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Let us resume our presentation at the point where we left off last time, that is to say, at the moment when Hirsch HYACINTHE, speaking to the author of Reisebilder whom he met at the baths of Lucca, says to him:

‘As true as God must give me all that is good, I was sitting quite as an equal, quite in a famillionnaire manner.’

So, this is where we begin, from the word ‘famillionnaire’, which has, after all, had its fortune. It is known for the starting point that FREUD takes from it. That is where we pick up again, and it is here that I will already try to show you the way in which FREUD approaches the witticism. The analysis is important for our discussion.

Indeed, the importance of this exemplary point is to show us—insofar as, alas, it is necessary to do so—in an unmistakable way, the importance of the signifier in what we can call, with him, the mechanisms of the unconscious. It is obviously quite surprising to see already that, for all those whose discipline does not particularly prepare them for it—I mean neurologists—as they wrestle more and more with this delicate subject of aphasia, that is, the deficit of speech, they make day-by-day remarkable progress in what we might call their linguistic formation. But psychoanalysts, whose entire art and technique rest upon the use of speech, have so far not taken the slightest account of it, even though what FREUD shows us is not simply a sort of humanist reference—displaying his culture or his readings—to what belongs to the domain of philology, but an absolutely internal, organic reference.

Since—I hope!—since last time, most of you at least have glanced at The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, you may have noticed that his reference to the technique of the joke as a technique of language is very precisely that around which his argumentation always revolves, and that if what arises in terms of sense, of meaning in the joke, is something that seems to him to deserve being brought closer to the unconscious, it is—let me insist that everything I have to say about the witticism comes close to this—based only on its very function of pleasure, which always and only pivots and turns because of structural analogies, which can be conceived of only on the linguistic level, structural analogies between what happens in the joke, I mean the technical side of the joke, let us say the verbal side of the joke, and what happens under various names, which FREUD discovered, that which is the proper mechanism of the unconscious, namely the mechanisms such as condensation and displacement. I will limit myself to these two for today.

So here is where we are: Hirsch HYACINTHE speaking to Heinrich HEINE, where Hirsch HYACINTHE—a fiction of Heinrich HEINE—recounts what happened to him. Something took place at the outset—to stick to this segment I have just isolated—something quite clear, exalting, as it were, in order to place it on a pedestal, to exalt what is to come, this invocation of the universal witness and the subject’s personal relation to that witness, that is, God:

‘As true as God owes me all good things…’

Which is something that is undeniably both significant by its meaning and ironic in what reality may reveal as lacking, but from there the statement is made:

‘…I was sitting next to Salomon ROTHSCHILD, quite as an equal…’

Here comes the emergence of the object: this ‘quite’, the totality, is that we are not entirely sure that this totality is truly closed, and indeed this is found at many levels, and I would even say at all levels in the use of this notion of totality. Here, in fact, he picks up on this ‘quite’, and he says: ‘quite…’ and here occurs the phenomenon, the unexpected thing, the ‘scandal of the utterance’, namely this unprecedented message, this something that we do not yet even know what it is, that we cannot yet name, and which is ‘famillionnaire.’

Something of which we do not know whether it is a slip or a successful act, a blunder or a poetic creation. We will see. It can be all at once, but it is appropriate to focus precisely on the formation, on the strictly signifying level, of the phenomenon of what will later be taken up—I will tell you, and I already announced it last time—in a signifying function that is its own as a ‘signifier escaping the code’, that is, everything that has until then been accumulated as formations of the signifier in its functions of creating meaning.

There is here something new that appears, which can be linked to the very spring of what one may call the progress of language, its change. First, we must pause at this something in its very formation, I mean at the point where it is situated in relation to the formative mechanism of the signifier. We must pause here to be able to continue validly on what will turn out to be the sites of the phenomenon, even its accompaniments, even at times its sources, its points of emergence.

But the essential phenomenon is this knot, this point where this new, paradoxical signifier appears, this ‘famillionnaire’—from which FREUD starts, and to which he returns constantly, on which he asks us to pause, on which—as you will see—up to the end of his speculation on the witticism, he does not fail to return as pointing to the essential phenomenon, the technical phenomenon that specifies the witticism, and which allows us to discern:

– what is the central phenomenon,
– that through which it teaches us on the level that is properly ours, namely relations with the unconscious,
– and what also at the same time allows us to illuminate from a new perspective all that surrounds it, all that brings it about in what one can call the tendenz—since it is the term tendenz that is used in this work—of this phenomenon of various radiations, toward the comic, toward laughter, phenomena that may radiate from it.

Let us therefore pause on this ‘famillionnaire’. There are several ways to approach it. That is the aim, not only of this diagram, but of this diagram to the extent that it is given to you to allow you to inscribe the different planes of signifying elaboration, the word elaboration being chosen here specifically, since it is chosen expressly, since FREUD refers to it specifically. Let us pause on this and, so as not to surprise you too much, let us begin to see in what direction this is headed. What happens when ‘famillionnaire’ appears?

One can say that:

– something there indicates itself to us as an intention directed toward meaning,
– something tends to emerge from there that is ironic, even satirical,
– something else also that appears less, but which develops, so to speak, in the after-effects of the phenomenon, in what will propagate in the world as a result of it.

It is a kind of emergence of an object, one that rather moves toward the comic, toward the absurd, toward nonsense. It is the famillionnaire inasmuch as it is the derision of the millionaire, tending to take the shape of a figure, and there would not be much to do to indicate to you in what direction it indeed tends to become embodied.

Besides, FREUD points out to us in passing that somewhere as well, Heinrich HEINE, doubling his witticism, will call the millionaire the ‘millionnarr’ [in German, ‘Narr’ means ‘fool’, so ‘millionnarr’ is ‘millionaire-fool’], which in German means the ‘fool-fool millionaire’, or… as we might translate it into French in the same line and continuity of substantivizing ‘famillionnaire’, which I spoke to you about a moment ago… the ‘fat-millionaire’ with a hyphen.

This is to tell you that this is the approach that keeps us from remaining inhuman. Let us not go much further into it, because, to tell the truth, this is not the time, it is precisely the kind of step one must not rush, namely, not to understand too quickly, because by understanding too quickly, one understands absolutely nothing at all.

This still does not explain the phenomenon that has just taken place before us, namely, how it is related to what we can call the ‘general economy of the function of the signifier’. I must insist here so that you all acquaint yourselves with what I wrote in what I called The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, namely the examples I gave in that text of the two functions I call ‘the essential functions of the signifier’ inasmuch as they are those by which, so to speak, the plough of the signifier digs into the real what is called the signified, literally evokes it, makes it arise, handles it, engenders it, namely the functions of metaphor and metonymy.

It seems that for some, it is my style, let us say, that blocks the entry to this article. I regret it. First, I can do nothing about it, my style is what it is. I ask them at this point to make an effort, but I would simply like to add that whatever shortcomings may occur due to my personal doing, there is also, all the same, in the difficulties of this style—perhaps they can perceive it—something that must correspond to the very object in question.

If it is indeed a question, with regard to the creative functions exercised by the signifier over the signified, of speaking about it in a valid way, that is to say not simply speaking about speech, but speaking in the thread of speech, so to speak, in order to evoke its very functions, perhaps the continuation of my presentation this year will show you that there are internal necessities of style, conciseness for example, allusion, even the point, which are perhaps essential elements, quite decisive for entering into a field whose avenues they not only command, but also its entire texture. We will return to this later on in connection with a certain style that we will not hesitate even to call by its name—as ambiguous as it may seem—namely mannerism, and I will try to show you that it has behind it not only a great tradition, but an irreplaceable function.

This is just a parenthesis to return to my text. In this text, you will see that what I call—after others: it was Roman JAKOBSON who invented it—the ‘metaphoric and metonymic function of language’ is linked to something that is expressed very simply in the register of the signifier, the characteristics of the signifier being those—as I have already stated several times in previous years—of the existence of an articulated chain, and, as I added in this article, tending to form closed groupings, that is to say, made up of a series of links taking hold of one another to form the chains, which themselves take hold of other chains in the manner of links, which is somewhat evoked also by the general form of this diagram, but is not directly presented.

The existence of these chains in their double dimension implies that the articulations or links of the signifier involve two dimensions:
– the one that can be called combination, continuity, concatenation of the chain,
– and the one of the possibilities of substitution always implied in each element of the chain.

This second, absolutely essential element, is the one which, in the linear definition that FREUD gave of the relation between the signifier and the signified, is what is omitted. In other words, in every act of language, the diachronic dimension is essential, but there is a synchrony implied, evoked by the permanent possibility of substitution inherent in each term of the signifier.

In other words, these are the two relations I am going to indicate to you:

– f(S…S1) S2 = S (-) s: diachrony – metonymy

– f(S/S1) S2 = S (+) s: synchrony – metaphor

– One gives the link of the combination of the link of the signifier,
– and the other the image of the relation of substitution always implicit in any signifying articulation.

It does not require extraordinary powers of intuition to realize that there must at least be some relation between what we have just seen occur and what FREUD schematizes for us in the formation of the ‘famillionnaire’. Namely, on two different lines:

‘…I was sitting…in a quite familiar way…’
and underneath:
‘millionnaire’.

FREUD adds: what can that mean? It may mean that there is something that has fallen out, that is elided, it means, insofar as one allows it or can realize it or achieve it, a millionaire, something has dropped out in the articulation of the meaning, something has remained, the millionaire. Something occurred that compressed, forged one into the other, the ‘familière’ and the ‘millionnaire’, to produce the ‘famillionnaire’. There is therefore something here which is a kind of special case of the function of substitution, a special case of which, in a sense, traces remain. Condensation, if you like, is a particular form of what can occur at the level of the function of substitution.

It would be good if, from now on, you kept in mind the long development I made around a metaphor, that around the sheaf of Boaz: ‘His sheaf was neither stingy nor hateful…’ showing how:

– it is the fact that ‘his sheaf’ replaces the term ‘Boaz’ which constitutes the metaphor, and that thanks to this metaphor something arises around the figure of BOAZ which is a meaning, the meaning of the advent of his paternity, with even all that can radiate and rebound from it by the fact that he comes to it, but—as you well remember—in an improbable, belated, unforeseen, providential, divine way,

– that it is precisely this metaphor which is there to show this advent of a new meaning around the character of BOAZ who seemed excluded from it, foreclosed,

– and that it is also in a relation of substitution, essentially, that we must see the creative spring, the creative force, the generative force—it is the case to say—of the metaphor.

This is a completely general function, I would even say:

– that it is through this, through this possibility of substitution, that the very generation, so to speak, of the world of meaning is conceived,

– that the whole history of language, that is to say, the changes of function through which a language is constituted, that it is here and nowhere else that we have to grasp it,

– that if ever we had the possibility to provide some kind of model or example of what is the genesis of the emergence of a language, in that unconstituted world that the world could be before anyone speaks, we must suppose something irreducible and original which is assuredly the minimum of signifying chains, but a certain minimum upon which I will not insist today, though it would be appropriate to speak about it.

But I have already given you enough indications about this, about that certain minimum [α, β, γ, δ], given that it is by means of metaphor, that is to say, by the play of substitution of one signifier for another, in a certain place, that is created not only the possibility for the development of the signifier, but the possibility for the emergence of ever-new meanings, always working to ratify, to complicate and deepen, to give its sense of depth, to that which in the real is only pure opacity. I wanted to find an example of this to illustrate for you what one can call what happens in the evolution of meaning, and how we always, more or less, find again this mechanism of substitution.

As usual in these cases, I await my examples from chance. Of course, it was not long before one was provided to me in my immediate surroundings, by someone who, in the grip of a translation, had had to look up in the dictionary the meaning of the word ‘atterré’, and who was surprised to realize that he had never really understood the meaning of the word ‘atterré’, discovering that contrary to what this person believed, ‘atterré’ does not originally and in many of its uses mean struck with terror, but rather brought down to earth.

In BOSSUET, ‘atterré’ literally means ‘to bring down to earth’, and in other texts a little later, we see this kind of weight of terror become more precise. As for us, we would undoubtedly say that the purists contaminate, distort the meaning of the word ‘atterré’.

Nevertheless, here the purists are entirely wrong, there is no kind of contamination, and even if suddenly, after having reminded you of this etymological meaning of the word ‘atterré’, some of you may have the illusion that ‘atterrer’ is obviously nothing other than to turn toward the earth, to make touch earth, or to bring as low as the ground, to consternate in other words, it remains that the common usage of the word implies this background of terror.

What does that mean? It means that if we start from something that has a certain relation to the original meaning by pure convention—because there is no origin anywhere for the word ‘atterré’—but let it be the word ‘abattu’, to the extent that it indeed evokes what the word ‘atterré’—in this supposedly pure sense—could evoke for us.

The word ‘atterré’, which is substituted for it first as a metaphor that does not seem to be one, because we start from the hypothesis that originally they mean the same thing: to throw to the ground or against the ground, this is what I ask you to notice, is that it is not for that reason that ‘atterré’ changes in any way the meaning of ‘abattu’, that it is going to be fertile, generative of a new meaning, namely what is meant by someone who is ‘atterré’.

Indeed, it is a new meaning, it is a nuance, it is not the same as ‘abattu’ and, as much as it may involve terror, it is not ‘terrorized’ either, it is something new, this new nuance of terror that it introduces into the psychological and already metaphorical meaning that the word ‘abattu’ has, because psychologically we are neither ‘atterrés’ nor ‘abattus’, there is something we cannot say as long as there are no words, and these words proceed from a metaphor, that is to say, what happens when a tree is felled, or when a wrestler is brought down, ‘atterré’, a second metaphor.

But notice that it is not at all because originally—it is this which is the interesting part—the ‘ter’ that is in atterré means terror, that terror is introduced, that in other words the metaphor is not an injection of meaning as if that were possible, as if meanings were somewhere, anywhere, in a reservoir.

The word ‘atterré’ does not bring meaning as it has a signification, but as a signifier, that is to say, having the phoneme ‘ter’, it has the same phoneme that is in ‘terreur’, it is by way of the signifier, it is by way of the equivocation, it is by way of homonymy—that is, by the most nonsensical thing there is—that it comes to generate this nuance of meaning, that it is going to introduce, that it is going to inject into the already metaphorical sense of ‘abattu’, this nuance of terror.

In other words, it is in the relation S/S’, that is, from one signifier to another signifier, that a certain relation S/s is going to be generated, that is, signifier to signified.

But the distinction between the two is essential: it is in the relation of signifier to signifier, in something that links the signifier here to the signifier there, that is, in something that is the purely signifying relation, that is, the homonymic relation between ‘terre’ and ‘terreur’, that the action which is the generation of meaning will be able to operate, namely the shading by terror of what already existed as meaning on an already metaphorical basis.

So this gives us an example of what happens at the level of metaphor. I would simply like to indicate to you something that will show you how this connects by the start of a path to something that will quite completely interest us from the point of view of what we see happening in the unconscious, insofar as, at the level of the phenomena of the creation of normal meaning, by the substitutive path, by the metaphorical path which presides over the evolution and creation of language, but at the same time over the creation and evolution of meaning as such, I mean of meaning insofar as it is not only perceived, but the subject is included in it, that is, insofar as the subject enriches our life.

I simply want to point out this to you: I have already indicated to you that the essential signifying function of the hook ‘ter’, that is, of something we must consider as purely signifying, of the homonymic reserve with which metaphor works—whether we see it or not. What else happens? I don’t know if you will immediately grasp it, but you will understand better when you see the development.

This is only the beginning of an essential path. It is that to the extent that the nuance of meaning ‘atterré’ is affirmed, is established, this nuance, notice it, implies a certain domination and a certain taming of terror. This terror is not only named, but it is in some way softened, and that is what allows, by the way, so that you continue to maintain it in your mind, the ambiguity of the word ‘atterré’.

After all, you tell yourself that ‘atterré’ does indeed have a relation with earth, that terror in it is not complete, that depression, in the sense in which it is unambiguous for you, keeps its prevailing value, that it is only a nuance, that to sum up, terror is in a half-shadow on this occasion. In other words, it is to the extent that terror is not noticed directly, is taken by the intermediate path of depression, that what is happening is completely forgotten until the moment when, as I have reminded you, the model is itself, as such, outside the circuit. In other words, insofar as the nuance ‘atterré’ has become established in usage, where it has become sense and usage of sense, the signifier is presentified, let us say the word: the signifier is, properly speaking, repressed.

In any case, as soon as the current nuance of the word ‘atterré’ is established, the model—unless one resorts to the dictionary, to scholarly discourse—is no longer available to you. Concerning the word ‘atterré’ it is like ‘terre’, ‘terra’, repressed. Here I am going a little too far ahead, because this is a way of thinking to which you are not yet very accustomed, but I believe it will save us from going back. You will see to what extent what I call for you here the beginning of things is confirmed by the analysis of the phenomena.

Let us return to our ‘famillionnaire’, to the point then of junction or metaphorical condensation where we saw it form. At this level, separating the thing from its context, that is, from the fact that it is Hirsch HYACINTHE, that is, the mind of Heinrich HEINE who engendered it, we will look for it later much further back in its genesis, in the antecedents of Heinrich HEINE with the ROTHSCHILD family. One would even have to reread the entire history of the ROTHSCHILD family to be sure not to make a mistake, but that is not where we are now.

For the moment we are at ‘famillionnaire’. Let us isolate it for a moment. Let us narrow as much as we can the field of vision of the camera around this ‘famillionnaire’. After all, it could have been born elsewhere than in the imagination of Heinrich HEINE:
– perhaps Heinrich HEINE fabricated it at another time than when he was in front of his blank paper with pen in hand,
– perhaps it was one evening during one of his Parisian strolls that we will evoke, that it came to him like that.
– There is even every chance that it was at a moment of fatigue, of twilight.
– To put it plainly, this famillionnaire could also be a slip of the tongue, it is even quite conceivable.

I have already mentioned a slip of the tongue that I had collected blooming on the lips of one of my patients… I have others, but I come back to this one because you always have to return to the same things until they are well worn out, and then you move on to something else… It is the patient who, in the course of recounting his story on my couch, or in his associations, evoked the time when, with his wife, whom he had ended up marrying before “Monsieur le Maire,” he was simply living “maritably.”

You have all already seen that this can be written “maritalement,” which means that one is not married, and underneath there is something in which the situation of the married and the unmarried perfectly combines: “misérablement.” That makes “maritablement.” It is not said, it is much better than said. You see here to what extent the message surpasses, not the one I would call the messenger, for it is truly the messenger of the gods who speaks through the mouth of this innocent, but surpasses the support of speech.

The context—as FREUD would say—completely excludes that my patient made a witticism, and indeed, you would not know it if I had not, on that occasion, been the Other with a capital O, that is to say, the listener, and not only an attentive listener but the listener who hears, in the true sense of the word. Nonetheless, placed in its proper place, precisely in the Other, it is a particularly sensational and brilliant witticism.

This bringing together of the witticism and the slip of the tongue, FREUD gives us in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life countless examples, and at times he himself emphasizes it, and precisely shows that it is something so close to the witticism, that he is himself forced to say—and we are forced to take his word for it—that the context excludes that the patient, whether man or woman, made this creation as a witticism.

Somewhere in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, FREUD gives the example of this woman who, speaking of the reciprocal situation of men and women, says:

“For a woman to interest men, she must be pretty…

Which, she implies in her sentence, is not given to everyone.

…but for a man, it is enough that he has his five limbs straight.” [ch.5, Lapsus]

Such expressions are not always fully translatable, I am often obliged to make a complete transposition, that is to say, to recreate the word in French. Here, one would almost have to use the term “tout raide.” The word “droit” is not in common usage, so uncommon that it is not in German either.

FREUD has to make a gloss between the four limbs and the five limbs, just to explain the genesis of the thing which nevertheless gives you the tendency, somewhat risqué, which is not in doubt. What FREUD shows us in any case, is that the word does not go so directly to the point, no more in German than in French where it is translated as five limbs straight, and moreover he gives it as textual that the context excludes that the woman appears so blunt. It is indeed a slip of the tongue, but you see how much it resembles a witticism.

So we see it:
– it can be a witticism,
– it can be a slip of the tongue, I would even say more,
– it can be purely and simply stupidity, a linguistic naïveté.

After all, when I describe this in my patient, who was a particularly likable man, it was not even truly a slip of the tongue for him, the word “maritablement” was indeed part of his lexicon, he did not at all believe he was saying something extraordinary.

There are people like that who go through life, who sometimes have very elevated positions, and who come out with words of this kind. A famous film producer was said to produce them by the kilometer all day long. He would say, for example, concluding some of his imperious sentences:

“And then that’s how it is, it’s signed qua non.”

That was not a slip of the tongue, it was simply a fact of ignorance and stupidity. I simply want to show you that we should pause a little at the level of this formation, and since we have after all spoken of slips of the tongue, which of all this is what affects us most closely, let us look a little at what happens at the level of slips of the tongue.

Just as we spoke of ‘maritablement’, let us return to the slip of the tongue through which we have passed several times in order to underline precisely this essential function of the signifier, the slip of the tongue—if I may say so—original, at the basis of Freudian theory, the one which inaugurates the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, after being, moreover, the very first thing published in its first printing, which is the forgetting of a name.

At first glance, forgetting is not the same as the things I have just spoken to you about, but if what I am explaining to you has its significance, that is, if it is indeed the mechanism, the metabolism of the signifier which is at the root and the driving force of the formations of the unconscious, we must find all of them there, and what is distinguished on the outside must find its unity on the inside. So now instead of ‘famillionnaire’, we have the opposite: we have something that is lacking.

What does FREUD’s analysis show us about the forgetting of a name, of a proper name, a foreign name? These are the beginnings of things to which I will return, and to which I will give their development later, but I must point out to you in passing the particularity of this case as FREUD presents it to us.

The proper name is a foreign name. We read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life as we read the newspaper, and we know so much that we think it is not worth pausing at things that were nonetheless the steps of FREUD, yet each of these steps deserves to be noted, because each of these steps is full of lessons and rich in consequences.

I point out to you on this subject—because we will have to return to it—that with a name, and a proper name, we are at the level of the message. This is something whose import we will have to recover later. I cannot tell you everything at once, like ‘the psychoanalysts of today’ who are so learned that they say everything at once, who speak of the ‘I’ and the ‘ego’ as things that have no complexity, and who mix everything up.

What is important is that we pause at what is happening. That it is also a foreign name, this is something other than the fact that it is a proper name. It is a foreign name in that its elements are foreign to FREUD’s language, that is, that ‘Signor’ is not a word of the German language.

But if FREUD points it out, it is precisely because we are there in a different dimension from that of the proper name as such, which, so to speak, would not be proper or particular at all, would have no homeland. They are all more or less attached to cabalistic signs, and FREUD points out to us that this is not without importance. He does not tell us why, but the fact that he isolated it in an initial chapter proves that he thinks it is a particularly sensitive point of the reality he addresses.

There is another thing that FREUD also highlights, and immediately, which we are used not to pausing on, and that is what seemed remarkable to him in the forgetting of names as he begins by evoking them to approach the Psychopathology of Everyday Life:
– that this forgetting is not an absolute forgetting, a hole, a gap,
– that something else appears in its place, other names.

This is where what is the beginning of all science begins, that is, astonishment. One can really only be astonished by what one has already begun, at least a little, to receive, otherwise one does not pause there at all because one sees nothing. But FREUD, precisely warned by his experience with neurotics, sees there something, sees that in the fact that substitutions occur, something deserves to be paused at.

Here I must hasten my pace a little, and make you notice the whole economy of the analysis that is going to be made of this forgetting of the name, of this slip of the tongue in the sense in which we would give the word slip that the name has dropped out.

Everything is going to be centered around what could be called a metonymic approximation. Why? Because what will first reappear are replacement names: BOTTICELLI, BOLTRAFFIO. How does FREUD show us that he understands them in a metonymic way?

We are going to grasp it in this, and it is for this reason that I make this detour through the analysis of a forgetting, it is that the presence of these names, their appearance in place of the forgotten SIGNORELLI, is situated at the level of a formation, also of substitution, but of combination.

There is no perceptible relation in the analysis that FREUD would make of the case between SIGNORELLI, BOLTRAFFIO, and BOTTICELLI, other than indirect relations linked solely to these phenomena of the signifier.

BOTTICELLI, he tells us, and I will stick first to what he tells us. I must say that this is one of the clearest demonstrations that FREUD has ever given of mechanisms for analyzing a phenomenon of formation and deformation connected to the unconscious. As far as clarity is concerned, nothing is left to be desired. For the clarity of my presentation, I am forced to present it to you in an indirect way by saying: this is what FREUD says.

What FREUD says asserts itself in its rigor, in any case what he says is of this order, namely:

– that BOTTICELLI is there because it is the remainder, in its last half, of ‘ELLI’ from SIGNORELLI, made incomplete by the fact that the ‘SIGNOR’ is forgotten.

– ‘Bo’ is the remainder, the incomplete part from Bosnie Herzégovine, insofar as the ‘HERR’ is repressed.

– Similarly for Boltraffio, it is the same repression of the ‘Herr’ which explains that Boltraffio associates the ‘Bo’ from Herzegovina to Travoï, which is a locality immediately preceding the adventures of that journey, the one where he learned about the suicide of one of his patients for reasons of sexual impotence.

That is, the same term as the one that was evoked in the conversation that immediately preceded with the person who is in the train between Ragusa and Herzegovina, and who evokes to him those Turks, those Muslims who are such agreeable people, who, when the doctor has not succeeded in curing them, say to him:

‘Herr! (Sir) We know that you have done everything you could, nevertheless…’

The ‘Herr’, the very weight, the significant accent, that is, that something which is at the limit of what can be said, this absolute ‘Herr’ which is death, that death as LA ROCHEFOUCAULD says: ‘…that one can no longer, like the sun, look at directly.’ and that indeed FREUD, no more than anyone else, can no longer look at directly. Then, whether it is made present to him—by his function as a doctor on the one hand, by a certain connection also manifestly present, itself, on the other hand…has a quite personal accent.

This connection at that moment in an unmistakable way in the text, precisely between death and something that has a very close relation to sexual potency, is very probably not only in the object, that is to say in what makes present to him the suicide of his patient. It certainly goes further. What does that mean?

It means that all we find are the metonymic ruins… concerning a pure and simple combination of signifiers: Bosnie Herzégovine …they are the metonymic ruins of the object in question which is behind the different particular elements which came to play there, and in an immediate past which is behind that: the absolute ‘Herr’, death. It is to the extent that the absolute ‘Herr’ passes elsewhere, vanishes, recedes, is pushed back, is, in the strict sense, unterdrückt, that there are two words with which FREUD plays in an ambiguous way.

This ‘unterdrückt’ I have already translated for you as ‘fallen into the depths’ insofar as the ‘Herr’ here, at the level of the metonymic object, has slipped away there, and for a very good reason, which is that it risked being a little too present as a result of these conversations, and as an ‘ersatz’, we find the debris, the ruins of the metonymic object, namely this ‘Bo’ which comes there to combine with the other ruin of the name which at that moment is repressed—namely ‘ELLI’—in order not to appear in the other substitution name that is given.

This is the trace, it is the sign we have of the metonymic level that allows us to rediscover the chain of the phenomenon in speech, in what can still be made present at this point where, in analysis, is located what we call free association, insofar as this free association allows us to track the unconscious phenomenon.

But that is not all, it remains that neither SIGNORELLI, nor the ‘SIGNOR’, have ever been—where we find the traces—the fragments of the broken metonymic object. Since it is metonymic it is already broken. Everything that happens in the order of language is always already accomplished. If the metonymic object is already so easily broken, it is because already as a metonymic object it is only a fragment of the reality it represents.

If the ‘SIGNOR’ itself cannot be evoked, if it is what causes FREUD to be unable to retrieve the name SIGNORELLI, it is that it is involved. It is obviously involved in an indirect way because for FREUD the ‘Herr’… which was indeed pronounced at a particularly significant moment of the function it can take as ‘absolute Herr’, as representative of that death which on this occasion is unterdrückt …it is that the ‘Herr’ can simply be translated as ‘SIGNOR’.

It is here that we find again the substitutive level, for substitution is the articulation, the signifying means by which the act of metaphor is established. But that does not mean that substitution is metaphor. If I am teaching you here to proceed along all these paths in an articulated way, it is not precisely so that you constantly indulge in abuses of language. I am telling you that metaphor occurs at the level of substitution, this means that substitution is a possibility of articulation of the signifier, and that metaphor operates there with its function of creating signified at the place where substitution can occur.

These are two different things. Similarly, metonymy and combination are two different things. I point this out to you in passing because it is in these non-distinctions that what is called an abuse of language is introduced, which is typically characterized by this: in what can be defined in logico-mathematical terms as a set or a subset, when there is only a single element, one must not confuse the set in question, or the subset, with that particular element. This may be useful to those who criticized my stories of α, β, γ, δ, last year.

Let us return then to what happens at the level of ‘SIGNOR’ and ‘Herr’: simply something as simple as that, it is obviously what happens in every translation: the substitutive connection in question is a substitution called ‘heteronymy’. The translation of a term into a foreign language, on the level of the substitutive act, in the comparison required by the existence at the level of the phenomenon of language of several linguistic systems, is called ‘heteronymous substitution’. You are going to tell me that this heteronymous substitution is not a metaphor. I agree, I only need one thing, that it is a substitution.

I am only following what you are forced to admit when reading the text. In other words, I want to have you draw from your knowledge precisely this: that you know it. Furthermore, I am not innovating, you must accept all this if you accept FREUD’s text.

I need nothing more to tell you that
– if the ‘HERR’ slipped away there [γ→β’],
– the ‘SIGNOR’, as the direction of the arrows indicates, slipped away there [γ→α].

Not only did it slip away there, but we can assume—until I come back to it—that it is there that it starts to turn, that is, that it is sent back like a ball between the code and the message, that it goes round in circles in what we can call… remember what I once let you glimpse as a possible mechanism of forgetting, and at the same time of analytic remembering… as being something we must conceive as extremely similar to the memories of a machine, to what is in the memory of a machine, that is to say ‘that which turns in circles until it reappears’, until it is needed, and which is forced to turn in circles to constitute a memory.

You cannot create machine memory otherwise, it is something for which we find a very curious application in the fact that if ‘SIGNOR’ can be conceived as turning indefinitely until it is retrieved between the code and the message, you see at the same time the nuance we can establish between:
– the ‘unterdrückt’ on the one hand,
– and the ‘Verdrängt’ on the other.
Because if the ‘unterdrückt’ here only needs to be done once and for all, and in conditions to which being cannot descend, that is, at the level of its mortal condition, on the other hand it is clear that something else is at stake, that is, that if this is kept in the circuit without being able to re-enter it for a certain time, we must admit what FREUD admits: the existence of a special force that holds it there and maintains it there, that is to say properly speaking of a ‘Verdrängung’ [repression].

Nevertheless, after indicating where I want to go on this precise and particular point, I indicate to you that even though indeed there is here only substitution, there is also metaphor: Every time there is substitution, there is a metaphorical effect or induction.

It is not quite the same thing for someone who is German-speaking to say ‘SIGNOR’ or to say ‘HERR’, I would even say more: it is quite different for our patients who are bilingual or who simply know a foreign language, and who at a given moment have something to say and say it to us in another language.

For them it is always, rest assured, much more convenient. It is never without reason that a patient passes from one register to another. If he is truly polyglot, it has a meaning. If he imperfectly knows the language he is referring to, naturally it does not have the same meaning. If he is natively bilingual, that does not have the same meaning either. But in every case it does have a meaning, and in any case here, provisionally, in the substitution of ‘SIGNOR’ for ‘HERR’, there was not metaphor but simply heteronymous substitution.

I return to this to tell you that on this occasion, ‘SIGNOR’… on the contrary, for the whole rest of the context to which it is attached, namely SIGNORELLI, that is, precisely the fresco of Orvieto, that is, as FREUD himself says, the evocation of the last things historically… represents precisely the most beautiful of elaborations of that impossible reality to face that is death.

It is very precisely by telling ourselves a thousand fictions—taking fiction here in the truest sense—on the subject of the last things that we metaphorize, that we tame, that we bring into this language, this confrontation with death. So it is quite clear that the ‘SIGNOR’ here, as it is attached to the context of SIGNORELLI, is something that truly represents a metaphor. So here is what we arrive at. We come to this, that we approach something that allows us to reapply point by point, since we find for them a common topology, the phenomenon of the witticism, the positive production of the ‘famillionnaire’ at the point where it occurred, and a phenomenon of slip, of gap.

I could take another and demonstrate it again for you, I could give you as an exercise to refer to the following example given by FREUD about the Latin phrase evoked by one of his interlocutors:

‘Exoriare ex nostris ossibus ultor!’

By arranging the words a bit, because the ‘ex’ is between nostris and ossibus, and dropping the second word indispensable for the scansion, aliquis, which is why he cannot bring forth aliquis. You could really only understand it by bringing it back to this same grid, to this same structure, with its two levels:
– its combinatory level with this chosen point where the metonymic object as such occurs,
– and its substitutive level with this chosen point where it occurs at the meeting of the two chains, of the discourse on the one hand, and on the other hand of the signifying chain in its pure state, at the elementary level, and which constitutes the message.

As we have seen, the ‘SIGNOR’ is repressed here in the message-code circuit [γ→α], the ‘HERR’ is unterdrückt at the level of discourse, for it is the preceding discourse that captured this ‘Herr’, and what you find, what allows you to get back on the trail of the lost signifier, are the metonymic ruins of the object.

That is what the analysis of the example of the forgetting of the name in FREUD gives us. From then on, what we can think about the ‘famillionnaire’ will appear more clearly. The ‘famillionnaire’ is something which, as we have seen, in itself has something ambiguous and quite of the same order as that of the production of a symptom.

If it can be carried over, superimposed, onto what happens in the signifying economy of the production of a language symptom: the forgetting of a name, we must find at its level what completes, what I pointed out to you earlier about its double function:

– its function of aiming toward meaning,

– its disturbing, groundbreaking neological function on the side of something one can call ‘a dissolution of the object’, that is: no longer ‘He admitted me to his side as an equal, in a completely famillionnaire way’ but this something from which arises what we can call ‘the famillionnaire’ insofar as, fantastic and derisory figure, it is related to one of those creations like a certain fantastic poetry which allows us to imagine something intermediate between the ‘fourmilionnaire’ [a play on words: ‘fourmi’ meaning ‘ant’ in French, and ‘millionnaire’, meaning ‘millionaire’] and the ‘mille-pattes’ [‘centipede’], which would also be a kind of human type as imagined, who pass, live and grow in the interstices of things, a Myrmeleon or something similar.

But even without going so far, something that can enter into the language in the way that, for some time now, a ‘respectueuse’ has meant a prostitute. These kinds of creations are something that have their own value by introducing us into something previously unexplored. They make arise something we could call a ‘verbal being’, but ‘a verbal being’ is just as much a being, simply, and which tends more and more to become incarnate.

Likewise, the ‘famillionnaire’ is something that plays, it seems to me, or that has played enough roles, not simply in the imagination of poets, but in history. I do not need to remind you that many things could go even closer than this ‘famillionnaire’.

GIDE, in Prométhée mal enchaîné, spins his whole story around what is not really the god, but the machine, the banker, ZEUS whom he calls the ‘Miglionnaire’… whose essential function in the creation of the witticism I will show you in FREUD …without anyone knowing whether to pronounce GIDE’s ‘Miglionnaire’ in the Italian or French way, I personally believe it should be pronounced in the Italian way. In short, if we look at ‘famillionnaire’, we see then, in the direction I point out to you, which is not reached at the level of HEINE’s text at that moment, that HEINE does not give it its freedom, its independence as a noun: even if a moment ago I translated it as ‘in a completely famillionnaire way’ it was precisely to show you that we remain here at the adverbial level.

Since—even—one can play on words, push the language with regard to ‘the manner of being’, and by splitting things between the two you see the difference between ‘the manner of being’ and what I was pointing out to you as direction, namely ‘a kind of being’. We have not gone that far, but you see the two are continuous. HEINE remains at the level of ‘the manner of being’, and he himself took care, in translating his own term, to translate it exactly, not in a completely ‘famillionnaire’ way, but as I did a moment ago: ‘in a completely famillionnaire way’.

What does this ‘in a completely famillionnaire way’ support? Something which is—without us in any way reaching that being of poetry—something extraordinarily rich, teeming, swarming in the way things happen at the level of metonymic decomposition.

Here the creation of Heinrich HEINE deserves to be put back into its text, into the text of the Baths of Lucca, into the text of this actual familiarity in which Hirsch HYACINTHE lives with Baron Christophoro DI GUMPELINO, who has become a very fashionable man, spreading himself in all sorts of courtesies and attentions to beautiful ladies, to which is added the fabulous, astonishing familiarity of Hirsch HYACINTHE clinging to his coattails.

The function of parasite, servant, domestic, go-between of this character suddenly evokes in us another possible decomposition of the word ‘famillionnaire’, not to mention that behind this word I do not wish to allude to the dismal and heart-rending role of women in the life of this caricatured banker whom HEINE brings out for us on this occasion, but certainly the famishing side of success, the hunger which is no longer the auri sacra fames, but the hunger to satisfy something which, until that moment of rising to the highest spheres of his life, had been refused him.

That would allow us to trace yet another way the possible decomposition, the possible meaning of this word ‘fat-millionnaire’. The ‘fat-millionnaire’ is at once Hirsch HYACINTHE and the Marquis de Cristoforo DI GUMPELINO and it is quite something else, because behind that there are all the relationships in the life of Heinrich HEINE, and also his relations with the ROTHSCHILDS, particularly ‘famillionnaires’.

What matters is that you see in this very witticism these two sides of metaphorical creation:

– in one sense, in the sense of meaning, in the sense where this word carries, moves, is rich in psychological meaning, and in the moment hits the mark and holds us by its brilliance at the very edge of poetic creation,

– and as—on the other hand—in a kind of reverse, which is not necessarily immediately apparent, the word, by the virtue of combinations that we could indefinitely extend here, teems with all that, on this occasion, swarms with needs around an object.

I alluded to fames, there would also be fama, that is, the need for brilliance and renown that spurs on the character of Hirsch HYACINTHE’s master. There would also be the fundamental infamy of this servile familiarity which leads, in the scene at the Baths of Lucca, to the fact that Hirsch HYACINTHE gives precisely to his master one of those purges of which he knows the secret, plunging him into the torments of colic at the very moment when at last he receives the note from the beloved lady which, in other circumstances, would allow him to reach the peak of his desires.

This enormous farcical scene provides, so to speak, “the underside” of this infamous familiarity, and is something that truly gives its weight, its meaning, its connections, its obverse and reverse, its metaphorical side and its metonymic side, to this formation of the witticism, and which is nonetheless not its essence, for now that we have seen its two sides, its causes and effects, the creation of meaning in ‘famillionnaire’ also involves a waste and something that is repressed.

It is necessarily something on the side of Heinrich HEINE, something that will begin—like the ‘SIGNOR’ from earlier—to turn between the code and the message.

On the other hand, we also have on the metonymic side [β’] all those falls of meaning, all the sparks, all the splashes that occur around the creation of the word famillionnaire, and which constitute its radiance, its weight, what gives it its literary value for us. Nonetheless, the only thing that matters is the center of the phenomenon, namely what occurred at the level of the signifying creation, that which makes it a witticism, precisely that, and not everything else that happens around it.

What sets us on the path to its function as the center of gravity of this whole phenomenon, what gives it its accent and weight, must be sought at the very center of the phenomenon, that is to say:

– at the level of the conjunction of the signifiers on the one hand,

– and on the other hand, as I have already indicated, at the level of the sanction given by the Other to this creation itself: in that it is the Other who gives this signifying creation value as a signifier in itself, value as a signifier in relation to the phenomenon of signifying creation.

It is in this that lies the distinction of the witticism in relation to what is a pure and simple phenomenon, a symptom relation, for example. It is in the passage to the secondary function that the witticism itself lies.

But on the other hand, if there were not all that I have just told you today… that is to say what happens at the level of the signifying conjunction which is its essential phenomenon, and what it develops as such, insofar as it participates in the essential dimensions of the signifier, namely metaphor and metonymy… there would be no possible sanction, no other possible distinction of the witticism.

For example:
– in relation to the comic there would be none possible,
– or in relation to the joke,
– or in relation to a raw phenomenon of laughter.

To understand what is at stake in the witticism as a phenomenon of the signifier, we must have isolated its facets, its peculiarities, its connections, its causes and effects, at the level of the signifier.

And the fact that the S, something at such a high level of signifying elaboration, FREUD stopped at to see in it a particular example of the formations of the unconscious, is also what holds our attention, it is also what you must begin to glimpse the importance of, when I have shown you in this respect how it allows us to proceed rigorously in a phenomenon itself psychopathological as such, namely the slip of the tongue.