🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

We left things last time at the point where, in the analysis of the witticism, I initially showed you one of its aspects, one of its forms, in what I call here the metaphorical function. We will now take a second aspect, which is introduced here under the heading of the metonymic function. In short, you might be surprised by this approach, which is to start from the example in order to develop successively functional relationships that, as a result, seem not to be connected to what is at issue—at least at first—by any general relationship.

This is due to an inherent necessity of the matter at hand, the sensible element of which, moreover, we will have the opportunity to demonstrate. Let us say that, concerning all that pertains to the order of the unconscious, insofar as it is structured by language, we find ourselves before the phenomenon that it is not simply the kind or the particular class but also the particular example that allows us to grasp the most significant properties.

There is here a kind of inversion of our usual analytic perspective—I mean “analytic” not in the psychoanalytic sense, but in the sense of the analysis of mental functions. There is, if I may say, something that could be called the “failure of the concept” in the abstract sense of the term, or, more exactly, the necessity to proceed by a form other than that of conceptual grasp.

This is what I was alluding to one day when speaking of mannerism, and I would say that this feature, which is indeed entirely directed toward our field, the terrain on which we move, is—rather than through the use of the concept—through the use of the concetto that we are obliged to proceed in this field. This is precisely because of the domain in which the structurations in question operate. The term “prelogical” is entirely likely to engender confusion, and I would advise you to strike it out in advance from your categories, given what has been made of it, that is, a psychological property. It is rather a matter of structural properties of language, inasmuch as they precede any question that we might pose to language about the legitimacy of what it—language—offers us as an aim.

As you know, this is nothing other than what, in itself, has been the subject of the anxious questioning of philosophers, thanks to which we have arrived at a kind of compromise, which is roughly this: if language shows us that we can hardly say much about it, except that it is “being of language,” it is assuredly to the extent, in this aim, that a “for us” is to be realized, which will be called objectivity.

This is no doubt a quick way of summarizing for you the whole adventure that goes from formal logic to transcendental logic. But it is simply to situate things, to tell you from the outset that it is in another field that we place ourselves, and to indicate to you that FREUD does not tell us, when he speaks to us of the unconscious, that this unconscious is structured in a certain way. He tells us in a way that is both discourse and verbal, insofar as the laws he advances—the laws of composition, of articulation of this unconscious—reflect and intersect exactly certain of the most fundamental laws of the composition of discourse.

On the other hand, in this mode of articulation of the unconscious, all kinds of elements are lacking for us, elements which are also implied in our common discourse: the causal link, he will tell us in relation to the dream, negation, and immediately afterward, to take it back and show us that it is expressed in some way in the dream.

That is, it is this field already explored, insofar as it is already outlined, defined, circumscribed, even plowed by FREUD, that we are trying to return to in order to try to formulate—let us go further: to formalize, more closely—what we have just called these primordial structuring laws of language, inasmuch as if there is anything that Freud’s experience brings us, it is that we are—by these structuring laws—determined to what is called, rightly or wrongly, the condition of the signified of the deepest image of ourselves, let us simply say that something in us beyond our auto-conceptual apprehensions:
– this idea that we can form of ourselves,
– on which we rely,
– to which we cling as best we can, and to which we sometimes rather too hastily rush to put an end,
– this term of synthesis, of totality of the person.
All these terms, let us not forget, are, precisely by Freud’s experience, subject to dispute.

Indeed, FREUD teaches us—and I must here nevertheless place it as a signed frontispiece—something that we may call the distance, even the gap that exists between the structuring of desire and the structuring of our needs. For if, precisely, the Freudian experience eventually refers to a metapsychology of needs, there is certainly nothing obvious about this; it can even be said in a wholly unexpected way compared to an initial obviousness.

It is indeed as a result of this path, of the detours to which the experience, as it was instituted and defined by FREUD, compels us, and which show us:

– how much the structure of desires is determined by something other than needs,
– how needs reach us, so to speak, only refracted, broken, fragmented, structured precisely by all these mechanisms called condensation, called displacement, called according to the forms, the manifestations of psychic life where they are reflected, which presuppose various other intermediaries and mechanisms, and where we precisely recognize a certain number of laws that are those to which we will arrive after this year’s seminar, and which we will call the laws of the signifier.

These laws are here the dominant laws, and in the witticism we learn a certain usage: “jeu de l’esprit?” [wordplay, but also “play of the mind”] with the question mark that the introduction of the term as such requires here.

– What is the spirit?
– What is ingenium?
– What is ingenio in Spanish, since I referred to the concetto?
– What is this I-don’t-know-what that is something other than the function of judgment, and which intervenes here?

We will only be able to situate it when we have pursued the procedures properly speaking, and, moreover, elucidated at the level of these procedures: what is at stake, what are these procedures, what is their fundamental aim?

We have already seen, regarding the ambiguity of a witticism with the slip of the tongue, of what emerges from the fundamental ambiguity that is in a way constitutive of it, which makes what happens and which, depending on the case, can be turned toward a kind of psychological accident, a slip before which we would remain perplexed without Freudian analysis, or on the contrary, taken up again, re-assumed, by a certain audition of the Other, by a way of homologating it at the level of a proper signifying value, that of the occasion taken by the neological, paradoxical, scandalous term: “famillionnaire” [famillionnaire: neologism, blending “family” and “millionaire”], a proper signifying function which is to designate something that is not only this or that, but a kind of beyond of a certain relationship that here fails, and this beyond is not only linked to the deadlocks of the relationship between the subject and the protector millionaire but to something that is here signified as fundamental: that something in human relations constantly introduces this mode of essential deadlock that makes or is based on this, that no desire, in sum, can, through the Other, be received, be admitted, except by all sorts of mediations:
– that refract it,
– that make it something other than what it is,
– that make it an object of exchange, and to say it all,
– that already from the origin submit the process of demand to a kind of necessity of refusal.

Let me explain, and in a way—since we are talking about the witticism—I will allow myself, to introduce the real level at which this question of the translation of demand into something that carries effect arises, to introduce it with a story, itself if not witty, whose perspective, whose register is far from having to be limited to the small spasmodic laugh.

It is the story that surely you all know, the story known as the masochist and the sadist:

– “Hurt me!” says the first to the second, who answers sternly:
– “No!”

I see it does not make you laugh. No matter. Some of you laugh anyway. This story, moreover, in the end, is not meant to make you laugh. I simply ask you to notice that in this story something is suggested to us that unfolds at a level that is no longer at all spiritual, which is precisely this: what could be better matched than the masochist and the sadist? Yes, but you see by this story: on the condition that they do not speak. It is not out of malice that the sadist answers no, it is according to his virtue as a sadist: if he answers, he is forced to answer, as soon as one has spoken, at the level of speech.

It is therefore to the extent that we have moved to the level of speech that this something which should, on condition that nothing is said, lead to the deepest understanding, arrives precisely at what I called earlier “the dialectic of refusal,” “the dialectic of refusal” insofar as it is essential to sustain, in its essence as demand, that which is manifested by way of speech.

In other words, if you see it, it is here that is manifested, I would not say in the circle of discourse, but in a way at the switching point, the junction where, on the part of the subject, this something is launched which loops back onto itself and which is an articulated sentence, a ring of discourse.

If it is here that we situate at this point δ the need, the need encounters, by a kind of necessity of the Other, this kind of response that for the moment we call refusal, that is, betrays this essential symmetry between these two elements of the circuit, the closed loop, the open loop, which means that in order to circuit directly from need toward the object of desire, that is, following this path, what presents itself here as demand ends up here with “No!”

No doubt this deserves that we look more closely into this something which here presents itself only as a kind of paradox that our schema simply helps to locate. It is indeed here that we take up again the chain of our propositions on the different phases of the witticism, and that today I introduce what we have called one of its metonymic manifestations. I have immediately set for you the idea, the example, in this form in which you can see the whole difference compared to what is the story of the “famillionnaire.”

It is the story of the dialogue between Heinrich HEINE and the poet Frédéric SOULIÉ, who was more or less his contemporary, a dialogue recounted in Kuno FISCHER’s book which, I think, was quite well known at the time:

“Look…” said Frédéric SOULIÉ to the one who was only a little older than he and whom he admired, “Look how the nineteenth century adores the Golden Calf!”

This is regarding the crowd that is gathering around an old gentleman, doubtless laden with all the reflections of his financial power. To this, Heinrich HEINE, looking with a disdainful eye at the object to which his attention is being drawn, replies:

“Yes, but that one seems to me to be past the age for it.”

What does this witticism mean? Where is its wit and its point?

You know that FREUD immediately, from the outset regarding the witticism, placed us on this plane: we will look for the witticism where it is, namely, in its text. Nothing is more striking on the part of this man to whom all the “beyonds” of the “psychological hypothesis” have been attributed, if one may say so, than the way in which, on the contrary, it is always from the opposite point of the materiality of the signifier that he starts, treating it as a datum existing for itself, and on the other hand, we evidently only have the example of this in his analysis of the witticism. Not only does he start every time from the technique, but it is to these technical elements that he entrusts himself in order to find the spring. What does he do immediately? What he calls “an attempt at reduction.”

Thus, at the level of the witticism “famillionnaire,” he shows us that, if we translate it into what might be called its fully developed meaning, everything that belongs to the witticism vanishes, thus showing in a way that it is in the relationship of fundamental ambiguity proper to metaphor:

That is to say, it is in the fact that a signifier, that is, the function that a signifier assumes as it is substituted for another, latent in the chain, it is in this relationship of ambiguity over a kind of similarity or positional simultaneity that what is at issue lies. If we break down what is at issue and read it in sequence, that is, if we say: “familiar as one can be with a millionaire,” everything belonging to the witticism disappears. Thus FREUD approached the witticism at the level of one of its metaphorical manifestations.

Here he finds himself faced with something whose difference one can sense, but just a moment… for FREUD is not one to spare us the detours of his approach in relation to the phenomenon… he hesitates to characterize this new variety of wit of thought [Gedanken Witz] as opposed to the wit of words [Wort Witz].

But very quickly he realizes that this distinction is entirely insufficient, that assuredly here it is what one would call “form,” namely, the signifying articulation, that one must rely on, and again it is to technical reduction that he will try to subject the example in question, to make it answer for what underlies it, to this questionable form given by subjective assent, that this is the witticism.

And we will see that there, he encounters something different. First, it seems to him, there must indeed be something of the order of metaphor. I repeat to you: he makes us follow all the approaches of his thought. That is why he pauses for a moment at the protasis, that is, at what the character who speaks to Heinrich HEINE, namely Frédéric SOULIÉ, has brought. Besides, he is only following Kuno FISCHER here, who indeed remains at that level.

There is in this “golden calf” something metaphorical; assuredly the “golden calf” has a kind of double value:
– on the one hand, it is the symbol of intrigue,
– and on the other hand, the symbol of the reign of the power of money.
Is this to say that this gentleman receives all the homage, no doubt because he is rich? Do we not find here something which, in a way, reduces and makes disappear what is the spring of what is at issue? But FREUD quickly realizes that after all this is nothing but something quite fallacious. This, in detail moreover, deserves a much closer look to find the richness of this example.

It is quite certain that what is already involved, in these first givens of the play on the “golden calf,” is something that is the material. Without going into depth about all the ways in which the verbal usage of a term that is undeniably metaphorical is instituted, one must see that if already the “golden calf” is something that in itself has the closest relation to this relation of the signifier to the image, which is the very side on which the idolater settles, in the end it is indeed in relation to a perspective that demands, if one may say so… in the recognition of the one who announces himself as “I am what I am”: namely, the God of the Jews… that something particularly demanding refuses all that posits itself as the very origin of the signifier, the nomination par excellence of any hypostasized image, for of course we are already further than idolatry that is purely and simply the worship of a statue.

It is also something that seeks its beyond, and it is precisely insofar as this mode of seeking this essential beyond is refused in a certain perspective, that this “golden calf” takes on its value, and it is only by something that is already a slippage that this “golden calf” takes on metaphorical usage.

That what is in the religious perspective of what may be called in idolatry a “topical regression,” a substitution of the imaginary for the symbolic, here secondarily takes on metaphorical value to express something else, something that may also refer at the level of the signifier, namely what others before me have called “the fetish value of gold,” namely something that also makes us touch on a certain signifying concatenation.

It is not for nothing that I evoke it here, since it is precisely this fetish function that we will immediately be led to touch. It is only conceivable, it is only referable within the dimension precisely of metonymy. So here we are with something already charged with all the intrications, all the entanglements, of the symbolic-imaginary function concerning the “golden calf.”

And is it there that the witticism lies or not—for here FREUD notes it, it is not at all the place where he situates it—the witticism? The witticism, as he notices, is in Heinrich HEINE’s riposte. And Heinrich HEINE’s riposte consists precisely in annulling, so to speak, in subverting all the references where this “golden calf” is its metaphorical expression, is sustained, to make it something else that is purely and simply there to designate the one who is suddenly brought back to his quality, and it is not by chance, where no doubt from a certain moment he deserves to be the calf who is worth so much per pound, if I may put it that way.

This calf is taken for what it is all of a sudden, a living being, and to say it all, someone who, here on the market established by this reign of gold, is reduced to being nothing but himself, sold as cattle, a calf’s head, and regarding this, to say: certainly he is no longer within the limits of the definition given by LITTRÉ, that is to say—the calf—in its first year, which I believe even a purist of the butcher’s trade would define as one that has not yet stopped suckling its mother, a purism I have been told is only respected in France.

“For a calf, he’s past the age!”

That this calf is not a calf here, it’s a rather aged calf, there is absolutely no way to reduce it—this remains a witticism—with or without the background of the “golden calf.” So FREUD here grasps a difference between the unanalysable and the analysable, and yet both are witticisms. What does this mean, if not that undoubtedly it is to two different dimensions of something we are trying to approach closely that the experience of the witticism refers.

And what presents itself as, in a way, as FREUD himself tells us, something that seems a sleight of hand, a trick, a lack of thought, is the common feature of a whole other category of wit, in short as one would commonly say, taking a word in a sense different from the one in which it is given to us. It is the same feature given also in another story, the one relating to the “first flight of the eagle” [vol in French means both ‘flight’ and ‘theft’—wordplay explained at first occurrence] of which a witticism was made concerning a rather extensive operation, that of the confiscation of the property of the D’ORLÉANS by NAPOLÉON III when he ascended the throne: “This is the first flight of the eagle,” he said. Everyone delighted in this ambiguity. No need to insist: here again is something where, truly, there is no question here of speaking of the wit of thought, it is indeed a wit of words, but entirely of the same category as the one here presented to us, of a word apparently taken in another sense.

It is amusing, by the way, occasionally to probe the underlying meanings of such words, and if FREUD takes care, since the word is reported to us in French, to underline for those who do not know the French language, the ambiguity:
– of “vol” as action, mode of birds’ movement,
– and “vol” in the sense of subtraction, of theft, of violation of property,
…it would be good to recall in this respect that what FREUD omits here—I do not say ignores—is that one of the meanings was historically borrowed from the other, and that it is from a use of vol that the term volerie, around the thirteenth or fourteenth century, came from the fact that the falcon flies at the quail, to the use of this offense against one of the essential laws of property, called theft.

This is not an accident in French, I am not saying that it happens in all languages, but it already happened in Latin, where volare had taken the same meaning from the same origin, showing moreover in this instance something which is not unrelated to what we are dealing with, namely what I would call “the euphemistic modes of expression” of that which, in speech, must ultimately represent the violation of speech precisely, or the violation of contract. On this occasion, it is not for nothing that the word vol is borrowed here from a wholly different register, namely the register of an abduction that has nothing to do with what we properly and legally call theft.

But let us stop there and return to what I am introducing here as the term “metonymic,” and I believe I must, beyond these ambiguities themselves, so elusive, of meaning, seek as a reference something else to define
– this second register in which the witticism is situated,
– this other thing that will allow us to unify its mechanism, with its first kind, to find the common factor, the common mechanism which everything in FREUD points us toward, without, of course, ever fully completing the formula.

What purpose would there be in speaking to you about FREUD if precisely we did not try to draw the maximum benefit from what he brings us? It is up to us to go a little further, I mean to provide this necessary formalization of which experience will tell us:
– whether it is a suitable formalization,
– whether it is a conforming formalization,
– whether it is indeed in that direction that the phenomena are organized.

A question in any case rich in consequences, for certainly for our entire way of dealing, in the broadest sense—that is, not simply in treating therapeutics, but in conceiving the modes of the unconscious—the fact that there is a certain structure, and that this structure is the signifying structure insofar as it takes up, as it cuts, as it imposes its grid on everything that is human need, is nevertheless something absolutely decisive and essential, which we see here, then, at the base of metonymy. This metonymy, I have already introduced several times, and specifically in that article called The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious.

I gave you an example of it deliberately taken at the common level of that experience which may come back to you from your secondary school memories, namely your grammar… metonymy is what at that time was called, from the perspective of a sort of underestimated QUINTILIAN, for it is clear that it is not the study of rhetorical figures that could have suffocated you, as there has never until now been much emphasis on it… at the point where we are in our conception of the forms of discourse, this metonymy, I took this example: “thirty sails” instead of “thirty ships,” pointing out here that these “thirty sails” are not purely and simply what is usually said about them, namely “taking the part for the whole,” that is, a reference to reality, for certainly there are far more than thirty sails. It is rare that ships have only a single sail, but since there is a literary background here, you know that we find these “thirty sails” in a certain monologue from The Cid. This is simply a point of reference or a signpost for the future.

Here we are with these “thirty sails,” and we do not know what to do with them, because after all either they are thirty and there are not thirty ships, or there are thirty ships and they have more than thirty sails. Yet it means thirty ships, and it is quite certain that, by indicating that it is in the word-for-word correspondence of what is at issue that we must seek the direction of what is called here the metonymic function, I am simply proposing to you a kind of problematic aspect of the thing.

But it is appropriate for us to enter more into the heart of the difference with metaphor, for after all, you might say to me that it is a metaphor. Why is it not one? That is the question.

Moreover, for some time now I have periodically heard that a certain number of you, in the course of your daily lives, are suddenly struck by encountering something they no longer know at all how to classify, as metaphor or as metonymy. This sometimes leads to disproportionate disturbances in their organism, and a kind of pitching sometimes a bit too strong, with, in short, this metaphor to port and this metonymy to starboard, which some have found a little dizzying.

Let us try, then, to get closer to what is at issue, for after all, I have also been told, regarding BOOZ, that “his sheaf was neither stingy nor hateful” could well be a metonymy. I believe I showed clearly in my article what that “sheaf” was, and how much that “sheaf” is truly something other than an element of his possession: it is something which, precisely as it substitutes for the father, brings forth the whole dimension of biological fecundity that was here underlying the spirit of the poem, and that it is not for nothing that on the horizon, and even more than on the horizon: in the firmament, the sharp thread of the celestial sickle will also appear, evoking the background of castration.

Let us return, then, to our “thirty sails,” and let us finally ask ourselves, so that it may be stated once and for all here, what is meant by what I call the metonymic function or reference.

I believe I have said enough—which is not without leaving a few enigmas—that it was essentially in substitution that the structural mechanism of metaphor lay, in that function brought to a signifier S, insofar as this signifier is substituted for another in a signifying chain.

Metonymy is this: the function taken on by a signifier—also S—insofar as this signifier is, in the contiguity of the signifying chain, in relation to another signifier:

f(S…S1) S2 = S (–) s

the function given to this “sail” insofar as, in a signifying chain, and not in a signifying substitution, it is in relation to the ship. I have therefore transferred the meaning in the clearest way.

And it is for this reason that representations of formal appearance, insofar as these formulas can naturally lend themselves to further demands on your part. Someone recently reminded me that I once said that what I was trying to do for your use here, to pinpoint the matters at stake in our discussion, was to forge “a rubber logic.” I said that. It is indeed something like this that is at issue, it is a topological structuring that sometimes inevitably leaves gaps because it is constituted by ambiguities. But let me tell you in passing that we will not escape it; if, however, we manage to push this topological structuring far enough, we will not escape a remainder of further demand, if indeed your ideal on this occasion is that of a certain univocal formalization, for some ambiguities are irreducible at the level of the structure of language, as we are trying to define it.

Let me also tell you in passing that the notion of “metalanguage” is very often used in the most inadequate way, in that it fails to recognize this: either metalanguage has formal requirements such that they shift the entire phenomenon of structuring where it must be situated, or else metalanguage itself must retain the ambiguities of language, in other words “there is no metalanguage,” there are only formalisations, either at the level of logic, or at the level of that signifying structure whose autonomous level I am trying to clarify for you.

“There is no metalanguage” in the sense in which it would mean, for example, a complete mathematization of the phenomenon of language, and this precisely because there is no way here to formalize beyond what is given as the primitive structure of language. Nevertheless, this formalization is not only required, but it is necessary. It is necessary here, for example, because after all you must see that this notion of substitution of one signifier for another:
– it is a substitution in something whose place must already be defined,
– it is a positional substitution.

And the position itself requires the signifying chain, namely a combinatory succession. I do not say that it requires all its features, I mean that this combinatory succession is characterized by elements, for example, that I would call intransitivity, alternation, repetition. If we go to this minimal original level of the constitution of a signifying chain, we will be taken far from our topic today.

There are minimal requirements, and I do not claim to have entirely covered them up to now. Nevertheless, I have already given you enough to propose something that allows for, so to speak, a certain reflection, and to start in this regard from this particularity of the example, which in this domain is something from which, for reasons doubtless absolutely essential, we must draw all our lessons.

It is indeed in this way that we will once again proceed and note, regarding this example, that even if this looks like a play on words, these “sails”—given the function they play on this occasion
– conceal from us as much as they designate for us,
– these “sails” are something that does not, with their full right as sails, does not “sail in” with all sails set into the usage we make of them.

These “sails” hardly slacken. These “sails” are something reduced in their scope and in their sign, that something which can be found not only in the “thirty sails,” but in the “village of thirty souls” where it quickly appears to you that:
– these souls are there as shadows of what they represent,
– that they are even lighter than the term suggesting too great a presence of inhabitants,
– that these souls, according to the title of a famous novel, can just as well be dead souls, much more than beings: souls that are not there.

Just as “thirty fires” is also a usage of the term and certainly represents a certain degradation or minimization of meaning. I mean that these “fires” are just as well extinct fires, that these are fires about which you will certainly say there is no smoke without fire and that it is not for nothing that these fires are in a usage that metonymically names what they stand in for. Without a doubt you will say that here, in the end, I am relying on a reference of meaning to make the difference.

I do not believe so, and I would have you note:

– that what I started from is that metonymy is the fundamental structure in which that something new and creative, which is metaphor, can occur,

– that even if something of metonymic origin is placed in a position of substitution, as is the case with the thirty sails, it is something different in its nature from metaphor, that, to put it plainly, there would be no metaphor if there were no metonymy.

I mean that the chain in relation to which, and within which, the places are defined, the positions where the phenomenon of metaphor occurs, is in this respect in a kind of slippage or equivocation.

“There would be no metaphor if there were no metonymy,” came back to me as an echo and not at all by chance because this has the closest relation to the exclamation, the comic invocation that I manage to put into the mouth of FATHER UBU:

“There would be no metaphor if there were no metonymy.”
Likewise:
“Long live Poland, because without Poland,” said Father Ubu too, “there would be no Poles!”

Why is this a witticism? It is precisely at the heart of our topic. It is a witticism, and it is funny precisely in that it is the reference as such to the metonymic function, for it would be a mistake to think there is any humor here regarding, for example, the role the Poles may have played in the misfortunes of Poland which are all too well known. The thing is just as funny if I say:

“Long live France, Sir, because without France there would be no French!”
Likewise if I say:
“Long live Christianity, because without Christianity there would be no Christians! And even, long live Christ!”

It is always just as funny, and one can legitimately ask why. I point out to you
– that here the metonymic dimension is absolutely unmistakable,
– that every kind of relationship of derivation in the use of the suffix, or affix, or ending in inflectional languages, is precisely the utilization for meaningful ends of the dimension of the chain.

Here there is no kind of pun… and I would even say that all the references overlap: the experience of the aphasic, for example, shows us precisely that there are two cases of aphasia, and very specifically when we are at the level of disorders that can be called disorders of contiguity, that is, of the chain, it is indeed these that the subject has the greatest difficulty distinguishing: it is the relationship of the word to the adjective, of “benefit” with “beneficent,” or with “do well” and with “beneficence,” it is in the other metonymic dimension that something happens. It is precisely this flash that, on this occasion, makes us consider as something not only comical but even quite farcical, this reference.

I point out to you that it is important here, indeed, to apply oneself to what one can call “property of the signifying chain,” and to grasp—I have tried to find some reference terms that allow you to grasp at the point where we are about to do so—what I mean by this “effect of the signifying chain,” an essential effect inherent in its nature as a signifying chain concerning what one can call meaning.

Do not forget that last year, it was by way of an analogical reference… which might have seemed metaphorical to you but which I clearly emphasized was not, that it claimed to be taken literally from the metonymic chain… that I placed, indicated, situated what is the essence of every kind of fetishistic displacement of desire,
– in other words, the fixation of desire somewhere before, after or beside, in any case at the door of its natural object,
– in other words, the institution of that absolutely fundamental phenomenon that one can call the radical perversion of human desires.

Here I would like to indicate another dimension, the one I would call in the metonymic chain “the slippage of meaning.” And I have already indicated to you the relation of this to its technique, the use, the literary process which is customarily designated by the term “realism.”

It is not conceived in this domain that one might move to all kinds of experiences: I submitted myself to that of taking a novel from the realist era, rereading it in order to observe, in a sense, the traits that could make you grasp that original something whose reference to the dimension of meaning can be connected to the metonymic usage as such of the signifying chain, and so I referred to a novel at random among the novels of the realist period, namely a novel by MAUPASSANT, Bel Ami. First of all, it is a very enjoyable read. Do it sometime. And upon reading it, I was quite surprised in this genre to find there exactly what I am trying here to designate as “slippage.”

“When the cashier had given him his change for his five-franc coin, Georges Duroy left the restaurant. Since he carried himself well, by nature and by the bearing of a former non-commissioned officer, he drew in his waist, twirled his moustache with a military and familiar gesture, and cast over the lingering diners a rapid, sweeping glance, one of those good-looking young man’s glances, that dart about like a hawk’s swoop.”

The novel begins like this. It seems like nothing, but then it continues moment by moment, encounter by encounter, and you witness in the clearest, most obvious way this kind of slippage.

If we look over the whole course of the novel, we see this something that causes a rather elementary being—I would say, to the point where he is reduced at the beginning of the novel, for this five-franc coin is the last one he has on him, reduced to utterly direct needs: the immediate preoccupation with love and hunger—is gradually, through a succession of chance events, good or bad, but generally good—for he is not only good-looking, but also lucky—is taken into a circle of systems, of manifestations of exchange, of the metonymic subversion of those primitive givens that, as soon as they are satisfied, are alienated for him in a series of situations.

Now, never is it about anything where he can either find himself or rest, and which carries him from success to success, to an almost total alienation of what is his own person. This is nothing in the detail, I mean in the way the aim is never to go beyond what happens in the succession of events and their recording in terms as concrete as possible.

At every moment, the novelist shows us a kind of double vision that constantly places not only the subject of the novel but everything around him in a perpetual double position in relation to what can be the object, even the most immediate one. I take the example of this restaurant meal, which begins as one of the first moments of the rise to fortune of this character:

“The Ostend oysters were brought, dainty and plump, resembling small ears enclosed in their shells, and melting between palate and tongue like salty candies. Then, after the soup, a trout was served, pink as a young girl’s flesh… And the guests began to talk. It was the moment of skillful innuendo, of veils lifted by words, as one lifts skirts, the moment of language tricks, of clever and disguised boldness, of all impudent hypocrisies, of phrases that reveal naked images with veiled expressions, that flash before the eye and mind the quick vision of all that cannot be said, and allow people of the world a kind of subtle and mysterious love, a sort of impure contact of thoughts by the simultaneous, disturbing, and sensual evocation, like an embrace, of all the secret, shameful, and desired things of entwinement. The roast had been brought in, some partridges…”

I may point out to you that this roast, the partridges, the terrine of fowl, and all the rest:

“They had eaten all that without tasting it, without noticing, preoccupied only with what they were saying, immersed in a bath of love.”

This perpetual alibi means that after all you do not know whether it is the young girl’s flesh or the trout that is on the table—and this, from the perspective of what is called realist description, is something that dispenses not only with any abysmal reference to any meaning—“trans-meaning” in any way, whether poetic, moral, or other—it is something that, it seems to me, sufficiently illuminates what I am indicating when I say that it is in a perspective of perpetual slippage of meaning that any discourse aiming to present reality is forced to maintain itself, and that what constitutes its merit, what makes it so there is no literary realism, is precisely that in this effort to get as close as possible to reality by expressing it in discourse, the discourse succeeds in nothing other than showing what the introduction of discourse adds of disorganization, of perversity to that reality.

If something here still seems to you to remain in too impressionistic a mode, I would nevertheless like to try, with you, another experiment. You see, we are trying to stay not at the level where discourse is accountable to the real, where it simply claims to connote it, to follow it in relation to the real, but at the function of an annalist with two n’s.

See what this produces. I took an author undoubtedly worthy, named Félix FÉNÉON, whom I do not have time to introduce to you here, and his series of Novels in Three Lines that he published in Le Matin. Undoubtedly it is not for nothing that they were collected, undoubtedly a particular talent is manifested there. Let us try to see which one. These are news stories in three lines that you can take at random at first, afterwards we might take some more significant ones:

– “For having pelted the gendarmes a little, three devout ladies… were fined by the judges of Toulens-Comblebourg.”

– “Paul, teacher on Saint-Denis Island, rang, for the return of the schoolchildren, the bell…”

– “In Clichy, a stylish young man threw himself under a rubber-tired cab, then, unharmed, under a truck that crushed him.”

– “A young woman was sitting on the ground at Choisy-le-Roi. The only word of identity her amnesia allowed her to say: model.”

– “The body of the sexagenarian… was swinging from a tree at Arcueil with this sign: too old to work.”

– “Concerning the mystery of Luzarches, the examining magistrate of Le Puy questioned the detainee… but she is mad.”

– “Behind a coffin, Mangin from Verdun-Chevigny. He did not reach the cemetery that day, death surprised him on the way.”

– “The valet… installed at Neuilly, in his absent master’s house, an amusing woman, then disappeared taking everything, except her.”

– “Pretending to search this stash for rare coins, two female swindlers made off with a thousand francs’ worth of ordinary money. Miss… Ivry.”

– “Beach… Finistère, two bathers were drowning. A swimmer rushed in, so that Monsieur Etienné had to save three people.”

What makes us laugh? These are really facts connoted with an impersonal rigor whose whole art, I would say, consists simply in their extreme reduction: this is said with the fewest words possible. If there is something comic, for example, to take the one at the top of the page, what happens when we hear:

– “Behind a coffin, Mangin from Verdun-Chevigny. He did not reach the cemetery that day, death surprised him on the way.”

It is something that touches in no way whatsoever that journey which is ours to the cemetery, whatever the diverse methods by which that journey might be accomplished. There is absolutely nothing like it, and I would say up to a certain point that this would not appear if things were said more lengthily, I mean if all this were drowned in a flood of words.

What I have called here “slippage of meaning,” that is, that something which makes us literally not know where to stop at any moment in this sentence as we receive it in its rigor, to give it its center of gravity, its point of equilibrium, is the whole art of this writing of these novels in three lines. It is precisely what I would here call their decentering. There is no morality here: a careful erasure of anything that could have an exemplary character, what in this case one could call “the art of detachment” of this style.

Nevertheless, what is told is still really something, a series of events, and I would even say more, this is the other merit in question, it is to give us their coordinates in an entirely rigorous way. It is indeed this something that I am aiming at, that I am trying to make you sense by showing you to what extent discourse, in its horizontal dimension, in its dimension of chain, is properly the “skating rink” on which this slippage of meaning occurs, as much worth studying as the “skating figures” upon which this slippage happens, at the edge, no doubt light, tiny, which can perhaps, so reduced, seem to us null, but which in any case presents itself and announces itself in the order of the witticism as what we could call a derisory, degrading, disorganizing dimension.

It is in this dimension that the style of the witticism, which is that of the “flight of the eagle” [vol de l’aigle: see previous wordplay note], is situated and placed, at the encounter of discourse with the signifying chain, which here turns out to be, at the level of the “famillionnaire,” at the rendezvous at γ, and which takes place here just a little further on.

Here Frédéric SOULIÉ brought something that obviously moves toward the “I,” since the perspective is Heinrich HEINE, it is the witticism, and he calls him as witness. There is always at the beginning of the witticism this perspective, this appeal to the Other as the site of verification:

“As surely—as Hirsch HYACINTHE would begin—as surely as God owes me all happiness.”

And God here, in his reference, can also be ironic. It is fundamental here.

SOULIÉ invokes Heinrich HEINE, much more prestigious than himself—without giving you the history of Frédéric SOULIÉ, although the article that Larousse devotes to him is quite charming—SOULIÉ says to him:

“Don’t you see, my dear master—something like that—isn’t it rather amusing to see this nineteenth century…”

Here it is the appeal, the invocation, the drawing of the “I” of Heinrich HEINE, of the one who is the pivotal point present in this matter

…to see this nineteenth century still adoring the Golden Calf?”

So we passed through here [2→1], then returned here [1→2] concerning the Golden Calf, in the place of usages and metonymy, because ultimately this “Golden Calf” is a metaphor, but a worn one, passed into language. We have just shown, incidentally, its sources, its origins, its mode of production, but in the end, it is a commonplace. And he sends his commonplace here [2→3], to the place of the message, by the classic path α→γ. Here [3] we have two characters, and you know well that these two characters can just as well be only one, since the Other, by the very fact that the dimension of speech exists, is in each one.

And indeed, as FREUD notes, if there had not already been present in the mind of SOULIÉ that something which in sum made him describe the character as a “Golden Calf,” it is because it is no longer a usage that, for us, seems accepted, but I found it in LITTRÉ: LITTRÉ tells us that a “Golden Calf” is a gentleman who is loaded with gold and who, because of this, is the object of universal admiration—there is no ambiguity, nor in German.

At that moment, that is, here [3→2] between γ and α: the return of the message to the code, that is to say, on the line of the signifying chain, and in a way metonymically, the term [calf] is taken up [by Heine] in something that is not the plane in which it was sent, is taken up in a way that clearly reveals here the meaning:
– of the fall of meaning,
– of the reduction of meaning,
– of the devaluation of meaning.

And, to put it plainly, this is what is at stake, and what, at the end of today’s lesson, I want to introduce: that metonymy is, strictly speaking, the place where we must situate this something primordial, this primordial and essential something in human language, inasmuch as we are going to take here, in opposition, the dimension of meaning, that is—in the diversity of these objects already constituted by language where the magnetic field of each one’s need, with its contradictions, is introduced—the response I introduced earlier, this something else which is this—which may perhaps seem paradoxical—which is the dimension of value.

And this dimension of value is properly something that has its dimension of meaning in relation to it. It rests and imposes itself:
– as being in contrast,
– as being another side,
– as being another register.

If some of you are quite familiar, I do not say with the whole of Capital—who has read all of Capital!—but with the first book of Capital, which generally everyone has read, I ask you to look up the page where MARX… at the level of the formulation of what is called the theory of “the particular form of the value of the commodity”…in a note, reveals himself to be a precursor of the mirror stage.

On that page, MARX makes this remark, superabundant in that prodigious First Book which shows—something rare—a person who maintains an articulated philosophical discourse, and he makes this proposition: that before any kind of study of the quantitative relations of value, it is necessary to posit:

– that nothing can be established except in the form, first of all, of the institution of this kind of fundamental equivalence which is not simply, as in so many others, so many equal pieces of cloth, but in half the number of garments,

– that there is already something that must be structured in the equivalence of cloth-garment, namely that garments can represent the value of the cloth, that is to say, it is not as a garment that it is something you can wear,

– that there is something necessary, even at the outset of the analysis, in the fact that the garment can become the signifier of the value of the cloth,

– that, in other words, the equivalence called value properly depends on the abandonment, by one or both of the two terms, of a part equally important of their meaning.

It is in this dimension that the effect of meaning of the metonymic line [3→2] is situated, which will allow us, in what follows, to find:
– what is the use of this introduction of the effect of meaning in the two registers of metaphor and metonymy,
– how, through this common introduction, they relate to a dimension, to a perspective, which is the essential one that allows us to reach the level of the unconscious.

This is what makes it necessary for us to appeal precisely, and in a way centered around this, to the dimension of the Other insofar as it is the place, the receiver, the necessary pivotal point of this exercise.

This is what we will do next time.