🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

The time is approaching the end of this year. My discourse on identification will of course not have been able to exhaust its field.
Nor can I feel, on that score, any sense of having failed you.

This field, indeed, someone at the outset was a little worried, not without grounds, that I had chosen in it a thematic
which seemed to him to allow, to be an instrument, even for us, of the ‘everything is in everything’. I have tried, on the contrary, to show you what in it is bound to structural rigor. I did so by starting from the second mode of iden¬tification distinguished by FREUD, the one that I believe, without false modesty, I have now rendered for all of you unthinkable except under the mode
of the function of the unary trait.

The field on which I am, since I introduced the signifier of the inner eight, is that of the third mode of identification,
this identification in which the subject is constituted as desire, and in which all our prior discourse kept us from misrecognizing
that the field of desire is conceivable for man only starting from the function of the big Other:
man’s desire is situated in the place of the Other, and is constituted there precisely as this mode of original identification
that FREUD teaches us to separate empirically – which does not mean that his thought on this point is empirical –
under the form of what is given in our clinical experience, most especially with regard to that so manifest form
of the constitution of desire that is that of the hysteric.

To be content with saying ‘there is ideal identification and then there is the identification of desire to desire’, that can do, of course,
for a first clearing of the ground – you must see that clearly – but FREUD’s text does not leave things there,
and does not leave things there already for the reason that, within the major works of his third topography,
he shows us the relation of the object, which here can only be the object of desire, with the constitution of the ideal itself.

He shows it on the plane of collective iden¬tification, of what is in sum a kind of meeting point of experience,
through which the unarity of the trait, if I may say so – my unary trait, that is what I meant to say – is reflected in the uniqueness of the model
taken as the one that func¬tions in the constitution of this order of collective reality which is, if one may say,
the mass with a head, the leader.

This problem, however local it may be, is indeed no doubt the one that offered FREUD the best terrain for grasping himself,
at the point where he was elaborating things at the level of the third topography, something that, for him, not in a structural way but in some way linked to a sort of concrete point of convergence, would gather together the three forms of identification.

Since likewise the first form, the one that will remain in sum at the edge, at the end of our development this year,
the one that is ordered as the first, also the most mysterious, although the first apparently brought to light
by analytic dialectic, identification with the father, is there, in this model of identification with the leader of the crowd,
and is there in some way implicated without being at all implicated, without being at all included in its total dimension,
in its full dimension.

Identification with the father indeed brings into question something of which one can say that, linked to the tradition of a properly historical adventure to the point that we can probably identify it with history itself, it opens a field that we have not even thought this year of bringing into our interest, for lack of having to be truly absorbed in it entirely.

To take first as object the first form of identification would have been to engage our entire discourse on identification in the problems of ‘Totem and Taboo’, a work ani¬mating for FREUD, which one can indeed say is for him what one may call die Sache selbst, the thing itself, and of which one can also say that it will remain so for him in the Hegelian sense, that is, insofar as for HEGEL die Sache selbst, the work, is in sum all that justifies, all in which deserves to subsist this subject
who was not, who lived, who suffered – what does it matter – only this essen¬tial externalization, with a path traced by him,
of a work; that indeed is what one looks at and what it alone wants to remain: phenomenon in motion of consciousness.

And from this angle one can indeed say that we are right, that we would rather be wrong not to identify FREUD’s legacy

• if it had to be limited to his work – with Totem and Taboo. For the discourse on identification that I pursued this year, through what it constituted as an operative apparatus – I think you can only now be at the point of beginning to
  put it to use – you can still, before the test, appreciate its importance, which cannot fail to be altogether decisive in everything that is for the moment called to the urgency of a formulation, first and foremost: fantasy.

I wanted to mark that this was the essential preliminary stage, absolutely requiring a properly didac-tic antecedence, so that the fissure, the defect, the loss in which we are may be properly articulated, so that we may refer with
the least appropriateness to what is at issue concerning the paternal function. I am making very precisely an allusion to this,
which we can qualify as ‘the soul of the year 1962’, the year in which two books by Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS appear:
Le Totémisme and La Pensée sauvage.

I believe that not one analyst became acquainted with them without feeling both – for those who follow the teaching here – strengthened, reassured, and without finding in them the complement. For of course he has the leisure to extend himself into fields, which I can bring in here only by allusion, to show you the radical character of the signifying constitution in all that is, let us say,
of culture, although, of course – he underlines it – this is not to mark a domain whose boundary is absolute.

But at the same time, within his so pertinent exhaustions of the classificatory mode – of which one can say that
wild thought is less its instrument than in some way its very effect – the function of the totem appears entirely reduced to these signifying oppositions. Now it is clear that this cannot be resolved, except in an impenetrable way,
if we, analysts, are not capable of introducing here something that is of the same level as this discourse,
namely, like this discourse, a logic. It is this logic of desire, this logic of the object of desire, of which I gave you
this year the instrument, in designating the apparatus by which we can grasp something that, to be valid,
can only have always been the true ani¬mation of logic, I mean where, in the history of its progress,
it made itself felt as something that opened onto thought.

It remains no less true that this secret spring may have remained masked, that as logic it did not interest, it did not implicate,
the movement of this world – which is not nothing: it is called the world of thought – in a certain direction which, though centrifugal, was nevertheless still determined by something that related to a certain type of object
which is the one that interests us at the moment. What I defined last time as ‘the point’, the point Φ
in a certain new way of delimiting the circle of connotation of the object, is what puts us on the threshold of having,
before leaving you this year, to posit the function of this point Φ, ambiguous, I told you, not only in
mediation, but in constitution, each inherent to the other – not only as the reverse would be worth the front,
but as a reverse, I told you, that would be the same thing as the front – of the S and of the (a) in fantasy[S◊a]:
– in the recog¬nition of what the object of human desire is starting from desire,
– in the recogni¬tion of why, in desire, the subject is nothing other than the cut of this object.

And how individual history – this discoursing subject in which this individual is only included – is oriented, polarized by this secret point and perhaps in the final term never accessible, if indeed one must admit with FREUD, at least for a time, in the irreducibility of an Urverdrängung, the existence of this ‘navel of desire in the dream’ of which he speaks in the Traumdeutung.
This is what we cannot omit the function of in any appraisal of the terms into which we decompose
the faces of this nuclear phenomenon.

This is why, before returning to the clinic, always too easy in putting us back into the ruts of truths
with which we accommodate ourselves very well in a veiled state, namely: what is the object of desire for the neurotic,
or again for the pervert, or again for the psychotic?

It is not that, this sam¬pling, this diversity of colors, which will never serve except to make us lose cards
that are interesting. ‘Become what you are’, says the formula of the classical tradition. It is possible, a pious wish.
What is certain is that you become what you misrecognize. The way in which the subject misrecognizes the terms, the elements and the functions among which the fate of desire is played out, insofar precisely as somewhere one of its terms appears to him in an unveiled form, this is that by which each of those we have named neurotics, per¬verts and psychotics, is normal.

The psychotic is normal in his psychosis and nowhere else, because the psychotic in desire has to do with the body.
The pervert is normal in his perversion, because in his variety he has to do with the phallus.
And the neurotic because he has to do with the Other, the big Other as such.

It is in that that they are normal, because they are the three normal terms of the constitu¬tion of desire.
These three terms, of course, are always present. For the moment, it is not a question of their being in any one of these subjects, but here, in the theo¬ry. That is why I cannot move forward in a straight line: at every step there comes to me the need to go over the point again with you, not so much out of such a concern that you understand me: ‘Do you care so much about being understood?’, I am told from time to time: these are pleasantries that I hear in my analyses. Obviously, yes!
But what makes the difficulty is that the kind of necessity of our discourse here is to make you see that in this dis-course, you are included in it. It is from there that it can be deceptive, because you are included in it in any case.

And the error can come only from the way in which you conceive that you are included in it. I was struck, reading, yesterday morning,
at the hour when the electricity strike had not yet begun, the work of one of my students on fantasy:
my God, not bad. Of course it is not yet the putting into action of the apparatuses of which I spoke, but still,
the mere col¬lation of the passages of FREUD where he speaks of fantasy in an absolutely brilliant way…

When one asks oneself what pertinence, in the absence of everything one can say these openings have conditioned since then,
from where the first formulation could have found this pertinence so as to remain in some way now marked
with the very stamp that is the one I am trying to isolate from things?

This dri¬ve that makes itself felt from within the body, these schemas entirely structured by these topological prevalences,
it is only on that that the accent lies: how to define what functions in the arrival from the outside and the arrival from the inside?
What incredible vocation for flatness must there have been, in what one may call the mentality of the analytic community,
to believe that this is the reference to what is called the biological instance!

Not that I am saying that a body, a living body – I am not joking – is not
a biological reality, only to make it function in Freudian topology as topology, and to see in it some kind of biologism that would be radical, inaugu¬ral, coextensive with the function of the drive, this is what makes there the whole extent,
the whole gapingness of what is called a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding absolutely manifest in the facts, namely that,
as there is no need to point it out, until further notice, that is to say until the revision we are awaiting
in biology, there has not been a trace of a biological discovery, nor even physiolo¬gical, nor even esthesiological, that has been made
by way of analysis – ‘esthesio¬logical’ means a sensory discovery – something one might have found
new in the way of sensing things.

What makes a misunderstanding is very clear to define: it is that the relation of the drive to the body is everywhere marked in FREUD, topologically. This does not have the same referential value, the idea of a direction, as a discovery of biological research.
It is quite certain that this ‘what is a body?’, you know, is not even an idea sketched out in the consensus
of the philosophizing world at the moment when FREUD sketches his first topography.

The whole notion of Dasein is poste¬rior and constructed to give us, if I may say so, the primitive idea one can have
of what a body is as a ‘there’, constituting certain dimen¬sions of presence…
and I am not going to redo HEIDEGGER for you, because if I speak to you about him, it is because soon you are going to have
this text of which I told you it is easy, you will take him at his word. In any case, the ease with which
we read him now proves well enough that what he launched into the current of things is indeed in circulation
…these dimensions of presence, whatever way one calls them: Mitsein, this being-there, and all that you want, In-der-Welt-sein,
all the worldhoods so different and so distinct, for it is precisely a matter of distinguishing them from space: latum, longum and profundum, which, we are shown without difficulty, is only the abstraction of the object, and because likewise this is proposed as such in this DESCARTES that I placed this year at the beginning of our exposition: the abstraction of the object as subsisting, that is to say already ordered in a world that is not simply a world of coherence, of consistency,
but enucleated of the object of desire as such.

Yes, all this makes admirable irruptions in our mental world in HEIDEGGER. Let me tell you
that if there are people who ought not to be, to any degree, satisfied by it, they are psychoanalysts, it is I.

This reference, no doubt suggestive, to what I shall call – see in it no sort of attempt to belittle what is at issue – ‘an artisanal praxis’, foundation of the utensil-object, as surely discovering to the highest degree these first dimensions of presence so subti¬ly detached as proximity, distance, as constituting the first lineaments of this world, HEIDEGGER owes a great deal of it – he told me so himself – to the fact that his father was a cooper.

Certainly, all that uncovers for us something with which presence has eminently to do, and to which we would cling much more passionately in posing the question of what all instruments have in common, the primitive spoon, the first
way of dipping, of withdrawing something from the current of things, what does it have to do with the ins¬trument of the signifier?

But in the end, is not everything for us from the outset decentered? If it has a meaning, what FREUD brings, namely: that at the heart of the constitution of every object there is libido, if that has a meaning, it means that libido is not simply
the surplus of our praxical presence in the world, which has always been the thematic, and what HEIDEGGER brings back.

For if Sorge is concern, occupation, is what characterizes this presence of man in the world, that means that when concern relaxes a little, one begins to fuck, which, as you know, is the teaching for example
of someone whom I choose here really without any scruple and in a polemical spirit because he is a friend:
Mr. ALEXANDER.

Mr. ALEXANDER moreover has a quite honorable place in this concert, simply a little cacophonous,
that one may call theoretical discussion in the American psychoanalytic society. He has his place by full right,
because it is evident that it would be a bit much if one could allow oneself, in a society as important and officially constituted as that American Association, to reject what really coincides just as well with the ideals,
with the practice of an area, called cultural, determined.

But in the end it is clear that even to sketch a theory of libidinal functioning as being constituted with the surplus share
of a certain energy – however we categorize it, survival energy or other –
is absolutely to deny all the value, not simply noetic, but the reason for being of our function as therapist,
as we define its terms and its aim.
 

That on the whole, practically, we accommodate ourselves very well, we were doing very well the business of bringing
people back to theirs, of business, of course, only what is certain is that even when we pin this result
under the form of therapeutic success, we at least know this, one of two things:

– either that we have done it outside any kind of properly analytic path, and then what was off at the heart of the matter, for that is what it is about, is still off,

– or else that if we got there, it is pre¬cisely to the whole extent – which is there only the ABC, the ba-ba of what is taught to us – where we did not seek, in any way, to settle the matter, but aimed elsewhere, toward what was off, what touched, at the center, the libidinal knot.

That is why every result sanctionable in the sense of adap¬tation…
I apologize, I am making here a little detour through banalities, but there are banalities that still have to be recalled, especially since after all, recalled in a certain way, banalities can sometimes pass for not very banal
…every therapeutic success, that is to say bringing people back to the well-being of their Sorge, of their little affairs, is always
for us, more or less – basically we know it, that is why we do not have to boast of it – a stopgap, an alibi, an embezzlement of funds, if I may express myself thus.

In fact what is even much more serious is that we forbid ourselves to do better, while knowing that this action
which is ours, of which we can boast from time to time as a success, is done by means
that do not concern the result. Thanks to these means we bring, in a complementary place that they do not concern, except by resonance, touch-ups; that is the maximum one can say.

When does it happen to us to restore a subject to his desire? That is a question I pose to those here
who have some experience as analysts, obvi¬ously not to the others. Is it conceivable that an analysis should have as its result
making a subject enter into desire, as one says enter into trance, heat, or reli¬gion?

It is precisely for that reason that I allow myself to pose the question at a local point, the only one in the end that is decisive, because we are not apostles, namely: whether this question does not deserve to be preserved when it comes to analysts?
For for the others, the problem posed is: what is the analyst’s desire, so that he can subsist,
persist, in this paradoxical position?

For after all it is very clear that in no way am I expressing a wish thereby that the effect of analysis should rejoin that fulfilled since always by mystical sects whose famous ope¬rations – no doubt deceptive, often dubious,
in any case most of the time – are not what I am asking you especially to take an interest in, except nevertheless
to situate them as occupying this global place of bringing the subject onto a field that is nothing other
than the field of his desire.

And to tell all, spending my last weekend through a series of rebounds, trying to see the meaning of a few
words of Muslim mystical technique, I had opened these things that I practiced at one time, like everyone.
Who has not looked a little at these indigestible and stupefying books of Hinduism, of the philosophy of I know not what asceticism, which are given to us in a dusty and generally misunderstood terminology, I would say all the better understood the stupider the transcriber is!

That is why the English works are the best. Above all do not read the German works, I beg you,
they are so intelligent that it immediately turns into SCHOPENHAUER.

And then there is René GUÉNON, of whom I speak because he is a curious geo¬metric locus. I see, from the number of smiles,
the proportion of sinners! I swear to you that at one moment, at the beginning of this century of which I am part – I do not know whether this conti¬nues, but I see that this name is not unknown, so it must continue – all French diplomacy found in
René GUÉNON – that imbecile – its master thinker. You see the result!

It is impossible to open one of his works without finding in it really nothing to fry [French idiom ‘rien à frire’, echoing ‘rien à faire’, meaning nothing useful to do with it], for what he always says
is that he must shut up. This probably has an absolutely inextinguishable charm, for the result is that thanks to that, all sorts of people, who probably did not have much to do, as BRIAND said: ‘You know very well
that we have no foreign policy, for the diplomat must be in a somewhat unbreathable atmosphere.’
Well then, that helped them stay in their little shell.

In short, all this is not to steer you toward Hinduism, but still, since I find myself, I cannot say rereading because I have never read them, the Hindu texts, and as I tell you, it is always very disap¬pointing from the outset.
But I have just seen again, transcribed, brought together, things much more accessible from Muslim mystical technique, by someone wonderfully intelligent, though presenting every appearance of madness, who is called Monsieur Louis MASSIGNON. I say ‘appearances’…
 
And referring to the buddhi, concerning the elucidation of these terms, the point he brings out in the function as term… I mean that it is the penultimate threshold to be crossed before the liberation sought before Hindu asceticism, the function he gives to the buddhi as the object, for that is what it means, which of course is written nowhere, except in this text by MASSIGNON, where he finds its equivalent with the MANSÛR of Shi‘ite mysticism
…the function of the object as being the indispensable turning point of this concentration, in order to arrive at metaphorical terms of the subjective realization at issue, which in the end is only access to that field of desire that we can call the desiring one pure and simple. And what is it, this desiring one?

It is of course the case that those who are the officiants of the domain, already well constituted, that I called last time that of Theo, whence naturally the suspicion, the exclusion, the smell of sulfur with which mystical asceticism is surrounded, in all religions.
Be that as it may, the articulated relation, at this stage, at the stage that can be called the completion of involution, of the assumption of the subject into an object – moreover chosen by mystical techniques with a very arbitrary order, it can be a woman, it can be a carafe stopper – seemed to me to coin¬cide perfectly with the formula S◊a as I formulate it for you as given, as formalization, the simplest we are permitted to attain in contact with the various forms of the clinic, that is to say because it is necessary to presume the structure of this central point as we can construct it – the term is FREUD’s – and as we must necessarily construct it, in order to account for the ambiguities of its effects.

The work to which I was alluding earlier, which I read yesterday morning, was trying to take up again – things do have to be digested – a chapter I had dealt with long ago, namely the structure of the Wolf Man, especially in the light of the structure of fantasy. The thing is quite well delimited in this work. However, in relation to the first formulations, those I made before having brought you the recent apparatuses, it marks little gain, but it indicates to me at what point after all you follow me, what I can show you here as a place to be crossed.

So let us take up again, simply to point it out – this is not a criticism – this work. There would be many others to do, and you would have to know it, have it circulated, which I would find desirable. The logical definition of the object,
which I allow myself to call Lacanian on this occasion, for it is not the same thing as speaking of execrated Lacanianism,
of the object of desire, its logical function, in this object, does not depend…
this is what the novelty of the little circle designates:

which I teach you to delineate by telling you that it is essentially constituted by the presence of this point which is there either in its central field¹, or at the limit of this field², or even here ³, for these three cases are the same, as final reduction of the field

¹ ² ³

…its logical function depends neither on its extension, nor on its comprehension, for its extension, if one can designate something by this term, lies in the structu¬ring function of the point. The more, if I may say so, ‘punctiform’ this field is, the more effects there are, and these effects are, if one may say so, effects of inversion. In the light of this principle, there is no problem concerning what FREUD provided us as reproduction of the Wolf Man’s fantasy. You know this tree, this big tree, and the wolves – who are absolutely not wolves – perched on this tree, five in number whereas elsewhere seven are spoken of.

If we needed an exemplary image of what (a) is, at the limit of the field [2], when its phallic radicality manifests itself by a sort of singularity as accessible, there where alone it can appear to us, that is to say when it approaches, or can approach, the external field [3], the field of what can be reflected, the field of that within which a symmetry can allow specular error, we have it there.

For it is clear, both that this is not, of course, the specular image of the Wolf Man that is there before him, and yet – we have marked this moreover long enough for it not to be something new
for the author of the work I am speaking of – it is the very image of that moment the subject lives as primal scene.

I mean that it is the very structure of the subject before this scene. I mean that, before this scene, the subject makes himself wolf looking, and makes himself five wolves looking. What suddenly opens to him in that Christmas night is the return of what he is, himself, essen¬tially, in the fundamental fantasy. No doubt the scene itself at issue is veiled

• we shall return shortly to this veil – from what he sees there emerges only this ‘V’ beating butterfly wings of his mother’s open legs, or the Roman ‘V’ of the clock hour, this five o’clock of the hot summer where the encounter seems to have taken place.

But what matters is that what he sees in his fantasy is S itself insofar as it is cut from (a) [S◊a]. The (a)’s are the wolves. And if I am passing through this today, it is because beside a difficult, abs¬tract discourse – and I despair of being able to carry it, within the limits in which we are, to its final details – this object of desire is illustrated here in a way that allows me to access immediately concrete elements of structure, which I would have more deductive ways of setting out for you, but I do not have the time and I pass by this route.

This non-specular object that is the object of desire, this object that can be found at this border zone as a function of images of the subject, let us say to go faster – although I run risks of confusion there – in the mirror constituted by the big Other, let us say in the space unfolded by the big Other, for that mirror must be removed except to make of it then that sort of mirror called – no doubt not by chance – a witch’s mirror, I mean those mirrors with a certain concavity, which contain within them a certain number of others, concentric, in which you see your own image reflected as many times
as there are of those mirrors in the large one.

For that is indeed what happens: you have, pre¬sent in fantasy, what may perhaps be definable, accessible, only by the paths of our experience, or perhaps – I know nothing about it, I care little besides – by the paths of the experiences to which I alluded earlier: that which is of the nature of the object of desire.

And this is interesting because it is a logical reference: the connoted object, delimited by EULER’s circles, is the object
of that function called ‘the class’. I will show you its close, structural relation with the function of privation, I mean the first of those three terms that I articulated as privation-frustration-castration. Only, what completely veils the true function of privation…

Although one can approach it: it is from there that I started to make for you the schema of universal and particular propositions.
Remember, when I told you: ‘every professor is literate’ [cf. supra 17-01], that does not mean there is only one professor. The thing is always truthful all the same. The spring of priva¬tion, of privation as unary trait, as constituent of the function of the class, is sufficiently indicated there.

But such is the function of dialec¬tic, of dialec¬tical reason whatever displeasure this may cause Monsieur LÉVI-STRAUSS who believes it is only a par¬ticular case of analytic reason, that precisely it permits us to grasp its wild stages only from its elaborated stages. Now this is not to say that the logic of classes is the wild state of the logic of the object of desire.

If one has been able to establish a logic of classes – I shall ask you to devote our next meeting to this object – it is because there was access, which one refused oneself, to a logic of the object of desire, in other words: it is in the light of cas-tration
that the fecundity of the privative theme can be understood.

Everything leads me to think, at the point I have reached in clarifying our route, that what I wanted to indicate only today is this function that I had long identified, to show it to you as exemplary of the most decisive incidences of the signifier, indeed the cruelest in human life, when I told you jealousy, sexual jealousy requires that the subject know how to count. The lionesses of the little leonine troop that I painted for you in I do not know what zoo were mani¬festly not jealous of one another, because they did not know how to count.

Here we touch with a finger on something: it is that it is quite probable that the object as it is constituted at the level of desire,
that is to say the object in function not of privation but of castration, only this object truly can be nume¬rical.
I am not sure that this suffices to affirm that it is countable, but when I say that it is nume¬rical,
I mean that it carries number with it as a quality. One cannot be sure which one:
there they are five on the diagram and seven in the text, but no matter, they are surely not twelve!

When I venture into similar indications, what is it that allows it? Here, I am on velvet [French idiom ‘être sur le velours’: to be in a comfortable/advantageous position], as in a risky interpretation: I await the reply. I mean that by indicating this correlation to you, I am proposing
that you notice all that you might let pass of its possible confirmation or disconfirma¬tion
in what presents itself, what is offered to you.

Of course, you may trust me, I have pushed a tiny bit further the status of this relation of the category
of the object, the object of desire, with numeration. But what makes it that I am here on velvet is that I can give myself
time, be content to tell you that we shall see this again later, without it remaining any less legitimate
to indicate there to you a marker whose taking-up by you can shed light on certain facts.

In any case, under FREUD’s pen, what we see at this level is an image: libido, he tells us, in the subject has emerged
from the shattered expe¬rience, zersplittert, zerstört. My dear friend LECLAIRE does not read German, he did not put in parentheses
the German term, and I did not have time to go and verify it. It is the same thing as the term splitting, split again.
The object manifested here in fantasy bears the mark of what we have called on many occasions the re-splittings of the subject.

What we find is assuredly here, in the very space, topological, that defines the object of desire, it is probable
that this inherent number is only the mark of the inaugural temporality that constitutes this field. What characterizes
the double loop is repetition, if one may say so, radical repetition: there is in its struc¬ture the fact of ‘twice around’,
and it is the knot thus constituted in this ‘twice around’.

It is both this element of the temporal and of the time-bound, since in sum the question remains open as to the way in which developed time, which is part of current usage where our discourse is inserted, but it is also this essential term by which
the logic constituted here differentiates itself in an altogether genuine way from formal logic as it subsisted intact in its prestige up to KANT.

And that is the problem! Whence came this prestige, given its apparently abso¬lutely ‘dead’ character for us?
The prestige of this logic lay entirely in what we ourselves reduced it to, namely the use of letters.
The little a and the little b of the subject and the predicate and of their reci¬procal inclusion, everything is there.

It never brought anything to anyone, it never produced the slightest progress in thought, it remained fascinating for centuries as one of the rare examples given to us of the power of thought. Why?
It is of no use, but it could be of some use. It would suffice – which is what we do – to restore in it this
which for it is the constituting misrecognition: A = A is there as principle of identity, there is its principle.

We shall say A – the signifier – only to say that it is not the same big A. The signifier, in essence, is different
from itself, that is to say that nothing of the subject can identify itself there without excluding itself from it. A very simple truth, almost evi¬dent, which by itself suffices to open the logical possibility of the constitution of the object in the place of this splitting, in the very place of this difference
of the signifier with itself, in its subjective effect. How this object constituting of the human world…

For what is at issue in showing you is that far from having the slightest aversion to this fact of psychological evidence
that the human being is liable to take – as they say – his desires for realities, it is there that we must follow him
because, how right he is, at the outset it is nowhere else than in the furrow opened by his desire that he can constitute
any reality whatsoever that falls or does not fall within the field of logic.

That is where I shall take it up next time.