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(All parts in English)

Identification: that is my title and my subject this year. It is a good title, but not a convenient subject.
I do not think you have the idea that it is an operation or a process very easy to conceive.

If it is easy to observe, it would perhaps nevertheless be preferable, in order to observe it well, that we make a small effort
to conceive it. It is certain that we have encountered enough of its effects to keep to the summary—I mean to things that are perceptible even to our internal experience—for you to have a certain sense of what it is. This effort
of conceiving will appear to you—at least this year, that is to say a year that is not the first of our teaching—
without any doubt, by the places, the problems, to which this effort will lead us, justified after the fact.

Today we are going to take a very first small step in this direction. I beg your pardon: this may perhaps lead us
to make those efforts that are properly called thought. It will not happen to us often, no more to us than to others.
Identification, if we take it as the title, as the theme of what we are saying, it is fitting that we speak of it otherwise
than in the form, one might say mythical, in which I left it last year.[session of 21-06-1961]

There was something of that order—of the order of identification, eminently—that was involved, you remember,
at the point where I left off my discourse last year, namely at the level where, if I may say so, ‘the damp sheet’ to which
you picture for yourselves the narcissistic effects that encircle this rock, what remained emerged in my schema:

This auto-erotic rock whose emergence the phallus symbolizes: an island, in sum, beaten by the foam of APHRODITE, a false island moreover, since indeed, like the one where CLAUDEL’s Proteus appears, it is an island without mooring, an island drifting away.
You know what CLAUDEL’s Proteus is: it is the attempt to complete the Oresteia by the comic farce which,
in Greek tragedy, obligatorily completes it, and of which there remain to us in the whole of literature only two wrecks
of SOPHOCLES, and a Heracles of EURIPIDES, if my memory is correct.

It is not without intention that I evoke this reference concerning the way in which, last year, my discourse
on transference ended on this image of identification. However much I tried, I could only produce the ‘Beautiful’ in order to mark the barrier where transference finds its limit and its pivot. Without any doubt, that was not the beauty of which I taught you
that it is the limit of the tragic, that it is the point where the elusive Thing administers to us its euthanasia.

I embellish nothing, although one imagines, on hearing sometimes certain rumors about what I teach: I do not make things too easy for you. They know it, those who formerly listened to my seminar on Ethics[1959-60], the one where I exactly approached
the function of this barrier of beauty under the form of the agony that the Thing requires of us in order for us to join it.

So that is where Transference ended last year. I indicated it to you—all those who attended the Provincial Days of October[1961]—I pointed out to you, without being able to tell you more, that there was a reference there hidden in a comic element
which is the point beyond which I could not push any further what I was aiming at in a certain experience.

An indication, if I may say so, to be found again in the hidden meaning of what one might call the cryptograms of this seminar—and from which after all I do not despair that a commentary may one day extract it and bring it to light, since indeed it has happened to me to have this testimony, which at this point is good hope, namely that the seminar of the year before last, the one on Ethics, was in fact taken up again—and according to those who were able to read the work, with full success—by someone who took the trouble to reread it in order to summarize its elements, namely Mr. SAFOUAN, and I hope that perhaps these things may be made available to you quickly enough for what I am going to bring you this year to be able to be linked to them, with one year jumping
over the second after it.

This may seem to you to raise a question, even to be regrettable as a delay: that is not altogether well founded, however,
and you will see that if you take up again the sequence of my seminars since the year 1953…

– the first on Technical Writings,
– the one that followed on The Ego, Technique and Theory, Freudian and Psychoanalytic,
– the third on The Freudian Structures of Psychosis,
– the fourth on The Object Relation,
– the fifth on The Formations of the Unconscious,
– the sixth on Desire and Its Interpretation,
– then Ethics,
– Transference,
– Identification, which we are now arriving at—there are nine of them,

…you will easily be able to find in them an alternation, a pulsation.

You will see that from two to two, the thematic of the subject and that of the signifier alternately dominate, which—given that it is
through the signifier, through the elaboration of the function of the symbolic that we began—brings us back this year as well
to the signifier, since we are in an odd number. Although what is at issue should properly be in identification
the relation of the subject to the signifier.

This identification, then, of which we propose to try to give an adequate notion this year, analysis has no doubt
made it rather trivial for us, as someone, who is quite close to me and understands me very well, said to me:

‘So this year what you are taking up is identification—and this with a pout—the all-purpose explanation!’

Thereby letting show at the same time some disappointment concerning, in sum, the fact that, from me, one rather expected something else.
Let that person be disabused! That expectation indeed—to see me escape the theme, if I may say so—will be disappointed,
for I fully intend to treat it, and I also hope that the fatigue this theme suggests to that person in advance will be dissolved.
I shall indeed speak about identification itself.

To specify at once what I mean by that, I shall say that when one speaks of identification, what one thinks of first
is the other with whom one identifies, and the door is easily opened for me to place the accent, to insist on this difference from the other to the Other, from the little other to the big Other, which is a theme with which I can indeed say that you are already familiar. Yet it is not by that route that I intend to begin. I am rather going to place the accent on what in identification
immediately presents itself as ‘making identical’ [idem facere], as grounded in the notion of the ‘same,’ and even of the same to the same,
with everything this raises in the way of difficulties.

You are not unaware, even without being able very quickly to identify what difficulties this has always offered to thought: A is A. If A is so very A, let it stay there! Why separate it from itself so as to reassemble it so quickly?
This is not mere and simple play of mind. Consider well, for example, that in the line of a movement of conceptual elaboration called logical positivism, where this or that person may strive to aim at a certain goal, which would be for example that
of positing no logical problem unless it has a sense identifiable as such in some crucial experience:
he would be resolved to reject anything whatsoever in the logical problem that cannot, in some way, offer this final guarantee,
by saying that it is a problem devoid of sense as such.

Still, if RUSSELL can give in his Principia Mathematica a value to the equation, to the setting equal,
of A = A, another—WITTGENSTEIN—will oppose it because precisely of impasses that seem to him to result from it
in the name of the starting principles. And this refusal will even be set down algebraically: such an equality thus obliging a detour
of notation in order to find what can serve as equivalent to the recognition of the identity A is A.

As for us, we are going to—this being posited: that it is not at all the path of logical positivism that seems to us, in matters
of logic, to be in any way the justified one—question ourselves, I mean at the level of an experience of speech,
the one we trust through its equivocations, even its ambiguities, on what we can approach
under this term ‘identification.’

You are not unaware that one observes across languages certain rather general, even universal, ‘historical turns,’ such that one can speak of modern syntaxes by opposing them globally to syntaxes, not archaic, but simply ancient, that is to say of the languages of what is called Antiquity. These sorts of general turns, I have told you, are of syntax. It is not the same with the lexicon, where things are much more shifting. In a way,
each language brings, in relation to the general history of language, fluctuations proper to its genius and which make it,
this or that one, more conducive to bringing out the history of a meaning.

Thus we may pause over what is the term, or the substantified notion of the term, of ‘identity’:
in ‘identity,’ ‘identification,’ there is the Latin term ‘idem.’ And this will be to show you that some significant experience
is borne in the ordinary French term, bearer of the same signifying function, that of the ‘same.’
It seems indeed that it is the ‘em,’ suffix of the ‘id’ in ‘idem,’ in which we find the function operating,
I shall say as ‘root’ in the evolution of Indo-European at the level of a certain number of Italic languages.

This ‘em’ is here—in ‘même’ [same]—doubled: ancient consone [consonantal?], which is thus found again as the residue,
the remnant, the return to a primitive thematic, but not without having picked up along the way the intermediate phase of etymology, positively of the birth of this ‘même,’ which is a familiar Latin metipsum, and even a metipsissimum
of expressive late Latin, thus urging us to recognize in what direction here experience suggests we seek the meaning
of all identity, at the heart of what is designated by a sort of redoubling of ‘myself.’

This ‘myself’ being—as you see—already this metipsissimum, a sort of ‘on this very day today’ [pleonastic expression; literally a redundant doubling like ‘today’s day’] that we do not notice, and which is indeed there in ‘myself’ [Cf. Ethics, session of 30-03]. It is then into a metipsissimum that, after the I, rush the you, the he, the she, the they, the we, the you, and even the self, which thus in French turns out to be a ‘self-same self’ [soi-même]. Thus we see there, in sum in our language, a sort of indication of a work, of a special signifying tendency, which you will allow me to qualify as ‘mihilism’ [a neologism built from moi, ‘I/me,’ suggesting an ego-centered tendency], insofar as this act, this experience of the I, is referred to in it.

Of course, the thing would have interest only incidentally, if we were not to find other traits of it where this fact is revealed,
this clear and easily identifiable difference, if we think that in Greek, the αὐτός [autos] of the self is what also serves to designate
the ‘same,’ just as in German and in English, selbst or self will come to function to designate identity.
So, this kind of permanent metaphor in French expression is—I believe—not for nothing that we note it here,
and that we question ourselves about it.

We shall let it be seen that it may not be unrelated to the fact—on a quite different level—that it was in French,
I mean in DESCARTES, that being could be thought as inherent in the subject, under a mode, in sum, that we shall call captivating enough that ever since the formula was proposed to thought, one can say that a good part of the efforts of philosophy consists in trying to disentangle itself from it, and nowadays in an increasingly open way, there being, if I may say so, no philosophical thematic that does not begin—with rare exceptions—by trying to overcome that famous ‘I think, therefore I am.’

I believe that this is not a bad entryway for us, that this ‘I think, therefore I am’ should mark the first step of our inquiry.
It is understood that this ‘I think, therefore I am’ belongs to DESCARTES’s procedure. I intended to indicate it to you in passing,
but I am telling you immediately: this is not a commentary on DESCARTES that I can in any way today attempt to undertake, and I have no intention of doing so.

The ‘I think, therefore I am,’ of course, if you return to DESCARTES’s texts, is—both in the Discourse and in the Meditations—infinitely more fluent, more slippery, more wavering than under this lapidary kind of form in which it is inscribed, both in your memory and in the passive or surely inadequate idea that you may have of the Cartesian process. How could it not be inadequate, since, indeed, there is not one commentator who agrees with another in giving it its exact sinuosity?

It is therefore not without some arbitrariness and yet with sufficient reasons, that this fact, this formula—which for you
makes sense and has a weight that surely exceeds the attention you may have given it until now—I am going to pause on it today to show a kind of introduction that we can recover there. For us, at the point of elaboration we have reached, it is a matter of trying to articulate in a more precise way this that we have already advanced more than once as a thesis: that nothing other supports the traditional philosophical idea of a subject, except the existence of the signifier and its effects.

Such a thesis, which, you will see, will be essential for every embodiment that we may subsequently give to the effects of identification,
requires that we try to articulate more precisely how we effectively conceive this dependence
of the formation of the subject with respect to the existence of effects of the signifier as such. We shall go even further, to say that if we give the word ‘thought’ a technical sense—the thought of those whose profession it is to think—one can, upon close examination,
and in a way after the fact, perceive that nothing of what is called ‘thought’ has ever done anything other than lodge itself somewhere within this problem.

By that sign, we shall note that we cannot say that, at the very least, we projected to think except in a certain way
—that whether we wanted it or not, whether you knew it or not—every experience of the unconscious that is ours here, every inquiry
into what this experience is, is something that places itself at this level of thought where—for insofar as we are going there no doubt together, but not without my leading you there—the most present, most immediate, most incarnated sensible relation of this effort
is the question you can ask yourselves, in this effort, about this ‘who am I?’

This is not some abstract philosopher’s game, for on this subject of ‘who am I?’—to which I am trying to initiate you—you are not unaware, at least some of you, that I hear all sorts of things about it. Those who know it may be,
of course, those from whom I hear it, and I will not put anyone in an awkward position by publishing here what I hear.
Besides, why would I do so, since I am going to grant you that the question is legitimate?

I can take you very far along this track, without the truth of what I tell you being guaranteed to you for a single instant,
although in what I tell you it is never a matter of anything but the truth. And in what I hear about it, why after all not say that it goes as far as the dreams of those who address themselves to me. I remember one of them. One may quote a dream:

‘Why,’ dreamed one of my analysands, ‘does he not tell the truth about the truth?’

It was about me that it was in this dream. This dream nevertheless ended up, in my fully awake subject, in reproaching me
for this discourse in which, to hear him, the final word would always be missing.

That is not to resolve the question by saying: ‘The children that you are always wait, in order to believe, for me to say the true truth.’
For this term ‘the true truth’ has a meaning, and I will say more, it is on this meaning that the entire credit of psychoanalysis is built.
Psychoanalysis first presented itself to the world as the one that brought the true truth. Of course one quickly falls back
into all sorts of metaphors that make the thing flee.

This ‘true truth’ is the underside of the cards [sic]. There will always be one, even in the most rigorous philosophical discourse.
It is upon that that our credit in the world is founded, and what is astonishing is that this credit still lasts, although, for quite some time now, not the slightest effort has been made to give even the smallest beginning of something that answers to it.

From then on, I feel rather honored that I am questioned on this theme: ‘Where is the true truth of your discourse?’ And I can even
after all find that it is precisely insofar as one does not take me for a philosopher, but for a psychoanalyst,
that one asks me this question.

For one of the most remarkable things in philosophical literature is to what extent among philosophers—I mean: insofar as philosophizing—
one ultimately never asks philosophers the same question, except in order to admit with a disconcerting ease that the greatest among them did not think a word of what they communicated to us, in black and white, and to allow themselves to think, concerning DESCARTES, for example, that he had in God only the most uncertain faith
because this suits one or another of his commentators, unless the opposite arrangement suits him better.

There is one thing, in any case, that has never seemed to shake anyone’s credit in philosophers, and that is that one has been able to speak concerning each of them, and the greatest of them, of a ‘double truth.’ So that for me who, entering psychoanalysis,
puts my feet right into it [idiom: puts his feet in the dish; plunges straight into the awkward matter] by asking this question about truth, if I suddenly feel the said ‘dish’ heating up under the soles
of my feet, that is after all only something I can rejoice in since, if you think about it, it is still I
who turned the gas back on.

But let us leave that now. Let us enter into these relations of the identity of the subject, and let us enter by way of the Cartesian formula
from which you are about to see how I intend to approach it today. It is quite clear that it is absolutely not a question of claiming to surpass DESCARTES, but rather of drawing the maximum effects from the use of the impasses with which he marks for us the ground.
If then one follows me in a critique that is not at all a ‘text commentary,’ let one kindly remember what I intend to extract from it for the benefit of my own discourse. ‘I think therefore I am’ seems to me in this form to concentrate common usages,
to the point of becoming that worn coin, without effigy, to which MALLARMÉ alludes somewhere.

If we retain it for a moment and try to polish its function as a sign, if we try to revive its function for our use,
I would like to remark this: namely that this formula—which I repeat to you, in its concentrated form we find in DESCARTES only at a certain point in the Discourse on Method—is not expressed thus, in this densified form.
This ‘I think, therefore I am’ runs up against this objection—and I believe it has never been made—which is that ‘I think’ is not a thought.
Of course, DESCARTES proposes this formula to us at the outlet of a long process of thought, and it is quite certain
that the thought at issue is a thinker’s thought. I shall say even more: this characteristic ‘it is a thinker’s thought’
is not required for us to speak of thought. A thought, to say it all, in no way requires that one think about thought.
For us in particular: thought begins with the unconscious.

One can only be astonished by the timidity that makes us resort to the psychologists’ formula when we try to say something about thought, the formula of saying that it is: ‘an action in a sketch-state, in a reduced state, the little economic model of action.’
You will tell me ‘one finds that somewhere in FREUD’! But of course, one finds everything in FREUD: in the turn of some paragraph, he may have made use of this psychological definition of thought. But in the end, it is totally difficult to eliminate
that it is in FREUD that we also find that thought is a perfectly effective mode, and in some way sufficient
unto itself, of masturbatory satisfaction. This is to say that, regarding what is at stake concerning ‘the meaning of thought,’
we perhaps have a somewhat longer span than the other workers.

Nevertheless, this does not prevent our questioning the formula at issue ‘I think, therefore I am’ and saying that, for the use made of it, it can only pose a problem for us. For it is fitting to question this utterance: ‘I think’—however broad the field may be that we have reserved for thought—to see whether it satisfies the characteristics of thought, to see whether it satisfies
the characteristics of what we can call a thought.

It could be that it is an utterance that proves quite insufficient to support in any way anything that we might
at the end identify in this presence: ‘I am.’ That is precisely what I claim. To clarify my point, I will point out this:
that ‘I think’ taken as it stands in this form is logically no more sustainable, no more supportable than the ‘I lie,’
which has already posed a problem for a certain number of logicians. This ‘I lie’ which is sustained only by logical wavering, empty no doubt but sustainable, which unfolds this semblance of meaning, very sufficient moreover to find its place in formal logic.
‘I lie,’ if I say it, it is true, therefore I do not lie, but I do lie nevertheless, since in saying ‘I lie’ I assert the contrary.
It is very easy to dismantle this alleged logical difficulty and to show that the alleged difficulty on which this judgment rests
lies in this: the judgment it contains cannot bear on its own enunciation; it is a collapse. It is from the absence of the distinction of two planes—from the fact that the ‘I lie’ is supposed to bear on the articulation of the ‘I lie’ itself, without being distinguished from it—that this famous difficulty arises. This is to tell you that, for lack of this distinction, it is not a genuine proposition.

These little paradoxes—which logicians make much of, moreover—to bring them immediately back to their proper scale,
may pass for simple amusements. They still have their interest: they should be retained so as to pin down, in sum,
the true position of all formal logic, up to and including that famous logical positivism of which I was speaking earlier.
By that I mean that, in our view, not enough has been made of use of the famous aporia of EPIMENIDES, which is only a more developed form
of what I have just presented to you concerning ‘I lie,’ namely:

‘All Cretans are liars, so speaks Epimenides the Cretan.’

And you immediately see the little spin-cycle that gets generated. It has not been used enough to demonstrate the vanity of the famous proposition called the ‘universal affirmative A’. For indeed, one notes on this occasion, that this is indeed there—we shall see it—the most interesting way of resolving the difficulty. For, observe carefully what happens if one posits this—which is positable—which has been posited in the critique of the famous ‘universal affirmative A’, whose substance some have claimed, not without grounds, has never been anything other than that of a ‘negative existential’ proposition: ‘There is no Cretan who is not capable of lying’.
From that moment on there is no longer any problem.

EPIMENIDES can say it, for the reason that expressed thus, he does not say at all that there is anyone, even a Cretan, who can lie in an uninterrupted stream, especially when one realizes that lying tenaciously implies a sustained memory such that he ends
up orienting discourse in the direction of the equivalent of a confession. So that even if ‘All Cretans are liars’ means that there is not a Cretan who does not want to lie in an uninterrupted stream, the truth will indeed end up escaping him at the turn, and precisely in proportion
to the rigor of that will. Which is the most plausible sense of the confession by the Cretan EPIMENIDES that ‘All Cretans
are liars’; this sense can only be this one, namely that he glories in it, he means thereby to throw you off the track,
while truthfully warning you of his method.

But that has no other aim, it has the same success as that other procedure which consists in announcing that, as for oneself, one is not polite, that one is of an absolute frankness: that is the type who suggests that you endorse all his bluffs. What I mean is that every ‘universal affirmative’—in the formal sense of the category—has the same oblique ends, and it is quite pretty that these ends burst forth
in the classical examples.

That it is ARISTOTLE who takes care to reveal that ‘Socrates is mortal’ must still inspire in us some interest,
which means offer a hold to what we can call among ourselves ‘interpretation’, in the sense in which this term claims to go a little
further than the function found precisely in the very title of one of the books of ARISTOTLE’s Logic.

For if obviously it is insofar as a human animal that the one whom Athens names SOCRATES is assured of death,
it is still very much insofar as named SOCRATES that he escapes it, and obviously, this not only because
his renown still endures for as long as the fabulous operation of transference carried out by PLATO will live on, but even
more precisely, because it is only insofar as having succeeded in constituting himself, from his social identity—that being of atopy
that characterizes him—that the one named SOCRATES—the one so named in Athens, and that is why he could not go into exile—
was able to sustain himself in the desire for his own death to the point of making it the acting out of his life. He added to it besides that ‘flower in the rifle barrel’ [idiomatically, a jaunty flourish in the face of danger] of acquitting himself of the famous ‘cock to Asclepius’
which would have been at issue if it had been necessary to make the recommendation not to shortchange the local chestnut seller.

So there is there, in ARISTOTLE, something that we can interpret as some attempt precisely to exorcise
a transference that he believed to be an obstacle to the development of knowledge. It was moreover on his part an error since the failure of it is patent.
It was surely necessary to go a bit further than PLATO in the denaturation of desire for things to lead elsewhere.
Modern science was born in a hyper-Platonism, and not in the Aristotelian return to, in sum, the function of knowledge according to the status of the ‘concept’. It required, in fact, something that we can call ‘the second death of the gods’—
namely their ghostly re-emergence at the moment of the Renaissance—for the word to show us its true truth, that which dispels, not illusions, but the darkness of meaning from which modern science arises.
So, we have said it, this sentence of ‘I think’ has the interest of showing us—it is the minimum that we can deduce from it—the voluntary dimension of judgment. We do not need to say as much: the two lines that we distinguish as enunciation and statement are enough for us so that we may affirm that it is insofar as these two lines become entangled
and confused that we can find ourselves before such a paradox that leads to that impasse of ‘I lie’
on which I paused you for a moment.

And the proof that this is indeed what is at stake, namely: that I can at once lie and say in the same voice that I lie.
If I distinguish these voices, that is entirely admissible. If I say: ‘He says that I lie’, that goes by itself, that raises no objection,
no more than if I were to say: ‘He lies’. But I can even say: ‘I say that I lie’.

There is nevertheless something here that should hold our attention, namely that if I say: ‘I know that I lie’, that still has something
entirely convincing that should hold our attention as analysts since, as analysts precisely, we know that the original,
the vivid and the gripping thing about our intervention is this: that we can say that we are made to say, to move ourselves in the dimension exactly opposite, but strictly correlative, which is to say: ‘But no, you do not know that you are speaking the truth’
Which immediately goes further. Much more: ‘You speak it so well only insofar as you believe you are lying, and when you do not want to lie, it is in order better to guard yourself against that truth.’ This truth, it seems one can embrace it only through these glimmers, truth:
daughter in this—you remember our terms—that she would by essence—like any other daughter—be only a stray one.
[…you are no more worthy to bear my colors than these clothes that are yours and like yourselves, phantoms that you are. Where then am I going, having passed into
you, where was I before this passage? Perhaps one day I shall tell you? But so that you may find me where I am, I am going to teach you by what sign to
recognize me. Men, listen, I give you the secret. I, truth, speak. Écrits p. 409]

Well then, it is the same for the ‘I think’: it indeed seems that if it circulates so easily for those who spell it out or rebroadcast
the message—the professors—it can only be by not dwelling on it too much. If we have for the ‘I think’ the same requirements as for the ‘I lie’:
– either this will mean: ‘I think that I think’, which then is absolutely speaking of nothing other than the ‘I think’ of opinion or imagination, the ‘I think’ as you say when you say: ‘I think she loves me’ which means that the troubles are going to begin. Following DESCARTES—even in the text of the Meditations—one is surprised by the number of incidences under which this ‘I think’ is nothing other than that properly imaginary notation on which no evidence, supposedly radical, can even be founded, can rest.
– Or else this means: ‘I am a thinking being’, which is of course then to jostle in advance the whole process of what aims precisely to draw out of the ‘I think’ a status without prejudice as without infatuation for my existence. If I begin by saying: ‘I am a being’, that means: ‘I am a being essential to being, no doubt.’ There is no need to throw in more; one can keep one’s thought for one’s personal use.

This having been pointed out, we find ourselves encountering what is important, we find ourselves encountering this level, this third term that we raised concerning the ‘I lie’, namely, that one may say ‘I know that I think’. And this fully merits holding our attention. Indeed, this is indeed the support of all that a certain phenomenology has developed concerning the subject.

And here I bring in a formula which is the one that we shall be led to take up again next times, and it is this one: what we have to deal with—and how this is given to us, since we are psychoanalysts—is radically to subvert, to render impossible that most radical prejudice, and of which it is the prejudice that is the true support of all this development of philosophy, of which one can say that it is the limit beyond which our experience has passed, the limit beyond which the possibility of the unconscious begins, namely that there has never been—in the philosophical line that developed from the Cartesian investigations called the ‘cogito’—that there has never been but a single subject that I shall pin down, to conclude, under this form: ‘the subject supposed to know’.

Here you must provide this formula with the special resonance which, in some way, carries with it its irony, its question, and notice that in carrying it over to phenomenology—and specifically to Hegelian phenomenology—the function
of this ‘subject supposed to know’ takes on its value by being appraised as to the synchronic function deployed in this discourse.
Its presence always there, from the beginning of phenomenological questioning, at a certain point, a certain knot of the structure will allow us to free ourselves from the diachronic deployment supposed to lead us to ‘absolute knowledge’.

This ‘absolute knowledge’ itself—we shall see it in the light of this question—takes on a singularly refutable value,
but only in this: today let us stop at positing this ‘motion of distrust’ of attributing this supposed knowledge—as supposed knowledge—to anyone whatsoever, but above all let us guard ourselves against supposing [sub-posing]-subjicere-any subject to knowledge.
Knowledge is intersubjective, which does not mean that it is everyone’s knowledge, but that it is the knowledge of the Other, with a capital O.
And the Other—we have posited it, it is essential to maintain it as such—the Other is not a subject, it is ‘a place’, to which one has been striving since ARISTOTLE to transfer the powers of the subject.

Of course, of these efforts there remains what HEGEL unfolded as ‘the history of the subject’. But that absolutely does not mean
that the subject knows one whit more about what is at stake. He has, if I may say so, emotion only as a function of an undue supposition, namely: that the Other knows, that there is an absolute knowledge. But the Other knows even less than he does, for the very good reason precisely that it is not a subject. The Other is the dump of the representative representatives of this supposition of knowledge, and this is what
we call the unconscious insofar as the subject has himself gotten lost in this ‘supposition of knowledge’.

He carries that along without knowing it, and ‘that’ is the debris that comes back to him of what his reality suffers in this thing, debris more or less unrecognizable. He sees them come back, he can say, or not say ‘that is indeed it’ or else ‘that is not it at all’, it is quite ‘that’ all the same.

The function of the subject in DESCARTES: it is here that we shall take up again next time our discourse, with the resonances
that we find in it in analysis. Next time we shall try to identify the references to the phenomenology
of the obsessional neurotic, in a signifying scansion where the subject is found immanent to every articulation.