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(All parts in English)

You may have noticed, not without satisfaction, that last time I was able to introduce you to our topic for this year by means of a reflection which, in appearance, might pass for a very philosophizing one, since it concerned precisely a philosophical reflection—that of DESCARTES—without eliciting from you, it seems to me, too many negative reactions.
Far from it, it seems that I was trusted as to the legitimacy of what followed. I rejoice in this feeling of trust that I would like to be able to translate, insofar as one at least sensed where I wanted, by that route, to lead you.

Nevertheless, so that you do not take it—in that I am going to continue today on the same theme—as a sign that I am lingering, I would like to state that such is indeed our aim in this mode we are approaching: to commit ourselves to this path. Let us say it right away, in a formula that all our subsequent development will illuminate: what I mean is that, for us analysts, what we understand by identification—because that is what we encounter in identification, in what there is of the concrete in our experience concerning identification—is an identification of the signifier.

Reread in the Course in Linguistics one of the many passages where DE SAUSSURE strives to pin down, as he constantly does by circling it, the function of the signifier, and you will see—I say this parenthetically—that all my efforts
have not in the end failed to leave the door open to what I would call less differences of interpretation
than genuine divergences in the possible use of what he opened up with this distinction so essential
between signifier and signified.

Perhaps I might touch incidentally, for you, so that at least you can register its existence, on the difference there is between one school and another, that of Prague to which JAKOBSON—whom I refer to so often—belongs, and that of Copenhagen to which HJELMSLEV gave its orientation under a title I have never yet mentioned before you, that of ‘glossematics’. You will see, it is almost inevitable that I shall be led to return to it, since we will not be able to take a step without trying to deepen this function of the signifier, and consequently its relation to the sign. You should nevertheless already know—I think that even those among you who may have believed, even to the point of reproaching me for it, that I was repeating JAKOBSON—that in fact the position I take here goes beyond, is ahead, spearpoint-like, with respect to that of JAKOBSON, concerning the primacy I give to the function of the signifier in every realization, let us say, of the subject.

The passage in SAUSSURE to which I was alluding a moment ago—I privilege it here only for its image value—
is the one where he tries to show what sort of identity belongs to the signifier by taking the example
of ‘the 10:15 express’. ‘The 10:15 express’, he says, is something perfectly defined in its identity,
it is ‘the 10:15 express’, despite the fact that, manifestly, the different 10:15 expresses that follow one another, always identical, every day, have absolutely, neither in their material, nor even in the composition of their chain,
anything but different elements, indeed even a different real structure. Of course, what is true in such an assertion presupposes precisely, in the constitution of a being such as the 10:15 express, a fabulous chaining of signifying organizations entering into the real through the mediation of speaking beings.

It remains that this has a kind of exemplary value, for clearly defining what I mean when I first utter what I am going to try to articulate for you, namely the laws of identification insofar as it is identification of the signifier.
Let us even point out, as a reminder, that—for us to keep to an opposition that is a sufficient support for you—
what is opposed to it, that from which it is distinguished, that which requires us to elaborate its function, is that identification—from whom, then, does it distance itself? It is from imaginary identification.

That one of which long ago I tried to show you the extreme, in the background of the mirror stage,
in what I shall call ‘the organic effect of the image of the similar’, the effect of assimilation that we grasp at this or that point in natural history, and the example that I took pleasure in showing in vitro in the form of that little creature called ‘the migratory locust’, and of which you know that the evolution, the growth, the appearance of what is called the ensemble of the phaneres, of that in which we can see it in its form, depends in some way on an encounter that occurs at such a moment of its development, of the stages, of the phases of larval transformation, where according to whether a certain number of traits of the image of its similar have—or have not—appeared to it, it will—or will not—evolve, depending on the case, according to the form called solitary or the form called gregarious.

We do not know at all, we know only very little indeed about the levels of this organic circuit that produce such effects; what we do know is that it is experimentally assured. Let us place it under the very general heading
of ‘image effects’, of which we shall find all sorts of forms at very different levels
of physics and even in the inanimate world, as you know, if we define the image as: any physical arrangement that results, between two systems, in constituting a biunivocal correspondence, at whatever level.

It is a very suitable formula, and one that will apply just as well to the effect I have just mentioned, for example,
as to that of the formation of an image, even a virtual one, in nature by means of a plane surface,
whether that of the mirror or that which I long evoked, the surface of the lake reflecting the mountain.

Is this to say that, as is the tendency…
and a tendency spreading under the influence of a kind, I would say, of intoxication, that has recently seized scientific thought, owing to the irruption of what is at bottom only the discovery of the dimension of the signifying chain as such, but which, in all sorts of ways, is going to be reduced by this thought to simpler terms, and this is very precisely what is expressed in the so-called theories of information
…is this to say that it is right, without any further connotation, to resolve to characterize the link between the two systems
—one of which is, with respect to the other, the image—by this idea of ‘information’, which is very general, implying certain paths traversed by that something which conveys the biunivocal correspondence?

This is indeed where a very great ambiguity lies, I mean the one that can only end by making us forget the proper levels of what information must involve if we want to give it another value than the vague one which would end up, in the final analysis, only giving a sort of reinterpretation, of false consistency, to what until then had been subsumed—and this from Antiquity to our own day—under the notion of ‘form’: something that takes hold of, envelops, commands the elements, gives them a certain type of finality which is, on the whole, that of ascent:
from the elementary toward the complex, from the inanimate toward the animate.

It is something that undoubtedly has its enigma and its own value, its order of reality, but which is distinct
—and this is what I mean to articulate here with all its force—from what the new scientific perspective brings us anew, the valorization, the extraction, of what is brought by the experience of language and of what the relation to the signifier allows us to introduce as an original dimension—which it is a matter of radically distinguishing from the real—under the form of the symbolic dimension.

As you see, it is not by that route that I am approaching the problem of what will allow us to split this ambiguity.
Even so, I have already said enough for you to know, for you already to have sensed, apprehended, in these elements of signifying information, the originality brought by the trait, let us say, of seriality that it contains. Also the trait of ‘discretion’, I mean of cut, this thing that SAUSSURE did not articulate better, nor otherwise, than by saying that what characterizes each of them is being what the others are not.

Diachrony and synchrony are the terms to which I indicated you should refer.

– Still, all this is not fully articulated: the distinction must be made between this ‘diachrony of fact’, too often merely what is targeted in the articulation of the laws of the signifier, and the ‘diachrony of right’ through which we rejoin structure.

– Likewise synchrony: it is by no means to say everything about it, far from it, to imply its virtual simultaneity in some supposed subject of the code. For that is to rediscover what I showed you last time, namely that for us there is there an entity that is untenable for us. I mean therefore that we cannot in any way be satisfied with resorting to it, for it is only one of the forms of what I denounced at the end of my discourse last time
under the name of the ‘subject supposed to know’.

That is why I begin in this way this year my introduction to the question of identification,
because it is a matter
– of starting from the difficulty itself,
– from that which is proposed to us by the very fact of our experience,
– from that from which it starts,
– from that on the basis of which we must articulate it, theorize it.

It is that we cannot—even in the state of aim, promise of the future—in any way refer ourselves, as HEGEL
does, to any possible termination—precisely because we have no right to posit it as possible—
of the subject in any absolute knowledge whatsoever. This ‘subject supposed to know’, we must learn to do without it at every moment.

We cannot resort to it at any moment. This is excluded by an experience that we already have, since the seminar on
Desire and Its Interpretation, first term, which was published; this is very precisely what seemed to me in any case not able to be suspended from that publication, because this is the term of an entire phase of this teaching that we have carried out: it is that this subject which is ours, this subject that I would like to question for you today, with regard to the Cartesian procedure, is the same one of which in that first term I told you we could not approach it any further than is done in that exemplary dream which articulates it entirely around the sentence: ‘He did not know that he was dead.’

In all rigor, this is indeed—contrary to the opinion of POLITZER—the subject of enunciation, but in the third person,
by which we can designate it. This is not to say, of course, that we cannot approach it in the first person, but that will be precisely to know that, in doing so—and in the most pathetically accessible experience—it slips away, for to translate it into
that first person is to arrive at this sentence, to say what we can say precisely insofar as, in the practical measure in which we can confront ourselves with this chariot of time, as John DONNE says ‘hurrying near’, it heels at our back,
and in that moment of pause where we can foresee the ultimate moment, precisely the one where everything will already let go of us,
to tell ourselves ‘I did not know that I was living by being mortal.’

It is quite clear that insofar as we can tell ourselves that we had forgotten it almost at every instant, we will be placed in this uncertainty, for which there is no name, neither tragic nor comic, of being able to tell ourselves, at the moment of leaving our life, that with respect to our own life we will always have been to some extent a stranger.

This is indeed what forms the basis of the most modern philosophical interrogation, that by which, even for those who understand little of it,
if I may say so, indeed even those very ones who make much of their feeling of this obscurity, still something passes—whatever one may say of it—something passes other than the wave of a fashion, in the formula recalling us to the existential foundation of ‘being toward death’ [Heidegger].

This is not a contingent phenomenon. Whatever its causes may be, whatever its correlations may be,
indeed even its scope, one can say that what one may call the profanation of the great fantasies—fashioned for desire by
the religious mode of thought—is what, leaving us uncovered, indeed unarmed, arouses something: this hollow, this void, to which this modern philosophical meditation strives
to respond, and to which our experience also has something to contribute, since
that is its place at the moment I am indicating to you sufficiently, the same place where this subject is constituted as not being able to know, precisely, that of which, and why, it is a matter there for him of the ‘Whole’.

That is the price of what DESCARTES brings us, and that is why it was good to begin from him. That is why I return to him today, for it is fitting to retrace the path in order to remeasure what is at stake in what you were able to hear me point out as the impasse, indeed the impossible, of ‘I think, therefore I am’. It is precisely this impossible that makes its price and its value.
This subject that DESCARTES proposes to us, if that is nothing but the subject around which cogitation had always revolved before,
and has revolved since, it is clear that our objections in our last discourse take on all their weight, the very weight implied
in the etymology of the French verb ‘penser’, which means nothing other than ‘to weigh’.

What can be founded on ‘I think’, where we know, we analysts, that ‘what I think about’ which we can grasp, refers back to a ‘what of’, and ‘whence’, ‘from what I think’, which necessarily slips away? And that is indeed why DESCARTES’ formula
questions us, as to whether there is not at least this privileged point of the pure ‘I think’, on which we might found ourselves.
And that is why it was at least important that I stop you for an instant.

This formula seems to imply that the subject would have to concern himself with thinking at every instant in order to assure himself of being, an already
very strange condition, but is it enough? Is it enough that he think he is in order for him to touch thinking being? For it is precisely there that DESCARTES, in this incredible magic of the discourse of the first two Meditations, suspends us.

He succeeds in making it hold—I say: in his text—and not once the philosophy professor has fished out the signifier,
and too easily will show the artifice that results from formulating that thus thinking, I may call myself ‘a thing that thinks’—
that is too easily refutable, but this takes nothing away from the force of progress of the text—save that we must indeed question
this thinking being, ask ourselves whether it is not the participle of an ‘êtrepenser’ [being-think], to be written in the infinitive and as a single word: ‘J’êtrepense’ [I being-think], as one says ‘j’outrecuide’, as our habits as analysts make us say ‘je compense’, indeed ‘je décompense’, ‘je surcompense’. It is the same term, and equally legitimate in its composition.

Henceforth, the ‘je pensêtre’ [I think-be] that is proposed to us in order to introduce us into it may appear, in this perspective, a scarcely tolerable artifice since, moreover, in formulating things thus, being already determines the register in which all my approach is inaugurated:
this ‘je pensêtre’—I told you so last time—cannot, even in DESCARTES’ text, be connoted except by traits of lure and appearance. ‘Je pensêtre’ brings with it no other greater consistency than that of the dream in which indeed DESCARTES, at several moments of his approach, left us suspended. ‘Je pensêtre’ can also be conjugated like a verb, but it does not go far: je pensêtre, tu pensêtres, with the ‘s’ at the end if you wish, that can still go, indeed ‘il pensêtre’.

All we can say is that if we make from it the tenses of the verb of a sort of infinitive ‘pensêtrer’, we will only be able to connotate it with what is written in the dictionaries: that all the other forms, beyond the third person singular of the present, are unused in French. If we want to make a joke, we shall add that they are ordinarily supplanted by the same forms of the complementary verb of ‘pensêtrer’, the verb s’empêtrer [to get tangled up].

What does this mean? It is that the act of ‘êtrepenser’ [being-think], for that is what is at stake, does not lead, for ‘who thinks who?’, except to a ‘perhaps have I?’, ‘perhaps I?’. And likewise I am neither the first nor the only one, for a long time, to have noticed the smuggled-in trait
of the introduction of this ‘I’ in the conclusion: ‘I think, therefore I am’.

It is quite clear that this ‘I’ remains in a problematic state and that until DESCARTES’ next move, and we shall see which, there is no reason for it to be preserved from the total questioning that DESCARTES makes of the whole process,
by profiling, as the foundations of this process, the function of the deceiving God.

You know that he goes further—the deceiving God is still a good God, in order to be there, to cradle me with illusions—
he goes as far as the evil genius, the radical liar, the one who misleads me in order to mislead me; this is what has been called ‘hyperbolic doubt’.
There is no way to see how this doubt spared this ‘I’, and thus leaves it, strictly speaking, in a fundamental wavering, which is what I want to draw your attention to.

There are two ways, this wavering, of articulating it: the classical articulation, the one already found—I rediscovered it with pleasure—
in BRENTANO’s Psychology. The one that BRENTANO quite rightly relates to Saint THOMAS AQUINAS,
namely that being can grasp itself as thought only in an alternating way: it is in a succession of alternating times
that it thinks, that its memory appropriates its thinking reality, without at any instant this thought being able to be conjoined
in its own certainty.

The other mode, which is the one that leads us closer to the Cartesian démarche, is precisely to notice the properly speaking evanescent character of this ‘I’, to make us see that the true sense of the first Cartesian démarche is to articulate itself as: ‘I think and I am not’. Of course, one can linger over the approaches to this assumption, and notice that: ‘I spend myself in thinking, all that I can have of being’. Let it be clear that in the end it is by ceasing to think that I can glimpse that I simply am. These are only approaches.

The ‘I think and I am not’ introduces for us a whole succession of remarks, precisely those I was speaking to you about last time concerning the morphology of French, first of all that concerning this ‘I’, so much—in our language—more dependent in its first-person form than in English or German for example, or Latin, where to the question ‘who did it?’ you can answer:
– ‘I’, ‘Ich’, ‘ego’,
– but not ‘Je’ in French, but ‘c’est moi’ or ‘pas moi’.

But ‘Je’ is something else, this ‘Je’—in speech—so easily elided thanks to the so-called mute properties of its vowel, this ‘Je’ that can be a ‘J’sais pas’, that is to say that the ‘e’ disappears. But ‘J’sais pas’ is something else—you can feel this well, being among those who have an original experience of French—than ‘je ne sais’. The ‘je ne sais’ is a ‘je sais without knowing’ [a play on the split negation, where ne marks the subject-position rather than directly negating sais].
The ‘ne’ of ‘je ne sais’ bears not on the ‘sais’, but on the ‘je’.

It is for this reason also that, contrary to what happens in these neighboring languages to which, not to go further,
I am alluding at this moment, it is before the verb that this decomposed part—let us call it that for the moment—
of negation, which is the ‘ne’ in French, falls. Of course, the ‘ne’ is not proper to French, nor unique; the Latin ‘ne’ presents itself
to us with the very same problematic, which here too I am only introducing and to which we shall return.

You know, I have already alluded to what PICHON, concerning negation in French, contributed to it by way of indications.
I do not think—and this is not new either: I indicated it to you at that same time—that PICHON’s formulations
on the forclusive and the discordantial can resolve the question, although they introduce it admirably; but the neighborhood, the natural path-breaking in the French sentence of the ‘je’ with the first part of the negation, ‘je ne sais’, is something that falls
within this register of a whole series of concordant facts, around which I was pointing out to you the interest of the particularly significant emergence, in a certain linguistic usage, of the problems that relate to the subject as such in its relations to the signifier.

What I therefore want to come to is this: that if we find ourselves—more easily than others—put on guard with respect
to HEGEL against this mirage of ‘absolute knowledge’, the one whose refutation is already sufficient if one translates it into the replete repose
of a sort of colossal seventh day in this ‘Sunday of life’ where the human animal will finally be able to sink its snout into the grass,
the great machine henceforth adjusted to the last carat of that materialized nothingness that is the conception of knowledge.

Of course, being will at last have found its share and its reserve in its stupidity henceforth definitively encrusted, and it is supposed that at the same stroke there will be torn away, along with the thinking excrescence, its peduncle, namely: care [souci]. But this, at the pace things are going,
which are made, despite its charm, to evoke that there is there something rather akin to what we practice, with—I must say—much more fantasy and humor: these are the various amusements of what is commonly called ‘science fiction’, which show on this theme that all sorts of variations are possible.

In this respect, of course, DESCARTES does not appear in a bad position. If one may perhaps regret that he did not know more
about these perspectives of knowledge, it is only in this respect that, had he known more of them, his morality would have been less short, but—apart from this trait that we are provisionally leaving aside here—for the value of his initial démarche, far from it, something quite other results.

The professors, regarding Cartesian doubt, labor greatly to emphasize that it is methodical. They are enormously attached to this. Methodical means ‘cold doubt’. Of course, even in a certain context, cooled dishes were consumed,
but in truth I do not believe that this is the right way to consider things.

Not that I wish in any way to incite you to consider the psychological case of DESCARTES—however fascinating this may appear—to recover in his biography, in the conditions of his kinship, even of his descendants, some
of those traits which, gathered together, can make a figure by means of which we shall recover the general characteristics
of a psychasthenia, or even to engulf in this demonstration the famous passage of the human coat-racks [Cf. Second Meditation],
those sorts of marionettes around which it seems possible to restore a presence that, thanks to the whole detour of his thought,
one sees precisely at that moment in the process of unfolding, I do not see much interest in it. What matters to me is that after having tried to make it felt that the Cartesian thematic is logically unjustifiable, I can reaffirm that it is not for all that irrational. It is no more irrational than desire is irrational for not being articulable, simply because it is an articulated fact, as I believe that this is the whole sense of what I have been demonstrating to you for a year:
to show you how it is so.

DESCARTES’ doubt—it has been emphasized, and I am not the first to do so either—is a doubt quite different from skeptical doubt of course. Beside DESCARTES’ doubt, skeptical doubt unfolds entirely at the level of the question of the real. Contrary to what one believes, it is far from calling it into question: it recalls one there, regathers one’s world there. And such-and-such a Skeptic whose whole discourse reduces us to holding as valid no more than sensation, does not thereby make it vanish at all; he tells us
that it has more weight, that it is more real than all that we can construct concerning it. This skeptical doubt has its place,
as you know, in HEGEL’s Phenomenology of Spirit: it is a moment of that search, of that quest to which knowledge has committed itself with respect to itself, that knowledge which is only a ‘not-yet knowledge’, thus which by that fact is an ‘already knowledge’.

This is not at all what DESCARTES is attacking. DESCARTES has nowhere his place in the Phenomenology of Spirit:
he puts the subject itself into question and, although he does not know it, it is the subject supposed to know that is at stake. It is not a matter for us of recognizing ourselves in what spirit is capable of; it is the subject itself as inaugural act that is in question. It is, I believe, what makes the prestige, what makes the value of fascination, what makes the turning-point effect that this insane démarche of DESCARTES in fact had in history, namely that it has all the characters of what we call in our vocabulary an ‘acting out’ [passage à l’acte].

The first moment of the Cartesian meditation has the trait of an acting out: it is situated at the level of what every attempt having the most radical, most originary relation to desire has that is necessarily insufficient, and at the same time necessarily primordial. And the proof: it is indeed to that that he is led in the démarche that immediately succeeds it.
The one that immediately succeeds it, the démarche of the deceiving God, what is it? It is the appeal to something that—to set it
in contrast with the earlier proofs, of course non-annullable, of the existence of God—I shall permit myself to oppose
as the verissimum to the entissimum: for Saint ANSELM, God is ‘the most being of beings’. The God at issue here, the one DESCARTES introduces at this point of his thematic, is this God who must assure the truth of everything that is articulated as such:
it is ‘the true of the true’, the guarantor that truth exists. And all the more a guarantor in that it could be otherwise, DESCARTES tells us,
this truth as such, that it could be—if that God so wished it—that it could be, properly speaking, error.

What does this mean if not that we find ourselves there within all that one may call the battery of the signifier, confronted with this unique trait, with this einziger Zug that we already know, insofar as strictly speaking it could be substituted for all the elements of what constitutes the signifying chain, support this chain by itself alone, and simply by always being the same.

What we find at the limit of Cartesian experience as such of the evanescent subject is the necessity of this guarantor,
of the simplest structural trait, of the unique trait if I may say so, absolutely depersonalized, not only of all subjective content, but even of every variation that exceeds this unique trait, of this trait which is Und [One/and?] being the unique trait [wordplay in French/German around un/Und and the one-ness of the trait].
The grounding of the One that this trait constitutes is nowhere taken from elsewhere than in its uniqueness. As such one can say of it
nothing other than that it is what all signifiers have in common: to be above all constituted as trait, to have this trait as support. Are we going to be able, around this, to meet in the concrete of our experience?

I mean what you already see emerging, namely the substitution, in a function that has given so much trouble to philosophical thought, namely this almost necessarily idealist slope that every articulation of the subject in the classical tradition has,
to substitute for it this function of idealization: insofar as on it rests this structural necessity which is the same one I have already articulated before you under the form of the ego ideal, insofar as it is from this point, not mythical, but perfectly concrete, of inaugural identification of the subject with the radical signifier, not of the Plotinian One, but of the unique trait as such,
that the whole perspective of the subject as ‘not knowing’ can unfold in a rigorous way.

This is what, after having had you pass today no doubt by paths about which I reassure you by telling you
that it is surely the most difficult summit of the difficulty through which I have to make you pass that has been crossed today,
this is what I think I can, before you, in a more satisfying way, more fitted to making us recover our practical horizons, begin to formulate.