🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I will therefore continue a little on the theme of the Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst. I am only doing so here in the parenthesis that I have already, the first two times, opened.

I told you that it was here that I had agreed… at the request of one of my students …to speak again this year for the first time since 63.

Last time I told you something that resonated in harmony with what encloses us: ‘I speak to the walls!’.

It is true that I provided a commentary on this remark: a certain little diagram, the one taken from the Klein bottle, which was meant to reassure those who, because of this formula [‘I speak to the walls’], might have felt excluded.

As I have explained at length, what is addressed to the walls has the property of reverberating. That I speak to you in this indirect way was certainly not meant to offend anyone, since after all, it can be said that this is not a privilege unique to my discourse!

Today I would like to shed some light on this wall… which is not at all a metaphor …to clarify what I can say elsewhere.

Because, obviously, it will be justified, in order to speak of Knowledge, that it is not at my seminar that I do so. For it is not just any Knowledge, but the Knowledge of the psychoanalyst. That’s it!

To introduce things a little, to suggest a dimension to some, I hope, I will say: that one cannot ‘speak of love’… as they say, except in a foolish or abject way, which is an aggravation: ‘abject’ is how it is spoken of in psychoanalysis …that one cannot ‘speak of love’, but that one can write about it: that should make an impression.

The letter, the letter ‘of (a)wall’… to follow up on that little ballad in six lines that I commented on here last time …it is clear that it would have to bite its own tail, and that if it begins:

‘Between the man… of whom no one knows what he is Between the man and love, there is the woman’

and then as you know it continues… I will not repeat it today …and it should end at the end, at the end there is the wall:

‘between the man and the wall, there is…’

…precisely the (a)wall, the letter of love.

What is best in what gets crushed somewhere, this curious impulse we call love, is the letter. It is the letter that can take on strange forms.

There was a guy, like that, 3000 years ago, who was certainly at the acme of his successes, of his successes in love, who saw something appear on the wall that I have already commented on… I will not go over it again …’Mene, Mene…’ – as it was said – ‘…Tekel, Upharsin.’ [מנא מנא תקל ופרסין], which usually – I do not know why – is rendered: ‘Mene, Thecel, Phares’.

When the letter of love reaches us… Because, as I have sometimes explained, letters always arrive at their destination, fortunately they arrive too late, besides being rare. It also happens that they arrive on time: these are the rare cases when appointments are not missed. There are not many cases in history where this has happened, as with that Nebuchadnezzar.

As an introduction, I will not go further into the matter, reserving the right to return to it. For this (a)wall, as I present it to you, is not very amusing.

Now, I cannot sustain myself except by amusing, whether it be serious amusement or comic amusement: what I explained last time is that serious amusements would take place elsewhere, in a place where I am sheltered, and that here I reserved comic amusements.

I do not know if this evening I will quite be up to the task, perhaps because of this introduction on the letter of (a)wall. Nevertheless, I will try.

Two years ago, I explained something which, once it passed, as it were, into the great rubbish channel, took the name quadripode. I was the one who chose this name and you can only wonder why I gave it such a strange name: why not ‘quadruped’ or ‘tetrapod’, which would have had the advantage of not being hybrid.

But in truth I asked myself the same question when I wrote it, I kept it, I do not know why, then I asked myself afterward what, in my childhood, such hybrid terms were called: half-Latin, half-Greek. I am sure I once knew how purists call this, and then I forgot.

Is there anyone here who knows how we designate the terms made, for example, like the word ‘sociology’ or ‘quadripode’, from a Latin element and a Greek element? I implore, let whoever knows it, state it! Well, that is not encouraging!

Because since yesterday—yesterday, meaning it was the day before yesterday—that I started searching for it, and as I still could not find it, since yesterday I have called about a dozen people who seemed to me the most likely to give me this answer. Well, never mind!

My ‘quadripode’ in question, I called them that to give you the idea that one can sit on it… just to, since I was in the mass media, reassure people a little …but in reality, I explain inside, regarding what I have isolated from the 4 discourses: these 4 discourses result from the emergence of the latest one, the discourse of the analyst.

The discourse of the analyst brings indeed… in a certain current state of thought …an order through which other discourses, which emerged much earlier, are illuminated.

I have arranged them according to what is called a topology. A topology of the simplest kind, but which is nonetheless a topology, in the sense that it can be mathematized. And it is so in the most rudimentary way, namely that it is based on the grouping of no more than 4 points that we will call “monads.”

It may not seem like much, yet it is so deeply inscribed in the structure of our world that there is no other foundation for the fact of the space we live in. Notice this well: that to place 4 points at equal distance from each other is the maximum you can do in our space. You will never be able to place five points at equal distance from each other.

This small form that I have just recalled here is there to give a sense of what is at stake: if the quadripodes are not tetrahedrons but tetrads, the fact that the number of vertices is equal to that of the faces is linked to the same “arithmetical triangle” that I drew at my last seminar [19-01-1972].

As you see, sitting down is not exactly restful: neither for one nor for the other.

The position on the left you are used to, so much so that you no longer even feel it, but the one on the right is no more comfortable: imagine yourself sitting on a tetrahedron set on its tip. Yet it is from there that one must begin for everything that concerns the kind of social base that rests on what is called a discourse. And it is this that I specifically advanced in my seminar before last but one.

The tetrahedron—to call it by its present aspect—has curious properties: if it is not, like that one, regular… the equal distance is only there to remind you of the properties of the number four, with regard to space …if it is arbitrary, it is strictly impossible to define a symmetry in it.

Nevertheless, it has this peculiarity: if its sides, namely those small lines you see connecting what are called vertices in geometry, if you vectorize these little lines, that is, you assign them a direction, it is enough for you to set as a principle that none of the vertices will be privileged by this… which would necessarily be a privilege, since if it happened, there would be at least two that could not benefit from it …so if you state:
– that nowhere can there be a convergence of three vectors,
– nor anywhere a divergence of three vectors from the same vertex,
then you necessarily obtain the following distribution:
– two incoming, one outgoing,
– two incoming, one outgoing,
– one incoming, two outgoing,
– one incoming, two outgoing.

That is to say, all so-called tetrahedrons will be strictly equivalent, and in every case you will be able, by removing one of the sides, to obtain the formula by which I schematized my 4 discourses:

According to this, which has a property, from one of the vertices: divergence, but without any vector arriving to nourish it, but conversely, on the opposite side you have this triangular path. This is enough to allow in every case, by a character that is absolutely specific, to distinguish these four poles that I state as the terms of Truth, the Semblant, jouissance, and the surplus-jouissance [plus-de-jouir].

This is the fundamental topology from which every function of speech emerges and which deserves to be commented on. It is indeed a question that the discourse of the analyst is well suited to raise, that of knowing what the function of speech is.

‘Function and field of speech and language…’, this is how I introduced what was to bring us to this present point of defining a new discourse. Certainly not that this discourse is mine: at the moment I am speaking to you, this discourse has, for almost three quarters of a century, been well and truly established.

It is not a reason, because the analyst himself is capable, in certain areas, of refusing what I say of it, that he is not the support of this discourse. And in truth, ‘being support’ here only means ‘being supposed.’ But that this discourse can take on meaning from the very voice of someone who is in it—that is my case—just as much a subject as any other, that is precisely what deserves our attention, in order to know from where this meaning is drawn.

Hearing what I have just put forward, the question of meaning may well seem to you not to pose any problems, I mean it seems that the discourse of the analyst calls sufficiently upon interpretation that the question does not even arise.

In fact, on a certain analytic scribble, it seems that one can read… and this is not surprising, you will see why …all the ‘meanings’ one wants, right up to the most archaic; I mean, as if there were an echo there, the eternal repetition of what, from the depths of the ages, has come to us under the term ‘meaning’, in forms of which it must be said that it is only their superimposition that makes sense.

For what is it due that we understand anything at all of the symbolism used in Holy Scripture, for example? To compare it with a mythology, whatever it may be, everyone knows that this is one of the most misleading forms of sliding. No one, for some time now, has been dwelling on this. When one seriously studies what is at stake in mythologies, it is not to their meaning that one refers, but to the combinatory of mythemes. Refer to studies on this point whose author, I think, I do not have to recall to you once more. So the real question is indeed to know where this ‘meaning’ comes from.

I have made use… because it was truly necessary …I have made use… to introduce what concerns analytic discourse, …I have used without scruple what is called the linguistic pathway.

And to temper the zeal that around me might have arisen too soon, sending you back to the usual mire, I recalled that nothing has been sustained… worthy of the title ‘linguistics’ as a science …that nothing has been sustained that seems to have language as such, or even speech, as its object, that it has only been sustained on condition that the linguists among themselves swore never, ever again… because that is all they had done for centuries …never again, not even remotely, to allude to the origin of language. That was, among other things, one of the watchwords I had given to that form of introduction articulated by my formula ‘The unconscious is structured like a language.’

When I say that it was to spare my audience a certain equivocal mire, it is not I who use this term; it is Freud himself, and precisely in connection with so-called ‘Jungian’ archetypes. Certainly it is not to lift that ban now: it is absolutely not a question of speculating on any origin of language. I have said that the question is to formulate the function of speech.

The function of speech—I stated this a very long time ago—is to be the only form of action that presents itself as truth. What is it, not what is speech, which is a superfluous question—not only do I speak, you speak, and even it speaks, as I have said, it happens all by itself, it is a fact, I would even say it is the origin of all facts, because nothing takes its place as fact until it is said.

Let it be noted that I did not say ‘when it is spoken’; there is something distinct between speaking and saying. A speech that founds the fact, that is a saying, but speech functions even when it founds no fact: when it commands, when it begs, when it insults, when it expresses a wish, it does not found any fact.

Today, here we can… these are not things I would go and produce over there, in the other place where fortunately I say more serious things …here, because it is involved in that seriousness that I always develop in a sharper way, and by always remaining at the said point as in my last seminar… I hope that next time there will be fewer people: it was not fun …but at least here we can laugh a little, these are comic amusements.

In the order of comic amusement, speech—it’s not for nothing that in cartoons it is depicted for you on banners: speech is like where it rises… banner or not! [wordplay: “bande” = band/strip/banner, “bander” = to become erect]

It’s not for nothing that it establishes the dimension of truth, because truth, the true one, true truth, truth as it came to be glimpsed only with analytic discourse, is that what this discourse reveals to anyone who simply engages in it in an axising way as analysand, is that… excuse me for returning to this term, but since I started, I will not abandon it …is that to have an erection… that’s what, over there, at the Place du Panthéon, I call out! …is that to have an erection has nothing to do with sex, not with the other, in any case!

To have an erection—we are here between walls—’to have an erection for a woman’, we must at least call it by its name, it means giving her the function, it means taking her as phallus. The phallus is not nothing!

I have already explained to you, over there where it is serious, I explained to you what it does. I told you that ‘the meaning of the phallus’ is the only case of a fully balanced genitive, it means that the phallus… it is what was explained to you this morning, I say this for those who are a little informed …it is what Jakobson explained to you this morning: the phallus is the meaning, it is that by which language signifies. There is only one Bedeutung, it is the phallus.

Let us start from this hypothesis, it will explain to us very broadly the whole function of speech. For it is not always applied to denote facts… that is all it can do, one does not denote things, one denotes facts …but it is entirely by chance, from time to time.

Most of the time it supplements the fact that the phallic function is precisely what makes it so that in Man there are only the relationships you know—bad ones—between the sexes. Whereas everywhere else, at least for us, it seems to go ‘smoothly’.

So that is why in my little quadripode you see at the level of truth two things, two vectors that diverge: – which expresses that jouissance, which is at the very end of the right branch, is a jouissance certainly phallic, but which cannot be called sexual jouissance, – and that in order for any of these strange animals, those who are prey to speech, to be maintained, there must be that pole there, which is correlative to the pole of jouissance as obstacle to the sexual relation: it is this pole that I designate as the semblant.

It is also clear for a partner, at least if we dare, as is done every day, to pin them down by their sex, it is obvious that the man, like the woman, each is pretending in that role. But in the end, these are stories they tell themselves.

But the important thing, at least when it comes to the function of speech, is that the poles are defined:

– that of the semblant,

– and that of jouissance.

If in man… what we imagine in a purely gratuitous way …there were a jouissance specified by sexual polarity, we would know it! Perhaps there was knowledge of it, entire ages boasted of it, and after all we have numerous testimonies, unfortunately purely esoteric, that there were times when people truly believed they knew how to handle it.

A certain Van Gulik, whose book seemed excellent to me, who picks from here and there… of course, like everyone, he draws more closely from what is found in the Chinese written tradition …whose subject is ‘sexual knowledge’, which is not very extensive, I assure you, nor very enlightening! But anyway, take a look at it if it amuses you: ‘Sexual Life in Ancient China.’ I challenge you to find anything in it that could serve you [Laughter] in what I called earlier the current state of thought!

The interest in what I am pointing out is not to say that things have always been the same as the point we have reached. Perhaps there were, perhaps there still are somewhere—even so, it is curious, it is always in places where one really has to show white credentials to get in—places where there occurs between man and woman this harmonious conjunction that would have them reach seventh heaven, but it is nevertheless very curious that one only ever hears of it from the outside.

On the other hand, it is quite clear that, through one of the ways I define it, it is rather with the big Φ that each one has a relation than with the other, this becomes fully confirmed as soon as one looks at what is called, by a term that fits so well, thanks to the ambiguity of Latin or Greek, what are called ‘homos’… ecce homo, as I used to say [Laughter] …it is absolutely certain that ‘homos’ get hard much better and more often, and more firmly.

It’s curious, but after all, it’s still a fact about which, for anyone who has heard a bit about it for some time, there is no doubt. Don’t be mistaken though: there is homo and ‘homo’, right! [Laughter] I’m not talking about André Gide! Don’t think that André Gide was a homo!

That brings us to what follows. Let’s not lose the thread, we are dealing with ‘meaning’. For something to have meaning in the current state of thought, sadly, it must present itself as normal.

That is precisely why André Gide wanted homosexuality to be normal. And as you may have heard echoes, in this sense, there is a crowd: in no time, it will fall under the bell jar of normal, to the point that we will have new clients in psychoanalysis who will come and say: ‘I’m coming to see you because I don’t pedal normally!’ [Laughter] It’s going to become a traffic jam! [Laughter]

And analysis started from there! If the notion of normal had not, following the accidents of history, acquired such an extension, it would never have come to be. All the patients, not only those taken by Freud, but it is very clear from reading him that it was a condition: to enter analysis, at the beginning, the minimum was to have a good university education. It’s said quite clearly in Freud. I must emphasize this, because the university discourse, about which I have said a lot of bad things, and for the best reasons, but still, it is what nourishes analytic discourse.

You understand, you can no longer imagine… this is to make you imagine something, if you are capable of it, but who knows, with the training of my voice …you cannot even imagine what it was, an area of time which is called for this reason ‘antique’, where the δοχα [doxa], you know the famous δοχα that is mentioned in the ‘Meno’, ‘but no, but no’ [Laughter], there was δοχα that was not academic.

Nowadays, there is not a δοχα, however futile, however limping, hobbling, or even stupid it may be, that is not found somewhere in a university curriculum! There is no example of an opinion, however stupid it may be, that is not identified, even… on the occasion that it is identified …taught. Well, that distorts everything!

Because when Plato speaks of δοχα [doxa] as something he literally does not know what to do with, he, a philosopher who seeks to establish a science, realizes that δοχα, the δοχα he encounters at every street corner, there are true ones.

Naturally, he is unable to say why, just like any philosopher, but no one doubts that they are true, because truth asserts itself. That created a context that was completely different from anything called philosophy, that δοχα was not standardized. There is not a trace of the word “norm” anywhere in ancient discourse. It is we who invented that, and naturally by searching for a Greek word of exceedingly rare usage!

One must nonetheless start from there to see that the discourse of the analyst did not appear by chance! We had to reach the ultimate state of extreme urgency for it to emerge.

Of course, since it is a discourse of the analyst, it takes… like all my discourses, the four I have named …the meaning of the objective genitive: – the discourse of the Master is the discourse about the Master, as was well seen at the acme of the philosophical epic in Hegel. – The discourse of the analyst is the same: we are talking about the analyst, he is the object (a), as I have often emphasized. This does not make it easy for him, naturally, to fully grasp his position, but on the other hand, it is most restful since it is that of the semblant.

So our Gide… to continue the braid: I take up Gide, then I will let him go, then we will take him up together, and so on …our Gide here, because he is still exemplary, does not get us out of our little business, far from it!

His business is a matter of being desired, as we commonly find in analytic exploration. There are people for whom this was missing in their early childhood, being desired. That drives them to do things so that it will happen to them later on. It is even very widespread.

But one must nonetheless clearly split things apart. It is not without connection, not at all, with discourse. These are not words that come out just anywhere during Carnival. Discourse and desire, here, have the closest connection.

It is even for this reason that I managed to isolate—at least, I believe so—the function of the object (a). It is a key point which, I must say, has not yet been much taken advantage of; it will come slowly. The object (a) is that by which the speaking being, when caught up in a discourse, is determined.

He does not know at all that what determines him is the object (a). In what way is he determined? He is determined as a subject, that is to say, he is divided as subject: he is the prey of desire.

It seems to happen in the same place as subverting words, but it is not at all the same, it is completely regular, it produces—it is a production!—it produces mathematically, so to speak, this object (a) as the cause of desire.

This is still what I have called, as you know, the metonymic object: that which runs all through what unfolds as discourse, discourse more or less coherent, until it hits a wall and the whole affair ends in fiasco.

Nonetheless, it remains that it is from there—and that is what is of interest—that we get the idea of cause. We believe that in nature, everything must have a cause, under the pretext that we are caused by our own bla-bla-bla. Yeah!

All the features are present in André Gide for things to be just as I have told you. It is above all his relation with the supreme Other: you must not believe at all, not at all, just like that, despite all he may have said, that it had no effect, the big Other.

Where it takes shape, the (a), he even had a notion of it entirely specified, it is in knowing that the pleasure of this big Other was to disturb that of all the little [others]!

As a result, he understood very well that there was a point of worry there that obviously saved him from the abandonment of his childhood. All his teasing with God was something strongly compensatory for someone who had such a bad start. It’s not his privilege [sic]. Yeah…

Once, long ago, I began… I only gave one lesson, a “seminar” as they call it …something on the Name of the Father.

Naturally, I began with the Father himself. I spoke for an hour, an hour and a half, about the jouissance of God. If I said it was a “mystical jesting,” it was so I would never speak of it again.

It is certain that since there has been a God, one and only, in short, the God who emerged from a certain historical era, it is precisely that one, the one who disturbs the pleasure of others. That is the only thing that counts.

– There were the Epicureans, who did everything to teach the method not to let oneself be disturbed in one’s own pleasure: and well, that failed!

– There were others who called themselves Stoics and said: “But on the contrary, one must rush toward divine pleasure.” But that fails too, you know, it only plays between the two.

It is the annoyance that counts! With that, you are all in your natural zone. You certainly do not experience jouissance, that would be an exaggeration to say, especially since, in any case, it’s too dangerous, but still, you cannot say you have no pleasure, right! That is even what the primary process is founded on.

All this brings us back up against the wall: what is “meaning”? Well, it is better to start again at the level of pleasure, the pleasure that the other gives you, it is common, we even call it—in a nobler zone—art (l, apostrophe) [Laughter].

This is where one must pay careful attention to the wall, because there is a well-illuminated zone of “meaning.” Well-illuminated for example by one called Leonardo da Vinci, as you know, who left some manuscripts and small odds and ends, not so much—he did not fill museums—but he did say profound truths, of which everyone should always remember.

He said: “Look at the wall”—like me… then, since that time, he has become the Leonardo of families, they give away his manuscripts as gifts. There is a luxury edition—even I was given a pair, can you imagine, but that does not mean they are unreadable [Laughter] …so he explains to you: “Look closely at the wall” as here, it’s a bit dirty.

If it were better maintained, there would be damp stains and maybe even mold. Well, if you believe Leonardo: if there is a mold stain, it is a fine occasion to transform it into a madonna or a muscular athlete… that works even better, because in the mold, there are always shadows, hollows …that’s very important: to notice that there is a class of things on walls, that lends itself to the figure, to the creation of art, as they say. It is figurative itself, the stain in question.

One must nonetheless know the relationship between that and something else that can appear on the wall, namely, the scouring, not just of speech… although it happens, that is how it always begins …but of discourse. In other words: is it of the same order, the mold on the wall or the writing?

That should interest here a certain number of people who, I think, not so long ago—it’s starting to get old—were very busy writing things, love letters, on the walls. That was a really beautiful time. There are those who never got over the time when one could write on the walls and where, from something at Publicis, it was deduced that “the walls had speech.” As if that could happen!

I would simply like to point out that it would be better if there were never anything written on the walls. What is already written there should even be removed. – “Liberty – Equality – Fraternity,” for example, is indecent! – “No smoking,” that is impossible, especially since everyone smokes, there is a tactical error there.

I already said it earlier about the letter of (a)wall: everything that is written reinforces the wall. That is not necessarily an objection. But what is certain is that one must not believe it to be absolutely necessary. But it is still useful, because if nothing had ever been written on a wall—this one or any other—well, the fact is, we would not have taken a single step toward what perhaps must be looked at beyond the wall.

You see, there is something I will be led to speak to you about this year: it is the relationship between logic and mathematics. Beyond the wall… to tell you immediately …there is, to our knowledge, only this Real which is precisely marked by the impossible, by the impossibility of reaching it beyond the wall. And yet, it remains the Real.

How could we have come to have an idea of it? It is certain that language has served us to some extent for this. That is even why I try to make this little bridge, the beginning of which you have seen in my recent seminars, namely: how does the One make its entrance?

This is what I have already expressed for three years with symbols: S1 and S2: – the first, I designated as such so you would hear in it something of the Master-signifier – and the second, of knowledge.

But would there be S1 if there were not S2? This is a problem, because they must be 2 first so that there can be S1. I addressed the thing in the last seminar, showing you that in any case they are at least 2 even for only one to emerge: 0 and 1, as they say: that makes 2. But that is in the sense in which it is said to be insurmountable.

Nevertheless, it is crossed when one is a logician, as I have already indicated by referring to Frege. But in the end, I hope it appeared to you that it was crossed with a light step, and that I indicated to you at that moment—I will come back to it—that there was perhaps more than a small step. The important point is not there.

It is very clear that someone whom you heard about for the first time this morning—René Thom, who is a mathematician. He does not agree that logic… that is, the discourse that is held on the wall …is something that is even sufficient to account for number, the first step of mathematics.

On the other hand, he seems to be able to account, not only for what is traced on the wall… that is nothing other than life itself, it starts with mold as you know …to account by number, algebra, functions, topology, to account for what happens in the field of life.

I will come back to this! I will explain to you that the fact he finds in such a mathematical function the very tracing of those curves made by the earliest mold before rising up to man, that this fact drives him to such an extrapolation as to think that topology can provide a typology of natural languages. I do not know if the question can currently be settled. I will try to give you an idea of where its present incidence lies, nothing more.

What I can say is that, in any case, the cleavage of the wall: —the fact that there is something established in front of it, which I have called: speech and language, —and that it is on the other side that it works, perhaps mathematically, …it is certain that we can have no other idea of it. That science is based, not as is said, on quantity, but on number, function, and topology, that is beyond doubt. A discourse called “Science” has found a way to construct itself behind the wall.

Only, what I think I must clearly formulate, and in which I believe I am in agreement with all that is most serious in scientific construction, is that it is strictly impossible to give to anything that is articulated in algebraic or topological terms the shadow of meaning.

There is meaning for those who, in front of the wall, take pleasure in mold stains that are found so well suited to being transformed into madonnas or the back of an athlete, but it is clear that we cannot be satisfied with those confusional meanings. In the end, that serves only to reverberate on the lyre of desire, on eroticism to call things by their name.

But in front of the wall, other things are happening, and that is what I call discourses. There have been others besides my four, which I have enumerated and which, by the way, are specified only so that you immediately see that they are specified as such: as being only 4.

It is certain that there have been others of which we know nothing more than what converges in those which are the 4 that remain for us, those articulated from the round of the a, of the S1 and S2, and even of the subject [S] who pays the price and who, moving through this round, from one to the next among these 4 vertices, has allowed us to isolate something for our orientation.

It is something that gives us the current state of that which—of social bond—is founded on discourse, that is, something where, whatever place one occupies in it… master, slave, product, or what supports the whole affair …whatever the place one occupies in it, one never hinders anything but a trifle.

Meaning, where does it arise from? It is in this that it is very important to have made that cleavage—no doubt awkward—that Saussure made, as Jakobson recalled this morning, between the signifier and the signified. Something, moreover, that he inherited—it is not for nothing—from the Stoics, whose rather particular position in these kinds of manipulations I mentioned to you earlier.

What is important, of course, – it is not that the signifier and the signified unite and that it is the signified which allows us to distinguish what is specific in the signifier, quite the contrary, – it is that the signified of a signifier… what I articulate with those little letters I mentioned earlier [S2, S1] …the signified [S2] of a signifier [S1]… where we attach something that can resemble a meaning …that always comes from the place that the same signifier occupies in another discourse.

That is what went to everyone’s head when analytic discourse was introduced: it seemed to them that they understood everything, poor things! Fortunately, thanks to my care, that is not your case…

If you understood what I say elsewhere—where I am serious—you would not believe your ears. In fact, that is why you do not believe your ears. It is because, in reality, you do understand it, but in the end, you keep your distance.

And that is quite understandable, since for the vast majority, analytic discourse has not yet caught you. It will come, unfortunately, for it is becoming increasingly important.

I would still like to say something about the knowledge of the analyst, provided you do not stop there. If my friend René Thom so easily manages to find, by cuts of complicated mathematical surfaces, something like a drawing, a striation, in short something he just as well calls a point, a scale, a wrinkle, a fold, and to make a truly captivating use of it… – if, in other words, there is between such a section of a thing which exists only so that one can write: there exists X: which satisfies the function F(X), – if he does that with such ease, …it remains nonetheless that as long as this does not exhaustively account for that with which, after all, he is quite forced to explain it to you, namely common language and grammar around it, there will remain a zone that I call the “zone of discourse” and which is the one upon which the analytics of discourses casts a sharp light.

What, then, can be transmitted as knowledge about this? In the end, one must choose! It is numbers that know, that know because they set in motion this matter organized at a point, naturally immemorial, and that continue to know what they are doing. There is one thing quite certain, it is that it is in the most abusive way that we insert “meaning” in there.

That any idea of evolution, of improvement, when in the supposed animal chain we see absolutely nothing that attests to this so-called continual adaptation, to such an extent that, after all, we have had to abandon it and say that, after all, those who pass through are those who managed to pass. That’s called “natural selection.” It strictly means nothing. It has a small sense borrowed from a pirate discourse, and then, why not that one or another?

The clearest thing that appears to us is that a living being does not always know very well what to do with one of its organs. And after all, maybe this is a particular case brought to light by analytic discourse on the troublesome side of the phallus. That there is a correlation between that… as I emphasized at the beginning of this discourse …a correlation between that and what is stirred up by speech, we cannot say anything more.

That at the point we have reached in the current state of thought… this is the sixth time I have used this phrase, and it is clear that it does not seem to bother anyone, yet it is really something that would be worth returning to, because the current state of thought—I make it a piece of furniture, but it is true, isn’t it? It is not idealism to say that thoughts are as strictly determined as the latest gadget …anyway, in the current state of thought, we have the hysterical discourse which, when one is willing to hear it for what it is, shows itself to be linked to a curious adaptation. Because, after all, if this business of castration is true, it means that, for man, castration is the means of adaptation to survival. It is unthinkable, but it is true.

All this is perhaps only an artifice, an artifact of discourse. That this discourse… so adept at completing the others …that this discourse persists, may be only a historical phase.

The sexual life of ancient China may bloom again, it will have a certain number of dirty ruins to swallow before that happens. But for now, what does it mean, this meaning that we bring? This meaning, in the end, is an enigma, and precisely because it is meaning.

There is, somewhere, in the second edition of a volume, of that volume I once let out, called Écrits, there is a little addition called “The metaphor of the subject.” I long played on the phrase which delighted my dear friend Perelman: “an ocean of false science”… One is never quite sure, and I advise you to start from there, from what I have at the back of my mind when I amuse myself precisely! …“an ocean of false science,” that may well be the knowledge of the analyst, why not?

Why not, if it is precisely only from its perspective that this is clarified: that science has no meaning, but that no meaning of discourse, since it can only be supported by another, is anything but partial meaning. If truth can never be anything but half-said, that is the core, that is the essential thing in the knowledge of the analyst.

It is that at that place… in what I have called the tetrapod or quadruped …at the place of truth stands S2. This knowledge is itself always to be questioned.

From analysis, on the other hand, one thing must prevail: that there is a knowledge drawn from the subject himself. At the place, the pole, of jouissance, analytic discourse places S: it is in the stumble, in the failed act, in the dream, in the work of the analysand that this knowledge results.

This knowledge, which is not supposed, it is decaying knowledge, leftover knowledge, surrogate knowledge: this is the unconscious.

This knowledge, it is what I assume, I define so that it can only be posed… a new feature in emergence …from the jouissance of the subject.