🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Thanks to someone who is willing to devote himself, like that, to brushing up what I am telling you about—he is there in the front row—I had, four, five days ago, the muzzle of my elocutions here brushed up; I am speaking of those of this year. That interested me because, after all, under this title of Encore, I was not sure I was within the field that I have cleared for twenty years, since precisely what it said was that it could last for a long time yet.

On rereading it, I found that it was not so bad, and especially—my God—to have started from this, which seemed to me a little thin for the first of my seminars this year, namely that:

‘The jouissance of the Other was not the sign of love’.

It was a starting point. A starting point to which perhaps I can return today in closing what I was opening there.

I did in fact speak somewhat about love.
But the pivotal point of what I put forward this year concerns what it is with knowledge, whose exercise I emphasized could represent nothing but a jouissance.

That is the key, the turning point, and it is to that that I would like today to contribute by a sort of reflection on what is done by groping in scientific discourse, with respect to what can occur as knowledge[S2].

I will go straight to what is at issue.
Knowledge is an enigma; it is an enigma that is made present to us by the unconscious, as it has been revealed by analytic discourse[S1◊ S2]:

…and which is stated roughly as follows: that for the speaking being, knowledge is what is articulated.
[at least in language (grammar) or even in logic (matheme)]

One could have noticed this for quite a long time, since, in sum, in tracing the paths of knowledge, one did nothing but articulate all sorts of things that for a long time were centered on being,
[passing from the master’s discourse(M:S1→S2→a ◊S) thought of being: Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle…
to the discourse of science (H:S→S1→S2◊a ): Descartes, Newton… where one articulates a knowledge about beings’ (from cosmology to astronomy)]
of which it is evident that nothing is, except insofar as it is said that it is.
[Cf. Hegel: everything that is rational is real, everything that is real is rational]

S2 I call that… One must know how to hear it: is it really of them that it speaks?[(S2) does it speak of the One and the Other (is it of them?) →of the relation]
Because after all, if we start from language, it is generally stated that language serves communication. Communication ‘about what?’ must one ask oneself, about which ‘them’?
[what is lost from the discourse M to the discourse of science (H) except the impossible to say→ what is inter-dicted, because ‘ex-sisting’]

Communication implies reference. Only there is one thing that is clear…
I am taking things here by the very small end of the scientific study of language
…language is the effort made to ‘give an account’ of something that has nothing to do with communication, and which is what I call lalangue [Lacan’s neologism from ‘la langue’; the idiosyncratic language of the unconscious beyond communication]. [cf. the seminar on The Purloined Letter, the ‘Introduction’: the combinatorics generated by the α,β,γ,δ, and the ‘caput mortum’]

Lalangue serves quite other things than communication.
That is what the experience of the unconscious has shown us insofar as it is made of lalangue, this lalangue that you know I write as a single word in order to designate what is our affair for each of us, with respect to what for us is the language, the so-called mother tongue, and not for nothing so called.

Communication, for its part, if one wanted to bring it a bit closer to what is effectively exercised in the jouissance of lalangue, would be that it implies something, namely the reply, in other words dialogue.
But as I once…
not especially this year
…as I once expressly articulated it, nothing is less certain than that lalangue serves first and foremost for dialogue.
[the construction of lalangue is made on the basis of identificatory experiences that are inscribed in α,β, γ, δ, and generate ‘like a language’, an unconscious knowledge that makes being present in the slip, the dream, the symptom… →no finality of ‘communication’]

I was able, like that, to pick up in passing…
because it happens that things come to hand for me
things I have heard spoken of for a very long time
…so I had to hand the work, an important book by someone named Bateson, about whom people had been banging on at me, enough to annoy me a little, because in truth it came from someone who had been touched by the grace of a certain text of mine and who had translated it, translated it by adding around it a few commentaries, and who had believed, in the Bateson in question, to find something that went noticeably further than what I had… had thought I had to state concerning the unconscious: the unconscious—so I said—structured like a language.

This Bateson is not so bad. It will soon be translated, thank God; that will allow one, like that, to see to what extent he fits admirably into what I say, into what I say concerning the unconscious.

The unconscious of which the author…
for lack of knowing that it is structured like a language
…the author shows himself as having only a rather mediocre idea.

But it must be said that there are things he has forged into very pretty artifices, and that he himself calls ‘metalogues’. Not bad… not bad insofar as, as he himself says, these metalogues would contain, if one is to believe him, some sort of progress, internal, dialectical, which would consist precisely in being produced only by questioning the evolution of the meaning of a term.

He realizes the artifice, of course…
as it has always been done in everything that has been entitled dialogue, the ‘Platonic dialogues’ among others
…that is, by making the supposed interlocutor say everything that in sum motivates the very question of the speaker, namely by embodying in the other the answer that is already there.

That is indeed wherein dialogue, classical dialogue…
whose finest are presented by the Platonic legacy
…that is indeed wherein classical dialogue shows itself not to be a dialogue.

If I said that language is that by which the unconscious is structured, it is precisely because language, first, does not exist.
Language is what one tries to know concerning the function of lalangue.

That is indeed how scientific discourse approaches it, except that what is difficult for it is to realize it fully, for the unconscious is the testimony, the testimony of a knowledge…
insofar as it escapes to a great extent from being
…which gives the occasion to notice how far the effects of lalangue go.

It is in ‘effects’—it is true—it is in ‘effects’ that this being gives an account, through all sorts of affects that remain enigmatic, of what results from this presence of lalangue, insofar as, as knowledge, it articulates things that go much further than everything that he himself, as stated knowledge, can bear. [‘caput mortum’ of the ‘seminar on The Purloined Letter’]

Language no doubt is made of lalangue; it is an elaboration of knowledge about lalangue itself, but the unconscious is a knowledge, a know-how-with lalangue.

What one knows how to do with lalangue, in other words, far exceeds what one can account for under the heading of language, but it poses the same question that is posed by the term ‘language’; it is on the same path, except that it already goes much further, that it anticipates the function of language, that lalangue affects us first by everything it contains as ‘effects’ that are ‘affects’.

And if one can say that the unconscious is structured by… like a language, it is very precisely in this, that these ‘effects’ of lalangue, already there as knowledge, as knowledge that has nothing to do, goes well beyond everything that being—the being who speaks—is capable of articulating as such; it is indeed in that that the unconscious…
insofar as here I support it by its deciphering[i.e. the unconscious-language, ≠ the real unconscious]
…that the unconscious can only be structured like a language, like a language always hypothetical with respect to what supports it, namely lalangue, namely this very thing that makes it possible that just now I could make of my S2 a question and ask: is it really of them indeed that it is a matter in language, in other words is language only communication?

The misrecognition of this fact that arose through analytic discourse, has lent…
has lent to what I am going to make today the pivot of my question on knowledge
…has lent to this: that in the underbelly of science there has arisen that grimace consisting in asking:
‘how can being know anything at all?’.

It is comical to see how this question claims to be satisfied.
I will take as an example this, that
– since the limit—I set it first—is made of this, that there are beings who speak,
– one asks oneself what the knowledge of those who do not speak might be.
One asks oneself; one does not know why one asks oneself, but one asks oneself all the same…
And one makes, for rats, a little labyrinth by means of which one hopes to be on the path of what knowledge is.

What then happens?
One hopes to be on that path because one hopes it will show what capacity it has for learning.

What capacity it has for learning—learning to… what?—to what interests it, of course, and one supposes that what interests it…
a supposition that is not absolutely unfounded
…must be, since one takes this rat not as ‘being’ but indeed as a body, which supposes that one sees it as a unit, as a rat unit.

One does not ask at all what can support the being of the rat, although from always one had indeed had the idea that being ought to contain a sort of fullness proper to it, since it was from there that, in the first approach to what being was, one had started, namely that being is a body.

One had elaborated a whole hierarchy, a whole scale of bodies, and one had started—my God—from this notion that each must indeed know what maintained it in being. In other words, one had not gone further than this idea that it was maintained there by something that had to be ‘its Good’, that had to give it pleasure.

But how is it, what change occurred in discourse such that all of a sudden one questions this being about the means it would have to surpass itself, namely to learn more than it needs in its being in order to survive as a body?

Thanks to the setup of the labyrinth and to a few accessories, namely that the labyrinth does not lead only to food but to something like a button or a flap that the supposed subject of this being must find the trick of in order to get to its food.

In other words, one transforms the question of knowledge into the question of a ‘learning’.

Is it the same thing for a rat, no longer considered in its being but in its unit…
for everything will come down to pressing the button
…whether it is a matter of the recognition of some trait to which one will conceive that then being is capable of reacting…
whether it be a luminous trait or a trait of color
…and one will note that after a series of trials and errors…
‘trials and errors’, as you know, that is what it is called: one left the thing in English, given those who found themselves breaking this path concerning knowledge
…one will see whether the rate of trials and errors, how long this rate will take to diminish enough for it to be recorded that the rat unit is capable of learning something.

What is posed only secondarily as a question—and it is the question I pose—is this:
is it whether the unit, the rat unit in question, will learn to learn?

That is where the true spring of the experiment lies: will a rat…
once it has undergone or once this trial ceases
…placed in the presence of a trial of the same order—we shall see shortly what this order is—
will it learn faster?

Which is easily materialized by a decrease in the number of trials that are necessary for the rat to know how it has to behave in such a setup; let us call setup the whole of the labyrinth and the flaps and the buttons that on this occasion function.

It is clear that the question has been so little posed—though it has been posed, of course—that one did not even think to question the difference there is, depending on whether the one who teaches the rat in question to learn to learn, depending on whether this one is or is not the same experimenter.

In other words, what is left aside is this: whether what one proposes to the rat as a theme to demonstrate its faculties of learning arises from the same source or from two different sources.
For if we refer to this, that the experimenter is quite evidently the one who in there knows something, it is even with what he knows that he invents the setup of the labyrinth, of the buttons and of the flaps.

If he were not someone for whom the relation to knowledge is founded on a certain relation that is…
I said it, why not repeat it
…of habitation or cohabitation with lalangue, it is clear that there would not be this setup, and that all that the rat unit learns on this occasion is to give a sign, a sign of its presence as a unit.

Whether it is the button or something else, the support of the paw on this sign, whether it be button or flap…
that the flap is recognized, it is recognized only by a sign,
…it is always by making a sign that the unit[ratière here] gains access to what leads one to conclude that there is learning.

But this relation which is, in sum, one of exteriority, of an exteriority such that nothing confirms that there can be a ‘grasp’ of the mechanism to which the push on the button leads, how not to grasp that the question is of importance, and of the greatest importance, that it is the only one that would count, namely: if there is not, in these successive mechanisms about which the experimenter can observe not only that it found the trick, but that it has—the only thing that counts—learned the way it is taken, that it has learned what is ‘to be taken’, it is clear that, I will say there, the coherence, the symbiosis that such an experiment realizes, if we take into account what pertains to unconscious knowledge, cannot fail to be questioned starting from this: that what must be known is how the rat unit responds to what has not been thought up from nothing by the experimenter.

That, in other words, one does not invent just any labyrinthine composition; that the fact that it comes from the same experimenter or from two different experimenters deserves to be questioned; and nothing in what I have been able to gather up to now from this literature implies that it is in this direction that the question has been posed.

But the interest of this example is not limited to this fact, to this fact of questioning that leaves entirely intact and different what pertains to knowledge and what pertains to learning.
[knowledge refers to lalangue: the relation of S1 to S2 and the eviction of a (H : S→ S1→/S2 ◊a) , whereas learning refers to what supports being: a]

What pertains to knowledge poses questions, and namely this one: ‘how is it taught?’.
It is quite clear that the question of ‘how is it taught?’, namely the notion of a science entirely centered on this: of knowledge that is transmitted in full[no remainder→matheme], is what produced, in what pertains to knowledge, that sifting by which a discourse that is called scientific constituted itself.

It constituted itself not at all without many misadventures.
If this year I recalled where it could arise[scientific discourse], it is certainly not without having been made…
fingere, fingo, says Newton… non fingo, he believes he can say: hypotheses non fingo: ‘I suppose nothing’
…and it is not by chance that this year I specified that it is indeed on a hypothesis, on the contrary, that everything turns: that the famous ‘revolution’—which is not at all Copernican but Newtonian—played.

It played on this, which is to substitute for a ‘it turns’ an ‘it falls’.
It is the Newtonian hypothesis as such, when he recognized in the astral ‘it turns’, cycles, when he clearly marked that it is the same thing as falling.

But to establish it—which once established allows one to eliminate the hypothesis—he indeed had to make that hypothesis.
[in the relation S1→S2 every production of knowledge (S2) places S1 in hypothesis, in supposition: S1←S2 in subjectum, subject sub-posed, ὑποχείμενον[upokeimenon]
→every ‘knowledge’ produces a supposed subject, hence the question: in the unconscious no knowledge, but a knowledge without subject?]

The question of introducing a scientific discourse concerning knowledge is to question it ‘where it is’, this knowledge, and this knowledge ‘where it is’: this means the unconscious, insofar as it is in the lair of lalangue that this knowledge rests.

I point out that the unconscious, I do not enter it—any more than Newton—without hypothesis.
The hypothesis that the individual who is affected by the unconscious is the same as what I call the subject of a signifier.
What I state under this minimal formula: that a signifier[S1] represents a subject[S] for another signifier[S2]:

I reduce, in other words, the hypothesis, according to the very formula that substantiates it, to this:
– that hypothesis is necessary to the functioning of lalangue,
– to say that there is a ‘subject’ is nothing other than to say that there is ‘hypothesis’[supposed subject].
[ὑπόθεσις ‘action of putting underneath’. The symptoms (hysterical, obsessional, etc.) designate an unknown knowledge→ the hypothesis of a subject (sub-posed) of the unconscious:
this unknown knowledge (S2) is articulated like a language→ ‘a signifier represents a subject for another signifier’]

The only proof we have of it is this: that the subject merges with this hypothesis and that it is the individual, the speaking individual, who supports it, is that the signifier becomes a sign.
The signifier in itself is nothing other than something definable as a difference, a difference from another signifier.
It is the introduction as such of difference into the field that makes it possible to extract from lalangue what pertains to the signifier.

But from there, and because there is the unconscious, namely lalangue insofar as it is by cohabitation with it that a being called ‘the speaking being’ is defined, the signifier can be called upon to make a sign, and understand this sign as you please:
– either the word ‘sign’,
– or the ‘t.h.i.n.g’ of English: ‘thing’, namely the thing.

The signifier, if as signifier it makes of a subject the formal support, reaches something else insofar as it affects it:
– an other, an other than what it is quite bluntly itself as signifier,
– an other made subject, or at least that passes for being so.

It is in that that it is, and only for the speaking being, that it happens to be as being, that is to say something whose being is always elsewhere, as the predicate shows.
[one is only ‘something’ (sign or thing, →predicate) →ex-sistence of the being of the entity. The master’s discourse is discourse of the ‘to-be-me’ by production of (a)].

The subject is never anything but punctual and vanishing; it is subject only by a signifier and for another signifier.

It is here that we must return to this: that after all, by a choice whose guide one does not know,
Aristotle took the side of giving no other definition of the individual than the body.
The body as organism, as what maintains itself as One, and not as what reproduces itself.

It is striking to see that between the Platonic Idea and the Aristotelian definition of the individual as founding being, the difference is properly that around which we still are, namely the question posed to the biologist, namely ‘how does a body reproduce itself?’.

For that is indeed what is at stake in every attempt at so-called molecular chemistry, namely how it happens that by combining a certain number of things in a single bath, something will precipitate that will make it so that a bacterium, for example, will reproduce as such.

The body—what then is it?
Is it or is it not the knowledge of the One?

The knowledge of the One is revealed not to come from the body; the knowledge of the One…
for as little as we can say of it
…the knowledge of the One comes from signifier1[S1].

Does signifier 1 come from the fact that the signifier as such is never anything but the one among others, referred as such to those others, as being the difference from the others?
The question has been so little resolved up to now that I made my whole seminar last year to question, to put the accent on this ‘there is of-the-One’ (y’a d’l’Un).

What does y’a d’l’Un mean? What y’a d’l’Un means is this, what the signifying articulation makes it possible to pick out: that from 1 among others…
and the point is to know whether it is ‘whichever it may be’
…there arises an S1, a swarm of signifiers, a buzzing swarm tied to this, that this 1 of each signifier…
with the question ‘is it of them that I speak?’ [S1→ S2: is this swarm of them?]
…this S1 that I can write first from its relation with S2, well, that is what the swarm is.

(S1 (S1 (S1 (S1 → S2) ) ) )

You can put as many of them here as you want; it is the swarm I am talking about.
The signifier as master, namely insofar as it ensures unity, the unity of this copulation of the subject with knowledge, that is the master signifier, and it is only in lalangue, insofar as it is questioned as language, that there emerges—and nowhere else—that there emerges the ex-sistence of that of which

– it is not for nothing that the term στοιχεῖον[stékeïon]: element[first element→elementary] emerged from a primitive linguistics [cf. RSI: 18-02-1975],

– it is not for nothing: the One signifier [S1] is not just any signifier; it is the signifying order insofar as it is instituted by the enveloping by which the whole chain subsists.

I recently read a work by someone who questions herself about what she takes for a relation that is that of S1 with S2, namely a relation of representation: S1 would be in relation with S2 insofar as it represents a subject.
The question of knowing whether this relation is asymmetric, antisymmetric, transitive, or other—namely whether the subject transfers from S2 to an S3 and so on—is a question that must be taken up again, taken up again from the schema I give of it here.

The One incarnated in lalangue is something that precisely remains undecided between the phoneme, the word, the sentence, even the whole thought; that is indeed what is at issue in what I call ‘master signifier’; it is the One signifier [S1], and it is not for nothing that, at the next-to-last of our meetings, I brought here to illustrate it the piece of string, the piece of string insofar as it makes this circle, this circle whose possible knot with another I began to question.
The symptom then is no longer ICS language, but ICSR, become real, outside meaning. The One of the symptom is in all cases a One of jouissance, the true master signifier that Lacan speaks of at the end of Encore. I say in all cases, that there are several cases, at least 2.
Indeed, when he says that this One goes from the phoneme to the whole thought, what must be grasped is that the whole thought, which nevertheless is a chain, counts as One just as much as the phoneme element. I could say a holophrased One. In both cases, whether it is the One of the element or of the One-thought, it is this One that for each person establishes his unity, his ‘unariness’ of jouissance, and that condemns him to the One-saying that knows itself all alone.
(C. Soler, 2013 Enigmatic symptoms)

I will not go further today since we have…
thanks to a question in sum external: the question of our shelter here
…since we were deprived of one of these seminars; it is something I will take up again in what follows, possibly.

What is important, to veer, to turn here the flap, the important thing of what psychoanalytic discourse has revealed consists in this, this of which one is astonished not to see the fiber everywhere, namely that
– this ‘knowledge’, which structures by a specific cohabitation what pertains to the being who speaks,
– this ‘knowledge’ has the greatest relation with love.

For what all love is supported by is very precisely this: a certain relation between 2 unconscious knowledges.
If I stated that transference is what the subject supposed to know motivates [the S1 ex-sisting, supposed to the knowledge S2], that is only a quite particular, specified point of application of what is there in experience, and I ask you to refer to the text of what I stated here on the choice of love.
It was in the middle of this year that I did it [cf. end of session of 16-01-1973].

If I spoke of something in this respect, it is in sum of recognition, recognition by signs that are always punctuated enigmatically, of the way in which being is affected, as subject, by this unconscious knowledge.

If it is true that there is no sexual relation because simply jouissance, the jouissance of the Other taken as body, that this jouissance is always inadequate:
– ‘perverse’ on one side, insofar as the Other is reduced to the object (a) [the fantasy: S◊a, in the ♂ formulas of sexuation: :§],
– I will say ‘mad’ on the other [side], insofar as what is at issue is the enigmatic way in which this jouissance of the Other as such is posed.
Is it not from the confrontation with this impasse, with this impossibility defining as such a Real, that love is put to the test, insofar as of the partner it can realize only what I called…
by a kind of poetry to make myself heard
…what I called ‘the courage with respect to this fatal destiny’.
[courage to sustain the phallic function by the exception: § even though ‘there is no sexual relation’, and thus ‘what does not stop not being written’ → by love: ‘what stops not not being written’ (contingency of Φ)]

Is it really courage that is at issue, or the paths of a recognition, of a recognition whose characteristic can be nothing other than this: that this so-called sexual relation, become there a relation of subject to subject [love]…
namely of the subject insofar as it is only the effect of unconscious knowledge
…that the way in which this relation of subject to subject ceases not to be written.

This ‘ceasing not to be written’, you see it, is not a formula I advanced at random.
If I indulged in the necessary as ‘what does not stop not being written’ [slip]…
sorry: that does not stop, does not stop being written on the occasion,
‘the necessary’ is not ‘the real’ [what does not stop not being written], it is ‘what does not stop being written’. [the necessary does not stop…]

The displacement of this negation that posits, that poses for us in passing the question of what pertains to negation, when it comes to take the place of a nonexistence. If the sexual relation responds to this of which I say that it—not only—does not stop not being written…
it is indeed of that and of it on the occasion that it is a matter
…that it does not stop not being written, that there is there impossibility; it is just as much that something cannot either say it, namely that there is no existence in saying of this relation.

But what does it mean… what does it mean to deny it? [:§→maintain the fantasized relation to an Alterity reduced then to the pregenital partial objects]
Is there in any way legitimacy in substituting a negation for the tested apprehension of nonexistence?
That too is a question that it will be for us to begin.
Does the word ‘interdiction’ mean more, is it more permitted, that too cannot, immediately, be decided.

But the apprehension of contingency as I have already embodied it in this ‘ceases not to be written’, namely of this something that, by the encounter [the happy (εὐτυχία) but contingent encounter],
– the encounter, it must indeed be said, of symptoms, of affects,
– of what in each individual marks the trace of his exile, not as subject but as speaking, of his exile from this relation,
is it not to say that it is only by the affect that results from this gap, that something…
in every case where love occurs
…that something…
which can vary infinitely as to the level of this knowledge,
…that something is encountered which, for an instant, can give the illusion of ‘ceasing not to be written’.

Namely that:
…something not only is articulated but is inscribed, is inscribed in the destiny of each, by which for a time…
a time of suspension,
…this something…
which would be the relation,
…this something finds…
in the speaking being
…this something finds its trace and its mirage path.

What would allow us—this implication—to shore it up?
Assuredly this: that the displacement of this negation, namely the passage…
to what just now I missed so well by a slip, itself quite significant
…namely the passage of negation, to ‘does not stop being written’, to the necessity substituted for this contingency, that is indeed the suspension point to which every love attaches itself; every love, in subsisting only on ‘ceasing not to be written’, tends to make this negation pass into ‘does not stop, does not stop, will not stop being written’.
[‘does not stop not being written’ (the impossible of the real) → ‘ceases not to be written’ (the contingent of the encounter) → ‘does not stop being written’ (the necessary of love)]

Such is indeed the substitute that, by the path of the existence, not of the sexual relation but of the unconscious that differs from it, by this path makes the destiny and also the drama of love.

Given the hour we have arrived at, which is the one where normally I wish to take my leave, I will not push things further here.

I will not push things further except to indicate that what I said about hatred is something that does not belong to the same plane on which the grasping of unconscious knowledge is articulated, but that, in what pertains to the subject, the subject of whom, you notice, it cannot be that he does not desire not to know too much about what pertains to this eminently contingent encounter, that he knows a little more of it, that from this subject he goes to the being that is caught up in it, the relation of being, of being to being, far from being that relation of harmony that since always…
one does not really know why
…a tradition whose convergence it is very curious to note, spares us, arranges for us:

– the convergence of Aristotle who sees in it only the supreme jouissance,

– with what the Christian tradition reflects back to us of this same tradition as beatitude, thereby showing its entanglement in something that really is only an apprehension of mirage.

The encounter of being as such, that is indeed where, by way of the subject, love comes to approach when it approaches…
I expressly posed the question: is it not there that what arises is what makes of being precisely something that is sustained only by ‘missing’ itself?

I spoke of ‘rat’ just now; that was what it was about [Laughter]:
it is not for nothing that one chose the rat [Laughter]; it is because the rat, that can be crossed out (se rature) [wordplay: ‘rat’ echoes ‘rature’ (to cross out/strike through) in French], one easily makes a unit of it.
And then that on a certain side I have already seen that: at a time like that, I had a concierge when I lived on rue de la Pompe: the rat, he—he—never missed it; he had for the rat a hatred equal to the being of the rat [Laughter].

The approach to being, is it not there that what in sum proves to be the extreme, the extreme of love resides, true love, true love leads to hatred; assuredly it is not analytic experience that made the discovery of it: the eternal modulation of themes on love bears enough reflection of it.

There, I leave you.

Am I to say to you ‘until next year’?

You will note that I have never, never, said that to you, that I note today—for that is what is at issue—I note today that I have never said that to you…

More exactly, I bring this remark to your knowledge, for I have always deprived myself of making it, for a very simple reason: it is that I have never known, for 20 years that I have been articulating things for you, I have never known whether I would continue next year [Laughter].

Ah, that, that is part of my destiny as object (a)!

So, since after all these 20 years, in the end I have closed the cycle of it:

– after 10 years, one had in sum taken speech away from me,

– and it happens, like that, that for reasons for which there was a part of destiny and also on my part, a part of an inclination to give pleasure to someone, I continued for 10 more years.

Will I continue next year? Why not stop there the encore?
What is admirable is that nobody has ever doubted that I would continue [Laughter].
That I make this remark nevertheless raises the question.
It could be after all that to this ‘Encore’ I add an ‘that is enough’.

Well then, in faith, I leave the matter to your wager, because after all there are many who believe they know me and who think that I find in that an infinite narcissistic satisfaction [Laughter].
Alongside the trouble it gives me, I must say that it seems to me, it seems to me little.

Place your bets, and then what will the result be?

Will that mean that those who will have guessed right, those love me?

Well, it is precisely that the sense I have just stated to you today:
that knowing what the partner is going to do, well, is not proof of love.

[Applause]