THE BODY IN THE TEACHING OF

Colette Soler

Translated by Lindsay Watson

It has been known right from the start that the unconscious is not without having some bearing on the body. What I mean is, it has been known since the beginning of Freud’s work. It has been known since the first deciphering of hysterical symptoms. It has been known as well through the Freudian discovery of the generally traumatic nature of sexuality. And thus with the discovery of what has to be called a shortcoming in the sexual instinct in man, I mean the genus, in those whom Lacan calls parlêtres, speaking beings; a shortcoming in the sexual instinct which is supplemented by the Oedipus in the Freudian doctrine. It has been known also, this bearing of the unconscious on the body, since the discovery of what Freud termed “beyond the pleasure principle”, that is to say, that something which presents itself from time to time as an injurious . So, right away, it was known that the unconscious was not without a relation to the body.

But it has to be said that has not brought much in the way of knowledge about the biological body. Lacan observed this. There is a whole paragraph in his text devoted to feminine sexuality to say that psychoanalysis does not, strictly speaking, facilitate any access to “new acquisitions in physiology, the facts about chromosomal sex ... and its genetic correlatives, its distinction from hormonal sex, their quota in anatomical determination.”1

It also has to be said that psychoanalysis did not reply to Tiresias’ question. Furthermore, as Lacan observed on one occasion, it has not even been able to enrich eroticism with one single new perversion. Well, obviously, between these two statements: the bearing of the unconscious on the body, and the little that psychoanalysis has brought to that which we imagine to be most bodily about the body, that is to say, its biological functioning, one might well ask, what does psychoanalysis do with the body? It has become a very fashionable question, though it is not really psychoanalysis that has made it so. It has become fashionable through the proliferation of what are known as physical therapies [body techniques]. We could draw up a list of them. It is quite clear that I probably only know of a quarter of these kind of therapies. In any case, think of yoga, of all the various forms of gymnastics, of the primal scream, and all the others; the techniques are multiplying. Well, I will open my report with an affirmation which, I hope, will become somewhat clearer throughout the paper. I will state first of all that I think it can be easily demonstrated that all physical therapies are techniques of the signifier. And, more precisely, that those which are labelled “physical therapies” are therapies of the master signifier. These are techniques whose total essence, I would say, is to make you get in step. That is an image, of course. On the whole, the aim is to make the body fit into an order. Perhaps it could be said that psychoanalysis is in a certain sense a physical therapy; you will see what I mean by this. It’s an affirmation that needs to be justified. Psychoanalysis is a physical therapy. And in every case, it is not one that makes you get in step. I’ve started by throwing that at you. Now I’ll try to comment on it.

1 J. Lacan, Écrits, p. 726. Let me put forward a first proposition: that the body is a reality. If, when you hear this proposition, you think that it means that the body is tangible, that it is more tangible than the evanescence of the word which runs around without catching on to anything, I will tell you right away that it doesn’t mean that. To say that the body is a reality, means that the body is not primary. It means that one is not born with a body. In other words, I am saying that it is some reality, but in the sense that reality, since Freud, has a subordinate status: it is something which is constructed, which is secondary.

In any case, it means that since I am proposing to talk to you about the body in the teaching of Lacan, we will certainly find that there is a great split on the matter in psychoanalysis. There is a major split between the orientation of Lacan’s teaching, and that of the dominant current in the IPA, which is . It has to be said that we never consider that the body is the nervous system. Of course, there is a nervous system. Who could argue with that? The nervous system is even put to use. But that is not how the body, as we approach it, is defined.

The fundamental postulate of Ego Psychology, and I am remarking on it solely to show the great divide, the great axis that crosses psychoanalysis, is that there are two innate characteristics on the side of the body. On the one hand, what they call the apparatuses, which one could call the apparatuses of reality, one of which, for example, is intelligence. They have read Freud’s system perception-, saying to themselves that he was thereby defining something that came from the body, and which would be a sort of inborn instrument, even though it might be capable of learning, but inborn nonetheless, an instrument for apprehending reality, the Innenwelt. So, on the one hand, the idea that the apparatuses of the real are innate and on the other, the idea that, fundamentally, the developmental stages of the body have to do with the body, and with nothing else. Well, leaving aside Hartmann, Lowenstein, or even Kris, let us take an author who comes from this current, such as Margaret Mahler, whom I will refer to again later. Margaret Mahler tells it to you absolutely black on white: there are two innate characteristics which come from the body, and which no-one can influence. In order to help understand them, it is not psychoanalysis that is called upon, but Piaget.

What is more, there is a third register which, itself, would depend on psychoanalysis, and which is that of the object relation. Indeed, to deal with things in that way, I would say, is to take the body out of the game, to a large extent. I will leave this orientation aside.

Instead, I will come back to this: that reality is not a primary given, it is already, I will use this term, a superstructure; that is to say that the relations which define the signifying structure are already inscribed in it, inhabit it, as Lacan says. That means that there is a beyond of reality. This theme of a beyond, as you know, is the title of an article by Lacan called “Beyond the reality principle”.2 He did not take it very far. He said so himself when he presented that selection of his writings. But he took up the theme much later in an article in 1, which is called, “La psychanalyse dans ses rapports à la réalité” [Psychoanalysis and its relations to reality], at the French Institute in Milan.3 In this article, he takes up the expression of “beyond the reality principle” to say that what is beyond the reality principle is science. Science,

2 J. Lacan, “Au-delà du principe de la réalité”, Écrits, French edition, pp. 73-92. 3 18.12.1968, pp. 51-59. as such, aims at the real. Thus, since I have introduced the term “reality”, I now introduce that which is its counterweight, if I can put it that way, in Lacan, which is that of the “real”. He defines it, as you know, on the basis of the impossible; that is to say, on the basis of a signifying impasse, more precisely, an impasse of formalisation.

The question for us now is to know if, beyond the body, taken from the start as something of reality, psychoanalysis gives access to something of the body that would be real. That is the question I would like to ask. As I said just now, one is not born with a body. In other words, the body is not primary. The living being is not the body. Lacan himself went into that in some depth. There is a distinction to be made between the organism, the living being, on the one hand, and that which, on the other hand, is called the body.

That is a constant in Lacan’s teaching. Obviously, you know that when you read an author like Lacan, whose teaching spanned 25 years, - a teaching which is always shifting, you can point up either those elements that are constant, or, on the contrary, those which evolved, which changed, or both at once. Here, I am pointing up a constant.

The idea that the living being is not sufficient to make a body, that is a constant, although there are some differences in relation to this constant. In a first phase, as Michael Elias reminded us at the opening [of this conference], it was via the image that Lacan approached the problem of the body. That period of his teaching is what Lacan refers to as “my antecedents”: that is to say, he considers that, properly speaking, it preceded his teaching. Indeed, during this period which preceded the Rome Discourse,4 he considers that in order to make a body you need a living organism plus an image. In other words, it was to the unity of that image that he attributed the feeling of the unity of the body - because that is the phenomenon, such a feeling of the unity of the body. At that time, he considered that that unity came from a visual gestalt. It came from the apprehension by the subject of the unity of his form in the mirror. In other words, at that time he opposed the unity and the uniqueness of the image to what there would be of the organism if it was left to itself, which at that time he characterised by its prematuration. He evoked there the state of malaise, the state of dehiscence of the organism, insofar as it is not co-ordinated with this image which allows it to take itself as a whole, delivers it from its fragmentation, which is primary in relation to the image.

We find, then, the opposition of an organism discordant in itself, non-unified, fragmented, with a body which is the organism unified by the image. It has to be said, indeed, that Lacan did not just leave it there, because, from the moment when he wrote “Function and field of speech and language”, he introduced a great principle of deciphering which unifies the work of Freud, which consisted in recognising in the work of the formations of the unconscious, the work of signifying mechanisms. It has to be said, too, that from that moment on, he made a U-tum in his description, and considered that it was the signifier that introduced discourse into the organism. The common point between the two periods is that, in any case, there is a discord. There is a discordance. And in the second period Lacan came, on the contrary, to think that the organism, let us say the animal organism, of itself has at its command a unity. It

4 J. Lacan, “Function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis”, Report to the Rome Congress... 1953, Écrits, English edition, pp. 30-113. is a cohesion. And it loses this cohesion because of the signifier. If you take the seminar Encore (you know how late it appeared in the teaching of Lacan), you will find the following: Speaking of the body he says: “the important thing is that it all sticks together sufficiently for the body to subsist, unless there is an accident as one might say, whether external or internal. Which means that the body is taken to be what it presents itself as being: a closed body.”5

And certainly, it is important to recognise that there is a cohesion of the organism. However, the point is that this cohesion does not suffice to give a body. In order for the organic individuality to become a body, Lacan says that it is necessary for the signifier to introduce the One. And he gives as proof his reference to the polyp. It’s such a little thing, he says, this living individual which is the basis of the living being, that zoology, when it looks for the individual at the level of the polyp, can no longer find individualisation. Put another way, there is a split at the level of the organism itself, between the living being and the individuated organism. It has to be added moreover, that in the human species, this organic individual has to have the addition of the signifier that makes him One.

Nonetheless, we should turn our attention to observable things. Let us take the following phenomenon. Let us ask ourselves what is the body of those ill people called schizophrenics. There, however, we can grasp the splitting when, for example, a schizophrenic tells us that his head is a metre above his trunk. I am giving an example that I heard. One could take a hundred others. This schizophrenic tells you that; it does not stop her organism retaining its unity, does it? Her head is not floating around for us. So this head which is floating around one metre above her trunk, is at the level of an image. Or at the level of the signifier. The two possibilities open up. It remains undecided as to whether for her it is a sensation, which would indicate to us that it is what we call her image that is affected, or whether it is not a sensation at all, but simply words: “a floating head”, but at the level of what is said. Well, you can see clearly there, in this very simple example, the disjunction between the organism, the image of the body, and the body in so far as it is caught up in the signifier, in so far as it is, rather, spoken. Along the same lines, let me give you another, though different example. Let us speak about hysterical somatisations, taking the case of the hysteric with a paralysed arm. Her body image is not affected, but, on the contrary, it is her organism that is affected in reality. And that is precisely why physicians rack their brains about it. There is indeed a paralysis, isn’t there? It is by no means the same thing as the schizophrenic who tells you her head is floating around - a metre above her trunk. For physicians, the head is right there, in its place. Whereas for the hysteric who has a paralysed arm, her mirror image remains intact, but, in contrast, two things are affected: the organism, on the one hand, and on the other, the body in so far as it is spoken. Well, those were two examples to help you feel these splits that are to be found in the phenomenon.

Now, the true body, the primary body, says Lacan, is language; that is, what he calls the body of the symbolic. It is a perfectly correct usage of the word “body”. You can check it for yourselves in the dictionary. The symbolic is a body in so far as it is a system of internal relations. That is why psychoanalysis is not an idealism. It’s because the Symbolic is in a certain way a body, having materiality, that there is – as

5 J. Lacan, Seminar XX, Encore, 1972-1973, p. 100.

Lacan points out explicitly in the Seminar on the Four Discourses,6 - what he calls the objectivity of the subject which means that, precisely, psychoanalysis retains a link with science.

This idea that language is body had already been put forward by him in the “Rome Report”. He said at that time: language is [a] body, “a subtle body, for sure, but a body nonetheless.”7 After all, it is an idea with an illustrious pedigree - there are many others, some much earlier in time - but one predecessor whom it is amusing to recall, since Lacan himself recalled it on occasion, is Stalin. At the time, Marxists were still debating where they could situate the borderline between what they termed infrastructure and superstructure, the principal term for them obviously being infrastructure. Well, Stalin took up a position, in a debate in which the question was, where could language be positioned? saying that language was not a superstructure. Curious. In any case, it is true that this is Lacan’s fundamental thesis: language is not a superstructure. Language is [a] body, and [a] body which gives body, what is more. In “Radiophonie” there is an entire page devoted to this question of the body, and the idea is very simple.8 At least, it has to be said in order for it to be found simple. The idea is that it is “the body of the symbolic”, an incorporeal body, he points out, which by embodying itself, gives you a body (“The first body makes the second by embodying itself”).9 In other words, this body which you call your own, is bestowed upon you by language. After all, this thesis of Lacan’s is only a particular case of a far more general thesis, namely that there is no fact unless it is said. A fact is something that is said. So let us say that the body is only a fact if it is said. It is a fact, that body of yours, because you say it: it is attributed to you in the singular.

But still, there are a few remarks we need to make on this point, aren’t there? Lacan said it one day: the animal does not have a body. The animal is an organism. There is a nuance here. And that which justifies us in saying “I have a body” - to take our body as an attribute instead of taking it as our very being - is, if I may put it that way, that we, as subjects, can do without it. As subjects of the signifier, we are disjunct from the body, as you can see from the fact that the subject is the one who is spoken about before he speaks. The subject, indeed, is there, in speech, before he has a body, before he is born, to put it bluntly. And he is stilI there, even when he no longer has a body, that is to say, after he is dead. So the duration of the subject, in so far as it is carried by the signifier, outlasts the duration of the body. It is because language assures us of this margin that Lacan calls this the margin beyond life, to be taken here as meaning the life of the living body. It is because language assures you of the beyond, - which is anticipation of the subject before his body is born, and which is the memory which remains when he is buried - that the body is disjunct from the subject. Of course, if we started again, we could have a lot of fun talking about ghosts, for example. We could also enjoy ourselves - though there might be far less to laugh about - talking about the immortality of the soul. Anyway, there are plenty of topics we could talk about, and which can only be thought about once we have established that the signifier carries something of being independent of the body. That much is clear.

6 J. Lacan, Séminaire XVII, L’Envers de la psychanalyse, 1969-1970. 7 J. Lacan, “Function and field of speech and language”, Écrits, p. 301, French edition. 8 J. Lacan, “Radiophonie”, Scilicet 2/3, pp. 60-62. 9 J. Lacan, “Radiophonie”, op cit, p. 613. So language attributes this body to you, and then gives it to you, by unifying it for you. The first effect of this on the body says Lacan, is to mortify it. Where the signifier is concerned, in fact, it doesn’t matter that much whether it is alive or dead. That is precisely what burial shows us. Fundamentally, burial is a way of refusing to acknowledge that the body, which is born through the signifier, if I may put it that way, becomes carrion, that the body, like all flesh, ends up disintegrating. Well, basically, the signifier, burial, which is obviously a strictly signifying practice, burial is a way of embalming the body, it is a way of ensuring its survival, having once brought it to life. The only thing is, it survives without that variable - whether it is alive or dead - being taken into account. And fundamentally, the signifier, it has to be said, is like Schreber’s God. Schreber’s God did not know the living, nor does the signifier. Lacan frequently evoked the effect of devitalisation. He evokes, as a sign of this devitalisation of the body by the signifier, the fact that, for example, the Ancients considered that the Universe of celestial spheres was an image of the body, was a sort of macro-body. Indeed, it is striking that, in order to imagine, to image the body, these Ancients went looking for it in the inanimate world. We could also evoke Descartes here, who, with his Cogito, was, if we can use such a term, the promoter of the subject. Well, Descartes, essentially, shows one thing: namely, that life is unthinkable. The element of the life of the body is unthinkable and, in thought, what can take up a position is nothing but extended substance. The opposition between thinking substance and extended substance in Descartes is, after all, a manifestation of the animation of the body escaping the signifier. It has to be said that this body, in a certain way, is already dead, like the subject, but differently. The first effect of the signifier is thus to negativise the living. The living being can only enter into the signifier at its cost, the cost of life or death.

However, moving on to another theme, it is true that the body prepares itself to receive the mark of the signifier, to be a locus of inscription, from whence it will be able to take itself into account. These bodies will be able to take themselves into account. The model for which is, in essence, the branding of sheep. The branding of sheep is the mark of belonging. If we had more time, I would have liked to go further into this question of branding, the different ways in which the mark, the marks, make their mark on the body, in order to inscribe there, always, it seems to me, a double connotation. On the one hand, of belonging, belonging to a set; and on the other hand, an erotic quality. And there is a whole range of phenomena to think about. Just think of the things Lacan evokes, such as tattoos, tattoos that both identify you and make of you an erotic object - in some societies, anyway. And take phenomena like circumcision. It has become vulgarised these days, if I can say so. But the discovery that in certain societies they still practice female circumcision, stirs up a bit of an outcry among the occidentals. It certainly should give us something to think about, this fact of inscribing a trace on the body in order to transform it into an erotic object. We could also think of scars, and what is particularly amusing, their distribution between the sexes. If you think about women’s scars, it is by choice their bellies that are affected by scarring. The caesarean is just that: a scar that can be talked about. Then there will be the blows, received by a masochist, which will leave their traces. It has to be said that men’s scars are more likely to be the scars of battle - what is left over to them of their warlike feats. In the same order of ideas, we should think about fashion, which is a mark which is obviously less inscribed in the flesh, and thus more revocable, but which nonetheless is essentially a way of giving yourself a form. And then we could talk about all the forms of gymnastics and also about cosmetic surgery – [esthetique, “aesthetic” in French], which not only gives you a new face but, as you know, if necessary, can give you new genitals, take your penis away, or graft one on if you don’t have one already. Let us say that we are in a universe where, obviously, if we wanted to amuse ourselves by exploring these phenomena of the marking of the body, we would find ourselves faced with too much to choose from. I won’t dwell on this further. I mention it only because the body which the symbolic attributes to you, is also marked by it. That is what Lacan formulates in different ways when he says, “the body makes the bed of the other.”10

That’s a nice way of putting it. And then he speaks of the body as a gaming table. He also says: the body intervenes as a third term, between knowledge - that is, unconscious knowledge - and jouissance, the jouissance of the living being. The effect of this intervention - this is what Lacan says - is fragmentation. We are used to considering fragmentation from its negative side, that is, to consider that the fragmented body is a suffering body. That is only one aspect of the matter, because fragmentation itself also means that it is language which attributes your organs to you. Put another way, it means that the body functions as a fragmented body. In “L’Etourdit”, Lacan insists on the fact that it is because the body inhabits language that it has organs.11

In the organism and in the global metabolism of an organism, language isolates organs and gives them their functions. One may sometimes even be aware of this in childhood. For example, I have a memory like this: when one is a child, and ill, and the adult asks you questions to find out, “What’s wrong with you?”, “Do you feel sick?”, “Does your liver hurt?”, “Does your stomach hurt?” How can the child from the start reply to such a question, given that the child may be able to localise a stomach on the surface, but as for the liver and the heart, what are they for a child coming into language? It is only once he has truly succeeded in framing this language and slipping into it, that he will be able to reply, “I feel sick.” [Literally, “My heart hurts.”] And it happens that for a long time he gets confused. So this fragmentation, which is taken to be a vexatious fragmentation of the image, is correlative to the functional working of the signifying body. You can see the corollary of this, precisely Freud’s thesis that Lacan denies the truth of: that is, “anatomy is destiny”. (S. Freud, “The dissolution of the Oedipus complex”). He says this, obviously, when speaking of the anatomy that differentiates the sexes: man or woman.

It is Freud’s thesis, but it is not Lacan’s. For Lacan, anatomy is not destiny. Destiny is discourse. This is so true that, in effect, Lacan’s entire re-working of the Oedipus, in particular in “L’Etourdit”, is to say that sex is not anatomical. He is saying that man or woman is an affair of the subject and it depends on the way in which each individual inscribes him/herself within the phallic function. And it has to be said that the increase, not only of those we call transsexuals but, correlatively, of surgical procedures for transsexuals, which consist of operating on them, I would say, really, makes of this Lacanian thesis, which, at the outset may seem startling, a phenomenon. The choice of one’s sex is not a function of anatomy. Obviously, that leaves open the question of what role anatomy does .

10 J. Lacan, “De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la réalité”, Scilicet 1, p. 58: “Tiers ‘au-delà’ dans ses rapports à la jouissance et au savoir, Ie corps fait Ie lit de I'autre par l'opération du signifiant.” “The third ‘beyond’ in its relations to jouissance and to knowledge, the body makes the bed of the other via the operation of the signifer.” See also: J. Lacan, “De l’Un-en-moins, Ie lit est fait l’intrusion qui avance de l’extrusion: c’est Ie signifiant même.” “Radiophonie”, Scilicet 2/3, p. 61. 11 J. Lacan, “L'Etourdit”, Scilicet 4, pp. 5-51; see particularly p. 12 and p. 30.

So this is the point we have reached for the time being: the spoken body, which the signifier attributes to you, is a devitalised body, a body which functions in the fragmentation that signifies. We have not yet got to the essential point, which I am going to pause on, and which is highly complex; I am not sure I will be able to unfold it in all its complexity. The essential point, the hub of the effect of the signifier on the body, is that the signifier - I mean the unconscious signifier - affects the body. The signifier affects the body, and more precisely, affects its jouissance. I would now like to propose to you, for a start, a few formulae which are paradoxical and which may, at the beginning, be rather difficult to understand.

First of all, affect - it is not to be taken for granted that affect can be put on the side of the body. We all live with the inverse conviction, that is to say that it is the subject who is affected. If necessary, we can say “in his/her body”, particularly if one is hysterical. One believes that one suffers from one’s body. Lacan completely displaces these formulae in the later years, especially in “On psychoanalysis and its relations to reality”, “Radiophonie”, Télévision, and L'Etourdit. So, here are the formulae. I will give them to you first and then I am going to try to explain them just a little. First of all, “The subject is happy”. That’s in Télévision.12 So there is an inversion of the conviction, “The subject does not suffer”. He is happy, whatever happens. On the other hand - is it correlative? – “(Unconscious) knowledge affects”. Now, that does not surprise us. What is surprising is that he adds, “affects the body”. Let me refer you to a useful text entitled “Ou pire”, which dates from the year when he was giving a seminar called Ou pire, in which Lacan developed, very didactically, the statement that unconscious knowledge affects, without any doubt. “But what? That is the question where people make mistakes. Not my subject, nor the soul, either... Me, I say that knowledge affects the body of the being who only makes himself a being of speech, in fragmenting his jouissance...”13 Fine! So, we need to understand what these two propositions mean. I have a couple more, one of which can be found in the Seminar Encore. Lacan says: “in order to jouir, there has to be a body.”14 But then there are two other propositions which immediately become problematic: “the body is the desert of jouissance”, and “jouissance is outside the body”.15 I am putting these formulae forward, bringing them together, because you can see that they show that after all there is some deciphering to do, if we want to find our way around a bit…

Let me read you a short passage where Lacan, basically, summarises his thesis, or as he said: “I go over it again...”. His starting point is structure, and he says that, in defining it, this structure which is thus signifying, “in defining it according to relations articulated by their order, and such that, in taking part in it, one can only do so at one’s own expense.”16 Thus the first affirmation: the living being only enters into language at his own expense. “Expense of life or of death.” That is what I attempted to comment on in terms of a mortification. “Expense of life instead of death, is secondary; expense [expenditure] of jouissance, that is what is primary. Whence the necessity of the plus-de-jouir in order for the machine to turn.”17 As to the passage in “Psychoanalysis and its relations with reality”, he defines “what it is about for everyone, where the body is concerned, that it should be precisely this desert of

12 J. Lacan, Télévision, Paris, Le Seuil, 1974, p. 40. 13 J. Lacan, “Ou pire”, Scilicet 5, p. 8. 14 J. Lacan, Encore, p. 26 [“a body is there to be enjoyed”]. 15 J. Lacan: “On psychoanalysis and its relations with reality”, Scilicet 1, p. 58. 16 J. Lacan: “Radiophonie”, Scilicet 2/3, p. 86. 17 J. Lacan: “Radiophonie”, Scilicet 2/3, p. 86. jouissance.”18 Well, how are we to understand that? What is this expenditure of jouissance, suffered by the body in virtue of the fact that we speak?

Before attempting to embark on this question, which will also make a logical break, if I may put it that way, I would like to make a few comments on this term jouissance which, clearly, is not a Freudian term. This term jouissance has to be situated in relation to the term pleasure, and in opposition to it. In any case, it is the use Lacan makes of it, which is not absolutely obvious in language, because in language, after all, it is a term that can be pulled on to the side of pleasure, and in particular, I would say, concerning what is called sexual jouissance, one can also speak of sexual pleasure. Lacan completely split the term jouissance from all its associations in the register of pleasure. Pleasure in Freud is always connoted by an agreeable sensation and in his work is correlated with the idea of a minimal level of excitation. Pleasure is the agreeable feeling of not too much excitation.

That is why Lacan commented on this, by saying that the Freudian pleasure principle consists in doing fuck all or the least possible, which for him is not really a value. On the contrary, it seems to him to be perfectly opposed to what he considers relevant to the analytic ethic. The analytic ethic is not an ethic of pleasure. This pleasure principle would mean wanting one’s good, which for the living being means wanting one’s good in the sense of well-being, as Lacan says in “Kant with Sade”, or the unbroken agreement between the creature and its life.19

Obviously, what Freud has let out of the bag is precisely the inverse of that; it is that one can be well in the midst of evil, to take up again the formula of “Kant with Sade”20 - that is, basically, that there is another satisfaction than that given by equilibrium, by homeostasis.21 The beyond of the pleasure principle, which Freud placed under this , phenomena like repetition, the repetition of trauma, masochism, the negative therapeutic reaction, that is to say, so many phenomena where it seems that one is confronted with what can only be described as a determination by the subject to suffer; constancy and determination.

This term “death drive”, which appears to be so unthinkable, and which is, indeed, a contradiction in terms, was split by Lacan into two components. On the one hand, there is the signifying component: the idea is that the signifier assures the subject of an image beyond life, thus giving a death which can be thought, can be anticipated, which means that one could indeed speak of a death drive. On the other hand, within the death drive he places jouissance, a deleterious jouissance, harmful to the ends of the homeostasis of pleasure. On that subject, there are many texts by Lacan in which he evokes, for example, what he calls “what it entails in the way of atrocious promises”. It has always made me laugh, this “what the approach of jouissance entails of atrocious promises”. It is the idea that jouissance is not desirable. Jouissance is not what desire aims at. Quite the contrary. Lacan concerned himself with situating the various barriers to jouissance. What creates barriers to jouissance, in Lacan’s teaching, is in part pleasure. Pleasure is what he calls: the incoherent binding of life, that is to say, in fact, the animal’s reaction in fleeing from pain, quite stupidly, as a barrier to jouissance, which basically would arise there where pleasure

18 J. Lacan: “De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la realité”, Scilicet 1, p. 58. 19 J. Lacan, “Kant avec Sade”, Écrits, p. 766. 20 In Sade’s own words “Quel paradis dans cet enfer” [ed.] 21 J. Lacan, “Kant avec Sade”, Écrits, p. 766. ends, and most eminently in the form of pain.

Yet this first barrier, which is a natural one, he says, fundamentally comes to be relayed for humans through a prohibition, by means of the law.22 In other words, the forbidden, which founds desire, in Lacan, is what sets up a barrier to jouissance. Ah! Obviously, that cannot be grasped unless you hold on to the vital principle that, for Lacan, desire, in essence, is to be unsatisfied, that is to say, desire has no object which responds to its aspiration. So there we have the first split: pleasure, desire and jouissance.

If we try to get a more precise idea, a more positive one, of jouissance, what do we find in Lacan’s teaching? There are, I would say, allusions, things he says in passing. There is first of all what we could call humanity’s dream regarding animal jouissance; that is to say, the jouissance the animal can be supposed to have in so far as it, the animal, is not under the disharmonious influence of the signifier, it devotes itself to securing the jouissance of its body, in the banal sense of the term. One could reflect, for example, on the elucubrations that can be constructed on the jouissance of the cat. One might say that for the dog - well, we speak of a dog’s life. There is another way one can oppose the dog to the cat. Lacan goes as far as dreaming of the lily of the fields. Does the plant have jouissance? How could one imagine the jouissance of the plant? It has to be said that Freud, too, dreamed of a jouissance that would not be encroached upon by the signifier. Just look at the passage in his text “On Narcissism, an introduction”, the short and very amusing passage where he sets up a series: the child, the cat and the woman, or rather certain types of women, not woman in general. He says that when you look at these types of beings, the child, for example, the tiny infant which has not even started to lisp, falling asleep with rosy cheeks after suckling, it is really the very image of the acme of beatitude to which man can aspire, appearing before us. It makes us dream, hearing that coming from Freud. So this little baby, or the cat in its haughty indifference, or even the woman, in the same supposed haughty indifference, are nonetheless images of beings who are supposed to repose in a closed jouissance, a jouissance to which the other, anything that constitutes the external other, does not have access. And, indeed, as Lacan says, the astonishing thing is that “one gets the idea of beatitude”.23 The strange thing is that the subject who is happy has an idea of beatitude, and believes he is separated from it. Well, that’s jouissance when you dream of it.

As far as the one which is not dreamt, however, Lacan points out a little series. He says that jouissance goes from tickling to grilling. This was at the time when there were quite a few people who were getting inflamed, in the true sense of the word. Today one could say that it goes from tickling to the suicide bomber. Jouissance, thus, is caught between on one end what Lacan would call the masochistic affectations, and at the other end: the horrors of war. It is true, too, that we are living in an epoch in which there is an extraordinary split in this respect in the world between the countries of homeostasis and those of jouissance. We find ourselves in the lands of homeostasis. These are lands in which people say it won’t last, but anyway it’s very cosy, our existence. It is so cosy that when you are involved with children and education, you have only one question in your head: these poor little things, what is going to traumatise them? And it’s so cosy that you fear that trauma

22 cf. J. Lacan, “Subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious”, Écrits, p. 821, French edition. 23 J. Lacan, Télévision, p. 40. will arise with every step they take, that it is no longer possible to bear anything; isn’t that the case? We are involved in a fantastic destabilisation in this respect, through clinging on to pleasure. And then there are countries where everything is blowing up all over the place. It is a huge split, for sure; there’s work to be done in exploring its nuances. There are certainly countries where one does not have the impression of homeostasis, that is the least that can be said; countries where it is rather a case of the unleashing of the most extreme forms of jouissance. Those were a few reflections to give a frame of reference for the way Lacan uses the term jouissance.

I would now like to try to throw some light on how we can understand this idea that the body is submitted to an expenditure of jouissance because it is caught up in the signifier. Such an expenditure that it makes of it a desert of jouissance, in so far as jouissance empties out the body of the speaking being. There are a few texts where Lacan gives us some landmarks, and particularly in the text called “Psychoanalysis and its relation to reality”, where we find the expression “desert of jouissance”.24 He introduces his reflection via a reference to an early text of Freud’s, a text from the very beginning of Freud’s teaching, his “Outline for a scientific psychology”.25 In this text, Freud affirms that what rules psychic life is the pleasure principle. But to the pleasure principle he adds something which causes pleasure to change meaning completely. What he adds to the pleasure principle is his idea of the trace, which he describes to us as traces in the psychic apparatuses. Lacan, in the traces that Freud tried to clarify, sees, fundamentally, a Freudian way of having perceived the signifying structure, the structure of the signifier. In fact, between what Freud calls the experience of satisfaction and what he calls hallucinatory satisfaction, what happens? The experience of satisfaction, clearly, is a purely mythical experience. It is precisely the idea of a primary satisfaction on a body that would not yet be marked, a body that would be the slab of virgin wax. There we really have an image of the body outside signification, a new body. Freud’s idea was that this first experience of satisfaction leaves an inscription, leaves a trace, leaves traces, and his entire work was to study this multiplicity of traces: how they are ordered, how they are articulated.

It leaves traces in return for which satisfaction from then on will never again be obtained except on the basis of these traces, in other words, in hallucinatory fashion. What Freud describes to us there is, all the same, a psychic mechanism famously cut off from reality, a psychic mechanism which only enjoys the trace, and that alone. In any case, he introduces there the idea that for the human being, jouissance is always marked by the index of a loss. That means that dissatisfaction is the primary and fundamental component of a psychic mechanism. It is Freud who says this, in every possible way, not Lacan. It’s the idea that this myth of a primary experience of satisfaction is there as a foil for the idea that all satisfactions that can ever arise are marked by a loss in relation to the supposed primary and complete satisfaction. This is correlated with the idea that whatever is going to be invested is a trace, a sign, a trait, Freud says; and from there Lacan will deduce his unary trait [trait unaire], that is to say, there is nothing other than the signifier of an experience of jouissance. But also that, once the signifier is there, jouissance - well, I won’t say it is no longer there, but in any case it is no longer there so completely. Now, if you like, the Freudian reference to this idea of the body as emptied of jouissance is a reference to

24 J. Lacan, “De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la réalité”, Scilicet 1, p. 58. 25 S. Freud, “Outline for a scientific psychology”, 1895, The birth of psychoanalysis, Paris, PUP, 1969, p. 307. repetition. In the “Outline for a scientific psychology”, it was nonetheless that which was already anticipated. It is the reference to the idea that the human being does nothing but reproduce signs, traits. But that does not mean that, in so doing, it attains what Lacan would call the thing, the thing precisely to designate both that which is not marked by a signifier and that which is undone in some way by the signifier. In other words, Lacan’s thesis that the signifier consumes the loss of the thing, is a thesis that has very precise Freudian references. It is not a Lacanian invention. It is the idea that the human is a being thirsting after an impossible first time, and between the subject and the thing, it’s like the sun and the moon, they never meet. So you see that after all, these Freudian schema’s of a first lost time, are very close to what Lacan takes up later, for example, in a text like “The direction of the treatment”, where he defines the unconscious as the place of “the first ideal marks in which the drives are constituted as repressed, in the substitution of the signifier for needs.”26 Thus it has to be said that the primary effect of the signifier is the repression or the annulment of the thing where we suppose full jouissance to be. That means, too, that the condition for , what Freud called libido, is a certain loss.

At this juncture I would like to say a few words about libido. There are a few pages which we need to look at closely concerning the libido, which can be found in “The position of the unconscious”.27 Here Lacan conjoins the notion of the libido with what he will later call, even though the term does not appear in this text, the desertification of the body by jouissance. In this text, as you know, he posits the idea that the libido is an organ, an instrument, at the same time as it is very close to that which could be a description of an object relation. When Freud introduced the idea of the libido, it was to account for that movement, there is no other term for it, which pushes the human being towards another, towards another that we are going to call here the object. The libido is what goes looking for a part of itself outside itself in some fashion, which assures you of an extension of yourself outside of yourself. Lacan’s idea is that this extension is only possible on the basis of a prior subtraction, on the basis of something that has been removed. He takes that at two levels in this text. He takes it even at the level of the animal, since he does not entirely take exception to the idea of an animal libido. At the level of the animal, he speaks of the libido in so far as it marks out the limits of the territory and he refers it to the loss that the living being is subject to in virtue of being sexed.28

There we find all of Lacan’s elucidations on the fact that sexed reproduction is correlative with the death of the individual. Which is not the case, for example, at the level of the polyp. Obviously, what interests us here is not so much the level of the animal, but of man. Lacan takes up the myth of Aristophanes who, in order to give an account of the libidinal movement of love, had invented this myth of the sphere which had been divided in two, which at once drove each half to seek for the other half. Lacan takes up this myth with what he calls the myth of the lamella, to introduce the idea that it is from the basis of a subtraction that there is a libido. He tells us in the text just what this subtraction is but in such an involved way that it really needs to be deciphered. He puts it in two ways. It seems to me that the subtraction in question is that of castration. Look at the text; he takes the example of the breast to say that

26 J. Lacan, “The direction of the treatment”, Écrits, p. 256, English edition. 27 J. Lacan, “La position de l’inconscient”, Écrits, p. 848, Fr. ed. 28 J. Lacan, “Position of the unconscious”, Écrits, pp. 847-848. fundamentally, what psychoanalysis has apprehended in the breast has nothing to do with any relation whatsoever to the sensoriality of the mother’s body: its warmth, its smell, its presence and what you will. The breast, as it comes into play in the weaning complex, is a breast that belongs to the infant, it’s a breast that isn’t the mother’s, it’s a breast in which the cut, he says, passes between the mother’s body and the infant’s body. In other words, it is a prehensile breast. It’s a breast that is going to hook the mother.

Lacan’s idea is that, in the weaning complex, it is not the mother that the child loses, but a part of himself, a part that belongs to him. Where excrement is concerned, that is obvious, of course. What is it that allows him to say this? He tells us that the breast prefigures castration. There is a little note at the end of “Position of the unconscious” where he points out that everything he has said in the text on the partial object in its four occurrences, the breast, faeces, the voice, the gaze, can only become intelligible if it is referred to the phallic object. This is exactly what he says: “We have not been able to extend (these considerations on the object) up to this point which constitutes its crucial interest, that is to say the object (-phi) as ‘cause’ of the castration complex.”29 In other words, this loss, this subtraction which founds the libido as a vector towards the object is identified with the subtraction of castration (-phi). It is, besides, what he expounds in the article that follows it, called “Du Trieb de Freud et du désir du psychanalyste”.30 Now, if that is how we are to take things, we ought here to consider the question of the psychoses. I will come back to that shortly, because I would like to take the current question one step further, by asking: what is left over in this negativisation of jouissance? For something is left over. Lacan says that this jouissance is going to be redistributed outside the body. For example, in ancient burials, where objects, which are placed next to the dead, enumerate jouissance in its extra-corporeal form. In other words, what subsists of jouissance is precisely the jouissance of the drive, it is what is at play in the drive. And in what sense is it outside the body? It is outside the body precisely because the signifying cut, the inscription of signifiers which operates by way of the demand of the other, will localise jouissance around the anatomical rims and in connection with the object which corresponds to it, but an object which is outside the body. Put another way, it should be borne in mind that, in the drive, there are two aspects, which were not very prominent in “Subversion of the subject”, but which Lacan highlighted more in “Position of the unconscious”. There is the signifying aspect of the drive, in so far as it inscribes a “unary trait”, but there is also the fact that it concerns an object, an object that Lacan will end up calling surplus jouissance, plus-de-jouir.

Moreover, if you take the expression “representative of the representation” that Lacan took up again from Freud, you will find these two aspects, since, according to the case, it is either a signifier or the object small a. What I am saying is that it is this object that he ended up calling plus-du-jouir, on the model of Marx’s “surplus value”. But, as you can see, it corresponds to the logic of the proceedings: in that this “plus” corresponds to the “minus” which came before it. This is because there was, first of all, through the effect of the signifier, a loss, a subtraction; that there is something or other that is going to be restored, a sort of compensation. That is what he says in “Radiophonie”, the text I read just now, whence comes the necessity for the “surplus jouissance” in order for the machine to work.31 This expression “surplus jouissance”

29 J. Lacan, “The position of the unconscious”, Écrits, p. 850, note of 1966. 30 J. Lacan, “Du Trieb de Freud et du désir du psychanalyste”, op. cit, pp. 851-854. 31 cf. J. Lacan, “Radiophonie”, Scilicet 2/3, pp. 61-62. is a bit ambiguous because the status of the object in Lacan’s teaching is complicated. At the same time, it is a lost object, it is an object that cannot be re- appropriated, and thus it is an object that is part of a series (--), but at the same time, it is “re-positivised” in some sense, in so far as it restores a certain coefficient of jouissance.

The body is affected, indeed, in the form of the extraction of jouissance, with its small compensation of “surplus jouissance”. So the subject is happy. Bonheur (happiness), says Lacan, you can see he plays on the word heur (hour): the encounter, fortune, the tuche; that is to say, the subject has nothing else in his head, if we can allow that he has a head at all - but to go on repeating himself. The subject is the insistence of repetition, and in this regard, everything serves his purpose. To repeat himself with a correlative that is not the other, in particular not the other sex, but that is this “surplus jouissance”. In Télévision, the example he takes is very purified, very condensed. It is the example of Dante and Beatrice. From Beatrice, Dante obtains nothing but a fluttering of the eyelashes. That is sufficient for him, for the time being. That is to say, what he meets is the object “gaze” and the Other (here the other is Beatrice) remains barred to the subject. In this sense, the encounter with the fantasy makes her exist. We can write this using the two circles of Euler as Lacan used them in Seminar XI:

These circles - well, I’m not making the same use of them as you find in Seminar XI. The subject is on the left and the Other is on the right. It has to be said that the subject, from whom a part of jouissance has been deducted, what he finds in the intersection is the fluttering of eyelashes. The Other, in so far is it is incarnated by Beatrice, remains barred, ex-istant. So, of the body and its jouissance, the only thing that can be approached by psychoanalysis, in so far as one talks about it there, is this object, which we can describe as real. Real, not because it has the materiality of a body, or spatial extension - it has neither of those things - but it is real precisely, in Lacan’s definition, in so far as it is impossible to apprehend by means of the signifier: that is to say, the signifier circles around it. The signifier makes it return to a certain place, but it cannot all the same be said that it designates it. It is certain that this object a in Lacan’s teaching cannot be grasped the way the Kleinians grasp objects. The pre-genital object such as is current among Kleinian analysts, for example, who make of it an object of reality, an object-phenomenon - that is not Lacan’s object a. Lacan’s object a, ultimately, is what cannot be circumscribed, the point which is circumscribed, but which yet remains impossible to circumscribe in any words.

Well, you can see that Lacan travelled a long road concerning the place of the body. He set off from the imagination. Then he placed the accent on the body divided up by the signifier, and drew implications from that. He went on to try to show using just one letter, this letter a, what was the most real of the body for psychoanalysis. In other words, it is a journey that leads us - that is a play on words - from what is experienced/felt [éprouvé (in the sense of “to feel something”) all the way to proof [la preuve]. That is what Lacan always deemed to be demandable from psychoanalysis: proof.

On that basis, I would like to make a few remarks in two registers: one concerns , and the other, the end of analysis, with the double meaning of the term “end”. If it is because of castration, which is the effect of the Name-of-the Father, that the order of the drives exteriorises jouissance, that is to say, substitute themselves for the full jouissance of the body; if, in other words, the libido is, in Lacan’s teaching, the other name of desire, then we could expect that psychosis, which Lacan formulated initially as being caused by a flaw in signification, shows us, proposes to us, certain anomalies which concern this order of the drives and the libido. As you know, Lacan came to think and indeed did say that psychosis reintroduced jouissance in the place of the Other. Obviously, that is perfectly logical, it may appear a little surprising, but the logic is impeccable. If it is the Name-of-the-Father which, via the operation of “castration” empties the body of its jouissance, we can expect that if there is a flaw, it will not be emptied. After all, that is precisely what Schreber showed us. Everything he described is a body which is by no means a desert of jouissance. It is a body which is invaded by jouissance, permanently. He describes for us an intrusion of jouissance into his body, at the same time as this jouissance, moreover, exceeds his body, since it is also the jouissance of God. So, Schreber describes a space of jouissance where his body is, I won’t say the body of God, since he tells us that his God is nothing but a number of words. It couldn’t be said more clearly that this is the universe of the signifier, but I won’t dwell on that. It seems to me that that has been touched on many times since last year’s meetings on psychosis.

Rather, I would like to refer to certain phenomena concerning autistic children; I would like to make a few remarks about them. To delimit the concept of “autistic children”, let us say that it is a question of children who fall within the classification of psychosis, without them being delirious. In all cases, it has to be said that all those who work with these autistics discern what I would call disorders of the drive. What is the regulated order of the drives? That is what Freud described for the [developmental] phases of the libido, and which was later taken up as the oral phase, and the anal phase, which preceded the phallic phase. For us, it is a mystery that this order should be perturbed in autistic children, in so far as we consider, with Lacan, that what inscribes this order is the Other. It is the veering of the demand of the Other that causes the child to pass from, for example, what is written as an oral demand to an anal demand. That comes to him from the Other. It is not, for us, a developmental phase of his body. Thus, the fact that it is a perturbation in the relation to the Other that perturbs this order - I would say that only confirms the thesis. Obviously, authors like Margaret Mahler and Melzer, for example, - I am taking these two authors whom you might not suspect of having read Lacan - on the other hand, come up against this disorder of the drives as if it were a problem, because they ask where that disorder can possibly come from. And Margaret Mahler cannot understand it at all, she finds a little ninny of six years who shows signs of oral erotism which are reminiscent of those of a baby of two months. She doesn’t understand, and if she wants to explain the phenomenon, she will have to have recourse to hypotheses on the disturbance of the body in so far as it is organic. Which is tantamount to using one mystery to explain another. The same goes for Melzer. Melzer invents a little doctrine, very much in the English empiricist style. To explain, for example, the prevalence of an oral eroticism, he comes up with the hypothesis that there may be some children who are born with one of the five senses especially prevalent, especially sharp, and that would explain why the child does not engage in the ordinary order of the drives. So there, at all events, we have a phenomenon which, in Lacanian doctrine, is perfectly comprehensible, and which, for these other styles of author, is not at all. So much is clear. I would like to speak about another trait. It is a trait which is frequently observed by these authors, and here I will refer to two cases which have the merit of being known to everyone. One is the case of “Stanley” described by Margaret Mahler, and the other is the case of “Joe” by Bruno Bettelheim. There is a common trait, quite a banal one, which is that of being plugged into a machine. Joe is an absolutely exemplary case. His body will not function, in the sense of vital functions, except via the intermediary of machines. In other words, in order to eat, to excrete, to sleep, he has to be connected up to his machines. That doesn’t happen automatically. The case of “Stanley” is less extreme, but very similar. Margaret Mahler describes only two states for this child; one state in which he is completely amorphous, and the other in which he is animated. In the former, he is limp as a rag, like a thing dumped on the floor, vaguely sucking at some part of his body, but as if completely delibidinised. For after all, the libido is nothing other man the aspiration for something else, and he looks completely delibidinised.

I would like to add something in parentheses. What Freud called the narcissistic libido is that libido which, in psychosis, remains fixated on the ego, sometimes on one’s own body. It is clear how Lacan introduces a distinction into this. What Lacan says is: jouissance remains in the body. Libido is not there, in so far as libido is the movement of desire. So, I would say that what for Freud is the narcissistic investment of the ego, is the equivalent of what Lacan describes as the body which is not emptied of its jouissance. So now I will close my parentheses and return to Stanley. Either he is completely amorphous, or he is momentarily animated by plugging in to the Other. That can happen in two ways. Margaret Mahler has the merit of describing it to us very precisely. She says; this child has two ways in which he becomes animated: either he puts his hand on the therapist, that is to say, he establishes physical contact with the body of the therapist, and everything happens as if this contact breathed some animation into him. Or, she says, and this is the priceless trait, he gets the same result by pronouncing certain words, that is to say, in putting the signifiers into play. This case is priceless, because it shows us that the external machine is the Other, the body of signifiers. It is so true that the body of the therapist has the same value, has the same affect as pronouncing some words. So there is a truly priceless example. At that moment, he starts to get animated like Bettelheim’s Joe, when he is plugged in to his machines; he can eat, etc., etc... If I take up Euler’s circles again, if we put the child on the left, and the Other on the right, we have the impression that they are like two circles that just touch each other, that is to say, the signifier doesn’t encroach on the body. Lacan mentions the disencroachment [desempiètrement] of the unconscious. Anyway, that was to give an example of these rather arid theses I have presented to you.

Now I would like to say a few words about the ends of psychoanalysis. I hope you can see now why I was able to say at the beginning that psychoanalysis is a technique of the body. Psychoanalysis is a technique of the body precisely in so far as, through the work of the signifier, it detaches this element “surplus jouissance”. Lacan offers two intuitive approaches to this “surplus jouissance”. He says: when you say of someone, “Now, there’s someone!”, it is certain that there is a surplus jouissance which is perceptible to the other. There is another case in which one is in the presence of a surplus jouissance, which is when you say, “What a cunt!”. Not to say: “He’s an imbecile”, but to designate a manner the subject has of sitting tight on his jouissance and being unshakeable there. It is in this sense that I could say that psychoanalysis is a technique of the body. Obviously, that poses a problem. It poses a problem of knowing whether psychoanalysis works for jouissance. I think we can reply with a No, in any case if we take our inspiration from Lacan. If we had to say what it works for, it is sure - that it is not without some relation to surplus jouissance, but it is a relation of detachment. That is to say, it works more for desire than for jouissance. It works to detach the cause of desire.

I will say two things: first, that doesn’t just happen on its own. As we know. It is true that, after all, psychoanalysis is an ordeal [épreuve]. I said just before that Lacan’s teaching concerning the body goes from the “experienced” [épreuve] to the proof [preuve]. It passes via the ordeal of the cure. It happens so little of its own accord, that Lacan considers that it needs something to make up the difference, an injection of ethics. There is no way we can speak of ethics without implying the idea of volition. This ethic, which, he says, is nothing other than the ethic of speaking well. Speaking well satisfies - write it in two words - it allows you to ask, “So what does that achieve?” This speaking well achieves the subject in his division with his jouissance, that is to say, against the fantasy, if I can put it like that. Of course, the fact that an ethic is needed in all that, has its practical applications. A practical application, for example, is the few pages that Lacan devotes to the affects in Télévision.32 Just now, I took up his thesis according to which knowledge affects the body. That does not prevent Lacan - indeed he uses it as the very basis for his argument - from reflecting on what are termed affects, in the everyday meaning of the word. In Télévision, he situates three principal affects: anguish (anxiety), sadness, and “gai scavoir”, as well as two which he considers to be more marginal, and which he emphasises less: boredom and moroseness. In any case, where anguish, sadness and gay science are concerned, it can be clearly seen how that is organised in relation to a body affected in its jouissance. Where anguish is concerned, it is obvious. I would say, this affecting of the body in its jouissance has an affect, and it is anguish. What he says about sadness and “gai scavoir” is less obvious because he tells us that sadness is a moral shortcoming, a form of cowardice. He is not shy to re-animate the whole vocabulary of the Christian ethic. Defect, moral cowardice, etc... Anyway, sadness is a shortcoming, while gay science is a virtue. That is understandable, it seems to me, only if you refer it to the passion for ignorance, which is the contrary of the ethic of speaking well. I would say that sadness is the affect which corresponds to the fact of not satisfying the ethic which precisely will circumscribe this real object of the body, this pure object. Gay science is the inverse. In the absurd, gay science is what allows you to enjoy the deciphering, which means that in deciphering you find a surplus jouissance. We could expand a great deal more on this idea which is that, for Lacan, ethics reorganises the doctrine of affects, in the classical sense.

The second remark I want to make concerns one of Lacan’s expressions which can be found in the lecture at the EFP in 1967, where he says that the analysand, even though he has passed through what I have called the ordeal, will “make a cause for himself from surplus jouissance”.33 “Make oneself a cause” is one of those expressions beloved of Lacan; it is perfectly equivocal. It has the characteristics of an interpretation, at that level. Initially he puts it in parentheses: “make a cause of surplus jouissance (as one might say to accept the inevitable [se faire une raison]).”34 Obviously if you approach the “making oneself a cause” from the angle of “accepting the inevitable”, it immediately introduces a little note of resignation, or at least of renunciation. It means: having renounced making oneself a cause of something else. Generally, what is it that one makes oneself a cause of outside of psychoanalysis,

32 J. Lacan, Télévision, pp. 33-43. 33 J. Lacan, “Lecture to the EFP [6/12/67]”, Scilicet 2/3, p. 26. 34 J. Lacan, “Lecture to the EFP [6/12/67]”, Scilicet 2/3, p. 26. and perhaps in spite of psychoanalysis, if it is “ego-psychologising”? In general, one makes oneself the cause of the master signifier, or of a signifier that functions like a master signifier. The causes, all the beautiful worthy “causes”, the good causes to defend, are a function of a signifier which has command over them. It has to be said that the cause of surplus jouissance is a cause which is fundamentally different from the causes organised by a master signifier. It is a singular cause, which only causes one by one. One all alone. It is a cause which does not collectivise. On the contrary, the causes which hook on to the master signifier are the causes which collectivise, that make crowds, make groups. In other words, with the master signifier, you can found an orthodoxy, even a psychoanalytic one.

That is exactly what the IPA has done. The IPA makes use of Freud’s master signifier, whatever it likes to say; it collectivises. It is so true that the IPA, as a group, will never creak. It’s robust, much more robust than all the Freudian causes, institutionally speaking. Obviously, good causes have an effect: segregation. Lacan frequently pointed this out. The good cause, in so far as it always consists in integrating itself into the discourse of the master, has an effect of segregation. That is to say that it designates a frontier between those who are collectivised under such and such a signifier - and those outside the field. It has to be said: what effect can it have to inscribe oneself in the analytic discourse in so far as it does not collectivise, and that the only social bond that is instated is the bond of the treatment, that is to say, two people for a limited time. One might perhaps be tempted to say that the “authorising oneself”, rather than the master signifier - for that is the alternative we are faced with - has a centrifugal effect. It is hard to see why groups would form around the notion of “self-authorisation”. To do what? I said to myself, when Lacan said to us, “wager from the father to the worse” [parier du père au pire] it was a way of saying, “wager from the master signifier to the object a”. Obviously, the command of the father - I am taking “father” here as equivalent to master signifier - the command that organises these causes, is one for all. That is what creates cohesions, devotions, common memories, old boys’ networks, etc... It has its charms. But this is at the level of collectivity. Is it the worst thing that could happen that it should be each for his own? It couldn’t just stop at that, in so far as Lacan nevertheless always considered that there was a collective function for the psychoanalyst and that this function at the level of the collective is a function that can only be conceived of because the discourse of the master reigns. It cannot be conceived of all alone. It is conceived of as an antidote, if I can put it that way. He designated this function by taking the image of the saint, each time he calls upon psychoanalysts to measure the political weight which should be theirs. Thus, devoting oneself to the object a, Lacan seemed to consider could have its political weight. I would like to finish now, by saying to you that there are perhaps worse things than understanding [pire que capire], in any case. It seems to me that the master signifier can bring about something worse to the power of two. And I was thinking precisely of the suicide bombers, for after all, it’s topical. There was a time when the phenomenon of suicide bombers was not apparent. Then there were some, not so long ago, during the last war. Then once again they were not to be seen. Now it is starting again. Think about it: a suicide bomber is someone who conjugates the father and the worst. It is someone who marches for the cause, for the cause he incarnates: it is not important whether it is Muslim power or not. Whatever cause is being defended, he marches to the master signifier, with his brothers or all alone. But at the same time, it ends up in that orgy of jouissance which is “blowing oneself up”. Lacan evoked grilling. Well, blowing yourself up with your own bomb is another way of doing that. That is what I call conjugating the father and the worst. There you are. I will stop there. I hope we’ll be able to discuss it a bit. Editor’s note: We are grateful to Colette Soler for permission to publish this spoken version.Text based on a wording by Guy de Villiers. Not checked by the author. First published in Quarto, May 1984. Written versions have been published since in Italian and Spanish. Editorial intervention has been kept to a minimum. Editor’s and translator’s notes in square brackets. After 5 years and 6 issues of JCFAR in England, “jouissance” is no longer italicised. Page 1 of 26

The Body in the Teaching of Jacques Lacan : May 1984 : Colette Soler

Published Jcfar Vol 6 p6-38 Winter 1995 (Journal of the Centre of Freudian Analysis & Research) Translated by Lindsay Watson Also https://jcfar.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/The-Body-in-the-Teaching-of-Jacques- Lacan-Colette-Soler.pdf

Original publication Text based on a transcription by Guy de Villiers of a presentation by Colette Soler. Not checked by the author. First published in Quarto, May 1984. Written versions have been published since in Italian and Spanish.

References decoded & availability by Julia Evans http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12365 Reference numbers & page numbers refer to the Jcfar publication p6 Lacan calls parlêtres, speaking beings : Jacques Lacan introduced the neologism ‘parlêtre’ in 1974 to indicate that “carnal being” which is “haunted by the word.” See Press Conference at the French Cultural Center, Rome (The Triumph of Religion) : 29th October 1974 : Jacques Lacan Availability given here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1471 Related text : The Logic and Surprises of Supervision at the Time of the Parlêtre : 7th March 2015 (Italy) : Éric Laurent or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12082 **** p6 discovery of what Freud termed “beyond the pleasure principle” : See Beyond the Pleasure Principle : 1920g : , SE XVIII p1-64 : Available as published at www.Freud2Lacan.com at here https://www.freud2lacan.com/docs/Beyond_the_Pleasure_Principle.pdf **** p6 Footnote 1 : “new acquisitions in physiology, the facts about chromosomal sex ... and its genetic correlatives, its distinction from hormonal sex, their quota in anatomical determination.” : J. Lacan, Écrits, p. 726. : ection IV, The Shine [Éclat] of Absences, p611 of Bruce Fink’s translation : see Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality : 1958 [Presented in Amsterdam, 5th September 1960] : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1352 : Sp88 of Jacqueline Rose’s translation : IV Glaring omissions A summary of this kind would bring out certain omissions, whose interest cannot simply be dismissed as 'not proven': 1. On the one hand, recent developments within physiology. such as the fact of chromosomic sexuality and its genetic correlates, as distinct from hormonal sexuality, and the relative share of each in anatomical determination; or simply what appears to be a libidinal predominance of the male hormone, to the extent of its regulating the oestrogen metabolism in the menstrual phenomenon. While the clinical interpretations of these facts may still be subject to reservations, yet they demand consideration no less for having been consistently ignored by a practice which would sooner claim messianic access to decisive chemical forces. The fact of our keeping, here, at a distance from the real may well raise the question of the division deliberately being imposed - which if it does not belong between the somatic and the psychic, which are in fact continuous, should be made between the organism and the subject. This assumes that we repudiate the affective dimension which the theory of error lays on the Page 2 of 26 subject, and articulate it as the subject of a combinatory logic which alone gives the unconscious its meaning **** p6 Tiresias’ question : One story holds that Hera and Zeus disagreed about which of the sexes experienced more pleasure during sex, with Hera arguing that the answer was men, by far. When they consulted Tiresias, he asserted that women had greater pleasure than men, and Hera thereupon struck him blind. ***** p6 Lacan observed on one occasion, it has not even been able to enrich eroticism with one single new perversion. : See Seminar VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis: 1959-1960: begins 18th November 1959 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=386 : Seminar VII : 18th November 1959 : p14-15 of Dennis Porter’s translation : No doubt something should remain open relative to the place we currently occupy in the development of erotics and to the treatment to be given, not simply to one individual or other, but to civilization and its discontents. Perhaps we should give up the hope of any genuine innovation in the field of ethics - and to a certain extent one might say that a sign of this is to be found in the fact that, in spite of all our theoretical progress, we haven't even been able to create a single new perversion. But it would be a definite sign that we have really arrived at the heart of the problem of existing perversions, if we managed to deepen our understanding of the economic role of masochism. Related texts: Notes on Seminar VII: 18th November 1959 from page 7 to 15 (Wo es war, … & polymorphous perversion & definition of Jouissance & Happiness) by Julia Evans on 6th October 2012 or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=523 Further comments on ‘perverse jouissance’: Seminar VII: session of 18th November 1959 by Julia Evans on 22nd October 2012 or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=516 Further on Seminar VII here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?cat=332 **** p8 Freud’s system perception-consciousness : See The Project for a Scientific Psychology: 23rd & 25th September & 5th October 1895: Sigmund Freud or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=401 : Examined in Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: 1954-1955: begins 17th November 1954 : Jacques Lacan See here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1141 **** p8 Well, leaving aside Hartmann, Lowenstein, or even Kris, : Further information at texts on lacanian history here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?cat=644 , by Heinz Hartmann here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?cat=660 , by Rudolf Loewenstein here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?cat=661 , by Ernst Kris (fresh brains’ dream) here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?cat=394 , **** p8 Margaret Mahler : Margaret Schönberger Mahler (May 10, 1897 – October 2, 1985) was a Hungarian physician, who later became interested in . She was a central figure on the world stage of psychoanalysis. Her main interest was in normal childhood development, but she spent much of her time with psychiatric children and how they arrive at the "self". Mahler developed the separation– theory of . Object constancy, similar to 's object permanence, describes the phase when the child understands that the mother has a separate identity and is truly a separate individual. Note : Mahler was alive and living since 1938 in . **** Page 3 of 26 p8 there are two innate characteristics which come from the body, and which no-one can influence. In order to help understand them, it is not psychoanalysis that is called upon, but Piaget. : Piaget is mentioned by Jacques Lacan in Seminar X & Seminar XI : See Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts: 1963-1964 : beginning 15th January 1964 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1145 : Seminar XI : 27th May 1964, p208 of Alan Sheridan’s translation : The Piagetic error—for those who might think that this is a neologism, I would stress that I am referring to Monsieur Piaget—is an error that lies in the notion of what is called the egocentric discourse of the child, defined as the stage at which he lacks what this Alpine psychology calls reciprocity. Reciprocity is very far from the horizon of what we mean at that particular moment, and the notion of egocentric discourse is a misunderstanding. The child, in this discourse, which may be tape-recorded, does not speak for himself, as one says. No doubt, he does not address the other, if one uses here the theoretical distinction derived from the function of the I and the you. But there must be others there—it is while all these little fellows are there, indulging altogether, for example, in little games of operations, as they are provided within certain methods of so-called active education, it is there that they speak—they don't speak to a particular person, they just speak, if you'll pardon the expression, à la cantonade.1 [Footnote 1 : To speak 'à Ia cantonade' is to speak to nobody in particular, to the company at large. By stressing the first letters of the phrase, Lacan is punning on his own name[Tr.] **** p9 : the relations which define the signifying structure are already inscribed in it, inhabit it, as Lacan says. Seminar IV : 6th February 1957 : See Seminar IV : The Object Relation & Freudian Structures 1956-1957 : begins 21st November 1956 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11980 : last paragraph of Earl’s Court Collectives’ provisional translation : He explains to us that there is an identification, on the part of the ideal ego, with objects which are in the text supposed to be all the same. Simply, if we look at the schema, we notice that he made sure to connect these three objects which we might otherwise suppose to be identical, with an external object behind all these objects. Can you not see in this a striking indication of a direction, a resemblance to what I am trying to explain to you? Namely, that the ideal ego does not simply concern an object, but something that is beyond the object and is reflected in this case, as Freud puts it, not purely and simply in the ego which, to be sure, can feel something of it and become impoverished by it, but in something else in [the ego’s] very foundations - in its first forms, its first demands, and in fact, the first veil it projects, in the form of the ego ideal. If you know of more references, please contact Julia Evans. **** p9 Footnote 2 : article by Lacan called “Beyond the reality principle” : J. Lacan, “Au-delà du principe de la réalité”, Écrits, French edition, pp. 73-92. : Beyond the “Reality Principle” : August to October 1936 : Jacques Lacan, p71 to 74 of Bruce Fink’s translation. Available on request to Julia Evans See Écrits : 1966 : Jacques Lacan : See here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1206 **** p9 : an article in Scilicet 1, which is called, “La psychanalyse dans ses rapports à la réalité” [Psychoanalysis and its relations to reality], at the French Institute in Milan. : Footnote 3, 18.12.1968, pp. 51-59. : On Psychoanalysis in its Relationships to Reality (Milan) : 18th December 1967 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12300 **** p10 : Lacan refers to as “my antecedents” : possibly a reference to On my antecedents: 1966? : Jacques Lacan : p51-57 of Bruce Fink’s translation of the Écrits. Copy available from Julia Evans. See Écrits : 1966 : Jacques Lacan : See here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1206 **** p10 : Indeed, during this period which preceded the Rome Discourse, Footnote 4, J. Lacan, “Function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis”, Report to the Rome Congress... 1953, Écrits, English edition, pp. 30-113. : See The Function and Field of Speech Page 4 of 26 and Language in Psychoanalysis (Rome) : 26th September 1953 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11831 & Rome Discourses – to introduce his report (Rome) : 26th September 1953 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12080 **** p11 : seminar Encore (you know how late it appeared in the teaching of Lacan), you will find the following: Speaking of the body he says: “the important thing is that it all sticks together sufficiently for the body to subsist, unless there is an accident as one might say, whether external or internal. Which means that the body is taken to be what it presents itself as being: a closed body.” Footnote 5 J. Lacan, Seminar XX, Encore, 1972-1973, p. 100. : See Seminar XX 8th May 1973 : See Seminar XX : Encore 1972 – 1973 (from 21st November 1972) : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=222 : pXI 8 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : In other words, the important thing is that all of that sticks together sufficiently for the body to subsist, barring any accident as they say, external or internal; which (8) means that the body is taken for what it presents itself to be: a closed body, as they say. **** p11 : In order for the organic individuality to become a body, Lacan says that it is necessary for the signifier to introduce the One. : Probably Seminar XX or Seminar XI : This is near, Seminar XX : 26th June 1973 : pVIII 10 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : The body, what is it then? Is it or is it not the knowledge of the One? The knowledge of the One is revealed as not coming from the body. The knowledge of the One, for the little that we can say about it, the knowledge of the One comes from the signifier One. NOTE : there is also a reference to biology on this page **** p 13 It’s because the Symbolic is in a certain way a body, having materiality, that there is – as Lacan points out explicitly in the Seminar on the Four Discourses : Footnote 6 J. Lacan, Séminaire XVII, L’Envers de la psychanalyse, 1969-1970. : Seminar XVII 18th February 1970 : pVII 3 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : what has in effect been lived by the one who well merits on this occasion the title of 'patient', should not make us forget that because of signifying links the subjective configuration has an objectivity that can be perfectly well mapped out and grounds the very possibility of the help that we contribute in the form of interpretation. Here, at a particular point of the linkage, specifically the altogether initial one, between S 1 to S2, it is possible that there opens up this fault which is called the subject. Here linkage-effects, in this case signifying ones, are brought into operation. Whether this lived experience that is called more or less properly thinking is or is not produced somewhere, there, here produced something that is due to a chain, exactly as if it came from thinking. Freud never said anything else when he spoke about the unconscious. This objectivity (3) not only induces but determines this position, which is a subject position, in so far as it is the focus of what are called defences. **** p13 language is [a] body, “a subtle body, for sure, but a body nonetheless.” : Footnote 7 J. Lacan, “Function and field of speech and language”, Écrits, p. 301, French edition. : See The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Rome) : 26th September 1953 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11831 & Rome Discourses – to introduce his report (Rome) : 26th September 1953 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12080 : p64 of Anthony Wilden’s translation : The Word is in fact a gift of Language, and Language is not immaterial. It is a subtle body, but body it is. Words are trapped in all the corporeal images which captivate the subject; they can make Page 5 of 26 the hysteric pregnant, be identified with the object of penis-neid, represent the flood of urine of urethral ambition, or the retained faeces of avaricious jouissance. **** Footnote 8 : In “Radiophonie” there is an entire page devoted to this question of the body : See Radiophonie: 9th April & 5th June 1970: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=756 : Question II p4 -5of Jack W. Stone’s translation : Following structure is to assure oneself of the effect of language. This is only done in putting aside the petition of principle that it reproduces from relations taken at the real. At the real to be understood from my category. For these relations also make a part of reality inasmuch as they inhabit it in formulas that are also present there. Structure is captured from there. From there, this is to say from the point where the symbolic takes body. I am going to return to this: body. It would be astonishing that one not see that in making language a function of the collective, one returns always to supposing someone, thanks to whom reality is redoubled in that he represents it, so that we no longer have to do more than reproduce this lining: in brief, in the wasp nest of idealism. I will come at the end to someone who is not of this vintage: someone to make a sign of it (quelqu’un à lui faire signe). … I return first to the body of the symbolic that must be understood as not at all metaphorical. As is shown by the fact that nothing isolates the body to be taken in the naïve sense, that in which the being sustained by it does not know that language is what discerns it for him, to the point that it would not be there if it were not able to be spoken of. **** Footnote 9 : In “Radiophonie” “The first body makes the second by embodying itself” : See Radiophonie: 9th April & 5th June 1970: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=756 : Question II p5 of Jack W. Stone’s translation : The first body makes the second from incorporating itself there. Whence the incorporeal that remains to mark the first, from the time after its incorporation. Let us render justice to the stoics for having known with this term: the incorporeal, to sign how the symbolic holds to the body. Incorporeal is the function, which makes a reality from mathematics, the application of a same effect for topology, or analysis in a broad sense for logic. But it is incorporated that structure makes affect, neither more nor less, affect only to be taken from what is articulated of being, only having there a de facto being, that is, from being said from somewhere. By which it is affirmed of the body that it is second whether it be dead or alive. Who does not know the critical point from which we date in man the speaking being: the sepulcher is where, in a fashion, it is affirmed that contrary to any other, the dead body keeps what gave the living its character: body. A Corpse [in English] remains, does not become carrion, the body that speech inhabited, that language corpsified. Zoology can take its departure from the pretension of the individual to make being from the living, but this is so that it might fold back on it, only if Zoology pursue it at the level of the polyper. The body, to take it seriously, is to start with what can carry the mark proper to range it in a sequence of signifiers. Starting from this mark, it is a support, not potential (éventuel), but necessary, of a relation, for it is still to support it to subtract itself from it. **** Page 6 of 26 p14 And that which justifies us in saying “I have a body” - to take our body as an attribute instead of taking it as our very being - is, if I may put it that way, that we, as subjects, can do without it. : Two possible references : See Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: 1954- 1955: begins 17th November 1954 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1141 : Seminar II 12th January 1955 : p72 Sylvana Tomaselli’s translation : It is very odd to say, there’s a truly strange incoherence in saying - man has a body. For us it makes sense, it is even probable that it has always made sense, but it makes more sense for us than for anybody else, since, with Hegel and without knowing it, in so far as everybody is Hegelian without knowing it. we have pushed to ) an extreme degree the identification of man with his knowledge. which is an accumulated knowledge. It is very strange to be localised in a body, and this strangeness can't be minimised, despite the fact that a great deal of time is spent puffing ourselves up and boasting about having reinvented human unity, which that idiot Descartes had cut in two. It is completely useless to make great declarations about returning to the unity of the human being, to the soul as the body's form, with large dosages of Thomism and Aristotelianism. The division is here to stay. And that is why physicians of our day and age' aren't the physicians of other times, except those who spend their time convinced that there are temperaments. constitutions, and other things of that sort. The physician has with respect to the body the attitude of the man who dismantles a machine. All statements of principles notwithstanding, this attitude is a radical one. That's the point where Freud started. and that was his ideal - to do pathological anatomy, anatomical physiology. to discover what this little-complicated apparatus embodied there in the nervous system is for. This perspective, which splits the unity of the living, certainly does have something of a disturbing, scandalous aspect, and one entire line of thought tries to counter it - I'm thinking of gestaltism and other well intentioned theoretical elaborations, which hope to return to the benevolence of nature and to a pre-established harmony. Of course, nothing proves that the body is a machine, and in fact there's every chance that it isn't. But that isn't the problem. The important thing is that this is the way in which one has tackled the question. I named him just now. the one in question, it's Descartes. He wasn't the only one. for it took quite a bit for him to begin to think of the body as a machine. What in particular it took was for there to be one which not only worked by itself. but which could embody in a quite striking way something essentially human. See Seminar XXIII: The Sinthome or Joyce and the Sinthome: 1975-1976: beginning on November 18th 1975 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=971 : Seminar XXIII, 11th May 1976 ; pXI 11 Cormac Gallagher’s translation : And this disgust concerns his [Joyce’s] own body in short. It is like someone who puts in parenthesis, who drives away the bad memory. This is what is at stake. This is altogether left as a possibility; as a possibility of the relationship to his own body as foreign. And this indeed is what is expressed by the fact of using the verb ‘to have’. One has one’s body, one is not it to any degree. And this is what leads to belief in the soul. As a consequence of which there is no reason to stop there. And one also believes that one has a soul, which crowns it all. This form of letting drop, of letting drop the relationship to one’s own body, is very suspect for an analyst. This idea of self, of self as body has something weighty about it. This is what is called the ego. If the ego is said to be narcissistic, it is indeed because there is something at a certain level which supports the body as image. But in the case of Joyce is the fact that this image, on this occasion is not involved, is this not what marks that on this occasion the ego has a quite particular function. How can that be written in, in my noeud bo? Page 7 of 26

See Jacques Lacan’s sayings excavated by Julia Evans on 17th October 2020 or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12725 **** p15 And fundamentally, the signifier, it has to be said, is like Schreber’s God. Schreber’s God did not know the living, nor does the signifier. Lacan frequently evoked the effect of devitalisation. : See Seminar III: The Psychoses: 1955-1956: from 16th November 1955: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=657 : Seminar III 11th January 1956 : p69 of Russell Grigg’s translation : Ultimately God only has a complete, authentic relationship with corpses. God doesn't understand anything of living beings, his omnipresence grasps things only from the outside, never from the inside. Here we have propositions that don't appear to be self-evident or demanded by the coherence of the system, such as we ourselves might conceive it in advance. … We shall have to structure the relationship between what guarantees the real in the other, that is, the presence and existence of the stable world of God, and Schreber the subject qua organic reality and fragmented body. **** p15 We could also evoke Descartes here, who, with his Cogito, was, if we can use such a term, the promoter of the subject. Well, Descartes, essentially, shows one thing: namely, that life is unthinkable. : See Seminar I: Freud’s papers on technique: 1953-1954 : begins on 18th November 1953 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1139 : Seminar I 7th July 1954 : p276 of John Forrester’s translation : One wants to be loved for everything - not only for one's ego, as Descartes says, but for the colour of one's hair, for one's idiosyncracies, for one's weaknesses, for everything. But inversely, and I would say correlatively, as a result of exactly that, to love is to love a being beyond what he or she appears to be. The active gift of love is directed at the other, not in his specificity, but in his being. 0. MANNONI: It was Pascal who said that, not Descartes. There is a passage in Descartes on the progressive purification of the ego beyond all its specific qualities. But you aren't wrong, in so far as Pascal tries to take us beyond the creature. 0. MANNONI: He said it explicitly. Yes, but it was a gesture of rejection. Love, now no longer conceived of as a passion but as an active gift, is always directed, beyond imaginary captivation, towards the being of the loved subject, towards his particularity. & see Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: 1954- 1955: begins 17th November 1954 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1141 : Seminar II 24th November 1954 : p6 of Sylvana Tomaselli’s translation : Look at the literature. You say that that's the job of those who think, but those who don't think must always have had, more or less spontaneously, some notion of the ego. What makes you so sure? You, in any case, belong with those who think, or at least you are following on after people who have thought about it. So, let's try to open the question, rather than settling it so unthinkingly. The type of people that we shall define, using a conventional notation, as dentists are very confident about the order of the universe because they think that Mr Descartes made manifest the laws and the procedures of limpid reason in the Discourse on Method. His I think, therefore, I am, so essential to the new subjectivity, is not as simple, however, as it would appear to these dentists, and some even think they detect in it a pure and simple sleight of hand, If it is in fact true that consciousness is transparent to itself, and grasps itself as such, it Page 8 of 26 does seem that the I is not on that account transparent to it. It is not given to it as different from an object. The apprehension of an object by consciousness does not by the same token reveal to it its properties. The same is true for the I. If this I is in fact presented to us as a kind of immediate given in the act of reflection by which consciousness grasps itself as transparent to itself, for all that, nothing indicates that the whole of this reality - and it is granting quite a bit already to say that we come to a judgement of existence l - would be exhausted by this. [Footnote 1, See Freud. 'Negation' (l925h) GW XIV 1 1-15: Stud III 373-7: SE XIX 235-9] & see Science and Truth: 1st December 1965 session of Seminar XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=739 : p5 of Bruce Fink’s translation : I did not thus just make an immediate pronouncement concerning psychoanalysis' vocation as a science. But it might have been noticed that I took my lead last year from a certain moment of the subject that I consider to be an essential correlate of science, a historically defined moment, the strict repeatability in experience of which perhaps remains to be determined: the moment Descartes inaugurates that goes by the name of cogito. This correlate, as a moment, is the aftermath [défilé] of a rejection of all knowledge, but is nevertheless claimed to establish for the subject a certain anchoring in being; I sustain that this anchoring constitutes the definition of the subject of science, "definition" to be understood in the sense of a “narrow doorway”. This lead did not guide me in vain, for it led me at year end to formulate our experienced division as subjects as a division between knowledge and truth, and to accompany it with a topological model, the Mobius strip; this strip conveys the fact that the division in which these two terms come together is not to be derived from a difference in origin. & there are many other references in the Écrits, Seminar VII, etc **** p16 it seems to me, a double connotation. On the one hand, of belonging, belonging to a set; and on the other hand, an erotic quality. And there is a whole range of phenomena to think about. Just think of the things Lacan evokes, such as tattoos, tattoos that both identify you and make of you an erotic object - in some societies, anyway. : See Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts: 1963-1964 : beginning 15th January 1964 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1145 : Seminar XI 26th February 1964 : p87 of Alan Sheridan’s translation : What is at issue in geometral perspective is simply the mapping of space, not sight. The blind man may perfectly well conceive that the field of space that he knows, and which he knows as real, may be perceived at a distance, and as a simultaneous act. For him, it is a question of apprehending a temporal function, instantaneity. In Descartes, dioptrics, the action of the eyes, is represented as the conjugated action of two sticks. The geometral dimension of vision does not exhaust, therefore, far from it, what the field of vision as such offers us as the original subjectifying relation. … p87-88 : I will go so far as to say that this fascination complements what geometral researches into perspective allow to escape from vision. How is it that nobody has ever thought of connecting this with. … the effect of an erection? Imagine a tattoo traced on the sexual organ ad hoc in the state of repose and assuming it’s, if I may say so, developed form in another state. How can we not see here, immanent in the geometral dimension—a partial dimension in the field of the gaze, a dimension that has nothing to do with vision as such—something symbolic of the function of the lack, of the appearance of the phallic ghost? **** p16 Footnote 10 That is what Lacan formulates in different ways when he says, “the body makes the bed of the other.” : J. Lacan, “De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la Page 9 of 26 réalité”, Scilicet 1, p. 58: “Tiers ‘au-delà’ dans ses rapports à la jouissance et au savoir, Ie corps fait Ie lit de I'autre par l'opération du signifiant.” : See On Psychoanalysis in its Relationships to Reality (Milan) : 18th December 1967 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12300 : p10 of Scott Savaiano’s translation : This is a chance to remind us of what there is between them, in the presence of the body, that establishes itself as disjunctive junction. The strange thing is that to which the body reduces itself in this economy. So profoundly misrecognized by Descartes that he reduces it to being mere extension, it would require that the imminent excesses of our surgery be applied to it in order to lay out for all to see that we dispose of it only in rendering it into its proper pieces, only insofar as it is dislodged from its jouissance. [JE adds The] Third “beyond” in relation [JE notes rapports = relationship] to jouissance and to knowledge, the body makes the bed of the Other through the operation of the signifier. **** p17 Footnote 10 : … makes the bed of the other.” See also : J. Lacan, “De l’Un-en-moins, le lit est fait l’intrusion qui avance de l’extrusion: c’est le significant même” : Radiophonie Scilicet 2/3 p61 : See Radiophonie: 9th April & 5th June 1970: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=756 : p5 of Jack W. Stone’s translation : The body, to take it seriously, is to start with what can carry the mark proper to range it in a sequence of signifiers. Starting from this mark, it is a support, not potential (éventuel), but necessary, of a relation, for it is still to support it to subtract itself from it. From before any date, Minus-One designates the place of the Other (Autre) (with the sigla big A) for Lacan. From the One-Short (Un-en-Moins), the bed is made for the intrusion that advances from the extrusion; this is the signifier itself. Not all fleshes go this way. From those alone that imprint the sign to negativize themselves, mount, in that bodies are separated from them, the clouds, the (p62) upper waters, of their jouissance, heavy with thunders to redistribute body and flesh. **** p17 Footnote 11 : that the body functions as a fragmented body. In “L’Etourdit”, Lacan insists on the fact that it is because the body inhabits language 11. J. Lacan, “L'Etourdit”, Scilicet 4, pp. 5-51; see particularly p. 12 and p. 30. : See L’Étourdit: 14th July 1972 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=221 : Possibly p28 of Jack W. Stone’s translation : This dire only proceeds from the fact that the unconscious, from being structured like a language, which is to say thelanguage (lalangue) it inhabits, is subjected to the equivoque by which each is distinguished. A language among others is nothing more than the integral of the equivoques that its history has let persist. This is the vein by which the real, the only one for analytic discourse to motivate its issue, the real that there is no sexual rapport, has made a deposit there in the course of ages. This in the currency (espèce) that this real introduces to the one, that is, to the unique of the body which from it takes an organ, and from this fact makes organs distanced by a disjunction whereby without doubt other organs come into its reach, but not without the quadruple path of these accesses infinitizing themselves inasmuch as is produced there the "real number." The language then, insofar as this currency has its place in it, makes an effect there from nothing other than the structure from which is motivated this incidence of the real. All that appears-is (parest) in it of a semblant of communication is always dream, lapsus, or joke. **** p17 that is, “anatomy is destiny”. (S. Freud, “The dissolution of the Oedipus complex”) : See On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love (Contributions to the Psychology of Love II) : 1912 : Sigmund Freud, SE XI &/or The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex : 1924d : Sigmund Freud, SE XIX p173-179, Published at Page 10 of 26 www.Freud2Lacan.com see here https://www.freud2lacan.com/docs/The_Dissolution_of_the_Oedipus_Complex.pdf **** p18 in “L’Etourdit”, is to say that sex is not anatomical. He is saying that man or woman is an affair of the subject and it depends on the way in which each individual inscribes him/herself within the phallic function. : See L’Étourdit: 14th July 1972 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=221 : p5 of Jack W. Stone’s translation : But of what is it a question? Of the rapport between the man and the woman insofar precisely as they would be proper, in that they inhabit language, to make stated this rapport. Is it the absence of this rapport that exiles them in their stabitat? Is it to labitate that this rapport can only be inter-dit (inter-dicted, or said-between [tr.])? **** p18 And it has to be said that the increase, not only of those we call transsexuals but, correlatively, of surgical procedures for transsexuals, which consist of operating on them, I would say, really, makes of this Lacanian thesis, which, at the outset may seem startling, a phenomenon. The choice of one’s sex is not a function of anatomy. : I have recently read a reference to surgical procedures for transsexuals & I cannot now refind it. **** p18 Lacan completely displaces these formulae in the later years, especially in “On psychoanalysis and its relations to reality”, “Radiophonie”, Télévision, and L'Etourdit. : See Radiophonie: 9th April & 5th June 1970: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=756 , Television: 31st January 1974 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=326, & L’Étourdit: 14th July 1972 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=221 **** p19 Footnote 12 First of all, “The subject is happy”. That’s in Télévision.12 J. Lacan, Télévision, Paris, Le Seuil, 1974, p. 40. : See Television: 31st January 1974 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=326 : p26-27 of Denis Hollier’s translation, published in October : Where in all this is what makes for good luck [bon heur]?11 Strictly speaking everywhere. The subject is happy-go-lucky [heureux]. It is his very definition since he can owe nothing if not to luck, to fortune in other words, and any piece of luck is good as something to maintain him, insofar as it repeats itself. What is astonishing is not that he is happy without suspecting what reduces him to this state- his dependence on the structure-but that he gets an idea of beatitude, an idea which is forceful enough for him to feel himself exiled from it. **** p19 “Ou pire”, which dates from the year when he was giving a seminar called Ou pire, in which Lacan developed, very didactically, the statement that unconscious knowledge affects, without any doubt. “But what? That is the question where people make mistakes. Not my subject, nor the soul, either... Me, I say that knowledge affects the body of the being who only makes himself a being of speech, in fragmenting his jouissance...” Footnote 13 J. Lacan, “Ou pire”, Scilicet 5, p. 8. : See Seminar XIX: 1971-72: …Ou pire …Or worse : from 8th December 1971 : Jacques Lacan or here : Scilicet is mentioned in Seminar XIX 21st June 1972 & this is probably from Account (Summary) of Seminar XIX -… Or worse : July 1973 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12303 : p6 of www.Freud2Lacan.com publication, translator unknown : But what? It’s the question where one makes a mistake. Not “my” subject (the one that I said a moment ago: that it is constituted in its semblant, I was saying its letter). Page 11 of 26

‐‐Nor the soul, what the imbeciles imagine, at least that’s what they let us believe, when one finds by reading them that soul with which man thinks, for Aristotle, the soul that a Uexküll reconstructs, in the guise of an Innenwelt, which of the Umwelt is the exact portrait. I say that knowledge affects the body of the being who is made being only from words, this from parcelling out his jouissance, by cutting it into pieces through that in order to produce falls from which I make the (a), to be read object little a , or even abject, which will be said that way when I am dead, a time when at last I will be heard, or again the (a) first cause of his desire. This body is not the nervous system, even though this system serves jouissance in as much as in the body it sets up predation or, better, the jouissance of the Umwelt taken as a form of prey – which from the Umwelt therefore does not figure the trait‐for‐trait, as one persists in framing it from a residue of a philosophical wake, whose translation as “affect” marks the non‐analysed. **** p19 Footnote 14 Seminar Encore. Lacan says: “in order to jouir, there has to be a body.” J. Lacan, Encore, p. 26 [“a body is there to be enjoyed”] : See Seminar XX : Encore 1972 – 1973 (from 21st November 1972) : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=222 : Seminar XX 19th December 1972 : pIII 15 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : Is this not what is supposed properly and precisely by this all which the analytic experience signifies here. Substance of the body, on condition that it is defined only as what enjoys itself. Only property of the living body, no doubt, but we do not know what living being is except uniquely in the fact that a body for its part enjoys. And what is more : we fall immediately on the fact that it only enjoys itself from corporalising (corporiser) it in a signifying way. **** p19 Footnote 15 “the body is the desert of jouissance”, and “jouissance is outside the body” J. Lacan: “On psychoanalysis and its relations with reality”, Scilicet 1, p. 58. : See On Psychoanalysis in its Relationships to Reality (Milan) : 18th December 1967 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12300 : p10-11 of Scott Savaiano’s translation : Thus it is from jouissance that truth is found to resist knowledge. This is what psychoanalysis discovers in that which it calls symptom – truth that makes full use of the disparagement of reason. We, psychoanalysts, know that the truth is that satisfaction not obviated by pleasure except as it exiles itself to the desert of jouissance. Without a doubt the masochist knows how to call this jouissance back from the desert, but does so merely to show (precisely to reach it only so as to excite a demonstrative figure with his simulation) that he is in it an “all” (tous – why not “tout”?) of the body, precisely that he is this desert. NOTE : it has not been possible to find the second quote. This may be that this is a translation of the text which appears in Autres Écrits: 2001 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=756 rather than the Scilicet version **** p19 Footnote 16 “in defining it according to relations articulated by their order, and such that, in taking part in it, one can only do so at one’s own expense.” J. Lacan: “Radiophonie”, Scilicet 2/3, p. 86. : Radiophonie: 9th April & 5th June 1970: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=756 : p21-22 of Jack W. Stone’s translation : And if this is the case, we rediscover the structure that is the wall of which we speak. In defining it from relations articulated from their order, and such that in taking part there, one only does it at one's own expense. Expense of life or else of death. Expense of jouissance, that's the main thing (voilà le primaire) **** Page 12 of 26 p19 Footnote 17 “Expense of life instead of death, is secondary; expense [expenditure] of jouissance, that is what is primary. Whence the necessity of the plus-de-jouir in order for the machine to turn.” J. Lacan: “Radiophonie”, Scilicet 2/3, p. 86. : See Radiophonie: 9th April & 5th June 1970: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=756 : p22 of Jack W. Stone’s translation : Expense of life or else of death. Expense of jouissance, that's the main thing (voilà le primaire) Whence the necessity of the surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir) for the mechanism to turn, jouissance only indicating itself there so that one might have it from this effacing (effaçon), as a hole to fill. Do not be astonished that I pause (ressasse) here when ordinarily I hurry along my path. (87) It is that in remaking here an inaugural cut, I am not repeating it, I am showing it doubling to gather what falls from it. **** p20 Footnote 18 : “what it is about for everyone, where the body is concerned, that it should be precisely this desert of jouissance.” J. Lacan: “De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la realité”, Scilicet 1, p. 58. : See On Psychoanalysis in its Relationships to Reality (Milan) : 18th December 1967 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12300 : p11 of Scott Savaiano’s translation : Without a doubt the masochist knows how to call this jouissance back from the desert, but does so merely to show (precisely to reach it only so as to excite a demonstrative figure with his simulation) that he is in it an “all” (tous – why not “tout”?) of the body, precisely that he is this desert. Reality, given this, is controlled by fantasy insofar as the subject produces (se réalise) himself through it in his very division. **** p20 Footnote 19 : says in “Kant with Sade”, or the unbroken agreement between the creature and its life. J. Lacan, “Kant avec Sade”, Écrits, p. 766. : See Kant with Sade: April 1963: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=236 : This is the nearest – from 1st page of James B. Swenson’s translation : If Freud was able to enunciate his pleasure principle without even having to worry about marking what distinguishes it from its function in traditional ethics, even without risking that it should be heard as an echo of the uncontested prejudice of two millenia, to recall the attraction which preordains the creature to its good, along with the psychology inscribed in various myths of goodwill, we can only credit this to the insinuating rise across the nineteenth century of the theme of "happiness in evil." **** p21 Footnote 20 : what Freud has let out of the bag is precisely the inverse of that; it is that one can be well in the midst of evil, to take up again the formula of “Kant with Sade” In Sade’s own words “Quel paradis dans cet enfer” [ed.] **** p21 Footnote 21 : basically, that there is another satisfaction than that given by equilibrium, by homeostasis J. Lacan, “Kant avec Sade”, Écrits, p. 766. : p61 of James B. Swenson’s translation : See Kant with Sade: April 1963: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=236 : Probably - Because it sets forth submitted to pleasure, whose law is to turn it always too short in its aim. A homeostasis which is always too quickly recovered by the living being at the lowest threshold of the tension upon which it subsists. *** p21 : “what it entails in the way of atrocious promises”. It has always made me laugh, this “what the approach of jouissance entails of atrocious promises” : See Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts: 1963-1964 : beginning 15th January 1964 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1145 : Seminar XI 10th June 1964, p234 of Alan Page 13 of 26

Sheridan’s translation : Who does not know from experience that it is possible not to want to ejaculate? Who does not know from experience, knowing the recoil imposed on everyone, in so far as it involves terrible promises, by the approach of jouissance as such? Who does not know that one may not wish to think?—the entire universal college of professors is there as evidence. But what does not wanting to desire mean? **** p21 Pleasure is what he calls: the incoherent binding of life, : See ‘The Subversion of the subject and the Dialetic of Desire: 19th to 23rd September 1960: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=242 : p319 of Alan Sheridan’s translation : But it is not the Law itself that bars the subject’s access to jouissance – rather it creates out of an almost natural barrier a barred subject. For it is pleasure that sets the limits on jouissance, pleasure as that which binds incoherent life together, until another, unchallengeable prohibition arises from the regulation that Freud discovered as the primary process and appropriate law of pleasure. **** p21 Footnote 22 : Yet this first barrier, which is a natural one, he says, fundamentally comes to be relayed for humans through a prohibition, by means of the law. cf. J. Lacan, “Subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious”, Écrits, p. 821, French edition. : See ‘The Subversion of the subject and the Dialetic of Desire: 19th to 23rd September 1960: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=242 : p319 of Alan Sheridan’s translation : But we must insist that jouissance is forbidden to him who speaks as such, although it can only be said between the lines for whoever is subject of the Law, since the Law is grounded in this very prohibition. Indeed, the Law appears to be giving the order, ‘Jouis!’, to which the subject can only reply ‘j’ouis’ (I hear), the jouissance being no more than understood. But it is not the Law itself that bars the subject’s access to jouissance – rather it creates out of an almost natural barrier a barred subject. For it is pleasure that sets the limits on jouissance, pleasure as that which binds incoherent life together, until another, unchallengeable prohibition arises from the regulation that Freud discovered as the primary process and appropriate law of pleasure. It has been said that in this discovery Freud merely followed the course already being pursued by the science of his time, indeed, that it belonged to a long-standing tradition. To appreciate the true audacity of his step, we have only to consider his recompense, which was not slow in coming : failure over the heteroclite nature of the castration complex. It is only indication of that jouissance of its infinitude that brings with it the mark of its prohibition, and, in order to constitute that mark, involves a sacrifice : that which is made in one and the same act with the choice of its symbol, the phallus. **** p22 unless you hold on to the vital principle that, for Lacan, desire, in essence, is to be unsatisfied, that is to say, desire has no object which responds to its aspiration. : Possibly The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power:10th-13th July 1958 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=138 : p41 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : since Freud situates it as the desire to have an unsatisfied desire. : &/or p62 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation - ̳That he sustains as subject‘ means that language allows him to regard himself as the scene-shifter, or even the director of the entire imaginary capture of which he would otherwise be nothing more than the living marionette. Phantasy is the perfect illustration of this original possibility. That is why any attempt to reduce it to imagination, failing to admit its failure, is a permanent misconception, a misconception from which the Kleinian school which has certainly carried things very far here, is not free, Page 14 of 26 because it has been incapable of even so much as suspecting the existence of the category of signifier. However, once it is defined as an image set to work in the signifying structure, the notion of unconscious phantasy no longer presents any difficulty. Let us say that in its fundamental use phantasy it that by which the subject sustains himself at the level of his vanishing desire, vanishing in so far as the very satisfaction of demand robs him of its object. & Presentation on Psychical Causality : 28th September 1946 : Jacques Lacan : Available at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /lacan : See Écrits : 1966 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1206 : p148 of Bruce Fink’s translation : Thus, and this is an essential point, the first effect of the imago that appears in human beings is that of the subject's alienation. It is in the other that the subject first identifies himself and even experiences himself. This phenomenon will seem less surprising if we recall the fundamental social conditions of the human Umwelt and if we evoke the intuition that dominates all of Hegel's speculations. Man's very desire is constituted, he tells us, under the sign of mediation: it is the desire to have one’s desire recognized. Its object is a desire, that of other people, in the sense that man has no object that is constituted for his desire without some mediation. This is clear from his earliest needs, in that, for example his very food must be prepared; and we find this anew in the whole development of his satisfaction, beginning with the conflict between master and slave, through the entire dialectic of labor. This dialectic, which is that of man’s very being, must bring about, through a series of crises, the synthesis of his particularity and his universality, going so far as to universalize this very particularity. **** p22 There is another way one can oppose the dog to the cat. Lacan goes as far as dreaming of the lily of the fields. Does the plant have jouissance? : See Seminar XVII: Psychoanalysis upside down/The reverse side of psychoanalysis: 1969-1970 : from 26th November 1969: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=241 : Seminar XVII 17th June 1970 : pXV 110 to XV 111 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : It is a question of articulating what is involved in this phallic exclusion in the great human game of our tradition, which is that of desire. Desire has no immediately proximate relationship to this field. Our tradition posits it as what it is, Eros, the making present of lack. It is here that one can ask – how can one desire anything at all? What is lacking? There is someone who one day said – do not tire yourselves out, there is nothing lacking, see the lilies of the fields, they sew not, neither do they spin, but they have their place in the kingdom of heaven. It is obvious that to put forward such challenging proposals, you would really have to be the very one who identified with the negation of this harmony. This at least is how he has been understood, interpreted, when he was described as the Word (le Verbe). He had to be the Word itself to deny what was as obvious as this. Anyway, this is the idea that people had of him. He did not say as much. He said, if we are to believe one of his disciples – I am the way, the truth and the life. But that he was made into the Word, is what clearly marks that people knew all the same more or less what they were saying when they thought that only the Word could disavow himself to this extent. It is true that we can well imagine the lilies in the fields as a body entirely given over to enjoyment. Every step of its growth identical to a formless sensation. The enjoyment of a plant. Nothing in any case allows us to escape it. It is perhaps infinitely painful to be a plant. Anyway, no one amuses themselves dreaming about that, except me. It is not the same thing for an animal, which has what we interpret as an economy – the possibility of moving around in order to obtain the minimum of enjoyment. **** Page 15 of 26 p22 Freud, too, dreamed of a jouissance that would not be encroached upon by the signifier. Just look at the passage in his text “On Narcissism, an introduction”, the short and very amusing passage where he sets up a series: the child, the cat and the woman, or rather certain types of women, not woman in general. : See On Narcissism – an Introduction : March 1914 : Sigmund Freud or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12221 : Translated by SE XIV p88-90 : This sexual overvaluation is the origin of the peculiar state of being in love, a state suggestive of a neurotic compulsion, which is thus traceable to an impoverishment of the ego as regards libido in favour of the love-object. [p88 Footnote 1 Freud returned to this in a discussion of being in love in Chapter VIII of his Group Psychology (1921) Sigmund Freud, SE XVIII p69-143 : published by www.Freud2Lacan.com : See http://www.freud2lacan.com/docs/Group_Psychology.pdf ] A different course is followed in the type of female most frequently met with, which is probably the purest and truest one. With the onset of puberty the maturing of the female sexual organs, which up till then have been in a condition of latency, seems to bring about an intensification of the original narcissism, and this is unfavourable to the development of a true object-choice with its accompanying sexual overvaluation. Women, especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain self-contentment which compensates them for the social restrictions that are imposed upon them in their choice of object. Strictly speaking, it is only themselves that such women love with an intensity comparable to that of the man's love for them. Nor does their need lie in the direction of loving, but of being loved; and the man who fulfils this condition is the one who finds favour with them. The importance of this type of woman for the erotic life of mankind is to be rated very high. Such women have the greatest fascination for men, not only for aesthetic reasons, since as a rule they are the most beautiful, but also because of a combination of interesting psychological factors. For it seems very evident that another person's narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own narcissism and are in search of object-love. The charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-contentment and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and the large beasts of prey. Indeed, even great criminals and humorists, as they are represented in literature, compel our interest by the narcissistic consistency with which they manage to keep away from their ego anything that would diminish it. It is as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind - an unassailable libidinal position which we ourselves have since abandoned. The great charm of narcissistic women has, however, its reverse side; a large part of the lover’s dissatisfaction, of his doubts of the woman’s love, of his complaints of her enigmatic nature, has its root in this incongruity between the types of object-choice. Perhaps it is not out of place here to give an assurance that this description of the feminine form of erotic life is not due to any tendentious desire on my part to depreciate women. Apart from the fact that tendentiousness is quite alien to me, I know that these different lines of development correspond to the differentiation of functions in a highly complicated biological whole; further, I am ready to admit that there are quite a number of women who love according to the masculine and who also develop the sexual overvaluation proper to that type. Even for narcissistic women, whose attitude towards men remains cool, there is a road which leads to complete object-love. In the child which they bear, a part of their own body confronts them like an extraneous object, to which, starting out from their narcissism, they can then give complete object-love. There are other women, again, who do not have to wait for a child in order to take the step in development from (secondary) narcissism to object- love. Before puberty they feel masculine and develop some way along masculine lines; after this trend has been cut short on their reaching female maturity, they still retain the capacity of longing for a masculine ideal – an ideal which is in fact a survival of the boyish nature that they themselves once possessed. [p90 Footnote 1, Freud developed his views on female Page 16 of 26 sexuality in a number of later papers: On a case of female homosexuality (1920a) {The Psychogenesis of a case of Homosexuality in a Woman: 1920: Sigmund Freud or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=408 SE XVIII p145-172} , On the effects of the anatomical distinction between the sexes (1925j) { SE XIX p241-258. Published bilingual by www.Freud2Lacan.com, at here | https://www.freud2lacan.com/docs/Some_Psychical_Consequences.pdf }, On the sexuality of women (1931b) { SE XXI p221-243 : Published at www.Freud2Lacan.net download here https://www.freud2lacan.com/docs/Female_Sexuality.pdf }, and in Lecture XXXIII ‘Femininity’ of his New Introductory Lectures (1933a),{ SE XXII p112-135 Published www.Freud2Lacan.com , download here https://www.freud2lacan.com/docs/Femininity.pdf}] p23 Footnote 23 “one gets the idea of beatitude”, J. Lacan, Télévision, p. 40. : See Television: 31st January 1974 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=326 : p26-27 of Denis Hollier’s translation, published in October : Where in all this is what makes for good luck [bon heur]?11 Strictly speaking everywhere. The subject is happy-go-lucky [heureux]. It is his very definition since he can owe nothing if not to luck, to fortune in other words, and any piece of luck is good as something to maintain him, insofar as it repeats itself. What is astonishing is not that he is happy without suspecting what reduces him to this state- his dependence on the structure-but that he gets an idea of beatitude, an idea which is forceful enough for him to feel himself exiled from it. **** p24 Footnote 24 : in the text called “Psychoanalysis and its relation to reality”, where we find the expression “desert of jouissance”. J. Lacan, “De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la réalité”, Scilicet 1, p. 58. : See On Psychoanalysis in its Relationships to Reality (Milan) : 18th December 1967 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12300 : p10- 11 of Scott Savaiano’s translation : Thus it is from jouissance that truth is found to resist knowledge. This is what psychoanalysis discovers in that which it calls symptom – truth that makes full use of the disparagement of reason. We, psychoanalysts, know that the truth is that satisfaction not obviated by pleasure except as it exiles itself to the desert of jouissance. Without a doubt the masochist knows how to call this jouissance back from the desert, but does so merely to show (precisely to reach it only so as to excite a demonstrative figure with his simulation) that he is in it an “all” (tous – why not “tout”?) of the body, precisely that he is this desert. **** p24 Footnote 25 : which he describes to us as traces in the psychic apparatuses. S. Freud, “Outline for a scientific psychology”, 1895, The birth of psychoanalysis, Paris, PUP, 1969, p. 307. : See The Project for a Scientific Psychology: 23rd & 25th September & 5th October 1895: Sigmund Freud or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=401 : Possibly Section [9] The Functioning of the Apparatus, SE I p312 or probably Part I, Section [18] Thought & Reality, SE1 p335 or p397 of ‘The Origins of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud’s Letters’ : Thought must further satisfy another condition. It must make no essential change in the facilitations laid down by the primary processes, or otherwise it would falsify the traces of reality. It is enough to say of this condition that facilitation is probably the result of the single passage of a major quantity, and that cathexis, though very powerful at the moment, leaves behind it no comparably lasting effect. The small quantities (8) that pass during thought- processes cannot in general prevail over the facilitations. Nevertheless there can be no doubt that thought-processes do leave permanent traces; since thinking something over a second time demands so much less effort than the first time. Therefore, in order that reality may not be falsified, there must be special traces(indications of thought-processes)which constitute a "thought-memory"- something which it has not so far Page 17 of 26 been possible to formulate. We shall hear presently of the means by which traces of thought- processes are distinguished from traces of reality. **** p25 Footnote 26 : “the first ideal marks in which the drives are constituted as repressed, in the substitution of the signifier for needs.” J. Lacan, “The direction of the treatment”, Écrits, p. 256, English edition. : See The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power:10th-13th July 1958 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=138 : p40 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : Hence the oscillation to be observed in Freud‘s statements on the relations between the superego and reality. The superego is not of course, the source of reality, as he says somewhere, but it traces out its paths, before rediscovering in the unconscious the first ideal marks in which the tendencies are constituted as repressed by the substitution of the signifier for needs. **** p26 Footnote 27 : concerning the libido, which can be found in “The position of the unconscious”. J. Lacan, “La position de l’inconscient”, Écrits, p. 848, Fr. ed. : See The Position of the Unconscious (Bonneval Hospital): 31st October 1960: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=5584 : p275 of Bruce Fink’s translation : The libido is this lamella that the organism's being takes to its true limit, which goes further than the body's limit Its radical function in animals is materialized in a certain ethology by the sudden decline [chute] in an animal's ability to intimidate other animals at the boundaries of its "territory." This lamella is an organ, as it is the instrument of an organism. It is sometimes almost palpable [comme sensible], as when an hysteric plays at testing its elasticity to the hilt. Speaking subjects have the privilege of revealing the deadly meaning of this organ, and thereby its relation to sexuality. That is because the signifier as such, whose first purpose is to bar the subject, has brought into him the meaning of death. (The letter kills, but we learn this from the letter itself.) That is why every drive is virtually [virtuellement] is a death drive. **** p26 Footnote 28 : At the level of the animal, he speaks of the libido in so far as it marks out the limits of the territory and he refers it to the loss that the living being is subject to in virtue of being sexed. J. Lacan, “Position of the unconscious”, Écrits, pp. 847-848 : See The Position of the Unconscious (Bonneval Hospital): 31st October 1960: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=5584 : p275 of Bruce Fink’s translation : See above quote **** p27 what psychoanalysis has apprehended in the breast has nothing to do with any relation whatsoever to the sensoriality of the mother’s body: its warmth, its smell, its presence and what you will. The breast, as it comes into play in the weaning complex, is a breast that belongs to the infant, it’s a breast that isn’t the mother’s, it’s a breast in which the cut, he says, passes between the mother’s body and the infant’s body. : See The Position of the Unconscious (Bonneval Hospital): 31st October 1960: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=5584 : p275 of Bruce Fink’s translation : Regarding what is represented thereof in the subject, what is striking is the type of anatomical cut (breathing new life into the etymological meaning of the word "anatomy") by which the function of certain objects – which should not be called partial, but which stand apart from the others – is determined. The breast, to take an example of the problems to which these objects give rise, is not merely a source of “regressive” nostalgia, having been a source of “regressive” nostalgia, having been a source of highly prized nourishment. It is, I am told, related to the mother’s body, to its warmth, and even to tender loving care. But that does not sufficiently explain its erotic value, which a painting (in Berlin) by Tiepolo, in the exalted horror with which it presents Saint Agatha after her ordeal, illustrates far better. Page 18 of 26 ln fact, it is not a question of the breast, in the senseof the mother's womb, though one may mix as much as one likes resonances in which the signifier relies heavily on metaphor. It is a question of the breast specified in the function of weaning which prefigures castration. Weaning has been too extensively situated, since Klein's investigations, in the fantasy of the partition of the mother's body for us not to suspect that the plane [plane in the geometrical sense] of separation passes between the breast and the mother, making the breast the lost object involved [en cause] in desire. For if we recall that mammalian organization places the young, from the embryo right up to the newborn, in a parasitical relation to the mother's body, the breast appears as the same kind of organ - to be understood as the ectopia of one individual on another – as that constituted by the placenta at the beginning of the growth of a certain type of organism which remains specified by this intersection. **** p27 Footnote 29 : “We have not been able to extend (these considerations on the object) up to this point which constitutes its crucial interest, that is to say the object (-phi) as ‘cause’ of the castration complex.” J. Lacan, “The position of the unconscious”, Écrits, p. 850, note of 1966. : See The Position of the Unconscious (Bonneval Hospital): 31st October 1960: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=5584 : p282 of Bruce Fink’s translation : Footnote 82 . Let it be pointed out, nevertheless, that in restoring here, in an ironic way, the function of the “partial” object, without making the reference to regression in which it is usually shrouded (let it be understood that this reference can onlky be operative on the basis of the structure defining the ofject that I call object a), I have not been able to extend it to the point which constitutes its crucial interest, namely the object (-F) as “cause” of the castration complex. But the castration complex, which is at the crux [noeud] of my current work, exceeds the limits assigned to [psychoanalytic] theory by tendencies in psychoanalysis that were claiming to be new shortly before the war and by which it is still affected as a whole. The size of the obstacle I must overcome here can be gauged by the time it took me to provide this sequel to my Rome discourse and by the fact that, even now as I edit it [for the 1966 Seuil edition], the original version still hasn’t been published. **** p28 Footnote 30 : he expounds in the article that follows it, called “Du Trieb de Freud et du désir du psychanalyste”. J. Lacan, “Du Trieb de Freud et du désir du psychanalyste”, op. cit, pp. 851-854. : Écrits : 1966 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1206 : On Freud's Trieb & the Psychoanalytic Desire : 7th January 1964 (Rome) : Jacques Lacan, p722 to 725 of Écrits – the first Complete Edition in English, 2002 : p721 (English) p851 (French) The drive, as it is constructed by Freud on the basis of the experience of the unconscious, prohibits psychologizing thought from resorting to "instinct," with which it masks its ignorance by assuming the existence of morals in nature. It can never be often enough repeated, given the obstinacy of psychologists who, as a group and per se, are in the service of technocratic exploitation, that the drive—the Freudian drive—has nothing to do with instinct (none of Freud's expressions allows for confusion here). Libido is not sexual instinct. Its reduction, when taken to an extreme, to male desire, indicated by Freud, should suffice to alert us to this fact. Libido, in Freud's work, is an energy that can be subjected to a kind of quantification which is all the easier to introduce in theory as it is useless, since only certain quanta of constancy are recognized therein. Its sexual colouring, so categorically maintained by Freud as its most central feature, is the colour of emptiness: suspended in the light of a gap. Page 19 of 26

This gap is the gap desire encounters at the limits imposed upon it by the principle ironically referred to as the "pleasure principle," the latter being relegated to a reality which, indeed, is but the field of praxis here. It is from this very field that Freudianism hews a desire, the crux of which is essentially found in impossibilities. **** p29 Footnote 31 : “Radiophonie”, the text I read just now, whence comes the necessity for the “surplus jouissance” in order for the machine to work. cf. J. Lacan, “Radiophonie”, Scilicet 2/3, pp. 61-62. : : See Radiophonie: 9th April & 5th June 1970: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=756 : Question V : What are its consequences on the plane of ? : p21 - 22 of Jack W. Stone’s translation : The efficacy of glottal stops at the siege of Jericho lets one think that here the wall makes an exception, to tell the truth sparing nothing on the number of turns necessary. It is that the wall is not found, on this occasion, to be made of stone, but rather of the inflexible of an extra wailing. And if this is the case, we rediscover the structure that is the wall of which we speak. In defining it from relations articulated from their order, and such that in taking part there, one only does it at one's own expense. Expense of life or else of death. Expense of jouissance, that's the main thing (voilà le primaire) Whence the necessity of the surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir) for the mechanism to turn, jouissance only indicating itself there so that one might have it from this effacing (effaçon), as a hole to fill. Do not be astonished that I pause (ressasse) here when ordinarily I hurry along my path. (87) It is that in remaking here an inaugural cut, I am not repeating it, I am showing it doubling to gather what falls from it. **** p29 : From Beatrice, Dante obtains nothing but a fluttering of the eyelashes. That is sufficient for him, for the time being. That is to say, what he meets is the object “gaze” and the Other (here the other is Beatrice) remains barred to the subject. : Television: 31st January 1974 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=326 : p26-27 of Denis Hollier’s translation, published in October : What is astonishing is not that he is happy without suspecting what reduces him to this state - his dependence on the structure - but that he gets an idea of beatitude, an idea which is forceful enough for him to feel himself exiled from it. Happily, on this point we have the poet giving the game away: Dante, whom I've just cited, and others, apart from those sluts who use classicism to fill their piggy-banks. A gaze, that of Beatrice - that is to say, a threefold nothing, a fluttering of the eyelids and the exquisite trash that results from it-and there emerges that Other whom we can identify only through her jouissance: her whom he, Dante, can not satisfy, because from her, he can have only this look, only this object, but of whom he tells us that God fulfills her utterly; it is precisely by receiving the assurance of that from her own mouth that he arouses us. **** p29 using the two circles of Euler as Lacan used them in Seminar XI: See Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts: 1963-1964 : beginning 15th January 1964 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1145 : Seminar XI : 27th May 1964, p211 of Alan Sheridan’s translation **** p31 that is precisely what Schreber showed us. Everything he described is a body which is by no means a desert of jouissance. It is a body which is invaded by jouissance, permanently. : Page 20 of 26

See Seminar III: The Psychoses: 1955-1956: from 16th November 1955: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=657 : Probably Seminar III 25th January 1956, p104 of Russell Grigg’s translation : I spoke last time about displacements of behavior - one realizes that it can't simply be a matter of rediscovering the mnemic, chronological localization of events, of restoring a piece of lost time, but that things also take place on the topographical level. The distinction in regression between entirely different registers is implicit here. In other words, what is constantly being forgotten is that it's not the case that if one thing comes to the fore another loses its price, its value, within topographical regression. It's here that events acquire their fundamental behavioral meaning. And this is when narcissism was discovered. Freud realized that there are modifications to the imaginary structure of the world and that they interfere with modifications to the symbolic structure - this is really how it has to be described, since remembering necessarily takes place within the symbolic order. When Freud explains delusion by a narcissistic regression of libido, with this withdrawal from objects ending in a disobjectualization, this means, at the point he has attained, that the desire that is to be recognized in delusion is situated on a completely different level from the desire that has to make itself recognized in neurosis. If one doesn't understand this, one will completely fail to see what differentiates psychosis from neurosis. Why should it be so difficult in psychosis to restore the subject's relation to reality, when the delusion is in principle entirely legible? This, at least, is what can be read in some passages in Freud, which you have to know how to emphasize in a less summary way than is usual. Delusions are indeed legible, but they are also transcribed into another register. In neurosis, one always remains inside the symbolic order, with this duality of signifier and signified that Freud translates as the neurotic compromise. Delusions occur in a completely different register. They are legible, but there is no way out. How does this come about? This is the economic problem that remains open at the time Freud completes the Schreber case. & See Seminar III: The Psychoses: 1955-1956: from 16th November 1955: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=657 : Probably Seminar III 16th November 1955, p11 of Russell Grigg’s translation : Since discourse, the lunatic's printed discourse, is at issue, it's therefore manifest that we are in the symbolic order. Now, what is the actual material of this discourse? At what level does the sense translated by Freud unfold? From what are the naming elements of this discourse borrowed? Generally speaking the raw material is his own body. In man the relation to one's own body characterizes, in the final analysis, the restricted, but really irreducible, field of the imaginary. If there is anything in man that corresponds to the imaginary function as it operates in animals, it's everything that, in a fundamental manner but one that is always barely graspable, relates him to the general form of his body at a point called an erogenous zone. Only analytic experience has been able to seize this relationship, always at the limit of the symbolic, at its mainspring. This is what the symbolic analysis of the Schreber case demonstrates for us. It's only by entering through die symbolic that we can successfully make any inroads into the case. & See Seminar III: The Psychoses: 1955-1956: from 16th November 1955: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=657 : Probably Seminar III 30th November 1955, p39 of Russell Grigg’s translation : What I designated thus in my first communication to the group Evolution psychiatrique, which at the time was quite remarkably original, was aimed at the paranoid affinities between all knowledge of objects as such. All human knowledge stems from the dialectic of jealousy, which is a primordial manifestation of Page 21 of 26 communication. It's a matter of an observable generic notion, behavioristically observable. What takes place between two young children involves this fundamental transitivism expressed by the fact that one child who has beaten another can say- The other beat me. It's not that he is lying - he is the other, literally. This is the basis of the distinction between the human world and the ani- mal world. Human objects are characterized by their neutrality and indefinite proliferation. They are not dependent on the preparation of any instinctual coaptation of the subject, in the way that there is coaptation, housing, of one chemical valency by another. What makes the human world a world covered with objects derives from the fact that the object of human interest is the object of the other's desire. How is this possible? It's possible because the human ego is the other and because in the beginning the subject is closer to the form of the other than to the emergence of his own tendency. He is originally an inchoate collection of desires - there you have the true sense of the expression fragmented body - and the initial synthesis of the ego is essentially an alter ego, it is alienated. The desiring human subject is constructed around a center which is the other insofar as he gives the subject his unity, and the first encounter with the object is with the object as object of the other's desire. This defines, within the speech relationship, something that originates somewhere else - this is exactly the distinction between the imaginary and the real. A primitive otherness is included in the object, insofar as primitively it's the object of rivalry and competition. It's of interest only as the object of the other's desire. The said paranoid knowledge is knowledge founded on the rivalry of jealousy, over the course of the primary identification I have tried to define by means of the mirror stage. This rivalrous and competitive ground for the foundation of the object is precisely what is overcome in speech insofar as this involves a third party. Speech is always a pact, an agreement, people get on with one another, they agree – this is yours, this is mine, this is this, that is that. But the aggressive character of primitive competition leaves its mark on every type of discourse about the small other, about the Other as third party, about the object. It's not for nothing that in Latin testimony is called testis and that one testifies on one's balls. In everything of the order of testimony there is always some commitment by the subject, and a virtual struggle in which the organism is always latent. & See Seminar III: The Psychoses: 1955-1956: from 16th November 1955: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=657 : Seminar III 14th December 1955 : p69-70 of Russell Grigg’s translation : One can say that in this delusion God is essentially the opposite term in relation to the subject's megalomania, but God as he is caught at his own game. Schreber's delusion will in fact reveal that God, through having wanted to harness his forces and turn him into detritus, excrement, carrion, the object of all the exercises of destruction that he has allowed his intermediary mode to bring about, has been caught at his own game. Ultimately God's greatest danger is to love Schreber, that transversally transversed zone, too much. We shall have to structure the relationship between what guarantees the real in the other, that is, the presence and existence of the stable world of God, and Schreber the subject qua organic reality and fragmented body. We shall see, provided we borrow a number of references from analytic literature, that a major part of his fantasies, of his hallucinations, of his miraculous or marvellous construction, consists of elements in which all sorts of bodily equivalents are clearly recognizable. We shall see, for example, what the hallucination of the little men represents organically. But the pivot of these phenomena is the law, which here lies entirely within the imaginary dimension. I say it's transversal because it's diagonally opposed to the relation of subject to subject, the axis of effective speech. Page 22 of 26

& See Seminar III: The Psychoses: 1955-1956: from 16th November 1955: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=657 : Probably Seminar III 11th January 1956, p74 of Russell Grigg’s translation : This is the requirement that my little square meets, which goes from the subject to the other and, in a way, here, from the symbolic towards the real, subject, ego, body, and in the contrary sense towards the big Other of intersubjectivity, the Other that you do not apprehend as long as it is a subject, that is, as long as it can lie, the Other that on the contrary one always finds in its place, the Other of the heavenly bodies, or, if you will, the stable system of the world, of the object, and, between the two, speech, with its three stages of the signifier, meaning, and discourse. This is not a world system, but a system of reference for our own experience - this is how it is structured, and we can situate within it the various phenomenal manifestations with which we have to deal. We shall not understand a thing unless we take this structure seriously. & See Seminar III: The Psychoses: 1955-1956: from 16th November 1955: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=657 : Probably Seminar III 15th February 1956, p146 of Russell Grigg’s translation : Where shall we look for them, given that they escape libidinal investment? Is it sufficient to appeal to libidinal reinvestment of the body? This mechanism, commonly held to be that of narcissism, is explicitly invoked by Freud himself to explain the phenomenon of psychosis. Briefly put, in order to mobilize the delusional relationship, it's supposed to be a matter of nothing other than enabling him, as one so quickly says, to become an object again. From one angle this coincides with a number of the phenomena involved, but it doesn't exhaust the problem. Each and every one of us knows, pro- vided he's a psychiatrist, that in a fully developed paranoiac there is no question of mobilizing this investment, while in schizophrenics the properly psychotic disturbance is as a rule much more extensive than in the paranoiac. Wouldn't this be because in the imaginary order there is no way of giving a precise meaning to the term narcissism? Alienation is constitutive of the imaginary order. Alienation is the imaginary as such. Nothing is to be expected from the way psychosis is explored at the level of the imaginary, since the imaginary mechanism is what gives psychotic alienation its form but not its dynamics. This is the point we always get to together, and if we don't get there unarmed, if we don't give in, it's precisely because in our exploration of analytic technique, and then of beyond the pleasure principle with the structural definition of the ego that it implies, we have the idea that beyond the little other of the imaginary we have to admit the existence of another Other. It's not only because we give it a capital letter that we are satisfied with it, but because we locate it as the necessary correlate of speech. & See Seminar III: The Psychoses: 1955-1956: from 16th November 1955: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=657 : Probably Seminar III 15th February 1956, p150 of Russell Grigg’s translation : What is at issue when I speak of Verwerfung? At issue is the rejection of a primordial signifier into the outer shadows, a signifier that will henceforth be missing at this level. Here you have the fundamental mechanism that I posit as being at the basis of paranoia. It's a matter of a primordial process of exclusion of an original within, which is not a bodily within but that of an initial body of signifiers. It's inside this primordial body that Freud posits the constitution of a world of reality, which is already punctuated, already structured, in terms of signifiers. Freud then describes the entire operation by which representation and these already constituted objects are brought together. The subject's initial apprehension of reality is the judgment of existence, which Page 23 of 26 consists in saying - This is not my dream or my hallucination or my representation but an object. It's a matter of testing the external by the internal - it's Freud saying this, not me - , a matter of the constitution of the subject's reality in a refinding of the object. **** p31 That is what Freud described for the [developmental] phases of the libido, and which was later taken up as the oral phase, and the anal phase, which preceded the phallic phase. NOTE from Julia Evans : Freud never delineated developmental phases so developmental should not be added. This point is taken up forcefully by Jacque Lacan in Seminar IV. : See Seminar IV : The Object Relation & Freudian Structures 1956-1957 : begins 21st November 1956 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11980 & Notes & References for Jacques Lacan’s Seminar IV : 21st November 1956 by Julia Evans here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12365 on 28th February 2017 or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12124 & Tracing Stages linked to Libido in Freud by Julia Evans here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12365 on 24th October 2017 see here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12192 **** p32 One is the case of “Stanley” described by Margaret Mahler, : See Some Observations on Disturbances of the EGO in a Case of Infantile Psychosis by Margaret S. Mahler , M.D. & Paula Elkisch , Ph.D. Pages 252-261 The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Vol 8, 1953 Issue 1, See here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00797308.1953.11822770?journalCode=upsc2 0 **** p32 the case of “Joe” by Bruno Bettelheim. : Probably Feral Children and Autistic Children by Bruno Bettelheim, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 64, No. 5 (Mar., 1959), pp. 455- 467 **** p35 Footnote 32 : A practical application, for example, is the few pages that Lacan devotes to the affects in Télévision. J. Lacan, Télévision, pp. 33-43. : See Television: 1974: Jacques Lacan : Availability given here , http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=326 : p22 of D. Hollier, R. Krauss and A. Michelson’s translation, in ‘Television, a challenge to the Establishment’ : p24 of October publication : It's the same old thing when it comes to the story of my supposed neglect of affect. I just want an answer on this point: does an affect have to do with the body? A discharge of adrenalin- is that body or not? It upsets its functions, true. But what is there in it that makes it come from the soul? What it discharges is thought. So you have to consider whether my idea that the un- conscious is structured like a language allows one to verify affect more seriously- than the idea that it is a commotion from which a better arrangement emerges. Because that's what they oppose me with. Does what I say about the unconscious go further than expecting affect to fall, adequate, into your lap? This adaequatio, being even more grotesque by coming on top of yet another one- really stacked- this time conjoining rei -of the thing- with affectus - the affect whereby it will get repigeonholed. We had to make it into our century for doctors to come up with that one. All I've done is rerelease what Freud states in an article of 1915 on repression, and in others that return to this subject, namely that affect is displaced. How to appreciate this dis- placement, if not so the basis of the subject, which is presupposed by the fact that it has no better means of occurring than through representation? **** Page 24 of 26 p32 In Télévision, he situates three principal affects: anguish (anxiety), sadness, and “gai scavoir”, : See Television: 1974: Jacques Lacan : Availability given here , http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=326 : p22 of D. Hollier, R. Krauss and A. Michelson’s translation, in ‘Television, a challenge to the Establishment’ : p26 of October publication : For example, we qualify sadness as depression, because we give it soul for support, or the psychological tension of Pierre Janet, the philosopher. But it isn't a state of the soul, it is simply a moral failing, as Dante, and even Spinoza, said: a sin, which means a moral weakness, which is, ultimately, located only in relation to thought, that is, in the duty to be Well-spoken, to find one's way in dealing with the unconscious, with the structure. And if ever this weakness, as reject of the unconscious, ends in psychosis , there follows the return to the real of that which is rejected, that is, language; it is the manic excitation through which such a return becomes fatal. In contrast with sadness there is the Gay Science [gay Sçavoir],10 which is a virtue. A virtue absolves no one from sin-which is, as everyone knows, original. The virtue that I designate as the Gay Science exemplifies it, by showing clearly of what it consists: not understanding, not a diving at the meaning, but a flying over it as low as possible without the meaning's gumming up this virtue, thus enjoying [jouir] the deciphering, which implies that in the end Gay Science cannot but meet in it the Fall, the return into sin. : Footnote 10, Provençal troubadours used the expression gai savoir [gay science] to designate their poetry.

Other texts by Jacques Lacan available in English, see here Related texts Melancholia, the Pain of Existence and Moral Cowardice : October1988 : Éric Laurent or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11933 Gay Knowledge, Sad Truth: 1997: Serge Cottet or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=296 Some Moral Failings Called Depressions: February 1997: Pierre Skriabine or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=319 COVID Sadness, The New Sorrow : 4th November 2020 : José Ramón Ubieto Pardo or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12736 On COVID here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?cat=729 **** p36 Footnote 33 where he says that the analysand, even though he has passed through what I have called the ordeal, will “make a cause for himself from surplus jouissance”. J. Lacan, “Lecture to the EFP [6/12/67]”, Scilicet 2/3, p. 26. : See Speech to the École freudienne de Paris on the Proposition : 6th December 1967 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12178 : p22 of Anthony Chadwick’s translation of the revised version published in Autres Écrits: 2001 : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=756 : This subject wakes up only to the fact that for each one in the world the affair becomes other than of being the fruit of evolution which of life makes for the said world a knowledge: yes, a no‐sense with which this world can sleep soundly. Such a subject is constructed from all the analytical experience, when Lacan attempts through his algebra to preserve it from the mirage of being One: by the demand and the desire that he poses as instituted from the Other and [277] by the bar which re‐applies from being the very Other, to make it that the division of the subject is symbolized by the barred S, the which, subject from then on to unforeseeable affects, to an inarticulable desire of its place, makes itself a cause (as one would say: makes a reason for itself), makes itself a cause of surplus Page 25 of 26 jouissance, of which however, by situating it from the object a, Lacan demonstrates very well the articulated desire, but from the place of the Other. **** p36 Footnote 34 Initially he puts it in parentheses: “make a cause of surplus jouissance (as one might say to accept the inevitable [se faire une raison]).” J. Lacan, “Lecture to the EFP [6/12/67]”, Scilicet 2/3, p. 26. : see above **** p37 One might perhaps be tempted to say that the “authorising oneself”, rather than the master signifier - for that is the alternative we are faced with - has a centrifugal effect. It is hard to see why groups would form around the notion of “self-authorisation”. To do what? : See ‘Proposal of 9th October 1967 on the psychoanalyst of the School’: Jacques Lacan or here // http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=135 : p1 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : Let us recall what exists among us. First a principle: the psychoanalyst is authorised only by himself. This principle is inscribed in the original texts of the School and decides its position. This does not rule out the School guaranteeing that an analyst has been formed by it. It can do so on its own initiative. **** FURTHER TEXTS The Real Presence and Slipperiness of the Body (LRO 248) : 11th October 2020 : Catherine Lacaze-Paule or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12716 Lacanian Psychoanalysis Not Without the Body : 18th January 2020 (Dublin) : Bernard Seynhaeve (audio) or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12609 Announcement of title for the 2020 NLS Congress, Interpretation, From Truth to Event : 18th June 2019 : Bernard Seynhaeve or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12627 Interpretation : From Truth to Event : 2nd June 2019 (Tel Aviv) : Éric Laurent or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12613 The symptom in the perspective of the speaking body in civilisation (audio) : 19th May 2016 (London) : Éric Laurent or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12016 The Unconscious and the Body Event : the full interview : July 2015 : Éric Laurent or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12023 The Unconscious and the Speaking Body : Paris : 17th April 2014 : Jacques-Alain Miller or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11959 On the origin of the Other and the post-traumatic object : 6th November 2004 (Lyon) : Éric Laurent or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12272 Trauma in Reverse : 27th April 2002 (New York) : Éric Laurent or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12265 Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body : 12th & 19th May 1999 (Paris VIII) : Jacques- Alain Miller or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12423 Interpretation and Truth : 1st July 1994 : Éric Laurent or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11992

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