🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I found myself on Saturday and Sunday, for the first time for me, opening the notes taken at various points of my seminar in recent years, to see whether the markers I gave you there, under the heading of: The object relation, then of desire and its interpretation, converged without too much wavering toward what I am trying this year to articulate before you under the term ‘transference’.

I realized that, indeed, in everything I have brought to you, which is there—it seems—somewhere in one of the cabinets of the Society, there are many things you will be able to find again, I think, at a time when there will be time to bring that out again, at a time when you will say to yourselves that in 1961 there was someone teaching you something. It will not be said that, in this teaching, there will be no allusion to the context of what we are living through in this era. I find that there would be something excessive in that. And also, to accompany this, I will read to you a little piece of what was my encounter, that same last Sunday, with this Dean SWIFT, whom I have had all too little time to speak to you about, when I already addressed the question of the symbolic function of the phallus, whereas in his work the question is in a way so omnipresent that one could say that, taking his work as a whole, it is articulated there as such.

SWIFT and Lewis CARROLL are two authors to whom, without having time to give you a running commentary, I believe you would do well to refer, to find there much material closely related—as closely as possible, as closely as it is possible in literary works—to the thematic to which I am for the moment the closest. And in Gulliver’s Travels, which I was looking at in a charming little edition from the middle of the last century, illustrated by GRANDVILLE, I found in the ‘Voyage to Laputa’—which is the third part, and has the characteristic of not limiting itself to the ‘Voyage to Laputa’…

It is at Laputa, a formidable anticipation of a cosmonautic station, that GULLIVER goes to wander in a certain number of kingdoms, about which he shares with us a certain number of significant views which for us retain all their richness, and namely in one of those kingdoms, when he comes from another, he speaks to an academician and says to him that:

‘In the kingdom of Tribnia, named Langden by the natives, where he had resided, the mass of the people was composed of informers, accusers, spies, prosecutors, plaintiffs, paid jurors, accompanied by all their auxiliary and subordinate instruments, all under the banner, orders, and pay of the ministers and their deputies…’

Let us move on from this theme, but he explains to us how the informers operate:

‘…they seize the letters and papers of these people and have them put in prison. These papers are placed in the hands of specialists, experts at detecting the hidden meaning of words, syllables, and letters…’

This is where SWIFT starts to have a field day [in the first occurrence: wordplay], and—as you will see—it is quite delightful regarding the substantial essence. For example, they will discover:
– that a chamber pot means a privy council
– A flock of geese, a senate
– A limping dog, an invasion
– The plague, a standing army
– A cockchafer, a prime minister
– The gout, a high priest
– A gibbet, a secretary of state
– A chamber pot, a committee of great lords
– A sieve, a lady of the court
– A broom, a revolution
– A mousetrap, a public office
– A cesspool, the public treasury
– A sewer, a court
– A cap with bells, a favorite
– A broken reed, a court of justice
– An empty barrel, a general [laughter]
– An open wound, public affairs.

When this method yields nothing, they have more effective ones, which their scholars call ‘acrostics’ and ‘anagrams’. First, they give all the initial letters a political meaning, so that N could signify a conspiracy, B a regiment of cavalry, L a fleet at sea, or else they transpose the letters of a suspicious document so as to reveal the most secret designs of a discontented party. For example, you read in a letter: ‘Our brother Thomas has hemorrhoids’, the skilled decipherer will find in the arrangement of these indifferent words a phrase that will make it clear that everything is ready for a sedition. I find it worthwhile to return, with the help of this text that is not so old, to their fundamentally paradoxical background, so evident in all kinds of features, to contemporary things.

Because in truth, having been awakened this night at an untimely hour by someone who communicated to me what you all have more or less seen, a false piece of news, my sleep was for a moment troubled by the following question: I asked myself if I was not misrecognizing, regarding contemporary events, the dimension of tragedy. In truth, this became a problem for me after what I explained to you last year about tragedy: I saw nowhere what I called ‘the reflection of beauty’ appear.

This actually prevented me from falling back asleep for a certain time. I later fell asleep again, leaving the question unresolved. This morning upon waking, the question had somewhat lost its urgency. It appeared that we are still on the level of farce, and with regard to the questions I was asking myself, the problem disappeared at the same time.

That said, we are going to resume things at the point where we left them last time, namely the formula I gave you as that of the obsessional’s fantasy:

A ⋄ Φ(a, a’, a”, a”’, …)

It is quite clear that presented in this way and in this algebraic form, it can only be entirely opaque to those who have not followed our previous development. I will try, in speaking of it, to restore its dimensions. You know that it stands in contrast to that of the hysteric:

(a / -ϕ) ⋄ A

as I wrote to you last time, namely a/-ϕ in relation to A, which can be read in several ways: ‘desire of—it is one way to say it—capital A’. So it is for us to specify which functions are respectively assigned in our symbolization to Φ [capital phi] and to ϕ [small phi]. I strongly urge you to make the effort not to rush into the analogical inclinations to which it is always easy, tempting, to give in and to say, for example, that:
– Φ is the symbolic phallus,
– ϕ is the imaginary phallus.

That may be true in a certain sense, but to stop there would really be to expose yourselves to missing the interest of these symbolizations, which, believe me, we do not like to multiply needlessly, simply for the pleasure of superficial analogies and mental facilitation, which is not, properly speaking, the aim of teaching. It is a matter of seeing what these two symbols represent. It is a matter of knowing what they represent in our intention. And you can already foresee, estimate, their importance and usefulness by all sorts of indications.

This year, for example, began with a very interesting lecture by our friend Mr. Georges FAVEZ, who, speaking to you for instance about what the analyst was, and at the same time his function for the analysand, told you a conclusion such as this: that in the end the analyst—for the analysand, the patient—took the function of his fetish. Such is the formula, in a certain aspect around which he had grouped all sorts of convergent facts, at which his lecture arrived.

It is certain that there was here one of the most subjective perspectives, and which, all the same, does not leave him completely isolated in his formulation. It was a formulation prepared by all sorts of other things found in various articles on transference, but which one cannot say does not present itself in a somewhat surprising and paradoxical form. I also told him that the things we would articulate this year would not fail, in some way, to respond to the question he had posed there.

When, moreover, we read in the now completed work of an author who has tried to articulate the special function of transference in obsessive neurosis, and who, in short, bequeaths to us a work which, starting from a first consideration of the ‘Therapeutic Incidences of Becoming Conscious of Penis Envy in Female Obsessive Neurosis’, leads to an action, a wholly generalized theory of the function of ‘The distance to the object’ in the handling of transference.

This function of ‘distance’, specially developed around an experience that is expressed in the progress of analyses, and especially analyses of obsessionals, as being something whose principal, active, effective driving force in the subject’s regaining possession of the meaning of the symptom—especially when it is obsessional—of the imaginary introjection of the phallus, is very precisely embodied in the imaginary fantasy of the analyst’s phallus, I am well aware that a question arises here.

Already, especially regarding the work of this author and especially, I would say, regarding his technique, I have introduced before you the posing of the question and the criticism that today, in a way closer to the question of transference, we will be able to tighten further—this criticism. This, incontestably, requires that we enter into a quite precise articulation of what the function of the phallus is, and specifically in transference. This is what we are trying to articulate using the terms symbolized here, Φ and ϕ.

And because we clearly understand that, in articulating analytic theory, it is never a matter of proceeding in a deductive way, from the top down, if I may say so, since nothing starts more from the ‘particular’ than the analytic experience, if anything remains valid in an articulation such as that of the author I mentioned a moment ago, it is indeed because his theory of transference, the function of the phallic image in transference, starts from a very localized experience, which, one can say, in some ways may limit its scope, but in exactly the same measure gives it its weight; it is because he started from the experience of obsessionals, and in a very acute and accentuated way, that we have to retain it and discuss what he concluded from it.

It is also from the obsessional that we will start today, and that is why I have produced, at the head of what I have to tell you, the formula in which I try to articulate his fantasy.

A ⋄ Φ(a, a’, a”, a”’, …)

I have already told you quite a lot about the obsessional, there is no need to repeat it. It is not a matter of simply repeating what is fundamentally substitutive, perpetually eluded, of that kind of ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ [wordplay] which characterizes the whole way in which the obsessional proceeds in his way of situating himself in relation to the Other, more exactly of never being in the place where in the moment he seems to designate himself.

What the formulation of the second term of the obsessional’s fantasy very precisely alludes to is this: that the objects, for him, as objects of desire, are in a certain way set in function of certain erotic equivalences, which is precisely in that something that we are accustomed to articulate, when speaking of the eroticization of his world, and especially of his intellectual world, which is exactly what this way of denoting this setting in function by ϕ aims at, which designates this something.

It is enough to refer to an analytic observation, when it is well done by an analyst, for us to realize that ϕ—we will gradually see what that means—is precisely what underlies this equivalence established between objects on the erotic level, that ϕ is in a sense the unit of measure in which the subject accommodates the function petit(a), the function of the objects of his desire.

To illustrate this, I really have nothing else to do but turn to the key observation of obsessional neurosis, but you will find it just as well in all the others, as long as they are valid observations, remember this feature of the thematic of the Rat Man, of ‘the man of the rats’. Why, moreover, is he called the Rat Man—in the plural—by FREUD, when in the fantasy where FREUD first approaches this kind of internal view of the structure of his desire, in that kind of horror caught on his face, of an unknown enjoyment, there are not rats, there is only one rat in the famous Turkish torture to which I will return in a moment.

If we speak of the Rat Man, it is indeed because the rat pursues under a multiplied form its course throughout the whole economy of these singular exchanges, these substitutions, this permanent metonymy, of which the symptomatology of the obsessional is the incarnate example. The formula, which is his, ‘so many rats, so many florins,’—this in relation to the payment of fees in analysis—is there only as one of the particular illustrations of this somehow permanent equivalence of all the objects grasped in turn in this kind of marketplace.

This metabolism of objects in the symptoms is inscribed, in a more or less latent way, in a kind of common unit, a gold-unit, standard-unit, which here the rat symbolizes, properly occupying the place of that something I call ϕ, insofar as it is a certain state, a certain level, a certain way of reducing, of degrading in a certain way—we will see in what sense we can call it degradation—the function of the signifier Φ.

What is at stake is to know what Φ represents, namely the function of the phallus in its generality, that is, in all subjects who speak and who therefore have an unconscious, to perceive it from the point given to us in the symptomatology of obsessional neurosis. Here, we can say that we see it emerge—under these forms that I call ‘degraded’—emerge, observe this well… in a way we can say, in accordance with what we know and what experience shows us in a very evident way in the structure of the obsessional… at the level of consciousness.

This phallic putting-into-function is not repressed, that is, deeply hidden, as in the hysteric. The ϕ, which is there in the position of putting all objects into function—in the place of the little f(…) of a mathematical formula—is perceptible, admitted, in the symptom, conscious, truly perfectly visible. ‘Conscious’, conscius, fundamentally, originally means the possibility of the subject’s complicity with himself, and therefore also of a complicity with the other who observes him. The observer has almost no trouble becoming complicit in this. The sign of the phallic function emerges from all sides at the level of the articulation of symptoms. It is precisely at this point that the question arises of what FREUD is trying, not without difficulty, to illustrate for us when he articulates the function of Verneinung. How can things be so spoken and so unrecognized at the same time!

For ultimately, if the subject were nothing but what a certain psychologism wants—which, as you know, even within our Societies, always maintains its rights—if the subject were ‘seeing the other seeing you’, if it were only that, how could one say that the function of the phallus is, in the obsessional, in a position to be known? For it is perfectly patent! And yet, one can say that even in this patent form, it participates in what we call ‘repression’, in the sense that, however admitted it may be, it is not admitted by the subject without the help of the analyst. And without the help of the Freudian register, it is neither recognized nor even recognizable.

It is exactly here that we touch with our finger that being a subject is something other than being a gaze before another gaze, according to the formula I just now called psychologistic, and which even goes so far as to include in its characteristics the existing Sartrean theory as well. To be a subject is to have one’s place in capital A, in the place of speech. And here, it is to make visible this possible accident that at the level of capital A this function exercised by the bar in capital A [A] takes place: namely, that there occurs this lack of speech of the Other as such, at the very moment when the subject here manifests himself as the function of ϕ in relation to the object.

The subject vanishes at this precise point, does not recognize himself, and it is there precisely, as such, in the lack of recognition that misrecognition occurs automatically, at this point of deficiency where this function of phallicism, to which the subject is devoted, is covered, unterdrückt, and in its place occurs this mirage of narcissism that I would really call ‘frenetic’ in the obsessional subject.

This kind of alienation of phallicism, which manifests itself so visibly in the obsessional in phenomena that can be expressed—for example, in what are called the difficulties of thought in the obsessional neurotic—in a perfectly clear, articulated way, admitted by the subject, felt as such: ‘What I think,’ the subject tells you, implicitly, in his discourse sufficiently articulated for the feature to be drawn and the sum to be made from his statement, ‘it is not so much because it is guilty that it is difficult for me to sustain it, to make progress in it, it is because it is absolutely necessary that what I think is from me, and never from the neighbor, from another.’

How many times do we hear this! Not only in the typical situations of the obsessional, in what I would call ‘obsessionalized relations’ that we produce, in a certain sense, artificially, in a relationship as specific as that of analytic teaching as such.

I have spoken somewhere—namely in my Rome Report—of what I have called at the foot of the ‘wall of language’. Nothing is more difficult than to bring the obsessional to the foot of the wall of his desire. For there is something of which I do not know if it has ever really been highlighted, and yet it is a very enlightening point. I will use to clarify it the term that you know I have already used more than once, the term introduced by JONES in a way in which I have indicated all the ambiguities, of ἀϕάνιςις [aphanisis], disappearance—as you know, that is the meaning of the word in Greek—disappearance of desire.

It seems to me that no one has ever pointed out this very simple and so tangible thing in the stories of the obsessional, especially in his efforts when he is on a certain path of autonomous research, of self-analysis if you wish, when he is situated somewhere on the road of this search which is called, in one form or another, ‘realizing his fantasy’, it seems that one has never stopped at the function—completely impossible to set aside—of the term ἀϕάνιςις [aphanisis]. If one uses it, it is because there is an entirely natural and ordinary ἀϕάνιςις [aphanisis] which is limited by the power the subject has to do what is called to hold, ‘to hold the erection’.

Desire has a natural rhythm, and even before evoking the extremes of the inability to ‘hold’, the most troubling forms of the brevity of the act, one can note this, it is that what the subject encounters as an obstacle, as a stumbling block, where, literally, something that is profoundly fundamental, of his relation to his fantasy, comes to break:

—it is, strictly speaking, that which, ultimately, in him, always comes to an end,

—it is that, in the line of erection, then of the fall of desire, there is a moment when the erection slips away.

Very exactly, it is precisely this moment that signals that, my God, overall, he is not endowed with more or less than what we would call a very ordinary ‘genitality’, even rather soft, as I have thought to notice, and to say it all, if it were a matter of something that would be situated at that level in the twists and torments that the hidden springs of his desire inflict on the obsessional, it would be elsewhere that we should direct our effort.

I mean that I always evoke, as a counterpoint, that which precisely we absolutely do not concern ourselves with, but which it is surprising that no one asks why we do not concern ourselves with—the development of gymnasia for sexual embrace, of making bodies live in the dimension of nakedness and being seized by the belly. I do not know, apart from a few exceptions—one of them being, as you well know, so disapproved, that of REICH specifically—I do not know that it has ever been a field where the analyst’s attention has extended.

In what the obsessional is dealing with, he may be more or less skilled at supporting it, at managing his desire. It is, all in all, a question of customs in an affair where things—analysis or not—remain in the domain of the clandestine, and where, consequently, cultural variations have little to do. What is at stake, therefore, is indeed elsewhere, it is situated at the level of the discord between this fantasy, precisely insofar as it is linked to this function of phallicism, and the act—in relation to that which always falls short—where he aspires to embody it.

And naturally, it is on the side of the effects of the fantasy, this fantasy that is all phallicism, that all those symptomatic consequences develop which are made to lend themselves to it, and for which, precisely, he includes everything that lends itself to it in this form of isolation so typical, so characteristic as a mechanism, and which has been emphasized as a mechanism in the birth of the symptom.

If, therefore, there is in the obsessional this fear of ἀϕάνιςις [aphanisis] that JONES highlights, it is precisely insofar, and only insofar, as it is the putting to the test—which always turns into defeat—of this function Φ of the phallus as we are trying for the moment to approach it. In short, the result is that the obsessional ultimately fears nothing so much as that to which he imagines he aspires: the freedom of his actions and his gestures, and the state of nature, if I may put it this way.

The tasks of nature are not his, nor is anything that leaves him sole master on board, so to speak, with God, namely the extreme functions of responsibility, pure responsibility, the one that one has in regard to that Other in which what we articulate is inscribed. And—I say this in passing—the point I am indicating is nowhere better illustrated than in the function of the analyst, and very precisely at the moment when he articulates the interpretation. You see that throughout my discourse today I am continually correlating, alongside the field of the neurotic’s experience, that which the analytic action reveals to us so specifically, insofar as necessarily it is the same, since it is there that ‘one must go’.

On the horizon of the obsessional’s experience, there is what I will call a certain fear always of ‘deflating’ [wordplay] which is, strictly speaking, related to something that we could call ‘phallic inflation’ inasmuch as, in a certain way, this function in him of the phallus Φ could not be better illustrated than by the fable of The frog who wanted to make herself as big as the ox:

‘The puny creature—as you know—swelled up so much that she burst.’

It is a moment of experience continually renewed at the real stumbling block to which the obsessional is brought on the frontiers of his desire. And it seems to me that it is important to emphasize this, not only in order to highlight a derisory phenomenology, but also to enable you to articulate what is at stake in this function Φ of the phallus inasmuch as it is the one hidden behind its coinage at the level of the function ϕ.

I have already begun to articulate this function Φ of the phallus the last time by formulating a term which is that of ‘real presence’. This term, I think you are sensitive enough to have noticed between which quotation marks I put it. In any case, I did not introduce it alone, and I spoke of ‘insult to real presence’ so that already no one would be mistaken, and we are not here dealing with a neutral reality. This ‘real presence’, it would be very strange if—if it fulfills the function which is the radical one I am trying here to help you approach—it had not already been identified somewhere.

And of course, I think you have already all perceived its homonymy, its identity with what the religious dogma, the one to which we have access, so to speak by birth, in our cultural context, calls by that name. ‘Real presence’, this pair of words as a signifier, we are accustomed, whether close or distant, to hearing it, long whispered in our ear about the Catholic Apostolic and Roman dogma of the Eucharist.

And I assure you that there is no need to look far to realize that this is right at the surface in the phenomenology of the obsessional. I assure you that it is not my fault!

Since I spoke earlier about the work of someone who focused research on the structure of obsessionality on the phallus, I take his key article, the one whose title I gave earlier: The therapeutic incidences of becoming conscious of penis envy in female obsessional neurosis, I begin to read, and of course, from the very first pages, all possibilities for critical commentary will arise for me regarding, for example, precisely this:

‘Like the male obsessional, the woman needs to identify herself regressively with the man in order to free herself from the anxieties of early childhood; but whereas the former will rely on this identification to transform the infantile love object into a genital love object, she, the woman, relying at first on this same identification, tends to abandon this first object and to orient herself toward a heterosexual fixation, as if she could proceed to a new feminine identification, this time with the person of the analyst.’

And further on, that:

‘Shortly after the desire for phallic possession, and correspondingly for the castration of the analyst, is brought to light, and as a result the aforementioned effects of relief are obtained, this personality of the male analyst is assimilated to that of a benevolent mother.’ [p.216]

Three lines further, we will find again that famous ‘initial destructive drive of which the mother is the object’, that is, the major coordinates of the analysis of the imaginary in the analysis presently being conducted. I have only punctuated in passing within this thematic, only the difficulties and the leaps that this general interpretation, in some way summarized here as a preface to all that is to be supposedly illustrated afterwards, presupposes as already traversed. But I need only go half a page further to enter into the phenomenology of what is at stake and into what this author—whose first writing this is, and who was a clinician—finds to tell us, to recount to us in the fantasies of his patient thus situated as obsessional.

And there is really nothing else before it. The first thing that comes to light is this: ‘she imagined male genital organs’—it is specified—‘in the place of the host without it being a matter of hallucinatory phenomena.’ [p.217]

We do not doubt it. In fact, everything we see in this area accustoms us to know very well that it is something quite different from hallucinatory phenomena…

‘…she imagined male genital organs in the place of the host.’

It is in the same observation that, further on, we have already borrowed last time the sacrilegious fantasies which consist precisely, not only in superimposing in such a clear way the male genital organs—here it is specified: ‘without it being a matter of hallucinatory phenomena’, that is, indeed as such, in a signifying form—superimposing them on what is also for us, in the most precise symbolic way, identifiable as ‘real presence’. But moreover, what is at stake is this ‘real presence’—to reduce it in a way, to break it, to crush it in the mechanism of desire, as the subsequent fantasies—which I have already cited last time—will sufficiently highlight. I do not think you imagine that this observation is unique. I will quote you among dozens of others, because an analyst’s experience only goes in one area by exceeding a hundred, the following fantasy that occurred in an obsessional at a certain point in his experience.

These attempts at desirous incarnation can in them reach an extreme erotic acuity, in situations where they may find in the partner some indulgence, deliberate or fortuitous, toward what is precisely contained in this thematic of ‘degradation’ of the ‘big Other’ into the ‘little other’, in the field of which the development of their desire is situated.

At the very moment when the subject believed he could maintain himself in this kind of relationship which for them is always accompanied by all the correlates of an extremely threatening guilt, and which can in some way be balanced by the intensity of desire, the subject devised the following fantasy with a partner who represented for him, at least for a moment, that so satisfying complement: to have the holy host play a role such that, placed in the woman’s vagina, it would be found capping the subject’s penis, his own, at the moment of penetration.

Do not think that this is one of those refinements that are only found in a special literature; this is truly in its common register. It is thus in the realm of fantasy, especially obsessional. So how can we not refrain from reducing all this to the register of a banalization such as that of a so-called ‘distance to the object’, insofar as the object at stake would be objectivity? This is exactly what we are described:

—the objectivity of the world as it is recorded by the more or less harmonious combination of spoken enumeration with common imaginary relations,
—the objectivity of form as specified by human dimensions,
—and speaking to us of the boundaries of the apprehension of the external world as threatened by a disturbance which would be that of the delimitation of the ego with what can be called the objects of common communication.

How can we not recognize that there is something here of another dimension: that this ‘real presence’ is to be situated somewhere and in a different register than that of the imaginary. Let us say that it is insofar as I am teaching you to situate the place of desire in relation to the function of man as a speaking subject, that we glimpse, that we can designate, describe, this fact that in man desire comes to inhabit the place of this ‘real presence’ as such, and populate it with its phantoms.

But then, what does Φ mean? Do I sum it up as designating this place of ‘real presence’ insofar as it can only appear in the intervals of what is covered by the signifier, that from these intervals, if I may say so, it is from there that the ‘real presence’ threatens the entire signifying system?

It is true, there is truth in this. And the obsessional shows you this at every point of what you call his mechanisms of projection or defense, or more precisely, phenomenologically, of conjuration: this way he has of filling in everything that may present itself as a gap in the signifier, this way that FREUD’s obsessional, the Rat Man, compels himself to count up to a certain number, between the flash of thunder and its sound. Here, in its true structure, is designated what this need to fill the signifying gap as such means: it is through this that anything can be introduced that will dissolve the whole phantasmagoria.

Apply this key to 25 or 30 of the symptoms with which the Rat Man and all the observations of obsessionals literally swarm, and you grasp at your fingertips the truth at stake, and even more: at the same time you locate the function of the phobic object, which is nothing other than the simplest form of this filling in.

Here, what I recalled to you the other day, regarding little Hans, ‘the universal signifier’ realized by the phobic object: that is it, nothing else. Here, it is at the outpost, I told you—long before approaching the hole, the gap realized in the interval where the ‘real presence’ threatens—that a unique sign prevents the subject from approaching.

This is why the role, the function, and the reason for phobia is not, as those who have only the word ‘fear’ on their lips believe, a genital or even narcissistic danger. It is very precisely—by virtue of certain privileged developments of the position of the subject in relation to the big Other, in the case of little Hans: to his mother—this point where what the subject fears to encounter is a certain kind of desire likely to send back into the nothingness ‘before’ all creation, the whole signifying system.

But then, why the phallus in this place and this role? This is where I still want today to go far enough to make you feel what I could call its ‘fitness’ [wordplay]… not deduction, since it is experience, empirical discovery, that assures us that there is something here to make us realize that it is not irrational as experience. The phallus, then, it is experience that shows it to us… but this ‘fitness’ that I wish to highlight, I want to stress that it is properly determined insofar as the phallus, as I have said—as experience reveals it to us—is not simply the organ of copulation, but is taken up in the mechanism of perversion as such.

Be clear about what I mean. What now needs to be emphasized is that: from the point which, as structural, represents the defect of the signifier, something—the phallus, Φ—can function as the signifier. What does that mean? What defines as a signifier something which we have just said is, by hypothesis, by definition and from the outset, the ‘signifier excluded from the signifier’, and so which can only enter by artifice, smuggling, and degradation, and this is precisely why we never see it except as the function of imaginary ϕ.

What then allows us to speak of it as a signifier and to isolate Φ? It is the mechanism of perversion. If we make the phallus the following, natural, schema, what is the phallus? The phallus, in the organic form of the penis, is not in the animal domain a universal organ. Insects have other ways of attaching to each other, and without going so far, the relations between fish are not phallic relations. The phallus presents itself at the human level among others as the sign of desire, it is also its instrument, and also presence. But I emphasize this sign to stop you at an essential element of articulation to retain: is it simply by this that it is a signifier? It would be crossing a limit a little too quickly to say that everything is summed up in this, for there are after all other signs of desire.

One must not even believe that what we observe in phenomenology, namely the easier projection of the phallus, due to its more insistent form onto the object of desire, onto the female object for example, which has led us to articulate many times, in perverse phenomenology, the famous equivalence: ‘girl = phallus’, in its simplest form, in the construction of the phallus, in the erect form of the phallus. That is not enough, even though we may see this kind of deep choice whose consequences we encounter everywhere as sufficiently motivated.

Is a signifier simply ‘to represent something for someone’, that is, the definition of the sign? That is it, but not simply that. For I added something else the other day when I reminded you of the function of the signifier, it is that this signifier is not simply, if I may say, ‘signaling to someone’, but at the same moment of the signifying spring, of the signifying instance: ‘signaling someone’, making the someone for whom the sign designates something, making the sign assimilate that someone, so that the someone also becomes this signifier.

And it is at this moment that I designate, as such, expressly as perverse, that we touch with our finger the instance of the phallus. For if the phallus that is shown has the effect of producing in the subject to whom it is shown also the erection of the phallus, this is not a condition that in any way satisfies any ‘natural requirement’.

It is here that there emerges and is designated what we call, in a more or less confused way, the ‘homosexual instance’. And it is not for nothing that, at this etiological level, we always point it out at the level of the male sex. It is insofar as the result is that the phallus, as a sign of desire, manifests itself, in sum, as the object of desire, as an object of attraction for desire. It is in this drive that its signifying function lies, as it is able to operate at this level, in this zone, in this sector where we must at once identify it as signifier and understand what it is thus led to designate.

It is nothing that can be directly signified, it is what is ‘beyond any possible signification’, and namely this ‘real presence’ to which today I have wanted to draw your thoughts, in order to make it the next step in our articulation.