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(All parts in English)

We do not know whether the series is the principle of seriousness. Nevertheless, I find myself confronted with this question of what I obviously cannot continue here, that which elsewhere is defined by my teaching, by what is called my seminar.

If only because not everyone is aware that I hold a little conversation here once a month, and since there are people who sometimes make quite a journey to follow what I say elsewhere under the name of ‘seminar’, well, it would not be fair, I mean with them, to continue here.

So, all in all, the question is to know what I am doing here. It is certain that this is not quite what I expected. I am influenced by this influx which means that those whom I actually called together for something called ‘The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst’ are not at all necessarily absent from here, but are rather drowned out a bit.

To those who are right here, I do not know if, by alluding to this seminar, I am speaking of something they know. They must also consider that, for example, since last time – those I meet here were present – precisely, I have opened this seminar.

I have opened it, and if one is a bit attentive and rigorous, one cannot say it could be done in a single session. Indeed, there have been 2, and that is why I can say I have opened it, because if there had not been a 2nd time, well, there would not have been a 1st. This is of interest to recall something I introduced some time ago concerning what is called repetition.

Repetition can obviously begin only with the 2nd time, which happens… from the fact that if there were no 2nd time, there would not be a 1st… which thus happens to be the one that inaugurates repetition: it is the story of 0 and 1.

Only with the 1 can there be no repetition, so for there to be repetition, for it not to remain open, there must be a 3rd time. This is what one seems to have realized regarding God: He does not begin, it took time to notice or perhaps it was always known but it was not noted, because after all, one can never be sure of anything in that regard, but in any case my dear friend Kojève insisted greatly on this question of the Christian Trinity [‘Trinité’ is a word play on ‘trois’/three].

Be that as it may, there is obviously a world, from the point of view of what interests us… and what interests us is analytic… between the 2nd time which is what I thought necessary to underline in the term ‘nachträg’: the après-coup [retroaction].

These are obviously things that I will not take up here – only in my seminar – I will try to return to them this year. It is important because this is where there is a world between what psychoanalysis brings and what a certain philosophical tradition, which is certainly not negligible, has brought, especially when it comes to Plato who indeed emphasized the value of the dyad. I mean that from it, everything tumbles down. What tumbles down, he must have known, but he did not say.

Be that as it may, it has nothing to do with the analytic nachträg, the second time. As for the 3rd, whose importance I have just underlined, it is not only for us that it takes it, it is for God himself.

At one time, and concerning a certain tapestry that was on display at the Museum of Decorative Arts, which was very beautiful, which I strongly urged everyone to go and see, one sees there The Father and The Son and The Holy Spirit, who were depicted strictly under the same figure, the figure of a rather noble and bearded character, they were 3 looking at each other, it makes a much greater impression than seeing someone facing his own image. From 3 onwards, it begins to make a certain effect.

From our point of view as subjects, what could possibly begin at 3 for God himself? It is an old question that I asked very early on when I began my teaching. I asked it very early and then did not return to it, and I will tell you right away why: it is that it is obviously only from 3 that he can believe in himself.

Because it is rather curious, it is a question that, to my knowledge, has never been asked: “Does God believe in himself?” Yet it would be a good example for us. It is quite striking that this question… which I asked rather early and which I do not believe is vain… apparently has not caused any stir, at least among my coreligionists, I mean those who were educated in the shadow of the Trinity.

I understand that, for others, it did not strike them, but for those, truly, they are “incorreligionigible” [wordplay: cannot be corrected religiously], there is nothing to be done with them. Yet I had there some notable people from the hierarchy that is called “Christian.”

The question arises whether it is because they are in it… which I find hard to believe… that they do not understand anything, or… which is much more likely… that they are of a rather integral atheism so that this question makes no impression on them. It is the solution towards which I lean.

One cannot say that this is what I just called a guarantee of seriousness since it can only be an atheism, in a way a kind of drowsiness, which is quite widespread. In other words, they have not the slightest idea of the dimension of the medium in which there is to swim: they float on the surface – which is not quite the same – they float thanks to the fact that they hold each other’s hand.

So in this way, it ends up forming what is called a network, with everyone holding hands like that. There is a poem by Paul Fort in this genre:

“If all the girls in the world – that is how it begins – …held hands, they could circle the world…”.

It is a crazy idea because, in reality, the girls of the world have never thought of that, the boys, on the other hand… he talks about them as well… the boys are good at that: they all hold hands.

They all hold hands all the more because if they did not hold hands, each would have to face the girl alone, and that they do not like. They have to hold hands.

Girls, that is another matter. They are drawn into it in the context of certain social rites, refer to Dances and Legends of Ancient China, that is chic, it is even Chou King – not shocking – Chou King. This Chou King was written by a certain Granet, who had a kind of genius that had absolutely nothing to do – neither with ethnology, although he was undeniably an ethnologist, – nor with sinology, although he was undeniably a sinologist, so this Granet, then, advanced that in ancient China, girls and boys confronted each other in equal numbers: why not believe it?

In practice, in what we know nowadays:

—the boys always form a certain group, beyond ten, for the reason I explained to you earlier [Laughter], because being alone, each one facing his own, as I explained: it is far too risky.

—For the girls, it is quite another thing. Since we are no longer in the time of the Chou King, they group together in pairs, they make friends with a friend, until they have, of course, snatched a boy from his regiment. Yes, sir! [Laughter]

Whatever you may think, and even if these remarks seem superficial to you, they are founded, founded on my experience as an analyst. When they have diverted a boy from his regiment, naturally they drop the friend, who, by the way, does not manage any worse for it.

Yes! Anyway, all this, I have let myself get a bit carried away. Where do I think I am! [Laughter] It came like that, from thread to needle, because of Granet and this astonishing story of what alternates in the poems of the Chou King: this chorus of boys opposed to the chorus of girls. I let myself be carried away like that, speaking of my analytic experience, on which I made a flash, but it is not the substance of things.

It is not here that I am presenting the substance of things. But where am I, where do I think I am, to speak, after all, to speak of the substance of things. I would almost think I was among human beings, or even tailor-made! That is how it is, and yet that is how I address them.

But that is it, it is talking about my seminar that led me on. Since after all you may be the same people, I spoke as if I were speaking to them, which led me to speak as if I were speaking of you and – who knows? – that leads to speaking as if I were speaking to you. Which, all the same, was not my intention. [Laughter]

It was not at all my intention because, if I came to speak at Sainte-Anne, it was to speak to the psychiatrists, and obviously not all of you are psychiatrists. So, what is certain is that it is a failed act. It is a failed act which at any moment may succeed, that is to say, it may well be that I am speaking to someone after all.

How can one know to whom I am speaking? Especially since, in the end, you count in the matter… though I try… you count at least for this: that I am not speaking from where I intended to speak, since I intended to speak at the Magnan amphitheatre and I am speaking in the chapel.

What a story! Did you hear? Did you hear? I am speaking in the chapel! That is the answer. I am speaking in the chapel, that is to say, to the walls! [Laughter] More and more successful, the failed act! Now I know to whom I have come to speak: to what I have always spoken to at Sainte-Anne, to the walls!

I do not need to go over it again, it has been a while. From time to time, I have come back with a little conference title like “What I Teach…” for example, and then a few others, I am not going to list them. I have always spoken to the walls there.

X – …

Lacan – Who has something to say?

X – We should all leave if you are speaking to the walls.

Lacan – Who… who is speaking to me there? [Laughter]

X – The walls.

Lacan

Now I am going to be able to comment on the fact that, by speaking to the walls, it interests a few people. That is why I just asked who was speaking. It is certain that the walls in what is called, in what used to be called in the days when people were honest, “an asylum,” “the clinical asylum” as it was said, the walls all the same, they are not nothing.

But I would say more: this chapel seems to me a place extremely well-suited for us to grasp what is at stake when I speak of the walls. This kind of concession of secularism to the inmates: a chapel with its complement of chaplains, of course.

It is not that it is remarkable – right? – from an architectural point of view, but after all it is a chapel, a chapel with the arrangement one expects of it.

It is too often omitted that the architect, whatever effort he makes to break free, he is made for that, to make walls. And the walls, indeed… it is still very striking that since, what I was speaking of earlier, namely Christianity, perhaps leans a bit too much toward Hegelianism… but it is made to enclose a void.

How can one imagine what filled the walls of the Parthenon and a few other baubles of that kind of which we have a few crumbling walls left, it is very hard to know. What is certain is that we have absolutely no testimony about it.

We have the feeling that during all that period which we pin with this modern label of paganism, there were things going on in various festivals called [pagan], we have kept the names of what they were because there are Annals that dated things like this:

“At the great Panathenaea Adymantus and Glaucon – you know the rest – met the one named Cephalus.”

What happened there? It is absolutely incredible that we do not have the slightest idea of it! On the other hand, as for the void, we have a great deal, because all that has been left to us, left by a tradition called philosophical, gives a big place to the void.

There was even a certain Plato who made his whole Idea of the world pivot around that, so to speak, it is he who invented “the cave.” He made it into a camera obscura: there was something happening outside, and all of that, passing through a little hole, made all the shadows.

It is curious, perhaps there one might have a little thread, a little trace. It is clearly a theory that lets us put our finger on what the object(a) is about. Suppose that Plato’s cave is these walls where my voice is heard.

It is clear that the walls, that gives me pleasure! And it is in that that you all, and each of you, enjoy by participation. Seeing me speak to the walls is something that cannot leave you indifferent.

And think, suppose Plato had been a structuralist: he would have noticed what the cave really is, namely that it is doubtless there that language was born. You have to reverse the matter, because of course, man has been wailing for a long time, like any little animal, after all they squawk for the mother’s milk.

But to notice that he is capable of doing something that of course he has heard for a long time, in the babbling, the stammering, everything happens, but to choose, he must have noticed
– that the “K”s resonate better from the back, the back of the cave, from the last wall,
– and that the “B”s and the “P”s burst out better at the entrance, that is where he heard their resonance.

I let myself get carried away tonight, since I am speaking to the walls.

One must not believe that what I am telling you means that I have gained nothing else from Sainte-Anne. At Sainte-Anne I only began to speak very late, I mean it had not occurred to me except to fulfill a few trifling duties.

When I was head of the clinic, I would tell a few little stories to the interns, it is even there that I learned to watch my step with the stories I tell.

One day I was telling the story of a patient’s mother, a charming homosexual whom I was analyzing, and having had no choice but to see her arrive – the twisted one in question – she let out this exclamation: “And I who thought he was impotent!” I tell the story, ten people among the – it was not only interns – they recognized her immediately!

It could only have been her! You realize what it means to be a society person! Naturally it caused a stir, because I was reproached for it, when in fact I had said nothing other than that sensational exclamation. Ever since, it has inspired great caution in me when it comes to presenting cases. But anyway, that is another little digression, let’s get back to the thread.

Before speaking at Sainte-Anne, after all, I did many other things there, if only to come and fulfill my function, and of course, for me, for my discourse, everything begins there.

Because it is obvious that if I speak to the walls, I took to it late, that is to say, before hearing what they send back to me, namely my own voice preaching in the wilderness… this is a response to the person – [cf. supra, person X: “We should all leave if you are speaking to the walls”]… well before that, I heard, I heard things that were quite decisive, at least they were for me.

But that is my personal business. I mean that the people here, by virtue of being between the walls, are quite capable of making themselves heard, provided that one has the right ears!

To put it all simply, and to pay tribute to her for something for which, after all, she personally bears no responsibility, it is, as everyone knows, around that patient whom I labeled with the name Aimée… which was not her real name of course… that I was drawn toward psychoanalysis.

She was not the only one, of course. There were a few others before, and there are still quite a few to whom I give the floor. That is what my “presentations of patients” consist of.

It happens that I speak about it afterward with some people who attended this kind of exercise… well, this presentation which consists in listening to them, which, of course, does not happen at every street corner… sometimes, when discussing it afterward… with some people who were there to accompany me, to catch what they could from it… it happens that, in speaking about it afterward, I learn something from it, because it is not immediate, it is necessary, obviously, to tune one’s voice to send it back to the walls.

It is around this that what I will try, perhaps this year, to question will revolve: it is the relationship of something to which I attach great importance, that is to say, logic. I learned very early what logic could make “odious to the world.”

It was at a time when I was practicing a certain Abelard, God knows attracted by I do not know what kind of fly bait! As for me, logic, I cannot say it made me absolutely odious to anyone except to a few psychoanalysts, because after all it is perhaps because I manage to seriously “buffer” its meaning. I succeed all the more easily because I absolutely do not believe in common sense.

There is sense, but there is no common sense. There is probably not one among you who hears me in the same sense. Besides, I strive to ensure that access to this sense is not too easy, so that you must add your own to it, which is a healthy and even therapeutic secretion: secrete sense vigorously and you will see how much easier life becomes!

It is precisely for this reason that I became aware of the existence of the object(a), of which each of you has the seed in potential. What gives it its strength, and at the same time the strength of each of you in particular, is that the object(a) is completely foreign to the question of meaning.

Meaning is a little dab of paint added onto this object(a) with which each of you has your particular attachment. It has nothing to do with meaning or with reason.

The question on the agenda is what reason has to do with what, after all, I must say that many tend to reduce to “réson.” Write: r.é.s.o.n. Write it, do me the favor. It is a spelling by Francis Ponge who, being a poet and being what he is, a great poet, is not without, in this matter, our having to take into account what he tells us. He is not the only one.

It is a very serious question, one I have only seen seriously formulated – besides this poet – at the level of mathematicians, that is to say, what reason… of which we will for now simply note that it starts from the grammatical apparatus… has to do with something that would impose itself, I do not want to say as intuitive… because that would fall back onto the slope of intuition, that is to say, something visual… but with something precisely resonant.

Is it what resonates that is the origin of the “res,” of what makes reality? It is a question that touches, strictly speaking, everything that can be extracted from language as logic. Everyone knows that it is not enough and that for some time now… one could have seen it coming for quite a while, since Plato precisely… mathematics has had to be brought into play.

And it is here, it is here that the question arises of where to center this real to which logical questioning refers us and which is found at the mathematical level.

There are mathematicians who say
– that one cannot ground oneself on this so-called formalist junction, this mathético-logical point of juncture,
– that there is something beyond, to which, after all, all the intuitive references from which mathematics believed it could purify itself do nothing but pay homage,
…and who seek beyond, to which réson – r.é.s.o.n – to appeal for what is at stake, namely the Real.
It is not tonight, of course, that I will be able to tackle the matter.

What I can say is that by a certain detour, which is that of a logic, that I was able to… in a journey that, starting from my patient Aimée, led in the next-to-last year of the seminar to articulate under the title “the four discourses,” towards which the sieve of a certain actuality converges… that I was able, by this route – to do what? – at least to give the reason for the walls.

For whoever inhabits these walls, these walls here, the walls of the clinical asylum, it is appropriate to know that what situates and defines the psychiatrist as such is his situation in relation to these walls, these walls through which secularism has effected in itself the exclusion of madness and what that means.

This can only be approached through the analysis of discourse. In truth, the analysis was so little done before me that it is true to say that there has never been, on the part of psychoanalysts, the least discord that rose up regarding the position of the psychiatrist.

And yet in my “Écrits” one finds collected something I made known before 1950 under the title “Remarks on Psychic Causality,” there I spoke out against any definition of mental illness that would take shelter in this construction of a semblance which, while being labeled “organodynamism,” nevertheless left entirely aside what is at stake in the segregation of mental illness, namely something that is Other, that is linked to a certain discourse, the one I designate as the discourse of the Master.

History still shows that this discourse lived for centuries in a way profitable for everyone, up to a certain turn where it became, due to an infinitesimal shift that went unnoticed by those concerned, what from then on specifies it as “the discourse of the capitalist,” of which we would have no kind of idea if Marx had not undertaken to complete it, to give it its subject: the proletarian.

Thanks to which the discourse of capitalism flourishes wherever the Marxist form of state reigns…

What distinguishes the discourse of capitalism is this: Verwerfung, the rejection, the rejection outside all fields of the symbolic, with the consequences I have already mentioned. The rejection of what? Of castration.

Every order, every discourse, that is akin to capitalism leaves aside what we shall simply call the things of love, my good friends. You see, it is nothing at all!

That is exactly why two centuries after this shift… let us call it “Calvinist,” after all, why not?… castration finally made its irruptive entry in the form of the analytic discourse.

Naturally, analytic discourse has not yet even managed to provide the slightest outline of an articulation for it, but at least it has multiplied the metaphor and has realized that all the metonymies spring from it.

This is in the name of which… carried along by a kind of, a sort of hubbub that arose somewhere among the psychoanalysts… I was led to introduce what was obvious in the psychoanalytic novelty, namely that it was a matter of language and that it was a new discourse.

As I told you, finally the object(a) in person, that is, this position in which one cannot even say that the analyst places himself: he is placed there, he is placed there by his analysand. The question I raise is: how can an analysand ever want to become an analyst. It is unthinkable!

They arrive there… like the marbles in certain backgammon games you know well, that end up falling into the thing… they get there without the slightest idea of what is happening to them. Well, once they are there, there they are, and at that moment, something does nonetheless awaken, and that is why I have proposed it as a subject for study.

Whatever the case, at the time when this whirlwind among the marbles took place, one cannot say in what joy I wrote “Function and Field of Speech and Language.”

How did it come about that I welcomed… among all sorts of other sensible things… a sort of motto in the style of a refrain, which you will find in… you just have to look in part IV, as far as I recall, something I found in an almanac, it was called: Paris in the Year 2000.

It is not without talent! It is not without talent, though one has never heard again of the name of the fellow, whose name I cite – I am honest – and who relates this thing that has… well, that finds itself in this story of “Function and Field…” like a hair in the soup, it starts like this:

“Between man and woman, there is love,
Between man and love,…

You never noticed that, did you, in its thing!

…there is a world.

Between man and the world, there is a wall.” [Antoine Tudal in “Paris in the Year 2000”]

You see, I had foreseen what I would say to you this evening: “I speak to the walls!” You will see, it has no relation to the following chapter [Laughter], but I could not resist it.

As here I am speaking to the walls, I am not giving a lecture, so I am not going to tell you what in Jakobson is enough to justify that these six little doggerel lines are nonetheless poetry, proverbial poetry, because it hums along:

“Between man and woman, there is love…

• But of course! There is only that, even!

…Between man and love, there is a world…

It is always what people say: “there is a world,” like that “there is a world” means: You! you’ll never get there! Casually, at the beginning: “Between man and woman, there is love,” it means that [Lacan claps his hands] it fits, a world floats, right!

But with “there is a wall” then you have understood that “between” means “interposition.” Because it is very ambiguous, the “between.”

Elsewhere, in my seminar, we will talk about mesology, what has the function of “between,” but here we are in poetic ambiguity and it must be said, it is worth it. Réson! Erase réson! [from the board] Love.

Love is there: there, the little circle [in blue]. Good! What I have just traced for you on the board, this board that turns, is one way among others of representing the Klein bottle.

It is a surface that has certain topological properties about which those who are not informed will inquire; it resembles a Möbius strip a lot, that is to say, simply what you get by twisting a little strip of paper and sticking the thing together after a half-turn.

Only there, it makes a tube, it is a tube that at a certain place turns back on itself. I am not telling you this is the topological definition of the thing, it is a way of picturing it that I have used enough for part of the people here to know what I am talking about.

So, you see, since the hypothesis is that, between man and woman it should make, as Paul Fort said earlier, a circle, so I put man on the left, pure convention, woman on the right, I could have done the opposite.

Let’s try to see topologically what pleased me in these six little lines of Antoine Tudal, to name him.

“Between man and woman, there is love.”

It communicates in full tube. There, you see, it circulates! It is shared, the flow, the influx and everything else added when one is obsessional, for example oblationality, that sensational obsessional invention.

Well! So love is there: the little circle, the little circle that is there everywhere, except that there is a place where it is going to turn back, and dramatically so!

But let us stick to the first stage: between man (on the left), woman (on the right), there is love, it is the little circle. This person I told you was named Antoine, do not think that I ever say a word too many, it is to let you know that he was of the male sex, so he sees things from his side.

It is a matter of seeing what is going to be there now… how we can write it… what will be between man, that is to say him, the “poet”… the “poet of Poasia,” as dear Léon-Paul Fargue used to say… what is there between him and love?

Will I be forced to go back to the board? You saw that it was a somewhat shaky exercise. Well! Well, not at all, not at all… because anyway, on the left, he occupies all the space. So what there is between him and love is precisely what is on the other side, that is, the right part of the diagram.

“Between man and love, there is a world”

That is to say, it covers the territory first occupied by the woman, where I wrote F on the right side. That is why the one we will call the man on this occasion, he imagines he “knows” the world – in the biblical sense, like that – that he “knows” the world, that is, quite simply this kind of dream of knowledge which comes to take the place of what was there in that little diagram, marked with the F of woman.

What allows us to see topologically exactly what is at stake is that, then, when we are told: “between man and the world,” this world substituted for the volatilization of the sexual partner… how did that come about, that is what we will see later… well “there is a wall,” that is, the place where this turning back occurs, this turning back that I introduced one day as signifying the junction between truth and knowledge. I did not say, myself, that it was cut, it is a poet from Papua who says it is a wall.

It is not a wall: it is simply the place of castration. What makes it so that knowledge leaves the field of truth intact, and reciprocally. Only what needs to be seen is that this wall is everywhere, because what defines this surface is that the circle or the point of turning back—let’s say the circle since I represented it as a circle—is homogeneous across the whole surface.

It is even what makes it mistaken to imagine it as an intuitively representable surface. If I were to show you right away the kind of cut that would suffice to volatilize this surface… as specifically, topologically defined… to volatilize it instantly, you would see that it is not a surface one can picture, but that it is something defined by certain coordinates… let’s call them, if you like, vectorial… such that at each point of the surface the turning back is always there, at each of its points.

So that, as for the relationship between man and woman and all that results from it with respect to each partner, namely his or her position as well as his or her knowledge, castration is everywhere. Love, love, whether it communicates, whether it flows, whether it surges, whether it is love, indeed!

Love, the good the mother wants for her son, the “(a)mur” [wordplay: ‘mur’=wall, ‘amour’=love, ‘a’ in parentheses], you only need to put the (a) in parentheses to recover what we touch with our finger every day: even between mother and son, the relation the mother has with castration, that counts for something!

Perhaps, to get a sound idea of what love is, maybe one would have to start from the fact that, when it is played out, but seriously between a man and a woman, it is always with the stakes of castration. That is what is castrating. And what passes through this pass of castration, that is something we will try to approach by somewhat rigorous paths: they can only be logical, and even topological.

Here I am speaking to the walls, even to the “(a)walls” [(a)murs] and to the (a)wallings, elsewhere I try to account for it. And whatever the use of walls for maintaining the form of the voice, it is clear that the walls, no more than anything else, can have any intuitive support, even with all the architect’s art as a key.

Curiously, when I defined those 4 discourses I spoke of earlier and which are so essential for situating what, whatever you do, you are always in some way the subjects of, and subjects, I mean “supposed” subjects, supposed to what is happening of a signifier, of which it is clear that it is the master of the game, and that you are only… with respect to something that is other, not to say the Other… that you are only the supposed subject. You do not give it meaning, you do not have enough of your own for that, but you give it a body, to this signifier that represents you, the Master-signifier!

Well, what you are in there, shadows of shadow, do not imagine that the substance, which it has always been your dream to attribute to yourselves, is anything other than that enjoyment from which you are cut off.

How can one not see what is similar in this “substantial” invocation and that incredible myth, of which Freud himself became the reflection, of sexual enjoyment, which is indeed that object that runs, that runs like in the game of the ferret, but of which no one is capable of stating the status except as the supreme status, precisely: it is the supreme of a curve to which it gives its meaning, and also very precisely the supreme which escapes it.

And it is in being able to articulate the spectrum of so-called “sexual” jouissances that psychoanalysis takes its decisive step. What it demonstrates is precisely that the jouissance one could call sexual… which would not be a semblance of the sexual… that one is marked by the index… nothing more for now… of what is only stated, only announced, by the index of castration.

The walls, before taking on status, before taking on form, it is logically that I reconstruct them:

→ → →

These S, S1, S2, and this a with which I have, for you over the past months, played around, that is all the same the wall. Behind which, of course, you can put the sense of what concerns us, of what we think we know what it means: truth and semblance, jouissance, surplus-jouissance.

But all the same, in relation to what does not need walls to be written, these terms like 4 cardinal points with respect to which you must situate what you are, it may well be, after all, that the psychiatrist might realize that the walls to which he is bound by a definition of discourse… For what is it that he is to deal with? It is not with any other illness than that which is defined by the law of 30 June 1838, namely: “someone dangerous for themselves and for others.”

It is very curious, this introduction of danger in the discourse on which social order is founded. What is this danger?

– “Dangerous for themselves,” well, society lives only by that,

– and “dangerous for others,” God knows that every freedom is left to each in that sense.

When I see, these days, protests rise up against the use that is made… to call things by their name and move quickly, it is late… in the U.S.S.R. of asylums, or of something that must have a more pretentious name, to shelter, let us say, opponents, it is quite clear that they are dangerous for the social order into which they insert themselves.

What separates, what distance, between the way of opening the doors of the psychiatric hospital in a place where the capitalist discourse is perfectly consistent with itself, and in a place like ours where it is still in its infancy?

The first thing that perhaps psychiatrists… if there are any here… might receive, I do not say from my speech, which has nothing to do with the matter, but from the reflection of my voice on these walls, is first to know what distinguishes them as psychiatrists.

That does not prevent them, within the limits of these walls, from hearing something other than my voice. The voice, for example, of those who are interned here since, after all, it might lead somewhere, even to forming a true idea of what the object(a) is. Why not?

I have shared with you this evening, all in all, a few reflections, and of course these are reflections from which my person as such cannot be excluded. It is what I hate most in others. Because after all, among the people who listen to me from time to time and who are called for that – God knows why – “my students,” it cannot be said that they deprive themselves of reflecting on themselves.

The wall can always serve as a “mirror” [wordplay: ‘muroir’ from ‘mur’=wall and ‘miroir’=mirror]. That is no doubt why I have come back like this, to tell stories at Sainte-Anne. It is not, strictly speaking, to ramble, but still, these walls, I have carried something of them on my heart.

If I can, over time, have succeeded in establishing… with my barred S [S], my S subscript 1 [S1], my S subscript 2 [S2], and the object(a), …the “réson” of being… however you choose to write it… perhaps after all you will not take the reflection of my voice on these walls as a simple personal reflection.

[the réson of what is faulty in reason]