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(All parts in English)

One may find that I am occupying myself here a bit too much with what is called—God damn this designation—the great philosophers.

It is because perhaps, not they alone, but they eminently, articulate what one may well call a quest, pathetic in that it always returns—if one knows how to consider it through all its detours, its more or less sublime objects—to that radical knot that I am trying, for you, to untie, namely: desire.

This is what I hope: to restore to the quest, if you are willing to follow me, decisively its property as an unsurpassable point, unsurpassable in the very sense I mean when I tell you that each of those who may be called by this name of ‘great philosopher’ cannot, on a certain point, be surpassed.

I believe I am entitled to confront, with your assistance, such a task insofar as desire is our business as psychoanalysts. I also believe I am required to devote myself to it, and to require you to do so with me, because it is only by rectifying our aim with respect to desire that we can maintain analytic technique in its primary function: the word ‘primary’ having to be understood in the sense of first to appear in history. At the outset it was not in doubt: a function of truth.

Of course, it is this function that calls upon us to question it, this function, at a more radical level. It is the one I am trying to show you by articulating for you this, which is at the heart of analytic experience: that we are enslaved, as men, I mean: as desiring beings, whether we know it or not, whether or not we believe we want it, to this function of truth.

For, need it be recalled, the conflicts, the impasses, which are the material of our praxis, can be objectified only by making intervene in their play the place of the subject as such, insofar as bound, as subject, in the structure of experience. That is the meaning of identification, insofar as such it is defined by FREUD.

Nothing is more exact, nothing is more demanding than the calculation of the subjective conjuncture when one has found in it what I can call, in the proper sense of the term, in the sense in which it is used in KANT, practical reason. I prefer to call it that rather than to use the ‘operative’ slant, because of what this term ‘operative’ has implied for some time now: a sort of evasion of the ground.

Recall, on this subject, what I taught you two years ago about this practical reason, insofar as it concerns desire: SADE is closer to it than KANT, even though SADE—almost mad, one might say, from his vision—can be understood only by being, on that occasion, referred to the measure of KANT, as I attempted to do. Recall what I said to you about the striking analogy between: the total demand for the freedom of jouissance in SADE, and the universal rule of Kantian conduct.

The function on which desire is founded, for our experience, makes manifest that it has nothing to do with what KANT distinguishes as the Wohlen, opposing it to the Gute and to the good, let us say with well-being, with the useful. This leads us to notice that it goes further: that this function of desire, it has nothing to do, I shall say, in general, with what KANT calls—so as to relegate it to the second rank in the rules of conduct—the pathological.

Therefore, for those who do not remember well in what sense KANT employs this term, for whom this could produce a misunderstanding, I shall try to translate it by saying, the protopathic, or again more broadly, what there is in the too-human human experience of limits linked to convenience, to comfort, to alimentary concession; it goes further, it goes so far as to imply tissue thirst itself.

Let us not forget the role, the function that I give to mental anorexia, as to that in whose first effects we can feel this function of desire, and the role I gave it by way of example to illustrate the distinction between desire and need. So far from it: ‘convenience, comfort, concession’? Will you not tell me that, no doubt, not ‘compromise,’ since we talk about it all the time.

But the compromises it has to make, this function of desire, are of another order than those linked, for example, to the existence of a community founded on vital association, since it is under this form that most commonly we have to evoke, observe, explain the function of compromise.

You know well that at the point we are at, if we follow Freudian thought through to the end, these compromises concern the relation of a death instinct with a life instinct, both of which are no less strange to consider in their dialectical relations than in their definition.

To set out again, as I always do, from some point of each discourse that I address to you weekly, I remind you that this death instinct is not a gnawing worm, a parasite, a wound, not even a principle of contrariety, something like a sort of yin opposed to yang, an element of alternation.

It is, for FREUD, clearly articulated: a principle that envelops the entire detour of life, which life, which detour, find their meaning only in rejoining it. To put it plainly, it is not without scandalous motive that some turn away from it, for here we surely are turned back, returned—despite all positivist principles, it is true—to the most absurd extrapolation, properly speaking metaphysical, and in contempt of all acquired rules of prudence. The death instinct in FREUD is presented to us as that which, for us I think, in its place, is situated as equal to what we shall call here the signifier of life[ϕ], since what FREUD tells us of it is that the essential of life, reinscribed within this framework of the death instinct, is nothing other than the design, necessitated by the pleasure principle, to realize, to repeat the same detour always in order to return to the inanimate.

The definition of the life instinct in FREUD—it is not vain to return to it, to re-accentuate it—is no less atopic, no less strange, in this that it is always fitting to re-emphasize: that it is reduced to eros, to libido. Observe carefully what that means; I shall accentuate it by a comparison in a moment, with the Kantian position. But already you see here to what point of contact we are reduced, concerning the relation to the body: it is a matter of a choice.

And so evident that this, in theory, comes to materialize itself in these figures of which one must not forget that at once they are new, and what difficulties, what aporias, indeed what impasses they oppose us with in justifying them, indeed in situating them, in defining them exactly. I think that the function of the phallus, in being that around which this eros, this libido, comes to be articulated, sufficiently indicates what here I mean to point out.

Taken together, all these figures, to take up the term I just employed, that we have to handle concerning this eros, what do they have to do with, what do they have in common, for example—to make one feel the distance—with the concerns of an embryologist of whom one still cannot say that he has nothing to do, he, with the life instinct when he questions himself about what an organizer is in growth, in the mechanism of cell division, the segmentation of the layers, morphological differentiation?

One is astonished to find somewhere under FREUD’s pen that analysis led to some biological discovery! This is found sometimes—as far as I remember—in the Abriss. What fly stung him at that moment? I ask myself what biological discovery was made in the light of analysis?

But likewise, since it is a matter of pointing out there the limitation, the elective point of our contact with the body, insofar of course as it is the support, the presence of this life, is it not striking that to reintegrate into our calculations the function of conservation of this body, it is necessary that we pass through the ambiguity of the notion of narcissism, sufficiently indicated, I think, so as not to have to articulate otherwise the very structure of the narcissistic concept and the equivalence that is placed there in object-bonding, sufficiently indicated, I say, by the accent placed, from the Introduction to Narcissism onward, on the function of pain, and from the first article, insofar as—reread this excellently translated article—pain there is not a signal of damage but a phenomenon of auto-erotism, as not long ago I recalled, in a familiar conversation, and regarding a personal experience, to someone who listens to me: the experience that one pain erases another. I mean that in the present one suffers badly from two pains at once: one gains the upper hand, makes the other be forgotten, as if libidinal cathexis, even on one’s own body, showed itself there subject to the same law that I shall call partiality, which motivates the relation to the world of the objects of desire.

Pain is not simply—as the technicians of its nature say—exquisite, it is privileged, it can be fetish.
This to lead us to the point that I have already, during a recent conference, not here[De ce que j’enseigne, 23-01-1962], articulated: that it is current in our discussion to call into question what the subjective organization designated by the primary process means, what it means as to what is and what is not of its relation to the body. It is there that, if I may say so, the reference, the analogy with Kantian investigation will serve us.

I apologize with all the humility one may wish before those who, from Kantian texts, have an experience that gives them the right to some marginal observation, when I go a little quickly in my reference to the essential of what Kantian exploration brings us. We cannot linger here over those meanders, perhaps at certain points: at the expense of rigor? But is it not also that by following them too much, we would lose something of what is massive, on certain points, in their reliefs? I am speaking of Kantian Critique, and specifically of the one called the Critique of Pure Reason.

From then on, do I not have the right to hold for a moment to this, which for anyone who will simply have read once or twice with enlightened attention the said Critique of Pure Reason, this, moreover which is contested by no commentator, that the categories called of Pure Reason certainly require, in order to function as such, the foundation of what is called pure intuition, which presents itself as the normative form, I go further: obligatory, of all sensible apprehensions: I say of all, whatever they may be.

It is in this that this intuition, which is ordered into categories of space and time, finds itself designated by KANT as excluded from what one may call the originality of sensible experience, of Sinnlichkeit, whence alone can come out, can arise any affirmation whatsoever of palpable reality. These affirmations of reality nonetheless remaining, in their articulation, subject to the categories of said pure reason without which they could not, not only be stated, but not even be perceived.

From then on, everything is suspended on the principle of this so-called synthetic function—which means nothing other than unifying—which is, one might also say, the common term of all categorical functions, common term that is ordered and decomposed in the table very suggestively articulated that KANT gives of it: or rather in the two tables he gives of it: the forms of the categories and the forms of judgment, which grasps that in right—insofar as it marks in the relation to reality the spontaneity of a subject—this pure intuition is absolutely required.

The Kantian schema can be reduced to Beharrlichkeit, to permanence, to holding, shall I say, empty, but the possible holding of anything whatsoever in time. This pure intuition in right is absolutely required in KANT for categorical functioning, but after all, the existence of a body, insofar as it is the foundation of Sinnlichkeit, of sensoriality, is not required at all. No doubt, for what can validly be called a relation to reality, this will not take us far since, as KANT stresses, the use of these categories of understanding will concern only what he will call empty concepts.

But when we say that this will not take us far, it is because we are philosophers, and even Kantians.
But as soon as we are no longer so, which is the common case, everyone knows precisely on the contrary that it leads very far, since all the effort of philosophy consists in countering a whole series of illusions, of Schwärmereien, as one expresses it in philosophical language, and particularly Kantian, of bad dreams…
at the same period, GOYA tells us: ‘The sleep of reason engenders monsters’
…whose theologizing effects show us clearly the exact opposite, namely that it leads very far, since through a thousand fanaticisms it leads quite simply to bloody violences, which moreover continue quite calmly, despite the presence of philosophers, to constitute, it must be said, an important part of the fabric of human history.

That is why it is not indifferent to show where the frontier effectively passes of what is efficacious in experience, despite all theoretical purifications and moral rectifications. It is entirely clear in any case that there is no reason to admit as tenable KANT’s transcendental aesthetic, despite what I called the unsurpassable character of the service it renders us in his critique, and I hope to make it felt precisely from what I am going to show should be substituted for it.

Because precisely, if something should be substituted for it and it functions while preserving something of the structure he articulated, that is what proves that he at least glimpsed, that he profoundly glimpsed the said thing.
Thus the Kantian aesthetic is absolutely not tenable, for the simple reason that it is, for him, fundamentally supported by a mathematical argumentation tied to what one may call the ‘geometrizing epoch of mathematics.’ It is insofar as Euclidean geometry is uncontested at the moment when KANT pursues his meditation that it is sustainable for him that there are in the spatio-temporal order certain intuitive evidences.
One need only bend down, open his text, to pluck examples of what may now appear, to a moderately advanced student in mathematical initiation, immediately refutable.

When he gives us, as an example of an evidence that does not even need to be demonstrated, that ‘Through two points only one straight line can pass,’ everyone knows, insofar as the mind has in sum quite easily bent itself to imagination, to the pure intuition of a curved space by the metaphor of the sphere, that through two points there can pass much more than one straight line, and even an infinity of straight lines.

When he gives us, in this table of Nichts, of ‘nothings,’ as an example of the leerer Gegenstand ohne Begriff, of the empty object without concept, the following example, which is rather enormous: the illustration of a rectilinear figure that would have only two sides. There is something that may seem, perhaps to KANT, and no doubt not to everyone in his time, as the very example of the nonexistent object, and on top of that unthinkable. But the slightest use, I would even say of a quite elementary geometer’s experience, the search for a trajectory described by a point linked to a rolling curve, what is called a Pascal cycloid, will show you that a rectilinear figure, insofar as it properly calls into question the permanence of the contact of two lines or two sides, is something that is truly primordial, essential to every kind of geometrical understanding, that there is indeed conceptual articulation there, and even a quite definable object.

Likewise, even with this affirmation that nothing is fecund except the synthetic judgment, can it still, after all the effort of logicization of mathematics, be considered subject to revision. The alleged infecundity of the ‘analytic a priori judgment,’ namely of what we shall call quite simply ‘the purely combinatory use’ of elements extracted from the primary positing of a certain number of definitions, that this combinatory use has in itself a proper fecundity, this is what the most recent, most advanced critique of the foundations of arithmetic[Frege] for example, can certainly demonstrate.

That there may be in the last instance, in the field of mathematical creation, a residuum obligatorily indemonstrable, that is no doubt what the same logicizing exploration seems to have led us to, Gödel’s theorem, with a rigor hitherto unrefuted, but it remains no less the case that it is by the path of formal demonstration that this certainty can be acquired. And when I say formal, I mean by the most expressly formalist procedures of logicizing combinatorics. What does that mean?

Is it therefore the case that this pure intuition, such as KANT, in terms of a critical progress concerning the forms required of science, that this pure intuition teaches us nothing? It certainly teaches us to discern its coherence, and also its possible disjunction from the so-called synthetic exercise, from the unifying function of the term of unity insofar as constituting in every categorical formation, and—once the ambiguities of this function of unity have been shown—to show us to what choice, to what reversal we are led under the solicitation of various experiences.

Ours here, obviously, alone matters to us. But is it not more significant than anecdotes, accidents, even exploits, at the precise point where one may remark the thinness of the point of conjunction between categorical functioning and sensible experience in KANT—the bottleneck point, if I may say so—where the question may be raised: whether the existence of a body—of course entirely required in fact—could not be called into question in the Kantian perspective, as to the fact that it is required in right?

Is there not something made to make this question present to you, in the situation of that lost child who is the cosmonaut of our time in his capsule, at the moment when he is in a state of weightlessness? I shall not dwell on this remark: that the tolerance—which it seems, no doubt, has never yet been tested for very long, but still—the surprising tolerance of the organism to the state of weightlessness is still made to make us pose a question.

Since after all dreamers question themselves about the origin of life, and among them there are those who say that it all at once began to fructify on our globe, but others that it must have come by a germ from astral spaces—I could not tell you how indifferent this sort of speculation is to me—all the same, from the moment when an organism, whether human, or that of a cat, or of the least lord of the living kingdom, seems so well in the state of weightlessness, is it not precisely essential to life, let us simply say that it be in some way in a position of equipollence with respect to every possible effect of the gravitational field?

Of course, the cosmonaut is always within gravitational effects, only it is a gravitation that does not weigh on him. Well then, where he is in his state of weightlessness, enclosed as you know in his capsule, and still more supported, padded on all sides by the folds of said capsule, what does he carry with him of an intuition, pure or not, but phenomenologically definable, of space and time?

The question is all the more interesting since you know that since KANT we have all the same come back to this. I mean that exploration, rightly qualified as phenomenological, has all the same brought our attention back to the fact that what one may call the naive dimensions of intuition, spatial ones namely, are not—even for an intuition so purified as one thinks it—so easily reducible, and that up, down, indeed left retain not only all their importance in fact, but even in right for the most critical thought.

What has become of it for GAGARIN, or TITOV, or GLENN, of his intuition of space and time, in moments where surely he had, as they say, other things on his mind? That would perhaps not be altogether uninteresting, while he is up there, to have with him a little phenomenological dialogue. In these experiments, naturally, it was considered that this was not the most urgent thing. There is, besides, time to return to it.

What I note is that, whatever the case may be concerning these points on which we, all the same, may be rather pressed to have answers from Erfahrung, from experience, him in any case, that did not prevent him from being entirely capable of what I shall call touching buttons, for it is clear, at least for the last [Glenn], that the affair was commanded at a given moment, and even decided from within. He therefore remained in full possession of the means of an efficacious combinatorics.

No doubt his pure reason was powerfully equipped with a whole complex assemblage that certainly made up the final efficacy of the experiment. It remains no less the case that, for all that we can suppose…
and as far as we can suppose the effect of combinatory construction in the apparatus, and even in the trainings, in the repeated instructions, in the exhausting formation imposed on the pilot himself, however far we suppose it integrated into what one may call the already constructed automatism of the machine
…it is enough that he have to push a button in the right direction and knowing why, for it to become extraordinarily significant that such an exercise of combinatory reason be possible: in conditions of which perhaps this is still far from the extreme attained of what we can suppose as constraint and paradox imposed on the conditions of natural motricity.

But that already we can see that things are pushed very far by this double effect, characterized on the one hand by the liberation of said motricity from the effects of weight, on which one may say that in natural conditions, it is not saying too much that it relies on this motricity, and that correlatively things function only insofar as said motor subject is literally imprisoned, taken within the shell that alone ensures the containment, at least at such a moment of flight, of the organization in what one may call its elementary solidarity.

Here then is this body become, if I may say so, a sort of mollusk, but torn away from its vegetative implantation.
This shell becomes such a dominant guarantee of the maintenance of this solidarity, of this unity, that one is not far from grasping that it is in it, in the end, that it consists, that one sees there, in a sort of externalized relation of the function of this unity, as the true container of what one may call the living pulp.

The contrast of this bodily position with this pure function of a reasoning machine, this pure reason that remains all that is efficacious and all from which we expect any efficacy whatsoever within, is indeed here something exemplary, which gives all its importance to the question I posed a moment ago:
of the conservation or non-conservation of spatio-temporal intuition, in the sense in which I sufficiently supported it by what I shall call ‘the false geometry of Kant’s time’: is it, this intuition, still there?

I have a strong tendency to think that it is still there. It is still there, this ‘false geometry,’ as stupid and as idiotic, because it is indeed produced as a sort of ‘reflection of combinatory activity,’ but a reflection that is no less refutable, for—as the experience of the mathematicians’ meditation has proved—on this ground we are no less torn away from gravity than in that place up there where we follow our cosmonaut.

In other words, that this purportedly ‘pure’ ‘intuition’ has come out of the illusion of decoys attached to the combinatory function itself, entirely possible to dissipate, even if it proves more or less tenacious.
It is, if I may say so, only the shadow of number.

But of course, in order to be able to affirm that, one must have founded number itself elsewhere than in this intuition.
Besides, assuming that our cosmonaut does not preserve it, this ‘Euclidean intuition of space’—and the much more debatable one of time that is appended to it in KANT, namely something that can be projected onto a line—what will that prove? It will simply prove that he is all the same capable of pressing correctly on the buttons without resorting to their schematism.

It will simply prove that what is already refutable here is refuted up there in intuition itself!
Which, you will tell me, perhaps somewhat reduces the scope of the question we have to ask him.

And that is precisely why there are other more important questions to ask him, which are precisely ours, and particularly this one, what becomes, in the state of weightlessness, of a sexual drive that is accustomed to manifesting itself while seeming to go against. And whether the fact that he is entirely stuck to the inside of a machine—I mean, in the material sense of the word—which incarnates, manifests, in so evident a way the phallic fantasy, does not alienate him, particularly in his relation to the natural weightlessness functions of male desire?
There is another question into which I believe we quite legitimately have our nose to put.

To return to number, about which it may surprise you that I make it such an element obviously detached from pure intuition, from sensible experience, I am not going here to give you a seminar on the Foundations of arithmetic—FREGE’s English title, to which I ask you to refer because it is a book as fascinating as the Martian Chronicles, where you will see that in any case it is evident that there is no possible empirical deduction of the function of number—
but since I have no intention of giving you a course on this subject, I shall content myself, because it is within our topic, with making you notice that for example the five points thus arranged that you can see on the face of a die, this is indeed a figure that can symbolize the number five, but that you would be quite wrong to believe that in any way whatsoever the number five is given by this figure.

As I do not wish to tire you by making infinite detours, I think the shortest way is to have you imagine a conditioning experiment that you would be in the process of pursuing on an animal—it is fairly frequent—in order to see this faculty of discernment—in this animal—in such a situation constituted by goals to be reached, suppose that you give it various forms.

Beside this arrangement thing that constitutes a figure, you would in no case expect, from any animal, that it react in the same way to the following figure which is nevertheless also a five, or to this one which is no less so, namely the form of the pentagon. If ever an animal reacted in the same way to these three figures, well then you would be dumbfounded, and very precisely for the reason that you would then be absolutely convinced that the animal knows how to count. Now you know that it does not know how to count. That is not a proof, certainly, of the non-empirical origin of the function of number.
 

I repeat it to you, this deserves a detailed discussion, of which after all the only true, sensible, serious reason I have
to strongly advise you to take an interest in it, is that it is surprising to see how very few mathematicians
—even though of course only mathematicians have treated them well—really take an interest in it.
It will therefore be on your part, if you take an interest in it, a work of mercy: visiting the sick, taking an interest
in questions of little interest, is that not also, in some respect, our function?

There you will see that in any case unity and zero, so important for every rational constitution of number, are
what is most resistant, of course, to every attempt at an experimental genesis of number, and very especially
if one intends to give a homogeneous definition of number as such, reducing to nothing all the geneses
one may attempt to give of number starting from a collection and from the abstraction of difference starting from diversity.

Here takes on its value the fact that I was led, by the straight line of Freudian progression, to articulate in a way that seemed necessary to me the function of the unary trait, insofar as it makes appear the genesis of difference in an operation that one may say is situated along the line of an ever-increasing simplification: that it is in an aim which is the one that results in the line of tally marks, that is to say in the repetition of the apparently identical, that there is created, disengaged what I call, not the symbol, but entry into the real as inscribed signifier—and that is what the term primacy of writing means there: entry into the real, it is the form of this repeated trait by the primitive hunter—of absolute difference
insofar as it is there.

Likewise, you will have no trouble—you will find them in reading FREGE[1848-1925], although FREGE
does not engage on this path, for lack of a sufficient theory of the signifier—to find in FREGE’s text
that the best analysts of the function of unity, namely JEVONS[1835-1882] and SCHRÖDER [1841-1902],
have placed exactly the emphasis, in the same way I do, on the function of the unary trait.

That is what makes me say that what we have here to articulate is that by reversing, if I may say so, the polarity of this function of unity, by abandoning unifying unity, Einheit, for distinctive unity, Einzigkeit, I lead you to the point
of posing the question of defining, of articulating step by step the solidarity of the status of the subject insofar as linked to this unary trait,
with the fact that this subject is constituted in its structure where the sexual drive, among all the afferents of the body,
has its privileged function.

On the first fact: the linkage of the subject to this unary trait, I shall put the final point today, considering the path sufficiently articulated, by reminding you that this fact so important in our experience, brought forward by FREUD,
of what he calls narcissism of minor differences, is the same thing as what I call the function of the unary trait,
for it is nothing other than the fact that it is from a small difference—and to say ‘small difference,’ that means nothing other than this absolute difference of which I speak to you, this difference detached from every possible comparison—it is from
this small difference, insofar as it is the same thing as the big I, the ego ideal, that every narcissistic aim can be accommodated: the subject constituted or not as bearer of this unary trait.

This is what allows us to take today our first step in what will constitute the object of our next lesson, namely the resumption of the functions: privation, frustration, castration. It is by taking them up again first, that we shall be able to glimpse where and how, the question is posed of the relation of the world of the signifier with what we call the sexual drive, privilege, prevalence of the erotic function of the body in the constitution of the subject.

Let us approach it a little, let us nibble at it, this question, starting from privation, because it is the simplest.
There is at least a[-a] in the world, there is an object missing from its place, which is indeed the most absurd conception of the world, if one gives its meaning to the word real. What can possibly be missing in the real?

Likewise it is because of the difficulty of this question that you still see, in KANT, trailing,
if I may say so, well beyond pure intuition, all those old remnants that hinder it with theology,
and under the name of cosmological conception…

– ‘In mundo non est casus’, he reminds us: nothing casual, nothing contingent.
– ‘In mundo non est fatum’: nothing is of a fatality that would be beyond rational necessity.
– ‘In mundo non est saltus’: there is no leap.
– ‘In mundo non est hiatus’

…and the great refuter of metaphysical imprudences takes upon himself these four denegations of which I ask you whether, in the perspective that is ours, they can appear as anything other than the very status, inverted, of that with which we always have to do:
– with cases, in the proper sense of the term,
– with a fatum properly speaking, since our unconscious is oracle,
– with as many hiatuses as there are distinct signifiers,
– with as many leaps as there occur metonymies.

It is because there is a subject who marks himself, or not, with the unary trait, who is 1 or –1, that there can be a (–a), that the subject can identify with the little ball of FREUD’s grandson, and especially in the connotation of its lack: ‘there is not,’ ens privativum.

Of course there is a void, and it is from there that the subject will set out: leerer Gegenstand ohne Begriff. Of the four definitions of nothing that KANT gives, and that we shall take up again next time, it is the only one that holds with rigor, there is there a nothing.
Observe that in the table I gave you of the three terms castration-frustration-privation, the counterpart, the possible agent, the properly imaginary subject from which privation may proceed, the enunciation of privation,
is the subject of imaginary omnipotence, that is to say of the inverted image of impotence.

Ens rationis, leerer Begriff ohne Gegenstand, empty concept without object, pure concept of possibility, here is the frame where is situated
and appears the ens privativum. KANT, no doubt, does not fail to ironize over the purely formal use of the formula that seems self-evident: all real is possible. Who will say the contrary? Necessarily!

And he takes the step further by making us notice that therefore some real is possible, but that this can also mean that some possible is not real, that there is possible that is not real. No less no doubt than the philosophical abuse
that can be made of it, is here denounced by KANT; what matters to us is to realize that the possible
at issue is only the possible of the subject. Only the subject can be this real negatived of a possible that is not real.

The –1 constitutive of the ens privativum, we thus see it linked to the most primitive structure of our experience
of the unconscious, insofar as it is that, not of the forbidden, nor of the ‘said no,’ but of the ‘unsaid,’
of the point where the subject is no longer there to say if he is no longer master of this identification with 1, or of this sudden absence of 1 that could mark him.

Here lies its strength and its root.

The possibility of hiatus, of saltus, casus, fatum, is precisely that in which I hope, beginning next session, to show you what other form of pure intuition, and even spatial, is specially concerned with the function of the surface insofar as I believe it capital, primordial, essential to every articulation of the subject that we may formulate.
 

HIATUS IRRATIONALIS

Things, whether sweat or sap flows in you,
Forms, whether you are born from the forge or from blood,
Your torrent is no denser than my dream;
And, if I do not beat upon you with an unceasing desire,

I cross your water, I fall toward the shore
Where the weight of my thinking demon draws me.
He alone strikes the hard ground on which being rises,
At blind and deaf evil, at the god deprived of sense.

But, as soon as every verb has perished in my throat,
Things, whether you are born from blood or from the forge,
Nature, – I lose myself in the flux of an element:

The one that broods in me, the same lifts you,
Forms, whether sweat or sap flows in you,
It is the fire that makes me your immortal lover.

H.P., August 29 Jacques Lacan.