🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Those who, for various reasons, personal or not, distinguished themselves by their absence from this meeting of the Society
that is called provincial are going to feel themselves prey to a little aside, because for the moment it is to the others that I am going to address myself, insofar as I remain indebted to them, since I said something at this little congress. It was to defend the part
they took in it, and that did not happen in me, I must say, without covering over some dissatisfaction on my part toward them.

One must nevertheless do a little philosophizing about the nature of what is called a congress. In principle it is one of those kinds
of meetings where people speak, but where everyone knows that whatever he says he participates in a certain indecency, so that
it is quite natural that only pompous nothings be said there, each ordinarily remaining screwed into his role to be kept.

This is not quite what happens at what we call, more modestly, our ‘study days’. But for some time everyone has been very modest: people call it a colloquium, a meeting; this changes nothing in the substance of the matter, it always remains congresses.

There is the question of Reports. It seems to me that this term is worth pausing over because in the end it is rather funny, if one looks
at it closely. Report in relation to what, of what, report between what, indeed, report against what, as one says ‘the little informer’?
Is that really what one means?

It would have to be seen. In any case, if the word ‘report’ is clear when one says Mr. So-and-so’s report on the financial situation, one still cannot say that one is entirely at ease in giving a meaning that must be analogous to a term like ‘report on anxiety,’ for example. Admit that it is rather curious to make a report on anxiety, or on poetry for that matter, or on a certain number of terms of that kind.

I nevertheless hope that the strangeness of the thing appears to you, and is specific not only to congresses of psychoanalysts but to a certain number of other congresses, let us say of philosophers in general. The term ‘report,’ I must say, makes one hesitate.
Indeed, at one time I did not hesitate to call ‘discourse’ what I might have to say on analogous terms, ‘Discourse on psychic causality,’ for example. It sounds precious; I went back to ‘report’ like everyone else.
Still, this term, and its usage, is made precisely to make you pose the question of the degree of appropriateness
by which these strange reports are measured in relation to their strange objects.

It is quite certain that there is a certain proportion of the said reports to a certain constitutive type of the question to which they relate: the void that is at the center of my torus, for example. When it is a matter of anxiety or desire, this is very palpable.
Which would allow us to believe, to understand, that the best echo of the signifier that we can have of the term report—called scientific on this occasion—would be to be taken with what is also called ‘the relation’ when it is a matter of the sexual relation.
Neither one nor the other is without relation to the question at issue, but only just.

It is precisely there that we find again this dimension of the ‘not without,’ insofar as it founds the very point where we introduce ourselves into desire, and insofar as access to desire requires that the subject not be without having it… Having it: what?
That is the whole question. In other words, that access to desire resides in a fact, in this fact that the covetousness of the being called ‘human’
has to be dejected inaugurally, in order to restore itself on the rungs of a power of which it is the question to know:
– the power ‘of whom,’
– indeed the power ‘of what’ it is,
– but above all—this power—‘toward what’ it exerts itself.

Now what it exerts itself toward, visibly, palpably through all the metamorphoses of human desire, it seems
is toward something ever more palpable, more specified, which is apprehended for us as this central hole,
this thing around which one must make ever more of a circuit for it to be a question of that desire that we know,
this human desire insofar as it is more and more informed.

That is what makes it, therefore up to a certain point legitimate, that their report—the ‘report on anxiety’ in particular from the other day—can only gain access to the question by being ‘not without relation’ to the question. That still does not mean
that the ‘without,’ if I may say so, should take too much precedence over the ‘not,’ in other words, that one should a little too easily believe oneself to be responding to the constitutive void at the center of a subject by too much destitution in the means of approaching it.

And here you will allow me to evoke the myth of the Foolish Virgin who, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, responds so nicely to
that of πενία[penia] of poverty in PLATO’S Symposium. πενία[penia] succeeds in her move because she is informed
about VENUS, but it is not compulsory; the improvidence symbolized by the said Foolish Virgin can very well fail in her impregnation.

So where is the unforgivable limit in this matter…
because after all that is indeed what is at stake, it is the style of what can be communicated, in a certain
mode of communication that we are trying to define, the one that forces me to return to anxiety here,
not in order to take things up again, nor to lecture those who spoke of it, not without failing
…a limit obviously sought, from which point one may reproach congresses in general for their results.

Where is it to be sought? Since we are speaking of something that allows us to grasp its void: when it is a matter
for example of speaking of desire, are we going to seek it in this sort of sin against desire,
in I do not know what fire of passion? Of the passion for truth for example, which is the mode on which we could
very well pin, for example, a certain bearing, a certain style, university bearing, for example?

That would be far too convenient, that would be far too easy. I will surely not go here to parody the famous roar
of the Eternal’s vomiting before some lukewarmness whatsoever: a certain heat also leads very well, as is known, to sterility.
And in truth, our morality—a morality that already stands very well on its own: Christian morality—says that there is only one sin,
the sin against the Spirit. Well then, we, we will say that there is no sin against desire, no more than there is fear
of ἀϕάνιςις[aphanisis], in the sense understood by Mr. JONES.

We cannot say that in any case we could reproach ourselves for not desiring well enough. There is only one thing
—and that we can do nothing about—there is only one thing to fear, and that is this obtuseness in recognizing the proper curve
of the path of this ‘infinitely flat being’ whose necessary propulsion I demonstrate to you on this closed object
that I call here the torus, which in truth is only the most innocent form that the said curvature can take.
Since in such another form—which is no less possible nor less widespread—it is in the very structure
of these forms, into which I introduced you a little last time, that the subject, moving, finds himself with his left placed
on the right [in mirror image], and this without knowing how it could have happened, how it was done.

At this point, all those here who are listening to me have nothing privileged, at this point, up to a certain point I would say that
I do not either: it can happen to me like to the others. The only difference between them and me up to now—it seems to me—
resided only in the work I put into it, insofar as I give a little more of it than they do.
I can say that in a certain number of things that were advanced, on a subject that no doubt I have not tackled: anxiety, it is not that which leads me to announce to you that it will be the subject of my seminar next year
—if indeed the century allows us there to be one—on this subject of anxiety I heard many strange things,
venturesome things, not all mistaken and that I will not have to take up again, addressing myself by name to this one or that one, one by one.
It nevertheless seems to me that what was revealed there as a certain failing was indeed that of a center,
and not at all of a nature to cover over what I call the void of the center.

Still, a few remarks from my last seminar ought, on the sharpest points, to have put you on your guard,
and that is why it also seems legitimate to me to approach the question from this angle today, since this follows on exactly from the discourse of eight days ago. It is still not for nothing that I put the emphasis there, recalled the distance that separates, in our fundamental coordinates—those into which our theorems on identification this year must be inserted—
the distance that separates the Other from the Thing, nor again that in so many words I thought I should point out to you the relation
of anxiety to the desire of the Other.

For truly failing to start from there, to latch onto that as onto a sort of firm handle, and for having only circled around it through I know not what modesty. For really at certain moments—I would say: almost all the time—and right into
those reports I spoke of, for I know not what, which belongs to that sort of lack which is not the right one, right into
those reports, even so you can note in the margin that I know not what, which was always convergence, imposing itself with a kind of compass-needle orientation, that the only term that could give unity to this sort
of oscillatory movement around which the question trembled was this term: ‘The relation of anxiety to the desire of the Other’.

And this is what I would like—because it would be false, vain, but not without risk, not to mark something here
in passing that could be like a germ there, in order to fish out everything that was said, no doubt interesting, over the hours of this little meeting where increasingly accentuated things came to be stated—so that this
does not dissipate, so that this connects back to our work, allow me to try here very massively, as in the margin
and almost in advance, but not without also a pertinence of exact points, at the point where we had arrived,
to punctuate a certain number of first markers.

There is a reference here that should at no moment fail you:
– if the fact that jouissance—insofar as jouissance of the Thing—is forbidden in its fundamental access,
– if that is what I told you all through the year of the seminar on Ethics,
– if it is in this suspension, in the fact that it is, this jouissance, aufgehoben, suspended, precisely that there lies the support-plane where desire as such will be constituted, and sustained: that is really the most distant approximation of everything that everyone can say!
…do you not see that we can formulate that the Other…
this Other insofar as at once it posits itself as being and as it is not, that it is to be, the Other here, when we move toward desire, we see clearly that insofar as its support is the pure signifier, the signifier of the law
…that the Other presents itself here as metaphor of this prohibition: to say that the Other is the law or that it is jouissance
insofar as forbidden is the same thing.

So, warning to the one—who is not here today, moreover—who, from anxiety, made the support and the sign and the spasm,
of the jouissance of an identified self—identified exactly as if he were not my student—with this ineffable fund of the drive
as of the heart, of the center of being, precisely where there is nothing!

Now everything I teach you about the drive is precisely that it is not confused with this mythical self,
that it has nothing to do with what is made of it in a Jungian perspective. Obviously, it is not common to say
that anxiety is the jouissance of what one might call the final fund of one’s own unconscious.
That is what this discourse amounted to. It is not common, and it is not because it is not common that it is true.

It is an extreme to which one can be led when one is in a certain error resting entirely on the elision of
this relation of the Other to the Thing insofar as antinomic. The Other is to be, therefore it is not. It nevertheless has some reality; without that I could not even define it as the place where the signifying chain unfolds.

The only real Other—since there is no Other of the Other, nothing to guarantee the truth of the law—the only real Other being that from which one could
enjoy without the law. This virtuality defines the Other as place, the Thing in sum elided, reduced to its place: there is the Other with a capital O.

And I will go immediately, very quickly, to what I have to say about anxiety. It passes—did I not announce it to you?—through
the desire of the Other. So that is where we are, with our torus; that is where we have to define it, step by step.
That is where I shall make a first pass, a little too quickly; that is never a bad thing, since one can go back.

First approach: are we going to say that this relation that I articulate by saying that ‘Man’s desire is the desire of the Other,’
which of course means to say something, but now what is in question, what this already introduces,
is that obviously I am saying something altogether different from saying that:
– the subject ego’s desire x is the relation to the desire of the Other,
– that it would be, in relation to the desire of the Other, in a relation of Beschränkung, of limitation,
– that it would come to be configured in a simple field of vital space or not, conceived as homogeneous,
– that it would come to limit itself by their collision.

Fundamental image of all sorts of thought when one speculates on the effects of a psychosociological conjunction.
The relation of the subject’s desire, of the subject to the desire of the Other has nothing to do with anything intuitively supportable
from that register. A first step would be to advance that if ‘measure’ means ‘measure of magnitude,’ there is no common measure
between them. And merely by saying that, we rejoin experience. Who has ever found a common measure
between his desire and whoever he is dealing with as desire?

If one does not put that first in every Science of experience—when one has the title of HEGEL, the true title of the Phenomenology
of Spirit—one may allow oneself anything, including delirious preachings on the benefits of genitality!
That is what and nothing else my introduction of the symbol means: it is something intended to suggest to you
that ( . ), the product of my desire by the desire of the Other, gives, and can only give, a lack: –1,
the subject’s defect at this precise point.

Result: the product of one desire by the other can only be this lack, and that is where one must begin in order to hold onto something.
This means that there can be no agreement, no contract on the plane of desire, that what is at stake
in this identification of man’s desire with the desire of the Other is this, which I will show you in a manifest game:
by making the puppets of fantasy play for you insofar as they are the support, the only possible support
of what can be, in the proper sense, a realization of desire.

Well then, when we have arrived there…
you can nevertheless already see it indicated in a thousand references:
– references to SADE, to take the nearest,
– the fantasy A Child Is Being Beaten, to take one of the first angles with which I began to introduce this game
…what I will show you is that the realization of desire means—in the very act of this realization—can only mean being the instrument, serving the desire of the Other, which is not the object you have in front of you in the act, but another who is behind.

This is the possible term in the realization of fantasy. It is only a possible term, and before having made yourselves
the instrument of this Other situated in a hyperspace, you indeed have to do with desires, with real desires.
Desire exists, is constituted, roams through the world, and it wreaks its ravages before any attempt of your imaginations, erotic or not, to realize it, and even, it is not excluded that you may encounter it as such, the desire of the Other, of the real Other as I defined it just now.

It is at this point that anxiety is born. Anxiety, it is as simple as can be. It is incredible that at no moment did I see
even the outline of this, which seemed at certain moments, as they say, to be a game of hide-and-seek, which is so simple.
People went to look for anxiety, and more exactly for what is more originary than anxiety: pre-anxiety, traumatic anxiety.

No one spoke of this: anxiety is the sensation of the desire of the Other. Only, as is only to be expected, each time
someone advances a new formula, I do not know what happens, the previous ones slip to the bottom of your pockets or do not come out anymore.

I still have to put that into an image—I apologize—and even crudely, to make felt what I mean,
after which you may try to make use of it, and it can be useful in all places where there is anxiety.
A little apologue, perhaps not the best; the truth is that I forged it this morning, telling myself that I had to try
to make myself understood. Usually I make myself understood alongside, which is not so bad: it keeps you from being mistaken
in the right place! Here, I am going to try to make myself understood in the right place and keep you from making an error.

Suppose me in an enclosed space, alone with a praying mantis 3 meters high, that is the right proportion
for me to have the size of the said male; moreover, I am clad in a shell to the size of the said male who is 1.75 m, roughly
my own. I look at myself, I view my image thus decked out, in the compound eye of the said praying mantis.
Is that anxiety? It comes very close.

Yet, in telling you that it is the sensation of the desire of the Other, this definition shows itself for what it is, namely purely introductory. You obviously have to refer to my structure of the subject, that is to say know all the preceding discourse, to understand that if it is the Other, with a capital O, that is at issue, I cannot be satisfied not to go any further, and to represent in the matter only that little image of myself as a male mantis in the compound eye of the other.

It is, properly speaking, a matter of the pure apprehension of the desire of the Other as such, if precisely I misrecognize what? My insignia! Namely that I, I am decked out in the male’s shell. I do not know what I am as an object for the Other. Anxiety, it is said, is an affect ‘without an object,’ but this ‘lack of object,’ one must know where it is: it is on my side. The affect of anxiety is indeed connoted by a lack of object, but not by a lack of reality.

If I no longer know myself as a possible object of this desire of the Other, this Other who is facing me, its figure is entirely mysterious to me, especially insofar as this form as such that I have before me cannot in effect either be constituted for me as an object, but where all the same I can feel a mode of sensations that make up the whole substance of what is called ‘anxiety,’ of that unsayable oppression through which we arrive at the very dimension of the place of the Other insofar as desire can appear there.

That is anxiety. It is only from there that you can understand the various angles the neurotic takes to manage it, this relation with the desire of the Other. So then, at the point we are at, this desire, I showed it to you last time as first necessarily included in the demand of the Other.

Here besides, what do you rediscover as first truth, if not the common stuff of everyday experience? What is anxiety-producing—almost for anyone, not only for small children, but for the small children that we all are—is, in some demand, what may well be hidden of this X, of this impenetrable and anxiety-producing X par excellence of: ‘What can he possibly want there?’

What the configuration here calls for, you can clearly see, is a ‘medium’ between demand and desire. This medium has a name; it is called ‘the phallus.’ The phallic function has absolutely no other meaning than being what gives the measure of this field to be defined, within demand, as the field of desire.

And indeed, if one wishes, everything analytic theory tells us, Freudian doctrine in the matter, consists precisely in telling us that in the end everything gets arranged there. I do not know the desire of the Other: anxiety! But I know its instrument: the phallus, and whoever I may be, man or woman, I am asked to go through there and not make a fuss, which in ordinary language is called: ‘continuing father’s principles.’

And as everyone knows that for some time now ‘father’ no longer has principles, that is where all misfortunes begin. But as long as ‘father’ is there, insofar as he is the center around which the transfer is organized of what in this matter is the unit of exchange, namely: 1/ϕ, I mean the unit that is instituted, that becomes the basis and the principle of every support, of every foundation, of every articulation of the field of desire, well then, things can go.

They will be stretched exactly between:

– the μὴϕῦναι[me phunai]: ‘May he never have begotten me!’ at the limit,

– and what is called ‘baraka’ in the Semitic tradition, and even biblically properly speaking, namely the contrary: what makes me the living, active extension of the law of the father, of the father as origin of everything that is going to be transmitted as desire.

Castration anxiety then, you will see here that it has two meanings and two levels. For if the phallus is this mediating element that gives desire its support, well then, the woman is not the worst off in this affair, because after all, for her it is quite simple: since she does not have it, she only has to desire it, and indeed in the happiest cases, it is in fact a situation with which she accommodates herself very well.

The whole dialectic of the castration complex, insofar as for her it introduces the Oedipus, FREUD tells us, means nothing else. Thanks to the very structure of human desire, the path for her necessitates fewer detours—the normal path—than for the man. For for the man, for his phallus to be able to serve in this foundation of the field of desire, will it be necessary for him to ask for it in order to have it? That is indeed something like what is at issue at the level of the castration complex.

It is a matter of a transitional passage from what, in him, is the natural support—become half foreign, wavering, of desire—the transitional passage through this habilitation by the law, that through which this piece, this ‘pound of flesh’ is going to become the pledge, the something by which he is going to designate himself at the place where he has to manifest himself as desire, within the circle of demand.

This necessary preservation of the field of demand which humanizes, by the law, the mode of relation of desire to its object, that is what is at issue at this point and what makes the danger for the subject, not as people say in all this deviation we have been making for years, trying to obstruct analysis, that the danger for the subject is not any abandonment on the part of the Other, but his abandonment as subject to demand.

For insofar as he lives, as he develops the constitution of his relation to the phallus tightly on the field of demand, it is there that this demand has, properly speaking, no term. For the phallus, although it is necessary—for introducing, for instituting this field of desire—that it be demanded, as you know, is properly speaking not in the power of the Other to grant as a gift on this plane of demand.

It is insofar as therapeutics does not manage to resolve the termination of analysis any better than it has done, does not manage to make it leave the circle proper to demand, that it stumbles, that it ends in the end on this revendicatory form, this unappeasable form, unendliche, which FREUD in his last article: Analysis Terminable and Interminable, designates: as unresolved castration anxiety in the man, as Penisneid in the woman.

But a proper position, a correct position of the function of demand in analytic efficacy and of the way of directing it, could perhaps allow us, if we were not so far behind on this point, a delay already sufficiently indicated by the fact that manifestly it is only in the rarest cases that we manage to come up against this term marked by FREUD as the stopping point of his own experience. Would to heaven that we got there, even if it is into an impasse!

That would already prove at least how far we can go, whereas what is at issue is knowing effectively whether going that far leads us to an impasse or whether elsewhere one can pass through. Must I, before leaving you, indicate a few of these little points that will satisfy you, to show you that we are in the right place, by referring ourselves to something that belongs to our experience of the neurotic?

What does the hysteric do, for example, or obsessional neurosis, in the register that we have just tried to construct? What do both of them do at this point of the desire of the Other as such? Before we fell into their trap by urging them to play the whole game on the plane of demand, by imagining to ourselves—which is not moreover an absurd imagination—that we will eventually manage to define the phallic field as the intersection of two frustrations, what do they do spontaneously?

The hysteric, it is very simple—the obsessional too, but it is less obvious—the hysteric does not need to have attended our seminar to know that: ‘man’s desire is the desire of the Other’ and that consequently the Other can perfectly well, in this function of desire—she, the hysteric—stand in for it. The hysteric lives her relation to the object by fomenting the desire of the Other—with a capital O—for that object. Refer yourselves to the case Dora. I think I have articulated this sufficiently at length and breadth not to need even here to recall it.

I simply appeal to everyone’s experience, and to the operations called those of a ‘refined intriguer’ that you can see developing in all hysterical behavior, which consists in sustaining in her immediate circle the love of such-and-such a man for such-and-such another woman who is her friend and the true final object of her desire.

The ambiguity of course always remaining profound as to whether the situation should not be understood in the opposite sense. Why? This is what of course you will be able, in the course of our discussion, to see as perfectly calculable from the sole fact of the function of the phallus which can always here pass from one to the other of the hysteric’s two partners. But we will return to this in detail.

And what does the obsessional really do concerning—I mean: directly—his affair with the desire of the Other? It is more clever, since indeed this field of desire is constituted by the paternal demand, insofar as it is this demand that preserves, that defines the field of desire as such by forbidding it. Well then, let him manage it himself! The one charged with sustaining desire at the point of the object in obsessional neurosis is the dead man!

The subject has the phallus, he can even on occasion exhibit it, but it is the dead man who is asked to use it. It is not for nothing that I pointed out in the story of the Rat Man, the nocturnal hour when, after having long contemplated himself erect in the mirror, he goes to the front door to open it to the ghost of his father, to ask him to observe that everything is ready for the supreme narcissistic act that for the obsessional this desire is.

Except for this, do not be surprised that with such means anxiety only surfaces from time to time, that it is not there all the time, that it is even much more and much better kept at bay in the hysteric than in the obsessional, the complaisance of the Other being much greater than that of, all the same, a dead man whom it is always difficult, all the same, to keep present, if one may say so. That is why the obsessional, from time to time, each time the whole arrangement that allows him to manage it, with the desire of the Other, cannot be repeated to satiety, sees reemerge, of course in a more or less overflowing way, the affect of anxiety.

Only from there, by going back, can you understand that phobic history marks a first step, in this attempt which is properly the neurotic mode of resolving the problem of the desire of the Other, a first step I say in the way this can be resolved. It is a step—as everyone knows—one very far, of course, from arriving at this relative solution of the relation to anxiety. Quite the contrary, it is only in a completely precarious way that this anxiety is mastered—you know it—through the intermediary of this object whose ambiguity already, for it, has already been sufficiently underlined for us between the function little(a) and the function little(ϕ). The common factor constituted by little(ϕ) in every little(a) of desire is there in some way extracted and revealed. This is what I will emphasize next time in order to start again from phobia, to specify what exactly this function of the phallus consists in.

Today, broadly, what do you see? It is that in the end the solution that we glimpse to the problem of the relation of the subject to desire, in its radical basis, presents itself thus: since it is a matter of demand and of defining desire, well then let us put it crudely, the subject demands the phallus and the phallus desires. It is as simple as that.

It is from there at least that one must begin as a radical formula to see effectively what indeed in experience is modeled, modulated around this relation of the subject to the phallus insofar as, you can see, it is essentially identificatory in nature, and that if there is something that indeed can provoke this upsurge of anxiety linked to the fear of a loss, it is the phallus. Why not desire? There is no fear of ἀϕάνιςις[aphanisis]. There is fear of losing the phallus, because only the phallus can give desire its proper field.

But now, let no one talk to us either of defense against anxiety. One does not defend oneself against anxiety! No more than there is fear of ἀϕάνιςις[aphanisis]. Anxiety is at the principle of defenses, but one does not defend oneself against anxiety. Of course, if I tell you that I will devote a whole year to this subject of anxiety, that is to tell you that I do not claim today to have gone around it, that this poses no problem.

If anxiety—it is always at this level, that my little apologue almost caricaturally defined anxiety for you, that anxiety is situated—if anxiety can become a sign, it is of course because, transformed into a sign, it is perhaps not quite the same thing as where I tried first to place it for you at its essential point. There is also a simulacrum of anxiety. At this level of course one may be tempted to minimize its scope, insofar as it is truly palpable that if the subject sends himself signs of anxiety, it is manifestly so that things may be gayer.

But that is still not where we can begin in order to define the function of anxiety. And then finally to say, as I claimed only to do today, massive things: let one open oneself to this thought that if FREUD told us that anxiety is a signal that passes at the level of the ego, one still has to know that it is a signal for whom?

Not for the ego, since it is at the level of the ego that it is produced. And that too, I regretted very much that in our last meeting, this simple remark, no one thought to make it.