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(All parts in English)

Arriving at the synthetic part of his work on the witticism—the second part—FREUD raises the question of the origin of pleasure, of the pleasure produced by the witticism.

Of course, it is increasingly necessary—I remind those among you who might believe themselves exempt from it—that you have at least read the text of “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious”. That is the only way you can know this work, apart from the case, which would not be of your choosing I believe, where I read the text to you myself.

Here I will extract some passages from it, but that considerably lowers the level of attention. It is the only way for you to realize that the formulas I am providing you, that I will try to provide you, often follow the line, I mean as closely as possible, of the questions FREUD asks himself.

The questions that FREUD asks himself, he does so in a manner that is often winding; he refers to various themes, psychological and otherwise, received in different ways. Those to which he refers implicitly through the way he uses the received themes are as important, even more important, than those he uses as references.

Those he uses as references are those he shares with his readers. The way he uses them reveals—it is really necessary never to have opened the text not to realize it—a dimension that had never, until him, been suggested.

This dimension is precisely that of the role of the signifier. I would like to get straight to the subject that concerns us today, namely what, FREUD asks, is the source of pleasure. “What is the source of pleasure?” he asks us. It is essentially what, in a language too widespread these days and which some would use when they describe it, the source of pleasure is to be sought essentially in its formal aspect.

Fortunately, this is not how FREUD expresses himself; he is even more precise:

“The source of pleasure in the witticism—he goes so far as to say—is simply the joke.”

That is the real source of pleasure. Nevertheless, of course, the pleasure we take during the exercise of the witticism is centered elsewhere. Do we not notice the direction of this source, and throughout his analysis, this kind of ambiguity inherent in the very exercise of the witticism, which makes us not realize where the pleasure comes from and that it requires all the effort of his analysis to show it to us? This is an absolutely essential element, an absolutely essential process.

According to a system of reference that will become more and more marked as the work goes on, he relates this source of pleasure to a playful period of infantile activity, namely that it is something that relates to those first games with words which in sum take us directly back to the acquisition of language as pure signifier, for it is, properly speaking, the verbal game, the exercise that we would say is almost purely, not to say emitter, purely emitter of the verbal form that will bring—primitive and essential—the pleasure.

So is it purely and simply a kind of return to an exercise of the signifier as such, to a period before control, that criticism, that reason will compel, gradually through all the learning of reality, …will force the subject to bring this control and criticism to this use of the signifier? Is it then in this difference that the main spring of the exercise of pleasure in the witticism will consist?

Certainly the thing seems very simple, if all that FREUD brings us was summed up in this. Of course, this is far from being all that he limits himself to. He tells us that this is the source of pleasure, but he also shows us in what direction this pleasure is used: this pleasure serves, in a way, to an operation of liberation of these old paths… inasmuch as they are still there in virtual potential, existing, still sustaining in a way something …and by passing through these paths, he gave them a privilege in relation to those that have been brought to the foreground of the subject’s thought control by his progress toward adulthood.

Restoring this privilege to these paths is something that immediately brings us back… and it is in this that all the previous analysis he made of the spring and the mechanism of the witticism comes into play… into structuring paths which are those of the unconscious itself.

In other words, the two sides of the witticism—it is he himself who expresses it in this way—are on the one hand: this aspect of the exercise of the signifier with that freedom which maximizes all its possibility of fundamental ambiguity and, indeed, to say everything, its primitive character in relation to meaning, the essential polyvalence it has with respect to meaning, the creative function it has with respect to meaning, the accent of arbitrariness it introduces into meaning. That is one of its sides. The other is the fact that this exercise in itself introduces us, directs us, evokes all that belongs to the order of the unconscious.

And this is sufficiently indicated, from FREUD’s perspective, by the fact that the structures revealed by the witticism, the way its constitution functions, its crystallization, are none other than those he himself discovered in his first apprehensions of the unconscious, namely: at the level of the dream, at the level of parapraxes, or successful acts, as you might want to interpret it, at the level of symptoms themselves.

It is for this reason that we have tried to give a more precise, more exact formula, since under the form, under the rubric of metaphor and metonymy, we find again, in their most general forms…in the forms that are equivalent for any exercise of language, and also for what we will find to be structuring in the unconscious…these forms are the most general forms in which, therefore, condensation, displacement, and the other mechanisms that FREUD highlights in the structures of the unconscious, are, in a way, only its applications.

This common measure of the unconscious with what we confer on it…not simply by the ways of mental habits, but by what is actually dynamic in the relation with desire…this common measure of the unconscious and of the structure of speech insofar as it is governed by the laws of the signifier, is what we are trying to approach ever more closely, to exemplify, to render exemplary by our recourse to FREUD’s work on the witticism. This is what we will try to look at more closely today.

If we emphasize what could be called “the autonomy of the laws of the signifier”, if we say—in relation to the mechanism of the creation of meaning—that they come first, this does not of course spare us from asking ourselves the question of how we should conceive, not only the appearance of meaning, but to parody a formula that was rather awkwardly produced in the logical-positivist school, we would say “the meaning of meaning”, not that this itself has a meaning.

But what do we mean when it comes to meaning? And FREUD too, in this chapter on the mechanism of pleasure, evokes it, constantly refers to it, and does not fail to mention that formula so often used regarding the exercise of the witticism: “meaning in nonsense,” as the authors have long said in a kind of formula that, in a way, reflects the two apparent sides of pleasure, the way in which it first strikes by nonsense, and on the other hand binds us and rewards us with the emergence of I don’t know what secret meaning—besides, always so difficult to define if we start from this perspective—in this very nonsense, or else in the path opened up by a nonsense that, at that moment, dazzles us, stuns us.

This is perhaps closer to the mechanism, and FREUD certainly is also much more ready to concede it more properties, namely that nonsense plays the role, for a moment, of luring us long enough so that a meaning…hitherto unnoticed, or, moreover, just as quickly passed by, fleeting, a meaning like a flash, of the same nature as the dazzle that for a moment fixed us on nonsense…strikes us through this apprehension of the witticism.

In fact, if one looks at things more closely, one sees that FREUD goes so far as to repudiate this term of nonsense. And this is also where I would like us to pause today, for it is indeed the nature of these approximations, which precisely allow one to avoid the last term, the final spring of the mechanism at play, to stop at formulas that no doubt have their appearance, their psychological appeal, but which are not, strictly speaking, the appropriate ones.

I am going to propose that we start from something that will not be an appeal to the child, who, no doubt, we know can indeed take some pleasure in these verbal games, and that one can indeed refer to something of that order to give meaning and weight to a kind of psychogenesis of the mechanism of wit, but if you think about it other than through a kind of satisfaction of a routine that is established by the fact that one refers to something like this primitive, distant, playful activity, to which after all all the graces can be granted, perhaps it is not something that ought to satisfy us so much, since it is also not certain that the pleasure of wit, in which the child participates only from afar, is something that ought to be exhaustively explained by an appeal to fantasy.

But I would like to arrive at something that ties the knot between this use of the signifier and what we can call satisfaction or pleasure. Here it is I who will return to this reference that seems elementary: if we turn to the child, we must nevertheless not forget that the signifier at the beginning is made to serve something, it is made to express a demand. So let us pause for a moment at the mechanism of the demand. It is something of a need that passes by means of a signifier that is addressed to the Other. Already last time I pointed out to you that this reference deserved that we try to probe its temporalities. These temporalities have been so little examined that I have alluded to it somewhere in one of my articles.

A person eminently [Rudolph Lœwenstein?] representative of the psychoanalytic hierarchy has written an entire article of about a dozen pages marveling at the virtues of what he calls “wording,” a word in English that corresponds to what we, more awkwardly in French, call “passage to the verbal” or “verbalization.” It is obviously more elegant in English than it is in French.

He marvels that a patient, singularly bristled by an intervention he had made by saying something that meant more or less “You have peculiar, or even strong demands”—which in English also carries a tone that is even more insistent than in French—was literally shaken by it as if it were an accusation, as if it were a denunciation, whereas when he took up the same term a few moments later using “needs,” that is, besoins, he found someone completely docile, willing to accept his interpretation. The kind of construction that the author in question gives to this discovery clearly shows us how much the art of wording is still, inside analysis or at least in a certain analytic circle, in a primitive state.

Because in truth, everything is there: demand is something that is by itself so relative to the Other, that the fact that it is the Other who accuses it, immediately puts him in a position to accuse the subject himself, to push him away, whereas by evoking need, he authenticates this need, he assumes it, he homologates it, he brings it toward himself, he already begins to recognize it, which is an essential satisfaction.

The mechanism of demand naturally… and the fact that the Other by nature opposes it, or rather, one could say, that demand by nature requires opposition in order to be maintained as demand…is linked precisely to the introduction into communication of language, and illustrated at every moment by the way in which the Other accesses demand.

Let us consider this carefully. It is to the extent that the dimension of language comes to be remodeled here, but also to pour into the signifying complex—to infinity—the system of needs, that demand is essentially something by its nature that establishes itself as potentially exorbitant. It is not for nothing that children “ask for the moon.” They “ask for the moon” because it is in the nature of a need that is expressed through the system of the signifier, to “ask for the moon.”

And besides, we do not hesitate to promise it to them. And besides, we are very close to having it! In the end, we do not yet have the moon, and what is essential is still to notice this, to highlight it: after all, in this demand for the satisfaction of a need, what happens purely and simply? We respond to the demand. We give to our fellow what he asks of us. Through what mouse hole must he pass? By what reduction of his claims must he reduce himself so that the demand may be ratified?

This is sufficiently illustrated by the phenomenon of need when it appears bare. I would even say that to access it as need, we must refer beyond the subject to I know not what Other:

– who is called CHRIST, who identifies with the poor for those who practice Christian charity,

– but even for others, for the man of desire, for Molière’s Don JUAN: he certainly gives the beggar what he asks, and it is not for nothing that he adds “for the love of humanity.”

It is to an Other—beyond the one who is before you—that, in the end, the response to the demand, the granting of the demand, is deferred. And the story—which is one of the stories on which FREUD pivots his analysis of the witticism—the story called “the salmon with mayonnaise,” is the most beautiful story that provides illustration here.

A character is indignant, after having given to a beggar some money he needed to face I don’t know what debts, what dues, to see him give to the object of generosity, a use other than the one that in a way already responds to another limited mind.

It is a true joke, when finding him the next day in a restaurant, treating himself to what is considered the sign of extravagant spending: “salmon with mayonnaise,” with that little Viennese accent the tone of the story can give, he says to him:

“What! Is that why I gave you money? To treat yourself to salmon with mayonnaise!”

To which the other enters into the witticism and replies:

“But then I do not understand! When I have no money I cannot have salmon with mayonnaise. When I have some, I cannot have it either! So when will I eat salmon with mayonnaise?”

Every example of the witticism is even more significant because of the very domain in which it moves, is even more significant because of its particularity, which seems to be the special something in the story that cannot be generalized. It is through this particularity that we arrive at the most vivid mechanism of the domain in which we place ourselves, and the relevance of this story is no less than that of any other story, which always puts us at the very heart of the problem, at the relationship between the signifier and desire, and at the fact that desire is profoundly shifted in its accent, subverted, rendered ambiguous itself by its passage through the channels of the signifier.

Let us be clear about all that this means. It is always in the name of a certain register—which involves the Other beyond the one who makes the request—that all satisfaction is granted, and this precisely deeply perverts the system of demand and response to demand.
– “Clothe those who are naked.”
– “Feed those who are hungry.”
– “Visit the sick.”
…I do not need to remind you of the seven, eight, or nine works of mercy; it is striking enough in their very terms that “Clothe those who are naked,” one could say, if demand were something that should be maintained in its direct thrust, why not “dress”—I mean at Christian DIOR—those men or women who are naked? That happens from time to time, but generally it is because one started by undressing them oneself.

Likewise “Feed those who are hungry”: why not “get them drunk”? That is not done, it would harm them, they are used to sobriety, they must not be disturbed.

As for “Visit the sick,” I will recall the phrase of Sacha GUITRY:

“Paying a visit always gives pleasure. If not when you arrive, then at least when you leave!”

The thematic relation of demand is at the heart of what constitutes our subject today. So let us try to schematize what happens in that pause which, in a way, displaces, by a kind of singular path, “bayonet-shaped” if we may say so, the communication of the demand to its reception.

So it is not to something other than mythic, but something profoundly true, that I ask you to refer in order to make use of this little diagram, and in the following way: let us suppose, nonetheless, that something must really exist somewhere, if only in our diagram, a demand that passes, for in the end everything is there.

If FREUD introduced a new dimension in our consideration of Man, it is not that something passes anyway, but that this something destined to pass, the desire that should pass, leaves somewhere not only traces, but an insistent circuit.

Let us then proceed from the diagram of something that would represent the passing demand. Let us put, since there is childhood: we can very well make the passing demand take refuge there. This child, who articulates something that is for him still only uncertain articulation, but articulation in which he takes pleasure, to which FREUD refers.

He directs his demand: let us say that it starts—fortunately it has not yet come into play—something is outlined that starts from this point we will call Δ or capital D: demand. And what does this describe for us? It describes for us the function of need: something is expressed that starts from the subject and ends the line of his need.

This is precisely what determines the curve of what we have isolated here as “discourse,” and this is done through the mobilization of something preexisting. I did not invent the line of “discourse,” the bringing into play of the stock, very limited at that point, of the stock of the signifier, insofar as, correlatively, it articulates something.

See how things are: if you want to rise together on the two levels:

– of intention [1→2→3], however confused you may suppose it to be, of the young subject as he directs the appeal,

– the signifier [I→ II→ III], however disordered you might suppose its use, insofar as it is mobilized in this effort, in this appeal, advances at the same time, and this something has a sense of increase which I have already indicated to you: the usefulness for understanding the retroactive effect of the sentence that is completed right at the end of the second stage.

Notice that these two lines are not yet intertwined, in other words, the one who says something says both more and less than what he believes he is saying. The reference here to the groping character of the child’s first use of language finds its full employment. If, in other words, on both lines progresses in parallel the completion of that something which here will be called the demand, it is nevertheless at the end of the second stage that the signifier will close upon something which here completes, as approximately as you like, the sense of the demand, that which constitutes the message, the something which the Other, let us say “the mother” to sometimes acknowledge the existence of good mothers, properly evokes, which coexists with the completion of the message. Both are determined at the same time:
– one as message,
– the other as Other.

And in a third phase of this double curve, we will see something which here is completed, and also here something which we will at least hypothetically indicate how we can name them, situate them in this structuring of the demand, which is what we are trying to put entirely at the base, at the foundation of the first exercise of the signifier in the expression of desire.

I will ask you, at least provisionally, to admit as the most useful reference for what we will try to develop further, to admit in the third phase this ideal case where the demand, as it were, meets exactly what prolongs it, namely the Other who takes it up concerning his message.

I believe that what we must consider here is something that cannot exactly be confused here with satisfaction, for there is in the intervention, in the very exercise of any signifier with respect to the manifestation of need, that something which transforms it and which already brings to it, through the contribution of the signifier, that minimum of transformations, of metaphors to say it outright, which means that what is signified is something beyond raw need, something remodeled by the use of the signifier. It is here, to put it simply, that something begins to be exercised, to intervene, to enter into the creation of the signified, something which is not a pure and simple translation of the need, but a resumption, re-assumption, remodeling of need, the creation of a desire which is other than need, which is a need plus a signifier.

As LENIN said:

“Socialism is something that is probably very sympathetic, but perfect community also has electrification.”

Here there is “in addition” the signifier in the expression of need. And on the other side here, in the third phase, there is certainly something that corresponds to this miraculous appearance. We have supposed it miraculous, fully satisfying, of the satisfaction by the Other of something, that something which is there created.

It is this something which here normally results in what FREUD presents to us as the pleasure of the exercise of the signifier, in short, the exercise of the signifying chain as such, in this ideal case of success, in the case where the Other comes here in the very prolongation of the exercise of the signifier.

What prolongs the effort of the signifier as such is this resolution here into its own, authentic pleasure, the pleasure of this use of the signifier. You see it in these few boundary lines. I ask you for a moment to accept, properly speaking as a hypothesis, the hypothesis that will remain underlying everything we will try to conceive as what occurs in common cases, in real cases of the exercise of the signifier.

For the use of demand, it is something that will be underpinned by this primitive reference to what we could call full success, or first success, or mythical success, or the primordial archaic form of the exercise of the signifier. This complete passage, this successful passage of demand as such in the real, insofar as it simultaneously creates the message and the Other, results in:

– this reworking of the signified on the one hand, which is introduced by the use of the signifier as such,

– and on the other hand, directly extends the exercise of the signifier into an authentic pleasure.

Both are balanced:

– on the one hand, there is this exercise that we indeed find, with FREUD, absolutely at the origin of verbal play as such, which is a pleasure always ready to arise.

– And of course, how much always—by everything we will now see of what happens to oppose it—how masked, on the other hand, is that novelty that appears, not simply in the response to the demand but in the verbal demand itself, appears this something that complicates, that transforms the need, that puts it on the level of what from then on we will call desire.

Desire being that something which is defined by an essential shift in relation to everything that is purely and simply in the imaginary direction of need, which is that something that introduces it by itself into another order, the symbolic order, with all the disturbance it may bring here.

In short, we see here arising in relation to this primary myth to which I ask you to refer, because we must rely on this in everything that follows, otherwise everything FREUD will articulate for us about the specific mechanism of the pleasure of the witticism will be rendered incomprehensible.

I emphasize that this novelty which appears in the signified by the introduction of the signifier is this something that we find everywhere, as an essential dimension accentuated by FREUD at every turn, in what is the manifestation of the unconscious.

FREUD sometimes tells us that something appears at the level of formations of the unconscious which is called surprise. It is something that should be taken not as an accident of this discovery but as an essential dimension of its essence. There is something original in the phenomenon of surprise:
– whether it occurs within a formation of the unconscious, insofar as in itself it shocks the subject by its surprising character,
– but also when, at the moment you reveal it to the subject, you provoke in him this feeling of surprise.

FREUD points this out at all sorts of points:
– either in “The Interpretation of Dreams,”
– or in “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,”
– or else, at every moment, in the text of “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious.” This dimension of surprise is itself consubstantial with what desire is, insofar as it has passed to the level of the unconscious. This dimension is what desire carries with it of a condition of emergence that is its own as desire, it is precisely that by which it is even likely to enter the unconscious, for not every desire is likely to enter the unconscious.

Only those desires enter the unconscious which, having been symbolized, can, upon entering the unconscious, preserve in their symbolic form, in the form of that indestructible trace of which FREUD again gives the example in the witticism, desires that do not wear out, that do not have the impermanence proper to all dissatisfaction, but which, on the contrary, are supported by this symbolic structure that maintains them at a certain level of circulation of the signifier, the one I have indicated to you as having to be, in this schema, situated in this circuit between the message and the Other:

That is, occupying a function, a place which, depending on the case, depending on the situations in which it occurs, means that it is by the same paths that we must conceive of the revolving circuit of the unconscious insofar as it is always ready to reappear there. It is in the action of metaphor:
– inasmuch as it is when, at certain original circuits, something comes to strike in the current, banal, received circuit of metonymy, that the emergence of new meaning is produced,
– and finally, in the witticism, it is in the open air that this ball is sent back and forth between message and Other, which will produce the original effect of the witticism.

Let us now go into more detail to try to grasp and conceive of it.

If we are no longer at this primordial level, at this mythical level of first establishment in its proper form of demand, how do things happen? Let us return to this absolutely fundamental theme: throughout the stories of the witticism, one sees nothing but petitioners to whom things are granted:
– either they are granted what they did not ask for,
– or, having been granted what they asked for, they make another use of it,
– or they behave toward the one who granted it to them with a very special insolence, reproducing, so to speak, in the relationship of the petitioner to the one solicited, that blessed dimension of ingratitude.

Otherwise, it would truly be unbearable to grant any request, for observe, as our friend MANNONI very pertinently pointed out in an excellent book, that the normal mechanism of the demand that is granted is to provoke ever-renewed demands, because in the end what is this demand, insofar as it meets its listener, the ear for which it is intended?

Let us do a bit of etymology here. Although it is not necessarily in the use of the signifier that the essential dimension to which one should refer resides, a bit of etymology is still there to enlighten us. This demand so marked by the themes of requirement in concrete practice, in the use, in the employment of the term… and even more in Anglo-Saxon than in other languages, but also in other languages… originally it is demandare, it is to entrust oneself, it is—on the level of a shared register and language—a handing over of one’s whole self, of all one’s needs, to another.

The signifying material of the demand is undoubtedly borrowed in order to take on another accent specially imposed on it by the actual exercise of demand.

But here the fact of the origin of the materials used metaphorically, as you can see from the progress of the language, is there to instruct us about what is at stake in this famous complex of dependence that I mentioned earlier with, according to MANNONI’s terms, an effect that the one who asks may think that indeed the other has truly granted one of his requests, in fact there is then no more limit: he can, he must, it is normal that he entrusts all his needs to him.

Everything I mentioned a moment ago about the benefits of ingratitude puts an end to things, puts an end to what could never stop. But likewise the petitioner is not accustomed by experience to presenting his demand so naked. The demand is not at all trusting; he knows too well what he is dealing with in the mind of the other, and that is why he disguises his demand. That is, he asks for something he needs in the name of something else which he sometimes also needs, but which will be more easily admitted as a pretext for the demand.

If necessary, this other thing, if he does not have it, he will simply invent it, and above all he will take into account, in formulating his demand, what is the system of the Other, the one I alluded to earlier:
– he will address the charity lady in one way,
– the banker in another way, all characters who appear in such amusing ways,
– the matchmaker in yet another,
– and yet another way to this or that one.

That is to say, not only will his desire be taken up and reworked in the system of the signifier, but in the system of the signifier as it is established, instituted in the Other, that is, according to the code of the Other, and simply
– his demand will begin to be formulated from the Other[1]
– first to be reflected[2] on this something which for a long time has passed into active status in his discourse: on the “I” that here and there utters the demand,
– to reflect it on the Other and, by this circuit, end up as a message[3].

What does this mean?

This is the appeal, the intention, it is the circuit of secondary need in which you can see there is not yet much need to give it too much the accent of reason, except that of control, control by the system of the Other, which of course already involves all kinds of factors that we are, for the occasion, only justified in qualifying as rational.

Let us say that if it is rational to take them into account, it is not implied in their structure that they are actually rational. What happens on the chain of the signifier according to these three phases that we see described here?

It is something that once again mobilizes the whole apparatus, all the arrangement, all the material in order to arrive here first at something, but at something that does not immediately pass to the Other, which here comes to be reflected [γ→β’→γ] on that something which, in the second phase, corresponded to the appeal to the Other, that is, to that object insofar as:
– it is the object admissible by the Other,
– it is the object of what the Other is willing to desire,
– it is the metonymic object.

And it is by reflecting on this object, coming in the third phase to converge on the message, that we find ourselves here… not in that happy state of satisfaction we obtained at the end of the three phases of the first mythical representation of demand and its success with its surprising novelty, and its pleasure satisfying in itself… we find ourselves halted at a message that bears within itself this character of ambiguity, of being the encounter of a formulation alienated from the very start… insofar as it originates from the Other, and from that side will lead to something that is in some sense the desire of the Other, inasmuch as it is from the Other itself that the appeal was evoked, and on the other hand, in its very signifying apparatus… to introduce all sorts of “conventional” elements, which are properly what we will call the character of “community,” or more precisely of displacement of objects, insofar as objects are deeply reworked by the world of the Other.

And we have seen that the discord between these two points of arrival of the arrow in the third phase is something so striking that it is precisely this that can lead to what we call a slip of the tongue, a stumbling of speech, by both paths. It is not certain that a univocal meaning is formed; it is so little univocal that the fundamental character of misdeal and misrecognition in language is an essential dimension of it. It is on the ambiguity of this formation of the message that the witticism will work, it is from this point, in various ways, that the witticism can be formed.

Today I will not yet draw out the diversity of forms under which this message can be taken up as it is constituted in its essential ambiguous form, in its ambiguity as to the structure, to follow a process that, according to what FREUD told us, has the aim of ultimately restoring the ideal progression that must lead to the surprise of novelty on the one hand, and to the pleasure of the play of the signifier on the other. This is the object of the witticism.

The object of the witticism is to recall for us that dimension through which desire, if not recovers what has been lost, at least indicates all that it has lost along the way in this journey, namely:
– what it has left at the level of the metonymic chain on the one hand, as remains,
– and on the other hand what it does not fully realize at the level of metaphor, if we call “natural metaphor” what happened earlier in that pure and simple, ideal, transition of desire as it forms in the subject toward the Other who takes it up and accesses it.

Here we find ourselves at a more evolved stage, at the stage where these two things have already intervened in the subject’s psychology:
– the “I” on the one hand,
– and on the other hand the deeply transformed object which is the metonymic object.
We are faced with metaphor, not “natural,” but the ordinary exercise of metaphor, whether it succeeds or fails, in this ambiguity of the message which is now or not to be resolved in conditions that remain in the natural state.

We have a whole part of this desire that will continue to circulate in the form of remains of the signifier in the unconscious. In the case of the witticism, through a sort of forcing…
– of happy shadow,
– of astonishing success and purely carried by the signifier,
– of reflections of former satisfaction,
…something will occur whose very effect is to reproduce that primary pleasure of satisfied demand, at the same time as it attains an original novelty.

It is this something that the witticism, by its essence, realizes, and how does it realize it? What have we seen up to now? We have said, all in all, that what is at stake for this is that this schema can serve us to perceive that something which is the completion of the initial curve of this signifying chain and which is also something that extends what passes from intentional need into discourse. How so? Through the witticism.

But how will the witticism come to light? Here we again find the dimensions of meaning and non-meaning, but I think we must grasp them more closely. If anything has been targeted in what I indicated to you last time about the metonymic function, it is properly what occurs in the unfolding of the signifying chain: equalization, leveling, equivalence, therefore as many erasures as there is reduction of meaning.

This is not to say that it is non-meaning, it is something which, by the very fact that I took the Marxist reference… that we bring into operation two objects of need, in such a way that one becomes the measure of the value of the other, erases from it precisely what is of the order of need, and thereby introduces it into the order of value… from the point of view of meaning and by a kind of neologism [“dé-sens” (de-sense), i.e. loss or reduction of meaning], which also presents an ambiguity, may be called “de-sense.” Let us call it today simply the “little sense.” And so you will see, once you have this key, the significance of the metonymic chain, of this “little sense.” It is precisely on this that most witticisms play.

It is necessary that the witticism brings out, reveals, not the character of non-meaning—we are not in the witticism, among those noble souls who—right after their great desert from whom—we will have revealed the great mysteries of general absurdity: the discourse of the “beautiful soul,” if it has not succeeded in ennobling our feelings, has recently ennobled its dignity as a writer, but for all that this discourse on non-meaning is nonetheless the most vain discourse we have ever been able to hear.

There is absolutely no play of non-meaning, but each time equivocation is introduced,

– whether it is the story of the calf, that calf about which I myself amused myself last time almost to make it the response of Heinrich HEINE, let us say that this calf after all is hardly worth much, at the date at which it is spoken of,
– and also everything you may find in wordplay, especially those called thought-puns,
…consists in playing on this thinness of words to support a full meaning.

It is this little sense that as such is taken up, and through which something passes that reduces to its scale this message insofar as it is at once success, failure, but the necessary force of any formulation of demand, and which comes to question the Other about this little sense here, and the dimension of the Other, essential.

That is why FREUD pauses, as at something quite fundamental, at the very nature of the witticism, the punchline: it is that there is no solitary witticism, the witticism is bound to something, even though we ourselves have fashioned it, invented it—if indeed we invent the witticism and it is not it that invents us—we feel the need to propose it to the Other, it is the Other who is charged with authenticating it.

What is this Other? Why this Other? What is this need for the Other?

I do not know if today we will have enough time to define it, to give it its structure and its limits, but let us simply say this, at the point where we are: that what is communicated in the witticism to the Other is what plays essentially in a way already particularly cunning and whose nature must be kept in front of our eyes.

What is always at stake is not to provoke that pathetic invocation of I do not know what “fundamental absurdity” to which I alluded earlier by referring to the work of one of the great “soft heads” [French: “tête molle” = a simpleton, here ironically] of this era, it is this that one must suggest, it is this dimension of “little sense”:
– by questioning, in a sense, value as such,
– by summoning it, so to speak, to realize its dimension of value,
– by summoning it to unveil itself as true value, which, note well, is a ruse of language, for the more it unveils itself as true value, the more it unveils itself as being supported by what I call “little sense.”

It can only respond in the sense of “little sense,” and this is where the very nature of the message of the witticism lies, that is, where, at the level of the message, I resume with the Other this interrupted path of metonymy, and I bring to it this question: “What does all this mean?”

The witticism is completed only beyond this, that is to say insofar as the Other acknowledges it, responds to the witticism, authenticates it as a witticism, that is, perceives what, in this vehicle as such for the question of “little sense,” there is of a demand for meaning, that is, the evocation of a meaning beyond that which is unfinished, which in all of this has remained in abeyance, marked by the sign of the Other, marking above all with its profound ambiguity every formulation of desire, binding it as such and properly speaking, to the necessities and ambiguities of the signifier as such, to homonymy properly speaking, that is, to homophony.

Insofar as the Other responds to this, that is, on the higher circuit, the one that goes from A to the message, what does it authenticate? What we will call here the nonsense. Here too I insist. I do not believe that we should maintain this term “nonsense” which only has meaning from the perspective of reason, of critique, that is, that this, precisely, is avoided in this circuit.

I propose to you the formula of the “pasdesens” [French wordplay: literally “not of meaning” but here also as in ballet “pas de” = step of], of the “pasdesens” as one says “pasdevis,” “pasdequatre,” “pasdeSuze,” “PasdeCalais.” This “pas de sens” is, properly speaking, what is realized in metaphor, for in metaphor it is the subject’s intention, it is the subject’s need that…
– beyond metonymic usage,
– beyond what finds satisfaction in common measure, in received values,
…precisely introduces this “pas de sens,” this something which, taking up an element in the place where it is, by substituting another for it, I would almost say any other, always introduces this beyond of need, in relation to any formulated desire, which is at the origin of metaphor.

What does the witticism do there? It indicates nothing more than the very dimension:
– the “step” as such properly speaking,
– the “step” if I may say so in its force,
– the “step” emptied of any kind of need
…which here would nonetheless express that which, in the witticism, can manifest what is latent in me of my desire, and of course something that might find an echo in the Other, but not necessarily. The important thing is that this dimension of the “pas de sens” is taken up again, authenticated. It is to this that a displacement corresponds.

It is not beyond the object that novelty is produced at the same time as the “pas de sens,” at the same time for both subjects:
– the one who speaks,
– and the one who speaks to the Other, who communicates it to him as a witticism.

He has traversed this segment of the metonymic dimension, he has had the little sense received as such. The Other has authenticated the “pas de sens,” and pleasure is completed for the subject.

It is insofar as he has managed to surprise the Other with his witticism that he harvests the pleasure which is indeed the same primitive pleasure as the mythical, archaic, infantile, primordial subject I was evoking for you a moment ago had gathered from the first use of the signifier. I will leave you with this process. I hope it has not seemed too artificial to you, nor too pedantic. I apologize to those whom this kind of little trapeze exercise gives a headache: I still believe it is necessary.

Not that I do not believe you capable in spirit of grasping these things, but I do not think that what I call your common sense is something so adulterated by the medical, psychological, analytic and other studies to which you have devoted yourselves, that you cannot follow me on these paths with simple allusions.

Nevertheless, the rules of my teaching do not make it untimely that we should, in some way, separate these stages, these essential times of the progress of subjectivity, in the witticism.

Subjectivity, that is the word I come to now, for up to now, and today still, in handling with you the courses of the signifier, something in the midst of all this is missing—not without reason, as you will see—it is not for nothing that in the midst of all this we see appearing today only subjects who are almost absent, sorts of supports for sending back the ball of the signifier.

And yet, what is more essential to the dimension of the witticism than subjectivity? When I say subjectivity, I am saying that nowhere is the object of the witticism graspable, since even what it designates beyond what it formulates, its character of essential allusion, of internal allusion, is something that here alludes to nothing, except the necessity of the “pas de sens.”

And yet in this total absence of object, ultimately something sustains the witticism which is the most lived of the lived, the most assumed of the assumed, that something which makes it, properly speaking, something so subjective, as FREUD says somewhere, this essential subjective conditionality, the sovereign word is there, arising between the lines.

“Nothing is a witticism…

He says, with that sharpness of phrasing found in almost no other literary author—I have never seen this under anyone else’s pen—

“Nothing is a witticism except what I myself recognize as a witticism.”

And yet I need the Other, for the entire following chapter… the one I have just spoken to you about today, namely the mechanism of pleasure, and which he calls “the motives of wit, the social tendencies highlighted by wit.” In French it was translated as “les mobiles,” I have never understood why “motif” is translated as “mobile” in French… has as essential reference this Other.

There is no pleasure of the witticism without this Other, this Other also as subject, without these relationships of the two subjects, of the one he calls the first person of the witticism, the one who makes it, and the one to whom, he says, it is absolutely necessary that it be communicated, the order of the Other that this suggests, and, to say it clearly right now, the fact that this Other is, properly speaking… and this with characteristic traits that can be seized nowhere else with such relief… that, at that level, this Other is here what I call the Other with a capital O.

That is what I hope to show you next time.