We are going to start from the current event that those of you who attended last night’s ‘scientific communication’ of the Society were able to appreciate. You were spoken to about the heterosexual relationship. Precisely, that is also what we are trying to speak about: the heterosexual relationship appeared, in that perspective, as essentially formative. It was, in sum, a primary given of the developmental tension between the parents and the child.

What appears in another perspective, which is exactly our point of departure and without any doubt in conformity with a first experience, is precisely what is in question: is the heterosexual relationship between human beings something simple? In truth, if we stick to experience, it does not seem so. If it were simple, it seems it would be made at least to constitute within the human world a series of islets of harmony, at least for those who had succeeded in clearing away the bad brush.

It does not seem that up to now we can consider there to be a common voice on the part of analysts — and after all, is there any need to invoke analysts on this? — and that, even when brought to its completion, the heterosexual relationship for the man presents itself as something […] since precisely its whole problem, it is the least one can say, turns around that.

Let us take BALINT’s writings for example, which are fairly centered on this, since it is in the very title of the collection on Genital Love. There one attests the coexistence of a quite terminal Spaltung, the juxtaposition of the current of desire and the current of tenderness. It is around this juxtaposition that this whole problem of the heterosexual relationship is composed.

That does not remove the interest of what was said to us last night, far from it! If only for the terms of reference that were employed, and for example this aesthetic condition, this conscious and aesthetic valorization of sex, to take up the terms of the speaker, which constitutes a fundamental stage, in her perspective, in the relation of the Oedipus. Her sex, her symbol presents itself — Mme DOLTO tells us — as a beautiful and good form, ‘Sex is beautiful,’ she added. This is obviously a perspective — from the mouth from which it came — assuredly flattering for the bearers of this male sex.

Finally… which does not seem, either, to be a given that we can adopt in a univocal way: I mean that if we refer ourselves to all the reservations of one of the persons who intervened, and with authority on this subject, and who gave us what one can call ethnological observations, all the same if we refer ourselves to the savages — to the good savages who have always been a term of reference for anthropologists, it does not seem, in truth, that this is a primary given — if indeed the savage is the first — of this beautiful and good form of the phallus.

To say everything, according to the whole set of documents, I am not even speaking of the learned documents, of those things that one elaborates afterwards in the ethnographer’s study, but of the experience that one can find among those ethnographers who were in the field, who were in the midst of the so-called ‘savages,’ good or bad, it seems precisely that it is truly a basis and a principle of relations between the sexes, even in the most backward tribes, that at least the erection of the phallus is hidden. Even in tribes that possess only the most primitive mode of clothing, there is the existence of something that consists precisely in hiding the phallus, the penis sheath for example, as ethnology testifies, as a strict residue, as the clothing that remains. And this is something quite striking.

And on the other hand, quite numerous ethnographers have testified as to a truly primary reaction, of the sort of irritation that persons of the female sex feel in the presence of properly erect manifestations of the phallus. For example, in the very rare case where there is no clothing at all, among the NAMBIKWARA whom you know our friend LÉVI-STRAUSS visited on several occasions and about whom he spoke at length, LÉVI-STRAUSS testified to me, on the question I put to him in this domain — and moreover what I am telling you for the moment bears the reflection of what was testified and of what he himself said in his book — that he never observed in front of the group, and in a way he himself could see, an erection in the male. Sexual relations take place without any special concealment, two steps from the group, in the evening, around the campfires, but erection, whether by day or at that moment, is not seen in public, and it does not occur there. This is not quite indifferent to our subject.

On the other hand, this notion of the ‘beautiful and good form,’ if one must situate as such the meaning of the phallus, is a perspective that we shall see to be rather unilateral. On the other side, I know well that there is the ‘beautiful and good form’ of the woman. Assuredly it is valorized by all the elements of civilization, but still one cannot say, there, if only because of its individual diversity, that we can speak of a univocal ‘beautiful and good form.’ Let us say practically that this ‘beautiful and good form’ in any case leaves more fluctuation than the other. No doubt, behind each woman the form of the Venus de Milo or of the Aphrodite of Cnidus is silhouetted, but still, it is not always with univocally favorable results.

Much has been reproached to DAUMIER for having given the gods of Greece the forms, let us say somewhat sagged, of the bourgeois men and bourgeois women of his time. It was reproached to him as a sacrilege. It is precisely here that the problem I indicate is situated: it is that if obviously it is so deplorable to humanize the gods, it is no doubt because humans do not always divinize themselves so easily.

In short, it is quite clear that if the necessities of the perpetuation of the human race are delivered over to the subject of the ‘beautiful and good form,’ the whole indicates therefore that we would content ourselves with average demands, that the term ‘beautiful and good form,’ perhaps not completely destined to fulfill, remains in any case quite enigmatic.

In fact, everything that has been said as apt, as remarkable, to valorize this ‘beautiful and good form’ of the phallus is precisely what is in question there. This does not eliminate, of course, its character as a pregnantly compelling form, as a prevailing form, but the discourse we are pursuing here, insofar as it is founded, insofar as it directly prolongs not only the Freudian discourse but the Freudian experience, is made to give us another idea of this meaning of the phallus. The phallus is not a form, is not an objectal form, insofar as that remains the captivating form, the fascinating form, at least in one sense, for the problem remains entire in the Other.

Attraction between the sexes is an infinitely more complex thing, as the whole economy of analytic doctrine reveals to us, and what we are committing ourselves to is to give its solution according to this formula which naturally is itself nothing other than a formula that must be developed in order to be understood, namely that the phallus is neither a fantasy, nor an image, nor an object — even if partial, even if internal — it is a signifier. And the fact that it is a signifier is what alone allows us to articulate, to conceive the various functions it takes on at the various levels of the inter-sexual encounter.

A signifier: it is not enough to say that it is a signifier. Which one? It is a signifier, the signifier of desire, and this of course raises a question that goes further: the signifier of desire, what does that mean? It is quite certain that the scope of this assertion implies that we know, that we say, and that we articulate first what desire is, in its formula.

Desire is not something that is self-evident in the function it occupies in our experience. It is not simply inter-sexual appetite, inter-sexual attraction, sexual instinct. It is of course understood that this does not eliminate either the existence of tendencies more or less accentuated, variable according to individuals, which have this primary character of manifesting themselves as something that is, let us say roughly, the more or less of power of this or that individual with regard to sexual union. This is something that resolves in no way the question of the constitution of desire as we see it in this or that individual, whether neurotic or not. The constitution of his desire is something other than what he has, if you like, as baggage of sexual potency.

That is why we are going to, by way of getting going again after this change of scenery that yesterday’s perspectives may have brought us, we are simply going to take up FREUD’s text again. I must say that it is not from today that I have been making this remark, but I communicate it to you today: one is amazed by the existence of this text of The Interpretation of Dreams; one is amazed as by a sort of miracle, because it is really not too much to say that one can read it as what is a thought in motion.

But it is even more: things are brought in times that correspond to a composition on several overdetermined planes — that is indeed where the word would apply — which makes it so that, by taking it simply, as I told you I did last time, that is to say by taking up the first dreams, the scope of what comes first far exceeds the reasons that are given for putting them first in the titles.

It is with regard to the memories of the day before, insofar as they enter into account in a determinism of dreams, that certain of these first dreams, that for example which I commented on last time with you, namely ‘the dream of the beautiful butcher’s wife’ as I called it, present themselves there. You saw that on the other hand it is really in order to approach the question of demand and desire — it is not I who put them into the dream, they are there: demand and desire are there, and FREUD does not put them there.

It is he, FREUD, who read them there. He saw that the patient needs to create for herself an unsatisfied desire. It is FREUD who says it, and already, by itself alone, with everything we know since then, and FREUD, of course, when he wrote it was not there to give the name with a little lamp, he had already taken a certain perspective on things; if he put things in this order, it is driven by a need for approach and composition that can go far beyond the division of his chapters, and in fact this dream has something truly, something especially introductory on this problem that is fundamental to the perspective that I am trying here to promote for you: desire, then, and there, demand.

It is hardly necessary to say it: demand is also everywhere, because if the dream occurred, it is because a friend asked her to come dine at her place. Moreover in the dream itself, demand is there in the clearest form. The patient knows that everything is closed that day, that she will not be able to make up for her insufficiency of material, of provisions, to meet the dinner she must offer. And then she asks, in the clearest way, the most isolated way one can present a demand, she asks on the telephone, which at the time — that is part of the 1st edition of The Interpretation of Dreams — was not in common use; the telephone is really there with all its full symbolic power.

Let us go a bit further: what are the first dreams we are going to encounter? We enter into The elements and the sources of the dream [Ch.V] and we first encounter ‘the dream of the botanical monograph,’ which is a dream of FREUD. I am going to pass over that one, but it is not because it does not bring exactly what we can now expect, namely what I am going to try to show you today precisely: to see the relations of the phallic signifier functioning with desire; only, since it is a dream of FREUD, naturally it would be a little longer and a little more complicated to show you.

I will do it if I have the time. It is absolutely clear, structured exactly according to the little schema that I gave you last time, that I began to draw for you with regard to the hysteric’s desire last time. But FREUD is not purely and simply a hysteric: if he has to hysteria the relation that every relation with desire entails, it is in a somewhat more elaborated way. We therefore skip the dream of the botanical monograph and we arrive at a patient whom FREUD tells us is a hysteric, and we take up the hysteric’s desire:

‘A young woman, intelligent and refined, reserved, of the ‘still waters’ type, recounts: “I dreamed that I arrived too late at the market and that I found nothing left at the butcher’s and at the vegetable woman’s.” There is assuredly an innocent dream; but a dream does not present itself in that way; I ask for a detailed account. Here it is: She went to the market with her cook, who carried the basket. The butcher told her, after she asked him for something: “You can’t get any more,” and he wanted to give her something else saying: “This is good too.” She refused and went to the vegetable woman. The latter wanted to sell her vegetables of a singular kind, tied in small bundles, but black in color. She said: “I don’t know what that is, I’m not taking that.”’

[A clever and refined young lady, who in life too belongs among the reserved, among the ‘still waters,’ recounts: I dreamed that I came too late to the market and that I got nothing from the butcher as well as from the vegetable woman. Certainly a harmless dream, but that is not what a dream looks like; I have it told to me in detail. Then the report runs as follows: She goes to the market with her cook, who carries the basket. The butcher says to her, after she has asked for something: That is no longer to be had, and wants to give her something else with the remark: That is good too. She refuses and goes to the vegetable woman; she wants to sell her a peculiar vegetable that is sold bound together in bundles, but black in color. She says: I don’t know that, I’m not taking that.]

FREUD’s commentary is essential here, since it is not we who analyzed this patient. What is at stake is to see what FREUD believes he can find in a work which at the time is roughly like the first work on atomic theory if it had come out without any kind of connection and any preparation with the physics that preceded it. Moreover it was in fact received with an almost total silence. It is therefore on the first pages of his book that, to speak of the presence of the recent and the indifferent in the dream [Ch.V, § 1], FREUD calmly ‘hands’ his readers the following commentary and tries to connect this dream to the events of the day:

‘She had really gone to the market too late and had found nothing left. One is tempted to say: the butcher’s shop was already closed.’ [She really went too late to the market and got nothing more. The meat-stall was already closed, imposes itself on one as a description of the experience.]

But he does not say that it is the patient who said it. Already he moved forward rather quickly by saying that it imposes itself like that. Yet, stop! FREUD comments:

‘Isn’t this quite like a very vulgar way of speaking that refers to some negligence in a man’s clothing?’ [But stop, isn’t that a rather common saying that — or rather its opposite — refers to negligence in a man’s clothing?]

In other words, it seems that in Viennese argot one would speak thus of someone who had forgotten to button his trousers, and that it would be customary, at least in familiar terms, to point it out to him by the phrase ‘Your butcher’s shop is not closed.’

‘The dreamer moreover did not use these words — FREUD tells us, and he adds — “she perhaps avoided them… That being said, let us look further.”’ [The dreamer did not use these words, moreover, perhaps avoided them… let us seek the interpretation of the individual details contained in the dream.]

‘When, in a dream, something has the character of a discourse, is said or heard instead of being thought — one ordinarily distinguishes it without difficulty — it derives from discourse in waking life…’ [Where something in the dream has the character of a speech, thus is said or heard, not merely thought — which can usually be reliably distinguished — that comes from speeches of waking life…]

It is therefore a matter of words insofar as they are inscribed in the dream as on a banderole. They are not implications of the situation: it is a matter of what is distinguished without difficulty, FREUD tells us, namely the element of language that FREUD invites us always to take as an element valid in itself.

‘That derives from discourse in waking life. No doubt these are treated as raw material: one fragments them, one transforms them a little; above all one separates them from the whole to which they belonged. The work of interpretation can start from these sorts of discourses. From where, then, do the butcher’s words come: “You can’t get any more?”’

[…that comes from speeches of waking life, which, to be sure, are treated as raw material, broken up, slightly altered, above all torn from their context. One can proceed in the interpretive work from such speeches. From where, then, does the butcher’s speech come: That is no longer to be had?]

‘That is no longer to be had.’: this phrase is taken by FREUD, at the moment he writes The Wolf Man, as a testimony he gives the reader that for a very long time he has been interested in this question of the difficulty there is in reconstructing what is pre-amnesic in the subject’s life, what is from before infantile amnesia. It is indeed on this point that he says this to the patient:

‘I myself pronounced them, in explaining to her a few days before that we could no longer have (evoke) the oldest lived experiences of childhood as such, but that they were returned to us by transfers and dreams in the analysis. It is therefore I who am the butcher, and she rejects this transfer of old ways of thinking and feeling. From where come the words, on the other hand, that she pronounces in the dream: “I don’t know that, I’m not taking that.” The analysis must divide this phrase. She herself, a few days before, in the course of a discussion, said to her cook: “I don’t know what that is,” but she added: “Be proper, I beg you!” Behave decently!’

[‘From myself; I had explained to her a few days before that the oldest childhood experiences are no longer to be had as such, but are replaced by “transferences” and dreams in the analysis.’ I am thus the butcher, and she rejects these transferences of old modes of thinking and feeling onto the present. From where comes her dream speech: I don’t know that, I’m not taking that? This must be broken up for the analysis. She herself said “I don’t know that” the day before yesterday to her cook, with whom she had a quarrel, but at that time added: Behave decently.]

It matters little what she said to the cook since this is taken as an element of phrase, since, as FREUD says, it is precisely insofar as what is retained of this phrase ‘I don’t know that, I’m not taking that’ is precisely the part that has no meaning, the very one that censorship tends to ward off, which is also said to the servant. FREUD remarks that it is insofar as this is retained in what is dreamed that the sense corresponds to ‘I don’t know that, I’m not taking that.’ One could add something more, if one were more rigorous, such as: ‘I don’t know that, Behave decently!’

‘We grasp the displacement: of the two phrases said to the cook, she kept in the dream only the one that was devoid of meaning; the one she repressed alone corresponded to the rest of the dream. One will say: “Be proper, I beg you!” to someone who will be voluntarily negligent in his clothing.’

[Here a displacement becomes tangible; of the two sentences she used against her cook, she took the meaningless one into the dream; the suppressed one, however: “Behave decently!” alone matches the rest of the dream content. Thus one could call out to someone who ventures indecent demands and forgets ‘to close the meat-stall.’]

Which is not either a very correct translation, for what is at stake in the German text is: ‘One will say: “Be proper, I beg you” to someone who dares to have improper demands and who forgets to “close his butcher’s shop”.’ The translation is fanciful.

‘The correctness of our interpretation is proved by its agreement with the allusions that are at the bottom of the incident of the vegetable woman. An elongated vegetable, sold in bundles, a black vegetable, can it be anything other than the confusion produced by the dream of asparagus and black radish? I need interpret asparagus for no one, but the other vegetable seems to me also to be an allusion.’

The word ‘allusion’ is not in the German text; it refers, says the German text, to a sexual theme:

‘This same sexual theme, we guessed it from the beginning when we wanted to symbolize the whole account by the phrase: “The butcher’s shop is closed.” We do not need here to discover the whole sense of this dream; it suffices to have demonstrated that it is full of meaning and in no way innocent.’

[That we have truly hit upon the track of the interpretation is then proved by the harmony with the hints that are laid down in the episode with the vegetable woman. A vegetable that is sold bound together in bundles (longish, as she adds afterwards), and black besides, what can that be other than the dream fusion of asparagus and black radish [pun: ‘schwarzer Rettich’ (black radish) sounds like ‘Schwarzer, rett’ dich!’ meaning ‘Black one, save yourself!’]? Asparagus I need interpret for no one who knows, but the other vegetable too — as a shout: ‘Black one, save yourself!’ — seems to me to point to the same sexual theme that we already guessed at the very beginning when we wanted to set in for the dream account: the meat-stall was closed. It is not a matter of fully recognizing the sense of this dream; so much is certain: that it is meaningful and by no means harmless.]

I apologize if this may have seemed a bit long to you. Now that we know a lot about it, I would simply like to refocus things on this little dream that we tend to read a bit quickly. Here is, in the clearest way, represented another relation of the hysteric with something that is what we are centering our aim on for the moment. Last time I indicated that the hysteric, in her dream and in her symptoms, needs there to be somewhere marked the place of desire as such. Here it is another thing: it is the place of the phallus signifier.

Let us interweave our theoretical discourse with these references to the dream concerning the hysteric so as to vary, and consequently also to relieve your attention. There are three other dreams of the same patient following, and we shall make use of them when it is appropriate. Let us stop for a moment on what it is for the moment to bring out: it is the same problem, the same phenomenon as the other day, namely the place to give to desire.

But here it is not a place that is marked in the field external to the subject of a desire as such:
– insofar as she refuses it to herself beyond demand,
– insofar as in the dream she assumes it as being the desire of the other, of her friend,
it is desire insofar as it is supported by its signifier, the phallus signifier by hypothesis, since that is what we are speaking about. It is a matter of knowing what function the signifier plays on this occasion.

FREUD, as you see there, introduces without any kind of hesitation, without any kind of ambiguity, the phallus signifier and what is at stake when it is a matter of something that is the only element he did not highlight as such in his analysis — because he had to leave us something to do — but which is quite striking. Indeed, all the ambiguity of the subject’s conduct with regard to the phallus, if the phallus is not the object of desire but the signifier of desire, all this ambiguity will reside in this dilemma, namely that this signifier:

– the subject can have it,

– or that he can be it.

It is because it is a signifier that this dilemma is posed, and this dilemma is absolutely essential: it is what lies at the bottom of all the slidings, of all the transmutations, of all the sleight-of-hand, shall I say, of the castration complex. Why does the phallus come into this dream? I do not believe we overstep anything abusive from this perspective if we say that the phallus is actualized as such in the dream of this hysteric around FREUD’s phrase: ‘That is no longer to be had.’

I had the usage confirmed to me, I would say absolute, of ‘to have,’ as it manifests itself in this linguistic usage that makes us say ‘to have it or not,’ or better still, in French: ‘to have some or not,’ which also has its scope in German. It is a matter here, in this phrase, of the phallus insofar as it arises as the object that is lacking. The object that is lacking to whom? That is of course what it is appropriate to know, but nothing is less certain than that it is purely and simply the object that is lacking to the subject insofar as he is a biological subject.

Let us say that first and foremost, this presents itself in signifying terms, and insofar as it is a phrase that introduces it, an articulated phrase as something that is linked to the phrase that articulates that this ‘is what one can no longer have,’ That is no longer to be had.

It is not a frustrating experience; it is a meaning; it is a signifying articulation of the lack of object as such. This, of course, accords with the notion that I put here in the foreground, namely that the phallus is the signifier here, insofar as who does not have it? — insofar as the Other does not have it, because it is a matter of something that is articulated on the plane of language, and that is situated as such on the plane of the Other; it is the signifier of desire insofar as desire is articulated as the desire of the Other. I will come back to that in a moment.

We are now going to take the second dream. The second dream at issue, of the same patient, is a dream said supposedly ‘innocent.’

‘Her husband asks: “Shouldn’t the piano be tuned?” She answers: “It’s not worth it!… Es lohnt nicht!

That means something like: “It doesn’t pay!”

“One must first have it re-covered. It is the repetition of a real event of the day before. But why does she dream it? She does indeed say that this piano is a disgusting box, which gives a bad sound, that her husband already had it before his marriage”

And as the analysis will show us, she says the opposite of what she thinks, that is to say that her husband did not have it before his marriage

“But the solution will be given to us by the phrase ‘It’s not worth it.’ She said it yesterday, says Freud, as she was visiting a friend. They urged her to take off her jacket, she refused, saying: ‘It’s not worth it, I’m going to have to leave.’ I then think that yesterday during the analysis, she abruptly put her hand to her jacket, one button of which had just come undone. It was as if she had said: ‘Please, don’t look on that side, it’s not worth it.’ Thus she replaces box with chest-box: box: Kasten, chest: Brust-kasten — and the interpretation of the dream brings us back to the time of her development: she was then beginning to be dissatisfied with her forms. If we pay attention to the “disgusting,” to the “bad sound,” and if we recall how many times the little hemispheres of the female body replace the big ones, the analysis brings us back again into childhood.”’

[Another harmless dream of the same patient, in a certain respect a counterpart to the previous one: Her husband asks: Shouldn’t the piano be tuned? She: It’s not worth it; it has to be newly leather-covered anyway. Again the repetition of a real event from the day before. Her husband asked so and she answered similarly. But what does it mean that she dreams it? She does indeed recount about the piano that it is a disgusting box that gives a bad tone, a thing her husband possessed already before the marriage, etc., but the key to the solution is nevertheless first given by the speech: It’s not worth it. This comes from a visit she made yesterday to her friend. There she was invited to take off her jacket, and refused with the words: Thanks, it’s not worth it, I have to go right away. In this telling it occurs to me that yesterday during the analytic work she suddenly grabbed at her jacket, where a button had come open. It is thus as if she wanted to say: Please, don’t look, it’s not worth it. Thus the box completes itself into a chest-box, and the interpretation of the dream leads directly into the time of her bodily development, when she began to be dissatisfied with her bodily forms. It also leads, probably, into earlier times if we take account of the “disgusting” and the “bad tone” and recall how often the small hemispheres of the female body — as contrast and as replacement — enter in for the large ones — in allusion and in the dream.]

Here we find ourselves on the other face of the question. If the phallus is the signifier of desire, and of the desire of the Other, the problem for the subject at the first step of this dialectic of desire, here is its other slope: it is a matter of being or not being the phallus.

Let us trust ourselves outright to this signifier function that we accord to the phallus, by saying this: just as ‘one cannot be and have been,’ one cannot either ‘be and not be,’ and if what one is not must be what one is, it remains to not be what one is. That is to say, what one is, to push it back into seeming, which is very exactly the position of the woman in hysteria: insofar as she is a woman, she makes herself a mask.

She makes herself a mask precisely in order — behind this mask — to be the phallus, and all the hysteric’s behavior, this behavior insofar as it manifests itself by this hand brought to the button whose meaning FREUD’s eye has long accustomed us to see, but accompanied by the phrase ‘It’s not worth it.’

Why ‘It’s not worth it’? Of course, because it is a matter that one not look behind, because behind, it is of course a matter that the phallus be there. But it really is not worth going to look there, since precisely one will not find it there! It is a matter for the hysteric… as FREUD immediately brings it to us in a note addressed to those he calls die Wissbegierige, which is translated in French as ‘to those who would like to go deeper into it,’ more exactly, to be more rigorous, that means: ‘to the amateurs of knowledge.’

And that will carry us to the heart of what perhaps I have already designated to you by this term borrowed from a morality that nonetheless remains marked by a human experience perhaps richer than many others, the theological morality that is called the cupido sciendi, which gives us the term that we can choose to translate desire.

These are delicate questions, equivalences between languages with regard to desire. I know that I have already obtained from my German-speaking students: ‘Begierde’; one finds it in HEGEL, but some find that it is too animal. It is odd that HEGEL used it with regard to the Master and the Slave, which is not too marked by animality…

So: ‘I shall note,’ says FREUD, ‘that this dream covers a fantasy: provocative conduct on my part, defense on hers.’

In short, he indicates again to us what is in fact a fundamental conduct of the hysteric but at the same time, in this context we see its meaning: the hysteric’s provocation is precisely something that tends to constitute desire, but beyond what is called defense, to indicate the place, beyond this appearance, of this mask, of something that is essentially what is presented to desire and which of course cannot be offered to its access, since it is something presented behind a veil, but on the other hand of course cannot be found there:

‘It is not worth it for you to open my bodice, because you would not find the phallus there, but if I put my hand to my bodice, it is so that you desire behind my bodice the phallus, that is to say the signifier of desire.’

This perhaps leads us to begin to ask ourselves how we would have to define, in all strictness, this desire, so as to make you nonetheless clearly feel what we are speaking about; I mean, not to limit ourselves to what someone, in dialogue with me, called — in my view rather happily, with regard to my little framework-lines that I serve you again from time to time and that you must not let slip from view — called a little Calder mobile. Why?

Let us try to articulate what we mean by: ‘desire as such.’ We posit desire in this dialectic as what is found on the little mobile beyond demand. Why is there a need for a beyond of demand? There is a need for a beyond of demand insofar, I told you, as demand, by its articulatory necessities, deflects, changes, transposes need. There is therefore the possibility of a residue.

It is insofar as man is caught in the signifying dialectic that there is something that does not go, whatever the optimistic persons who no doubt indicate to us what happens happily as a locating of the other sex between children and parents may think. Only one thing is missing: that it also go as well between the parents, whereas it is precisely there that is the whole level at which we are approaching the question.

There is therefore a residue. How does it present itself? How must it necessarily present itself? It is no longer now a matter of sexual desire. We shall see why sexual desire must come to that place, but from the moment there is a general relation of a need in man with the signifier, we find ourselves before this: namely that if something restores the margin of deviation marked by the incidence of the signifier on needs, and if this beyond presents itself — as experience proves that it presents itself — that is what we call desire.

But as a possible form of its presentation, here is roughly how we can articulate it: the way in which desire must present itself in the human subject depends on what is determined by the dialectic of demand. If demand has a certain effect on needs, it on the other hand has its own characteristics. These own characteristics, I have already articulated them here: it is that demand, fundamentally, in its existence and by the sole fact that it is articulated as demand, posits — even if it does not expressly ask it — the Other as ‘absent’ or ‘present,’ and giving or not giving this absence or this presence, that is to say as a demand for love, this something that is nothing, no particular satisfaction, which is what the subject brings by the pure and simple response to the demand.

It is here that the originality of the introduction of the symbolic under the form of demand is situated: namely that it is against the background of a demand for love that the originality of the introduction of demand in relation to need is situated. If this entails some loss in relation to need in whatever form it may be, must this be found beyond demand? It is quite clear that if it must be found beyond demand, that is to say beyond what this dimension of demand brings, in sum, of distortion to need, it is insofar as beyond we must find again something where the Other loses its prevalence, where, if you like, need insofar as it starts from the subject takes back first place.

Nevertheless, since already what is demanded has passed through the filter of demand at the level and at the stage of the unconditioned, it is only as, if one can say, a second negation that we are going to find again beyond what it is precisely a matter of finding, which is the margin of what was lost in this demand. And the beyond is precisely the character of absolute condition that is in desire.

What presents itself in desire as such is that something that is borrowed, of course, from need…
how would we make our desires, if not by borrowing the raw material of our needs?
…but that passes into a state, not of the unconditioned since it is a matter of something borrowed from a particular need, but of an absolute condition, without measure with any proportion of need to any object whatsoever, and insofar as this condition can be called absolute precisely in this, that it abolishes there the dimension of the Other, that it is a demand in which the Other does not have to answer yes or no.

This is what is the dimension, the fundamental character of human desire as such. Desire, whatever it may be, in the state of pure desire, is this: it is that something torn from the ground of needs and that takes the form of an absolute condition in relation to the Other.

It is precisely the margin, the result of the subtraction, if one can say, of the requirement of need in relation to the demand for love, that is to say that desire, inversely, is going to present itself as what in the demand for love is rebellious to any reduction to a need, because in reality that satisfies nothing other than itself, that is to say desire as absolute condition.

It is because of that that sexual desire is going to come to that place, precisely insofar as sexual desire presents itself in relation to the subject, in relation to the individual, as essentially problematic, and on both planes. On the one hand, on the plane of need, it is not FREUD who first underscored it; it is since the world is world that one has wondered how the human being, who is a being that has the property of recognizing what is advantageous to him, how he takes on, how he admits a need that incontestably pushes him to aberrant extremes, for the reason that it corresponds to no immediately rationalizable need, but that introduces into the individual, let us say, what has been called the dialectic of the species.

By its nature, sexual need presents itself in a certain problematic for a subject who is precisely what we have just said, even if philosophers articulated it otherwise:
– that is to say someone who can rationalize his needs,
– that is to say articulate them in terms of equivalence,
– that is to say of signifier.

On the other hand, with regard to the demand for love, the expression of sexual desire — it is going to become desire precisely, and it will be called desire because it can be placed only there, at the level of desire as we have just defined it — sexual desire presents itself, with regard to the demand for love, in a problematic way, whatever one may say about it and whatever holy water one tries to cover it with under the form of selfless giving.

The question of desire, with regard to the formulation of what is called in all languages ‘to formulate one’s demand,’ is problematic insofar as, to express things in the most common language, which is revealing here, it is a matter in the end, whatever the mode in which demand is formulated, that this be outlined: that the Other enters into play from the moment sexual desire is in question under the form of the instrument of desire. This is the reason why it is at the level of desire, as we have thus defined it, that sexual desire is posed insofar as it is in question: that is to say insofar as it cannot really be articulated.

There is not really a word — hear it from my mouth, since it may not do any harm for me to say that not everything is reducible to language; I have always said it, of course, even if it has not been heard — there is not a word to express something, and something that has a name, and it is precisely desire. To express desire, as popular wisdom knows very well, there is only blather. The question of the signifier of desire therefore poses itself as such, and that is why what expresses it is not a signifier like the others.

It is something that, indeed, is borrowed from a prevailing form of the push of the vital flow in this order, but that is nonetheless taken up in this dialectic as a signifier, with what this passage into the register of the signifier entails of mortified in everything that accedes to this dimension of the signifier.

Here the ambiguous mortification presents itself very precisely under the form of the veil, of the veil that we see reproduced every day under the form of the hysteric’s bodice, that is to say the fundamental position of the woman in relation to the man concerning desire: namely that there, behind the blouse, do not go and look there at all, because of course there is nothing, there is nothing but the signifier precisely — which is not nothing — the signifier of desire. Behind this veil, there is that something that must not be shown, and that is in what the demon I spoke to you about last time or the time before last with regard to the ‘unveiling of the phallus in the ancient Mystery’ presents itself and is articulated and is named as the demon of modesty. And modesty has different scopes in the man and in the woman.

I alluded to that, whatever its origin may be:
– the horror the woman has of it,
– or something that arises quite naturally from the delicate soul of men
…I alluded to this veil that very regularly covers, in the man, the phallus. It is exactly the same thing that covers, more or less normally, the totality of the woman’s being, insofar as what is at stake is precisely behind. What is veiled is the signifier of the phallus. And the unveiling of something that would show only nothing, that is to say the absence of what is unveiled, is very precisely to this that what FREUD called, with regard to the female sex, ‘dread’ with regard to the head of MEDUSA, or ‘horror’ that responds to the absence revealed as such, is connected.

Ultimately, what is at stake in this perspective, this play of the subject of desire and the signifier of desire, is something that is not exhausted at the point we have reached, that is only begun but, you see it well, that completely overturns a notion, like this one for example, which obscures this whole dialectic of the approach to the other in the sexual relationship, and supposedly matured by the sexual relationship, that progress would be from a partial object to a total object. There is there, properly speaking one can say, a true camouflage, an escapology.

For, to say things in proper terms, it would rather be much more the problem raised by the fact that in acceding to the place of desire, the other does not at all become, as one tells us, the total object. But the problem is this: it is that the other becomes totally object insofar as instrument of desire.

That is indeed what it becomes, and it is a matter of maintaining as compatible this position of the other as Other, that is to say as place of speech, the one to whom demand is addressed and the one whose radical irreducibility as Other manifests itself insofar as he can give love, that is to say something that is all the more totally gratuitous in that there is no support of love except, as I told you: to give one’s love is very precisely and essentially to give as such nothing of what one has, for it is insofar precisely as one does not have it that it is a matter of love.

It is a matter of this discordance between what there is of absolute in the subjectivity that gives or does not give love, and the fact that his access to him as object of desire, it is very precisely necessary that it be made totally object. It is in this essentially vertiginous gap, essentially nauseating, to call it by its name, that the difficulty of access in the approach of sexual desire is situated.

Somewhere, FREUD alludes in the most precise way to the symptom that in the hysteric manifests itself under the form of nausea and disgust, by bringing it close to phenomena of vertigo insofar…
It is not FREUD who says it, but it is in BREUER’s text. BREUER’s text refers to MACH, and to MACH’s works on The Motor Sensations, in order to mark with an intuition that it is in the discordance of optical sensations and motor sensations that the essential spring of this labyrinthine phenomenon lies, which would manifest itself and whose series we would see take shape: vertigo, nausea, and disgust.

Indeed it is perfectly observable, and I have already observed it in more than one, that the realization, the perception of the approach of the Other in desire under the form of the phallic signifier…
with this kind of short-circuit that results, at the point where the analysis of such a thing is possible, this short-circuit that is established of this phallic signifier with that something that, then and at that moment in the subject, can appear only empty, namely the place that the organ must normally occupy, I mean the place between the two legs, which, at that moment, is evoked only as place
…is something that is accompanied by the fact — and I would have ten observations to propose to you on this subject, in all sorts of forms, either quite clean, raw and clear, or under other diversely symbolic forms, the subject saying it nonetheless quite clearly — that it is insofar as the other as object of desire is perceived as phallus, and that as such it is perceived as lack in the place of his own phallus, that the subject experiences something that resembles a very curious vertigo, that someone even went so far as to compare for me to a sort of metaphysical vertigo experienced in other of the rarest circumstances encountered in subjects with regard to the notion of being itself, insofar as it underlies everything that he is.

On that, for today I will end. We shall thus return to this dialectic of being or having of the hysteric. We shall go further. You will see how far that carries us in the obsessional.

I announce to you right away that you must nonetheless clearly feel that this is not without relation to a whole dialectic, another one, and imaginary, of which not only has one proposed the theory to you, but which one ingurgitates more or less forcibly into patients in a certain technique concerning obsessional neurosis, insofar as the phallus as an imaginary element plays there a prevailing role.

We shall see what it can bring there as corrections, as well theoretical as technical, the consideration of the phallus, no longer as image and as fantasy, but as signifier.