🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

In the dialogue I am continuing with you, there are necessarily hiatuses, saltus, casus, occasions, not to mention fatum.
In other words, it is cut through by various things. For example, last night, we heard LAGACHE’s interesting, important communication
at the scientific session of the Society, on sublimation. This morning I felt like starting again from it, but on the other hand on Sunday I had started elsewhere, I mean from a sort of remark on the character of what is continuing here as research.
It is obviously a conditioned research. By what? For the moment, by a certain aim that I shall call ‘the aim of an erotics’.

I consider this legitimate, not because we are – by nature – essentially destined to pursue it when we are on
the road where it is required. I mean that we are on this road a little like, over the centuries, those who meditated
on the conditions of science were on the road toward that in which science actually succeeds – hence my reference to the cosmonaut
which indeed has its meaning – insofar as that in which it was succeeding was certainly not necessarily that which it expected
up to a certain point, although the phases of its research are abolished, refuted by its success.

It is certain that among people… we are using this term in the broadest sense, unless we use it in a slightly reduced sense, that of the gentiles, which would obviously leave open the curious question of the gentiles defined in relation to x –
you know where this definition of the gentiles starts from – which would leave open the curious question of how it comes about that
the gentiles represent, if I may say so, a secondary class – in the sense in which I meant it last time – of something founded
on a certain prior acceptation.

All the same, that would not be bad, because in this perspective, the gentiles are Christendom, and everyone knows that Christendom as such is
in a notorious relation with the difficulties of erotics, namely that the Christian’s entanglements with VENUS are still something it is rather difficult to fail to notice, even though one pretends to take the matter, so to speak, lightly.

In fact, if the core of Christianity is found in the Pauline Revelation, namely in a certain essential step made in relations
to the Father, if the relation of love to the Father is that essential step, if it truly represents the crossing-over of everything that the Semitic tradition inaugurated of greatness…
of this fundamental relation to the father, of this originary baraka, to which it is nonetheless difficult not to recognize that
FREUD’s thought is connected, even if in a contradictory, maledictory way, we cannot doubt it,
for if the reference to Oedipus can leave the question open, the fact that he ended his discourse on MOSES as he did
leaves no doubt that the foundation of Christian Revelation is indeed in this relation of grace that PAUL has succeed the Law with
…the difficulty is this: the Christian does not remain, and for good reason, at the level of the Revelation, and yet he lives in a society such that one can say that, even reduced to the most secular form, its principles of law nonetheless derive directly
from a catechism that is not without relation to this Pauline revelation.

Only, since the meditation on the Mystical Body is not within everyone’s reach, a gap remains open such that practically
the Christian finds himself reduced to this, which is not all that normal, fundamental: no longer really to have any other access to jouissance as such than to make love. That is what I call his entanglements with VENUS.

For, of course, with what he is placed among in this order, it all works out, all told, on the whole, rather badly. What I am saying is very perceptible, for example as soon as one leaves the limits of Christendom, as soon as one goes into zones dominated by Christian acculturation, I mean not the zones that were converted to Christianity, but those that underwent the effects of Christian society.

I will remember for a long time a long conversation carried on one night in 1947 with someone who was my guide
for an excursion made in Egypt. He was what one calls an Arab. He was, of course, by his functions and also by the zone
where he lived, as much as could be under the sway of our category. It was very clear in his discourse, this sort of effect of promotion of the erotic question.

He was certainly prepared by all sorts of very ancient resonances of his sphere to place in the foreground of the question
of the justification of existence his jouissance, but the way he embodied it in woman had all the dead-end characteristics of what one can imagine as most stripped-down in our own society; the demand in particular for renewal, for an infinite succession,
due to the character of the essentially unsatisfying nature of the object, was indeed what made the essential part, not only
of his discourse, but of his practical life.

A figure, one would have said in another vocabulary, essentially torn away from the norms of his tradition.
When it comes to erotics, what must we think of these norms? In other words, are we charged with giving, for example, justification to the practical subsistence of marriage as an institution even through our most revolutionary transformations?

I believe there is no need at all for all the effort of a WESTERMARCK to justify, through all sorts of arguments,
of nature or of tradition, the institution of marriage, because it simply justifies itself by its persistence, which we have seen before our eyes,
and in the most clearly marked form of petty-bourgeois traits, through a society which at the outset believed it could go farther
in putting fundamental relations into question, I mean in communist society.

It seems very certain that the necessity of marriage was not even brushed by the effects of that revolution. Is that,
properly speaking, the domain in which we are led to shed light? I absolutely do not think so!

The necessities of marriage prove, for us, to be a properly social trait of our conditioning: they leave completely open the problem of the dissatisfactions that result from it, namely of the permanent conflict in which the human subject finds himself – for that sole reason
that he is human – with the effects, the repercussions of this law of marriage.

What is the testimony of this for us? Quite simply the existence of what we observe, insofar as
we concern ourselves with desire, I mean that there exists in societies – whether they are well organized or not, whether one makes there
in greater or lesser abundance the constructions necessary for the habitation of individuals – we observe the existence of neurosis.
And it is not where the most satisfying conditions of life are ensured, nor where tradition is most secure, that neurosis
is rarest. Far from it.

– What does neurosis mean?

– What is, for us, the authority, if I may say so, of neurosis?

It is not simply linked to its pure and simple existence. Too easy is the position of those who in this case cast its effects back
onto a sort of displacement of human weakness. I mean that what effectively proves weak in social organization as such is shifted onto the neurotic, of whom one says that he is maladapted. What proof!

It seems to me that the right, the authority that follows from what we have to learn from the neurotic, is the structure he reveals to us.
And at bottom, what he reveals to us, from the moment we understand that his desire is indeed the same as ours,
and for good reason, what he gradually comes to reveal to our study, what makes the dignity of the neurotic, is that he wants to know.

And in a way it is he who introduces psychoanalysis. The inventor of psychoanalysis is not FREUD, but Anna O.
as everyone knows, and of course, behind her many others, all of us.

What does the neurotic want to know?..
here I slow my flow so that you may hear clearly, for each word has its importance –
he wants to know what there is of the real in that of which he is the passion, namely, what there is of the real in the effect of the signifier.

Of course this presupposes that we have come far enough to know that what is called ‘desire’ in the human being is unthinkable except in this relation to the signifier, and the effects inscribed in it. This signifier, which he himself is by his position, namely
as living neurosis, is – if you refer to my definition of the signifier, moreover it is inversely what justifies it, because it is applicable – that by which this cryptogram that a neurosis is, what makes it as such, the neurotic, a signifier and nothing more.

For the subject he serves precisely is elsewhere; it is what we call his unconscious. And that is why he is…
according to the definition I give you of it
…as neurosis, a signifier: it is that he represents a hidden subject – but for what? – for nothing other than another signifier.

That which justifies the neurotic as such, the neurotic insofar as analysis – I let pass this term borrowed from the discourse
of my friend LAGACHE yesterday [scientific session of the SFP] – ‘valorizes’ him, is insofar as his neurosis contributes to the advent
of this discourse required by an erotics at last constituted. He, of course, knows nothing of it and does not seek it.

And we as well, we have to seek it only insofar as you are here, that is to say that I shed light for you on the significance
of psychoanalysis in relation to this required advent of an erotics. Hear: of that by which it is thinkable that the human being may also in this domain, and why not, make the same breakthrough, and which moreover leads to that bizarre instant of the cosmonaut in his shell.
Which leaves you to think that I am not even trying to foresee what a future erotics may produce.

What is certain is that the only ones who have dreamed of it properly, namely the poets, have always ended up with rather strange constructions. And if some prefiguration can be found in what I dwelt on at some length – the sketches
that may be given of it precisely in certain paradoxical points of the Christian tradition, courtly love for example –
it was to underline for you the altogether bizarre singularities – let those who were its hearers remember –
of a certain sonnet by Arnaut DANIEL for example, which open up very curious perspectives for us on what the relations between the lover and his lady would effectively represent.

[Pus Raimons e Truc Malecx
chapten n’Enan e sosdecx,
e ieu serai vielhs e senecx
ans que m’acort in aitalprecx
don puesca venir tan granspecx:
al cornarl’agramestiersbecx
ab que traissesdel corn logrecx;
e pueispogra leu venir secx
que’lfums es fortz qu’ieis d’inz des plecx.

Since Lord Raimon – joined to lord Truc Malec – defends Lady Ena and her commands, I shall first be old and white-haired before consenting to such requests,
from which so great an impropriety might result. For, to ‘put this trumpet to his mouth’, he would need a beak with which he would draw from the ‘pipe’ the grains.
And then, he might well come out of there blind, for strong is the smoke that rises from its folds.

Ben l’agr’ops que fosbecutz
e’lbecxfosloncx e agutz,
que’lcorns es fers, laitz e pelutz
e prions dinz en la palutz,
e anc nul jorn no estaiessutz,
per que rellent en sus loglutz
c’ades per si cor ne redutz:
e no taing que mais siadrutz
cel que sa boc’al corn condutz.

He would indeed need to have a beak and for that beak to be long and sharp, for the trumpet is rough, ugly, and hairy, and never on any day is it dry, and the swamp is deep inside: this is why the pitch ferments above which ceaselessly escapes from it of itself, disgorged. And it is not fitting that he should ever be a favorite, he
who puts his mouth to the pipe.

Pro’iagra d’azausassais,
de plus bels que valgron mais;
e si en Bernatz s’en estrais,
per Crist, ancno’ifes que savais,
car l’en prespaors et esglais:
que si’lvenguesd’amonlo rais,
si l’escaldera’l col e’lcais;
e no’scove que dona bais
aquel que cornes corn putnais.

There will be quite enough other trials, finer ones and ones that will be worth more, and if lord Bernart withdrew from that one, by Christ, he did not for an instant act
as a coward for having been seized by fear and dread. For if the thread of water had come down on him from above, it would have scalded his neck and cheek entirely, and it is not fitting afterwards that a lady kiss one who would have blown into a stinking trumpet.

Bernatz, ges eu no m’acort
al digRaimon de Durfort
qe vos anc mais n’aguessetz tort,
que si cornavatz per deport
ben si trobavatz fort contrafort,
e la pudorsagra’ustot mort,
que peitzol no fa fems en ort:
e vos, qui que’us en desconort,
lauzatz en Dieu que’us n’a estort!

Bernart, I do not agree with Raimon de Durfort that you were wrong: if you had trumpeted for pleasure, you would have found a harsh obstacle,
and the stench would soon have killed you, it which smells worse than manure in a garden. As for you, whoever may try to dissuade you from it, praise on this matter God
who made you escape it
Ben es estortz de perilh
que retragfor’a son filh
e a totzaicels de Cornilh;
mielz li vengrafos en eisilh
que la cornes el enfonilh
entre l’esquine’lpencenilh
per on se legon li rovilh;
ja no saubra tant de gandilh
no’l compisses logroinge’lcilh.

Yes, he has indeed escaped a great peril, which would afterwards have been reproached to his son and to all those of Cornil. Better for him it would have been to go into exile than to have ‘blown’ it in the funnel between the spine and the penis, where the rust-colored matters follow one another. He would never have known how to guard himself enough, that she would not have pissed on his muzzle and eyebrow.
Bernatz de Cornes no s’estrilh
al corn cornar ses grandozilh
ab que’ltrauctap el penchenilh:
pueispoiracornar ses perilh.

Let Bernart not at all set himself to blow the trumpet without a great plug, with which he will close the hole of the penis, and then he will be able to blow without peril]

That is not at all unworthy of comparison with what I am trying to situate as an extreme point on the aspects of the cosmonaut.
Of course, the attempt may appear to us to partake somewhat of mystification, and besides it came to a quick end.
But it is entirely illuminating for situating for us, for example, what must be understood by sublimation.

I recalled last night:
– that sublimation, in FREUD’s discourse, is inseparable from a contradiction, namely that jouissance, the aim of jouissance, subsists and is in a certain sense realized in every activity of sublimation.
– That there is no repression, that there is no erasure, that there is not even compromise with jouissance,
– that there is paradox, that there is detour, that it is by paths apparently contrary to jouissance that jouissance is obtained.

This is properly thinkable only precisely insofar as in jouissance the medium that intervenes, the medium through which access is given to its core, which can only be – I have shown you – the Thing, that this medium can also only be a signifier.

Hence this strange aspect that the Lady takes in our eyes in courtly love. We cannot manage to believe in it,
because we can no longer identify a living subject to such a degree with a signifier, a person called BEATRICE
with wisdom and with what for DANTE was the whole, the totality of knowledge. It is not at all excluded by the nature of things
that DANTE in fact slept with BEATRICE. That changes absolutely nothing in the problem. One thinks one knows that not.
That is not fundamental in the relation.

These markers having been laid down, what defines the neurotic? The neurotic gives himself over to a curious re-transformation of that whose effect he undergoes.
The neurotic, all in all, is an innocent: he wants to know. In order to know, he goes off in the most natural direction,
and naturally at the same time it is precisely there that he is deceived.

The neurotic wants to retransform the signifier into that of which it is the sign. The neurotic does not know, and for good reason:
– that it is as subject that he has fomented this: the advent of the signifier insofar as the signifier is the principal erasure of the thing,
– that it is he, the subject, who by erasing all the traits of the thing, makes the signifier.

The neurotic wants to erase this erasure; he wants to make it so that this did not happen. That is the deepest meaning of the summary, exemplary behavior of the obsessional. What he always returns to – without ever of course being able to abolish its effect, for each of his efforts to abolish it only reinforces it – is to make it so that this advent to the signifier function did not occur, that one recover what there is
of the real at the origin, namely, what all that is the sign of. I leave this indicated, initiated, to return to it in a generalized way
and at the same time a more diversified one, namely according to the three species of neuroses: phobia, hysteria, and obsession, after I have completed the circuit
to which this preamble is destined: to bring me back into my discourse.

This detour therefore is indeed made to situate and at the same time justify the double aim of our research, insofar as it is that
which we are pursuing this year on the terrain of identification:
– impossible – however extremely metapsychological our research may appear to some – not to pursue it exactly on the edge where we are pursuing it, insofar as analysis is conceivable only in this most eschatological aim, if I may express myself thus, of an erotics,
– but also impossible, without maintaining, at least at a certain level, consciousness of the meaning of this aim, to do properly in practice what you have to do, that is to say of course not to preach an erotics, but to manage with this fact that even among the most normal people and within the full and entire, and good-faith, application of norms, well, it does not work.

That not only, as M. de La ROCHEFOUCAULD said: ‘There are good marriages, but there are no delightful ones,’
we can add that since then it has deteriorated a little more, since there are not even good ones either,
I mean, from the perspective of desire.

It would still be somewhat implausible for such remarks not to be able to be put in the foreground in an assembly of analysts. This does not thereby make you the propagandists of a new erotics; this situates what you have to do
in each particular case: you have to do exactly what each person has to do for himself and for which he more or less needs
your help, namely, while waiting for the cosmonaut of future erotics, artisanal solutions.

Let us take things up again where we left them last time, namely at the level of privation. I hope I made myself understood, concerning this subject, insofar as I symbolized it by this –1, the turn, necessarily not counted, counted as minus one in the best hypothesis, namely when it has gone around the turn, the turn of the torus.

The fact that I immediately stretched the thread that relates the function of this –1 to the logical foundation of every possibility of a universal affirmation, namely to the possibility of grounding the exception – and that is moreover what requires the rule, the exception does not confirm the rule, as people kindly say, it requires it, it is its true principle – in short, that by drawing for you my little dial, namely by showing you that the only true assurance of the universal affirmation is the exclusion of a negative trait: ‘there is no man who is not mortal’

I may have lent myself to a confusion that I now intend to correct so that you may know on what principled terrain I am making
you advance. I was giving you this reference, but it is clear that one must not take it for a deduction of the whole process
from the symbolic. The empty part where there is nothing, in my dial, must at this level still be considered as detached.

The –1 that the subject is at this level is in no way subjectivized in itself; there is not yet in any way any question of knowing or of non-knowing.
For something to happen of the order of this advent, an entire cycle must be closed, of which privation is therefore
only the first step. The privation at issue is real privation for which, with the support of intuition whose right, you will grant me,
one may well grant me, I am here only following the very traces of tradition, and the purest.

KANT is granted the essential part of his procedure, and this foundation of schematism, I seek a better one in order to try to make it
sensible, intuitive for you. The mainspring of this real privation, I forged it. It is therefore only after a long detour that there can come to pass
for the subject this knowledge of his original rejection. But by then, I tell you right away, enough things will have happened such that
when it comes to light the subject will know, not only that this knowledge rejects him, but that this knowledge is itself to be rejected
insofar as it will prove to be always either beyond or short of what must be attained for the realization of desire.

In other words, that if ever the subject – which has been his aim since the time of PARMENIDES – reaches identification, to the affirmation
that it is τὸαὐτό[to auto] ‘the same, to think and to be’ νοεῖν καὶεἶναι [nœin kaieinai], at that moment he will find himself irremediably divided between his desire and his ideal. [Τὸγὰραὐτὸνοεῖνἐστίντεκαὶεἶναι]

This, if I may say so, is intended to demonstrate what I could call ‘the objective structure’ of the torus in question.
But why would one refuse me this use of the word ‘objective,’ since it is classical concerning the domain of ideas,
and still used up to DESCARTES?

At the point, then, where we are, and so as not to return to it again, what is at stake as real is perfectly tangible, and it is only a question of that.
What led us to the construction of the torus at the point where we are is the necessity of defining each of the turns as
a ‘1’ irreducibly different. For this to be real, namely for this symbolic truth—since it presupposes computation, counting—
to be founded, to be introduced into the world, it is necessary and sufficient that something have appeared in this real, and that is the unary trait.

One will understand that before this ‘1’, which is what gives all its reality to the ideal: the ideal is all that there is of the real in the symbolic,
and that suffices. One understands that at the origins of thought—as they say—at the time of PLATO and in PLATO, not to go back
further, this brought about adoration, prostration, the ‘1’ was the good, the beautiful, the true, the supreme being.

What the reversal consists in, the one we are called upon to face on this occasion, is to realize that,
however legitimate this adoration may be from the point of view of an affective elation, it nonetheless remains the case that this 1 is nothing other than the reality of a rather stupid stick. That is all!

The first hunter—I told you—who on an antelope rib made a notch to remember simply that he had hunted
10 times, 12 or 13 times, he did not know how to count, note that. And it is even for that reason that it was necessary to put them there, these marks,
so that the 10, 12 or 13, all the times, would not be confused, though they deserved it nonetheless, one into the other.

So at the level of the privation in question, insofar as the subject is first objectively this privation in the thing
—this privation that he does not know he is—of the uncounted turn. It is from there that we start again in order to understand what happens
—we have other elements of information—for him to come from there to constitute himself as desire, and for him to know the relation there is
from this constitution to this origin, insofar as it can allow us to begin articulating some symbolic relations
more adequate than those promoted up to now regarding what his desire-structure is, for the subject.

This does not for all that lead us to presume what will remain of the notion of the function of the subject when we shall have put it
into a desire-equation. This is what we are indeed forced to traverse with him, according to a method which is in sum only that
of experience—it is the subtitle of HEGEL’s Phenomenology: Wissenschaft der Erfahrung, science of experience—
we follow an analogous path with the different data that are those offered to us.

The next step is centered—I might just as well not mark it here with a chapter title, I do so for didactic purposes—it is that of
frustration. It is at the level of frustration that, with the Other, the possibility for the subject of a new essential step is introduced.

The 1 of the unique turn, the 1 that distinguishes each repetition in its absolute difference, does not come to the subject—even if its support is nothing other than that of the real stick—it does not come from any heaven, it comes from a constituted experience, for the subject with whom we are dealing:
– by the existence, before he was born, of the universe of discourse,
– by the necessity this experience presupposes, of the place of the Other with a capital A, as I defined it earlier.

It is here that the subject is going to conquer the essential, what I called this second dimension, insofar as it is a radical function of his own locating in his structure, provided that metaphorically, but not without claiming to reach in this metaphor the very structure of the thing, we call torus-structure this second dimension insofar as it constitutes among all the others,
the existence of loops irreducible to a point, non-evanescent loops.

It is in the Other that this irreducibility of the two dimensions necessarily comes to be incarnated insofar as, if it is perceptible somewhere, it can only be—since up to the present the subject for us is only the subject insofar as he speaks—in the domain of the symbolic.
It is in the experience of the symbolic that the subject must encounter the limitation of his displacements, which first makes him enter
into experience, the point, if I may say so, the irreducible angle of this duplicity of the two dimensions.

It is for that that the schematism of the torus will be of the greatest use to me, you will see, and from experience amplified
by psychoanalysis and the observation it awakens. The object of his desire, the subject can undertake to say it. He does nothing but that.
It is more than an act of enunciation, it is an act of imagination. This elicits in him a maneuver of the imaginary function,
and in a necessary way this function reveals itself as present as soon as frustration appears.

You know the importance, the emphasis, that I put, after others—after Saint AUGUSTINE in particular—on the awakening moment
of jealous passion in the constitution of this type of object, which is precisely the one we have constructed as underlying
each of our satisfactions, the small child prey to jealous passion before his brother who, for him, in image, brings forth
the possession of this object, namely the breast…
which until then has only been the underlying object, elided, masked for him behind this return of a presence linked to each
of his satisfactions, which has only been—in this rhythm in which the necessity of his first dependence was inscribed, was felt—
the metonymic object of each of these returns
…here it is suddenly produced for him in the illumination—with effects signaled to us by his deathly pallor—the illumination of this something
new which is desire.

Desire for the object as such, insofar as it resounds to the very foundation of the subject, as it shakes him well beyond his constitution:
– as satisfied or not,
– as suddenly threatened in the most intimate part of his being,
– as revealing his fundamental lack, and this in the form of the Other,
– as bringing to light at once metonymy and the loss it conditions.

This dimension of loss, essential to metonymy, loss of the thing in the object, that is the true sense of this thematic of the object
insofar as lost and never found again, the same one that is at the basis of Freudian discourse, and endlessly repeated.

One more step: if we push metonymy further, you know it, it is the loss of something essential in the image,
in this metonymy called the ego, at this point of birth of desire, at this point of pallor where AUGUSTINE stops before
the infant, just as FREUD does before his grandson eighteen centuries later.

It is falsely that one can say that the being of whom I am jealous, the brother, is my semblable, he is my image, in the sense that the image
in question is the founding image of my desire. There is the imaginary revelation, and that is the sense and function of frustration. All this
is already known, I am only recalling it as the second source of experience: after real privation, imaginary frustration.
But as with real privation, I have today indeed tried to situate for you what it serves, with respect to the term that interests us,
that is to say in the foundation of the symbolic, likewise we have here to see how this founding image, revelatory of desire,
is going to be placed in the symbolic.

This placement is difficult. It would of course be entirely impossible if the symbolic were not so—as I have recalled, hammered, for so long and long enough for it to get into your heads—if the Other and the discourse where the subject has to place himself were not awaiting him
from always, from before his birth, and if through the intermediary at least of his mother, of his nurse, he is spoken to.

The mainspring in question, the one which is both the ABC, the infancy of our experience, but beyond which for some time now
one no longer knows how to go precisely for lack of knowing how to formalize it as ABC, is this, namely the crossing, the naïve exchange that occurs,
by virtue of the dimension of the Other, between desire and demand. If there is, as you know, something by which one can say that at the outset
the neurotic let himself be caught, it is by this trap, and he will try to make pass into demand what is the object of his desire, to obtain from the Other,
not the satisfaction of his need—for which demand is made—but the satisfaction of his desire, namely to have its object,
that is to say precisely what cannot be demanded.

And that is at the origin of what is called dependence in the subject’s relations to the other. Just as he will try, even more paradoxically, to satisfy, by the conformation of his desire, the Other’s demand. And there is no other sense—no correctly articulated sense I mean—
to what is the discovery of analysis and of FREUD: to the existence of the superego as such. There is no other correct definition, I mean: no other that makes it possible to escape confusional slippages.

I think, without going further, that the practical, concrete, everyday resonances, namely the neurotic’s impasse, are first of all
—and before the problem of the impasses of his desire—this impasse perceptible at every instant, grossly perceptible, and against which you see him
always stumbling. It is what I shall express summarily by saying that for his desire, he needs the sanction of a demand. What do you refuse him, if not that which he expects from you: that you ask him to desire fittingly. Not to mention what he expects from his spouse,
from his parents, from his lineage and from all the conformisms around him. What does that allow us to construct and perceive?

Provided that demand is renewed according to the turns traversed, according to the full circles, all around, and the successive returns
that the return requires, but inserted by the loop of demand, of need. Provided that—as I let you hear
through each of these returns—what allows us to say that the elided circle, the circle that I called simply, so that you may see what I mean in relation to the torus, the empty circle, comes here to materialize the metonymic object beneath all these demands.

A topological construction is imaginable of another torus which has the property of allowing us to imagine the mapping of the object
of desire, the empty internal circle² of the first torus, onto the full circle¹ of the second which constitutes a loop, one of those irreducible loops

Conversely, the circle on the first torus, of a demand, comes here to be superposed in the other torus—the torus here support of the other,
of the imaginary other of frustration—comes here to be superposed on the empty circle of this torus. That is to say to fulfill the function of showing
this inversion—desire in one, demand in the other, demand of the one, desire of the other—which is the knot where the whole dialectic
of frustration gets stuck.

This possible dependence of the two topologies, that of one torus on that of the other, expresses in sum nothing other than what is
the aim of our schema insofar as we have it supported by the torus. It is that if the space of Kantian intuition, I would say must,
thanks to the new schema we introduce, be put in parentheses, annulled, aufgehoben, as illusory because the topological extension of the torus allows it for us, by considering only the properties of the surface, we are sure of the maintenance, of the solidity
so to speak, of the volume of the system without having to resort to the intuition of ‘depth’. What you see, and what this images:

It is that in maintaining ourselves, to the full extent that our intuitive habits permit it, within these limits, it results that…
since between the two surfaces there is only a substitution by biunivocal mapping, although inverted,
namely that once cut out it will be in this direction on one of the surfaces and in that other on the other
…it nonetheless remains that what this makes perceptible is that from the point of view of the space required, these two spaces, the inside
and the outside, from the moment we refuse to give them any substance other than topological, are the same.

What you will see expressed in the key phrase indicates—already in the Rome Report—the use I intended to make of it for you,
namely that the property of the ring, insofar as it symbolizes the function of the subject in his relations to the Other, consists in this
that the space of its interior and the exterior space are the same. From that point the subject constructs his exterior space on the model of the irreducibility of his interior space.

But what this schema shows is, with evidence, the deficiency of the ideal harmony that could be required from object to demand,
from demand to object. An illusion sufficiently demonstrated by experience, I think, for us to have felt the need
to construct this necessary model of their necessary discordance. We know its mainspring and, of course, if I seem to advance only with slow steps, believe me, no stagnation is too much if we want to secure the following steps.

What we already know and what is represented here intuitively is that the object itself as such, insofar as object of desire,
is the effect of the impossibility of the Other to respond to demand. That is what is seen here manifestly in this sense that to said demand,
whatever its desire, the Other could not suffice to it, that it necessarily leaves uncovered the greater part of the structure. In other words, that the subject is not enveloped, as is believed, in the whole, that at least at the level of the subject who speaks, the Umwelt does not envelop his Innenwelt.

If there were something to be done in order to imagine the subject in relation to the ideal sphere, from always the intuitive and mental model
of the structure of a cosmos, it would rather be that the subject would be…
if I may allow myself, for you, to push, to exploit
—but you will see that there is more than one way to do it—its intuitive image
…it would be to represent the subject by the existence of a hole in said sphere, and its supplement by two sutures.

Let us suppose the subject to be constituted on a cosmic sphere. The surface of an infinite sphere is a plane, the plane of the blackboard
indefinitely prolonged. There is the subject [A], a quadrangular hole, like the general configuration of my skin from just now,
but this time in negative.

I sew one edge to the other [B1], but on this condition that they are opposite edges, that I leave free the two other edges [2].
The following figure results, namely, with the void filled in here, two holes that remain in the sphere of infinite surface.

It only remains to pull on each of the edges of these two holes [C] in order to constitute the subject on the infinite surface, as constituted in sum by what is always a torus, even if it has a satchel of infinite radius, namely a handle emerging on the surface of a plane [D].

That is what it means at maximum, the relation of the subject with ‘the great Whole’.
We shall see the applications we can make of it.

What is important here to grasp is that for this covering-over of the object by demand, if the imaginary other thus constituted,
in the inversion of the functions of the circle of desire with that of demand, the Other, for the satisfaction of the subject’s desire,
must be defined as without power. I insist on this ‘without’, for with it emerges a new form of negation in which are properly indicated
the effects of frustration. ‘Without’ is a negation but not just any negation, it is a negation-linkage,
well materialized, in the English language, by the conformist homology of the two relations of the two signifiers within and without.
It is a linked exclusion which already in itself alone indicates its reversal.

One more step, let us take it, it is that of the ‘not without’. The other, no doubt, is introduced into the naïve perspective of desire as
without power, but, essentially, what links him to the structure of desire is the ‘not without’: he is not without power either.
That is why this Other, which we introduced insofar as in sum metaphor of the unary trait, that is to say of what we find
at its level and which it replaces, in an infinite regression, since it is the place where these 1s succeed one another all different from one another
of which the subject is only the metonymy, this Other as 1—and the pun is part of the formula that I use here to define the mode under which I introduced it—finds itself again, once the necessity of the effects of imaginary frustration has been looped, as having this unique value, for it alone is not ‘without power’, it is at the origin possible of desire posited as condition, even if this condition remains suspended.

For that, it is ‘as not1’ [French pas = not / step]: it gives to the subject’s –1 another function which is first incarnated in this dimension, which this ‘as’
situates for you sufficiently as being that of metaphor. It is at its level—at the level of the ‘as not1’ and of all that will remain
suspended from it in what follows, as what I called the absolute conditionality of desire—that we shall have to deal next time,
that is to say, at the level of the third term, of the introduction of the act of desire as such, of its relations to the subject on the one hand,
to the root of this power, to the rearticulation of the times of this power, insofar as—you see it—I am going to have to go back
over the possible step in order to mark the path that has been accomplished in the introduction of the terms ‘power’ and ‘without power’.

It is insofar as we shall have to pursue this dialectic next time that I stop here today.