🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Last time, I left you with this remark, made to give you the sense that my discourse does not lose its moorings. Namely, that the importance for us of this inquiry this year lies in this: that the paradox of the automatism of repetition is that you see a cycle of behavior emerge, writable as such in the terms of a resolution of tension in the couple, therefore ‘need-satisfaction,’ and that nevertheless, whatever the function involved in this cycle—however carnal you may suppose it to be—it remains no less true that what it means as an automatism of repetition is that it is there to bring forth, to recall, to make insist, something that is nothing other in its essence than a signifier, designable by its function, and especially under this aspect, that it introduces into the cycle of its repetitions—always the same in their essence, and therefore concerning something that is always the same thing—it introduces there difference, distinction, uniqueness.

That it is because something originally happened, which is the whole mystery of trauma, namely: that once something occurred which from then on took the form A, that in repetition behavior—however complex, engaged, you may suppose it to be in animal individuality—is there only to make this sign A re-emerge. Let us say that behavior, from then on, is expressible as behavior number so-and-so. It is this behavior number so-and-so, let us say it—the hysterical attack, for example.

One of the forms in a determinate subject is his hysterical attacks; that is what comes out as behavior number so-and-so. Only the number is lost for the subject. It is precisely insofar as the number is lost that this behavior comes out, masked in this function of making the number re-emerge, behind what one will call the psychology of his attack, behind the apparent motivations. And you know that on this point no one will be demanding in finding for him the appearance of a reason: it is the very property of psychology always to make a shadow of motivation appear.
It is therefore in this structural juxtaposition, of something inserted radically into this vital individuality with this signifying function, that we are, in analytic experience.

Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, that is what is repressed: it is the lost number of behavior so-and-so. Where is the subject in all this?

– Is he in radical, real individuality?
– In the pure patient of this capture?
– In the organism henceforth drawn in by the effects of ‘it speaks,’ by the fact that one living being among others was called to become what Mr. HEIDEGGER calls ‘the shepherd of being,’ having been caught in the mechanisms of the signifier?
– Is he, at the other extreme, identifiable with the very play of the signifier?

And is the subject only the subject of discourse, in some way torn away from his vital immanence, condemned to hover over it, to live in this sort of mirage that follows from this redoubling which makes it so that everything he lives, not only does he speak it, but that, living it, he lives it by speaking it, and that already what he lives is inscribed in an ἔπος[epos: discourse], a saga woven throughout the whole course of his very act?

Our effort this year, if it has a meaning, is precisely to show how the function of the subject is articulated elsewhere than in one or the other of these poles, playing between the two. This is, after all—I imagine it—what your cogitation, at least I like to think so after these few years of seminars, can give you, if only implicitly, at every moment as a bearing point. Is it enough to know that the function of the subject is in the in-between, between:
– the idealizing effects of the signifying function,
– and this vital immanence that you would confuse—I think, still, despite my warnings—readily with the function of the drive?

That is precisely what we are engaged in, and what we are trying to push further, and also why I believed I had to begin with the Cartesian cogito, in order to make perceptible the field that is the one in which we are going to try to provide more precise articulations concerning identification.

I spoke to you, some years ago, about little Hans. There is, in the history of little Hans—I think you have kept the memory of it somewhere—the story of the dream that can be pinned with the title of ‘the crumpled giraffe’: zerwutzelte Giraffe.
This verb, zerwutzeln, which has been translated as ‘to crumple,’ is not a completely current verb of the common Germanic lexicon.
If wutzeln is found there, zerwutzeln is not. Zerwutzeln means to make into a ball. It is indicated in the text of the dream of the crumpled giraffe that it is a giraffe that is there, beside the large living giraffe, a paper giraffe, and that as such one can make it into a ball.

You know all the symbolism that unfolds throughout this observation, in the relation between the giraffe and the little giraffe, the crumpled giraffe under one of its aspects, conceivable under the other
– as the reduced giraffe,
– as the second giraffe,
– as the giraffe that can symbolize many things.

If the large giraffe symbolizes the mother, the other giraffe symbolizes the daughter, and little Hans’s relation to the giraffe, at the point where things stand at that moment in his analysis, will quite readily tend to become embodied in the living play of family rivalries.
I remember the astonishment—it would no longer be in order today—that I provoked at the time by designating at that moment in the observation of little Hans, and as such, the dimension of the symbolic put into action in the young subject’s psychical productions concerning this crumpled giraffe.

What could there be more indicative of the radical difference of the symbolic as such, than to see appearing in the production—certainly on this point not suggested, for there is not a trace at that moment of a similar articulation concerning the indirect function of the symbol—than to see in the observation something that truly embodies for us, and images the appearance of the symbolic as such in the psychical dialectic.

‘Really, where could you have found that?’ one of you said to me kindly after that session. The surprising thing is not that I saw it there, because it can hardly be indicated more crudely in the material itself, it is that at that point one can say that FREUD himself does not dwell on it there, I mean does not place all the underlining that is appropriate on this phenomenon, on what it materializes, so to speak, before our eyes.

That is indeed what proves the essential character of these structural delineations, namely that: by not making them, by not pointing them out, by not articulating them with all the energy of which we are capable, it is a certain face, a certain dimension of the phenomena themselves that we condemn ourselves, in some way, to misconstrue.

I am not going to go over again on this occasion the articulation of what is at stake, the issue in the case of little Hans; the things have been published enough, and well enough, for you to be able to refer to them. But the [signifying] function as such, at that critical moment—the one determined by his radical suspension to his mother’s desire in a way, so to speak, that is without compensation, without recourse, without exit—is the artifice function that I showed you to be that of phobia, insofar as it introduces a spring: a key-signifier that allows the subject to preserve what is at stake for him, namely this minimum anchoring, centering of his being, that allows him not to feel himself a being completely adrift in maternal caprice. That is what is at stake.

But what I want to point out at this level is this, namely that in a production eminently little subject to caution on this occasion—I say this all the more since everything toward which little Hans had previously been oriented, for God knows he was oriented, as I showed you, none of that is of a nature to set him on a field of this type of elaboration—little Hans shows us here—under a closed figure—certainly—but exemplary—the leap, the passage, the tension between what I first defined as the two extremes of the subject:

– the animal subject that represents the mother, but also with her great neck, no one doubts it, the mother insofar as she is that immense phallus of desire, still ending in the grazing beak of this voracious animal,

– and then on the other side, something on a paper surface—we shall return to this dimension of the surface—something that is not devoid of every subjective accent.

For one clearly sees the whole stake of what is involved: the large giraffe, as she sees him playing with the little crumpled one, cries very loudly until finally she grows tired, she exhausts her cries. And little Hans, sanctioning in some way the taking possession, the Besitzung of what is at stake, of the mysterious stake of the affair, by sitting on it, draufgesetzt.
This fine mechanism must make us feel what is at stake, if indeed it is a question of his fundamental identification, of the defense of himself against this original capture in the world of the mother, as of course no one doubts at the point where we stand in the elucidation of phobia.

Here already we see this function of the signifier exemplified. This is indeed where I still want to pause today, concerning the point of departure of what we have to say about identification. The function of the signifier, insofar as it is the mooring point of something from which the subject is constituted, that is what is going to make me pause for a moment today on something that, it seems to me, must quite naturally come to mind, not only for reasons of general logic, but also for something that you must touch in your experience, I mean the function of the name.
Not ‘noun,’ the name grammatically defined, what we call ‘the substantive’ in our schools, but the name, as in English—and in German as well, moreover—the two functions are distinguished. I would like to say a little more here, but you understand the difference well: the name is the proper name.

You know, as analysts, the importance that the subject’s proper name has in any analysis. You must always pay attention to what your patient is called. It is never indifferent. And if you ask for names in analysis, it is indeed something much more important than the excuse you can give the patient, namely that all sorts of things can hide behind this sort of dissimulation or erasure there might be of the name, concerning the relations he has to bring into play with such-and-such another subject.

This goes much further than that. You must sense it, if not know it.

What is a proper name? Here, we should have much to say.
The fact is that indeed we can bring a great deal of material to the name.

This material, we analysts, even in ‘controls,’ a thousand times we shall have to illustrate its importance.
I do not think that we can, here precisely, give it its full scope without—this is one more occasion to touch with the finger the methodological necessity of it—referring ourselves to what, at this point, the linguist has to say.
Not in order necessarily to submit to him, but because concerning the function, the definition of this signifier that has its originality, we must at least find there a check, if not a complement, to what we can say.

In fact, that is indeed what is going to happen. In 1954[?] there appeared a small factum by Sir Alan H. GARDINER.
There are from him all sorts of works, and in particular a very good Egyptian grammar, I mean of ancient Egypt; he is therefore an Egyptologist, but he is also and above all a linguist.

GARDINER made—it was at that time that I acquired it, during a trip to London—a very small book called The Theory of Proper Names. He made it in a somewhat contingent way. He himself calls this a controversial essay: a controversial essay; one may even say—that is a litotes—a polemical essay. He did it following the intense exasperation to which a certain number of statements by a philosopher had brought him, one whom I am not pointing out to you for the first time: Bertrand RUSSELL, whose enormous role you know in the elaboration of what one might call nowadays mathematized logic, or logicized mathematics. Around the Principia mathematica, with WITHEHEAD, he gave us a general symbolism of logical and mathematical operations that one cannot fail to take into account as soon as one enters this field.

Thus RUSSELL, in one of his works, gives a certain altogether paradoxical definition—the paradox moreover is a dimension in which he is far from being reluctant to move, quite the contrary, he uses it more than his share—Mr. RUSSELL therefore put forward, concerning the proper name, certain remarks that literally drove Mr. GARDINER beside himself. The quarrel is in itself sufficiently significant that I think I should introduce you to it today, and on this occasion attach remarks that seem important to me. By which end shall we begin? By GARDINER or by RUSSELL? Let us begin with RUSSELL.

RUSSELL finds himself in the position of the logician. The logician has a position that does not date from yesterday; he makes a certain apparatus function to which he gives various titles: reasoning, thought. He discovers in it a certain number of implicit laws. At a first stage, he isolates these laws: they are those without which there would be nothing of the order of reason that would be possible.

It is in the course of this altogether original inquiry into this thought that governs us, through Greek reflection, that we grasp, for example, the importance of the principle of contradiction. This principle of contradiction having been discovered, it is around the principle of contradiction that something unfolds and is ordered, which certainly shows that if contradiction and its principle were only something so tautological, tautology would be singularly fertile, for Aristotelian logic does not unfold simply in a few pages.

With time, however, the historical fact is that far from the development of logic moving toward an ontology, a radical reference to being that would supposedly be aimed at in these most general laws of the necessary mode of apprehending truth, it moves toward a formalism, namely that what the leader of a school of thought as important, as decisive in the orientation it has given to an entire mode of thought in our time, as Bertrand RUSSELL, devotes himself to, is arriving at placing everything concerning the critique of the operations brought into play in the field of logic and mathematics into a general formalization as strict, as economical as possible.

In short, the correlation of RUSSELL’s effort, the insertion of RUSSELL’s effort in this same direction, in mathematics, leads to the formation of what is called ‘set theory,’ whose general import can be characterized by the fact that there one strives to reduce the whole field of mathematical experience accumulated over centuries of development, and I think one cannot give a better definition of it than this: it is to reduce it to a play of letters. This therefore we must take into account as a datum of the progress of thought, let us say in our time: this time being defined as a certain moment of the discourse of science.

What does Bertrand RUSSELL, under these conditions, come to give, on the day he becomes interested in it, as a definition of a proper name? It is something that in itself is worth dwelling on, because it is what is going to allow us to grasp—we could grasp it elsewhere, and you will see that I will show you that one grasps it elsewhere—let us say, that share of misrecognition implied in a certain position, which happens to be effectively the corner into which the whole effort of the centuries-long elaboration of logic has been pushed.

This misrecognition is quite properly this, that without any doubt I am giving it to you in some way from the outset in what I have here laid down, necessarily by a necessity of the exposition, this misrecognition is exactly the most radical relation of the thinking subject to the letter. Bertrand RUSSELL sees everything except this: the function of the letter. That is what I hope to make you feel and show you. Have confidence and follow me. You are now going to see how we are going to proceed.

What definition does he give of the proper name? A proper name is, he says: ‘a word for particular,’ a word to designate particular things as such, outside all description.

There are two ways of approaching things:

– to describe them by their qualities, their reference points, their coordinates from the mathematician’s point of view, if I want to designate them as such. This point, for example, let us put it that here I could tell you: it is to the right of the board, at about such-and-such a height, it is white, and this and that… That is a description, Mr. RUSSELL tells us,

– and the ways there are of designating them, outside all description, as particular, that is what I am going to call a ‘proper name.’

The first ‘proper name’ for Mr. RUSSELL—I already alluded to it in my previous seminars—is the ‘this,’ this one: ‘this is the question.’ There is the demonstrative raised to the rank of proper name. It is no less paradoxical that Mr. RUSSELL coolly envisages the possibility of calling this same point: John. It must be acknowledged that we have all the same here the sign that perhaps there is something that exceeds experience, for the fact is that it is rare to call a geometric point John…

Nevertheless, RUSSELL never shrank from the most extreme expressions of his thought. It is all the same here that the linguist becomes alarmed. All the more alarmed because between these two extremes of the Russellian definition ‘word for particular,’ there is this altogether paradoxical consequence that—consistent with himself—RUSSELL tells us that SOCRATES has no right to be considered by us as a proper name, given that for a long time SOCRATES is no longer a particular.

I am abbreviating what RUSSELL says. I am even adding a note of humor to it, but it is indeed the spirit of what he means to tell us, namely that SOCRATES was for us ‘PLATO’s master,’ ‘the man who drank hemlock,’ etc. That is an abbreviated description. It is therefore no longer as such what he calls: ‘a word to designate the particular in its particularity.’

It is quite certain that here we see that we lose completely the thread of what linguistic consciousness gives us, namely that if we must eliminate everything that, among proper names, is inserted into a community of notion, we arrive at a sort of impasse, which is precisely what GARDINER tries to counterpose with properly linguistic perspectives as such.

What is remarkable is that the linguist…
not without merit, and not without practice, and not without habit, through an all the deeper experience of the signifier in that it is not for nothing that I pointed out to you that this is someone whose part of the labor unfolds in a particularly suggestive and rich angle of experience, namely that of the hieroglyph, since he is an Egyptologist
…is going to be brought—he—to counter-formulate for us what seems to him characteristic of the function of the proper name.

This characteristic of the function of the proper name, in order to elaborate it, he is going to take as reference John Stuart MILL and a Greek grammarian of the 2nd century before JESUS CHRIST called Dionysius THRAX. Strikingly, he is going to encounter in them something which, without arriving at the same paradox as Bertrand RUSSELL, accounts for formulas that, at first sight, may appear homonymic, so to speak.

The proper name, ἴδιον ὄνομα[idion onoma], moreover is only the translation of what the Greeks brought on this matter, and namely this Dionysius THRAX: ἴδιον[idion] opposed to Χοινόν[koinon]. Does ἴδιον[idion] here coincide with the particular in the Russellian sense of the term? Certainly not, since otherwise Mr. GARDINER would not take support from it if it were to find agreement with his adversary there. Unfortunately, he does not manage here to specify the difference in the term property as applied to what the original Greek point of view distinguishes, with the paradoxical consequences at which a certain formalism arrives.

But, sheltered by the progress permitted to him by the reference to the Greeks—quite fundamentally—then to MILL, closer to him, he brings out this point at issue, that is to say what functions in the proper name, what makes us immediately distinguish it, pick it out as such, as a proper name. With a certain pertinence in approaching the problem, MILL places the accent on this: that what distinguishes a proper name from a common noun is on the side of something that is at the level of meaning. The common noun seems to concern the object insofar as with it it brings a meaning.

If something is a proper name, it is insofar as it is not the meaning of the object that it brings with it, but something that is of the order of a mark applied in some way onto the object, superimposed on it, and which for that very reason will be all the more closely bound to it the less open it is—by virtue of the absence of meaning—to any participation with a dimension through which this object exceeds itself, communicates with other objects.

MILL here moreover brings in, sets into play a sort of little apologue linked to a tale: the bringing into play of an image of fantasy. It is the story of the role of the fairy MORGIANA who wants to preserve some of her protégés from I know not what scourge to which they are promised, by the fact that a chalk mark has been put in the city on their door. MORGIANA prevents them from falling under the blow of the exterminating scourge by making the same mark on all the other houses in the same city.

Here, Sir GARDINER has no difficulty in demonstrating the misrecognition implied by this apologue itself: namely that, if MILL had had a more complete notion of what is involved in the incidence of the proper name, it is not only of the identifying character of the mark that he should have made mention—in his own fabrication—but also of the distinctive character. And as such the apologue would be more suitable if one said that the fairy MORGIANA had also had to mark the other houses with a chalk sign, but differently from the first, so that the one who, entering the city to fulfill his mission, seeks the house where he must make his fatal incidence fall, would no longer know how to find which sign is at stake, for lack of having known in advance precisely which sign had to be sought among others.

This leads GARDINER to an articulation which is this: that, with manifest reference to this distinction of signifier and signified, which is fundamental for every linguist, even if he does not promote it as such in his discourse, GARDINER, not without foundation, remarks that it is not so much a matter of absence of meaning in the use of the proper name, for after all everything says the contrary.

Very often proper names have a meaning. Even Mr. DURAND, that has a meaning. Mr. SMITH means blacksmith, and it is quite clear that it is not because Mr. BLACKSMITH would happen to be a blacksmith that his name would be any less a proper name. What makes the use of a proper name, Mr. GARDINER tells us, is that the accent, in its use, is placed not on the meaning, but on the sound insofar as it is distinctive. There is here manifestly a very great advance in dimensions, which in most cases will practically allow us to notice that something functions more especially as a proper name.

Nevertheless, it is still rather paradoxical precisely to see a linguist—whose first definition he will have to give of his material, phonemes, is precisely that they are sounds that are distinguished from one another—give as a particular trait of the function of the proper name that it is precisely from the fact that the proper name is composed of distinctive sounds that we can characterize it as a proper name. For of course, from a certain angle, it is manifest that every use of language is precisely founded on this, that a language is made with a material that is that of distinctive sounds.

Of course, this objection does not fail to appear to the author himself of this elaboration. It is here that he introduces the subjective notion, in the psychological sense of the term, of the attention accorded to the signifying dimension as—here—sound material.

Observe carefully what I am pointing out here: it is that the linguist who, according to a principle of method, must strive to set aside, I do not say to eliminate totally, from his field—just as much as the mathematician—everything that is properly psychological reference, is all the same brought here as such to make mention of a psychological dimension as such, I mean of the fact that the subject, he says, cathects, pays special attention to what is the body of his interest when it is a matter of the proper name, it is insofar as it conveys a certain sound difference that it is taken as a proper name, noting that inversely in ordinary discourse, what I am in the process of communicating to you, for example, at this moment, I pay absolutely no attention to the sound material of what I am telling you. If I paid too much attention to it, I would soon be led to see my discourse slacken and dry up.

I am first trying to communicate something to you. It is because I believe I know how to speak French that the material, effectively distinctive in its basis, comes to me. It is there as a vehicle to which I pay no attention: I am thinking of the goal toward which I am going, which is to convey to you certain qualities of thoughts that I am communicating to you.

Is it so true as that that each time we pronounce a proper name we are psychologically alerted to this accent placed on the sound material as such? It is absolutely not true. I think no more about the sound material: ‘Sir Alan Gardiner,’ when I speak to you of him, than at the moment when I speak of zerwutzeln or anything else.
First of all, my examples here would be badly chosen, because they are already words that—writing them on the board—I bring out as words.

It is certain that, whatever the value of the linguist’s claim here, it fails very specifically insofar as it believes it has no other reference to make valid than the psychological. And it fails on what? Precisely on articulating something that may well be the function of the subject, but of the subject defined quite otherwise than by anything of the order of the concrete psychological, of the subject insofar as we could, as we must, as we shall, define it properly in its reference to the signifier.

There is a subject that is not confused with the signifier as such, but that unfolds in this reference to the signifier, with traits, characters perfectly articulable and formalizable, and that must allow us to grasp, to discern as such the idiotic character—if I take the Greek reference, it is because I am far from confusing it with the use of the word ‘particular’ in the Russellian definition—the idiotic character as such of the proper name.

Let us now try to indicate in what sense I intend to make you grasp it: in this sense in which for a long time I have brought in at the level of the definition of the unconscious the function of the letter. This function of the letter, I brought it in for you in a way, first of all in some sense, poetic. The seminar on The Purloined Letter, in our very first years of elaboration, was there to indicate to you that indeed something—to be taken in the literal sense of the term letter since it was a missive—that there was something that we could consider as determining, even in the psychical structure of the subject. A fable, no doubt, but one that only rejoined the deepest truth in its structure of fiction.

When I spoke of The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious a few years later, I placed there—through metaphor and metonymy—a much more precise accent. We are now arriving, with this starting point that we have taken in the function of the unary trait, at something that will allow us to go further.

I posit that there can be no definition of the proper name except insofar as we become aware of the relation of the naming emission with something that, in its radical nature, is of the order of the letter.
You are going to tell me: here then is a very great difficulty, for there are lots of people who do not know how to read and who use proper names, and then proper names existed, with the identification they determine, before the appearance of writing.

It is under this title, under this register, Man before Writing, that a very good book appeared which gives us the latest point of what is currently known of human evolution before history. And then how shall we define ethnography, of which some have thought it plausible to put forward that it is properly speaking everything that, of the order of culture and tradition, unfolds outside any possibility of documentation by the tool of writing? Is that so true as all that?

There is a book to which I can ask all those whom this interests, and some have already anticipated my indication, to refer, it is the book by James FÉVRIER on the History of Writing. If you have the time during the holidays, I ask you to refer to it. You will see displayed there with evidence something, of which I indicate to you the general spring because it is in some way not brought out and yet is everywhere present, namely that, prehistorically speaking if I may express myself thus…
I mean to say to the full extent that the stratigraphic layers of what we find attest to a technical and material evolution of human accessories
…prehistorically, everything that we can see of what takes place in the advent of writing, and therefore in the relation of writing to language, everything takes place in the following way, whose result I here very precisely set forth, articulated before you, everything takes place in the following way:

– without any doubt we can admit that man, since he is man, has a vocal emission as speaking.

– On the other hand, there is something that is of the order of these traits, of which I told you the admiring emotion I had in finding them again marked in little rows on some antelope rib, there is in prehistoric material an infinity of manifestations, of tracings that have no other character than being, like this trait, signifiers and nothing more.

People speak of ideogram or ideographism; what is meant by that? What we always see, each time one can bring in this label of ideogram, is something that indeed presents itself as very close to an image, but that becomes an ideogram in proportion to what it loses, to what it erases more and more of this character of image.
Such is the birth of cuneiform writing; it is for example an arm or an ibex’s head, insofar as from a certain moment onward this takes on an aspect, for example like this for the arm:

That is to say that nothing of the origin is any longer recognizable. That transitions exist there has no other weight than to strengthen us in our position, namely that what is created is, at whatever level we see writing emerge: a baggage, a battery of something that one has no right to call abstract, in the sense in which we use it nowadays when we speak of abstract painting, for they are indeed traits that come out of something that in its essence is figurative, and that is why one believes it is an ideogram, but it is an erased figurative, let us push the word that here necessarily comes to mind: repressed, even rejected. What remains is something of the order of this unary trait insofar as it functions as distinctive, that it can on occasion play the role of a mark.

You are not unaware—or you are unaware, no matter!—that at Mas d’Azil, another site excavated by PIETTE of whom I was speaking the other day, pebbles were found, stones on which you see things for example like this:

This will be in red for example, on rather pretty pebbles, faded greenish. On another you will even see outright this:

which is all the prettier in that this sign is what is used in set theory to designate the membership of an element.

And there is another one: when you look at it from afar, it is a die, one sees five points. On the other side you see two points. When you look on the other side, it is still two points. It is not a die like ours, and if you inquire with the curator, if you have the display case opened for you, you see that on the other side of the five there is a bar, a 1. So it is not quite a die, but it has an impressive aspect at first glance, that you may have believed it is a die.

And in the end you will not be wrong, for it is clear that a collection of movable characters, to call them by their name, of this sort, is something that in any case has a signifying function. You will never know what it was used for, whether it was to cast lots, whether they were exchange objects, tesserae properly speaking, objects of recognition, or whether it served for anything you may concoct on mystical themes. That changes nothing in the fact that there you have signifiers.

That the said PIETTE dragged in the wake of that Salomon REINACH into raving a little bit about the archaic and primordial character of Western civilization because supposedly this would already have been an alphabet, that is another matter, but this is to be interpreted as symptom, but also to be criticized in its real scope. That nothing allows us of course to speak of archi-archaic writing in the sense in which this would have served—these movable characters—to make a sort of cave printing press, that is not what is at issue. What is at issue is this, insofar as such ideogram means something, to take the little cuneiform character I showed you a while ago, this:

at the level of a quite primitive stage of Akkadian writing… designates the sky, it follows that it is articulated ‘an’.
The subject who looks at this ideogram names it ‘an’ insofar as it represents the sky. But what will result from this is that the position is reversed, that in serving, in a writing of the syllabic type, to support the syllable ‘an,’ which at that moment will no longer have any relation to the sky. All ideographic writings without exception, or so-called ideographic writings, bear the trace of the simultaneity of this use called ideographic with the use called phonetic of the same material.

But what is not articulated, what is not made evident, that before which it seems to me no one has stopped up to the present, is this: it is that everything happens as if the signifiers of writing, having first been produced as distinctive marks, and this we have historical attestations of, for someone called Sir Flinders PETRIE showed that, well before the birth of hieroglyphic characters on the potteries that remain to us from the so-called predynastic industry, we find, as marks on the potteries, approximately all the forms that were later found to be used, that is to say, after a long historical evolution, in the Greek, Etruscan, Latin, Phoenician alphabet, everything that interests us in the highest degree as characteristics of writing.

You see where I want to come to. Although in the final term what the Phoenicians first, then the Greeks, did admirably, namely that something which permits a notation as strict as possible of the functions of the phoneme with the help of writing, it is in an altogether contrary perspective that we must see what is at issue—writing as material, as baggage, was waiting there…
following a certain process to which I shall return, that of the formation, let us say, of the mark that today embodies this signifier of which I speak to you
…writing was waiting to be phoneticized, and it is insofar as it is vocalized, phoneticized like other objects, that it learns—writing—if I may say so, to function as writing.

If you read this work on the history of writing, you will find at every moment confirmation of what I am giving you here as a schema. For every time there is a progress of writing, it is insofar as a population has attempted to symbolize its own language, its own phonetic articulation, with the help of a writing material borrowed from another population, and which was only in appearance well adapted to another language, for it was no better adapted…
it is never well adapted of course, for what relation is there between writing and that modulated and complex thing that a spoken articulation is?
…but which was adapted by the very fact of the interaction that there is between a certain material and the use one gives it in another form of language, of phonetics, of syntax, anything you like, that is to say that it was the instrument in appearance the least appropriate at the outset for what one had to do with it.

Thus passes the transmission of what is first forged by the Sumerians, that is to say before it arrives at the point where we are here, and when it is taken up by the Akkadians, all the difficulties come from the fact that this material fits very badly with the phonematism into which it has to enter, but on the other hand once it enters into it, it influences it according to all appearances, and I shall have to return to this.

In other words, what the advent of writing represents is this: that something that is already writing—if we consider that the characteristic is the isolation of the signifying trait—being named, comes to be able to serve, to support that famous ‘sound’ on which Mr. GARDINER places all the accent concerning proper names.

What results from this?

What results from this is that we must find, if my hypothesis is correct, something that signs its validity.

There is more than one; once one has thought of it they swarm, but the most accessible, the most apparent, is the one that I am going to give you at once, namely that one of the characteristics of the proper name—I shall of course have to return to this and in a thousand forms, you will see a thousand demonstrations of it—is that the characteristic of the proper name is always more or less linked to this trait of its linkage, not to the sound, but to writing.

And one of the proofs, the one that today I want to place in the foreground, forward, is this: it is that when we have undeciphered scripts, because we do not know the language they embody, we are quite embarrassed, for we must wait until we have a bilingual inscription, and that still does not go very far if we know nothing at all about the nature of its language, that is to say about its phonetic system.

What do we wait for, when we are cryptographers and linguists? It is to discern in this undeciphered text something that might well be a proper name, because there is this dimension at which one is astonished that Mr. GARDINER does not have recourse, he who still has as standard-bearer the inaugural leader of his science: CHAMPOLLION, and that he does not remember that it was concerning CLEOPATRA and PTOLEMY that the whole deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyph began, because in all languages CLEOPATRA is CLEOPATRA, PTOLEMY is PTOLEMY.

What distinguishes a proper name, despite small appearances of adaptation [amodiations: local modifications/adjustments]—one calls Köln, Cologne—is that from one language to another it is preserved in its structure. Its sound structure no doubt, but this sound structure is distinguished by the fact that precisely that one, among all the others, we had to respect, and this by reason of the affinity, precisely of the proper name to the mark, to the direct affixing of the signifier to a certain object.

And here we are in appearance falling back again, in the most brutal way, onto the word for particular.
Does that mean that for all that I here give Mr. Bertrand RUSSELL reason? You know it: certainly not!
For in the interval lies the whole question precisely of the birth of the signifier from that of which it is the sign.

What does that mean?

It is here that there is inserted as such a function that is that of the subject, not of the subject in the psychological sense, but of the subject in the structural sense.

How can we, under what algorithms can we—since it is a matter of formalization—place this subject?

Is it in the order of the signifier that we have a means of representing what concerns the genesis, the birth, the emergence of the signifier itself?

It is toward this that my discourse is directed and that I shall take up again next year.