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(All parts in English)

At the moment of presenting to you our last remarks of this year, Plato’s invocation at the beginning of the Critias came to my mind. Indeed, it is precisely there that it is found, inasmuch as he speaks of tone as an essential element in the measure of what is to be said. May I, indeed, know how to maintain this tone. In order to do so, Plato invokes that which is precisely the object he will discuss in this unfinished text: nothing less than the birth of the gods.

A convergence which, for my part, has not failed to please me, since in a lateral sense at least, we have ourselves come very close to this theme, to the point of hearing someone—whom you might, in certain respects, regard as a professional atheist—speak to us of the gods as that which is found in the Real. What I am telling you here happens to be received by many each time as something addressed to him in particular.

I say “particular”:
– not individual,
– certainly not to whomever I please, since many if not all receive it,
– nor collective for that matter, since I observe that of what is received, each person leaves room—among you—for contestation if not discordance.
So a wide space is left from one to the other. Perhaps this is what is called—in the literal sense—“speaking in the desert”.

This is certainly not because I have to complain this year of any desertion, since, as everyone knows, in the desert there can be almost a crowd; the desert is not constituted by emptiness. What is important, what I dare hope, is that it is somewhat in the desert that you have come to find me. Let us not be too optimistic nor too proud of ourselves; nonetheless, let us say that all of you have had at least a small concern for the limit of the desert. That is precisely why I make sure that what I tell you is, in fact, never burdensome for the role I find myself— and must—play with certain ones among you, namely that of the analyst.

To put it plainly, it is:
– insofar as my discourse, on my path this year, targets the position of the analyst, and as I distinguish this position as that which is at the heart of the analyst’s response to meet the power of transference,
– insofar as, in this very place which is his, the analyst must absent himself from any ideal of the analyst,
– insofar as my discourse respects this condition, I believe,
that it is apt to allow for this necessary conciliation, for some, of my two positions:
– that of the analyst,
– and that of one who speaks to you of analysis.

Under various headings, in various ways, one can of course formulate something that pertains to the order of the ideal; there are qualifications of the analyst, and that is already enough to constitute a means of this order. The analyst, for example, must not be entirely ignorant of a certain number of things, but this is not what comes into play in his essential position as analyst.

Here, certainly, opens the ambiguity that surrounds the word “knowledge”. Plato, in this invocation at the beginning of the Critias, refers to knowledge, on the guarantee that concerning what he addresses, the tone will remain measured. In his time, the ambiguity was much less. The sense of the word “knowledge” here is much closer to what I am aiming for at the moment when I try to articulate for you the position of the analyst, and it is indeed here that is motivated, that is justified, this starting point from the exemplary image of Socrates, who is the one I have chosen this year.

Thus, last time, I arrived at this point which I believe is essential, a turning point in what we will have to articulate subsequently, concerning the function of the object(a) in my diagrams, inasmuch as, until now, it is after all the one I have least elucidated. I did so in connection with this function of the object inasmuch as it is a part which presents itself as a separated part, “partial object” as it is called, and referring you to the text—which I urge you during these holidays to consult in detail and with attention—I pointed out to you that the one who introduces this notion of “partial object”, Abraham, understands by it in the most formal way a love of the object from which this part is precisely excluded: it is the object minus this part.

Such is the foundation of the experience around which revolves this entry of the “partial object” into play, of the interest henceforth accorded to it.

In the final analysis, the speculations of Winnicott—an observer of the child’s behavior—regarding the transitional object, relate to the meditations of the Kleinian circle. For a long time, it seems to me that those who listen to me, if they do hear me, may have had more than a hint of the most formal clarifications on the fact that this partiality of the object has the closest relation with what I have called the function of “metonymy,” which lends itself in grammar to the same ambiguities.

I mean that here as well you will be told that it is “the part taken for the whole,” which leaves everything open, both as truth and as error:
– as truth, we will understand well that this “part taken for the whole,” in the operation is transformed, it becomes the signifier,
– error, if we attach ourselves only to this side of the part, in other words if we head toward a reference of reality to understand it. I have sufficiently emphasized this elsewhere, I will not return to it here.

What matters is that you remember what, last time, around the schema on the board and another that I will take up again in a simpler form, you should know what relationship exists between the object of desire, insofar as I have always emphasized, articulated, insisted before you on this essential trait, its structuring as a partial object in analytic experience and its fundamental function as obturator and its corresponding libidinal aspect as a result. The relationship there, which I highlighted last time, is precisely what remains the most irreducibly invested at the level of the proper body: the fundamental fact of narcissism and its central core.

The sentence I extracted from Abraham, namely that it is insofar as the real phallus remains, unbeknownst to the subject, that around which the maximum investment is maintained, preserved, kept, it is in this very relation that this partial object finds itself elided, left blank in the image of the other, inasmuch as it is invested…
the very term “investment” taking all its sense from the ambiguity it carries in the German besetzt… not only as a charge but as something which surrounds this central blank.

And indeed, if we are to address any other obviousness, is it not clear that the image we can erect at the acme of the fascination of desire, precisely that which—from the Platonic theme to Botticelli’s brush—renews itself in the same form: that of the birth of Venus,
– Venus Aphrodite, daughter of the foam,
– Venus rising from the wave, this body erected above the waves of bitter love,
– Venus or even Lolita.

What does this image teach us, as analysts, if we have indeed managed to identify it in the symbolic equation, to use Fenichel’s term “girl = phallus”? For the phallus—what does it teach us, except that it is articulated here, not in any other way but strictly speaking in the same way, that the phallus, where we see it symbolically, is precisely where it is not, where we suppose it manifests itself beneath the veil in the erection of desire:

it is on this side of the mirror[2]: where it is supposed, it is where it is not.

If it is there before us, in this dazzling body of Venus, it is precisely inasmuch as it is not there that this form is invested—in the sense in which we have said just now—with all the allure, all the Triebregungen [German: “drive excitations”] that surround it from the outside. The phallus itself, with its charge, is on this side of the mirror, within the narcissistic enclosure[1].

If the mirror is there, we have the following relation: what emerges as a fascinating form is invested with libidinal currents coming from where it has been withdrawn—from the base, from the foundation so to speak, from the narcissistic foundation—from where everything that comes to form, as such, the object structure is drawn, provided we respect its relations and elements.

What constitutes the Triebregungen function of a desire, desire in its privileged function—in the proper relation called desire, distinguished from demand and need—has its seat in this remainder, to which in the image there corresponds this mirage by which it is identified precisely with the part that it lacks, and whose invisible presence gives what is called “beauty” precisely its brilliance, what the ancient himeros meant, which I have often approached, going so far as to play on its ambiguity with hemera [here: day]. [The Greek word “himeros” means desire, and it is a play on words with “hemera,” meaning day.]
Here is the central point around which turns what we have to think about the function of (a), and of course it is appropriate to return to it again, and to remind you of the myth from which we started—I say “myth”—this myth that I fabricated for you this year at the time of the Symposium, of “the hand that reaches for the log.”

What a strange warmth, this hand must carry with it for the myth to be true, for at its approach this flame bursts forth by which the object catches fire? A pure miracle against which all good souls rise up, for rare as this phenomenon may be, it must—though it is considered unthinkable—still be such that it cannot, in any case, be prevented. It is indeed the complete miracle that, in the midst of this induced fire, a hand appears. It is the purely ideal image, it is a dreamed phenomenon like that of love.
– Everyone knows that the fire of love burns only quietly.
– Everyone knows that the damp beam can contain it for a long time without anything being revealed outwardly.
– Everyone knows, in short, what is tasked—with the most kindly beta [Agathon] in The Symposium—to articulate in a nearly derisive way: that the nature of love is the nature of the moist, which means, at its root, exactly the same thing as what is there on the board, that the reservoir of objectal love, inasmuch as it is love of the living, is precisely this Schatten, this narcissistic shadow.

Last time, I presented to you the presence of this shadow, and today I would even go so far as to call it this stain of mold, of mildew perhaps better named than one thinks, if the word moi is included. We would join there all the speculation of the gentle Fénelon, he too—so to speak—wavering, when he also makes the moi the sign of I do not know what kinship with divinity.

I would be just as capable as another of extending this metaphor very far, even to the point of making my discourse a message for your sheet. That smell of dead rat that surfaces from linen if one lets it sit on the edge of a bathtub should allow you to spot in it a fundamental human sign. My analyst’s style, it is not only by preference that I favor for it paths qualified, stigmatized as “abstract,” it may simply be to spare you an olfactory sense that I could just as well tickle as anyone else.

In any case, behind it, you see taking shape this mythical point—which surely is the one born of libidinal evolution—that analysis, without ever really knowing how to situate it on the scale, has outlined around the “urinary complex” in its obscure relation with the action of fire: antinomic terms, one struggling against the other, play of the primitive ancestor.

As you know—our ancestor—analysis discovered that its first reflex in play at the appearance of the flame must have been to piss on it, renewed in Gulliver. Profound relation of “uro”: I burn, to “urina”: I piss on it. All this is inscribed at the bottom of infantile experience: the operation of drying sheets, dreams of linen enigmatically starched,
– rather of the laundress’s eroticism in Mr. Visconti, for those who were able to see his splendid staging of all possible whites, illustrating on the stage, materializing for us, the fact and the reason for knowing why Pierrot, on stage, is in white. In short, it is a small, very human milieu that pivots around the ambiguous moment between enuresis and the first pollutions.
– It is thereabouts that the dialectic of love and desire is played out in its most sensitive roots.

The central object, the object of desire—without wanting to push further this myth placidly incarnated in the first images in which, for the child, what is called the little geographic map, the little Corsica on the sheets that every analyst knows well appears—the object of desire presents itself there, at the center of this phenomenon, as an object saved from the waters of your love.

The object is found in a place which is precisely—and this is the function of my myth—to be situated in the midst of the same burning bush where one day was announced in its opaque response what there is—“I am what I am”—at that very point, where, for lack of knowing who is speaking there, we are always left to hear the question “Che vuoi?” [Italian: “What do you want?”] where the devil of Cazotte neighs, a strange metamorphic camel’s head from which, just as well, the “little faithful bitch of desire” can emerge. Such is what we are dealing with as regards the little (a) of desire, such is the summit point around which pivots that with which we are dealing in it, throughout its structure.

But as for the libidinal attraction never surpassed, I mean that what precedes it in development, namely the first forms of the object as separated: the breasts, the feces, only take on their function insofar as nachträglich [German: “after the fact,” “retroactively”] they are taken up again as having played the same game in the same place, as something enters into the dialectic of love from primitive demands, from the drive of feeding, which was established from the beginning, because the mother speaks.

There is a call to what is beyond what can satisfy, to this object called “breast” immediately taken as instrumental value, to distinguish this background, this backdrop that the breast is not only what is rejected, what is refused, because already one wants “something else.” It is also around the demand that the feces—first gifts—are withheld or given, as a response to demand. Here, in all this anteriority where we have structured the oral and anal relations, is this function: having merges with being or serves as the call of being, of the mother, beyond anything she can bring as anaclitic support.

As I told you, it is from the phallus, from its emergence in this dialectic, that the distinction between being and having opens—precisely because it is brought together in it. Beyond the phallic object, the question—this is exactly the right word—opens at the place of the object otherwise. What it presents here, in this emergence of the island, this fantasy, this reflection, where it is precisely incarnated as the object of desire, is manifested precisely in the image—I would almost say: the most sublime—in which it can be incarnated, the one I emphasized earlier as the object of desire: it is incarnated precisely in what is lacking in the image.

It is from there that everything which is to follow in the subject’s relation to the object of desire originates: if it captivates by what it lacks there, where is it possible to find that by which it captivates? The continuation, and the horizon of the relation to the object—if it is not above all a relation of preservation—is, if I may say, to interrogate it on “what it has in its belly,” which proceeds along the line where we try to isolate the function of little (a): it is the properly Sadean line along which the object is questioned down to the depths of its being, along which it is solicited to turn itself inside out in its most hidden aspect, in order to come to fill this empty form inasmuch as it is a fascinating form.

What is asked of the object is: how far can it withstand this question? And after all, it can only truly withstand it up to the point where the last lack of being is revealed, up to the point where the question becomes indistinguishable from the destruction of the object. It is because this is the limit that there is that barrier I set for you last year, the barrier of beauty or of form, it is the one by which the demand to preserve the object reflects back on the subject himself.

Somewhere in Rabelais, Gargantua leaves for war: “Keep this which is most beloved,” his wife says to him, pointing to what, in that era, is much easier to designate unambiguously than in ours, since you know that this item of clothing called “la braguette” then had its glorious character, that is to say: it cannot be kept at home. The second thing is truly full of wisdom, as is never lacking in any of Rabelais’s remarks, it is this:

“Risk everything, everything can go into battle, but this keep irreducibly at the center”

…this is precisely what must not be risked.

This allows us to shift in our dialectic, because all of this would be very pretty if it were as simple to think desire from the subject, if we were to find again at the level of desire this myth, which developed at the level of knowledge, of making the world that kind of vast web entirely spun from the belly of the spider-subject.

What does this mean, would it be so simple for this subject to say: “I desire”?

Not so simple, much less simple—you know it from your experience—than to say: “I love oceanically,” as Freud so charmingly puts it in his critique of religious effusion. I love, I bathe, I soak, I flood and I drool for good measure, and in any case all of this by slobbering, barely enough most often to wet a handkerchief, especially as it becomes increasingly rare. The “great wets” have faded since the middle of the nineteenth century. Show me today someone like Louise Colet, and I would go out of my way to see her.

To be desiring is something else, it rather seems that it leaves the “I” in suspense, it leaves it so thoroughly stuck, in any case, in the fantasy that I challenge you—that “I” of desire—to find it anywhere else than where Mr. Genet points to it in Le Balcon. I have already spoken to you about Mr. Jean Genet—that dear Genet…—about whom I once gave you a whole seminar. You will easily find the passage in Le Balcon, about this game of fantasy.

Genet admirably points out what girls know well, that: whatever the elaborations of those gentlemen thirsty to incarnate their fantasies, there is a common trait to all, it is that—by some detail in the execution—it must not seem real, because otherwise, perhaps, if it became completely real, one would no longer know where one stands. There might not be for the subject any chance of surviving it.

That is the place of the barred S signifier: S, so that it is known that it is only a signifier, this indication of the inauthentic is there, the place of the subject as the first person in the fantasy. The best way I find to indicate it—I have already suggested it several times somewhere—is to restore to its true form the cedilla of “ça” in French: it is not a cedilla, it is an apostrophe, it is—in the apostrophe of “c’est”—the first person of the unconscious. And you can even cross out the final “t”: “c’es”. That is one way of writing the subject at the level of the unconscious, the subject of the fantasy.

It must be said that this does not make the transition from object to objectality any easier. As you see, some even speak of the displacement of certain lines in the spectrum. There is a whole disjunction of the object of desire in relation to the real object—insofar as we may mythically aspire to it—which is fundamentally determined by the negative or included character of the appearance of the phallus.

This is nothing other than what I was aiming at earlier in taking you through this brief survey of the object, from its archaic forms up to its horizon of destruction:
– from the orificial object, the anificial object—if I may put it that way—of infantile past,
– to the object of the fundamentally ambivalent aim which remains, until the end, that of desire,
…for it is a pure lie—since in any case it is of no critical necessity—to speak, in relation to the object of desire, of a so-called “post-ambivalent” stage.

Likewise, this way of ordering the ascending and concordant scale of objects in relation to the phallic summit is exactly what allows us to understand the connection of level that exists, for example, between the sadistic attack insofar as it is not at all a pure and simple satisfaction of a supposedly elementary aggression, but rather, as such, a way of interrogating the object in its being, a way of drawing from it the “or else” introduced, from the phallic summit, between being and having.

That we find ourselves after the phallic stage “as ambivalent as ever” is not the worst misfortune; it is that, by producing things from this perspective, what we can notice is that we never go very far, namely that this object, as object of desire, there is always a moment when we are going to let it go, for lack of knowing precisely how to pursue the question.

To force a being—since this is the essence of the little (a)—beyond life, is not within everyone’s reach. This is not simply an allusion to natural limits to constraint, to suffering itself; it is that even forcing a being to pleasure is not a problem that we so easily solve, and for a good reason, which is that it is we who are running the game, it is ourselves who are in question.

– Justine of Sade, everyone marvels that she resists, in truth, indefinitely, all ill treatment, so much so that it really takes Jupiter himself to intervene and strike with his thunderbolt for it to end. But in truth, Justine is nothing but a shadow.

– Juliette is the only one who exists because it is she who dreams, and as such, and in dreaming, she necessarily must—read the story—expose herself to all the risks of desire, no less than those faced by Justine. Obviously, we hardly feel ourselves worthy of such company because she goes far. One should not make too much of it in polite conversation. People who care only about their little selves can find in it only a rather thin interest.

So here we are brought back to the subject. How then is it from the subject that all this dialectic of desire can be conducted, if he is nothing but an apostrophe inscribed in a relation that is above all the relation to the desire of the Other?

Here is where the function of the capital I, the signifier of the ego ideal, comes in, and very precisely insofar—as I have told you—it is from it that i(a), the ideal ego, preserves itself:
– this precious thing that one tries to take,
– this ceramic, this little pot—always a symbol of the “created”—in which everyone tries to give himself, to himself, some consistency.

Everything contributes to this, of course, all the notions of form and model: we have here, in the reference to the Other, this construction of the support around which the taking or not of the flower will be able to play out. Why? Because, of course, there is no other way for the subject to subsist. What does analysis teach us, if not that the character, the analogically radical function of the phobic image is what Freud ferreted out in the ethnographic formation of the time, under the heading of the totem, now quite shaken.

But what remains of it? Nothing other than this: that one is willing to risk everything for desire, for the fight, for prestige and even for one’s life, but not a certain limit image, but not the dissolution of the shore that binds the subject to his image. A fish, a tree, do not have a phobia. That a Bororo is not an ara is not a phobia of the ara. If this apparently involves analogous taboos, the only common factor between the two is the image in its function of delimiting and discerning the object, it is the ideal ego.

This metaphor of the desirous in just about anything can indeed always become urgent again in an individual case.

Remember little Hans. It is at the moment when the desired finds itself defenseless at the place of the desire of the Other, which threatens the shore, the limit, i(a), that the eternal artifice reproduces itself and that the subject constitutes it: he appears as enclosed in “the bear skin before you have killed it,” but it is in reality a bear skin turned inside out and it is inside that the phobic defends the other side of the specular image. The specular image has a face of investment, of course, but also a face of defense: A barrier against the Pacific of maternal love.

Let us simply say that the investment of the Other is, in short, defended by the ideal ego and that the ultimate investment of the proper phallus is defended by the phobic in a certain way. I would go so far as to say that phobia is the warning light that appears to warn you that “you are running on reserve” of libido. You can still go a certain distance with that. That is what phobia means and that is precisely why its support is the phallus as signifier.

I will not need, in this regard, to remind you, in our past experience, of all that illustrates, all that confirms, this way of considering things. Just remember the subject of The Analysis of a Single Dream by Ella Sharpe, that little cough when he warns her before entering her office, everything that is hidden behind that, everything that comes out with his stories, his familiar daydreams:

“What would I do if I were in a place where I did not want to be discovered? I would make a little barking noise. People would say: it’s only a dog.”

Everyone knows the other associations, the dog, who one day started to masturbate along his leg—I mean the patient’s leg.

What do we find exemplary in this story? That the subject, in a position of defense more than ever at the moment of entering the analytic office, pretends to be a dog. He pretends to be one, but all the others are dogs before he enters. He warns them to take back their human appearance before he enters. Do not imagine that this in any way corresponds to a special interest in dogs. In this example, as in all the others, being a dog has only one meaning, it means that one goes “woof, woof,” nothing else:

“I would bark, people would say—those who are not there—‘it’s a dog’: value of the einziger Zug [German: ‘single trait’].”

And likewise, when you take the schema by which Freud gives us the origin of identification which is properly that of the ego ideal, by what means does he do so? By the means of collective psychology. What happens, he tells us, prefiguring the great Hitlerian explosion, for everyone to enter into this kind of fascination that allows for the mass seizure, the freezing of what is called a crowd?

So that collectively all the subjects, at least for a moment, have this same ideal which allows anything and everything for a rather short time, what is needed, he tells us? That all these external objects are taken as having a common trait, the einziger Zug.

Why does this interest us? Because what is true at the collective level is also true at the individual level. The function of the ideal, insofar as it is around it that the subject’s relation to his objects is organized, is very precisely as, in the world of a speaking subject, it is a pure and simple matter of metaphorical attempt to give them all a common trait.

The world of the speaking subject—which is called the human world—corresponds to this: it is that to all objects—to take them in this animal world which analytic tradition has made exemplary of defensive identifications—it is a pure matter of decree to fix this common trait to their diversity. Whether they are dogs, cats, badgers, or does, to decree that in order to subsist in a world where the subject’s i(a) is respected, they all—whoever they may be—go “woof, woof,” such is the function of the einziger Zug.

It is essential to keep it thus structured, for outside this register, it is impossible to conceive what Freud means in the psychology of mourning and melancholia. What distinguishes mourning from melancholia? For mourning, it is quite certain that it is around the metaphorical function of the traits conferred on the object of love, inasmuch as they then have narcissistic privileges, that all the length and difficulty of mourning will revolve. In other words, and all the more significantly as he says it almost with astonishment, Freud insists on what is at stake: mourning consists in authenticating the real loss, piece by piece, bit by bit, sign by sign, element big I by element big I, until exhaustion. When that is done: it is over! But what does it mean if this object was a little (a), an object of desire, if not that the object is always masked behind its attributes: an almost banal fact.

But the affair, as is well known, begins only from the pathological, that is to say, from melancholia where we see two things: it is that the object is—curiously—much less graspable for being certainly present and for triggering infinitely more catastrophic effects, since they go as far as the drying up of that Trieb which Freud calls the most fundamental Trieb, the one that binds you to life. It is necessary to read, to follow this text, to hear what Freud points out: I do not know what disappointment—which he cannot define—is there.

What are we to see in such a veiled, masked, obscure object? None of the traits—of an object that is not seen—can the subject attack, but insofar as we follow him, we analysts can identify a few through those he targets, namely his own characteristics: “I am nothing, I am only a…”. Note that it is never a matter of the specular image. The melancholic does not tell you that he looks bad or has a lousy face or is twisted. He is the lowest of the low, he brings disaster on all his kin. He is entirely—in his self-accusations—in the realm of the symbolic. Add to that the having: he is ruined. Is this not meant to put you on the trail of something?

I am only indicating it to you today by marking a specific point which, in relation to these two terms of mourning and melancholia, marks in my eyes, at least for now, a point of convergence. It is that of what I would call not mourning nor depression, concerning the loss of an object, but a certain type of “remorse” as it is triggered by a certain type of outcome that we will note as being of the order of the “suicide of the object.”

Remorse, then, concerning an object that has entered—on some basis—into the field of desire and which, for that reason or because of some risk it ran in the adventure, has disappeared. Analyze these cases, the way is already traced for you by Freud. Already in normal mourning, he points out to you that this drive which the subject turns against himself could well have been, with regard to the object, an aggressive drive.

Probe these dramatic remorses in the cases where they arise. You will perhaps see in them what is the force from which there returns, against the subject himself, a power of insult that can be akin to that of melancholia. You will find the source of it in this: that with this object, which thus slipped away, it was therefore not worth, if I may say, taking so many precautions, it was therefore not worth turning away from one’s true desire if, as it seems, one has gone so far as to destroy it.

This extreme example—which is not so rare to see after such a loss following what happens between desiring subjects during those long embraces called the oscillations of love—is something that brings us to the heart of the relationship between the big I and the little (a), certainly to that limit around something where the security of the boundary is always in question, that is what is at stake at this point in the fantasy, which is the one from which we must know how to move the subject away. This certainly requires in the analyst a complete mental reduction of the function of the signifier, insofar as he must grasp by what mechanism, by what means, by what detour, it is always that which is at stake when it comes to the position of the ego ideal.

But there is something else that I cannot—now that I have reached the end of my discourse—do more than indicate, and that concerns the function of (a). What Socrates knows—and what the analyst must at least glimpse—is that with the little (a) the question is entirely different at its core, from that of access to any ideal. What is at stake here, what happens in this island, this field of being that love can only circle around, is something about which the analyst can only think:
– that any object can fill it,
– that we are led to waver on the boundaries where this question arises: “What are you?”, with any object that has once entered the field of our desire,
– that there is no object that has more or less value than another, and here is the mourning around which the desire of the analyst is centered.

Agathon, towards whom, at the limit of the Symposium, Socrates’s praise will be directed, is the fool of fools. He is the most foolish of all, he is even the only completely foolish one. And it is to him that it was given to say, in a ridiculous form, what is truest about love. He does not know what he is saying, he babbles, but that does not matter, and he is no less the beloved object. Socrates says to Alcibiades:

“All that you say there to me, it is for him.”

There is the function of the analyst, with all that it involves of a certain mourning. But after all, what does this mean if not that here we join that truth which Freud himself left outside the scope of what he could understand. A singular thing, and probably due to those reasons of comfort, let’s say those which I am exposing to you today under the formula of the necessity of conserving the vase, it does not seem to have been understood yet that: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” that is what it means.

People do not want to translate it because it probably would not be Christian in the sense of a certain ideal, but it is a philosophical ideal, believe me. Christianity has not yet had its last word. It means:

– with regard to anyone, you can pose the question of the perfect destructiveness of desire,

– with regard to anyone, you can make this experience of knowing how far you will dare to go in interrogating a being, at the risk for yourself of disappearing.

[End of the seminar 1960-61]