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‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud’ was delivered in Paris on May 9, 1957, before the Philosophy Group of the Federation of Literature Students of the Sorbonne. It was first published in La psychanalyse (dated May 14-26, 1957), 1957, no. 3, Psychoanalysis and Human Sciences, pp. 47-81, before appearing in 1966, in Écrits, Paris, Seuil, coll. ‘The Freudian Field’. This is the first publication we are presenting to you.

The Instance Of The Letter In The Unconscious Or Reason Since Freud (1957) — Jacques Lacan

‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud’ was delivered in Paris on May 9, 1957, before the Philosophy Group of the Federation of Literature Students of the Sorbonne. It was first published in La psychanalyse (dated May 14-26, 1957), 1957, no. 3, Psychoanalysis and Human Sciences, pp. 47-81, before appearing in 1966, in Écrits, Paris, Seuil, coll. ‘The Freudian Field’. This is the first publication we are presenting to you.

Children in swimsuits
O cities of the sea, I see among you your citizens, men and women, their arms and legs tightly bound in strong ties by people who will not hear your language, and you will only be able to pour out among yourselves, in plaintive wails, laments and sighs, your pain and your regrets for lost freedom. For those who bind you will not understand your language, just as you will not understand them.
(Notebooks of Leonardo DA VINCI, Codice Atlantico 145. r. a., trans. Louise Servicen, Gallimard, vol. II, p. 400).

If the theme of this volume 3 of La Psychanalyse required this contribution from me, I owe this deference to what will be discovered here, to introduce it by situating it between writing and speech: it will be halfway.

Writing, in fact, is distinguished by the prevalence of the text, in the sense that this factor of discourse will be seen to take here, – what allows for that tightening which, in my view, should leave the reader no other exit than their entry, which I prefer to be difficult. This will therefore not be a writing in my sense.

The priority I give to nourishing my seminar lessons each time with a new contribution has until now prevented me from providing such a text for them, except for one of them, which is otherwise unremarkable in their sequence, and to which it is only worth referring here for the scale of their topicality.

For the urgency with which I now take the pretext to set aside this aim only covers the difficulty of sustaining it at the level at which I must here present my teaching, it does not move too far from speech, whose different measures are essential to the formative effect I seek.

That is why I have taken the approach of a conversation that was requested of me at that moment by the philosophy group of the Federation of Literature Students1, to find the accommodation suitable for my presentation there: its necessary generality finding a match in the extraordinary character of their audience, but its unique object meeting the complicity of their common qualification, the literary one, to which my title pays homage.

How can one forget, in fact, that Freud constantly and until the end maintained the primary requirement of this qualification for the training of analysts, and that he designated in the universitas litterarum of all times the ideal place for his institution2.

Thus, the recourse to the movement restored in the heat of this discourse marked, moreover, by those to whom I address it, those to whom it is not addressed.

I mean: none of those who, for whatever purpose in psychoanalysis, tolerate their discipline claiming some false identity.

Habitual vice and such in its mental effect that even the true one may appear as an alibi among others, from which one hopes at least that the refined doubling does not escape the subtlest.

This is how one observes with curiosity the turn beginning regarding symbolization and language in the Int. J. Psychoanal., with the great help of wet fingers leafing through the folios of Sapir and Jespersen. These exercises are still novice, but it is above all the tone that is lacking. A certain seriousness makes one smile when returning to the truthful.

And how could even a psychoanalyst today not feel drawn to it, when touching upon speech, when his experience receives from it its instrument, its framework, its material and even the background noise of its uncertainties.

I. – THE MEANING OF THE LETTER

Our title suggests that, beyond speech, it is the entire structure of language that psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious. From the outset, it alerts the attentive mind that it may have to revisit the idea that the unconscious is only the seat of the instincts.

But how should we take this letter here? Quite simply, literally [at face value – in French “à la lettre” is a wordplay meaning both “literally” and “concerning the letter”]. By letter we designate this material support that concrete discourse borrows from language.

This simple definition presupposes that language is not to be confused with the various somatic and psychic functions that serve it in the speaking subject. For the primary reason that language, with its structure, pre-exists the entry that each subject makes into it at a certain moment in their mental development.

Let us note that aphasias, caused by purely anatomical lesions of the cerebral apparatuses that give these functions their mental center, are found as a whole to distribute their deficits along the two sides of the signifying effect of what we here call the letter, in the creation of meaning3. This indication will be clarified by what follows.

The subject as well, if he can appear to be a serf of language, is even more so of a discourse, in the universal moment of which his place is already inscribed at his birth, if only in the form of his proper name.

The reference to the experience of the community as to the substance of this discourse resolves nothing. For this experience takes its essential dimension in the tradition that this discourse establishes. This tradition, well before the historical drama is inscribed in it, founds the elementary structures of culture. And these very structures reveal an ordering of exchanges that, even if unconscious, is inconceivable outside the permutations that language allows.

Whence it follows that to the ethnographic duality of nature and culture, a ternary conception is about to be substituted: nature, society, and culture, of the human condition, of which it might well be that the last term is reduced to language, that is, to what essentially distinguishes human society from natural societies.

But we will here neither take a side nor a start, leaving to their darkness the original relations of the signifier and of labor. Contenting ourselves, to discharge a point with the general function of praxis in the genesis of history, to note that even the society that would have restored, in its political right with the privilege of producers, the causative hierarchy of the relations of production to the ideological superstructures, has not for all that engendered an Esperanto whose relations to socialist reality would have from the root excluded any possibility of literary formalism4.

As for us, we will rely only on the sole premises whose value has been confirmed by the fact that language has effectively conquered in experience its status as a scientific object.

For it is by this fact that linguistics5 presents itself in a pioneering position in this domain around which a reclassification of the sciences signals, as is customary, a revolution in knowledge: only the necessities of communication make us register it under the heading of this volume as “human sciences,” despite the confusion that may thus be covered.

To point to the emergence of the linguistic discipline, we will say that it holds, as is the case with any science in the modern sense, in the constituting moment of an algorithm that founds it. This algorithm is the following:

S/s

which is read: signifier over signified, the over corresponding to the bar that separates the two levels.

The sign written thus deserves to be attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure, even though it is not strictly reduced to this form in any of the numerous diagrams under which it appears in the printed versions of the various lessons from the three courses of the years 1906-07, 1908-09, 1910-11, which the devotion of a group of his disciples gathered under the title Course in General Linguistics: a primordial publication for transmitting a teaching worthy of the name, that is to say, one that can only be grasped in its own movement.

That is why it is legitimate to pay homage to him with the formalization S/s, in which the modern stage of linguistics is characterized in the diversity of the schools.

The thematic of this science is from then on indeed suspended from the primordial position of the signifier and the signified, as distinct orders and initially separated by a barrier resistant to signification.

It is this that will make possible an exact study of the connections specific to the signifier and of the extent of their function in the genesis of the signified. For this primordial distinction goes well beyond the debate concerning the arbitrariness of the sign, as it has developed since ancient reflection, or even the impasse experienced in the same period that opposes the bi-univocal correspondence of the word to the thing, even in the act of naming. This is contrary to the appearances given by the role attributed to the index finger pointing to an object in the learning of his mother tongue by the subject infans or in the use of so-called concrete school methods for the study of foreign languages.

On this path, things can go no further than to demonstrate6 that there is no meaning that is sustained except by referral to another meaning: touching to the extreme the remark that there is no existing language for which the question of its inadequacy to cover the field of the signified arises, it being an effect of its existence as a language that it meets all needs there. If we try to confine in language the constitution of the object, we can only observe that it is found only at the level of the concept, very different from any nominative, and that the thing, being clearly reduced to the name, breaks apart in the double divergent ray of the cause where it has taken shelter in our language and of the nothing to which it has relinquished its Latin robe (rem).

These considerations, as stimulating as they may be for the philosopher, turn us away from the place from which language questions us about its nature. And one will fail to support the question as long as one has not shaken off the illusion that the signifier corresponds to the function of representing the signified, or better yet: that the signifier has to answer for its existence on the basis of any signification whatsoever.

For even when reduced to this last formula, the heresy is the same. It is the one that leads logical positivism to the quest for the meaning of meaning, the “meaning of meaning” as the objective is called in the language in which its adherents frolic. Hence we see that the text most laden with meaning is, in this analysis, reduced to insignificant trifles, the only ones resisting being mathematical algorithms, which are themselves, as is fitting, without any meaning7.

It remains that the algorithm S/s, if we could extract from it only the notion of the parallelism of its upper and lower terms, each taken only in its entirety, would remain the enigmatic sign of a total mystery. Which, of course, is not the case.

To grasp its function, I will begin by producing the faulty illustration by which its usage is classically introduced. Here it is:

(the word “tree” over the image of a tree)

where one can see what favor it opens to the direction previously indicated as erroneous.

For my listeners, I substituted another, which could not be considered more correct than to patch together in the incongruous dimension to which the psychoanalyst has not yet entirely renounced, in the justified feeling that his conformism has value only starting from it. Here is this other:

(two toilet doors marked over them “hommes” “dames”)

where one can see that, without greatly extending the scope of the signifier involved in the experience, simply by doubling the nominal species through the mere juxtaposition of two terms whose complementary sense seems bound to be consolidated, the surprise occurs of an unexpected acceleration of meaning: in the image of two twin doors that symbolize, with the voting booth offered to the Western man to satisfy his natural needs outside his home, the imperative he seems to share with the great majority of primitive communities and which subjects his public life to the laws of urinary segregation.

This is not merely to shock the nominalist debate with a low blow, but to show how the signifier in fact enters the signified; namely, in a form which, for not being immaterial, raises the question of its place in reality. For in having to approach the small enameled plaques that support it, the blinking gaze of a myopic person might perhaps be justified in questioning whether this is really where one should see the signifier, whose signified in this case would receive from the double and solemn procession of the upper nave its final honors.

But no constructed example could equal the relief encountered in the living experience of truth. Which is why I have no reason to be dissatisfied for having forged this one: since it awakened in the person most worthy of my trust this memory from her childhood, which, happily thus brought within my reach, fits best here.

A train arrives at the station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are sitting in a compartment facing each other on the side where the window opening onto the outside lets the view of the buildings along the platform where the train stops unfold: “Look,” says the brother, “we’re at Ladies!” – “Idiot!” replies the sister, “don’t you see we’re at Gentlemen.”

Indeed, apart from the fact that the rails in this story materialize the bar of the Saussurean algorithm in a form well-suited to suggest that its resistance may be other than dialectical, it would take, and it is the fitting image, not having one’s eyes in the right place to get confused here about the respective place of the signifier and the signified, and not to follow from which radiant center the first comes to reflect its light in the darkness of unfinished meanings.

For it will carry Dissension, only animal and doomed to the oblivion of natural mists, to the boundless power, implacable to families and harassing to the Gods, of ideological War. Gentlemen and Ladies will henceforth be for these children two homelands towards which their souls will each draw from a divergent wing, and on which it will be all the more impossible for them to reach a pact that, being in truth the same, neither could yield on the preeminence of one without impinging on the glory of the other.

Let us stop there. It could be the history of France. More human, as it happens, when evoked here than that of England, destined to tumble from the Big End to the Little End of the Dean Swift’s egg. What remains is to conceive what step and what corridor the S of the signifier, visible here in the plurals of which it forms the center of its receptions beyond the window, must cross in order to bring its elbows to the channels through which, like warm air and cold air, indignation and contempt come to blow on this side.

One thing is certain, in any case, this access must not include any signification, if the algorithm S/s with its bar is appropriate for it. For the algorithm, in that it is itself nothing but the pure function of the signifier, can reveal only a structure of the signifier in this transfer.

Now, the structure of the signifier is, as is commonly said of language, that it is articulated. This means that its units, wherever one starts in mapping their reciprocal encroachments and their increasing inclusions, are subject to the double condition of being reduced to ultimate differential elements and of being composed according to the laws of a closed order.

These elements, a decisive discovery of linguistics, are the phonemes, where one should not look for any phonetic constancy in the modulatory variability to which this term is applied, but the synchronic system of differential couplings necessary for the discernment of words in a given language. Thus one can see that an essential element in speech itself was predestined to be molded into the movable characters which, whether Didots or Garamonds pressing in the lowercase cases, validly present what we call the letter, namely, the essentially localized structure of the signifier.

With the second property of the signifier, that of being composed according to the laws of a closed order, is affirmed the necessity of the topological substrate, of which the term “signifying chain” that I usually use provides an approximation: rings whose necklace is sealed in the ring of another necklace made of rings.

Such are the structural conditions that determine as grammar the order of constituent encroachments of the signifier up to the unit immediately superior to the sentence, – as lexicon the order of constituent inclusions of the signifier up to the verbal locution.

It is easy, within the limits where these two enterprises of apprehending the use of a language stop, to realize that only the correlations of the signifier to the signifier there provide the standard for any search for meaning, as marked by the notion of the use of a taxeme or a semanteme, which refers to contexts of just the next degree above the concerned units.

But it is not because the enterprises of grammar and lexicon exhaust themselves at a certain limit that one should think that meaning reigns undivided beyond that. This would be a mistake. For the signifier by its nature always anticipates meaning by, in a sense, unfolding its dimension ahead of itself. As is seen at the level of the sentence when it is interrupted before the meaningful term: Never do I…, Still and all…, Perhaps again… It nonetheless makes sense, and all the more oppressively as it is content to make itself awaited8.

But the phenomenon is no different when, with only the backward movement of a but, making it appear, beautiful as the Shulamite, as virtuous as the prize maiden, dresses and prepares the Black woman for marriage and the poor woman for auction.

Hence one can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that meaning insists, but that none of its elements consists in the meaning of which it is capable at that very moment.

The notion of a ceaseless sliding of the signified under the signifier thus imposes itself, – which F. de Saussure illustrates with an image that resembles the two sinuosities of the upper and lower Waters in the miniatures of Genesis manuscripts. A double stream where the marker seems slender as the fine streaks of rain drawn by the vertical dotted lines supposed to delimit there segments of correspondence.

All experience goes against this, which led me at a certain point in my seminar on psychoses to speak of “quilting points” [French: points de capiton – a term coined by Lacan for moments where meaning is anchored in the signifying chain] required by this schema to account for the dominance of the letter in the dramatic transformation that dialogue can effect in the subject9.

But the linearity that F. de Saussure holds as constitutive of the chain of discourse, in accordance with its emission by a single voice and the horizontal line on which it is written in our script, while it is indeed necessary, is not sufficient. It is imposed on the chain of discourse only in the direction in which it is oriented in time, even being taken as a signifying factor in all languages where: [Pierre beats Paul] reverses its time by inverting its terms.

But it is enough to listen to poetry, which perhaps was not the case for F. de Saussure, for a polyphony to be heard there and for all discourse to prove itself aligned along the multiple staves of a score.

Indeed, there is no signifying chain that does not carry, as attached to the punctuation of each of its units, all that is articulated from attested contexts, vertically, so to speak, from this point.

Thus, to take our word: tree, no longer in its nominal isolation, but at the end of one of these punctuations, we shall see that it is not only by virtue of the fact that the word bar is its anagram, that it crosses that of the Saussurean algorithm.

For, decomposed into the double spectrum of its vowels and consonants, it summons with the oak and the plane tree the meanings with which it is charged in our flora, of strength and majesty. Draining all the symbolic contexts in which it is taken in the Hebrew of the Bible, it raises on a treeless mound the shadow of the cross. Then it is reduced to the capital Y of the sign of dichotomy, which, without the image telling the story of the coat of arms, would owe nothing to the tree, however genealogical it claims to be. Circulatory tree, tree of life of the cerebellum, tree of Saturn or Diana, crystals precipitated in a tree that conducts lightning, is it your figure that traces our destiny in the tortoise shell passed through the fire, or your lightning that brings forth from an unnamable night this slow mutation of being in the ἐν Πάντα [Greek: en Panta, “in everything”] of language:

No! says the Tree, it says: No! in the glittering
Of its proud head

verses that we hold as equally legitimate to be heard in the harmonics of the tree as their reverse:

Let the storm treat universally
As it does a blade of grass.

For this modern stanza is ordered according to the same law of parallelism of the signifier, whose harmony governs the primitive Slavic epic and the most refined Chinese poetry.

As is seen in the common mode of being where tree and grass are chosen, so that there arise the signs of contradiction of: saying “No!” and of: treating as, and that through the categorical contrast of the particularism of the proud one to the universality of its reduction, the indistinguishable glittering of the eternal instant is consummated in the condensation of the head and the storm.

But all this signifier, one may say, can only operate by being present in the subject. This is exactly what I satisfy by supposing that it has passed to the level of the signified.

For what matters is not that the subject knows more or less of it. (GENTLEMEN and LADIES could be written in a language unknown to the little boy and the little girl and their quarrel would be all the more exclusively a quarrel of words, but not for that any less ready to be charged with meaning).

What this structure of the signifying chain reveals is the possibility I have, precisely insofar as my language is shared with other subjects—that is, insofar as this language exists—of using it to signify something entirely different from what it says. A function more worthy of being highlighted in speech than that of disguising the subject’s thought (most often indefinable): namely, that of indicating the place of this subject in the search for truth.

Indeed, it suffices for me to plant my tree in the expression: to climb the tree, or even to project onto it the mocking light that a descriptive context gives to the word: to arbor, in order not to let myself be imprisoned in any communiqué of facts, however official it may be, and, if I know the truth, to make it understood despite all censorship, between the lines, through the sole signifier my acrobatics through the branches of the tree may constitute—provocative to the point of burlesque or only perceptible to a trained eye, depending on whether I want to be understood by the crowd or by a select few.

The properly signifying function thus depicted in language has a name. This name, we learned in our childhood grammar on the final page where the shadow of Quintilian, relegated to a ghostly chapter to convey final considerations on style, seemed to hurl its voice under the threat of the hook.

It is among the figures of style or tropes—from which we get the verb “to find”—that this name is indeed to be found. This name is metonymy.

Of which we will recall only the example that was given: thirty sails. For the uneasiness it provoked in us, that the word ship hiding there seemed to double its presence by being able, through the very repetition of this example, to borrow its figurative meaning—veiled less these illustrious sails than the definition they were supposed to illustrate.

The part taken for the whole, we told ourselves in fact, if the thing is to be taken in reality, gives us little idea of what we are to understand about the importance of the fleet that these thirty sails are nevertheless supposed to assess: that a ship has only one sail is in fact the least common case.

From this one sees that the connection between the ship and the sail is nowhere else but in the signifier, and that it is in the literalness of this connection that metonymy is based10. We will designate this as the first side of the effective field constituted by the signifier, so that meaning can take its place there.

Let us say the other. That is metaphor. And let us immediately illustrate it: the Quillet dictionary seemed fit to provide a sample not suspect of being selected, and I did not look any further for the joke than the well-known line by Victor Hugo:

Her sheaf was neither miserly nor hateful…

under the aspect of which I presented metaphor at the appropriate moment in my seminar on psychoses.

Let us say that modern poetry and the surrealist school have led us to make great strides here, by demonstrating that any conjunction of two signifiers would be equivalent to constitute a metaphor, if the condition of the greatest possible disparity of the signified images were not required for the production of the poetic spark, in other words, for metaphorical creation to occur.

Certainly, this radical position is based on an experience called automatic writing, which would not have been attempted without the assurance its pioneers took from Freud’s discovery. But it remains marked by confusion because the doctrine is false.

The creative spark of metaphor does not spring from the bringing together of two images, that is, of two equally actualized signifiers. It springs between two signifiers, one of which has substituted itself for the other by taking its place in the signifying chain, the hidden signifier remaining present through its (metonymic) connection to the rest of the chain.

One word for another, such is the formula of metaphor, and if you are a poet, you will produce, as if it were a game, a continuous flow, even a dazzling fabric of metaphors. Moreover, the effect of intoxication achieved in the dialogue that Jean Tardieu composed under this title is obtained only by the demonstration performed there of the radical superfluity of all meaning for a perfectly convincing representation of bourgeois comedy.

In Hugo’s verse, it is clear that not the slightest light springs from the assertion that a sheaf is neither miserly nor hateful, for the reason that there is no question of it possessing more of the merit than of the demerit of these attributes, both being, along with it, properties of Boaz who exercises them in disposing of her, without sharing his feelings with her. If his sheaf refers to Boaz, as is indeed the case, it is by substituting itself for him in the signifying chain, in the very place that awaited it to be elevated by a degree through the removal of avarice and hatred. But hence it is also from Boaz that the sheaf has cleared this space, as he is now thrown into the darkness outside where avarice and hatred shelter him in the hollow of their negation.

But once his sheaf has thus usurped his place, Boaz could not return to it, the thin thread of the little his that attaches him to it being an additional obstacle to reconnecting this return by a title of possession that would keep him within avarice and hatred. His affirmed generosity is seen reduced to less than nothing by the munificence of the sheaf which, being taken from nature, knows neither our restraint nor our rejections, and even in its accumulation remains lavish by our measure.

But if in this profusion the giver has disappeared with the gift, it is to resurface in what surrounds the figure where he has annihilated himself. For it is the radiance of fertility—which announces the surprise celebrated by the poem, namely the promise that the old man will receive in a sacred context of his coming to fatherhood.

It is thus between the signifier of a man’s proper name and that which abolishes it metaphorically that the poetic spark is produced, here all the more effective in realizing the meaning of fatherhood as it reproduces the mythical event in which Freud reconstructed, in the unconscious of every man, the journey of the paternal mystery.

Modern metaphor does not have any other structure. That is why this utterance:

Love is a stone laughing in the sun,

recreates love in a dimension that I have said seems tenable to me, against its ever-imminent sliding into the mirage of a narcissistic altruism. One sees that metaphor is situated at the precise point where meaning is produced in nonsense, that is, at that passage Freud discovered which, when crossed in reverse, gives rise to that word which in French is “the word” par excellence, the word that has no other patronage than the signifier of the mind11, and where it is touched that it is man’s very destiny that he challenges by the derision of the signifier.

But to come back from here, what does man find in metonymy, if it is to be more than the power to circumvent the obstacles of social censorship? Does this form, which gives its field to truth in its oppression, not reveal some servitude inherent in its presentation?

It is worth reading the book in which Leo Strauss, from the classical land offering asylum to those who have chosen freedom, meditates on the relationship between the art of writing and persecution12. In pressing as closely as possible the kind of connaturality that ties this art to this condition, he lets one glimpse that something which imposes its form here, in the effect of truth on desire.

But do we not feel for some time now that by having followed the paths of the letter to reach Freudian truth, we are burning, its fire taking from everywhere.

Certainly, the letter kills, as it is said, when the spirit gives life. We do not deny it, having had to pay homage somewhere here to a noble victim of the error of seeking the spirit in the letter, but we also ask how without the letter the spirit would live. The claims of the spirit would yet remain irreducible, if the letter had not proven that it produces all its effects of truth in man, without the spirit having the least involvement.

This revelation is what came to Freud, and his discovery, he called the unconscious.

II. – THE LETTER IN THE UNCONSCIOUS

Freud’s complete works present us with one page out of three of philological references, one page out of two of logical inferences, everywhere a dialectical apprehension of experience, the linguistic analytics there reinforcing its proportions as the unconscious is more directly concerned.

Thus, in the science of dreams, every page is about what we call the letter of discourse, in its texture, in its uses, in its immanence to the matter at hand. For this work opens, with the work itself, the royal road to the unconscious. And we are warned of this by Freud, whose confidential aside when he launches this book toward us in the first days of this century13 only confirms what he proclaimed to the end: in this all-or-nothing of his message is the whole of his discovery.

The first clause articulated from the very opening chapter, because the exposition cannot bear any delay, is that the dream is a rebus. And Freud stipulates that it must be taken as I first said, literally. This has to do with the instance in the dream of that same lettered (in other words, phonematic) structure in which the signifier is articulated and analyzed in discourse. Just like the unnatural figures of the boat on the roof or the man with a comma for a head expressly evoked by Freud, the images of the dream are to be retained only for their value as signifiers, that is, for what they allow one to spell out of the “proverb” proposed by the dream’s rebus. This structure of language that makes the operation of reading possible is at the origin of the signifiance of the dream, of the Traumdeutung.

Freud exemplifies in every possible way that this value of the image as signifier has nothing to do with its meaning, bringing into play the hieroglyphs of Egypt where it would be ridiculous to deduce from the frequency of the vulture, which is an aleph, or of the chick, which is a vau, to indicate a form of the verb to be and the plurals, that the text has even the slightest interest in these ornithological specimens. Freud finds his bearings in certain uses of the signifier in this writing, which are erased in our own, such as the use of a determinative, adding the exponent of a categorical figure to the literal representation of a verbal term, but it is in order better to bring us back to the fact that we are in a writing where even the so-called “ideogram” is a letter.

But there is no need for the common confusion about this term for, in the mind of the psychoanalyst who has no linguistic training, the prejudice prevails of a symbolism derived from natural analogy, or even from the coaptative image of instinct. So much so that, outside of the French school which guards against this, it is along the lines of: seeing in coffee grounds is not reading in hieroglyphs, that I have to recall a technique to its principles, one whose ways can be justified by nothing other than the aim of the unconscious.

It must be said that this is accepted only with difficulty and that the mental vice denounced earlier enjoys such favor that one can expect today’s psychoanalyst to admit that he decodes, before resolving to make with Freud the necessary stops (turn toward the statue of Champollion, says the guide) to understand that he deciphers: what is distinguished from the former by the fact that a cryptogram has all its dimensions only when it is that of a lost language.

To make these stops, however, is only to continue within the Traumdeutung.

The Entstellung, translated as transposition, where Freud shows the general precondition of the function of the dream, is what we designated above with Saussure as the sliding of the signified beneath the signifier, always at work (unconsciously, let us note) in discourse.

But the two aspects of the incidence of the signifier on the signified are found there.

Condensation (Verdichtung) is the structure of superimposition of signifiers where metaphor takes its field, and whose name, by condensing in itself the word Dichtung [German: poetry], indicates the kinship of the mechanism to poetry, up to the point where it envelops poetry’s properly traditional function.

Displacement (Verschiebung) is closer to the German term for that shift of meaning demonstrated by metonymy and which, from its first appearance in Freud, is presented as the most apt means of the unconscious to outwit censorship.

What distinguishes these two mechanisms, which play a privileged role in dream-work (Traumarbeit), from their homologous function in discourse?—Nothing, except for a condition imposed on the signifying material, called Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit, which must be translated as: consideration for the means of staging (the translation as “the role of the possibility of representation” is here much too approximate). But this condition constitutes a limitation exercised within the system of writing, far from dissolving it into a figurative semiology where it would join the phenomena of natural expression. By this, one could probably shed light on the problems of certain modes of pictography, which one is not authorized, simply because they have been abandoned as imperfect in writing, to consider as evolutionary stages. Let us say that the dream is similar to that parlor game where one must, in the hot seat, have the spectators guess a known statement or its variant by the sole means of silent staging. That the dream has speech at its disposal does not change anything, since for the unconscious it is only one element of the staging like any other. It is precisely when the game and likewise the dream come up against the lack of taxiematic material to represent the logical articulations of causality, contradiction, hypothesis, etc., that they prove that both are a matter of writing and not of pantomime. The subtle procedures that the dream is found to employ to represent these logical articulations—much less artificially than the game usually does—are, in Freud, the subject of a special study where it is confirmed once again that the work of the dream follows the laws of the signifier.

The rest of the elaboration is designated by Freud as secondary, which derives its value from what is at stake: fantasies or daydreams, Tagtraum to use the term Freud prefers in order to situate them in their function of wish-fulfillment (Wunscherfüllung). Their distinctive feature, given that these fantasies can remain unconscious, is thus indeed their meaning. Now, of these Freud tells us that their place in the dream is either to be taken up as signifying elements for the formulation of unconscious thought (Traumgedanke), or else to serve in the secondary elaboration in question here, that is, in a function, he says, which there is no need to distinguish from waking thought (von unserem wachen Denken nicht zu unterscheiden). One can give no better idea of the effects of this function than by comparing them to whitewash patches, which, stenciled here and there, tend to transform into the appearance of a genre painting the rather off-putting clichés in themselves of the rebus or the hieroglyphs.

I apologize for seeming to spell out Freud’s text myself; it is not just to show what is gained by simply not omitting anything from it. It is in order to situate, on fundamental and never revoked reference points, what has happened in psychoanalysis.

From the very beginning, the constitutive role of the signifier in the status that Freud established for the unconscious, immediately and in the most precise formal modes, was misunderstood.

This for a double reason, the less noticed of which is naturally that this formalization alone was not enough to make the instance of the signifier recognized, for at the time of the publication of the Traumdeutung it was far ahead of the formalisms of linguistics, to which one could probably demonstrate that, by its sheer weight of truth, it blazed the trail.

The second reason is, after all, only the reverse of the first, for if psychoanalysts were exclusively fascinated by the meanings revealed in the unconscious, it was because these drew their most secret appeal from the dialectic that seemed to be immanent to them.

I have shown in my seminar that it is in the necessity of correcting the ever-accelerating effects of this partiality that the apparent turnarounds, or better yet the course corrections, that Freud, in his primary concern to ensure the survival of his discovery through the initial adjustments it required of knowledge, felt compelled to make in his doctrine along the way, are to be understood.

For in the situation he was in, I repeat, of having nothing that, responding to his object, was at the same level of scientific maturation—at least he did not fail to maintain this object at the measure of its ontological dignity.

The rest was the affair of the gods and played out in such a way that analysis today takes its bearings from those imaginary forms that I have just shown as sketched in reserve upon the text they mutilate—and that it is on these that the analyst’s aim adjusts itself: mixing them in dream interpretation with the visionary release of the hieroglyphic aviary, and more generally seeking control of the exhaustion of analysis in a kind of scanning14 of these forms wherever they appear, in the idea that they are witnesses to the exhaustion of regressions as well as to the remolding of the “object relation” in which the subject is supposed to be typified.

The technique that claims such positions can be fertile in diverse effects, very difficult to criticize under the shield of therapeutics. But an internal critique can emerge from a flagrant discordance between the operative mode that this technique authorizes—that is, the analytic rule by which all its instruments, beginning with “free association,” justify themselves through the conception of the unconscious of its inventor—and the complete ignorance that reigns there of this conception of the unconscious. The most extreme adherents believe they are done with a pirouette: the analytic rule must be observed all the more religiously for being only the fruit of happy accident. In other words, Freud never really knew what he was doing.

A return to Freud’s text shows, on the contrary, the absolute coherence of his technique with his discovery, at the same time as it allows us to place his procedures in their proper rank. That is why any rectification of psychoanalysis requires returning to the truth of that discovery, which is impossible to obscure in its original moment.

For in the analysis of the dream, Freud intends to give us nothing other than the laws of the unconscious in their most general extension. One of the reasons why the dream was most suitable for this, Freud tells us, is precisely that it reveals these laws no less in the normal subject than in the neurotic.

But in either case, the efficacy of the unconscious does not end upon awakening. Psychoanalytic experience is nothing other than to establish that the unconscious leaves none of our actions outside its field. Its presence in the psychological order, in other words in the functions of relation of the individual, nevertheless deserves to be specified: it is in no way coextensive with this order, for we know that, if unconscious motivation manifests as much in conscious psychic effects as in unconscious psychic effects, conversely, it is an elementary reminder to note that a great number of psychic effects which the term unconscious, by virtue of excluding the character of consciousness, legitimately designates, are nonetheless in their nature entirely unrelated to the unconscious in the Freudian sense. It is thus only by an abuse of language that one confuses psychic and unconscious in this sense, and thus qualifies as psychic an effect of the unconscious upon the somatic, for example.

It is thus a matter of defining the topology of this unconscious. I say that it is precisely that which is defined by the algorithm:

S/s

What we have been able to develop from the incidence of the signifier on the signified, accommodates its transformation into:

f(S) 1/s.

It is from the co-presence not only of the elements of the horizontal signifying chain, but of its vertical adjacencies, in the signified, that we have shown the effects, distributed according to two fundamental structures in metonymy and in metaphor. We can symbolize them as:

f(S..S’)S ~ S(–)s ,

that is, the metonymic structure, indicating that it is the connection of signifier to signifier that allows the elision by which the signifier installs the lack of being in the object relation, using the value of reference of signification to invest it with the desire aimed at this lack it supports. The sign – placed between ( ) here shows the maintaining of the bar, which in the primary algorithm marks the irreducibility by which, in the relation of signifier to signified, the resistance of meaning is constituted15.

Now here is:

f(S’/S)S ~ S(+)s ,

the metaphoric structure, indicating that it is in the substitution of signifier for signifier that an effect of signification is produced that is poetic or creative, in other words an advent of the meaning in question16. The sign + placed between ( ) here shows the crossing of the bar—and the constitutive value of this crossing for the emergence of meaning.

This crossing expresses the condition of passage of the signifier into the signified, the moment of which I marked above by temporarily identifying it with the place of the subject (p. 58, 3rd and 4th part).

It is the function of the subject, thus introduced, on which we must now pause, because it is at the crucial point of our problem.

I think, therefore I am (cogito ergo sum), is not only the formula in which, with the historical apex of a reflection on the conditions of science, the link is constituted between the transparency of the transcendental subject and his existential affirmation.

Perhaps I am nothing but object and mechanism (and thus nothing more than phenomenon), but certainly insofar as I think it, I am—absolutely. No doubt philosophers have made important corrections here, and specifically that in what thinks (cogitans) I never do anything but constitute myself as object (cogitatum). It remains that, through this extreme purification of the transcendental subject, my existential connection to its project seems irrefutable, at least in the form of its actuality, and that:

“cogito ergo sum” ubi cogito, ibi sum,

overcomes the objection.

Of course, this limits me to being there in my being only to the extent that I think I am in my thought; to what extent I truly think it concerns only me, and, if I say it, interests no one17.

To evade it, however, under the pretext of its philosophical semblances, is simply to show inhibition. For the notion of subject is indispensable to the handling of a science such as strategy in the modern sense, whose calculations exclude all “subjectivism”.

It also means forbidding oneself access to what can be called the universe of Freud, as one speaks of the universe of Copernicus. Indeed, it is to the so-called Copernican revolution that Freud himself compared his discovery, emphasizing that it was once again about the place that man assigns himself at the center of a universe.

The place I occupy as subject of the signifier—is it, in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified, concentric or eccentric, that is the question?

It is not a matter of knowing whether I speak of myself in a manner consistent with what I am, but whether, when I speak of myself, I am the same as the one I am speaking of. And there is here no inconvenience in bringing in the term thought. For Freud designates by this term the elements at play in the unconscious; that is, in the signifying mechanisms I have just recognized there.

Nonetheless, the philosophical cogito is at the center of that mirage which makes modern man so sure of being himself in his uncertainties about himself, even through the suspicion he may long since have learned to practice regarding the traps of self-esteem.

And yet, if, turning against the nostalgia it serves, I use the weapon of metonymy and refuse to seek any meaning beyond tautology, and if, in the name of “war is war” and “a penny is a penny”, I decide to be nothing but what I am, how can I detach myself from the evidence that I am in this very act?

No less than if I carry myself to the other metaphoric pole of the signifying quest and devote myself to becoming what I am, to coming into being—how could I doubt that even by losing myself there, I am there?

Now, it is precisely at these points, where evidence is about to be subverted by the empirical, that the twist of the Freudian conversion lies.

This signifying play of metonymy and metaphor, even to and including its active point which pins my desire on a refusal of the signifier or on a lack of being, and ties my fate to the question of my destiny, this play is played, until the game is called, in its inexorable subtlety, where I am not because I cannot situate myself there.

That is to say, it is little of those words by which I may have momentarily startled my listeners: I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. Words which, to any attentive ear, make palpable in what ambiguity the ferret of meaning flees our grasp along the verbal string.

What must be said is: I am not, there where I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am, there where I do not think I am thinking.

This two-faced mystery joins with the fact that truth is evoked only in this dimension of alibi, whereby all “realism” in creation takes its virtue from metonymy, just as meaning gives access only at the double bend of metaphor, when one has their unique key: the S and the s of the Saussurean algorithm are not on the same plane, and man is deluded in thinking himself situated at their common axis, which is nowhere.

At least this was so until Freud made his discovery. For if what Freud discovered is not precisely this, it is nothing at all.

The contents of the unconscious deliver to us, in their disappointing ambiguity, no reality in the subject more consistent than the immediate; it is from truth that they derive their virtue, and within the dimension of being: Kern unseres Wesen, the terms are in Freud.

The double-action mechanism of metaphor is the very one in which the symptom, in the analytic sense, is determined. Between the enigmatic signifier of the sexual trauma and the term to which it has just been substituted in a current signifying chain, the spark passes that fixes in a symptom—metaphor in which the flesh or the function are taken as signifying element—the meaning inaccessible to the conscious subject where it might be resolved.

And the riddles posed by desire to all “natural philosophy,” its frenzy mimicking the abyss of the infinite, the intimate collusion in which it envelops the pleasure of knowing and that of mastering with enjoyment, are due to no other disorder of instinct than its being caught in the rails—eternally stretched toward the desire for something else—of metonymy. Hence its “perverse” fixation at the same suspension point of the signifying chain where the screen memory becomes immobilized, where the fascinating image of the fetish becomes petrified.

There is no other way to conceive of the indestructibility of unconscious desire—when there is no need that, in seeing its satisfaction forbidden, does not wither, in the extreme case by the consumption of the organism itself. It is in a memory comparable to what we call by that name in our modern thinking machines (based on an electronic realization of signifying composition) that this chain lies, which insists on reproducing itself in transference, and which is that of a dead desire.

It is the truth of what this desire was in its history that the subject cries out through his symptom, as Christ said the stones would have done if the children of Israel had not given them their voices.

This is also why psychoanalysis alone makes it possible to distinguish, within memory, the function of recollection. Rooted in the signifier, it resolves, through the ascendancy of history in man, the Platonic aporias of reminiscence.

It suffices to read the “Three Essays on Sexuality,” covered over for the masses by so many pseudo-biological glosses, to observe that Freud derives all access to the object from a dialectic of return.

Thus starting from the nostos hölderlinien [nostos: Greek, “return,” with a poetic allusion to Hölderlin], it is to Kierkegaardian repetition that Freud comes less than twenty years later, that is, his thought, having submitted itself from its origin to the humble but unbending consequences of the talking cure, was never able to free itself from the living servitudes which, from the royal principle of the Logos, led him to rethink the mortal antinomies of Empedocles.

And how can one conceive otherwise than upon that “other scene” of which he speaks as the place of the dream, his recourse as a scientific man to a Deus ex machina less derisory than what is revealed here to the spectator, that the machine governs the stage manager himself. Obscene and ferocious figure of the primordial father, inexhaustible in redeeming himself in the eternal blindness of Oedipus, how else to think, except that he had to bow his head under the force of a testimony that surpassed his prejudices, that a nineteenth-century scholar should have cared more than anything in his work for that “Totem and Taboo,” before which today’s ethnologists bow as before the growth of an authentic myth.

It is indeed to the same necessities as those of myth that this imperative proliferation of particular symbolic creations responds, in which the compulsions of the neurotic, down to their details, are motivated, just as in what are called the sexual theories of the child.

Thus, to place you at the precise point where my commentary on Freud is currently unfolding in my seminar, little Hans, at five years old left stranded by the shortcomings of his symbolic environment, faced with the enigma of his sex and existence suddenly actualized for him, develops, under the guidance of Freud and his father, his disciple, around the signifying crystal of his phobia, in a mythical form, all possible permutations of a limited number of signifiers.

This operation demonstrates that even at the individual level, the solution to the impossible is provided to man by the exhaustion of all possible forms of impossibility encountered in the signifying equation of the solution. A striking demonstration that sheds light on the labyrinth of an observation that has so far only been used to extract materials for demolition. It also reveals that in the coextensivity of the development of the symptom and its curative resolution, the nature of neurosis is established: whether phobic, hysterical, or obsessive, neurosis is a question that being poses for the subject “from where it was before the subject came into the world” (this subordinate clause is the very phrase used by Freud in explaining the Oedipus complex to little Hans).

It concerns here that being which appears only as the flash of an instant in the void of the verb to be, and I have said that it poses its question for the subject. What does this mean? It does not pose it before the subject since the subject cannot come to the place where it is posed, but it poses it in the place of the subject, that is, in that place it poses the question with the subject, as one poses a problem with a pen and as the ancient man thought with his soul.

It is thus that Freud brought the ego into his doctrine. Freud defined the ego by its own resistances. They are of an imaginary nature in the sense of coaptative lures, of which the ethology of animal behavior in display and combat offers us the example. Freud showed their reduction in man to the narcissistic relation, whose elaboration I have taken up in the mirror stage. There he united the synthesis of the perceptive functions in which the sensori-motor selections that define what he calls reality for man are integrated.

But this resistance, essential for cementing the imaginary inertias that block the message of the unconscious, is only secondary compared to the resistances proper to the signifying path of truth.

This is the reason why an exhaustion of defense mechanisms, as palpable as Fenichel makes it for us in his technical problems because he is a practitioner (whereas his entire theoretical reduction of neuroses or psychoses to genetic anomalies of libidinal development is mere flatness), manifests itself, without his accounting for it or even being aware of it, as the reverse side of which the mechanisms of the unconscious would be the obverse. Periphrasis, hyperbaton, ellipsis, suspension, anticipation, retraction, denial, digression, irony—these are the figures of speech (figurae sententiarum of Quintilian), just as catachresis, litotes, antonomasia, hypotyposis are the tropes, whose terms are imposed on the pen as the most apt to label these mechanisms. Can we see in them only a mere manner of speaking, when these are the very figures enacted in the rhetoric of the discourse actually uttered by the analysand.

By stubbornly reducing to an emotional permanence the reality of resistance, of which this discourse would be nothing but the cover, today’s psychoanalysts only show that they fall under the blow of one of the fundamental truths Freud rediscovered through psychoanalysis. It is that, with a new truth, it is not enough to make room for it, for it is a matter of taking our place in it. It demands that we unsettle ourselves. One cannot succeed by merely getting used to it. We get used to the real. Truth, we repress.

But it is especially necessary for the scholar, the magus, and even the physician, that he be the only one to know. The idea that, in the depths of the simplest and, moreover, sickest souls, there is something ready to hatch—so be it! But someone who seems to know as much as they do about what to make of it… Come to our aid, categories of primitive, prelogical, archaic thought, even of magical thought, so convenient to impute to others. For it is not fitting that these peasants keep us breathless by posing riddles that prove to be quite mischievous.

To interpret the unconscious as Freud did, one would have to be, like him, an encyclopedia of the arts and the muses, doubled as an assiduous reader of the Fliegende Blätter. Nor would the task be easier to put ourselves at the mercy of a thread woven of allusions and citations, puns and equivocations. Will we have to make a trade of antidoted fripperies?

Yet it must be accepted. The unconscious is neither primordial nor instinctual, and the only elementary things it knows are the elements of the signifier.

The books that can be called canonical on the unconscious—the Traumdeutung, the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and the Joke (Witz) in its relation to the unconscious—are nothing but a fabric of examples whose development unfolds in the formulas of connection and substitution (only multiplied tenfold by their particular complexity, and sometimes tabulated by Freud as an appendix), which are those we give for the signifier in its function of transfer. For in the Traumdeutung, it is in the sense of such a function that the term Übertragung or transference is introduced, which will later give its name to the operative spring of the intersubjective link between analysand and analyst.

Such diagrams are not only constituent in neurosis for each of its symptoms, but are the only means of encompassing the thematic of its course and its resolution. As the great analytic observations given by Freud are admirable in demonstrating.

And to bring us back to a more limited but more manageable datum, to offer us the final seal with which to close our remarks, shall I cite the 1927 article on fetishism, and the case Freud reports there of a patient18 for whom sexual satisfaction required a certain shine on the nose (Glanz auf der Nase), and whose analysis showed that he owed it to the fact that his early Anglophone years had shifted into a glance at the nose (a glance at the nose, and not shine on the nose in the “forgotten” language of the subject’s childhood) the burning curiosity that attached him to his mother’s phallus, that is, to that eminent lack-of-being whose privileged signifier Freud revealed.

It is this abyss opened to thought by a thought making itself heard in the abyss that from the start provoked resistance to analysis. And not, as is said, the promotion of sexuality in man. This is the object that has predominated in literature across the centuries. And the evolution of psychoanalysis has managed, by a comic sleight of hand, to make of it a moral instance, the cradle and waiting place of selflessness and lovingness. The Platonic harness of the soul, now blessed and illuminated, goes straight to paradise.

The intolerable scandal at the time when Freudian sexuality was not yet holy was that it was so “intellectual.” In this, it revealed itself as the worthy partner of all those terrorists whose conspiracies were set to ruin society.

At the moment when psychoanalysts are working to remodel a right-thinking psychoanalysis whose sociological poem of the autonomous ego is its crowning achievement, I wish to tell those who listen to me how they will recognize bad psychoanalysts: it is by the term they use to denigrate any technical and theoretical research that pursues the Freudian experience along its authentic line. It is the word: intellectualization, execrable to all those who, themselves living in fear of feeling what it is to drink the wine of truth, spit on the bread of men, without their saliva ever being able to do more than act as a leaven.

III. The Letter, Being, and the Other

Is that which thinks in my place then another self? Does Freud’s discovery represent the confirmation, at the level of psychological experience, of Manichaeism19?

No confusion is possible in fact: what Freud’s research introduced was not to more or less curious cases of a secondary personality. Even in the heroic era we have just mentioned, where, like animals in fairy tales, sexuality spoke, never did the atmosphere of devilry that such a direction would have engendered become precise20.

The end that Freud’s discovery proposes to man was defined by him at the peak of his thought in moving terms: Wo es war, soll Ich werden. There where it was, I must come to be.

This end is one of reintegration and harmony, I will say reconciliation (Versöhnung).

But if one ignores the radical ex-centricity of oneself to oneself to which man is confronted, in other words the truth discovered by Freud, one will fail in the order and means of psychoanalytic mediation, and will make of it the operation of compromise to which it has indeed come, to that which both the spirit of Freud and the letter of his work most strongly repudiate: for the notion of compromise, being constantly invoked by him as underpinning all the miseries that his analysis aids, one can say that recourse to compromise, whether explicit or implicit, disorients all psychoanalytic action and plunges it into darkness.

But it is also not enough to rub up against the moralistic hypocrisies of our time and have a mouth full of “total personality,” to have even said something articulated about the possibility of mediation.

The radical heteronomy whose yawning gap Freud’s discovery has shown within man can no longer be covered over without making everything that attempts it fundamentally dishonest.

Who then is this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since at the very heart of my identity with myself, it is he who agitates me?

His presence can only be understood at a second degree of otherness, which already situates him himself in the position of mediation with respect to my own splitting from myself as well as from a fellow being.

If I have said that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other with a capital O, it is to indicate the beyond where the recognition of desire is knotted to the desire for recognition.

In other words, this other is the Other that even my lie invokes as a guarantor of the truth in which it subsists.

From which it is observed that it is with the emergence of language that the dimension of truth emerges.

Before this point, in the psychological relation, perfectly isolable in the observation of animal behavior, we must admit the existence of subjects, not due to some projective mirage—the old chestnut that psychologists love to endlessly attack as a phantom—but because of the manifested presence of intersubjectivity. In the ambush where it hides, in the constructed trap, in the lingering feint where a fugitive breaking away from a group throws off the predator, something more emerges than in the fascinating erection of the parade or combat. Yet nothing there transcends the function of the lure at the service of a need, nor affirms a presence in that beyond-the-veil where all of Nature can be questioned about its purpose.

For the question itself to come to light (and it is known that Freud reached this in Beyond the Pleasure Principle), language must be.

For I can deceive my adversary by a movement that is contrary to my battle plan; this movement only exercises its deceptive effect precisely to the extent that I produce it in reality, and for my adversary.

But in the propositions with which I open peace negotiations with him, it is in a third place, which is neither my word nor my interlocutor, that what it proposes to him is situated.

This place is nothing other than the place of the signifying convention, as it is revealed in the comic aspect of this painful complaint of the Jew to his companion: “Why do you tell me that you are going to Krakow so that I will believe you are going to Lemberg, when you are actually going to Krakow?”

Of course, my troop movement from earlier can be understood within this conventional register of the strategy of a game, where it is according to a rule that I deceive my adversary, but then my success is appreciated in the connotation of treachery, that is, in the relation to the Other, guarantor of Good Faith.

Here, the problems are of an order whose heteronomy is simply misunderstood by being reduced to no “feeling for others,” no matter how it is named. For “the existence of the other,” having lately managed to reach the ears of the psychoanalyst-Midas through the partition that separates him from the phenomenologists’ conclave, it is known that this news runs through the reeds: “Midas, King Midas, is the other of his patient. He himself said so.”

But what door, indeed, has he broken down here? The other, which other?

The young André Gide, daring his landlady to whom his mother entrusted him, to treat him as a responsible being, by ostentatiously unlocking, in her view, with a key that is false only in that it opens all the same padlocks, the padlock she herself believes is the worthy signifier of her educational intentions—which other is he targeting? The one who will intervene, and to whom the child will laughingly say, “What use is a ridiculous padlock to keep me obedient?” But just by having stayed hidden and waiting for the evening, for after the tight-lipped reception that suits the moment, to scold the boy—not only is it another person whose face she shows him with anger, it is another André Gide, who is no longer so sure, from then on and even looking back now, of what he wanted to do: who is changed even in his truth by the doubt cast on his good faith.

Perhaps this empire of confusion, which is simply that in which all human opera buffa plays out, deserves that we pause here, to understand the ways in which analysis proceeds not only to restore order there, but to set up the conditions for the possibility of restoring it.

Kern unseres Wesen, the core of our being, is not so much what Freud instructs us to aim for—as so many before him have done through the vain adage “Know thyself”—but rather it is the paths leading to it that he gives us to revise.

Or rather, this that he proposes we reach, is not something that can be the object of knowledge, but rather, does he not say, it is that which makes my being, and he teaches us that I bear witness to it as much and even more in my whims, in my aberrations, in my phobias and my fetishes, as in my vaguely civilized persona.

Madness, you are no longer the object of the ambiguous praise in which the wise man has set up the impregnable burrow of his fear. If, after all, he is not so badly housed there, it is because the supreme agent who has always dug its tunnels and labyrinth, is reason itself, it is the same Logos that he serves.

And how, then, could you imagine that a scholar as little gifted for the “engagements” that solicited him in his own time as in any other, as Erasmus was, played such an eminent role in the revolution of a Reformation in which man was as much invested in every man as in all?

It is that to touch, even slightly, the relation of man to the signifier, here the conversion of exegetical procedures, changes the course of his history by altering the moorings of his being.

It is in this way that Freudianism, however misunderstood it may have been, however confused its consequences may be, appears to any gaze able to perceive the changes we have lived through in our own life, as constituting an elusive but radical revolution. To amass testimonies is pointless21: everything that interests not only the human sciences, but the destiny of man, politics, metaphysics, literature, the arts, advertising, propaganda, and thus, I do not doubt, the economy, has been affected by it.

Is this anything other, however, than the discordant effects of an immense truth in which Freud traced a pure path? It must be said that this path is not followed, in any technique that prides itself solely on the categorization of its object, as is the case with psychoanalysis today unless it returns to Freud’s discovery.

Likewise, the vulgarity of the concepts on which its practice is based, the bits of faux-Freudism that are now merely ornamental, as well as what must be called the disrepute in which it prospers, together testify to its fundamental renunciation.

Freud, by his discovery, brought within the circle of science this boundary between object and being which seemed to mark its limit.

Whether this is the symptom and the prelude to a questioning of man’s situation in being, as all the postulates of knowledge have assumed up to now, do not be satisfied, I beg you, with cataloging the fact that I say it as a case of Heideggerianism—even if it is prefixed with a “neo,” which adds nothing to that style of dustbin by which it is customary to dispense with all reflection by recourse to the “get-rid-of-that” of its mental debris.

When I speak of Heidegger or rather when I translate him, I strive to let the word he utters retain its sovereign significance.

If I speak of the letter and of being, if I distinguish the other and the Other, it is because Freud indicates them to me as the terms to which refer these effects of resistance and transfer, which I have had to measure myself against unequally, for twenty years now, as I practice this impossible endeavor, as everyone likes to repeat after him, of psychoanalysis. It is also because I must help others not to get lost in it.

It is to prevent the field of which they are the heirs from lying fallow, and for this, to make them understand that if the symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so, no more than to say that man’s desire is a metonymy. For the symptom is a metaphor, whether or not one cares to say so, just as desire is a metonymy, even if man mocks it.

And if I invite you to be indignant that after so many centuries of religious hypocrisy and philosophical showmanship, nothing has yet been validly articulated of what binds metaphor to the question of being and metonymy to its lack, would it be necessary that, of the object of this indignation, as perpetrator and as victim, something is still there to respond: namely the man of humanism and the credence, irredeemably protested, that he has drawn on his intentions.

T. t. y. m. u. p. t.22 *14-26 May 57.

• In his letter of October 15, 1970, J. Lacan, addressing Tomás Segovia, said: “No one can have the slightest idea. But to you, who put such wonderful care at my service, I will confess what I have never told anyone. It is about the initials of the phrase that I can say to myself today, and have been able to for a long time, and with which I have hidden my bitterness: ‘Tu t’y es mis un peu tard’ [You got to it a little late]. The ‘e’ is missing in the Écrits, but… I hope, not in the original text.”

1- The talk took place on May 9, 1957, at the Descartes amphitheater at the Sorbonne, and the discussion continued over drinks.

2- Die Frage der Laienanalyse, G.W., XIV, pp. 281-283.

3- This aspect, which is highly suggestive in overturning the perspective of the ‘psychological function’ that obscures everything in this matter, appears illuminating in the purely linguistic analysis of the two major forms of aphasia, which one of the leaders of modern linguistics, Roman Jakobson, was able to organize. See, in the most accessible of his works, Fundamentals of Language (with Morris Halle), Mouton and Co, ‘S-Gravenhage, chapters I to IV of the Second Part.

4- One will remember that the discussion concerning the necessity for the advent of a new language in communist society really did take place, and that Stalin, to the relief of those who trusted in his philosophy, settled it in these terms: language is not a superstructure.

5- Linguistics, as we say, that is, the study of existing languages in their structure and in the laws that are revealed therein – which leaves aside the theory of abstract codes, inappropriately classified under the heading of the theory of communication, the theory, of a physicist constitution, called information theory, or even any more or less hypothetically generalized semiology.

6- See De magistro by Saint Augustine, of which I commented on the chapter ‘De significatione locutionis’ in my seminar on June 23, 54.

7- Thus M. Richards, author precisely of a work on the appropriate procedures for this objective, shows us in another the application of these. For this, he chooses a page of Mong-Tse, Mencius for the Jesuits: Mencius on the mind, it’s called, given the subject of the piece. The guarantees provided for the purity of the experience are in no way inferior to the luxury of its approaches. And the expert scholar in the Traditional Canon where the text is inserted, is encountered at the very site in Beijing where the demonstrative spinner was transported without regard to cost. But we too will be transported, and at a lower price, to see the transformation of a bronze that emits a bell sound at the slightest brush of thought, into a sort of mop for cleaning the blackboard of the most dismal English psychologism. Not without, alas, quickly identifying it with the author’s own meninges, the only thing left to remain of his object and himself after the accomplished exhaustion of the sense of the sense of the one, and the common sense of the other.

8- It is in this that verbal hallucination, by taking on this form, sometimes opens for us a door of communication, until now missed from being unnoticed, with the Freudian structure of psychosis (Seminar of the year 55-56).

9- We did this on June 6, 56 with the example of the first scene of Athalie, admitting that a passing allusion in the New Statesman and Nation by a highbrow critic to the ‘high prostitution’ [the phrase ‘haute putasserie’ plays on the French term ‘haute putain’ and means both high-class prostitution and hypocrisy] of Racine’s heroines was not unrelated to it, by prompting us to give up the reference to the savage dramas of Shakespeare, which had become compulsive in analytical circles where it played the role of the soap for the villain of philistinism.

10- Here we pay homage to what we owe in this formulation to Mr. Roman Jakobson, we mean his works in which a psychoanalyst at every moment finds a way to structure his experience, and which make “personal communications” as superfluous for us as for anyone else. One indeed recognizes in this oblique form of allegiance the style of that immortal couple: Rosenkranz and Guldenstein, whose mismatch is impossible, even by the imperfection of their destiny, for it lasts by the same device as Jeannot’s knife, and for the very reason for which Goethe praised Shakespeare for having presented the character in their double: they alone are the entire Gesellschaft, society itself (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Ed. Trunz, Christian Wegner Verlag, Hamburg, V 5, p. 299) (a). Let us in this context thank the author of Some remarks on the role of speech in psycho-analytic technique (I. J. P., Nov.-Dec. 1956, XXXVII, 6, p. 467), for having taken care to stress that they are “based on” a work from 1952. Thus, it is understandable that nothing of the work published since is assimilated there and yet the author is not unaware of it since he cites me as its editor (sic. I know what editor means). (a) The whole passage of Goethe would have to be distilled: Dieses leise Auftreten, dieses Schmiegen und Biegen, dies Jasagen, Streicheln und Schmeicheln, diese Behendigkeit, dies Schwänzeln, diese Allheit und Leerheit, diese rechtliche Schurkerei, diese Unfähigkeit, wie kann sie durch einen Menschen ausgedruckt werden? Es sollten ihrer wenigstens ein Dutzend sein, wenn man sie haben könnte; denn sie sind bloss in Gesellschaft etwas, sie sind die Gesellschaft…

11- This is indeed the equivalent of the German term Witz, to which Freud marked the aim of his third fundamental work on the unconscious. The much greater difficulty of finding this equivalent in English is instructive: wit, weighed down by the discussion going from Davenant and Hobbes to Pope and Addison, leaving its essential virtues to humor, which is something else. Only pun remains, yet it is too narrow.

12- Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss, The Free Press, Glencoë, Illinois.

13- See the correspondence, specifically nos. 107 and 119, of the letters selected by his editors.

14- It is known that this is the procedure by which a research assures itself of its result by a mechanical exploration of the entire extension of its object’s field.

15- The sign ~ here designates equivalence.

16- S’ in the context designates the productive term of the signifying effect (or signifiance); it is latent in metonymy, patent in metaphor.

17- It is altogether different if, for example, by posing a question such as: “Why philosophers?”, I make myself more ingenuous than nature, since I am asking not only the question philosophers have always asked, but the one in which perhaps they are most interested.

18-Fetischismus, G. W., XIV, p. 311.

19- One of my colleagues went so far as to wonder if the id (Es) of the later doctrine was not the ‘bad ego’.

20- Nevertheless, note the tone in which at that time one could speak of the goblin tricks of the unconscious: Der Zufall und die Koboldstreiche des Unbewussten, this is a title by Silberer, which would be absolutely anachronistic in the present atmosphere of soul managers.

21- I note the latest to date in what comes quite simply from the pen of François Mauriac to excuse himself, in the Figaro littéraire of May 25, for his refusal to “tell us his life.” If no one can engage in it with the same heart anymore, it is, he tells us, because for half a century, Freud, “whatever we think of him,” has passed through there. And, after momentarily yielding to the received idea that it is to subject us to the “history of our body,” he quickly returns to what his writer’s sensitivity could not fail to notice: it is the deepest confession of the soul of all those close to us that our discourse would publish if it were to come to completion.