🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I left you last time with the apprehension of a paradox concerning the modes of appearance of the object.
This thematic, starting from the object insofar as it is metonymic, was asking what we were doing when, this metonymic object, we made it appear as the common factor of that so-called line of the signifier, whose place I designated by that of the numerator in the great Saussurean fraction, signifier over signified. This is what we were doing when we made it appear as signifier, when we designated this object as the object of the oral drive, for example.

Since this new type designated the genus of the object, in order to make you grasp it I showed you what is new that is brought to logic by the mode in which the signifier is employed in mathematics – in set theory – a mode which is precisely unthinkable if we do not place in the foreground, as constitutive, the famous paradox called the Russell paradox, in order to make you touch with your finger what I started from, namely that, as such, the signifier is not only not subject to the so-called law of contradiction, but is even, properly speaking, its support, namely that A is usable as signifier insofar as ‘A is not A’.

From this it resulted that the object of the oral drive insofar as we consider it as the primordial breast,
with respect to this generic mamma of psychoanalytic objectalization, the question could be posed:
the real breast, under these conditions, is it mammary? I was telling you: no!

As is quite obvious, since to the whole extent that the breast is found – in oral erotics – erotized,
it is insofar as it is something quite other than a breast, as you are not unaware, and someone after the lesson came, approaching me, to tell me: ‘Under these conditions, is the phallus phallic?’. Of course, not at all!

Or more exactly what must be said:

– it is insofar as it is the signifier phallus that comes as a revealing factor of the meaning of the signifying function at a certain stage,
– it is insofar as the phallus comes to the same place, on the symbolic function where the breast was,
– it is insofar as the subject constitutes itself as phallic, that the penis, it – which is inside the parenthesis of the set of objects that have reached, for the subject, the phallic stage – that the penis, can one say, not only is no more phallic than the breast is mammary, but that things are posed much more gravely at this level, namely that the penis, a real part of the body, falls under the blow of that threat which is called castration.

It is by reason of the signifying function of the phallus as such that the real penis falls under the blow of what was first apprehended in analytic experience as threat, namely the threat of castration.

So here is the path on which I am leading you. I am showing you here its goal and its aim. It is now a matter of traversing it step by step, in other words of reaching what, since our start this year, I am preparing and approaching little by little, namely: the privileged function of the phallus in the identification of the subject.

Let us clearly understand that in all this, namely in this that this year we are speaking of identification, namely in this that from a certain moment in Freud’s work, the question of identification comes to the foreground, comes to dominate, comes to rework the whole Freudian theory, it is insofar as – one almost blushes to have to say it – from a certain moment – for us after FREUD, for FREUD before us – the question of the subject poses itself as such, namely: ‘What is it that’:

– ‘What is there?’,
– ‘What functions?’,
– ‘What speaks?’,
– ‘What is it that… many other things besides’?

And it is insofar as one nevertheless really had to expect it – in a technique which is a technique, roughly speaking, of communication, of address from one to the other, and, to say it all, of relation – one nevertheless really had to know who it is that speaks, and to whom?

That is indeed why this year we are doing logic. I can do nothing about it; it is not a matter of knowing whether I like it or whether I dislike it. I do not dislike it. It may not displease others. But what is certain is that it is inevitable.

It is a matter of knowing into what logic this leads us. You have indeed been able to see that already I have shown you – I strive to be as short-circuiting as possible, I assure you that I am not playing truant – where we are situated with respect to formal logic, and that assuredly we are not without having our say in it.

I remind you of the little dial that I constructed for you for all useful purposes and to which we may perhaps have more than once the opportunity to return:

Unless this – by reason of the pace we are forced to maintain in order to arrive this year at our goal –
must remain for a few more months, or years, a suspended proposition for the ingenuity of those who take the trouble to return to what I teach you.

But surely, it is not only a matter of formal logic. Is it a matter of, and this is what has been called since KANT

• I mean in a well-constituted way since KANT – a transcendental logic, in other words the logic of the concept? Surely not that either! It is even rather striking to see to what point the notion of the concept is apparently absent from the functioning of our categories.

What we are doing, it is not at all worth our giving ourselves much trouble for the moment in order to give it a more precise pinning-down, it is a logic, of which first of all some say that I tried to constitute a sort of elastic logic, but in the end that does not suffice to constitute something very reassuring for the mind, we are doing a logic of the functioning of the signifier, for without this reference constituted as primary, fundamental, of the relation of the subject to the signifier, what I advance is that it is properly speaking unthinkable even that one should manage to situate where the error is into which all analysis gradually entered, and which consists precisely in this, that it did not make this critique of transcendental logic, in the Kantian sense, that the new facts it brings strictly impose.

This, I am going to confide to you, which has no historical importance in itself, but which I think I can nevertheless communicate to you by way of stimulation, this led me – during the time, short or long, during which I was separated from you and from our weekly meetings – led me to stick my nose back, not as I had done two years ago, into the Critique of Practical Reason but into the Critique of Pure Reason.

Chance having it that I had brought along – by forgetfulness – only my copy in German, I did not do the complete rereading, but only that of the chapter called ‘Introduction to the Transcendental Analytic’.

And although regretting that the some ten years during which I have been addressing myself to you have not had, I believe, much effect as to the spread among you of the study of German…
which does not fail to leave me always astonished, which is one of those little facts that sometimes make me reflect back to myself my own image as that of the character in a well-known surrealist film called Un chien andalou, an image which is that of a man who, by means of two ropes, hauls behind him a piano on which rest – without allusion – two dead donkeys
…with this difference, that at least those who already know German do not hesitate to reopen the chapter I designate for them in the Critique of Pure Reason: this will surely help them to center properly the kind of reversal that I am trying to articulate for you this year.

But in a certain sense – it is not a universal key but an indication – I think I can quite simply remind you that the essence lies in the radically other, decentered way in which I am trying to make you apprehend a notion which is the one that dominates the whole structuring of the categories in KANT.

In this he does nothing but put the purified point, the finished point, the final point, to what dominated philosophical thought until, in some sense, there, he brings it to completion in the function of Einheit which is the foundation of every synthesis, of ‘a priori synthesis’, as he expresses it, and which indeed seems to impose itself, from the time of its progression starting from Platonic mythology, as the necessary path:
– the ONE, the great ONE that dominates all thought, from PLATO to KANT,
– the One which for KANT, as synthetic function, is the very model of what in every a priori category brings with it, he says, the function of a norm, understand well: of a universal rule.

Well then, let us say, to add its sensitive point to what since the beginning of the year I have been articulating for you: if it is true that ‘the function of the ONE’ in identification, such as the analysis of Freudian experience structures and decomposes it, is that, not of Einheit, but that which I have tried to make you feel concretely since the beginning of the year as the original accent of what I called for you the unary trait.

That is to say, something quite other than the circle that gathers, on which in sum all logical formalization ends up at a level of rudimentary imaginary intuition: not the Eulerian circle but something quite other, namely, what I called for you a one¹. This trait, this unplaceable thing, this aporia for thought, which consists in this, that precisely the more it is purified, simplified, reduced to no matter what, with sufficient chopping-off of its appendages, it can end up being reduced to this: a 1.

What is essential, what makes the originality of this, of the existence of this unary trait and of its function, and of its introduction…
whereby, this is precisely what I leave in suspense, for it is not so clear that it is by man, if it is on one side possible, probable, in any case put into question by us that it is from there that man came out
…therefore, this ‘1’, its paradox is precisely this: it is that the more it resembles itself – I mean, the more everything that belongs to the diversity of resemblances is erased from it – the more it supports, the more it ‘1-carnates’ [wordplay on ‘incarnates’ replacing ‘in-’ with ‘1’] shall I say – if you will allow me this word – difference as such.

The reversal of the position around the 1 means that, from Kantian Einheit, we consider that we pass to Einzigkeit, to uniqueness expressed as such. If it is by this route, if I may say so, that I am trying – to borrow an expression from a title, I hope famous for you, of a literary improvisation by PICASSO – if it is by this route that I chose this year to try to do what I hope to bring you to do, namely to ‘catch desire by the tail’, if it is by this route, that is to say not by the first form of identification defined by FREUD, which is not easy to handle, that of Einverleihung, that of the consumption of the enemy, of the adversary, of the father, if I started from the second form of identification – namely from this function of the unary trait – it is obviously for this purpose.

But you see where the reversal is: it is that if this function…
I believe that this is the best term we have to take, because it is the most abstract,
it is the most supple, it is the most properly signifying: it is simply a capital F
…if the function that we give to the ‘1’ is no longer that of Einheit but that of Einzigkeit, it is that we have passed – which it would still be fitting that we not forget, which is the novelty of analysis – from the virtues of the norm to the virtues of the exception.

Something that you have retained at least a little, and for good reason: the tension of thought arranges itself with it by saying ‘the exception confirms the rule’. Like many stupidities, it is a profound stupidity; one simply needs to know how to peel it apart. Had I done nothing but make this stupidity completely luminous like one of those little beacons one sees on top of police cars, that would already be a small gain on the plane of logic. But obviously that is a side benefit. You will see it, especially if some among you… Perhaps some could go so far as to devote themselves, so far as to make in my place one day a little summary of the way in which Kantian analytic must be re-punctuated.

You can well imagine that there are the beginnings of all this: when KANT distinguishes the universal judgment and the particular judgment, and when he isolates ‘the singular judgment’ by showing its profound affinities with ‘the universal judgment’, I mean: what everyone had noticed before him, but by showing that it is not enough to group them together, insofar as ‘the singular judgment’ does indeed have its independence, there is there something like the waiting stone, the beginning of this reversal of which I am speaking to you. This is only one example.
There are many other things that begin this reversal in KANT. What is curious is that it was not done earlier, even.

It is evident that what I was alluding to before you, in passing, the time before last, namely the aspect that so scandalized Mr. JESPERSEN, linguist – which proves that linguists are not at all endowed with any infallibility – namely that there would be some paradox in KANT placing negation under the heading of categories designating qualities, namely as second moment, if one may say so, of the categories of quality:
the first being reality, the second being negation, and the third being limitation.

This thing that surprises, and by which it surprises us that it greatly surprises this linguist, namely Mr. JESPERSEN, in this very long work on negation that he published in the Annals of the Danish Academy. One is all the more surprised because this long article on negation is precisely made to—in sum from beginning to end—show us that linguistically negation is something that is sustained only by, if I may say so, a perpetual overbidding. It is therefore not something so simple as to place it under the heading of quantity where it would purely and simply be confused with what it is in quantity, namely zero. But precisely, I have already indicated enough to you on this point: those whom it interests, I give them the reference, Jespersen’s great work is truly something considerable.

But if you open the Ernout and Meillet Dictionary of Latin Etymology, referring simply to the entry ‘ne’, you will perceive the historical complexity of the problem of the functioning of negation, namely that profound ambiguity which means that after having been this primitive function of discordance on which I insisted, at the same time as on its original nature, it still always has to lean on something which is precisely of this nature of the 1, as we are trying to grasp it closely here: that negation is not a zero: never, linguistically, but a ‘not one’.

To the point that the only Latin ‘non’, for example—to illustrate what you can find in this work published at the Danish Academy during the war of 1914, and for that reason very difficult to find—the Latin ‘non’ itself, which seems to be the simplest form of negation in the world, is already a ‘ne oinom’; in the form of ‘unum’ it is already a ‘not one’.
And after a certain time one forgets that it is a ‘not one’, and one adds yet another ‘one’ after it.

And the whole history of negation is the history of this consumption by something which is—Where? That is precisely what we are trying to pin down—the function of the subject as such.

That is why PICHON’s remarks are very interesting, which show us that in French one sees the two elements of negation functioning so clearly—the relation of ‘ne’ with ‘pas’—that one can say that French, indeed, has this privilege, not unique moreover among languages, of showing that there is no true negation in French. What is curious, moreover, is that he does not notice that if things are thus, that must go a little further than the field of the French domain, if one may so express oneself.

It is indeed very easy, on all sorts of forms, to notice that it must necessarily be the same everywhere, given that the function of the subject is not suspended down to the root from the diversity of languages. It is very easy to notice that ‘not’, at a certain moment in the evolution of the English language, is something like ‘naught’.

Let us go back, so that I may reassure you that we are not losing our aim. Let us start again from last year, from SOCRATES, from ALCIBIADES and all the gang who, I hope, at that moment provided your amusement.
It is a matter of conjoining this logical reversal concerning the function of the 1 with something with which we have long been occupied, namely: desire.

Since, given the time that I have not spoken to you about it, it is possible that things may have become a little blurry for you, I am going to make a very small reminder, which I think is just the moment to make in this exposition this year, concerning this. You remember—it is a discursive fact—that it is through that that I introduced, last year, the question of identification: it is properly speaking when I approached what, concerning the narcissistic relation, must be constituted for us as a consequence of the equivalence brought by FREUD between narcissistic libido and object libido.

You know how I symbolized it at the time, a little intuitive diagram, I mean something that can be represented, a schema, not a schema in the Kantian sense. KANT is a very good reference; in French, it is gray.
Messrs. TREMESAYGUES and PACAUD nevertheless accomplished this tour de force of rendering the reading of the Critique of Pure Reason—of which it is absolutely not unthinkable to say that, from a certain angle, one can read it as an erotic book—into something absolutely monotonous and dusty.

Perhaps, thanks to my commentaries, you will manage, even in French, to restore to it that sort of spice of which it is not exaggerated to say that it contains it. In any case I had always let myself be persuaded that in German it was badly written, because first of all the Germans, except some, have the reputation of writing badly. That is not true: the Critique of Pure Reason is as well written as FREUD’s books, and that is no small thing. The schema is the following:

It was a matter of what FREUD speaks to us about, at this level of the Introduction to Narcissism, namely: that we love the other with the same humid substance that is that of which we are the reservoir, which is called libido, and that it is insofar as it is here ¹, that it can be there ², that is to say surrounding, drowning, wetting the object opposite. The reference of love to the humid is not mine; it is in the Symposium that we commented on last year.

The moral of this metaphysics of love, since that is what is at issue, the fundamental element of the Liebesbedingung, of the condition of love—the moral, in a certain sense I do not love…
what is called loving, what we call here loving, by way of also knowing what remains beyond love, thus what is called loving in a certain way
…I love only my body, even when this love, I transfer it onto the body of the other.

Of course, there always remains a good dose of it on mine! It is even up to a certain point indispensable, if only, in the extreme case, at the level of what must indeed function auto-erotically, namely my penis, to adopt—for the sake of simplification—the androcentric point of view. This simplification has no inconvenience, as you are going to see, since that is not what interests us. What interests us is the phallus.

So, I proposed to you—implicitly, if not explicitly, in the sense that it is even more explicit now than last year—I proposed to you to define, in relation to what I love in others which, for its part, is subject to this hydraulic condition of equivalence of libido, namely that when it rises on one side, it rises on the other side as well.

What I desire—what is different from what I experience—is what, in the form of the pure reflection of what remains of me invested in any state of affairs, is precisely what is lacking to the body of the other, insofar as it, for its part, is constituted by this impregnation with the humid of love. From the point of view of desire, at the level of desire, this whole body of the other, however little I love it, has value only, precisely, through what it lacks.

And it is very precisely for that that I was going to say that heterosexuality is possible. For one must understand one another:
if it is true—as analysis teaches us—that it is the fact that the woman is effectively, from the penile point of view, castrated, which frightens some…
if what we are saying there is not nonsensical, and it is not nonsensical, since it is obvious: one encounters it at every turn, in the neurotic, I insist, I say that it is indeed there that we discovered it. I mean that we are sure of it, for the reason that it is there that the mechanisms operate, with such refinement that there is no other possible hypothesis to explain the way in which the neurotic institutes, constitutes his desire, hysterical or obsessional. Which will lead us this year to articulate completely for you the meaning of the hysteric’s desire, as of the obsessional’s desire, and very quickly, because I will say that, up to a certain point, it is urgent
…if it is thus in such-and-such a one, just as much in others as in the neurotic: it is even more conscious in the homosexual than in the neurotic. The homosexual tells you himself that it nevertheless affects him, and very painfully, to be before this tailless pubis. It is precisely because of that that we cannot rely on it so much, and moreover we are right to; that is why my reference, I take it from the neurotic.

All this having been said, it still remains that there are still quite a lot of people whom that does not frighten!
And that consequently it is not crazy…
let us simply say: I am indeed forced to approach the thing like that, since after all no one has said it like that; when I have said it to you two or three times, I think that it will end up becoming quite evident to you
…it is not crazy to think that what, in beings who can have a normal, satisfying—I mean—relation of desire with the partner of the opposite sex, not only does that not frighten him, but it is precisely that which is interesting, namely that it is not because the penis is not there, that the phallus is not there. I would even say: on the contrary!

What allows one to find again, at a certain number of crossroads, in particular this:
that what desire seeks is less, in the other, the desirable than the desiring, that is to say what is lacking to him. And here again I beg you to recall that this is the first aporia, the first b.a.-ba [elementary ABC/primer; also a pun with ba] of the question, such as it begins to be articulated when you open this famous Symposium which seems to have traversed the centuries only so that theology might be made around it. I am trying to make it something else, namely to make you notice that in every line one effectively speaks there of what is at issue, namely Eros.

I desire the other as desiring. And when I say as desiring, I have not even said, I have expressly not said as desiring me.
For it is I who desire, and desiring desire, this desire could not be desire of me except if I find myself again at this turning, there where I am, of course, that is to say if I love myself in the other, in other words if it is myself that I love. But then I abandon desire.

What I am in the process of accentuating is this limit, this frontier that separates desire from love. Which does not mean, of course, that they are not conditioned by all sorts of bits and pieces. That indeed is the whole drama, as I think that it must be the first remark that you should make to yourselves about your analyst’s experience, it being understood that it happens, as with many other subjects at this level of human reality, that it is often the ordinary man who is closer to what I would on occasion call ‘the bone’. What is to be desired is obviously always what is lacking, and that is precisely why in French desire is called ‘desiderium’, which means regret.

And this too joins what last year I accentuated as being that major point aimed at from the outset by the ethics of passion, which is to make, I do not say that synthesis, but that conjunction whose question is whether precisely it is not structurally impossible, whether it does not remain an ideal point outside the limits of the outline, which I called the metaphor of true love, which is the famous equation, ἔρόν [éron] over ἐρώμενος [éromenos], ἔρόν [éron] substituting itself… the desiring substituting itself for the desired at that point, and by this metaphor equivalent to the perfection of the lover, as it is likewise articulated in the Symposium, namely that reversal of all the property of what one may call ‘natural lovability’, the wrenching in love which puts everything one can oneself be of the desirable out of reach of cherishing, if I may so say.

This ‘noli me amare’, which is the true secret, the true last word of the ideal passion of that courtly love whose term it is not for nothing that I placed—so little current, I mean so perfectly confusional as it has become—on the horizon of what I had articulated last year, preferring rather to substitute for it, as more current, more exemplary, that order of experience—this one not at all ideal but perfectly accessible—which is ours under the name of transference, and which I illustrated for you, showed you as already illustrated in the Symposium, under this altogether paradoxical form of SOCRATES’ properly analytic interpretation, after the long madly exhibitionistic declaration, in short the analytic rule applied at full blast to what is ALCIBIADES’ discourse.

No doubt you were able to retain the irony implicitly contained in this, which is not hidden in the text, namely that the one whom SOCRATES desires on the spot, for the beauty of the demonstration, is AGATHON. In other words the nonsense-ographer [déconnographe: coinage from déconner, to talk nonsense], the pure spirit, the one who speaks of love in such a way… as one doubtless ought to speak of it, comparing it to the peace of the waves, in a frankly comic tone, but without doing it on purpose, and even without noticing it.

In other words, what does SOCRATES mean? Why would SOCRATES not love AGATHON, if precisely stupidity in him—as in Monsieur TESTE—is precisely what is lacking to him? ‘Stupidity is not my strong point.’
It is a teaching, for that means, and this then is articulated in so many letters to ALCIBIADES:

‘My handsome friend, keep talking, for it is that one, you too, whom you love. It is for AGATHON, this whole long discourse. Only the difference is that you do not know what is at issue. Your strength, your mastery, your wealth deceive you.’

And indeed, we know enough about ALCIBIADES’ life to know that few things were lacking to him of the order of the most extreme of what one can have. In his way, entirely different from SOCRATES’, he too was from nowhere [de nulle part/atopos-like outsideness], moreover received with open arms wherever he went, people always too happy with such an acquisition.
A certain ἀτοπία [atopia] was his lot: he was simply too cumbersome. When he arrived in Sparta, he simply found that he was doing the king of Sparta a great honor—the thing is reported in PLUTARCH, articulated plainly—by making a child with his wife, for example—it is to give you the style—that was the least of things.
There are some who are hard men; to finish with him, they had to surround him with fire and bring him down with arrows.

But for SOCRATES, that is not the important thing. The important thing is to say: ‘ALCIBIADES, concern yourself a little with your soul.’
Which, believe me, I am quite convinced, does not at all have the same meaning in SOCRATES as it took on following the Plotinian development of the notion of the One. If SOCRATES replies to him: ‘I know nothing, except perhaps what concerns the nature of eros’

It is indeed that SOCRATES’ eminent function is to be the first who conceived what the true nature of desire was.
And it is exactly for that reason that, from this revelation down to FREUD, desire as such in its function…
desire insofar as it is the very essence of man, says SPINOZA—and everyone knows what that means, man, in SPINOZA, it is the subject, it is the essence of the subject—that desire remained, during this respectable number of centuries, a function half, three quarters, four fifths, occulted in the history of knowledge.

The subject at issue, the one whose trace we follow, is the subject of desire and not the subject of love, for the simple reason that one is not the subject of love, one is ordinarily, one is normally its victim. That is quite different.
In other words, love is a natural force. That is what justifies the point of view called ‘biologizing’ in FREUD. Love is a reality. That is why moreover I tell you: ‘the gods are real.’
Love is APHRODITE who strikes; they knew that very well in Antiquity; it surprised no one.

You will permit me a very pretty pun. It is one of my most divine obsessionals, very advanced in his analysis, who made it to me a few days ago: ‘L’affreux doute de l’hermaphrodite’ [the dreadful doubt of the hermaphrodite / sound-play sliding from Aphrodite to affreux doute]. I mean that I cannot do less than think of it, since obviously things have happened that have made us slide from Aphrodite to dreadful doubt.
I mean: there is much to be said in favor of Christianity. I cannot support it too strongly, and quite especially with regard to the bringing-out of desire as such. I do not want to deflower the subject too much, but I am quite resolved on that point to advance to you every possible shade of it, that all the same, in order to obtain this laudable end above all others, that poor love was put in the position of becoming a commandment—that is nevertheless to have paid dearly for the inauguration of this search which is that of desire.

We, of course, all the same, we analysts, ought to know a little how to summarize the question on the subject, that what we have indeed advanced concerning love is that it is the source of all ills! (i.l.l.s.). Maternal love, etc. It makes you laugh! … The slightest conversation is there to demonstrate to you that a mother’s love is the cause of everything. I do not say that one is always right, but it is all the same along that path that we ride the carousel every day. That is what results from our daily experience.

Therefore, it is well established that, concerning the search for what it is, in analysis, that the subject is—namely what it is fitting to identify it with, if only in an alternating way—it can only be a matter of that of desire. That is where I shall leave you today, not without making you remark that although, of course, we are in a position to do it much better than it was done by the thinker I am going to name, we are not so much in no man’s land.

I mean that, immediately after KANT, there is someone who noticed it, who is called HEGEL, whose whole Phenomenology of Spirit starts from there: from Begierde [desire]. He had absolutely only one fault, which is to have no knowledge—although one can designate its place—of what the mirror stage was. Hence this irreducible confusion which puts everything under the angle of the master-slave relation, and which renders this approach inoperative, and which means that all things have to be taken up again from there. Let us hope, as for us, that favored by the genius of our master, we shall be able to settle in a more satisfactory way the question of the subject of desire.