🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Today the circle whose fidelity had never once wavered is nonetheless beginning to falter.
And at the end of the race it is nonetheless I who will have had you…

Last time, I left this in a certain indeterminacy, but I think that today is the penultimate time, unless we part so satisfied with one another that I do not tell you so at the end. For I believe that there will remain enough things open, ambiguous, disputed, contested, for me to imagine that I must make a small reprise next time of the conclusions, intended at least to fix certain points of this year’s seminar.

I must tell you that, starting from what is at once the most formulated and the most uncertain: the technical rules as they are expressed for the first time in FREUD’s Technical Papers, we have been led, by a slope that was in the nature of the subject—one cannot say in its essence—to that around which we have been, for more than a trimester—that began in the middle of last trimester, the current trimester is short—to what is the essential question of analysis, what one can call the structure of transference.

You can feel clearly that we have spoken only of that for about the time I have just stated and that, just as well, we have not finished speaking of it! I believe that, in order to situate the questions that relate to transference, one must start from a central point.
It is toward this central point that our dialectic has led us.

The question as it is formulated now is this: we have been led by the movement of our investigation to see the dual dialectic of transference as imaginary, however you take it, namely from the illusory projection of any one of the subject’s fundamental relations onto the analytic partner, up to the more elaborated notions called ‘object relation’, the relations between transference and countertransference, everything that remains within the limits of what one can place under the general rubric of a ‘two bodies’ psychology’ has shown us through a thousand cross-checkings, which are not simply a theoretical deduction but concrete testimonies from the authors I brought you…
remember what I told you about what BALINT brings us as testimony about what he observes, what he calls the termination of an analysis does not take us out of an intersubjective relation of a special type, a narcissistic relation, as we have seen what limit it both imposes on analysis, and what impasse on the understanding of what is at stake, in all its forms
…we have highlighted and made evident the necessity of deepening the third term that makes it possible to conceive this sort of mirror transference, to conceive what one could call the engine of its progress. This third term is speech.

We need not be surprised by it, since it has a tendency, despite all the efforts one might be led to make…
simply because we let ourselves be carried by a movement whose deep reasons I tried to show you
…all the efforts we can make to forget that analysis is a technique of speech or to subordinate this speech to a function as a means, it is absolutely impossible to invert the normal relation of things in this way, and not to see that speech is the very medium within which analysis moves. It is in relation to the function of speech that the different springs of analysis take on their meaning, their exact place, and by that fact alone, in a way, our mode of intervention is commanded.

I am summarizing the intention there. I cannot go back over all the springs and all the arguments. Everything that we will develop subsequently as teaching will only take up again in a thousand forms, confirm through the theoretical impasses to which it leads the authors, above all through the technical or practical impasses to which it leads the therapist.

We have been led to begin the elaboration of this function of speech, in relation to which everything that happens in analysis must take on its meaning in order to be properly situated, and in certain cases in order to be able to be distinguished from this or that other connected function which ends up becoming confused, flattened, telescoped into one another, if one does not keep to this central point.

Last time introduced into this progress the necessity of calling the function of speech into question. We were led to accept here, to enrich ourselves with the discussion of a fundamental text on the meaning of speech, the way in which speech relates to meaning, that is to say to the function of the sign. It seems that we cannot say there that it is a matter of anything other than one of the most principled, original developments of the dialectic itself.

It is not a point of view included in the system of the sciences as it has been constituted only for a few centuries. It is not a particular sector of the sciences that would be in some way foreign to ours, that of linguistics. We see that, long before linguistics emerged in the modern sciences, already someone—by the sole fact, as Saint AUGUSTINE says, of meditating on the art of speech, that is to say that he speaks about it—is led to the same problem that the progress of linguistics now encounters.

This problem is posed as follows: that for every grasp of the function of the sign, for every question posed, namely when the sign relates to what it signifies, we are always referred from sign to sign. That is to say that we understand that the system of signs, as it is first posed concretely, is a system which by itself forms a whole, institutes an order, and this order—apparently the first encounter with the problem is here—is without an exit. In a word: of course there must be one, otherwise it would be a senseless order. To understand that this is what it comes to, we must take the entire order of signs as they are instituted concretely, hic et nunc, as we say from time to time.

That is to say that language cannot be conceived as a series of emergences, of shoots, of buds, that would come out of each thing, as giving the little point, the little asparagus head, of the name that would emerge from it. Language is conceivable only as a network, a mesh that holds together as a whole and that, cast over the surface of all things, of the totality of the real, brings there, inscribes there that other plane, that other order which is precisely what we call here the plane of the symbolic, insofar as it must be distinguished in our action from the plane of the real.

These are metaphors, images, ‘comparison is not reason’, but it is to illustrate what I am explaining to you, and so that it enters into the corners of your mind where some obscurity may still remain.

It nevertheless results, from this impasse, from this paradoxical exit that was brought to light in the 2ème part of the Augustinian demonstration, which we did not exhaust but began last time, that henceforth the question of congruence, of the adequacy of the sign, I no longer say to the thing but to what it signifies, leaves us before an enigma that is nothing other than that of truth, and that, just as well, it is there where Augustinian apologetics awaits us, as he tells us:
– either you possess this meaning,
– or you do not possess it.

If you understand something that is expressed in these signs of language, it is always in the end in the name of a light that is brought to us from outside the signs, that is to say:
– either by a truth grasped inwardly, by the inner truth that already appears to us in something that allows us to recognize the truth borne by the signs,
– or, on the contrary, by something that is shown to you from outside, that is, in a repeated and insistent way, put in correlation with the signs; consequently it is by a certain illumination linked to the presence of an object that the sign will take all its force and all its truth.
And here things are reversed: truth, so to speak, is placed outside, elsewhere.

Let us indeed see clearly the dialectical see-saw, the total reversal of the position as it is brought by the Augustinian dialectic, and which is directed, according to the type of dialogue, toward the recognition of the authentic Magister, De Magistro, the recognition of the inner Master of truth.

We may with good reason suspend ourselves and stop within this dialectic up to a certain point…
centering this subject in a way that is, in a sense, deductive, logical: that is not what is at stake
…up to a certain point we may legitimately stop after the double revolution of the demonstration, to remark that the very question of truth is precisely posed by the dialectical progress itself. In other words that:

– just as at one point in his demonstration Saint AUGUSTINE forgets, for example, an entire demonstrable face, communicable by demonstration, by the act to be imitated, of teaching, that is to say of the technique of the bird-catcher for example, he forgets that this one is already structured—as we noted in passing—instrumentalized by speech itself; it is not conceivable as a complex technique, trick, trap for the object, the bird that is to be caught, except in a human world structured by speech,

– likewise here, AUGUSTINE seems to forget that already the very question of truth is in some way included within his discussion, and that as soon as he calls speech into question, he calls it into question with speech, and that it is with speech that he himself creates the dimension of truth, that every utterance emitted, formulated, communicated as such, introduces into the world this new thing of this affirmation, of this exit, of this emergence of meaning that is posed and that first and foremost asserts itself, less as truth than as extracting from the real the dimension of truth.

Indeed let us observe it carefully, and in detail. When AUGUSTINE brings us as an argument that speech can be deceptive, it is quite obvious that by itself alone this sign can only, from beginning to end, hold itself up, present itself, in the dimension of truth. For to be deceptive it asserts itself as true. This is for the one who listens. For the one who speaks, deception itself not only imposes the support of the truth that is to be concealed, but, in all its rigor, as the lie develops, it presupposes a true deepening, a true development of the truth to which, so to speak, it responds. For as the lie develops, as it organizes itself, extends its prolongations, its tentacles in order to develop as such and as lie, it requires the correlated control of a truth that is, properly speaking, to be avoided and that it must encounter at every turn of the road.

It is not the question of the lie that is the true problem. Starting from it is nonetheless extremely important because it demonstrates better than any other this thing, moreover which is nonetheless well known, which is part of the moralist tradition:

‘One must have a good memory when one has lied.’

That means that one must know an awful lot of things in order to manage to sustain a lie in its status as lie, for there is nothing more difficult to do than a lie that holds. If it is not the true question, the true question is that of error. Moreover it is always and traditionally there that the problem has been posed. It is quite clear that error is absolutely definable only in terms of truth. I mean not that the opposition is in some way black-white: there would be no white if there were no black, that is not what is at stake. No!

Just as the lie, to be sustained and pursued, literally imposes the constitution of truth, since the lie presupposes it as known in a certain way in all its rigor, and even well established, and even that one constructs it more and more in order to sustain the lie, the problem is one degree below for error, but the connection is no less intimate in the sense that there is not, by essence, an error that, precisely, does not present itself and does not teach itself as truth.

Otherwise, it would not be an error! In short, error is, so to speak, the common and habitual incarnation of truth. And if we want to be entirely rigorous we will say that as long as truth is not entirely revealed, that is to say in all probability until the end of time, it is of its nature to propagate itself in the form of error. And one would not have to push things much further for us even to see there a constitutive structure of the revelation of being as such.

But I am only indicating that to you as the small door left open onto something we will have to come back to.
Today we keep to this internal phenomenology of the function of speech.
What is it here, now, that we are going to encounter?
– We spoke of deception as such, we saw that it is sustainable only as a function of truth, not only of truth, but of a progress of truth.
– We saw error, and we see that it is in some way the very manifestation, common, of truth. The paths of truth are paths of error by essence.

You will tell me: ‘So how do we arrive within discourse…
we are speaking of the phenomenology of speech for the moment. We are not in the process of speaking of the confrontation as it is instituted by a certain experience
…how, within speech, in the end, will error ever be detectable?’

What we need for that, precisely, is beyond truth, either in the object, or in the measure of the illumination of inner evidence, of what Saint AUGUSTINE brings us at the end of the discourse as a perspective not without a thousand reservations; I would ask you to take up this text again and notice that he does not at all consider that he is finished with the problem of discourse; there is even a sentence that expressly reserves it:

‘It is not saying everything to say what we have said; there remains the question of the usefulness of discourse.’

After him we take up the problem: how is the problem of error posed within discourse? For if it presents itself as truth by essence, it is quite clear that if we speak of it as error, it is also because we admit that it can be unmasked. Within discourse, you remember what is the very foundation of the structure of language, namely the relation of a material signifier, that is to say of something that is what we called last time the verbum, insofar as it is something that cum voce articulata: by an articulated voice, cum aliquo significata: with a certain signification. The essential distinction of the signifier and the signified, taken term by term, one by one, they have a relation that appears in their correspondence as strictly arbitrary.

In other words, there is no more reason to call the giraffe: giraffe, and the elephant: elephant, than to call the giraffe: elephant, and the elephant: giraffe. There is therefore no kind of reason not to say that the giraffe has a trunk and that the elephant has a very long neck. It is an error in the system, generally accepted, but it is an error that is strictly undetectable, as Saint AUGUSTINE remarks: ‘As long as the definitions are not set down!’. Now, what is more difficult than to set down the correct definitions?

There is nevertheless something else. It is that if you pursue your discourse on the giraffe, defined as having a trunk, and the elephant as having a long neck, if you pursue indefinitely your discourse in existence, two things will happen, can happen:

– either you continue to speak correctly about the giraffe, as if it were the elephant, and then it will be quite clear that, by the term ‘giraffe’, it is the elephant that you are defining; there would simply be a question of agreement between your terms and the terms generally accepted.

This is likewise what Saint AUGUSTINE brings in his demonstration regarding the term perducam: he brings to light two possible meanings. But that is not what is generally called error. Error is precisely marked in this: that it is an error in that it arrives at a given moment at a contradiction, and that if, for example, I said that roses are plants or objects that generally live under water, and if the continuation of the discourse manifestly demonstrates this error in this: that as it will appear in the continuation of the discourse that I remained for twenty-four hours in a room where there were roses, and since moreover it is evident that my discourse contains a thousand terms, I cannot remain twenty-four hours under water, it is quite clear that roses do not usually live under water, since there are roses that remained twenty-four hours with me in a place where I was not under water.

In other words, it is contradiction in discourse that is the dividing line between truth and error. It is also the Hegelian conception of absolute knowledge: absolute knowledge is the moment when the totality of discourse closes upon itself in an absolutely perfect noncontradiction, including and up to this: that discourse posits and explains itself as discourse, justifies itself as discourse.

And until we arrive at that ideal, of which you know only too well…
by the very existence of things and by the dispute not only persistent over all themes and all subjects, with more or less ambiguity, according to the zones of our interhuman action, but also the manifest discordance between the different systems that order actions, religious, juridical, scientific, political systems
…you know that there is neither superposition nor conjunction of the different references, that there is a series of gaps, of faults, of tears, which do not allow one to conceive human discourse in a unitary register.

We are therefore always, up to a certain point, with respect to every position, every emission of speech that posits itself as true, in a kind of internal necessity of error. We are thus brought back, in appearance, to that sort of historical Pyrrhonism which
– suspends every emission by the human voice of something that moves in this dimension of truth and strikes it in an absolutely radical way with an interrogation,
– suspends it in a kind of waiting for a future of which it is not at all unthinkable that it may be realized, for we see only too well what I would call ‘the struggle of these different symbolic systems’.

And we know that after all it is not without effect in the life of men, and even in the order of things.
And the whole system of the sciences as it is currently—I am speaking of the physical sciences—is much more conceivable as the progress of a certain symbolic system to which things rather give their nourishment and their matter, for the perfection of this system of symbols, and thus as this system of symbols is perfected, we see things much more decompose, be disturbed, dissolve…and that the pressure of this symbolic system always goes further in a certain elaboration, than we can conceive it, on the contrary, as a kind of adequation, of clinging garment that would be given by the system of symbols to things.

All the progress of the system of symbols that is the system of the sciences—it is useless to tell you—is accompanied by that kind of upheaval that one calls as one wishes: ‘conquest of nature’, ‘transformation of nature’, ‘hominization of the planet’…
On which there remains such an ambiguity that the very notion of a kind of ‘rape of nature’, one cannot say that it is not made present in our epoch, in the most evident way. Are we in some way reduced to conceiving the progress of this symbolic system…
and to the very extent that it goes toward that kind of ‘well-made language’ that one can say is the language of the system of the sciences
…as something deprived of reference to a voice [a language without speech].

For that is where the Augustinian dialectic leads us: to deprive of any kind of reference to that domain of truth within which it nevertheless develops, implicitly by its very movement, to which it cannot fail at every instant to refer in order to move.
Well then, it is there that one cannot fail to be struck by the Freudian discovery. It brings something which, though it is of the empirical domain, nonetheless brings us, in this question—which looks to be beyond all experience, and literally metaphysical—an aid, a contribution, of such striking character that it blinds, or that one thinks only of closing one’s eyes to its existence.

For observe this: if the Freudian discovery is what I tell you it is—namely that in a whole series of human manifestations, which are not precisely of the order of discourse, this is what generally characterizes them; it is for that reason that they are called, from a certain angle, without looking further, variously irrational—what is expressed is literally a speech.

Observe that the essential spring of everything that is of the psychoanalytic field is this, and presupposes that the subject’s discourse develops normally—what I am telling you here is FREUD—in the order of error, of misrecognition, even of denegation: it is not quite the lie, it is between error and lie. This is presupposed by the Freudian system, what I have just made you notice, which are truths of common sense. But there is no reason not to recall them.

Our human discourse—thus especially that which will take place during the analysis and the analytic session—developing in this register of error, something happens by which truth breaks into this system. What I am telling you is what FREUD says, and it is what we must become aware that it is what FREUD says. This something brings us the message of truth. And for us analysts, that is to say for those who are introduced, who know how to see this field of phenomena which is the analytic field, something happens that is not of the contradiction of discourse.

We do not have to push subjects as far as possible along the path of absolute knowledge, to educate them on all planes; it would not be enough to do that in psychology to make them see the absurdities in which they usually live, one would have to see also in the system of the sciences; we do it here because we are analysts, but if one had to do it with patients, you see where that would lead us!

Something that is not, either, from the encounter with the real, for it is precisely that which is at stake: we take them between four walls, them; we do not guide them by the hand in life, that is to say in the consequences of their ‘stupidity’, something by which truth catches up, so to speak, with error from behind. And this something is what we can call essentially as being the most manifest representative of the mistake: it is in the slip, in the act that is improperly called ‘failed’, for in a certain way all our failed acts, like all our words that stumble, are words that confess and acts that succeed, that succeed precisely in the sense of this revelation of a truth that is there, essentially behind.

That is what Freudian thought implies. If FREUD’s discovery has a meaning, it is that one: truth catches error by the collar in the mistake. I say: in Freudian thought, for you will see the consequences if you do not admit what I am telling you. In Freudian thought, a truer, purer meaning manifests itself within that something more or less confused, whether you call that free associations, dream images, symptoms of something, which is a speech in the sense that it is it that brings truth, and that it is in the symptom, in the succession of dream images. This is expressed in FREUD. Reread, at the beginning of the chapter Dream-work [ch. VI]:

‘A dream,’ he says, ‘is a sentence, it is a rebus…’
[Ein solches Bilderrätsel ist nun der Traum, und unsere Vorgänger auf dem Gebiete der Traumdeutung haben den Fehler begangen, den Rebus als zeichnerische Komposition zu beurteilen. Als solche erschien er ihnen unsinnig und wertlos.]

There are 50 pages of The Interpretation of Dreams that would lead us to this consideration: everything that will appear just as well, since he gives us the structure of the dream, of that formidable discovery of ‘condensation’. You would be quite wrong to believe that condensation means simply a term-for-term correspondence of a symbol with something. He tells us clearly; reread the chapter on condensation:

‘In a given dream, the whole of the dream thoughts, that is to say manifestly the whole of the things signified, the meanings of the dream, is taken as a network as a whole and is represented not at all term by term, but by a series of interlacings.’

It would be enough for me to take one of FREUD’s dreams and to make a drawing on the board. One only has to read to see that it is like that: the whole of meanings is represented by the whole of what is signifying, that is to say that in each signifying element of the dream, in each image, there is reference to a whole series of points, of things to signify, and conversely that each thing to signify is represented in several signifiers. We likewise find the structure, the relation of what it signifies and of what is to be signified.

So this is where we are led, we, by the Freudian discovery: to see manifest itself that something which is speech, and which speaks, in a sense through—or even despite—the subject. This something, he shows it to us and tells it to us not only by his speech, but by all sorts of his other subjective manifestations, going as far as one can even dream it, namely that by his very body the subject emits a speech that as such is speech of truth, and a speech that he does not even know that he emits as signifying, that is to say that the subject always says more than he wants to say, always more than he knows how to say.

And the objection that AUGUSTINE makes, the principal one, to the inclusion of the domain of truth in the domain of signs, is, he says:

‘That very often subjects say things that go much further than what they think, that they are even capable of confessing the truth while not adhering to it.’

It is the reference to the Epicurean who maintains, he says, that the soul is mortal, but who, to maintain it, cites arguments of the adversaries, and for those who have their eyes open, says AUGUSTINE, they thus prove the fact of truth. For even in citing the arguments of the adversaries as being refuted, those who see, see that there is the true speech, and they recognize the value of the doctrine that the soul is immortal. Such is the Augustinian perspective.

By something whose structure and function as speech we have recognized, indeed, the subject bears witness to a meaning that is truer than everything he expresses through his discourse of error. And if it is not thus that our [analytic] experience is structured, it has strictly no meaning. I am going to make you notice it. For if for a single instant you do not think that it is in this perspective that our experience is, namely that the speech the subject emits without knowing it goes beyond his limits as a discoursing subject, but within his limits as a speaking subject, if you do not conceive in this perspective what we do, the objection at once appears: why, if it is not like that that we think, if it is not that that the analytic experience is, the objection—which I am astonished is not all the time more out in the open in what is opposed to us—is naturally this one: why does this discourse, which you detect in the register of mistake, not fall under the same objection as common discourse beyond which you claim to go, namely if it is a discourse like another, why is it not itself likewise plunged into error?

This is why every conception of the Jungian style of the unconscious—the one that makes, under the name of ‘archetype’, of the unconscious the real place of another discourse, that is what is its refutation—falls categorically under this objection, namely: why are these archetypes, these substantified symbols such as he has them reside permanently in a kind of substructure of the human soul, what do they have that is truer than what is supposedly on the surface? Is it by this metaphor: that what is in the cellars is necessarily truer than what is in the attic?

Discourse is subject, the discourse of the unconscious, exactly to the putting in parentheses, until the end of time, of discourse, of the rest of discourse. So it is indeed that it is a matter of something else, in the register of Freudian thought that has disclosed this place of the unconscious to us. In other words, we are beginning to glimpse what FREUD means when he tells us that the unconscious does not know contradiction or that it does not know time.

It is not very far pushed, it is not even quite true in terms of discourse, in the sense that one can, by pushing what it thus emits, encounter contradictions, but we also see in what sense these assertions go: it is not in the sense of a kind of reality that would truly be unthinkable. For reality falls under contradiction; reality makes it such that when I am here, it cannot be you, Miss X, who could be here in my place. That is a contradiction of the order of reality. One does not see why there the unconscious would escape this kind of contradiction.

But what FREUD means when he speaks of the unconscious, of the suspension of the principle of contradiction, is precisely this: that this more truthful speech, even authentically veridical, that we are supposed to detect, not—you see it now—by observation, but by the interpretation of discourse, this revelation of truth in the symptom, in the dream, in the slip, in the Witz, is precisely subject to other laws than this discourse, subject to this condition of moving within error, until the moment when it encounters contradiction. It is something else.

There is there a zone of speech which is speech structured as speech revealing a truth under other modes, by other means than those that constitute discoursing discourse. And it is exactly that which we have to explore, which we have to relate in a rigorous way if we want to make the least progress in the thought of what we do. Naturally, nothing forces us to it. I even profess quite commonly that most human beings can do without it, do without it even quite commonly and nonetheless accomplish in a perfectly satisfactory way what they have to do. I will even say more: it is quite common that one can push discourse extremely far, and even dialectic, while doing entirely without thinking.

Nevertheless, it is quite clear that every kind of progress, of deepening of the symbolic world, which constitutes what one calls a revelation, implies at least for a little moment what one calls an effort of thought, and that it is quite plausible that an analytic activity that takes place—if you understand me and follow me—entirely within the domain of a series of particular revelations for each subject, implies that the analyst maintains himself, so to speak, at least on the alert on the subject of the meaning of what he does, that is to say that he leaves a kind of small reference to thought from time to time.

You thus see clearly what is at stake. Here we are in the presence of a question. The question is this: what is the structure of this speech that is beyond discourse?

A novelty has been brought since Saint AUGUSTINE: the revelation in the phenomenon of these lived, subjective points, where a speech is revealed that surpasses the discoursing subject. It is nonetheless something rather striking, rather astonishing. It is even to the point that we can hardly believe that one never noticed it before. No doubt it was necessary, precisely for one to notice it, that the common run of men had been engaged for some time, historically, in a discourse that was badly disturbed, perhaps deviated, and in some way quite inhuman, quite alienating, for this kind of discourse to have manifested itself, with such acuity, such presence, such urgency, a kind of discourse of which one must nonetheless not fail also to recognize that it appeared in the suffering part of beings, and that it is under the form of a morbid psychology, of a psychopathology, that this discovery was made.

I also leave this to your reflection, in the form of a question mark: what do we then see?
We see, in this perspective of the dialectic of this speech beyond discourse, take on their meaning and be ordered, in a remarkable way, the terms we use most commonly, as if these were henceforth data that do not deserve more ample reflection.

We see quite their place, and as I was telling you last time, we see in this reference exactly the sectors where are situated—one could draw them—those ambiguous formations to which we are accustomed to refer, under the terms of Verdichtung, which is nothing other than this polyvalence of meanings in language, than these encroachments, these cross-overs by which, if you like, the world of things, represented by fields of this kind, is not covered exactly by the world of the symbol, but on the contrary is taken up like that, which makes it such that to each symbol correspond indeed a thousand things in things, and conversely.

This Verneinung which is that by which is sustained precisely in discourse something by which is shown the negative side of this non-superposition. For it has a positive side and a negative side, for one must make the objects enter into the holes, and since the holes do not correspond, it is the objects that suffer from it.

And this third register, that of Verdrängung, which is also preferable in this register of discourse.

For observe it well: always, each time we speak without thinking further…
without thinking ill of it, for certainly that is not our strong point
…each time we speak of repression…
observe it concretely, it is an indication, go and you will see
…each time there is repression…
and repression is not repetition, repression is not denegation,
for one must not mix everything, not confuse everything as one commonly does
…each time there is, properly speaking, repression…
and one must begin to spell that out in the first experimental data of FREUD
…it is always a matter of an interruption of discourse.

I showed it to you one day regarding The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, regarding this fact, this forgetting of names.
‘The word fails me’: at what moment in literature does a turn like that appear for the first time?
It is somewhat important to know such things! ‘The word fails me’ was used for the first time by SAINT-AMANT, who is a poet of the 17th century. This information I am giving you is in the linguistic connection of the vocabulary of the Précieuses. Do not believe that for that reason I have gone through the whole of French literature to be sure that SAINT-AMANT…
Besides, he did not write it, but said it like that, simply, in a street.

It is SOMAIZE, in the Dictionary of the Précieuses, who notes it among a thousand other things, as a turn of mind, a thousand other forms which are now common to you, and nonetheless were created in the boudoirs of that amiable society which devoted itself entirely to the perfection of language. You see the curious and close relation that there can be here between the Carte du Tendre and psychoanalytic psychology. In short, ‘The word fails me’: one would never have said such a thing in the 16th century.

Perhaps one must go back to Saint AUGUSTINE to go a little further in the psychology of the slip. But the first time he speaks of it, he nonetheless implies that in the slip something other—he uses the term aliud—than what the subject wants to say, is signified. In short, this word that fails you and that was the one FREUD spoke of in that famous forgetting of the name of the Lord of Orvieto, SIGNORELLI, I showed you how it was linked to the fact that the conversation that preceded had not been carried through to its end, because it led straight toward the HERR, the absolute master, death.

And after all there are perhaps internal limits to what one can say, as MEPHISTOPHELES, often cited by FREUD, says:

‘God cannot teach everything that God knows to his boys. They are not there yet!’

Repression is that. Each time the master stops on the path of his teaching for reasons that pertain to the nature of his interlocutor, there is already repression there. And if you will look well, I am giving you images, intended to put the ideas back in place: I too do repression, but it is a bit less than what one does usually, which is of the order of denegation.

Take for example the first dream that FREUD gives in the chapter on condensation. It is the dream of the botanical monograph, a marvelous demonstration of everything I am telling you: how botany represents not only flowers with everything they signify for FREUD, namely that, like many husbands, he offers flowers to his wife less often than he ought. Naturally, FREUD is nonetheless not without knowing what it means that during the day he had had to go rummage in a monograph on cyclamens, and that cyclamens are his wife’s favorite flowers.

With FREUD one always goes straight to the subject. And there too, of course, he never told us the bottom of the matter. But we have no trouble guessing it. There are other things: there is the conversation with the oculist KÖNIGSTEM, everything that recalls for him of reined-in ambitions, of bitterness: the famous story of cocaine. Let us not forget this story of cocaine; he never forgave his wife because he tells us clearly:

‘If she had not made me come urgently, I would have taken the cocaine a bit further, and I would have become a famous man.’

In the conversation evoked there is the patient Flora, and on that appears Gärtner, gardener, who, as if by chance, passes by with his wife. He finds her ‘bluming’, flourishing. And the essential point is this, if you look well at things: first, there is there a chain of thoughts: the patient Flora for whom he seemed to have a tender inclination, it seems that one cannot go much further in a certain sense, even for FREUD: not decided to break with his wife, it is better to leave in a certain shadow the fact that one does not bring her flowers as often as she would desire.

To leave in a certain shadow also everything that at that moment is suspended from this dialogue of permanent, underlying claim, which is that of FREUD at that moment, who is awaiting his appointment as extraordinary professor. It is always more or less underlying in all these dialogues with his colleagues, the struggle he is waging to have himself recognized, but it is even more underscored in the text by the fact that the GÄRTNER in question interrupts him.

The two residues of the day that bring their nourishment to this dream, namely this conversation and the sight of the book on cyclamens during the day, are here employed for the formation of this dream very precisely in this: that, insofar as lived during the day, they are already the phonematic points, if I may say, around which there set in motion a certain speech formulating bluntly:
– ‘I no longer love my wife’, for example,
– or ‘I am misrecognized by society, I am hampered’.

As he says moreover, behind all that there is what he calls his fantasies and tastes for luxury. As one of our colleagues said in a certain lesson on FREUD: ‘Freud was a man without ambitions, without needs’. Really! There are people who, I think, have never opened a book by FREUD. He says that at the time when he absolutely did not have a penny, and it is true that he suffered in his time of study, he absolutely could not at that time do any work, and technical, medical, student work, except on monographs; from that moment he aspired—it is enough to read FREUD’s life, to know a few of his most famous replies to people who came to him with their heart on their sleeve with idealistic intentions toward him, the brutality of FREUD’s answers concerning what constituted his interests, FREUD’s interests, in existence. One should nonetheless not, fifteen years after FREUD’s death, fall into geography concerning him! Thank God, Mr. JONES is only halfway…
There will remain a little something of FREUD to us through FREUD’s work to bear witness to us of the fellow’s personality.

Let us return to that famous dream. If there is repression and if there is dream, if the first link that is given to us on the royal road to the unconscious is this: of repressed desire with the dream, it is essentially in this that there was a certain speech during the day that could only be a suspended speech, that did not go to the bottom of confession, to the bottom of things, to the bottom of being.

And it is there that I leave today the question: can a spoken speech ever, in the present state of relations between human beings and outside the analytic situation, be a full speech? It is in this interruption of discourse, in this encounter with a law of misrecognition, which is the law of common conversation, that is found the spring of Verneinung.

If you read—I urge you to do so, because it is not that which I will take up next year—the Traumdeutung, and we are all sufficiently guided by these threads that I am trying to give you, these directives that I am trying to stretch across the general text of FREUD’s thought so that you can manage in the Traumdeutung and see how all these things become clearer, and even how the meaning that sometimes seems ambiguous, obstinately given by FREUD to the word ‘desire’, holds, and how true, how valid it is, for he knows very well what he means.

But he must admit at a turning point, at a moment—I am willing after all, for those who understand nothing, to say that one can take his discourse for a kind of obstinacy, even a quite surprising denegation—this fact that he concedes that one will indeed have to admit that there will be two types of dreams: so-called wish dreams, and punishment dreams. But he feels clearly, if one understands what is at stake, that this desire that manifests itself in the dream, this repressed desire, is something that identifies with this register into which I am gently trying to have you enter: it is being that is waiting to be revealed.

In this perspective of this waiting of being, the meaning of the term desire takes its full value in FREUD. It unifies, it makes it possible to understand just as well those paradoxical dreams such as the dream of the poet who had that youth so difficult and who eternally has the same dream in which he is a little tailor’s clerk.

Just as well, what is at stake there is not so much a punishment dream, as precisely that something which—and we will return to it—is in an essential spring in the revelation of being, namely crossings of the identification of being with a new path of being, with a new stage, with a new symbolic incarnation of itself.

That is what gives value to everything that is of the order of passing the competitive examination, the exam, the habilitation; it is what that reveals not as a test in the sense of a test or anything, but as investiture. So you thus see something on which I will want to conclude in a moment. Just in case, I put on the board this little diamond which is a kind of dihedral with six faces.

Let us set them all alike, one above, the other below a plane. It is not a regular polyhedron, although all its faces are equal. But the vertices or polyhedral angles are not all the same. There are two that are trihedra, on three faces, and the three other vertices are on four faces. So if we conceive this: that the median plane, the one in which there is the triangle that splits this pyramid in two, is, if you like, the surface of the real. In this surface of the real—I am speaking of the quite simple real—nothing, if you like, can cross it, nothing of what is there, and there all the places are taken, at each instant all the places are taken.

And at the next instant, everything is changed. It is quite clear that with our world of words and symbols, we introduce into it, if we call the real a second dimension, something else, a hollow, a hole, something thanks to which all kinds of crossings and interchangeable things are possible. As has been remarked, this kind of hole in the real is called, depending on whether one considers it in one way or another, being or nothingness. This being and this nothingness, we have nonetheless already touched more than once, are essentially linked precisely to this phenomenon of speech.

It is in this dimension of being that the tripartition is situated, on which I always insist with you to make you understand the elementary categories without which we can distinguish nothing in our experience, tripartition: of the symbolic, of the imaginary, and of the real. It is not for nothing, no doubt, that there are three. There must be there a kind of minimal law which here geometry only embodies, namely indeed that if in this plane of the real you detach some flap that introduces itself into a third dimension, you will never be able to make a solid, so to speak, except with two other flaps at minimum. To such a schema, to such a representation, can be related this, which makes it such that first it is only in the dimension of being, and not of the real, that the three fundamental passions can be inscribed, of which you may have heard the enumeration and the register, and which make it such that we are in the human plane that in […] analysis is instituted by the sole fact that it is a matter of being and not of the object.

Thus are created:
– at the junction of the symbolic and the imaginary, the passion or the break, if you like, or the ridge line that is called love,
– at the junction of the imaginary and the real, the one that is called hate,
– and at the junction of the real and the symbolic, the one that is called ignorance.
And what do we call the institution—straight away, before any beginning of analysis—of something that is already of the order of transference, the triggered, thunderstruck side of the existence of this dimension, before anything has been linked of what can be disengaged in the margins, the fringes of this concubinage that is analysis? If from the start these two possibilities are virtually present, and precisely at the beginning in their extreme form of love and hate, they cannot be conceived except in this register, and with the accompaniment of that something that goes so much without saying that precisely one does not name it in the primitive components of transference, and which is precisely ignorance insofar as it is passion. That is to say insofar as it is instituted as such at the foundation of the situation.

The subject who comes into analysis places himself as such in the position of the one who does not know. There is no possible entry into analysis—one never says it, one never thinks of it—without this reference, and it is absolutely fundamental. It is exactly to the extent that speech progresses…
that is to say where that something which is the upper pyramid is built up, that something whose correspondence with these three faces, perhaps next time, when we are far enough along, I will show you, which is none other precisely than the elaboration of the Verdrängung, the Verdichtung, and the Verneinung
…that this being is realized, of course absolutely unrealized at the beginning of analysis, as at the beginning of every dialectic.

For it is quite clear that if this being exists implicitly, and in a way virtually, the innocent one, the one who has never entered into any dialectic, has literally no kind of presence of this being; he believes himself quite simply in the real. It is the deepening of analysis by way of this revelation of this included speech, this revealed speech in a discourse in a way expressly put in doubt, in suspension, put in parentheses by the law of free association, it is precisely in this discourse the realization of this being.

It is insofar as analysis is not only what in the schema that I gave you, the O and the O’, it is not only this reconstitution of the narcissistic image, which it very often is. If we were only, in analysis, in the putting to the test of a certain number of small behaviors, more or less well grasped, more or less cleverly projected, thanks to the collaboration, we are told in plain terms, of these two egos, here occupied with watching for the emergence of I do not know what ineffable reality, to which one can make exactly the objection that one can make, as I told you a moment ago, for all the rest of discourse: why would that reality have something privileged among the others?

It is precisely insofar as this discourse allows, in relation to this point O, which is indeed sometimes its completed image in O’, this point O goes somewhere else in my schema—a schema is never anything but a schema—somewhere behind, and as his speech symbolizes it, is realized in his being.

We will leave it there today. And I earnestly ask those whom this discourse will have sufficiently interested, even worked upon, to put to me in short terms a certain number of small questions, not too long, since we will have only one more seminar, and around which I will try to order the conclusion, if indeed one can speak of conclusion, which will serve as a knot in order to catch up next year a new chapter.

I am more and more inclined to think that next year I will have to divide this seminar into two, for certain reasons: so as not to fail you in speech, to do on the one hand President SCHREBER, to show the situation of the problem of psychosis in relation to this register, and what the symbolic world means in psychosis, for that is where the question is, and on the other hand to show you—I think I will do that regarding Das Ich und das Es—how, within such a dialectic, the structuralism introduced by FREUD takes on its true meaning, for literally the ego, the super ego and the Es, if they were nothing other than a kind of tracing, a change of name of the old psychological entities of passion, of the ego, and of the unconscious, one really does not see what new thing FREUD would have brought.

If indeed these notions are usable as concepts, are worth something, it is insofar as they attach directly to the dialectical point to which I think I have led you this year, with this analysis that bears as much on the Technical Papers as on the Einführung der Narzissmus, and you will see that the three references (Ich, Es, Überich) are something other than the use that is commonly made of them.