🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

Dear friends, to resume our discourse interrupted for three weeks, I will start from what we recalled last night with accuracy: that our discourse must be a scientific discourse. That said, it appears that in order to achieve this goal, the paths are not so easy when it concerns our object. Last night I simply pointed out the originality of the moment constituted, in the examination of the phenomena of man, by the foregrounding, the halt constituted by the whole Freudian discipline on this privileged element called desire. I pointed out to you that up until FREUD, this element in itself had always been reduced, and from some angle, elided early on.

And this is what allows us to say that until FREUD, every study of human economy was more or less part of a concern for morals, ethics, in the sense that it was less about studying desire than already reducing and disciplining it. Now it is the effects of desire in the very broad sense—the desire is not one of the effects among others—it is the effects of desire with which we are concerned in psychoanalysis. This, this is the meaning of all that I strive to remind you here, of what manifests itself in these phenomena of human desire, namely its fundamental subduction, not to say ‘subversion’, by a certain relationship which is the relationship of desire to the signifier.

Today it is not so much this that I will remind you of once more, although we must return to it in order to start from there again, but I will show you what it means, in a rigorous perspective, one that maintains the originality of the condition of human desire, what this something represents for it, which is always for you more or less involved in the handling you make of this notion of desire and which deserves to be distinguished from it. I will say more: which can only begin to be articulated from the moment when here we are sufficiently imbued with
– the notion of complexity in which this desire is constituted,
– and this notion of which I speak—which will be the other pole of today’s discourse—it is called jouissance.

Let us briefly take up what constitutes as such this deviation–alienation of desire in the signifier. We will try to arrive at what, in this perspective, can constitute that term in which consists the fact that the human subject, in his world, takes hold of the very conditions that are imposed upon him, as if these conditions were made for him, and that he is satisfied with them.

This, I already indicate to you, will lead us— I hope to get there today—to what I have already indicated to you at the beginning of the year, taking things from the perspective of the witticism, on the nature of comedy.

Let us briefly recall this:

– that desire is essentially installed in a relation to the signifying chain,
– that desire is posed and proposed first in the evolution of the human subject as demand,
– that frustration in FREUD is Versagung, that is to say refusal, or more precisely retraction.

However far back we go with the Kleinians, into genesis, observe that this exploration—which assuredly was a progress, the one that leads us from most of the problems of the evolution of the neurotic subject to the so-called ‘sadistic–oral’ satisfaction—observe simply that this satisfaction operates in fantasy, and already and from the outset in a retaliation of the fantasized satisfaction.

We are told: everything starts from the need to bite, sometimes aggressive, in the small child in relation to the mother’s body. Let us not forget all the same that all this never consists in an actual bite, that these are fantasies and that nothing in this deduction can even make us take a step, except to show us that the fear of the bite in return is here the essential nerve of what is at issue, of what it is a matter of demonstrating.

Indeed, speaking last night with one of you who is trying to take up again, after Susan ISAACS, some valid definitions of the terms of fantasy, quite rightly he told me of his total embarrassment in making any deduction that would be founded purely and simply on the imaginary relationship between subjects.

It is absolutely impossible to validly distinguish unconscious fantasies from that formal creation which is the play of imagination if we do not see that already the unconscious fantasy is dominated, structured by the conditions of the signifier.

The primordial objects, good and bad, the primitive objects from which the entire analytic deduction is reconstructed, constitute a kind of battery in which several series of substitutes are already drawn, destined for equivalence: milk, the breast, later become, some, semen, some, the penis. Already the objects are, if I may put it this way, signified. What occurs from the relation with the most primordial object, the maternal object, operates right away and already on signs, on what we could call, to give an image to what we mean, ‘the currency of the Other’s desire’. [Cf. the remains of the metonymic object, session of 20–11–1957]

And what I pointed out to you last time, looking as closely as necessary to see it well, at this work which FREUD considers decisive [‘A child is being beaten’], I emphasized that it marked the inaugural step in analysts’ understanding, true and authentic understanding, of the problem of perversion.

What we did last time was thus of a nature to make you perceive that in these very signs, a division can occur. All these signs are more complicated, more precisely the whole of the signs cannot be reduced to what we could call what I have already indicated to you as being titles, kinds of fiduciary values: to have this or that.

They are not purely and simply representative values, ‘currency of exchange’ as we have just said a moment ago, and in some sense signs as constituted as such. Among these signs there are some which are constituent signs, I mean those by which the creation of value is assured, I mean those by which something real, which is engaged at every instant in this economy, is struck with this bar that makes it a sign.

This bar [Cf. unary trait, einziger Zug], constituted last time by this stick–sign of the whip or whatever strikes, is that something by which even an unpleasant effect becomes distinction and establishment of the very relation, by which the demand can be recognized as such. That by which what was first a means of annulling the rival reality of the brother becomes secondarily that something by which the subject himself is distinguished, by which he himself is recognized as something that can be either acknowledged or cast into nothingness. That something which already presents itself as the surface upon which can be inscribed all that can be given thereafter: a kind of blank check, so to speak, upon which all gifts are possible.

And you can see well that since all gifts are possible, it is because here it is not even a matter of what can or cannot be given, because here it is indeed about that relation of love of which I tell you that it is constituted by what the subject himself essentially gives: that is to say, what he does not have. All the possibility of this introduction to the order of love presupposes this fundamental sign by the subject, which can be either annulled or recognized as such.

During this interval I asked you to do some reading. I hope you have done so, I mean that you have at least somewhat attended to Ernest JONES’ ‘The phallic phase’ and ‘Early development of female sexuality’. I want—since I must move forward today—only to punctuate for you with an example which is quite localized: I came upon it again in seeing what had been said for a certain anniversary commemorating the fiftieth of JONES, and which coincided with the period when this phallic phase was coming to the forefront of English psychoanalysts’ interest.

And in this issue I reread once more with great interest this article by Joan RIVIERE, in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. X, entitled ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’. Pursuing the analysis of a specified case which is not the general case of the assumption of womanliness, Joan RIVIERE shows how, in a case she situates in relation to various branches and possible paths in the accession to womanliness, one of these cases demonstrated for her, presented itself as having a womanliness all the more remarkable in its apparently absolutely complete assumption in that it was precisely in one of those subjects whose whole life otherwise could seem—at the time much more so than now—the assumption of all masculine functions.

In other words, it is a question of someone who had a perfectly independent, developed, free professional life, and who nevertheless—which, I repeat, was more striking at that time than now—manifested a sort of correlative assumption, to the maximum, at all levels, of what could be called her ‘feminine functions’. This, not only in the apparent, public form of the functions of mistress of the house, in her relations with her husband, in showing everywhere the superiority of the qualities which are, in our social state, supposed to be unequivocally the social characteristics of what is the woman’s charge, but particularly in another register, especially on the sexual plane, something entirely satisfying in her relations with the man, in other words in the jouissance of the relation.

Now this analysis brings out, beneath this apparent and complete satisfaction of the feminine position, something very hidden which nonetheless constitutes its basis, something which without any doubt is what one finds after one has been led there all the same by some small—but infinitely small—discordance appearing on the surface of this in-principle completely satisfying state. This hidden something, it is interesting to show it because you know the importance, the emphasis our experience has been able to place on Penisneid, the claim to the penis, in many troubles of the development of female sexuality.

Here what is hidden is in fact quite the opposite: namely this phallus, as it is called. I cannot retell for you the history of this woman, that is not our object today, but the source of the fundamental satisfaction which supports what apparently blossoms in this happy libido, is the hidden satisfaction of her supremacy over the parental figures. This is the very term used by Mrs. Joan RIVIERE, and this is by her considered to be at the very source of what presents itself with a character not so assured in the evolution of female sexuality as not to be noticed in this case.

The source of the satisfying character of orgasm itself, is the proof that precisely from the detection of this hidden spring of personality in the subject—even if only transiently—this has the effect of profoundly disturbing what had been acquired or presented in the subject as a completed, mature and happy relationship, having even led, for a time, to the disappearance of this happy outcome of the sexual act.

What we have before us, Mrs. Joan RIVIERE emphasizes, is this: it is that it is in terms of the subject’s need to avoid from men the retaliation for this surreptitious subtraction from the other of the very source and symbol of their power, which, as the analysis appears, as the analysis advances, appears more and more evidently guided and dominated, is given the meaning of the subject’s relation with persons of both sexes.

It is to the extent that this must be in order to avoid the punishment, the retaliation from the men who are here targeted, that the subject, in a very fine scansion that appears all the more clearly as the analysis advances but which was already perceptible nonetheless in these small anomalous traits of the analysis, each time that the subject has demonstrated her phallicly constituted power, rushes into a series of moves, either of seduction, or even of sacrificial procedures: doing everything for others, and precisely, in appearance, adopting here the highest forms of feminine devotion as something which consists in saying: ‘But see, I do not have this phallus, I am a woman, and pure woman…’ and to mask herself, especially in the moves which immediately follow with men, for example in these professional dealings in which she shows herself eminently qualified, suddenly adopting by a sort of evasion the attitude of someone excessively modest, even anxious about the quality of what she has done, and in reality playing ‘a whole game of coquetry’—as Mrs. Joan RIVIERE puts it—which at that moment serves her not so much to reassure as to mislead in her mind those who might often take offense at this something which, in her, presents itself essentially and fundamentally:
– as aggression,
– as need and jouissance of supremacy as such,
– as deeply structured on a whole history which is that of rivalry first with the mother, then with the father.

In short, about an example like that, however paradoxical it may seem, we see well that what is at issue in an analysis, in the understanding of a subjective structure, is always something which shows us the subject engaged in a process of recognition as such.

But recognition of what? Let us understand it well: since the subject is unconscious of this need for recognition, this is precisely why we must somewhere situate this Other, necessitated by every relation of recognition, situate it in an otherness of a quality we have not known until now, nor until FREUD:
– that which makes it the pure and simple place of the signifier by which being is divided from its own existence,
– which makes the fate of the human subject something essentially linked to his relation with this sign: to be what is made of this sign, to be the object of all sorts of passions which in this very process presentify death in that it is in his link to this sign that the subject is sufficiently detached from himself to be able to have this relation, seemingly unique in creation, to his own existence and which is the ultimate form of what in analysis we call masochism, namely this something by which the subject apprehends the pain of existing, this division where the subject is constituted from the outset as existence.

Why? Because elsewhere, his being has to be represented in the sign, and the sign itself is in a third place.

This is what, from the level of the unconscious, structures the subject in this decomposition of himself without which it is impossible for us to validly ground in any way what is called the unconscious.

Take the slightest dream, you will see—provided you analyze it correctly, referring to the Traumdeutung—that it is not in what presents itself in the dream as articulated signifier, even when the first deciphering has been done, that the unconscious is embodied. On every occasion FREUD comes back to it and emphasizes: ‘there are dreams,’ he says, ‘that are hypocritical’. They are nonetheless the representation of a desire, if only the desire to deceive the analyst. Recall what I have emphasized to you about that fully articulated passage in the ‘Analysis of a case of female homosexuality’. [cf. ‘Psychogenesis of a case of female homosexuality’, in Neuroses, psychoses and perversions]

But this unconscious discourse itself—but which is not the last word of the unconscious—is supported by what is really the last spring of the unconscious: it can only be articulated as the subject’s desire for recognition, even if through a lie already articulated at the level of mechanisms which escape consciousness, desire for recognition which on this occasion supports the lie itself, which can present itself, in a false perspective, as a lie of the unconscious.

This gives you the meaning and the key to the necessity in which we find ourselves to posit, at the origin of any analysis of the complete subjective phenomenon as it is delivered to us by analytic experience, this schema around which I try to make the authentic progression of the experience of the formations of the unconscious advance. And it is the one I have recently presented before you in this form which I can today present to you in a simpler way. It is of course always the simplest forms which must be brought in last.

Here, what do we have in this ‘three–pole triangle’ which constitutes the position of the subject? The subject insofar as he is in his relation with a triad of terms which are the signifying foundations of all his progress?

Namely the mother insofar as she is the first symbolized object, whose absence or presence will become for the subject the sign of the desire to which his own desire will be attached, in other words what will make of him or not, not simply a child satisfied or not, but a desired child or not. This does not constitute an arbitrary construction. Recognize that I am placing here something that our experience has taught us to discover step by step. We have learned from experience what consequences in cascade, of almost infinite destructuring, are entailed by the fact that for a subject, before his birth, he had already been an undesired child.

This term is essential. It is more essential than having been at this or that moment a more or less satisfied child.

The term desired child is the one which corresponds to the constitution of the mother as the seat of desire.

To this corresponds all this dialectic of the child’s relation to the mother’s desire which I have tried to show you and which is summed up, concentrated in this, in the primordial fact of the symbol of the desired child, and here the term of the father [Name of the father], insofar as he is in the signifier, this signifier by which the signifier itself is posited as such.

And this is why the father is essentially creator, I would even say absolute creator, the one who creates from nothing, it is insofar as the signifier, in its original dimension, in itself, can contain the signifier, that it is defined as the emergence of this signifier. It is in relation to this that something essentially confused, indeterminate, not detached from its existence and yet made to detach from it: the subject insofar as he must be signified, has to orient himself.

If identifications are possible, it is always to the extent that something for the subject is structured in this triadic relation constituted at the level of the signifier. And if he can, within his lived experience, give this or that meaning to this something which is given to him by his particular human physiology, it is in this relation that this is constituted.

Now, I do not need to return to the fact of the homology of the terms, of what is constituted at the level of the signified, on the side where the subject is in relation to these three symbolic terms. This homology—I have partly demonstrated it, in fact that is all I am doing here in the end—I ask you, until further information and fuller demonstration, to follow me on this. It is in the relation to his own image that the subject rediscovers the duplicity of the maternal desire in relation to him as the desired child, which is only symbolic. He feels it, he experiences it in this relation to the image of himself upon which so many things can be superimposed, that something which is illustrated by an example. I will give it immediately.

Last night I alluded to having looked quite closely at the story of GIDE’s childhood as Jean DELAY presents it to us in truly exhaustive fashion in the pathography he has given us of this case. It is quite clear that GIDE, ‘the disgraced child’—as the author said somewhere in front of the photographic image before which the person felt himself shudder—GIDE, the disgraced child, the child delivered in his eroticism, primitive auto-eroticism, to the most unconstituted images since, he tells us, he found his orgasm in his identification with situations that were in some sense catastrophic, found very precisely his jouissance in the reading of certain terms, in the reading of Madame de SÉGUR, for example… whose books are truly fundamental to all the ambiguity of primordial sadism, though perhaps the sadism there is not the most elaborated… where it took the form of the beaten child, of a servant who drops something in a great ‘patatras’ of destruction of what she holds in her hands.

Hence the identification with that character GRIBOUILLE in a tale by ANDERSEN, who goes drifting with the current and ends up on a distant shore, transformed into a dead rat, that is to say, in the least humanly constituted forms of that pain of existence.

Assuredly, there we can apprehend nothing else but that abyssal something which is constituted in this primary relation with a mother of whom we know both that she had very high and very remarkable qualities, and that indefinable something totally elided in her sexuality, in her feminine life, which assuredly places the child, in his early years, in a completely unplaced position.

The turning point, the point at which the young GIDE’s life regains, so to speak, meaning and human constitution, is in this crucial moment of identification… which is given to us as clearly as it can be in his memory and which leaves without doubt its mark on his entire existence, since he preserved the pivotal point and the object throughout his life… in this identification with his young cousin, for which it does not suffice to give the term in such vague form.

Identification, certainly, he tells us so. When? In that moment, whose singular character we do not sufficiently dwell on, when he finds his cousin in tears on the second floor of that house into which he had rushed, drawn not so much by her as by his instinct, by his love of the clandestine that prevailed in that house.

After crossing the first floor where his cousin’s mother—his aunt—he sees her, or more precisely glimpses her, more or less in the arms of a lover, he finds his cousin in tears. And there, in a sum of intoxication, enthusiasm, love, distress, and devotion, he devotes himself to ‘protecting this child,’ as he later tells us. Let us not forget that she was his elder: at that time GIDE [22-11-1869] was 13 years old, and Madeleine [Madeleine Rondeaux: 07-12-1867] was 16.

At that moment there occurs something whose meaning we absolutely cannot understand:
– if we do not set it in that third relationship where the young André is, not merely with his cousin, but with the one who, on the floor below, is dissipating the heat of fever,
– and if we do not recall that antecedent which André GIDE gives us in La Porte étroite, namely an attempt at seduction carried out by the said mother of his cousin.

What then occurs is something—what? He became ‘the desired child,’ André GIDE, at the moment of that seduction, from which he moreover fled in horror because in fact nothing came to bring that element of mediation, that element of approach which would make it something other than a trauma; he found himself for the first time, nevertheless, in the position of desired child. This moment produces the outcome of this new situation which, in one sense, will be salvific for him but which will nevertheless fix him in a profoundly divided position, in view of the mode of late activity—and I repeat, without mediation—in which this encounter took place.

What will he retain in the constitution of this symbolic term which until then he lacked? He will retain nothing other than the place of the desired child which he will at last be able to occupy through his cousin. In that place where there had been a void, there is now a place, but nothing more, for in that place, of course, he refuses himself: he cannot accept the desire of which he is the object. But on the other hand, his ego undeniably does not cease:

– to identify itself, and this forever, without knowing it, with the subject whose desire he is now dependent on, that is to say, himself,

– to fall in love forever, and until the end of his life, to fall in love with that little boy he was for a moment in the arms of his aunt, that aunt who caressed his neck, his shoulders, and his chest.

And we will see that his whole life lies in what we can state, namely what he confessed to us, namely that from his honeymoon on—everyone is astonished and scandalized—and almost in front of his wife, he thought of the “tormenting delight,” as he puts it, of caressing the arms and shoulders of young boys he meets on the train.

This is now a famous page that has become part of literature, in which GIDE shows what, for him, remains the privileged point of all fixation of his desire. In other words, what—at the level of what becomes for him his ego ideal—was subtracted here, namely the desire of which he is the object and which he cannot bear, he assumes for himself; he becomes forever and eternally in love with that same caressed little boy that he himself did not want to be.

In other words, we grasp here this: that this term of the desired child where something must be elaborated, where he must join that signifier which primarily constitutes the subject in his being, this ego, this point x where he is, must join it in some way, that here is constituted that ego ideal which marks every psychological development of a subject. This ego ideal is marked:

1) by the sign of the signifier,

2) by knowing where it can start, namely—by progression from the ego—or on the contrary, without the ego being able to do anything but undergo, through a series of accidents, delivered over to adventures from the signifier itself.

In other words, to recognize that what occurs unbeknown to the subject through the mere succession of accidents, what allows him to subsist in his signifying position of more or less desired child, this something is there which shows us that it is in the same place—whether it happens by the conscious route or by the unconscious route—it is in the same place that there occurs what we call, in one case, the ego ideal, and in the other case, perversion.

The perversion of André GIDE lies not so much in the fact that he can only desire little boys, the little boy he had been; the perversion of André GIDE consists in this: that there, he can constitute himself only by perpetually telling himself, submitting himself—in that Correspondence which for him is the heart of his work—to being the one who asserts himself in the place occupied by his cousin, the one whose every thought is turned toward her, the one who literally at every moment gives her all that he does not have, but nothing else, who constitutes himself as a personality in her, through her, and in relation to her. This places him in that kind of mortal dependence on her which makes him cry out somewhere:

‘You cannot know what the love of a Uranian is! It is something like an embalmed love.’

This complete projection of what is his own essence into what is the basis, and indeed the heart and root, in him, of his existence as a literary man, a man wholly in the signifier and in his relations and in what he communicates, it is by this that he is signified in his inter-human relation and that for him this undesired woman can indeed be the object of the supreme love, which is essentially bound to him; and when this object with which he has filled that hole of love without desire, when this object comes to disappear, he utters that pitiful cry whose kinship with the cry of comedy par excellence I indicated to you last night: ‘My casket! my dear casket!’, the casket of The Miser.

All passions, insofar as they are alienation of desire in an object, are on the same footing. Of course, The Miser’s casket makes us more easily laugh—at least if we have in us some accent of humanity, which is not universally the case—than the disappearance of GIDE’s correspondence with his wife. Obviously, it should be for us all something that has its value forever.

Nonetheless, fundamentally, it is the same thing, and GIDE’s cry at the disappearance of that correspondence is the same cry as that of comedy, as that of the miser HARPAGON. This comedy in question—what is it? Comedy is something that reaches us through a thousand scattered remarks.

Comedy is not the comic. Every comic element must be able to, if we give a correct theory of comedy, if we believe that at least for a time comedy was the production before the community—the community insofar as it represents a group of men, that is to say, as constituting above itself the existence of a Man as such—if comedy was what it seems to have been at a moment when the representation of the relation of man to woman was the object of something which had a ceremonial value, of something which makes it so that I am not the first to compare theatre to the mass: all those who have approached the question of theatre have noted that assuredly, in our era, only the drama of the mass essentially represents what, at a moment in history, represented the complete development of the functions of theatre.

If on the one hand, in the time of the great era of Greek theatre, tragedy represents this relation of man to speech insofar as he takes it in his fatality and in a conflicting fatality, then, insofar as the symbolic chain is the link of man to the signifying law, it is not the same at the level of the family and at the level of the community: this is the essence of tragedy.

Comedy represents this, and it is not without relation to tragedy, since, as you know, a comedy always completed the tragic trilogy. We cannot consider it independently, and this comedy, I will show you that we find its trace and its shadow even in the marginal commentary of the Christian drama itself. Of course, not in our era of constipated Christianity, where one would not dare to accompany the ceremonies with those robust farces constituted by what was called the “Risus paschalis,” but let us set this aside.

Comedy presents itself as the moment when the subject and man attempt to take this relation to speech as being, no longer his commitment, his disguise in those contrary necessities, but as being after all not only his affair, but that something in which he must articulate himself as the one who profits from it, who enjoys it, who consumes it, and who—to put it plainly—is the one who, from this communion, is destined to absorb the substance and the matter.

Comedy, one can say, is something like the representation of the end of the communal meal from which tragedy itself was evoked. It is man, in the end, who consumes all that has been presented there of his common substance and flesh, and it is a matter of knowing what this will yield.

What this will yield, to understand it I believe there is absolutely no other means than to refer you to ancient comedy, of which all the comedies that followed are only a kind of degradation where the features are always recognizable, to the comedies of ARISTOPHANES, to those comedies such as The Assembly of Women, such as Lysistrata, such as The Thesmophoriazusae.

You must refer to them to see where this leads us, and of course it is to these that I referred when I began to indicate to you in what sense comedy manifests, by a kind of internal necessity, this relation of the subject from the moment when it is his own signified—namely, the fruit of the result of this relation of signifier—that must indeed come onto the stage of comedy, fully developed.

It is this term which designates itself, necessarily insofar as it is signified, that is to say, insofar as it gathers, assumes, and enjoys the relation to a fact which itself is fundamentally in a certain relation with the signifying order, the appearance of that signified called the phallus.

It so happens that since I brought you this term, I have only had to open this something, in the days following the quick outline I gave you of MOLIÈRE’s The School for Wives, as representing this essential comic relation, something which I believe I can consider as a very singular resurgence of a truly extraordinary masterpiece of comedy, if what I believe I read in the comedy of ARISTOPHANES is correct, and which is nothing other than The Balcony by Jean GENÊT. What is The Balcony by Jean GENÊT?

You know that rather lively opposition has been raised to its being presented to us. We of course have no reason to be surprised by such a thing in a state of theatre where one can say that its substance and its interest consist mainly in the fact that on stage the actors display themselves under various titles, which of course fills with pleasure and titillation those who are there to identify with this kind of exhibition, we must call it by its name.

If theatre is assuredly something else, I believe that a play like the one articulated for us by Jean GENÊT is well suited to make us feel it, but it is not certain either that the public is in a state to hear it. It nevertheless seems to me difficult not to see its dramatic interest, which I will try to set out for you.

You see, GENÊT speaks of something that means roughly this—I am not saying that he knows what he is doing, it has absolutely no importance whether he knows it or not; CORNEILLE probably did not know either what he was writing insofar as CORNEILLE, and yet he did it with great rigor…

– if the human functions insofar as they relate to the symbolic, namely the power of the one who, as they say, binds and looses—that is to say, what was conferred by Christ upon the posterity of Saint Peter and upon all bishops [religere, in Latin]—binds and looses the order of sin, of fault,
– if the power of the one who condemns, who judges and who chastises, namely that of the judge,
– if the power of the one who assumes command in that great phenomenon which infinitely surpasses that of war, and who, therefore, is the commander-in-chief, more commonly the general,
– if all these figures thus represent functions in relation to which the subject finds himself in some way alienated in relation to that speech of which he is the support in a function far surpassing his particularity,
– if these figures are suddenly to be subjected to the law of comedy,

…that is to say, if we begin to represent to ourselves what it is to enjoy these positions—positions of irreverence, no doubt, to pose the question in this way, but the irreverence of comedy is not something at which one should stop without trying to see what results from it a little further on.

Of course, it is always in some period of crisis, it is at the supreme moment of Athens’ distress—precisely due to the aberration of a series of bad choices and a submission to the law of the city which appears literally to be dragging it to its ruin—that ARISTOPHANES attempts this awakening which consists in saying that after all, we are exhausting ourselves in this endless war, that there is nothing better than to stay at home, warm, and to find one’s wife again.

This is not something which is, strictly speaking, posed as a morality; it is a resumption of man’s essential relation to his condition which is suggested, without our having to know moreover whether the consequences are more or less salutary.

Here then we see “the Bishop,” “the Judge” and “the General,” set before us starting from this question: what indeed can it be to enjoy one’s condition as “Bishop,” as “Judge” or as “General”? And then this explains to you the device by which this Balcony is nothing other than what is called “a house of illusion.”

That is to say, if indeed what takes place at the level of the various forms of the ideal ego that I have located here is in some way something which in fact is not, as is thought, the effect of a supplication in the sense of a progressive neutralization of functions rooted in the interior, but on the contrary something which is always more or less accompanied by an eroticization of the symbolic relation.

The assimilation can be made of the one who, in his position and in his function as “Bishop,” as “Judge” or as “General,” enjoys his condition with that something which all keepers of houses of illusion know, namely the little old man who comes to take satisfaction in a strictly calculated position which will place him for an instant in the most strangely varied stance assumed in relation to a complicit partner who will be willing to play the role, on that occasion, of being his respondent.

Thus we see someone employed in some credit establishment, who comes there to don sacerdotal ornaments in order to obtain from a compliant prostitute a confession which, of course, is nothing but a sham, and for which it is necessary that by some degree truth should come closer—in other words, that something in the intention of his accomplice should allow him to see in it this relation to a guilty enjoyment in which he must at least believe she participates… and it is not the least singularity of the art, of the lyricism with which the poet Jean GENÊT knows how to pursue before us this dialogue of the character, assuredly grotesque beyond all expression, grotesque in proportions further magnified: he has him mount roller skates so that his caricatural stance is thereby heightened still more… and in which we see the perverse subject assuredly take pleasure in seeking his satisfaction in that something to which he puts himself in relation, with an image, with an image however insofar as it is the reflection of something essentially signifying.

In other words, in three great scenes GENÊT presents to us, embodies for us on the level of perversion that which, from that moment on, takes its name, namely what in blunt language we can, in days of great disorder, call: “the whole mess in which we live,” insofar as it is—as is every society—always more or less in a state of degradation.

For society could not be defined otherwise than by a more or less advanced state of degradation of culture: the whole mess—namely, all this confusion which is established in the nonetheless sacred and fundamental relations of man and speech—the whole mess is there represented in its place, and we know what it is about.

What then is it about?

It is indeed a matter of something that embodies for us the relation of the subject to the functions of the law in their various forms and in their most sacred forms, as being themselves something that is pursued through a series of degradations in which the leap is for an instant made, namely that it is none other than the “Bishop” himself, the “Judge” and the “General” whom we see here in the posture of specialists, as one expresses it in terms of perversion, and who call into question the relation of the subject with the function of speech.

What happens? This happens: that this relation, if it is an adulterated relation, if it is a relation in which each has failed and where no one finds themselves again, nonetheless continues to be sustained. However degraded it may be there, being presented before us, nonetheless this relation remains, namely subsists purely and simply, if not as dependence and legitimate recognition of this relation, then at least as something linked to the fact that there exists what is called “its order.” Now, to what is this relation to the maintenance of order reduced if a society has come to its most extreme disorder? It is reduced to something called the police.

This kind of last recourse, of last right, of last argument of order which is called the maintenance of order, which is created with the help of the establishment, as being in the end the center of the community, of that which is also presented at its origin, namely the “three crossed pikes” and at the center of the campus—this reduction of everything that is order, to its maintenance—this is embodied in the pivotal, central character of GENÊT’s drama, namely the Prefect of Police.

The hypothesis is this, and it is really very pretty: it is that the Prefect of Police, namely the one who essentially knows that upon him rests this maintenance of order and that he is in a certain way the last term, the residue of all power, the Prefect of Police—his image has not yet risen to a sufficient nobility for any of the little old men who come to the brothel to ask to have the ornaments, the attributes, the role and the function of the Prefect of Police.

There are some who know how to play the “Judge,” and who, before a little prostitute, in order for her to admit she is a thief, also penetrate her so as to obtain that confession, for “How would I be a judge if you were not a thief?” says the “Judge.” But I will spare you what the “General” says to his mare. On the other hand, no one has asked to be the Prefect of Police. This, of course, is pure hypothesis: we do not have enough experience of brothels to know if in fact for a long time the Prefect of Police has risen to the dignity of the figures into whose skin one can enjoy slipping.

But the Prefect of Police—because here the Prefect of Police is the good friend of the madam of the whole brothel: I am not at all seeking here to make theory, no more than I have said that these are concrete matters—the Prefect of Police comes and asks anxiously: “Has there been anyone who asked to be the Prefect of Police?” And this never happens.

Just as there is no uniform of the Prefect of Police. We have seen displayed the robe, the cap of the “Judge,” the képi of the “General,” not to mention the trousers of the latter, but there is no one who has entered into the skin of the Prefect of Police to make love. This is what is the pivot of the drama.

Now you should know that everything that happens inside the brothel takes place while outside the revolution is raging. Everything that happens—and I will spare you: you will have great pleasure in discovering this comedy—everything that happens inside—and it is far from being as schematic as what I am telling you, there are cries, there are blows, in short, they are having fun—is accompanied by the crackle of machine guns outside.

The city is in revolution, and of course all these ladies expect to perish in beauty, massacred by the dark-haired and virtuous working women who are here supposed to represent the whole man, the real man, the one who does not doubt that his desire can reach its advent, namely assert itself as such and in a harmonious way. Proletarian consciousness has always believed in the success of morality, whether it is wrong or right, what does it matter…

What matters is that Jean GENÊT shows us the outcome of the adventure—I am forced to go a little quickly—in this: that the Prefect of Police, he, does not doubt, because it is his function. As it is his function—this is why the play unfolds as it does—the Prefect of Police does not doubt that “after, as before” the revolution, it will always be the brothel.

He knows that the revolution in this sense is a game, and indeed, in a sleight of hand which I will pass over… for there is still there a very fine scene where the diplomat of race comes to enlighten the amiable group gathered here at the center of the house of illusion about what is going on at the royal palace, namely there, in its state of greatest legitimacy: the queen is embroidering, and is not embroidering—the queen is snoring, she is snoring and not snoring—the queen is embroidering a little handkerchief: it is a matter of knowing what will be in the middle, namely a swan, a swan of which it is not yet known whether it will go on the sea, on a pond or on a cup of tea… I will therefore pass over what concerns the final vanishing of the symbol.

But what happens is that she who becomes the voice, the speech of the revolution, namely one of the prostitutes who has been carried off by a virtuous plumber and who finds herself playing the role of the woman in a Phrygian cap on the barricades, with this in addition that she is a sort of Joan of Arc, namely that she will know—she knows it inside and out—the masculine dialectic because she has been where it is heard developing in all its phases—she will know how to speak to them and to answer them, the said Chantal, since she is called thus in this play.

And she is whisked away in a moment, that is to say, she receives a bullet in her skin and immediately afterwards power appears incarnated by the mistress of the house in question, Irma, the madam of the brothel, who assumes, and with what superiority, the functions of the queen. Is she not, she also, someone who has passed to the pure state of symbol, since, as it is expressed somewhere: “in her, nothing is true except her jewels”?

And from that moment, we arrive at that something which is the regimentation of the characters, of the perverts whom we have seen exhibiting themselves throughout the first act, into the truly authentic, integral role, into the assumption of the reciprocal functions they embodied in their variously amorous little games.

At this moment a dialogue of rather great political sharpness is established between the character of the Prefect of Police, who needs them naturally to represent what must replace the previously upset order, and to have them assume functions—which they do not do, moreover, without reluctance, for they understand very well that it is one thing to enjoy oneself warm and sheltered within the walls of one of those houses, where one does not reflect enough that it is precisely the place where order is most meticulously preserved, and another to be put at the mercy of the gusts of wind, indeed of the responsibilities that these actually assumed functions entail.

Here we are obviously in frank farce, but this is the theme, this is the conclusion of this farce of high flavor on which I would like, at the end, to lay the emphasis. It is namely that in the midst of all this dialogue, the Prefect of Police continues to keep his concern:
– “Has there been anyone who has come to ask to be the Prefect of Police?”
– “Has there been anyone who has recognized my greatness enough?”

It must be admitted that here perhaps, for an instant at least, his imaginary place in this encounter has a satisfaction difficult to obtain. What happens? First this: discouraged from waiting indefinitely for the event which is to be for him the sanction of his accession to the order of respected, since profaned, functions, the Prefect of Police first consults… what he has now succeeded in demonstrating: that he alone is order and the pivot of everything, namely that in the end this means that there is nothing else in the last analysis but force, and here we find something not lacking in significance inasmuch as the discovery of the ideal ego was roughly for FREUD coincident with the inauguration of that type of character which offers to the political community a unique and easy identification, namely: the dictator… the Prefect of Police consults those around him on the matter of the appropriateness of a kind of uniform and also of a symbol which would be that of his function, and not without timidity, for the occasion.

In truth, he has somewhat offended the ears of his listeners: he proposes a phallus. Would the Church not see some objection to it? And he inclines toward the “Bishop” who indeed for a moment nods his cap and marks some hesitation, but suggests that after all, if the dove of the Holy Spirit were made of it, the thing would be more acceptable. Likewise the “General” proposes that the said figure be painted in national colors, and some other suggestions of this sort lead one to think that of course they will arrive quickly enough at what is called on the occasion a Concordat.

It is at this moment that the coup de théâtre bursts. One of the girls, whose role in this play truly teeming with meanings I have spared you, appears on stage and her speech still broken by the emotion of what has just happened to her, and which is nothing less than this: the character who was the friend—and this turns out to be quite significant—of the savior of the prostitute who had reached the state of revolutionary symbol, the character then of the plumber—he is known in the house—came to find her and asked her for everything necessary to resemble the character of the Prefect of Police.

General emotion. Tightening of the throat. We are at the end of our troubles. Everything has been there, including the wig of the Prefect of Police, who starts: “How did you know?” He is told: “You are the only one to think that everyone ignored that you wore a wig.”

And the character, once adorned with all the attributes of the one whose figure is truly the heroic figure of the drama, makes this gesture—the prostitute’s gesture—of throwing in his face, after having cut it off, that with which, she says modestly, he will never deflower anyone. At this moment the Prefect of Police, who was very near to reaching the summit of his contentment, nonetheless has this quick gesture to check that he still has it. He still does indeed, and his passage to the state of symbol, in the form of the proposed phallic uniform, has now become unnecessary.

Indeed, from this moment it is quite clear that the one who represents simple desire… pure and simple desire, this need that man has to rejoin, in a way that can be authentically and directly assumed, his own existence, his own thought, a value that is not purely distinct from his flesh… it is clear that it is insofar as this subject who is there representing man… the one who has fought so that something we have until now called “the brothel” might recover its footing, its norm and its reduction to something that can be accepted as fully human… that that one does not reintegrate into it, that that one does not offer himself to it once the trial is over, except on the precise condition of castrating himself, that is to say, of making the phallus into something reduced once again to the state of signifier, to that something which can or cannot be given or withdrawn, conferred or not conferred, by the one who at that moment merges—and in the most explicit way, that is to say that this is what the comedy ends on—merges with and rejoins the image of the Creator of the signifier, of the “Our Father,” of the “Our Father who art in heaven…”.

It is on this, which we can certainly at our discretion emphasize as blasphemous or strictly speaking as comic, that the comedy ends. I will take up again and refer to these terms. You will see how for us it will serve as a point of reference in this essential question of desire and jouissance, of which today I wanted to give you the first gram.