🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

We will wander again—I feel like saying—through the labyrinth of the position of desire. A certain return, a certain fatigue of the subject, a certain Durcharbeitung, as it is said, seems necessary to me—I have already indicated this last time, and explained why—to an exact position of the function of transference. That is why today I will return to highlight the meaning of what I told you last time by bringing you back to examine the so-called phases of “the migration of the libido on the erogenous zones.”

It is very important to see to what extent the naturalist view implied in this definition is resolved, articulated in our way of stating it insofar as it is centered on the relationship between demand and desire. From the very start of this path I pointed out: that desire preserves, maintains, its place in the margin of demand as such, that it is this margin of demand that constitutes its locus, …that, to point out what I mean here—it is in a beyond and a this side—in this double hollow that already sketches itself as soon as the cry of hunger comes to be articulated—that at the other extreme we see that the object called the nipple in English, the “tip of the breast,” the nipple, ultimately takes on, in human eroticism, its value of ἄγαλμα [agalma: wonder, precious object], becoming the support of this voluptuousness, of this pleasure of a biting in which what we can well call a “sublimated voracity” is perpetuated insofar as it takes this Lust, this pleasure and also these Lüste, these desires—you know the ambiguity that the German term retains, which is expressed in this shift of meaning produced by the passage from the singular to the plural—so its pleasure and its desires, its covetousness, this oral object takes them from elsewhere.

That is why, through an inversion of the use of the term “sublimation,” I have the right to say that here we see this deviation in relation to the aim in the opposite direction of the object of a need. Indeed, it is not from primitive hunger that the erotic value of this privileged object here takes its substance; the EROS that inhabits it comes nachträglich, through retroaction, only after the fact, and it is in oral demand that the place of this desire has been hollowed out. If there were no demand, with the beyond of love that it projects, there would not be this place on this side: of desire, which forms itself around a privileged object. The oral phase of sexual libido requires this place hollowed out by demand.

It is important to see whether presenting things in this way does not involve some specification that could be marked as being too partial. Should we not take literally what FREUD presents to us in certain of his statements as the pure and simple migration of an organic, mucous erogeneity, I would say? And, equally, can it not be said that I neglect natural facts, namely, for example, those instinctual, devouring motions that we find in nature linked to the sexual cycle: cats eating their young. And also the great phantasmatic figure of “the praying mantis” that haunts the analytic amphitheater is present there as a mother image, as a matrix of the function attributed to what is so boldly, perhaps after all so inappropriately, called the “castrating mother.”

Yes, of course, I myself willingly used in my analytic initiation the support of this image so rich in echoing for us the natural domain, which presents itself for us in the unconscious phenomenon. In encountering this objection you can suggest to me the necessity of some correction in the theoretical line, with which I think I can satisfy you along with myself.

I paused for a moment at what this image represents and asked in a certain way what, in fact, a simple glance cast over the diversity of animal ethology shows us, namely, a luxuriant richness of perversions. Someone well-known—our friend Henri EY—has fixed his gaze on this subject of animal perversions, which after all go further than anything human imagination could invent. I believe he even made an issue of it in l’Évolution psychiatrique.

Taken in this register, are we not thus brought back to the Aristotelian view of a sort of external field to the human field as the foundation of perverse desire? That is where I will pause for a moment, asking you to consider what we do when we stop at this fantasy of “natural perversion.” I do not fail to recognize, in asking you to follow me on this ground, what such a reflection may seem to have of meticulousness, of speculation, but I believe it is necessary to clarify what is both founded and unfounded in this reference.

And thus, by this path, we are going to—you will see right away—find ourselves reaching what I designate as fundamental in subjectivation, as an essential moment of any establishment of the dialectic of desire.

To subjectivize the praying mantis on this occasion is to suppose for it—which is not at all excessive—a sexual enjoyment.

And after all, we know nothing about it; the praying mantis may be, as DESCARTES would not hesitate to say, a pure and simple machine—”machine”: in his own language—which precisely supposes the elimination of all subjectivity. We have no need, for our part, to stick to these minimal positions: we grant it this enjoyment. But this enjoyment—that is the next step—is it enjoyment of something insofar as it destroys it? For it is only from there that it can indicate to us the intentions of nature.

To immediately point out what is essential for it to be, for us, any kind of model of what is at stake, namely our “oral cannibalism,” our “primordial eroticism”—I will designate it right away—it is necessary, strictly speaking, that we imagine here this enjoyment as correlated with the decapitation of the partner, which it is supposed to experience as such, to some degree. I do not shrink from it, because in truth it is animal ethology that is for us the primary reference for maintaining this dimension of “knowing”—which all the advances in our knowledge make so precarious for us in the human world—to truly identify itself with the dimension of “misrecognizing,” of Verkennung as FREUD says.

Only one remark: the observation, elsewhere in the realm of the living, of this imaginary Erkennung, of this privilege of the similar, which in certain species even reveals itself to us in organogenic effects. I will not return to the old example around which I used to make you circle during my exploration of the imaginary at the time when I began to articulate something of what, over the years, has matured—matured before you: my doctrine of analysis—the pigeon, in that it only completes itself as a pigeon by having seen its “pigeon image,” for which a small mirror in the cage may suffice, and also the locust, which only passes through its stages by having encountered another locust.

There is no doubt that, not only in what fascinates us, but in what fascinates the male praying mantis, there is this erection of a fascinating form, this unfolding, this posture from which, for us, it draws its name: “the praying mantis,” it is particularly from this position—not without lending itself to I do not know what wavering return for us—which appears to our eyes as that of prayer. We note that it is before this fantasy, this incarnate fantasy, that the male gives in, that he is caught, called, drawn, captivated in the embrace that will be fatal for him. It is clear that the image of “the other imaginary” as such is present there in the phenomenon, that it is not excessive to suppose that something of that image of the other is revealed there.

But is it for all that to say that there is already some prefiguration there, a kind of inverted copy of what would thus be presented in humans as a sort of remnant, a trace, of a definite possibility of variations in the play of natural tendencies? And if we are to grant some value to this example, monstrous in the strict sense, we cannot help but notice that the difference with what presents itself in human fantasy—that in which we can proceed with certainty from the subject, there where alone we are assured of it, namely in that he is the support of the signifying chain—we therefore cannot help but notice that in what nature presents to us, from the act to its excess, to what overflows and accompanies it, to that devouring surplus which marks it for us as an example of another instinctual structure, there is synchrony: it is at the moment of the act that this complement is exercised, for us exemplifying the paradoxical form of instinct.

Hence, does a limit not emerge here, allowing us to strictly define how what is exemplified serves us, but serves us only to give us the form of what we mean when we speak of a desire? If we speak of the enjoyment of this other which is the praying mantis, if it interests us on this occasion, it is because either it enjoys where the male’s organ is, and it also enjoys elsewhere, but wherever it may enjoy—of which we will never know anything, it does not matter—that it enjoys elsewhere only takes on meaning from the fact that it enjoys—or does not enjoy, it does not matter—there. That it enjoys wherever it pleases, this only has meaning, in the value this image takes on, by relation to a “there” of a virtual enjoyment.

But in the end, in the synchrony—whatever it is—it will never be, after all, even when diverted, anything but copulatory enjoyment. I mean that, in the infinite diversity of instinctual mechanisms in nature, we can easily discover all possible forms, including the one in which the organ of copulation is lost in loco in the very act of consumption. We can also consider that the fact of devouring is there one of the many forms of the bonus given to the individual partner of copulation, insofar as it is ordered to its specific end, to keep it in the act that must be permitted. The exemplifying character, then, of the image offered to us begins only at the precise point where we have no right to go:

– namely that this devouring of the partner’s cephalic extremity by the praying mantis is something marked by the fact that it is accomplished with the female partner’s mandibles, which as such participate in the properties that the cephalic extremity constitutes in living nature,
– namely a certain gathering of individual tendency as such,
– namely the possibility, in whatever register it is exercised, of discernment, of choice. In other words, that the praying mantis prefers that, the head of its partner, to anything else, that there is a preference there, malle, mavult [he prefers, he wishes], that is what she likes.

And it is insofar as she likes that, that for us, in the image, she shows herself as enjoyment at the expense of the other, and to put it simply, that we begin to insert into natural functions what is at stake, namely moral sense, in other words that we enter into the Sadean dialectic as such.

This preference for enjoyment over any reference to the other is discovered as the essential polarity dimension of nature. It is all too visible that this moral sense is brought by us, but that we bring it to the extent that we discover the sense of desire as this relation to something that, in the other, chooses this partial object.

Let us pay even closer attention here. Is this example fully valid to illustrate for us this preference for the part over the whole, a judgment that can be illustrated in the erotic value of that nipple extremity I was just talking about? I am not so sure, insofar as it is less, in this image of the praying mantis, the part that would be preferred to the whole—in the most horrible way, already allowing us to short-circuit the function of metonymy—than rather the whole that is preferred to the part.

Let us not forget, in fact, that even in an animal structure as apparently distant from us as that of the insect, the value of concentration, of reflection, of totality, represented somewhere in the cephalic extremity, certainly functions, and that in any case, in the fantasy, in the image that binds us, this decapitation of the partner as it is presented to us here plays with its particular emphasis.

And to put it simply, the fabulous value of the praying mantis, that which underlies what it actually represents in a certain mythology or more simply in folklore, in everything on which CAILLOIS has placed emphasis under the register of myth and the sacred, which is his first work, it does not seem that he sufficiently pointed out that we are here in poetry, in something that draws its emphasis not only from a reference to the relationship to the oral object as it is outlined in the κοινῇ [koinè: common tongue] of the unconscious, the common language, but in something more accentuated, in something that indicates to us a certain link between acephaly and the transmission of life as such, in the designation of this: that in this passage of the flame from one individual to another, in an eternity signified for the species, the τέλος [telos: end, purpose] does not pass through the head.

This is what gives the image of the mantis its tragic meaning which, as you can see, has nothing to do with the preference for an object called the oral object which, on no occasion—in human fantasy at least—relates to the head. It is something quite different that is at stake in the connection to the oral phase of human desire.

What takes shape as a reciprocal identification of the subject with the object of oral desire is something that goes—as experience immediately shows us—to a constitutive fragmentation, to those fragmenting images that were recently mentioned during our “Provincial Days” as linked to I know not what primitive terror which seemed, I do not know why, for the authors, to take on some disturbing value of designation, whereas it is indeed the most fundamental, the most widespread, the most common fantasy, at the origins of all of man’s relations to his somatics.

The pieces of the anatomy room that populate the famous image of “Saint George” by CARPACCIO in the small church of Saint Mary of the Angels in Venice are indeed what, I believe, with or without analysis, has not failed to present itself—at the level of dreams—to every individual experience, and also in this register, the head that wanders around by itself goes on very well, as in CAZOTTE, telling its little stories.

The important thing is not there. And the discovery of analysis is that the subject, in the field of the Other, encounters not only the images of his own fragmentation but already, from the origin, the objects of the desire of the Other, that is, of the mother, not only in their fragmented state but with the privileges granted to them by the mother’s desire.

In other words, there is one of these objects that he encounters, and it is the paternal phallus—already encountered in the subject’s first fantasies, says Melanie KLEIN—at the origin of the “fàndum” of “he must speak, he will speak.” Already in the inner empire, in this interior of the mother’s body where the first imaginary formations are projected, something is perceived that stands out as more particularly accentuated, even harmful: the paternal phallus.

On the field of the desire of the Other, the subjective object already encounters identifiable occupants, against the measure of which, so to speak, at the rate of which, it must already assert itself and weigh itself, and place these little weights, variously shaped, which are in use among the primitive tribes of Africa where you see a small animal shaped like a twist, or even some phalliform object as such. So, at this phantasmatic level, the privilege of the image of the mantis is only this—which, after all, is not so certain—that the mantis is supposed—her males—to eat them in series, and that this transition to the plural is the essential dimension through which she takes on a phantasmatic value for us.

Thus, this oral phase is defined. It is only within demand that the Other constitutes itself as a reflection of the subject’s hunger. The Other, therefore, is not simply hunger, but articulated hunger, hunger that demands. And thus the subject is open to becoming an object there, but, so to speak, of a hunger that it chooses. The transition is made from hunger to eroticism by way of what I earlier called a preference: she likes something, that, especially with a certain greed if one can say so. Here we are reintroduced into the register of original sins. The subject comes to place himself on the à la carte menu of cannibalism, which everyone knows is never absent from any communion fantasy. Read this author I have spoken of over the years with a kind of periodic return, Baltasar GRACIAN. Obviously, only those of you who know Spanish can find their full satisfaction there—unless you have it translated.

Translated very early, as was done at the time, almost instantly throughout Europe—nevertheless, some things remained untranslated. It is a treatise on communion, “El Comulgatorio,” which is a good text in the sense that something rarely admitted is revealed there, the delights of the consumption of the Corpus Christi, the body of Christ, are detailed there. And we are invited to dwell on this exquisite cheek, this delicious arm, I will spare you the rest, where spiritual concupiscence is satisfied, lingers, thus revealing to us what always remains implicated in the forms, even the most elaborate, of oral identification.

In opposition to this thematic in which you see, by the virtue of the signifier, deployed over an entire field already created to be secondarily inhabited, the most original tendency, it is really in opposition to this that last time I wanted to show you a meaning of anal demand that is usually little or poorly articulated, by showing you that it is characterized by a complete reversal to the benefit of the other, of initiative.

And it is precisely there that lies—that is to say, at a stage not so obviously advanced nor secure in our normative ideology—the source of discipline, I did not say duty, the discipline, as it is called, of cleanliness where the French language so nicely marks the oscillation with property, with what belongs properly, education, good manners if I may say so.

Here, the demand is external, and at the level of the other, and is posed as such, articulated. The strange thing is that we must see here and recognize, in what has always been said, and whose significance it seems no one has really addressed, that here the object of gift is, properly speaking, born as such, and that what the subject can give in this metaphor is exactly tied to what he can retain, namely his own waste, his excrement. It is impossible not to see something exemplary, something that must be designated as the radical point where the projection of the subject’s desire into the other is decided.

There is a point in the phase, where desire is articulated and constituted, where the other is, properly speaking, the dump. And it is not surprising to see that the idealists of the theme of a “humanization” of the cosmos, or as they are forced to express themselves these days: of the planet, one of the phases always manifest in the humanization of the planet, is that the animal–man makes it, strictly speaking, a dump, a refuse dump. The oldest testimony we have of human settlements as such are enormous pyramids of shell debris, which have a Scandinavian name.

It is not for nothing that things are so. Moreover, it seems that if one day it is necessary to construct the mode by which man entered the field of the signifier, it is in these first heaps that it will be appropriate to designate it. Here, the subject is designated in the evacuated object as such. Here is, so to speak, the zero point of desire. It rests entirely on the effect of the demand of the Other. The Other decides, and it is precisely where we find the root of this dependence of the neurotic. There is the sensitive point, the sensitive note by which the desire of the neurotic is characterized as pregenital.

It is precisely insofar as he depends so much on the demand of the Other, that what the neurotic asks of the Other, in his neurotic demand for love, is to be allowed to do something with that place of desire, that it is this place of desire which evidently remains, up to a certain point, dependent on the demand of the Other. For the only meaning we can give to the genital stage, insofar as something would reappear at this place of desire that would deserve to be called a natural desire—though, given its noble antecedents, it can never truly be so—is that desire should one day appear as that which is not asked for, as aiming at what one does not ask for.

And then, do not be quick to say that this is what one takes, for example, because nothing you say will ever do more than drop you back into the little mechanics of demand. Natural desire, strictly speaking, has this dimension of not being able to be said in any way, and that is precisely why you will never have any natural desire, because the Other is already installed in the place, the Other with a capital O, as the one where the sign rests. And the sign suffices to set up the question: “Che vuoi?”, “What do you want?” to which at first the subject cannot answer anything, always delayed by the question in the response it requires.

A sign represents something for someone and, lacking knowledge of what the sign represents, the subject before this question [Che vuoi?], when sexual desire appears, loses the someone to whom the question is addressed—that is, himself… and the anxiety of little Hans is born. Here is drawn that something which, prepared by the furrow of the subject’s fracture through demand, is established in the relation—which for a moment we will take as it often stands: isolated—between the child and the mother.

The mother of little Hans, and in fact all mothers—”I appeal to all mothers,” as the other said—distinguishes her position in this, that she marks, for what begins to appear as a little twitch, a little unmistakable tremor in the first awakening of a genital sexuality as such in Hans: “that’s really dirty,” desire is disgusting, this desire of which he cannot say what it is.

But this is strictly correlated to an interest no less dubious in something that here is the object, the one to which we have learned to give all its importance, namely the phallus. In a way that is no doubt allusive but not ambiguous, how many mothers—all mothers—before the little faucet of little Hans, or of some other, before the “Wiwimacher,” the “pee-maker,” however one calls it, will make remarks such as: “my little one is very well endowed,” or, “you will have many children.” In short, the appreciation as applied to the object, still quite partial here, is something that contrasts with the refusal of desire.

Here, at the very moment of the encounter with what solicits the subject in the mystery of desire, the division is established between this object which becomes the mark of a privileged interest, this object which becomes the ἄγαλμα [agalma: marvel, precious object], the pearl at the heart of the individual who here trembles around the pivotal point of his advent to living fullness, and at the same time a lowering of the subject.

It is appreciated as object, it is depreciated as desire. And it is around this that the establishment of the register of “having” will turn, where the accounts are kept. The matter is worth pausing over, I will go into more detail. The theme of “having,” I have long announced it to you with formulas such as this: “love is giving what one does not have,” of course, for you can see that, when the child gives what he has, it is at the previous stage. What is it that he does not have, and in what sense?

It is not on the side of the phallus—although one can make the dialectic of “being” and “having” revolve around it—that you must look to truly understand what new dimension is introduced by entry into the phallic drama. What he does not have, what he does not have at his disposal, at this point of birth, of revelation of genital desire, is nothing other than his act. He has nothing but a draft on the future. He institutes the act in the field of the project.

And here I would ask you to notice the force of linguistic determinations by which, just as desire has taken on in the conjunction of Romance languages this connotation of desiderium, of mourning and regret, it is not insignificant that the primitive forms of the future were abandoned for a reference to “having.” “Je chanterai,” is exactly what you see written: “Je chanter-ai,” in fact this comes from cantare habeo. The decadent Roman language found the surest way to rediscover the true sense of the future: I will kiss later, I have the kiss as a draft on the future: I “désirer-ai” [play on French: I will desire, but formed like “I will have”].

And in the same way this habeo introduces into debeo the symbolic debt, into a habeo deprived. And it is in the future tense that this debt is conjugated when it takes the form of commandment: “You will honor your father and mother,” etc. But… and it is here that I want today only to hold you at the edge of what results from this articulation, slow no doubt, but made precisely so that you do not hasten your progress there too quickly… the object at stake, separated from desire, the phallus-object, is not the simple specification, the homologue, the homonym of the little (a) imaginary where the fullness of the Other, of the capital O, falls away. It is not a specification finally come to light of what would previously have been the oral object, then the anal object.

It is something… as I indicated to you from the outset, at the beginning of this talk today, when I pointed out to you the subject’s first encounter with the phallus… it is a privileged object in the field of the Other. It is an object that comes as a deduction from the status of the Other, of the big Other as such.

In other words, the little (a)… at the level of genital desire and the phase of castration, of which all this—you can clearly see—is meant to introduce you to the precise articulation… the little (a) is the A minus phi: (a) = A – ϕ.

In other words, it is by this means that the ϕ (phi) comes to symbolize what is lacking in the A for it to be the noetic A, the fully realized A, the Other insofar as one can have faith in its response to the demand. Of this noetic Other, desire is an enigma, and this enigma is bound up with the structural foundation of its castration. It is here that the whole dialectic of castration is inaugurated.

Be careful now not to confuse this phallic object with that same sign which would be, at the level of the Other, the sign of its lack of response; the lack in question here is the lack of the desire of the Other. The function that this phallus will assume insofar as it is encountered in the field of the imaginary is not to be identical to the Other as designated by the lack of a signifier, but to be the root of that lack.

It is the Other that is constituted in a relation, certainly privileged to this object ϕ, but in a complex relation.

It is here that we will find the point that constitutes the deadlock and the problem of love, that the subject can only satisfy the demand of the Other by lowering it, by making this other, the object of his desire.