It seems difficult not to speak stupidly about language. Yet, Jakobson, since you are here…
you will allow me to address you with ‘tu’ since we have already lived through a certain number of things together
…yet it is Jakobson, what you manage to do. And once again, in these interviews that Jakobson gave us [Lectures at the Collège de France, Feb. and Dec. 1972], I was able to admire him enough to pay him homage now.

Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France in February 1972

Yet one must, one must nourish stupidity. Not because all those we feed are ‘stupid’, if I may put it in a term to which this year we will have to return essentially, that is, because it sustains their form,
but rather because it is demonstrated that feeding oneself is part of stupidity. Must I re-evoke before this hall,
where one is, all in all, in a restaurant and where one believes moreover, one imagines, that one feeds oneself because one is not
at the university restaurant, but this imaginative dimension is precisely in that that one feeds oneself.

[stupidity is that of S1 (fundamental signifier of the subject, product, Plus-de-jouir of discourse A)→ asemantic signifier, cut off from any reference to meaning and to knowledge: S1◊S2,
and which demands to be nourished with jouissances (phallic jouissances in repetition aiming at S1 but reaching only (a), ‘jouissances of the idiot’, etc.) again and again…]

What I evoke is what… I trust you to remember what analytic discourse teaches:
this old link with the wet nurse, mother on top of it as if by chance, with behind it this infernal story of the mother’s desire and everything that follows from it. That is indeed what is at stake in nourishment, it is indeed some sort of stupidity,
but which the same discourse establishes, if I may put it like that, in its right [the question of the foundation…].

One day I realized that it was difficult—I am taking up the same word from the first sentence—to avoid entering into
linguistics from the moment the unconscious was discovered. From which I did something that seems to me, in truth, the only objection I can formulate to what you may have heard one of these days, from Jakobson’s mouth…
namely that everything that is of language would fall under linguistics, that is to say in the last instance under the linguist, not that
I do not—very easily—grant it to him when it is a matter of poetry, with regard to which he advanced this argument
…but if I take everything that follows from language…
and namely what results from it in this foundation of the subject, so renewed, so subverted,
that it is indeed there the status by which everything that from Freud’s mouth has asserted itself as the unconscious is secured
…then I will have to forge some other word to leave Jakobson his reserved domain, and if you like I will call that ‘linguistery’ [neologism: Lacan’s coinage, built on ‘linguistics’, to name a domain adjacent to linguistics while also mocking it]. I engage in linguistery, which leaves me somewhere with the linguists, not without having explained so many times that from linguists I undergo, I experience—and after all cheerfully on the part of so many linguists—more than one reprimand.

Certainly not from Jakobson, but that is because ‘he is fond of me’, in other words: he loves me [Laughter], that is the way
I express that in intimacy. But if you are waiting for what I could say about love, this will in sum
only confirm this certain disjunction that, fortunately, this morning—well, I found this this morning, exactly at half past eight, as I began to take notes, it is always the hour when I do it for what I have… well… to tell you,
it is not that I have not been thinking about it for a long time, but it only gets written at the end—I found this: ‘linguistery’.

That has effects, namely at the level… not of the said, because after all there are saids that are common to the two fields, it is indeed on that that I take my reference, and it is from there that I can say that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’.
[linguistery has as its object ‘lalangue’ [wordplay: ‘lalangue’ (Lacan) fuses ‘la langue’ (‘the language’) into one word to stress homophony and jouissance]: what, from experiences of jouissance tied to the primordial Other, is inscribed as a ‘trait’ in α (alpha),β (beta),γ (gamma),δ (delta) and generates through combinatorics
a structure, (cf. the ‘introduction’ to the seminar on The Purloined Letter), like a language, an unconscious knowledge that breaks into ordinary discourse through the slip,
the witticism…]
But it is sufficiently clear that, having posited this saying…
as I have since advanced others, but anyway it is already not bad
that a certain number stick to that one: it is important
…this saying, after all, is not of the field of linguistics, it is an open door onto what you will see commented
in what is going to appear, developed in the next issue of my well-known ‘a-periodical’ [Scilicet n° 4],
with the title ‘L’Étourdit’: d.i.t.

[In the session of 21-12-1972 Lacan recalled ‘the strict equivalence of topology and structure’ developed in L’étourdit (dated July 14, 1972),
where he shows that this (Möbian) topology of discourse A makes it possible to pass:
– from ‘univocal discourses’ with ‘spherical’ topology (→H,U,M: with two faces, with an inside and an outside, a signifier supporting the ‘distinction’ and a signified, etc.)→ which fall under linguistics
– to ‘a multivocal discourse’ with Möbian topology which, like the Möbius strip, has only one face (example of the continuity of the two topologies in the cross-cap),
and which concerns S1 the signifier without signified → cut off from knowledge: S1◊ S2→ asemantic, the ‘stupidity’ of singularity, S1→ which falls under linguistery]

I take it up there, I start from the sentence that I, last year, on several occasions wrote on the board
without ever giving it any development, because I found that I had better to do,
namely to listen to someone who, after having been willing to take the floor here,
namely this Récanati whom you heard once again last time,
and thanks to whom I can note the legitimacy of the title ‘seminar’, thanks to him therefore I did not follow up on this that:

‘the saying is precisely what remains forgotten behind what is said in what one hears’.

Yet it is by the consequences of the said that the saying is judged [the saying→ the said→ the heard: the univocity of meaning that masks the saying].
But what one does with the saying remains open: one can do lots of things with furniture from the moment,
for example, when one has ‘wiped out’ a seat or a bombardment [→numerous equivocations].

There is a text by Rimbaud that I mentioned, I think, last year [(?) seminar 1967-68: The Analytic Act, session of 10-01-1968].
I did not go looking, I did not go looking for where it is found verbatim, and then it is because I was in a hurry this morning…
it was this morning that I thought of it again, I still think it is last year…

A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and begins the new harmony.
A step of you is the uprising of new men and their setting-off.
Your head turns away: the new love!
Your head turns back, – the new love!
‘Change our lots, sift the plagues, beginning with time’, sing these children to you.
‘Raise anywhere the substance of our fortunes and of our wishes’, we beg you for it.
Arrival of always, who will go away everywhere.

It is this text that is called ‘To a reason’ which is marked out by this retort that ends each stanza: a new love. And since I am supposed to have spoken of love last time, why not take it up again at this level.
For those who know, who have already heard a little something about it, I will take it up at the level of this text,
and always on this point of marking the distance from linguistics to linguistery.

Love is—at Rimbaud’s, in this text—the sign, the sign pointed out as such of the fact that one changes reason [→of discourse],
that is indeed why it addresses that reason: ‘To a reason’, one has changed discourse.

I think that still…
although there are some who go off into the corridors
asking that one explain to them what the 4 discourses are
…I think that, like that, to the collective, I can refer to the fact that I articulated four and that I do not need
to remake the list for you. I want to point out to you that these 4 discourses are in no case to be taken as a sequence of historical emergences, that there was one that came for longer than the others is not what matters here.

[→ love is the sign of the change of discourse: ‘a new love’↔another signifier.
In the 4 discourses, the impotence of the ‘Plus-de-jouir’ to reach Truth triggers a rupture, a leap (quarter turn counterclockwise),
an overturning of the preceding discourse→ another ‘reason’→ another ‘signifier’ comes to occupy the place of the Semblant,
for example the overturning of the Hysteric discourse leads to the Master’s discourse: S1 takes the place of S.]

In saying that love is the sign that one changes discourse, I properly say this:
that the last to take this deployment that allowed me to make them 4…
but they exist as 4 only on the foundation of this psychoanalytic discourse that I articulate of 4 places,
and on each, of the taking of some signifier effect stipulated as such
…this psychoanalytic discourse, there is always some emergence of it at each passage from one discourse to another.

It is worth being retained, not to make history since it is not a matter of that in any case,
but if one finds oneself for example placed in a historical condition, if one spots, if one advances,
but it is freely that one considers that the foundation of the university in the time of Charlemagne
was the passage from a Master discourse to the threshold of another discourse.

Simply to retain that, in applying these categories, which are themselves structured only by the existence…
which is a term, but which has nothing terminal about it
…of psychoanalytic discourse, one should only prick up one’s ear to the putting to the test of this truth…
that there is emergence of analytic discourse at each ‘passage’
…of what analytic discourse allows one to point to as the crossing from one discourse to another.

[each of the discourses H,U,M begins by sustaining the possibility of a sexual relation (phallic jouissance) in order to end up at the aporia, at the impotence of the ‘Plus-de-jouir’
to reach Truth (the jouissance of the body of the Other). Discourse A questions the jouissance of the Other (a→ S→ S1 ◊ S2), so there is ‘emergence’ of discourse A,
and demand for love, each time one changes discourse when one comes up against the flaw, against the impotence of the ‘Plus-de-jouir’ to realize the jouissance of the body of the Other
→ when the Other answers ‘That is not it!’.]

Last time I said that ‘The jouissance of the Other…
I will spare you the rest, you can take it up again
…is not the sign of love’, and here I say that ‘love is a sign’.

Does love hold in the fact that what appears is nothing other, is nothing more than the sign?
It is here that The Logic of Port-Royal, the other day evoked [François Récanati, 12 Dec. 1972], would come to lend us help.

The sign…
this logic advances, and one always marvels at these sayings
that take on weight sometimes a long time after
…the sign is what is defined only by the disjunction of 2 substances that would have no ‘common part’,
what nowadays we call ‘intersection’. This will lead us to answers, in a moment.

[there is heterogeneity of the two substances: potential (material) substance ≠ substance of extension (predicative).
Cf. supra ‘the narrow path’ that Lacan clears (littoral) between two heterogeneous spaces]

What is not the sign of love…
I take it up therefore from last time—the statement I made about the jouissance of the Other,
what I have just recalled a moment ago in commenting: ‘…of the body that symbolizes it’
…the jouissance of the Other…
with the capital A that I underlined on that occasion
…is properly that of ‘the Other sex’, and I commented: ‘of the body that symbolizes it’.

Change of discourse: assuredly it is there that it is astonishing that what I articulate from psychoanalytic discourse,
well it moves, it knots, it crosses… No one takes the hit!

[It is from discourse A that one can ‘point’ to this overturning of one discourse into another,
and the movement that results from it (‘it moves’, Lacan says)—the ‘round dance of discourses’—is perceived only by the ‘looping’ that discourse A makes possible]

No matter how much I say that this notion of ‘discourse’ is to be taken as social bond…
as such founded on language and differentiating its functions with regard to this use of language [as social bond],
it thus seems, as such, not without relation to what in linguistics is specified as grammar
…nothing seems to be modified: this instituting use, no one raises it, at least in what appears.

[linguistery, which is founded on S1 (the signifier of jouissance, as singular (odd), cut off from knowledge→ stupidity) leads to the notion of ‘discourse’ to be taken as social bond (two in discourse A→ each type of discourse, each ‘reason’, founds, structures, institutes, gives form (information) to a social bond, like a grammar (cf. structured like a language). Linguistics is founded on the signifier, support of the distinctive trait (phoneme), and on the signified as ‘message’ under the condition of conformity of the signifying chain to the code of language (hence grammar) → theory (scientific: mathematical, genetic…) of information]

Perhaps that raises the question of what is going on with the notion of information.

Is it that, in taking language in linguistery…
the notion that seems promoted as an easy apparatus, apt to make language function in linguistics in a not-stupid way, the one that involved codes and messages, transmission, subject therefore, and likewise space, distance
…is it that, despite the dazzling success of this information function, a success such that one can say
that the whole of science comes to be infiltrated by it…
we are at the level of molecular information, of the gene and of the windings of nucleoproteins around DNA rods, themselves wound around one another, and all that is linked by hormonal bonds, these are messages that are sent, that are recorded.
What is that to say, since likewise the success of this formula takes its incontestable source
in a linguistics that is not only immanent but indeed formulated. In short, the notion that is going to extend all the way to the very foundations of scientific thought,
to be articulated as neguentropic
…is there there something that cannot make us pose a question,
if it is indeed what moreover: from my linguistery, I gather—and legitimately—when I make use of the function of the signifier?

What is the signifier?

The signifier as I inherit it from a linguistic tradition that, it is important to note,
is not specifically Saussurean, it goes back much higher…
it is not I who discovered it
…as far as the Stoics, it is reflected in Saint Augustine, it is to be structured in topological terms.

As regards language, the signifier is first of all that it has a signified effect, and it is important not to elide that between the two
there is what is written as a bar, that there is something ‘of bar’ to be crossed.
It is clear that this way of topologizing what is at stake in language is illustrated…
certainly in the most admirable form
…by phonology, in the sense that it embodies in the phoneme what is at stake in the signifier,
but that the signifier can in no way be limited to this phonematic support.

What is a signifier?

First I have to stop to pose the question in this form: ‘a’ put before the term is in use as an indefinite article,
that is to say that already it supposes that the signifier can be collectivized, that one can make a collection of it,
that is to say speak of it as something that is totalized.
[the essence of the signifier being to be ‘pure difference’ from all the others, there is no predicate that allows all of them to be gathered into a collection]

Since the linguist surely would have trouble, it seems to me, explaining…
because he has no predicate to found it—this collection—to found it on a ‘the’
…as Jakobson remarked, and very specifically yesterday, it is not the word that can found this signifier,
the word has no other place where it can be made a collection than the dictionary, where it can be ordered.

To make you feel that ‘the’ signifier, in the occasion…
as Jakobson very properly remarked from his semantic reflection
…to make you feel it, I will not speak of the famous ‘sentence’…
which yet is also there the signifying unit, and which, on occasion, one will try,
in its typical representatives, to collect as is done on occasion for one and the same language
…I will speak rather of the ‘proverb’, about which I cannot say that a certain little article by Paulhan, which recently fell into my hands, did not make me take an interest, all the more keenly since Paulhan seems to have noticed…
in this kind of so ambiguous dialogue, which is the one made by the foreigner
with a certain ‘area of linguistic competence’ as one says
…realized in other words that with his Malagasies the proverb had a weight
that seemed to him to play an entirely specific role.

That he discovered it on that occasion will not prevent me from not going further,
but from noting that in the margins of the proverbial function there are things at the limit that will show how this signifiance is something that fans out—if you allow me this term—from the proverb to the locution.

What I am going to ask you… You will look up in the dictionary the expression ‘à tire-larigot’!
Do it, you will tell me what you find!
And then, in interpretation, construction, fabulation, one goes so far as to invent a Monsieur, just for the occasion, who would have been called Larigot, and it is by pulling his leg so hard as well that one would have ended up creating ‘à tire-larigot’.

– What does ‘à tire-larigot’ mean?
There are many other locutions as extravagant that mean nothing other than that:
– the submersion of desire, that is the meaning of ‘à tire-larigot’.
– By what?
– By the pierced barrel!
– Of what?
– But of signifiance itself, ‘à tire-larigot’: a mug of signifiance.

So what is it, what is it, this signifiance? [neither the word, nor the sentence, nor the proverb, nor the locution…]
At the level where we are, it is what has signified effects.

But let us not forget that at the outset, if one attached oneself—and so much—to the signifying element, to the phoneme,
it was in order to mark well that this distance, which one has wrongly qualified as the foundation of arbitrariness…
that is how Saussure expresses himself—probably against his heart.
He was dealing—as happens, isn’t it? [sic]—with imbeciles; he thought something quite different,
much closer to the text of the Cratylus when one sees what he has in his drawers: stories of anagrams
…what passes for arbitrariness is that the signified effects, they, are much more difficult to weigh.

It is true that they seem to have nothing to do with what causes them.
But if they have nothing to do with what causes them, it is because one expects that what causes them
has a certain relation with the real. I mean: with the serious real.

What one calls the serious real, one must of course put in a shove to approach it,
to realize that seriousness can only be the serial; one must have followed my seminars a little.

In the meantime, what one means by that is that the referents, the things it is for, this signified, in approaching them…
Well precisely they remain approximate, they remain macroscopic for example.
Yet that is not what is important; it is not that it is imaginary, because after all that would already be quite enough
if the signifier allowed us to point to this image that we need in order to be happy. Only that is not the case.

It is in this approach that the signified has as its property, except the introduction of the serial, of the serious, but that is obtained only after a very long time of extracting from language this something that is caught in it,
and of which we—at the point where I am in my exposition—we have only a distant idea,
– even if only regarding this indefinite ‘a’ [A signifier],
– and regarding this ‘the’ of which we do not know—regarding the signifier—how to make it function so that it collectivizes it.
In truth one must invert: instead of a signifier that one questions, to question the signifier ‘One’.
But we are not there yet.

At the level of the signifier-signified distinction, what characterizes the signified as to what is nevertheless there as indispensable third, namely the referent, is properly that the signified misses it, that the collimator does not work.
The height of heights is that one still manages to make use of it by going through other stuff!

[the signified does not allow access to the real, except through the series which approaches it ‘only after a very long time of extraction’ (cf. Fibonacci series) and in an ‘approximate’ way
→ the collimator does not work. Cf. supra: ‘…after all that would already be quite enough if the signifier allowed us to point to this image that we need in order to be happy’]

In the meantime, in the meantime, to characterize the function of the signifier, to collectivize it in a way
that likewise resembles a predication, well we have something that is what I started from today,
since Récanati—still from the logic of Port-Royal—spoke to you of substantivized adjectives:
– of roundness extracted from round, [the ‘Beautiful’ of the sphere of the phallic world/the unclean of the ex-sisting Thing]
– why not of justice from the just, [the ‘Good’ of the ‘just what is needed’/dangerous ex-sisting Jouissance]
– and of prudence from some other substantive forms. [the ‘True’ as approach to ex-sisting Truth]

That is indeed, all the same, what will allow us to push forward our ‘stupidity’ [advance S1 in the round dance of discourses],
to decide that perhaps it is not—as one believes—a semantic category,
but a mode of collectivizing the signifier. Why not? Why not? The signifier is stupid!

It seems to me that this is of a nature to engender a smile, a stupid smile naturally!
But a stupid smile, as everyone knows, you only have to go into cathedrals: a stupid smile is an angel’s smile.

It is even there the only justification—you know—of the Pascalian admonition; it is its only justification.
If the angel has such a stupid smile, it is because he swims in the supreme signifier;
finding himself a bit on dry land would do him good, perhaps he would not smile anymore.

It is not that I do not believe in angels, everyone knows it:
I believe in them inextractably and even inexteilhardly [wordplay: ‘inexteilhardement’ is a neologism that splices ‘Teilhard’ into the rhythm of ‘inextricablement’, alluding to Teilhard de Chardin] [Laughter] [cf. session of 07-04-1965].

It is simply that I do not believe, on the other hand, that he brings the slightest message [Ἄγγελος (angelos: messenger)],
and it is—on that point, at the level of the signifier, isn’t it—wherein, wherein he is truly signifying precisely.

[S1, the fundamental signifier, is ‘stupid’ because cut off from knowledge: S1 ◊ S2, → asemantic, it bears no message, no signified, no sense,
and it is there in the ‘non-sense’ of the symptom, of the slip, of the dream… that ‘it is truly signifying’, that it signifies, denotes, designates, what is not there,
what is always absent, what is ‘lost’ and desperately aimed at]

So it would still be a matter of knowing where all that leads us, and of posing to ourselves the question of why
we put so much emphasis on this function of the signifier [the ‘stupid’ S1].
It would be a matter of founding it, because still, it is the foundation of the symbolic—we maintain it—
whatever its dimensions that allow us to evoke only analytic discourse.

[this ‘stupid’ S1 signifier is not that of linguistics but that of linguistery, of stupidities, of jouissance, of what ‘cannot be said’
→ at the very foundation of the symbolic as trace, writing, of an experience of jouissance]

I could have approached things in another way, I could have told you how one comes to ask me for an analysis
for example. I would not want to touch that freshness; there are some who would recognize themselves, and God knows what they would think, what they would imagine about what I think. Perhaps they would believe that I believe them stupid, which is truly the last idea that could come to me in such a case; it is not a question—not at all!—of the stupidity of this or that person.

The question is that analytic discourse introduces a substantivized adjective:
stupidity, insofar as it is a dimension in exercise, of the signifier. There, one has to look more closely.
[the logic of Port-Royal (cf. above the presentation by F. Récanati) distinguished potential substance and predicative substance (substantivized adjective)].

For after all, as soon as one substantivizes [an adjective], it is to suppose a substance [potential, sub-posed, subjectum:
ὑποχείμενον (upokeimenon)], and substances—my God—nowadays, we do not have them by the shovelful:
– first ‘thinking substance’,
– and ‘extended substance’.
[these 2 substances are close to the predicative substance and the potential substance of the logic of Port-Royal (at Port-Royal they defend Descartes and draw inspiration from Aristotle)]

It would perhaps be fitting to question from there, where ‘the substantial dimension’ can well be placed,
which precisely, however distant it may be from us, and up to now only making signs to us,
what can well be that to which we could fasten this substance in exercise, this dimension…
that one would have to write d.i.t., hyphen, mention [‘said-mention’, even ‘said-mansion’]
…to which the function of language is first of all what watches over it, before any better and more rigorous use.

[lalangue as a language] [this third dimension of substance (said-mension or said-mention even said-mansion: the residence of the said, place of the knowledge of the Other,
of truth and of jouissance) occasionally reveals the jouissance that is exercised there in a ‘saying’ whose writing remains to be deciphered]

First, ‘thinking substance’, we can still say that we have sensibly modified it. Since this ‘I think’ which, supposing itself, deduces existence from it, we have had a step to take and this step is very properly that of the unconscious.
If today I am still dragging along in the rut ‘the unconscious as structured by a language’,
well all the same let it be known: it totally changes the function of the subject as existing:
– the subject is not the one who thinks,
– the subject is properly the one whom we engage—toward what?—not, as we tell him,
like that to charm him, ‘to say everything’…

I know it is late and because I do not want to tire the one whom I consider on the occasion as my host,
namely Jakobson, I know that I will not manage today to go beyond a certain field.

Nevertheless if I speak of the ‘not-all’…
which bothers a lot of people
…if I put it in the foreground to be the aim of this year of my discourse,
this is indeed the occasion to apply it: one cannot say ‘not-all’, but that one can say stupidities, that is the whole point.

It is with that that we are going to do analysis and that we enter into the new subject which is that of the unconscious.
It is precisely insofar as he agrees to stop thinking, the fellow, that we will perhaps know a little more about it
and that we will draw some consequences from the saids, from the saids precisely that one cannot unsay, that is
the rule of the game [beyond ordinary discourse: the irruption of a ‘saying’, of another discourse].

From there a saying arises that does not always go as far as being able to ex-sist to the said, because precisely of what comes to the said
as consequence, and that it is there the test by which a certain real in the analysis of anyone—however stupid [singular, odd…] he may be—can be reached.
[cf. L’étourdit: ‘That one say remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard’: the consequences of the ‘said’ (what one hears: univocal sense) mask the ‘saying’]

Status of the ‘saying’: I must leave all that aside for today.
But still I can tell you that what there will be this year that is more of a pain in the ass
is that it will all the same be necessary to submit to this test a certain number of sayings of the philosophical tradition. What I regret very much is that Parmenides, I speak of Parmenides: of what we still have of his sayings, well of what the philosophical tradition extracts from it, of what for example my master Kojève starts from:
it is the pure position of being.
[against the philosophical discourse on being, as Kojève takes it up from Parmenides: ‘being is, non-being is not’,
Lacan opposes a being founded on nothing (zero) that ex-sists and that founds the series through nomination:
zero bears ‘a name like 1’, first element, then 1 bears a name like ‘2’, etc. (cf. Frege’s founding of the natural integers)]

Fortunately, fortunately Parmenides wrote, wrote in reality poems.
It is confirmed there precisely wherein it seems to me that the testimony of the linguist here takes precedence.
It is that precisely, in employing these apparatuses, these apparatuses that resemble very much what I will—just at the end—be able to point to, namely mathematical articulation:
– alternation after succession,
– framing after alternation.

In the end it is indeed because he was a poet that Parmenides says in sum what he has to tell us, in the least stupid way.
But otherwise ‘that being be and that non-being not be’, I do not know what that tells you, but I find it stupid.
Do not believe that it amuses me to say it; it is tiring because all the same we will this year need being, something that—thank God—I have already advanced: the signifier ‘One’, for which I have, last year, sufficiently it seems, cleared the way for you to say: there’s some One. That is where seriousness starts from, however stupid that may look too.

We will therefore all the same have some references to take, and to take at minimum—from the philosophical tradition. What interests us is where we are, and where we are with
– thinking substance [the se jouis] [wordplay: ‘se jouis’ echoes ‘je suis’ (‘I am’) and ‘je jouis’ (‘I enjoy/jouir’)],
– and, as its complement, the famous ‘extended substance’ that one does not get rid of so easily either, since that is modern space.

Substance [thinking] against this pure space if I may put it like that—this pure space as one says that…
one can say it as one says pure spirit, and one cannot say that it is promising
…this pure space is founded on the notion of parts on condition of adding to it this:
that all are external: partes, extra partes, that is what we are dealing with.
One even managed with that to get by, that is to say to extract a few little things from it, but serious steps had to be taken.
[‘partes, extra partes’ → spherical or Möbian topology]

To situate, before leaving you, my signifier, I propose to you, I propose to you to weigh what, last time, is inscribed at the beginning of my first sentence which includes the jouir of a body—of a body that ‘the Other, symbolizes it’—
and perhaps includes something of a nature to bring into focus another form of substance: jouissant substance.

Is that not what properly supposes—and precisely under everything that is signified there—the psychoanalytic experience. [discourse A: abandonment of sense (S1◊ S2) for signification, cf. Frege: ‘Sinn und Bedeutung’, Sense and denotation]
Substance of the body, on condition that it be defined only by ‘what is enjoyed’. Mere property of the body,
living no doubt, but we do not know what it is to be living except only in this: that a body is enjoyed.

[Descartes located the body in extended substance, to which Lacan objects: the body enjoys only by being ‘embodied in a signifying way’ → (a) jouissance of a part of the body
of the other. It is there that Lacan designates the origin of Descartes’s ‘failure’ concerning his theory of the passions: ‘The Passions of the Soul’ (Gallimard, Pléiade, p.691).]

And more: we immediately come up against this, that it is enjoyed only by embodying it in a signifying way.
Which means something other than the partes extra partes of extended substance,
as this sort of… this sort of Kantian…
let us say it: it is an old boat that is somewhere in my Écrits, which one reads more or less well
…this sort of Kantian that Sade was, namely: that one can enjoy only a part of the body of the other,
as he expresses it very, very well, for the simple reason that: one has never seen a body wrap itself completely, totally, to the point of including it and phagocytizing it around the body of the other [Laughter].

It is even for that that one is reduced simply to a little embrace like that, a forearm
or anything else [Laughter]. And that jouir has this fundamental property that it is in sum the body of the one
that enjoys a part of the body of the other. That it—that part—can enjoy too, that pleases the other more or less,
but in the end it is a fact that he cannot remain indifferent to it.

And even that it happens that something is produced that goes beyond what I have just described,
marked with all the signifying ambiguity, namely that the ‘jouir of the body’ is a genitive,
therefore depending on whether you make it objective or subjective:
– has this Sadian note, on which I put just a small touch [subjective genitive: to enjoy it as partial object],
– or on the contrary ecstatic, suggestive, which says that in sum it is the Other who enjoys [objective genitive].

Of course there is there only a level that is well localized, the most elementary in what jouissance is,
jouissance in the sense in which last time I promoted ‘that it was not a sign of love’.
That is what will have to be sustained, and of course that leads us from there,
– from the level of phallic jouissance [jouissance of the idiot, jouissance of the organ, immediate jouissance, Sadian, enjoying a partial object],
– to what I properly call the jouissance of the Other, insofar as it is here only symbolized; it is still quite another thing, namely this ‘not-all’ that I will have to articulate.

But in this articulation, what does it mean… what is the signifier? The signifier…
for today I will close on that, given the motives I have for it
…I will say: the signifier is situated at the level of jouissant substance as being…
very differently from everything I am going to evoke
…in resonance with physics and, not by chance, with Aristotelian physics.
Aristotelian physics which, merely by being able to be solicited as I am going to do,
shows us to what extent precisely it was an illusory physics.

The signifier is the cause of jouissance: without the signifier how even approach this part of the body?
How, without the signifier, center this something that, of jouissance, is the material cause?
That is to say that, however vague, however confused it may be, it is a part that, of the body [material cause], is signified in this approach.

[Aristotle in his Physics distinguishes four types of ‘causes’: material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, final cause]

And after having thus taken what I will call the material cause, I will go straight—this will later be taken up, commented—
to the final cause, ‘final’ in all senses of the term, properly in that it is its term [the end]:

– the signifier is what makes a halt! [final cause] to jouissance,

– after those who embrace [formal cause] if you allow me: alas!

– and after those who are weary [efficient cause]: holà!

The other pole of the signifier, the stopping blow is there, as much at the origin as the vocative of command can be.
And the efficiency of which Aristotle makes the 3rd form of the cause is nothing after all but this project by which jouissance is limited.

– [the material cause: two bodies,
– the formal cause: the embrace, the union that aims to fill the gap of the inexistence of the sexual relation,
– the efficient cause: jouissance,
– the final cause: ‘holà!’ → what makes a ‘halt!’ to jouissance]

All sorts of things no doubt, which appear in the animal kingdom, parody for us this path of jouissance in the speaking being. Precisely it is in them that something is drawn, that they participate much more in the function of the message: the bee carrying pollen from the male flower to the female flower, that looks much more
like what communication is.

And the embrace, the confused embrace from which jouissance takes its cause, its last cause, which is formal,
is it not much more something of the order of grammar that commands it?

It is not for nothing that ‘Peter beats Paul’ is at the principle of the first examples of grammar,
nor that Peter—why not say it like that—‘Peter and Paule’ gives the example of conjunction, except that one must ask after: who shoulders the other. [wordplay: ‘Pierre et Paule’ echoes ‘Pierre épaule’ (‘Pierre shoulders’)] [Laughter]

I have already played on that for twenty years. One can even say that the verb is defined only by this:
it is to be a passibête signifier—it must be written in one word—passibête [wordplay: ‘passibête’ compresses ‘pas si bête’ (‘not so stupid’)] than the others no doubt,
but also one that makes the passage of a subject, of a subject precisely, to his own division in jouissance,
and that it is even less so when it becomes a sign, when that division it determines in disjunction.

One day I played around a literal slip, ‘calami’, as one calls that.
I made a whole one of my lectures last year on the orthographic slip that I had made:

‘You will never know how much I loved you’ addressed to a woman, and ended ‘mé’.

I was since told that, taken as a slip, that perhaps meant that I was homosexual.
But what I articulated last year is that, when one loves, it is not a matter of sex.

That is where, if you will allow it, I will leave it today.