All needs, all the needs of the speaking being are contaminated by the fact of being involved in another satisfaction…
underline these three words
…in what they can be lacking, the said ‘needs’ I mean.

How can that happen?
This 1st sentence that—my God—waking up this morning I put down on paper just like that, so that you would write it down. This 1st sentence carries the opposition of needs…
provided that this term, whose recourse is common, you know it,
can be grasped so easily, since after all it is grasped only by being lacking
…in what I have just put forward as this other satisfaction.
[1st register: satisfaction-need → pleasure-displeasure]

The other satisfaction—still, you must hear it—is indeed what is satisfied at the level of the unconscious,
and insofar as something is said there, and is not said there, if it is quite true that it is structured like a language.
I take this up again, that is to say from a certain distance from what for a moment I have been referring to,
namely jouissance on which this ‘other satisfaction’ depends, the one that is borne by language.

[2nd register: the other satisfaction (with language) brings the unconscious into play → symptom, slip, dream…]

If, like that, finally in the interval, in the interval of time of what I am stating here [i.e. between two seminar sessions]
it happens to you… it could happen to you, it could even be indicated to you by echoes you might have
of what, treating it long ago, very long ago: 58-59 [in fact: 1959-60]—‘The Ethics of Psychoanalysis’ I designated,
finally what I insisted on starting from nothing less than Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’. It can be read!

There is only one misfortune—for a certain number here—that it cannot be read in French:
it is manifestly untranslatable.

It happened to me, it happened to me to make sure of it—I had not suspected it until now—
by having a copy sent to me while I was in the mountains,
by having a copy sent to me that one was able to find for me,
thanks to I do not know what that happens in publishing—the publishers drive me mad!

That is no reason for me to advertise them, by speaking precisely of what drives me mad…
on this occasion that was not what drove me mad at all
…simply a translation which of course had served me, as it served others…
you must not think that I read Greek like that easily, well, Greek
…and so the translation, when it is facing it, gives a little support, like that. Yeah…

In short, there used to be at Garnier something that could make me believe there was a translation,
by someone named Voillequin, or Voilquin, I do not know how that is pronounced. He is a university man obviously.
It is not his fault [Laughter], it is not his fault if Greek does not translate into French!

Be that as it may, to have had that translation all by itself…
for some time things having condensed in such a way
that at Garnier they no longer give you anything but—who moreover has merged with Flammarion [Laughter], yeah…
…they no longer give at Garnier anything but the French text. Yeah! So when you read that, you cannot get out of it.
It is strictly speaking unintelligible:

‘Every art and every inquiry—I don’t know, I’m starting, huh?—likewise every action and every reflective deliberation—what relation between those four things?—tend it seems toward some good. Thus one has sometimes been perfectly right to define the good:
that at which one aims in all circumstances. However—this comes on top like hair in the soup, we have not yet spoken of it—
it seems indeed that there is a difference between the ends.’ [Πᾶσα τέχνη καὶ πᾶσα μέθοδος, ὁμοίως δὲ πρᾶξίς τε καὶ προαίρεσις, ἀγαθοῦ τινὸς ἐϕίεσθαι δοκεῖ• διὸ καλῶς ἀπεϕήναντο τἀγαθόν, οὗ πάντ᾽ ἐϕίεται. Διαφορὰ δέ τις φαίνεται τῶν τελῶν•]
I defy anyone to be able to sort themselves out from that text without abundant commentaries,
and which cannot not refer—and I assure you always very painfully—to the Greek text,
to shed light on that thick mass, of which however it is impossible to think
that it is simply because they are badly taken notes.

In reality, of course, because there come, there come like that with time a few fireflies in the minds of the commentators, it occurs to them that if they are forced to take so much trouble, there may perhaps be a reason for it!
It is not at all necessary that Aristotle [-384, -322] be unthinkable. I will return to it.

[the elucidation of the written, the surpassing of the bar between S1 and S2 requires a long work… why ‘take so much trouble’, if not to unveil the jouissance
(the other satisfaction, beyond the simple satisfaction of needs) that is hidden there, inscribed by Φ (the function of the written) between S1 and S2, but ‘encrypted’ → cf. symptom.]

What I had written, in the form like that of what is typed [since January 1954 a stenotypist ‘types’ what Lacan says]
what was found written of what I had said about The Ethics, appeared more than usable to the very people who precisely,
at that moment were busy making me… designating me to the attention of the International Psychoanalysis, with the result we know.

But at the same time, well… well it would have been very good if from all that there had nevertheless floated those few reflections on what psychoanalysis involves of ethics: it would have been in a way all profit!
[in ‘The Ethics of Psychoanalysis’, Lacan makes a first reading of the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ where he shows that this field of ethics taken up from Aristotle undergoes an ‘epistemological break’ (cf. Foucault) with Kant (Critique of Practical Reason) then with Sade (for example ‘Frenchmen, one more effort…’).
We then witness the emergence of a new discourse on jouissance, founded on universal laws (cf. ‘Kant with Sade’).]

I would have gone, me, splash! And then ‘The Ethics of Psychoanalysis’ would have stayed afloat.
Here is an example—well, things must always be taken as close as possible—an example of this, that calculation is not enough. Because, because I prevented that ‘Ethics of Psychoanalysis’ from appearing!

I refused it simply, starting from the idea that—my God—the people who do not want me, I do not try to convince them. One must not convince: the proper of psychoanalysis is not to conquer, idiot or not! [Laughter]
It was nevertheless a seminar not bad at all! [Laughter]

All things considered and because the thing had already, like that, once been written, and through the care of someone
who did not participate at all in that calculation from earlier, who—he—had done that like that: fair play like honest money,
with all his heart, who had—he—then… who had made of it a writing, a writing of his own.
He was not thinking at all, of course, of snatching it from me.

He would have produced it as such, if I had been willing… Fine! So I was not willing.
But that does not prevent that it is perhaps, of all the seminars, the only one that I will rewrite myself, and of which I will make a written work. I have to make one, you know! Why not choose that one?

Fine! You see that what I am trying, what must be done, isn’t it, is nevertheless…
let’s say: there is no reason not to put oneself to the test of seeing something like that for example: in what way Freud,
by positing certain terms as he could, in thinking what he was discovering, how…
how that terrain, others saw it before him?

That is what I say, one more proof, another way of testing what is at stake,
is that this terrain is thinkable only thanks to the instruments with which we operate,
and that the only instruments through which we could see the testimony being conveyed, well, are writings.

It is quite clear, it is made palpable by a very simple test, that even reading it in the French translation, the Nicomachean Ethics, isn’t it…
you will understand nothing of it of course, but no more than what I am saying, so that still suffices
…you will see that Aristotle is no more understandable than what I am telling you, and that it is even rather less so because he stirs up more things, and things that are more distant from us.

But it is clear that this ‘other satisfaction’ I was speaking of just now, well it is exactly that one, traceable as it arises…
from what?—well my good friends, impossible to escape it
…if you do not put there at the foot of the thing—isn’t it—Universals: the Good, the True, the Beautiful.
[The foundation by philosophical discourse (which belongs to the master’s discourse) of ‘universes’, of ‘spherical logics’, of ‘worldviews’
is done according to ‘Universals’, variable according to the philosophers and subjects of ‘quarrels’]
That there be these three meanings, specifications, gives a pathetic aspect to the approach made of it by certain texts, like that, those that fall under an authorized thought. I say ‘authorized’ with the sense, between quotation marks, that I give to that term: bequeathed with an author’s name.

There are certain texts that come to us like that from what I look twice at calling ‘a very ancient culture’, because it is clear that it is not ‘culture’.
Culture insofar as distinct from society, that does not exist.
Culture is precisely that old thing, that we no longer have on our backs except like vermin.

Because we do not know what to do with it except to pick it off.
I advise you to keep it because it tickles, it wakes up.
It will wake up your feelings that tend rather to become a bit dulled under the influence of surrounding circumstances, that is to say of what others, who will come after, will call your culture.

Culture…
the culture that will have become for them culture, because for a long time you will be under it
…everything you sustain of social bond, because in the end there is only that:
that social bond that I designate with the term ‘discourse’, because there is no other way to designate it,
once one has noticed that the social bond is established only by being anchored in a certain way in language,
imprints itself, is situated, is situated upon that swarm, that is to say the speaking being.

One must not be surprised, one must not be surprised that prior discourses—and then there will be others—
prior discourses are no longer thinkable for us, or very difficultly.

[the social bond (discourse) that is imprinted (function Φ of the written) on the speaking being depends, in its structure, on the discourses that preceded and produced it → Aristotle.
The change of discourse (surpassing of the master’s discourse) that occurred with Kant and Sade ‘contains’ the elements of the previous discourse: the Universals]

Fine… I mean that, in the end
– in the same way that the discourse that I try to bring to light is not, like that, immediately accessible to you to hear,
– from where we are, it is also not very easy to hear Aristotle’s discourse.

But is that a reason for it not to be thinkable? It is quite clear that it is!
It is simply when, when we imagine, well, that Aristotle means something,
well that we worry about what he surrounds.

Because after all what he surrounds…
what he catches in his net, in his network, what he draws out,
what he handles, what he has to deal with, with whom he fights…
What is he… what does he maintain, what does he bear, what does he work on, what does he pursue?

But obviously, after all, what I had just read to you earlier, the 41st lines, you do hear the words, you do suppose that it means something like that, something, you do not know what naturally!
‘Every art’ or ‘every inquiry’, ‘every action’, all that: what does each of those words mean?

It is still because he put many in a row…
and then that it reaches us printed after having been written, like that, for a long time
…that we suppose there is something that makes, that takes hold in the middle of all that.

And it is indeed from the moment we ask ourselves the question, the only one: where did it satisfy them, things like that?
No matter what its use then was: we know that it was conveyed, that there were volumes of Aristotle…
It throws us off all the same, and very precisely in this:
‘where did it satisfy them?’ is translatable only in this way: ‘where would there have been a fault in a certain jouissance?’
[‘faut’ can mean ‘is needed’ (falloir) or ‘fails’ (faillir); pun: ‘the jouissance that one needs’ vs ‘the jouissance that fails’]

In other words, why in a text like this, why did they worry like that?
You heard well: ‘fault’, lack, something that is not going well, something that slips in what is manifestly aimed at,
and then it starts like that right away, at the beginning, the Good and Happiness: ‘DU BI, DU BIEN, DU BENÊT’! [pun on sound: ‘bi’ (nonsense syllable), ‘bien’ (good), ‘benêt’ (simpleton)]
[the master’s discourse, by the phallic function that supports S1→S2 as ‘possible’: S1→S2 (‘Du Bi’) indeed leads to the Product: a (the Good, Happiness),
but ends in impotence (the Simpleton): a◊S]

Reality is approached with the apparatuses of jouissance [S1→S2→ a], here is another formula I propose to you,
provided that we center ourselves well on this: that there is no other apparatus than language.

That is how in the speaking being jouissance is apparatused, and that is what Freud says, of course if we correct this statement which is the one where I will come in a moment to hook it, namely that of the pleasure principle.

What does that mean? Why did he say it like that?
He said it like that because there were others who had spoken before him
and that was the way that seemed to him the most audible.

It is very easy to pick out in the end, and this conjunction of Aristotle with Freud helps with this picking out.
If I push further to the point where now it can be done:
if the unconscious is indeed what I say, structured like a language, namely,
– that from there this language is no doubt illuminated by being posited as apparatus of jouissance,
– but conversely jouissance too, perhaps that in itself too it shows

• that it is in default,
• that for it to be like that, there must be something on its side that limps.

What did I tell you: reality is approached with that, with the apparatuses of jouissance.
And yes, that does not mean that jouissance is prior to reality,
that is also a point where Freud lent himself to misunderstanding, somewhere.

And you will find in what is classified in French under ‘Essays on Psychoanalysis’,
I tell you this so that you can find your bearings, because if I simply give you the bibliographic indication,
you will not even know where it is, it is in the ‘Essays on Psychoanalysis’.

There is something that resembles the idea of a development, isn’t it? [(I) pleasure principle→(II) reality principle]
There is a Lust-Ich before a Real-Ich. It is a slipping, it is a return to the rut:
that rut that I call ‘development’, and which is only a hypothesis of mastery.
[master’s discourse: S1→S2→ a, with its rut: a◊S→ phallic jouissance, supported by fantasy]

Supposedly the baby: nothing to do with the Real-Ich!
Poor little rascal, incapable of having the slightest idea of what the real is!

That is reserved for the people we know,
those ‘adults’ of whom moreover it is expressly said that they can never manage to wake up.
That is to say that when something arrives in their dream that would threaten to pass into the real,
it panics them so much at once that they wake up, that is to say that they continue to dream!

It suffices to read, it suffices to be in it a little, it suffices to see them live, it suffices to have them in psychoanalysis [Laughter] Yeah…
to notice what it means then, that ‘development’. Yeah…
When one says ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ for ‘processes’, there may be there a kind of way of speaking that creates an illusion.

In any case, let’s say that it is not because a process is called ‘primary’—one can call them whatever one wants after all—that it appears first.

As for me, I have never looked at a baby without… having the feeling that there was for him no external world:
it is quite manifest that he looks only at that, and that it excites him manifestly!

And that—my God—in exact proportion to the fact that he does not yet speak. From the moment he speaks,
well—from that moment, very exactly, not before—I understand that there is repression.
The process may be primary—of the Lust-Ich—and why not?
It is obviously primary as soon as we begin to think, and it is certainly not the first.
This idea of development that is confused—with what?—with the development of mastery, I said it earlier,
that is where one must nonetheless have a little, well a little ear, like for music:
I am m’être, I progress in m’êtrise, development is when one becomes more and more m’être, I am m’être of myself as of the Universe. Yeah, that is indeed what I was speaking of earlier: con-vaincu. [puns: ‘m’être’/‘m’êtrise’ echo ‘maître’/‘maîtrise’ (master/mastery); ‘con-vaincu’ echoes ‘convaincu’ (convinced) while splitting into ‘con’ (idiot) + ‘vaincu’ (defeated)] [being as product: (a)]

The ‘universe’…
from certain small—like that—lights, a bit… that I tried to give you
…the ‘universe’, the ‘universe’ is a flower of rhetoric.
[the ‘sphere’ of language of the phallic function is limited to phallic jouissance and fails to grasp what in jouissance is unpredicable]

So that could perhaps help to understand that…
with that literary echo
…the ego, perhaps it too is, flower of rhetoric no doubt, that grows from the pot of the ‘pleasure principle’,
from what Freud calls Lustprinzip, and from what I define: ‘from what is satisfied by blahblahblah’.
For that is what I say when I say that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’. I have to dot the i’s!

The ‘universe’…
you can perhaps nevertheless now realize, because of the way
in which I have accentuated the use of certain words, their different application in the two sexes,
namely what I have accentuated of the ‘all’ [;] and of the ‘not all’ [.]
…the ‘universe’ is where saying ‘all’ succeeds… [; !by the ex-sistence of the exception: : §]
Yeah… Am I going to start doing some William James there?
…succeeds at what?

The answer: …
thanks to the point where with time I have ended up making you arrive, where I hope I have ended up making you arrive…
…succeeds in making the sexual relation fail in the male way [; !aims at the impossible (ex-sistence) of: § →S◊ a (formula of fantasy)].

Normally I should gather snickers here [Laughter], alas nothing of the sort!
The snickers should mean: Ah! so you are caught: two ways to fail the affair, the sexual relation. That is how the music of the epithalamium is modulated.

The epithalamium, the duo…
because one must nonetheless distinguish the ‘duo’ from dialogue
…alternation, the love letter, that is not the sexual relation. They turn around the fact that there is no sexual relation.

That there is therefore the male way of turning around and then the other…
that I do not designate otherwise, because that is what this year I am in the process of elaborating
…namely how in the female way, it is elaborated from the ‘not all’.
Only since up to now the not all has not been much explored, that is what obviously gives me a bit of trouble.

On that I am going to tell you a good one [Laughter], to distract you a little.
Yeah, it is that, in the middle of my winter sports I believed I had to, to keep my word, travel as far as Milan,
at one fast bird-flight hour from Milan that it was, by rail it took a whole day to go there.

Fine in short, I went to Milan and since I can never leave…
because I am like that, you understand,
I said that I will redo The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, but it is because I re-extract it
…I cannot not stay at the point where I am, so that giving that absolutely crazy title for a lecture to the Milanese who have never heard of that: ‘psychoanalysis in its reference to the sexual relation’.

Well they are very intelligent… They heard it so well that at once, that very evening in the newspaper it was written:

‘For Doctor Lacan, the ladies, the “donne”, do not exist!’ [Laughter]

Well it is true, what do you want, if the sexual relation does not exist, well, there are no ladies then, huh! [Laughter]
There was a person who was furious, it was a lady from the M.L.F. from over there [Laughter]. And it even had to be that I explain it to them, and I took care to explain it to them. There was in any case one who was really… ah yes! I said to her:

‘Come tomorrow morning, I will explain to you what it is about, I will explain to you that it is precisely of that that I speak!’.

I try to elaborate what there is to this affair of the sexual relation starting from this:
that if there is a point from which it could be illuminated…
since precisely there is something there that does not come together
…it is precisely on the side of the ladies, insofar as it is a matter of elaboration of the not all [.], a matter of clearing the way, which is my true subject of this year, behind this Encore which is…
well there you have it: one of the senses, that I try again and then others.

That means that it is perhaps by another path that I will manage to bring out something,
that is not quite what has been brought out up to now on female sexuality.

Because still it is very interesting, and it is even striking that… there is one thing in any case that from
this not all gives a dazzling testimony, with one of those nuances, one of those oscillations of meaning that happens, because language must nonetheless accustom us to that.

You see what change of sense the not all makes, when I tell you:

‘Our colleague analysts, on female sexuality, they do not tell us everything!’.

It is even quite striking, because one cannot say that it is they who have advanced the question by an inch. I am speaking of female sexuality. They have no more reason than the others not to know something of it,
there must be for that a more internal reason, linked precisely to this structure of the apparatus of jouissance.

Fine then, to come back then to what earlier I raised to myself—quite alone—as an objection,
namely that: that there was a male way of failing, and then another.
I am speaking of failing the sexual relation, which is its only form of realization, if as I posit there is no sexual relation.

So then when I say that, saying ‘all’ [;] succeeds,
that does not prevent saying not all [.] and succeeding too, provided it is in the same way, that is to say that it fails.

It is not a matter of analyzing how it succeeds.
It is a matter of repeating until one has had enough why it fails.
Why it fails is objective. I have already insisted on it.

It is even so striking that it is objective, that it is on that that one must center in analytic discourse
what there is to the object. It is the object. There is no need to look…
as I have already said for a long time
…for the good and the bad object, and in what they differ: the object is neither good… There is the good, there is the bad, oh dear…
Precisely, today I try to start from it—huh—from what has to do with the Good, the Good, and what Freud states.

But the object is a failure, it is the essence of the object: failure. [the object (a) at best reaches only an insufficient phallic jouissance, through S◊a]
You will note—huh?—that I spoke of ‘essence’ just like Aristotle [οὐσία (oussia)].
And then so what! That means that those old words are quite usable.

Well, in a time when I was treading less in place than today…
it is even there that I went through it, right after Aristotle
…I said that if something had somewhat aired out the atmosphere after all this Greek treading-in-place around eudaimonism…
it simply means happiness: that, that translates
…if something had pulled them out of that, it was the discovery of utilitarianism.

It left the listeners I had then neither warm nor cold, because utilitarianism they had never heard of it, so that they could not make a mistake and they could not believe that it was recourse to the useful.

I explained to them what utilitarianism is at the level of Bentham, that is to say not at all what one believes,
and that for that one must read the theory, ‘Theory of fictions’, and that utilitarianism does not mean anything other than this:
it is that the old words…
that is what it is about: those that already serve
…well it is what they serve for that one must think, nothing more.
[Cf. seminar 1959-60: ‘The Ethics’, session of 18-11-1959: ‘Truth has the structure of fiction’]
And not be surprised at the result when one uses them, one knows what they serve for: for there to be the jouissance one needs,
if you have followed me up to now, except that thanks to something…
I still cannot always re-evoke everything
…of what I put the accent on, on the equivocation between failing (faillir) and needing (falloir).

This leads us ‘to there being the jouissance one needs’, to translate it: ‘to there being the jouissance one must not’.
Yes I am teaching something positive there, as one says, except that it is expressed by a negation.
And why would that not be as positive as anything else?

The ‘necessary’…
what I propose to you to accentuate in this mode
…what does not cease—of what?—well precisely: to be written, [does not cease → necessary]

It is a very good way to distribute at least 4 modal categories [necessary, impossible, contingent, possible].
I will explain that to you another time, but I am giving you a little bit more of it for this time.

[the 4 categories of Aristotle’s modal logic: Necessary, Impossible, Contingent, Possible,
– Necessary → what does not cease to be written: what posits a saying in the said → what manifests ex-sistence.
– Impossible → what does not cease not to be written: the sexual relation.
– Contingent → what ceases not to be written: the first writing: Φ.
– Possible → what ceases to be written.]

What does not cease not to be written is a modal category that is precisely not the one you would have expected
to oppose the necessary, which would rather have been the contingent.
But imagine that the necessary is conjugated with the impossible, and this ‘does not cease not to be written’ is its articulation.
But let’s leave it!

The necessary insofar as it does not cease to be written [phallic function], is that what is produced is ‘the jouissance one should not have’.
That is the correlate of there being no sexual relation. And it is the substantial of the phallic function.

So now I take it up again at the level of the text. It is ‘the jouissance one should not have’ that I believed I said conditionally.
Which suggests to us for its use the protasis, the apodosis:
it is ‘if there were not that [protasis], it would go better [apodosis]’, conditional in the second part: material implication,
the one of which the Stoics noticed that it was perhaps what there was most solid in logic.

Jouissance then: how are we going to express this ‘that one should not’ about it except by this:
if there were another than phallic jouissance…
here, like that, so that you do not lose the rope,
it is awful but if I talk to you like that, like I took my notes this morning, you will lose the thread
…if there were another, it should not be that one.

It is very pretty. One must use, huh… one must use, but really use, know how to use, use to the breaking point
things like that, as dumb as cabbage, old words. That is utilitarianism.
And it allowed a big step to get unstuck from the old stories, there, of Universals in which one was engaged
since Plato and Aristotle, and where it had dragged through the whole Middle Ages,
and where it still suffocates Leibniz, to the point that one wonders how he was so intelligent.

Yes, if there were another, it should not be that one.

Listen to that! What does that designate, ‘that one’? That designates
– what in the sentence is ‘the other’,
– or the one from which we started to designate this other, as ‘other’?
Because, after all, if I say that, which is sustained at the level of material implication,
because in sum the 1st part designates something false, ‘if there were another’:
there is no other than phallic jouissance!

Except the one about which the woman does not breathe a word…
perhaps because she does not know it
…the one that makes her ‘not all’ in any case.

It is therefore false, huh, that there is another.
Which does not prevent the continuation from being true, namely that ‘it should not be that one’.
[from a false premise (fiction) the true can be deduced (material implication) → jouissance, but which one is it?]

You know that it is quite correct, that when the true is deduced from the false it is valid, it sticks, the implication.
The only thing one cannot admit is that from the true the false follows. Logic, not badly put together!

That they noticed that all by themselves, these Stoics!
There was Chrysippus, and then there was another who was not of the same opinion.
But still, one must not believe that these were things that had no relation with jouissance.
It suffices to have these terms rehabilitated.

It is therefore false ‘that there is another’, which will not prevent us from playing once again on the equivocation
and starting not from ‘faillir’ but from ‘false’ [‘false that there is another’ → ‘it is necessary that there be another’ (faut)…],
and from saying that ‘it should not be that one’.

Supposing ‘that there is another’… But precisely there is not, and at the same time it is not because there is not,
and that it is on that that the ‘it should not’ depends, that the guillotine falls any less surely.
Well then that one, which is not the other, the one from which we started, that one must be fault,
hear it as ‘guilt’ [guilty → cut], and fault for the other, for the one that is not.

Which opens to us, like that laterally…
I am telling you like that, in passing
…this little glimpse that has all its weight in a metaphysics.
There can be cases where it is not only we who go looking for a thing to reassure ourselves
in this trough of metaphysics, we too can also hand it something…

Well then, ‘that non-being not be’ one must still not forget that at every instant, this…
that I said: ‘that non-being not be’
…this is carried by speech to the account of being, of which it is the fault…
of which it is the fault ‘that non-being not be’
…and it is indeed true besides that it is its fault because if being did not exist, we would be much calmer
with this question of non-being, and it is therefore well deserved that one reproaches it with it, namely that it be at fault.
[the question is to know whether what founds being is that ‘being is, and non-being is not’ or rather that non-being is (Φ as fiction) and that being is not, except insofar as it ex-sists]

That is also why, if what I am dishing out to you is indeed true, which on occasion enrages me, what I started from, I suppose you do not remember it, it is that when I forget myself to the point of… of ‘poublier’, that is to say ‘tout-blier’,
there is ‘all’ in that, well then I deserve to bail, to bail that it be about me that one speaks and not at all about my book.
Exactly as it was happening—well it is the same everywhere—in Milan where it was perhaps not quite about me
that one was speaking when one said that ‘for me the ladies do not exist’, but it is certainly not about what I had just said.

Fine, then let us return to our Aristotle after this clarification we made: that in sum this jouissance,
this jouissance, that is to say what comes to the one who speaks, and not for nothing, it is because already, because he is a little premature.

He has something to do with this famous sexual relation of which he will have only too much occasion to notice that it does not exist—it is therefore rather in second—in second than in first…
and in Freud there is the mark of it, there are traces of it: if he spoke of Urverdrängung, primordial repression,
it is indeed because precisely the true, the good, the everyday repression,
well precisely it is not 1st, it is 2nd
…one represses the said jouissance, well because it is not fitting that it be said, and this for the reason precisely
that the saying of it can only be this: ‘as jouissance, it is not fitting’, what I already put forward earlier by this bias:
that it is not the one that is needed, that it is the one that must not be.

[primordial repression (Urverdrängung) created irremediably ‘the fault line’, it is not of the same order as secondary repressions and their ‘returns of the repressed’ in the mode of the phallic function in a desperate attempt to recover a mythical ‘lost jouissance’, which results only in the jouissance that is not fitting.]

Repression occurs only by attesting in all sayings, in the least of sayings,
what is implied in this saying that I have just stated: that jouissance is not fitting: ‘non decet’.
Not fitting to what? To the sexual relation in this sense that because of what it speaks, the said jouissance,
it—the sexual relation—is not.
[the phallic function (the jouissance that speaks) results (on the ♂ side) only in phallic jouissance reduced to objects (a) → ‘non decet’, but in keeping silent it is worse…]

That is indeed why, it does… it does better to keep silent, with the result that it makes the sexual relation,
in its very absence, still a bit heavier, or heavier (feminine) if it is absence that is at issue.
That is indeed why, that in the end it does not keep silent, and that the first effect of repression
is that, is that it speaks of something else. And that is what makes the spring—as I heavily indicated—
that is what makes metaphor the spring.

There! You see the relation of all that with utility, this utilitarian makes you capable of serving for something.
And this for lack of knowing how to enjoy otherwise than to be… than to be enjoyed,
or ‘played’ since it is precisely the jouissance one should not have.

Well it is from there, it is from this ‘step by step’ that today made me scan something essential,
that we must approach…
and I will leave you the time, by dismissing you now
…that we must approach this illumination that Aristotle and Freud can take from one another,
by questioning how might be pinned down, might cross through one another,
what Aristotle in Book VII of the said Nicomachean Ethics poses the question about… about… about pleasure.

Since pleasure is in an undoubted way what seems to him the surest thing to refer to jouissance, neither more nor less,
he thinks without any doubt that it is there something that can only be distinguished from need,
those needs from which I started in my first sentence.

There it is a matter, he says, of what he frames of generation, that is to say of what relates to movement.
For him, Aristotle, movement, because of what he put at the center of his world…
of this world now forever gone down the drain
…because he put at the center ‘the unmoved mover’,
– it is in the line of what follows immediately, namely the movement that this unmoved mover knows how to cause,
– it is a little further still for what there is of what is born and what dies, of what is engendered and what corrupts, that needs of course are situated: needs are satisfied by movement.

Strange thing, how is it that we must, under Freud’s pen, precisely find that again
in the articulation of what there is of the pleasure principle?
What equivocation makes it that in Freud, the pleasure principle is evoked only from what comes from excitation,
and from what this excitation provokes of movement to evade it?

What a strange thing that it be that which under Freud’s pen must be translated as pleasure principle,
when in Aristotle, assuredly there is there something that can be considered only as a lessening of pain,
but surely not as a pleasure. If Aristotle comes to pin down somewhere what is of pleasure,
it could only be in what he calls…
and which one cannot translate into French other than as an ‘activity’
…what he calls ἐνέργεια [energeïa], and on the occasion moreover there are only chosen ones
that he can promote to this function of illuminating what there is of pleasure.

Very strange thing, very strange thing the examples he gives of it—and of course not without coherence—are ‘seeing’.
That is for him where the supreme pleasure resides, and at the same time the one he distinguishes from the level where he placed
γἐνεσις [genesis], the generation of something, the one he pushes away from the heart, from the center, of pure pleasure.

No pain needs to precede the fact that we ‘see’, for ‘seeing’ to be a pleasure. It is amusing that
put on this footing, put on this path, the question posed like that, he must—always consult Book VII—
put forward—what?—what French cannot translate otherwise, for lack of a word that is equivocal, than ‘to smell’.

Here Aristotle puts on the same plane olfaction—which is strange—olfaction and vision.
And he has a vivid sense of the diversity of the thing, and also that pleasure—however opposed this 2nd sense seems to the 1st—
was found supported by it. And he adds third: ‘hearing’.

Fine, since we are arriving very close to 45 [13h 45] I can well begin, not leave you with a riddle,
the remark that in advancing on this path, but do you not recognize that on this path…
of which after all we must already have taken the step I told you earlier,
of seeing that jouissance refers centrally to that one which must not be,
which ‘would be necessary’ for there to be sexual relation, but which remains entirely stuck to it
…what arises under the point, under the pinning-down that Aristotle designates—is what?—
it is very exactly what analytic experience allows us to pick out as being…
of at least one side of sexual identification, the male side to name it
…what can be picked out as being precisely the object.

The object that takes the place of what of the Other cannot be perceived.
It is insofar as the object (a) plays somewhere—and from one departure, one alone: the male—the role of what comes in the place
of the missing partner, that is constituted—but what?—what we have the habit of seeing arise also in the place of the real,
namely fantasy [S◊ a].

But I am almost sorry to have, in this way, said enough of it, which always means said too much,
since if one does not see the difference, the radical difference of what is produced on the other side,
namely starting, I cannot say from ‘the woman’…
since precisely what next time I will try to state in a way that holds,
that holds and is complete enough that you can bear the time
that will then last the resumption, that is to say half a month
…that on the side of woman…
but mark this ‘La’ with this oblique stroke
by which I designate each time I have the occasion what must be barred
…starting from woman, it is about something other than the object (a)—I will state it to you next time—
that is at stake in what comes to supplement—to this sexual relation—not being.