🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

I have some very important things to tell you today. Last time, we left things at the function of the subject in the witticism.

I think that the weight of my ‘subject,’ on the pretext that we are using it here, has not for you become something to wipe your feet on. When one uses the word ‘subject,’ it generally triggers very personal, sometimes emotional reactions in those who above all insist on objectivity.

On the other hand, we had arrived at that kind of converging point which is located here and which we call A… in other words, the Other as the locus of the code, the place where the message constituted by the witticism arrives… by this path that in our schema can be crossed at this level, from the message to the Other, and which is the path of the simple succession of the signifying chain as the foundation of what occurs at the level of discourse, that is to say, by this path where, in the text of the sentence, something essential is manifested that emanates, which is what we have called the ‘little bit of meaning.’

This validation of the ‘little bit of meaning’ of the sentence—always more or less apparent in the witticism—by the Other, that is what we pointed out last time, without lingering over it, contenting ourselves with saying that from the Other, what is transmitted here is sent back in a double action which returns to the level of the message, which validates the message, which constitutes the witticism, insofar as the Other has received what is presented as a ‘little bit of meaning,’ it transforms it into what we ourselves have called, in an equivocal, ambiguous way, the ‘not-meaning’ [pasdesens: not a step of meaning, but a non-meaning].

What we have highlighted by this is not the absence of meaning, nor nonsense, but something which is a step in the apprehension of what meaning shows of its process, of what it always has of the metaphorical, of the allusive, of that in which need, from the moment it has passed through the dialectic of demand introduced by the existence of the signifier, this need is, in a way, never reached.

It is through a series of steps similar to those by which ACHILLES never catches up with the tortoise [reference to Zeno’s paradox], that everything in language proceeds and tends to recreate that full meaning, that meaning elsewhere, that meaning which is nonetheless never attained.

So here is the schema at which we arrived in the last quarter of an hour of our discourse last time, which, it seems, was a bit ‘tired,’ as some have told me. My sentences were not finished, according to someone. Yet, when reading my text, I did not find that they lacked a tail. It is because I try to propel myself step by step into something hardly communicable, that these stumblings have to occur. I apologize if they are repeated today.

We are at the point where we need to question ourselves about the function of this Other, to put it plainly, about the essence of this Other in this crossing that we call—as we have indicated enough—under the title of the ‘not-meaning’ [pas de sens], this ‘not-meaning’ insofar as it is, in a way, the partial recovery of that ideal plenitude of demand purely and simply realized, from which we started, as from the starting point of our dialectic.

This ‘not-meaning,’ by what transmutation, transubstantiation, subtle operation of communion, so to speak, can it be assumed by the Other? What is this Other?

To put it plainly, here is something sufficiently indicated to us by the problematic that FREUD himself highlights when he speaks to us of the witticism, with this power to suspend the question, which means that undeniably, the more I read—and I do not deprive myself of it—the various attempts that have been made throughout the ages to closely grasp this mysterious question of the witticism, I truly do not see, no matter which author I refer to, and even going back to the fertile period, the romantic period, any author who has even gathered the primary, material elements of the question.

Something like this, for example, at which FREUD pauses here, can be said in two ways:

– On the one hand, he says with that sovereign tone that is his, which so stands out from the ordinary blushing timidity of scientific discourses: ‘Only that is wit which I recognize as such.’ This is what he calls this ‘irreducible subjective conditionality of wit,’ and the subject is indeed the one who speaks, says FREUD himself.

– And on the other hand, emphasizing that when I am in possession of something that is properly of the order of wit, I have only one urge, I cannot even fully enjoy the pleasure of the witticism, of the story, unless I have, so to speak, tested it on the Other, indeed: unless I have somehow transmitted the context of it.

It would not be difficult for me to make this perspective, this sort of hall of mirrors appear, by which, when I tell a story, if I am really seeking fulfillment, repose, the accord of my pleasure in the consent of the Other, it remains on the horizon that this Other will in turn tell this story, and will pass it on to others, and so on.

These two ends of the chain:

‘Only that is wit which I myself feel as such.’
but on the other hand:
‘There is nothing sufficient in my own consent at this point,
unless the pleasure of the witticism is completed in the Other and by the Other.’

Let us say—if we pay close attention to what we are saying, I mean if we do not see there any kind of simplification that might be implied in this term—that ‘wit must be communicated’ provided that we leave to this term ‘communication’ an openness whose content we do not yet know.

Thus, in FREUD’s observation, we find ourselves faced with something essential that we already know, namely, the question of ‘what is this Other’ who is, in a sense, the correlative of the subject. Here we find this correlation affirmed in a requirement, in a true need inscribed in the phenomenon. But the form of this relationship of the subject to the Other, we already know it. We already know it since we insisted here on the necessary mode under which our reflection proposes the term subjectivity.

I have alluded to this kind of objection that might come to minds trained in a certain discipline, and trying, under the pretext that psychoanalysis presents itself as a science, to introduce the requirement that we speak only of objectifiable things, namely, things on which agreement through experience can be made, and that by the very fact of speaking of the subject, it becomes a subjective thing and is not scientific, implying thereby in the notion of the subject, this thing, which at a certain level is there, namely:

– this ‘on this side’ of the object which allows one, in a way, to give it its support,

– this ‘beyond’ as well, behind the object, which presents us with this sort of unknowable substance,

– in short, this something refractory to objectification, for which your education, your psychological formation, in a sense provide you with all the armament.

Naturally, this leads to even more vulgar forms of objection, I mean the identification of the term subjective with the distorting effects of feeling on another’s experience, thereby not introducing any less some transparent mirage that grounds it in this kind of immanence of self-consciousness, on which one relies a bit too quickly to sum up the theme of the Cartesian cogito.

In short, a whole series of brambles that are there only to come between us and what we designate when we bring subjectivity into play in our experience. From our experience as analysts, it is ineliminable, and in a way, by a path that passes quite elsewhere than along the path where one might set obstacles for it. Subjectivity, for the analyst, for one who proceeds by means of a certain ‘dialogue,’ is what must be taken into account in one’s calculations when dealing with that Other who can include in theirs their own error, and not seek to provoke it as such. Here is a formula I offer you, and which is certainly something perceptible. The slightest reference to a chess game, or even to the game of odd and even, is enough to confirm it.

Let us say that by thus stating the terms, subjectivity emerges or seems to emerge—I have already emphasized all this elsewhere, there is no need for me to repeat it here—in a dual state, that is, as soon as there is struggle, or camouflage in the struggle, or display. Nevertheless, it certainly still seemed to us that we saw here, as it were, its reflection at play. I illustrated this with terms that I do not need to repeat, I think, regarding the approach and the phenomena of fascinating erection in inter-animal struggle, even in intersexual display.

We certainly see there a kind of natural coaptation, of which precisely, this character of reciprocal approach, of a behavior that must converge in the embrace, thus at the motor level, at the so-called ‘behaviorist’ level, in that striking aspect of this animal that seems to perform a dance.

It is precisely this that also leaves something ambiguous in the notion of intersubjectivity in this case. Reciprocal fascination can be conceived as simply subjected to the regulation of an isolable cycle in the instinctual process, which, after the appetitive stage, allows the consummation of the instinctual end that is properly sought. We can reduce it to an innate mechanism, to an innate relay mechanism which, without the problem of the function of this imaginary capture, ends up being reduced in the general obscurity of all living teleology, and which—after having, for a moment, arisen from the opposition, so to speak, of the two subjects—can, at an effort of objectification, once again vanish, fade away.

It is altogether different as soon as we introduce into the problem whatever resistances, in whatever form, of a signifying chain. The signifying chain as such introduces into this an essential heterogeneity—understand ἑτερογενής, with the emphasis on ἕτερος [héteros, meaning ‘other’ in Greek, possibly ‘inspired’], and of which in Latin the proper meaning is that of ‘remainder,’ of ‘residue.’ There is a remainder as soon as we bring into play the signifier, as soon as it is by means of a signifying chain that one addresses and relates to the other.

A subjectivity of another order is established, which refers to the place of truth as such, and which renders my behavior no longer deceptive but provocative, with this A which is included in it, that is, this A which, even for the lie, must call upon the truth and which can make truth itself into something that does not seem to belong to the register of truth.

Recall this example:

‘Why do you tell me you are going to Krakow when you are really going to Krakow?’

This can make truth itself the need for the lie, which, much further, makes the qualification of my good faith at the moment I lay down my cards depend on it, that is, which puts me under the power of the Other’s assessment, insofar as he thinks he is catching my play by surprise just as I am actually showing it to him, and which subjects the discrimination between bravado and deceit to the mercy of the Other’s bad faith. These essential dimensions are mere experiences of everyday experience.

But, although they are woven into our everyday experience, we are nonetheless inclined to elide them, to evade them, and why? For the reason that as long as analytic experience and the Freudian position have not shown us this hetero-dimension of the signifier at play all by itself, as long as we have not touched, realized this hetero-dimension, we can ‘believe,’ and we will not fail to ‘believe,’ and all Freudian thought is imbued with this belief founded on something that marks the heterogeneity of the signifying function, namely this radical character of the subject’s relation to the Other insofar as he speaks.

It was masked until FREUD by the fact that we take for granted, in a certain way, that the subject speaks, so to speak, according to his conscience, good or bad, which means that we think the subject never speaks without a certain intention of meaning.

The intention is behind his lie or his sincerity, it does not matter, but this intention is derisory, that is to say, if it is held to have failed, I mean that in believing himself to be saying it, the subject tells the truth, or deceives himself, even in his effort toward confession, it nonetheless remains that the intention was until now confused in this occasion with the dimension of consciousness, because it seemed to us, this consciousness, inherent to what the subject had to say as meaning. The least that until now has been held as affirmable is that the subject always had to say a meaning, and by that fact the dimension of consciousness seemed to him inherent. [Cf. Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation]

The obstacles, the objections to the theme of the Freudian unconscious always find their last recourse there. How can we anticipate Traumgedanken as FREUD presents them to us, that is, this something which, in sum, for common apprehension, for ordinary intuition, appears as ‘thoughts which are not thoughts’? That is why a real ‘dis-exorcism’ is necessary at the level of this theme of thought.

Certainly, the theme of the Cartesian cogito retains all its force, but its harmfulness—if I may say so on this occasion—lies in the fact that it is always bent. I mean that this ‘I think, therefore I am,’ it is difficult to grasp it at the very tip of its spring, and perhaps it is nothing more than a witticism. But let us leave it at that; we are not here to demonstrate the relationship of philosophy with the witticism. The Cartesian cogito is indeed experienced in the consciousness of each of us, not as an ‘I think, therefore I am,’ but as an ‘I am as I think,’ and, of course, this presupposes behind it an ‘I think as I breathe: naturally.’

I believe it suffices to have the slightest reflective experience of what sustains the mental activity of those around us, and since we are scholars, let us speak of those who are harnessed to great scientific works, so that we may very quickly form the notion that there are probably, on average, not many more thoughts in action in the whole of this ‘thinking body’ than in that of any industrious cleaning woman caught up in the most immediate necessities of existence.

The term, the dimension of ‘thought’ has absolutely nothing to do in itself with the importance of the discourse conveyed. Even more, the more coherent and consistent this discourse is, the more it seems to lend itself to all forms of absence with regard to what can reasonably be defined as a question posed by the subject to his existence as a subject. In the end, here we are confronted with this again:

– that in us a subject thinks, thinks according to laws which turn out to be, strictly speaking, the same as the laws of the organization of the signifying chain,

– that this ‘signifier in action’ which is called in us the unconscious, is designated as such by FREUD, and so much individualized, separated from everything that is the play of drive, that FREUD, in a thousand forms, repeats to us that it is a ‘different psychic scene.’

The term is repeated constantly in the Traumdeutung, and in truth, FREUD borrows it from FECHNER. I have emphasized the singularity of the Fechnerian context, which is far from being something we can reduce to the observation of psycho-physical parallelism, or even to the strange extrapolations in which FECHNER engages, owing to the existence, affirmed by him, of the domain of consciousness. The fact that FREUD borrows from his deep reading of FECHNER this term ‘different psychic scene’ is something he always puts in correlation with the strict heterogeneity of the laws concerning the unconscious, in relation to everything that may relate to the domain of the preconscious, that is, to the domain of the comprehensible, to the domain of meaning.

This Other in question and that FREUD finds, which he also calls ‘reference of the psychic scene’ concerning the witticism, is the one about whom we have to pose the question today, it is the one whom FREUD keeps bringing us back to concerning the paths and the very process of the witticism.

‘There is not for us,’ he says, ‘a possibility of emergence of this witticism, without a certain surprise.’

And in German, it is even more striking:

– this something which renders the subject in a way foreign to the immediate content of the sentence,
– this something which presents itself at times by means of apparent nonsense, nonsense heard with regard to the meaning of which one may say for a moment ‘I do not understand,’ ‘I am confused,’
– this rupture of the subject’s assent to what he assumes: ‘there is, in a way, no real content to this sentence.’

This is the first stage, FREUD tells us, of the natural preparation of the witticism, and it is within this that this something is going to happen which, for the subject, will constitute precisely that sort of pleasure generator, that ‘pleasure-genic’ which is the character of the witticism.

What happens at this level? What is, as it were, this order of the Other that is invoked in the subject?

Since there is also something immediate in it that is turned by means of the witticism, the technique of this turning movement must inform us about what is targeted, about what must be attained as the mode of the Other in the subject. This is what we will focus on today, and to introduce it—up until now I have only referred to stories recounted by FREUD himself, or almost nothing else—I will now introduce it with a story that is not specially chosen either.

When I decided this year to address before you the question of the Witz or Wit, I began a little investigation. It is not surprising that I began it by questioning a poet, and a poet who precisely introduces into his prose, as well as occasionally in more poetic forms, in a very particular way this dimension of a certain especially dancing wit that somehow inhabits his work, and that he brings into play when he occasionally speaks—as he is also a mathematician—of mathematics. To be clear, I am speaking here of Raymond QUENEAU. And while we were exchanging our first remarks on this subject, he told me a story. As always, things come to you like a ring fits your finger not only within the analytic experience. I had spent a whole year speaking to you about the signifying function of the horse [Cf. seminar 1956-57: The object relation, the phobia of little Hans], and here, in the witticism, this horse will enter in a very strange way into our field of attention.

The story QUENEAU told me, you do not know it: he took it precisely as an example of what one can call ‘long witty stories,’ as opposed to ‘short stories.’ It is a whole first classification, in fact, as we will see, which conditions, as Jean-Paul RICHTER says somewhere, the body and soul of wit, to which one can oppose the phrase from HAMLET’s monologue which says that if conciseness is lavished by the witticism, it is only its body and its adornment. Both statements are true because both authors knew what they were talking about. You will see indeed whether this term ‘long story’ suits QUENEAU’s story, for the witticism passes somewhere through it. So here is the story. It is an exam story, a baccalaureate story if you like: there is the candidate, there is the examiner.

– Tell me, said the examiner, about the battle of Marengo.

The candidate pauses for a moment, looking dreamy:

– The battle of Marengo? The dead! It’s awful… The wounded! It was appalling…

– But, said the examiner, couldn’t you tell me something more particular about this battle?

The candidate thinks for a moment, then replies:

– A horse rearing up on its hind legs, and neighing…

The examiner, surprised, wants to probe a little further and says:

– Sir, in that case would you talk to me about the battle of Fontenoy?

– The battle of Fontenoy? The dead everywhere! The wounded in abundance. A horror…

The examiner, interested, says:

– But sir, could you give me some more particular indication about this battle of Fontenoy?

– Ooh! said the candidate, a horse rearing up on its hind legs, and neighing.

The examiner, maneuvering, asks the candidate to tell him about the battle of Trafalgar. He replies:

– The dead! A charnel house… The wounded! By the hundreds.

– But really, sir, can’t you tell me anything more particular about this battle?

– A horse…

– Excuse me, sir! I must point out that the battle of Trafalgar is a naval battle.

– Ooh! Ooh! said the candidate, Back off, you old nag!

This story is valuable to me because it allows us to break down, I believe, what is at stake in the witticism. I believe that the entire properly witty character of the story is in its punchline. This story has no reason to end, to conclude, if it is simply made up of the kind of game or contest in which the two interlocutors oppose each other. However far you push it, the effect is produced immediately.

It is a story we laugh at because it is comic. It is comic—I do not even want to go further into this comic aspect—because, to be honest, so many enormous and particularly obscure things have been said about the comic since Mr. BERGSON wrote a book on laughter, of which one can simply say that it is readable.

The comic, what does it consist of? Let us limit ourselves for the moment to saying that the comic is linked to a dual situation. It is insofar as the candidate is before the examiner that this contest—in which, of course, the weapons are radically different—continues, this something is generated that tends to provoke in us what is called ‘lively amusement.’ Is it really the subject’s ignorance that makes us laugh? I am not sure.

Of course, the fact that he brings these basic truths about what can be called a battle, which one would never say, at least when taking a history exam, is something that certainly deserves a moment’s attention. But we cannot even get involved in that, because, in truth, it would lead us to questions about the nature of the comic, and I do not know whether we will have the opportunity to enter into that, except to complete the examination of FREUD’s book, which indeed ends with a chapter on the comic in which it is striking to see FREUD suddenly being a hundred feet below his usual acumen. And we rather ask ourselves why FREUD, no more than the worst author focused on the most basic comic, on the notion of the comic, has somehow refused it. This will probably help us be more indulgent towards our psychoanalyst colleagues who also lack all sense of the comic: it seems to be excluded from the practice of the profession.

It is therefore, it seems—as much as we participate in a strongly comic effect—something that is much more the preparation for war, and it is on this that the final blow must fall, which is before this story, strictly speaking, witty.

I ask you to observe this carefully: even if you are not very sensitive, one or another of you, to what constitutes the wit of this story, the wit nevertheless is contained, lies in one point:
– namely, this sudden departure from the limits of the diagram,
– namely, when the candidate does something that is, strictly speaking, almost implausible if for a moment we have placed ourselves in the perspective that would situate this story in some kind of lived reality.

This, for the subject, suddenly seems to expand, to stretch with reins over that kind of image which, there, takes on almost all its quasi-phobic value. In any case, it seems to us, in a flash, to be a homogeneous instant to what can be reported from all sorts of childhood experiences which, from phobia to all kinds of excesses of imagined life—into which we find it so difficult to penetrate—form, in fact, one and the same thing.

After all, it is not rare that we see reported, in the whole anamnesis of a subject’s life, the entry, strictly speaking, of the big horse—the same horse that descends from the tapestries, standing up—the entry of this horse into a dormitory where the subject is there with fifty classmates. This sudden emergence of the signifying fantasy of the horse is that something which makes of this story, the story—call it what you will—ludicrous or poetic, in any case surely deserving, on this occasion, the title of witty.

If simply, as FREUD says, the sovereignty in the matter is yours, at the same time it may well be called a funny story. That it converges by its content with something that is related to a recognized form at the level of the phenomena of the unconscious is not surprising for us, and this is what makes the value of this story, that its aspect is so clear.

But does that mean that this is enough to make it a witticism? Here, in a way, are broken down these two moments I will call: its preparation, and its punchline. Are we going to stop there? We could stop there at the level of what can be called Freudian analysis. I do not think that any other story would offer more difficulty in highlighting these two moments, these two aspects of the phenomenon, but here they are particularly clear.

In the end, I believe that what makes the character not simply poetic or ludicrous, but properly witty, is something that follows precisely this retrograde or retroactive path, of what, here, we designate in our schema as the ‘pasdesens’ [not-meaning: wordplay on ‘step of meaning’ and ‘lack of meaning’].

It is that, however elusive, ungraspable the punchline of this story may be, it is still heading toward something.

It is perhaps forcing things, no doubt, to articulate it, but to show the direction it will nonetheless be necessary to articulate it. It is that this peculiarity to which the subject returns with something that could in another context be no longer wit but humor, namely that horse rearing up on its hind legs and neighing, but maybe that is indeed the real salt of the story!

Indeed, of all that we have integrated from history into our experience, into our education, into our culture, let us clearly say that this is the most essential image and that we cannot take three steps in a museum, look at paintings of battles, without seeing this horse standing on its hind legs and neighing.

Ever since it entered the history of war with, as you know, a certain brilliance, it is truly a landmark in history, the moment when there were people standing on this horse, or riding this animal which is shown to us standing on its hind legs and neighing.

This truly entailed at the time… that is, somewhere between ECHNOS II and ECHNOS III [uncertain reference], at the arrival of the Achaeans on horses… an enormous progress—that is, these people suddenly had, compared to the horse harnessed to chariots, an extraordinary tactical superiority—up to the war of 1914, where this horse disappears behind other instruments which rendered it practically obsolete. So from the Achaean era to the war of 1914, this horse is indeed something absolutely essential to these relations, or to this inter-human commerce called war.

And the fact that it is also the central image of certain conceptions of history, which we can precisely call battle-history, is something we are already quite prepared—as far as that period is over—to perceive as a phenomenon whose signifying character has been distilled as history progressed. In the end, a whole history is summed up in this image which seems futile to us in the light of this history, and the indication of meaning is indeed something which means that after all there is not much need to torment oneself about the battle, nor Marignan, nor Fontenoy, maybe a little more justifiably about the battle of Trafalgar.

Of course, all this is not in the story. It is not about teaching us here some wisdom regarding the teaching of history, but the story points to, heads toward, it does not teach: it indicates in which direction this ‘pasdesens’ in the circumstance is in the sense of a reduction of value, a dis-exorcism of something fascinating. In what way does this story act, and in what way does it satisfy us, give us pleasure?

Precisely regarding this margin of introduction of the signifier into our meanings which makes us remain slaves to a certain point, that something escapes us after all beyond what this chain of the signifier holds for us as connection with that something which can just as well be said right at the beginning of the story: namely ‘The dead! the wounded!’ and the very fact that this kind of repeated monody can make us laugh also indicates quite clearly to what extent access to reality is denied us, insofar as we enter it through a certain bias which is strictly speaking the bias of the signifier.

This story should serve us simply on this occasion as a reference point. FREUD emphasizes that there are always at play, as soon as it is a question of transmitting the witticism, of the satisfaction it can bring, three persons. The comic can be content with a game of two, in the witticism there are three.

This Other, who is the second, is located in different places:

– Sometimes here he is the second in the story, without it being known or even necessary to know whether it is the schoolboy or the examiner.

– He is just as much you, while I am telling you the story, that is, during this first part, you let yourselves be somewhat taken in, I mean in a direction that demands your various sympathies, either for the candidate or for the examiner, who in a certain way fascinates you or puts you in an attitude of opposition in relation to something in which you see, in this story here, that it is not so much your opposition that is sought, simply a certain captivation in this game where the candidate is immediately grappling with the examiner, and where the latter will catch out the candidate.

And of course, this is sketched out in other stories, otherwise more suggestive, in those stories of a bawdy or sexual type.

You will see: – that it is not so much about diverting whatever resistance or repugnance there is in you in a certain direction, – but, on the contrary, about beginning to set it into action.

Indeed, far from extinguishing what, within you, might object… a good story already tells you that if it is going to be risqué, already something in its beginning will indicate to you that we are going to be on that terrain… there you prepare yourself, either to consent, or to resist, but certainly something in you opposes, on the dual plane, lets itself be caught up in this side of prestige and display which announces the register and order of the story.

Nevertheless, something unexpected will occur, which is always on the level of language, of course. In this story, the play on words, strictly speaking, is pushed much further, it is here so thoroughly decomposed that we see: – on the one hand a pure signifier, the horse in this case, – and on the other hand, we also see in the form of a cliché that it is much more difficult to find again here, the element, strictly speaking, play of signifiers,… but nevertheless it is clear that there is nothing else but that in this story.

It is beyond, it is insofar as something surprises you that there will be the fundamental equivocation, the way in which in the story there is a passage from one meaning to another by way of a signifying support… the examples I have previously given are enough to show this… that this gap will make you reach the stage where it is as a witticism that what is communicated to you strikes you. And you are always struck elsewhere than in the place where your attention, your assent, your opposition were initially, so to speak, drawn or lured.

Whatever the effects, whether they are: – effects of nonsense, – effects of the comic, – effects of risqué participation in something sexually exciting,… let us say that it is never more than a preparation, that something through which we can say that what is imaginary, reflective, strictly speaking sympathetic in the communication, the activation of a certain tendency where the subject is the second person, can be distributed into two opposing roles.

This is only the support, the preparation of the story. Likewise, everything that attracts the subject’s attention, everything that is awakened at the level of consciousness, is only the base intended to allow something to pass to another plane, a plane which itself appears, strictly speaking, always as more or less enigmatic, surprising, to say it clearly, and it is in this that we find ourselves on that other plane at the level of the unconscious.

Therefore, it seems to us, we can ask ourselves the question—since it is always something purely linked to the mechanism of language as such—on this plane… – where the Other seeks and is sought, – where the Other is joined, – where the Other is targeted, – where the Other is reached in the witticism.… how can we define this Other?

After all, if we pause for a moment at this schema, we will use it to state first truths and very simple things. This schema does not entail, even once one makes something like a grid or a framework in which the signifying elements as such must essentially be identified, when we take the various modes or various forms in which the witticism can be classified, we find ourselves led to classifications such as these: – the play on words, – the pun strictly speaking, – the play on words by transposition or displacement of meaning, – the witticism by transposition or displacement of meaning, – the witticism by what is called the small modification in a word which is enough to illuminate something and to make an unexpected dimension emerge.

In the end, whatever classificatory elements we introduce, we have, along with FREUD, tended to reduce them to terms that are inscribed in the register of the signifier.

Does this mean that, in the end, a machine, situated somewhere in α [Other] or in γ [Message]—that is, receiving from both sides, for example, the task of decomposing the access paths by which the term ‘famillionnaire’ is formed in the first example we took, or on the contrary, in the other example, that of the ‘Golden Calf,’ the passage from the ‘Golden Calf’ to the butcher’s calf—is somehow capable of authenticating, of validating as such, if we suppose it sufficiently complex to perform the exhaustive and complete analysis of the signifying elements, if it is capable of registering the effect and saying ‘this is a witticism,’ that is to say, that in a certain way the equivalence of the message with the code is precisely what is suitable for us to be within the at least possible limits of something called a witticism.

Of course, this idea is presented here purely humorously. There is no question of it, it goes without saying. What does this mean? Does this suffice for us to say that, in short, we must have in front of us a human being? Of course, that can go without saying, and we would be very happy with that. If we say this, it roughly corresponds, in general, to experience, but precisely because, for us, the term ‘the unconscious’ exists with its enigma: ‘the human being,’ it is precisely the kind of answer that we must break down. We will begin by saying that we need to have in front of us a real subject.

This indicates that since it is in this direction of meaning that the role of the witticism lies, this meaning—we have already indicated and asserted—can only be conceived in relation to the interaction of a signifier and a need. In other words, for a machine, the absence of this dimension of need is what raises objection and stands in the way of its ever validating the witticism. Thus, we see clearly that it is situated at the level of the question, but can we say for all that that this real someone must have needs that are homogeneous with ours?

This is not necessarily indicated from the outset of our approach since, in the witticism, this need will nowhere be designated and what the witticism designates, what it aims at, is something which is precisely a distance between the need and that which is brought into play in a certain discourse, and which by that very fact puts us at a distance from an infinite series of reactions in relation to what is strictly speaking the need. So here is a first definition.

It is necessary for this subject to be a real subject. God, animal, or human? To be clear, we do not know. And what I say is so true, that all the stories of the supernatural, which also do not exist for nothing in human folklore, do not at all rule out the possibility that one might make wit with ‘a fairy’ or with ‘a devil,’ with someone who is, in a sense, posited as having relationships that are entirely different, in their reality, from those that specify human needs.

Certainly you will tell me that these beings, more or less verbal of thought, are nonetheless more or less woven from human images. I do not deny it! In fact, that is exactly the point!

For, in the end, we find ourselves between these two terms:

– first, dealing with a real subject, that is, with a living being,

– on the other hand, with a living being who hears language, and indeed, much more, who possesses a stock of what is exchanged verbally—usages, expressions, idioms, terms—without which, of course, it would not be possible for us to enter into communication with them by language in any way.

What does the witticism suggest to us and, in a sense, make us grasp?

It is that these images, as they are in human economy, that is, with this state of disconnection, with this apparent freedom which allows among them all these coalescences, these exchanges, these condensations, these displacements, this juggling that we see at the root of so many manifestations that constitute both the richness and the heterogeneity of the human world in relation to biological reality, which we very often take, from the analytic perspective, as a reference system.

That in this freedom of images there is something… whether we want to consider it as primitive, that is, as conditioned by a certain primary lesion of the interrelation of man and his environment… this thing that we have tried to designate in the prematurity of birth, in that essential relationship which makes it through the image of the other that man finds the very unification of his most elementary movements.

Whether it starts there or elsewhere, what is certain is that these images… in their characteristic state of anarchy in the human order, in the human species… are acted upon, are taken, are used by signifying manipulation, and it is in this sense that they pass into what is at stake in the witticism.

What is at stake in the witticism are these images insofar as they have become more or less common signifying elements, more or less recognized in what I have called the metonymic treasure, in what the Other is supposed to know of the multiplicity of their possible combinations, moreover entirely abbreviated, elided, purified even in terms of meaning.

It is of all the metaphorical implications which are, in a sense, already stacked up and compressed in language that we are speaking. It is language for all that it contains in its times of significant creation, but in a non-active, latent state. That is what will be sought.

That is what I invoke in the witticism, what I seek to awaken in the Other, to which I entrust, so to speak, the support, and to put it simply, I address myself to him only insofar as what I introduce in my witticism is something I suppose already rests in him: he possesses this metonymic treasure.

To take one of the examples FREUD gives concerning a famous ‘man of wit’ in Viennese society, about a bad writer who floods the Viennese newspapers with his productions on the stories of NAPOLEON and his descendants. The character FREUD speaks of has a physical peculiarity, that of being red-haired. One can translate the German word into French by saying that this character talks nonsense and that he is red-haired: ‘ce rouquin filandreux’ [this stringy redhead], as it was translated in the French version, who drags on through all the stories of the Napoleonic line.

And FREUD stops and says: we see the possible decomposition on two levels: on the one hand, what gives spice to this story is the reference to the ‘red thread’ that runs through the whole newspaper.

A metaphor itself poetic, which—as you know—GOETHE borrowed from that red thread which makes it possible to recognize the smallest piece of rope—even if stolen, and especially if it is stolen—from the ships of His British Majesty at the time when sailing navies made great use of ropes, and which means that thanks to this red thread something absolutely authenticates a certain kind of material as belonging to a certain origin.

It is likewise this metaphor, more famous for German-speaking people than it can be for ourselves, but I suppose enough of you have, at least from this quotation, in fact, heard of—perhaps even without knowing it—this passage from GOETHE’s Elective Affinities that means you understand what is at issue, that in the play, between this red thread and this stringy character who speaks dullness, is lodged this reply more or less in the style of the period.

That can make people laugh a lot at a certain moment, in a certain context, and that is where I want to arrive, in a certain context that may rightly or wrongly be called ‘cultural,’ which makes something count as a successful punchline, as a witticism. What FREUD tells us at this point is that under cover of the witticism something has been satisfied, which is that aggressive tendency of the subject that would not manifest otherwise. He would not have allowed himself to speak so crudely of a literary colleague if, under the cover of the witticism, it had not been possible.

Of course, this is only one side of the issue, but it is clear that there is a great difference between purely and simply uttering an insult and expressing oneself in this register. To express oneself in this register is to appeal in the Other to all sorts of things supposed to be part of his usage, of his most common code. It is expressly to give you this perspective that I have taken this example borrowed from a special moment in the history of Viennese society.

It is because this red thread is something immediately accessible to everyone… and I will even say, in a certain way, it flatters in each one that something which is there as a common symbol, a desire for recognition, everyone knows what it is about… and in evoking this red thread, something else is indicated, in the direction of the witticism, which puts into question not simply the character, but also a certain value, very particularly and very questionably, which can be defined as follows: those who are essayists, or who approach history from a certain anecdotal angle, are also those who are accustomed to setting as the background theme something in which there appears all too clearly: the inadequacy of the author, the poverty of his categories, even the fatigue of his pen.

In short, a certain style of production at the edge of history, and precisely of that production which clutters the journals. It is something quite characteristic, quite indicated in this witticism, to show us the same traits of direction, of meaning that do not reach their end, but which is precisely what is nevertheless aimed at in the witticism that gives it its scope and value.

We are therefore in a position to say—in contrast to the fact that the living being must be a real living being—that this Other is essentially a symbolic place, it is precisely that of the treasure, let us say of those phrases, or even those ‘received ideas’ without which the witticism cannot take on its value and scope.

But let us observe at the same time that it is not in it—although it is precisely emphasized as meaning—that it is targeted. On the contrary, something happens at the level of this common treasure of categories, and the character that we can call ‘abstract’ of this common treasure: I am alluding very precisely to the element of transmission which makes it so that there is something supra-individual in a certain way, which connects by an absolutely undesirable community with everything that, since the origin of culture, separated the singularly immortal character, so to speak, of what is addressed when the subject is targeted at the level of the ambiguities of the signifier. It is truly the other term, the other pole, of the poles between which the question arises of who the Other is.

This Other, we must of course have: – that it be real, that it be a living being, of flesh, even though it is not, after all, its flesh that I provoke, – that, on the other hand, there is also something almost ‘anonymous’ in that to which I refer in order to reach it and to elicit its pleasure at the same time as my own.

What is the driving force that is there between the two—between this real and this symbolic: the function of the Other, which is strictly speaking put into play? Certainly, there is enough to say that this Other is truly the Other as the place of the signifier.

But from this place of the signifier I only make emerge a direction of meaning, a ‘pasdesens’ [not-meaning, step of meaning], where, truly and in the last resort, lies the spring of what is active. I think we can say that here, the witticism certainly presents itself as a Spanish inn, or more exactly—as in such an inn you must bring your own food, you find the wine—here it is rather the opposite: it is I who must bring the wine of speech, for I will not find it there, even if I consume, in a more or less farcical and comic way, my adversary.

But this wine of speech, it is always present, always there in everything I say, I mean that usually the witticism is there ambient in everything I am recounting as soon as I speak, and I necessarily speak in the double register of metonymy and metaphor. This ‘little bit of meaning’ and this ‘not-meaning’ are all the time intersecting in the way those thousand shuttles, which FREUD somewhere refers to in the Traumdeutung, cross and uncross.

This wine of speech, I would say that usually it spills into the sand. What happens in this very special communion between the ‘little bit of meaning’ and the ‘not-meaning,’ which occurs between me and the Other concerning the witticism, is indeed something like a communion… and regarding our opposition, certainly, it, more specifically humanizing than any other, but if it is humanizing it is precisely that we start from a level, on both sides, that is very inhuman… it is this communion where I indicate the Other.

I will tell you that I need his cooperation all the more as he himself is the vessel, or the GRAIL, and it is precisely because this GRAIL is empty, I mean that I am addressing in him nothing that is specified, I mean that does not unite us at that moment in any communion, toward any accord of desire or judgment, but that it is only a form. And a form constituted by what? Constituted by the thing that is always at stake with the witticism, and which in FREUD is called inhibitions.

It is not for nothing that in preparing my witticism, I evoke something that tends in the Other to solidify him in a certain direction. This is still only a shell in relation to something deeper, which is precisely linked to that stock of metonymies without which, in this order, I certainly cannot communicate anything at all to the Other.

In other words, for my witticism to make the Other laugh, it is necessary—as BERGSON says somewhere, and it is the only good thing in ‘Laughter’—that he be ‘of the parish.’ What does this mean? The very term ‘parish’ will help us progress in understanding what is at stake.

I do not know if you know the origin of the word parish. It is rather peculiar, but ever since etymologists have looked into it, they have never been able to understand by what miracle a thing which was originally παροικία [paroikia]… that is, people who are not of the house, I mean the house of the land, who are from another world, who have their roots in another world, Christians specifically, since the term appeared with Christianity… was, so to speak, metaphorized by another term which inscribed its signifying element in a χ [ki], which is found in the Italian parrocchia, that is, the πάροχος [parokos] in Greek, meaning the provider, the steward to whom the officials of the Empire knew they had to address themselves in order to obtain just about everything an official of the Empire could desire, and in those blessed times of Roman peace, that could go very far.

We are thus at the level designated by this ambiguous term ‘of the parish,’ which indeed highlights the limitation of the field where a witticism acts. You can see well that not all witticisms have the same effect everywhere and at all times, since the one about the red thread had only a slight effect on you compared to ‘the candidate’s story’ just now.

As you are constituted here as an audience, it was quite natural that something as ‘of the parish’ as the baccalaureate or any exam would serve well as a container for what had to be conveyed, namely, a direction of meaning. No doubt, inasmuch as it reaches none, this direction is only the distance that always remains between any realized meaning and what I might call an ideal full-meaning.

I will add one more play on words. The way in which this Other is constituted at the level of the witticism, this is what we know from FREUD’s usage, who calls it censorship, and which concerns meaning.

The Other is constituted as a filter that imposes order and obstacle on what can be received or simply heard. There are things that cannot be heard, or which, as a rule, are never heard anymore, and which the witticism seeks to make heard somewhere, as an echo. To make them heard as an echo, it uses precisely what stands in the way, like some kind of reflective concavity.

It is already to this metaphor that I had come earlier, within which something resists, something that is entirely made up of a series of imaginary crystallizations in the subject.

We are not surprised to see things occur at this level. The little other, to call things by their name, participates in the possibility of the witticism, but it is within the resistance of the subject… which, for once, and this is most instructive for us, I seek rather to provoke… that something will be heard that resonates much further, and which makes the witticism directly resound in the unconscious.