It happened to me not to publish The Ethics of Psychoanalysis . At that time it was, for me, a form of politeness:
« after you, I beg you », « I beg you… », « do go on then… », « ’fter you… ».

With time, I got into the habit of noticing that, after all, I could say a little more about it. And then I realized that what constituted my way forward was something of the order of « I don’t want to know anything about it! ».
That is no doubt also what, with time, makes it that—still—I am here,
and that you too are here, I am always astonished by it, still!

For some time there has been something[May 1968] that favors it: it is that there is also in you, in the great mass
of those who are here, the same—apparently—the same « I don’t want to know anything about it! ». Only, everything is there: is it the same?
The « I don’t want to know anything about it! » of a certain knowledge that is transmitted to you in bits and pieces, is that really what it is about?
I don’t think so.

[The fossilized knowledge ‘transmitted in bits and pieces’ of university discourse is violently contested starting in May 68, in the name of a knowledge that would aim at truth through science,
philosophy, sociology, etc. But if university discourse is to be rejected, truth itself is lying, it concerns only a knowledge that protects…
through belief in the existence of the Other and in the fictions of knowledge that it allows
…from the horror of another knowledge, that of castration, of the absence of a sexual relation… → « …is it the same?[…]I don’t think so. » ]

And even, it is precisely because you suppose that I am starting from elsewhere in this « I don’t want to know anything about it! »
that this supposing binds you to me.

[The S2 of the knowledge supposed to Lacan, sub-poses (sub-jectum) a subject (who is never anything but supposed): S1← S2: the ‘subject supposed to know’ at the origin of transference, subject depositary of universal knowledge: the Other, Pascal’s ‘God of the philosophers’, or Hegel’s ‘absolute knowledge’, etc. The end of transference is also the fall of the ‘subject supposed to know’.]

So that if it is true that I say that, with respect to you, I can only be here in the position of analysand
of my « I don’t want to know anything about it! », until you reach the same, there’ll be a long time.

[Lacan always said that he was speaking (first and foremost) to analysts. His seminar resembles an inverted analytic dispositif:
– to an analyst: Jacques Lacan, very many people came in the position of analysand of their ‘I don’t want to know anything about it!’ that the Other does not exist.
– very many analysts came to the seminar where Lacan is in the position of analysand of his ‘I don’t want to know anything about it!’ of this real unconscious that cannot be reached by the sole work of deciphering the unconscious-language.
But here, in the position of analysand, Lacan alone produces (cf. ‘…alone as I have always been…’) the forging of the path of knowledge of the 2nd turn ‘of the turns said’, the one that aims

• beyond the half-said truth – at the real of saying. The half-saying of truth can only miss the real of saying; truth is lying (alètheia), it can only mask the real.
  But far from truth, in the outside-of-meaning of S1s, by making the equivocations of lalangue resonate in series,
  – one can reach the real dimension of the symptom,
  – recognize there the unheard-of letters of the ‘poem of lalangue’ of which each person is constituted,
  – and reach the position of a subject separated from the Other and from its identifications.
  → « …until you reach the same, there’ll be a long time. »]

And that is exactly, that is exactly what makes it that only when yours appears sufficient to you, you can…
if you are, conversely, my analysands
…you can normally detach yourselves from your analyst.
There is—contrary to what is being put about—no impasse of my position as analyst with what I am doing here with respect to you.

Last year, I titled what I believed I could tell you: « …or worse », then: « it oupires itself », (s, apostrophe). [pun: ‘ça s’oupire’ sounds like ‘ça soupire’ (it sighs) and ‘ou pire’ (or worse)]
That has nothing to do with « I » or « you »: « I don’t oupire you », nor « you don’t oupire me ».
[the title of the 1971-72 seminar was ‘…Or worse’→ two heterogeneous dimensions: ‘…’ and ‘Or worse’.
– the ‘Or worse’, the un-known knowledge of the unconscious-language that is structured as discourse in the analytic dispositif, where ‘it oupires itself’,
– the ‘…’ of the ‘saying’, here represented by the ellipses,]

Our path, that of analytic discourse, progresses only from this narrow limit,
from this knife-edge that makes it that elsewhere it can only ‘oupire itself’.

[this path that Lacan forges on a narrow littoral (literal) (cf. Lituraterre) between:
– on one side the unsayable of the real (not graspable by the symbolic), the wall of the impossible,
– and on the other the un-known knowledge of an unconscious structured like a language, whose enigma must be decrypted],
between the two, the littoral path of analytic discourse, that of the letter.

It is this [analytic] discourse that sustains me and, to begin it again this year,
I will first suppose you in bed, a bed of ‘full employment’, two in it.
[‘in bed’ as two, with an imperative: ‘Enjoy!’—the bed of conjugal love, that of enjoyment (legal sense), of legal union (civil code),
but also the bed of inter-dicted enjoyment, the bed of the dream, and the couch that binds the analysand to the subject supposed to know through ‘transference’ love]

Here I have to apologize to someone who, having kindly inquired into what my discourse is

• a jurist, to situate it – I thought I could… could, so as—to him—to make him feel what its foundation is,
  namely that language is not the speaking being, I told him that I did not find myself out of place
  having to speak in a Faculty of Law, the one where it is perceptible…
  perceptible through what is called the existence of codes, of the civil code, of the penal code, and many others
  …that language is held there, it is separate[the numerous volumes of the codes: civil, penal…],
  and that the speaking being—what are called ‘men’—has to do with that, as it has been constituted over the ages.

So to begin, to begin by supposing you in bed, of course I have to apologize to him for that!
I will not budge from it today though! And if I can apologize for it, it is by reminding him, by reminding him that,
at the foundation of all rights there is what I am going to talk about, namely enjoyment.
Law speaks of that, law does not even fail to recognize this departure, this good customary right
on which the use of concubinage is founded, which means sleeping together.

Obviously I am going to start from something else, from what in law remains veiled, namely what one does with it: embracing.
But that is because I start from the limit, from a limit from which indeed one must start in order to be serious,
what I have already commented on: being able to establish the series, the series of what approaches it.

Usufruct is indeed a notion of law and it brings together in a single word what I already recalled in this seminar
on the ethics I was talking about just now, namely the difference there is from the tool , there is from the useful to enjoyment.

What is the useful for? It is what has never been well defined because of a respect—a prodigious respect—
that, thanks to language, the speaking being has for the means.
Usufruct means that one can enjoy one’s means but must not waste them.
When one has received an inheritance, one has the usufruct of it; one can enjoy it on the condition of not using it up too much.
That is indeed where the essence of law is: it is to apportion, to distribute, to retribute, what enjoyment is.

But what is enjoyment?
That is precisely what, for the moment, is reduced for us to a negative instance: enjoyment is what is of no use! Only that does not say much more.
Here I point to, I point to ‘the reserve’ implied by this field of law, of the right to enjoyment.

[the reserve is the part of a canvas, protected by wax, that will be neither printed nor painted.
enjoyment is heterogeneous to the field of law (limited to usufruct), what is left blank in this field]

Law is not duty; nothing forces anyone to enjoy, except the superego.
The superego is the imperative of enjoyment: ‘enjoy!’, it is the commandment that comes… from where?
That is indeed where the turning point is found [cf. diagram] that analytic discourse interrogates.

[in analytic discourse the analyst in the position of semblance (a) addresses the subject (S) in the position of Other, about his enjoyment.
The analysand ‘produces’ swarms of S1 cut off from knowledge S2 (in the position of truth).
These swarms of S1 are any signifiers cut off from knowledge → asemantic (‘say everything that comes into your head even if it makes no sense’),
but they cannot rejoin their truth in S2, only allow S2 to be glimpsed fleetingly as local knowledge that lies there.]

C’est well on this path that I tried at one time—the time of the ‘after you…’—that I ‘let pass’ [cf. start of session]
to show that if analysis allows us to advance in a certain question [ethics: from ‘right’ to ‘duty’ (of enjoyment)],
it is indeed because we cannot hold ourselves to what I started from—surely respectfully—
to what I started from, namely Aristotle’s Ethics, to show what slippage had occurred with time.

Slippage that is not progress, slippage that is contour, slippage that from a consideration—in the proper sense of the term—of a consideration of being
which was Aristotle’s, brought about
– in the time of Bentham’s utilitarianism,
– in the time of the Theory of fictions,
– in the time of what in language [Saussure] demonstrated the value of tool, the value of use.

[Aristotle is situated in the master’s discourse (master → m’→être: S1→ S2→ a), which is a discourse on the nature of being that would be determined from the ‘sovereign Good’: a,
from a cosmological hierarchy of the harmony of the spheres: from the sublunary sphere (the human world) to the supreme sphere: the immobile sphere that would be at the principle of everything. From Aristotle (- 384,- 322) to Bentham (1748,1832) then Saussure (1857,1913), language is conceived in the same ‘contour’ (S1 → S2),
– as a structure of social order (master-slave) for Aristotle (M),
– as a structure of appropriation of goods for Bentham and his theory of fictions (U),
– as a structure of communication of knowledge (Saussure’s signifier/signified: H).
These three discourses belong to the same spherical contour (with an inside and an outside) and are consistent (universe, cosmos…) by exclusion of the heterogeneous (ex-sistence):
– a in the Hysterical discourse (in its ‘scientific discourse’ side, at least),
– S in the Master discourse,
– S1 in the University discourse,
→ with in each of these discourses the connection S1→ S2 posited as relation + principle of non-contradiction (exclusion of the impossible)].

And that is what finally lets us come back to interrogate what it is with this being, with this ‘Sovereign Good’ [a]
posited there as an object of contemplation, and from which one had thought one could build an ethics [foundation of a ‘ought to be’].

So I leave you on this bed to your inspirations [in sexual embrace or in the dream]. I go out, and once again I will write on the door…
so that on the way out, perhaps, you will be able to realize the dreams you will have pursued on this bed
…the following sentence:
the enjoyment of the Other…
of the Other with [a capital A]… it seems to me that by now—eh?—it should be enough that I stop there.
I have hammered your ears enough with this ‘capital A’ that comes after [in the sentence: ‘the Other with…’], given that now it drags everywhere, this capital A put in front of the Other, more or less opportunely besides,
it is printed willy-nilly
…the enjoyment of the Other, of the body of the Other that…
it too: ‘with a capital A’
…of the body of the Other that symbolizes it, is not the sign of love.

I write that and I do not write after it: finished, nor amen nor so be it.

It is not the sign… It is nonetheless the only answer.
What is complicated is that the answer is already given at the level of love.

And that enjoyment, because of this, remains a question, a question in that the answer it can constitute is not necessary first.
It is not like love: love, it, makes a sign and—as I have said for a long time—it is always reciprocal.
I advanced that very gently by saying that feelings are always reciprocal, it was so that it would come back to me:

– And then, and then… and love… and love… it is always reciprocal?
– But yesss! but yesss! [Laughter]

That is even why the unconscious was invented: to realize that ‘man’s desire is the desire of the Other’,
and that love is a passion that can be the ignorance of this desire, but that nonetheless leaves it all its scope.
When one looks more closely one sees its ravage. [‘man’s desire is the desire of the Other’→ aspiration to be only one → ravage]

So of course that explains that the enjoyment of the body of the Other, that, is not a necessary answer.
[since ‘love is reciprocal’, it suffices to recover completeness, the fullness of the One]

It goes even further: it is not a sufficient answer either, because love—it—demands love,
it does not cease to demand it, it demands it again! [→ enjoyment: neither necessary, nor sufficient]
‘Again’ is the proper name of this fault from which, in the Other, the demand for love departs.

[the fault in the Other (S(A)) is structural, permanent → love, which would allow ‘completeness’, is demanded again and again]

So where does it start from, where does this ‘it’ start from that is capable…
certainly—but in a non-necessary, non-sufficient way
…of responding by enjoyment, enjoyment of the body, of the body of the Other?

That is indeed what last year, inspired in a certain way by the chapel of Sainte-Anne that was carrying me on the system,
I let myself go so far as to call the (a)wall. [pun: ‘(a)mur’ = amour (love) + mur (wall) + object a] [the ‘traces’, on the body, of objects a].

The (a)wall is what appears as strange signs on the body and that comes from beyond, from outside,
from that place that we believed, just like that, we could peer at under the microscope in the form of the germen,
about which I will point out to you that one cannot say that it is life there since it also bears death, the death of the body, as much as it reproduces it, as much as it repeats it, as much as it is from there that the in-body comes.

It is false to say ‘separation’ of soma and germen, since by bearing this germen the body bears traces.

[the traces in question on the (a)wall are not those of sexual characteristics, but ‘strange signs inscribed’ on the body, clothes, jewelry, adornments, tattoos,
which envelop the body and signify its unity by the presence of an ἄγαλμα [agalma] (a) hidden inside, of a supreme Good]

There are traces on the (a)wall. The being of the body is sexed, certainly, but it is secondary, as one says.
And as experience [Ψ (psi)] shows, it is not on these traces [♀ (female), ♂ (male)] that the enjoyment of the body depends
insofar as the Other symbolizes it. That is what the simplest consideration of things advances.

What is at stake then in love? As psychoanalysis advances it…
with an audacity all the more incredible since all its experience goes against it,
since what it demonstrates is the contrary
…love is to make One. It is true that… that one has been speaking only of that for a long time,
of the One: fusion, ἔρως [éros] would be tension toward the One.

‘There’s 1’ [homophony with French ‘y a d’l’un’], that is what I supported my discourse of last year on,
and certainly not in order to flow together into that original confusion [2 in 1 → ‘One’],
that of desire which leads only to the aim of ‘the fault’ where it is demonstrated that the One holds only from the essence of the signifier.

If I interrogated Frege at the outset, it was to try to demonstrate the gap there is,
from this One to something that pertains to being, and behind being, to enjoyment.

[‘There’s 1’ does not aim at the ‘One’: ‘love is to make One’, but aims on the contrary to found 1 on ‘0’ (‘…the ‘gap’ there is from this 1… to being’),
as Frege (Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik) generates the sequence of numbers starting from 0 as a contradictory concept]

I can still tell you by a small example: the example of a parakeet [Laughter] that was in love with Picasso.
Well, you could see it in the way it nibbled at the collar of his shirt and the lapels of his jacket.
This parakeet was indeed in love with what is essential to man, namely his accoutrement.
This parakeet was like Descartes, for whom men were clothes on a pro-menade if you allow me,
of course it is ‘pro’, it promises the maenad, that is to say: when one leaves them [the clothes].
But it is only a myth, a myth that comes to converge with the bed from earlier [2 in 1].

[once the clothes are removed (i.e. what makes the body’s display) there remains only the body → partial objects (a) and not the One of being (S1) → impossibility—of them—of making two, hence the reiterated question about S1→ S2: ‘this S1, is it of them?’ and the answer: ‘that’s not it’]

To enjoy a body [a] when there are no more clothes is something that leaves intact the question [cut in the recording]
of what makes the One, that is to say, identification.

The parakeet identified with Picasso dressed. The same holds for everything that is of love.
– In other words, the habit loves the monk because it is through that that they are all only One.
– In other words, what is under the habit and that we call the body,
it may be that it is only the affair of that remainder that I call the object (a).
What makes the image hold [the coat] is a remainder. [(a) as coat rack, bearing]
And what analysis demonstrates is that love in its essence is narcissistic,
that the patter about the objectal is something whose substance, precisely, it knows how to denounce in what remains in desire, namely its cause, and what sustains it
– from its dissatisfaction [cf. the hysteric],
– or even from its impossibility [cf. the obsessional].

The impotence of love—though it is reciprocal—rests on this ignorance of being the desire to be One.
And this leads us to the impossible of establishing their relation—the relation of whom?—the two sexes.

Assuredly, I said, what appears on these bodies, under these enigmatic forms that are sexual characteristics which
are only secondary, no doubt makes sexed being, but being is the enjoyment of the body as such, that is to say as (a)…
put it [write it] as you like [asexed or (a)sexed]
…as (a)sexed, since what is called ‘sexual enjoyment’ is dominated, marked by the impossibility of establishing as such,
nowhere in what can be enunciated, this only One that interests us:
the One of the relation, sexual relation. [complementation of the two sexes → completeness]

That is what analytic discourse demonstrates, in that precisely as regards one of these beings as sexed,
man insofar as he is endowed with the organ called phallic…
I said: ‘called…’
…sex, bodily sex, the sex of the woman…
I said ‘the woman’: precisely there is no such thing, there is no ‘The woman’, woman is ‘not all’
…the sex of the woman tells him nothing, except through the intermediary of the enjoyment of the body [the ‘a’ objects].

[Discourse A: a (Semblance)→ S (the Other as enjoyment)→ S1 (Produced as Surplus-enjoyment)◊ S2 (Truth as enjoyment of the body of the Other, The woman)].

What analytic discourse demonstrates is…
allow me to say it in this form
…that the phallus [S1] is conscientious objection, made by one of the two sexed beings, to the service to be rendered to the Other.

[the S2 cannot found the S1→ impotence to ‘recover’ the One of love.
There is no sexual relation; sexuality aims at S1 but reaches only objects (a), partial and pregenital: oral, anal, vocal, scopic:
– On the question of love → ‘this S1, is it of them?’, S1→S2→ a:→ ‘that’s not it!’ → ‘I ask you to refuse what I offer you, because that’s not it’.
– On the question of enjoyment → ‘this S1, S2?’ or S1◊S2→ ‘that’s not it’ (no enjoyment of the body of the Other→ L woman, not ‘The woman’)]

And don’t talk to me about the woman’s secondary sexual characteristics because, until further notice,
it is those of the mother that prevail in her. Nothing distinguishes woman as a sexed being except precisely sex.

That everything turns around phallic enjoyment is very precisely
what analytic experience bears witness to, and bears witness in that L woman is defined from a position
that I pointed to as ‘not all’ with respect to phallic enjoyment. [resumption of the recording]

I go a bit further: phallic enjoyment is the obstacle by which man does not manage—shall I say—
to enjoy the body of the woman precisely because what he enjoys is that enjoyment, that of the organ.

And that is why the superego, as I pointed it out earlier with ‘enjoy!’, is the correlate of castration
which is the sign with which the admission is adorned that the enjoyment of the Other—of the body of the Other—only promotes itself from infinitude,
I will say which one: the one supported by Zeno’s paradox—no more, no less—himself.

Achilles and the tortoise, such is the schema of enjoying, on the side of the sexed being [♀]. When Achilles has taken his step, fired his shot
beside Briseis, like the tortoise, she too has advanced a little, this because she is ‘not all’, not all his, something remains,
and Achilles has to take the second step as you know, and so on…

It is even like that that nowadays—but only nowadays—one has managed to define number, the true [number],
or rather, the real [number]. Because what Zeno had not seen is that the tortoise is not spared either
from this fatality of Achilles: it is that since her step is smaller and smaller, he too will never reach the limit.

And it is in that that any number whatsoever is defined, if it is real. A number has a limit, and it is to that extent
that it is infinite. [ex.: the geometric series with ratio ½ and first term 1 (1 + ½ + ¼ +… converges (to infinity) toward its limit: 2, without ever reaching it]
Achilles, it is quite clear, can only overtake the tortoise; he cannot catch up to her, but he only catches up to her in infinitude.

Only, that is said as regards jouissance insofar as it is sexual:
– jouissance is marked on one side by this hole that secures it only by another route than phallic jouissance,
– is it that on the other side [on the side of the Other], something cannot be reached that would tell us how what up to now is only fault, gap in jouissance [fault of phallic jouissance], would be realized? [jouissance of the body of the Other]

That is what, singularly, can be suggested only by very strange glimpses.
‘Strange’ is a word that can be broken down: being-angel. [pun: French ‘étrange’ can be heard as ‘être ange’, ‘to be an angel’/‘being an angel’]

[Cf. The Annunciation, but above all the Gospels (from the Greek εὐαγγέλιον evangélion: ‘good news’) → the message of love (divine).
The emphasis is put on the message, on a knowledge (S2) → being angel is aiming at the Other as knowledge (and the jouissance of the body of the Other)]

It is indeed something against which the alternative warns us: being as stupid as the parakeet from earlier.

[aiming at S1, the asemantic signifier—deprived of meaning—and reaching only (a): being stupid is aiming at the phallic signifier → aiming at the repetition of ‘the jouissance of the idiot’,
which leads only to the partial object and to phallic jouissance (a→ ? S→ S1), but closes off access to S2 (impotence to reach the jouissance of the body of the Other: S1◊S2).
‘Stupidity’ is words deprived of meaning, or having to do with love, that aim at S1 but reach only (a).
– Cf. the beginning of the next session on analytic discourse and the dimension of stupidity.
– Cf. ‘Little Hans’ and his approach to stupidity.
– Cf. Pascal: ‘Man is neither angel nor beast, and the misfortune is that whoever wants to play the angel plays the beast.’
→ ‘the parakeet in love with Picasso’ aims at love (S1), reaches ‘the strange signs on the (a)wall’ and obtains only a phallic jouissance]

But nevertheless, let us look closely at what the idea inspires in us that, in jouissance—in the jouissance of bodies—
sexual jouissance would have this privilege of being able to be interrogated as being specified at least by an impasse.
It is, in this space, space of jouissance, to take something bounded, closed: it is a place [language as place
of the Other→heterogeneity of being and of the Other→geometry], and to speak of it is a topology [speech traverses the place →being in the Other→topology].

Here we are guided by what, in something that you will see appear as the point of my discourse of last year,
I believe I demonstrate: the strict equivalence of topology and structure, what distinguishes the anonymity of what one speaks of as jouissance, namely what law orders: a geometry precisely, the heterogeneity of the place, is that there is a place of the Other.
From this place of the Other—of a sex as Other, as absolute Other—that the most recent development of this topology allows us to advance, I will put forward here the term compactness.

Nothing is more compact than a fault, if it is indeed clear that somewhere it is given that the intersection of all that is closed there
being admitted as existing in a finite number of sets [→ at least two], it follows—it is a hypothesis—
it follows that the intersection exists in an infinite number [→Φ]. This is the very definition of compactness.

[the fault includes its limit → closed space. In this fault if two (at least) closed subspaces have a non-empty intersection, then there exists an infinity of closed spaces
(cf. the Borel-Lebesgue theorem on the reals)
that have a non-empty intersection, which—applied here—shows an infinity of phallic jouissances connected to each other (non-empty intersections) →Φ → coverage of ‘the fault’ possible up to the bounds (without reaching them) by an infinity of ‘closed’ jouissances interconnected by Φ→ (phallic ‘masculine’ jouissances)]

And this intersection I am speaking of [Φ] is the one that I advanced earlier as being what covers, what makes an obstacle
to the supposed sexual relation, namely: to what I state, that the advance of analytic discourse [A] holds precisely in this:
that what it [A] demonstrates is that its discourse is sustained only by the statement that there is not, that it is impossible to posit
the sexual relation, it is from there that it [A] also determines what really is the status of all the other discourses.

[only discourse A sustains the impossibility of the sexual relation [S1◊S2], the other discourses sustain its possibility (coverage of the fault by phallic jouissance):
– master discourse M: with S1→S2: master-slave relation → production of a but at the price of the incompleteness of the discourse (exclusion of S),
– hysteric discourse H: with S→S1: S1→S2 contingent: production of a knowledge S2 but at the price of the inconsistency of the discourse (exclusion of a)
– university discourse U: with S2→a: S1→S2 necessary and production of subjects of knowledge but at the price of the undemonstrable of the discourse (exclusion of S1)].

Such is named the point that covers, that covers the impossibility of the sexual relation as such.
Jouissance insofar as sexual is phallic, that is to say that it does not relate to the Other as such.

Let us follow there the complement of this hypothesis of compactness.
A formula is given to us by the topology that I qualified as ‘the most recent’,
namely of a logic constructed, constructed precisely on the interrogation of number and of what it leads to:
of a restoration of a place that is not that of a homogeneous space. [→ the fault: closed set including its own limit, like the number]

The complement of this hypothesis of compactness is this: in the same bounded, closed, supposed instituted space, the equivalent of what earlier I advanced about the intersection passing from the finite to the infinite is this: it is that, supposing
this same bounded, closed space, covered by open sets, that is to say by what is defined as excluding its limit…
by what is defined as greater than one point, smaller than another,
but in no case equal either to the point of departure or to the point of arrival, to give you an image quickly
…the same space then being supposed covered by open spaces, it is equivalent—it can be demonstrated—to say that the set
of these open spaces always offers itself to a subcovering of open spaces, all of them constituting a finitude,
namely that the sequence of the said elements constitutes a finite sequence.

[this same closed space of ‘the fault’ (including its limit) can be covered by open spaces (each not including any limit). In this configuration a finite number of open spaces ( ‘feminine’ jouissances, ‘not all’) can ensure the coverage of this closed space that is ‘the fault’ and even overflow it]

You can note that I did not say that they are countable, and yet that is what the term ‘finite’ implies.
To be countable, one must find an order there, and we must mark a pause before supposing that this order
is findable.

[open spaces (without limit) do not imply the ordinal, whereas in closed spaces the convergence of the series toward a limit produces an order]

But what the demonstrable finitude of open spaces, capable of covering this bounded,
closed space—on this occasion—of sexual jouissance means in any case, what it implies in any case, is that the said spaces…
and since it is a matter of the Other side, let us put them in the feminine
…can be taken 1 by 1 or else also ‘one by one’.

Now that is what occurs in this space of sexual jouissance which thereby proves compact.
These women ‘not all’ [they are not all in the ‘phallic sexual relation’, a part of them can overflow it],
as they isolate themselves in their sexed being, which therefore does not pass through the body [the body reaches only partial objects → (a)sexed]
but through what results from a requirement in speech, from a logical requirement,
and this very precisely in that logic, the coherence inscribed in the fact that language ex-sists,
that it is outside these bodies that are agitated by it, the Other…
the Other with a capital A now
…which is embodied [the woman’s S2 as S(A)]—if one can say so—as sexed being requires this ‘one by one’.
[The One of being meets the 1 of number? → The woman… But the Other is barred (S(A)) → L woman]

And it is indeed there that it is strange, that it is fascinating…
it is the right word: Other fascination, Other fascinum [proper sense: charm, spell. figurative sense: phallus (of the ancient mysteries)]
…this requirement of the One, as already strangely the Parmenides could have let us foresee, is what comes out of the Other.
Where being is, it is the requirement of infinitude. I will comment, I will come back, on what it is with this place of the Other.

But right now, to make an image and because after all, I can well suppose that something
in what I put forward might weary you, I am going to illustrate it. It is well known how much analysts have amused themselves
around this Don Juan of whom they have made everything, including—what is too much—a homosexual!

Is it that, by centering it on what I have just imaged for you of this space of sexual jouissance, to be covered on the Other side, by open sets and arriving at this finitude [♀]… I did indeed mark that I did not say that it was the number,
and yet, of course it happens: in the end they are counted. What is essential in the feminine myth of Don Juan is indeed that, it is that he has them one by one, and that is what the Other sex is, the male sex insofar as it is a matter of women.

It is indeed in that that the image of Don Juan is capital, it is in what is indicated by this: that after all he can make a list of them, and from [the moment] when there are names, one can count them:
if there are ‘millee tre’ it is indeed that one can take them ‘one by one’, and that is the essential.

You see it: there is there something quite other than the One of universal fusion.
If woman were not ‘not all’, if in her body it were not ‘not all’ that she is as sexed being,
none of that would hold. What is that to say?

That I have been able, to give an image of facts that are facts of discourse, this discourse of which in analysis we solicit the exit
—in the name of what?—from the letting-go of all that there is of other discourses, the appearance of something
where the subject manifests itself in its gap [the fault in the Other: S(A)], in what causes its desire.

If there were not that, I could not make the joint, the seam, the junction with something that comes to us indeed from so far elsewhere: a topology of which nevertheless we cannot say that it does not derive from the same spring, namely from another discourse, from a discourse so much purer, so much more manifest in the fact that it is genesis only of discourse.

That this converges with an experience to that degree, that it allows us to articulate it,
is there not something there that is made also to make us come back, and justify at the same time,
what in what I put forward [a] is borne, s’oupire:
– never to have recourse to any substance,
– never to refer to any being,
– to be in rupture, as a result, with anything whatsoever that is enunciated as philosophy.

[philosophy is inscribed, as a question on Truth, in the master’s discourse, typically Platonic or Aristotelian (A. Whitehead: ‘Western philosophy
is only a series of footnotes to Plato’s dialogues’). As such its object is the question of being—Product of the master’s discourse—and of the substance of being (the Idea, the sovereign Good, etc.). Lacan brings together mathematical discourse and analytic discourse, as twin discourses in that both the one and the other are cut off from any object:
– ‘Mathematics is a science in which one does not know what one is talking about, nor whether what one is saying is true.’ (B. Russell)
– analytic discourse produces ‘pure’ signifier, asemantic (S1), cut off from all knowledge (S2): S1◊S2]

Is that not justified? I suggest it—I will advance it later, further on—I suggest it from this: that everything that has been articulated of being, everything that makes it refuse the predicate—to say ‘man is’, for example, without saying what—
that the indication is given to us thereby that everything that is of being is tightly linked precisely to this cutting
of the predicate and indicates that nothing, in sum, can be said except by these detours in impasse, by these demonstrations of logical impossibility whereby no predicate suffices, and that what is of being, of a ‘being’ that would posit itself as absolute,
is never anything but the fracture, the break, the interruption of the formula ‘sexed being’ insofar as sexed being is engaged in jouissance.

[each discourse, in sustaining the Impossible, comes up against logical aporias (impasses), against impotence to reach Truth, against a ‘that’s not it’,
(it is not the expected jouissance) and triggers its surpassing by passage to another discourse:
– Hysteric discourse: sustaining S→S1: (impossible) → impotence of S2 to rejoin (a) → logical inconsistency of the discourse (exclusion of a),
– Master discourse: sustaining S1→S2 (impossible) → impotence of (a) to rejoin S → logical incompleteness of the discourse (exclusion of S),
– University discourse: sustaining S2→a: (impossible) → impotence of S to rejoin S1 → logical undemonstrability of the discourse (exclusion of S1),
– Analytic discourse: sustaining a→S: (impossible) → impotence of S1 to rejoin S2 → logical undecidability of the discourse (exclusion of S2).]