I am thinking of you [I.O.C.], that does not mean that I am thinking you [D.O.C.].

Someone here perhaps remembers what I said about a language where one would say…
if I believe what is reported to me about its form
…where one would say “I like to you”, which is indeed how it is shaped better than another to the indirect character
of this reach which is called love.
[distinction between “to think the object” (direct grasp according to Aristotle→D.O.C.) and “to think of the object”, explanation -indirect→I.O.C. by modern formalized science)]

I am thinking of you.
That is already indeed to object to everything that could be called the human sciences in a certain conception of science, not the one that has been made for only a few centuries,
but the one that, with Aristotle, defined itself in a certain way.

From which it follows that one must ask oneself, on the foundation, on the principle of what analytic discourse has brought us,
by what route this new science which is ours [psychoanalysis] can indeed pass.
[Aristotle would have objected that the (formalized) human sciences explain but do not understand, do not “grasp” their object: “man”, →role of analytic discourse]

This implies that I first formulate where we start from.
Where we start from is from what this analytic discourse gives us, namely the unconscious.

That is why I will first give you a few formulas, perhaps a bit tight,
concerning what can be said of what the unconscious is,
and precisely with regard to that traditional science that makes us pose the question:

“how is a science still – after what can be said of the unconscious – possible?”.

I already announce to you that – however surprising that may seem to you at first, but you will see that it is not-
this will lead me today to speak to you about Christianity. [and about the “partition” that Descartes makes there to found the discourse of science (cf. Koyré)]

Discours scientifique Discours analytique

– [In scientific discourse: the object (a) cannot be reached directly (I.O.C.) by knowledge (S2), science produces a knowledge cut off from its object (mathematical formalization→“I think (S2) where I am not (◊a)”).

– In analytic discourse, the object (a) is at the start (D.O.C.) but it is the knowledge (S2) about S1 that cannot be reached: analysis produces a swarm of asemantic S1s, cut off from knowledge S2→“non-sense”. → “I am (S1) where I do not think (◊S2)”]

The unconscious…
I begin with the difficult formulas… which I suppose must be such,
…the unconscious…
everything that, today, I will develop to make it more accessible to you, but I give my formulas here,
…the unconscious is not that “being thinks”…
as what is said about it nevertheless implies, this in traditional science
…the unconscious is…
after having said what it is not, I say what it is
…it is that being, in speaking – when it is a being that speaks – it is that being, in speaking, enjoys,
and I add: wants nothing… wants to know nothing more. I add that this means: to know nothing at all.
[discourse: (semblance)→(enjoyment)→(plus-of-enjoying)↓◊(S2: truth)]

To lay down at once a card that I could have made you wait a bit: that there is no desire to know,
that there is not that famous Wissentrieb that Freud points to somewhere. There Freud contradicts himself.
Everything indicates – that is the sense of the unconscious – not only that man already knows everything he has to know,
but that this knowledge is perfectly limited to this insufficient enjoyment that consists in his speaking.

[in scientific discourse (where Freud was inscribed) knowledge (S2) is cut off from the object (a)
→the desire to know that animates science is “passion of ignorance” (of a)]

You can see well that this carries a question about what becomes of this effective science
that we do possess under the name of a “physics”.
In what way does this new science concern the real?

The fault of the science that I qualify as traditional, being the one that comes to us from Aristotle’s thought,
this “fault” I said, is to imply that “being thinks”, that thought be such that the thought-of be in its image [D.O.C.],
that is to say that being thinks.

[Aristotle: “Man thinks with his soul”: that “being thinks” implies that the subject (being) and its predicate (thinks) are homogeneous, that there be equivalence
of “thinking” and “the thought” (cf. Parmenides: “For thinking is the same thing as being.” “Τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι.” [To gar auto noein estin te kai einai])]

To go to an example that is closest to you,
I will put forward that what makes what are called “human relations” livable is not to think about them.

And it is on that that what is comically called behaviorism was founded:
conduct – in what it says – could be observed in such a way that it is illuminated by its end.

It is on that that one hoped to found the human sciences: to envelop all behavior…
there being supposed in it the intention of no subject
…with a finality posited as making this behavior an “object”, nothing easier…
this “object” having its own regulation
…than to imagine it in the nervous system.

The trouble is that it [behaviorism] does nothing more than inject into it everything that was elaborated philosophically, Aristotelianly, of the soul. Nothing is changed. What is touched by the fact that behaviorism has not distinguished itself,
as far as I know, by any upheaval of ethics, that is to say of mental habits.

The fundamental habit being that an object serves an end, is founded…
whatever one thinks of it it is always there
…on its final cause, which is to live in the occasion, more exactly to survive, that is to say to postpone death and dominate the rival.

You see it, it is clear that the number of thoughts implicit in such a conception of the world – Weltanschauung,
as one says – is properly incalculable. It is always about the equivalence of thinking and the thought.

What is most certain of this mode of thinking: traditional science,

– it is what is called “its classicism”,
the Aristotelian reign of class, that is to say of genus and of species, in other words of the individual considered as specific,
– it is also the aesthetics that results from it,
– and the ethics that is ordered from it.

I will qualify it in a simple way, too simple and that risks making you see red…
it is the case to say it, but you would be wrong to see too quickly
…be that as it may I say my formula:
– thinking is on the side of the handle, [master’s discourse: S1 → S2→a↓]
– and the thought-of on the other side. [master’s discourse: …◊S]

What is read: from the fact that the handle is speech [of the master], it alone explains and gives account.
In that behaviorism does not leave the classical: it is said-handle [pun in French: “dit-manche” echoes “dimanche” (Sunday) and plays on “manche” (handle/sleeve)] [Laughter], to be written as I write said-mansion,
“The Sunday of life” as Queneau says, not without at the same time revealing its being of stupefaction […◊S],
not evident at first glance.

But what I note of it is that this “Sunday” was read and approved by someone who in “the history of thought”
knew a thing or two about it – Kojève namely- who applauded this “Sunday of life”
recognizing in it nothing less than the absolute knowledge that Hegel promises us.

[the “dialectic of the master and the slave” [S1 → S2] must lead (by successive “Aufhebung”)
to the “Sunday of life” of “absolute knowledge”, in a Kojèvian reading, and to “the end of History”, etc.]

As someone perceived recently, I align myself…
Who aligns me? Is it he or is it I: finesse of the language
…I align myself rather on the side of the baroque, it is a pinning borrowed from the history of art.

As the history of art, just like history and just like art, are a matter not of the handle but of the sleeve, that is to say of sleight of hand. Before continuing, I must say what I mean by that…
the subject “I” being no more active in this “I mean” than in “I align myself rather on the side of the baroque”.
…and that is what is going to make me plunge into the history of Christianity.

You did not expect it, huh? Yet I am going to do it: splash, there you go [Laughter].

[the sleight of hand “from the handle” to “the sleeve” concerns the passage from the master’s discourse to the discourse of science concomitant with the Baroque and the “century of geniuses”:
Descartes (1596-1650), Pascal (1623-1662) etc. but also the passage from the masculine formulas to the feminine formulas of sexuation :: §→/ §]

The baroque is at the start the little story…
the little story: little history
…of Christ, I mean what the story of a man recounts [: §]…
do not hit yourselves: it is he himself who designated himself as “the Son of Man”!
…what four texts called “evangelical” recount [εὐαγγέλιον [euangelion], from εὖ [eu]: good, and ἄγγελος [angelos]: messenger]
as not so much “good news” as “good announcers” for their kind of news [: §],
that can also be understood like that and it seems more appropriate to me.

Those write in such a way that there is not a single fact that cannot be contested there…
and God knows that naturally one rushed into “the muleta”, one did not deprive oneself of it
…but that these texts are nonetheless what goes to the heart of truth, of truth as such,
up to and including the fact that I state: that one can say it only half.

It is a simple indication, is it not… This hair-raising success would imply that I take the texts
and that I give you lessons on the Gospels, you see where that would lead us! [Laughter]

This is to show you that they cling closest only in the light of the categories that I tried to draw out
from analytic practice, namely: the symbolic, the imaginary and the real.

To stick to the first, I stated that truth is the said-mention [pun in French: “dit-mention” echoes “dimension”; cf. The Freudian Thing: “I, Truth, speak”, Écrits, p. 409], a small hyphen and d.i.t. at the start, the said-mention properly speaking, the mention of the said [symbolic = mention of the said (or said-mansion, mansion: house of the said…)].

In this genre the Gospels, one cannot say better, one cannot say better about truth…
it is from that that it results that they are Gospels
…one cannot even better make the said-mention of truth play, that is to say better push reality back into fantasy.

[fantasy: S◊a is supported by: §→. ! and coincidence of a and L]

After all, what followed has sufficiently demonstrated…
since I leave the texts, I will stick to the effect
…that this said-mention supports itself.

It flooded what is called “the world” by restoring it to its truth of filth [the (a) as waste].
That is to say that it relayed what the Roman, mason like no other, had founded of a miraculous balance of the universal, with in addition finally “baths of enjoyment” that those famous “Thermae” symbolize sufficiently
of which there remain to us some collapsed bits, of which we can have no kind of idea how much that,
as far as enjoying is concerned, was the top of the top [Laughter]!

Yeah! Christianity rejected all that into abjection considered as world,
that is how it is not without an intimate affinity with the problem of the “true” that Christianity persists.

That it be “the true religion”, as it claims, is not an excessive claim,
and all the more so because when one examines the true closely, it is what one can say worst about it.

In particular that in this register, that of the true, when one enters it one never gets out.
To belittle truth, as it deserves, one must have entered analytic discourse.
What analytic discourse dislodges, puts truth in its place, but does not shake it.

It is reduced but indispensable, everything is there and nothing will prevail against this consolidation,
except what remains of the “Wisdoms”, but that did not confront it.
Taoism for example, or other doctrines of salvation for which the affair is not truth but “way”…
as the name “Tao” indicates
…“way” if they manage to prolong something that resembles it.

It is true that the little story of Christ has in all appearance, and as I stated clearly…
with even the effect that… there are people who are nice, they do like dogs,
they pick up the ball and bring it back to me, it was brought back to me
…the little story, I was saying then, presents itself not as the undertaking of saving men, but as that of saving God.

[men are not in peril in ; !, but it is a matter of saving God as exception: : §]

It must be recognized that for the one who took on this undertaking, Christ namely…
for those who would be completely deaf, is it not
…well he paid the price, that is the least one can say, and that the result, one must indeed be astonished that it seems to satisfy.

For that God be ³indissolubly, is of a nature all the same to make us prejudge that the count “1,2,3” preexists him. One of two things:
– either he takes account only of the after-effect of Christian revelation, and it is his being that takes a hit from it,
– or if the 3 is prior to him, it is his unity that takes the blow, whence it becomes conceivable that the salvation of God be precarious, delivered in sum to the goodwill of Christians.

The funny thing is obviously…
I already told you that, but you did not hear. Well anyway, I already told you that…
…the funny thing is that atheism is sustainable only by clerics,
much more difficult among laypeople whose innocence in the matter remains total.
Remember that poor Voltaire: he was a clever guy, agile, crafty, extraordinarily bouncy,
and quite worthy in sum of entering there, you know: the empty-pockets opposite there, the Panthéon there. [Laughter]

Freud, fortunately, gave us a necessary interpretation…
which does not cease to be written as I define the necessary
…a necessary interpretation of the murder of the son as founding the religion of grace.
He did not quite say it like that, but he did clearly mark that it was a mode of denial
that constitutes a possible form of the avowal of truth.

Thus Freud re-saves the father! In which he imitates Jesus Christ [Laughter], modestly no doubt,
he does not put all the pedal to the metal but he contributes to it for his small part,
as what he is, namely “a good Jew not quite up to date”, it is excessively widespread [Laughter],
they have to be regrouped so that they take the bit between their teeth.

How long will that last?

Because there is all the same something that I would like to come closer to, concerning the essence of Christianity.
You are going to suffer over that today!
For that I must go back higher.
The soul – you have to read Aristotle, you know it is a good read – is obviously what the thinking of the handle comes to.
It is all the more necessary – that is to say not ceasing to be written- that what it elaborates there, the so-called thinking in question,
is thoughts about the body. The body should amaze you more! Yeah…

In fact that is precisely what amazes, what amazes classical science: how can it work like that?
Namely at once a body, yours, any other wandering body besides, it is the same thing,
you are at the same point, it must at once:

– that it suffice as it is – something made me think like that, a little syndrome that I saw come out of my ignorance, well that was recalled to me: that if by chance tears dried up, the eye no longer worked very well. That is what I call “the miracles of the body”, you feel it right away already.
Suppose it no longer cries, no longer juices, the lacrimal gland, you will have troubles,

– and on the other hand, it is a fact that it whines – and why the devil?- as soon as bodily, imaginatively
or symbolically one steps on your foot: one “affects” you, that is what one calls it [Laughter]. Yeah…

What relation is there between this whininess and the fact that it implies to ward off the unforeseen, that is to say “that one bolts”?
It is a vulgar formula, but it says well what it means, because it joins exactly the barred subject [S]
of which here you have heard some consonance. The subject bolts indeed as I said and more often than its turn.

Note, there only, that there is every advantage in unifying the expression for the symbolic, the imaginary and the real,
as – I tell you this in parentheses – Aristotle did who did not distinguish
– the movement of the ἀλλοίωσις [alloïosis],
– change and motion in space,
it was for him – but he did not know it – it was for him: that the subject bolts.

Obviously, he did not possess the true categories, but all the same he felt things well…
In other words, what matters is that all that sticks enough for the body to subsist, barring accident, as one says, external or internal, that is to say that the body is taken for what it presents itself to be: a closed body [a unity], as one says.

Who does not see that the soul is nothing other than its identity supposed to itself [to the body], with everything one thinks to explain it.
[if “thinking is the same thing as being” then “the soul” is the principle of the body: of its unity, of its uniqueness, of its movement, of its alteration
(cf. Aristotle “De anima”). In the master’s discourse (in the same way that the master commands his slaves) thinking is what commands the body (with the soul),
what is “on the side of the handle” → the master signifier: S1 is at the principle of all discourse, commands every movement of the body,
orders (gives form to) every action → the soul is what makes the body a drive apparatus oriented toward the search for the “Good”]

In short the soul is what one thinks about the body, on the side of the handle, and one reassures oneself by thinking that it thinks the same,
hence the diversity of these explanations:
– when it is supposed to think secret, it has secretions,
– when it is supposed to think concrete, it has concretions,
– when it is supposed to think information it has hormones, or else again it devotes itself to D.N.A., which makes אֲדֹנָי [ADoNaï], ADoNis [Adonaï: the “Good”, Adonis: the “Beautiful”]. [Laughter]
[to think concrete→concretions, to think secret→secretions…→thinking is homogeneous with the body (marked by the signifier→objects (a)) and determines the body in its movements, in its alterations, in its productions, all oriented toward the search for the “Good” (drive apparatus), → the substance of the soul is enjoyment]

All this to bring you to this…
that I nevertheless announced at the start on the subject of the unconscious,
since I do not speak only like that, like one whistles
…that it is really curious that it is not brought into question in psychology, that the structure of thought rests on language, which language…
that is all that is new in this term “structure”, the others [“structuralists”],
qualified by that label, they do what they want with it
…but what I point out is that language carries a considerable inertia,
which is seen by comparing its functioning to those signs that are called mathematical: mathemes,
only by this fact: that they are transmitted integrally.

One absolutely does not know what they mean, but they are transmitted.
It nonetheless remains that they are transmitted only with the help of language, and that is what makes the whole thing limp.
That there is something that grounds being, that is assuredly the body, on that Aristotle was not mistaken.
He untangled a lot of it, one by one – the history of animals – but he does not manage – read him well-
to make the joint with his affirmation.

It is about what he affirms…
you have never read naturally the “De Anima” despite my supplications
…but what he affirms is that man thinks with an instrument, with his soul, that is to say as I have just told you,
I could say it in summary quickly: “the mechanisms” [drive mechanisms] supposed on which his body is supported.

[“man thinks with his (a)ul”, S1 unifying the objects (a) as a drive apparatus→ with language ordering the mechanisms of the “body of enjoyment”
→ the “traces” on the body of the inscriptions (engrams) of past enjoyment experiences, during successive identifications: α (alpha), β (beta), γ (gamma), δ (delta) and the four objects (a)]

Naturally, pay attention: it is we who are at mechanisms because of our physics…
but our physics besides is a physics already in the station, on a siding I mean, because there has been quantum physics since: mechanisms blow up…
…well Aristotle, who had not entered the defiles of mechanism, that simply means precisely that,
what he thought of it. So, “man thinks with his soul” means that he [man] thinks with Aristotle’s thinking,
in which thinking is naturally on the side of the handle [within the frame of the master’s discourse].

It is evident that, one had all the same tried to do better, is it not? [from the master’s discourse (Aristotle) to the discourse of science]
It is… there is still something else before quantum physics, there is energetism and the idea of homeostasis.

But all this would lead us – yeah!- would lead us toward this, would lead us toward this that the unconscious
is something else entirely [from the discourse of science to analytic discourse], and if I tightened the thing around this that I stated first,
it is namely what I called “inertia in the function of language”, which makes every word this energy
still not taken into an energetics, because that energetics is not easy to measure.
[word can convey an energy of enjoyment ((a) inter-dicted between S1→S2 → phallic enjoyment, or that of slips, dreams…) not codified by linguistic structure]

To make come out of there not quantities but numbers, which however they may be chosen, well in a way

• note!- completely arbitrary, one arranges that there always remains somewhere a constant,
  for that is the foundation of energetics, and well it is not easy. [cf. the constants of physics (G, c, h, e, k,…)]

[from the master’s discourse (global thinking of being) to the discourse of science (mathematical-logical formalization) something is lost, for even mathematical-logical structure
falls under language which can only “grasp” the formalizable part of the object (literal littoral), but the object itself remains inert there. This is what gives rise to the writing of a letter
“in place” of the object (cf. the constants in physics) and to the surpassing of scientific discourse by analytic discourse. Analytic discourse takes this letter (a)
as a point of departure in a dispositif (a→S: “say everything that passes through your head even if it makes no sense”) that leads to the production of S1 “in swarms”.]

For the “inertia” in question we are forced to take it at the level of language itself.
What relation can there indeed be between
– the articulation that constitutes language,
– and an enjoyment that proves to be the substance of thought, that makes of this thought, so easily reflected
in the world by traditional science, the one that makes it that God is the Supreme Being, and that this Supreme Being
cannot – dixit Aristotle – be anything other than the place from which it is known what the Good of all the others is.

That makes something that does not have much relation to thought,
if we consider it as above all dominated by this inertia of language.

[the enjoyment that can be retained (phallic enjoyment) by “the net”, “the chain”, the network of language, through the phallic function
which, in supporting S1→S2, will posit a metaphorical “sense” of the lost object (said-mention), this enjoyment is not the one that is needed,
the one that one indefinitely attempts to re-raise by swarms of S1 through the irruptions of the “formations of the unconscious” that come to hole the discourse.]

It is not very surprising that one has not known how to tighten, wedge, make squeal enjoyment,
using what seems best to support what I call the inertia of language,
namely the idea of the chain, bits of string in other words,
bits of string that make circles and that, one does not really know how, catch onto one another.

I already put this to you once, I will of course try to do better, about a lesson that I myself am astonished at
as I advance in age, that last year’s things seem to me 100 years ago.
So it was last year that I took as theme the formula…
that I thought I could support with a well-known knot that is called “the Borromean knot”
…the formula: “I ask you to refuse what I offer you, because it is not that”.
It is a formula carefully adapted to its effect like all those that I utter.
See “L’étourdit”, I did not say: “the saying remains forgotten….”, I said: “that one say…”.
Likewise here I did not say: “because it is only that”.

“It is not that!”
– it is the cry by which the obtained enjoyment is distinguished from the expected one,
– it is where what can be said in language is specified.

Negation has every appearance of coming from there, but nothing more.
The structure, to plug into it, demonstrates nothing except that it is of the very text of enjoyment,
in that, by marking by what distance it lacks the one that would be at stake “if it were that” [the enjoyment that is needed],
it does not only suppose it as “the one that would be that”, it supports another. There!

[language has the same structure as “lalangue” (generated by the combinatorics of α,β,γ,δ as “a language”).
The structure supports the enjoyment that must fail (to fail) and not the enjoyment that is needed (to need) or that would be needed,
the one of which “lalangue” is the very text: attempts to inscribe the enjoyment felt from past experiences]

This said-mention [the phallic function]…
there I repeat myself, but we are in a domain where precisely the law is repetition
…this said-mention is Freud’s saying, it is even the proof of Freud’s existence:
in a certain number of years one will need one [Laughter].

Just now I brought him close like that to a little buddy: I brought him close to Christ.
Well, obviously, we also need the proof of Christ’s existence, it is evident: it is Christianity.
Christianity is the fact that you know: it is hooked there…

Anyway for the moment we have “Three Essays on Sexuality” to which I ask you to refer, moreover,
which I will have to make use of, as I formerly made use of those writings on what I call “the drift”
-to translate Trieb – the drift of enjoyment.

Yes, all that in sum, all that – I insist on it – is properly what was collapsed throughout all philosophical antiquity
by the idea of knowledge. Thank God, Aristotle was intelligent enough to isolate in the agent intellect what is at stake
in the function of the symbolic. He simply saw that it was there that – the symbolic – it is there that the intellect had to act.

But he was not intelligent enough…
not enough because not having enjoyed the Christian revelation
…to think that a word…
be it his own, in designating this νοῦς [nouss] [nous] that is supported only by language
…concerns enjoyment, which nevertheless is metaphorically designated in him everywhere,
because all this story of matter and form,
what is all that, what does it suggest as an old story concerning copulation!

[the soul makes the body a drive apparatus oriented toward the search for the “Good”→ S2 (form) in-forms the body (matter) into a drive apparatus]

That [the Christian revelation] would have allowed him to see, well, that it is not at all that, that there is not the slightest knowledge,
the least one can say is that the enjoyments [the (a)] that support its semblance [S2],
it is something like the spectrum of white light. On the sole condition that one see:

– that the enjoyment at stake [white light] is outside the field of this spectrum [which has only (a)→ “partial objects”, rainbow illusion, lacking a unifying S1: S2→ a→S◊S1],

– that it is a matter of metaphor [enjoy-meaning] [pun in French: “joui-sens” plays on “jouissance” (enjoyment) and “sens” (meaning)],

– that one must put everything that is of enjoyment, the false finality [aim at S1 and reach only (a)]
as answering to what is only pure fallacy of an enjoyment that would be apt for the sexual relation
[fallacy that has to do only with (a) and does not reach the Other], and that in this respect all enjoyments are only rivals
of the finality that it would be if enjoyment had the slightest relation with the sexual relation.

I am going to add, like that, a little pour on Christ, because he was an important character
and then because it comes here to comment on the baroque.
The baroque: it is not for nothing that people say that my discourse partakes of the baroque.

I am going to ask you a question:
what importance can there be in Christian doctrine to the fact that Christ had a soul?

This doctrine speaks only of the incarnation of God in a body,
it must be that the passion suffered in this person made the enjoyment of another.
There is nothing that is missing here, no soul notably.

Christ even resurrected is worth by his body, and his body is the intermediary by which communion with his presence
is in-corps-poration, oral drive, with which the spouse of Christ-“Church” as it is called – contents itself very well,
having nothing to expect from a copulation. [Laughter]

Everything that surged from the effects of Christianity, in art notably…
and it is in that that I join this baroquism with which I accept to be clothed, is it not
…see the testimony of someone who returns from an orgy of churches in Italy [i.e. Lacan]: everything is exhibition of bodies evoking enjoyment, short of copulation, which if it is not present, it is not for nothing.

[ a doctrine (S2) aims at the out-of-sex enjoyment which is that of the “partial objects” of the “fragmented body”, the objects (a): oral, anal, vocal, scopic,
producing as plus-of-enjoying a subject S, but without the finality S1 to unify its field because: S◊S1, → heterogeneity of being and the thought-of, of “thinking” and “the thought”]

It [copulation] is as out-of-field as it is in the human reality that it sustains,
that it nonetheless sustains fantasies [S◊a in the M discourse] of which it is constituted [a →S in the U discourse, that of Christian doctrine]. Nowhere in any cultural era has this exclusion been avowed in a more naked way.

I will say a little more…
and do not believe that I do not dose my sayings to you
…I will go so far as to tell you that nowhere as in Christianity
the work of art as such proves itself in a more patent way for what it is always and everywhere: obscenity.
[obscœnus: “of bad omen” (Bloch and v. Wartburg)]

The “said-mension” of obscenity [U discourse: S2→ a →S] that is what by which Christianity revives the religion of men.
I am not going to give you a definition of religion because, there is no more a history of religion
than a history of art. Religions are like arts, it is a trash can, it does not have the slightest homogeneity.

There is all the same something in these utensils that one manufactures to outdo one another [no unity (S1) in the substitute objects of a].
What is at stake is urgency…
for these beings who by nature [Sic] speak
…the urgency that consists in their going to the loving deduction under exclusive modes…
of what I could call, if it were conceivable,
in the sense I gave earlier to the word “soul”, namely what makes it function
…excluded from what would be the soul of copulation, if I dare support from this word what…
to push them there effectively if “It” were the soul of copulation
…would be elaborable by what I call “a physics” which in the occasion is nothing but this: a thought supposable to thinking.

There is there a hole and this hole is called the Other, at least it is thus that I believed I could name it.
The Other as the place where the word of being is deposited…
you will pay attention- huh? – to the resonances
…founds truth and with it “the pact” that makes up for the inexistence of the sexual relation insofar as

– it would be thought, thought-of, thinkable,

– discourse would not be reduced to starting – you remember the title of one of the seminars- to starting only from semblance.
That thought act in the sense of a science only by being supposed to thinking, that is to say that being be supposed to think,
that is what founds the philosophical tradition starting from Parmenides.
Parmenides was wrong and Heraclitus right, that is indeed what is signed by the fact that somewhere Parmenides [slip] states:

– Οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει [outè legei outè kruptei]: he neither avows nor hides,
– ἀλλὰ σημαίνει [alla semaïnei]: he signifies,
putting back in its place the discourse of the handle [of the master] itself, from what he calls like that:
– ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς [o anax ou to manteionesti to en Delphoïs]: the prince (the handle) who vaticinates at Delphi.
[ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς, οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει].

The most implausible thing, the mad story, the one that for my part makes the delirium of my admiration,
I throw myself flat on the ground when I read Saint Thomas [1224-1274], because it is damn well put together.

For Aristotle’s philosophy to have been by Saint Thomas re-injected into what one could call
“Christian consciousness” if that had a sense, it is something that can be explained only because this one…
well it is like for psychoanalysts: Christians hate what was revealed to them, and they are quite right! [Laughter]

This gaping inscribed in the very status of enjoyment as said-mension of the body, this in the speaking being,
that is what rebounds with Freud by this test- I say nothing more – that is the existence of speech.

Where it speaks it enjoys, and that does not mean that it knows nothing, because all the same, until further order,
the unconscious has revealed nothing to us about the physiology of the nervous system- no? –
nor even about the functioning of “bandaging” nor of premature ejaculation.
[cf. supra: “the unconscious is that being in speaking, enjoys, and wants to know nothing more, to know nothing at all”]

To finish with this story of “the true religion”, I will nonetheless point out while there is still time
that God manifests himself only from the Scriptures that are called “Holy”.
They are “Holy”- in what? – in that they do not cease repeating the failure…
read Solomon all the same, he is the master of masters,
he is the “felt-master” [pun in French: “senti-maître” plays on “sentiment” (feeling) and “maître” (master)] [Laughter], a guy of my kind [Laughter]
…the failure of the attempts of a wisdom of which being would be the testimony.

Well all that does not mean, my little friends, that there were not some things from time to time, thanks to which enjoyment…
without counting which there could be no wisdom
…could believe itself come to that end of satisfying the thought of being.
Only there, I add: this end was satisfied only at the price of a castration.

In Taoism for example…
you do not know what it is, of course, very few know it,
well I practiced it, I practiced the texts of course [Laughter]
…in Taoism is the patent example in the very practice of sex: one must retain one’s cum to be well.

Buddhism of course is the trivial example by its renunciation of thought itself.
Because what is best in Buddhism is Zen…
and Zen consists in that, in answering you with a bark, my little friend
…it is what is best when one wants naturally to get out of this “infernal business” as Freud said.

It is more than probable that ancient fabulation, “mythology”…
as you call that, or Claude Lévi-Strauss also called that like that
…mythology of the Mediterranean era among others, it is precisely the one that one does not touch because
it is the most exuberant and then above all because people have made such juices of it that one no longer knows by which end to take it.

Well then this mythology also arrived at something, at something like psychoanalysis:
you understand, these gods like that, there were gods by the shovelful, it was enough to find the right one,
it was enough to find the right one and it made this thing, this contingent thing, that makes that sometimes after an analysis,
we arrive at this that “each one” fucks properly his “each one female”.

They were all the same gods, that is to say representations a little bit consistent of the Other.
Because naturally, let us pass over the weakness of the analytic operation, there is a very, very singular thing,
it is that this is so perfectly compatible with Christian belief,
that from this polytheism we have seen the rebirth, in the era pinned with the same name.

I tell you all that because precisely I am back from the museums and that, in sum the Counter-Reformation…
ah the Counter-Reformation!
…it was returning to the sources, and that the baroque is the display of it, it is the regulation of the soul by bodily scopy [a].

It will be necessary that once…
well I do not know if I will ever have the time
…to speak of music in the margins.

But I speak only of what is seen in all the churches of Rome,
– everything that clings to the walls,
– everything that collapses,
– everything that delights,
– everything that deliriously raves,
in short what I called earlier obscenity, but exalted.

I wonder, for someone who would come like that from the far depths of China,
what effect this dripping of representations of martyrs must be able to make on him.

And I would say that it overturns itself these representations which are themselves martyrs…
you know that “martyr” means “witness”
…martyrs of a suffering more or less pure, it is our painting until one made the void
by beginning seriously to deal with little squares [i.e. cubism, Vasarely, etc.].

There is after that, a reduction of the human species, that is what no doubt motivates that this name “human”
resounds like “unhealthy humor”, there is a remainder, it makes “misfortune”, yes.

This reduction is the term by which the Church intends to carry the species precisely to the end of times.
And it is so grounded in the gap proper to the sexuality of the speaking being, that it risks being at least as grounded…
let us say because all the same I do not want to despair of anything
…at least as grounded as “The Future of Science”, that is the title – you know – that he gave to one of his books
that other little priest who was called Ernest Renan and who was a servant of truth too, to the hilt.
He demanded only one thing of it…
and that was absolutely first, without that it was panic
…that it have no consequences. [Laughter] Yeah…

The economy of enjoyment, that is what is not yet near the tip of our fingers, it is important all the same

• it would have its little interest- that we get there. But to tell you what it is of what one can see of it
  starting from analytic discourse, that is what perhaps we have a little chance of finding from time to time,
  by essentially contingent ways.

If my discourse today were not something absolutely entirely negative,
I would tremble at having entered the philosophical discourse.

But all the same there is a route: since already we have seen some wisdoms that lasted a little while, why is it that with analytic discourse, we would not find again something that would give a glimpse of a precise thing,
and after all what is energetics if not also a mathematical thing.

That one will not be mathematical, that is indeed why the analyst’s discourse is distinguished from scientific discourse.
Anyway, this chance, let us put it under the sign of “by sheer luck”, again.