🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

This schema is not the object of my discourse today; it serves only to make you grasp its aim, only as a marker indicating to you what use the topology of this surface, of this surface called a torus, is for us, insofar as its constitutive inflection, that which necessitates these turns and returns, is what can best suggest to us the law to which the subject is subject in the process of identification. This, of course, can finally appear to us only when we have effectively gone around everything it represents, and to what extent it is suited to the dialectic proper to the subject insofar as it is a dialectic of identification.

As a marker, then…
and so that—when I bring out this or that point, when I accentuate this or that relief—you register, if I may say so, at each moment the degree of orientation, the degree of pertinence, in relation to a certain goal to be reached, of what I shall be advancing at that moment
…I will tell you that, at the limit, what can be inscribed on this torus, insofar as it can serve us, will be symbolized roughly as follows, that this form, these drawn circles, these letters attached to each of these circles, will designate it for us for the moment.

The torus, no doubt, seems to have a privileged value. Do not believe that it is the only non-spherical surface form capable of interesting us. I cannot too strongly encourage those who have some inclination, some facility for this, to refer to what is called algebraic topology, and to the forms it proposes to you in that something which, if you wish, in relation to classical geometry, the one you keep inscribed in the seat of your pants from your passage through secondary education, presents itself exactly in the analogy of what I am trying to do for you on the symbolic plane, what I have called an elastic logic, a supple logic.

This is even more manifest for the geometry at issue, for the geometry at issue in algebraic topology presents itself as the geometry of figures made of rubber. It is possible that the authors bring in this rubber, this rubber as one says in English, in order to put clearly into the listener’s mind what is at issue. These are deformable figures which, through all deformations, remain in a constant relation. This torus is not obliged to present itself here in its full, solid form.

Do not believe that among the surfaces that are defined, that must be defined, namely those that interest us essentially, closed surfaces, insofar as in any case the subject itself presents itself as something closed, closed surfaces, whatever your ingenuity—you see that the whole field is open to the most exorbitant inventions—do not believe, moreover, that imagination lends itself so readily to the forging of these supple, complex forms, which coil and knot with themselves. You need only try to make yourselves supple with knot theory to perceive how difficult it already is to represent the simplest combinations.

Even so, this will not take you far, for it is proved that every closed surface, however complicated it may be, you will always succeed in reducing, by appropriate procedures, to something that cannot go further than a sphere provided with a few appendages, among which precisely those that, from the torus, are represented there as an attached handle, a handle added to a sphere, such as I drew for you recently on the board, one handle being sufficient to transform the sphere and the handle into a torus, from the point of view of topological value.

So everything can be reduced to the addition, to the form of a sphere, of a certain number of handles, plus a certain number of other possible forms. I hope that in the session before the holidays I will be able to initiate you into this form which is quite amusing. But when I think that most of you here do not even suspect its existence! It is what is called in English a cross-cap, or what one can designate by the French word mitre. Finally, suppose a torus that has the property, somewhere along its circuit, of inverting its surface; I mean that at a place situated here between two points A and B, the outer surface crosses… the surface that is in front crosses the surface that is behind, the surfaces cross one another.

I can only indicate it to you here. It has some very curious properties, and it may even be quite exemplary for us, insofar as in any case it is a surface with this property that the external surface, it—if you like—is continuous with the internal face by passing through the inside of the object, and can therefore return in a single circuit on the other side of the surface from which it started.

This is something very easy to realize, in the simplest way, when with a strip of paper you do what consists in taking it and twisting it so that its edge is glued to the far edge while reversed [Möbius strip]. You perceive that it is a surface that effectively has only one face, in the sense that something moving along it never encounters, in a certain sense, any boundary, passing from one side to the other without your being able to grasp at any moment where the sleight of hand was carried out.

So there is there the possibility, on the surface of any sphere, as coming to realize, to simplify a surface, however complicated it may be, the possibility of this form there. Let us add to it the possibility of holes; you cannot go beyond that, that is to say, however complicated the surface you imagine, I mean for example however complicated the surface you may have to make, you will never be able to find something more complicated than that. So there is a certain naturalness in referring to the torus as the intuitively simplest, the most accessible form.

This can teach us something. On this point I told you the meaning that we could give by convention, by artifice, to two types of circular loops, insofar as they are privileged there:

– the one that goes around what may be called the generating circle of the torus, if it is ‘a torus of revolution’, insofar as, capable of repeating itself indefinitely, in some sense the same and always different, it is well suited to represent for us signifying insistence, and especially the insistence of the neurotic’s repetitive demand [D].
– On the other hand, what is implied in this succession of turns, namely an accomplished circularity [d] while remaining unnoticed by the subject, which offers us an easy, evident, and in some way maximal symbolization, as to intuitive sensibility, of what is implied in the very terms of unconscious desire, insofar as the subject follows its routes and paths without knowing it.

Through all these demands, it is in some sense by itself—this unconscious desire—the metonymy of all these demands. And there you see the living incarnation of those references to which I have made you supple, accustomed, throughout my discourse, namely those of metaphor and metonymy.

Here, metonymy finds, in some sense, its most palpable application, as manifested by desire insofar as desire is what we articulate as supposed in the succession of all demands insofar as they are repetitive. We find ourselves before something where you see that the circle described here deserves that we assign to it the symbol capital D, as symbol of demand. This something concerning the inner circle must indeed have to do with what I will call metonymic desire.

Well then, among these circles—the circles that we can make [on the torus]—there is a privileged circle that is easy to describe: it is the circle which, starting from the outside of the torus, finds the way to loop back, not simply by inserting the torus into the thickness of its handle, not simply by passing through the central hole, but by enveloping the central hole without, however, passing through the central hole.

That circle has the privilege of doing both at once: it passes through and it envelops it. It is therefore made of the addition of these two circles, that is to say it represents [D+d], the addition of demand and desire, in some way allowing us to symbolize demand with its underlying desire.

What is the interest of this? The interest of this is that if we arrive at an elementary dialectic, namely that of the opposition of two demands, if it is within this same torus that I symbolize, by another analogous circle, the demand of the Other, with what it will involve for us as ‘either-or’: either what I demand, or what you demand, there is a non-coincidence of demands.

We see this every day in ordinary life. This is to recall that in the privileged conditions, at the level where we are going to seek it, to question it in analysis, we must remember this, namely the ambiguity that is always present in the very use of the term ‘or’, or rather, this term of disjunction symbolized in logic thus: A v B.

There are two uses of this ‘either-or’. It is not for nothing that logic marks all its efforts and, if I may say so, makes an effort to preserve for it always the values of ambiguity, namely to show the connection of an inclusive ‘either-or’ with an exclusive ‘either-or’.

That the ‘either-or’ concerning, for example, these two circles may mean two things, the choice between one of these two circles. But does that mean that simply, as to the position of the ‘either-or’, there is exclusion? No! What you see is that the circle into which I am going to introduce this ‘either-or’ includes what is called the intersection symbolized in logic by ‘∩’.

The relation of desire with a certain intersection involving certain laws is not simply called upon in order to place on the ground, matter of fact, what one may call ‘the contract’, the agreement of demands

It is, given the profound heterogeneity that there is between this field [¹] and this one [²], sufficiently symbolized by this: here we are dealing with the closure of the surface [¹], and there, strictly speaking, with its internal void [²].

This is what offers us a model, what shows us that it is a matter of something other than grasping the common part between demands. In other words, for us it will be a matter of knowing to what extent this form can allow us to symbolize as such the constituents of desire, insofar as desire, for the subject, is that something which it has to constitute on the path of demand. Already now I indicate to you that there are two points, two dimensions that we can privilege in this circle particularly significant in the topology of the torus:

it is, on the one hand, the distance that joins the center of the central void to this point which happens to be, which can be defined as a sort of tangency thanks to which a plane cutting the torus will allow us to isolate in the simplest way this privileged circle. This is what will give us the definition, the measure of little (a) as object of desire.

On the other hand, insofar as this itself is locatable, definable only in relation to the very diameter of this exceptional circle, it is in the radius, in the half, if you like, of this diameter, that we shall see what is the spring, the ultimate measure of the subject’s relation to desire, namely φ as the symbol of the phallus.

That is what we are tending toward, and what will take on its meaning, its applicability, and its scope, from the path we shall have traveled beforehand, enabling us to make this image itself manageable, palpable, and to a certain extent suggestive for you of a genuine structural intensity.

That said, it is well understood that the subject—in what we are dealing with: our partner who calls us in that which we have before us in the form of this call and that which comes to speak before us—only what can be defined and scanned as the subject, only that identifies itself. It is worth recalling this because, after all, thought slips easily.

Why, if one does not dot the i’s, would one not say that ‘the drive identifies itself’, and that ‘an image identifies itself’? The term identification cannot be said, with precision, to ‘identify itself’, nor is the term identification introduced into FREUD’s thought, except from the moment when one can, to some degree whatsoever, even if it is not articulated in FREUD, consider as the dimension of the subject—this does not mean that this does not lead us much further than the subject—this identification.

The proof, there too—and I remind you of this, which one cannot know whether I am pointing to it in the antecedents, the premises, or in the future of my discourse—is that the first form of identification, and the one to which reference is made, with what lightness, what starling-like parroting, is the identification which, we are told, ‘incorporates’, or again—adding confusion to the imprecision of the first formula—‘introjects’.

Let us be content with ‘incorporates’, which is the better one. How can one even begin with this first form of identification, when not the slightest indication, not the slightest marker, except vaguely metaphorical, is given to you in such a formula as to what it can even mean?

Or else, if one speaks of incorporation, it is indeed because something must occur at the level of the body. I do not know whether this year I will be able to push things far enough—I hope so all the same, we have time before us to arrive there, returning from where we set out—to give its full meaning, and its true meaning, to this incorporation of the first identification.

You will see, there is no other way to bring it in, except by reaching it through a thematic that has already been elaborated, and since the most ancient, mythical, even religious traditions, under the term ‘mystical body’. It is impossible not to take things in the span that runs from the primitive Semitic conception: from the father of all time to all those who descend from him, identity of body.

But at the other end, you know, there is the notion I have just called by its name, that of the ‘mystical body’, insofar as it is from a body that a church is constituted. And it is not for nothing that FREUD, in order to define for us the identity of the ego in its relations with what he at times calls Massenpsychologie, refers to ‘the corporality of the Church’.

But how can I start you from there without lending myself to all confusions and making you believe that, as the term ‘mystical’ indicates well enough, it is along entirely different paths from those into which our experience would want to lead us? It is only retroactively, in some sense returning to the necessary conditions of our experience, that we will be able to introduce ourselves into what every attempt to approach, in its fullness, the reality of identification suggests to us as antecedence.

Thus the approach I chose in the second form of identification is not by chance; it is because this identification is graspable in the mode of approach through the pure signifier, by the fact that we can grasp in a clear and rational way a slant, a bias for entering into what the identification of the subject means, insofar as the subject brings forth the unary trait, rather than the unary trait, once detached, makes the subject appear as ‘the one who counts’, in the double sense of the term.

The breadth of the ambiguity that you can give to this formula…
– ‘the one who counts’ actively, no doubt,
– but also ‘the one who counts’ simply in reality, ‘the one who counts’ really, obviously will take time to find himself in his count, exactly the time we shall take to go through everything I have just designated here for you
…will have its full meaning for you.

SHACKLETON and his companions in Antarctica, several hundred kilometers from the coast, explorers delivered over to the greatest frustration, one that is not due only to deficiencies more or less elucidated at that moment—for this is a text already some fifty years old—to the more or less elucidated deficiencies of a special diet that is still being tested at that moment, but who may be said to be disoriented in a landscape, if I may still say so, virgin, not yet inhabited by human imagination—it will suffice for the human network to have furrowed its paths for it no longer to be empty, but at the beginning, it is—
report to us, in notes quite singular to read, that they always counted themselves as one more than they were, that they could not find themselves in it.

One always wondered where the missing one had gone, the missing one who was not missing except in this: that every effort at counting always suggested to them that there was one too many, therefore one too few. There you touch the appearance, in a bare state, of the subject which is nothing but that: the possibility of one signifier more, of one extra 1, thanks to which it itself notes that there is 1 missing.

If I remind you of this, it is simply to point out, within a dialectic involving the most extreme terms, where we situate our path, and where you may believe and sometimes even ask yourselves whether we are not forgetting certain references. You may, for example, even ask yourselves what relation there is between the path I have made you travel and these two terms with which we have had to deal, and constantly have to deal, but at different moments, the Other and the Thing. Of course, the subject itself in the final term is destined for the Thing, but its law, its fatum more exactly, is this path, which it can trace only by passage through the Other, insofar as the Other is marked by the signifier. And it is on this side of that necessary passage through the signifier that desire and its object are constituted as such.

The appearance of this dimension of the Other and the emergence of the subject, I cannot too strongly recall it in order to give you the full sense of what is at issue, and whose paradox, I think, must be sufficiently articulated for you in this: that desire—understand it in the most natural sense—must and can only be constituted in the tension created by this relation to the Other, which originates in this:
from the advent of the unary trait, insofar as first of all and to begin with, of the Thing it effaces everything, that something, everything other than this 1 that it has been, forever irreplaceable.

And there we find, from the first step—I point this out to you in passing—the formula, there the formula of FREUD ends:
‘Where it was—the Thing—there I must come to be.’ One would have to replace, at the origin, with: ‘Wo Es war, da durch den Ein’, rather than ‘durch den Eins’, there, by the ‘one’ as ‘1’, the unary trait—‘werde Ich’, the I will come to be. The whole path is fully laid out, at each point of the path. It is indeed there that I tried to suspend you last time by showing you the necessary progress at that moment, insofar as it can be instituted only by the effective dialectic accomplished in the relation with the Other.

I am astonished at the kind of dullness into which it seemed to me my articulation, yet carefully worked out, of ‘Nothing perhaps’ and ‘Perhaps nothing’ was falling. What, then, is needed to make you sensitive to it?
Perhaps precisely my text at that point…
and the specification of their distinction as message and question, then as answer,
but not at the level of the question, as suspension of the question at the level of the question
…was too complex to be simply heard by those who did not note it in its turns so as to return to it.

Disappointed as I may be, it is necessarily I who am wrong. That is why I return to it, and in order to make myself heard. Today, for example, might I not at least suggest to you the necessity of returning to it, and in the end simply by asking you: do you think that ‘nothing certain’, as enunciation, can seem to you to lend itself to the slightest slippage, to the slightest ambiguity with ‘surely nothing?’

It is still not the same! There is the same difference as between ‘nothing perhaps’ and ‘perhaps nothing’. I will even say that in the first, ‘nothing certain’, there is the same virtue of undermining the question at its origin as there is in ‘nothing perhaps’. And even in ‘surely nothing?’ there is the same virtue of answer, eventual no doubt, but always anticipated in relation to the question, as it is easy to put one’s finger on, it seems to me, if I remind you that it is always before any question—and for reasons of safety, if I may say so—that one learns to say in life, when one is little: ‘surely nothing’. That surely means nothing other than what is already expected, that is to say what one can consider in advance as reducible to zero, like the loops. The anxiety-relieving virtue of Erwartung, that is what FREUD knows how to articulate for us on occasion: ‘nothing but what we already know’. When one is like that, one is calm, but one is not always.

Thus what we see is that the subject, in order to find the Thing, first engages in the opposite direction:
that there is no way to articulate these first steps of the subject except through a nothing that it is important to make you feel in this very dimension, both metaphorical and metonymic, of the first signifying game, because each time we analysts are dealing with this relation of the subject to nothing, we regularly slide between two slopes:
the common slope tending toward a nothing of destruction—that is the unfortunate interpretation of aggressivity considered as purely reducible to the biological power of aggression, which is in no way sufficient, except by degradation, to support the tendency toward nothing as it arises at a certain necessary stage of Freudian thought, and just before he introduced identification: in the death instinct.

The other is a nihilation that would assimilate itself to Hegelian negativity. The nothing that I am trying at this initial moment to sustain for you in the institution of the subject is something else. The subject introduces nothing as such, and this nothing is to be distinguished from any being of reason that is that of classical negativity, from any imaginary being that is that of impossible being as to its existence, the famous ‘Centaur’ that stops logicians—all logicians, even metaphysicians—at the entrance to their path toward science, which is not either the ens privativum, which is strictly speaking what KANT—admirably, in the definition of his four ‘nothings’, from which he makes so little use—calls the ‘nihil negativum’, namely, to use his own terms: ‘leerer Gegenstand ohne Begriff’, an empty object, but let us add, without concept, without possible grasp by the hand.

It is for that reason, in order to introduce it, that I had to place before you again the network of the whole graph, namely the constitutive network of the relation to the Other with all its referrals.

I would like, in order to lead you along this path, to pave your way with flowers. I am going to try to do so today, I mean to mark my intentions. When I tell you that it is from the problematic of what lies beyond demand that the object is constituted as object of desire, I mean that it is because the Other does not respond—except that ‘nothing perhaps’, that ‘the worst is not always certain’—that the subject will find in an object the very virtues of his initial demand.

Understand that it is in order to pave your way with flowers that I remind you of these truths of common experience, whose significance is not sufficiently recognized, and try to make you feel that it is not chance, analogy, comparison, nor only flowers, but deep affinities that will lead me to indicate to you the affinity—at the end—of the object to this Other with a capital A, insofar for example as it manifests itself in love, that the famous passage which Eliante, in Le Misanthrope, took up from Lucretius’s De natura rerum…

‘The pale one is comparable to jasmines in whiteness.
The black one, enough to frighten, is an adorable brunette.
The thin one has figure and freedom.
The plump one is in her bearing full of majesty.
The untidy one, bearing few charms upon herself,
Is placed under the name of neglected beauty…’

…is nothing other than the impossible-to-erase sign of this fact: the object of desire is constituted only in relation to the Other, insofar as it itself originates in the value of the unary trait. No privilege in the object, except in this absurd value given to each trait of being a privilege.

What else is needed to convince you of the structural dependence of this constitution of the object, object of desire, in relation to the initial dialectic of the signifier insofar as it comes to fail against the non-response of the Other?

If not the path already traversed by us in the Sadean inquiry, which I showed you at length—and if that has been lost, know at least that I have committed myself to returning to it in a preface I have promised for an edition of SADE—that we cannot fail to recognize, with what I call here the ‘structuring affinity’ of this progression toward the Other, insofar as it determines every institution of the object of desire, which we see in SADE at every moment intermingled, braided one with the other, invective…
I say invective, against the Supreme Being, its negation being only a form of invective, even if it is the most authentic negation of it
…absolutely woven together with what I shall call, in order to approach it, to come at it a little, not so much the destruction of the object as what we might at first take for its simulacrum, because you know the exceptional resistance of the victims of the Sadean myth to all the ordeals through which the novelistic text makes them pass.

And then what? What does this sort of ‘transfer to the mother’—embodied in Nature—of a certain and fundamental abomination of all her acts mean? Should this conceal from us what is at stake, and yet we are told that this is indeed what is at stake: by imitating her in her acts of destruction, and pushing them to the last term by an applied will, to force her to recreate something else. Which is to say what? To restore the Creator to his place. In the end, at the final term, SADE said it without knowing it, he articulates this, by his enunciation:

‘I give you your abominable reality, you the Father, by substituting myself for you in this violent action against the mother.’

Of course, the mythical restitution of the object to nothing aims not only at the privileged victim, ultimately adored as object of desire, but at the very multitude, by millions, of all that is. Recall the antisocial plots of SADE’s heroes: this restitution of the object to nothing essentially simulates the annihilation of signifying power.

That is the other contradictory term of this fundamental relation to the Other as it is instituted in Sadean desire. And it is sufficiently indicated in SADE’s last testamentary wish:
– insofar as it aims precisely at that term which I specified for you as ‘the second death’, the death of being itself,
– insofar as SADE, in his will, specifies that from his tomb and intentionally from his memory, despite his being a writer, there must literally remain no trace.

And the thicket must be reconstituted on the place where he will have been buried. That of him, essentially as subject, it is the ‘no trace’ that indicates where he wants to affirm himself, very precisely as what I called ‘the annihilation of signifying power’.

If there is something else I have to remind you of here, in order sufficiently to mark the legitimacy of the necessary inclusion of the object of desire in this relation to the Other insofar as it implies the mark of the signifier as such, I would point it out to you less in SADE than in one of his most sensitive, indeed most illustrious recent, contemporary commentators.

This text, published immediately after the war in an issue of Les Temps Modernes, recently republished through the care of our friend Jean-Jacques PAUVERT in the new edition of the first version of Justine, is PAULHAN’s preface. A text like that cannot be indifferent to us, insofar as you are following here the turns of my discourse.

For it is striking that it is by the sole paths of a rhetorician’s rigor—you will see—that there is no other guide to PAULHAN’s discourse—the author of Fleurs de Tarbes—than his so subtle extraction, I mean: by these paths, of everything that has so far been articulated on the subject of the meaning of Sadianism.

Namely what he calls the ‘complicity of Sadean imagination with its object’, that is to say the view from the outside, I mean by the approach that a literal analysis can make of it, the surest, strictest view that can be given of the essence of masochism, of which precisely he says nothing. Except that he makes us very clearly feel that it is along this path, that there lies the last word of SADE’s démarche, not to judge it clinically, and in some way from the outside, where nevertheless the result is manifest: it is difficult better to offer oneself to all the ill-treatment of society than SADE did at every moment, but that is not the essential point.

The essential point being suspended, in this text of PAULHAN—which I ask you to read—which proceeds only by the paths of a rhetorical analysis of the Sadean text in order to make us feel, only behind a veil, the point of convergence, insofar as it is situated in this wholly apparent reversal—founded on the deepest complicity with that of which the victim is here in the end only the symbol, marked by a sort of absent substance—of the ideal of Sadean victims: it is as object that the Sadean subject annuls himself.

In which indeed he rejoins what phenomenologically appears to us then in MASOCH’s texts. Namely that the term, that the acme of masochistic jouissance is not so much in the fact that it offers itself to endure or not endure this or that bodily pain. But in this singular extremity—which, as you will know, in books you will always find again in the small or great texts of masochistic phantasmagoria—this annulment, properly speaking, of the subject insofar as he makes himself pure object.

There is no term to this except the moment when the masochistic novel, whatever it may be, arrives at this point which from the outside may seem so superfluous, even ornate, luxurious, which is properly speaking that he himself forges himself, this masochistic subject, as being the object of a bargaining, or very exactly of a sale between the two others who pass him between themselves as a possession. Venal property and—observe it—not even a fetish, for the final term is indicated in the fact that it is a vile good, sold cheap, that there will not even be any need to preserve as the ancient slave who at least constituted himself, imposed himself, as worthy of respect by his market value.

All this, these detours, this path paved precisely with the Fleurs de Tarbes, or with literary flowers, in order clearly to mark for you what I mean when I speak of what I have, for you, accentuated, namely the profound perturbation of jouissance:
– insofar as jouissance is defined, in relation to the Thing, by the dimension of the Other as such,
– insofar as this dimension of the Other is defined by the introduction of the signifier.

Three more little steps forward, and then I will put off until next time the rest of this discourse, for fear that you may too much feel what grippe-fatigue is gripping me with today.

JONES is a curious character in the history of analysis. In relation to the history of analysis, what he imposes on my mind, I will tell you at once, to continue this path of flowers today, is what diabolical will to dissimulation there could well have been in FREUD for him to have entrusted to this ‘cunning Welshman’—as such too short-sighted—for him not to go too far in the work entrusted to him: the care of his own biography.

It is there, in the article on symbolism that I devoted to JONES’s work—which does not simply mean the desire to end my article on a very good note, which is what is meant by what I concluded on, namely the comparison of the activity of the ‘cunning Welshman’ with the work of the chimney sweep. He did indeed sweep all the flues very well, and justice may be done me that in said article, I followed him through all the turns of the chimney, until coming out with him all black through the door that opens into the salon, as perhaps you recall.

Which earned me from another eminent member of the Analytic Society—one of those I esteem and love the most, Welsh too [Winnicott]—the assurance in a letter that he really understood absolutely nothing of the use I apparently thought I found in this meticulous démarche.

JONES has never done anything more in his biography…
to mark nevertheless a little his distance
…than to bring a small external light, namely the points where the Freudian construction finds itself in disagreement, in contradiction with the Darwinian gospel, which is on his part simply a properly grotesque manifestation of chauvinist superiority.

JONES, then, in the course of a work whose progression is gripping because of its very misrecognitions, especially concerning the phallic stage and his exceptionally abundant experience of female homosexuals, JONES encounters the paradox of the castration complex which assuredly constitutes the best of all that to which he adhered—and rightly adhered—in order to articulate his experience, and into which literally he never penetrated this much! [hand gesture].

The proof is the introduction of this term, certainly manageable, on condition that one knows what to do with it, namely that one knows how to locate in it what must not be done, in order to understand castration, the term of ἀϕάνιςις [aphanisis]. To define the meaning of what I can call, without forcing anything here, ‘the effect of the Oedipus’, JONES tells us something that could not be better situated in our discourse: here he finds himself—whether he wants it or not—party to the fact that the Other, as I articulated it to you last time, forbids the object or desire. My ‘or’ is—or seems to be—exclusive. Not quite:

‘Either you desire what I desired, I, the dead God, and there is no longer any other proof—but it suffices—of my existence than this commandment that forbids you its object, or more exactly, that makes you constitute it in the dimension of the lost: whatever you do, you can no longer do anything but find another one, never that one.’

This is the most intelligent interpretation I can give of this step, which JONES crosses blithely—and I assure you, drums beating!—when it is a matter of marking the entry of these homosexual women into the sulfurous domain that will henceforth be their habitat: either the object, or desire, I assure you it does not drag! If I dwell on it, it is in order to give to this choice—vel, vel—the best interpretation, that is to say that I add to it, I make my interlocutor speak as well as possible.

‘Either you renounce desire…’ JONES tells us… When one says it quickly, it can seem self-evident, all the more so since beforehand we have been given the occasion for repose of soul, and at the same time for the comprehenshade [wordplay on compréhension/noir], by translating castration for us as ἀϕάνιςις [aphanisis]. But what does it mean, to renounce desire?

– Is this ἀϕάνιςις [aphanisis] of desire so tenable, if we give it this function, as in JONES, of subject of fear?

– Is it even conceivable first of all in the fact of experience, at the point where FREUD brings it into play in one of the possible—and, I grant, exemplary—outcomes of the Oedipal conflict, that of the female homosexual?

Let us look at it closely. This desire that disappears, to which—subject—you renounce, does not our experience teach us that this means that, from then on, your desire is going to be so well hidden that it may for a time seem absent? Let us even say, in the manner of our cross-cap or mitre surface, it inverts itself in demand. Demand here, once again, receives its own message in an inverted form. But in the end what does this hidden desire mean, if not what we call and discover in experience as repressed desire.

In any case there is only one thing we know very well that we shall never find in the subject: it is fear of repression as such, at the very moment when it operates, in its instant. If in ἀϕάνιςις [aphanisis] it is a matter of something that concerns desire: it is arbitrary—given the way our experience teaches us to see it slip away—it is unthinkable that an analyst should articulate that in consciousness there could be formed something that would be the fear of the disappearance of desire. Where desire disappears, that is to say in repression, the subject is completely included, not detached from this disappearance. And we know it, anxiety, if it occurs, is never anxiety of the disappearance of desire, but of the object it conceals, of the truth of desire, or if you prefer, of what we do not know of the desire of the Other.

Any interrogation of consciousness concerning desire as being able to fail can only be complicity. Conscius means accomplice, besides. In this, etymology here regains its freshness in experience. And that is precisely why I reminded you earlier, on my path paved with flowers, of the relation of Sadean ethics to its object.

This is what we call the ambivalence, the ambiguity, the reversibility of certain drive-pairs. But in simply saying that of this equivalent, that it turns around, that the subject makes itself object and the object subject, we do not grasp its true spring, which always implies this reference to the big Other where all this takes its meaning.

Therefore, ἀϕάνιςις [aphanisis] explained as the source of anxiety in the castration complex is, properly speaking, an exclusion of the problem. For the only question that an analyst-theorist has to ask himself here…
whose having indeed a question to ask himself is perfectly understandable,
for the castration complex remains up to now a reality not completely elucidated
…the only question he has to ask himself is the one that starts from this fortunate fact: that thanks to FREUD, who bequeathed him his discovery at a stage far more advanced than the point to which he—analyst-theorist—can arrive, the question is to know why the instrument of desire, the phallus, takes on this so decisive value. Why is it that, and not desire, which is implicated in an anxiety, in a fear of which, all the same, it is not vain, concerning the term ἀϕάνιςις [aphanisis], that we have borne witness, so as not to forget that every anxiety is anxiety of nothing, insofar as it is against ‘nothing perhaps’ that the subject must rampart himself. Which means that for a time it is for him the best hypothesis:

‘nothing perhaps to fear.’

Why is it there that the function of the phallus comes to arise, there where indeed everything would without it be so easy to understand, unfortunately in a wholly external way to experience? Why the thing of the phallus, why does the phallus come as measure, at the moment when it is a matter—of what?—
– of the void included at the heart of demand, that is to say of the Beyond the pleasure principle,
– of what makes demand its eternal repetition, that is to say of what constitutes the drive.

Once again we are brought back to this point, which I shall not go beyond today, that desire is built on the path of a question that threatens it, and which belongs to the domain of ‘not-being’ [n’être / naître], which you will permit me to introduce here with this play on words.

A final reflection was suggested to me these days, with the always daily presentification of the way in which it is fitting to articulate decently—and not merely with snickering—the eternal principles of the Church, or the wavering detours of the various national laws on birth control.

Namely, that the first reason for being—of which no legislator up to now has made mention—for the birth of a child is that one desires it. And that we who know well the role of this—whether or not it was desired—on the whole development of the later subject, it does not seem that we have felt the need to recall it, in order to introduce it, to make it felt through this drunken discussion, oscillating between the evident utilitarian necessities of a demographic policy and the anxious fear—do not forget it—of the abominations that eugenics might eventually promise us.

It is a first step, a very small step, but an essential step and how much—when put to the test, you will see—discriminating it is to point out the constituting relation, effective in every future destiny, supposedly to be respected as the essential mystery of the being to come, that it was desired, and why.

Remember that it often happens that the ground of the desire for a child is simply this, which no one says:

‘That he be as not-one, that he be my curse upon the world.’