🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Last time I left you at the level of this symbolic embracing of the two tori where there is embodied, in the imaginary register, the relation of interversion, if one may say so, lived by the neurotic, in the sensible, clinical measure in which we see that, apparently at least, it is in a dependence on the demand of the Other that he tries to ground, to institute his desire.

Of course, there is there something grounded in this structure that we call the structure of the subject insofar as he speaks, which is the one for which we are devising for you this topology of the torus that we believe to be very fundamental.

It has the function of what is called elsewhere, in topology, the fundamental group, and after all, this will be the question to which we shall have to indicate an answer. I hope that this answer, at the moment when it will have to be given, will really already be superabundantly sketched out.

Why, if this is the fundamental structure, has it for so long and always been so profoundly misconstrued by philosophical thought? Why, if it is so, does the other topology, that of the sphere, which traditionally seems to dominate all the elaboration of thought concerning its relation to the thing? Let us take things up again where we left them last time, and where I indicated to you what is implied in our very experience.

There is in this knot with the Other – insofar as it is offered to us as a first sensible approximation, perhaps too easy, we shall see that it is, assuredly – there is in this knot with the Other, as it is imaged here, a relation of lure.
Let us return here to the current, to the articulated form of this relation to the Other. We know it.

How could we not know it, when we are every day the very support of its pressure in analysis and the neurotic subject, with whom we are fundamentally dealing, presents himself before us as demanding from us the answer, this very thing even if we teach him the value there is, of this answer, in suspending it. The answer about what?
It is indeed this that justifies our schema insofar as it shows us, desire and demand substituting for one another, it is precisely that the answer is about his desire and about its satisfaction.

What today I will no doubt be almost certainly limited to by the time allotted to me is to articulate well to what coordinates this demand addressed to the Other is suspended. This demand for an answer, which specifies in its true reason, its ultimate reason, before which every approximation is insufficient, the one that in FREUD is pinned down as versagen, laVersagung, the refusal, or else deceptive speech, breach of promise, at the limit vanitas, at the limit of bad speech, and the ambiguity, here I remind you of it, that links the term ‘blasphemy’ to what it has given through all sorts of transformations, moreover very pretty in themselves to follow: ‘blame’.

I shall go no further along this path. The essential relation of the frustration we are dealing with to speech is the point to be sustained, to be maintained always as radical, failing which our concept of frustration degrades, it degenerates to the point of being reduced to lack of gratification concerning what in the last instance can no longer be conceived except as need.

Now it is impossible not to recall what FREUD’s genius originally assures us regarding the function of desire

• that from which he started in his first steps, let us leave aside the letters to FLIESS, let us begin with The Interpretation of Dreams and let us not forget that Totem and Taboo was his favorite book –
  what FREUD’s genius assures us is this: that desire is fundamentally, radically, structured by this knot called the Oedipus.

And whence: it is impossible to eliminate this internal knot – which is what I am trying to sustain before you by these figures –
this internal knot called the Oedipus insofar as it is essentially what?
It is essentially this, a relation between:
– a demand that takes on such a privileged value that it becomes the absolute commandment, the law,
– and a desire, which is the desire of the Other, of the Other at issue in the Oedipus.

This demand is articulated thus: ‘You shall not desire she who has been my desire.’ Now it is this that founds in its structure the essential thing, the starting point of Freudian truth.

And it is there, it is from there, that every possible desire is in some way compelled to this sort of irreducible detour, this something akin to the impossibility in the torus of reducing the loop on certain circles, which makes desire have to include within itself this void, this internal hole, specified in this relation to the original Law.

Let us not forget the steps that…
to found this primary relation around which, we forget it all too much, all the Liebesbedingungen, all the determinations of love are for FREUD articulable, and only by that means
…let us not forget the steps that in the Freudian dialectic this requires: it is in this relation to the Other, the killed father, beyond this passing away of the original murder, that this supreme form of love is constituted.

It is the paradox, not at all concealed, even if it is elided by that veil over the eyes which seems here always to accompany the reading of FREUD: this moment is ineliminable, that after the murder of the father there arises for him…
himself, even if this is not sufficiently explained to us, it is enough for us to retain the moment as essential in what one can call the mythical structure of the Oedipus
…this supreme love for the father, which precisely makes of this passing away of the original murder the condition of his henceforth absolute presence.

Death in sum, playing this role, manifested itself as alone being able to fix him in this sort of reality, no doubt the only one as absolutely enduring, of being as absent. There is no other source for the absoluteness of the original commandment.
That is where the common field is constituted in which the object of desire is instituted, in the position no doubt that we already know as necessary for it at the imaginary level alone, namely a third position.

The sole dialectic of the relation to the other insofar as transitive, in the imaginary relation of the mirror stage, had already taught you that it constituted the object of human interest as linked to his semblable, the object (a) here, in relation to that image which includes it, which is the image of the other at the level of the mirror stage i(a).

But this interest is in some way only a form, it is the object of that neutral interest around which even the whole dialectic of monsieur PIAGET’s inquiry can be ordered, by placing in the foreground that relation he calls reciprocity, which he believes he can join to a radical formula of the logical relation.

It is from this equivalence, from this identification with the other as imaginary, that the ternarity of the emergence of the object is instituted, but this is only an insufficient, partial structure, and thus one that we must recover, in the end, as deducible from the institution of the object of desire at the level where, here and today, I articulate it for you.

The relation to the Other is not this imaginary relation founded on the specificity of generic form, since this relation to the Other is specified there by demand, insofar as it causes to emerge from this Other, which is the Other with a capital O, its essentiality, if I may say so, in the constitution of the subject, or, to take up the form always given to the verb ‘inter-esser’, its ‘inter-essent-iality’ to the subject.

The field in question therefore can in no way be reduced to the field of need and of the object which, for the rivalry of his semblables, can at the limit impose itself – for that will be the slope on which we shall go to find our recourse for ultimate rivalry – impose itself as an object of subsistence for the organism. This other field, which we define and for which our image of the torus is made, is another field, a field of signifier, a field of connotation of presence and absence, and where the object is no longer an object of subsistence, but of ex-sistence of the subject.

To come to demonstrate it…
it is indeed in the last instance a matter of a certain place of ex-sistence of the subject, necessary,
and that this is the function to which the little (a) of primary rivalry is raised, brought
…before us we have the path still left for us to travel, from that summit to which I brought you last time, of the dominance of the other in the institution of the frustrating relation.

The second part of the path must lead us from frustration to that relation to be defined, that which as such constitutes the subject in desire, and you know that it is only there that we shall be able properly to articulate castration.
Thus in the last instance we shall know what this place of ex-sistence means only when this path has been completed.

Already now we can, indeed we must, recall – but recall here to the philosopher least introduced to our experience – this singular point, seeing it so often slip away from his own discourse, namely that there is indeed a question, to wit:

– why it is necessary that the subject be represented – and I mean in the Freudian sense, represented by a representative representative – as excluded from the very field where he has to act, in relations let us say Lewinian, with the others as individuals,

– that at the level of structure we must come to account for why it is necessary that he be represented somewhere as excluded from this field in order to intervene in it, in this very field.

For after all, all the reasonings into which the psycho-sociologist leads us in his definition of what I called a moment ago a Lewinian field, are never presented except with a perfect elision of this necessity:
that the subject be, let us say, in two topologically defined places, namely in this field, but also essentially excluded from this field, and that he manages to articulate something, and something that holds together.

Everything that, in a thought of human conduct as observable, comes to be defined as learning, and at the limit objectification of learning, that is to say assembly, form, constitutes a discourse that holds together, and which up to a certain point accounts for a host of things, except this: that in effect the subject functions not with this simple employment, if I may say so, but in a double employment, which is still worth our stopping at and which, however elusive it presents itself to us, is perceptible in so many ways that it suffices, if I may say so, to bend down and gather up the proofs. It is nothing other than what I try to make you feel each time, for example, when incidentally I bring back the traps of double negation and when the: ‘Je ne sache pas que je veuille’ is not understood in the same way, I think, as ‘Je sais que je ne veux pas’.

Reflect on these little never-exhausted problems – for the logicians of language exercise themselves on them, and their stammerings there are more than instructive – that as often as there will be words that flow, and even writers who let things flow from the tip of their pen as they are spoken, one will say to someone – I have already insisted on this, but one cannot return to it too often – ‘Vous n’êtes pas sans ignorer’ to say to him: You do know very well, all the same!’

The double plane on which this plays is that it goes without saying that someone writes like that, and that it has happened.
I was reminded of this recently in one of those texts by PRÉVERT, at which GIDE was astonished:
‘Did he mean to make fun, or does he really know what he is writing?’ He did not mean to make fun: it flowed from his pen.

And all the criticism of the logicians will not prevent it from happening to us, provided we are engaged in a true dialogue with someone, namely provided it is a matter, in whatever way, of a certain condition essential to our relations with him, which is the one I think I am about to arrive at, that it is essential that something between us be instituted as ignorance, that I will slip into saying to him, however learned and purist I may be: ‘vous n’êtes pas sans ignorer’.

On the same day when I was speaking to you about it here, I refrained from citing what I had just read in Le Canard Enchaîné, at the end of one of those set-pieces that continue under the signature of André RIBAUD, under the title ‘La Cour’:
‘Il ne faut pas se décombattre…’ – in a pseudo-Saint-Simonian style, just as BALZAC wrote a 16th-century language entirely invented by himself – ‘…de quelque défiance des rois’. You understand perfectly what that means. Try to analyze it logically, and you see that it says exactly the opposite of what you understand. And you are naturally entirely justified in understanding what you understand, because it is in the structure of the subject.

The fact that the two negations that here are superimposed not only do not cancel each other out, but indeed effectively support each other, depends on a topological duplicity which means that ‘Il ne faut pas se décombattre’ is not said on the same plane, if I may say so, on which the ‘de quelque défiance des rois’ is instituted. Enunciation and statement, as always, are perfectly separable, but here their gap bursts open. If the torus as such can serve us – you will see – as a bridge, if it already proves sufficient to show us what consists, once this doubling has entered the world, this ambiguity of the subject, is it not also good at this point to pause over what evidence this topology contains?

And first of all in our simplest experience, I mean that of the subject, when we speak of engagement, is there any need for great detours – those that here I make you cross for the needs of our cause – is there any need for great detours for the least initiated to evoke this: that to engage oneself already implies in itself the image of the corridor, the image of entrance and exit, and up to a certain point the image of the way out closed behind oneself, and that it is indeed in this relation to the closing of the way out that the final term of the image of engagement reveals itself?

Is much more needed? And all the literature that culminates in KAFKA’s work can make us perceive that it suffices to invert what – it seems – last time I did not image enough for you by showing you this particular form of the torus in the form of the handle detached from a plane:

The plane presenting here only the particular case of an infinite sphere widening one side of the torus.
It suffices to tip this image over, to present it belly up.

All these architectures are nevertheless not without something that should hold us by their affinities with something that must indeed go further than the simple satisfaction of a need, for an analogy whose irreducibility is obvious, impossible to exclude from everything that is called for him interior and exterior, and that the one and the other open out one onto the other and command one another.

What I called a moment ago the corridor, the gallery, the underground…
Memoirs Written from the Underground, DOSTOEVSKY entitles it,
that extreme point where he scans the palpitation of his ultimate question
…is that something that is exhausted in the notion of a socially usable instrument?

Of course, like our two tori, the function of the social agglomerate and its relation to routes, insofar as their anastomosis simulates something that exists in the organism’s utmost intimacy, is for us a prefigured object of questioning.
It is not our privilege, the ant and the termite know it, but the badger KAFKA speaks to us of, in his burrow, is not precisely a sociable animal.

What does this reminder mean if not – for us, at the point where we have to advance – that if this relation of structure is so natural, that on condition of thinking about it we find its roots everywhere, and sunk very deep, in the structure of things, the fact that, when it is a matter of thought organizing the relation of the subject to the world, it has so abundantly misconstrued it over the ages, precisely raises the question of why there is here repression pushed so far, let us say at the very least misconnaissance.
This brings us back to our starting point, which is that of the relation to the Other, insofar as I called it founded on some lure that it is now a matter of articulating quite elsewhere than this natural relation, since moreover we see how much thought lets it slip away, how much thought refuses it.

It is moreover from there that we must start: and from the position of the question to the Other, of the question about his desire and his satisfaction.
If there is lure it must hold somewhere to what I called a moment ago the radical duplicity of the subject’s position.

And this is what I would like to make you feel at the proper level, then, of the signifier insofar as it is specified by the duplicity of subjective position, and for a moment ask you to follow me on something that in the last instance is called the difference for which the graph, to which I kept you attached for a certain time in my discourse, is properly speaking forged. This difference is called the difference between the message [Perhaps nothing] and the question [Nothing perhaps?]

This graph, which would inscribe itself so well here in the very gap through which the subject is doubly connected to the plane of universal discourse, I am going today to inscribe there the four points of convergence which are those you know:

– A,
– s(A) the signification of the message insofar as it is from the return coming from the Other of the signifier that resides there,
– here S◊D the relation of the subject to demand insofar as the drive is specified there,
– here the S(A) the signifier of the Other, insofar as the Other in the last instance can be formalized, significantized only as himself marked by the signifier, in other words insofar as he imposes on us the renunciation of all metalanguage.

The gap that it is a matter of articulating here is wholly suspended in the form where, in the last instance, this demand to the Other to answer alternates, balances itself in a series of returns between:
– the ‘Nothing perhaps?’,
– and the ‘Perhaps nothing’: here it is a message.

It opens onto what appeared to us as the opening constituted by the entry of a subject into the Real. Here we are in accord with the most certain elaboration of the term possibility: Möglichkeit. The possible is not on the side of the thing, but on the side of the subject. The message opens onto the term of eventuality constituted by an expectation in the constituting situation of desire, such as we are trying here to grasp tightly. Perhaps, possibility is prior to this nominative nothing which, at the extreme, takes on the value of a substitute for positivity.

It is a point, and a point is all it is. The place of the unary trait is there reserved in the void that can answer the expectation of desire.
It is something altogether different from the question insofar as it is articulated ‘Nothing perhaps?’, from the ‘perhaps?’…
at the level of demand called into question: ‘what is it that I want?’, speaking to the Other
…from the ‘perhaps?’ that comes here into a position homologous to what at the level of the message constituted the eventual answer.

‘Perhaps nothing’ is the first formulation of the message. ‘Perhaps: nothing,’ that can be an answer, but is it the answer
to the question ‘Nothing perhaps?’ Precisely not! Here, the enunciative ‘nothing,’ as positing the possibility of the non-place of concluding, first, as prior to the quota of existence, to the power of being, this enunciative at the level of the question takes all
its value from a substantification of the nothingness of the question itself.

The sentence ‘Nothing perhaps?’ opens, for its part, onto probability
– that nothing determines it as a question,
– that nothing is determined at all,
– that it remains possible that nothing is certain,
– that it is possible that one cannot conclude, except by recourse to the infinite anteriority of the Kafkaesque Trial,
– that there is pure subsistence of the question with the impossibility of concluding.

Only the eventuality of the Real makes it possible to determine something, and the naming of the nothingness of the pure subsistence
of the question, that is what, at the level of the question itself, we are dealing with.

– ‘Perhaps nothing’ could be at the level of the message an answer, but the message was precisely not a question.
– ‘Nothing perhaps?’, at the level of the question, yields only a metaphor, namely that the power of being is of the beyond.
–
– Every eventuality has already disappeared there, and every subjectivity as well. There is only an effect of meaning, referral of meaning to meaning to infinity,
– except that, for us analysts, we have become accustomed through experience to structuring this referral on two planes
– and that this is what changes everything.

Namely that metaphor for us is condensation, which means two chains and that metaphor makes, metaphor,
its appearance unexpectedly right in the middle of the message:
– that it also becomes message in the middle of the question,
– that the ‘family’ question begins to be articulated, and that there arises right in the middle ‘the millionaire’s million,’
– that the irruption of the question into the message occurs in this, that it is revealed to us that the message manifests itself right in the middle of the question,
– that it comes to light on the path where we are called to truth, that it is through our question of truth, I mean, the question itself, and not in the answer to the question, that the message comes to light.

It is therefore at this precise point, precious for the articulation of the difference from enunciation to statement, that we had to pause for a moment. This possibility of ‘nothing,’ if it is not preserved, is what prevents us from seeing, despite this omnipresence that is at the principle of every properly subjective possible articulation, this gap, which is likewise
very precisely embodied in the passage from sign to signifier, where we see appear what it is that distinguishes the subject in this difference. Is he in the end a sign, he, or a signifier? Sign—sign of what?—he is precisely the sign of nothing.

If the signifier is defined as representing the subject before another signifier: indefinite referral of meanings, and if this signifies something, it is because the signifier signifies before the other signifier this privileged thing which is the subject insofar as nothing.

It is here that our experience allows us to bring out the necessity of the path by which no reality is supported, in
the structure, identifiable insofar as it is that which allows us to pursue our experience. The Other therefore answers nothing,
except that ‘nothing is certain,’ but this has only one meaning, namely that there is something of which he wants to know nothing,
and very precisely of this question. At this level, the impotence of the Other is rooted in an impossible,
which is indeed the same one along whose path the subject’s question had already led us.

Not possible was this void where the unary trait came to arise in its dividing value. Here we see this impossible take body, and conjoin what we saw earlier to be defined by FREUD concerning the constitution of desire in the original prohibition.
The impotence of the Other to answer rests on an impasse, and this impasse, we know it, is called the limitation of his knowledge.

‘He did not know that he was dead,’ that he attained this absoluteness of the Other only through death not accepted but undergone,
and undergone through the subject’s desire. That the subject knows, if I may say so:
– that the Other must not know it,
– that the Other asks not to know.

That is the privileged share in these two non-confounded demands, that of the subject and that of the Other, namely that precisely
desire is defined as the intersection of what in the two demands is not to be said. It is only from there
that demands formulable everywhere other than in the field of desire are freed. Desire thus is first constituted,
by its nature, as what is hidden from the Other by structure.

It is precisely what is impossible to the Other that becomes the subject’s desire. Desire is constituted as the part of demand
that is hidden from the Other. This Other who guarantees nothing, precisely as Other, as place of speech,
– it is there that it takes on its edifying incidence, it becomes the veil, the covering, the principle of occultation of the very place of desire,
– and it is there that the object will take cover.

So if there is an existence that is constituted first, it is that one, and it substitutes itself for the existence of the subject himself,
since the subject, insofar as suspended on the Other, remains likewise suspended on this that on the side of the Other nothing is certain,
except precisely that he hides, that he covers something which is this object, this object which is not yet perhaps anything
insofar as it is going to become the object of desire.

The object of desire exists as this very nothing of which the Other cannot know that it is all that it consists in.
This nothing insofar as hidden from the Other takes on consistency, it becomes the envelope of every object before which the very question
of the subject stops, insofar as the subject then becomes no longer anything but imaginary.

Demand is freed from the demand of the Other insofar as the subject excludes this non-knowledge of the Other.
But there are two possible forms of exclusion:

– ‘I wash my hands of what you know or of what you do not know, and I act.’ ‘You are not without being ignorant…’ means to what point I do not care whether you know or whether you do not know.

– But there is also the other way: ‘you absolutely must know’ and that is the path the neurotic chooses, and that is why he is, if I may say so, designated in advance as your victim.

The right way for the neurotic to solve the problem of this field of desire insofar as constituted by this central field
of demands, which precisely overlap and for that reason must be excluded, is that he finds that the right way
is that you know. If it were not so, he would not undertake psychoanalysis.

What does the Rat Man do by getting up at night like Theodore?
He drags himself in slippers toward the corridor to open the door to the ghost of his dead father in order to show him what?
That he is getting an erection. Is that not the revelation of a fundamental conduct?
The neurotic wants that, for lack of being able to—since it turns out that the Other can do nothing—at the very least he know.

I spoke to you earlier of engagement: the neurotic, contrary to what is believed, is someone who engages himself as subject.
He closes himself off to the double outlet of the message and the question, he puts himself in the balance in order to decide between the ‘nothing perhaps?’
and the ‘perhaps nothing,’ he posits himself as real before the Other, that is to say as impossible.
No doubt this will appear to you better, from knowing how it occurs.

It is not for nothing that today I made this image of the ‘Freudian Theodore’ arise in his nocturnal and phantasmatic exhibition, for there is indeed some medium, and better said, some instrument to this incredible transmutation of the object of desire into the existence of the subject, and it is precisely the phallus. But this is reserved for our next discussion.

Today I simply note that, phallus or not, the neurotic arrives in the field as that which, of the real, is specified as impossible. This is not exhaustive, for we shall not be able to apply this definition to phobia.
We shall only be able to do so next time, but we can very well apply it to the obsessional.

You will understand nothing of the obsessional if you do not remember this dimension that he incarnates, he the obsessional,
in that he is in excess; that is his form of the impossible for him, and that as soon as he tries to emerge from his ambushed position as hidden object, he must be the object from nowhere.

Hence this sort of almost ferocious avidity in the obsessional to be the one who is everywhere in order precisely to be nowhere.
The obsessional’s taste for ubiquity is well known, and for failing to locate it you will understand nothing of most
of his behaviors. The least of things, since he cannot be everywhere, is in any case to be in several places at once, that is to say that in any case, nowhere can one seize him.

– The hysteric has another mode, which is the same of course since the root of this one, although less easy, less immediate to understand.
– The hysteric too can posit herself as real insofar as impossible; then her trick is that this impossible will subsist if the Other admits it as sign.
– The hysteric posits herself as the sign of something the Other could believe in, but in order to constitute this sign she is indeed real, and at all costs this sign must impose itself and mark the Other.

Here then is where this structure leads, this fundamental dialectic, resting entirely on the ultimate failure
of the Other as guarantor of certainty. The reality of desire is instituted there and takes its place there by means of something whose paradox we shall never point out enough, the dimension of the hidden, that is to say the dimension that is indeed the most contradictory the mind can construct as soon as truth is at issue.

What could be more natural than the introduction of this field of truth if not the positing of an omniscient Other?
To the point that the keenest, sharpest philosopher cannot sustain the very dimension of truth except by supposing
that it is this knowledge of the one who knows everything that allows him to sustain himself. And yet nothing of man’s reality,
nothing of what he seeks nor of what he follows, is sustained except by this dimension of the hidden, insofar as it is this that infers
the guarantee that there is a truly existing object, and that by reflection it gives this dimension of the hidden.

In the final analysis it is this that gives its only consistency to that problematic Other; the source of all faith, and of faith
in God eminently, is indeed this: that we move within the very dimension of that which, although the miracle
that he must know everything gives it in sum all its subsistence, we act as if always, nine-tenths
of our intentions, he knew nothing of them.

‘Not a word to the Queen Mother’ such is the principle on which every subjective constitution unfolds and shifts.

Is it not possible that a conduct proportionate to this true status of desire be conceived, and is it
even possible that we fail to notice that nothing, not one step of our ethical conduct can,
despite appearances, despite the secular chatter of the moralist, be sustained without an exact locating of the function of desire?

Is it possible that we content ourselves with examples as derisory as that of KANT when, to reveal to us
the irreducible dimension of practical reason, he gives us as an example that the honest man, even at the height
of happiness, will not be without at least for an instant weighing whether he renounces this happiness in order not to bear
false witness against innocence for the benefit of the tyrant?

An absurd example, for in the era in which we live, but equally in that of KANT, is the question not
entirely elsewhere? For the just man will hesitate, yes, namely whether in order to preserve his family he must or must not bear false witness. But what does that mean?

– Does that mean that if he thereby gives a hold to the tyrant’s hatred against the innocent, he could bear true witness, denounce his little friend as a Jew when he really is one?
– Is it not there that the moral dimension begins, which is not to know what duty we must fulfill or not fulfill vis-à-vis truth, nor whether our conduct does or does not fall under the universal rule, but whether we must or must not satisfy the tyrant’s desire?

There lies the ethical balance properly speaking. And it is at this level that—without bringing in any external drama:
we do not need it—we also have to do with what, at the end of analysis, remains suspended on the Other.
It is insofar as the measure of unconscious desire, at the end of analysis, remains still implicated in this place of the Other
that we embody as analysts, that FREUD at the end of his work can mark as irreducible
the castration complex, as unassumable by the subject.

This I shall articulate next time, making it my business to leave you at the very least a glimpse that a correct definition
of the function of fantasy and of its assumption by the subject perhaps allows us to go further in the reduction
of what has appeared up to now in experience as an ultimate frustration.