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(All parts in English)

d ⇒ $ ◊ a ⇔ i(a) ⇐ m
D ⇒ A ◊ d ⇔ s(A) ⇐ I
Δ ⇒ $ ◊ D ⇔ S(Ⱥ) ⇐ Φ

I am writing this on the board to begin with, to avoid writing it incorrectly or incompletely when I have to refer to it. I hope at least to be able to shed light on all three of these formulas by the end of our talk today. To take things up a little from where I left them last time, I was able to note — not without satisfaction — that certain of my remarks had not failed to provoke some emotion.

Namely for the fact that I seemed to have been able to endorse the opinions of this or that woman psychoanalyst who had thought it necessary to advance the opinion that certain analyses of women did not necessarily gain by being pushed to their term, for the reason, for example, that the very progress of the analysis could — the said subjects in analysis — deprive them, up to a certain point, of their properly sexual relations. I mean that the continuation or advancement of the analysis could threaten a certain enjoyment conquered and acquired.

Following which I was asked whether I endorsed this formula, namely whether analysis should indeed stop at a certain point for reasons that, so to speak, would be situated outside the laws of its very progress. I will reply that everything depends on what one considers to be the aim of analysis. Not its external aim, but what governs it, so to speak, theoretically.

It is quite certain that a perspective on analysis that is that of an adjustment to reality, this adjustment to reality being considered as something implied in the very notion of the development of analysis — I mean that it would be given in the condition of the man or the woman that a full elucidation of that condition must obligatorily lead him or her to a kind of pre-formed, harmonious adaptation — is a hypothesis, and a hypothesis that, in truth, nothing in experience comes to justify.

In other words, to enlighten my lantern and use terms that are the very ones that will return today, this time in a completely concrete sense since it concerns the woman, and in truth this is a quite sensitive point of analytic theory, namely that of its development, of its adaptation proper to a certain order, and assuredly one that is of the human order, does it not seem at once quite certain that, as regards the woman, one should not confuse:

– what she desires — I give the term “desire” its full sense — with what she demands,

– nor confuse what she demands with what she wants, in the sense in which one says: “what woman wants, God wants.”

These simple reminders, if not of self-evidence then at least of experience, can be meant to show that the question one asks as to what is to be realized in analysis is not something simple. The last time, if this came in somewhat laterally in our discourse, what we were speaking of, what I wished to lead you to, what I will bring you back to today in order to give a more generalized formula for it and which will serve me thereafter as a landmark in the critique of the fundamental, precisely normative, identifications of man and woman, what I brought you last time was an outline of what we must consider as being that sort of identification which produces the ego ideal insofar as it is the point of exit, the pivot point, the point of outcome of that Oedipal crisis around which the analytic experience was initiated, and around which it ceases no longer to turn, even though it takes positions ever more centrifugal.

And I insisted on something that could be stated thus: that any identification of the ego-ideal type was a certain putting into relation of the subject with certain signifiers in the Other, which I called insignia, and that this relation came, in sum, to graft itself upon another desire than the one that had confronted the two terms of the subject and of the Other insofar as he bears these insignia. That, more or less, is what it amounted to. Which, of course, did not satisfy everyone, even though, speaking to so-and-so, I had given only this as a reference.

Do you not see, for example — and this is indicated as a matter of first rank by FREUD as well as by all authors — that insofar as a woman makes an identification with her father, in her relations with her husband she makes against him every reproach that she had made against her mother?

Here is something — and it is not a matter simply of becoming fascinated with this example, there are of course other forms under which we will find the same formula — but here is something exemplary that illustrates what I have just told you: it is insofar as the identification has been made by the assumption of certain signs, of signifiers characteristic of the relations of one subject with another, that this comes to cover over and implies the bringing to the forefront of relations of desire between this subject and a third party.

You find again the subject S, the big A and the little a. Where is the big A, where is the little a, here? No matter! The important thing is that they are two. Let us start again from this remark to which I am trying to bring you back and which is something one could say participates in LA ROCHEFOUCAULD’s maxim concerning things one cannot look at head-on: the sun and death. In analysis there are things like these. It is rather curious that it is precisely the central point of analysis that one looks at more and more obliquely, and that one looks at through the intermediary of theoretical spyglasses ever more distant. The castration complex is one of those.

Observe what is happening and what has happened since FREUD’s first apprehensions. There was there something pivotal, something essential in the formation of the subject: namely this strange thing — it must be said — that had never before been promoted, never articulated: that in the formation of the subject something takes place around a very precise, particularized, paradoxical, archaic threat, indeed one that provokes horror.

Strictly speaking, it is a decisive moment, doubtless pathogenic but also normative, turned around a threat that is not, there, isolated, that is coherent with that relation called the Oedipus relation between the subject, the father, the mother:
– the father here acting as bearer of the threat,
– the mother, object of the aim, of the targeting of a desire itself profoundly hidden.

There you find again, right at the origin, what precisely is to be elucidated. It is that it is in this ternary relation that there will be produced the assumption of those relations to certain insignia already indicated, in sum, in this castration complex, but in an enigmatic way since, in a manner of speaking, these insignia are themselves placed, in relation to the subject, in a singular relation. They are — so one says — threatened, and at the same time it is still they that are to be gathered, received, and this in a relation of desire concerning a third term, which is that of the mother.

At the beginning that is indeed what we find, and when we have said that, we are precisely before an enigma, before something that is to be articulated, to be coordinated upon by practitioners. We have this complex relation by definition and by essence, complex to seize, to articulate, and which we meet in the life of our subject. What are we going to find?

A thousand forms, a thousand reflections, a kind of dispersion of images, of relations fundamental for us to allow us to seize all their incidences, all their psychological reflections, all the multiple psychological tasks that are borne in the experience of the neurotic subject. And then, what happens?

There occurs this phenomenon that I will call that of psychologizing motivation, which will make it so that in seeking in the individual, in the subject himself, the origin, the meaning of this fear of castration, we arrive at a series of displacements, of transpositions in the articulation of this fear of castration that do more or less — I will sum up — than range themselves as follows: this trace of castration, which is at first in relation with the object of the father, the fear of the father, we are first led to consider it in its incidence and to notice its relation with a tendency, a desire of the subject: that of his bodily integrity. And it is around the notion of narcissistic fear that that of fear of castration will be promoted.

Then, always following, along a line that is necessarily genetic, that is to say that goes back to the origins from the moment we seek in the individual himself the genesis of what then develops, we find promoted, brought to the forefront — because one always has, of course, clinical material for seizing the incarnations, so to speak, of a certain effect — we find the fear of the feminine organ, in a way, moreover, ambiguous:
– either that it is what becomes the seat of the threat against the incriminated organ,
– or on the contrary that it is the model of the disappearance of this organ.

Further on, what we will find at the origin of the fear of castration, by an ever greater moving back where — you will see — at the last term it seems to me quite striking and singular in its outcome, is what will be feared as prior to castration. At the last term, which is the one we have progressively reached — and I will not redo for you today the list of the authors we find, but for the last one you know it is Mélanie KLEIN — what is at the origin of the fear of castration is the phallus itself, hidden at the bottom of the maternal organ, and perceived by the child, quite at the origins, as the paternal phallus, as having its seat inside the maternal body. It is it that is feared by the child and by the subject.

And — do you believe — it is already quite striking to see appear, as it were in a mirror, facing the threatened organ, this threatening organ, and in a way ever more mythical the more it is pushed back. But here, for the last step to be taken, the paternal organ, inside the maternal sex, must in sum be considered as threatening. It is because the subject himself has made of it, at the sources of what are called his primordial aggressive tendencies, his primordial sadistic tendencies, the ideal weapon.

And everything comes back, at the last term, to a sort of pure reflection of the phallic organ, considered as the support of a primitive tendency which is that of pure and simple aggression, the castration complex isolating itself, in sum, reducing itself to the isolation of a primordial partial aggressive drive, at the same time disconnected, it seems from then on. And indeed, it is very much the whole effort of authors, what they then had the greatest trouble with: to reintegrate what concerns the castration complex into its complex context, namely that whence it set out and which profoundly motivated its central character in the subjective economy that was at the origin in question in the exploration of neuroses. And of course, you know to what efforts authors would be led in order nonetheless to restore, to put back in its place, what appears in the final analysis, when we look at things, as a pure, simple and vain turning upon itself of a system, of a set of concepts.

For in the end, if we attentively examine the economy of what Mélanie KLEIN articulates as occurring at the level of this early Oedipus — which is still a sort of contradiction in terms, it is a way of saying “the pre-Oedipal Oedipus,” “the Oedipus insofar as it is the Oedipus before any of the characters of the Oedipus have appeared” — what we find simply articulated in the interpretative signifiers she uses to give a name to those drives she encounters or believes she encounters at the last term in the child is that in her own signifiers she implies exactly the whole dialectic that is in question at the origin, namely the question at stake and which must be taken up from the start and in its essence, which is this: if castration has this essential character, if we take it insofar as it is promoted by analytic experience and theory and by FREUD — this since his beginning — let us now know how to see what it means.

Before being feared, before being lived, before being psychologizable, what does it mean? Castration is not a real castration. This castration is linked, we have said, to a desire. It is even linked to the evolution, the progress, the maturation of desire in the human subject. If it is castration, it is quite certain, on the other hand, that the link to that organ — moreover so difficult, within the notion of the castration complex, to center properly — is not a castration addressing itself to the genital organs as a whole.

That is indeed why, moreover, in the woman it does not take the aspect of a threat against the genital organs as such, but as something else, precisely as the phallus. Likewise in the man, one could legitimately raise the question of whether, in this notion of the castration complex, one should isolate the penis as such or include both penis and testicles. In truth, of course, this designates that what is at issue is something other than this or that: it is something that has a certain relation with the organs, but a certain relation whose specifically signifying character already, from the origin, is beyond doubt. And it is this signifying character that dominates.

Let us say that at the very least a minimum must be retained of what, in its essence, the castration complex is: the relation of a desire, on the one hand, with, on the other hand, what I will on this occasion call a mark. For desire, say to us Freudian experience and analytic theory, to happily traverse certain phases, to reach maturity, it is necessary that something as problematic to situate as the phallus be marked by that something which makes it so that it is maintained, conserved, only insofar as it has traversed the threat of castration properly speaking.

And this must be maintained as the essential minimum beyond which:
– we set off into synonymies,
– we set off into slippages,
– we set off into equivalences,
– we set off also, at the same time, into obscurities.

Literally, we no longer know what we are saying if we do not retain these characteristics as essential. And is it not better, first and foremost, to direct ourselves toward the relation of these two poles, let us say, of desire to the mark, before trying to go seek it in the diverse ways in which that, for the subject, is incarnated, in the reason of a linkage which, from the moment we leave this starting point, will become more and more enigmatic, more and more problematic, and soon more and more eluded?

I insist on this character of mark which has moreover…
in all other manifestations than analytic, interpretative, significative manifestations, and quite certainly in all that incarnates it ceremonially, ritually, sociologically
…the character of being the sign of all that supports this castrating relation whose anthropological emergence we have begun to glimpse by way of analysis.

Let us not forget, up to this point, the signs, the religious incarnations for example, where we recognize this castration complex: circumcision, for instance, to call it by its name, or again such and such a form of inscription, of mark in the rites of puberty, of tattooing, of all that produces marks, that imprints upon the subject, in connection with a certain phase which, in an unambiguous way, presents itself as a phase of accession to a certain level, to a certain stage of desire — all that always presents itself as mark and impression. And you will say to me:

“Here we are! The mark, not hard to encounter!”

Already in experience, when one has herds, each shepherd has his little mark so as to distinguish his sheep from those of others, and it is not such a stupid remark. There is indeed a certain relation, if only this: that in any case we would already grasp therein that the mark presents itself nonetheless in a certain transcendence with respect to the constitution of the herd. Must that suffice us? It is very true in a certain way, for example, that circumcision presents itself as constituting a certain herd, the herd of the elect, sons of God.

Are we merely rediscovering that? Surely not! What analytic experience and what FREUD, at the outset, bring us:
– is that there is a close, intimate relation between desire and the mark,
– is that the mark is not simply there as a sign of recognition for the shepherd — whom we would have difficulty knowing where he is in the present case — but when it is a matter of man this means that the living being marked, here, has a desire that is not without a certain intimate relation with this mark.

It is not a matter of moving too quickly, nor of saying that it is this mark that modifies desire. There is perhaps from the origin in this desire a gap that allows this mark to take its special incidence, but what is certain is that there is the closest relation between what characterizes this desire in man and the incidence, the role and the function of the mark. We find again this confrontation of the signifier and desire which is that around which all our questioning here must bear.

I would not like to stray too far, but here nonetheless a small parenthesis: let us not forget that the question here very obviously opens onto the function of the signifier in man, and that this is not the first time you have heard talk of it here. If FREUD wrote Totem and Taboo, if it was for him a need and an essential satisfaction to articulate this Totem and Taboo — refer to JONES’s text to see well the importance that it had for him, and which was not simply an importance of applied psychoanalysis — to rediscover, enlarged to the dimensions of the sky, the little human animal with which he found himself dealing in his consulting room: it is not “the celestial dog” as compared to “the terrestrial dog” as in SPINOZA; it is that it is a myth so essential that for him it is not a myth.

What does Totem and Taboo mean? It is that we are necessarily led, if we want to understand something that is FREUD’s particular interrogation at the level of this experience of the Oedipus in his patients, we are necessarily led to this theme of the “murder of the father.” Of course you know, there, that FREUD does not question himself. What can it mean that, to conceive, in sum, a passage — which is the passage from nature to humanity — one must pass by the murder of the father? According to his method, which is a method of observer, of naturalist, he groups, he makes swarm around this sort of point of concurrence, of crossroads, to which he arrives, all the documents, all that ethnological information brings him.

And of course, what do we see swarm to the fore? The particular contribution of his experience meets the ethnological material. No matter that it is more or less outdated now, that has no importance. The fact that it is the function of phobia, with the theme of the totem, that is there the point where he finds himself again, where he is satisfied, where he sees conjugate the signs whose trace he follows — all that shows us clearly that this is absolutely indiscernible from a progress which puts at the forefront this function of the signifier. Phobia is a symptom in which — in an isolated way, and promoted as such — the signifier comes to the forefront. I spent last year explaining it to you, showing you to what point the signifier of a phobia is something that has thirty-six thousand meanings for the subject. That is the key point: it is the signifier that is missing so that the meanings can keep themselves — at least for a time — a bit quiet. Without that, the subject is literally submerged by them.

Likewise, the totem is that as well: the all-purpose signifier, the key signifier, the signifier thanks to which everything is ordered, and principally the subject, for in this signifier the subject finds what he is. And it is in the name of this totem that for him what is forbidden is also ordered. But what does this, so to speak, veil from us, hide from us in the last analysis? It is this ‘murder of the father’ itself, so that it is around it that there can be effected the conversion, the revolution thanks to which the young males of the horde will see something ordered that is going to be the primitive law, that is to say the prohibition of incest. This simply hides from us the close link there is between:
– death,
– and the appearance of the signifier.

For do not forget this nonetheless: in its ordinary course, everyone knows that life hardly stops at the corpses it makes; the big fish eat the small, or even, having killed them, do not eat them, but it is certain that the movement of life levels what it has before it to abolish, and there already lies the whole problem, of knowing in what way a death is memorized, even if this memorization is something that remains in a certain sense implicit, that is to say if, as everything lets us see, it is of its nature, of this memorization, that it be forgotten by the individual, whether it is a matter of the ‘murder of the father’ or the murder of MOSES.

It is essentially of its nature to forget what nonetheless remains absolutely necessary as the key, as the pivot point around which our mind must turn: namely that a certain link has been made signifying, which makes this death exist otherwise than, strictly speaking, in the real, in the teeming of life.

There is no existence of death; there are deaths, and that is all! And once they are dead, no one in life pays it any further attention. In other words, what makes:
– both FREUD’s passion when he writes Totem and Taboo,
– and the blazing effect of the production of a book that appears and is very generally rejected and spat out?

That is to say that everyone starts saying:
– What is this fellow telling us?
– Where does he come from?
– By what right does he tell us this?
– We, ethnographers, have never seen that!

Which does not prevent it from being one of the truly capital events of our century, and that around it indeed all the inspiration of critical, ethnological, literary, anthropological work is profoundly transformed. What does that mean, if not that FREUD there conjugates two things: he conjugates desire with the signifier. He conjugates them as one says one conjugates a verb. He brings the category of this conjugation into a mode of thought which, up to him, concerning man, remains a mode of thought I will call an academizing thought, designating thereby a certain ancient philosophical lineage which, from Platonism to the Stoic and Epicurean sects and, passing through Christianity, tends profoundly:
– to forget, to elude this organic relation of desire with the signifier,
– to situate it, to exclude it from the signifier,
– to reduce it, to explain it, to motivate it within a certain economy of pleasure,
– to elude what there is in it that is absolutely problematic, irreducible, and strictly speaking perverse,
– to elude what is the essential, living character of the manifestations of human desire, at the forefront of which we must place this character that is not only maladapted, inadaptable, but fundamentally perverted, marked.

It is the situating of this link between desire and the mark, between desire and the insignia, between desire and the signifier, that we are here striving to effect. Here are the three little formulas I have written for you:

d ⇒ $ ◊ a ⇔ i(a) ⇐ m
D ⇒ A ◊ d ⇔ s(A) ⇐ I
Δ ⇒ $ ◊ D ⇔ S(Ⱥ) ⇐ Φ

I simply want today to introduce them, to tell you what they mean, because we will not be able to go further. But these formulas are — to my mind — those around which you will be able not only to try to articulate something of the problem I have just proposed to you, but to articulate all the vagations, indeed even the divagations of analytic thought concerning what always remains our fundamental problem.

Ultimately, let us not forget that it is the problem of desire. Let us first say what the letters there mean:

d ⇒ $ ◊ a ⇔ i(a) ⇐ m

– d is desire,
– S is the subject,
– little a is the little other, the other insofar as he is our fellow, the other insofar as his image [i(a)] holds us, captivates us, supports us, and around which we constitute that first order of identification that I defined for you as narcissistic identification, which is m, the ego.

This first line puts you into a certain relation the arrows of which indicate that it cannot be traversed to the end starting from each extremity, that it stops — starting from each extremity — at the precise point where the directing arrow itself meets another of opposite sign, but it puts into a certain relation ego or narcissistic identification with, on the other hand, the function of desire. I will take up the commentary on it.

The second line concerns that upon which I based my entire discourse at the beginning of this year, and insofar as I tried to show you in the witticism a certain fundamental relation of desire not with the signifier as such, but with speech, namely, demand.

D ⇒ A ◊ d ⇔ s(A) ⇐ I

– D, as written here, means demand.
– A that follows is the big Other, the big Other insofar as he is the place, the seat, the witness to whom the subject refers himself in his relation with any other, as being the place of speech. There is no need here to recall how long and with constant returns I have articulated the necessity of this big Other as the place of articulated speech as such.
– Here one finds the little d.
– Here you encounter a sign for the first time, it is the little s. The little s here has the same meaning it usually has in our formulas, namely that of the signified. s(A) means: ‘what in the Other is signified, what in the Other, for me the subject, takes on the value of signified by means of the signifier’, that is to say strictly speaking what we called a moment ago the insignia.
– It is in relation with these insignia of the Other that there is produced the identification which has as fruit and result the constitution, in the subject, of I which is the ego ideal. By the constitution of these formulas alone you have made present that there is accession of signs to the identification of the ego ideal only when the term of the big Other has entered into play.

– Here you find again the little d.

The third line, in other words Δ:

Δ ⇒ $ ◊ D ⇔ S(Ⱥ) ⇐ Φ

is the one that concerns the problem I am trying to articulate before you today, namely that it tries to articulate, in a chain that serves as a landmark, like the preceding ones, this: Δ is precisely that upon which we are questioning ourselves, namely the very spring by which the human subject is put into a certain relation to the signifier, this in his essence as subject, as total subject, as subject in his completely open, problematic, enigmatic character, and that is what this formula expresses. You see here the subject again returning in his relation with the fact that his desire passes by way of demand [S◊D], that he speaks it, and that this has certain effects — that is simply what is symbolized here.

Here you have the capital S which is, as usual, the letter by which we designate the signifier. This formula S(A) explains that S is something I am going to try to tell you, and precisely what Φ, the phallus, realizes. In other words, that the phallus is that signifier which introduces into A something new, and which introduces it only into A and at the level of A, and which is that thanks to which this formula is going to take its illumination from the effects of the signifier at this precise point of incidence upon the other. That is to say, what this formula will allow us to shed light on concerning what happens by virtue of the existence of the relations that are thus articulated.

Let us now take up what is at issue. Man’s relation to desire is not a pure and simple relation of desire; it is not in itself a relation to the object. If this relation to the object were already instituted, there would be no problem for analysis. Men, as most animals are presumed to go, would go to their object; there would not be this secondary relation, if I may say so, of man to the fact that he is a desiring animal, and all that occurs at the level we call perverse consists in this: that he enjoys his desire.

If the whole evolution of the origins of desire turns around those lived facts that are called the relation, let us say masochistic — that is the one that, in the genetic order, they make us bring out first — but one arrives at it by a sort of regression, if I may say so, the one that offers itself as the most exemplary, as the most ‘pivot’, is the so-called sadistic relation, or the scoptophilic relation.

But it is quite clear that it is by a reduction, a handling and an artificial, secondary decomposition of what is given in experience that we isolate them in the form of drives that substitute for one another and are equivalent. The scoptophilic relation, insofar as it conjugates exhibitionism and voyeurism, is always ambiguous: the subject sees himself as being seen, or sees the subject as seen, but does not, of course, see him purely and simply. It is in jouissance, in the kind of irradiation or phosphorescence that issues from the fact that the subject finds himself in a position come from one knows not what primitive gap, as it were extracted from his relation of implication with the object. And from there he apprehends himself fundamentally as patient in this relation. Whence the fact that we find, at the bottom of this analytic exploration of desire, masochism. Masochism is that the subject apprehends himself as suffering, so to speak, in his existence as a living being, as, there, suffering as being the subject of desire.

Where is the problem now? This is the side that will remain forever only an irreducible character, the altogether false side of human desire with respect to any reduction and adaptation, and no psychoanalytic experience — for its part — will go against it. The subject does not simply satisfy a desire, he enjoys desiring, and that is an essential dimension of his jouissance.

To omit this sort of primitive datum — to which, I must say, so-called existentialist investigation has brought certain lights, has re-set into a certain illumination what I am here articulating to you as I can — simply thinking that you refer yourselves sufficiently to our everyday experience for this to have a meaning which is developed, throughout pages of varying magisterial quality, by Monsieur SARTRE in Being and Nothingness. It is not always of absolute rigor, philosophically speaking, but it is surely of incontestable literary talent.

What is striking is that things of this order could not have been articulated and developed with so much brilliance except since precisely the time when analysis has, in a sense, given right of citizenship to this dimension of desire. Monsieur JONES, whose usefulness and function in analysis were in direct proportion to what he did not understand, very quickly tried to articulate the castration complex by giving it an equivalent. To say it all, the phallic signifier made for him, throughout his existence as a writer and analyst, the object of what one could call in him a veritable phobia.

For truly what he wrote that is best, culminating in his article on ‘The Phallic Phase’, consists precisely in trying to articulate, to say why that damned phallus that one finds there under our feet at every instant, why this privilege for that object moreover insubstantial when there are things just as interesting — the vagina, for example? And indeed, the man is right: it is quite clear that this object is no less interesting than the phallus, and we know it! Only what astonishes him is that the one and the other do not have the same function.

He was strictly condemned to understand nothing about it, to the very extent that from the outset, as soon as he tried to articulate what this castration complex was in FREUD, he felt the need to give it an equivalent. Already, one sees the start of the first impulse, which arises there instead of retaining what is perhaps tough, irreducible in the castration complex, namely the signifier phallus. He was not without a certain orientation in this. He perhaps had but one fault: it was to think that this sentence with which he ends his article on the phallic phase, namely ‘God created them man and woman’ — it is on that that he concludes, plainly showing the biblical origins of his conviction — and since God created them ‘man and woman’, it is therefore made to go together. And it must all the same be to that that it leads or that it says why.

Now precisely, we are in analysis to realize that when one asks that ‘it say why’, one enters into all sorts of complications. And it is for that reason that at the outset he substituted for the term castration the term ἀϕάνισις [aphanisis], which he sought in the Greek dictionary — it must be said that it does not present itself as one of the most employed words among the authors — and which means disappearance. Disappearance of what? Disappearance of desire. That is what the subject would fear in the castration complex, according to Monsieur JONES. And then, with his sprightly little step of a Shakespearean character, he did not seem at all to suspect that it was already an enormous problem that a living being could suspect as a danger, not the disappearance of lack, of the weaning from his object, but of his desire, for there is no other way to make ἀϕάνισις [aphanisis] an equivalent of the castration complex than to define it as he defines it, namely: ‘the disappearance of desire’.

Is there then not here something that is absolutely unfounded? But that it is already something of the second or third degree in relation to what we can call a proper relation in terms of need, that seems not to be in doubt, and that he does not seem in the least to suspect.

That said, even granting already that all the complications suggested by the simple posing of the problem in these terms are resolved, it remains that the problem is to know how in this relation to the Other, insofar as it is in the Other and in the gaze of the Other — it is not for nothing that I place the scoptophilic position at the heart: it is because it is indeed at the heart of this position, but just as much in the attitude of the Other. I mean that there is no sadistic position which, in a certain way, is not accompanied — to be properly qualifiable as ‘sadistic’ — by a certain masochistic identification.

Thus the problem is to know what, in this relation of his being to himself detached in which the human subject is, puts him in this quite particular position with respect to the Other, where what he apprehends, where what he enjoys, is something other than the relation to the object, but a relation to his desire; in the final analysis it is a matter of knowing what the phallus as such comes to do in there.

That is where the problem lies, and before seeking to engender it, to imagine it by a genetic reconstruction founded on references that are what I will call ‘fundamental references of modern obscurantism’, namely formulas like this one, which are, in my opinion, excessively more imbecilic than anything you can find in those little books taught to you under the term religious instruction or catechism, namely: ‘ontogenesis reproduces phylogenesis’.

When our great-grandchildren know that in our time that sufficed to explain heaps of things, they will say to themselves: ‘All the same, man is a funny thing!’, and moreover they will not notice what they will have in its place at that moment. It is thus a matter of knowing what the phallus comes to do there.

d ⇒ $ ◊ a ⇔ i(a) ⇐ m
D ⇒ A ◊ d ⇔ s(A) ⇐ I
Δ ⇒ $ ◊ D ⇔ S(Ⱥ) ⇐ Φ

Let us posit for today this: that the existence of this third line — namely that the phallus, indeed, is something that plays a certain role, a role of signifier. What does that mean? Let us start from the second line, which means this: that if there is a certain relation of man to the little other which is structured, constituted as what we have just called human desire, in the sense that this desire is already fundamentally something perverse, all its demands will be marked by a certain relation.

That is the meaning of what we see in this new little lozenge-shaped symbol that you find incessantly in this formula and which simply implies that everything in question here is governed by something which is precisely that quadratic relation that we have from the beginning placed at the foundation of our articulation of the problem, and which says that there is no S conceivable, articulable, or possible without this ternary relation a → a’ → A. That is all it means.

For demand, so to speak, to exist, to have a chance, to be something, there must therefore be a certain relation between A as the place of speech, and this desire as it is structured: S◊a, as it is structured in the first line.

d ⇒ $ ◊ a ⇔ i(a) ⇐ m
D ⇒ A ◊ d ⇔ s(A) ⇐ I
Δ ⇒ $ ◊ D ⇔ S(Ⱥ) ⇐ Φ

What the composition of these lines implies is this:

– just as narcissistic identification, namely what constitutes the ego of the subject, is made in a certain relation — of which we have seen all the variations, all the differences, all the nuances of prestige, of presence, of domination — in a certain relation with the image of the other: i(a), there is there the correspondent, the correlate of what, on the other side of the point of revolution of this chart, namely the double equivalence line [ ] that is there in the center, brings into relation this very possibility of the existence of an ego with the fundamentally desiring character and linked to the vicissitudes of desire which is here articulated in the first part of the line [S◊a],

– likewise every identification that is identification to the insignia of the Other: s(A), that is to say of the third as such, depends — on what? — on demand, on demand and on the relations of the Other to desire: A◊d.

This is quite clear and evident, and it is what allows us to give its full value to the term which FREUD himself calls by what we very improperly call — I will re-articulate, I will return to why this term is very improper — the term frustration: it is a matter of Versagung.

We know from experience that it is insofar as something is versagen that there is produced in the subject this phenomenon of secondary identification or of identification to the insignia of the Other: s(A). What does that imply? This implies that for there to be something that can even be established — I mean for the subject — between:
– the big Other as the place of speech,
– and this phenomenon of his desire, which is placed on a plane entirely heterogeneous since there is a relation with the little other insofar as the little other is his image [i(a)]
… something must introduce into the Other, into the Other as the place of speech, this same relation to the little other which is requisite, which is necessary, which is phenomenologically tangible, in order to explain human desire as perverse desire.

That is the necessity of the problem we have proposed today. This may seem obscure to you. I will tell you only one thing: if we posit nothing at all, not only will we realize that it becomes more and more obscure, but in addition everything gets muddled, whereas what is at issue is to know that if we posit this, we will be able to bring out a bit of order.

We posit that Φ, the phallus, is that signifier by which there is introduced into A, as the place of speech — the big A — the point through which the relation to the other, little (a) as little other, is introduced, and — that is not all — insofar as the signifier has something to do with it there. There it is. It looks as if it bites its own tail, but it must bite its tail. It is clear that the signifier has something to do with it, since we encounter this signifier at every step.

We encountered it first at the origin: there would be no origin — not of culture, but of what is moreover the same thing if we distinguish culture and society — there would thus be no entry of man into culture if this relation to the signifier were not at the origin. What we mean here is that:
– just as we defined the paternal signifier as the signifier which, in the place of the Other, posits, authorizes the play of signifiers,
– there is this other privileged signifier which is the signifier that has as its effect to institute in the Other this, which changes its nature, namely that that is why this Other is barred: S(A).

This, which changes its nature — namely that it is not purely and simply the place of speech, but that it is something which, like the subject, is implicated in this dialectic situated on the phenomenal plane of reflection with regard to the little other and which posits that the Other is implicated in this — and which adds to it — it is purely and simply as signifier that it adds to it — that this relation exists insofar as it is the signifier that inscribes it.

I ask you, whatever difficulty this may cause you, to keep this in mind, to stick to it for today.

I will show you subsequently what this allows us to articulate and to illustrate.