🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

It is not because we apparently divert ourselves from what is your central concern, that we do not find it again at the extreme periphery. That is what, I believe, happened to me almost without my noticing it at the BORGHÈSE Gallery, in the most unexpected place.

My experience has always taught me to look at what is near the elevator, which is often significant and which people never look at. The experience transferred to the museum of the BORGHÈSE Gallery—which is entirely applicable to a museum—made me turn my head at the moment one emerges from the elevator, thanks to which I saw something at which people really never stop, I had never heard anyone talk about it: a painting by someone named ZUCCHI.

He is not a very well-known painter, although he has not completely slipped through the mesh of critical attention. He is what is called a mannerist of the first period of Mannerism, in the sixteenth century. His dates are approximately 1547–1590, and it is a painting called “PSICHE sorprende AMORE,” that is to say, EROS. It is the classic scene of PSYCHÉ raising her little lamp over EROS, who for a while has been her nocturnal lover, never seen. No doubt, I think, you have a little idea of this classical drama.

PSYCHÉ, favored by this extraordinary love, that of EROS himself, enjoys a happiness that could be perfect if she were not seized by the curiosity to see who it is. It is not that she is not warned by her lover himself never, under any circumstances, to cast light upon him, without being able to tell her what sanction would result, but the insistence is extreme. Nevertheless, PSYCHÉ cannot help but do it, and, at that moment, the misfortunes of PSYCHÉ begin. I cannot recount them all to you. First, I want to show you what is involved, since that is what is important about my discovery.

I have obtained two copies and I am going to circulate them. I have doubled these two reproductions with a sketch by a painter whose style even those unfamiliar with my family relationships will recognize—I hope—and who kindly, given his wish to please me this morning, made for you this sketch that will allow me, in my demonstration, to highlight what is at stake.

You see that the sketch corresponds, in its significant lines at least, to what I am passing around. I do not know if you have ever seen the subject of EROS and PSYCHÉ treated in this way. For me, what struck me—though this has been treated in countless ways, both in sculpture and painting—is that I have never seen PSYCHÉ appear, in any work of art, armed as she is in this painting, with what is represented there very vividly as a small cleaver and which is precisely a scimitar in this painting. On the other hand, you will notice that what is here significantly projected in the form of the flower, and the bouquet of which it is part, and also the vase into which it is set, you will see in the painting in a very intense, very marked way, that this flower is, properly speaking, the mental visual center of the painting.

It is so in the following way: this bouquet and this flower come to the foreground and are seen, as one says, “contre-jour” [in backlighting], that is, it here forms a black mass: it is treated in such a way that it gives this painting its character that can be called mannerist. It is drawn in an extremely refined way. There would certainly be things to say about the flowers chosen for this bouquet. But around the bouquet, coming from behind the bouquet, radiates an intense light that falls on the extended thighs and the belly of the figure symbolizing EROS. And it is truly impossible not to see here, indicated in the most precise way and as if by the most insistent index finger, the organ that must anatomically be concealed behind this mass of flowers, namely, very precisely, the phallus of EROS.

This is seen in the very manner of the painting, accentuated in such a way that it cannot be a matter of an analytical interpretation, that the thread uniting the threat of the cleaver to what is here properly designated to us cannot fail to appear in the representation. To put it plainly, the thing is worth designating precisely because it is not common in art.

We have been shown JUDITH and HOLOPHERNE many times, but still HOLOPHERNE is not what this is about, it is about “cutting cabèche” [wordplay: ‘cutting the head’]. So the very gesture, tense, of the other arm holding the lamp is also made to evoke for us all the resonances of precisely that type of other painting to which I am alluding. The lamp is there, hanging above the head of EROS. You know that in the story it is a drop of oil spilled in a slightly abrupt movement of PSYCHÉ, very moved, which comes to awaken EROS, causing him, as the story specifies, a wound from which he suffers for a long time.

Let us observe, to be meticulous, that in the reproduction you have before you, you can indeed see something like a luminous streak that starts from the lamp and goes toward the shoulder of EROS. Nevertheless, the obliqueness of this streak does not suggest that it is this drop of oil, but rather a ray of light. Some will think that there is indeed something quite remarkable here and that it represents on the part of the artist an innovation, and thus an intention that we could attribute to him unambiguously, I mean that of representing the threat of castration applied in the amorous context.

I believe we should quickly move away from this if we were to go in that direction. We should quickly move away from this because of what I pointed out to you—not fully pointed out yet, but which I hope has already come to mind for some of you—which is that we know this story, despite the influence it has had in the history of art, only from a single text: the text of APULEIUS in The Golden Ass. I hope, for your pleasure, that you have read The Golden Ass, it is a text, I must say, very exhilarating [Psyché: cf. The Golden Ass (IV, 28,1 – VI, 24,4)].

If, as has always been said, certain truths are included in this book, I can tell you that in a mythical and pictorial form these are real esoteric and initiatory secrets, it is a truth wrapped in the most shimmering, not to say the most tickling, the most titillating aspects. For in this initial appearance, it is in truth something that has not yet been surpassed, even by the most recent productions which have, in recent years in France, delighted us in the most distinctive erotic genre, with all the nuance of sadomasochism that gives erotic novels their most common spice.

Indeed, it is in the midst of a horrible story of the abduction of a young girl, accompanied by the most terrifying threats to which she finds herself exposed in the company of the ass—the one who speaks in the first person in this novel—it is in an interlude, an inclusion within this adventure of rather strong flavor, that an old woman, to distract for a moment the girl in question, the kidnapped one, the victim, tells her at length the story of EROS and PSYCHÉ.

Now, what I pointed out to you earlier is that it is following the perfidious insistence of her sisters, who do not stop trying to make her fall into the trap, to violate the promises she made to her divine lover, that PSYCHÉ succumbs. And the last means of her sisters is to suggest that he is a frightful monster, a serpent of the most hideous aspect, that surely she is not without danger in being with him. As a result, the mental short-circuit occurs in that, noting the recommendations, the extremely insistent prohibitions to which her nocturnal interlocutor resorts, imposing on her, by recommending that under no circumstances should she violate his very strict prohibition not to try to see him, she sees all too well how this recommendation coincides with what her sisters suggest. And that is where she takes the fatal step.

To take that step, given what is suggested to her, what she believes she must find, she arms herself. And in this sense we can say… although the history of art gives us, to my knowledge, no other testimony, I would be grateful if someone now, prompted by my remarks, would bring me proof to the contrary …that if PSYCHÉ has been depicted in this significant moment as armed, it is indeed from the text of APULEIUS that the mannerist in question, ZUCCHI, has thus borrowed what makes the scene original. What does that mean?

ZUCCHI presents us with this scene, the story of which was already very widespread at the time. It was widespread for all sorts of reasons. Even though we have only a single literary testimony, we have many in the realm of plastic and figurative representations. For example, it is said that the group in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence represents an EROS with a PSYCHÉ, this time both winged—you may notice that if here EROS has wings, PSYCHÉ does not—PSYCHÉ, in that case, winged with butterfly wings.

For example, I possess Alexandrian objects where PSYCHÉ is depicted in various aspects and frequently equipped with butterfly wings: the butterfly wings in this instance are the sign of the immortality of the soul. The butterfly, for a very long time, given the phases of its metamorphosis, that is, born first as a caterpillar, a larva, wraps itself in that kind of tomb, a sarcophagus, wrapped in a way that even recalls the mummy, where it remains until it reappears in the light in a glorified form, the theme of the butterfly, signifying the immortality of the soul, appeared as early as Antiquity, and not only in various peripheral religions, but also, indeed, has been used and is still used in Christian religion as a symbol of the immortality of the soul. In truth, it is very difficult to deny that this is what we may call the misfortunes or adventures of the soul in this story of which, as I told you, we have only a mythological text as the basis, the foundation of its transmission in Antiquity, the text of APULEIUS.

In this text by APULEIUS, whatever some authors may think by variously emphasizing the religious and spiritual meanings of the thing and who would readily find that in APULEIUS we find only a reduced, properly speaking novelistic form that does not allow us to reach the original significance of the myth, despite these allegations, I believe on the contrary that the text of APULEIUS—if you refer to it, you will notice it yourself—is on the contrary extremely rich.

It is so in the sense that this point in question, the one represented here in this moment by the painting, is only the beginning of the story, even though we already have in this text the previous phase of what may be called not only the happiness of PSYCHÉ, but earlier a first trial, namely that PSYCHÉ is at the start considered as beautiful as VENUS, and it is already as the effect of a first persecution by the gods that she finds herself exposed on the top of a rock—another form of the myth of Andromeda—to something that must seize her, that must be a monster, and which turns out in fact to be EROS, to whom VENUS has given the task of delivering her to the one of whom she must be the victim. But he, in short, seduced by the one to whom he finds himself delegated with the cruel orders of his mother, abducts her and installs her in that place of deep concealment where she in sum enjoys the happiness of the gods.

The story would end there if poor PSYCHÉ did not partake of a nature other than the divine nature and did not show, among other weaknesses, the most regrettable family feelings, that is to say, she finds no rest nor peace before having obtained from EROS, her unknown husband, the permission to see her sisters again—and you see that here the story follows on. So, before this moment there is a short period, a short preceding moment in the story, but the whole story unfolds afterward. I am not going to tell you the whole story because that is outside our subject.

What I simply want to tell you is that when Jacopo ZUCCHI produces this little masterpiece, it was not unknown, no more and no less than to the brush of RAPHAEL himself because, for example, as you know, it stretches over the ceiling and the walls of that charming FARNÈSE palace. These are pleasing scenes, almost too pleasing. We no longer, it seems, are able to endure a kind of prettiness into which, for us, seems to have declined what must have appeared, the first time that type sprang from the genius brush of RAPHAEL, as a stunning beauty. In truth, one must always allow for this: when a certain prototype, a certain form appears, it must make an impression completely different from what it is when it has been not only reproduced thousands of times but imitated thousands of times. In short, those paintings of RAPHAEL at the Farnesina give us a development, scrupulously modeled on the text of APULEIUS, of the misadventures of PSYCHÉ.

So that you do not doubt that PSYCHÉ is not a woman, but truly the soul, let me simply tell you that, for example, she goes to DEMETER who is presented there with all the instruments, all the weapons of her mysteries—and this really is, in fact, about initiation into the mysteries of ELEUSIS—and that she is turned away.

The one named DEMETER desires above all not to get into trouble with her sister-in-law VENUS. And it is only this, that, all in all, the unhappy soul, for having fallen and made at the origin a misstep for which she is not even to blame—for at the origin this jealousy of VENUS comes from nothing other than that she is considered by VENUS as a rival—finds herself tossed about, turned away from all help, even religious help itself.

And one could make a whole minute phenomenology of the unhappy soul compared to that of the consciousness qualified by the same name. Regarding this very pretty story of PSYCHÉ, we must not be mistaken, the theme in question here is not that of the couple. It is not about the relationship between man and woman, it is about something that… one only really has to know how to read to see that it is not truly hidden but is right in the foreground and too obvious, as in The Purloined Letter [wordplay: “La lettre volée”], …is nothing other than the relationship between soul and desire. It is in this that the composition—I do not think I am exaggerating in calling it “extremely striking”—of this painting, can be said, for us, to isolate in an exemplary way this sensitive character, depicted by the intensity of the image produced here, to isolate what could be a structural analysis of Apuleius’s myth that remains to be done.

You know enough, I have told you enough about what a structural analysis of a myth is for you to know at least that it exists. In Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS, one finds the structural analysis of a certain number of North American myths, I do not see why we should not engage in this same analysis with respect to the fable of APULEIUS. Of course, we are—curiously—less well served for these things closer to us than for others that seem further removed as regards sources, that is to say, we ultimately have only one version of this myth: that of APULEIUS.

But it does not seem impossible, within the myth, to operate in a way that makes it possible to bring out a certain number of pairs of significant oppositions. Through such an analysis, I would say, without the aid of the painter, we might perhaps let pass unnoticed the truly primordial and original character of the moment, of the best-known moment, moreover: everyone knows that what remains in the collective memory of the meaning of the myth is this, that EROS flees and disappears because little PSYCHÉ has in sum been too curious and, moreover, disobedient.

What is at stake, what is contained, what is hidden behind this well-known moment of myth and story, would be—if we believe what the painter’s intuition here reveals to us—nothing other than this decisive moment. Certainly, it is not the first time we see it appear in an ancient myth, but whose value as emphasis, whose crucial, pivotal character, had to wait for quite a few centuries—in sum, for FREUD—to be placed at the center of the psychic theme.

And that is why it is not useless, having made this discovery, to share it with you, for in sum it comes to designate… in the small image that will remain—by virtue of the very time I am devoting to it this morning—imprinted in your minds …it comes to illustrate what today I can hardly do more than point to as the point of convergence of two registers:

– that of instinctual dynamics insofar as I have taught you to consider it as marked by the effects of the signifier, and thus to emphasize even at this level how the castration complex must be articulated, can only be fully articulated by considering this instinctual dynamic as structured by this mark of the signifier,
– and at the same time, this is the value of the image, to show us that there is thus a superposition or overimpression, a common center, a vertical sense at this point of production of the castration complex into which we are now going to enter.

For you see, that is where I left you last time, having taken the theme of desire and demand in chronological order, but by repeating to you at every moment that this divergence, this splitting, this difference between desire and demand which marks with its line all the early stages of libidinal evolution, is determined by the nachträglich action, by something retroactive coming from a certain point where the paradox of desire and demand appears with its minimal brilliance, and which is truly that of the genital stage, insofar as there, desire and demand, it would seem, should at least be able to be distinguished.

They are marked by this feature of division, of splitting which, for analysts—consider it well—must still be, if you read the authors, a problem, I mean a question, an enigma, more avoided than resolved and which is called “the castration complex.” Thanks to this image, you must see that the castration complex, in its structure, in its instinctual dynamics, is centered in such a way that it coincides exactly with what we may call the point of the birth of the soul.

For, in the end, if the myth of PSYCHÉ has a meaning, it is this: that PSYCHÉ only begins to live as PSYCHÉ… not simply as endowed with an extraordinary initial gift, that of being equal to VENUS, nor even with a hidden and unknown favor, that, in short, of infinite and unfathomable happiness, …but as PSYCHÉ, as the subject of a pathos that is properly that of the soul, at that very moment when the desire that has fulfilled her will flee from her, will slip away, it is from this moment that the adventures of PSYCHÉ begin.

I told you one day: “every day is the birth of VENUS,” and as the myth, the Platonic one, tells us, it is therefore also every day the conception of EROS. But the birth of the soul is, in the universal and in the particular, for all and for each, a historical moment. And it is from this moment that in history unfolds the drama with which we are concerned in all its consequences.

In the end, one can say that if the analysis with FREUD went straight to this point, I would say that if the Freudian message ended on this articulation—see Analysis Terminable and Interminable—it is because there is a final term—the thing is properly articulated in this text—where we arrive, when we succeed in reducing in the subject all the avenues of its resurgence, of its revival, of unconscious repetitions, when we have managed to make them converge towards that rock—the term is in the text—of the castration complex: the castration complex in man as in woman, the term penisneid is among other things in this text nothing but the pinning down of the castration complex as such. It is around this castration complex and as—if I may say so—starting again from this point, that we must put to the test everything that may in some way have been discovered starting from this point of impasse.

For, whether it is a question of emphasizing the absolutely decisive and primordial effect of what pertains to the agencies of knowledge for example, or the implementation of what is called “the aggressiveness of primordial sadism,” or again what has been articulated in the different developments possible around the notion of “the object,” of its decomposition and its deepening, of this relation, up to the point of emphasizing the notion of good and bad primordial objects, all this can only be situated in a proper perspective if we seize, in a divergent manner, from where this has effectively diverged, starting again from this point up to a certain unsustainable degree by its paradox, which is that of the castration complex. An image like the one I take care today to present before you is in some way to embody what I mean when I speak of the paradox of the castration complex.

Indeed, if all the divergence that may have seemed to us so far—in the different phases we have studied—motivated by the discord, the distinction of what is the object of demand—whether in the oral stage: the demand of the subject, or in the anal stage: the demand of the other—with what in the Other occupies the place of desire, which would in the case of PSYCHÉ be to a certain extent masked, veiled though secretly glimpsed by the archaic, infantile subject, would it not seem that what can broadly be called the third phase, commonly known as “the genital phase,” is this conjunction of desire insofar as it can be involved in whatever demand of the subject, is this not precisely what must find its respondent, its counterpart in the desire of the Other?

If there is a point where desire presents itself as desire, it is indeed there where Freud’s first emphasis was made to situate it for us, that is, at the level of sexual desire revealed in its real consistency and no longer in a contaminated, displaced, condensed, metaphorical way.

It is no longer a question of the sexualization of any other function, it is the sexual function itself that is at stake. To give you a sense of the paradox to be pinpointed, I was searching this morning for an example to embody the embarrassment in which psychoanalysts find themselves regarding the phenomenology of this genital stage, I came across an article by MONCHY on the “castration complex” in the International Journal.

To what is an analyst, who today is once again interested—since there are not many—in the castration complex, led to in order to explain it? Well, to something that I give you as a riddle. I will summarize it very briefly. The paradox of course cannot fail to strike you that without the revelation of the genital drive, it is necessarily marked by that splitting which consists in the castration complex as such, the Trieb is for him something instinctual.

It is a question of someone starting with a certain background—VON UEXKÜLL and LORENZ—he speaks to us at the beginning of his article about what are called releaser mechanisms (congenital reaction schemes), which brings to mind the fact that with little birds who have never been subjected to any experience, it suffices to project the shadow identical to that of a hawk to provoke all the reflexes of terror. In short, the imagery of the lure, as the author of this article who writes in English expresses in French: “l’attrape” [wordplay: ‘the lure’]. Things are all simple, the primitive “lure” must be sought in the oral phase. The reflex of biting, that is, since the child can have the famous sadistic fantasies which result in the severing of the most precious object, the mother’s nipple, that is where the origin must be sought for what, in the later genital phase, will manifest itself by the transfer of fellatio fantasies, as this possibility of depriving, injuring, mutilating the partner in sexual desire in the form of his organ.

And this is why—not your daughter is mute—but why the genital phase is marked with the possible sign of castration. The nature of such a reference, of such an explanation is obviously indicative of this kind of reversal that has occurred and which has gradually led to place, under the register of primary drives, drives that become, it must be said, more and more hypothetical as they are pushed back into the original background, which in the end, results in an accentuation of the constitutional theme, I don’t know what innate factor in primordial aggressiveness. This is certainly quite indicative of the current orientation of analytic thought.

Are we not correctly spelling things out by stopping at this point, that experience—I mean the problems that experience raises for us—in a sense truly offers us in common.

Already, I have presented before you what was articulated by JONES, in a certain need to explain the castration complex, in the notion of ἀϕάνισις [aphanisis: disappearance], a common Greek term brought into currency in the analytic discourse of FREUD, and which means disappearance. It concerns the disappearance of desire and the idea that what is at stake in the castration complex would be, for the subject, the fear aroused by the disappearance of desire.

Those who have followed my teaching long enough cannot—I hope—fail to remember…in any case those who do not remember can refer to the excellent summaries made by LEFEBVRE PONTALIS…that I have already pushed it forward by saying that if there is a perspective here, there is all the same a singular reversal in the articulation of the problem, a reversal that clinical facts allow us to pinpoint.

That is why I have long analyzed before you, have criticized the famous dream of Ella SHARPE which is precisely what my seminar analyzed in its last session. This dream of Ella SHARPE revolves entirely around the theme of the phallus. I urge you to refer to this summary because it cannot be repeated and the points there are absolutely essential.

The meaning of what is at stake in this context is what I have pointed out: that, far from the fear of aphanisis projecting, so to speak, into the image of the castration complex, it is on the contrary the necessity, the determination of the signifying mechanism that, in the castration complex, in most cases drives the subject not at all to fear aphanisis but rather to take refuge in aphanisis, to put their desire in their pocket. Because what analytic experience reveals to us is that something is more precious than desire itself: to keep its symbol, which is the phallus. That is the problem presented to us.

I hope you have observed this painting well. Those flowers that are there in front of the sex of EROS, they are precisely not so abundantly marked that one cannot see that, behind, there is nothing. There is literally not enough room for the least sexual organ, so that what PSYCHÉ is about to cut there has already literally disappeared from reality.

And besides, if something is striking, as opposed to the good form, the beautiful human form of this truly divine woman in this image, it is the extraordinarily composite character of the image of EROS. This face is that of a child, but the body has something Michelangelesque: muscular and already almost beginning to be marked, not to say sagging, not to mention the wings.

Everyone knows there has been a long debate about the sex of angels. If the debate lasted so long, it is probably because people did not quite know where to stop. Be that as it may, the apostle tells us that, whatever the joys of the resurrection of bodies, once the heavenly feast has come, nothing more will be done in heaven in the sexual order, neither active nor passive.

So what is at stake, what is concentrated in this image, is precisely that something which is the center of the paradox of the castration complex. It is that, far from the desire of the Other, inasmuch as it is approached at the genital phase, being able to be—if in fact—ever accepted in what I would call its rhythm, which is at the same time its elusiveness as far as the child is concerned, namely that it is still a fragile desire, that it is an uncertain, premature, anticipated desire, this ultimately masks for us what is really at stake, which is quite simply the reality at whatever level of sexual desire to which, so to speak, the psychic organization as psychic is not adapted.

It is that the organ is only taken, brought, approached, transformed into a signifier, and that in order to be transformed into a signifier, it is in this that it is cut. And reread everything I have taught you to read at the level of little Hans. You will see that it is only about that:

– Is it rooted?
– Is it removable?
– In the end, he manages: it is unscrewable, you unscrew it and you can put on others.

That is what it is about. What is striking is that what is shown to us is the relation of this elision thanks to which it is here nothing but the very sign that I call: the sign of absence. For what I have taught you is this: that if Φ, the phallus as signifier, has a place, it is very precisely to supply the point, at that very level where in the Other, signifiance disappears, where the Other is constituted by the fact that somewhere there is a missing signifier.

Hence the privileged value of this signifier that one can no doubt write, but can only write in parentheses, stating quite precisely this: it is the signifier of the point where the signifier is missing S(A). And this is why it can become identical to the subject itself, to the point where we can write it as the barred subject: S, at the only point where we analysts can place a subject as such—for us analysts—that is, insofar as we are bound to the effects resulting from the coherence of the signifier as such when a living being makes itself its agent and support. We see this: from then on the subject has no other possible efficacy—if we admit this determination, this overdetermination, as we call it—than that of the signifier that erases it. And this is why the subject is unconscious.

If one can even speak—and even where one is not an analyst—of double symbolization, it is in this sense that the nature of the symbol is such that two registers necessarily follow: that which is linked to the symbolic chain, and that which is linked to the disturbance, the confusion that the subject has been able to bring into it, for it is there that in the end the subject situates itself most certainly. In other words, the subject affirms the dimension of truth as original only at the moment when it uses the signifier to lie.

This relationship, then, of the phallus with the effect of the signifier, the fact that the phallus as signifier—and this means therefore transposed to a completely different function than its organic function—is precisely what must be considered as the center of any coherent apprehension of what is at stake in the castration complex, that is what I wanted this morning to draw your attention to. But I also wanted to open, not yet in an articulated and rational way, but in an imaginative way, what we will bring next time and which is, if I may say so, brilliantly represented thanks to the very mannerism of the artist who made this painting.

It is this: did it occur to you that by placing in front of this phallus as missing—and as such, raised to major signifiance—this vase of flowers, ZUCCHI turns out to have anticipated by three and a half centuries—and I assure you right up to these last days: without my knowledge—the very image I have used in the form of what I called “the illusion of the overturned vase” [wordplay: “l’illusion du vase renversé”] to articulate the whole dialectic of the relations of the ideal ego and the ego ideal. I said this a very long time ago, but I have completely revisited the thing in an article that will soon appear. This relationship of the object, as object of desire, as partial object with all the necessary adaptation, this is what I have tried to articulate in its different elements in this system I called “the illusion of the overturned vase” in a fun physics experiment.

The important thing is to project into your mind this idea that the problem of castration as a mark, insofar as it marks, insofar as it is the center of the whole economy of desire as analysis has developed it, is closely tied to that other problem which is how the Other…
– as the place of speech,
– as the fully legitimate subject,
– as the one with whom we have, at the limit, relations of good faith and bad faith
…can and must become something exactly analogous to what can be found in the most inert object, namely the object of desire: (a). It is this tension, this drop, this fundamental drop in level which becomes the essential regulation of everything in man that is problematic in desire, it is this that is at stake in analysis.

I think next time I will be able to articulate it for you in the most exemplary way. I concluded what I taught you about Ella SHARPE’s dream with these words: “This phallus”… I was saying, speaking of a subject caught in the most exemplary neurotic situation for us as it was that of aphanisis determined by the castration complex …“This phallus, he is and he is not.” This interval: being and not being, language allows us to glimpse in a formula where the verb “to be” slips: “he is not without having it.”

It is around this subjective assumption between being and having that the reality of castration plays out. In fact, the phallus—I wrote at the time—has a function of equivalence in the relation to the object: it is in proportion to a certain renunciation of the phallus that the subject comes into possession of the plurality of objects that characterizes the human world.”

In an analogous formula, one could say that the woman is without having it, which can be experienced very painfully in the form of penisneid, but which—I add this to the text—is also a great strength. This is what Ella SHARPE’s patient does not consent to realize: he “puts the phallic signifier in safekeeping.” And I concluded:

“No doubt there is something more neurotizing than the fear of losing the phallus, it is not wanting the Other to be castrated.”

But today, after we have explored the dialectic of transference in The Symposium, I will offer you another formula, which is this: if this desire of the Other is essentially separated from us by this mark of the signifier, do you not now understand why ALCIBIADES, having perceived that there is in SOCRATES the secret of desire, asks… in an almost impulsive way, from an impulse that is at the origin of all the false paths of neurosis or perversion, for this desire of SOCRATES, which he also knows exists since it is on this that he bases himself …to see it as a sign.

That is also why SOCRATES refuses. For this, of course, is nothing but a short-circuit: seeing desire produced as a sign is not, for all that, to be able to access the path along which desire is caught up in a certain dependency, which is what is at stake to know. So you see here the beginning of what I am attempting to show you and to trace as a path toward what must be the desire of the analyst.

For the analyst to have what the other lacks, he must have “nescience,” and as “nescience” he must be in the mode of having, he must not be without having it as well, he must be no less “nescient” than his subject. In fact, he is not without having an unconscious himself. No doubt he is always beyond everything the subject knows, without being able to tell him. He can only give him a sign: “to be what represents something for someone,” that is the definition of the sign.

There being, in sum, nothing else that prevents him from being this desire of the subject, except precisely having it, the analyst is condemned to “false surprise.” But be well aware that he is effective only by offering himself to the “true” one, which is intransmissible, of which he can only give a sign. “To represent something for someone,” that is exactly what must be broken, for the sign that must be given is the sign of the lack of signifier. It is, as you know, the only sign that is not supported because it is the one that provokes the most unspeakable anguish.

Yet it is the only one that can allow the other to access what is of the nature of the unconscious, to the “science without conscience” [wordplay: “science sans conscience”] of which you may perhaps now understand, before this image, in what sense, not negative but positive, RABELAIS says it is the “ruin of the soul.”