What can I have to tell you, Again?
Given how long it has lasted and how it has not had all the effects I would want from it.
Well precisely because of that, what I have to say is not lacking.

Nevertheless, since one cannot say everything, and for good reason, I am reduced to this narrow path
which means that at every instant, I must keep myself from slipping back into what is already found made, into what has been said.

That is why today I will try once again to maintain this difficult breaking of trail,
since by a title we have at the same time a strange horizon, of being qualified by this ‘Again’.
I must today give the marking-out of a certain number of points that will this year be our points of orientation. There is something that last time was formulated: the function of the written[Φ].
It is one of our points this year, one of our pole-points.

I would like to remind you however that I think that the first time I spoke to you—if I am not mistaken—
I stated that:

‘Jouissance—the jouissance of the Other, which I said is symbolized by the body—is not a sign of love’.

Naturally it goes through, it goes through because one feels that it is on the level of what made the preceding saying,
that it does not give way. Yet there are in that terms that very much deserve to be commented:

– ‘Jouissance’ is indeed what I try to make present by this very saying.

[the ‘saying that it is not going well’, the ‘saying no’ at which every discourse (H,U,M,A) ends up in its powerlessness to reach the truth of ‘the jouissance of the body of the Other’, overturns the ‘failed’ discourse and passes to the following discourse: rotation by a quarter turn and change of object (a)]

– This ‘Other’, it is more than ever put into question, it must be hammered again, struck again, so that it takes its full sense, its complete resonance:

• place on the one hand,
• but on the other hand advanced as the term that is supported, since it is I who speak, who can speak only from where I am, identified with what I qualified last time as pure signifier[Φ]: ‘Man, a woman—I said—are nothing but signifiers’, and it is from there that they take as such,
  I mean as distinct incarnation of sex, that they take their function.

‘The Other’, in my language, therefore can only be the other sex.

• What is it with this Other?
• What is it with its position with regard to that around which the sexual relation is realized?
  That is to know a jouissance that the analytic discourse has precipitated: this function of the phallus of which in sum the enigma remains whole since only ‘effects of absence’ are articulated there.
  Is that to say however that it is there, as one believed one could translate too quickly,
  the signifier of what is lacking in the signifier?

That is indeed what this year will have to put a full stop to.
That is to know: of the phallus to say what is, in analytic discourse, the function.
We will not arrive at it straight on. But solely in order to clear the ground, I will say that what last time
I brought in as being, as accentuating, the function of the bar is not without relation to the phallus.
[the bar (Φ) between S1 and S2 where something is given to be seen without being seen, is given to be known without being known,
something that ‘is off’ (cf. the cloching, ‘la clocherie’) → which requires a reading, a deciphering (littoral literal, cf. Lituraterre)]

It remains for us, in the 2nd part of the sentence, linked to the first by a ‘…is not…’: ‘…is not the sign of love’:
this is indeed where our horizon also points. We must this year articulate what it is about,
which is indeed there as at the pivot of everything that has been instituted from analytic experience: love.

[In discourse A love is the sign of an impossible knowledge → tipping of the discourse (‘I ask you to refuse what I offer you because it is not that’)]

Love—people have long spoken only of that. Do I need to accentuate that it is at the center, that it is at the heart,
very precisely of philosophical discourse, and that it is there assuredly what must put us on guard.

– If philosophical discourse has been glimpsed as what it is: this variant of the master’s discourse…
– If last time I could say of love, insofar as what it aims at is being,
namely what in language slips away the most, that on which I insisted as what was going to be, or what precisely, of being, made surprise.
– If I could add that this being, we must question ourselves:

• whether it is not so close to this being of the signifier ‘m’être’: ‘m, apostrophe, e with grave accent…’[slip], – whether it is not being at command,
• whether there is not there the strangest[being-angel?] of lures.

Is it not also in order, with the word ‘sign’, to command us to interrogate
that in which the sign is distinguished from the ‘signifier’?

So here are a few points
– one of which is ‘jouissance’,
– another is ‘the Other’,
– the 3rd ‘the sign’,
– the 4th ‘love’.

When we read or reread what was emitted from a time when the discourse of love confessed itself to be that of being,
when we open this book which is that of Richard of Saint Victor on the divine trinity, it is from being that we start.
From being insofar as it is—pardon me this slip of writing—conceived as ‘the be-ternal’[pun: ‘être’ (to be/being) + ‘éternel’ (eternal), also ‘éternel for the hard of hearing’], as the eternal for the hard of hearing.

And that from being, after this elaboration, this pathing nonetheless so tempered in Aristotle,
and under the influence no doubt of the irruption of this ‘I am that I am’ which is the enunciation of Judaic truth,
when all this comes to culminate in this idea…
this idea until then circumscribed, brushed against, approached, approximate of being
…comes to culminate in this violent tearing away from the function of time, by the enunciation of the Eternal[‘I am that I am’],
there results strange consequences.

Namely the enunciation:
[1]that there is being which, eternal, is so of itself[God: ‘I am that I am’],
[2]that there is being which, eternal, is not so of itself[the angel, etc.],
[3]that there is being which, eternal…[slip]which non-eternal, does not have that fragile being, in some way precarious, even nonexistent,
does not have it of itself[man],
but which stops at what seems to impose itself by the fact of logical definitions…
if however negation sufficed in this order, of a univocal function, to ensure existence
…which stops at this: that what is not eternal could in no case…
since from the 4 subdivisions that are produced from this alternation of the affirmation and the negation of the eternal and of the of itself,
4]is there, he says, a being which non-eternal, could be of itself [the signifier]?
And assuredly this appears, to the Richard of Saint Victor in question, to have to be set aside.

Does it not seem however that there is there precisely what it is about concerning the signifier?
Namely that the signifier, no signifier, advances itself, produces itself as such, as eternal.

That is no doubt what—rather than qualifying it as ‘arbitrary’—Saussure could have tried to formulate:
the signifier, let us say, it would have been better to advance it under the category of the contingent, in any case of what is assuredly not eternal, of what repudiates the category of the eternal, but which yet, singularly, is of itself.

As it offers itself to us: this signifier of itself has effects.

And yet if there is something that can advance from it, it is its participation…
to use a Platonic approach
…it is its participation in this nothing, from which effectively it is the very emergence of the creationist idea
to tell us that something altogether originary was made ex nihilo, that is to say from nothing.

It certainly seems…
does it not seem to you, is there not something that appears to you,
if the laziness that is yours can be awakened by some apparition
…that Genesis tells us nothing other than the creation of nothing…
indeed, of what?
…of nothing other than signifiers. As soon as this ‘Creation’ arises, it is articulated by the naming of what is.

– Is that not creation in its essence?

– Is creation not nothing other than the fact that what was there, as Aristotle assuredly cannot fail to state it, namely that if there ever was something, it had been there since always?

– Is it not, in the creationist idea…
essentially of creation, and of creation from nothing
– …that the signifier is fundamentally what it is about, that it is about it in a way that founds?

– Is that not precisely what consists in what we find of what,
by reflecting itself in a ‘worldview’, was enunciated as ‘Copernican revolution’?

For a long time, I cast doubt on what Freud on that thought he could advance.
As if, from what the discourse of the hysteric taught him…
namely from this other substance that wholly holds in this:
that there is signifier and that it is about the effect of this signifier in this discourse of the hysteric
…by gathering it up he knew how to make it turn by that quarter turn that made it the analytic discourse.

[H→A, cf. supra ‘it turns’, from discourse H: S → S1 → S2◊a, to discourse A: a → S → S1◊ S2].

The very notion of ‘quarter turn’ evokes revolution, but certainly not in the sense in which revolution is subversion.
Quite the contrary, what turns—this is what is called ‘revolution’—is destined by its very enunciation to evoke return.

Assuredly we are not at the completion of this return,
since it is already in a very painful way that this quarter turn is accomplished[H→A: the Freudian revolution].

But it is never too much first to evoke that if there was somewhere revolution it is certainly not at the level of Copernicus, that it was useless to evoke terms that are only of historical erudition, namely that for a long time the hypothesis had been advanced: that the sun was perhaps indeed the center around which it turned. But what does it matter!
What mattered to these mathematicians was assuredly the departure—the departure of what?—of what turns.

What we know of course is that this eternal sweep of the stars of the last sphere…
the one to which Aristotle supposes yet another,
which would be that of the immobile, first cause of the movement of those that turn
…if the stars turn it is indeed assuredly because the earth, the earth turns on itself,
and that it is already a marvel that from this sweep, from this revolution, from this eternal turning of the stellar sphere,
there were men to forge, to forge these other spheres, where to make turn…
from this oscillatory movement which is that of the Ptolemaic system
…the spheres of the planets, of those that turning around the sun, find themselves with regard to the earth
in this ambiguous position of going and coming in crochet-teeth.
Is it that, from there, to have cogitated the movement of the spheres is not an extraordinary tour de force,
to which after all Copernicus only made the remark that perhaps this movement of the intermediate spheres
could be expressed otherwise, that the earth was at the center or not, was assuredly not what mattered to him most.

The Copernican revolution is in no way revolution, except in function of this: that the center of a sphere
can be supposed—in a discourse that is only an analogical discourse—to constitute the master point.
The fact of changing this master point…
whether it be the earth or the sun
…has nothing in itself that subverts what the signifier ‘center’ preserves of itself.

This signifier keeps all its weight and it is quite clear that far from man…
what is designated by that term, what is what? what makes signified
…that man has ever been in any way shaken by the fact that the earth is not at the center,
he very well substituted the sun for it.

What matters is that there be a center, and since it is of course now evident:
– that the sun is not a center either,
– that it is strolling through a space whose status is more and more precarious to establish,
– that what remains well at the center is quite simply this good routine that makes the signified
in the end always keep the same sense, and that this sense, it is given by the feeling each has
of being part of his world at least, that is to say of his little family, and of everything that turns around.
And that each, each of you—I speak even for the leftists—you are there more than you believe…
and to a degree of which you yourselves would do well to take the span
…attached to a certain number of prejudices that seat you and that limit the reach of your insurrections, in the shortest term, to that very precisely where it brings you no inconvenience at all, and namely not in a worldview that remains, it, always perfectly spherical, the signified finds its center wherever you carry it.

It is not, until further order, the analytic discourse…
so difficult to sustain in its decentering,
which still has to make its entry into common consciousness
…that can in any way subvert anything whatsoever.

Yet, if one allows me to make use all the same of this reference called ‘Copernican’,
I will accentuate what it has of effective, of this that it is not at all about a change of center.

That ‘it turns’, it continues to keep all its value, however motivated, reduced though it ultimately is to this departure
that the earth turns, and that by this fact it seems to us that it is the celestial sphere that turns. It continues indeed
to turn and it has all sorts of effects, which makes that after all it is by years that you count your age.

Subversion…
if it existed somewhere and at a moment,
it does not consist at all in having changed the turning point of what turns
…it is in having substituted for the ‘it turns’, an ‘it falls’: ‘c cedilla, a’: ‘ça tombe’.

The live point, as some nonetheless had the idea of noticing it,
– it is neither Copernicus,
– a little more Kepler, because of the fact that it does not turn in the same way, it turns in an ellipse.

And already it is more energetic as corrective to this function of the ‘center’: it is it that is put into question.
That toward which ‘it falls’ is at a point of the ellipse that is called the focus[F1],
and in the symmetrical point[F2], there is nothing.
This assuredly is a quite essential corrective to this image of the center.

But the ‘it falls’ takes, if I may express myself thus, its weight—its weight of subversion—and precisely in this that, that it is not only changing the center that makes it ‘revolution’…
since by keeping the center, revolution continues indefinitely
and precisely to return always on itself[→ repetition]
…it is that the ‘it falls’ ends up in what?

Very exactly in this and nothing more than: F = G.mm’/d2(universal law of gravitation of Newton)],
the distance d that separates the two masses expressed by m and m’, and that what is thus expressed[F = G. mm’/d 2], namely a force, a force insofar as everything that is mass is susceptible, with regard to this force, of taking a certain acceleration, that it is entirely in this writing, in what is summed up in these 5 small letters written in the hollow of the hand,
with a number in addition as power, power squared of the distance, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance.

It is there, it is in this effect of writing that consists what is thus unduly attributed to Copernicus,
in something that precisely tears us away from the function as such…
imaginary function, imaginary function and yet founded in the real
…of revolution.

[Lacan tells us that this effect of the signifier is here an effect of writing, that what is written in ‘five small letters …//… with a number in addition’
is the foundation of this repetitive return of the stars, of ‘what always returns to the same place’ (definition of the real), of repetition…
In the same way four small letters: α, β, γ, δ, at least, are at the foundation by their combinatorics of lalangue,
of the unconscious structured like a language, and of another ‘repetition’ (cf. ‘the introduction’ of the seminar on The Purloined Letter)]

This being stated…
no doubt reminder, but just as well prelude
…what matters is to underline that what is produced…
what is produced as such in the articulation of this new discourse
which emerges as being the discourse of the analyst,
…the discourse of analysis, is this:
it is that the foundation, the departure, is taken in the effect as such of what pertains to the signifier.

[the ‘ab-sense’: S1◊ S2, from discourse A which ends up in the production of signifiers S1 cut off from every signified, from every sense, from every knowledge → asemantic signifier,
where, there only, of the ‘signifier as such’ (no signified) → the effect of writing can be ‘read’ → Φ(cf. ‘What is said remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard’)]

Far from its being admitted…
in some way by lived experience
…far from its being admitted, as from the very fact, that the signifier carries with it effects of signified
from which this structuring was built that I stated to you, just now, as a reminder,
how for a long time it seemed natural that a ‘world’ constituted itself,
whose correlatives were this something beyond, which was being itself, being taken as eternal: theology.

And that this world remains, whatever the case, ‘a conception’—that is indeed the word—a view, a look, an imaginary grasp, a ‘world’ conceived as being the whole, the whole with what it contains—whatever opening one gives it—of limited.
[→ ‘spherical’ conception of discourses H, U, M].

And that from this results this something that nonetheless remains strange, namely that someone, a ‘One’,
a part of this world, is at the start supposed to be able to take knowledge of it, finds himself in this state that one can call ‘ex-sistence’, for how would he otherwise bear being able to ‘take knowledge’ if, in a certain way,
he were not ex-sisting. It is indeed there that always was marked the oscillation, the dead end, the vacillation that resulted
from this cosmology, from this something that consists in the admission of a world.

Is there not in analytic discourse…
such as it is established from the quarter turn of which I spoke just now—
…is there not something that, of itself, must introduce us to this that every… every maintenance, every subsistence, every persistence of the ‘world’ as such[‘sense of the world’: S1→ S2], it is very precisely there what this discourse introduces:
it is that, it—this subsistence, this persistence—must as such be abandoned[‘ab-sense’: S1◊S2 of discourse A]?

Language is such…
the tongue forged by philosophical discourse[discourse M, imaginary support of (S1→S2)→ production of a ‘sense of the world’]
…language is such that at every instant, you see it…
at the moment I advance anything whatsoever of what can, from this analytic discourse, be established, mark you
…that I can at every instant only slip back—into what?—into this ‘world’,
into this supposed of a substance that nonetheless is found impregnated with the function of being.

And that to follow the thread of analytic discourse tends to nothing less than to re-break, to inflect, to mark
with a proper curvature, and with a curvature that could not even be maintained as being that of lines of force,
which produces as such the fault, the discontinuity, the rupture, which suggests to us to see in the tongue what in the end breaks it, so that nothing seems better to constitute what can be the horizon of analytic discourse than this use
that is made by mathematics, this use that is made of the letter, as being singularly what on the one hand reveals
in discourse what—not by chance—is called grammar: the thing that is revealed of language only in writing.

But it is not either—if it is not by chance—it is not either without necessity.[γράμμα (gramma): written sign]
It is that if grammar is what in language is revealed only by writing,
it is that beyond language this effect[of writing→Φ]…
this effect that is produced by being supported only by writing,
which is assuredly the ideal of mathematics
…it is there ‘that around which’ what is at stake in language is revealed.

Namely that, by refusing in any way the reference to writing, it is also to forbid oneself what of all the effects of language
can come to be articulated, and to be articulated in this something that we can only make that from language it does not result, namely a supposed ‘this side’[being: (a) as absence, as lack] and ‘beyond’[being as being-by: (a) as object of substitution].

It already suffices that these spatial references be evoked, for in some way that they impose themselves.
If we suppose a this-side, we feel well that there is there only an intuitive reference.
And yet we know well that language is distinguished by this: that in its effect of signified
it is never precisely anything but ‘beside’[παρά (para)] the signifier.

That what it is necessary… what it is necessary for us to break ourselves to, is to substitute for this imposition…
which is what language provokes: imposition of being
…the radical taking, the admission from the start that of being we have nothing, never.

But to write it otherwise than the ‘being-by’—not ‘appearance’ as people have always said, the phenomenon,
that beyond which there would be this something that God knows—noumen…—where it has indeed led us[where the noumen leads us]
that is to say to all the opacifications that are named precisely obscurantism.

That it is in the very paradox of everything that comes to be formulated as effect of writing of language[the bar (Φ) between S1 and S2], that it is at the very point where these paradoxes burst forth that being presents itself, and presents itself never except as being-by.
One would in the end have to learn to conjugate, to conjugate as one should:
– I by-am,
– you by-are,
– he by-is,
– we by-are,
– and so on.
Well then, all this introduces us, introduces us to this enunciation which…
you can well admit it if you give the accent that this new spelling
with all its consequences, all its morphological consequences
…that one must know how to assume, in this new conjugation that I propose to you:

– it is indeed from there that one must take what is at stake in what is found to be also in a relation
of being-by, of being beside, of being παρά (para) with regard to this ‘sexual relation’ of which it is clear that in everything that approaches it, language manifests itself only by its insufficiency,

– it is indeed with regard to this being-by that what makes up for this relation insofar as nonexistent,

– it is indeed in this relation to being-by that we must articulate what makes up for it, namely precisely love.

It is properly fabulous that the function of the Other, of the Other as place of truth…
and to tell all, of the only place—though irreducible—that we can give
to the term of divine being, of God to call it by its name
…God is properly the place where—if you allow me the term—the god is produced, the saying, the sayer, the say.
For nothing, saying makes God.

As long as something will be said, the ‘God hypothesis’ will be there.
And it is precisely in trying to say something that this fact is defined:
that, in sum, there can truly be atheists only among theologians.

Namely those who speak of God.
No other way to be one, except to hide one’s head in one’s arms in the name of I do not know what fright,
as if this God had ever actually manifested any presence whatsoever.

By contrast it is impossible to say anything without at once making it subsist,
were it only under this form of the Other, that the Other too says the truth.

A thing that is quite evident in the slightest course of that thing that I detest,
and that I detest for the best reasons, that is, History.
History being very precisely made to give us the idea that it has some sense,
whereas the first of the things we have to do is to start from what we have there in front of us:
a saying[S1 a-semantic] which is the saying of another who tells us his stupidities[ab-sense],
his embarrassments, his hindrances, his stirrings, and that it is there that it is a matter of reading.

It is a matter of reading, it is a matter of reading—what?—it is a matter of reading nothing other than the effects of these sayings.
And these effects, we see well everything in which it stirs, it moves, it bothers, it worries speaking beings.
And of course for it to lead to something, it really must be of use,
and that it be of use—my God…—for them to manage, for them to accommodate themselves,
so that lame-limping they nonetheless manage to give a shadow of little life to this feeling called love.

It is necessary, it really is necessary, it has to last still, namely that through the intermediary of this feeling something be produced that in the end…
as people who, with regard to all that,
took their precautions, like that, under the screen of the Church, saw very well
…that it lead to reproduction. Reproduction of what? Reproduction of bodies.

But might it not be, might it not be felt, might it not be touched with the finger,
that language has other effects than leading people by the nose to reproduce again, in body-to-body, and in bodies, like that, incarnated?

There is something nonetheless that is another effect of this language, which is, which is precisely the written.

There is nonetheless this among its characteristics, if I dare express myself thus, and worthy of being noted,
that of the written, since language exists, we have seen mutations.
What is written—it is not easy to say—what is written is the letter,
and the letter—my God—is not always made in the same way.

So on that they make history, the history of writing, and they rack their brains to imagine what the Mayan or Aztec pictographies could well have been for, and then a little further on the pebbles of the Mas d’Azil.

In short, what could these funny dice have been, what did one play with that?
All that, since it is as usual the function of History, one would have to say:
‘above all do not touch the Axe, initial of History’, that would be a good way to bring people back
to the first of letters, the one to which I limit myself: I always stay with the letter A.

It is moreover quite clear that the Bible begins only with the letter B,
it had left me the letter A[ Laughter ] so that I could use it!

There is much to learn, not by looking for the pebbles of the Mas d’Azil,
nor even by doing what I did like that, for my good public at one time—public of analysts—a good little while,
one would explain to them the unary stroke, the notch, it was within reach of their understanding.

But it would be better to look more closely at what mathematicians do with letters, and namely since,
in contempt of a certain number of things and in the most well-founded way, they set about, under the name of set theory, noticing that one could approach the ‘One’ in another way than intuitive, fusional, loving in short:
‘We are only one’.

Everyone knows, of course, that it never happened between two that they be only one, does it.
But still, we are only one. It is from there that this idea of love starts.
It is really the crudest way to give to this term…
to this term that manifestly eludes
…the sexual relation, its signified.

[‘the jouissance of the body of the Other is not the sign of love’. The jouissance of the body of the Other is barred in all discourses, which never manage to reach their truth: because of the phallic function in aiming at S1 one reaches only ‘functioning-as’ things: objects (a) → powerlessness to ensure the jouissance that one ‘must’ (there is no sexual relation). In the being-by of substitutive objects (a), it is love that makes up for the absence of the sexual relation in order to ‘realize the One’]

The beginning of wisdom should be to begin by noticing that…
and it is in that that old father Freud did blaze paths nonetheless
…it is nonetheless very pretty, very striking…
it is from there that I started, because it myself, like that, touched a little,
it could touch anyone besides, could it not
…to notice that the foundation of love, if it has to do with the ‘One’,
has very exactly as result never to make anyone go out of himself.

If it were that…
it is all that and nothing but that that he said, is it not
…from the moment he introduced the function of narcissistic love, everyone could feel that the problem
was how there could be a love for another.

And that, it is quite clear that this ‘One’[love] that everyone has on his lips,
is first and essentially of the nature— is it not?—of this mirage of the ‘One’ one believes oneself to be.

But still it is not in order to say that this is the whole horizon,
namely that there are, there are as many ‘Ones’ as one will want.

When I say ‘there are as many ‘Ones’ as one will want’, I do not mean:
there are as many individuals as one will want, because that, that means nothing, it is counting.

There are as many ‘Ones’—as ‘One’—the ‘Ones’ of the 1st hypothesis of Parmenides,
these ‘Ones’ are characterized by not resembling each other in anything.

What is the irruption, the intrusion of set theory is precisely to posit this:
let us speak of the ‘One’ in that it is about things that between them have strictly no relation at all.

Namely, let us put there what one calls ‘objects of thought’ or ‘objects of the world’, all that, that counts each as ‘One’, and if we assemble these absolutely heteroclite things, we give ourselves the right to designate this assembly by a letter.

That is how it is expressed, at the beginning of set theory, for example the one that last time
I brought forward under the heading of Nicolas Bourbaki. You let this pass: it is that I said…
as moreover it is written, as it is printed, as it is printed in the said set theory
…that the letter designates an assembly. [on 09-01 Lacan speaks of the letter (A) to designate a ‘place’ → place ≈ place of assembly]

It is precisely that, although the authors…
since as you know they are multiple, the authors
who ended up giving their assent to the definitive edition of the said theory
…take care of this: of saying that they designate assemblies.

But that is precisely where their timidity is and at the same time their error: the letter is the only thing that makes these assemblies.

The letter, or the letters ‘are’—and not ‘designate’—these assemblies.
And as letters they are taken as functioning as these very assemblies.
You see that in still keeping this ‘as’, I keep myself to the order of what I advance when I say that

‘the unconscious is structured like a language’.

[Each ‘One’ realized leaves a trace of the identification with the love object, a singular trace, heterogeneous to the others. The letter makes the assembly of it into a ‘place’.
Cf. the genesis of the letter ([+,+,-,+,-,+,+,+,-,+,-,-,+,…]→[1,2,3, 2,1,3…]→[α,β,γ,δ]) in the ‘Introduction’ to the seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’]

This ‘as’ is very precisely…
I always come back to it
…thought as saying… not saying that the unconscious is structured by a language: it is structured as…
The assemblies—those that are at stake in set theory—are as a letter.

[the combinatorics of α,β,γ,δ(→without the ‘caputmortum’) produces from ‘Lalangue’→‘…like a language’]

And it is about this when we advance in mathematical utterance.

What role does it play?
What support can we take there to read?

– To read insofar as there are letters,
– to read only by reading only the letters,
– to read what is at stake when we take language as what functions to make up for the absence of what precisely is the only part of the real that cannot come to be formed of letters, namely: the sexual relation.

It is in the very play, the very play of mathematical writing[the small letters] that we have to find,
if I may say, the point, the point of orientation toward which we have to direct ourselves so that from this practice,
from this new social bond that emerges and singularly extends, and that is called the analytic discourse,
draw what one can draw from it as to the very function of this language, of this language that we in sum trust, so that this discourse have effects, no doubt average but sufficiently bearable,
so that this discourse can support and complete the other discourses.

[the emergence of analytic discourse closes the loop in four discourses and triggers ‘the round of discourses’ and its ‘grazing light’]

We will see on occasion…
since for some time it is clear that university discourse is written otherwise
and that it must be ‘uni toward Cythera’, that it must spread sex education
…we are going to see how that will be done, what it will lead to… one must above all not obstruct it.

The very idea that from the point where knowledge is posited very exactly in the authoritarian situation of semblance,
that from that point something could diffuse that has the effect of improving, if one can say, inter-sex relations,
is something that assuredly is made, for an analyst, to provoke a smile.

But after all, who knows?
We already said it, the smile of the angel is the stupidest of smiles, so one must never boast of it, must one?

But very assuredly it is clear that this very idea, that the demonstration if I may say, at the blackboard,
of something that relates to sex education is certainly not made, from the point of view of the analyst’s discourse, to appear full of promises of good encounters or of happiness, as one sometimes says.

There is nonetheless something that in my Écrits shows, if I may say, that my good orientation,
since it is the one I try to convince you of, is not from yesterday.
It is nonetheless on the day after a war, where nothing obviously seemed to promise singing tomorrows, that I wrote something called ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty’ where one can nonetheless very, very well read—if one writes, and not only if one has an ear—

that the function of haste is the function of this little (a), little (a-t).

I mean that what it is about and that would deserve to be looked at more closely, is not simply this…
which is already very, very articulated, is it not, namely a little riddle
linked to the fact that there are for 3 persons 3 white disks, and black ones: one fewer
…that in fact that is where things are played out.

And that in this subjective extrapolation which makes that, in appearance, the instant of seeing, the instant of seeing two whites,
the one who does not know who he is but who knows that the other two, in any case each, can see themselves as what they are,
namely white, and at the same time, if by chance they thought themselves black and that the one who thinks from the start was himself so, would know very well, at the same time, that he is white.

There is there something of which I only brought out the fact that something like an intersubjectivity
can lead to a salutary outcome, but which would assuredly deserve to be looked at more closely.

Very precisely at the level of what each of the subjects supports not of being ‘one among others’,
but of being with regard to the other two the one who is the stake of their thought, namely very precisely
each intervenes in this ternary only under the heading precisely of this object (a) that he is under the gaze of the others.
That is what no doubt I will have the occasion to accentuate in what I will advance later.

In other words they are 3, but in reality they are 2+a, and it is indeed in this that this 2+a, at the point of a,
is reduced not to the 2 others but to a 1+a.

You know that on that I have already used these functions to try to represent to you the inadequate character of the relation of the 1 to the other, what I have already done by giving to this a as support the irrational number that is the number called ‘golden number’.
It is insofar as from a, the two others are taken as 1+a, that functions this something that can lead
to an exit in haste.

This function of identification, which is produced in a ternary articulation, is the one that is founded on this:
that in no case can 2 as such hold as support, that between 2—whatever they may be—
there is always the 1 and the other, the 1 and the a, and that the other could in no case be taken for a 1.

It is very precisely in this that in the written something, something is at play that…
from this brutal fact,
…takes as ‘One’ all the 1s one will want, that the impasses that are revealed from it are by themselves for us
a possible access to this being, a possible reduction of the function of this being in love.

And it is in this, in this that I want to end on this term by which the ‘sign’ is differentiated from the ‘signifier’:
the signifier—I said—is characterized by this, of representing a subject for another signifier.

What is at stake in the sign?
For ever the cosmic theory of knowledge, the ‘worldview’, cites the famous example
of ‘smoke that there is not without fire’.

And why here would I not advance what it seems to me, that smoke can just as well be the sign of the smoker,
and not only just as well the sign of the smoker but that it always is so by essence,
that there is smoke only as sign of the smoker.

Everyone knows that if you see smoke at the moment you approach a desert island, you tell yourself right away
that there is every chance that there is there someone who knows how to make fire, and until further order, it will be another man.

This sign, this sign insofar as the sign is not ‘the sign of something’,
but is the sign of an effect that is what is supposed as such of a functioning of the signifier,
which is what Freud teaches us and what is the departure, departure as such of analytic discourse,
namely that the subject is nothing other…
whether or not he is conscious of which signifier he is the effect
…is nothing other as such than what slips in a chain of signifiers.

It is nothing other than this effect which is the intermediate effect,
intermediate between what characterizes one signifier and another signifier,
it is that each is 1, that each is an element.

We know nothing, we do not know of any other—in sum—support by which the 1 is introduced into the world
except the signifier as such, and insofar as we learn to separate it from its effects of signified.

What therefore in love is aimed at is the subject, the subject as such, insofar as it is supposed to a sentence,
articulated to something that is ordered, can be ordered for an entire life,
but what we aim at in love is a subject and it is nothing else.

A subject as such does not have much to do with jouissance, but by contrast, insofar as his sign,
his sign is something that is capable of provoking desire, there is the spring of love,
and by that the course that we will try to continue in the near times
to show you where love and sexual jouissance meet.