🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I experience a certain difficulty in taking up again with you what I am pursuing, these subtle, light traces, from the fact that last night I had to say things more emphatically. What matters for what concerns us, for the continuation of our seminar, is that what I said last night obviously concerns the function of the object, little (a), in the identification of the subject, that is to say something that is not immediately within our reach, that is not going to be resolved right away, on which last night I gave, if I may say so, an anticipatory indication by making use of the theme of the three caskets.

This sheds a great deal of light, this theme of the three caskets, on my teaching, because if you open what is bizarrely called the Essays on Applied Psychoanalysis, and if you read the article on the three caskets, you realize that you remain a little unsatisfied; in the end you do not quite know where he is driving at, our father FREUD.

I believe that with what I told you last night, which identifies the three caskets with demand, a theme with which I think you have long been familiar, which says that in each of the three caskets – without that there would be no riddle, there would be no problem – there is the (a), the object which is, insofar as it interests us, us analysts, but not at all necessarily the object that corresponds to the demand. Not at all necessarily the opposite either, because without that there would be no difficulty.

This object is the object of desire. And desire, where is it? It is outside, and where it really is, the decisive point: it is you the analyst, insofar as your desire must not be mistaken about the object of the subject’s desire.
If things were not like that, there would be no merit in being an analyst.

There is one thing, which I also tell you in passing, which is that I nevertheless put the emphasis, before an audience supposed not to know, on something in which I perhaps have not here put enough of my heavy, clumsy boots, namely that the system of the unconscious, the Ψ system, is a partial system.

Once again I repudiated – with obviously more energy than grounds, given that I had to go fast – the reference to totality, which does not exclude speaking of the partial. I insisted, in this system, on its extra-flat character, on its surface character on which FREUD insists with all his might all the time. One can only be astonished that this generated the metaphor of ‘depth psychology’. It was entirely by chance that, just now before coming, I came across again a note I had taken from The Ego and the Id:

‘The ego is first and foremost a bodily entity, not only an entity entirely on the surface, but an entity corresponding to the projection of a surface’.

It is next to nothing! When one reads FREUD, one always reads him in a certain way that I shall call the deaf way.

Let us now take up again our pilgrim’s staff, let us take up again where we are, where I left you last time.
Namely on the idea that negation, if it is indeed somewhere at the heart of our problem, which is that of the subject, is not already straightaway – merely by taking it in its phenomenology – the easiest thing to handle.
It is in many places, and then it happens all the time that it slips through our fingers. You saw an example of this last time: for an instant – concerning the non nullus non mendax – you saw me put in that ‘non’, remove it, and put it back. One sees this every day.

I was told in the interval that in the speeches of the one whom someone, in a note – my poor dear friend MERLEAU-PONTY – called ‘the great man who governs us’, in a speech that the said ‘great man’ delivered, one hears: ‘One cannot not believe that things will go smoothly’. On that: exegesis… What does he mean? What is interesting is not so much what he means, it is that: manifestly we understand very well, precisely what he means, and that if we analyze it logically we see that he says the opposite. It is a very pretty formula into which one constantly slips in order to say to someone: ‘you are not without being unaware…’.

It is not you who are wrong; it is the relation of the subject to the signifier that from time to time emerges. These are not simply minor paradoxes, slips that I pin in passing: we shall encounter them again, these formulas, at the proper turn, and I think I shall give you the key to why ‘you are not without being unaware…’ means what you want to say.
So that you may recognize yourselves in this, I can tell you that it is indeed by probing it that we shall find the proper weight, the proper inclination of this balance on which I place before you the neurotic’s relation to the phallic object when I tell you:

‘to catch that relation, one must say: he is not without having it’.

That obviously does not mean that he has it. If he had it, there would be no question.

To get there, let us start again from a brief reminder of the phenomenology of our neurotic concerning the point at which we are, his relation to the signifier. For some time now, I have begun to let you grasp what there is of writing in the matter of the signifier, of original writing.

It must nevertheless have occurred to you that this is essentially what the obsessive deals with all the time:
ungeschehenmachen, making it be non-happened. What does that mean? What does that concern? Manifestly, it can be seen in his behavior, what he wants to extinguish is what the annalist writes all along his history, the annalist with two ‘n’s that he has within him: it is the annals of the affair that he would very much like to erase, scrape off, extinguish.

By what channel does Lady MACBETH’s speech reach us when she says that all the water of the sea would not erase that little stain, if not through some echo that guides us to the heart of our subject? Only here it is, in erasing the signifier – as is clear that this is what is at stake, in his way of doing, in his way of erasing, in his way of scraping what is inscribed – what is much less clear for us, because we know a little bit more than others, is what he wants to obtain thereby.

This is why it is instructive to continue on this road on which we are, on which I am leading you, as regards how a signifier as such comes about. If it has such a relation to the foundation of the subject, if there is no other thinkable subject than that something natural X insofar as it is marked by the signifier, there must nevertheless be a spring to this.

We are not going to content ourselves with this sort of blindfolded truth. The subject, it is quite clear that we must find it at the origin of the signifier itself. ‘To pull a rabbit out of a hat’…
that is how I began sowing scandal in my properly analytic remarks.
The poor dear deceased man, quite touching in his fragility, was literally exasperated
by this reminder that I made with great insistence, because at that moment these were useful formulas
…that to make a rabbit come out of a hat, one had to have put it there beforehand.

It must be the same concerning the signifier, and this is what justifies this definition of the signifier that I give you, this distinction from the sign, namely that:
– if the sign represents something for someone,
– the signifier is articulated otherwise: it represents the subject for another signifier.

You will see this confirmed enough at every step for you not to let go of the solid handrail.
And if it thus represents the subject, how is that?

Let us return to our starting point, to our sign, to the elective point where we can seize it as representing something for someone: in the trace. Let us start again from the trace, to follow our little affair by the trace.
A step, a trace, FRIDAY’s step on ROBINSON’s island, emotion, the heart pounding before this trace.
All this teaches us nothing, even if from that pounding heart there results a whole trampling around the trace.
That can happen at any crossing of animal tracks.

But if, arriving, I find the trace of this: that an effort has been made to erase the trace, or if I no longer find any trace of this effort, if I have come back because I know – I am no prouder for that – that I left the trace, that I find that – without any correlate allowing this erasure to be tied to a general erasure of the features of the configuration – the trace as such has indeed been erased, there I am sure that I am dealing with a real subject. Observe that, in this disappearance of the trace, what the subject seeks to make disappear is his passage as subject himself.
The disappearance is doubled by the aimed-at disappearance, which is that of the very act of making disappear.

This is not a bad trait by which we may recognize the subject’s passage when it is a matter of his relation to the signifier, insofar as you already know that everything I teach you about the structure of the subject, as we try to articulate it from this relation to the signifier, converges toward the emergence of these moments of fading properly linked to this eclipsing beat of what appears only in order to disappear, and reappears in order to disappear again, which is the mark of the subject as such.

That being said, if around the erased trace the subject encircles the place with a ring – something that from then on concerns him, the marker of the place where he found the trace – well then, there you have the birth of the signifier. This implies – this whole process involving the return of the last moment upon the first – that there can be no articulation of a signifier without these three moments. Once the signifier is constituted, there are necessarily two others before it:

– One signifier is a mark, a trace, a writing, but one cannot read it alone.
– Two signifiers is a muddle, a non sequitur.
– Three signifiers is the return of what is at issue, that is to say of the first.

It is when ‘the step’, marked in the trace, is transformed – in the vocalization of the one who reads it – into ‘pas’, that this ‘pas’

• on condition that one forget that it means ‘the step’ – can first serve, in what is called the phoneticism of writing, to represent ‘pas’ [not], and at the same stroke to transform ‘the trace of a step’ eventually into the ‘absence of trace’ [pas de trace].

I think that in passing you hear the same ambiguity that I made use of when I spoke to you, concerning wit, of ‘pas de sens’ [no meaning / step of meaning], playing on the ambiguity of the word ‘sens’ [meaning / direction], with that leap, that crossing that takes us where laughter is born when we do not know why a word makes us laugh, this subtle transformation, this rejected stone which, by being taken up again, becomes the cornerstone…
and I would gladly make the pun with the ‘π.r’ of the formula of the circle, because indeed
it is in it, I announced it to you the other day when introducing √-1, that we shall see measured,
if I may say so, the vector angle of the subject in relation to the thread of the signifying chain
…that is where we are suspended, and that is where we must get a little used to moving:
on a substitution through which what has a meaning is transformed into equivocation and finds its meaning again.

This ceaselessly turning articulation of the play of language, it is in its syncopations themselves that we have to locate, in its various functions, the subject. Illustrations are never bad for adopting a mind’s eye
in which the imaginary plays a large role. That is why – even if it is a detour – I do not find it bad to sketch for you, quickly, a little remark, simply because I find it at this level in my notes.
I have spoken to you more than once, concerning the signifier, of the Chinese character, and I care very much to disenchant for you the idea that its origin is an imitative figure. There is an example of it, which I took only because it served me best: I took the first of those articulated in these examples, these archaic forms, in KARLGREN’s work
called Grammata Serica, which means exactly: Chinese signifiers.

The first one he uses in its modern form is this one, it is the character ‘kě’: 可
which means can [capacity, to permit] in the Shuowén 说文, which is a scholar’s work, at once precious
for us because of its relatively ancient character, but which is already very learned, that is to say woven with interpretations,
which we may have to take up again. It seems that it is not without reason that we may trust the root given for it by the commentator, and which is very pretty. Namely that it is a schematization of the impact of the column of air as it comes to push, in the guttural stop, against the obstacle opposed to it by the back of
the tongue against the palate. This is all the more attractive because, if you open a phonetics work,
you will find an image that is approximately that one:
丁
to translate for you the functioning of the stop. And admit that it is not bad that it should be this:
可
which is chosen to figure the word ‘can’, possibility, the axial function introduced into the world by the advent of the subject
in the very middle of the real. The ambiguity is total, for a very great number of words are articulated kě in Chinese, in which this:
丁
will serve us as phonetic. With this exception:
口
[kou], which completes them, as making the subject present to the signifying framework, and which – without ambiguity and in all the characters –
is the representation of the mouth. Put this sign above it:
大
it is the sign dà which means big. It manifestly has some relation to the little human form generally lacking arms:
人
Here, since it is a big one that is at issue, it has arms. This:
可
has nothing to do with what happens when you have added this sign to the preceding signifier:
大
From now on this is read ‘Jī’:
奇

But this preserves the trace of an ancient pronunciation of which we have attestations thanks to the use of this term in rhyme
in ancient poems, namely those of the 詩經 Shìjīng, which is one of the most fabulous examples
of literary misadventures, since it had the fate of becoming the support of all sorts of moralizing lucubrations, of being the basis
of a whole very convoluted teaching of the mandarins on the duties of sovereigns, of the people, and of the tutti quanti, whereas it is manifestly a matter of love songs of peasant origin.

A little practice of Chinese literature – I am not trying to make you believe that I have a great deal of it, I do not take myself
for WIEGER who, when he alludes to his experience of China – this is a paragraph that you can find
in books, within everyone’s reach, by Father WIEGER. Be that as it may, others besides him have illuminated this path,
namely Marcel GRANET, whose beautiful books on Dances and Legends
and on Ancient Festivals of China you would after all lose nothing by opening.

With a little effort you will be able to become familiar with this truly fabulous dimension, which appears from what one can do with something resting on the most elementary forms of signifying articulation. By good fortune, in this language the words are monosyllabic. They are superb, invariable, cubic, you cannot be mistaken about them. They identify with the signifier, it is the case to say so. You have groups of four verses, each composed of four syllables. The situation is simple.

If you see them, and think that from that one can make everything come out, even a metaphysical doctrine that has no relation with
the original signification, this will begin, for those who are not there yet, to open your minds. Yet that is how, for centuries, moral and political teaching was made on refrains that in sum meant ‘I would very much like to fuck with you’. I am not exaggerating at all, go and see. This means ‘jī’:

奇
which is commented on as: ‘great power, enormous’. That has of course absolutely no relation with this conjunction
[i.e. the conjunction of 可 and 大]. Jī does not mean great power much more than this little word for which in French there is not really something that satisfies us: I am forced to translate it by the ‘odd’ [impair], in the sense that the word ‘impair’ can take: of slippage, of fault, of crack, of something that does not work, that limps, in English so nicely illustrated by the word ‘odd’. And as I was telling you earlier, that is what launched me onto the Shìjīng 詩經.
Because of the Shìjīng, we know that it was very close to ‘kě’:
可
at least in this, that there was a guttural in the ancient language which gives the other implantation of the use of this signifier:
奇
to designate the phoneme ‘qí’. If you add this in front of it,
木
which is a determinative, that of the tree, and which designates everything that is wooden, you will have, once things are at that point, a sign that designates the chair:
椅

This is said ‘yǐ’, and so on. It continues like that, there is no reason for it to stop. If you put here, in place of the sign of the tree, the sign of the horse [mà]
马
that means to mount astride.
骑
This little detour – I consider it – has its usefulness, in order to show you that the relation of the letter to language is not
something to be considered along an evolutionary line.

One does not start from a thick, sensible origin, in order to draw from it an abstract form. There is nothing that resembles anything that could be conceived as parallel to the so-called process of the concept, even merely of generalization.
One has a series of alternations where the signifier comes back to beat the water, if I may say so, of the flow with the paddles of its mill,
its wheel each time bringing something back up that trickles, only to fall again, become enriched, become complicated,
without our ever being able at any moment to seize what predominates, the concrete starting point or equivocation.

This is what is going to lead us to the point where today the step I have to make you take: a large part of the illusions that bring us to a standstill, of the imaginary adhesions – and it matters little that everyone remains more or less stuck there like flies, but not analysts – are very precisely linked to what I shall call ‘the illusions of formal logic’.
Formal logic is a very useful science, as I tried last time to point out to you the idea of it, provided that you realize that it perverts you in this: that since it is ‘formal’ logic, it ought to forbid you
at every instant from giving it the slightest meaning.

That is of course what, with time, people have come to. But the very serious ones, the good fellows, the honest men of symbolic logic as known for some fifty years, it gives them, I assure you, a hell of a hard time, because it is not easy to construct a logic as it must be – if it truly answers to its title of ‘formal logic’ – by relying strictly only on the signifier, by forbidding oneself any relation, and therefore any intuitive support from what may rise up from the signified in the case where we make mistakes.

In general that is how one gets one’s bearings: I reason badly, because in that case any old thing would result:
my grandmother upside down. What can that matter to us? It is not generally with that that we are guided, because we are very intuitive. If one does formal logic, one can only be so.

Now, what is amusing is that the foundational book of symbolic logic, Bertrand RUSSELL and WHITEHEAD’s Principia Mathematica, arrives at something that comes very close to being the goal, the sanction of a symbolic logic worthy of the name: to encompass all the needs of mathematical creation. But the authors themselves stop just short of it, considering as a contradiction liable to call all mathematical logic into question this so-called ‘paradox’ of Bertrand Russell. It is a matter of something whose bias strikes at the value of the so-called theory of sets.

In what way a set differs from a class definition is left in a relative ambiguity, since what I am going to tell you – and which is what is most generally accepted by any mathematician – namely that what distinguishes a set from this form of the definition of what is called a class, is nothing other than that the set will be defined by formulas called axioms, which will be set down on the blackboard in symbols reduced to letters to which a few additional signifiers indicating relations are adjoined. There is absolutely no other specification of this so-called symbolic logic in relation to traditional logic, except this reduction to letters. I guarantee it to you; you may believe me on this without my having to go further into examples.

What then is the virtue – necessarily, which is indeed somewhere – such that it is by reason of this sole difference that there could be developed a heap of consequences, whose impact, I assure you, on the development of something called mathematics is not slight, in relation to the apparatus available for centuries, and for which the compliment paid to it – that it did not budge between ARISTOTLE and KANT – is turned back?

It is indeed – if all the same things set themselves to galloping as they did, for Principia Mathematica makes two very very large volumes, and they have only a very slight interest, but anyway if the compliment is turned back – it is indeed that the apparatus beforehand, for some reason, found itself singularly stagnant. So from there, how do the authors come to be astonished by what is called ‘Russell’s paradox’?

RUSSELL’s paradox is this: one speaks of ‘The set of all sets that do not contain themselves’. I must shed a little light on this story, which may at first glance seem rather dry to you. I indicate it to you right away: if I interest you in it – at least I hope so – it is with this aim that there is the closest relation – and not merely homonymic, precisely because it is a matter of signifier and consequently a matter of ‘not containing [French comprendre also means to understand]’ – with the position of the analytic subject, insofar as he too, in another sense of the word ‘comprendre’ [to understand / to contain] – and if I tell you ‘not to understand’, it is so that you may be able to understand in every way that he too ‘does not understand [contain] himself’. Passing through this is not useless, you are going to see it, for on this road we are going to be able to criticize the function of our object.

But let us stop for a moment on these sets that do not contain themselves. Obviously, in order to conceive what is at stake, one must begin – since in communication we still cannot avoid making concessions to intuitive references, because you already have intuitive references, so they must be jostled in order to put in others.

Since you have the idea that there is ‘a class’, and that there is ‘a mammal class’, I still have to try to indicate to you that one must refer to something else. When one enters the category of sets, one must refer to bibliographical classification dear to some, a classification made up of decimals or otherwise, but when one has something written, it has to be placed somewhere, one has to know how to retrieve it automatically.

So let us take ‘a set that contains itself’. Let us take, for example, the study of the humanities in a bibliographical classification. It is clear that one will have to place inside it the works of humanists on the humanities. The set of the study of the humanities must contain all works concerning the study of the humanities as such.

But let us now consider ‘the sets that do not contain themselves’; that is no less conceivable, it is even the most ordinary case. And since we are set theorists, and there is already a class of ‘the set of sets that contain themselves’, there is really no objection to our making the opposite class – I use ‘class’ here because that is indeed where the ambiguity will reside – the class ‘of sets that do not contain themselves’: ‘the set of all sets that do not contain themselves’.

And this is where logicians begin to rack their brains, namely that they say to themselves: this ‘set of all sets that do not contain themselves’: does it contain itself, or does it not contain itself? In one case as in the other it will fall into contradiction:
– because if, as appearances suggest, it contains itself, here we are in contradiction with the starting point that told us it was a matter of sets that do not contain themselves.
– On the other hand, if it does not contain itself, how can one except it precisely from what this definition gives us, namely that it does not contain itself?

This may seem rather ‘babyish’ to you, but the fact that it strikes them to the point of stopping them, the logicians…
who are not exactly people of a sort to stop at a vain difficulty, and if they feel in it something they can call a contradiction calling their whole edifice into question
…it is indeed because there is something that must be resolved and that concerns – if you are willing to listen to me – nothing other than this, namely the only thing the logicians in question have not exactly seen, namely that the letter they use is something that has powers in itself, a spring to which they do not seem quite accustomed.

For – if we illustrate this in application of what we have said, that it is nothing other than the systematic use of a letter – reducing, reserving to the letter its signifying function in order to make the whole logical edifice rest on it, and on it alone, we arrive at something very simple, namely that it is quite simply equivalent to what happens when we charge the letter (a), for example – if we begin speculating on the alphabet – with representing as letter (a) all the other letters of the alphabet.

One of two things:
either we enumerate the other letters of the alphabet from b to z, in which case the letter (a) will represent them unambiguously without thereby containing itself, but it is clear on the other hand that, representing these letters of the alphabet qua letter, it comes quite naturally, I will not even say to enrich, but to complete, in the place from which we drew it, excluded it, the series of letters, and simply in this that, if we start from the fact that a – that is our starting point concerning identification – fundamentally is not a, there is no difficulty here: the letter a, inside the parenthesis where are arranged all the letters that it comes symbolically to subsume, is not the same a
and is at the same time the same.

There is no sort of difficulty there. There should be all the less, since those who see one there are precisely those who invented the notion of ‘set’ in order to face the deficiencies of the notion of ‘class’, and consequently suspecting that there must be something else in the function of the set than in the function of the class. But this interests us, for what does that mean? As I indicated to you last night, the metonymic object of desire, that which, in all objects, represents that elective little (a) where the subject loses himself, when this object comes to light, metaphorical, when we come to substitute it for the subject, which in demand has come to syncopate itself, to vanish – no trace: S–
we reveal it, the signifier of this subject, we give it its name: the good object, the mother’s breast, the mamma.

Here is the metaphor in which, let us say, all the articulated identifications of the subject’s demand are caught.
His demand is oral; it is the mother’s breast that takes them into its parenthesis. It is the a that gives their value
to all these units that are going to add themselves in the signifying chain: a(1+1+1…).

The question we have to pose is to establish the difference there is between this use we make of the mamma,
and the function it takes in the definition, for example, of the class ‘mammals’. The mammal is recognized
by this, that it has mammas.

It is, between us, rather strange that we are so poorly informed about what one actually does with them in each species. The ethology of mammals is still terribly lagging since on this subject we are – as for formal logic – about no further than the level of ARISTOTLE – excellent work: the History of Animals!

But for us, is that what the signifier ‘mamma’ means to tell us, insofar as it is the object around which we substantivize the subject in a certain type of relation called ‘pregenital’?

It is quite clear that we make a completely different use of it, much closer to the manipulation of the letter ‘E’
in our paradox of sets, and to show it to you, I am going to make you see this: a(1+1+1…), is it the case that,
among these ‘1’s of demand whose concrete signifiance we have revealed, there is or is there not the breast itself?

In other words, when we speak of oral fixation, the latent breast, the actual one – the one after which your subject goes
‘ah! ah! ah!’ – is it mammary? It is quite obvious that it is not, because your oral types who adore breasts,
they adore breasts because those breasts are a phallus. And it is even for that reason – because it is possible for the breast also to be phallus – that Melanie KLEIN makes it appear right away as quickly as the breast, from the outset, by telling us that after all it is a little breast more convenient, more portable, nicer.

You can clearly see that positing these structural distinctions can lead us somewhere, insofar as the repressed breast reemerges, comes back out in the symptom, or even simply in a move that we have not otherwise qualified:
the function on the perverse scale – to produce – of that something else which is the evocation of the phallus-object.
The thing is inscribed thus:

What is the (a)? Let us put in its place the little ping-pong ball, that is to say nothing, anything, any support of the subject’s alternation game in the fort-da. There you see that it is strictly a matter of nothing other than the passage of the phallus from a+ to a– and that thereby we are in the relation of identification, since we know that in what the subject assimilates, it is himself in his frustration, we know that the relation of S to this 1/a – him ‘1’, insofar as assuming the signification of the Other as such – has the closest relation with the realization of the alternation (a).(–a)}, this product
of a by –a which formally makes a –a2.

We shall tighten [grasp more closely] why a negation is irreducible. When there is affirmation and negation: the affirmation of negation makes
a negation, the negation of affirmation too. We see there emerging in this very formula of –a2, we find again
the necessity of bringing into play, at the root of this product, √–1.

What is at stake is not simply the presence, nor the absence of the little (a), but the conjunction of the two,
the cut. It is the disjunction of a and of –a that is at stake, and it is there that the subject comes to lodge himself as such,
that identification has to be made with that something which is the object of desire.

That is why the point where – you will see – I have brought you today is an articulation that will serve you
in what follows.