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🤖🧠 Saikbilim Evirileri 🤖🧠

20 November 1963

I do not intend today to indulge in any play that resembles a coup de théâtre, I will not wait until the end of this seminar to tell you that this seminar is the last one I will give. For some, those initiated into the things that are happening, this will not be a surprise; for others, it is out of regard for their presence that I make this declaration. Until very late last night… a certain piece of news was brought to me… I could believe that I would give you this year what I have given you for the past ten years, it was prepared, I will do nothing better than to give you the first: I announced that this year I would speak to you about the Names of the Father.

It is not possible to make it understood: why this plural concerning the names? What I intended to bring as progress to a notion that I initiated as early as the third year of my Seminar, when I addressed the Schreber case, the function of the Names of the Father punctuates in my past teaching the reference points where you have been able to see the outlines being established:

• firstly, January 15, 22, 29 and February 5, 1958, the paternal metaphor
• secondly, the seminars of December 20, 1961 and those that followed, January 62, concerning the function of the proper name.
• thirdly, the seminars of May of my year on transference concerning what is involved in the drama of the father in the Claudelian trilogy.

Refer to these seminars to see in what direction I wanted to pursue my discourse… There is here, already in an advanced stage of its structuring, something that could have allowed me to take the next step. This seminar is linked to the one on anxiety. Before going further, what my seminar on anxiety brought… It was possible to give full weight to formulas such as anxiety is an affect of the subject. To organize it also according to the structure, that of the subject defined as the subject who speaks, who is founded, who is determined in an effect of the signifier. Where and at what time, in reference to the level of synchrony, at what time is this subject affected by anxiety?

(diagram on the board)

Whatever this time may be, this time on which we are going to dwell, what the subject is affected by in anxiety, it is, as I have told you, by the desire of the Other. The subject is affected by it in a way that we must call immediate, not dialectizable, and it is in this that anxiety is, among the affects of the subject, that which does not deceive.

I have told you about anxiety, of which you thus see, in what does not deceive, at what more radical level—than anything that has been derived in Freud’s discourse—its function as a signal is inscribed. There is no way to situate this function, except at this level. By posing it thus, it is confirmed and remains valid, as Freud himself felt it enough to maintain, that all the first formulations he gave of anxiety, direct transformation of the libido, etc., remain still understandable. What else have I said concerning anxiety, opposing myself to the psychologizing tradition which distinguishes anxiety from fear by its correlates, especially the correlate of reality, I change things here, saying of anxiety: it is not without object. This object a, whose fundamental forms I have sketched as well as I could: what has fallen from the subject in anxiety, this object a, which is the same as I designate as the cause of desire.

To anxiety, to anxiety which does not deceive, is substituted for the subject what must be effected by means of this object a, more than one thing can be effected… this is suspended—which was reserved for the future—and which you will not entirely lose, for you will find it in a book to be published in six months, it is to this that the function of the act is suspended and also something else. Last year and for now what I have stuck to: the function of this little a in the fantasy, in the function it assumes of being the support of desire, of desire inasmuch as what is given to the subject to reach most intensively in his realization as a subject at the level of consciousness… it is through this chain that its dependence on the desire of the Other, of desire, is affirmed once more.

Do I need, am I not too tempted to recall, so that there is not too much confusion, the radical, thoroughly restructuring character of these conceptions both of the subject and of the object. Of course, we ourselves have long spoken and have detached ourselves from any conception of the subject that makes it a pure correlate of the intelligent to the intelligible, of the antique nous, of all faith placed in knowledge. Here, anxiety shows itself in a crucial position. In Aristotle, for the antique tradition, [agonia], a local pathos that is calmed in the impassibility of the Whole. There remains something of the ancient position even in positivist thought, that on which the so-called psychological science still now bases and lives.

Certainly, something remains grounded in this correspondence of intelligence to the intelligible and it is not without foundation that it can show us that human intelligence is in its foundation not different from animal intelligence; – see the theories of evolution, the progress of intelligence, its adaptation -. This allows us a theory starting from this intelligible supposed in the data of facts, to deduce that this process is reproduced in each individual, a hypothesis not even glimpsed by positivist thought, which is that these facts would be intelligible. Intelligence, from this perspective, is nothing more than an affect among others, an affect founded on an affect, intelligibility.

Hence this psychology of fortune-tellers, even from the heights of university chairs. Here, affect is only obscure intelligence; there is only one thing that escapes the one who receives this teaching: it is its effect of obscurantism persisting from this perspective. It is a technocratic enterprise, the psychological assessment of subjects in need of employment, having entered bowed under the psychologist’s measure within the frameworks of existing society.

The essence of Freud’s discovery stands in radical opposition to this. The first steps of my teaching followed in the footsteps of Hegelian dialectic; a necessary stage to break into this so-called world of positivity. Hegelian dialectic is reduced to logical roots, intrinsic deficit of the logic of predication: namely that the universal is founded only on negation; that the particular alone, in finding existence there, appears as contingent. The whole Hegelian dialectic, made to fill this gap, shows there—in a prestigious transmutation—how the universal, by way of scansion: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, can come to particularize itself. But whatever the effects of prestige of Hegelian dialectic, that by Marx it entered into the world, completing what from Hegel was the meaning, through the subversion of a political and social order founded on the ecclesial, the Church whatever its necessity, Hegelian dialectic is false and contradicted as much by the observation of the natural sciences as by the historical progress of fundamental science, namely mathematics.

It is here that anxiety is the sign as a contemporary of the development of Hegel’s system, Kierkegaard, immediately saw, anxiety is for us the witness of an essential gap which bears witness that the Freudian doctrine is the one that clarifies it.

This structure of the relation of anxiety to desire, this double gap from the subject to the object fallen from him where beyond anxiety he must find his instrument, the initial function of this lost object on which Freud insists, that is the flaw that does not allow us to treat desire in logical immanence.

Of violence alone as the dimension to force the dead ends of logic, here Freud brings us back to the heart of that something on which to ground the bases of what was for him the illusion, which he called in the manner of his time the alibi, Religion, which I for my part call the Church.

It is on this very field by which the Church holds intact and in all the splendor that you see in it, against the Hegelian revolution, it is there that Freud advances to the very foundation of ecclesial tradition, that he allows us to trace the split of a path that goes beyond, infinitely further, structurally further than the limit he set in the form of the myth of the murder of the father.

It is on this hazardous, shifting terrain, that there, this year, I wanted to advance before resuming the ecclesial order. For, as for the father, their father, the servants of the Church, the Fathers of the Church, let them allow me to say that concerning the father I have not found them sufficient. Some know that I have practiced since my pubertal age the reading of Saint Augustine. De Trinitate, it is about ten years ago that I became acquainted with it. I reopened it these days only to be surprised at how little he says about the father. He was able to speak to us of the Son and much of the Holy Spirit, but I do not know what kind of evasion occurs, automaton under his pen when it comes to the father. How can one not protest, in such a lucid mind, against the radical attribution to God of the term causa sui. A punctuated absurdity since, from the prominence of this which I have told you, there is no cause except after the emergence of desire.

What is cause and cause of desire—not equivalent to the antinomy of cause and cause of itself—could in no way be held as an antinomic equivalent of cause for him. Augustine, against all intellectual piety, falters on what I wanted to articulate to you with all kinds of examples: Acher Ehyé, the Hebrew. I am that I am, ego sum qui sum, I am.

That one finds there an “I am he who is” says Saint Augustine—already in French it sounds false and lame—by which God asserts himself as identical with Being, this God, at the moment Moses speaks, would be nothing but pure absurdity.

Here then is the meaning of this function of the little a in the various forms I spoke to you about last year, where those who follow me could see where it stopped.

In anxiety, the object little a falls. This fall is primitive; the diversity of forms this object takes in its fall is in a certain relation to the mode under which the subject apprehends the desire of the Other. This explains the function of the oral object. It can only be understood—as I have long insisted—if this object, the breast, which the subject lets go of, from which he detaches himself, is fundamentally an object belonging to him.

If at that moment this object is introduced into the demand to the Other, in the appeal toward the mother, it outlines under a veil the beyond where the desire of the mother is knotted: the astonished baby throws back its head when detaching from the breast.

This breast is only apparently belonging to the Other; see the biological references, the nursing complex is constituted differently in an animal context. Here, the breast is a deep part and a part affixed to the mother’s thorax.

A second form: the anal object. Phenomenology of the gift, of the present: by letting go of the feces, conceding them as to a dominant order of the demand of the Other obviously an impostor, not the demand to the Other, a time further ahead, what is still ambiguous in the Other, desire. How have the authors not recognized that it is here that the support of what is called oblative behavior is anchored, that it is through a real ambiguity, through a telling evasion, a panic flight before anxiety, that one has been able to situate the oblative conjunction at the level of the genital act. Moreover, it is here that Freud’s teaching, through a translation which is retained, situates for us the gap of castration.

Last year I insisted on this, that all Freud has said shows us, is that orgasm is not just what the psycho-biologists of his time called the mechanism of detumescence. It is necessary to articulate that what counts in orgasm represents exactly the same function, for the subject, as anxiety. Orgasm is in itself anxiety, insofar as by a central gap, desire is forever separated from jouissance.

Let no one object with moments of peace, of fusion of the couple, where each may even say that the other is quite content. We analysts look more closely to see what is in these moments of fundamental alibi: a phallic alibi. The woman in a sense sublimates herself in her function as sheath, she resolves something, something which goes further and remains infinitely outside. That is why I have long commented for you on this passage from Ovid where the myth of Tiresias is fabricated. It is also necessary to point out the traces of this untouched beyond of feminine jouissance in the masculine myth of her supposed masochism.

Further on, symmetrically, as on a descending curved line in relation to this summit of the gap of desire—jouissance at the genital level—I have punctuated the function of the little a in the scopic drive.

Its essence is summarized in this, that more than elsewhere, the subject is captive of the function of desire. It is because here, the object is strange, the object a for those who have not followed me in my first approximation, it is this eye which in the myth of Oedipus is the equivalent of the organ to be castrated. Yet it is not quite that which is at stake. In the scopic drive where the subject encounters the world as spectacle which he possesses, he laughs… that this lure by which what comes out of him and what he faces is, not this true little a, but its complement i(a), its specular image, that is what appears to have fallen from him.

He is caught, he rejoices, he exults in what Saint Augustine denounces and designates in such a sublime way—I would have liked also to have you go through this text—designates as the concupiscence of the eyes. He believes he desires because he sees himself as desiring and he does not see that what the Other wants to tear away from him is his gaze. The proof is what happens in the phenomenon of the Unheimlich: every time that suddenly, by some incident contrived by the Other, this image of him in the Other appears to the subject as deprived of its gaze; here the whole weave of the chain in which the subject is captive in the scopic drive unravels, and it is the return to the most basal anxiety, the Aleph of anxiety. This is what is gathered together in its most fundamental structure, the relation of the subject to the little a and the Aleph will be there to help us symbolize it. I have not yet gone beyond the scopic drive, the crossing which I designate of what manifests itself there and goes to point to imposture: this fantasy which I have articulated under the term agalma, summit of obscurity where the subject is plunged in the relation of desire, the agalma is this object which he believes his desire is aiming at and it brings to its extreme the misrecognition of this object as cause of desire.

Such is the frenzy of Alcibiades and the response that Socrates gives him: “take care of your soul,” of what Plato will later do: “…your soul and take care of this object you are pursuing, it is only your image”; this object in its function of aim and of mortal cause. “Mourn this object; then you will know the ways of your desire, for I, Socrates, know nothing; it is the only thing I know of the function of Eros.”

This is how I have led you to the threshold, the fifth term of this function of the little a, by which the fan, the unfolding, of this little a in the pre-genital relation to the demand of the Other will show itself. We will see the little a come from the Other, the only witness, from that place of the Other which is not only the place of the mirage, this little a, I have not named it; yet I have shown it in one of the meetings of our society, I could have clarified it at the days on paranoia, I refrained. Namely, what was at stake, namely the voice.

The voice of the Other must be considered as an essential object. Every analyst will be called upon to give it its place, its various incarnations, both in the field of psychosis and in the formation of the superego.

This, phenomenological approach, this relation of the voice to the Other, the little a as fallen from the Other, we can exhaust its structural function by bringing the question to what the Other is as subject. Through the voice, this object fallen from the organ of speech, the Other is the place where it speaks. Here we can no longer escape the question: who?, beyond the one who speaks in the place of the Other, and who is the subject, who is there beyond from whom the subject, every time he speaks, takes the voice?

It is clear that if Freud, at the center of his doctrine, places the myth of the father, it is because of the inevitability of this question. It is no less clear that, if the entire theory and practice of psychoanalysis appear to us today as stalled, it is for not having dared, on this question, to go further than Freud.

That is precisely why one of those whom I have trained as I could spoke, concerning a work that is not without merit, of the “question of the father.”

This formula was poor, it is even a misreading without being able to blame him for it. There can be no question of the question of the father, for the reason that we are beyond the formula that we can formulate as a question.

How could we today have drawn the approach to the problem introduced here? It is clear that the Other cannot be confused with the subject who speaks in the place of the Other, if only by his voice, the Other, if it is what I say, the place where it speaks, it can pose only one kind of problem: that of the subject before the question.

Now Freud, he felt this admirably. Since I must from today enter into a certain silence, I will not fail to point out to you here that one of my students, Conrad Stein, has, in this field, traced the way. I would have asked you to refer to his work, for it is quite satisfactory.

What he has done, how despite all the error and confusion of the time, Freud put his finger on what deserves to remain despite all the certainly well-founded criticism of the specialist, on the question of the Totem, see Lévi-Strauss. It remains nonetheless, and Freud is the living demonstration, how much one who is at the level of the search for truth can rise far above all the opinions of the specialist. What would remain of it otherwise but that it must be a matter of the subject before the question?

If mythically the father can only be an animal, the primordial father, the father before the prohibition of incest can only be before the advent of culture, and according to the myth of the animal his satisfaction is without end: the father is that chief of the horde.

But that he calls it Totem, and precisely in the light of the advances brought by the critique of structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss which highlights the classificatory essence of the Totem, what is needed in the second place is to set at the level of the father the function of the name (refer to a certain of my seminars, the one where I defined the proper name.) The name, it is that mark, already open to reading, that is why it will be read in the same way in all languages, something is printed there, perhaps a subject who is going to speak. Bertrand Russell is mistaken when he says one could call John a geometric point on a board, he can always ask it hoping it will answer him!

I had also marked as reference the characters that A. Gardiner discovered on Phoenician pottery from Upper Egypt, prior to the discovery of the alphabet, this to illustrate that pottery never spoke up to state its trademark, but that there is in the signifier this side that awaits reading and that it is at this level that the name is situated. Here I am indicating something of the direction to follow, see what contribution the path we are now approaching gives us.

For this father, can we not, go beyond the myth to take as reference what the myth implies in this register provided by our progress on these three terms of jouissance, desire, and object. For immediately we will see concerning the father, the father, in order for Freud to find this unique balance, this sort of conformity, of the law and desire truly joined, necessitated by each other in incest, on the supposition of the pure jouissance of the father as primordial. But this, which is supposed to give us the imprint of the formation of desire in the child in its normal process, is it not here that it is worth asking the question of why it produces neuroses?

It is here that the emphasis I have allowed to be placed on the function of perversion, in its relation to the desire of the Other as such, represents the facing of the wall, the taking literally of the function of the Father—the supreme being, see Sade—meaning always veiled and unfathomable. But of his desire as implicated in the order of the world, it is here, in petrifying his anxiety, that the pervert installs himself as such.

First arch: how are so-called normal desire and that which is positioned on the same level, perverse desire, composed and combined? First, the position of this arch, from which, subsequently, to understand a range of phenomena that go from neurosis, inseparable in our eyes from a flight before the term of the father’s desire, to which is substituted the term of demand, and also that of mysticism, in all traditions, except those, you will see, of asceticism, assumption plunged toward the jouissance of God.

What constitutes the obstacle in Jewish mysticism and even more in Christian, and still more for love, is the incidence of the desire of the Other.

I cannot leave you without at least pronouncing the name, the first name, by which I wanted to introduce the specific incidence of the Judeo-Christian tradition, not that of jouissance, but of the desire of a God, the god Elohim.

It is before this God, the first term, that Freud, surely beyond what his pen transmits to us, stopped. This God, whose name is only the name Shaddai, which I would never have pronounced.

This name in Exodus, Chapter VI, the Elohim who speaks in the burning bush that must be conceived as his body, that is translated by the voice and about which they did not want to explain to you that it is indeed something else, this God speaking to Moses says to him at that moment: “When you go to them, you will tell them that my name is I am, Ehyeh, I am what I am.”

The property of these terms: to designate the letters that compose the name, always certain letters chosen from among the consonants. I am, I am the procession, there is no other meaning to be given to this I am than to be the name: I am.

But it was not under this name that I announced myself to your ancestors. “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and not God of the philosophers and the scholars,” says Pascal at the beginning of the Pensées. Of that one, it can be said that a God is encountered in the real, as all real is inaccessible, it is indicated by that which does not deceive: anxiety. This God who announced himself to Abraham, first, did so by a name of the Elohim at the burning bush: El Shaddai, the Greeks, those who made the Septuagint translation, were much more informed than we are.

They did not translate Ehyeh as: I am he who is, like Saint Augustine, but as the being, [eimi to on], and not [einai], being; that has a meaning, they thought as Greeks that God is the supreme being, you do not separate people from their habits. They did not translate it as nowadays by Almighty but prudently as theos. All the rest being lord, kyrios, the shem, the name that is not pronounced.

What is El Shaddai?

It was not intended that I tell you today. I will not force the door, even if it be that of hell, to tell you, but I intend to introduce what I could have told you with something essential:—refer to Kierkegaard—the Akedah, the sacrifice of Abraham in the form in which one enters into a tradition where images are not forbidden,—the representation of these things is forbidden among the Jews—why, from time to time, there is a fever to get rid of them? See the images of Epinal, Michelet, etc. What is seen in the images at this level, everything that is needed, not to supplement my seminar for the names are not there, but the images are there, as a fan of everything I have told you. I have advanced enough that you will find there what I have announced of the paternal metaphor.

There is a son, his head pressed against the little stone altar (painting by Caravaggio), he grimaces, he suffers, Abraham’s knife is raised above him, the angel who is there, presence of the one whose name is unpronounceable.

The angel, an angel, what is an angel? These angels, how will you remove them from the Bible? I said to an eminent father, I drove him mad. My last conversation with Father Teilhard de Chardin, I thought I would make him cry, this man.

— Are you really speaking to me seriously?

— Yes, Father, it is a question of the texts. With his namer of the planet, what was he doing with the angels?

This angel holds back Abraham’s arm and without Father Teilhard’s consent, whatever of this angel, it is indeed under the title of El Shaddai that he is there. Always traditionally seen there. It is indeed under this title that all the pathos of the drama unfolds where Kierkegaard leads us. Before this restraining gesture, Abraham came there for something. God gave him a son and gives him the order to bring his boy for a mysterious rendezvous, hands and feet bound like a sheep, to sacrifice him. Before being moved, we might recall that, to go and sacrifice his little boy to the local Elohim at the time, was common. It continued so late that it was necessary, for it to stop, for the angel and the prophets to stop the Israelites on the way to start again.

Let us look further, you will tell me, this son, he is his only son. That is not true, Ishmael is already fourteen years old, but Sarah remained barren until the age of ninety. Ishmael was born from the patriarch’s intercourse with a slave.

Already the sound of the primacy of El Shaddai, the one who drew Abraham out from among his brothers and his fathers, there were so many fathers who were still alive: Shem who lived five hundred years, and, in all the lineages, they had children around the age of thirty—in any case, this El Shaddai, if he truly has something to do with this child of the miracle of Sarah, who says, “I am withered”—look toward the corpus luteum, menopause existed at the time!—one can conceive that Abraham therefore was attached to Isaac, he is the child of the promise.

Sarah dies some time after. Many people are present there and Ishmael returns. After Sarah’s death, Abraham, this patriarch, shows himself for what he is, a formidable progenitor. He marries and will have five children, but they are not the children who received the baraka of Sarah. This omnipotence reaches the very boundary of the territory of his people. Another nearby elohim gives the right trick to repel the invader, El Shaddai leaves with the tribes that brought him to the assault.

El Shaddai is the one who elects and promises and passes through his name a certain alliance that can be transmitted in only one way, by the paternal baraka; he is the one who makes one wait for a son even for a woman of ninety and much more beyond that.

A small book from the end of the 11th century by Scholomo Ben Isaac of Troyes, an Ashkenazi, you will read strange commentaries on Abraham’s misfortune. In the Mishnah, there is a dialogue between Abraham and God, when the angel says “do not stretch out,” Abraham says: “If it is so, I have come here for nothing; I will at least make a slight wound for your pleasure, Elohim…”

That is not all that can be seen in the image of Epinal, there is something else, to the right and left in the painting by Caravaggio, this ram’s head that I introduce in the form of the shofar, the horn is unmistakably torn off.

As for what this ram is, it is on this that I would like to conclude. For it is not true that the animal appears as a metaphor for the father at the level of phobia. Phobia is only a return; that is what Freud was saying with reference to the Totem. Man does not have so much to be proud of being the latest arrival of creation, the one made from mud, which is not said of any being. He will go looking for honorable ancestors and we are still there: he needs an animal ancestor. In the “Sayings of the Fathers,” the “Pirké Avot”—much less important than the Talmud—translated into French by Rashi, it is categorically stated that according to rabbinical tradition, the ram in question is the primordial ram. It was there—Hassé Mimé Berechit—from the six days of creation, which designates it for what it is: an Elohim. It is not the one whose name is unpronounceable, but all the Elohim. That one is recognized as the ancestor of the race of Shem—thus of the origins.

So this ram’s head with horns entangled in a thicket that stops it, this place of the thicket, I would like to comment to you, the very text lets one feel that it rushes to the place of sacrifice. What does it come greedily to feed on, when the one whose name is unpronounceable designates it for sacrifice?

What Elohim designates for sacrifice to Abraham in place of Isaac, is his ancestor, the god of his race.

Here is marked the edge between the jouissance of God and that which, in a tradition, designates it as desire, the desire for something which is to be made fall, this is the biological origin. Here is the key to this mystery in which is bound the version with regard to the Judaic tradition, the practice of metaphysico-sexual rites, regarding what unites the community in the festival with regard to the jouissance of God. Something manifests itself that, as being the desire, essentially highlights that gap which separates jouissance from desire and the symbol is that, it is in the same context, the relation of El Shaddai to Abraham, circumcision as the sign of the alliance of the people whom he has chosen, circumcision designates this little piece of flesh cut off to the enigma of which I had led you by a few hieroglyphs, this little a.

I will leave you here. Before I leave you, I will say that if I interrupt this seminar I do not do so without apologizing to those who for years have been my faithful listeners, those who, nourished by the words, the terms, the paths and ways learned here, like those who turn this imprint against me. In the recent and confused debates, a group has truly shown itself in its function as a group led hither and thither into blind whirlpools. One of my students tried to save a confused debate on the analytic level, he thought he ought to say… that the truth, that the true piece, the meaning of my teaching, is that it is never caught. What an incredible misunderstanding! What childish impatience at best.

Is this enough to justify a metonymic function of truth? Where has one seen, as in mathematics, that each chapter refers to the next? I was approaching a certain point of the density where you could not reach—there are not only the attributes of infatuation and stupidity, the mind in the form of a peel, editorial committee, there is something else—I have indeed searched; I sometimes find it, the truth of the praxis called psychoanalysis. What is its truth?

If something proves disappointing there, this praxis must advance toward a conquest of the true by way of deception, for transference is nothing else, as long as there is no name in the place of the Other, it is inoperative. If my progress is gradual, cautious, is it not all that I have tried to promote in this direction against which I have always had to take a stand, otherwise it risks slipping toward the path of imposture.

For two years, having entrusted to others the inner management of a group, in order to leave the purity to what I have to say to you: no difference between yes and no.