🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

This year, we have chosen as the theme of our seminar the formations of the unconscious. Those among you—and I believe this is the majority—who were present last night at our scientific session, are already in tune. That is to say, they know that the questions we are going to raise this time concern directly the function in the unconscious of what, over the previous years, we have developed as being the role of the signifier.

A certain number of you—I put it this way because my ambitions are modest—I hope, have read the article which is in the third issue of La psychanalyse, which I published under the title of The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious. Those who have had this courage will be well placed, even better placed than the others, to follow what is going to be discussed. In any case, it seems to me that it is a modest expectation that I may have, that you who take the trouble to listen to what I say, also take the trouble to read what I write, since after all it is for you that I write it. Those who have not done so, then, would still do better to refer to it, all the more since I will constantly be referring to it. I am forced to assume as known what has already been stated.

Finally, for those who have none of this preparation, I am going to tell you what I will limit myself to today, what will be the subject of this introductory lesson to our discussion. I will remind you at first… in an inevitably brief, inevitably allusive way, since I cannot start over… a few points marking, as it were, what in previous years initiates, announces what I have to say to you about the function of the signifier in the unconscious. Then, for the sake of those whose minds may be left a little breathless by this brief reminder, I will explain to you what this schema means, to which we will have to refer throughout the rest of our theoretical experience this year.

Finally, I will take an example, the first example used by FREUD in his book on The Joke, not to illustrate it, but to bring it forth, because there is no joke except a particular one, there is no joke in space, abstract. And I will begin to show you in this regard how the joke turns out to be the best entry point to our object, namely, the formations of the unconscious. Not only is it the best entry point, but I would also say it is the most striking form in which FREUD himself shows us the relations of the unconscious with the signifier and its techniques.

Therefore, I remind you first… since these are my three parts, and so you know what to expect from what I am going to explain, which will at the same time allow you to manage your mental effort… that the first year of my seminar consisted essentially, with reference to Freud’s Technical Writings, in introducing you to the notion of the symbolic function as the only one capable of accounting for what may be called ‘determination in meaning,’ this being the reality that we must consider as fundamental in the Freudian experience.

Thus, I remind you: determination in meaning, which is nothing else in this case than a definition of reason, I remind you that this reason is found at the very root of the possibility of analysis, and that it is precisely because something has been knotted to something similar to speech, that discourse can untie it.

In this connection, I pointed out to you the distance that separates this speech, insofar as it is filled by the being of the subject, from the discourse that buzzes above human acts, themselves made impenetrable by the imagination of their motives, rendered irrational precisely in that they are rationalized only in the egoic perspective of misrecognition.

That the ego itself is a function of the symbolic relation and may be affected by it in its density, in its synthesizing functions, all equally made of a mirage but of a captivating mirage—this I also reminded you in the first year—is possible only by reason of the gaping opening created in the human being by the biological presence—original in him—of death, as a function of what I have called ‘the prematurity of birth.’

This is the point of impact of the symbolic intrusion, and here is where we had arrived at the junction between my first and my second seminars. The second seminar—as I should remind you—highlighted this factor of repetitive insistence as coming from the unconscious, repetitive insistence which we have identified with the structure of a chain of signifiers.

And it is this that I tried to make you glimpse by giving you a model in the form of the so-called ‘syntax’ of α, β, γ, δ, for which you have an exposition that, despite the criticisms it has received—some of them justified: there are two small omissions that should be corrected in a later edition—seems to me to be a summary overview on the subject of this syntax, which should still, for a long time, serve you well.

I am even convinced that it will improve with age, and that in a few months, or even by the end of this year, you will find it less difficult to refer to it than you do now. This is to remind you of what is at issue in this so-called syntax of α, β, γ, δ, and also to respond to the commendable efforts that some have made to reduce its scope, which in any case for them is an opportunity to test themselves. But that is precisely all I am seeking, so that in the end, whatever impasse they may have found in it, it will nonetheless have served them for this exercise, which we will have the opportunity to return to in what I will have to show them this year.

I point out to you that certainly—as those who have taken this trouble have emphasized to me, and even written to me—each of these terms, α, β, γ, δ, is marked by a fundamental ambiguity, but it is precisely this ambiguity that gives the example its value. We have thus entered these groupings, onto the path of what is now the speculation of what is called research on ‘groups and sets,’ their starting point being essentially based on the principle of beginning with complex structures in which simple structures appear only as special cases. Now precisely, I will not remind you how the small letters [α, β, γ, δ,] are generated, but it is certain that after the manipulations which make it possible to define them, we arrive at something very simple, each of these letters being defined by the relations between them of the two terms of two pairs:
– the pair of the symmetrical and the dissymmetrical, of the dissymmetrical and the symmetrical,
– and then the pair of the similar to the dissimilar, and of the dissimilar to the similar.

Thus, we have here this minimum group of four signifiers, whose property is that each of them can be analyzed according to its relations with the other three, that is to say—to confirm, incidentally, the analyses of JAKOBSON, and moreover his own statement when I met him recently—the minimum group of signifiers necessary for the primary, elementary conditions of what can be called linguistic analysis to be given. Now, as you will see, this linguistic analysis has the closest relationship to what we call analysis, plain and simple, they are even the same, essentially, if we look closely, they are nothing else.

In the third year of my seminar, we spoke of psychosis in so far as it is founded on a primordial signifying deficiency, and we showed what happens when the real is subducted, when, carried along by vital invocation, it comes to take its place in that deficiency of the signifier, which we discussed last night under the term Verwerfung [rejection in the sense of foreclosure], and which—I admit—is not something that is without presenting some difficulties.

This is why we will have to return to it this year, but I think what you have understood in this seminar on psychosis is that, if not the ultimate recourse, at least the essential mechanism of this reduction of the Other, of the big Other—the Other as seat of speech—to the imaginary other, this substitution of the symbolic by the imaginary, and even how we can conceive the effect of total strangeness of the real that occurs at moments of rupture in this dialogue of delusion, through which alone the psychotic can sustain in himself what we will call a certain intransitivity of the subject, something which, as far as we are concerned, seems entirely natural: ‘I think, therefore I am,’ we say intransitively. But certainly, this is the difficulty for the psychotic, precisely to the extent of this reduction of the duplicity of the Other with the capital O and the other with the small o:
– of the Other as seat of speech and guarantor of truth,
– and of the other in the duel, who is the one in front of whom he finds himself as being his own image.

This disappearance of this duality is precisely what makes it so difficult for the psychotic to maintain himself in a human reality, that is, in a symbolic reality. I will finally recall that in this third year I illustrated this dimension of what I call dialogue, in so far as it allows the subject to sustain himself, with the example of the first scene of Athalie, no more and no less.

It is a seminar that I would very much have liked to take up again to write it down, if I had had the time.

I nevertheless think that you have not forgotten the extraordinary dialogue of that ABNER, who here appears as the prototype of the false brother and the double agent, who in a sense comes to test the ground in the first announcement of: “Yes, I come into his temple,” and who sets off, I do not know what attempt at seduction—admire how extraordinary it is! It is true, of course, that the way we have crowned him makes us forget a little all these resonances, and I pointed out to you how the high priest made use there of some essential signifiers:

– “And God remained faithful in all his threats,”
– “promises of heaven,”
– “why do you renounce?”

The term “heaven” and a few other well-chosen words are in essence nothing other than pure signifiers. I highlighted for you their absolute emptiness. He skewers, if I may say so, his adversary, to the point that he reduces him to nothing more than that pitiful worm who, as I told you, returned to the ranks of the procession and served as bait for ATHALIE, who in this little game—as you know—will eventually succumb.

This relation of the signifier to the signified, so visible, so tangible in this dramatic dialogue, is something about which I spoke to you in reference to the famous schema of Ferdinand de SAUSSURE:

the current, or more exactly the double parallel flow—this is how he represents it—of the signifier and the signified as being distinct and destined to a perpetual sliding over one another.

It is in this context that I devised for you the images of the upholsterer’s technique: the quilting point, the “point de capiton” [pun on “point,” both sewing stitch and a moment of fixation], where at some point the fabric of one must be attached to the fabric of the other. So that we know, at least, what the possible limits of these slidings are: the quilting points leave some elasticity in the links between the two terms.

This is precisely what we will resume when I have also recalled for you the function of my fourth year of the seminar, when I have told you that, in sum, in parallel and symmetrically to this, and to what the dialogue of JOAD and ABNER led to, there is no true subject that stands except the one who speaks in the name of “Speech.” You have not forgotten the level on which JOAD speaks: “Here is how this God answers you through my mouth.” There is no other object in the reference to this Other. This is symbolic of what exists in all valid speech.

Likewise, in the fourth year of the seminar, I wanted to show you that there is no object, except metonymic, the object of desire being the object of the desire of the other, and desire always being the desire for something else, very precisely for what is lacking in the object that was lost originally, in so far as FREUD shows us it is always to be found again.

In the same way, there is no meaning, except metaphorical. Meaning only arises from the substitution of one signifier for another in the symbolic chain. This is precisely what is denoted in the work I was telling you about earlier, and to which I invited you to refer, on The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious. [La Psychanalyse no. 3, pp. 47-81, Écrits p. 493]

In the following symbols, respectively of metaphor and metonymy, S is linked in the combination of the chain to S1, all in relation to S2, which leads to this: that S in its metonymic function is in a certain metonymic relation with s in the signification: f(S…S1)S2 = S(–)s [metonymy]

Likewise, it is in the substitution of S1 in relation to S2, a relation of substitution in metaphor, that we have this, symbolized by the relation of capital S to small s1, which here indicates—it is easier to say than in the case of metonymy—the function of emergence, of creation of meaning: f(S/s1) S2 = S (+) s [metaphor]

This, then, is where we stand. And now we are going to approach what will be the object of our research this year. To begin, I have constructed a schema for you, and I will now tell you what, at least for today, it will serve us to prepare.

If we must find a way to approach more closely the relations of the chain of signifiers to the chain of the signified, it is through this crude image of the quilting point. But it is evident, for it to be valid, that we should ask ourselves where the upholsterer is. He is obviously somewhere. The place where we might put him on this schema would all the same be, just a little, too childish.

It may occur to you that… since the essential aspect of the relations between the chain of signifiers and the flow of the signified is something like a reciprocal sliding, and that despite this sliding we must grasp where the connection, the coherence between these two flows occurs… it may occur to you that this sliding, if there is sliding, is necessarily a relative sliding: the displacement of each produces a displacement of the other and so it must also be in relation to a sort of ideal present in something like the crossing in opposite directions of the two lines, that we must find some exemplary schema.

You see, it is around something like this that we could group our speculation.

This notion of the present is going to be extremely important, only a discourse is not a point-like event in the manner of RUSSELL, if I may say so. A discourse is something that has a point, a material, a texture, and not only takes time, has a dimension in time, a thickness, which means that we absolutely cannot content ourselves with an instantaneous present, but moreover, all our experience… everything we have said and everything we are capable of presenting immediately by experience: it is quite clear, for example, that if I begin a sentence, you will only understand its meaning when I have finished it, because it is still absolutely necessary, it is the definition of the sentence, that I have spoken the last word for you to understand where the first one stands… shows us in the most tangible example what can be called the nachträglich [retroactive] action of the signifier, that is to say what I am constantly telling you in the very text of the analytic experience, as being given to us on an infinitely greater scale in the history of the past.

On the other hand, it is clear, it is a way of expressing myself, I think you have noticed this, in any case I emphasize again in my article on The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, in a very precise way, and to which for now I ask you to refer, this thing that I expressed to you in the form of a topological metaphor, if I may say so: it is impossible to represent on the same plane the signifier, the signified, and the subject. This is neither mysterious nor opaque, it is demonstrated in a very simple way in reference to the Cartesian cogito. I will refrain from returning to this now because we will simply encounter it again in another form. This is simply to justify to you that the two lines we are now going to manipulate and which are these:

– The stopper means the beginning of a trajectory,

– and the tip of the arrow is its end.

You recognize my first line here, and the other which comes to hook onto it after having crossed it twice.

I simply point out that you should not confuse what these two lines represent here, namely the signifier and the signified [in Saussure’s schema], with what they represent here [in the graph: γ→A and δ→δ’]:

≠

which is slightly different, and you will see why. In fact, we place ourselves entirely on the plane of the signifier. The effects on the signified are elsewhere, they are not directly represented in this schema.

It concerns the two states, the two functions, that we can apprehend in a signifying sequence. In the first phase of this first line [γ→A], we have the chain of signifiers in so far as it remains entirely permeable to the properly signifying effects of metaphor and metonymy, which implies the possible actualization of signifying effects at all levels, namely particularly:
– up to the phonemic level,
– up to the level of the phonological element,
– of what grounds the pun, the play on words,
…in short, what in the signifier is that something with which we analysts have to play constantly, for I think that except for those who are here for the first time, you must recall how this happens in the play on words and the pun. It is precisely by this, moreover, that today we will begin to enter into the subject of the unconscious, through the joke and the Witz [Witz: German term for joke, wordplay].

The other line [δ→δ’] is that of rational discourse in which a certain number of points of reference, of fixed things, are already integrated, these things in this instance being able strictly to be grasped only at the level of what is called “the uses of the signifier,” that is, what concretely, in the use of discourse, constitutes fixed points, which as you know, are very far from responding in a univocal way to a single thing.

There is not a single semanteme that corresponds to a single thing, but to things that are, most of the time, quite diverse. Here we stop at the level of the semanteme, that is, what is fixed and defined by a use.

This other line [δ→δ’] is thus that of ordinary, common discourse, as it is accepted in the code of discourse, of what I would call the discourse of the reality that is common to us. It is also the level where the least creation of meaning occurs, since the meaning is already, in a way, given, and for the most part this discourse consists only in a subtle reworking of what are called received ideas, and it is precisely at the level of this discourse that the famous “empty discourse” occurs, from which a certain number of my remarks on the function of speech and language have started.

You see clearly, then:
– this [δ→δ’] is the concrete discourse of the individual subject, of the one who speaks and who makes himself heard. It is this discourse that can be recorded on a disc.
– The other [γ→A] is what all this includes as possibilities of decomposition, reinterpretation, resonance, metaphorical and metonymic effects.
One moves in the opposite direction from the other, for the simple reason that they slide over one another, but one intersects with the other, and they intersect at two perfectly recognizable points.

If we start from the discourse [δ→δ’], the first point where the discourse meets the other chain [γ→A] that we will call the properly signifying chain is, from the point of view of the signifier, what I have just explained to you, namely “the bundle of uses,” in other words what we will call “the code.” And the code must be somewhere for this discourse to be heard. This code is very evidently in the capital A that is there, that is, in the Other in so far as it is the companion of language. This Other, it is absolutely necessary that it exists, and I ask you to note, as the occasion arises, that there is absolutely no need to call it by that idiotic and delirious name “the collective consciousness.”

An Other is an Other, one is enough for a language to be alive, it is even so much enough that this Other, all by himself, can also be the first moment. If there is one who remains and who can speak his language to himself, that is enough for there to be him, and not only an Other, but even two others, in any case someone who understands him. One can continue to make jokes in a language when one is still its only possessor.

Here, then, is the first encounter [α] at the level of what we have called “the code.” And in the other, the second encounter [γ] which completes the loop, which constitutes properly speaking the meaning, which constitutes it from the code it first encountered, is at this point of outcome. You see two arrows that end up—and today I will spare you telling you which is the second of the arrows that ends here [γ]—at this point γ, it is the result of this conjunction of discourse with the signifier as the creative support of meaning: it is the message. Here, meaning comes to light, the truth there is to be announced—if there is truth—is there in the message.

Most of the time, no truth is announced, for the simple reason that the discourse [δ→δ’] does not at all pass through the chain of signifiers [γ→A], that it is pure and simple purring of repetition and chattering, and that it passes somewhere in a short circuit between β and β’, and that the discourse says absolutely nothing, except to signal to you that I am a speaking animal. It is the common discourse of these words for saying nothing, by means of which one assures oneself that what one is facing is not simply what man is in his natural state, that is, a ferocious beast. These two points, β and β’, as the minimum knot of the short circuit of discourse, are very easily recognizable:
– it is precisely the object in the sense of the metonymic object I spoke to you about last year,
– it is, on the other hand, the “I” in so far as it indicates in the discourse itself, the place of the one who speaks.

Observe closely that in this schema you can tangibly grasp both what links and what distinguishes the truth perfectly and immediately accessible to linguistic experience, but which the Freudian experience of analysis intersects with the at least principled distinction between:
– this “I,” which is nothing other than the place of the one who speaks in the chain of discourse, which moreover does not even need to be designated by an “I,”
– and on the other hand the message, that is, this thing that absolutely requires at minimum the apparatus of this schema in order to exist.

It is totally impossible to extract any message, nor any speech in an irradiating and concentric way, from the existence of just any subject, if there is not all this complexity. No speech is possible for the very reason that:
– speech precisely presupposes the existence of a chain of signifiers, which is something whose genesis is far from simple to obtain, we spent a year achieving it,
– and which presupposes the existence of a network of uses, in other words, the use of a language.

Which moreover presupposes this whole mechanism that means, whatever you say, whether you think about it or not, whatever you formulate, once you have entered the wheel of the chattering mill, your discourse always says more than what you say in it, and very evidently, based solely on the fact that it is speech, relies on the existence somewhere of that term of reference which is the plane of truth, of truth as distinct from reality, something that brings into play the possible emergence of new meanings introduced into the world, literally introduced into reality, not the meanings that are already there, but the meanings it causes to emerge.

There you have, radiating from the message on one side, from the “I” on the other—the meaning of those little fins you see there—two divergent directions:
– one that goes from the “I” towards the metonymic object [β→β’]
– and towards the Other [β→α],
to which the message corresponds symmetrically by the return path of discourse:
– the direction of the message towards the metonymic object [γ→β’]
– and towards the Other [γ→α].

All of this, for now, I ask you to take note of.

On the schema, you will see that this will be of great use to us, which may seem self-evident to you:
– the line that goes from the “I” towards the Other [β→α]
– and the line that goes from the “I” towards the metonymic object [β→β’],
and you will see what the two other remarkably exciting and full-of-interest lines correspond to, which go:
– from the message towards the code [γ→α], because precisely this return line exists. If it did not exist, as the schema itself indicates to you, there would not be the slightest hope of creation of meaning,
– it is precisely in the interplay between the message and the code and also in the return from the code to the message [α→γ], that the essential dimension will be at play in which the joke introduces us directly.

It is there that, for a certain number of lessons I think, we will stay in order to see all that can take place there that is extraordinarily suggestive and indicative. On the other hand, this will give us another opportunity to grasp the relationship of dependence in which the metonymic object finds itself, that famous object which is never this object, always situated elsewhere, which is always something else, which we began to address last year. Now, let us approach this Witz.

The Witz, what does it mean? It has been translated as the joke, the witticism. I will immediately pass over the reasons why I prefer joke. The Witz also means wit. Wit, to say everything, immediately presents itself to us in extreme ambiguity, because in the end, a joke is occasionally the object of some devaluation, it is lightness, lack of seriousness, fancy, caprice.

As for wit, one pauses, one thinks twice before speaking in the same way of “wit.” All the same, “wit,” in the sense of a witty man, does not have an excessively good reputation; still, it is precisely around this that the center of gravity of the notion of wit lies, and it is appropriate to leave it with all its ambiguities, including wit in the broad sense, that wit which obviously too often serves as a flag for dubious merchandise: the spirit of spiritualism.

This wit, we can center it on the joke, that is to say, on something in it that seems the most contingent, the most perishable, the most open to criticism. It is indeed in the genius of psychoanalysis to do things like this, and that is already why we should not be surprised that it is, after all, the only point in FREUD’s work where what is elsewhere decorated with a capital letter, namely Spirit, is properly mentioned. Nevertheless, it still remains that this kinship between the two poles of the term wit has always given rise to disputes about the scale.

In truth, it would be amusing to recall for you… for example, in the English tradition where it is the term Wit which is even more clearly ambiguous than Witz, and even than esprit in French… the discussions about the true, the authentic wit, the good wit, so to speak, and then about the bad wit, that is, this wit with which tricksters amuse the world. How to distinguish them?

The difficulties into which critics have entered are the only thing to which we must in fact refer. And this continues even after the eighteenth century, with ADDISON, POPE, etc., at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the English Romantic school, the question of Wit could not fail to be at the forefront and on the agenda, and in this respect, the writings of HAZLITT are also quite significant, and someone we will have occasion to speak about, COLERIDGE, is still the one who went the furthest in this direction.

I could tell you the same thing for the German tradition, and in particular about the conjunction, the promotion to the forefront of wit and literary Christianity which followed a strictly parallel evolution in Germany, where the essential question of Witz is at the heart of all German Romantic speculation, that is, of something which, from a historical point of view and also from the point of view of the situation of analysis, will again deserve our attention.

What is truly striking is how far the criticism around the function of Witz or Wit goes, for which, I must say, there is nothing corresponding in this country, and although, as you know, the only people who have seriously dealt with it here have been poets, that is to say, in this period of the nineteenth century, the question is not only alive but is at the heart of BAUDELAIRE and MALLARMÉ.

But moreover, it has never been, even in essays, except from the critical point of view, I mean from the point of view of an intellectual formulation of the problem. The decisive point is this. The fact is that, whatever you read on the subject of the problem of Witz or Wit, you always reach extremely tangible impasses, which only lack of time prevents me from developing for you today—I will come back to them.

I must erase this part of my discourse, and let it testify—as I will later prove to you—what a leap, what a sharp break, what a difference of quality and result is constituted by FREUD’s work.

FREUD had not made this investigation to which I have just alluded, that of the entire European tradition on the subject of Witz… I have left aside yet another, the main one, the Spanish tradition, because it is too important for us not to have to return to it abundantly later on… FREUD had not done it, he tells us his sources, they are clear: they are three books, very sensible, very readable, by those worthy German professors from small universities who had the time to reflect peacefully, and who produced things not pedantic at all, and who are respectively named K. FISCHER, Friedrich Theodor VISCHER, and T. LIPPS, a Munich professor who certainly wrote the best of the three, and who goes quite far, to say everything, who really reaches out to meet Freudian research.

Simply, if T. LIPPS had not been so concerned with the respectability of his Witz, if he had not wanted there to be false and true ones, he certainly would have gone much further. It is precisely the opposite that FREUD did not hold back at all. FREUD was in the habit of getting involved, and that is why he saw much more clearly. It is also because he saw the structural relations that exist between the Witz and the unconscious.

On what level did he see them? Only on the level that can be called formal. I mean “formal” not in the sense of pretty forms, the roundnesses of all that people try to use to plunge you back into the deepest obscurity. I am speaking of form in the sense in which it is understood, for example, in literary theory, because there is yet another tradition I have not spoken to you about, but also because I will often have to return to it, a tradition born recently: the Czech tradition, the group that formulated formalism, about which here we think this reference is vague.

Not at all! It is simply your ignorance that makes you believe that. Formalism is a literary critical school that has an extremely precise meaning, and which the state apparatus, over there on the side of Sputnik, has been persecuting for some time already. Anyway, whatever the case, it is precisely at the level of this formalism, that is to say, a structural theory of the signifier as such, that FREUD immediately places himself, and the result is not in doubt, it is even entirely convincing: it is a key that will allow us to go much further.

I do not need to ask you—after having asked you to read my articles from time to time—to read, since I am speaking to you this year about the Witz, FREUD’s book, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten. That seems to me the least one could do.

When you look at the structure of this book, you will see that it is based on this, that FREUD starts from the technique of the joke and always comes back to it, and that it is supported by the technique of the joke. What does that mean for him? It means verbal technique, as it is said, and as I tell you more precisely: technique of the signifier. It is because he speaks of the technique of the signifier and always returns to it, that he truly untangles the problem.

He makes levels appear, that is to say: suddenly one sees with the greatest clarity what must be recognized and distinguished in order not to get lost in perpetual confusions of the signified and of thoughts which absolutely do not allow one to find a way out. Suddenly one sees:

– that there is a problem of wit, for example,
– and that there is a problem of the comic, and that it is not the same thing,
– just as the problem of the comic and the problem of laughter.

However much they may sometimes go together, and even all three get mixed up, it is still not the same problem. The problem of wit—to be clarified—starts with FREUD from the technique of the signifier.

It is from there that we are going to start with him, and a very curious thing, this which takes place at a level that assuredly is not immediately indicated as that of the unconscious, it is precisely from there, and for profound reasons that pertain to the very nature of what is at stake in the Witz, it is precisely by looking there, that we will see the most about what is not quite there, which is alongside, which is the unconscious, and which precisely is illuminated and revealed only when one looks a little to the side.

There you find, by the way, something that you will always find in the Witz, it is the nature of the Witz which is thus: when you look there, it is what allows you to look where it is not.

Let us begin with FREUD by the keys of the technique of the signifier. FREUD did not strain himself to find his examples: almost all the examples he gives us, and which may appear to you somewhat down to earth and of unequal value, are taken from his professors, respectively: K. FISCHER, F. T. VISCHER and T. LIPPS, which is why I told you of the esteem in which I hold them.

There is, however, another source with which FREUD is truly imbued, and that is Heinrich HEINE. It is from him that he takes the first example, which is that marvelous phrase that blossoms from the mouth of Hirsch HYACINTHE, a Jewish collector from Hamburg, needy and famished, whom he meets again at the Baths of Lucca. If you want to have a full reading on the Witz, you should read Reisebilder. It is astonishing that it is not a classic book.

In Reisebilder there is a passage in the Italian part, on the Baths of Lucca, and it is there that, with this inimitable character of Hirsch HYACINTHE… about whose qualities I hope to have time to say more… and speaking with him, he obtains this statement: that he had the honor of tending to the corns on the feet of the great ROTHSCHILD, Nathan the Wise, and that during this time he, Hirsch HYACINTHE, considered himself an important man.

For while he was paring Nathan’s corns, he thought that Nathan the Wise was foreseeing all the brokers he would send to the kings, and that if he, Hirsch HYACINTHE, happened to pare the corn on his foot a little too much, it would cause irritation up high which would make Nathan in turn pare down a bit more on the hides of the kings.

And step by step, he also tells us about another ROTHSCHILD he knew, namely Salomon ROTHSCHILD. And one day when he introduced himself as Hirsch HYACINTHE, he was answered in a good-natured way:

– “I too am the collector for the lottery, I do not want my colleague to enter the kitchen.”

And, exclaims Hirsch HYACINTHE:

– “He treated me in a most famillionnaire manner.”

This is where FREUD stops, which is completed by that very pretty “What is it?” A neologism, a slip of the tongue, a joke? It is certainly a joke, but the fact that I could ask the two other questions already introduces us into an ambiguity of the signifier, into the unconscious.

Indeed, what is FREUD going to tell us? We recognize here the mechanism of condensation materialized in the material of the signifier, a kind of “stamping,” with the help of I do not know what machine, between two lines of signifying chain:

“Salomon Rothschild treated me in a most familiar manner.”

And then underneath, FREUD makes the schema—also signifying:

…there is “millionnaire,” and so there is:
– “naire-aire” on both sides,
– “mili-milli” also on both sides.
It condenses and, in the interval, “famillionnaire” appears. Let us try to see a bit what this gives on this schema. I am forced to go a bit quickly, but there is still something here I have to point out.

Discourse, obviously, is what starts from the “I,” what goes to the Other. We can schematize it there as going towards the Other. We can also, which is more correct, see that every discourse starting from the Other—whatever we may think—starts and comes to reflect on the “I,” because it must be taken into account, and it moves towards the message. [α→β→β’→γ] And this simply means to announce in the second phase the invocation of the other principal chain of discourse: “I was with Salomon Rothschild, completely familiar,” return to the Other at the second phase.

However, due to the mysterious property of the “mil” and the “aire” that are in both, something at the same time… do not forget that these two lines are still two lines that only have interest if things circulate simultaneously along this line… something is stirred, which is the agitation of the elementary signifying chain as such, and which, here at the first phase of the emergence of the message, comes to reflect on the metonymic object that is “my millionaire,” because the metonymic object schematized by its belonging is what is at stake for Hirsch HYACINTHE.

It is “his millionaire” who at the same time is not “his millionaire,” because it is rather the millionaire who possesses him, so that nothing actually happens. It is precisely because nothing happens that this millionaire comes to reflect at the second moment, that is, at the same time as the other. The familiar manner arrived there.

In the third moment, millionaire and familiar come to meet and merge in the message, to make famillionnaire. This may seem quite childish to discover, and yet it is precisely because it is I who made the schema. Only when this has stuck with you throughout the year, you might say to yourself that the schema serves some purpose.

It still has a certain value, in that thanks to its demand for topology, it allows us to measure our steps regarding the signifier, namely that as it is made, and in whatever way you traverse it, it limits all our steps. I mean that every time something consists in taking a step, it will require us not to take more than three elementary ones. You will realize that this is what the little starting stoppers and the arrow tips as well as the fins are for, which concern the segments that must always be in a secondary intermediate position; the others are either initial or terminal.

So, in three stages, the two chains—the chain of discourse and the chain of the signifier—have come to converge at the same point, at the point of the message. That means Mr. Hirsch HYACINTHE was treated in a truly famillionnaire way. This message is completely incongruous in the sense that it is not received, it is not in the code. That’s the whole point.

The message in principle is made to be in a certain relationship of distinction with the code, but here it is at the level of the signifier itself that it is clearly in violation of the code, of the definition I propose to you for the joke, in the sense that it is a matter of knowing what happens, what is the nature of what happens there. And the joke is constituted by the fact that the message produced at a certain level of signifying production, by virtue of its difference, by virtue of its distinction from the code, takes on, by this distinction and this difference, the value of a message. The message lies in its very difference from the code.

How is this difference sanctioned? That is the second level in question.

This difference is sanctioned as a joke by the Other, and this is indispensable, and this is in FREUD, for there are two things in FREUD’s book on jokes: it is the promotion of signifying technique, the express reference to the Other as third party, which I have been harping on for years, which is absolutely articulated in FREUD, especially in the second part of his book, but necessarily from the beginning, perpetually: for example, FREUD tells us that the difference between the joke and the comic lies, for example, in the fact that the comic is dual.

As I say, the comic is a dual relation, but there must be the third Other for there to be a joke, and indeed this sanction of the third Other, whether it is supported by an individual or not, is absolutely essential: the Other throws the ball back, that is, classifies it in the code as a joke, he says—in the code—“this is a joke.” This is essential, so that if no one does it, there is no joke. In other words, if famillionnaire is a slip, and if no one notices, it does not make a joke. But it is necessary that the Other codifies it as a joke.

And the third element of the definition: it is inscribed in the code, through this intervention of the Other, that this joke has a function that is related to something located deeply at the level of meaning, and which is, I am not saying a truth—I will illustrate for you with this example that it is not as famillionnaire that we make subtle allusions about I don’t know what, about the psychology of the millionaire and the parasite, for example.

Of course, this contributes greatly to our pleasure, and we will return to it, but I submit to you from today that the joke, if we want to seek it—and with FREUD, for FREUD will lead us as far as possible in the direction where its point is, since it is a point we are dealing with and a point there is—its essence lies in something that relates to something absolutely radical in the sense of truth, namely what I have called elsewhere, in my article on The Instance of the Letter, something that pertains essentially to truth, which is called “the dimension of the alibi of truth.”

Namely, that at whatever point we might… and bringing about in ourselves I do not know what mental diplopia… want to closely grasp what the joke is, what is at issue, what specifically makes the joke, it is to designate and always to the side, and only to be seen precisely by looking elsewhere.

It is on this that we will resume next time. I certainly leave you with something suspended, with a riddle, but I believe at least to have stated the very terms to which I will later show you we must necessarily rally.