🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Here we are then, entering through the door of the witticism whose principal example we began to analyze last time, the very one FREUD used in the form of the witticism “famillionnaire,” attributed at the same time to Hirsch HYACINTHE, that is, to this poetic creation full of meaning.

It is not by chance, then, that it is on this background of poetic creation that FREUD happens to have chosen his principal example, and that we ourselves have found—as, moreover, is usually the case—that this principal example turned out to be particularly apt to represent, to demonstrate, what we wish to demonstrate here.

No doubt, as you have seen, this leads us into the analysis of the psychological phenomenon in question regarding the witticism, at the level of a signifying articulation that—undoubtedly, if this interests you, at least I hope it does for a great many of you—is no less the object, as you can easily imagine, of something that can seem disconcerting.

I mean that, without a doubt, this element which surprises, which unsettles the mind, is also the nerve of this reprise, which I wish to undertake here with you, of the analytic experience, and concerns the place, and I would almost say, to a certain point, the very existence of the subject, as someone asked me—a person who was certainly far from being uninformed—neither uninformed about the question, nor uninformed about what I am trying to bring to it—someone asked me the question:

‘But then, what becomes of this subject, where is it?’

The answer is easy when it comes to philosophers, since it was a philosopher who asked me this question at the Society of Philosophy where I was speaking. I was tempted to reply, but on this point, I could just as well return the question to you, and say that I leave the floor precisely to the philosophers. After all, the entire work does not have to be reserved for me.

This question regarding the elaboration of the notion of the subject certainly demands to be revised in light of the Freudian experience. If something needs to be modified there, it should not be something that surprises us, either. In other words, if FREUD has brought something essential, is it really what we might have expected—to see minds, and particularly those of psychoanalysts, adhere, I would say all the more firmly, to a notion of the subject, one embodied in a certain way of simply thinking of the ego, which is merely a return to what we might call ‘grammatical confusions’ regarding the question of the subject, the identification of the ego with a power of synthesis that certainly no datum in experience permits us to sustain.

One can even say that there was no need to reach the Freudian experience, no need to resort to it, for a simple sincere inspection of what each of our lives is to allow us to glimpse that this so-called ‘power of synthesis’ is more than held in check, and that, truly—except in fiction—there is really nothing more commonplace in experience than what we could call not only the incoherence of our motives, but I would even say more: the feeling of their profound lack of motivation, of their fundamental alienation.

If FREUD brings us a notion of a subject that operates beyond, this subject within us so difficult to grasp, if he shows us its mechanisms and its activity, this is certainly something that should always have drawn our attention, that this subject… in that it introduces a hidden unity, a secret unity, in what appears to us at the level of the most common experience: our profound division, our profound fragmentation, our profound alienation with respect to our own motives …that this subject is other.

Is it simply a sort of double, a ‘bad ego subject,’ as some have said, especially since it indeed harbors many surprising tendencies, or simply ‘another ego,’ or, as one might believe I am saying: ‘truer ego’? Is that really what is at stake?

Is it simply a double, purely and simply an other that we can conceive of as structured like the ego of experience?

Here is the question, and here too is why we approach it this year at the level and under the title of the Formations of the Unconscious. Certainly the question—already present—offers an answer: it is not structured in the same way. In this ego of experience, something presents itself within it that has its own laws. There is, in short, an organization of these formations that not only has a style but also a particular structure.

FREUD addresses and dissects this structure at the level of neuroses:
– at the level of symptoms,
– at the level of dreams,
– at the level of slips,
– at the level of the witticism.
He recognizes it as unique and homogeneous. The entire nerve of what he sets out for us at the level of the witticism—and this is precisely why I have chosen it as the entry point—rests on this, it is his fundamental argument: to make the witticism a manifestation of the unconscious.

This means that it is structured, that it is organized according to the same laws as those we have found in the dream. He recalls these laws, he enumerates them, he articulates them, he recognizes them in the structure of the witticism:
– these are the laws of condensation,
– these are the laws of displacement.

Essentially and above all, something else adheres here: he also recognizes what I called at the end of my article, to translate: ‘Consideration for the necessities of staging.’ He also brings this as a third element. But it does not really matter what we call them; the nerve of what he brings, the key to his analysis, is this recognition of common structural laws: by this is recognized that a process—as he puts it—has been drawn into the unconscious. This is what is structured according to the laws, structured according to these types. This is what is meant when it is a matter of the unconscious.

What happens? What happens at the level of what I am teaching you is that we are now in a position, that is to say, after FREUD, to recognize this event, all the more demonstrative in that it really has everything to surprise us. That these laws—this structure of the unconscious, that by which a phenomenon is recognized as belonging to the formations of the unconscious—are strictly identifiable, correspond, and I would even say more: correspond exhaustively with what linguistic analysis allows us to identify as being the essential modes of formation of meaning in so far as this meaning is generated by combinations of the signifier.

The term signifier takes on its full sense from a certain moment in the evolution of linguistics, the moment when the notion of the signifying element is isolated, very closely linked in its concrete history to the emergence of the notion of ‘phoneme.’ Of course, confined only to this notion, the notion of signifier, in so far as it allows us to take language at the level of a certain elementary register, we can define it in two ways:
– as a chain on the one hand, diachronic,
– and as the possibility within this chain, the permanent possibility of substitution in the synchronic sense.

This grasp at a fundamental, elementary level of the functions of the signifier is the recognition, at the level of this function, of an original power which is precisely that where we can locate:
– a certain engendering of something called meaning,
– and something which in itself is very rich in psychological implications,
…and which receives a sort of complement…
without even needing to push further on its own path, its search, to dig deeper its furrow
…in what FREUD himself has already prepared for us at this point of juncture between the field of linguistics and the proper field of analysis.

It is a question of showing us that these ‘psychological effects,’ that these ‘effects of the engendering of meaning,’ are nothing other than, correspond exactly to what FREUD has shown us as being the formations of the unconscious. In other words, we can grasp this something that until then remained elided in what one can call ‘the place of man,’ it is very precisely this: the close relationship that exists between the fact that, for him, there exist objects of a truly surprising heterogeneity, diversity, variability, in relation to biological objects.

For what we can expect as being the counterpart of his existence as a living organism, this singular something that presents a certain style, a certain exuberant, luxuriant diversity, and at the same time an elusiveness—as such, as a biological object—of the world of human objects, this is something that, in this conjuncture, must be closely and indissolubly related to the submission, to the subduction of the human being by the phenomenon of language.

Of course, this had not failed to appear, but up to a certain point and in a certain way, it was masked, masked insofar as what is graspable at the level of discourse, and of concrete discourse, always presents itself in relation to this engendering of meaning in a position of ambiguity, this language indeed already being oriented toward objects which themselves include something of the creation they have received from language itself, and something which already could have been precisely the object of an entire tradition, even of a philosophical rhetoric, that which poses the question in the most general sense of the critique of judgment: what is the value of this language? What do these connections represent in relation to the connections to which they seem to lead—even which they claim to reflect—which are the connections of the real?

This is indeed the outcome of a tradition of critique, a philosophical tradition whose point and apex we can define by KANT. And already in a certain way, that one can interpret, think of KANT’s critique as the most profound questioning of any kind of real, insofar as it is subjected to the “a priori categories” not only of aesthetics but also of logic, is indeed something that represents a pivotal point at the level of which human meditation resumes in order to rediscover that something which was not seen in this way:
– to pose the question at the level of discourse, at the level of logical discourse, at the level of the correspondence between a certain syntax of the intentional circle as it closes in every sentence,
– to take it up beneath and across that book of the critique of logical discourse,
– to take up the action of speech in that creative chain where it is always capable of engendering new meanings: by way of metaphor in the most obvious manner, by way of metonymy in a way that, for its part, has remained—I will explain why when the time comes—until a very recent period always profoundly masked.

This introduction is already difficult enough for me to return to my example “famillionnaire,” and for us to try to complete it here. We have reached the notion that in the course of a precisely intentional discourse where the subject presents himself as wishing to say something, something occurs that goes beyond his will: something that presents itself as an accident, as a paradox, as a scandal.

This neoformation appears with traits not at all negative of a sort of stumbling, of a slip, as it could be… after all, I have shown you equivalents, things that singularly resemble it, in the order of the pure and simple slip… but on the contrary is found, in the conditions in which this accident occurs, to be registered, to be valued as a significant phenomenon, precisely as the engendering of a meaning at the level of the signifying neoformation, a kind of collapse of signifiers which are found there—as FREUD says—compressed together, stamped one into the other, and this meaning is created, and I have shown you the nuances and the enigma of it—between what and what?—between this evocation of “way of being” properly metaphorical:

“He treated me in a completely famillionnaire manner”

…this evocation of “way of being,” this “verbal being” just about to take on that singular animation whose ghost I have already tried to conjure up before you with the “famillionnaire”:
– the “famillionnaire” in that it makes its entry into the world, as representative of something that for us is very likely to take on a reality and a weight infinitely more constant than those more faintly drawn of the millionaire,
– but which I have also shown you has something sufficiently animating in existence to truly represent a characteristic character of a historical era and I have indicated to you that it was not only HEINE who invented it, I spoke to you about GIDE’s Prométhée mal enchaîné and his miglionnaire.

It would be of much interest to pause for a moment at the gidian creation of Prométhée mal enchaîné. The millionaire of Prométhée mal enchaîné is Zeus the banker, and nothing is more surprising than the elaboration of this character. I do not know why, in the memory left to us by the work of GIDE—eclipsed perhaps by the unheard-of brilliance of Paludes, with which he nevertheless makes a sort of correspondence and double—it is the same character in both.

There are many traits that serve to cut across him: the millionaire in every case is someone who happens to have singular behaviors with his fellows, since it is from there that we see the idea of the gratuitous act emerge.

ZEUS the banker, in his inability to have with anyone else a truly authentic exchange… insofar as he is here identified, if one may say so, with absolute power, with that “pure signifier” aspect found in money, calling into question, so to speak, the existence of any kind of possible significant exchange… finds nothing else to escape his solitude but to proceed as follows, as GIDE expresses it:

– to go out into the street with, in one hand, an envelope bearing—something that at the time had value—a five-hundred franc bill, and in the other hand a slap, if one may put it that way,

– to let the envelope fall, and to the person who kindly picks it up for him, to propose that he write a name on the envelope, in exchange for which he gives him a slap, and it is not for nothing that he is ZEUS, a tremendous slap that leaves him stunned and wounded, then to slip away and send the contents of the envelope to the person whose name was thus written by the one he has just treated so roughly.

Thus, he finds himself in a position of having chosen nothing himself, of having compensated, so to speak, a gratuitous malice by a gift that owes absolutely nothing to himself, so much is his choice to restore, if one may say so, through his action, the circuit of exchange, which cannot be introduced in any way or by any means, to participate in it in this way by force, so to speak, to engender a kind of debt to which he does not participate at all and whose entire outcome, moreover, will unfold in the rest of the novel by the fact that the two characters will never again be able to reconcile, so to speak, what they owe each other: one will become almost blind, and the other will die from it. This is the whole story of the novel, and it seems that at a certain level it is a deeply instructive and moral story, usable at the level of what we are trying to demonstrate.

Here then is our Henri HEINE who finds himself in the position of having created this character as a background, but in this character, of having made emerge, with this signifier “famillionnaire,” the double dimension of:

– the metaphorical creation,

– and on the other hand a kind of new metonymic object, the “famillionnaire,” whose position we can basically locate here [the metaphorical creation at γ] and here [a kind of metonymic object at β’].

I showed you last time that in order to conceive the existence of the signifying creation called the “famillionnaire,” we could here [at β’] find—although here of course attention is not drawn to this side—all the debris, all the ordinary scraps, upon reflection of a metaphorical creation upon an object. That is, all the signifying underlayers, all the signifying fragments into which we can break up the term “famillionnaire”: femme, fames, fama, infamy, indeed whatever you wish, famulus, all that Hirsch HYACINTHE actually is for his caricatural master, Cristoforo DI GUMPELINO.

And here at this place [at β’] we must systematically seek, each time we are dealing with a formation of the unconscious as such, what I have called “the debris of the metonymic object” which assuredly, for reasons that are quite clear from experience, naturally prove particularly important when the metaphorical creation—so to speak—has not succeeded. I mean when it has come to nothing, as in the case I showed you of the forgetting of a name: when the name SIGNORELLI is forgotten, to find the trace of this hollow, this gap that we find at the level of the metaphor, the metonymic debris there take on their full importance.

The fact that at the level of the disappearance of the term “Herr,” it is something that is part of the whole metonymic context in which this “Herr” was isolated, namely the “Bosnia Herzegovina” context, which allows us to restore it, takes on here its full importance.

But let us return to our “famillionnaire.” Our “famillionnaire” has thus been produced at the level of the message.

I pointed out to you that here we must find ourselves, at the level of the “famillionnaire,” with the metonymic correspondences of the paradoxical formation that occurred at the level of the forgetting of the name, in the SIGNORELLI case. We must also find something that corresponds to the elision or disappearance of “SIGNOR” in the case of the forgetting of the name; we must also find it at the level of the witticism.

That is where we left off. How can we conceive of, reflect on what happens at the level of the “famillionnaire,” insofar as the metaphor, here a witty one, is successful? Up to a certain point, there must be something that corresponds, that marks in some way “the residue,” let us say “the waste of metaphorical creation.”

A child would say it immediately. If we are not fascinated by the reifying aspect that always leads us to handle the phenomenon of language as if it were an object, we will simply learn to say obvious things, in the way mathematicians proceed when they handle their little symbols in x, a and b, that is, without thinking about anything, without thinking about what they mean, since that is precisely what we are looking for, that is what happens at the level of the signifier. To know what it means, let us not seek what it means.

It is absolutely clear that:
– what is rejected,
– what is missing at the level of the metaphor, the remainder,
– what is cast out,
– what remains as residue from the metaphorical creation,
…it is the word “familier.”

If the word “familier” did not appear, and if “famillionnaire” appeared in its place, the word “familier” must be considered to have gone somewhere, to have suffered the same fate as that which I pointed out to you last time as being reserved for the “SIGNOR” in SIGNORELLI, that is, to go off and continue its little circular circuit somewhere in the unconscious memory.

It is the word “familier.” We will not at all be surprised that it should be so, for the simple reason that this word “familier” is precisely that which, in this instance, actually corresponds to the mechanism of repression in the most usual sense, in the sense of what we experience at the level of something that corresponds:
– to a past experience,
– to a personal experience, let us say,
– to an earlier historical experience, going far back where, of course, it would no longer be the being at that moment of Hirsch Hyacinthe himself, but that of his creator, namely Henri HEINE.

If in the poetic creation of Henri HEINE the word “famillionnaire” bloomed in so felicitous a way, it matters little to us to know under what circumstances he found it. He may have found it during one of his strolls on a Parisian night which he must have ended alone, after the encounters he had, around the 1830s, with Baron James ROTHSCHILD who treated him as an equal, and in a completely “famillionnaire” manner. Perhaps it was at that moment that he invented it, rather than letting it fall from his pen while he was at his desk. But no matter: he achieved this felicitous success, and that is good.

Here I will go no further than FREUD. About a third of the way through the book, after the analysis of “famillionnaire,” you see FREUD taking up the example again at the level of what he calls “the tendencies of the mind,” and identifying in this creation, in the formation of this witticism, and qualifying as an “ingenious invention” this creation by HEINE. It is something that finds its counterpart in his past, in his personal family relations. It is indeed familiar, “famillionnaire,” because behind Salomon de ROTHSCHILD, who is the one he put at stake in his fiction, there is nothing other than another “famillionnaire” who is of his family, namely Salomon HEINE, his uncle.

Who played in his life the most oppressive role, throughout his entire existence, treating him extremely badly, not simply refusing him what he might have expected from him on any concrete level whatsoever, but much more: finding himself in the position of “the man who refused,” who blocked in HEINE’s life the realization of his major love, the love he had for his cousin whom he could not marry for this essentially famillionnaire reason, that the uncle was a millionaire and he himself was not.

So, all in all, HEINE always considered as a betrayal what was nothing but the consequence of this family deadlock so deeply marked by millionnairity. Let us say that this “familier” which happens to be there, which plays the major signifying function in the correlative repression of the witty creation, is the signifier which in the case of HEINE the poet, the artist of language, shows us in an obvious way the underlying presence of a personal meaning in relation to the creation here, witty or poetic. This underlying presence is linked to the word, and not to everything that might have been confusedly accumulated as the permanent meaning in HEINE’s life, of a dissatisfaction and of a very singularly compromised position toward women in general.

If something intervenes here, it is through the signifier “familier” as such. There is no other way, in the example indicated, to reach the action, the incidence of the unconscious, except by showing here the meaning closely linked to the presence of the signifying term “familier” as such. Of course, such remarks are made to show us that when we have entered onto this path of linking to the signifying combination the entire economy of what is registered in the unconscious, this of course leads us far, and into a regression that we may consider, not as ad infinitum, but back to the origin of language.

We must consider all human meanings as having been at some moment metaphorically engendered by signifying conjunctions. And I must say that considerations like this are certainly not without interest. We always have much to learn from examining this history of the signifier.

This remark that I am making incidentally is simply to give you here an illustration of it while I am thinking about it, concerning this identification of the term “famille” as being that which is repressed at the level of the metaphorical formation, because after all… unless you have read FREUD or simply have even a very slight degree of homogeneity between the way you think while you are in analysis and the way you read a text …you do not think of “famille” in the term “famillionnaire” as such.

With the term “atterré” whose analysis I gave you last time:
– the more the realization of the term “atterré” is achieved,
– the more it moves in the direction of terror,
– and the more the earth is avoided, which yet is the active element in the signifying introduction of the metaphorical term “atterré.”

In the same way, the more you go in the direction of “famillionnaire,” the more you think of the “famillionnaire,” that is, the millionaire who has become, become transcendent so to speak, become something that exists in being, and no longer purely and simply that kind of sign, and the more the “famille” itself tends to be repressed as an active term in the creation of the word “famillionnaire,” elided.

But if for a moment you return to taking an interest in the term “famille”—as I did—at the level of the signifier, that is, by opening the LITTRÉ dictionary, from which Monsieur CHASSÉ tells us MALLARMÉ took all his ideas. The most striking thing is that he is right, but being right in a certain context, I would even say that he too gets caught in it, no less than his interlocutors. He feels as though he is breaking down a door. Of course, he is breaking it down because it is not open.

If in fact everyone thought about what poetry is, there would be truly nothing surprising in realizing that MALLARMÉ must have taken a keen interest in the signifier. Simply, since no one has ever really even approached what poetry really is, that is, they vacillate between I don’t know what vague and murky theory about comparison, or on the other hand reference to I don’t know what musical terms, that is where people want to explain the supposed absence of meaning in MALLARMÉ, without noticing at all:
– that there must be a way to define poetry in terms of the relationship to the signifier,
– that there is perhaps a slightly more rigorous formula, and that from the moment one gives this formula, it is much less surprising that in his most obscure sonnets, MALLARMÉ is called into question.
That being said, I think no one will one day discover that I too got all my ideas from the LITTRÉ dictionary!

It is not because I open it that that is the question. So I open it, and I can inform you of this, which I suppose some of you may know, but which is nonetheless of interest, that the term “familial” in 1881 is a neologism.

A careful consultation of a few good authors, who have since looked into this problem, has allowed me to date the appearance of the word “familial” to 1865. That means the adjective “familial” did not exist before that year. Why did it not exist? Here is something quite interesting. In the end, the definition given by LITTRÉ is something that relates to the family, at the level, as he says, of political science. To put it plainly, the word “familial” is much more tied to a context like, for example, “family allowances” than to anything else.

It is insofar as the family was, at a certain moment, taken, that one could approach it as an object at the level of a politically relevant reality, that is, precisely insofar as it was no longer quite in the same relation, in the same structuring function with the subject… it had always been, up to a certain era, that is, in a way, included, taken within the very bases and foundations of the subject’s discourse, without even being considered separately for that reason …that it was drawn from the level of a resistant object, of an object that became the subject of a particular technical handling, that something as simple as the adjective correlated to the term family came to light.

You cannot fail to notice that perhaps this is not something insignificant at the very level of the use of the signifier “family.” In any case, such a remark is also made to make us consider that we must not view what I have just told you about the placing into the circuit of the repressed and the term “family” at the time of Henri HEINE as having absolutely the same value as it may have in our time, since the mere fact that the term “familial” not only is not usable in the same context, but even does not exist at the time of HEINE, is enough to change, so to speak, the axis of the signifying function linked to the term “family.”

This is a nuance which, on this occasion, may be regarded as not negligible. It is thanks, moreover, to a series of such negligences that we can imagine that we understand ancient texts as their contemporaries understood them. Nevertheless, everything indicates that there is every chance that a naïve reading of HOMER corresponds in no way to the true meaning of HOMER, and that it is certainly not for nothing that people devote themselves to a painstaking exhaustion of the Homeric vocabulary as such, in the hope of roughly restoring the dimension of meaning that is at stake in these poems.

But the fact that they retain their meaning, even though by all likelihood a good part of what is improperly called “the mental world,” the world of meanings of the Homeric heroes, completely escapes us, and most probably must escape us in a more or less definitive way, it is all the same, on this level, the distance from the signifier to the signified that allows us to understand that a particularly well-made concatenation, that is what precisely characterizes poetry: signifiers to which we can still and probably indefinitely, until the end of the centuries, give plausible meanings. [Cf. Sém. 1975-76, Joyce’s remark about his own work]

So here we are at our “famillionnaire,” and I think I have more or less gone around what can be said about the phenomenon of the creation of the witticism in its own register and in its proper order. This may, perhaps, allow us to get closer to the formula we can give for the forgetting of the name that I spoke to you about last week.

What is the forgetting of the name? On this occasion, it is that the subject posed before the Other, and to the Other itself as Other, the question “Who painted the Orvieto fresco?” And he finds nothing.

I want to point out to you, on this occasion, the importance of my concern to give you a correct formulation, on the pretext that analysis discovers that if he does not mention the name of the painter of Orvieto, it is because “SIGNOR” is missing, so you might think that it is “SIGNOR” that is forgotten. That is not true. First, because it is not “SIGNOR” he is looking for, it is SIGNORELLI that is forgotten, and “SIGNOR” is the repressed signifying scrap of something happening at the place where SIGNORELLI is not found.

Understand well the entirely rigorous nature of what I am telling you. It is absolutely not the same thing to recall SIGNORELLI or “SIGNOR.” When you have made with SIGNORELLI the unity it carries, that is, when you have made of it the proper name of an author, the designation of a particular name, you no longer think of “SIGNOR.”

If “SIGNOR” has been detached from SIGNORELLI, isolated within SIGNORELLI, it is in relation to the decomposing action peculiar to the metaphor, and insofar as SIGNORELLI was caught in the metaphorical play that resulted in the forgetting of the name, the one that analysis allows us to reconstruct.

What analysis allows us to reconstruct is the correspondence of “SIGNOR” with “Herr” in a metaphorical creation that aims at the meaning that lies beyond “HERR,” the meaning “HERR” took on in the conversation with the character who at that moment is accompanying FREUD on his little journey to the mouths of Cattaro, and which causes “HERR” to become the symbol of that before which his mastery as a doctor fails, of the absolute master, that is to say, the evil he cannot cure, the character who commits suicide despite his care, and in short, death and impotence that threaten him personally, FREUD.

It is in the metaphorical creation that this breaking up of SIGNORELLI occurred, which allowed “SIGNOR,” which indeed is found as an element, to pass somewhere. One must not say that it is “SIGNOR” that is forgotten, it is SIGNORELLI that is forgotten, and “SIGNOR” is something we find at the level of the metaphorical residue in that the repressed is this signifying waste. “SIGNOR” is repressed but it is not forgotten, it does not have to be forgotten since it did not exist before.

If it could so easily fragment, moreover, and detach from SIGNORELLI, it is because SIGNORELLI is precisely a word of a language foreign to FREUD, and it is quite striking, remarkable… and from experience, which you can easily have if you have the experience of a foreign language… that you can much more easily discern the component elements of the signifier in a foreign language than in your own.

If you start to learn a language, you notice, between the words, elements of composition, relations of composition that you entirely omit in your own language. In your language, you do not think of words by decomposing them into root and suffix, whereas you do it in the most spontaneous way when you learn a foreign language. That is why a foreign word is more easily fragmentable and usable in its elements and its signifying decompositions than is any word of your own language.

This is only an additional element of the process that can also occur with words of your own language, but if FREUD began with this examination of the forgetting of a foreign name, it is because it is particularly accessible and demonstrative. So what is there at the level of the place where you cannot find the name SIGNORELLI? This means precisely that there was, in that place, an attempt at a metaphorical creation. The forgetting of the name, what presents itself as the forgetting of the name, is what is appreciated in the place of “famillionnaire.” There would have been nothing at all if Henri HEINE had said: he received me entirely as an equal, entirely…ts…ts…ts…

This is exactly what happens at the level where FREUD seeks his name SIGNORELLI. It is something that does not come out, that is not created; it is there that he seeks SIGNORELLI, he seeks it there improperly. Why? Because at the level where he ought to look for SIGNORELLI, as a result of the preceding conversation, a metaphor is expected and called for, one that concerns that something which is meant to serve as a mediation between what is at stake in the course of the conversation FREUD is having at that moment and what he rejects, namely death.

That is precisely what is at stake when he turns his thoughts toward the Orvieto fresco, that is, what he himself calls “the last things,” the elaboration, so to speak, eschatological, which is the only way he can approach this kind of abhorric term, of a term unthinkable, so to speak, in his thoughts, this something at which he must nevertheless indeed come to a halt. Death exists, which limits his being as a man, which also limits his action as a doctor, and which sets an absolutely irrefutable boundary to all his thoughts.

It is because no metaphor comes to him along the path of elaborating these things as being “the last things,” because FREUD refuses all eschatology except in the form of an admiration for the painted Orvieto fresco, that nothing comes, and that in the place where he seeks its author—for in the end it is a matter of the author, of naming the author—nothing occurs because no metaphor succeeds, no equivalent can be given at that moment for SIGNORELLI, because SIGNORELLI has taken on a necessity, is called at that moment in a very different signifying form from that of its simple name, which at that moment is nonetheless solicited to come into play, in the way in which, in “atterré,” the function of the root “ter” operates, that is to say, it breaks up and elides itself.

The existence somewhere of the term “SIGNOR” is the consequence of the failed metaphor that FREUD calls, at that moment, to his aid. That is why you see the same effects that I have indicated as necessarily existing at the level of the metonymic object, that is, at that moment, of the object in question, of the represented object, painted upon “the last things.” FREUD says:

“Not only did I not retrieve the name SIGNORELLI, but I never remembered so well, never at that moment so clearly visualized the Orvieto fresco, I,” he says, “who am not—and we know this by all sorts of other features, particularly from the form of his dreams—I, who am not so imaginative.”

If FREUD was able to make all these discoveries, it is most probably because he was much more open, much more permeable to the symbolic play than to the imaginary play. And he himself notes this intensification of the image at the level of memory, this more intense reminiscence of the object in question, namely the painting, and even up to the face of SIGNORELLI himself, who appears there in the posture in which, in the paintings of that era, donors and sometimes the author himself appear.

There is SIGNORELLI in the painting, and FREUD visualizes him. So there is not a sort of pure and simple, massive forgetting, so to speak, of the object. On the contrary, there is a relation between the revival, the intensification of some of these elements, and the loss of other elements, of signifying elements at the symbolic level, and at that moment we find the sign of what happens at the level of the metonymic object, while at the same time we can thus formulate what happens in this formula of the forgetting of the name, more or less as follows:

We find here the formula of metaphor insofar as it operates by a mechanism of substitution of one signifier S for another signifier S’:

What happens as a consequence of this substitution of signifier S for another signifier S’? What occurs is that at the level of S’ there is a change in meaning, namely that the meaning of S’, let us say s’, becomes the new meaning we will call little s: ss, insofar as it corresponds to that capital S.

But in truth, so as not to let any ambiguity persist in your mind, namely, you might believe that it is a matter here of this topology, that little s is the meaning of capital S and that S must be brought into relation with S’ so that little s can thereby only then produce what I call s”. It is the creation of this meaning which is the aim, the functioning of metaphor. The metaphor is always successful insofar as:
– this has been carried out,
– the meaning has been achieved,
– the meaning has entered into function in the subject,
…S and S’, exactly as in a formula for the multiplication of fractions, are simplified and cancel each other out.

It is to the extent that “atterré” ends up signifying what it truly is for us in practice, that is, more or less affected by terror, that the “ter” which served as an intermediary between “atterré” and “abattu” on one hand—which, strictly speaking, is the most absolute distinction, there is no reason for “atterré” to replace “abattu”—but the “ter” which is here for having served as a homonym brought in that terror, that the “ter” in both cases can be simplified. It is a phenomenon of the same order that occurs at the level of the forgetting of the name.

If you really want to understand what is at issue, it is not a matter of a loss of the name SIGNORELLI, it is a matter of an x, which I introduce here because we are going to learn to recognize it and to use it, this x is this call of meaningful creation whose place we will find in the economy of other unconscious formations. To tell you straight away, it is what happens at the level of what is called “the desire of the dream.” I will show you how we find it again, but here we see it simply at the place where FREUD should recover SIGNORELLI.

He finds nothing, not simply because SIGNORELLI has disappeared, but because at that level he must create something that satisfies what is the question for him, namely “the last things,” and insofar as this x is present, something, which is the metaphorical formation, tends to be produced, and we can see it in this: that the term “SIGNOR” appears at the level of two opposed signifying terms, twice the value S’, and that it is for this reason that it undergoes repression as “SIGNOR,” that at the level of x nothing has occurred, and that is why he does not find the name, and that “HERR” plays the role of the place it occupies:
– as a metonymic object,
– as an object that cannot be named,
– as an object that is only named by something that is within its connections.

Death is the absolute “HERR.” But when one speaks of the “HERR,” one does not speak of death, because one cannot speak of death, because death is very precisely both the limit and probably also the origin from which all speech departs.

So this is where comparison leads us, the term-by-term relation of the formation of the witticism with that unconscious formation whose form you can now see more clearly as it apparently appears negative. It is not negative. Forgetting a name is not simply a negation, it is a lack, but a lack—we always tend to go too fast—of that name.

It is not because this name is not caught that there is a lack: it is the lack of this name which causes, in searching for the name, this lack at the place where this name should fulfill its function, where it can no longer fulfill it because a new meaning is required, one that demands a new metaphorical creation. That is why SIGNORELLI is not retrieved, but on the other hand, the fragments are found somewhere where they ought to be found in the analysis, where they play the function of the second term of the metaphor, that is, of the term elided in the metaphor.

This may seem like Chinese to you, but it does not matter if you simply let yourself be led as it appears. However Chinese this may seem to you in a particular case, it is actually very rich in consequences in this: if you remember it when you need to remember it, it will allow you to clarify what happens in the analysis of this or that unconscious formation, to grasp it in a satisfactory way, and conversely to notice that by eliding, by not taking it into account, you are led to what are called reifications or very crude, summary identifications—if not generating errors, at least tending to reinforce and support the errors of verbal identifications which play such an important role in constructing a certain “psychology of softness” precisely.

Let us return again to our witticism and to what should be thought of it. I would like to introduce you to another kind of distinction which, in a way, comes back to what I started with, namely the question of the subject. The question of the subject, what does it mean? If what I told you just now is true, if it is to the extent that thought always reduces itself to making the subject the one who designates himself as such in discourse, I would point out to you that what distinguishes him, what isolates him, what opposes him, is something we could define as the opposition of:

– what I would call “the saying of the present” [énoncé],

– with “the present of the saying” [énonciation].

This seems like a play on words; it is not at all a play on words [this will correspond to the two “levels” (to come):].

“Dire du présent,” that is to say, what says “I” in discourse… moreover, in common with a series of other particles, with “HERR” we could include “here,” “now,” and other “taboo” words in our psychoanalytic vocabulary …is that which serves to locate in discourse the presence of the speaker, but which locates him in his actuality as speaker.

It is enough to have the slightest test or experience of language to see that, of course, the present of language, namely what is presently in the discourse, is something completely different from this locating [by the “I”] of the present in the discourse: what happens at the level of the message is the present of the discourse.

This can be read in all kinds of modes, in all kinds of registers, it has no necessary relation with the present as it is designated in discourse as the present of the one who upholds it, that is, something totally variable and for which, besides, words truly have only the value of particles.

“I” has no more value here than in “here or now.” The proof is that when you talk to me about “here or now,” and it is you, my interlocutor, who are talking about it, you are not talking about the same “here or now,” you are talking about the “here or now” that I am talking about. In any case, your “I” is certainly not the same as mine.

These are very simple words intended to locate the “I” somewhere in discourse. But “the present of the discourse” itself is something entirely different, and I will at once give you an illustration of it at the level of the shortest witticism I know, which will moreover introduce us at the same time to another dimension besides the metaphorical dimension. There is another one.

If the metaphorical dimension is the one that corresponds to condensation, I spoke earlier about displacement: it must indeed be somewhere, it is in the metonymic dimension. If I have not yet addressed it, it is because it is much more difficult to grasp, but precisely this witticism will be particularly favorable to making us feel it, and I will introduce it today.

The metonymic dimension, insofar as it can enter into the witticism, is that which is of context and of the use of combinations in the chain, of horizontal combinations. It is thus something that is exercised by associating elements already preserved in the treasury, so to speak, of metonymies. It is insofar as a word can be linked in different ways in two different contexts, which will give it two completely different meanings, that by being taken up in a certain way, we exercise ourselves, strictly speaking, in the metonymic sense.

I will give you the example, also a principal one, next time in the form of this witticism that I can announce to you so that you can think about it before I discuss it. It is the one that occurs when Henri HEINE is with the poet Frédéric SOULIÉ in a salon, and when the latter says to him, again about a character loaded with gold who occupied a big place at the time, as you see, and about whom he says, because he is very much surrounded—it is SOULIÉ who is speaking:

– “You see, my dear friend, the cult of the ‘Golden Calf’ is not over.”
– “Oh…,” replies Henri HEINE, after looking at the character, “for a calf, he seems to me to have passed the age.”

That is the example of the metonymic witticism. I will emphasize it, I will break it down next time.

It is insofar as the word “calf” is taken in two different metonymic contexts, and solely for that reason, that it is a witticism, for it truly adds nothing to the meaning of the witticism to give it its sense, namely that this character is cattle. It is funny to say that, but it is a witticism to the extent that, from one reply to another, “calf” has been taken in two different contexts and exercised as such.

If you are not convinced, we will return to it next time, this to return to the witticism through which I want once again to make you feel what is at stake when I say that the witticism operates at the level of the play of the signifier, and that this can be demonstrated in an ultra-short form.

A budding young woman, to whom we can attribute all the qualities of true education, which consists in not using bad words but knowing them, is invited to her first “surprise party” by a young rake who, after a moment of boredom and silence, during an otherwise imperfect dance, says to her:

– “You see, mademoiselle, that I am a count.”

– “Ah! Te…” she simply replies.

This is not a story; I think you have read it in the little special collections and that you may have heard it from its author, who was quite pleased, I must say, but it nevertheless displays particularly exemplary features, for what you see here is precisely the incarnation by essence of what I have called “the present of discourse.”

There is no “I,” the “I” does not name itself. There is nothing more exemplary of the “present of the saying”—as opposed to the “saying of the present”—than the pure and simple exclamation. The exclamation is the very type of “the presence of discourse” as long as the one who utters it completely effaces his present: his present is, if I may say so, entirely recalled into “the present of discourse.”

Nevertheless, at this level of creation, the subject shows this presence of mind, for such a thing is not premeditated, it comes like that, and it is in this that we recognize that a person has wit. She adds this simple modification to the code, consisting of adding that little “te” which takes its entire value from the context, if I dare say so, namely that the count does not content her, except that the count, if he is as little satisfying as I tell you, may not notice anything.

The witticism is completely gratuitous. Nevertheless, you see here the elementary mechanism of the witticism, namely that the slight transgression of the code is taken in itself as a new value allowing the instantaneous creation of the meaning needed. What is this meaning? It may seem to you that it is not in doubt, but after all, the well-bred young woman did not say to her count that he was what he was minus a “te,” she said nothing of the sort.

The meaning to be created is precisely that which is situated somewhere in suspension between the self and the Other. It is an indication that there is something, which at least for the moment, leaves something to be desired. On the other hand, you can clearly see that this text is in no way transposable: if the character had said that he was a marquis, the creation would not have been possible.

It is quite obvious that according to the good old formula that delighted our fathers in the last century: “How are you?” they would ask, and the answer was, “And ticking for mattress?” It was better not to reply, “And ticking for eiderdown?” You will tell me that it was a time when people enjoyed simple pleasures.

This “Ah! te…” you grasp here in its shortest form, in an unquestionably phonematic form, since it is the shortest composition one can give to a phoneme. There must be two distinctive features, the shortest formula for the phoneme was this: “T, E,” a consonant resting on a vowel, or a vowel resting on a consonant, but a consonant resting on a vowel being the classical formula.

Here it is a consonant resting on a vowel, and this is amply sufficient to constitute its message as a message, insofar as it is a paradoxical reference to the current use of words and, as such, directs the thought of the Other toward something that is essentially the instant grasp of meaning; that is what is called being witty, that is also what, for you, initiates the properly combinatorial element upon which all metonymy is based.

For if today I have also spoken to you a great deal about metaphor, it is at the level, once again, of locating the mechanism of substitution, which is a four-term mechanism… the four terms which are in the formula I gave you in The Instance of the Letter:

…and of which you sometimes see so singularly what the operation is—at least in form—the essential operation of intelligence, that is to say, to formulate the correlate of the establishment, with an X, of a proportion. When you take intelligence tests, that is nothing other than this. Only, that is not enough to say that man is distinguished from animals by his intelligence in any straightforward way. He may be distinguished from the animal by his intelligence, but perhaps in the very fact—that he is distinguished by his intelligence—the introduction of signifying formulations is essential, primordial. In other words, moreover, to formulate things even better, to put in its place the question of the so-called intelligence of humans as being the source of his “more X reality,” we should begin by asking: “intelligence of what?” What is there to understand? Is it—with the real—is it really a matter of understanding?

If it is purely and simply a relation to the real that is at stake, our discourse must surely manage to restore it in its existence as real, that is to say, must in the strict sense result in nothing. That is, in fact, what discourse generally does. If we arrive at something else, if we can even speak of a History having an end in a certain knowledge, it is because discourse has brought to it an essential transformation [Cf. Hegel and “absolute knowledge”].

That is indeed what it is about, and perhaps simply about these four little terms linked in a certain way that are called relations of proportion. These relations of proportion, we are once again inclined to reify them—that is, to believe that we take them from objects. But where, in the objects, are these relations of proportion, if we do not introduce them with the help of our little signifiers?

It remains that, for any metaphorical play to be possible, it must be founded on something in which there is something to substitute, on what is the base, that is to say, the signifying chain:
– the signifying chain as base,
– as principle of combination,
– as the place of metonymy.

That is what we will try to approach next time.