🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

The point is to continue to deepen this distinction between desire and demand, which we regard as so essential in the proper conduct of the analysis, and failing which we believe that it slides irresistibly around a practical speculation founded, on the one hand, on the terms of frustration, on the other hand, on the terms of gratification, terms which in our view constitute a genuine deviation from its path. What is at issue, therefore, is to continue in the direction of something to which we have already given a name: the distance from desire to demand.

This is not, in a way—a Spaltung—this is not a term that I use at random; it is a term that was, if not introduced, at least strongly emphasized in FREUD’s very last writing, the one in the middle of which, so to speak, the pen fell from his hands, because it was simply torn from him by death.

This Ich Spaltung is truly the point of convergence to which FREUD’s last meditation—one cannot say brought it and brought it back—amounts: it is something of which we have only a fragment, a few pages that are in volume XVII of the Gesammelte Werke. You must read it in order to bring forth in yourselves the presence, in FREUD’s mind, of the question it raises. You will also see there with what force he emphasizes that the ego’s function of synthesis is far from being everything when it is a matter of the analytic Ich.

To take up again what we said last time, because I believe that one can progress here only by taking three steps forward and two steps back, by setting off again and each time gaining a small step, I am nevertheless going to try to recall fairly quickly what I insisted on last time in speaking of desire on the one hand and demand on the other. Namely, as regards desire, what I called its bound character, inseparable from the mask, and which I illustrated for you quite especially by reminding you of this: that it is going too fast to distinguish the symptom as a simple underside beneath an outside.

I spoke to you of the patient Elisabeth Von R., of whom, in sum, I was telling you that, simply by reading FREUD’s text, one can say—and FREUD says it, articulates it:
– that her pain in the upper part of the right thigh is her father’s desire and the desire of her childhood friend,
– that it is each time she evokes, in the history of her illness, the moment when she was entirely enslaved to her father’s desire, to her father’s demand, and when, scarcely at the margin, there was at work this breach of the desire of her childhood friend, which she reproached herself for taking into consideration,
– and that the pain in her left thigh is the desire of her two brothers-in-law, insofar as one represents good masculine desire, the one who married her youngest sister, and the other the bad, who moreover was regarded by all these ladies as a very bad man.

Beyond that remark, what must be known how to consider before understanding what our interpretation of desire means, is that in the symptom—and that is what ‘conversion’ means—desire is identical to the somatic manifestation that is its right side as it is its reverse. On the other hand, I introduced—since if we have advanced it is because things are only introduced in the form of a problematic—this problematic of desire insofar as analysis shows it to us as determined by an act of signification. But that desire is determined by an act of signification does not at all deliver its meaning in any finished way. It may be that desire is a by-product, if I may express myself thus, of that act of signification.

In one of the articles that I cited to you as constituting the true introduction to the question of perversion, insofar as it too presents itself as a symptom, and not as a pure and simple manifestation of an unconscious desire representing us, at the moment when the authors realize that there is just as much Verdrängung in a perversion as in a symptom, in one of these articles published in the International Journal, it is a matter of the case of a neurotic subject; the author pauses over this fact that a subject, after having succeeded in his first coitus in a satisfactory way—this is not to say that other things will not be so thereafter—immediately after this first coitus, gives himself over to a mysterious act, in truth unique in his existence.

Returning home on his way back from the one who granted him her favors, he gives himself over to this particularly successful exhibition—I think I moreover already alluded to it in one of my seminars—particularly successful in the sense that it is carried out with the maximum of fullness, and on the other hand of security: he pulls down his pants and exhibits himself along a railway embankment and, by the light of a passing train, he thus happens to exhibit himself to an entire crowd without running the slightest danger, of course. And this act is interpreted by the author, in the subject’s general neurotic economy, in a more or less happy way.

It is not even on that side that I am going to dwell, but I am going to stop at something which is this: assuredly, for an analyst, that this is a significant act, as one says, is certain.

But what signification? What does it mean? That he still has it?

I repeat to you that he has just committed his first copulation.

What does it mean? That he still has it at everyone’s disposal, namely that he has become personal property? What does he want, in a way, by showing it? Does he, by showing it, want to efface himself behind what he shows, to be nothing more than the phallus?

All of this is likewise plausible, and even within one and the same act, one and the same subjective context; what above all seems there to be extremely important and worthy of being emphasized, I will say more than anything else, and that is indeed underlined, confirmed by what the patient says, by the context of the observation, by the very sequel of things, is that this first coitus was fully satisfying.

What the act in question shows first and foremost, before any other interpretation, is that his satisfaction is taken and realized. This act indicates what is left to be desired beyond satisfaction. I simply recall this little example to fix ideas about what I mean by the problematic of desire, insofar as it is determined by an act of signification, and insofar as this is distinct from any graspable meaning. I also want to recall in this connection, and add it to what I said last time, that considerations of this sort, those that show the profound coherence, coalescence of desire with the symptom that masks it, with what appears in its manifestation.

This is something that puts back in its place many vain questions that one always asks oneself about hysteria, but much more still about all sorts of sociological, ethnographic, and other facts, where one always sees people getting their feet tangled around the question. Let us take an example: an excellent little booklet has just appeared as a number in a small collection, ‘L’Homme’, which appears at PLON. It is the book by Michel LEIRIS on the effect of possession and on the theatrical aspects of possession, things that he develops around his experience among the Ethiopians of Gondar.

Reading this excellent volume, one clearly sees how facts of trance of incontestable consistency combine, marry perfectly with a certain character externally typified, determined, expected, spotted in advance, known by the ‘spirits’ that are supposed to seize the subjectivity of the characters who manifest all these singular manifestations, which the ceremonies called shamanism observe, since that is what is at issue in the region indicated.

And more: that this is not simply that conventional part that one can notice, that manifests itself, that reproduces itself with regard to the manifestation of the incarnation of such and such a spirit. It is the disciplinable character of these manifestations and, up to a certain point, so disciplinable that the subjects perceive it as something that is a training of the spirits who are nevertheless those who are supposed to seize them.

But the thing reverses: these spirits have done their apprenticeship in behaving properly. The phenomenon of possession, with all that it contains of phenomena powerfully inscribed in emotions, in an entire pathos where the subject is entirely possessed during the time of the manifestation, is perfectly compatible with all this richness linked to the insignia of the god, of the genius, and which make of it only in an entirely artificial way a sort of problem that our mentality would try to inscribe under the type of simulations, imitations, or other terms of that kind. The very identity of the desiring manifestation, with its forms, is there entirely tangible.

The other point, the other term in which this dialectic, this problematic of desire is inscribed, is what, by contrast, I insisted on last time: this eccentricity of desire with respect to any satisfaction, which allows us to understand what in general is its profound affinity with pain.

That is to say that, at the limit, what desire purely and simply borders on, no longer in its developed forms, in its masked forms, but in its pure and simple form, is this pain of existing that represents the other pole, the space, to put it plainly: the area within which its manifestation presents itself to us.

Opposed to this problematic, in describing thus what I call the area of desire, its eccentricity with respect to satisfaction, I do not claim, of course, to resolve it: this is not an explanation that I am giving there, it is a posing of the problem, and that is indeed what we have to move forward into today. I recall, on the other side, the other element of the diptych, of the opposition that I proposed last time: it is the one that is linked to the character of the identifying function, of the idealizing function, insofar as it turns out to depend on the dialectic of demand, insofar as the identification of everything that takes place in that register is grounded in a certain relation to the signifier, in the Other signifier, which is as a whole characterized, and with regard to demand, as being the sign of the presence of the Other.

There too something is instituted that must indeed have a relation to the problem of desire, which is
– that in which this sign of presence comes to dominate the satisfactions that this presence brings,
– that in which what makes it so fundamentally, in so extended a way, so constantly, that the human being pays himself with words, just as much or at least in a perceptible, very appreciable proportion, in relation to more substantial satisfactions.

This is simply to recall the fundamental characteristic that relates to what I have just recalled. Is it to say, moreover, that only the human being pays himself with words? Here again a parenthesis, complementary to what I said last time: it is not only the human being who pays himself with words.

Up to a certain degree, we know that certain domestic animals—and it is not excluded to think it—have some satisfactions linked to human speech. I do not need there to make evocations, but we even learn strange things. There seems to be a degree of credibility that one can give to the statements of those who are called, in a more or less appropriate way, specialists. We have been told that minks—captive, for the purpose of lucre, namely to profit from their fur—waste away and provide only rather mediocre products to furriers if one does not make conversation with them. That makes, it seems, the breeding of minks very costly by increasing overhead expenses.

It would thus seem that, in any case, something manifests itself there of which we also do not have the means to enter further into the problematic, but which assuredly must indeed be linked to the very fact of being enclosed, because minks in the wild state are, in all appearance, barring further information, beyond the possibility of encountering that kind of satisfaction. In short, I would simply like to indicate to you the relation, the direction in which we can see, in relation to our problem, the Pavlovian studies of conditioned reflexes. In the end, what are conditioned reflexes?

In their most widespread forms, and those that occupied the greatest part of the experiment, conditioned reflexes are indeed an intervention in a more or less predetermined, innate cycle, a cycle of instinctive behavior. All these little electrical signals, these little bells, these little clappers, with which they drum the poor animals’ eardrums, in order to manage to make them secrete their various physiological productions, their gastric juices on command, these are indeed signifiers, and nothing else.

They are fabricated by beings—in any case experimenters—for whom the world is very clearly constituted by a certain number of objective relations among which what one can rightly isolate as properly signifying constitutes an important part of this world. Besides, it is with the aim of showing by what kind of progressive substitution route a psychic progress is conceivable, that all these things are constructed and elaborated. Up to a certain point, one could ask oneself why, in the end, these animals so well trained, this does not amount to teaching them a certain kind of language.

What is not the only thing that deserves to be remarked is that precisely the leap is not made and that, when Pavlovian theory comes to bring into play what occurs in man with regard to language, he or it—PAVLOV or the theory—takes the very correct course of speaking, as regards language, not of an extension of the system of significations such as it is brought into play in conditioned reflexes, but of a second system of significations, that is to say implicitly to recognize, which is perhaps not fully articulated in the theory, that there is something different in the one and in the other. And what is different, we will say that we can try to define it, to define this distinction, this difference, in this: that it must be situated in what we call the relation to the big Other, insofar as this constitutes the place of a unitary and signifying system. Or again, we would say that what is lacking in this discourse of signals is the concatenation for the interested subject, that is to say for the animal.

In the end, what would be formulated simply, we would state under this form of saying that, in sum, whatever the advanced character of these experiments, what is not found—and perhaps what it is not a question of finding—is the law in which these signifiers brought into play would be ordered. Which amounts to saying that it is the law that, finally, the animals would obey. It is quite clear indeed that there is no trace of reference to such a law, that is to say to anything that is beyond the signal, namely that from a short chain of signals, once established, no kind of law-giving extrapolation is perceptible there. And it is precisely in that that one can say that one does not succeed in instituting the law. I repeat: this is not to say, for all that, that there is no dimension of the Other with a capital A for the animal, but nothing is effectively articulated within it as discourse.

So what we arrive at, if we summarize what is at issue in the subject’s relation to the signifier in the Other, namely what happens in the dialectic of demand, is essentially what characterizes the signifier, not as substituted—which is the case in conditioned reflexes—as substituted for the subject’s needs, but the signifier itself as being able to be substituted for itself, as being essentially of a substitutive nature.

And it is in this direction that we see the dominance of what matters, namely the place it occupies in the Other. What we see pointing in this direction is what I try in various ways to formulate here as essential to the signifying structure, that is to say this topological space, not to say this typographical space that makes precisely the law of its substitution, this numbering of places, these numbered places that give the fundamental structure of a signifying system as such. It is insofar as the subject is made present within a world thus rediscovered in the position of Other, that this something—which is a fact highlighted by experience—called identification occurs. For lack of satisfaction, it is to the subject who can accede to demand that the subject identifies.

D ⇒ A ◊ d ⇔ s(A) ⇐ I

I left you there last time by posing the question:

– then why not the greatest pluralism in identifications?
– as many identifications as unsatisfied demands?
– as many identifications as there are others who present themselves in the subject’s presence as those who respond or do not respond to the demand?

The key to this distance, to this Spaltung, is found here reflected by the construction of this little diagram that I put today for the 1st time on the board, and which constitutes something that we must find again in the 3 lines that I have already twice repeated to you. I think you have them in your notes, but I can remind you of them, namely:

1) d ⇒ $ ◊ a ⇔ i(a) ⇐ m

The line that links the little d of desire on one side, by way of this relation of the subject to little a [S◊a], to the image of a [i(a)] and to m, that is to say the ego.

2) D ⇒ A ◊ d ⇔ s(A) ⇐ I

The second line, representing precisely demand, insofar as it goes from the Demand to Identification by passing through the position of the Other with respect to desire, that is to say that you see here the Other decomposed insofar as it is beyond it that there is desire, and by passing through the signified of A [s(A)] which, at that level, would be placed here, I mean in a first stage of the diagram that was the one I made for you last time, that is to say in the fact that it [the Other] responds only to demand, and which precisely goes, because of something that is what we are seeking in a second time, to divide in this relation, not simple but double that I have moreover already initiated by other routes, into two signifying chains: the first which is here when it is alone and simple at the level of demand, being here insofar as it is a signifying chain through which demand has to make itself heard.

Something else will intervene that doubles this signifying relation. It is this doubling of the signifying relation, insofar as you can for example, among other things but naturally not in a univocal way, identify it as has hitherto been done with the mother’s response. The lower line [2] represents what happens in sum at the level of demand, at the level where the mother’s response by itself makes the law, that is to say in sum subjects the subject to her arbitrariness.

3) Δ ⇒ $ ◊ D ⇔ S(Ⱥ) ⇐ Φ

Finally, the other line [3] represents the intervention of another agency corresponding to the paternal presence and to the modes under which its agency makes itself felt beyond the mother. And of course, it is not so simple, and if everything indeed were a question of mom and dad, I hardly see how we could account, at least, for the facts with which we have to deal.

It is therefore into the question of this Spaltung, which is purely and simply the one that is identical, responsible for this gap between desire and demand, for this discordance, for this divergence that is established between desire and demand, that we are now going to introduce ourselves, and that is why we still have to return, to pose again the question of what a signifier is.

I know that you ask yourselves each time we part: in the end, what can it possibly mean? You are right to ask yourselves, because assuredly it is not said like that, it is not a foregone conclusion. Let us take up again the question of what a signifier is at the elementary level. I propose that you stop your thought on a certain number of remarks.

For example, do you not believe that we are touching something that is at least… I do not know what example to give you, perhaps something about which one could speak of emergence? If we note what is specific about the fact, not of a trace, for a trace is an imprint, it is not a signifier, one nevertheless clearly feels that there can be a relation, and that in truth what is called the material of the signifier always participates somewhat in the evanescent character of the trace. That seems to be one of the conditions of existence of this signifying material. Yet this is not a signifier: even the footprint of FRIDAY that ROBINSON discovers during his walk on the island is not a signifier.

But on the other hand, supposing that he, ROBINSON, for some reason erases this trace, there we clearly introduce the dimension of the signifier. It is from the moment one erases it, when it has a meaning to erase it, that the something that is a trace is manifestly constituted as a signifier. One sees indeed that if, there, the signifier is a crucible, it is insofar as it bears witness to a past presence and that conversely, in what is signifying, there is always, in the fully developed signifier that is speech, there is always a passage, that is to say something that is beyond each of the elements that are articulated and that are by nature fugitive, vanishing. And it is this ‘passage’ from one to the other that constitutes what is essential in what we call the signifying chain, and this ‘passage’ insofar as it is evanescent, that is what makes voice.

I do not even say ‘signifying articulation’: it may be an articulation that remains enigmatic, but that what supports it is voice; it is also at this level that what answers to what we first designated of the signifier as bearing witness to a presence that is past emerges.

Conversely, in a ‘passage’ that is current, what manifests itself is something that deepens it, that is beyond and that makes it a voice. In sum, there again what we find is also, after it has been erased, what remains—if there is a text, namely if this signifier is inscribed among other signifiers—what remains is the place where it was erased, and it is indeed this place too that supports transmission, which is something essential thanks to which what succeeds one another in the passage takes on the consistency of ‘voice’.

We are truly there only at the level and at the point of emergence, but an essential point to grasp. What makes the signifier as such something that can be erased, leaving only ‘its place’, that is to say that one can no longer find it again. It is this property that is essential, and which makes it so that if one can speak of emergence, one cannot speak of development. In reality, the signifier contains it within itself. I mean that one of the fundamental dimensions of the signifier is to be able to annul itself.

For this there is a possibility that we can on the occasion qualify as ‘the mode of the signifier’ itself and which is materialized by something very simple that we all know and whose originality we must not allow ourselves to conceal by the triviality of its use: it is the bar. Every kind of signifier is, by its nature, something that can be barred.

People have spoken a great deal, ever since there have been philosophers who think, of the Aufhebung, and one has learned to make a more or less cunning use of it. This word means at once annulment—and essentially that is what it means for example: ‘I cancel my subscription to a newspaper, or my reservation somewhere’—and it also means, thanks to an ambiguity of meaning that makes it precious in the German language, ‘to raise to a power, to a higher situation’.

It does not seem that one stops enough at this: that properly speaking, there is only one kind of thing, I will say roughly, that can properly be annulled: it is a signifier. For in truth, when we annul anything else, whether imaginary or real, it is simply because strictly, in doing it and thereby, we do nothing but annul what is at issue, we raise it to the rank, to the qualification of a signifier.

There is therefore within the signifier—of its chain and of its maneuver, of its manipulation—something that is always able to depose it from its function—in the line or in the lineage: the bar is a sign of bastardization—to depose it as such, by reason of this properly signifying function of what we shall call the general consideration. I mean that in which, in the given of the signifying battery insofar as it constitutes a certain system of available signs, and in a concrete current discourse, the signifier falls away from the function that its place constitutes for it, which I tore from this consideration or constellation that the signifier institutes by applying itself to the world by punctuating it. And that from there it falls from consideration into desideration [wordplay: ‘désidération’ is a neologism opposed to ‘considération’, built on ‘désirer’ (to desire)], namely there where it is marked by this precisely: that it leaves something to be desired.

I am not amusing myself by playing on words; I simply want by this use of words to indicate to you a direction by which we draw closer to this link of signifying manipulation to our object, which is that of desire. Its opposition of consideration to desideration marked by the bar of the signifier, being here of course intended only to indicate a direction, a beginning.

This does not, of course, resolve the question of desire. Whatever the economy to which this conjunction of two terms lends itself in the Latin etymology of the word desire. [desiderare: to regret someone’s, something’s absence. (Bloch Wartburg)]
it remains that it is properly insofar as the signifier presents itself as annulled, as marked by the bar,
that we properly hold what one can call a product of the symbolic function, a product precisely insofar as it is isolated, insofar as it is distinct from the general chain of the signifier and from the voice that it institutes.

It is only from the moment when it can be barred that any signifier whatsoever has its proper status,
that is, that it enters into this dimension that makes it so that every signifier is in principle…
to distinguish here what I mean by ‘annulment’, which is so essential…
the term is used in FREUD, and in quite amusing places where no one seems to have thought of going to spot it: if it is FREUD who uses annulment, it does not have the same resonance
…in principle every signifier is revocable.

So, from the moment when we have made these remarks, it follows that for everything that is not signifying,
that is in particular, on the occasion, for the real, the bar becomes one of the surest and shortest modes of its elevation
to the dignity of signifier.

And this, I already pointed out to you in an extremely precise way with regard to the fantasy of the beaten child,
when I pointed out to you that in the second stage of the evolution of this fantasy…
namely the one that FREUD indicates as having to be reconstructed
and as never, except obliquely and in exceptional cases, being glimpsed
…this sign which, at the first stage, was that of the debasement of the hated brother, namely that he was by the father beaten,
…in the second time, and when it is a matter of the subject himself, becomes on the contrary the sign that he is loved, he, the subject: he in fact accedes to the order of love, to the state of being loved, because he is beaten.

Which nonetheless does not fail to pose a problem, given the change of meaning that this action has taken in the interval, and this is properly conceivable only for the case precisely where this same act which:
– when it is a matter of the other, is taken as ill-treatment, and as such perceived by the subject as the sign that the other is not loved,
– when it is the subject who becomes its support at a certain given moment of his position with respect to the other, this act takes on its essential value and its function as signifier: it is because the subject himself finds himself raised to this dignity of signifying subject that it is taken at that moment in its positive register, in its inaugural register. It properly institutes him as a subject with whom there can be a question of love.

This is what FREUD—one must always return to FREUD’s sentences; they are absolutely always lapidary—
in the ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes’, expresses thus:

‘The child who is then beaten becomes loved, appreciated on the plane of love.’

And it is precisely at that moment, that is to say in that article of which I am speaking to you, that FREUD introduces the remark that was simply implied in Ein Kind wird geschlagen, that is to say what I had, by analysis of the text, initiated, but that FREUD, there, formulates in black and white. He formulates it without absolutely motivating it, but by orienting it
with that kind of prodigious flair that is his and that is everything that is at stake in this dialectic
of the recognition of this beyond of desire. He says:

‘This quite particular fixity that is read in the monotone form of “A child is beaten”,
probably allows only a single signifiance: the child who is there beaten is thereby appreciated.’

It is a matter of little girls in this study, and what FREUD recognizes in this Starrheit. The word is very difficult to translate into French because it has an ambiguous sense in German; it means at once fixed in the sense of a fixed gaze and rigid.
It is not absolutely related, although one is there at the contamination of the two senses: they have an analogy in history and that is indeed what is at issue. It is a matter of our seeing there point out this something of which I have already marked for you the place of the knot that it is a matter of untying for the moment, namely this relation there is between:
– the subject as such,
– the phallus here as problematic object,
– and the essentially signifying function of the bar, insofar as it comes into play in the fantasy of the beaten child.

For that it is not enough for us to content ourselves with this clitoris which in so many respects leaves much to be desired. It is a matter of seeing why it is there, here, in a certain posture so ambiguous that in the end, if FREUD recognizes it in what is beaten on the occasion, it is because the subject, by contrast, does not recognize it as such. It is a matter of the phallus:
– insofar as it occupies a certain place in the economy of the subject’s development,
– insofar as it is what is the indispensable support of this subjective construction,
– insofar as it pivots around the castration complex and penisneid.

And it is a matter of seeing now how it comes into play in this relation, this grip, this seizure of the subject by the signifier,
or inversely, what is at issue by this signifying structure such as I have just recalled here one of the essential terms. For this it is fitting that we pause for an instant, in the end, on the mode under which this phallus can be considered:

– Why does one speak of phallus, and not purely and simply of penis?

– Why moreover do we indeed see something else, and under what mode do we bring the phallus into play? Something else is the way in which the penis comes, in a more or less satisfying way, to substitute for it, both for the male subject and for the female subject.

– Also: to what extent is the clitoris on this occasion implicated in what we can call
‘the economic functions of the phallus’?

Let us observe what the phallus originally is, ϕαλλός [phallos] in Greek. It is there that we see it for the first time in Greek Antiquity attested in the texts where, if we go looking for the texts where they are in different places in ARISTOPHANES, in HERODOTUS, etc., we first see that the ϕαλλός [phallos] is not at all identical to the organ insofar as belonging to the body, prolongation, member, organ in function, if one can say.

The ϕαλλός is—in a way that dominates by far—used with regard to a simulacrum, to an insignia [fallace]
whatever the mode under which it presents itself:
– whether it is a stick at the top of which the male organs are hung,
– whether it is an imitation of the male organ,
– whether it is a piece of wood, a piece of leather, or a series of varieties under which it presents itself,
…it is something that is a substitutive object, and at the same time, it is its property that this substitution is
in a way very different from substitution in the sense in which we have just understood it, from sign-substitution.

One can say that almost, and even including the use of this substitution, it has all the characteristics of a real substitute, this kind of object that we call in good stories, and always more or less with a smile, that treat of the most singular objects, if one can say, by their unfindable character that there is in human industry.
It is nonetheless something whose existence and even possibility one cannot fail to take into account.

The olisbos—ὄλισβος in Greek [olisbos]—is often confused with the ϕαλλός. In short, what is striking in the very singular instance
of this object which for the Ancients, and beyond any kind of doubt, plays the role within the Mysteries,
of the object around which, so to speak, were placed—and likewise, it seems, to such a point that initiation lifted them—the last veils, that is to say an object which, for the revelation of meaning, was considered as the last significant character.

Does not all this put one on the path of what is at issue, namely, in sum, this prevalent economic role of the phallus
as such, that is to say insofar as it represents, in sum, desire in its most manifest form; I will oppose it term by term to what I was saying of the signifier which is essentially: ‘a hollow that is introduced into the fullness of the world’.

Conversely, what manifests itself in the ϕαλλός is what of life manifests itself in the purest way as turgidity, as thrust, and we clearly feel the image of the ϕαλλός at the very bottom of everything we manipulate as a term, which makes it so that, for example in French, it is under the form of ‘pulsion’ that the German term ‘Trieb’
could be translated.

This privileged object—if one can say—of the world of life, which moreover in its Greek appellation is akin to everything
that is of the order of ‘flow’, of ‘sap’, even of ‘the vein’ itself, for it seems that it is the same root there is in ϕλέψ [phléps: vein, artery] and in ϕαλλός.

It seems that things are thus such that this most manifest, manifested point of desire in its vital appearances [the phallus], is precisely what is found to be unable to enter into the area of the signifier except by unleashing there, so to speak, the bar.

Everything that is of the order of intrusion, of vital thrust as such will be found, insofar as it comes here to point, to maximize itself in this form or in this image, to be something—this is what experience
shows us; we are only reading it—that will inaugurate as such everything that presents itself:

– either as connotation of an absence where it does not have to be since it is not, namely what makes one consider the human subject who does not have the ϕαλλός as castrated,

– or inversely, for the one who has something that can claim to resemble it, as threatened with castration.

Indeed, if I allude to the ancient Mysteries, it is quite striking to see that on the walls, the rare frescoes that we have preserved in a remarkable integrity, those of ‘the villa of the Mysteries’ at Pompeii,
it is very precisely just next to the place where the unveiling of the ϕαλλός is represented that there arise, represented with an entirely impressive size, these characters at natural size, these kinds of demons that we can identify by a certain number of cross-checks—there is one on a vase in the Louvre
and in a few other places—these winged demons, booted, not helmeted but almost, and in any case armed
with a flagellum, begin to apply the ritual punishment to one of the impetrants, of the initiants who are in the image, that is to say to bring forth the fantasy of flagellation in the most direct form, in the most immediate connection with the unveiling of the phallus.

It is also quite clear that by all sorts of tests, of attestations that are brought to us by experience
which has nothing of proven and which demands no kind of investigation into the depth of the ‘Mysteries’, it is clear that in all the ancient cults, it is in the very measure that one approaches the cult, that is to say the signifying manifestation of the fecund power of the great goddess, that everything that relates
to the ϕαλλός is the object of amputations, of marks of castration, or of increasingly accentuated prohibition; the eunuch character of the priests
of the great goddess, of the Syrian goddess, being something of the most recognized, found again in all sorts of texts.

It is insofar therefore as the phallus is found situated, always covered by something that is castration,
the bar placed on its accession to the signifying domain, that is to say on its place in the Other with a capital A.

That by which, in development, castration is introduced, is never—observe it directly in the observations—by way of a prohibition, on masturbation for example. If you read the observation of little Hans, you will see that the first prohibitions have no effect on him.

If you read the story of André GIDE, you will see that his parents fought during all his first years to prevent him from it and that the professor BROUARDEL, showing him the great pikes and the great knives
that he had—because already it was the fashion among doctors to have at home a whole ‘unhook that for me’—
promised him that if he started again, ‘they would saw that off’. And the child GIDE reports to us very well that he did not believe
for a single instant in such a threat, because in truth it seemed to him ‘extravagant’, in other words,
nothing other than the episodic manifestation of professor BROUARDEL’s own fantasies.

It is not that at all that is at issue. As the texts indicate to us, the observations too: it is insofar
as ‘the being in the world’ which, after all, on the plane of the real would have the least reason to presume itself as being castrated
—namely the one who had occasion to be so, that is, the mother—it is nevertheless under this angle, that is to say at the level
of the Other, at the place where castration manifests itself in the Other, where it is the desire of the Other that is marked by the signifying bar of A here, it is by this essentially route that for man as for woman
the something specific that functions as castration complex is introduced.

When we spoke of the Oedipus complex at the beginning of last term, I emphasized this under the form of saying that first and foremost: the first person to be castrated in the intersubjective dialectic is the mother. It is there first that the position of castration is encountered. It is because of that that, according to destinies that are different
for man and for woman, the little girl—because castration is first encountered in the other—
it is because of that that the little girl joins this apperception with what the mother has frustrated her of.

That is to say that it is first under the form of a reproach to the mother that what is perceived in the mother as castration is thus also perceived as castration for her. It is under the mode of this rancor, which comes to add itself to the other antecedent frustrations, that presents itself, first for the girl—FREUD insists on it—the castration complex.

And it is because the father comes here only in a position of replacement for what she finds herself first frustrated of,
that she moves onto the plane of the experience of privation. It is because already it is at the symbolic level that this real penis of the father presents itself, which we are told that she awaits as a substitute for what she perceived herself as being frustrated of, that we can speak at that moment of privation, with the crisis that this privation engenders and the crossroads
that it offers the subject of renouncing:
– either her object, that is, the father,
– or her instinct, that is, of identifying with the father.

There results a curious consequence: it is that the penis, precisely because it has been introduced into the woman’s castration complex under this form of symbolic substitute, is at the source in the woman of all sorts of conflicts
of the type of those that are called conflicts of jealousy, or again of the partner’s infidelity. This is felt as a real privation, I mean with an entirely different accent from what the same conflict can represent seen from the man’s side.

I will go quickly over that; I will return to it. But there is one thing that we must see: it is that if the phallus is found
under the barred form where it has its place as indicating the desire of the Other, the whole sequel of our development
will show us how the subject will have to find his place as desired object with respect to that desire of the Other,
and consequently, it is always—as FREUD indicates to us with regard to his so remarkable insight on a beaten child—it is always insofar as he does not have the ϕαλλός that the subject, in the end, will have to be situated,
that he will find his identification as subject, insofar—as we will see—that the subject is as such, himself a subject marked by the bar. This manifests itself in a clear way in the woman, whose developmental incidences with regard to the phallus I have approached today by a simple indication.

Thus, in sum, the woman finds herself caught in an insoluble dilemma—the man too moreover—
which is what around which all the typical manifestations of her femininity must be placed: neurotic or not.
It is, as I indicated to you, as regards finding her satisfaction, namely:
– first the man’s penis,
– then next, by substitution, the desire for the child.
This is classical. I am here only indicating what is current in analytic theory.

What does that mean? It is that in the end, in order to find again a satisfaction as deep-seated,
as fundamental as that of maternity, as demanding moreover, as instinctual, she finds what is satisfaction only by the routes of the substitutive line: it is insofar, I would say, that the penis is first a substitute,
I would go so far as to say a fetish, then next that the child, he too, in a certain respect is a fetish, that the woman reaches
what is, let us say, her instinct and her natural satisfaction.

Conversely, for everything that is in the line of her desire, she finds herself bound to the necessity, implied by
the function of the ϕαλλός [phallos], of being—to a certain degree, which varies—to be this ϕαλλός insofar as it is
the very sign of what is desired, and it is indeed to that that […] if repressed as the function of the ϕαλλός may be, what, in what is considered as properly femininity, is the whole exhibition phase responds, namely that in which the woman offers herself as object of desire. Everything that in the feminine function, insofar as it exhibits itself and offers itself as object of desire, identifies her in a latent and secret way with the ϕαλλός, that is to say in sum, situates her being as subject as desired ϕαλλός, as ‘signifier of the desire of the Other’, situates it, that being,
beyond what one can call the feminine masquerade since in the end everything she shows of her femininity
is precisely linked to this profound identification, to a signifier that is the most linked to her femininity.

We see there appear the role and the root of what one can call, in the subject’s completion on the path of the desire of the Other, her profound Verwerfung, her profound rejection as being of that in which she appears, as properly
under the feminine mode. Her satisfaction therefore passes by the substitutive route, and her desire manifests itself on the plane where
it can end only in a profound Verwerfung, in a profound strangeness of her being, in that in which she must appear.

Do not believe that for the man the situation is better. It is even more comical.
The ϕαλλός, he has it, the poor wretch! And it is indeed of knowing that his mother does not have it that traumatizes him,
for then, since she is much stronger, where are we going? It is there, in this primitive fear of women, that Karen HORNEY showed one of the most essential springs of the disturbances of the castration complex.

Just as the woman was caught in one dilemma, the man is caught in another. It is in the line of satisfaction that for him the masquerade is established, because in the end he will resolve the question of the danger that threatens what he in fact has by what we know well, namely pure and simple identification with the one who has the insignia,
with the one who has all the appearances of having escaped the danger, that is to say the father. And in the end the man
is never virile except by an indefinite series of procurations. These come to him from all his grandparents
and from all his ancestors, by way of the direct ancestor.

But conversely, in the line of desire, that is to say insofar as he has to find his satisfaction from the woman, he will look for the ϕαλλός too. We have all the clinical and other attestations; I will return to it next time.
And it is precisely because this ϕαλλός, he does not find it where he looks for it, that he looks for it everywhere else.
In other words, the symbolic penis, for the woman, is inside, so to speak, the field of her desire,
whereas for the man it is outside. This to explain to you that men always have,
in the relation, centrifugal tendencies.

It is insofar therefore that in the end she is not herself,
– insofar as she is in the field of her desire,
– that is to say insofar as in the field of her desire she has to be the ϕαλλός
…that the woman will experience Verwerfung, that subjective identification [I] is the one that ends at the level of the 2nd line:

D ⇒ A ◊ d ⇔ s(A) ⇐ I

And it is insofar as he is not himself, insofar as he satisfies, that is to say that he obtains the satisfaction of the other, that the man finds himself, in love, outside his Other. So it is insofar, I would say, that he perceives himself
only as the instrument of satisfaction. And that is why in the end the problem of love
is the problem of this profound division that it introduces within the subject’s activities.

It is always because what is at issue, according to the very definition of love, is to give what one does not have:
it is to give—for the man—what he does not have, to a being who does not have what he does not have, that is to say who does not have the phallus.