legs, and then there are those who send the things, the stuff, the sperm into the central cavity like with the bug, I think. And then people marvel: how they must enjoy such things! If we did that to ourselves with a syringe in the peritoneum, it would be voluptuous! It’s with this kind of thing that people think they are building something correct.

Whereas the first thing to grasp is precisely the dissociation, and it is clear that the question, the only question, the very interesting question, is to know how
– something we can, for the moment, call correlative to this disjunction of sexual jouissance,
– something I call “lalangue,” obviously it has a relation to something of the real, but from there to thinking it could lead to mathemes that allow us to build science, well, that is clearly the question.

If we looked a little more closely at how science is put together, I tried to do that once, just a little bit, a small approach: “Science and Truth.”

There was a poor guy once, whose guest I was at the time, who got ill from having heard me on that subject, and after all, that’s where you see my discourse is understood, he was the only one to fall ill! It’s a man who has shown himself in a thousand ways to be not very strong.

Anyway, I have absolutely no kind of passion for the mentally deficient, I distinguish myself in this from my dear friend Maud Mannoni.

But since the mentally deficient are also encountered at the Institute, I don’t see why I should be moved. Anyway, Science and Truth was an attempt to approach a little something like that.

After all, maybe this famous science is made with almost nothing at all. In which case, it would be easier to understand how things, appearance also conditioned by a deficit like “lalangue,” could lead straight to it.

So, these are questions that maybe I will address this year. Anyway, I will do my best… Or worse!