🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Today, within the framework of the theoretical teaching that we will have succeeded this year in traversing together,
I am indicating to you that I must choose my axis, if I may put it that way, and that I will place the emphasis on the support formula [S◊a]
of the third species of identification that I noted for you long ago, from the time of the graph,
in the form of S◊a, which you now know how to read as barred S cuture [cut/cutting; source pun/coinage around coupure] of little (a).

Not on what is implicit in it, nodal, namely ϕ, the point thanks to which eversion can take place from one into the other,
thanks to which the two terms present themselves as identical, in the manner of the reverse and the obverse, but not
just any reverse and any obverse, otherwise I would not have needed to show you in its place
what it is when it repre¬sents the double cut on that particular surface whose topology I tried to show you in the cross-cap; this point designated here is the point ϕ thanks to which the circle drawn by this cut can be for us
the mental schema of an original identification.

This point – I believe I have sufficiently stressed in my recent talks its struc¬tural function – can, up to a certain point, conceal for you too many satisfying properties: this phallus, there it is with that magical function which is indeed the one
that all our dis¬course has long implied in it. It would be a bit too easy to find there our landing point.
That is why today I want to place the emphasis on this point, that is to say on the function of (a), little (a), insofar as it is
at once, properly speaking, what can allow us to conceive the function of the object in analytic theory, namely that object which in psychic dynamics is what struc¬tures for us the entire progressive-regressive process, that with which we are dealing in the relations of the subject to his psychic reality, but which is also our object: the object of analytic science.

And what I want to bring forward, in what I am going to say to you about it today, is that if we want to qualify this object in a properly logical perspective – and I stress: logicizing – we have nothing better to say of it except this:
that it is the object of castration. By that I mean, I specify: with respect to the other functions that have been defined up to this point
of the object, for if one can say that the object in the world, insofar as it can be discerned there, is the object of a privation,
one can also say that the object is the object of frustration. And I am going to try to show you precisely in what way
this object, which is ours, differs from it.

It is quite clear that if this object is an object of logic, it could not until now have been completely absent, undetectable in all the attempts made to articulate as such what is called logic. Logic has not always existed in the same form; the one that perfectly satisfied us, that fulfilled us up to KANT who still took pleasure in it,
this formal logic, born one day under the pen of ARISTOTLE, exercised this captivation, this fascination until people became attached,
in the last century, to what in it could be taken up again in detail. It was noticed, for example, that a great many
things were missing in it on the side of quantification. It is certainly not what was added to it that is inte¬resting, but rather that by which
it held us, and many things that people thought they had to add to it go only in a singularly sterile direction.

In fact, it is on the reflection imposed on us by analysis concerning these powers so long insisted upon of Aristotelian logic that the inte¬rest of logic can present itself for us. The gaze of the one who strips formal Aristotelian logic of all its
so fascinating details must – I repeat it to you – abstract from what it brought decisively, as a cut in the mental world, in order truly even to understand what preceded it, for example the possibility of the whole Platonic dialectic, which is always read as if formal logic were already there, which completely falsifies it for our reading.
But let us leave that.

The Aristotelian object – for that is indeed what it must be called – has precisely, if I may put it this way, the property of being able to have
properties that belong to it in its own right: attributes. And it is these that define classes. Now this is
a construction that owes itself only to confusing what I shall call – for lack of anything better – the categories of being and having.
This would deserve lengthy developments, and to make you cross this step I am obliged to resort to an example
that will serve me as support. Already, this decisive function of the attribute, I showed it to you in the quadrant:

It is the introduction of the unary trait that distinguishes the phasic part, where it will be said for example that ‘every trait is vertical,’
which in itself implies the existence of no trait, from the lexical part, where there may be vertical traits, but where there may
also be none. To say that ‘every trait is vertical’ must be the original structure, the function of universality, of universalization
proper to a logic founded on the trait of privation.

Πᾶς[pass] is the ‘all’…

it evokes I know not what echo of the god PAN. This is indeed one of those mental coalescences that I ask you to make the effort to cross out from your papers. The name of the god PAN has absolutely nothing to do with ‘all,’ and the panic effects with which he frolics in the evening among the simple minds of the countryside have nothing to do with any mystical effusion or otherwise. The alcoholic raptus, called by the old authors ‘panto¬phobic,’ is rightly named in this sense that,
it too, Πανικός[panikos], something hunts it, disturbs it, and it goes out through the window. There is nothing more
to put into that; it is an error of overly Hellenizing minds to bring to it that retouching on which one of my old masters, though much beloved by me, brought us this correction: one should say the ‘panto-phobic’ raptus. Absolutely not.

…Πᾶς[pass], it is indeed the ‘all,’ and if it relates to anything, it is to πάσασθαι[passastaï], to possession.
And perhaps I shall be taken to task if I bring this πᾶς closer to the pos of possidere and of possum,
but I do not hesitate to do so. Possession or non-pos¬session of the unary trait, of the characteristic trait: that is what the establishment of a new explicit classificatory logic of the sources of the Aristotelian object turns around.

This term ‘classificatory,’ I use intentionally, since it is thanks to Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS that you henceforth have the corpus, the dogma¬tic articulation of the classificatory function in what he himself calls – I leave him
responsibility for the humorous touch – ‘the savage state,’ much closer to Platonic dialectic than to Aristotelianism:
the progressive division of the world into a series of halves, pairs of antipodal terms that it encloses in types whose

• on this subject read ‘The Savage Mind’ [French title: La pensée sauvage] – you will see that the essential point lies in this: what is not ‘hedgehog’ but whatever
  you like, ‘shrew’ or ‘mar¬mot,’ is something else. What characterizes the structure of the Aristotelian object
  is that what is not hedgehog is non-hedgehog. That is why I say it is the logic of the object of privation.

This can lead us much further: as far as that sort of elusion by which the problem is posed, always sharply in
this logic, of the function of the excluded third, which you know poses a prob¬lem right into the heart of the most elaborated logic,
of mathematical logic.

But we are dealing with a beginning, with a simpler core, which I want, for you, to make image-like as I told you
by an example. And I will not go looking for it very far, but in a proverb that presents in the French language
a peculiarity that nevertheless does not leap to the eyes, at least not of Franco¬phones.

The proverb is this: ‘All that glitters is not gold.’ In German col¬loquial usage for example, do not think
that one can be content to transcribe it raw: ‘Alleswasglänztistkein Gold.’ That would not be a good translation.
I see Miss UBERFREIT[?] nodding her head as she hears me. She approves me on this point. ‘Nichtalleswasglänztist Gold’
may give more satisfaction as to the sense apparently, putting the emphasis on the ‘alles,’ thanks to an anticipation
of the ‘nicht’ which is not at all habitual, which forces the genius of the language and which, if you reflect on it, misses the sense,
because that is not the distinction at stake.

I could use EULER circles, the same ones we used the other day regarding the relation
of the subject to some arbitrary case: ‘all men are liars.’

Is that simply what it means? Is it that, to remake it here: one part of what glitters is in the circle
of gold, and another is not, is that the meaning?

Do not think I am the first among logicians to have paused at this structure. And in truth, more than one author
who has dealt with negation has indeed paused at this problem, not so much from the point of view of formal logic
which, as you can see, scarcely pauses there except to misconstrue it, but from the point of view of grammatical form, insisting
on this, that the ‘all’ is ordered in such a way that it is precisely ‘goldness’ [or-ité from or, gold] if I may express myself thus,
the quality of gold of what glitters, that is put in ques¬tion, goes in the direction of denying it the authenticity of gold, thus goes in the direction of a radical calling-into-question.

Gold is here symbolic of what makes shine and, if I may put it so as to make myself understood, I stress: what gives the object
the fascinating color of desire. What is important in such a formula, if I may express myself thus, forgive me
the play on words, is ‘the storm point’ [point d’orage, also echoing point d’orgue] around which turns the question of what makes shine, and to say the word,
the question of what truth there is in this brightness. And from there of course, no gold will be true enough
to secure that point around which the function of desire subsists.

Such is the radical characteristic of this sort of object that I call (a): it is the object put in question, insofar as one can say
that it is what inte¬rests us, we analysts, as what interests the listener to any teaching whatsoever.
It is not for nothing that I have seen nostalgia arise on the lips of this one or that one who wanted to say:

‘Why does he not say – as someone put it – the truth on truth?’

It is really a great honor one can pay to a discourse that takes place every eight days in this insane position of being there behind a table before you, articulating this sort of exposition of which, pre¬cisely, one is ordinarily quite content
that it always eludes such a ques¬tion. If it were only a matter of the analytic object, namely of the object of desire,
such a question could never even have thought of arising, except from the mouth of a ‘Huron’ who would imagine
that when one comes to the University, it is in order to know ‘the truth on truth.’

Now that is what is at stake in analysis. One could say that this is what embarrasses us in making – often despite ourselves – the mirage shine in the minds of those to whom we address ourselves. We find ourselves – I have said it –
quite embarrassed, like the fish, by the pro¬verbial apple, and yet it is indeed there, it is with it that we are dealing, it is upon it – insofar as it is at the heart of structure – it is upon it that what we call castration bears.

It is precisely insofar as there is a subjective structure that turns around a type of cut,
the one I represented to you thus:

…that there is at the heart of fantasmatic identification this organizing object, this inductive object. And it could not be otherwise for the whole world of anxiety with which we are dealing, which is the object as defined object of castration.

Here I want to remind you from what surface is borrowed this part that I called ‘enucleated’ for you last time,
which gives the very image of the circle according to which this object can be defined. I want to make you picture what the property is
of this double-turn circle. Progressively enlarge the two lobes of this cut, so that they pass
both, if I may put it thus, behind the anterior surface:

This is nothing new; it is the way in which I have already demon¬strated to you how to move this cut. There is in fact
only to move it, and one very easily makes appear that the complementary part of the surface, relative to what is isolated around what one can call the two central leaves, or the two petals, to make them rejoin the inaugural metaphor of the cover of Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS’s book [‘Thought is a sad flower’], with that very image.
What remains is an apparent Möbius surface. It is the same figure that you find there:

What is indeed found, between the two edges thus displaced of the two loops of the cut, at the moment when its two edges draw near, is a Möbius surface. But what I want to show you here is that for this double cut
to rejoin itself, to close on itself – which is implied in its very structure – you must gradually extend
the internal loop of the inner figure-eight. That is indeed what you hope of it, that it will be satisfied with its own covering-over by itself:

that it enters into the norm, that one knows what one is dealing with: what is outside, and what is inside. What this state of the figure shows you, for you can clearly see how it must be seen:

This lobe [a] has extended on the other side, it has gained on the other face [b], it shows us visibly that the external loop will, on this surface, join the internal loop [c] on condition of passing by the outside. The so-called projective plane surface completes itself, closes itself, reaches completion. The object defined as our object, the object for¬ming the world of desire, rejoins its intimacy
only by a centrifugal path. What does that mean? What do we find there again?

I take up again from higher up: the function of this object is linked to the relation by which the subject is constituted in relation to the place
of the Other, capital A, which is the place where the reality of the signifier is ordered.

It is at the point where all signifiance fails, is abolished, at the nodal point called ‘the desire of the Other,’ at the so-called phallic point, insofar as it
signifies the abolition as such of all signifiance [S1: a-semantic signifier], that the object little (a), object of castration, comes to take its place.
It therefore has a relation to the signifier.

And this is why here again I must remind you of the definition from which I set out this year, concerning the signifier:
the signifier is not the sign – and the ambiguity of the Aristotelian attribute is precisely that it wants to naturalize it,
to make of it the natural sign: ‘every tricolor cat is female’ – the signifier, I told you – unlike the sign which represents something for someone – is what represents the subject for another signifier.

And there is no better example than the seal. What is a seal? The day after the day when I delivered this formula to you,
chance had it that an antiquarian friend of mine placed in my hands a little Egyptian seal which, in an unusual way,
but not a rare one either, had the form of a sole with, on the top, the toes and the bones drawn.
The seal, as you have understood, I found it in the texts; it is indeed that: a trace, if one may say so.

And it is true that nature abounds in it, but it can become a signifier only if, that trace, with a pair of scissors,
you go around it and cut it out. If you extract the trace afterward, it can become a seal. And I think the example already enlightens you sufficiently: a seal represents the subject, the sender, not necessarily for the recipient.
A letter can always remain sealed, but the seal is there for the letter; it is a signifier. Well then, the object (a),
the object of castration, participates in the nature thus exem¬plified of this signifier. It is an object structured like that.
In fact, you will realize that at the end of all that the centuries have been able to dream of concerning the function of knowledge,
that is all that remains in our hands.

In nature, there is thing-stuff, if I may express myself thus, that presents itself with an edge. Everything that we can
conquer there that simulates a knowledge is never anything but detaching this edge – and not using it but forgetting it – in order to see the rest which, curious thing, from this extraction turns out completely transformed, exactly as the cross-cap images it for you.
Namely, do not forget it: what is this cross-cap? It is a sphere, I have already told you, you need it,
one cannot do without the backside of this sphere.

It is a sphere with a hole that you organize in a cer¬tain way, and you can very well imagine that it is by pulling
on one of its edges that you make appear, more or less while holding it back, that something which will come to plug the hole,
on condition of realizing this: that each of its points joins the opposite point, which naturally creates considerable intuitive difficulties, and which even obliged us to the whole construction that I detailed before you,
in the form of the cross-cap pictured in space.

But what? What is important? It is that, through this operation that occurs at the level of the hole, the rest of the sphere
is transformed into a Möbius surface. By the enucleation of the object of castration, the whole world is ordered in a certain way
which gives us, if I may put it thus, the illusion of being a world.

And I would even say that, in a certain way, to make an intermediary between this Aristotelian object, where this reality
is in some sense masked, and our object that I am trying here to promote for you, I would intro¬duce in between that object
which inspires in us at once the greatest mistrust, by reason of prejudices inherited from an epistemological education,
but which is what one always falls into of course, which is our great temptation…
we others, in analysis, if we had not had the existence of JUNG to exorci¬se it,
we might perhaps not even have realized to what point we still believe in it
…it is the object of Naturwissenschaft, it is the Goethean object, if I may say so, the object that, in nature, incessantly reads as in an open book all the figures of an intention that one really ought to call quasi-divine, if the term God had not,
from another side, been so well preserved.

This – let us say it – demonic, rather than divine, Goethean intuition, which also makes him read in the skull found on the Lido
the completely imaginary form of WERTHER, or forge the theory of colors, in short, leave for us the traces
of an activity of which the least one can say is that it is cosmogonic, engendering the oldest illu¬sions of micro-macrocosmic analogy, and yet still captivating in a mind so close to us. What does this depend on?
To what does GŒTHE’s personal drama owe the exceptional fascination it exerts on us, if not to the surfacing, as central, of the drama in him, of desire. ‘Warum Gœthe ließ Friederike ?’ [Why did Goethe leave Friederike?] wrote, as you know, one of the survivors
of the first generation in an article: Theodor REIK.

The specificity and the fascinating character of GŒTHE’s per¬sonality is that we read there, in all its presence,
the identifica¬tion of the object of desire with that to which one must renounce in order for the world to be delivered to us as world.

I have sufficiently recalled the structure of this case – by showing its analogy with the one developed by FREUD
in the history of the Rat Man – in The Individual Myth of the Neurotic, or rather, it was published somewhere without my consent,
since that text I neither reviewed nor corrected, which renders it quasi unreadable; nevertheless it trails around here and there,
and one can recover its broad outlines.

This complementary relation of (a), the object of a constitutive castration where our object as such is situated, with this remainder,
and where we can read everything, and espe¬cially our figure i(a), this is what I have attempted to illustrate this year at the point,
for you, of my discourse. In the specular illusion, in the fundamental misreco¬gnition with which we are always dealing, S takes the function of specular image in the form of i(a), whereas it has, if I may put it thus, nothing to do with it of the same kind.

It could in no way read its image there, for the good reason that if it is something, this S, it is not
the complement of little i factor of little (a) [i(a)]; it might rather be quite well its cause, let us say, and I use this term intentionally, because for some time now, precisely since the categories of logic are wavering a bit,
cause, good or bad, in any case does not enjoy a good press, and people prefer to avoid speaking of it.

And indeed, there are hardly any but us who can find our way there, in this func¬tion whose old shadow, after all the mental progress traversed, one can in sum approach only by seeing in it in some sort the identical of all that manifests itself as effects, but when they are still veiled.

And of course this is not at all satisfying, except perhaps if precisely it is not by being in the place of something,
by cutting off all effects, that cause sustains its drama. If there is moreover a cause worthy
that we attach ourselves to it, at least by our attention, it is not always and in advance a lost cause.

Therefore we can articulate that if there is something on which we must place the emphasis, far from eluding it,
it is that the function of the partial object cannot in any way for us be reduced, if what we call the partial object is what designates the point of repression by reason of its loss.

And it is from there that the illusion of the world’s cosmicity takes root. This acosmic point of desire insofar as it is designated by the object of castration, this is what we must preserve as the pivot point, the center of all the elaboration
of what we have accumulated as facts concerning the constitution of the world as objectal.

But this object (a) that we see arising at the point of failure of the Other, at the point of loss of the signifier,
because this loss is the loss of this very object, of the never refound member of dismembered HORUS, this object,
how can we fail to give it what I shall parodically call its reflexive property, if I may say so, since it grounds it,
since it is from it that it proceeds, since it is insofar as the subject is first and only essentially cut of this object
that something can be born which is this interval between skin and flesh, between Wahrnehmung and Bewusstsein,
between perception and consciousness, which is Selbstbewusstsein.

It is here that it is worth stating its place in an ontology founded on our experience. You will see that it joins here
a formula at length commented by HEIDEGGER, in its pre-Socratic origin.
The relation of this object to the image of the world that it orders constitutes what PLATO properly called ‘the dyad,’
on condition that we notice that in this dyad the subject S and the (a) are on the same side.
Τὸγὰρ αὐτὸνοεῖνἐστίντε καὶεἶναι, this formula that long served to confuse – which is not sustainable – being and knowledge, means nothing other than that.

In relation to the correlate of little (a), to what remains when the constitutive object of fantasy has separated, being and thought are on the same side,
on the side of this (a). Little (a) is being insofar as it is essentially missing from the text of the world, and that is why around little (a) there can slip in everything called the return of the repressed, that is to say what sweats out there and betrays itself there as the true truth that interests us, and which is always the object of desire insofar as all humanity, all humanism, is constructed, for us, so as to make us miss it.

We know from our experience that there is nothing that truly weighs in the world except what alludes to this object whose place the Other, capital A, takes in order to give it a meaning. Every metaphor, including that of the symptom,
seeks to bring this object out into signification, but all the proliferation of meanings it can engender does not succeed
in staunching what is at issue in this hole of a central loss.

That is what regulates the relations of the subject with the Other, capital A, what regulates secretly, but in a way of which it is certain that it is no less effective than this relation of (a) to the imaginary reflection that covers and overtops it. In other words,
on the road – the only one offered to us for recovering the inci¬dence of this little (a) – we first encounter the mark
of the occultation of the Other, under the same desire. Such is indeed the path: (a) can be approached by this path which is
what the Other (with a capital A) desires in the failing subject, in fantasy, the S.

That is why I taught you that the fear of desire is lived as equivalent to anxiety, that anxiety is the fear
of what the Other desires in itself from the subject, this in itself grounded precisely on ignorance of what is desired at the level of the Other. It is on the side
of the Other that (a) comes to light, not so much as lack but as to being. That is why we arri¬ve here
at posing the question of its relation with the Thing, not ‘Sache,’ but what I called ‘das Ding.’

You know that, in leading you to this limit, I did nothing but indicate to you that here, the perspective reversing itself,
it is i(a) that envelops this access to the object of castration.

Here it is the image itself that creates the obstacle in the mirror, or rather, in the manner of what happens in those dark mirrors,
one must always think of this darkness whenever, in the ancient authors, you see the reference to the mirror intervene,
something may appear beyond the image given by the clear mirror. The image of the clear mirror is what that barrier I once called the barrier of beauty clings to. For the revelation of little (a) beyond this image, even if it appears in the most horrible form, will always retain its reflection.

And it is here that I would like to share with you the good fortune I had in encoun¬tering these thoughts under the pen of someone whom I consider quite simply as the bard of our Letters, who unquestionably went further than anyone, present or past, on the path of the realization of fantasy: I have named Maurice BLANCHOT, whose L’arrêt de mort had long been for me the sure confirmation of what I said all year, in the seminar on Ethics,
concerning ‘the second death.’

I had not read the second version of his first work, Thomas l’Obscur. I think that so small a volume,
none of you, after what I am going to read to you from it, will fail to test himself against. Something is encountered there that incarnates the image of this object (a), with regard to which I spoke of horror; that is the term FREUD uses when it is a matter of the Rat Man.

Here, it is the rat that is at issue. Georges BATAILLE wrote a long essay turning around the well-known central fantasy
of Marcel PROUST, which also concerned a rat: Histoire de rats. But need I tell you that if APOLLO
riddles the Greek army with the arrows of the plague, it is because, as monsieur GRÉGOIRE saw very well:
if AESCULAPIUS – as I taught you a long time ago, is a mole, it was not so long ago that I rediscovered
the plan of the molehill in a θόλος[tholos], one more, that I visited recently – if therefore AESCULAPIUS is a mole, APOLLO is a rat.

Here it is. I anticipate, or more exactly I take from a little before Thomas l’Obscur – it is not by chance that it is called that:

‘And in his room […] those who came in, seeing his book always open at the same pages, thought that he was pre¬tending to read. He was reading.
He was reading with unsurpassable minuteness and attention. He was, beside each sign, in the situation in which the male finds himself when
the praying mantis is about to devour him. They looked at one another. The words, issuing from a book that was taking on a mortal power, exercised over the gaze that touched them a gentle and peaceful attraction. Each of them, like a half-closed eye, let in the gaze too keen
which in other circumstances it would not have suffered. Thomas therefore slipped toward those corridors which he approached defenseless until the moment when he was noticed by the intimacy of the word.
It was not yet frightening; on the contrary, it was an almost pleasant moment that he would have liked to prolong. The reader joyfully contemplated that little spark of life that he did not doubt he had awakened. He saw himself with pleasure in that eye that saw him.
His very pleasure became very great. It became so great, so pitiless, that he underwent it with a kind of dread and that, having straightened up,
unbearable moment, without receiving from his interlocutor a complicit sign, he perceived the whole strangeness there was in being observed
by a word as by a living being, and not only by a word, but by all the words that were found in that word,
by all those that accom¬panied it and that in their turn contained within themselves other words, like a sequence of angels
opening to infinity up to the eye of the absolute.’

I spare you these crossings that pass through this

‘while, perched on his shoulders, the word ‘He’ and the word ‘I’ were beginning their carnage…’

up to the confrontation I was aiming at in evoking this passage for you:

‘His hands sought to touch an impalpable and unreal body. It was an effort so painful that this thing that was moving away from him and,
in moving away, attempting to draw him, seemed to him the same as that which was unspeakably drawing near. He fell to the ground. He had the feeling of being covered with impurities. Every part of his body was undergoing an agony. His head was compelled to touch evil, his lungs to
breathe it. He was there on the floorboards, writhing, then withdrawing into himself, then coming out. He crawled heavily, scarcely different from the serpent he would have wished to become in order to believe in the venom he felt in his mouth […].

It was in this state that he felt himself bitten or struck, he could not know which, by what seemed to him to be a word, but which resembled
rather a gigantic rat, with piercing eyes, pure teeth, and which was an all-powerful beast. Seeing it a few inches
from his face, he could not escape the desire to devour it, to bring it into the deepest intimacy with himself. He threw himself upon it and,
driving his nails into its entrails, sought to make it his own. The end of the night came. The light that shone through the shutters went out. But the struggle with the frightful beast that had at last revealed itself to be of an incomparable dignity, an incomparable magnificence, lasted a time
that could not be measured. This struggle was horrible for the being lying on the ground who ground his teeth, tore up his face,
tore out his eyes to let the beast into them and who would have resembled a madman if he had resembled a man.

It was almost beautiful for that sort of black angel, covered in reddish fur, whose eyes sparkled.
At times one believed he had triumphed and he saw descending into him, with an uncontrollable nausea, the word innocence that sullied him.
At times the other devoured him in turn, dragged him by the hole from which he had come, then cast him back like a hard and empty body.
Each time, Thomas was driven back to the depths of his being by the very words that had haunted him and that he pursued as
his nightmare and as the explanation of his nightmare. He always found himself emptier and heavier, he moved only with
an infinite fatigue. His body, after so many struggles, became entirely opaque and, to those who looked at him, it gave the restful impression of sleep, although he had not ceased to be awake.’

You will read the rest. And the path does not stop there, in what Maurice BLANCHOT reveals to us.
If I have taken care here to indicate this passage to you, it is because at the moment of leaving you this year, I want to tell you
that often I am aware of doing nothing else here but allowing you to carry yourselves with me to the point where,
around us, multiple, the best already arrive. Others may have noticed the parallelism there is between this
or that of the researches now being pursued and those that together we elaborate. I will have no difficulty in reminding you
that on other paths, the works, then the reflections on the works by himself of a Pierre KLOSSOWSKI, converge with this path of the search for fantasy as we have elaborated it this year.

Little i of little (a) [i(a)], their difference, their complementarity and the mask that one constitutes for the other, that is the point
to which I will have led you this year. Little i of little (a) [i(a)], its image is therefore not its image: it does not represent,
this object of castration, it is in no way that representative of the drive upon which repression falls electively, and for a double reason, namely that this image is neither the Vorstellung since it is itself an object, a real image

• refer yourselves to what I wrote on this subject in my Remarques sur le rapport de Daniel Lagache – an object that is not
  the same as little (a), which is not its representative either.

Desire, do not forget, in the graph where is it situ¬ated?

It aims at S◊a, fantasy, in a mode analogous to that of the ego where the ego refers to the specular image.
What does this mean, if not that there is some relation of this fantasy to the desiring one himself.
But can we make, of this desiring one, purely and simply the agent of desire?
Let us not forget that on the second floor of the graph, d, desire, is a ‘who’ that answers a question,
that does not aim at a ‘who’ but at a ‘che vuoi?’ [Italian: what do you want?].

To the question ‘che vuoi?’ the desiring one is the answer, the answer that does not designate the ‘who’ of ‘who wants?’, but the answer
of the object. What I want in fantasy determines the object from which the desiring one it contains must avow himself as desiring.

Always look for him, this desiring one, within whatever object of desire, and do not go objecting necrophilic perversion, since precisely that is the example where it proves, on this side of ‘the second death,’ physical death still leaves something to be desired,
and that the body lets itself be glimpsed there as entirely taken in a signifier function, separated from itself
and testimony to what the necrophile embraces: an ungraspable truth.

This relation of the object to the signifier, before leaving you, let us return to the point on which these reflections are seated, that is to say
to what FREUD himself marked regarding the identification of desire – in the hysteric, in parentheses – with the desire of the Other.
The hysteric indeed shows us quite well what the distance is of this object from the signifier, this distance that I defined
by the deficiency of the signifier, but implying its relation to the signifier; indeed, with what does the hysteric identify when – FREUD tells us – it is the desire of the Other toward which she is oriented, and which has set her hunting.

And this is where affects, he tells us, emotions – considered here, under his pen, as tangled, if I may put it that way, in the signifier, and taken up as such – it is on this point that he tells us that all ratified emotions,
the forms, if I may put it so, conventional forms of emotion, are nothing other than ontogenic inscriptions
of what he compares, of what he reveals as expressly equivalent to hysterical attacks, which is to fall back again
upon the relation to the signifier. Emotions are in some sense ‘cast-offs’ [caduques also means obsolete/decayed] of behavior, fallen parts taken up again as signifier.

And what is most palpable, all that we can see of it, is found in the ancient forms of combat.
Let those who have seen the film Rashomon remember those strange interludes that suddenly suspend the combatants, who each go sepa¬rately to make three little turns upon themselves, to make toward I know not what unknown point of space a paradoxical bow. This is part of the struggle, just as in sexual display.

FREUD teaches us to recognize this kind of inter¬ruptive paradox of incomprehensible scansion.
The emotions, if something of them is shown to us in the hysteric, it is precisely when she is on the track of desire,
it is this clearly mimed character, as one says out of season, by which one is deceived and from which the impression of falseness is drawn.

What does this mean, if not that the hysteric of course cannot do anything other than seek the desire of the Other
there where it is, where it leaves its trace in the Other, in utopia, not to say atopia, distress, even fiction,
in short, that it is by the path of manifestation as one might expect, that all symptomatic aspects are shown.
And if these symptoms find this path laid out, it is in connection with this relation, which FREUD designates, to the desire of the Other.

I had something else to indicate to you, concerning frustration. Of course, what I have brought you this year about it,
concerning the relation to the body, what is only sketched in the way I intended, within a mathematical body, to give you the beginnings of all sorts of paradoxes concerning the idea we can form of the body,
finds applications certainly well made to modify profoundly the idea we can have of frustration as a deficiency concerning a gratification referring to what would be a so-called primitive totality,
such as one would like to see designated in the relations of the mother and the child.

It is strange that analytic thought has never encoun¬tered on this path, except in corners, as always,
observations by FREUD, and here I designate in the Wolf Man the word ‘Schleier,’ this veil with which the child is born capped,
and which drags through the analytic literature without anyone ever having even thought that there was the beginning of a very fertile path:
the stigmata.

If there is something that allows one to conceive as involving a totality of I know not what primary narcissism

• and here I can only regret that someone who asked me the question is absent – it is indeed assuredly the reference
  of the subject, not so much to the parasitized body of the mother, but to those lost enve¬lopes in which one reads so well this continuity
  of the inside with the outside, which is the one to which my model of this year introduced you, and to which we will have to return.

I simply want to indicate to you, because we will find it again later, that if there is something where the relation to the body,
to incorporation, to Einverleibung, must be accentuated, it is on the side of the father – left entire¬ly aside – that one must look.
I left it entirely aside because I would have had to introduce you – but when would I do it? – to a whole tradition that one might call mystical and which assuredly, by its presence in the Semitic tradition, dominates the whole personal adventure of FREUD.

But if there is something one asks of the mother, does it not strike you that it is the only thing she does not have, namely the phallus? All the dialectic of these last years, up to and inclu¬ding the Kleinian dialectic, which nevertheless comes closest to it, remains falsified because the emphasis is not placed on this essential divergence.

It is likewise impossible to correct it, impossible also to understand anything of what makes the impasse of the analytic relation, and quite especially in the transmission of analytic truth as didac¬tic analysis is carried out, because it is impossible to introduce into it the relation to the father: that one is not the father of one’s analysand. I have said enough and done enough so that no one dares any longer – at least in a circle close to mine – risk advancing that one can be his mother.

Yet that is what is at issue. The function of analysis such as it inserts itself there where FREUD left us the continuation open, the gaping trace, is situated where his pen fell, regarding the article on the splitting of the ego, at the point of ambiguity to which this leads him: the object of castration is that term ambiguous enough that at the very moment the subject has set himself to repress it,
he establishes it firmer than ever in an Other.

So long as we have not recognized that this object of castration is the very object by which we situate ourselves
in the field of science – I mean that it is the object of our science, as number or magnitude can be the object of mathematics – the dialectic of analysis, not only its dialec¬tic, but its practice, its very contribution,
and even the structure of its commu¬nity, will remain suspended.

Next year I will treat for you, as strictly pursuing the point where I left you today, anxiety.

[End of the seminar ‘Identification’]