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The last time I spoke to you about the GRAIL. You are the GRAIL, which I solidify by all sorts of awakenings of your contradictions, in order to have you authenticated in spirit, if I may put it that way, to which I send you the message, and whose essential point would consist in its very flaws.

As it is always appropriate to go back a little over what is best understood, I will try, in a certain way, to materialize on the board what I told you last time. What I told you last time concerned the Other, that sacred Other who, in short, will complete, fill in a certain way in the communication of the witz, that something, that gap which constitutes the insolubility of desire.

In a certain way, the “witz” returns its enjoyment to the demand, essentially unsatisfied, under the double aspect, identical moreover, of surprise and pleasure: the pleasure of surprise and the surprise of pleasure.

Last time, I insisted on the process:
– of immobilizing the Other [preparation],
– of forming what I called “the empty Grail”,
which is represented in FREUD by what he calls “the facade” of the witticism:
– that something which in a way diverts the attention of the other from the path along which the witticism will pass,
– that something which, in short, fixes inhibition somewhere precisely to leave free elsewhere the path through which the spiritual word will pass.

Here, then, is roughly how things would be schematized. The path traced by speech, here condensed into a message addressed here to the Other, a message whose stumbling block, the gap, the flaw is authenticated by the Other as a witticism, but by that very act essentially returned to the subject himself, and constituting the indispensable complement for the subject of the proper desire of the witticism. Here then is the schema we usually use:

Here is the Other, in γ the message, here the “I,” here the metonymic object.

But if the Other is indispensable to us…
this, of course, refers to points we will assume you already know
…if the Other is indispensable to the closure constituted by discourse insofar as it reaches the message in a state of satisfying, at least symbolically, the fundamentally insoluble character of the demand as such, if therefore this circuit is the authentication by the Other of this allusion, in short, to the fact that:

– nothing of the demand, once man has entered the symbolic world, can be attained except by a sort of infinite succession of “steps of meaning” [pasdesens – in French, this also means “nonsense” or “lack of meaning”],

– that man—a new ACHILLES in pursuit of another tortoise—is condemned, by the entanglement of his desire in the mechanism of language, to this infinitely unsatisfied approach, linked to the integration into the very mechanism of desire, of something we will simply call discursivity,

…so if this Other is there as essential to the last symbolically satisfying step, constituting an instantaneous moment: the witticism as it passes, it is still appropriate for us to remember that this Other, too, exists.
He exists in the way of the one we call the subject, who is somewhere circulating like the ferret.

Do not imagine that the subject starts from need: need is not yet the subject.
Where is he? Perhaps we will say more about this today.

The subject is the whole system, and perhaps something that is completed in this system.
The Other is the same, he is constructed in the same way, and that is precisely why the Other can take over from my discourse.

I will encounter some special conditions that nevertheless must not be lacking if my schema is to serve any purpose, for them to be representable there. These conditions are those we mentioned last time.

Let us now note what marks the vectors or the directions on these segments.

Here, starting from the “I”:

– towards the object [β→β’]
– and towards the Other [β→α],

starting from the Message:

– towards the Other [γ→α]
– and towards the object [γ→β’]

For of course there is a very strong relation of symmetry between:

– this message [γ→α],
– and this “I” [β→β’],

and the same [relation of symmetry] again, centrifugal:

and the same, centripetal:

between:
– the Other as such, as the place of the treasure of metonymies,
– and then this metonymic object itself, insofar as it is constituted within the system of metonymies.

What have I done—did I explain to you last time—in what I can call the preparation of the witticism? This preparation, which is sometimes best accomplished by not making one, but it is clear that it is not a bad thing to make one. We only have to recall what happened when I did not make one: it happened that sometimes you were left “with your beak in the water” [French idiom: “le bec dans l’eau”—left high and dry, baffled] for things as simple as the “Ah! te…” that I told you about one day, [Cf. session of 20 Nov.] which seems to have left some of you puzzled.

If I had made a “preparation” on the reciprocal attitudes of the “little count” and of the “well-bred young girl,” you might have been [quite] titillated enough for the “Ah! te…” at that moment to have crossed over something more easily. Since you were paying much attention, some of you took a certain time to understand.

On the other hand, the story of the horse from last time made you laugh much more easily, because it involved a long “preparation,” and while you were enjoying yourselves over the remarks of the examinee, which seemed to you marked by the powerful insolence that lies at the heart of ignorance, you found yourselves, in short, quite ready to see enter the flying horse that ends the story, that truly gives it its flavor.

What I produce in the Other with this “preparation” is certainly something we call in FREUD Hemmung, inhibition: something which is simply that opposition, which is the fundamental basis of the dual relation, to everything that I could, as object, set against you as objections. It is quite natural: you put yourselves in a state to withstand the shock, the approach, the pressure. Something is organized which is usually called defense [here inhibition], which is the most elementary force. And this is precisely what is at stake in those kinds of preludes that can just as well be made in a thousand ways.

Sometimes “nonsense” [nonsens – both ‘nonsense’ and ‘lack of meaning’] plays the role of this prelude, it is a provocation that draws the mental gaze in a certain direction. It is a lure, this sort of corrida: sometimes it is “the comic,” sometimes it is “the obscene.” In fact, what is at stake in accommodating the Other is, in a way—in the opposite direction to the metonymy of my discourse—a certain fixation of the Other inasmuch as he himself is discoursing about a certain metonymic object. And in a certain way, we will say: any one at all. There is absolutely no need for this to have the slightest relation to my own inhibitions. No matter! Anything will do, as long as a certain object occupies the Other at that moment. This is what I explained to you last time when I spoke about this sort of “imaginary solidification,” which is the initial position for the passage of the witticism.

In short, what you see, this is the homologous at the level of the Other…
that we take here as subject, this is why I am giving you another system which I draw in blue
…it is the homologous of the line we usually call β→β’, the relation of the “I” to the metonymic object, what we will call the first subject and—to indicate here the superposition of the system—of the other subject in relation to the system of the first.

You see then that what is at stake, for the relay to be given from the Other to the message which authenticates the witticism as such, is that the relay be taken up within its own system of signifiers, that is to say, if I may put it this way, the problem is referred back to it: that is, it, in its own system, authenticates the message as a witticism.

In other words, my γ→α presupposes a sufficient parallelism with a γ’→α’, which is precisely indicated on the schema, this necessity inherent to the witticism which gives it that sort of perspective that, theoretically, reproduces itself infinitely: that a good story is made to be told, that it is only complete when it is told and when others have laughed at it, and that even the pleasure of telling it includes the fact that others in turn will be able to put it to the test on others.

If there is no necessary connection between what I must evoke in the Other of metonymic captivation in order to leave the way open for the spiritual word, there is, on the other hand, necessarily a connection… this is made sufficiently evident by this schema between the signifying chain as it must be organized in the Other, the one which here goes from δ’’’ to δ’’, just as here it goes from δ’ to δ… there must be a connection, and this is what I expressed last time by saying that “the Other must be of the parish” [être de la paroisse – to be an insider or member of the group].

He must not simply, generally speaking, understand French, although that is already a first way of being of the parish, if I make a witticism in French, there are many other things assumed to be known in which he must participate for a given witticism to get through and succeed.

So here then, represented in the schema, are two conditions which we could roughly write as follows: that if you wish, something which would here be β’’→β’’’, that is to say a certain inhibition provoked in the Other. Here, I make a sign made of two small arrows in opposite directions, which are equal and opposite to my metonymy, that is to say to γ→α.

On the other hand, there is a sort of parallelism between γ→α and γ’→α’, which can be expressed this way: that γ→α can find its homologation. We have expressed this by putting a rough spirit [esprit rude – possibly a technical neologism or allusion to a “rough breathing” sign] in parentheses in γ’→α’, that is to say the Other homologates it as such, homologates it as message, authenticates it as witticism.

This at least has the advantage of fixing the ideas, of letting you visualize—since it is one of the mental organs most familiar to the intellectual—of letting you visualize what I mean when I spoke last time of the two subjective conditions for the success of the witticism, namely what it requires of the imaginary other for, within that “cup” presented by the imaginary other, the symbolic Other to hear it.

I leave it to ingenious minds to relate this to what—a curious thing—I once said in a metaphor, and I must have had a reason for it, for using almost the same formal schemata, when I once used the image of the “concave mirror” regarding narcissism. At that time I was mainly concerned with imaginary images, and with the conditions of appearance of the imaginary unity in a certain organic reflection, through something whose formal tendencies make it… We shall not pursue a comparison which, in any case, could only be forced, even if it may be suggestive.

We are now going to make a little more use of this schema, for whatever the interest of what I am thus recalling for you, the sense of what I said last time, if it were not to lead us further, would be rather short. I would like at least once for you to see this clearly, that the initial schema we have been using since the beginning of the year thus transforms into this, by the fact that we develop the formula of the Other as subject, it transforms into this that we have:

– γ→α for the subject,

– here β→β’ [relation to the metonymic object],

And beyond that, this arrangement β’’→β’’’ is reproduced, which means that the Other too has a relation to the metonymic object, finds himself in a position to see at the next level the necessity of γ→α being reproduced, which here becomes γ’→α’, and so on indefinitely.

The last loop, that through which essentially passes the return of need toward something which is this indefinitely deferred satisfaction, is something that, in a way, must make the whole circuit of the Others before returning to the subject, here at its terminal point. In fact, we will soon have to reuse this schema.

For the moment let us stop at something that is a particular case and which FREUD precisely considers immediately after he has given this analysis of the mechanisms of the witticism, of which this is only the commentary. He speaks of what he calls “the social motives of the witticism,” and from there he goes to the problem of the comic. That is what we are going to try to approach today, not to exhaust it because FREUD expressly says himself that he only approaches it from the angle of the witticism, and that otherwise this is a domain infinitely too vast for him even to consider entering it, at least on the basis of his experience.

It is quite striking that, to introduce the analysis of the comic, he puts in the foreground, as being what in the comic is closest to the witticism, with the sureness of orientation and touch that is characteristic of FREUD, what is the closest to the witticism and what he presents to us as such, is precisely what at first glance might seem the most distant from the spiritual, namely the naïve.

The naïve, he tells us, is realized by something based on ignorance, and quite naturally he gives examples taken from children: the scene—which I believe I have already evoked here—of children who, for the benefit of adults, have put together a whole little very pretty story, and which consists in a couple separating, the husband going off to seek his fortune, and returning after a few years, having indeed succeeded in finding wealth, but whom the wife greets by saying:

“You see, I have conducted myself magnificently, I too have not wasted my time during your absence.”

And she opens the curtain on a row of ten dolls. It is always a little puppet scene. But naturally the children are astonished, perhaps simply surprised—they perhaps know more than one might think in the circumstance—but in any case they are surprised by the laughter that bursts out among the adults who have come to see this little scene.

Here is the type of funniness, or the good story, or the “naïve” witticism as FREUD presents it to us. He gives it to us in an even closer technical form to what we call the techniques of language in the story of the little girl who, for her brother who has a slight stomachache, suggests a Bubizin. The little girl has heard of a Medizin for herself, and since Mädi means in German little girl, and Bubi little boy, she thinks that if there are Mädizin for little girls, there must also be Bubizin for little boys.

[“Ein 3½jähriges Mädchen warnt seinen Bruder: Du, iß nicht soviel von dieser Speise, sonst wirst du krank werden und mußt Bubizin nehmen. ‘Bubizin?’ fragt die Mutter, ‘was ist denn das?’ Wie ich krank war, ‘rechtfertigt sich das Kind’ habe ich ja auch Medizin nehmen müssen. ‘Das Kind ist der Meinung, daß das vom Arzt verschriebene Mittel Mädi-zin heißt, wenn es für das Mädi bestimmt ist, und schließt, daß es Bubizin heißen wird, wenn das Bubi es nehmen soll. Dies ist nun gemacht wie ein Wortwitz, der mit der Technik des Gleichklangs arbeitet, und könnte sich ja auch als wirklicher Witz zugetragen haben, in welchem Falle wir ihm halb widerwillig ein Lächeln geschenkt hätten. Als Beispiel einer Naivität scheint es uns ganz ausgezeichnet und macht uns laut lachen.’ Der Witz …,VII : Der Witz und die Arten des Komischen”]

Here is another thing which, provided one has the key, that is to say understands German, can easily be turned into a “funny story,” or can be presented on the level of the spiritual. In truth, although of course this reference to the child is not out of place, the feature, not even of ignorance, but of that something which FREUD defines very specifically in this, which makes it easily substitutive in the mechanism of the witticism, which lies in the fact that, all in all: “there is something,” he says, “that pleases us in it,” and which is precisely what plays the same role as what I just called “fascination” or “metonymic captivation,” it is that we feel in the one who is speaking, and who is involved, that there is absolutely no inhibition.

And it is this, this absence of inhibition in the other, which allows us to transmit to the other, to the one to whom we tell it and who is already himself fascinated by this absence of inhibition, to transmit the essential thing in the witticism, namely this beyond that it evokes, and which here, in the child, in the cases we have just mentioned, consists not essentially in their funniness, but in the evocation of that time of childhood when the relation to language is something so close that it directly evokes for us this relation of language to desire, which is what, in the witticism, constitutes its proper satisfaction.

We are going to take another example borrowed from an adult, and I believe I have already cited it at some point. One of my patients who was not distinguished by what is usually called very advanced convolutions and who, recounting one of those somewhat sad stories, as often happened to him, explained that he had made an appointment with a little woman met in his wanderings, and that this woman had quite simply, as often happened to him, stood him up, as it is called, “poser un lapin” [French idiom: to stand someone up]. He concluded his story by saying:

“I understood well, once again, that she was a woman of non-receipt.” [In French: “une femme de non-recevoir”—playing on “fin de non-recevoir,” a legal term meaning refusal to consider or receive a request.]

He was not making a witticism, he was saying something quite innocent, which nevertheless has its piquant character, and satisfies in us something that goes well beyond the comic apprehension of the character in his disappointment, which, on occasion, if it evokes in us—and this is entirely doubtful—a feeling of superiority, is certainly much inferior in this regard. Since in this point I am alluding to one of the mechanisms often put forward, highlighted, supposedly as the mechanism of the comic, namely the one that consists in our feeling superior to the other.

This is entirely questionable, nothing being—although it was a very great mind who tried to sketch the comic mechanism in this sense, namely LIPPS—it is entirely refutable that this is the essential pleasure of the comic. If there is anyone in this circumstance who retains all his superiority, it is precisely our character, who finds in this occasion grounds to justify a disappointment that is quite far from undermining his self-confidence, which remains unshakeable. If any superiority, then, arises concerning this story, it is rather a kind of lure, that is to say, for a moment everything engages you in this mirage constituted by the way you pose him to yourself, or the way you pose the one who tells the story, in relation to the text of desire or disappointment, but what happens goes far beyond that.

It is that, precisely, behind this expression “woman of non-receipt,” what is drawn is the fundamentally disappointing character in itself of every approach, far beyond the fact that this or that particular approach may be satisfied. In other words, what amuses us here as well is the satisfaction found by the subject who has let this innocent word slip in his disappointment, namely that he finds it sufficiently explained by a phrase he believes to be the accepted expression, the ready-made metonymy for such occasions.

In other words, he finds again in the top hat in the form of a plush rabbit… which he believes to be the real, living rabbit of the valid explanation, and which—in fact, for him—is indeed imaginary… this rabbit that constitutes precisely that very disappointment which he will always be ready to see reproduced, unshaken and constant, without being otherwise affected by it, each time he approaches the object of his mirage.

Here then, what you see is that, in short, the witticism of the ignorant or of the naïve, of the one in the circumstance, to make my witticism, which this time is always complete, so to speak, at the level of the Other. I no longer need to provoke in the Other anything that constitutes that solid cup, it is already entirely given to me by the one whom, by raising to the dignity of a funny story, the one from whose mouth I gather the precious word whose communication will constitute a witticism, the one whom I in a sense raise to the dignity of master-word through my story. The mechanism is, in short, that all the dialectic of the naïve witticism holds in this, that all the dialectic of the naïve witticism is contained in the blue part of the schema:

And that what must be provoked in the Other in the imaginary order so that the witticism in its ordinary form may pass and be received here, is in a way entirely constituted by his naïveté, his ignorance, his very self-satisfaction, and it suffices simply to broach it today to have it homologated by the third party, the great Other, to whom I communicate it as such, to have it raised to the rank and title of witticism.

Naturally, here however, through the promotion of the imaginary other as such, in this analysis of metonymies, in the pure and simple satisfaction he finds in language, and which serves him not even to notice to what extent his desire is deceived, this introduces us—and this is why FREUD places it at the junction of witticism and the comic—this introduces us to the dimension of the comic as such and leads us to pose the question.

Here we are not at the end of our troubles, for in truth, on the subject of the comic, a number of considerations have indeed been introduced, various theories all more or less unsatisfying, and it is certainly not a pointless question to ask ourselves why these theories are unsatisfying, and also why they have been put forward. Clearly, we must go through all sorts of forms in which these theories have presented themselves in order to revisit them. There is no way to spell them out, their addition, their succession, their history, as it is called, will, I believe, not lead us in the direction of anything fundamental.

The question of the comic is in any case, let us say it, evaded every time we try to approach it—I am not saying to resolve it—solely on the psychological level. “Wit” as well as “the comic” are obviously, on the psychological level, easy to gather together under this category of the laughable, or of that which provokes laughter.

Of course, you cannot help but be struck that up until now, even while concluding that the witticism is more or less well received, absorbed, by the fact that you sanction it with a discreet laugh or at least a smile, I have not addressed this question of laughter.

The question of laughter is far from resolved. Naturally, everyone is ready to make it an essential characteristic of what takes place in the “spiritual,” and just as much in the “comic,” but when it is a matter of making it in some sense the spring of expressive character—if one may say so here—of laughter, when it is a matter even simply of connoting to which emotion this phenomenon might correspond, of which it is possible to say, although it is not absolutely certain, that it is unique to man, one begins to enter into things which, generally speaking, are extremely troublesome.

I mean that even those whom we feel are trying to approach, who are brushing up in a certain analogical, metaphorical way, a certain relationship of laughter with what is involved in the apprehension that corresponds to it, the best that can be said is that those who have said what seem the most tenable, the most prudent things on this subject, do little more than note that something which would be analogous in the very phenomenon of laughter. Namely, what it may leave behind somewhere as oscillatory traces, in the sense that it is a spasmodic movement with a certain mental oscillation which would be that of the passage, for example, as KANT says:

– from something that is a tension, to its reduction to nothing,

– the oscillation between an awakened tension and its abrupt fall in the face of nothing, an absence of something which, after its awakening of tension, was supposed to resist it.

Here is an example where the sudden passage from a concept to its contradiction becomes apparent in a psychologist, one of the last of the century, Léon DUMONT, whom DUMAS refers to in his article on psychology. It is a DUMAS article, very subtle, very fine and for which this fortunate man did not tire himself, but which is well worth reading, for even without effort, he brings some very pretty elements.

In short. Laughter, of course, far exceeds the question both of the spiritual and of the comic. It is not uncommon to be reminded that there is in laughter something that is, for example, simply the communication of laughter, the laughter of laughter, the laughter of something linked to the fact that one must not laugh. The fits of giggles of children under certain conditions is still something that also deserves to hold our attention.

There is also a laughter of anxiety, and even of imminent threat, the embarrassed laughter of the victim who suddenly feels threatened by something that quite exceeds, even the limits of their expectation, the laughter of despair. There are even laughters of mourning suddenly learned.

Are we going to deal with all these forms of laughter? That is not our subject. I simply want to emphasize here, since it is not my aim to give you a theory of laughter, that in any case nothing is more distant from being able to satisfy us than the Bergsonian theory of the mechanical arising in the midst of this kind of myth of vital harmony, of that something whose—taken up here on this occasion in a particularly schematic way—the so-called eternal novelty, permanent creation of the élan vital, to be taken up here in a particularly condensed way.

In this discourse on laughter, BERGSON shows well enough, makes evident enough the character, strictly speaking […] To state that one of the characteristics of the mechanical as opposed to the vital is its repetitive character, as if life did not present us with any phenomenon of repetition, as if we did not all piss every day in the same way, as if we did not all fall asleep every day in the same way, as if we reinvented love every time we have sex!

There is truly something incredible in this kind of explanation by the mechanical itself, an explanation which, throughout the book, reveals itself as a mechanical explanation. I mean that the explanation itself falls back into a lamentable stereotypy which entirely misses what is essential in the phenomenon. If it were truly the mechanical that was at the origin of laughter, where would we go?

Where would we place the very subtle remarks of KLEIST about puppets, which go completely against this supposed laughable and fallen character of the mechanical? For he so finely underlines that it is an ideal of grace that is in reality achieved by these little machines which, simply agitated by a few threads, themselves achieve a kind of elegance in the tracing of their movements, linked to the constancy of the center of gravity of their curve, provided simply that they are constructed a little well, I mean following the strict examples constituted by the characteristics of human joints, and in the end, he points out, that no dancer’s grace can reach what can be achieved by a puppet simply handled with dexterity.

Let us set aside the Bergsonian theory, on this occasion, simply to note how much it can completely ignore what is given by the very first, most elementary apprehensions of the mechanism of laughter. I mean even before it is involved in anything as elaborate as the relationship to the spiritual or the relationship to the comic, I mean in the fact that laughter touches on everything that is imitation, doubling, the phenomenon of the double, the mask, and if we look more closely, not only the phenomenon of the mask but also that of unmasking, and this according to moments that deserve our attention.

You approach a child, with your face covered by a mask: he laughs in a tense, awkward way. You come a little closer to him: something begins that is a manifestation of anxiety. You remove the mask: the child laughs. But if you have another mask under that mask, he does not laugh at all.

All I want to indicate here is how much at the very least this calls for a study that can only be an experimental one, but which can only be so if we start to have a certain idea of the direction in which it must be pursued and of which everything—in any case in this phenomenon as in others that I could bring here to support my claim, though it is not my intention here to emphasize it—of which everything shows us that there is in any case a very intense, very tight connection between the phenomena of laughter and the function in man of the imaginary, namely the captivating character of the image, captivating beyond the instinctual mechanisms that answer for it, whether in struggle, or parade, sexual parade or combative parade, and which add in man that additional accent which makes the image of the other very deeply connected to that tension I was speaking of earlier.

This tension always evoked by the object to which attention is given, attention that consists
– in placing it at a certain distance from desire or hostility,
– in that something in man which is at the foundation and very base of the formation of the ego,
– in that ambiguity which makes its unity outside itself, that it is in relation to its fellow that it establishes itself and finds this unity of defense which is that of its being as a narcissistic being.

It is in this field that the phenomenon of laughter must be situated. And to indicate to you what I mean, I will say that it is in this field that there occur these drops in tension to which the authors who have been particularly interested in this phenomenon attribute the occasional, instantaneous triggering of laughter.

If someone makes us laugh when he simply falls to the ground, it is as a function of:

– the image, more or less tense, more or less pompous, to which we had not even paid much attention before,
– those phenomena of stature and prestige which are in a sense the common currency of our lived experience, to the point that we do not even perceive their contours.

It is precisely to the extent, to say everything, that the imaginary character continues his more or less elaborate course in our imagination, while what supports him in reality is there, planted and sprawled on the ground.

It is to this extent that laughter bursts out: it is always through something that is a liberation of the image. Understand this liberation in both ambiguous senses of the term:
– that something is freed from the constraint of the image,
– and that the image also goes wandering off by itself.

There is something comic in the duck whose head you have cut off and which still takes a few steps in the barnyard. That too is something of that order, and that is also why the comic will connect somewhere with the laughable, it is at the level of the direction I → object: β→β’, or β’’→β’’’.

It is certainly to the extent that the imaginary is engaged, somewhere, in this relation to the symbolic that we will see appearing at a higher level, which interests us infinitely more than the whole set of phenomena of pleasure, laughter inasmuch as it connotes, accompanies the comic.

To introduce today the notion of the comic, I would like to start with an example. When Henri HEINE in the story of the “Golden Calf,” replies to SOULIÉ, in a line that is intended to find precisely the spiritual communication when he speaks of the “Golden Calf” regarding the banker. It is almost already a witticism, at least a metaphor, which meets in Henri HEINE this response:

“For a calf, it seems to me to be a little past the age.”

Notice that if Henri HEINE had said that literally, it would simply mean that he had understood nothing, that he would be like my ignorant from earlier, like the one who told the story of “the woman of non-receipt.” The retort that Henri HEINE makes would be comic, in a certain way, and that is what constitutes the underside of this witticism, it is also a little like that, I mean that it sends SOULIÉ back to his garden, it puts him in his little shoes, if I may put it that way.

After all, SOULIÉ did not say anything so funny, and Henri HEINE, by outdoing him, by showing that it can be taken another way, by raising another metonymic object than the first calf, enters and plays on the level of comic opposition. The comic opposition, in short, is linked to the fact that it is impossible not to notice first an absolutely essential difference.

It is that the comic, if we grasp it here in its fleeting state, on the occasion of a witticism, in a line, in a word, in an exchange of retorts, is still something that goes much further, I mean that involves, not purely and simply our encounter, something in a flash in which there is no need for a very long embrace for it to pass with a witticism.

I am addressing all of you, whatever your current position, without knowing where you come from, nor even who you are. For there to be comic relations between us, there must be something that involves each of us much more personally with the other.

Thus, you see there emerging in the relation between SOULIÉ and Henri HEINE something that concerns a mechanism of seduction. There is something that is still a bit rebuffed on SOULIÉ’s side by Henri HEINE’s reply. In short, for there to be a possibility to speak of the relation of the comic, we must place this relation of the demand to its satisfaction, no longer in an instantaneous moment, but in something that gives it its stability and constancy, its path in its relation to another determined person.

For what we analyzed in the substrata of the witticism as being that essential structure of the demand insofar as it is taken up by the other and must be essentially unsatisfied, there is nonetheless a solution that is the fundamental solution, the one all human beings seek from the beginning of their life to the end of their existence. Since everything depends on the Other, in short, the solution is to have an Other all to oneself. That is what is called love. In this dialectic of desire it is a matter of having an Other all to oneself.

The field of full speech as I once evoked it for you is designated, defined on this schema by the very conditions in which we have just seen that something can and must be realized that is equivalent to the satisfaction of desire, the indication that it can only truly be satisfied in the beyond of speech.

It is the link that unites the “Other” with this “I,” its “metonymic object” and the “message.” This is the area and the surface where what is full speech must stand: that is, the essential, characteristic message which constitutes it, this full speech, the one I illustrated for you with “You are my master,” or “You are my wife,” is indeed outlined in this way: you, you, the other, are my wife.

It is in this form, as I told you, that man gives the example of full speech in which he engages as subject, establishes himself as the man of the one to whom he speaks and announces it to her in this form, and says to her: “You are my wife.” I also showed you the strangely paradoxical character of this “You are my wife.”

It is that everything rests on something which must close the circuit [cf. “love is always reciprocal”]. It is that the metonymy involved, the passage from the Other to this unique “object” constituted by the phrase, still requires that the metonymy be received, that something then passes from γ to α, that is, that the “you” in question does not, for example, simply reply: “But no, not at all!”

Even if she does not reply “But no, not at all!”, something else occurs much more commonly, which is that by the very fact that no preparation, however skillful, like the witticism, comes to make us confuse this line β’’’→β’’ with the metonymy γ→α, that is to say, these two lines remain perfectly independent, that is, the subject in question indeed retains his own system of metonymic objects.

We will see the contradiction that is established in the “circle” β→β’→β’’’→β’’→…

…namely that everyone—as the saying goes—has his own little idea, this founding speech will collide with what I will call, since we are here in the presence of a square, the problem not of the quadrature of the circle, but of the “circulation of distinct metonymies,” even in the most ideal union:

“There are good marriages, there are none that are delightful,” said La ROCHEFOUCAULD.

Now, the problem of the Other and love is at the center of the comic. To know this, it is first necessary to remember that if we want to learn about the comic, it would perhaps not be a bad idea, for example, to read comedies. Comedy has a history, comedy even has an origin on which much attention has been focused, and the origin of comedy is most closely tied to the relation that can be called the relation of the “Id” [Ça] to language.

The “Id” that we sometimes speak of, what is it? Of course, it is not simply the original radical need, that need which is at the root of individuation as an organism. This “Id” can only be grasped beyond the entire elaboration of desire in the network of language. This “Id” is something that, in the end, is realized only at the limit.

Here, human desire is not initially taken up in this system of language which postpones it indefinitely: there is no place for this “Id” to constitute and name itself. Yet it is, beyond all this elaboration of language, what represents the realization of that primary need, the form, and which in man at least has no chance even of knowing itself. We do not know what the “Id” of an animal is, and there is very little chance that we will ever know it, but what we do know is that the human “Id” is entirely engaged in this dialectic of language: it is it which carries and preserves the original existence of the tendency.

Where does comedy come from? We are told: from that banquet where man, in short, says yes in a kind of orgy—let us leave to that word all its vagueness—of that same meal which is constituted by offerings to the gods, that is, to the immortals of language. The fact that ultimately every process of elaboration of desire in language comes down to—and gathers together in—the consumption of a banquet, in the fact that after all this detour, it is ultimately to return to enjoyment, and to the most elementary. This is how comedy makes its entry into what can be considered with HEGEL as being “the aesthetic face of religion.”

What does ancient comedy show us?

It would be a good idea for you to stick your nose into ARISTOPHANES from time to time. It is always the moment when the “Id” takes back for its own profit, puts on the boots for its most elementary use of language. It’s clear: in “The Clouds,” ARISTOPHANES makes fun of EURIPIDES and SOCRATES, SOCRATES especially. In what form does he show us this? He shows it to us in this way: that all this fine dialectic is put to the use of an old man trying to satisfy his desires by all sorts of tricks, to escape his creditors, to find a way to get money given to him, or for a young man as well: to escape his commitments, all his duties, to mock his elders, etc.

This return of need in its most elementary form, this foreground emergence of what originally entered the dialectic of language, namely, most particularly all the needs of sex and all hidden needs in general, that is what you see taking place in the foreground on the Aristophanic stage, and this goes far. And especially, I draw your attention to the plays concerning women and the way this kind of return to the character of elementary need underlies the whole process.

What role is especially given to women here, insofar as it is through them that, for example, ARISTOPHANES invites us, for the moment of imaginary communion that comedy represents, to become aware of something that can only be perceived retroactively, that if the State exists, and the city:
– it is so it can be taken advantage of,
– it is so a feast of plenty, which nobody actually believes in, may be held in the agora,
– it is so, in short, that one returns to being surprised by good sense contradicted by the perverse competition of the city submitted to all the tugs of a dialectical process,
– so that through the intermediary of women, the only ones who really know what a man needs, one returns through the intermediary of women to good sense, and naturally all of this takes the most exuberant forms.

It is piquant only because of what it reveals to us about the violence of certain images. It also helps us to imagine fairly well a world where women were perhaps not quite what we imagine through the authors who present us a refined Antiquity.

Women, it seemed to me, must have been—I speak of real women, not the Venus de Milo—must have had a lot of hair in Antiquity and probably did not smell good, if we believe the emphasis placed on the function of the razor and certain perfumes.

Whatever the case, in this Aristophanic twilight, especially that which concerns this vast insurrection of women, there are some very striking and beautiful images. Not least the one that suddenly appears in this phrase of one of the women before her companions, all of whom are not only dressed as men but have attached beards on the side of omnipotence—it’s simply a matter of which beard it is—who suddenly bursts out laughing and says to them:

“How funny, it looks like an assembly of grilled cuttlefish with beards!”

This twilight vision is also something that seems quite apt to suggest to us the entire substratum of relations in ancient society.

Toward what does this comedy evolve? Toward the new comedy. And the new comedy, what is it? The new comedy is something that shows us people engaged in general in the most fascinated and stubborn way with some metonymic object. All types of humans are encountered there, whoever they may be. There is the lecher, the characters who are the same as those found in Italian comedy: these are characters defined by a certain relation to an object, and around whom the entire new comedy pivots, the one that goes from MENANDER [-343→ -292] to our own day, around something that replaces this eruption of sex, which is love, and here, love named as such, love which we will call naïve love, ingenuous love, love which generally unites two rather insipid young people, and which forms the pivot of the plot.

And when I say pivot, it is truly because love plays this role, not of being comic in itself, but of being the axis around which all the comic in the situation revolves up to a period that can be very clearly characterized by the appearance of romanticism, and which we will leave aside for today.

Love is a comic feeling. The summit of comedy is perfectly locatable, definable: comedy in its proper sense, in the sense in which I present it here before you, finds its peak in a unique masterpiece, the one which is in a way the hinge of a transition
– from the presentation of the relations between the self and language, in the form of the self’s taking possession of language,
– to the introduction of the dialectic as such of the relations of man to language, which occurs in a blind, closed form.

In romanticism, this is very important in the sense that romanticism, without knowing it, turns out to be a confused introduction to this dialectic of the signifier as such, of which, all in all, psychoanalysis turns out to be the articulated form. But in the line of comedy, let us say classical, the summit is reached at the moment when the comedy I am talking about, which is by MOLIÈRE and is called “The School for Wives,” poses the problem in an absolutely schematic way, since it concerns love, but love here is present as an instrument of satisfaction. MOLIÈRE presents the problem in a way that offers its grid, with clarity, absolutely comparable to a theorem of EUCLID.

A gentleman named ARNOLPHE, who does not even need to be, for the thing to be rigorous, a man with only one idea—it turns out better that way, but as metonymy serves in the witticism to fascinate us—is indeed a man whom, from the start, we see entering with what we could call the obsession not to be a “cuckold.”

This is his main passion, it is a passion like any other, all passions are equivalent, all passions are equally metonymic. It is the principle of comedy to pose them as such, that is, to center attention on a “self” that believes completely in its metonymic object. To say that he believes in it, moreover, does not at all mean that he is attached to it, for it is also one of the characteristics of comedy that the “self” of the comic subject, whoever he may be, always emerges from it absolutely intact. Everything that has happened during the comedy has passed over him like water off a duck’s back, whatever paroxysms he may have reached in the play.

“The School for Wives” ends with an “Oof!” from ARNOLPHE, and yet, God knows what he has gone through! It is here that I want to briefly remind you what is at stake.

ARNOLPHE has therefore pronounced for a little girl:

“I noticed her for her gentle and calm look. I loved her at the age of four.”

He has therefore chosen his little woman, and has already stated the “You are my wife.” It is even for that reason that he becomes so agitated when he sees that this dear angel is about to be snatched from him. At the point he has reached, he says, she is already my wife, and he has already established her socially as such, to whom he says: “You are my wife.” And he has elegantly resolved the question. He is a man—his partner, named CHRYSALDE, tells him—”who has insight.” It is said somewhere, and in fact, he has so much insight that he has formulated this: he does not need to be the monomaniac character we spoke of at the beginning. Take away this monomania: he is an educator.

Old men have always concerned themselves with the education of girls and have even set principles for it. There, he has found a very happy principle: he himself said that he arranged the care by which she should be kept in that state of being completely idiotic, he says.

“And you would not believe,” he says to his friend, “how far it goes; why, just the other day she asked me if babies were not made through the ear.”

That is what should have set off the alarm for him [French idiom: “mettre la puce à l’oreille”—to arouse suspicion], because if in fact the girl had had a healthier physiological understanding of things, perhaps she would have been less dangerous. “You are my wife,” full speech, is the metonymy. Everything he has little AGNÈS read, namely the duties of marriage, is truly and fittingly explained.

“She is completely idiotic,” he says, and he believes he can base, as all educators do, the security of his construction on that. What does the whole development of the story show us? It could be called “How wit comes to girls.” Wit comes to girls in this, the singularity of AGNÈS’s character seems to have posed a true enigma for psychologists and critics: is she a woman, a nymphomaniac, a coquette, this, that?

Absolutely not! She is a being who has been taught to speak and who articulates. She is caught by the word of the character—completely insipid, by the way—that is the character of the young man, HORACE, who comes into play in the matter when, in the major scene where ARNOLPHE is about to propose tearing out half his hair for her, she calmly replies: “Horace, with two words, would do more than you.”

She punctuates what is punctuated throughout the play, that is, that what came to AGNÈS with the encounter of that character is precisely this: that the character says things that are witty and delightful to hear. What he says, she is quite incapable of telling us and of telling herself, but it is through speech—that is, through something which breaks the whole system of learned speech, of educational speech—that she is captivated, and this kind of ignorance is one of the dimensions that MOLIÈRE already simply connected to this: that precisely for her, there is nothing but this system of speech.

When ARNOLPHE explains to her that he kissed her hands, her arms. She asks, “Is there anything else?” She is very interested. AGNÈS is a “Goddess Reason.” Likewise, the term reasoner, “raisonneuse,” is what, at a certain moment, suffocates ARNOLPHE, when he tries to reproach her for her ingratitude, her lack of sense of duty, the betrayal she practices towards him. She answers pertinently:

“But what do I owe you? If it is only for having made me stupid, your expenses will be repaid!”

And the word “reasoner” and “raisonneuse” is what comes from ARNOLPHE’s mouth.

In other words, from the outset we find ourselves with the reasoner facing the ingénue, and what constitutes the comic spring is that we see, as soon as wit comes to the girl, the reasoner appear in the presence of the character who, himself, becomes the ingénu, because at that moment, in words leaving no ambiguity, he says that he loves her, and he tells her in every possible way, and he tells her to the point that the culmination of his declaration consists in saying to her more or less this:

“You will do exactly what you want—that is—you will have Horace if you want, when the time comes.”

That is to say, the character even overturns the very principle of his system, that in the end, he would rather be a “cuckold,” which was his main concern in the whole affair, than lose the object of his love. Love—this is the point at which I say the summit of classical comedy is reached—love is here… and it is very curious to see how we perceive it now only through all kinds of words that stifle it, through romantic words… love is an essentially comic spring.

It is precisely in this that ARNOLPHE is a true lover, much more authentically in love than the one named HORACE who here is perpetually wavering. Love is comic, precisely in that it is the love most authentically love that declares and manifests itself.

It takes this whole shift in perspective that has occurred around the term “love” for us no longer to be able to conceive of it so easily. For it is a fact: the more the play is performed, the more ARNOLPHE is played in his ARNOLPHE register, the more people become hesitant and say to themselves

“this MOLIÈRE, so noble and so profound, when you have just laughed at it, you ought to weep at it…”

That is to say, the entire romantic change in perspective makes people find it almost no longer compatible for the comic to go along with the authentic and utterly overwhelming expression of love as such. Here then is the outline of the story. I should still provide what brings it full circle. What brings it full circle is this: thanks to the stupidity of the third character, that is, the character HORACE, who on occasion behaves entirely like a fool, even going so far as to place the one he has just eloped with back in the hands of her legitimate successor without ever having been able to identify him until then as the jealous man from whom AGNÈS suffers tyranny, it is to that very man that he confides.

No matter, this character is quite secondary. Why is he there? So that the problem is posed in these terms, namely that ARNOLPHE, at every moment, is informed, hour by hour, minute by minute, of what is happening in reality:
– by that very person who is his rival,
– and on the other hand, just as completely authentically, by his own ward, AGNÈS, who hides nothing from him.

Indeed, as he wishes, she is completely idiotic, only in the sense that she has absolutely nothing to hide, that she says everything, and says it in the most pertinent way. But from the moment she is in the world of speech, this is open—no matter the power of educational formation—her desire is beyond, her desire is not simply on the side of HORACE, to whom we do not doubt she will eventually inflict everything ARNOLPHE so dreaded, but simply by the fact that she is in the domain of speech, she knows her desire is beyond that speech.

She is charmed by words, she is charmed by wit.

It is precisely because something is beyond this metonymic actuality that one tries to impose on her, that she escapes, that, even while always telling ARNOLPHE the truth, nevertheless everything she does is quite equivalent to deceiving him. HORACE himself perceives this, when he tells the story of the sandstone and the stone, about the girl who throws her little stone out the window saying to him:

“Go away, I no longer want to hear your speeches, and here is my answer.”

Which seems to mean, “Here is the stone I throw at you,” but which is also the vehicle for a little letter, is something which indeed—HORACE underlines it very well—for a girl whom one has wanted until then to keep in the most extreme ignorance, is a rather well-found ambiguity. It is the beginning of those double meanings, of all that play from which one might hope for the best in the future.

Here then is the point on which I wanted to leave you today. The self is by nature beyond this grasp of desire in language. The relation to the Other is essential in that the path of desire necessarily passes through the Other, not as the Other is the unique object, but as the Other is the respondent of language, and by himself subjects it to its whole dialectic.