🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

I have the impression that last semester – I have heard the repercussions – I left you a little out of breath. I did not realize it, otherwise I would not have done so. I also have the feeling that I repeated myself, that I went round in circles. This, moreover, perhaps did not prevent some of the things I wanted you to hear from being left behind along the way.

Perhaps it is worth taking a small step back, let’s say a look at the way I approached things this year.

What I am trying to show you about the witticism – for which I have outlined a certain schema whose usefulness may not immediately appear to you – is its unity: how things fit together, how they mesh with the previous schema.

Ultimately, it is something you must perceive as a constant in what I teach you. It would still be necessary for this constant not to be simply something like a small flag on the horizon, toward which you orient yourselves. You need to understand where this is taking you, into what detours it leads you. This constant is the observation that I believe is absolutely fundamental for understanding what is in FREUD, that of the importance of language, as we have said, first, and then of speech. And the closer we come to our object, the more we notice where the difference lies in the importance of the signifier in the economy of desire, let us say again in the formation, the shaping of the signified.

You may have noticed it last night, in hearing what Madame PANKOW brought to our scientific session, which was of interest to us. It so happens that in America people are concerned with the same thing I am explaining to you here. They are trying to introduce the essential, in determining these psychic troubles, these economic troubles, the fact of communication and what they occasionally call the message.

You may have heard Madame PANKOW speak to you about someone who is far from being born yesterday, namely Mr. Gregory BATESON, anthropologist and ethnographer, who has brought something that makes us reflect a little beyond the tip of our nose about therapeutic action.

He is trying to formulate something that is at the root of the genesis of psychotic disorder, in something that is established between mother and child, and which is not simply the effect of tension, of retention, of defense, of ratification, of frustration, in the elementary sense that I specify, of interhuman relation, as if it were something happening at the end of an elastic band.

He is trying to introduce from the outset the notion of communication – insofar as it is centered, not simply on contact, on a relationship, on an environment, but on meaning – to place it at the origin of what has happened as originally discordant, rending, in what binds the child in its relations with the mother. And when he designates, when he denotes, as being the essential discordant element of this relation, the fact that communication has presented itself in the form of a ‘double relation’ [double bind].

As Mrs. PANKOW told you very well last night, telling you that in the same message in which the child has deciphered the mother’s behavior, in that same message there are two elements which are not defined with respect to each other, simply in the sense that one presents itself as the defense of the subject with respect to what the other means, which is the common notion we have of what happens at the level of the mechanism of defense.

When you analyze, you can say: “What the subject says in order not to recognize that there is some meaning in him somewhere.” He announces it to himself, just as he signals to you on the side. That is not what it is about. It is about something that concerns the Other, and which is received by the Other in such a way that, if he responds on one point, he knows by that very fact that he will find himself trapped on the other.

As Mrs. PANKOW told us yesterday:
– if I respond to the declaration of love my mother makes to me, I will provoke her withdrawal,
– and if I do not hear it as such, that is, if I do not respond to her, I will lose her.

So you see that we are now introduced into this dialectic of double meaning, in this alone that it involves a third element.

It is not one after the other… that is to say, something that is beyond meaning, a meaning that would have the privilege of being the most authentic… it is two messages simultaneously, in the same transmission so to speak, two meanings that create in the subject a position such that he finds himself at an impasse. This proves to you that even in America there is enormous progress. Does this mean that it is completely sufficient? Last night Mrs. PANKOW very clearly emphasized what this attempt had of being ‘close to the ground,’ of being empirical.

Of course, it is not at all about empiricism: if in America there were not, alongside, works that are very important, carried out on the level of what is called ‘game strategy,’ they would not even have thought of introducing this into analysis, which is still a reconstruction of something that is supposed to have taken place at the origin, which determines this deeply torn, unbalanced position of the subject in relation to, precisely, what the message has as constitutive for the subject.

If this position does not imply that the message is something constitutive for the subject, it is hard to see how one could ascribe such great effects to this primitive double relation. So the question that arises is to know what the situation will be, what the process of communication will be insofar as it fails to be constitutive for the subject.

It is another point of reference that must be sought. Up until now, when you read and when you hear what Mr. BATESON means, you see that everything, in short, is centered, no doubt on the double message, but on the double message as double meaning. It is precisely here that the system fails, and in what way? In that, it is only this way of conceiving things, of presenting them, that precisely neglects what the signifier has as constitutive in the signification.

Last night, I had made a note in passing – which I now lack – that I had picked up in Mrs. PANKOW’s very remarks, and which comes down roughly to this:

“There is no – she said – word that would ground speech as act.”

And this is indeed on the path to what I am now approaching: among these words, there must be one that ‘grounds speech as act in the subject.’ It is in this sense that she expressed her demand, her sense of the system’s insufficiency. It is in this that Mrs. PANKOW expressed a demand for stabilization of the whole system: that within speech there should be, somewhere, something that grounds speech as true.

She was thus, in this sense, turning to a recourse to the perspective of personality. This is indeed what she brought yesterday, and it is at least something that has the merit of testifying to a certain demand corresponding to something that, in the system, leaves us uncertain, does not allow us sufficient deduction, sufficient construction.

I absolutely do not believe that this is how it can be formulated. This personalist reference, I do not believe it is psychologically founded except in the sense that we cannot help but sense that in this impasse created by meanings, insofar as it is supposed to trigger a profound bewilderment in the subject when he is a schizophrenic, we cannot help but feel that there must be something that is at the root of this deficit.

It is not simply the experience maintained, taken, impressed, of these dead ends of meanings, but also something that is the lack of something that grounds meaning itself and that is the signifier. And something more still, which is precisely what I am going to address today, that is to say, something that is founded not simply as personality, as something ‘that grounds speech as act,’ as Mrs. PANKOW said last night, but something that is posited as that which gives authority to the Law.

Here we call law, precisely, what is properly articulated at the level of the signifier, that is, the text of the Law. It is not the same to say that there is a person who must be there to uphold, so to speak, the authenticity of speech, and to say that there is something that authorizes the text of the Law.

Because this something that authorizes the text of the Law is something that suffices to be itself at the level of the signifier, that is, the Name-of-the-Father, what I call the Name of the Father, that is, the symbolic father. It is something that subsists at the level of the signifier, it is something that, in the Other insofar as it is the seat of the Law, represents this Other in the Other, this signifier that supports the Law, that promulgates the Law.

This is precisely what is expressed by the myth necessary to FREUD’s thought, the myth of Oedipus.

That for which – look at it very closely – it is necessary that he himself provides, in this mythical form, the origin of the Law: it is that, for there to be something which makes the Law founded in the Father, there must be the murder of the father. The two things are closely linked, that is to say, the Father insofar as he promulgates the Law is the dead Father, that is, the symbol of the father. The dead father is the Name of the Father, which is constructed here on the continuum.

This is absolutely essential. I will remind you on occasion why. Around what did I center everything I taught you two years ago about psychosis? Around something I called Verwerfung. I tried to make you feel it as something that is other than Verdrängung, that is, the fact that the chain of signifiers continues – whether you know it or not – to unfold, to be ordered in the Other, which is essentially the Freudian discovery.

But I told you that Verwerfung was something that was not simply beyond your access, that is, in the Other as repressed and as signifier. That is what Verdrängung is, it is the chain of signifiers. The proof of this is that it continues to act without you giving it the slightest meaning, it determines the slightest meaning without you knowing it as a chain of signifiers.

I also told you that there is something else which on this occasion is Verwerfung. There can be in the chain of signifiers a signifier or a letter that is missing, that is always missing in typography… because it is a typographical space, the space of the signifier, the space of the unconscious is a typographical space. One must try to define typographical space as something constituted in a line, in small squares. There are topological laws of typographical space… there is something that is missing in this chain of signifiers.

You must understand the importance of the lack of the particular signifier I just mentioned, which is the Name of the Father, precisely as it founds as such the fact that there is Law, that is, articulation in a certain order of the signifier – Oedipus complex, or law of Oedipus, or law of prohibition of the mother, for example – the signifier which signifies that, within this signifier, the signifier exists. That is the Name of the Father. And as you see, within the Other, it is an essential signifier.

It is around this that I have tried to center for you what happens in psychosis, namely how the subject must make up for the lack of this essential signifier which is the Name of the Father. And it is around this that I have tried to organize for you everything I have called the chain reaction, or the rout, that occurs in psychosis. What must I do here?

Should I immediately enter into this reminder of what I told you about President SCHREBER? Or should I show you in an even more precise way what I articulate, what I have just announced by showing you in detail what relation you are to articulate at the level of this year’s schema… which, to my great surprise, does not interest everyone, but which nevertheless interests a few… at the level of this year’s schema, to try to articulate for you what I have just tried to indicate?

Do not forget that this schema was constructed to represent for you what happens at the level of something that deserves the name technique, the technique of the witticism, which is something particular, quite singular since, clearly, it can be produced in the most unintentional way in the world by the subject.

As I showed you, the witticism is sometimes nothing more than the reverse of a slip of the tongue, and experience shows that many witticisms are born in this way: one realizes after the fact that one has been witty. It happened on its own. At first, in some cases, it could be taken for exactly the opposite, a sign of naivety. I alluded last time to the naïve witticism. This witticism, with its result which is this satisfaction peculiar to it, it is around this that last semester I tried to organize this schema for you in order to try to locate how we might conceive the origin of that special satisfaction it provides.

This led us back to nothing other than the dialectic of demand beginning from the ego. Recall the schema of what I could call the primordial symbolic ideal, which is completely non-existent at the moment of satisfied demand insofar as it is represented by the simultaneity of the intention – insofar as it is going to manifest itself in a message – and the arrival of this message as such in the Other, I mean the fact that the signifier, since this chain is the chain of signifiers, arrives in the Other.

It is seen as such if there is perfect identity, simultaneity, exact superimposition between:
– the manifestation of intention, insofar as it is that of the ego,
– and the fact that the signifier is, as such, ratified in the Other: this something that is at the origin of the very possibility of the satisfaction of speech.

We therefore suppose – this is what I call the primordial ideal moment – that:

– if this moment exists, it must be constituted by this simultaneity, this exact coextensivity of desire as it manifests itself, and of the signifier as it carries and comprises it,

– if this moment exists, what follows – that is, something here, which will succeed the message – is something that will follow its passage in the Other, which will correspond to what is necessary, and to what is realized in the Other and in the subject for there to be satisfaction.

This, very precisely, is the necessary starting point for you to understand that it never happens. That is to say, it is of the nature and the effect of the signifier that what happens here [γ] appears as signified, that is, as something made of the transformation, the refraction of desire by its passage through the signifier.

And why? Because it is for this reason that these two lines are interlaced: it is to make you sense the fact that desire is expressed and passes through the signifier, that is, that it crosses the line of the signifier, and at the level of this crossing of desire with the line of the signifier it encounters what?

It encounters the Other – we will see in a moment, since we will have to return to it, what this Other is in this schema – it encounters the Other – I did not tell you as a person – it encounters the Other as the treasure of the signifier, as the seat of the code. In other words, it is there that the refraction of desire by the signifier occurs.

Desire thus arrives as signified, other than what it was at the start, and that is why, not “your daughter is mute,” but why your desire is always cuckolded [cocu; in French, “cocu” means cuckolded, also used for comic effect]. It is because in the interval, what is at stake shows you that it is rather you who are, cuckolded. You yourself are betrayed in this, that your desire has slept with the signifier. This is essential.

I do not know how I should better articulate things for you to make you understand them. This is due to the fact that desire as an emanation, the point of a moment of this radical ego, simply by the fact that it is this path. That is the meaning of the schema, it is there to visualize for you this concept that the passage through the chain of the signifier introduces into the dialectic of desire, by itself, this essential change.

So it is quite clear that for the satisfaction of desire everything depends on what happens at this point [A], first defined as the place of the code, as that essential something which, already by itself, from the beginning, ab origine, simply by its structure as signifier, brings about this essential modification of desire at the level of its crossing of the signifier. There, everything else is involved since there is not only the code, there is much else. I am situating myself here at the most radical level, but of course there is the Law, there are prohibitions, there is the superego, etc.

But to understand how these different levels are constructed, one must understand that already at the most radical level, inasmuch as there is an Other as soon as you speak to someone, that there is an Other in him as subject of the code, already we find ourselves subjected to this dialectic of the cuckolding of desire.

So everything depends, it turns out, on what happens at this crossing point, at this level of passing through. It turns out that all possible satisfaction of human desire will thus depend on the agreement:
– of the signifying system as it is articulated in the speech of the subject and, as Monsieur de LA PALICE would tell you:
– of the system of the signifier as it rests in the code, either at the level of the Other as the place and seat of the code.

A small child hearing this would be convinced, and I do not claim that this is a step further that what I have just explained to you makes us take. It still needs to be articulated.

It is there that we are going to approach the junction I want to make for you between this schema and what I announced earlier as essential regarding the important question of the Name of the Father. You will see being prepared, being sketched out – and not being generated or especially self-generated – the leap that must be made to arrive. For everything happens at the level of discontinuity: the peculiarity of the signifier being precisely that it is discontinuous.

What does the technique of the witticism bring us by experience? This is what I have tried to make you feel in every way. It is something which, while involving no particular immediate satisfaction, consists in this: that something happens in the Other which is equivalent, which represents, which symbolizes what could be called the necessary condition for any satisfaction, namely that you are indeed heard beyond what you say since in no case can what you say truly make yourself heard. The witticism as such develops in the dimension of metaphor, that is to say that it is beyond the signifier inasmuch as through it you try to signify something and that, all the same, you always signify something else.

It is precisely in something that will present itself as a stumbling of the signifier that you are satisfied simply by this: that at this sign the Other recognizes this dimension beyond where what is at stake must be signified, and which you cannot signify as such. This is the dimension that the witticism reveals to us, and it is important, it founds this schema in experience, by the necessity we have had to construct it, to realize what happens in the witticism, namely that this something which makes up, to the point of giving us a kind of happiness, for the failure of the communication of desire by way of the signifier, is something that in the witticism is realized in the following way: the Other ratifies a message as stumbled, as failed, and by this very stumbling, recognizing the beyond-dimension in which true desire is situated, that is, what, because of the signifier, fails to be signified.

You see that the dimension of the Other extends a little:
– for there he is not only the seat of the code,
– there he intervenes as subject, ratifying a message in the code, complicating it, that is to say he is already there at the level of the one who constitutes the Law as such, since he is capable of adding to it this trait, this message, as supplementary, that is to say as himself designating the beyond of the message.
This is why I began this year, when it came to the formations of the unconscious, by speaking to you about the witticism.

Let us try to look more closely, in a less exceptional situation than that of the witticism, at this Other insofar as we are trying to discover in its dimension the necessity of this signifier inasmuch as it founds the signifier, that is, inasmuch as it is the signifier that institutes the legitimacy of the Law or of the code.

To return to our dialectic of desire, we are not always going to express ourselves when we address the other by way of the witticism. If we could do so, we would be happier in a certain way. It is, during a short time in the discourse I address to you, what I try to do. I do not always succeed. It is your fault or it is mine, but it is absolutely indiscernible, from this point of view.

But finally, on the down-to-earth plane of what happens when I address the other, there is a dimension that allows us to found it in the most elementary way at the level of the conjunction of desire and this signifier of the Other. It is a word that is absolutely marvelous in French, for all the equivocations it allows to be made, and for how many puns that I myself blush to use here, except in the most discreet way.

As soon as I have said this word, you will remember immediately to what sort of evocation I am referring. It is the word “tu” [second person singular “you” in French]. This “tu” is absolutely essential in what I have repeatedly called full speech, speech inasmuch as it founds something in history, the “tu” of “You are my master,” or “You are my wife.” This “tu” is the signifier of the call to the Other, this Other of whom I have shown you… and I recall for those who have kindly followed the whole chain of my seminars on psychosis… the usage I have made of it, the demonstration I have tried to bring to life before you around this distance:

– from “You are the one who will follow me,”
– to “You are the one who will follow me.”

In other words, what already at that moment I was approaching for you, what I tried to train you in, is precisely what I am now going to allude to, and to which I had already given its name.

There is in these two terms, with their difference… and more in one than in the other, and even completely in one and not at all in the other… a call.

In “You are the one who will follow me” [“Tu es celui qui me suivras” – future tense with invocation], there is something that is not in “You are the one who will follow me” [“Tu es celui qui me suivra” – future tense as an objective statement], and this is called invocation. If I say “You are the one who will follow me,” I invoke you, I grant you, I grant you to be the one who will follow me, I elicit in you the “yes…” that says:
– “[yes] I am yours,”
– “[yes] I devote myself to you,”
– “[yes] I am the one who will follow you.”

But if I say “You are the one who will follow me,” I do nothing of the sort, I announce, I state, I objectify, and even, at times, I repel. It can even mean: “You are the one who will always follow me, and I am fed up with it.” In fact, in the most ordinary way, the most consistent way this sentence is spoken, it is a refusal.

Invocation is something that of course requires a wholly different dimension, namely that I make my desire depend on your being, in the sense that I call it to enter the path of this desire, whatever it may be, in an unconditional way. It is this process of invocation, in the sense that it means I appeal to the voice, that is, to what supports speech: not to speech, but to the subject, precisely as the one who bears it, and that is why at this level I am at the level I referred to earlier, when speaking about Mrs. PANKOW, as the personalist level.

That is exactly why the personalists go on and on with “you, you, you…” all day long. Mr. Martin BUBER, for example, whose name Mrs. PANKOW mentioned in passing, is indeed in this register, a prominent name. Of course, there is here an essential phenomenological level, and we cannot but pass through it. But we should not simply give in to its mirage either, to prostrate ourselves before it, because that is where we actually encounter this danger: at the level of this personalist attitude which quite readily lends itself to mystical prostration.

And why not? We refuse no attitude to anyone; we simply ask for the right to understand them. This is not, moreover, refused to us on the personalist side, but it is refused to us on the scientistic side, because if you begin to attach authenticity to the subjective structure of what the mystic tells you, the scientist also considers that you are falling into ridiculous indulgence, whereas it seems to me that any subjective structure, whatever it may be, insofar as we can follow what it articulates, is strictly equivalent, from the point of view of subjective analysis, to any other.

Namely, that only the idiotic fools of the type of Mr. BLONDEL (the psychiatrist) can object, in the name of a so-called “ineffable morbid consciousness,” experienced, of the other, something that presents itself not as “ineffable,” but articulated. This must as such be refused, in the name of the confusion that comes from this: that one believes that what is articulated is precisely what is beyond, when in fact it is nothing of the sort: it is what is beyond that articulates it.

In other words, there is no need to speak of the “ineffable” in regard to this subject, whether delirious or mystic. We are at the level of subjective structure, of something as such that cannot present itself in any other way than as it does, and which as such therefore presents itself with its full value at its level of credibility.

If there is any “ineffable,” either in the delirious or in the mystic, by definition he does not speak of it, since it is “ineffable”! So we have no need to judge what he articulates, that is, his speech, by what he cannot speak of. If it is possible – and we quite willingly suppose it – that there is “ineffable,” never in the name of the “ineffable” do we refuse to grasp what he demonstrates as structure in a speech, whatever it may be.

We may get lost in it, in which case we give it up. But if we do not get lost, the order it demonstrates and reveals is to be taken as such, and we generally find that it is infinitely more fruitful to take it as such and to try to articulate the order it lays down, provided we have the right points of reference. That is what we strive for here: we start from the idea that it [his speech] was essentially made to represent the signified. We are immediately drowned, because we fall back into previous oppositions, namely that we do not know the signified.

This “you” in question is the one we invoke, but in invoking it, it is still this personal subjective impenetrability which, of course, will be involved, but it is not at this level that we seek to reach it. We seek to give it what is at stake in every invocation.

The word invocation has a historical use, it is what took place in a certain ceremony among the Ancients, who had more wisdom than we do on certain points, which they practiced before combat. It consisted in doing what was necessary – probably they knew what – to win over to their side the gods of others.

That is exactly what “invocation” means, and it is in this that resides the essential relation to which I now bring you back, this second necessary stage, of the call: for desire and demand to be satisfied, it is not enough simply to say “you, you, you…” and get a pulse participation. It is precisely a matter of giving him the same voice that we wish him to have, of evoking that voice which is precisely present in the witticism, at least as its own dimension.

The witticism is a provocation that does not succeed, in the great feat, the great miracle of invocation. It is at the level of speech, and insofar as it is a matter of this voice being articulated in accordance with our desire, that invocation takes place. We then find again at this level that all satisfaction of demand, insofar as it depends on the Other, is thus going to be suspended on what happens here, that is, in this revolving back-and-forth of the message to the code and from the code to the message, which allows, through the Other, for my message to be authenticated in the code.

We return to the previous point, that is, to what constitutes the essence of the interest we share this year in the witticism.

I will simply point out in passing that if you had had this schema, that is, if I had been able, not to give it to you, but to forge it for you at that time, in other words, if we had arrived together at the same moment at the same witticism, I could have illustrated for you on this schema what essentially happens in President SCHREBER, insofar as he became the prey, the subject absolutely dependent on his voices. If you look closely at the schema behind me:

And if you simply suppose that everything that could in the Other respond in any way at this level I call the level of the Name-of-the-Father, which embodies, specifies, particularizes—I don’t know… particularizes what?—what I have just drawn for you, which must in the Other represent the Other as giving reach to the Law, is verworfen [forcibly rejected; technical term in Freud and Lacan].

If you suppose that this is absent—which is the definition I have given you of Verwerfung—the Name-of-the-Father, you notice that the two links [dotted] that I have boxed here, namely the back and forth from the message to the code [M→A] and from the code to the message [A→M], are thereby destroyed and impossible, and that this allows you to map onto this schema the two fundamental types of phenomena of voices that appear as substitutes for this lack, this absence, precisely as it was once evoked.

This is the tipping point, the turn that precipitates the subject into psychosis—and for now I leave aside “in what way” and “at what moment” and “why”—it is afterward, in the hollow, in the void made by this: that precisely what is called, at a moment, at the level of “you are” and of the Name-of-the-Father… that this Name-of-the-Father, insofar as it is able to ratify the message, is the guarantor… that what you can then see on this schema occurs, namely that it occurs as autonomous, and for this very reason, that the Law as such presents itself as autonomous.

I began this year my discourse on psychosis with a sentence I told you in one of my patient presentations, in which it was very clear at what moment the sentence mumbled by the patient: “I just came from the butcher’s,” tipped over, following these appositions that were no longer assumable by the subject, with the word “sow,” which beyond this, was no longer, by the subject, integrable, and by its own movement, by its own inertia as signifier, tipped to the other side, drawn from the reply in the Other.

That was pure and simple elementary phenomenology. The point is to see why—and after all, we can do without it—what is at issue, by the exclusion of what happens between the message and the Other, will result in the two major categories of voices and hallucinations that SCHREBER has, namely the emission here at the level of the Other, of signifiers of the fundamental language.

That is, of what appears as such, thus as broken and original elements of the code, articulable only in relation to each other because this fundamental language is so organized that literally it covers the world with its network of signifiers without anything else being sure and certain except that it concerns the essential total signification. Each of these words has its own weight, its accent, its value as signifier. The subject articulates them in relation to each other. Each time they are isolated, the truly enigmatic dimension of signification—as it is infinitely less obvious than the certainty it entails—is something absolutely striking. In other words, the Other emits, if I may say so, only beyond the code with no possibility of integrating that something which can come from here [M], that is, from the place where the subject articulates his message.

And on the other hand, especially if you put back here the little arrows, there will come something that in no case will be authentication of the message, that is, a return from the Other as support of the code onto the message to integrate it, to authenticate it in the code with any intention whatsoever, but which, of course, will also come from the Other, like every message since there is no way for a message not to come from the Other, even when it comes from us as a reflection of the Other since it is made with a language that is the language of the Other.

So this message will depart from the Other here, and will leave this reference point to articulate itself in this kind of discourse:
– “And now I want to give you…”,
– “Specifically I want this for myself…”,
– “And now this must nevertheless…”

What is missing from all this?

– The main thought which is expressed at the level of “the fundamental language,”
– the voices themselves which know the whole theory,
– the voices themselves which also say “We lack reflection.”

This means that from the Other indeed depart messages of the other category of messages. It is, strictly speaking, a message that, as such, cannot be ratified, a message which also manifests itself in the pure and broken dimension of the signifier:

– something whose signification only lies beyond itself,

– something which, because it cannot participate in this authentication by the “you,” presents itself as something that has no other object than to present as absent this position of the “you” where signification is authenticated, for of course the subject strives to complete this signification.

He therefore provides them, the complements to his sentences: “I do not want now,” say the voices. That is elsewhere. It is said elsewhere, that he, SCHREBER, cannot confess that he is a whore, eine Hure. Not everything is spoken. The message here remains broken in that it is precisely that it cannot pass through the voice at all, it can only arrive at the level of the message as an interrupted message.

I think I have sufficiently indicated to you that the essential dimension which develops and imposes itself in the Other as the place of rest, the treasure of the signifier, involves – for it to be able to fully exercise its function as Other – this: that in the passage of the signifier, there is this signifier of the other as Other. Why? I mean insofar as the other precisely also has beyond him this Other, insofar as he is capable of giving foundation to the Law. But it is a dimension that is, of course, of the order of the signifier, which is embodied in persons who may or may not support this authority.

But the fact, for example, that on occasion persons are lacking, that there is paternal deficiency, in the sense for example that the father is too stupid, is something that in itself is not the essential thing. What is essential is that the subject, from whatever angle, has acquired the dimension of the Name-of-the-Father.

Of course, what actually happens, what you can note in biographies, is that the father is often there precisely to do the dishes in the kitchen with his wife’s apron. That is not at all what suffices to determine a schizophrenia.

I am going to lay out for you the small schema with which I want to introduce for next time this: it is what will allow us to make the connection between this distinction, which may seem a bit scholastic, between the Name-of-the-Father and the real father:
– the Name-of-the-Father insofar as it can, on occasion, be lacking,
– and the father who does not seem to need so much to be there for it not to be lacking.

So I am going to introduce what will be the subject of my lesson next time, namely what I entitle from today onward, the paternal metaphor. That is to say, of course, a name is never anything but a signifier like any other.

It is indeed important to have it, but that does not mean that one attains it, any more than one attains the satisfaction of desire which is in principle cuckolded, as I mentioned earlier. This is why in the act, the famous act of speech that Mrs. PANKOW spoke about yesterday, it is in this dimension that we call metaphorical that the evocation I spoke of earlier will be realized concretely, psychologically. In other words, the Name-of-the-Father must be had, but one must also know how to make use of it, and it is in this, it is through this, that the fate and the outcome of the whole affair may depend greatly on the actual words that take place around the subject, particularly in his childhood.

But the essence of the paternal metaphor, which I am announcing to you today, we will speak of at greater length next time, …consists in a triangle:

And we have the schema:

And everything that is realized in the S depends on what is posited as signifiers in the A. The A, if it is truly the place of the signifier, must bear some reflection of this essential signifier, which I represent here, in this zigzag, what I have called elsewhere – in my article on L’instance de la lettre – the ‘L schema.’

There must be at least something distinguished there, which distinguishes at least these four cardinal points. We have three of them, which are given by the three subjective terms of the Oedipus complex as signifier, at each vertex of the triangle.

And it is on this that I will return next time. For now, I ask you, simply to whet your appetite, to admit what I am telling you.
The fourth term is, indeed, the S. But as it is he, and he—not only do I grant you this, but it is from there that one starts—is indeed ineffably stupid:
– he does not have his signifier among the three vertices of the Oedipal triangle,
– he is outside,
– he depends on what is going to happen in the game,
– he is ‘the dead man’ in the game.
It is even because the game is structured in this way, I mean that it continues not only as a particular game but as a game instituting itself as a rule, that the subject will find himself depending on the three poles called the ego ideal, the superego, and reality.

But to understand this transformation of the first triad into the other, one must see that, however much ‘dead’ he may be, the subject—since there is a subject—remains in this game at his own risk, that is, at this unconstituted point where he is, he will have to take part in it, if not with his money—he may not have any yet—at least:
– with his skin,
– with his images,
– with everything that follows from it,
– with his imaginary structure.

And the fourth term, the S, will represent itself in something that is opposed in the ternary to the signifier of the Oedipus, that is, in something which, for it to fit, must also be ternary. For of course, in the stock and baggage of images—open, to see, the books of Mr. JUNG and his school: you will see—there are countless, it sprouts and vegetates everywhere, and there is: the serpent, the dragon, tongues, the flaming eye, the green plant, the flowerpot, the concierge, all these are images, truly all fundamental and indisputably loaded with signification. Only, one strictly has nothing to do with them, if you wander at this level, except to lose yourself with your little lantern in the vegetating forest of primitive archetypes.

And to understand something there, it is necessary to know that for what interests us, namely the intersubjective dialectic, it is insofar as there are three selected images, I articulate my thought rather strongly here to take on the role of guide in all this, which is in fact not at all difficult to understand since we already have something absolutely all prepared, and all prepared in a way not only to be the counterpart, but to merge with the base of the ‘mother, father, child’ triangle: it is the relation of the fragmented body—at the same time enveloped by quite a few of those images we mentioned earlier—with the unifying function of the total image of the body, in other words, the relation of the ego and the specular image.

This already gives us the base of the imaginary triangle. The other point—this is precisely where we are going to see the effect of the paternal metaphor—the other point, as I told you in my seminar last year on Object Relations, but you will now see it take its place in what we are entering into this year, that is, for The Formations of the Unconscious, this point, I think you have recognized it just by seeing it here as the third with the mother and the child. But you see it in another relation, which I did not hide from you at all last year, since it was on this that we finished, namely in the relation with the Name-of-the-Father, that is, what gave rise to the emergence of the horse fantasy in our little Hans.

This third point, I finally name it, I think you all have it on your lips, it is nothing other than the phallus. And that is why the phallus occupies such a central place as object in the Freudian economy. Which alone is enough to show us that psychoanalysis today is moving further and further away from this, and that precisely this phallus, as a fundamental function with which the subject imaginarily identifies, is completely elided, to be reduced to the notion of partial object, which is absolutely not its original function in FREUD’s economy. This phallus will thus bring us back to something that has not been completely understood, at least from what I thought I heard at the end of my last lecture, that is, to comedy.

I will leave you with this theme today. I simply wanted, to conclude, to show you in what direction and in what way this complex discourse, by which I am trying to bring together all the things we have said, connects and holds together.