I can certainly confess to you that I had hoped that the so-called ‘school’ holidays would have thinned out your attendance.
It is far too long that… that I have wanted to speak to you like this, while walking a little among you,
it would make certain things easier, it seems to me. But anyway, since this satisfaction is refused me,
I return to what I started from last time, to what I called ‘another satisfaction’, satisfaction of speech.

Another satisfaction, that…
I repeat, it is the beginning of what I said last time
…the one that answers to the jouissance it took ‘just’, ‘just’ for it to happen between what I will abbreviate by calling them ‘the man and the woman’, and which is phallic jouissance.

Note here the modification introduced by this word ‘just’. This ‘just’, this precisely is a ‘barely’, barely achieved…
which, I think, is perceptible to you
…to give precisely the reverse of the failed attempt.

It succeeds ‘just barely’ and already here we are carried there…
since last time, at least I hope so,
the greatest number were there who know that I started from Aristotle
…to see there, in sum, justified what Aristotle brings of the notion of justice as ‘the just middle’.

Perhaps some of you saw, when I introduced this ‘all’ that is in the ‘just barely’,
that I made there a sort of detour, a detour that was to avoid the word ‘prosdiorism’
which designates precisely this ‘all’, this ‘some’ at times, which are missing in no language.

Whether it is the prosdiorism, the ‘all’ that on occasion comes to make us slide from Aristotle’s justice to exactness,
to ‘barely-success’, it is indeed that which legitimizes me in having first produced this entry of Aristotle…
from the fact that it is not understood right away like that, and that, all in all,
Aristotle, if he is not understood so easily because of the distance that separates us from him
…that is indeed what justified me, as for me, in telling you that reading is not at all something
that obliges us to understand; one must read it first.

[reading is first of all reading semantic S1s, hermetic like hieroglyphs because deprived of meaning → one must read Aristotle the way one ‘reads’ a dream
(Lacan said that one had to read Descartes ‘like a nightmare’)]

And that is indeed what makes that today…
well perhaps in a way that will appear to some as a paradox
…I am going to advise you to read a book of which the least one can say is that it concerns me;
this book is called ‘Le titre de la lettre’, it appeared with the Galilée press, collection ‘À la Lettre’.

I will not tell you the authors, who seem to me on this occasion rather to play the role of underlings,
but that is not in order to diminish their work, for I will say that, as for me, it is with the greatest satisfaction that I read it. And it is in sum the test to which I would like to submit your audience,
rather than recommending, sounding the trumpet for the publication of this or that book.

This book written, in sum, with the worst intentions, as you will be able to see in the last thirty pages, is nonetheless a book whose circulation I cannot encourage too strongly.

I can say in a certain way that if it is a matter of reading, I have never been so well read,
to the point of being able to say that from a certain side I could say ‘with so much love’.
Of course, as it turns out by the fall of the book, it is a love of which the least one can say
is that its usual lining in analytic theory is not without being able to be evoked…

It seems to me that that would be saying too much…
and then perhaps it is even too much to say to put in there in some way the subjects
…that would perhaps be to acknowledge them too much as subjects, to evoke their feelings.

It is a model of good reading. To the point that I can say that I regret not having obtained,
from those close to me, anything that in my eyes is equivalent.

The authors, since I must all the same designate them, believed they had to limit themselves…
and my God, why not compliment them for it, since the condition of a reading
is obviously that it be in place, that it impose limits on itself
…and they attached themselves to my article, to that article collected in my Écrits which is called ‘L’instance de la lettre’.

I can say that, to punctuate for example what distinguishes me from what can be understood of Saussure,
I do not say more; what distinguishes me from him, what makes that I have—as they say—‘diverted’ him,
one really cannot do better.

Where does that lead, from thread to needle?

To that impasse which is indeed the one I designate concerning what is at stake in discourse, in analytic discourse,
in the approach to truth and its paradoxes. That is no doubt something where in the end, I do not know what…
and I have no further to probe it
…I do not know what escapes those who imposed on themselves this extraordinary work,
everything happening therefore as if it were precisely at the impasse to which my whole discourse is made to lead them,
that they hold themselves quit of it, that they declare, or declare to me…
which comes to the same at the point they reach
…to be quinauds.

But precisely, that is where I find it entirely indicated that you confront yourselves—I underline it—
up to the conclusions of which you will see that, all in all, one can qualify them as brazen.
Up to those conclusions, the work continues in a way where I can recognize only a value of clarification, of light, quite striking.

If that could by chance, well, clarify your ranks a little, given what I began with,
I would see in it for myself only advantage. But after all I am not sure, because, why…
since you are still here in such numbers
…not trust you: that nothing in the end will surely repel you [Laughter].

Up to those 30 or 20 last pages, I did not count them because in truth those are the ones, those alone, that I read diagonally; the others will be of a comfort that, all in all, I can wish you.

On that, what I have today to tell you is indeed what I announced to you last time,
namely to push further what is at stake regarding what I ended on.

Namely, the consequence of what I believed…
certainly not without having long made my way for that
…of what I believed I had to state about what there is between the sexes, between the sexes in the speaking being, that makes no relation,
and how, in sum, it is only from there that can be stated what makes up for that relation.

It has been a long time that on that I marked out with a certain ‘Y’a d’l’Un’ the first step in this démarche.
This ‘Y’a d’l’Un’, as one must say, is not simple. [wordplay: contracted spoken French for ‘Il y a de l’Un’, literally ‘there is some One/One-ness’; also heard as ‘d’un’ (‘of one’)]

Of course in psychoanalysis, or more exactly, since one must say it, in Freud’s discourse, this is announced from ἔρως[eros], from ἔρως defined as fusion of what, from two, makes one, and from there—my God—
little by little, is supposed to tend to make only One out of an immense multitude.

Whereby, as it is clear that even, all of you as you are here, an assured multitude,
not only do you not make only One but have no chance, even were it to commune, as one says in my speech, of arriving at it, as is only too demonstrated, every day.

Freud must indeed bring forth this other factor, which must indeed obstruct this universal ἔρως,
in the form of Θάνατος[Tanathos], of reduction to dust.

It is obviously something permitted metaphorically to Freud, thanks to this blessed discovery of the 2 units of the germen: this ovum and this spermatozoon, of which roughly one could say that it is from their fusion that there is engendered—what?—
a new being, and also to limit oneself to two elements that conjoin.
Except that it is quite clear that, looking at things more closely, the thing does not go without a meiosis,
without a wholly manifest subtraction, at least for one of the two, I mean just before the very moment
when the conjunction occurs, the subtraction of certain elements which of course are not for nothing in the final operation.

But the biological metaphor is certainly, here again much less than elsewhere, what can suffice to reassure us.
If the unconscious is indeed what I say it is, structured like a language, it is at the level of language that we must question this One, this One of which of course the succession of centuries has made an echoing, an infinite resonance;
do I need here to evoke the Neoplatonists [Porphyry of Tyre, Plotinus…] and all the rest?

Perhaps I will still have, a bit later, to mention very quickly this adventure, since what I need today is quite properly to designate from where the thing not only can but must be taken from our [analytic] discourse,
from this new discourse, from this renewal that what our experience brings brings into the domain of ἔρως.

One must indeed start from this: that this ‘Y’a d’l’Un’ is to be taken from the accent that there is One [‘all alone’],
and precisely since there is no relation, that ‘Y’a d’l’Un’ and ‘d’l’Un all alone’,
that it is from there that one grasps the nerve of what is at stake concerning what, after all, we must indeed call
by the name whose thing resounds throughout the centuries, namely that of love.

In analysis we deal only with that. And it is not, it is not by another route that it operates.
A singular route, in that it alone has allowed one to detach what I, who speak to you, believed I had to bear…
I mean this transference, and namely insofar as it is not distinguished from love
…from the formula: ‘the subject supposed to know’.

And there, I think that throughout what I will have to state today, I cannot fail to mark
the new resonance that this term of knowing can take for you, for everything that follows.
Perhaps even in what a moment ago you saw me waver, retreat, hesitate, to tip toward one sense or the other:
toward love or toward what is still called hate.

Think that, in sum

– if, as you will see, what I expressly invite you to take part in,
namely a reading whose point is expressly made to—let us say—discredit me,
which is certainly not something before which someone [Derrida] who in sum speaks only of desidération would recoil,
and who aims at nothing else,

– that, in sum, where this point strikes, or more exactly seems—to the authors—supportable, is precisely from a de-supposition of my knowing.

And why not? Why not, if it turns out that this must be the condition of what I called ‘reading’?
What do I know after all, what can I presume of what Aristotle knew? Perhaps I will read him better,
to the extent that I suppose that knowing to him less. Such is the condition of a strict putting-to-the-test of ‘reading’.
And that is the one from which, in sum, I do not slip away.

It is certainly difficult, it would be little in conformity with what, in fact, we are offered to read by what exists of language,
namely what comes to be woven from effects of its ravining; you know that this is how I define writing [Cf. Lituraterre].

It would, it seems to me, be disdainful—to say the least—not to traverse or echo what over the ages…
and of a thought that has been called—I must say improperly—philosophical
…what over the ages has been elaborated on love. I am not going to do here a general review.

But I think that, given the kind of heads, well, that I see here clustering, you must all the same have heard
that on the side of philosophy, the love of God has held a certain place in this affair, and that there is there a massive fact, of which, at least laterally, analytic discourse cannot not take account.

Thus, well-intentioned persons…
it is much worse than those who are ill-intentioned
…well-intentioned persons…
when, as it says somewhere in this booklet, I was, as what is written there has it, ‘excluded’ from Sainte-Anne,
I was not excluded, I withdrew, it is very different, but anyway what does it matter, we are not there, all the more since these terms ‘excluded’, ‘to exclude’, have in our topology all their importance
…well-intentioned persons found themselves in sum surprised to have an echo; it was only an echo,
but since these persons were…
my God, one must indeed say it
…of the pure philosophical tradition, and of the one that lays claim…
it is indeed in that that I call it ‘pure’
…there is nothing more philosophical than materialism, and materialism believes itself obliged…
God knows why, as one must say
…to be on guard against this God of whom I said that he dominated, in philosophy, the whole debate on love.

The least one can say is that a certain embarrassment, given the bridge, the springboard, the maintenance for me of an audience,
that was offered me from that warm intervention, is that I was placing between the man and the woman a certain Other…
with a capital A, which there was, according to those who made themselves the volunteer vehicles of this echo,
…a certain Other that had every appearance of being only ‘the good old God’ as always.

For me it seems perceptible that as for ‘the good old God’, this Other, this Other advanced then…
then at the time of ‘L’instance de la lettre’
…this Other advanced then as the place where speech can be inscribed only in truth,
this Other was nonetheless indeed a way—I cannot even say—of secularizing, of exorcising this ‘good old God’.

But what does it matter! After all, who knows? There are many people who compliment me,
in I do not know which of the last or next-to-last seminars, for having finally managed to posit that God did not exist.
Obviously they hear, they hear, but alas they understand, and what they understand is a bit precipitate.

Perhaps today I am rather going to show you in what precisely this ‘good old God’ exists.
The mode under which he exists [: §→ex-sists] may perhaps not quite please everyone and notably not
the theologians who are—I have said it for a long time—much stronger than I am at doing without his existence.

Unfortunately I am not quite in the same position, from the fact that precisely I have to do with the Other,
and that this Other…
this Other who, if there is only One all alone,
must indeed have some relation with what then appears of the other sex
…this Other I am indeed forced to take into account, and everyone knows that after all I did not refuse myself…
in this same year that I evoked last time: of ‘The Ethics of Psychoanalysis’,
…to refer to courtly love.

Courtly love, what is it?
It was that kind… that wholly refined way of making up for the absence of sexual relation
by pretending that it is we who put an obstacle to it.
That is truly the most formidable thing that has ever been attempted, but how to denounce the pretense?

Of course I pass over this, well, that as for the materialists, that would be a magnificent way…
well, instead of being there wavering over the paradox that it appeared in the feudal era, to see on the contrary how without that, it takes root, how it is from the discourse of fealty, of fidelity to the person, and, to put it plainly: at the last term of what is always ‘the person’, namely the master’s discourse
…it would be the most splendid way to see how necessary it was…
to the man whose Lady was entirely—in the most servile sense—enslaved, the ‘assujette’
…how it was the only way to get out of it with elegance concerning what is at stake and which is the foundation,
namely: the absence of sexual relation.
[courtly love remains in the master’s discourse (:§), but it is from the idealized Lady that one is the ‘féal’ → ‘the Lady’ becomes the exception of:§]

But anyway I will have to deal…
later I will take it up again; today I must cleave a certain field
…I will have to deal with this notion of the obstacle which in Aristotle…
because all the same I still prefer Aristotle to Jaufré Rudel, eh?
…what in Aristotle is called precisely ‘the obstacle’, the ἔνστασις[ènstasis].
My readers [the authors of ‘Le titre de la lettre’], my readers…
of whom, I repeat, you must all buy the book in a moment
…my readers even found that, namely that the instance that they interrogate with care, a precaution…
I tell you: I have never seen a single one of my students do work like that, alas! No one will ever take seriously what I write, except of course those of whom I said earlier, incidentally, that they hate me under the pretext that they de-suppose knowing in me. What does it matter!
…yes, they went so far as to discover the ἔνστασις[ènstasis], the Aristotelian logical obstacle
that I had kept for the best bite, for this ‘Instance of the Letter’ [Laughter].

It is true that they do not see the relation; they put it only in a note, but they are so well accustomed to working, especially when something animates them, the desire for example to get a master’s degree, as one must say more than ever, and well they also brought that out, the note from I no longer know what page, to which I ask you to refer, like that,
that will allow you to consult Aristotle and you will know everything when I finally take up this story of the ἔνστασις.
[the note recalls that ‘Benveniste had proposed the concept of the instance of discourse to designate the discrete acts and each time unique by which the language is actualized in speech by a speaker’ → the speaker places himself outside the language (→ex-sists) to produce his own speech → there too :: §]

Well, where is it? where is it, the ἔνστασις? Well… Ah, it’s killing!
Naturally I will not find the page when it is at the moment when I would need to pull it out for you.
Well, wait… Yes, there… There: Page 29…28 and 29 [or p. 39 of the 1990 edition].

You can read following that the passage of the Rhetoric and that of the… the two passages of the Topics
which will allow you to understand right away, to know plainly, what I mean when I reread Aristotle.
And more exactly when I try to reintegrate into Aristotle my 4 formulas, you know the: § and what follows.
[Rhetoric, II, 25; Prior Analytics, II, 26; Topics, VIII, 2, 157ab, Topics, II, 11, 115b]

Yes! Well, why would materialists, as one says, be indignant that, as always,
I even—why not?—put God as a third party in the affair of human love?
I suppose that even materialists sometimes know something about the threesome, don’t they?

So let us try to move forward, let us try to move forward on what results from this step to be taken,
of which in any case nothing bears witness that I do not know what I still have to say at this level, here, where I speak to you.

The least I can say is to be at least able to suppose, to have at least made you admit,
at least admit that I admit, that as for being… for the offset of this book…
an offset open from the start and which will continue to the end
…is to suppose me—and with that one can do anything—to suppose me an ontology or what comes to the same, a system.

Honesty, all the same, makes that in the circular diagram where supposedly is knotted what I advance from L’instance de la lettre, it is in terms, in dotted lines…
rightly so, for they weigh little
…that are put—enveloping them, enveloping all my statements—the names of the principal philosophers
in the general ontology of whom I would insert my alleged system.

Well then, for me, let us say that it cannot be ambiguous that, at least for what I have articulated in recent years, this ‘being’ as it is sustained in the philosophical tradition, that is to say that sits down in ‘thinking’ itself,
supposed to be its correlate, well, that to this very precisely I oppose:
– that in this very affair we are played by jouissance,
– that thought is jouissance,
– that what analytic discourse brings is this, which was already begun in ‘the philosophy…—in quotation marks—
…of being’, namely that there is jouissance of being.

I will say even more: if I spoke to you of the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’, it is just because the trace is there,
that what Aristotle seeks and what opened the way to everything that trailed after him,
is ‘what is this jouissance of being?’ that a Saint Thomas will afterwards have no trouble forging,
this ‘theory’, as it is called, as Abbé Rousselot calls it…
of whom I spoke last time
…as Abbé Rousselot calls it: ‘the physical theory of love’.
Namely that, after all, the first being of which we indeed have the feeling, well, is our being,
and that everything that is for the good of our being will thereby be jouissance of the Supreme Being, that is to say, of God.

That in loving God, to put it plainly, it is ourselves that we love.
And that in loving ourselves first…
charity well ordered, as one says
…we render to God the homage that is fitting.

To this, what I oppose as being is…
if one wants at all costs that I use this term, what… what is witnessed from… what this small volume is forced to witness from its first pages of reading—simple reading¬—
…namely the being of signifiance.

And the being of signifiance, I do not see in what, isn’t it, I fall short of the ideals,
the ideals, I say, because it is entirely outside the limits of its outline for materialism,
entirely outside the limits of its outline to recognize that the reason for this being of signifiance
is jouissance insofar as it is jouissance of the body.

Only a body, you understand, since Democritus that does not seem materialist enough—eh—one must find
atoms, isn’t it, and all the stuff, and vision, odorization, and everything that follows, all that is absolutely bound up.
It is not for nothing that on occasion Aristotle—even if he plays the fastidious one—cites Democritus; he leans on him.

The atom is simply a flying element of signifiance: it is a στοιχεῖον[stoïkheion] quite simply.
Except that one has all the trouble in the world getting out of it when one retains only what makes the element ‘element’,
isn’t that so, namely that it is unique, whereas one would have to introduce a little the Other, namely difference.
The jouissance of the body, if there is no sexual relation, one would have to see in what that can serve it.

It seems to me I have already marked out…
I am pressed by time
…it seems to me I have already marked out that, to take things from the side where it is logically that the quantifier;,
that is to say ‘all x’, is a function, a mathematical function of ![;!]
that is to say from the side where one lines up, in sum by choice… Women are free to line up there too if it pleases them
—eh?—everyone knows that, that there are phallic women! It is clear that the phallic function does not prevent men from being homosexual, but it is just as much it [the phallic function] that serves them to situate themselves as man and to approach the woman.

Since what I have to speak about is something else: about the woman precisely,
I will go quickly because I suppose I have already drummed it into you enough for you still to have it in your head.

I say that short of castration…
that is to say, of something that says no to this phallic function, and God knows it is not at all simple
…there is no chance that the man has jouissance of the woman’s body, in other words, ‘makes love’.
That is the result of analytic experience!

That does not prevent him from desiring her in every way even when this condition is not met.
Not only does he desire her but he does all sorts of things to her that look astonishingly like love.

Contrary to what Freud maintains, it is the man…
I mean the one who finds himself male without knowing what to do with it, while still being a speaking being
…who approaches the woman, as one says, who can even believe that he approaches her,
because in that regard the convictions I spoke of last time, convictions are not lacking.

Only what he approaches…
because that is the cause of his desire
…is what I designated as object(a); that is the act of love, precisely.

Making love, as the name indicates, is poetry.
But there is a world between poetry and the act.

The act of love is the male’s polymorphous perversion, this in the speaking being.
There is nothing more assured, more coherent, more strict, as concerns Freudian discourse.

What I still have half an hour to try to introduce you to—if I dare express myself thus—[Laughter]
is what is on the woman’s side. So, of two things one:

– or what I write has no meaning, that is the conclusion of this little book
and that is why I ask you to refer to it,

– or when I write this :. ! – which is read, which is read as a function, as a function I must say unusual, not written, even in the logic of quantifiers, namely the bar, the negation bearing on the ‘not all’ and not on the function – when I say this: that there ranks—if I may express myself thus—ranks under the banner of women any speaking being whatsoever, it is from this that it is grounded not to be all
and as such to rank itself in the phallic function.
That is what defines—wait! the… the… the… the… the… the what?—the woman precisely. [Laughter]

With this reservation that ‘The woman’…
let us give her a capital T while we are at it, that will be nice [Laughter]
…with this reservation that The woman can only be written by barring ‘ ’.

There is no The woman…
definite article to designate the universal
…there is no ‘The’ woman since…
I have already ventured the term, and why would I think twice about it?
…since by her ‘essence’ she is ‘not all’ [. !].

So as to stress something to which I see my students much less attached in my reading
—isn’t that so?—than the least underling when he is animated by the desire to get a master’s degree [Laughter].

There is not a single one of my students who has not made I do not know what muddle over… over I do not know what:
– the lack of a signifier,
– the signifier of the lack of a signifier [Laughter],
– and other stammerings about the phallus.

Whereas I designate for you in this , ‘The’ signifier [S1], all the same common and even indispensable.
The proof is that already earlier I spoke of the man and of the woman: yes, it is indispensable!

This is a signifier; it is by this that I symbolize ‘The’ signifier [S1],
‘The’ signifier whose place it is absolutely indispensable to mark, which, which cannot… which cannot be left empty,
this: that this is ‘The’ signifier whose property is that it is the only one that cannot signify anything [S1], but only this: to found the status of woman in this that she is ‘not all’, which does not allow speaking of ‘The woman’.

But on the other hand, if there is no woman—if I may say—except excluded, in the nature of things which is the nature of words…
one must indeed say, eh, that what I advance there can nonetheless be said, because if there is something they themselves complain about enough for now, it is indeed that, eh! well!
Only they do not know what they are saying! That is the whole difference between them and me [Laughter]
…if therefore there is no woman except excluded by the nature of things as woman,
it nonetheless remains that if she is excluded by the nature of things it is precisely
– from this: that being ‘not all’ she secures herself as ‘ woman’,
– from this: that in relation to what the phallic function designates as jouissance, they have—if I may say—an additional jouissance.

You will note that I said ‘additional’ because if I had said ‘complementary’, where would we be?
We would fall back into the whole. Yeah… They do not stop—none stops—at being ‘not all’, at the jouissance of…
which is at stake all the same, and my God, in a general way, one would be quite wrong not to see
that, contrary to what is said, it is still the women who possess the men.

At the level of, of the popular…
and that is why I never really speak, except from time to time probably,
well I must drool a bit like everyone, but in general I say important things
…and when I note that the popular calls…
the popular, I know some; they are not necessarily here, but I know quite a few!
…the popular calls the woman ‘the bourgeois wife’, that is indeed what it means, it is that to be under the boot—eh?—
it is he who is, not she. [cf. courtly love as master’s discourse: S1→ S2/a]

So the phallus—‘her man’ as she says—since Rabelais we know that it is not indifferent to her.

Only the whole question is there: she has various ways of approaching this phallus and of keeping it to herself, eh?
And even that it plays, because it is not because she is ‘not all’ in the phallic function that she is not there at all.

She is not there ‘not at all’; she is there fully, but there is something in addition…
this ‘in addition’, eh, pay attention, keep yourselves from taking its echoes too quickly,
I cannot designate it better or otherwise because I have to cut and go fast
…there is a jouissance…
since we stick to jouissance, jouissance of the body
…there is a jouissance that is…
if I may express myself thus, because after all why not make a book title of it,
it is for the next one in the Galilée collection: ‘Beyond the phallus’ [Laughter], that would be cute, eh? and then it would give another consistency to the MLF. [Laughter]
…a jouissance beyond the phallus, eh!

If you have not yet noticed…
—eh?—I am naturally speaking here to the few semblances of men,
well who… whom I see here and there, [Laughter] fortunately for the most part I do not know them,
so I prejudge nothing [Laughter] for the others as… Yeah…
…there is something that perhaps the few semblances of men in question may have noticed…
like that from time to time, well, between two doors
…well there is, there is what shakes them or what helps them.
[the feminine response to the phallic function: ‘/ §’ shakes them, but ‘. !’ helps them]

And then when you look furthermore at the etymology of these two words in that famous Bloch and Von Wartburg,
which I delight in, and which I am sure you do not even each have in your library,
you will see that the relation there is between secouer and secourir is not something that happens by chance, all the same!

There is a jouissance—let us say the word—of ‘her’, of this ‘she’ that does not exist, that signifies nothing.
There is a jouissance, there is a jouissance of ‘her’ of which perhaps she herself knows nothing, except that she feels it; that she knows. She knows it of course when it happens. It does not happen to all of them.

But anyway on the subject of so-called frigidity, after all one must make room:
– for fashion too, [Laughter]
– and for relations between men and women.
[so-called ‘frigidity’ is the feminine response § to the supposed phallic jouissance (:§) (→it is not that)]

That is very important, since of course all that, as in courtly love,
is in Freud’s discourse—alas—covered over by… covered over like that by petty considerations [Lacan’s laughter]
that have wrought their ravages [sic], just like courtly love, all sorts of petty considerations on the…
on clitoral jouissance, on the jouissance that one calls as one can: ‘the other’ precisely,
the one that I am, like that, trying to make you approach by the logical route,
because until further notice there is no other.

There is one certain thing, and one that for a long time still leaves some chance to what I advance:
that of this jouissance the woman knows nothing, because for a long time, all the same, people have begged them,
begged them on their knees…
and I spoke last time of women psychoanalysts
…to try all the same to tell us about it, to get near that, well pfutt! not a word, eh!

One has never been able to get anything out of it. So one calls it as one can: ‘vaginal’,
the… the, the, the, the, the posterior pole of the snout of the uterus [Laughter] and other bullshit [Laughter], as one must say.
But after all, if she simply felt it and if she knew nothing of it,
that would also allow throwing a lot of doubt, there, on the side of the famous frigidity I spoke of earlier,
isn’t that so, which is also a theme, a literary theme, well, isn’t that so.

Anyway, well… It would still be worth stopping there, because imagine:
these few days that I spend…
well these ‘few days’, I have done nothing else since I was 20, well, let us pass on
…exploring the philosophers on this subject of love, naturally I did not right away center that on this affair of love.

But anyway, it came to me at some point, with precisely Abbé Rousselot of whom I spoke to you earlier,
and then the whole quarrel of physical love and ecstatic love, as they say.
[phallic jouissance aims at ‘Lfemme’ as S1 but reaches only objects (a) (partial objects) and proves powerless to arrive at the jouissance of the body
of the Other (the other jouissance), which leads to distinguishing carnal love from ecstatic love, ‘popular’ Aphrodite from ‘Uranian’ Aphrodite]

Anyway I understand that Gilson did not find this opposition very good,
he found that perhaps Rousselot had made there a discovery that was not one,
that it was part of the problem, that love is as ecstatic in Aristotle as in Saint Bernard,
provided one knows how to read the chapters on φιλία[philia], on friendship.

You cannot know…
well yes! You cannot know: it depends! There are some here who must know all the same
…what a debauch of literature has been produced around that:
– Denis De Rougemont, you see this: ‘Love and the Western World’, it hits hard! [Laughter]
– And then, and then there is another, who is not… who is no more stupid than another, who is called Nygren, he is a Protestant, yes: ‘Eros and Agape’.

Anyway! It is true, naturally that in Christianity they ended up inventing a God who is the one who enjoys! [Laughter]

There is still a small bridge, when you read certain serious people, as it happens they are women!
I will still give you an indication of it, which I owe, like that, to a very kind person
who had read it and who brought it to me. I threw myself on it, threw myself on it!

Ah! I have to write it down because otherwise it will be of no use to you and you will not buy it.
Besides you will buy it less easily than the book that has just appeared about me.
You will buy it less easily because I think it is out of print. But anyway you may manage to find it.
People went to a lot of trouble to bring me this Hadewijch of Antwerp.

She is a Beguine; she is a Beguine, that is to say what one calls—quite nicely—‘a mystic’.
I do not use the word ‘mystic’ the way Péguy used it: ‘mystique is everything that is not politics’ [Laughter],
mystique is something serious, eh.

There are a few people, and precisely most often women, or else gifted people like Saint John of the Cross. Yeah, because one is not forced, when one is male, to put oneself on the side of ;!,
one can also put oneself on the side of the ‘not all’ [. !], yeah…

There are men who are as good as women—it happens!—and who by the same token find themselves as good:
they glimpse, let us say despite… well I did not say despite their phallus—despite what encumbers them under that title [Laughter],
they feel the idea, well, that somewhere there could be a jouissance that would be beyond.
Yeah… That is what one calls ‘mystics’.

And if you read this Hadewijch…
whose name I do not know how to pronounce, but anyway someone who is here
and who knows Dutch will explain it to me, I hope, in a moment,
if you read this Hadewijch…

Anyway, I have already spoken of other people who were not so bad either on the mystical side, but who located themselves rather
on that side, of what I was saying earlier, namely on the side of the phallic function [; !]: Angelus Silesius,
all the same, despite everything, well, by dint of confusing his contemplative eye with the eye by which God looks at him,
it is still a bit funny; it must still be part of perverse jouissance.

But for the Hadewijch in question, for Saint Teresa, well, let us still say the word…
and besides you only have to go look in a certain church in Rome, Bernini’s statue,
to understand right away
…well then: that she enjoys, there is no doubt!

And what does she enjoy?
It is clear that the essential testimony of mystique is precisely to say that:
that they feel it but that they know nothing of it.

So here, like that, to finish, well what I propose to you, what I propose to you is that thanks to this small path-clearing, the one I am trying to do today, something be fruitful, succeed—just barely, eh?—
of what was being attempted at the end of the last century, at the time of Freud precisely.

What was being attempted was to bring back this thing that I will not at all call ‘chatter’ nor ‘verbiage’,
all these mystical ejaculations which are in sum—yeah!—which are in sum what one can read best.
At the very bottom of the page, note: ‘Add to it the ‘Écrits’ of Jacques Lacan! Because it is of the same order’.

Whereby naturally you are all going to be convinced that I believe in God:
I believe in the jouissance of woman insofar as it is in addition, on condition that this ‘in addition’ there,
you put a screen on it, before I have explained it well.

So all they were looking for, there like that, all sorts of worthy people, there in the entourage of anyone,
of Charcot and the others, to explain that mystique is, was affairs of cum.
But if you look closely, it is not that, not that, not that at all!

That is perhaps what must make us glimpse what is at stake with the Other:
this jouissance that one feels and of which one knows nothing, but is that not what puts us on the path of ex-sistence? [wordplay: Lacan’s split of ‘existence’ to stress ‘standing-outside’ (ex-) rather than simple being]

And why not interpret a face of the Other, a face of God…
since it was that, through there, that I approached the matter earlier
…a face of God as supported by feminine jouissance, eh?

Since all that comes about, isn’t it, thanks to the being of signifiance,
and since this being has no other place than this place of the Other that I designate with the capital A, one sees the double vision of what happens: that is also how, in the end, the function of the father is inscribed insofar as it is to it that castration relates,
so… so one… one sees that it does not make two ‘God’, but that it does not make only one either.

In other words, it is not by chance that Kierkegaard discovered ex-sistence in a little seducer’s adventure,
it is by castrating himself, it is by renouncing love, isn’t it, that he thinks he can reach it.

But perhaps after all—why not?—Régine too perhaps ex-sisted?

This desire for a good, at the second degree…
which is not caused by a little (a), that one
…it is perhaps through Régine that he had its dimension.

There, I have said enough for today…

Ecstasy of Saint Teresa